McKettricks of Texas: Garrett (14 page)

From the looks of things, he'd forgotten Julie was even in the room.

She suppressed a sigh and started for the doorway. It was time to get Calvin out of the tub, into his pajamas, oversee the tooth-brushing ritual.

“Julie?”

Garrett's voice stopped her on the threshold of the corridor leading to the guest quarters and to Esperanza's living area. She straightened her spine, waited for him to go on, but didn't turn around or speak.

“Would you mind coming back here after you tend to Calvin?” he asked quietly. “Just to keep me company for a little while?”

There was nothing needy in his tone, and nothing demanding, either. Garrett was making a simple request.

She turned her head, felt an actual impact when their two gazes met. If she hadn't figured out instantly that something was happening when he kissed her the night before in the pool, she'd have known it then.

“Okay,” she replied, in a smaller voice than she'd used in a long time.

Since the next day was Saturday, and Calvin was looking forward to spending the time with Tate and the twins, he was unusually tractable about brushing and flossing, being tucked in and kissed and saying his prayers. Libby, Paige and Julie would be away for hours, visiting a whole series of bridal shops in search of Libby's wedding dress.

Harry jumped up onto the bed and curled up at Calvin's blanketed feet, starting to snore practically the moment he'd settled in.

Calvin squeezed his eyes tightly shut, determined to sleep. The sooner he fell asleep, he probably reasoned, the sooner it would be morning.

Julie chuckled and kissed his forehead. “You're trying too hard,” she whispered.

Calvin's eyes popped open, wide and faintly dazed because he wasn't wearing his glasses. “It's
never
going to be morning!” he fretted.

Julie smoothed his hair lightly, remembering when she was little, looking forward to something, counting the days till it finally came—Christmas, or a birthday, or the last day of school, or the
first
day of school.

Back then, she and her sisters had wanted to speed time up.

Usually, their dad would smile wistfully and tell them not to wish their lives away.

“It
will
be morning,” Julie reminded her eager son.

“When?”
he asked fitfully.

She leaned down, kissed his forehead just once more.
“When it's morning,”
she answered. “Happy trails and sweet dreams, cowboy.”

Calvin huffed out a sigh, but he grinned at her before turning onto his side, snuggling down into his pillow and his covers and squeezing his eyes closed again. “'Night, Mom.”

Julie lingered in the doorway, savoring this child, this fleeting place in time. It was all too easy, she reminded herself, to get caught up in causes and concerns and plans for the future and forget what truly mattered—loving and being loved, in the present moment.

She closed the door softly, took her time returning to the kitchen.

Garrett was putting his plate, glass and utensils in the dishwasher when she arrived, and she noticed that he'd set out a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

Catching her looking at them, he chuckled, turned to
face her, leaning back against the counter and folding his arms. His dark blond hair looked especially shaggy, and his beard was coming in, bristly and golden. His blue eyes twinkled with a certain benevolent mischief.

“It's okay, Julie,” he told her, in a tone he might have used to reassure a skittish mare, indicating the wine with a slight inclination of his head. “I'm not out to seduce you.”

An unspoken
yet
hovered between them.

“A glass of wine would be nice,” she said, struggling to find her equilibrium.

“Good,” Garrett said. He picked up the wine in one hand and caught the stems of the glasses together in the other, then led the way onto the indoor patio on the near side of the pool.

The lighting was soft, the water was a great sparkling rectangle of turquoise, and the retractable roof was open to the silvery dance of a zillion stars spread across the night sky.

Garrett chose one of several tables, set down the things he was carrying, and drew back a chair for Julie to sit.

She hesitated—it was here, after all, in this very swimming pool where she'd felt a degree of desire she'd never even imagined to be possible—and the equation was obvious. Sexy man plus starlight plus wine and privacy equaled extreme vulnerability on her part.

Sex was one thing—it would be beyond good with Garrett, no doubt about that—but emotional entanglement was another. Easy manner, cowboy getup and horseback riding aside, he was a man with serious political aspirations—everybody in Blue River knew his association with Senator Cox was an apprenticeship of sorts, a way of learning the ropes.

And the fact of Garrett's association with a man Julie had always considered a scoundrel sent up all kinds of red
flags in her mind. If Garrett had respected Cox enough to work for him from the time he finished law school and passed the bar, which he had, until their recent break in the midst of the pole-dancer scandal, what did that say about Garrett's judgments and values?

Once she took a chair, Julie just sat there, feeling like a lump.

Garrett gave a small, rueful smile, wry at the edges, and poured wine into her glass, then his own.

“We need to talk,” she blurted, and immediately felt like four kinds of fool.

Garrett sat back comfortably in his chair—hell, he was damnably comfortable in his skin—and waited indulgently for her to go on.

She reached for her wineglass, nearly spilled it and set it down again, without taking so much as a sip.

Garrett smiled again, though his eyes were solemn. And still he waited. Wine by the pool under a universe full of shimmering stars had been
his
idea, but now that she'd opened her big mouth and clearly regretted it, he wasn't going to let her off the hook.

She cleared her throat, picked up her glass again, and sloshed back a gulp that nearly choked her.

Garrett didn't say one word, but a hint, a shadow, of amusement lingered on his mouth, and his eyes never left her steadily reddening face.

Julie took a second sip of wine, this time slowly, stalling in the hopes that her composure would return.

It did, sort of.

“What happened last night,” she said, nodding toward the pool, “our kissing each other and everything…”

She ran out of steam.

Garrett chuckled, sipped his wine. Set his glass down and took his sweet time picking up the conversational ball. “At least you're willing to admit it was mutual,” he said. “Last night, you seemed bound and determined to put all the blame on me.”

Julie's cheeks pulsed with heat. She knotted her fingers together in her lap. “I'm not denying there's a certain
attraction,
” she ventured, and then had to stop and clear her throat, which was mortifying.

Garrett gave an almost imperceptible nod of agreement. Or encouragement. Or
something.
But he went right on letting her dangle.

“Feel free to jump in and contribute to this exchange at any time,” Julie said, annoyed.

That made him laugh. It wasn't just a chuckle—oh, no. Garrett McKettrick threw back his head and gave a husky shout of amusement.

Turnabout, Julie decided, was fair play.
She
waited now.

He watched her for a long time, and his regard felt, she thought, like a caress. Which was just ridiculous, in her opinion, because he wasn't touching her.

Thank
God,
he wasn't touching her.

“It seems reasonable to assume,” he said, after a long time, “that you and I might wind up in bed together one of these days—or nights—since there's a
certain attraction
here. You've probably guessed that the whole idea works for me, on every possible level, but it has to work for you, too, Julie—because if it doesn't, it can't happen at all.”

Julie hadn't been involved with a lot of men, but she wasn't naive, either. Garrett's blunt honesty was new, in her admittedly limited experience, and she didn't know quite what to make of it.

Did he actually
mean
what he said?

Would he
really
back off if she told him this wasn't the right time in her life for a—well—a fling?

Garrett picked up the bottle, leaned, topped off her glass. “What?” he prompted, watching her face, raising one eyebrow.

“We're very different,” Julie said.

He grinned. “In all the right places,” he replied.

“That isn't what I mean and you know it.” She steadied herself with another sip of wine. It was a very nice wine, she thought. A shiraz, maybe, or a merlot. Even without peering at the label—which she refused to do—she knew the full-bodied red was way out of her price range.

And Garrett McKettrick, her pragmatic side pointed up, was out of her league. Not because he was better—of course he wasn't—but because he traveled in different circles, normally. Very sophisticated ones. Not that Julie couldn't fit in, if she made the effort, but that was the problem. She didn't want to change.

She liked her life a lot—teaching English in a small high school, despite all the attendant problems, and running the drama club.

She loved her sisters.

Most of all, she loved Calvin, and she wanted to raise him in the little town of Blue River, where she'd grown up herself.

Garrett smiled, evidently enjoying her frustration. “Talk to me,” he said.

“You're not working for Senator Cox anymore?” she asked, back in blurting mode.

Dammit,
she thought. She was intelligent. She was certainly competent. Why did her IQ make a swan dive whenever she spoke to or even looked at this man?

“No, that's over,” he replied.

“What about your career?”

“What about it?”

Her temper flared in the way Libby and Paige swore made her hair crackle. “Surely your
career
isn't over,” she said. “We didn't run in the same crowd in school—you were a popular rodeo jock and I was artsy and a little weird—but—”

Again, one of his eyebrows rose. “A
little
weird?” he teased. “You wore white lipstick all through junior year.”

Taken by surprise, Julie spoke without thinking. “You noticed that? The white lipstick phase?”

Garrett laughed. “It was hard to miss, especially since you dressed like Morticia Addams most of the time.”

“I did
not
dress like Morticia Addams!” Julie protested, laughing too. “I just wore a lot of black, that's all. I was making an existential statement.”

He rolled his marvelous eyes. “Whatever.”

The muscles linking Julie's shoulders to her neck let go in a sudden burst of relaxation; the swiftness of it made her feel light-headed.

This was
some
wine.

She finally looped back to where she'd left off—Garrett's career. “My point is, even in high school you were interested in politics. You wanted to serve in the U.S. Senate, if not be president. Has all that changed?”

Garrett stopped smiling. Turned his wineglass slowly on the tabletop, by the stem. Then he looked straight into her eyes. “The truth is, I'm not really sure,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

Why
was
she asking?

Because she needed to know his long-term plans, if she
was going to get involved with Garrett, even on a temporary basis.

To a man, a fling was a fling, and when it was over, it was over. But Julie knew that if she shared her body with this particular man, there was a good chance her heart would jump ship, too.

Julie was a risk taker by nature, or, at least, she
had
been, until Calvin was born. Now, she was more careful, because if her heart got broken, Calvin's surely would, too. And she had to stay strong to be the kind of mother to him that her own had never been to her or to her sisters.

It would make a lot more sense to simply walk away, right now, before things got any more out of hand.

Except that she was a normal woman, not yet thirty, with healthy desires and needs that made her body ache with a singular loneliness sometimes—okay,
often
—in the depths of the night.

“I have a son,” Julie said, very quietly and at considerable length. “What I do affects him. We're between homes, Calvin and I, and he just met his father for the first time since he was a baby. I don't want to confuse him. He looks up to Tate, and now you, and like any little boy, he's impressed by airplanes and all the rest—”

She was rambling.

Tears sprang to Julie's eyes at that moment, and she was completely unprepared for them.

Garrett reached over, took her hand and pulled her easily onto his lap.

“Hey,” he said. “Everything's going to be okay.”

“That,” Julie sniffled, making no move to get back to her own chair, “is easy for
you
to say. For you, everything
will
be okay, because you're a man, and a
McKettrick
man, at that.”

Garrett cupped her cheeks in his hands, let the pad of his right thumb brush lightly over her mouth.

“Don't you dare kiss me,” Julie said, thinking she'd die if he didn't do exactly that.

“I can wait,” he told her, his voice a sleepy, rumbling drawl. “Because sooner or later, Julie Remington, I mean to kiss you all over, and I'm only
starting
with your mouth.”

A hot shiver went through her.

It was going to be one of those achy nights, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.

Garrett traced the edges of her mouth with his thumb again. “Did you mean it when you offered to cook for me?” he asked, his voice slow and low. His face was so close to hers that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her lips.