by Bethany Kane
“Nice,” Katie said politely before she placed a forkful of salad in her mouth.
Miles chuckled. “You don’t seem very interested, Katie.”
She took her time chewing and swallowed. “I’m not much for gambling. Not with money, anyway.”
Miles leaned forward slightly, his hazel eyes gleaming. “What do you like to take a gamble on, Katie Hughes?”
“Just the little things, like my future.”
Miles chuckled, clearly thinking she was joking. Katie didn’t mind.
“So I heard a rumor you were a tax attorney,” he prompted.
Her mouth was full, so she just nodded.
“Can I hire you to do some consulting? I could use a good tax attorney in my corner.”
She considered while she swallowed and took a sip of wine. It was a tempting offer. Her savings wouldn’t last forever. But she had other things in mind for her future—the gamble she’d referred to just now.
“I’ll pass,” she said with a friendly smile. “I don’t do the type of tax work you probably need, anyway. I might be looking for work, depending on how things work out for me in Vulture’s Canyon, but you’ll need a specialist, with all the tax issues that come from the gambling operation.”
“If you’re looking for work in this area, you’ll end up having to come to me anyway.”
She gave him an “excuse me?” look at his overconfidence. He chuckled.
“I’m just telling it like it is, not bragging. There aren’t many men in this area who could afford to pay a high-class Los Angeles attorney like you.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of getting out of the tax business.”
“You’re kidding. Why would you want to do something like that?” he asked, amused, as he reached across the table and grabbed her hand in his.
Katie found his attitude incredibly condescending. Miles Fordham didn’t know anything about her. What right did he have to be surprised at her choice of career even if she told him she planned to join the space program?
Someone touched Miles’s shoulder, saving Katie from his patronizing flirtation. She gently pulled her captive hand back. Miles was too preoccupied to notice. His eyes widened with male appreciation when he looked up and saw the woman standing next to him. Katie continued to eat her salad as she studied the new arrival curiously.
“Amber. Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Miles complimented, his gaze roving over the tall, curvy redhead wearing a wool skirt, leather boots, a matching belt and a soft-looking angora sweater that clung to generous breasts. One thing was for certain: whoever this woman was, she didn’t do her clothes shopping in any stores Katie had spotted as of yet in southern Illinois. When Amber twisted slightly in her heeled boots, Katie was reminded of a six-year-old showing off her new party dress to Daddy. Whoever Amber was, Katie decided as she chewed a cherry tomato, she couldn’t be much older than twenty or twenty-one.
“Katie, I’d like you to meet Amber Jones. She’s the new hostess at the restaurant.”
“Nice to meet you,” Katie said.
Amber’s return greeting wasn’t quite as warm, but Katie couldn’t really blame her. The girl obviously had a thing for Miles, the way she was staring at him like he was a rock star while they exchanged small talk.
“Well, I’d better get back to work,” Amber said breathily after a moment. “Will I see you at happy hour at the lodge bar tonight?”
“Sure. Maybe I’ll be there.”
Amber grinned and sashayed away from the table, apparently satisfied despite Miles’s ambiguous response. A dose of Amber must have dislodged the topic of their former conversation from Miles’s brain. He resumed his meaningless banter about his plans for the hotel and boat, and Katie nodded politely once in a while, which seemed to be a sufficient enough response for Miles.
It wasn’t bad at all, Katie decided as she sipped the last of her wine. The food and wine had been good; the sun radiating through the pane of glass had warmed and relaxed her. She watched idly as Amber seated a group of businessmen on the terrace and lingered to chat and charm them. One of them stroked her hip in a gesture that went beyond flirtation. Amber wasn’t put off, however, given her seductive smile.
After lunch, Miles asked her if she’d care to see the latest renovations he’d done on the house he’d had built on the club grounds, but Katie politely refused, explaining that the two glasses of wine had made her a little tipsy.
“All the more reason for you to come to my house and check out my hot tub and heated pool,” Miles told her suggestively.
“All the more reason for me not to,” she replied with a warm smile.
As they reached Miles’s car after lunch, Katie was surprised when he abruptly let out a stream of invectives. It wasn’t that she wasn’t used to cursing—Rill, for instance, had a repertoire of curse words that only an Irishman could acquire—but Miles hadn’t said so much as “hell” since she’d first met him.
She hurried around to the driver’s side of the car to see what he was staring at with such fury.
“Both tires. Slashed,” he said.
“Damn,” Katie mumbled. “Who would do something like that?”
“Take your pick,” Miles said bitterly. “Any one of those Vulture’s Canyon hippies or the illiterate coal miners from the hills might have done it. There’ve been little incidents in the past—plenty of them. Idiots wouldn’t recognize progress if it stabbed them in the eyeball.”
“You mean the person who slashed your tires doesn’t want you to put in the gambling boat?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” He got on his cell phone and snapped out an order for some employee to call Sheriff Mulligan. He was in such a tiff, Katie felt a little uncomfortable. She was relieved when he told the same employee to bring another one of his cars around so he could take Katie home.
Despite that nasty bit of business, thanks to the two glasses of chardonnay, she was in a much better place to meet up with Rill later that afternoon. She saw him immediately when they pulled up to the house. He wore jeans, a red T-shirt, a flannel shirt and a pair of work gloves and walked around the corner of the house with a huge stack of logs in his arms. He came to a halt in the yard as she thanked Miles and got out of the passenger door of his BMW sedan. As she got closer to Rill, she noticed the storminess in his blue eyes and the rigidness of his facial muscles.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded as Miles turned his car around and headed back down the hill.
What the feck do ya t’ink yer doin’?
From the sounds of things, Rill was not in a good mood. Surprise, surprise.
“I went out to lunch with Miles,” she said with a shrug.
“You went to lunch with Miles,” Rill repeated sarcastically. “That man is reviled by every citizen of Vulture’s Canyon and every coal miner in the employ of the Black Velvet Mines. Fordham is fixing to change everything about their way of life by installing that gambling boat. Do you plan on making life hell for me, Katie, or does it just come naturally to you?”
“Why should you care what the people of Vulture’s Canyon think of Miles Fordham? He’s okay. And it’s not like you sympathize with the people in this town. I’m not a part of this town—isn’t that what you said the other day?”
Rill made a sound of deep disgust and stalked toward the front porch on long legs. Katie pursued at a jog, not finished with her argument. She tripped on the first step and caught herself from falling flat on her face by using Rill’s back as a brace, causing him to drop a log. It clattered loudly on the wood steps.
“Did Fordham get you drunk?” he asked incredulously, pausing on the stairs.
“No, I did that myself,” Katie mumbled, righting herself. She slung her bag on her shoulder and picked up the log. When she noticed Rill’s blazing eyes, she added, “Not drunk, just a little tipsy. We had wine with lunch.”
“You had wine with lunch.”
Her sigh was filled with asperity. S
he took another log off the pile in his arms in order to lessen his load. When she tried to take another, he shifted his arms, preventing her. She gave him a condemning glance.
“Is that all you’re going to do? Repeat everything I say and give me dirty looks?” she asked.
“Put those logs back on here.”
She frowned at him and did what he said, putting the logs back in his arms. He stomped up the stairs. Katie let him go this time, made a pit stop in the bathroom and then cautiously entered the living room a few minutes later. Rill glanced over at her from where he knelt before the fireplace.
“I would have preferred to have lunch with you, but you were nowhere to be found when I got up this morning,” she said quietly.
He’d been about to say something, but her honesty made him pause. He threw the last of the kindling sticks he held in his hand into the growing fire and stood.
“I was hiking in the woods,” he said gruffly. “I do that a lot.”
Katie removed the jacket she’d been wearing, tossed off her flats and settled into the corner of the couch, drawing up her knees. “Your car was gone.”
He shrugged. “There are hundreds of hiking trails around here maintained by the forest preserve. Sometimes I drive to the park entrances and try different ones. Other times, I just wander around here.”
“Does it bring you any peace?”
“No, not really. Something to do, though.”
He didn’t move to join her on the couch, but he didn’t walk out of the room, either. The living room was cast in shadow despite the brilliance of the fall day outside. Katie could see the gleam of his eyes from beneath a lowered brow as he studied her. When Miles had arrived earlier, she’d showered and thrown on a pair of skinny jeans and a frilly little button-up blouse, and tempered the super-feminine effect with a sleek belted jacket. She hadn’t once thought about how she looked when she was with Miles, but she felt hyperaware of how she might appear to Rill. It suddenly occurred to her that Eden had always been dressed impeccably in conservative suits and elegant tailored blouses.
She couldn’t help but feel Rill must find her appearance lacking.
His forehead crinkled. “What are you thinking, Katie?” he asked slowly.
“I was thinking it blows my mind. I don’t understand it. You must be bored to tears living here.” It wasn’t a complete lie. She’d been wondering about that very thing even though she hadn’t been thinking it at the moment he’d asked. “Are you at least writing?”
He exhaled and stepped toward her. Katie gave an inner sigh of relief when he walked around the coffee table and sat on the center cushion of the couch, his thigh just inches away from her toes. For a few tense seconds, she’d been sure he was going to walk out of the room and abandon her once again.
“I haven’t written a word since I came here.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged, the movement bringing her gaze down to his shoulders and chest. He looked delicious in denim, red cotton and flannel . . . rugged and so male she could practically taste the pheromones he exuded on her tongue. She was overwhelmed with a need to touch him, but something stilled her hand. Maybe it was the voice inside her that kept reminding her repeatedly that she wasn’t what Rill wanted. Not really.
You’re not his type. You’re not like Eden.
“I haven’t got any ideas for a story,” he said, his voice carrying that flat, empty tone that Katie hated. She breathed deeply and felt a glimmer of satisfaction when his eyes flickered over her chest.
“I haven’t seen a computer anywhere. Don’t you have one here?”
“Yeah,” he muttered, glancing away from her breasts.
“Well . . .” She paused and gave a wide yawn. The heat from the fire had started to warm her. “Why don’t you at least set it up, make yourself a work space? It’d at least create an atmosphere for the possibility of writing.”
When he didn’t say anything, Katie thought he’d dismissed her advice just like he did everything else she offered him. She sighed dispiritedly and laid her cheek on the arm of the couch. He turned at her defeated sound.
“Why are you here, Katie?” he asked her yet again, his tone a mixture of irritation and puzzlement.
“I told you,” she mumbled groggily.
“Why did you quit your job?”
“I hated that job,” she said impulsively.
His mouth dropped open in surprise. “I thought you loved it. You said you did. You always had such great stories to tell about those weird old Hollywood movie stars. I always pictured you wandering into some Gothic Hollywood mansion and meeting up with Gloria Swanson–type Sunset Boulevard loons, telling them how they could save a buck or a million on their taxes.”
She shifted her head and stared at the fire, not wanting Rill to see the tears that sprang into her eyes. Why was she always trying to convince the world she was so happy and fulfilled when she wasn’t? Once she’d begun the role, it was so difficult to break out of it. She’d had no one to blame but herself for her typecasting. She’d wanted to do something different with her life for years now—something meaningful—but it was so damn difficult not to play the role everyone expected of her. Even when she volunteered for charities, she couldn’t get it right, coming off like a spoiled Hollywood golden girl who assuaged her guilt by sacrificing a pittance of her time to the needy.
Maybe part of her identity was associated with being an affluent, educated white woman from Southern California, but she was more than that. She was.
Why wouldn’t anyone believe her?
“Katie?” Rill asked in a quiet, firm voice.
She turned her chin reluctantly and met his stare. One of his eyebrows crinkled in concerned puzzlement when he saw the tears in her eyes.
He reached for her.
She couldn’t understand why she felt this compulsion to cry when it felt like heaven to rest her cheek on Rill’s hard chest while his hands moved up and down her arms and over her back, soothing her. Katie just stared at the fire and absorbed everything Rill offered her: his compassion, his strength . . . his heat.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled wetly after a few minutes. “I don’t know where that came from.”
“Yeah, you do,” she heard him say, his voice rumbling straight through his flesh into the ear she pressed next to his chest.
She lifted her head and looked at him in surprise. “You mean aside from the two glasses of wine?”
He gave her a hard glance and stretched, hooking a box of tissues sitting on the end table with his finger.
“Why don’t you just tell me about it?” he suggested as she wiped her face with a tissue.
Despite the tempting invitation, Katie hesitated. She knew what she wanted to do with her life—in a general, very vague sort of way. The thing she most dreaded was the reaction she’d get from her friends and family, and Rill counted as both.
He had once, anyway, Katie thought as the earthshaking memory of him consuming her with single-minded intent last night in the darkness smashed into her awareness. Something shifted in his expression and she wondered in a flash of panic if he’d recalled those volatile moments at the same second she had.
It was all so confusing. Just because her own life was chaos, did she feel some inner need to throw everyone else’s life into disarray, as well? Not that Rill’s life was running like clockwork, but Katie surely wasn’t making things any smoother for him with her presence.
“I . . . I’m thinking about changing careers. My work isn’t very fulfilling,” she said, desperate to deflect that sudden hard gleam in Rill’s eyes, wild to ignore the way her right breast was crushed against his ribs, how she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. She pressed her face against his sternum.
“I know you think I’m a mess,” she said in a choked voice. For a tension-filled moment, he didn’t speak or move. Her head rose as he inhaled deeply.
“I don’t think you’re a mess, Shine,” he said quietly. She
clamped her eyes shut to suppress a flood of emotion when she felt his hand move in her hair. “I think you’re impossible, and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with you, but I know from firsthand experience you don’t even begin to qualify as a mess.”
She couldn’t hold it in anymore. She gasped for air and shook. Rill just held her and touched her hair while she cried out the past few years of uncertainty and self-doubt.
When her tears had quieted and she’d succeeded in soaking Rill’s T-shirt, he placed his large, open hand on her back. She felt the heat of his palm soaking down through her blouse. She wasn’t sure how to interpret the gesture, but she sensed he wanted her to look up at him and knew she was right when he spoke.
“I need to talk to you about something, Katie.”
She remained completely still. It struck her that he was going to tell her to leave again, and not in the self-destructing, bitter manner she’d grown used to since arriving in Vulture’s Canyon, but in the old, sweet, thoughtful Rill way. It terrified her to consider it. She’d have no defense against a kind rejection.
When he didn’t speak again, she took the coward’s way out, and fell asleep in his arms.
Ten
The sensation of Katie’s even, slow breath lulled him until Rill, too, drifted off into sleep. He wasn’t sure how long he was out of it, but when he awoke, he had a hard-on that was difficult to ignore. He sat there on the couch with an armful of soft, fragrant woman and wondered how he could have gone for so many years without having this profound of a physical reaction to Katie. He grimaced as he tried to shift into a more comfortable position without waking her, but his erection continued on its merry way.
His cock must be making up for lost time.
Lost time, he thought disgustedly. The only thing lost between Katie and him except for the old security of their friendship, the once-familiar structure of their relationship.
He’d been planning on telling her when he saw her again that he’d thought things over and come to a crucial conclusion. Things weren’t irreversible. They’d crossed the line, but the line was still within their vision. They still could creep back over it to their separate territories. Sure, it’d take some effort, and effort required energy and care, and those were two resources Rill had been in short supply of lately.
