Shane caught movement in the corner of his eye a second before an icy voice said, “Son of a bitch…”
He turned in time to see Sinclair whirl away from the passenger side window. Wrong again, Maguire. The situation just got more fucked up.
Chapter Seventeen
“Son of a bitch…” She couldn’t even finish the sentence. Too many words fought to get out at once, and they choked her. Somehow, despite blinding anger and a hemorrhaging heart, she managed to turn on her heel and start walking. Anywhere. Away.
Behind her, the Rover door slammed. “Sinclair.”
“No.” She didn’t turn around, didn’t slow her pace. If she stopped, she just might shatter to a million pieces right there in the stupid parking corridor between the post office and the dry cleaner. Sunlight slanted across the mouth of the alley, highlighting her escape. All she needed to do was get there.
“Sinclair.” A big hand closed around her arm. A flex of muscles made momentum her enemy and swung her around to face Shane. “Don’t walk away.”
“Why? Because that’s your move?” She took a step back, but he didn’t let go.
“Because I want to explain. I know how everything you just heard sounded—”
“Do you?” Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. “Explain this, Shane. Did you want to come back to Magnolia Grove?”
Something guilty flashed in his eyes, and she had her answer before he opened his mouth. “No,” he admitted.
Her blood heated to a boil. “That night we danced at my sister’s wedding, did you have any plan on staying?”
“No. Not then, but—”
“But you lied.” Pain sliced through her chest, and she tried to tug her arm free again. “You lied about a lot of things, didn’t you?”
“No.” He released her arm and ran a hand through his hair. “Look, it’s true I didn’t originally come back with any plans to stay. I expected to do the job and move on. But then I saw you again, spent time with you, and my plans changed.”
“Not from what I heard, they didn’t.”
He stared at the ground for a moment, expelled a breath, and then looked up at her. “I wanted to get this project across the finish line before discussing my change of plans with Haggerty.” His attention shifted to the alley wall, as if the century-old assemblage of bricks and mortar was the most fascinating thing in the world. “It’s a tricky situation.”
A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob clawed its way out of her throat. “A tricky situation? You want to know about a tricky situation? Try mine. I’m thirty days from losing my home, I might be pregnant, and the man I was stupid enough to hand my heart to—again—is about to leave town. Again.”
Dammit. She hadn’t meant to blurt that out. Shane’s expression froze.
“What?” He took a step toward her.
She took a step back. “I’m…about to lose my home.”
“Not that part.”
Those green eyes were too intense. It was her turn to stare at the ground. “I might be pregnant. I took a drugstore test, and it read positive. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning to get something more official.”
Hands cupped her shoulders. She looked up to find concern written all over his face—in the set of his brow and the grooves bracketing his mouth. “I thought that couldn’t happen?”
There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in the question, or suspicion. Gentle as his words were, she couldn’t handle them. She spun away and wrapped her arms around her waist to try and hold herself together. “It wasn’t supposed to. The test I took this morning could be wrong. But even if it’s not, I don’t know if the pregnancy will be different than before.”
Dammit. She was very far down a road she didn’t want to be on. Chances were good she knew exactly where it ended—with Shane, the pregnancy, everything—and the bottom line was, she had no one to blame but herself for winding up here again. Apparently, she never learned.
“We’ll figure it out.” The low assurance came from close behind her, and then his hands settled on her shoulders again. The urge to lean against him and let herself be supported by his big, sturdy frame nearly overwhelmed her. She dug deep for the strength her father seemed to think she possessed and stepped away. It took another moment, and a deep breath, before she could turn and face him. “There’s no ‘we.’ You’re leaving.”
A muscle clenched in his jaw. “I’ll be back.”
“After Hawaii? Or Seattle? Or another ten years? Excuse me if I don’t promise to wait this time.”
“It’s nothing like last time. I have to go, but—”
“Just like last time.”
“No. Trust me.”
“Trust? Seriously? Look where trusting you has gotten me.”
“That’s not fair. I didn’t know Ricky—”
“Ricky? You think this is about Ricky?” Her shoulders sagged. “Life’s not fair, Shane. I learned that lesson ten years ago.”
He was in motion before she could blink, closing the distance between them, and holding her in her spot with the sheer determination in his eyes. “I’ll be back. And when I get back, I’m going to fix this—all of it—whether you trust me or not.”
…
“I got good news, and bad news, Maguire. Which do you want first?”
Shane squeezed through a group of Japanese tourists at Lihue Airport to get a better look at the departing flights timetable. “I thought I had the good news. Least that’s what I’d call overseeing the execution of emergency plans that helped a key client’s new resort weather a tropical storm without a single major issue.”
“I call that business as usual,” Haggerty responded. “I expected nothing less.”
Shane stifled a curse. The board showed a two-hour delay in the departure time for his flight to Seattle. “Fine. I’ll take the good news.”
“The good news is Magnolia Grove wants the firm to finish the project. They’re happy with the plans you drafted, and they’re not interested in changing horses this far into the race.”
“That is good news. I’ll switch my ticket from Seattle to Norcross and be in Magnolia Grove by this evening.” He already knew how Haggerty would respond, but some masochistic part of him needed to hear it.
“Not so fast, hotshot. The city council respects your skills, but they think things might go smoother if someone else comes down to deal with the face-to-face interactions.”
Peel the spin off that statement and it meant, essentially, he’d been fired as the director of the project. The knowledge left a bad taste in his mouth. Even though he’d expected the outcome, it hurt. A lot. Twice now, he’d been booted from his hometown in the name of keeping the peace. Deep down, he’d harbored hope things would go his way, this time. But history did, indeed, repeat itself.
You really are washed up there. He swallowed that bitter pill and then, what the hell, decided he might as well find out which hungry young project manager had benefitted from his fuckup. “Who are you sending?”
“I’m going. This one’s not delegable.”
“Awesome. I’ve got the boss as my own personal janitor. I hope this concludes the bad news portion of this call.”
“Get real, Maguire. I haven’t gotten to the bad news yet.”
Well, shit. Was it worse than spending the last three days reaching out to Sinclair via text and voicemail, and getting no response? Worse than the text he’d finally received from her in the wee hours of the morning, his time, stating simply, “I’m pregnant,” which answered one question but left an assload of others unaddressed. Could the doctor determine viability? He figured they could, at least for now, because otherwise she would have sent a different text. Something like, “Adios, motherfucker. Thanks for nothing.” So yeah, they were on track to be parents. Was she excited? Scared? Was she okay? He had no fucking idea because she was stonewalling him.
And he was making it easy for her, because the whole goddamn universe was conspiring to pull him away. “What’s the bad ne
ws?”
“Despite getting soundly convicted in the court of public opinion for bullying Miss Smith, and basically asking for the beatdown you dished out, Pinkerton’s still got some clout around town. He convinced the planning commission to fast-track the golf course approval based on the plan and report he submitted.”
His heart sank into his boots. “They approved it?”
“Less than twenty-four hours after you left.”
Perfect. The one thing he thought he could count as an accomplishment evaporated like mist. Failure landed on him like the proverbial ton of bricks—one heavy blow at a time. Successfully completing the project? Fail. Proving to his hometown a Maguire boy could make something of himself? Fail. Protecting Sinclair’s home? Fail. Winning back the woman he loved? That was shaping up as the most spectacular fail of them all.
“From what I learned this morning,” Haggerty continued, unaware he’d thrown Shane into a tailspin, “Pinkerton and his cronies wasted no time getting a crew up there to start building up the banks.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Apparently, he said one—or three—of those shits out loud, because Haggerty made a sound of agreement. “Not our shit, at least, because our fingerprints aren’t on Pinkerton’s report. When ours comes in later this week, I’m confident it’s going to reflect everything you spelled out for them. Of course, by then they’ll have seen for themselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“April in Georgia, son. How long do you think it will be before they get a soaker?”
He did a search on his tablet. About twelve hours, according to the latest weather reports. Being right offered little comfort if it came at the expense of Sinclair’s home. As if he weren’t feeling impotent enough, fate tossed one more thing out there over which he had absolutely no control and made a mockery of his big talk about fixing everything. By the time Sinclair got home from New York, the barn would be flooded, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Or was there? He stared down the crowded terminal, to where TSA had stacked a low wall of checked luggage waiting to go through a security screening. He blinked and pulled his vision into focus. Ideas clicked into place in his mind and energized his tired system. Fuck that. You told her you’d fix this. Fix it.
“Change of plans, Haggerty. I can’t go to Seattle yet.”
He scanned the departing flights board and started calculating. He had calls to make, planes to catch. Over the line, his boss sounded surprisingly calm.
“You don’t say?”
“Personal emergency.”
“I wondered when this was coming. All right. Do what you gotta to do. Truth is, the client isn’t expecting you until next week anyway.”
The information put a pause in Shane’s planning. “How’d you know I was going to need personal time?”
“I remember the one that got away. I didn’t figure you for the type to let her slip through your fingers twice. Go get her, Maguire.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Then get your ass to Seattle. After Seattle, we’ll discuss training some of the project managers to take on more client-facing legwork, but in the meantime, our contract flies you home every weekend. I trust this time you’ll be wanting to take advantage of that perk?”
Shane grabbed his bag and shouldered his way to the ticket line. “That’s the plan.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Where are you?”
Sinclair adjusted the earpiece of her cell-phone headset. “My flight just landed. I’m at the airport.” She unlocked a luggage cart from the kiosk while on the other end of the line her sister relayed information to someone—presumably her husband.
“Beau says the roads are ugly thanks to this rain we’re having. Want to come over for dinner and spend the night? We finished setting up the second bedroom.”
Second bedroom, aka “nursery,” Sinclair thought and wondered if she’d be needing one of those in about nine months…and if so, where the hell she was going to put it? “Thanks, but no. I’ve got to get home.” While she still had one. She appreciated her sister’s offer. Savannah had been nothing but supportive since Sinclair had called her Thursday after her confrontation with Shane and dumped the disaster of her life all over her poor sister. She’d cried long-distance tears of joy when Sinclair had phoned from the middle of a Manhattan jewelry show yesterday morning to relay the news she’d received from her gynecologist—the pregnancy test was positive, and initial hormone levels suggested the baby was exactly where it should be.
“How are you feeling?”
Elated, sick, terrified, sick, hopeful, sick. “Fine.” She snagged the first of her two checked bags and loaded it on the cart.
“Have you talked to Shane yet?”
“No.” Savannah already knew she’d opted to inform Shane of the test result via text, and had made no secret of the fact she disagreed with that decision.
“He didn’t respond at all? Not a word?”
“He texted.” She grabbed her other bag from the carousel, stacked it on the cart, and wheeled toward the exit.
“Are you really going to make me ask?”
“Savannah, I’m standing in the middle of an airport, here.”
“I don’t care if you’re standing in the middle of the Vatican. What did he say?”
She sighed and pulled her cart to the side, accidentally cutting off a businessman in the process. He glared as he drew even with her. “You want to know what he said when he found out I was pregnant?” The businessman’s expression froze, and he hurried past as if she might throw a net over him. Men.
“Spill it.”
“This won’t take long. It was only two words.”
“Sinclair…”
“Okay. Okay.” She took a deep breath. For some stupid reason, her heart skipped a beat at the idea of saying the words out loud. “He texted, ‘Trust me.’”
Silence followed. Finally, she asked, “Did you hear me?”
Then she heard it. A sniffle.
“Don’t even.”
“I c-can’t help it,” her sister replied and sniffed again. “You’ll see. Anyway, as two-word replies go, that’s a pretty good one. Can you do it?”
“Trust him? I don’t know. He lied to me. I know that doesn’t necessarily sound like a big deal, given everything at stake now, but it is to me. How do I know he didn’t lie about everything?”
“Because you know,” her sister insisted quietly. “You knew how he felt about you ten years ago, and you know how he feels now. And underneath the completely understandable anger you’re experiencing, you know how you feel, too. For that reason alone, you need to give him the chance to explain.”
She closed her eyes and let the truth of her sister’s words sink in—the near inevitability of them. She’d loved Shane Maguire for ten years. He’d been her first. He’d be her last. It would always be him. “I know.” The words came out little more than a whisper.
“So, call him,” Savannah urged. “Call and talk things out.”
She looked at her watch. “I planned to call him tonight, anyway. My guess is he’s on a flight to Seattle right now, but even if he’s not, this isn’t a conversation I want to have on the road.”
“Especially not tonight. Be careful driving home. You’re headed into the mess, not away from it.”
Sinclair signed off with a promise to be careful and strode through desultory rain to where she’d parked her car. The blanket of gray overhead hung low. A few beams of sunlight broke through in isolated patches to the south, like rays of hope. Her gaze sought them out in her rearview mirror as she drove onto the freeway, and she tried not to read anything into the fact that the skyline in front of her churned with clouds—thick and foreboding. Not a shred of light in sight.
Afternoon gave way to evening as she drove home, but the murky sky and constant rain made it an uninspiring transition from dusk to dark. She didn’t normally mind the drive. Watching the sprawl of Atlanta thin out to suburbs, and then
farms, and then miles of greenbelt dotted by the occasional signs for gas, food, Jesus, or Lake Winnepesaukah helped her shed the stress of the business side of her job. But tonight she just wanted to get home—for however much longer it would be home to her. The lawyer she’d retained to give her an opinion on her chances of fighting Ricky’s termination of her land lease hadn’t been too encouraging. Yes, the Pinkerton Family Trust might owe her damages for entering into a land lease they knew, or should have known, violated local zoning codes, but at the end of the day, the code was the code, and it would control. He was looking into the specific language to determine if she had any wiggle room given she used her building for business and residential purposes, but ultimately, she’d probably have to move.
A couple months ago, her world had been settled. Stable. Within her control. Now the status of her home was just one more uncertainty in a life suddenly rife with them. Maybe she was going to be a mother. She’d do whatever she could to make it happen. Of that much she was certain. Maybe she would have the man she loved at her side. She’d do whatever she could to make that happen, too, even if it meant uprooting herself from the place she considered home. Shane didn’t. Yes, he’d let her believe their second chance included him coming back to stay, and he’d let her believe coming home was important to him, but considering how bleak the odds of her keeping her home looked at the moment, it could be the universe was trying to send her a message.
Maybe he didn’t come back to Magnolia Grove, but he came back to you.
The epiphany flew from her mind when she reached the rise of the hill where the Whitehall Plantation stood, and through the steady curtain of rain her headlights picked up the outline of trucks and equipment sitting in the distance, beside long, parallel walls of mounded dirt.
“That bastard.”
Ricky and team had wasted no time getting their golf course construction underway. Dammit, she still had over three weeks to move, according to his stupid notice. How much rain had they gotten? She slowed and took the turn to her drive. How much of it was being funneled down to her end of the creek? More importantly, how much water could her end of the creek hold before the banks overflowed?
Emergency Attraction (Love Emergency) Page 19
