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What was unusual about this particular plane was the message trailing through the clear blue sky behind it: Marry Me, Kelly.
She stared at it with a sort of horrified fascination. She supposed a case could be made that it was exactly the sort of impulsive, outrageous thing the old Jordan would have dreamed up, the sort of thing she’d claimed only moments ago to miss. Her heart, in fact, turned a somersault in her chest, a slow loop-de-loop that very nearly made her giddy.
Her gaze riveted on that message, she bit back a groan. The whole blasted county was going to know about Jordan’s proposal now. Well, maybe not that Jordan was behind it, though that news would come quickly enough. Los Pinos was small enough that nothing ever stayed secret for long, including the identity of the man who’d taken his family’s plane up from the local airstrip to make his proposal in such an outrageous way. Her phone was probably ringing off the hook already.
Even as she watched, the plane made another slow loop and circled back. Just when it reached a spot directly overhead, she saw something being scattered through the sky. Like confetti falling, it drifted down until the first touch of pink landed on her cheek. Rose petals, she realized at its silky touch against her skin. The man had filled the sky with rose petals.
She sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of them, then lowered her head and rode deliberately away from the cascade of pink. Tears stung her eyes. He was making it awfully damned hard to say no. So far, though, he hadn’t come close to the one thing that would have guaranteed a yes.
She reached the house just in time to see him settling his tall, lanky frame into a rocker on the porch. At the sight of her he stilled and waited, his expression oddly hesitant. That was a new side of Jordan altogether, one that stole her breath away. Not once in all the years she’d known him had he ever appeared the least bit vulnerable. He’d always been terribly, terribly sure of himself.
“You have rose petals in your hair,” he said quietly.
“Funny thing about that,” she said just as quietly, her gaze caught with his. “They were falling from the sky.”
His mouth curved into a slow smile. “Amazing.”
“Not many men could make that happen.”
“Maybe not. I suppose it takes a man intent on making an impression.”
Kelly sighed. “Jordan, you’ve never needed messages in the sky or rose petals to make an impression on me. Don’t you know that?”
He seemed to sense that she hadn’t been as impressed as he’d hoped. “What does it take?” he asked.
She reached up and patted his cheek. “I think I’ll let you think about that awhile longer.”
Undaunted, he followed her into the house, heading straight for the kitchen as always. This time, though, he maneuvered past her and reached for the cups himself. He looked as if he needed to stay occupied, so Kelly washed up at the kitchen sink, then settled herself at the table and waited.
He filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then lingered over her selection of herbal teas. “Which one?”
“Orange spice, I think. The situation seems to call for a little zing.”
“What situation would that be?” he inquired, leaning against the counter, his gaze on her steady and unrelenting.
She really hadn’t wanted to get into this again today. In fact, she had warned him the topic was off-limits. Those blasted rose petals had made that impossible. “This notion you’ve gotten in your head,” she said.
“About marrying you?”
She grinned at his quick-wittedness. “That’s definitely the one. It appears to me that this breakup with Rexanne has hurt you more than you’re willing to admit. Perhaps it’s addled your brain.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. Did you really love her, Jordan? Was I mistaken in thinking that she just came along at the right time, at the precise moment when you’d decided you needed a wife to complete your transformation into solid citizen?”
He went very still. “Transformation?”
Kelly almost chuckled at his expression. “I seem to recall a boy who ran away from home at seventeen to be a wildcatter on the oil rigs. Then there was the disruption you caused at the high school when you got on the public address system and performed a rock song you had composed. The lyrics, as I recall, had every teacher blushing. The principal had to take the rest of the day off, she was so stunned. And let’s see now, there was the summer you rustled a few of your own daddy’s cattle, so you could start your own herd.”
A once-familiar impish grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Not fair,” he accused. “I was only seven when I did that.”
“It was, however, the beginning of a highly notable career as the family rebel. I’m sure Harlan despaired of your ever turning into someone respectable.” She surveyed him closely, from the neatly trimmed brown hair to the tips of his polished boots, and regretted that his hair no longer skimmed his collar and his boots weren’t worn and dusty. “I’d say you beat the odds. A wife would complete the package.”
“You make it sound so cold and calculating,” he objected.
She shrugged. “If the shoe fits…”
“It doesn’t. I’m thirty years old. It’s just time I settled down.”
“When was it you decided you needed a wife?” she asked.
“What do you mean, when?”
“What was the precise date?”
“I don’t recall,” he said stiffly. “Sometime last fall, I suppose.”
“I’ll tell you precisely. It wasn’t fall at all. It was January 12, your birthday. You turned thirty with a worse midlife crisis than most men have when they’re forty-five. You made your decision. Then you looked around and chose Rexanne. When that didn’t work out, you did another survey of the candidates and decided on good old Kelly. Did you figure all alone out here, I wouldn’t put up much of a fuss before saying yes?”
He had the grace to look embarrassed by her assessment.
“Well, isn’t that exactly how it happened?” she persisted.
“Something like that,” he agreed with obvious reluctance. He regarded her with a stubborn thrust of his chin. “That doesn’t make the plan any less sound.”
“Exactly how far have you thought this through?” she inquired carefully, barely keeping a flare-up of temper in check. “Have you chosen a wedding date? Picked the caterer? Reserved the church?”
“Not exactly,” he muttered in a defensive tone, which told her that was exactly what he had done.
She was going to lose it and fling her steaming hot tea straight at him in another ten seconds. “Let me guess,” she said. “You were figuring on the same date you’d set with Rexanne and you figured the caterer could just change one of the names on the cake. The minister wasn’t likely to care who was standing next to you, isn’t that right?”
“Those are just details,” he argued. “You can pick the date, the church, the caterer and anything else you want. The sky’s the limit.”
“How thoughtful!”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“Oh, I think I do. When a man gets the romantic notion of letting me fill in for his originally intended bride, I definitely have to get a little sarcastic,” she said, clinging to her cup so tightly her knuckles were turning white. The idea of splattering that tea all over him was looking better and better. Unfortunately the stuff was cooling too fast to do much damage and far faster than her temper.
“You have it all wrong,” he insisted. “It’s not like I plucked your name off some computer network. You and I have known each other all our lives. We’re compatible.”
“Oh, really?” she said doubtfully. She seized on the most obvious thing she could think of to point out their differences. “Where did you plan on us living?”
He seemed taken aback by the simple question. “In Houston, of course.”
“I hate Houston,” she shot back.
“No, you don’t,” he said, as if he knew her better than she did herself. “You just had a bad experience there. Paul colored the way you feel about the city.”
Kelly gritted her teeth to control her exasperation. “No,” she said eventually, when she could speak calmly. “I disliked it from the first.”
“Then why the hell did you move there?”
She would not tell him in a thousand years that she had moved there to be near him. “Because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. There were opportunities there that didn’t exist around here.”
“And there still are. Even more doors will open up to you as my wife.”
It was the last straw. “Dammit, Jordan, don’t you know me at all? I will not use you or anyone else to gain acceptance,” she said tightly. “Around here I have made my own way. I have earned the respect people have for me.”
“I never said you hadn’t,” he said. Now his exasperation was clearly growing by the second. “I’m just saying things will be easier for you as my wife.”
She sighed. “You’ll never get it.”
His expression suddenly softened and he hunkered down in front of her. His eyes were level with hers and filled with so much tenderness that Kelly wanted to gaze into them forever. “I do get it,” he said quietly. “One of the things I admire most about you is your fierce independence.”
“Then how could you even think about taking that away from me and making me nothing more than your appendage?”
His lips quirked with amusement. “Plenty of wives are able to exert their independence. Marriage isn’t likely to join two people like us at the hip. I am capable of compromise, Kelly.” His gaze caught hers. “Are you?”
The question caught her off guard. “Not if it means losing who I am.”
“I want to marry you because of who you are,” he declared. “Why would I want you to change?”
“That’s what marriage does. It changes people.”
“Not if they fight it.”
She had no ready answer for that. She was beginning to weaken and he knew it. She could read the gleam of triumph in his eyes. With his hands resting on her thighs, with his masculine scent luring her, all of the old yearnings were beginning. Heat flooded her body and made her reason vanish. She had wanted Jordan Adams as far back as she could remember. She had ached for his touch, hungered for just one of the wicked kisses that he seemed to share so freely with other women.
“You’ve never even kissed me,” she murmured without thinking.
She hadn’t meant it as a dare, only as an observation, but Jordan was quick to seize the opening. His hands, softer now than they had been when he was working his father’s ranch, but still strong, cupped her face. His thumbs gently grazed her lips until they parted on a sigh of pure pleasure. His mouth curved into a half smile at that and, still smiling, he touched his lips to hers.
The kiss was like the caress of warm velvet, soft and soothing and alluring. It made her head spin. The touch of his tongue sent heat spiraling through her, wicked curls of heat that reached places she was certain had never before been touched.
“Oh, Jordan,” she murmured on another sigh as he gathered her close and deepened the kiss until she was swimming in a whirlpool of sensation.
In her wildest imagination she hadn’t known, hadn’t even guessed at the joy a mere kiss could bring. This was Jordan, though, the man she’d always believed to be her other half. If she had known his touch would really be like this, she would have fought for him long ago. She wouldn’t have waited, patient and silent, for him to wake up and notice her. She would have overcome her shyness, shoved aside all of her fears of rejection and tried to seduce him.
If only she were more than a means to an end, if only he really, truly loved her, she would say yes to him in a heartbeat, if only to guarantee that incredibly rare moments like this would never end.
When at last he released her, Jordan looked almost as dazed as she felt. His hands lingered on her face as if he couldn’t bear to break the contact.
“Was that a yes?” he asked.
Kelly listened to her heart and heard yes repeated over and over. Her head, though, was louder. “No,” she said with more regret than she’d ever felt about anything she’d ever done.
“But…”
She touched a finger to his lips. “Don’t argue. This isn’t about all the clearheaded, rational arguments you can mount. It’s not about bullying me until you get your way.”
Jordan looked as lost as if she’d been talking about astrophysics. “What, then?”
“Think about it,” she advised him, hiding a grin at his confusion. “I’m sure it will come to you eventually.”
Now that he’d really, truly kissed her, now that she knew the first faint stirrings of all the passionate possibilities in his arms, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bear it if it didn’t.
Chapter Three (#ulink_07e1c7b6-c4cc-5625-8c37-dbbb99b049bb)
“He is clueless,” Kelly declared to Jordan’s sister-in-law Jessie a few weeks later.
Kelly hadn’t been around when Jessie’s marriage to Erik Adams ended with his tragic death in a ranch accident. Jessie had been pregnant with Erik’s baby at the time. By the time Kelly had returned to Los Pinos, Luke, the oldest of the Adams brothers, had delivered the baby during a blizzard and he and Jessie had fallen in love and married. Whenever the two of them came home to White Pines with their daughter, Jessie slipped away for a visit and the kind of girl talk they rarely got elsewhere. Over the past months, Kelly had come to consider her a good friend.
“For a man widely regarded as brilliant, I think his synapses regarding women short-circuited sometime around puberty,” Kelly added as she kneaded her bread dough with a ferocity that had Jessie grinning.
“You love him, though, don’t you?” Jessie teased. Regarding Kelly intently, she reached over to still her flour-covered hands.
Kelly gazed into blue eyes filled with concern and sighed heavily. Eventually she drew in a calming breath and shrugged. “Depends on when you ask.”
“I’m asking now.”
“Now I’m exasperated, annoyed, perplexed and bordering on murderous.” Her temper flared up all over again. “He actually thinks I’ll pack up Dani and move back to Houston. Wasn’t he even awake during my marriage to Paul? Did he miss every single one of the opinions I expressed about the city during the entire drive from Houston back to this ranch? Has he been oblivious to how hard I’ve worked to make a go of this place? Can’t he see how I love it?”
“Maybe he can see that the work is wearing you out. Maybe he just assumes a wife should want to live where her husband lives,” Jessie suggested. “There is a tradition of that sort of thing. Whither thou goest, et cetera.”
“Well, times have changed. I’ve been there, done that. I’m perfectly happy right here.”
“You look exhausted to me.”
“So what? I didn’t say it was easy. I said I loved it. Every little improvement I’m able to accomplish around here gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. How can I give that up to go be some socialite wife?”
“It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation. Compromise,” Jessie said.
“He used the same word, but he doesn’t know the meaning of it,” Kelly said with conviction. Jordan was the kind of man who knew exactly what he wanted and assumed the rightness of it. Control was second nature to him. He was more like his father in that respect than he had ever acknowledged.
She sighed. “When I came back here after the divorce, I really needed to figure out who I was. I was no longer the teenager with the crush on the boy next door. I was no longer Paul Flint’s cheated-on spouse. I didn’t know who I was. I’m still rediscovering myself. I don’t want to need anyone ever again.”
“Then don’t marry him.”
“Have you ever tried to say no to Jordan?” Kelly inquired dryly. “Short of barring the front door, disconnecting the phone and never looking out the windows, I can’t seem to avoid these declarations of intent he’s been dreaming up for the past month. Did you look in the living room? There must be seven dozen roses in there. I sneeze when I walk through the door. Worse, Dani’s beginning to ask a lot of questions. I’ve avoided answering them so far, but that can’t go on much longer. She’s a very perceptive child and all those roses are hard to kiss off.” She hesitated. “That’s another thing that worries me.”
“What?”
“Dani. Jordan acts as if he’s scared to death of her sometimes.”
Jessie nodded. “I can believe that. The first time he held Angela, he looked as if he might faint. Obviously he’s just not used to being around kids.”
“Maybe,” Kelly said doubtfully. “What if it’s more than that? What if he just plain doesn’t like children?”
