No. That had not been fun.
“And you have talked?” Eliza asked. “You told him why you had to marry? You cleared up that misunderstanding?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad. Secrets are not good for the soul. They eat away at your peace of mind long after they have any right to.”
Diana recalled detecting a similar tone in her friend’s voice the last time they’d lunched, something that hinted at a deeper meaning behind the idle advice. Yet Eliza harboring secrets? She’d never known her friend to be anything but frank and open. It seemed so unlikely, and yet…
“Is there something bothering you, Eliza? Some deep, dark secret you’re longing to get off your chest?”
“Oh, we all have secrets,” Eliza replied blithely, before ending the conversation with the direction to, “Enjoy what’s left of your weekend.”
Enjoying the weekend hadn’t been difficult, not while she concentrated on the now and studiously ignored the what-comes-next. But after they left the hotel on Monday afternoon and commenced the trip back to Sioux Falls, that question loomed larger and larger with each passing mile. They had left Fantasyland behind. Soon they would return to the real world, the real world where he would return to Australia and she would not.
The notion of saying goodbye had tied Diana in a twisted pretzel of anxiety by the time they arrived at her home. Max had been silent on the drive, wrapped in thoughts that set his jaw tight. She dared not ask. A full schedule of acting and speech and etiquette classes had packed her childhood, and a fat lot of good they were proving now. She did not know what to say. Thank you and goodbye seemed vastly inadequate.
As they turned into her street and approached her home, Diana peeked a quick sideways glance at her silent companion, at the grim, hard lines of his face and the tick of a muscle in his cheek. The tendrils of apprehension that had twisted through her system banded steely tight in her chest. This was not going to be easy. Added to the farewell, she knew memories of his last visit to her home and his fear over her intruder would be riding him hard.
She searched for a distracting comment, something to bridge the awful tension, but before she could utter a word Max’s posture stiffened. His big hands tightened on the wheel. “That car.” He nodded to indicate the white sedan blocking the entrance to her garage. “Is there any reason it should be in your drive?”
“I don’t know,” she replied slowly. “Unless it’s Gregg.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Except…I haven’t been home. Why would he still be hanging around?”
Max didn’t care about the whys. He didn’t intend asking for any when he found the creep, either. He stopped the car in the street and turned to Diana. “Give me your keys.”
“Do you think he’s in the house?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Max said tightly. The thought that he might have broken in, that he might have done so at another time and found Diana here alone, afraid, defenseless, near choked him with fury. “Stay here. I won’t be long.”
This time he didn’t bother checking the car. He went straight to the house, eyes scanning the snow-covered front garden for any signs of movement in the long shadows of late afternoon. No footprints in the snow, no broken windows in the front of the house, no signs of forced entry.
Inside the house lay silent and visibly untouched. Quickly he moved from room to room, finding nothing but a keen edge of disappointment. A primal part of him had wanted to find the creep, had wanted an excuse to make him regret coming back here. But he suppressed it because of the distress on Diana’s face when she’d considered that he might be in her home. Because of the tremor in her cold hands as she handed over the keys.
Because he wanted to protect her from all those fears, to shield her from all distress, to drive every thought and every memory and every impact of David Young from her consciousness.
After one run through the house, Max knew the stepson wasn’t inside. So where the hell was he? Certain he would find him lurking somewhere, inside or out, he’d ordered Diana to stay in the car. Now he experienced a wrench of misgiving. He’d been gone a couple of minutes, five at the most, yet suddenly that felt like four-and-a-half too many.
He hurried to the front door and out through the courtyard, breath backing up in his lungs until he could see the car again.
She wasn’t in it.
“Diana.”
Heart pounding, he yelled her name and the gasp of her choked reply—not quite his name, not even a whole word—sliced through the silence and into his blood like a cold knife of fear. A sign of movement beyond the rental car, in the shadows by the garage doors, caught his attention and he crossed the snow-covered lawn at a dead run.
The bastard had hold of her by the arm and, Max realized with a jolt of pure rage, by the scarf wrapped around her neck.
“Let her go.”
If he’d done as requested, Max might have resisted the primal impulse pounding through his veins. But Gregg didn’t release his stranglehold grip on Diana until Max lifted him off the ground by the coat collar, and when he made the mistake of opening his spiteful little mouth, Max planted a fist in the center of that sneering insult. He would have liked to repeat the procedure, once for every time he’d bullied Diana and once for every insult. But the worm went down in a heap in the snow and he was smart enough not to get up again.
Max swallowed his disappointment and called the police.
This time Diana didn’t argue with his decision to call the law or with his decision to stay the night. Max had expected both. All through the questioning and the charging procedure, he’d sensed her gathering her defences and preparing to shut him out. And when they were finally alone, when he said “I’m staying” in a brook-no-argument tone, she did open her mouth to protest.
He silenced that with a hard, possessive, I’ve-had-enough kiss that flared into instant passion. They’d made love with an urgent intensity that shattered any remaining doubts. She was his. He was staying. Tomorrow they would work out what to do about all their future tomorrows.
He’d woken wanting her again, slowly this time with the night behind them and the morning light soft on her body. But when he loped an arm across the bed he came up with nothing but tangled sheets. From beyond the closed bathroom door came a low electrical hum and he squinted at his watch.
Seven-fifteen.
Later than he usually slept—he’d needed to catch up, to relax from yesterday’s drama, to unwind the last coils of tension. But even if she insisted on going into work, as she’d intended before the Gregg incident exploded, it wasn’t too late to entice her back where he wanted her.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and padded to the bathroom. When he pushed the door open, the hum escalated to a pitchy wail. Diana, drying her hair, the expression on her face abstracted. For a second he just drank in the perfect picture of his woman relaxed and unselfconscious, the way he wanted to find her every morning for the rest of his life.
Except preferably in his bed. Without the robe.
He may have moved, or breathed. Whatever caught her attention caught it quickly and she startled upright, her squeak of surprise silenced beneath the dryer’s howl. Their eyes met in the mirror, hers as round as the O of her mouth, and he smiled his good morning.
She didn’t, and Max realized that her surprised expression held traces of yesterday’s scare. With a muffled oath at his own clumsiness, he closed down the space separating them and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I’m sorry,” he murmured against her ear. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
For a minute she stood stiffly in his arms, her own stretched awkwardly in hairdrying position. When he attempted to take the sleek silver machine from her hand, he realized that a strand of hair had caught, tangled somehow in the air intake vent. Max took hold of the dryer and inspected the damage.
“Can you get it out?” she asked.
“I can try.”
That was no ha
rdship. He got to breathe the scent of her freshly washed skin, still warm and moist from her shower. He took his time and once he’d freed her, he lifted her onto the vanity.
“Stop.” Her hand, planted in the middle of his chest reinforced the crisp command. “I have to get ready for work.”
“It’s early yet.”
“I want to go in early, to catch up.”
“Okay.” He was prepared to be reasonable. He was prepared to do whatever it took to wipe the remnant worry from her expression, to make her smile, to bring her gaze up from chin level to meet his eyes. “This won’t have to take long.”
She puffed out a sound that was a small part laughter but mostly exasperation. “Oh, please. You don’t do anything in half measures.”
Pleased to have earned that recognition, Max grinned. He planted a hand either side of her hips and leaned in to nuzzle the side of her neck. The restraining pressure of her palm against his chest increased until he leaned back.
“It wasn’t a compliment,” she said curtly. “We need to talk.”
Of course they did. He’d just hoped for a little more time to show her they belonged together. He rested his face against hers for a second, cheek to cheek, while he attempted to shift focus. Being buck naked, his body’s focus was blatantly obvious. “I don’t suppose we could have this conversation back in bed?”
“No…although it might be more comfortable if we have it with clothes on.”
If Max had been listening with his upper body, he’d have picked up the distancing vibes way back at we need to talk. Now he picked them up but he refused to be shut out. He eased back into his own space—barely—and waited for her to talk.
“What are you doing here, Max?” she asked without prevarication.
“You think I would leave you alone? After last night?”
“After last night, Gregg will not be back. You know you didn’t have to stay.”
“I didn’t have to,” he said simply. “I wanted to.”
Her expression tightened, as if denying those words admission. “You said before we went to Kentucky that you would be going home as soon as your business was done.”
“That’s what I intended. But I don’t have to rush right back.”
“Maybe you don’t have to hurry back, but you do need to go back at some point. I think it would be better if we acknowledged that fact and—”
“Better for whom?”
She blinked at his interruption. Moistened her lips before resetting them in a firm line. Max wanted to kiss that gravity away, but he settled for brushing his thumb across her bottom lip. With cupping her face in his hand so she couldn’t look away.
“Come with me,” he said with quiet intensity.
Their eyes met and held, hers bright with momentary hope. Or at least that’s what he thought he saw before she shook her head. “To Australia? I can’t just up and…” She blew out a choppy breath. “I can’t.”
Oh, but she could. Despite her resolute expression Max sensed a subtle yielding in the husky tone of her voice.
“Take some time off. Holiday time. Sick days.”
She blinked and in the space of a heartbeat the resolve was back in her face, her posture, the hand she raised to stop his approach. Resolve and something else he couldn’t identify. He was still trying to work out what he’d said when she pushed off the vanity and ducked past him. “I need to get ready for work.”
He followed her into the bedroom, found her rifling through clothes with a kind of panicky desperation. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her inner tension. His nature urged him to push, to demand an answer, to break down this wall while the foundations still shook with her indecision.
But instincts honed by these past days together, by the lessons learned in Kentucky, reined him back in. He had time for a little patience and he had another incentive that would mean more to Diana than words he wasn’t sure he could deliver.
“Think about it.” With restraint he leaned down and kissed her cheek. “We’ll talk at lunch.”
“Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying…” Given that her brain remained punchdrunk from Max’s come-with-me proclamation several hours before, Diana thought she may have misheard or misinterpreted her boss’s words. “Nash Fortune wants to buy my collection?”
“Not the whole collection. A selection,” Jeffrey stressed. He beamed like a proud parent. “I thought about having champagne on ice to celebrate your first commercial sale, but then I remembered the roses.” He rolled his eyes and grimaced. “And I decided against.”
Diana couldn’t imagine the effect champagne in the morning would have on her wildly flailing emotions. At the moment she struggled to contain a whoop of delight. Half an hour ago she’d battled the rough ache of tears in the back of her throat.
All because the words come with me had triggered exploding kernels of hope in her heart.
Oh, yes, she wanted to go with him—to Australia, to Timbuktu, to Mars—but not on an extended holiday fling. She wanted more than that and during the night, when she’d loved him with her heart and her soul wide open, when he’d kissed the fingerprint bruises on her arm with devastating tenderness and held her close to his heart, she had fooled herself into believing that he felt the same riptide of emotion.
The same wondrous sense of complete connection.
But, no. He wanted her to take holiday leave. If she’d been quick-witted enough, she would have asked “for how long?” Just so she knew what to pack! Instead she, who had suggested their need to talk in the first place, had bolted from further discussion before the threatening tears erupted. By lunch she may have gathered her defences and formulated an answer that didn’t include yes, Max.
“Have we spaced out again?” Jeffrey cleared his throat loudly. And winked. “That must have been some weekend in Lexington!”
He knew about Max. From Eliza, of course, since she had called Jeffrey to pass on the message about Diana missing work yesterday. The notion of them talking about her private life caused an uncomfortable niggle in Diana’s stomach. She despised gossip. And she hated the smutty subtext of Jeffey’s wink. “I would prefer if we didn’t discuss my private life,” she said archly.
Jeffrey opened his mouth and shut it again, as if he’d thought better of whatever he was about to say. “None of my business,” he said finally. “Unless he’s thinking of taking you back to Australia, in which case that does impact my business plans.”
The business proposal. The roses, the trashed card. Otherwise occupied, Diana hadn’t given them another thought in the five days since. This might just take her mind off Max.
“Can we talk about that now?” she asked, sitting up straighter in her chair.
“Absolutely.” Jeffrey rubbed his hands together. “Where do I start?”
“He offered you a partnership in Click?” Max stopped slap-bang in the center of the sidewalk, the only sign that her revelation had knocked him off balance.
“I guess that is it,” Diana confirmed. “In summary.”
“You don’t look very excited.”
She supposed she should feel more jazzed, but Jeffrey’s curveball had whizzed by her at the worst possible time. She was too distracted by the nagging voice in the back of her head recanting the proposal she really wanted to hear.
Come with me to Australia, Diana, not for a holiday, but forever.
“I will be excited,” she said emphatically, talking over the top of that fanciful imp. “I just need some time to digest the details and the implications. Partnerships in my family have left me with some cause for circumspection.”
“Your father’s?” he guessed and she nodded.
“Not that I want to compare David’s idea of a partnership deal with Jeffrey’s.”
From the corner of her eye she saw two women looking back over their shoulders as they passed, and she realized they were partly blocking the pedestrian traffic. She should have waited until they were at the restaurant before telling
him, but when he’d arrived to take her to lunch—earlier than she’d expected—he’d asked the leading question, “How was your morning?” and she just blurted out the news.
Now she resumed walking. “Where are we going for lunch?”
Did she imagine his hesitation? “I bought the makings of a picnic. I thought we could take a drive up to the Falls. It’ll be easier to talk without interruption.”
True. Except it was February. “It’s not exactly picnic weather,” she pointed out.
Paused at the passenger side of the Lexus, he studied her face for a moment. Perhaps her nose was turning blue in the icy wind because he said, “Then let’s go to your house…if that’s all right with you?”
She nodded, appreciating the fact that he’d bothered to ask. “Let’s do that. It will be easier to talk if my teeth aren’t chattering.”
A woman she recognized as a recent gallery client gave them a long sideways look as she passed. Max doffed his hat and the woman smiled at them both before hurrying off. “Does everyone in this town read that bloody column?” he asked.
Diana frowned. “What column?”
His gaze met hers after the briefest hesitation, and Diana felt a sinking weight in the pit of her stomach. “I gather you haven’t seen the gossip page in today’s newspaper then?”
Ten
This was not going as Max had planned. First she’d dropped the bombshell about Jeffrey’s partnership proposal. Now he had to show her the gossip column. He hoped like hell she had a long lunch break or all his morning’s rushed preparations would be in vain.
Glancing across the car’s center console at Diana’s face, he couldn’t tell if she was truly unmoved or doing a mighty fine job of disguising her emotions. Once they had gotten into his car, he had opened the paper straight to the society pages, to the short column of gossipy pieces about local identities, with no names named.
This week’s lead item didn’t need any names.
She started to read it out loud, her voice as clear as the midday February sky, as crisp as the air whipping off the snow.
Back in Fortune's Bed Page 12
