Stay With Me (3 page)

“Don’t need her tomorrow, actually,” I said. “She gets to sleep in. I have a date.”

Lily’s eyes opened wide, the tired boredom over my sad manipulations disappearing in light of fresh news.

“What?” She smiled, then her brows moved together. “Wait, a date—in the morning?”

“Duncan Spoon,” I began, feeling a tingle cover my skin at the thought, “is meeting me for coffee and breakfast in the morning.”

“Holy shit, Savi!” she said. “That’s wonderful, how’d he ask you?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again, tilting my head. “I asked him, actually.”

She blinked, and that
of course
look painted her features. “Ah,” she said, going back to her bacon.

“No, not
ah,”
I said. “It wasn’t like that.” I remembered the look he gave me. “There was this moment, and then I turned into a teenager and the words were out of my mouth and he was saying yes before I knew what happened.”

Lily laughed. “Oh, a
moment,
huh? And what teenager did you turn into, because that was never you.”

I rested my face in my hands. She was right. I was never the giddy girly teen. That was her. I was the one laughing at girls like her as I straddled the ass of a hot guy on the back of a hot bike.

“God, I really am pathetic.”

She laughed again and pulled my hands away. “You aren’t the challenged one in the family, Savi. Dad is.”

“Speaking of, he texted me that he was leaving Mrs. Sullivan’s house this morning,” I said, rubbing a temple. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he made us do that,” she said. “Heaven help us if we didn’t find a phone to call home before we got in a car.”

“Well, I’m pretty good on him driving across town,” I said. “And I really don’t need to know about his visits to Mrs. Sullivan.”

“Jigsaw puzzles,” Lily said.

“Yeah, you gotta love that they have a code word for it, I’ll give them that,” I said.

“Don’t you think she needs to drop the
Mrs.?”
Lily said, her nose crinkling. “I mean, I understand respecting the deceased and all, but once you’re doing—jigsaw puzzles with another man, I’m thinking it’s time to let that go.”

“Especially when Dad says it,” I said, getting a body shiver over the image of them. Nope, wasn’t going there.

“Well, at least Duncan said yes,” Lily said, making my body shiver change direction.

“Oh, good, we’re back there, are we?”

She laughed. “It’s a good thing. Gives you something good to focus on.”

The words hit a nerve, as I recalled Duncan saying something similar about my focus. “And now I’m a hot mess.”

“Why?” she asked. “It’s what you’ve wanted since he hit town.”

“I know, but I turn into a babbling idiot around him,” I said. “I don’t know why. Any other man, I’m myself, I’m mature. I take control. I hold the cards.”

She eyed me over her tea glass. “Wow, romantic.”

“It works,” I said, sitting back. “That may sound unromantic to you, but . . .”

“If it worked, Savi, you wouldn’t still be doing it over and over,” she said. “Men aren’t estate sale contracts. Or old rusty crap to pick over.” She laughed at that. “Well, some of them are.”

I paused and toyed with a piece of bacon, letting her words settle. “Romance and I aren’t friends.”

“You can’t judge that off one man,” she said, the earlier cloud of distraction coming back to her eyes as they met mine. “Maybe this guy is different because you’re thinking with your heart instead of your business sense.”

“Well, my heart needs to grow up a little before tomorrow,” I said. “And you’ve got to come to my rescue if you see me sinking.”

“Me?” she said, and then the cloud got ominous. “You’re coming here?”

I widened my eyes. “Where else would we go for breakfast?”

“The diner? I mean, wouldn’t you want to be alone?” she said. “Without eyes around?”

I shook my head. “The diner’s not alone, Lily, it’s got more eyes. And the ones here I know,” I said. “It’ll help distract me when I zone out into the stupids. What could go wrong with that?”

Lily licked her lips and narrowed her gaze like she was thinking out her words, making me feel like I needed to hold on to something. “You’d be surprised,” she muttered under her breath.

I frowned, the warning flags from earlier waving a little closer to the front now. “What?”

“Wanted to let you know we’re going to have a house guest for a while,” she said. “Or the shop is. The room upstairs. Someone is coming into town tonight.” When she paused in her very uncharacteristic rambling and I just stared at her, she sighed like I was forcing the words from her. “From Florida.”

New tingles hit my skin as her meaning hit the mark, and not the good kind. More like that feeling you get when you’re told a tornado is about to rip through your world.

“Ian?” I breathed, and then cleared my throat. “Ian’s coming home?”

My voice sounded funny to my ears. But that could have been the blood rushing through my head.

Lily nodded. “Afraid so.”

“For how long?”

She glanced around, as if the subject was making her itchy and she wanted customers to rescue her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think . . . maybe indefinitely.”

“Maybe indefinitely,” I echoed. I stared at the bacon in my hand and set it back on the plate.

Maybe indefinitely.

• • •

Ian McMasters and I were like gasoline and fire. Chemistry I could feel from a mile away, and more addictive than any drug. Together, we were explosive.

That was fine. For a long time, in fact, that worked for us. We were both wired that way—off the beaten path. Or the rocky one, according to my mother. Romance and love were silly things we avoided, at least with each other. Probably because we weren’t good at it.

I thought I found it briefly in my early twenties with a musician who rolled through town dripping with sex appeal and dreamy eyes. I spent a week telling myself that it was love at first sight, waved my heart around and let my guard down. Evidently all my guards down. Three weeks after the guy rolled away, I found myself pregnant.

Ian was there. He was always there—my rock and my hard place, all in one. Telling me it would be okay. That I wasn’t alone and we’d find the way like we always did. Reminding me that our reality was so much more trustworthy than words.

And it was. We may have been trouble together, but we were solid. Sex and excitement were real. Tangible. Any worries or fears were drowned in a sea of adrenaline and steamy, mind-blowing sex. It worked for us. No strings, no expectations. No overnight stays, even. Just a fix to a craving. Ian, with his intense smoky eyes and sexy swagger. His constant hunger to go do something crazy. His voice that whispered naughty things against my skin. It was easy with him.

When Abby was born, she made things whole. I calmed my wild ways a bit and fell in love with being her mother, but
Uncle Ian
was always in our lives. He was all I needed—a best friend and a lover, who always went home because not staying kept it real.

Until we broke our own rules, and he broke my heart.

I’d become stronger in his absence. I turned the rebel attitude to my advantage and became a kick-ass mom, a hard-nosed negotiator in my dad’s business, and steeled myself around men. Well, except when it came to Duncan Spoon, evidently, but I wasn’t counting that. That was just a silly crush on my part. But no one hurt me anymore. I didn’t need that, and I didn’t need the work of romance and gush and all that fluff. Men were icing, not the cake.

Now, my biggest heartache, my kryptonite, the original cake before any icing, and the one person aware of all my broken places, was coming back.

“Why?” I asked Lily, but she shrugged it off, saying he was just working with Jim on some things with the business. Stepping up and being “family” for once. I took that as her very nice way of saying they were bailing him out of something. I figured his diving business in Key West was flopping, and Jim, the quiet responsible brother, was waving a life buoy.

Jim and Lily, the eternal pillars of doing the right thing. That had to get exhausting.

“Are you gonna be okay?” she asked me before I left.

“Of course,” I said, mumbling something about time and water and bridges.

In reality, I was eyeing the clock, wondering what time the ripple would hit me. The one that would knock me to the floor and throw walls up around my heart once Ian McMasters was within my radius.

Chapter Three

I walked across the street feeling like a rag doll. How completely one hour could change my perspective.

I entered the big open barn door of Old Tin Barnes, wound around the old horse stable that was originally left out of laziness and later kept out of novelty. Everything in the “showroom” that stacked the walls or hung from slats was invisible to me as I made my way to the back office that had been my dad’s before me. Once upon a time, my “office” had been the tack room, and it still smelled of leather and metal. I loved that. The essence of a time long gone yet soaked into the beams with the dirt and the conversations. Sometimes, I liked to close my eyes and imagine the words oozing from the still exposed rafters. The voices of the people who’d once made their living in that big drafty barn, caring for the horses of the hopeful. The ones who ventured to Copper Falls, Texas, to hit the big time during the oil boom.

Our old barn was one of the few remaining original buildings in Copper Falls. Ours, the old courthouse, which was now a landmark, and the McMasters Meats building, which was once a saloon and whorehouse.

Fitting, I thought as I collapsed into my chair, that Ian would be staying in his old room up there. “Where all the action happened” as he used to brag when he was young, before he proved it himself. He loved the sordid history of the building. Good. Now he could revel in it.

I glanced at my overflowing wastebasket and yanked the bag out, heading out the back door, knowing full well what I’d find and hoping I was wrong. Crap. I wasn’t. The Dumpster was full, nearly to the point that the lid was just kind of hovering. Looking down the alley on both sides, I noticed theirs were nice and empty.

“As they should be on garbage day,” I said out loud. Just in case.

Grumbling, I took a deep breath and shoved my little bag in. It went, but there weren’t many days left of that. And I had a phone call to make. I trudged back in and sat in my chair like a pouting child. That’s what I felt like.

What happened to my Duncan joy?

Ian, that’s what. Eleven years earlier, he’d turned my life upside down by taking my heart and my trust and my crumbled walls and steamrolling right over them. He was my best friend. I never saw it coming.

My fingers automatically reached into the bowl of skeleton keys I kept on my desk. In my line of work, they showed up here and there, and I kept every single one I found. They were sad. A weird thing to say about an object, I realized, but there was something sad about their usefulness running out. That they were cast aside and forgotten, their purpose gone. It was soothing to me in a way, to keep them, as if I were giving them a new life.

I picked one out of the bowl and rolled it between my fingers. The last time I’d seen Ian was the day he drove out of town on his motorcycle. A backpack containing all he cared to take with him was strapped behind him where I would normally sit. Four days before that, I’d found him underneath a pretty redhead, her riding him like a prized bull. Two days before
that,
we’d used the L word. You can see how well the dominos fell from there.

My trust shattered, I gave it to no one after that. I saw everyone and everything for what they put out into the world, and what they’d want from me. Even Duncan, who made my heart race a little for once, wasn’t immune to my pessimism. He looked like he couldn’t harm a fly with those gorgeous blue eyes and disarming smile, but I still didn’t trust him. Appearances were deceiving.

Maybe Ian was fat and bald now.

Not likely. His brother was still hot, and all he did was chop up meat for a living. Ian was supposedly a scuba instructor and divemaster and owner of a dive shop in Key West, rumored to still personally operate one of his three boats. That much physical activity out in the sun, well, maybe he would be all weathered and wrinkled. Hey, a girl could dream.

“Savi, honey?” my dad’s voice resonated from the rafters. “You here?”

“Office,” I called back, taking a deep breath and putting my game face on.

I heard the wood creaking overhead as he descended the steps from the loft. That was Dad’s area up there now, complete with a mini-fridge and a TV and a confiscated foosball table. He also enjoyed piddling around with restoration, especially clocks, so all that ended up there with him as he watched the Discovery Channel.

He came around the corner through my doorway with his trademark wink, his now white hair combed perfectly into place, neatly dressed as usual in slacks and a button-down polo shirt. It never mattered to him that we dealt in dirty merchandise and worked in a barn, Theo Barnes believed in dressing for success. On Saturdays, he sometimes downgraded to nice jeans and a
denim
polo shirt. Only if he was feeling particularly rebellious.