by Susan Crosby
“Yes, it’s very hot,” Shana said. “Come sit with me, peapod. Let’s enjoy the fire and the tree for a little while before bedtime.”
Kincaid added ambiance to the moment by turning on some Christmas music while Emma snuggled in with her mother. She’d started smiling at him now and then, but she still wouldn’t let him lift her out of her high chair or into her car seat. It was beginning to bother him that she wasn’t warming up to him the way she did with other people.
Like Dylan, whom she’d seemed to adore from the first moment.
Emma fell asleep almost instantly, so Shana carried her upstairs and put her to bed.
“I think I’ll have some brandy,” he said when Shana returned. “Want some?”
“I’ve never had it. Maybe a taste.”
He splashed some into a small snifter and passed it to her to take the first sip. She tasted it tentatively then wrinkled her nose. “Ugh.”
She gave it back to him with a lopsided smile and sat on the sofa again. She’d replaced her shoes with fuzzy pink slippers and had brushed her hair. He thought he smelled lemons and realized she had to have put on some perfume. He wanted to sniff her neck. He wanted to sit on the couch with her, put his arms around her and watch the fire together. He settled for sitting at the opposite end of the sofa instead of in his chair.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“Sure.”
“How long has it been since you’ve had a Christmas tree?”
He wasn’t certain he wanted to take a trip down memory lane, but he answered her, anyway. “This would be my first.”
“Ever?”
“In my whole life.”
“That’s really sad.”
“It is.” He sipped his brandy and thought about it. “We lived in trailers most of the time. No room for a tree. No money, anyway. My father drank it all away—what little there was. When my mom reached her breaking point, she took off. I never heard from her directly after that. We were notified of her death a couple of years later.”
“How horrible!”
He didn’t want to think about. “That’s when I emancipated myself and got out, too.”
“What’s involved in emancipation?”
“You have to have a job, a place to live and parental permission. And you have to stay in school. Plus, I had to convince a judge I was better off on my own. I’d been to this area once in middle school on a field trip about the gold rush. I never forgot it.”
“Who gave you a job?”
“Aggie’s late husband, John. He offered me a room in their house, too, but they still had five kids at home, and I needed time alone, so I rented a room from June Morrison.”
“The librarian?”
“She was kind and quiet. I studied hard, I worked harder and I kept my nose clean.”
Shana heard so much more than just the spoken words. She heard his pain at his mother’s abandonment and his father’s abuses. She heard pride in his ability to take care of himself. Above all, she heard strength and confidence. He’d overcome a lot to get to this level of success.
She vowed to make this Christmas truly special for him. He might be a man who had everything money could buy, but he couldn’t buy memories.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said into her long silence. “I don’t.”
Shana slid down the sofa until she was next to him. She tucked an arm under his and leaned her head against his shoulder. “What a lot of deep, dark secrets people keep hidden from the world,” she said, feeling his cheek settle against her hair.
“You smell like lemons.”
“You smell like brandy.”
A few beats passed. “Is that bad?” he asked finally.
“No. It’s just different. You usually smell like the outdoors, and sometimes like wood smoke.”
He lifted his arm and settled it around her. They both went quiet for a while, then she said, “Until I came back last year I’d spent ten years roaming the world. I lived in hostels mostly, and tents a lot. Occasionally a hotel room, sometimes even a swanky one, if we’d befriended the right person along the way. The last place was a shack on a farm in Spain.” She swallowed. “I don’t want that life for my daughter. You’ve given me stability, and a chance for me to build a future for my daughter and me. I don’t know how to repay you for that.”
“We?” he asked, backtracking on what she’d said.
“Me and Richard. Emma’s father. He died of bacterial meningitis before I knew I was pregnant. It was so quick. Healthy, then gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. Especially for Emma. He was a fun-loving, kind and totally irresponsible man.”
“Yet you loved him.”
“I did. But toward the end, I’d gotten restless. I wanted to root somewhere, and he still wanted to wander.” She’d surprised herself by moving next to Kincaid when she’d struggled for days to keep her distance. And he was surprising her now by just holding her. “We were loners who found each other. We didn’t gather a lot of friends along the way.”
She still hadn’t, she thought. She was stuck in that mode. It wasn’t a good example for Emma.
“Do his parents know about Emma?”
“They don’t believe she’s his. I probably got pregnant a few days before he died. And she was overdue. So…” She snuggled closer to Kincaid, close enough to feel the beat of his heart against his chest. “I hope they want to meet her sometime, but I’m okay with it for now, especially knowing what I know of them, which isn’t good. Emma’s got lots of family here.”
It was barely eight o’clock, but suddenly Shana was exhausted. She’d been working hard physically for three days, much harder than she usually did. And it was comfortable here in front of the fire, being held against his warm, firm body. She rested a hand on his chest to keep from sliding, then closed her eyes. He encircled her with his other arm, slid his hand up and down her arm in a soothing and yet arousing way. His heart beat a little louder, a little faster.
What are we doing here, Kincaid? The words stayed trapped in her head. She’d made the move, getting closer to him out of sympathy for his heartbreaking childhood. His had been much worse than hers, which was more a case of being ignored than abused. She could learn from him.
“How’d you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
His breath was warm against her hair. She realized how comfortable she’d gotten with him, dangerously so. She sat up and moved away, immediately feeling cold and a little lost.
“How did you let go of the past?” she asked. “I need to do that, and I can’t seem to.”
“I didn’t for a long time. It was something Aggie said after her husband’s funeral. I was barely legal age and the man who’d given me my break had died. I was going to have to make it on my own somehow. She said if I kept going through life with that chip on my shoulder, I was never going to be able to stand up straight and look someone in the eye so they knew I was telling the truth. ‘You need to forgive your parents,’ she said. She made me say it to her right then. ‘I forgive you, Mom and Dad.’”
“That’s all it took?”
“All? It was the hardest damn thing I’d ever done. It felt like I had a mouth full of rocks. Aggie made me repeat it until I could say it straight out and clearly. By then, I really had forgiven them. Although I never forget,” he added quietly. “It’s not that it doesn’t haunt me sometimes, but I can deal with it.”
“Why have you kept to yourself so much?”
“I figured if anyone knew where—who—I’d come from, they would think less of me. It took time and maturity to get past that. By then, it’d become a habit being a loner.”
“And now?”
“I’ve been trying to be more open. I’ve accepted invitations to go to parties and barbecues, things like that.”
“Why has it become important now?”
He cocked his head. “Why all the questions?”
“I’m trying t
o understand you. Now that I’ve spent time with you, I think some of the ideas I’ve had in my head about you are wrong.”
“Like what?”
“Like why you pursued my sister when you knew she and Joe were meant for each other.” There. She’d gotten it out in the open, that hurdle she hadn’t been able to get past with him.
“Dixie?” he said, looking shocked. Then he shook his head. “Dixie and I became friends, good friends, while I remodeled her shop, but that’s all.”
She tried to analyze his expression. He’d always seemed to be honest with her, so why would he be lying this time?
“Is that why you’ve always been irritated with me?” he asked intently.
She shrugged. “That’s part of it, I guess. I didn’t respect you for going after a woman who so clearly belonged to someone else.”
“Ask Dixie, if you don’t believe me. We did talk about it, because she’d thought the same thing. I hadn’t had a woman friend before, not a close one. She misread me. We got it squared away. I like her. I also admire her. There’s nothing more to it.”
“If I talk to Dixie she’ll think it’s because I’m interested in you myself.”
He just stared at her, asking a question without saying the words aloud.
She squirmed, hedging the truth some. “Of course you interest me, Kincaid. But I don’t want to risk what we have going here.”
“It’s getting harder every day not to touch you,” he said, reaching for her pink-slippered feet and pulling them into his lap. He waited long enough that she could’ve pulled her feet back, then he tossed her slippers to the floor and began massaging her feet. “Close your eyes and enjoy it,” he said.
She curled her toes. “I don’t want to get used to this.”
“This?”
“This comfort. This ease.” She paused. “This excitement. I’m doing everything for you that a wife does, except sleeping with you.”
“Dammit, Shana. Just lie back and relax. If I’d wanted to seduce you into my bed, I would have done so by now.”
“Well, that’s a little egotistical, don’t you think?”
“It’s the truth.” He looked annoyed. “You know, it’s very hard to do something nice for you. You’re always suspicious of motive.”
He was right, of course. But she wasn’t suspicious of anyone except him. What did that say?
“Chicken,” he said with a challenging grin. He still hadn’t released her feet, and she still hadn’t relaxed them.
She finally shoved a pillow under her head and stretched out. “Okay, but don’t blame me if you get all excited.”
“Okay, but feel free to blame me if you do.”
She peeked at him, then settled in. “As if. I get massages now and then at Dixie’s spa. It’s never turned me on.”
“You haven’t had one from me.”
He sounded too sure of himself, but it was only her feet, after all, hardly an erogenous zone for her.
Or so she thought.
He manipulated her toes, pushed deeply into her arches, and rotated her ankles, all normal foot massage techniques, but there was something about how he was doing it. His work-calloused hands added a new dimension, rubbing her skin differently from soft, lotion-covered hands. And he had a way of teasing her skin with his fingertips even as his hands massaged deeply. And then he let his fingers drift up her legs, almost to her calves, dragging them down slowly, pressing down, lengthening her muscles, tight from going up and down a ladder much of the day.
And it felt so good, so relaxing…so arousing. She moaned a little, wriggled a little. Her foot slid over the placket of his jeans as she moved, revealing he was aroused, too.
“Not blaming you,” he said quietly but with a certain amount of humor.
She opened her eyes a little. “I am blaming you.”
He changed then. His expression darkened. His hands moved farther up her legs beneath her jeans. He tickled the backs of her knees, making her arch up. He dragged her onto his lap so that she straddled him then began to massage her back through her shirt. She could’ve said no anytime, could’ve climbed off him, but she stayed, enjoying the first sensual touch she’d experienced in two years.
He eased her forward so that her face was tucked against his neck, her chest against his, then he stroked her back with strong fingers, loosening every muscle while at the same time exciting her more than she thought imaginable. He slid his hands down her rear, cupped her there and settled her differently on him, so that she could feel his hard ridge of arousal pressing against her, even through two layers of jeans.
It was the layers separating them that finally woke her up to reality. They needed to keep those layers between them. The only way this relationship, this job, could work was if they didn’t give in to their desire. There was too much at stake, too much to lose, especially for her.
She pulled back, was tempted to kiss him, but didn’t. She climbed off him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it in every way. She headed to the stairs, feeling wrung out.
“A pool’s been started about us,” he said.
She stopped, turned around.
He came up beside her. “I just thought you should know.”
“Do you know the specifics?”
“Whether we’ll be sleeping together by Christmas.”
She crossed her arms. People were betting on exactly what she wanted for herself, except she didn’t want to wait as long as Christmas. “And how exactly would anyone know if that happened?”
“How does anyone know anything in this town? Maybe one way would be to wait a few months beyond Christmas and see if you end up pregnant, then count back.”
“Haven’t they heard of birth control? The very last thing that can happen is that I get pregnant. I can’t bring another pregnancy upon myself and my parents. My mom and I are getting along okay. That would end that.”
He said nothing. She didn’t know what to make of it.
“I am sorry, Kincaid. For all that you’ve given me, I don’t seem to be able to repay you with anything of value. I didn’t mean to tease you.” She gestured toward the couch, feeling as if they should clear the air.
“You’re repaying me with exactly what I expected when I hired you—good, hard work. As for that,” he said, pointing as she had to the sofa, “I enjoyed it, but it was good that you stopped it. I’ll keep better control from now on.”
Disappointment landed on Shana with a thud. In some ways, she wished he would just take charge, not be sensitive to her wish to keep her reputation spotless. And yet, she wouldn’t admire him for that. What a tangled web…?.
“Good night, Shana.”
“Night.”
An hour later, she heard him come upstairs and go to his bedroom. What had he been doing? Watching television? Staring at the tree?
Wondering how to get rid of her now that she’d become a complication?
He felt responsible for her now. She needed to hold up her end of the bargain.
Chapter Ten
On Saturday night, Shana drove into the parking lot of the Stompin’ Grounds, pulled into a space, then before she’d shifted into Park, backed out and left. “This is crazy,” she muttered. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want her baby girl to sleep somewhere other than in her own bed tonight, within hearing range.
“Now what?” she asked herself as she drove north, thinking she would head to Grass Valley instead, away from the watchful eyes and betting pool of Chance City.
It had been hard leaving Emma, hard enough to make Shana cry. Plus, she was going out alone because Aggie had a date with Doc. Aggie had suggested two of her granddaughters, but they both had plans.
Everyone had a date—or a husband—except her. She hadn’t even thought about it before, but no one had asked her out since she’d moved to town. No one had even seemed interested. That was pretty depressing in itself. She must give off a leave-me-alone vibe she wasn’t aware of. She knew she was defens
ive about her independence, about not wanting to rely on anyone, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to have fun.
Except…that was clearly what everyone thought.
Determined to change that misconception, Shana found a turnaround and headed back to the Stompin’ Grounds, where she would know people and could find someone to share a table with or a game of pool. She was pretty good with a cue stick.
If only she liked beer. She hated the stuff, but she figured the country bar and grill probably didn’t offer strawberry margaritas, which would leave her with no choice but beer.
It’d been hard leaving Kincaid at home, too. She would’ve liked his company for her first night without Emma, but the past couple of days had been tension-filled enough. They’d been cordial to each other, acting as if nothing had happened between them, but her dreams were full of him at night, and during the day she couldn’t be within a few feet of him without her body almost attaching itself to his.
It was a dangerous situation for her, although he seemed to be managing just fine.
Which really ticked her off.
Shana greeted two smokers standing by the front door to the bar, then she went inside. It was noisy, but in a good way. Music and laughter mingled. The sound of pool balls clacking punctuated the din. Even though she’d never been here, the bartender welcomed her by name, so she took a seat at the bar and ordered a hamburger and a beer.
People waved, many she knew by sight if not by name. The hamburger was good, the music made her sway and the beer wasn’t as bad as she remembered. She kept eyeing the pool table, hoping for a turn. She recognized Big Dave Gunderson. He’d been a friend of Gavin’s in high school, which meant he’d also graduated with Kincaid. He’d been called Big Dave since middle school, being taller and broader than any other boy. He still was.
He’d also taken Kincaid’s date home last week.
He gave her the eye now and then when it wasn’t his turn to shoot. When she finished her meal, he wandered over. Or moseyed over, she thought, a definite cowboy sort of swagger in his step. His hair was a little shaggy, his jaw soft and his teeth unusually white, as if he’d just had them bleached.
