What the Heart Wants (What the Heart Wants, #1)(62)
“Why?”
Refusing even to try to answer, she stared back at him, her lips pressed together.
His face hardened, and his left eyebrow lifted. “Don’t tell me you don’t have anything to wear, because I’ve seen your closet. If you want, you can even wear that sexy red number again—if you put something on under it.”
“I have a headache.” It was true. She did have a headache, but she always got one when she took an afternoon nap in the heat of the day.
“So? Take an aspirin.”
She could feel her defiance crumbling under his steady gaze and tried wheedling. “I don’t like the Bosque Club. It’s too crowded. Couldn’t we go somewhere else where we could be more private?”
Jase’s eyes narrowed to slits of jet. “Somewhere people won’t recognize me?” He spoke slowly, enunciating each word with care, like a death sentence.
Laurel was startled at his misinterpretation. “No, no, that isn’t it at all! I’m proud to be seen with you—anywhere!” Her words tumbled over each other into a near incoherency. “It’s not you…that was sixteen years ago…even Bosque Bend doesn’t have that long a memory—oh, maybe a few old fuddy-duddies…but it wouldn’t matter if everyone did. I love you…I always have—”
“Then, what’s the problem?”
Her shoulders slumped as she suddenly understood the unrelenting tenacity and determination that had enabled Jase to rise in the business world. Did she actually think she could withhold Daddy’s downfall from him in perpetuity? She probably should have told him when he first appeared at her front door, but now she’d waited too long. Besides, what would she have said? She didn’t have the words. She’d never discussed it before, not even with her mother.
The end of her idyll was in sight, but maybe she could delay it one day longer.
“Okay, I’ll go, but not tonight.” She tossed her head. “Tomorrow night.”
Jase studied her face for a moment, then nodded his assent and held out his hand. “Promise?”
She clasped his hand and even managed a smile. “Promise.”
He sealed their bargain with a long kiss before relaxing his embrace so they could talk. “I’ll cancel the reservations, then. And about dinner—don’t worry about it. I put in a stint as a short-order cook and can rustle up edible grub in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
After a dinner of chicken tenders and fries, they watched an old Michael Douglas movie and made love on the leather couch in the den before trailing upstairs to bed.
Her last night with him. She tried to absorb every moment of it to warm herself during the cold, lonely nights to come.
*
Thursday morning dawned bright and clear, auguring another sweltering afternoon. Laurel’s dreams had been troubled, but she decided to suck it up and think positively.
Maybe everything would turn out just fine. Maybe the club would be stuffed to the gills with new members, people who’d moved into town so recently that they wouldn’t know who she was. And maybe the old-timers would keep their mouths shut, as Ray apparently had.
The other side of the bed was empty, but she could hear Jase’s heavy tread on the stairs, accompanied by a rhythmic clinking. She sat up in bed to greet him as he came through the door, holding a small tray.
He put it down on the edge of her nightstand. Coffee and toast.
“Breakfast in bed, milady, but you’ll have to take care of yourself for lunch.” He pulled up a chair to sit with her while she ate. “I’ll be out till later in the afternoon. Got a hot deal I need to handle personally.”
“It sounds like you’re buying up the whole town.”
He laughed. “It’s a numbers game. Most of the prospects don’t pan out, so I’ve got to keep a lot of them coming in. Perseverance is what it’s all about.”
Perseverance. Laurel rolled the word around in her head. Perseverance—that was the key. Her spine straightened. Perseverance. She’d make it through tonight, come hell or high water.
*
It was cleaning day. After Jase left, she dressed in her old gym shorts and a Lynnwood Elementary tee, then went through the whole house, room by room.
If Mama could see her now, bucket and mop in hand, she’d be horrified, but Laurel wasn’t leading her mother’s untroubled, leisurely existence. Dovie Elizabeth Kinkaid Harlow had lived all but the last two years of her life in a cocoon, insulated from anything the least bit unpleasant. Would she have been strong enough to handle bad times if she’d had more challenges earlier in her life?
By noon, she needed a break and some fresh air. Boldly opening the front door without first checking if someone was waiting in ambush, she walked out onto the sidewalk and took several deep, cleansing breaths.
She looked up and down Austin Avenue. She’d always been proud of where she lived. All six houses on this block had been built in the late 1800s, when cotton was king of the blackland prairie. Most of them had changed hands through the years as old-time fortunes ebbed or their owners aged. The house next door had been sold four years ago when old Colonel Kraft, whose family had been in residence there since the place was built, had to be hauled off to a nursing home when he began flashing the housekeeper. The Carrolls—a young couple who drove off to their jobs in Waco at six every morning and returned at eight every evening—lived there now. Laurel had never met them and doubted anyone else on the block had either.