by Linda Seed
“I was, but recently things have, let’s say, clarified for me. I can’t screw around anymore. I have to get this done and get my career going. I can’t be a caretaker forever.” The breeze was ruffling his sandy-colored hair, and he lifted a hand to brush it out of his face.
Rose wondered what, exactly, had happened to clarify things for him, and where he’d found the sudden motivation to get his metaphorical house in order. Was it possible he knew about the baby? But then she thought, no. The only people who knew were her friends. Well, and the tourist who’d bought the pregnancy test for her. Her friends would not betray her confidence, and the tourist didn’t even know Will.
She shook off the thought. It was something on his end, then. With a sudden jolt of horror, she thought about his bitchy ex, the one who wouldn’t let go.
“Have you heard from Melinda lately?” Rose inquired, trying to sound like she was just making conversation.
“Ah … Yes. Yes, I have.”
“And?”
He gave her a kind of sideways look that she found impossibly endearing. “Are you sure you want to hear about this?”
“I’m sure. Spill it, Science Boy.”
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, fiddled with it a little bit, then passed it across the table to her. Up on the screen was the latest text exchange between the two of them, dated two days before.
Melinda: Will, you’re going to have to acknowledge me at some point.
Will: I don’t see why. We broke up.
Melinda: What’s done can be undone. People break up and get back together all the time.
Will: I’m with Rose now. Please stop, Melinda. You’re with Chris. Just be with Chris.
Melinda: You asshole. If you think you can get away with just ignoring me, you’re sadly mistaken.
No response from Will. Then Melinda texted again ten minutes later:
If you keep treating me like this, I’ll tell Chris that you kissed me. You’ll lose your job. You’ll be out on the street, you tiny-dicked bastard.
That last bit made Rose grin, despite how horrible it all was. She could attest to the falsity of the tiny-dicked comment.
He took the phone from Rose and placed it back into his pocket.
“Did you know she was this crazy when you were dating her?”
“No.” He looked thoughtful. “Well, maybe a little. She did get kind of obsessive about things sometimes. But I didn’t know she was at this level of crazy.”
The fact that Melinda was pursuing Will made Rose feel anxious and angry. But what he’d told Melinda—I’m with Rose now—filled her with a kind of giddy pride. The overall result was a seesaw of emotions she didn’t quite know how to handle. But, hell. Being flummoxed by her emotions was pretty much the status quo these days.
“What are you going to do about her?” Rose toyed with a piece of a baguette. She kept her voice calm and conversational—just two pals chatting about a crazy ex—but every instinct told her to track down Melinda and pull her hair out by the roots.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged and looked out at the water, to where the sun was slowly inching toward the horizon. “Nothing, I guess.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? You have to do something. She’s stalking you, for God’s sake.” To Rose’s mind, taking out a restraining order would not have been out of line. Rose had read online about companies that would send boxes of dog shit to your enemies. Right about now, that seemed like a pretty useful service.
Will returned his gaze to Rose. “I figure if I ignore her, she’ll go away. She’s not going to tell Chris that I kissed her, because then I’ll tell him the truth: that she was the one who made a move on me. No. She’s not going to jeopardize her relationship with someone as high-powered as he is. I mean, he’s what she always wanted in the first place: a rich guy who looks good in a suit. I really don’t even get why she’s doing this.”
“Competition,” Rose said, sipping from the tall paper cup of iced tea Will had brought for her. “All of this started when she met me, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, there you go. It was fine that you two were broken up when she thought you were lonely and sad, regretting the day that you let her walk out of your life. But then she sees you with me, and I’m much hotter than she is.” She grinned at him, and shot him a wink. “In her shallow, two-dimensional way, she probably saw the hair and the tats and thought that I’m way more sexually adventurous than she could ever be. Cue the insane stalking.”
“You are more sexually adventurous,” Will observed.
“Of course. She was probably a missionary position, only-on-Saturday-nights girl. But don’t tell me about it.” She put up a hand, palm out, to stop him. “I don’t want to know.”
Being here with him, even if they were spending the time trashing his ex, felt so good that Rose had to remind herself that she wasn’t going to do this; she wasn’t going to go all gooey over him and give him her heart. She needed her heart to be safe and intact for her child. But he looked so sweet with the early evening sun on his face, his hair mussed by the breeze, that when he came to her side of the picnic table and sat next to her, so close that she could feel the warmth of his thigh against hers, she didn’t even think to move away.
“I don’t regret the day I let her walk out of my life,” he said. “Just for the record. She wasn’t right for me. She wasn’t who I wanted. You are.”
For a moment, her rational brain kicked in. “Look, Will. We shouldn’t—”
He shut down her protest with a kiss.
And damned if it didn’t work. When his lips touched hers, she went all stupid, and she forgot what she’d wanted to say. What was it about a kiss that could do this to a person? That could empty your brain and make your insides go soft? Whatever it was, Rose lost herself in it. The taste of his mouth and the warmth of his tongue, the feel of his breath on her, made her want to forget everything else and live right here, forever. Somehow, against her own volition, she stopped being the girl with the heart that needed protecting, and instead rose from her seat on the bench and settled herself in his lap.
His arms went around her and gathered her in, and she felt right. She felt at peace.
Damn it.
When the two of them came up for air, he smoothed her hair back from her face with his warm hand.
“Rose. I’m not in this for a good time. I’m in this. Completely. I just wanted you to know.”
And oh, God, she wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe in this, in him. She rested her forehead against his.
“Can I come to your place tonight?” She could feel his breath as he spoke just inches from her skin. “Please?”
It was the please that did it. She was powerless to say no.
And anyway, she could be strong again tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I heard you went out with Will last night.” Kate sounded a little smug.
“No,” Rose protested. “I mean, yes, I saw him. But we didn’t ‘go out.’ We mostly … stayed in. And how do you know about it, anyway?” Rose was talking to Kate on her cell phone as she was getting ready for work. Rose’s place was a mess, partly because she wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and partly because she and Will had stayed in bed until the last possible minute, and she hadn’t had time to clean up.
“Jackson cooked the meal that Will brought to you after work last night. And Jackson has been known to gossip on occasion.”
“Well … okay.” Rose reached down to the floor and picked up her bra from the night before, amid fond memories of how it had gotten there. “Yes, we had dinner. But it wasn’t a ‘date.’ ” She said the word with implied air quotes.
“Uh huh,” Kate said. “So, he didn’t stay over?”
Rose was silent.
“Just what I thought,” Kate said.
“Are you being smug?” Rose demanded. “Because you sound smug.”
“Maybe a little. So does this mean you two are
on again?”
“No, it does not.” Walking around the house, cleaning up before work, Rose saw something on top of her refrigerator, investigated, and discovered that the pink, silky lump was last night’s panties. You had to admire a man whose lovemaking resulted in panties on top of the refrigerator.
“Why not ?” Kate’s voice had the whiny tone of a toddler asking why she couldn’t have ice cream.
“Because. It’s just … I’ll admit I had a moment of weakness last night. More than a moment. More like … Okay, it was about twelve hours of weakness. But that doesn’t mean anything’s changed. It’s still a really bad idea for me to get involved with him right now. With everything that’s going on.”
“Honey, you’re already involved.”
“Yes, well, considering that I’m carrying his child, it’s fair to say that.” Rose sighed, closed her eyes, and pressed a hand to her forehead. “But emotionally, I can’t go there, Kate. I just can’t.” She plopped down onto her sofa, the panties still in her hand.
“Well, he’s already there. Do you really think it’s fair to keep sleeping with him, knowing he’s got feelings for you, if you aren’t planning to see it through?” Kate sounded like a stern mother. Rose expected the next words out of her mouth to be, I’m very disappointed in you, young lady.
“You have a point,” Rose admitted.
“So, you’re going to give him a chance?”
“No. I’m going to stop sleeping with him.”
Giving that up was going to be about as easy as giving up breathing. But it had to be done, for her sake and for the baby’s.
“You’re an idiot,” Kate said.
“Hey.”
Kate’s voice softened. “Sweetie, you know I love you. I just don’t think you’re seeing the big picture.”
Rose felt tears come to her eyes, and she swiped them away with her fingertips.
“Okay, well, thank you for your advice. But I really have to go now. I have to get ready for work.”
“Rose—”
Rose hung up on her. She wasn’t mad at Kate, not really. But she didn’t want Kate to chip away at her resolve. Her resolve was already crumbling as it was.
Will was feeling pretty good that morning. The night he’d spent with Rose had him singing under his breath as he went about his daily routine at Cooper House. He checked the pool filter, which seemed to be working fine since his repairs. The gardeners had been there the day before, but they hadn’t trimmed the hedges surrounding the rose garden on the house’s east side. He’d have to call and get them back out here.
He took a spin through the main house to make sure the cleaning crew had dusted inside Chris’s action figure case. Sometimes they didn’t, and Will didn’t blame them. Who really wanted to remove two hundred superhero action figures and then get them back exactly in the same places? But God help them if Chris showed up on the spur of the moment—which rarely happened—and there was dust inside his action figure case. Will checked it out, and it looked good. He left the room humming, and did a little dance move in the doorway.
Okay, so he hadn’t won Rose over completely yet. She hadn’t told him about the baby, and he figured that was a sure sign that she didn’t fully trust him. Also, she had shut down a little as he’d said goodbye. He could see it in her face, in the set of her chin. But his memories of last night were so vivid, so lovely, that he couldn’t let that bother him. He’d show her that he could be who she needed him to be, and then he would be that. And then they’d be together—all three of them. A family.
In the meantime, he had to act like a guy who was ready to support that family. It was time to stop delaying and finish his dissertation. His morning rounds at the main house done, he went back to his cottage and settled in at his laptop to write.
The data was solid, and he had all he needed. As tempting as it was to spend more time out on the beach with his birds, he knew that was just a delaying tactic, a way to hold off the demands that would come with moving his career forward. And while it would be so much easier to just keep checking the dust under a set of plastic action figures, at this point in his life, more was required of him.
He sat down and got to work.
Will was making some real progress on his manuscript when his cell phone, which was sitting next to his laptop on the desk, pinged. He checked it, and he froze when he saw Chris’s message:
Hey, buddy. Just wanted to let you know Melinda’s coming to Cooper House early for the wedding. She’ll arrive on Saturday. I’ll be there the following Friday. Said she needed a little getaway. Get the place ready for her?
Will felt his limbs go cold. Melinda was going to be on the property for six days, without Chris. It would be just the two of them. And she was still acting like a crazy stalker.
What could he do? It wasn’t like he could refuse to let her come. It was Chris’s place, not his. He couldn’t quit, or he’d have no place to live.
He considered faking a family emergency. He could say that his great aunt was ill, and he had to return to his ancestral home to be with her. But he didn’t have a great aunt, nor did he have an ancestral home.
Melinda wasn’t coming here for a getaway before the wedding, he was sure of it. She was coming here to mess with him. How was he supposed to handle her? He felt about as prepared for this as he was to fly a 747.
He needed advice, and he thought about who he could ask. Jackson had a lot of experience with women—far more than Will had—but as far as Will knew, Jackson had never dealt with a ridiculously persistent one who was hooked up with his boss, but who was relentlessly pursuing him.
But then again, who had?
There was a lot to do in the run-up to the wedding, and one of the biggest jobs was getting the old barn on the Delaney Ranch ready for the reception.
The ceremony would be held at the lodge, on the lawn in front of the gazebo. But the reception was going to be in the cavernous, picturesque barn that the Delaneys had retired about eleven or twelve years ago when they’d had a new, state-of-the-art one built. Gen had been using the barn as studio space for her artist-in-residence program, but she’d found alternate accommodations for the current artist until after the proceedings.
Will was over at the ranch a day or two after the text about Melinda, helping Daniel string white lights from the roof of the barn.
One of the things about Will’s flexible work schedule was that he was always being recruited by his friends to help with this or that, and he could never claim to have an important meeting or a big client in from back East. Same with Daniel. As an artist, his schedule was his own.
Not that Will minded. This kind of thing helped him to avoid his dissertation when he wanted to, which was handy. And now that he didn’t want to avoid his dissertation—he just wanted to get it done—at least the task gave him the opportunity to approach Daniel about the Melinda problem.
Daniel didn’t know about the baby—Will figured that was Rose’s to tell, when she was ready—but he knew about the crazy ex, and Will thought he could use whatever help he could get with that particular situation.
Will was on a ladder, with Daniel on the ground feeding strings of lights up to him, when he casually brought up the issue.
“So, my ex is coming up to Cooper House on Saturday.” He hammered a nail and looped the wire of the string of lights around it. “Without Chris.”
“Well, that’s awkward,” Daniel said. The roof of the barn was high—about thirty feet up—and Will felt a brief and disturbing sense of vertigo as he peered down at him.
“It is,” Will agreed. He pounded another nail, attached more lights.
“Especially after she kissed you in the wine cellar,” Daniel observed.
The two of them had been at it with the ladder and the lights for a while now, and they were both dusty and sweaty. They were taking turns regarding who would get on the ladder and who would be the guy on the ground. While they did this, Ryan was busy painting the outside of the barn, so
mething that had been overdue for years. Most of the painting was done, but there was still some trim to finish up. Will regretted the fact that Ryan was out of earshot, because Will would have appreciated his take on the Melinda situation as well.
“The thing is,” Will said, during pauses in his hammering, “it wasn’t just the kiss. There have been text messages.”
“What kind of text messages?” Daniel fed more lights up to Will.
“Ah … You can’t ignore me. You’re not going to get away with treating me like this. That sort of thing.”
“Uh oh,” Daniel said.
“Yeah.”
Will climbed down from the ladder, moved it a couple of feet to the left, and climbed up again.
“And she’s coming here alone.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, shit.”
“Right.”
Will hammered and strung lights while they both thought about that. Sweat was dripping into Will’s eyes, and he wiped it away with the back of his arm.
“Well, that’s going to be uncomfortable at best, and at worst, it’s going to end with you losing your job,” Daniel summed up.
“And my home,” Will added.
“And then there’s Rose,” Daniel said. “How’s she going to feel about you being on the property alone with a woman you used to sleep with, and who now actively wants to sleep with you?”
Will nodded, steadied himself on the ladder, and hammered another nail. “That about covers it.” He looked down at Daniel. “So, what do I do?”
Daniel ran a hand through thick, dark hair that was cropped short. He propped his hands on his hips. “Well, you’ve just got to get through a week, and then the wedding will be over and she’ll be gone.”
“Right.”
“You could always take the approach of being really busy that week,” Daniel suggested. “Always on the run, never around at Cooper House. ‘So sorry, Melinda. I can’t stop to chat about your sexual needs. I’ve got to arrange place cards for the reception.’ That kind of thing.”
“I’m a man. Men don’t arrange place cards,” Will said.
“You’re stringing fairy lights. Don’t get cocky.”
