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“You.” He put his hands on her arms and ran them up to her shoulders, letting the warmth of her seep into his palms. “You always have.”
“I don’t think this—”
“Good. Don’t think.” He crushed his mouth down on hers.
She jolted. He knew that, but only dimly—the ripe taste of her flooded him, a wine more heady than sweet. He pulled her tight against him, running his hands over her, feeding on the feel of her, the scent and taste and heat that was Dixie.
It wasn’t enough. He needed more—needed enough of her that she wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave him again. His arms tightened around her.
And, dammit to hell, as soon as he did that, she started struggling. Pushing him away.
Cole had to drop his arms and let her go. Again. And it hurt, again.
Her mouth was wet, her hair wildly mussed and her eyes snapping with anger. “I won’t be forced.”
It was guilt that made him snap back. “Forced? It was a kiss!”
“You were going too fast. Pushing too hard.”
His mouth twisted. So did something inside, something that spilled out ugliness. “You’ve given me every reason to think you’d like to be kissed. Or was that all part of the game? Do you get a charge out of teasing men?”
“Where did that come from?” she snapped.
“You like men, don’t you? Eli, Russ, me—you flirt with us all. Am I just one of your men, Dixie?”
She spun around and started back toward the path.
“That’s right. Walk away. That’s your answer to everything.”
She paused. Slowly she turned. “People who leave aren’t exactly high on your list, are they, Cole? Or maybe they make the wrong list. Eleven years ago, I was the one to leave. We haven’t talked about that.”
“That’s right, I forgot. Talking is your other answer.”
She scowled. “I like yelling, too, sometimes.”
“I remember.” God, he did remember. Not the exact words of that last fight, but the feelings. She’d been furious, hurt—and the more angry she’d gotten, the colder he’d turned, until he’d thought he might never be warm again. “You yelled plenty when I forgot your birthday. Then you left me.”
She stared. “Tell me that isn’t the way you remember it.”
“It’s what happened! I messed up with the dates—”
“You refused to change a dinner with a client to another day!” She advanced, fists clenched at her sides. “We had a date, you and I, but you forgot and booked a dinner with a client for that night. I was hurt, yes, because you’d forgotten, but that wasn’t why I left!”
“Then why?” he demanded. “Tell me why, because I remember you screaming at me that if I wouldn’t take you out instead of my client, you were leaving—and you did!”
“You could have switched your client to another night instead of putting me off! I came last, like usual. Over and over you showed me where I stood—business came first, your family second, and I finished a poor third. Yet in spite of that, you couldn’t stand it if I so much as smiled at another man!”
His lip curled. “Half the time, you smiled at everyone but me. Is it any wonder I wasn’t sure of you?”
“You weren’t there for me to smile at! God, I’d be waiting for a phone call, then when it came you’d tell me you had to cancel lunch. Or dinner. By the last month we were together,” she finished bitterly, “you’d canceled pretty much everything except sex. That, you had time for.”
Her words struck him mute, inside and out. In the flash of mental silence that followed he heard his own words, past and present, echoing in his mind. After a moment he asked quietly, “Did you really think that? That all I wanted from you was sex?”
She gave her head a little shake, as if she were emerging from the fog, too. When she spoke there was a thread of humor in her voice. “Surely I must have screamed something along those lines.”
“By then we were accusing each other of everything short of abetting the Holocaust. I didn’t think you meant it.”
“I, on the other hand, believed you meant every word. You weren’t screaming, like me. You were deep in your chill zone, still speaking in complete, grammatically correct sentences…everything you said came out cold and deliberate.”
“I have no idea what I said. I was terrified.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You?”
“Oh, yeah. I was losing you and I knew it.” He’d never really believed he’d be able to hold on to her, so he’d held on too tightly, letting jealousy twist its knife in him. “I’d bought a ring.”
The words just slipped out. Dammit, he’d never wanted her to know that, never wanted anyone to realize how deep and complete a fool he’d been.
Her eyes went huge. “A ring?” she whispered.
“I was going to ask you to wear it on your birthday. Or,” he added wryly, “on whatever night I managed to make time to celebrate your birthday.”
Her eyes closed. She rubbed her chest as if it hurt. “Give me a minute. You…That’s a real leveler.” She paced away a few steps, then just stood there, her hand on her chest, looking away…pretty far away, he suspected. About eleven years. “If I’d known…”
“You might not have left. And that,” he added with painful honesty, “would probably have been a mistake. I wanted to keep you, but I had no intention of changing. I didn’t know how, back then. We’d have made each other miserable.”
She looked back at him. “I was sure you’d call. I waited for weeks for you to call and say you’d been wrong and wanted me back.”
“I was waiting for you to call and apologize. I gave you a month, being big on tests back then. You mentioned that.” He remembered only too well what she’d said. “Or shouted it. You were sick of the way I kept testing you, but as usual I didn’t listen. At the end of the month I decided you’d failed the test. I pitched the ring into the deepest canyon I could find. It was all very dramatic.”
She shook her head, a sad smile touching her mouth. “God have mercy on the young.”
“Young and stupid,” he agreed. “Both of us.”
Suddenly she laughed. “Pigheaded fits, too. Both of us waiting for the other one to call—”
“Confess their sins—”
“And come crawling back.” She grinned. “Admit it. The crawling part figured in your fantasies, too.”
“Absolutely.” Right up until he threw away the ring that had meant so much…and so little. After that, he’d made up his mind to forget her.
He’d failed.
For a moment they just looked at each other, letting the past settle back into place. Cole found that the shapes it fell into weren’t quite the ones it had held before. “I was out of line earlier,” he admitted. “Way out. I shouldn’t have accused you of being a tease, or…” He swallowed. “Or forced a kiss you didn’t want.”
“I wanted it,” she said, low voiced. “Then I got scared.”
“God, I never meant—”
“Of course not,” she said quickly. “If I’d let you know…but I don’t like to admit it when I’m frightened.”
But he knew of another time she’d been frightened, one she’d told him about. That knowledge hung between them.
She’d been eight when her father died, fifteen when her mother became engaged again. Helen McCord had believed she’d found the man who would take care of her and her daughter forever. Dixie hadn’t liked him, but she’d kept quiet about it for her mother’s sake. They’d just moved in together when Helen’s heart condition had grown suddenly worse. She’d gone in for surgery, comforted by the knowledge that the man she loved would be there to take care of her daughter.
The day after her surgery, that man had cornered Dixie in her bedroom. She’d gotten away. She’d even left her mark—the bastard probably bore a scar on his forehead to this day. And she hadn’t told her mother about it until Helen was home from rehab.
It was typical of Dixie. Admirable. And it provided a stark exclamation point to all the reasons he’d had for doubting she could ever commit completely to one man. Life had taught her not to trust men. To rely only on herself.
“It wasn’t you I was afraid of,” Dixie said at last. “Not you. That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for your comments,” she added with attempted lightness. “Some women may find jealousy attractive. I don’t.”
“Noted.” He nodded, grimly accepting that he’d given her a flashback moment. One more in a long series of mistakes he’d made with her. “You’ve seen my temper, my favorite spot and my least favorite side of myself. Can I show you my cabin now?”
She shook her head. “I do want to see it, but not today. Things are pretty charged between us right now. I don’t want to fall into your bed by accident.”
His pulse leaped. Down, boy, he told his most optimistic body part, and held out a hand. “Walk back with me?”
She smiled, came to him and took his hand. The connection felt good. After a moment he said, “I guess this means I’ll have to postpone my plans for an afternoon of hot sex.”
Her laugh was shaky. “Good guess.”
Postponed, he thought. What a wonderful word. For a few minutes it had looked as if he was going to lose her all over again. They walked back in a silence every bit as complete as when they’d walked out to the meadow…and wholly different.
Chapter Seven
It was surprisingly easy to keep the conversation light on the way back to The Vines. Maybe, Dixie thought, because of that stubborn rascal, hope. It was back, messing with her mind, making her think dangerous thoughts.
She reminded herself that they hadn’t really settled anything. Certainly nothing inside her felt settled. Cole had toppled several of her fixed ideas about the past, turning the present into unfamiliar territory.
He’d bought her a ring. He’d been planning to ask her to wear it.
Never, not once, had she dreamed that Cole had given any thought to marriage. He’d wanted more than one summer, yes. He’d urged her to take a job in San Francisco so they could continue their affair. She probably would have, too, even though the New York job she’d been offered was better for her professionally. If not for their last big fight she probably would have stayed in California to be close to him.
What if Cole had taken her out, as planned, on her birthday? What if he’d presented her with that ring? Would she have said yes?
She didn’t know. That unsettled Dixie more deeply than anything else she’d learned today. For years she’d thought of herself as the one deeply in love, the one most hurt when they couldn’t make their relationship work…now she learned that Cole had been ready to commit to her for life. And she wasn’t sure if she would have said yes.
Shouldn’t she know? If she’d been so deeply in love, why hadn’t she thought about marriage?
Dixie couldn’t find answers for those questions. Maybe it was impossible to see the past clearly through the lens of the present. After all, the woman who’d loved Cole for that short, mad summer was gone.
But the woman who remembered that summer was sitting beside a man who tempted her in ways the younger Cole hadn’t. Hope and humor were beguilements she didn’t know how to defend against.
Maybe she didn’t want to.
By the time they reached The Vines, the sky was grumbling to itself through stacked-up clouds dark with rain. Dixie was congratulating herself on arriving ahead of the storm when she noticed the two unfamiliar cars in front of the big house.
She groaned. “I forgot about the dinner tonight. Should I change? Cancel that,” she said with a glance at her watch. “There isn’t time.” She started digging in her purse, hoping she’d remembered her lipstick.
Cole grinned. “If I say you look fine, am I being supportive or insensitive?”
“Honest, I hope.” No lipstick. She grimaced and took out the little brush. At least she could get rid of the tangles.
He got out, came around to her side and opened her door. She finished with her hair, stashed the brush, stepped out—and he took her hands, both of them, carried them to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the back of each, in turn. “Fine doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said softly. “I’m not sure how to tell you how good you look.”
Her cheeks warmed with pleasure. “Try.”
He cocked one wicked eyebrow. “I could say you look like a wet dream.”
She laughed and pulled her hands back. “Not when I’m going to dinner with your folks, you can’t.” She slanted him a mischievous look. “But it’s okay if you think it.”
“I’m thinking,” he assured her as they headed for the door.
The living room lay past the foyer and the gallery with its curving staircase, and opened onto the covered lanai where Dixie had sketched Caroline. It was a cheerful blend of antiques and French country accents, with fabrics ranging from the drapes striped in poppy, grass and sunflower to the chairs covered in poppy-and-black toiles.
At the moment, it was full of tense people. One of them was the man Dixie had seen twice now. The Western Man.
She stopped three paces in, astonished and wary. Whatever he was doing here, no one looked very happy about it.
Mercedes stood near the sofa with her boyfriend du jour, Craig Bradford—who must have some virtues Dixie had failed to discover, since he’d lasted longer than most. Good looks alone weren’t enough to account for that, given her friend’s theories about relationships.
Merry looked stunned. Her sister, Jillian, sat on the couch, staring at the stranger and shaking her head slowly, as if she were denying some monstrous question. Across from them, standing nearest their visitor, was Eli.
Eli was furious.
It wasn’t obvious, but Dixie had studied that face. She saw the rigid control in the muscles along his jaw and the emotion seething in eyes that burned like green fire.
They all had green eyes, all of Spencer Ashton’s children, didn’t they?
Dixie’s mouth fell open at a sudden, impossible thought. Her gaze swung to the stranger.
“What’s going on?” Cole asked, his voice sharp.
Eli’s gaze swung to him. “Let me introduce you. This is Grant Ashton. Your oldest brother.”
“So he says.” Merry’s voice was flat.
Oh, yes, Dixie thought. Yes, the head shape was the same. The eyes. She’d seen the resemblance the morning she ran into him, but it hadn’t occurred to her…
“What the hell—?” Cole’s words were more question than curse. He looked from one to the other of them.
“I know this must be a shock. I’m sorry for that.” That was the stranger, Western Man…Grant Ashton.
Cole took a step forward, his face hard. “You’d better have some sort of proof.”
“He does.” Caroline Ashton stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her face pale but composed. “He showed me his parents’ marriage license.”
“You spoke to him?” Eli asked, scowling.
