“There are no mistakes in this life,” Oggie Jones intoned from the front seat. “Believe it. That girl is sittin’ beside you at this exact minute because beside you is where she wants to be.”
Beau muttered something about how old guys should mind their own business. Starr just cuddled closer and smiled.
Oggie Jones let them out in front of a Best Western motel. They thanked him and stood waving as the boat of a car drove away.
“What a guy,” Starr murmured in admiration.
“Yeah,” Beau agreed. “Got a mouth on him the size of the Grand Canyon.” For that remark, he got an elbow in the ribs. “Hey!”
She grabbed his hand. “Let’s get a room.” She started for the glass door to the lobby.
He didn’t budge. “One room? What about the hands-off rule?”
He would have to ask that. She let go of his hand. “You want your own room, is that it?”
“I was only saying—”
She didn’t let him finish. “This is really not a problem. We’ll get two beds instead of one. Fair enough?”
Shaking his head, he followed her inside.
The guy behind the desk had terry-cloth robes he could rent them, toothbrushes for sale—and a dryer they could use for their still-clammy clothes. By nine-thirty, their clothes were hung up in the closet nook off the bath in their room, all ready for tomorrow. They’d taken turns in the shower. Starr had made her call to Tess. They sat on their beds in their rented robes eating pepperoni pizza.
Once the pizza box was empty, Beau stretched out and grabbed the remote.
Now come on. What was this thing with guys and the remote? It had to be genetic. Ethan had it, and he wasn’t even five. Beau lay back on his stacked pillows, surfing away, those muscular hairy legs crossed at the ankles.
Starr folded up the empty pizza box—slowly, with great care. Then she rose and put it in the wastebasket in the corner. She was working up the nerve, she told herself. In a minute or two, she’d ask him to turn it off, say they needed to talk.
He sent her a glance, a warm smile…and looked at the screen again, pointing the remote, switching to another channel.
It was nice, really. The two of them, safe and dry and warm. Together—even if they did have separate beds and he was watching TV. It felt…easy between them now. Companionable.
The way it wouldn’t feel when she broke the news….
Maybe she’d brush her teeth first. Yeah. When in doubt as to how to tell a guy about the baby—get those teeth clean. The news about the baby might be the priority here. But dental hygiene was important, too.
She went to the vanity area between the closet nook and the bathroom and slithered the cellophane wrapper off the brush. The guy at the counter had provided a travel-sized toothpaste for free. She squeezed on a line of Crest and went to work.
Much better, she thought, once the job was done and her mouth felt minty-fresh. On the TV, the AFLAC duck was squawking. Beau chuckled.
Starr whirled from the sink and opened her mouth to speak.
But no.
Really, not now. Not right this minute. Let him relax for a while. It had been a rough day.
Under the rented robe she still wore her panties—and a souvenir T-shirt she’d bought from the guy at the front desk. It was extra-large. White, with an oil derrick spouting oil on the front and the words Casper Comes In A Gusher.
The perfect attire for a hands-off kind of night.
She removed the robe and hung it on a hanger—taking a lot more time than she needed to get it on there just right. She even tied the tie at the waist, so it wouldn’t slip off and end up on the floor.
Once she had the robe hung up to her liking, she trotted over and meticulously folded the bedspread back to the bottom of the bed, smoothing out every wrinkle, getting the folds perfectly straight. Then she pulled back the covers and slid in. She fluffed up the pillows and made herself comfortable.
He was watching some nature show now. Baboons grooming each other, a woman with an English accent talking in the background.
“Beau…”
He rolled his head her way and gave her a lazy smile. “Want to watch something else? Name it.” He waved the remote at her. “We’ll find it.”
“I…” It just wasn’t happening. She couldn’t quite get it out. “Whatever. It’s okay.”
“Sure?”
I’m having your baby, Beau. “Yeah, really. This is fine…”
He hesitated, watching her. And then he shrugged and turned back to the screen again.
Well, she thought. Another opportunity royally blown. She looked at the ceiling for a while, thoroughly disgusted with herself. She was, she decided, the biggest coward in the whole wide world. Worse than that, she didn’t intend to get one bit braver. Not tonight. She reached for the lamp switch. “Mind?”
“Not a problem.” He turned the sound way down.
She switched off the light, lay back and closed her eyes. She’d get to it, she told herself. She would. Very soon…
At two-thirty in the morning—or so the digital clock on the nightstand said—Beau sat, wide-awake, in the dark. He’d switched off the TV hours ago, even though it was too damn quiet without it.
He could hear Starr breathing from the other bed, a tender little whisper of sound. Through the shadows, he could see the shape of her. She was turned on her side, facing the far wall, black hair spilling back, darker than the night itself, across the white pillow. He let his gaze travel up the slope of her shoulder, slide down the sweet indentation of her waist, rise again at the soft swell of her hip….
He shouldn’t have let her come with him on this disaster of a trip. He shouldn’t even be seeing her, really. They should have left it alone after that night on the porch out at the cabin.
Hell, they probably shouldn’t have even started up together in the first place. But they had. And now there were only a few days left and she would be gone. She wanted to share those days with him—and damn it to hell, he wasn’t going to refuse her.
On the low dresser past the foot of the bed, against the opposite wall, he could see the envelope the lawyer had given him. Starr had taken it from her purse when she was digging around in there for a comb. She’d held it out to him, a shining look of hope on her beautiful face—that he’d open it, see what was in it.
Well, he wasn’t going to open it. Not ever. He didn’t need his daddy’s old beat-up watch and his brother’s battered wallet. He didn’t need the keys to a truck that had been impounded and an apartment long ago rented to somebody else.
He’d carry it all on home with him, only because if he threw it in the trash right now, she just might pull it back out and insist that he take it with him—or go ahead and open it herself.
Uh-uh. Whatever she did if he tossed it out, there would be an argument.
He didn’t need that. Not over the stuff T.J. used to carry in his pockets, not over something as meaningless like that.
And as for the things his brother had said…
Well, they were only the usual: Pansy-ass loser. Two-bit nobody. Chump cowhand. Idiot. Fool…
She didn’t need to hear it. Hell. Neither did he—but it was better than a cigarette burn and a sharp knife slicing, now wasn’t it? And while he sat there in that visitation booth and took what his brother dished out to him, he held the knowledge that she waited for him—safe, nowhere near that place—that when it was over he could leave, go back to a good, honest life, where he was straight with his neighbors and there were people who trusted him.
It was like Starr had said. Some things you just had to do. He felt a duty to go down there, now and then, to listen to his rotten brother rant. It was a duty he hated. It left him stupid and speechless with rage every time. But he knew he’d end up doing it again before T.J. finally ran out of appeals.
Starr sighed and moved beneath her blankets. She turned over, so she faced his side of the room. Beau sat as still as the headboard he leaned against. He waite
d for her to settle in again.
But her breathing had changed. “Beau?” She canted up on an elbow and reached for the lamp. He shut his eyes against the burst of brightness. When he opened them again, she was squinting at him. “God, Beau. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Now and then.”
She dragged herself up against the headboard. “It can’t be good for you, awake all the time,” she grumbled. “People need their sleep.”
“Yeah. Guess they do.”
“Ugh.” Grumpy and rumpled and so beautiful it hurt to look at her, she shoved back the covers and swung those long, smooth legs of hers to the floor. He got a flash of panty and didn’t feel the least bit guilty for looking. “Water,” she mumbled.
He admired the view of her walking away from him as she trudged around the end of her bed and over to the sink, where she grabbed a plastic cup and took a long drink. She set the cup down harder than she needed to and whirled on him, bracing a fist on her hip. “So are you ever going to tell me what went on with that brother of yours, what had you so mad you were driving seventy in the pouring rain on a narrow two-lane road?”
He could see by the determined gleam in her eye that she wasn’t letting up on him until told her. And now he’d gotten a little time and distance from it, he figured he could probably talk about it without cursing a blue streak and breaking up the furniture. “Nothing much happened. He called me a bunch of names—whispering, keeping it low. He knows enough not to get the guards on him until he’s finished reaming me a new one. I sat there and listened. He brought up how I turned on my own brothers, how I screwed him and Lyle, destroyin’ their lives.”
“That’s sick and disgusting. And completely untrue.”
“Maybe. But it’s still his favorite subject when he gets me in to visit—how he wouldn’t be where he is if it wasn’t for me. Hell, to hear him tell it, Lyle wouldn’t be dead. If they hadn’t got arrested for rustling your dad’s cattle—because I turned traitor to my own kin—Lyle wouldn’t have been in jail where he got in that fight and got stabbed to the heart with a shiv filed down from a spoon.”
She slapped a hand on the fake-marble sink counter. She had her lips pressed hard together and one hip stuck out, the oil derrick on her T-shirt pulsing with every angry breath she took. “That’s totally ridiculous. You know that, don’t you?”
He chuckled. “Yeah. But I still get mad enough to kick my own dog every time he does it to me.”
“You know he’s not worth your getting mad at.”
“You bet I do—but I don’t let the facts stop me. And the good news is, once I settle down, it’s not really so bad. When I calm down enough to give it a little thought, I can see that at least the time’s past when I would wet my pants in terror at the very thought that he might find a way to get out and come after me.”
“He’s never getting out,” she said.
“Yeah,” he answered dryly. “I suppose you’re right—and the truth is, if T.J. found a way to come after me now, I’d fight back. One of us would end up dead.”
“Him,” she said, blood in her eye.
Beau chuckled. “You’ve never seen my brother fight. He fights dirty. There’s a damn good chance he’d win. Lucky for me I’ll never have to face that problem.”
“But…that’s all? He gets you down there to beat you up with words? To accuse you of doing what he and Lyle did to themselves?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well then, Beau…why do you go?”
“You know, I was just sitting here in the dark asking myself that very same question….”
She waited for him to finish—tapping her bare foot, adorable in her impatience. When he didn’t go on, she demanded, “And?”
He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s all he knows. He’s not going to change. Good old Taft Eldridge will trot out a few more appeals and when that’s all through with, they’ll stick a needle in his arm—close the book on him, you could say. End of story. Lights out. He’ll be off to join my daddy and Lyle in hell. They’ll burn on together for all eternity.”
She stood there, still fuming, waiting for more. When it didn’t come she pushed away from the counter and marched over, ripe breasts bouncing under that silly shirt, and plopped herself down on the edge of his bed. Hauling one foot up, knee out so he had a good view of a nice stretch of milky-white inner thigh, she raked that gleaming, tangled black hair away from her forehead and let out a hard breath. “I’m sorry. There has to be more.”
“There isn’t.”
“I don’t believe you. There has to be something that keeps you going back.”
He let his gaze wander up and down that thigh, his fingers just itching to reach out and stroke it. And his fingers weren’t all that itched. If she turned around and looked down the blanket that covered his lower body, she’d see how happy he was to have her nearby. “You want me to keep hands off, you shouldn’t be showing all that leg.”
She only scowled at him. “Get a grip—and get back to the subject.”
He bent a knee up, easing the ache a little—and masking the evidence of it. “You make it so hard.”
She kept on scowling. “You aren’t going to distract me from getting to the bottom of this.”
He shifted on the pillows, canting his upper body her way, breathing through his nose, sucking in the jasmine scent of her. “There’s nothing more to get to. We’re at the bottom. He’s a low-down rotten piece of human trash, my brother—but he is my brother. There’s one thing I can do for him. I can listen while he trots out all the garbage. So I do.”
“But what good does it do—him saying awful things to you, you sitting there and taking it?”
“Hell if I know. But as far as I can see, he’s pretty much driven to do it. And I can take it. It’s nothing to what he used to do. It’s only words. I sit there and I let him say them. It’s…what I’m willing to do.”
She wasn’t buying his reasoning. She looked at him sideways. “You’re punishing yourself, aren’t you?” Now flags of outraged color rode high on her velvet-soft cheeks. “Somewhere deep inside yourself, you believe what T.J. says to you. In your heart, you take the blame for everything, all the really bad stuff that happened in your family—your drunk, abusive daddy and your poor mom dying. Your brothers turning out the awful way they did…”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
She yanked her shoulders back and faced him squarely. “And I don’t believe you.”
He looked at her flushed face, her flashing eyes—and the way that T-shirt showed the outline of her breasts. He could see her nipples.
Need for her slammed through him. Damn her and damn the knowledge in her eyes.
“You sit there,” he said, his voice low and rough as the sudden lust raging through him. “You sit there and tell me what I feel, how I am. Sit there in that shirt that shows off just about everything, driving me crazy with wanting you while you pick through my brain.”
On her cheeks, the bright spots of color flamed all the redder. “That’s what you think, huh?” She looked at him as if he’d just hauled off and punched her. “That’s what you really believe this is about? Me teasing you while I dig out all your secrets? That’s what you think I’m up to here?”
He was getting that ashy feeling in his mouth. That feeling a guy gets when he’s been a total ass. “All right. Look. I’m outta line.”
Her sweet face got softer. The mouth he loved quivered a little. “Who you gonna talk to, Beau? Who you gonna be honest with, if not with me? I’m the one who knows you, Beau. I’m the one who cares. You can go ahead, say no to me, say no to the life we might have shared. You can…deny me. And deny any truth I see about you. That’s your right. I might even forgive you for all your denials, because I do know, I understand, the kind of things you’ve been through. Just…don’t try to hurt me when all I did was to tell you the truth as I saw it. Don’t attack me for saying what I really believe. Don’t be mean or low-d
own. Leave that kind of stuff to T.J., all right?”
The last thing he had any right to do at that moment was to touch her. But he couldn’t help himself. He reached out, pressed his palm to the achingly soft skin of her flushed cheek.
“Oh, Beau,” she whispered, laying her own hand over his. He felt her tremble, saw the tears that welled in those violet eyes.
He muttered, gruffly, “I don’t know what the hell you see in me.”
She sighed, cupping his hand in her smaller one, rubbing her cheek against his palm. “Well, and that’s the basic problem, now isn’t it?”
It hurt him—hurt bad. To see his own cruelty reflected back in her eyes.
He spread his fingers, letting hers slip between. Catching them, folding her fingertips into his palm, he gave a tug to pull her toward him. “Come on. Lie down with me….” She resisted, giving him a reproachful look as one tear escaped and slid along her cheek. He brushed that tear away with his free hand. “Just for a minute. You can stay outside the covers. I swear I won’t put any moves on you.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”
“Come on…”
With a sigh she came down to him, the whole silky length of her pressing close to his side. He slipped his arm under her, so he could hold her closer still.
“Oh, Beau,” she said low, her breath warm on his neck. “What am I going to do with you?”
He smiled to himself. He had a few ideas—not that he’d be acting on them. Uh-uh. They had a deal and he wouldn’t go back on it, no matter how the feel and the womanly scent of her stirred him. He stroked her silky hair. “You might not believe this. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. But I am grateful you came with me. I’m glad you’re here.”
She snuggled closer. “Well.” She made a sniffing sound and brushed at her nose. “That helps. It does….”
They were quiet together. It was good, just lying there with her tucked up close beside him. He tried to stay with that—with what was happening right now.
But still, the question that kept haunting him crept into his mind: How he would bear it when she was gone?
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