A soft knock sounded at her door.
Dulcy reached for the remote and pressed the mute button.
Another knock.
She sank lower into the cushions. Given the late hour, there were only a handful of people it could be. More than likely Barry had called Jena and Marie, told them what had happened and asked them to look in on her. Maybe if she pretended to be asleep, they would just go away.
Another knock, this time more insistent. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang.
Dulcy put her hands over her ears. But even as she did so, she knew it wouldn’t work. Finally she pushed the pillow aside, straightened the old University of New Mexico T-shirt she wore, stalked to the door and swung it open.
“I’m fine. Why don’t you just go home? We’ll talk about this—”
Her words trailed off as her gaze caught on a long, muscular pair of jeans-clad legs, slid down to a pair of familiar cowboy boots, then moved up past a soft chambray shirt and into Quinn’s somber face.
Dulcy raised a shaking hand to her tangled hair, her entire body instantly humming to life, her heart expanding to beat painfully against her rib cage. “I…I thought you were Jena and Marie.”
“Are you really fine?” he asked quietly, his dark eyes shifting as he looked her over.
“Depends on your definition of fine.”
“The normal one would do.”
No, then, she wasn’t fine. She was a mess. A big, fat, sloppy, emotional mess.
“Can I come in?” he asked, shifting from boot to boot.
Dulcy glanced behind her. But it was more than the empty cartons and crumbs littering the coffee table that concerned her, or the muted images flickering across the television screen. Her apartment was her last bastion. The only place Quinn hadn’t stamped with memories of his presence, his kisses or his lovemaking.
She gripped the door frame. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He nodded as if he understood. She wondered if he did.
“You left the ranch before I had a chance to talk to you,” he said simply.
“Oh? And what would you have said?” Dulcy scanned his striking face, fisting her hands to keep them from reaching up to smooth the lines of worry from his forehead, tug his dark hair free. “I’m sorry?” Her voice quavered. “Goodbye?”
“Dulcy…” He reached out for her.
It took everything she had to step away from his touch. “No, please, don’t.” She took a deep breath, ordering herself not to cry. “I just need some time to think, okay? Everything…everything happened so damn fast. I have to find a way to process it all.”
He stood silently watching her, no expression giving away his thoughts.
“I just feel like I’ve had so little control over my life lately, you know?” she whispered, suddenly desperate to make him understand. “Brad’s disappearance and reappearance. Us…” She looked everywhere but at him.
“Sometimes control is overrated,” he said.
She stared at him. “Control is the only thing that makes my life bearable, Quinn, don’t you see that? If anyone can see that, understand that, it has to be you. The way you were raised…the difficulties you’ve faced. You know both sides of the fence. I do, too.” She steeled herself. “When you touch me, something happens. Something wild. Something so completely uncontrollable it scares me to death.”
He appeared ready to reach for her again, but instead shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “So that’s it, then? Is this where we end?”
Dulcy’s heart plummeted. “What?”
“We. You and me, Dulcy. Us. And there is ‘an us.’ No matter what you tell yourself, something happened between us over the past few days. Something more than that uncontrollable something you mentioned.”
“Sex,” she whispered. “It was just sex.”
His eyes narrowed. “Is that all you think it was?”
She closed her eyes and nodded, even though she knew she was wrong, wrong, wrong.
She felt his fingers on her face and looked at him in surprise. His brown eyes were full of warmth, of softness, of every second of the time they’d spent together.
“You’re wrong. But that’s not for me to tell you.” He dropped his hand and looked down the hall toward the stairs. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”
Dulcy’s chest threatened to cave in on itself as she watched him walk away, his proud back disappearing down the stairs. The outside door slammed, and she winced. Then she closed her own apartment door and slid down it to sit on the floor.
FRIDAY MORNING Dulcy sat back in her office chair and stared at the multicolored pile of cards in the middle of her desk, compliments of Mona, who’d said they arrived in the morning mail. She randomly fingered one, a muted purple envelope, and separated it from the rest. The Johnsons, the return address read. The Johnsons were dear friends of her parents, which meant the card inside would be sappy and apologetic. “Sorry to hear about the breakup of your engagement,” the words would say. Or “There are a lot of fish in the sea. Don’t give up because you got a rotten one.”
She grimaced. Over the past three days, since she and Quinn had discovered Brad’s little love nest, the news had already made the rounds of Albuquerque’s social circle. Had done so even before Barry dropped her off at her apartment. She’d dragged herself inside to find a frantic message from her mother waiting on her answering machine, who had been looking for reassurance that the gossip was just that, gossip.
She opened the card and wondered what it was about broken engagements that everyone associated them with death. Sorry about your loss…. Condolences… This, too, shall pass… Card companies didn’t even have to be especially original in the variances. She hadn’t even known you could buy cards that fit this specific occasion.
She blindly reached for her ever-present coffee cup, just as the phone rang. The contents of the cup went spewing all over the cards. She snatched up the receiver at the same moment she reached in her drawer for a pile of napkins to sop up the mess.
“Hello?”
When no one immediately responded, she could feel a jitterbug dance in her chest. The same dance it had been doing ever since Quinn had left her apartment the other night.
“Hello?” she said again.
“Miss Ferris?”
Dulcy’s hands slowed and the jitterbug died. Much as it had every other time over the past three days that she’d answered the phone or her apartment door or looked up at a knock on her office door, hoping it would be Quinn. And it wasn’t.
Not that she expected it would be. By telling her that she knew where to find him, he’d knocked the ball fully into her court. There would be no calls from him. No more surprise visits. If there was to be anything between them, she would have to be the one to initiate contact.
The caller was following up on a claim Dulcy had filed the day before but for which she neglected to include the supporting documentation. Promising to fax the information right over, she hung up the phone, made a valiant attempt at saving the soggy mass of colored envelopes before her, then sagged in her chair.
Okay, so she supposed it might not be a bad idea to call Quinn. Just to let him know that she didn’t blame him for what had happened. But for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what she might say. Hey, thanks for the memories. Do you want to be friends? Or Oh, look, your ex is with my ex. How about a date? Or the even more vague So…where do we go from here?
Dulcy leaned back and picked up the garbage pail next to her feet. Positioning it even with the desk, she swept the destroyed cards into the bin, ignoring that she felt better as she did it. Were you supposed to respond to these cards? Acknowledge the well-wishers? Thank them for their thoughtfulness the same way you thanked them for wedding presents?
She topped the mess off with her empty coffee cup and dripping napkins, then tucked the wastebasket back under her desk.
What upset her more was that all along she had been terrified about what
would happen when everyone found out she’d been “doing” the best man. Ironically, no one even knew about her and Quinn. Well, except for Esmerelda. And Jena. Instead, Brad ended up the bad guy. And as luck would have it, the public was turning him into an unlikely hero of sorts. New Mexico’s most eligible bachelor chose love over an arranged marriage.
Dulcy slapped her hand against her forehead and groaned. She had little doubt that if the opposite had happened, if she and Quinn had been found out, she would have been painted as the harlot of the century. The friendship-ruining hussy who, while her fiancé was missing, was seducing the best man. Pictures of Yolanda and Brad were splashed all over the society pages, beaming at photographers, always touching as if they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. This news far eclipsed the other two-sentence piece noting that Wheeler Industries was as good as bankrupt and that another competing company was making a move to take it over.
But not even that was really bothering her. No. She didn’t care what happened with Brad from here on out. She and Brad had never been a love match. She knew that now because she had something with which to compare the cold union. Rather, what caused the ache in her heart was that it was as though the magic between her and Quinn had never existed. With no one around to acknowledge it, to ask about it, to add “Congratulations on bouncing back,” “Way to go on boinking the best man” comments to their cards of condolence, it was as if it had all been a figment of her imagination. A rip in reality that closed back up the instant Brad was found and she sent Quinn packing.
Is that what happened when your secret fantasies became real? And where did she go from here? Did she spend the rest of her life mooning over a guy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself when they were together but was now making sure they weren’t even within touching proximity?
“Hey.”
Dulcy peeled her hands from her eyes. “Hey, yourself,” she said to Jena, who stood leaning against the doorjamb.
“You look like shit.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Jena pushed from the door, then poured herself into one of the two visitor chairs in front of the desk. “You probably shouldn’t be here, you know. I think after all that’s happened, a few days of major R and R wouldn’t be out of the question. In fact, that’s exactly what you should do this weekend. Take off. Have some fun.”
Dulcy winced. She had a lot of fun the past week. And just look at where that had gotten her.
She glanced at the yellow legal pad on the corner of her desk. It was filled with all the steps she’d taken to cancel the wedding arrangements. She thought she’d covered everything. After tomorrow it all would be moot, anyway. One o’clock would come and go, and she and Brad wouldn’t be anywhere near an altar. She grimaced. Well, at least she wouldn’t be.
Jena opened the jelly bean jar on her desk and fished out a couple of red ones. “What about the honeymoon to Fiji? Did you get the money back?”
“Nope.” She eyed the two envelopes lined up beside her mousepad. One held the plane tickets; the other held the engagement ring she would mail to Brad. “Special fare. Nonrefundable.”
Jena slowed her chewing. “Are you going to go?”
“Where?”
“To Fiji, of course.”
“Nope.” She fingered the envelope and the itinerary inside. Then she tossed it to her friend. The envelope seemed to stop in midair, then drift down into Jena’s lap. “Be my guest.”
Her friend looked like a ten-year-old on Christmas morning. “No way.”
Dulcy smiled for the first time in what felt like forever. “Way.” She shrugged, then turned around and took a bottle of sunblock from a drawer in the cabinet behind her. It landed on top of the tickets. “They come with a price, though.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Sit shotgun with me at the meeting with Mandy Mallone later this morning. I’m afraid if I go in there after…well, you know, all that’s happened with me, I just might make her fiancé eat the prenup agreement, if everything’s not in order.”
Jena shrugged. “I’ll go just to watch you do that.”
“You’re supposed to stop me from doing that.”
“Then, forget it.”
Dulcy laughed. “Be there at eleven.”
Jena picked up the tickets and the sunblock. Halfway to the door she hesitated and gave a deep sigh. She swiveled on her heels, then placed the bottle and the envelope on the desk in front of Dulcy. “As much as it kills me, I can’t do this. You should be the one to take that trip, babe. Not me.” She crossed her arms as if to keep her hands from snatching the tickets back. “A piña colada on a sandy beach is just the ticket to get your mind off everything.” She grinned. “Grab that hot guy of yours and go.”
Dulcy swallowed. “I don’t have a hot guy.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Whatever.”
Jena told her she’d see her at eleven, then left her office.
QUINN LEANED against the mahogany monstrosity of a desk that befitted the president of Wheeler Industries. That which wasn’t packed into boxes was stacked next to an overflowing garbage can near the door.
He’d agreed to meet Brad there at nine. He didn’t know what his friend had to say, but curiosity had gotten the better of him. That, and he was going stir-crazy out at the ranch.
He absently rubbed the back of his neck. It was harder than hell being in the city and knowing Dulcy was only a few blocks away. But he could understand her need for time, which was how he chose to interpret her saying it was over between them. Actually, she hadn’t suggested it was over. He had. Right after his pride had taken a major dent when she stepped away from his touch.
It wasn’t every day a woman found out her fiancé, or rather her fiancé’s mother, had been interested in her only for her money—albeit money she didn’t have. But to discover that that same fiancé was in love with another woman, too, well, that was enough to send anyone off on a search for a stretch of uninterrupted reflection time.
The problem was, he was having a hard time giving it to her.
He’d been through enough in his lifetime to know that even if you played by the rules, there was no guarantee it all would turn out right in the end. And he and Dulcy hadn’t exactly played by the rules, which gave him double the worry about any future with her.
The sound of whistling heralded Brad’s arrival. Quinn crossed his arms watching his friend enter the office carrying another box.
“Good, you’re here,” he said, then grinned.
Quinn grimaced. “Getting fired suits you.”
“I didn’t get fired, I resigned.”
“Yes, as soon as the company was taken over by the highest bidder.”
Brad slid a pile of files into the box and waved a hand. “Details. I never was very good with those.”
“And the shylock?”
“The shylock? Oh, you mean Tucci.” The smile finally left his face. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t thought about what I’m going to do with him yet.”
Quinn cocked a brow. “Don’t you think that’s something you should worry about?”
Brad moved around, putting more items into the boxes. “That’s not why I asked you here.”
“Why did you ask me here?”
Brad put a mantel clock down, then stood. His grin was too wide, too knowing. “I saw you.”
“Saw me what?”
“With Dulcy. On the back of that horse.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“The horse or Dulcy?”
Brad chuckled. “Both.”
Quinn leaned back on his hands. “Why didn’t you say anything the other day? It might have saved you some trouble if you had just focused the blame on the two of us.”
“Not my style.”
Quinn already knew that. Recent behavior aside, Brad was a stand-up guy. The kind you called in an emergency. The type you could trust with anything. It had been an heroic action so many ye
ars before that had started their friendship, but it was those solid qualities that maintained it.
Quinn cleared his throat. “You know I could help you out with Tucci.”
“Help me out? How?”
“Even the account.”
“You mean pay him?” Brad looked at him long and hard. “If you told me ten years ago that this is where we would be standing right here, right now, I would have laughed my ass off.” He shook his head. “No. Thanks for the offer, bud. It means more than you know, but I’ll take care of Tucci.”
“You know where I am if you change your mind.”
“Yeah, I know where you are. Exactly where you shouldn’t be.”
“How so?”
Brad crossed his arms and rested them on the back of one of the two leather wing chairs in front of his desk. “I’ve known you for a long time, Quinn. I know the last thing you would do is boink my fiancée, unless you were serious about her.” He glanced at his watch. “You should be with her. I can only imagine what she’s going through right now, after all that’s gone down.” He reached out for the paper folded back to the Society section and tossed it at him. “Can you believe how everyone’s reacting to me? I got three cushy job offers yesterday and another one this morning.”
Quinn skimmed the grainy black-and-white photo of Brad and Yolanda, then put the paper back on the desk.
“The thing is, Dulcy is a great girl. I would never have caved to mother’s demands, otherwise. I mean, who wouldn’t want a piece like that hanging on your arm, waiting for you at home, warming up your bed every night.” He shook his head. “Only, I’d already met Yolanda.”
“Or Yolanda met you.”
Rather than be insulted, Brad grinned. “Trust me, I’m not going into any of this with blinders on, Quinn. I know her past. With you. With others.” He shrugged. “But what can I say? I love the girl. And if she ends up taking everything I own—” he motioned toward the boxes “—or rather, all that I don’t own, so be it. I made that decision the instant I decided to tell mother I wasn’t marrying Dulcy. What I couldn’t live with was wondering what would have happened if I never gave us a chance, you know? Maybe she does love me. Maybe we’ll rent a two bedroom apartment on the wrong side of town, have two-point-two kids and live happily ever after.” He grinned. “Or maybe we’ll just have a few months of great sex and she’ll leave me for the next target. I don’t know. But I’m sure going to have a lot of fun finding out.”
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