Jeannie Watt (13 page)

“Hi, this is Tara Sullivan. I’m calling about the cancellation for the Night Sky High School reunion.”

“Oh, yes. I am sorry about that, but we had hoped that by cancelling early enough, it would give you time to fill your rooms.”

“That’s very considerate of you,” Tara enunciated. “I was wondering, for my own information, why you cancelled?”

The woman hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I’m not privy to that information. Mr. Bidart is in Night Sky right now, and he called earlier in the day.”

It took Tara a moment to find her voice and it took another moment to find words that were not comprised of four letters. This was a low blow.

“He’s not staying at the Somers Inn by any chance?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“I understand,” Tara said truthfully. “But—” she paused, bit her lip and then went for broke “—if you happen to be in contact with Mr. Bidart, would you ask him to please contact me? I think there has been a miscommunication. I’d like to clear it up—for possible future functions.” Plus the one that was stolen right out from under her nose.

“I will do what I can,” the associate replied in a no-promises tone.

“I appreciate it very much. Thank you.” When Tara finally hung up the phone, she walked straight to the kitchen, straight to the fridge.

She needed a drink. Maybe two. And since she had no wine in the house, she settled for the closest thing she had—Luke’s supply of Bud Light.

M
ATT’S FOOTSTEPS
echoed as he let himself in the front door of Tara’s house. He stopped and listened. No radio playing upstairs. No singing. No humming. Just the sound of a bottle cap bouncing on a hard surface. He followed the noise into the kitchen.

Tara was leaning against the counter, beer in her hand. As Matt came into the room, Tara lifted the bottle in silent greeting, making no effort to put on a game face.

“Bad day?” Matt asked.

A corner of her mouth tightened as she slowly nodded her head.

“Anything major?”

“Pretty much.” She gave him a brief description of what had transpired that afternoon, throwing in several colorful adjectives to describe the future Mrs. Ryan Somers and that lady’s future father-in-law as well.

“They keep whittling away at me, Matt, and it gets kind of exhausting after a while.”

She shook her head, then lifted the bottle to her lips and took a sip. Matt could see by her expression that she wasn’t a beer drinker. Well, he was.

“You want me to finish that for you?”

“No. I think I need it.” She gestured to the fridge. “Feel free. I’m sure Luke won’t mind. I’ll just replace it before he starts on the gardens.”

Matt pulled another out of the fridge, popped the top and came to lean against the counter next to Tara. Their shoulders touched. He liked the sensation.

“You know,” she said, gesturing with the bottle, “sometimes I wonder why I keep plugging away.”

“Why do you?” Matt asked conversationally.

She turned her head toward him, her eyebrows raised. “Like I told you. I love this place. Besides, I don’t appreciate being pushed around.”

He could understand that. She gave him a half smile over the top of her beer bottle and Matt felt an almost instantaneous response as he watched the slow curve of her lips. He was tempted to lean forward and touch her beautiful mouth with his own.

“Ryan wants me to run scared and I won’t.”

“It takes an awful lot of effort to fight those two,” Matt pointed out.

“Sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” She lifted her shoulder eloquently and took another drink. This time she didn’t grimace.

“Is it worth it?” he asked, having a hard time pulling his eyes away from her mouth. The beer had left a sheen of moisture on her lips and Matt imagined tasting those tiny droplets. One by one. With the tip of his tongue.

“You want to hear the story?” Tara asked. “Decide for yourself?”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” she said without hesitation, and Matt had a feeling the alcohol was already going to her head. “Ryan’s family is originally from California. Martin bought the inn and moved here when Ryan was a junior in high school. He transplanted well. The girls were all nuts about him and it was a pretty sad day for the female populace when he graduated and headed off to college.”

“Were you one of the sad ones?”

Tara looked surprised. “No. I pretty much kept to myself back then.” The remark hung in the air for a moment, before she said, “I didn’t see Ryan again until we were both out of college and working in Elko. He was with an accounting firm and I was teaching at the community college. We met at a Christmas party. He was very, very charming, which I know now is his modus operandi. He told me he remembered me and that he’d heard I didn’t date. That wasn’t quite true, but…” Tara shrugged. “Anyway, he said he could change all that. I bet him he couldn’t….”

The rest of Tara’s narrative went almost exactly as Matt had assumed it would. Tara had been the beautiful, but standoffish college teacher and Ryan the guy who decided he was man enough to scale her defenses. Which he did. It was only after he’d dropped his charming facade and scored in a rather self-centered style, as near as Matt could tell by reading between the lines, that Tara realized she’d been a notch on the bedpost, a challenge he couldn’t resist and nothing more.

“I know what happened to me is probably not unusual,” Tara confessed when she was done, “but it shook my confidence. Broke my trust…hurt my pride.”

The last words were so low and bitter, Matt had a hard time hearing them. Tara took one last drink and then set the beer aside. “Such is life.”

She moved to the sink and pulled a paint encrusted brush out of the container of water, grimacing as she held it up. She poured dish soap on the bristles and began working it in.

“Why does Somers still have it in for you?”

Tara didn’t turn around, but her reply was quick and certain. “Because he got hit in the two places that hurt him most—his pride and his pocketbook. He came to see me a few weeks after our…encounter. He’d had too much to drink and he was ready for another go. I was not.”

Matt waited. He’d really like to have a short go with Ryan himself.

“He refused to back off, so I hit him.” She glanced over her shoulder, smiling. “I broke his nose.”

Matt’s grinned back. He’d noticed the bump on Ryan’s classic profile. It pleased him to know Tara had put it there.

Tara turned the faucet on and rinsed the brush. “He ran straight down to the sheriff’s office before the bleeding stopped to press charges and file for a restraining order. He said that he’d tried to break up with me weeks ago and that I wouldn’t take no for an answer and now I was getting violent.” She squeezed the excess water out of the bristles and reshaped them.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I denied it and added a few claims of my own, like assault. And trespassing. There were no witnesses to anything. It was his word against mine, according to the judge. That really irritated Ryan. He couldn’t believe that my word held as much weight as his.” She laid the brush on the drain rack, then wiped her hands.

“Go figure.”

“Now, this might surprise you,” Tara said with a straight face, “but Ryan can be petulant and vindictive.”

“No.”

“Yes. He can. He needed revenge—I had disfigured and humiliated him, after all, and he couldn’t really tell anyone how it happened, so he decided to use his clout to get me fired from the college. But Jack found out what was going on—Ben is the registrar’s assistant at the college. And it just so happened that Ryan’s accounting firm did the books for the Owl Club Casino….”

“I like where this is heading,” Matt murmured.

“Long story short, Ryan’s firm ultimately kept the accounts, but lost Ryan.”

“He got fired?”

Tara nodded. “He’d been maneuvering to become a partner. Talk about a major blot on his employment record as well as a blow to his gigantic ego. Plus, Jack’s boss must have put the word out. Ryan couldn’t get a job anywhere to his liking. Martin finally had to bankroll him so that he could buy a small business here in Night Sky—not anywhere near the status of his old firm. In fact, it’s pretty darned Podunk. So now Ryan hates me and his dad hates me.”

“But why doesn’t Ryan hold a grudge against Jack?”

“He doesn’t know Jack was involved.
I
wouldn’t know if Nicky hadn’t been friends with one of the junior associates at the accounting firm. Very ‘hush, hush,’ but Nicky can get anyone to blab. Jack’s not a guy who looks for gratitude. It embarrasses him. He never said a word to me, before, during or after, so I’ve never said a word back. He just quietly saved my butt. He doesn’t know Ryan holds me responsible.” Her smile was humorless. “The thing that slays me is that Ryan’s ego is so big he honestly thinks he’s the victim in this.”

She tilted her head then, her long braid sliding over her shoulder, reminding Matt of the day he’d run his fingers through her hair as he struggled to contain it in an elastic band. One of these days, he’d really like to undo that braid. Fill his hands with dark hair while he slowly showed Tara that not all men were self-centered, two-faced jerks.

It wouldn’t happen. He wasn’t at a point in his life to let it happen. And then his gaze met hers. And he realized that she was thinking something along the same lines as him.

For one long and very uncertain moment, they stared at each other, the atmosphere between them growing increasingly charged, until Tara swallowed and looked down.

Matt studied her profile.

Say something.
“And that’s why Martin Somers keeps throwing roadblocks at you?”

The question sounded forced, inane, but Tara didn’t seem to care.

“That’s why,” she agreed in a slightly uneven voice. She started for the fridge. “Dinner might be a little late.”

“We can go out to dinner,” Matt suggested. The air in the kitchen still seemed charged with possibility.

“I don’t think so, Matt. I have stuff to do.”

She pulled the fridge door open, apparently thinking the conversation was over. She was wrong.

He pushed it shut. Tara’s eyes widened. “Matt…”

He ignored her warning tone and settled his hands on her shoulders. “Tara, give yourself a break,” he said quietly. “Take a night off.”

“Matt—” She abruptly broke off. Biting her lip, she frowned.

“I don’t know what to do here,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, and Matt knew she wasn’t talking about dinner. She brought her hands up to rest on his upper arms and let out a breath as her head slumped forward to rest against his chest. He felt her inhale, then exhale again. He waited, his thumbs unconsciously smoothing over her delicate clavicles, his nerves humming.

When she finally raised her head, she slid her hands from his arms up to his face. “Why don’t you kiss me?” she asked quietly.

It was an invitation, not an inquiry. Matt’s blood pressure jolted up, but he forced himself to stay still.

“Are you sure?”

She smiled. “Of course not. I’m too cautious to be sure.”

That was when Matt knew he’d lost the battle. He gently put his arms around her and pulled her close.

Their lips met. Cautiously at first. Their tongues touched lightly and then Tara sighed as their mouths melded together. It was the kiss Matt had wanted to give Tara since their first encounter in the parlor, the kiss she’d apparently been waiting for. Mutual, deep and hungry in every sense of the word.

At first Matt did his best to hold himself in check, satisfying himself with running his fingers over her hair and down her back, lightly following the curve of her waist and skimming over the sides of her hips, telling himself he’d stop after just one more kiss.

But there’s so much time to make up for….

Tara made another small sound in her throat as Matt’s hands traveled slowly up her midsection to cup her breasts through the soft chambray of her shirt, his thumbs finding and lazily teasing her nipples through too many layers of fabric. It was a good sound, an encouraging sound, which Matt translated as an invitation to undo buttons.

“Tara?” he asked as his lips left hers. He needed to get a grip here.

“Shhh,” she murmured, reaching up to pull his mouth back down, opening her lips, drawing him in, putting all thoughts of getting a grip firmly out of his mind.

He gave up on the buttons and pushed his hand up under her shirt, his fingers skimming over her incredibly smooth skin. He felt her shudder and then she buried her fingers in his hair, pressing her lower body against his.

Definitely a woman he could get lost in. And the stunning thing was that he wanted to get lost in her. They were teetering on a brink, about to go over…

He couldn’t do it.

With a Herculean effort, Matt forced himself to pull back, to disengage his lustful body, engage his more logical brain. Logical brain seemed to be on hiatus, possibly due to lack of blood, but he sucked in a breath and gave it another try.

He looked down into Tara’s beautiful face, his breathing still ridiculously uneven, and watched shifting emotions play over her features as she cautiously held his gaze. Confusion. Annoyance. Vulnerability rapidly masked by indifference.

She read him well, made no move to pull him back down to her. When she finally spoke, her voice was low, slightly husky, and self-protectively sardonic. “You need to be going?”

Matt grabbed the lifeline. “Yeah.”

“Any particular reason?”

But before he could answer, she asked, “You aren’t leaving for my own good or anything, are you?”

“I think maybe I’m leaving for my own good.”

Tara gave him a suspicious look.

“You don’t want to get involved with me.”
Just ask my ex-girlfriend.

“Not even for one night?”

A long beat of silence followed. “Is that all you’re looking for?” The thought irritated him. Maybe he was getting more attached to this woman than he’d realized.

“Nothing more.” She seemed to think that would reassure him.

Matt shook his head. He wouldn’t do a one-nighter with Tara, for myriad reasons, none of which he cared to single out and analyze at the moment. But if he had to, protectiveness would be number one. He wouldn’t start something that had the potential to do emotional damage to either of them, no matter what Tara wanted.

“You don’t do casual?” She spoke with a forced indifference that told Matt exactly how hard it was for her to say the words.

“There are times,” he admitted, “but frankly, in the long run, it isn’t very fulfilling.”

“Voice of experience?”

He nodded.

“Then I guess you’re right,” she said coolly. “You should be going.”

“Tara, maybe we should talk about this.”

She shook her head, her expression stony, and he knew then how much his rejection had stung. A strong desire to make things better, to ease the hurt, slammed into him.

“Please go.” The words fell like chips of ice. “We can talk tomorrow.”

Matt headed for the door.

The phone rang before he got there. He paused with his hand on the door handle as Tara picked up the receiver. She said hello, her eyes still on Matt, her expression still carefully impassive, and then her demeanor abruptly changed.

At first he thought it was trouble, but after a few seconds, he realized it was Bidart, getting back to her about the cancelled reservation. She turned her back to him and Matt took that as a sign of dismissal. He pulled the door open and stepped out into the warm night air.