The Bachelor Project

by Victoria Chancellor

  “I think I need to tell you what I realized after you left, if you don’t mind.”

  Ethan squinted at her through the bright sunlight. “Whatever you’d like. Although I think the fault is entirely my own.”

  Robin shook her head. “This goes back to my wedding. Or to be more accurate, why I didn’t have a wedding.”

  Ethan frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “Please, let me tell you about why Gig and I broke up.” Robin looked across the peaceful stream, clearing her mind of the feelings Ethan stirred in her. He’d wanted to talk about last night, but she needed to go back farther. Back into her childhood.

  Chapter Nine

  “I suppose I was always one of those clingy children. You’ve seen them in the stores. They hang off their mothers like living accessories. The difference is that my parents wouldn’t tolerate such behavior. I learned to be a well-behaved daughter. Instead of showing them affection, I had Great-aunt Sylvia. She didn’t have children of her own, but she would have made a wonderful mother. She held me, read to me, had tea parties for me and my dolls. We were the best of friends for as long as I remember, until I went off to college.” Robin smiled sadly at the memories. “When I came back home, I suppose I was just a little too big to curl up in her lap.”

  “But you still wanted to.”

  “Yes, at times.” She sighed. “I’d known Gig for most of my life. He was two years older and had already established himself in his career at his father’s bank.”

  “I know this is way off the subject, but where did he get a name like Gig?”

  Robin chuckled. “Family tradition. Like his father and his grandfather, he graduated from Texas A&M. So he took the nickname from the ‘gig ’em Aggies’ saying when he was a kid.”

  “I suppose it’s a better name than Biff or Chip,” Ethan quipped, obviously not impressed by the sometimes silly nicknames her social set chose.

  Robin nodded. “I suppose I just accepted it at the time, although looking back on it, the name does sound silly.” She laughed as she gazed out over the water. “I’m having a hard time imagining a sixty-year-old Gig.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t marry a guy named after a football team.”

  She turned to smile at Ethan. “You know—I am, too.” For more than one reason.

  “I got you off the subject.”

  Robin sobered as she turned back to the peaceful setting before them. “Gig and I were thrown together at many family and social events. It seemed logical, almost inevitable, that we’d get engaged.” She shrugged, remembering all the times people had said they made such a lovely couple. “So we did.”

  “Did you love him?”

  She watched the sunlight play off the current, reminding her of the large emerald-cut diamond in the engagement ring she’d returned on her last day in Houston. And the confusion and anger in Gig’s eyes as she’d told him the wedding was off. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him or her family, but she finally had to admit she couldn’t spend the rest of her life with him.

  “I wanted to. I tried. I thought I did. Looking back, no, I didn’t. I realized after I moved into the Franklin home that I loved the idea of being a couple far more than I loved the actual man.”

  “Then you made the right decision.” He said the words to be encouraging, she knew, but his tone told her something else. Something she wanted to know, as soon as she’d unburdened herself and apologized once more.

  “Having realized my feelings for Gig weren’t the kind poets describe, I tried to understand why I felt so bad about calling off the wedding. I finally understood that most of my remorse was over my own behavior.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had to admit to myself that I’d smothered him. I’d planned our evenings to be together. I’d arranged my schedule to be a part of his life. I constantly asked him about the future—what he wanted to do next year, five years, even twenty years away. Before we were married, I was mentally planning our retirement years.” And yet they hadn’t discussed some of the things most couples who were deeply in love considered—such as having children. Perhaps that was because deep down inside, neither one of them could make a permanent commitment. But she’d probably never know how Gig had really felt.

  She sighed. “I wanted so much for the two of us to become a family that I overwhelmed him. Gig wanted a nice, comfortable, nonpassionate marriage. Oh, not a marriage of convenience or anything like that. He wasn’t a monk.”

  “I don’t think I need to hear this part.”

  “Oh.” She looked up and realized she was doing it again—telling intimate details. Revealing herself to someone who didn’t want to know. “Sorry. Of course you don’t. Well, anyway, it turned out that Gig and I wanted far different things from a marriage. Just before I broke the engagement, he accused me of smothering him, and I know now that’s exactly what I was doing.”

  “No one could blame you for wanting it all. If I were to—Let’s just say that my views on marriage are more in line with yours than ol’ Gig’s.”

  Robin smiled and turned to look at Ethan. “Thanks, but I know I went overboard with time spent together, planning, all the things that drove him to distraction. If I’d truly loved him, I would have noticed how he wasn’t participating in the conversations, the plans. But I was so caught up in the moment that I never thought about him.” Poor Gig. He’d probably assumed her overwhelming actions had more to do with the wedding plans than what she’d wanted—no, needed—in a relationship.

  She took a long breath. “And I did the same thing with you.”

  “What?”

  “I got so involved with the idea of decorating your home, spending time with you in the evenings and learning about small-town life that I didn’t consider your feelings. You were trying to be polite, I know.” She held up her hand when he started to protest. “And you succeeded. You were so nice, so welcoming, that I let my need to belong get entirely out of hand.”

  “Robin, I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  “No, it’s true. I know myself now, Ethan. I know how overwhelming I can be when I’m focused on one thing. I was so intent on doing a good job with your house that I drove you right out the front door!”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “You’re just being polite again.”

  “No, I’m not. You were honest with me. It’s time I did the same.”

  ETHAN HADN’T DISCUSSED his personal life with anyone in the past four years. He had no need to wallow in the details; everyone in town already knew the story.

  Everyone except Robin, apparently.

  He supposed he should feel grateful a town that thrived on knowing everyone’s business thought enough of him not to gossip about his failings. After all, they’d been witness to the last disaster, and they’d heard about the first one from family and friends who’d been on hand.

  He sighed, then ran a hand through his hair. Unable to sit on the rock any longer, he picked up a handful of pebbles and walked to the edge of the creek.

  “I told you about being an FBI agent in Dallas. What I didn’t mention was that I was engaged when I made the decision to leave the Bureau, go back to my small-town roots.” He zinged a pebble across the water, watching it skip three times before disappearing. “My fiancée, Monica, was beautiful, intelligent and very career-minded. Suffice it to say, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea.”

  “Did she refuse to go with you?”

  “Not exactly. She tried to talk me out of it. When that didn’t work, she pouted for a while. Then she looked into job opportunities in Austin, San Marcus and San Antonio. We talked about her commuting. We talked about having kids someday, and how I wanted them to have the same kind of stable family life I did as a child.” Ethan shrugged. “I thought everything was settled. I thought she had come around to my way of thinking.”

  “But she hadn’t,” Robin guessed.

  “Not even close.” Having Monica �
�come around to his way of thinking” had seemed logical and important four years ago. Now the words sounded…selfish. Still, she should have talked to him about her doubts. She didn’t have to humiliate him before his friends and family.

  He skipped another pebble across the water, this time more forcefully, as he remembered what would have been his wedding day. “She didn’t call off the engagement, though. She simply left me standing at the church, looking out at all our guests and wondering what the hell had happened.”

  “You didn’t have a clue?”

  “No! I was frantic. I thought she’d been in an accident. Or kidnapped. Or anything but the truth.”

  “Which was that she couldn’t go through with the wedding.”

  Ethan turned back to her, feeling the heat not only of the sun, but of the lingering embarrassment of being left at the altar. “No, and she couldn’t go through with the marriage, either, which probably hurt the most. Hell, we’d been together for two years. I thought we had the kind of close relationship where we could tell each other anything. To know that she’d had these serious doubts all along about settling in a small town and hadn’t said anything…” He shook his head. “I felt like such a failure after I got over the initial shock and anger.”

  “Oh, Ethan, I can’t believe you were a failure in your relationship. She was the one who didn’t have the courage to be honest with you.”

  “Wait. You haven’t heard the best part,” he added with sarcasm. He walked the length of the small area between rocks and bushes, gathering his nerve to finish the tale.

  “I went ahead with the move. There was nothing keeping me in Dallas any longer. Ranger Springs was happy to hire me because they wanted to update their police force, bring in new technology and skills. Aunt Bess had been widowed the year before, and she was lonely living by herself in San Antonio, so I asked if she’d like to move in with me.”

  “I’m sure she was a lot of comfort.”

  Ethan nodded. “She was. I’m close to my parents, but somehow spending time with her made the pain go away faster. She was always there, always seemed to know the right thing to say or do to cheer me up or make me settle down.”

  “She sounds so much like my Great-aunt Sylvia. I can see why the two are friends.”

  “Bess liked the town. I began to meet people socially, and one lady in particular. Belinda lived in an even smaller town about seven miles from here, but she came to Ranger Springs to attend a church bazaar one day about a year after Monica and I…broke up.” He chuckled at the memory. “I met her when she ran a Stop sign. She was so embarrassed. She had the cleanest driving record I’d ever seen, so I gave her a warning.” He looked up at the tips of the cottonwoods, glinting almost silver in the sunlight. “And then I asked her out.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t usually pick up women through my job,” he clarified, just in case Robin thought he’d made a habit of hitting on women he stopped…or ones who called about wild animals in the middle of the night. “She was just so darn sweet. She taught preschool at a day-care center in San Marcus. She loved children, loved rural life. She was pretty, too, in a really wholesome sort of way.”

  He kicked a stone out of his way as he felt his jaw tense. “So…I asked her to marry me a few months later.”

  He looked up at Robin to see the expression on her face. He’d expected surprise, even shock, but she looked confused.

  “Did you love her?”

  “I loved what she stood for. Like you said earlier, I loved the idea of being married, of having a family.” Although he’d never lied to Belinda by professing a great, passionate love for her, he’d never been completely honest. Maybe at the time he hadn’t realized how caught up he’d been in the fantasy of the perfect small town, the perfect wife. He hadn’t been fair to her, and they’d both paid a price.

  “Did she accept?”

  “Yes, she did. I suppose I was considered a good catch. She was almost thirty, ready to start a family. She was kind of shy, so meeting men didn’t come easily to her.”

  “You aren’t married, so obviously something happened.”

  “History repeated itself,” Ethan said bitterly. “We planned a traditional wedding right here in Ranger Springs because the church was larger than in her town. Everything was perfect—or so I thought.”

  “Don’t tell me—”

  “Yeah, the same thing happened. I arrived at the church, she didn’t. I was frantic with worry—again—and then I got her message.” He shook his head at the memories. “At least she was polite enough to send her regrets.”

  “Oh, Ethan.”

  “Seems she realized at the last minute that we didn’t love each other. She claimed I was so solid and dependable that she thought we’d be a good match, even though we weren’t wild about each other…you know. Anyway, she couldn’t go through with the wedding. She was sorry that she just couldn’t tell me in person.”

  Robin stuck her chin up a notch. “She didn’t have enough backbone for a man like you.”

  He had to chuckle at her assessment. “We’re talking about a two-time loser in the marriage department. Trust me, I wasn’t feeling on top of the world at that moment.”

  “Of course not, but in the long run, it was for the best.”

  “With about two hundred expectant faces staring at me, though, I didn’t appreciate the fact at the time. But to be fair, I should have paid more attention to Belinda. I’m sure that if I’d really loved her, I would have picked up on her reservations about the wedding. I knew she was shy; I should have known she’d have a hard time expressing her opinion. But I really wanted the dream, you know? The happily-ever-after we expect when we decide we’re ready to settle down.” After what Robin had told him of her reasons for wanting to marry, he believed she, more than anyone else, would understand his feelings.

  She held out her hands in an instinctive gesture of comfort. “You poor guy. Having everyone in town witness the scene at the church must have been so embarrassing for you.”

  He settled on the rock next to her. “One of the reasons I could stay was the support I received from the people here. They were great. Oh, I know they’re busybodies most of the time, but they have big hearts. They took me in, made me feel better after I was forced to face some facts about myself.” He shooed a honeybee away from Robin’s hair, his fingers yearning to stroke the soft, golden strands. “Kind of like you’re doing right now.”

  She smiled tentatively. “I can understand because I put someone in the same situation you were in. Or almost the same. I didn’t leave Gig standing at the altar, but I did cancel just three weeks before the wedding.”

  “Like I said before, you did the right thing. Someday you’ll find a man who wants the same life you do, and then you won’t run away.”

  “I want to believe I’ll find that special person, but right now, I’m concentrating more on finding myself. I don’t want to go through life doing all the right things and discovering I’m miserable when I’m seventy. Or having regrets for what I should have done.”

  Ethan smoothed a strand of Robin’s sun-warmed hair back behind her ear. “A wise person once said that life is not a rehearsal. I believe that. I want to believe I’ll have everything I desire from life, but I’m not in a hurry to make the same mistake again.”

  “So make different mistakes,” Robin answered softly. “Just don’t shut yourself off from life, from happiness.”

  She didn’t know how alluring she was, with an aura of innocence and freshness that spoke more of her character than a canceled wedding or a brokenhearted fiancé.

  He hadn’t meant the day to turn out this way. He’d had no intention of touching her, of wanting her. But his hand lingered on her shiny, smooth hair. His gaze was drawn to her perfectly shaped lips. And then he was drowning in her eyes, so warm and welcoming.

  He leaned forward, eliminated the distance separating them. He was going to make different mistakes, starting right now. Robin closed her eyes
and parted her lips, and he was lost, lost, in a kiss that had been nearly two weeks—or maybe a lifetime—in the making.

  ROBIN LEANED into the kiss, her thoughts swirling like eddies in the stream, and her emotions soaring like the wispy white clouds overhead. Here, on this heated rock in a deserted Eden, she didn’t want to think about yesterdays or tomorrows. She only wanted Ethan’s kiss to go on forever. His lips were firm but gentle, his tongue insistent as he pressed closer. She met each thrust with equal fervor, her hunger for this intimacy surprising in its intensity.

  His strength shouldn’t have surprised her; she’d admired his body on many occasions. But the easy way he lifted her, pulled her across his lap and settled her more tightly against him made her gasp in awe. He covered her lips and continued to kiss her until her head spun and her breath came in shallow puffs.

  His hands molded her to him along her back, her shoulders, her hips. She pressed into him, her breasts sensitive and tight against his chest. She wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, including the grand wedding, her enjoyable career, her need for family, even her fiancé. Kissing Ethan was real and exciting and…frightening.

  She pulled away, panting and wide-eyed. What was she doing? Ethan was a client. She’d tried her best to make that distinction stick this past week. And here she was throwing herself at him, kissing him back, wanting more.

  What was happening between them?

  “Robin?”

  “I…I don’t know what just happened.”

  “Then I must be out of practice. I thought we were kissing.”

  “That was more than a kiss.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  “How did we get from talking to kissing? I thought we weren’t going to do anything like that.”

  “I thought so, too.” He didn’t seem the least bit remorseful. In fact, he still held her close. Still looked at her with those intense, sexy eyes.

  “You’re my client. I don’t go around kissing my clients.”