Yeah, time to put the brakes on anything but contract talk. She had the man’s entire family history spread out only a few feet away. There was no opportunity for anything but work, which was the right answer anyway. Her father would go from heart attack recovery to a grave if she so much as smiled at Declan too long.
She meant to rub her hands together but clapped instead. The sharp whack wiped out the room’s quiet. “Speaking of work—”
“Were we?” One of his eyebrows inched up, and he managed to make the condescending look seem sexy.
“First, I need to know if you speak for all of the Hanovers.”
“Everywhere?”
She clamped down on a growl. Clearly it was going be one of those evenings. “Your brothers.”
“Consider me the spokesperson.” He rolled back his shoulders and managed to highlight every rippling muscle on his arms and chest.
Impressive skills, but no way was she getting sidetracked by all that hotness. “Let’s set some ground rules.”
“Yeah, I would have bet money you’d have ground rules.”
Before he could say something else to tick her off, which she assumed was inevitable, she walked to the back of the house. She didn’t know he’d followed until his husky voice hit her in the back of the neck from only inches away. The shiver that ran through her had nothing to do with fear.
The kitchen sat right in front of them. Instead of hanging out in there she took a left and headed into the dining room where she’d already closed the curtains to the deck and set up some notebooks for them. She’d toyed with the idea of having a notary waiting nearby but figured that was a bit presumptuous. No need to spook Declan this soon.
She kept moving until a table separated them. With her hands resting on the back of the chair at the head of the table, she let her gaze wander over him. No wonder Mallory turned into a giggly schoolgirl around him. He had the Holy-Hell-Hot thing down.
He wasn’t pretty-boy handsome. He had a dark edge that went far past his near-black hair. Strength radiated off him. Control oozed until an invisible wall surrounded him and he silently dared her to break through.
Maybe he learned it through the discipline of the Army, or maybe dear old Charlie passed the trait on, though she was starting to doubt that, but Declan’s self-assurance showed in every line of his body. He walked into a room like he owned it and argued as passionately as if he’d sat in on those fancy lawyer classes with Beck.
To keep from getting thrown off by whatever sly thing was bopping around in his head, she grabbed onto the last thing he said. “You gamble?”
“Never.”
That’s what her investigation suggested, but the quick response had her attention. “Not even a lottery ticket?”
“I don’t believe in luck.” He glanced down at the yellow lined notebooks and pens. “What about those rules?”
Following his gaze, she noticed how she had lined up the edges of the paper with the pens. Man, it looked like she used a ruler. Yeah, nothing like a good case of nerves to bring out a woman’s buried compulsions. “The rules are simple.”
“I’m betting they’ll piss me off.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she launched into her prepared speech. “No straying off topic. No touching. No chit chat. We negotiate and hammer this out, so you can move on to whatever other state suits you. Preferably one on the East Coast.”
Straightforward and in a calm voice, she ticked them off on her fingers despite the circus act spinning and jumping in her stomach. When she finished, her heart thumped loud enough to drown out her voice. That had to be a good sign. A teacher once told her panic was just a sign of her body preparing her to do whatever she feared doing.
He just stood there. The longer the silence stretched, the more she cursed that teacher and her idiot theory.
For what felt like an hour, but probably barely amounted to minutes, he didn’t move. Didn’t show any reaction until his lower lip twitched. “Go back to the second one.”
“What?”
“The second thing on your list.”
Touching. So much for thinking she’d handled everything well. She tightened her grip on the chair, letting the edge bite into her palm. “You know very well what I said.”
His head dropped to one side. “If this is a business meeting, why are you worried about touching?”
Well, damn. “Don’t read more into that than there is.”
“Is it the idea of me touching you or of you touching me that has you all prickly?”
Talk about a miscalculation. So much for trying to push his attention to business. “Neither.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true. You’re a grown woman. We keep running into each other, sparking off each other. Why can’t you admit you’d like to experiment with a little touching?”
If he smiled, she was going to punch him. She might anyway. “Declan.”
“It’s an honest question.” He shot her a you-started-this crooked smile. “A man needs to know these things in advance.”
“Are you done?”
“If you won’t answer the question on the table then how about this one, and I admit this delivery lacks some tact, but the question is a valid one. Why do you think, even if I do sell Shadow Hill to you for a shockingly high, almost unconscionable amount of money, because that’s what it would have to be, that I’ll turn around and leave town?”
Her stomach bounced right to her knees. She hadn’t even considered the possibility of him staying. She could succeed in getting Shadow Hill and still run into him every few hours around town. That spelled disaster for her father, for Declan and potentially for her self-control.
She forced her breathing to stay even. “You’ll need somewhere to live.”
“I can buy a place.”
She thought she heard the chair crack under her palms. “Not in Sweetwater.”
“Are you forbidding it?”
She toyed with the idea of doing that but the gleam in his eye suggested he was looking for a challenge and she didn’t want to hand it to him. “I’m talking about the reality of finding a willing seller.”
“Didn’t you learn anything at the grocery store?”
“Random greetings are different from some of the old-timers accepting you here. I don’t see people lining up to do business with you.” That was the one card she held. This town hated the Hanover name. Anyone welcoming the brothers into their home faced a possibly sharp backlash.
“With the money I’ll have from screwing you on the sale of Shadow Hill?” He widened his stance. It was a small movement but it commanded attention. “Oh, I think someone will sell property to me.”
All the rage and frustration tumbling around inside of her broke loose. Forget tact and the calm moments they’d spent together. He clearly wanted a fight. “You seem smart. You even seem like you could be a decent guy. But why here? You’ve lived all over with the Army, right? Pick one of those other places. Any other place, Declan.”
“I like it here.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Almost always.” He went to the two-seat breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining room. “And, not to sound like a complete ass, but where are you getting the money to make this big play to buy me off? This house is really nice, but I’m not seeing evidence of hidden millions.”
That was the truly tricky part. Her dad had rebuilt after being conned all those years ago. He had his house and she had the cottage, even though it did come with a mortgage. Between the two of them, they could buy the property back. They’d need a big loan and would have to call in a few favors at the bank. It would suck and still suffocate them in debt. Her father likely would balk, insisting he should get the house for free, but she could make it work with some help from his friends.
First, she had to negotiate a price that didn’t make her throw up or have to sell blood every other day. “Shadow Hill isn’t worth anywhere near your suggested millions.”
Declan’s lips smacked together in that way men did when they thought the little ladies had lost their way. “Oh, I disagree.”
That punching urge came back to her. “We’ll pick a mutually agreed-upon appraiser and come up with a fair market . . . why are you shaking your head?”
“You forgot the ‘shocking amount’ part I’m going to demand.”
There it was. The one sarcastic step too far. The one that sent her temperature spiking into the danger zone. It was a wonder the top of her head didn’t blow off with the heat boiling inside of her. “Do you really not understand? There are people in this town who will make it impossible for you to stay.”
“There’s a lynch mob, but I don’t think it’s as big as you think it is. Unless you mean your father.”
“For one, but your dad screwed a lot of people here. He was the favored hometown boy who promised them a financial wonderland and then ripped them all off. He broke their trust in the most fundamental way.”
“I’m aware of his sins.”
“He came up with a scheme, got people to invest, got my father to invest town funds. Then Charlie took off.” She held up a finger as the words kept rolling out of her. “But not before cleaning up the tracks behind him. He destroyed people, and some families lost everything.”
Declan’s blank expression never wavered. “Noted.”
“The police chief is itching to get his hands on you.” Her hands flew around as she talked, desperate to make him understand. “I wouldn’t go even one mile per hour over the speed limit, if I were you.”
Lounging against the breakfast bar with his ankles crossed and his lips flat, Declan refused to get it. She could see that in every line of his body and didn’t know what else to say. There had to be an argument, the right argument, to make him understand.
He shrugged. “My driving is fine.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
No matter what angle she used, he discounted it, and her fury spewed. Damn it, here she was struggling not to like him and he wasn’t doing anything to help her protect him. “Wake up. You can’t be this nonchalant about all of this.”
“You know what I am, Leah?” His voice was so soft, so deadly flat as he pushed off from the bar and came to stand next to her. His hand rested next to hers on the back of the chair. “Tired of being judged by Charlie’s actions.”
The brakes slammed somewhere in the back of her head. He was furious. She could see it in the flat line of his mouth and boiling fire in his eyes.
She backed up until the curtains brushed against her hair. “I didn’t—”
“You did.” A nerve ticked in his cheek. “The man abandoned my mom. After the first few years, Charlie didn’t even bother to come around for visits and he never sent money. He left a legacy of shit, and I’ve been shoveling it ever since. So, when you crawl up on your high horse and look down on me, I don’t exactly get worried about it because, you see, I’ve lived with that kind of condescending bullshit my whole fucking life.”
His voice shook as he spoke, low and subtle, but she heard it. When he stopped talking, his anger continued to shake the room. Tension rolled off his stiff shoulders and slammed into her, stealing her breath with its force.
“You want me to feel guilty.” She whispered the phrase because he was right there, just inches away, hovering over her and closing in without moving.
“I want you to understand you aren’t the only one who’s lived with Charlie’s mess.”
“I get that you’re a victim.” One of the hundreds, possibly thousands, Charlie left in his wake.
“I refuse to accept the label and all the dysfunction that goes with it.”
Maybe survivor was the right word. This could be the greatest, most convincing con of his life, of course, and part of her wanted to believe that so she wouldn’t care, but she couldn’t muster the skepticism. A piece of the wall she’d erected against Declan slipped and shattered.
“Why are you really here? Tonight, in my house.” She could smell the soap in his skin, something with a hint of lime, and see the way his dark hair curled at the ends.
His mouth was so close. His body next to hers until it blocked her view of the kitchen beyond.
His gaze traveled over her face and landed on her mouth. “I don’t know.”
“At least that’s honest.” Her voice sounded breathy. She tried to inhale deeply through her nose to keep from gulping for air.
“You didn’t know I could be honest?” There was no anger in his voice but there was something else. The slightest shift until his breath blew across her cheek.
The air crackled and whatever was jumping back and forth between them had her head pounding. She had to move.
“Okay, stop. Let’s back up a second.” She slipped around the chair and kept walking around the table. The man had her literally running around in circles in her own dining room. “I get it. I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I can see that being Charlie Hanover’s kid would suck.”
“Just a little, yeah.”
“So, let me help. Really, I’m not working an angle here. Let’s work out a reasonable solution.”
She was so busy noticing his sudden smile that she missed the way he was following her around the table. The goal was to get to the kitchen, maybe keep her hands busy with drinks or something else, but she turned around and he stood in front of her, hovering over her. She shifted back against the wall and his hand balanced right next to her head. She couldn’t sneak around the corner to the bedroom, which was probably a good thing. But she couldn’t run either because she’d lost feeling in her legs.
“What if what I want from you has nothing to do with the house?” He was close enough for her to see the faint white outline of a scar along his jawline.
She balled her hand into a fist to keep from touching it. “You don’t—”
“Don’t tell me what I want or think. Every time I’m near you, you tick me off.”
“Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“But then that moment hits and suddenly you don’t bug me at all. Quite the opposite. I don’t understand it, but I’m not sure how much longer I can fight it.”
The same thing happened to her. She saw him and her knees weakened. He opened his mouth and she wanted to smack him. Then time marched on and the wobbly-knee thing came back. It was a vicious cycle of attraction to a man who should mean nothing to her.
“We could resolve the confusion by staying away from each other.” She put her hand against his chest to push him away. His heart hammered under her palm.
“Not going to happen.”
“I get a say in this.” Not that she intended to use a veto right now.
He leaned in with his entire body. Only her hand separated them as his mouth brushed up the line separating her cheek and her ear. “Then tell me to stop.”
It was all she could do to keep from grabbing a fistful of his shirt and dragging him in even tighter.
“That’s what I thought,” he said right before his mouth settled over hers, full and deep.
The kiss wasn’t subtle or short. He didn’t linger or caress. He dove in, his lips angling over hers as a groan rumbled in his chest. His hand rubbed the base of her neck and dipped into her hair. The other one slipped around her waist as his body pressed her into the wall.
Legs tangled as their hands slid over each other. She rotated her hips until she cradled his obvious bulge between her legs. He had her short of breath and aching to tear off his clothes. Even while she struggled to step away, a voice inside her head screamed to forget everything, everyone, and
take this for her.
She could drag him into the bedroom and . . . whiteboard. Reality crashed down on her, smothering her with the shocking implications of what she was doing.
“Wait.” Using every ounce of strength she had to break away, she turned her head to the side and drew in a deep breath, letting the air rush down and into her lungs. “Slow down.”
His mouth traveled to her neck and trailed a line of kisses to the top of her collarbone. “Why?”
“I don’t know if I want this.” But she did. She craved it with every cell and every fiber.
But something in her words got through. He lifted his head. Those eyes were clouded with a need so intense that she toyed with the idea of dragging him to the couch and ignoring the disaster looming in the bedroom.
“Okay.” His voice sounded raw and deep.
That was almost too easy. “Okay?”
His head dropped to her shoulder as his chest rose and fell on harsh breaths. A shuddering exhale echoed around them right before his head came up and his hands hit the wall on either side of her. “A woman says stop, you stop.”
She trailed her hand down his chest because she loved that sentiment and the thought of not touching him in that second proved impossible. “Something you learned from—”
He caught her hand in his. Their fingers entwined. “My mom.”
“We should . . .” Something. Leah wasn’t sure what. No, she knew what she wanted to do but that was vastly different from what she had to do, which was turn him away.
He pushed off from the wall as he mumbled something under his breath. Something she couldn’t make out. Walking away, he kept going until he stopped in the family room. Stood right in the middle, not moving, as if it were some sort of free-from-kissing safety zone.
He nodded toward the door with a smile. “Let’s go have dinner at the diner.”
No Turning Back Page 8