More importantly, her weekly film class date with Jennings aside, what was she doing here?
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Rachel turned away from the fields to face him standing at the top of his steps. She’d heard him coming, of course. A herd of elephants had more stealth than he did. “Just a penny? You really ought to ask Dominic for a raise.”
“Okay, okay.” She could tell from his voice he was smiling. “I can go up to a nickel. But those better be some good thoughts.”
“Dirty ones, you mean?”
“I’m not picky. Any thoughts that include me with all my body parts intact will do.”
She smiled too. It was hard to stay morose in his presence for very long. He stood quietly, and she knew he was waiting for her to share her thoughts or cut him down with an insult or even storm away to go knock on Jennings’s door and hightail it out of there.
She did none of those things.
It was confusing, this wishy-washy sensation inside her that made it impossible for her to hurl accusations at his head. Making decisions and sticking to them was what she did. She should have confronted him about his money, asked him about Eric’s past and the deep, dark secret Nora didn’t want her to know.
But then what? What comes after that?
She didn’t know. And she didn’t want to find out.
“I was just thinking about the show,” she lied. It was neutral territory. It would have to do. “You’re not half bad, you know. You could be an actor if you wanted.”
He snorted and moved down the steps. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, his feet bare, hair perfectly tousled, the scruff of a blond beard just beginning to show. He’d probably rolled out of bed when she pulled up.
Her heart clenched. Michael in bed. Michael getting out of said bed just to say “hello”.
“Stop. You’re making me blush.”
“I’m serious.” She crossed her arms over her stomach. “You have a natural gift for it.”
His laughter boomed through the morning air, his hand shooting out and resting on her forehead. “Are you sick or something? Delirious again?”
“Very funny.” She felt her color rising. She couldn’t remember all of their conversations from opening day, but she knew she’d said too much. “It just seems like a waste, you out here raising crops and playing jailer to Nick.”
“I dunno. Being jailer has been an interesting experience. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately.”
“You? A lot of thought?”
He draped a loose arm over her shoulder. It was a friendly move, nothing the least bit sexual about it, but it was enough to make every part of her body spring to life. It was like she was twelve and dancing with a boy for the first time. Every smile meant something; every touch was logged into her mental files to be reviewed later.
“It’s shocking, I know—don’t tell anyone. But this farm has a way of turning boys into men. Hard work and no bullshit. It does crazy things. And it’s more fun than I thought it would be, whipping Nick’s ass into the ground. I sometimes wonder…”
“So do it.” Rachel turned, loosening herself from his arm to face him. His eyes still sparkled with warmth and humor, but there was seriousness there as well. She shifted, overcome with just how intently he looked at her. “Turn this place into a boot camp or something—if you have the resources, I mean. You’re a good coach. You have an incredible way with people. It’s like you see something inside them, and they can’t help but want to please you.”
He studied her with an uncomfortable intensity. Rachel launched ahead, eager to fill that awkward space with something. “I can’t tell you how nice it would be to have a place like this to send my mom. Or Molly. Someplace to turn girls into women.”
He gripped the back of her neck, but not hard and not with any ill intentions. A warm, callused thumb rubbed along the base of her skull. It felt magical. He felt magical.
“There are places you can send your mom, Rachel. They don’t always work, of course—I can think of three programs my dad blew off in my first decade of life alone. But that’s all you can really do. Give them the option, hope they make the right choices.”
She stiffened a little as his hand grew firmer, more intense.
“And you always could try letting Peterson take care of Molly for a little while,” he added.
He always ruined it.
Rachel’s blood pressure mounted; her head throbbed with an intensity that made her want to cry. She was not handing her sister off to some random guy so she could enjoy a few moments of privacy. She was not going to abandon her family again. It wasn’t that easy—life wasn’t that easy. They didn’t all have bank accounts full of money, no responsibilities other than food and sleep.
He must have noticed the shift in her, because his hands went up in mock surrender. “It was just a suggestion. I swear. Don’t kill me. He backed away, almost playfully, his eyes never leaving hers. And then his knee gave out under him. He didn’t fall or crash or anything—it was more like a slow giving way of weight, and he sank to the ground as if the leg simply refused to hold on anymore. It was giving up.
Rachel knew the feeling—and any murderous urges she might have been harboring disappeared.
“Oh God—are you okay?” she cried, sinking next to him. They were on a fairly grassy area, so the mud wasn’t a problem, but he scrunched his face up the way men did when they were trying not to show pain. It made her heart stop.
“I’m fine,” he said, swearing. “I just need a minute. This fucking knee. I never know when it’s going to give anymore.”
She stayed crouched there, waiting for some indication that he was ready to go either up or down, when Jennings came nimbly down the steps of his Airstream. Seeing the older man seemed to fortify Michael, because he pressed one hand on Rachel’s shoulder and made it to his feet.
“Should we skip class? Do you need us to stay?” Rachel asked, not convinced he was all right. She looked to Jennings for confirmation, but he stood there, watching Michael with only a slight crease to his forehead.
Michael waved her off. “I’ll be fine. Go and watch your depressing movies. Besides—Nick should be here any minute. I can make him be my errand boy today.”
“But—”
“I’m fine, Rachel.”
“You need—”
He turned his back and moved toward his trailer, effectively ending the conversation. As she got Jennings into the car and started the engine, Rachel realized it was the only time she’d ever seen him walk away without trying to get the best of her first.
Chapter Twenty
Cupid Kills
Michael was a firm believer in hard work. The harder a man pushed, the better his chances of winning, whether his finish line was in sports or life or women. Hard work was what shaped his body, and it was what was slowly but surely chipping away at Nick’s layers of angst.
But if he had to spend one more minute at the Odyssey Theater, going to staff meetings and emergency rehearsals, having long-winded conversations about cues and queues and all sorts of stage-y things that could have gone unsaid, he was going to smash something.
Where Michael came from, things got done through doing, not talking.
At first, it had tickled his fancy to run around stage in a skirt, yelling for war and yelling for Cleopatra to stop acting like such a twat. But truth be told, he was getting tired of dying every night for the loss of that woman’s love.
It was a stupid way for a man to handle his problems.
Antony should have hauled Cleopatra over his shoulder, whisked her away to some little hut on the Mediterranean Sea and fucked her senseless. All that beachfront property, all that skin showing—and they wanted to talk politics? He would never understand why people launched huge campaigns to gain control over a land or riches they would never take the time to appreciate. Between the whole of Egypt and the Cleopatra he faced on stage every night, Michael knew which one he’d pick every time.
&n
bsp; So what was he waiting for?
He might not have use of his knee and he might not know what he was going to do with his life anymore, but he was still Michael O’Leary. He was still capable of showing his might and wooing a woman.
And he knew exactly what woman needed that wooing.
“I hope you’re planning on staying in this afternoon,” Rachel warned as they walked out of the Odyssey, having wasted an entire half a day on something called scrim placement, which was basically shadow puppets they made with their bodies. “You were doing an awful lot of jumping up and down at practice yesterday.”
“I don’t need to rest,” he said firmly. Resting meant thinking, and thinking wasn’t doing him any favors lately. “And I don’t want to hear you say one more word about what my body can or cannot do—at least, not unless you want a personal demonstration.”
“Pretending your injury isn’t a problem doesn’t make it go away.”
“Neither does obsessing about it. Now, come on,” he said, turning toward the parking lot. “Daylight’s wasting, and I always prefer to play with the lights on.”
He was at the right angle to catch her first reaction, a wide smile that she immediately suppressed into a scowl. Ninety-five percent flash. He was sure of it.
“Funny. I don’t recall you inviting me anywhere,” she said primly. “The rest of the cast was talking about maybe having an extra rehearsal and ordering some pizzas over at Kevin’s house.”
“I don’t think so, Red.” He grabbed her hand and started pulling. She fought it at first, but he kept his clasp firm. With a sigh that was more show than anything else, she finally let him win, her fingers falling naturally through his own. “There’s no way I’m going to piss all over this day of freedom. You and I are going to go have some fun. My way.”
“What kind of fun did you have in mind? And I swear, if you say anything related to your anatomy, I’m walking away right now.”
Michael placed his free hand over his chest. “You hurt my feelings, Rachel. I have nothing but honorable intentions in mind.”
Her lower lip came out in a pout, and the look she cast up at him was full of promise. Michael’s groin tightened, and before he could stop himself, he pressed his fingers against hers. Something about the way the noonday sun shone on the pair of them transformed her into someone soft and pliable and almost unrecognizable.
Almost but not quite.
He was growing used to the woman Rachel became around him, not exactly willing to let him in, but no longer fighting tooth and nail to keep him away. She was a continual challenge, a game whose rules he was learning by heart.
It was a game he desperately wanted to play.
He looked down one more time as he held the car door open, ushered her into the crappy old Pacer he’d gotten working with his own two hands and didn’t have the heart to give away. She no longer looked foreign there. She looked relaxed. Comfortable. His.
I’ll give you anything you want, her eyes seemed to say as they met his. There was the challenge. There was the game. But let’s see if you can earn it first. The clock starts now.
Oh, he was going to earn it all right.
And the clock had started a long, long time ago.
“I don’t understand.”
Rachel sat in Michael’s car, refusing to get out of the door he held open. Mock gallantry, all of it. He wouldn’t have bothered to play the gentleman at all except she refused to budge from her seat. He probably didn’t know what else to do with her.
“It’s easy. Lift a foot, plant it on the ground. Repeat. The rest will come naturally.”
“Aren’t you hilarious,” she said, putting both feet on the ground at the same time. It seemed the only way to thwart him. “But I thought you said fun. This place is the antithesis of fun.”
Michael laughed. “Oooh, a big word. That’ll put me in my place.”
One thing was for sure—she wanted to put him in his place. Badly. Her house—no, correction, her mother’s house—rose up before them, a cutout box of a building containing all the things that were the opposite of what a day spent with Michael should be.
Michael was easy-going and carefree and good with his hands. Michael rolled in the mud and thumped his chest and kissed her like he wanted to roll her in the mud and thump on her chest.
But this…
This was where her family lived, where memories lodged inside every kitchen cabinet and under every shut door. Michael was not this house. He was the temporary answer to a question that had yet to form itself inside her mind.
“I showed you mine,” Michael said, strolling up the driveway like he owned the place. “Now it’s your turn to show me yours.”
“That’s not fair!” she called, but it didn’t deter him. He just kept moving toward the front door. She trotted a few steps behind him, grateful her mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway. “Yours is a motor home.”
“Are you saying it wasn’t big enough for you? You shame me. Women are always saying size doesn’t matter.”
She laughed. It wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t help it. It was impossible to take this man seriously for any longer than five minutes at a time, and she was beginning to wonder why she bothered trying. If he wanted the grand tour of the infamous Longfellow residence, who was she to say no?
“Fine. You win.” She got out her keys and stabbed them in the lock. “Come in and see the highly exotic granite kitchen that almost never gets used and the bedroom I had as a teenager and still have today. It’ll be the height of all my adolescent fantasies. This is really all you had planned?”
“Well, to be honest, I was hoping you were going to offer to cook me dinner.”
Before she had a chance to figure out an appropriate insult, he waltzed right in, taking stock of the blandly ordinary foyer without a word. It led into a formal living room decorated by the careful hands of Indira’s favorite interior designer, who shared her love of white leather couches and white carpets and all the rest done up in lightly stained woods.
“Shall I take my shoes off first?” Rachel asked, stalking past him to the hallway. “Barefoot in the kitchen and all that?” She pointed out various doors like she was reading a shopping list. “Laundry. Storage. Pantry. Closet. Guest bathroom. Don’t go in there; it’s this weird and creepy homage to my mother’s lost career.”
“Oh, I like the sound of that,” Michael murmured. When Rachel shot him an inquiring glance, he grinned. “The barefoot stuff. And the homage room. I think I want an homage room.”
“What man doesn’t?” Rachel returned breezily.
She threw open the door and flipped the lights. The walls were like one of those restaurants that prides itself on putting up autographed photos of every celebrity who ate there, except her mother’s face was pulled into a tight smile in each metallic picture frame. Her two Tony Awards were encased behind a solid wall of glass, and on the opposite wall stood one of the costumes from Indira’s first stage production ever, when she’d been nothing more than a chorus-line girl. The sequined one-piece was being modeled by a mannequin whose face had been painted to resemble a youthful Indira Longfellow, and it even had a real wig placed on top of its head.
“That is, hands down, the creepiest thing I have ever seen in my life,” Michael announced, staring at it. He looked back over his shoulder at Rachel. “Please tell me you didn’t have to grow up with that thing watching you every day.”
“I think I might just like you, after all.”
Rachel took a place at Michael’s side and stared up at the faux Indira. Mommy Scariest, she and Molly used to call her. “We used to have this game, Molly and I. We would take turns sitting in here with the lights out, seeing who could stay in the longest. There’s this little security camera up there in the corner, and it has a flashing blue light that illuminates the room every ten seconds or so. When it’s dark in here, it’s like a little flash of lightning, and it lands right on Mommy Scariest’s face.”
Michael�
�s chuckle filled the room with a warmth she didn’t think it had ever contained before. That laugh could have done wonders for their peace of mind when they were girls. It banished fears. It made it seem like everything would be okay.
It made her happy.
“Did you win?” he asked, turning to her. “Oh, wait—that’s a dumb question. I bet you always—”
The world went dark, and Rachel jumped, her body inadvertently seeking the warmth and comfort of the one next to her. Michael wrapped an arm around her waist, his fingers pressing into her side so she couldn’t help but move closer.
She’d forgotten the lights in here were on a timer. Which meant…four, three, two, one. FLASH.
Michael’s arm, still around her, grew tense and tight, pulling her so close she almost lost her footing.
“Holy shit,” he murmured. “You were right. That is seriously disturbing.”
Rachel felt herself being led purposefully out the door, which Michael slammed behind them.
“Promise me we will never go in that room ever again.”
“I think I can safely give you that.” The low rumble in his voice was almost indistinguishable—but it was distinguishable enough. “I intend to get a lot more.”
“So this is it,” Rachel said, her legs and voice shaky. “Is this the point where you ask me to show you my room, and my mom yells up the stairs to keep the door open?”
“No. We can go now if you want.”
Her arms came up in a gesture of exasperation, though exasperation was barely word enough to describe it. It was like he was toying with her. She was the puppet on the end of a string, and he threw it around to see how she’d jerk and dance.
She didn’t want to dance—at least not like that.
It wasn’t her fault—there was just so much of him. Here, in front of her, strong and enticing, capable of doing things to her insides it wasn’t seemly to mention. He was everywhere she turned, a constant reminder of what her life was missing. She couldn’t show up anywhere without expecting him to be watching, waiting. She couldn’t go to sleep at night without seeing his face, smiling, as always, but also intent. Wanting her.
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