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The man liked her. He more than liked her.
Dexter Lancaster had a thing for Nell. The man was twenty years her senior, at least, but Crash knew from his subtle body language and from the way he was looking at her that he found her undeniably attractive.
Lancaster was no fool. And judging from the fact that his law firm had one of the best reputations in the country, he also was not an underachiever. Any second now, he was going to ask Nell out to dinner.
“I was wondering…” Lancaster started.
Crash coughed and stepped into the room.
Nell slipped her hand out from beneath Lancaster’s as she turned to look up at him. “You’re back,” she said, giving him a smile. It was a bigger smile than the one she’d given Dex Lancaster. “Did you have any problem getting the rings?”
Crash took the two jewelers’ boxes from the inside pocket of his jacket and set them on the table in front of her. “None whatsoever.”
“You know Dex, don’t you?” she asked.
“We’ve met a few times,” Crash said.
The lawyer stood up as he held out his hand, and the two men shook.
But their handshake wasn’t a greeting. It was a not-so-subtle sizing up. It was more than obvious, from the once-over Lancaster was giving him, that he was trying to figure out what claim—if any—Crash had already staked out.
Crash met the older man’s gaze steadily. And after the handshake was done, he moved slightly to stand closer to Nell, putting one hand on the back of her chair in a gesture that was clearly possessive.
What the hell was he doing?
He didn’t want this girl.
He’d resolved to stay away from her, to keep his distance, both physically and emotionally.
But as much as he didn’t want her, he didn’t want to see her taken for a ride, either.
Crash didn’t trust lawyers any farther than he could throw them, and Dexter Lancaster was no exception to his rule, despite the fact that his eyes twinkled like Santa Claus’s.
Lancaster checked his watch. “I have to get going.” He twinkled at Nell. “I’m sure I’ll talk to you soon.” He nodded at Crash as he slipped on his overcoat. “Nice seeing you again.”
Like hell it was. “Take care,” Crash lied in return.
“What was that all about?” Nell turned to ask as the door closed behind Dexter Lancaster.
Crash opened the refrigerator and pretended to be engrossed by its contents. “Just a little Army/Navy rivalry.”
Nell laughed. “You’re kidding. All that tension just because you’re in the Navy and he was in the Army?”
Crash took a can of soda out and shut the refrigerator door. “Crazy, huh?” he said as he escaped into the other room.
Chapter 3
Nell glanced up from her computer to see Crash standing in her office. She jumped, nearly knocking over her cup of tea, catching it with both hands, just in time.
“God!” she said. “Don’t do that! You’re always sneaking up on me. Make some noise when you come in, will you? Try stomping your feet, okay?”
“I thought I’d made noise when I opened the door. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She took a deep breath, letting it slowly out. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve been…feeling sideways all day. There must be a full moon or something.” She frowned at the half-written letter on her computer screen. “Of course, now I’ve got so much adrenaline raging through my system, I’m not going to be able to concentrate.”
“Next time, I’ll knock.”
Nell looked up at Crash in exasperation. “I don’t want you to knock. You’ve been working as hard as I have—this is your office, too. Just…clear your throat or play the bagpipes or whistle, or something.” She turned back to the letter.
Crash cleared his throat. “I’ve been ordered to tell you that after two days of rain, the sky’s finally clear, and the sun’s due to set in less than fifteen minutes,” he said.
Sunset. Nell glanced at her watch, swearing silently. Was it really that time already?
“I’m waiting for a fax from the caterer, and Dex Lancaster’s supposed to call me right back to tell me if Friday is okay to come out and discuss some changes Daisy wants to make to her will, but I guess he can leave a message on the machine,” she told him, thinking aloud. “I’m almost done with this letter, but I’ll hurry. I’ll be there. I promise.”
Crash stepped closer. “I’ve been ordered to make sure you arrive on time, not five minutes after the sun has gone down, like last Monday. Daisy said to tell you that the rest of the week’s forecast calls for total cloud coverage. In fact, the prediction is for snow—maybe as much as two or three inches. This could be the last sunset we see for a while.”
The last sunset. Every sunset they saw was one of Daisy’s very last sunsets.
Every clear day for the past two weeks, Daisy had brought Nell’s work to a screeching halt as they’d all met in the studio to watch the setting sun. But now there was less than a week before the wedding, and the list of things that needed to be done was still as long as her arm. On top of that, the sun was setting earlier and earlier as midwinter approached, cutting her workday shorter and shorter.
It was also reminding her that the passage of time was bringing them closer and closer to the end of Daisy’s life.
Nell looked at her watch again, then up into the steely gray of Crash’s eyes.
To her surprise, there was amusement gleaming there.
“I’ve been ordered not to fail,” he told her, giving her an actual smile, “which means I’m going to have to pick you up and carry you downstairs to the studio if you don’t get out of that chair right now.”
Yeah, sure he was. Nell turned back to the computer. “Just let me save this file. And wait—here comes that fax from the caterer now. I just have to—Hey!”
Crash picked her up, just as he’d said he would, throwing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold as he carried her out of the door.
“Okay, Hawken, very funny. Put me down.” Nell’s nose bumped his back and her arms dangled uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure where to put her hands.
He seemed to have no problem figuring out where to put his hands. He held her legs firmly with one arm, and anchored her in place by resting his other hand squarely on the seat of her jeans. Yet despite that, his touch seemed impersonal—further proof that the man was not even remotely interested in her.
And after two weeks of living in the same house, sleeping in a room one door down the hall from his, and working together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on this wedding that had somehow grown from a small affair with forty guests into a three-hundred-person, Godzillasized event, Nell probably didn’t need any further proof.
William Hawken wasn’t interested.
Nell had given him all the full-speed-ahead signs—body language, lingering eye contact, subtle verbal hints. She’d done damn near everything but show up naked in his room at night.
But he’d kept at least three feet of air between them at all times. If he was sitting on the couch and she sat down next to him, he soon stood up on the pretense of getting something from the kitchen. He was always polite, always asking if he could get her a soda or a cup of tea, but when he came back, he was careful to sit on the opposite side of the room.
He never let her get too close emotionally, either. While she had babbled on about her family and growing up in Ohio, he had never, not even once, told her anything about himself.
No, he was definitely not interested.
Except whenever she turned around, whenever he thought she wasn’t looking, he was there, looking at her. He moved so soundlessly, he just seemed to appear out of thin air. And he was always watching.
It was enough to keep alive that little seed of hope. Maybe he was interested, but he was shy.
Shy? Yeah, right. William Hawken might’ve been quiet, but he didn’t have a shy bone in his body. Try again.
Maybe he was in love with someone else, someone far away, someone he couldn’t be with while he was here at the farm. In that case, the careful distance that he kept between them made him a gentleman.
Or maybe he simply wasn’t interested, but he didn’t have anything better to look at, so he stared at her.
And maybe she should stop obsessing and get on with her life. So what if the most handsome, attractive, fascinating man she’d ever met only wanted to be friends? So what if every time she was with him, she liked him more and more? So what? She’d be friends with him. No big deal.
Nell closed her eyes, miserably wishing that he were carrying her to his room. Instead, he took her all the way down the stairs and into Daisy’s art studio.
Jake had set up the beach chairs in front of the window that faced west. Daisy was already reclining, hands lazily up behind her head as Jake gently worked the cork free from a bottle of wine.
The last sunset. Crash’s words rang in Nell’s ears. One of these evenings, Daisy was going to watch her last sunset. Nell hated that idea. She hated it. Anger and frustration boiled in her chest, making it hard to breathe.
“Better lock the door before you put her down,” Daisy told Crash. “She might run away.”
“Just throw her down fast and sit on her,” Jake recommended.
But Crash didn’t throw her down. He placed her, gently, on one of the chairs.
“Watch her,” Daisy warned. “She’ll try to squeeze in just one more call.”
Nell looked at the other woman in exasperation. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, okay? But I’m not going to drink any wine. I still have too much work to—”
Jake put a wineglass in her hand. “How can you make a toast if you don’t have any wine?”
Daisy sat up to take a glass from Jake, who took the chair next to her. She leaned forward slightly to look across him to Nell. “I have an idea. Let’s just let this wedding happen. No more preparations. We’ve got the dress, the rings, the band’s set to come and nearly all the guest have been called. What else could we possibly need?”
“Food would be nice.”
“Who eats at weddings, anyway?” Daisy said. Her cat-green eyes narrowed as she looked at Nell. “You look exhausted. I think you need a day off. Tomorrow Jake and I are going skiing over in West Virginia. Why don’t you come along?”
Skiing? Nell snorted. “No thanks.”
“You’d love it,” Daisy persisted. “The view from the ski lift is incredible, and the adrenaline rush from the ride down the mountain is out of this world.”
“It’s really not my style.” She preferred curling up in front of a roaring fire with a good book over an adrenaline rush. She smiled tightly at Crash. “See, I’m one of those people who ride the Antique Cars in the amusement park instead of the roller coaster.”
He nodded, pouring soda into the delicate wineglass Jake had left out for him. “You like being in control. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He sat down next to her. “But skiing’s different from riding a roller coaster. When you ski, you’ve still got control.”
“Not when I ski,” Daisy said with a throaty chuckle.
Crash glanced at her, his mouth quirking up into one of his near smiles. “If you had bothered to learn how to do it instead of just strapping the skis on for the first time at the top of a mountain—”
“How could I waste my time on the bunny slope when that great huge mountain was sitting there, waiting for me?” Daisy retorted. “Billy, talk Nell into coming with us.”
Crash’s eyes met Nell’s, and she wondered if he could tell just from looking how brittle she felt today. She’d been tense and out of sorts just a few minutes ago, but now she felt as if she were going to snap.
Crash on the other hand, looked exactly as he always did. Slightly remote, in careful control. That was how he did it, Nell realized suddenly. He stayed in control by distancing himself from the situation and the people involved.
He’d cut himself off from all his emotions. Sure, he probably didn’t feel as if his rage and grief were going to come hurtling out of him in some terrible projectile vomit of emotion. But on the other hand, he didn’t laugh much, either. Oh, occasionally something she or Daisy said would catch him off guard, and he’d chuckle. But she’d never seen him laugh until tears came.
He’d protected himself from the pain, but he’d cut himself off from the joy as well.
And that was another desperate tragedy. Daisy, so full of life, was dying while Crash willingly chose to go through life emotionally half-dead.
Nell was clinging to the very edge of the cliff that was her control, and the sheer tragedy of that thought made her fingernails start slipping.
Crash leaned slightly toward her. “I can teach you to ski, if you want,” he said quietly. “I’d take it as slowly as you like—you’d be in control, I promise.” He lowered his voice even further. “Are you all right?”
Nell shook her head quickly, jerkily, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s hand signal. “I can’t go skiing. I have way too much to do.” She turned toward Daisy, unable to meet the other woman’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Daisy didn’t say it in front of Jake and Crash, but Nell could see what she was thinking—it was clearly written on her face. She thought Nell was missing out. She thought Nell was letting her life pass her by.
But life was about making choices, dammit, and Nell was choosing to stay home, to stay warm instead of strapping slabs of wood onto her feet and risking broken arms and legs by sliding at an alarming speed down an icy slope covered with artificial snow. The only thing Nell was missing was fear, discomfort and the chance for a trip to the hospital.
She sat back in her chair, feeling as if the sudden silence in the room was the fault of her bitchiness. Her chest got even tighter and the suffocating feeling she was fighting threatened to overwhelm her. She looked at Crash. He was watching the sky begin to change colors as he sipped soda from his wineglass.
What did it look like to him? Did he look at the beautiful pink and reddish-orange colors with as much detachment as he did everything else? Did he see the fragile lace of the high clouds only as a meteorological formation, only as cirrus clouds? And instead of the brilliant colors, did he see only the dust in the atmosphere, bending and distorting the sun’s light?
“How come you’re not required to drink wine?” Her words came out sounding belligerent, nearly rude. But if he noticed, he didn’t take offense.
“I don’t drink alcohol,” he told her evenly, “unless I absolutely have to.”
That didn’t make sense. Nothing about her life right now made any sense at all. “Why would you have to?”
“Sometimes, in other countries, when I meet with…certain people, it would be considered an insult not to drink with them.”
That was it. Nell boiled over. She stood up and set down her glass, sloshing the untouched contents on the tablecloth. “Could you possibly be any more vague when you talk about yourself? I mean, don’t bother adding a single detail, please. It’s not as if I give a damn.”
Nell was furious, but Crash knew that her anger wasn’t aimed at him. He’d just been caught in her emotional crossfire.
For the past two weeks, she had been in as carefully tight control as he was. But for some reason—and it didn’t really matter what had triggered it—she’d reached her limit tonight.
She was staring at him now, her face ashen and her eyes wide and filled with tears, as if she’d realized just how terribly un-Nell-like she’d just sounded.
Crash got to his feet slowly, afraid if he moved too quickly she’d run for the door.
But she didn’t run. Instead, she forced a tight smile. “Well, I sure am the life of the party tonight, huh?” She glanced at the others, still trying hard to smile. “I’m sorry, Daisy. I think I have to go.”
“Yeah, I have to go, too,” Crash said, hoping that if he sounded matter-of-fact, Nell might let him walk with her. The stress she’d been under for the past few weeks had been hellishly intense. She didn’t deserve to be alone, and he, God help him, was the only candidate available to make sure that she wasn’t. He took her arm and gently pulled her with him toward the door.
She didn’t say a word until they reached the stairs that led to the second floor of the rambling modern farmhouse. But then, with the full glory of the pink sky framed by the picture window in the living room, she spoke. “I ruined a really good sunset for them, didn’t I?”
Crash wished that she would cry. He would know what to do if she cried. He’d put his arm around her and hold her until she didn’t need him to hold her anymore.
