Blue-Eyed Devil (14 page)

“We’re doing okay,” Hardy said easily. “We’ve bought up leases for some mature fields, and got some good results with CO, flooding. And we bought an interest in a nonoperated property in the Gulf — we’re getting some good play out of it.” He watched as I drank my Dr Pepper. “You cut your hair,” he said softly.

I lifted a hand and scrubbed my fingers through the short layers. “It was in the way.”

“It’s beautiful.”

It had been so long since I’d gotten a compliment of any kind that I was desperately tongue-tied.

Hardy was watching me with an intent stare. “I never thought I’d have a chance to say this to you. But that night — ”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” I said hastily. “Please.”

Hardy fell obligingly silent.

My gaze focused on the hand resting on the countertop. It was long-fingered and capable, a workman’s hand. His nails were clipped nearly to the quick. I was struck by the scattering of tiny star-shaped scars across some of his fingers. “What . . . what are those marks from?” I asked.

His hand flexed a little. “I did fencing work after school and during summers while I was growing up. Put up barbed wire for the local ranchers.”

I winced at the thought of the wicked barbs digging into his fingers. “You did it with your bare hands?”

“Until I could afford gloves.”

His tone was matter-of-fact, but I felt a twinge of shame, aware of how different my privileged upbringing had been. And I wondered about the drive and ambition it must have taken for him to climb from a trailer-park life, the aluminum ghetto, to where he’d gotten in the oil business. Not many men could do that. You had to work hard. And you had to be ruthless. I could believe that about him.

Our gazes caught, held, the shared voltage nearly causing me to fall off the barstool. I flushed all over, heat gathering beneath my clothes, inside my shoes, and at the same time I was overtaken by a nervous chill. I had never wanted to get away from anyone so fast.

“Thanks for the drink.” My teeth were chattering. “I have to go, I’m . . . It was nice to see you. Good luck with everything.” I got off the chair and saw with relief that the crowd had thinned out, and there was a negotiable path to the door.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Hardy said, tossing a bill on the counter. He picked up the jacket of his business suit.

“No, thanks, I’ll get a taxi.”

But he walked with me anyway.

“You’ll lose your place at the bar,” I muttered.

“There’s always another place at the bar.” I felt the casual pressure of his hand at the small of my back, and I recoiled instinctively. The light touch was instantly withdrawn. “Looks like it’s still raining,” he said. “Do you have a coat?”

“No,” I said abruptly. “It’s fine. I don’t mind getting wet.”

“Can I drive you somewhere?” His tone had gentled, as if he recognized my increasing distress even if he didn’t understand the reason for it.

I shook my head violently. “A taxi’s fine.”

Hardy said a few words to one of the doormen, who went out to the curb. “We can wait inside,” he said, “until a car pulls up.”

But I couldn’t wait. I had to escape him. I was so full of anxiety standing beside him, that I was afraid I was going to have a panic attack. The side of my jaw was throbbing for no reason at all, and my ribs ached where Nick had kicked me, oven though I was all healed now. The resonance of old wounds. I’m going to fire my therapist, I thought. I shouldn’t be nearly this screwed up after all the time I’ve spent with her.

“Bad divorce?” Hardy asked, his gaze falling to my hands. I realized I was clutching my purse in a death grip.

“No, the divorce was great,” I said. “It was the marriage that sucked.” I forced a smile. “Gotta go. Take care.”

Unable to stay inside the bar any longer, I dashed outside even though the taxi wasn’t there yet. And I stood there in the drizzle like an idiot, breathing too hard, wrapping my arms around myself. My skin felt too tight for my body, like I’d been shrink-wrapped. Someone came up behind me, and from the way the hairs on the back of my neck lifted, I knew Hardy had followed me.

Without a word he draped his suit jacket around me, cocooning me in silk-lined wool. The feeling was so exquisite that I shivered. The scent of him was all around me, that sunny, soft spice I had never forgotten . . . God, it was good. Comforting and stimulating at the same time. Absolute world-class pheromones. I wished I could take his jacket home with me.

Not him, just the jacket.

I turned to look up at him, at the raindrops glittering in the rich brown locks of his hair. Water fell in tiny cool strikes on my face. He moved slowly, as if he thought a sudden move might startle me. I felt one of his palms curve along the side of my face, his thumb wiping at the raindrops on my cheek as if they were tears.

“I’d ask if I could call you,” I heard him say, “but I think I know the answer.” His hand moved to my throat, caressing the side with the backs of his fingers. He was touching me, I thought, dazed, but at that moment I didn’t give a damn. Standing in the rain, wrapped in his jacket, was about the best feeling I’d had in a year.

His head lowered over mine, but he didn’t try to kiss me, just stood looking into my face, and I stared up into intense blue. His fingertips explored the underside of my jaw and wandered to the crest of my cheek. The pad of his thumb was slightly callused, sandpapery like a cat’s tongue. I was filled with mortified fire as I imagined what it might feel like if he —

No.

No, no . . . it would take years of therapy before I’d be ready for that.

“Give me your phone number,” he murmured.

“That would be a bad idea,” I managed to say.

“Why?”

Because there’s no way I could handle you, I thought. But I said, “My family doesn’t like you.”

Hardy grinned unrepentantly, his teeth white in his tanned face. “Don’t tell me they’re still holding that one little business deal against me?”

“The Travises are sort of touchy that way. And besides,” — I paused to lick a raindrop from the corner of my mouth, and his gaze followed the movement alertly — “I’m not a substitute for Liberty.”

Hardy’s smile vanished. “No. You could never be a substitute for anyone. And that was over a long time ago.”

It was raining harder now, turning his hair as dark and slick as otter’s fur, his lashes spiking over brilliant blue eyes. He looked good wet. He even smelled good wet, all clean skin and drenched cotton. His skin looked warm beneath the mist of droplets. In fact, as we stood there surrounded by the city, and falling water and lowering night, he seemed like the only warm thing in the world.

He stroked a sodden curl back from my cheek, and another, his face still, severe. For all his size and strength, he touched me with a gentleness Nick had never been capable of. We were so close that I saw the texture of his close shaven skin, and I knew that the masculine smoothness would he delicious against my lips. I felt a sharp, sweet ache somewhere beneath my rib cage. Wistfully I thought of how much I wished I had gone with him that night at the wedding, to drink champagne under a strawberry moon. No matter how it might have ended, I wished I had done it.

But it was too late now. A lifetime too late. A million wishes too late.

The taxi pulled up.

Hardy’s face remained over mine. “I want to see you again,” he said in a low voice.

My insides turned into a mini-Chernobyl. I didn’t understand myself, why I wanted so much to stay with him. Any rational person would know that Hardy Cates had no real interest in me. He wanted to annoy my family and get my sister-in-law’s attention. And if doing that meant screwing a girl from the other side of the tracks, so much the better. He was a predator. And for my own sake, I had to get rid of him.

So I plastered a disdainful smile over the panic, and gave him a look that said I’ve got your number, pal. “You’d just love to fuck a Travis, wouldn’t you?” Even as I said it, I cringed inwardly at my own deliberate crudeness.

Hardy responded with a long stare that fried every brain cell I possessed. And then he said softly, “Just one little Travis.”

I went scarlet. I felt myself clenching in places I didn’t even know I had muscles. And I was amazed that my legs still worked as I went to the taxi and got in.

“Where do you live?” Hardy asked, and like an idiot, I told him. He handed a twenty to the cabbie, a huge overpayment since 1800 Main was only a few blocks away. “Drive careful with her,” he said, as if I were made of some fragile substance that might shatter at the first bump on the road.

“Yes, sir!”

And it wasn’t until the cab pulled away that I realized I was still wearing his jacket.

The normal thing would have been to have the jacket dry-cleaned immediately — there was a service in the building — and have someone take it to Hardy on Monday.

But sometimes normal just isn’t happening. Sometimes crazy feels too good to resist. So I kept the jacket, uncleaned, all weekend. I kept stealing over to it and taking deep breaths of it. That damned jacket, the smell of Hardy Cates on it, was crack. I finally gave in and wore it for a couple of hours while I watched a
DVD
movie.

Then I called my best friend, Todd, who had recently forgiven me for not talking to him in months, and I explained the situation to him.

“I’m having a relationship with a jacket,” I said.

“Was there a sale at Neiman’s?”

“No, it’s not mine, it’s a guy’s jacket.” I went on to tell him all about Hardy Cates, even going so far as to describe what had happened at Liberty and Gage’s wedding almost two years ago, and then about meeting him in the bar. “So I just put on the jacket and watched a movie in it,” I concluded. “In fact, I’m wearing it right now. How far outside of normal is that? On a scale of one to ten, how crazy am I?”

“Depends. What movie did you watch?”

“Todd,” I protested, wanting a serious answer from him.

“Haven, don’t ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once stuck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars.”

I had always liked Todd’s father, Tim Phelan, but I’d never understood his art. The best explanation I’d heard was that Tim Phelan was a revolutionary genius whose sculptures exploded conventional notions of art and displayed common materials like bubble gum and masking tape in a new context.

As a child I had often wondered at the perplexing role reversal of the Phelan household, in which the parents seemed like children, and their only child, Todd, had been the grown-up.

It had only been at Todd’s insistence that the family kept standard hours for eating and sleeping. He had dragged them to parent/teacher conferences even though they didn’t believe in the grading system. Todd had no luck, however, in curbing their wild house decorating. Sometimes Mr. Phelan would pass through the hallway, pause to sketch or paint something right on the wall, and continue on his way. Their house had been filled with priceless graffiti. And at holiday time, Mrs. Phelan would hang the Christmas tree, which they called a bodhi bush, upside down from the ceiling.

Now Todd had become an enormously successful interior designer, mostly because of his ability to be creative without going too far. His father disdained his work, which pleased Todd tremendously. In the Phelan family, Todd had once told me, beige was an act of defiance.

“So,” Todd said, returning to the subject of the jacket. “Can I come over and smell it?”

I grinned. “No, you’d take it for yourself, and I have to give it back. But not until tomorrow, which means I have at least twelve hours left with it.”

“I think you need to talk with Susan this week about why you’re so afraid of a guy you’re attracted to that you can’t handle anything more than fondling his jacket. While he’s not in it.”

I was instantly defensive. “I already told you, he’s a family enemy and I — ”

“I call bullshit,” Todd said. “You didn’t have any problem telling your family to go to hell when you wanted to be with Nick.”

“Yeah, and as it turned out, they were all right about him.”

“Doesn’t matter. You have the right to go after any guy who appeals to you. I don’t think you’re afraid of your family’s reaction. I think it’s something else.” A long, speculative pause, and then he asked gently, “Was it that bad with Nick, sweetheart?”

I had never told Todd that my husband had physically abused me. I wasn’t at the point that I could talk about it with anyone other than Gage, Liberty, or the therapist. The concern in Todd’s voice nearly undid me. I tried to answer, but it took forever to force a sound from my tight throat.

“Yeah,” I finally whispered. My eyes flooded, and I wiped them with my palm. “It was pretty bad.”

Then it was Todd’s turn to wait a while, before he could manage to speak. “What can I do?” he asked simply.

“You’re doing it, you’re being my friend.”

“Always.”

I knew he meant it. And it occurred to me that friendship was a lot more dependable, not to mention long-lasting, than love.

When an apartment at 1800 Main became available, it never lasted long despite the multimillion-dollar price tag. No matter whether your place was a thousand square feet — the size of my manager’s apartment, which I loved for its coziness — or four thousand square feet, you got the best views in Houston. You also had the benefits of twenty-four-hour concierge and valet service, designer kitchens loaded with granite and quartz, Murano glass light fixtures, bathrooms with travertine floors and Roman soaking tubs, closets you could park a car in, and membership to a sixth-floor club featuring an Olympic-sized pool, a fitness center, and your own personal trainer.

Regardless of all those amenities, Gage and Liberty had moved out. Liberty was not much on high-rise living, and she and Gage had both agreed that Matthew and Carrington needed to live in a house with a yard. They had a ranch north of Houston, but it was too far from the city and Gage’s offices to be their main residence. So they had found a lot in the Tanglewood subdivision and had built a European-style home there.