His Forever Valentine

by Marie Ferrarella

  When avoiding him was impossible, she acted politely, treating him as if he was a stranger. Anyone seeing them could tell that something was definitely wrong between them.

  But when Ray, who had worked pretty steadily as one of the background people in the movie, asked him what was going on between the two of them, Rafe all but bit his head off. “There’s nothing wrong. You’re imagining things.”

  “I don’t have that good an imagination,” Ray pointed out.

  But Rafe had already walked away.

  * * *

  THE DAYS WENT by, one by one like leaves falling from a tree in autumn. With each day that passed, Rafe knew he was that much closer to never seeing Val again. He spent the next week waging an internal war as to whether or not to come see her one last time, to ask her what happened, to wish her well or just to look at her before she permanently slipped out of his life, a mirage he obviously couldn’t possess.

  The internal war had its ups and downs. The upshot was that it left him utterly inert—and not just a little surly.

  He took on projects—nothing was too small or too large—and worked from one end of the day to the other. It didn’t help. His disposition, the rest of his family noted, continued to grow surlier.

  As the last day of filming approached, his family was having a harder and harder time dealing with this new version of Rafe that constantly muttered under his breath as he went storming his way through daily life.

  Finally, urged on by his father, Mike confronted Rafe on the range as the latter worked to fix another length of fence that had gone down. Mike drove up, parked his Jeep beside Rafe’s and got out. Rafe, he noted, didn’t even bother looking his way.

  “What’s going on with you?” Mike demanded without any preamble as he walked up to him. “You’ve been out of sync ever since the night of the Valentine party. What happened? She turn down your best moves?” Mike laughed, trying to kid Rafe out of his surly shell.

  And then he stopped, scrutinizing Rafe’s expression. “She didn’t turn you down, did she?” Rafe still made no answer, but he didn’t have to. Mike could see the answer in his brother’s eyes. “So, what’s the problem? You find that you’re falling for her and you’re afraid if she finds out, she’ll clip your wings?”

  There was no way Rafe was about to go into any details. The whole experience was far too painful for him to share, so he went with what had originally troubled him before everything had blown up in his face. “The problem is that she’s going to be leaving.”

  “So? Ask her to stay,” Mike suggested.

  Rafe looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “For what?” he demanded.

  “For you, I thought.”

  “Right,” Rafe sneered, swinging his hammer against the post and driving a nail in so hard, the barbed wire shimmied. “She’s part of a glamorous business, her mother’s an actress—”

  “Ex-actress,” Mike interjected mildly.

  Rafe gave him a dirty look, as if that point was too minor to even bother correcting. “Okay. But her parents are successful. What have I got to offer her?”

  Mike leaned against the post that had been reinforced earlier, folding his arms across his chest. “Well, you’re not exactly a pauper, you know. You’ve got a share in a pretty successful ranch.”

  Which amounted to a nice sum, Rafe granted, but “nice” wasn’t what was needed here—even if that was the only obstacle in the way. “I repeat, what have I got to offer her?”

  Mike watched at him for a long moment, as if assessing what he felt he saw in his brother’s expression, in his body language.

  “What about love? Unless, of course,” Mike allowed with a shrug, “you don’t love her.”

  Denial sprang to Rafe’s lips—but what was the point? Loving Val didn’t change anything, at least not for her. “Yeah, I do.” Even though he’d wanted to issue a denial, all that had come out of his mouth was an affirmative answer. Even his head was turning against him. Forget about his heart, Rafe thought disgruntled.

  “So go for it,” Mike urged. “Ask her to stay. What’s the worse that can happen? She’ll leave? Well, that’s what’s happening now and this way, at least you have a shot at keeping her here. Look, Rafe, you’ve got nothing to lose by asking her and everything—according to what I see—to lose if you don’t.”

  Dropping the hammer to the ground, Rafe ran the back of his arm against his forehead, wiping away his sweat. “Will you shut up and stop nagging me if I go?”

  “No,” Mike admitted truthfully, then added, “but it’s a start.”

  Muttering a few new choice things under his breath, Rafe picked up his shirt off the post where he’d hung it and pulled it back on. “Take over,” was all he said as he moved to climb into his Jeep.

  “I always do,” Mike called out after him, then added, “Good luck!”

  Rafe waved his hand over his head in acknowledgement but didn’t look back.

  He wasn’t going to ask her to stay—what was the point? Rafe thought—but he was going to ask her what happened, why when everything seemed to be going so well between them it had suddenly blown up. She owed him some sort of an explanation.

  She owed him at least that much.

  * * *

  THE SET WHERE some of the filming had taken place looked like a ghost town in miniature, or at least what he suspected one would look like once the lifeblood had been drained out of a town.

  Accustomed now for the past seven weeks to seeing people hustling about with special hand cameras focused on small sections of the set at a time, now there was no camera or any sort of action to focus on. In addition, true to Val’s promise, everything had been cleaned up. There was no trash, no debris lying around or floating on the wind.

  But along with the trash, the sounds of life were gone, as well. It only went to underscore the emptiness he was feeling. In his gut he knew that getting over Val would be rough, maybe even impossible, at least at first.

  Who was he kidding? It was going to take a long, long time.

  It hadn’t hit him just how hard it was going to hurt—and just how much he didn’t want her to go—until this very moment, as he stood looking around the empty set. Leaving his Jeep where it was, he broke into a run, heading to the site where her trailer had been parked, praying that it was still there, that she hadn’t already taken off.

  His heart was in his throat by the time he reached his destination.

  The trailer was still there.

  His adrenaline spiked. Rafe doubled his speed as he ran up the steps to the front door.

  “Val,” he called, pounding on the door. “Are you in there? Val, open up, I have to talk to you!”

  “Now?”

  The voice asking the question came from behind him. Swinging around, he saw Val standing there, looking at him in apparent confusion.

  “We’re packing up to leave by nightfall,” she told him coolly, proud of herself for holding it together. Wondering how long she could manage to continue doing that. “If you wanted to talk, you should have come earlier.”

  He came down the steps, fighting the urge just to pull her into his arms. To kiss her senseless and defy her to tell him that she wasn’t feeling something. But for now, he held himself in check, hoping to appeal to her reason. “I’m here now.”

  She deliberately avoided looking into his face as she began to push past him to get to the trailer. “I don’t have time to—”

  He caught her by the arm as she tried to pass him. “Make time.”

  It wasn’t an order, it was an entreaty.

  She raised her chin defiantly. “Why should I? You all but went into hiding for the past ten days.”

  He stared at her incredulously. Was she serious? Why was she turning this around, making it his fault? She was the one who’d started it. �
�You threw me out of your trailer, remember?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t even try to come back. If I had meant anything at all to you, you would have tried to work things out instead of accepting the situation and just walking away.”

  Damn, there really should be some kind of a self-help book when it came to understanding women. “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” he emphasized.

  She’d given him more credit than that. He had to know what she was doing, what she was hoping he would do in turn. She’d needed to have all her fears allayed and he’d just gone silent on her, accepting what she said at face value and going away—as if she didn’t mean anything to him.

  “And you weren’t even curious why?” she demanded now.

  All he’d known at the time was she wanted nothing to do with him—and it really, really hurt. “It was enough that you didn’t want me around.”

  She shook her head. This was pointless. She was better off just concentrating on healing and forgetting about nebulous happily-ever-after endings that never materialized. “Look, I’ve got to—”

  Rafe moved quickly, blocking her way to the trailer. Feeling like a man who was about to go down for the third time, he tried another approach. “Is there any chance that you might want to someday stay in a town like this? Not now,” he underscored so she wouldn’t feel as if he was rushing her, “but someday?”

  Hadn’t he been paying attention these past seven weeks? “In case you haven’t noticed, I have been staying in a town like this.”

  She’d only been here as part of her work. He wasn’t talking about that. “No, I mean for longer.”

  About to dismiss the topic, Val saw something in his eyes, something that spoke to her, saying things that he hadn’t put into actual words yet. She decided to let whatever was going on here play itself out. “How long is ‘longer’ and exactly why would I be staying?”

  He struggled for a moment, his protective side warring with the side that desperately wanted her to stay, or to at least come back. In the end, that side won out and he was honest with her.

  “Because I can’t make it knowing that when you leave, you won’t be back. I have to believe that you’d be coming home to me no matter how long it took.”

  Was he actually saying what she thought he was saying? “Rafe—”

  He held his hand up to stop her. “Let me finish,” he requested. “If I stop, I’ll never be able to say this. And I need to say it. Look, I get it. You need to be in the family business and this is a little hick town to you, but that night, after the party, I felt like there was something special going on between us. We weren’t just two people having really, really great sex. I felt a real connection with you, felt something strong taking hold and maybe that’s scary for you but I don’t think we should just throw it away because one of us is scared. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often. It’s like that comet thing—” He searched for a name.

  “Haley’s Comet?” Val supplied.

  “That’s the one. It doesn’t come through very often. Neither does what we have between us. If we don’t hitch a ride on it now, we might never hitch a ride at all.”

  Val blinked, trying to process what he was saying—and what he meant by it. “Are you proposing to me?”

  Momentarily stunned, he shrugged helplessly. “Kinda. Sort of.” Oh, hell, he might as well call a spade a spade. “Yes, yes I am,” he finally told her, laying himself bare. He watched her eyes as he asked, “What do you say?”

  “What I say is that that has to be the strangest proposal on record.” And one that she felt he probably regretted making, even now. “Look, Rafe, it’s not that I don’t have feelings for you—”

  “Just ‘feelings’?” he questioned. If she really didn’t love him, he needed to know now, before he made an even bigger fool of himself than he already had.

  And then she said something that he was unprepared for, something that blew him right out of the water. “All right, I love you,” she cried. “But that’s just the problem. I’ve been married once and losing Scott almost killed me. I don’t want to have to go through that again.” She saw him opening his mouth to speak and she cut him off with one final argument. “And you can’t promise me that you won’t die.”

  “No, I can’t,” he agreed quietly. “But I can promise to love you with my last ounce of strength until I do.”

  She could feel the tears gathering up, but this time, they were tears of joy. He’d genuinely moved her. “Oh, damn you, Rafe, why’d you have to go and say that?”

  “Because I mean it,” he told her, slipping his arms around her. “I love you. Whether you stay or go, that’s not going to change how I feel about you. We’re a very steadfast bunch, the people in my family. And when we fall in love, it’s forever. That part’s not going to change, whether you go or stay, but I’d really rather that you stay—or at least come home to me after each film is rolled.”

  “Wrapped,” she corrected, biting back a laugh. Val sighed. “I guess I have to stick around. Someone’s got to teach you the proper terms of my industry. It might as well be me.”

  “And the proposal?” he asked. “What’s your verdict on that?”

  She threaded her arms around his neck. “I guess that’s a yes, too.”

  “Good answer.”

  He kissed her then, before she could say something else or come up with another stumbling block to put in his path. He kissed her for a long time—just to be sure.

  * * * * *

  Don’t miss Marie Ferrarella’s next romance,

  MISSION: CAVANAUGH BABY,

  available September 2013

  from Harlequin Romantic Suspense!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Her Secret, His Baby by Tanya Michaels

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  Chapter One

  Never in her twenty-five years had Arden Cade done anything so rash. What was I thinking? Although she usually woke in gradual, disoriented stages, this morning she was instantly alert, hoping to discover the previous night had been a dream—a vivid, thoroughly sensual dream.

  But there was no disputing the muscular arm across her midsection or the lingering satisfaction in her body.

  Physically, she was more relaxed than she’d been in nearly a year, her loose limbs at odds with her racing thoughts. Her first impulse was to bolt from the bed, putting distance between herself and the still-sleeping cowboy. She hesitated, not wanting to wake Garrett before she’d had a chance to gather her composure. Besides, his body heat and the steady rumble of his breathing were soothing. Beckoning. It was so tempting to snuggle closer beneath the sheets and—

  Don’t you learn?

  Cuddling into his heat was what had landed her in this situation. But she’d been cold for so long. She’d needed to feel something other than suffocating grief. If only yesterday hadn’t been the ninth of March.... What the hell had made her think scheduling a photography job would keep her too busy to mourn?

  Memories of the night before flooded her—the despair that had gaped like a chasm, the encounter with a c
harming stranger, the reckless bliss she’d found in his arms.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, people usually look happier at wedding receptions.” The man’s teasing tone was deep and rich, unexpectedly warming her.

  She had to tilt her head to meet his clear gray eyes. Knowing her clients deserved better than a photographer who depressed the guests, she struggled for a light tone as she gestured toward the crowded dance floor. “I was feeling sorry for myself because I’m not out there,” she lied. “I love to dance.”

  A slow grin stole over his face, making him even more attractive. As the younger sister of two ridiculously good-looking brothers, Arden didn’t impress easily, but this man made her pulse quicken.

  “I’d be happy to oblige,” he offered. “I realize you’re working, but I have some pull with the groom. Hugh was my best friend in high school.”

  His casual words pierced her. Arden had kept the same best friend from preschool into adulthood, rejoicing three and a half years ago when the sister of her heart married Arden’s oldest brother and became her sister-in-law. This was the first March 9—Natalie’s birthday—since the car accident that had killed Natalie and her toddler son, the first March 9 in over two decades Arden hadn’t spent with her friend.

  “Rain check,” she’d managed to respond, abandoning the stranger to snap shots of the twirling flower girl.

  After the reception ended, Arden should have gone home, but facing her dark, empty apartment seemed unbearable. She packed her equipment, then sat in the hotel bar while ice melted in her untouched whiskey. Time passed with excruciating slowness.

  Then Garrett Frost walked in, his earlier suit replaced with a casual button-down shirt and a pair of dark jeans that somehow made him even more devastatingly handsome.