Unwrapping Holly: (6 page)

She slid across the seat and shoved open the door. Cole reached for her, but she managed to evade his grasp, and jumped out of the truck.

“Thanks,” she said, wind and snow whipping wildly around her. “Or whatever I’m supposed to say under these circumstances.” She shoved the door shut.

Cole pounded the steering wheel, and then realized he didn’t even know her full name. He jerked his door open, and ice pelted down on his skin, snow instantly clinging to his shirt.

“Holly! ” he called, noting she was already halfway to The Tavern. He started to pursue, but he drew up short when he realized it wasn’t Jacob standing there, hands in a leather bomber jacket, but Abe, with his truck running a few feet away, as if he was in a hurry.

“Sorry, man,” Abe offered, motioning to Holly. He wasn’t an instigator, not one to show up unannounced, without Jacob by his side, prodding him. “But Jacob broke his damned leg.”

“What? How?”

“Some bastard hit his wife, so Jacob intervened. Managed to land a foot on some ice in the process.”

Ouch. “How bad?”

“Bad,” Abe said. “Real bad. Thought you’d want to follow us to the hospital.”

There was no question—he was following. He might want to beat Jacob’s ass now and then, but Jacob was his baby brother. Cole shook his head. Before he turned back to his truck, Cole quirked a brow. “Did he at least pop the bastard a good one before he went down?”

Abe laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Popped him a nice shiner. But you know Jacob. He’s looking at possible surgery, and he’s worried about the woman having repercussions from his actions. He’s pretty freaked out.”

“That’s our boy,” Cole said, referring to the way Jacob was always fighting for the underdog. More than once, it had gotten him in trouble but always with good intentions. And no real man hit a woman. “Tell him I’ll call the sheriff.”

Abe nodded and Cole slid into his truck and yanked the door shut. Instantly, the sweet scent of her flared his nostrils.
Holly.
Regret ground through his nerve endings, pulsed in his cock. Turned out, he’d become a one-night stand after all. One that had finished with far too little of a good thing. And he couldn’t be happy about that. No matter how fantasy-worthy this truck had now become.

Three days after her hot interlude with a sexy stranger, Holly sat at Betty’s Diner, her laptop in front of her. Surprisingly, she’d managed to put words on a few pages. Her cottage writing escape had become home of the “ruby wish” and subsequent fantasy man, thus a distraction. Which pretty much defeated the purpose of coming home for the holidays this early.

She couldn’t seem to get anything done there for replaying that night with Cole. The kissing, the touching, how he removed her dress. She plopped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. God. The dress. And then the rash escape out of complete mortification that, once she’d recovered from her embarrassment, left her wondering what might have happened had she stayed.

“Get you more hot cocoa before I leave for the night, sweetie?” Holly glanced up at Jean, the fiftysomething waitress who’d worked at the diner since Holly was a teen. “No, thanks, Jean.”

“How’s the next best seller coming?” she asked. “You sure been working hard. And here I thought you got to sit in you pj’s and eat bonbons.”

Holly grinned at that. “I admit to working in my share of sleepwear, but I’ve yet to eat a bonbon. Though I’ve heard they’re quite yummy.” She made a mental note to tell her mom to cool the bragging, and hug her for being proud enough to do it. Mom had made sure everyone she’d ever met in this lifetime knew when Holly had made the
USA Today
list.

Jean snickered. “Well,” she said, hands on her robust hips, accented by a tightly tied white apron, “I can’t produce bonbons, but we got plenty of pie and ice cream in the back if you decide you want some. Carol and Susan will be here until ten.”

Holly glanced at her watch. It was eight now. She hated writing with a time limit. Damn. She shook off that counterproductive thought and focused on Jean, offering her a genuine smile. “Have a good night and thanks for letting me hog your table so long.” It was true that small towns had negatives, like gossip gabbers, but it also came with lots of friendly faces, a warmer feeling in general that had been too easily missed on previous quick visits home. “It’s nice to be home.”

“You can hog my table any day,” she said. “Come back tomor row.”

Behind Holly, the bell on the door chimed as it had many times since her arrival. She ignored any curiosity about new customers now as she had every other newcomer’s entrance, avoiding distractions. Cole was enough to distract her focus on writing. She didn’t need more.

“I probably will,” Holly said. “I’ve gotten more done these past few hours than I have in a week.”

“Good,” she said. “Glad we could help.” She reached in her apron and pulled out a book. “There is a little favor if I could ask?” She slid the book onto the table where Holly could see it was a copy of
Deadly Suspicions
by Holly Rivers, her pen name, which she’d chosen to avoid an accusation of distraction at the law firm while she was still there. Jean grinned. “Me and the girls were wondering if you could autograph our books. I mean how often can you say you knew a bestselling author when they were in braces and pigtails?”

“Of course,” Holly said, blushing. She picked up a pen, scribbling a personalized note in the inside cover before handing it to Jean. “And for the record, I
never
wore pigtails any more than I eat bonbons.” Carol, one of the other waitresses, a redheaded fireball who kept all the customers—and Betty—in line, slid a couple copies of the book onto the table. “I’ll leave them here. No rush.”

Holly laughed. “You got it, Carol. And actually, I’ll take a cup of coffee after all.” She had to make the most of these last two hours.

“Make that two,” came a deep familiar male voice just before Cole slid into the seat across from her. Holly’s eyes went wide, her heart thrumming wildly in her chest.

“Anything for one of the Wiley boys,” Carol said, and rushed away.

“I better go, now that trouble has arrived,” Jean said, teasing Cole, clearly familiar with him.

“Hey now,” Cole said, giving Jean a sexy, one-dimple smile that would have set any woman’s heart racing. “You’ll give Holly the wrong idea. Because I
know
you must be referring to Jacob and Abe.”

Jean chuckled, the light in her eyes saying that Cole’s appeal reached across the age-groups. “ ’ Cause you ain’t got a lick of trouble in you, do you now, boy?”

“Not a lick,” Cole replied mischievously, cutting Holly a sideways look.

Holly blushed at his little innuendo and the unbidden erotic images it evoked, but Jean didn’t seem to notice. She chuckled a bit more. “I believe that about as easily as I believe fish can fly.”

“Some fish can fly,” Holly said instinctively, fumbling for anything to divert her mind from the memory of her naked breasts in Cole’s hands. She’d always been the family encyclopedia, the keeper of important catalog information, which had served her nicely in the legal field as well.

“She has a point,” Cole said, resting his forearms on the table and speaking to Holly. “I’m the nice, responsible brother of the three, and she knows that.”

Jean shook her head. “I’ll tell you all the gossip about him tomorrow,” Jean promised Holly. “I’m out of here for now. You kids have a good night.”

Cole’s expression lit with amusement as he waved good naturedly to Jean and then fixed a penetrating stare on Holly. He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Wonder if that gossip will include a sexy encounter in the front seat of my truck three nights ago?”

Panic rose in her, but she quickly noted the amusement in his eyes and dismissed it, trying not to get lost in the depths of those chocolate brown eyes—with little amber and copper speckles that reminded her of autumn. Feigning more chagrin than she felt, she said, “You are not the ‘nice’ one you claim to be for even bringing that up.”

“Because you’d rather pretend it never happened, right?” he pointedly challenged.

“That’s right,” she said, not backing down one bit. “I want to pretend it didn’t happen. I wasn’t supposed to ever see you again.”

He arched a brow. “Is that so?”

She almost swallowed her tongue at that question but managed to charge forward. “Yes. It’s so. And we both know you know it. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“But here I am,” he said softly. “What are you going to do with me?”

Holly leaned back against the leather of the booth, and tried to portray her calm and collected courtroom persona. But as she crossed her arms in front of her chest and the glittery Santa shirt her mother had insisted she wear that day, and now regretted immensely, she was anything but. She was in uncharted territory. The men she’d been with in the past might have been merely “vanilla sex” competent, but at least she knew what to do with them. This one, she did not. At least not outside her fantasies, definitely not in flesh and blood. She’d never acted as brazenly as she had with Cole. What was she going to do with him? There were lots of things she
wanted
to do with him. Like lick him in all kinds of places, but that wasn’t going to happen.

He arched a brow that said,
Feel free to throw out suggestions if you are having trouble narrowing the options. Or I could suggest a few possibilities myself.
His eyes twinkled with sexy mischief. “You could start—”

Carol reappeared at that moment, and Holly wanted to scream. She could start how? Start by kissing him all over? By getting up and dragging him to the restroom and finally feeling what it was like to have that man inside her? To—

“How’s Jacob doing?” Carol asked, filling the two coffee cups she’d brought to the table with the pot she held. “I heard from Katie over at the salon, he got in some fight at The Tavern Friday night, defending some woman from a wife beater, and broke his leg.”

“Jacob is doing a fine job of defying doctor’s orders to stay in bed and has irritated me every opportunity he gets. So he’s pretty much back to his normal self, with the addition of a cast and bigger-than-usual attitude.”

Carol chuckled. “He was a hero from what I hear,” she told him. “Helped that poor woman. So cut the boy some slack. I’ll give you some pie to take to him. That coconut kind he likes so much. Let me know if you two need anything more.”

“I’ll see that he gets it,” he said. She walked away and he refocused on Holly. “And there you have the gossip circuit of a small town. She found out in the salon. But now
you
know. That’s why my brother came to the truck the other night; otherwise they would not have. Some fun over a beer inside the tavern is one thing. They know appropriate boundaries.”

Holly now felt bad for thinking the worst of his brothers the night before. “I’m sorry. I thought. . . .” She pushed her computer aside, welcoming him for the first time since he sat down. She should be writing, but she wasn’t going to try now. The diner would close soon anyway. “Did Jacob at least get one good jab in before he went down?”

A slow smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “That’s the exact question I asked when I found out.”

She smiled. “You did?”

He nodded.

“And?” she prodded. “Did he?”

“He did,” Cole said. “But the woman went right back to her husband. Jacob’s feeling like he did it all for nothing.”

Holly poured cream into her coffee and stopped a moment. “That’s not true,” she said. “Tell him it’s not true. What he did told her there are people out there that will help. Maybe it will become the tiny chip in her husband’s persona of intimidation that makes her less afraid to act. Sheriff Jack was involved, I assume? He’s never been one to look the other way. He’ll stay on the guy.”

“Sheriff Jack is the reason Jacob isn’t charged with assault. This kid he scrapped with is new in town. The sheriff promised the guy he’d take off his badge and punch him himself if he ever heard of him hitting a woman again. That pretty much discouraged him from filing charges.” He studied her a moment. “You know this town as if you grew up around here. And if the staff here is any indicator, it seems folks know you, too.”

Part of her clamored with the warning to stop the talking, to avoid getting personal, but she found herself answering anyway. “As I mentioned, I grew up here, yes. Went to school with Sheriff Jack. His dad pulled me out of more than a ditch or two in his day as sheriff.” She shook her head. “That was when I first had my driver’s license and it was not pretty. I wasn’t so good at navigating in the snow.”

Amusement flickered across his face. “And now? Are you good in the snow now?”

“Judging from the slipping and sliding I was doing coming over here, no,” she said, and laughed, amused at herself. “I’m out of practice, for sure. Other than a short visit here or there, I’ve been gone ten years. Around my area of the country, these past ten years, snow is a fable.”

“Where would that be?”

“Houston, Texas. Law school and then a law firm.”

He picked up the book. “And then writer?”

“Yes. And finally doing it full-time, which has me nervous as heck. I can’t seem to put words on the page. That’s why I came home. I thought a change of scenery might help me through the terror of failure.”

Glancing at the book and then at her, he said, “I think the part here that says ‘
USA Today
bestselling author’ guarantees you’ve succeeded.”

“One time on a list does not make a career,” she said drily, and shifted the conversation away from anything that reminded her of the deadline fast approaching. “What about you? I know you weren’t here before that because I’ve never heard of the Wiley brothers. And clearly everyone else has. How’d you end up here?”

“I came to town about two years after you left from the sounds of it.” He slid back into the seat and stretched one long leg parallel to the table, his back against the wall, one arm lazily draped on the seat. Casual, easygoing. “My mom and dad—both gone now—retired from corporate living in upstate New York. Dad and I had always talked about opening a business together, and it seemed the right time. I was twenty-five, four years out of college, working for a big-city contractor. There wasn’t a local operation in Haven, so it seemed a perfect fit. And where we went, my brothers tended to follow.”