“Mr. Forrest,” Tamara corrected.
Lance nodded. “Right. Mr. Forrest.”
“Do you live in the forest?” Cody asked, and laughed at his joke.
“Matter of fact, I do.” The twinkle leapt back to life in his eyes, and Tamara felt a strange sense of relief. “About a million trees all around.”
“Wow .”
Before the delay cost her any more time than necessary, Tamara spoke up. “I have to get him to bed. What exactly do you want?”
Lance sobered once more, and stepped forward to give her the bag he carried. “A steak,” he said with a lift of one shoulder. “First you put it on your eye, then you eat it, and you’ll feel a lot better by morning.”
She took the bag and peeked inside. A thick, beautiful T-bone. In spite of herself, she felt a stab of hunger. Macaroni and cheese worked for Cody, but every so often, it would be nice to eat like an adult.
Nonetheless, she held it out to him. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Oh, come on, what’ll it hurt?”
She glanced at Cody, who listened intently. “Take the steak for a second, will you?” She picked up a towel. “Let me get this child out of the tub.”
“I’ll help you.”
“That isn’t—” she began, but Cody had already stood up, shivering, and Lance wrapped the boy in a towel. He held Cody close, pretending to shiver, and Tamara’s protest died in her throat.
She wasn’t truly prepared to see the resemblance between them, but even with the softness of toddlerhood still on him, Cody was a carbon copy of his father. A sudden and unexpected fear stabbed her stomach. What if Lance turned around right now and looked in the mirror? Would he see what was so plain to Tamara?
But he didn’t turn. With typical little-boy trust, Cody yawned and put his head on Lance’s shoulder. Lance rubbed a big tanned hand over the little back, as naturally as he’d swung his fists in the bar.
The picture pierced her. Lance wasn’t supposed to be gentle—that much she knew. To hide her expression, she turned away, reaching to pull the plug from the drain. “If you put him down, he can go get dressed.”
“All by himself?” Lance said in an admiring tone. “Man, you’re really a big kid, aren’t you?” He set the boy on his feet and straightened, watching as Cody pitter-pattered from the bathroom, towel clutched around him.
Tamara picked up the bag and held it out firmly. “Take your steak and all your little charming tricks and leave, please.”
He didn’t move. For a minute, he only looked at her, his eyes sober. “You don’t like me, do you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“First impressions can be misleading. I don’t have a fight every time I go into a bar.”
She set the grocery bag on the edge of the sink beside him and crossed her arms. “I don’t want to be rude, but I have a headache, and a test to study for, and I don’t have time for all this.”
He nodded, and she tried not to notice the way the light broke in bright gold bands in his hair, like threads of fool’s gold in iron pyrite. “All right,” he said. “Keep the steak. It really will help.”
“No. Take it with you.”
He looked at her, puzzlement in his blue eyes. “I’m trying to make amends here. Help me out a little, huh?”
“I don’t want your amends, thank you. I don’t want anything from you. I just want you to leave.”
For a long, quiet minute, he simply looked at her. Tamara felt a fluttering disturbance in those private, untouched parts of her body she’d thought might have finally got the message by now.
Obviously not.
Pinned in the soberness of his formerly twinkling eyes, she wished she could accept everything he offered. Not just the steak. Much more—the promise of pleasure and laughter, the promise of a few hours unburdened with the worries that ate up her days. Men like this made an art form of sex—the kind of sex that made you forget everything and just live.
An unwelcome prickle of awareness moved on her shoulders, down her back. It had been so long….
The trouble was, a few pleasurable hours was the sum total of all he offered, and her life wasn’t that simple. Not anymore. She crossed her arms. “Please, just go.”
“I am sorry you got hurt, Tamara,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around town.”
She said nothing. If she gave him nothing to embroider upon, he’d have to leave sooner or later.
At last, he did just that—turned away from her and ambled toward the bathroom door, then paused with his hand on the threshold. “See you around,” he said again.
And gave her the most wicked, charming grin she’d ever seen—replete with seductive dimples and twinkling eyes and a teasing promise of seduction that stole her breath. Before she could react, he was out the front door, closing it quietly behind him.
She stood in the middle of the bathroom, arms crossed, and shook her head in wonder as she remembered the steak on the sink. That rat—he’d known exactly what he was doing.
Well, he could grin and wink and flash dimples for a year and a day. It wouldn’t do him any good with Tamara. She had a real life to think about.
She got Cody tucked in, and heard his prayers. As he lay there on his pillow, printed with cartoon figures, Tamara reminded herself it was all worth it. For Cody, she could do anything.
Her headache trebled when she opened her accounting book. Dry figures lay dully against the page, and she took a breath, fighting the deep resistance she felt. As she had told herself a hundred times, bookkeeping and accounting were good jobs, with benefits. Later, after they were on their feet, maybe she could finish her English degree.
Resolutely, she took out her notes and began cross-checking herself. The page didn’t disappear, as it always had when she studied history and languages and literature, but she could do it.
She had to.
Chapter Three
An hour into her studies, Tamara rested her head on her arm. Just for a minute. Just to clear her eyes. Maybe ease the headache pounding through her temples.
She fell asleep. And dreamed she was at college again. She and Eric walked one of the avenues on campus, beneath trees shedding leaves in red and brown and yellow, their varied shapes dotting the withering lawn and floating atop the green water of the pond. The air was crisp and full of excitement. She and Eric debated the place of poets in the scope of history, swinging their hands between them.
Tamara jolted awake suddenly, yanked into her tiny kitchen in Red Creek by the sound of a tomcat in the garbage cans outside. She blinked slowly, an ache in her chest.
Four years, and she still dreamed about it all the time. Four years, and she had not come to terms with the fact that she would never be that free, excited girl again, with a future filled with intellectual pursuits, in the company of people who didn’t think she was odd for enjoying French films or preferring to read rather than go to the rodeo.
At the university, for the first time in her life she’d found people to talk with about the things she loved. Music and books and history, a world of ideas and dreams and visions that most people around Red Creek found impractical at the very least.
She missed it desperately.
Wearily she closed the book and turned off the overhead light, making her way to the bathroom. She was almost too tired to shower, but if she left it till morning, she would be more rushed than she could stand. She stripped off her clothes and turned on the shower to let steam heat the small room.
In the mirror, she caught sight of her face. She leaned forward, gingerly touching the black eye. Her entire lid was purple, a garish contrast to her green iris. It added an impression of too many years on her youngish face, like the tightness around her mouth, the circles ringing her eyes. With a frown, she tugged out the braid and worked her fingers through the dark mass of her hair. Better. She didn’t look so old and worn with it down.
She rubbed a circle in the misting mirror, looking for the girl she’d been only a few short years ago
. Was her life over at twenty-five? Sometimes it felt like it.
The mirror swallowed her image once more. Tamara fixed the temperature of the water and stepped into the shower. The heated spray felt glorious on her tired neck and she sighed aloud, ducking her head to let the water pound down on the tight muscles. What a day.
A wavery picture of Lance Forrest floated before her closed eyes, then solidified. That bright hair. The twinkle in his eyes. The aura of zesty good humor that surrounded him. He made her think of Loki, the Norse god of mischief.
He wasn’t at all what she had expected all these years.
* * *
Tamara’s cousin Valerie had generally liked dark men—brooding, ruthless types who took what they wanted and strode through life without giving a second thought to the people around them. Bad boys. Jocks. Businessmen. Never the kind of man Tamara found attractive.
She should have realized, looking at Lance’s brother Tyler, that Lance would not be the dark brooding man in her imagination, that vague image toward whom she had directed all her frustration and hatred all these years. If not for Lance Forrest, she had told herself over and over, she would be happily teaching in a university somewhere, working on her doctorate.
Instead, she was stuck in Red Creek, eating macaroni and cheese, studying accounting so she could eventually pay doctor bills, taking care of a child she adored and wanted, but wasn’t even her own.
It was Valerie who had given birth to Cody.
Tamara and Valerie’s mothers had come to Red Creek together, to make a new life for themselves far from their poverty-stricken Arkansas roots. To some degree, they had succeeded, but the sisters had very different ideas of what marked success and when Tamara was eight, they had a fight. They never spoke again.
But Valerie and Tamara managed to sneak around to see each other, anyway. Six years younger than her dazzling cousin, Tamara had worshiped the ground Valerie walked upon, and lived for the stories of romance and love Valerie spun.
When Valerie was in high school, she fell in love with Lance Forrest, and the pair were an item for their last two years there. Valerie had even shown Tamara the ring Lance had given her as a promise ring. It was a striking tiger-eye—he’d said diamonds were too common for a girl like Valerie.
But at the end of senior year, Lance had left Valerie and gone off to college. He never came back; instead he went to work for a Houston construction firm. Occasionally Valerie caught word here and there of what he was doing, but she never saw him when he came to town.
Finally, she gave up and married another man, and just as quickly divorced him. Tamara knew it was because Valerie had never quite gotten over her first love. It struck her young heart as deeply romantic—and tragic.
After her own high school graduation Tamara went to college at the University of Colorado at Denver. There she met Eric Marks, a philosophy major. By her junior year, they shared a small apartment and had planned a future in which they both taught at the same university. When Tamara’s mother died at the start of her junior year, Tamara suffered a setback, but with Eric’s support, managed to stay in school.
That Christmas, the first Christmas without her mother, Tamara received a letter from Valerie, telling her Lance Forrest had come home, and their love affair had been rekindled. Tamara worried, but Valerie sounded so happy, she tried to put aside her reservations.
But she’d been right to worry. After a brief—and by Valerie’s accounts—torrid affair, Lance blew out of town just as quickly as he’d come in.
Leaving Valerie pregnant.
It had been the beginning of the end. By the time Spring Break rolled around, Tamara was worried enough about the wild ravings of Valerie’s letters to go home and check on her. Valerie had always been a little unstable, prone to wild swings of emotion, but it had increased tenfold with pregnancy. Valerie had no one else—her own mother had gone back to Arkansas, washing her hands of her daughter.
Spring Break stretched to two weeks, then three. Eric made frantic, and increasingly irritated phone calls to Red Creek, urging Tamara to get back to school, but Tamara knew she couldn’t live with herself if anything happened to her cousin.
Despite Tamara’s efforts to get Valerie counseling, three months after Cody was born, Valerie drove herself off a high mountain road. It was ruled an accident, but Tamara knew better. When September came—the start of what should have been her senior year—Tamara was the adoptive mother of a baby son. Eric, disgusted with what he called her “provincial values,” deserted her.
Tamara had stayed in Red Creek.
With a jolt, Tamara realized she’d been standing under the water for a long time. Her neck was still stiff, but better. She picked up the shampoo bottle—an expensive salon brand that was one of her few luxuries. Squeezing a tiny dot out in her palm, she began to wash her hair.
Now, she faced a moral dilemma. After almost four years of blaming Lance for everything, Tamara discovered he wasn’t some dark evil man who’d stolen Valerie’s virtue and deserted her. Not at all. He was what they would have called a rake in the old days, an unapologetic good-time Charlie who had no intention of ever settling down, but loved all the women he met along the way.
Which put Tamara’s long-nursed plans of revenge in a new perspective. In the first place, she didn’t quite know what sort of revenge she had meant to take. Her fantasies of making Lance pay had always been rather vague. She supposed she’d imagined making him fall in love with her, then breaking his heart, as he’d broken Valerie’s.
The reality of his compelling physical presence made that seem a little absurd.
Valerie had planned to use Cody to get her revenge. In her more rational moments, Valerie had continually talked about it, her sapphire eyes cold and glittery. She planned to milk Lance Forrest of his money, using his own blood.
Tamara wouldn’t do that. Cody was too precious to be used. Period.
So what possible revenge could there be? She had no money or power. Lance wasn’t the kind of man who usually noticed her, so the seduction and broken heart angle were out. It was embarrassing that she’d even believed she might have a chance.
But then a vision of his wicked, promising grin flashed over her imagination.
What would it be like? Seducing him? Touching his golden skin, his sun-kissed hair, kissing his sensual mouth?
She shivered. Don’t even think about it.
There was another angle she did have to think about. Cody.
Should Lance know about his child? Did he have any rights to a child he didn’t even know existed?
No. Given his ways, he probably had dozens of children scattered around. One more wouldn’t make any difference.
Wearily, she rinsed shampoo out of her eyes, then blinking, looked for the soap. The bar she used was over on the sink. Cody’s crayon sat in the soap dish, and she picked it up with a giggle. What the heck.
She drew blue lines on her tummy, as he had. And down her arms, and her legs, feeling like a wild Scot. Remembering a movie she’d seen, she drew a line down the middle of her face, and rubbed blue crayon over the left side, and left it like that while she conditioned her hair. She wondered vaguely what battle she was preparing herself for.
But she knew. As her hands moved on her body, she remembered Lance Forrest’s big masculine hands, with their square, strong fingers. Her nerves tingled at the thought, tingled in her stomach and her knees and along the back of her neck. Tingled in anticipation.
She was preparing for a battle with herself. With her need to be touched like a woman. She ached to be stroked and pleasured, to be held and tended. It had been such a very long time.
And in that single moment, she knew she was going to do it. She was going to let Lance Forrest pursue her, keeping herself just out of his reach until he was in her clutches.
Then she would walk away, as he had walked away, leaving three broken lives behind him. For Valerie, for Cody and most of all, for her own broken dreams, she would do it. She
would seduce Lance Forrest.
* * *
The morning of the funeral, Lance laid out his black suit, an Italian number a woman in Houston had picked out for him. He dressed carefully. Snowy shirt, silk socks, his good shoes. Before dawn broke, he got in his Fairlane, and went to the funeral home to say his goodbyes privately.
It was what people did, wasn’t it? But the minute he stepped inside, Lance knew it was the wrong thing for him. The wrong way for him to bid farewell to his father. He shook his head at the funeral director and left.
He drove to a lake a few miles from town. And there in the outdoor stillness of morning, Lance felt his father. Here was where Lance stood with his old man, learning to fish. Here was where his father had told him everything he considered important. Here is where would Olan Forrest would linger.
Lance put his head down. He wanted to weep, but the tears wouldn’t come. What kind of son couldn’t shed tears for his father? He could feel them, thick and hot in his throat, but they were stuck there. He hoped they didn’t all come out in a humiliating rush at the funeral.
It had felt like the right thing to do, coming out to the lake. His father would be glad that Lance had worn the Italian suit, and the shoes that had cost more than a month’s rent on his Houston apartment. Olan would be glad to see him here like this, straddling easily the two things the older man had valued most—money and nature.
It was an odd combination, but Lance’s father had loved having money. Lots of it. And he took pride in the fact that he’d earned every penny himself, doing a man’s work, not some sissified thing like banking or playing the stock market. He hadn’t been the best father or husband in the world, but on his own terms, in his own way, he’d done what he set out to do.
And Lance had loved him.
After a time, Lance knew he had to get back to his mother’s house. There were a hundred things left to do, and she’d want it all to be just right.
He took his time walking back to his car, trying to breathe and feel okay, instead of the weird shakiness that seemed to have overtaken him. Maybe he was just hungry.
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