What kind of lunatic was he thinking about this based on a one night stand?
Still, she handled the kids like she knew what she was doing and was comfortable with it. They both had dark hair and brown eyes, tall, thin. Their kids had a very high probability of being good looking and intelligent. He could have something to look forward to when he came home from tour other than a cold house and a note from the housekeeper that she’d stocked him with milk and bread, but he’d have to call if he wanted anything else. If he was going to be thinking this way at all, he needed to get Tessa on the usual background checks or she’d have his head on a platter.
“What?” Alex had appeared at the side of his table and was looking at him funny.
Marc blinked. “Nothing.”
“You had an odd look on your face.”
“Just thinking.” That song of Jason’s wasn’t so difficult to put lyrics to. It started bubbling around in his head as he looked at her. That bright focused smile that hadn’t been practiced in a mirror to impress him after the show. It was genuine. Marc grabbed her wrist and dragged her into the booth next to him.
“What are you doing?” She pulled away. “You’re going to give the yokels ideas.”
“I’ll have them killed if they touch you.” Something black reared up in his chest. If anyone touched her wrong, he might have to kill them himself.
“Yeah, I’m honored, but hiring hit men is a little extreme.” Alex stood up. “I just came over to tell you that Paul is making you eggs Benedict. He says you look thin. I’ll bring it right out and then I’m turning my tables over to Drew for the rest of the day.”
“You having lunch with me? Because you’re going to need your strength.” He grinned.
Alex laughed. She had a great, musical laugh. “Here, there, and everywhere.” Then she headed for the kitchen.
* * * *
“Did you tell his majesty what I told you to tell him?” Paul demanded as soon as she walked through the door.
“Yes.” Most of it. She hadn’t mentioned that in addition to Marc looking thin, he needed a good woman to take care of him. Too bad she wasn’t that good woman. Nobody was going to be calling her a good woman anytime soon. Alex fished her tips out of her apron pockets before tossing it in the hamper inside the back door.
“What did he say?”
“He asked if I was going to eat with him.”
Paul’s lips curled into a Cheshire smile. “Excellent.”
“Hey, Alex,” Tina said, walking in the out door from the outside seating area. Twice already this summer, she’d done that, and Drew had ended up with a face full of food both times. “There’s a guy out here who asked to talk to you.”
“Tina, you have to mind the doors,” Paul snapped.
“Oh, sorry.” Tina frowned at the doors like they were at fault.
“Is it a customer?” Alex asked.
“Is what a customer?”
“The guy who wants to talk to me.”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
That didn’t narrow the field much. If he wasn’t a townie, Tina didn’t know him. Otherwise he could have been anyone from the President of the United States to the postmaster two towns over. That field included Roger. Crap. “What does he look like?”
“Chubby, dark hair. He’s right over there by the bench at the sidewalk.” Tina pointed out the door.
Alex’s hands went cold. Roger. That nice warm feeling that had been pooling in her belly at the thought of going home with Marc froze solid. She threw open the out door hard enough that it banged on the wall and raced across the concrete as fast as walking would allow.
Roger had been seated on the far edge of Tina’s section, almost on the sidewalk. He smiled and reached for her when she skidded to a stop in front of him.
Alex put her hands behind her back and laced her fingers together for good measure. “What are you doing here?”
“I missed you, my darling.”
“Did you now?”
“Alex, don’t be like this.”
Alex raised an eyebrow.
Roger nodded. “I understand. You’re angry. I can make it up to you.”
“You can make it up to me by going back to your wife.”
“You know I don’t love her. I just can’t leave her now. Not with the new baby.”
Alex clenched her fingers together. “I don’t want you to leave your wife for me.”
“But I don’t love her. I love you.”
Alex forced herself to take even breaths. This is why she had needed to get off campus for the summer. His arguments made sense when he made them in person. She needed the distance to let logic work. She took a step backward. “So you keep telling me, but whether you love me or not is immaterial. I’m not going to be responsible for destroying your family anymore than I already have.”
“Carla has destroyed my family. I am doing my best for my children.”
“You don’t need me to do the best for your children.”
“But I do. I love you. You give me the strength to go on. I can’t live without you.”
Her battle plan of even breathing faltered. “You wouldn’t do anything irrevocable, would you?” Him dying for her had to be worse than him leaving his wife for her. That’s what she’d been telling herself for the last three years, every time she had told him they were done, and he’d made his veiled threats.
“I can’t survive without you. My life is a barren wasteland.” He held out a manila envelope. “This is for you.”
“What is it?”
“Your master’s thesis. I can turn it in now and make sure it gets approved before fall semester starts. There’s still time to get a freshman English class.”
Alex stared at the envelope. Her thesis. She’d planned on spending most, if not all, of next semester working on it so she could get a teaching post, maybe next year. Then she’d have her toe in the door for a real faculty position. Working side by side with Roger. Somehow that didn’t have the same draw it used to. “You finished my thesis?”
“No, this was an unfinished one that I found.”
Someone misplaced a master’s thesis and didn’t check the lost and found? That wouldn’t happen. No one would get most of the way through a master’s thesis and just abandon it. No one had dropped out of the program in the last three years or she’d have heard. “Who’s is it?”
“Melanie Finch.”
“Melanie—Melanie Finch? What did you do? Raid her room and steal her notes after she committed suicide last Christmas?”
“No, she was working on it before then. I just finished it up for you.”
“She was writing about Sylvia Plath.”
Roger shrugged. “We’ll tell the committee that you changed your topic after Melanie died because she was such a good friend.”
“I barely knew Melanie.” That warm pool in her stomach that had frozen when Tina had told her Roger was here was now splintering and stabbing at her gut. He stole a paper from a dead girl in an effort to woo back his mistress after she finally managed to get enough backbone together to really call it off this time. Alex didn’t recall auditioning for a soap opera, but here she was. “Roger, you need to go.”
“I saw you last night with that young man.”
Young man? Oh. “That’s my boyfriend.” Or at the very least the guy she liked and who she was pretty sure liked her back in a very honest and above board way.
“I see.” Roger’s mouth tightened. “I’m surprised to see a man like that with you.”
Alex licked her lips, allowing herself a moment to let his phasing sink in. A man like Marc. Clever, kind, willing to be seen in public with her. No, she didn’t deserve a man like Marc, but she didn’t deserve a man like Roger either, no matter what she’d done in the past. “He’s the same age as you are.”
Roger winced. In comparison, Marc looked two hundred times hotter. “Alex, please, I can make this right
. You know he’s going to leave you. I would never abandon you. I love you.”
Alex’s fingers ached from being clenched together so long. His shoulders sagged, so bereft that she wanted to put her arms around him and tell him everything would be all right. Old habits died hard. She needed to ask Marc about hiring hit men for them. “You need to go. Your wife is probably wondering where you are.”
“She’s visiting her family in Connecticut. I told her I was coming here to get some peace and quiet to work on my book.”
“You’re staying in town?”
“I got a cabin at the In the Pines campground on the mountain.”
“You should go home.” Alex turned and started back toward the restaurant.
“‘The sedge has withered from the lake. And no birds sing.’”
Alex forced her feet to keep moving forward. “Quoting Keats to me won’t help this time, Roger.” Not if he was going to quote La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Calling a woman merciless wasn’t the best way to win her back, even if she wanted to return.
Paul had their food plated and waiting when she walked back in. “Who was that?”
“My master’s advisor. I can’t believe you put the food on the plates before I got in here. What happened to the freshest possible presentation?” Alex shifted the hot plates to a tray with a bright pink silicone potholder.
“I plated them when I saw you start back this way. Hurry up or those eggs are going to overcook just sitting there.”
He was watching her. Of course he was watching her. A teeny, tiny gossipy town and her biggest scandal was wandering around with a stolen master’s thesis.
“You know Marc is a better man,” Paul said when she was halfway through the door where she couldn’t respond.
The worst part was—she did know. The way Marc’s gaze followed her as she worked her way across the dining room with their lunch like there wasn’t another woman on the planet for him. She wasn’t his dirty little secret. The frozen pool in her belly thawed and started to simmer. “Hungry?”
“For whatever you have.”
She slid the plate in front of him. “So what’s the plan for this afternoon?”
“I thought we could go back to the house and get to know each other better.”
“Or we could just have sex.”
“Or we could do that.” He grinned and dug into his eggs.
* * * *
Alex brushed her fingers around Marc’s shoulder. Sun poured through the open window, bringing with it the sound of the waterfall on the other side of the house. A breeze lifted the buttercup yellow curtains while birds chirped outside. Honeysuckle growing up the side of the house scented the room. Crisp white sheets on a dark mahogany sleigh bed. Marc’s chest rose and fell under her cheek as his breath slowed to a normal rhythm. His arm draped down her back so that his hand rested on her bare hip. He brushed his lips across her temple. “Good?”
If he only knew. She was happy to have sex in a bed. “Very good.”
He chuckled. “Good.”
“Marc?”
“Yeah, babe?”
“Why me?”
“What do you mean, why you?” His hand slid up and around her waist, tugging her closer.
“Why did you pick me out of all the available women in town?” In the world.
“You came highly recommended.” He brushed his lips across her temple.
“By Paul and Ida.”
“Sure, and Angela.”
“But you could have ignored them.”
“They were very convincing.”
“Oh.” And that was enough for him. Like getting suggestions when buying a new car. Should she ask if she was just a weekend rental or a long-term lease? No, that was too much like a relationship conversation. Roger always hated those talks. According to all the women’s magazines, men in general hated them. Which left her with nothing to talk about. The beautiful, scented, and soft room morphed into a dungeon of silence. What if he was waiting for her to say something? What if he was starting to think she was some kind of idiot because she wasn’t talking? Crap. “So how did you end up connected to Potterville?”
“What?”
He sounded half asleep. Shit, she should have kept quiet. “I just wondered how you ended up here. It’s not a big deal.”
“A buddy of mine married a woman from here and built this house for her. He had a guest cabin built just below this and a studio building behind the house so the band could come out here to record. Cassie still owns the campground next door, too.”
“There’s a campground next door?” Alex couldn’t see out the window from here. There was a good-sized cabin down the mountain a little way with a set of stairs leading up here. Now that she thought about it, she remembered seeing an oversized shed through the kitchen windows. Other than that, it was trees on all sides.
“There’s a path through the trees that connects them, but you have to know where it is otherwise there would be fans here all the time. There’s also a locked gate and a fence. You’d have to have climbing equipment to get to the house from there without the key. Don’t worry about the fans.”
And why would she when he was making such a big deal about how they weren’t a danger? Unless he’d had stalkers in the past. The ones she’d seen in town hadn’t seemed so bad. The only really dangerous person in town was Roger, and the worst he could do was out her.
Or kill himself, which was turning out to be an emptier threat all the time. Instead, he’d chased her here with a stolen thesis. She needed to get off this train of thought before it crashed into something.
“How did he meet her?”
“We exiled him.” Marc shifted, curving his body to hers. “He had just broken up with this coat hanger he’d been living with and was being a pain in the ass.”
Since his friend was probably not in a serious relationship with a wire coat hanger, he must mean a very thin woman. Did that suggest that he didn’t like skinny women? It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to gain a little weight; it just never stuck to the right places.
“So we shipped him off to the In the Pines Campground to cool his heels before we murdered him and stuffed him under the drum riser.”
Every muscle in Alex’s body wound tight. “What was the name of the campground?”
“In the Pines. That’s the title of Cassie’s dad’s favorite song, so she named her campground after it.”
Crash.
In the Pines Campground. Where Roger was “working on his book.” And it was right next door. Alex sat up so fast her head spun. “I’m going to go take a shower.”
Marc trailed his fingers down her spine. “Towels are in the cupboard.”
She forced herself to walk across the room like a normal person. No hunching, no scurrying, no whimpering. Inside the white and yellow bathroom, she tried to shut the door sanely, but it slipped at the last second and slammed. “Sorry. Wind caught it.”
“I’m gonna go downstairs.” The floor creaked.
“Okay.” From where she was leaning against the door like Marc was a vicious killer about to come after her, she could see her reflection in the mirror. Was that flush from recent sex or from panicked flight? Dear God, she did look like a coat hanger. But he had to know she wasn’t starving herself. She had eaten as much as he had at lunch.
Roger was at the campground next door with a stolen master’s thesis. He might find his way over here and tell Marc about them. Alex fanned her face. Paranoia was goosing her imagination. Marc said there was a fence, and the trail between the campground and the fence was hidden. Roger would also have had to know who Marc was, and Roger knew less about popular music than she did. Roger was a jazz guy.
Alex stepped under the stream. She needed a good rinse to wash the crazy out.
By the time she got to the living room, he was on the phone and watching a baseball game on the big screen TV in the corner. No Roger lurking at the windows. The house only lacke
d for decent reading material. There was a shelf in the living room with a few bestsellers on it, but nothing interesting. She could pull out the Percy Bysshe Shelley bio she was reading. Marc might even want to talk about it. Shelley and Byron were rock stars in their day. Marc might have some good insights on the joys of being mobbed by adoring fans.
No, her brain hurt from a long breakfast shift and all those conspiracy theories she was building in the bathroom. She didn’t have the mental fortitude to digest Shelley or discuss his history.
Marc didn’t seem to care what she did. He was involved in his game and his phone call. He didn’t need to have someone hanging on his every breath. Being with him was easy. He wasn’t making demands other than the ones she enjoyed fulfilling. She could learn to like this for however long it lasted.
Chapter 6
Marc switched off the TV. Alex had fallen asleep against him. She was going to wake up with crazy hair. That was kinda cool. He couldn’t remember the last woman he met who wasn’t obsessed with her appearance. Even Maureen, who was about the most mellow woman he’d ever met, had issues with what she would or wouldn’t wear in public. He leaned his head on Alex’s. Paul had said she was pretty together. It was nice to hang with a woman who wasn’t getting all neurotic on him.
His phone rang with Dez’s ringtone, and like an idiot, he answered. The point of giving her the Darth Vader theme was so he wouldn’t pick up when she called. “What do you want now, Dez?”
“Who says I want anything, baby?”
“Pattern of behavior. What do you want?”
“I was just missing you is all. We had some good times.”
“Until you started fucking around with your personal trainer on my dime.” Alex shifted so Marc forced himself to relax. No need to wake her up by getting angry at the ex.
“I told you, baby. I was lonely.”
He had to stop answering her calls. Damn Jody for giving her the number. Now he was going to have to get a new one. “How much do you need?”
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