“You’re like a kid in a candy store,” she murmured when she followed him inside and he deliberated the choices.
“There are two dozen flavors. If you order vanilla, I might have to turn you over my knee.”
“I wasn’t going to order vanilla,” she lied.
He laughed softly and brushed his finger down her nose. “Freckles are showing.”
Her face went even hotter. “I don’t want ice cream, anyway.”
He cocked his head slightly toward her. “Would you prefer chocolate cake?”
Her mouth ran dry. Axel in protector mode was something she was becoming accustomed to. Axel in any other mode was too dangerous for words.
“Um, sorry sir, but we don’t have chocolate cake here.” The acne-dotted teenager standing at the counter looked confused. “The list of flavors is up there.” He gestured with his ice cream scoop at the menu hanging above his head.
Axel slanted another look her way. “What do you think, Tara?”
She gave him the sternest look she could muster. “Chocolate cake isn’t on the menu.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”
And then, leaving her quaking, he grinned at the boy behind the counter. “Two cones, please. Vanilla.”
Chapter Eleven
“How old do you suppose that kid was?” They were back on the highway leaving town, vanilla ice cream cones eaten. “Stevie Stuart. The miniature, human cannonball.”
Tara looked from the side-view mirror where she could see Mason Hyde’s ramshackle truck several car lengths behind them. “I don’t know. Five? Six? Why?”
“No reason.” He flipped a heater vent toward her. “You warm enough?”
“Yes.” She was more than warm enough. Her taste buds were still satiated by vanilla ice cream. But the rest of her was hung up on…chocolate cake.
“You ever think about having kids?”
She closed her eyes, dying. “I’m thirty years old.” It was the best she could manage.
His thumb tapped the steering wheel. “Biological clock ticking?”
Her tongue felt the size of Alaska. “Something like that.” She hesitated for several thick beats. “You?”
“Some day.” His voice was careless as he picked up speed to pass a slower-moving trailer. “You might have noticed the Clays are big on family.”
“Yes.” She spotted Mason’s truck again. This time about five vehicles back. “How did you, um, get into the bodyguarding business?”
“The agency doesn’t do only personal security.”
She didn’t want to be curious but she was. “What else does it—you—do?”
“Make the world a safer place. That’s the reason why the agency exists, anyway.” His lips twisted a little. “I don’t know how well I’ve fit into that picture.”
“Why?”
He just shook his head, and she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But after a long moment, he did. “I’ve failed at the most important thing I could have done.”
She turned a little toward him. “What?” Then she frowned. “Or can’t you say?” That had been her father’s typical refrain when she’d want to know why they had to uproot their lives again.
“Yeah.” His voice was gruff. “I can’t say.”
She eyed his profile. The weight he seemed to feel was like a tangible thing, and she wished she hadn’t brought it up. “I’m sure you’d change things, if you could.”
His gaze slanted toward her. “Do you believe that?”
She suddenly felt out of her depth, and wasn’t entirely certain why. “Yes.” She hesitated. “I…I think you take your professional responsibilities very seriously.”
He looked back at the road. His thumb stopped tapping the wheel. “And my personal ones?”
She opened her mouth. But it was a while before she could even form words. “I…I don’t know you well enough to say.”
He snorted softly. “Right. We didn’t get to know each other at all that weekend.”
She straightened in her seat, feeling scorched. “I don’t know how you ended up doing the work that you do.” She pressed her hands together. “You come from a town that’s hardly a dot on the map. Where’s the leap from that, to this Hollins-Winword stuff?” Her father had been recruited into his service just after graduating from Yale.
“Family connections.” His voice was dry.
His family were primarily ranchers with a few lawmen and businessmen tossed in. She found it difficult drawing a line from that to what Axel did for a living. It was her turn to sound disbelieving. “Right.”
He just shrugged, though, not choosing to elaborate.
She plucked at the hem of the long sweater she was wearing. “Do you ever think you’d get out of it?” She moistened her lips, feeling terribly careful. “Do the horse-breeding thing full-time?”
But he didn’t answer. He just switched lanes again. “Are you going to go back to writing for magazines again?”
“After Sloan’s case is resolved?” She turned her palms upward for a moment. “I don’t know.”
His thumb silently tapped the steering wheel. “Do you miss it?”
“Yes,” she answered promptly.
He slanted her a look. “What do you miss about it?”
“I—” she said and then broke off. What did she miss about working at the magazine? “The creativity of it.”
He smiled. “Seems like you’re showing plenty of that with all the jewelry you make.”
“It’s not the same.”
“How so?”
She started to give him an answer only to realize she didn’t have one. Had she ever spent a sleepless night working on an article so she could relax enough to go back to sleep?
She honestly couldn’t remember.
“There was nothing in the paper this morning about the trial.” Not that she’d really expected there to be.
“No.” He adjusted his rearview mirror. Switched lanes again.
She finally noticed the speedometer and looked out at the mirror on her door. Mason’s truck was closer again. Three cars behind. “Are you in a hurry to get back to Weaver?”
“No.”
She tilted her head, giving the speedometer another glance. “Then why are you going nearly thirty over the speed limit?”
“Because I want to shake the truck that’s been following us for the past twenty miles.”
“Mason Hyde’s been following us in his truck.”
“Mason’s in a Corvette today.”
She went stiff and turned to look out the back window. “I haven’t seen a Corvette.” Only that ramshackle truck that she’d believed was the same one Mason drove.
“That’s because Mason is good at what he does. Turn around.”
She turned around to face the front. Alarm had her heart suddenly ready to climb up her throat. “You’re going to get stopped for speeding.”
“Maybe.” He pulled around a semi and went even faster. Without taking his eyes from the road, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a few buttons, then lifted it to his ear. “Mason. You get the license on that truck called in?” He listened for a moment. “Keep trying.” He disconnected and dropped the phone on the console between their seats. “It’s going to be fine, Tara.”
She pushed her hair behind her ears. “Sure. Fine.” Her voice was shaky. She pressed her palm to her belly, carefully pulling in a deep breath. Letting it out just as slowly. Everything’s fine. Just fine.
Axel’s phone beeped and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
He lifted the phone to his ear again. “Yeah.”
Almost immediately, the speedometer’s needle dropped away from the red zone where it had been nearly buried.
Tara’s breath rushed out of her and she leaned her head against the headrest, feeling weak.
“Thanks, Mason.” Axel set the phone again on the console. “Truck just took a turnoff.”
Her heartbeat began settling down, though it still left h
er feeling queasy.
The same way she’d always felt after one of her father’s alerts. “Nobody cares that I’m Sloan McCray’s sister, Axel. Nobody.”
“I care.”
She pressed her lips together. “That’s not what I meant.”
He gave her a quick glance. “I know. And maybe we are all being paranoid. But I’d rather be cautious than take a chance with you.”
Everything inside her squeezed. “Because Sloan hired you,” she pointed out. Reminding her silly, silly heart.
“That’s one reason.”
“What other reasons would there be?”
He looked at her. His eyes seemed more gold than brown. “You know why.”
She swallowed. Hard. “You don’t have to feel responsible just because we once…once slept together.”
“As I recall, it was more than once…once. Several times more than once…once.”
A flush burned from her head to the toes she was curling inside her low-heeled boots. “One weekend,” she allowed, sounding mortifyingly prim.
“Best damn weekend of my life,” he murmured.
“Right,” she countered. She couldn’t prevent the scoff. “That’s why you snuck out while I was sleeping.”
“I tried to wake you. But you were dead to the world.”
“I’d had too much to drink.”
He snorted softly. “The only drinks you had were in the Suds-n-Grill the first night. You’d had too many orgasms.”
She looked out the window, feeling scorched. “In your dreams,” she lied.
His hand caught hers, and wouldn’t release her even when she yanked. “Every night,” he said, his voice flat, “every night since then I’ve thought about you. About us.”
“There is no us, Axel.” She couldn’t afford for there to be. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure just who she was reminding more. Him, or her. “There’s one weekend that was a fluke, and then there is the paycheck you earn to watch me. That’s not an us.”
“What if I wasn’t earning that paycheck?”
“Men like you never give up that sort of career.” He had even avoided answering that very issue not ten minutes earlier.
“Men like me. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Men like you!” Her voice rose and she struggled to bring it back down. “Like Sloan. Like my father. You live two lives and it works perfectly well for you, but for—” She started but then broke off again.
“But for the rest of you, it takes its toll,” he concluded.
She refused to acknowledge the stinging deep behind her eyes. “Yes. The rest of us get to pay the price.”
He was silent for a long while. “I’m sorry.”
She stared ahead while the snowy countryside whizzed past their windows. “So am I.”
“For what it’s worth,” he said after a long while, “not every family involved with this sort of work is like yours was.”
She just shook her head. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah. I do.” He waited a beat. “Family connections, remember?”
She laughed, disbelieving. “Okay, so you have some distant uncle somewhere who introduced you to someone, who introduced you to someone, and so on and so forth.”
He suddenly veered toward the shoulder of the road, pulling right off the highway.
“What are you doing?” She grabbed the armrest as they rocked to a stop. Over his shoulder, she saw a black Corvette fly past them. But Mason didn’t pull off near them. He just kept driving.
Axel turned in his seat toward her, evidently unconcerned with Mason. “It is an uncle. And he’s not distant. It’s a lot of people, actually. And they’re not distant, either.”
She pressed her hand to the nerves jangling in her belly. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that I know not all families are like yours, because I know what my family is like.”
“Your father raises horses. Practically everyone in the state knows that.”
“Yeah. But he didn’t always. Hollins-Winword doesn’t possess anything as typical as an office complex, but if they did, there’d be a wall of greats and my father would be smackdab in the middle of it. He ran more black ops in his time there than any other agent, before or since. But he was smart enough to recognize when it was time to get out.”
She tried to reconcile the man she knew with the one Axel described, and failed. “And when was that?”
“When he married my mother.”
“So you don’t know. He was out when you were growing up. You have roots, Axel. The kind that Sloan and I never even had an opportunity to sprout!”
“You’re missing my point, Tara. My father wasn’t—isn’t—the only one in the business. And they’ve all raised families. Normal families. They didn’t move around every six months. They didn’t keep all of their worldly possessions tucked into a backpack. Not everyone involved in this sort of work lives a life like you experienced.”
She didn’t want to believe him. Because if she did, then what sort of person did that make her for continuing to keep quiet about her pregnancy?
She, who hated secrets, was keeping the biggest one of all. “None of this matters anyway,” she said, looking blindly out the window because it was so much easier than facing those golden-brown eyes of his. “I had a life in Chicago. Once Sloan’s case is over—” She bit her lip.
“You’ll go back. To a house you don’t own anymore. To a magazine you don’t write for.”
The words were only the truth.
A truth that plagued her.
She adjusted the seat belt resting over her lap, so very near the tiny life growing inside her. “Why would I stay in Weaver?”
She heard him exhale and he abruptly set the truck back into motion. “Good damn question,” he muttered.
And then, they said no more.
For the rest of that week, Axel didn’t suggest again that she close the shop, though he seemed to find plenty of things for them to do before going home at the end of the workday. Stopping by his brother-in-law’s clinic to discuss some horse he wanted to buy. Driving around town with the excuse that he just wanted to see what changes had occurred while he’d been gone.
She’d quickly learned there was no point in arguing. After a day at the shop, she wanted nothing more than to go home. Yet it was so apparent that he was avoiding being alone with her any more than necessary.
In the morning, after showering and dressing for work, she’d find a cup of herbal tea waiting for her in the kitchen while he took his crack at the shower. At the shop, he moved displays and unpacked boxes and even—when she had to take a quick break for the ladies’ room—rang up a sale to Tom Griffin just before closing on Saturday. The man, flush with success over his anniversary gift, ran in to purchase the bustier hanging in the phone booth.
The only thing Tara needed to do when she returned to the front of the shop was tuck a few more sheets of pearlescent tissue inside the bag that Axel was ready to hand over to Tom.
The man was practically skipping when he darted out of the store, and Tara couldn’t help but smile a little as she turned around the Closed sign and locked the door.
Axel looked as amused as she felt when her gaze landed on him.
But the relative silence that had lasted for days between them reared its ugly head. She turned away to straighten the folds in a handmade quilt hanging over an iron rod near the front window. “I, um, I need to stop at the grocery store sometime soon. We’re out of milk.”
“We’ll go on the way home.” His lips quirked. “We sound like some old, comfortable couple.”
She stopped fiddling with the quilt’s already-perfect folds. “Only you’re not old.”
“Neither are you.”
They also weren’t a couple, but she knew there was no point in pointing out the obvious.
She moved behind the register, pulled out the cash drawer and gathered up the sales receipts for the day. Then she carried them in
to the back to lock in the safe, while Axel turned out the lights in the front of the shop.
With him around, there was no need for her to do any of her usual after-hours tasks that she typically did when the store was closed. Because he was taking care of most of them while she was open.
That left more hours of the day back at her place that had to be filled with something. The only positive result was that she’d made a serious dent in replacing much of the jewelry that she’d sold at the Valentine’s Festival.
She spun the lock on the safe and turned out the lights in the back, then waited until Axel gave that abbreviated “all’s clear” honk from his vehicle before slipping out the rear door and straight into the truck.
He had his cell phone at his ear. “See you then,” he said, and hung up. “My mom,” he told Tara as he put the truck in gear and drove out of the narrow alleyway. “Wants us to come by for dinner.”
“Aren’t we going to go there tomorrow for Sunday dinner?” Axel had already told her that they would be.
“Yeah, but this’ll just be us.”
She bit back her protest, knowing it would be futile, anyway. “I still need to get some milk.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t miss out on your calcium.”
She tightened her seat belt and shushed her conscience for about the millionth time. When he turned the opposite direction of her house, though, she realized he intended to drive out to his parents’ place right then and there. “Can’t we go home first so I can change?”
She couldn’t stop the pinpricks of awareness that sprung up from the gaze he slid over her. “You look fine.”
She dashed her hand down the front of her beige ankle-length skirt. It was one of the few items in her closet that still fit.
Pretty soon, she was going to have to go shopping for different clothes.
Maternity clothes.
She chewed the inside of her lip as they drove out of town. As had become her habit, she kept watch in the rearview mirror for any sign of Mason Hyde following them in one of his apparently ever-changing fleet of vehicles.
If she hadn’t met him that first day at the shop and seen him speeding past them when she and Axel were on their way back from Cheyenne, she wouldn’t know the man existed.
A Weaver Wedding Page 12