JAMES THOUGHT HIS body might combust beside Mara’s. Which was ridiculous since he’d just combusted inside her.
He took off the condom and dropped it in the trash can beside the bed.
The two of them had dozed on the beach for a little while before making their way inside to make love in his shower as they cleaned the lake water and sand from their bodies.
A few minutes ago her hand on his hard length woke him from a dead sleep. And he didn’t care.
Her breasts were as perfect in his mouth as he remembered. Her skin as soft under his hands. The muscles of her belly still shivered when he brushed his palm over her hip bone, and although the curve of her hip was wider and her belly was more rounded than he remembered, he didn’t think he had ever seen a woman as stunning as Mara Tyler. The curve of her hips, the rounded area of her belly were results of her carrying his child. He was in awe of that.
She sighed beside him, her breasts pressing against his side. This was what he’d been missing. Not just the sex, but the closeness.
Mara knew things about him that no one else knew, and not only the events of graduation night. She knew how much he wanted to continue the Calhoun legacy in town, knew how much he’d hated playing football. He traced his fingertips over her hip and felt her shiver against him. Her fingertips drew shapes over his chest.
“I should drive you home.”
“I know,” she said, but didn’t make a move to separate her body from his.
“What are you thinking about?”
She was quiet for a long moment. Her breathing grew deeper, and her hand stilled against his chest. James thought she might have drifted off to sleep. He closed his eyes. There was plenty of time to drive to the orchard. According to the book Mara gave him, as well as Gladys’s insistence, the little boy would sleep through the night. The clock on his bedside table said they had at least a couple of more hours, and he intended to spend every moment of them with Mara in his arms.
“I was thinking that I wish I hadn’t waited two years to come back home,” she said.
James’s eyes snapped open, and he twisted her hair around his hand, holding her in place. Beyond that he didn’t dare move, wondering if he’d heard correctly. Moments passed. Then she sighed, and her body relaxed against his. She made the soft sound that he remembered, the one that signaled she had fallen asleep.
“I wish I’d followed you to wherever it was you went,” he said to the dark room. Then he closed his eyes and slept.
* * *
SUNLIGHT TRICKLED THROUGH the open window, teasing James’s eyes open. He glanced at the clock. Just after six. He should wake Mara. He flipped over on the bed, but she wasn’t there. He sat up, looked around. No sign of the red bikini, no sign of her.
He got out of bed, pulled his still damp shorts from the night before over his hips and wiped a hand over his eyes.
Gone. Again.
Damn it, why did he keep making the same mistakes with her?
He checked the bathroom, but it was empty. Padded downstairs, but there was no sign of her in the living room or the kitchen. There was, however, fresh coffee in the pot on the counter. He poured a mug and stepped onto the deck.
Mara stood at the water’s edge, the tank and capris from the day before covering her body. Relief washed over him. Not gone in the night, then. Not gone at all. Just not in his bed.
He could live with that.
Slipping his feet in the flip-flops he’d left in the grass the night before, James started across the yard.
“Good morning,” he said when he reached her side.
“Hi.” She sipped from her own mug of coffee, watching the gray sky as it shifted to pink in the distance.
“Want me to drive you home?”
She nodded, and the fact that she wasn’t talking made him cold despite the warm morning.
They were outside the city limits, his Jeep eating up the miles between Slippery Rock and Tyler Orchard too fast for his liking. He glanced at her, but couldn’t read her expression. He thought he caught a bit of regret in her eyes, but her feet tapped along to the happy song on the radio.
He slowed as he neared the driveway to the orchard. Mara put her hand on his and said, “Stop.”
James pulled the Jeep to the side of the drive and waited.
“I’m not sorry about last night.”
“Neither am I.” He was only sorry he hadn’t made a move sooner, because if he had just a few weeks to convince her to stay, he would need every second of every day to do it.
“I’m not sorry about any of it,” she said. “Not the weekends we stole, not that we kept it only between us. Not any of it.”
He wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but he thought he wasn’t going to like the ending.
“I am sorry about one thing. I’m sorry I walked out in Nashville, and I’m sorry that it took me so long to tell you about Zeke.”
“That’s two things.”
She shook her head. “They’re linked. One doesn’t happen without the other. It just doesn’t.” James’s heart beat a little faster with that admission. Because if the two events were linked, it meant if she’d stayed in Nashville, she’d have stayed permanently. He could work with that knowledge.
“You can’t keep apologizing for that.”
“And you haven’t really gotten stupid-mad about it yet.”
“I may not have made accusations.” He shrugged. “Besides, what’s the point in getting stupid-mad?”
She shot him a confused look, that line forming between her eyebrows again. “The point is yelling, getting all those feelings out so they can be examined and dealt with.”
“I can examine and deal with those emotions without the yelling or the accusing or the fighting.” He’d never seen much point in either yelling or fighting. Making a case, being calm in the delivery—those were the things that got him what he wanted. What he wanted now was Mara, and he didn’t need to yell or fight to get her. He only needed to convince her that she wanted to be with him. Based on last night, he was more than halfway there.
“You’re a better person than me, then.”
“And that is a very good thing,” he said, teasing her. She smiled at that. “And we can’t keep going over the same details or we’ll never move forward. You walked out in Nashville. I got over it. You didn’t tell me about Zeke until now.” That was still sticky. He’d missed more than a year of his son’s life, and that hurt. “You did what you thought you had to do. I can deal with that.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she opened her door. “Okay. I’ll walk the rest of the way, in case they’re all still sleeping.”
“I think they know we spent the night together.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged and got out of the vehicle. “Do you still want some company at darts tonight?”
“Definitely.”
“Then I’ll see you in a few hours.”
She closed the door and started to walk up the drive. She turned at the little path that led around the house toward the plum orchard and the backyard. When the two of them and Collin were kids, how many times did they sneak into the kitchen to steal cookies using that path?
He watched her until she was gone, then reversed out of the drive and turned onto the highway.
Halfway there, he told himself. Just keep making your case.
* * *
MARA GATHERED HER hair in her hands and secured it to the top of her head with a red elastic. She sat in the security office of Mallard’s, making a few more adjustments to the new program she’d been writing for the place. Because the store was so small, the program was coming together more quickly than she’d imagined.
She checked the wall clock. Just after three. She’d already put in the order for the new surveillance cameras for both the interior and exterior of the store. Once the cameras arrived, she would oversee the installation. The new locks had already been installed. Everything was on track, and there wasn’t much more to do today. If she left now, she could spend an hour or so with Zeke before meeting James and the others at the Slope.
It would be their first public outing, and the thought made the butterflies in her stomach swarm to life. Dinner at his house didn’t count because the only people who had been around were their friends and her relatives. And his parents, but Jonathan hadn’t given her too many dirty looks. By the time the group sat down to eat, the older man had been playing with his grandson as if they’d never been apart. Jonathan’s seeming approval meant a lot, but it didn’t mean the rest of the town would fall in line.
Despite James’s statements the night before, he needed the town’s approval to become sheriff. If being with her meant he wouldn’t get that approval, she would have to leave, no matter how strongly her heart protested. She couldn’t be the reason someone else became sheriff; the job meant too much to James. It was part of his identity.
Eventually, no matter what he said now, her costing him the sheriff position would turn him against her.
Mara shut down her computer and put her laptop in her bag. Downstairs, she saw CarlaAnn at the register, chewing gum. She was on her cell phone, and the usual teenage bagger was nowhere to be seen.
“And that is when I knew it was that Tyler girl,” she was saying. She paused, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Well, I can’t help that that isn’t what you heard. That’s the way it happened, Viola,” she said.
Mara waited at the door, unashamed to be eavesdropping on CarlaAnn’s half of the conversation.
“You know precisely why she hasn’t been arrested or charged with anything. The Calhouns are covering for her. Again.”
That did it. Sheriff Calhoun hadn’t covered for Mara even once. He had questioned her, but had never been able to prove anything because she and the guys had been smart enough to cover their tracks. Mara folded her arms across her chest, and her gaze fell on the new electronic security pad she had installed at the employee’s entrance.
She shouldn’t do it. It was childish. She was an adult.
“And you know that little bastard of hers is going to wind up just the same as she—”
Mara whirled around. She would listen to the gossip about her; after all, most of it was true. But for CarlaAnn to bring Zeke into it... That was hitting below the belt.
She booted her computer back up, opened the security protocol for the employee door and began tapping keys on the computer.
It only took a couple of minutes to make the changes, and CarlaAnn was still on the phone when she left the security office once more.
“Well, the same to you, then,” the older woman said and stabbed her finger against the phone’s screen.
Mara pasted a smile on her face. “See you tomorrow,” she called out as she passed the register.
“You don’t work Saturdays.”
“I’m expecting one of the cameras to arrive tomorrow. No rest for the wicked,” she said, with a careless shrug of her shoulder.
“Hmmpf,” CarlaAnn mumbled.
Mara shook her head and continued out the door. She wasn’t going to let the CarlaAnns of Slippery Rock ruin her day. She’d had great sex last night, had a good day at work today, and now she was going home to play with her son. There was nothing to complain about with that kind of day.
Besides, CarlaAnn was going to get a little surprise in the morning, and despite the fact that she knew it was childish, the anticipation made Mara giddy.
She was home within twenty minutes, and Zeke met her at the door.
“Ma, ma, ma,” he chanted, pushing his little fists against the screen. Mara picked him up.
“Hey, little man. I like these words you’re learning,” she said and pressed a kiss to his forehead. She set him on the floor and dropped her laptop bag onto a chair as she slipped off her shoes.
Zeke toddled off to his building blocks and began making a tower. She poked her head into the kitchen and saw Gran standing before the open refrigerator door.
“What are you doing?” she asked on a laugh.
“I was helping Amanda in the berry garden. It gave me hot flashes, and I’m using the fridge to cool down.”
Mara shook her head. “You’re nuts.”
“I’m old. Give me a break.”
“How was Zeke today?”
“Busy. We read a book and he decided to help Amanda in the berry garden—how he stayed so cool and I got so hot I have no idea. I think I’ll go take a cold shower, see if that’ll help me cool off.”
“Do you want us to take him tonight?” It surprised her how easily the us slipped off her tongue. She kind of liked how it felt. Us. She and James. It was nice.
“You are not taking that sweet baby to a bar.”
“They serve food, so technically it’s a bar and grill.”
“I wouldn’t call what Merle passes off as food as actual food.”
“But it is edible,” Mara pointed out.
“All the same. Give me a half hour to shower and I’ll be fine.”
“We aren’t meeting until seven, so take your time.”
She rejoined Zeke in the living room and added a block to the tower. The little boy watched the tower for a long minute, then picked up another block from the floor. He considered it for a moment, then dropped it. His pudgy hand reached for a block in the center of the tower, and the whole thing tumbled down.
Mara shook her head and chuckled. “You know, when you pull the blocks from the tower, it always falls over.”
Zeke didn’t seem to mind. He simply picked up a couple of new blocks and began building again. Mara handed him a block. He examined it and let it drop. While he built, Mara talked.
“I’m going out with your daddy tonight. Your uncle Collin and Savannah will be there. And Savannah’s brother, Levi. It’s nice to be back here, to see everyone.” Zeke kept building, so Mara continued talking. “It’s different. Nice, but different. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Slippery Rock, and now I can’t imagine not being here.”
Zeke handed her a block, and Mara added it to the tower.
“It isn’t as easy to build a life as it is to build a tower, but maybe it could be different here.” What was even sillier was thinking about building a life here after a single night with James Calhoun, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “You and I could figure out a babysitting or nanny situation for when I’m working, and I could take the shorter jobs instead of always volunteering for the more difficult ones. I’m almost finished writing the program for Mallard’s, and it’s really only a couple of weeks since I’ve been on the job. My bosses at Cannon will like that. Between jobs, we could live here. Would you like that?”
Zeke didn’t answer. He just kept stacking the blocks. He picked up the last one, which was barely as big as his palm. He examined it, turning it over in his hand a few times. Then he reached up on tiptoe and placed it on top of the other blocks. He looked at Mara triumphantly.
She clapped her hands. “Good job, kiddo. You did it.”
Zeke looked at his creation for a split second, then plucked a block from the middle of the stack, sending the whole thing toppling to the hardwood floor. He giggled, but instead of building another tower, he toddled off to grab the purple plush dinosaur.
Mara began picking up the blocks, putting them in the plastic storage bin according to size.
There was still a lot to work out with James. A lot to work out about Zeke, and a lot to work out with her job, too. With James’s, as well. If she saw that her presence was having a bad influence on his future, no matter how badly she wanted to stay, she would go.
But for now, what was the harm in doing a little planning?