by Abby Gaines
Could it be?
Could she have fallen for a man who teased her, who called her on her fears and her pride, who wasn’t the least bit awed by her brain, who had crazy ideas for his future because he’d been hurt in the past?
Could she have fallen for a man who came through for his family time after time, who understood her neuroses and wanted her anyway, who had no respect for the creativity he couldn’t stifle, who had a compelling interest in her 34Cs, who made her feel eminently desirable, who tested her wits and made her laugh?
I love him.
Her cell phone beeped in her purse; she ignored it.
But…I love Daniel. Don’t I?
Not for a while she hadn’t, she realized. And her feelings for Daniel had been like a cozy fire she warmed herself in front of. Loving Trey was like being in the fire.
So what now?
This likely wasn’t going to be easy. Falling in love with a guy who planned to hightail it out of town was almost as dumb as falling in love with a guy who then fell for her best friend. But she was used to working for what she wanted. So was Trey.
They would make it happen.
She heard a footfall on the decking behind her and knew it was him.
“Sadie.” His voice was gruff, rougher than she’d heard before.
She turned, and in the moonlight saw deep emotion etched in his face. He wrapped his arms around her, molding her to him from head to toe, as if every inch of him needed to touch her.
“Trey,” she said huskily.
“Shh.” It was a warm breath against her temple. “It’s okay, sweetheart.”
His mouth brushed hers. Then came back, clamped over hers, and he kissed her with earthshaking ferocity.
She parted her lips on a startled cry, and he moved in, seeking, finding, then demanding more. Heat rose within her, and she matched his ardor. One large hand cupped her head, his fingers kneading her scalp and sending shivers right down to her calves.
This wasn’t like any other kiss they’d shared. No humor, no teasing, no spirit of competition. Just a raw intensity that made bone melt into flesh, nerves fuse into one charged mass. It was a kiss that said they could get through anything.
“You’re beautiful, Sadie,” Trey said when he tore his mouth from hers. “Amazing.”
He gave her the confidence she needed.
As he trailed his lips and his tongue down her neck, she said, close to his ear, almost inaudibly, because maybe her courage wasn’t right up there yet, “I love you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TREY TENSED.
His hands dropped away, leaving her exposed, unprotected.
He frowned down at her. “What did you say?”
She’d jumped the gun. In probably the worst possible way. “I know it’s too soon for you,” she said nervously. “But it’s true. I love you. I shouldn’t have said it, but it just hit me right now and I was so excited…”
“How convenient,” he said grimly.
Convenient? She loved him and he found it convenient?
“Er, Trey? Are we in the same conversation?” She rubbed her arms, cool where the breeze found them. “Because I’m not up for another of those days where I ask you to the dance and you make me feel like an idiot.”
He barked a laugh. “Then don’t act like an idiot.” He raked a hand through his hair. “How could you think I would believe you?”
“Hey,” she said, annoyed now. “I didn’t go laying my heart out on a platter for you to pick over and discard. And I’m not in the habit of lying.”
“You’re still in the habit of self-delusion,” he said. “Hell, Sadie, I expected you to be upset—that’s why I rushed out here as soon as I got Meg’s text. But I thought you had more self-respect than this.”
“What text?” Sadie rummaged in her purse for her phone. The little envelope symbol for a new message showed on the screen. She pressed to read it.
Daniel and I just got married! Honeymooning in Vegas. Back Thurs. Much love, Mrs. Wilson.
Married? Meg and Daniel?
Sadie stared down at the phone, unable to identify the emotions that rolled through her in successive waves. “I…hadn’t seen this,” she said.
Trey snorted.
“I hadn’t,” she said, more loudly as she realized whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t grief. As for jealousy…maybe envy that her friend had married the man she loved, but nothing related to her own former feelings for Daniel. She grabbed Trey’s arms, her fingers closing around firm flesh. “Trey, I’m telling you I love you!”
“And I told you long ago I would never settle for being second choice,” he said, disgusted. “Forget it, Sadie.”
Something wasn’t adding up here, and Sadie’s scientific brain couldn’t find the logic. “You mean your rebound thing?”
“I mean second choice,” he said. “As in my whole life to date. But not anymore.”
She processed the words, found a chord of memory. “You told Meg you were the last choice to run the business after your dad and Logan died.”
“That’s right. Dad never asked me to join the firm. It was always going to be him and Logan.”
“Because you wanted to play football!”
He shrugged.
“That’s what your I-hate-the-garden-center thing is about,” she said slowly.
“I don’t hate the—”
“That’s why you get so edgy when your mom talks about Logan. You think she’s comparing you.”
His jaw tightened. “I don’t get edgy.”
She let go of him and backed up against the railing. “And now you’re giving up a business you’ve built, leaving your connection to your dad, leaving a family who loves you, just because the garden center wasn’t always intended for you.”
“Not only did the business not choose me, I didn’t choose it. I had things I wanted to do, things I never got to do because I’ve been standing in for Dad and Logan.”
“And now you’re turning me down,” she said, out raged, “because you think you’d be second choice after Daniel.”
“I know I would! And if you think I’ll ever be Daniel Wilson’s stand-in…”
“That’s just dumb,” Sadie said. She took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. “Trey, I don’t understand what’s changed between now and five minutes ago, when you said you wanted to date me. You didn’t seem to care about Daniel then.”
“I wasn’t asking you to date me,” he said. “I wanted to have sex.”
“You were only asking me to go to bed with you?”
“That’s right.” He bit out the words.
“You said it was a date.”
“It’s a euphemism.”
“Date is not a euphemism for sex.”
“It can be,” he said, less aggressively.
“So when you say to a woman, would you like to go out on a date, you’re asking would you like to have sex?”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“So is deciding you love me when you hear Daniel’s got married.”
“I don’t love Daniel,” she said desperately. “Trey, please, believe me. You’re the one.”
“I don’t think you’d outright lie about loving me,” he said. “I think you’re attracted to me physically, and now you’ve deluded yourself into believing you love me, in place of Daniel.”
Red fury hazed Sadie’s vision. “You’re right,” she said. “I can’t possibly love you. Why would I want a guy who goes through life with a chip on his shoulder and can’t see a good thing when it’s right in front of him?”
“If by a good thing you mean you…”
“I mean a family who adore you, your amazing landscaping talent, which by the way you love but won’t admit it, and—and your whole life. Which includes me, you jerk.”
Trey’s mouth set in a hard, narrow line. “Fascinating though your thoughts are, it’s time we headed back to Memphis.”
“I’ll
make my own way home,” Sadie said.
AN INQUIRY TO A friendly-faced barista in a coffee cart on the square revealed that Hot Springs did not possess a rental-car office. Or a train station or a bus station.
Maybe Sadie had been premature in vowing to make her own way home.
She could think of only one other option.
Standing on the sidewalk on the east side of the square, she stuck out her thumb.
Twenty seconds later a truck pulled up.
“Get in,” Trey growled through the open window.
“No.” She hitched her purse strap up her shoulder. “You don’t want my love, you don’t get my company, either.”
“I don’t want your company. I just don’t want to turn up at your parents’ place without you.” He paused. “And what you were offering wasn’t real love.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t want to know.” She stepped forward, past the truck, and stuck out her thumb again.
“You’re not damn well getting a ride with some psycho killer.” He was beside her again.
“You can’t think I’m that stupid,” she said. “I’ll only accept a ride from a woman.”
“Don’t make me drag you in here,” he snarled.
A car pulled up behind the truck. The driver honked the horn. A moment later a man stuck his head out the window. “Are you okay, miss?”
“She’s not a miss,” Trey muttered. “She’s a lunatic.”
“Falling in love with you sure makes me a lunatic,” Sadie retorted. “I’m looking for a ride,” she called to the other driver. “I’m going to Memphis, but you can let me out at the interstate.”
TURNED OUT THE OTHER guy was going to Memphis, or so he claimed.
So much for I’ll only accept a ride from a woman.
Trey was powerless to stop Sadie climbing into the white Dodge sedan. He wrote down the license plate—not trusting himself to remember when he was so damn mad at her—so when the cops found her mangled body, he could give them the information along with an excellent description of the abductor.
But even storing those details didn’t make him comfortable about Sadie choosing to ride home with a complete stranger, even if he did look harmless. Trey tailed the Dodge to the I-70 on-ramp to verify the guy was at least heading east in the direction of Memphis. Then, since he was going that way anyway, he followed the car onto the nearly empty interstate. The plan was to put his foot down, blast past Sadie in a burst of righteously indignant acceleration.
But the Dodge stuck at precisely seventy miles per hour, which he found suspiciously serial killer-ish behavior, so he hung around behind it. Of course, driving at seventy was the kind of thing Daniel would do, too.
The kind of behavior a woman like Sadie found attractive.
He shook off a sudden pang of jealousy. Sadie wasn’t about to fall for the guy who’d offered her a ride, just because he stuck to the speed limit. She didn’t give her affections that lightly.
She’d said she loved him.
Trey turned over in his mind the memory of that whispered I love you. Not faltering—there’d been no hesitation—but a sense of surprise had lurked in the words. A wondrous secret, unexpectedly shared.
His body had reacted in the most extraordinary way. The hairs at his nape had risen, his heart had thundered like a train. The urge to whoop and dance her around that terrace had possessed him.
Then he’d come crashing down. It was Daniel she loved—she’d made that clear from the beginning. To declare suddenly that she’d switched her affection to Trey…what man would accept that?
Even if a part of him was desperate to.
No way, he wasn’t desperate. Not for Sadie Beecham, the girl next door.
He needed to get back on track, get out of Memphis and start his new life.
He fumbled for his phone. With his thumb he typed a text message to Sadie. Rest area 2m ahead get out there I’ll drive u home.
Through the back window of the Dodge he saw Sadie suspend her animated conversation with Serial Killer and glance down, presumably at her phone.
A couple of seconds later his phone beeped with her message. No.
He thumped the steering wheel, then propped his phone against it so he could type a reply and watch the road. Don’t be stupid hitchhiking dangerous.
So is txting while u drive came the reply. Trey cursed.
He didn’t get to type another message before his phone beeped again. Go home; leave town; do whatever; just stay away from me.
Who put semicolons in a text, for Pete’s sake? How geeky could you get?
Not leaving u to get strangled by a psycho, he typed.
Dammit, Sadie was laughing! He could see her in profile, head tilted back as she shared his words with her driver buddy.
Not joking. He stabbed the keys furiously. Sticking right with u until home.
There was a long pause, and he thought he’d shut her up. He should have known better.
I don’t need u. I might love u, but I don’t need u. U don’t seem to know the difference, which means u can’t be the man for me.
Trey gripped the wheel tighter, and his phone slid out, landing on the floor. He fumbled carefully for it, keeping his gaze on the Dodge. He felt that if he turned away for just one moment, the jerk would hurt Sadie.
He wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
He thought about the look in her eyes when she’d realized all he wanted from her was sex. Then when he’d thrown her love back at her.
In the car up ahead, Sadie seemed to be laughing again. He wiped his palm against his jeans, then began to type. U got over me fast what a surprise is your buddy there the next Mr Right-for-Sadie?
As he hit Send, he felt a twinge of remorse. He brushed it off, just as he’d brushed off that sweat from his palm. He was only telling the truth, showing her what she was like.
He waited for her reply.
It never came.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SADIE ROLLED HER chair back from her desk and swiveled to see her whiteboard. The wheat-protein mind map she’d drawn was doing nothing to inspire her. But at least they were about to sign off the current phase of the project. The next phase would be…
Boring.
She glanced guiltily around, as if her colleagues could read her thoughts. This was her job—she loved it. This was where she excelled, commanded the respect of several widely acknowledged geniuses. Was geniuses the plural of genius? Or should it be genii?
She still hadn’t figured out the solution for getting to do her new project. Trey’s face popped into her mind, but she dismissed him. Another problem that wasn’t about to go away.
She should be able to handle heartbroken by now, after the Daniel fiasco. But losing Trey—I never had him—wasn’t like losing Daniel. Whom of course she’d also never had.
Losing Trey was like excavating a garden ready to become landscaped perfection…no, Daniel was more landscaped perfection, and she’d discovered it bored her. Losing Trey was like throwing herself into a jungle adventure, only to have the jungle spit her out.
Garden. Jungle. Another thing that was going wrong. Or rather, going nowhere.
Trey had left her the design for her garden and the list of plants. He’d emailed the offer of one of Kincaid Nurseries’ staff to do the work, no charge. In a moment of excessive pride she’d turned him down and said she would do it herself.
Trey had told her from the beginning she couldn’t do it, and deep down she knew he was right. She’d been so determined not to let her parents see what a failure she was at growing things, she’d ended up with nothing.
She was a coward.
She didn’t want to be.
Sadie closed her office door, then picked up the phone and dialed.
Her mom answered.
“Mom, I need to talk to you and dad about my garden.”
“Sadie, is that you?” Mary-Beth asked anxiously.
In her panic, she’d plunged straight in without the
usual courtesies.
“Yeah, it’s me. Mom, can you get Dad on the other phone, so we can talk?”
When her father picked up the extension, she said, “Mom, Dad, as you know, I’ve been planning my new garden for a while.”
“Is it ready at last?” her dad said. “When can we come?”
“It’s not ready,” Sadie said, “because I’ve killed every plant I ever bought. I can’t grow things like you guys. I want to be able to, but I can’t….” Ugh, she was sniveling. “And now my garden is a bomb site and Trey’s not working on it, and it’s never going to be okay again.”
She was crying, talking nonsense, but somehow her parents made sense of it.
“Snap out of it now, Sadie, love,” her dad said. “Your mother and I will come see this garden, and we’ll figure out how to fix it.”
“But I can’t—”
“We’ll fix it,” Mary-Beth said. “It sounds best if you don’t touch it again, dear.”
Sadie gave a half sniff, half laugh. “But it’s such a long way for you to come.”
“Half an hour,” her father scoffed. The same father who’d commented frequently about the fact she lived so far away she’d be forgetting her upbringing and becoming a stranger to her nearest and dearest.
“There’s a ton of work,” she warned them. “Maybe I should hire someone.”
“Don’t you dare,” Mary-Beth snapped. More calmly, she said, “Sadie, sweetheart, do you realize how long it’s been since your father and I have been able to do anything for you?”
“Last time was when we found you a date for that dance,” her father mused.
Sadie shuddered. “Let’s not talk about that.”
“The fact is, Sadie Beecham, you have a habit of making other people feel useless,” her mother said.
“I don’t—”
“You’re so blasted good at everything, the rest of us can only sit on our hands. Occasionally I get to dish out the cod-liver oil, but I know you only take it to be polite.”
“Mom…” Sadie closed her eyes. How did Trey have more insight into her parents than she herself? “I only let you see the things I’m ‘blasted good’ at. Everything else, I hide away from everyone…but believe me, I have a closetful of failures.”