One Night With The Best Man

by Sara Daniel

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He winked.

  Heat flooded her cheeks. “You know what I mean. Don’t try to create a sexual context where there isn’t any.”

  “Professor, from the moment I saw your assets through that hospital gown, all I’ve thought of is sexual contexts with you.”

  “Grow up, Alex. And my name is Susan.” She gestured for him to leave the kitchen ahead of her.

  “Lead the way, Susie.” He gestured right back. “If I have to go to the bedroom for any other reason, I’m going to revel in being immature and hormonal, and check you out while we walk.”

  Marching through the living room and down the short hallway, she tried to ignore where his gaze rested, but her stomach flip-flopped and every nerve ending sparked with awareness. “If you’re so into backsides, you should have become a doctor, so you could see a new one every day.”

  “I don’t want to see everybody’s,” he said from behind her, so close his breath brushed her neck. “I have standards, and let me tell you, in those tight jeans, you’ve met and exceeded every one of them.”

  Despite the promise of heaven in his voice, the last thing she needed was a guy with a sworn avoidance of all attachments. She did not need a fling with a man who wouldn’t stick around. She had a plan for permanence and stability and to build an organic dairy legacy. People would come and go from her life, but she could count on the farm and her university research to always be there for her.

  Alex had handled hanging out in the kitchen that bore no resemblance to the one he’d eaten meals in every day for the first eighteen years of his life. He’d enjoyed ogling Susie’s butt in her fitted jeans and loved how her skin flushed and her nipples tightened in response.

  But one glance inside his old bedroom destroyed the sexy tension. He couldn’t distract her with a quickie when his bed was covered with baseball trophies and dried dance corsages.

  “All this shit can be thrown away. I’ll pay for the Dumpster to come. Done.” He dusted his hands together and back-stepped out of the doorway to escape.

  “What about this?” She scooted around him, engulfing him in the subtle scent of lilies, and picked a framed photo from a box.

  The light reflected the layer of dust over the glass, along with a chipped corner. The metal frame was dull and speckled, the edges uneven. “Dumpst—”

  She tipped the frame. The reflection disappeared, allowing him to view the picture. A grinning, dark-haired, four-year-old boy gripped the steering wheel of a tractor, his feet dangling off the lap of a similarly dark-haired man who held him around the waist and beamed with pride.

  Entranced, Alex stumbled toward the vision of warm, happy memories. Then reality crashed in. Fifteen years after the idyllic scene had been captured, the same tractor would roll over, pinning Dad underneath it and killing him.

  Alex took the frame, intending to hurtle it against the wall, but couldn’t let go of the evidence of the bond he’d had with his father. He wanted to sink to the floor and cry like a baby. Hell, he even wanted to make his father proud. Which was total shit. The only thing that would have inspired pride and approval from his father would have been to follow in his footsteps and become a farmer, allowing the work to kill first his spirit then his body.

  “Do you want me to give you a minute?” Susie’s compassionate voice next to his ear startled him.

  Too discombobulated to attempt a callous or flirtatious reply, he allowed the truth to slip free. “Yes.”

  After patting his shoulder, she strolled toward the doorway. The memories and boxes in the room closed around him as if he’d stepped in suffocating quicksand. He might summon the strength to tackle the task with her at his side, but he didn’t stand a chance alone.

  “No! Don’t go. Please.”

  Pausing, she raised her eyebrows, but otherwise didn’t move closer or farther from him.

  A raw sense of desperation, not unlike when an enemy cut off his reinforcements, enveloped him. “I’ve harassed you and acted like a jerk, and I’m sorry. I promise not to feel you up or jump you. I just really suck at trips down memory lane and could use a little moral support, if you don’t mind staying with me.”

  Her gaze softened, and she slipped her arm around his waist, her warm curves burning through his clothes and into his flesh. “Of course I’ll stay. How about if I bring things to you and you can tell me about each item? Judging from your reaction to this picture, I think you’ll immediately know which things have meaning that you want to save and which don’t.”

  He scrubbed his knuckles through his hair. It was longer than it had been in years without his regular military trims. “Sure, I can do that much.” He took a deep breath, filling his nose with her lily scent again. “I think.”

  She brushed her lips over his cheek. “Sit down.”

  Knocked over by her unexpected gesture, he sank to the floor. “We can get through this whole room as long as I have enough kisses for reinforcement. How about the next one on the lips?”

  “How about you tell me about this girl?” She shoved another picture in front of him, steel replacing softness in her tone.

  Another junkyard frame, this one encasing a picture of him with the high school’s head cheerleader moments after they’d been crowned prom royalty. He glanced at Susie’s pursed lips and bit back a grin. If she wanted to disapprove, he’d make it worth her while.

  “Her school spirit was the stuff of legends. First time she gave me head, I went out and hit a grand slam. Damn, she was a good time. Jealous?”

  “That you took advantage of some girl? Hardly.”

  His naiveté had been the only thing taken advantage of. “I’ll admit to being jealous when I discovered the third baseman and the shortstop also shared her school spirit.” Relieved the memories no longer carried the charged, confused emotions of his youth, he set the picture in the discard pile. “Next.”

  “Newspaper clippings of the baseball state championships.”

  They’d been his moments of glory until he’d gone off to war. Carrying a wounded comrade to safety and the medical care that would save his life had been Alex’s real moment of glory. But no newspaper stories or pictures had documented it. The quiet, heartfelt thanks of Luke’s wife had been more than enough reward.

  “Better save the papers for Mamá. She was so proud to see me in black and white. It’s a shame I didn’t die in combat for the Marines. My heroic sacrifice would have made the paper for her.”

  Susie’s grip tightened on the stack of papers. “If you’re trying to joke, you’re not funny.”

  “Dying for your country never is.” But he’d been prepared to make the sacrifice. His father had given the same life commitment to the farm. Having nothing left he was willing to give his life for left Alex with a strange emptiness.

  “If you come across any newspaper articles about Dad’s accident, set them aside for my mother. She’ll want them, but I’ll never be able to look at them. Are there any more pictures of hot, promiscuous girls who corrupted my innocence?”

  Susie’s gaze rested on him for far too long. Finally, she broke the contact and set the newspapers under the tractor photo. “You’re not as shallow as you want me to think.”

  He resisted the urge to squirm. “Of course I’m shallow. Just because I promised not to try to get into your pants doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it.”

  “You need to improve your bullshit because you’re not fooling either of us.”

  As if the junk in the room hadn’t sent his emotions into enough of a tailspin, his heart clenched and then sped up when she called him out. Unable to prevent a smile, he turned the expression into a smart-ass smirk. “Did you use your teacher voice on me, Professor?”

  “It’s the only voice I’m using on you from now on. No girls, promiscuous or otherwise, in this picture.” She handed him a photo of himself as a skinny, miserable thirteen-year-old wearing overalls and a T-shirt, scooping cow manure from the barn alongside his dad.
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  “That summer sucked. Dad decided I was old enough to pull a grown man’s workload, and I decided to get as far away from the farm as I could as soon as I turned eighteen.” Alex had left home, but he hadn’t been able to outrun the guilt. If he hadn’t left, he’d have been around to prevent the accident that had claimed his father’s life.

  “The Marines took you pretty far away, I’ll bet, but I can’t imagine they worked you any less hard.”

  “I didn’t resent it like I did the chores here. Believing in a noble cause made the bad days bearable. Anyway, at the time of this picture, I wasn’t dreaming about joining the Marines. I banked on enjoying a big league baseball career.”

  “What happened with that? You were obviously good.” She waved a toy tractor set between the keep and discard piles.

  “Keep for Luciana. I fully expect to be an uncle within the next year.”

  She set it aside with a smile. “So, back to America’s favorite pastime.”

  He shrugged. “Sure, I was good, but you have to be a lot better than good to land a career in the majors. I have no regrets about baseball. I dreamed of being a superstar, like every other boy who’s ever played the game. Like all those other boys, reality eventually kicked in, and I needed a backup plan. Which sure as hell wasn’t going to be the farm.”

  Susie held up an ugly orange T-shirt.

  He pointed to the throw-out pile. “Now, confession time for you. Why did you leave your pristine classroom to shovel cow pies out of a barn?”

  “First of all, I haven’t left the classroom.” She tossed two more shirts to him, and he dropped them both on the Dumpster pile. “I still carry a full teaching load. Second, I rarely shovel manure or anything else. Have you been to the barn yet?”

  “No, and as long as the wedding’s not taking place inside it, I don’t plan to.” He stood and plowed through the box of shirts, pulling one with a hardware store logo from near the bottom. “Keep this one for Luciana. Blake’s parents used to run the store. Everything else is trash.”

  She set the shirt aside while he swiped the corsages and trophies from the bed into the box and pushed it to the junk pile. Family pictures went to the keep side, earning only a cursory glance to weed out old girlfriends, but not enough for him to dwell on the memories within the photos.

  Soon, he’d divided the room into two halves. He’d done it. He’d gone through everything and survived with his soul intact.

  Susie clasped his palm. “Nice job on conquering your demons. Even better, we have time for a tour of the barn before you have to report to the tent for the rehearsal.”

  “I already told you I’m not setting foot in there. If we have time to kill, this bed is now conveniently bare and available.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “You can stand in the barn doorway if you’re too chickenshit to go inside.”

  Alex tugged her hand, pulling her flush with his chest. He could seriously get into her body rubbing against his. “You don’t call a Marine chickenshit.”

  She smirked. “Prove it, and I’ll take it back.”

  Chapter Three

  Hell if he didn’t swallow her bait whole. “You play dirty. I like that in a woman.”

  “I’ve seen the kind of women you like. If you’re attracted to me, I won’t take it as a compliment.”

  Alex laughed. If she wasn’t tied to the one piece of property he refused to have anything to do with, she would be damn near perfect. In addition to being witty and intelligent, she had a compassionate side that threatened to drown him in sweetness. Maybe if he concentrated on the sweetness of her ass again, he’d forget about their destination as she dragged him across the back lot.

  Unfortunately, the barn still drew his attention. He’d known it as a white building with peeling paint and a sagging roof, but the structure in front of him was bright red with white trim and not a bit of sag.

  The door sported a prominent University Employees Only sign. Susie bypassed it in favor of a new section of the building with an entrance labeled Visitors and ushered him into a Plexiglas-enclosed observation area.

  “Visitors? Do you think you’re going to become a tourist destination or something?” Despite the laughable idea, he’d have been the first to encourage his family to take a gamble on it if they could have made any money to ease their financial burden.

  “Considering we’re running an educational endeavor, we’re open to field trips and independent study groups. Mostly, we use this room for academic observation and research.” Touching a computer monitor, Susie filled the screen with columns of numbers. “Students and instructors can come here and access the data we’ve recorded.”

  “What is there to record besides how much milk you get every day?”

  “We keep records about the food the cows are eating. In addition to the quantity of milk, we test the nutritional content at every milking, correlating it with the different feeds the cows are ingesting, while staying away from hormones and antibiotic supplements.”

  Beyond their glassed-in room, the employee door opened. Three men and two women, some not much younger than him, some barely out of their teens, filed in. Each nodded or waved to Susie, and a couple shot him speculative glances. They strode through the barn, some switching on the milking stations, others opening the large animal doors for the cows to enter single file.

  “Those are a few of my grad students. They’ll milk each cow, test the milk, and record their findings. Another group will do the same thing in the morning. I have seven students in each group, so no one is stuck trying to run everything and they also get a few days off a week.”

  Relief raced through him that she didn’t have the constant twice-a-day pressure his father and then his sister had dealt with. But raising any kind of livestock required a lot more work than the never-ending milking.

  “What about the rest of the farm chores? Do your students do those, too, or are you stuck with the remaining work?”

  “A part-time handyman and some undergrads take care of repairing things and other labor-intensive tasks. I oversee the operation, but I’m well aware of who does the heavy lifting, and it’s not me.”

  The buildings and the land might be where his family had toiled, but the similarities ended there. Susie wasn’t working herself into the ground, the way his father and sister had. Keeping her teaching job also meant she didn’t depend on the operation to pay the bills and put food on the table either. He didn’t have to worry about the farm destroying her.

  “Come with me. I want to look at the data from the kelp-meal supplement research.” Opening a see-through plastic door, she led him out of the observation area, along a walkway with painted lines on the floor.

  Stepping across a line, she joined a young woman who measured a small test tube of milk and clamped it into a machine. A series of numbers spilled across a computer monitor, and both women leaned in, studying the screen with the intensity of a Marine on alert for land mines.

  Dairy farming had been part of his life since birth, but Alex knew nothing about the operation Susie ran. Sure, he understood every movement of the students attending to the actual milking, but the computers and numbers flipped the focus from back-breaking labor into an intellectual endeavor.

  The sexy professor had turned everything he’d thought he’d known about farm work on its head. What other surprises would she reveal if he took the time to uncover them?

  Alex stepped into Susan’s personal space, his chest brushing her back as he peered over her shoulder at the kelp supplement chart. She took a deep breath and tried to focus on her student’s thesis update.

  “After I enter all the data on Monday, I’ll have six months of findings to draw conclusions on the benefits of kelp,” Layla said.

  The intensity of Alex’s presence traveled down her spine and settled in Susan’s core until her thighs quivered.

  “I’m looking forward to your analysis and preliminary observations.” Thankfully, she managed to find her professor voice a
nd hang onto an appropriate image for her student, no small feat when every fiber inside her burned to twist toward to the sexy hunk at her back and beg him to slide his hand inside her panties.

  Layla’s gaze swept over him with undisguised appreciation. “Your new research project looks like it will provide very entertaining results.”

  “Oh, no. We’re not—” Susan protested. “Alex’s family used to own this farm, so I’m giving him a tour of what we do.”

  He laughed, undermining her attempt at professionalism. “I’m all about letting Susie use my body in the name of research.”

  Oh God. She stepped away from his magnetic force field and cleared her throat, trying to pretend her legs weren’t trembling. “Sorry for distracting you, Layla. We’ll let you return to your work.”

  She laughed. “No need to rush off on my account.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s on my account. I have that effect on women.” He winked.

  “The only research on your body is going to be how fast I can shovel a grave to bury you in. Outside, Alex, now.” Susan led him to the employee door, and thankfully he followed her out. She strode around the side of barn, not stopping until she’d gone far enough to be certain her students couldn’t see or hear them. Then she spun to face him. “You weren’t doing my professional image any favors in there.”

  His lips curved in an unrepentant smirk. “Professor, you might be a bit out of touch if you think college students have never heard a sexual innuendo before.”

  He made her sound ridiculous and uptight, but she had a community and a position with the university to protect. “In addition to what you said, you were rubbing against my back in front of her.”