The Last Single Maverick

by Christine Rimmer

  “I’m waiting,” she said without looking at him. “This had better be good.”

  She didn’t sound happy, but at least she’d stopped crying.

  He set the toast on the table and reclaimed his chair.

  She did look at him then. One eyebrow inched toward her hairline. “Well?”

  He decided to lay it right out there. “Marry me. We’ll buy the Hitching Post. You can teach me how to run it. We’ll get a big house with a wide front porch, just like you always dreamed about, on a nice piece of land where we can have a large floppy-eared dog and a couple of horses. And then we’ll get to work having a whole bunch of loud, rowdy kids.”

  She set down her coffee cup and looked at him sideways. “You just want to have sex with me again.”

  As if he would deny that. “Well, yeah. The sex is great. It’s all great with us. And come on, think about it. You want to get married and have kids. And I want you. Here. In Thunder Canyon. With me. And when Ma started in about hearing wedding bells, it all fell into place for me. Why the hell shouldn’t we both get what we want? Why should you go? You don’t really want to go, do you?”

  She pressed her lips together and stared out the window again.

  He didn’t let her off the hook. “Look at me, Joss.”

  Slowly she turned her head and met his eyes. She wore a slightly stunned expression. “What?” Her voice was more than a little bit husky.

  He rose from his chair. Just enough to capture her beautiful mouth. He kissed her. Hard. “Marry me.”

  She stared at him for about half a century, dark eyes huge and anxious in her amazing face. Finally, she sighed. “Your mother. I think she really is thrilled at the idea that we’re getting married.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “We just met. Shouldn’t she be warning us to take it slow?”

  “Joss, she sees what you do for me. She’s relieved that I’m back among the living again after months of dragging around like a ghost of myself. She thinks we’re good together. Why shouldn’t she be happy at the thought that we’re making it legal?”

  Slowly, she shook her head. “She’s just so different from my mom, that’s all. If we, um, do this, my mom is going to hit the ceiling. She’s going to go right through the roof and it is not going to be pretty. You can take my word on that.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble. We’ll deal with your mom together when the time comes.”

  “But really, our getting married, it seems crazy. Insane. I mean, yeah, you’re right about things being good with us. You…do it for me. You’re the absolute best. On so many levels.”

  He felt triumph rising. “And you do it for me.”

  “But get real. It’s been a week. It’s not like it’s undying love or anything.”

  “So what?”

  She kicked him under the table—not hard, but right on the shin.

  He winced. “Ow, that hurt.”

  She had her soft mouth all pinched up. “I don’t like you dissing love, Jace. I happen to believe that love matters.”

  He reached down and rubbed where she’d kicked him. “Okay, it matters. I guess. If you say so. But I mean, well, what is it anyway?”

  She glared. “What do you mean, what is it?”

  “Well, I mean, you loved Kenny Donovan, right?”

  She sat completely still for a moment, her face somber, her eyes unhappy. And then, with a heavy sigh, she slumped back in her chair. “I thought I loved Kenny.” She shook her head. “Now, though…now, I only wonder how I could have thought that. I look back and the only good thing I can say about him is that he seemed like a nice guy. At first.”

  “Exactly. That’s it. I thought I loved Tricia Lavelle. And what did I love really? Who did I love? I swear I didn’t even know her. I saw her at a party, standing by a grand piano, wearing a short, sparkly red dress, her long blond hair shining in the light from the chandelier over her head. She looked really good in that dress. And what did I do? Out of nowhere, on the spot, I decided it must be love.” He made a low, disbelieving sound. “Me, Jason Traub, in love. I mean, come on. Where did that come from? Until I got a look at Tricia in that red dress, all I ever wanted from any woman was a good time and for her to go away when I was ready to go to sleep.”

  Joss’s expression had relaxed a little. She reminded him, “Your mother said you’ve been looking for the right woman.”

  He grunted. “My mother said I’ve been looking for you.”

  “She meant the right woman.”

  “Okay. Fine. Yeah. I guess I have been looking lately—for the right woman, for the things that really matter in life, the things I never realized how much I wanted. But love? I meant what I said a minute ago. I honestly don’t have a clue about love and I don’t even want to go there. I’m just a guy doing the best I can to make my life a good one, to…get involved.”

  She pulled a face. “Get involved?”

  “Yeah. With my…community, you know? With this community. Like Aunt Melba said the first day I met her, ‘Get involved, young man. Stop sitting on the sidelines of life.’ I admit, I just wanted to get away from her when she said that, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a hundred percent right.”

  Joss almost smiled. “So.” Her velvety gaze sparked with challenge. “The mystery woman’s name was Tricia Lavelle, huh?”

  He picked up a piece of toast, and then realized he didn’t want it after all. He set it down. “That’s right.”

  She put her hand on his arm. It felt good there. He wanted to scoop her up and carry her back to the bedroom. He might keep her there all day and into the night….

  But first he had to convince her that they could be a great team in a lifetime kind of way.

  “I want to hear about her, about Tricia Lavelle,” Joss said, as he’d pretty much expected she would. “I want the story, all of it.”

  He groaned. “Now?”

  She repeated, “All of it.”

  He pushed his plate away. “It’s pretty damn embarrassing. I acted like an idiot.”

  “Hey, you’re talking to the girl who was going to marry Kenny Donovan, remember?”

  He held her gaze. “You’re no idiot. You always knew what you wanted. And that cheating creep just had you convinced he was it. And from what you’ve said, he was it. At first.”

  “Thank you.” She said it softly. And then she added, “Now, about the thing with you and Tricia…”

  Resigned, he explained, “All that happened with her is that I saw a good-looking girl in a red dress and I had a completely out-there reaction. Instead of admitting I wanted what I always wanted—an overnight, totally unmeaningful relationship—I decided that I was in love. Which is a complete pile of crap. I’m just not that deep. I have no idea what love really is and I’m better off not kidding myself that I do. I see now that I need to just go for what works and what’s right and leave it at that.”

  She squeezed his arm. “Tell me about her.”

  “Ack. You’re kidding. You want more?”

  “I do, yes. More.”

  He tried to bargain. “Tell me first that this isn’t going to ruin my chance of getting you to marry me.”

  She almost smiled, but not quite. “Talk.”

  So he did. “I met her through her dad, Jack Lavelle. Jack’s rich as Rupert Murdoch, a legendary oilman. He was a real-life wildcatter back in the day. In fact, he was once in partnership with my dad.”

  “You don’t mean Pete, do you?”

  “No, I mean my birth father.”

  “And Tricia. Is she in the oil business as well?”

  “Are you kidding? She might break a nail. Tricia dabbled in modeling. A couple of years ago, she even made the cover of Sports Illustrated. But she’s never had to work. She has trust funds for her trust fund. One look at her in that slinky sequined party dress, standing by the grand piano in the front sitting room of her daddy’s Highland Park mansion, all that blond hair falling in golden waves to her perfect ass, singing ‘The Yellow
Rose of Texas’ for her adoring daddy and all his rich guests, and I was gone, gone, gone.”

  Joss brushed his shoulder with a comforting hand. “It’s not so surprising that you fell for her. She sounds pretty fabulous.”

  “She did look fabulous, I’m not denying that. But what’s the old saying about all that glitters?”

  Joss smiled at him, a rueful sort of smile. “Go on.”

  “You sure you haven’t heard enough?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Fine. All right. We spent the holidays in a series of luxury hotels all over the world. For the first time, I thought I understood what it was to be head-over-heels for a woman. I bought an engagement ring with a rock the size of the Alamo. And on New Year’s Eve, I went down on my knees and proposed….” He left it there. Maybe she would let it go.

  He wished.

  “And?” she prompted softly.

  “Tricia got cagey.”

  “Cagey, how?”

  “She said she loved me madly, of course. But she was only twenty-four. Much too young to settle down, she said. Couldn’t we just go on having fun? And then, in a few years, when she got old—that’s exactly how she put it. ‘When I get old.’ Then we could talk seriously about getting married. She said I could move to Dallas and get work with her daddy. Because Tricia was never, ever leaving her daddy—well, except temporarily, for a prime modeling gig in New York or to lie around slathered with suntan oil, wearing a bikini the size of three postage stamps aboard a friend’s yacht on the French Riviera.”

  Joss said, “And the last thing you ever wanted was to go to work for anybody’s daddy….”

  He chuckled then, even though he knew the sound didn’t have any humor in it. “You got that right. Plus, as I said, Lavelle is in the oil business. And by then I was already thinking I might want out of the oil business. I was thinking that I wanted…” He frowned as he let the sentence wander off.

  “You wanted what?”

  “Truth is, at that point, I didn’t really know what I wanted. But it wasn’t to spend another five or ten years jetting around the world with some spoiled little rich girl. Suddenly I was seeing my supposedly ‘perfect woman’ in a whole new—and not very attractive—light. I started wondering what my problem was, wondering what I thought I was up to, generally speaking.

  “All the things I’d been sure of in my life—my place in the family business, my no-strings-attached lifestyle—I was all at once itching to change. I’d thought Tricia was the solution to the vague unanswered questions that had started nagging in my brain. But within a few days of her blowing off my marriage proposal, I saw that it was never going to work with her. I realized I didn’t even like Tricia much.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I felt so stupid. Here I’d been telling her I would love her forever and now all I wanted was to get free of her. So I tried to be really smooth and subtle. I told her that maybe we ought to cool it for a while.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She said that was fine with her. She said that ever since I’d started in on her to marry me, I hadn’t been any fun anyway.”

  “Wow, that was kind of cold.”

  He grunted. “That was pure Tricia. She’s a girl who just wants to have fun—and to live near her daddy.”

  “So that was the end of it?”

  “Yeah. It really bummed me out, you know? But not for the reason my whole family assumes. Not because she ripped out my heart and ate it for breakfast like everyone seems to think. By the end, I didn’t give a damn about Tricia—in fact, I’d realized I probably never had given a damn about her. I was just glad it was over without any big scenes. But all the questions in my head, about the way my life was going, about my work for Traub Oil, about all of it, those questions were nagging me worse than ever. I realized I had no idea what I wanted. I only knew I didn’t want the life that I had. I went into a really low period after that.”

  “A depression, you mean?”

  “I don’t know if I would call it that. It was just, well, I didn’t care about much. I blew off Jackson and Laila’s wedding, I was so down. I regret that. A lot. I decided to quit the family business. I had no interest in the things that I used to enjoy.”

  “Like…casual relationships with women?”

  “That’s right. Can you believe it? I didn’t even care about sex. And before the thing with Tricia, I always cared about sex.”

  She did smile then. “You seemed to enjoy yourself last night.”

  “Yeah.” He drank in the sight of her, those brandy-brown eyes, the lush, delicious curves of her mouth, the thick, cinnamon-kissed waves of her dark hair. “My interest in sex has returned at last. It’s a miracle. It started about a week ago. The day I met you.”

  Her expression turned knowing. “Oh, come on. You told me that day that you only wanted to be friends.”

  “No, I said I would love to be friends and I accepted the fact that you weren’t going to have sex with me. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested. I was. From the first moment I saw you. And that was a great moment for me. It’s been six months since it ended with Tricia. And until eight days ago, I had nothin’ going on with any woman. No dates, no interest. Not even a spark.”

  She tried to be cynical. “You’re working me, right? To get me to say yes to this wild plan of yours. Next you’ll be saying you fell in love with me at first sight.”

  “No way.” He put up a hand, palm out, like a witness swearing an oath. “Uh-uh. I told you already. When it comes to love, I’ve accepted the hard fact that I have no idea what it is or when I’m in it—that is, if I’ve ever been in it, which I seriously doubt. When it comes to love, I’d rather just not go there. The whole subject makes me nervous, you know what I mean? I don’t understand it and I prefer just to leave it alone.”

  She studied his face for several long seconds. “So really, what you’re proposing is a practical arrangement.”

  He knew he was getting to her. He tried not to get too cocky, but he couldn’t hide his excitement. “That’s right. That’s it. You and me—together, a team. Getting everything we want out of life. We…pool our experience and resources. We start a family.”

  “Wait. You want a family, too?”

  “Haven’t I just been saying that?”

  “No. You said I wanted a family and you were willing to help me have one.”

  “Then let me correct that. I do want a family. A family with you. Remember when you first told me about your dream for your life?”

  “I do, yeah. Sheesh, that was embarrassing.”

  He didn’t follow. “Embarrassing, how?”

  “Well, I mean, that even after Kenny betrayed me, I actually considered taking him back….”

  “But I told you I could see what you were getting at—that you had a dream, and it was hard to give that dream up.”

  Her expression softened. “Yeah, you did understand. I really appreciated that.”

  “And I’m trying to tell you now that when you described your dream to me, I started thinking how great that would be—to be a dad, to be a husband to someone like you, to have a big house with a bunch of kids. I realized something about myself. I was tired of being my family’s last single maverick. I knew I could go for just the life you were describing. Seriously, I could. Who knew? But it’s true. I think part of what’s been eating at me the past several months is I’ve been wanting what a good-time guy like me never wants and I just wasn’t ready to admit that yet. But I’m ready now. I promise you, Joss. I want a great big family. I want that a lot.”

  Her eyes had that special light in them again. “Oh, this is crazy.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the sanest thing two people can do. To get married because they want the same things out of life, because they’re good together in all the right ways.”

  She picked up her coffee cup, looked into it and then set it back down. “So, if we did this, when would we do it?”

 
“You mean, when would we get married?”

  “Yeah.” She seemed slightly breathless. “When—I mean, I kind of would like a real wedding, you know? I would like to wear my dress.”

  He sent a wary glance at the pile of white over on the sofa. “That dress?”

  She bit her lip. “Tacky, huh? To marry you in the dress I chose to marry Kenny in?”

  It did kind of bug him. But come on, what did it matter? It was just a dress. And if she liked it so much, why not? “You want to wear that dress, you wear it.”

  “Oh, Jace. Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.” He stuffed his own discomfort at the thought of her coming down the aisle toward him wearing that dress. “You wear your dress. And we get married right here, at the resort. I’m thinking on the last Saturday of the month.”

  “This month?”

  “Yeah. Okay, I know it’s quick, but I say we go for it. We put a nice party together for our families and friends in the time we have till then, and after that, we get on with our lives.”

  Out of nowhere, she jumped up and headed for the bedroom.

  He watched her go, too surprised at the suddenness of her leaving to ask her what was up. But then, a few seconds later, she returned with her cell phone. She tapped it a few times. “That’s the twenty-eighth? Saturday, the twenty-eighth…”

  So, okay. A calendar. She’d brought up the calendar on her phone. She slanted him a sharp look and he realized she wanted confirmation. “Er, sounds about right.”

  She narrowed her eyes at the screen. “That’s twenty days. Tight.”

  “Joss.”

  “Um?”

  “Is that a yes?”

  She glanced up. “Did I mention this is insane?”

  “Repeatedly.” He pushed back his chair, captured her wrist, took the phone from her hand and set it on the table. “Is that a yes?”

  She looked up at him, a little frown etching itself between her smooth brows. “I mean, this would be for real? This would be a real marriage and we would both give it everything. We would commit ourselves to making it work.”