Lead Me On

by Crystal Green

  He pulled on a pair of jeans, then went to his door. When he opened it, he almost stepped on a piece of paper.

  He picked it up, his heart already sinking.

  Clint,

  I couldn’t sleep, and since I was going to leave early in the morning, anyway, I thought I would just get out of your hair sooner rather than later.

  I owe you a big thanks, not only for your hospitality, but because you do know how to show a girl a good time. I’m never going to forget this past week, and I mean that.

  Here, it was as if she’d stopped writing and started again. The penmanship was a little shakier.

  Dani and Riley kept telling me that you’d changed since college, and they were right. You can do anything, Clint, and I’m not just blowing smoke at you. Some girl is going to be damned lucky to have you someday. She’s going to be the type who doesn’t have neurotic issues. She’s going to be country through and through, and she’s not going to be a fish out of water in your life. She’s truly going to be perfect for you, and I wish you all the happiness in the world with her. She’ll be the luckiest woman.

  His gaze couldn’t focus on the rest, which looked like platitudes and thank-yous for having her as a guest.

  The writer, he thought. The woman who couldn’t tell him all this in person last night.

  His gut churned as he crumpled up the letter and tossed it behind him while he went into the hallway, toward her room, throwing open the door.

  All he saw was a neatly made bed, just as if no one had stayed there.

  Just as if she had never come into his life and then left it in pieces.

  But this was how it had always been meant to go, Clint thought. How could it have turned out any other way with two people who’d only been trying to find closure with a decade-old fantasy?

  Blanking out his mind—and everything else—Clint went to work on the ranch, driving to the horse barn, walking through it, feeling like an empty page.

  His employees stared, but he barely felt it. And when he got an email later in the day while he worked in the barn’s office, all he could do was laugh.

  It was from his brothers. They had stopped their threats and hired an attorney.

  He leaned back in his chair, remembering what Margot had said to him at The 76 as they’d talked at the table by the dance floor.

  I know someone who could help.

  She’d been referring to a lawyer, but she’d had no way of knowing that the only person Clint longed to have at his side, fighting every battle with him, was her.

  * * *

  THE DAYS PLODDED by for Margot that week.

  She tried to make them go faster by “filling her creative well,” seeing as many movies as she could, reading like a freak and sorting through magazines to find some inspiration for a new project.

  But she kept going back to daydreams about country bars, starlit nights, comfortable cowhide couches and a gazebo on a ranch.

  And a cowboy who had messy golden hair, roguish blue eyes and a cocksure grin.

  Even an early Sunday afternoon on her condo balcony with the newspaper and a plate of blueberry scones under the October sun couldn’t cheer her up and out of this funk.

  So she called the only two people who even had a chance of making her feel better.

  First, she got Dani on the line for the conference call, then Leigh, who was shooting on location at a dairy, where she was going to make homemade ice cream in passion-laced flavors.

  “Still hating myself,” Margot said as soon as Leigh got on the line.

  The Queen of Cream answered first. “Stop beating yourself up about Clint.”

  “Yeah,” Dani said, a good friend until the end, although Margot knew she was frustrated with this romantic outcome. “You thought things weren’t going to work out with him, so you nipped it in the bud.”

  And she’d nipped it with a letter. Margot heard it in every syllable her friends uttered.

  She hadn’t even been able to tell him what she really felt in person.

  She rested her head on the back of the lounge chair. “I was afraid of what would happen if I tried to say those things to him face-to-face and not in a letter. There’s a reason I’m a writer.”

  Or was a writer.

  She still hadn’t told Dani and Leigh about the canceled book or her bleak career outlook. Leigh was riding high, Dani was going to open her own business one day and Margot was deadweight.

  Why did it seem as if Clint was the only person she could’ve confided in? He’d given her ideas, not commiseration.

  He had made it seem as if they could find their way out of a dark room together, and with every day that passed, she wanted to believe that they might’ve made it if she’d decided she could break out of her patterns and change.

  Too late, though, she thought. She’d already written the end to that story.

  Leigh’s sympathetic voice came back on. “What would you have said to him that you didn’t write in the letter?”

  She bit her bottom lip. “I have no idea how to put what I feel into the words that come out of my mouth. And usually those words are the wrong ones, anyway.”

  “You know exactly what you should’ve said to him,” Dani said.

  Margot sat up. “What? That I’m all of a sudden so sure that I’m not going to get bored, just like my parents always did, or that he’s not going to want to move on, either, like he always did?”

  Dani piped in again. “That’s what the Margot who won’t get out of her rut would say. This Margot is scared to death.”

  “No, I’m...”

  Yes, she was.

  Leigh said, “When you love, you have to do it with everything you’ve got, right, Dani?”

  “Right.”

  Dani sounded so sad that Margot’s problems disappeared, and she seized the chance to get the spotlight off her. But she also did want to know what was going on with one of her very best friends.

  “Is everything okay with you, Dan?”

  On the other end of the line, she could hear her friend sigh.

  “I mean it,” Margot said. “We can go back to working my crap out later.”

  “Yeah,” Dani finally said. “Of course we’re okay. Don’t change the subject.”

  A clump of silence passed before Dani said, “Okay, so it hasn’t been such a smooth road. But Riley’s been out of town on business, looking at some real estate for his boss, and he’s coming back tonight. I’m going to give him a big welcome home. You should see the stuff I bought.”

  Margot got a bad feeling about this. “Stuff?”

  “Uh-huh. We’ve got a cheeky little Boudoir-type place within driving range—tasteful but tempting. It would’ve been perfect for my auction basket if I’d had any imagination at the time.”

  Both Leigh and Margot went quiet until Margot said, “I’ll be the first to tell you that fun and games in a bedroom aren’t going to help anything.”

  “It’ll put us both back in a good mood.”

  Dani’s words echoed something Margot had said to Clint the night when things had first started spiraling out of control with Le Crazy Horse.

  It was fun, okay?

  But that had just been the half of it. It had been the first time she had been flailing with her feelings in the aftermath of sex. The first time she had done anything to avoid examining how she really felt about him.

  She wasn’t sure it was love. Not yet. But love started somewhere, and if this wasn’t the beginning of it, she didn’t know what else it could be.

  Love. Her, Margot Walker, single girl on the go.

  Now a true fish out of water.

  Margot picked at a nylon lacing on her lounge chair. “Whatever you do, Dan, good luck.”

  “Tonight will be a g
reat night for us. I’m sure of it. And, after his welcome home, I’ll show him the wedding dress I finally ordered. I sent you all a picture of it this morning, so check your email.”

  Margot reached for her iPad on the glass-topped table next to her, accessing her account.

  When the picture appeared, her heart seized up.

  “It’s beautiful, Dani.”

  Margot wasn’t just saying that. The gown was simple, with a one-shoulder bodice, chiffon ruching and beaded flower appliqués. So Dani.

  But, much to Margot’s surprise, it could’ve been so her, too. Dressed in white, just as she’d been that last night with Clint in the negligee he’d given her. She sighed, and Leigh must’ve thought it was just because of the gown.

  “Dammit, my phone’s taking forever to download my email. Reception out here is terrible.”

  Dani laughed. “Don’t worry—you’ll see it later, crabby.”

  “I’m not crabby.”

  “But you are.” Dani was in teasing mode now because the heat was off her. “I would be, too, if I still hadn’t heard from my secret admirer.”

  “On that note,” Leigh said, “I need to go. Everything’s set for me to shoot.”

  They said their goodbyes, leaving Dani and Margot alone on the phone.

  Margot said, “You did good, finding that dress.”

  “Believe it or not, sometimes I actually know what I’m doing.” She had a wink in her voice. “You take care of yourself, okay? No maudlin nights, drinking wine, pining away for Clint.”

  Was that how Dani saw her these days? As a helpless thing who pined away?

  She thought of Clint as waves of need—and the start of something bigger—rushed over her.

  A single girl on the go. That’s truly not who she was anymore, and maybe the readers who had been buying her books had seen that way before Margot had.

  Clint had known it, too.

  Getting up from her lounge chair, she went to the railing of her balcony, looking over the wide-open spaces that just didn’t seem wide enough anymore—not after being on Clint’s ranch.

  It was time to travel someplace she’d never gone before, wasn’t it? And even if she crashed and burned, at least she wouldn’t have this hollow pit in the very center of her where Clint should be.

  And that’s when Margot decided that she hadn’t been moving forward this past week—she’d been going nowhere.

  Margot finally said to Dani, “No maudlin nights. I promise.”

  And after they hung up, she headed straight for her room, where her suitcases and travel gear were stored. She got one of her bags out of the closet and threw it on her bed.

  She’d had enough of this. If she was going to travel, it needed to be in the direction she should’ve been heading all along.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the headlights from Riley’s truck flared over the family room windows of their rented suburban house, Dani was ready for him.

  She took a deep breath, smoothing her hands down the negligee she’d purchased this week.

  Egypt, she thought, feeling the sheer material beneath her hands. The beige gown didn’t hide much, parting down the middle to show a flash of skin and belly button above the barely-there undies.

  As she adjusted her headpiece—a chain of coins that dipped onto her forehead—she rushed to the hallway. But when she passed the mirror, she checked her makeup one last time.

  Heavy eyeliner—check.

  Red lipstick—check.

  The front door opened, and she turned off the hall light, dashed to the bedroom, then lit a single candle on an end table. As the door closed, she took her place on the bed, her blood flowing hot as she made like Cleopatra and rested on her side, one hand propping up her head.

  She heard a jangle of keys as Riley spilled them into the glazed ceramic bowl by the front door, then the sound of his footsteps on the wooden floor. Then...

  The TV switching on?

  She sprang up in bed, her headdress clinking. “Riley?”

  A pause, then the TV volume going down. Footsteps into the hallway.

  She got back into position.

  “Dani? You home?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “The lights were off, so I—”

  Then he stood in the doorway, the candlelight flickering over him. His eyebrows were knitted as he scanned the scene.

  “Welcome to Egypt,” she said, crooking a finger at him.

  Her nightie covered one breast, but only with a teasing sheerness. The other breast was exposed as the material gaped away from her.

  Passion clouded Riley’s eyes, but she could see the sexual haze lift from them as the seconds passed.

  She thought about how she’d lied to Margot and Leigh this morning. Things hadn’t been so okay between her and Riley. He’d been on this business trip for most of the week, and before he’d gone, he’d spent a lot of time in the yard, mowing, cutting, weeding. She’d let him blow off steam out there, too, knowing they would sit and have another talk when he was ready.

  But he hadn’t been ready before he’d left town, so she thought a little nudge might be in order. Plus, she’d missed him. Terribly.

  She rolled to her belly. “I’ve been counting down the minutes until you got back.”

  “You know I have, too.”

  Why did he make it sound as if he’d been waiting until she got back from somewhere after leaving him behind?

  “That’s some getup,” he said.

  “I thought you might like a trip to an intriguing destination.”

  “Sounds like Margot and that basket of hers.”

  Another comment laden with deeper meaning. He was obviously referring to the way things between Margot and Clint hadn’t turned out so well.

  He came to sit on the bed, and her pulse darted up and almost out of her as she crawled over to him and started to unbutton his shirt.

  “I did a lot of thinking while I was gone,” he said.

  She stopped with the buttons. Riley had always been a thinker—a stalwart man who never did something until he’d worked every angle out in his mind.

  Why did she get the feeling that she’d been his main subject?

  “You’re about to say something bad,” she said.

  “No, Dani.” He touched her headdress. “We were best friends before we were anything else, and I don’t know if that set the tone for the rest of our lives. I should’ve expected change after being together for years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that what we felt for each other was always very straightforward and innocent. There were never wild nights like Margot had with Clint, where things were stormy and crazy. I think that seeing them together did something to you, and I can’t blame you for that. You’re only human.” He ran a hand down her hair. “But there’re deeper things going on with you, too, and that’s what we have to work through before we set foot in front of any wedding altar.”

  But we’re Dani and Riley, she wanted to say. Things never go wrong.

  She took off the stupid headdress. “I don’t want to talk about my parents again and how they’ve warped me.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, but he finally nodded. He wouldn’t talk about it now, she thought, even though it was clearly on his mind.

  He took her headdress, handing it back to her. She refused it.

  “You think I’m rejecting you or something?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “God, Dani. When I saw you lying here, I wanted to tear off what little you have on.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  He smiled. “Because I didn’t choose you just for sex. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you, and we’re not going to
work things out by going to Egypt.”

  He was right. Margot and Clint had found that out the hard way, so why had she started down the same path with Riley?

  “You know what we need to do?” he asked.

  She motioned to her costume. “Ask for a refund?”

  With great tenderness, he kissed her, just a touch of his lips on hers.

  Just a world of exploding hearts and a shower of need that twirled through Dani.

  “We need to get to know each other all over again,” he said, his fingers at her nape, his thumb caressing the sensitive spot near the center of her throat.

  She made a small sound of pleasure. “I’d say you already know a lot about me.”

  “I think I know enough to realize that you want some excitement. And before we get married, I want you to get it all out of your system so you can’t say we never tried this and we never tried that before we settled down.”

  It took her a moment to realize that this was Riley speaking. Her Riley.

  “We’re going to experiment?” she asked.

  “You can put it however you want. I look at it as courting—getting to know you all over again.”

  “Courting.” She laughed. “It’s so...”

  “Old-fashioned? Probably. But I can put old-fashioned behind if that’s what you want.”

  Now she gaped at him. “What are you saying?”

  There was a hint of something she’d never seen in Riley’s gaze before, and it excited the heck out of her.

  No—the hell out of her.

  “I want you to show me everything about yourself, Dani, no matter what it is,” he said. “Court me in whatever way you want.”

  Her imagination started to go berserk, as if Riley had opened a door to a room that she’d always kept locked, especially from him.

  But he’d found a key.

  He put the headdress back on her, that dark and sparkling gleam still in his gaze.

  Dani smiled, feeling reborn.

  And tonight, she was an Egyptian goddess with a servant who would do anything for her.

  Anything and more.