Not Another New Year’s (8 page)

Or his brother, either, which made him feel only marginally better.

Things I Hate about New year’s

Writing the wrong date on my checks until June.

T
he next morning, Hannah tiptoed out of the suite, aware that her hostess was still sleeping in one of the two bedrooms. Before shutting the front door behind her, she cast a last glance out the sliding glass leading to the living area’s attached balcony. The incredible view of broad beach and foaming surfline only added to her reluctance to leave the place. It would be so much easier to step out into the salty air and let the forever stretch of water and that endless wash of waves on sand hypnotize her into somnolent inaction.

But it was time to wake up and smell the coffee! she told herself, shutting the door and forcing her feet along the path leading toward the Hotel Del Coronado’s lobby. The resort was magnificent, a Victorian dream palace stretching wide along the beach
and reaching high into the sky with red-roofed cupolas and towers. While yesterday the weather had been almost summer magnificent, showing it off to perfection, today the early-morning sky was heavy with clouds.

Suiting her mood, Hannah thought, as she lined up at a coffee cart set up in the corner of the sumptuous lobby, across from a King Kong–sized Christmas tree. Maybe a little caffeine would lighten her heart, but she doubted it. While she’d been mentally preparing for this morning’s meeting a long time, her physical body seemed to protest the idea of carrying through with her plan.

What was she? she fumed to herself. A woman or a mouse? She’d been the latter for much too long, and today she was going to change that. Today she was going to get answers to the questions that had been plaguing her for months.

The person at the front of the coffee line was served, and the rest of them shuffled forward as he stepped away. He.

Tanner Hart.

Her future fled from her thoughts and his footsteps halted as he caught sight of her.

From three feet away she let herself look at him again, forgetting for a moment he was the same man who’d made her so furious yesterday afternoon, with his presumption and his orders.

God, he was beautiful. His long hair brushed the collar of his white Henley shirt, which was tucked into ancient blue jeans. Despite the casual attire, her imagination could easily morph him to secret agent—Secret
Ser vice
agent—wearing a
Men in Black
dark suit and sunglasses. Surely he’d have had a different haircut too, right? And she could see that as well, those straight golden strands sheared close to his head, leaving nothing to soften the lean planes of his cheeks and his hard, square jaw.

Suddenly she remembered the bristly caress of his chin along the line of her calf. Her whole body flushed, her breasts swelling to push against the cups of Desirée’s decadent, demicut bra. Why couldn’t she remember more of New Year’s night? Every time she convinced herself he’d dished her up a plate of baloney, that in truth nothing more intimate had happened between them than what she could recall, she would hear the word “explosive” whispering in her head and…she’d wonder.

Surely she would have felt the echo of any, uh, activity between her thighs? But God, she’d been so aroused, so surprisingly and incredibly ready for sex, that he could have slipped right inside—

“Jesus,” Tanner said now, striding forward to shove one of the two coffees he held into her hand. “I should have ordered it iced.”

She cleared her throat and pretended intense interest in the plastic top. Had her thoughts been so clear on her face? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s the way you—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

Then he muttered something about the American flag and grabbed her hand to tow her away from the line. “Hey, wait,” she protested. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He glanced over at her, still walking. “I’m getting
going on our day. I pegged you for an early riser and I can see that I was right.”

“
Our
day?” It would be bad enough without a witness. “Nuh-uh. I thought I made it clear to you yesterday I don’t need or want a babysitter.”

He’d managed to drag her outside, to the portico and steps that led to the parking lot and then to the street. “What about a driver? Don’t you need one of those?”

Hannah had already asked for directions, and knew it didn’t require a car to get where she was going. She freed her hand from his. “I have feet. I’m walking.”

“To where?”

She shrugged. “Nowhere in particular.” Lie. The park on Orange. “I’m going to explore.” Deal with the woman who had done her wrong.

Tanner frowned, eyeing her and then glancing up at the sky. “Looks like it might be a wet morning.”

“Everybody knows it never rains in Southern California.” Oh, she hoped it didn’t anyway. The last thing she needed today was wet weather. She’d hated it for over twenty years.

“Hannah…”

It was time to get firm with him—though hadn’t she already? She narrowed her eyes, pretending he was seven years old and trying to take cuts in line. “Tanner Hart, that will be enough.”

He stared at her a moment, then burst out laughing. “Or what, you’ll take away my hall pass?”

Her neck burned, and then the flush rose higher. How often in how short a time could one person make
it so clear to her? She was truly no good with men. (Or if not “no” good, at least woefully out of practice.) God. Face it, Duncan’s long absence had turned her into the proverbial old maid schoolteacher—albeit one who’d worn an engagement ring on her finger. She could hate him—

No. She couldn’t really hate Duncan.

Instead she silently swore at Tanner and started to move past him.

He caught her around the upper arm, just as a bellhop trundled out the entrance with a brass rack filled with luggage. Tanner released his grip, only to slide his arm around her shoulder and pull her near, out of the other man’s way. They were chest to breast, the light jacket she wore brushing the long-sleeved cotton shirt he had on. This close, she breathed him in, smelling coffee, the tang of something citrus—his shampoo?—then a deeper note that reminded her of his sheets—and his skin.

Swallowing hard, she stared at the clean line of his tan throat and silently swore again. Why did he have to smell so good? Why did he have to feel so strong and firm against her body?

For years she’d figured her romantic life was set—though lacking a precise “I do” date. In all that time, loyal little Do Bee that she was, she had never looked at another man, let alone gotten close enough to lick one’s neck.

And now she wanted to. God, she so wanted to run her tongue along Tanner’s skin. She wanted to trail the tips of her breasts along his hard chest and feel the hot, thick evidence that he desired her against her
thigh. She wanted to take him in her hand and have him take her in
his
hand, filling that aching place inside her.

Her scalp prickled and she looked up to catch him gazing down at her with the same kind of burn that was flickering low in her belly. It was like being hungry, this want that she felt, except the emptiness wasn’t only inside. It was outside of her body too, in inches, yards, miles of sensitized skin that demanded a man’s hand. A man’s mouth.

Tanner’s touch.

His arm abruptly fell away. He stepped back and a flick of his lashes doused the fire she thought she’d seen in his eyes. “You go on, then.” Now there was even more distance between them, and she had to doubt whether there’d ever been any heat on his side at all. “Have a good morning.”

Before she could gather enough of her pride to make clear to the man how
extremely
glad she was he’d finally taken the hint and was leaving her on her own, he was gone. There was nothing to do but suck in a few calming breaths and set off in the opposite direction.

Walking past blocks of shops and cafés while sipping at her coffee, she tried putting Tanner and her unprecedented, inconvenient reaction to him out of her mind. Not that she blamed herself exactly. For sure he was overbearing and overconfident. But he was also sexy and gorgeous (admit it, movie star beautiful), and she wasn’t dead.

Suddenly, a little shiver tracked down her back. Hannah glanced around, wondering what had spooked her. There were people on the sidewalk
around her, people with coffees or cell phones who didn’t seem to be paying attention to a twenty-seven-year-old woman carrying her own cardboard cup.

But she felt someone’s eyes on her.

Another chill skulked down her spine.

Glancing around again, her attention was caught by a man’s figure across the street. Her heart crashed against the inside wall of her chest and her feet stuttered to a halt. With a dry mouth she watched him duck into a small juice bar, but not before she’d registered his dark hair in its military cut, the crisp lines of his khaki uniform, the heavy diving watch on his right wrist that she’d wrapped and sent to his FPO address two Christmases before.

Without thinking, she darted across the four-lane street. Horns honked, but she didn’t blink or hesitate at the noise.
Could it…Oh, God, could it be?

Even as she reached the opposite curb, the juice bar’s door opened again. The man reemerged and she stared—

—only to recognize it wasn’t Duncan.

This was some other naval officer, striding past her without a second look. Some other naval officer who was likely the object of some other woman’s dreams. Maybe also a man who had made promises he didn’t have the guts to rescind.

But he wasn’t Duncan.

Her heart restarted, and after a minute she was calm enough to continue on her way. How silly she was. She knew it couldn’t have been Duncan

At the thought, tears stung her eyes. Damn. Hadn’t she cried enough for him? And hadn’t she figured out after six weeks and approximately six hundred
boxes of Kleenex that what she was mourning wasn’t just the loss of someone she’d seen as the focus of her future, but also the loss of the little fantasy she’d been living? The one in which she went along with everything everyone else thought was right for her and that then her life would turn out just perfect.

Caroline had taken that away from her too.

Hannah turned a corner and saw the park up ahead. Her feet slowed of their own accord. They even backtracked half a block to find a trash receptacle where she could dump her now empty cardboard cup.

Squinting, she staked it out from that safe distance. Against the backdrop of the dark gray clouds overhead, the grounds looked vibrant. Green grass broken up by tall trees, a white, Disneyesque bandstand, parking, picnic tables, a playground. In one corner, a group was practicing tai chi. At the concrete tables, older people were perusing newspapers. A handful of mothers trailed toddlers through the sand between swings and slides.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate Caroline in the small crowd. Duncan’s parents had a photo of her—of the two of them, actually. When Hannah had dropped by their house, three blocks from where she’d grown up, to return the heirloom engagement ring, she’d seen it atop the piano. If his mother had remembered it was there, Hannah felt sure she would have hidden it away, but her unexpected arrival had flustered both of his parents. She’d always known them, always loved them, so she’d pretended not to notice the framed shot.

Until they’d left her alone as they went for coffee and the ever-present Kleenex. Dry-eyed and maybe clear-headed for the first time in her life, Hannah had used the minutes alone to examine the fuzzy photo. And sow the seed that led her to this moment.

Hauling in a last deep breath, she reminded herself that she needed to do this. She needed to do this for herself and maybe for every woman in the world whose man and whose future she’d depended upon had been stolen.

At the crosswalk on the corner she pressed the button to wait for the light. The vehicle traffic was heavy—no wonder those cars had honked a few blocks back—and she waited for the little stick man to come to life and send her on her way.

A rotund senior citizen wearing Easter egg colors came to wait beside her. He smiled, tipping his compact umbrella at her in friendly greeting. “My knees are telling me it’s going to be a gully-washer,” he confided. “You’d better get indoors before the clouds start crying.”

Hannah smiled. “It never rains in Southern California,” she said for the second time that morning, her gaze shifting upward just as a fat drop fell—
splat!
—onto her nose. Her jaw dropped and another landed square on her tongue.

In the next second it was as if someone had overturned a giant watering can. Cold, fat raindrops landed on her shoulders and the top of her head. Between one breath and the next, car tires were hissing on dark pavement that was turning even blacker with the wet.

She smelled that distinctive mix of rain and petroleum products and tamped down the unpleasant memories it evoked.

Her companion unfurled his umbrella, and as the light turned green for them, he offered to share his little island of dry as they crossed the street. Glancing ahead, Hannah groaned out loud.

“Are you all right?” her friendly man asked.

“I’m fine.” Frustrated. Out of luck. The visitors in the park were already scattered, running down the street and into cars. By the time she made it to the other sidewalk, they’d all be gone. “But I won’t be crossing after all. Thanks, anyway.”

With a little shrug he left her high and dry (well, wet, of course). Drenched, actually. And she experienced again that creepy sense that someone was watching.

It made her jump back when an old but pristine Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb in front of her, though too late to prevent a rooster tail of gutter water from spraying over the top of her borrowed black boots. Then the passenger window rolled down to frame a familiar face on the driver’s side.

“Hey, little girl,” Tanner said. “Can you help me find my lost puppy?”