Country Bride

by Debbie Macomber

  “Is this Taryn’s mother?” she guessed.

  He looked up from the file folder with a slightly unfocused look in his eyes. It took a moment for his gaze to sharpen.

  “Right. That’s Marcy.” He made a rueful sort of face. “And before you think I keep the picture around with the rest of those as some physical token of my undying love, let me assure you that’s definitely not the case. I keep the picture partly for Taryn’s sake, to help her remember her mother. But also because it reminds me that life can change in an instant.”

  Why did he think he needed a constant reminder of that delightful little fact of life? she wondered.

  He took the frame and held it for a moment, then shook his head and set it back on the shelf. “Marcy took off not long after that was taken. I was out of town meeting with investors for my first restaurant, which is probably why she picked that particular day to leave. At least she stopped long enough to drop Taryn off with my mother before she skipped town with a guy she had just met on the slopes.”

  “Wow. You had no advance warning?”

  “Technically, no, but I should have known. We were broken long before she left. I ignored plenty of signs that she had been trying to edge out of our lives for a while. She kept dropping all these hints and I ignored them, too busy trying to provide for her and Taryn. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll tell you. We weren’t exactly what you’d call a match made in heaven. If you want the truth, I married her mostly to piss off my father.”

  She gave a rough laugh at his matter-of-fact tone, though it wasn’t amusing in the least. “Quite a reason to bind your life to someone.”

  “Well, that’s the reason we dated, anyway. Marcy was a party girl. She skied hard and she played hard, just like I did. My father hated her and I hated my father so it seemed a perfect scenario. I wasn’t the most mature twenty-one-year-old guy around, I’ll freely admit it.”

  “Most aren’t,” she murmured.

  “Marcy and I were just messing around, you know? Neither one of us was serious—and then we found out she was pregnant.”

  “A shock for both of you, I’m sure.” She had to admit, she had a tough time picturing Brodie as a wild young man, though she had heard the stories. She knew he’d been a rising star in the heavily competitive ski-jump world and that he’d trained for the Olympics. She found it tough to gel that image with the driven entrepreneur he’d become, though she wasn’t sure why. She could imagine he had to use some of that same dedication and drive in any competitive athletics that he used in the business world.

  “I didn’t want to keep her. Taryn, I mean. Deep down, despite her party-girl ways, Marcy was Catholic and would never consider terminating the pregnancy. At first, I pushed her to give the baby up for adoption. The last thing I wanted at the time was to be tied down with a kid.”

  Guilt flickered in his gaze and he sighed heavily. “I sometimes think Taryn would have been better off if I had continued to push for that. If Marcy and I had decided not to get married instead.”

  “How can you say that? You love Taryn.”

  “I love her but I haven’t been the best father.”

  He spoke in a low voice, his mouth tight and those shadows of guilt in his blue eyes, and her heart ached for him. She felt extraordinarily touched that he would confide this in her, something she very much doubted he had ever shared with anyone else. At the same time, it terrified her. In only a matter of days, their relationship had shifted from tension and dislike to something far different. Something intense and rich and sweetly profound.

  She touched his arm. “All parents wish they had done something better. It’s part of the universal code of parenting, I think. Don’t beat yourself up, Brodie.”

  The muscles beneath her fingers flexed. “I pushed her too hard. The last few years, it seems like I rode her all the time. About grades, about boys, about her clothes, about wasting so much time online and texting.”

  “You mean like any concerned father would?”

  “Between my work schedule and her hectic school and social life, it seems like the few moments I did spend with her at dinnertime or whatever were always strained and tense. She wanted something from me and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell it was.”

  Your love. Just your love. She bit her lip and remained silent, not wanting to add to his guilt.

  “Even though we had my mom to pick up the slack, losing Marcy when Taryn was just a little kid was tough on her,” he went on after a pause. “I think it was harder because for those first few years Marcy would flit in and out on a whim, make all kinds of promises, then never keep any of them. You want to know what a terrible, selfish person I am? It was almost a relief to me when Marcy was killed in an avalanche heli-skiing in Chile somewhere. Yeah, I grieved for all those missed chances and for the woman I’d tried to convince myself I loved years ago, but at least after she died, I knew she couldn’t break Taryn’s heart anymore.”

  “You’re not a terrible person, Brodie.” It would be far, far easier for her if he were. She could feel those cracks in the ice around her heart cut deeper, almost hear the thunder in her ears as pieces of it fell away like glaciers calving in the Arctic sea.

  “I should have tried harder to keep my marriage together so Taryn could have had a chance at a regular life, with a mother who wasn’t always looking for the next thrill until it killed her.”

  Evie didn’t want this, the sweet, seductive tenderness that curled around and between them. She wanted to run as far and as fast as she could away from this soft warmth.

  “I didn’t know you then but I have a little experience with who you are now. I have no doubt whatsoever that you did all within your power to make things work. Trust me when I say you’re the most determined man I’ve ever met.”

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  A few weeks earlier, her words might have been edged with derision. She had viewed Brodie as a man who took what he wanted, regardless of the consequences. She had seen firsthand the power he wielded in Hope’s Crossing, the way he could sway a roomful of civic leaders to his way of thinking.

  What she had once considered arrogance, now she recognized as vision and sheer strength of will. He knew what he wanted—and unlike most of the world, he had no problem doing what was necessary to make it happen, whether that was developing a neighborhood or healing his daughter.

  “A compliment,” she murmured. “Definitely a compliment.”

  “I’ll take it as such, then.”

  Their gazes met and the air between them suddenly seemed to crackle and spark with electricity. She knew he was thinking about that kiss. She could see it in the way he swallowed and the expansion of his pupils, until the dark almost overtook the blue of his irises.

  He wanted to kiss her again. And she wanted to let him.

  “Taryn is probably awake by now,” she said, then was embarrassed by the huskiness of her voice.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “She can be a pretty sound sleeper.”

  She needed to go now, while she could. Move. The warning registered in her mind but she couldn’t seem to make her feet cooperate. With a funny sense of inevitability, she saw Brodie walk around his desk to stand in front of her.

  “Evaline,” he murmured. Just that, only her name, and she was lost. She didn’t resist when he pulled her to her feet or when he curved one hand around her cheek, his fingers warm on her skin, or when he lowered his head and his mouth found hers.

  He tasted delicious, of cherries and a hint of chocolate, probably from that thin slice of cake he’d had for dessert after lunch. Somehow she had always known chocolate would eventually be her downfall but this wasn’t quite what she’d expected.

  Where their first kiss had been slow and easy, this one was...more. More sensual, more intense, more demanding
.

  More...wow.

  His tongue licked at the seam of her mouth and she couldn’t resist parting her lips, drawing him closer, pressing her body to his as he deepened the kiss.

  Oh. My. He was an extraordinary kisser. Who would have thought serious Brodie Thorne would kiss a woman with this knee-weakening intensity that made her want to throw every shred of common sense down the mountainside, crawl right into his lap and stay for a week or so, just learning the mysteries of his clever mouth?

  Somehow—she was only vaguely aware of the logistics of it—he shifted their position until she was perched on the edge of the desk and he was standing between her legs. The heat of him was intoxicating. It seeped through her skin, warming all those cold and empty places inside her.

  They kissed for a long time and might have continued indefinitely, heedless of Taryn or Mrs. O. or anything else, except a phone suddenly bleated softly between them.

  He drew back a little, his eyes murky and aroused and filled with regret. The phone rang again and she scrambled back a little way on the desk. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

  “I don’t think so. Who knows what I might say? I’m not sure I have a functioning brain cell in my head right now.” He paused and gave her a long look. “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

  She swallowed hard, wanting nothing more than to sink back into him. She had a job to do here, she reminded herself, and it didn’t include kissing her employer until she forgot everything, including her patient.

  “Depends how you define problem.”

  He sighed and moved away from her, much to her regret.

  “I know how much I owe you. What you’re doing with Taryn is amazing. She’s showing real progress and I don’t want to do anything to screw that up.”

  “It was only a kiss, Brodie.”

  “A pretty spectacular one, as far as kisses go.”

  She refused to feel flattered by that. Or so she told herself. “Don’t worry about it. For some reason I don’t quite understand, we happen to have this...vibe...between us. It’s completely insane. I get it.”

  “Not completely insane,” he murmured.

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Evie. I’ve been attracted to you since the day you showed up in Hope’s Crossing.”

  “You have not. You hated me when I came to visit your mother the first time!”

  “Hate is a strong word. Distrust fits better. I tend to be protective of the people I care about. I was looking out for my mother, wondering at your motives for befriending her. I won’t deny that, but even when I was suspicious of you, that didn’t stop me from having, uh, completely inappropriate thoughts about you. For one thing, I’ve been wondering for months how all that wondrous hair would feel if I ever had the chance to slide my fingers through it.”

  She shivered, enthralled by his words even as she knew she ought to tell him to shut up now, while she still had half a chance of walking out of this room without kissing him again. She didn’t, though, and her penance was that he continued to seduce her with those low, murmured words.

  “Having you here in my house has only intensified my attraction to you. Not only that, but I’m beginning to see someone even more amazing on the inside. Strong and kind, clever, compassionate, funny. How could any man in his right mind not be dying to kiss you?”

  She hitched in a ragged little breath, wanting desperately to jump back into his arms again.

  She couldn’t. If he knew she had allowed Charlie in his house, he wouldn’t see her as any of those things. More like manipulative, devious, seditious.

  The reminder compelled her to ease away from him. What was the word he’d used? Inappropriate. This whole tangling of tongues thing was completely inappropriate, especially given her deception.

  With a great deal of effort—and no small amount of regret—she eased away from him, scooting to the side of the desk and standing again. “I’d better go check on Taryn.”

  His expression was rueful. “Yeah. It’s going to be a problem.”

  “Not if we don’t let it be. Let’s just pretend this kiss and the one the other day never happened. Whatever the catalyst—stress, proximity, whatever—they were both mistakes. Yes, I’m attracted to you. I’m sure if I stood on Main Street and took a poll, half the women in town would be able to say the same thing. But I can’t afford this kind of...distraction...right now. I’m here to help Taryn transition to her home-based program. That’s all. This is a critical time in her therapy and we would both do better to focus on our objective here.”

  “Our objective. Right.”

  “Taryn needs my attention right now. Her occupational therapist is coming this afternoon so I need to go make sure she’s ready.”

  They never had discussed possible candidates to replace her, Evie realized as she left his office and walked down the hall toward Taryn’s rooms. Let him figure it out himself. She wasn’t about to head back into his office right now—not when it was taking all her strength to walk away.

  Nine

  It was only a kiss. A simple merging of mouth against mouth, with a jumble of highly compatible pheromones thrown in to make things interesting. More than a week later, Brodie was still trying to convince himself of that—and still trying to talk himself down from trying it again.

  Evie had made it abundantly clear she wasn’t interested, despite the tension that seemed to shiver in the air whenever they were in the same room. Her priority was Taryn and she considered this attraction between them merely a distraction.

  Under other circumstances, he might have appreciated the irony that Evie Blanchard—of the bleeding heart and the hippie-chick clothes and the zeal for beading—was the one being brisk and businesslike here.

  He knew she was right. Beyond that, while they might share an attraction and he was coming to see her in a much more favorable light as he watched her care for his daughter, on the most basic of issues they were highly incompatible. He craved structure and order and calm. Evie was the complete opposite of all those things. She was color and chaos, passion and heat.

  And yet. There was a softness about her, a fragile vulnerability, that called to him even though he knew it was, in her words, completely crazy.

  He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her for more than a week. In the middle of a business meeting, he would remember the particular curve of her mouth, that sexy little hitch in her breath, the sweet, wildflower scent of her, and his thoughts would scatter like the aspen leaves that were turning gold now as August faded towards September.

  The smartest thing, the only thing, had been to avoid her—and he’d done his best for more than a week. He had mostly stayed away from the house during the time he knew Evie was likely to be there, choosing to move more of his work responsibilities to his office in downtown Hope’s Crossing.

  The only time he’d spent more than a brief moment with her had been a week earlier, Wednesday, when Evie had agreed to sit in on another interview for Taryn’s rehab therapist. This candidate had been perfect—fresh out of physical-therapy training, enthusiastic, energetic. Evie had approved of her right away. He wondered if her alacrity was indeed due to Stephanie Kramer’s credentials or if Evie was that anxious to return to her job at the bead store.

  Stephanie had been excited to take the job but because of other commitments she couldn’t start until the following week. With obvious reluctance, Evie had agreed to stay on another week, until after Labor Day.

  For Taryn’s sake, he was relieved since his daughter’s progress the last ten days had been nothing short of miraculous. She was taking several steps at a time unassisted and her vocabulary and sentence structures—while still a little hesitant—were head and shoulders above where she’d been before she’d come home.

  He was deeply grateful for
Evie, though her continued presence at his home also meant another week of his keeping as healthy a distance as he could manage.

  Even when he stayed away, he wasn’t doing a very good job of maintaining focus in the rest of his life.

  Right now, for instance, he was supposed to be in a meeting with his attorneys for a rehab project he was considering in a section of tiny crumbling houses in the Old Town area of Hope’s Crossing. Instead, he had been forced to leave them all waiting so he could run home like a kid who’d left his homework on the kitchen table instead of stuffing it in his backpack to take to school.

  Evie’s arrival that morning, along with her gangly yellow-haired Labradoodle, had distracted him so much as he’d been on his way out the door that he’d completely forgotten a pile of vital contracts he needed for the meeting.

  His plan was to slip into his office, grab the contracts and leave again without anybody being the wiser. No witty banter with Evie, no soft exchange of confidences, and definitely no more of those delicious kisses.

  Too damn bad for him.

  The house was quiet. He knew this was the morning Mrs. Olafson usually went to the grocery store but he might have expected to hear Taryn and Evie rocking out in the therapy room to the music Taryn liked to work to, or playing the game system the Angel of Hope had sent, or at least laughing and talking about something, as they tended to do.

  Nothing. Just silence.

  The van had still been parked out front so he knew they hadn’t gone anywhere. Curious, he couldn’t resist peeking his head into her suite of rooms, and found them empty. Maybe they were out in the pool, though late-August mornings in the mountains were cool enough for sweatshirts, at least until the sun burned off the mist. He kept the water comfortable for his own laps and could usually swim until the first snowfall. Since the all-season cover for the pool was set to be installed in a few weeks, he could swim all winter if he wanted.