“What is that banshee’s name?”
Candace led her into what looked like the master bedroom. “Raina. I’ve only met her a couple of times myself. They broke up way before Brian and I got together. But she, ah, still has feelings for him, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“She comes to the parlor sometimes. Brian has made her leave before. I even tried to talk to her and pretty much got the same reaction you did since I’m only a stupid rich bitch too, and Brian really doesn’t give a shit about me and he’s only going to dump my ass so why should she listen to me, and blah, blah, blah. Ghost has changed his cell phone number because of her. Apparently, when they broke up, she made threats about killing herself.”
“Lovely. And you were knowingly plotting to put me in the middle of all this?”
“Just ignore it, Mace. Bad luck that she showed up here tonight. She doesn’t come around that much. It’s not a big deal.”
Macy raised her eyebrows as a fresh wave of shrieking burst from the hall outside. Ignore that? She sighed. “He comes with quite the baggage, doesn’t he?”
Chapter Nine
So, yeah, it was mostly his fault this had been delayed. But Ghost didn’t think they were ever going to get back to Macy’s apartment.
She’d made him proud tonight, though, and it had been worth it. “See? They’re not so bad.” He braked to turn in to her building’s parking lot and chuckled. “At least, not all of them.”
“No, not all of them.” A little movement out of his peripheral vision caught his eye, and he glanced down to see she had twisted her purse strap practically into knots.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that. I really didn’t think there’d be any danger of her being there tonight. I saw that a couple of her friends were there but ordinarily, that’s not her crowd.”
“Maybe her friends let her know you were there with someone.”
“That’s a possibility. You okay?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was bright. Too bright.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “But I do want you to know that I left the whole fighting-over-a-guy thing back in middle school.”
“Okay…”
“I don’t know what the deal is with that girl, but I don’t want any part of it.”
“There’s no deal with that girl.”
“Well, just so we’re clear. If that’s some ongoing off-and-on thing—”
“Hell no. It’s off. It’s been off.”
“—I don’t need the drama.”
“You think I do?” He pulled to a stop in the same space he’d taken earlier. “What, are you having second thoughts?”
“No, but frankly? I don’t see how you can go from that to…me.”
“Yeah, I’d love to get a look at whatever dude you hooked up with last too. See how we compare.” He gave her arm a nudge and grinned when her jaw snapped closed, but he knew it wouldn’t stay that way.
“But…well…it leads me to wonder if something she said might hold at least some merit.”
“What did she say?”
“Basically that I was a rich-bitch revenge f**k for you.”
He hoped she didn’t notice—or that she couldn’t see—the way those words made his jaw clench. Damn you, Raina. “Yeah, that sounds like something she would say. Don’t worry about it.”
“Well…am I? I just want to know what I’m getting myself into here. I don’t like surprises.”
He sat back and stared straight out the front of the windshield, sighing heavily. “Macy, I can tell you with absolute honesty that you are not a ‘revenge fuck’. I don’t screw people indiscriminately, so the very fact I’m here means I like you. Beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you. Am I going to put a ring on your finger any time soon? Hell no. But you strike me as the type who wouldn’t be looking for that from a guy like me, so it’s all good, right?”
She only lowered her head, watching her fingers toy with the purse strap, and something surged in his chest.
“Macy? Is that cool?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wondered if it was cool with him. A minute ago “no strings” would have been music to his ears. But in that split second when he’d asked and she’d faltered…a world of dreams had exploded in his head, an entire universe of what ifs.
But whatever alternate universe had just infringed on their reality receded back into place, and she looked at him. “No strings, just fun?”
Now she made it sound so casual, too casual. There was nothing casual about the intensity of his want, his need, for her. Sitting in the dim light, she was stunning. Absolutely cover-girl gorgeous, and he knew in his heart this was another girl who could shred him all over again, really do a number on him. She could stamp her number right in the middle of his f**king forehead, and laugh about it.
Was he a fool of the biggest magnitude?
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” she said, sounding relieved. He was relieved by her relief. Whatever it took them to get out of his car and into her bed. Apparently his dick didn’t care how big a fool he was.
“Sit tight.” He felt her gaze on him as he jumped out and ran around to open her door, but hopefully she wasn’t watching so closely that she could tell it almost pained him to walk. Excited was an understatement. He was threatening to bust the fly on his jeans. It was almost embarrassing.
After she got out of his car, she took his hand. Something about the simultaneous simplicity and enormity of her supple fingers curling around his f**ked him all up inside, made something wild and protective ignite inside him.
Trust. She trusted him. Everything about him and his world was the opposite to her and hers, but she was willing to take this crazy gamble on him.
“What is it?” she whispered when he’d only stood there staring down at her like a dope for the last ten seconds.
He snapped out of it and shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You can come in,” she said, as if afraid he thought he wasn’t welcome now or something. She dug in her purse with her other hand and came out with a jumble of keys. Together, they strolled toward her first-story apartment door.
For a second, he hoped things wouldn’t get weird. Then he bitched himself out for acting like a little girl.
Of course things were about to get weird. He lived for weird.
But nothing prepared him for the “weird” that greeted him when Macy flipped on a lamp inside her place.
Okay, in all fairness, this was Texas and the country-and-western décor was, if not the norm, then pretty damn acceptable. But not among anyone he associated with. Everywhere he looked was leather and brown-and-white cowhide patterns. And the trophies. Jesus. She had a special lighted display case for them. He knew she rode horses a lot, but she must have been competing since she could walk to accumulate all of those.
Rows of them. Trophies. Medals. Framed pictures of her holding them as a snaggle-toothed little girl, then a gangly teenager, finally the gorgeous woman he knew. An older couple beaming with pride flanked her in most of them. Parents, probably. She bore a striking resemblance to the woman.
One picture in particular caught his eye. She was astride, turning a barrel in a cloud of dust. The photographer had caught the fierce, determined scowl on her face perfectly, and it didn’t do any favors for his current erection.
“I had no idea I was in the presence of the Queen of the Rodeo.”
“Obnoxious, isn’t it?” she asked, wrinkling her pert nose and tossing her purse on the pale leather loveseat.
“Oh, sure. Totally obnoxious,” he joked.
She laughed. “Well, I sort of…can’t bring myself to get rid of them. For a long time after I quit competing, I packed them away. I didn’t want to look at them, but in the end, I cracked. I guess it’s my inborn competitive streak—I have to have the reminder that I accomplished something. Silly, right?” She actually seemed to be blushing.
It was insanely sexy.
“I get it,” he said. “I feel the same way when I wake up and see the unconscious hookers and the tower of empty beer cans I built the night before. It’s so hard to let go.”
He struggled to keep the statement dead serious, and sure enough, he was gifted with an alarmed look from her wide hazel eyes.
Then, suddenly, she got it. Without him having to say a word or crack a smile, her body went off alert, and she laughed. “God, you’re bad.”
“So is there some reason why you quit racing?”
Her gaze flickered from the relics of her glory days to his face. There was a directness in that stare that threatened to undo him. “Candace never mentioned it to you?”
Racking his brain and coming up empty, he shook his head. “Nope.”
“I was competing in Conroe when I was eighteen. I’d just made the last turn when—I don’t know what happened. I don’t even remember. But apparently, something spooked my horse, and I was thrown. Cracked a couple vertebrae among a dozen other things. I was black and blue all over. Ten weeks in a brace, plus surgery and physical therapy…it was…scary. My mare, Sugar, broke her leg and had to be put down.” She nodded toward the picture he’d been contemplating earlier. “That’s her there.”
“Damn, girl.”
Her lip quirked. “After I came out of all that, I just didn’t have the fire for it like I used to. I still ride, still love it, but I’m way more cautious than before. In all things, I guess.”
“I can see how that would happen. Do you still have problems?”
“Sometimes. But overall I’ve been really lucky. Very lucky. So I don’t complain too much.”
He opened his mouth to say he found it pretty incredible she would even want to look at a horse after something like that, but then being pulled from the mangled wreckage of his parents’ car at six years old hadn’t made him swear off vehicles. Just the opposite, really. He spent his spare time trying to fix them. The bigger the job, the more he liked it. But he’d never be able to mold that shredded mass of metal in his memory into anything resembling an automobile, even in his dreams.
She had caught him. “Were you about to say something?”
“Just that”—he struggled to contain the emotion threatening to crack his voice—“maybe we can compare scars.”
There was little else he’d seen in his entire life more beautiful than Macy’s smile. Maybe that was because, now that he thought about it, it was a fairly rare thing. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine?”
He winked at her. “That and other things.”
The inquisitive way she was looking at him drove him nuts, made him desperate to know what was going on behind those pretty eyes. One thing he knew for certain: there were depths in her he hadn’t even begun to fathom. She intrigued him. Sorting her out would be no simpler than twisting that hunk of distorted metal back into mint shape.
“I’m going to get you used to me before it’s over, you know,” he said.