by Megan Crane
“Am I paying you to stand in the middle of your hotel room, staring off into space like a slack-jawed yokel?” he asked quietly, nothing but gold in those eyes of his. “I don’t recall putting that in my budget.”
“No sir,” she replied, as stunned at the notion that Jonah Flint was teasing her as she’d been by the sight of his mouthwateringly hard abdomen. But then the afternoon rushed back at her. And all she could see was Chelsea Collier and the look she’d put on her face, in her blue eyes. A look she recognized from a life she thought she’d put behind her. “My job is to attack and undermine nice women who have the temerity to be dating your twin brother without your permission.”
Jonah studied her for a moment, his gaze narrow. He put out a hand to hold the doorjamb in a way that wasn’t erotic at all, despite the shivering thing that rolled over and then stretched out deep inside of her. It told her that anything he did was erotic. To her.
“Do you know her?” His tone was polite, the gold gone from his gaze.
“No. Nor, after today, will I ever.”
“Are you planning to relocate to the Marietta area?” He sounded distant and much too cool. It put her on alert. “Perhaps take a position in the same high school where that nice woman teaches history classes?”
“I’m not much of a teacher, no,” Gracelyn said tightly.
“Then what the hell do you care if you hurt the feelings of a complete stranger you’ll never see again?” His voice was still polite, but there was no pretending she didn’t feel the flare of power in it then, or see it right there on his clever face. It reminded her who he was. Who she was, more importantly. “I asked if you could do this and you assured me you could. Did you lie to me, Gracelyn?”
There was a cold glint in his hazel gaze then that made Gracelyn think that lying to this man was one of the more foolish things a person could do, with consequences she’d rather not face, thank you. She swallowed. She resisted the urge to fold her arms across her chest, which she knew he would read—correctly—as a protective gesture on her part.
“I didn’t lie to you,” she managed to say, to push out through her throat which was suddenly and unaccountably too tight. “But it’s been a long while since the middle school social scene. I think I forgot that being that mean takes its own toll.”
“Your job is to worry about the toll I’ll take,” he said with a quiet ruthlessness that crowded out everything else in the suite. In the whole state and that great big sky above it. “You’re not here to care about anyone else.”
He was right, of course. What did she care? This wasn’t her family. This wasn’t her fight and she wasn’t her mother. She was a hired gun with no stake in what happened—and her feelings were her own problem.
This isn’t real, she told herself then. This is an emotional reaction to the fact you’re back here—because you know that if you wanted to, you could jump in a car and drive home in a few short hours. You could see Bex and Grandma Betty. You could—
She didn’t want to think about that. Or them.
“I think I understand the job just fine,” she replied instead, aware that her hands were in fists only when he focused all that brooding attention of his on them. She shoved them in the pockets of her jeans instead. “It’s the execution that I’m finding a bit harder to cope with. You’ll forgive me, I hope. I’ve never pretended to be anyone’s bitchy girlfriend before.”
Jonah looked at her then for what felt like a long time and Gracelyn didn’t have the slightest idea what he saw. Something told her she didn’t want to know, but even so, she couldn’t bring herself to break his gaze.
“You’re different here.” His voice was low. Rough. “Maybe it’s the clothes.”
She felt that like a touch. The way that hazel gaze gleamed gold as it moved over her, tracing the soft t-shirt she wore under her travel blazer and the way her jeans slicked over her hips. He lingered at her silver belt buckle and then shifted up again, to the breasts that were a lot more visible in clingy cotton than they’d ever been in one of her workplace appropriate dresses. She ordered herself to ignore that swooping feeling inside of her, as if she’d just stepped over the edge of a very high cliff.
Not stepped. Jumped.
“It’s a well known fact that all women are bitchier in stilettos,” she agreed. She’d meant to sound light. A little bit arch, a little bit amused. What came out was much huskier, threaded through with a thousand layers of all the things she didn’t want to acknowledge were happening here. Like the hotel’s old ghosts were there too, cluttering up the rooms and stealing all the air.
“Is it hard?” He looked as surprised at the question as she was, and far more disgruntled. His strong hand tightened against the doorjamb before he dropped it to his side. He straightened. “Being back in Montana.”
“I didn’t think it would be.” Gracelyn felt the way she had when she’d stepped out of the car and found herself beneath that great, big, breathtaking sky. Small and awed, as if she was suspended in something sacred. Profound. But there was nothing here but Jonah Flint and that curious look in his dark gold eyes that she could feel everywhere. “Marietta is hundreds of miles away from where I’m from.”
That hint of a smile on his mouth almost undid her, then. “That doesn’t answer the question, darlin’.”
“Ah.” She smiled, and she didn’t know why her eyes felt too bright, as if this was all deeply emotional. As if they knew each other. “There it is. Darlin’.”
“I did warn you of the danger.”
“So you did.”
And it felt as if maybe they weren’t talking about endearments anymore.
Jonah’s gaze was a brilliant thing, too bright and dark at once. And Gracelyn understood with the kind of perfect clarity that had once sent her running from the only home she’d ever known at eighteen that she never should have come here. She never should have come back to Montana, and she never, ever should have gone anywhere with him.
That nothing would ever be the same after this, least of all her.
“Your night is your own,” he told her. And he was Jonah Flint, her boss, again. So abruptly and completely that it called even more attention to whatever had just happened between them. Gracelyn found she’d caught her breath. “I have some things to take care of, but I’ll expect to see you for breakfast in the morning. I’m an early riser. Seven work for you?”
“Of course,” she said, and tried to smile. “I’m not going to argue with the boss about start times.”
“Not if you’re smart,” he agreed, without a hint of a smile in return, which only a truly insane person would feel like heat.
And then he was gone, closing her door gently—much too gently—behind him.
Leaving Gracelyn to stand there in the lengthening shadows of her bedroom, in this haunted place with her arms wrapped around her middle—the Montana she’d walked away from right there on the other side of her great big windows and Jonah Flint a cipher she shouldn’t even want to puzzle out—thinking that as it turned out, she wasn’t very smart at all.
Chapter Four
‡
It was remarkably easy to fall into a routine, Gracelyn had learned at the hands of her deeply ill-qualified parents—even in the strangest of circumstances, for which her role as the uber-bitchy girlfriend of the great Jonah Flint certainly qualified.
“Not bitchy, necessarily,” Jonah amended one evening as the four of them took a walk in the woods up in the hills above town. He smirked at her, while the other couple walked ahead. “Just perpetually unimpressed.”
“I think I have that part down,” Gracelyn muttered, glaring at him.
If only it were true. If only she could feel about Marietta the way she had about her own hometown. But instead, the town—and, God help her, the people—seemed to wedge its way further into her every minute she spent there.
Gracelyn woke at dawn every day and went for a long run, pushing herself further each time in the crisp, cool September mornings.
She ran along the winding river that cut through town and then ambled along beyond it, or out the roads that led toward the foothills of the towering, soaring mountains in the distance. She ran until her legs felt like jelly and her breath sawed in and out of her chest, and yet it didn’t work its usual magic. She didn’t feel smoothed out and mellowed straight through when she was done, she only felt momentarily still inside.
And the trouble was that when she was still like that, there was no pretending she wasn’t coming to love this place. The sky, the hills. The light. Montana itself. The compelling man who’d brought her here. The wilderness right there on the edge of town, instead of a long drive away. And she couldn’t pretend there wasn’t a huge part of her—that she hadn’t known was there, or that she’d been ignoring for over ten years—that thrilled to it. All of it.
And yet despite that, Gracelyn knew those stolen moments at the end of each run were the closest to sane she was likely to get in the midst of this crazy situation.
This situation she’d happily signed up for, lest she forget.
Gracelyn hadn’t forgotten. How could she, when she met Jonah in the living room of their suite at seven each morning, both of them showered and crisply professional, to discuss the day’s plans over their breakfast?
To fall deeper and more completely under his spell, more like, which was about as far away from smart as she could get.
But she was ignoring that part. She had to. Because there was so much to do.
There were lunches with Chelsea and Jasper when Chelsea could steal away from her high school duties. There were hours spent trailing along behind the Flint brothers as they maneuvered around each other with gradually decreasing stiffness. There were a thousand opportunities each day to pretend that this was still just a job to her. There were dinners at local restaurants or in the loft Jasper and Chelsea shared above the microbrewery, rich with little moments that tugged at Gracelyn with far too much unwanted familiarity.
Or maybe—and much worse—that was longing she felt, and worse by the day. Pure and simple and terrifying.
“Being here must make you miss Montana a little,” Chelsea said on one of those nights, with the resolute cheerfulness she’d resorted to when she spoke to Gracelyn. That and her apparent failure to notice any digs were her weapons, and she used them well. She even smiled as she did it—leaving Gracelyn to reflect on the sad fact that under different circumstances, she’d probably like Chelsea Collier.
Or maybe she did like her. Maybe that was the trouble, because that certainly wasn’t part of Jonah’s plan.
“You mean the Montana of rugged mountains and cool, crisp, glacial lakes, I think,” Gracelyn said then, with all of that longing churning around inside of her, making her feel reckless. “Good looking cowboys and prosperous ranches and the great blue yonder.”
She and Jonah were sitting on their side of the dinner table as they all enjoyed an after-dinner whiskey. Jonah had his heavy, sculpted arm slung across the back of her chair, the very picture of the easy, relaxed couple they weren’t. Gracelyn could see their cozy reflection in the antique mirror that took up most of the wall across from her, and it was so tempting to believe what she saw there. So tempting to sink into it, to pretend she didn’t know better.
But she did.
She focused on Chelsea instead. “That Montana is not where I grew up.”
“It’s all the same Montana,” Chelsea countered softly. Another potential bridge, as if she couldn’t accept the possibility that Gracelyn wouldn’t eventually cave and help her build one if she kept offering them, one after the next. “Isn’t it?”
And Gracelyn shoved aside what she was supposed to be doing here. What games she was meant to be playing, night after night. She leaned forward and smiled at Chelsea, and it was a hard sort of smile that scraped at her as she aimed it across the table. It had more to do with the sudden heat she could feel prickling in her eyes than any agenda of Jonah’s. And for some reason, in this open plan, artfully-arranged loft with the bold thrust of Copper Mountain framed in all the windows as another pink sunset cavorted over its peak, she didn’t care the way she knew she should.
“I don’t think it is,” she said, and there was too much emotion in her voice. She felt Jonah go still beside her. “The Montana I come from is way out in the country, like any other rural place you can think of and a great many you’d probably prefer not to think of at all. Everyone is poor and that means everyone is desperate. There are more meth heads than First Families where I grew up, Chelsea. There’s long and painful history anywhere you look, but no one’s going to collect it and put it in a museum. We just try not to talk about it in polite company.”
She knew her breath was too ragged, as if she was out running, and she could sense Jonah’s movement beside her more than see it. She couldn’t look away from Chelsea Collier’s stricken blue gaze.
“People in my Montana don’t know how to leave the place they were born, where they would go or what they would do, so they stay there and rot instead. It’s not Marietta.” Gracelyn let out a small, hollow laugh. “It’s not a place you would stop your car if it had a flat, much less move in and build a future.”
She started to say something else, but Jonah simply pulled her close with that arm on her chair and wrapped his hand right over her mouth, pressing his palm against her lips. She could taste the salt of his skin, and the heat of it, too, and the sudden contact was shocking. Erotic.
Their eyes met, a brief and electric warning, and she felt his dark gold, brooding gaze all the way down to the soles of her feet.
And she was certain he could feel the way she shivered, then. She watched the gold in his gaze flare, too bright and too hot when there were eyes on them. Too wild and untamed, when this thing between them was supposed to be an act.
“And that,” Jonah said, turning his attention back to the table, and even cracking that small smile of his that made Gracelyn’s stomach flip over, “is why Gracelyn shouldn’t drink whiskey. It makes her a little bit maudlin and whole lot feisty, every time.”
Everyone laughed, even Gracelyn laughed. He pulled his hand back, running his fingers along the tender skin of her jaw and up toward her temple as he went, and she felt it everywhere. Everywhere. It lit her up, making her shift in her chair around the surge of near-painful need that came with it, and he wasn’t even looking at her. He was concentrating on his brother. Of course he was.
It was the sexiest thing that had ever happened to her, and it wasn’t even real.
Worse, it was dangerous, because Chelsea was still watching her. Gracelyn forced a smile, made a rueful sort of noise, and pushed her glass away from her with a hand she was pretty sure only she could tell was shaking.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “He’s not kidding. I really shouldn’t drink whiskey.”
They didn’t speak of her outburst again.
As the days wore on, they talked about the upcoming rodeo and the cowboys already descending on the town, many of them getting into the usual sort of trouble at FlintWorks or the other bars in town—the historic Grey’s Saloon on Main Street and the rougher Wolf Den further down Front Street. Gracelyn drifted in the sweet pull of the long, blue September afternoons when Jonah took his conference calls and kept tabs on his empire. She wandered past the particular quaintness of the storefronts in town, and admired the direct courtesy of the locals that could have bled into friendliness, if Gracelyn had let it. She lost herself in the contrast between the magnificent Graff Hotel, on one end of the same block that, way down on the other end, held the Wolf Den and a brand new, eclectic tattoo parlor. The way the sun filtered through the evergreens that lined the foothills and the cottonwoods down near the water; the way the river danced beneath its light. The way the great big sky folded itself over everything, so vast it hurt.
It was much too easy to be in Marietta, no matter what she might have told Chelsea. It was much too easy to relax into its pure Montana embrace and forget she wasn’t going
to stay. To punch in her grandmother Betty’s number again and again on her cell phone each night when she was alone in her bed, but refuse to push SEND every time. To forget that none of this was real and none of it was hers—including and especially Jonah.
Because the touching was the worst part. Or the best part. Or the hardest part, she couldn’t quite decide—but it was killing her.
Every morning they sat on separate couches in the gold and wood accented salon of a suite where the original owner had spent his first fortune on the local prostitutes, his second on a copper boom that had never quite materialized, and his third on the railway that ran behind the hotel, but had ultimately bankrupted him. All of which Gracelyn knew, because she did her best to look at anything but Jonah during their scrupulously polite breakfast hour.
Because the rest of the day, all she did was look at him. Touch him, smile at him. Sit on his lap when he tugged her there, snuggle into his side when she could. Do a thousand things that suggested the physical intimacy she was finding it harder and harder to remember was all for show.
On the last day of their first week in Marietta, she ran a personal best, banging out seven hard miles on the coldest morning yet. She was filled with a kind of dark jubilation when she made it back to the hotel to see Jonah running toward her from the opposite direction, because she felt like she could handle anything in the world at that moment.
Even him.
And who cared that it had taken her long hours to fall asleep last night? She’d stared up at the canopy of stars she could see out her window, doing her best to forget about the way Jonah had slid his hand over the nape of her neck after another painful dinner, like a prelude to a deeply possessive kiss that had never come.
Or the way he’d wrapped his arm around her shoulders as they’d walked back to the Graff, holding her close against his side like he knew how wretched her role here made her feel—but maybe also so she could feel that same tension simmering in him that she knew was in her, too. That same tension they’d both ignored when the door to the suite had shut behind them, springing away from each other and heading for their rooms, as if even a second more in each other’s company meant they’d explode.
