Where There's a Will (Whiskey River Book 1) (2 page)

I
T WAS A
fair enough question and since she’d been freaking out on him and losing her cool since she’d first seen the darkening sky she guessed that shrugging it off wasn’t an option.

But in for a penny in for a pound her mom used to say. So she tipped her head to the side and batted her lashes at her very handsome, very sexy, very much not-available-to-her boss. “What makes you think I’m afraid of tornadoes?”

He threw his head back and laughed. A big full-throated sound that filled this depressing little storm shelter and made her almost forget about the storm raging outside. His hair was thick and sandy brown, his face chiselled with a square jaw. And he was too strong to be termed pretty or just handsome, Ryder had the face of a man who lived life and loved it.

He was wickedly smart and had a reputation for being a man who played as hard as he worked. All things that pushed him even further off limits to her. She was so close to getting out of the cycle of poverty that had dogged her family for generations. Finish this last semester at law school and then the bar and then a nice high-paying job with a firm in San Antonio or Austin.

So kissing him at the Christmas party hadn’t been her smartest idea. But to be fair, who would have guessed that he could pack so much punch into one little kiss? She stared at his mouth. She’d watched him argue several cases in court and felt a secret thrill listening to the mellow tones with the hint of a drawl in his voice and the slow methodical way he could tear a witness down.

One thing she knew about Ryder was he didn’t suffer fools or liars easily.

“Addison, I’ve known you for a long time and I’ve never seen you so flustered. Even that time old man Coogan came into the office brandishing his Colt .45 automatic and threatening to shoot me if I didn’t make his wife come back to him,” Ryder said.

“Poor Coogan. His heart was in the right place and his hands were shaking. He wouldn’t have followed through.” At least, she didn’t think he would have. She’d talked to the older man, convinced him to put down his gun and diffused the situation, but then her older brother was a cop and she’d grown up in a rough neighborhood. She knew how to handle touchy situations.

“My point exactly. What’s the deal with you and tornadoes?”

“Dammit.”

He didn’t say anything just sat there waiting. And she’d seen him use this tactic with clients before. He called it the truth silence. Said that the longer it grew the more antsy people became and soon they’d confess everything. And it worked.

She’d used it herself last summer during one of her mock trials at school.

“I just don’t like them….they are unpredictable—

“If you are going to lie to me, at least make it sound believable,” he said.

She nibbled on her lower lip and reached for the charm of her necklace. It was a small gold cross that had been given to her when she’d been baptized as a baby. She traced the cross with her finger and remembered the sound of howling wind and the wooden frame on their tiny house shaking. She remembered her big brother hunkered down beside her, both of them unsure if they’d live or not. And given that their mom was passed out in the kitchen after one of her drunken binges, they’d known all they had was each other.

“I just don’t like them,” she repeated.

She had worked diligently and carefully to maintain an image of herself to Ryder as a hard-working law student. She didn’t want to admit she’d grown up in The Barrels, the poor side of town that many pretended didn’t exist. She didn’t want him to look at her and see the poverty that she’d worked so hard to scrub from her image.

“Tell me, Addison. Your secrets are safe with me,” he said.

She knew that. She’d trusted him almost from the moment they’d met, but she didn’t want to rely on him. She’d been attracted to him but she’d learned early on that she couldn’t do a relationship and not lose herself in it. And she had goals so she’d ignored Ryder and his bedroom eyes. There was only one person who hadn’t let her down and that was her brother, Adam.

She liked Ryder. He was her boss, her late night fantasy and that was fine because she had no intention of ever acting on anything. But telling him about her fear—her biggest one. Even she knew that wasn’t wise.

“When I was about fourteen,” Ryder said, “there was a big storm. Not sure if you remember it. You’d have been awfully young.”

She nodded. Yeah, she remembered it. In fact thinking about that storm made the top of her lip sweat.

“Well, you know I grew up on the outskirts of town just past the fork of Whiskey River,” he said, speaking of the tributary of the Pedernales the town took its name from. “The siren sounded but the wind was stirring the chimes my mother had hanging in the big Live Oak in our front yard. The sound was melodic and I just stood there, tipping my head back toward the sky as the wind buffeted around me. It was so strong. Powerful. I wanted to be a part of the storm.”

She could see that. Picture a teenaged Ryder trying to own the storm and bend it to his will. So different from her eight-year-old self cowering in a corner.

“My mother yanked me inside, dragged me into the laundry room which doubled as a tornado shelter, and yelled at me for scaring her, but I never felt in danger from the storm.”

“That’s because you’re crazy,” she said.

“Nah,” he said with a lazy wink. “The storm missed us and headed toward town. That was the storm that tore through The Barrels section on the other side of the tracks. Took out a lot of homes.”

She nodded. She remembered. The broken glass, wooden slates everywhere. Houses randomly destroyed. Random. Like fate, that tornado had decided who lived and who died. It had spared her and Adam but not their next-door neighbors. That scared her too. The randomness of it.

“Tell me,” he said again.

The wind whipped around the building. The sound lonely and plaintive and so damned scary. She knew it was just the wind and that this building might look old and historic but Ryder and his partners had rehabbed it to withstand the tornadoes and gusts they got here in Texas.

As much as she didn’t want to talk about her past the sound of the wind and the fear inside her mind made that impossible.

“I grew up in The Barrels,” she said.

“Oh, I didn’t know that. So you got hit with the storm?”

“Yes. My brother and I were trapped in our house during that tornado. We didn’t have a storm shelter,” she said. “We didn’t even know we were supposed to get in a closet, or the bathtub. The house shook all around us, the wind sounded like a freight train that was going to tear everything apart. It was—is—my worst nightmare. I just…I know we’re safe most of the time but every time those sirens go off I want to hide and forget. But I never can.”

He shifted around in the closet and came over to sit next to her. He wrapped his arms around her, tipping her chin up so that she could see he had a small scar on the underside of his own chin. He made her feel safe. She didn’t want safety to be a person. She needed safety to be something she carried inside of herself.

But for right now safety was Ryder. His spicy aftershave and his deep, soothing voice.

“You don’t have to forget, Addison, that storm made you stronger. Made you into the woman you are today.”

She stared at him for a long moment and realized that the storm had changed her. That night she and Adam had realized they couldn’t depend on their mom and had finally admitted it. The both of them had looked out for each other and made a solid plan to change their lives.

And that change had brought her here to Ryder and this moment in a storm shelter. Her entire life she’d been running from that storm that had shaken her world and finally she was in a place where she could slow down, breathe, take what she wanted. She didn’t have to keep running.

She looked up into his dark blue eyes, shoving all thoughts of the tornado to the back of her mind. “I have a question for you.”

“What is it?”

She hesitated. But she wasn’t a meek person. And the stuff that she wanted the most, her law degree, a well-paying job and a house of her own—those were things she found it the easiest to go after. But a kiss from the one man she knew she shouldn’t have kissed and the one man she hadn’t been able to forget, frightened her.

She lifted her hand and stroked her finger down his jaw to that tiny scar and shifted back just a little bit so she could see his face more clearly. “Why haven’t you tried to kiss me again since the Christmas party?”

She could tell she’d shocked him. His pupils dilated and his arm around her shoulder tightened and then he lowered his head and she felt the brush of his breath over her lips before he kissed her again.

Chapter Two

‡

S
HE TASTED JUST
like he remembered. No, better. Sweet, like melted honey. With a spicy kick that made him want more. Ryder knew there were reasons he shouldn’t be kissing Addison. But he’d spent the last three months thinking about kissing her again. Kissing her, and more.

He pulled her closer, deepening the kiss. Running his hands up her back, feeling the softness of her body against his.

Instant heat. She felt it too. He could tell by how her body molded against his and her tongue answered his in a wicked rhythm.

Wow.

Addison moaned and snuggled closer, but it wasn’t close enough. He helped her straddle him, her dress pushed up and then flowing around them. She wiggled her hips, not much, just enough to have his eyes crossing and him thinking about the only thing that would feel better—skin to skin contact.

He drew back to look at her. “Addison.”

“Ryder.”

Her lips were already swollen, her eyes dark pools of emerald. Damn, he was really going to regret this. Firmly, he moved her to sit beside him, wrapped his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug.

“That’s why I haven’t kissed you again.”

Confused, she said, “Because it was good?”

With his free hand he traced his fingers over that beguiling, pouty mouth. Unable to resist, he kissed her again, brief and hard. “Too good. In about thirty seconds we were going to reach the point of no return. We were going to make love right here, right now.”

She thought about that a moment. “And that would be bad, why?”

“Because the first time with you should be special. I don’t want it to be in a closet in the middle of a tornado warning when you’re doing anything you can to forget the memories the tornado brings up.”

“
If
we made love, which is by no means a given, it wouldn’t be because I was afraid of a tornado.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You can’t deny that was at least part of the reason you kissed me.” He’d bet the Kelly ranch on that.

Addison raised her chin pugnaciously. “You kissed me. I merely responded like any woman would have when—” She broke off abruptly.

“When her boss kisses her?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure you weren’t thinking like my boss just now. I know I wasn’t thinking about being your secretary.”

“My point, exactly. I want to do this right, Addison.”

“Do what right?”

Irked, he kissed her. When she would have spoken he kissed her again. “Honey, if you’re trying to frustrate me you’re doing a good job of it.” He continued before she could speak. “I want to get to know you and you get to know me,” he explained.

She moved out of his embrace and sat cross-legged in front of him, her dress modestly arranged around her limbs. “I’ve been working for you for a long time. Don’t you think we know each other by now?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about you outside of the office. You’ve never talked about your childhood. I had no idea you grew up in the Barrels.” If he had, he’d have been more careful about recalling that long ago tornado that destroyed much of that side of town.

She frowned. “My childhood isn’t something I like to remember.”

“It was that bad?”

“Yes. Which is why I’ve been working my butt off to get my law degree.”

Ryder knew Addison commuted to law school part time so she could continue to work part time for him. She never acted as if it was hard to do both, but he knew it had to be.

“I have an interview in Austin next week, by the way,” she said. “It’s Tuesday morning, so I’ll have to take the day off.”

A job interview? Addison was that close to finishing law school? When were her boards? Somehow all that had slipped past his radar. “Why are you interviewing in Austin?”

“What do you mean, why? After I take my boards, I’ll need a new job. I want to practice law, not be your legal secretary forever.”

Addison was thinking about leaving Whiskey River. Leaving him. He knew it wasn’t personal. After all, this afternoon was only the second time they had kissed. But it felt damned personal to him.

He didn’t want her to go. “But why Austin? You’d have to move.”

“Yes, that’s usually what getting a job in another town entails. Why are you so shocked?”

“I’m not shocked. I just . . . don’t want you to move.”

She tilted her head and looked at him. “Why?”

Because he liked having her here. He couldn’t imagine not seeing her almost daily. What’s more, he didn’t want to imagine it. “I just think you ought to look for a job closer to home, that’s all.”

“There
are
no jobs in Whiskey River. Ford, Gamble and Lannigan is the only law firm in town. I haven’t heard you mention the firm is looking for a junior associate.”

“We’ve talked about taking on another attorney.” Occasionally. Not very seriously. Still, their client list was steadily growing, just as Whiskey River itself was growing. It was certainly possible he and his partners could agree to bring Addison into the group.

Addison looked skeptical. “I can’t afford to wait on a maybe. I’m looking in San Antonio and Austin. If I don’t find anything at either of those cities, then I’ll expand my search.”

“Don’t be hasty,” he said.

“Give me a reason to rethink it,” she said.

Ryder wanted to. But he couldn’t make an offer without talking to his partners and he knew that if he slept with Addison, working with her when the affair ended would be bad.