Читать книгу Having the Bachelor's Baby - Victoria Pade - Страница 8

“Northbridge. Thirty miles. Thirty short miles…”

Clair Cabot was talking to herself. But reading the sign above the highway out loud as she drove underneath it didn’t ease any of the tension she was feeling. In fact, the closer she got to her destination the more her stress level increased.

Northbridge. The small Montana town where fifteen-year-old Clair and her father had moved when her father had purchased a ranch to turn into a school and quasi-boot-camp for troubled preadolescent boys.

The small Montana town where Clair had gone to high school and met and married her high-school sweetheart before moving with him to Denver.

The small Montana town she’d last visited for a single night in June to attend her graduating class’s tenth reunion.

The small Montana town where, for the second time in her life, a man had altered her course….

“Take a deep breath and blow it out. Take a deep breath and blow it out,” she recited, performing the relaxation technique advised by her doctor when she’d passed out in her office a week ago.

The deep breathing helped a little. Only a little. Because after all, she was still getting closer and closer to Northbridge with every passing minute. To Northbridge and to the Northbridge School for Boys…and to the school’s new owner—Ben Walker.

Clair had to do the deep breathing again at just the thought of Ben Walker.

Ben Walker—Northbridge’s bad boy.

Or at least that’s what he’d been as a teenager. So bad that by the time Clair had arrived in town he’d already been sent to Arizona for a program for adolescents in trouble. Which meant that even though Clair’s best friend through high school had been Ben Walker’s twin sister, Cassie, Clair hadn’t even met Ben until the last semester of senior year when he’d been allowed to come back to graduate with his class. And by then Clair had been so involved with Rob Cabot she hadn’t even noticed Cassie’s hardtack twin.

Until the reunion in June.

“Stupid reunion,” Clair muttered.

But the reunion wasn’t to blame for what had happened the last time she was in Northbridge, she thought, contradicting herself. It was Rob Cabot who had set the wheels into motion. It was his fault.

Her ex-husband.

She’d asked him if he was going to the reunion—not face-to-face, she hadn’t wanted to ever see him again after the divorce. But she’d e-mailed him and asked him.

And that’s all she’d done—she’d asked him. Nicely. Politely. She hadn’t goaded him or challenged him or done anything to provoke him. She hadn’t even let him know that if he was going, she wasn’t—although that had been her plan. She’d only e-mailed and asked him if he was going. A simple question that had only required a simple, straight-forward, honest answer.

And that’s what she’d thought he’d given her.

He’d said there was no way he was going, that he and his new wife—the woman he’d married less than twenty-four hours after his divorce from Clair had been finalized—had better things to do.

So naturally Clair had figured the coast was clear and she could go. She could go without worrying about seeing Rob. Without worrying about seeing his new wife. Without feeling uncomfortable. Without having to relive the pain of the past eleven months. She could just go and have fun.

Which was all she’d intended to do.

But she should have known better. She should have known that Rob wouldn’t forgo anything so anyone else—especially Clair—could have free rein with it.

So of course, who had she met at the sign-in table within five minutes of arriving at the Northbridge High School gymnasium?

Rob.

And his new wife.

His pregnant new wife.

And as if that hadn’t been enough salt poured into Clair’s wounds, Rob had seized the opportunity to place his hand on his new wife’s belly, smile smugly and say, “So now we know I wasn’t the problem.”

The memory of that moment still hurt. It was one of the worst of Clair’s life. She’d whispered, “Congratulations,” in a shocked, choked voice, and then she’d made a beeline for the ladies room to hide in one of the stalls and sob.

That was where she’d been when her old friend Cassie had found her.

Poor Cassie had spent an hour standing outside the stall door to talk her through her misery until Clair managed to muster enough courage to finally come out.

“I’m going home,” she’d announced then.

But Cassie wouldn’t hear of it. “I won’t let you do that,” Cassie had said. “You’re here, and you can’t just turn around and go back to Denver before we’ve even had a chance to say hello. It’ll be okay. I’ll stay right by your side and I won’t let Rob get within a hundred yards of you again.”

It had taken more talking on Cassie’s part to convince Clair, but in the end she’d succumbed and agreed to stay.

But not without a stiff drink.

The problem was, one stiff drink had become two. Then three. Then Clair had lost count.

And although Cassie had tried to be good to her word and remain close by, she’d been the head of the reunion committee and had had other responsibilities and duties that had made that impossible.

Instead, Cassie had sent her twin brother to act as a buffer.

Her twin brother, Ben. Reformed town bad boy. Hunk extraordinaire.

Clair had not minded that Rob had gotten to see her with the best-looking man in the room.

And since one semester at Northbridge High hadn’t left Ben a lot of things to reminisce about, once Cassie had turned Clair over to him, Ben had stayed by Clair’s side from then on.

Of course even though Clair didn’t know it for a fact, she’d assumed that Cassie had told Ben about her situation and, looking back on that night, Clair thought he’d probably just taken pity on her. But it hadn’t seemed that way at the time. At the time he’d been disarmingly sweet and charming. His wry observations of their classmates had made her laugh. He’d somehow managed to actually lift her spirits. To put her at ease. To make her feel good about herself again. To help her rise above the low blow her ex-husband had struck and make her completely forget Rob and his pregnant new wife were anywhere around.

And all the while he’d kept both her and himself well stocked with margaritas.

Yes, he’d had a whole lot to drink, too. Which had no doubt contributed to the fact that they’d ended up together…for the entire night.

“Northbridge. Fifteen miles,” Clair read aloud.

Take a deep breath and blow it out. Take a deep breath and blow it out….

It would have been so much easier if she hadn’t let Cassie talk her into staying at that reunion, Clair thought now. Or if, once she’d stayed, she’d continued not knowing Ben Walker existed—the way she’d hardly known he existed ten years ago.

But oh, brother had she known Ben Walker existed. With those smoky blue-green eyes and that deliciously wicked quirk that curled the corner of this mouth when he was showing that hint of devil that still lurked beneath the surface.

Clair had most certainly known he existed that night in June.

Not that she had a vivid memory of too much more than that when it came to Ben Walker, though. Beyond the way he looked and being with him during the early portion of the evening, she hardly remembered anything. She definitely didn’t recall how they’d gotten to her room at the local bed-and-breakfast where she was registered. And from that point, the rest of the night was just a blur she couldn’t bring into any kind of clear focus no matter how hard she tried.

But the next morning? Now that she remembered.

She’d been mortified to wake up in bed with a man she barely knew.

So mortified that while he was still sleeping, she’d run out on him without a word, without leaving him a note, without a remnant of herself left behind—as if that might erase what had happened between them. She’d left him in her room, thrown her suitcase in the back seat of her car and driven straight home, hoping she would never have to see Ben Walker again.

Hoping she could just forget that reunion, that trip to Northbridge, that one night. Hoping she could just forget it all.

And wouldn’t that have been nice….

But instead, a month after the reunion the Realtor who had been trying to sell the Northbridge School for Boys on her behalf had called to say he had a buyer. A buyer named Ben Walker.

Okaaay, she’d said, hoping the transaction could be done by proxy, that she still wouldn’t have to face him.

There was just one glitch.

Since her father was no longer living and able to turn the place over to the new owner himself, Clair had told the Realtor she was willing to do it. Only she’d told the Realtor that before there was even a buyer and before she’d had any idea that that new owner would be Ben Walker. And he was taking her up on the offer.

The offer to personally return to Northbridge to orient him on the workings of the place and the social service requirements he would have to meet for a placement facility of that nature.

So there she was, the week before Labor Day, once again on her way to Northbridge. Embarrassed that she’d had a few too many drinks and spent the night not only with a virtual stranger, but a virtual stranger who was her friend’s brother. Embarrassed that she’d ditched that brother the next morning. And carrying with her the consequences of her actions.

“Welcome to Northbridge, Montana,” she said sarcastically, once again reading a sign as she turned right, off the nearly deserted rural highway.

It was two more miles down a road that ran between matching fields of cornstalks that formed tall walls on either side and cast long shadows in the late evening light. Then the fields gave way to ancient oak trees lush with green leaves before she actually reached the town itself. And Main Street.

Clair pulled into the first place she came to on Main Street—the service station, which, along with the bus station across the street, was the beginning of that end of the town proper.

She didn’t need gas. She just needed to stop. So she parked alongside the station rather than at the pumps and got out.

The front door to the station was open, even though it was long after the scheduled 6:00 p.m. closing time, and so was the big garage door where a truck with its hood raised was apparently being worked on in the mechanic’s bay. But no one was anywhere to be seen. Clair headed for the restroom, which she knew would only be locked if someone else was using it.

No one was, so she stepped inside and turned on the light before she leaned back against the door, closed her eyes and once again advised herself to breathe.

This wasn’t the way things were supposed to work out, she couldn’t help thinking as it began to sink in that she really was in Northbridge again.

Her dad was supposed to live to a ripe old age and go on running the school until he was ready to turn it over to someone else himself.

She was supposed to be married. She was supposed to have a big family to bring back and raise in Northbridge so her father could be included, so her father could revel in his role as grandfather. She was supposed to finish her own life here in Northbridge. And she was supposed to do it all with Rob.

But that wasn’t the way things had worked out.

And if there was one thing she’d learned in the last year of having her whole life turned topsy-turvy, it was that she had to deal with whatever came of the latest topsy-turvy turn.

“So deal,” she told herself. But that was easier said than done.

Still, she was determined to manage to the best of her ability.

So she took one more deep breath, blew it out and opened her eyes.

If there was a cleaner gas station bathroom in the country, Clair had never been in it and just the sight of that spotless space made her smile.

Northbridge.

Where else would the station owner’s mother come in to personally scrub the restroom and keep a crocheted doily across the top of the toilet tank?

Clair pushed off the door and after using the pristine facilities, she grabbed the heart-shaped, strawberry-scented soap from a ceramic dish on the edge of the sink to wash her hands. Then she dried them with paper towel taken from a roll held on the wall by a dispenser with two brown bears perched atop either end of the bar.

And all the while she kept thinking, only in Northbridge….

She tossed the used paper towel into a wicker basket, and glanced at herself in the mirror above the sink.

It had been a long drive from Denver, through Wyoming to Montana, and she’d been traveling since dawn. It was now after eight o’clock, and she decided she looked like someone who had been behind the wheel of a car all that time.

Some repair work was in order, she decided.

She grabbed a tissue and blotted her face, paying particular attention to her forehead since she’d just had her very wavy, honey-blond hair cut short—including the bangs that were now barely below her hairline and left most of her brow showing.

With that done, she opened her purse and removed a small makeup bag. After applying a light dusting of blush onto the crests of her high cheekbones and into the hollows below them, she passed the brush lightly along the underside of her jawline.

She was grateful to have the skin and the bone structure she had—neither would put her on the cover of a magazine but at least her complexion had always been clear and between her cheekbones and jawline there was some definition.

She wished her eyelashes were longer though, and reapplied mascara to help give the illusion that they were. And as she did, she was glad to see that the whites around her almost-purple irises weren’t bloodshot as they had been the week before when the latest topsy-turvy turn her life had taken had kept her from sleeping for several nights.

A light coating of lip gloss didn’t alter the natural pink of lips that she also wished were a bit fuller. And for about the hundredth time since she’d had her hair cut, she wondered if it had been wise to go so drastically from shoulder-length to a curly cap that the stylist had proclaimed sporty and cute and so much more au courant than the way she’d been wearing it.

Actually, what she was wondering was what Ben Walker would think of her haircut. But she curbed that thought the minute she realized she was having it. Rob hated short hair and would have had a fit—which had probably influenced her decision to do it. But once she had gone ahead with the new style, it had seemed liberating to do something for herself. She certainly wasn’t going to start fretting over the approval or disapproval of another man.

“Sporty and cute and au courant,” she said, finding that repeating the hairstylist’s words and taking stock of her new look somehow helped bolster her. It also helped remind her that she was her own woman now. Strong enough to have withstood a lot in the past year. Resilient. Capable. Competent. She could take care of herself and whatever else she needed to take care of. So what if things hadn’t turned out the way they were supposed to? She could handle it. She could handle anything.

At least she hoped she could when her stomach did the little lurch it had been doing for the past few weeks, and she remembered that the latest topsy-turvy turn was a big one.

But still, now that she had actually arrived in Northbridge, and had freshened up and reassured herself that she would be okay, she felt better than she had driving into town.

Even if she was back in Northbridge to hand over her father’s school.

Even if she was divorced.

Even if she’d made one of the biggest miscalculations of her entire life when she’d spent the night with Ben Walker in June and became pregnant with his baby…!

The Northbridge School for Boys was just outside of town to the west. When Clair turned off the road onto the drive that led up to it, she stopped the car so she could have a moment to look at the place her father had loved.

The original house was a flat-faced, three-story wooden box painted pale yellow and trimmed in white. The building stood about a quarter of a mile from the road in a circle of elm trees that seemed to protect it.

The house and trees blocked the view of the barn, chicken coop, pigsties and paddocks behind the main building that made the school a working ranch. The small caretaker’s cottage where she and her father had made their own home was also to the rear of the main house and out of sight from the front approach.

Clair stopped between two matching white rail fences that bordered the drive on both sides. Within the confines of those fenced pastures there were horses to her right and dairy cows to her left. The fence gave way to a circular drive, and a lush green lawn carpeted the ground to the flower beds that decorated the space immediately in front of the house.

Those who didn’t know what the place was or didn’t get close enough to read the small brass plaque that announced it was the Northbridge School for Boys would never guess it wasn’t merely the pastoral estate of a gentleman farmer.

But that had suited her father. He’d always said that even though it might be an institutional facility, he wanted it to be homey and welcoming and something the boys would learn to take pride in. And because that wasn’t always a simple task with troubled kids, his tool-box had been at the ready to make repairs—always assisted by whoever had wreaked the damage.

This was the first time Clair had been to the school since her father’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack. She hadn’t been able to face staying there alone when she’d come to the reunion, but she’d planned to at least drive out and have a look at things.

Instead she’d made her abrupt departure from the bed-and-breakfast, from Northbridge—and from Ben Walker—without ever doing that.

But now that she was there she was pleased to see that the place the Realtor had said was beginning to show some signs of neglect over the past year, looked as well tended as it had when her father had been at the helm.

No doubt that was thanks to Ben Walker. The Realtor had told Clair that as soon as the sale had closed he’d begun to work on the place so he could open this month.

He’d also moved in—again, according to the Realtor who had told her that Ben Walker would be living on-site just as she and her father had. But the Realtor had also said that Ben Walker would give up the cottage to Clair while she was there, to spare her the expense of the bed-and-breakfast. During that time, he would stay in the main building.

So there she was.

Inside, Ben Walker was waiting for her.

She couldn’t imagine what he must think of her. She was just reasonably sure it couldn’t be anything good. But there was nothing she could do about that now so she decided she might as well get this show on the road.

Take a deep breath and blow it out.

Clair took her own silent advice again.

Then she drove the rest of the way to the building.

Apparently Ben Walker wasn’t watching for her because the big mahogany door remained closed as she parked, turned off the engine and got out of the car with her suitcase.

When she reached the front door she automatically put her hand on the knob to open it before it occurred to her that the place didn’t belong to her—or to her father—any longer and that she couldn’t just go in.

So she pulled her hand away and rang the bell instead, feeling a whole new layer of awkwardness.

But when the door opened it wasn’t Ben Walker on the other side of it. It was Cassie Walker.

“Hey there, stranger!” Clair’s old friend greeted her with a smile and a big hug. “I was hoping you’d get here before I left, and you just barely made it.”

“Cassie!” Clair responded with a full measure of relief echoing in her voice. She hadn’t expected her friend to be there but the fact that Cassie was helped immensely.

“Come in, come in,” Cassie encouraged. But despite the invitation, she didn’t make way for Clair because, as if the change in Clair had just registered, she said, “You cut your hair.”

“I did,” Clair confirmed, self-consciously fingering the short curls at her nape.

“It’s so cute. I love it on you. Even though I’m still mad at you.”

“You’re mad at me?”

“For the reunion. I can’t believe you left that night without telling me you were going and then didn’t even call before going back to Denver the next day. I don’t care if you were in a hurry to escape before you had to see Rob again.”

A second wave of relief washed through Clair. She’d called her friend a few days after the reunion, worrying that Cassie’s twin might have told her that he’d spent the night with Clair. But when it had become clear that Ben hadn’t said anything about it, Clair had given her friend the likeliest excuse—not wanting to see Rob again—to explain her hasty departure both from the reunion and from Northbridge the following morning. But for just a moment, Clair thought maybe Ben had told Cassie belatedly and her friend was genuinely angry. It was good that that didn’t seem to be the truth.

“Maybe we’ll have time to visit and catch up while I’m here now,” Clair said to appease her friend.

“I’m counting on it,” Cassie said. Then she obviously recalled that they were still standing in the doorway and said, “Oh, look at me—I told you to come in and then went right on blocking the door.” But this time she stepped out of the way.

Clair took her suitcase with her into the foyer and while Cassie closed the door behind her, Clair glanced around.

From what she could see, Ben Walker had left the lower level of the house just as her father had—just as it had been when the building had served as a private home. The large foyer had a hardwood floor and paneled walls with archways cut out of them to connect a living room to the right and a recreation room that housed a reproduction of an antique pool table to the left.

There was also a broad staircase directly across from the door, with hallways leading to the rear of the house on both sides of it. The space above the foyer was open to the second level where the staircase branched off in both directions to rise to the third floor.

Cassie aimed her chin up the stairs then and shouted, “Ben! Are you coming down? Clair’s here.”

He must have already been on his way before that because no sooner were the words out than his voice came in answer from the left branch of the staircase.

“On my way,” he said as work-booted feet and long, jean-clad legs with impressively muscular thighs came into view, followed by a leather tool belt slung low on a pair of narrow hips, a V-shaped torso with muscular chest, mile-wide shoulders and bulging biceps that were all barely contained in a plain white T-shirt.

“It was you who said you heard a car on the drive and then what do you do but disappear,” Cassie said to him as he reached the second-floor landing.

But not even that brought his gaze to them. Instead, stalled on the upper landing, he was so intent on replacing tools in the loops of his tool belt it was as if Cassie and Clair were only incidental.

“I wanted to close that paint can before I forgot,” he muttered.

Both Cassie and Clair stood there watching him, and as she did it struck Clair that he was even better-looking than she remembered—something she hadn’t thought was possible.

And it wasn’t only the bounty of his body that was remarkable. His dark, sable-brown hair was short all over and in a sexy disarray that made it impossible to tell if it was by design or nature. His features were the kind that a camera would love—stark and chiseled, with a square brow, a sharp jaw that cradled a chin with the slightest cleft in the center and a nose that was thin and perfectly aquiline.

His skin was smooth and sun-bronzed, his lean cheeks were shadowed with a day’s growth of beard that made him look appealingly scruffy, and when he finally finished hooking his tools through their allotted loops and cast his attention in the direction of the foyer, the blue-green of his eyes was so intense Clair thought she could feel his gaze settling on her.

But not so much as the hint of emotion was evident in his deep voice when he said, “Hello, Clair.”

Then he finally came the rest of the way down the steps on legs that bowed a little and carried him on a slow swagger that had just a hint of insolence to it.

And all of a sudden Clair found her throat so dry she had trouble saying, “Hi.”

His eyes remained on her but he didn’t say anything else, and Clair wasn’t sure if she was imagining it or if there was a sort of challenge in his expression. In his whole stance.

But if there was she didn’t know what he was challenging her to or how to meet it, and she was grateful when Cassie filled the gap.

“Have you eaten? Are you hungry? Thirsty? We had Chinese food and there are leftovers. And I made a pitcher of lemonade a little while ago.”

“Just the lemonade sounds good,” Clair managed.

Cassie checked her wristwatch. “I only have a few minutes before I need to leave for a committee meeting. I’m helping Ben with things around here because he’s down to the wire, but I also have stuff going on for fall semester at the college—although admittedly as a student advisor I won’t be swamped there until the kids show up so I’ll be in and out with you guys the whole time you’re here. Anyway, how about if I pour while Ben takes your suitcase out to the cottage?”

The only part of what Cassie said that registered with Clair was the part about Cassie only staying a few more minutes. And that fact made her suffer a fresh bout of panic. But she didn’t let it show. Instead she said a weak, “Okay.”

Cassie linked her arm through Clair’s then and headed for the kitchen, chattering about Northbridge going international with the opening of Ling’s Chinese Palace restaurant.

It wasn’t like Cassie to be so frenzied, and Clair wondered if her friend was responding to the tension in the air. But she was too on-edge herself to do more than let Cassie carry her along.

And all the while she was watching Ben as he walked ahead of them with her suitcase, knowing she shouldn’t be looking at his great rear end, and that she certainly shouldn’t be trying futilely to remember what it had looked like naked.

But it was only when they reached the large kitchen at the back of the house and Ben went out the sliding door that she managed to stop thinking about his derriere and focus on something else. On the kitchen itself.

The kitchen was as it had always been—a big, wide-open space with commercial-size appliances, and very little in the way of decor—with the exception of the backsplash tiles with the floral motif. There was a marble island counter with barstools on one side of it, and, for dining purposes, there was a long rectangular table with picnic-bench-style seating.

Cassie motioned Clair to one of the barstools, and then went to the refrigerator.

“It’s hard for you to be here again with your dad gone, isn’t it?” Cassie said when her brother was out of sight and earshot, letting Clair know that that was what her friend attributed the tension to.

“A little,” Clair admitted because that was also a factor in her stress.

“Will you be okay alone in the cottage? I really wish you could stay at my place, but with my roommate’s brother sleeping on our couch right now I know you wouldn’t be comfortable. My offer is still good, though, to come out here and stay with you, if you want.”

It was a tempting offer—not only because then Cassie would provide a constant diversion from Ben, but because Clair would have liked to spend time with her friend.

But she had a purpose other than helping Ben Walker get the school started and that purpose would only be served without a diversion.

So Clair said, “I’ll be okay. You don’t have to babysit me.”

“It wouldn’t be baby-sitting,” Cassie assured. “And I don’t mind if you need me.”

“Thanks, but, no. Really. I’m fine.”

Cassie accepted that, brought Clair the glass of lemonade and then pointed to the wall clock. “I hate to rush off the minute you get here but I have to.”

“It’s okay,” Clair lied.

“I’ll be back tomorrow, and Ben will take good care of you in the meantime—won’t you?”

Clair hadn’t heard him come back and since she was facing away from the sliding door she had to look over her shoulder to make sure that’s who Cassie was talking to.

“Uh-huh,” he answered.

But apparently it was answer enough for Cassie because it prompted her to say, “All right then, I better go. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

Clair and Ben responded with goodbyes of their own and then all of a sudden they were alone. In a silence Clair thought was heavy enough to be tangible.

But she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know whether to launch into an explanation of what had gone through her mind at the reunion and the next morning. Or to make excuses for herself. Or to try to convince him that her actions that night were unusual in the extreme—which they were.

Or maybe she should just act as if nothing had happened at all….

“Long drive from Denver,” he said then, interrupting the silence and her racing thoughts as he went to stand on the opposite side of the island. He stretched his arms wide and grabbed hold of the edges of the countertop.

“It is a long drive,” Clair agreed. “But I got a really early start this morning and it was a nice day for traveling. Sunny but not too hot.”

She couldn’t believe she was actually talking about the weather. Still, she just couldn’t bring herself to delve into anything deeper.

And then he did.

He said, “She doesn’t know—Cassie, that is—about what happened at the reunion. Between you and me. Nobody does.” He paused, made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, and added, “Including me in a lot of respects.”

“I’m not all that clear myself. Even about the parts I remember,” Clair admitted, staring at the beads of water on the outside of her lemonade glass because she couldn’t look him in the eye.

“We did have a lot to drink that night,” he allowed, making it easier for her. At least up to a point. “But the next morning…I was sobered up by then, you must have been, too.”

“In more ways than one,” she said half under her breath.

“What does that mean?” he asked anyway.

Whether she wanted to explain or not, apparently she was going to have to so Clair didn’t see any reason to fight it and merely gave in.

“That’s just not something I do—or have ever done— spending the night with someone like that,” she said haltingly because what she’d done was so foreign to her that she didn’t even know how to refer to her behavior. “I…” She had to clear her throat. “Before that I’d only…been…with Rob.”

“Rob?”

“Cabot. Rob Cabot? My husband—ex-husband?”

Ben shook his head and shrugged. “Am I supposed to know him?”

“We all went to high school together. He was there, at the reunion. With his new wife. He wasn’t supposed to be. He said he wasn’t going. It was the first time I’d seen him since our divorce, and the whole thing is still so strange to me and it just hit home and… Well, that’s why Cassie asked you to keep me company,” Clair said, looking for any kind of light to dawn in him.

But it never did. “All I know is that I was having a lousy time that night and never should have let my sister talk me into going. I was like a fish out of water that last semester of school and I was just as much a fish out of water that night. But when I told her I was leaving she said you were having a rotten time, too, and asked if I would sit with you until she could get back to you.”

Which Cassie hadn’t been able to do.

“So you didn’t know—” Clair cut herself off, not wanting to get into the subject of Rob and that night in the middle of the rest of this. “And it wasn’t just a pity—”

She couldn’t believe that train of thought had found voice. Her voice.

But it made him smile. A slow, lopsided, private-joke-kind of smile that somehow managed to instantly dissipate a lot of the tension in the room.

“You thought that whole night was a…out of pity?”

“I thought it was possible,” she confessed quietly.

Now he was trying to keep from grinning and in the struggle his eyebrows arched up over the bridge of his nose in a way that made him look innocent and devilish all at once. “I didn’t know anything was going on that I should pity you for,” he said.

“Good.”

“But I have to admit you have me curious now.”

“Too bad,” she said, her tone making it clear she had no intention of satisfying that curiosity.

For some reason that made him laugh. Which, in turn, helped even more of the tension evaporate.

“Okay,” he said, his stance relaxing, too, as he let his weight shift to one hip and stood up straighter to cross his arms over his chest. “So is that why you disappeared the next morning? Because you thought I’d only been there out of pity?”

“No, I was just… Well, I was crazy that next morning. I couldn’t believe I’d actually done what I’d done. I just…ran.”

He didn’t respond immediately. In fact he didn’t respond for so long that Clair hazarded a glance up at him.

He was watching her. Studying her. As if he were trying to decide whether or not to accept what she was telling him.

Finally he said, “I didn’t appreciate it.”

Nothing like being blunt.

But Clair knew she had it coming.

“I’m sorry. I know it was probably bad etiquette or something. I just didn’t know what to do or say or how to act or…anything. All I could think to do was to go home.”

That sounded lame. But it was the truth.

He either realized that or opted for letting her off the hook, though, because after another moment of studying her he said, “How about we forget the reunion ever happened and start over?”

She couldn’t completely forget it. But, for the time being, Clair thought it might be best to put it on a back burner.

“I’d like to start over,” she said, agreeing to at least that part of his suggestion.

“Then let’s do that.”

Those aqua eyes were warmer than they’d been since her arrival and that warmth made her feel much, much better.

“I can tell you’re worn-out from the drive, and since I want to get an early start tomorrow I told Cassie I’d fix the two of you breakfast at seven-thirty, if that’s all right with you?”

“Sure, seven-thirty is fine.”

“Okay, then, since you’ve had a long trip and we’re starting early tomorrow, how about if I walk you out to the cottage, let you unpack and get some rest? And we’ll consider tomorrow day one?”

“I’d like that.”

“Okay, it’s a deal.”

He held out his hand for her to shake and she took it without thinking that the feel of it might cause anything to erupt in her.

But it did. That perfectly innocent handshake that any two strangers might have shared made her extremely aware of the heat of his skin, the strength of his grip, the sensuality of his touch—things she didn’t want to be aware of at all.

And just the fact that she was, spurred her to say, “I don’t even think you should walk me to the cottage. I’ll just slip out as if I was never here, and we’ll be that much closer to putting the reunion behind us and starting over.”

“You’re sure?” he asked as she got down from the barstool in a hurry.

“Positive. You don’t know me. I’m not here,” she said on the way to the sliding door.

He followed her that far anyway, reaching around in front of her to open the door, keeping his hand high up on the edge of it and leaning against it as she went outside.

“Okay. See you around, stranger,” he said from behind her.

“Maybe. If you’re lucky,” she countered, stealing one more glance over her shoulder at him and finding him smiling that private-joke smile again.

It made her want to stay.

How did that happen? she asked herself as she gave him a little wave and turned away to head down the short brick path to the cottage.

But she didn’t have an answer. She only knew that somehow she’d gone from nearly hyperventilating at just the thought of seeing Ben Walker again, to actually being tempted to linger a while longer with him. And that the effect he had on her was like no other any man had ever had on her before.

Although maybe his having unusual effects on her shouldn’t have come as such a surprise under the circumstances.

Circumstances in which he’d managed to conquer her infertility.