A Weaver Wedding

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  She went over to him and snatched both away, half-afraid that he’d refuse to give them to her. But he did, and she yanked her coat over her shoulders, turning toward the parking lot. “Your mother is looking for you.”

  He ignored that and followed her. “I’m not going away, Tara.”

  She wanted to press her hands over her ears. Instead, she quickened her steps until she was practically jogging through the rows of vehicles. Then her foot hit a patch of ice and she gasped, throwing out her hands to stop her fall. But she never made contact with the pavement.

  Axel scooped her up from behind. “Easy there.” His voice was soft against her neck.

  She strained against his arm, but it was immovable. “Let me go.” The words were garbled. Just as garbled as her vision thanks to the stupid tears that burned her eyes.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” He settled her carefully on her feet and muttered an oath when he saw her tears. “Ah, hell. Don’t cry. I can take most anything but you crying.”

  That did not help. She felt the tears spill over her lashes and blamed the hormones pelting around inside her for her deplorable lack of control. “I’m so sorry you’re uncomfortable!” She swiped her cheeks but it was as effective as sticking her thumb in a leaking dam. “Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

  He was silent, his expression unreadable. “I can’t.”

  “Why not? Because of this story about Sloan? Nobody would make the mistake of thinking I matter to him, least of all me.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know him.” His voice was soft—as soft as it had been in the middle of the dance floor, but his words still seemed to echo around her.

  “Well, I’m glad you do, because I don’t. Not anymore.” She tried peeling Axel’s fingers away from where they were wrapped around her waist and the bunched lapels of her coat. “And I only have your word about all of this. So—”

  He exhaled and released her. “Why on God’s green earth would I make any of this up?”

  Certainly not because he’d need such a line to get close to her. She’d already proven how easy that was.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted and turned again to head for her SUV. She could see it just four vehicles over. “And frankly, I don’t care,” she said over her shoulder as she walked, more carefully this time, toward it.

  She squashed her biting conscience.

  After all. What was one more lie between them?

  Chapter Four

  If he followed her home, Tara wasn’t sure what she would do. But she didn’t see any sight of Axel’s truck in her rearview mirror as she drove straight home from the high school.

  That didn’t seem to keep her foot from hitting the gas harder than necessary, though.

  She parked in the garage and when she realized she’d locked the car door, she exhaled, annoyed, and unlocked it again. This was Weaver, for heaven’s sake.

  Nothing bad ever happened here, no matter what Axel said.

  She went inside the house, dumped her coat over the back of a kitchen table chair and filled the teapot with water before setting it on the stove.

  Which wouldn’t light.

  Kicking the old stove would do nothing but scuff her pumps, so she refrained, but it took a deep exhale to stop herself. She lit the pilot light again and tried the burner. The small flame jumped to life beneath the teapot and leaving it to heat, she kicked off her shoes and carried them with her to her bedroom.

  The shutters at the windows beckoned, but she resolutely avoided looking out and exchanged her party clothes for her long chenille robe. Back in the kitchen, she dropped an herbal tea bag in a mug and took the shrilly whistling teapot off the stove again.

  Only when the whistling dwindled did she hear the doorbell ringing.

  Since nobody ever came to her door, she didn’t have to guess hard who might be on her front porch.

  There was no law that said she had to answer the door, she reasoned.

  Only to go to the door and yank it open, anyway.

  Axel stood there with his finger pressed steadily against the doorbell.

  “Leave me alone.”

  He lowered his finger and stuck a cell phone out at her. “Say hello,” he said evenly.

  She eyed the phone. “Excuse me?”

  He put the phone to his ear. “Your sister will be on in a second,” he said.

  For a moment, her brain seemed to stop working. But then her senses returned and she glared at Axel. “I don’t know what sort of game you’re—”

  “Seconds are precious here, Tara,” he interrupted.

  She snatched the phone out of his hand. Held it to her ear. “Hello.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it on our birthday,” her brother’s voice greeted her.

  She nearly dropped the phone. “Who is this?”

  “Goober, just do what Clay tells you, and I’ll explain things later.”

  Her eyes closed. Goober. Her brother’s nickname for her when they were kids. Who else but he would know that? The McCrays had never stayed put anywhere long enough for other people to take note of them. “Sloan—”

  But the connection was already dead.

  She still held the phone to her ear, though, as if by some miracle she could reestablish that much-too-brief contact.

  Finally, Axel slid the phone out of her numb fingers and pushed her gently inside the door.

  She couldn’t even muster a protest when he nudged her down onto the couch in the living room, or when he disappeared into the kitchen and returned with the tea that she’d forgotten all about.

  “Thought you liked coffee, not tea,” he said, taking her hands and wrapping them around the ceramic mug as he sat on the wrought-iron coffee table, facing her. “But you’ve obviously just fixed this.”

  He’d removed the tea bag, she realized dimly, staring into the pale liquid. “I stopped drinking coffee,” she said faintly. “You’re really serious about all this.” She lifted her gaze to his.

  His expression was solemn. “Yeah.”

  Her brother’s words echoed in her head. “That’s the only time Sloan’s spoken directly to me in three years.” She lifted the mug, but lowered it again without drinking. “We used to live together, you know. We shared a brownstone.” The first place she’d really called home. But even that hadn’t lasted. “I didn’t think there was anything about each other that we didn’t know. Then he decided to go undercover, and…” She shook her head. “Everything changed. Everything.” Her life. Her brother.

  “Not forever. Temporarily. That’s what you said.” Axel leaned forward, his looped fingers hanging loosely between his wide-planted legs. His deep gold hair sprang back from his tanned forehead and his gaze was steady. “This situation—me, here—will be temporary, too.”

  Of course it would be.

  Because his interest in her had nothing to do with their time in Braden and everything to do with his job.

  She cleared her throat, but the knot there seemed destined to remain forever. “So…say I do go along with all of this—” which she wasn’t saying yet, no matter how shocking it had been to hear Sloan’s voice “—what can I expect? I mean, what do you plan to, um, to do? Follow me when I go to the grocery store? Stand guard outside the shop when I’m open? What?”

  “Stay with you around the clock. There will be some periods when I can’t be with you. That’s when my backup will be in place.”

  “Hold it.” She waved her hand and set her mug on the neat pile of magazines beside the muscular bulge of his jean-clad thigh. “Go back to this clock issue.”

  “What about it?”

  She had a fleeting image of an armed guard standing on the front step of her shop, scaring away customers.

  Just because her life in Weaver was supposed to be temporary didn’t mean that she could afford to lose business. Classic Charms was no front. It was a real business. One that she’d worked hard to make
successful. It kept her ancient house in decent repair, and now more than ever, she needed the shop to remain as profitable as it possibly could to tide her over when the baby came.

  “I can’t have you hanging around my shop every minute that I’m open.” People would get the wrong idea. They’d start putting one and one together, and getting three.

  “Not just the shop. Here, too. 24/7.”

  Could this possibly get any worse? “For how long?” Her voice rose despite her efforts.

  “Until we neutralize the threat against Sloan.”

  “We?”

  “The authorities. Hollins-Winword. Your brother.”

  “But not you?”

  “That’s not my assignment.”

  She managed not to wince again. “And how long will this neutralizing take?”

  His fingers spread, palms turned up. “As long as it takes.”

  She pressed her fingers against her forehead, her headache growing by the minute.

  As long as it takes.

  How many times had her father used that line, when he was moving them to yet another home? Another state? Another country?

  How long would they get to live here this time? she would ask, forever hoping that it might be long enough to finish a school year. Make a friend. Set some roots.

  All the things she’d longed for since before she could remember.

  Her father’s impatient answer had always been the same. “We’ll be here as long as it takes, Tara.” Then he’d send her away to bug her mother, because whatever he was doing behind the closed doors of his office—he’d always had an office, no matter how tiny a place they had—was far more important than answering the questions of his only daughter.

  She couldn’t remember how many moves it had been before she’d stopped asking.

  But she had stopped.

  And when she’d been old enough, she’d made her own home. Set down her own roots.

  Only to give it all up again when Sloan had asked her to.

  “Couldn’t someone else do this—” she said as she waved her hand, grimacing “—guarding business?”

  “Someone else could. But someone else isn’t. I am.”

  She wanted to toss her hands out and cry “Why?” but she did no such thing. “People are going to…to get the wrong impression if they see you dogging every step I make. Particularly after being at the dance together…and…and what you told Joe Gage. You didn’t even go over to say hello to your own family because we were dancing. You know how gossip thrives in this town. Everyone will be talking about us!” The very idea of it was enough to give her hives.

  His eyebrows rose a little and she tried not to notice the way his gaze seemed to drop for a burning moment to her mouth. “Would you rather people gossip about our involvement—” he said as he sketched in the air quotes around the word “—or know the real reason we’re together?”

  “I don’t like giving people a reason to gossip about me at all!”

  “They already gossip about you.”

  “No they don’t,” she disagreed.

  He made a disbelieving face, slanting his head. “Yeah. They do. But maybe they wouldn’t be so anxious to do so if you didn’t act so standoffish toward everyone in town.”

  Indignation weighted down her jaw. “I’m not standoffish! I talk to every customer at the shop. I serve at all the civic events, just like all the other business owners do.”

  “That’s business. What about friends? I know you don’t have any lovers.”

  Her face went hot. Aside from her brief, lamentable excuse of a marriage when she’d been eighteen, she’d had no lovers but Axel—information which she’d foolishly shared with him during “that” weekend. “I did go to the dance this evening,” she reminded him. “Not that my friends or lovers are your business.”

  “It is my business when I need to know who’s in your life.” He lifted his hand, forestalling her further indignation. “But it doesn’t matter. I already know the basics. Tonight’s dance aside, you don’t socialize, Tara. You go to rotary and chamber of commerce meetings. You don’t even stay to drink a cup of coffee and complain about the pastor’s sermon when you go to church on Sundays.”

  She tightened the edges of her robe over her bare knees, feeling stiff as a poker. “What makes you so certain of that? Because you listen to the gossip about me?”

  He sighed again. “Hollins-Winword set you up here in Weaver in the first place. Do you think nobody has been keeping an eye on you since then?”

  Her jaw loosened and she pushed off the couch, blinking through the abrupt head-rush from standing so quickly. “You’ve been…been spying on me? You knew all of this…this stuff when you and I…when we—” She broke off, unable to form words for the outrage filling her veins.

  “Nobody’s spying on you. And when I ran into you in Braden, all I learned about you, came from you. But the agency has kept an eye out for your safety since you moved to Weaver. That would have included vetting anyone who seemed to be getting close to you. Only nobody did.”

  Except him.

  Her otherwise utterly solitary lifestyle wasn’t just something noticed behind her nosy neighbor’s twitching lace curtains at the front windows.

  It had become notations in someone’s logbook.

  Humiliation burned inside her, keeping company with the hovering nausea and the ulcerating worry about her brother. “So who’s been prepared to do this vetting?” She nearly choked over the word. “And did they vet you?”

  “Nobody knows about us but us, which under the circumstances is just as well.” He pushed to his feet, and it was more like an uncoiling of a dangerous animal. “I know this is hard to hear. If it weren’t for the latest threat against your brother, there would’ve been no reason for you to know that anything out of the ordinary was even going on.”

  “No reason? No reason to know that someone,” she threw her arm out toward the front door, “is out there watching my life, tallying up my activities in neat little columns?”

  “Think of it more like you’ve had some guardian angels watching over you.”

  She gave a short, humorless, laugh. “Pretty words for an unacceptable situation. How would you like it if you learned that someone was watching over you?”

  He had the decency, at least, to grimace. “I wouldn’t,” he admitted. “And there’s nothing to be gained by debating a moot point. You know now. So let’s get the details of my watch worked out. You open the shop every day except Sunday?”

  “Yes,” she answered, grudgingly. “And I haven’t agreed to anything.”

  “I don’t need a lot of space here,” he continued on, as if she’d said nothing at all. “I can sleep on the floor, if need be.”

  Her hands curled. “If you’re expecting an invitation to use my bed, you can forget it,” she said witheringly.

  His jaw cocked slightly to one side. “I’m your bodyguard. It would be inappropriate to share your bed.”

  She yanked the sash of her robe tighter. “Then I’m glad we’re agreed.”

  “I didn’t say I agreed,” he clarified, his voice smooth. “I said it would be inappropriate.”

  A flush started in her forehead and burned all the way down to her toes. Which annoyed her all over again.

  She snatched up the mug and carried it into the kitchen.

  “The situation won’t be as bad as you think,” he said, following her.

  No. The situation was worse than he could possibly think.

  She dumped the tea down the sink and rinsed the mug. She wanted coffee. Or something a heck of a lot stronger.

  She turned and leaned back against the counter. “How many people know you’re not really a horse breeder?”

  “I told you. I am a horse breeder.”

  “Fine. How many people know about the other—” she said as she waved her hand “—you know. Secret stuff.”

  She hated secrets.

  The irony that she was keeping a pretty large secret
herself wasn’t lost on her.

  “Very few. It’s important to keep it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Hollins-Winword does a lot of good work. But in the process, they’ve made plenty of enemies.”

  She plucked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “So, it benefits you that everyone thinks you’re sticking to me like glue because you’re suddenly infatuated with an older woman.”

  That dimple beside his cheek flashed momentarily. “You’re barely two years older than me. That hardly makes you a cougar, darlin’.”

  “My name is Tara.” Darlin’ was for the man who she’d believed wanted to share her bed as badly as she did. Who’d made her actually think about a future.

  His faint smile threatened to widen and she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  She turned and yanked open the refrigerator. It was well past dinnertime; she needed to eat. But nothing appealed, particularly with the way her stomach seemed to be rolling around. “So, I suppose your behavior at the dance tonight was just to set up the pretense that you and I are involved.” She addressed her comments toward the jug of milk.

  “We are involved.” His hand closed over the back of her neck and she jerked, shoving the refrigerator door closed as she turned so his hand would fall away.

  “No, we are not,” she snapped. One weekend did not an involvement make and she’d do well to remember that. “If anything, this is just going to look suspicious to people. Seeing how—as you’ve observed—my life has always been so sterile. And then you come to town and boom, we’re an item?” She shook her head, dismissively. “Who’s going to believe that?”

  The corner of his lip cocked upward. “They know me.”

  She grimaced. “What? No skirt goes unchased?”

  “Not at all. Just that people who know me, know that when I set my eye on something—or someone—I don’t pussyfoot around. I act.” He paused a beat and the air between them was suddenly thick. Hot. “You, of all people, should be aware of that.”

  She shut off her reaction before the erotic images could leap out of the cage where she’d kept them locked since waking up, alone, in that motel room. “I prefer not to talk about that.”