“It’s my fault,” Savannah answered, her guilt mounting as the doctor frowned at the gash. “He surprised me and I accidentally knocked him in the head with a paint can. He lost consciousness.”
“I was stunned for a second.”
“You lost consciousness. He could have a concussion or…I don’t know…brain damage.” Otherwise, he’d have already put the kibosh on the ridiculous engagement misunderstanding.
Light brown eyes narrowed and cut to her. “I don’t have brain damage.”
Dr. West clicked her tongue and gingerly tipped his head down to more closely examine the wound. “Heck no, sugar. You’d have to have a brain first, which you clearly do not, seeing as how you don’t know better than to sneak up on a person.” She patted his shoulder. “You’re going to need stitches for sure, but I want to get a CT before we close you up.” She made her way to the door. “Sit tight. Someone will be in to take you down to radiology soon.”
And then they were alone, for what felt like the first time. Her and this near-stranger—a man both sets of parents believed to be the love of her life, her husband-to-be, not to mention the father of her unborn children. How had things spiraled out of control so quickly?
She looked down. The yellow handprint on the front of her shirt filled her vision. Oh, yeah. There was that. She slid off the table and tried adjusting the henley, but no matter how she arranged the fabric, the stamp of his large hand found its way back to her breast. Resigned, she turned to face him. “I’ll go set them straight.”
He raised his head. His gaze landed on the imprint of his palm on her shirt and turned hot. Her chest tightened. The heated inspection continued up her throat, and stalled again at her mouth. She couldn’t keep from licking her lips. Slowly, inevitably, those amber eyes found hers—like double shots of Johnnie Walker Gold, and twice as potent.
“Don’t.”
Chapter Three
“Don’t what?”
If his neighbor suspected he had brain damage before, she looked damn near certain of it now. He needed to talk fast or she’d be in the lobby letting the cat out of the bag before he made it back from getting his head examined.
“Don’t set them straight.”
Her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. Her expression suggested she’d revised his status from brain damaged to insane. And maybe he was out of his mind at the moment, but the sight of one’s mother dissolving into grateful tears and praising Jesus impacted a guy. It also offered up a painful reminder that he wasn’t the only one who’d suffered over the last three years. His parents had, too, and along with the reminder came a shameful realization—he’d withdrawn so far into his own self-protective cave he’d inadvertently added to their pain, and heaped on an unhealthy dose of plain old worry. About him. Had the stress contributed to his mom’s recent cancer diagnosis? Guilt gnawed at his gut. It certainly hadn’t done her any favors. He’d been given an opportunity to alleviate that worry so his parents could shift their energy and focus to his mom’s well-being. No, it wasn’t honest, or strictly ethical, but it felt right.
“I know I sound crazy, but I promise I’m not. Just hear me out.”
She crossed her arms, chewed her lower lip, and shot a glance at the door. He estimated he had about two seconds before she bolted. Usually he went to great lengths to avoid talking about the past. The conversation left him raw all over again, but right now showing his ugliest scars served a purpose.
“Three years ago, almost to the day, I lost my wife and baby daughter in a car accident.”
That snapped her attention back to him. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
And she was. He could see the emotion swimming in her eyes, feel it in the light touch of her hand on his.
An awkward silence stretched. Three years and he still didn’t know what to do with people’s sympathy. “Thanks,” he finally managed. “The months following the accident were”—he grappled for a word to describe the hopelessness, the rage, and the unbearable pain of loss—“hell. For all of us.”
“Of course they were.” Her soft voice barely exceeded a whisper. No platitudes, no advice, just acceptance of the truth of the statement. She squeezed his hand as she said the words, and he fought the strangest urge to wrap his arms around her and hold on.
“Things leveled out after a while. I adjusted to my new reality.” He forced a smile to soften the bitterness in his voice. “A little more time passed and my parents—particularly my mom—started dropping little hints whenever we’d talk. Hints like the Hamiltons’ nice, single niece recently moved to Atlanta and could probably use a tour guide, or the McKays’ middle daughter finally divorced her no-good husband and accepted a teaching job at Emory, and that’s not so far from you, is it?”
Her lips twisted into the off-center smile that always captivated his cock.
“Sounds familiar?”
She nodded. “Vaguely.” Her grimace almost made him laugh. “They want us to be happy, but in your case, the natural instinct to meddle is compounded because—”
“Because they want to know I’m okay. Yeah, I get that now. They need assurances I’m not so trapped in the pain of the past that I’m closed off to the future. Their compulsion to be certain I’m squared away might have reached a new urgency because my mom was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.”
“Jesus, Beau. Is it serious? I mean, of course it’s serious, but—”
“We’re hoping for the best. She caught the lump early and it’s stage one, so…” Nothing more to say there until they knew more. “They don’t need to waste their energy worrying about me, and I didn’t understand how worried they were until this afternoon. When your father referred to me as his future son-in-law, my mother cried tears of happiness, and an invisible weight rolled off my dad. I don’t want to take that away from them.”
“That’s very sweet and noble of you, but we can’t lie to ease their minds.”
“Sure we can.”
She opened her mouth to rebut, but he forged ahead. “Not forever, just a few weeks. The holidays are a difficult time for us. I assumed they always would be, but now I—we—have a chance to restore some hope and joy to the season for my parents.” Unfair of him to emphasize how his parents’ happiness now rested on her narrow shoulders, but circumstances had manipulated them into this position, and not even the annoying needles of guilt over his tactics changed his mind.
She bit her lip again. He waited.
“You’re only delaying their inevitable disappointment and making it more acute. Don’t you think they’ll take the news much harder if they spend the next month emotionally invested in our happily ever after? Plus, I don’t know about your parents, but mine will be beyond pissed when they learn we lied to them.”
“They’ll never know about the lie. They live two hundred miles away. They only know what we tell them. Shortly after the New Year we’ll reach the conclusion we make better friends than soul mates and call off the engagement. Simple and civilized.”
“And then your parents will go back to worrying about you.”
“No. They’ll realize I’m okay, I just mistook rekindled childhood affection and”—no point pretending it wasn’t there—“grown-up lust for more.”
Dark blonde eyebrows arched. “Lust?”
“I got smacked in the head, Savannah, but I’m a long way from dead, which is what a man would have to be not to lust after you.” As compliments went, it lacked poetry and subtlety, but her cheeks turned a lust-inspiring shade of pink anyway, and he imagined them turning the same color while her lips formed his name and her body trembled against his.
Careful, Montgomery. Acknowledging the lust was arguably strategic. Acting on it? Not. Time to sell her on this from another angle. “Look, I don’t know the details of your situation, but I get the impression your family developed some expectations about your personal life, and having a fiancé for the next little while might save you some grief. Wouldn’t you like to get through the holidays
without awkward explanations? Especially the kind guaranteed to trigger the parental meddling instincts?”
She scrubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes, which reminded him of the trips she’d made down the hall to the garbage chute last night. She hadn’t gotten much sleep.
“Yes, the notion holds some appeal, but”—she blinked and focused on him again—“it’s dishonest.”
“A victimless lie to serve a higher good. Everyone deserves a happy holiday. If we do this, we all win. You avoid a bunch of unwanted matchmaking efforts. I avoid the same. Your parents get to fixate on Sinclair’s love life instead of yours, and my parents get some long-overdue peace of mind.”
“One question.”
He fought back a grin of triumph. The question was a formality. He had her. “Shoot.”
“Should they be worried you’re so trapped in the pain of the past, you’re closed off to the future?”
A knee-jerk denial leaped to his lips, but her unwavering, don’t-bullshit-me stare had him biting it back. He’d celebrated victory too soon. Knowing this, he answered carefully. “I’ve come to terms with the past. Maybe not willingly, or gracefully, but ultimately I didn’t have much choice. As for the future, I take it as it comes, because, again, I don’t have much choice. I prefer to concentrate on the present.”
Those blue eyes softened with sympathy, but her mouth turned down in a slight frown. “That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Did she expect him to say he had the capacity to put his heart and soul on the line again, risk standing by helplessly while whatever power controlled such things ripped everything he loved away from him? He did not. He’d lived through it once, and just in case time tried to heal the wound, his job presented him with regular reminders of how fragile all those hopes and dreams were when pitted against the whims of fate. Did that qualify him as closed off, or sane? Probably both. Either way, he knew his limits.
“I’m fine. Nobody needs to worry about me.”
She continued to nibble her lower lip as she considered him, and he momentarily lost himself in a fantasy of sinking his teeth into the soft swell.
“Hey, Montgomery. West told me you decided to spend Thanksgiving with me.”
He looked over to see a young, spike-haired orderly at the door with a wheelchair.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Isaiah. My plans didn’t include you.”
The kid grinned, showing off a gold-crowned front tooth, and pushed the chair into the room. “Planned or not, I’m here to wheel your sorry ass to radiology.”
Savannah took a couple steps toward the door. “I’ll just…ah…go out to the waiting room.”
Shit. Would she tell their families the truth? He tried to read her intentions as Isaiah cornered him with the chair, but he didn’t know her well enough to guess what the little crinkle between her eyebrows meant. Assuming he enjoyed any advantage whatsoever, now seemed like the time to press it.
“Don’t leave me at this guy’s mercy.” He took a seat in the wheelchair and hit her with the best pleading look he could manage. “He’s lost more patients in these hallways than I can count.”
Isaiah rolled his eyes. “Two lousy patients in four years, and they were both deliberate runners. Neither was my fault.”
“One ended up in the morgue.”
“Don’t make it sound like that. Dude got lost, not dead—”
“God knows where I’ll end up.” Beau angled his chin down and looked up at her from under his eyelashes. “Chaperone me. There’s a waiting area in radiology.”
“I don’t want to break any rules…” Her uncertain gaze shifted to Isaiah.
The orderly shrugged. “No rule against accompanying this wussy-assed whiner to X-ray. Personally, I think this has nothing to do with me, or my supposedly lost patients. More like big bad Beau Montgomery freaks out at the thought of sticking his noggin in a tube. But if it calms his nerves to have a pretty lady holding his sweaty hand while he waits, that’s okay with me.”
Beau bit his tongue. He had no qualms about the CT, but if compassion kept her at his side, he’d play along. “I’d appreciate the company, if you don’t mind.”
Her off-center smile tugged on his balls. “Of course I don’t mind.” To Isaiah, she added, “Lead the way.”
The heels of her silver…stilettos? pumps?—he didn’t know what to call them—tapped along the marbleized linoleum as she walked beside him. Her fuck-me shoes from her date last night, he decided, and experienced a strange surge of satisfaction knowing One-for-Three had fucked nothing but himself.
They turned right at an intersection of corridors, and followed the signs to the radiology department. Isaiah wheeled him into the waiting area, paused at the reception desk to drop his version of a charming smile on the admin minding the desk, and then sent him a salute along with a pithy, “So long, sucka,” on his way out.
Savannah took an empty seat beside his chair. “I’m sorry I conked you in the head.”
He waved off the apology. “It’s not like you saw me coming and took aim. I frightened you. You obeyed a standard reflex to defend yourself.”
The crinkle reappeared between her eyes. “You know, I still have no idea what brought you to my apartment in the first place.”
Admitting he’d come over with a noise complaint seemed counterproductive. “Maybe I wanted to borrow a cup of sugar?”
“Ha. You’re not exactly the borrow-a-cup-of-sugar kind of neighbor. The entire time I’ve lived next door we’ve exchanged less than three words. I never dreamed you were the same lady-killer who tried to impress me when I was five by riding his bike no-handed and ended up crashing into the garage door.”
Oh, yeah, he’d done that, hadn’t he? Her little laugh fluttered the fine hairs on his arm. He imagined her breath ruffling other sensitive zones, and shifted in the chair as his jeans turned into a self-inflicted bondage game. “Did it work?”
“I might have had a weakness for risk-takers back then, but I know better now. We’ve both changed a lot since those days.” Her eyes drifted down his body, provoking an instant response from a part of him still eager to impress her, and then snapped up to meet his. “A lot. We definitely don’t know each other well enough to convince our families we’re engaged.”
His hard-on backed off. Mentioning the lie he hoped to perpetrate on their families had that effect on him. The good news? She was still considering the deception. The bad news? She had a point. But not an insurmountable one. “You’re Savannah Smith: snake hater, lover of yellow walls and black lace.”
She laughed. “Well, okay, I stand corrected. You got me in a nutshell. But for the record, I haven’t forgotten about you chasing me around our backyards, terrorizing me with that creepy rubber snake. I’m afraid we have irreconcilable differences.”
His lips threatened to stretch into a smile. “How can you say that to the man who gave you your first flowers?” He remembered picking daisies with her in the backyard.
“Those were your mom’s flowers, and they don’t make up for the snake.”
“Not so fast, Smith. I outgrew the snakes some time ago.”
“’Round about the time you developed an appreciation for black lace?”
“A man’s interests evolve. I can go either way on yellow walls, if that helps.”
“Very accommodating of you.” Her smile lingered, though he still saw plenty of reservations lurking in those clear blue eyes. “You really think you know me well enough to pull this off?”
“We just have to make it through this afternoon. After that, like I said, our parents live a safe distance away so it’s not like we have to keep this up on a day-in-day-out basis until January. As far as today goes, I think you’re underestimating my powers of observation.”
“Okay, Sherlock, tell me something about me.”
He racked his brain for details. The piece of mail tucked in his back pocket sprang to mind. He retrieved the embossed envelope from the Solomon Foundation for Art,
and held it out to S.E. Smith in apartment number 202. “You’re into art.”
“Yes. What’s this?”
“The mail carrier put it in my box yesterday by mistake.”
She took the envelope and slipped it into her purse. “Misdirected mail brought you to my apartment this afternoon? You could have slipped it in my box.”
“Mail delivery was my cover, to further my real goal of getting you to lower your music.”
“Oh.” Her cheeks colored a bit. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was disturbing you. I guess I got caught up in my redecorating.”
“I figured something along those lines. I heard you moving stuff around last night, too.”
“Crap, I’m really sorry. I don’t mean to win the most annoying neighbor award. I’m usually not so loud. Especially at night.”
Not purposely, no, but the echo of her voice through the wall replayed in his mind. Breathless snippets of, That’s good. A little more. Almost…almost…oh, no, not yet…
“You’d be surprised how well sound travels. Especially at night.”
Chapter Four
Exactly what sounds traveled surprisingly well at night? The slightest lift of a dark brow answered her unvoiced question. Savannah smacked her palm to her overheating face and nearly groaned out loud. Dammit, wouldn’t a decent neighbor give a girl a heads-up when that sort of disturbance first became apparent?
Then again, what would one say? Hi. We haven’t met, but I feel like I know you. I definitely know when you and your boyfriend have sex.
Hiding behind both hands now, she asked, “Is it just you, or have I provided the entire complex with a cheap thrill?”
“Just me. I’m the only one with a bed flush against the magic wall, and apart from when I’m lying there with no TV or music going, I don’t hear much.”
Thank God for small favors, but it seemed like a very small favor in the grand scheme of things. Yesterday at this time she’d been anticipating a proposal from Mitch, and a celebration of the big news over Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Today she had a trampled heart and two sets of parents ecstatic about her nonexistent engagement to a man who knew her best as the noisy sex lady next door.
Emergency Engagement (Love Emergency) Page 3