She frantically rolled off the couch, nearly tripping over her long skirt, and darted into the kitchen with no real thought other than escape.
Mercifully, there was a small powder room off the kitchen and she slammed the door shut, pressing back against the wood while her heart hammered inside her ears almost—but not quite—loudly enough to block out the voices she could hear from the other room.
Shaking, she splashed water over her face, and pulled the small beige towel off the ring next to the pedestal sink, pressing it to her forehead. Her flushed cheeks.
Maybe whoever it was would leave. Quickly.
But no sooner than she formed that hopeful thought, she heard the voices grow louder. Heavy boots sounded on the wood floor. They were in the kitchen.
Cringing, she held her breath until the voices receded again.
She stared at herself in the narrow mirror above the sink. This is what she got for doing something she shouldn’t have done.
Particularly with the secret she was holding.
She resolutely squared her shoulders and finished freshening up, but her resolution quailed when she realized she’d altogether forgotten her panties out in the living area.
Where had they left them?
On the pool table?
The floor?
She exhaled shakily and yanked open the door, her skirt swishing around the ankles of her boots as she walked through the empty kitchen with—please, please—no one the wiser that she was thoroughly bare beneath.
The voices, she learned quickly enough, belonged to Axel’s cousins, Casey and Erik.
“They came to shoot some pool,” Axel told her when she reappeared, her gaze furtively searching the floor for a distinctive hank of lace.
“Didn’t figure you’d even be here what with all the time you’ve spent at Tara’s,” Erik said. He held a longneck bottle toward her. “Want one?”
“No thanks.” She smiled, but it felt stiff.
She’d spotted her panties.
Barely hidden beneath the toe of Axel’s boots.
“I told ’em we were heading back to town.” Axel’s voice showed none of the strain hers did.
“Yes. Right.” She willed her face not to flush, but it was a futile effort at best. She felt like a teenager caught necking.
Only she’d never been a teenager who’d necked.
“That’s cool.” Erik selected a pool cue from the rack that had yet to be hung on the wall. “We’re still gonna shoot, though.”
“Not all of us are lovebirds,” Casey added, grinning.
Tara quickly moved away from the pool table. She had a smile on her face, she was certain of it, because her lips felt as if they were sticking to her teeth.
“Go ahead and give me grief,” Axel drawled. “The two of you hanging out here on a Saturday night, shooting pool with only each other’s mug to look at? Really sad.”
Casey grunted. “That’s pretty low.”
Erik grunted, too. “And pretty damn true.” He twisted the top off his bottle to take a healthy swig. “Could drive a guy to drink.”
Axel bent down and picked up one of the bottles from the cardboard carrier sitting on the floor.
If she weren’t so mortified, Tara would probably have been impressed with the imperceptible way he managed to tuck away her ruined panties in his jeans’ pocket beneath his loose shirttails all at the same time, with neither of his cousins the wiser.
“Yeah. Root beer.” He set the bottle of old-fashioned root beer on the rail and shook his head again. “If you’re going to mope around because you can’t get a girl, at least be a man about it and drink real beer.”
“I like root beer,” Erik defended.
Casey slid another cue out of the rack and rolled it against the felt. “And I like not having to pay for pool like we do at Colby’s.”
“You don’t have to pay for pool at Colby’s.”
“We do now,” he groused. “You haven’t been there in a month of Sundays, Ax, so you don’t know. New owner’s rules. And since you’re never here anyway…” He shrugged again, leaving the rest unsaid.
“I thought both of your parents had pool tables at their homes.” Tara distinctly remembered talk about that around the dinner table at the big house.
“They do.” Axel had a glint in his eyes that she wasn’t sure was owed to their near discovery or not. “But neither one of them want to play at their folks’ places because their dads will want to play, too, and they’ll mop the floor with them.”
Casey grimaced. “Also sad, but true.”
“My dad and uncles can whip almost anyone around here when it comes to pool,” Axel explained.
“And poker,” Casey added.
“And drinking.” Erik tilted his bottle to his lips. “The real stuff,” he said after he lowered it again.
Tara tried to envision the men she knew with the picture their sons were painting and found it difficult. Just as difficult as it was to see any of them involved in the kind of work that Axel had described. The Clay family in general was about the most responsible, upstanding, salt-of-the-earth kind of people she’d ever met.
“Oh.” Hardly a stellar response. But then she was standing there clutching her hands together as if they contained all of her lost marbles while cool air drifted maddeningly up her long skirt in a needless reminder that her panties were residing in Axel’s front pocket. “Maybe we should be going,” she suggested.
Axel’s arm slid around her stiff shoulders. “Good idea, sweetheart.” He directed her toward the door. “Turn off the lights when you guys leave.”
“Always do.” Casey and Erik had already lost interest and were racking up the balls on the table.
Axel grabbed their coats from the coatrack by the door and Tara rapidly shoved her arms in the sleeves when he held hers for her. As soon as he let go, she yanked open the heavy door and hurried outside.
The night air slapped her burning cheeks with a welcome chill as she strode to his truck. Inside, she snapped on her safety belt, keeping her eyes resolutely ahead even when Axel got behind the wheel and she could feel the weight of his gaze on her.
After a moment, he started the engine and backed away from the cabin and the other pickup parked there. “It could have been a lot worse,” he pointed out. “They could have walked in ten minutes earlier.”
Her thighs clenched. Hard. “This doesn’t change anything. We…we’re not doing this again. You’re still not sharing my bed when we get home.”
“Some men might take words like that as a challenge,” Axel remarked. He turned the headlights to high. “Fortunately, I’m not one of them.”
“Good, because the moment has definitely passed.” She stared out the side window. What a liar she was, sitting there, her body shockingly tight with tension and still shockingly wet with want. “I don’t know what we were thinking.”
“I know what I was thinking.” His voice was like gravel, but after that he blessedly said no more.
They passed the lights of his parents’ house and soon they’d reached the highway.
They’d been driving for nearly a half hour and Axel could practically feel the freeze warning exuding from Tara’s pores. “I’m not going to apologize,” he warned.
He’d be damned if he would.
Whether or not he knew better than to cross that line with her while assigned to protect her, she’d wanted him just as badly as he’d wanted her. And he wanted her still, all over again. He was beginning to think he always would.
“I didn’t ask for an apology.” Her voice was cool.
“Good.” He ignored the caveman urge to kiss that cool tone right out of her. But it wasn’t easy.
They rounded the last sweeping curve before Weaver when his phone beeped, and he snatched it up. “Yeah.”
Max Scalise’s voice greeted him, fully in lawman mode.
And it had every hair on Axel’s body standing on end.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,�
� he said and slammed the phone back on the console.
Tara’s face was a pale blur. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a fire.” He hesitated. “At your house.”
She jerked. “What?”
But he didn’t have to repeat it. Because, of course, she’d heard him perfectly well.
Her hair swung around her chin as she shook her head. Hard. “No. No, there can’t be a fire. I didn’t use the stove for breakfast before we left this morning. I didn’t leave a curling iron on.” Then, she realized that he was slowing the truck on the deserted highway, preparing to pull a U-turn. “Why are you turning around?”
“To take you back to my place.”
“No!” She grabbed his arm and the truck lurched unevenly. “We have to go to Weaver.”
He straightened the wheels. “It’s not safe.” He didn’t know that for certain, but until they knew the cause of the fire, he wasn’t taking any chances.
“But it’s my home!” Her fingertips dug even harder into his arm. “Please, Axel.”
He made the mistake of looking at her.
At the sheen of tears he could see in her eyes.
He muttered a low oath and stood on the brakes and the truck fishtailed to a jerking stop. “Max said your house is fully engulfed. There’s nothing you’re going to be able to race in and save.” Not her jewelry-making materials. Not her neatly squared magazines. Not her clothes or her books or that lonely photograph of her and her brother as kids with their parents that she kept on her dresser.
“Please, Axel.”
It was just one more sign that he was a piss-poor agent when he couldn’t withstand her soft, choking plea.
With a ripe curse, he reached past her for his glove box, yanking out his holster.
She went still, watching as he worked off his coat, fastened on the holster, then pulled the coat on again.
“You do have a gun.” Her voice was small.
“And I hate carrying it. Which is why I’d just as soon go back to my place.” He shoved the truck into gear and pulled back onto the road. Toward Weaver.
She finally spoke when they could see the pinpoints of light ahead of them. “Thank you.”
“You won’t be thanking me for long.”
They could smell the smoke from blocks away. But he knew the true horror didn’t hit Tara until he turned down her street.
Fire trucks were parked everywhere, their flashing beacons strobing over the windows of the nearby houses. Fat hoses pulsed and snaked along the sidewalk, over melting snow and winter-dead lawn, wielded by firefighters in helmets and heavy gear. Waves of billowing, cloying smoke rose from the remains of Tara’s house.
“Oh my God,” Tara whispered. She pressed her palms to her stomach as he slowed the truck to a crawl. She looked ill. “There’s nothing left.” She coughed into her hand.
Axel pulled to a stop well behind the barricade set up by the sheriff’s cruisers. When she reached for the door handle, he caught her arm. “You can’t go out there.”
“It’s my house.”
He didn’t let go. Would have pulled her right into his arms, if he thought she’d have let him. “I know. But you still can’t go out there. I shouldn’t have even brought you this close.”
“And I shouldn’t have been with you!” Her voice filled the cab of his pickup. “If I’d have been here—”
“—you might have been caught inside,” he finished, his voice flat. “Tara. I know this is hard. But think.”
She gulped down a choking breath. “Nothing ever stays the same. No matter what I do, everything always changes.” She stared again through the windshield. “Just once, God, just once, why can’t things just…stay…put?”
“Not everything changes.” His hand cupped the back of her neck. “It’s going to be all right, Tara.”
She laughed brokenly. “How?” She gestured toward the wreckage of her house. “There’s nothing left!”
She was right. Nothing was left but a stinking, swimming miasma of soot and debris. And still, arching streams of water jetted over it all from the fire hoses.
“Do they have to wash away every last reminder that it ever existed?”
He couldn’t help it. He tugged her close. Pressed his lips to her forehead. “They don’t want it to spread to the neighboring houses,” he said quietly.
Her face crumpled again and she pulled away.
Axel put the truck in gear and began backing away from the melee only to stop when he saw Dee Crowder waving madly at them. She darted over the yard across from Tara’s, her robe flapping behind her and her curly hair bouncing.
He rolled down his window when she reached the truck and the cloying smoke rolled inside. “Dee—”
“Oh, thank God.” She pressed her head to the side of his truck for a minute. “One of the firemen said there was nobody in the house, but—” She shook her head again, then lifted the collar of her robe to her nose, trying to block out the horrible smoke. Her gaze bypassed Axel.
“Tara.” She moved the robe again away from her mouth. “If there is anything I can do.” She shook her head, looking back at the house for a moment. “I just can’t believe it. Nobody can. Cynthia’s going around the neighborhood. Gathering up some things we know you’ll need just to get you through for a few days. I’ve got a spare bedroom, too. If you need a place to stay…or…well, I imagine that’s not going to be necessary.”
“Thanks, Dee,” Axel answered when Tara just stared mutely at Dee.
She reached in and squeezed his hand, her smoke-reddened eyes looking from Tara’s shell-shocked face to Axel. “Should I get the stuff out to your folks’ place?”
“That’d be good, Dee. Thanks.”
Dee nodded. Squeezed his arm once more, before stepping off the running board of his truck. She returned to the far side of the street where onlookers were clustered around, watching the goings-on with equal measures of shock and morbid fascination.
He closed the window and continued inching his way out of the congested street.
“Where are we going?” Tara’s voice was dull.
“Back to my place.”
She didn’t argue.
He would have felt better if she had.
She was silent until they reached his cabin. “Your cousins are still here.”
Sure enough, Casey’s truck was still there. “They won’t be for long.” He went around to open her door but she’d already slid from the high seat, her skirt trailing behind her.
He took her arm and guided her inside.
One look at Tara’s face and both of his cousins put down their pool cues.
He lifted a hand toward them. “In a minute.”
He walked Tara into his bedroom and nudged her onto the side of his bed. When she made no move to remove her coat, he leaned over her and did it himself.
“That place was supposed to be temporary.” Her voice was raw. “So why does it hurt so much?”
He crouched at her feet and pulled off her boots. “Maybe because you’ve lived there longer than anywhere else.”
She didn’t reply as she silently tipped backward onto the pillows.
Worry was a hard, painful knot in the pit of his stomach as he settled his quilt over her. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
She turned her head further into the pillow. “No.”
He exhaled. Uncurled a clenched fist and lifted it to brush her tangled hair away from her pale, exhausted face. But he stopped the motion midair.
If he’d been doing his job the way he was supposed to have been, if he hadn’t let himself get distracted by her, he might have prevented the fire.
Might have caught the bastard who’d set it and they could have put an end to this whole mess.
“Just rest” is all he said, moving silently out of the bedroom to pull the door nearly closed.
Jaws tight, he went into the kitchen—the room farthest from his bedroom. Casey and Erik followed.
“I’ve already he
ard,” Erik said, holding up his cell phone. “That was Dad. He’s been trying to reach you.”
Axel bet Tristan was, too. “My phone’s in the truck.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Casey asked.
“Tell your dad to keep a shotgun handy,” he muttered, entirely serious. If a person drew a line between the farm, the Double-C and Daniel and Maggie’s place, it was almost a perfect triangle, with Axel’s cabin squarely between, as snug as a protected child.
“It’s like that, then,” Erik said, doing a reasonable job of trying to hide his shock. He had yet to feel the Hollins-Winword itch, despite the fact that his father, Tristan, was about as deep in the agency as it was possible to get.
“Yeah. It’s like that.”
Casey nodded solemnly. He, too, had avoided the agency’s lure. His interest was literature and ladies. But he was also one of the best shots in the family. His father, Daniel, had taught him well. “You want us to keep post around here?”
Axel scrubbed his hand down his face. His father could put the ranch hands on alert on the horse farm side. Matthew could do the same on the Double-C side. “Keep anyone from getting past your dad’s place. And for God’s sake, don’t talk about any of this to an outsider.” He knew the reminder was needless, but made it anyway.
His cousins nodded and immediately headed out.
Axel quietly went back to the bedroom, peering around the door. Tara had turned on her other side. He couldn’t see her face. Nor could he hear her crying. Her tears would have been easier to take than her numb silence.
He went out to his truck and retrieved his cell phone. Ignoring the messages that were waiting, he dialed his father.
“We’ve heard,” Jefferson answered immediately. “Where are you? Are you both okay?”
“The cabin. I’m okay.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not so sure about her.”
“Max said the old place went up like a Roman candle. Anyone saying yet what caused it?”
Axel knew the fire department would do its own investigation, but considering the situation, it was too much to hope that the fire had been accidental. “Can you drive out here?”
“Yeah. I’ll bring your mother.”
“Good.” There was nobody better in a crisis than Emily Clay. “How many hands you got around?”
A Weaver Wedding Page 14