Her tone wasn’t a lover whispering this time, but quiet and real. He got it. He was going to have to get a grip. Maybe. He slipped his hands out of her shorts, since that behavior had provoked her suddenly cautious tone. He started rubbing and kneading her back instead. Heat shimmered between them, slick and fever-hot now.
Miserably hot now.
“Tucker.”
“Just a little more. I promise I’ll stop.”
From nowhere, a throaty chuckle. “That’s what the boys said in high school.”
“You think I haven’t matured beyond that?”
“Um. At this moment, no. I wouldn’t trust you further than I could throw you.”
“I think that’s the real issue here. You could throw me. Maybe you already did throw me.”
“I think you’re stalling.”
“Me? I’m pretty sure those are your hands still on my butt.”
“That’s completely accidental.”
“Oh, yeah?” He wasn’t regaining sanity. Didn’t want sanity. But somehow, even ready to go off like a firecracker, he was calming down. Damn woman. She’d made him smile. Kept making him smile. “You think we could just stay here all night? Like this? Just teasing each other until the sun comes up?”
“You don’t think you’d get tired?”
“There’s no chance in heaven or hell that I could get tired. Not holding you.”
A silence fell. She lifted her head, so her eyes could meet his in the darkness. Her hands slid away from his behind. “What are you trying to do to me, Tucker MacKinnon?”
“If you don’t know, I must not be doing it very well. But to give myself an excuse, it’s been a long time. I tried to give it up completely after the divorce, but couldn’t quite make that work. Even so, I know I’m way out of practice. Next time we do this, I’ll—”
“You’re giving me a whole lot of information there, Tucker. You sure this is stuff you want me to know?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure.”
“So you think there’s going to be a next time.”
“Definitely. And soon. Don’t you?”
She eased out from under his arm. He wished it weren’t so damned dark. He couldn’t see her expression clearly enough to interpret what she was feeling. “I want to laugh, Tucker. And I want to say yes. But here’s the thing. I’m not looking for marriage for a really simple reason. I’m no good at it. And having kids our age—boys who see everything, who are curious about everything sexual—means it’s just about impossible to have a sexual connection without marriage. So…I’m going in the house now. I’m going to rouse the boys. Close up for the night.”
She didn’t run into the house, but she escaped too fast for him to argue with her or analyze what she’d said. The boys showed up before he’d even caught his breath. Both were whining and complaining about being interrupted, it wasn’t late, it wasn’t fair, what was so special they had to stop the game that instant and Will totally didn’t want to go home yet.
“I have a plan,” Tucker suggested. That got no one’s attention, so he said it louder.
That made Will turn, hunch his shoulders. “Uh-oh. It’s always trouble when my dad gets a plan.”
“I’m starting to learn that,” Garnet said, innocent as sunshine—when there were two boys standing in front of her, priceless chaperons.
“Well, here’s the plan. I was going to suggest it to Pete’s mom first, but hey, it’s up to all four of us. It’s not easy to carve out any free time in the summer, but I think I could wrangle a long afternoon next Tuesday. If Pete’s mom could do the same…well, I was thinking about a kayak race. Two teams. Winners get a serious prize.”
Tucker saw Garnet’s immediate frown. Yeah, he knew she had the shop, that summer was her bustling season, no different than his. But sometimes, family had to come first. At least it did for him. And provocative attraction or not, he needed to know it did for her.
Besides. He’d failed every other way to get Pete to do a sport or much of anything outside. So now he was reduced to bribery and manipulation. That wasn’t how he liked to operate, but dagnabbit, sometimes the ends really did justify the means.
“Mr. Tucker, I’ve never even been in a kayak,” Pete said, wearing his old-man worried look.
“I know that. But here’s the thing. We’d set up the race so it was an even match. You’d be my crew, Pete. And your mom would be Will’s crew. That way, both teams would have a novice kayaker and an experienced one. It’d be fair competition for both sides.”
Pete was still frowning, but Tucker could see he was considering it. “I can swim. In fact, I can swim really well. But is it hard to kayak?”
“It can be. But I’ll pick a kayak run that won’t be too hard for anyone.”
Pete wasn’t quite ready to give up that frown yet. “So what’s the prize for the winners?”
Hell. Tucker hadn’t thought that far ahead—but he knew the prize had to be a stunner or the plan would never work. “A hundred-buck gift certificate at Best Buy. The winner is the winning kid—although the adults can veto an inappropriate purchase. Otherwise, it’s whatever the winner wants.”
“I’m in,” Pete said immediately.
“I’m in,” Will said, just as fast.
“I’m obviously in, since it was my plan. Garnet?” For the first time since their embrace, he looked at her.
Her lips still looked kiss-plumped and pink, her neck still impossibly vulnerable…but her expression had turned careful. Crystal-sharp careful. “I’m feeling ganged-up on,” she said.
“Yeah, so?”
“Yeah, so, I think you should have brought up the plan with me first.”
“You’re right. I should have. But the thing is…either the idea works for all four of us, or it doesn’t work at all. I mean, if either of the kids doesn’t want to do this, I don’t want to force-feed the idea. So there just seemed no reason to—”
“We want to do it,” Pete said firmly. He was all but salivating at the vision of the money he could spend in Best Buy.
“Yeah, that’s a big ‘me, too,’” Will said.
“Tucker, you are an evil, evil man,” Garnet pronounced.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
She sighed. “I’ll have to make sure my staff are both here and can take over. I don’t want to be the bad guy if there’s some crisis I can’t help with. And if there’s a threat of storms—”
Tucker looked at the boys. “Yeah, yeah. That’s obviously a rain-check kind of deal. So let’s hear a straight yes or no.”
He knew she’d go for it. He saw how she looked at Petie, how excited he was. That sealed the deal. So she was willing to put family before her work, which mattered to him more than anything he could say.
He was beyond-belief curious about those hundred-dollar bills—but when push came to shove, that was just a mystery. Nothing that really mattered.
* * *
The following Monday night, Garnet jerked awake at the unexpected chime of her cell phone. She groped in the dark for it on her bedside table, found it, dropped it, and with one eye open, saw 1:00 a.m. on the bedside clock. She bent over, felt with her hands, found the phone, slapped it open.
“Sally?” She could see the name on the phone, felt an immediate ball of thorns form in her stomach.
“Yeah. It’s me. I know you need me tomorrow—you and Pete are going on that kayak thing.”
“What happened. Where are you.” This had happened too many times before for Garnet to phrase questions.
“In the hospital. I’ll get out in a couple days. But I’m afraid I can’t—”
“How bad?”
“Two bruised ribs. Nothing too bad. But when I fell down the stairs, it seems I did something to my right ear. Burst an eardrum or something.”
“Another fall, huh? From a one-floor apartment.” Garnet closed her eyes. “Oh, honey. When are you going to shake that guy?” But she backed off from that line immediately. “You need me to come?”
“No. And the doc says, even with the eardrum problem, I’ll be better and back at work by Friday.”
“Okay. Tell me if you need anything. I’ll visit you tomorrow.”
They talked a few minutes more, then Garnet clicked off the phone. She sat in the dark, not likely to fall back to sleep, unsure whether she should call Tucker this crazy late, or wait until tomorrow to cancel their kayak outing.
She hated to call him this late. He had to be sleeping. But she knew he’d had to rearrange schedules and employees for the kayak thing tomorrow. If it were her, she’d want to know the change in plans as soon as possible.
So she phoned. He immediately answered in a rusty, sleepy voice.
“Has to be you. You’re canceling for tomorrow.”
She was startled that he knew why she was calling. “Yes. I’m sorry. Please tell Will I’m sorry, too. I didn’t have a choice—”
“You don’t need to give me a reason, Garnet. I expected it. See you when we trade the boys next time.”
She heard a click. It was more like a plunk than a downright slam. Still. He’d ended the call more than abruptly, and she stared at the phone for several moments before leaning back, wide-awake now and confused by Tucker’s comments. He’d been sleeping, of course. He might have been disoriented or not thinking normally.
But the word expected kept replaying in her mind. He’d expected her to cancel their kayak outing? Expected her to let the kids down?
What was that about?
She’d never had the chance to mention her employee being in the hospital. He couldn’t possibly guess something like that was going to happen. She hadn’t known. No one could have known.
So what Tucker must have expected…was that she’d let him down.
Two mornings later, Tucker was leading a rambunctious group of sixty-five boys on Snake Trail. The kids were twelve- and thirteen-year-olds—which meant they were as easy to control as a pack of hyenas. The trail was a three-mile hike around the east side of the mountain, included some boulder-climbing and slinking through a couple of narrow canyons.
Tucker loved it because it invariably took some of the sass and starch out of a wild group. They loved it because of the name. A six-foot snake had been spotted on the trail maybe five or six years ago. The unwitting snake had become a legend that the next group of kids always heard about. The boys always hoped there’d be another snake that big…or preferably bigger.
He turned around when he heard the buzz in his pocket, grabbed his cell, used the pause to turn around and survey the strung-out gaggle of boys. All of them looked capable of causing murder and mayhem. And likely would. But temporarily they were all hiking, even the stragglers.
His cell took the message. Just a short one. A velvet voice, saying, “I could tell you were annoyed the other night.”
He hit her number, texted, Not.
She texted back. Yeah, you were. Is there a reason you don’t want to explain why you were so irritated?
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The last kid in line—who was at least sixty pounds overweight, and overdressed for a holy-hot day—went down like a sinking rock. Hard to believe the boy could suffer heat exhaustion this quickly, but something, for damn sure, was wrong, and Tucker went running.
* * *
Late that same afternoon, Garnet finally managed to trap Sally in the back room.
“I’m all right. I keep telling you. I don’t need to be coddled.”
“I’m not coddling you,” Garnet lied. “I need you to help me with this, because I just can’t get the time to do it. And you’ve got an artsy streak that I’ll never have.”
“There’s a hundred real things that need doing—like mowing. Like bundling herbs. Like—”
Every job Sally named involved bending and twisting. As beautiful as she was, her dark chocolate face had looked almost white since she’d shown up for work yesterday. The son of a sea dog had taken two teeth this time. The right side of her mouth looked like an overripe plum. She’d come to work in a giant-size man’s shirt—all the better to hide swelling and bruises.
Sally said she’d left the creep—but Garnet had heard that story before. Every time she hoped Sally meant it, but in the meantime, all she could do was give Sally work she could handle and offer support.
The project was a poster, in the form of a burnt-edge rustic slash of pine.
An overlay of white made for easy-to-see printing. Special Uses for Vanilla was already stenciled at the top.
Sally read off the list Garnet wanted added to the poster. “‘When you’re painting a room, add a couple tablespoons of vanilla to the can to make the unpleasant paint smell disappear.’ You can really do that? ‘Add ground vanilla to baked goods.’ Hmm. ‘Vanilla absolute is the highest concentrated extract of vanilla—and costs a fortune, so it’s used in expensive perfumes.’” She looked up. “I never smelled vanilla in a perfume.”
“It’s in quite a few. But it doesn’t smell like cooking vanilla in that form.”
“Well, hey.” Sally lowered her head again, and read further. “‘Artificial vanilla extract isn’t made from vanilla. It’s made from vanillin…but also from ingredients like pine sap, clove oil and lignin—which is a waste product from the manufacture of paper.…’ All right, all right. I admit this is more interesting than I thought. Customers’ll get a kick out of some of this.”
“That’s what I thought,” Garnet said, feeling relieved Sally was buying in to the project. Her cell vibrated as she hiked back into the shop. She noticed Mary Lou take on two guy customers, who were clearly husbands looking for something their wives wanted.
She clicked on the phone, smiling as she stepped outside.
Tucker’s voice was low and quiet, yet seemed to suck up all the oxygen in her sphere. She leaned against an outside bench, hiding in the shade.
“I’m sorry if I sounded ticked. The truth is, I thought you were running,” he said…as if he expected her to remember their texts from this morning.
Which she did, every word, every nuance, every inflection. “You thought I was running from the chance to go kayaking?”
“Come on. You know I didn’t mean that. I thought you were using an excuse. To pull back. From me. From us. From what seems to be building between us.”
“I canceled because I had a sick employee. Sally. She called from the hospital in the middle of the night.”
She heard him clear his throat. “Well, damn. I’m sorry. More than sorry. I’m sorry I got sharp, and sorry I didn’t believe you.”
Well, if that wasn’t the most unfair thing on the planet. Damn man was so honest that he forced her to be honest, too. “It’s 100 percent true, about canceling because of Sally. But…what you thought was true, too. I’m…worried about where the two of us are going.”
“You think you’re alone?”
“Tucker. I’m as far from an Ole Miss sorority girl as you can get.”
“Huh? Didn’t we already cover this? I married the traditional Southern belle. The marriage was as much fun as being tarred and feathered. Trust me, I’ll never be looking for a repeat.”
She heard the wry tone in his voice, and yeah, he was funny. But he hadn’t seemed to hear her concern before—and she didn’t think he got it this time, either. “Let me tell you about the hundred-dollar bills,” she said seriously.
“I didn’t ask.”
A fat, black-and-yellow bumblebee hovered by the shop screen door. Another car pulled into the yard—three women, shoppers. The ball of fur—the pregnant cat that wasn’t hers—was snoozing in the sun. Had to be a hundred degrees out. Damn cat d
idn’t have a lick of sense.
“Ever since Petie was born—even before Johnny died—my mother would drive over, a couple times a year, set up this ‘treasure hunt’ where I’d run across hundred-dollar bills all over the house. Usually there was a thousand dollars.”
“Okay,” he said, as if prodding her to continue.
“I gave them back. She’d just do it again. When Pete got old enough to understand what money was, she made him part of it. It was fun. The treasure hunt. For him. For her. Just not for me.”
There was a silence on the other end, then another quiet “okay.”
“I stopped giving it back. There was no point. So every time, I put it in an account, for Pete’s college. I put her name, Pete’s name and my name on it. So she can take it back anytime she wants. And in the meantime, I’ve got a darned nest egg for Pete’s college.”
“No wonder you’re unhappy. This sounds awful.”
Okay. He made her smile. A short smile, but still a smile. “It’s about trust, Tucker. Respect. My parents had two perfect daughters, and then there was me. Got pregnant the first time I slept with a boy, ran off and married him on high-school graduation night. Nothing was right between Johnny and me. My sisters both have master’s degrees. I finished high school by the skin of my teeth.”
“I’m still listening.”
“My mom—and my dad—don’t believe I can take care of my son financially for a second. They’re very generous. And no one yells at me. It’s just there. I’m not the black sheep, exactly. It’s more… Somehow a weakness crept into the gene pool. My sisters and mother are gorgeous. I’m ordinary. The rest of the family talk up investments and 401Ks. I struggle to make payroll. They all have gorgeous homes. I started out with a leaky roof and furniture from Goodwill.”
“Garnet.”
“What?”
“You’re not envious of them.”
“Good grief, no. I want what I have. What I’ve built myself. I just need you to know, I guess, that I’m not close with my family. I’m not sure I even know what it takes to be close in a family. I love my son more than my life. But I haven’t felt a pull for a man in a long time, Tucker. And I don’t want to fail you. Or me. And it’s worrisome, because I don’t have any credentials in the family or marriage arenas.”
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