As If You Never Left Me (Crimson Romance)
Read As If You Never Left Me (Crimson Romance) Online
Authors: Katriena Knights
Tags: #romance, #spicy
Avon, Massachusetts
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
Copyright © 2013 by Katriena Knights
ISBN 10: 1-4405-6783-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6783-4
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6784-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6784-1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © Istockphoto.com/Stock Shop Photography LLC, Gremlin
A Sneak Peek from Crimson Romance
It had been a good day, and Joely Birch felt about as high as the clouds she could see out her office window. Laughing to herself, she pressed her nose against the glass. The pine-filled valley swooped away, deep down below. She imagined herself suspended above the trees in a hang glider, or perhaps powered by her own wings. She laughed, dizzy with the height and her own happiness, then leaned back and rubbed at the mark her nose had made on the glass.
Joely turned to the computer again, where the graph for her quarterly profit estimate sheet was still displayed. Black numbers all over the place. Compared to last October, business was booming, and last October hadn’t been that bad. With the holidays approaching, things could only get better.
She folded her hands under her chin and gazed contentedly at the graph. When she’d left the sprawl of New York City fourteen months ago and settled here, in the sprawling mountains of Colorado, she’d told herself she was doing the right thing. Up until now, she wasn’t sure she’d believed it.
From the little gallery’s front room, Joely heard whistling. Perry hadn’t heard the good news yet, but Joely was sure her one-and-only employee’s mood would just get better when she did. The bell on the front door tinkled, indicating a customer had come in, and Perry’s whistling stopped. The cheerful sound of her voice rose in its place.
Joely looked back out the window. A lone aspen stood gold against the dark green of the pines. Most of the aspens had dropped their leaves by now and stood reaching empty silver branches to the blue sky. Joely had never seen skies as blue as these, here above the smog, sometimes above the clouds. Today, there were only a few puffy white ones, floating high. It was truly a gorgeous day. Maybe she’d go for a walk later —
“Joely?”
Joely jumped, only then realizing how far she’d let herself drift. Sheepish, she looked up to see Perry grinning at her around the half-open office door.
“Boy, you’re in la-la land.” She stepped into the room. “I haven’t seen you that lost in space since the early, ‘Are we ever going to sell anything’ days.”
Joely laughed. “I have a right to be. Look at this.” She moved a little aside as Perry came over to peer at the computer.
“Hot damn!” said Perry as the significance of the graph soaked in.
“That’s right. Maybe there’ll be a Christmas bonus this year.” Joely had no qualms about letting Perry see the spreadsheets — the two of them had spent too many hours alone in this place to have any secrets from each other.
“That wouldn’t suck.” Perry grinned, then she, too, jerked herself back to the present. “Oh, there’s a guy out front who wants to ask you about one of the new pieces.”
“Which pieces?”
“Your pieces. The wolf ones you brought in this morning. You didn’t give me the rundown.”
“Oh, right.” Joely had just finished the wolf-themed pots last night, and hadn’t had time to make up display cards. “I’ll take care of it.” She stood, straightening her sweater. “Does he sound interested?”
“Maybe. I told him your more complicated pieces run around two hundred, and he didn’t blink. And he’s wearing a really nice suit.”
Joely paused at the door. “A suit? Nobody up here wears a suit.”
“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say he’s from out of town. Fine Flatlander Man, we’ll call him.”
“Fine, huh?” Joely grinned. “Then I guess I’d better hurry.”
She stepped out of the office into the space behind the gallery’s main display case. The case was full of jewelry, consignment work from local artisans. She sold other items on consignment as well — paintings and sculptures and an exquisite selection of handmade dream catchers. But the centerpiece of her business was the pottery filling the shelves across the room. All that was her own work.
The man perusing her new wolf-themed pieces, his back toward her, was indeed wearing a nice suit. Armani, she decided, at the same time realizing she hadn’t had the occasion to identify a suit since she’d left New York. In this area, even the well-heeled tended toward jeans.
In any case, the suit hung nicely across his shoulders. Wide shoulders set atop a tall, lean body. He had brown hair, cut neatly. From the back he looked like — Joely gave a reflexive shudder.
“Good morning,” she said brightly. “Perry says you’re interested in the new pieces?”
He turned around. For a moment, Joely just stared at him, unable to believe what she was seeing. Her heart took a giant leap in her chest and her adrenaline soared, not sure whether her system should fight or flee or do something else entirely.
His gray-blue eyes regarded her placidly, a smile tugging the corners of his full and inarguably lovely mouth. “Hello, Joely.”
Too aware of Perry’s lingering presence behind the counter, Joely cleared her throat.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking at your pottery, apparently.”
The familiar voice sent tingles up and down her spine, thoroughly against her will. She hadn’t heard it in a very long time, not even over a phone line. Those primal reactions should have died out a long time ago, but apparently they hadn’t. Fighting an urge to walk toward him, maybe to touch him — hell, to step right up to him and rip his shirt off, have her way with him right in the middle of the sedate little boutique — she set her mouth in a cold line.
“Are you going to buy it?”
He turned his attention to the sleek, graceful urn, eyeing the howling timber wolf etched on its long curves.
“It’s beautiful.”
Joely watched his long, clever fingers as they turned the pottery in his hands. She remembered the magic those hands could perform — when he’d bothered to use them.
“Put it down. You’re going to break it.”
He set it gently on the shelf, the vague smile becoming wider, and soft. “You’ve really developed your technique. I remember when you still had trouble keeping the clay on the wheel.”
“Do you want something, Rey?”
He hesitated, then slowly drew folded papers from inside his jacket. “I want to give you these.”
Joely’s heart skipped, her mouth going dry. The divorce papers. She’d drawn them up herself fourteen months ago, using software she’d gotten off the Internet, and she’d given them to Rey right before she’d left him. That was the last she’d heard of them.
He held them out to her and she stared at them, afraid to touch them. Even more afraid to touch him, for fear even the accidental brush of his fingers against hers would set off a chain reaction she wouldn’t be able to control.
“I finally realized you never filed these, or, as far as I could tell, ever even ran them by a lawyer. Given the circumstances, I thought I should deliver them in person.”
She forced herself to reach out, forced her hands not to shake. Careful not to touch him, she took the papers, opened them. Her heart started beating again. She breathed.
“You haven’t signed them.”
“No. I didn’t file them, either, or take them to my lawyer.”
“Why not?”
“I guess the same reason you didn’t. I didn’t want to.”
Suddenly exasperated again instead of relieved, she shoved the papers back at him. He wouldn’t take them. “It’s been over a year, Rey. You called me what, twice? What the hell do you want?”
“I want you to have dinner with me.”
Joely spared a glance over her shoulder where Perry still lingered behind the counter. Perry cocked an eyebrow, then slid past the door, back into the office. Joely recognized that expression — she was going to have to bring Perry up to speed, Rey-wise, or suffer the consequences of a bruised friendship.
“Just like that?”
He smiled, bemused. “It’s just dinner.”
“You came two thousand miles just for dinner?”
“Well, not really.”
“Then what do you want really?”
He took a long breath, his attention moving to the papers, still in Joely’s hand. “I want to talk. About those, about some other things.” His gaze strayed to the office door behind her, as if afraid Perry might come back into the room at any moment.
Joely was having a hard time looking him in the eye, her body betraying her with alarming intensity. She wanted him. Preferably naked, his hands all over her. Wanted him inside her. Hoping for some sort of control, she took a long, slow, careful breath.
“I don’t think this is the time or the place,” he said.
She swallowed, her heart fluttering again. “No, it isn’t. I have work to do.”
“Then will you see me tonight?”
The bell on the door tinkled and a woman entered, pausing to look at the jewelry.
“All right. Fine.”
“Good.” He plucked the papers from her hand and laid them on the counter behind her. “Meet me tonight at that little restaurant next door. Six o’clock. Bring these with you if you want and I’ll sign them, then I’ll take them back to New York and get them filed. Otherwise — well, I have some things to say.”
He turned toward the door, looked back over his shoulder once with a look half smolder and half regret, then he was gone.
It was all Joely could do to keep from running after him. Not fair. So not fair that he could just walk in out of nowhere and light her hormones up like a torch. She was having trouble catching her breath.
Behind her, the office door creaked open and Perry came out, a concerned expression on her face. “I’ll take care of the customers,” she offered.
“Thanks.”
Joely retreated into the office. The computer was still on, a screensaver winding brightly colored patterns across the screen. She pressed a button. The profit graph returned.
She mustered a strained smile. She was doing well on her own. Nothing and no one could take that away, and her heart still warmed at the thought. But everything had changed, because after fourteen months of building life as a single woman, suddenly she was married again.
In the showroom, the bell on the front door tinkled again, signaling the departure of their customer, and Perry came back into the office.
“What’s the story?” Perry demanded.
“There’s no story.” No way was Perry going to let her get away with that, and Joely knew it. She wasn’t even sure why she’d tried.
Predictably, Perry cocked her head to one side and regarded her friend dubiously. “You tell me you’re divorced, then this long tall drink of water shows up on your doorstep with invalid divorce papers and there’s no story?”
Joely put her head in her hands. “Okay, so I fudged things a little. We’re not legally divorced.”
“So I gathered. And you committed this little oversight because … ?”
Joely gave a defeated shrug. “I don’t know. I was doing well here, and I didn’t feel like dragging up the past.”