“Well, you’re going to have to do something you don’t want to do,” I told him. “You’re going to have to pay me what you owe me for the damage to my truck. I had to repair it out of pocket. It’ll cost you five hundred dollars.”
“Bullshit,” Sebastian said, laughing.
“Who’s contributing to the swear jar now?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “And it’s not bullshit. I’ve got the receipt. Had to pay for parts and labor for the broken headlight. Hung the bumper back on myself.”
“I knew you were handy,” he said. “And maybe I never called you because I wanted to see you again.”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh. You never called me because you’re a liar and a cheat. There’s nothing romantic about that. Nothing romantic about us now, here.”
“Are you sure?” Sebastian stepped closer, and I had to resist an urge to step backward. I didn’t want him to see that he had me rattled. “Is there really nothing romantic about the fact that you look like an angel in this light? That I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when you charged into that boring meeting and broke it up, wild and angry and absolutely beautiful? Nothing romantic about this sunset?”
I turned back to the window, and Los Angeles was a city on fire, glorious and otherworldly, all of its pleasures and problems illuminated in the same light. It was a beautiful city, and not for the first time, I wondered why my mother couldn’t have pursued her dreams here. She could’ve commuted back and forth between the city and the farm. I did it nearly every day. Why had the siren’s calls been to Las Vegas? We could’ve had a family, all of us together, if she’d maybe watched a sunset in downtown Los Angeles from the top of a building.
Sebastian jolted me from my maudlin musings with his hot mouth right where my neck met my shoulder, making me gasp and shudder at the same time. He’d set his whiskey aside somewhere, leaving his hands free to roam across the front of me, cupping a breast with one hand, sending the other down the front of my stomach. I tossed my head, and it gave him increased access to my neck. Backing into him only revealed that he was just as turned on as I was, the two of us attracted to each other without question. Then, God help me, I turned around in his arms to kiss him on his mouth again. He was a good kisser, damn it, and it felt good, and I judged myself so harshly even as my lips melded with his. The whiskey taste on his tongue was one I shared now, too, and it made my belly burn. I wove my fingers into his hair and pulled, feeling the softness of those strands, my heart racing at the soft sound he made for that little pain I’d caused him. He squeezed my ass through my jeans and pressed the evidence of his arousal against my body, and it was all I could do to not rip his clothes off right there and then, in the middle of his office, for all the occupants of the other buildings around us to see.
I’d never experienced this kind of chemistry with anyone. Never in my entire life had I ever felt like I was burning for another human being, but that’s the helpless way I responded to Sebastian’s kisses, his caresses, God, even the smell of him. He looked like the kind of man who would douse himself in expensive cologne every morning before leaving for work, but he smelled natural, as if he’d simply rubbed his body with a coarse towel in the sunshine and gotten down to business. He had—and maybe this was ridiculous—almost a farm smell about him, not of manure or anything, but of the pure outdoors, of fresh air and sweet hay and joy. I didn’t know how I could smell all of that on his skin, my hands creeping across the front of his shirt, but there it was. The man felt good and smelled good. And his kissing left me weak in the knees, panting, wanting more, and wondering if it would be the right thing to do.
I mean, I hated him, right? He infuriated me. He was disrespectful and dismissive and an all-around jerk and he didn’t deserve me. I was a good person.
The thing was, I wanted to be bad. That’s what he made me want. He made me want to do bad things with him, to tear off my own clothes and beg him to have his way with me. I remembered what he’d been like in that dream I had. How good he’d made me feel. The way I’d felt when I woke up, right in the throes of orgasm, his phantom touch still burning my skin.
I knew he could make me feel like that in real life. I didn’t know how I knew for sure, but I did. It probably had something to do with the way my body was on fire right now, just pressed up against his, the two of us like horny kids celebrating reaching second base.
And then, just as suddenly as we’d fallen in together, our hands learning each other’s bodies, I was done with him again, pushing away roughly, remembering my distaste, the thought of it coloring my attraction to him.
“Rachel…” His voice was low with longing, begging me. God, I wanted him, but I wanted him to suffer, too.
“Let’s see how you like being ignored,” I told him, so out of breath it was hard to get the sentence out, and left.
Chapter 5
“You can tell me what’s wrong, you know, if there’s anything wrong.”
I jumped at Dad’s voice across the dinner table and shook my head. I’d worried him to death, getting back well after the time he’d expected me back on the farm. It had been my night to cook dinner, and I’d failed him. He’d cooked himself—fried chicken again. It was the only thing he knew how to do—to bread something and dip it in frying oil—and I told him he couldn’t have it every night. He should’ve heated up some of the leftovers I’d preserved in plastic containers from lighter dinners, but he was an old-fashioned man who liked something fresh for dinner every night. I remembered my mother berating him about it. She didn’t really know how to cook either, and she didn’t like eating fried chicken as much as Dad did.
“Rachel, I know you, and I know when something’s wrong,” he tried again. “You can tell me anything.”
I picked at the fried chicken. How was I supposed to tell him that I felt guilty for not cooking for him? That would just lead to an argument about responsibilities and who’s the parent in this relationship and a bunch of other things that didn’t need to be rehashed. Would he really want to know that I’d spent the better part of the afternoon and evening hours stalking a rich and powerful businessman and getting frisky with him in his top-floor office? That didn’t seem like something Dad would want to know. And how could he understand how awful I felt about everything? I’d demanded five hundred dollars from Sebastian, and he’d laughed in my face, and yet I still let him kiss me, let his hands explore my body, told my hands to do a little exploring themselves.
“Rachel—?”
“Dad, nothing’s wrong,” I snapped, then immediately felt bad for doing so. What was wrong with me? Had making out with Sebastian made me incapable of being a normal human being? I got along with Dad just fine. We understood each other, and we worked well together. There was more of him in me than there was of my mother, and that was saying something because he often accused me of being her physical doppelgänger, as if it were my fault. All of the value and work ethics and everything else inside of me, though, all came from Dad.
Which led me to wonder if he’d ever stalk and kiss a billionaire.
“I’m not trying to suggest that anything’s wrong,” he protested. “It’s just…you’re quiet. You got home late. You haven’t eaten anything.”
I took a big bite of a chicken leg and chewed it, eyeing him balefully. “I promise that there is nothing wrong. Nothing to worry about. I got just a little turned around in the city because I was distracted, and when you add the traffic into that mistake, it accounts for the time.”
“I don’t care that you got home late—though you could’ve called me and put my mind at ease, I suppose.” He sighed, visibly fumbling for words as his fingers drummed against the tabletop. They were an old man’s hands, I suddenly noticed. When had Dad gotten old man’s hands? “You’re acting strangely. That’s the thing, Rachel. Like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”
I had to give him something, or he wasn’t going to let this go. He’d worry about it and worry about it until he worried himself sick. He got th
e same way about other things he couldn’t control, like the weather. But the “ghost” I’d admit to seeing wasn’t going to be that of Sebastian Clementine’s apparent lust for me. That was too embarrassing. I’d have to invent something that was almost true. It was the only way I’d get Dad off my back.
“I guess I got to thinking, while I was lost in downtown, just how pretty a city it is,” I said, not knowing what words were going to fall out of my mouth until they were out already, unable to take them back. “It was right at sunset—that’s why I’d gotten turned around, because I couldn’t see the names of the street signs to get back to the highway. Traffic was awful, but the sunset illuminated the buildings like they were on fire, and I wished that my mother…”
Dad winced as if I’d landed a physical blow, and I lapsed into silence. We didn’t talk about my mother. She’d betrayed us, and I’d just betrayed Dad by bringing her up. I was so stupid. I should’ve just copped to making out with a stranger I hated. However he would’ve reacted to that revelation would’ve been preferable to what I’d just done to him now by mentioning the fact that at one time, there had been an intact family unit residing in this house.
“Go on, Rachel,” Dad instructed, and I sighed and hung my head.
“It’s stupid.”
“Finish it.”
“I wished my mother had maybe seen Los Angeles the way I’d seen it today,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth in a torrent, me eager to be done with them and stop hurting Dad. “That maybe, if she’d seen it like that, so beautiful, she could’ve realized she could make her dreams happen anywhere she wanted to. That maybe, Los Angeles would be a place for her to live her dreams and she could still have her family.”
“Do you miss your mother?” Dad asked, and it was a question that I didn’t know how to answer. If I said no, he’d worry that I’d become callous. If I said yes, he’d worry that he failed me as a parent, failed to love me enough, that he was only half as good because I lacked a mother.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Maybe I was just missing the idea of her. It’s been ten years, you know, since she left. Maybe I’m just feeling that milestone.”
“That’s not a happy milestone, Rachel.” Dad looked even older in this moment, though maybe it was just the way the light above us was throwing shadows on his face. “It’s a sad thing for a girl to not have a mother for an entire decade.”
“I’m not a girl anymore, Dad. I’m an adult, same as you.”
“But you were just a girl when she left.” He took one of my hands and studied it. “I know I’ve told you this before, but you look just like her. It’s uncanny. I don’t know how much you really remember about her. You were young …”
“I was twelve,” I offered. “I remember plenty—the good and the bad.” I’d also been old enough to realize that Dad would never put away the pictures of all of us, him and me grinning like loons, both of us with the things that made us happiest, and her only with a curve of a smile, saving her face from wrinkles or unable to smile fully because she wasn’t living her dream with us. She didn’t dream of us when she closed her eyes and fell asleep. She dreamed of something else, and the knowledge of that killed Dad. I’d put away all of those sad frames one by one, so he wouldn’t note their absence until they were all gone, piled in a box beneath my bed. I hadn’t opened it since I’d shoved the last picture in there, and now I had the strangest urge to go through them again, to try and distract myself from my troubling interactions with Sebastian by examining my non-relationship with my mother.
“Seeing you every day is like remembering her,” Dad said. “I know you can’t help the way you look, but it does make me miss her an awful lot. You think she ever thinks about us? Think she misses us ever?”
His eyes were bright with unshed tears, tears I knew he wouldn’t shed, not in front of me, and not in private either. That shining pain took my heart and wrung it out. My shoulders hitched once in a silent sob, but I tried to keep the tears just as still in my eyes even as they threatened to brim over.
“I think she’d be an idiot not to,” I said. “I happen to think that we’re a pair of pretty amazing people, if I may say so myself.”
“Do you…ever want to leave?” Dad asked.
I gulped. Honesty would hurt him here. I had to be careful. “Leave for where?”
“You know. Away from the farm? Like your mother?”
“I like the farm,” I protested. “I grew up here my entire life. Why would I want to leave?”
“I would understand, you know, if you wanted to do something else with your life,” he said. “Farming’s not for everyone, and it just keeps getting harder and harder. Farming has always been my dream, and I don’t want to force that dream on anyone else.”
“Dad, what else am I going to do?” I asked, laughing. “I majored in farm management.”
“You can do whatever you want to do,” he argued, suddenly vehement. “You’re an amazing person, and anything you want to do, you can do. Never let anyone tell you anything different.”
“Well, thank you, but I’m staying right here,” I said. “I like helping you out here. I like being outside. Think of how miserable people who have to stay in an office all day are. I couldn’t imagine it.”
“There are lots of other jobs different from farming that wouldn’t require you to be in an office all day,” Dad reasoned. “You could work for the National Parks Service. You could…you could be a dancer, if you wanted.”
I shook my head. “Her dream isn’t mine.”
“I’m a fool to think that my dream is yours,” he said. “I’m a tyrant for keeping you here.”
“You didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do,” I said, exasperated. “I feel at home here. This is my home. And I wanted to do farming. That’s why I went to school. It’s what I went to school for—to learn the new things about the business that you never got a chance to learn. To figure out how technology and the economy and even the climate were all working together to shape our industry. This is what I want to do.”
And yet I had been exposed to so much while I was at college, suddenly aware that there was a whole world out there I hadn’t seen and didn’t understand. I was a sheltered kid, eager to stick with Dad after my mother had left us, eager to please him and prove to him that I wasn’t just going to take off, too. If it had been up to me, I never would’ve even gone to college, content to stick by his side and be his helper for the rest of my life. He was the one who’d pushed me away, who’d encouraged me to go out and do something for myself. College had been an immensely formative experience for me. It had made me think about the “what if” scenarios. What if I’d majored in something different? What if I went away to college and never returned to that farm again? It was tempting to indulge in such fantasies, but it wasn’t useful. It wasn’t real. And it would only hurt Dad. He was the most important person in my life.
“I just don’t want to push you away like I pushed your mother away,” he said. “I want you to be happy. That’s the only thing I want. And if you’re not happy here, if you want to do some exploring on your own, I’d understand. Really, I would.”
“What would you do without me?” I teased him, trying to lighten the mood, to end our discussion. “You’d eat only fried chicken or whatever else you could bread and fry, you’d wear dirty clothes, the house would fall down around you, and the deliveries wouldn’t get made. Let’s face it, old man. You need me.”
“I would make do without you,” he tried, but I shook my head, cutting off whatever else he was going to say.
“End of discussion,” I said, even as my stomach roiled. “I’m happy here. I’m sorry that I mentioned my mother. It was just a passing thought.”
“It’s okay if you think about your mother,” Dad said. “You’re half of her, after all.”
“I don’t really feel like I am.”
“Well, it’s the truth.” He dug around in his pocket until he located his w
allet and produced a worn piece of paper in it. “Here. Take this.”
“What is it?” I unfolded it; it had been unfolded and refolded so many times that it was as limp and fragile as a piece of cloth.
“Contact information,” he explained. “For your mother. Now, I don’t know if she still has this number, or lives at this address, or if the email is active, but there it is. You deserved to know this a long time ago, and I guess it was just my pride that kept it from you. I’m sorry.”
I was holding a physical link to my mother in my hands, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said automatically. “You were just doing what you thought was right.”
But he was lost in memories. “I thought I was so lucky marrying your mother. I never thought she would want someone like me. I almost didn’t believe it, even when she was walking down the aisle in the church toward me. She seemed so foreign to me, so otherworldly, that I was certain she’d sprout wings and fly away at any moment. But she never did. Well, not until she did. And I never knew how hard she’d pined for Las Vegas until then. She kept things hidden, kept them secret. I see a lot of that nature in you. You’re secretive.”
I considered the secret I was concealing from him now, the feelings I’d had for a man I didn’t know and didn’t like. That would make me alien to him, as well, knowing that I’d burst into a business meeting and wound up making out with Sebastian. Dad knew I was sassy and a little bit mean, but he had no idea the things of which I was capable.
I wondered if my mother had been prone to such bouts of surprising behavior, or if that was a quality I had all to my own.
“We don’t have any secrets, Dad,” I told him, trying to reassure the both of us. “And you can have this. I don’t know why I was thinking about her today. I almost never do.”
“Now, she’s your mother, Rachel,” he said. “And I want you to keep that. It’s been making my wallet awfully heavy.”
Dare Page 4
