The Bachelor's Baby (Bachelor Auction Book 3) (5 page)

Her deliberate tone was spoken with an inward sort of reflection, like she wasn’t being as flippant as she wanted to appear.

“That sounded sad,” he noted, oddly caught by her change of mood. “You just said you’ll be back to visit.”

“I will, but I realized this trip that I probably won’t come back here to live. My safety net is gone. So yes, I’m sad.”

And apprehensive, if he wasn’t mistaken. He wouldn’t call himself deeply intuitive, but you didn’t work closely with men in tight confines around heavy machinery without learning to read faces. Hers was taut beneath her projection of friendliness.

“Problems at work?” he asked.

She flashed a glance up at him, wariness practically sparking off her like static, before dropping her gaze to her drink and asking, “Why do you say that?”

Interesting.

“You said you didn’t have a safety net here anymore. That implies you need or want one. What’s wrong? Are they downsizing or something?” He intensified his scavenge across her features, trying to read clues in an expression that went from poker-bluff to surprised and maybe…relieved? Because he hadn’t guessed correctly?

“No, I have a job as long as I want it,” she said with more confidence than most people showed these days. “The safety net remark just means—” She shrugged. “I took a chance when I moved away. Most people want to know there’s a Plan B when you take a risk, that you can fall back on the familiar. I’ve always had that and it was comforting. But I don’t really need it anymore. I’m pretty established in Chicago.”

He’d never had a fallback. Once his father had died, he’d been his mother’s backup as much as the other way around. She hadn’t pulled any punches about their situation, and he’d felt the gravity of their circumstances every single day. By the time they’d been kicked out of Charlie’s, he’d been the breadwinner and fully responsible for the both of them.

“You like Chicago?” he asked, curious how she’d wound up there from here.

“I’d better, hadn’t I?” she scoffed, pretending to be tough again, then quirked her mouth in rueful confession. “Things have been less than ideal lately. I’m given to understand it won’t always be this way, but for now it sucks and I would have preferred to know I could run home anytime. But now I can’t. So I’ll have to grin and bear it.”

His hackles rose as a suspicion formed, one that always had the power to light his fuse. “What are you talking about? Not sexual harassment?”

“What? No,” she dismissed, plainly surprised. A frown of mixed emotions chased across her expression. After a brief second of indecision, she allowed, “Not exactly.” She took a deep swallow and she set her drink away, hand tremoring a little. “It’s nothing, really. Kind of a stalker.”

The same but different. His insides went cold. “Are you serious?”

Her nod was more a hitch and shrug, trying to be dismissive, like it wasn’t a big deal. “I haven’t told anyone here, not even Blake. He’d lose his mind and there’s nothing he could do. Everything that can be done, has been. The station has been great, following up with the police to take every measure, hiring me personal security, but…” She shrugged. “There’s only so much they
can
do.”

“You can’t go back to that,” he stated.

Her impatient wave dismissed his remark. “I can’t quit my job. It’s an inconvenience—”

“It’s more than an inconvenience, Meg,” he cut in, old anger rising like a skeleton from a grave.

“Whoa,” she cautioned, palm almost touching his chest. “I can see you’re on my side, which is nice, but this is exactly why I haven’t told Blake. You guys with your overdeveloped protective instincts.
Changing my routines
is an inconvenience,” she clarified. “Never going anywhere alone is a total pain, but I’m not about to let a stranger cut short a career I’ve spent my whole life building. I’ll figure out how to live my life around these restrictions.”

He told himself to back off, but he knew exactly how vulnerable a single woman was, no matter how resourceful and independent she tried to be.

“You really should talk to your brother about it.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up. Tell me about you,” she insisted. “Why are you here? In Marietta, I mean. Ranching. ‘Cause that’s a really nice suit and it doesn’t look very old.”

Her switch to interviewer threw him and he debated pushing her to expound on her own situation, but he could see she wanted to close that door.

“I got tired,” he replied. “Money’s nice and so is the Caribbean, but frankly, when I finally got time off, the last thing I wanted to do was get on yet another airplane to visit the beach. And the men might as well be cattle for all the ways I had to ride herd. If they so much as grazed the wrong blade of grass, my ass was in a sling. I’m not saying we don’t need environmental laws, but I got tired of micromanaging to enforce them.”

“And you think there aren’t regulations governing ranching? Gone are the days when you just had to keep the wolves off the herd and drive them to market, you know.”

“I know. I was on a ranch until I was twenty and saw a lot of changes in those last few years. It’s changed even more since.” He wouldn’t tell her that her remark the other day about going organic had put a bee in his bonnet. He was looking into it.

“It’s a business,” she reinforced.

“I happen to have a degree in business.” He wasn’t bragging. It was a fact.

“There’s also a lot of backbreaking labor,” she cautioned, but a winsome grin and a scan across his shoulders told him that her questioning his strength and willingness to work was a tease.

“I’ve always been the hands-on type,” he assured her, pleased that she heard the innuendo and blushed.

“Do you have family in Marietta?” she asked.

“Other side of the state. Some cousins and an aunt. We get in touch a couple times a year, but I don’t see a lot of them. We all have lives.” He shrugged.

She nodded.

The latest bachelor winner caused a huge cheer to go up, making them both look.

“Oh!” She waved as she saw her companion was shrugging into her coat and looking for her. “I think Liz wants to go. Thanks for the drink.” She gave him a crooked smile. “I mean that. I’m glad we’re okay.” He thought he heard more than a chipper goodbye. She looked like she wished they weren’t cutting this short.

He wished they weren’t, too. Damn it, why wouldn’t she just come back to his place and let them get where attraction wanted to take them?

Her friend wound her way through the tables to arrive next to them. She was the poster-child for California Girls with dark blond hair, white teeth, and looks that were glamorous and wholesome at the same time.

“Sorry to interrupt, but—hi,” she said with a friendly smile.

“Linc Brady, Liz Flowers. Soon to be Canon,” Meg introduced. “I finally got that sister I asked Santa for when I was five.”

“And a clumsy niece,” Liz said with an exasperated chuckle. “I just got a text. The girls were using a box cutter to make some backdrops for the play. Nothing life threatening, but Petra needs a couple of stitches. I’m going to run her to the emergency room, but I’ll come back for you. Do you mind?”

“Oh, um…” Meg had thought Liz wanted to leave for the night. They had dropped Petra at her cousin’s on the way to the auction, so it would only take a minute to collect her and cut across town to the hospital. Meg was done with the auction, but wouldn’t mind finishing her drink with Linc. She glanced at him.

“I can take you home,” he offered. “I’ll be driving right by.”

‡

M
eg hadn’t expected
that. Or the way her blood expanded in a big pump of excitement through her veins as she absorbed how close he stood. Glancing up, she found him looking at her mouth. The sizzle in her nerve endings grew sharper.

“Would you mind?” she asked, not sure if she was talking to him or Liz.

“Not at all,” Liz assured her with a smile that was a teensy bit sly. “I’ll have to fill out forms anyway, which will take some time. I’d rather not make you wait for us.”

The shift in plans felt wicked, but in a good way. Minutes later, Meg was bundled into her coat, sitting in Linc’s leather-scented pick up truck, bottom warmed by the seat element. The interior of the truck was dark and intimate with the local station playing the latest country tune on low volume. Snow was starting to fall in earnest, flakes flying into the beam of the headlights.

“Meg, I hope you’re taking this situation at your work seriously. Because I happen to know that chasing environmental regulations is nothing compared to enforcing the safety ones. Too many people think it’s a sign of weakness to take basic precautions. Or a waste of time. It’s not. It’s smart.”

She smiled across at him in the dark, both irritated and touched by his concern. “I’m being very careful. Honestly.” Overly, really, but she appreciated the station’s abundance of caution. “And I will talk to Blake about it if it will keep
you
from playing Big Brother.”

A pause, then, “This one hits close to home for me. There was a guy that went after my mom when I was a kid.”

“Seriously? What happened? Is that why you asked me if it was sexual harassment?”

“Yeah. He was really aggressive about it, pressing her with unwanted attention. Don’t be foolish and think that ignoring it will make it go away.”

“I won’t. I swear. But what happened? How did she make him stop?” She was listening carefully, eager to put an end to her own situation.

“She didn’t. I did. And got my ass kicked in the process.”

Meg delivered news on a daily basis. She knew what a beating looked like. Terrible things happened to good people all the time. It was her job to hold herself at a distance, but certain things still had the power to leave a mark if she saw a personal connection. Those were times when her emotions refused to be shoved into neutral and this was one of them.

“How old were you?” she asked with a kind of morbid dread, wanting to know but not. Her heart felt clutched in a vise.

“Fourteen. I guess there was a silver lining because a grown man beating the hell out of a teenager gets charged for it, especially when the cause of the dispute is made clear to the officer.”

“I should hope so,” she muttered, outraged on his behalf. “Did he go to jail?”

“Probation. And he served in another town, not that we would have seen him if he’d stayed. That’s how we wound up working on a ranch again.”

“Again?” she repeated curiously.

“My parents were ranchers, but Mom had to sell when Dad died. I was ten and we moved into town. She worked in the doctor’s office during the week, but went out on Saturdays to clean for Charlie. It was one of his hands who was cornering her up there, coming into the doctor’s office if he was in town. She couldn’t afford to lose either job so she didn’t say anything.” Linc glanced pointedly across to her. “It’s not your fault this is happening to you, Meg.”

Little did he know. She sighed and linked her gloved fingers in her lap, not trying to explain that she may not have done anything overt to encourage her rabid fan, but she did have a tab to settle with the Universe.

“Did this Charlie feel bad or something?” she asked.

“Yeah. After the guy was arrested, Charlie showed up at our apartment. The other hands used to call him Chuckles. Facetiously. He never smiled, didn’t say two words if none would do. I was still moving pretty slow, had a couple of busted ribs. He was grizzled and scary looking, but he was genuinely sorry that his employee had frightened Mom and hurt her son. He was also down a body at the ranch after firing the S.O.B. He looked me over, said I’d do once I healed, then asked Mom if she’d like to take over the books on top of keeping house. We moved out there and lived over the cookhouse. She kept the men fed along with everything else.”

“That sounds like it was a good situation.” She was reading his tone as much as his words. “What made you leave?”

“Charlie died. The ranch went to his nephew in Florida and he sold everything off then put the property on the market. That put us out of work and our home so I got Mom settled near her sister-in-law and took a job on the oilrigs. I was twenty, trying to pay for school. The money was green.”

“So seductively green,” she agreed dolefully, having been tempted herself by the bigger paychecks far from home along with everything else the city had offered. “Is your mom still near Lewiston?” He hadn’t mentioned her when she had asked about his family.

“She passed away a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. Typical dumbass kid, I figured I had plenty of time to spend with her after I’d ticked off all my career goals. You’d think I’d have learned after losing Dad that parents aren’t immortal.” His voice was heavy with self-recrimination.

“I was in Chicago when my mom passed. I still hate myself for not being here, even though I couldn’t have known it would happen,” she admitted, still experiencing a pang even this many years later.

“It’s just you and your brother?” He slowed for the turn into her driveway then halted with just the nose of his truck off the road.

“And Ethan. He’s sixteen and been with us half-time since he was a baby, um—Is there a problem?” she asked as he put the truck into park.