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He turned to wait.
She felt breathless when she reached him and knew it wasn’t owed entirely from her sprint across the parking lot. But now that she’d caught up to him, she felt completely tongue-tied. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You already thanked me.”
“I know, but … I—” She broke off, shaking her head a little. “I just really enjoyed myself.”
“Catching up with your cousin?”
“No.” Seemingly of its own accord, her fingers touched his arm. Which was strange, because she wasn’t generally a touchy sort of person. “Well, yes, I mean it was good to see Jeremy. Of course. And your sister. She and Jeremy seem so perfect for each other. I meant I really enjoyed dinner with you.”
His right eyebrow lifted slightly. “You were pretty quick to add more company.”
Her lips parted. “She’s your sister. How could we not invite them to sit with us? Would you rather have had me be rude?”
“I’d rather have had you to myself,” he said bluntly.
That dark and sensual something that had wakened while they’d danced reared again, clenching hard inside her belly. “I’d have liked that, too,” she admitted and gave a little blessing to that margarita or she’d never have had the guts to say the words aloud. “Maybe we could do this again,” she added boldly. “Have dinner. Just … just the two of us.”
The parking lot was too dark for her to see the expression in his eyes. “Maybe.”
Maybe was just another word for no.
She swallowed hard and while she still had some nerve, leaned up and pressed her lips to his cheek. “That’s for being there after the tornado that day,” she said when she went back down on her heels.
He watched her for a moment that was so tight she felt almost sure that he was going to kiss her back.
Really kiss her.
But he didn’t. He just nodded and pulled open his truck door. “You know your way back to your sister’s from here?”
“Yes.”
“Drive carefully.”
“You do the same.” Her voice was faint.
He started up the truck engine and she backed away several feet and watched him drive away.
She wasn’t sure what had just happened.
All she knew was that she felt shaky.
And ridiculously disappointed.
“You were out late last night.”
Emily looked up from the coffee she was pouring into a mug when Wendy padded silently into the kitchen the next morning. “Not terribly.”
“It was practically ten.” Wendy reached around her for a coffee mug of her own. “What were you doing?”
Mildly amused, Emily filled her sister’s mug and replaced the pot on the coffeemaker’s burner. “Maybe I was going wild and crazy like my little sister used to do.”
Wendy made a face. “Ha-ha. Your idea of wild and crazy is leaving the house without a bra on under your tailored shirt.” She twisted her hair up in a deft twist and stuck a clip in it that she pulled out of the pocket of her silky red robe. Then she poured some cream into her coffee and carried it over to the kitchen table that sat in a sunny little alcove. She sank down onto a chair and stretched out her long, shapely legs before sipping her coffee with catlike pleasure.
Emily just shook her head. Her sister could roll out of bed and look like a magazine spread for lingerie. She, though, would have to fuss with her hair for two hours just to get some semblance of style into the stubbornly straight strands and she’d have had to have some serious surgery to gain some of the curves that Wendy came by naturally.
And sad to say, Wendy had her pegged when it came to the whole “wild and crazy” thing.
“You’re the kind of woman who makes women like me feel like dish rags,” she muttered.
Wendy rolled her eyes. “So says the epitome of strikingly beautiful Nordic blondes,” she returned. “I know why I’m feeling sleepy this morning. Because my beautiful daughter woke up twice last night. But what’s got you so cranky this lovely morning? Anything to do with whatever mischief you were getting up to last night?”
“I’m not cranky. And there was no mischief. I had dinner with Max Allen.” Emily sat down across from her sister and sank her nose into her coffee mug. “This decaf stuff is for the birds.” She got back up and added a hefty dose of cream to it.
“Not cranky my hind end,” Wendy observed. “Open up that plastic container there next to the stove. Maybe you’ll find something in there that’ll help.”
Emily opened the container and stared almost lasciviously at the pastries inside. “Did you make these?”
“I did.”
She plucked one flaky croissant-shaped item out of the container and set it on a paper napkin. “I still can’t believe you can cook.”
Wendy laughed. “Baking isn’t cooking,” she said.
“It’s harder,” Marcos said, entering the kitchen just then. He leaned over his wife, planting a kiss on her lips that seemed to raise the temperature in the room by a good five degrees.
Emily just focused on her flaky pastry that tasted a little like almonds and a lot like something sinful. She couldn’t very well tell her brother-in-law and sister to “get a room” when they were right in their very own home.
Emily was the interloper here.
She took another huge bite of the pastry and added a spoon of sugar to her coffee. Maybe if she went into a sugar coma, she’d be able to forget about the way she’d practically thrown herself at Max the evening before. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said to nobody in particular, before leaving the room with her creamy, sweet coffee and a second pastry.
“What’s eating her?” she heard Marcos ask.
She reached the guestroom she’d commandeered before she heard her sister’s reply. But if she’d thought she’d avoid her sister’s curiosity entirely, she was wrong, which she learned when Wendy boldly walked into the bathroom a while later while hot water poured down on Emily’s head.
“So …” Wendy flipped down the lid on the commode, blithely ignoring the glare that Emily gave her from around the shower curtain, “Max Allen?”
“It was business,” Emily said shortly, yanking the shower curtain back in place and sticking her face into the spray of water.
“Until ten o’clock business?”
Emily turned her back to the water and rinsed the shampoo out of her hair. “You knew I was meeting with him for Tanner.”
“And again … until ten o’clock?” Wendy’s voice was full of laughter.
Emily yanked the curtain back enough to eye her sister. “It was just business.”
“Methinks you sound a little defensive, sister dear.”
Emily shut off the water and stuck her hand out. “Make yourself useful and hand me a towel.”
Wendy dutifully pressed a fluffy white towel into her hand. Emily swiped it over herself and wrapped it around her torso before fully pulling back the shower curtain and stepping out. “We had a lot to go over,” she said. She found a comb in her toiletry bag and began dragging it through the tangles in her hair. “So we worked through dinner at Red.”
“My favorite restaurant,” Wendy inserted, grinning. “For obvious reasons.” Not only did Marcos manage the place, but Wendy was the pastry chef there. “And very romantic.”
Emily ignored that. “Excellent food was the goal. But we did run into Jeremy and Max’s sister, Kirsten, there.” She slid a glance toward her sister. “Why didn’t you remind me that Max was her brother?”
Wendy shrugged. “I didn’t think about it, to be perfectly honest. Why is it a big deal?” Her gaze was still sharp. “I mean, since your interest in Max is just business, anyway?”
Emily slapped her comb down on the vanity before she tore out her hair by the roots and picked up a tube of face cream instead. “I just felt sort of like an idiot.” She squeezed out a few drops of cream and worked it in. “He’s practically a relation.”
Wendy picked up the tube that Emily had set down and took the top off, smelling it. “Hardly. Jeremy Fortune is a distant cousin which means his brother-in-law is perfectly free game for an interested woman.”
Emily exhaled noisily. “Wendy, I am not interested that way.”
“Lies’ll give you wrinkles,” Wendy advised. She held up the expensive cream. “Better use a little more of this.”
Emily snatched the tube out of her sister’s hand and capped it again. Then all of her irritation seemed to fizzle out of her. She stared at herself in the mirror but was only seeing Max in her mind’s eye. “Do you know much about him?”
“Some.” Wendy picked up the comb and stood behind Emily. “Don’t you have conditioner or something to keep your hair from tangling like this?”
“I’m out. Please don’t tell me you dated him, too.” Until she’d fallen for Marcos, Wendy had been quite the social butterfly.
Wendy tsked and started working gently at the snarls. “I never dated Max Allen,” she assured. “I do know that he’s sown some of his own wild oats, though. But then, after all that mess with little Anthony—” She broke off, shaking her head.
Emily studied her sister’s reflection in the mirror over the sink. “Who’s Anthony?”
Wendy’s gaze met hers in the mirror. “He was Max’s baby. At least that’s what everyone thought for a while.”
Wendy couldn’t have shocked her more if she’d tried. “Max has a child?”
Wendy shook her head. “No. It’s a long story. But you remember when William and Lily were supposed to have gotten married last year?”
Emily nodded. She’d heard the story more than once about how William had gone missing on his and Lily’s wedding day. All of William’s sons—Jeremy being one of them—had been frantic to find him. But it had been months before he’d been found, recovering from an automobile accident, and a while after that before his memories of Lily and his family had fully returned to him.
“Well, while everyone was worrying over why William hadn’t shown up at the church that day, an old girlfriend of Max’s had basically dumped a baby on him, telling him it was his. He was living with Kirsten at the time and she helped him take care of the baby for a while. But the baby wasn’t Max’s. It was Cooper Fortune’s—did you ever meet Cindy Fortune?” Wendy shook her head before Emily could answer. “Coop’s mother. Anyway, it turned out that the baby had actually been left at the church the day of the wedding.”
Emily turned around, staring at her sister. “Someone abandoned a baby at the church?”
“The baby’s real mother. Presumably she’d done it to get the baby to his father, but that got all messed up. Obviously. And Max’s old girlfriend Courtney somehow ended up with the baby, claiming it was hers and Max’s. All lies, of course, and Max ended up turning the baby over to the authorities, and eventually they were able to determine that Cooper was the baby’s natural father.”
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