Where There’s A Will

by Stacy Gail

  And Miranda.

  The rich scent of freshly ground coffee and the general hubbub of his surroundings faded. He never noticed. All he saw was her, earnestly bent over a laptop, chewing on her lower lip as she clicked and dragged images on the screen.

  Damn.

  What was it about her that made everything inside him come to a quiet, airless standstill? It had been that way even when they’d been dating. Maybe he had a weakness for blondes. But not every blonde stunned him into brain-dead paralysis the way she did. The reaction had to be a weird result of all the toxic baggage her bastard of a father had saddled them with, and he wished to God it would just go away. It tripped him up, this obsessive, half-mad tunnel vision he had when it came to her. The only good thing about it was that if he had to be locked onto another person the way he was with her, at least she wasn’t hard to look at.

  She definitely appeared to be better than when he’d last seen her. Her eyes weren’t red and swollen and shooting pure death at him. Her pale hair was neatly pulled back behind a thin elastic headband and curled around it like a graceful pale crown. Princess hair. It left her nape exposed, and the mere sight of it beckoned his mouth. God, he loved that classy neck of hers. Its tug was so powerful it was all he could do to keep from going to his knees beside the loveseat so he could cover that Grecian-goddess slope with his lips.

  Wait. Had he ever kissed her on the back of the neck? Until that moment, he was certain he’d covered every inch of her with his mouth, but that knockout of a nape...He shivered. Oh man. That hidden gem may have missed his attention back in the day. Sloppy of him, really. He needed to make up for that.

  Coe jerked his head back as the wayward thought slammed him. What the hell. Hadn’t his life gotten screwed up enough the last time he got involved with Princess Brookhaven? Tangling with her had been the single worst mistake in his life. The last thing he should think about now is kissing her anywhere, much less on that delicate, tempting arch of her nape.

  Yeah, tempting was the right word. So tempting he could practically feel his mouth there...

  A woman who edged around him on the way out of the coffeehouse gave him an odd look. Only then did he realize he was blocking the door, staring at Miranda like some creepy peeper. Cussing under his breath, he unglued his feet from the floor and closed the distance between them. There was no point in putting this off any longer, so he might as well get this over with.

  “Almond milk. Just the thing for those who are lactose intolerant.” He placed the carton next to her laptop and dropped down on the loveseat next to her before she could tell him to go away. “Is the coffee any good here?”

  “Coe.” She stared at him, her mouth an O of surprise. That mouth. Pink and soft, it wrapped around his name in a way that made him wish it’d wrap around the most sensitive part of his anatomy. He’d forgotten how much he’d enjoyed hearing her say his name. “What are you doing here?”

  “Making a personal delivery and asking about the coffee.” Not to mention his car had insisted on turning into the parking lot the moment he realized she was there.

  Stupid car.

  “I don’t want any milk. I don’t want anything from you.”

  Something harsh twisted inside him. “Yeah, you’ve made that clear.”

  “Then why do you keep trying?”

  “Because if I can get you to accept this one little thing, I’ll know you’re at last starting to let go of all the shit you’re lugging around.” The words came out of nowhere, startling him. But once they were out he realized they were bang-on target. The more she snubbed him, the more apparent it became that she was stuck in neutral thanks to a past that had wounded them both. If he had to kick her in the ass to get her back in gear, he didn’t have a huge moral problem with it.

  The look she gave him could have frozen over hell’s last acre. “I’m not lugging around anything. I simply want nothing to do with you.”

  “You don’t say.” He draped a long arm over the back of the loveseat and didn’t miss how she inched forward to avoid being physically close. Damn, it was like she thought he had cooties. “Do you think you might want something to do with me if it involved an apology?”

  She growled. Holy crap, she actually freaking growled. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

  “Must be nice. I wish I could say the same.”

  “I...what?”

  “It’s been pretty comfortable all these years, thinking I was the only one who got reamed by the Brookhaven beast.” He shrugged while she stared him like he’d started speaking in tongues. “No wonder you accused me of crying about being a victim. That’s basically how I felt.”

  “You were a victim.” The words came out flat, sucked dry of all emotion, and it matched the look in her eyes. No anger, no anxiety. Nothing. It was as though her inner well had run dry and now she was dead inside. The mere idea gripped him with a painful sort of panic that was hard to define. “You just weren’t my victim.”

  “I...know.” The admission cost him, but it had to be said. He hated unfairness more than anything. The brutality that his father had rained down on his mother had been unfair, just as it had been unfair that he’d been born weak and helpless into a world of violence. Now he had to face that he’d been unfair to Miranda, a fact that just about gutted him. He hadn’t been able to sleep since she’d dragged him to the bleachers last week and knocked his mental lights out with a kiss.

  Oh, man. That kiss. Every time he closed his eyes he could see her pulling him toward her, feel her lips moving like crushed silk over his, her mouth drinking him in as if she was dying of thirst and he was her all-time favorite beverage of choice...

  He shifted in his seat as the pressure in his groin began to pulse.

  Her deadened expression remained unmoved at his admission. “Well. That’s good to hear. If that’s all—”

  “It’s not.” He paused, trying to find the words that would make everything better. They had to be pretty damn powerful words, to undo seven years of animosity. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how things went down that night when you told me about your dad patenting my valve. The only thing I can remember clearly is how shocked I was. I never saw that possibility coming, and I lashed out like a reflex being hit. That’s not an excuse. That’s the truth.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Excuse or not, the fact remains that it was your idea to approach my father, not mine. I didn’t even know what your gizmo was.”

  “I get that.” Goddamn it, she wasn’t listening to him. Or, he corrected with brutal honesty, maybe he hadn’t yet said anything that was worth listening to. “Here’s the thing...I was wrong, Miranda. I was wrong to put you in that position, and I was wrong to blame you for it afterward. I hate that I was such a bastard to you. You didn’t deserve it.”

  At last, a spark of surprise widened her otherwise lifeless eyes. “What?”

  “Since you were the one who coughed up my gizmo, as you call it, it was easy to hate you as much as I hated your dad for screwing me over. But I was wrong to hold you responsible for any of it, when all you did was try to help me. I took everything out on you, and I’m sorry and ashamed that I did that. It wasn’t fair. No matter how upset I was at the time, there’s no excuse for using you as a convenient target. I’m not asking for forgiveness for being such a dick, because I don’t expect it. My only point here is that you’re not doing yourself any favors by holding onto all the anger I can see boiling away in you. So please, for your own sake, lighten the hell up and stop letting the assholes of the world get you down.”

  That pretty mouth of hers dropped open again, almost as if she knew he liked it when it made that shape and had decided to torment him with it. “You do realize you just called yourself as asshole.”

  “In the immortal words of Popeye, I am what I am.”

  “So you’ve finally
remembered you gave me the valve to give to my father?”

  For half a second he thought about lying, but that would only make things worse. “Not really.”

  She made a sound of impatience. “How did I learn of its existence, Coe? How did I get my hands on it? How would I have recognized what it was, even if I had been instructed by my father to go looking for it? How did my father even know about it in the first place?”

  “I have an answer for that one,” he jumped in when she took a breath. “I told him about it when I worked at the racetrack, but at the time he didn’t seem interested.”

  She appeared flummoxed by the news. “So... what? Are you now going to think he sent me after you to pull some crazy Mata Hari espionage thing on you?”

  “I didn’t say that, so don’t put words in my mouth. Just because I don’t have a perfect memory on how things went down, it doesn’t mean I don’t believe you. In fact, once you took me under the bleachers, what you described sounded uncomfortably familiar. I don’t doubt that it happened exactly the way you said it did.”

  “But how the hell can you not remember something so important?”

  He grimaced. He didn’t want to answer. He really, really didn’t...

  “Coe?”

  Shit. There was no way of getting out of full-disclosure mode now. “I’m going to be as honest as I can, so try not to take my head off, all right? At the time, what I remember...” Aw, hell. “I was more interested in getting laid than anything else. FYI, guys are remarkably single-minded when they’re horny, so it’s understandable I’m fuzzy on the details.”

  “Understandable?” She stared at him. “Because of your so-called fuzziness, you wound up accusing me of prostituting myself so I could steal from you. You were the one who gave me that frigging valve in the first place, but it’s understandable you forgot about it? Did you really just say that?”

  Maybe she had a right to take his head off, at that. “I didn’t say I was proud of it, because I’m not. I should have paid more attention to you, and to my own actions, and I’m kicking myself in the ass because I didn’t. I wish I’d never invented that fucking thing in the first place. It’s caused nothing but trouble.”

  “The valve didn’t cause trouble. People did. My father, you...even me,” she added with a rough sigh and rubbed her brow as if that would relieve the tension there. “I was so painfully arrogant. Until that night when everything fell apart, I thought I was the center of your universe. Yours, and my dad’s. Then in a handful of hours, my dad chose ownership of the valve instead of a relationship with his daughter, and you said the valve was the only thing of value that you had, and proceeded to cut me loose as well. I lost you both, maybe in part because I took you for granted.”

  “Miranda.” The enormity of the trauma she’d suffered hit him, seven years too late, and it chilled him to the bone. “You lost us both because your dad and I were total assholes. You were better off without us.”

  A corner of her mouth curled in wry acknowledgment before she shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I do feel better after clearing the air like this. The last thing I expected from you was a no-holds-barred apology.”

  “A real man knows how to stand up and take ownership of his fuckups. And if he’s smart, he learns from that fuckup so it never happens again.”

  The side-eye she slid his way didn’t look particularly convinced. “Well...thank you. Apology accepted.”

  He nodded at the carton of almond milk. “Does that mean you’ll also accept the milk?”

  “How’s the search for documentation on your valve coming along?” That cool mask slipped back into place, and she didn’t even bother to glance at the carton in question. “Have you found anything that would stand up in probate court? I’ll accept anything you produce, of course, but the way the will is worded, a probate judge will have to approve it as well.”

  “So it’s still a no on the milk, huh?” Her comment barely registered, which should have made him question his priorities, but it didn’t. For years he’d held a monster-sized grudge against Miranda for nabbing one of his first inventions and selling him out. But now that there was an opportunity to get it back, all his brain could do was fixate on one thing—Miranda. Maybe she’d been his real focus from the very beginning, and he’d just been too pissed off to see it. “Does that mean you haven’t accepted my apology?”

  “I have, because I can see you genuinely regret it, and I appreciate that. But I’m going to be as honest with you as you’ve been with me—it’s going to take more than a few minutes for forgiveness to come. For years I’ve been vilified as some scheming espionage whore-trash, to use your words, when all I did was make the mistakes of loving you, and trusting my father. Maybe it’s wrong of me to hold a grudge, but I’m going to need some time.”

  Yeah, there might not be enough I’m sorrys in the universe to make that insult go away, and that realization filled him with a shocking amount of regret. One thing was clear; even if she never forgave him, that didn’t mean he had the right to disrespect her all over again by giving up on trying to make amends. He’d fucked up, and it was his responsibility to fix it.

  If there was one thing he was good at, it was fixing things.

  “You’re right not to forgive me for being such a prick, and for—what did you call it?—slut-shaming you once you returned. I’m the one who should be ashamed.” Very gently, in part because he suspected she’d swat him away, he touched her hand. “All I can do now is promise you that I’m done with waging war on you.”

  “That’s...that’s nice to hear.” Disappointment shot through him when she moved her hand out of reach, so much so that it took his breath away. “But really, the only promise I want from you now is that you’ll do everything possible to find evidence that you invented the fuel valve. Have you found anything yet?”

  “I haven’t been looking.”

  Her brows came together and she turned in her seat to face him fully. “I know you said you read the will, but did you skip over the part about the time limit you’re working with?”

  What he wouldn’t give to brush away the tense line between her brows. But with body language alone, she’d already told him that no trespassing would be allowed. “I didn’t skip anything.”

  “I can sign over the valve’s patent within sixty days of my father’s death, as long as that person has sufficient evidence proving the valve’s original design came from them. In other words, you.”

  Didn’t he just tell her he read the thing? “I know.”

  “But after sixty days,” she pressed, clearly not believing he had a grasp on the situation, “all remaining family members—like my sister Katherine and her soon-to-be husband—have to agree that the patent should go to you as well, and I know they’ll never do that. After that sixty-day window closes, the only people I’ll be able to give or sell the patent to without their consent will be members of the family, including spouses. My father obviously had a modicum of guilt over stealing from you to put this in his will, but not enough to simply give it back to you. If you don’t come up with verifiable evidence that the valve was your invention, the only alternative I’ll be stuck with is to...”

  She seemed to choke on the remainder of her words. “What?”

  The look she gave him was full of dread. “Coe...I don’t know how to say this.”

  Holy crap. “What?”

  “If you can’t find verifiable evidence that the design is yours, then the only way I’ll be able to give it to you without Katherine’s interference is...is if I marry you and make you part of the family.”

  That same weird stillness slammed into him again, this time hard enough to punch the air out of his lungs. “What?”

  “I assure you, the thought horrifies me just as much as it does you.” She leaned toward him as she had under the bleachers, and for a second he thou
ght she might kiss him again. “Seven years ago you lost the only thing of value you had in your life, right? If you want it back, you’ve got to prove the valve was your design before time runs out.”

  “Easier said than done.” At last he figured out how to breathe normally. “I’ve never written things down. What little I put onto paper, you gave to your dad.”

  She winced. “Don’t remind me. I was so, so stupid, trusting him like that.”

  “He was your dad, Miranda.” The heat of long-held fury in her voice shocked him. Clearly this was one sore spot that had never healed. “Now that I’m not so pissed off about the whole thing, I can see you had no idea that parents can be a kid’s worst enemies. But the fact is, they’re usually the ones who’re close enough to do the most damage. It sucks, but it’s the truth.”

  She opened her mouth, then seemed to change her mind. “I just want to put this mess behind me. You probably feel the same way.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then find something that ties you to the valve.” Her eyes beseeched him, and for a moment she looked so desperate he had the craziest urge to put his arms around her. “If you can do that, I promise I’ll be out of your life forever, okay? Just...please find something.”

  He nodded to let her know he understood, but understanding wasn’t something he had a firm hold on. Not when her words pummeled him like invisible fists.

  * * *

  R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” sounded from Miranda’s purse lying next to her on the passenger’s seat. Slowing down for a curve, Miranda took her eyes off the road long enough to shoot it a dirty look. Making that particular song for her sister’s ringtone probably wasn’t the nicest thing she’d ever done, but it suited Katherine to a T. Every conversation somehow turned into a melodrama no soap opera could rival, so there was no point in answering.