by Cara Colter
But just as he made that decision, Gracie froze. It reminded him of a deer sniffing the air, some sense alerting it that it no longer was alone, that it was being observed. Then Gracie turned her head slowly and looked directly at him.
He saw recognition dawn in her eyes, and then in the set of her mouth.
She folded her arms over the green smudge on her chest and lifted her chin, trying for composure, distancing herself from that woman who had been hurling shoes and shouting invective at horses.
Taking a deep breath, feeling a sensation in his chest that was similar to what he felt just before starting the mission, just before stepping into the heat of battle, Rory Adams moved toward Gracie.
And stopped right in front of her.
Had he ever known her eyes were that color? He thought it was called hazel, a plain word for such a rich mix of golds and greens and browns worthy of an exotic tapestry.
Had he ever known that her lips were lush and wide? The kind of lips that a man imagined crushing under his own?
Of course he hadn’t.
She had been a kid. His friend’s sister.
Now she was a woman. A beautiful woman, if not a very happy one!
He hesitated, picked up her shoe—who said he couldn’t be chivalrous?—and handed it to her.
“Hello, Gracie.”
* * *
Grace Day blinked at the way her nickname sounded coming off his lips. So right.
As if part of her had ached to be called that again.
And, of course, part of her did. But by her brother. Not by Rory Adams.
She grabbed her shoe from his hand, and accidentally brushed his fingertips. The shock was electrical, and to hide its shiver from him, she shoved the shoe on her foot, buying a moment to breathe.
It had been eight years. Couldn’t he be bald? Or fat? Couldn’t life give her one little break?
She straightened, trying for dignity even though she was distinctly lopsided, and the narrow strap of her sundress chose that moment to slide down her shoulder.
Grace could clearly see that Rory Adams was better than he had been before. Twenty-one-year-old lankiness was gone, replaced with a male physique in its absolute prime. He was tall—well, he’d always been that, standing head and shoulders above his peers—but now he was also broad-shouldered and deep-chested.
He was wearing a sports shirt—short-sleeved—that showed off rock-hard biceps, the ripple of toned forearms. Khaki shorts hugged lean hips and powerful thighs, showed the naked length of his long, tanned legs.
His face had matured, too. She was not sure she would say it was better. Changed. The mischievousness of a young man was gone. So was the devil-may-care light that had always burned like fire in the depths of those green, green eyes.
Around his eyes, now, were the creases of a man who had squinted into the sun a great deal. There was a set to his jaw, a firmness around his mouth that had not been there before.
There was something in his expression that was closed and hard. It was the look of a warrior, a man who had accepted the mantle of serving his country, but at a price to himself. There were new shadows in eyes that had once been clear.
Rory Adams had seen things—and done things—that made the tatters of the birthday party behind her seem frivolous and superficial.
Her eyes wandered to his hair. It was brown, glossy and rich as a vat of melted dark chocolate, shining with the highlights of the Okanagan early summer sun.
The last time she had seen him, that dark hair had been very short, buzzed off to a mere shadow, vanity- and maintenance-free in preparation for hard, hot work in inhospitable climates.
Now, Rory had returned to a style closer to that she remembered from when he was coming in and out of their house with Graham.
Rory’s family had moved onto their block and into their school district in the latter half of Graham’s senior year. And then in those carefree days after they had finished high school, they had both worked for the same landscaping company.
That was before they had decided it was imperative that they go save the world.
Rory’s hair was longer than it had been even then, longer than she had ever seen it, thick, rich, straight until it touched his collar, and then it curled slightly.
She supposed that’s what everyone who got out of the military did—exercised the release from discipline, celebrated the freedom to grow their hair.
And yet the long hair did not make him look less a warrior, just a warrior from a different age.
Too easy to picture him with the long hair catching in the wind, that fierce expression on his face, a sword in his hand, ready.
He was the kind of man who made a woman feel the worst kind of weakness: a desire to feel his strength against her own softness, to feel the rasp of rough whiskers against delicate skin, to feel the hard line of those lips soften against her mouth.
But Rory Adams had always been that. Even now Grace could feel the ghost of the girl she had once been. She could feel the helpless humiliation she had felt at fourteen because she loved him so desperately.
And pathetically.
She’d been as invisible to him as a ghost. No, more like a mosquito, an annoyance he swatted at every now and then. His best friend’s aggravating kid sister.
She’d known from the moment he had first called her six months ago, that nothing good could come from seeing him.
There had been something in his voice, grim and determined, that had made her think he had things to tell her that she was not ready to hear, that she would probably never be ready to hear.
Besides, seeing Rory? It could only make her yearn for things that could never be. She had never seen Rory without her brother, Graham.
The brother who was not coming home. Hadn’t she thought seeing her brother’s friend would intensify the sense of loss that was finally dulling to a throbbing ache instead of a screaming pain?
Once she had blamed this man who stood before her for Graham’s choices, but a long time ago she had realized her brother had been born to do what he was doing. It was a choice that he had been willing to give his life for.
And he had.
But if Rory wanted to think she still held him responsible, and if it kept up some kind of barrier between them, that was okay.
Because what shocked Gracie right now was that what she felt looking at Rory was not an intensified sense of loss. Rather, she was unprepared for how the yearning of her younger self—to be noticed by him, to be cared about him—had not disappeared with her braces and her first bra.
Not even close.
She blinked. And then again, hard. “No one calls me that,” she said. “No one calls me Gracie.”
She thought she sounded childish and defensive. She didn’t want him to know he’d had any kind of effect on her.
Why couldn’t she just have said, “Hello, Rory. Nice to see you”? Why couldn’t she have just said that, all her years of hard-won polish and sophistication wrapped around her like a protective cloak?
Because he had caught her in a terrible moment. Running after renegade ponies, her shoe broken, her hair clasp lost, her strap sliding around and her dress stained beyond repair.
If she’d known he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, she would have invited him to the office she was so proud of on the main street of downtown Mason.
Where she could have been in complete control of this reunion!
“What do they call you?”
His voice was deep and sure and sent unwanted shivers down her spine.
Miss Day would have sounded way too churlish, plus she was wobbling on one shoe, and feeling damp and disheveled and not at all like the cool professional woman she wanted him to believe she was.
“Grace.”
“Ah.”
/> She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, his gaze probing, those deep green eyes feeling as though they were stripping away her maturity and success and exposing the vulnerable and gauche girl she was so startled to find was alive and well within her.
“Graham’s the only one who called me that. Everyone else called me Grace. Even my parents.”
“Graham and me,” he reminded her.
Gracie-Facie, pudding and pie, kissed the boys and made them cry…
On those rare occasions when Rory Adams had noticed her, it had been to tease her mercilessly.
But that boy who had teased—the one with the careless grin, and the wild way—seemed to be gone. Completely.
Why couldn’t her inner child be so cooperative?
“So, how’s life?” he said.
As if he’d just been walking by, and happened upon her. Which she doubted. When she’d talked to him a week ago, she’d told him she didn’t want to see him.
She should have guessed that would not have changed about him. He was not a man who had had to accept no for an answer very often. Especially not from those of the female persuasion. She should have guessed he would not accept it from her.
“The same as when I talked to you a week ago,” Grace said stubbornly. “Fabulous.”
This was not true. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
“Except for the ponies,” he commented dryly, but he she had a feeling he wasn’t buying it, and not just because of the ponies. Not for a second.
Couldn’t he see that her dress was perfectly cut fine linen? That the shoe he had handed her was an expensive designer shoe? Couldn’t he see that she was all grown up and that she didn’t need any help from big, strong him to get her through life’s hurdles?
Of which, at the moment, she had more than her fair share.
“Fabulous,” she repeated, tightly.
“You look worried,” he said after a moment.
And then he did the darndest thing. He took his thumb, and ever so gently pressed it into her forehead.
Where she knew the worry lines had been building like storm clouds for a whole week!
Ever since Serenity had arrived with her entourage. Ponies. Tucker.
There was a momentary sensation of bliss: a momentary desire to lean into that thumb and all it offered. Someone to lean on. Someone to talk to. Someone to trust.
Hopeless illusions that she, of all people, should have left far behind her. The end of her engagement really should have been the last straw.
Had been the last straw, Grace told herself firmly. Her business was everything now. Everything. She had laid herself out on the altar of romantic love—and had been run through by love’s caprice—for the last time.
She was not leaving herself open to hurt anymore. She had made that vow when her fiancé of two years, Harold, had bade her adieu. Vowed it.
And then, as if to test that vow, Serenity had come.
And now Rory was here. This man appearing in her life, her entertaining the notion it would be nice to hear his opinion about Serenity—or feel his whiskers scrape her face—those were tests of her resolve.
When he had phoned, she had contemplated asking him a few questions, but in the end she had decided not to.
And the deep cynicism that permeated his expression should only confirm how right she had been in that decision.
Because he could lay her hope to rest. Dash it completely before it was even fully formed.
Hope was such a fragile thing for her.
Hope was probably even more dangerous to her than love. But still, not to hope for anything at all would be a form of death, wouldn’t it?
She was not about to trust her hope to someone like him. And yet, there it was—the temptation just to tell him, to see what he thought.
Not to be so damned alone.
Recognizing the utter folly of these thoughts, Grace slapped his thumb down from her forehead. “I’m not worried.”
No sense giving in to the temptation to share confidences, to tell him she’d spent years building up her business. One incident like this, and it could all crumble, word spreading like wildfire that she was unprofessional, that she’d had a disaster.
Thank goodness the party had been over, the last of the pint-size revelers being packed into their upscale minivans and SUVs when the ponies had made their break for it. Hopefully the park people—or the press—wouldn’t come along before she got this cleared up.
But that was only the immediate problem, anyway, although all her problems were related at the moment.
“Didn’t the ponies come with a pony person?” he asked.
Ah, that was the other problem. The pony person was exactly the secret she wanted to keep.
“The pony person is, um, incapacitated. Not your problem,” she said, flashing him a smile that made him frown. She had been aiming for a smile that said, This? Just a temporary glitch. Nothing I can’t handle.
And she had obviously missed that smile by a long shot. Grace hoped he didn’t catch her anxious glance toward the parking lot.
Thankfully, she’d had the trailer the ponies had arrived in moved way across the parking lot into the deep shade of the cottonwoods on the other side. She had not wanted the partygoers to bump right into it in its decrepit condition.
“Maybe we’ll meet again under different circumstances,” she said, hoping he would take the hint and leave.
But he did not have the look of a man who responded to subtlety, and he had caught her glance toward the parking lot. Now he was looking past her. She moved in front of him, trying to block his view, but it was no use. He looked over her head, easily.
Not a single person at the party had mentioned the trailer. It was as if they hadn’t seen it at all.
But then, most people weren’t like him.
And Rory Adams had become a man who saw everything, who missed absolutely nothing.
Of course, she knew from the few things Graham had said when he came home on leave that these men led lives that depended on their ability to be observant of their surroundings, every nuance of detail, every vehicle, every person, every obstacle.
Rory stepped around her, and headed right toward where the ramshackle horse trailer was. It was painted a shade of copper that almost hid the rust eating away at it around the wheel wells.
On the side, in fading circus letters, three feet high, it said, Serenity’s Wild Ride.
He looked over his shoulder at Grace, his eyes narrow. “What’s she doing here?”
He recognized the trailer. He knew Serenity. Was it what Grace feared? Or what she hoped?
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU know her,” Grace said, scrambling to keep up with him on her one shoe. “You know Serenity.”
She stopped and picked up the other on her way. Since one had a heel and the other didn’t, she took them both off and dangled them from her fingertips.
“A chance encounter a long, long time ago.” Rory glanced back at her, hesitated, and then waited. “Watch for pony poo.”
“Oh!” Life was so unfair. Well, that was hardly a newsflash. But, if Grace had to see Rory Adams, wouldn’t it have been nice if she had been sipping a glass of white wine and looking entirely unflappable, rather than chasing after him in bare feet, avoiding poo?
“What’s she doing here, Gracie?”
She wanted to remind him she didn’t want to be called Gracie, but something about the way Rory had stopped and was looking down at her made her feel very flustered.
The weak compulsion to share the burden won.
“She came by the office a week ago.”
“She knew where your office was,” he said flatly.
“I’m in the phone book. She said she knew Gra
ham.”
Grace did not miss how his eyes narrowed at that.
“She knew I had an event company.”
“So, she’s done some homework.”
“You don’t need to make it sound like she’s running a sting, and she found an easy mark.”
He raised an eyebrow. It said exactly.
“She just wondered if I could give her some work. She had ponies, I had an upcoming birthday party. It seemed like it might be win-win.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Hell’s bells. She did not like it that he could see through her that easily. It meant she had to avoid looking at his lips.
Naturally, as soon as she told herself not to look at his lips, she did just that. Why did men like him have this kind of seductive power over people? Female people anyway!
“What makes you think I’m not telling you something?” she hedged.
“I was Graham’s best friend for ten years and you refused to see me, but a complete stranger shows up who claims a passing acquaintance to your brother and you’re forming a business partnership with her?”
“I rented her ponies for an afternoon. That’s hardly a business partnership.”
“It’s not ‘I can’t see why we need to talk,’ either.”
Something crossed his face.
“I hurt your feelings,” Grace said, stunned.
For a moment, he looked stunned, too. Then a shield came down over his eyes, making them seem a darker shade of emerald than they had before. A little smile tickled the sinfully sensuous curve of his mouth. His expression was not exactly amusement, and not exactly scorn. More a kind of deprecating self-knowledge.
“Gracie, honey—”
Gracie wasn’t bad enough? Now he had to add honey to it?
“I don’t have feelings for you to hurt.”
That was what he wanted for her to believe. And she saw it was entirely possible that he believed that himself. But she didn’t.
And suddenly Rory Adams was more dangerous to her than ever. Because he wasn’t just handsome. He wasn’t just the first man she’d ever had a crush on. He wasn’t just her brother’s best friend and fellow adventurer.