Stay (Dunham series #2) (31 page)

Then governor. Then the White House.

He was now one of the most powerful men in Chouteau
County. He’d turned the county’s bad reputation into a good one,
and the people he served believed in him the way they’d believed in
Knox.

With every success, small and large, he would take
another step eastward away from Missouri, away from Vanessa.

“You’re a hot mess.”

She took the handkerchief Knox waved in front of her
face and he sat down on the swing beside her. Neither spoke for a
long time and Vanessa mopped up her tears, blew her nose.

“I got mascara on your handkerchief,” she finally
said.

“I don’t care about the mascara. It’s the snot I’d
rather not stick back in my pocket.” She laughed reluctantly. After
another long while, he murmured, “A man will move heaven and earth
for the woman he loves.”

“He doesn’t love me.”

“Yeah, about that. You don’t see how he looks at
you.”

While that might have been comforting . . . “It’s
gratitude, pure and simple. Or lust, I don’t know. It’s not . . .
me
. It can’t be. He doesn’t know me well enough. The minute
he figures out his feelings aren’t real, he’ll start resenting me—”
Her voice broke. “—for taking him away from his life.”

Another long pause. “You underestimate him.”

“He’s a county prosecutor. I’ll bet he can barely
leave his karate studio the way I can’t leave Whittaker House
because too many people scream too loudly. He wants—” She waved a
hand. “—He wants to be the governor of Missouri.
The president
of the United States.
I don’t see him not getting where he
wants to go and I can’t take that away from him.”

“Why are you assuming what he would or wouldn’t
think or do?”

She bit her lip. “Because I know what I would do. I
wouldn’t leave Whittaker House and follow a man to Washington—or
even Jeff City. What would I do? Stand there and be pretty? I don’t
want to get mixed up in all that bullshit for no monetary gain. I
can kiss ass here and make a mint. And I certainly wouldn’t go back
to Chouteau City. Not for
anything
. Not
ever
. I don’t
really understand why
he
went back.”

Knox laughed. “Honey, I don’t understand that,
either.” He sighed. “Vanessa, I love you two like my own, but I’m
at a loss here. I may have done you both a disservice by helping
you be just successful enough that you got trapped.”

“Didn’t you feel trapped when you were the
prosecutor?”

“Naw. I didn’t have to go anywhere for the woman I
loved. I did, however, drop a quarter of a million dollars I didn’t
have to get her out from under her father’s farm. And then she left
me.”

“Wha—?” Vanessa looked at him then. She could see
his profile in the moonlight, and he didn’t look at her. “Did you
get your money back?”

“No. That wasn’t part of the deal and I couldn’t
renege on the deal without getting my ass thrown in jail.”

“What happened?”

He slid her a look then. “She came back to me. She
yelled at me for buying her.” He chuckled. “Then she went to her
father and got almost every penny of it back at gunpoint.”

“
Lawdy
,” she breathed, and gripped the chains
of the swing tighter.

“Vanessa, I would have done anything to have her,
but I let her go because that’s what she wanted and I couldn’t
refuse her.”

“If that was what she wanted, why did she come back
to you?”

“Because she wanted to try. Wanted to see where our
relationship could go if she were with me of her own free will, on
equal ground. It almost ruined me financially. I would’ve lost
everything I owned.” He gestured vaguely back toward the mansion.
“Whittaker House was the only thing keeping me afloat for months.
You knew that, but you didn’t know why. If she hadn’t come back to
me, it would have been for nothing. If she hadn’t gone to her
father to get it back, I still would’ve lost everything, but it
would have been worth it to have her in my life, to have her love,
freely. And she doesn’t know any of that, so if you breathe a word
of it I’ll turn you over my knee.”

He would, too.

“I don’t want to hope.”

He sighed. “I can appreciate that.”

Vanessa swallowed and bowed her head again, watching
her mascara-tinged tears fall on her pink skirt, staining it.

She didn’t care.

“You need to get waterproof mascara. You’re
scary.”

She laughed through her tears.

“Just tell him, Vanessa. Tell him what you told me.
Let him decide.”

“That would be too easy.”

“You’ve had a crush on Eric since you were twelve
years old.” Vanessa gulped. “Yet here you’re ready to let go of a
chance at something you wanted? Makes no sense. Most people don’t
get that second chance, Vanessa, and if they do, it only takes a
little while to figure out it won’t work. I’ve been watching you
two. I see the way you look at each other, the way you interact. I
don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to get you together, because I
can’t think of anybody better suited to you than Eric, and vice
versa. Kinda like it didn’t occur to me to ask if you’d think about
becoming Vachel’s legal guardian.”

She sighed.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “Vanessa sees what
she wants. She goes after it. She works out the one and only route
she wants to take, and if things don’t fall exactly into place
right when she thinks they should how they should, she gets
pissy.”

“
What?!
”

“You had it all mapped out,” Knox murmured,
gesturing vaguely into the night. “You thought he would stay in
town and you’d grow up and go get him. Your grand plan went to pot
because he left . . . But, all these years, you haven’t been able
to let go of him.

“And okay,” he went on, ignoring Vanessa’s squeak of
protest, “so you have him now, but you don’t know what to do with
him because it’s fifteen years later and life happened and he
suddenly dropped in your lap, and not only wasn’t it part of your
original plan, he’s got his own plans.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Truth is rarely fair.” He paused. “I had a plan
once, but I abandoned it. If I’d stuck to the original script, my
uncle would never have tried to kill us. My wife wouldn’t have had
the nerves in her feet cut to shreds, my daughter wouldn’t be deaf,
I wouldn’t have opened my eyes in a morgue to see a scalpel about
to cut me open.”

“That makes
my
point, not yours.”

“Shut up and let me finish. What I should’ve done,
since I was too stupid to stick to Plan A, was tell Justice I loved
her and wanted to marry her. If I’d told her who I was, if I’d laid
my situation out for her, she would’ve married me in a heartbeat,
but I was afraid she’d say no. I didn’t have to jump any of the
hoops I jumped through, and worse—what I did was pure evil. I can’t
ever
atone for that, especially when all I needed was a
little courage to tell her how I felt, instead of doing what I did.
It would have been
that
easy. So . . . think about that for
a while.”

He rose then, dropped a kiss on the top of her head,
patted her shoulder, and left.

By the time she went back to her cottage, it was two
in the morning and Eric was asleep. She dropped her clothes where
she stood, climbed in beside him, and wrapped herself around
him.

She fell asleep to the sweet rhythm of Eric’s
heartbeat.

* * * * *

27: The Last Sleigh Ride

Vanessa awoke to the feeling of a hard naked chest
half underneath her and a large arm wrapped around her. Eric’s
breathing was shallow and regular; he was still asleep and she was
sprawled on top of him, her knee barely brushing his morning
arousal.

Just tell him.

She had been following Knox’s advice for years and
he had never led her astray. She was well educated. She was very
well off by some standards and downright rich by Mansfield
standards. Knox was not a man who gave bad advice, so why shouldn’t
she take this advice?

Because she
was
afraid. She was afraid of
what
wouldn’t
happen more than she had ever feared anything
in her life.

Please come stay with me at Whittaker House
forever.
Her heart broke because she hadn’t the courage to say
it.

Vanessa felt Eric’s hand begin to caress her upper
arm and shoulder, and his breathing changed a bit.

“I have a chubby.”

That was so unexpected it surprised a laugh out of
Vanessa. “I couldn’t tell,” she drawled.

He drew her toward him so that her mouth barely
brushed his and they kissed lightly. “I want to do something about
that today, Vanessa,” he murmured against her lips, his eyes open
and watching her watch him. “Preferably now.”

“I can’t right now,” she breathed. “Much as I’d like
to. Knox and I have a meeting with my architects this morning in—”
She looked at the clock. “—an hour and it’ll take me a while to get
ready. That’s why he’s here.”

His forehead wrinkled. “On Sunday? For what?”

“The golf course. This was the only time we could
all get together. Now that we have our zoning, we can finalize the
plans.”

Eric’s eyes narrowed and she smiled when he
murmured, “I can’t tell you how ballsy I think that is, but now
that I’ve been here, I don’t see why you need one.”

“In case you didn’t notice, most of my regular
guests are elderly.”

“I did, as a matter of fact.”

“Elderly people die and then they don’t come to my
place to spend their children’s inheritances. Their children sure
aren’t going to come here to soak up the nostalgia.”

He began to laugh and then he was laughing so hard
he was choking and coughing.

“A few years ago when we were just starting out, I
hosted a couple of corporate retreats to have some mid-week
off-season income. I really liked that experience and I knew I
wanted to make that my main source of revenue, become known for
that. Go after the deep corporate pockets. But then . . . nobody
ever booked a corporate retreat here again no matter what I did, so
I had a research firm see if they could find out why.”

“No golf course.”

“We haven’t been in a financial position to build
one until OKH bought Knox’s share. The corporate guests
didn’t—don’t—care about me or my food. They came here for a
complete ‘respite from the information age,’ but when it came right
down to it, they couldn’t go without a golf course.”

“What do you mean, ‘respite from the information
age’? You’ve made two counties a hotspot all by yourself.”

“Well, I have to be. This is where I work. The
people who are foolish enough to come here and crack their laptops
find out the whole place is wired, but then they get mad at me
because they didn’t have a restful vacation.”

“What do you say?”

“I say, ‘It states very clearly on the website and
in my brochure that Whittaker House is not responsible for the
quality of your stay if you insist on bringing your work with
you.’”

“Does it really say that?”

“It most definitely does. It’s part of the waiver or
disclaimer or whatever it is that they sign to stay here. It’s not
in fine print.”

“What do they say when you tell them that?”

“I can guarantee you there’ll be at least one that
does it to me today, so you can watch. I tell them to go to hell,
but only in the nicest way.”

“What about this afternoon?”

She shook her head. “I fired my bartender last week
and I have two interviews coming today. Shelly’s not here and it’s
a month and a half before the new concierge shows up. I have six
guests checking out today and four checking in. I might have
butchering to do today; I don’t know if Vachel bagged anything last
night. I still have to arm wrestle Alain over next Saturday’s dish
and I need to make about ten dozen chocolate chip cookies for the
county commissioners as a thank you. It’s going to be nasty busy
today.”

With that, she rolled out of bed and headed to the
bathroom. Eric left her alone to shower, which was rather
disappointing, but it was necessary because she needed that time to
prepare for her meeting.

He was still in bed but on his phone when she turned
off the shower and came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around
her body.

“He did what?” he snapped, and Vanessa got a sharp,
tingling sensation of dread behind her breastbone.

“No. Have Connelly take it . . . Dammit, can’t I
leave for one fucking weekend without something happening?”

Vanessa swallowed and went into her closet. Shuffled
blindly through her clothes while she listened.

“You all couldn’t possibly have let me know this
when I was spending the last month running around trying to get my
schedule cleared? . . . No, he didn’t tell me . . . Yeah, okay,
whatever. It’s going to have to wait until tomorrow morning . . .
Yes, tomorrow! . . . I don’t give a shit! Go to Wilson and get a
continuance . . . Whaddaya mean, out of continuances? He
said
that? . . . All right, fine. Nine o’clock. I get
it.”

She winced when she heard the phone hit the wall
hard enough to possibly put a hole in it, then pieces clattering to
the wood floor. When she emerged from the closet, she saw Eric
lying on his back, an arm thrown over his eyes.

Sitting on the bed beside him, she didn’t say
anything. She just began dressing, and suddenly, she wished Eric
were dressing her. She didn’t dare ask.

“You’re welcome to come to the meeting with me,
Eric,” she murmured when he still hadn’t said anything.

“I have to go home today.”

Vanessa’s heart broke.

“I heard.”

Vanessa got up and Eric grabbed her arm, pulling her
down on top of him. He wrapped his other arm around her shoulders
and held her to him to kiss her urgently, deeply so that she lost
herself somewhere in him.