CLAIRE WAS unnaturally quiet once they left his parents’ house. The only time she spoke was to ask him if he’d mind closing up the car’s top, since dusk had drained the day of its heat as well as its light. He’d accommodated her, although he would have left the top open if she hadn’t been cold. He was looking forward to taking long, nighttime top-down drives this summer, with the stars twinkling above him and all that darkness gusting through the car.
Other than mentioning the top, though, Claire didn’t say a word. As they wound their way through North Adams and up into the hilly switchbacks of the Berkshires, she sat silently, minute after minute, her hands folded primly in her lap and her gaze glued to the SUV in front of them, its taillights glowing and a kayak strapped to its roof.
Mark wasn’t a mind reader. If he’d been blessed with that particular talent, he might have guessed that Rex would stick one to him this past April Fool’s Day to spite him for having been chewed out so royally over last year’s show. Mark might have prepared himself somehow, or taken steps so Rex couldn’t make him the butt of a joke. Or he might not have been so harsh after last year’s show so Rex wouldn’t have been so eager for revenge.
Like hell. Rex had deserved the dressing down and the hit to his wallet he’d received last year. And he deserved punishment this year, too, even if this year the mayor hadn’t called Mark up to complain about the havoc Rex’s show had wrought throughout the city. Rex had wrought havoc in the lives of only two people this year: Mark and the woman whose mind he wished he could read.
She seemed to have had a good time at his parents’ house. Lovey had obviously adored her—the dog didn’t rub her nose against the shins of people she didn’t adore, and she’d rubbed her nose against Claire’s shins so much, she’d probably come close to wearing a hole through the fabric of Claire’s pants. He’d had no trouble reading the dog’s mind. She thought Claire was just fine.
He had to agree with Lovey. Claire was fine. Better than fine. She was sharp and funny and gentle. She was passionate about preserving antique buildings like his parents’ house, and when a drip of bouillabaisse broth had settled on her lower lip and she’d caught it with the tip of her tongue, he’d remembered, with a sharp twinge in his groin, that she was also passionate in other contexts.
When the time came for him to settle down, he’d want to settle down with a woman like Claire O’Connor, someone calm and steady and thoughtful, someone who could roll with the punches and hang on to her sense of humor. Someone with hair like hers, and legs like hers and wide, green eyes and a passionate pink tongue exactly like hers.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, trying to ignore his own sudden hunger, which had nothing to do with food.
“God, no.” She laughed weakly. “I’m stuffed. Your mother is a very good cook.”
“I liked your mother’s cookies, too.”
“My mother bought those at a bakery.”
“Doesn’t matter. I think we should be grateful that our mothers are skilled when it comes to feeding our friends.” Talking about their mothers helped to take the edge off his hunger. It was a hunger he couldn’t satisfy, not with Claire. Not as long as he wasn’t ready to settle down. He might not be able to read her mind, but after today he had a pretty clear idea of at least one aspect of it: Claire wasn’t the sort of woman a bachelor could party with and part from. She was loyal, committed. Even after breaking up with a guy, if she believed that guy needed her, she came running, breaking the speed limit if necessary.
If Mark touched her—and with her hand resting on her knee, just inches to the right of the gear stick where his own hand rested, touching her would require only a small shift in his position—he would want her. If he kissed her, his hunger for her would overtake him. And then he’d break her heart, because he wasn’t ready to be anyone’s fiancé yet. If he were, she could easily be the one. If. But he wasn’t. Not yet.
She glanced at him, smiled and turned back to stare at the SUV ahead of them on the narrow road.
What was she thinking?
“Was today horrible for you?” he asked, hoping to jostle a reaction out of her.
“What?” She looked confused. “No. It was lovely.”
“I thought you were going to say, ‘It was Lovey.”’
“No, the dog was fine. I liked the dog.”
“She can be a little pushy. I saw her sniffing at your legs all afternoon.”
“I didn’t mind.” She settled back in her seat. “Lovey’s an awfully sentimental name for a dog.”
“My parents consider it alliterative,” he explained. “Lovey Lavin.”
“That does have a nice ring to it.”
Claire seemed to be loosening up, relaxing a little, her posture thawing. An hour into the drive, he finally had a conversation going. “We had another dog when I was growing up,” he told her. “I got to pick his name.”
“I take it you didn’t name him Lovey.”
“I named him Scamp,” Mark said. “A manly name.”
She smiled—and glimpsing her smile made him feel even more triumphant. “Scamp was a mutt,” Mark recalled, shaking his head nostalgically. “We picked him up at the pound. He was a great dog.” Scamp had joined the family when Mark was seven and had died when he was in college. As much as he liked Lovey, she would never replace Scamp in his heart.
“Mark?” Claire’s voice had an edge to it.
“Yeah?”
“Look at the car ahead of us—the SUV. Doesn’t it look like the boat is wobbling?”
The road was dark, but his headlights caught the sway of the kayak on the SUV’s roof, and the vibrations in the straps holding it in place. “Hard to say,” he muttered, easing up on the gas. “I think—”
And then he stopped thinking—because the kayak snapped free of its restraints and shot backward like a fiberglass missile, slamming into the hood of his car, careening off it and crashing against the windshield. His air bag exploded in front of him, shoving him back into his seat as he floored the brake pedal. The Benz-mobile jerked to a halt and the air bag fizzled into a limp sack that dangled from the steering column.
He turned to Claire. She was pressed back into her own seat, her air bag also limp and emitting a metallic scent. Her eyes were closed and a red welt appeared on her chin. She wasn’t moving.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered, then said it louder as he yanked off his seat belt. “Oh, my God! Claire! Claire, are you all right?” He ran his hands over her face, her shoulders, her throat and then back up to her face. “Claire!”
Her eyes fluttered open. “I’m okay,” she said in a shaky voice.
“Are you sure?” Leaning over her, he saw glints of something sparkling in her hair and on her knees. Chips of his windshield. The outer layer of the safety glass had spider-webbed from one end to the other, and some of the inner layer had splintered off into the car, onto Claire. “Don’t move,” he ordered her.
“I’m okay.”
“You’ve got glass on you. You could be hurt. Don’t move.” He lifted his hand toward her hair and noticed that his fingers were trembling. Oh God, oh God. She could be hurt. Claire.
“I’m okay,” she said, her voice a bit stronger. “I’m fine.” She lifted her hands to her hair and plucked a couple of glass chips from the tangled waves. “It’s not sharp.”
“Don’t.” He grabbed her hands and pulled them away from her head. The insides of her wrists were unnaturally pink, like that raw spot on her chin. The air bag must have caused the abrasions.
He continued holding her hands, in part to keep her from groping for glass in her hair and in part because he couldn’t bear to let go of her. Her flexing fingers reassured him that she was, indeed, okay. But his pulse pounded crazily in his skull, and an edge of hysteria was making his vision momentarily go red. She could have been killed!
She hadn’t been killed. She was okay. His breathing slowed, his vision returned to normal, but he kept her hands clasped tightly within his. He wasn’t about to let go.
“Mark. Look at your car.”
“The hell with my car!” A car was just a car—even if it was a Mercedes SLK Roadster. Claire…God help him, if she’d gotten hurt…
Transferring both her hands into one of his, he used his free hand to open the console between the seats and pull out his cell phone. Clicking it on, he punched in the emergency number. After one ring, it was answered by a nasal woman who informed him he’d reached the police station of a town whose name he didn’t recognize, and his call was being recorded.
“Yes,” he said, still clinging to Claire’s hands. “My car was just hit by a boat.”
“By a boat? Are you in the water?”
“No. The boat’s on land. It was on the roof of an SUV, and now—” He squinted through the dense lace of cracks obliterating his windshield. “—it’s on the hood of my car.”
“Is anyone hurt?”
He gazed at Claire, at that raw smudge on her chin, at her startled eyes and sweet, delicate mouth. “No,” he said, feeling his heart heave in relief. “No one’s hurt.”
A HALF HOUR LATER, Claire remained standing along the shoulder of the road in the thickening night, her arms folded across her chest and her purse hanging by its strap over her shoulder. Beside his damaged car Mark huddled with a police officer, a tow-truck operator and the burly, bearded driver of the SUV. They all seemed remarkably calm under the circumstances. If an unsecured kayak had hit her car, she’d be pretty upset—and her car wasn’t a brand-new Mercedes Benz.
Fortunately, the kayak didn’t weigh much. It had dinged and dented the hood of the car, but most of the damage was to the windshield. Claire suffered a pang of grief for the car. Just hours ago, Mark and his father had taken it for a spin through the streets of Williamstown, two little boys flush with the thrill of tearing through town in a hot coupe. Now that hot coupe sat like roadkill on the side of Route 2.
After a few more moments of debate with the other men, Mark broke from the group and strode over to her. “How are you?” he asked.
She was amazed that he seemed more concerned about her condition than his car’s. She was in far better shape than the car was. Her chin stung a little—a glance in the side mirror had indicated a burn the size of a quarter on the edge of her jaw. But that would clear up in a day. “I’m fine,” she told him for the umpteenth time. “How are you?”
He ran his hands along her arms from her elbows to her shoulders and back again, as if checking for fractures. Then he released her and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Here’s the deal. The other driver is freaking out, pleading guilty left and right. He’s told the cop the whole thing is his fault—”
“Which it is,” Claire pointed out.
“I think he wants to keep his insurance company out of it. I don’t know if he realizes how much the repair is going to cost, but for now, he’s saying he’ll take care of everything.”
“Will he take care of getting us back to Boston?”
Mark sighed. “Yeah, but not tonight. I need to have the car towed back to Boston for repairs, and apparently it’s next to impossible to get that done on a Saturday night. The local guy said he’d do it tomorrow—and he’s the only tow operator in the area. He’s willing to tow the car to his garage for the night, and then move it down to Boston tomorrow, even though that’ll mean skipping church.” Mark reached up and she felt a light tug on her scalp as he un-snagged a piece of glass, and then the soothing stroke of his fingers freeing the chip from a wavy lock. “Actually, he sounded kind of pleased about skipping church.”
She was so distracted by his hand moving through her hair that she momentarily lost track of what he was saying. Once he’d tossed the bit of glass onto the gravel at their feet, her mind cleared and she digested his words. “So what are we going to do tonight?”
“Well, Ray—that’s the SUV driver—said his sister-in-law owns an inn in town, and she can put us up for the night. His treat.”
Claire ruminated. Was the inn nice? A picturesque bed-and-breakfast or a dive? More important, would Ray’s sister-in-law put them up in one room or two? “Do you think we’d be better off returning to your parents’ house for the night?”
“We’re sixty miles from their house. I can’t see asking them to drive all this way to get us, and then drive home, and then have to bring us back here tomorrow.”
Claire nodded. “And we’re how far from Boston?”
“About seventy miles.”
“Okay.” She was tired, and it wasn’t just from the stress of the accident. She also felt overwhelmed by the gracious reception his parents had given her, by the food and the company and the long drive…and most of all by the understanding that she had fallen for a man who had no intention of abandoning his bachelor ways. By the time they’d left his parents’ house, she could no longer deny the unpleasant truth: she loved Mark Lavin. And he’d made it clear that he loved his swinging single status.
If only he would throw a fit over his battered car instead of gently fishing pieces of glass out of her hair, she’d be able to steel her heart against him. But he was being so kind, so considerate—as if she, a woman his obnoxious disk jockey had shoved into his life, was more important to him than his dream car.
“So should we take Ray up on his offer and stay at the inn?” he asked.
“Sure.” She shrugged. She had no pressing business back in Boston, and returning to Mark’s parents’ house would only bring her back to the place where she’d been forced to acknowledge that she loved him.
He patted her shoulder, then pivoted and jogged back to the men clustered by the Mercedes. They conferred for a few more minutes, the bearded man spoke into his cell phone, and Mark returned to Claire. “Officer Beldon is going to drive us to Ray’s sister-in-law’s place. Ray is on the phone with her now. She’s expecting us.”
Claire nodded, gave the policeman a grateful smile, and warned herself that when Mark placed his hand at the small of her back, it was only to guide her over the uneven surface of the road’s shoulder. As soon as they were both seated in the back of the cruiser—Claire did her best to ignore the cage-like divider installed to keep criminals from attacking the officers in the front seat—Mark pulled his hand from her and left a chaste space between them.
She twisted to peek out the rear window as Officer Beldon drove away from the scene. The tow-truck operator was busy hooking Mark’s car up to his wrecker. “How bad is it?” she asked Mark. “How much damage?”
He shrugged. “I’m no expert. Windshields are an easy repair. The hood, I don’t know.”
“You seem to be taking it well.”
“It’s just a car,” he said.
“It’s a very expensive new car.”
“You could have been hurt—or killed.” His voice broke slightly on the last word.
She was touched by his concern. “So could you.”
He shrugged again. “I never get hurt,” he said. “But you…Thank God you’re all right.” His voice drifted off, and she felt a wave of emotion in its wake. Mark seemed more relieved than Claire herself that she hadn’t been injured.
The inn Officer Beldon drove them to would not have received many stars from the Michelin Guide. A sprawling, dilapidated building surrounded by pine trees, it featured a well-lit front porch and lopsided shutters adorning the windows. A wooden plaque reading Lake Vue Inn hung from a post near the front steps. Claire wondered whether the misspelling was deliberate.
Officer Beldon dropped them off with a reminder that in the morning he’d transport them to the body shop where Mark’s car had been towed, and he’d fax Mark a copy of his accident report once it had been processed. They watched him drive away, then climbed the porch steps and entered the building.
A sturdy, dark-haired woman no more than a few years older than Claire greeted them as they crossed the threshold. “Come on in, folks!” she bellowed, a welcome almost as enthusiastic as Mark’s parents’. “I’m Betty. This is such an honor, having a pair of celebrities like you staying here! I’ve set aside my best room for you.”
“Celebrities?” Claire muttered. Mark scowled.
“When Ray gave me your name,” Betty said, nodding to Mark, “I recognized it right away. The radio station, right? You’re a famous bachelor, and you—” she turned to Claire “—are the woman who made him give up his wild bachelor life.”
“How do you know this?” Claire asked as Mark’s frown deepened.
“It was in the Boston Globe.”
“You read the Globe?” Mark asked. “We’re miles from Boston.”
“To tell you the truth,” Betty admitted, motioning for them to follow her up a crooked flight of stairs, “no, I don’t read the Globe. But you’re on the Web site.”
“The Globe Web site?”
“No, the Boston’s Best bachelor Web site. There’s a whole bunch of us who’ve been following the Boston’s Best bachelors over the years. A girl’s allowed to dream, right?” She marched down a narrow hall as she prattled on. “When word got out that the City Hall woman lassoed you, well, I’ve got to tell you, the chat room just about exploded. Some people thought it was a betrayal of everything Boston’s Best stands for. Others said, ‘Hey, what are you gonna do? When Cupid’s arrow pricks you, that’s it. Today a bachelor, tomorrow a hubby.’ Love can be that way. Me, I think the whole thing is awful romantic.” She swung open a door at the end of the hall and flicked on a light. “Here it is—best accommodations in the place. I’ve stocked the bathroom with soap and shampoo, some toothbrushes and a little toothpaste sample. Ray explained the circumstances of your stay, and I figured you’d need some toiletries. Stranded so far from home, thanks to that turkey’s stupid boat. I told my sister when she married him, I said, ‘Donna, he loves kayaks more than he’ll ever love you.’ But did she listen to me?”
Apparently not, although Claire kept her mouth shut.
“I’ve only got one key for the room—” She pressed it into Mark’s hand “—but that shouldn’t be a problem for you two lovebirds. There are a couple of other guests here—the season hasn’t started yet, so it’s pretty quiet. If you need anything, I’m downstairs. Just pick up the phone and dial zero. There’s coffee and muffins in the morning.”
Before Mark could respond, their garrulous hostess vanished down the hall.
Claire surveyed the room. Like the stairs, the floor was slightly crooked. The rug looked as if a dance troop had been holding step-dance rehearsals on it, and the bedspread was so faded she couldn’t guess its original color. The curtains were equally faded, the dresser’s surface scratched, and the light emerging through the bathroom door was a sickly yellow. A single queen-size bed extended from one wall.
“Do you think this building is a landmark?” Mark asked with a sly smile.
“I think it deserves a demolition hearing,” she shot back.
He moved to stand beside her. His gaze followed hers to the bed. “If this is no good, Claire—”
“It’s fine,” she said curtly. The bed was large, and she was exhausted after this long, eventful day. All she wanted to do was wash the glass out of her hair and go to sleep. She definitely didn’t want to have to explain to their hostess why a room with only one bed in it wasn’t acceptable to the celebrity couple whose alleged engagement had been dissected and debated on the Internet.
“You’re sure?”
Claire crossed to the bathroom. The ledge of the sink held two cellophane-wrapped toothbrushes and a mini tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap were perched on the rim of the tub. “All I need is shampoo and a pillow.”
“All right.” Mark gave her a dubious look, then crossed to a lumpy-looking easy chair and settled into it. “You can have the bathroom first. Be careful with your hair. You could cut yourself on any glass splinters that might still be caught in it.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t cut myself.” She stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.
Was she crazy? She gazed at her distorted reflection in the warped mirror above the sink. She looked weary and pale, except for the scuff mark on her chin, but she didn’t look crazy. She and Mark were adults and they’d been through a traumatic experience. They’d wash up, get some rest, and go back to Boston tomorrow. She’d sleep in her clothes. Nothing was going to happen. She didn’t want anything to happen. Mark didn’t love her, he didn’t want to make a commitment to her, he hardly knew her…
Nothing was going to happen.
Turning from the mirror, she felt a shiver trip down her spine. A memory of the instant the kayak had hit the car flashed through her, and she felt dizzy—not from pain but from shock. Mark had brought her to Williamstown to meet his parents—to convince his parents that he and she weren’t lovers. And somewhere along the way, she’d realized she’d let herself fall in love with him, which made her the biggest fool the world had ever seen. And then his car had been hit by a kayak.
The whole trip seemed surreal.
It still seemed surreal after she’d showered, after she’d dressed again in the clothes she’d worn all day, brushed her teeth and wrestled the pocket comb she had in her purse through her wet, tangled locks. Surreal and exhausting. She was too drained to think about love or Mark or what might have been if he wasn’t a famous Boston bachelor. She needed to get some sleep. And she needed to return to the life she’d had before April Fool’s Day.