Woodrose Mountain (19 page)

“I didn’t want to keep her. Taryn, I mean. Deep down, despite her party-girl ways, Marcy was Catholic and would never consider terminating the pregnancy. At first, I pushed her to give the baby up for adoption. The last thing I wanted at the time was to be tied down with a kid.”

Guilt flickered in his gaze and he sighed heavily. “I sometimes think Taryn would have been better off if I had continued to push for that. If Marcy and I had decided not to get married instead.”

“How can you say that? You love Taryn.”

“I love her but I haven’t been the best father.”

He spoke in a low voice, his mouth tight and those shadows of guilt in his blue eyes, and her heart ached for him. She felt extraordinarily touched that he would confide this in her, something she very much doubted he had ever shared with anyone else. At the same time, it terrified her. In only a matter of days, their relationship had shifted from tension and dislike to something far different. Something intense and rich and sweetly profound.

She touched his arm. “All parents wish they had done something better. It’s part of the universal code of parenting, I think. Don’t beat yourself up, Brodie.”

The muscles beneath her fingers flexed. “I pushed her too hard. The last few years, it seems like I rode her all the time. About grades, about boys, about her clothes, about wasting so much time online and texting.”

“You mean like any concerned father would?”

“Between my work schedule and her hectic school and social life, it seems like the few moments I did spend with her at dinnertime or whatever were always strained and tense. She wanted something from me and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell it was.”

Your love. Just your love.
She bit her lip and remained silent, not wanting to add to his guilt.

“Even though we had my mom to pick up the slack, losing Marcy when Taryn was just a little kid was tough on her,” he went on after a pause. “I think it was harder because for those first few years Marcy would flit in and out on a whim, make all kinds of promises, then never keep any of them. You want to know what a terrible, selfish person I am? It was almost a relief to me when Marcy was killed in an avalanche heli-skiing in Chile somewhere. Yeah, I grieved for all those missed chances and for the woman I’d tried to convince myself I loved years ago, but at least after she died, I knew she couldn’t break Taryn’s heart anymore.”

“You’re not a terrible person, Brodie.” It would be far, far easier for her if he were. She could feel those cracks in the ice around her heart cut deeper, almost hear the thunder in her ears as pieces of it fell away like glaciers calving in the Arctic sea.

“I should have tried harder to keep my marriage together so Taryn could have had a chance at a regular life, with a mother who wasn’t always looking for the next thrill until it killed her.”

Evie didn’t want this, the sweet, seductive tenderness that curled around and between them. She wanted to run as far and as fast as she could away from this soft warmth.

“I didn’t know you then but I have a little experience with who you are now. I have no doubt whatsoever that you did all within your power to make things work. Trust me when I say you’re the most determined man I’ve ever met.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

A few weeks earlier, her words might have been edged with derision. She had viewed Brodie as a man who took what he wanted, regardless of the consequences. She had seen firsthand the power he wielded in Hope’s Crossing, the way he could sway a roomful of civic leaders to his way of thinking.

What she had once considered arrogance, now she recognized as vision and sheer strength of will. He knew what he wanted—and unlike most of the world, he had no problem doing what was necessary to make it happen, whether that was developing a neighborhood or healing his daughter.

“A compliment,” she murmured. “Definitely a compliment.”

“I’ll take it as such, then.”

Their gazes met and the air between them suddenly seemed to crackle and spark with electricity. She knew he was thinking about that kiss. She could see it in the way he swallowed and the expansion of his pupils, until the dark almost overtook the blue of his irises.

He wanted to kiss her again. And she wanted to let him.

“Taryn is probably awake by now,” she said, then was embarrassed by the huskiness of her voice.

“I doubt it,” he said. “She can be a pretty sound sleeper.”

She needed to go now, while she could.
Move.
The warning registered in her mind but she couldn’t seem to make her feet cooperate. With a funny sense of inevitability, she saw Brodie walk around his desk to stand in front of her.

“Evaline,” he murmured. Just that, only her name, and she was lost. She didn’t resist when he pulled her to her feet or when he curved one hand around her cheek, his fingers warm on her skin, or when he lowered his head and his mouth found hers.

He tasted delicious, of cherries and a hint of chocolate, probably from that thin slice of cake he’d had for dessert after lunch. Somehow she had always known chocolate would eventually be her downfall but this wasn’t quite what she’d expected.

Where their first kiss had been slow and easy, this one was…
more.
More sensual, more intense, more demanding.

More…
wow.

His tongue licked at the seam of her mouth and she couldn’t resist parting her lips, drawing him closer, pressing her body to his as he deepened the kiss.

Oh. My. He was an extraordinary kisser. Who would have thought serious Brodie Thorne would kiss a woman with this knee-weakening intensity that made her want to throw every shred of common sense down the mountainside, crawl right into his lap and stay for a week or so, just learning the mysteries of his clever mouth?

Somehow—she was only vaguely aware of the logistics of it—he shifted their position until she was perched on the edge of the desk and he was standing between her legs. The heat of him was intoxicating. It seeped through her skin, warming all those cold and empty places inside her.

They kissed for a long time and might have continued indefinitely, heedless of Taryn or Mrs. O. or anything else, except a phone suddenly bleated softly between them.

He drew back a little, his eyes murky and aroused and filled with regret. The phone rang again and she scrambled back a little way on the desk. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

“I don’t think so. Who knows what I might say? I’m not sure I have a functioning brain cell in my head right now.” He paused and gave her a long look. “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

She swallowed hard, wanting nothing more than to sink back into him. She had a job to do here, she reminded herself, and it didn’t include kissing her employer until she forgot everything, including her patient.

“Depends how you define
problem.
”

He sighed and moved away from her, much to her regret.

“I know how much I owe you. What you’re doing with Taryn is amazing. She’s showing real progress and I don’t want to do anything to screw that up.”

“It was only a kiss, Brodie.”

“A pretty spectacular one, as far as kisses go.”

She refused to feel flattered by that. Or so she told herself. “Don’t worry about it. For some reason I don’t quite understand, we happen to have this…vibe…between us. It’s completely insane. I get it.”

“Not
completely
insane,” he murmured.

“Sorry?”

“You’re a beautiful woman, Evie. I’ve been attracted to you since the day you showed up in Hope’s Crossing.”

“You have not. You hated me when I came to visit your mother the first time!”

“
Hate
is a strong word.
Distrust
fits better. I tend to be protective of the people I care about. I was looking out for my mother, wondering at your motives for befriending her. I won’t deny that, but even when I was suspicious of you, that didn’t stop me from having, uh, completely inappropriate thoughts about you. For one thing, I’ve been wondering for months how all that wondrous hair would feel if I ever had the chance to slide my fingers through it.”

She shivered, enthralled by his words even as she knew she ought to tell him to shut up now, while she still had half a chance of walking out of this room without kissing him again. She didn’t, though, and her penance was that he continued to seduce her with those low, murmured words.

“Having you here in my house has only intensified my attraction to you. Not only that, but I’m beginning to see someone even more amazing on the inside. Strong and kind, clever, compassionate, funny. How could any man in his right mind not be dying to kiss you?”

She hitched in a ragged little breath, wanting desperately to jump back into his arms again.

She couldn’t. If he knew she had allowed Charlie in his house, he wouldn’t see her as any of those things. More like manipulative, devious, seditious.

The reminder compelled her to ease away from him. What was the word he’d used?
Inappropriate.
This whole tangling of tongues thing was completely inappropriate, especially given her deception.

With a great deal of effort—and no small amount of regret—she eased away from him, scooting to the side of the desk and standing again. “I’d better go check on Taryn.”

His expression was rueful. “Yeah. It’s going to be a problem.”

“Not if we don’t let it be. Let’s just pretend this kiss and the one the other day never happened. Whatever the catalyst—stress, proximity, whatever—they were both mistakes. Yes, I’m attracted to you. I’m sure if I stood on Main Street and took a poll, half the women in town would be able to say the same thing. But I can’t afford this kind of…distraction…right now. I’m here to help Taryn transition to her home-based program. That’s all. This is a critical time in her therapy and we would both do better to focus on our objective here.”

“Our objective. Right.”

“Taryn needs my attention right now. Her occupational therapist is coming this afternoon so I need to go make sure she’s ready.”

They never
had
discussed possible candidates to replace her, Evie realized as she left his office and walked down the hall toward Taryn’s rooms. Let him figure it out himself. She wasn’t about to head back into his office right now—not when it was taking all her strength to walk away.

CHAPTER NINE

I
T
WAS
ONLY
A
KISS
.
A simple merging of mouth against mouth, with a jumble of highly compatible pheromones thrown in to make things interesting. More than a week later, Brodie was still trying to convince himself of that—and still trying to talk himself down from trying it again.

Evie had made it abundantly clear she wasn’t interested, despite the tension that seemed to shiver in the air whenever they were in the same room. Her priority was Taryn and she considered this attraction between them merely a distraction.

Under other circumstances, he might have appreciated the irony that Evie Blanchard—of the bleeding heart and the hippie-chick clothes and the zeal for beading—was the one being brisk and businesslike here.

He knew she was right. Beyond that, while they might share an attraction and he was coming to see her in a much more favorable light as he watched her care for his daughter, on the most basic of issues they were highly incompatible. He craved structure and order and calm. Evie was the complete opposite of all those things. She was color and chaos, passion and heat.

And yet. There was a softness about her, a fragile vulnerability, that called to him even though he knew it was, in her words, completely crazy.

He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her for more than a week. In the middle of a business meeting, he would remember the particular curve of her mouth, that sexy little hitch in her breath, the sweet, wildflower scent of her, and his thoughts would scatter like the aspen leaves that were turning gold now as August faded towards September.

The smartest thing, the only thing, had been to avoid her—and he’d done his best for more than a week. He had mostly stayed away from the house during the time he knew Evie was likely to be there, choosing to move more of his work responsibilities to his office in downtown Hope’s Crossing.

The only time he’d spent more than a brief moment with her had been a week earlier, Wednesday, when Evie had agreed to sit in on another interview for Taryn’s rehab therapist. This candidate had been perfect—fresh out of physical-therapy training, enthusiastic, energetic. Evie had approved of her right away. He wondered if her alacrity was indeed due to Stephanie Kramer’s credentials or if Evie was that anxious to return to her job at the bead store.

Stephanie had been excited to take the job but because of other commitments she couldn’t start until the following week. With obvious reluctance, Evie had agreed to stay on another week, until after Labor Day.

For Taryn’s sake, he was relieved since his daughter’s progress the last ten days had been nothing short of miraculous. She was taking several steps at a time unassisted and her vocabulary and sentence structures—while still a little hesitant—were head and shoulders above where she’d been before she’d come home.

He was deeply grateful for Evie, though her continued presence at his home also meant another week of his keeping as healthy a distance as he could manage.

Even when he stayed away, he wasn’t doing a very good job of maintaining focus in the rest of his life.

Right now, for instance, he was supposed to be in a meeting with his attorneys for a rehab project he was considering in a section of tiny crumbling houses in the Old Town area of Hope’s Crossing. Instead, he had been forced to leave them all waiting so he could run home like a kid who’d left his homework on the kitchen table instead of stuffing it in his backpack to take to school.

Evie’s arrival that morning, along with her gangly yellow-haired Labradoodle, had distracted him so much as he’d been on his way out the door that he’d completely forgotten a pile of vital contracts he needed for the meeting.

His plan was to slip into his office, grab the contracts and leave again without anybody being the wiser. No witty banter with Evie, no soft exchange of confidences, and definitely no more of those delicious kisses.

Too damn bad for him.

The house was quiet. He knew this was the morning Mrs. Olafson usually went to the grocery store but he might have expected to hear Taryn and Evie rocking out in the therapy room to the music Taryn liked to work to, or playing the game system the Angel of Hope had sent, or at least laughing and talking about something, as they tended to do.

Nothing. Just silence.

The van had still been parked out front so he knew they hadn’t gone anywhere. Curious, he couldn’t resist peeking his head into her suite of rooms, and found them empty. Maybe they were out in the pool, though late-August mornings in the mountains were cool enough for sweatshirts, at least until the sun burned off the mist. He kept the water comfortable for his own laps and could usually swim until the first snowfall. Since the all-season cover for the pool was set to be installed in a few weeks, he could swim all winter if he wanted.

Once Evie was out of his house and his mind, he probably wouldn’t need the relentless distraction of laps.

If they weren’t swimming, they could have gone for a walk. Evie liked being outside. He wouldn’t exactly call her a nature girl but she definitely thrived on sunshine and fresh air. He could understand that. Being outside helped him think more clearly, probably because of the ADD.

Forgetting these contracts seemed an entirely too familiar habit, one he had worked hard as an adult to overcome. School had been a nightmare for him of missed homework and forgotten assignments, notes from teachers, frustration all the way around. His father had despised that weakness in his son and couldn’t understand why Brodie couldn’t just put his mind to it and succeed.

He’d tried. The only saving grace for him had been sports. When he was swimming or skiing or running, all the connections in his brain seemed to click along just fine.

Now that he was an adult, he’d managed to come up with techniques to block out the chaos in his head but sometimes when he pushed himself too hard or worked outside his comfort zone, he could still stumble. These contracts were a perfect example. He should have remembered them. The meeting was his main priority for the day and he’d known he needed the contracts. He had even set them on the corner of his desk, after vetting them the night before, in plain view so he wouldn’t forget them.

By now, he should have known his own weaknesses well enough to have had the foresight to slide the contracts into his laptop case when he’d finished with them. Since he hadn’t, here he was, burdened with the complication of having to run home for them.

He located them quickly and stuck them under his arm, then decided to run into the kitchen for a slice of the banana bread Mrs. O. had made earlier. Though it had filled the house with the delicious nutty scent, he’d left in too much of a rush to enjoy it then.

The window was open above the sink in the kitchen and he heard a muffled bark from outside, saw a shadow of movement. Ah. There they were. He should have known. The backyard, with its sweeping views of Hope’s Crossing, had become a favored spot for Evie and Taryn.

He had twenty minutes before his rescheduled meeting, which left him just the right amount of time to say a polite hello and then leave before he could cross any more boundaries with Evie, he decided.

The morning was cool but pleasant as he opened the door leading to the deck. He closed it behind him with a snick, then turned back around. “Good morning,” he started to say, but the words and everything else inside him seemed to stutter to a grinding halt and he only got out the first consonant.

For a full thirty seconds, he could do nothing but stare, shock paralyzing his thoughts, and then fury washed over him, fierce and hot.

“What the hell is this?”

Evie whirled around at his voice and he saw guilt and panic bloom in her blue eyes. Her mouth opened slightly but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned her attention quickly back to Taryn until the girl, standing unassisted, threw a ball for Jacques.

The dog caught the ball easily but even he seemed to sense something wrong. He padded toward Taryn and planted his haunches in front of her.

On some peripheral level, Brodie was aware of the others. Evie. Taryn. The dog. But the bulk of his attention was focused on one person, the young man standing on Taryn’s other side, whose features had gone as white as Woodrose Mountain in January.

Brodie was vaguely aware he was crumpling the contracts but he couldn’t seem to make his fists unclench. Charlie Beaumont looked as if he’d like nothing more than to take a step backward, out of his reach, but he stayed frozen in place.

“Get away from my daughter, you little son of a bitch.”

“If he moves, she might fall.” Evie’s voice was calm, which somehow seemed to infuriate him even more. He threw the contracts down on the deck table, wedging them under the centerpiece vase filled with flowers from the garden, to keep the papers from fluttering away in the breeze.

Charlie Beaumont. The kid who had decided it would be a barrel of laughs to drive drunk with a bunch of teenagers in his car, rob a bunch of businesses, including several of Brodie’s own, and destroy dozens of lives.

If not for him, Taryn would be starting school again this week. She would be going to cheerleader camp and texting her friends nonstop and beginning to think about college applications.

Instead, here she was having to relearn even the most basic functions—while Charlie Beaumont stood by, probably to mock and laugh at her.

It was taking every ounce of his self-control to keep from stalking forward, scooping Taryn up and carrying her far, far away from this punk who had hurt his baby girl.

He turned his rage on Evie, the obvious accomplice in the whole thing. She stood there looking perfectly calm, perfectly serene, while he wanted to yell and curse and break something. Preferably something attached to Charlie Beaumont.

“This is completely messed up. What the hell is he doing here?”

“Right now we’re working on multitasking. Taryn is throwing the ball to Jacques while balancing at the same time, which works multiple gross-motor skills as well as focus and concentration. Charlie is spotting if she needs help.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

She sighed, looking slightly apprehensive. Good. She should be.

“If you’re going to yell at me, let’s get Taryn to the deck. She can’t stand this long.”

Much to his astonishment, Taryn turned with Evie and Charlie’s help and made her painstaking way to the steps. Charlie grabbed her walker when Evie asked him to and carried it over to Taryn, who used it without help to make her way up the four wide, low steps leading to the terraced deck. How long had she been tackling stairs? he wondered. He’d had no idea she had progressed so far.

Pride warred with his anger and confusion as he watched Charlie smoothly take the walker from her and grab her elbow to lower her to one of the teak chairs, as if he’d done it dozens of times.

When Taryn was settled with the dog at her feet, Charlie shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts. Brodie had to give the kid credit for looking him in the eyes, though he looked scared to death.

“I’ll go,” he said quietly.

“Good idea.” He knew he sounded like an ass but he was so furious he didn’t trust himself to be around Charlie Beaumont right now. “On second thought, you can stay until somebody tells me what’s going on and why I shouldn’t have you arrested right now for trespassing.”

“Dad, stop.” Taryn gave him a disgusted, eye-rolling look that was so painfully familiar from the time before her accident that he almost had to stare. “Chill. It’s f-fine.”

“Not with me.”

“Charlie…is my f-friend. Therapy is…f-fun…with him.”

“How long has he been coming here?”

Evie looked as if she didn’t want to answer but she finally sighed. “Over a week. Since the day after we went to String Fever that first time. He’s been coming just about every morning for an hour or two, then Hannah Kirk comes for another hour or two. I should have told you. I just…knew this is how you’d react.”

“How am I supposed to react when somebody I trusted with my daughter’s
life
betrays me in my own home?” He thought of the soft tenderness of their kiss, of the growing feelings he had been doing his best to ignore.

He was not a man who trusted easily. Growing up with a father who treated him like a failure had left him wary and prickly. Marrying a wild, immature woman and then having to stand by and watch his child suffer because of it hadn’t helped alleviate his unwillingness to let someone else into his life.

But he had trusted Evie, more than any woman except his mother. How could she have brought Charlie into his house, into his daughter’s life, knowing Brodie’s animosity toward the kid who had destroyed everything?

“I should have told you. That was certainly wrong and I’m sorry. But everything I did was for Taryn’s sake.”

He opened his mouth to argue but closed it again. He had no desire to leave Charlie alone with his daughter out here but he also didn’t want to fight this out in front of a couple of teenagers and a very curious-looking dog—not when this duplicity seemed so very personal.

“Ms. Blanchard. May I have a word with you inside?”

At his icy tone, her eyes turned cool as well, a far cry from the soft warmth in them when he’d kissed her. Even then, she had been keeping this from him, he realized with disgust.