To the One I Love: That Old Familiar FeelingAn Older ManCaught by a Cowboy

by Emilie Richards

  Certain she’d proved her immaturity for once and for all, she ran from the den, her purse flapping at her hip.

  Chapter 7

  Heedless of the weather outside, Marti only wanted escape. She ran to the gleaming foyer and yanked open the front door. The wind tore it from her grasp, banging it back against the wall, leaving another awful hole in the wall, no doubt.

  “Marti, wait.”

  She was beyond listening. She had broken it off with Devlin months ago, and she’d been smart to do so. He didn’t love her, he didn’t even respect her. Nothing had changed. And the past few weeks of prancing around each other had only proven it.

  The rain drummed down horizontally, looking more like opaque white sheets than raindrops. The moment she left the wide, slippery steps, she was drenched. She could hear Devlin yelling her name, but she ignored him.

  If she could just get to her car, she’d be all right. She’d put Devlin out of her mind; forget his touch, his kiss. So what if it took her the rest of her life? She was young. She had her whole life ahead of her.

  The awful irony bubbled inside her.

  Her tennis shoes slid on the cement driveway and she skidded into the side of her car, banging her hip. Blinded by the rain, she dragged at the convertible top, cursing when it would only go up partway. Her car seats had become pools of rainwater, the dashboard a waterfall. If the interior ever recovered it would be a miracle.

  Strands of hair stuck to her face, blew across her eyes. Grabbing hold of the car top, she yanked again, but her grip was wet and her hands slipped off. She gritted her teeth and renewed her grip.

  Arms came around her. Large hands closed over hers. A solid male torso met her back. “Let go, Marti, the storm is too severe.”

  She jerked against the top, closing her eyes against the feel of Devlin, warm even in the driving rain. When would she learn? When would she exorcise the demon inside her that kept her softening, turning toward, returning to him?

  “Stop,” he said against her ear. He had to practically yell to be heard above the harsh crashes of thunder. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  She pulled at the top again, straining with all of her weight to make it budge. “What do you care?”

  She heard him curse then he wrapped his arm around her waist and bodily lifted her away from the car. “I care if it gets us both fried from lightning.”

  “Put me down!”

  He merely tightened his grip and ran for the shelter of the house. Once inside, he carried her straight up the stairs, through a bedroom where she barely got an impression of ivory furnishings, before he set her down on a cool, tiled bathroom floor.

  The sound of thunder was muffled there. The sounds of their breathing was rough. Marti stared at the water collecting on the peach-tinted tile.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She froze and damned the surge of hope inside her. He’d never apologized before.

  She watched him from the corner of her eyes. “For what?”

  He sat down on the wide edge of the enormous Roman tub and handed her a towel from the folded stack nearby. His gaze caught hers and her foolish heart climbed so far into her throat she was in danger of choking.

  He cared for her. She could see it in his expression. “For what, Devlin?” She took a step toward him. Please, just say something. Mention the letter, if you wrote it. Tell me I matter. That I’m not laughable.

  His hand lifted off his thigh, as if to reach for her.

  The gilt lamp fixtures on the Venetian plaster walls made a popping sound, then went dark.

  She sucked in a breath, trying to see him. But it was useless. The bathroom was pitch, seemingly airless, though her saner self knew it really wasn’t.

  “Dammit to hell.” His voice was near her. She felt his hand on her arm. “It’s okay. Stay here. I’ll find some bloody candles or something.”

  “Non-bloody ones would do better,” she said faintly and heard his soft half-laugh. She realized that if she closed her eyes, it was easier to keep her bearings. Probably because she wasn’t trying so hard to penetrate the blackness.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  She wondered if she imagined the brush of his lips across her temple as he spoke, and was dismally afraid that she had. “I’m not afraid.” Not of the dark, anyway. “It’s just…really dark.”

  “Truer words,” he murmured. “I’ll be back.”

  Marti heard his shoes squishing across the tile and realized that it had become oddly silent outside the house. The thunder and blowing rain were no longer evident. She hoped that meant Hurricane Leslie was merely skirting the panhandle rather than that the worst was yet to come.

  She gingerly put out her left hand and felt the edge of the granite countertop. She leaned back against it, feeling somewhat more grounded. And, as promised, Devlin soon returned, bearing a strong flashlight.

  “Hardly romantic,” he said dryly as he pointed the strong beam toward the floor. Eerie shadows cast upward on the walls. “You’re shivering.”

  “How can you tell?”

  The silence ticked between them. “I can tell,” was all he finally said.

  For some reason, his comment didn’t strike Marti as arrogant, but excruciatingly intimate. Her shivers ratcheted a mile up the scale.

  He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave the flashlight with you. This is dry, at least, if you want to get out of your wet stuff.”

  She noticed then that he held a light-colored robe. He piled it on the edge of the tub alongside the flashlight, then moved past her toward the door.

  Without thought, she grabbed his arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be downstairs.” He felt as impervious as a rock beneath her touch as he kept moving.

  Her hand fell away.

  “In the study,” he added before he disappeared into the darkness beyond the corral of light cast by the flashlight.

  She let out her breath and sank weakly onto the tub, absently putting out a hand to steady the flashlight as it threatened to roll into the tub. Water dribbled from her hair, creeping beneath the wet collar of her shirt.

  “Another stellar moment, Marti.” She pressed the robe that smelled wonderfully of him to her face and pretended that all the moisture she wiped away came from rain rather than tears.

  In the bedroom that he’d appropriated for the duration, Devlin peeled out of his wet jeans and shirt and replaced them with a dry set. It did him no good to think about that decadent tub in the guest room bath. He thought, anyway.

  Swiping a towel over his hair, he headed downstairs, going the long way around—through the back of the house and the old-fashioned servant’s quarters—to avoid walking past the guest room where he’d taken Marti. He ought to have been bumping into furniture or walls at every turn, given the complete darkness in the house. But he was used to making his way in unfamiliar territory. This house, that he’d had to go over if only to dispose of it, was no longer unfamiliar.

  He preferred it when it had been.

  It wasn’t entirely dark in the kitchen, in any case. Not with the nearly constant strobe of lightning shining through the wealth of windows. They probably should have been boarded up.

  He used the light of the storm to find another flashlight, but the beam was weak when he tested it. So he grabbed the fat candles off the breakfast buffet and took them all back to the study. Dear old dad had been a smoker. There were matches and a lighter in the desk drawer. He checked the phone to see if there was a dial tone. But it was dead. Marti wouldn’t be calling Grammer later, after all. The electric radio was useless, too.

  He was glad he’d had the foresight to check with the weather service when he’d first realized the storm was heading toward town. They weren’t quite in the path of Hurricane Leslie, but she was bound to leave some widespread chaos.

  He lit the large candle, leaving the others for later, if necessary, and set it on the desk where he could see enough to continue what he’d been doing before Mar
ti had appeared: throwing out a mountain of memories. There were a stack of albums on the floor by the desk chair. He leaned over and picked them up. It would have been smarter never to have started looking at the stuff before throwing it out. Less time consuming, for one thing. Less disturbing, for another.

  Why had his father kept all the old photos of his first marriage and his son?

  He couldn’t even convince himself that Phillip probably hadn’t realized he’d still had the old things. Not when the worn albums had been lining the top of the credenza behind the desk, right behind Phillip’s old-fashioned daily calendar and manual typewriter.

  He pushed the albums onto the desk, catching the hairbrush they knocked into. Marti’s. He set it on the credenza. Along with a compact. She’d also missed the paperback book that had fallen from her purse, and a small notebook—the same kind he favored. A square of folded paper fell out of the notebook when he stuck it with the other items. Marti’s scrawled handwriting covered nearly every inch of it.

  He smiled faintly. A person might expect Marti’s handwriting to be as perfectly formed as the rest of her was; but instead of the girlish-round penmanship he’d once expected, he’d long ago realized her writing was sharp and hurried. As if her pen could barely keep up with her thoughts.

  He tilted the paper toward the candle, feeling like the bloody idiot he was—mooning over a sprite’s handwriting for God’s sake.

  Several words leapt out at him. Bedford Mills. Zoning. Singles’ resort.

  He leaned closer to the candle and unfolded the paper, his curiosity getting the better of him.

  Marti’s instinct had been right about Cox. Definitely bigger than a bridge, he thought, when he finished reading the article that Marti had written.

  A soft sound brought his attention away from the words and Marti materialized out of the darkness as she neared the desk. In the flicker of candlelight and whisper-silent lightning, she looked like a starving man’s last meal. His robe that she wore was white, making the gleam of her skin even more creamy, her shining brown hair even richer.

  He shut off wondering what she wore beneath the thick terry cloth, and held up the pages. “You wrote this.”

  Her hands had pulled the robe’s tie even tighter, and now they toyed with the long ends. “Wrote what? I can’t see—oh.”

  “From your purse.”

  She sucked at her lower lip for a moment, leaving it with a faint sheen that was drugging to see. “Yes,” she finally admitted. “I wrote it. So now you know the truth. I stink—”

  “It’s good.”

  A low roll of thunder filled the silence.

  “What did you say?”

  He set the pages on the desk and pressed them flat. “Too much sentimentality, but the bones are good. Really good. What are you planning to do with it? Are your sources reliable?”

  “I—yes. I told you that the Colman Courier promised me a byline,” she said faintly. “It’s…you think what I wrote is—”

  “Good,” he repeated.

  She exhaled audibly and plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. Darkness hid her from the waist up. But her knees poked out where the robe parted, and they looked really…naked.

  He shoved his hand through his hair and dragged his gaze back to the slightly bedraggled papers. “Not perfect,” he murmured. Right. Her knees were perfect. Her legs were perfect. She was perfection packaged in a small, tight package.

  He blindly reached into the top drawer and found a pen. “Look, here.” He began marking up the page. “Pull this bit about the Trinity Group and the singles’ resorts up to the first paragraph. More punch. Nobody on Colman Key would want an all-inclusive resort—any kind of resort, undoubtedly—in their backyard. It’s way too commercial. It would change the entire flavor of the key.” He marked some more. “And here. Redundant. You’ve already laid out how many of the parcels along the shore have been purchased…you don’t need to do it again.” He shook his head. “No wonder Lou Cox was ready to split a vein when he brokered the deal. This passage after could stand a little elaboration.” What’s that bastard Mills up to, he wondered. Drugs up the Gulf, maybe. Dev had a contact in the DEA. He wondered if he could still get hold of the guy.

  “But is it enough to convince the residents that all of Cox’s actions are geared toward the development of a singles’ resort? No wonder he wants a new bridge. The traffic to a Trinity resort would be tremendous. I can bring out the facts, but it’ll be up to the residents to do something to stop the zoning changes that would allow the beachfront to be developed.”

  “That’s all you can ever do,” Devlin said. “Lay out the facts.”

  Then his thoughts scattered when Marti rose and came around to his side. She leaned over the desk, resting on her arms as she peered at what he was doing. Her hair slid across one shoulder, and the crisscrossed front of the robe gaped enough to expose the swell of her breast. She moved her arm, pointing at one of his scrawls, and the robe jealously tightened again, hiding that tantalizing glimpse. “I’ve never noticed your handwriting before. It’s…um—”

  “Barely legible.”

  “—well, I can’t read what you’ve written here.”

  He looked. But he couldn’t even read his own damned writing, and it had nothing to do with his chicken scratch style and everything to do with the rain-watered scent of her.

  He wanted to untie the robe wrapped around her—his robe—and lay her out over the nearest surface. The desk would do. Instead he focused on her article that was now marked up with his editorial comments.

  “Like father like son.” He grimaced. He tossed the pen down and turned away from her. “You could type it,” he said.

  “On what? My laptop is at Grammer’s. I’m pretty sure that fancy computer over there is useless when there is no electricity.”

  “The old-fashioned way.” He turned on the flashlight and shone it on the typewriter sitting on the credenza. “Except you’ve probably never even used one of those old things.”

  “Don’t be insulting. A keyboard is a keyboard. It’s not like they moved the letters around when they started making electric typewriters.”

  “The infamous ‘they.’” Anything to distract him from her soft skin was a good thing. He moved the typewriter to the desk, pushing aside a jumble of scrapbooks to make room for it.

  “Is there a ribbon in it?” She sounded skeptical.

  “Don’t know. Roll in some paper and find out. There’s some in the middle drawer on your right.”

  She sat down in his father’s desk chair and found the paper. She pulled out a few sheets. Set one on the desk and rolled another into the typewriter.

  She struck a few keys. “Have to press hard, don’t you?” She peered at the sheet. “Voilà. We have ribbon.” She began typing rapidly. “I used to type ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back’ in my dreams,” she said. “Uses every letter in the alphabet, did you know that?”

  If he had, he’d forgotten. He couldn’t help smiling as he watched her put in a fresh sheet. She was practically wriggling in the chair with excitement. She adjusted the candle so she could see her copy, which looked like it was bleeding ink from his editing.

  She started to type, slowly at first, then more quickly. He wondered if she knew she tucked the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she worked. His palms itched from wanting to touch her terry-cloth-covered body. He could sit behind her. Slide his hands into the gaping lapels—

  He yanked the bag of trash out of the garbage can and was grateful when the heavy plastic didn’t split.

  “You’re not really throwing away that stuff, are you?”

  “Yes.” He tied it off and dumped the lumpy bag with the other half-dozen piled against the wall. “It’s not like I have a place to store this sh—stuff.”

  She stopped typing and picked up the scrapbook that was left on the desk, paging through it. “But…Devlin, they’re some of your most important articles.”

&nb
sp; “How do you know?”

  “Well, this one is.” She lifted the scrapbook. “Your Rwanda series is here. I studied it in school. Are the other scrapbooks like it?”

  They were. It didn’t matter to him, though. He’d never been one for collecting memorabilia from his career. He wrote what he wrote and went on to the next story. “It was a long time ago.”

  She was silent for a moment then returned to her typing only to stop again a moment later. “What?”

  “That’s why you went out with me the first time, isn’t it. Because of my writing.” The assumption tasted sour.

  “I went out with you because you were the only person who helped me up that day at the fashion show,” she corrected.

  “Did you know who I was?”

  She sighed a little. “I was a journalism major, Devlin. How could I not know? But you’re the one who found me at Style. I didn’t go chasing after you like some…groupie.”

  How well he knew that. She’d been as adamant about not sleeping with him as he’d been about making certain she understood the rules. No commitment. No future.

  His hands fell on an ashtray, still with a cigarette butt in it. He dumped the whole thing in the trash.

  She continued typing. She was better at it than he was. He had speed, but it was only from years of refining his own peculiar hunt-and-peck method.

  “You’re watching me,” she said.

  “I often did. I never made it a secret that I liked the way you look.” He waited a beat. “A lot.”

  “You didn’t watch me while I was trying to work,” she clarified.

  “You never tried to work around me before.”

  “You never indicated an interest.”

  There was no point in denying the truth. He stared at the hollow of her throat, where the small diamond pendant rested. It glinted in the candlelight.

  She sighed. Typed some more. He turned to the bookshelves and began pulling items off. She stopped typing again. “What did you mean earlier? Like father like son.”