“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You looked as if you were lost in thought. And like a woman who has been on her feet all day.”
He took a step into the kitchen and she wondered how it was possible for the massive room to suddenly feel so tight and claustrophobic.
“I was just thinking what a lovely view you have from here. I’ve been wondering all day why Joe’s great-grandfather didn’t place his house in exactly this spot. I suppose it was logical in those days to build the homestead close to the creek where they drew their water, but up here makes far more sense from a purely aesthetic point of view.”
“I suppose the early Pine Gulch settlers had a few more things on their mind than aesthetics. Survival probably carried a little more weight with them.”
“You’re probably right.”
She knew exactly what it was like to exist purely in survival mode. She had done just that in the terrible months after Joe’s death, when she had been fighting so desperately to keep the ranch afloat while she was pregnant and grieving and trying to be strong for her three little boys who had missed their father so much.
But time moved on. She moved on. Day by day, that bleak, wintry world had given way to sunshine. Jolie’s birth had been a big part of that. Selling the ranch had helped as well, she acknowledged, despite how much she had agonized about the decision.
“Anyway,” Carson said, “you are more than welcome to use the pool or the Jacuzzi anytime. I know you said at dinner you needed to get home to your kids tonight but if you’d like to come early in the morning, please feel free, or even when we leave for the ski resort after breakfast.”
She tried to picture herself enjoying a soak in that luxurious indoor hot tub overlooking the valley. It was a lovely image right now with every muscle in her body aching, but she knew she would never be able to bring herself to get quite that comfortable in Carson’s house.
“Thank you. But right now, all I want is a hot shower and my bed.”
For just an instant, something bright and glittery sparked in his eyes and her insides gave a long, slow roll. She drew in a breath and pushed away the reaction, frustrated at her weakness when it came to him.
“Is everything all set for tomorrow?” he asked. “Do you need anything else?”
“I think I’ll be fine. According to the menu your assistant sent me, breakfast in the morning was to be macadamia banana pancakes with orange butter. I’m also adding a smoked salmon and asparagus frittata. Is that still acceptable?”
“You’re making my mouth water just thinking about it, even though I’m full from the wonderful dinner.”
“I thought you all might need more protein before you go skiing. I know it always used to help me to eat a high-protein breakfast before I hit the slopes.”
“You ski?”
“I used to snowboard in college, if you can believe that.”
He stared at her and she had to laugh. “Should I be insulted that you look so astonished? Do you think I’m too old and settled to be a snowboarder?”
“No. I was just trying to wrap my head around it. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
What did he mean by that? She flushed, remembering how she had responded to his unexpected kiss.
“I wasn’t a bad boarder, either. It’s been a while, though. We used to take the boys to Jackson but I haven’t had much time the last few years.”
“Why don’t you bring the boys and come with us tomorrow?”
Now it was her turn to stare and she forgot about being tired. “Now who’s full of surprises? You’re inviting my energetic boys to spend the day snowboarding with the international guests whose European business interests you’re trying to purchase? Are you completely insane?”
“I’m beginning to think so,” he murmured. Or at least she thought that’s what he said but he spoke too low for her to completely understand.
“Well, thank you for the invitation,” she said, “but I’m going to have to pass, though Hayden would wring my neck if he knew. He’s been bothering me since the first snowfall to take him.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
She shook her head. “Do you have any idea of the logistics that would be involved? I don’t think any of their snowsuits still fit, for one thing. They’re getting new ones for Christmas but that’s still four days away. And beyond that, if my boys and I go off having a grand time at the ski resort with the Hertzogs, how, exactly, do you expect me to prepare your dinner tomorrow night?”
“We could figure something out.”
“No. Thank you, but no. That’s one of the things on our list for Christmas vacation. You go and have a good time with your guests and I’ll stay here and make sure you have something edible at the end of the day.”
“If you change your mind, let me know.”
She nodded, though, of course, she wouldn’t. In her preoccupation with his unexpected invitation, she hadn’t paid any mind to what he was doing while they discussed snowboarding but now she realized while she was arguing with him, he had stepped to the sink and started drying and putting away dishes.
“Hey, stop right now,” she said suddenly.
He blinked at her. “Stop what?”
“Cleaning up! You don’t have to do that. You’re paying me a ridiculously obscene amount to take care of those little details.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve washed plenty of dishes in my day.”
She blinked. “You? The CEO of McRaven Enterprises?”
He gave a rough-sounding laugh. “Fifteen years ago McRaven Enterprises didn’t exist. I was CEO of exactly nothing.”
“Fifteen years? You’ve done amazing things in that short amount of time.”
While she had been busy having babies, he had been making his fortune. She supposed that might depress some women but she wouldn’t have traded her life for anything, even with all the pain and sorrow on the road of her life’s journey.
“I had a few breaks when I was first starting out,” he said. “Things have snowballed from there. I’ve been really extraordinarily lucky.”
That wasn’t true, she knew. Before she would even consider selling him the ranch, she had researched all she could about him. She knew his reputation for taking faltering or stagnating tech businesses and turning them around.
“You don’t have to use false modesty with me, Carson. Everything I’ve read about you says you’re brilliant, that you have almost single-handedly made McRaven Enterprises a force to be reckoned with.”
He looked uncomfortable with her praise, almost embarrassed, something she never would have expected. She found it startling and more than a little appealing.
“Not bad for a guy who had to take the GED to get a high-school diploma and barely made it through college taking night classes,” he said lightly, with far more self-deprecation than she would have ever imagined.
He reached into the refrigerator for a Perrier and twisted the cap and she had the feeling the action was purely to cover his discomfort from talking about himself.
She didn’t remember reading about his early beginnings in any of the articles she had seen about him. Such a humble background made his current success all the more remarkable and clearly reflected that he was a man of focus and determination, something she had already figured out for herself.
She knew she should go home. She had a million things to do, though she also knew from a quick phone call to her niece, Erin, that all the children were sound asleep. Still, she felt strangely content in such quiet conversation with him and she was suddenly reluctant to end it.
“You never married?”
He took a long sip of water. When he lowered the bottle, she saw a change in his expression, as if something dark and sad had slid across it. His mouth compressed into a tight line.
“I was married once. A long time ago.”
He spoke reluctantly, as if he didn’t share that information with many people, and she almost regretted asking him.
“How long is a long time?” she asked.
“Well, I was barely eighteen. I’m thirty-six now. I guess you can do the math.”
She didn’t remember reading anything about a marriage or a divorce in any of the articles she had found about him but she supposed if the event had been so long ago, he had probably preferred to keep the information private.
Maybe he wasn’t divorced. She pushed the thought away. She would have known when she sold him the ranch if he had a wife hanging around somewhere. The sale documents had been complicated and detailed and surely that information would have come to light.
“They say young marriages have a rougher road. I suppose that must be true.”
He sipped at his water again with a faraway look. “It wasn’t easy, by any means. Suzanna was only seventeen and we were young and naive and thought we could handle anything.”
“Most teenagers do.”
That made him smile, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Right. Well, both of us were escaping rough home lives and had some sort of idealistic plan to rescue each other, I guess.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure we ever really intended to marry. I don’t know that we would have if Suzanna hadn’t discovered she was pregnant.”
Pregnant? He had a child somewhere?
“That sort of changed everything. We decided we would try to hold things together and try to build a future together, so we scraped together enough for a marriage license and got married at a justice of the peace. I worked construction in the day and washed dishes at night so we could afford an armpit of an apartment in Oakland.”
He said he and his wife had both been escaping bad home lives. She wondered what sort of misery he had endured and was grateful again for her own parents who had provided her with nothing but love through her childhood.
“What happened with your marriage?” she asked, though she was almost afraid to hear the answer. Somehow she sensed by his suddenly stark expression that it had a grim ending.
He was quiet for several moments. The only sound in the kitchen was the soft tick of the clock. She thought perhaps he wasn’t going to answer and was just about to apologize for her rude prying when he let out a heavy breath. “She died in childbirth, along with our son.”
Oh, dear heaven. She never would have expected that answer. Jenna gazed at him as sadness soaked through her. He had lost a wife and a child who never had a chance at life.
She felt as if everything she thought she had known about Carson had just been tossed in a hundred directions.
All this time she had thought him cold, hard, distant. Arrogant, even. He was so reserved with her children—and even with the Hertzog children—but now she wondered if he used that stoic, even stony, demeanor as a mask.
Nothing she said could ease his heartache but she knew firsthand how very much simple condolences could mean to a grieving heart.
“I’m sorry, Carson. So very sorry.”
Her low words seemed to echo through the quiet kitchen, reaching deep inside him to a raw wound he thought had healed long ago.
Why the hell was he telling her this? He never talked about Suz and their baby. Never. There wasn’t another soul on earth who knew this part of his past, of the guilt and pain that had been his constant companions for so long after her death.
He had been so alone, so angry. Just a stupid, powerless punk, bitter at the world and especially at the substandard hospital’s emergency room that had delayed admitting her because they were a poor teenage couple without health insurance, and at the incompetent doctors who hadn’t diagnosed her toxemia in time to save either of them.
Mostly he had been consumed with guilt. He had vowed to love and cherish and take care of Suz and their baby and he had screwed up.
He still carried that guilt inside him like an anchor, though he had become so accustomed to it after all these years that it just seemed a part of him now.
He knew it had been his fault she died. If he had done a better job providing for them, it wouldn’t have happened. Early in her pregnancy he had taken a construction job with health insurance but had ended up walking out because of the callous way the company treated its workers.
She had wanted to apply for government assistance, as her mother and sisters and everyone else in the inner-city projects where she had grown up had done. But Carson’s prickly pride wouldn’t allow it. He had promised her he would find another position with insurance before she had the baby, but times had been tough and he had failed. And because of his pride and stupid convictions, his wife and son had died.
He could never forgive himself for that.
He had vowed as he stood over the two side-by-side graves that he would never allow anyone else to depend on him. He couldn’t be counted on, nor could he count on anyone else. His childhood had taught him that.
He had worked hard to graduate from college in three years by taking a double load of classes. He had used the small malpractice settlement from the hospital to invest in his first company, a failing Silicon Valley software start-up with a winning product but poor management. He had turned it around in eighteen months then bought another company and another and had been doing it ever since.
Every McRaven company provided extensive health-care programs for its employees, especially prenatal care. It was a primary part of the business model.
None of the success he found would ever ease the guilt over those two lives that had depended on him.
“What was his name?”
He blinked away the past and realized Jenna was watching him closely, her features soft with sympathy.
“Your son,” she said when he didn’t answer. “What did you name him?”
“Suzanna picked out Henry James. She’d always loved the author—and the name—so that’s what I stuck with.”
He didn’t think about his son as often as he thought of his young wife. He had loved the idea of having a child as much as it had terrified him, but mostly he had been happy because Suzanna had been happy. She glowed with joy and hope at the idea of bringing new life into the world—a minor miracle itself, since her upbringing in deep poverty and despair would have left most women cynical about the future.
Henry James McRaven would have been graduating from high school this year. It was a stunning realization.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said again. She laid a hand on his arm with a comforting kind of gesture that seemed a sweet balm to the aching corner inside him.
“It seems like another lifetime ago. I was a different person.”
“But it’s one of the things that shaped the man you’ve become, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Without question.”
It had been a terrible time in his life, one he wouldn’t wish on anyone, but those years had defined everything that came after.
If Suzanna and Henry had lived, he didn’t know what course his life would have taken. He certainly wouldn’t have been so driven to prove something to the cold, heartless bitch he called fate.
He studied Jenna, this woman who had somehow managed to reach through his careful barriers and tug out memories and experiences he had always believed he preferred to keep close inside him.
“So what events in your past helped shape the woman you’ve become?”
She leaned against the marble work island, her head tilted as she appeared to consider his words. “I’m still very much a work in progress.”
“Aren’t we all?”
A warm intimacy surrounded them in the quiet kitchen. That connection he had been fighting all day seemed to tighten between them.
He should leave right now, before this thing between them grew even stronger. He knew it was the wise course—and he was a man who prided himself on his prudence. But he couldn’t seem to make himself move from this spot. He wanted to know about her, he discovered.
“If you had to pick the top three events that shaped you, what would make the list?” he asked impulsively.
She made a face. “No fair asking me to have a coherent thought after I’ve been on my feet since seven o’clock,” she protested. “Anyway, I don’t know if I could narrow it down to three.”
“Try.”
She paused for a moment, her forehead furrowed in concentration. “Well, I suppose off the top of my head—and purely in chronological order—the first thing would have to be my parents’ death in a car accident when I was sixteen. My brother Paul had just turned twenty-one and he became legal guardian to me. I was a sixteen-year-old girl who thought she was invincible and that was the first time I realized the precariousness, the fragility, of life.”
“That’s one.”
Her features grew pensive. “Of course, I would have to include falling in love with Joe the summer before I graduated from college, and then marrying him and moving home to Pine Gulch to stay for good. Hand in hand with that would have to be the births of each of our beautiful children. Those four wise little souls shaped me more than anything else.”
She grew quiet, her eyes shadowed. “Then my world and my children’s was forever changed two years ago on October 15 when a tractor rolled over on the man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, crushing our future together. I guess that’s three.”
A few days ago, he would have thought he had little in common with a woman like Jenna Wheeler. But the pain in her eyes was only too familiar. For a long time after Suzanna’s death, he had seen it gazing back at him in the mirror.
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” he said.
She was speechless for a moment then she laughed, a low, surprised sound that somehow lifted his spirits.
“It really does. That’s the perfect word for it.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He had spent all day telling himself why that would be a grievous mistake, but right now none of those reasons seemed very important. She was soft and warm and eminently desirable here in the quiet of his kitchen.
He leaned forward slightly and he could smell her again, that strangely seductive scent of vanilla and cinnamon.
Her gaze met his and in those glittery green depths he saw the same spark of awareness that sizzled through him, the same subtle yearning.
She caught her breath and leaned toward him slightly, her weight canted onto her toes.
His nerves tightened with anticipation and he moved to close the last few inches between them.
At the very last second, just when his mouth would have covered hers, she turned her head and took a jerky step backward.
“Please don’t, Carson. Not again.” She let out a shaky breath and he saw her hands were trembling.
Frustration burned through him. She had been ready for his kiss, had parted her lips in clear invitation. He knew he hadn’t imagined it. “Why not?”
“Because it’s completely unfair!” Her voice was heated. “I have no defenses against a man like you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She drew her hands to her suddenly rosy cheeks, then dropped them as if the heat there burned her fingers. “I have dated one man seriously in my life and I married him a year later. I’m not the sort of sophisticated socialite who can do the casual affair thing. I’m just not.”
“What makes you think that’s what I want?”
She gave him an impatient look. “You will break my heart, Carson. I’m sure you won’t mean to but you’ll do it anyway because that’s the kind of man you are.”
Her words shouldn’t have the power to hurt him but they sliced him open anyway. “How do you know what kind of man I am?”
Her laugh sounded sharply discordant after the warm intimacy they had just shared. “Look at you. You’re like something out of a movie. Gorgeous, rich, successful. I’m the mother of four children, hanging by my fingernails on the ledge of a wild, turbulent world. You will chew me up and spit me out and there will be absolutely nothing I can do about it. When whatever this is is out of your system, I will be left here living just down the hill from Raven’s Nest, forced to see your house out my window and remember.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. We can go back to the place we were before you…before you kissed me this afternoon. I had hoped we were on our way to being, if not friends, at least friendly.”
“That’s what you want? A friend?”
“Right now I want to go home to my children. I’ve been away too long. I’ll be back first thing in the morning for breakfast.”
He wanted to argue with her. To tell her he had never known anything like his attraction to her. But how could he possibly refute what he knew was absolute truth?
“That snow has made everything slick. Be careful.”
Her smile was rueful and, he thought, a little sad. “What do you think the last five minutes was all about?”
Before he could answer, she grabbed her scarf and coat off the hook by the back door and headed out into the snow.
A few moments later, he watched her van’s headlights cut through the night as she headed down the drive toward her house.
She was right. Somehow they needed to step back a bit. What other option was there? She wasn’t interested in anything casual and he would never allow anything else. As soon as Christmas was over, he would be heading back to California, to his deals and his penthouse and the life he had carved out for himself, as empty and cold as that suddenly seemed.