“Mind? I’ve been trying to match you up with my brothers for years. I’d love you to be my sister-in-law.”
Summer held up one hand. “Nobody said anything about marriage. But you should know this is your fault.”
“My fault?” Madeline quipped.
Abby and Chelsea were all ears, too.
“Remember Tuesday night when you told all of us to close our eyes and envision the man of our dreams?” Summer asked.
“You pictured Kyle?” Abby said.
“I dreamed of a man who was shirtless and sexy, water glistening on his chest. Kyle arrived at the inn that same night soaking wet.”
Pushing her dessert plate back, Abby said, “I drew a blank.”
Summer noticed Chelsea looking into the distance. Sam Ralston was staring back at her, his jaw set, his shoulders back, arms folded across his chest as if begging for trouble.
The waitress returned to top off their coffees. “There’s a man in town asking about you, Summer,” Rosy Sirrine said.
Looking up at the iconic waitress, Summer said, “Does he have dark hair and green eyes?”
Rosy fanned herself. “Oooeee. That’s him. When I refilled his coffee cup and gave him extra cream he called me Aphrodite, the goddess of love. When I told him charm doesn’t work on me, he muttered something about furies.”
Summer smiled to herself, because in Greek Mythology The Furies were avenging female spirits mere mortals feared. Rosy was tall and had broad hips and steady hands. Nobody could remember a time when she hadn’t been the head waitress here, and yet there was no gray in her black braid, no lines in her face. She finished pouring the coffee and turned to leave as quietly as she’d arrived.
“Wait,” Summer called to her back. “What did Adonis ask?”
Rosy glanced at Summer over her shoulder, and for a moment her eyes looked as old as time itself. Summer knew something about nearly everybody she’d met in Orchard Hill. She knew that most men were intimidated by Abby’s IQ, and she knew why Chelsea refused to give Sam Ralston the satisfaction of looking directly at him, and she knew that the couple that owned The Hill were thinking about retiring. But she knew almost nothing about Rosy Sirrine.
The older woman finally spoke. “When a body’s looking for the truth, it’s best to go directly to the source.”
Summer got lost in her reveries as she pondered that. Kyle Merrick was an investigative reporter, and yet he’d asked her very few personal questions. She’d seen that list in his room, so she knew he was gathering information about her. The details of her past weren’t buried very deep. With his investigative skills, he could have easily discovered her secrets. Why hadn’t he said something or done something?
Did she have this all wrong? Was he the one hiding something? What was his secret?
By the time Summer turned her attention back to her friends, Abby and Chelsea had dropped their napkins on the table next to their uneaten dessert. Summer did the same.
Looking at each of her friends, Madeline said, “Aren’t any of you going to eat your pie?”
At the same time, Summer, Abby and Chelsea pushed their plates toward Madeline. Not even Chelsea could help laughing when Madeline dug in.
Summer was on the second floor of the inn when she caught her first whiff of something wonderful wafting on the air. By the time she finished her work in Room Seven, she’d identified the tangy aroma of Chinese takeout.
She went to the window. Sure enough Kyle’s shiny silver Jeep was parked down below. She stood listening for footsteps overhead. Hearing nothing, she was about to walk away from the window when she noticed a movement near the river.
The lone figure of a man paced back and forth on the bank. Dark pants, dark shirt, dark hair. Even from this distance she knew it was Kyle.
Fairly gliding down the stairs, she put away her dust cloth and window cleaner and hurried past the registration desk where half a dozen small, white cartons sat waiting. She had no clear plan in mind as she pulled on a light, heathery sweater and was on the winding path leading down to the river when he stopped pacing. The leaves on the birch trees lining the banks were just beginning to uncurl from their buds, the river itself an orange and yellow reflection of the setting sun.
There was tenseness in Kyle’s shoulders, a coiled restraint in the muscles down his back and legs. She wondered if whomever he was talking to on the phone was aware of how close Kyle’s coiled control was to springing.
He said something. Listened. Repeated it, louder the second time. Although she couldn’t hear the words themselves, his tone was angry.
He muttered something crass and final, told whoever was on the other end what he could do with his opinion, and hurled the phone into the river with so much force it skipped three times before sinking out of sight.
The river babbled, the wind crooned and, from twenty feet behind him, Summer said, “That’s one way to deal with poor reception.”
Kyle turned slowly, first his head and then the rest of him.
As he stood looking at her in the gathering twilight, she witnessed a gradual change in him, as if something was dissipating like vapor into thin air.
Beneath his watchful gaze, she held perfectly still. She didn’t know whom he’d talked to or why they’d argued, but she knew something momentous had just occurred.
The sun was below his shoulders now, his shadow stretching all the way to the tips of her shoes. They called her the keeper of secrets. She hadn’t set out to uncover people’s most intimate riddles. She’d simply listened.
That was the secret ingredient, quietude. More often than not, if she said nothing, people said something.
As she waited, she couldn’t help noticing Kyle’s rangy physique covered by his black pants and shirt. His eyes delved hers, and whatever she’d been thinking about seemed to have dissolved into thin air, too.
She wasn’t the only one saying nothing. And it occurred to her that there was more than one option. He could tell her what had just transpired over the phone. Or he could take her inside and take her to bed.
Talk about a win-win proposition.
Chapter Eight
Kyle wondered how long it was going to take to come to terms with the fact that the black mark behind his name was permanent. He’d known this day was coming. Secretly, he’d been in denial, but the frustration and inevitability had been keeping him up nights for months. He hated having his hands tied. And he hated—
He turned his back on the river, on the setting sun and on the futility of his thoughts. And there was Summer.
The lighted kitchen window glowed a soft yellow in the distance behind her. A pontoon loaded down with a boisterous group of adults enjoying the spring evening and whatever was in their heavy-duty cooler chugged past, the rumble of the oversized outboard motor at odds with the heavy bass blasting from their radio.
When the boat was slightly downriver, he said, “I promised you dinner. I left it in the inn.”
“I noticed.” She shivered in her lightweight sweater.
“I hope you like Chinese,” he said.
“I do.”
He didn’t know why he was talking about food. Probably because it was easier than talking about what had just transpired. He’d made an irrevocable decision. It had been coming for almost a year, the end of his career. He’d been fighting it, searching for a resolution or a solution. But there wasn’t one, at least not one he could live with. He and his lawyer had participated in a long-distance conference with three men from the paper’s legal department and Kyle’s immediate boss. His former immediate boss.
He still had to call Grant Oberlin. He didn’t know what he was going to say to the man. He didn’t know what had possessed him to pitch his phone into the river, either, for he wasn’t often given to fits of rage. If Summer had witnessed it, she didn’t appear affected by it. Not questioning or judging, a quiet presence in a complicated world, she looked back at him.
She wore jeans and a sweater today. And flat shoe
s. And a gray shirt that was feminine but not frilly. Like her. A silver charm hung from a delicate chain around her neck; a pearl drop earring gleamed on each ear. He wondered if he dared ask her to come closer, for he wanted to cover her mouth with his, to wrap his arms around her and to lay her down right here. He wanted to bury his face in her neck and make love to her until the stars came out and the fire of his damnation was forgotten, doused as surely as his phone.
Looking at Summer, he realized that making love to her that way wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Looking at Summer, he was struck by the realization that anything was possible.
“Kyle?”
He started.
“Did you hear me?”
He hadn’t, and he didn’t apologize for it. He was too busy processing everything he was feeling. The bolt of sexual attraction was the easiest to identify, although that wasn’t what had rendered him speechless.
He didn’t question the discovery. He was in love with the woman staring back at him in waiting silence. He, Kyle Merrick, was in love. With Summer Matthews. A woman who apparently hadn’t existed until six-and-a-half years ago.
“We don’t have to do any of the things I mentioned,” she said. “Even though it’s getting cold out, and it’ll be dark soon.” She gave him a small smile that went straight to his heart. “We don’t have to go inside. We don’t have to eat or talk, and you don’t have to come back to my room with me. We can stand out here all night if you want to.”
In a hundred years Kyle hadn’t expected to smile. It was hard to believe he’d zoned out enough to miss the fourth option.
“I’d like to,” he said.
He had to give her credit for patience.
He’d never been so completely overwhelmed by circumstances out of his control and so certain he knew exactly what he was doing. He started toward her. “I’d like to eat, talk and take you to bed. Why don’t you choose the order?”
Smiling that sexy-as-hell all-knowing woman’s smile of hers, she let him take her hand. Together, they went inside. And although she didn’t tell him where she planned to start, he was pretty sure she’d made up her mind.
“Oh, Kyle. Yes, yes and yes.” Summer’s eyes slipped closed, and she let her head loll back in ecstasy.
Eat. Talk. And then make love.
Hadn’t that been her plan?
Luckily there were no other guests in the inn tonight; therefore nobody had heard all the noise she and Kyle were making. They hadn’t quite gotten to her bedroom yet. When they’d first come in from the river, she thought she would light the closed sign in the window and gather up all the cartons of food and take them to the kitchen.
Eat. Talk. Then make love.
The closed sign was on, but the boxes of takeout were still sitting on the registration counter. All were opened, and several of them were half gone. What was there about this man that made her so ravenous? She’d always had a high metabolism, but this voracious appetite was for more than food.
Eat, talk and make love.
She hadn’t really thought it was possible to do all three simultaneously. They talked a little while Kyle opened the cartons. They ate a little between kisses.
There had been a lot of kissing.
“Try this,” she said, squeezing a bite-sized morsel of Guai Hua Shrimp with scallops between the ends of her chopsticks.
He smiled when her first attempt didn’t make it to his mouth. It landed next to the registration book with a quiet plop. She thought his smile looked tired.
“I guess I should let Riley and Madeline know I’ll be attending the wedding after all,” he said.
Between bites of fried rice and egg rolls, he’d calmly told her that there was no longer a story waiting for him in L.A. He was officially no longer gainfully employed.
“I don’t imagine being able to attend the wedding is much consolation,” she said, spearing a piece of Chengdu Chicken with the tip of her chopstick.
“There’s consolation, and then there’s consolation,” he said, unbuttoning her top button.
She put down her chopstick and held his hand in place. The kissing was good, and so was the takeout, but there was something lurking behind his eyes and beyond his touch. He had something on his mind, something he needed to say but hadn’t yet managed to broach. So she waited. She wouldn’t push him. She never pushed.
As she held his hand to her breastbone, she was glad he’d thought to plug his iPod into her computer. Although not so sure this was the time or place for The Barber of Seville, at least the comic opera’s lively overture covered the silence as Kyle decided where to begin.
She could tell by the way he withdrew his hand from hers that he was almost ready.
In a deep, slightly removed tone of voice, he finally said, “A year ago I received a tip that had to do with the trafficking and extortion of illegal immigrants. The source checked out. I saw the photographs of young kids and women, shoddily dressed and filthy, fear in their eyes as they were herded into a warehouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The EIEO was behind me one hundred percent, and everybody knows how much power they wield in human rights’ cases. The piece I wrote made the front page of The Herald.” He paused for emphasis. “Three hours before the authorities busted into an empty warehouse on the lower east side.”
“There were no illegal immigrants being held against their will in living quarters unfit for rats?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head, and, although he leaned his hip against the desk, too, she knew he was far from relaxed.
“Someone leaked your story early?” she asked.
He nodded. “The EIEO wasn’t pleased. When money I couldn’t explain showed up in my bank account, things got even more interesting.”
Summer moved the carton of fried rice out the way. Resting her elbow where the food had been, she faced Kyle.
When he was ready, he continued. “The paper printed a retraction and launched the required investigation. They didn’t prove anything. I couldn’t prove anything, either, such as where that money came from or how that story could have been submitted without my knowledge. It came from my computer, contained my access code and my protected password. I couldn’t be reached to verify. The paper had no reason to doubt me and every reason to trust me, so they ran it. It’s like I told every lawyer I’ve talked to, I don’t know who hacked in to my computer, and I don’t stinking need money.”
From the registration desk, the opera music swelled and Figaro boasted how clever he was. Kyle didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. Summer believed there was a great deal he wasn’t telling her, but the condensed version was that somebody had successfully and methodically ruined his career. Kyle couldn’t prove his innocence, and the paper didn’t need to prove his guilt. Democracy had been founded on the ideal that a person was innocent until proven guilty. Too often it was the other way around.
Summer looked into Kyle’s eyes, and her heart turned over. He’d grown quiet again. Whoever had said it was the quiet ones you had to watch was wrong. The quiet ones were often the good ones. Kyle was one of the good ones, perhaps one of the few good men left in this complicated world.
She took a deep breath of air scented with meandering river and springtime. He breathed deeply, too, and looked at her in waiting silence. Everything inside her strained toward him.
She wanted to kiss him. She was going to kiss him, but first she pressed herself closer, her hands on his upper arms. Turning her face into his shoulder, she pressed her lips to his neck. The shuddering breath he took was more erotic than a moan.
She looked up at him, then lifted her hands to either side of his face. Raking her fingers through his coffee-colored hair, she went up on tiptoe and, pressing her mouth to his, let him know he didn’t have to prove anything to her.
Her senses whirred and blood rushed through her veins. Kyle’s kiss was familiar, yet it contained a new urgency, one she understood, for she felt it, too—this need to feel, to live and breathe and tou
ch and be touched. Pagan perhaps, lusty definitely, but it was human and it was beautiful.
Their passion went from zero to sixty in an instant. Summer tugged his shirt from the waistband of his pants, giving her hands access to the bare skin of his back. She kneaded the taut muscles between his shoulders, slowly working her way lower. As the tips of her fingers delved the edge of his waistband, she felt his hands come around her back.
The next thing she knew she was bodily lifted to right where he wanted her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and hooked her ankles around his waist. Already the world was spinning.
Kyle needed more—more of Summer’s sighs, her throaty moans, more of her hands on him, more of her skin uncovered.
He couldn’t keep his mouth off hers, couldn’t keep from seeking closer contact with every inch of her body pressed so close to his. But it wasn’t close enough. It would never be enough through their clothes.
He set her on the registration counter and swept the cartons out of his way. And all the while he kissed her, their mouths open, tongues meeting, groans blending with the undulating final strains of the age-old opera.
“Now I know why I prefer dresses,” he said, hindered by the barrier of her jeans.
How she managed to laugh when he was kissing her, he didn’t know. But laughter trilled out of her, spilling over into the jagged hollows inside him.
“Kyle,” she whispered, her mouth close to his ear.
He stopped fumbling with her jeans long enough to listen.
“I think I’ll self-combust if you don’t take me to bed.”
She slid down his body. And darted for her room.
Kyle caught up with her just before she got there. He swung her into his arms, and they fell together onto the bed. He didn’t think about what he was doing. There would be time for thinking later. Right now he had passion to burn off and the woman he loved to please.
A Bride Until Midnight Page 11