Sweet Dreams

by Stacey Keith

  His heart beat faster when he thought about it.

  * * * *

  “So what are your plans for tonight?” Coralee asked, kicking the walk-in freezer door shut behind her. “It’s a beautiful Saturday night in Cuervo, Texas. You gotta have something cooking besides another batch of blueberry muffins.”

  The question took Maggie off guard, which made her mess up a line of frosting on a birthday cake. Now she’d have to scrape off the excess with a knife and try to hide the mistake. No way was she telling Coralee—or anyone else, for that matter—where she was going tonight. She was rattled enough without having to worry about small-town gossip. Wherever Jake was taking her, she hoped it was about three hundred miles from here.

  She took a deep breath and tried to pipe the frosting again. Maybe it was her nerves talking, but if she messed this thing up any worse, they’d have to send her back to cake college. The smart thing to do would be to put it away until tomorrow when, God willing, her hands might be steady.

  “I’m not doing anything tonight,” Maggie fibbed. “Are you going to your UFO club?”

  Coralee nodded, as matter-of-fact as if Maggie had asked her about a PTA meeting or a potluck supper. UFOs were the mainstay of Coralee’s life, along with cooking shows, crossword puzzles and Ed, her husband. Ed was retired and rarely stirred from the Barcalounger.

  “There’s been a sighting near Big Bend National Park,” Coralee said with the hushed urgency she used when discussing her “saucers.” “Any day now I expect them to come to Cuervo. You know how my Ed got took up by one. He’ll be the first to tell you, they’re none too gentle on folks.”

  Maggie bit down hard on a smile. The idea of any interstellar beings taking an interest in doughy, monosyllabic Ed was pretty funny.

  “We’re doin’ a slideshow at the club tonight,” Coralee said. “You sure you don’t want to come?”

  Maggie glanced at the clock and shook her head. “Me and Gus are staying in and watching our shows, but thanks anyway. Look, if you want to leave early, I can lock up. I doubt we’re going to get slammed fifteen minutes before closing.”

  Coralee brightened. “I wouldn’t mind cuttin’ out a little early. If I don’t get there before Patsy McCulskey does, she steals my seat.” She lifted her apron over her head and hung it on a peg. “You and Gus have fun tonight.”

  Oh, we will. Maggie put on her best smile and waved Coralee out the door. But the instant she had the bakery to herself, every doubt, every fear, every impulse of racing excitement hit her all at once. She dropped the pastry bag and took a deep breath.

  She couldn’t believe she was actually going through with this. How many times this week had she actually had to sit down because when she thought about Jake, her legs wouldn’t hold her?

  Maggie glanced at the clock again. Okay, now it was ten minutes till closing. She went to the front window and looked out. The sun had set and Main Street was awash in the blue of twilight. Mr. Wilcox from the lumber store flipped the door hanger from Open to Closed. One store over, Sue Ellen from Country Couture scooped up the fat lazy tabby that slept on her doormat and brought him inside. The street was mostly deserted now, which tempted Maggie to do something she had never done: lock the door early and turn out the lights.

  Feeling like a bad store owner, a bad person even, she put the half-decorated cake into the refrigerator, locked the back door and then tiptoed up the outside stairs to her apartment. Jake was coming to pick her up in about an hour, so she’d have to hurry.

  First, she walked Gus, which was hard because he loved his walks and kept tearing around in circles so she couldn’t get his leash on. Then she rushed him through his evening constitutional.

  She, Magdalene Rose Roby, was going on a date with the handsomest man she’d ever set eyes on—not to mention one of the richest men in the country. And if that wasn’t scary enough, she was doing it knowing full well that guys like Jake were never in it for the long haul. They dazzled you with the shiny beads and then they disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  Practical Maggie, the Maggie who ironed her Christmas ribbons so she could use them again, forced herself back down to earth. Things were clearer there—or would be if she stopped thinking how badly she wanted to have sex with him. Jake sure knew how to woo, but that didn’t mean she owed him anything. Like sex. To a man in his income tax bracket? What he’d sent her was like tossing a nickel in a wishing well.

  Gus had his nose buried in a tuft of milkweed. “Come on,” she told him. “You’re just stalling now.” She dragged him back to the apartment and poured fresh water into his bowl. Then she hurried through her shower, told herself to slow down, hurried through the annoying shaving and then stepped out of the bathroom with a fluffy towel around her head.

  She usually didn’t wear much makeup, but tonight she tidied up her brows and applied a smoky eyeshadow to the crease of her lids and some shimmer to the center. Thank you, April, for showing me how. Maggie brushed two coats of mascara on her lashes, surprised when she didn’t make a mess of it. Then she lined her lips and filled them in with a red shade called Siren.

  The entire time she heaped scorn on herself for going to all this trouble—for going out with Jake in the first place. But she kept right on fussing, didn’t she? Talking herself out of it was like trying to argue with Gus.

  Still caught up in her mental tug-of-war, she put on the red Christian Dior dress with the fit-and-flare retro cut and then looked at herself in the mirror. Someone else stared back, someone too fancy to have ever set foot inside Cuervo. Her heart pounded. Too late to chicken out now.

  By the time she blow-dried her hair and slipped on her ballet flats, the doorbell rang. Gus crowed so loudly, she practically jumped out of her skin. She scrambled to find her favorite perfume, sprayed some in a cloud out in front of her and then walked through it. Too much? Too late.

  She went through the door feeling as though she might just black out. Gone was any sense of gravity. Peering through the spyhole at Jake, movie-star handsome in his white shirt and black pants, only added to the feeling that the world was spinning way faster than she could handle.

  Maggie opened the door.

  Jake stood under her porch light and locked eyes with her.

  Her whole body went molten.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Maggie Roby was a wet dream.

  Jake couldn’t keep his eyes off her, even though he knew staring was never good form.

  He gave a low whistle. “You’re killing me.”

  It flustered her a little, he could tell. She looked around and then strode with more determination than eagerness down the stairs to the car. It was the only car parked there, so lucky guess.

  She stood next to it, clutching her purse like a life preserver. Clearly, she didn’t want people to see her going anywhere with a man.

  “Why, Magdalene, you aren’t nervous, are you?” he asked, knowing she was and amused by it. “Afraid the locals will talk?”

  “They always talk. Can we go now?”

  Jake opened the door and watched her slide across the seat. There was something about the way she sat there looking straight ahead, all prim and church lady-ish, that made him…hungry. He wanted to get in beside her and pull her onto his lap. He wanted to see what good Texas girls who didn’t like to be talked about wore under their sexy party dresses. Maybe they didn’t wear anything at all.

  And he was hard already. Rock hard. He closed the door before she could see, glad he’d put the top up. Thinking about it wasn’t helping. Besides, he was getting way ahead of himself. Maggie wasn’t going to be a pushover like most of the women he dated. But why the hell did he find that so refreshing?

  “So who was that I saw upstairs with the ears and the tail?” he said, getting in the car and starting the engine. “You don’t actually call that a dog, do you?”

  “His name is Gus,�
� she said with a bit of the indignation he liked provoking in her. “He’s a highly trained attack dog, so watch it.”

  “More genetic nightmare than attack dog.” He grinned, waiting for lightning bolts to come shooting out of her eyeballs. But again the impression he got was nervousness. Even in the dim light of the dashboard, her face was so open, he could have read her like a book. Her alarm. Her need. Her distrust. Her fascinating ambivalence.

  It was all there, and it drew him in despite a firm belief that liking a woman was far more dangerous than just sleeping with one.

  “So tell me, Magdalene,” he murmured, nosing the car past the first of Cuervo’s two stoplights. “Aren’t you curious to know where I’m taking you?”

  She shrugged, which practically shouted yes. The dress he’d gotten her showed enough cleavage to be distracting. Even out of the corner of his eye he could see the delicious rise and fall of her breasts, just as real as the rest of her, real and ready for a man’s hands. For his hands. He clamped them tight to the steering wheel to keep from doing something impulsive.

  “The way I figure, Mason wouldn’t be friends with you if you were a serial killer,” she said. “So the chances of you hacking me into tiny pieces aren’t great. More than that, a girl should never expect.”

  “Boy, you set the bar high.” Interesting, he thought, tucking that tidbit away for later consumption. There was nobody as jaded as a disappointed idealist like her. Still, Maggie had the power to surprise him, which was new. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been surprised by much of anything, woman-wise, except the time he’d walked into his hotel room in Munich to find the girl from reception sprawled out naked on his bed.

  “I like to think I’m a realist,” she said. “You know—manage your expectations. If at the end of the night no one’s screaming or bloody, that’s a win.”

  She looked so prissy sitting over there with her hands in her lap and her ridiculous notions about “managing” expectations. He just couldn’t let her get away with it. “That’s quite a line of bullshit you tried to get over on me,” he said.

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “You’re not a realist, Magdalene. You’re the most hopeless romantic I know.”

  Bullseye.

  He grinned.

  She’d puff herself up now because he’d found her out. If there was one thing Maggie didn’t like, he knew, it was being told a truth about herself that she wasn’t prepared to admit to yet.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, looking out the window.

  He picked up speed on the farm road heading toward Richmond. “Of course you do. You have a record player in your bakery. Mason says you listen to Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones all day. Maybe, if you’re feeling frisky, a little John Coltrane. I saw what you drive—it’s a 1953 Chevy pickup, in cherry condition, too. You own a vintage cash register and go completely gooey around babies. You don’t just wear your heart on your sleeve, princess, you run it up a flag pole and carry it on parade.”

  He didn’t think she knew how beautiful she was when the mask came off. She stared at him, her mouth a small oh, with none of her usual “How long before you try to grope me” hauteur.

  And fuck if he wasn’t just eating it up.

  “I don’t miss much,” he said. “Not when it’s someone who’s worth my interest.”

  “It’s like you’ve been stalking me,” she said, doing a poor job of pretending not to smile. “Do you know what I have for breakfast?”

  “Coffee. Black. Toast on the side, buttered right up to the edges.” He heard rather than saw her quick intake of breath. “I’m right, aren’t I? Now ask me what it is you really need from life, Magdalene Roby.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure you think it should involve nudity of some kind.”

  “Lots of nudity.” The word just sort of hung there for a minute while his mind went places it probably shouldn’t have, not with Maggie only an arm’s reach away. “What you need is someone who can show you a bigger world. Who isn’t afraid of women who are hungry for it. Hungry for everything, actually.”

  His voice was low and the drawl had crept back into it. Hell, he hadn’t been in Cuervo a full ten hours yet and already he was drawling. He’d worked hard to get rid of that hick remnant of Palestine, Texas. Now it had worked its way back in somehow, as though it knew he didn’t have to be anything less than who he really was now.

  “Suppose I was…hungry,” she said, gazing straight at him with those marvelous dark eyes. “Suppose there is, as you say, a bigger world out there. I can’t just leave my bakery, my friends, my family, and follow my dreams. I have responsibilities here.”

  Her voice had gotten a little shrill, which he recognized for what it was: an attempt to strangle that deep, forbidden longing. Craving, even. And sitting next to Maggie without touching her gave him fierce cravings of his own. They crawled over him, inside him, biting like fire ants.

  “I’m not like you,” she said. “You avoid staying in any one place for long. For me, one place, the right place, is all I need.”

  “Maybe not all you need,” he said. “How do you know you like something until you’ve tasted it?”

  Now the word tasted slid around in the space between them. It reminded him of what he’d been thinking about earlier, which was what she might have on underneath that dress. He liked buying her dresses. He liked imagining what they might look like on her voluptuous curves. Then he liked imagining what his hands would look like gliding over those curves.

  But when he thought about that, it was difficult to remember anything else. Where he was going, for instance.

  “Whoa, almost missed the turnoff.” Jake hit the brakes and fishtailed into the turn, just enough to make it fun. He could see her alarm and confusion, especially since the road wasn’t paved and it seemed to go right into the middle of nowhere.

  “Okay, maybe I’m not joking about you chopping me up into tiny pieces,” she said. “Are we at the old Peterson place?”

  If he were the kind of man who chortled, he would have totally done that, all evil genius with the hands rubbing together and the diabolical laugh. As they started up a low hill, he felt the thrill of a personal triumph coming on. She was going to love this. Now that it was almost here, he loved this, too.

  Emma had helped, of course. He couldn’t wait to tell her how it turned out, minus the panting and moaning and the clothes coming off.

  If clothes were coming off. Christ, he hoped so.

  When they crested the hill and Maggie saw what he’d done, she gasped. He wore that gasp like a merit badge. His chest swelled with pride. His heart suddenly felt too big for it. But the little girl joy he saw on Maggie’s face was so worth any trouble he’d gone to. It was even worth worrying that he’d done too much, too soon. Just because he was used to wielding authority and indulging whims didn’t mean everyone else was comfortable with it.

  He’d bet that a hopeless romantic like his Maggie would love the gesture. And she clearly did.

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

  On top of the hill, he’d created a drive-in movie theater. A full-sized movie screen sat at one end; a grill and a cooking station sat on the other end where the best chef Emma could find in the area waved them in. The waiter wore formal attire—also Emma’s idea—and there was a table covered in white linen next to a tree hung with decorative lanterns.

  Jake couldn’t stop grinning. It was perfect.

  “How on earth…?” Maggie couldn’t get all the words out.

  “You’re a classic movie buff,” he explained. “Like me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Cassidy, of course.”

  Jake parked the car and she got out, walking slowly toward the table as though afraid if she rushed it, the whole thing would go poof. He joined her, accepting a champagne
flute of sparkling water from the waiter. Maggie did the same.

  “Am I dreaming?” she asked.

  “Maybe you are.” He clinked glasses with her and looked around, as pleased with himself as if the grass, the trees, the starry sky were all his doing, too.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “For all of it.”

  In just that moment, all the wariness was gone from Maggie’s face. Instead, it glowed as brightly as the lanterns behind her. Her entire heart shone there, a woman’s heart, before life had had its way with it.

  Jake was so moved, he leaned down and brushed his lips against hers.

  She tasted of peppermint. Something hot and drugging drove straight through him. She returned the kiss, softly at first, drawing him after her. This was a different kiss from the one in the gazebo. This was a kiss Maggie meant, and he found himself intoxicated by the tenderness of it. Sweetness he’d always thought killed passion, now made it that much hotter.

  Gently, he claimed her mouth, lost in the lushness of it. The urge to take more moved restlessly inside him, more of that intense rush, that sensation of flying. More of her warm pink lips.

  Maggie was no ordinary woman.

  But he was beginning to understand what that actually meant.

  * * * *

  Maggie pulled away and opened her eyes, half-expecting everything to have vanished like a dream. What she saw instead were the smooth planes of Jake’s face, his sensuous lips and bristly lashes. He felt warm and male and powerful.

  He had created this fantasy for her. Just her.

  But she also worried. She couldn’t help it. Maybe she worried because there was no precedent for this, not in her life at least. The men she knew didn’t make grand gestures. They drove old beater trucks and went hunting. You always caught them with dirty magazines under the bed.

  As much as she wanted Jake, she still balked at the idea of sleeping with him just because he’d succeeded at sweeping her off her feet. Or of Jake thinking this was all some kind of prelude to her capture. She couldn’t bear the thought of him casting her aside, not now. Not after this. And not only that he would cast her aside, but that the fantasy he’d created was done with the purpose of sleeping with her, not simply pleasing her.