Strangers When We Meet

by Marisa Carroll

  That made him a jerk, a loser and a wuss all rolled into one. He could have at least told her he’d gotten drunk on beer. Or Scotch. What normal red-blooded American male drowned his sorrows in champagne?

  F. Blake Weston, Esq., Wall Street shark on his way to the top of the food chain, brought low by a woman and a six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. He groaned and shut his eyes against the sparkles of sunlight that glinted off the water and sent tiny arrows of pain shooting through his brain.

  He’d have to apologize to the cinnamon-haired woman at the B and B. That is, if she didn’t turn on her heel and walk out of the room the next time she saw him. He’d showered and shaved and taken a handful of aspirin, but it hadn’t done much to improve his appearance, if his wavering reflection in the pool below the bridge was anything to go by.

  “Good morning, Mr. Weston. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “Oh, hell,” he muttered under his breath, turning slightly toward the silky voice that was every bit as intriguing now as it had been an hour ago. He grunted a reply and went back to staring at the water, trying to get his thoughts in order. The sooner the better didn’t necessarily mean right then and there.

  “You aren’t contemplating suicide, are you?” she asked cheerily, leaning both elbows on the stone wall and following his gaze into the water. “There are lots of rocks, I admit, but at this time of year the water’s only about two feet deep, even under the bridge.”

  “That would be just my luck if I were thinking about doing myself in. But even if I did jump and hit my head on a rock, I doubt it would hurt any more than it does right now.”

  “Champagne hangovers are the worst,” she said, nodding sagely, a hint of laughter lacing her words.

  Blake felt a shiver skitter up his spine. God, her voice was sexy. And tantalizingly familiar. Where had he heard it before? He chanced another glance in her direction. She was wearing a thick, softly woven sweater in shades of green over faded jeans that hugged her long legs and cupped her rounded bottom as though the fabric had been spun to their exact dimensions. She was looking at him, her generous mouth curved into a smile, her intelligent sherry-brown eyes narrowed against the sun. She was even more intriguing outdoors than in. He couldn’t be that far gone, he mused, if he could still recognize a good-looking woman when he saw one.

  She wasn’t beautiful, this Emma person. Not if you judged her by Heather’s supermodel standard. But pretty was too pale and tame a word to describe her. So was cute or anything else that came to mind. Intriguing. That one word fit her best. There was a scattering of freckles across her high cheekbones, and her nose just missed being snub. Her hair was between red and brown, the color of some exotic spice. Wavy and long, it was pulled off her face with gold clips and shot through with fiery highlights that hadn’t been as noticeable in the dining room as they were in the sunlight. She was tall and slender but nicely curved in all the right places, as he’d already noticed. The kind of woman any man would be proud to have by his side—or in his bed.

  Where the hell had that thought come from?

  He clamped his teeth together and put a rein on his overactive imagination. It had been little more than twenty-four hours since he’d found the woman he loved coming naked into their living room to meet another man, and here he was thinking about a perfect stranger in his bed.

  Well, maybe not quite the perfect stranger. She seemed to be laughing at him again.

  “At least you only drank a magnum of champagne. I remember my father telling me about a series of dinners he attended on his first diplomatic mission to one of those tiny, fabulously wealthy enclaves that only career foreign service personnel and jet-setting billionaires ever heard about before the Travel Channel came along. The dinners were hosted by twin brothers, hereditary princes who were politically powerful and huge rivals in business and love—” She broke off. “I’m sorry. I tend to get carried away sometimes telling stories. You’re probably not in the mood....”

  “No, go on,” he said, ignoring the voice inside his head that told him this was a perfect opportunity to break off the conversation and go slinking back to his room—the one with the big four-poster bed he should be sharing with Heather. “Your story sounds interesting, and I’m sure there’s a moral, or a temperance lecture, at the end of it somewhere.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think there’s a moral, and there’s certainly not a lecture. It’s just a good story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  She waited with the eagerness of a born storyteller with a captive audience. He leaned back against the stone parapet and crossed his arms over his chest. “Fire away.”

  “Okay. You asked for it.” Bracing her hands behind her, she levered herself onto the parapet. He watched, approving. The wall was a good four feet high. She was stronger than she looked. “The first night when it came time for the mandatory toasts, a magnum of champagne appeared at each place setting. One of the first things a rookie diplomat learns is not to insult his host. The princes were notorious sticklers for protocol, and my father and the others did their best to keep up with their host and his brother through round after round of flowery toasts. Sadly, the champagne was a very indifferent vintage, but needs must.”

  “The sacrifices one makes for his country.”

  “Exactly.” She smiled at him across the small distance that separated them. “The next night it was the second brother’s turn. And when it came time for the toasts, he produced jeroboams of the same indifferent vintage.”

  “A jeroboam. For each guest? I’m impressed.”

  “My father was horrified. His head was still pounding from the night before, but he did his best to make inroads on the stuff and couldn’t get out of bed until noon the next day. The third dinner was a nightmare. They were on the elder prince’s yacht, and you’ll never guess what he presented his guests.”

  “Two jeroboams each of cheap champagne?” He hadn’t the foggiest notion what bottle of champagne could be bigger than a jeroboam.

  “No. A Salmanazar each.”

  He might have an MBA from Harvard but he had no idea what she was talking about. “What the hell is that?”

  “Surely you know a Salmanazar is more than twice as large as a jeroboam?” She laughed again, and he found the note of self-deprecation endearing. “Oh, dear. My one year of finishing-school trivia is leaching out again, isn’t it. Or maybe, that’s what happens when you spend half your growing-up years in embassy compounds.”

  “Twice the size? Drinking one of those would kill a man.”

  “It nearly put my father in the hospital. He had nightmares of Balthazars and Nebuchadnezzars showing up at the table.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Blake said truthfully. “Aren’t they the names of biblical kings or wise men or something?”

  “They’re also gigantic bottles of wine. The Nebuchadnezzar holds fifteen liters of wine. Twenty regular bottles. I’ve never seen one, but I’m sure they’re impressive.”

  “And give the waiter a hernia pouring them.”

  “Exactly. Drinking more than two glasses of champagne gives me a headache,” she confessed.

  “Tell me about it.” He turned and rested his elbows on the stone wall, staring into the water. “I doubt there’s a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne in the entire state of Indiana,” he said in all honesty.

  “How did you find your way to Cooper’s Corner from Indiana?” she asked, obligingly changing the subject.

  “I live in Manhattan now.” If he kept the answers short and sweet, maybe he wouldn’t make a bigger fool of himself than he already had.

  “Manhattan for me, too, the last few years,” she said. “Before that, all over the world. Were...were you there when the towers fell?”

  He nodded shortly. It was still hard for him to talk about that terrible day. He’d lost too many friends. More
even than in war. Except, of course, it was a war, just a different kind from the ones he’d served in in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

  “Me, too.” She fell silent.

  “How does your story end?” he asked, steering the conversation back into shallow water.

  When she spoke, she sounded relieved. She, too, had memories she didn’t want to dredge up in the light of the late fall morning. “After that night, the embassy liaison officer took the prince’s major domo aside and explained that it was unnecessary to be quite so...generous. Most Americans, he explained, weren’t capable of...assimilating...so much culture at one sitting. Both princes laughed and congratulated themselves on one-upping the foreigners, and each other, and were perfectly satisfied to go back to serving a single bottle at each place setting. They’d made the Americans look slightly foolish and got rid of a lot of poor champagne that was cluttering up their cellars at the same time. It took my father a week to recover from the hangover.”

  “All in the service of Uncle Sam.”

  “Well, at least the State Department. And yes, you’re right. My dad’s boss said he was ready to give his all for his country, but he damned well wasn’t going to ruin his stomach with cheap champagne. Not without drawing hardship pay.”

  Her laugh was carefree and bubbly, as heady as a good champagne should be. “I bet they didn’t teach you to laugh like that at your finishing school.”

  “They didn’t teach me much of anything. Can you imagine—my parents paid thousands of dollars to send me to a school that taught such nonsense but didn’t even offer calculus or physics on the curriculum?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and her tone was challenging. “Are you suggesting my parents didn’t have my best interests at heart when they sent me to St. Catherine’s?”

  He lifted one hand as though to ward off an attack. He found he was enjoying their verbal give-and-take despite his pounding head. “No. I’m sure they thought the school would benefit you greatly, just as I’m sure you made a stink about going.”

  The sternness around her generous mouth relaxed, and she smiled again. “You’re right. I did make a stink. A big one. But St. Catherine’s wasn’t about to change their curriculum for a student whose math grades were mediocre at best, which made my objections somewhat suspicious in the administration’s eyes. They politely asked my parents to enroll me, posthaste, in a school where I could fulfill my ambition to major in math and enter MIT.”

  “MIT?”

  She cleared her throat. “I was trying to make a point. My paternal grandmother was mortified. St. Catherine’s was her alma mater. I was the fifth generation of her family to go there and the only one not to graduate and enter into an advantageous marriage.”

  “You’re not married?” He’d already noticed the absence of a ring.

  “No.” This time she cut him off. “I went to live with my mother’s parents. I graduated from high school in Connecticut. Then I went to India to be with my parents for a year before I came back to New York to go to college.”

  “NYU? Columbia?” He didn’t usually spend this much time in small talk with a woman. Hell, he rarely had time for small talk, period, but he didn’t want her to go.

  “Columbia. I’m a psych major.”

  He groaned. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” she asked, slipping off the parapet. “My storytelling prowess? I can assure you I didn’t learn that in college. It comes naturally from my grandfather.”

  He shook his head, watching as she dusted off the seat of her jeans with both hands. His breath caught for a quick, hard second in his throat and he had to pull his eyes away before the hardness moved lower in his body. “No. Your knack of asking just the right questions to keep a guy talking whether he wants to or not.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s wasn’t at all what I was trying to do.” She turned and took a step away from him in the direction of the village.

  He reached out and grabbed her hand, circling her wrist with his fingers. “That’s not what I meant to say.” He’d boxed himself into a corner. If there was any way he was going to salvage the situation, it would have to involve telling her the truth. “I...it’s just... It’s this damned headache and the fact that the last day or so—” He broke off.

  “You had your heart broken,” she said softly.

  “Maybe not broken.” He gave a short laugh that came out more of a growl. “But it’s beat up pretty bad. I’ll get over it. I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  She looked at her hand, encircled by his larger, stronger fingers. He supposed he should let her go, back off and give her space, but he didn’t want to, so he held on to her. “I do tend to talk a lot. And to ask nosy questions. You’re not in the mood to talk about your broken heart. I can understand that. Although, if everyone felt that way, I’d be out of a job—” She caught herself up short.

  “Look, I told you I don’t have a broken heart.”

  She made a noncommittal sound. “I think a hangover cure’s in order, though.”

  “A cure? I’ve already taken as much aspirin as the law allows.”

  She laughed again, and the sound carried over the bridge and toward the village. “No, not aspirin. A real cure. Guaranteed hundred percent effective. Made of all kinds of strange and wonderful things.”

  “No thanks, I’m not up to some quack cure.”

  “It’s not a quack cure. It works. And you’ll be glad to hear it’s the invention of a real, authentic medical doctor.” She looked at him, and the sparkle was back in her rich brown eyes and a smile curved her generous mouth. His heart thudded in his chest. Lord, she had a kissable mouth. He wondered what she would say if he blurted out the fact that he’d be willing to bet every cent he had that kissing her would cure his hangover for sure—and maybe his broken heart. “I think it’s time you met my grandparents. You’ll like them.” She hesitated and squared her shoulders, her glance sliding past his to a point somewhere next to his left ear. “Visiting them is the reason I’m here in Cooper’s Corner this week.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  TELLING BLAKE WESTON she was in Cooper’s Corner to visit her grandparents wasn’t exactly a lie. She was there partly for that reason. It was the other part Emma didn’t want him to know. That she was supposed to be there to plan a party to announce her engagement to one of the town’s favorite sons. Or at least the favorite son of Lori and Burt Tubb, the owners of Tubb’s Café.

  She didn’t want to talk about her heartache and indecision to a stranger. But she’d almost done just that. She was acting as desperate and needy as the people who called her show. The moment Blake Weston had touched her, any semblance of reasonable thought had left her brain, and she was functioning on pure emotion. She wanted to tell him she knew how he felt, how he hurt...and how angry she was for him—and for herself.

  That’s what shocked her most. The realization that the terrible knot of coldness inside her wasn’t pain. It was anger, pure and simple. That’s why, even though she’d denied it to herself long before this moment, she’d begun to doubt whether she truly loved Daryl. If she did, shouldn’t she be sad and weepy and feeling as if her world had come to an end? Instead, she felt her hands curl into fists. She’d like to poke him in the nose. She wished she’d stuck around that awful night she’d seen him at the restaurant and done just that. Or maybe pulled the shimmery silver hair of the woman whose breasts had brushed his arm, whose eyes had stared so intimately into his—

  “Hey, at least give me a chance to put on the gloves.” Blake raised his free hand in a defensive stance as though they were getting ready for a round of boxing. He sounded as if he was only half joking. “I know I’m not at my best at the moment, but—”

  Emma blinked, bringing his rugged face into focus. “No. No. I’m sorry. I’
m not angry with you. I...I was thinking of someone else.” Her hand was still wrapped in his much bigger one. She tugged it loose, feeling heat rise in her cheeks. She should have done that right away. She started walking. “C’mon, let’s get you something for that hangover. My grandparents’ home is just up this street.”

  It only took him half a dozen long strides to gain a step on her. He turned slightly toward her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have grabbed you that way. I missed that session in sensitivity class, I guess.” He angled his head enough to catch her eye. He was trying to look chastened and humbled and not doing a very good job of it, unless he was trying to look like a chastened and humbled highwayman or pirate.

  She couldn’t help herself. She smiled. “You never took sensitivity training.”

  “I beg your pardon. Everyone at Braxton, Cartwright and Wheeler, from the mail room boy to the partners themselves, has been enlightened to the signs and symptoms of lingering patriarchal attitudes, as well as the dangers of potential lawsuits for sexual harassment,” he added dryly.

  “It happens,” Emma replied. She’d had enough women call her show to complain, as well as some men. She told them all the same thing. Start a paper trail. Take it to the proper authorities. Follow through. She even had one or two callbacks to tell her the advice had worked.

  “I know it does,” Blake replied. “I offended you again. It was a pretty lame joke. I’m really batting zero this morning.”

  “That said,” Emma continued briskly, “I’m not one of those women who hollers rape or sexual harassment every time a man touches her. And I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt about being off your game until after you’ve recovered from your hangover.”