Can't Buy Me Love (37 page)

“I can’t get off the ranch. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Not without you.”

The will. He was stuck here for his sister’s sake for four more months.

Four more months. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stay here with him and his love that wasn’t real. She wasn’t strong enough to resist him. And she’d fall. Hard. And then when the four months were over and he went on his way, she’d be destroyed. Ruined.

She stood still at the edge of a decision she’d made a thousand times in the past. It was harder this time,
because what she was turning away was so precious. So rare. But in the end, the old habits reached up out of her past to support her, and it wasn’t all that hard to just turn her head away from what she wanted.

“You can take care of Victoria?” she asked. “Jacob? In case Dennis comes back around?” She had every intention of making sure that didn’t happen, but Luc would be a good backup plan.

He stepped toward her, her arms in his hands before she could flinch away. She bit back a gasp at his touch, the heat of him. “What’s going on in that head of yours, Tara? I can’t—”

“I’m going to leave.”

“What? Why?”

“Because that is what I do, Luc. I leave.”

“What about the Nordstrom deal?”

“If you’re so interested, you go to the meeting.” She reached behind her and grabbed the sketch of the boot, that symbol of all the financial freedom she’d always wanted. But the truth was, no financial freedom was worth the pain love inevitably brought.

“What about Dennis?”

“I have that protection order.”

“Don’t do this, Tara. I love you. You. All of you.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Luc,” she snapped. “You barely know me.”

“Then tell me, Tara. Right now. Tell me what it is I don’t know about you. What is so unloveable about you, and you let me be the judge of whether or not my feelings are real. Trust me that much.”

“I should just go.”

“Yeah, and I’ll just follow you, Tara. Screw the will and my sister. I want you. I want to be with you and if you don’t want to be with me, you need to tell me why, and enough of this bullshit about hockey.”

She met his eyes and steeled herself. She was always
the instrument of her own downfall—this would be no different.

“When I was a kid, before I conned that first old man—”

“Mr. Beanfang.”

That he remembered was somehow sweet. As if he’d memorized her poisonous song, unaware that it was going to poison him too.

“I was fifteen and mad at my mom because she kept bringing these assholes into our lives and they ruined … they ruined everything. And Grant … he liked me. My mom knew it. And she didn’t do anything. Ever. She looked the other way, told me I was imagining things. That I was jealous. That I was a spoiled brat who didn’t want her to be happy. But she knew it was the truth. So on my sixteenth birthday … I didn’t say no.”

“Oh my God—”

“It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t sexy. Or fun. It didn’t make me a grown-up. And then my mother, when I told her, when I came to her crying and bleeding … she kicked me out of the house. No money. No clothes. No car. Nothing. I slept at a friend’s house for a few nights, but then … then I met Dennis.”

“Sweetheart, Tara.” His hands ran over her face like a river, like water trying to change the shape of the stones in its banks. “You were a kid. And your mother … your mother should have protected you.”

“But I hurt her, don’t you get it? I loved her and I hurt her. She loved me and she betrayed me. Your father loved you and look how he treated you. Look at what Victoria’s husband did to her. That’s love, Luc—it’s handing someone the knife to stab you in the back.”

She shook her head, stepping backward toward the door.

“You want me to love you, but all I ever do is hurt
people. And you might think you love me, but you don’t. No one ever has.”

She turned and opened the door but he shut it again, his hand on the wood in front of her face. “Don’t give up like this, Tara,” he breathed, his head pressed into the back of hers, a weight that would drown her if she let it. “Don’t walk out that door. We can talk—”

He wouldn’t let her leave, so she would have to make him be the one to walk away.

“Talk?” she asked, hating him. Hating herself. “That’s not what we do, Luc.”

She took off her shirt, one button at a time. Her breasts without the bra glowed in the moonlight. It took him a second to realize what she was doing and he looked up in her eyes. Naked love and disappointment fought there.

“Don’t do this,” he whispered.

She ignored both and shrugged out of the shirt. The air was cold, his gaze colder, as disappointment and love were eaten by anger.

“Come on, Luc.” She leaned back against the desk. “Maybe I can still earn that bonus. I’ve got tricks I haven’t even—”

He bent, grabbed her shirt, and shot it at her chest. Her reflexes caught it.

“Get dressed,” he said. “And go, if that’s what you want. But I won’t be a part of your punishment, or whatever this is. I love you too much.”

The door slammed shut behind him and she slipped the shirt up over her shoulders and started to button it, but her hands were shaking too hard. And then her legs were shaking and the boots couldn’t keep her up anymore.

She slid to the ground, a sob breaking through her chest, right through her ribs.

This was what she needed to do.

And because it hurt, she knew it was right.

The next morning, the demon was back, but worse. Worse than ever. And the voice … she realized now, the voice wasn’t her mother’s.

It was hers.

And Tara Jean, battered and bruised, didn’t have the capacity to fight. Didn’t even know why she should. Why she should try to be anything but what she was.

Getting into the black leather pants took an act of physics and athleticism not unlike the pole vault. The boots laced up the back, up to her knee, and the heel was red and three inches high. The thin white sweater seemed demure until she put it on, winding the long, gauzy tails around her waist over and over again until she looked like a good-girl dominatrix.

From under her sink she dug out her hot rollers, putting her hair up into big floppy curls, then she lacquered them with a pound of hair spray. Scrunching and spraying until she looked like a monument to big hair. A monument to Texas femininity.

She finished it off with the holy trinity: red lipstick, black eyeliner, and big hoops.

On the countertop her cell phone buzzed. Just as it had ten minutes ago. She didn’t have to look at the display to know it was Claire Hughes.

She was now a half-hour late for that meeting.

And the pain, the pain was almost gone.

Her head ached and burned where Luc had pressed his forehead to it last night. Her flesh remembered the touch of his hand. The way his skin looked like liquid gold, felt like silk, tasted like salt and sugar under her lips.

But slowly, bit by bit, staring at her cold eyes in the mirror, she convinced herself that it was all a dream.

And it was over.

She willed the woman in the mirror to believe it, to turn her heart to stone, her mind to a sharp blade, cutting out the tenderness, the sweetness, the heat and fury—every single memory and emotion attached to Luc Baker. Until they lay in ribbons, broken and bleeding, all attachment to her gone.

Leaning toward the mirror, she ran a finger around the edge of her lips.

This wasn’t a mistake—the clothes, the hair, the stone-cold look in her eyes.

This was Tara Jean Sweet.

Victoria tried not to feel assaulted by the ambiance of Applebee’s. Honestly, between the music (far too loud) and the kids screaming (totally unchecked), it was like being slapped in the face with noise.

“Table for one?” a young woman asked, her brown hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, the enthusiasm faked. She had a button on her shirt asking people to ask her how much she loved it here. Victoria had the feeling that if she were to ask, the girl might cry.

“I’m … I’m ah …” She looked over the woman’s shoulder and saw a familiar gray suit jacket on a man at the bar. The curve of his shoulders, however, was not so familiar.

Dejected
, those shoulders said. And all the excitement she’d had for this illicit date fizzled.

I don’t want to play cheerleader tonight
, she thought with a heavy sigh. She’d done enough of that in her marriage. It was the one aspect of being a widow that she was beginning to enjoy—not having to be responsible for some fragile man’s mood.

But perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps those shoulders did not say dejected. Perhaps they said “slight shoulder injury from an intense squash game.”

Yes, she liked that much better. Though, frankly, she wasn’t all that interested in hearing the play-by-play of a squash game.

She’d had enough of that, too.

Frankly, she just wanted to flirt. To feel pretty, maybe even sexy. She had in fact worn her tightest jeans, the dark wash, with her gold sandals. And she’d left her hair down, pleased with how it had stopped falling out now that she was away from New York and Toronto. The stress of her life.

Really, all she wanted was to make out in the parking lot.

Was that too much to ask from an illicit afternoon date at Applebee’s?

No. It wasn’t. She had the feeling it happened all the time.

She stepped up to the bar, to Dennis’s shoulder, expecting him to turn to her with a wide smile, but he didn’t. He slowly drained the last of the beer from a big pint glass.

“Dennis?” she said, and finally he turned.

Her heart folded up shop and closed for the night at the sight of him. Disheveled. Unshaven. His eyes were dark and bloodshot. He smelled of a two-day bender.

She reeled back.

“Hey now, princess, how are you?”

The “princess” rankled. It really did, but she managed to smile.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” His voice lost its happy drunk effect and seemed mean. Toward her.

“You don’t look so good.”

“Well.” His eyes were shrewd, malicious, and this was a side of him she’d never seen. It made her clutch her purse a little closer. “I think you can blame that little fact on your brother.”

“My brother?”

“I can’t prove it, of course, because your brother is slick like that, but he hired people to get me out of town. To scare me away from you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” he moaned, and she snapped back, slipping her purse strap over her shoulder. She’d been called enough names to last a lifetime. And Dennis Murphy was clearly not the man she’d hoped he was.

Without another word she turned on the heel of her little gold sandals, which frankly, now that she thought about it, looked cheap and awful, and headed back to the hostess station, the front door, and the wide world beyond.

She heard a mumble and a crash and she could feel him behind her, a few steps.

“You all right?” the hostess asked as she passed, and Victoria managed to give the woman a reassuring smile as she hit the doors and the heat of the parking lot.

She was halfway to her car before Dennis caught up to her, grabbing the inside of her elbow and spinning her around so hard she nearly fell.

“Do not touch me!” she hissed, all that anger she’d swallowed rising up like a suppressed indigenous tribe, with arrows and rocks and hate.

“Listen, Victoria.” She wondered how she ever could have thought him handsome. He was hideous. She jerked her arm, but he held on so hard she’d have bruises. “I need you to walk back in there and sit down with me. You need to tell your brother to leave me the fuck alone.”

“Not on your life. I’m not interested in dating you, Dennis. Not anymore.”

“Dating?” he howled. “You think we’re dating? You stupid little rich girl. I wouldn’t date you if you were the last pair of tits on the planet.”

Her blood roaring in her ears, embarrassment and anger giving her superhero strength, she tore away from him, her arm stinging, her hand numb, and she turned and ran for her car, fumbling with her keys, tears of anger and fear burning in her eyes.

Wrong. So wrong. Again
.

Her chest heaving, she tried to get her keys in the door but her hands were shaking and suddenly he was there, batting the keys to the ground, grabbing her purse.

“I need money.”

“I don’t have any,” she snapped, pulling her purse back.

“Please, you think I believe that crap about you giving all the money back to the people your husband fleeced?”

He was rifling through her stuff, tossing things onto the cement like they were garbage, a package of Kleenex, her sunglasses, Jacob’s school picture.

“Give me that, you asshole!” she yelled, jerking the purse.

But Dennis barely even looked up. With the assurance of a man with too much practice, he lifted one hand and cuffed her so hard she fell back against the car, her ears ringing.

Gasping, she tasted blood and carefully crouched, picking up her keys. She’d leave the purse, along with what was left of her dignity and pride, on the asphalt with her Kleenex. She just needed to get out of there.