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  Chapter 11

  Four beers and a deep-fried cheesecake on a stick later, Mal was drunk. She leaned her forehead against the closed window in the backseat of Chase’s car, trying to focus on the lyrics of the country song on the radio. Something about a cheating heart. The two-door sports car had a tiny backseat, and it was a very bumpy ride. Too bumpy for her bumpy stomach.

  “You OK back there?” Keith asked, more or less without slurring, from the front passenger seat. He seemed to have had two beers to her every one. But he was a big guy. A big, strong, hairy guy. He could lift hay bales. He could drink twelve beers. Was that four times two, she wondered?

  “What?” Keith turned around, blinked, then turned quickly back to the front.

  Chase rolled down the front windows. “Please don’t throw up on my leather seats.”

  “If you had a truck like a normal person, I could throw up anywhere.” Keith definitely slurred that time. “Wait, that’s not—”

  Finishing that sentence seemed to be too much work, so he let his head drop back on the headrest. “Hey, thanks for the ride, man.”

  “No problem. You are definitely not in a state to drive.”

  “I know, and after . . .” Keith’s words trailed off and he stared out the open window.

  Mal closed her eyes. The backseat spun for a moment, like she was still on the dance floor. Michael never let her dance, she thought. Then everything faded away.

  When Chase pulled into the Carson’s driveway, Keith motioned for him to stop at the big house. “I’ll make sure Mal gets in OK. I can walk home.”

  “You sure?”

  “Chase, it’s like—” He waved in the general direction of the house. “I can do it.”

  “Do you have house keys?”

  Keith gave him what he hoped was a withering look, then spilled out of the car. He pulled the seat forward and reached back to help Mal out. She was out cold. “Mal,” he whispered, not wanting to disturb her—she looked sweet and peaceful and quiet—but also not wanting her to sleep in the car. With Chase. “Mal,” he whispered even louder. Chase gave him a look, then reached back and pinched Mal on her thigh. She jumped up, hit her head on the roof, and, groaning, looked around, finally meeting Keith’s eyes.

  “Hey,” she said in a sleepy voice. Damn, it was sexy.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go to bed.”

  “OK,” she said, taking his hand. “I’ll tell Luke tomorrow.” She had some trouble levering herself out of the seat, so Keith gave her hand a gentle tug. At that, she catapulted out of the seat and into Keith’s chest, nearly knocking him over. “Whoa,” she said. “I’m strong.”

  Keith closed the car door and waved to Chase. Then he walked, dragging Mal, to the front door, where he reached up and pulled the key out of the loose piece of siding on the right side and inserted it into the lock. As he maneuvered Mal through the doorway, he heard Chase drive away. Mal looked up at him with bleary eyes. “Thank you for bringing me home.” She looked around the hall. “Which one is my room again?”

  Keith hitched her arm over his shoulder and put his other arm around her waist. He half carried her up the stairs and down the hall. When he got to her room, he tripped over a pair of shoes and pitched forward onto the bed. Moving more quickly than he would have thought possible, he rolled and fell on his back onto the bed, with Mal on top of him. She looked up at him in shock. She was definitely awake now. She looked into his eyes, her brown eyes warm and focused. She raised her hand and brushed his dark hair off his forehead.

  “Am I crushing you?” she whispered.

  “No, you’re OK,” he whispered back, his eyes drifting to her lips. He felt her breath on his mouth as she moved closer. No, he thought, but then her lips connected with his and he thought, Yes. They were soft and warm and slightly insistent. His hands came up to cup the sides of her face with the intention to push her away—to push his brother’s fiancée away—but then she gently pushed her tongue into his mouth, and he was lost.

  He opened his mouth wider, tilting his head so his tongue could explore her the way she was doing to him. She was a damn good kisser. His hands swept down, across her shoulders, down her sides, past her waist to the soft curves of her butt. He just let his hands run up and down her body, memorizing the shape of her curves beneath his rough hands. Her hands were moving, too, under his shirt to the warm skin of his chest, and he gasped as her hands moved lower, but he didn’t want to think, he just wanted to kiss her, so he hitched her up higher on his body and pulled her even closer.

  In the back of her mind, Mal knew she should not be doing whatever it was she was doing. But it felt so right and so delicious that she couldn’t find the sense to stop. She was kissing Keith. This was no sloppy too-much-beer kiss. They were focused on each other, devouring each other’s mouths, and when his hands roamed from her face down her sides, she sighed and let her hands do their own explorations. The skin under his shirt was so warm, taut and smooth and prickly with hair.

  Keith ran his hands across her front, cupping her breasts and gently squeezing, and she moaned into his mouth. His hands were big, she thought, and strong. She moved her hand over the front of his jeans. He was big all over, she thought, pushing away a vague warning bell in the back of her mind. She reached for the button on his jeans.

  And was abruptly dumped on the floor.

  “Damn,” Keith said, rubbing his face. “God, I’m sorry,” he said, reaching down to pick her up off the floor.

  She got up on her own and brushed off her ego.

  “Keith—” Mal started. Keith shot off the bed and toward the door.

  “No, I’m sorry. You’re my brother’s fiancée. This was a mistake. I’ve put you in a terrible position.”

  “It wasn’t so terrible,” she murmured, looking at the floor.

  “Dammit, Mal,” he said, and she thought he was going to reach for her again, and she was ready for whatever terrible positions he could come up with.

  But he didn’t. He shoved his hands in his pockets—a little less room in those jeans now, she observed—then turned and kicked the dresser. “Good night,” he said, almost running into the door frame on his way out. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” she whispered to the closed door. She sat on the edge of the bed, toed off her shoes. Crap, she thought. Just, crap.

  Chapter 12

  Mal woke up with a headache.

  It was much worse when she opened her eyes, what with the sun streaming in through the window, all warm and friendly and welcoming. Stupid sun. She silently cursed whoever had let her fall asleep with the curtains open.

  Then she remembered the last person in her room the night before. Keith. With the hands and the tongue and the jeans.

  That made her headache even worse.

  She should feel terrible, she thought. She should regret putting him in the terrible position (not so terrible, she remembered), of thinking he was making her cheat on his own brother. But she wasn’t engaged to Luke. She was free to kiss whichever scowling cowboy she wanted to.

  Of course, Keith didn’t know that. Neither did any of the Carson family. Except Luke. That’s it, she decided, reaching blindly for her cell phone. Luke needs to come home, and we need to clear this up. Every day she spent in Hollow Bend, she got deeper and deeper into their lives. She practically had a job interview at Dr. Monroe’s.

  It would be nice to work, though. She didn’t mind the hard, physical labor of the farm (although her back sort of minded), but she loved numbers.

  She had dropped out of school just three credits shy of her accounting degree. She had wanted to take the CPA exam and work for nonprofit organizations. Her vision was to work cheap; Michael would be a doctor, so they would be able to afford it. She wanted to work cheap and work for good causes, groups that wouldn’t be able to hire a good accountant normally. Women’s shelters, libraries, garden clubs—whatever. Anyone who was doing something they loved, something good.

  But Michae
l’s residency had taken them from Connecticut to Maryland, and he wanted to get married before he left. She didn’t want to break up with him, not really, so she agreed. They went to the justice of the peace, signed some papers, and that was it.

  Then Michael said he didn’t like the idea of his wife being so far away, especially during their first year as husband and wife. He promised when he was a rich doctor, she could go back to school and study whatever she wanted. And he needed her. He was so busy, he was becoming really scatterbrained. He would forget to eat if it wasn’t for her.

  So they moved to Maryland. She worked, doing the books for a local car dealership. Not exactly what she’d envisioned, but even though she reported to a real accountant, the books were complicated enough to keep her interested. She supported them while Michael worked his crazy hospital hours in pediatric oncology.

  Then the work he did started receiving attention, which he deserved. He was so dedicated, so passionate about his work. He would come home from a shift on the pediatric ward exhausted and heartbroken that he couldn’t do more, that he couldn’t just fix the problem like a broken bone and be done. She loved him so much then; she was seeing the side of Michael she liked the best. Not the side that was in pain, but the side that had compassion and drive. That, she had thought, was why they made such a good couple.

  She wasn’t entirely sure how the decision for her to stop working came about. Michael was rising in the ranks, and he wanted to impress the administration and the board. And the best way for him to get to the top was for both of them to be working toward that goal. Anyway, he was curing cancer; Mal was balancing the books for a low-rent car dealership. There was no contest, really.

  So she quit her job, set up the house. She tried to manage the cooking and cleaning with as much enthusiasm as she managed accounts, but it wasn’t the same. She missed numbers. Michael suggested she start counting calories.

  She shook her head, remembering the years of charity committees and girls’ nights out. Of frying her hair blond and the horrific realization of what a Brazilian bikini wax actually was. Of shopping with the other doctors’ wives, how it didn’t seem right to spend thousands of dollars on clothes she would only wear once, but how Michael insisted, saying that they could afford it.

  Michael thought she could channel her do-gooder energies into charity work, so she sat on committees, planned luncheons, bid on things she didn’t need at charity auctions. This was not what she wanted to do. So when she contacted a battered women’s shelter about doing a fund-raiser for them, and they told her they would love the money, but what they really needed was for someone to help write grants and manage the donations they received every year, Mal jumped at the chance. She quit her committees and dug into the shelter’s books.

  They were a mess. The director had been doing just enough to keep them afloat. Mal saw that jumble of mismatched spreadsheets, disorganized invoices, uneven balances, and she almost started drooling. She could help with this. This, she could fix.

  And she did. Michael was not thrilled that she’d quit her committee work—if the other wives liked her, they would be invited more places and he would get ahead even faster. But if this was what she really wanted to do, he would just work that much harder. He would work hard for both of them.

  Mal was too happy with her work to feel guilty. She spent six months straightening out the old books, then streamlining the shelter’s bookkeeping procedures so that they were simpler to follow. She trained a few of the residents on how to receive the invoices and log them into the system so she could pay the bills. She even started working on a grant from the state for a small computer center where she could train more residents, help them with resumes.

  Then the center was audited. Somehow the fact that she wasn’t an official CPA received some attention, and the IRS came in, went over everything with a fine-toothed comb. The books were perfect; she was sure of it. But the grant-making bodies were not satisfied with her qualifications and other donors got cold feet.

  The shelter was closed six months later.

  Mal’s heart was broken. The director was shattered, and the residents—they quickly scattered. Mal hoped they’d landed on their feet, but she wasn’t an idiot.

  Then she found out who had alerted the state to her lack of qualifications.

  Michael said he’d done it for her own good, that he wasn’t sure if she was qualified to take on such a big project, and obviously she wasn’t. “Look what happened when the authorities found out what you were doing.”

  “Women are homeless because of you,” she said, “women who were abused and who had no other options.”

  “There’s no need for histrionics,” he said. “And now you have more time for committee work, which is much more effective anyway. Bill—you know, Dr. Ashton-Pierce—was telling me his wife is working on something new, something with animals or kids . . .”

  Mal felt a gentle pressure on her knee and started. Peanut was resting his head on her lap, looking up at her with those brown puppy-dog eyes. His tongue lolled out when she looked at him.

  “You big lump,” she said, bending down to scratch his head. Peanut took that as an invitation and jumped on the bed, licking her face, then curling into a ball at her side.

  “Are you comfortable? Good,” said Mal as she tried to hang on to the end of the bed. Then she gave up the struggle, leaned against Peanut, and tried to go back to sleep.

  Except she couldn’t. Her head hurt, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what she was going to say when she went downstairs. She had jumped on Keith last night. True, he had jumped back, at least she thought he had—her memory was a little fuzzy. Whatever he had done, she’d liked it. She liked kissing him.

  But he still thought she was engaged to his brother. So he was probably feeling pretty bad right now. That was not the way she wanted him to feel about kissing her. She wasn’t sure why it mattered, exactly. Once Luke got back, she’d tell them all the truth and she’d go. Even if Keith had no problem kissing attached women (which she doubted), he probably didn’t have a great fondness for kissing liars.

  That’s what she was. She was weak, she was a doormat, and now she was a liar. “I’m really building up quite a resume,” she said into Peanut’s head.

  He licked her nose.

  She had read a book once where the main character could just close her eyes and will herself to sleep, and, boom, she slept. “Go to sleep,” Mal intoned in what she hoped was a convincing voice. “Peanut, knock it off,” she said as Peanut rolled over onto her. So she did what she used to do with Michael when she couldn’t sleep. She lay as still as possible, staring at the ceiling. There were forty-three small cracks in the ceiling, and she was awake.

  She had just about decided to bite the bullet and go down for breakfast when her phone rang. Good, she thought. It’s Luke. Then suddenly that didn’t seem so good. Did she tell him she’d kissed his brother? Why should it matter to him? But the need to find out when the hell he was coming to get her won out, and she snapped open the phone.

  “Luke, please, I’m begging you—”

  “Who’s Luke?”

  Not Luke, she thought. Michael.

  “Michael?” she whispered, hoping maybe she was mistaken.

  “Yes, Mallory, it’s your husband. Have you forgotten me so soon?”

  “How did you get this number?” Her heart was beating faster, her hands sweating. She didn’t know she was shaking until Peanut whimpered, put his head on her lap, and stilled her.

  “Mallory, you were always so stupid with money. You put the cell phone purchase on my credit card. I just looked at the statement, and there it was.”

  “Oh.” That was a stupid thing to do. She was stupid.

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, first of all, I want to know why you insisted on running away. Honestly, you’re like a child trying to avoid punishment. It’s a little ridiculous, and, frankly, a little embarrassing. Do you know what people are sayi
ng about you here? About us?”

  “I’m sorry, Michael. I just couldn’t . . .” She couldn’t say what she couldn’t. She couldn’t talk to him; somehow, when she tried, he just sucked all the words right back, leaving none for her.

  “I gave you your separation, I gave you everything you ever wanted. Mallory, if we had a problem, we could have talked about it. I would have sat down with you, let you explain everything, and we would have found a solution. But every time I ask you what’s wrong—and I have been asking that a lot lately, Mallory—you have nothing to say. I don’t understand. How can I make it right if I don’t know what’s wrong?”

  Everything is wrong, she wanted to shout. You belittle me, you control me, you bully me, and when I try to tell you how I feel, you explain it all away like it’s my fault! Like I’m being paranoid! You say you don’t want to be with me, but you won’t let me go! She was gripping the phone hard, pressing it tight to her ear. And she was moving her mouth, but nothing was coming out. She couldn’t figure out how to say anything to him. Frustration, rage bubbled up inside of her and spilled out in hot tears down her cheeks. Why couldn’t she talk to him? Maybe he was right; maybe if she couldn’t articulate it, it was nothing.

  “The women’s shelter,” she said. That, she knew, was something bad he’d done. She was mad about that.

  “Mallory, that was ages ago. Anyway, Bunny is fixing your mistake. She’s organizing a fund-raiser to get a new shelter built, state of the art.”

  “My mistake?”

  “Yes, Mallory, we went over this. If you hadn’t bitten off more than you could chew, the shelter wouldn’t have been shut down. Anyway, that’s the past. Bunny said you just needed a break, that it was intense having such a go-getter husband. Is that the problem, Mallory?”