by Crane, Megan
He shook his head, his gaze intent on hers, then dropping down to her lips.
“It’s that prissy little voice coming out of that mouth of yours. It’s so damned hot.” It took a long time for him to drag his gaze back up to hers, and by the time he did, she’d succumbed to that heat again. It flashed over her, drugging and deep. “You’re the kind of girl who could start a bar fight.”
Chelsea was almost positive that was an insult and that she should be offended. Shouldn’t she? But she’d spent thirty years being widely regarded as the sort of woman who might faint at the idea of entering a bar. A kind of latter day Puritan, by default. The kind of woman, or so she’d heard through the grapevine, that men cheated on because she felt too much and they were afraid to admit to her that they had darker needs.
The kind of solid, bland, invisible woman absolutely no one in her right mind would ever choose to be. Who Chelsea had simply become without meaning to, sometime in high school, and had been stuck with ever since.
The notion that she might be the kind of femme fatale-like creature who drove men to get into brawls? To act like fools, like she could make them lose their heads? Obviously, she should be appalled at the notion. But there was that part of her—the part that reveled in feeling that surge of feminine power from deep inside, the part that felt like joy—that exulted in the idea.
“What would you do?” she asked. His expression turned quizzical. “If I started a bar fight?”
His lips crooked, and she knew how they tasted now. The magic they could do.
“Oh,” he said, his voice thick with Texas and a certain male confidence she should find offensive, she knew she should, “I’d handle it.” The look he shot her then was level, the faint amusement in those bright hazel depths intoxicating. “But then you and I would have a pretty serious conversation.”
He leaned in closer then, cupping the back of her head in his hand and pulling her mouth to his. He kissed her, hard and consuming, as if the night was just getting started. And she wished it was, harder than she’d ever wished anything else.
“My God,” she whispered, when she could speak again, because the darkness outside the car was bluer by the moment, and she had a real life waiting for her no matter how hard she pretended otherwise. “I have to teach in the morning.”
“I hate to break this to you, darlin’, but it’s already morning.”
Chelsea glanced at her watch, then shuddered. “I have to go.”
His smile was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and she knew she was hoarding it even as it happened—tucking the image of it away somewhere deep inside, in case this was the last time she ever saw it. She told herself that didn’t hurt to think like that, that bittersweet was a good thing.
It meant something worthwhile had finally happened to her.
“Go.” His voice was a low scrape that worked in her like another touch of those talented hands of his, that punch of giddy fire, the same kick in her pulse. “Before I change my mind and keep you.”
It was only a line. She knew that. But it still burst inside of her, bright and sharp, and she knew she’d cling to it when he was gone. Maybe for the rest of her sensible, solid, old maid’s life, right here in this house she was fairly certain was her destiny, as she slowly and irrevocably turned into her mother.
Chelsea made herself climb out of his car though it was by far the hardest thing she’d ever done, and she liked that he waited there as she walked to her door, watching intently like he thought the mountain lions might swoop in and get her on the short walk to safety.
The trouble was, she liked it all. Everything about this man who should have been her enemy. Too much.
And as she opened the door and slipped back in to her comfortable life and the consequences she’d surely have to suffer for what she’d done tonight, Chelsea still felt Jasper’s hard mouth on hers and the hot brand of his possession like an ache inside of her, and she knew it was worth it.
Whatever happened next, she didn’t regret a single second of this night.
Not one second.
She made it through a particularly chilly breakfast a few hours later in the face of Mama’s furious silence. The Silent Treatment was her mother’s weapon of choice. Usually, Mama trotted it out and Chelsea fell all over herself trying to fix whatever was wrong. Cajoling and even begging, until Mama could be coaxed into discussing whatever it was she was angry about. It was better to grovel a little than to suffer through the angry silence, which Chelsea could remember Mama unleashing on the entire family for weeks at a time when she’d been a kid. It was part of the game.
But the Chelsea Collier who had roared off on a stranger’s motorcycle and found herself in his bed all night didn’t want to play that game. Not today. If Mama wanted silence, she could do silence. It was better than the recriminations that were sure to follow.
She stood for what felt like hours in her shower, pretending the hot water was as restorative as a night’s sleep, then found she hated all of her usual work outfits when she looked for something to wear. She might not want to prance around with her ass on display the way Jasper had told her she should, but she discovered that after last night, it turned out she had a whole wealth of feminine vanity she’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to before. Whatever else happened today, she didn’t want to face it while dressed like a woman twice her age.
It took some digging, but she found a black dress Jenny had talked her into buying in Bozeman once on one of her wedding-planning expeditions, but which Chelsea had banished to the depths of her closet. It was just too much, she remembered thinking. But she pulled it on today, and liked the way the soft material flowed around her. It was feminine and flattering, skimming over her curves without calling too much attention to them and then flaring out on its way to her knees. She started to twist her hair back, but stopped, letting it fall to her shoulders instead, because it seemed to go better with the dress. A pair of low heels with a delicate ankle strap and she was ready for school—and dressed, she thought, like she thought she deserved to be considered pretty as well as competent.
Because she did. And she was. And she didn’t know why that had never occurred to her before.
And she couldn’t think of a better outcome from her first and only one night stand than to hold herself in higher esteem because of it.
Mama harrumphed as she passed her on her way out the door, and then scowled when Chelsea only grinned at her.
And then she set off to face her fate.
The long drive down into town from Crawford House was stunningly beautiful that morning, the way it always was, with the mountains and the sky and the clear air in all directions, and Chelsea put her windows down despite the chill of the morning and breathed it deep into her lungs.
She’d never been involved in one of Marietta’s scandals, except by default. She’d been the pitiable creature who that otherwise nice Tod had betrayed, the sad sack girlfriend who couldn’t hold on to her man—never the scarlet woman. She found that on some level, she was looking forward to it.
At least it was something new.
And unlike what had happened on Tod’s back deck in July, this time, it was actually about her.
She didn’t expect to see Jasper again. She told herself she was fine with that as she pulled into the parking lot at the high school. She was a grown woman—she knew how things worked even if she’d never worked them herself before. Hadn’t most women her age collected a number of these nights by now? The good news was, she didn’t have to go to any great lengths to avoid Jasper in the aftermath of their night together. She’d never spent much time in Grey’s Saloon, so their paths were unlikely to cross aside from the usual nod and wave in public spaces.
You can handle this, she told herself briskly. People do it all the time.
Chelsea jumped slightly when she heard a car door slam nearby, jerking back into the here and now to see Gemma Clayton, a fellow teacher in the history department, heading toward the school bu
ilding. She waved and smiled with genuine pleasure, and knew it was time to get on with the rest of her life.
She doubted she’d have to interact much with Jasper Flint ever again.
Chelsea got out of her car and started across the parking lot toward the smiling, waiting Gemma and the school doors, telling herself that what she felt then was nothing more than the cool morning air, the crisp fall weather, and not a sharp shot of something hollow, straight into her heart.
“Do you have a minute?”
Chelsea smiled automatically as she glanced up to see Sharla Dickinson, the high school principal, standing in the door of her classroom.
“I was about to head home for the day,” she said, packing up her bag as she spoke, shoving a whole stack of student essays in with rather less care than she usually took. “But sure, I have a minute. Even two.”
She wanted nothing more than to drag herself home, crawl into her bed, and sleep until her alarm went off the next morning, but she didn’t say that. She thought she’d done a decent job of pretending not to be dead on her feet all day—surely she could hold on for a few more minutes.
“I wonder if we need to talk,” Sharla said, and the strange note in her voice made Chelsea pause, then search her boss’s face.
“About?”
Sharla looked more uncomfortable than Chelsea had ever seen her. “I just think it’s worth reiterating that while this is a small town, it’s best for everyone—for the students in particular—if we keep our personal lives private.”
Chelsea let out a startled laugh. “I agree completely, Sharla. Has there been some kind of incident?”
If she wasn’t mistaken, Sharla, who had once faced down the angry father of a pregnant high school junior toting a shotgun without so much as breaking a sweat, was blushing. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but instead waved a hand at Chelsea. Or, more specifically, at her dress.
“Just look at you,” she said, and then shook her head. “I don’t like to listen to gossip, Chelsea—”
“Then don’t.”
Sharla sighed. “Is this going to be an issue?”
Chelsea straightened, and felt her chin tip up, which was never a great sign.
“If you mean, will I wear perfectly conservative dresses to work, then the answer is yes. I very well might. Unless there’s a new dress code that applies only to me?”
“You don’t look like yourself,” Sharla said gently.
She was about twice her age, now that Chelsea thought about it, and was wearing an outfit eerily similar to the one Chelsea had been sporting yesterday. Jasper had hit that nail on the head, she thought wryly. With his usual hard, unerring accuracy.
But she wasn’t thinking about Jasper. That was an exercise in futility, and she was determined to be the kind of adventurous woman who had no time for the futile. She wanted to act the way she thought a woman like that would act: like she did such things all the time and it was all no big deal.
She kept chanting those phrases in her head, like they might stick.
But Sharla was still talking, a frown etched between her eyes. “I’m worried about you.”
“Because I’m wearing a dress?”
“Because the Chelsea Collier I know never would have made a spectacle of herself in the middle of Main Street yesterday evening,” Sharla said, and her voice wasn’t at all accusing. It was concerned.
Which Chelsea found was maybe the most insulting of all.
“Sharla,” she said, fighting to keep her voice calm, and happy that all her years of teaching teenagers made her able to do that to some degree, “correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Lewis own a motorcycle?”
“You know he does.”
“And didn’t I see you riding on the back of that motorcycle all the way down Main Street on the Fourth of July? The high school principal on a Harley, hanging on to her boyfriend’s waist for everyone to see?”
“That’s not really the point, and I think you know it.”
Chelsea fantasized about her bed. The soft pillows, room to stretch out—God, she wanted to close her eyes for a while. A long while. She rubbed a hand over her face instead, and hoped that if she pretended she didn’t have that pounding at her temples, it would go away.
“I don’t have the slightest idea what your point is,” she said honestly.
“You,” Sharla said simply. “My point is you. When all of that unpleasantness happened this summer—”
“My boyfriend cheated on me and I caught him in the act.” It felt liberating to simply say that. Not to mince around it with all of those euphemisms and significant looks for once. “I won’t faint if we call it what it was.”
“This is what I’m trying to say,” Sharla said then. “When it happened you were horrified that you were suddenly the name on everyone’s lips. But today, it’s like you’re proud of it. That change concerns me. It concerns me more that it doesn’t seem to strike you as odd at all.”
Chelsea wished she could say what she actually thought—which was, simply, that comparing Tod Styles to Jasper Flint was like comparing a flashlight to the summer sun, and what did she care what people said about it? She wasn’t horrified. At all.
But she doubted Sharla would understand that when she wasn’t certain she did.
“He comes from a very different world,” Sharla was saying, still frowning at Chelsea, her gaze direct and intent. And still so concerned.
“And I’m a simple, hometown girl who’s easily made a fool of,” Chelsea finished for her.
“I didn’t say that,” her boss said calmly. “But you had a big disappointment this summer and I’d hate to think this was some kind of reaction to that. Or that you threw yourself into something only to find you’re in over your head.”
It was one thing, Chelsea realized, for her to think that Jasper was out of her league and to caution herself against holding out any hope for anything more than the one night they’d had. It was something else entirely to have someone else think all of that and worse, that she was a naïve idiot who Tod had so destroyed that she’d tossed herself into the path of the romantic equivalent of a speeding train.
It took every bit of willpower she had to keep her temper under control. And to keep her mouth shut on a selection of inappropriate retorts, from a breezy Oh, I was just using him for sex to a snappier The only thing that disappointed me this summer was that I’d ever suffered Tod’s company in the first place.
There was no point and anyway, this woman was her boss as much as she was a friend, it would behoove her to remember. Chelsea waited until she was sure she could control herself before she let herself speak.
“Maybe,” she said kindly, very kindly, because she could see Sharla only wanted to help—that Sharla thought she needed help and was trying to give it despite the fact it made her uncomfortable—and that came from a good place no matter how it made her grit her teeth, “you don’t know me as well as you think you do. Maybe no one does.” She picked up her bag and looped it over her arm, then started toward the door, a silent announcement that she was done with this conversation. “And maybe that’s something it’s high time I changed.”
7.
Jasper didn’t know what the hell he was doing, lurking around outside the high school like some kind of obsessed, insane stalker. But baffling though he might find his own behavior, he couldn’t seem to help himself.
Besides, he told himself, stalkers would hide. Conceal themselves behind the hedges or something. They wouldn’t stand there out in the open, leaning up against his Range Rover like he wanted everyone in Marietta to see him, would they?
But as he did just that, with the crisp fall afternoon gorgeous and gold around him and that snap in the breeze, it occurred to him that he had no experience when it came to chasing women. They’d always chased him. The naughtier ones had followed him around boldly when he’d been a boy, while the good ones had confined themselves to longing glances they’d thought he didn’t notice. When he’d
grown older and started making all that money, there’d been more women than he could count whenever he turned around. Wherever he went. At some point, the competition to get in his bed had slid into a fight to get his ring, and he understood, now, that he’d grown complacent with all that relentless attention. He hadn’t been nervous about a female in as long as he could recall.
One more way Chelsea Collier was turning him inside out, he thought wryly. He supposed he’d just have to get used to it.
The parking lot was nearly empty when she finally appeared, and he thought his heart actually stopped in his chest at the sight of her.
She was so damned pretty. It snuck beneath his ribs and lodged somewhere underneath, like a stitch in his side, making it hard to concentrate on anything but the flirty swing of that dress around her lovely legs, the clever little buckles around her ankles that managed to be demure and sexy at once, and all of her gleaming blonde hair down around her shoulders today, so bright and something like joyful in the sunlight. She marched out of the double doors with a frown on her face, like she was leading a charge straight into some or other battle, and he knew the very moment she saw him there. Waiting for her.
It was satisfying in ways he couldn’t articulate even to himself to see the hitch in her step, and then the way her walk changed, turned into more of a languid saunter, all hips and intent, like she could still feel him the way he still felt her. The way her pretty face smoothed out, and her lips twitched in the corners, inviting him to think some more on the stunning wickedness of that mouth of hers, all that carnal promise right there on her face for everyone to see.
How had the men in this place kept their hands off of her? Idiots, he thought.
“Have you been standing out here all afternoon?” she asked when she drew closer. He could see the sleepless night around her eyes, and thought it made her that much prettier. That much more his.
“Not all afternoon.”
“You look like you’ve been here a while.”
A delightful possibility occurred to him. “Are you trying to keep me your dirty secret? Oops. You should have made that clear, probably.”