Surrender To Sultry

by Macy Beckett

  “C’mon, hon. Anyone can see your daddy needs you,” Colt said. “Plus, it’s a darn shame to leave so soon after the Lord called you home.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Part of him wanted Leah to know he didn’t buy into her bullshit. The other part had stopped caring why she came back to town, so long as she stayed here.

  She dipped her spoon into a pile of Cool Whip and then sucked it clean. “I have a life in Minnesota.”

  “Nothin’ you can’t rebuild here,” the preacher said. “Unless you plan on getting back together with Ari.”

  Ari? Colt’s fist tightened around his glass of iced tea. Who the hell was that?

  “My ex-fiancé,” Leah explained with a dismissive wave. “And no, I’m not.”

  “You were engaged?” Colt felt the blood in his face drain into his suddenly throbbing heart. He didn’t want to believe Leah had loved another man enough to say yes to spending a lifetime with him. Colt had messed around with a lot of women over the years, but he’d never cared for any of them. He’d never wanted to put a gold band on anyone’s finger. He glanced at Leah’s hand, sick at the thought of her wearing some other guy’s ring.

  “Yep,” her daddy said. “To a doctor.”

  Holy flaming sack of shit. A doctor? Like he could compete with that. The ring was probably freakin’ enormous—a real sparkler. The kind he couldn’t afford. Colt didn’t want to know any more, but he couldn’t stop torturing himself. “Why’d you break it off?”

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  The doctor had dumped her? Did that mean she still loved him? And why on earth would anyone let Leah go? She was damn near perfect. “What happened?”

  She got quiet and darted a glance at her daddy. Then she scooped a big spoonful of strawberries and ate them real slow. When she’d finished chewing, she swallowed, cleared her throat, and announced, “I can’t have children.”

  Colt wasn’t sure what to say to that. Sorry seemed to fit, but he’d grown tired of hearing that word after his accident. Nobody liked being on the receiving end of pity.

  “I had some health problems when I was younger,” she went on, “and I needed a hysterectomy.” She shrugged one shoulder and jabbed a chunk of cake with her spoon. “At first, Ari was okay with it, but then he decided he wanted kids.”

  Colt wished he could punch the good doctor in the nuts. “There’s more than one way to start a family.” Leah would make a great mother. A blind man could see it. At any given moment, there were a dozen children in Sultry County that needed fostering. The same was true in Minnesota.

  “He’s entitled to have biological kids if that’s what he wants.” She set down her spoon and pushed her plate aside. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yeah, there is—when his DNA’s more important to him than his wife.” Colt snorted in disdain. “Good riddance. He probably would’ve made a crap husband…beggin’ your pardon, Pastor Mac.”

  “It’s all right, son,” the preacher said. “I’m inclined to agree.” He looked at his daughter. “I didn’t know the whole story till now.”

  “I’m allowed to keep some things private,” Leah told him. “Besides, I’ve only been home a couple of weeks. I haven’t had time to catch you up on everything.”

  “Well, this is one more reason for you to stay,” her father said. “What’s there to go back to?”

  “My life, that’s what,” she gritted out.

  Leah clenched her jaw and stared down her daddy. The old guy did the same, and the two of them had words without saying a thing. Clearly, they’d had this argument before. Colt didn’t understand what was so great about Minnesota or why Leah would want to return. Knowing her, she was just being stubborn. The worst thing he could do was push—then she’d really dig in her heels.

  “It’s all right,” Colt told her. “It’s a big decision. Sleep on it a while.”

  And while she was sleeping, he’d double his efforts to keep her in Sultry Springs. If there was any chance they could have a life together, he’d grab the opportunity with both hands and go down fighting to keep it. Anything it took—the end would justify the means. Maybe it was time to get sneaky again. Lucky for Colt, that came easier than breathing.

  Chapter 9

  Leah had barely stepped inside from dropping off Daddy at cardiac rehab when a familiar rumble sounded from the driveway and rattled the windowpane. She pushed aside the living room curtain and squinted against the morning sun at Colt, who’d just kicked his Harley to standing. Leah was impressed. He’d promised to roll in bright and early to help work on the lawn, but she hadn’t expected him to arrive before the paper. When he tugged off his helmet, his turquoise eyes found her at once. He nodded hello, and as it always did, her tummy greeted him with a wild flutter.

  God bless, it was getting worse—her body and mind were officially at war. With each passing day, she felt her resolve slipping, and if she wasn’t careful, her body would win the final battle in a brazen victory. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good idea to have him over with Daddy gone.

  Despite her worries, she couldn’t help snickering at the way Colt’s fingertips tenderly brushed the Harley’s seat as he walked away, like a lover who couldn’t bear to part from his better half. No mistress could compete with that hog. How many women had it outlasted? Leah didn’t even want to know.

  She slipped on her sneakers and met him on the front stoop. While she pulled her hair into a ponytail, Colt moseyed up, hands wedged in his back pockets, looking finer than any man had a right to be.

  His gaze traveled the length of her body for a few static beats, and after he’d had his fill, he said, “Honey, I could sop you up with a biscuit.”

  Leah waved him off. He’d said the same thing after church yesterday when she’d changed into sweats, and she didn’t look any better today in yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

  “I’m serious,” he insisted, leaning to the side to admire her butt, then shaking his head in appreciation. “Whoever invented those stretchy pants deserves free beer for life. They cling to all the right places.”

  Leah hid a smile and skipped down the front steps. “We’d better get started.” She didn’t want to encourage him. Besides, she’d never been able to take a compliment. “I’ve gotta pick up Daddy in a couple of hours.”

  “I see you’re still a slave driver,” he complained. “I’ll never forget all the chemistry facts you made me memorize in my granddaddy’s shed.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She doubted it. They’d pulled a couple all-nighters in that shed, but they hadn’t done a lick of schoolwork. Just a lot of licking. “What’s absolute zero?”

  “Zero Kelvin,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “The coldest it gets.” With a wink, he added, “Basically, the opposite of you in those ass-huggin’ drawers.”

  She paused on the front walk, feeling her eyes widen. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be.” He nudged her with his elbow. “That was an easy one. The answer’s right in the question.”

  “Okay, what does TNT stand for?”

  “Trinitrotoluene, but that doesn’t count either,” he said, heading toward the backyard shed. “I have to know that stuff for work.”

  “Well then, what’s the definition of a solid?”

  “Something with definite volume and shape.” A grin split his face. “Again, like you in those britches.”

  She shoved his shoulder playfully, but it didn’t budge him. “Time to admit you’re smarter than you think.”

  “Didn’t I say you were a good tutor?”

  She sniffed a laugh. “You must’ve absorbed it through osmosis, because we didn’t do a lot of talking.”

  He went quiet for a few strides, letting the crunch of half-dead grass beneath his boots replace their conversation. Finally, he said, “I wish we
had.”

  “Had what?” she asked.

  “Done more talking.” They reached the old metal shed, and Colt unlatched the door. “Maybe if I hadn’t rushed things, you wouldn’t have gotten in trouble and run off like you did.”

  Leah’s heart jumped. In trouble could mean a lot of things. Her first thought was that he’d found out about the pregnancy, and she couldn’t hide the fear in her voice. “What do you mean, gotten in trouble?”

  He froze, one hand curled around the aluminum door, then studied her for a long moment. The sheriff in him had clearly noted the change in her inflection, and Leah cursed herself for panicking.

  “Your daddy found out we slept together, and you two had a fight.” His voice was slow and careful, thick with new doubt. “Or at least that’s what you’ve been telling people. Is there more to the story?”

  She swallowed hard and shook her head.

  “One of these days, you’re gonna have to quit lying to me, Angel.” An emotion flashed in his eyes, something that looked a lot like hurt. “I’m on your team.”

  Leah felt heavy inside. She half expected to sink a few inches into the grass.

  “Was it me?” Colt asked, staring into the darkness of the shed. “I always figured there was something else going on, but maybe it was me all along.”

  “No.” She couldn’t let him think that. It wasn’t fair to him—none of this was fair to him. She rested one hand lightly on his back. “It was more complicated than that. I just don’t like talking about it.”

  He glanced at her. “Promise?”

  “Pinky swear.” She extended her little finger.

  The ghost of a grin tipped his mouth as he regarded her pinky. He hooked his finger around hers and gave a shake, then led the way inside the shed.

  He didn’t bring up the subject again, but she could tell he wanted to. They busied themselves in an effort to diffuse the uneasy silence—Colt stacking bags of Weed & Feed inside the seed spreader while she gathered trowels and rakes. It stayed that way for the next several minutes, until they’d hauled the supplies to the front yard.

  “So,” Colt began while tearing open a bag of feed, “how long have you been a home health aide?”

  After the personal topics they’d unearthed during the last couple weeks, his attempt at small talk felt unnatural, but Leah thought about it and replied, “About six years.”

  “And you always lived with your patients?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Where’d you stay before then?” Casually, he shook the bag of granules into the seed spreader, then asked what he’d probably been wondering all along. “Who took you in when you left home?”

  She should’ve known this wasn’t innocent small talk.

  “And why Minnesota?” he added.

  Growing up in Sultry Springs had taught Leah a thing or two about how inquiring minds worked, so she’d already prepared an answer. “I wanted to get as far away from here as the Greyhound would take me, which turned out to be Minnesota.” She knelt at the main flower bed and used her trowel to uproot a cotton-tipped weed the size of a small cornstalk. “I spent a couple nights at the women’s shelter, then found a church. That’s where I met Benny. He took me in and offered me a clerical job—scheduling appointments, answering phones, things like that.”

  “Benito Alvarez?” Colt asked. “The guy whose Escalade you’re driving?”

  “The guy whose Escalade I’m parking, yes.”

  She’d mostly told the truth…omitting the seven months beforehand when she’d lived with the Ackermans. Instead of crashing at a women’s shelter, she’d met Jim at the bus station, and he’d driven her to his house in the ’burbs. She’d met Benny after the birth, when she was at the lowest point of her life. That’s when she’d sought comfort at church. She’d never had the courage to attend services while pregnant—she was afraid of what the congregation might think.

  “He was real good to me,” she said, getting a little misty. “Gave me a job and a home and never asked for anything in return. He’s the one who encouraged me to try my hand at nursing.” She sat back on her heels, smiling at the bittersweet memory. “We were driving to work one morning, and I asked him to stop for a squirrel on the side of the road. She’d been hit by a car, but not hard enough to kill her. I scooped her up in a box and we drove her to the vet.”

  “Did they save it?”

  “No,” Leah said. “But they put her down so she didn’t suffer. I sang to her when she passed. Benny said anyone with a soul that gentle was a born healer.”

  “I’m glad you found Alvarez,” Colt said, folding the empty bag and handing it to her. “Sounds like he was a second daddy to you.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She took the bag and tossed it onto the front stoop. “He’s Ari’s father. That’s how the two of us got together.”

  Colt made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat. “You mean Dr. Pecker?”

  A burst of laughter shook Leah’s chest. She couldn’t keep a straight face when she told Colt, “That’s not nice.”

  “Well, no shit. He’s a total wanker.”

  “I promise, he’s not.”

  Colt’s only reply was a disbelieving grunt.

  “Really.” Ari had his flaws, but they’d been friends once. She didn’t want Colt thinking ill of him, though she didn’t know why she cared. “He was in residency while I was getting my license, and he took the time to help me study, no matter how—”

  A whir of plastic interrupted her as Colt began pushing the seed spreader in a meticulous line parallel to the sidewalk. The tight set of his jaw told her he didn’t care to hear any more. Refusing to meet her gaze, he marched onward until he’d coated several rows of lawn. Just when Leah returned her trowel to the dirt, the whirring stopped and Colt heaved a sigh.

  “Do you still love him?” he asked.

  She pushed the blade into the ground and levered back. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think about him?”

  She lifted one shoulder. “It’s kind of hard not to when you bring him up like this.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Leah added another weed to her pile and released a quiet sigh. Yes, she understood. Colt wanted to know if it was Ari’s face she saw behind her eyelids when she rested her head at night, or if the memory of his touch gave her chills from a thousand miles away.

  Not even close. She didn’t think of Ari that way, never really had. Only one man held that kind of power over her, and it was the one currently scowling from behind a dusty seed spreader.

  “No,” she admitted. “He doesn’t cross my mind all that much.”

  With a satisfied nod, Colt resumed his work. If she’d lied and said she still loved Ari, it might keep Colt at arm’s length, but she couldn’t do that to him. She’d wronged him so much already.

  She watched him a while and noticed a slight unevenness to his gait, not quite a limp but it would be in a few hours. The muscles along his back bunched beneath the snug-fitting fabric of his T-shirt, and when he reached the end of each row, he’d stop and press both thumbs along his lower spine. As much as she wanted to mind her own business, she hated seeing him in pain.

  “When did you quit physical therapy?” she asked over her shoulder while attacking another weed.

  He continued working and raised his voice over the clamor. “I dunno. About as soon as I started walking again, I guess. Didn’t see the point in going back. All the lady did was watch me stretch and suffer, maybe holler at me every now and then. I figured I could do that by myself at home.”

  That didn’t surprise her. Men like Colt—old-school tough guys who liked being in charge—generally disliked a stranger contorting their bodies and bossing them around. Leah’d never had a patient quit on her, but only because they’d lived under the same
roof and there was no escape.

  “Well, you need to go back,” she said. “I can tell you quit too soon.”

  He dismissed her with a harrumph and tried lengthening his stride to conceal the discomfort, but his slowing pace proved she was right.

  “Come here,” she said, standing and brushing dried grass from her knees. When he glanced at her with a question in his gaze, she motioned for him to join her. “Show me where it hurts.”

  He smiled through the pain. “We gonna play doctor?”

  “We’re going to play nurse. That means you show me yours, but I won’t show you mine.”

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  She grabbed one hip and shifted her weight to it. “You coming or not?”

  “You always this bossy, Nurse McMahon?”

  Tired of his obstinacy, she marched over and joined him, stepping close enough to take in the scents of crisp fall air and shaving cream that clung to his skin. He smelled completely male, not a hint of styling products or perfumed dryer sheets. Leah tried to ignore the thrill that charged her body at the thought of touching his. She could be a professional about this.

  “Go ahead and take off your shirt,” she said as sternly as she could.

  His lips twitched. “Right here in the front yard? Don’t you wanna go inside?”

  Inside with a half-naked Colt? Bad idea. “Right here. We’ll make it quick.”

  “Kinda chilly this morning,” he complained, never mind the sheen of perspiration along his tawny forehead. “Can’t we do this in the den?”

  “Nice try.” She lifted his shirt hem to take a peek at his lower back, noting a raised scar marring his flesh. She bent at the waist for a closer look. “Surgery?”

  “Uh-huh, last year.” In one fluid motion, he grabbed a handful of cotton and tugged the shirt over his head, then turned to face her. “For nerve damage.”

  “Nerve da—” she began before the sight of him knocked the wind from her lungs, leaving her in an open-mouthed, testosterone-induced walking coma. She might’ve even drooled a little bit—it was hard to tell.