Can't Buy Me Love (14 page)

One thing she was sure of: there was no way, absolutely no way she was going to get tangled with Luc on the first day of her new life.

“We paid all the big bills before Lyle died,” she said. “I can handle things until next month.”

“And then …?”

“And then, I figure you’ll have taken care of this little problem.”

There was a long silence that gave Tara Jean the impression that real business owners didn’t act this way. Fine. She was learning.

“Well, if you see him, tell him to get his ass into Dallas, first thing.”

“Absolutely,” she said, scanning her emails. If she had any intention of seeing him, she’d tell him.

Around lunch she headed toward the big house, looking for a sandwich.

She found Eli on the porch, sweating and drinking sweet tea. He was staring off down the driveway, toward the gravel road that led to Springfield.

Eli was a staring-off-into-the-distance kind of guy, and she didn’t think anything of it until she stepped onto the verandah and he gestured with his glass over Tara’s shoulder.

“You talked to him?”

“Luc?” she asked. Now that Lyle was gone, there could only be one
him
.

Eli nodded and Tara turned to see Luc, in shorts and a T-shirt, his head bowed on his neck like a boxer stepping
into the ring, running through the midday June heat.

Deep in her body, as if kindling had been set, ready for a match, a fire ignited.

The gray shirt he wore was nearly black across his shoulders and down his spine. His legs … good lord, the man had nice legs.

“What … what’s he doing?” she asked, trying not to sound slightly out of breath.

“Running. Every day. Twice a day.”

“You talked to him?” She treaded lightly, sensing a whole lot of pissed-off beneath his ninja calm.

“Can’t get him to slow down long enough to say three words.”

She thought about that call from Randy. And how Eli had been screwed in the will, how he was probably dying to turn this place on its ass and couldn’t do it without Luc signing those papers.

I am not getting near that man today
, she told herself.
Not if I can help it
.

“You got anything sweet?” she asked, watching Luc’s body get smaller and smaller as he chased dust and sunlight across his own dry, flat land. “Candy? Gum?”

“Cough drop.” He held out a Halls in a crumpled white wrapper.

“Gross.”

But she took it anyway.

Tuesday morning, Luc was all over the radio on her drive to the ranch. Apparently, Melanie in the Morning had a GIANT crush on the hockey star and she was all aflutter with the idea that Luc Baker might actually get traded to the Dallas Mavericks, which Tara could only assume was a hockey team.

Melanie in the Morning further theorized that being
in Texas for his father’s funeral was probably just a cover—that Luc was really here to talk to management and work out with the team.

Melanie probably didn’t realize how stupid she sounded. She never seemed to.

Tara Jean flipped the radio off in disgust.

But a day that started bad only got worse when she got to the ranch.

“What do you mean, you’re pregnant?” she asked Jennifer Hodges, who, when she wasn’t knocked up, was Tara’s small-sized sample model.

The final measurement for the samples was scheduled for two weeks away, the beginning of July, the second-to-last step before Tara Jean hand-delivered them to the factory where they were cut and sewn in bulk. Most of the fashion world used factories in Taiwan and Bangladesh to keep costs down, but Lyle had liked to brag that they made clothes for Americans, by Americans. Using the hides of American cows.

Cost him a freaking bundle, but it was something to be proud of.

But the final measurements were going to be a problem since Jennifer hadn’t kept her legs together.

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said. “I’m seventeen weeks and I’ve already gained ten pounds and my boobs are huge—”

“Great, fine.” Tara pinched the bridge of her nose and eyed all that sweet, sweet candy that was still in the garbage can. “Don’t worry, Jennifer, and … congratulations.”

Christ. What was with all the breeding going on around here?

Now she needed a small model. For next week. She’d give it a shot herself, but her C-cups hadn’t fit into a small since she was in seventh grade.

Today, when she went in for lunch it was Ruby standing
on the porch, watching Luc run down the driveway through the shadows from the tall poplars.

“I can’t say I like the man,” Ruby whispered, as if Luc might hear her from a hundred yards away, “but I love watching him run away.”

“You dirty bird,” Tara laughed, and Ruby smiled.

“I’m old, not dead. Here.” She handed Tara the mail. Tara flipped through it, and opened up the envelopes from Jones Tannery and All-American Shipping.

Both overdue bills.

What in the world was going on here? Lyle had signed those checks, hadn’t he?

She made sure of things like that, usually taking the books and the bills into Lyle’s bedroom and helping him put his shaking, indecipherable signature on the right line.

She’d begged him to give her the authority to sign bigger checks before he died, but he’d been so wrapped up in getting his children down here, he’d pushed it off.

Or maybe he never intended to do it.

The betrayal bit deep.

“Ruby, have you cleaned out Lyle’s room?”

“Not yet.” The smile and gleam slowly leaked from her eyes. “Today, maybe.”

“Well, I’m just gonna check and see if I left something there.”

Ruby nodded and since Luc had run out of sight and the show was over, she headed back into the house in front of Tara.

Lyle’s room was quiet. Abnormally hushed and dark, like a church or a bar bathed in daylight. The pieces of medical equipment sat blank-faced and unneeded, their cords curled uselessly around their necks.

His sheets had been stripped. A naked pillow sat alone on his state-of-the-art hospital bed.

The table by the chair where she usually sat was still
filled with the various pills and creams that made Lyle comfortable. The books she and Ruby had read to him were still splayed open, their spines bent forever to the page where they’d stopped reading, like a clock stopped just when he’d died.

Oddly enough, she wasn’t sad. It was as if the weekend had dried her out and looking at these things, the flotsam of a man’s last days, she only felt glad that she’d known him.

She lifted the
New York Times
crossword puzzle that Ruby had been doing with him and found the invoices she was looking for.

Unpaid.

Great
. The last hope she’d had that this was a mistake died.

Now she was going to have to get the checks signed by Luc. Unless she could call the bank and sweet-talk someone into seeing things her way.

It was stupid, but she wanted to hold onto this little fantasy that the company was hers. That she didn’t need anyone, much less a man, to make her plans come to fruition. She’d had enough of leaning hard on a man’s strong shoulder her whole damn life; she wanted to do this on her own.

“Did you know my grandpa?” a small voice asked and she jumped, her heart a startled bird heading for the trees.

“Christ, kid,” she muttered, turning to face Victoria’s little boy, Jacob. Who’d been sick.

The boy clutched an inhaler in one hand, a giant robot in the other, and in this room, with its big furniture and the very adult nature of the equipment, he looked so terribly, terribly small.

“You were going to marry him, right?” he asked, shaking a long dark curl out of his eyes. The kid had
beautiful hair. Black and curly. Shiny, like the coat of Eli’s horse.

“No,” she said honestly. “It was just pretend.”

“My mom and uncle call you Bimbo Barbie.”

She snorted before she could help it. “That’s … ah …”

“It’s not nice.” The expression on his face, that tilt to his chin and the unflinching look in his eyes—it was a little pup version of one she saw on his grandfather.

And his uncle.

Something tight and hot clenched in her chest. Was this kid defending her? He didn’t even know her.

“Yeah, well, it’s not the worst I’ve heard.” She looked around for Victoria. “Where’s your mom?”

“She’s signing me up for dance classes.”

“Dance classes?”

“I don’t want to go. But she’s not listening to me.”

He shrugged. And she knew that shrug, remembered the weight of it on her own shoulders—the tension, the way it hurt sometimes like her bones were breaking to pretend she didn’t care.

And she wouldn’t care now. Not about his pain.

She tapped the bills against the edge of the table and sighed. “Well, you should probably get out of here,” she said.

For a second, the boy’s blue eyes searched hers and she could see in the kid’s face—plain as day—that he missed his mom. Could feel her absence even though she was close.

That he was bored. And a little scared.

“See you around,” she said, and walked away, forcing herself not to look at him any more than she had to.

Tara called their account manager at the bank and tried to sweet-talk him into letting her have signing rights over those damn checks, but Matthew Pierce was impervious to sweet talk.

“I need a letter from the power of attorney, signed by Luc Baker,” he said. “That’s it.”

“You sure?” she asked, trying to project as much nudity into her voice as possible.

“Absolutely.”

She hung up before she started calling him names.

Because she was weak, she checked the garbage can in the greenhouse, but Ruby had already taken out the trash, and her candy supply with it.

The world ain’t fooled by all your airs, Tara Jean
, the demon said.
You and me, we never get nothing in this life without asking for it, usually on our knees
.

She was going to have to talk to Luc.

Today. The second day of her new life.

Being around him, it was as if she had fresh skin, raw and sensitive. Brand new.

Which was ludicrous. There was nothing brand new about Tara Jean.

She’d been putting this off for too long. She checked her look in the mirror behind her desk. A black leather vest with nothing under it revealed toned arms and shoulders that truly were a gift from God, because it wasn’t as if she lifted anything heavier than a Tootsie Pop. On the bottom she wore a pair of wide-legged, white linen pants and red shoes that did incredible things for her ass.

A small silver chain with her mother’s delicate cross nestled between her breasts. An ironic statement, mostly.

She imagined Luc’s eyes there, on her body, the pale soft skin of her chest, and her body flushed, hot and prickly.

She rearranged the girls, fluffed her hair, put on some lipstick, and, praise Jesus, found a yellow Mike and Ike in the bottom of her purse.

As Lyle would say, she was ready to bring down some big game.

Luc pitied the
next person who asked him for something.

He really did.

Vicks was in some kind of fit, signing Jacob up for lessons and clubs and classes that the poor kid had little to no interest in. And worse, she was trying to schedule Luc for chauffeur duty. Maman had already started talking about getting his team to the annual Sick Kids Children’s Hospital Christmas Gala. Eli was hanging out on the perimeters—sitting on the porch when Luc went for a run, lurking in the shadows when he got back.

Please
, Luc had thought more than once as he walked by the silent cowboy,
ask me for something. Anything
.

Because then we’ll have some words
.

Which, in this case, was hockey player for
I will take you out
.

But Eli was cagey and he kept his mouth shut.

Luc tugged the gloves up higher over his wrists and wrapped his fingers around the twine of the next bale of hay. He lifted, walked thirty feet, and heaved the hay into the far corner of the horse arena.

He should email Dominick, the Cavaliers’ trainer, and let him know about the hay bale workout. Because this shit was no joke. The muscles of his shoulders, back, and arms screamed with the effort.

It reminded him he needed to call Gates and tell him to lay off the strippers. He was becoming ESPN’s favorite Athlete Behaving Badly.

After he moved all of this hay, he’d call the guys and check in.

His shirt stuck to his skin, cold and clammy, and he took it off, tucking it into the back waistband of his running shorts.

Once the arena was cleared of the hay bales and the bags of feed that sat by the door leading out toward the paddock and the Angus fields beyond, he was going to bring in some workout equipment. Running wasn’t enough, and he was starting to lose weight. And the headaches were getting out of control. He woke up every morning feeling like there was an ice pick buried in the middle of his forehead.

No wonder Matthews wanted him to rest.

He would never admit this to anyone, but there were mornings when he wanted to stay in bed. Pretend, for a few hours, that he wasn’t Luc Baker and that one workout might really change things.