by Kat Cantrell
“You’re okay,” he muttered to her. Which made one of them. “You can go ahead.”
“Thanks,” she said under her breath. “That was almost a disaster.”
No almost about it. It had been a disaster of the highest order, now that his brain had come unplugged. How was he supposed to make a campaign speech when all he could think about was how much he wished he could continue that embrace someplace more private?
“Hi, everyone,” she began, her voice clear because obviously she wasn’t affected by a small thing like a man she didn’t like very much keeping her off the ground. That was all there was to it, after all. He should keep that in mind.
“You all know Caleb Hardy is an American hero,” she continued. “A Navy veteran to whom we owe a great deal of gratitude. And you see he’s not afraid to lend a helping hand, even to his opponent.”
All of that sounded suspiciously complimentary. What was she doing? She wasn’t supposed to be talking him up. But since he could easily segue her comments into his master plan anyway, he was all over that. “Just taking a lesson from Ms. Nixon here. At our first meeting, she jumped into a major fracas to help me with no thought to her own personal safety. That’s someone you want in your corner when push comes to shove.”
Now he’d gotten her good and confused, judging by the way her smile slipped. She glanced at him and then back at the crowd, all of whom were watching this show with rapt fascination. And why wouldn’t they? Not only was it the first mayor’s race in Superstition Springs’ history, it had already jumped straight past conventional into… something else.
“Um, you’re welcome,” she said, but the last syllable rose at the end like it was almost a question instead of a statement. “Anyone would do the same.”
“But you genuinely cared about reaching out to assist a stranger. You have a heart for helping people. That’s why you’ll make a good mayor.”
“Right. I would,” she said faintly. “You would too. Probably.”
“No. That’s where we have to disagree,” he cut in with a sage nod at the crowd. “I’m a newcomer. I couldn’t possibly make the right decisions for a town I didn’t grow up in. You have family here. History.”
His throat got a little tight as he spoke. Every word was true. He didn’t really belong here, not yet. All he wanted was a chance to earn his place, to be able to say that about himself one day—that he had family here, roots, history.
She stared at him for a long moment, clearly speechless, so he shrugged away the sudden bout of melancholy and went for broke. Nothing like a clear, hard sell. “You’ll look out for everyone as well as you did for me when I faced adversity.”
“It was a pig,” Havana mumbled and lifted her hair from her shoulders, then put it back in exactly the same place as if she couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands.
Serenity had grown increasingly agitated the longer this went on, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other until she’d finally had enough, apparently. Jumping onto the small stage, she cut them both off with a nervous laugh.
“So, I have it on good authority that Caleb cares about this town’s history too,” Serenity told everyone.
“Yeah,” Lennie Ford tossed in before Caleb could say a word. “I like what I heard about keeping the buildings and trying to get more folks to open shops in the original town. Talk more about that.”
This was not going as planned. He should have had a talk with Serenity, obviously. Havana wasn’t her enemy, and frankly, he was a little cross that her own aunt had taken sides against her.
“I, um…” It wasn’t his turn, but Havana nodded graciously, lifting a hand in his direction to indicate he should go ahead. Dang it if she didn’t have more class than all the women he’d known in California. “It seems to me that all of you bring something unique to the table. We should honor that. Just like Havana brings unique skills to the table that I don’t have. We can all work together instead of being at odds.”
“You may not have grown up here, but neither did I,” Mavis J called out, earning nods and murmurs from some of the other old-timers. “I came here in the eighties because I wanted to find like-minded people. Folks who cared about the same things I did, who had music and art in their veins. This place speaks to the soul. You feel it too, or you wouldn’t have been talking about embracing our culture. You are one of us.”
That caught him in the gut sideways. The sharp ache mellowed almost instantly into the kind of longing he’d always suppressed well enough to ignore. Not this time. It all surged to the forefront. Superstition Springs wasn’t where he’d expected to end up, nor had any of these people invited him, but he’d found something special nonetheless. And he wanted to embrace it.
Eleven
After that catastrophe of a campaign speech, Havana wanted to crawl in bed. But Damian walked her back to the hotel and for some reason didn’t dash off like he usually did. Instead, he followed her inside, his expression unreadable.
He probably felt sorry for her and wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to fall apart after essentially being told Caleb belonged here and she didn’t. It was fine. Old news. Definitely nothing to cry over. At least not in front of anyone.
“Well, I’m sure you have calls or something,” she said with false brightness, pausing inside the door. When she turned to say goodbye, he was a lot closer than she’d anticipated, and her arms brushed his chest. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Damian murmured. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
He was such a sweet man, more concerned about her than the shopping center that slipped further and further away the longer she couldn’t get her act together. She smiled up at him and shook her head. “I’ll figure something out. Don’t give up on me.”
“I won’t.” His gaze roved over her face, and that’s when she caught a glint in his eyes that she’d never seen before. “I have to admit, I think you’re really brave, taking on the entire town in the name of this project. You were pretty great.”
“Oh.” Rattled, she shook her head and took a step back from his earnest praise. “No, I was a flop.”
She laughed self-consciously. There was a weird vibe here she couldn’t put her finger on. Damian was always nice to her, but she’d never picked up the sense that he’d singled her out for any special treatment. He was nice to everyone. This was the first time he’d complimented her with such fervor though.
“Havana.”
He reached out and snagged her hand, holding it in his, which he’d done before. Lots of times. Usually when they were pretending to be a couple. No one else was around at the moment though since Serenity had opted to stay behind at the diner to talk up her golden boy to the crowd.
So Damian had no reason to be stroking her knuckle with his thumb.
“Havana,” he repeated huskily. “You tried to hug me at the diner, and I messed up. I didn’t realize— Well, I see now that you’ve been using this fake engagement to get closer. I’m sorry it took me this long to clue in.”
“I… what?” She stared at him, her hand hanging limply in his as she scrambled to figure out where this conversation had gone off the rails. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“It’s not?”
His brows drew together in confusion. Oh, man. Oh, this was not good. This was an even worse disaster than the campaign speech. Her pulse hammered in her throat.
“No! I mean…”
She took a deep breath and bit back all the things she’d been about to spew out because first and foremost, she couldn’t hurt his feelings. He meant a lot to her, and she’d always considered him a dear friend. What was this terrible misunderstanding going to do to that friendship?
Or to the project? If she rejected him, he might not want to work with her anymore. She had to fix this.
Fake engagement. What had she been thinking?
“Okay, look,” she said as calmly as possible and squeezed his hand. “I value you as a friend. But that’s a
ll there is to it. I appreciate so much that you’ve agreed to act as my fiancé, but it’s led somewhere I didn’t intend for it to go. I’m not interested in you that way.”
That was about as tactful as she could be. He nodded once and let their fingers slip apart, his expression flattening.
“I see. I overstepped. My apologies.”
He didn’t sound upset. Cautiously she put a hand on his arm to show that they were still good. “I hope we can put this behind us and move on. As friends.”
Hopefully he didn’t take offense to her stressing that last part as heavily as she had. But he just gave her a small smile and briefly covered her hand with his palm.
“It’s Hardy then, right?” he asked.
“What’s hardy?” And then it dawned on her. “Caleb? What’s he got to do with this?”
Damian shook his head with an amused hmm. “He’s the reason you only think of me as a friend. I was hoping I was wrong, but I don’t think I am.”
“You are way off base,” she said and forced a laugh to cover the raspy note in her voice that would reveal far more to him than she’d like. “Way, way off. Like a billion miles from base. Maybe even—”
“I’ll remind you of this conversation in a few weeks.”
His smile got a lot smugger as she sputtered. Finally she found her vocal chords and used them to shoo Damian out the door with a firm good night. Honestly. Caleb was not the reason she thought of Damian as a friend. That had been the case before she’d even met Caleb.
He was the reason she hadn’t slept well all week. The reason her mind wandered frequently, only to end up reliving the first and second time she’d ended up in his arms while fantasizing about the third and fourth. He was definitely at least half the reason she’d botched the campaign speech.
And she’d take that to her death bed, thank you very much.
That night’s sleep didn’t go any better. Not only did Caleb make an unsurprising visit to her dreams, nerves unsettled her stomach to the point of ridiculous. The writing was on the wall. The town loved Caleb and didn’t love her. Serenity fell into that camp too—her own aunt preferred an outsider to her niece. It hurt, for more reasons than one.
She was here trying to fix the fact that she’d left. Didn’t everyone get that?
The next morning, the townsfolk all dutifully trooped to Ruby’s to participate in the first-ever Superstition Springs electoral process. By noon, Serenity and Augusta Moon, who had married Keith Moon’s eldest son, had the ballot box in hand, ready to count the votes so they could declare the official winner.
As Serenity and Augusta disappeared into the back of Ruby’s to lock themselves into her small office, Caleb untangled from his friends and made his way over to offer his hand. Of course. Because she needed additional stimuli at this point in time. But she couldn’t be rude, so she reached out.
The moment their flesh connected, a jolt went clear up her arm, and she didn’t bother to pretend it hadn’t, not when she had Damian’s voice echoing through her head. No, Caleb wasn’t the reason she couldn’t be anything but friends with Damian, but Damian was definitely the reason she knew the difference in what it felt like to hold hands with her fake fiancé and Caleb.
Dang it.
“May the best woman win,” he said cheerfully.
Clearly he’d gotten plenty of sleep in his room right below hers. Not that she’d spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about how close he was or anything.
“I think you’ve got it locked up, Miss Congeniality,” she said with an arched brow.
That made Caleb laugh, and she wished she didn’t like his laugh so much. He was so comfortable in his own skin, quick to poke fun at himself as fast as he made jokes about anything else. His enormous confidence might be at least seventy-five percent of his attractiveness.
Damian was confident in his own quiet way. Why couldn’t their flesh spark when they touched? It was maddening.
“It was a tough crowd,” he allowed. “I tried to make sure the whole process was balanced and not weighted so heavily in my favor.”
“Yeah, why did you?” she couldn’t help but ask. That had been bothering her, but after having to set Damian straight and expending so much energy trying to forget about the man sleeping in the room below, she’d yet to fully examine that odd piece of yesterday’s speeches.
“You started it. Caleb is an American hero,” he mimicked in a singsong voice. “That is so far from the truth—”
“I don’t sound like that.”
“That’s exactly what you said.” But he grinned to take the sting out of it. “Maybe without the falsetto. But still. My military service has nothing to do with my ability to lead a town.”
“I know. I was going to say that,” she said wryly. “But we got all off track, and then it didn’t seem to make a difference what I said. Serenity and her cohorts would have countered everything anyway. So I’m prepared to lose.”
She wasn’t. Not at all. Maybe she should have said she was expecting to lose, but that would sound petty. If Caleb got elected, it would be because the citizens of Superstition Springs thought he was the best choice. Period. And democracy said they got to make that choice, misguided or not.
“I hate that it went down like that.”
She shrugged with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “The folks don’t seem to like my brand of help.”
Which was the kicker. The thing that she hated. If she couldn’t have a husband, she needed a replacement. Helping the people of this town had been it. But she’d floundered from the start, leaving these enormous depths of nurturing she had inside her untapped. Story of her life. Maybe she deserved to go unfulfilled for abandoning her sisters and Serenity, who had definitely depended on her help. And maybe part of the problem was that she’d tried to give Serenity money to make up for that, and money wasn’t the motivating factor here.
But what was?
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I’m sorry that’s the case.”
Caleb ran a hand through his close-cropped brown hair, rumpling it, which detracted from his appeal not at all. Nothing did. His face wasn’t classically handsome and certainly had its share of worn places, as if he’d spent a lot of time in the sun without benefit of sunscreen. But it worked on him, creating a whole that was downright mouthwatering.
Which of course begged the question—why did she continue to put Damian between them? When she’d conceived of this fake fiancé idea, she hadn’t met Caleb yet. Didn’t matter. She knew herself and getting married, having that soul-deep connection with someone, was still something she yearned for. What she did not want was the soul-deep evisceration when she lost it. Still didn’t.
Except Caleb had happened. He made her feel… alive sometimes, as if she hadn’t really been awake until he’d engaged her temper, her vitality, even her funny bone sometimes. What would it be like to explore that even further? Her gaze strayed to his mouth as her thoughts inevitably circled there, imagining how he might kiss her. If she told him the truth about Damian, which she wasn’t at all prepared to do.
The expression on his face heated as he caught her watching him, and her gaze automatically lifted to lock with his. He was too close, too male, smelled too much like something her body craved and like her entire world had just spun off its axis.
That was the only excuse she could come up with for why she ached for him to touch her. However he pleased. He could slide a palm up her arm, cup her jaw. Brush a thumb across her ear. She wasn’t picky. But the touch of his lips on hers… The shudder that visual unleashed rocked her to the core.
She clawed it back, desperate to regain some of the control she’d lost. Futile. Control over anything in her life had been slipping away since Cole had announced he was done. And maybe that was the crux of this fake engagement plan—she’d needed to take action, to prove she still called the shots in her own life, not Cole. And neither did Serenity with her wacky predictions, never mind that it had unfolded exactly as she’d sa
id.
Work success may overshadow the desire for a relationship, and a problem may arise in becoming a bit too pushy or aggressive.
Yep, in retrospect, that was a frighteningly accurate statement concerning the events of yesterday. She’d tried to push her agenda on the town, and they weren’t buying. Well, if she wanted to be honest, that might have attributed to some of the reason Cole had dropped her like a hot potato too. He’d had a real problem with her ambition as well as her tendency to be assertive. Which was not the same thing as being bossy, like he’d said.
Wow. Fine time to have these realizations, after she’d already barged into town and blown her chances on this shopping center. Probably. But none of this explained why she’d so badly wanted to get married to Cole and then, in response to his rejection, had so carefully ensured she’d never meet anyone new by plunking down the barrier of Damian.
She didn’t believe Serenity’s predictions had any weight. Not really. But still, just in case, she’d carefully avoided the heartache of constantly wishing for someone to care for and constantly screwing that up.
Though she really didn’t get what was so bad about wanting to use the untapped stores inside that yearned to nurture. The right way though. Not because she’d been forced into it as a child. Not because she’d latched onto the wrong man for her. And definitely not because she’d railroaded townspeople into a shopping center they didn’t want—they had motivations and dreams she couldn’t begin to understand.
It would be better if she lost the race. These people needed something better than what she could give them.
Serenity and Augusta picked that moment to return from the back, ballot box in hand with the news of who had won. Havana didn’t need to hear the announcement; the answer was written all over the huge smile on her aunt’s face. Caleb was the new mayor.