“I trust you were naked the entire time?”
“I’m still naked. Are you still planning to be in Atlanta next month for the jewelry expo?”
Definitely smug. “Yes, but I’m not coming for dinner afterward unless you put some clothes on. The honeymoon’s over.” She peeked through her sheer curtains at her empty driveway.
“Oh, Sinclair,” her sister sighed, “as long as Beau’s got a pulse and a tongue, the honeymoon’s never over.”
She let the curtain drop back into place and grinned, despite her nerves. “I’m scandalized, Mrs. Smith-Montgomery. But it sounds like you had fun, and you weren’t sick the entire time.”
“I’m not going to lie to you. First trimester is not the ideal time to go on a snorkel boat.”
“So noted, although I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for me. All’s well on the baby front?”
“Yep. Baby likes the beach, as it turns out.”
“Convenient, since mommy likes the beach.” She paced over to her drafting desk and started straightening sketches.
“What can I say? He’s his mommy’s boy.”
She stopped tidying. “Boy?”
“Yes.” Savannah took an audible breath. “We just found out today. We’ve got a healthy baby boy in the works. I know I said I’d be thrilled either way, and I would, but—”
“But a boy is wonderful,” Sinclair finished for her sister and gave fate an invisible high five. Beau had lost his first wife and their four-month-old daughter in a car accident a couple years before Savannah had moved into the apartment beside his. Falling in love again, the baby…all of it had been an emotional minefield for him. Having a baby boy was a completely new experience for both of them. Something solely theirs, that they didn’t have to share with the past.
“Mom and Dad don’t know yet,” Savannah added.
“They won’t hear it from me.”
“Thanks. Mom’s next on my call list. You don’t have to keep it to yourself long.” Savannah sighed. “So…what’s new with you?”
“Me?” Was it her imagination, or did this sound like more than a casual inquiry on her sister’s part? “Not too much. A national retailer expressed interest in carrying some of my pieces, and I picked up a few hefty new custom commissions.”
“Sounds like you’re kicking ass professionally, but to be honest, I’m more curious about your personal life. What’s new there?”
Yep, Savannah was definitely chasing after specific information, and she’d studied at the knee of a master. She could be single-minded when she wanted to be, like a shark chasing prey. “Why do you ask?”
“I saw you dirty dancing with Shane Maguire at the wedding—”
“We were not dirty dancing. It was just a dance. One dance.”
“I gave him your purse, and then the both of you disappeared, so in my book, it wasn’t just a dance. You were wearing a different dress when you came back to the reception, which leads me to believe the escapade involved him tearing your clothes off.”
“I didn’t leave with him. There was no escapade. Jeez. Is that what everyone thinks? I couldn’t keep my hormones under control through my own sister’s wedding? He’s an old friend. He happened by while I was having a problem with my dress and helped me out. I drove myself home and changed. Now you have the whole sordid story.”
“That’s not the whole story, and we both know it,” Savannah said gently. “He’s the guy, isn’t he?”
Shit. She released a breath and rubbed her chest. “Yes.”
“Does he know?”
“He does now.” As briefly as possible, she explained their deal, and how that had evolved into…whatever it had evolved into.
“Wow,” Savannah said when she finished. “So, what now?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “He wants a second chance and says he plans to stick around, but…” She walked over to the window again.
“You don’t believe him?”
“I don’t know.” She was becoming the queen of I-don’t-knows. “I’m not the kind of girl men stick around for—”
“Bullshit.” The gentleness disappeared from Savannah’s voice. “He didn’t stick around. He couldn’t, and deep down you know that, but since then you haven’t let anyone get close enough to stick. I can name two reasons why that’s the case, but neither has anything to do with you not being sticky enough.”
“Okay, fine. Maybe I’m not looking to get stuck? I know this might be hard to believe, but if you look past the glow of your own happiness, you’ll see a whole bunch of people—me included—who prefer casual, non-stick arrangements.”
“How would you know what you prefer? You got hurt once. Things took an unplanned turn, and you got in way over your head. The experience left a scar. I understand. But you’ve been guarding yourself ever since. You’re not sixteen anymore. You’re a grown-ass woman. And a grown-ass woman knows how to handle a relationship without getting in over her head.”
“You sound just like Mom.”
“She’s astute, our mother. But I bet even she doesn’t have a clue as to the other reason you’ve avoided handing your heart to anyone again. It’s because—”
“Why is it that everyone who gets into a serious relationship suddenly becomes an expert on love?” The heart in question started to pound, but she mustered up a laugh. “Henpecked single people everywhere want to know.”
Savannah went on as if she hadn’t interrupted. “You haven’t given your heart to anyone else because the best parts of it are already spoken for. Shane has them. He’s always had them.”
“That’s not true.” She forced another laugh, which came out hollow because her lungs refused to hold air.
“Whether you like it or not,” her sister insisted.
“I don’t like it.” The words flew out of her mouth, loud and angry, and not at all the outright denial she’d intended. She dropped down in a chair at her kitchen table and rested her forehead in her hand. “I don’t like it,” she repeated, letting the underlying truth settle over her. “Shit. What am I going to do?”
“He wants a second chance, Sinclair. You both deserve that much.”
The sound of tires rolling up her driveway propelled her into motion. She got up and crossed to the door. “There’s so much baggage between us.” A lift of a handle, a hard tug, and the big door rolled open. She stepped out onto the stone porch and pulled the door shut behind her with a bang. The Range Rover rolled to a stop just a few feet away. “What if it doesn’t work out?”
“What if it does?”
“Spoken like a newlywed.”
Shane came around the front of the Rover, all masculine grace and rangy muscles in a black Henley and army-green utility pants. The late-afternoon sun put copper highlights in his uncharacteristically windblown hair, but the thing that really made her knees go weak was his face. A good day’s worth of stubble lined his jaw, and the look in his eyes suggested she could expect to feel the rasp of it on every inch of her skin.
“Gotta go,” she mumbled in the general direction of her phone and hit disconnect a moment before two strong arms pulled her up against the hard bluff of his body and a hot mouth covered hers.
Chapter Twelve
He’d meant to clean up and arrive on her doorstep looking a little less like he’d been running his ass off for the better part of forty-eight hours. But a quick shower and change of clothes had been the best he could manage, because he’d gone and done something impulsive—something besides haul her into his arms and take possession of her mouth as if he could suck every doubt out of her head with a long, thorough kiss—and ended up scrambling to get the details of a new plan in place.
Sadly, that plan didn’t involve delivering orgasms in her driveway, so he ended the kiss in stages, cupping her jaw, brushing his mouth over hers, lingering there for increasingly brief moments until she sighed against his lips and opened her eyes. “You’re late.”
He was. Five minutes. “You�
��re strict.” He kissed her again, hard and quick. “You can punish me. Later.”
One dark brow arched. “Careful what you promise, Maguire. I might hold you to it.”
As she spoke, she rubbed her palm over his cheek, and it occurred to him she’d never seen him unshaven before. At least not since going without a shave for more than a day made any discernable difference. Did she like it? He sure as hell liked the feel of her hand smoothing his jaw. “I’m at your mercy, once we’re through with today’s tour.” He took her hand and led her to the car.
“Speaking of which, what is on this afternoon’s itinerary?” She halted by the passenger door and tucked her phone into the pocket of her black, insulated ski vest. “Am I dressed right?”
He used the question as an excuse to inspect her, from the top of her sexy, bundled-up hair to the toes of her black-and-gray cross-trainers. True, he got a little caught up in the way her white thermal top clung to her breasts, but not so distracted he didn’t consider if it would keep her warm enough once the sun set. Probably, but he could if it didn’t. He opened the passenger door. “That works.”
“Great.” She climbed into the Rover, unknowingly treating him to a glimpse of long legs and her perfect, heart-shaped ass in skintight black leggings. Would she notice he’d only answered one of her questions?
As soon as he settled himself behind the wheel, she asked, “Where are we headed?”
That would be a yes. He reversed into a turn. “On a hike. Nothing too grueling.”
“Okay, fine. But where?”
“One of the new subdivisions. You’ll see.” There was no way to divulge their exact destination without divulging more than he wanted her to know.
Apparently going with the flow suited her this afternoon, because she just rolled her eyes and then combed the side of his hair with her fingers. “Looks like you had a busy day.”
He leaned into the rake of her nails against his scalp as she tried to bring order to hair he’d let wind dry after his shower because he hadn’t wanted to spare extra minutes to run a comb through it. “A busy couple days,” he admitted as he made the turn onto the main road. “I had a meeting in Virginia this morning with a special consultant, after coming off a full day of meetings yesterday.” Not to mention a shitload of personal business he’d sprung on himself in his effort to give her tangible evidence he was invested in this.
She scoured her nails along the back of his neck and sent a scalp-tightening chill of pleasure along his nerve endings. Only the fact that he sat behind the wheel of a moving vehicle prevented him from dropping his head and giving himself over to those roaming fingers. “Sounds important.”
“Hmm.” Her fingertip brushed his earlobe, and his cock twitched. “Some of it is. Some is bullshit. Politics. Money. Jockeying for position.”
“You thrive on the challenge.” Her hand retreated down his neck and across the top of his shoulder.
“I like it, most of the time,” he acknowledged. “I know it might seem counterintuitive, based on the guy I was until Uncle Sam got ahold of me, but I’m good at what I do. The planning, the logistics, and especially the execution. Acquiring those skills forced me to learn patience and get a handle on my reckless tendencies.”
Then again, he’d let his impulsive side off the leash in a major way over the last forty-eight hours. He glanced her way to find her giving him a hard-to-read look. “I know a lot of people around here expected me to end up like Derek. Can’t say I’m sorry to disappoint them.”
She skimmed her fingers along his jaw, just a fleeting touch, and then lowered her hand to her lap. “I’m proud of you,” she said quietly. “I always have been.”
Something in his chest warmed and expanded, but he simply took her hand, joined their fingers, and gave her a smile. “Always? Why Sinclair, have you been keeping track of me?”
She shrugged. “I might have heard a thing or two, from time to time. Mrs. Pinkerton’s cousin-in-law has a neighbor whose nephew works in the same nursing home where your mom works—or something like that. I’m never one hundred percent on her sources, but she seemed to know about every stripe and commendation, and then every promotion when you went private.”
“No personal curiosity on your part, then?”
She shrugged again. “I might have visited the Haggerty website once or twice over the years.”
“Just keeping tabs?”
Her smile dug a little indentation in her cheek. “Checking to see if you’d gotten fat and bald.”
He laughed. “Disappointed?”
“Extremely.”
“Well, I didn’t have Claudia Pinkerton supplying me with highlights from the adventures of Sinclair Smith, but I cyberstalked you, too, from time to time.”
“To see if I’d gotten fat and bald?”
He laughed and slowed to make a turn onto a narrow paved road. “To watch you establish your business, and grow it. I’m proud of you, too, baby girl.” He gave her hand a squeeze and then released it to take the wheel and steer the Rover as the road transitioned from paved to dirt. “You turned something you loved into a successful career. That takes talent and hustle.”
The road turned bumpy, but he risked a glance at Sinclair and found her blushing.
“Thank you,” she said. “There’s luck involved, too. I got some good visibility early on thanks to a sorority sister who married into a high-profile family. She asked me to design her rings and the jewelry she wore for the wedding. That parure I did for her is what really launched me.”
“You can’t underestimate the appeal of a good puh-roo.” What the fuck was a puh-roo?
“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
She had him there. He could distinguish a ring from a necklace, but despite checking her website and social media posts, he didn’t know much about jewelry. Given everything he had on deck for this evening, he figured he might as well tell the truth. “Honestly, the entire time I stalked you I was only on the lookout for one thing.”
“Discount codes?”
“A change to your last name.”
She stilled. “You checked to see if I’d gotten married?”
He braked and eased the Rover to a stop at the end of the dirt road. Resting his wrists on the wheel, he turned to her. “Back in the day, when you wouldn’t answer my calls and returned my letters, my CO advised me I had no business trying to stay in contact a sixteen-year-old girl who clearly wasn’t feeling reciprocal. He told me to consider you the one that got away and let you get on with your life. I did, because a part of me had always figured it was only a matter of time before I fucked us up, and then—big surprise—I did, and obviously, you wanted nothing to do with me. But another part of me knew better. I ignored it. I shouldn’t have.”
She shook her head. “It’s ancient history, Shane—”
He opened his door to cut her off, because he didn’t want her to tell him it didn’t matter. Their history mattered, and tonight was about proving it to her. “We’re here. Ready to hike?”
…
Sinclair followed Shane past a sign announcing lots for sale, onto a parallel path of hard-packed dirt carved from the tracks of vehicles. Despite the evidence of human encroachment, vines wove around the trunks of mature trees and grew thick on either side of the trail. Back in high school, there had been no clear-cut walkway. No generous lots demarked by for sale or sold signs and corner-staked with little orange flags. It had been untouched woodland. These days, it no doubt merited Shane’s professional interest as one of Magnolia Grove’s newest future home sites. Did he remember following her into these same woods on a sultry May night to celebrate his eighteenth birthday?
Somewhere around here grew a willow tree with limbs that reached the ground and had provided the perfect shelter for her to give him gifts she couldn’t take back. Despite how everything between them had played out, she counted that night as one of the most special moments of her life. They were traipsing dangerously
close to that sacred ground. The path veered, and she followed him around a bend. They walked past a fenced-off lot where a crew had assembled the frame of a large, two-story home. Her heart sank. Was the tree even around anymore? She didn’t want to sully the memory of that night with some haphazard tour of new construction.
“How much farther?” she asked when the path split again. Another half-built house came into view, along with some no trespassing signs. Nothing looked familiar. She was all turned around.
“Let’s go this way.” He stopped at one of the orange flags staked into the ground near a narrow opening between two pines and held some branches aside for her.
She hesitated. “The sign says ‘No Trespassing.’”
His slow smile belonged to an eighteen-year-old renegade. “There was a time when you were down for a little rule-breaking.”
Maybe he did remember. “Yeah, but we’re not kids anymore, and it wouldn’t look good for the city’s expert consultant to get busted for trespassing.”
The smile only widened, carving a groove beside his mouth. “Trust me, baby girl.” With that, he walked through the opening and disappeared behind the fringy overgrowth.
She danced with uncertainty for a moment. A woman who lived in the middle of nowhere knew her way around the wilderness, but they’d taken one too many turns while she’d been journeying down memory lane. The result? She wasn’t sure how to get back to the car. She did know the region was blessed with a variety of wildlife that hunted at dusk and might not be intimidated by a lone woman on an empty trail—raccoons, foxes…skunks. Something skittered in the roots near her feet. “Shane!” She dived through the opening in the pines, only to run into an unyielding wall of muscle and bounce off with a breathless, “Oomph.”
Quick hands caught her arms and steadied her. “It’s official. Something about this place makes you want to jump me.”
And that’s when she saw it—lights shining from under the rounded, drooping branches of a winter-bare willow tree. Their tree. Taller, broader, but theirs. Her heart stuttered. “Shane?”
Emergency Attraction (Love Emergency) Page 13