“I never noticed this ruthless streak in you before, Eliot.” He tapped her on the end of the nose and started for the sofa, munching popcorn as he went.
Ellie couldn’t believe he’d done that. Tapped her on the nose as if she was an adoring puppy. Like she was Tori! Before she quite realized what she meant to do, Ellie had grabbed for a non-weapon and flung it at his broad and cocky shoulders. The stuffed purple bunny hit him square in the middle of the back and flopped harmlessly to the floor.
Ross turned slowly, his dark gold eyebrows arched in surprise, a fluffy piece of popcorn perched between his thumb and forefinger and held a bare inch from his mouth. His gaze dropped from Ellie to the floor, then with an annoying lack of response, he bent to pick up Purple Bunny. “Hey, I haven’t seen this little guy in a while,” he said as he lifted the tattered, flop-eared, one-eyed, half-stuffed rabbit off the floor. Turning the bunny over, Ross dusted him off, as if a bit of carpet fuzz would stand out amid all the stains the toy had accumulated over the years. “I see he’s still sporting his Pat Paulsen For President! button.”
“He’s a lifetime member of the League of Women Voters, too,” Ellie said on a sigh, wishing she hadn’t thrown the toy at Ross, wishing he didn’t know so much about the significance of Purple Bunny. The stuffed rabbit had come into her life through Lana and Kelly. None of them could really remember who had originally given the gift to whom, but it had become Lana’s and Kelly’s lucky charm and, when it was her turn to keep him, Purple Bunny became just one more thing Ellie had to keep track of. Not that she wasn’t fond of the little fella. She just didn’t like anyone else knowing she could be that sentimental.
Except Ross knew.
She could usually fool Lana and Kelly with her grumbling about believing a dumb bunny could bring luck, but Ross knew. Damn it, he knew. “Lana’s had him the past several months and I sort of hoped she’d forget about passing him on to me, but over the weekend, at her wedding, she tossed. him to me and, idiot that I am, I caught him.”
“I’d have caught him, too, if I’d known you were going to toss him at me. That’s no way to treat an old friend, El, and you know it.” Ross held Purple Bunny against his chest, ignoring the miscellaneous clutter of nostalgia pinned to the ratty fur. “I take it you wanted to get my attention.”
Ellie lifted her chin. “Don’t tap me on the nose like you’re my benevolent great uncle or something. You know how I feel about that sort of thing.”
He frowned. “You didn’t used to be so touchy.”
“You didn’t used to be so—” She stopped right there. Was she trying to pick a fight with him? When their time together was already on short notice? “Look, it’s late. Maybe you ought to go home.” Her glance fell to the bag of popcorn in his hand. “Take the popcorn with you and go home to your fiancée. Before she shows up here to get you.”
There was a flicker of concern in his eyes, as if for an instant, he weighed love against friendship and wondered if he might have to choose between them. But then he dropped onto the sofa again, letting Purple Bunny slide down to sit beside him. So there they sat, the two men in her life. One almost out of stuffing and the other stuffing himself with popcorn. For all their shortcomings, she loved them both. With a shake of her head, she plopped herself into the shabby comfort of the armchair, where she could keep an eye on them.
But it seemed only fair to offer a warning. “She will come after you, Ross.”
“No, she won’t.” His smile was the thing Ellie loved best of all. Mischievous, sexy, devil-may-care. He tossed more popcorn in his mouth and looked around. “So, tell me about Lana’s wedding to... Who did she marry?”
“Blake Warner,” Ellie supplied. “You’ll like him, Ross. He’s a really nice guy.”
“He’d have to be if Lana married him. But I always thought she and Johnny were a match made in heaven.”
“So did everyone else. Me included.” She stretched out her hand and he, obligingly, put some popcorn in it. “But heaven-made matches come in a distant second to Las Vegas ones, it seems.” Ellie related the tale of how prim-and-proper Lana had left to marry her childhood sweetheart, gotten stranded and pregnant in Las Vegas, and returned to Bachelor Falls sans any sign of Johnny and followed promptly by Blake. “You should have been here last month,” Ellie concluded. “The Bachelor Falls busybodies were working overtime trying to find Lana’s baby a proper father.”
“Are you sure the Bostians didn’t abduct the Lana we know and substitute someone more adventurous? I would never have thought Lana would... But I suppose, all’s well that ends well, huh?” With a shake of his head, he tossed more popcorn into his mouth. “So, when’s the baby due?”
“August.”
“A baby, wow. That’s hard to imagine. I’m sure Lana will be a wonderful mom—more like your mother than mine, I hope—but well, you know what I mean.”
“It isn’t like we’re all still eighteen, Ross. You said it yourself tonight. ‘There comes a time for a man to settle down,’ you said.” She swallowed a piece of popcorn in her mouth, sucking off the saltiness. “Even Kelly’s getting married next month.”
“I heard. You’re going to have to get on the stick, Ellie. Otherwise you’ll end up being named honorary aunt to all your friends’ kids.”
“Except yours. I’d have to be called Kaunt Ellie to match your three darling little K-kiddies.”
He shifted uncomfortably, knocking Purple Bunny into a floppy lump beside him. “Tori gets a little carried away with her planning. We’ve barely even talked about having kids.”
Ellie arched her eyebrows playfully. “You’re having three children, Ross. One boy, one girl, one undecided. You might get to name the dog, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
He set the bag of popcorn aside and propped Purple Bunny upright again. “I’m not going to spend the entire week defending Tori every time you don’t agree with something she says. So let’s just get this out in the open right now and put it behind us. Because, come Saturday, I’m getting married.”
And that pretty much summed up the one thing she disagreed with most, Ellie thought. But instead of saying so, she just shook her head. “One of the great things about our friendship has always been that we can disagree with impunity. There’s nothing you need to defend to me. If you love Tori, then I’ll love her, too. It’s that simple.”
“But...?”
That was the problem with having a friend who knew you so well. They could see through a lie at forty paces. “No buts. You’re getting married and I’ll adjust to the idea. I will.”
He honestly looked surprised by the thought that his decision effected her. “Are you upset because I’m marrying Tori?”
“Upset is too strong a word, Ross.” Concerned, worried, annoyed...any one of those would have been acceptable. But upset? No, she was not upset. “I’m a little—”
“Concerned?” he suggested.
“No,” she lied, then blundered on before he could question it. “It’s not that I expected you to stay single forever, you know. I intend to get married someday, myself. It’s just knowing that we’re both changing and our friendship is going to have to change, too.”
He reached for the bag, but his hand paused in middive for more popcorn. “You worry too much,” he said finally. “You and I go back too far and know too many of each other’s secrets to lose touch. Fifty years from now, our friendship will be as strong as ever, you’ll see. I’ll even convince Tori that we should name the undecided child after you. T. S. Eliot Kilgannon has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
“Not enough Ks,” she said, remembering the times she’d daydreamed of how it might feel to have that name as her own. Not that she’d ever really thought it possible. She frowned as she noticed he’d begun rubbing his neck again as if it ached. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I like a little variety in my alphabet. So sue me.”
“No, what’s wrong with your neck? You keep rubbing at it like it really hurts.
”
“Just a muscle spasm. It’s been acting up more than usual the past few months.”
About three and a half months, would be Ellie’s guess. The exact amount of time he’d been engaged to Tori. But she wasn’t going to point that out.
She didn’t have to. “It’s been getting worse ever since Tori and I set the date. All the extra stress of planning a wedding, I imagine.” He stopped rubbing his neck and reached into the bag for more popcorn.
Ellie sighed and wrestled her way up from the depths of the armchair. She walked to the old desk in the corner, the one her mother used as a catchall for anything and everything she didn’t know where else to put. Finding what she was looking for, Ellie walked over and put it next to Ross on the sofa. “There,” she said. “Maybe that will help.”
He looked at the small, plastic cow and munched some more popcorn. “I’ll bet your fingers are really tired by the time you get a gallon of milk out of her,” he said with a grin.
“I use a milking machine.” She picked up the cow and showed him the rollers underneath. “It’s a massager,” she explained. “I thought it might help that pain in your neck.”
He ran the plastic massager across the back of his neck in a quick experiment. “You’re right. I can feel the pain beginning to moo-ve away.”
“Give me that!” She took it from his hand, resolutely refusing to smile at his nonsense. “This is the way you do it.” She knelt beside him on the sofa and used the massager to knead his shoulder muscles with short, rolling strokes. “See?”
“Mmm.” Ross closed his eyes and leaned forward, turning slightly so she could reach a larger area of his back. “Must be a one-owner massager,” he said. “Old Bessie didn’t respond this well to me. Can you get her to graze just a little lower?”
Moving the massager in lower circles across his shoulders, Ellie laid her hand on his arm to brace herself as she leaned closer. The muscles in his arm flexed hard beneath her touch and her palm grew warm against his skin. She found a soft, stealthy pleasure in the repetitive, even motion and a faint fascination with the slow, steady rise and fall of Ross’s back as he breathed in and out. In. Out.
“You could make a good living doing this, Ellie,” he said, his voice relaxing into a deeper baritone. “How come you never told me you have hidden talents?”
“Same reason I never told you about the time I thought I wanted us to be more than friends.”
He tensed beneath the back and forth motion of the massager and opened his eyes. “When was that?”
She pushed against his arm, feeling the corded strength under her fingertips, and sat back on her heels, dropping the cow massager into Purple Bunny’s lap. “When was what?” she asked, all innocence.
He frowned at her and again set the popcorn bag aside. “When did you look upon my handsome visage and realize your heart was mine for the asking?”
Ellie wrinkled her nose. “Oh, it happened a long, long time ago. Before you had a visage at all. And, truth be known, I believe it was the time you introduced me to Freda’s blackberry wine.”
He grinned, probably as much with affection for the Kilgannon’s longtime housekeeper and cook as at the remembered—and overly nostalgic—taste of her homemade liquors. “You’re pulling my strings, Miss T. S. Eliot Applegate. And that is not a nice thing to do to a man who is willing to admit he once found you so irresistible he broke up with his girlfriend, only to learn to his dismay that you preferred a much inferior male.”
Ellie looked at him, surprised and wantonly pleased. “You are such a liar, Ross.”
“If I was going to lie about something like that, Ellie, believe me, I’d paint myself in a more flattering light.”
The undertone of truth unaccountably made her uncomfortable. “Which supposedly inferior male did I prefer?”
“I’ve blocked the weasel’s name from my memory,” he said, smiling slyly as he crunched on a popcorn kernel. “It’s too painful to recall. But I do remember the woman I scorned for you.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet you do.” Ellie shifted her weight and stretched her legs until her bare feet rested on the coffee table. “Considering that you were always the one to break up with your girlfriends, you could name any one of them and be reasonably safe from argument.”
“It was Stacy Halloran,” he said, as if there could be no doubt. “I broke her heart and then...” He paused to sigh before popping another kernel into his mouth. “...and then you broke mine.”
The ease of long familiarity returned as quickly as it had vanished and Ellie was once again comfortable with his teasing. “As I remember, you broke up with Stacy Halloran and started dating Belinda Morgan the very next day.”
“Belinda was strictly rebound. I never really loved her.”
“You never really loved any of them, Ross.” She laughed. “Remember the time you were determined to elope with—oh, jeez, what was her name?”
He looked pleasantly blank. “Give me a hint. What did she look like?”
Ellie crossed her arms and gazed at him with amused patience. “Let’s see if I can remember,” she teased. “Short, blond, big blue eyes...does that ring any bells?”
He stopped smiling. “You just described Tori,” he said in his let’s-not-go-there tone of voice.
“I just described a girl you were passionately in love with during Christmas break of our junior year in high school. You surely see some similarities between the girls you’ve dated and the one you’re going to marry?”
He put the empty popcorn bag on the table and dusted his hands on his jeans. “Not really. Coloring, maybe. I’ve always been partial to blondes, I suppose, but you don’t have to act as if they were all interchangeable.”
Ellie stared at him. “That was not my meaning at all, Ross, and you know it.”
He held her gaze for a moment and, for the first time, Ellie considered the possibility that their friendship had already changed, had already veered onto a path which would take them away from each other.
“You’d be perfectly within your rights to boot me off your comfy sofa, Eliot.” Ross’s eyes held an apology, as well as a plea for peace. “I don’t know why I’m suddenly so sensitive over every little thing you say about Tori. The only explanation I can offer is that it’s terribly important to me that the two of you get along.”
“It’s important to me, too, Ross.”
“So you’re not going to kick me off the couch?”
She shook her head. “I’ve already beat your socks off tonight. So I’m feeling rather gracious. When I want you to leave, I’ll point at the door and you’ll go.”
He put his hand over hers, there on the cushion, with Purple Bunny as chaperone, and Ellie felt a shiver of longing twist deep inside her heart. Once he’d thought of her as more than a friend. Once—or twice—she’d thought of him as a friend who might become something more. But their once had never coincided and for just a moment she wondered what might have happened if it had.
Of course, this was better. She’d trade a dozen what-ifs for the certainty that Ross was, and always would be, her friend. “I think maybe we’re both feeling a little threatened by what marriage will do to our relationship. It has to change, you know. It wouldn’t be fair to Tori if it didn’t.”
“I know.” He squeezed her hand and picked up the popcorn bag. “Popcorn’s gone.”
“It’s late.”
He looked at her hopefully. “One more bag?”
“Ross...”
“Thanks, Ellie. You’re saving me from certain starvation.” He got up and headed for the kitchen, crumpling the empty bag into a ball, tossing it in the air and catching it with one hand. “Got anything to drink with it? Some milk, maybe?”
“I milked the cow just this morning,” she called after him, more glad than she wanted to admit that he was in no hurry to go home to his fiancée. “Check the fridge.”
As he disappeared into the kitchen, Ellie heard the aggressive buzz of a sports car as it turn
ed onto the block and zipped down the street, passing the house in fourth gear. From the kitchen, she heard Ross set the microwave and open the refrigerator, whistling as he prepared his snack. Outside, the car braked, its gears grating as it suddenly backed down the street nearly as fast as it had gone up. Ellie watched the twin headlights cut a swatch of light across the porch and heard the sudden quiet as the motor whirred to an abrupt stop in her driveway. With a sigh, she picked up Purple Bunny and arranged his long, sad ears. “Your designated driver is here,” she called to Ross.
He stopped whistling and appeared in the doorway a second later. “What?”
“Tori’s here.”
He looked momentarily dismayed, his gaze switching from Ellie to the door and back. “What’s she doing here?”
“Just a guess,” Ellie said dryly, “but I imagine she’s merely being thoughtful.”
Ross met and held her gaze.
“Or maybe she wanted to make sure popcorn was all we were sharing.”
There was no guilty start, no blink of surprise, nothing to indicate that the same idea hadn’t occurred to him as well. “She doesn’t eat popcorn,” he said.
Ellie didn’t comment. She just gave Purple Bunny an unenthusiastic tap on his frayed nose and went to open the door for Tori.
Chapter Five
“Where’d you pick up the Beamer?” Chip asked when Ellie walked into the office the next morning. “Thought you didn’t hold with foreign-made cars.”
“It beats walking.”
“And every other means of getting to work.” Chip moved himself and his admiration to the window. “How come you’re driving Ross’s car?”
Dropping the keys onto her desk, Ellie glanced at the shiny, black BMW she’d just parked out front. “It was blocking my driveway this morning.”
Chip turned to look at her with a huge grin, obviously imagining only one trade worthy of getting to drive the BMW. “Is he sleeping over at your house?”
A Bachelor Falls Page 6
