Because she knew him.
“Sounds good. Thanks,” Lisa replied. As the waitress arrived and took their drink order, Lisa looked at Scott again and frowned.
“What happened to your face?” she mouthed.
She was referring to the fresh, two-inch-long scrape just below his left eye, he knew.
“Ran into a door.” Without bothering to lower his voice particularly, he told her the same lie he’d told Nola and everyone else who’d asked, because the truth wasn’t something he wanted getting all over this small, gossipy, next-door-to-inbred town. The truth was ugly, and there was no room for ugly in the glittery never-never land he was at that moment pretending to be a part of.
“A door?” Lisa looked skeptical, but then her attention was claimed by Macy at the far end of the table, asking about her mother. Lisa answered and then amplified her answer in response to another question, and the conversation turned general as the drinks arrived. Lisa’s “usual” was a cosmopolitan, Scott noted with a glance. As she picked up her glass, her eyes slid to his face.
I’ve got no problem with anyone who’s of age drinking. It just doesn’t do it for me.
He’d said that to her a long time ago, when he’d come across her and Nola and a number of their girlfriends—he didn’t think Macy or Alexis had been part of the group, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, as all the hot chicks who hung with Lisa had started to look alike to him by then—guzzling beer in one of the barns at about age seventeen. He’d been obviously disapproving, Lisa had laughed at him and offered him a beer, he’d turned her down flat, and she had called him uptight, among other things. Then he’d taken the booze away from them and dumped it out.
From the way she watched him as she took that first sip of her cosmopolitan, he had a feeling she was remembering that long-ago night, too.
“Lisa tells me you’ve been keeping her pretty busy lately.” Peyton was talking to him, making a stab at casual conversation, although the two of them had always had about as much use for each other as a cat and a dog.
Quashing his instinct to give the guy a hard time, Scott searched for what he considered to be a relatively pleasant tone and found it.
“Office is jumping.”
“You’re lucky to have the work.” Peyton shook his head. “Our business is way down.”
“Is it?” Scott deliberately relaxed back in his chair and settled in for what he could tell already was going to be a long night. Through the table’s glass top, he watched with slightly sour appreciation as Lisa crossed long, slim legs. Then Peyton’s hand settled on her knee, and Scott found himself gritting his teeth.
“Off about fifty percent, if we’re lucky.”
“Damned recession.” Nola said it cheerfully. Beneath the table, Lisa’s legs shifted, Peyton’s hand dropped, and Scott was once again able to look at the guy without wanting to deck him.
“Crime’s the one thing that’s pretty much recession-proof,” he drawled, and Nola laughed.
“Hey, Joel, you all ever get that shopping center you were building out in Versailles finished?” one of the men—Ben, he thought—spoke from the other end of the table.
Joel nodded. “Now we’re working on getting it all rented out.”
“My company’s a tenant. We just opened an interior design store in there named Ruffles.” Nola grinned at Joel. “Now, if we could just get the developer to give us a break on the rent . . .”
Joel replied, Nola said something else, and suddenly everybody was talking. Under the cover of the general conversation, Lisa leaned toward Scott. His eyes flicked over her. Her hair was sliding over one shoulder, resting against her tawny skin and the vibrant red of her dress like a swathe of shiny black satin. Because she was leaning toward him, he could just see the first gentle slopes of her breasts and the suggestion of cleavage between them. Instead of being red to match the dress, as he would have expected, her lipstick was some barely there color that shimmered in the torchlight and made her parted lips look sexy as hell. The dark fringes of her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. Her eyes gleamed gold at him.
Beautiful didn’t begin to cover it.
“So, did you get your dad settled?” she asked in a voice meant for his ears alone. There was so much talk and laughter around them that she was confident of not being overheard.
Still moodily studying her, he wasn’t feeling much like chatting, but he answered: “Yeah.”
“Is he what happened to your face?”
Again, they knew each other too well. She’d been witness to a lot of his physical scars over the years, most all of them from the same source. Once upon a time, he’d found it embarrassing.
His shrug was an admission. “He changed his mind about going about halfway there, and when I wouldn’t turn the car around, he punched me. With a set of car keys.”
Lisa eyes widened. She drew in a breath. “He barely missed your eye.”
“He’s getting old. His aim’s going.”
“That’s not funny! The mean old bastard ought to be put away for the rest of his life.”
She looked so indignant on his behalf that Scott smiled at her.
“What mean old bastard?” Peyton turned back to ask.
Scott didn’t say anything. Lisa looked momentarily flustered. Even though she’d raised her voice at the end, he knew she’d meant their conversation to be private, that she hadn’t intended to be overheard. He waited to see if his unfortunate family situation was now going to become the subject of general dinner-table conversation.
“A guy in the system.” Lisa’s vague answer was dismissive. Her gaze slid to Nola, who was now listening in again, too. She gave her friend a quick, rallying smile. “Did you persuade this cheapskate to lower the rent?”
The sudden gaiety in her voice was meant to start a whole new round of conversation, Scott realized. He was glad to have confirmed that she considered the private things they knew about each other private. Not that he had really doubted it, or her, in that regard.
“No.” Nola gave Peyton a mock-indignant glance, to which he threw up his hands.
“It’s not up to me,” he protested. “It’s my dad’s company. He’s here somewhere. Talk to him.”
Nola replied, but Scott missed it because Peyton’s hand was riding Lisa’s knee again.
“How about we all head for the buffet?” Macy—or maybe it was Alexis—suggested. He was having trouble keeping them straight, although one was a blonde and the other was a redhead. He kind of vaguely remembered them as part of Lisa’s wild teenage crowd, but beyond that less than solid fragment of recollection, they were attractive strangers whom he was perfectly willing to let remain that way.
“I’m starving. Aren’t you?” Rising with a supple undulation that was meant to make him take notice of her curves, as Scott was perfectly aware, Nola latched on to his arm with a smile when he stood up with the rest. As she leaned into him, all warm, willing flesh draped in bright turquoise silk, he managed to smile back—it wasn’t that hard, he discovered, as long as he kept his attention fixed strictly on Nola—while coming up with a suitably agreeable reply. Summoning his inner gentleman, reminding himself that by accepting her invitation he’d made Nola his responsibility for the evening, he set himself to showing her as good a time as possible while ignoring everything that might have bugged him if he’d let it. Which wasn’t easy: Peyton held Lisa’s hand, slid his arm around her waist, dropped a kiss on her shoulder.
And that was just while they were walking to the buffet line. Once inside the tent, Scott found that he knew a surprising number of people—Lexington’s wheelers and dealers tended to be members of the country club—and was distracted enough by the conviviality he had no choice but to engage in to lose track of Lisa. When he and Nola returned to the table, though, she was already there, with Peyton, of course, beside her. Sitting down, he discovered that Peyton’s hand was on her knee again.
Hostile didn’t even approach how he felt as he worked to keep
his eyes off Lisa’s legs, hold up his end of the conversation, and eat his way through whatever tasteless food he had piled on his plate.
Without reaching under the table, grabbing Peyton’s hand, and breaking his damned wrist.
Unlike himself, Lisa was downright animated. Merry, even. Talking and laughing all through dinner. Leaning into Peyton, letting her head brush his shoulder, offering him tidbits from her plate. By the time they were finishing after-dinner drinks, Scott felt as though every word he said was being forced out through clenched teeth.
Being dragged away by Nola to the dance floor was almost a r elief.
He could handle having Nola plaster herself against him, handle having his earlobe nibbled and the back of his neck stroked, handle the smoldering looks she gave him and the way her cheek nuzzled his jaw. All that was par for the course, and he didn’t have any real trouble keeping the fun from going any further than he wanted it to go. At any other time, he might even have found himself getting into the spirit of things: Nola was luscious enough to make any man in his right mind salivate.
Unfortunately, at the moment he didn’t seem to be in his right mind. He danced with Nola, and he danced with Macy and Alexis, and with a number of other women, too, some of whom he even knew, slow dances, fast dances, dirty dances, plus everything in between, and barely registered a lick of it. He was a good enough dancer, having made a deliberate decision to master the basics, just like he ’d mastered golf and tennis, too, because they were upper-crust skills that might prove useful to him in what he had made up his mind a long time ago was going to be his climb to the top. But except for the occasional mild turn-on it afforded if the woman in his arms was hot enough, he didn’t particularly enjoy dancing at the best of times, and tonight he didn’t enjoy it at all.
Because of Lisa.
She and Peyton were practically necking on the dance floor. She danced with other men, too. There was a lot of partner swapping going on, and she seemed to get pretty friendly with everyone she was with. But it was Peyton who really got his goat.
It was Peyton whose neck she wrapped her arms around. Peyton she was going pelvis to pelvis with. Peyton who let his hands slide down to her ass.
Seeing that, Scott felt a spurt of pure rage. It was primitive and illogical and stupid as hell, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He had come tonight primarily to irk Lisa, had ended up being tortured himself instead, and was now fed up to his back teeth with the whole situation.
“Excuse me a minute, will you?” he asked his partner. Who happened to be Nola, although she could have been a Keebler elf for all the awareness he’d had of her. When he escaped, he headed for the men’s room, which was in the lower level of the clubhouse, and when he left there he lingered in the darkness outside the tent for a minute, just to get a few perspective-enhancing breaths of fresh air.
What’s wrong with you? You know what a flirt she is.
He might know, but he didn’t have to like it.
He probably would have stayed out there longer if he hadn’t spotted a couple of lawyers he knew, walking with their partners up from the golf course, on a rough collision course with the area near the practice range, where he lurked. One thing he knew: He was in no mood to indulge in casual conversation at the moment.
Ducking back inside the tent, pondering the possibility of pleading work or a headache or anything to end the evening before he totally lost his cool, he ran smack into Lisa. From her direction, she must have been coming from the ladies’ room. He saw her only at the last minute, just when they were about to bump into each other in the shadowy darkness at the far corner of the tent. To forestall a collision, he caught her upper arms just above the elbows.
“Oh!” It was a little sound of surprise. She looked up at him, her eyes widening as she recognized him. “Scott.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Peyton bearing down on them. That he’d spotted them, and that Lisa was his target, Scott had no doubt.
His hard-won perspective dissipated, just like that.
“Dance with me,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he pulled her out onto the floor and into his arms.
22
The truly maddening thing about it was that in Scott’s arms was just exactly where she wanted to be.
They closed hard and strong around her, pulling her against him without giving her a chance to protest. Because he was Scott, she didn’t want to. She relaxed in his embrace, her hands flattening on his chest so that she could feel the firm resilience of the muscles there beneath the smooth cotton of his shirt. Having the freedom to touch him like that was a luxury, and she reveled in it. Moving with him, and the music, she enjoyed the solid contours beneath her palms as she breathed in the scent of him: crisp and clean, as though he’d just come in from the outdoors. He was wearing his charcoal suit with a white shirt and pale blue tie, the one that matched his eyes. She’d been thinking all evening how handsome he looked in it, and how consequential. The hunky former farmhand was still hunky but now unmistakably a VIP. Through his clothes she could feel the heat of his body, and it lured her closer. Sliding her hands slowly and with deliberate sensuality up to his shoulders, she curled her arms around his neck and nestled against him, acutely conscious of how unyielding his chest felt against her breasts, experiencing the instant reaction of her nipples to the contact with a stir of pleasure. His hips were so close that she could feel the brush of his lower body against hers; his belt buckle was a small, hard rectangle just above her belly button. His legs felt long and powerful as they moved with hers. The fine wool of his trousers grazed her bare knees and calves.
Her heart was suddenly beating way too fast. Her pulse was tremulous. Her stomach seemed to quiver. Everything about him, from the square angle of his clean-shaven jaw just above her eye level to the breadth of his shoulders to the sturdy warmth of his neck beneath her fingers, appealed to her. She liked the confident way he held her. She liked how big and muscular he felt. She liked that there was no trace of alcohol on the warm breath that just feathered her cheek.
Swaying with him to the slow, throbbing beat of the music, her body started to throb most pleasurably in turn. Smiling slightly, she tilted her head back and opened her eyes to look at him. His face was in shadow because of the ceiling of tiny white lights that twinkled like a thousand stars overhead, but as he met her gaze she could tell one thing for sure: He wasn’t smiling back at her.
“Do you deliberately try to turn men on?” His low voice had a definite edge to it. “Or is it something you just can’t help?”
His tone might be disagreeable, but his body language—the way his head bent close to hers, the possessive splaying of his hands across her back, the intimacy of his movements—told her that he was as much a prey to the heat flaring up between them as she was. The difference was, he was fighting it. As usual.
She gave a little gurgle of laughter. “Wait a minute. Are you admitting I’m turning you on?”
“Of course you are. You know it, too. And you’re loving every minute of it, aren’t you?”
“Maybe. All right, yes, I am loving it. And so are you, underneath all your bullshit. You think I can’t tell what you’re thinking? I can.”
“Baby, if you knew what I was thinking, you’d run for the hills.”
Slowly she shook her head. “I wouldn’t run.”
There was the briefest of pauses. “Now that’s a hell of a thing to say to me.”
“At least I’m honest about what I want.”
Smiling at him, she pressed deliberately closer yet. He hadn’t been kidding: The proof of his arousal was right there between them now, impossible to mistake. He knew she felt it: His lips thinned and his jaw tightened even as he slanted a glinting look down at her.
“Just so you know, this isn’t going to happen.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, yes, you do. You and m
e. No way.”
She lifted her brows at him teasingly. “You could try relaxing and enjoying it.”
“I might—if I wanted to wind up as one more notch on your bedpost.”
“Now, that’s insulting.” Her tone was untroubled rather than angry or reproachful. Her arms tightened around his neck as he swung her around in a movement of the dance. His body was absolutely, unmistakably masculine, and she loved that it was. He was holding her so close to him now that she could feel his body heat radiating through his clothes, feel the slide of his shirt over his skin, feel the rigid length of him pressing solidly against her. Far too close for her to have any doubt that he wanted her badly, although she could also sense resistance in every tense muscle. “I’d be willing to bet anything you like that your bedpost has a lot more notches on it than mine.”
Another brief pause. “Touché.”
“I thought so.”
His arms were taut around her. His hips and thighs molded her own. She could feel the tangible proof of his desire with every move they made. That pleasurable throb inside her turned into something that was hotter and more liquid, and her mouth went suddenly dry. Moistening her lips with her tongue, she met his gaze.
“This is nice, you have to admit.”
“ ‘ Nice ’ isn’t quite the word I’d use.” But the sudden huskiness of his voice gave him away. He was as turned on as she was.
“What word would you use, then?”
“Dumb.”
“You don’t always have to be smart, you know. Or in control.” She deliberately stroked the warm, smooth skin at the nape of his neck, her touch light and teasing. His lips firmed. His eyes darkened. His hold on her tightened. He swung her around again, and she clung to him. Her breasts snuggled against his chest. Her hips moved seductively against his. Her thighs pressed his thighs.
Her heart was drumming. Her bones were melting. Deep inside, her body quaked and burned.
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