by Linda Seed
Aria was so flummoxed by the simple equation of whether lunch equaled a date that she didn’t even realize she hadn’t answered him yet. She tried to come out with something—anything—and found herself stammering.
“I wasn’t … I didn’t …”
“Come on.” He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead, he started walking down Main Street with long, easy strides.
The arrogance of him literally walking away without her left her speechless. What the hell was she supposed to do now? Chase after him like a puppy? Or just let him go?
Damn it, she thought, not for the first time in relation to Liam Delaney.
She was hungry, and she was lonely, and he looked so damned good as he walked away. She grabbed her bags and hurried after him.
Aria had been so certain that Liam was trying to lure her into a date that it was utterly unexpected when he walked straight past several nice-looking restaurants and led her to a taco truck at the corner of Main Street and Burton Drive.
“This isn’t a restaurant,” she said, realizing as she said it that she sounded stupid.
“You don’t like tacos?” he asked, his eyebrows raised.
“That’s not … I mean, sure. I like tacos.”
Apparently, I like tacos was all the input he needed from her. He placed an order and paid, and after a short wait, he was handed a very aromatic sack and two takeout cups of whatever he’d ordered for them to drink.
“All right, come on,” he told her, and started walking down Main Street.
“Is that the way you do things?” she said, hurrying after him. “It’s just, ‘Come on, woman,’ and then you go and wait to see who follows you?”
“I never called you woman,” he said, not unreasonably.
“You were probably thinking it.”
“Do you want your tacos or not?” He stood there looking at her with that half grin, his eyebrows raised in question.
The bag smelled good, and her stomach rumbled in response.
“Yes, I want my tacos.”
“Well, all right, then.” He walked down Main Street a little farther with Aria chasing after him, then he turned on Bridge Street.
He didn’t slow down until they’d reached a small park with a stretch of grass dotted with trees, a tiny wooden building that a plaque said was a Chinese temple, and an Asian-inspired fountain that trickled water onto smooth rocks below.
He led her to a bench in the shade, and she sat beside him.
“This is lovely.” She looked around in surprise, having neither seen nor heard of this park before in her explorations of the town.
“Yeah. The creek’s right over there, behind the trees.” He motioned with one hand. “You can hear it, this time of year. Water’s fairly high after the rains.”
She listened, and he was right: She could hear that, and so much else. The breeze rustling the branches of the trees. Some kind of small bird calling to its brethren. The gentle sounds of the fountain. And the occasional car passing by on Burton Drive—locals going about their day, or maybe tourists on the way to somewhere else.
“I got you a Coke,” he said, holding out one of the cups. “I figured everybody likes Coke.”
“You wouldn’t have had to guess if you’d asked,” she grumbled. “But, yes, I like Coke. Hand it over.”
“If I’d asked, it would have given you time to change your mind,” he said, as casually as if he’d been asking her to pass him a napkin. “Chicken or beef?”
“And why a taco truck?” she asked.
“Same deal. If I’d taken you into a restaurant, the whole time we were waiting for a table or looking at the menus, you’d have been planning to go to the ladies’ room and sneak out the back door.” He looked around the park. “There’s no back door here. Now, do you want chicken or beef?”
She stared at him for a moment, surprised at how accurate his assessment was. “Chicken.”
“Good choice, though I’m partial to beef, myself.” He dug a taco out of the paper bag and handed it to her.
She unwrapped the taco, looked at it, and belatedly said, “I wouldn’t have freaked out if we’d gone to a restaurant.” It was bullshit, and she knew it.
“Really? You wouldn’t have figured that was too much like a date, when you’ve already told me you don’t date? You wouldn’t be in your car on your way back to the ranch right now?”
“Well …”
“Eat your taco.”
She wanted to be irritated at how smug he was, but he was right. And the taco looked damned good. She took a bite and savored the flavors of tender chicken, chiles and spices.
“Wow. This is really good.”
“Isn’t it? That truck’s been in the same spot for years. I go a couple times a week, at least.”
They ate in companionable silence in the cool, crisp air.
“So, you going home for Christmas, Aria?”
He said it so casually that it had to be idle conversation—it couldn’t have been him prying into her private life. And yet, the question sounded like an accusation, or an interrogation.
“The residency is three months,” she said, avoiding what he was really after—some tidbit about her family or friends, some juicy bit of information about who she was when she wasn’t here.
“Hmm.” He took a bite of his taco, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed. “I don’t imagine Gen’s got you chained to the guesthouse, though.”
Smartass.
“No. I’m not going anywhere for Christmas,” she said.
“Well, good. Then you can come to our place for Christmas dinner.” He sounded entirely too pleased with himself.
“That’s very nice, but—”
“Hell, it’s not me being nice. It’s self-preservation. If my mom finds out you’re all alone in that guesthouse because I didn’t have the manners to invite you, she’ll have my ass.”
Aria wanted to protest, but she figured it was probably true.
“Your mother’s quite a woman,” she said.
He nodded seriously. “Yes. She is.”
If he’d asked about hers, it would have plunged the conversation into an abyss of avoidance and awkwardness that would have killed the friendly mood. But he didn’t. Instead, he told her a story about Sandra.
“My mother grew up on the ranch,” he said.
“But she’s not a Delaney by birth, is she?”
“No. She’s not. What happened is, her dad was a ranch hand—got a job working for my grandfather when my mother was only about five, six years old. Her mom had taken off—God knows where—and her dad had to bring her along when he came to work. Now, my grandmother was a sucker for kids, especially little girls, since she didn’t have any of her own. So she kept an eye on my mom during the day, taught her how to bake pies and tend a garden, that kind of thing. Then, as my mom got older, she started to notice my dad.”
Aria wiped some salsa from her mouth with a paper napkin. “What did your grandparents think of that?”
He let out a low, short laugh. “Not much one way or the other, since my father was a lot older, and he thought she was just some annoying little kid who followed him around everywhere.”
“I guess he didn’t stay annoyed for long,” Aria remarked.
“Well, that’s the thing about my mother. When she sets her mind to something, she by God makes it happen. Every time.” He unwrapped another taco. “She says I’m the most like her, out of all her kids.”
Was that a warning? A challenge? She shot him a glance before reaching into the bag for another taco.
She’d thought he would make a move on her the last time she saw him, when they were together in the barn. He hadn’t. She thought the same thing now: surely he would make some kind of play to get her back to the guesthouse—or back onto the table in the barn.
Part of her really wanted that.
But again, he defied her expectations. When they were done with their tacos, he crumpled up the bag, threw it into a trash can, and walk
ed her back to her car, which was parked on a side street up from the toy shop where they’d run into each other.
“I guess I’ll see you back at the ranch,” he said. His tone was annoyingly casual, as though there were nothing going on here except two acquaintances bumping into one another for a chat about the weather.
“Um … okay. I guess so.”
The thing was, she hadn’t wanted this to be a date, and she hadn’t wanted him to kiss her. But now that she’d gotten her wish on both counts, she felt acutely disappointed.
She got into her car and started the ignition, thinking simultaneously about the excellent tacos and about sex.
Those two things didn’t usually go together in her mind, but for Liam, she could make an exception.
Liam drove back to the ranch wondering if he’d played it wrong. Should he have kissed her? Should he have made some kind of move?
He’d wanted to—so much that he’d barely been able to think about anything else. But she was so skittish that he figured he had to proceed carefully, bringing her so gently into a relationship that she wouldn’t even know she was in one until she was already there.
If he’d moved too quickly with her at the start—jumping right to sex, and thus putting himself in the casual hookup category—he couldn’t make the same mistake again.
But, shit, it had been hard to hold back, hard to be friendly and chatty, keeping his distance like the two of them were just old friends.
He couldn’t fuck this one up. He had to play it smart.
And wanting to be smart made him think about his mother and the story he’d told Aria. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to talk to Sandra about this thing he had going on.
If Sandra always got what she wanted—and she did—then maybe she could teach her son a bit about how she did it.
Chapter Twenty-One
If Liam had to make a list of things his mother enjoyed, listening to other people’s complaints about their love lives probably would have ranked somewhere near the bottom, between foreign documentaries and toenail fungus.
That was why she was giving him this particular look, the one that said she was barely putting up with him but was doing it, nonetheless, out of a sense of motherly duty.
“What the hell do I know about dating?” she grumbled as she stood in her bedroom folding a basket of laundry that was fresh from the dryer. “I’ve only ever dated one man in my life, and even that wasn’t what you’d call romantic. My God, the man didn’t even know how to propose. ‘Guess we might as well get married,’ that’s what he said. Hmph. I’m not exactly the damned voice of experience.”
Liam was standing with his hands in his jeans pockets, feeling sheepish. As much as he hated doing laundry, he figured he’d feel less awkward if he had something to do with his hands, so he grabbed a few random shirts and socks off the top of the basket and started folding them.
“Not like that.” Sandra slapped at his hand as he made a mess of folding a T-shirt. “Like this.” She demonstrated, producing a shirt folded so neatly it could have been on a shelf at Macy’s.
He folded another shirt and held it up for his mother’s approval.
“Better.” She nodded. “Now, if you’re going to be standing there, I guess you’d better get on with it and tell me whatever the hell’s on your mind.”
He picked a pair of socks out of the basket and rolled them into a tidy bundle. For a moment, he didn’t say anything.
“I want to get to know Aria better.” He’d considered a few strategies for broaching the subject, and had decided on the direct approach.
“Well, what’s stopping you, boy? Don’t tell me you want somebody to Cyrano the thing for you, hiding in the damned bushes and feeding you lines of poetry?” She chuckled at her own humor.
“No.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Well … she is. I mean, she’s not a problem. That’s not how I meant to say it. It’s just … she’s kind of private. We’ll be having a conversation, and I’ll ask some innocent question, and she just shuts down.”
She let out one of her Sandra grunts. “I saw some of that when she was over for dinner. She’s got some secrets, that one. Not sure they’re any of your business, either.”
“They might not be.” He folded a pair of his dad’s underwear, trying not to think too much about that as he was doing it. “But I don’t want to cross-examine her. I just want to get her to go out with me.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve tried asking.”
“She’d say no.” She was about to ask him how he knew that, but he cut her off. “I just know, all right?”
She grumbled a little and snapped a shirt in the air to broadcast her disagreement. “Only a damned fool would sit around wondering why a woman won’t go out with him when he’s never asked her on a date. But if you’re so sure you’re a psychic, well …”
He ignored the fact that she’d just called him a damned fool. He’d actually been one more than a few times when she hadn’t noticed, so it all evened out.
“The thing is, if she knows I’m trying to get something started with her, she’s going to shut me down. So I have to kind of … you know … get in there sideways.”
“You want to date the woman without her knowing that’s what you’re doing,” Sandra summarized.
“Well … pretty much.”
“What the hell are you asking me for?” she asked irritably. “Do I look like a damned relationship counselor?”
“No, but you get what you want about ninety percent of the time, so I figure you must know something I don’t.”
She shot him a look that was part annoyance, part amusement. “Well, boy, I know a hell of a lot that you don’t. So at least you’re right about that.”
They folded in silence for a few minutes while she thought about his question.
With a lacy bra in her hands—Liam tried not to think about whether it was hers or Breanna’s—Sandra glanced at him. “She doesn’t seem to get out of that guesthouse much.”
“I guess.”
“Woman’s been here for weeks—the middle of all this natural beauty—and she just works most of the time.” She shook her head and tsked. “Seems to me she could benefit from a tour from somebody who knows what’s what around here.”
The space between his eyebrows furrowed as he considered that. “If I offer to show her around, that’s pretty transparent. I mean, I—”
“That’s why you’re not going to do it, boy. Gen is. It’s all part of the service, with the whole artist thing.”
“She is?”
“That’s right.” Sandra nodded decisively. “Then, when the two of ‘em are already out there, looking at an elephant seal or some such, Gen’s going to have an emergency at the gallery. Luckily, you’ll be available to take over and save the damned day.”
“Huh.” Liam was impressed by his mother’s ability to devise a scheme on the fly. “That’s really sneaky.”
Sandra grunted. “How the hell do you think I got your father to marry me? If I’d left it to him, he’d still be single and you kids wouldn’t exist. Though sometimes that scenario sounds pretty relaxing, to tell the truth.”
“I’ll talk to Gen,” he said.
“No, you’d better let me do it,” Sandra said.
“Why?”
“Because she can say no to you. But the girl’s smart enough not to cross her mother-in-law.” She considered what she’d just said, then nodded crisply.
All in all, Liam considered himself fortunate that Sandra was on his side.
When Gen called Aria to offer her a tour of the area—everything from Hearst Castle to the elephant seal habitat to the cookie bakery in Cayucos—she knew something was up. Why a tour? And why now, when Aria had already been here for weeks?
She knew there was a scheme of some kind at work, but she misread what it was. She thought it was Gen feeling sorry for her because she rarely got out of the guesthouse and the barn. She though
t it was an attempt to force her into getting out and socializing—something she was more or less open to.
Her error became clear when Liam invited himself along on the outing at the last minute—and Gen suddenly had an “emergency” that caused her to abandon the whole thing barely one hour into it.
If she’d had any doubt that the situation had been orchestrated, it was banished when she realized Liam had insisted on bringing his own vehicle.
Of course he would, wouldn’t he? Otherwise, he and Aria would have been stranded down in Cayucos at the fish and chips place by the pier, which was one of the first places they’d stopped.
It was around one in the afternoon, and Gen had just finished her Caesar salad when she made a big production of feeling some Braxton Hicks contractions, saying she needed to visit her obstetrician to get checked out.
Aria knew it was a scheme rather than the real thing because Liam just let her go. If Gen had really been concerned about her pregnancy, Liam would have called off the outing and taken her to the doctor himself.
“Oh, jeez. I’m so sorry. God. If I’d had any idea this was going to happen …” Gen said as she gathered her purse and prepared to dash off like a rabbit fleeing a coyote.
“Uh huh,” Aria responded, her eyes narrowed.
“You’re mad,” Gen said. “I don’t blame you. Really. But I don’t want to take any chances.” Gen was cradling her belly with one arm.
“Sure,” Aria said, a french fry in her hand.
When Gen was gone, Aria glared at Liam. “Well, that was convenient.”
“What was?”
“Her having to leave, all suddenly like that. With you here. Leaving me alone with you. When you just happened to have your truck handy to drive us home.”
Liam raised his eyebrows. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They finished their fish and chips and had another round of beer, then they walked out on the pier with the ocean wind tousling their hair and prompting them to pull their jackets tight around themselves.
“You’re telling me you didn’t arrange this?” she said as they headed back up the pier toward town.
“You think I’d do something like that?” He put his hand to his heart, wounded.
