“Is it Marcus?” I have a bad feeling in my gut, but he’s the only person that this leads to.
“Yeah.” His answer is quick and met with a simmering anger that I recognize from him. There’s the brother I know and love. “I told him about her. I needed his help.”
“You told Marcus. Who else?”
“He’s the only one I told. It had to be him or someone he told.”
“Why did you tell him anything?”
“I had her license plate and nothing else.”
My thumb rubs in circular motions over my pointer finger as I take it all in.
He adds, “I couldn’t lose her again.” I know he could have told Jase. Jase could have looked up her information. But I don’t remind him of that. He holds on to guilt too much.
I have nothing but silence as I think of any reason that Marcus would come for us. He’s not a man I want as an enemy, but I’m also not certain it’s him.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. It will never happen again.” He strengthens his resolve and leans forward, daring me to object. And I do.
“And what if she leaves you again?” I ask him and he stares back at me, his chest rising and falling with determination. “What if she finds out something she shouldn’t?”
He doesn’t say what I expect him to, that she won’t. Instead he merely answers, “Then I’ll follow her.”
My breath leaves me slowly, words failing me.
“She’s mine,” he says as if nothing else matters. And maybe it doesn’t.
I nod my head once.
The hands of the clock in the office are all I can hear as I run my thumbnail under the flap of the envelope and stare back at my brother. “She’s changed you.”
“How’s that?” he asks me. Again he’s on the defensive, and it makes me smile. I like to see him showing something that’s real.
“It’s hard to pretend when you’d do anything for someone you love.”
His gaze flickers to the envelope in my hand and he stares at it as he says, “I didn’t come here for a heart to heart, Carter.”
“You didn’t open it?” Although the words come out with disbelief, the corners of my lips kick up with amusement. He’s so consumed with Addison he didn’t give a fuck about the one thing I’ve been losing sleep over.
“Marcus said it was a message of what’s to come,” he tells me as I finally open it. The paper tears easily and inside I’m surprised to find only a one-by-one-inch square photo. It falls into my palm facedown and I toss the crumpled envelope onto the desk, then flip the small piece of photo paper over.
“I went through all that shit for that?” Daniel asks, but I ignore him, too drawn to the picture.
I trace the curve of her porcelain face. I let the rough pad of my thumb run along the edge of the photo as I note her beautiful smile and the way her dark hair is lit with the sunshine in the image.
My heart pounds hard and I can’t hear what Daniel’s saying. I can’t hear anything but the conversation I had with Tony Romano in the basement cellar months ago. The man who I’ve been avoiding, and the man who reached out to Marcus to deliver the message rather than tell me himself.
The dimly lit, cold and dark room was as unforgiving and unmoving as I was when he made his case and I turned him down.
Then he started bartering with things that didn’t belong to him.
With women the Talverys were shipping off. His enemies. He wanted me to help him in a war against the Talverys and he was offering their property as payment. There was no way I’d ever accept.
“What it is?” Daniel presses, barely interrupting my memory.
“The gift from the Romanos.” I don’t know how the words come out strong as I gently place the photo onto the desk. “They want us on their side of this war they’re starting.”
I remember the way the heavy knife felt in my hand as I picked it up from his desk and stabbed it down onto the splintered wood in front of him. The sharp tip struck the paper in front of him.
The photo of the enemy family.
“If you give me any woman to start a war, it better be this one,” I sneered in his face. I remember the stale stench of whiskey and cigars as I turned my back on him, leaving the knife where it was. With the tip of it stabbing the shoulder of the enemy’s daughter. The shoulder her father’s large hand was clenched around tightly.
His pride and joy, and one and only heir.
I didn’t think he’d ever have the balls to take her and offer her to me.
“A gift?” Daniel questions with his brows raised and then picks up the photo.
“Yes,” I answer him impatiently, quick to hide my depravity.
The photo of the one thing I asked for—Aria Talvery.
“In exchange for a war … she’s mine.”
* * *
Carter’s story, MERCILESS, is next.
Read now!
MARRIAGE MATERIAL
Barbara Samuel
Chapter One
Lance Forrest hit Red Creek, Colorado, much the same way as he always did—radio blaring so loud it seemed as if his car were floating on the sound. Rock and roll, naturally. Through the windows blew a light, dry mountain wind, combing playful fingers through his always too-long hair. He breathed the air deep, all the way to the bottom of his lungs, smelling the sharply evocative mix of sunlight and crushed pine needles on earth just faintly damp.
He’d been living in Houston, where the air weighed three hundred pounds per square inch, and nothing could have been finer than the sweet mountain air of home. He hung his elbow out the window, feeling a faint hint of September bite. The aspens, shaking their gold-coin leaves against a sky the color of a little girl’s Easter ribbon, already showed autumn had arrived.
Red Creek wasn’t much of a town. Barely three thousand people if you didn’t count the tourists and skiers and the new crop of rich folks building million dollar “retreats” on enormous parcels of land buried in the trees. Lance didn’t. Not many of them stayed year-round. Even fewer had the faintest clue what Colorado really meant.
As he reached the outskirts of town, he noticed a few changes—the grocery store had been revamped to look like any big-time supermarket. A brand-name pizza parlor camped next to the lone motel. Next to the old drugstore, where Lance had spent many hours over ice-cream sodas, a gourmet coffee shop and French bakery offered upscale breakfast goodies.
Not so bad. It would be unrealistic to expect the place to stay completely preserved year after year. Lance could live with a few changes. Cheerfully, he waved to everyone he saw, grinning at the double takes they did at his car.
His car. It was a beauty, all right. A 1965 Ford Fairlane, silver-gray, with white walls and an engine designed when gas was a quarter a gallon. It rumbled like a street rod as he ambled up Main Street, the engine purring even at nine thousand feet above sea level. It was his pride and joy, this car, fully restored down to the last detail.
His father would have loved it.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, Lance saw the black-and-white sheriff’s car that had fallen in behind him. He grinned. Right on time. Sheriff Holloran never let him get past the Kwick Shop without a tail, and it hardly would have felt like a proper homecoming without the escort. Holloran no doubt hoped to catch him swigging from an open beer, but not even Lance was fool enough to drink and try to navigate the mountain passes over which he’d driven. He half wished he had one now, though, just to nettle Holloran. The old man must have missed Lance after so long a time—who else would give him so much to do?
At the traffic light by the courthouse, Lance lifted his green bottle of soda pop, and waved at the sheriff over his shoulder. Damn, it was good to be home.
Even if it was for a funeral.
* * *
Tamara Flynn wiped glasses desultorily and glanced at the clock. One more hour and she was free. She put the glass neatly in its place on the rubber matting behind the bar and turned to pick up another, trying to hi
de a yawn by lowering her head.
Not that anyone would notice. There were only a handful of customers at the Wild Moose Inn this early in the day. A pair of retirees had taken up permanent residence over a backgammon board in the booth in the corner. A closemouthed traveling salesman who drove through Red Creek on Mondays and Fridays on his way to and from Denver, nursed his single beer. A handful of construction workers, off for three days to mark the passing of old man Forrest—he’d dropped dead of a heart attack right at this bar, one hand on a whiskey, the other reaching for a waitress’s behind—played pool in the back room.
Late afternoons were always like this—slow and lazy. Tamara used the time to prepare the bar for the late shift, stocking the cooler full of bottled beer, and making fresh gallons of Bloody Marys and margaritas for the crowd that would come in later for the buffalo steaks, venison stew and antelope burgers that had made the place famous for twenty-five years.
Tending bar in an eccentric mountain bar and restaurant wasn’t everyone’s idea of a great job, but for Tamara, it was perfect. It let her squeeze in a half schedule of accounting classes at the community college every morning before she arrived at eleven, and let her off in time to fix dinner for her son, Cody, and spend some time with him before he went to bed.
A lock of hair escaped the fat band she used to hold it back, and Tamara took a second to tuck the errant strand back in. She glanced at the salesman’s beer. He nursed one for almost an hour, and never had a second, but habits might change. This one hadn’t. The beer was still half-full.
The bell above the door rang, and Tamara glanced up without much interest. Long fingers of buttery light slanted through the big front window and door, skidding off varnished yellow pine walls. The man in the doorway stood there silhouetted against that gold, as if allowing his eyes to adjust. For a single, fanciful moment, Tamara thought he looked as if he wore a halo.
There was a scrape of a chair toward the back, and Tamara glanced in that direction automatically. Only then did she become aware that the room had gone quiet. The knot of construction workers had come forward to stand in a ragged line in the archway to the back room, their attention focused on the new customer.
She looked back at the man with a frown, alert for trouble. He moved into the room with a marked lack of concern, as if he didn’t see the burly group eyeing him.
His lazy stroll took him from the shadows into the flat square of sunshine spilling over the flat pine dance floor, and Tamara, almost without realizing it, caught her breath.
The dark gold hair was windblown and untidy and too long, but it caught the light in sinful, banded streaks. His face was sun-lined and high-planed. His eyes twinkled, and the lips almost smiled, as if he had a secret. There was cockiness in that expression, the kind of brash confidence some men seemed to own from birth.
Her gaze traveled downward, over his body. All man, one-hundred-percent American made: broad shouldered, with solid biceps and the hardy sort of forearms that came from swinging tools; lean hips and long legs, slightly bowed.
Against her will, Tamara found a half grin of her own forming. If he wasn’t a man without a care in the world, he sure gave a good imitation.
What she wouldn’t give to have that feeling again!
The dancing eyes fixed without worry on the burly line of men at the back room. “Hi, boys,” he drawled.
Not one of them replied. Tamara thought of the television commercials when a stranger came into a rundown, hot place and opened a beer, and the whole room filled with a snowstorm. That was the kind of wary, intense attention these men gave the newcomer, and he bore it with the same singular lack of concern.
He dropped onto a barstool, shoved untidy, wind-blown hair from his face and smiled. “I’ll have a beer, sugar.”
The endearment shouldn’t have been a surprise. It went along with everything else. “What kind of beer?” she said, calmly meeting his eyes. Men knew the rules. If a woman wasn’t swayed by pretty little gestures or outrageous flirting, they moved on fast enough.
The dancing in his eyes—dark blue—increased. “Cold one,” he said.
Tamara sighed. Why did men always think that was so clever? Contrarily, she opened the cooler and pulled out the most expensive import. “Glass?”
“Just like that will be fine.”
Even the most cynical of women would have had a hard time resisting that relentlessly good-natured al-most-smile. Tamara looked away, trying to find something to do with herself. This was the hardest part of the job for her—when someone sat down at mid-bar and showed every sign of wanting to talk. She wasn’t a chitchat sort of person.
“What’s your name, darlin’?” he asked.
She plucked a snowy white bar towel off the sink and wiped the necks of the liquor bottles in the well. If she told him, maybe he’d stop the annoying endearments. “Tamara.”
“Tamara, huh?” He took a sip of the expensive brew straight from the bottle, and inclined his head. “That can’t be right.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Anyone call you Tammy?”
She lifted her brows. “Not if they wanted to live to tell about it.”
He grinned widely, and Tamara saw against her will that there was an honest-to-God dimple deep in the left cheek. “Good,” he said. “I used to know a real mean Tammy. She put pig piss in my thermos once.”
Even the taciturn salesman looked up at that.
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“Yep, it was. Luckily, my brother found out about it before I actually drank it.”
Warning herself that it was a mistake, Tamara smiled.
“That’s better,” he said. “Always consider the day a success if I can make a pretty lady smile.”
Tamara shook her head. “If you talked to Tammy like this, you deserved the thermos trick.”
He chuckled. “I didn’t say I didn’t deserve it.” He inclined his head. “You know, you make me think of…” The glinting eyes narrowed. “A cat I used to have. Big calico, with green eyes, just like yours.”
She rolled her eyes, this time, not even bothering to hide it. “Mister, that’s an old line.”
“No way!” he protested, but the laughing eyes betrayed him.
Honestly, she felt a real laugh almost break the surface over that. It was impossible to mind being hustled when it was so blatantly offered as exactly that. She put a hand on her hip. “You’ve yet to come up with a single original line, as a matter of fact.”
He looked at the salesman. “Is she always this tough?”
The salesman who’d never uttered more than the required words to get his beer now rubbed his chin. “No nonsense, more like.”
“Goes with the territory,” Tamara said in her defense.
The golden man let go of a low chuckle. Tamara found her eyes on his mouth, on the white teeth and long brown throat. A faint, almost forgotten sensation of awareness moved in her.
“Well, it gives you a nice aura of mystery,” he said. His voice was not deep or rough, as might have suited him, but a pleasant tenor that was surprisingly easy to listen to. “And you know men—we like women who have a few mysteries.”
“Well,” she countered, “you know women. We like men with a little bit of sense.”
Again, he let go of a delighted laugh. “One of the great conundrums of life, don’t you think?”
Tamara was surprised at his use of the word—it didn’t strike her as part of the ordinary vocabulary of the kind of man he seemed to be. The assumption that he would be stupid stung her conscience for a moment and she smiled. “I guess it is.”
An odd stir in the atmosphere of the bar made her nerves prickle. Tamara looked up, alert and frowning. She’d tended bar long enough to recognize that kind of warning—and her instincts were right.
The restless construction workers from the back room had drifted out, one or two at a time, until they were spread throughout the room. One stood at the pass-out bar, two by th
e front door, another dead center of the room. The last, a burly, dark-haired finisher named Gus, with a beer gut straining the front of his old white T-shirt, swaggered over to stand beside the man at the bar.
Trouble. Damn.
Tamara pushed away from the bar and backed up slowly toward the door that led to the empty restaurant.
“Tamara,” said the sun-gilded man at the bar, reaching into his pocket for money as if Gus and the others were invisible, “I think I’m ready for another beer.”
He stood up, took some bills out of the front pocket of his jeans and sat back down. Tamara turned, ready to run for the other room. He might be stupid enough not to recognize the hatred bristling through the room, but she didn’t intend to be in the middle of a fight when it broke out.
The construction worker who’d been at the pass-out bar stepped back three paces, blocking Tamara’s way to the restaurant.
She narrowed her eyes and thought of the phone. As if he read her mind, he backed up another foot and leaned his considerable shoulders against the receiver. He gave her an apologetic glance. “Sorry, honey. Old Gus has been waiting for this a long time. That man stole his girl.”
Gus bellied up to the man at the bar now. “Well, well, well,” he said with false joviality. “Lance Forrest. ‘Bout time you brought yourself back here.”
The name hit Tamara hard. She narrowed her eyes. Lance Forrest, the legendary wild man of Red Creek, by all accounts a hell-raiser that put even his father to shame. Her heart sped up.
She’d been on duty the night Olan Forrest had dropped dead of a heart attack. She’d been on duty a hundred nights before that when she had to call him a cab, or have a bouncer toss him out, or knock his wandering hands aside when she served him.
Hard to believe this gorgeous creature, who seemed made of sunlight, could be in anyway related to that bad-tempered womanizer.
It also explained a lot. Tamara felt her mouth go tight. Lance Forrest. It was about time. He wasn’t exactly what she’d expected after all these years, but that freewheeling nature would fit neatly into her plans.
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