Читать книгу A Ring And A Rainbow - Deanna Talcott, DeAnna Talcott - Страница 12

Hunter’s mouth brushed over hers. She should have stopped him, Claire thought dizzily, before she allowed his powerfully sweet kiss to addle her brain and destroy her defenses.

Yet Hunter didn’t overpower her, and his mouth made no demands. Instead he expertly touched and tasted, meeting her hunger halfway. In a gesture of comfort that did seem to have some inexplicable healing power.

Years and burdens fell away as he magically carried her back to her youth, to memories that were steeped in expectation and hope. He lifted her, and she soared, weightless for the first time in years.

No hard feelings? she thought woozily. Everything about him was hard. The way he held her, the way he cradled her. The way his fingers pressed into her back, drawing her to him, the way his knee instinctively sluiced between her legs, taking possession.

It would have been easy to give herself up to the kiss. Remarkably easy. But she restrained herself, slapping a conscious rein on her emotions, willing her tongue to still, her lips to cease their explorations.

Hunter pulled away, the coarse stubble on his cheek grazing hers. “Now that,” he whispered huskily, “makes me feel like I’ve come back home.”

His arms dropped loosely to her sides, his fingertips sliding down the length of her forearms and her wrists. She imperceptibly drew back, shaking him off.

“Hunter,” she said shakily, “that won’t happen again. You can joke and say that we’ve kissed and made up. But all we will ever be toward each other is polite. Anything else is out of the question. We can be neighbors for the few days you’re here. But anything more than that is—”

“Out of the question?”

She took a step back, regret nipping at her heels. “Yes. I think maybe we understand each other now.”

“Don’t count on it, Claire. I never did things the easy way. You, better than anyone, should know that.”

“The whole town knows that, Hunter. Because you didn’t just walk out on me, you walked out on your dad and your mom. They expected you to run the station, to keep it going.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted,” he retorted, dismissing her reproach.

“Apparently, neither was I,” she pointed out softly. She turned to go, then stopped at the back door, the key still in her hand. It was all she could do to walk away from him, but she forced herself to do it. “I meant to tell you. I know you’ll be crowded here, and there’s no good place to stay within thirty miles. So, if you decide you need an extra bedroom, someone’s welcome to use the guest bedroom at my place. You can let them know.”

She opened the door and had one foot on the steps.

“Thanks, Claire. I’ll bring my stuff over later.”

She swung around to face him, unable to wipe the surprise off her face. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll shower first, then bring my stuff over,” he said nonchalantly, “after the girls get in.”

“I didn’t mean you,” she stammered. “I meant Courtney or Lynda or—”

“You’ll want me,” he said decidedly.

Her eyes widened.

“That is, I’m the one that’s the best houseguest. The girls and their families are loud and noisy and on a schedule that runs counterclockwise to the rest of the world.”

“I can adjust.” She’d have to adjust, because there was no way she could live in the same house with Hunter. Not even for a few days.

“But Courtney’s baby is colicky. Beth’s little boy has asthma and—”

“I know that.”

“But he’d probably be allergic to your cat.”

“What! How do you know I have a cat?” Claire bristled, incensed that he knew even one intimate detail about her. Huh. He probably regarded her as an old maid who had nothing to do except sit around carrying on conversations with her cat.

“Mom mentioned it. Said you found the kitten in her garage.”

“Well, she couldn’t take care of it,” she said defensively. “That was the winter she went on that whale-watching cruise.”

He chuckled. “Mmm, nice of you to take it in, though. Even so, it would most likely send Brendon into an asthma attack. Cat dander, and all that.”

Claire grimaced. Okay. She didn’t want to be responsible for that. “Then maybe Mindy. Or Lynda…”

“I don’t know. Mindy’s husband is a lovable guy, but an uncontrollable slob. And frankly, they bicker all the time. But you probably already know that, too. Lynda’s better half works nights, and when he isn’t working he’s up banging around the kitchen, making omelettes and frying up hash browns.” He lifted his broad shoulders. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

She stepped back inside the kitchen. “No. Not a good idea. It wouldn’t look good for you to be in my house.”

“Why not?”

She sputtered. “Because—because someone might think we were taking up where we left off.”

“So?”

“So it matters to me what people think—and I don’t want you in my home.”

To his credit—or amazing acting abilities—Hunter recoiled, as if he’d been hurt. “I just thought it would be the best all-around solution,” he said. “For both of us. Since you were willing to help us out, and I simply want to fly under the radar with my sisters’ families.”

“Hunter, we both know it goes way beyond that.”

He gave her a long, assessing gaze, one that made Claire waffle. She needed to dismiss those tawny-colored eyes, that suggestive slant of his mouth. He wasn’t going to talk her into this. He wasn’t! But even as her mind was saying ‘no,’ her body was saying ‘yes.’ She could feel herself gravitating to him, as much as she wanted to deny it.

“I was only taking you up on your offer for a place to stay because I wanted a little peace and quiet. Just while the girls are here. Then I’ll move out, I swear. Nobody even needs to know I’m there, if it embarrasses you.”

Claire paused, her blood growing even hotter—and for anentirely different reason. Hunter didn’t know what embarrassment and humiliation was. But she’d faced it down. For twelve years after he’d left, she’d stared it in the eye and risen above it. If he thought he could just move in with her and resume their old comfortable relationship—

“Hey, I’ll sneak in after dark and leave before dawn.”

The implications sent a curling sensation through Claire’s middle—making her feel as if he was intentionally taking that impulsive kiss one step further. “Now that would be an even worse idea.”

“Look, Claire,” he reasoned, “we’re going to have to get past this. I’m going to be here for a while to settle Mom’s estate. We’re going to be neighbors for a few weeks, like it or not. But as soon as the girls leave to go home and get all their kids back in school and their activities, my energies go to putting this place in order. I don’t even have time to make nice with you. I want to get the job done and get out of here.”

Claire should have been hurt. But she wasn’t. In fact, it was almost a relief to know where he stood and what he intended to do. In the meantime, she’d bash back her inclinations and brace up her defenses. She’d drive him out of her mind and banish him from her soul. She would not let him get the best of her.

For she knew, without another word between them, that in the next few hours she’d relent and Hunter would move into her home as a houseguest. But she’d absolutely, positively draw the line at letting him move back into her heart.

Hunter moved in with a matched set of leather luggage, and an apologetic smile. He stood uncomfortably in the kitchen of the frame home she’d inherited from her mother and eyed the new wallpaper with the whimsical birdhouse border. His gaze flitted over the remodeled kitchen. The oak cabinets were a far cry from the dark avocado-green ones he probably remembered. The refinished claw-foot table now had four matching chairs, instead of five spindly castoffs. “I didn’t mean to strong-arm you over this, Claire.”

“Sure you did,” she said easily, putting the coffee carafe back on the burner. At the same time, she wondered whether he was having second thoughts. “The coffee’s all set for tomorrow morning. If you get up before me, all you have to do is turn it on.”

“Thanks.”

“Help yourself to whatever you need,” she said breezily, wishing the moment she uttered the words she could take them back. What could the man possibly need? Intimate confessions at midnight? Another stolen kiss behind closed blinds? A little pleasure in the pantry? “Bread’s in the bread box,” she said, “eggs in the fridge and cereal’s on the top shelf over the stove. I don’t do much more than yogurt for breakfast—and I eat that in the car.” She paused. “I’ll be out early tomorrow, Hunter. I’ve got a house to show. So I’ve left a key on the table. I’ll be in and out, so our paths probably won’t even cross. Don’t worry about that.”

He looked. The key ring, an advertising piece for Falls Company Real Estate, offered a single brass key. “Sounds like you’re trying to avoid me.”

“No. I’ve got a house to sell and a living to make, that’s all.”

He nodded slowly. “Funny to think of you as a real estate agent now. I remember the time you had to beg Mrs. Montgomery for the receptionist’s job. So? You like it?”

“It was probably the single best thing that ever happened to me.” Polite conversation, she reminded herself, that was the only thing they needed to make together. Yet the phrases make time, make music, make love went zinging through her head.

He nodded again, his attention fixed on the pot rack over the work island.

“With a kitchen like this I know you’ve learned how to cook.”

“Enough to get by. But I don’t like to eat alone.” Hunter shifted his big, muscular frame, nailed her with a look, then let the implication slide. They should have been husband and wife by now, she thought miserably. She should have been making him eggs and kissing him out the door in the morning. They should have had sleeper-clad feet padding to their bedside before dawn.

“You’ve changed things around here so much, Claire, I wouldn’t have recognized the place.”

“Things don’t stay the same, Hunter. Of course, people don’t stay the same, either. But I guess you’ve figured that out.”

He snorted, inclining his head slightly. “I would have recognized you, though.”

“Really?”

“Mmm. I could have been a block away, on Main Street, and picked you out of a crowd.” She waited, feeling her eyelashes drop a coquettish fraction of an inch, wondering what he meant. “You’ve got this tilt in your get-along. It’s the way you walk.”

“A tilt in my get-along?” Claire repeated, acutely conscious that Hunter’s comment was slightly suggestive.

He chuckled. “And the way you twist yourself around. You have this distinctive way you lean back from the hip and look over your shoulder. You did it on the back-porch steps today. Just like I remembered.”

“I think the explanation for that is startled. I was startled that you’d think my invitation included you.” She grabbed a tea towel off the counter, folded it and hung it over the oven door. “I certainly never saw that coming.”

“Hey. I always did like to keep you guessing, Claire.”

“No guessing games this time around, Hunter,” she warned. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if he started teasing her again, not like the old times. He wouldn’t, of course. Because his eyes were shadowed, and his grief was palpable. No, his mind was on another kind of loss.

“Well—” he lifted a shoulder “—I appreciate you putting me up anyway. Being around the girls and their families makes me feel like an outsider. Like I’m the odd man out, the one who’s in the way.”

“Hunter, your sisters wouldn’t make anyone feel like an outsider. And I doubt you’re in the way.”

“Mmm, no,” he said dryly, “not when it comes to lifting and carrying.” He leaned against the countertop. “They already put me to work. I hauled in two high chairs, a bunch of diaper bags, a playpen, and then, before I came over, I put a portable crib together.”

Claire’s gaze drifted to the empty spot against the far wall. She’d intentionally saved that space for a high chair. It didn’t look as if that was going to happen. “At least you made yourself useful,” she said coolly.

“The girls wondered when you were coming over.”

“I thought about it. But I wanted to give them some time alone. It’s always hard, going into the house for the first time, realizing the people you love aren’t there anymore.”

He thoughtfully flicked the zipper tab on the shaving kit tucked under his arm. It was a muscular gesture, one that put a curling sensation through Claire’s middle. “They appreciated the hot meal, Claire. Said it was just like you, to do something like that.”

Claire ignored the praise. She couldn’t bear it if he was nice to her; she’d rather be dismissed. She’d learned how to deal with that.

“They also said you should be there with us, eating.”

A lump formed in Claire’s throat as she imagined taking her place at the Starnes family dinner table. She once thought that those girls would be her sisters-in-law, that she would be part of the family. “How’s everybody holding up?”

He looked away, considering. “Lynda’s family is staying with friends, so I haven’t seen much of her. But Courtney’s pretty upset,” he admitted. “She was planning a trip back next month, and she feels guilty, like she should have arranged her trip sooner, to get here before…well, you know.”

Claire nodded. Courtney was the sensitive one. The one who nursed the sickliest-looking plants back to health. The one who chased flies out of the house rather than pick up a flyswatter. “The last thing your mother would have tolerated was Courtney’s guilt. You find a way to tell her that.”

Hunter offered her a searching gaze; one Claire was totally unprepared for. She remembered the last time he’d looked at her like that—when he’d told her he was moving out of town, and he’d wanted her to say it was okay.

“You always had a way of making people feel better, didn’t you? I remember you offered up a few suggestions I listened to.”

“No. Not always,” she said, avoiding the magnetic color of his irises. “I can think of one in particular you didn’t listen to.”

Once more, the reminder of their broken love affair skittered through the room.

“I wasn’t ready, Claire,” he said finally. “It wouldn’t have worked. Not back then. Not for either of us.”

Claire pinned him with a look. “Don’t tell me something I already know, Hunter. I would have been miserable with you, and we both know it.” Hunter’s eyes narrowed; obviously that was not the answer he expected. Not from her. She had loved him so desperately, he’d believed she’d always wait for him. But the waiting game had long been over. She didn’t want to talk about it, either, not with a man who still turned her inside out with a want she couldn’t control. “Come on, let me show you to your room,” she invited, heading into the hall. “It’s a little fluffy for you, but I’m sure you’ll get along.”

“Fluffy?” he inquired, tossing his garment bag over his arm and dragging his suitcase along behind him. “That sounds like something you’d name a cat, not do to a room.”

Claire smiled, in spite of her resolve not to. “No, the cat’s name is Zoey, and she has very little patience for anyone who does not come bearing tuna.” She paused at the foot of the stairs, in the front foyer.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, noting that the newel post, banister and balusters had been replaced with turned oak. The bare lightbulb was gone, replaced by an oak and glass fixture. Everything was warmer, more inviting. Without all the laundry piled on the stairs, or the space by the front door clogged with worn-out tennis shoes and book bags and jackets, the foyer looked ten times bigger than he remembered—and, for once, it looked loved.

Claire started up the wide staircase, now carpeted in a rich, oyster-colored hue.

“I made my room over into a guest room and took Momma’s room. Because it was bigger and in the front of the house,” Claire said.

Hunter hesitated, momentarily unnerved to think he’d sleep in Claire’s old room, the one she’d had as a teenager. He hadn’t expected that. He’d only wanted to be in the house with her, alone, to reinforce, in his own mind, that he’d made the right decision all those years ago. Yet he was already questioning it. Why, that single kiss had only served to remind him that there was such a thing as cataclysmic chemistry.

“It’s probably a whole lot less than what you’re used to,” she went on, pausing at the top of the steps, “but it’s the best I’ve got.”

“It’ll be fine,” he answered, moving up the last two steps and toward the open door of her room. It took him three steps to cross the hall, and then he stopped short on the threshold, wondering at the time warp that had fashioned the differences in their lives. He remembered a broken-down twin bed, cheap, torn shades on the windows, and walls with a few odd posters and tons of pictures torn from her mother’s magazines. “Huh.” His shoulders slumped, taking it all in. “Looks a little different without the posters.”

“That was a kid thing, a stage. Now I call this the ‘garden room.’”

“My.” The rough plaster-and-lath walls were painted eggshell, a mere backdrop for blue and salmon colors. Gauzy white curtains hung behind the plaid tab-top drapes and complimented the floral and checked bedding. It was a remarkable makeover, of bold strength and delicate fragility. He walked into the room and put his suitcase at the end of the bed. “You are either a chameleon or an escape artist, to change a room like this.”

She laughed behind him, as if she found something about his statement genuinely funny. “I’m not the escape artist. You are. I stayed here to make something of myself.”

He rolled the implication over in his head. She was hurt, and by golly, she was going to take every opportunity to remind him that he was responsible for it. “That was a poor choice of words, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I’d say so.” She tipped her head and walked into the room. “Okay. There’s plenty of hangers in the closet, and I cleaned out a drawer for you. Extra blankets and towels on the top shelf of the closet. No phone, no TV, no amenities.”

He tossed his garment bag on the bed, atop the sprigged duvet, and ran a hand over the foot of the iron bed. “Nice and quiet, though.”

“Mmm, we do have plenty of that around Lost Falls.”

There were fresh flowers on the table, but Hunter quickly realized she hadn’t brought them in for his benefit. It was Claire, filling up her life and redoing all the things that had been absent when she was growing up. She paused to smooth a crease from the pillow slip and Hunter watched, mesmerized by the gentle, feminine gesture.

“Recognize it?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“The bed,” she prompted.

He looked down, frowning. It was an old-fashioned double bed, the iron frame painted ochre, the headboard high and round, the footboard like a cameo on its side.

“Your mother gave it to me,” she went on. “From the cabin.”

His jaw slid off center. “No? That old bed frame we had in the barn? We propped it against the door one summer, to keep the dog in.”

“I found all the parts and pieces, and she was cleaning out and wanted to get rid of it….”

His hand trailed over the joints of the iron rungs. “Beautiful. What you’ve done to it, Claire.”

“I was glad to have it. Kind of like a hand-me-down, to remind me of the cabin.”

He snorted, smiling on the inside as the distant memories crowded into his mind. “We had a lot of fun out there, didn’t we?”

“It was my favorite place ever,” she said. He watched her doe-dark eyes go soft, and reluctantly admitted there wasn’t a woman on the face of the earth to compare to Claire. “I felt like a new person every time I was out there. Of course, there was that one time…”

He turned, intentionally arching an eyebrow at her. “Only one time?” he asked. “We had the craziest things happen to us out there. Remember the time you said ‘move over’ and I fell out of the hayloft?” He shook his head. “I wore that cast for six weeks. And it was the middle of summer. Wrecked my whole baseball season.”

“So? It wasn’t my fault. What about the time we played cops and robbers and you tied me up and left me there? Out in the woods.”

“I was coming back.”

“Yeah. Right. If Beth hadn’t come along, I’d probably still be there.”

He couldn’t stop the slow, amused smile that eased across his face. “You were spittin’ mad. Had to bribe you with a quarter candy bar just to get you to talk to me again.” He laughed, remembering how much it had meant to him to earn his way back into Claire’s good graces. “And then there was that treasure hunt you concocted to find the gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“Me? You were the one who wanted the gold.”

“Well, you were the one who dug it out of your mother’s purse and gave it to me.”

Claire rolled her eyes, remembering. “Oh, I got in so much trouble. In my whole life I’ve never gotten in so much trouble as I did that one time, for losing that ring.”

“We didn’t lose it,” he reminded, “we buried it. My folks turned that place upside down looking for it.”

“Back then I had no idea what it meant to my mom. Or else I wouldn’t have done anything so stupid.” She paused. “A month’s worth of rent and a summer’s worth of groceries.”

Hunter rapped the iron bed frame with the back of his knuckles, pensively remembering all they had once shared. Even with all the struggles, it had been an idyllic childhood, very much removed from the real world.

“It was a world away,” he allowed, marveling that for moments they could reminisce and talk and laugh as they once did. “I’ve thought about the place a few times since I’ve left. But it’s the strangest thing…I don’t miss it. I wanted to leave so badly that I don’t think I’ve missed anything at all about Lost Falls.” His head swiveled, as he realized what he’d said, expecting her to be angry. “Except you.”