by Jeannie Watt
Finally, dressed in a simple blue scoop-neck T-shirt and her jeans with the bling on the back pockets, she slipped her feet into sandals, slapped on a couple of silver bangles and headed out the door. This was just going be an evening of shared conversation and food. Nothing else, so there was no need for butterflies.
The butterflies weren’t listening—probably because she was lying to herself. This was not about just food and conversation. This was about two people deciding what their next move would be—and the fluttering intensified as she parked her car, then crossed the neat lawn to the redwood deck, where Gabe was tending the coals in a barbecue.
“Hey,” he said with an easy smile. He was wearing his glasses and instead of the dark jeans and oxford shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, he had on well-worn jeans that hugged the muscles in his thighs and a charcoal-gray T-shirt. He looked comfortable, laid-back—pretty much the exact opposite of how she felt.
“Hey yourself,” she replied, smiling as if she was as relaxed as he. “I didn’t think about it until I was driving over, but I should have brought beer or wine or something.”
“I have plenty.”
“Glad to hear it,” Dani replied with more feeling than she intended.
Gabe cocked an eyebrow. “Bad day?”
A breeze swirled by and she brushed the hair back from her face. “Long day.” She wasn’t going to broach the matter of Chad and the reunion, mainly because she was disgusted with herself. “Yesterday—that was a bad day.”
Gabe motioned to the wood-framed glass door leading into the house and Dani followed. “What happened yesterday?” he asked as he held the door open for her. “It didn’t involve Lacy, did it?”
“No. I had a run-in with a client,” Dani said as she stepped inside. The interior was almost as empty as that of her house, except that it was much more opulent. Black granite counters, stainless-steel appliances, a vaulted ceiling. Built-in bookshelves and cabinets lined two walls while the south wall, which faced her ranch, was entirely glassed-in, giving him a tremendous view.
She turned back as Gabe set a glass on the counter and Dani realized that even though he was there temporarily, he had nicer wineglasses than she did. Perhaps because hers had been free with the purchase of a bottle of Christmas chardonnay.
“What happened with your client?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I was too candid. Bad habit of mine. I think I’m being tactful, but sometimes I just say things.”
“When one works with the public, candid isn’t always the best option.”
“You sound like someone who knows.”
“No. I’m someone who doesn’t work with the public for that very reason. That’s why I have Serena. She fronts for me.”
“Perhaps I should get Kelly to front for me.”
“What happened?” Gabe asked again as he handed her the glass.
“The short version is that I told a client that she was a beginner and that the horse she’d purchased wasn’t a beginner’s horse. She said she’d thought that it was my job to turn the mare into a beginner’s horse.” Dani rolled her shoulders as she recalled the uncomfortable discussion where she had to walk the thin line between truth and smoothing the client’s ruffled feathers. “Then I said that was my job, but that I needed to work with her, too, so that she knew the same cues the horse did. For some reason she thought I was telling her that she was a poor rider rather than a beginning rider, which wasn’t my intention, and...” She lifted the wine in a salute.
“Are you certain you want to make this your chosen profession?”
“Oh, yes.” She spoke with certainty. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was her chosen profession. “This is part of the game. I did manage to convey what I was really saying. Finally. The woman apologized for misunderstanding, but it was kind of stressful. I wasn’t unhappy to see her get into her car and drive away.”
Gabe smiled at her from across the counter, where he was rubbing olive oil on two steaks. “Sounds like you did all right.”
“Funny how much more important these encounters are when you’re running your own business. One person bad-mouthing you can cause considerable damage.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Dani cocked her head at him. “How long have you been in business for yourself?”
“Five years. I interned while in college with some pretty big firms, then was fortunate enough to get a start-up loan from the father of a friend, who also threw some contacts my way.” One corner of his mouth tightened wryly. “One of the few times in my life things went according to plan.”
“You’ve hit a few bumps in the road?”
“You could say that,” he answered smoothly, lifting the plate with the T-bones. “How do you like your steak?”
“Medium.”
“I’m no grill master, but I’ll do my best.”
Not a grill master indeed. He had a station set up next to the barbecue kettle that would have done a surgeon proud, all the implements lined up in a neat row—tongs, spatula, fork—and the seasonings in another. He allowed the palm of one hand to hover over the charcoal for a few seconds, gave a satisfied nod and carefully set the first steak on the hot grill, lifting it, then resettling it so the meat wouldn’t adhere, then repeated with the other steak.
“Done this before, have you?”
“I’m a guy. I like cooking dangerously.”
“All you need is a Kiss the Cook apron and the picture would be complete.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” he said as he shifted one steak a fraction of an inch.
“An apron?”
He slowly shook his head. “No.”
Dani felt a smile start to play on her lips as she caught his drift. “I thought we agreed to a friends-only evening?”
“Hey,” he said with an innocent shrug. “Kissing the cook is a time-honored tradition and totally innocuous. Like kissing a maiden aunt.”
“I think kissing you would be nothing like kissing a maiden aunt,” she said drily.
“Want to find out?” he asked with a waggle of his eyebrows that made her smile finally break through, despite the unsettling low, slow tumble deep in her abdomen. She was edging closer to that flame and rather enjoying the flicker of heat.
She stepped back. “Maybe I’ll wait until you put on your apron.”
He set down his tongs with a clatter. “I’ll just be a minute...”
Dani laughed, but even though he gave the appearance of kidding, he wasn’t. He wanted to kiss her. She could see it in the way his eyes kept drifting to her lips and realized that she was going to have to make a decision here. Fish or cut bait.
“Can’t blame a guy for trying...in a friendly way.” He picked up the tongs and turned his attention back to the steaks and Dani drew in a breath. She had no doubts now that they were heading in the same direction, despite the friends-only talk. Her question was how far did she want to go?
She sat on the edge of the redwood deck and watched Gabe’s profile while he tended the grill. He might not be married, but he had to be involved with someone. Guys like this didn’t just walk around unencumbered—not unless there was some kind of chink in the armor.
“What?” Gabe asked and Dani realized just how intently she’d been studying him.
“Just wondering what your fatal flaw is.”
“Too many to count,” he replied easily, returning his focus to the steaks.
“I guess that’s why you’re single.”
He turned an amused gaze toward her. “Probably,” he agreed. “You do have a gift for being candid.”
“I’m nothing compared to my sister Jolie.”
“She’s the one moving in with you in a few months.”
“Yes. She’s the reason we still have the ranch. My older sisters, Mel and Allie, wanted to sell after Allie and Kyle decided to split up. I agreed to sell, too, even though I love the place, because I thought I was going to be with SnowFrost for a long time.” She took a sip of wine.
“Then the bad thing happened.”
“Company went under?”
“Oh, yeah. And it was a surprise. The owners had done a superb job of making us believe that everything was going well—not to fool us, but because they were hoping it would eventually be true. That things would turn around. They didn’t.” Gabe pulled the first steak off the grill and set it on a plate. “At first I was devastated. I knew I could find another job, but working at SnowFrost... It was small and intimate. I loved my job. And it was gone.”
“Stinks.”
Dani smiled. “But then I realized that although SnowFrost had failed, at least the owners had taken a shot, and maybe it was time that I also took a shot—while we still owned the Lightning Creek. It was the perfect place to set up the business I dreamed of, but honestly never really planned to embark on because it wasn’t secure. Well, neither was my nine-to-five job in the end.”
“Did it bother you to think about selling? Back when you’d thought you wanted to?” Dani shot him a questioning look and he said, “You mentioned that your older sister never liked the ranch much, even though she settled on it. I was wondering how you felt.”
“Like I said, I love the ranch, but felt for Allie. She was so unhappy, and Mel, who worked in real estate, seemed to think selling was the best bet.” Dani shrugged. “So I went along with it. Sometimes you have to cut ties with things you love in order to move forward.”
Gabe’s gaze seemed to sharpen as he slowly nodded. “Good point.”
“How about you? Do you have any deep emotional ties to a place?”
“I traveled too much as a kid.”
“Military brat?”
“Foster child. Juvenile delinquent.”
Dani felt her mouth start to drop open and managed to shut it again. “I had no idea.”
Gabe shrugged and brought the plates to the table, where he’d already laid out a simple green salad, a loaf of French bread and butter. “It’s just the way things were,” he said before smiling at her. “I hope you don’t mind simple.”
“Me? The queen of the frozen entrée? I think not.” But she was still working on that foster-child thing. It was one thing to have one pair of foster parents, but to be moved around a lot—that didn’t sound good at all.
Gabe sat across from her, picked up a steak knife and carved out his first bite. Dani did the same, missing the easy camaraderie that had been there seconds before. Gabe concentrated on his meal for a few long moments, then looked up and addressed the issue with a few quick sentences. “I was a foster child because my mother was unstable. Living in someone else’s house wasn’t that bad.”
“Because yours was.”
“Yeah.” He spoke matter-of-factly, without a trace of self-pity, and Dani began to relax as his acceptance of his past became evident. “I was removed from the home the first time when I was seven, after my grandmother died. Mom wanted me back when I was eleven. That lasted almost a year, then I was put back in the system and stayed there.”
“You’ve made a success of your life.”
An odd look crossed his face, then vanished. “Because someone eventually hammered into me the point that I was the only person in charge of my life. I may not have been able to choose the life I lived as a child, but I could choose my future.”
“You appear to have chosen well.”
Gabe lifted his wine, gave a small salute before he drank. “Honestly? I have no complaints.”
“Neither do I,” Dani said. “Well, if I had a do-over, I would have my dad live. But other than that, I have no complaints.”
“He died young?”
Dani set down her fork and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. There was half a steak left, but she was done for now. “In his late forties. An out-of-the-blue heart attack.”
“Must have been hard on your mother, having four kids and no husband.”
But at least she had a mother who wanted her. A mother who had worked her ass off trying to hold on to the ranch so that she and her sisters could grow up there, as their father had wanted.
“She’s tough. We all are.”
“I noticed,” he said, smiling his crooked smile at her and making her pulse bump up again. She was beginning to enjoy the sensation rather than feel threatened by it. Gabe wasn’t Chad. “Does she still live in the area? Your mother,” he added when she looked at him blankly.
Dani smiled. “After Jolie graduated high school, she had a wild fling with the school principal, whom she’d fought with on and off throughout all of our academic careers. They married and retired to Florida.”
“So the story had a happy ending?”
“And we’re trying to keep it that way. We kind of...edit our lives a bit when we talk to Mom. Otherwise she’d fly home, kick butt and take names.”
“Probably a good thing for Kyle you do that.”
“The Kyle situation is hard to finesse, but Allie does her best to make things appear more amicable than they are. We all fly down to Orlando once a year to have mother-daughter time, so...” She lifted her eyebrows and raised one shoulder in an eloquent shrug.
“You’re handling your own problems rather than letting her take them on.”
“That sounds so much better than saying that we’re kind of lying to our mom.”
He laughed at that and then the conversation shifted to other less personal areas, such as the community and whether Montana winters were any worse than Midwest winters—safe subjects that allowed Dani to stop measuring her words. Gabe was easy to talk to and Dani had found herself discussing matters she generally didn’t—like her family life. And she was enjoying the vibe between them, the subtle hum of attraction that neither was acknowledging at the moment although they both were more than aware of it.
If he had a fatal flaw, did it matter? Would she let herself get close enough that it did matter?
Not without a whole lot of forethought and caution.
But there were other ways to get close—ships-that-pass-in-the-night ways. She could do that. In fact, the thought of doing it made her feel deliciously in control—to the point that when Gabe finally walked her to her truck as twilight fell, she turned and took his face in her hands and rose up on her toes to gently kiss him good-night.
That was the plan, anyway, but as his lips parted beneath hers, she couldn’t help but explore a little farther. He tasted so damned good—his lips were firm and warm and wonderful, and she sensed that while he was holding back, he could be easily pushed over the line. She was tempted to give him that nudge, but instead stepped back. Dropped her hands from his face, even though she really, really wanted to pull his lips back to hers and see exactly what he had to offer.
There was a clear question in his eyes as she put a little space between them and slowly she shook her head.
“I just had to know,” she said matter-of-factly, ignoring the way her heart was hitting her ribs. “For the record, Gabe, that was nothing like kissing my maiden aunt.”
* * *
GABE STARTED TOWARD the house after Dani turned her truck around and headed down the drive, shifting himself so that he could walk more comfortably. She’d barely kissed him and he’d become instantly hard. It’d been so damned difficult to keep from touching her, but he was fairly certain if he had, she would have backed off—even though she’d been the one to initiate. He hadn’t touched, she hadn’t backed off and they’d parted on good terms. The only problem was that he was now fully aware he wanted Dani in a way that didn’t fit into his plans. Not yet anyway. Later...
He’d think about later, well, later. Right now he had a goal and he felt that he’d made some decent headway on getting to know her and gaining her trust. She had talked rather openly about her family and for the first time since...maybe ever...he’d told someone besides Neal about his mom. Not much, but a little.
Why?
To get Dani to open up, of course. But it had felt like more than that. It was one thing to tell her he’d been in foster care, another
to give her details. He didn’t give details of his life, because the next thing you know, all the sordid truth would come out. He didn’t think he should still be doing penance for teenage mistakes, but he also didn’t want to be judged on those mistakes, and if life had taught him one thing, it was that people judged first.
He turned before opening his door and watched the old pickup kick up dust as it thundered down the driveway to Dani’s house. Yeah, he’d made headway, but it didn’t feel right.
She’d wanted to sell the ranch before she’d lost her job. That was what he needed to focus on.
Sometimes you cut ties with things you love in order to move on.
Something else he needed to focus on. She’d verbalized exactly what he wanted her to see—that she and her sister would be better off moving on. They’d get paid handsomely and the older sister would no longer be reminded of a painful past. Plus Deputy Kyle wouldn’t have any reason to mess with them any longer. Win, win, win. And another win if he counted Stewart.
Gabe walked back into the house and booted up his laptop to see what he could find about Jolie Brody—particularly who she worked for.
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT WAS SLEEP?
Something that had eluded Dani after she returned home from her “friends-only” evening with Gabe, leaving her yawning the next morning and doing her chores in a haze. Apparently sleep had eluded Gabe, too, because every time Dani rolled over in bed to face the window, she could see his lights. Nothing new, because he was a night guy, despite his insistence that he was changing, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking of her. She sure as hell couldn’t stop thinking about him.
How crazy had it been to give in to temptation and kiss him?
A little crazy, but nothing she wouldn’t have done pre-Chad. She’d kissed Gabe because he was attractive and she wanted to reassure herself that she was still in control, that she didn’t need to be emotionally paralyzed by what Chad had done to her. And she had been in control—right up until her lips had touched his and a primal urge for more had slammed into her. Even now the memory of the brief kiss, the way her hands had automatically tightened on his shoulders as she pulled herself closer to him, made her grow warm. She’d been lucky to have walked away as easily as she had, without losing face or ending up in his bed.