Keepsake (17 page)

"That, too." He glanced around, but seemed puzzled why they were still there. "Ready to go?" he asked, gesturing an after-you through his topcoat pockets.

Shy. That's what he seemed. It was their first real date, after all. Olivia found his manner irresistibly intriguing. "We have time," she said, preferring for obvious reasons to arrive with the crush. "Would you like a drink before we leave?"

"Thanks, no," he said with a hapless smile. "I'd better hold on to what's left of my wits."

"Nervous?"

"Uh-huh."

"Me
, too." For oh so
many different reasons.

She looked around them as if she also were seeing everything for the first time. Suddenly, what she saw didn't impress her very much: a small, fireplaced living room that fed into an open foyer that fed into a dining area. Two good pieces of cherry furniture from
France
. A fairly valuable slant-top desk of yew wood. Top-of-the-line fabric, naturally, on all the upholstered surfaces. And the Aubusson. But that was it, the sum total of her nesting instinct so far. It was nothing compared to the loving care that her mother and her sister-in-law had lavished on their respective homes. Olivia hadn't even got around to doing something about the bare walls and windows yet. Except in the bedroom, of course.

"I don't spend much time at home," she said, feeling obliged to confess to that sin. "I've never even used the fancy exhaust hood in the kitchen. I mostly eat cereal."

"You're not domestic. Okay," he said, giving her a puzzled look. "Duly noted."

How mortifying; she sounded as if she were auditioning
for the part of his wife. "I don't know why I'm—we're—so nervous," she said. "We were a lot more relaxed around one another when we were growing up."

He smiled. "You weren't as pretty then."

"And you weren't as debonair. I need a drink," she said, hoping that wine would calm her heart. "Why don't you take off your coat?"

She went into the kitchen and took a bottle of merlot from a cupboard, then handed it to Quinn to open while she slid out a stemmed glass for herself—and then one for him—from a wooden rack above the counter.

Should she warn Quinn that there might be a ruckus in the receiving line? She didn't see how she could.
Anyway, presumably he had a clue. 
She held out both glasses; dutifully, he filled them.

So there they stood in their fancy duds, searching for something to toast. He touched his glass to hers. "Here's to the modern woman," he said with a look that Olivia somehow took as mocking.

"Because I don't cook? I can cook," she said, bristling. "Anyone can cook. All you have to do is follow a recipe."

Please, please, don't open the fridge.
There was nothing there except a carton of skim milk, some yogurt, and some cigar-looking things that used to be bananas. She had put them in the fridge after the fruit flies showed up, thinking—ha-ha—that she'd use them to make some kind of tea bread for her mother for Christmas.

Ha-ha.

"I guess you're right," she said, sipping to his toast after all. "I'm a pathetically modern woman."

He leaned back against the kitchen counter and gave her a thoughtful look. "What did it say under your yearbook mug shot? I was never mailed a copy, needless to say."

"Oh! Would you like to s—?"

Dumb; why remind him of a year he'd never get back? "Y'know, I think it's buried somewhere in a closet," she amended. "Maybe another time. Anyway, as I recall, it said, 'Olivia Bennett—she hasn't got time for the pain.' "

"Carly Simon."

"Mm-hmm," she said, sipping her wine. "I suppose it was as accurate as any of those predictions are. They're a little like horoscopes, aren't they? You see what you want to see in them."

"Liv, I have a confession to make," he said out of the blue. "All those years that I spent in
California
... well, I thought of you more than once. A lot more than once."

Her heart was on the launching pad, ready for liftoff, when he added, "and every damn thought of you was more bitter than the one before it."

"Oh."

He set the wineglass down on her
granite
counter and walked up to the bank of windows in the breakfast area, the windows that had a view of a swift-running river he could not see. For a long moment he was lost in his own private reverie, this buzz-cut, cummerbunded stonemason who'd just confessed to harboring bitter thoughts of her.

Olivia waited,
hurt and baffled
, to hear more.

Soon enough, it came rolling out. "I resented you because you had everything I ever wanted in life: stability, a proper family, the admiration and respect of everyone around you.

"Oddly enough," he added with a shrug, "I never resented your brother. I knew I was smarter than
Rand
, and better on the field. But you! You had everything I had—ambition, brains, discipline—and wealth and status besides. That gave you an unbeatable edge. God, how I hated that. Hated you. Thought I hated you, anyway," he said with a pained glance in her direction.

He turned back to the river that he didn't know was there. "But guess what? It turns out that I was wrong," he said softly. "It turns out that I've been confusing hate with something else. So maybe I'm not so smart, after all."

He got lost in such profound silence that Olivia, type A that she was, felt the need to prompt him."Something else?''

"Yeah."

He sounded so resigned, so melancholy. But not very specific.

"Something else?"

"Mmm." Turning from the window, hands still in his pockets, he said, "But honest to God, I'm not sure what."

He came back toward her and when he got close he stopped, half-circling her face with his fingertips. "Look at you," he said in a voice of wonder. "There's not a man alive who could resist you. But there are other beautiful women in the world—a lot of them in
California
—and I've never felt this way about any of them."

He laughed at himself and said, "God, I sound like an arrogant bastard. Am I out of line, telling you this?"

"I'll let you know," she said, hardly daring to breathe. Beautiful?
She
wasn't beautiful.

"Liv, we're not lovers, so how can this be—?" He made a comical face, lifting his eyebrows and compressing his lips.

"Something else?"

"Yeah. That. I spent seventeen years resenting you, and now suddenly it's
... something else."

Olivia understood completely; she was feeling it herself. She studied his face and marveled that she knew it so well: the hazel eyes, narrowed in self-defense from the sun even when the sun wasn't shining; the eyebrows that were pulled together in determination more often than not; the squared chin with its hint of a cleft; the nose with its bridge more Roman than Celtic; the wide grin with a tiny, endearing overlap in the two front teeth. She knew his face almost as well as she knew her own.

"We grew up together," she said, trying to explain away the comforting sense of familiarity. "That should count for something."

Quinn's response to that was a chuckle. "We grew up together, it's true. But you were a major pain in the butt."

"That's what I thought about you!"

"I never could stand your self-assurance. You were way too cocky for a girl."

"Isn't that funny? I used to think you were rude, refusing to let a girl win."

"I know. You expected me to give up my seat to you, so to speak. And yet
you
always went for the jugular.''

"And you always went for the knees."

He nodded in fond recollection. "You remember the day the door of your locker was siliconed shut and you couldn't get at the take-home final you were supposed to hand in? I did that."

"I was sure you did. That's why I stole your term paper from study hall a week later."

"You
did that?"

"Uh-huh. And then I gave it to Tim Kroft. He got an A."

"You little devil!" Quinn said with a surprised laugh. "If I had known that, I wouldn't have stuck up for you when Jimmy O'Malley wrote that limerick about you and posted it all over school."

"I remember that. You ripped them all down and then you gave Jimmy a black eye. That was really nice of you, Quinn," she said with a sigh, and she meant it. The limerick had been insulting and obscene and she had been completely devastated by it.

She looked up and said, "I was so grateful. I never forgot what you did. I think that's why after you and your father disappeared, I sneaked into the cottage to save your trophies before the police could confiscate them. My parents still don't know that I was hiding them all this time."

"It amazes me that you did that. And even though I reacted like a jerk when I found it out, I have to say, it was a terrific gesture. I should have thanked you properly at the time."

She took a sip of her wine. "Properly?''

Please, please, please.

Quinn smiled, then lifted the glass from her hand, setting it carefully on the counter beside them. He slid his hands behind her head, twining them in the curls of her hair.

"Yeah. Properly," he whispered, bending his face to hers for the kiss. It was tenderly given, a light and yet lingering token that had as much respect in it as it had affection.

She closed her eyes, the better to savor the brush of his mouth against hers, and felt the shiver of his breath as he
said, "I want you to know
... that sometime soon
... I plan to make love to you, Olivia Bennett."

"Now who's cocky?" she whispered, but the shivers that rippled over her were her own.

Ignoring her challenge, he began to drop feathery kisses on her cheek, her chin, the arc of her throat. She leaned her head back like a cat to savor the strokes and felt his voice rumbling on the surface of her skin as he tested her with tiny, provocative nips and murmured, "I want you to know
... that I'm not in this
... for the thrill of it all."

"Oh, gosh, I am," she whispered through a pleasurable haze.

His chuckle echoed close to the beat of her pulse, quickening it. He sounded so sure of himself. "Livvy
... Liv," he said on a sigh, "you do things to me
..
.
."

"I
...
can
tell," she said as he pressed close to her, signaling his arousal.

He brought his mouth back to hers for another kiss, night-and-day different from the first. This one was an expression of raw hunger—rough, ready, a sharp and painful reminder that he meant what he said. Caught off guard by it, Liv made a sound in her throat of surprise and then of surrender as she yielded to the force of it.

His hand caught and cupped her breast through the thin fabric of her dress, sending a surge of desire rocketing through her. He pulled the sparkly string-strap away from her shoulder and ran his tongue in the hollow there, driving her deeper into the ground.

"Christ, how I want you!" he muttered, coming back to cover her mouth greedily with his. He had her pinned against the counter; her hands gripped the smooth
granite
in her effort to steady herself against him. His kiss was dark, delicious, an invitation to a steamy netherworld that she rarely had time to visit.

"I'm sorry
... I'm sorry
... this isn't what I'd planned," he said hoarsely, but he didn't sound sorry at all.

"I'm sorry, too," she whispered, which also was not true. "The
... oh, God, the—"

She brought her hands up around his neck and cupped the back of his closely shorn head, pulling him closer, returning his kisses, feeding the fire. It was her one, last, willful indulgence before she broke away and finished her sentence by gasping, "The
timing.
It's awful."

His look seemed blurred and undirected for a second, but he snapped back into focus quickly enough. "The gala?''

She nodded glumly.

He scowled and shook his head, like a boy being offered bad medicine. "I say we stay here instead," he said, bringing his mouth closer to hers again.

"No, wait, stop," she said, laying her fingers against his lips. His face was inches from hers. She stared fiercely into his green eyes, battling the promise of pleasure she found there. She was only a slinky dress and a pair of pantyhose away from saying yes. It would be so easy, so decadent, to hole up with him in her townhouse making love instead of getting on with her campaign to rehabilitate him with the good citizens of Keepsake.

But she had a civic duty.

"We
have
to go, Quinn. They're expecting me. They might think something—"

"Happened to you? Because you were alone with the gardener's son?"

She grimaced and said, "Oh, come on, Quinn. You know that's not what they'd think."

He shrugged. "It was worth a shot." And then he grinned that heart-melting, endearing grin of his and took a big step back from her. "Madame," he said with a deep bow and a graceful flourish of both hands, "your chariot awaits."