The Devil in Denim (15 page)

Alex, it seemed, liked big bold canvases. Abstract art, photographs, and landscapes were mixed together in a series that should have been confusing but somehow worked.

She was staring at a huge painting of a stormy beach with lightning over the water when the door behind her opened and Alex stepped through.

He stopped when he saw her. Then smiled. A dangerous smile. “I thought you’d left.”

He sounded pleased. Her pulse bumped traitorously. “I wanted to check that the catering staff were done. And besides, it’s not polite to go before you say good-bye to the host,” she said, then winced. God. She sounded like Veronica.

“They know what they’re doing,” Alex said. “But thank you.” His eyes gleamed very green, and Maggie was suddenly aware that there wasn’t much space between them and that she couldn’t hear any other voices in the apartment. Just the music—something low and rock with a beat that might have made her want to dance if her feet hadn’t been protesting quite so hard—piping through the rooms on what was, no doubt, a state-of-the-art sound system.

“Has everyone gone?” Maggie said, feeling her pulse kick up a notch or two.

“Just put Gardner and Dan Ellis in cabs,” Alex confirmed. “Just you and me now.” His smile had faded but there was heat in the green eyes now.

“I—” She stopped, swallowed, tried again. “Then I should go too.”

“No rush,” he said softly.

“It’s late.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Alex…”

“Maggie…” he mimicked back.

She knew that she should go. Knew it was dangerous to stand here in semidarkness with this man with the fizz of champagne in her blood and the too-strong awareness of him shivering across her skin. But she stood still, just looking at him. “We said we wouldn’t do this,” she said.

“But that was before the mistletoe,” Alex said.

“That was just a friendly kiss,” she protested, knowing it was a lie.

“If you kiss all your friends like that, then you must be very popular,” Alex said.

“It was
nothing
.”

He stepped closer. Almost touching. She had to tilt her head back to watch his face. Which was set in a very determined expression.

“No,” he said. “You can choose to ignore it. You can do nothing more about it, but I’m not going to let you get away with that. That kiss was short but it wasn’t nothing. It was—” He stopped, paused, eased back a fraction. “I liked it. You liked it. I’d like to do more of it. But that’s up to you.”

She wondered if he could hear the thump of her heart as loudly as she could.

Probably not. Probably he couldn’t read the conflict between her body and her head raging through her in her eyes either.
Up to me
. A heady thought. That if she chose, she could reach up and kiss him. Give in to what they both wanted. Feel that heat and fire again. Or she could walk away and leave him aching. Leave herself aching as well if she was being honest.

Aching was better than stupid.

There. A shred of sanity. She gripped it tightly and made herself step backward. “We can’t,” she said. “I can’t. I need to go.”

Alex breathed out, closed his eyes briefly, then stepped back. “Of course.” He turned on his heel and walked toward the front of the apartment. Maggie followed him warily, not quite believing that he’d given up so easily. She collected her coat from the rack in the entrance hall where it was hanging next to someone’s forgotten silver wrap. When she turned back with the coat draped over her arm, Alex was standing between her and the door, in the pool of light shed by the lamp hanging over his head. In the rich light, his hair gleamed gold, but the rest of his face was shadowed as he watched her.

She lifted her gaze up to the lamp. And the mistletoe hanging over his head.

Mistletoe.

She’d been right. It was dangerous. Poison to sanity and reason.

That was the only explanation for the maddening urge to walk closer to him and kiss him again.

Mistletoe.

Madness.

Or magic.

Just one more. What can it hurt?

She licked her lips without thinking and Alex sucked in a breath. The coat fell to the floor as she closed the gap between them and slid her arms around his neck.

This time there was nothing gentle about the kiss. This time he took without hesitation, took the chance she offered with a decisive assault on her senses that made her shiver. His mouth demanded and persuaded and teased until she opened hers in return and gave him more.

Somehow they’d crossed the room so that her back pressed to the wall. Alex curled his fingers through hers and pushed her hands up and back, holding her pinned while all the time his mouth took her over and turned the air hot and her head spinning. He pressed into her, his cock hard against her, her heels putting her at just the right height for it to settle against her and send even more pleasure spiking through her.

But he didn’t do more than that. Didn’t move his hold on her to touch her, to loosen clothing and her last grip on reason. No. He just kissed her and kissed her until she was boneless and shaking and the only thing holding her up was the weight of his body against her and the warm curl of his hands in hers.

And then, just when she thought she was either going to have to beg him to just take her or go mad, he finally lifted his mouth from hers. Stepped back. Drew a hand that maybe shook slightly through his hair and straightened his tie while she stood right where she was, not entirely sure how she was still standing upright.

Her breathing and his were too fast, too loud in the room as they stared at each other.

“So,” Alex said eventually. “Not nothing.”

“No,” she agreed when she remembered how to talk. “But still a very bad idea.” She stooped, picked up her coat, and walked past him and out of the apartment before the mistletoe could make her lose her mind again.

*   *   *

Very early on Monday morning, Maggie decided to try again to see her dad. She wanted to hear his side of the story before she officially started work and signed a contract with the devil. Just to see if it gelled with Alex’s. See if the Saints really were in trouble. Plus, he owed her an explanation.

It was just past eight when she pulled into the drive. She’d climbed out of bed at o’dark hundred, giving up any pretense of getting more sleep. Between worrying about her dad and obsessing over kissing Alex, she had tossed and turned the last two nights. So now she had arrived with time to spare. Early enough that Tom would be up but hopefully too early for him to have gone anywhere yet. That was assuming he and Veronica were home, of course.

Well, she’d soon find out. She pressed the doorbell rather than letting herself in. Veronica didn’t look too pleased to see her when she opened the door.

“Is he here?” Maggie asked.

“He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“I’m his daughter, not a disturbance.”

She could almost see Veronica’s retort hanging in the air. But the blonde bit back her words and jerked her head toward the back of the house. “He’s with his plants.”

Ah. That explained some of the attitude. Veronica didn’t like the time Tom spent in his greenhouse with his orchids. Mostly because it was Maggie’s mom who’d loved orchids. Tom had started keeping them alive after her mom had died and had gotten sort of hooked. Not many people in the baseball world knew about his other obsession and he liked it that way. If she’d thought about it a bit harder, she should’ve guessed that he might be hiding away with the cymbidiums and lady’s slippers, doing all the crazy things orchid enthusiasts did to baby the fragile plants along. It was a good way to shut out the real world. Maggie’s mom had used it to distract herself from being a baseball widow.

Her footsteps echoed down the back hall as she headed for the yard. The house seemed very quiet. Normally when Tom was home, all the TV sets would be on, showing all the latest sports news and, because Veronica mostly insisted he keep the volume turned down, he’d have music playing as well. But today, silence.

It made the house feel almost as strange as the offices at Deacon did. Maggie’s spine tensed as she walked, trying to shake off the sense of oddness. Damn it. Couldn’t there be one place in her life that still felt normal?

The cold air slapped against her face as she ducked out the back door and half jogged, half slithered down the paved path that led to the greenhouse. It made stepping into the heated atmosphere of the greenhouse itself almost shocking. She peeled off her coat, hung it on one of the hooks near the door next to Tom’s well-worn leather Saints coat, and tucked her scarf and gloves into the pockets.

Here at least there was music, something jazzy playing softly in the background. She was never quite sure what Tom might be listening to from day to day, but in the greenhouse he usually stuck to quieter tunes, insisting the plants didn’t like the rock he often favored elsewhere.

Maggie craned her neck, trying to spot her father. The greenhouse was, like the house, pretty big. Her father didn’t do anything by halves. He’d built the greenhouse for her mom after Maggie was born, replacing the original, much smaller one with this cathedral of glass. Not that she could see much glass now, apart from directly overhead. No, the place was full of greenery and foliage, the paths between the plants—some in pots on tables, some hanging from the ceiling, some hanging off trees located here for the express purpose of keeping orchids happy—narrow and winding.

“Dad!” Maggie called. “You in here?”

Silence. For just that fraction too long. Then Tom’s voice came from a distance. “I’m up back.”

Of course. Maggie pinned his voice as coming from the right and set off on the right-hand fork of the path. She moved carefully through the plants, wary of snagging one of the fragile blooms and breaking it. She didn’t particularly like orchids. Some of them were beautiful, but some were plain alien and ugly looking and one of the last memories she had of her mom was her carrying bags of potting mix out from the car toward the greenhouse. Away from Maggie.

As usual.

“Dad, you wanna send up a smoke signal or something?” she called again as she moved toward the rear of the greenhouse.

“I’m over near the
Epidendrum calanthum,
” he said.

“Let’s assume I don’t have the location of all your specimens memorized, okay?” Or the names for that matter. She knew a few of the orchids that had been her mom’s favorites but after a while all the Latin names blurred together.

“Back corner, near the last bridge.”

That much she understood. The greenhouse had a complicated watering system to maintain the humidity the orchids loved, and one of the conceits the greenhouse designer had worked into the system was a little landscaped stream that S-curved its way through the floor, necessitating a series of small wooden bridges to make hauling stuff across it easier. The stream itself was only a foot and a half wide in most places, easy enough to step across except when you were lugging forty-pound sacks of dirt or multiple pots of orchids or the odd tree.

Maggie rounded the next corner, and sure enough, there was Tom, sitting in a chair beneath the palm tree that stood sentry beside the bridge. He had a delicate pair of pruning shears in one hand, but he didn’t look like he’d actually been doing much, sitting half slumped, his eyes fixed on the tree’s upper branches.

As he heard her footsteps, he half turned, an odd expression on his face.

“There you are,” Maggie said.

“Maggie.” He pushed out of the chair, crossed to her, and bent to kiss her cheek. His unshaven jaw was scratchy … a novel sight. He only ever went without shaving when he was on vacation. Which was something that had happened about once in a blue moon when Maggie had been growing up.

“What brings you my way?” he said.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. “I left you messages.”

“I took Veronica away for a few days,” he said, ducking his head to snip at a stray fern frond. “She needed a break.”

“I needed you here.” Her voice cracked a little and she swallowed.

“No you didn’t.” He straightened but he didn’t look at her.

“Dad!” She caught his arm. “Yes. I did. What’s going on with you? You said we’d talk before the press conference and then you just bailed. Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?”

“I’d imagine that Alex has told you what was going on by now,” Tom replied. He patted her hand before disengaging her grip gently.

Maggie stepped back, throat stinging. “You mean the money? Yes. Yes, he has. But what I still don’t understand is why
you
didn’t tell me. Why you’ve been hiding it all this time? Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you paid for me to go to school for. To help you?”

“Darlin’, by the time you got to grad school, it was already going to hell. The Saints had a bunch of investments that went bad when the market tanked. I didn’t want to worry you.”

“You thought it would be better to keep me in the dark until you told me that you’d sold the Saints?” Her voice squeaked upward again and she swallowed hard, trying to ease the tightness.

Tom sighed. “I kept hoping things would turn around. And then by the time I realized they wouldn’t, the only thing that might have helped would have been selling everything we owned to pour good money after bad and lose that too. It was too late. And then Alex came knocking.”

“And his offer was just too good to refuse?” She gripped one hand on the back of the chair, feeling wobbly.

“Yes,” Tom said bluntly. “It was.”

“So just like that, everything we ever talked about … it was just forgotten?”

“Maggie. I don’t want to talk about this. The deal’s done. Can’t you just move forward?”

“No. No, I can’t. All my life I wanted to work for the Saints. To work with you. To take over one day. You wanted that too. But when push came to shove you just forgot me.”

Tom gave a heavy shuddering sigh, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth suddenly stark against his skin. “I didn’t forget you, Maggie. I just didn’t think you could do it.”

She felt like he’d punched her, the wind knocked out of her, making her bend forward, hand on her stomach to catch her breath. Tom had never told her that she couldn’t do something, that he didn’t believe that she couldn’t achieve anything she wanted. “You didn’t think I could do it?”