Mischief danced, cornflower-blue, in Brody’s eyes. He arched one eyebrow and waited, calm as a seasoned fisherman with a trout on the hook. “But not immediately, mind you,” Carolyn clarified. “I mean, the sensible thing to do would be to forget the whole stupid idea and pretend we never had this conversation. But—”
“But…?” Brody prompted, his voice husky.
He was still standing too close.
“But I’m not feeling very sensible at the moment,” Carolyn admitted, on a rush of breath.
“Me, either,” Brody said, and the twinkle was back in his eyes. “But one of us has to be strong, here. Somebody has to be responsible. So I’m telling you flat-out, Carolyn Simmons—no matter how badly you may want me, I’m not available.”
Carolyn smiled wryly, calm on the outside, every nerve jangling on the inside. “Thanks for straightening me out on that score,” she said, pleasantly surprised that she was able to strike a breezy note. “What happens now?”
“We do the thing up right,” Brody said, sounding confident. “Starting with a few ground rules.” “Ground rules?”
“Yeah,” Brody told her. “No sex, for the time being anyhow. And both of us can see other people if that’s what we want to do.”
Carolyn hoped the pang that last stipulation gave her didn’t show on her face. She was sort of seeing Bill Venable, and sort of not seeing him, but she already knew he’d never be more than a friend to her, nor she to him.
Bill loved Angela.
And she, God help her, was still hung up on Brody.
“What?” Brody asked, when she didn’t say anything.
“If you want to go out with Joleen Williams,” Carolyn said loftily, “that’s certainly your prerogative.”
The twinkle in Brody’s eyes turned to temper. “Did I, at any point in time, say I wanted to date Joleen?”
“You didn’t have to,” Carolyn said. She folded her arms. “It’s quite obvious.”
“I don’t know how you figure that,” Brody said, clearly irritated. “Do you see Joleen standing around here somewhere, waiting for me to help her on with her coat or pin a corsage to her party dress so we can go out on the town?”
It just went to show a person, Carolyn thought, how quickly a spring breeze could turn into an ill wind. Not more than a minute before, she and Brody had had all they could do not to have sex right there in his brother’s kitchen. Now they were practically at each other’s throats.
“You’re the one who wanted to keep their options open when it came to dating,” Carolyn pointed out, proud of being—okay, sounding—so collected and reasonable.
“And you’re the one who’s already dating,” Brody bit out.
So he did know about Bill. She’d wondered.
“Look at that,” Carolyn retorted, flinging her hands out from her sides because she had to do something with the buildup of energy that wouldn’t constitute felony assault. “I was already playing by the ground rules before I even knew there were any!”
Brody glared at her.
Carolyn glared back.
One of the dogs gave a mournful little whimper, as though the poor creature had just spotted a mushroom cloud billowing on the horizon.
“What kind of guy is so hard up for a date that he joins an outfit like Friendly Faces?” Brody finally demanded. That familiar muscle in his cheek was bunched up again.
“One like you, I guess,” Carolyn took great delight in saying. “Or are you going to claim it was your horse who signed up for a membership?”
Brody leaned in, his nose nearly touching hers. “This is why we need ground rules,” he said.
“I think we need a referee,” Carolyn replied. “Why don’t we just call it a day, Brody? Why don’t we cut our losses and run?”
That was when he rested his hands on her shoulders, bent his head and kissed her, lightly at first, then hard and deep, with tongue.
The effect was tectonic, and she was literally breathless when the kiss finally ended.
“That’s why we’re not going to cut our losses and run,” Brody all but growled. “Get your things, Carolyn. I’m taking you home.”
She should have been glad about that, but, oddly, she was stung instead.
She did return to the bathroom, however, collect her original clothing, now rolled up in a soggy clump, and stomped back to the kitchen, where Brody was waiting, with his truck keys already in hand.
Talk about anxious to get rid of somebody.
Carolyn squelched a crazy urge to cry and marched out through the back door, which Brody obligingly held for her.
The two dogs followed, eager, like all their species, for any chance to go anywhere.
When Brody reached his truck, he went immediately to the passenger side and opened the door. Once Carolyn was in, he hoisted the dogs, one at a time, into the rear part of the extended cab.
Carolyn fixed her gaze straight ahead, silently noting that the windshield needed washing.
Brody got behind the wheel, slammed his door shut and cranked the key in the ignition, causing the starter to make an ominous grinding sound.
“This is going to keep happening,” he told her tersely, “until we go to bed and get each other out of our systems.”
Carolyn shifted in the confines of her seat belt and would not look at him. “Way to sweep a girl off her feet,” she snapped. “Take me home, Brody. Now.”
The truck made another odd noise when he shifted it into gear. “Fine,” he replied. “I’ll be glad to take you home. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Conner and Tricia are swinging naked from the chandeliers or something, but I guess that’s a risk you’ll just have to run.”
Carolyn blushed so hard it hurt. What if Tricia and Conner were still somewhere in Natty McCall’s wonderful old Victorian house, thinking they had the place to themselves and, well, whooping it up?
In the next moment, though, Brody’s words took root and blossomed into an image—Tricia, six months pregnant, swinging nude from one of the light fixtures, like the daring young girl on the flying trapeze.
Carolyn laughed. She couldn’t help it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Brody was grinning. “What?” he asked.
“I was just thinking about the chandelier thing,” Carolyn admitted.
That made Brody chuckle. “It brings one hell of a picture to mind, all right,” he agreed. “My guess is, my brother and his lovely bride are probably behaving themselves again by now. Tricia mentioned that they were headed out to dinner.”
“Are we crazy?” Carolyn asked, very softly and after long consideration. Every silence that fell between them seemed to throb with things that wanted saying and couldn’t be said. “The way we go from being this close to having sex to fighting like a pair of feral cats in a back alley—what is that, Brody?”
He thought before he answered. Finally said, “I think they call it passion.”
With that, he reached over and gave her thigh a squeeze, about midway between her knee and her hip.
Carolyn tilted her head back, closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer that Brody didn’t know he’d turned her insides to molten lava with a single touch.
HE’D MEANT TO GO straight to the shop—Brody would always think of the place as Natty McCall’s house, no matter what they turned it into—but darned if his truck didn’t turn in at River’s Bend of its own volition.
Carolyn didn’t protest, or comment. She just turned her head toward the rising house and since Brody couldn’t see her face, he was left to guess at what might be going on inside her head.
The construction crew was finished for the day, loading toolboxes into the backs of pickup trucks, calling to each other, laughing.
For some reason, the sight stirred up some lonesome feelings inside Brody.
That sensation of being on the outside looking in was getting old.
Or maybe it was this confounding woman sitting in the seat just across the console, dete
rmined to say as little to him as possible.
The workmen all waved and smiled, and Brody greeted them with nods as he drove up what would one day be a paved driveway. For now, though, it was still a dirt road, thinly peppered with gravel.
“Tricia mentioned that you mean to go on calling the property River’s Bend,” Carolyn said, her head still turned toward the house, her tone bemused, or maybe wistful. “She seemed pleased by that.”
“River’s Bend is as good a name for the place as any other,” Brody said. “Besides, I liked Tricia’s dad. Most everybody liked Joe McCall.”
“Tricia misses him,” Carolyn observed, finally looking at Brody. He couldn’t read her eyes, but it didn’t matter, because she was so damn beautiful, in the late afternoon light, a gilded creature wearing somebody else’s clothes.
This nobility crap, Brody decided glumly, was overrated. By now, if he’d pressed his advantage earlier, in the ranch-house kitchen, they’d probably be recovered from round one and ready to move on to round two. Or even three.
“That’s natural,” Brody said, in belated reply to Carolyn’s remark.
“Do you miss your dad?” Carolyn asked, as he parked the truck in front of the partially completed three-car garage and shut off the engine.
She sure did have a way of coming out of left field, this woman.
Brody sighed, shook his head. “I never really knew my father,” he answered honestly. “Conner and I were just babies when he died, and our mother didn’t live long after we were born. When I think of parents, I think of Kim and Davis, and I’m sure my brother does, too.”
He opened the truck door and would have gone around to help Carolyn out of the rig—he’d been raised to treat a lady with respect and courtesy, as had Conner and their cousin, Steven—but she was over the running board with her feet planted firmly in the rocky dirt before he could get there.
He took Valentino and Barney from the back and let them circle, as dogs will do when they’ve been confined for a while, sniffing the ground and looking for a likely place to let fly.
“What about you, Carolyn?” he asked.
“What about me?” she challenged, but mildly, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand.
“You asked me about my dad. I’m asking you about yours.”
“Never knew him,” Carolyn said, like it didn’t matter.
This seemed important, though Brody wasn’t sure why. Important enough to press the issue, in fact.
“What about your mother?”
She met his gaze then, and the expression he saw in her eyes was so bleak that he felt it like a punch in the gut. “Just a memory of somebody driving away and leaving me behind,” she said.
Brody hadn’t wept since the day the Lisa and Justin were buried, side by side, in a windswept little graveyard up in Montana, but he wanted to then.
Didn’t, though.
They were both quiet for a few moments, neither one moving.
“This is quite a house,” Carolyn said, at long last.
Brody rummaged around inside himself and came up with a flimsy grin. He was proud of that house, saw its conception and construction as the first really grown-up things he’d ever done, and showing it to Carolyn made him feel good.
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “It will be, if it’s ever fin ished.”
“Show me where you plan to hang the Weaver,” Carolyn said, her still-wet boots making a squishy crunch in the gravel as she approached the front door.
He was a few moments remembering what she meant by the term, but then it came to him that she was referring to Primrose Sullivan’s picture, the one he’d bought at the shop and insisted she deliver. He’d have to keep it over at the cabin for a while, of course, but he did have a spot picked out for it.
The doors and locks had been installed, and Brody found the key among the others on his ring.
The inside of the house smelled like fresh lumber and new masonry, and the windows were all glassed in. He flipped a switch, expecting nothing, and the track lighting high over their heads came on, throwing the massive living room into an oddly forlorn relief.
He was going to be lonely here, he realized. He was lonely everywhere.
Brody shook off the thought, smiled at Carolyn and gestured toward the space over the living room fireplace.
“There,” he said. “That’s where the picture’s going to wind up.”
Carolyn seemed to see the piece hanging there. She smiled, albeit a little wanly, her hands resting on her hips. “Perfect,” she said.
Brody cupped a hand under her elbow, loosely, wanting her to look at him, not wanting her to turn skittish and spook. “Now that we’ve established the ground rules,” he began, pausing once to clear his throat, “there’s the part that comes after.”
She held his gaze, and she deserved credit for that, because it was so obvious that she wanted to look away instead. “You’re a persistent man,” she said, very softly.
Brody had never wanted to kiss a woman—Carolyn or anyone else—as badly as he wanted to now.
At the same time, he knew it might be the mistake of a lifetime if he went ahead and did it.
“Persistent doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said, when he figured he could trust himself to speak. “You’ve never met a man with more stick-to-it in him than I have, except for Conner, maybe, and he’s taken.”
“Yes,” Carolyn agreed, almost in a murmur, her whole attention focused, it seemed to Brody, on his mouth. Her voice was dreamlike, almost sleepysounding. “Conner is definitely taken.”
Brody wondered, momentarily, if Carolyn had had a thing for Conner, before he married her best friend. Wondered if by chance her attraction to him was a case of transference.
But that was crazy. Before Lisa’s call that fateful night, seven years back, Carolyn had been in love with him, Brody—hadn’t she?
This is me standing here, he wanted to say. This is me, Brody Creed. Not Conner. Brody.
But, of course, he didn’t, though the decision couldn’t be chalked up to good sense; he was just plain thunderstruck by the possibility.
“What comes after the ground rules, Brody?” Carolyn asked quietly. “After the no-sex pact, and the freedom to see other people if we want to, what happens then?”
At last, Brody found his voice. He even rummaged up a passable grin, one that might even have masked all the catastrophic things happening in the core of his being.
“Maybe,” he said, struck by sudden inspiration, “we could start with dinner and a movie?”
CHAPTER TEN
DINNER AND A MOVIE.
With Carolyn.
Sounded like a good start to Brody. But no sex? Had he actually been the one to stipulate that? Was he out of his ever-lovin’ mind or what?
“Dinner and a movie,” Carolyn repeated thoughtfully, mulling his invitation over. She looked wicked-hot, standing there in the middle of what would one day be his living room. The borrowed shirt was a little too tight across her breasts and a little too short in the bargain, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of stomach skin whenever she moved just right.
Brody shifted uncomfortably, and he was just about to jump in and try to renegotiate the whole no-nooky thing when Carolyn rocked him with a tiny smile and announced her decision.
“A tame enough evening, I think,” she said, and was quick to add, “As long as we don’t have to sleep together, of course.”
Tame? Was that how she saw him—as tame?
Brody gulped. “Of course.”
But he was thinking, You and your big mouth. Brody Creed, you are five known kinds of fool, and a few that haven’t been discovered yet.
“When?” Carolyn asked.
Brody just stood there for a moment, stumped by the question, simple as it was. Then he untangled his tongue and said, “Tomorrow night? I promised Tricia I’d feed their horses and these dogs tonight, and it’s getting pretty late anyhow.”
Carolyn bit her lower lip, thinking again. W
as it really that hard to make the decision?
“Tomorrow night isn’t good,” she said, with a little shake of her head. “I have other plans. How about Friday or Saturday?”
“Saturday would work,” Brody suggested, cagey now. Carolyn was probably playing hard to get, and two could ride in that rodeo. The only reason he didn’t go for Friday instead was that he didn’t want to seem too eager.
“Great,” she said, looking around. “Is there more?” she asked, with a quirky little grin. “To the house, I mean?”
“Yeah,” Brody replied, oddly relieved even though, by his reckoning, Saturday was on the yonder side of forever. He offered his hand, letting her decide whether to take it or not.
She did.
By then, the dogs were already off on an expedition of their own, checking out other parts of the house.
Brody showed Carolyn the kitchen first, with its big stove and center island and its many windows, then the room he planned on using as an office, then the guest quarters and the family bedrooms and, finally, the master suite.
“Big place,” Carolyn said, hesitating in the double doorway of the main bedroom.
“Carolyn,” Brody teased, shaken and, at the same time, buzzed, “it’s okay to go inside. There isn’t even a bed in here yet.”
She blushed a little, stooped to pet Barney when he doubled back briefly to brush against her before taking off again. After that, like a person wandering in a dream, Carolyn moved to the middle of the room. Putting her hands out from her sides, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes and did a slow, graceful pirouette.
In that moment, Carolyn seemed impossibly beautiful to Brody, like a sprite or a fallen angel or a fairy queen. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised if she’d sprouted gossamer wings. When she stopped moving and met his gaze again, she looked embarrassed.
He wanted to tell her it was okay, that he could watch her dance like that for the rest of eternity and be perfectly happy, but he’d sound like a damn idiot if he did, so he held his tongue.
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