Cara Colter - A Hasty Wedding

“If that’s all, Mr. Fallon,” she said, looking at her watch, “I really should have gone home half an hour ago.”

Her voice was perfect. Reprimand accepted. Except then she went and spoiled it all. Her lip trembled just a little bit. She ducked her head, but not quickly enough.

The silence filled the room. She refused to look at him.

His hand found her chin and lifted it, and she was forced to look at him. She saw the immediate remorse flash through the gray depths of his eyes.

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“Not at all,” she said. Her voice was trembling now, too. It would have been so much better if he didn’t touch her, if his hand was not resting on her chin, his fingertips leathery and tough. Yet his touch was not tough at all. It was everything she had known it would be.

Electric. Strong. Tender.

“Here you are, working extra time, as always, and I come in and blast you.”

His cold, hard anger was much, much easier to handle.

“You were absolutely right, I should have told you about the knife. I just didn’t even think. It won’t—”

“Holly, I think what I should have said was that it scared me. When Tomas told me what had happened, I could imagine you at the end of that knife and it scared the living daylights right out of me.”

She stared at him. He was not a man who looked like anything would scare him. She had seen him face tough, angry kids, big kids, without even a flicker of fear. So what did that mean, that he had been scared for her?

“I’m sorry it happened to you,” he said in a low voice.

Don’t read too much into it, she warned herself. He would have been sorry it happened to anybody. He ran a tight ship. An incident had occurred out of the far reaches of his control. His fear for her had not been personal.

“I guess what I wanted to say was that I don’t want you siding with the kids against me,” he continued. “I need to know what’s going on, and I need to know you trust me.”

“Oh.”

Now that he was being nice, she felt more like crying than ever.

“Maybe,” she whispered, “I need to know you trust me, too.”

“Oh.”

He let go of her chin, thankfully, though her skin felt like it burned where he had touched it. He leaned back and ran his hand through his hair. The rooster tail sprang right back up the instant his hand passed over it.

“You know what?” he said.

She shook her head mutely. Too much to hope that he was going to say, I just realized I’m madly in love with you.

“We’ve been working too hard,” he said instead. “The whole water thing has put an incredible amount of stress on the ranch, and you and I have been carrying the majority of the load. I know you’ve been putting in more time in the front lines than anyone could have asked of you.”

This was looking hopeful. You and I, as in a partnership.

“Joe Colton was right. He told me he thinks it’s time to move on.”

“That would be a whole lot easier if the culprit had been caught.”

“That’s what I said. When I spoke to Kade Lummus today, he said they have a firm suspect. That’s very confidential.”

She knew it was his way of telling her he did trust her. “But he didn’t tell you who?”

“No. I took Rory out for lunch after, but I’m afraid I couldn’t even use our old college friendship to get that out of him. Not even for the secret fraternity handshake.”

His quick sense of humor was coming through again. It was almost as if nothing happened. They slipped so naturally back into the easy give-and-take that had become a hallmark of their relationship.

After they had discussed the water a little further, she told him she had pulled Lucille’s file and put it on his desk, as she thought he might need it to figure out what to do about the sudden and probably totally unauthorized arrival of her brother, Tomas.

“He’s going to stay with Joe and Meredith for now,” Blake told her. “I’ll have to do some checking and see what kind of trouble he’s in, but really I think—knife aside—he just wants to be with his sister. I’ll see what I can do for him.”

“You don’t believe he’s dangerous, either.”

“Let’s not go there again.”

She grinned, relieved that the old tone seemed to be back between them, realizing how much she looked forward to her communication with this man, how much a part of her life he had become.

In fact, the Hopechest Ranch now seemed to be her whole life, much to her father’s disgust.

“Your brains and your skills and you’re working as a secretary? For a pittance?” Todd Lamb never passed up an opportunity to belittle her efforts.

Well, maybe she was kidding herself, but somehow she felt like more than a secretary. She felt like she mattered, and that these kids needed her. For the first time in her life, someone needed her.

Her relief at the old tone being back between her and Blake was pitifully short-lived.

“Joe told me he and Meredith are going to host a barn dance a week from Saturday to try and lighten the mood in the community, bring people together again. He’s got this funny idea that people are more good than bad, given a chance, and that the folks of Prosperino need to be brought back to that wholesome truth.”

She ignored Blake’s slightly cynical tone. “What a charming idea. Honestly, Joe and Meredith Colton are such a lovely couple.” The kind of couple she envied so much. The kind of couple who had found it. That thing that everyone searched for.

Love.

Found it and let it sustain them, but more, had not just kept it as sustenance for themselves and their family, but had given it away over and over again.

To the community, to their foster children.

And in that giving, they lived a truth that the whole world needed to know: that love given away, multiplied itself and came back.

Holly suddenly felt so lonely she thought she might cry, after all. She’d never had that in her own family. Her mother was totally self-involved in her looks and her shape and her clubs, and her father was totally self-involved in his career and his power plays. They were two people with no time for each other, and in the end, no time for their daughter, who had needed things from them so desperately.

“Holly?”

She looked up, forced herself to smile. “Hmm?”

“You looked so sad for a second there.”

“Oh,” she said. “I think you were right. Too many things have happened. It’s been very stressful. You may have even been right about the incident with the knife. It may have made more of an impression than I thought.”

“You’re in need of some diversion.”

“I have a great book at home.” She wished she could snatch that back the moment it slipped out of her mouth. Good grief, she sounded like a pathetic old maid. It was a good thing she hadn’t mentioned her cat, as well.

“I had something else in mind,” Blake said. “Why don’t you allow me to take you to the dance? As a way of thanking you for all the extra work you do, and apologizing for being such a boor right now.”

She understood then that their relationship could never go back to what it had been before. Not now that she was carrying the secret. If she didn’t love him, it wouldn’t have mattered that he had only asked her out as a way of saying thank-you. Or apologizing. Or because he felt sorry for her.

Even with her new secret knowledge, or maybe because of it, she had some pride.

Her handsome boss fully expected his plain-Jane secretary to fall all over herself with gratitude because he had asked her out.

Methodically, not meeting his eyes, she turned off her computer and neatly covered it with the dust cover. She placed her paperwork in a neat stack, and when she was totally composed she gave him a steady look and a frosty smile.