Star Bright (31 page)

“I should go into the cat-transport business. That toolbox is perfect.”

Rainie shook her head. “Cat lovers might disagree.”

“Why? You ever seen those tiny cages they stick cats in? And those cardboard carriers with the airholes are even worse. My toolbox is much nicer. At least Thomas can move around, and with that saddle blanket over the tools, he can even take a nap if he wants.”

“That’s true,” she conceded.

“So stop lookin’ so worried. The cat is fine.”

Rainie nodded, but in truth, it wasn’t the cat she was worried about now.

“Parker, about what just happened,” she ventured.

He angled a look at her that was laden with meaning. “Nothin’ just happened, Rainie, and nothin’ is goin’ to happen.”

Once at the ranch, Rainie couldn’t wait to get Thomas out of his temporary prison. Only when Parker opened the lid, the cat shot from the enclosure like a bullet from a gun. Before either of them could react, Thomas was streaking across the yard toward the arena and was soon nowhere to be seen.

“Damn it.” Parker put his hands on his hips. “Here, Thomas!” he bellowed.

“That isn’t how you call a cat,” Rainie informed him.

He gave her a bewildered look. “How, then?”

Rainie showed him by example, calling, “Here, kitty, kitty,” in a high-pitched voice.

Parker shook his head. “Darlin’, my vocal cords weren’t made to sing soprano.”

“I’ll do it then. You’ll only scare him.”

Parker carried her suitcase into the house while she criss-crossed the yard, calling shrilly to the cat. When Parker went back outside, Rainie was clear over by the arena building, trilling into the evening air, pleading with Thomas to come back. Parker sighed. He’d never been a cat person, but Rainie clearly was. If Thomas didn’t return, she’d be heart-broken.

“Here, kitty, kitty!” he yelled. “Thomas!” Under his breath, Parker muttered, “Don’t do this to me, you brainless fluff ball.” Thinking the cat could have covered quite a bit of ground in the time since he’d escaped, Parker circled behind the house to search more area. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Nothing.
Parker went back to join Rainie. She looked so forlorn standing there in the fading light, her skirt drifting around her slender legs like a flowery flag in the evening breeze. He walked up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. She instantly stiffened and grasped his wrists, as if she feared that his hands might wander.
No way.
Parker knew they had a long way to go before she would be ready for anything remotely resembling intimacy. And oddly, he was okay with that. Now that he’d found Rainie, he finally understood what his dad had always meant when he said true love was about a whole lot more than just sex. Loving this lady was a multifaceted experience. As much as he desired her physically, he was willing to wait as long as she needed him to wait. Another of his dad’s sayings sprang to his mind:
Anything worth havin’ is worth waitin’ for.
Rainie was definitely worth waiting for.

“He’ll be all right, honey,” he murmured near her ear, praying his reassurance wouldn’t prove to be false. “There’s nothin’ out here to hurt him. We’ll put food and water on the porch. Once he calms down, he’ll come sniffin’ for his supper.”

Rainie reluctantly accompanied him to the house, but Parker didn’t miss the worried glances she kept shooting behind her as they walked.

“He’ll be fine,” he said again. “Trust me on that. Okay? If there’s anything I understand, it’s critters. He’ll be back before we go to bed, guaranteed.”

Thomas didn’t return. Parker listened for meows as he and Rainie shared an evening meal of canned chili and crackers, a repast that his houseguest barely touched. He kept an ear peeled as they cleaned up the kitchen and fed Mojo. After partaking of his meal, the puppy curled up under the table and went to sleep. No yowls had yet sounded from the porch. Rainie looked sad and worried. Parker could think of no way to comfort her.

“You said once that he loves tuna. How about if we open a can and go sit on the swing? Maybe he’ll smell it and come to you.”

“That might work,” Rainie said.

After opening the tuna, Parker grabbed a couple of jackets from the wall pegs and draped one around Rainie’s slender shoulders. As he pulled her hair out from under the denim collar, he knew he’d never loved anyone in quite the same way that he loved her. Just the scent of her—apples, vanilla, and cinnamon—made his senses spin and his arms ache to hold her close.

“What’s the name of your perfume?” he couldn’t resist asking. “I’ve never smelled the like.”

She giggled. “It’s my own concoction, a blend of extracts from my cupboard. Do you have any idea how much perfume costs nowadays? Even the copycat stuff is expensive. I decided to come up with my own scent.”

He made a mental note to buy her some perfume, but then just as quickly scratched the idea. He loved how she smelled.

The night had turned chilly. When they sat on the swing, Rainie huddled inside the jacket, shivering. Her summer skirt was made of thin, insubstantial stuff, offering little protection from the cold.

“That’s central Oregon for you, hotter than hell durin’ the day and colder than a well digger’s ass when the sun goes down.” Parker tucked her under his arm and drew her close. He felt her body brace against him, a telltale sign that she was more than a little worried about him making unwelcome advances. He guessed that was only natural. The dynamics of their relationship had taken a drastic turn that morning, and as young and innocent as Rainie was in many ways, she’d also seen the dark side of a man’s nature. “Relax,” he said softly. “If you’re thinkin’ I might put a move on you, get it out of your head right now. Nothin’ like that is on my agenda.”

“It’s not?”

The surprise in her voice made him smile. “Absolutely not. We’ve got the rest of our lives, Rainie mine. I’m in no hurry.” He ran his hand lightly over the jacket that covered her arm. “The way I see it, all really good marriages are built upon a solid foundation of friendship. I’m not denyin’ the importance of a physical relationship. Don’t get me wrong. But sex alone will never be the glue that holds us together. Our friendship will do that. Someday when we’re old, we’ll have the friendship to fall back on.”

“You haven’t asked me to marry you, and I haven’t said I will, Parker. Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?”

“Nope.”

“But I haven’t said I love you, and I’m still married to another man.”

Parker didn’t need to hear her say that she loved him. He knew she did. He saw the truth of it in her eyes every time she looked at him. “You’re contractually bound to Peter Danning, not married to him. There’s a difference. Not even the Roman Catholic Church would hold you to the vows you made to him.” He let that hang there for a moment. “Were you married to him in a church? I never thought to ask.”

“No. We got married in Las Vegas the first time around.”

“The first time around?”

“There’s a policy at Barrestol against executives fraternizing with subordinates. Peter was so far up the ladder that he probably wouldn’t have been fired for having a relationship with me, but it still would have reflected badly on him if anyone had found out. So I left the company. We were married in Vegas, I moved in with him, and he kept it a secret for almost six months. When he felt I’d been gone from the company long enough, he concocted a story about how we’d bumped into each other after I left and started dating. A few weeks later, he announced our engagement, and the second time, which was all for show, we were married in a vineyard by a justice of the peace.”

“He’s some piece of work, isn’t he?”

“Appearances are everything to him.” She shivered again. “That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you, Parker. You don’t care what other people think.”

“I care,” he corrected. It occurred to him that he had encouraged Rainie to share her secrets with him but that he had shared very few of his own. Nothing deep, anyway. Nothing that hurt or made him feel ashamed when he thought about it. In order for her to truly know who he was as a person, he needed to correct that. “I just refuse to put on an act to impress anyone. For a while when I first went away to college, I tried to slick myself up.”

“In what way?”

“Lots of ways. I stopped talkin’ like my dad, for one, and tried to sound educated.” Parker thought back to that time in his life and shook his head at the craziness that had overcome him. “I got it into my mind that my dad was a low-class, blue-collar worker from the marrow of his bones out, and I wanted to make somethin’ better of myself. I went shoppin’ for some fancy duds—khaki slacks, loafers, and dressy shirts with button-down collars.” He jostled her closer with a quick hug, wanting to warm her so she’d stop shivering. “It took me about three years to mature and realize that the real challenge in my life was to become half the man my father is.

“It isn’t about the clothes a man wears, or how he talks, or how sophisticated he is. It’s about who he is on the inside. My dad is an honest, loyal, and hardworkin’ man. There’s nothin’ fancy about him, but even with all my education, I’m surprised at how much he knows sometimes. He just went to a different school, learnin’ everything the hard way. When I’m gettin’ ready to breed a mare, I can quote genetic theory that sounds real impressive, but in the end, I’ll make the same call my dad does almost every time. He can’t tell me
why
he’d breed a black to a gray to get a certain color foal. He just knows that the mix will work. He can’t say
how
he can tell a gray from a blue roan, but he can tell the difference with one close look. It blows my mind, but he’s right every damned time. A man doesn’t need to go to college to be well educated, bottom line, and when a university graduate with a master’s degree gets to thinkin’ he’s better than everyone else just because he has some book learnin’ under his belt, he’s settin’ himself up for a hard fall.”

Rainie gazed off through the deepening twilight. “So you stopped wearing khaki slacks?”

“Yep. Went back to my faded old jeans and scuffed boots, and from that moment forward, instead of focusin’ on how I looked, I focused on who I was. Samantha accuses me of takin’ it too far. I’m the only one of my father’s sons who talks exactly like he does, and with the passage of time, I’ve come to mimic him more and more. She swears up and down I didn’t drop all of my Gs a year ago. What’s up with me doin’ it now? I don’t have any answers. Maybe I’ve patterned myself after him so closely because I feel guilty.”

“For what?” she asked.

Parker took a moment to answer, because confessing the truth made him feel like a worthless, ungrateful shithead. “For thinkin’ he didn’t measure up, that he was somehow less than my fancy-talkin’ professors at university, and that I was gonna be better than him just because I was gettin’ an education. An education that he paid for, by the way. I was an ungrateful brat. I know now it was just a stage I went through, and to my credit, it didn’t last very long. But I’ll always feel bad for thinkin’ that way, even for a time. There isn’t a finer man who’s ever walked the earth, and if someone tells me I’m just like Frank Harrigan, I feel proud.”

Rainie bent her head and dragged the toe of her shoe over a porch plank as the swing moved forward. “So that’s why you downplay the fact that you attended college.” She glanced up, her eyes shimmering in the gloaming, the tendrils of blondish hair at her temples trailing in the breeze. “I’ve wondered about that. Most of the time, no one would ever guess you have one degree, let alone that you studied equine genetics. That isn’t like taking a course in basket weaving, Parker. It takes brains.”

Parker stared off through the deepening twilight. “It takes brains to be the horseman my father is, too. What I learned after finishin’ that coursework was that it’s only a tool, not a measure of who I am.” He deliberately sent her a questioning look, not wanting her to guess that he’d just bared his soul to her on purpose. “How did we get off on this?”

“I like being off on this. I’m finding out things about you that I never knew.”

And he’d been remiss in making her wait so long. “You likin’ what you see?”

Her sweet face softened in a thoughtful smile. “I’m liking it a lot. I’ve known for a long time that you’re nothing like Peter. This just drives it home. If he had your education, he’d broadcast it everywhere he went. You act as if you never set foot on a university campus. In your position, he’d try to dazzle people with genetic theory. You seldom reveal that you know anything about genetics.”

Parker couldn’t help but laugh. “Darlin’, if I got started in on equine genetics, your eyes would glaze over with boredom and you’d drop off to sleep.”

She chuckled with him. “Probably so.”

A long silence fell between them. When Parker finally spoke, his voice had gone thick and gravelly. “I’m sorry he hurt you so much, honey. Just for the record, if I’d met you under other circumstances, and I would have been fired for fraternizin’ with you, I would have told my superiors to take the damned job and shove it.”

She fixed him with those beautiful eyes that always made him feel as if he might get lost in them. “I know.”

Those two words meant the world to Parker.
I know.
He glanced quickly away. She wasn’t ready to make the scary confession
I love you
, but he could wait. She felt it. That was all he needed to know.