by Tami Hoag
Across the table, Miss Emma, dressed in a pink sweat suit, her fine hair mussed around her head, sniffed the air like an eager foxhound, mischief gleaming in her eyes. “Smells like a touch of Passion’s Promise over horse liniment. What’s the story on this, McSwain?” A naughty smile tipped up her lips as her delicately lined face lit up with the glow of anticipation. “Is it kinky?”
Maggie ground her teeth. Her hand tightened visibly on the back of her chair. “No, it’s not kinky. In fact, it’s not at all worth discussing.”
“You can tell us, Mary Margaret,” Miss Emma assured her in a conspiratorial tone as she tore a biscuit in two and baptized half in a puddle of raspberry jam. “We’ve been around the block a time or two, you know.”
Mrs. Claiborne sniffed. “A time or two? You darn near ran your tires bald.”
Miss Emma’s answer was an impish grin.
Maggie took her seat, snapping open a linen napkin as if it were a bullwhip. “There’s nothing to tell.”
She had awakened the previous afternoon on Rylan’s bed—alone, untouched, frustrated, and furious with herself. How many years had she been waiting for Rylan Quaid to make love to her, only to fall asleep when the perfect opportunity presented itself!
He certainly had been ready if not willing. She almost groaned aloud at the memory of the accidental intimate contact they made when he sat down on the bed. At least there was one part of him that was living up to her dreams. And she had zonked out. Her big seduction scene and she had nodded off before they’d even gotten to the good part.
Of course, the scene might have been salvaged had Ry come into the room to awaken her. He could have stretched out beside her and wooed her out of sleep with a string of soft kisses that started at her temple and trailed downward over her cheek to just under her jaw to the hollow at the base of her throat. She would have sighed, half awake, watching him through lowered lashes as he tugged the towel away from her breasts to capture an aroused peak in his mouth….
Instead, he’d bellowed through the door that he had a hunt club meeting in thirty minutes, and she’d better quit sawing logs and haul her tail out of bed. The rude, overbearing, overgrown ox. What kind of gentleman insinuated that a lady snored?
Damnation. Her clever plan had gotten her nowhere, and nothing on God’s green earth could scrub the scent of that blasted horse liniment off her skin. She’d soaked in a tub slick with a double dose of rose-scented bath oil and gotten nothing but slippery. She’d fumigated her room with a cloud of Passion’s Promise, but she still smelled like Mr. Ed.
“I knew a French chef once,” Miss Emma said dreamily. Gazing at the brass chandelier, she pressed a frail-looking hand to her heart as if feeling it beat would somehow sharpen her age-dimmed memory. “We met at a little sidewalk café in Antwerp, Belgium. He used to do the most delicious things with olive oil. I declare, it makes my heart race to think of it.”
“It ought to make your nose grow,” Mrs. Claiborne said with a snort as she cut a bite from her slice of ham. “You’ve never been to Belgium. You’ve never been farther than Biloxi.”
Miss Emma gave her sister a peeved look. “So I got the location mixed up. Sue me. It must have been New Orleans and it just seemed like Antwerp.” She turned back to Maggie with the sincere look of a schoolteacher at lesson time. “The point is, different men find different things erotic. With André it was olive oil. Baron Huntleigh once went wild watching me eat a fig. If Rylan finds horse liniment stimulating, darlin’—”
“Believe me, Miss Emma,” Maggie cut her off as she mutilated a slice of toast with a butter knife. “Rylan doesn’t find horse liniment stimulating. I’m sure I haven’t the first idea what Rylan Quaid finds erotic.”
Miss Emma looked puzzled. “Hadn’t you better find out?”
Maggie intended to redouble her efforts to find out. She was going to crack that steely control of Ry’s if it killed her. When she got through with him, he wouldn’t be able to spell “just friends.” However, she had no intention of discussing her plans with the ladies. She considered it something of a failure that Ry hadn’t become a slave to her charms already, and she was no more willing to concede defeat than the rest of Dixie.
She sat back in her chair and took a casual sip of steaming coffee. “Have you ladies ever considered what fun it would be to own a dog?”
“I take it the honeymoon isn’t over,” Maggie drawled as she walked into Primarily Paper through the stockroom. She and Katie used the wallpaper and custom drapery store as a base for their decorating service. Her business partner was deeply involved in kissing her husband good-bye for the morning.
Nick raised his head and winked at Maggie. “What can I say? She can’t get enough of me.”
That sounded entirely possibly to the ears of someone who wasn’t getting any from anyone, Maggie thought sourly.
Katie gazed up at Nick with stars in her eyes and a disgustingly happy pink glow on her cheeks. Her voice was seductively smoky when she spoke. “Can we discuss that statement in depth later?”
The look Nick gave his petite wife could have set the Arctic Ocean boiling. “At lunch.” He dropped a quick kiss on her nose and turned to leave. “Bye, kitten. See ya, Maggie.” He walked out whistling, pausing at the front door to flip the “Closed” sign to “Open.”
“It’s nice to see some of us are happy,” Maggie said, dropping into the chair behind her desk. Too agitated to do any real work, she opened a file and pretended to search for the invoice on a shipment of wallpaper.
Katie turned toward her and started to make a retort, but stopped herself and sniffed the air instead. Her face pinched into a frown. “What in the world is that awful smell? It smells like”—she sniffed again—“horse liniment.”
“Can we change the subject? How was Williamsburg? Are the leaves down there turned yet?” Maggie rattled on as if her partner were actually carrying on a conversation with her instead of circling her desk like a buzzard.
“No. Beautiful. Yes.” Katie stopped in front of the desk, crossed her arms over her chest, and gave Maggie one of her patented no-nonsense looks. “Mary Margaret McSwain, would you kindly explain to me why you smell like Man O’War?”
Maggie was saved from having to answer by the jingle of the bells above the door. Rylan ambled in. Maggie’s heart picked up a beat. Even though she was furious with him, she couldn’t help but appreciate the way he looked in a pair of faded jeans or the way his powerful upper body filled out the navy blue T-shirt he wore. Lord, how she wanted to get her hands on that body of his!
Pulling his battered blue baseball cap off and combing his hair back with his fingers, Ry stepped around behind the counter. He went to his sister and bent to give her a peck on the cheek. “Welcome home, princess. That Yankee treatin’ you decent?”
Katie gave him a saucy grin. “What if he isn’t?”
“I’ll take him apart, pack him in a crate, and ship him back to New Jersey.” Ry’s reply was calmly delivered, but there was an unmistakable glint of promise in his steely gaze. He was fiercely protective of Katie, not only as her big brother, but as her surrogate father as well. Katie had been only sixteen at the time of her father’s death. Ry had considered himself her guardian from that day until the day she’d married Nick Leone.
“Over my dead body!” Katie giggled and hugged him around his hard waist. “What brings you down from your mountain?”
“Besides welcoming you home, I needed to pick up some vet supplies and dog food.” Watching Maggie from the corner of his eye, he added as a deliberate afterthought, “Oh, and I came to talk to Maggie.”
So she ranked somewhere below kibble on his list, did she? Maggie had to bite her tongue to keep from cutting him to ribbons with the remarks that sprang to mind.
He wasn’t likely to fall in love with her if she jumped down his throat every time he made a careless remark, was he? If he was, as she suspected, wary of getting his heart involved, it wouldn’t help her cause any to run him in
to the ground for such a minor injustice—no matter how furious it made her. Hadn’t she told herself she had to be understanding, that it was going to take some work to bring out Ry’s tender side? Of course she had. So she tamped her temper down, telling herself she would find an infinitely more pleasurable way to exact her revenge.
Ry watched the process of her rapid mood change with amusement. Maggie was his match all right. Her mind was never still for an instant. They’d keep each other on their toes for the next forty or fifty years—once he got her to the altar.
She eased up out of her chair to perch on the edge of her desk, crossing her legs in a way that made her snug beige skirt ride up to her knees. “Why, Rylan, how sweet of you to drop by to see me.” Leaning toward him, she presented her cheek to him as if she expected to be kissed, and batted her lashes.
“Got something in your eye, Mary Margaret?” He congratulated himself on keeping his own eyes off the way her bosom rose and fell beneath her soft brown sweater.
Maggie looked away from him and held her breath as she counted to ten. When she turned back, she wore a smile as brittle as an oak leaf in November. “No, darlin’, but how considerate of you to ask. Just what did you want to speak to me about?”
“I’m bringing your dog over Saturday morning.”
Maggie’s jaw dropped. “You can’t! You promised you’d keep him!”
“Until he was fit to leave. He’ll be fit to leave by Saturday.”
She slid off the desk and began pacing. “How can you know that? How can you know he won’t have a relapse or something?”
Ry scowled at her. “If he has a relapse of starvation, I’ll take it out on your hide, Mary Margaret. You told me you’d take that dog and take care of him.”
Her frown matched his. “You conned me into it. I haven’t had enough time to talk it over with Miss Emma and Mrs. Claiborne yet. They’re not entirely convinced it would be a good idea to have a dog at Poplar Grove.” And if Mrs. Claiborne’s reaction this morning had been any indication of how long it would be before a dog would reside at Poplar Grove, they had a long wait ahead of them. Maggie didn’t think hell was liable to freeze over by the weekend. “Why can’t you keep him another week?” Or two or ten, she wanted to add.
“Because someone dropped off a golden retriever this morning, and she’s no more than a week away from having puppies. I need the space your dog is taking up, friend,” he said with a pointed look.
Maggie turned to her partner. Katie was trying to appear immersed in work, jotting notes as she went over some sketches of a house they were working on. Maggie mustered up her sweetest, most appealing smile. “Katie, darlin’, wouldn’t your dog just love to have a playmate?”
“Sure he would,” she said dryly. “But then where would Nick and I live? Our house isn’t big enough for my wolfhound to have playmates.”
“Damnation,” Maggie muttered under her breath. She wheeled hopefully as the front door opened and another friendly face came into view. “Zoe, sugar, wouldn’t your kids love to have a dog, a sweet, little, adorable dog? Why, he’s no bigger than a toy.”
Zoe Baylor smoothed the skirt of her nurse’s uniform as she took a seat at the table where sample books of wallpaper were piled. “Girl, our sweet little adorable cat who isn’t any bigger than a toy had kittens on my new sofa yesterday. The last thing I need is to throw a dog into the bargain.”
“Face it, friend,” Ry said smugly. “Junior is your dog, and he’s coming to live with you.”
Maggie leaned a hip against her desk and ground her teeth, having no trouble whatsoever dreaming up methods of revenge.
Ry reached out and tweaked her cheek. “By the way, get out your party dress. We’re going to a dinner sponsored by the Virginia Grand Prix Association a week from Friday night.” He turned to leave, then stopped and turned back, sniffing the air with a devilish sparkle in his eye. “That a new perfume you’re wearing, Mary Margaret?”
She couldn’t speak for a full thirty seconds after he left. It took that long to wrestle back the urge to run after him and bean him with her paperweight. Finally she glanced at Zoe and Katie and said, “Sweeps a girl right off her feet, doesn’t he?”
The look on Katie’s face mixed bewilderment and amusement. “What was that all about?”
“Here’s the Reader’s Digest version: Rylan proposed to me because he thought it was the practical thing to do, then he took it back and suggested we be ‘just friends.’”
“Rylan proposed to you?” Katie’s gray eyes went moon-round.
Maggie frowned. “He doesn’t love me, Katie.”
“Did he say that?” Zoe asked gently.
“He didn’t have to.” She sank back against the edge of her desk, her shoulders slumping dejectedly. “He ran down his checklist of reasons why we should get married; love wasn’t one of them.”
“So are you ‘just friends’?”
Maggie’s gaze burned through the plate glass window as she stared at Ry across the street where he stood talking with Katie’s husband. “Yeah. Like Lee and Grant.” She turned back to her best friend of nearly ten years with her heart in her eyes. “I love him, Katie. I want him to be my husband, but I won’t marry a man who doesn’t love me.”
“He’s had some rough breaks, Maggie. Be patient with him,” Katie pleaded for her brother’s sake.
“You mean because of your mother leaving?” Maggie asked, needing to hear her own theory proved right.
“Partly. Ry grew up not trusting women. Then something happened when he was at college. I know he was serious about a girl there, then he had to come home when Daddy died, and he never mentioned her again. I tried to find out what happened, but you know Ry. Getting a story out of him is like trying to pull a grizzly bear’s teeth. I finally gave up. He’s spent a long time nursing old wounds and protecting himself from new ones, Mag. Those kind of walls are hard to break down. I ought to know; Nick had to scale a bunch of them to get to me.”
Yes, Maggie thought, the walls Ry had built and fortified around his heart would be difficult to tear apart, but she was determined to do it. There was a man behind those walls who needed love and who had love to give, whether he realized it or not. She knew he did. In her heart, in her dreams, she knew.
“I can handle it,” she said, tapping a finger to her lips as the wheels started turning in her head.
A fond smile split Zoe’s thin dark face. “I recognize that scheming look, Maggie. What are you planning?”
A slow, self-satisfied smile turned up the corners of Maggie’s lips. “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. I’m going to drive up to D.C. and buy myself a dress for that party next week. A dress hot enough to melt granite. Then Lord have mercy on that big ornery brother of yours, Katie, ’cause I’ve set my sights on him, and I mean to have him.” Her smile broke into a full-fledged grin that glowed with mischief as she winked at Katie. “You know what they say, darlin’: All’s fair in love and war.”
Katie chuckled. “Which one is this?”
“A little bit of both, sugar. A little bit of both.”
The first herd of tourists had already descended on Poplar Grove when Ry pulled into the yard in his pickup. Cars from five different states and one province of Canada were lined up in the parking area. A group of about fifteen people stood on the lawn in front of the manor, their attention focused on Mrs. Claiborne as she spoke and gestured at the white columns and up to the carved pineapple finial that crowned her home.
Ry glanced at the little spotted dog curled up on the seat beside him. “You’re home, Junior. I sure hope you like crowds.”
He was about to reach for the door handle, when he spotted Maggie hurrying across the forecourt. She was a vision out of the colonial past dressed in a long dark blue gown with a tightly fitted waist. Frothy lace trimmed the snug sleeves and edged the deeply cut square neckline.
Ry sat back and groaned in dismay. How men ever walked around in skintight breeches back then was be
yond him, what with all the women running around in dresses that displayed a lady’s charms to such perfection. To make matters worse, Maggie was wearing a pendant that swayed and bobbed just above her breasts and drew his gaze downward. As if her cleavage wasn’t enough on its own.
She swung the passenger door open and climbed up into the truck with a wicker picnic basket. When she closed the door, the cab was immediately filled with the pungent scent of Passion’s Promise.
“Jeepers cripes, Mary Margaret,” Ry said, coughing. “That perfume’s enough to choke a horse!”
Maggie scowled at him. Somehow her hot shower had only served to make matters worse. Apparently it had opened her pores and let the perfume soak in. “Please, Rylan, all this flattery will make me light-headed.”
“That’s not the flattery making you light-headed, you’re being overcome by fumes.”
A minor detail only a mannerless swine would call attention to. She must be bonkers to love a man with so little couth, Maggie thought. But love him she did. A tired smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “I had a little accident this morning. At least I don’t smell ready to run for the roses anymore.”
“What are you doing in that getup?” Ry asked, fighting to keep his eyes off her breasts.
“One of the tour guides called in sick today. I’m taking her place.”
She glanced at the little dog curled up next to Rylan’s thigh and frowned again. It hardly looked like the same animal they had found wounded and abandoned only a matter of days ago. He’d been bathed and fed. His coat was now snow white with mahogany-colored spots. He wore a collar with a rabies vaccination tag affixed to it. His injured paw was wrapped in a fresh bandage. Staring at her with shiny eyes, he perked his triangular ears up and barked at her. Maggie shook her head. Ry had worked a miracle with his skill and caring.
“We’ve got exactly fifteen minutes to sneak Junior here into the house,” she said. “So here’s the plan—”