by Heidi Betts
“So where do we start as far as that’s concerned, anyway?” he asked.
She blinked, caught off guard by the question.
“You want to talk about that tonight?” She was surprised he wanted to talk about the end of the engagement at all so soon, let alone the steps that would need to be taken to cancel the wedding.
“Why not?” he replied with a shrug. And then he let his gaze slide down the length of her body and back up again. “Unless you wanted to get to bed. I really shouldn’t have dropped in on you so late.”
He put one foot on the floor, prepared to stand up and let himself out, but she stopped him with a hand on his wrist.
“Don’t go,” she told him, feeling her throat close with unexpected emotion. “It’s fine. My only plans for tomorrow were to…” She trailed off, not entirely sure how to finish that sentence.
“Work on more of the arrangements for the wedding?” he supplied wryly.
She gave a reluctant nod.
“Well, the good news,” he said, sounding cheerier than she would have expected, “is that you don’t have to change your plans. Just alter them a little to start cancelling the arrangements instead of setting them up.”
“As long as you seem to be in a fairly good mood,” she said, “I should warn you that the chances I’ll be able to get your deposits back are slim to none. They’re non-refundable, and of course I’ll do my best to talk the vendors into reconsidering, but—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he cut her off to say. Then when she didn’t respond, he added, “I expected as much. And even though it’s no small amount of money, I’d rather let it go than add to your stress level by making you fight to get it back.”
“Are you sure?” she asked quietly. It was a very substantial “no small amount” of money; anyone else would be livid at the thought of losing it.
Taking another drink of his sweet tea, he tipped his head in the affirmative. “My relationship with Laurel was an easy one. There’s no sense in complicating matters now that it’s over.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Kara promised. “I don’t want you or Laurel to have to worry about anything.”
“With you at the helm? Never,” he offered gently. Then he glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late. I’d better go and let you get to bed.”
She padded after him in her bare feet when he slid off the stool and headed for the front of the house. He opened the door, then turned to face her, hand still on the brass knob.
“Thanks for keeping me company tonight.”
“It was my pleasure,” she told him. “And I really am sorry things didn’t work out with you and Laurel.”
He didn’t respond for a second. Instead, his attention seemed to be locked on her lips. She licked them self-consciously, wondering if she had a spot of tea there, or some smeared lipstick from earlier.
“At least I still have you,” he murmured in a low voice without lifting his gaze.
Kara didn’t know what to make of that. Of the words or his tone.
But she didn’t have long to wonder about it, either. One minute he was staring at her, so intently she almost began to fidget. The next, he was moving in, coming closer and closer until his mouth covered hers.
Everything inside of Kara went stock-still as soon as their lips touched. She stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped thinking.
The kiss was warm and soft and tasted of sweet tea, with a hint of the Scotch he’d consumed earlier. It was everything she’d ever imagined and more. It started out so slow and tentative, just a brush of lips on lips. Then, as though a match had been struck, it was so much more.
Grabbing her by the upper arms, Eli dragged her against him. She could feel the heat of him through the thin silk of her robe, the press of his arousal at her belly.
In all the years she’d dreamed of kissing him, her fantasies had never been like this. Sometimes she’d imagined light, chaste kisses that made her feel like the princess in a fairy tale. Other times, she’d imagined uncontrollable passion that incited him to sweep her into his arms and carry her off to the bedroom à la Gone with the Wind.
But this was nothing like either of those scenarios. It was real and raw and made her feel as though her entire being was going up in flames.
She clung to him as the heat radiated through her. His mouth enveloped her, his tongue sweeping inside to claim her in a way she couldn’t ever remember experiencing before.
And then it was over. Without warning, he pulled away, took a step back at the same time he set her a step away from him in the opposite direction.
Reality slapped Kara in the face more effectively than a bucket of frigid ice water falling over her head. They were both breathing heavily, chests heaving while they struggled to look anywhere but at each other.
“I should go,” he said in little more than a mumble.
The words buzzed in her ears, sounding as though they were coming to her through a very long wind tunnel. Her ears, she realized, were ringing in time with the spinning of her head. The best she could do was nod in agreement as he opened the door and walked out into the night without a backward glance.
Kara stood frozen in place, the events of the past few seconds flashing through her mind. It had been wonderful…it had been terrifying. She wanted it to happen again…she wished it had never happened.
The man of her girlhood dreams—oh, who was she kidding?—her girlhood and womanly dreams…had just kissed her half-senseless. And all she could feel was horrendous guilt over the fact that he was her sister’s only very recent ex-fiancé.
* * *
Eli took the long way home. The “long way” being three loops around Kara’s block on foot before finally making his way to his car and back to his apartment. The same dark, empty apartment he hadn’t wanted to return to earlier.
He didn’t particularly want to return there now, but it wasn’t as though he had much choice unless he wanted to spend the night in one of his own equally dark and empty hotel rooms.
He’d seriously considered his options during his extended walk, though. Part of him had wanted to lope back up Kara’s front steps, pound on the door until she opened it, and burst inside, sweeping her into his arms and upstairs to her bedroom. The other part—the part that ruled his head rather than his libido—wondered how the hell he could kiss his former fiancée’s sister like a house afire on the very same day his engagement had been called off.
How he could be lusting after her even now.
Had he ever felt this way after kissing Laurel? He didn’t think so. Or at least, he didn’t remember so.
All of the kisses with Laurel that he could remember had been fairly chaste…just like the entire rest of their relationship. They had been a lovely, upstanding couple. From the outside, they had probably looked perfectly prim and proper, candidates for gracing the cover of Garden & Gun’s “Who’s Who of Charleston” edition.
Inside, however, there had been no passion. Respect and friendship, certainly—and that wasn’t about to change, regardless of Laurel’s decision to call things off.
But until he’d kissed Kara—and he still didn’t know what in blue blazes had prompted him to do it—he hadn’t realized just how lacking in passion his relationship with Laurel had been. Kissing Kara had been like touching a live wire. It had scorched him from his lips to the top of his head and all the way back down to his toes. He couldn’t recall ever having such an intense reaction to kissing a woman…or if he had, she’d blown the memory straight out of his brain.
The question was: what the hell was he going to do about it?
The smart thing would be to go home, take a shower, climb into bed, and forget that the kiss had ever happened.
The blood still pounding in his head and through his veins—not to mention lower extremities—with the force of molten lava told him that was clearly going to be an impossibility.
Which put him back at square one with what the hell was he going to do abo
ut this sudden, powerful attraction to Kara Kincaid?
Four
Kara hadn’t slept a wink the night before. How could she after that kiss? It had been as though she had two invisible demons sitting on either shoulder, pulling her in opposite directions like a wishbone.
Those little invisible entities hadn’t taken the forms of the typical devil and angel, though. Oh, no. Instead, they’d very clearly sported the faces of Eli and Laurel.
Eli smiling, winking, being his usual charming self, doing his best to smooth-talk her into another soul-shattering kiss with that smooth Southern drawl. (Just because she shared that accent didn’t mean she couldn’t still be affected by it.)
And then Laurel on the other side, frowning, her eyes filled with hurt, asking, Why, Kara? How could you do this to me…your very own sister?
No, she didn’t sleep a wink with that preying on her conscience.
So here she was, up at the crack of dawn. Which wasn’t all that unusual—a lot of her days began before the sun started its slow climb into the sky.
Normally, however, she was functioning with eight solid hours of sleep to keep her upright. Also normally, she would be dressed for work, and either already in her office at the front of the house or on her way to her first appointment.
But today was far from normal. Instead of continuing to plan her sister’s wedding, she was supposed to be in the process of dismantling it. Instead of being dressed in a stylish, professional skirt and blouse, she was in her bare feet, wearing one of her favorite light-as-air sundresses covered in giant orange poppies, with a thick, neck-to-knee apron over that. It was hot pink, with white lace along the top and at both of the pockets in the center, and had Everyone has their price…mine is chocolate stitched beside a delicious-looking pile of chocolates.
Like a lot of women raised in the South, when the going got tough, the tough got cooking. Or baking, as the case may be.
Even growing up as she had, in a house filled with servants—or household help, as was probably the more politically correct term these days—any time her mother had felt undue stress, she’d ended up in the kitchen, up to her elbows in flour with a rolling pin in her hand. Sometimes she’d baked her weight in biscuits. Other times she’d fried enough chicken to feed the entire Confederate army. And still others, she’d made so many cookies all of the Kincaid children had been sent to school the next day with bags enough to become homeroom heroes.
Elizabeth had also taught each of her girls to cook—and the boys, too, if they were willing to learn. At least enough that they wouldn’t starve if they were ever left to their own devices.
Thanks to her mother’s talented instruction, Kara made a mean honey-glazed ham and created desserts so yummy that she’d briefly considered opening her own bakery before deciding to go into event planning instead. Mainly because she was only motivated to bake when she was emotional, for some reason—angry, sad, nervous…or in this case, guilty and confused. And what kind of bakery could stay open if the owner baked only when she was in the mood?
As it was, she didn’t know what she was going to do with the butter pecan cookies that even now were beginning to cool on her marble countertop. All she knew was that she needed to keep busy. Needed the precision of measurements, the therapeutic act of mixing, and the repetitive movements of dropping dough onto cookie sheets, then sliding them off with a spatula when they were done.
At exactly 8:15 a.m., the phone rang. It startled her. This was her personal line, not the business line in her office, and she rarely got personal calls so early in the morning…unless something was wrong. And considering her family’s current troubles, something could indeed be wrong.
Her stomach clenched and her fingers tightened inside her oven mitt as she set another cookie sheet on top of the stove. Lord, what now? Her father had been murdered, her mother had been arrested for his death, her sister had called off her wedding… What more could happen that hadn’t already—fires, floods, pestilence?
The minute the thought crossed her mind, she shook herself and wished she could call it back. There was no better way to jinx something than to ask that exact question, and her family sure as all get-out didn’t need any more jinxes falling on them.
Shedding the oven mitt and saying a quick prayer that this was not going to be more bad news, she picked up the cordless receiver from its cradle and hit the talk button.
“Hello?”
“Kara, hon, it’s Penelope from Eli’s office.”
The familiar voice sang over the line, lifting the cloud of foreboding that had begun to weigh her down. She blew out a breath even as she wondered why Eli’s assistant was calling her on her personal line. They’d had plenty of interaction over the past few months, setting up meetings to go over wedding plans, but that had always been on her business line.
“Hello, Penelope. How are you?”
“Just fine, sweetie. How about you?”
“Fine,” she replied by rote.
“Mr. Houghton asked me to call you at home and set up an appointment for this afternoon. Are you available?”
Kara’s heartbeat sped up and her lungs began to burn until she realized she’d stopped breathing. Inhaling quickly, she told herself to stop being such a ninny and asked, “Do you know why he wants to meet?”
A short pause. “I just assumed it was more to do with the wedding. Why—are you busy today?”
It was a simple enough question, but Kara heard the eager curiosity underlying the words.
“No, no,” she answered before Penelope became any more suspicious than she already was.
Eli obviously hadn’t said anything about his broken engagement, and Kara wasn’t about to be the one to start the Charleston rumor mill churning. Penelope was a dedicated employee, but this was the South—gossip was practically a sporting event.
“I’ll be happy to meet with him whenever he likes,” she added. He probably just wanted to get together to discuss the cancellations and make sure she covered all the details.
And if he could act as though nothing untoward happened last night, so could she.
* * *
The doorbell rang forty minutes later, a full hour earlier than she’d been expecting. With a jolt of panic, Kara dropped the last of her dirty utensils in the dishwasher and took a quick glance around the kitchen to make sure it didn’t look like a natural disaster had struck.
The problem with baking, she grumbled silently on her way to the front door, was that once you started, you couldn’t stop. Not unless you wanted everything ruined and gone to waste.
So even though she’d told Penelope she was at Eli’s disposal and agreed to meet with him at 10 a.m., as soon as she’d hung up the phone, she’d had to go right back to sliding cookies hot from the oven onto cooling racks, spooning fresh batter onto empty sheets, and repeating until she’d run out. She’d done it all as quickly as humanly possible, but the laws of physics only allowed these things to move so fast.
Which left her not much time to clean up, ditch the apron, change her clothes and refresh her hair and makeup. If Eli had shown up as scheduled instead of devilishly early, she might actually have made it. As it was, she was hoping against hope that someone else was at the door. A neighbor asking to borrow sugar—something she was low on, thanks to her early-morning baking binge—or maybe one of her brothers needing a favor…or wanting to grab a handful of cookies, since they seemed capable of smelling the scents of her kitchen from a mile away.
Wiping her hands on her apron, she yanked open the door…and released a sigh of resignation. Of course.
“Good morning, Eli,” she said, stepping back to invite him inside. “You’re early.”
He shot her a dazzling smile. “What can I say? I was eager to see you again.”
Caterpillars broke through their cocoons and turned into butterflies inside her stomach. So much for pretending last night hadn’t happened.
“Actually, I have meetings all afternoon and wanted things hamme
red out with you before I get distracted. I hope you don’t mind.”
She asked, “What things did you have in mind?”
Rather than answering, he tipped his head to the side and sniffed. “Do I smell pie?”
“Cookies, actually,” she corrected.
He lifted one brow and gave her a look.
Her lips twitched as she struggled not to grin. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, please,” he said with enthusiasm, actually clapping his hands and rubbing them together.
“Come on.” Reaching behind her, she loosened the ties of her apron as she led him back to the kitchen. Once they arrived, she slipped it over her head and folded it to set on one of the stools beside the center island.
“You must have gotten up awfully early to do all this,” he remarked, taking in the dozens upon dozens of cookies covering every flat surface in the room.
She ignored that, instead busying herself by collecting a small plate and filling it with cookies, then setting it on the counter in front of him. He was sitting in the same spot as last night, looking infinitely comfortable. As though he was used to lounging around in her kitchen. As though he belonged there.
Lifting a cookie halfway to his mouth, he paused to study it.
“Butter pecan,” she supplied a scant second before he took a bite and let out a long, appreciative moan.
Eli wasn’t new to her baking skills. They’d grown up together, and he’d spent enough time with her family as an adult that he’d been the recipient of plenty of both her and her mother’s culinary creations.
But for some reason, having him here with her—just the two of them, in her home, in her oven-heated kitchen—felt more…intimate than any of the other times he’d sat across from her, eating her cookies.
Clearing her throat in an attempt to shake off the uncomfortable tingle building beneath her skin, she asked, “Would you like something to drink with those? I know you’re not overly fond of tea, but maybe a cup of coffee or…” She trailed off, running a mental inventory of her refrigerator.