Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) (26 page)

She gave him a kiss worthy of the silver screen. Worthy of the cover of
LIFE
magazine. On the town square in Brazos Bend, Texas, Torie kissed Matt Callahan with all the emotion churning inside her. She poured herself into the moment, and his heated response curled her toes, melted her knees, and ... broke her heart.

She wanted this to be real. She wanted this ring—well, maybe not this exact ring—and this engagement. She wanted this man. And he was using her as muffin repellent. How humiliating was that?

“Hell,” he murmured as he broke the kiss. Then he was pushing her away, turning her around. “Let’s get that ice cream before I spontaneously combust.”

***

Matt kept his hand at the small of Torie’s back as he led her to Kathy Hudson’s latest venture, the ice-cream parlor she’d named Princess, Too. It didn’t escape his notice that they’d attracted the attention of, not only everyone on the street, but also those peering from the shop windows, and from the courthouse steps in the middle of the square.
Well, that should do it.

It seemed as if he were working on the ninety-sixth hour of this day, and it wasn’t even suppertime yet. But after he took care of this one last detail, he could relax. Go home. Maybe work in the vineyard for a while, then take the boat out and fish. By himself.

Mark could pull guard duty for a few hours. Matt needed some breathing room. He needed some distance from Torie.

After he completed this one little task.

Matt pulled open the door to the ice-cream parlor and called out in a loud voice, “Hello, everyone. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, I want you to know that I’m a happy man. The beautiful, talented, and sweet-as-a-Parker County peach Victoria Bradshaw has agreed to be my wife.” Holding up Torie’s left hand, he wiggled it so that the rock on her ring finger flashed in the sunlight. “I’m inviting all y’all to come celebrate with us. Double-dip cones for everyone. I’m buying.”

As expected, the place went wild with cheers and catcalls and more than a few groans of disappointment. In less than three minutes, the line stretched out the door, down past the jewelry shop, and around the corner. There was nothing the people of Brazos Bend liked better than romance mingled with scandal and discussed over something sweet and free.

At first, Torie kept shooting him glares of exasperation, but after a half dozen oohs and aahs over the ring, she got into the spirit of the moment.

Matt walked behind the counter, tied on a white apron, washed his hands, and grabbed a scoop to assist Kathy and help move things along.

“Well, aren’t you a surprise?” Kathy handed him a sugar cone and pointed toward a tub of Rocky Road. Matt’s gaze lingered on the dangling earrings in Kathy’s ears. It was the first time he’d seen ice cream cone jewelry on a female above the age of eight. “She’s a pretty thing, I’ll give you that, but isn’t she the gal who plugged your leg with a nine millimeter?”

“I like a girl with spirit.”

“Hmm ...” Kathy handed a cone filled with lime and orange sherbet over to a teenager with a smile, then said, “Maddie stopped by to see me on her way out of town. She didn’t mention an engagement in the family.”

“That’s one thing I love about my sister-in-law. She respects her family’s privacy.” He smiled widely at a redheaded toddler in his mother’s arms and handed over the requested junior-dip-sized vanilla.

Kathy chuckled. “You should know better than to try and put me in my place, Matt Callahan. I don’t have a shy bone in my body—comes from being an aging hippie and convicted felon. If you wanted privacy, you wouldn’t have come home to Brazos Bend, and you certainly wouldn’t have offered to buy everyone in town ice cream at my shop. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“No problem. Glad to be of help.” Seeing that the crowd around Torie had thinned a bit, he called out. “Sweetheart? What can I scoop up for you?”

“Now, there’s a loaded question,” she drily observed. “As much as I love ice cream, I think I’ll wait. I need to fit into my wedding gown, after all.”

“You sure? I bet Kathy has a tub of catfish flavor in the back.”

“Lame, Callahan. Lame.”

“That’s disgusting is what it is,” Kathy commented. She handed Torie a cone of frozen yogurt. “Try this, Ms. Bradshaw. It’s low fat and wedding gown safe. So, when is the big day?”

Torie looked at Matt, who shrugged. He’d completely lost his train of thought when she took a big, long lick of the ice-cream cone. Hell, this was a mistake.

“October thirteenth,” Torie said with a smile to Kathy.

Kathy gasped with horror at the unlucky date and Torie launched into some silly explanation almost as wild as the tales he’d spun in the jewelry store. Matt tried to tune her out, to drag his gaze back to the next person in line and focus his attention on ice cream orders. He failed miserably.

Torie licked that ice-cream cone with exaggerated enthusiasm. She played with it on her tongue. She put the whole thing in her mouth and sucked.

She drove him to the very edge of crazy.

The little tease.

When the line finally trickled down to the last customer, Matt was more than ready to escape. He took off the apron and tossed it on the counter behind him. Then, reaching into his wallet, he pulled out the credit card he’d appropriated earlier.

Kathy took the card, checked the name, and lifted her brows in surprise. “You know what you’re doing, Matthew?” she asked softly.

“I do,” he murmured back. “Run the card, Kathy. I’ll make it good. You know that.”

She gave him the pen, the two-part receipt, and a disapproving look. Matt signed the cardholder’s name, then stuck the receipt and the credit card in his back pocket.

He would return Torie’s credit card to the wallet in her purse later.

Chapter Fourteen

She waited until he pulled into the driveway at the lake house. Unfastening her seat belt, she turned to him and said, “Explain why you did that to me.”

Had she not been watching him so closely, she’d have missed the slightest of flinches, which betrayed him. “Did what?”

So she’d hit a nerve. Good. “The whole public spectacle. It wasn’t necessary, Callahan. I know small towns, too. The catfish caper was enough—you didn’t need the whole engagement- ring-and-ice-cream circus. Was it all some sort of payback? A way to humiliate me? I heard your brothers mention that possibility this morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Victoria,” he replied, amusement lacing his tone as he opened his door and let Paco scramble out.

The amusement did it. Her temper flared and she yanked open the door and climbed down onto the rocky ground. Rather than head for the house, she turned the other way. Right at that moment, she wanted away from Matt Callahan, away from his brother or brothers lurking inside, away from computer printouts and hushed phone calls and all the other paraphernalia of investigation, away from his father’s overexcited dog.

Torie wanted her life back.

She took the path leading to the vineyard and walked fast. The pressure of tears built behind her eyes and she clenched her teeth and forced them back. She wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t a crier. As she swung her arms, the ring caught the sunlight and sparkled. Emotion bubbled up inside her. She wrenched off the ring and threw it down—onto the path where she could find it later, not out into the field. She wasn’t that big of a fool.

No, Torie was mad.

Angry.

Furious.

“Victoria, hold up,” Matt called from behind her.

She whirled on him as he bent to scoop up the ring. “Don’t tell me what to do!”

Then she picked up her pace, broke into a jog, then a run. She ran until she topped the hill; then she stopped to catch her breath. Bent over, her hands on her knees, she waited until the fire in her lungs eased. When she finally straightened, fatigue gripped her. Tears flooded her eyes and a pair spilled down her cheeks.

“C’mere, Shutterbug. This is the best sittin’ rock on the ranch. It’s a wonderful place to watch the sunset.”

Matt patted the space beside him on a flat-topped boulder a few yards to the right of the trail. Torie hadn’t heard him come up behind her. “I was going to sit on that rock, anyway,” she explained as she took the seat he’d indicated. “I’m not doing it because you told me to.”

“Of course you’re not.” Matt lifted her arm and kissed the back of her hand. “Look, nothing I did today was intended to insult you. I’m not accustomed to explaining myself.”

“I’m not accustomed to letting other people run my life. That hasn’t happened since I stopped listening to my father when I was a teenager.”

His mouth quirked in a lopsided grin. “You are one of no more than three people I can call to mind who are capable of standing up to General Lincoln Bradshaw.”

She sniffed with disdain and smelled rain on the air. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“When Helen visited me in the hospital, she shared a few stories about the brawls y’all had. I recall one about missing a curfew?”

Torie smiled, her gaze following a hawk soaring on the breeze ahead of the storm clouds building in the east, her mind on events of long ago. “Actually Helen was the one who missed the curfew, but he didn’t even notice. He just assumed it was me. I had the dedication of the righteous that night.”

“When we were that age, Branch didn’t notice if we were at home or on the moon.”

“Widowers on opposite ends of the spectrum, then. I’ve been on my own a long time. I might not have always made the best decisions, but they were always my decisions. I hate having that taken away from me.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and gave her a sheepish grin she didn’t buy for a second. “I guess that means you’d rather get engaged on your own terms, hmm?”

She was tempted ... oh, so tempted ... to tell him the truth. How would Matt Callahan react if she said,
I’d rather it was real? I wish you’d meant the kisses and the catfish-house declaration. I wish the ring and ice cream celebration were real.

I wish you really loved me.

Maybe he’d pull out his 007 memory eraser stun gun and blast her back to good sense. Probably, he’d run away from her just as fast as he possibly could.

Her brain must have been scrambled by the stalker. For all her faults, Torie had never been a feebleminded woman. Falling in love with Matthew Callahan was nothing short of stupid. And that’s what she’d done. It’d been fast, but Torie had spent her entire life doing things fast.

No more falling about it. She knew that now. She’d hit ground. Torie Bradshaw was head over heels in love with the man who’d given her an engagement ring two hours ago. As a prop.

A prop. A fake. Torie knew all about fake. She dealt with it daily in her job, and wasn’t it fun when her work exposed the lie? Only this time, the tables were turned. The joke was on her. She was in a spotlight she didn’t like, didn’t want. What made it even worse was that he seemed to enjoy it. The jerk.

What if he’d meant all those things he said and pretended? Like she did. Fool that she was. Imagine if his proposal had been real. Marrying him would be straight out of Cinderella meets James Bond.

Yeah. Right. Like that would ever happen.
The Spy Who Loved Me ... not.

It’d serve him right if she told him how she felt. It might actually needle his conscience just a bit. She knew he had one. Admittedly, it had come as a bit of a surprise, considering the man’s occupation, but she’d witnessed it firsthand. What else but a guilty conscience would have made him go by his father’s house and retrieve Paco after leaving the ice cream parlor?

“That’s the closest I’ve ever been to a marriage proposal,” she finally said. “Let’s just say I had something different in mind for the event.”

If he gave her half a lead, she might just do it. Torie tried to be honest and forthright with others. Besides, if she was going to suffer with the knowledge of such a dire predicament, then he should have to suffer, too. It was only fair.

Torie tried to be fair, too.

Besides, what if ...

No. Don’t go there. Absolutely, positively don’t go there.

Unaware of her inner turmoil, Matt scooped up a handful of pebbles off the ground and threw them one by one down the hill. “I admire the way you’ve kept it together throughout all this, Victoria. If it helps, I don’t think it’ll last much longer. We’ll find the slime who’s doing this, and you’ll get your life back.” Capturing her gaze, he murmured, “I promise.”

But will I get my heart back?

They sat quietly for a time, watching the sun sink behind the hilltops, the sky awash with red and gold. As the brilliant colors muted to shades of pink and purple, Matt said, “It’s been a helluva day.”

“That it has.”

“You know, Victoria, I understand what you’re feeling.”

What? I doubt it.

“My brothers and I did something stupid when I was in my first year of college. In his first act of parenting in years, Branch cut us off financially and sent us away from here and from each other. We didn’t know where each other ended up. You know what? A selfish part of me was happy about it. I was the oldest and Branch hadn’t been worth shooting since my mother died. Responsibility for my brothers fell on me. I don’t know that I recognized it at the time, but I was glad to be off on my own, with no one to answer to but my own conscience. I was glad to finally have the chance to live my life for me, to follow the path I wanted to follow.”