And with that she turned on the hottest water she could stand and proceeded to scrub the life out of her face for punishment.
When the residual makeup was gone and her cheeks were their own color again, she eased up on herself by gently patting her skin dry.
As she did, she became increasingly aware of the bad taste in her mouth. And of how unpleasant her breath must be.
She would never in her life use someone else's toothbrush, but a tube of toothpaste seemed to call to her and she ended up putting some on her index finger and doing a makeshift job on her teeth until every trace of liquor taste was gone.
And then another bit of temptation struck.
Bending over to slurp water from her cupped palm to rinse her mouth, her gaze fell to the bottle of aftershave on the counter. Her attention caught on it like a sweater on a bramble bush, and as she dabbed at her mouth with the dry washcloth she suddenly became obsessed with taking a whiff of the stuff.
The rear-end cowboy had been clean shaved when he'd awakened her, but she hadn't been aware of any cologne smell, so her curiosity about what scent he chose for himself got the better of her.
She reached for the bottle, thinking that the top was screwed on tight.
It wasn't.
The bottle tipped, splashing its contents over her hand, her forearm, her shirtfront and the countertop, filling the whole room with a scent not unlike the soap except with a woodsy undertone.
Groaning yet again, she screwed the top on tight, washed her hand and arm and mopped up the countertop. But there was nothing to be done about the aftershave on her T-shirt to announce that she'd been snooping.
Could this morning get any worse?
There was no way around stepping out of that bathroom reeking of his aftershave, so Abby resigned herself to facing the music, again thinking that the sooner she did that, the sooner she could get home, out of the man's sight andâwith a little luck and a lot of hiding for the rest of her lifeâmaybe she'd never have to face him again.
She took a deep breath and sighed it outâas much in self-disgust as to bolster her courageâsquared her shoulders and walked out of the bathroom.
“I...uh...accidentally knocked over a bottle of aftershave on the counter. The lid wasn't on tight, and some of it spilled. I'm sorry. I'd be happy to replace it,” she said in a hurry.
He was rummaging in a drawer and only when he had a pair of socks in hand did he face her. He leaned near, sniffing as he did. “Smells better on you than on me.”
She couldn't imagine that was true but appreciated that he didn't make any bigger deal out of it than that.
Then he straightened up again and studied her face. “Better. Much better.”
She self-consciously touched her fingertips to her cheek. “I know I was kind of smeared up.”
“This is even better than before that.”
Had she looked so bad last night? “Not so clownishâis that what you mean?” she asked, embarrassed once more.
“You didn't look like a clown. Just a fresh-faced woman trying to cover it up when she shouldn't have.”
“Fresh faced,” she repeated. It sounded better than shy, quiet, predictable and provincial. But somehow, in her mind, it went along with those other things and still added up to boring. She was just...
plain.
And she guessed it was time to give up trying to be anything else and accept it.
“I'd like to go home now.”
As if he could tell that she hadn't taken his comment as a compliment, he stepped close in front of her, grasped her chin in a strong hand and tilted her face upward until she was looking right into his aquamarine eyes.
“The makeup just hid how really beautiful you are,” he said quietly, as if confiding a secret.
And then he did something that totally and completely surprised her.
He kissed her.
Square on the mouth. A soft, delicate meeting of warm, slightly moist, decidedly expert lips against hers, in a kiss so tender she might never have guessed a man like Cal Ketchum would give it. Except for the added bit of devilry in the tip of his tongue touching ever so lightly to her upper lip just before he ended it.
The kiss was over before she knew it, but still it had wielded power enough to leave her knees weak and her head spinning more than it had been under the effects of alcohol.
And all she could think of was that she wanted more...
Of the kisses, not the alcohol.
“Sure I can't persuade you to stay awhile?”
Awhile? How about forever? As a willing slave to kisses as potent as that one...
“No,” she said in a semipanic at her own thoughts, her own weaknessâa weakness she'd never known she possessed. “I have to go home. Now.”
“Who says?”
“Me,” she insisted.
He let out an exaggerated sigh of disappointment. “If your heart is set on it. I guess we'd better go, then.”
He began to button his shirt from the top, and a wave of disappointment washed through her. She just wasn't certain over what. Maybe over losing the sexy sight of his bare chest and stomach? Maybe over his agreeing to let her go rather than keeping her captive to kisses like the one before and the silent promise it held of more passionate ones?
She honestly didn't know.
She only knew that she couldn't take her eyes off his hands working their way down that shirtfront and then tucking the tails into his jeans in a way that unwittingly tantalized her imagination with images of what was hidden behind that zipper.
Then, as if he didn't have any idea what he was doing to her insides, he bent over and pulled on the socks he'd taken from the drawer.
Bent over...
Her hand actually itched to reach out and pat that great derriere again.
Maybe she was a wilder woman than she realized.
“Shoes!” she said to snap herself out of her own reverie as he yanked on a pair of tan snakeskin cowboy boots. “I need my shoes, too.”
He nodded toward the side of the mattress. “Those I did take off you. They're over there.”
Abby nearly ran for them, grateful for somethingâanythingâto do rather than watch him finish dressing as if they'd shared more intimacy than they had.
“Ready?” he asked when he was.
“Please,” she said, knowing it was too polite and kind of a dumb response, but just wanting to escape that room, which seemed to be getting smaller by the minute.
He held his arm out toward the door, and Abby came close to flying out of it, down the stairs and through the front door, all without so much as a glance at anything in the rest of the house.
She was in the passenger's seat of the black convertible parked outside before Cal had made it to the porch steps.
She tried not to watch him finish the trip she'd taken in such a hurry, but even from the corner of her eye she could see long, muscular legs carrying him down the steps. And when he walked around to the driver's side, her gaze seemed to stick like glue to that rear end again.
“Where to?” he asked as he got behind the wheel and started the engine.
This was how I got into trouble last night,
she remembered. But this time she didn't hesitate to give him directions to the family home she and her sisters shared.
Then she sank as deeply into the seat as she could so no one in town could readily see her being taken home in the same clothes she'd been wearing the night before, by a gorgeous man who no one would believe had been a gentleman. That kiss notwithstanding.
“Ashamed to be seen with me?” he asked, noticing.
“Ashamed of myself,” she answered almost under her breath.
“For cuttin' loose a little?”
“For cutting loose way too much.”
“Way too much? Honey, I've seen people cut loose a whole lot more than you did last night. Much to my regret.”
“That you've seen other people do worse or that I didn't do more?”
He just grinned over at her and left her guessing.
After a moment he said, “Ask me what I want as payback for behavin' myself.”
She was a little afraid to inquire. But she owed him a great deal for not turning the previous evening into the nightmare it might have been had he been another man, so she complied. “What do you want as payback?”
“I want to pick you up tonight about eight and have you show me where around here is the best place to watch the sunset.”
An involuntary thrill ran through her at the prospect, even as she told herself she'd be better off never seeing him again as she'd promised herself earlier.
“It looks good from anywhere,” she said in an attempt to resist him. And her own desires.
“But there's always a prime place or two to settle in and watch. If you've been here your whole life the way you said, you must know where it is. Or were you lyin' about bein' ashamed to be seen with me?”
“Will you still behave yourself?” she heard herself ask, hating that she sounded like such a prude. Predictable, provincial and now prudish.
“Can't make any promises,” he said. “But I'll try.”
“I don't know....” She shouldn't. She really shouldn't give in to this. To him. To herself.
“I'll behave myself better if you do this than if you don't,” he threatened with a glint of mischief in the sidelong glance he shot her way.
“What does that mean?”
He only shrugged and grinned.
“My reputation will already be in shreds after you were seen carrying me out of that bar last night.”
“Thought that's what you wantedâto show folks you were different than they thought you were.”
“Maybe not
that
different.”
“What'll they be sayin' if I start showin' up to howl at the moon under your bedroom window every night?”
“That you're a lunatic.”
He laughed. “And that all sorts of things must have gone on between us to drive me crazy.” He pulled up in front of her house and stopped the car. “So what'll it be? Show me the best place to watch the sunset or have me raisin' a ruckus under your window?”
“This smacks of blackmail, you know.”
“Doesn't it, though?” he answered with yet another grin. “Tonight at eight?”
She wasn't sure whether or not he'd actually make good on his threat. And it wasn't really much of a threat to begin with. So she could have refused. Could have and should have.
But she did owe him for driving her home the night before. For not taking advantage of her or of the situation.
“Okay,” she said. “Eight o'clock.”
His grin turned victorious, and he leaned across the seat as if to kiss her again.
Only she leaned back farther and faster than he leaned forward, avoiding his lips.
“But don't get any ideas,” she warned as she got out of the car and closed the door behind her.
“Too late. I already have plenty of 'em.”
He pulled away from the curb then, and she could hear him laughing devilishly as he did.
What's gotten into me?
she asked herself, watching his car as long as she could see it and knowing she should not have plans to spend any amount of time with the man again. Not when she couldn't hold her own with him. And what did he want with someone like her, anyway, when even the town accountant hadn't found her exciting enough?
So call the man and tell him you won't go after all,
she ordered herself.
But she knew she wasn't going to do that. Crazy as it seemed not to.
And it did seem crazy.
Because here she was, shy, quiet, predictable, provincial, prudish Abby Stanton.
Playing with fire.
3
“F
INALLY.”
“It's about time.”
The voices of Abby's sisters came from inside the house as she turned from the curb after watching Cal Ketchum drive off. Bree was apparently on the lookout upstairs at the bay window in one of the four bedroomsâthe one they'd used as a guest room since their brother, Lucas, had left. Emily was standing at the window downstairs that opened onto the round turret that wrapped one corner of the two-story white clapboard Victorian house.
Abby just waved without calling any kind of answer back to her sisters because she didn't want to draw any more of their neighbors' attention than she already had.
She headed for the house, struck as she always was by how beautiful the old place was, how much it looked like a dollhouse. Wide porches followed the line of the multicantilevered and gabled front and the turret on both levels, with spindled railings and poles making the turret look like a double-decker, attached gazebo.
A steep roof topped the house, and an octagonal roof finished off the turret, keeping it from being stark. Gingerbread latticework accentuated all the overhangs, and beveled glass surrounded the carved entrance door.
But in spite of how inviting her home was, there was no speed in Abby's climb up the six steps that lifted her into the cool shade where white wicker chairs, a swing and two settees all with flowered cushions waited for someone to while away the early-summer days. She wasn't anxious to face her sisters and so, rather than going right in, she plucked a few wilting leaves from the bright red geraniums that grew in a pot hanging beside the door.
But that only bought her a moment before Emily appeared just inside the wooden screen.
“Firstâare you all right?” Emily demanded, sounding as if she, not Abby, were the oldest sister when, in fact, she was the middle one.
“I have a splitting headache, but other than that I'm okay,” Abby answered as she crossed the threshold into a large entryway with a center table occupying a fair share of the space.
“I can't believe you did this,” Bree said from directly overhead. Voices tended to echo slightly in the entryway because it was open to the ceiling of the second floor, surrounded on the upper level by a banistered walkway off which the bedrooms opened. The echo lent power to Bree's disapproval.
“Which part can't you believe?” Abby asked her youngest sister as Bree came around to the oak staircase and descended it to join her and Emily in the entry.
“All of it,” Emily said as if the question had been directed at her. “What were you doing letting that guy carry you out of that bar last night? And where did you go with him? And why didn't you call so we didn't have to sit up all night wondering if you were okay or in trouble or sick or who knows what?”
Bree picked up where Emily left off. “We take you out to get your mind off the wedding and Bill, and the next thing we know, some stranger is carting you off like a sack of potatoes. By the time we got through the crowd in that place, all we saw was him driving away with you.”
“And then when you weren't here when we got home and didn't come home
all night,
” Emily continued, “we didn't know what to think. Or if we should call the sheriff or if calling the sheriff would end up with him finding you boinking that cowboy somewhere.”
“Bree!” Abby said with an embarrassed laugh.
“Looks to me,” Emily contributed, “as if it's a good thing we didn't call the sheriff because boinking that cowboy is just what he'd have caught you doing.”
Emily was as conservative as Abby, so it was an indication of how put out she was that she'd even say a word like
boinking.
“I was not
boinking
anybody,” Abby informed them.
“Oh, no? You spent the whole night with him and here you are now, with your clothes all messed up as if you were wrestling around in them. Your hair has gone crazy. And you're reeking of men's cologne,” Bree declared.
“Maybe it isn't only her hair that's gone crazy,” Emily pointed out.
They were concerned about her but they were also peeved and goading her, too, to find out what had really gone on in the past twelve hours.
Continuing in that vein, Bree said, “Geez, Abby, this isn't like you.”
“Yeah, we didn't think you'd carry the wild-woman thing
this
far. We've been scared to death that our getting you drunk made you do something dangerous.”
When all else fails, try guilt.
“Okay, okay. I'm sorry,” Abby said, finally moving from the entryway.
She was badly in need of an aspirin and something to drink that would remoisten a desert-dry mouth. She could have gone to the kitchen at the back of the house by heading straight down the hallway from the foyer. But her sisters were blocking that path, so it was easier to take a left and go through the formal living room, pass under the yellow-stained-glass-lined archway that connected the dining room and finally to the kitchen from there.
Bree and Emily trailed her like ducklings.
“So what happened?” Bree finally asked outright.
The kitchen was very large, divided in half by a low row of cupboards so the appliances and butcher's block were on one side, and a breakfast nook big enough to seat eight on its U-shaped bench seat was built into the wall on the other.
Abby took a bottle of aspirin from a narrow cupboard beside the sink. “Is there any lemonade left?” she asked rather than answering Bree's question.
Emily poured her a glass from a pitcher in the refrigerator, handed it to her and, with emphasis, repeated, “What happened last night?”
“Nothing,” Abby said simply, making a face after swallowing the white tablets with the lemonade Bree always made too sour.
“Nothing, my foot,” Bree said, a note of anticipation for a juicy story creeping into her voice.
Abby felt boring again, knowing she was going to disappoint her youngest sister. With all the worrying and waiting up they'd done, they deserved at least a titillating tale. But they weren't going to get it. Unless she lied. Which she considered doing for their sakes. And maybe for her own, too, so she could liven up their image of her.
Only in the end Abby couldn't bring herself to make something up.
“I hate to admit it, but Bill was right about me. I left the bar with Cal Ketchum because I came out of the bathroom and couldn't stand the thought of going back to the table with those other people who had joined you guys.” She went on to outline how Cal came to not only carry her from the bar, but also take her to his house, and what had gone on from there.
And when she finished she took a good long look at her sisters, almost hoping they might doubt her bland story and think it was only a cover-up for something deliciously scandalous. That they might say
You don't expect us to believe that's all that happened, do you?
But they knew her too well.
They both visibly relaxed. Clearly not even entertaining the notion that she and the rear-end cowboy had spent a night of mindless passion because he couldn't resist her and she'd been more than just pretending to be a wild woman. Somehow it was demoralizing to think that her reputation as shy, quiet, steady, provincial, predictable Abby Stanton was so ingrained that even a whole night spent with Cal Ketchum couldn't heat it up.
“It looked like he tried to kiss you in the car just now,” Bree said then, proving she had been watching from the upstairs window.
“He did,” Abby admitted.
“And you didn't let him,” Emily guessed as if that were a given.
It pricked something in Abby and made her decide on the spot to give them a little shock. “Not that time I didn't let him, no.”
“There was another time that you did let him kiss you?” Bree asked.
“Just once. Earlier. At his house.” And didn't it feel good to let them know that! Almost as good as the kiss itself had felt.
“Then something did happen?” Emily said, perking up hopefully.
But that was as far as Abby could take it. She just couldn't lie. “Only the one kiss. It was next to nothing.” To him, anyway. She was certain of that. Sure, it had curled her toes, but to a man like Cal Ketchum? He probably gave away kisses like that every day of the week.
She brought her lemonade to the breakfast nook where both her sisters were sitting and slid in, too.
“So what's up with him anyway? Where did he come from? What's his story?” Emily was anxious now for details.
“I don't know. Unfortunately I slept through most of the time with him and this morning I was too interested in finding out what I couldn't remember about what went on last night. I didn't ask about anything more than that. But maybe I'll find out about him tonight.”
“Tonight?” Bree repeated. “What's tonight?”
“He's picking me up at eight so I can show him the best place to watch the sunset,” she said matter-of-factly.
“And you're going? With someone you don't even know? Without being drunk?” Emily was finally shocked.
“I owe him. For all he
didn't
do last night,” she admitted, not going on to let them know that she was as nervous about it as if it were her first date ever.
“So do you like him?” Emily asked.
Abby shrugged. It wouldn't do to like him. And she wouldn't admit that she did. Not to her sisters. Not to herself.
“He's nice. Nicer than you'd expect for as good-looking as he is. He isn't arrogant or conceited. But it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to pay him back for taking me home last night and not doing anything while I was nearly passed out in his bed and at his mercy. And then that will be that.”
“What makes you so sure?” Bree asked, her voice full of possibilities.
“Cal Ketchum isn't interested in someone like me. He acts like he saw through the wild-woman thing, but I'm sure he still thinks that a little of it was real. You know when he realizes the truth he'll be on to someone exciting.”
“What are you? Dull as dishwater?” Bree asked.
Abby shrugged again. “Let's be honest, Bill wasn't off the mark when he complained about me. I
am
shy and quiet and steady and predictable and provincial. Even last night I couldn't pull off the wild-woman thing. And this morning I was terrified I might have done something I couldn't face. Or promised something I couldn't follow through on. Maybe I'm not dull as dishwater...I
hope
I'm not. But I'm also not the kind of woman a man like that bothers with. I'm just not the type a world-class ladies' man wastes his time with.”
“Oh, Abby,” Emily said in a moan. “I'd like to chop Bill Snot-grass into tiny pieces for making you doubt your appeal to anybody.”
“Bill Snot-grass?” Abby repeated with a laugh.
“Well, that's what he is. Among other things. I still don't buy his reasons for calling off the wedding. I think he just got cold feet, chickened out and then laid the whole thing on you because he wasn't man enough to admit it.”
“Or worse,” Bree said under her breath.
“Or worse?” Abby asked.
“I can't help feeling he had something else up his sleeve. Maybe something he had a guilty conscience over and it made him feel better to pick at you.”
“But I am all the things he said,” Abby reminded, wishing she had more than last night and one kiss by the rear-end cowboy to refute it. “Anyway the good news is, being shy, quiet, steady, predictable and provincial isn't fatal. It isn't really bad at all. I'm okay with it. It just won't keep Cal Ketchum coming around. And that's good because I don't want him coming around. I just want to get tonight over with so my debt is paid and I can go on with my own business.
Without
a man to confuse things. I need a break from men for a while. Like maybe the next ten years.”
“It's good to take some time for yourself. Regroup,” Emily agreed.
“Besides, rebound relationships never work out,” Bree added.
“So let's just not make a big deal out of what isn't a big deal. I did something dumb last night, but luckily I was with a man who didn't take advantage of the situation. Tonight I'll pay him back by showing him the sunset. I'll be home before ten without even a peck on the cheek to say good-night, and that'll be that.”
Both her sisters nodded their heads as if they thought she was absolutely right.
She
thought she was absolutely right
But somehow she couldn't help wishing that she wasn't.
Because for no reason she could begin to understand, the whole lily-white scenario she'd just laid out for the coming evening made her feel oddly downhearted.