Jaded (14 page)

She opened the menu and shrugged out of the jacket, but draped it across her legs for the warmth as she considered the offerings. Dating conventions suggested she get a salad, but she’d given most of her lunch to Cody. Decision made, she closed her menu.

“That was fast,” he commented.

“I’ve eaten here a couple of times on dates,” she said.

His head came up. “Dates?”

Her mother’s wince flashed in her brain, but she held her head high. “Dates. You find that surprising?”

“No,” he said.

“It’s not surprising I said it.”

“It’s honest,” he said. “No one seriously, though.”

“It didn’t feel right,” she said. “I’m not staying.”

“That wouldn’t matter to most men,” Lucas said easily.

“It matters to me. It wouldn’t be fair for me to date them knowing I’m leaving at the end of the contract. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“And yet here you are with me.”

Their server showed up with glasses of water. “Are you ready to order?”

“I’d like the pulled pork sandwich, with fries,” Alana said.

“The Copper Rock burger with Swiss,” Lucas said, then flicked a glance at Alana. “Wine?”

“Beer, actually. Goes better with the pork.”

Lucas added a beer to that order. After collecting their menus, the server left, leaving Alana with a choice. If she wanted to go back to Chicago different, she needed to have this conversation.

“Here I am with you,” she said. She couldn’t tell if that amused him, offended him, or didn’t matter at all.

“What keeps you so busy in your off-hours?”

“Good question. I was a research analyst for the Wentworth Foundation.”

“Which is . . .”

“It’s a think tank, a nonprofit economic research foundation focusing on global initiatives,” she said, reciting the tagline from the website.

One eyebrow lifted. “In English?”

“The policy analysts need research to write their papers. I compile policy papers, research, legislation, newspaper and magazine articles, that kind of thing.”

“How did you end up doing that?”

Another little smile. “My stepfather is Peter Harrison Wentworth.”

“The name’s familiar,” he said as the server set their drinks on the table.

“The former senator.”

His eyebrows lifted over the glass of beer. “No kidding.”

“No kidding. He decided not to run for reelection after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but he wanted to stay involved in public policy. His choices were become a lobbyist, which he found personally abhorrent, or do something like this.”

“Why won’t you go back to work there?”

“I could,” she said. “I probably will.”

“Does this have something to do with the mistake?”

“It has everything to do with the mistake,” she said, then changed the subject. “What brought you from Denver to Walkers Ford?”

His expression closed off again. “A mistake of my own.”

“Personal or professional?”

“Both.”

She sipped her beer. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

He shrugged, as if making mistakes was no big deal. “I was on the DEA task force in Denver. My ex-wife wanted a husband who was there, emotionally and physically. When the job in Walkers Ford opened up, we moved here. I thought a slower pace of life would give us a chance to work on our marriage, but all it did was wedge dynamite in the fault lines and blow it apart. She filed for divorce eight months later.”

The frank assessment made her blink. “I’m sorry.”

He swallowed another mouthful of beer. “So was I.”

“How long have you been divorced?”

“Two years. Your turn. Tell me about the mistake.”

How to characterize David? “He started as a program manager for the foundation. It’s a part-time position that runs for a specific duration and gives people exposure to the behind-the-scenes workings of a foundation, and a chance to network. He was bright, ambitious, outgoing, with a real gift for connecting with people. He wanted to run for office, make a difference. The Senator knows everyone, and I mean everyone, in Washington and appreciates ambition, so when David came on board, they got on like a house on fire. Suddenly he was at the office full-time, going to meetings with the Senator, coming over for dinner for strategy sessions. I liked him. He was charming. Easy to be with. He always had something to say.

“I’m not sure how we started dating. I think I needed a plus one for a banquet or something, and they’re not my favorite way to spend an evening. He made them easier. After that we just . . . I don’t know. We’d get dinner, or see a play on the weekends. He was just there.” At work, at home, in her bed.

“What happened?”

Alana got out her phone, logged in to the restaurant’s wireless, and went to YouTube. “That’s my sister’s engagement,” she said, and offered the phone to Lucas.

His dark hair gleamed in the low light as he watched Freddie’s big moment play out on a stage at Wembley Stadium in London. Toby’s band had just finished the last encore when he called Freddie out onstage. She wore fitted jeans, a pair of Chanel ballet flats so old they were clearly vintage, and a button-down shirt Alana remembered from high school, and she was clearly, beautifully stunned. Flashbulbs were going off all over the stadium as Toby went down on one knee, opened a ring box, and asked Freddie to marry him. According to the tabloids, people two miles away could hear the cheer that went up when she said
yes
.

“Freddie Wentworth is your sister?” Lucas said. “You never said anything.”

“I’m a little fanatical about her privacy, and my own.” Alana retrieved her phone. “And this was my proposal.”

The scene was vastly different, a political fund-raiser given in Chicago for a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. The Senator and her mother had arranged for Paul Simon to play. At the end of the set, David, who was acting as the emcee for the night, called her up onstage. Mildly bewildered, she went, but the other shoe dropped only after she was in the spotlight. The rest of it seemed to happen in slow motion. She didn’t need to see the video to know what was happening. The memory was burned in her brain, and the reaction of anyone watching spelled out the whole humiliating incident, moment by moment.

On screen, David proposed.

Lucas’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

In the video, Alana shook her head frantically.

Lucas winced.

Silence fell in the room. A nervous laugh and some coughing before the singer, in an act of generosity Alana would remember for the rest of her life, said something that deflected the audience’s attention, causing the lighting person to switch the spotlight back to him.

“Ouch,” Lucas said.

Alana remembered the moments backstage not with her brain but with her body. The way she’d been shaking, fury and humiliation burning David’s cheeks and eyes. Her mother’s utter disbelief. Her own fury rising when she realized her mother and David had cooked it up together.

The next day the librarian LISTSERV she belonged to contained a post about the contract job in Walkers Ford. Her family had fought her departure, but she’d stood her ground.

“I’ll quit,” she’d said. “I can either keep working for you from Walkers Ford, or I will quit and do this on my own.”

“You don’t know what you want,” her mother had said impatiently. “You never have, so don’t be ridiculous. David is perfectly suited for you.”

In that moment, one single thought had surfaced in her brain. She’d
never
known what she wanted. That had to change. Now. She’d just chosen to set her own desires aside for the greater good of the family; the foundation; in some ways, the world. But knowing her mother thought she wanted, or deserved, a pale substitute of Freddie’s international moment burned like acid in her throat.

“I didn’t mean to humiliate him,” Alana said hastily. “I really didn’t. But I wasn’t ready for that. We’d been dating for a few months, and I had a good time with him, but I had no idea he was thinking about getting married. I certainly wasn’t thinking about getting married.”

“I got that, yeah,” Lucas said.

She smiled at his deadpan humor. But with the initial burst of enthusiasm and defiance behind her, she’d slipped back into her old routine. She loved the library work, spent her nights doing Freddie’s research, and never really cut the velvet ribbons tying her to the foundation, to her old life.

Until she realized that if she didn’t go after Lucas, she’d go back to Chicago exactly the same as she was when she left. Decisions weren’t easy, or her strong suit. She just followed where Freddie led, and for the most part, she was happy to do that. She had the kind of life people dreamed of having, making a difference on a large scale, jet-setting around the world, rubbing shoulders with rock stars and billionaires and policy makers at every level.

So why did she feel so ridiculously happy sitting across from Lucas at a restaurant in Brookings, South Dakota, discussing kitchen renovation plans?

Don’t think about that. You’re going home. You said you were going home. You’ve made commitments there. You can’t leave your family. Freddie depends on you, and the work matters. You don’t really have a reason to stay.

“So that’s my bad breakup,” Alana said briskly, retrieving her phone. The memory didn’t just sting. It burned. “He proposed. I said no. My mother was so disappointed.”

Lucas’s brow furrowed. “You’re not your sister. I don’t know you all that well, but you don’t seem like the type to want a big production for anything that intimate.”

She blinked, because if he’d figured that out, he knew her better than most of her family. “After that, all I knew was that I needed to do something different. Be different. I needed time to regroup.”

“Walkers Ford, the halfway house for people needing a second start,” he said, startling a laugh out of her. “I hope it goes better for you than it did for me.”

Time to change the subject. “How long will it take to renovate the kitchen?”

“A few weeks. I can move the fridge into the living room, but there’s nowhere else wired for the stove unless I move it into the garage.”

“So no cooking, unless I microwave and use paper plates. I’m leaving in a few days anyway.”

“I can wait. This is going to be a hell of a mess.”

The corners of her mouth lifted. “No, if you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it. It’s your house, after all.”

“But you’re living in my house.”

Such simple words, with so many nuances to them. She did live in his house. She slept in his bed, and Walkers Ford was his town. Mr. Walker might own the bank, and Dave Miller might be the school superintendent, and a husband-and-wife team might be the doctor-pharmacy team, but this was Lucas Ridgeway’s town. He protected the residents, their property, their sense of safety.

A delicious shiver of possession danced up her spine. She was accustomed to belonging somewhere. She’d always belonged to the Wentworth family, but always by accident. Born to her mother and father, part of the package when her mother married the Senator, part of the team at the foundation. But no one possessed her. No one reached out and claimed her. Of course in the twenty-first century, women didn’t want to be claimed. They built careers, made their own money, raised children on their own, planned for their own retirement.

Given a little time, she could probably come up with a less politically correct ambition, but she really, really wanted to belong somewhere, to someone. Because there was a difference between being part of a package deal, and belonging.

“I like being in your house,” she said.

His gaze somehow both sharpened and heated. “Keep going.”

“I’d like to be in your bed.”

“I can arrange that.”

6

L
IBRARIANS KEPT SECRETS.
They heard odd stories, got requests that ranged from reasonable to wildly inappropriate, and like cops, they learned not to bat an eyelash. But keeping the arousal humming under her skin from heating into a radiant aura visible in the spring darkness took every bit of her professional demeanor.

And then some.

Lucas backed into her driveway. “I’ll unload this,” he said as he shifted into park in front of the single detached garage.

“I’ll help,” she said.

“Go inside,” he said, his brusque tone refusing her offer of help.

The interior light faded, leaving them in darkness. Moonlight washed the planes of his face in pale light. Her gaze skipped from his eyes, shadowed in darkness, to his mouth. Trusting the darkness to hide them from the neighbors, she reached out and brushed her fingertips over his full lips.

“I have something in mind for that mouth,” she said.

She felt more than saw the sudden tension in his body, then his lips parted ever so slightly, and his exhalation drifted over her fingertips. “Go inside,” he said against her fingertips, this time lower, rougher. A completely different meaning.

She slid out of the truck, crossing paths with Lucas in front of the truck as he went to open the garage. Duke trotted out of the screened-in porch and was waiting for her at the kitchen door, his front paws on the top step, his tail wagging. She let him in and gave him a dog biscuit. He settled under the kitchen table.

She walked down the hall, into the bedroom, where she set her glasses on the nightstand and draped her sweater over the end of the spindle bed. There was no point in emphasizing the cliché. Her T-shirt and jeans weren’t sexy, but they weren’t unattractive, either. For a long moment she debated where to stand, or sit, the sounds of Lucas unloading the truck, faint but purposeful. But when the tailgate clanged shut, she stripped back the chenille spread and top sheet, then scrambled onto the bed and sat in the middle, cross-legged. It was almost a relief not to have to figure out what someone else wanted. This was about what she wanted.

And Lucas didn’t seem to object to giving it to her. Lucas Ridgeway had lied to her. He’d said he wasn’t going to get hurt by their secret affair, but she wasn’t so sure.

His sneakers didn’t make much noise against the floors, but she could hear him approaching. He appeared in the doorway, all broad shoulders and lean hips in his T-shirt and jeans. She liked that he didn’t change, that he didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was. He was unlike most of the other men of her acquaintance, who needed to establish who they were through words. They used volume, both sound and content, to create an outline of a man. They used degrees, dropped names, touched on all the high points—education, travel, connections, work—to paint a desirable picture. Lucas Ridgeway just was.