Ugly Ducklings Finish First

by Gail, Stacy

  The Tex-Mex restaurant they settled on had a large al fresco dining area on the flagstone edge of the river. Well-fed pigeons kept a trained eye out for any stray crumb, while mariachi music drifted through the air. It was a picturesque, tranquil sight worth any tourist’s snapshot. Payton, however, was anything but tranquil. Every survival instinct she possessed screamed to get the hell out of the path of the natural disaster that was Wiley Sharpe.

  “Well.” In desperation, she opened a menu and wondered if she couldn’t somehow find a way to keep that fragile barrier between them during the entire lunch. “I hope you brought your appetite. Everything here looks delicious.”

  “Delicious,” he repeated in absent agreement, not touching his menu. “Payton, you have no idea how strong my appetite is right now.”

  I can guess. The words almost popped out before she bit her tongue to keep it silent. Good grief. She really was far gone if she saw sexual innuendo in every little comment. “So. How’d your class go this morning?”

  “Class? Oh, right, my class. We’re currently exploring the wonderful world of precedents.” He undid the button at his throat and heaved a sigh in relief. “How do you think your lecture went this morning?”

  “You were there. You tell me.”

  “Clear, concise and to the point without putting people to sleep. From a lawyer’s perspective, I was impressed. You really know your stuff.”

  She tried to ignore the bloom of pleasure at his praise. “I suppose the subject matter might interest a lawyer, at that. Is that why you were there? Are you working on a case involving the medical field?”

  His shrug was dismissive. “It’s always helpful to keep a hand in. I have to admit, it was interesting to see you in your element. I felt like bragging to everyone that I knew you when we were kids.”

  “That probably wouldn’t have impressed anyone. I’m sure recounting some of your courtroom dramas would have been much more interesting.”

  “Believe me, there’s nothing dramatic about the case I’m working on now.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just your basic foreclosure case. I’m trying to iron out a few snags old Carlos Xavier is having with his bank.”

  Payton’s brows shot up. “Carlos Xavier? He’s still alive?”

  “And kicking.” He paused as their waiter approached, then turned his attention back to her after they’d ordered. “About eighteen months ago Carlos took out an ARM loan on a parcel of land he couldn’t begin to afford. Ultimately he wound up losing everything, including the family homestead, which he’d put up as collateral.”

  “How awful.” Payton’s brow puckered with concern. “They’ve had that farm since the Spanish Land Grants. We went to school with his grandkids, remember? I had a king-sized crush on Alex Xavier in the seventh grade.”

  “Really?” Green eyes narrowing, he slanted her a glance. “He married Trina Merrick years ago and is the father of three.”

  “Darn. There go all my schoolgirl fantasies.”

  “You snooze, you lose.”

  She snorted. “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “No problem.” A basket of razor-thin tortilla chips and roasted-pepper salsa were placed in front of them by their speeding waiter, and Wiley reached for a chip. “Alex manages his mother’s clothing store now, but this has hit the entire family hard. It wasn’t just land that was lost. It was their heritage.”

  “I can only imagine the pain they’re going through.” She searched his face and saw the concern shadowing his eyes. “It must be very hard, doing what you do.”

  “No more than your job, I imagine.”

  “True enough. I’ve had some cases that still give me nightmares, but at least I don’t know my patients the way you know your clients. You know their histories, their families. It’s personal.”

  “That’s the risk you run if you want to live in a small town. And it has its compensations.” Their food arrived, hot and steaming and carrying the tempting scents of garlic, tomatoes, cilantro and peppers. “The community has rallied around Carlos as best they can. I doubt you would see that kind of reaction in a big city like, say, Houston.”

  In the process of reaching for her fork, Payton lifted a brow at his choice of cities. “How did Mr. Xavier get into this mess in the first place?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out now. Carlos bought five hundred acres of what appeared to be prime grazing land south of Bitterthorn. He had the idea he could make the land pay for itself by leasing out the grazing rights to area ranchers.”

  “Sounds normal.” Payton nodded as she dug into the enchiladas bursting with melted cheese. “Horace Weems did that with the lot that backed up to my parents’ backyard. I remember my dad saying old man Weems made a mint off of that land without lifting a finger.”

  “Leasing grazing land is usually profitable for everyone involved, but something went wrong with this deal. The land Carlos bought wasn’t nearly as fertile as he’d been told. It’s so alkaline that rocks grow better there than any kind of plant life.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Xavier look it over for himself?”

  “He’s an old man, Payton, and he’s used to trusting what his friends and neighbors tell him.”

  “Who sold him this bill of goods?”

  An attractive frown furled Wiley’s brow. “It was a commercial real estate agency based in Dallas that brokered the deal. Farmer’s Bank backed him with the ARM loan.”

  “I see.” Remembering a wizened old man from a decade ago, she shook her head. “I can’t bear the thought of that proud old man losing everything. Didn’t anyone try and talk him out of such a risky proposition?”

  “Like who? Most of the time Carlos won’t even talk to me. He personifies the term patriarch, in the finest Old World tradition. He answers to no one.”

  “What about the people who gave him the loan?”

  “Farmer’s Bank can’t be held responsible for a bad business move one of their customers make, Payton,” he said, reaching for the sugar dispenser to dump a small mountain of the white stuff into his iced tea. “I have an appointment with one of the loan officers later this week to discuss the case, a man by the name of Prentice Fields.”

  Payton pursed her lips. “Prentice Fields. I don’t think I know that name.”

  “He moved to town four or five years ago. Apparently he was a real big shot in the Dallas—Fort Worth banking community, but he wanted the slower pace of small-town life. So he moved to Bitterthorn.”

  “I’m surprised Mr. Xavier trusted an outsider.”

  “Fields simply okayed a loan, Payton. And just because his bank foreclosed on Carlos, that doesn’t mean he’s the bad guy here. From what I’ve seen, he seems to be genuinely distressed over the Xavier foreclosure. The whole town is.”

  “The whole town and me. I’m glad he’s hired you to deal with this.”

  “I haven’t been hired exactly.” He lifted a wry brow at her quick glance. “Like I said, the community’s rallied around the Xavier family. I’m just doing some digging on their behalf.”

  “That’s sweet of you.” Her face softened with a smile while something in her chest warmed at his generosity. “Have you found anything?”

  “While the land deal itself seems unfair due to the apparent misrepresentation of the property, from a legal standpoint it’s on the up and up.”

  “Then that’s it. Carlos doesn’t have a chance.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. In this economy, plenty of foreclosures have been overturned due to technicalities or worse, because mortgage lenders weren’t following federal law. I’m just making sure none of that happened here.” A smear of sour cream brushed her lower lip as she took another bite, and he leaned over to capture it on his finger before she could move. “You missed some.”

  Jolted by the se
nsation of his finger feathering over her lips, Payton froze. The tip of his finger slipped between her lips, which closed over it on instinct rather than calculated provocation. Gently she took him into her mouth and licked the cream off with a sweep of her tongue, reveling in the addictive mixture of sour cream and the salty-sweet flavor that was uniquely Wiley.

  Sin must taste like this.

  Her breath caught, her eyes dilating wildly as her gaze lifted to his. In the span of a heartbeat, a wildfire ignited in her blood to pool like molten lava in her lower belly. Desire pulsed through her veins like a drug, and the bloom of dizzying heat between her legs spawned an ache there, her emptiness demanding to be filled. With him. She could almost feel him inside her, surging into her as she opened for him as much as she could to take his hardness in all the way to his hilt, and she would writhe her hips to milk every last drop of ecstasy from him...

  She jerked away when she realized she was still sucking on him, a belated spasm of self-preservation stabbing through the haze of hunger cloaking her brain. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t feel this. Not with the Coyote. He was right—she took everything too seriously, especially when it came to the men she chose to take to her bed. Wiley, on the other hand, enjoyed anyone with a pulse. They were too dissimilar to ever make any kind of sense. It was impossible.

  More’s the pity.

  “We might as well go,” Payton managed as her heart tried to beat her to death. “We’re just about finished here.”

  “No.” He shook his head, and his tone was a strange mixture of grimness and excitement. “I think we just started.”

  “Pardon?”

  He was so still it seemed as though he didn’t even breathe. Like a panther waiting to pounce.

  She’d never felt more like prey in her life.

  “We gave it our best shot, Payton. Ignoring it. Pretending it’s not there. But it’s not working. It’s not going away.”

  Her fingers tightened on the napkin until her knuckles turned white. Please don’t do this. “What’s not going away?”

  “You know. Look at me.” When she didn’t comply, his hand came down over hers, not at all gentle. “Damn it, Payton, look at me. I’m not going to face this by myself.”

  “You should have just left it alone.” Confused and irrationally angry with herself for wanting to taste him again, she tossed his hand away. “We could have gone our separate ways after today, happy and content with the way things stood between us.”

  “You’re fooling yourself if you think you’d be either happy or content if you let yourself walk away from this attraction without exploring it first.”

  She flinched. Now he’d done it, letting the genie out of the bottle like that. “Listen to me very carefully, Wiley. I am not attracted to you.”

  The narrowing of his eyes was the definition of dangerous. “You never used to lie.”

  “I’m not lying now.” She was almost certain of it.

  “If this isn’t attraction, what the hell is it?”

  “Curiosity. From a logical standpoint, it makes perfect sense.” What the hell, if she had to release her inner Vulcan to hide behind, then so be it.

  “Logical.” He said it as if the word were an obscenity. “What the hell does logic have to do with this?”

  “It has everything to do with this. Ten years ago you were every girl’s dream. It stands to reason I might consider it interesting to find out what all the fuss was about. But that’s not attraction.”

  “No.” His calm tone was downright ominous as he folded some cash into the bill and set it aside. “It’s not.”

  “Well...great.” She eyed him as if he were a bomb that may or may not go off. He wasn’t going to let her off that easily, was he? “I’m glad we understand each other.”

  “I understand that what you just said is a massive load of bullshit. And if you believe it, you’re not as smart as I give you credit for.”

  “Amazingly enough, I don’t give a damn what you think.” With the desperate need to escape pounding away at her—though she convinced herself it was anger—Payton surged to her feet. “Thanks loads for lunch, Coyote. Let’s do it again next reunion.”

  She didn’t get far, and she supposed in retrospect she was stupid to think she would. The hand that clamped around her arm as she moved onto the river’s crowded pathway was stronger than she’d expected. Her headlong momentum swung her in a wide arc back into him, and the raw force of their bodies colliding startled her. Out of reflex she opened her mouth, but she never had a chance to make a sound as his lips came down squarely over hers.

  A wild shiver shook her. She couldn’t help it. Nor could she stand that he had to have felt it. But when he held her as if pulling her against him with all his strength would somehow fuse them together, she couldn’t hide anything from a man as experienced at love games as Wiley.

  His body was tensed, as solid as a brick wall, and it surrounded her with everything that was unabashedly male. The force of their bodies coming together stole her breath, but it was his mouth’s avid hunger that melted her from the inside out. His lips were bold and knowing, his taste addictive even as his mouth made love to hers with consummate skill. It was a skill she wanted to match with a recklessness she’d never felt before, overpowered by the need to give him a sampling of what it was to be overwhelmed. But even as she tried, Payton was the one falling under the spell of luscious sensation. The feel and flavor of him was more devastating than her greatest fantasies, and she was left wondering if she could die from something as simple as a kiss.

  A whimper of dazed pleasure whispered from her, no louder than a breath, but somehow he heard it. She knew he had, because a tremor rocked his body as though something wild suddenly escaped its tether. He broke away to pull her out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and into a deserted arched alleyway between a restaurant and an apartment building.

  Her brain tried to sputter back to life. “Wiley, wait—”

  His mouth silenced her as he pushed her back against the cool stone facade of the restaurant, a hungry conquering that was wordless and absolute. The firm press of his lips enticed hers to open, and when the hot silk of his tongue stroked against hers in a shivery caress, her very bones seemed to liquefy under the sensual assault. Lush pleasure bloomed like a drug, filling her with a sweet lassitude even as it made her greedy for more. She nuzzled her lips against his until their fit was perfect, a sensual melding of satin against steel, and she relished his nearly soundless moan of delighted approval. The sensation of his chest pressing against the sensitive cushion of her breasts was so intimate—so right—it was almost enough to make her forget where they were, who they were. Who he was.

  The Coyote.

  Player.

  Heartbreaker.

  They were both fighting for breath when Payton turned her head just enough to break the contact. With the imprint of his mouth throbbing like a brand on hers, reality crystallized around her with painful clarity.

  She’s kissed him. After all these years, she’d finally kissed Wiley Sharpe.

  Damn her idiotic self for wanting to do so much more than just kiss him.

  Her knees shook as she stepped sideways against the wall and away from him. “Wow.”

  Something like a laugh rocked out of him. “Yeah. Wow.”

  “That was...” Mind-blowing. Life-altering. Bordering on a religious experience. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting? It felt like more to me.” His eyes turned ravenous. “A lot more.”

  “So speaks Bitterthorn’s premiere playboy.” She couldn’t have stopped the words if her life depended on it. But bottom-lining it, that’s what this was all about. He was the Coyote, and she was anything but. Put the two together and it made for an even worse mismatch than her parents. “You shouldn’t have done that, Wiley.”

 
; “I didn’t do it by myself. In case you weren’t paying attention, I had help.”

  “Yeah, well, the help stops here. Just because there’s a little attraction between us—”

  “A little?”

  “That doesn’t mean you have any right to take advantage of it.”

  He gave her a baffled look. “Would you mind telling me why the hell not?”

  Payton shriveled up inside when she realized she sounded like a hysterical Victorian spinster. “Look, I’m going to be as honest as I can, okay? You’re one hell of a kisser, and you’re every woman’s idea of the perfect man to have a knock-your-socks-off affair with.”

  His smile was hot enough to make her tingle in all the right places. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “The thing is, I’m not interested in that.”

  His smile faltered. “What?”

  “I’m only going to be here for six more days. And while that’s usually how long your relationships last, that’s not how I operate. So please, let’s just stay out of each other’s way while I’m here, okay? I’m too smart to get tangled up with a man like you.”

  “A man like me.” He repeated the words as if sampling their taste, and if the way his face darkened was any indication, they didn’t agree with him at all. “You know what, Payton? There are times when you’re too damn smart for your own good.”

  “Maybe that came out wrong. What I meant—”

  “I know exactly what you meant. You’re judging me on the boy you once knew and obviously didn’t respect very much.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. I’m forever going to be the Coyote to you, right? The shallow, brainless guy most likely to be slapped with a paternity suit? Damn, you’re right, you are smart. You’re a freaking genius to have figured out I haven’t changed one iota in ten long years.”

  “Look, you’re the one who kissed me,” she flung out, then felt like the universe’s biggest jackass.

  The look he gave her told her he heartily agreed with her personal assessment. “Luckily for the both of us, I never make the same mistake twice.”