A Weaver Christmas Gift
A Weaver Christmas Gift
Allison Leigh
HELP WANTED: HUSBANDJane Cohen needs a man for her baby plan. Love and marriage are non-negotiable – she wants the fairy tale! So she cuts her friend-with-benefits loose… because while Casey Clay is gorgeous, he doesn’t do commitment. The trouble is, this irresistible man has set the bar high for her husband hunt…Casey’s feelings run deep for Jane, but when it comes to babies he can’t give her what she wants – and his secrets don’t stop there. As mistletoe goes up around them, is this the season for Casey and Jane’s moment of truth… and shot at true love?
His back was still toward her.
He had a small scar over his right shoulder blade. She’d kissed her way over it dozens of times but had never asked what had caused it.
Why hadn’t she asked?
Because she wasn’t interested?
Or because she was afraid he wouldn’t have told her?
She slowly propped the broom handle against the wall and walked over to him. Her hand wasn’t entirely steady when she placed it on his shoulder, but it was a lot steadier than her insides felt.
He stiffened at her touch and looked at her.
She didn’t know what was tormenting him.
And maybe comfort wasn’t their thing.
But she did know what was.
She leaned forward and slowly pressed her lips against his. She felt him inhale slightly. Resistance, almost.
But not quite.
***
Return to the Double C:
Under the big blue Wyoming sky, this family discovers true love
A Weaver Christmas Gift
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
There is a saying that you can never be too rich or too thin. ALLISON LEIGH doesn’t believe that, but she does believe that you can never have enough books! When her stories find a way into the hearts—and bookshelves—of others, Allison says she feels she’s done something right. Making her home in Arizona with her husband, she enjoys hearing from her readers at Allison@allisonleigh.com (mailto:Allison@allisonleigh.com) or PO Box 40772, Mesa, AZ 85274-0772, USA.
In loving memory of Saing.
Contents
Cover (#u31947191-c22b-55f9-819c-03ea09c04a9d)
Excerpt (#u6e172314-6c5a-5633-88f2-c56913bea9ae)
Title Page (#u025ab0c9-a2a7-5c0e-8994-24d7492e1065)
About the Author (#ud0775fff-32b7-587c-89ca-bf4bae0ebaf0)
Dedication (#u157c6dd4-b2d5-5f8f-ae29-e7ac5dc34e93)
Chapter One (#ud46602f1-372e-56d9-bddd-6ec07a249f23)
Chapter Two (#u44c0cd4e-2978-5efd-9ad4-0c4cc5b301af)
Chapter Three (#uabd20e17-8ac9-5492-bfb1-ecd086436f27)
Chapter Four (#u7cb3768d-4911-5942-8b25-66d4fa177253)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_330308b9-92b5-5794-97c3-9c6d53cd410e)
“I’ve decided to get pregnant.” As far as sweet nothings went, Jane Cohen’s statement didn’t rank very high on the scale.
Casey Nathaniel Clay had to have heard her wrong. Maybe his head was still reeling from the truly phenomenal sex. Outside of the bedroom, he and Janie couldn’t seem to agree on the time of day. Inside the bedroom, though, they were like two halves of a whole.
But in the year since their relationship—for lack of a better word—had moved into the bedroom, not once had either one of them expressed an inclination to take things into the “serious” realm.
He levered himself up on his elbow and peered down at her.
Her long golden hair was tangled around her head, strands clinging to her cheeks and neck, sliding in loose curls down her chest, over her breasts that were still rising and falling as she caught her breath from not one but—hell, yeah, if he didn’t mind counting ’em—two orgasms.
He dragged his stupidly reluctant gaze upward to meet her coffee-colored eyes. “What’s that you say?”
She pressed her lips together. They were the same soft pink as her nipples. “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.” Annoyance rang in her voice as she impatiently pushed her hair from her face. “I was perfectly clear.”
Ordinarily, people tended to consider Casey a relatively intelligent guy. His degrees from MIT supported that opinion. But just then, he didn’t seem capable of forming much of a coherent thought, much less a reasonable response.
What the hell are you talking about? was in the forefront of his mind. And he was pretty sure that wasn’t what Janie was looking for.
She seemed to know what he was thinking anyway, because her lips tightened even more.
Looking disgusted, she rolled her eyes and shoved his shoulders aside, disentangling her warm legs from his, and slid off the bed. “Cool the panic jets, Casey.” Her voice was tart as a bowl of lemon juice with the closest supply of sugar a few counties away. “I wasn’t suggesting I wanted to get pregnant by you.”
The words stung more than she’d ever know.
He eyed her, wondering why he’d thought that getting into bed with the infernal woman was a good idea in the first place. But that was just what happened when a man followed his baser nature. “Then why on earth did you bring it up now?” he groused.
She made that impatient sound that only women seemed to know how to make, the sound meant to convey he was missing something completely obvious to anyone with a half a brain. The sound that pretty much meant he was dumber than a box of rocks. She retrieved her robe from the back of the bedroom door and slid into it, yanking the belt around her narrow waist.
The action only served to draw attention to her breasts.
They were perfect, those breasts. Surprisingly full for someone with such a lean, athletic figure. Her legs were perfect, too. And don’t get him started on her butt—
“Because if I want to have a baby, all this has to change.” Her tone—superior and vaguely snooty—pulled his attention back to her face. She was waving her hand toward the bed. Toward him.
The pink robe was thin. It clung lovingly to her curves as she moved around the room, snatching up their strewn articles of clothing.
Again, he focused with an effort and bunched the blanket around his hips as he sat up. This particular turn of the conversation made sprawling there naked as a jaybird seem ill-advised. “Change,” he repeated warily.
She made that sound again and tossed him his jeans. She hadn’t found his boxers yet, but he didn’t care. He got off the bed and pulled on the jeans anyway. “Obviously, I can’t proceed with my plan while we’re—” she waved her hand again “—whatever we are.”
“Friends with benefits,” he hazarded. It was a safer definition than some he could have offered.
She snorted softly. “I think friends is overstating.”
He grimaced, not liking the fact that her words bit any more than he liked the way the night had taken such an abrupt turn south. “We’re friends,” he grumbled. Maybe it was an exaggeration, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t an outright lie.
Her eyebrows rose as if she didn’t believe the claim any more than he did. She’d pulled on the pair of black horn-rimmed glasses that she rarely wore when she was working at Colbys, the bar and grill she’d bought five years ago. The lenses made her eyes look unnaturally large.
The first time he’d seen her wearing them, he’d decided the bookish glasses made her look even sexier.
Oddly approachable.
Times like this, he wished he’d never seen her in them, considering they’d ended up in bed together almost immediately after.
“Please,” she drawled. “In what way are we friends? There’s nothing on which we ever agree.”
Even over that point, he had to differ. “You pour a decent beer. And you came to your senses finally and stopped charging to use the pool tables.”
“High praise. We don’t have a friendship. We have a...a sexship.” She didn’t look at him as she tossed him his T-shirt. It still hit him square in the chest. “I want to have a baby,” she said again. “But I have no desire to be a single mother.” She bent over again and the lapels of her robe gaped, giving him an eyeful of creamy skin. “Call me old-fashioned, but I intend to be married first.” She straightened and dropped his socks on the corner of the bed in front of him.
Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?
“And then stay that way,” she added flatly. “My mom never married my dad. After she kicked him out, she struggled every single day raising my sister and me. Trust me. I am not doing that. I want a husband.”
His head felt oddly light. He sat on the bed and shoved his feet into the socks. “You told me you’d had one of those and couldn’t imagine wanting another.”
“I don’t want another husband like Gage,” she said, as if Casey was missing the point. “He was a complete workaholic.” She gave Casey a pointed look, evidently accusing him of fitting the description, too. “I want someone who will put me first.”
“Someone who’ll let you run the show, you mean,” he muttered. One thing he’d learned about Janie Cohen was that she liked to think she was always in the driver’s seat.
She gave him one of her snippy smiles. “At least I have a plan.”
He scratched his chin. He’d forgotten to shave before coming to see her. He usually tried to remember to, because her fair skin was so easily marred by his whiskers. But he’d had a long day and hadn’t thought beyond seeing her as soon as possible. “Am I supposed to take some hint there that you think I don’t?”
“I’m not talking about you.”
Maybe he’d spent too many hours studying computer feeds, because following her thought process was giving him a headache. “And the plan is to get a husband so you can get knocked up?”
“I’m a thirty-two-year-old woman,” she said. “Knocked up is for teenagers who don’t know better.”
“Like your mom.”
She made a face and ignored that. “Obviously, I’m not getting any younger. So I need to get started.” She waved him out of the way and smartly flipped the sheets into some semblance of order.
He had the feeling he was being flipped away just as easily as the wrinkles in the fabric.
“Just like that.” He snapped his fingers in her face. “What are you going to do? Order yourself up some husband out of Mail-Order Husbands Weekly?”
She hesitated as if she was actually giving the idea some thought.
“I was kidding,” he said hastily.
“There are mail-order brides,” she said. “Guess there are probably mail-order husbands. But no.” She fluffed the pillows, put them back at the head of the bed and turned to face him, her hands propped on her narrow hips. She looked up at him through her glasses with her vaguely buggy brown eyes.
And he was damned if he didn’t want to tumble her right back onto that bed and mess up the sheets all over again, even if she was annoying as hell.
“I intend to find a husband right here in Weaver.”
He barked out a laugh before he could stop himself.
“You think it’s funny?” Her voice went silky but her eyes were as chilly as a Weaver winter. “You think I’m incapable of finding a man who might want to put a ring on it?”
“I think the pickings around Weaver are gonna be a tad slim for a woman like you,” he answered, trying unsuccessfully to curtail his untimely amusement. Their small Wyoming town wasn’t exactly a mecca of single, eligible adults. Despite the consumer electronics company he ostensibly worked for, Cee-Vid, the town was first and foremost a ranching community. Always had been. Always would be. And Jane—for all of her talents—didn’t strike him as a typical rancher’s wife.
A niggle of guilt pricked his mind over that. Among his own relatives, he could count a passel of ranchers. None of their wives were particularly “typical” either. There were doctors, accountants, business owners...
Jane had propped her hand on her hip and was staring down her nose at him. Considering she was about a foot shorter, it was a feat he might have admired under other circumstances.
“A woman like me,” she repeated. Her eyebrow arched. “Want to explain that one, Clay?”
“Untie the knots in your little white panties, sport,” he returned. “I just meant you’re a tad...classy...for some of the guys around here.”
She didn’t look particularly soothed. “I run a bar where the dress code just means wiping the manure off your cowboy boots before you come in,” she snapped. “How on God’s green earth does that make me classy?”
Stubborn. Headstrong. A straight shooter who didn’t suffer fools. He kept the descriptors to himself. At one time or another—often all at once—they fit the woman standing in front of him. She was also beautiful as hell, uncommonly unpretentious and a challenge to his senses as well as his brain.
He dragged his T-shirt on over his head and pretended not to notice the way her gaze dropped, just for a second, to run hungrily over his abdomen before he yanked the white cotton over it.
Sex.
That was what the two of them were good at.
Exceedingly good at, they’d discovered. And, he’d thought, to their mutual satisfaction and content.
Now she wanted more. A baby. A husband.
“What about love?” he asked.
If he hadn’t been watching closely, he might have missed the way her gaze flickered. “What about it?”
“That’s usually the reason people get married, isn’t it? What’s in this plan of yours when it comes to that?”
* * *
It was the first week of September, but Jane still felt a shiver jolt down her spine.
She casually moved away from Casey, crossing the room to retrieve the garish Hawaiian-print shirt he’d been wearing unbuttoned over his T-shirt when he’d arrived. The garment was hideous in the extreme, but it smelled of him and that wasn’t hideous at all. No. The scent was warm. Slightly spicy. Definitely heady.
She shivered again and turned to carelessly fling the shirt at him. She wished she could fling away the man’s effect on her as easily. “I’m not looking for love,” she said blithely. “Just a—”
“Legitimate sperm donor.” As he caught the shirt, he seemed to look right into the depths of her with his silvery-gray eyes.
“Why does it even matter to you?” She kept her voice tart as much for self-preservation as from habit. Unless she was mindless with lust in his arms, it was always easier to spar with the tall man with the butterscotch-colored hair than have any sort of serious conversation. Mostly because she was never entirely sure what exactly he was thinking.
Despite his outwardly laid-back style, she’d never made the mistake of thinking Casey Clay actually was laid-back. He was too intense for that. And much, much too secretive.
When it came to him, sex was easy.
It was all the rest that was impossible.
“Be glad that I’m under no illusions that you might be a candidate,” she finished.
His mobile, scrumptious lips twisted wryly. “Janie.” He pressed his splayed hand against his chest. “I might be wounded.”
“But you’re not,” she deadpanned, then rolled her eyes when his cell phone chirped and he grabbed it off the nightstand. “Naturally.” It wasn’t the first time his phone had interrupted them. At least this time it had waited until after.
She went into the adjoining bathroom while he answered. Not particularly proud that she tried to listen in but trying anyway, she twisted her tangled hair up into a clip at the back of her head.
However, his voice was low, his words brief, revealing as little as they ever did.
She returned to the bedroom just as he was pocketing the phone. “Let me guess.” She might not have overheard the reason he was being called away, but she had a good idea where he was going and she smiled facetiously. “Somebody’s computer is on the fritz at Cee-Vid and you have to go save the day. Or the night, as it were.”
His gaze slid over her, setting off another darned shiver. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
Cee-Vid produced video games. He was in charge of the computer systems there, but she couldn’t imagine what could be so critical at the business that he’d get called at all hours of the night in the way he often was even if he’d already been there all day.
She’d have suspected him of having a wife if Weaver weren’t so small that such a fact would have been impossible to hide.
Everyone knew everyone else’s business around town. Or so it had seemed to her since she’d moved there five years ago. As a result, it was still an amazing thing to her that they’d been able to keep their...encounters...private.
He stepped up to her and raised his hand. She stiffened. Not from fear, but because he was drawing a single fingertip slowly down her cheek and she felt a corresponding line of heat work down her spine. He was a truly impossible man, but for some unfathomable reason, he charged her batteries in a way nobody else had ever done.
And the faint half smile on his face warned her that he knew exactly the reaction he elicited.
Dammit.
“Mebbe you figure you don’t need to order up a dose of love with this prospective husband of yours, but you didn’t say anything about chemistry either.” He waited a knowing beat. “Don’t pretend you don’t want passion. I know otherwise.”
She wanted to move back from him in the worst way, but she knew that was what he was expecting, so she held her ground. “Passion is overrated,” she said.
His eyes took on an unholy glint. “It gets a couple into the bedroom, sport. I’ve always heard that making babies is a lot more fun when it’s done the old-fashioned way. Or were you thinking you’d be able to get yourself in the family way while keeping your convenient husband at arm’s length?”
“Medical science is a wonderful thing.” She savored the satisfaction of actually igniting some surprise in his silvery gaze. “But no. I want a husband. I want to make a baby—or babies—with him.” Though she hadn’t expected it, over the past several months she’d come to realize she wanted the same thing her little sister had. She wanted to be more than a business owner. She wanted a real home. A real family. “I expect to get pregnant in the usual manner.”
His lips twisted again. He was probably thinking she was nuts. She knew he wasn’t jealous. He didn’t care about her that way. He cared that she gave as good as she got when their clothes started hitting the floor.
Chemistry. She and Casey Clay had it in spades.
But that was all they had.
There was no future. He’d made that abundantly clear from the very start. She might have had a change of mind along the way, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he had.
Or that he ever would.
“Borrow your sister’s baby for a week,” he advised. “The allure might wear off after 24/7 of diapers and bottles and crying.” He tugged the garish shirt over his wide shoulders. “Hell. Get a puppy. Angeline’s gonna have a whole new litter of ’em in a month or so that’ll be needing homes. I’ll hook you up with one.”
She just eyed him. Angeline, she knew, was his sister who lived with her husband and family over in Sheridan. They’d met once in passing some time ago. In passing because family get-togethers weren’t part of Casey and Jane’s deal. He didn’t invite her to any—even though, with the Clay family, who had fingers in nearly every pie in town, there seemed to be many.
And if he had invited her, she’d have told him he was out of his tree anyway. They weren’t dating. They were just sleeping together. Nothing more.
“This isn’t like deciding I want a new pair of shoes. Or a new dog. I’ve never even had a dog.”
He gave her a vaguely shocked look and she wished she’d kept that tidbit to herself.
“I want a husband,” she added quickly. “A family of my own. I want it when I wake up and when I go to sleep and I’m too old now not to do something about it!”
Something came and went in his eyes as he put on his worn tennis shoes. He didn’t even bother tying the laces. “If you’re bound and determined, I could probably set you up with a couple candidates.”
She nearly choked. “I don’t need your help finding a husband.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, sport.” Then his head swooped and his mouth caught hers in a fast, thorough kiss that left her knees weak and her insides hot. When he lifted his head again, she was certain there was amusement lurking at the corners of his lips. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
About what? Ending things with him? Allowing him to set her up with someone else?
“I won’t change my mind,” she said stiffly. Removing him from the equation would best be accomplished cold turkey. Like a swift yank that removed an adhesive bandage. “So the next time you’re looking for a bedmate, you’ll have to look elsewhere.” The fact that he wouldn’t have to look hard wasn’t lost on her. Despite his unfathomable dedication to the ugly shirts of the world, Casey Clay was stupefyingly gorgeous. Intelligent and humorous despite his secretive nature. In her very own bar, Jane had witnessed countless women throwing themselves at him.
She had never been one of them. Their relationship, their sexship, hadn’t been planned. It had been more like a head-on collision neither one of them had predicted.
“It won’t be the same.” His lips crooked. “Nobody gives good...bickering...like you.”
She pressed her lips together, not wanting to be amused, particularly now, and headed downstairs to the back door. He never parked in front on the street, where his truck might be noticed. She yanked open the door. It was almost midnight and outside, everything was quiet and still. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure—”
“It’s been more than that,” he drawled as he stepped past her. “Since passion isn’t factored in this plan of yours, you’ll probably want to remember what it feels like when you’re working your way through your matrimonial prospects. But if you find yourself in need of a reminder, you know where to find me.”
“Working at Cee-Vid,” she said smoothly. “Because nothing’s more important than keeping those video games coming.” Then, before she changed her mind, she pushed the door closed behind him.
If she’d wanted confirmation that Casey would never be interested in redefining their friends-with-benefits relationship, she’d certainly gotten it.
She just wished that it didn’t hurt quite so much.
Chapter Two (#ulink_f7751b0a-4379-5c5e-a644-2c56c32fed21)
Inside his office at Cee-Vid, Casey entered a code on his computer that revealed a security panel in one wall. Cee-Vid had been producing some of the most popular video games in the world for the past few decades. But behind the front, the company did a heck of a lot more as a location of Hollins-Winword, an equally successful organization that hardly anyone in the world knew existed. International security. Black ops. Hollins-Winword did it all and they did it well. And right now, they had an asset on the ground in Nepal named Bax Kennedy who had missed his last two check-ins. Casey’s mind should have been strictly on that fact. But it wasn’t.
It was on Jane Cohen.
He stepped up to the security panel that looked like a small wall mirror and stared into the iris scanner.
She wanted to get pregnant. Have a baby.
The scan completed and a numeric panel lit behind the false mirror’s surface.
Why hadn’t he seen it coming? She was a woman. Past thirty. There were enough females among the Clay clan for him to know perfectly well that her desire for a family wasn’t unnatural. Hell, his entire extended family believed in having kids.
It was what the Clays did.
Except for him.
He tapped in another code on the smooth surface and heard the nearly soundless, hollow release that came from somewhere inside the wall. A moment later, part of the wall moved, revealing itself as the door it actually was, and he stepped through into the cavernous communications center they called Control.
“Status?”
Seth Banyon leaned back in his chair and stretched, looking relaxed even though his eyes never stopped roving the bank of screens covering the wall in front of him. “Same.”
Casey felt the automatic door closing behind him and he moved across the large blue-lit room to stand behind his associate. Like Casey, Seth collected a paycheck that showed that he worked for Cee-Vid. But also like Casey, his real employer was hidden deep and well beneath that. “This was a simple assignment,” he said. “All Bax had to do was escort the emir’s niece back to college.”
“Without drawing attention to the fact that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be in the first place. Money,” Banyon muttered. “More trouble than it’s worth, if you ask me.”
The emir had plenty of it. His affection for his only sister’s three children was well-known. When whispers of a possible kidnapping attempt had reached him, he’d reached out to Hollins-Winword to discreetly resolve matters.
Casey had two sisters and from them, four nephews and a niece. They were still children but whatever their ages, he knew there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to help keep them safe.
He stepped around Banyon and tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards that surrounded the room. The uppermost screen on the wall in front of them shifted from a satellite image to a photograph of the emir’s niece and nephews. “This isn’t about money. It’s about a power struggle between the emir and his despot of a second cousin. And a whole lot of oil behind them. Where are the other two?”
“Safe behind the walls of their London estate in the loving arms of their mama.”
“At least that’s something. We’ve only got Samira to worry about. Wish to hell she would have stayed in London instead of going out on this mission trip of hers.”
A series of electronic chimes sounded and a moment later, another interior door slid open and the man in charge stepped inside.
To most of the world—including the regular employees of Cee-Vid, who didn’t know anything else was going on beneath the surface—Tristan Clay was merely the brilliant mind behind Cee-Vid.
To a select few, he was close to the top of the food chain inside Hollins-Winword. And to Casey, Tristan Clay was not only his boss but his uncle.
The older man’s piercing blue gaze went straight to the bank of screens. “Where’re we at?”
Protocols were always followed whenever an asset or an operative went off plan. It was easier for Casey to work through them than it was for him to think about Janie’s “plan,” and he nudged Banyon out of the seat and took his position at the controls. “Last contact was thirty-six hours ago.” His fingers started flying over the console, satellites high above the world snapped to attention, and Casey did the only thing in the world he figured he was meant to do.
He kept Hollins-Winword’s own safe.
* * *
“You do realize that if women could just snap their fingers and find the perfect man, the entire chocolate industry might crumble to dust?” Hayley Templeton’s slender fingers hovered indecisively over the opened box of Godiva delectables sitting on top of the gleaming wood bar at Colbys.
Jane wasn’t indecisive at all. She plucked a heart-shaped piece from the box and bit it in half, sighing a little over the explosion of bliss on her taste buds. “I know I can’t just snap my fingers,” she countered. If her digits possessed such magic, she’d have waved them over Casey and he wouldn’t have bothered offering up his friends and associates to put their heads in her matrimonial noose.
He would have given his neck to her willingly.
Instead, he’d bolted.
Just as she’d known he would.
The chocolate suddenly lost its appeal, but she ate the second half of the heart anyway before rinsing her hands at the bar sink and pulling the latest rack of glasses fresh from the dishwasher built into the cabinets below the bar. “Other women manage to find spouses here in Weaver. So why can’t I?”
Hayley finally selected a chocolate and replaced the lid on the gold box. “Get that away from me before I eat the rest.”
“They are your chocolates,” Jane reminded her. Her friend had brought them with her when she’d stopped by the bar and grill that afternoon.
“And I expect you to save me. I haven’t been running with Sam Dawson four times a week only to have a box of chocolates, given to me by a grateful patient, going straight to my hips.” Hayley groaned. “Sam’s a slave driver. You’d think she’d have a little sympathy for her friends.”
Sam Dawson was a deputy with the sheriff’s department. “She gave me a parking ticket the other day. Sam doesn’t have any sympathy for anyone.” Jane took pity on Hayley and tucked away the golden box of temptation before unloading the rack of glasses onto the shelves on the wall behind her. “I think she was just making up for the fact that I kicked her butt in racquetball last week.”
“I honestly don’t know how I ended up with such competitive friends.” Hayley propped her elbows on the bar and glanced around. At three in the afternoon, the place was busy with families having late lunches or early dinners, but the bar itself was quiet.
It would pick up later, though. Friday nights were always packed at Colbys. The establishment had been a Weaver staple since long before Jane had bought it from the family of a friend she’d known since college. Well, she amended mentally, since her ex-husband, Gage Stanton, had staked her purchase of the place.
What was unusual, though, was Hayley stopping in at that hour of the day. Finished with the sparkling clean pilsner glasses, Jane turned back to her friend. “So what’s wrong?”
Hayley ran her hand down the sleek tail of her ponytail. “Who says anything’s wrong?”
Jane shook her head a little. When it came to the town of Weaver, even after several years there, they were still relative newcomers. As was Sam Dawson. But the three of them had all struck up an enduring friendship. She dumped ice into a glass, filled it with diet cola and set it in front of her friend. “You know bartenders are the best listeners. Comes with the territory.”
Hayley pulled a face and reached for the drink. “Counselors are the best listeners,” she corrected her. “My PhD in psychology says so.” She twisted the glass between her fingers. “Just some family dissension. Evidently, after more than thirty years of estrangement, my grandmother has been trying to mend fences with my dad and my uncle, and they’re not having any of it.”
Because the bar was so quiet and the restaurant section had its own complement of servers, Jane pulled up the stool she kept behind the bar and sat down to sip at her own soda. “This is their mom you’re talking about?”
Hayley nodded. “Vivian Archer Templeton.” She drew out the name, then lifted her shoulders. “She lives in Pittsburgh and has been making noises about visiting them in Braden. I think Daddy and Uncle David are wrong and should be more receptive. They didn’t really take kindly to my input. As far as they’re concerned, she’s just a selfish, filthy-rich snob who’ll never change.”
“And Dr. Templeton never goes off duty,” Jane murmured. “Is she really rich?”
“Loaded. She married into it, evidently, when she married her first husband. My grandfather. Steel or something.” Then Hayley seemed to shake off her thoughts. “Back to you and the great husband hunt. Believe me. I completely understand a ticking biological clock.” Her lips twisted ruefully as she patted her chest. “Ticktock, ticktock here, too. None of us are getting any younger. But women these days do have babies without rushing into a marriage.”
“Not me.” Suddenly restless, Jane grabbed a clean bar towel and moved to the far end to start polishing the long wooden surface. “I know society has changed since my mother did it, but that doesn’t mean single parenting is easy. As a family counselor, you would know that more than anyone.”
“True enough.” Hayley rested her elbow on the bar and propped her chin on her hand. “Though your mom didn’t make that choice alone. Your dad walked out on all of you, didn’t she?”
“She made him leave.” And once he was gone, her mother had pretended he never existed at all. Since her parents had never married, doing so had been horribly easy.
Hayley made a soft mmming sound.
Jane pulled out the chocolate box again and waved it under Hayley’s nose. “Stop looking at me like I’m one of your patients or I’m going to open this up again.”
Hayley pushed the box aside. “Fine. Since we’ve established the fact that you can’t just snap your fingers for a husband, what do you plan to do about it?” There was a smile in her eyes as she nodded toward the fishbowl on one end of the counter. “Have a drawing like you do for a free meal?”
“I’ve heard worse ideas.” Jane put away the chocolates again and eyed the bowl where people dropped in a business card or simply a name and phone number, scratched on the back of their receipt, for her weekly drawing. “I wonder if any guys would bother to enter.”
Hayley laughed. “For a chance with you? Half the men in this town—married or not—have probably had a fantasy or two about you.”
Jane grimaced. “I seriously doubt that.” She certainly hoped not. “Kind of an ick factor there, Dr. Templeton.”
“I know who isn’t at all icky.” Her friend smiled slyly. “Casey Clay.”
“I should never have told you about him,” Jane muttered.
Hayley’s smile widened. “If I were your therapist—”
“You’re not.”
“—I would suggest that you think about your feelings where he’s concerned.”
“I have no feelings,” Jane lied. “The man is impossible. He can’t even keep his truck clean. The last time I saw it, he had a pile of junk on the passenger seat that you wouldn’t believe.”
“Good family.” Hayley held up her index finger. “All of the Clays who live in the area are plain old good people.” She held up a second finger. “Well over six feet tall. Exceptional shape.” Her eyes twinkled. “Thick golden-brown hair and gray eyes. In other words, the usual good genes for that particular family.” She held up her third finger. “Intelligent.” Her pinky finger joined the others. “Good sense of humor.” She added her thumb. “Single, heterosexual male. Messy truck notwithstanding, I could go on.”
“Then you date him.”
Hayley laughed softly and glanced around the empty bar before leaning forward over her crossed arms. “You’re the one who’s been secretly sleeping with him for the past year. Seems to me he’d be your best candidate. And you realize if you’re not dating him, someone else will. Isn’t that going to bother you?”
Jane shrugged as if it wouldn’t, even though the very idea of it made her more than a little ill. “What he does isn’t my concern. He’s allergic to commitment anyway. He’ll tell you that himself.” He’d certainly said that exact thing to her more than once. Before they’d ended up in bed together, as well as after.
“You used to say the same thing about yourself.”
“Some allergies cure themselves, I guess. I want a baby.” She also was afraid she wanted Casey, but that was never going to happen. Cutting her losses now would be easier than having to later.
Hayley’s expression turned sympathetic. “I know you do, sweetie. But—” she lifted her hand peaceably “—this is just a little food for thought. Sometimes people will focus harder on a secondary issue in order to avoid dealing with a primary issue.”
“Casey Clay is not my primary issue,” Jane said flatly. “I knew exactly where we stood with each other and that’s why I ended things with him last night.” It was her own bad luck she’d allowed her emotions to creep in where he was concerned. She dragged the fishbowl over and dumped the half-dozen business cards and receipts out onto the bar top. “I can’t be hunting for a husband when I’m sleeping with him.”
She tugged off the card taped to the front of the fishbowl that described the weekly free-meal drawing and turned it over to the blank side. She pulled a pen from her pocket and uncapped it. “So what do you think? Win a free meal with Jane Cohen? Entries open to single men only?”
Hayley chuckled wryly and covered her eyes. “Girlfriend, you are just asking for trouble.”
* * *
“Is she serious?”
At the sound of his cousin’s voice, Casey looked up from the pool table where he was lining up his next shot. Erik was holding the fishbowl that usually sat on the end of Colbys’ wooden bar top.
Casey shrugged and focused on his shot again. “She gives away a free meal every week. Has for a long time. So what?” It was Friday night. Colbys was typically crowded. And even though Casey hadn’t really wanted to meet his cousin here after his encounter with Jane the night before, he hadn’t been able to come up with a good excuse not to. He’d located Bax, the missing asset in Nepal. He and the emir’s niece were no worse for wear, and though Bax hadn’t yet gotten her returned to her London apartment, at least they knew she hadn’t been abducted by her father’s terroristic cousin. For now, things were back on track.
At least in that world.
Casey involuntarily looked over to the bar where Jane was busy pouring out drinks. Her long hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail that swayed every time she turned to grab a glass off the shelves behind her. She was in her usual working garb of black T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, but the fact that she wore them transformed the ordinary into something extraordinary.
She was a smart cookie. Never missed a thing. So he knew she was well aware of his presence. She just hadn’t bothered to give him so much as a glance.
He, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking toward her.
He took his shot and sent the balls rolling.
None landed where he’d intended.
“Not just her usual free meal,” Erik was saying. He set the fishbowl on the rail near Casey before leaning over the table with his cue. “Looks to me like she’s shaking up the status quo between you two.”
Erik was the only one who knew of Casey’s involvement with the woman.
Past involvement, he reminded himself, since she’d pretty much kicked him to the curb the evening before.
He dragged his attention away from the smooth curves of Jane’s lightly tanned arms. “She’s over twenty-one,” he said casually. “Free to do whatever she wants.”
“That why your game seems shot to hell all of a sudden?”
He ignored Erik and glanced at the fishbowl.
When the words on the side of it penetrated, he very nearly tore the white index card free of the tape holding it in place.
She certainly wasn’t wasting any time with her husband hunt.
He held up the glass bowl, studying the contents. The damned thing was more than half full. Evidently, adding herself to the free-meal menu had spurred a whole new interest in her drawing.
“She’s out of her tree,” he muttered. Glancing around the bar, he spotted Keith Lambert, who was one of the game designers on the legitimate side of Cee-Vid, whom his uncle had recently hired straight out of school. The young guy, his usual plaid bow tie in place, was sitting in a corner booth with a couple other Cee-Viders. All three of them had their noses stuck in their cell phones as if they didn’t know how to communicate face-to-face.
Casey moved over to their table and plunked the fishbowl in the center of it, startling the young men. He knew plenty of designers who didn’t look as if they needed a good dose of sunshine, but these guys sure did. Collectively, they were pretty much the embodiment of every clichéd computer-geek joke. “Step right up, guys.” He tapped the bowl with Jane’s hand-printed invitation stuck to the side.
Keith squinted through his horn-rimmed glasses as he read the card. Then he craned his neck to look at Jane behind the bar across the room. “Sweet. I hear older women are hotter in the sack.”
Casey’s fingers curled. He’d bet his favorite shirt that Keith had never even kissed a girl, hot or otherwise. The same went for his pallid companions. Jane would make mincemeat of all of them before they ever got to dessert, much less anything after that. “So I’ve heard,” he said blandly. “Might consider stuffing the ballot box to up the odds in your favor.”
Keith’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Cheat?”
“She doesn’t specify one entry,” Casey reasoned. “The only restriction is you have to be single.” He plucked the pen from Keith’s ink-stained shirt pocket and tossed it on the table in front of him. “Go for it, man.”
Keith’s buddies were grinning and nearly bouncing in their booth.
Before he either rolled his eyes or knocked their heads together, Casey returned to his pool game.
But the game was already done. Erik had already cleared the felt. “You owe me twenty,” his cousin said, looking as if he wanted to laugh.
Casey pulled out his wallet and slapped down the money. “Why aren’t you home in the loving arms of your wife, anyway? Wedded bliss already wearing off?” His cousin and Isabella had gotten married the previous year and Casey knew good and well that they were besotted with each other.
“Izzy’s in Cheyenne with Lucy for a few days. They’ve taken some of their students for a dance workshop down there before school starts up next week for the fall.”
Lucy was another of their cousins, and she ran the only dance school in Weaver. Isabella taught a few classes there. “Little girls in tap shoes or big girls in belly-dancing costumes?” He felt his gaze straying back toward the bar but mastered the impulse and picked up his beer mug instead. “Your wife teaches both.”
Erik grinned wryly. “Don’t forget the pole-dancing-for-fitness classes.” He rubbed his jaw. “She actually had me try it, you know.”
Casey nearly dropped his beer. Despite being Tristan Clay’s son, Erik had gone into the ranching side of the Clay dynasty. But even in that, he had to go his own way, choosing to maintain his own brand rather than use the Double-C brand started by their grandfather, Squire, that was already one of the most well-known in the state. His cousin was salt-of-the-earth steady and more than a little old-fashioned, so the image that sprang to mind was one for the record books. “Swinging around on a pole?”
His cousin looked chagrinned. “It’s harder than you think. I fell on my ass. Izzy’s never gonna let me live it down.”
For the first time since Jane’s wanna-baby bombshell, Casey actually laughed. “She’s not the only one. I just don’t want to picture it in my mind. Afraid it’ll do permanent brain damage. What about Murph?”
Murphy had been Isabella’s teenage ward when she’d first come to Weaver. Now she was legally his mother and soon Erik would legally be his father. And Casey could rib the other man—who was his best friend as much as his cousin—about anything under the sun, including his new family, but he knew Erik had never been happier.
Erik grinned. “He was no more successful at it than I was, but you didn’t hear that from me. So what’s Jane really up to?”
Casey hid his frown in his beer and shrugged. He hadn’t shared Jane’s sudden life goal with Erik, mostly because it might lead to discussions he didn’t want to have. “Don’t ask me.”
Erik gave him a disbelieving look, but thankfully let the matter drop. Instead, he waved at the pool table. “Double or nothing?”
“Rack ’em up.” Casey’s gaze started to slide to the bar but he physically turned his back so he was looking toward the front door instead.
He took one last glance toward Keith. He and his buddies were busily stuffing business cards into the fishbowl.
God help them all.
Chapter Three (#ulink_95b1c6f3-f2c7-5290-932e-23941b57fb97)
Jane managed a tight smile before shutting her front door in Prospect Number Three’s face.
The past three weeks—especially the past three Thursday-night dates with Number Three and his predecessors, One and Two—had been abysmal.
Number One, a real estate agent from nearby Braden, hadn’t understood the difference between Thursday and Friday and, after standing her up at the restaurant where she’d arranged to meet him, had instead accused her of standing him up when he’d expected her there the following night. She hoped he handled his real estate transactions with more accuracy.
Number Two was a veterinary technician from right here in Weaver. Nothing really wrong with Two. Except he spent the entire evening talking about his ex-girlfriend, with whom he was clearly still in love. Jane had felt like a matronly aunt, advising him to contact the girl and make things up with her.
And Number Three...
Jane heaved a sigh and leaned back against the door she’d just closed. Number Three might possess some genius intellect, but conversing about anything outside of the video games he designed had been impossible. And then the nitwit had believed she was going to invite him in for some dessert of a very personal variety after the dinner she had paid for.
She wouldn’t have gone out with him at all, because he worked at Cee-Vid, which was too closely connected to Casey, except that Number Three—like Two and One—had won the weekly fishbowl drawing.
The first thing she was going to do when she went to the bar the next day was throw out the fishbowl and all of its contents. If the only way she could get a date was through a drawing, she’d be better off looking into that whole mail-order-husband thing.
She rubbed at the pain between her eyebrows caused by the past ninety minutes of mind-numbing boredom and headed into her bedroom, shedding her knee-length sweater dress as she went. It was still relatively early, and she was too keyed up to relax. So she changed into jeans and a bright red turtleneck and headed back out to Colbys.
She’d throw out the fishbowl when she got there.
Her assistant manager, Merilee, had worked for Jane long enough not to show her surprise when she walked in the door on what was supposed to be her night off. Jane went straight to the glass bowl and dumped the contents in the trash, along with the card displaying the “rules” of the drawing. Then she stuck the bowl beneath the counter and glanced around the sparsely occupied tables.
She didn’t want to acknowledge what she was really doing: looking to see if Casey happened to be around playing pool. The pool tables were his primary interest where Colbys was concerned. Far more than any libations that she offered in the bar or food that they served in the restaurant.
But the tables were quiet.
“Everything all right?” Merilee asked when Jane sighed a little.
“Just fine.” Jane grabbed a bottled water, then pushed through the door to the storeroom, where all the shelves were neatly packed with supplies. She went into the minuscule office squeezed between the storage room and the draft cooler where her beer kegs were housed and threw herself down on the squeaky chair behind the beat-up metal desk.
But instead of opening the water bottle or booting up her computer, she picked up the photograph of her sister that sat in a wood frame on the corner of the desk. Julia was cuddling her infant son, Drake, and Julia’s husband, Don, was cradling them both in his arms. Happiness radiated from their eyes.
Jane rubbed her thumb over the picture glass, melancholy weighting her down. Julia, who now lived in Montana, was two years younger than Jane. She and Don had been married only eighteen months, though they’d been sweethearts since high school.
Would Jane’s marriage to Gage have been more successful if they hadn’t gotten married so quickly, while they’d still been in college, where they’d met?
She rubbed her forehead again and set down the picture frame.
Melancholy. She hated it.
Annoyed with herself, she started up the computer and drank down half of the water while waiting for it to chug to life. For the past year, ever since she’d made the mistake of asking him for a little help with the recalcitrant thing, Casey had been after her to let him upgrade her system.
And you’ve only resisted because you wanted to do it yourself. He wanted to take over, and you balked.
During that first consultation, instead of fixing the computer, somehow or other, they’d ended up having sex in the storeroom after Colbys was closed down for the night.
She set the water bottle aside and thumped her hand on the side of the computer, pushing away the memory. The computer gave out a little hiccupping sound and a fan somewhere inside it whirred to life. A few moments later, the screen finally lit up, and she set about updating her books. It didn’t take her long, because she kept up with the task almost daily even though she detested it. It might be overkill—her accountant, her ex-husband and Casey had all independently accused her of it—but she liked knowing to the penny where she was at any given time.
She used to think it came from watching her mother scrimp and save and worry about every dime right up until she died before Jane moved to Weaver. But Julia had come out of their childhood without sharing this particular obsession of Jane’s.
“Pregnant yet?”
Startled, she swiveled in her chair, knocking the water bottle into the computer keyboard with her elbow. She gave Casey an annoyed look as she hastily yanked the keyboard off the desk, trying to protect it from the spilled water. “Ever hear of knocking?”
“Door wasn’t closed.” He was leaning casually against the doorjamb. “Wouldn’t worry too much about that keyboard. It’s already a decade past its life expectancy.”
She used the hem of her sweater to swipe up the spreading puddle with one hand and held the keyboard aloft with the other. It was awkward because of the cords tethering it in place; though she’d never admit it, she wished she had the nifty wireless things that Casey had tried to equip her with. “What are you doing here?”
“Grabbing a bite.”
The grill usually closed at ten on weeknights and it was still well before that. “Then get to it,” she said waspishly. “Jerry’s cooking alone tonight.” During their busier times, her main cook was joined by his son, Jerry Junior.
Casey sighed noisily and grabbed the keyboard out of her hand, holding it high when she tried to take it back. “There’s no crime in asking for help.”
“I don’t need help. I need a towel.” More annoyed with the way her stomach was jumping around at the sight of him than she was the minor spill, she scooted past him and grabbed a neatly folded towel from a stack of them in the storeroom. It was only a matter of seconds, but when she reentered the office, he was already sitting down in her chair, boots propped on the corner of her desk while he tapped away at the keyboard resting on his lap.
“Stop that!” She tried shoving at his legs, but he was immovable. There was no room to get around him, so she reached across him to wipe the towel over the desktop, drying what was left of the water. She didn’t have the computer hooked up to an internet connection—another source of contention between them—nor did she have any little computer games to amuse him. She needed the computer for one thing and one thing only: keeping her business records. “You’re snooping.”
“Nope.” His fingers flew over the keyboard with enviable ease. “Just doing a little maintenance. When’s the last time you backed up your data?”
She glared at the back of his head, controlling the urge to swat him with the towel even though it was mighty tempting. “Last week,” she lied.
He snorted. “Last month, you mean.” He tapped some more. “You need to be on an automatic backup. You’re maxing out your memory. You won’t let me add more. You keep everything that’s important about Colbys on this thing.” He looked over his shoulder up at her. “If you’re not careful, you could lose it all.”
He was the only person she’d ever met who had honest-to-goodness gray eyes. If she hadn’t spent as many hours in his arms as she had, she would have suspected the distinctive color came from contact lenses rather than nature. But she was the one whose imperfect vision required the aid of contact lenses, not Casey.
His eyebrow rose and she realized she was standing there like an idiot, staring into his eyes. “Fine,” she agreed abruptly. “I’ll get a new computer. Update it all.” She barely waited a beat. “I will get it,” she emphasized. “I don’t need you doing it for me.”
“I swear, if you needed your own appendix taken out, you’d insist on holding the scalpel.” He turned his attention back to the computer. “Still amazes me that you’re willing to let someone else contribute their gene pool to this kid you want.”
“You’re just annoyed because I’m not letting you take over and do whatever you want.”
He glanced at her again and sudden heat slid through her veins at the look in his eyes. “A month might have passed since you announced your little ‘plan—’” he air-quoted the word “—but I’m pretty sure there’re a few things I do that you still want, Janie.”
She exhaled noisily and tossed the towel over his head. “Cool your jets, Clay.” Because it was her own jets she was worried about, she backed out of the small office and headed out front to the bar. He wouldn’t say or do anything in front of other people that would give any hint they were lovers.
Had been lovers, she mentally corrected herself.
Past tense.
Merilee was mixing up a round of frozen margaritas when Jane moved behind the bar. The noise of the blender was familiar and welcome. There were a few orders waiting, and she tied a black apron around her hips, then washed her hands before starting to fill them.
Casey appeared soon after but rather than going over to the grill as she expected, he slid onto one of the bar stools near where she was working. “Think I’ll eat in here,” he said.
She wanted to gnash her teeth. Instead, without missing a beat on the Long Island iced tea she was concocting, she slid a menu in front of him.
He flipped the laminated card between his fingers. “I’ve got this thing memorized,” he pointed out.
“Which only proves the fact that you spend too much time in a bar. Beer?”
He nodded. “You’re the proprietress of said bar. I wouldn’t complain about having regular customers if I were you. Bad for business.”
She topped off the cocktail with a dash of cola, then moved down to the taps and drew his beer. She set the mug in front of him. “What’s it going to be? No, wait. Let me guess. Meat loaf and mashed or the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings?”
“Janie.” He gave her a lazy grin. “I’m touched. You know me so well.”
“I know you never order a steak when you’re here,” she said drily.
“Considering my family’s Double-C beefsteaks are the best around, why would I pay someone else for one?” He suddenly stretched across the bar toward her, but only to stick the menu back on the little pile beneath the bar.
She was glad she’d managed to control the urge to take a step back. “So which is it? Meat loaf or burger?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs.”
She shrugged. “You’re just saying that to be contrary, but it makes no difference to me. You’re the one who’ll regret it.” She turned to the register and punched in the order, then started loading glasses into a dishwasher tray.
“Where’s the fishbowl?”
Something in his tone made her neck prickle. She glanced at him. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a definite smirk of amusement lurking in his gray eyes.
“I put it away.”
“No takers in the win-a-date-with-Janie contest?”
“Actually, I had more entries than I knew what to do with. But I didn’t need them after I met Keith. You must know him from Cee-Vid. Keith Lambert?” She folded her arms on the bar top and leaned toward him conspiratorially. “He’s the perfect candidate. Intelligent. And that bow tie.” She smiled slowly. “Once that comes off, he’s very...energetic.”
Casey’s eyes narrowed. “I know you better than that, sport. Max isn’t going to find Keith’s body cut into pieces and left on the side of the road somewhere, is he? I’d hate to have to bail you out of jail.”
Max was Max Scalise, the sheriff and Casey’s cousin by marriage. There were times when Jane speculated that one out of every three people in Weaver was somehow related to the wealthy Clay family. “Why would I want to get rid of Keith?” Just because he was duller than dishwater? “He could turn out to be the—”
“Next Mr. Janie?”
“—man of my dreams.”
Casey’s lips twitched as he twisted his beer mug against the wooden surface of the bar. “In his dreams, maybe. A little young for you, isn’t he?”
Jane looked up from his hand. Why was it that his hands were callused, suntanned and very masculine, when Keith’s had been white as snow and softer than hers? The two men did the same sort of work, for Pete’s sake.
Olive, one of the servers from the grill, arrived with his order of spaghetti and meatballs. She was nineteen and made quite a production over setting the plate in front of him, along with a napkin-wrapped set of flatware and a heaping helping of nubile come-hither smiles on the side.
“Thank ya, darlin’,” Casey drawled.
Olive looked ready to swoon as she went through the archway back to the restaurant.
Jane pulled off her apron and set Casey’s bill beside his plate. “A little young for you, isn’t she?”
He laughed soundlessly. “Say the word, sport, and we can go right back to the way things were.”
Fortunately, where he was concerned, she’d had lots of practice overlooking the way he made her stomach lurch, so she was reasonably confident she didn’t display the same besotted expression as Olive.
“Oh, yeah?” She angled her head and batted her lashes comically. “You gonna put a ring on it and donate some genetic material?” She patted his cheek dismissively and walked away before she had to witness his response.
“Merilee,” she called as she headed toward the exit, “make sure Casey Clay doesn’t skip out on his bill. Don’t want anyone around here thinking they can get things for free.”
Casey watched Jane sail through the door, then glanced at Merilee, who was giving him a wry look.
“Think she had another bad date,” Merilee shared, moving down to his end of the bar.
Casey would bet on it. But he could play ignorant when he wanted. He twirled his fork in the spaghetti noodles. “What makes you say that?”
Merilee grinned. She was a little younger than Jane and lived over in Braden. Casey’d heard somewhere that she was engaged to a fireman. “If you had a good dinner date, would you be hanging around your workplace an hour after appetizers?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and shook her head. “Not me, my friend. How’s that pasta?”
“Not as good as the meat loaf would have been.”
Merilee grinned. “Not one of Jerry’s best dishes, that’s for sure. Jane’s been trying to get him to use her recipe, but he says the kitchen’s his domain and unless she wants him to quit, to leave him to it.”
Casey figured the only reason Jane allowed Jerry any leeway at all was because she couldn’t easily replace him. When it came to her business, like her personal life, she wanted to control every damn little detail.
He didn’t begrudge her that particular right—he called plenty of his own shots, too—but it definitely made dealing with her a challenge. “You said another bad date.” He gave up on the watery spaghetti and bullet-hard meatballs and picked up the beer. It was just the way he liked. A little dark. A little toasty. And not too heavy on the hops. “She having a lot of ’em?”
Merilee obviously saw nothing odd in the question. There was a reason why gossip was Weaver’s number-one sport. Everyone talked about everyone. “I know she’s had a date every Thursday night for the past month with a different guy each time. Far as I can tell, none of them led to a second date. The rest of the time, she’s here working.”
He did have to give Jane props for being a hard worker. She might bust his chops about getting called into Cee-Vid at all hours, but she wasn’t much better.
It was a good thing they’d never tried moving their relationship out of the bedroom. Even if she’d never been struck with baby fever, it still would have been a recipe for disaster.
Knowing it didn’t make the thought particularly welcome, though.
“You can take that away,” Casey told Merilee, nudging the still-full plate toward her.
“Want me to get you something else?”
He shook his head as he slid off the bar stool. He drained the last mouthful of beer and pulled some cash from his wallet that he dropped on the check. “Catch ya later, Merilee.”
She scooped up the money with a smile and turned to the register. He left the bar and headed toward his truck, parked in the lot that was situated between Colbys and the dance studio.
Even at that hour of the evening, there was still activity over there. Business was obviously going well for his cousin.
He drove out of the lot but was too restless to head home. He briefly considered dropping by his parents’ place. Maggie and Daniel Clay still lived in the house where Casey had been born and raised. But he decided against it. He enjoyed his folks’ company, but he wasn’t in the mood for a dose of happy hearth and home. For the same reason, he didn’t drop by J.D.’s place. His sister and her husband, Jake, were always welcoming, too. Jake’s twin boys—preteen hellions that they were—would be chasing around while two-year-old Tucker did his level best to keep up with his big brothers.
He rubbed his fingers absently over the gnawing in his chest and drove without stopping right past his own house—a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farmhouse that he’d moved from the country into town and restored with his dad’s help—all the way to Shop-World, which was on the other side of Weaver.
His excuse was he needed to pick up some groceries for his empty refrigerator. That Janie lived out by the big-box store was just a coincidence.
Her bright and shiny silver pickup was parked in front of her condo when he trolled past. She’d turned on her porch light. He looked up at the still-dark window on the second floor directly above the door. Her bedroom. He doubted she’d gone to bed. She was probably puttering around in her kitchen or the walled-in yard she had out back, where he’d always parked before when he’d come calling. It was rare for her to just sit and chill. She always seemed to need to be doing something.
He circled the block, giving up the pretense altogether that he cared about groceries when he passed Shop-World for the second time without a glance, and slowly drove past her condo again. The light had gone on in her bedroom window, and she was standing in front of the window looking out.
Dammit.
No way she’d fail to see his dusty black pickup truck creeping, two miles an hour, down her street when there was a big ol’ streetlamp overhead. Speeding up would make him look even more stupid. Stopping altogether wasn’t an option.
She wanted things he couldn’t give her, he reminded himself.
Then she lifted her arms and closed the white plantation shutters, cutting herself off from view.
Another needless reminder. She wanted things, but not from him.
His jaw tight, he turned around and drove home.
Chapter Four (#ulink_7b4764ad-813e-59fc-a497-01d60d77e433)
“Arlo Bellamy.”
Jane turned her attention from the strawberry daiquiris she was mixing for a trio of young women she’d just carded to Hayley, who was sitting at the end of the bar. “What?”
Hayley tucked her hair behind her ear. She was nodding. “Arlo Bellamy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him before. He’s my neighbor. You should go out with him.”
Despite herself, Jane’s gaze flicked toward the pool tables.
It was Saturday night and the Clay contingent was out in force. Casey was there, wielding his personal pool cue with his typical expertise. He had at least a dozen relatives with him. With a group that large, she would have assumed they were celebrating something special. But experience had already shown her that when it came to the Clay family, they didn’t seem to need any special reason to socialize en masse.
“He’s thirty-eight,” Hayley was saying. “He’s the estate lawyer who has that office down on Second Street.”
Jane focused with an effort on her friend’s voice rather than Casey. “The one who has that bronze horse statue out in front?”
Hayley nodded. “I think you’d have a lot in common.”
“Never met him.” She couldn’t recall the lawyer ever stepping foot in Colbys.
“So? He’s nice.”
“How do you know? Just because he’s a lawyer?” She flipped on the blender and assembled three glasses in front of her. “Guy could be a stalker.” She thought of Casey driving past her house the other evening.
She’d been dangerously close to beckoning him to come inside.
And where would that have gotten her?
Certainly no closer to marriage and a baby.
“I doubt he’s a stalker,” Hayley said drily. “He’d have chosen to live somewhere other than Weaver where he’d have a larger pool of pickings.”
Jane killed the blender and poured out the sweet drinks. Personally, she found the daiquiri concoctions sickening, but they never failed to appeal to a good portion of her patrons. She swirled whipped cream on top of the pink drinks and set them on a tray for her server to pick up, then started on the next order. She’d been tending bar for so many years that the motions were routine. Comfortable. “If he’s so nice, why haven’t you dated him?”
Hayley gave her a look. “Girlfriend, you are the one who says she’s on the hunt for a husband. Not me.”
“Nor me,” Sam Dawson said as she stepped up to the bar and slid onto the stool that Hayley had been saving for her. “Sorry I’m late.”
Unconcerned, Hayley waved her hand toward Jane. “You’ve met Arlo,” she said to Sam. “Tell her he’s a nice guy.”
“He’s a nice guy,” Sam said obediently. Her dark blond hair was pulled into the usual knot at the back of her head. “No arrests since I’ve been here.”
Hayley grinned. “See, Jane? No arrests.”
Jane set a bottle of light beer in front of Sam and flipped off the bottle cap in the same motion before turning back to her order. “High praise, all right.” She wondered if Casey had ever been arrested.
Probably not. From all appearances, as a general rule the Clays seemed to be a highly upstanding lot.
“Arlo might not want to go out with me, then.” She pulled the bottle of Grey Goose down from the shelf behind her and poured it liberally over ice. “I have been.” She followed the vodka with a splash of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and set the drink on another tray. For whatever reason, cocktails seemed to be the order of the evening among the crowd. Usually beer and margaritas were the heavy favorites but that night she was serving up everything from Manhattans to Slippery Nipples.
“No way.” Both Hayley and Sam looked agog.
She paused in front of them, long enough to pull another steaming rack of glasses out of the dishwasher. “That’s how I met Gage in college. A couple dozen of us were protesting the unfair firing of a professor and we all got picked up.” She set the rack on the rubberized mat next to the small sink and moved down to the taps. “Eventually, the charges were dismissed.”
A burst of laughter came from the crowd of Clays surrounding the pool tables, drawing more eyes than just Jane’s. Which was fortunate for her, because she had no witnesses to the way she managed to spill Guinness over her hand while she watched Casey’s fine, fine behind as he leaned over for his shot. She shut off the tap and swiped her hand over her apron, then loaded up another tray. She had three cocktail waitresses on hand that night, and they were stretched to the max. Pulling someone over from the restaurant wasn’t an option. Every table there was full, too, with a line of people stretching out the door, waiting.
A fine October night in Weaver. The weather was good, no snow yet, and people were out for a good time.
Rather than let the orders keep stacking up, she stepped out from behind the bar and delivered several herself and collected quite a few empties on her way back. Some young guy was trying to chat up Hayley and Sam, and her friends looked amused and happily occupied.
Everything was exactly as she’d planned when Gage had given her the money five years ago to buy Colbys, and she couldn’t help smiling to herself as she went behind the glossy wood bar again and pulled up the next order.
One root beer. One designer microbrew that she ordered from Montana. The microbrew that she’d begun carrying only because it was Casey’s favorite.
The combination was what Casey and his cousin Erik usually ordered and she figured now was no exception. She glanced over at the pool tables. Only this time, instead of seeing Casey’s rear end, she saw him leaning against the wall, staring boldly back at her.
Heat shot through her, and she tore her gaze away from his. She pulled out an icy bottle of root beer along with a frosted mug, filled another with Casey’s beer and stuck them on a tray before going back over to her girlfriends.
She had a plan and she was sticking to it.
“Give your neighbor my number,” she told Hayley. She had to raise her voice, because the jukebox was blaring, billiard balls were clacking, and the crowd gave off a general blur of chatter and laughter.
Hayley’s eyebrows lifted. She glanced from Jane’s face across the room toward the pool tables. Then she nodded.
Satisfied, Jane washed her sticky hands and reached for the next order.
She didn’t allow herself any more glances toward the pool tables and the very unreachable Casey Clay.
* * *
Even though Casey saw Jane play server several times, she didn’t play server to his party. And when he was called into work just before ten o’clock, he was glad for the excuse to escape. Glad, at least, until he got to his office and spent the next twelve hours studying satellite feeds and reports regarding three agents who’d gone missing in Central America.
By the next night, the situation had escalated even more, and the next thing he knew, he found himself sitting beside Tristan on a plane to Hollins-Winword’s headquarters in Connecticut.
Four days later, he was watching two caskets being carried off a plane while rain poured down on their heads.
“This isn’t your fault.” Tristan stood next to him on the tarmac, looking as grim as Casey had ever seen.
“Feels like it,” Casey returned flatly. “I was the last one in communication with them.”
“And their status was still clear,” Tristan pointed out.
“Was still my watch,” he said. It didn’t matter that there’d been others on shift, as well. Casey was their commander. He was supposed to be the one who could find a gnat on a wall eight thousand miles away.
“At least we had something to recover. There was a time we wouldn’t have even been able to retrieve their bodies.” Tristan’s boss, Coleman Black, stood on the other side of Casey. Coleman was a hard-looking older man with gray hair and a face lined from sun and responsibility. The only time Casey had ever seen him really smile had been on the rare occasions he was around Casey’s sister Angeline and her husband, Brody Paine. Casey’s brother-in-law was Cole’s son—a rarely acknowledged fact because of the inherent dangers that went along with that—and his visits were extremely rare; Casey could count them on one hand.
But in his role with Hollins-Winword, Casey had had many more encounters with the agency’s head.
“Back when your uncle here was a young buck,” Cole was saying, “we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the things we can now.” He shook his head as they watched the caskets being loaded into a waiting black hearse.
“Jefferson’d be the first to confirm that,” Tristan murmured.
Tristan’s older brother Jefferson had been an HW field agent back in the day. During an especially tricky assignment, he’d landed in a third-world prison; ultimately, he’d escaped, but his partner hadn’t. Even though Jefferson had returned to Weaver to become a horse breeder, had gotten married, had two grown kids and an ever-growing herd of grandchildren, the experience all those years ago still colored his life. When his son, Axel, had followed in his footsteps with the agency, he had not been particularly thrilled.
“We should’ve been able to do more,” Casey said now. Failure. Grief. Responsibility. It all weighed inside his gut like concrete blocks holding him below water. “Kept those caskets from ever being needed, and we damn sure should’ve found McGregor by now.” The third part of the missing trio was still a big fat unknown. They didn’t know if Jason McGregor’s body was lying in a ditch somewhere, tossed aside the same way Jon and Manny had been. They didn’t know squat.
“It’s not your fault,” Tristan said again. “You’ve got to have something to go on and we’re flying blind.”
Cole made a sound Casey figured was meant to be agreement, though with the cagey old guy, it was hard to tell. He clapped Casey once on the shoulder before letting out a sigh and walking out from beneath the shelter of the airplane hangar into the rain toward the hearse.
“He’s going along to meet the families,” Tristan said.
“Will he tell them the truth about how they died?”
His uncle’s lips twisted and he shook his head. “If he follows his own protocol? No. But it never pays to anticipate Cole’s actions too much. The man’s a law unto himself.”
He turned and gave Casey a long look. Even though Casey was tall, his uncle still topped him by an inch. “I’ve been in your shoes, Case,” he reminded him. “I was never in the field either. Stayed safe, closed up in an office miles—usually countries—away from the action. But we’re supposed to be the guardian angels, making sure those guys taking their chances out there in the field make it safely back home again. And I know only too well that it’s not easy to handle when that doesn’t happen.”
“I want to know what went wrong,” Casey muttered. “I want to find McGregor.”
“We will. We’ll investigate.”
“I know. And I also know that not every investigation bears fruit.”
The hearse, with Cole inside, drove away. The private airfield where the plane had landed was once again empty.
“Take my advice.” Tristan nudged him back toward the black SUV in which they’d arrived. “Go back home. Put your arms around that pretty bartender of yours—”
Startled, Casey shot him a look. “What?”
“You’re Hollins-Winword, kid,” Tristan drawled, looking vaguely amused. “Nephew of mine or not, you know what that means. There’s nothing in your life that you’re going to keep secret from us.” He climbed behind the wheel of the SUV himself, having dismissed the driver he’d been assigned even before they’d left HW’s headquarters.
Casey got in the passenger seat and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing away the headache that was forming. “Secrets aside, she’s anything but mine.”
“Most of us start out thinking that way.” His uncle drove out from beneath the hangar and headed in the opposite direction the hearse had taken. “Regardless, I’m telling you to focus on something good. Don’t take the crap that happened here home to bed with you. When they went off grid, you did everything anyone could have done to find them. You can’t control from a distance what those guys do once they’re on an op. That buck doesn’t stop at your door.” His hands tightened around the steering wheel and he sighed. “It stops with Cole. And he’s been dealing with that reality since before you were a sparkle in your daddy’s eye. McGregor is good in the field. If he’s able to lift his head, we’ll find him. Bring him back safely. But in the meantime, you’ve got to let go of the things you can’t change or you’re going to end up useless. Not just to the agency but to everyone who cares about you outside of the agency, as well.”
It was probably the longest speech he’d ever heard from his uncle. “Easier said than done.”
“I know.” Tristan waited a few beats. “Your bartender—”
“She’s not—”
“The bartender, then,” Tristan fired back. “What’s the problem there?”
Casey hadn’t discussed this particular situation with anyone. Not Erik. Not even his own father. But Tris wasn’t his father. He was his boss. His mentor. “She wants to get married.”
“Then put a ring on her finger already,” his uncle said as if the answer were obvious. “You’ve been sleeping with her for more than a year, for God’s sake.”
Casey felt his neck get hot like some kid called on the carpet. He stared out at the Connecticut countryside. HW’s compound—hidden in plain sight—was located inside a toilet-paper factory. “She doesn’t want to marry me. She was plenty clear about it.”
His uncle waited a beat. “And you believed her?” He sounded as if he wanted to laugh and Casey looked over at him. “Son, you have a lot to learn about women.”
Casey grimaced. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She only wants a husband so she can have a baby.”
Tristan’s eyebrow lifted. “So?”
“I’m not interested,” he said flatly, and looked out the side window again, ending the conversation.
But it seemed that there were some things the omniscient Hollins-Winword didn’t know after all.
Because even if Casey was interested in making a baby with Janie Cohen, he was incapable of it.
Thanks to a case of the mumps while he’d been doing a semester of college in Europe, he was sterile.
And there wasn’t one damn thing he could do to change it.
* * *
“So, Jane.” Arlo smiled down at her as they stood on her front porch. “I hope you enjoyed yourself this evening as much as I did.”
Jane squelched the pang inside her. Arlo was a perfectly attractive guy. He was intelligent. Well-read. Humorous. He hadn’t talked about an ex-girlfriend all night. He had no ex-wives. No baggage at all from previous relationships. He had insisted on paying for their dinner—Chinese—at the restaurant they’d gone to in Braden. His car had been spotless inside, he wore a suit and tie with comfort, and he even had a full head of brown hair.
And most of all, he’d talked about how—now that he was well established in his career—he’d realized there were things missing in his life that he wanted.
Like a wife.
A family.
He couldn’t have more perfectly matched her requirements if he’d tried.
“I had a very nice time, Arlo.”
He smiled and kissed her cheek. “So when I call you tomorrow, you’ll answer?”
She couldn’t help smiling. He didn’t make her bells and whistles ring—yet, she made herself add—but he was exactly what Hayley had said. A nice man. “Yes, I’ll answer.”
His eyes crinkled a little as his smile widened. His teeth were white and perfectly straight. Then he pushed open the door that she’d unlocked. “Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow.” She waited in the doorway, watching him until he reached his sedate Volvo. In a community dominated by pickup trucks and SUVs, his choice of a sedan certainly set him apart. He sketched a wave before climbing in and driving off.
She let out a sigh and slowly stepped into her house and closed the door.
“Thought good ol’ Arlo was never gonna leave.”
She screeched and threw her keys at where the voice was coming from before it penetrated that Casey was the one speaking. She pressed her hand to her racing heart and leaned forward slightly, feeling a little dizzy from the fright.
But then she snapped up, straight as a board, and glared at him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He was sprawled on her couch, looking way too much at home in his worn jeans, ugly red shirt with cartoonish fish swimming across it and cowboy boots. “Waiting for you, obviously.”
She closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them again, he was still there. Messy butterscotch hair, gray eyes and all. She tried again. “How did you get in?” she asked with what she considered to be extraordinary patience.
“You left your back door open.” He pulled his boots off the arm of her couch and sat up. “You ought to be more careful, sport. No point in locking the front door if you ignore the back one. You never know what sort of trouble you might be inviting.”
“Weaver’s as safe as a church,” she muttered crossly. She dropped her purse on the glass coffee table in front of the couch and tossed her lightweight wool coat on the armchair. “Turns out you’re the only trouble I needed to worry about. Do I need to count the silver?”
His lips curved but the amusement didn’t seem to quite make it to his eyes. “What sort of grade did Arlo earn?”
“An A,” she said crisply. “Plus.”
“Liar. I saw that tepid cheek kiss he gave you.”
“So not only do you break and enter, but you spy, as well.”
“Door totally unlocked,” he repeated. “A regular invitation, I figure. If you were really interested in Arlo, you’d have invited him in.”
“And we’d have found you squatting in my living room. How were you planning to explain that?”
He shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t invite him in.”
She snorted. “You knew nothing of the sort.” She strode into the kitchen and pulled a half-empty bottle of chardonnay out of the refrigerator. Arlo, it turned out, was a teetotaler. Which she completely respected. Even though she owned a bar and grill, she wasn’t much of a drinker. But finding Casey in her house was more than she could take.
She grabbed a glass from her cupboard, wiped the dust out of it and poured the wine. She took a fortifying gulp, then carried it with her back to the living room. She pointed her finger at him. “Do I need to call the sheriff on you?”
He pulled out his cell phone and handed it to her. “Max is on my speed dial,” he offered, annoyingly helpful. “All of my cousins are.”
She exhaled noisily and collapsed on the other end of the couch. “Casey—”
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Allison Leigh
HELP WANTED: HUSBANDJane Cohen needs a man for her baby plan. Love and marriage are non-negotiable – she wants the fairy tale! So she cuts her friend-with-benefits loose… because while Casey Clay is gorgeous, he doesn’t do commitment. The trouble is, this irresistible man has set the bar high for her husband hunt…Casey’s feelings run deep for Jane, but when it comes to babies he can’t give her what she wants – and his secrets don’t stop there. As mistletoe goes up around them, is this the season for Casey and Jane’s moment of truth… and shot at true love?
His back was still toward her.
He had a small scar over his right shoulder blade. She’d kissed her way over it dozens of times but had never asked what had caused it.
Why hadn’t she asked?
Because she wasn’t interested?
Or because she was afraid he wouldn’t have told her?
She slowly propped the broom handle against the wall and walked over to him. Her hand wasn’t entirely steady when she placed it on his shoulder, but it was a lot steadier than her insides felt.
He stiffened at her touch and looked at her.
She didn’t know what was tormenting him.
And maybe comfort wasn’t their thing.
But she did know what was.
She leaned forward and slowly pressed her lips against his. She felt him inhale slightly. Resistance, almost.
But not quite.
***
Return to the Double C:
Under the big blue Wyoming sky, this family discovers true love
A Weaver Christmas Gift
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
There is a saying that you can never be too rich or too thin. ALLISON LEIGH doesn’t believe that, but she does believe that you can never have enough books! When her stories find a way into the hearts—and bookshelves—of others, Allison says she feels she’s done something right. Making her home in Arizona with her husband, she enjoys hearing from her readers at Allison@allisonleigh.com (mailto:Allison@allisonleigh.com) or PO Box 40772, Mesa, AZ 85274-0772, USA.
In loving memory of Saing.
Contents
Cover (#u31947191-c22b-55f9-819c-03ea09c04a9d)
Excerpt (#u6e172314-6c5a-5633-88f2-c56913bea9ae)
Title Page (#u025ab0c9-a2a7-5c0e-8994-24d7492e1065)
About the Author (#ud0775fff-32b7-587c-89ca-bf4bae0ebaf0)
Dedication (#u157c6dd4-b2d5-5f8f-ae29-e7ac5dc34e93)
Chapter One (#ud46602f1-372e-56d9-bddd-6ec07a249f23)
Chapter Two (#u44c0cd4e-2978-5efd-9ad4-0c4cc5b301af)
Chapter Three (#uabd20e17-8ac9-5492-bfb1-ecd086436f27)
Chapter Four (#u7cb3768d-4911-5942-8b25-66d4fa177253)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_330308b9-92b5-5794-97c3-9c6d53cd410e)
“I’ve decided to get pregnant.” As far as sweet nothings went, Jane Cohen’s statement didn’t rank very high on the scale.
Casey Nathaniel Clay had to have heard her wrong. Maybe his head was still reeling from the truly phenomenal sex. Outside of the bedroom, he and Janie couldn’t seem to agree on the time of day. Inside the bedroom, though, they were like two halves of a whole.
But in the year since their relationship—for lack of a better word—had moved into the bedroom, not once had either one of them expressed an inclination to take things into the “serious” realm.
He levered himself up on his elbow and peered down at her.
Her long golden hair was tangled around her head, strands clinging to her cheeks and neck, sliding in loose curls down her chest, over her breasts that were still rising and falling as she caught her breath from not one but—hell, yeah, if he didn’t mind counting ’em—two orgasms.
He dragged his stupidly reluctant gaze upward to meet her coffee-colored eyes. “What’s that you say?”
She pressed her lips together. They were the same soft pink as her nipples. “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.” Annoyance rang in her voice as she impatiently pushed her hair from her face. “I was perfectly clear.”
Ordinarily, people tended to consider Casey a relatively intelligent guy. His degrees from MIT supported that opinion. But just then, he didn’t seem capable of forming much of a coherent thought, much less a reasonable response.
What the hell are you talking about? was in the forefront of his mind. And he was pretty sure that wasn’t what Janie was looking for.
She seemed to know what he was thinking anyway, because her lips tightened even more.
Looking disgusted, she rolled her eyes and shoved his shoulders aside, disentangling her warm legs from his, and slid off the bed. “Cool the panic jets, Casey.” Her voice was tart as a bowl of lemon juice with the closest supply of sugar a few counties away. “I wasn’t suggesting I wanted to get pregnant by you.”
The words stung more than she’d ever know.
He eyed her, wondering why he’d thought that getting into bed with the infernal woman was a good idea in the first place. But that was just what happened when a man followed his baser nature. “Then why on earth did you bring it up now?” he groused.
She made that impatient sound that only women seemed to know how to make, the sound meant to convey he was missing something completely obvious to anyone with a half a brain. The sound that pretty much meant he was dumber than a box of rocks. She retrieved her robe from the back of the bedroom door and slid into it, yanking the belt around her narrow waist.
The action only served to draw attention to her breasts.
They were perfect, those breasts. Surprisingly full for someone with such a lean, athletic figure. Her legs were perfect, too. And don’t get him started on her butt—
“Because if I want to have a baby, all this has to change.” Her tone—superior and vaguely snooty—pulled his attention back to her face. She was waving her hand toward the bed. Toward him.
The pink robe was thin. It clung lovingly to her curves as she moved around the room, snatching up their strewn articles of clothing.
Again, he focused with an effort and bunched the blanket around his hips as he sat up. This particular turn of the conversation made sprawling there naked as a jaybird seem ill-advised. “Change,” he repeated warily.
She made that sound again and tossed him his jeans. She hadn’t found his boxers yet, but he didn’t care. He got off the bed and pulled on the jeans anyway. “Obviously, I can’t proceed with my plan while we’re—” she waved her hand again “—whatever we are.”
“Friends with benefits,” he hazarded. It was a safer definition than some he could have offered.
She snorted softly. “I think friends is overstating.”
He grimaced, not liking the fact that her words bit any more than he liked the way the night had taken such an abrupt turn south. “We’re friends,” he grumbled. Maybe it was an exaggeration, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t an outright lie.
Her eyebrows rose as if she didn’t believe the claim any more than he did. She’d pulled on the pair of black horn-rimmed glasses that she rarely wore when she was working at Colbys, the bar and grill she’d bought five years ago. The lenses made her eyes look unnaturally large.
The first time he’d seen her wearing them, he’d decided the bookish glasses made her look even sexier.
Oddly approachable.
Times like this, he wished he’d never seen her in them, considering they’d ended up in bed together almost immediately after.
“Please,” she drawled. “In what way are we friends? There’s nothing on which we ever agree.”
Even over that point, he had to differ. “You pour a decent beer. And you came to your senses finally and stopped charging to use the pool tables.”
“High praise. We don’t have a friendship. We have a...a sexship.” She didn’t look at him as she tossed him his T-shirt. It still hit him square in the chest. “I want to have a baby,” she said again. “But I have no desire to be a single mother.” She bent over again and the lapels of her robe gaped, giving him an eyeful of creamy skin. “Call me old-fashioned, but I intend to be married first.” She straightened and dropped his socks on the corner of the bed in front of him.
Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?
“And then stay that way,” she added flatly. “My mom never married my dad. After she kicked him out, she struggled every single day raising my sister and me. Trust me. I am not doing that. I want a husband.”
His head felt oddly light. He sat on the bed and shoved his feet into the socks. “You told me you’d had one of those and couldn’t imagine wanting another.”
“I don’t want another husband like Gage,” she said, as if Casey was missing the point. “He was a complete workaholic.” She gave Casey a pointed look, evidently accusing him of fitting the description, too. “I want someone who will put me first.”
“Someone who’ll let you run the show, you mean,” he muttered. One thing he’d learned about Janie Cohen was that she liked to think she was always in the driver’s seat.
She gave him one of her snippy smiles. “At least I have a plan.”
He scratched his chin. He’d forgotten to shave before coming to see her. He usually tried to remember to, because her fair skin was so easily marred by his whiskers. But he’d had a long day and hadn’t thought beyond seeing her as soon as possible. “Am I supposed to take some hint there that you think I don’t?”
“I’m not talking about you.”
Maybe he’d spent too many hours studying computer feeds, because following her thought process was giving him a headache. “And the plan is to get a husband so you can get knocked up?”
“I’m a thirty-two-year-old woman,” she said. “Knocked up is for teenagers who don’t know better.”
“Like your mom.”
She made a face and ignored that. “Obviously, I’m not getting any younger. So I need to get started.” She waved him out of the way and smartly flipped the sheets into some semblance of order.
He had the feeling he was being flipped away just as easily as the wrinkles in the fabric.
“Just like that.” He snapped his fingers in her face. “What are you going to do? Order yourself up some husband out of Mail-Order Husbands Weekly?”
She hesitated as if she was actually giving the idea some thought.
“I was kidding,” he said hastily.
“There are mail-order brides,” she said. “Guess there are probably mail-order husbands. But no.” She fluffed the pillows, put them back at the head of the bed and turned to face him, her hands propped on her narrow hips. She looked up at him through her glasses with her vaguely buggy brown eyes.
And he was damned if he didn’t want to tumble her right back onto that bed and mess up the sheets all over again, even if she was annoying as hell.
“I intend to find a husband right here in Weaver.”
He barked out a laugh before he could stop himself.
“You think it’s funny?” Her voice went silky but her eyes were as chilly as a Weaver winter. “You think I’m incapable of finding a man who might want to put a ring on it?”
“I think the pickings around Weaver are gonna be a tad slim for a woman like you,” he answered, trying unsuccessfully to curtail his untimely amusement. Their small Wyoming town wasn’t exactly a mecca of single, eligible adults. Despite the consumer electronics company he ostensibly worked for, Cee-Vid, the town was first and foremost a ranching community. Always had been. Always would be. And Jane—for all of her talents—didn’t strike him as a typical rancher’s wife.
A niggle of guilt pricked his mind over that. Among his own relatives, he could count a passel of ranchers. None of their wives were particularly “typical” either. There were doctors, accountants, business owners...
Jane had propped her hand on her hip and was staring down her nose at him. Considering she was about a foot shorter, it was a feat he might have admired under other circumstances.
“A woman like me,” she repeated. Her eyebrow arched. “Want to explain that one, Clay?”
“Untie the knots in your little white panties, sport,” he returned. “I just meant you’re a tad...classy...for some of the guys around here.”
She didn’t look particularly soothed. “I run a bar where the dress code just means wiping the manure off your cowboy boots before you come in,” she snapped. “How on God’s green earth does that make me classy?”
Stubborn. Headstrong. A straight shooter who didn’t suffer fools. He kept the descriptors to himself. At one time or another—often all at once—they fit the woman standing in front of him. She was also beautiful as hell, uncommonly unpretentious and a challenge to his senses as well as his brain.
He dragged his T-shirt on over his head and pretended not to notice the way her gaze dropped, just for a second, to run hungrily over his abdomen before he yanked the white cotton over it.
Sex.
That was what the two of them were good at.
Exceedingly good at, they’d discovered. And, he’d thought, to their mutual satisfaction and content.
Now she wanted more. A baby. A husband.
“What about love?” he asked.
If he hadn’t been watching closely, he might have missed the way her gaze flickered. “What about it?”
“That’s usually the reason people get married, isn’t it? What’s in this plan of yours when it comes to that?”
* * *
It was the first week of September, but Jane still felt a shiver jolt down her spine.
She casually moved away from Casey, crossing the room to retrieve the garish Hawaiian-print shirt he’d been wearing unbuttoned over his T-shirt when he’d arrived. The garment was hideous in the extreme, but it smelled of him and that wasn’t hideous at all. No. The scent was warm. Slightly spicy. Definitely heady.
She shivered again and turned to carelessly fling the shirt at him. She wished she could fling away the man’s effect on her as easily. “I’m not looking for love,” she said blithely. “Just a—”
“Legitimate sperm donor.” As he caught the shirt, he seemed to look right into the depths of her with his silvery-gray eyes.
“Why does it even matter to you?” She kept her voice tart as much for self-preservation as from habit. Unless she was mindless with lust in his arms, it was always easier to spar with the tall man with the butterscotch-colored hair than have any sort of serious conversation. Mostly because she was never entirely sure what exactly he was thinking.
Despite his outwardly laid-back style, she’d never made the mistake of thinking Casey Clay actually was laid-back. He was too intense for that. And much, much too secretive.
When it came to him, sex was easy.
It was all the rest that was impossible.
“Be glad that I’m under no illusions that you might be a candidate,” she finished.
His mobile, scrumptious lips twisted wryly. “Janie.” He pressed his splayed hand against his chest. “I might be wounded.”
“But you’re not,” she deadpanned, then rolled her eyes when his cell phone chirped and he grabbed it off the nightstand. “Naturally.” It wasn’t the first time his phone had interrupted them. At least this time it had waited until after.
She went into the adjoining bathroom while he answered. Not particularly proud that she tried to listen in but trying anyway, she twisted her tangled hair up into a clip at the back of her head.
However, his voice was low, his words brief, revealing as little as they ever did.
She returned to the bedroom just as he was pocketing the phone. “Let me guess.” She might not have overheard the reason he was being called away, but she had a good idea where he was going and she smiled facetiously. “Somebody’s computer is on the fritz at Cee-Vid and you have to go save the day. Or the night, as it were.”
His gaze slid over her, setting off another darned shiver. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
Cee-Vid produced video games. He was in charge of the computer systems there, but she couldn’t imagine what could be so critical at the business that he’d get called at all hours of the night in the way he often was even if he’d already been there all day.
She’d have suspected him of having a wife if Weaver weren’t so small that such a fact would have been impossible to hide.
Everyone knew everyone else’s business around town. Or so it had seemed to her since she’d moved there five years ago. As a result, it was still an amazing thing to her that they’d been able to keep their...encounters...private.
He stepped up to her and raised his hand. She stiffened. Not from fear, but because he was drawing a single fingertip slowly down her cheek and she felt a corresponding line of heat work down her spine. He was a truly impossible man, but for some unfathomable reason, he charged her batteries in a way nobody else had ever done.
And the faint half smile on his face warned her that he knew exactly the reaction he elicited.
Dammit.
“Mebbe you figure you don’t need to order up a dose of love with this prospective husband of yours, but you didn’t say anything about chemistry either.” He waited a knowing beat. “Don’t pretend you don’t want passion. I know otherwise.”
She wanted to move back from him in the worst way, but she knew that was what he was expecting, so she held her ground. “Passion is overrated,” she said.
His eyes took on an unholy glint. “It gets a couple into the bedroom, sport. I’ve always heard that making babies is a lot more fun when it’s done the old-fashioned way. Or were you thinking you’d be able to get yourself in the family way while keeping your convenient husband at arm’s length?”
“Medical science is a wonderful thing.” She savored the satisfaction of actually igniting some surprise in his silvery gaze. “But no. I want a husband. I want to make a baby—or babies—with him.” Though she hadn’t expected it, over the past several months she’d come to realize she wanted the same thing her little sister had. She wanted to be more than a business owner. She wanted a real home. A real family. “I expect to get pregnant in the usual manner.”
His lips twisted again. He was probably thinking she was nuts. She knew he wasn’t jealous. He didn’t care about her that way. He cared that she gave as good as she got when their clothes started hitting the floor.
Chemistry. She and Casey Clay had it in spades.
But that was all they had.
There was no future. He’d made that abundantly clear from the very start. She might have had a change of mind along the way, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he had.
Or that he ever would.
“Borrow your sister’s baby for a week,” he advised. “The allure might wear off after 24/7 of diapers and bottles and crying.” He tugged the garish shirt over his wide shoulders. “Hell. Get a puppy. Angeline’s gonna have a whole new litter of ’em in a month or so that’ll be needing homes. I’ll hook you up with one.”
She just eyed him. Angeline, she knew, was his sister who lived with her husband and family over in Sheridan. They’d met once in passing some time ago. In passing because family get-togethers weren’t part of Casey and Jane’s deal. He didn’t invite her to any—even though, with the Clay family, who had fingers in nearly every pie in town, there seemed to be many.
And if he had invited her, she’d have told him he was out of his tree anyway. They weren’t dating. They were just sleeping together. Nothing more.
“This isn’t like deciding I want a new pair of shoes. Or a new dog. I’ve never even had a dog.”
He gave her a vaguely shocked look and she wished she’d kept that tidbit to herself.
“I want a husband,” she added quickly. “A family of my own. I want it when I wake up and when I go to sleep and I’m too old now not to do something about it!”
Something came and went in his eyes as he put on his worn tennis shoes. He didn’t even bother tying the laces. “If you’re bound and determined, I could probably set you up with a couple candidates.”
She nearly choked. “I don’t need your help finding a husband.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, sport.” Then his head swooped and his mouth caught hers in a fast, thorough kiss that left her knees weak and her insides hot. When he lifted his head again, she was certain there was amusement lurking at the corners of his lips. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
About what? Ending things with him? Allowing him to set her up with someone else?
“I won’t change my mind,” she said stiffly. Removing him from the equation would best be accomplished cold turkey. Like a swift yank that removed an adhesive bandage. “So the next time you’re looking for a bedmate, you’ll have to look elsewhere.” The fact that he wouldn’t have to look hard wasn’t lost on her. Despite his unfathomable dedication to the ugly shirts of the world, Casey Clay was stupefyingly gorgeous. Intelligent and humorous despite his secretive nature. In her very own bar, Jane had witnessed countless women throwing themselves at him.
She had never been one of them. Their relationship, their sexship, hadn’t been planned. It had been more like a head-on collision neither one of them had predicted.
“It won’t be the same.” His lips crooked. “Nobody gives good...bickering...like you.”
She pressed her lips together, not wanting to be amused, particularly now, and headed downstairs to the back door. He never parked in front on the street, where his truck might be noticed. She yanked open the door. It was almost midnight and outside, everything was quiet and still. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure—”
“It’s been more than that,” he drawled as he stepped past her. “Since passion isn’t factored in this plan of yours, you’ll probably want to remember what it feels like when you’re working your way through your matrimonial prospects. But if you find yourself in need of a reminder, you know where to find me.”
“Working at Cee-Vid,” she said smoothly. “Because nothing’s more important than keeping those video games coming.” Then, before she changed her mind, she pushed the door closed behind him.
If she’d wanted confirmation that Casey would never be interested in redefining their friends-with-benefits relationship, she’d certainly gotten it.
She just wished that it didn’t hurt quite so much.
Chapter Two (#ulink_f7751b0a-4379-5c5e-a644-2c56c32fed21)
Inside his office at Cee-Vid, Casey entered a code on his computer that revealed a security panel in one wall. Cee-Vid had been producing some of the most popular video games in the world for the past few decades. But behind the front, the company did a heck of a lot more as a location of Hollins-Winword, an equally successful organization that hardly anyone in the world knew existed. International security. Black ops. Hollins-Winword did it all and they did it well. And right now, they had an asset on the ground in Nepal named Bax Kennedy who had missed his last two check-ins. Casey’s mind should have been strictly on that fact. But it wasn’t.
It was on Jane Cohen.
He stepped up to the security panel that looked like a small wall mirror and stared into the iris scanner.
She wanted to get pregnant. Have a baby.
The scan completed and a numeric panel lit behind the false mirror’s surface.
Why hadn’t he seen it coming? She was a woman. Past thirty. There were enough females among the Clay clan for him to know perfectly well that her desire for a family wasn’t unnatural. Hell, his entire extended family believed in having kids.
It was what the Clays did.
Except for him.
He tapped in another code on the smooth surface and heard the nearly soundless, hollow release that came from somewhere inside the wall. A moment later, part of the wall moved, revealing itself as the door it actually was, and he stepped through into the cavernous communications center they called Control.
“Status?”
Seth Banyon leaned back in his chair and stretched, looking relaxed even though his eyes never stopped roving the bank of screens covering the wall in front of him. “Same.”
Casey felt the automatic door closing behind him and he moved across the large blue-lit room to stand behind his associate. Like Casey, Seth collected a paycheck that showed that he worked for Cee-Vid. But also like Casey, his real employer was hidden deep and well beneath that. “This was a simple assignment,” he said. “All Bax had to do was escort the emir’s niece back to college.”
“Without drawing attention to the fact that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be in the first place. Money,” Banyon muttered. “More trouble than it’s worth, if you ask me.”
The emir had plenty of it. His affection for his only sister’s three children was well-known. When whispers of a possible kidnapping attempt had reached him, he’d reached out to Hollins-Winword to discreetly resolve matters.
Casey had two sisters and from them, four nephews and a niece. They were still children but whatever their ages, he knew there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to help keep them safe.
He stepped around Banyon and tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards that surrounded the room. The uppermost screen on the wall in front of them shifted from a satellite image to a photograph of the emir’s niece and nephews. “This isn’t about money. It’s about a power struggle between the emir and his despot of a second cousin. And a whole lot of oil behind them. Where are the other two?”
“Safe behind the walls of their London estate in the loving arms of their mama.”
“At least that’s something. We’ve only got Samira to worry about. Wish to hell she would have stayed in London instead of going out on this mission trip of hers.”
A series of electronic chimes sounded and a moment later, another interior door slid open and the man in charge stepped inside.
To most of the world—including the regular employees of Cee-Vid, who didn’t know anything else was going on beneath the surface—Tristan Clay was merely the brilliant mind behind Cee-Vid.
To a select few, he was close to the top of the food chain inside Hollins-Winword. And to Casey, Tristan Clay was not only his boss but his uncle.
The older man’s piercing blue gaze went straight to the bank of screens. “Where’re we at?”
Protocols were always followed whenever an asset or an operative went off plan. It was easier for Casey to work through them than it was for him to think about Janie’s “plan,” and he nudged Banyon out of the seat and took his position at the controls. “Last contact was thirty-six hours ago.” His fingers started flying over the console, satellites high above the world snapped to attention, and Casey did the only thing in the world he figured he was meant to do.
He kept Hollins-Winword’s own safe.
* * *
“You do realize that if women could just snap their fingers and find the perfect man, the entire chocolate industry might crumble to dust?” Hayley Templeton’s slender fingers hovered indecisively over the opened box of Godiva delectables sitting on top of the gleaming wood bar at Colbys.
Jane wasn’t indecisive at all. She plucked a heart-shaped piece from the box and bit it in half, sighing a little over the explosion of bliss on her taste buds. “I know I can’t just snap my fingers,” she countered. If her digits possessed such magic, she’d have waved them over Casey and he wouldn’t have bothered offering up his friends and associates to put their heads in her matrimonial noose.
He would have given his neck to her willingly.
Instead, he’d bolted.
Just as she’d known he would.
The chocolate suddenly lost its appeal, but she ate the second half of the heart anyway before rinsing her hands at the bar sink and pulling the latest rack of glasses fresh from the dishwasher built into the cabinets below the bar. “Other women manage to find spouses here in Weaver. So why can’t I?”
Hayley finally selected a chocolate and replaced the lid on the gold box. “Get that away from me before I eat the rest.”
“They are your chocolates,” Jane reminded her. Her friend had brought them with her when she’d stopped by the bar and grill that afternoon.
“And I expect you to save me. I haven’t been running with Sam Dawson four times a week only to have a box of chocolates, given to me by a grateful patient, going straight to my hips.” Hayley groaned. “Sam’s a slave driver. You’d think she’d have a little sympathy for her friends.”
Sam Dawson was a deputy with the sheriff’s department. “She gave me a parking ticket the other day. Sam doesn’t have any sympathy for anyone.” Jane took pity on Hayley and tucked away the golden box of temptation before unloading the rack of glasses onto the shelves on the wall behind her. “I think she was just making up for the fact that I kicked her butt in racquetball last week.”
“I honestly don’t know how I ended up with such competitive friends.” Hayley propped her elbows on the bar and glanced around. At three in the afternoon, the place was busy with families having late lunches or early dinners, but the bar itself was quiet.
It would pick up later, though. Friday nights were always packed at Colbys. The establishment had been a Weaver staple since long before Jane had bought it from the family of a friend she’d known since college. Well, she amended mentally, since her ex-husband, Gage Stanton, had staked her purchase of the place.
What was unusual, though, was Hayley stopping in at that hour of the day. Finished with the sparkling clean pilsner glasses, Jane turned back to her friend. “So what’s wrong?”
Hayley ran her hand down the sleek tail of her ponytail. “Who says anything’s wrong?”
Jane shook her head a little. When it came to the town of Weaver, even after several years there, they were still relative newcomers. As was Sam Dawson. But the three of them had all struck up an enduring friendship. She dumped ice into a glass, filled it with diet cola and set it in front of her friend. “You know bartenders are the best listeners. Comes with the territory.”
Hayley pulled a face and reached for the drink. “Counselors are the best listeners,” she corrected her. “My PhD in psychology says so.” She twisted the glass between her fingers. “Just some family dissension. Evidently, after more than thirty years of estrangement, my grandmother has been trying to mend fences with my dad and my uncle, and they’re not having any of it.”
Because the bar was so quiet and the restaurant section had its own complement of servers, Jane pulled up the stool she kept behind the bar and sat down to sip at her own soda. “This is their mom you’re talking about?”
Hayley nodded. “Vivian Archer Templeton.” She drew out the name, then lifted her shoulders. “She lives in Pittsburgh and has been making noises about visiting them in Braden. I think Daddy and Uncle David are wrong and should be more receptive. They didn’t really take kindly to my input. As far as they’re concerned, she’s just a selfish, filthy-rich snob who’ll never change.”
“And Dr. Templeton never goes off duty,” Jane murmured. “Is she really rich?”
“Loaded. She married into it, evidently, when she married her first husband. My grandfather. Steel or something.” Then Hayley seemed to shake off her thoughts. “Back to you and the great husband hunt. Believe me. I completely understand a ticking biological clock.” Her lips twisted ruefully as she patted her chest. “Ticktock, ticktock here, too. None of us are getting any younger. But women these days do have babies without rushing into a marriage.”
“Not me.” Suddenly restless, Jane grabbed a clean bar towel and moved to the far end to start polishing the long wooden surface. “I know society has changed since my mother did it, but that doesn’t mean single parenting is easy. As a family counselor, you would know that more than anyone.”
“True enough.” Hayley rested her elbow on the bar and propped her chin on her hand. “Though your mom didn’t make that choice alone. Your dad walked out on all of you, didn’t she?”
“She made him leave.” And once he was gone, her mother had pretended he never existed at all. Since her parents had never married, doing so had been horribly easy.
Hayley made a soft mmming sound.
Jane pulled out the chocolate box again and waved it under Hayley’s nose. “Stop looking at me like I’m one of your patients or I’m going to open this up again.”
Hayley pushed the box aside. “Fine. Since we’ve established the fact that you can’t just snap your fingers for a husband, what do you plan to do about it?” There was a smile in her eyes as she nodded toward the fishbowl on one end of the counter. “Have a drawing like you do for a free meal?”
“I’ve heard worse ideas.” Jane put away the chocolates again and eyed the bowl where people dropped in a business card or simply a name and phone number, scratched on the back of their receipt, for her weekly drawing. “I wonder if any guys would bother to enter.”
Hayley laughed. “For a chance with you? Half the men in this town—married or not—have probably had a fantasy or two about you.”
Jane grimaced. “I seriously doubt that.” She certainly hoped not. “Kind of an ick factor there, Dr. Templeton.”
“I know who isn’t at all icky.” Her friend smiled slyly. “Casey Clay.”
“I should never have told you about him,” Jane muttered.
Hayley’s smile widened. “If I were your therapist—”
“You’re not.”
“—I would suggest that you think about your feelings where he’s concerned.”
“I have no feelings,” Jane lied. “The man is impossible. He can’t even keep his truck clean. The last time I saw it, he had a pile of junk on the passenger seat that you wouldn’t believe.”
“Good family.” Hayley held up her index finger. “All of the Clays who live in the area are plain old good people.” She held up a second finger. “Well over six feet tall. Exceptional shape.” Her eyes twinkled. “Thick golden-brown hair and gray eyes. In other words, the usual good genes for that particular family.” She held up her third finger. “Intelligent.” Her pinky finger joined the others. “Good sense of humor.” She added her thumb. “Single, heterosexual male. Messy truck notwithstanding, I could go on.”
“Then you date him.”
Hayley laughed softly and glanced around the empty bar before leaning forward over her crossed arms. “You’re the one who’s been secretly sleeping with him for the past year. Seems to me he’d be your best candidate. And you realize if you’re not dating him, someone else will. Isn’t that going to bother you?”
Jane shrugged as if it wouldn’t, even though the very idea of it made her more than a little ill. “What he does isn’t my concern. He’s allergic to commitment anyway. He’ll tell you that himself.” He’d certainly said that exact thing to her more than once. Before they’d ended up in bed together, as well as after.
“You used to say the same thing about yourself.”
“Some allergies cure themselves, I guess. I want a baby.” She also was afraid she wanted Casey, but that was never going to happen. Cutting her losses now would be easier than having to later.
Hayley’s expression turned sympathetic. “I know you do, sweetie. But—” she lifted her hand peaceably “—this is just a little food for thought. Sometimes people will focus harder on a secondary issue in order to avoid dealing with a primary issue.”
“Casey Clay is not my primary issue,” Jane said flatly. “I knew exactly where we stood with each other and that’s why I ended things with him last night.” It was her own bad luck she’d allowed her emotions to creep in where he was concerned. She dragged the fishbowl over and dumped the half-dozen business cards and receipts out onto the bar top. “I can’t be hunting for a husband when I’m sleeping with him.”
She tugged off the card taped to the front of the fishbowl that described the weekly free-meal drawing and turned it over to the blank side. She pulled a pen from her pocket and uncapped it. “So what do you think? Win a free meal with Jane Cohen? Entries open to single men only?”
Hayley chuckled wryly and covered her eyes. “Girlfriend, you are just asking for trouble.”
* * *
“Is she serious?”
At the sound of his cousin’s voice, Casey looked up from the pool table where he was lining up his next shot. Erik was holding the fishbowl that usually sat on the end of Colbys’ wooden bar top.
Casey shrugged and focused on his shot again. “She gives away a free meal every week. Has for a long time. So what?” It was Friday night. Colbys was typically crowded. And even though Casey hadn’t really wanted to meet his cousin here after his encounter with Jane the night before, he hadn’t been able to come up with a good excuse not to. He’d located Bax, the missing asset in Nepal. He and the emir’s niece were no worse for wear, and though Bax hadn’t yet gotten her returned to her London apartment, at least they knew she hadn’t been abducted by her father’s terroristic cousin. For now, things were back on track.
At least in that world.
Casey involuntarily looked over to the bar where Jane was busy pouring out drinks. Her long hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail that swayed every time she turned to grab a glass off the shelves behind her. She was in her usual working garb of black T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, but the fact that she wore them transformed the ordinary into something extraordinary.
She was a smart cookie. Never missed a thing. So he knew she was well aware of his presence. She just hadn’t bothered to give him so much as a glance.
He, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking toward her.
He took his shot and sent the balls rolling.
None landed where he’d intended.
“Not just her usual free meal,” Erik was saying. He set the fishbowl on the rail near Casey before leaning over the table with his cue. “Looks to me like she’s shaking up the status quo between you two.”
Erik was the only one who knew of Casey’s involvement with the woman.
Past involvement, he reminded himself, since she’d pretty much kicked him to the curb the evening before.
He dragged his attention away from the smooth curves of Jane’s lightly tanned arms. “She’s over twenty-one,” he said casually. “Free to do whatever she wants.”
“That why your game seems shot to hell all of a sudden?”
He ignored Erik and glanced at the fishbowl.
When the words on the side of it penetrated, he very nearly tore the white index card free of the tape holding it in place.
She certainly wasn’t wasting any time with her husband hunt.
He held up the glass bowl, studying the contents. The damned thing was more than half full. Evidently, adding herself to the free-meal menu had spurred a whole new interest in her drawing.
“She’s out of her tree,” he muttered. Glancing around the bar, he spotted Keith Lambert, who was one of the game designers on the legitimate side of Cee-Vid, whom his uncle had recently hired straight out of school. The young guy, his usual plaid bow tie in place, was sitting in a corner booth with a couple other Cee-Viders. All three of them had their noses stuck in their cell phones as if they didn’t know how to communicate face-to-face.
Casey moved over to their table and plunked the fishbowl in the center of it, startling the young men. He knew plenty of designers who didn’t look as if they needed a good dose of sunshine, but these guys sure did. Collectively, they were pretty much the embodiment of every clichéd computer-geek joke. “Step right up, guys.” He tapped the bowl with Jane’s hand-printed invitation stuck to the side.
Keith squinted through his horn-rimmed glasses as he read the card. Then he craned his neck to look at Jane behind the bar across the room. “Sweet. I hear older women are hotter in the sack.”
Casey’s fingers curled. He’d bet his favorite shirt that Keith had never even kissed a girl, hot or otherwise. The same went for his pallid companions. Jane would make mincemeat of all of them before they ever got to dessert, much less anything after that. “So I’ve heard,” he said blandly. “Might consider stuffing the ballot box to up the odds in your favor.”
Keith’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Cheat?”
“She doesn’t specify one entry,” Casey reasoned. “The only restriction is you have to be single.” He plucked the pen from Keith’s ink-stained shirt pocket and tossed it on the table in front of him. “Go for it, man.”
Keith’s buddies were grinning and nearly bouncing in their booth.
Before he either rolled his eyes or knocked their heads together, Casey returned to his pool game.
But the game was already done. Erik had already cleared the felt. “You owe me twenty,” his cousin said, looking as if he wanted to laugh.
Casey pulled out his wallet and slapped down the money. “Why aren’t you home in the loving arms of your wife, anyway? Wedded bliss already wearing off?” His cousin and Isabella had gotten married the previous year and Casey knew good and well that they were besotted with each other.
“Izzy’s in Cheyenne with Lucy for a few days. They’ve taken some of their students for a dance workshop down there before school starts up next week for the fall.”
Lucy was another of their cousins, and she ran the only dance school in Weaver. Isabella taught a few classes there. “Little girls in tap shoes or big girls in belly-dancing costumes?” He felt his gaze straying back toward the bar but mastered the impulse and picked up his beer mug instead. “Your wife teaches both.”
Erik grinned wryly. “Don’t forget the pole-dancing-for-fitness classes.” He rubbed his jaw. “She actually had me try it, you know.”
Casey nearly dropped his beer. Despite being Tristan Clay’s son, Erik had gone into the ranching side of the Clay dynasty. But even in that, he had to go his own way, choosing to maintain his own brand rather than use the Double-C brand started by their grandfather, Squire, that was already one of the most well-known in the state. His cousin was salt-of-the-earth steady and more than a little old-fashioned, so the image that sprang to mind was one for the record books. “Swinging around on a pole?”
His cousin looked chagrinned. “It’s harder than you think. I fell on my ass. Izzy’s never gonna let me live it down.”
For the first time since Jane’s wanna-baby bombshell, Casey actually laughed. “She’s not the only one. I just don’t want to picture it in my mind. Afraid it’ll do permanent brain damage. What about Murph?”
Murphy had been Isabella’s teenage ward when she’d first come to Weaver. Now she was legally his mother and soon Erik would legally be his father. And Casey could rib the other man—who was his best friend as much as his cousin—about anything under the sun, including his new family, but he knew Erik had never been happier.
Erik grinned. “He was no more successful at it than I was, but you didn’t hear that from me. So what’s Jane really up to?”
Casey hid his frown in his beer and shrugged. He hadn’t shared Jane’s sudden life goal with Erik, mostly because it might lead to discussions he didn’t want to have. “Don’t ask me.”
Erik gave him a disbelieving look, but thankfully let the matter drop. Instead, he waved at the pool table. “Double or nothing?”
“Rack ’em up.” Casey’s gaze started to slide to the bar but he physically turned his back so he was looking toward the front door instead.
He took one last glance toward Keith. He and his buddies were busily stuffing business cards into the fishbowl.
God help them all.
Chapter Three (#ulink_95b1c6f3-f2c7-5290-932e-23941b57fb97)
Jane managed a tight smile before shutting her front door in Prospect Number Three’s face.
The past three weeks—especially the past three Thursday-night dates with Number Three and his predecessors, One and Two—had been abysmal.
Number One, a real estate agent from nearby Braden, hadn’t understood the difference between Thursday and Friday and, after standing her up at the restaurant where she’d arranged to meet him, had instead accused her of standing him up when he’d expected her there the following night. She hoped he handled his real estate transactions with more accuracy.
Number Two was a veterinary technician from right here in Weaver. Nothing really wrong with Two. Except he spent the entire evening talking about his ex-girlfriend, with whom he was clearly still in love. Jane had felt like a matronly aunt, advising him to contact the girl and make things up with her.
And Number Three...
Jane heaved a sigh and leaned back against the door she’d just closed. Number Three might possess some genius intellect, but conversing about anything outside of the video games he designed had been impossible. And then the nitwit had believed she was going to invite him in for some dessert of a very personal variety after the dinner she had paid for.
She wouldn’t have gone out with him at all, because he worked at Cee-Vid, which was too closely connected to Casey, except that Number Three—like Two and One—had won the weekly fishbowl drawing.
The first thing she was going to do when she went to the bar the next day was throw out the fishbowl and all of its contents. If the only way she could get a date was through a drawing, she’d be better off looking into that whole mail-order-husband thing.
She rubbed at the pain between her eyebrows caused by the past ninety minutes of mind-numbing boredom and headed into her bedroom, shedding her knee-length sweater dress as she went. It was still relatively early, and she was too keyed up to relax. So she changed into jeans and a bright red turtleneck and headed back out to Colbys.
She’d throw out the fishbowl when she got there.
Her assistant manager, Merilee, had worked for Jane long enough not to show her surprise when she walked in the door on what was supposed to be her night off. Jane went straight to the glass bowl and dumped the contents in the trash, along with the card displaying the “rules” of the drawing. Then she stuck the bowl beneath the counter and glanced around the sparsely occupied tables.
She didn’t want to acknowledge what she was really doing: looking to see if Casey happened to be around playing pool. The pool tables were his primary interest where Colbys was concerned. Far more than any libations that she offered in the bar or food that they served in the restaurant.
But the tables were quiet.
“Everything all right?” Merilee asked when Jane sighed a little.
“Just fine.” Jane grabbed a bottled water, then pushed through the door to the storeroom, where all the shelves were neatly packed with supplies. She went into the minuscule office squeezed between the storage room and the draft cooler where her beer kegs were housed and threw herself down on the squeaky chair behind the beat-up metal desk.
But instead of opening the water bottle or booting up her computer, she picked up the photograph of her sister that sat in a wood frame on the corner of the desk. Julia was cuddling her infant son, Drake, and Julia’s husband, Don, was cradling them both in his arms. Happiness radiated from their eyes.
Jane rubbed her thumb over the picture glass, melancholy weighting her down. Julia, who now lived in Montana, was two years younger than Jane. She and Don had been married only eighteen months, though they’d been sweethearts since high school.
Would Jane’s marriage to Gage have been more successful if they hadn’t gotten married so quickly, while they’d still been in college, where they’d met?
She rubbed her forehead again and set down the picture frame.
Melancholy. She hated it.
Annoyed with herself, she started up the computer and drank down half of the water while waiting for it to chug to life. For the past year, ever since she’d made the mistake of asking him for a little help with the recalcitrant thing, Casey had been after her to let him upgrade her system.
And you’ve only resisted because you wanted to do it yourself. He wanted to take over, and you balked.
During that first consultation, instead of fixing the computer, somehow or other, they’d ended up having sex in the storeroom after Colbys was closed down for the night.
She set the water bottle aside and thumped her hand on the side of the computer, pushing away the memory. The computer gave out a little hiccupping sound and a fan somewhere inside it whirred to life. A few moments later, the screen finally lit up, and she set about updating her books. It didn’t take her long, because she kept up with the task almost daily even though she detested it. It might be overkill—her accountant, her ex-husband and Casey had all independently accused her of it—but she liked knowing to the penny where she was at any given time.
She used to think it came from watching her mother scrimp and save and worry about every dime right up until she died before Jane moved to Weaver. But Julia had come out of their childhood without sharing this particular obsession of Jane’s.
“Pregnant yet?”
Startled, she swiveled in her chair, knocking the water bottle into the computer keyboard with her elbow. She gave Casey an annoyed look as she hastily yanked the keyboard off the desk, trying to protect it from the spilled water. “Ever hear of knocking?”
“Door wasn’t closed.” He was leaning casually against the doorjamb. “Wouldn’t worry too much about that keyboard. It’s already a decade past its life expectancy.”
She used the hem of her sweater to swipe up the spreading puddle with one hand and held the keyboard aloft with the other. It was awkward because of the cords tethering it in place; though she’d never admit it, she wished she had the nifty wireless things that Casey had tried to equip her with. “What are you doing here?”
“Grabbing a bite.”
The grill usually closed at ten on weeknights and it was still well before that. “Then get to it,” she said waspishly. “Jerry’s cooking alone tonight.” During their busier times, her main cook was joined by his son, Jerry Junior.
Casey sighed noisily and grabbed the keyboard out of her hand, holding it high when she tried to take it back. “There’s no crime in asking for help.”
“I don’t need help. I need a towel.” More annoyed with the way her stomach was jumping around at the sight of him than she was the minor spill, she scooted past him and grabbed a neatly folded towel from a stack of them in the storeroom. It was only a matter of seconds, but when she reentered the office, he was already sitting down in her chair, boots propped on the corner of her desk while he tapped away at the keyboard resting on his lap.
“Stop that!” She tried shoving at his legs, but he was immovable. There was no room to get around him, so she reached across him to wipe the towel over the desktop, drying what was left of the water. She didn’t have the computer hooked up to an internet connection—another source of contention between them—nor did she have any little computer games to amuse him. She needed the computer for one thing and one thing only: keeping her business records. “You’re snooping.”
“Nope.” His fingers flew over the keyboard with enviable ease. “Just doing a little maintenance. When’s the last time you backed up your data?”
She glared at the back of his head, controlling the urge to swat him with the towel even though it was mighty tempting. “Last week,” she lied.
He snorted. “Last month, you mean.” He tapped some more. “You need to be on an automatic backup. You’re maxing out your memory. You won’t let me add more. You keep everything that’s important about Colbys on this thing.” He looked over his shoulder up at her. “If you’re not careful, you could lose it all.”
He was the only person she’d ever met who had honest-to-goodness gray eyes. If she hadn’t spent as many hours in his arms as she had, she would have suspected the distinctive color came from contact lenses rather than nature. But she was the one whose imperfect vision required the aid of contact lenses, not Casey.
His eyebrow rose and she realized she was standing there like an idiot, staring into his eyes. “Fine,” she agreed abruptly. “I’ll get a new computer. Update it all.” She barely waited a beat. “I will get it,” she emphasized. “I don’t need you doing it for me.”
“I swear, if you needed your own appendix taken out, you’d insist on holding the scalpel.” He turned his attention back to the computer. “Still amazes me that you’re willing to let someone else contribute their gene pool to this kid you want.”
“You’re just annoyed because I’m not letting you take over and do whatever you want.”
He glanced at her again and sudden heat slid through her veins at the look in his eyes. “A month might have passed since you announced your little ‘plan—’” he air-quoted the word “—but I’m pretty sure there’re a few things I do that you still want, Janie.”
She exhaled noisily and tossed the towel over his head. “Cool your jets, Clay.” Because it was her own jets she was worried about, she backed out of the small office and headed out front to the bar. He wouldn’t say or do anything in front of other people that would give any hint they were lovers.
Had been lovers, she mentally corrected herself.
Past tense.
Merilee was mixing up a round of frozen margaritas when Jane moved behind the bar. The noise of the blender was familiar and welcome. There were a few orders waiting, and she tied a black apron around her hips, then washed her hands before starting to fill them.
Casey appeared soon after but rather than going over to the grill as she expected, he slid onto one of the bar stools near where she was working. “Think I’ll eat in here,” he said.
She wanted to gnash her teeth. Instead, without missing a beat on the Long Island iced tea she was concocting, she slid a menu in front of him.
He flipped the laminated card between his fingers. “I’ve got this thing memorized,” he pointed out.
“Which only proves the fact that you spend too much time in a bar. Beer?”
He nodded. “You’re the proprietress of said bar. I wouldn’t complain about having regular customers if I were you. Bad for business.”
She topped off the cocktail with a dash of cola, then moved down to the taps and drew his beer. She set the mug in front of him. “What’s it going to be? No, wait. Let me guess. Meat loaf and mashed or the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings?”
“Janie.” He gave her a lazy grin. “I’m touched. You know me so well.”
“I know you never order a steak when you’re here,” she said drily.
“Considering my family’s Double-C beefsteaks are the best around, why would I pay someone else for one?” He suddenly stretched across the bar toward her, but only to stick the menu back on the little pile beneath the bar.
She was glad she’d managed to control the urge to take a step back. “So which is it? Meat loaf or burger?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs.”
She shrugged. “You’re just saying that to be contrary, but it makes no difference to me. You’re the one who’ll regret it.” She turned to the register and punched in the order, then started loading glasses into a dishwasher tray.
“Where’s the fishbowl?”
Something in his tone made her neck prickle. She glanced at him. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a definite smirk of amusement lurking in his gray eyes.
“I put it away.”
“No takers in the win-a-date-with-Janie contest?”
“Actually, I had more entries than I knew what to do with. But I didn’t need them after I met Keith. You must know him from Cee-Vid. Keith Lambert?” She folded her arms on the bar top and leaned toward him conspiratorially. “He’s the perfect candidate. Intelligent. And that bow tie.” She smiled slowly. “Once that comes off, he’s very...energetic.”
Casey’s eyes narrowed. “I know you better than that, sport. Max isn’t going to find Keith’s body cut into pieces and left on the side of the road somewhere, is he? I’d hate to have to bail you out of jail.”
Max was Max Scalise, the sheriff and Casey’s cousin by marriage. There were times when Jane speculated that one out of every three people in Weaver was somehow related to the wealthy Clay family. “Why would I want to get rid of Keith?” Just because he was duller than dishwater? “He could turn out to be the—”
“Next Mr. Janie?”
“—man of my dreams.”
Casey’s lips twitched as he twisted his beer mug against the wooden surface of the bar. “In his dreams, maybe. A little young for you, isn’t he?”
Jane looked up from his hand. Why was it that his hands were callused, suntanned and very masculine, when Keith’s had been white as snow and softer than hers? The two men did the same sort of work, for Pete’s sake.
Olive, one of the servers from the grill, arrived with his order of spaghetti and meatballs. She was nineteen and made quite a production over setting the plate in front of him, along with a napkin-wrapped set of flatware and a heaping helping of nubile come-hither smiles on the side.
“Thank ya, darlin’,” Casey drawled.
Olive looked ready to swoon as she went through the archway back to the restaurant.
Jane pulled off her apron and set Casey’s bill beside his plate. “A little young for you, isn’t she?”
He laughed soundlessly. “Say the word, sport, and we can go right back to the way things were.”
Fortunately, where he was concerned, she’d had lots of practice overlooking the way he made her stomach lurch, so she was reasonably confident she didn’t display the same besotted expression as Olive.
“Oh, yeah?” She angled her head and batted her lashes comically. “You gonna put a ring on it and donate some genetic material?” She patted his cheek dismissively and walked away before she had to witness his response.
“Merilee,” she called as she headed toward the exit, “make sure Casey Clay doesn’t skip out on his bill. Don’t want anyone around here thinking they can get things for free.”
Casey watched Jane sail through the door, then glanced at Merilee, who was giving him a wry look.
“Think she had another bad date,” Merilee shared, moving down to his end of the bar.
Casey would bet on it. But he could play ignorant when he wanted. He twirled his fork in the spaghetti noodles. “What makes you say that?”
Merilee grinned. She was a little younger than Jane and lived over in Braden. Casey’d heard somewhere that she was engaged to a fireman. “If you had a good dinner date, would you be hanging around your workplace an hour after appetizers?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and shook her head. “Not me, my friend. How’s that pasta?”
“Not as good as the meat loaf would have been.”
Merilee grinned. “Not one of Jerry’s best dishes, that’s for sure. Jane’s been trying to get him to use her recipe, but he says the kitchen’s his domain and unless she wants him to quit, to leave him to it.”
Casey figured the only reason Jane allowed Jerry any leeway at all was because she couldn’t easily replace him. When it came to her business, like her personal life, she wanted to control every damn little detail.
He didn’t begrudge her that particular right—he called plenty of his own shots, too—but it definitely made dealing with her a challenge. “You said another bad date.” He gave up on the watery spaghetti and bullet-hard meatballs and picked up the beer. It was just the way he liked. A little dark. A little toasty. And not too heavy on the hops. “She having a lot of ’em?”
Merilee obviously saw nothing odd in the question. There was a reason why gossip was Weaver’s number-one sport. Everyone talked about everyone. “I know she’s had a date every Thursday night for the past month with a different guy each time. Far as I can tell, none of them led to a second date. The rest of the time, she’s here working.”
He did have to give Jane props for being a hard worker. She might bust his chops about getting called into Cee-Vid at all hours, but she wasn’t much better.
It was a good thing they’d never tried moving their relationship out of the bedroom. Even if she’d never been struck with baby fever, it still would have been a recipe for disaster.
Knowing it didn’t make the thought particularly welcome, though.
“You can take that away,” Casey told Merilee, nudging the still-full plate toward her.
“Want me to get you something else?”
He shook his head as he slid off the bar stool. He drained the last mouthful of beer and pulled some cash from his wallet that he dropped on the check. “Catch ya later, Merilee.”
She scooped up the money with a smile and turned to the register. He left the bar and headed toward his truck, parked in the lot that was situated between Colbys and the dance studio.
Even at that hour of the evening, there was still activity over there. Business was obviously going well for his cousin.
He drove out of the lot but was too restless to head home. He briefly considered dropping by his parents’ place. Maggie and Daniel Clay still lived in the house where Casey had been born and raised. But he decided against it. He enjoyed his folks’ company, but he wasn’t in the mood for a dose of happy hearth and home. For the same reason, he didn’t drop by J.D.’s place. His sister and her husband, Jake, were always welcoming, too. Jake’s twin boys—preteen hellions that they were—would be chasing around while two-year-old Tucker did his level best to keep up with his big brothers.
He rubbed his fingers absently over the gnawing in his chest and drove without stopping right past his own house—a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farmhouse that he’d moved from the country into town and restored with his dad’s help—all the way to Shop-World, which was on the other side of Weaver.
His excuse was he needed to pick up some groceries for his empty refrigerator. That Janie lived out by the big-box store was just a coincidence.
Her bright and shiny silver pickup was parked in front of her condo when he trolled past. She’d turned on her porch light. He looked up at the still-dark window on the second floor directly above the door. Her bedroom. He doubted she’d gone to bed. She was probably puttering around in her kitchen or the walled-in yard she had out back, where he’d always parked before when he’d come calling. It was rare for her to just sit and chill. She always seemed to need to be doing something.
He circled the block, giving up the pretense altogether that he cared about groceries when he passed Shop-World for the second time without a glance, and slowly drove past her condo again. The light had gone on in her bedroom window, and she was standing in front of the window looking out.
Dammit.
No way she’d fail to see his dusty black pickup truck creeping, two miles an hour, down her street when there was a big ol’ streetlamp overhead. Speeding up would make him look even more stupid. Stopping altogether wasn’t an option.
She wanted things he couldn’t give her, he reminded himself.
Then she lifted her arms and closed the white plantation shutters, cutting herself off from view.
Another needless reminder. She wanted things, but not from him.
His jaw tight, he turned around and drove home.
Chapter Four (#ulink_7b4764ad-813e-59fc-a497-01d60d77e433)
“Arlo Bellamy.”
Jane turned her attention from the strawberry daiquiris she was mixing for a trio of young women she’d just carded to Hayley, who was sitting at the end of the bar. “What?”
Hayley tucked her hair behind her ear. She was nodding. “Arlo Bellamy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him before. He’s my neighbor. You should go out with him.”
Despite herself, Jane’s gaze flicked toward the pool tables.
It was Saturday night and the Clay contingent was out in force. Casey was there, wielding his personal pool cue with his typical expertise. He had at least a dozen relatives with him. With a group that large, she would have assumed they were celebrating something special. But experience had already shown her that when it came to the Clay family, they didn’t seem to need any special reason to socialize en masse.
“He’s thirty-eight,” Hayley was saying. “He’s the estate lawyer who has that office down on Second Street.”
Jane focused with an effort on her friend’s voice rather than Casey. “The one who has that bronze horse statue out in front?”
Hayley nodded. “I think you’d have a lot in common.”
“Never met him.” She couldn’t recall the lawyer ever stepping foot in Colbys.
“So? He’s nice.”
“How do you know? Just because he’s a lawyer?” She flipped on the blender and assembled three glasses in front of her. “Guy could be a stalker.” She thought of Casey driving past her house the other evening.
She’d been dangerously close to beckoning him to come inside.
And where would that have gotten her?
Certainly no closer to marriage and a baby.
“I doubt he’s a stalker,” Hayley said drily. “He’d have chosen to live somewhere other than Weaver where he’d have a larger pool of pickings.”
Jane killed the blender and poured out the sweet drinks. Personally, she found the daiquiri concoctions sickening, but they never failed to appeal to a good portion of her patrons. She swirled whipped cream on top of the pink drinks and set them on a tray for her server to pick up, then started on the next order. She’d been tending bar for so many years that the motions were routine. Comfortable. “If he’s so nice, why haven’t you dated him?”
Hayley gave her a look. “Girlfriend, you are the one who says she’s on the hunt for a husband. Not me.”
“Nor me,” Sam Dawson said as she stepped up to the bar and slid onto the stool that Hayley had been saving for her. “Sorry I’m late.”
Unconcerned, Hayley waved her hand toward Jane. “You’ve met Arlo,” she said to Sam. “Tell her he’s a nice guy.”
“He’s a nice guy,” Sam said obediently. Her dark blond hair was pulled into the usual knot at the back of her head. “No arrests since I’ve been here.”
Hayley grinned. “See, Jane? No arrests.”
Jane set a bottle of light beer in front of Sam and flipped off the bottle cap in the same motion before turning back to her order. “High praise, all right.” She wondered if Casey had ever been arrested.
Probably not. From all appearances, as a general rule the Clays seemed to be a highly upstanding lot.
“Arlo might not want to go out with me, then.” She pulled the bottle of Grey Goose down from the shelf behind her and poured it liberally over ice. “I have been.” She followed the vodka with a splash of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and set the drink on another tray. For whatever reason, cocktails seemed to be the order of the evening among the crowd. Usually beer and margaritas were the heavy favorites but that night she was serving up everything from Manhattans to Slippery Nipples.
“No way.” Both Hayley and Sam looked agog.
She paused in front of them, long enough to pull another steaming rack of glasses out of the dishwasher. “That’s how I met Gage in college. A couple dozen of us were protesting the unfair firing of a professor and we all got picked up.” She set the rack on the rubberized mat next to the small sink and moved down to the taps. “Eventually, the charges were dismissed.”
A burst of laughter came from the crowd of Clays surrounding the pool tables, drawing more eyes than just Jane’s. Which was fortunate for her, because she had no witnesses to the way she managed to spill Guinness over her hand while she watched Casey’s fine, fine behind as he leaned over for his shot. She shut off the tap and swiped her hand over her apron, then loaded up another tray. She had three cocktail waitresses on hand that night, and they were stretched to the max. Pulling someone over from the restaurant wasn’t an option. Every table there was full, too, with a line of people stretching out the door, waiting.
A fine October night in Weaver. The weather was good, no snow yet, and people were out for a good time.
Rather than let the orders keep stacking up, she stepped out from behind the bar and delivered several herself and collected quite a few empties on her way back. Some young guy was trying to chat up Hayley and Sam, and her friends looked amused and happily occupied.
Everything was exactly as she’d planned when Gage had given her the money five years ago to buy Colbys, and she couldn’t help smiling to herself as she went behind the glossy wood bar again and pulled up the next order.
One root beer. One designer microbrew that she ordered from Montana. The microbrew that she’d begun carrying only because it was Casey’s favorite.
The combination was what Casey and his cousin Erik usually ordered and she figured now was no exception. She glanced over at the pool tables. Only this time, instead of seeing Casey’s rear end, she saw him leaning against the wall, staring boldly back at her.
Heat shot through her, and she tore her gaze away from his. She pulled out an icy bottle of root beer along with a frosted mug, filled another with Casey’s beer and stuck them on a tray before going back over to her girlfriends.
She had a plan and she was sticking to it.
“Give your neighbor my number,” she told Hayley. She had to raise her voice, because the jukebox was blaring, billiard balls were clacking, and the crowd gave off a general blur of chatter and laughter.
Hayley’s eyebrows lifted. She glanced from Jane’s face across the room toward the pool tables. Then she nodded.
Satisfied, Jane washed her sticky hands and reached for the next order.
She didn’t allow herself any more glances toward the pool tables and the very unreachable Casey Clay.
* * *
Even though Casey saw Jane play server several times, she didn’t play server to his party. And when he was called into work just before ten o’clock, he was glad for the excuse to escape. Glad, at least, until he got to his office and spent the next twelve hours studying satellite feeds and reports regarding three agents who’d gone missing in Central America.
By the next night, the situation had escalated even more, and the next thing he knew, he found himself sitting beside Tristan on a plane to Hollins-Winword’s headquarters in Connecticut.
Four days later, he was watching two caskets being carried off a plane while rain poured down on their heads.
“This isn’t your fault.” Tristan stood next to him on the tarmac, looking as grim as Casey had ever seen.
“Feels like it,” Casey returned flatly. “I was the last one in communication with them.”
“And their status was still clear,” Tristan pointed out.
“Was still my watch,” he said. It didn’t matter that there’d been others on shift, as well. Casey was their commander. He was supposed to be the one who could find a gnat on a wall eight thousand miles away.
“At least we had something to recover. There was a time we wouldn’t have even been able to retrieve their bodies.” Tristan’s boss, Coleman Black, stood on the other side of Casey. Coleman was a hard-looking older man with gray hair and a face lined from sun and responsibility. The only time Casey had ever seen him really smile had been on the rare occasions he was around Casey’s sister Angeline and her husband, Brody Paine. Casey’s brother-in-law was Cole’s son—a rarely acknowledged fact because of the inherent dangers that went along with that—and his visits were extremely rare; Casey could count them on one hand.
But in his role with Hollins-Winword, Casey had had many more encounters with the agency’s head.
“Back when your uncle here was a young buck,” Cole was saying, “we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the things we can now.” He shook his head as they watched the caskets being loaded into a waiting black hearse.
“Jefferson’d be the first to confirm that,” Tristan murmured.
Tristan’s older brother Jefferson had been an HW field agent back in the day. During an especially tricky assignment, he’d landed in a third-world prison; ultimately, he’d escaped, but his partner hadn’t. Even though Jefferson had returned to Weaver to become a horse breeder, had gotten married, had two grown kids and an ever-growing herd of grandchildren, the experience all those years ago still colored his life. When his son, Axel, had followed in his footsteps with the agency, he had not been particularly thrilled.
“We should’ve been able to do more,” Casey said now. Failure. Grief. Responsibility. It all weighed inside his gut like concrete blocks holding him below water. “Kept those caskets from ever being needed, and we damn sure should’ve found McGregor by now.” The third part of the missing trio was still a big fat unknown. They didn’t know if Jason McGregor’s body was lying in a ditch somewhere, tossed aside the same way Jon and Manny had been. They didn’t know squat.
“It’s not your fault,” Tristan said again. “You’ve got to have something to go on and we’re flying blind.”
Cole made a sound Casey figured was meant to be agreement, though with the cagey old guy, it was hard to tell. He clapped Casey once on the shoulder before letting out a sigh and walking out from beneath the shelter of the airplane hangar into the rain toward the hearse.
“He’s going along to meet the families,” Tristan said.
“Will he tell them the truth about how they died?”
His uncle’s lips twisted and he shook his head. “If he follows his own protocol? No. But it never pays to anticipate Cole’s actions too much. The man’s a law unto himself.”
He turned and gave Casey a long look. Even though Casey was tall, his uncle still topped him by an inch. “I’ve been in your shoes, Case,” he reminded him. “I was never in the field either. Stayed safe, closed up in an office miles—usually countries—away from the action. But we’re supposed to be the guardian angels, making sure those guys taking their chances out there in the field make it safely back home again. And I know only too well that it’s not easy to handle when that doesn’t happen.”
“I want to know what went wrong,” Casey muttered. “I want to find McGregor.”
“We will. We’ll investigate.”
“I know. And I also know that not every investigation bears fruit.”
The hearse, with Cole inside, drove away. The private airfield where the plane had landed was once again empty.
“Take my advice.” Tristan nudged him back toward the black SUV in which they’d arrived. “Go back home. Put your arms around that pretty bartender of yours—”
Startled, Casey shot him a look. “What?”
“You’re Hollins-Winword, kid,” Tristan drawled, looking vaguely amused. “Nephew of mine or not, you know what that means. There’s nothing in your life that you’re going to keep secret from us.” He climbed behind the wheel of the SUV himself, having dismissed the driver he’d been assigned even before they’d left HW’s headquarters.
Casey got in the passenger seat and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing away the headache that was forming. “Secrets aside, she’s anything but mine.”
“Most of us start out thinking that way.” His uncle drove out from beneath the hangar and headed in the opposite direction the hearse had taken. “Regardless, I’m telling you to focus on something good. Don’t take the crap that happened here home to bed with you. When they went off grid, you did everything anyone could have done to find them. You can’t control from a distance what those guys do once they’re on an op. That buck doesn’t stop at your door.” His hands tightened around the steering wheel and he sighed. “It stops with Cole. And he’s been dealing with that reality since before you were a sparkle in your daddy’s eye. McGregor is good in the field. If he’s able to lift his head, we’ll find him. Bring him back safely. But in the meantime, you’ve got to let go of the things you can’t change or you’re going to end up useless. Not just to the agency but to everyone who cares about you outside of the agency, as well.”
It was probably the longest speech he’d ever heard from his uncle. “Easier said than done.”
“I know.” Tristan waited a few beats. “Your bartender—”
“She’s not—”
“The bartender, then,” Tristan fired back. “What’s the problem there?”
Casey hadn’t discussed this particular situation with anyone. Not Erik. Not even his own father. But Tris wasn’t his father. He was his boss. His mentor. “She wants to get married.”
“Then put a ring on her finger already,” his uncle said as if the answer were obvious. “You’ve been sleeping with her for more than a year, for God’s sake.”
Casey felt his neck get hot like some kid called on the carpet. He stared out at the Connecticut countryside. HW’s compound—hidden in plain sight—was located inside a toilet-paper factory. “She doesn’t want to marry me. She was plenty clear about it.”
His uncle waited a beat. “And you believed her?” He sounded as if he wanted to laugh and Casey looked over at him. “Son, you have a lot to learn about women.”
Casey grimaced. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She only wants a husband so she can have a baby.”
Tristan’s eyebrow lifted. “So?”
“I’m not interested,” he said flatly, and looked out the side window again, ending the conversation.
But it seemed that there were some things the omniscient Hollins-Winword didn’t know after all.
Because even if Casey was interested in making a baby with Janie Cohen, he was incapable of it.
Thanks to a case of the mumps while he’d been doing a semester of college in Europe, he was sterile.
And there wasn’t one damn thing he could do to change it.
* * *
“So, Jane.” Arlo smiled down at her as they stood on her front porch. “I hope you enjoyed yourself this evening as much as I did.”
Jane squelched the pang inside her. Arlo was a perfectly attractive guy. He was intelligent. Well-read. Humorous. He hadn’t talked about an ex-girlfriend all night. He had no ex-wives. No baggage at all from previous relationships. He had insisted on paying for their dinner—Chinese—at the restaurant they’d gone to in Braden. His car had been spotless inside, he wore a suit and tie with comfort, and he even had a full head of brown hair.
And most of all, he’d talked about how—now that he was well established in his career—he’d realized there were things missing in his life that he wanted.
Like a wife.
A family.
He couldn’t have more perfectly matched her requirements if he’d tried.
“I had a very nice time, Arlo.”
He smiled and kissed her cheek. “So when I call you tomorrow, you’ll answer?”
She couldn’t help smiling. He didn’t make her bells and whistles ring—yet, she made herself add—but he was exactly what Hayley had said. A nice man. “Yes, I’ll answer.”
His eyes crinkled a little as his smile widened. His teeth were white and perfectly straight. Then he pushed open the door that she’d unlocked. “Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow.” She waited in the doorway, watching him until he reached his sedate Volvo. In a community dominated by pickup trucks and SUVs, his choice of a sedan certainly set him apart. He sketched a wave before climbing in and driving off.
She let out a sigh and slowly stepped into her house and closed the door.
“Thought good ol’ Arlo was never gonna leave.”
She screeched and threw her keys at where the voice was coming from before it penetrated that Casey was the one speaking. She pressed her hand to her racing heart and leaned forward slightly, feeling a little dizzy from the fright.
But then she snapped up, straight as a board, and glared at him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He was sprawled on her couch, looking way too much at home in his worn jeans, ugly red shirt with cartoonish fish swimming across it and cowboy boots. “Waiting for you, obviously.”
She closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them again, he was still there. Messy butterscotch hair, gray eyes and all. She tried again. “How did you get in?” she asked with what she considered to be extraordinary patience.
“You left your back door open.” He pulled his boots off the arm of her couch and sat up. “You ought to be more careful, sport. No point in locking the front door if you ignore the back one. You never know what sort of trouble you might be inviting.”
“Weaver’s as safe as a church,” she muttered crossly. She dropped her purse on the glass coffee table in front of the couch and tossed her lightweight wool coat on the armchair. “Turns out you’re the only trouble I needed to worry about. Do I need to count the silver?”
His lips curved but the amusement didn’t seem to quite make it to his eyes. “What sort of grade did Arlo earn?”
“An A,” she said crisply. “Plus.”
“Liar. I saw that tepid cheek kiss he gave you.”
“So not only do you break and enter, but you spy, as well.”
“Door totally unlocked,” he repeated. “A regular invitation, I figure. If you were really interested in Arlo, you’d have invited him in.”
“And we’d have found you squatting in my living room. How were you planning to explain that?”
He shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t invite him in.”
She snorted. “You knew nothing of the sort.” She strode into the kitchen and pulled a half-empty bottle of chardonnay out of the refrigerator. Arlo, it turned out, was a teetotaler. Which she completely respected. Even though she owned a bar and grill, she wasn’t much of a drinker. But finding Casey in her house was more than she could take.
She grabbed a glass from her cupboard, wiped the dust out of it and poured the wine. She took a fortifying gulp, then carried it with her back to the living room. She pointed her finger at him. “Do I need to call the sheriff on you?”
He pulled out his cell phone and handed it to her. “Max is on my speed dial,” he offered, annoyingly helpful. “All of my cousins are.”
She exhaled noisily and collapsed on the other end of the couch. “Casey—”
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Allison Leigh
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: HELP WANTED: HUSBANDJane Cohen needs a man for her baby plan. Love and marriage are non-negotiable – she wants the fairy tale! So she cuts her friend-with-benefits loose… because while Casey Clay is gorgeous, he doesn’t do commitment. The trouble is, this irresistible man has set the bar high for her husband hunt…Casey’s feelings run deep for Jane, but when it comes to babies he can’t give her what she wants – and his secrets don’t stop there. As mistletoe goes up around them, is this the season for Casey and Jane’s moment of truth… and shot at true love?