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Conner and Tricia knocked off the prelude to foreplay to greet Carolyn—Conner with a smile, Tricia with a hug. When Kim joined in, it was like something out of a reality-show reunion.
All Brody could do was wait, though he did remember enough of his manners to stand in the presence of a lady.
Carolyn finally forced herself, visibly, to look at him. Pink color pulsed in her cheeks and hot damn, she looked good.
“Hello, Brody,” she said.
“Carolyn,” he replied, with a nod of acknowledgment.
Brody immediately grew two left feet and felt his tongue wind itself into a knot.
It was junior high school all over again.
Only worse.
In junior high, it had been all about speculation. As a man, he knew, only too well, what it was like to kiss this woman, to make love to her.
Stand in a puddle and grab hold of a live wire, he thought.
That’s what it’s like.
“Kim says everything’s fine at the shop,” Tricia told Carolyn, with a sparkling little laugh. “I was hoping I’d be missed a little bit, though.”
Carolyn smiled, no longer looking quite so much like a doe poised to run after catching the scent of a predator on the wind. “Oh, you were definitely missed,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Kim agreed cheerfully, opening one of the big double ovens to check on the tamales.
They smelled so good that Brody’s stomach rumbled.
Things settled down to a dull roar over the next few minutes—Carolyn and Tricia washed up at the sink and began setting the table, while Davis pulled the corks on a couple of bottles of vintage wine.
It came as no surprise to Brody—and probably not to Carolyn, either—that they wound up sitting side by side at the huge table in the next room. The others made sure of it, the way they always did.
Brody and Carolyn were so close that they bumped elbows a couple of times. The scent of her—some combination of baby powder and flowers and a faint, citrusy spice—made him feel buzzed, if not drunk, which was weird because he let the wine bottle go by without pouring any for himself.
Tricia passed on it, too, of course, being pregnant.
Carolyn, by contrast, seemed uncommonly thirsty. She nibbled at the salad, and then the tamales and Kim’s incomparable Mexican rice and refried beans, but she seemed to be hitting the wine pretty hard.
“So, anyway,” Kim said, her voice rising above the others. “Carolyn signed up for Friendly Faces—that dating website—and she’s practically under siege, there are so many men wanting to meet her.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Brody saw Carolyn go pink and then mauve. Obviously, she hadn’t expected Kim to spill the frijoles in front of God and everybody.
Brody wanted to chuckle. He also wanted to stand on Carolyn’s front porch with a shotgun and make sure no other man got past him.
“Oops,” Kim said, widening her eyes. She’d let the news slip on purpose, and everybody knew it, but since the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak, that was that. “Sorry.”
Davis gave his wife a look.
Carolyn looked down at her lap, still red and making no pretense of eating.
Casually, Brody leaned over, took hold of the nearest wine bottle and refilled her glass. She glanced at him with an expression of mingled desperation and gratitude and practically drained the thing in a few gulps.
Brody bit back a grin. Well, there was one bright spot to the situation, he reflected. Now he had the perfect excuse to drive Carolyn home, because she was obviously in no condition to get behind the wheel.
An awkward silence fell, broken only by the clinking of silverware against colorful pottery plates.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Tricia piped up, breaking the verbal stalemate. “The dating service thing, I mean. More and more people are meeting their soul mates online these days. Why, the statistics—”
Carolyn looked so utterly miserable by then that Brody felt downright sorry for her. She swallowed hard, raised her chin and bravely interrupted, “It’s only a trial membership. I was curious, that’s all.”
“She’s swamped with guys wanting to get to know her,” Kim said, warming to the topic all over again.
Another wine bottle was opened and passed around.
Carolyn sloshed some into her glass, avoiding Brody’s eyes when she shoved the bottle at him to keep it moving.
“Are you sure you ought to...?”
At last, Carolyn looked at him. She flashed like a highway flare on a dark night, because she was so angry.
Because she was so beautiful.
“I’m of legal age, Brody Creed,” she said, slurring her words only slightly.
The others were talking among themselves, a sort of distant hum, a thing apart, like a radio playing in the next house or the next street, the words indistinct.
“Besides,” Carolyn went on briskly, before he could reply, “I’ve only had two glasses.”
“Four,” Brody said quietly, “but who’s counting?”
“It’s not as if I normally drink a lot,” she informed him, apropos of he wasn’t sure what.
“Have another tamale,” Brody counseled, keeping his voice down even though they still seemed to be alone in a private conversational bubble, him and Carolyn, with the rest of the outfit someplace on the dim periphery of things.
“I don’t want another tamale,” Carolyn told him.
“You’re going to be sick if you don’t eat something,” Brody reasoned. He didn’t think he’d used that particular cajoling tone since Steven and Melissa’s last visit, when he’d been appointed to feed his cousin’s twin sons. He’d had to do some smooth talking to get them to open up for the pureed green beans.
“That’s my problem, not yours,” Carolyn said stiffly.
“Around here,” Brody said, “we look out for each other.”
She made a snorting sound and tried to snag another passing wine bottle, but Brody got hold of it first and sent it along its way.
That made her furious. She colored up again and her eyes flashed, looking as if they might short out from the overload.
Brody merely held her gaze. “Eat,” he said.
She huffed out a sigh. Stabbed at a tiny bite of tamale with her fork. “There,” she said, after chewing. “Are you satisfied?”
He let the grin come, the charming one that sometimes got him what he wanted and sometimes got him slapped across the face. “No,” he drawled. “Are you?”
It looked like it was going to be the slap, for a second there.
In the end, though, Carolyn was at once too flustered and too tipsy to respond right away. She blinked once, twice, looking surprised to find herself where she was, and swayed ever so slightly in her chair.
“I want to go home,” she said.
Brody pushed his own chair back and stood, holding out a hand to her. “I think that’s a good idea,” he replied easily. “Let’s go.”
Kim and Davis, Conner and Tricia—he was aware of them as a group, rimming the table with amused faces but making no comment.
“I guess I have to let you drive me, don’t I?” Carolyn said.
“I reckon you do,” Brody said. “We’ll take my truck. Somebody can bring your car to town later.”
Carolyn, feisty before, seemed bemused now, at a loss. “But what about washing the dishes and...?”
“Davis and Conner can do the cleaning up.” Brody slid a hand under her elbow and raised her to her feet, steered her away from the table and into the kitchen, Barney sticking to their heels like chewing gum off a hot sidewalk.
He squired her to the truck and helped her into the passenger seat, careful to let her think she was doing it all herself.
Barney took his place in the backseat of the extended cab.
Once he was behind the wheel, Brody buzzed his window and Carolyn’s about halfway down. She was going to need all the fresh air she could handle.
“You’re going to hate yourself in the morning,” he said easily, as they drove toward the gate and the road to town.
He’d only been teasing, but Carolyn’s sigh was so deep that it gave him a pang, made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut.
“It might not even take that long,” she said sadly. “I’m—I’m not used to drinking and I—well, I’m just not used to it, that’s all.”
Brody reached over, gave her hand a brief, light squeeze. “That’s pretty obvious,” he said gently.
“I feel like such a fool,” Carolyn lamented, refusing to look at him.
“Don’t,” Brody said.
She looked down at her hand, where his had been rested for a second, and frowned, seemingly surprised to discover that he’d let go.
“You probably think I’m pathetic,” she went on, staring straight through the windshield again.
“Nothing of the sort,” Brody assured her gruffly.
“Getting drunk. Signing up for a dating service—”
Before he needed to come up with a response, she turned to look at him, straight on. And she was pea-green.
“Stop!” she gasped. “I’m going to be—”
Brody stopped, and she shoved open the door and stuck her head out.
“Sick,” she finished.
And then she was.
CHAPTER FIVE (#uf7c115c5-a9d7-5b32-aee2-ae56f0742b88)
IF SHE’D DELIBERATELY set out to make a lasting impression on Brody Creed, Carolyn thought wretchedly, as she stared at her wan image in the mirror above her bathroom sink later that evening, she couldn’t have done a better job.
First, being the proverbial bundle of nerves, she’d had too much wine at supper. Then, with ultimate glamour and grace, she’d thrown up, right in front of the man. Just stuck her head out of his truck door and hurled on the side of the road, like somebody being carted off to rehab after an intervention.
“Very impressive,” she whispered to her sorry-looking one-dimensional self.
With the spectacle playing out in her mind’s eye, Carolyn squeezed her eyes shut, mortified all over again. Brody had reacted with calm kindness, presenting her with a partial package of wet wipes and following up with two time-hardened sticks of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum.
She’d been too embarrassed to look at him afterward, had hoped he would simply drop her off at home and be on his way again, with his dog, leaving her to wallow privately in her regrets.
She couldn’t be that lucky.
Instead of leaving her to her misery, he’d told Barney to stay put, insisted on helping Carolyn down from the truck and escorting her not only through the front gate and across the yard, but also up the outside staircase to her door.
“I’ll be all right now,” she’d said, when they reached the landing, still unable to meet his eyes. “Really, I—”
Brody had taken her chin in his hand; sick as she was, the combination of gentleness and strength in his touch had sent a charge through her. “I believe I’ll stay a while and make sure you’re all right,” Brody had replied matter-of-factly.
Though she was painfully sober by then, Carolyn didn’t have the energy to fight any losing battles, so she merely unlocked the door and allowed him to follow her inside.
Winston, perched on the windowsill, greeted him with raised hackles and a hiss.
“Whatever, cat,” Brody had said, with desultory resignation. “I’m here, like it or not, so deal with it.”
Carolyn had hurried into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth, following up with a mouthwash swish and two aspirin from the bottle in the medicine cabinet. Then she’d slipped into her room and changed her T-shirt.
And here she was back in the bathroom again, trying to work up the courage to go out there into the kitchen, thank Brody for bringing her home and politely send him packing.
He was moving around out there, running water in the sink, carrying on a one-sided chat with Winston, his voice set too low for her to make out the words. The tone was chiding, but good-natured.
Most likely, Brody was bent on winning over the cat.
The idea made Carolyn smile, but very briefly, because even smiling hurt.
How would she feel when the actual hangover kicked in?
Sobering thought. That’s what you get for drinking, she told herself grimly. You know you’re not good at it.
All this self-recrimination, she realized, was getting her nowhere, fast. So Carolyn drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, let the air whoosh out of her lungs and forced herself to step out of the bathroom and walk the short distance to the kitchen.
