Mercury Rising

She was looking at his mouth. So dangerous. So exactly what she longed for. She realized she was biting the inside of her lower lip. She made herself stop. “It’s not only my mother.”

“What else?”

“You know what,” Jane answered. “We don’t want the same things.”

“That’s right.” The very sound of Cade’s voice was like a tender hand, stroking. “We do want different things. I want you. You want me.”

“Very funny.” She wasn’t laughing. “I mean we want different things in life. So this can’t go anywhere.”

“Is it so necessary for a love affair to go somewhere?” Cade asked.

“Not as long as you’re having that love affair with someone who isn’t me.”

“But, Jane,” he answered, “I thought you understood. I don’t want to have a love affair with someone who isn’t you.”

Mercury Rising

Christine Rimmer

For my nieces, Lily and Tessa and Morgan, with all my love.

CHRISTINE RIMMER

came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.

THE BRAVOS: HEROES, HEROINES AND THEIR STORIES

THE NINE-MONTH MARRIAGE (SSE#1148)

—Cash Bravo and Abby Heller

MARRIAGE BY NECESSITY (SSE #1161)

—Nate Bravo and Megan Kane

PRACTICALLY MARRIED (SSE #1174)

—Zach Bravo and Tess DeMarley

MARRIED BY ACCIDENT (SSE #1250)

—Melinda Bravo and Cole Yuma

THE MILLIONAIRE SHE MARRIED (SSE #1322)

—Jenna Bravo and Mack McGarrity

THE M.D. SHE HAD TO MARRY (SSE #1345)

—Lacey Bravo and Logan Severance

THE MARRIAGE AGREEMENT (SSE #1412)

—Marsh Bravo and Tory Winningham

THE BRAVO BILLIONAIRE (single title)

—Jonas Bravo and Emma Hewitt

MARRIAGE: OVERBOARD

—Gwen Bravo McMillan and Rafe McMillan

(Weekly Serial at www.eHarlequin.com)

THE MARRIAGE CONSPIRACY (SSE #1423)

—Dekker (Smith) Bravo and Joleen Tilly

HIS EXECUTIVE SWEETHEART (SSE #1485)

—Aaron Bravo and Celia Tuttle

MERCURY RISING (SSE #1496)

—Cade Bravo and Jane Elliott

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

“M om?”

Virginia Elliott turned from the window. “Ah. Thank you, dear.” Jane gave her the fresh-cut blush-pink roses she’d just wrapped in a cone of newspaper. “So lovely…” Virginia brought them close, breathed in their scent. “You do have a way in the garden. Your aunt Sophie would be proud.”

Jane’s beloved Aunt Sophie Elliott had been a single lady all her life. When she’d died, nearly three years ago now, she left Jane her beautiful old house and the gorgeous garden surrounding it.

Her mother turned back to the window. “I notice your new neighbor is at home.”

“Yes.” Jane kept her voice and her expression as bland as a clean white sheet. “He does travel a lot, though.”

Virginia had the roses in her left hand. Her right strayed to the pearls at her throat. She fondled them, ticking them off like the beads of a rosary. “He was out there, on the side porch, just a moment ago.” Each word was heavy with disdain.

Jane resisted the urge to say something sarcastic. Well, Mother. It is his house. I suppose he has the right to be out on the porch.

Word around town was that Cade Bravo owned an ostentatious new house in Las Vegas and a condo in nearby Lake Tahoe. He’d taken the small town of New Venice completely by surprise when he’d bought the Lipcott place next-door to Jane’s. A run-down farmhouse-style Victorian seemed the last place he would ever want to live.

But the house wasn’t run-down anymore. Renovations had gone on for months. Finally the various work crews had picked up and moved on and the new owner had taken up residence.

“At least he had the grace to respect the integrity of the original home,” Virginia said grudgingly, hand still at her pearls.

Jane thought he had done a beautiful job with the old house. It looked much as it must have when it was first built, at the turn of the last century, a house a lot like Jane’s house, one that harkened back to simpler, more graceful times, with an inviting deep wraparound porch and fish scale shingles up under the eaves.

Virginia muttered, “Still. One of those Bravo boys living on Green Street. Who ever could have imagined such a thing?” Green Street was wide and tree-lined. The charming old houses on it had always been owned by respectable and prosperous members of the New Venice community, people from well-established local families—the Elliotts and the Chases, the Moores and the Lipcotts.

True, Cade Bravo had surprised everyone by prospering. In that sense, he fit the profile for a resident of Green Street. Was he respectable? Not by Virginia Chase Elliott’s exacting standards. But then, in Virginia’s thoroughly biased opinion, no Bravo was—or ever could be—considered respectable.

“Does he bother you, honey?” Her mother was looking right at her now.

“Of course not.”

“He was always such a wild one—the worst of the bunch, everyone says so. Takes after that mother of his.” Virginia’s gray eyes narrowed when she mentioned Caitlin Bravo. Her hand worried all the harder at her pearls. “I suppose he’s got the women in and out all the time.”

“No. He’s very quiet, actually, when he’s here—and you should get those roses home. Cut an inch off the stems, at a slant, and—”

Her mother waved the hand that had been so busy with the pearls. “I know, I know. Remove any leaves below the waterline.”

Jane smiled. “That’s right. And use that flower food I gave you.”

Virginia sighed. “I will, I will—and how is Celia?”

Celia Tuttle was one of Jane’s two closest friends. Her name was Celia Bravo now. A little over two months ago, at the end of May, Celia had married Cade’s oldest brother, Aaron.

“Happy,” said Jane. “Celia is very, very happy.”

One of Virginia’s eyebrows inched upward. “Pregnant, or so I heard.”

“Yes. She and Aaron are thrilled about that.”

“I meant, a little too pregnant for how long they’ve been married.”

Jane shook her head. “Mother. Give it up. Celia is happy. Aaron loves her madly. They are absolutely adorable together, totally devoted—and looking forward to having a baby. I’d like to find a man who loves me the way Aaron Bravo loves his wife.”

Her mother made a prim noise in her throat. Jane folded her arms and gave Virginia a long, steady look heavily freighted with rebuke.

Virginia relented. She waved her hand again. “All right, all right. Celia is a sweet girl and if she’s happy, I’m happy for her.”

“So good of you to say so.”

“Don’t get that superior tone, please. I don’t like it when you do that—and I know, I know. Celia is your dearest friend in the world, along with Jillian.” Jane and Celia and Jillian Diamond had been best friends since kindergarten. “I ought to have sense enough never to say a word against either of them.”

“Yes, you should.”

Virginia stepped closer, the look in her eyes softening. She reached out and smoothed Jane’s always-wild hair in a gesture so tender, so purely maternal that Jane couldn’t help but be soothed by it. Jane did love her mother, though Virginia was not always easy to love.

“You haven’t mentioned how your date went Friday.”

Jane gave her mother a noncommittal smile. “I had a nice time.”

Virginia looked pained. “My. Your indifference is nothing short of stunning.”

Indifference. Sadly that pretty much summed up Jane’s feelings about Friday night. It had been her second date with that particular man. He taught Science at the high school and Jane had met him over a year ago now. He’d come into her bookstore looking for a good manual on Sierra birds and a well-illustrated book on weather patterns. He really did seem the kind of man she’d been looking for: steady and trustworthy, kind and wise. A man who had sought to be her friend first. He’d told her he admired her straightforwardness, said he respected her independence and valued her intelligence. Jane believed him when he said those things.

And he was nice-looking, too, with thick brown hair and a muscular build. There was nothing not to like about him. Jane did like him. She also knew in her heart that liking was all she felt for him.

Was she asking too much in daring to want it all—decency and steadiness and a kiss that turned her inside out?

Probably.

“Gary Nevis is a great guy, Mom. I just don’t think he’s the guy for me.”

“Now. Give it time. You might discover there’s more there than you realized.”

“Good advice,” Jane agreed without much enthusiasm.

“And on that note, I’ll take my roses and go home.”

Jane walked her mother out the door and down the front steps.

“A beautiful summer we’re having,” her mother said as they proceeded down the walk toward the car at the curb.

“Oh, yes.” Jane turned her face up to the warm ball of the August sun. “A splendid summer.” Northern Nevada’s Comstock Valley was, in Jane’s admittedly biased opinion, the best place in the entire world to live. A place where the pace of life was not too hectic, where you knew your neighbors, where people were always forgetting to lock their doors and it never mattered because nothing bad every happened. Here, folks enjoyed reasonably mild winters and summers where daytime temperatures tended to max out in the low eighties.

At the curb, about twenty feet from the low, celadon-green sports car parked in front of Cade’s house, Jane took the roses and held the door open while her mother got settled into her Town Car, sliding onto the soft leather seat and taking the sunscreen out of the windshield, folding it neatly and stowing it in back.

“Here. Give me those.” Virginia took the bundle of fragrant pink blooms, turned to lay it carefully on the passenger seat to her right, then smiled up at her daughter once more. “Thank you for coming to church with me.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“And for the lunch.”

“My pleasure.”

Virginia lifted her cheek for a kiss.

Jane fondly obliged. Then she stepped back and swung the door shut. Her mother fumbled in the console for a moment, came up with the key and stuck it in the ignition. A moment later, the big car sailed off down the street, turning at the corner onto Smith Way and rolling on out of sight.

Jane turned back toward her house. She got about two steps and paused to admire the scene before her.

Her house was Queen Anne-style. It had a turret with a spire on top, touches of gingerbread trim in the eaves and a multitude of cozy nooks and crannies.

Her garden stole her breath. It was late-summer glorious now, a little overblown, like a beautiful woman just past her prime. The Jack clematis that climbed the side fence was in full flower. Black-eyed Susans thrust their gold-petaled faces up to meet the sun. The big patch of lacy-leaved cosmos to the right of her walk was a riot of purple, white, lavender and pink.

Among the cosmos, on pedestals of varying heights, Jane had mounted a series of gazing balls, one blue, one pink, one green, one that looked like a huge soap bubble, crystal clear with just the faintest sheen of mother-of-pearl. The cosmos partially masked them. They peeked out, smooth reflective spheres, giving back the gleam of sunlight.

Oh, it was all so very lovely. If she didn’t have her dear aunt Sophie anymore, at least she had a house and a garden that filled her heart to bursting every time she took a minute to stop and really look at it.

Jane let out a small laugh of pure pleasure. Enough with basking in delight at the beauty that surrounded her. She needed to put on her old clothes and her wide straw hat and get after it. With the bookstore closed, Sunday was prime time for working in the yard. She had the rest of the day completely to herself—and the tomatoes and carrots out back cried out for harvesting.

She started up the walk again—and spotted Cade Bravo, just emerging from the shadows of his porch.

She hadn’t meant to look toward his house, she truly hadn’t.

But somehow, she’d done it anyway. And as her glance found him, he emerged into the sunlight, those long, strong legs of his moving fast, down the steps, along the walk.

The sunlight caught in his hair. Oh, he did have beautiful hair—not brown and not gold, but some intriguing color in between, hair that made a woman want to get her fingers in it. He kept it short, but it had a seductive tendency to curl. Jane secretly thought it was the kind of hair a Greek god might have, hair suitable for crowning with a laurel wreath.

He waved, just a casual salute of a motion, long fingers to his forehead, so briefly, then dropping away as he moved on by.

“Hi, Cade.” She gave him a quick cool smile, ignoring the shiver that slid beneath the surface of her skin, pretending she didn’t feel the heat that pooled in her belly, that she didn’t notice the sudden acceleration of her pulse rate.

Turning away in relief and despair, Jane made for the haven of her house.

Chapter Two

C ade got past Jane and went on down the walk. He had hardly glanced at her, just given her that quick wave and moved on by.

He knew that was how she wanted it. So fine. Let her have what she wanted.

It wouldn’t have been such a bright idea to try to get her talking right then, anyway. He was on edge. Who could say what dangerous things might slip out of his mouth? The sight of Virginia Elliott, staring at him through Jane’s dining-room window, fingering her pearls and scowling, had pretty much ruined his day.

Cade got in his car, slammed the door and started the engine. He wanted a drink. But he didn’t want to sit by himself in the house he probably never should have bought, pouring shots and knocking them back.

Drinking alone was just too depressing. So he was headed for the Highgrade, a combination saloon/café/gift shop/gaming establishment on Main Street. Headed for home—or at least, the closest thing to home he’d every known. He’d grown up there, in the rambling apartment above the action, on the second floor.

Flat-roofed and sided in clapboard, the Highgrade was paneled inside in never-ending knotty pine. Slots lined the walls and the air smelled of greasy burgers, stale beer and too many cigarettes.

Okay, there had to be better places for a man in need of cheering up to go. But even on Sunday, he knew he’d find a few die-hard regulars in the bar. They wouldn’t be big talkers. He’d be lucky to get a few grunts and a “Hiya, Cade.” But technically at least, he wouldn’t be drinking alone.

It was a very short drive to Main Street. Cade swung into the alley between the Highgrade and Jane’s store, Silver Unicorn Books.

Jane. The name echoed like a taunt in his brain.

Seemed he couldn’t turn around lately without being reminded of her. Ubiquitous. That was the word for her.

And don’t laugh. Yeah, maybe he hadn’t been to college—like Jane. And like both of his brothers. But he could read. And set goals. He tried to learn a new word for every weekday. Five new words a week. Times fifty-two. Do the math. Two hundred sixty new words a year. Including ubiquitous, which was another word for Jane.

Because she was everywhere. She had the store next to his mother’s place. One of her two closest friends had married his brother. And she lived in the house beside his.

Yeah, yeah. If living next to her bothered him, he shouldn’t have bought the damn house in the first place.

But he’d had that itch to move back home. And he’d scratched it by buying the old Lipcott place. How the hell was he supposed to know what was going to happen to him as a result of buying a damn house? How was he going to know ahead of time that proximity would breed awareness? And that awareness would develop into a yen.

It just wasn’t the kind of thing that he’d ever imagined could happen to him. Uh-uh. Cade Bravo didn’t brood over lovers—or over women he wished would become his lovers.

Why should he? In spite of his lack of formal education, women liked him just fine. He’d never had to put up with a whole lot of rejection. Most women were willing to look at him twice. And besides, he’d always been a guy who took life as it came. If a woman didn’t respond to him, well, hey, guess what? There’d be someone new on the horizon real soon.

He’d never been the type to pine and yearn.

Or at least, he hadn’t until now.

Cade parked his car in one of the spaces reserved for family at the rear of the building and went in through the back door.

Caitlin Bravo had owned the Highgrade for over thirty years, since before Cade was born. The way Cade understood it, his bad dad, Blake Bravo, had set her up with it. The old man had given her three sons and the Highgrade and then vanished from their lives, never to be seen by any of them again.

In fact, Cade had never seen his father, period—not in the flesh anyway, only in pictures. It was no source of pride to him that he was the only one of Caitlin’s three sons who had his daddy’s eyes. Silvery eyes. Scary eyes, a lot of folks thought.

And let’s lay it on the table here, the old man had been a pretty scary guy.

Blake Bravo had faked his own death in an apartment fire not all that long after he’d planted the seed that would one day be Cade. And later, once everyone thought he was dead, he had kidnapped his own brother’s second son, claimed a huge ransom—and never returned the child.

The way everyone figured it now, in hindsight, Blake must have put some poor loser’s body in his place when he burned that apartment building down. And somehow, he must have managed to falsify dental records. He’d been out on bail at the time, up on a manslaughter charge after killing some other luckless fool in a barroom brawl.

Getting dead had made it possible for him to beat the manslaughter rap without even going to trial. One clever guy, that Blake Bravo.

The good news was, Blake was really and truly dead now. He’d died in an Oklahoma hospital a little over a year ago. Embarrassed the hell out of Caitlin, to learn that the dead guy she’d always considered the love of her life had lived an extra thirty years and then some beyond what she’d known about.

Inside the Highgrade, things were hopping on the café side. It was usually that way on Sundays after church. Caitlin, in skintight jeans and a spangled Western shirt, was playing hostess, leading people to the booths, ringing them up at the register when they were ready to go. She saw him and gave him a wink.

He went the other way, into the comforting morose silence of the bar.

Bertha was bartending. Big and solid with carrot-colored braids anchored in a crown around her head, Bertha didn’t talk much. She had a good heart and a ready smile. Cade had never known a Highgrade without Bertha Slider working there.

“Hey, honeybunch.” One look in his face and Bertha knew what to do. She put the bottle of Cuervo on the bar with a shot glass beside it, set out the lime wedges and the salt, poured the beer chaser.

There were two other guys down the bar a ways. Cade saluted them and got the expected pair of grunts in response. He fisted his hand, licked the side of it and poured on the salt. Then he knocked back the first shot.

It was no good, he realized about an hour later. He’d only had a couple of shots, after all, hadn’t even gotten himself to the stage where his lips started feeling numb.

And he didn’t want any more. Didn’t want to get drunk.

Things had gotten pretty bad when a man didn’t even have the heart to pour a river of tequila over his sorrows. He tossed a twenty on the bar, said goodbye to Bertha and got the hell out.

He knew he shouldn’t have, but he went back to his house. Somehow, while those two shots and that one beer to chase them hadn’t made him even close to drunk, they had broken through his determination to put the book-peddling temptress next door out of his mind. He stopped in front of his house and turned off the engine and just sat there behind the wheel, staring at her front yard where flowers of every kind and color twined the fences and lined the walk.

He didn’t see her. She must be in back. He knew she was out in that yard of hers somewhere. It was her gardening day.

Sundays, as a rule, she went to church with her mother. And after that, she would go out and work in the yard. Sometimes she wore a huge, ugly straw hat. But sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes, she’d go bare-headed, anchoring that wildly curling coffee-colored hair in a tumbling knot on her head. Always, for working in the yard, she wore baggy old clothes that somehow, to him, seemed all the more provocative for what they didn’t reveal.

Yeah, all right. He knew her habits. He knew her ways.

He’d observed her going in and out of her house morning, afternoon and evening, headed to and from that bookstore of hers, all that hair loose on her shoulders, snaky tendrils of it lifted and teased by the wind.

She often left her windows open. He could hear her in there sometimes, talking on the phone in that soft alto voice of hers. Her laughter was low, musical…warm.

The sound of her had the same effect on him as the sight of her. It made him think of getting her naked and burying his face in all that hair—of listening to that gorgeous voice of hers pitched to a whisper, saying wicked things meant for his ears alone.

He knew damn well she had a wild side. He also knew she kept it under strictest control. Ask anyone. They’d tell you. Since Rusty Jenkins died seven or eight years back in a botched convenience store robbery, Jane Elliott had strictly walked the straight and narrow. She’d gone to Stanford after Rusty died, got herself a nice liberal arts degree. She had her garden and her auntie’s house and her cute little bookstore on Main Street. She dated only upwardly mobile guys with steady jobs. She was thoroughly practical, completely down-to-earth and obstinately sensible.

Cade, on the other hand, had made his money in poker parlors up and down the state and later, in the big tournaments in Las Vegas and L.A. And yeah, he’d been in a few tight scrapes with the law—most of them while he was in his teens and early twenties, back when Jane’s uncle, J. T. Elliott, who was now the mayor, had been the sheriff. He also had that rep as a lady-killing charmer. And yeah, all right. He’d admit it. The rep was mostly earned.