Forbidden Dreams (14 page)

She laughed too. “I do not. Not that he believes it, of course. That’s what the Christmas party’s all about, really, every year. I only go to check out his annual parade of suitors. From them I accept only three to, as Dad puts it, ‘give a fighting chance.’ If it weren’t for my agreement with him, I wouldn’t bother going at all.”

Jase looked at her laughing face, not quite sure if he should believe her. He remembered the mercurial, elfin humor she’d evinced even as a little girl. “I see. You have an agreement with your dad regarding suitors. What does that entail?”

Was Elwin’s approval required if a guy wanted to become a suitor?
Jase refused to ask. He’d long ago quit seeking approval from anyone. But to his dismay, he found himself wishing he’d spent more time learning about Elwin Landry and what might please him, what might not.

He drew himself up short. “Suitor” was not a term he’d ever apply to himself. It suggested a permanence he no longer sought in a relationship.

“… as long as I accept three of his candidates at the party,” Shell was saying when he picked up the conversation again, “and give each of them a minimum of one date afterward, he stops tossing men across my path for the rest of the year.”

Her eyes gleamed like emeralds in sunlight. “I can’t wait to see how he reacts when he sees me walking in with a date. Of my own choosing.”

Jase’s breath caught in his throat. Was that how she saw him? As a date of her “own choosing”? Before he started dwelling on how much that meant to him, and why, he asked, “How does he go about throwing men across your path with you living where you do?”

“He doesn’t do that anymore. That’s what the agreement’s all about. Before we made our pact, he’d invite me to lunch just us, he’d assure me—then, at the last minute, some young businessman from out of town, who just happened to be at loose ends, would join us. Then Dad would be ‘called away,’ leaving me to entertain his friend.”

She made a face. “Honestly, he kept bombarding me with the most unlikely types. Of course, he thought they were very likely because they had adequate portfolios. I’ve consistently found them inadequate in ways important to me.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s see.” She ate the last of her soup, then shoved her bowl away and pulled her coffee cup nearer. “The last year I let him get away with that, before I came back here and opened my store, his selection included a bombastic little fellow with dandruff and a highly inflated opinion of his own value, but he had an MBA from Harvard, had been first in his class, so Dad approved. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a guy because he was less than handsome, so long as he interested me, had a personality that meshed with mine. The dandruffy little man had no personality that I could discern. Another one who was really good to look at, from my point of view, and who looked good to Dad because he was a lawyer with a top-end firm, I nixed. What Dad failed notice was the guy’s utterly disgusting habit of sniffing at the end of every sentence he spoke. But the worst one he ever saddled me with was a newspaperman who referred to him self by the high-falutin title of ‘Investigative Journalist.’ I can’t believe my dad trusted him with me, even over a lunch table.”

Jase winced. Right. He remembered her explosive reaction when he’d mentioned having seen her picture in the paper. He clenched his hands under the table. “And you hate newsmen.” It wasn’t a question.

Her eyes flared, green sparked with golden lights. “There’s no lower creatures on earth than people who make their living off other people’s grief or misfortune, who scrape up dirt and spread it around, creating the illusion of filth even where none exists!”

“Not all newspaper writers do that.”

She raised one skeptical brow. “Give any one of them a chance and that’s exactly what he’ll do. And then he’ll use the excuse that the public buys papers only to read bad news, that it sells better than good news. And to often cite ‘the public’s right to know.’ That,” she added, shoving back her chair and getting to her feet, “is one of the reasons I seldom look at newspapers. I don’t need my life filled with that kind of garbage.”

Jase took his still-soggy wallet from his pocket. It had somehow stayed on the dashboard of his mostly drowned Jeep. He peeled apart a couple of soaked bills, and tossed them onto the table. “What about current affairs? Isn’t ignoring the news sort of like hiding your head in the sand? Or maybe like living in a time warp?”

She flicked a glance over him, as she headed toward the exit. “Not at all. I’m pretty well up on what goes on in the world. I just avoid sleaze and the people who produce it. As well as the places it’s published, and that includes daily papers.”

“Shell—” he began. He was interrupted by a man who recognized Shell and wanted to know if the book he’d ordered was in yet. When that man had passed on by, it was one friend or customer after another all the way back to the mall. When they reached her store, Carrie told Jase that the garage had called and wanted him to drop by as soon as possible. A loaner car was available for him now.

“Later?” he asked Shell, searching her eyes as he held her arm, preventing her from helping a customer for just a moment. “Dinner?”

She shook her head. “Ned’s picking me up right after work. I don’t want to ask him to make two trips, Jase.”

“I’ll come get you myself. Please, Shell?” He’d booked a room in a local hotel that morning and was not looking forward to spending the evening alone, despite their advertising free wireless hookup.

Shell shook her head. “Ned would still have to bring the tractor back out to ferry me across the creek.” She needed a time-out from him, so she could sort through all the different emotions he’d aroused in her, all the different things he’d made her think about, the different questions he had her asking herself.

“But …”

“Jase, I said no. Thank you, but no.”

He traced the line of her chin. “Okay,” he said as if he understood what she needed, and why. “But don’t let Ned drive you to work tomorrow.”

“I’m not working tomorrow. We’re closed on Sunday.”

“Okay, I’ll pick you up on this side of the washout Monday, and we’ll have breakfast together, all right?”

Shell thought of the suitcase she’d be carrying Monday, in order to leave right after closing time to catch the ferry into the city for her father’s party.

With Jase.

Her heart tripped, and before she could prevent it, she’d reached up and smoothed back the thick, crisp hair that persisted in falling over his forehead.

“Monday,” she said. “For breakfast.”

Never before had the thought of breakfast with a man given her what she was sure would be a terminal case of butterflies.

Get through the next couple of days,
she told herself.
Get through the nights. And let the tomorrows happen as they would …

“You look as if you belong on the top of that Christmas tree,” Jase said, sliding his arm around Shell as the band began playing a slow, old-fashioned tune. Even with his sore leg, he thought he could dance to this one. For the past hour he’d had to watch as a succession of what he assumed were potential suitors beat out a rhythm with Shell on the highly polished floor of the conservatory in her father’s Point Gray home.

That had beat out a rhythm within him, a deep, dark, primitive one that had him clenching his fists and teeth as he watched. She’d returned to his side frequently, only to be drawn away by another swain. At last he had her all to himself, and until his leg gave out, he didn’t mean to let her go.

Dressed in a gold lame gown that left her shoulders bare and clung to her body from breast to hip before flaring out in a crinoline-stiffened bell that ended just above her knees, she looked more beautiful than he’d dreamed she would. His only regret was that instead of leaving her hair loose, she’d swept it up and fastened it to the back of her head with a glittering gold clip.

She smiled up at him. “And you look as if you belong in an elegant ballroom. I’m darned sure you didn’t have a tuxedo hidden away in that beat-up old tote bag of yours. How did you manage a rental on such short notice?”

He twirled her away, then held her at arm’s length as he stroked one hand down his lapel. “Now does this fit like a rented suit?”

She grinned. “Looking for compliments?”

“Of course.”

“It fits,” she said as he spun her around again and brought her up against his chest, “like it was made for you.” She ran her hand up his chest and around to the back of his neck.

Jase shuddered in pleasure. For a moment he couldn’t resist resting his cheek on her hair as they danced behind a tall banana plant, whose fronds brushed the glass roof overhead. Oh, man, but she smelled good. He wished he could spirit her away, take her with him back to his hotel when this evening was over, instead of leaving her with her family.

“It was made for me,” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on the conversation. “Yesterday, while I waited for you to get off work, I called a friend in L.A. He burgled my apartment and sent it up by courier to the hotel where I’m booked for tonight.”

She tilted her head back. “Your coming without your tuxedo indicates a certain lack of confidence completely unexpected in a man of your … um, talents.”

He swung her past a grouping of wicker chairs and glass tables, where several couples sat sipping champagne. “My ‘talents’?” he asked, grinning down at her. “Believe me, little Shell, you haven’t begun to learn about my talents.”

He loved the lively color that spread over her cheeks and made her eyes glitter. He loved, too, the way she lowered her lashes for just an instant, then widened her eyes and looked up at him with exaggerated innocence. She was flirting with him, and it delighted him to catch her in this mood.

“Maybe I know all I care to know about those talents,” she said.

He tightened his arm around her waist. “And maybe you don’t.”

She smiled, ducked her head, and for just an instant rested her brow against his shirtfront. “Maybe,” she conceded, then returned the conversation to his sending for his tux.

“Would you have me believe that you didn’t bring evening dress with you because you weren’t completely certain you’d be able to persuade me to get you into this bash?”

His smile faded, and he shook his head. “Until I arrived here, Shell, I didn’t know you were connected to the people I had to meet, had no idea I’d be seeing an old childhood friend.” He drew her closer. “Or dancing with her in Elwin Landry’s conservatory.”

She had forgotten that. Amazing, she mused. It sometimes seemed that the two of them had been together forever, instead of merely a few days; that she hadn’t let his memory lie dormant in the back of her mind until he awakened it with a reminder of a mouthful of live crabs.

As he held Shell and swayed to the music, Jase glanced at her father. Elwin Landry was tall and rawboned, with a face that made Jase think of Abraham Lincoln despite his Nordic coloring. They had met at an intimate family dinner attended by Elwin, his wife, their three sons, Shell and Jase. He’d been disappointed not to meet Elwin’s mother and Sterling Graves, who’d had other plans, but would be joining the party later.

Jase had been taken at once by the older man’s quick intelligence and wide knowledge not only of finances, but of other world affairs. He wondered how a man of Elwin’s caliber could maintain the outmoded belief that his daughter needed someone to make her decisions for her.

His wife, Sondra, was small and vivacious, her hands constantly in motion, touching, patting, gesturing. While she appeared to be brainless and fluffy, with her froth of strawberry-blond curls more suited to a girl of twenty than a woman of fifty, Jase had discovered in her a mind as incisive as her husband’s. Elwin appeared to have no trouble accepting his wife as his equal. So why did he want to choose his daughter’s mate?

“How do you think your father took it,” he asked Shell as they danced, “your bringing me along? The man certainly has a knack for hiding what he feels.”

“I think Dad likes you,” she said. “At least he hasn’t put you through the third degree, the way he used to with the men I dated while I was in college.”

“Maybe he’s beginning to trust your judgment.” Shell looked down, remembering Ned’s warning that the first thing to go was one’s judgment. She was more than a little afraid he might be right. From the moment she and Jase had met that morning, and all through the day, she’d been more and more certain that she was in danger of losing her head over, as well as her heart to, the man.

Yet what could she do? How could she protect herself against herself? And did she really want to? Even if their relationship was to be brief, should she deny herself the joy it would bring?

The music blended from one big-band-era piece into another, and yet another, and she nestled close to Jase. She was achingly aware of his scent, his power, his tenderness whenever he touched her face or curved a hand over her shoulder. Sometimes he swung her away so he could look at her, smile at her, but always, every time, he gathered her back close to him with what sounded like a gentle groan of pleasure. It was a pleasure she shared to the full depths of her being, a pleasure she wished would never end.

When another couple brushed too close and he tried to swing Shell aside, his leg gave way. He stumbled and took a quick step sideways to catch himself against a papasan chair.

“Sorry about that,” he murmured. He tried to draw her back into his arms, but she shook her head and stepped away, holding out one hand.

“Your leg,” she said. “It’s had enough, hasn’t it? Come on, there’s something I want to show you anyway.”

He laughed, drawing more than one glance toward him, glances that lingered enviously as he linked his fingers with Shell’s and grinned irrepressibly at her. “Women have etchings now?” he asked.

She laughed. “That,” she said, “comes later.”

He held her close to his side and smiled into her eyes. But his smile faded and his voice was husky as he asked, “Promise?”

Before she could swallow the tightness in her throat and form a reply, the butler stopped a respectful distance in front of her and cleared his throat.