Fallen Into You (5 page)

Her father, either through complete disinterest or acute awareness, glanced at Kara one last time, then turned on his heel and headed back towards his office, shuffling his papers once more.

Scott stared at her, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “A friend?”

“Yes,” she said, turning back to her office, but Scott wasn’t done yet.

“How the hell do you make friends like
that
?”

Kara paused in mid-stride and turned back. “What did you say?”

Scott’s mouth twisted in a parody of a smile – he looked as though he had tasted something rather foul but was trying to be polite and not spit it out. “He’s a greaser,” he said to her in a stage whisper, leaning forward earnestly. “He’s got long hair and wears a leather jacket and he probably rides a motorcycle. He’s a mechanic, and a failed one at that – he can’t even keep his grungy old garage afloat. How do you wind up friends with someone like that?”

Kara opened her mouth to defend herself, but what came out was something entirely different. “What’s wrong with long hair and leather jackets?”

Scott rolled his eyes. “He’s probably got tattoos under it, too.”

Yeah – it’s a phoenix on his thigh. You can only see it when he’s naked.

She bit her lip hard to keep from saying the words that had popped into her head. She was supposed to feel guilty! She was supposed to be contrite! How dare she challenge him when he was talking about the very man who had taken her away from him, if only for an evening?

Her face flushed brilliant red as her boyfriend went on and on about the man from the ‘other side of the tracks.’ Finally Kara had heard enough. Her emotions were all over the place, but the biggest one was a strange anger that overrode all the rest. She took a deep breath and held up her hand to silence him.

“I have work to do,” she said, then turned on her heel and strode into her office. She shut the door firmly behind her.

It wasn’t closed for long though. Three sharp, authoritative taps to the glass and the handle turned without invitation. In strolled her father, taking commanding strides, and sat himself down in her client’s chair, again, without requiring an invite.

“So,” he began. “What’s going on, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can smell something going on here between you and this Wallace. And what you told me about the car wasn’t strictly true, was it? I might be of the older generation, but I’m not an idiot.”

“I know you’re not an idiot, dad, I…”

“Scott is your boyfriend. Remember that.”

He hated it when she interrupted, but she let it drop, like she always did, like she had done since she was old enough to talk.

“Not only that, he’s very important to this business,” he continued. “To our business.”

It wasn’t a coincidence that Scott Blake worked at the bank. He was from a high status family, higher even than her own. The Blakes owned the country club, and hence access to all the networking that went on there. Nothing happened without the Blakes knowing, and little happened without their approval. If you wanted to do business with the upper echelons of society, you had to keep the Blakes happy.

And the Dermots did – that’s how the youngest of the Blakes had ended up working there. The position of Chief Loans Officer was a prestigious one demanding great responsibility. Yet despite his limited experience, Scott had walked into the role with the same sense of entitlement with which he walked everywhere in life. It suited the Blakes as it meant they spread their roots of influence yet wider, and it suited the Dermots as it kept them connected with rich clients.

“You need to think very carefully about the things you do,” he said, sternly, “because they affect all of us.”

It stung when he admonished her. Kara felt like she’d fell short of his expectations her whole life. She could hold her own in any company, as Scott regularly found out, but there was something about her dad that she just couldn’t fight against.

Sometimes she wished she hadn’t come back to work in the family business after college. That she’d gone away, worked hard, and returned having gained her success independently. That she’d emerged from the cocoon as a beautiful butterfly with none of the stages in between. But her mom had got cancer and that had been the calling for her to return and take responsibility.

Surely her father didn’t know that anything had happened between her and Anders – he just sensed the chemistry and detected her guilt. The car story didn’t help, of course. But then she was never any good at hiding things from her dad. She felt like she was a kid again, caught with her hand in the cookie jar. However one thing was for certain – this thing with Anders could go no further.

Chapter Five

B
y the time Anders got back to the shop, he was able to think a little more clearly. Now he recognized the name of the bank president – Alexander Dermot – as the same last name as Kara’s. Of course he was her father. Anyone could look at her, the way she dressed, that car she had wrecked, and recognize that she came from that kind of money. Why hadn’t he put it together in the first place? The Dermot family was like old money royalty in town.

He supposed that he was too busy thinking about what she looked like naked to think about who her father was.

He was in a foul mood for the rest of the day. The boys in the shop recognized it and steered clear, lest they risk a storm of work thrown at them simply because Anders needed to take it out on somebody. He knew damn good and well what he was like when he got riled up. Besides, it wasn’t fair taking it out on them. None of them knew just how tight money was. And if the garage did fail – God forbid – it would be all of them out of a job. So he stayed out of the way, doing inventory and trying to clear his head. He had almost succeeded when Jared, one of the newer hires, came to the back.

“Boss?” the man asked, his voice rather timid for such a big man.

“Right here.”

“There’s a woman out there to see you…”

“I’m not here.”

“Yes, but…she is insisting. She’s not budging.”

“Let her sit there, then. She’ll get the picture.”

“She said you would want to see her.”

“She’s wrong.”

“Name’s Kara?”

“Fuck.”

Anders dropped the box of air filters and put his hands on his forehead. Jesus Christ, what a day, and now the last person he wanted to deal with was waiting for him outside. Insisting on seeing him, apparently.

Anders looked at Jared, who had taken a few steps back toward the door. He suddenly felt like a jerk for being…well, a jerk. “You look scared,” he said.

Jared just gave him a blank stare.

“Did you draw the short straw?”

“Huh, boss?”

“Did they send you back here to get me because you’re the low man on the totem pole?”

Jared had the grace to blush. “That’s me.”

“I’m not going to bite your head off,” he said. “I know I’ve got a temper, but honestly, I think the guys make me out to be a monster.”

Jared suddenly smiled. “They call you Anders the Hun.”

Anders burst into laughter. It felt good, like new energy coursing through his body. He stepped toward the door and patted Jared on the shoulder as he passed. “You can brag about how you came into the Hun’s lair and escaped unscathed, huh?”

His smile began to falter when he got to the front of the shop. Kara stood in the middle of the room, tall in her high heels, looking around with interest. The men in the bays kept glancing over at her, and Anders was certain they liked what they saw.

Hell, he liked it, too.

“What can I do for you?” he boomed, and was gratified when she looked a little startled. They keys in her hand jingled. She turned to him and just stared for a moment, but then mustered up a weary smile.

“I’m here to talk about my car,” she said directly, avoiding pleasantries just as adroitly as he had. “I need to know what to do next.”

“Okay.”

“And I need to talk to you about what happened this weekend.”

“Hell of a storm, wasn’t it?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Anders picked up the paperwork that went along with her car and gave it a glance, avoiding her gaze. He took his sweet time, making her wait. He heard her toe begin to tap on the floor, and he glanced at her feet. Sure enough, there were those red soles.

Louboutins.

“Impatient much?” he asked, looking up at her.

“I like to get to the point.”

“So I noticed.” He gestured to the back. “If you want to talk about something other than your car, we should do it where the guys won’t hear.”

“I don’t care what they hear,” she said, suddenly defiant.

“Okay. They love some good gossip. They will be happy to tell their wives or their girlfriends, and then those ladies will talk down at the beauty salon or the grocery store, and word will eventually get around about how
you
get around. But if you’re cool with that, then let’s hear it.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

He gestured again to the storeroom. “After you.”

Anders watched as she walked in front of him. Her hips swayed just so, and so did her hair, that auburn fall of waves that touched the center of her back. He remembered how soft it was when he sank his hands into it. Her blouse was neatly tucked into her slacks, and those long legs were made even longer by the high heels, which made her almost as tall as he was. He watched her ass move as she walked and fought the effect that it was already having on his body. Jesus Christ – he was like a mushroom after a spring rain, shooting right up to attention.

When they were in the storeroom, she spun to look at him. He stopped at the door but didn’t close it – the room was too small to allow that kind of liberty without giving both of them all sorts of wrong ideas. “You were saying?”

She tossed her hair back and licked her lips. They were painted a deep red, and he suddenly realized she hadn’t had lipstick on this morning, when he saw her in the bank.

“Friday night was a one-time thing,” she said.

“It wasn’t once. It was four times.”

“Very funny.”

“No, it wasn’t – it was actually pretty hot.”

She blushed scarlet but refused to look away. “Don’t make this difficult.”

“So that was your boyfriend there at the bank? The patronizing creep?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“Which? Patronizing? Creep? Or boyfriend?”

Kara rolled her eyes. “I just wanted to say that I don’t want any trouble, Anders. I have a good life going. A good job, a nice boyfriend, all of that…the white picket fence, so to speak.”

“Nice?”

She wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “What?”

“A ‘nice’ boyfriend, huh? Just ‘nice’.”

“So?”

“Doesn’t exactly sound like a thrill a minute, does it? Just sounds kinda…boring”

She pressed those painted lips together and simply glared at him.

Anders sighed. “Look…if you’re worried that I’m going to tell someone about what happened, you can rest easy. I have no desire to ruin anything you’ve got going on. We had some fun, and that was it. I’m okay with that if you are.”

She tilted her head. “So that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“I guess you’re the kind of man who does things like that all the time.”

Anders grinned. “Not nearly enough.”

She gave him the slightest of smiles in return. “I don’t.”

“Don’t do things like that?”

“Never.”

Anders raised an eyebrow. “You seemed to be…”

“Okay with it?”

“More than okay with it.”

She suddenly put her hands over her face. He watched as she took a deep breath and then ran her hands through her hair, looking at him again with those wide brown eyes. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “One minute I was out in the rain, and the next I was in your house, and the next I was in your bed. It was just…it had a momentum all its own.”

Anders nodded. “But it was fun, wasn’t it?”

Her face flushed again, and he remembered what she looked like when she was in the white-hot grip of ecstasy. “Yes.”

They were silent for a long moment, staring at each other. Anders heard the ding of the shop door opening and the voice of one of his employees talking to a customer about their vehicle. Anders reached behind him and pushed the door shut.

Kara nodded as if something had been settled. “So that’s that, then.”

“Just out of curiosity…is he?”

“Is he what?”

“Boring.”

She took another deep breath, then let it out on a shaky laugh. “That’s not an appropriate question, you know?”

Anders shrugged.

He watched as she looked up at the ceiling for a minute. “He’s…nice. Well, to me. That doesn’t mean he’s boring.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s exciting, either.”

She suddenly glared at him again. “Why the hell do you care?”

Anders had that sixth sense that something could happen between them again. There was just that…tension. Given who her boyfriend was, this was a bad idea. It was beyond bad, it was insane. He could put his whole business at stake. But that sense of danger was like a red rag to Anders. He knew he should keep away, but that was what made it almost inevitable.