“I’ve never told you something, Goose, and it’s high time I did: thank you.”
He knew she wasn’t talking about taking care of her so she wouldn’t end up with hypothermia that night. But he still wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn her gratitude.
“For what?”
“Your discretion.”
“Oh, that,” he said, understanding her meaning. He took a sip of bourbon. “Well, had to, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t. Especially after I stopped representing your dad.”
This was not a conversation he wanted to have. They were going back to a very painful place for him, and she had no clue how he felt. And there was damned little he could do or say to help her understand. What was he going to do? Admit he felt something for her after only one night of hot sex five years ago?
He turned to look directly at her. “I didn’t just keep my mouth shut for him.”
Why the fuck did I just admit that?
Because I’ll always care about this woman, that’s why.
Even if she’s another man’s bride-to-be.
She swallowed. “Well, whatever your reasons, thanks. And I guess I should say sorry as well.”
“You apologized that day, Harriet.”
The day you broke my heart.
He was very glad to have the comfort of Old Garnet during this conversation, and he drained his glass for the second time that night.
“Yes, but I didn’t give you any reason, did I? That has always bothered me, Goose. Always.”
Harriet studied her glass, which was still mostly full, as Goose studied her.
“It has?” he asked, unable to keep the note of surprise out of his voice.
“Yes,” Harriet said, sipping her drink. “I’m glad you understand now, but back then—at that moment outside the courthouse—you were just so… I don’t know. Befuddled. Upset.”
“Hurt,” he added, holding up his emptied glass, thinking it would look a mite bit better generously filled with some copper-colored liquid from the large bottle on the tray.
She sighed, closed her eyes, and dropped her head. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “But I couldn’t—”
“Harriet, stop it,” he said, trying to shrug off the deepening emotional tenor of their discussion. “I know why you did it, okay? I learned that afternoon Dad had hired your firm.”
“But you didn’t know that when we were together on the courthouse square, did you? That’s the part that bothers me.”
He sat up and turned to her. “I don’t get it, Harriet. What would you have done differently that morning?”
“I couldn’t have done anything differently. The ethics rules, the way I understand them, wouldn’t have allowed me to do anything other than what I did—besides quitting my job, I suppose,” she said bitterly.
“Since we both know that, there’s no need to keep holding on to that regret. Forget about it.”
“I don’t think I could ever do that,” she said.
“Why?”
* * *
“Because…”
She should not finish that sentence. Why tell him now that she regretted not being able to see him that Monday night five years ago? That she’d wondered what kind of meal he would’ve cooked for her? That she’d tortured herself with fantasies of what it would have felt like to be held by him again?
And why the fuck was all this going through her head right now? Five years later and engaged to another man?
Because she was in front of a roaring fire, drinking bourbon, naked except for three blankets, and sitting just feet away from a guy that she had really wanted…
…that she still wanted.
Oh, no…
“Harriet?” he asked and leaned toward her.
But she backed away from him and started to nearly hyperventilate.
“Um, I just regret it. Regret putting you in that position, Goose,” she said awkwardly instead of saying what had been on the tip of her tongue.
I regret it because I wanted a next with you, Goose.
Shit, there it was.
No, there it is. This is still happening for me. Whatever we’re talking about isn’t in the past. At least it isn’t for me.
But what about him?
* * *
Goose had seen the wave of discomfort wash over her and felt strangely guilty; he couldn’t for the life of him think what he’d done to make her so skittish in just a few moments. Hell, she was already half-naked on the couch with him. The time to have gotten uncomfortable had long passed, unless she had started to feel like he did, and what were the chances of—
Oh my God.
He knew he had to get off that couch before he made a move—or she did—that they’d both regret.
But he also wasn’t going to let this chance pass him by. He knew he’d regret acting on his feelings. He was not going to go there, no matter how much he wanted her—and how much she seemed to want him. Because he wasn’t an idiot. He could tell when a woman was attracted to him.
And he had realized on that couch just seconds earlier that Harriet Hensley was in that category.
People might not think of him as a man with much if any honor, but that sure as hell didn’t mean he wasn’t going to act according to his own standards of integrity.
Yet he knew he’d regret not telling Harriet how he felt.
Because if he had been hurting all these years, maybe there was the small chance she’d endured a similar long season of pain. And a few words from him could put an end to that for both of them.
Goose stood with his glass, grabbed the bottle of Garnet, and walked to one of the windows along the front of the house. Clouds were rolling in, and he could see by the intermittent illumination of a half moon the wind was whipping the trees along the road into a frenzy of swaying branches. A storm was coming. They needed to get the hell out of there.
“Harriet, I don’t regret our night together,” he said bluntly and kept looking out the window. “I never have.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Never. Not for a moment.”
Her words cheered him but also deepened his sense of loss.
“Well, I guess I do have one regret. We never got to have that dinner together. We never got to see what happened next.”
“Yeah,” she said sadly and looked into the fire.
He bit his tongue, literally, to keep from saying the next thing. But he failed. This was his chance to say it and walk away. He’d get it off his chest, and she’d know the truth.
I still want her.
“And I am really regretting right now that you’re engaged, Harriet Hensley. Because if you weren’t—”
He stopped, stunned and sickened at his near admission. Harriet stared at him and stood. One of the blankets dropped from her shoulders, leaving them bare and shining in the warmth of the fire, her skin the brightest thing in the room save the flames themselves.
“Because why, Goose?”
He glanced at her and immediately turned away. “You need to get your clothes on, Harriet.” He nodded toward the window. Holding his glass in his right hand, he pointed outside. “Rain’s coming. We need to go or we’re going to get caught in it.”
She took several steps toward him until she was before the window with him and within arm’s reach. “Answer my question,” she demanded.
He stood up straight and stared down at her. “Because… I don’t take things that don’t belong to me,” he said slowly and clearly.
“And I’m not a thing,” she snapped. “I don’t belong to someone like they own me.”
He closed his eyes tightly. “No, Harriet. Not like this.”
“You seem to think I’m offering you something?”
He opened his eyes and looked her up and down. “From my point of view, yeah, it would certainly seem that way.”
“Then you’d be wrong. I’m not. But you’re right on one point. I am engaged. But the question I want answered is what you’d do if I weren’t.
You brought it up, started to say something. And I’d like to hear that answer.”
“Why do you think you’re entitled to—I don’t think I should answer,” he said and looked down to keep his eyes off her.
“Fine. Your privilege to keep quiet, but remember you brought it up,” she said, pointing at him. “And let’s be clear about something before we leave here tonight: I was not offering you a demonstration about what I’d do if I weren’t engaged.”
After a moment, Goose leaned toward her, sneering. “You know what? I don’t need a demonstration. I already know what you’d do, remember?”
“Wh-what?” She took a step backward. “I thought the question was what you’d do.”
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “You just suggested a different point of view—what you’d do if you weren’t engaged. Your words, not mine. Careless language, counselor. Tells me a lot about what’s on your mind.”
“But—”
“I’m one of the luckiest men on the planet. You know why? Because I know how it feels to make love to you, Harriet Hensley.” She was shaking, and so was he. He drew closer to her, taking deep breaths to calm himself. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that what you wanted me to admit? I think it is, considering that oh-shit look on your face right now and the fact that you walked over here to the window to confront me.”
She backed away, weakly shaking her head as he continued to move toward her.
“Yeah, looks like I got that right,” he said, nodding. He stalked her until she was only inches away. “I’m thinking you’d like me to tell you I want to strip those blankets off you right now, throw you on the couch, and make love to you all night long like we did at The Cooperage. Am I right?”
“Goose, I didn’t mean to—”
“I haven’t forgotten a minute, a second of what happened between us in that room, Harriet. Do you know how many times I’ve thought about that night? Or did you suspect that, and you’re now just fucking with my mind, teasing me for your own little power trip or—”
“I am not teasing you! I’ve never forgotten that night either! I’ve wondered for the past five years what if when it came to you and me! Is that what you want me to admit?”
They stood in silence, panting and staring hard at each other.
After a very long pause, he answered.
“Yes,” he confessed in a feeble voice. He pressed his lips together and looked at the floor. “You really ought to get your clothes on so we can get out of here.” He returned to the window, unable to look at her.
After a few moments of sucking back tears and coughs, Harriet gathered the clothes from the chairs near the fireplace and slunk to the bathroom. When he heard the bathroom door close, Goose finally let himself cry.
11
“Well, if that’s what Harriet said, we’ll have to do it,” Hannah confirmed.
Goose had just reported the results of the outing with Harriet on Friday evening.
Not that he had provided all the gory emotional details. He was trying to forget that shit.
And failing miserably.
His entire weekend had been one big metaphorical kicking-his-own-ass fest as he’d moped around his suddenly small-feeling home.
He’d thought about Kyle Sammons, of all people.
The complete despair he was experiencing had to be how Kyle had felt for years—ten fucking years or more!—before getting together with Hannah. Goose knew he was reaping the bitterest kind of karma: knowing exactly how a former enemy had felt at the enemy’s lowest point.
He’d smeared Kyle’s name, ragged him, hated him. Kyle had taken his dad’s job, and it had sickened Goose at first to see Hannah with the man.
Then he got a big lesson in humility—as in he was bass-ackward wrong about what kind of man Kyle Sammons really was. Now they were friends. Not close, but working on it.
At least Kyle had a happy ending. Took over a decade, but Kyle got his.
No such possibility for him. Time to move on.
The problem was that in moving on, Harriet was still there. The two of them were supposed to be working on the application together. And he couldn’t just say he couldn’t do it anymore.
So time to suck it up and get it through it.
He’d excitedly told Hannah how he and Harriet had found the island and the reputed moonshine still site. Hannah had greeted this news with a big whacking slab of doubt, telling him that she’d always heard from her dad that those stories about an illegal still somewhere out on the distillery’s acreage had been just that—stories, fabrications, sweet little fairytales to cover up the harsher truth of trying to survive out in the sticks in the Depression. Made it seem romantic and not a matter of hardscrabble, brutal subsistence—that’s what she said she didn’t like.
But her continuing skepticism rankled him. His grandfather had always told him how “those distillery Davenports” (referring to that branch of the family) liked to deny the existence of the still because that was a hell of a lot easier than admitting their own kin were so poor that they had to resort to breaking the law to survive. And breaking the law on distillery property too. Like anyone would want to admit to allowing that.
Instead, Hannah was more concerned about the boundary issue.
“We have to get the property line established, especially if there was a still down there. That could be considered historic, I suppose, and look good on the application,” she mused.
Along with Walker Cain, the master distiller, he was sitting with Hannah in the distillery café. It had become a regular thing on Monday mornings for Bo, Hannah, Walker, and Goose to get together for breakfast. Sometimes other distillery employees would show up—they didn’t exclude anyone unless there was serious business to discuss, and that usually happened in the conference room next to the gift shop. But most employees just dropped by to say hi, get coffee, and go. As a result, in addition to fostering good relationships with the employees, the four of them had gotten close over the past year or so, and all worked well together. Bo was absent that morning, however; Lila had a bad cold, and he was taking his fiancée to the doctor.
Goose reached for a powdered donut. “I guess this puts the application on hold for a while.” He realized he said it with a sense of relief.
“Like hell it does.” Hannah pulled out her phone and made a call. “Harriet Hensley, please. … Not there? … A cold?” She sat up straight, listening to the speaker on the other end of the line. “Fell into what? … Thanks.” She put the on the table. Her jaw was set, and her narrowed eyes fixed on Goose.
“I was going to tell you about all that.” Goose tore into his donut. The white sugar tumbled from the confection and littered his dark blue polo shirt. All his official Old Garnet logo gear was dirty. He’d forgotten to do his laundry over the weekend because he’d been so preoccupied.
Hannah crossed her arms over her chest and Walker chuckled.
“I’m waiting,” Hannah said.
Goose did so, reporting how Harriet had fallen just as they were leaving the woods and the creek area.
“And I took her to Lila’s in the four-wheeler because it was the closest place. She was freezing, and I had to get her someplace warm.”
Hannah uncrossed her arms. “Lila will probably forgive that, considering the circumstances, but I’m not sure I can get over you taking her out to some remote spot in the dark! What the hell were you thinking?”
“We were looking for the old still site,” Goose threw back at Hannah with a bit of vinegar. “I didn’t kidnap the woman and drag her all over the grounds.”
Hannah grunted, stood, and shot a glance at Walker, who was biting his lip trying not to laugh. “Well, cousin, here’s what you’re going to do. Follow me.”
* * *
There were bad ideas, like getting a haircut from someone you didn’t know and lending money to friends.
Then there were Hannah Davenport’s ideas.
Hannah called Harriet at home, apologized profus
ely, and said Goose was on his way with a get-well present or two. He had only listened to Hannah’s side of the conversation, but it was abundantly clear that Harriet wanted no visitors.
Yet Hannah was insistent, said Goose would be there soon, and that he could just leave the gifts on the front steps of Harriet’s townhome if she didn’t want to answer her door. So half an hour after revealing the story of Harriet’s tumble into Old Crow Creek, he was in the Old Garnet pickup truck, parking in a guest spot at Harriet’s condo development on Main Street in Bourbon Springs.
Hannah’s presents, of course, were two large bottles of Old Garnet. But she’d included something special as well courtesy of the master distiller, who had learned of Harriet’s sad state. Walker had added a flask of Garnet Center Cut, bourbon pulled from one of the choicest barrels in the old rickhouse. After the breakfast meeting had broken up, Walker had told Goose to go to the gift shop and bring him a flask. Within a few minutes, Walker had returned to the visitors’ center with a full flask, and Goose was sent on his way as a human get-well-soon card bearing gifts of premium bourbon.
Goose carried the flask in the back pocket of his jeans and the bottles of Old Garnet in two bags, cradled in the crook of his left arm. He walked to Harriet’s front door, rang the doorbell, and waited to see whether she’d appear. On the small stoop was a large terra-cotta pot filled with deep red mums. Hannah would definitely approve of the color. She had insisted that all the mums bought for fall planting at the distillery be deep red—garnet—and nothing else.
Goose waited, head bowed, not ready to see Harriet. Maybe she wouldn’t come to the door. That would be just fine with him. He had no clue what to say to her in light of what they’d said to each other at Lila’s house.
After Harriet had slipped back into her still-damp clothes on Saturday night, they got back into the four-wheeler without another word to each other. As soon as Goose had turned the ignition, the heavens opened up, and cats, dogs, and other assorted critters had dropped from the coal-black skies in sheets of spitting, cutting rain. By the time they’d made it back to the distillery a harrowing half an hour later (under ideal conditions, the trip would’ve only taken ten minutes), they were both soaked to the bone.
Bourbon Springs Box Set: Volume II, Books 4-6 (Bourbon Springs Box Sets Book 2) Page 41
