The Best Man in Texas

by Tanya Michaels

  “That way,” she’d lectured, adorably earnest, “even if we run out of time before we leave on Saturday, you know you got to do the stuff you most wanted.”

  Not likely. Every time he glanced at her, he wrestled with the realization that what he wanted most might well be right in this room.

  “Damn it!” Hadn’t he just sworn that this wasn’t a problem? That he could recognize how attractive Brooke was without being attracted to her? That he could enjoy her company platonically without becoming addicted to it and wanting more?

  For the first time ever, Jake empathized with his father’s alcoholism, with the self-destructive desire to have something you knew rationally you should leave the hell alone.

  “Jake?” Brooke had glanced up, startled by his sudden oath.

  “Sorry. Stubbed my toe.” It was the best lie he could improvise, but still pretty absurd considering he was standing squarely between the dresser and the foot of the bed with absolutely nothing in his way. Yes, the big studly fireman stubbed his toe on carpet fiber. That’s plausible. “Hey, are you hungry? We could run out and get an early dinner.”

  “I guess.”

  “You could bring all those brochures with us,” he cajoled, “and tell me about what you’ve learned so far.” Food and facts. And more importantly, miles between them and this mocking king-size bed.

  THEY FOUND A MODEST-LOOKING building with a hand-painted sign that read simply Hamburger Shack. The paper menus bore out that description. Entrées included a three-cheese burger, buffalo burger, barbecue burger, veggie burger and “chopped steak” salad. But what the diner lacked in upscale decor or variety, it made up for in taste.

  “Wow,” Jake said, surreptitiously double-checking to make sure he didn’t have mustard on the side of his mouth. “This may even be better than the burgers at Buck’s.”

  Brooke blinked. “That’s where my sister works. For now, anyway. I’m surprised the two of you hadn’t met before the party. She definitely would have remembered you. And she’s not exactly forgettable herself.”

  “Umm.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, it will sound insulting and that’s not what I…”

  She set her hamburger down. “Go ahead. I can take it.” She sounded oddly forlorn, rather than angry on her sister’s behalf.

  After a moment, he laughed. “I’m not sure you understand. It’s just, I’m sure your sister…?”

  “Meg,” she reminded him.

  “Sorry. I knew that. I’m used to ranks and call signs. I’m not as good with actual birth names. Anyway, I know I met her at Grace’s, and I recall that she was wearing something…bright. But that’s about it.” Nothing like his first meeting with Brooke, which he’d thought about in vivid detail afterward. He could still remember the stiff bearing of her shoulders that was so far removed from her casual, laughing demeanor as she’d teased him today or her fluid grace whenever she was on a dance floor.

  He’d been trained to study situations and assess them for possible dangers; Meg, from what he could recall, was pretty, a bit flirty but essentially harmless, having no tactical impact on his life. Brooke, however, had been a threat to his peace of mind from the moment he saw her.

  Sidestepping that explosive topic, Jake redirected the conversation to less personal matters. “Tell me about what you found in the brochures and we can start prioritizing.”

  “Well, the Incline Railway—which is the steepest passenger incline in the world—is open until about nine during the summer, so we might have time to do that after dinner. If you’re interested,” she added sheepishly.

  “I’m interested.”

  “Tomorrow we could hit the aquarium or Lookout Mountain or try to squeeze in both. And I was reading about Ruby Falls—the cave with the underground waterfalls? The normal tour features music and theatrical lighting and geographical information, like the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite. But they also offer another, more limited, lantern tour on certain nights. It’s quieter and darker, except for the lanterns, and includes folktales and legends. The literature described it as a night of natural beauty and an aura of mystery, beginning with a 260-foot descent into the mountain.”

  “Sounds intriguing.” The tour sounded fine, Jake supposed, but he was having a much stronger reaction to the idea of being in such close quarters with Brooke, surrounded by potentially romantic lighting. Get a grip. It’s a cave, not a candlelit four-star restaurant. There was little chance she’d be overcome by the seductive atmosphere and throw herself at him.

  Which left him simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

  “I can call in the morning,” she volunteered, “and see if we’re too late to get tickets for tomorrow night.”

  He grinned at her efficient tone and all the facts she’d apparently memorized in such a short time. “You’re very good at this. Ever think about becoming a travel agent instead of a journalist?”

  She paused, as if debating her next words. “There was a time I considered both. Sort of. I wanted to be a travel writer, visit faraway places and bring them to life for other people who would never be lucky enough to see them. You know who Kira Salak is?”

  He shrugged apologetically. “It’s possible I’ve heard of her, but…bad with names, remember?”

  “She’s been all over the world, won writing awards. I wanted to be like her.” Brooke laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “Which sounds ridiculous when I say it aloud. She’s kayaked alone to Timbuktu, and you had to coerce me to get on a plane today just because it’s smaller than what I’m used to. It’s obvious I made the right career move, covering something safe like weddings and charity events rather than trying to chronicle a firsthand trip to the south pole or the Amazon.”

  The hollowness in her tone was unsettling. She was too young, with far too much still ahead of her, to sound so resigned over the way her life had turned out. Most beautiful women on the verge of marrying the man of their dreams would be ebullient.

  “Who’s to say you can’t still follow long-ago dreams?” Jake demanded. “Maybe you won’t go to the south pole. But that doesn’t mean Giff won’t take you to the south of France for your anniversary or some great Italian villa. Isn’t there some kind of freelance market for travel pieces?”

  “I—”

  “Just look at this weekend,” he interrupted. Granted, Tennessee might not have the same exotic cachet as, say, the African Serengeti or the Australian Outback, but everyone had to start somewhere. “You’re taking a trip and writing about it!”

  “Technically, I’m writing about your trip.” Her lips quirked in a smile. “But I appreciate the thought. I didn’t mean to sound defeatist when I was talking about the travel writing. That was just a crazy idea I had when I was younger. I have other goals now and I’m on the logical path to reaching them. I am very happy with my life.”

  Really? Because Jake had once caught an arsonist, still holding the gas can, and even his protestations of innocence were more believable than Brooke’s declaration.

  AFTER SPENDING SEVERAL HOURS in the June heat, exploring Lookout Mountain on Friday, Brooke was blissfully appreciative of the aquarium’s cool interior.

  Despite the escalating temperatures, however, she’d had an amazing morning. She’d been alternately awed by the natural wonders—such as the Balanced Rock, billed as weighing a thousand tons, perched on two tiny rock points—and charmed by the more fanciful elements of their tour, such as the local legends about gnomes. Knowing how amused her mother would be by the stories, Brooke had even purchased a decorative gnome for her parents’ yard, kind of a gag gift and the type of whimsical gesture Didi loved.

  Brooke had been less charmed by Lovers’ Leap. Oh, the view had been spectacular enough, but she’d cringed at the accompanying “romantic” legend of a Cherokee woman who’d been thrown off the edge because she dared love a man forbidden to her. According to folklore, the man had then jumped to his own demise, presumably so that th
ey could be together in the hereafter.

  One woman in oversize sunglasses and a UNC Tar Heels shirt had sniffed loudly at the story’s conclusion. Brooke hadn’t been able to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

  “I take it,” Jake had commented in a whisper, “that you’re not impressed with the legend of the star-crossed maiden and brave?”

  “Stories like that always make me feel like the grinch who stole Valentine’s Day,” Brooke had grumbled. “I remember having to read Romeo and Juliet in high school and all my girlfriends thought it was so moving. I was the killjoy who didn’t get it. Okay, yes, Shakespeare had some great lines in that play and I’ve loved some of his other works, but…what was the takeaway, really? That if you truly love someone, you’d die without them? Melodramatic tripe.”

  “So you’ve never felt that way about anyone,” Jake had concluded. “That you’d die without them?”

  She’d had a fleeting impression of herself, at twenty, mooning over Sean the sexy poet. She’d definitely fallen under the delusion that she just had to be with him—idiotic, since he’d turned out to be a self-centered jerk who’d habitually asked her for loans and had caused her more disturbance than joy. She hadn’t died without him, she’d thrived, reminded anew of how to make intelligent choices in her life. Ultimately, perhaps she should be grateful to him for helping make decisions that led her to Giff.

  “Let’s say I was thrown into an abyss,” Brooke had hypothesized. “I am confident that Giff, much as he loves me, is far too rational to leap to his own doom. Why would I even want him to do that for me? It’s inane. And I know that, should anything ever happen to him, he would want me to remember him well and move on with my life. Tossing yourself off a cliff or stabbing yourself with your lover’s dagger is really just the cowardly way out.”

  Jake had stared at her for a long moment before agreeing, “Your outlook does sound more sensible.”

  “Thank you,” she’d said uncertainly.

  One could take his words as praise, yet something in his eyes kept them from being an outright compliment. She’d been curious to know what else he’d been thinking but had stopped herself from asking. Now, two hours later, they stood and watched frolicking river otters. The playful spectacle erased any lingering thoughts of her philosophy about lovers who threw themselves from precipices.

  “I’ve always loved otters,” she said.

  “Really? They seem pretty…frivolous.” Jake flashed her a teasing smile—she knew he was about to give her grief, but found herself grinning back rather than growing defensive. “I would have expected you to champion more serious, organized creatures.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Such as?” Nothing that she knew of in the animal kingdom carried appointment books or smartphones. “You’re going to say something like an ant or worker bee, aren’t you?”

  “I was thinking more like a lioness. They’re smart, organized. They feed the pride, raise the young and take down animals bigger than themselves.”

  She’d assumed he was setting her up for good-natured mocking, and instead he’d compared her to a fierce, majestic animal? Not for the first time today, she felt as if she were tripping over her own expectations. That’s a man like Jake for you.

  He’d always keep a woman on her toes, never quite sure what to expect. It might be fun for an evening out or a road trip, but long term? It would be an unnerving, exhausting way to live, always trying to figure out the person you were with and never quite sure you had it right.

  Then again, life with a man like Jake would have other perks.

  Cheeks warming, she glanced away from him and toward the pond, making herself smile at the otters even though she wasn’t really seeing them anymore.

  “We should move on to the next exhibit so we don’t cause a traffic jam,” she muttered.

  He gestured toward the door. “Lead on, Macduff. Although, technically, the original quote was ‘lay on.’”

  Brooke whipped her head around and stared.

  “What?” He returned her gaze smugly. “You thought you were the only one to study Shakespeare in school? Most of A&M’s degree plans are ranked in the national top ten. Besides…”

  “Yes?”

  “That commonly misquoted line from Macbeth was one of the tie-breaker questions last week at a trivia bar where some of us from the station hang out.” Jake winked at her. “We got it wrong, but I always learn from my mistakes.”

  “Trivia bar?”

  He nodded. “I don’t subject myself to Karaoke on Saturdays, but I enjoy the trivia they do on weeknights. Plus they serve excellent buffalo wings.”

  “You had me going for a minute. I pictured you reading the Bard between calls at the firehouse.”

  “Truthfully, if I’m reading during my downtime, I prefer a Jeff Shaara novel.” They made their way into the multistoried central room where fiber-optic lights rippled like waves—the effect both soothing and dramatic. Ramps wound downward past huge tanks of fish, turtles and colorful coral. “What about you? You read a lot?”

  “Mostly nonfiction,” she said as they stopped to study some striped fish. Did her admission make her sound dull and unimaginative? Originally her problem had been just the opposite. “I used to make up lots of stories in my head, and whenever I read novels, my attention would wander. I’d take the characters and run with them, imagining what they looked like, which didn’t always match the descriptions in the book, and what they’d say to me if they knew me. Ten minutes would pass and I’d realize that I hadn’t even finished the page because I’d been dreaming up some adventure for me and whatever character instead of following the actual plot.”

  “How did you end up writing for a newspaper instead of spinning your own adventure tales?” Jake asked.

  “I had to write book reports in elementary and middle school and chose nonfiction whenever possible because it helped me focus instead of getting carried away.” But only marginally.

  She omitted mention of the transcontinental flight she’d imagined herself taking with Amelia Earhart in the Yellow Peril. Any longing she’d had for such a trip had been cured by Boom’s landing yesterday.

  “I got interested in biographies and reading historical accounts by journalists of the day,” she said, watching as graceful stingrays “flew” through the water. “I joined the seventh grade school paper and just followed that path.”

  “You were goal-oriented even in the seventh grade? I’m not sure whether that’s admirable or a little eerie.”

  “It’s not like I didn’t experiment with other ideas along the way,” she admitted. “I wrote a novel once. A very, very bad one.”

  Jake’s eyebrows rose. “Really? When was this?”

  “About ten years ago. College.” She could feel her face heating as she recalled some of the more torrid passages. At the time, she’d considered the sensuality of her prose daring and cutting-edge, on par with great works that had spent time on the banned-books list. In retrospect, her writing had been overwrought and painfully girlish. “I was…going through a phase.”

  “What was the book about?”

  “I aimed for epic historical literature and fell short. Oh, look, there’s the moray eel!” She pointed. “I see where it’s hiding now.”

  Next to her, Jake chuckled. It was a soft sound, nearly drowned out by the conversations buzzing around them, but he was standing so close she could almost feel the vibration of his body as he laughed.

  “You’re not going to tell me any more about the book, are you?”

  “Not in this lifetime. Or any future lives, for that matter. Really, the scathing rejection letter I got was a blessing. I can’t imagine how humiliated I’d be if that ‘book’ was available for people to actually read. The rejection did me the double favor of also being so contemptuous that I resumed my original course, getting serious about a career in journalism.”

  They were headed for the Ocean Journey exhibit when a toddler ran in the wrong direction, up the ramp and ba
rreled past Brooke. He was followed by a mother frantically trying to catch him who bumped into just as many passersby as her son. Jake reached out to steady Brooke, his hand at her waist, making sure she didn’t fall. Simply a precautionary measure, since neither the woman nor the little boy had jostled her that hard.

  “You okay?” Jake asked, although she was clearly fine. She hadn’t even lost her balance.

  But the touch of his hand, warm through the lightweight fabric of her shorts, was enough to make her dizzy. It called to mind his arms around her as they’d danced at the engagement party. The way he’d felt when their bodies brushed, the way he’d looked at her.

  “I—I’m good,” she said, her breathless delivery at odds with her words.

  He hadn’t moved his hand yet, hadn’t stepped back—not that he had room to move very far. Ironically the high volume of people on the ramp made her feel more alone with him, as the crush of pedestrians squeezed them against the rail in a seemingly isolated bubble.

  “We shouldn’t just be standing here,” she heard herself say. The declaration sounded impressively casual. It didn’t hint that, in her mind, things left unsaid rioted. We shouldn’t touch. We shouldn’t have so much fun together. We shouldn’t…

  “Right this way.” Jake finally lifted his hand from her hip but then dropped both palms on her shoulders, gently steering her forward even while keeping her close in front of him. Because of the crowd, she reminded herself. And the limited space.

  What if it’s more than that? Was she impossibly conceited to think that this gorgeous man who’d been Giff’s best friend for more than twenty years might be looking for an excuse to touch her?

  Once they’d reached the bottom, he resumed an impersonal distance. She sighed, annoyed with herself for blowing an innocuous moment out of proportion. Just because she’d been explaining her previously overactive imagination was no reason to start indulging it again.

  “Hmm.” From behind her, Jake leaned forward so that he could better read the informational placards in front of the tank.