“I really … I can’t believe you’ve really forgiven me.”
“I’ve done some seriously shitty things in my life, Tori,” he said, scratching at his chest. “And some of the shittiest were to you. You didn’t owe me anything. The fact that we’d had sex just complicated things. You did the right thing for you.”
“What … what about now?” she asked, pointing to the bed. “Does this complicate things?”
“Probably,” he said. “But I’m ready to risk some complications.”
chapter
20
Eli was very
susceptible to bribery. He wasn’t proud of it. The morning after Victoria had come over, Ruby called and asked him to hook up her sink and dishwasher.
All the soreness in his body, the pinpricks of pain along his neck and back where Victoria had sunk her nails, blazed at the thought of seeing her so soon.
But his mind thought all that excitement was a bad idea. “Don’t you have a bunch of people there whose job it is to get that shit to work for you?”
“They’re all busy. Gavin’s telling me the dishwasher isn’t a priority until next week.”
“Well, then I figure—”
“Food for a week,” she said, “so you don’t have to keep eating those sad little sandwiches.”
His stomach roared with its vote and he just couldn’t say no. Sometimes he thought if he saw another jar of peanut butter he just might cry. “Tamales?”
“Of course.”
“Damn it. Give me a few hours. And make sure Amy and that Gavin guy aren’t around.”
Which is how he happened to be on his back, trying to hook the dishwasher up to the water line behind a stack of boxes and stainless-steel appliances, when Victoria, Celeste, and Ruby came in and started arguing.
And it sounded like an old argument.
“How many times do I have to say no to this?” Victoria cried. He felt like he needed to come out of hiding, in case this was an argument Victoria didn’t want him hearing.
“You don’t,” Celeste said. “You don’t have to say no at all.”
“We don’t have the money,” Victoria said, “to renovate that barn. We just paid for all that damn advertising! The
New York Times
Travel Section isn’t exactly cheap, Celeste.”
“You’re being shortsighted again.”
“Fine, you want to ask Luc for more cash?”
“I will.”
“A couple months ago asking Luc was a last resort.”
“I’m not saying I’ll like doing it, but it’s the right thing to do, Victoria.”
Victoria muttered something he couldn’t hear.
“What about those friends of yours in New York?” Celeste asked. “Have you invited them to the grand opening?”
The silence in the room was the loudest he’d ever heard and he held his breath, now praying that he didn’t get found.
“I will.”
“You’ve been saying that for weeks. We agreed that those women are our core demographic.”
“I said I will.” Victoria’s voice was full of all kinds of steel and he admired that about her. That paisley-covered mouse had grown into a lioness. “We need to talk about this
Dallas A.M
. thing. Madelyn Cornish called—”
“She actually called?” Ruby asked, and Eli smiled. Ruby loved her a.m. talk shows. “Madelyn Cornish? What’s she like?”
“She’s nice, but they’re pushing hard for a date we can do a spot on her show, and I—”
“Let me handle it,” Ruby said. “I … I want to handle this.”
There was a pause, and he could imagine Victoria and Celeste looking at each other. “Knock yourself out, Ruby,” Celeste said, but she sounded angry.
“Celeste,” Victoria asked, her voice softer. “What’s wrong? You seem so—”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Celeste said.
“Is this about Gavin?” Victoria asked, and instead of an answer he heard footsteps walking out the door.
“I’d take that as a yes,” Ruby said.
“Me too,” Victoria agreed.
Victoria made herself wait four days before taking Jacob out to see Eli and the horses. Four long days and even longer nights. She didn’t know what kind of magic that man had, but the second she saw him it was as if no time had passed and her body was right back on that bed.
“Any of your mares pregnant?” she asked, when he came to stand beside her at the fence after helping Jacob find the hose so that he could fill the plastic troughs in the corners of the paddocks.
“Too early to tell,” he said, tipping his hat back, watching her with a focus and intent she found utterly unnerving.
“What?” She smiled, feeling herself blush, like the sixteen-year-old she never got a chance to be. Was he remembering everything she remembered? The feel of his hand on her breast, the lick of his tongue on her belly, the way—
“I was in the kitchen the other day.”
She coughed, pulling herself away from the dirty movies in her head.
“New peanut butter and jelly recipe?”
“Your kitchen. I overheard you and Celeste.” She felt
the smile fade from her face and she turned away, staring blindly at her son.
“Eavesdropping? That’s a little beneath you, isn’t it?”
“At first I was just scared. You women yelling like that—” He whistled, and she tried not to smile. Perhaps she would have hidden, too.
“What do you need the money for?” he asked.
“You can’t really care about this?” she said, giving him an out, hoping he’d take it.
“I can. I do.”
She stayed silent out of self-preservation. They’d blurred so many lines already, she didn’t need to like this man any more. To need him any more than she did. She’d tried to put all of that needy, weak woman crap behind her.
“Tell you what,” he said, shifting so his body blocked her son from view, curling around her slightly. “You tell me what you need that money for and tonight when you come back here … I’ll get out the rope.”
Her bark of a laugh, so unfeminine, echoed around the field. Horses turned, shook out their manes.
“Are you trying to blackmail me with sex?”
“Is it working?”
Yes. Very much, yes
.
“Celeste wants to renovate the barn and arena so we have more space. A ballroom. She seems to think we could make a fortune in weddings.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I totally agree, but we just don’t have the budget right now. We can do it in a few years, once things take off.”
He nodded. “Seems wise.”
Never in her life had she been called wise. She liked it. A lot. “Thanks. But she’s going to go and get the money from Luc—I know she is.”
“If Luc’s got enough money, why is that a problem?”
“Because we’ve already borrowed a huge amount of
money from him and I don’t want to keep running to my brother every time I need something. The spa was supposed to be about me standing on my own two feet, and how is that supposed to happen with my brother paying for everything?”
“What about those friends of yours?” he asked. “You gonna call them?”
“When pigs fly,” she whispered, bitterness boiling up in her throat like vomit. “They’d come in a heartbeat. Pay whatever I asked them too, and tell every single one of their friends where they were going to go—”
“Sounds like the kind of people a spa could use.”
She glared at him. “That’s what Celeste said after she called all of her bitchy model friends and invited them. But my friends … those cannibalistic—” She shook her head, so angry she couldn’t find the right words to describe the terribleness of those women.
“Asshats?”
That brought her up short and he shrugged. “I’ve always liked that word.
Asshat
. Sounds good.”
How was she laughing? How could she stand here, filled with the sourness of her animosity, and laugh?
“You shouldn’t invite the asshats,” he said. “No matter what Celeste says. It’s got to be bad for business.”
An emotion too similar to gratitude welled up behind her heart and she welcomed it with resignation. It was her lot in life to be grateful, to be on the receiving end of someone else’s generosity. She wondered what she gave Eli in return. Or her brother. Celeste.
All of the people who helped her, did they see how one-sided their relationship with her truly was?
Eli stepped away, letting the world back between them. “I was going to show Jacob some of that ultrasound—”
“Wait a second, I have a question.”
He smiled, settled back in, a sexual light filling his eyes. “What do I get for answering?”
This was a dangerous game. Totally reckless; her son was just yards away. Her brain was screaming warnings, but his eyes … that body. Those hands that knew just what to do with her weak and willing flesh.
“Tonight,” she whispered, leaning toward him slightly, channeling all the vixen/sex goddess she could while wearing cracked galoshes. “I want to put you in my mouth.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, his mouth opened and shut, and she felt such power at her fingertips.
“What’s … what’s your question?” His voice was guttural, sexy and dark, and her body responded. Night could not come quick enough.
“Why were you in my kitchen?” She smiled, drunk on her power. Her fingertips touched his collar, the heat of his skin beneath.
“Ruby bribed me with food to put in her dishwasher.”
Ah, didn’t that just kill a girl’s inner diva! She pulled her fingers away, but he grabbed them, pressing her hand to his chest, where she felt the pounding of his heart underneath his shirt.
“And I wanted to see you.”
Celeste had so far done a very good job of ignoring Gavin. It had been a mistake to cultivate this relationship. Luckily, the awareness her body had of his made him easy to avoid. Every time the fine hair on the back of her neck started to vibrate, she found a pressing need to be anywhere but where she was.
Thomas, on the other hand, was not so easy to shake off.
“You want to check out the lights in the change rooms?” he asked, leaning against the door to the kitchen, his black T-shirt striped with dust. Skinny and dark-haired, he didn’t look anything like Gavin.
She wondered what his mother looked like, what kind of women Gavin usually chose when he wasn’t trying to make time with sixty-three-year-old former models.
“You’re done?” she asked, surprised. He’d started cutting holes for the recessed lights yesterday.
“When you hire the best …,” he said with a grin.
She’d long ago stopped trying to be distant with Thomas. He made it impossible. He told her dirty jokes, for crying out loud. No one told Celeste Baker dirty jokes.
“Go on in,” he said, gesturing for her to head in first. He stood by the light switch. “I want you to have the full effect.”
“You’re good, Thomas,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at him. “But they’re just lights.”
It was dark in the windowless room, and as she turned the corner away from the door it got even darker.
“Okay,” she yelled, and warm yellow lights illuminated the room from behind the subtly elegant brown sconces.
The pot lights overhead flickered on, staying dim, giving the room an intimate, sophisticated glow.
She turned slowly, taking it all in. “I may have to eat my words—” She stopped. There, in the middle of the room, between the first bank of lockers and the whirlpool and sauna, was a sheet of plywood propped up over two sawhorses.
A plastic water bottle had been stuffed with mums and zinnias from Ruby’s garden, and two wrapped Subway sandwiches sat on either side.
“Thomas!” she yelled just as someone behind her did the same thing.
“Where the hell are you, Thomas?” Gavin walked around the corner, gleaming like copper and gold in the low lights.
Her stomach, her womb, clenched hard at the sight of him.
He glanced down at the sandwiches. The flowers.
“Did you do this?” His blue eyes were so bright with hope and excitement under the glitter of his lashes. His smile spoke directly to her sex, whispered secrets her body loved.
“This?” she asked, too loud, too crisp. “No. Lord, no.”
He turned away, nodding as if agreeing that it was a ridiculous idea, and she realized how awful she sounded.
“That didn’t come out right,” she said.
“I don’t care how old you are.”
“That’s because you have no idea what I have to do to look like this. Trust me, five years from now—”
He shrugged, his lips twisted into a cruel knot. “I don’t care about five years from now.”
“I do.”
Suddenly he was right in front of her and he was angry. Not the icy anger from weeks before; this time he burned like the hottest part of a fire. As if everything inside of him was being torched. “I was ready to go slow, let you get used to the idea, but you win. I’m out, Celeste. Enjoy your fucking old age.”
The pain was actually quite stunning. Like being blinded.
He turned on his heel, his big, broad back leaving the warm glow of light his son had prepared.
For a week now Victoria had been coming out to Eli’s house after her son was asleep. A week of lying in this bed. In his house. And he couldn’t quite get over how unbothered he was.
He wouldn’t go so far as to say it felt natural, but it was comfortable, her shoes sitting beside his front door, her sweater slung over the back of his kitchen chair.
Her warm, soft body in his bed.
It was the second week in November, and the days were flying by in anticipation of the nights they spent together.
He sat up against the headboard and stroked her back. “You ever notice how the quiet’s not as quiet when there are two people?” he asked.
“Is that your way of asking me to leave?” She pushed herself up on her elbows, her breasts cradled in the white sheets of his bed, like lovely eggs in a nest.
He kissed her shoulder. “No.”
“Excellent, because I have a favor—”
Good God, the woman was persistent! “The answer is still no. No costumes, Tori. Leave a man some dignity—”
“It’s not costumes, but I still think you’d make a hot Wild West sheriff.”
“Well, sheriff, that’s different. You said sheik or some other shit last time.”
She kissed him, and her laughter tasted like peaches and candy and everything delicious. The soft weight of her breasts felt even sweeter. He eased himself down in the sheets, bringing her with him.
Once more
, he thought.
Just once more before she leaves
.