Chapter Five

At two minutes before eight, right after Harper finished the phone call with her mother, she thought Rafferty was going to blow off returning to the castle, but then she heard his voice right outside her office talking to Papa Ron as they discussed their plans for later in the evening.

Her plans involved heating up leftovers and watching television, which was pretty much what Papa Ron had already said to Rafferty, but she had a good reason for turning hermit after work. She handled so much mentally at the castle during the day that, by the time she was through, her brain felt fried and all she wanted to do was binge watch her favorite show.

Lately, though, she’d taken to blowing off her friends when they invited her for a night out because seeing happy couples made her stomach feel like she’d eaten bad seafood.

Was it asking too much from life that out of the millions of decent single men in the universe, one could be tossed her way? So that she wouldn’t keep finding all the not-so-decent ones and wasting time with the wrong man?

With a sigh, Harper got back to the business of writing out checks to pay the castle’s never-ending bills, and when she looked at the clock again, an hour had passed, and her stomach demanded food. She capped the pen and returned it to the whimsical frog prince cup holder. Then she balled up the scrap paper she’d used to write notes to herself and cleared her desk. After locking the safe and making sure nothing was out of place, she left the office and went to check to see if Papa Ron was gone.

Sometimes he had a habit of forgetting the time and stayed as late as she did. Personally, she thought his claim of a busy social life was bogus and that, like her, he was lonely. She fluffed the sides of the flouncy skirt she’d changed into to keep herself cool. Since she’d had the episode with overheating and Rafferty having to rescue her, she was a lot more careful of the heat.

When she went to find Papa Ron, she discovered Rafferty alone in the costume room talking on the phone. She hovered in the doorway, catching the tail end of a conversation saying he was sorry he was running late but was on the way.

Noticing a bolt of material out of place, Harper walked in. She set her purse in a chair and straightened the bolt then neatened a table filled with sewing supplies and put a pair of scissors back where they belonged. “Is your costume ready?” she asked once Rafferty was off the phone.

“Yes, and Papa Ron said for me to tell you that he’s going to the diner if you want a supper companion.” He set his phone on the worktable and sat on a chair to put his sneakers on. Rising, he indicated the door. “If you’re ready to leave, I’ll walk you to your car.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s on the way to mine? Because I’m a gentleman?” He grinned. “Because you want me to kiss you good night?”

“I’d rather kiss a frog.” She was glad he couldn’t read her mind. Long before he’d said, kiss you good night, she’d thought about exactly that.

They walked together toward the front entrance, but Harper abruptly stopped when they passed the employee break room. “I can’t remember if I locked the supply room.”

“You lock away the cleaning supplies?”

She shook her head. “It’s not cleaning stuff. The food for the booths is kept there. I had to install a coded entry lock after someone went in and stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of food and left the room in shambles on two occasions.”

Spinning around, she headed back the way she’d come, not surprised Rafferty tagged along with her. All the Bradford brothers had a protective gene even when they didn’t particularly like the person they were looking out for.

After reaching the supply room, Harper tried the door, dismayed to discover it wasn’t completely closed. It swung open when she touched it, and she stepped in with Rafferty following her. She flicked on the light, bracing herself to see a mess, relieved when there wasn’t one.

“It doesn’t look like there’s anything—”

The door slammed shut behind them, the lock clicking firmly into place. She could have sworn she heard shoes clacking loudly on the hallway floor before the sound faded.

“No!” Harper brushed past Rafferty and pushed on the door. No, no, no! She leaned her forehead against it. This can’t be happening.

“What’s wrong?” Rafferty reached around her and tried the knob.

“It doesn’t open from the inside,” Harper explained.

Rafferty stopped fiddling with the knob. “Are you serious?”

She swallowed, telling herself not to panic. “I had the locksmith purposefully create a system that wouldn’t open from the inside. I thought if I did that, I could catch any future thieves in the act. They’d be trapped in here.”

Rafferty frowned. “Then call your assistant.”

“I can’t. My phone is in my purse, which I left in the costume room. Use yours.”

“I left mine on the table in the same room.”

Harper gasped. “We’re…locked in with no way to…” She began beating on the door, yelling for help, stopping when she realized Rafferty was just standing there. “You want to give me a hand?”

“Scream and hope someone rescues me? I’d rather my skeleton be found in here.”

Harper would never understand the male ego. “Screaming threatens your manhood?”

“Nothing threatens my manhood.”

Harper rolled her eyes at that. “Fine. You’re a rescuer. So rescue us.”

A second of silence filled the room. Rafferty made a grand show of flexing his muscles. “Not even I, in all my manliness, can break through a steel door.”

“Well, then can you please get us out through the window?”

He glanced around the crowded space. “Which is where?”

“Around those shelves full of snow cone syrup.” She walked past the plastic bottles filled with the colorful liquid and pointed.

Exasperated, Rafferty said, “It’s twenty feet off the ground.”

“You didn’t ask me how high it was.” She crossed her arms.

“Since I don’t fly,” he looked at the shelves, “and since those won’t support either of our weight, we need another way out.”

“I say yelling for help is our best bet.”

“Feel free.” Rafferty tipped his head up, studying the window. He rested an arm on one of the shelves. “But I doubt anyone is going to hear you. We might be stuck in here all night.”

Cold, hard reality was an ugly awakening. Spend the night with Rafferty. Everyone will think… “I’ll look for something we can hit against the door. That should make more noise.” She marched back toward the door.

“Harper—” Rafferty tried to interrupt.

She shushed him. “I can’t stay the night with you. What will people think?”

“That you’re the luckiest woman in Morganville?”

Harper glared at him, and then a thought occurred to her, and she went to the opposite wall. “The air conditioning vent. We can get out that way.” She motioned him over. “Let me stand on your shoulders.”

“You’re not tall enough.”

“Oh, shush. This will work. It’s not like you have an ace up your sleeve, right? Then help me.”

Rafferty muttered something under his breath about her stubbornness but knelt, holding out his hands for her to use to climb on. She kicked off her shoes and gingerly stood on his shoulders.

When he rose, a wave of dizziness hit. Harper let out a squeak, plopped her butt down on his shoulders, and clasped her hands tightly around his eyes.

He pried them off. “This is the part where you stand up. Try again.” He lowered her to the floor.

This time, Harper managed to stand and maintain her balance. When she stretched to reach the vent, she was still short at least five feet. Frustrated, she stomped her foot. Rafferty’s shoulder sagged, and Harper lost her balance but stopped her fall by clinging to Rafferty’s back. Her skirt draped over his head and wrapped around his face, covering his nose and mouth like a pair of pantyhose.

Trying to free him and herself, Harper shifted her weight, leaning back and tugging hard.

The skirt pulled tighter, and Rafferty made a garbled noise. They staggered backward together.

Rafferty’s foot caught on a pallet of sugar, and they went down, Harper first, landing on her back, and Rafferty falling on top of her, the back of his head thwacking her in the stomach.

He wrestled the skirt away from his face and slid off her onto the sugar, gulping in air with ragged breaths.

Mortified, Harper jerked her skirt down to cover her comfortable granny panties.

“Are you trying to kill me?” He rubbed a red line on his neck then paused. “Are you okay?”

Harper tried not to laugh, but when she thought about Rafferty’s arms flailing around windmill-style, she couldn’t help herself. She laughed until tears sprang to her eyes, and when she could finally speak, she said, “I’m so sorry about that.”

“Yeah. You sound like it.”

“At least you weren’t flashing your underwear,” she said.

“I didn’t look. I was busy concentrating on not strangling to death.”

Harper sat up and winced then put a hand on her lower back.

He immediately put his hand there, covering hers, concern on his handsome face. “Are you hurt?”

Liking the feel of his hand and hating that she did, Harper quickly said, “Probably a bruise. Nothing major.” She glanced at the door and bit her lip. Up until now, she’d done a good job of fighting off the dread, but it was beginning to settle around her.

Once on a stupid dare from a childhood friend, she’d locked herself in a trunk, and then the friend had forgotten to tell anyone where Harper was. She’d been stuck for hours. Since then, she hated being trapped anywhere. It was why she always took the stairs and never an elevator.

Wanting to keep her mind off how she felt, Harper stood and went around a row of shelves where an assortment of old blankets was stashed, wondering if they should tear them up and tie them together. Maybe if they did figure out how to reach the window, they could use the blankets to lower themselves out onto the ground below.

“No,” Rafferty said as if guessing her thoughts. “The blankets would only come apart.”

“Great.”

“On the bright side, if we do end up stuck in here, we have the blankets if the temperature drops. Unless you’d prefer to snuggle against me.”

Harper made a show of batting her eyelashes at him. “Definitely you. Why would I settle for a blanket when the Rafferty Bradford is within arm’s length?”

He laughed.

Harper paced back and forth. “I hate this.”

“Not a picnic for me, either, sweetheart.” He rapped his knuckles against the stone wall. “But it could be worse. At least it’s May. I imagine these walls get a lot colder in the winter.”

Harper went back and tried the door again, yelling louder this time. Whirling around, she asked, “Do you have keys on you? We can try sticking them between the door and the jamb and prying it open.”

Rafferty shook his head. “I left them with my phone, but even if I had them, it wouldn’t work.”

Harper ran her fingers through her hair. “I can’t do this,” she said. She wanted…needed out of here. What she didn’t want was to break down and lose it in front of Rafferty. Control yourself, Harper. Only babies cry, and no one wants to see your tears. Her father had said that repeatedly to her on the phone in the days and weeks after he’d left, but she’d cried anyway, begging him to come home.

Taking a calming breath, she forced the tears back and beat on the door as hard as she could.

…

At first, Rafferty thought Harper was upset only because she’d hurt her finger smacking it against the door, but then he realized there was more to it. Her lips started doing that wobbly thing women did right before they cried.

In all the years he’d known Harper, he’d never seen her cry. Never seen her lose control of her emotions.

“Hey.” He approached.

She held her hand up. “Don’t.” She ducked her head, her hair covering the side of her face. After several deep breaths, she raised her head, her face wearing that I’ve-got-this expression of hers, but the fear in her eyes told another story.

Since he knew she wasn’t afraid of him, he could only surmise she didn’t like being locked in the room for some reason.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I went fishing with my dad?”

She clasped her hands together tightly and shook her head.

“I hadn’t yet learned to swim. He warned me to stay away from the edge of the lake. It had rained heavily the night before, and the ground was soft.”

“And you didn’t listen, right?” she asked in a soft voice.

“Not for a second. I eased out of his line of sight, and the next thing I knew, the ground gave way and I slid right into the lake.” He smiled down at her.

“Is that the end of the story?” She raised her hand to press her lips against the finger she’d hurt.

Heart thumping, he swallowed hard. “This room gets an adequate air supply, right?”

“It does. Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine.”

“What happened with the lake?”

“The lake? Oh, yeah… On the way into the lake, I got a bunch of mud up my nose and in my mouth. Then in the water, I went under twice before my dad got to me. I couldn’t breathe, and I thought my end credits were going to roll. Pretty traumatic for a kid. I was terrified of water after that.”

She bit the side of her lip. “In the summer, you’re out on the lake every chance you get. I guess you conquered your fear.”

“I did. Because it was either control the fear or let the fear be in control.”

“How did you do it?”

“I faced it. Over and over again. I did it safely, in small steps, and then one day I realized that it no longer had any power over me.” He raised his eyebrows. “You want to talk about your fear?”

At first, he thought she was going to deny it. Then she shrugged. “It makes me feel helpless, and I hate it.”

Rafferty stilled, surprised, but glad that she’d confided in him.

Harper squeezed by him. She stopped a few steps behind him and without looking back said, “Not long after my father died, I was playing hide and seek with a friend, and she dared me to get inside a trunk. I did, and while I was locked in there, she and her mom left, and my mom didn’t know I was in there.”

“Since then, you don’t like being unable to leave when you want to,” he guessed.

“No. I don’t.” She gave him a look. “Don’t tease me about this.”

“I would never do that.”

She nodded as if she believed him, then her lips curved into a small smile. “Thank you.”

Rafferty smiled, too, hoping maybe this could be a step toward rekindling their friendship.

Then her smile faded, and she crossed her arms, body tensing as she looked warily around the room.

Wanting to rescue her from the fear, he said, “Let’s do something to keep your mind off being stuck in here. Any ideas?”

She nodded, expression brightening. “We can play a game.”

“What kind?”

“Probably not the kind you’re used to playing with a woman,” she said.

Rafferty sighed. “Look, we’re stuck in here for now, so let’s call a truce until we get out. You don’t insult my dating life, and I won’t insult you for being so uptight.”

“I am not—” She choked it off when he raised an eyebrow. “Fine. Truce it is. We can play a game my girlfriends and I call ‘reveal or pay up.’ You have to answer whatever question the other players ask. If you refuse, you have to ante up or accept a dare from the other person. Since we don’t have any cash on us, we’ll find some paper to use as the twenty dollar markers and square it once we’re out of here.”

Rafferty whistled. “That’s an expensive ante.”

She shrugged. “It’s supposed to be to deter players from not answering. Unless you’re too afraid to play?”

“I’m not afraid of Truth or Dare, darling.”

“Hmm,” Harper said like she knew something he didn’t. She tore small strips of paper from the side of a brown paper bag, divided them evenly, and passed a handful to him.

He spread out a couple of blankets on the floor and sat across from Harper, figuring if nothing else, the game was a harmless way to pass the time until someone noticed they were missing.

Harper studied him for a long moment before she abruptly asked, “What happened to you to make you anti-commitment?”

“Nothing. Not every guy goes the distance in a relationship.”

She frowned like she could see right through the excuse he’d perfected saying over the years.

Rafferty quickly said, “My turn. What’s the best thing about being you?”

“My family. My friends. The town. I feel blessed to have my life. Most days.” Harper toyed with one of the bag strips. “My turn. In all the conversations we had as friends, you never told me how you came to be a firefighter. Did you really want to become one, or are you following a family tradition?”

“I never wanted anything more than to become a firefighter. Every time I’d hear the sirens, I’d run outside. Did that a couple of times in the middle of the night until Mom laid the law down.” He laughed then thought for a second. “My turn. What do you want the most? Besides me, I mean.”

She gave him a huffy look. “I want to get married. Have kids. I understand why you don’t want that.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I’m betting it’s that you don’t want to be in a relationship because you think it’ll hamper your freedom. Am I right?”

Rafferty was silent for a second, torn between not wanting to delve into the past and wanting Harper to understand why he felt the way he did about relationships. He decided to be open about it. “I dated my college girlfriend Jill for a year, and she started pushing to get married.”

“That’s young,” Harper said.

He nodded. “I told her that with two more years of college and neither of us making much money, marriage would be a mistake.”

Brows furrowing, Harper asked, “Breaking up with your college girlfriend is the reason you don’t do relationships?”

“That’s not what happened. We fought, and a few days later as my roommates and I were coming back from spring break, following Jill and her friends in their car, there was an accident. A semi lost control and hit her car head-on.”

Harper gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

Rafferty paused, lost in the memory. He’d run to the fiery wreck. Other motorists had tackled him, keeping him from jumping into the flames. On his knees on the highway, screaming at the sky, he’d sworn then he’d live the rest of his life and never break another heart. “I wasn’t fast enough to save her.”

“You do realize what happened wasn’t your fault, right?” Harper asked. “It was an accident. A crazy, messed-up event that life sometimes throws at people. Don’t hold your heart hostage over something you had no power to prevent or to change.”

Rafferty pulled himself back to the moment at hand and shrugged. Talking about the event poked at a grief he didn’t like to think about. And he didn’t want anyone’s pity.

As if she sensed he was done talking, she let out a sigh and smoothed a wrinkle in the blanket. Then she smiled a trouble-making smile. “Double or nothing?”

He nodded, thankful for the shift in conversation.

“My turn. Double or nothing,” he said, knowing he was about to win his ante back.

“Bring it,” she said in a soft voice.

“I dare you to kiss me.”

“Wh-What?” she sputtered. “There was—”

“Nothing stated in your rules about physical contact.” He motioned his fingers. “Pay up. Give me back my markers.”

She held out a hand. “Wait,” she said slowly. “One kiss. No tongue.”

“You don’t get to alter the dare. You either accept or you pay. Now fork it over.” He motioned again.

Her shoulders stiffened, and that stubborn look well associated with her crossed her face. “I accept,” she said.

“You… Huh.” Hadn’t seen that coming. Good thing he was sitting on the floor, because he would have fallen out of a chair. “You’d rather kiss me than pay?”

“I need the money.”

“Or it’s a good excuse to do what you’ve wanted to do for years, right?”

She ground her teeth and rolled her eyes. “Oh, so right. You had me at the first brooding smirk.”

“I don’t brood or smirk.” He rubbed his jawline, trying to find a way to backtrack. She’d called him on something he’d never thought she’d do. Wasn’t that just a kick in the shorts? But he never backed down from a challenge. “All right. Then let’s do this. Kiss away. I’m all yours, sweetheart.”

Her eyes dropped to his lips, and the tip of her tongue darted out, licking her bottom lip.

He felt like he’d been thrust into a heat wave the way his body warmed. Well, here was hoping he hadn’t just made a big old mess of things. Rafferty straightened then stood slowly.

Clearing her throat, Harper rose as well. She put her hands on his hips, searching his eyes intently before rising onto her tiptoes and touching her mouth lightly to his.

At the first taste, Rafferty thought she was sweeter than any honey he’d ever tried and ten times more addicting. He hadn’t expected that, either.

She leaned forward, off balance, pressing into him, and his arms closed tightly around her, his hands on her upper back, urging her closer. Heat shot through him, and all he could think was: more.

The longer he kissed her, the less he wanted to let go. For the first time in his life, Rafferty knew he didn’t own the situation.