Real Men Will (13 page)

She glanced at the clock—2:45. Beth wanted to say
now
. She could do it. Cairo would be at the store in fifteen minutes. Beth could be home in thirty. And they could be naked within seconds. She could have him inside her, pushing deep, filling her until she screamed.

“Eight,” she said, forcing herself to say the reasonable thing, instead of the “God, I need it right this moment” thing.

“I’ll be there,” Eric said.

When he hung up, Beth set her phone carefully on the desk, clenched her hands in fists and ducked her head to hide the slow grin spreading across her face. She’d spent her whole career serving the needs of others—it was time to serve the hell out of her own. If this was a mistake, she was going to milk every last drop of pleasure from it before the regret set in. Every. Last. Drop.

W
HEN THE REGRET CAME
,
it hit her like a collapsing brick wall. Actually, there was no metaphor needed. It hit her with all the force of opening her front door and finding her father standing there instead of Eric Donovan.

“Daddy!” she squeaked, immediately regressing to her guilt-filled adolescence. “What are you doing here?”

He winked and slipped off the old-fashioned hat he always wore when he put on a suit. He was a big fan of elegance. And modesty. Beth tried not to think of how much cleavage she was currently showing in this dress.

“I was in town for a doctor’s appointment.”

“Are you okay?” she gasped.

“Healthy as a horse. It was only a checkup. And then I went out for dinner with an old friend, and when I realized how late it was, I thought I’d take you out for dessert before I headed home.”

“You should have…” She dropped the thought when she remembered he didn’t own a cell phone. “Don’t you think you should start back now while it’s still light? Mom will be worried.”

“Oh, she worries anyway. I’ll call and tell her I’ll be late. Unless you have other plans.” He finally seemed to notice her dress and craned his neck to look behind her.

“I… No, I just…”

“You won’t believe who called me up for dinner tonight,
querida
. I don’t think I’ve seen him since…”

Her father heard the footsteps on the stairs at the same moment Beth did. He looked down, and Beth stepped forward.

Eric bounded up two more stairs before his head rose and he stopped with comical suddenness. In fact, he nearly pitched face-forward with the momentum, but he grabbed the railing and saved himself.

Her dad smiled. “I see I’m interrupting.”

“No!” Beth said. Eric seemed frozen.

“Come up, come up!” her dad said, waving Eric forward.

He looked warily at Beth, but took one more step, and then another. Beth had no choice but to back into her apartment and let them both in. The landing wasn’t big enough for the three of them to stand around, with all that awkwardness taking up so much space.

“Hello! I’m Beth’s father,” her dad said with an enthusiasm that deepened his faint accent.

“Um, Eric, this is my dad, Thomas. He just happened to be in town tonight! Dad, this is Eric.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Eric said as they shook hands. His gaze slid to Beth’s and she cringed and shook her head.

“The pleasure is mine,” her father said. “But I can see you two were on your way out. I’ll leave you to your evening.”

“Dad. No. I’ll just—”

Eric interrupted. “I was just stopping by. You should spend time with your daughter.”

“Thank you!” Beth said. “You and I can go out, Dad. I’ll see Eric another time.”

Eric started backing away.

Her father eyed him, and then his weathered face broke into a wide smile. “I have the perfect solution. We’ll all have dessert and drinks together. I’d love to get to know some of Beth’s friends.”

Beth almost choked on her tongue. Eric wasn’t even a friend. He was just a sex partner.

She realized she’d been shaking her head for a full ten seconds. “No, Dad.”

“Come. You haven’t introduced me to a gentleman friend since high school.”

Oh, my God, why was he bringing
that
up?

“Mr. Cantrell,” Eric started, but Beth cut him off.

“Dad, no. Eric doesn’t want to go out with us. He was only—”

“Of course he does,” her dad said, and now there was steel behind that smile.

Eric swallowed. Loudly.

“He wasn’t staying long!” she insisted.

Her father frowned.

Eric’s face blanched. “I think dessert would be wonderful,” he said in such a rush that she barely understood him.

But her father must have understood perfectly, because his smile was suddenly natural again and he slapped Eric on the back. “Yes. Wonderful. Let me just call your mother and tell her it’ll be another hour before I leave.”

“There’s a phone in the spare room!” Beth said as if there wasn’t a phone right next to the couch.

Just an hour,
Beth prayed.
Please, just an hour.
Not that it mattered. As soon as they were done, Eric would bolt into the night without looking back.

Her father disappeared.

“Ohmigod,” Beth whispered, grabbing Eric’s arm. “Why did you say yes?”

“I had to! You said I wasn’t staying long, and I just… I had to say something!”

“But not that!”

“You basically told him I was here to have sex with you! What was I supposed to say?”

“Are you kidding me? I was going to say you were picking up a CD.”

“A CD? Who the hell even has CDs anymore?”

“Eric!” She shook his arm hard. “Do you really think my dad knows that? He’s seventy-three!”

“I panicked, all right? I wasn’t planning on meeting your family tonight.”

Beth let go of him and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God, I am so, so sorry. This is a disaster. Just…” She froze, then glanced toward the hallway. “Just go! Now! Before he—”

Her father stepped into the hall, shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie. “Your mother’s been appeased. I promised to bring her a piece of pie. Is there a place with good pie around here? How about that place we had brunch,
querida?
”

She gave one last, best effort. “I don’t think they’re open in the evenings, Daddy.”

“Nonsense. I looked at the dinner menu when we were there. I thought I might take your mother back sometime. What was it called?”

“Karen’s,” she murmured. The place was a fifteen-minute drive away, and her dad would want to linger.

“That’s it! Let’s go. My treat.”

Beth gave Eric one last, long, helpless look. He just cleared his throat, apparently unwilling to be rude and bow out. Admirable, she supposed, but she desperately wished he was a low-life bastard at that moment. “I’ll get a sweater,” she said, sighing. His gaze slid down to her breasts, then shifted away so suddenly that she thought she saw his eyes spin.

She felt like a guilty kid as she walked to the closet to grab her most modest button-down sweater. But she always felt that way around her father. It was the one reason she let her mom talk her into keeping the White Orchid a secret. Because Beth would rather die than see heartbroken disappointment in her dad’s eyes again. That one time eighteen years ago had been the worst moment of her life. So she pulled on her sweater and pretended she’d been doing nothing wrong and she was still the nice girl she’d been before her father had found out she wasn’t.

E
RIC WAS DROWNING IN
mortification. At some point during the evening, he just expected to keel over, stone-cold dead from guilt. The things he’d been thinking about doing to Beth. The things he’d meant to do as soon as he got her alone.

But her father didn’t know that. He couldn’t even suspect it. Could he?

At least Eric had gotten a free pass on the ride over. He’d stuttered something about taking his own car, just in case. Just in case of what, he had no idea, but he’d escaped. Admittedly, he’d had a brief impulse to simply drive home, but that would definitely be the last straw with Beth. And he really, really wanted to see her again. He just didn’t want to see her sitting next to her father.

The man was just finishing up a story about living on a ranch in Argentina as a boy. “So your father was a rancher?” Eric asked Thomas politely. Eric immediately took another sip of his wine, hoping the bottle would be gone soon.

“No, my father was an Englishman. A banker. He came to Argentina on business and fell in love with my mother. He never left.”

“She must have been a beautiful woman.”

“Oh, she was, Eric. In fact, my Beth looks just like her.”

“Oh, Dad, that’s not true,” she said.

“It is true,” he insisted, covering her hand with his. “You’re a beautiful woman. But you know, your grandmother had six kids at your age.”

She sighed as if they’d had this conversation many times. “I’m not going to have six kids.”

“No, but one or two…” His eyes slid to Eric. “With a very lucky man.”

“Eric is just a friend,” Beth jumped in.

“Come,
querida.
You don’t dress that way for a friend.”

Beth pulled her sweater tighter and cleared her throat. “I’m very busy with work,” she said, but her normally confident posture had lost a little of its strength.

Her dad shook his head. “Selling ladies’ foundation garments. With a college degree.”

Eric was slightly confused by that description, but he was more confused by Beth’s reaction. She met his gaze, her eyes widening as she gave the faintest shake of her head. “I’m not a salesperson,” she said as she turned back to her dad. “I’m the manager.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “Working in a store like that, it’s no wonder you haven’t met a gentleman yet. It’s nothing but women all day!”

She shook her head, but her dad turned to Eric.

“Why do you think my Beth hasn’t settled down?”

Eric pictured Beth standing in her store, surrounded by lingerie and vibrators and little trays of jewelry that looked suspiciously like nipple rings. He pictured her giving classes on sex and dating men with piercings that marked their bodies like damned picture books. He swallowed hard and looked at her in desperation.
Why hadn’t she settled down?
Didn’t her father know anything about her?

Judging by the way she shook her head again, he didn’t.

Eric must have looked completely frozen, because Beth spoke for him. “People marry later these days. I’m not in a rush.”

“All your old friends in Hillstone have gotten married and had children.”

Eric watched her face stiffen. She looked…angry. “All right. People who aren’t in Hillstone marry later. None of my friends are married,” she said. “And I won’t be getting married anytime soon. Jeez, I swear, you’re getting worse than Mom.”

“I want to be a grandfather before I die.” Without missing a beat, he turned his smile on Eric. “So, tell me about your family.”

Here was a subject Eric could handle. He gave her dad the abbreviated version of his family story, but Eric was focused on Beth the whole time. She looked younger and softer. And maybe a little lost. Her dad kept a loose hold on her hand as the waiter came to take their plates away. Her father had ordered a cheese course with wine. Beth had eaten only half a cracker.

“Sounds like you’re an enterprising young man,” her dad said.

Eric didn’t know about the
young
part. Though he felt a bit like a teenager tonight, caught between the girl he wanted to feel up and her eagle-eyed father.

“You must be a very special man to have taken all that on at such a young age,” her dad continued, raising his eyebrows.

“I just did what had to be done,” Eric said. “And there are plenty of men who have jobs and families at twenty-four. It’s nothing special.”

Her dad slid his eyes toward Beth. “He’s a good one.”

“Dad,” she said flatly, a pink flush spreading over her cheekbones.

“Do you like my daughter, Eric?”

Oh, Jesus. Eric snatched up his glass of wine to buy a moment. Did he
like
her? More like he wanted to drive her straight home and carry her into his house and straight to his bed. So far his relationship with Beth Cantrell had been about fifty percent lust and fifty percent guilt, but tonight was tipping it out of balance.

“Of course, Mr. Cantrell,” he finally said. “She’s a wonderful woman.” He added, “Everybody likes her,” trying for a compliment, but it ended up sounding suspiciously like a cop-out.

The server came to offer the dessert menu again, and Eric and Beth stared at each other while her father discussed pie with the waitress. “And what about you two? Would you like something?”

“No!” they both said.

Beth squeezed her dad’s hand. “You need to get home, Dad. It’s late. If you get into an accident, Mom will never forgive you.”

“That’s true,” he conceded. “Especially if I spill the pie.”

Beth nodded solemnly while Eric said a quick prayer that this was almost over. It was still sinking in. His stomach still felt high in his throat from the moment he’d looked up and seen her standing there with a dapper older gentleman. Not what he’d expected from the evening. Not at all.

And yet, it was fascinating to watch Beth be someone else. Not the sexy, confident, unflappable woman from the White Orchid, but the daughter of this man who was obviously a big believer in old-fashioned values. She crossed her legs and slumped a little in her chair, her eyes on her father’s hand as she tapped her thumb against his.

When she looked up and caught Eric’s gaze, she mouthed,
I’m sorry,
and suddenly all this was hilarious. Absurd. How the hell had a no-strings-attached night of sex ended with him meeting Beth’s father and answering pointed questions about family and values?

Eric suddenly couldn’t stop a smile. Beth looked away, but he saw her mouth tighten at the edges.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure,” her dad said as he stood, setting his hat on his head with a flourish.

Beth stood. “Where are you going?”

He gestured toward the waitress, who approached with a box that clearly held a whole pie. “I’ve got to get this home to your mother. But you two stay and enjoy. I ordered you apple pie à la mode. To share.”

“Dad—”

“Nonsense. Eric will see you safely home, won’t you, Eric?”

“Of course,” Eric said, standing, as well.

Her dad signed the check and shrugged his coat on.

“Thank you for the wine, sir,” Eric said, putting a lot of thought into the right pressure of his handshake, which was strange. What could it matter what kind of impression he made on Beth’s dad?

He was still mulling that over as Beth finished hugging her father. Their pie arrived, vanilla ice cream pooling in the plate as it melted.

“Oh. My. God,” Beth groaned as she collapsed into her chair. “I can’t…I don’t even know what to say. I’m…
horrified,
to say the least.”