Cassidy Harte and the Comeback Kid (13 page)

His Cassie hardly ever cried. He couldn't bear this, the heavy, unforgiving weight of knowing he had hurt her. Not just once, but a thousand times over the past ten years. Self-disgust filled his chest, his throat, even as he had to force himself not to reach for her.

She didn't want him here. He was only hurting her more every day by his stubbornness.

“Don't cry, sweetheart. Please. I'm sorry. I should never have come back. I'll leave in the morning, I promise. I won't bother you again.”

She swiped at the tear and glared at him. “Don't you dare walk away from me again, Zack Slater. Not when I was just trying to gather the courage to give you another chance.”

He froze, afraid to believe what he thought he just heard her say. It took every ounce of energy within him to remember to breathe. “You mean that?”

“I must. Why else would my legs be shaking?”

A shocked joy exploded inside of him, fierce and bright and buoyant. He drank in her tousled beauty, wanting to burn every second of this into his brain.

Her smile trembled just a little, like a small, tender wildflower in a mountain breeze. With a groan, he reached out and clasped her face in both hands and lowered his mouth to hers.

He kissed her slowly, reverently, savoring every inch of her mouth. She kissed him back, this time with no hesitation or wariness. Her lips moved under, opened for him.

Welcomed him home.

He wanted to weep from the torrent of emotions gushing through him. This was where he belonged. Right here, with her arms around him and her mouth soft and giving beneath his.

This was where he had always belonged.

Entwining his hands in her sexy little cap of hair, he deepened the kiss. Her breathy sigh of response acted on his already inflamed body like a rush of hot wind on a grass fire.

Her arms pulled him closer, then closer still, until he could feel her soft curves through the thin cotton of her robe. He folded her against him, marveling again at how perfectly they fit together.

Gradually, through the haze of joy and desire engulfing him like coastal fog, he realized she was shivering against him, ever so subtly but enough to make him draw away. “Is that from the cold or from nerves?”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Your legs aren't the only thing shaking, sweetheart.” He looked closer and realized she had come outside with no shoes. The wooden porch slats must be freezing beneath her bare feet.

“No wonder you're trembling. Here, let's get you inside.”

He picked her up and opened her door. The soft glow inside came from a trio of slim candles she had left burning on the mantel.

“You didn't have to do that. I'm not helpless.”

“I know. You've always been so strong and determined. It's one of the things I love most about you.”

Strong? He must have her mixed up with another woman. She had been anything but strong in those days and months after he had left, when she had kept herself from shattering apart only because Matt and poor Lucy needed her.

In the intervening years she had cowered in her safe little life like a rabbit in a hole. And like that rabbit, while she might have felt free from the danger of heartache in that insular world, she had also been slowly starving to death.

Depriving herself of the very things she needed to survive.

Even knowing that—even with the vow she had made to herself that morning—she didn't feel very strong right now. A low, constant fear hummed through her but she refused to give in to it.

The simple truth was, she believed him. About Melanie. About the crime ring he stumbled onto. About how he thought he was doing the right thing for her by leaving.

She would never agree with the choice he had made. But that morning as they had ridden through the mountains where she had fallen in love with him so long ago, she had finally come to understand it.

Maybe he had to leave so that he could finally learn to see himself the way she always had—as a good, decent, honorable man who deserved whatever happiness life had in store for him.

The candles' glow burnished him in gold, catching in his hair and the gold flecks in his eyes. That beautiful, sculpted face she had loved for so long.

She smiled suddenly. She could be stronger than fear.

She would be.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him fiercely. He remained still for one instant then he groaned and dragged her against him, his mouth ardent and demanding as he pressed her down to the plump cushions of her couch.

Eventually kissing wasn't enough. It had been too long and her emotions were too raw, too close to the surface. She gasped when his hand shifted from the skin at her hip until he was barely touching the curve of her breast. Heat pooled in her stomach, in her thighs, and she arched against him.

He groaned against her throat and trailed kisses along her jawline, then back to her waiting mouth while his fingers touched her.

Oh, dear heavens, she had missed him. Missed this. The fire and the closeness and the sweet churn of her blood.

Only with Zack had she ever felt so stunningly alive, and she wanted it to go on and on forever.

His fingers danced over her nipple, and the shock of it was like leaping into an icy mountain lake without testing the waters first. She couldn't seem to catch her breath, and for a moment she was afraid she was in way over her head.

“Zack, stop,” she gasped.

The slow torture of his fingers stilled instantly. Wariness crept into his eyes.

“I'm just not…I don't think I'm ready for…for more. Not yet.”

He gazed at her for a moment, his eyes glittering, then he drew in a ragged-sounding breath. “I can un
derstand that. I'm sorry. I've just dreamed of touching you for so long.”

He stepped back from the couch and raked a hand through his sun-streaked hair. When she saw his hand trembling slightly, she had to admit to a certain completely feminine sense of power.

“Thank you for understanding,” she murmured. “We rushed into things before. I don't want to make that mistake again.”

“You're right. You're absolutely right.” With a lopsided smile he reached out and grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Slow and easy. I can handle that.”

He kissed her forehead and wrapped his arms around her tightly. At the feel of that hard, muscled body against her, she suddenly wasn't so sure “slow and easy” would be enough.

 

The next week was as close to heaven as she could imagine.

The pace of life in the Lost Creek kitchen didn't slow at all just because she and Zack were busy rediscovering each other. She still put in long hours cooking for the ranch guests, ordering supplies and training Claire Dustin to take over for her.

Zack was busy, too. Although he didn't put it in so many words, she had a feeling his continued absence from his business interests in Denver was causing problems, because a few days after that momentous kiss at her house, he moved his office to one of the extra rooms in the ranch, installing computers, phone lines and a crisp, efficient, somewhat snooty assistant named Claudia.

While she devised menus and tested out recipes, his
days were filled with conference calls as he ran his little empire in absentia.

And it
was
an empire, she was coming to realize. It was one thing to know in the abstract that Zack had built his own very successful business from the ground up. It was quite another to watch him in action, with his sleeves rolled up and a pair of wire reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose as he talked on the phone about capital outlays and IPOs.

She had to admit she found the contrast between the rough-edged cowboy she had known and this high-powered executive very sexy.

Even with their respective workloads, they still tried to spend every available moment together. In the past week they had managed to squeeze time to go riding together several times, to take moonlit hikes into the mountains around the ranch, and the night before they had taken a drive through the massive splendor of Grand Teton National Park to have dinner at Jenny Lake Lodge inside the park.

Although they spent long, drugging hours kissing and rediscovering each other, he always stopped before things went too far. While she was touched—and amazed—at his restraint, she was also growing increasingly frustrated.

She was falling for him again, and hard. A part of her still quaked at the thought, but the rest of her couldn't deny that she was happier than she had been since she was that fresh-faced eighteen-year-old girl head over heels in love.

Just now they were on their way to the Independence Day parade in Salt River, set to begin in just under fifteen minutes.

She had almost said no when he'd suggested it after
breakfast that morning. Not because she didn't want to go—the small-town parade was usually one of the highlights of her year—but she was fairly sure gossip about poor Cassidy Harte and her long-lost fiancé was still running rampant around town. She wasn't sure if she had the fortitude to face the inevitable stares and whispers.

Small-town life definitely had certain advantages over living in a big city. But the endless buzzing grapevine—where everyone thought they had a God-given right to dabble in everybody else's business—wasn't among them.

Most people in Star Valley still believed Zack Slater had run off the week before their wedding with her brother's wife. What would they think when they saw the two of them together?

Trying not to pay attention to the butterflies step kicking in her stomach, she folded her hands tightly together. She didn't care what anyone said. She was strong. She could handle a few stares and whispers.

If she was going to show up in the middle of the Independence Day parade with Zack Slater, she wasn't going to have much of a choice.

I
t wasn't quite as bad as she had feared.

Once they'd walked the short distance from their parking space to the parade route, her nerves had settled somewhat. They still received their share of raised eyebrows, and she could hear more than a few whispers behind their backs. But no one was outright rude to them.

Either Zack didn't notice or he didn't care. He placed a hand at the small of her back as they looked for a spot to watch the parade, both to guide her and to stake his claim, she suspected.

He looked gorgeous, as usual, in weathered boots, faded jeans and a tailored short-sleeved navy cotton shirt that stretched over the hard muscles of his chest. Her mouth watered just looking at him as he set up the folding lawn chairs they had borrowed from the Lost Creek at an empty spot in front of the grocery store.

She settled into the chair and tried to put the mur
murs and prying looks out of her mind, content just to bask in the moment.

She enjoyed all of Salt River's little celebrations—from the summer concerts in the park to the homecoming football game to the Valentine's Day carnival at the elementary school—but the Independence Day parade was always a highlight.

Folks here took their patriotism seriously. They hadn't been sitting for five minutes when one of the elderly American Legion members rushed over with a couple of small flags for them to wave along with everyone else.

Cassie smiled as she took it, scanning the crowd for some sign of her brothers. She couldn't see them and wasn't sure if that little fact relieved her or disappointed her.

Jesse would be busy directing traffic away from Main Street, she remembered. But Matt and Ellie and the girls were probably planted somewhere along the crowded parade route, Sarah watching along with them.

She hadn't seen them in a week. Guilt pinched at her as she realized how isolated she had become from them, how she had ducked out of their regular Sunday barbecue and had declined Ellie's invitation to go to the annual rodeo with them later that night.

Although she winced at the realization, she was too terrified about their reaction if they saw her with Zack. She still hadn't told her family the two of them were in the slow process of renewing their relationship. She couldn't. Not yet.

She might have forgiven Zack for walking away ten years ago but she was fairly certain her overprotective brothers wouldn't be so quick to let bygones be bygones.

Not when it came to Zack Slater.

But since they were nowhere in sight, she didn't have to worry about it right this minute. She had a parade to enjoy.

Half an hour later she was smiling at the antics of a couple of clowns who looked remarkably like Reverend Whitaker and his wife when she happened to glance at Zack. He was watching her intently, an odd light in his hazel eyes.

Heat soaked her cheeks. “What's the matter?”

He gave her one of those soft, beautiful smiles that made her catch her breath and feel more than a little light-headed. “Nothing. I just like watching you.”

What was she supposed to say to that? She could feel more heat crawl up her cheekbones and figured she was probably as red as the stripes on her little flag.

“You belong here, don't you?” he asked quietly.

“Jeppson's? Well, I do spend plenty of time inside yelling out my produce order.”

He smiled, then turned serious again. “No, I mean all of it. Salt River. The whole small-town thing. You're very lucky.”

“Lucky? Because I've never been anywhere in my life?”

“Because you're part of this and it's a part of you. You belong,” he repeated.

She narrowed her gaze, giving him a closer look. That odd light in his eyes was envy, she realized. He was envious of
her?
A woman whose entire life had been spent within a sixty-mile radius? Who couldn't walk a block through town without having to stop and visit with at least three or four people along the way and who had to schedule at least an extra half hour for
any shopping trip just because she knew she was bound to run into someone who wanted to chat?

Zack had never had any of that. She was barely aware of the high school band passing by with its enthusiastic rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Instead she remembered his childhood. His drunk saddle bum of a father with the itchy feet, who had dragged his young son from ranch to ranch across the West, never content to stick long in any place.

Zack had gone to nine different elementary schools, he had told her, in six different states.

He had never experienced this. The sense of continuity, of community. Of being inextricably linked with something bigger than yourself. A wave of pity for him crashed over her, and she wanted to gather him close in her arms right there in front of everyone and cradle him against her.

“You belong in Denver now,” she offered. “You have a big apartment there and your business. Oh, and your ranch in the San Juans. You belong there.”

He was quiet for a moment, then he gave her another of those slow, serious smiles. “I've never felt as much at home in either of those places as I do right here in Salt River when I'm with you.”

Unbearably touched, she felt the hot sting of tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them back and reached across the width between them to place her hand on his where it rested on the arm of his lawn chair. He turned his hand over and clasped hers, and they stayed that way, fingers locked together, for the rest of the parade.

She always grew a little melancholy when the last float passed by, when people gathered up their little flags and their lawn chairs and headed home. It was
the same ache that always settled in her chest as she watched the last leaf fall from the big sycamore outside her window at the Diamond Harte at the knowledge that she wouldn't see another until spring.

Where would she be a year from now when the parade again marched down Main Street? Would the man who sat beside her still be a part in her life? Or would he march on just like the parade?

Her chest felt tight and achy at the thought. She knew she was going to have to face that possibility, but right now she didn't want to think about anything beyond the moment.

“So what's next?” he asked as they packed up their own chairs and began the trek back to his Range Rover. “Do you have to hurry on back to the ranch to fix dinner?”

“No. Jean told all the guests they were on their own today. I think most of them were coming into town for the Lions Club barbecue later.”

“So you're free for the rest of the day?”

She nodded. “What did you have in mind?”

His grin somehow managed to be mischievous and seductive at the same time, something only Slater could pull off. “Well, if I had a pickup truck, we could always take a picnic up in the mountains later and make out while we watch the fireworks.”

An instant image of their first time together flashed through her mind and an answering heat curled through her stomach. Drat the man for stirring her up like this right on crowded Main Street!

“What's that old saying? If wishes were horses then beggars would ride?”

He laughed. “Not a horse. A pickup. I have this
sudden, overwhelming compulsion to buy a truck. Where's the nearest dealership?”

“Matt always buys his ranch vehicles in Idaho Falls. It shouldn't take more than an hour to pick out a truck, right? I should think we can make it there and back before the fireworks show with time to spare.”

He stopped dead and stared at her. She met his gaze squarely, wondering if he could correctly read the message in her eyes. She was ready to move forward, to take the next step with him. The sooner the better, as far as she was concerned.

“Are you sure?” he murmured, as if he could read her thoughts.

With a slow smile she nodded. An instant later he dropped the folded lawn chairs and yanked her into his arms, right in the middle of town, and lowered his head for a fiery kiss.

She would have stood there all afternoon just basking in the hot promise of that kiss—with no thought at all for where they were and who might be watching—if a carload of teenagers hadn't chosen that moment to drive past honking and catcalling.

With a flustered laugh she broke the kiss. “Whoa.” That was the only coherent thought she could put into words.

Before he could answer, she saw his gaze sharpen on something behind her. Fearing one of her brothers had stumbled onto them, she turned and saw with relief that it was only Wade Lowry.

Her relief was short-lived.

Wade stepped forward, his hands clenched into fists and his handsome face twisted with anger. “I heard the rumors but I couldn't believe they were true. How can
you stand to be seen with this…this son of a bitch after what he did to you?”

She blinked, stunned by his words, his animosity. A regular churchgoer, Wade hardly ever used profanity. It was so out of character that she didn't know how to answer him.

Why would he be so furious? Was it jealousy? Maybe he thought they had more of a relationship than they did. She went out with him occasionally but she had always tried to be clear that she wasn't interested in anything more serious with him. He was her friend. She hated the idea that she might have hurt him.

“Wade—” she began, but he cut her off.

“He took Melanie away! She never would have left if it hadn't been for him.”

She blinked, disoriented by his words. Melanie? This was about
Melanie?
Had Wade been one of the many men ensnared in her sister-in-law's twisted, sticky web of destruction?

She couldn't believe it. The man she knew was far too decent and principled to sleep with another man's wife, no matter how alluring she might be. But the emotions in his eyes told a different story. Of betrayal and loss and something else she couldn't recognize.

“Wade, he didn't leave with Melanie,” she said gently.

He turned his anger toward her, and she drew in a shaky breath at the force of it blazing at her. “Of course he did! Everybody knows that! People saw the two of them go. Your own brother saw them leave together!”

Zack stepped forward. “You know exactly why I left town ten years ago, don't you, Lowry? And it wasn't because of some imaginary tryst with Melanie Harte.”
Zack's voice was sharp, his eyes suddenly as hard as granite.

Wade stiffened. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm sure if you put your mind to it and thought real hard, you could probably figure it out.”

“You're crazy. Everybody knows you ran off with Melanie. The only mystery is why a woman like her would be willing to settle for a no-account drifter like you.”

“That's what I might have been then,” Zack murmured, pure ice against Wade's fiery anger. “But not anymore. Now I have money and power. And a very long memory.”

Wade flexed his hands into fists, looking as though he was ready to lash out any second and turn the verbal confrontation physical.

She could just imagine Jesse's reaction as Salt River chief of police if he had to come break up a fight between the two men. She huffed out a breath, furious with both of them—Wade for starting it and Zack for tossing fuel onto the fire.

“This is ridiculous. You two are not going to brawl in the middle of Main Street. Not if I have anything to say about it. I'm sorry you're upset, Wade. I don't know what was between you and Melanie. That's your business. Just as what is between Zack and me is mine.”

She didn't give him time to respond, just grabbed on tightly to Zack's arm. “Come on, Slater. If we're going to make it to Idaho Falls and back, we had better hurry.”

He looked down at her as if just remembering her presence. With one last stony look at Wade, he opened
the door to his glossy Range Rover for Cassie, then climbed in and drove away, leaving the other man standing in the street glaring after them.

They were almost to Tin Cup Pass before she finally lost patience with his continued silence. “Okay. Spill it. What was that all about.”

He gripped the wheel. “You tell me. He's
your
boyfriend.”

She barely refrained from slugging him while he was driving. “He's my friend. You want to tell me what you have against him?”

He said nothing for several moments while yellow lines passed in a blur. “I'm fairly certain he was one of the men I saw that night unloading that airplane full of drugs,” he finally said.

She stared at him. “Wade? You're telling me you think
Wade Lowry
was part of some vicious criminal operation? A drug smuggler? That's impossible! You must be mistaken.”

“Why?”

She could give him a hundred reasons. A thousand! Wade was a kind and gentle man. A little stuffy, maybe, but generally considered to be one of the nicest men in town.

She was struggling to put it into words when she suddenly remembered something else. “It's impossible! Ten years ago he was on the other side of the law. He was an officer with the Salt River PD.”

He kept his eyes on the road but his mouth hardened. “So were the rest of them.”

Her jaw sagged. “What? You're telling me the Salt River Police Department was running drugs?”

“I don't know about all of them. There were only four men there that night, all wearing masks. The only
one I recognized for sure was Chief Briggs. He was the one giving the orders.”

She didn't find that such a stretch of the imagination. Jesse had told her enough horror stories about his predecessor that she could certainly believe Carl Briggs would have been capable of anything. He had been completely dirty, as crooked as a snake in a cactus patch.

Briggs had been under indictment on multiple counts of corruption five years earlier when he'd dropped dead of a heart attack.

Jesse was still trying to repair the damage Briggs had done to the small police department's reputation during his tenure.