Carolyn was still in way over her head, lake or no lake, but she had had the presence of mind to wonder why Brody hadn’t even attempted to make love to her, when he had the chance.
“You wouldn’t have succeeded anyhow,” she said stiffly, and maybe a beat too late.
“Are you challenging me?” Brody wanted to know. Managing the horse, even with another rider in front of him, required no discernible effort on his part. He might have been part of the animal, he was so at ease. “If you are, I’m up to it—so to speak.”
Hard need went through Carolyn’s entire being in that moment. She was half again too stubborn—and too rattled—to come up with a response.
Brody laughed, and one of his hands rose to slip inside her loose-fitting flannel shirt to cup her breast. Even with a bra and a T-shirt in between, he must have felt her nipple tighten against his palm.
It took all of Carolyn’s considerable self-control to grab his wrist and jerk his hand away. “We have an agreement, Brody,” she reminded him tersely. “No sex. Remember?”
“That might have been a little rash of us,” he said. “Deciding to save ourselves, I mean.” His breath brushed her right ear, and then he nibbled briefly at the lobe.
Carolyn bit back another groan. Gave him a quick jab with her elbow. “Stop it, Brody,” she said.
He sighed again. By then, Moonshine was traveling at a smooth lope, and the motion of that horse, and Brody at her back—well, it was beyond sensual. It was very nearly climactic.
“Is this agreement of ours…open-ended?” he finally asked.
Up ahead, Carolyn spotted Blossom, placidly munching on grass alongside the trail.
“Wh-what do you mean?” Carolyn asked, glad to see the runaway mare within catching distance, and unhurt.
“I mean,” Brody almost breathed, making no comment on Blossom’s reappearance, though he’d surely seen her, “that the no-sex deal isn’t working for me. We need to discuss it, Carolyn.”
“Discuss it?” Carolyn echoed. “That isn’t what you mean at all, and you know it.”
They drew up alongside Blossom, and Carolyn swung one leg over Moonshine’s neck and jumped to the ground while Brody leaned to take hold of the mare’s bridle strap in case she took a notion to run off again.
“What do I mean, then, since you seem to know?” Brody countered, wielding that grin again. He let go of the bridle when she was mounted on Blossom, but he didn’t make Moonshine turn, didn’t give her so much as an inch of space, so his left leg was pressing into her right.
“It’s working fine for me,” Carolyn said, ignoring the question.
“What’s working fine for you?”
She flushed. “The no-sex agreement,” she said. She pointed Blossom toward home and gave the animal a light nudge with her boot heels to get her going.
Brody kept up. “Now, that is a peculiar statement, Carolyn,” he observed mildly, “because the nooky-ban obviously isn’t working any better for you than it is for me—which is to say, not at all.”
“Nooky-ban?” Carolyn shot back. “Isn’t that color ful?”
“Oh, I just ooze colorful,” Brody teased.
“Shut up, Brody.”
He didn’t, of course. “Why can’t you just admit it, Carolyn? Wherever else we might have dropped the ball, we had a real good thing going in bed.”
Even she, the queen of denial, couldn’t refute that one. “Not good enough, obviously,” she said, glaring over at him. “It didn’t keep you in Lonesome Bend, now did it?”
Now that they’d recovered Blossom, and Kim and Davis wouldn’t be sending out a posse to look for her, Carolyn had time to be mad at herself.
She should be at the shop right this minute, have the door unlocked and the Open sign facing the porch.
Instead, Tricia was probably there by herself, wondering where the heck Carolyn was.
She was so engaged with this thought, and others like it, that she didn’t immediately notice the strange stillness that had descended over Brody.
A glance in his direction verified the intuition.
His jawline was tight, his backbone was straight as a ramrod, and he was looking directly ahead, between Moonshine’s ears. Both horses were ambling along at an easy pace now.
“Like I said before,” Brody went on, without looking at her, “it’s time we talked.”
“I’m not sure we have anything to say to each other,” Carolyn said, hoping those words hadn’t come out sounding as sad as they felt.
At last, he caught and held her gaze. His expression was grim. “I have plenty to say to you, Carolyn,” he answered, “and I mean to get it all said.”
Panic took wing behind Carolyn’s rib cage, like some crazed little bird. “Brody, I have to get back to the shop—I never planned on being gone this long and—”
“Later will be fine,” he said, when she finally fell silent. “Your place or mine?”
Your place or mine?
Risky business, either way.
Still, Brody wasn’t going to let her put him off, that much was plain.
“How about the coffee shop?” she asked, too brightly. “We could meet after I close the shop at five.”
“Too public,” Brody said, looking as though he’d never grin that trademark grin of his again, he was so solemn.
Carolyn tried to think. If they “talked” at Brody’s place, he’d have condoms handy, so why not go ahead and seduce her? Essentially, she’d be helpless against him, and he knew that.
If, on the other hand, they got together at the apartment, all he’d have to do was kiss her, or cup her breast in his hand again, and she wouldn’t care whether or not they used a condom.
“My place,” she finally said. “Six o’clock?”
Brody nodded, and Kim and Davis’s barn came into view, and the conversation was over—for the time being, anyway.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN FRONT OF Kim and Davis’s barn, Brody dismounted and left Moonshine at the hitching rail to take hold of Blossom’s bridle strap. Carolyn was still in the saddle, flustered and so delicious that just looking at her sent a whole new charge of desire grabbing its way through him like wildfire.
“I’ll tend to the mare,” Brody told her quietly. “You go on into town and do whatever it is you figure you should be doing right now.”
Carolyn bit her lower lip, nodded once, got down and practically sprinted to her car. Next thing he knew, she was speeding down the driveway in the proverbial cloud of dust.
One corner of Brody’s mouth quirked up at the sight, but there wasn’t much juice behind that grin. If only he hadn’t run off at the mouth before about how he and Carolyn oughtn’t to have sex, he might be making love to the woman in the tall grass back there at Hidden Lake right now—condom be damned—instead of watching her rush off like the devil himself was on her trail.
He heard the creak of screen-door hinges, and Kim stepped out of the house, sans her usual yappy little sidekicks, to stand on the side porch, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand. “Brody?” she called, casting a concerned look in the direction of Carolyn’s still-billowing dust-plume. “Did something happen?”
“Nothing happened,” Brody replied.
And I mean nothing. Damn it all to hell.
He led Blossom inside the barn, hoping Kim would leave him in peace, so he could unsaddle the mare, give her a flake of hay and a quick brushing and get on with his day.
No such luck.
“It’s not like Carolyn to rush away like that,” Kim said, standing in the breezeway now, watching him over the door of Blossom’s stall. “She didn’t even say goodbye.”
She’d always been as light-footed as a Sioux scout, Kim had. Back when he and Conner and Steven were kids, she’d had an uncanny way of showing up out of nowhere, without any sound to warn of her approach, just when they were about to get into some kind of mischief.
“She’s in a hurry to open the shop,” Brody said offhandedly.
“You made Carolyn mad again, didn’t you?” Kim persisted.
Inwardly, Brody sighed, wondering if the whole universe was out of whack, or if it was just him. There had to be some reason why nothing had gone his way since he’d opened his eyes that morning.
“No,” he said, returning the grooming brush to the high, rusty nail where it was kept, dangling from a small leather loop. “I didn’t.”
Kim narrowed her eyes at him as he opened the stall door and eased through the gap to stand there in the aisle, facing her. “Something upset her,” she said.
Brody ducked his head, rubbed the back of his neck. It wasn’t until then that he realized he’d left his hat in his truck, down at the main ranch house. These days, he figured, he probably would have forgotten his right arm if it wasn’t hooked to his shoulder.
“Carolyn doesn’t need me to upset her,” he said reasonably. “She can handle that one all on her own.”
Kim sighed and folded her arms. She was dressed about normal for her, in a pink Western-cut shirt with pearly snaps, worn jeans and boots. “Maybe you ought to go after her. The two of you could talk….”
“We’ve already made plans to do that,” Brody answered, willing to give Kim that much information but no more.
Kim opened her mouth, closed it again, evidently deciding she had nothing more to say. It was a rare phenomenon, but it happened.
Brody grinned, kissed her on the forehead and headed for the barn door.
Moonshine, ever patient, waited at the hitching post. Brody released the loose slipknot he’d made with the reins and hauled himself up into the saddle.
Kim, on her way back to the house by then, waved a farewell.
Passing the corral on Moonshine, Brody paused to look over at Firefly, the Thoroughbred Kim and Davis had adopted some time before. While he understood their concern about the animal’s welfare, he had serious reservations where Firefly was concerned.
This was no ordinary saddle horse. The Thoroughbred was fifteen hundred pounds of raw power, with the blood of champions running hot in his veins. He was still sound physically, but famously temperamental—according to Davis, even the most seasoned jockeys in the business had refused to ride him, there at the end of his mostly unremarkable career.
Brody was a cowboy, not a jockey, and for that very reason, he was tempted to throw a saddle and bridle on that gelding and see for himself just how fast the sucker could run.
Of course, Davis would kill him if he tried. Provided the horse didn’t kill him first, that is.
Still, the idea burrowed into Brody’s already beleaguered brain, germinated and took root there, like a magic bean.
But he was, as Davis would say, burning daylight; he had fence lines to ride, if he didn’t want a lecture from his uncle about pulling his weight on the ranch.
At the moment, Brody didn’t want a lecture from anybody.
WHAT HAVE I DONE? CAROLYN asked herself, as she drove toward town.
Well, duh, that self answered. You practically offered yourself to Brody Creed on a silver platter, that’s what. You invited him to your apartment, knowing full well what’s going to happen.
A smile broke over Carolyn’s face, and a thrill went through her, lodging squarely between her pelvic bones. “God, I hope so,” she said, right out loud, the announcement rising, it seemed, from the very ground of her being, as though her body had somehow summoned all its resources to be heard over the voice of common sense.
Brimming with crazy emotions she couldn’t begin to untangle, let alone name, Carolyn wondered if she really was losing her mind.
When she arrived at the shop, Tricia was there, as she’d expected.
What Carolyn hadn’t expected was a store full of customers.
Where had they all come from? She hadn’t seen a bus outside, or even a car.
“Glad you could make it,” Tricia told her sweetly, looking her over with an expression of knowing amusement frolicking in her eyes.
Carolyn, unprepared for a crowd, blushed. She smelled like a horse, her hair probably looked like a fright wig, and her friend seemed to know precisely what she’d been up to that morning, up at Hidden Lake.
Or almost up to, anyway.
Probably impossible, she thought, with considerable relief. Tricia was smart, but she wasn’t psychic, for pity’s sake.
“I’ll be right back,” she told Tricia, racing for the inside stairs.
Reaching her apartment, Carolyn took the world’s fastest shower, threw on fresh clothes, blow-dried her wild tresses into a semblance of submission and practically broke her neck getting back down to the shop.
All the shoppers had gone by then, and Tricia, perched on a high stool behind the counter, eyed Carolyn with good-natured suspicion.
“And where have you been, pray tell?” she asked warmly.
Carolyn knew what Tricia was thinking—that she’d been out the whole night and not just for part of the morning—and she teetered on the edge of protesting too much.
“Out,” she replied pleasantly, as Winston meowed and curled himself around her ankles. “Where did all those people come from?”
“Around,” Tricia said airily. “Word seems to be getting out that we carry unique merchandise. Two of them had seen the gypsy skirt online, and they wanted to know if they could make offers. I told them they’d have to go to the auction site and bid.”
Carolyn felt the usual pang at the thought of selling the skirt. It would be better if it went to a stranger, though, someone who lived far away from Lonesome Bend. Seeing some local woman wearing it would be like catching regular glimpses of a child she’d given up for adoption in the company of another mother.
“Good call,” Carolyn said, and began straightening a display table. She needed, in that moment, to look busy.
“Carolyn,” Tricia said firmly, but quietly.
Carolyn stopped cold, like a Londoner during the Blitz, hearing the telltale whistle of a dropping bomb.
“We need to talk,” Tricia told her.
Brody had said pretty much the same thing, just that morning.
Why did everyone suddenly want to talk? Whatever happened to leaving well enough alone?
“O-o-okay,” Carolyn said warily, stretching out the word. She stopped pretending to work and turned to meet Tricia’s gaze. “You start.”
Tricia sighed. “You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been leaving the shop early a lot lately,” she began. “And I don’t think that’s fair to you. We’re supposed to be partners.”
“Tricia,” Carolyn reminded her friend softly, “you’re expecting a baby. I don’t mind covering for you once in a while.”
“That’s just it,” Tricia answered, “it hasn’t been just once in a while. I feel perfectly fine—honestly, I do— but some days I just feel so tired. My doctor says that’s pretty much normal, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing more than your share.” Another sigh. “Which means something has to give.”
Carolyn swallowed hard, suddenly aware, and keenly, of what was coming. She should have anticipated that Tricia would want to quit the business, she supposed, but she hadn’t. The decision made sense—while Tricia would have lots of help at home after the baby came, the new arrival would take up more of her time and energy, not less.
“I’m not asking you to buy me out,” Tricia went on. “I know that isn’t possible right now. Maybe, once the baby is older—”
When the baby was older, Carolyn thought, with a mixture of understanding and affectionate envy, there would probably be another baby. If not several.
“Carolyn,” Tricia urged, “say something.”
Carolyn rummaged up a smile. “Everything has to change
sometime,” she said, looking wistfully around at the shop, with all its colorful and many-textured handmade offerings. It was a haven of grace, a virtual celebration of creativity, and Carolyn hadn’t realized how much she loved the place until now. “But it was good while it lasted.”
Tricia eased down off the stool then and sort of waddled over to Carolyn. A worried frown creased her forehead. “While it lasted?” she echoed. “Are you saying you don’t want to keep the shop open?”
Carolyn spread her hands wide for a moment. “How would I do that, Tricia?” she asked. “I can’t afford to hire help, and running this place alone would be too much, considering all the sewing I need to do in addition to stocking shelves, keeping the books, waiting on customers and all the rest.”
“Carolyn,” Tricia said, her voice taking on a note of quiet urgency, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying here, and it’s no wonder, I guess, given all I’ve left out.” She drew a deep breath, let it out and rested her hands on the sides of her protruding belly. “I was hoping to become a sort of silent partner—you know, pump some cash into the business and maybe help out in an advisory capacity once in a while. Track down new artists online. If I invested in the shop, well, then you could hire some help—maybe a couple of part-timers?—and still have more time for the creative stuff.”
Always wary of anything that sounded too good to be true, Carolyn plunked her hands on her hips, in an unconscious reflection of Tricia’s stance, and considered the situation. Finally, she blurted out, “Is this charity?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Tricia replied, “of course it isn’t charity. It’s a business proposition.” She looked thoughtful for a long moment. “I suppose I could buy you out, though, and hire a manager and some salespeople—but what would be the use in that? It’s things like those aprons you’re always whipping up, and your eye for unique merchandise, that sets us apart from other stores and galleries.”
“No,” Carolyn said, very quickly, and then blushed.
“Huh?” Tricia asked, clearly confused.
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