Dakota Cassidy - Talking After Midnight

“You call it whatever you like, Tag, but hear me clear, Marybell’s a gentle, kind soul. She’s one of the best hearts I know—one of the best friends I have—and I won’t have you toyin’ with her emotions. I don’t know everything about her, but I do know, if I lost her at Call Girls because of some silly love spat with you, I’d likely snatch old Coon Ryder’s gun from his gnarled grasp and hunt you down.”

Just one more thing he loved about Em. She was fiercely loyal. She could have wrangled the Hawthorne men and Maizy together in a million ways that would have left some of them feeling displaced, but she’d do it without a single resentment from any of them. Slow and steady with a firm hand on the prize. The prize being family.

This fact about her was to be admired. “Swear on my carefully placed mayo, I’ll be on my best behavior—a perfect gentleman.”

She gave him a motherly pat on his cheek. “You see that you are. And one more thing.”

“I know, I know. Coon’s gun. You’re not afraid to use it.”

“Leave your baggage at the airport.”

“My what?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I mean, Taggart. Leave all your broodin’ and sufferin’ out of this noncourtin’. Just for tonight, try to enjoy the company of another human being who isn’t related to you and doesn’t want to play Candy Land for twelve never-ending rounds.”

Tag barked a laugh. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t like Candy Land?”

Her face went soft. “I don’t like that you’ve hurt for a very long time and you might mess up this opportunity to have a little fun by dredging up something that’s long over. I’ve seen you do it before, but it wasn’t with someone I care a great deal about.”

Alison. She meant Alison. Fair. That was a fair assessment of his life at this point. He had things he was working out—coming to grips with. Sometimes they colored everything he did—or didn’t do. “It’s just a sandwich,” he defended.

“One I hope you have the most amazin’ time ever sharing with Marybell—baggage free.” She gave him a quick pinch of the cheek before returning to the kitchen to Jax.

Propping the door open, he fought the envy the picture of Em and Jax made. He loved Jax, wanted him to be happy.

But maybe, after all this time, it was time for him to find some happiness, too. Even if it was just sharing a bologna sandwich with a woman who made his pulse kick up a notch.

Maybe.

* * *

Marybell took better care when she climbed out of her office window this time, avoiding the shrubs below it and hopping right over them only to get caught up on the gutter. “Damn!” she yelped into the night, grabbing for the side of the guesthouse to no avail.

Her fingers slipped and she crashed to the ground onto something hard. Not ground-hard, something that was softer hard. And grunted.

Her eyes, still adjusting to the light, gripped an arm, muscled and covered in flannel.

That arm came up around her waist and rolled her off him. Tag, covering her upper body with his, pressed her into the cold ground with his chest. He grinned, impossibly handsome, and her heart responded with impossible flutters. “If you squashed my carefully made bologna sandwiches, I’m going to be really upset with you. It took me two hours just to get the bread to rise.”

Her heart pounded so hard she was sure Tag would feel it right through his jacket. Don’t panic. People shield is appropriately in place and it’s dark.

She scoffed at him, refusing to grin back, no matter how much she wanted to. “Two hours? Novice.”

He nodded as if she’d just complimented him. “You make bread, too? Only someone who makes her own bread would know two hours is a ridiculous amount of time to make bread. But look at all the things we have in common. Wanna swap recipes?”

“I make trips to the grocery store to support the people who make it. Now let me up, please.” Before I die right here on this ground with you and all those hard muscles of yours pressed against me. Because it feels far too good—and uncomfortable—and good.

“Is that any way to talk to the man who made you bologna sandwiches?”

Marybell gave him a nudge, even though she really didn’t want to. In fact, what she really wanted was to lie right here with Tag, on the ground that didn’t seem quite as cold, and watch the stars bobbing above their heads on this crisp night.

Instead, she let her arms rest limply at her sides. “Is pinning me to the ground any way to treat the woman you made the bologna sandwiches for?”

“I’ll take that to mean you’ll join me.” He thrust upward to a sitting position and held out his hands to her.

Marybell ignored them and levered herself upward on her own, taking a good look at her surroundings. Tag had spread a blanket out beneath the window of her office right next to the garden gnome that Sanjeev, Dixie’s right-hand man at the Big House, was so fond of. He’d laid out some paper plates and napkins, apparently, now scattered in every direction when she’d fallen on them. “What is this?”

Tag pulled some matches from his pocket and scraped one to ignite it. He held up a small candle and struck a match, illuminating his angular face and making his dark eyes look even darker. “This is dinner. Remember our date?”

For a couple of seconds, Marybell was speechless. No one had ever done something like this for her. Not in all her thirty years. The gesture stole her breath. It was sweet and thoughtful and utterly unexpected.

And under the window of her office. “I don’t remember confirmin’ our date.”

He popped open a bag of chips and dumped them on her plate with another grin. “Ah, but you didn’t deny it, either.”

“So if I don’t say no, it’s automatically a date?”

“That’s what the rule book says.”

“Who wrote this rule book?”

“Probably some desperate guy who couldn’t get a firm yes for a date.”

She laughed, or maybe she giggled. The silly noise coming from her throat sounded suspiciously like a giggle. The kind of giggle a woman uses when she’s enamored with a man. When everything he says is charming and a total orgasm to her ears. Marybell clamped her lips shut. “I thought I told you I wasn’t dating.”

Tag handed her a plate, complete with a sandwich cut neatly in a triangle, some fresh fruit and a pile of chips. “I don’t think you got that far.”

She hesitated. No food. She couldn’t have a sandwich with this man. She’d been an unwitting party to ruining his life. You didn’t have a sandwich with a man whose life you’d annihilated. “I’m not dating.”

He ignored her and thrust the plate at her again along with a bottle of ginger ale. “I know this is your favorite.”

He’d gone out of his way to find out what she liked to drink? Bits of the icy formation around her heart broke off like chunks of an overheated glacier. Marybell took the plate and the ginger ale and set them beside her on the blanket. “Thank...you.”

Tag leaned back against the guesthouse and grinned again, letting his long legs unwind in front of him. “That’s more like it. I like gratitude in the women I’m not dating.”

She quashed the smile she was fighting with a vengeance. “As long as we’re clear this isn’t a date, I’ll eat your bologna sandwich, but it’s only because I’m starving and you’ve left me little choice now. Madge will be closin’ up shop soon, which means I can only get whatever she has left. Usually that’s eight-hour-old meat loaf.”

Tag took an enormous bite of his sandwich and nodded, swallowing hard. “Bologna’s better for you than meat loaf. All these by-products put hair on your chest.”

Her laughter tinkled from her lips before she could stop it. She nibbled at a chip to keep from making any more unfamiliar mating noises, but her mind was racing. “Why did you do this?”