Gentry found the ransom note in her room that evening. The single sheet of notebook paper was stuck with tape to the center of the mirror in the dressing room and she pulled it off with a sigh. But when she unfolded the note, she had to laugh.
Cutout letters spelled odd-shaped. words in between pictures cut out of magazine ads. Sydney’s magazine would never be the same, and although Gentry couldn’t say it had been sacrificed for a good cause, at least the note was clever and she could imagine the fun they’d had putting it together.
She scanned the note, pausing once or twice over a picture to puzzle out the meaning. HOLDING. A cutout yellow sun beside a picture of a man’s hairy legs. RANSOM. A cellular phone was circled in red with a line drawn through the center and an arrow pointing to an ad for Florida orange juice. COME TO. A picture of a house with a pool. AFTER. Another smiling yellow sun, with an ad for a down comforter below it. OR ELSE. SIGNED. At the bottom, above a penciled-in signature line, was a picture of a wedding dress with a pasted-on cutout of Tinkerbell tossing magic dust. Glitter was glued all around the page and fell in a shimmering trail to the signature line. At the bottom of the page, big block letters spelled out P.S. BRING BEER!
Gentry read it again, aloud this time, laughing and shaking her head at the energy they’d put into this.
“Holding…”
“Sunburn, suntan, legs, suntanned legs…knees? Sun knees? Sonny!”
“Holding Sonny ransom. Don’t phone…”
“Florida? Orange? Sergeant Orange!”
“Sergeant Orange. Come to the pool after sundown. Or else. Signed, The Magic Wedding Dress.”
She could imagine Sydney dictating the words, while Heather clipped the pictures and Hillary glued them neatly onto the paper. What they expected her to do was a little harder to imagine, but she suspected that if she went out to the pool, she’d find them there, pretending they had no earthly idea where the note had come from.
They would read it, ask questions, make up new interpretations for the pictures and deny ever having seen Sonny’s legs.
“Are they missing?” Heather would ask with concern.
“You should check the emergency room,” Hillary would suggest.
Sydney would, naturally, go straight for the bottom line. “Did you bring the beer?”
She was suddenly glad they were here for the week. Being with them was the best thing she could do for herself right now. After the incident between Sonny and Jake, she had wanted nothing more than to be alone, so she’d left the house, headed for her favorite stores and wandered aimlessly through the aisles. She’d driven fast, put a compact disc in the player and turned up the volume. Anything to keep from think ing about Jake, wondering if he was all right, hoping his nose wasn’t broken, thinking he had provoked Sonny’s punch, knowing he didn’t deserve a broken nose, deciding she wouldn’t think about him ever again, and then running through the list again.
As she drove homc, she had toyed with the idea of walking to the guest house. Just to check on him. Make sure…what? That she still loved him? Bad idea.
But now, here was an invitation from her friends, teasing her to come out and play. What would she ever do without them? She changed into her swimsuit and tucked the note into the folds of her towel, knowing they’d be eager to admire their handiwork. Then she headed for the kitchen to get the ransom for “sun knees.”
JAKE DIVED INTO THE POOL, slicing his way through the cool, chlorinated blue until he reached the bottom, then turning to push off with his feet and shoot like an arrow to the surface. He had a picture of Pop’s Stetson-shaped swimming pool hanging on a wall at the Two-Penny Lodge. It was something of a joke around the lodge that he had been Charlie North’s son-in-law, and Jake wondered at times why he left the reminder in place.
But he knew the answer. The picture kept him centered. It had probably been the single, most compelling reason he hadn’t put up a fight when Gentry left. For him, the pool represented everything she had been when he met her…cool, sophisticated, funny, intriguing, inviting, heated, sparkling, luxurious, exhausting, pampered…the list could run for pages. Jake had grown up half a country away and never once imagined that such a pool…or woman, existed.
Gentry had blazed into his life like a fireball and he had been determined to have her, no matter the cost. He’d pursued her, romanced her, stolen her away, and then eagerly taken her home to a world he couldn’t wait to share. But she didn’t know how, or wouldn’t make the effort, to fit into his world, and he soon discovered there was no more a place for her at the TwoPenny Lodge than there was for a swimming pool shaped like a Stetson hat. She didn’t belong there, she didn’t want to belong there, and he had been wholly responsible for her unhappiness.
Now he was just wholly responsible for his own.
He shouldn’t have come here. No matter what Ben had told him. Gentry was going to marry Harris this time. It would be admitting too many mistakes to cut her losses at this point. One lapse in judgment could be explained away, wiped out, annulled, but to call off the wedding at the last minute a second time…
She wouldn’t do that. He knew that as surely as he knew she wanted to. He’d known the moment he kissed her he couldn’t stop her and shouldn’t try. He’d waited too long, missed whatever window of opportunity he might once have had. Some mistakes couldn’t be undone.
Feeling the curved side of the pool, he remembered the feel of her body stretched luxuriantly beside him in their bed at the lodge. Following close on the heels of that came the memory of this afternoon and Gentry in her dressing room, looking beautifully disheveled in the wedding dress, and trying to make contact with his reflection in the mirror.
He would treasure that image for the rest of his life.
Gripping the pool’s tiled rim, he crooked one arm over the edge while he wiped the water from his face, being careful not to bump his nose in the process. He didn’t want to get another nosebleed. It seemed to have taken forever to get that one stopped. He supposed he ought to be grateful Harris’s cast-iron punch hadn’t been delivered full face or full force, otherwise his nose would be flatter and fatter, and hurt like the dickens. As it was, he’d just gotten clipped, enough to make his eyes water like lawn sprinklers and give him one mother of a nosebleed, but narrowly missing serious injury.
He thought he might feel a little sorry for Harris…except that he couldn’t find much sympathy for any man who could look forward to a future with Gentry in it. Even at her temperamental worst, she was pure, fascinating energy and he would have given ten years of his life to steal her away from this wedding, too. But then, as always, came the question he’d failed to ask before…once he had her, what would he do with her?
Shaking back his hair, he grasped the pool rim with both hands and pushed up and out of the water.
“Want a beer?”
His heart stopped beating and then rushed to catch up as he turned to see her sitting an oversize hat brim away. The moon was making a slow appearance in the darkening sky and the automatic lights around the pool flickered somewhere between off and on. She was sitting beside the round table where he’d sat with her father earlier in the day, her bare feet hooked on the edge of the chair, her legs drawn into a slender triangle, her arms carelessly draped across them. If he hadn’t already been in love with her, he would have fallen head over heels right then.
“I’d love one. Thanks.” He’d forgotten where he left his towel, so he wiped his face with his hands and finger-combed his slick hair, getting rid of as much moisture as he could before he walked around the pool to join her at the poolside table. His body, newly relaxed by the exercise, knotted with a tense and tight desire.
“Are you all right?” She peered closely at him in the semidark. “Don’t you have to wear a bandage or anything?”
“No. I was lucky. I’ll live to get punched another day.”
“But I thought he broke your nose. The way you put your hands over it and with all the blood, I just assumed…”
“Just a nosebleed.” Jake felt like a fourteen-yearold assuring his girl he was too much of a man to be felled by a bump on the nose. “It looked a lot worse than it was.”
“I’m glad it isn’t broken. I was always rather partial to your nose just the way it is.”
“My nose and I are flattered. It’s nice to know there’s at least one thing about me you find appealing.”
“You deserved that punch, you know,” she said as if she’d thought about it a lot. “Except that no one actually deserves to be hurt. But you did do your best to goad Sonny into hitting you.”
Jake wasn’t sure there was a good way to defend himself on that, so he didn’t try. “Did you mention a beer?”
She offered him the bottle and he took it, brushing her fingers in a touch that wasn’t accidental and wasn’t meant to be. She didn’t jerk away from him, but she didn’t respond, either…at least not that he could tell. He twisted off the lid and took a long, cold swallow from the bottle. Dropping into a chair across from her, he tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound completely inane. “Did Harris hurt his hand?” Oh, great opener, Daniels, he thought.
Gentry lifted her brows, obviously sharing his opinion. “Not nearly as badly as I hurt his feelings after you left to take care of your nose.”
“Did you beat up the bully for me, Liz?”
“Not for you. I couldn’t believe the two of you were brawling in my bedroom. I made sure Sonny understood that it is not to happen ever again.”
“It was hardly a brawl. He wouldn’t have hit me at all if you hadn’t distracted me by cheering him on.”
“I wasn’t cheering. I was glad he missed you…the first time.”
“So was I. But then, I was glad when Cleo smooched him.” Jake put his head back and laughed long and deeply.
“I did want to, uh, talk to you about that.” Embarrassment was burned into every word, as if her voice were blushing. He loved it.
“You want to discuss smooching?” he asked in his best I’m-here-for-you-if-you-need-to-talk tone. “We could call Cleo in as a consultant, if you’d feel more comfortable.”
She pressed her lips together, and he could all but hear her silently counting to ten. “Could we forget that part for a minute? I wanted to tell you…ask you, really, if…The thing is, something rather strange happened in my bedroom today and I…”
“Did you notice it immediately upon putting on the wedding gown or did it occur later?”
She frowned. “Later. It was an odd sensation and I…Maybe I imagined…Oh, never mind.”
He cleared his throat and asked very seriously, “Are you referring to the moment our reflected images made contact in the mirror?”
Her eyes flashed to his in annoyance. “No. Honestly, Jake, can’t you stop teasing me about that?”
“Stop?” He gave her a sympathetic smile. “This is the first time I’ve mentioned it, but if it bothers you…”
“It does. You’re acting like there was really some sort of magic going on because of that silly dress. And it wasn’t like that at all. I was distracted because of the button and—”
“Which button?” he interrupted her, as if it were a matter of grave concern. “The missing button? Or the missing button that wasn’t missing? Or the missing button that wasn’t missing that turned up missing after all?”
Her temper was rising. Jake even thought he could see her hair beginning to curl. “The button that caught in the lace when I reached behind my back to unbutton the dress.”
She kept her consonants nice and tight. He’d always admired her articulation-under-fire skills. “Oh, the snagged button.” He nodded. “Go on. You were distracted because of the snagged button…?”
“It isn’t important.”
“No, I really do want to hear about this strange occurrence that happened in your bedroom today.”
Her discomfort was a thing of beauty and he watched her struggle with pure enjoyment.
“Okay. Well, when I was going into the bedroom, I felt…I mean, did you notice…? Was it my imagination or…?” She stopped and sucked in a breath of hard-won composure. “All right, I’m just going to say this straight out. Did I get stuck in the doorway between my dressing room and bedroom?”
He made her wait only a moment or two before he set her at ease with a nod of concurrence. “You were stuck, Gentry. You were stuck in the no-budge position until I stepped around you and pulled you through that doorway. I’m no therapist, you understand, but I think that what happened to you today is most likely a psychological phenomenon in which a person struggles with two conflicting desires…to go forward and to not go forward because the person fears what lies ahead.” He paused just long enough to see her head dip in a nod of possible agreement. “It’s called Smooch-a-phobia.”
He laughed so hard, he nearly didn’t duck in time. The empty beer bottle soared over his head, with a mile to spare, and landed, neck down, on the lawn. “Liz? You missed me.”
Her temperature hit the boiling point. “Jacob Daniels! You are the most annoying, exasperating, irritating—”
“Irksome,” he suggested.
“Irksome, aggravating, irrepressible—”
“Irresistible.”
“Irresistible, infuriating, maddening—”
“Magnificent.”
“Magnifi—! Stop that. You know I hate it when you do that to me.”
“I never could get you to work magnificent in. Tripped me up every time.”
One foot began to swing back and forth as a mark of her irritation. “Sometimes I wonder how you ever persuaded me to run away with you.”
“No, Gentry, it was the other way around. You persuaded me that I had to take you away with me.”
“I did not. You begged me. You said you would feed me fresh raspberries and real cream.”
“You misunderstood. I said you’d dine on baked trout and low-fat milk.”
“You said you’d bring me breakfast in bed every day.”
“I said, there would be guests to be fed every day.”
“You said you couldn’t live without me and that you would love me until the day you died.”
Jake’s desire to tease her fled. “Sometimes I say the damnedest things.”
She met his gaze across the table and smiled, sort of sadly, he thought.
“Yes,” she finally said. “Sometimes you do.”
They sat quietly, letting the past slip back into the safe, manageable framework of memory. The moments whisked past one by one, linking hands to reach an uncomfortable silence. Gentry was the first to break it, and she chose the category called “regrets.” “You shouldn’t have come here, Jake.”
“I believe we’ve pretty well reached consensus on that, all around. If it makes you feel better, I wish I hadn’t.”
A faintly unhappy smile grazed her lips and was gone. “At last we’ve found something we can agree on.”
“Don’t be stingy, Liz. I bet we could list dozens of issues on which we see eye to eye.”
“Name three and you can have another beer.”
He tipped his head back and stared at the sky. “Rain, green and pasta,” he said. “Hand over the beer.”
“Wait a minute. Rain, green and pasta? What kind of issues are those?”
“Okay, maybe issues was the wrong word. But you said name three things we agree on and I did. So give me the beer.”
She refused with a shake of her head. “That’s cheating and you know it. I could as easily say we agree on snow, pink and potatoes. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He closed his eyes and breathed in the soft, sensual, familiar scent of her. “We agree we could never eat pasta too many times in the same week. We agree that green is a good color for a child’s bedroom. We agree that rain is the most erotic setting for a kiss.”
Her stillness drifted over him, sharing the bittersweet memories contained in three random words.
“Now, do I get the beer?” he asked quietly. “Or do I have to tell you why we agree on snow, pink and potatoes?”
“No.” She picked up another bottle and held it out to him.
He took it with one hand, wondering why he hadn’t left this morning, or yesterday, or anytime before now. “I’m going home tonight,” he said, so he wouldn’t be tempted to forget. “Catching the red-eye flight back.”
“You mentioned that before.”
“Did I?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
He looked at the bottle in his hand and then at the ones still on the table. “Am I crashing another party here?”
Her gaze followed his to the evidence. “Oh, no. I was expecting to find my friends out here, but apparently I misinterpreted their plans.”
“And here I was hoping you had come to kiss me goodbye.”
Her short laugh was meant to scoff at the idea, but it caught a note of husky wistfulness in her throat and lost the intended effect. “That would be a stupid thing to do.”
“Yes. And you’re not stupid.”
“No, I’m not.”
“It would be a mistake to think we could find that closure you mentioned last night…at the police station…while we were sitting together on the bench.”
She got the picture, as he’d meant for her to, and the memory of that angry, impulsive, passionate kiss joined them at the table like a guest who stayed on and on, not knowing the party was over.
She stood abruptly, unfolding from the chair like a long-stemmed rose, her body enticingly encased in a maillot. He admired her with a hunger born of deprivation and the same intense emotion he’d felt the first time he set eyes on her. He watched her take a running step and dive into the pool, escaping from him and the uncomfortable memories he’d brought with him.
If he had a grain of sense about self-preservation, he’d walk away right now.
But he set the beer on the table, followed her to the edge of the pool and dived in after her.
GENTRY DIDN’T KNOW why she was still running from Jake. But her impulsive plunge into the water was only another form of escape. Why had she stayed at the pool when she realized he was in it? Had she wanted to watch him gather himself and rise from the water like Poseidon? Did she need to see each drop of water kiss him in a caressing stream, bathing his hard body in glistening adoration? Was this her punishment for not being the wife he wanted? To see him one more time and know she would never desire any other man with the same intensity, the same aching need?
Maybe she was trying to postpone the goodbye she didn’t want to say, running away from the moment when she would toss off a casual word of farewell, as if she didn’t mind at all that she would never see him again.
The confusion flowed into her arms and legs and she set off across the pool to work it out, to convince her heart she didn’t care. But she barely made a half lap before she felt his arm snake around her waist and pull her against him. She was ashamed she didn’t summon the will to push him away, but what was the point? Her body would only have followed his, found some way to bypass the voices of reason and sanity to find the pleasure she had discovered so many times in his embrace.
Turning in his arms, she found his mouth and filled it with her tongue. From cool sensibility to eager intensity, she let the passion flood her senses like a drug, and they sank together, clinging and careless of any need but one. His hand tugged at her suit, found a way inside, and grasped her breast in a pleasurably painful massage. She dug her fingers into the taut muscles of his shoulders and clung to him until, inevitably, the kiss pulled them through a sea of regret to the incandescent twilight.
They broke the surface and the kiss at the same moment, splashing away from each other as if that would disguise the reality of the passion that drove them. Jake swam a lazy backstroke to the ladder, then climbed from the water. Gentry poured the tension inside her into long strokes, swimming the length of the pool, striving for exhaustion and forgetfulness. When her muscles protested the abuse, she pulled herself partially up onto the tiled rim and laid her head on her hands.
Her breathing was torturous and slow, as much a result of the intensity of that watery embrace as from the exercise. She tried to recover a normal rhythm-anything normal would be good. But then she heard the splash his wet feet made as they approached and her pulse soared out of control again. Touch me, she pleaded with him in silence, but kept her head down, embarrassed to let him see the desire in her eyes and know how badly she wanted him.
He stopped in front of her…she could feel the splatter of the water drops that dripped from his body to the ground…and then a pound of soft cotton towel dropped on top of her head. A moment later, a corner of the towel lifted and she opened her eyes to see him peering in at her. She couldn’t do this. She didn’t want to be here. To be so close to him and know they had never been further apart. “Jake, I…”
“Want another beer?” He sounded normal. As if they hadn’t just shared a watery and erotic kiss.
She frowned beneath the thick cotton terry, unexpectedly annoyed by his casual tone. As if he were offering one of his buddies a cold brew after a successful fishing trip. “No, thanks,” she said, pulling the towel off her head. “I’ve had one too many already.”
Ignoring the offer of a hand up, she boosted herself out of the pool and gathered the towel around her, uncaring that he watched every move, but intensely aware that he did. She intended to leave then, but stubbornly, returned to her chair instead, unwilling to run away yet again.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began hesitantly. “But your fiancé is being held hostage by a fairy.”
She looked at his teasing smile and then at the ransom note open on the table, realizing she ought to thank him for forcing the tension to ebb beneath the comfortable pattern of their bantering. “I know,” she said, searching for the light tone he would expect. “Three fairies, to be exact.”
“Three fairies.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I was going to guess this was the work of the Tooth Fairy, but if she’s not working alone…How many fairies are there altogether?”
“Well, let me think.” With him so close, his body glistening with the interplay of moisture and light, it was difficult to concentrate, to hit the rhythm of theirusual wordplay. “There’s the Fairy Godmother, the Fairy Princess, the Queen of the Fairies, the Sugarplum Fairy, Woodland—”
“Okay, okay. Let’s concentrate on one at a time.” He pointed to the note. “Do you recognize her?”
“Yes, that’s Tinkerbell.”
“Is she from this area?”
Gentry twisted her rope of wet hair into a thick knot on top of her head and noted the level of her tension by the erratic tapping of her foot. “Haven’t you been to Disneyland, Jake? The Magic Kingdom?”
“I thought Tinkerbell lived in Never-Never Land.”
“Only in the off-season.”
He picked up the note and scanned it, then had to brush the glitter from his fingers. “What’s all this sparkle stuff?”
“Magic dust.”
“Oh.” Impressed, he looked more closely at his fingers. “Does this mean I can fly?”
She couldn’t think of a response, much less a witty one, so she just sat there, her body begging for his in a mute, hopeless silence, as her foot tapped and tapped….
“I can see you don’t believe in magic dust, Liz.” His tone sounded a little forced as well. “But if you ever want to see Sonny again…” He looked up. “I suppose you do want to see him again?”
She made a rueful face and nodded.
“I was afraid of that.” He sighed and looked at the ransom note again.
Was it her imagination or did the paper tremble slightly in his hand?
“How did these three fairies convince Sonny to go peacefully? Did they sprinkle him with magic dust? Give him a couple of painkillers? Get him punchdrunk?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say they overpowered him with their combined charm and talked him into doing something he will regret in the morning.”
“Hmmm,” Jake murmured. “I’d like to meet these fairies myself.”
And that was the last turn of the screw. Gentry jumped up, gathering her towel, picking up the remains of this unbearable tension, forcing herself to talk normally, move normally, act normally.
Don’t think about the fact that he’s leaving in a couple of hours. Don’t think about never seeing him again. Don’t think about kissing him goodbye. Remember how you failed. Remember how unhappy you made him. Remember how unhappy you made yourself.
“Well, I’ve got to go. Have a safe trip. You should visit Ben and Sara sometime. Maybe the five of us can get together. Play golf. Go fishing. Wouldn’t that be grand? It would be—”
Then she was pulled fiercely into his arms and his mouth was on hers, his tongue tasting hers, his body hard and demanding against hers, and the tension inside her snapped, uncoiling like a spinning reel, releasing the passion, the hunger, the love.
In seconds, their hands sought remembered territory, their lips claimed new possession. His desire was the rough thrust of his tongue in her mouth. Hers, the frenzied search of her hand beneath the cool, wet cling of his swimsuit. His deep moan of pleasure filled her senses as his rigid desire filled her hand. He fumbled at her breast, gave up trying to push aside the maillot and took her in his mouth. She kissed his shoulder, his neck, caressed every slick, hot part of him. Their passion was like a separate entity, awakening at a touch, whipping through their bodies with no thought for any need but its own. Taking, probing, reaching…until it exhausted their energy, and simply stopped. She was almost grateful when Jake took the initiative to pull back and let her catch her breath.
She was shaking when Jake gathered her gently against him; trembling as he held her, touched her hair, whispered words—just words—to her racing heart; quivering as his lips bathed her in soothing, calming kisses. When she finally caught her breath, she lifted her face for his kiss, wanting him to immerse her confusion in a numbing embrace that would annul her failures and wipe away her mistakes, and leave her, finally, whole.
Jake cupped her chin in his hands and looked into her eyes. With excruciating tenderness, he stroked her cheek with his thumb and brushed aside a strand of her still-damp hair. “You are the most tempting woman I’ve ever known, Liz, and I want you so much it’s a constant, aching hunger inside of me.”
“That’s the way I feel, too.” At this moment, she would do anything, say anything, to have him. “Let me go with you, stay with you, be with you. This time I’ll get it right. We’ll get it right. I won’t be so demanding. I won’t insist on having my own way. I—”
His thumb stopped on her lips, stilling her plea. “Gentry, if I believed there was a chance in hell you meant one word of that, I wouldn’t let go of you until sometime in the next century. And I know without a doubt that an hour from now, I’m going to be kicking myself from here to town and back again, but I’m saying goodbye. Right here, right now. I’m going to walk out of your life because you and I are not a perfect fit.. .and we’re never going to be. Sometimes, you have to know when to cut line and move on. That’s what I’m doing, before I ruin your life again.”
His words took her completely by surprise, and before she could form a coherent protest, he brushed her lips with a softly poignant kiss. “I’ve probably seen a thousand movies with really great exit lines, but not one of them comes to mind. So, I’ll just leave you with my for-what-it’s-worth opinion. On Saturday, wear the million-dollar wedding gown. It’ll make your pop happy. You look like a million dollars in it. And if there should be such a thing as magic and happilyever-after…Hell, it can’t do any harm to wear the silly thing.”
She watched him walk away, disbelieving, hurt, irritated, and getting angrier with every step he took. He probably thought she’d go running after him, assure him he was wrong, that he wouldn’t, couldn’t ruin her life. Well, he was wrong. There was such a thing as dignity.
“I’ll show you, Jacob Daniels,” she said softly, over the lump of pride in her throat. “I’ll show you. I will live happily ever after…without you.”
The only problem with that, Gentry thought, was that he would never know if she succeeded.