Just Let Go… (8 page)

She liked watching Austen think when he thought nobody was watching him. His face was animated and open. Lovable.

They tossed around a few more useless ideas until finally Gillian gathered her courage to bring up the one that kept beating at her brain. “What about the daughter? Carolyn? I mean, she’s the one who made this mess. Can you persuade her to unmake it?”

Austen was visibly shocked. “There are things that I’ll do, but that’s not one of them.”

So now he’s got sexual ethics? Still, his answer pleased her. “Something’s changed?”

“No,” he said coldly and it was like watching the Berlin Wall come up.

“Then why?” she pressed.

Austen remained stubbornly silent, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond her. Eventually he stood and picked up the flyers. His brows drew together in a confused frown. “Haywood had to promise something to Big Ed and he did it without me knowing, which is no easy feat.”

“Big Ed?”

“Ed Patterson. He runs the association of oil and gas producers and he’s my boss. He doesn’t have a change of heart unless he’s getting something out of it. There was a sweet deal in place for him when the route was negotiated.”

Gillian followed his line of thinking. “Somebody promised him something more?”

He shot her a sideways glance. “Nothing that would make the papers.”

“Is this what the indictment’s about?”

Austen frowned. “What indictment?”

“Kickbacks, bribery, graft, corruption,” she told him, dancing around his situation, and hopefully he’d help her out.

“The governor?” he asked, not helping her out at all.

Gillian hesitated before finally blurting out the truth. “You.”

He squinted hard, and then paused before answering. “I’m not worried. You shouldn’t be either.”

“It’s nothing?” she asked cautiously.

He waved a hand. “Part of doing business, that’s all.”

Relieved at his answer, Gillian pretended she wasn’t worried. He was right, people got brought up on indictments all the time. All the same, she didn’t want him in trouble. In spite of all the ways that he’d hurt her, she didn’t want to see him hurt. She told herself that such thinking was the result of her charitable upbringing, that he shouldn’t be held responsible for bad acts because he’d been raised by the world’s most obnoxious drunk. She told herself that her heart was unmoved and untouched, but she worried she was wrong.

However, there were more immediate problems to worry about. The train route, for example. “So was the governor’s new deal illegal? We find out, expose it and we’ll have trains in Tin Cup once again.”

Austen laughed, which he shouldn’t have, since it was a darned good notion, and shouldn’t it be treated as such? “Only in the movies, Gillian. They didn’t break any laws. They did something worse. They did things that look bad politically and in an election year nobody likes when the spotlight hits the backroom where the deals are made. People get very, very angry. See, what you do is find out and then merely
threaten
to expose it. Friendly persuasion.”

“Extortion,” she said flatly, disturbed by the immoral direction of the conversation. Disturbed that parts of her liked it. Or maybe it was the excitement in his eyes, the way she could feel the hum in her parts. Gillian had always been drawn to wicked things, but usually she was able to resist. At that thought, she frowned, and crossed her legs more firmly together.

“All we have to do is find out—” he started, and was interrupted by a banging on the door.

“Gillian!”

Austen looked at her. “Who the hell is that?”

“Jeffrey.”

“Jeff Junior?” Austen sounded incredulous rather than jealous.

“He’s very successful now,” she defended, raising her voice to be heard above Jeffrey’s pounding.

“Gillian! Are you all right?”

Austen made no move to answer the door. In fact, he appeared completely unconcerned. “Well?” she asked, miffed by his lack of concern.

“He’s after you, not me.”

“But it’s your room. You should answer it. I’m only a guest.”

Finally noticing her discomfort, Austen began to smile. “He suspects we’re doing something?”

“Open the door,” she demanded, because the roguish look on his face was starting to alarm her.

Without warning he reached for her, pulled her tight in his arms and kissed her.

Retribution had begun, wicked retribution.

Sweet retribution, she thought, getting dizzy from the feel of his lips. Her hands crept into his hair, locking him tighter, deepening the play of her tongue.

Who needed the straight and narrow when they had this?

His hands slid underneath her shirt, marauding over her skin and her breasts, the banging on the door an unnecessary distraction.

Long, earth-shattering moments later, Austen pulled back and brushed a careless thumb over her swollen mouth. “Now you look like we’re doing something.” He acted like the whole thing was nothing more than a ploy. If it hadn’t been for the backlit flames in his eyes or the uneven breathing, she probably would have been ticked, but Mr. I Feel Nothing had a hard-on bigger than Texas.

Her sexually conflicted self heaved a sigh.

“Gillian!”

Now back in the present, Gillian jerked open the door, ready to calmly explain to Jeffrey that theirs was an uncommitted relationship and she didn’t need another babysitter.

His innocent eyes were wide, shocked. “For crying out loud, Gillian, button up when you answer the door.”

What?

Her gaze flew to her unbuttoned blouse, the daisy-covered bra riding a little lower than what the manufacturer had intended. Realizing that she’d been played, she whirled around, repairing her clothes, noticing the satisfied smirk on Austen’s face.

Bastard,
she mouthed silently.

He raised his brows and shrugged.

Once her clothes were restored to their proper place, Gillian turned back to Junior…
Jeffrey.

“Why are you here?”

“We were supposed to meet for dinner,” stated the man who had never lied in his life.

“We were not.”

His face flushed with embarrassment. “Well, not exactly, but…” He trailed off, searching for his words. Eventually he found them. “I was worried. People were talking abut what happened last night.”

Gillian glanced at Austen because he was to blame, except for the part where she went all out to seduce him, and then he got all jerky, and she got all teary, and all she wanted was to seduce him all over again.

Austen’s expression was carefully blank.

Then Gillian looked at Junior, who was good-hearted and faithful and didn’t inspire her to seductive thoughts at all. “Exactly what were they saying, Jeffrey?” she asked, her voice magnificently angry, because she was. At herself.

“They said you dumped beer on him. That you were furious at him.”

“She’s not so furious now,” Austen interjected, choosing this moment to interrupt what should have been a private conversation.

Gillian glared at him over her shoulder, eyes promising slow death. “You’d be surprised at how furious I am now.”

Jeff, gentleman to the end, held out his arm. “Let’s go, Gilly.”

She was tempted. Unfortunately, Jeff wasn’t the cause of said temptation. “Don’t look like that,” she snapped, seeing how pleased Austen was. There was only one Master Manipulator in this town, and it was her.

Though right now, there was still work to be done, and somebody had to do it. She waved a tired hand in Junior’s direction. “Go home, Jeff. I’m fine. I’m touched by your concern for my—”

“—ass,” interrupted Austen.

“—well-being,” she continued through her locked jaw, “but I don’t need it.”

“Gillian,” Austen said from behind her.

“Can I finish?” she said, not looking at him, because he might not care about the people of this town, but she did.

Then Austen handed her the radio, turning up the volume, and she heard the dispatch, “10-54. We got a passle of goats grazing out on FM 1432. All units, and bring the cattle prods. Dogs if you got ’em.”

“It’s for you,” Austen explained.

Emergency trumped all. Gillian grabbed her keys and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll be back later,” she said to Austen, meeting his eyes. “Don’t do anything to disappoint me.”

After that, she turned to go, missing the worry on his face.

T
HREE HOURS AND
one goat rodeo later, it was long past supper, and Gillian was sitting at her kitchen table, pricing rummage sale items and planning a baby shower. These were the normal Tin Cup days, but her mind was racing forward to Austen’s upcoming task, i.e. fixing the rail route.

“Mindy, do you think I’m too confident?” asked Gillian while trying to decide if a cross-stitched flower pillow was worth twenty-five cents or one dollar. Certainly the smart price was twenty-five cents, but Gillian didn’t want people to think her family had cheap things, so she wrote one dollar on the tag.

“Absolutely.”

“Do you think I’m too certain that I can do whatever I put my mind to, no matter if it’s impossible or not?”

“Without a doubt,” answered Mindy, scratching over the one dollar and repricing it to a quarter.

“Speaking truthfully, have I ever so screwed up that you thought, ‘That poor Gilly, she’s losing it.’”

“Only once.”

Gillian turned her attention to the last item on the table, a blue cashmere sweater adorned with seed pearls. It was a timeless classic and worth something. Worth a lot. In fact, thirty dollars sounded like a bargain, high enough to know it wasn’t cheap, and low enough to make the customer think it was a steal. Boldly she inked in thirty. “Am I losing it?”

“I’m guessing that you lost it again last night and are just now feeling the hard ground hit you in the butt.”

Gillian looked at her best friend, knowing Mindy would listen to her forever and never complain, or switch the subject, or stifle a yawn. No, Mindy was the best, and as such, deserved for Gillian to shut up.

“I invited you here to discuss the plans for the baby shower, not price garage sale paraphernalia, nor discuss my sex life. I shouldn’t be doing this. This is your moment.”

Mindy settled herself comfortably in a chair and sighed happily. “I’m sure you want to have your dramatic ‘Let’s think about Mindy’ moment, but let me tell you, I would rather find out why you disappeared last night.”

Thinking about last night, Gillian frowned. “No, you wouldn’t.”

Mindy leaned closer with an evil grin on her face. “Trust me. I would. Was it awe-inspiring? Did the angels sing? Did the pavement melt?”

Truth, lie or hedge?
“It was awful,” she replied, some combination of all three.

Mindy covered her ears. “Okay. I don’t want to hear this. Good gawd almighty, if a girl can’t live out vicarious sexual fantasies through her bestest and most single friend, then what’s the point in having high-maintenance friends?”

Determined to appear unmoved by the more painful aspects of reality, Gillian pulled out a pen and her engraved notepad and then shifted expectantly toward Mindy.

“Maybe he thinks I’m too high maintenance.” Gillian considered it, wrote H.M. on the paper in neat, curlicue letters directly underneath the embossed GILLIAN H. WANAMAKER.

Mindy grabbed the pen away and scratched it out. “That’s just sad. Pull your head out, silly Gilly.” Then she paused, a bemused expression on her face. “You know, I have been waiting my entire life to say that, and never could. Until now.”

Now properly put in her place, Gillian wrote
C-A-K-E
in bold letters on the paper. “You’re exactly right. What kind of cake do you want? Red velvet, double chocolate fudge or coconut?”

“Coconut. Boiled icing.”

“I told him he had to fix the rail route,” Gillian explained, while writing down Mindy’s preferences, not that she couldn’t recite them by heart, but sometimes things needed to be put in writing.

“Maybe some fudge. No punch. I always hated punch.” Mindy watched Gillian take careful notes and then glanced up. “The rail route needs fixing?”

Gillian contemplated her best “gonna pop any second now” friend and weighed the idea of unloading all of Gillian’s troubles and woes on a woman who by all rights should be eating ice cream and stenciling a toy train border around a nursery ceiling. No, she would not be that heartless. “Can we talk about your baby shower for a second?”

“You’re right, of course. Coconut. Fudge. No punch.” Mindy paused. “Why does it need fixing?”

Realizing that her best friend was bound and determined to sidetrack the conversation, Gillian whipped out the morning edition and pointed to the minuscule newspaper article. It was a mere one column inch that might as well have said: TIN CUP’S
APOCALYPSE NOW.

Quickly Mindy scanned the piece, then looked up and frowned. “When did this happen?”

“Yesterday.”

Normally a very peaceful person, Mindy slapped a hand at the paper, a dramatic gesture most likely learned from Gillian. “Did he do this? He did this, didn’t he? That tick-infested, scumball viper!”

Gillian winced. “His girlfriend did it.”

Mindy tossed the paper aside. “Girlfriend? What the hell, Gillian! What the hell is wrong with you?”

It was the sort of straight-shooter thinking that was exactly what Gillian needed. Someone to make her see sense. Someone to keep her from falling into the same weak-knee trap that she laughed about in others. Not laughing to be cruel, more to feel good that she had enough self-confidence not to get that way herself. “She’s not exactly his girlfriend. She’s the governor’s daughter. I don’t think there’s any deep feelings involved, more gratuitous sex,” she explained, sounding exactly like everyone she’d ever laughed at. Irony was a cruel, cruel thing.

Mindy folded her arms over the bowling ball of her belly, “Oh, boo hoo, look at Mary Sue.”

Gillian sniffed. “You don’t have to be mean.”

At that, Mindy burst out laughing and then stopped when she noticed Gillian’s frankly peeved expression. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes. “So why aren’t you charging down to the statehouse and taking care of it yourself, exactly as you’ve always done?”

Gillian considered the idea. “I wouldn’t charge to the statehouse. This isn’t baking or domestic disputes, or rounding up stray livestock. It’s politics.” Not that she couldn’t do it if she put her mind to it, though. State politics? How hard could it be?

“Then why drag Austen into this at all?” Mindy asked, obviously believing that Gillian had some deep-seated, long-repressed lovesick motives at work.

Gillian rolled her eyes, not understanding why Mindy was overlooking the obvious. “Because it’s his mess to clean up.”

After Gillian stated the obvious reason, Mindy arched a brow that was soaring in its skepticism. “The real reason?”

Now that she’d been outed, Gillian stayed quiet for a minute, forming a coherent answer. “He’s smarter than you think. He can do it. I’m right about this, Mindy, I know I am, and don’t snicker.”

Thankfully, Mindy did not snicker. “You want this for him or you? Does it tweak that legendary Gillian Wanamaker pride that you’re hot for a man who most of the town considered white trash rather than some political giant with highways named after him?”

He’d never been white trash. Not to her.
“You make me sound like a snob.”

“No, you’re a realist, and I can’t figure out why you’re sounding so mushy now. That is too important. What if he doesn’t fix it, Gillian? What if this mess is beyond repair? Do you know what will happen then?”

Gillian tried to smile. “I’m thinking you’re going to tell me.”

“Damn straight. If this doesn’t get set back to rights, we’ll lose the station and you’ll have damaged Austen’s delicate psyche irrevocably—that means forever in case you’re confused. Then everybody in this town will be questioning your judgment, which means you’ll be back sharpening pencils at the bank while Mr. McIcky will be undressing you with his tiny rat eyes. Your mother will start baking more, then you’ll eat more. You’ll stop running and eventually get fat. And I, your best friend and mother of your future godchild, will have to move to Plano, where I will wither away among all the other soccer moms, blowing out my hair, taking yoga classes and drinking chardonnay. I hate chardonnay. It’s like drinking ant piss.”

“Why will you be in Plano?” asked Gillian, leapfrogging to the pertinent part of the conversation.

“Brad thinks the high school is going to axe some teachers. Namely him. With the baby on the way, he thought it’d be smart to move to a place with a little more job security. I had convinced him that with the rail hub and the new development plans that come along with it, we’d make it okay in Tin Cup.”

Oh.
“That’s why you’ve been putting off painting the nursery?”

“The Realtor said that toy trains are a real-estate don’t.”

Gillian eyed her “about to pop” best friend, now realizing that life well and truly sucked for everybody in this town, and Mindy should have shared her suckiness with Gillian. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to say anything because I thought this was a crisis we had averted.” Mindy shrugged. “Guess not.”

No. It was merely a detour on the lifelong journey to Gillian getting everything that she always wanted and/or deserved.

Her mind whirling, Gillian tapped her pen on the paper, the light of battle in her eyes. “You and my future godchild are going nowhere. And Brad’s not going anywhere, either. I don’t know how yet, but I can fix this.”

Mindy sighed with relief. “I knew you could, Gillian. I’m just not willing to leave my family’s financial well-being in the unreliable hands of Austen Hart.”

Gillian, who had only last evening left her physical well-being in the very reliable hands of Austen Hart, wisely chose not to respond.

He would fix it. They would fix it. She would be on him like glue until all was right, and it would be because Gillian performed the impossible on a daily basis. Feeling better, she shot Mindy her bestest, most confidentest Wanamaker smile and double-checked the list, because a woman lived and died by her ability to throw the perfect party.

“Okay, so, we have coconut, fudge, no punch. And how about one of those watermelon baby baskets? I can put some lace around the edges.”

“Add cherries. I used to hate cherries, but the hormones are making the taste buds wonky. Does your momma have any fresh cherries in the kitchen? I’m getting a little hungry.” Mindy didn’t wait for a response, but instead went to forage for food, while Gillian made goofy baby shower doodles.

It would work out. It had to.

A
USTEN TOOK THE NEWS
of her accompanying him to Austin unsurprisingly well.

“This isn’t about you,” she warned, seeing the leap of anticipation in his face when she told him. And it wasn’t.

She stalked about his hotel room like a caged animal, not that she felt the room was too small, not like she was achingly aware of the male testosterone that was flirting with her nose. “This is about Mindy’s nursery and dislike of chardonnay,” she continued on, valiantly ignoring it all.

“Are you going to tell me what that means?” he asked, crossing his hands behind his head, leaning back on the bed, the very picture of a man with absolutely nothing to lose. The very picture of trouble. Regretfully, she looked away.

“We need to stay focused on developing a plan, and genius takes time.”

“You’re too stressed. It’s late. Genius doesn’t appear on demand. Better to relax and let your creative juices work their magic.”

“Are you propositioning me? Now?” Perhaps she was being overly sensitive, but she didn’t want her magic worked. Frankly, her magic was worked enough.

“Well, I wasn’t, but if you want me to, I will.”

She was bone-deep tired, and Austen looked so comfortable, so easy, so tempting. Even the bed of the Spotlight Inn looked—adequate. Saliva pooled in her mouth, embarrassing her.

His eyes met hers, and Gillian felt a flash of heat, the thrill of this thing between them. Lightning.

And just as quickly, the heat in his eyes was gone. “I’m trying to be on my best behavior,” he told her, his voice husky and gruff. “But this is as good as it gets. You’re cruising for a fall, Gillian.” And he sounded a little more than sad.

Before she did something she would regret, Gillian turned away. “We’ll leave in the morning, first light.”

And with that, she retreated.

T
HE TRIP TO
Austin was four hours in the car, which meant four hours to learn more about the Secret Life and Times of Austen Hart: The Post-Tin Cup Years. Partly because she was a curious person, and more precisely because Gillian firmly believed that Austen could do this, with the proper encouragement and guidance, of course, and she didn’t want to be wrong.

He had always proven her wrong, and everybody had always said she was wrong, but
wrong
wasn’t a word she wanted in her vocabulary. Deep down, she wanted to think there were parts to Austen Hart that stayed hidden and locked away. Parts of him that were good and tender and caring. He’d kept those parts hidden in high school, only turning them out on special moments, but the way he’d been since he’d returned, the way he had treated her, had treated everyone, made her wonder if Austen Hart had killed those parts for good.

Maybe this was wrong.

As he drove, she watched the stillness of his hands on the wheel. Frank Hart had always had the Jim Beam jitters in his hands, that awful mad-dog twitch in his cheek, but Austen had always been still as night.

“What have you been doing since high school?”

At her question, he turned, his face hidden behind dark glasses, but the smile was all practiced charm. Another thing learned in his post-Tin Cup years. She remembered the light in his face the night he had talked about prom and the hotel. The roses, the champagne, and it dawned on her that his smile had been the same.

Feeling sad and foolish, Gillian realized that the practiced charm had been there all along.

“I’ve been living large.”

“What happened to you?”

He turned his attention back to the road, completely unnecessary in her opinion since they were on a desolate stretch of highway and the likelihood of impending traffic was right up there with Gillian dying her hair black.