by Lori Wilde
A career that had lost its shine.
His knee twinged again, dark thoughts for another time. He slapped a grin on his face, readjusted the tool belt to fit, and strapped it on.
Sesty studied him, head canted, lips pursed, and unless he missed his guess, he saw a hot flare of interest in her dark blue eyes. Some women got charged up over men in tool belts. Did she?
Just in case she did, he positioned the belt low on his hips like a cowboy’s holster. Her gaze tracked his every move. Yep. He definitely had her attention.
“I’ll need a saw,” he said.
“Got one.” She reached into the closet for a jigsaw.
“Should have known.” He moved to take the saw from her. “Some things never change. You always were prepared.”
“Not on the night that—” She broke off, shook her head. “Never mind that.”
Yeah, he didn’t want to talk about that night either. The night she broke up with him in the police station after their parents came to pick them up, following their spectacular crash into the Sweetheart Fountain.
It was the first time he’d had his heart ripped from his chest and torn to shreds. He thought of the old Rod Stewart song, “First Cut is the Deepest,” and turned away from her with the saw tucked tight against his chest.
Forty hours.
Just get through the forty hours with her. If he could survive working so close to her for forty hours, he could survive any test of will and come out unbreakable.
HER TINY OFFICE was not the best place to do sawing and hammering and painting, but she really had nowhere else for them to work besides her own home, and she wasn’t about to take him there. The setting was too intimate, too ripe for temptation.
Gad! You have to stop thinking like this. There is nothing between you and Josh.
That ship had sailed a long time ago. Yes, he was sexier than ever. Yes, every time she looked at him, her body heated up in troublesome places. And yes, she kept imagining doing the most scandalous things with and to him. But she’d been scorched by love, and he’d been the first one to set her ablaze. How stupid would she be to go back for third degree burns?
They worked for hours on the set pieces. She held the plywood in place over two saw horses while he cut out the designs—a box of chocolates, a teddy bear wearing a heart-shaped bow, Cupid, again, slinging an arrow. Sawdust flew. Goggles protected their eyes, but sawdust got in their hair, clung to their clothes, landed on their lips.
Once the cutting was done they took a break and swept up the mess. Sesty pulled two bottles of water from the minifridge in the corner and passed one to him.
“Thanks.” Josh ran the back of his arm over his forehead, which was beaded with manly perspiration, and then tilted back his head and took a long drink.
Sesty’s gaze hung on the column of his throat and watched his powerful neck muscles gulp down the water. She remembered what it felt like to run her palms over his bare chest, finger the taut ripples of his hard planes and lines. Instantly, her body reacted. Tingling, tightening, moistening.
To distract herself, she moved to the closet, found the sandpaper and hand sander she’d gotten from her father, put her goggles back on and started sanding the teddy bear cutout.
“Do you have another sander?” he asked, coming over to squat down beside her.
“Only the one.”
“Then let me do the sanding.”
“I’ve got it.” She bumped his shoulder with hers, muscling him out of her personal space.
“You sure hate giving up control.”
“No more so than you.”
“I’m no control freak,” he denied.
“The heck you aren’t. I’ve heard people talking. They say the reason you wrecked during your last race was because you thought you knew better than your crew chief.”
“Yeah, well, it’s easy for people to be armchair pit crew. They have absolutely no idea what it’s really like out there on the track.” He got a faraway look in his eyes.
“What is it like?” she prodded.
“Scary, exhilarating, a complete physical and mental rush. Actually, it’s a whole lot like great sex.” His gaze lingered on her breasts.
She ignored that last part. “How difficult is it?”
“It requires one hundred percent concentration. One wrong move and poof!” He clapped his hands, flinging fine particles of sawdust into the air. “It’s all over.”
Which was precisely why she’d broken up with him. She couldn’t handle loving a daredevil, knowing that at any moment one wrong turn and he’d never come home to her.
“Is it true? Did you crash because you didn’t listen to your crew chief?”
“It’s true that I don’t like to be controlled.”
“Who does? Now do you understand why I want to wield my own sander?”
Josh flapped a permissive hand. “Okay. You’ve made your point. Sand away.”
“Thank you for getting out of my way.” She pushed her goggles back down over her face and went back to the sanding, pressing her lips into a straight light, keeping her attention fully focused on the task at hand. Taking no notice, as best she could, of the masculine man sitting on the floor beside her.
The vibrating sander sent tremors up her palm, through her arm, and into her shoulder. The sander hit a rough patch on the plywood, made a revving noise.
She switched it off and raised her goggles for a closer look. There was a divot where the jigsaw blade had hung in the plywood, cutting a small chunk from the side of the teddy bear’s face.
“Oh no,” she exclaimed.
“What is it?”
“Teddy’s ruined.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look here.” She traced an index finger over the flaw.
“What?”
“The cut is jagged.”
“So?”
“We need to cut out a new teddy Bear. I’ve bought a couple of extra pieces of plywood just in case something like this happened.”
“Excuse me?” He cupped his palm around an ear.
“We’ve got to cut out a new—”
“I heard what you said, but I can’t believe my ears. You’re going to throw out this cutout because of one little mistake?”
“It’s on the bear’s face where everyone can see.”
“Big deal. This is a set design that will be used once. People aren’t going to be inspecting it with a magnifying glass. Odds are no one will notice.”
“I’ll know.”
“Sesty, you’ve got to be joking.”
“Don’t you see how important this is? The event has to go off without a hitch. If I screw this up, I’ve lost my shot.”
“You’re not going to screw it up.”
“I will if I let subpar work go up on that stage.” She prodded the divot with her finger and more wood fell out.
“Stop poking at it!”
“I can’t. Do you think I’m OCD?”
“Ses.” He laid a firm hand on her shoulder and gently tilted her around to face him. “Trust me. It’s going to be okay. Everyone will be looking at the bachelors anyway. Let it go.”
She cast a glance over her shoulder. The light caught the cutout just right, making the irregular cut look like a deep gash. Yes, she was being irrational and she knew it, but knowledge couldn’t counter the anxiety punching her stomach. “It’s not perfect.”
He took her chin between his fingers and thumb and forcefully turned her head back to meet his gaze.
She averted his eyes. His stare was simply too intense.
“Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she met his eyes. Dark pools of chocolate, warm and inviting, enticed her to jump right in.
“Do you know anyone who is perfect?” he asked.
�
��No,” she admitted. She didn’t know why the flawed cutout bothered her so much, but it did.
“You sure about that?” He lowered his head.
“Yes.” She felt kind of silly now. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Then why do you feel like you have to be perfect all the time? It’s a losing battle. Why do you do that to yourself?”
It was a good question, a rational question. Too bad she didn’t have a rational answer.
“Because,” she explained, as the stomach anxiety pole-vaulted into her throat, “if I’m not perfect, I won’t be good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
And without even knowing she was thinking it, Sesty blurted, “To be loved.”
He peered at her for a long moment. “Honey, anyone who would reject you because you have flaws isn’t worthy of your love. You’re lovable just the way you are—an imperfect perfectionist, who tries her best to please everyone but herself.”
“You think I’m lovable?” She breathed, unable to believe she was asking him. It was pathetic. A competent woman didn’t go fishing for compliments. She earned them.
“Smart, gorgeous, obsessive, insecure, what’s not to love?” He laughed.
“Those last two don’t sound like lovable qualities to me.”
“Are you kidding me?” He smiled kindly—much more than kindly—it was a smile brimming with encouragement and belief. In her. A tingle went up and down her spine, sparkly and hot. “Those last two qualities are what make you the most lovable.”
“How’s that?”
“If you were truly perfect, everyone would hate your guts.”
“But I’ll never be perfect.”
“Bull’s-eye.”
“So I should just stop striving for excellence?”
“Not excellence, perfection.”
“I don’t know the difference.”
His smile flipped over. “Redoing the cutout means that much to you, huh?”
“Yes.”
He put out his hand. “Give me that jigsaw.
This was silliness. They didn’t have time to redo the cutout. Why was she being so picky?
A memory washed over her. Something she’d tucked away in the back of her brain and shut the door on, but it returned to her now with startling clarity. She was nine years old and struggling in math and her usual straight A’s had taken a hit. She’d gotten a C. Knees shaking, palms sweating, stomach aching, she approached her parents with the wretched report card to sign.
Her mother had taken the report card from her, scowled darkly. “What is this, young lady?”
“A C!” her father exploded. “Snows do not make C’s!”
She burst into tears, apologized profusely for her failings. It hadn’t mattered. Her parents scolded her. “You’ve let us down. We are so disappointed in you.” That night they did not tuck her in bed as they did every other night. “We can’t look at you right now,” her father said when he sent her to her room without dinner as her punishment.
Left alone in the dark, sobbing into a pillow, she had made a vow. She would always strive to be perfect. If she were perfect, her parents would not be disappointed in her.
Throughout her life she had received that same message loud and clear, from her parents, from teachers, from Chad, from society at large. The world values champions. Therefore, in order to be loved, she could not fall.
The only person who had not expected perfection from her, had in fact encouraged her to fail and fail spectacularly, was Josh.
“Hey,” he’d said to her once. “If I didn’t wreck cars, I wouldn’t learn how to drive skillfully. You’ve got to crash a few times in order to get better. You never crash, you never succeed.”
Of course, that was why she’d broken up with him—over a crash, over a flaw. The night they totaled her parents’ car, smashing through the park and into the Sweetheart Fountain, Josh hadn’t been behind the wheel.
She had.
But he’d been the one to take the blame. Before the police had gotten there, he made her switch seats with him. In the end, her parents vilified Josh, and she felt she had no choice but to pick them over him.
And now here he was, doing it all over again. Pushing her to accept her flaws as a lovable part of who she was.
It felt wonderfully strange.
Chapter Five
TEN P.M. WAS late for Twilight, and the streets stretched empty when they emerged from her office after cutting, sanding, and painting perfect set designs for the bachelor auction. While they’d been inside, city workers had twined red, white, and pink twinkle lights throughout the trees on the courthouse lawn and in nearby Sweetheart Park.
“Well.” Sesty paused on the street outside the art gallery featuring kitschy, Texas objects d’art. “This is good-night.”
Josh didn’t make a move.
Neither did she.
They stood peering into each other’s eyes, surrounded by the smell of sawdust, acrylic paint, and the night breeze wafting off Lake Twilight, but in spite of the cool temperature, she wasn’t cold.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.
“No need,” she replied breathlessly. “I don’t require a bodyguard. Remember, you’re back in Twilight. Not some big city.”
“I’m walking you to your car,” he insisted. “And I’m not taking no for an answer. Where are you parked?”
“I’m not. I walked. I have a house over on Prosper Lane.”
“That’s a half a mile away. You definitely are not walking home in the dark.”
“All right,” she said. Twilight was a safe place, but sometimes, in the dark, the mind could play tricks with shadows, and she welcomed his company.
“Let’s cut through the park,” he said, and put a proprietary hand to the small of her back.
“There’s a curfew in effect for the park.” She was so aware of his hand, but didn’t try to shake him loose. “It closes at ten.”
“Since when?”
“There was some trouble a few years back with teenagers hanging out in the park after hours, drinking and making mischief.”
“It’s only a few minutes after ten. And how do you close a park anyway?”
“The cops patrol through here pretty frequently.”
“If they catch us, we’ll just explain we’re cutting through, not loitering. We’re both well over twenty-one.”
She swatted at him, felt giggly and girly. “Oh, you and your bad boy ways.”
“C’mon.” He winked. “Live a little.”
How many times had he said that to her in the past? Too many to count.
“What’s the worst that could happen if we get caught?” he whispered, lowering his head close to her ear. “They call our parents?”
Silly as it was, that gave her pause. What would her parents say if they heard she’d gotten caught trespassing in Sweetheart Park after hours with Josh Langtree? She shook off the impulse. It was past time she stopped caring about what her parents thought. She loved them, but she’d allowed them to dominate her life for too long. Their approval of Chad had been one of the reasons she started dating him in the first place, and look where that road had taken her—to a big fat dead end.
The light pressure of his palm against her spine triggered something inside her. A click. A pop. A settling into place, like the pieces of a puzzle coming together to form a cohesive whole.
Feels like old times.
He guided her over the wooden bridge that spanned a fingerling tributary of the Brazos River. They’d traversed this path many times before. Usually, holding hands or with their palms tucked in each other’s back pockets. Nostalgia made her smile at the girl she’d once been.
Hard plastic Valentine’s Day ornaments had been hung from the trees and they shone brightly in the reflection o
f the colorful twinkle lights. Hearts. Flowers. Cupids. Cheesy, yes but it was a little romantic too, she had to admit.
“They rope you in with it, don’t they?” Josh said, as if reading her thoughts. “No matter how hard you try to resist Valentine’s Day mania, you can’t escape it in this town.”
“From a purely practical standpoint, it’s all about pulling tourism dollars into our town. It’s Twilight’s lifeblood, after all.”
“All the hype makes it hard not to succumb to the illusion, but I’m not falling for the hokum.” Josh’s staunch jaw tightened.
“Me either.”
“Seems like we’re the only sane people in town when it comes being immune to Valentine’s Day.”
“Seems like,” she murmured, but a wisp of sadness tugged at her heart. She liked the sweet fantasy of one true love, but it was just that, wasn’t it? A fantasy and nothing more.
They left the wooden footbridge, strolled down the paved path that skirted the water’s edge. His hand was still at her back. She was so aware of it. Of him.
It had been ten years since she’d seen him, but it seemed no longer than a heartbeat. Was it really possible? To pick up the threads of a tattered relationship, only to find they’d never broken? She tried to breathe, but hope tangled up in her lungs, twisted around until she thought she might suffocate on the feeling.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
Up ahead lay the Sweetheart Tree, crowned with a red lights entwined around a heart-shaped wire frame. Josh stopped in front of it, a come-be-bad-with-me smile plucking at his lips as he studied the trunk of the old pecan.
“The Sweetheart Tree is still here.” He sounded amazed.
“It’s been here for over a century. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“How long do pecans live, for godsakes?”
“Apparently more than a hundred years.”
“Even with all the carvings.”
“We never carved our name into the tree like everyone else did,” she said.
“Because you wouldn’t let me.”
“The sign says not to. It’s bad for the tree.”