Читать книгу Personal Relations - HEATHER MACALLISTER, Heather Macallister - Страница 11

“JEFF! BROOKE’S OFFICE said she’s on her way over to see Chase!”

“Is that good?”

“Are you kidding? Film school, here I come!”

BROOKE AND CHASE stared at each other, each absorbing the implications of their changed status. Then they let out twin sighs of relief.

For the moment, all Brooke could think about was that she only had half the battle to fight she had before.

And then a wide grin split Chase’s face, which pretty much changed him from a shoo-in for jerk of the century—to…something else.

He dropped his head and shook it slightly, then looked skyward before beaming that smile her way again.

Brooke felt its impact like a punch to her stomach. She was still in the process of realigning her opinion of him and didn’t have any attractive-man filters in place.

Oh, boy.

Trying to regroup, she blurted out, “But if you’re against them marrying—and I’m including any living-together arrangement—then why did you tell them they could live with you?”

“I never—oh, yeah.” He winced. “Jeff had asked me to help him find a job so he could support the little gold—” Chase broke off abruptly. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but she was feeling generous. Relief could do that to a person.

“He wanted a job right away so he could earn the apartment deposit. I want him concentrating on his grades, not staying up half the night bagging groceries, so I said they could live with me.”

Brooke nodded. “I probably would have said the same thing.”

He turned down the wattage on his smile. “So what was with the get-a-big-diamond advice?”

It was Brooke’s turn to look sheepish. “I hoped that Jeff would be shocked at how much they cost. I thought maybe it might start an argument—or at least a discussion. Money is the number one topic couples argue about. I was just buying time until I could talk with you.”

The warmth was back in his expression. Unfortunately, she was feeling a little—okay, a lot of—warmth of her own.

He drew a deep breath. “This calls for a drink. And I’m talking all the caffeine and sugar. The full monty.”

He came from behind the desk and headed toward a worktable that had a wooden file cabinet beneath it.

Except as she quickly saw, it wasn’t a file cabinet but a small refrigerator filled with cans and bottles.

“Ohh…” She closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Dr Pepper in there, would you?”

“A woman after my own heart.”

Or maybe not. There was an awkward silence during which Chase sorted through the selections in the little refrigerator and they ignored any inflammatory interpretations of what he’d said.

“The vending machines on this floor only carry Coke, so I’ve got my own private stash.” He squatted down and dug way in the back, past bottles of water and diet sodas until he pulled out a single can of Dr Pepper.

“Here it is.” He held out the can as though it were a bottle of vintage burgundy.

Brooke’s mouth watered in anticipation. “You only have one?”

“Yeah. It’s for emergencies. We’ll have to split it.” He reached for two glasses emblazoned with a gold “$10,000,000 Seller” emblem, and removed the ice tray from the tiny freezer compartment.

“Oh, I couldn’t…you take it. I’ll have a can of whatever else you’ve got in there.”

“No way. We both deserve it.” He popped the top and Brooke heard a fizz as the liquid was poured over ice. “It’s been one of those days.”

Gesturing for her to take one of the two club swivel chairs on her right, he pulled one away from the worktable with his foot and handed her the drink.

“To our new alliance.” Chase clinked his glass to hers, then downed half the drink in a single swallow. “Oh, that hit the spot.”

“You can say that again.” Brooke closed her eyes and felt the sugar and caffeine jack up her pulse. Sure she’d pay with a sugar low later, but right now, she didn’t care.

“So…Brooke is it?”

She nodded.

“I’m really sorry for—”

Brooke stopped him by vigorously waving her hands. “No—please. Let’s just start over.”

He grinned. “I like your style.”

Brooke hadn’t been conscious of having a style. She’d just wanted to put the whole ugly confrontation behind them.

“So what do you do, Brooke?” Chase eased back in the chair, probably unaware that his shirt was stretched across his chest in a way that…in a way she normally didn’t notice on a man.

In a way she definitely shouldn’t be noticing on Chase. But…well, she did. She was a woman, even though she hadn’t been acting like one for the past several years, and he was…waiting for an answer to his question. “I work for Haldutton in the personnel department.”

“On Travis, or are you at The Woodlands location?”

“Travis.”

“The Travis building is one of the properties we manage.”

He gulped more of his drink, making Brooke feel guilty that she’d taken half of it. But this was like smoking the peace pipe after treaty negotiations with the enemy. It would have been rude to refuse the gesture.

“I cannot tell you how relieved I am that we’re on the same page here.” He slid a sideways glance at her. “We are aren’t we?”

“If you’re on the they’d-better-get-their-education-first page, then we are.”

“I am. Just verifying.” He set his glass on the laminated tabletop. “Jeff is living with me until he finishes high school. He’s a senior now and doesn’t know what he wants to do with himself. Which doesn’t particularly matter since I know what he should do.”

To an outsider, that should have sounded unbelievably arrogant, but Brooke not only understood, she felt exactly the same way about Courtney.

“I’ve spent months going through the college admissions drill with him and when he started talking marriage—marriage—I panicked,” Chase admitted with disarming candor.

“So did I.” A soul mate. The man was her soul mate. He was going through the same thing with his stepbrother that she was going through with Courtney. He knew.

“I mean, I pulled some serious strings to get him into Baylor. It’s a good, steady school. Not a party school. Jeff doesn’t need an excuse to party.”

“Oh, I know. I feel the same way about Courtney.” The words babbled out. She hadn’t met anyone else responsible for a sibling—like a parent, but not a parent—and being able to talk with him was such a relief. “The thing is, I’ve been so frustrated because she wouldn’t fill out the applications. I had to do it.”

“I know! What is up with that?”

“Well, Courtney claims she doesn’t want to go to college. She says she wants to be an actress and being in this play at school has only made it worse. It’s not as if I’m telling her she can’t be an actress, I just want her to be able to support herself and for that, she’s got to get an education.”

“Exactly!” His look of approval made her feel better than it should have.

A lot better. A dangerous kind of better. “So…where did this marriage talk come from? I mean, I thought Courtney and I had a good relationship, but this came out of nowhere.”

“Beats me. With a mother like the one Jeff’s got, you’d think he’d never want to get married. She’s bounced around the world leaving a trail of husbands in her wake—including my father. She dragged Jeff with her, but when he was ready to start high school, he wanted to stay in one place. When he asked if he could live with me, I was more than happy to have him. Our family moved a lot when I was growing up. I didn’t have any brothers and sisters and it was hell trying to fit in all the time.” He smiled slightly. “Jeff was the only brother I ever had and he’s basically a good kid. He just needs some grounding.” He looked at her. “Nothing against your sister, but he doesn’t need marriage right now.”

“Neither does Courtney. And it doesn’t make sense for her to want to get married unless…”

“Jeff said she wasn’t pregnant.”

“No, not that.” And Courtney had been mad when Brooke had asked. “But maybe she knows that Jeff has money and figures he’ll support her while she’s trying to break into acting.” Except that Jeff seemed more like the supportee than the supporter. In deference to her new alliance with Chase, Brooke decided not to point that out.

“Don’t worry. I’ll set them both straight on that. What do your parents have to say about all this?”

“They don’t know and I’d rather not tell them if I can avoid it. They’re living in El Bahar where my dad is working, so Courtney and I are living in the house while she finishes high school. Technically, I’m her guardian—or I was until she turned eighteen. And by the way, whoever made the stupid law about eighteen-year-olds being legal adults has obviously never been responsible for a teenager.”

“I hear you.” Chase laughed. “But I’ve got to tell you, you don’t look much older than high school age, yourself.”

“I’m twenty-five.”

He swept his gaze over her, the sort of gaze that made a woman hold in her stomach. He probably wasn’t even aware that he’d done so, but Brooke was. Extremely aware.

And she’d sucked in her stomach.

“Wasn’t that kind of a drag to have your sister dumped on you?”

Brooke was shaking her head even before he finished. “No, in fact I was glad.” She looked at him, at the face that was considerably friendlier than when she’d first entered the office, at the one person who understood exactly what her responsibilities had been the past several years.

And found herself telling him everything—everything about the day that had changed her life. “When I was her age, I really screwed up. This is a chance to redeem myself.”

“What happened?”

“Oh…poor choices and peer pressure. It was spring break my senior year and a bunch of us had gone to the beach at Galveston. I was driving my parents’ van. You know that cars are banned from the beach, and there was nowhere to park. Anywhere. The place was packed.”

Chase nodded. “I’ve done spring break in Galveston.”

“So you know how it is. Anyway, we finally went out to the tip of the island by some beach houses and just drove on past them onto the beach. We figured if anybody said anything to us, we could tell them we’d rented one of the houses. We had a great time, but a police cruiser caught us sneaking back onto the road that night. I was going to pull over but this guy I liked was with us and he kept telling me to keep driving.”

“You tried to outrun a police car?”

“It wasn’t like it was a high-speed chase or anything. We were dodging them between the houses. Everybody said I should kill the lights and just pull into one of the driveways until the police car left. So, I turned off the lights and…”

She could still hear Jason’s voice laughing and saying, “Way to go, Brooke!” and flinging his arm around her. She still remembered the tight curl of awareness that took over her insides and made her want to do anything to keep it there.

The rest of her friends started chanting, “Go, Brooke! Go, Brooke!”

She’d had a reputation as a goody-two-shoes, which was why her parents had let her drive in the first place. All her life she’d followed the rules and this one time when she hadn’t…

“I skidded in the sand, missed the driveway and hit the support beam of a beach house.”

“Were you all right?” Chase asked immediately.

“Oh, yeah. The airbags went off. The kids in the back weren’t wearing seat belts and got thrown forward. Still, we were all lucky—just bruised mostly.” She sighed. “The van was totaled, the beach house might as well have been. I think the repairs cost more than building it from scratch would have. Oh, and did I mention that the house was owned by a lawyer?”

“Ouch.” He gave her a sympathetic look.

“Yeah. I was completely at fault, we were sued, and there went my college fund, my parents’ savings, retirement, the whole bit.”

“And you’ve been beating yourself up about it ever since, right? You look the type.”

Brooke gave him a wry smile. Just a little while ago, her type had been compared to a madam in a brothel. “I made a mistake…a really stupid mistake. And I paid for it. I’m still paying for it, I suppose, but Courtney shouldn’t have to. My father took the job overseas because of the money he could make and because I told my parents I’d look after Courtney. They trusted me when they didn’t have to and I will do anything not to let them down again. So, Courtney is not getting married before she graduates from high school, and she is not blowing off college, either. That’s all there is to it.”

“Hey.” He reached out and covered the hand she’d fisted in her lap.

She watched as his fingers closed around hers in slow motion. She could feel every line in his palm. Warmth enveloped her hand and her wrist. It was well on the way to her elbow before he squeezed gently and released her hand.

“You aren’t in this alone anymore,” he said quietly, but with an underlying strength that made Brooke want to melt against him and let him carry all the problems on his substantial shoulders.

As she gazed into his dark eyes, Brooke realized that the melting part was still a distinct possibility.

How had she missed the fact that Jeff’s ex-relative was a total babe? Of course, his babeness had been hidden when he was in jerk mode and was now brilliantly illuminated by relief and the effects of sugar and caffeine.

She sighed, and the corner of his mouth rose.

“I feel the same way.”

Brooke doubted it, she really doubted it.

“So what now?” he asked.

“Now?”

“Jeff and Courtney—how do we cool their jets?”

“Not by telling them they can’t see each other.”

“You got that right.” Chase stood and cleared away her empty glass and his own, then snagged paper and pens from the desk and brought them back with him. “We have to be smart about this—use our heads, not react emotionally.”

“Right. Heads, not hormones.”

“Exactly.”

When he sat, he pulled the chair closer to hers so he could write at the table.

Heads, not hormones. Heads, not hormones.

Hormones were tricky little devils. Up until now, Brooke had simply had to put them in deep-freeze storage until it was safe to thaw them out. Actually, she was looking forward to the thawing—after Courtney left for school.

As Brooke picked up her pen, she couldn’t help noticing that Chase’s knee was a fraction of an inch away from her own. It was close enough that she could feel the heat from his leg. Heat. She swallowed. Heat could be bad.

“We need a plan.” He flashed her a grin. “Preferably the same one.”

“Yes, a plan,” she echoed brilliantly. But really, how was she supposed to think with him sitting so close and acting like a take-charge male?

She hadn’t even known she liked a take-charge kind of guy. She’d always thought there wasn’t a lot of difference between the take-charge type and a bully. “So have you got any ideas?” she asked hoping that he wouldn’t notice that she’d been staring at him.

“Bribery?”

“Chase, your brother drives a Porsche. What’s left for you to bribe him with?”

“Good point.” He starting tracing circles—perfect circles—on the paper.

Brooke watched his fingers and the way they held the brushed silver pen. He had nice hands. Nice fingers. Fingers that kept going around and around and around….