by Bella Riley
All the things she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge she had felt about meeting Sean when she and Andi had been talking upstairs earlier came to the fore. But even worse than the fact that she clearly had no self-control over her stupid feelings was that she was certain Sean could see her attraction to him written all over her face.
Her unfortunate reverse poker face.
Taking the stool to the far side of the one Sean had been using, she was pleasantly surprised again that he didn’t sit down until she was seated. He was obviously a gentleman like his brother and father. It should have made her more comfortable.
Instead, her nerves ratcheted up a notch.
There was nothing quite like a man who looked like a bad boy acting the part of a gentleman. It tended to do all sorts of ooey-gooey things to her insides.
Okay, so she’d sit and eat as fast as she could and then she’d flee.
She was reaching for the fork when a pang landed in the pit of her empty stomach at the thought. Her instinct had always been to run. From bad jobs and bad boyfriends. Coming here, to Emerald Lake and the inn, brought her to the first truly solid place she’d ever had beneath her feet.
Why should she be the one to leave in a hurry just because Stu’s brother had come home for a wedding that should have never been in the first place?
Three weeks ago when she’d gone to break it off with Stu, she’d vowed that she was going to change her life for the better. She’d started off by throwing herself into not just Andi and Nate’s wedding, but something that was all hers: the Tapping of the Maples Festival. In two weeks she was going to put on her first big event in the Adirondacks. Even before Stu had left, she’d watched the details line up one after the other and knew in her heart just how great the festival was going to be for the entire town.
So, yes, she was uncomfortable, sitting in the inn’s kitchen with Sean. But that didn’t mean she was going to fold under the pressure. Just the opposite, in fact. Not only was she going to sit here and enjoy every single bite of her chocolate cake, but she was going to force herself to relax about Stu’s brother. For years she’d listened to Stu’s stories about his beloved older brother and she’d wanted to meet him. Finally, she was getting her chance.
“So,” she said to Sean. “Stu said you were traveling?”
“I was.”
While she waited for him to say more she finally took a bite of the cake. Oh god, it was good, half a dozen layers of chocolate cake surrounded by white and brown frosting. So good that she might have actually let loose a small moan of appreciation.
Closing her eyes to fully appreciate every single taste sensation of the cake, when she finally swallowed it down and opened her eyes back up, she was surprised to find a glass of milk in front of her.
After drinking half the glass in one gulp, she smiled and said, “Thank you. That was the perfect touch.”
“You’re welcome.”
She swore one half of his mouth almost quirked up as he said it, but she couldn’t have proved it for a jury. It was just a sense she had that he was loosening up a little bit.
“Where were you traveling, if you don’t mind me asking?”
One of the things she loved most about her job was talking to the inn’s guests about their travels. She very much wanted to visit all those wondrous places she’d heard about.
It was another vow she’d made to herself: one day would see the seven wonders outside of a book or cable TV program.
“I’ve been all over Asia these past weeks.”
She could tell he was a big traveler, simply by the way he said it, like it was no big deal to visit Asia. If it had been her, she would have been gushing all over the place and pulling out pictures.
“I’ve always wanted to see that part of the world,” she murmured after taking a second, smaller bite of cake. “Do you have a favorite country in the Far East?”
“Japan.” He seemed almost surprised by his response. “Especially in the spring.”
She leaned forward on her hands guessing, “Were the cherry blossoms in bloom when you were there?”
“Everywhere.”
She closed her eyes, trying to imagine what it must have been like to stand beneath the pink blooms. “How lovely it must have been,” she said, a smile on her lips at the vision in her head.
“Lovely,” he echoed.
She opened her eyes and found his gaze locked to hers, a definite smile trying to form on his lips. His brown eyes were darker than she remembered them being a few minutes earlier. More intense. Which was saying something, because he was one of the most intense men she’d ever come across.
Wanting to go back to that space they’d just been in where things had finally felt somewhat comfortable, she said, “Stu told me you own your own business.”
His almost-smile disappeared. “I just sold it.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that. Of course, she went for honest. Just like she always did. “Is that a good thing?”
“It was time to move on.”
Yes, she knew about moving on. “Any thoughts about what you’re going to do next?”
Feeling borderline comfortable again, she was about to take another bite of cake when Sean said, “Look, Rebecca, you seem like a nice person, but the truth is I don’t understand what happened with you and my brother. Maybe you could explain it to me.”
She nearly dropped the fork at his abrupt conversational switch. But really, how could she blame him for asking the question? They hadn’t had a chance to talk much about it beyond her earlier, “Yes, the wedding is off. And by the way, your brother has gone god-knows-where.”
“I’ll do my best.” She wanted to be as honest as possible with him, despite knowing she had to keep Stu’s secret.
Ugh. This was going to be a hard conversation. The first of many to come if she wasn’t mistaken.
She put down the fork on the side of the plate and pushed it away from her. She wasn’t hungry anymore, anyway.
“You probably know that Stu and I have been friends for a really long time. Since college.”
“He always said you made him laugh.”
She smiled at the comment. “He made me laugh, too. Did he tell you the first time we met was a nude-drawing class?”
Sean’s lips twitched a little bit again and she found herself wishing he would let himself smile. But, again, his mouth flattened out before that could happen.
“No.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I probably should have known right then and there that I wasn’t cut out for being an artist.” She wrinkled her nose. “If it had been a naked woman then maybe I could have done it with a straight face, but a naked old man… Well, it was just so gross…”
He didn’t say anything, simply raised an eyebrow, and she realized she was getting off track.
“Anyway, fast forward ten years later, and I needed a job.” And an escape. From her mistakes. “Stu offered me one here at the inn.” She looked around the inn’s kitchen, at all the upgrades she’d helped make in the past nine months. “I love working here. I absolutely love it.”
“Did you and Stu date in college?”
“No. We were just friends.”
“When did that change?”
She dreaded this next part of her explanation. Because this was where it got sticky and didn’t totally add up—even in her own mind. But she felt that she owed Stu’s brother the fullest explanation she could give him. She would have told Stu’s parents the same thing she was about to tell Sean, but they’d never actually come out and asked her. Unfortunately, it had been so awkward between them since Stu left town that she hadn’t felt comfortable just blurting it out.
She had to take a deep breath before answering. “It didn’t. Not really.” She picked a chocolate crumb off the stainless-steel countertop with the tip of her index finger and absentmindedly licked it off. “That was the problem, in the end. I think we both were far more enamored with the idea of gett
ing married and settling down than we were of each other.”
Sean was silent for a long moment. “So you didn’t love him?”
Rebecca didn’t like the way he said it, like she’d set out to purposely hurt his brother.
“Of course I love Stu. I’ve loved him practically from the moment I met him.” She was sitting straighter on her stool now, her shoulders back, her chin up. “But as a friend.”
“How could it have taken you so long to realize this? You were engaged for months.”
“When I saw Andi and Nate together,” she admitted softly, “I knew I could never settle for anything less than that kind of love.”
She couldn’t believe she was saying these deeply personal things to a man she’d met only hours before. A man she wasn’t sure liked her very much.
But Rebecca didn’t know how to lie.
And the truth was, she didn’t want to lie about her emotions anymore, about what her heart did or didn’t feel.
Next time around the relationship block, she wanted love. Real love.
Not the false promises she’d let herself believe for so long.
“So when you realized this, you broke it off with him.”
“I was going to, but he—”
She stopped, realizing what she’d been about to say. When Stu had begged her not to tell anyone he hadn’t specifically added his brother’s name to the list, but she’d made a promise to her best friend. And as hard as it was to keep that promise, by definition anyone included Sean.
“He what?”
She could see suspicion in Sean’s eyes. He knew she was keeping something from him.
“He told me he’d just realized he couldn’t marry me either. We agreed to call off the wedding.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “So the wedding was off. But you were still friends, weren’t you?”
“Of course we’re still friends,” she said, even though a little voice in her head couldn’t help but wonder how a true friend could leave her to deal with not only the aftermath of their breakup but the inn and the Maple Festival all by herself.
“Why did he leave, Rebecca?”
Sean’s voice was soft. Lulling. Coaxing. Mesmerizing, even.
Suddenly Rebecca realized that if anyone could get Stu’s secret out of her, it was Sean.
This knowledge had her scooting off the stool, picking their plates up, and putting them in the sink. She could feel his eyes on her the entire time.
“Do you really expect me to believe that he didn’t tell you why he was leaving? That he just left?” His voice was still smooth, but there was steel behind every word. Along with a determination to learn not only Stu’s secrets… but every single one of hers. “Especially after you’ve just told me he’s your best friend? Why wouldn’t he have confided in you, even if you had both made a mistake about getting engaged?”
Rebecca turned from the sink and wiped her hands on a white dish towel. “I found his note in the morning. I thought we were going to have a chance to talk about things more in the morning. I thought we were going to be together to tell everyone about calling off the wedding.”
“So he was just gone in the morning and you have no idea why?”
She hated this. Hated knowing without a shadow of a doubt that Sean was going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing at her until she broke.
She shook her head, feeling trapped in a terrible web. One that she’d help to weave.
Anger finally lit his features. “I’ll never forgive you if he’s hurt and you didn’t give me the information I need to help him.”
“I’ll never forgive myself either,” was the only thing she could bring herself to say.
“Then tell me, Rebecca.”
She found herself looking desperately at the door. Not just as an exit, but with the hopes that if she was really, really lucky, Stu would reappear with a smile on his face and everything figured out so that he could give everyone the explanations they were looking for.
Too bad she knew better, wasn’t it?
“It’s late,” she told Sean, feeling unbelievably weary. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and it starts early at the front desk.”
She was halfway to the kitchen door, had almost started to believe he was going to let her get away for the night, when he said, “I’m not going to wait much longer for you to tell me the truth, Rebecca.”
She whirled around, angry now herself. “How dare you accuse me of lying to you! Especially when I’ve just told you things you frankly have no right to know about my relationship with your brother.”
But she could see from the hard, closed look on his face that he didn’t care about what she’d told him. Only what she hadn’t.
Didn’t he realize how bad she felt about having to keep his brother’s secret?
Well, no, of course he didn’t. Which was why there was no point in her spending another minute down here with him. Forget the cake, she was going to go and finally take that bath she’d been dreaming of for hours.
Which was when she remembered her dress.
And the stupid zipper.
Of all the people to have to ask for help… she almost groaned out loud. But knowing it was either Sean or scissors, she turned around to face him one more time.
Wishing the earth would open up and swallow her whole, she made herself say, “This is really awkward, but I’m afraid I need your help with something.” She lifted her right arm slightly. “The zipper on my dress is stuck. That’s partly why I came downstairs. I was hoping to find someone who could help me. Since we’re the only ones up, I’d really appreciate your help, if you wouldn’t mind.”
He didn’t move for a long moment and then he was coming toward her. She shouldn’t have felt like a lamb being stalked by a lion but—oh god—she did. And as he came closer, ten feet dissolving to five, then three, then a handful of inches, she had to firmly resist the urge to back up.
He’d touched her only once before now—when he’d grabbed her shoulders after the wedding to ask about Stu—and she hadn’t been able to forget the feel of his hands on her yet. She didn’t need round two to make things any worse.
“Lift your arm a little more,” he said softly.
That was when she made the mistake of looking up at him and his eyes caught hers.
She’d heard what he’d said, but her brain couldn’t seem to comprehend the meaning of it. Not when he was standing this close. Not when she could finally see the faint line of a scar that cut across his face, cheek to chin. Not when she was breathing in his intensely masculine scent, reminiscent of cedar chips and summer bonfires.
Finally, her brain registered his words and she lifted her arm. He held still just long enough for her to wonder if he was as reluctant to touch her as she was to be touched by him. And then she felt his fingers lightly brush against the side of her rib cage.
She could feel her body reacting to his nearness, heat creeping across her skin. Chills, followed by a rush of extreme heat, had no business swamping her system from nothing more than the lightest brush of his fingertips.
He worked the zipper slowly, steadily. Feeling light-headed, she realized she was holding her breath.
Breathe. She had to figure out a way to breathe.
“I see what’s stuck, Rebecca. But I’m going to have to get at it from the inside.”
The breath she’d been about to take caught inside her windpipe at the way he said her name, his low tones wrapping around the seven letters like velvet.
“From the inside?” she repeated pointlessly. He couldn’t repair her dress through the thin safety of fabric?
She’d never survive this.
“I’m afraid so.”
How she wished Sean was like her brothers-in-law. They made her laugh, made her groan at their stupid jokes and irrational love of football, and she loved them because they loved her sisters, but that was it. There were no hidden currents. No reasons she wouldn’t want to be alone with them in a dark hallway. And if on
e of them had had to reach inside her dress to fix a stuck zipper, even if they got a feel-up by accident, they would’ve simply laughed about it later.
But neither she nor Sean was laughing.
She had to stop thinking this way. There was nothing between her and Sean. And there never would be. He was simply Stu’s brother.
Getting all weird about his fingers inside her dress was crazy.
“Okay,” she said as firmly as she could manage. “Go for it.”
She tried to think of something, anything but Sean’s lightly calloused fingertips sliding over her skin. She focused on the problems they’d had getting the right silverware into the inn’s dining room. She reviewed her mental files on the guest last week who’d “accidentally packed” the alarm clock. Heck, she went all the way back to the time when she was five and had the mumps so bad she could hardly recognize herself in the mirror.
But nothing, not one single thing she could think of, could distract her from the sensation of his warm touch on her sensitive skin.
Finally, the fabric from the inside of her dress shifted out of the zipper’s teeth, and in one smooth motion Sean pulled it all the way down, then back up.
Abruptly, he pulled away. So fast that he half spun her around and she stumbled.
She’d just vowed—in triplicate—not to keep running. But if ever there was a time and place to run, it was now.
Because with only the slightest brush of his fingers across her skin, Sean had made her feel things no other man ever had.
She was upstairs and in her room with the door locked in record time.
Why hadn’t she just used scissors to cut her dress off?
Chapter Five
What was wrong with him?
If he’d been the least bit in control of any of his senses, he would have gotten the hell out of the kitchen the minute Rebecca walked in. But every second he spent with her had his brain working on less and less of a rational plane.
Which was crazy, because he was always rational. Hell, he’d used his analytical mind to make millions of dollars.
She looked soft, warm, but finding out just how smooth her skin actually was, when she’d trembled at his touch, all he’d been able to think about was pulling her against him.