Rescued by a Wedding: Texas Wedding / A Marriage Between Friends. Kathleen O'Brien
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TWO IN THE MORNING. After a long evening poring through payroll records, Susannah yawned while she roamed the first floor, checking dead bolts and turning off lights.
As she passed the staircase that led down to the wine cellar, she heard a strange scrabbling noise deep in its shadows.
For a moment, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. The wine cellar had been her grandfather’s last folly, a ridiculous expenditure better suited to the millionaire rancher he’d once been than the struggling, debt-ridden peach farmer he’d become.
She used the front part of the cellar now for preserves, and the occasional bottle of peach wine. The back half, beyond the wrought-iron wine door, had become a mess of storage and clutter. Boxes of sentimental junk, yard games, canopies and chairs that came out only for parties, furniture too broken to sit in but too fine for the dump.
Her grandfather’s ghost would be appalled.
Luckily, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
But she heard the noise again, so it hadn’t been her imagination, either. It must be Trent down there, rooting around in the dark. She wondered why, then remembered that she’d mentioned she needed to dig out the tents and get them cleaned for the peach party.
She hadn’t been hinting for him to do it. Had he thought she was? It wouldn’t have crossed her mind to ask him to lug anything so heavy, not after taking that hard fall this afternoon.
She felt a nip, like a small bee sting of guilt, deep in her conscience. She hadn’t even properly thanked him for his work on the trees, much less offered any TLC for his injury. Pitching in on odd jobs at Everly was above and beyond anything their “agreement” required of him. And things were such a mess around here that she was deeply grateful for any extra help from anyone.
She just hadn’t known how to show it without feeling vulnerable. Only anger felt truly safe, and she hadn’t had the courage to retreat from it, even when he clearly deserved better treatment.
Relations between them were obviously going to remain complicated, but that didn’t absolve her from the obligation to show decent manners. She made her way down the stairs quickly. She had on only a nightshirt, but it was old and grubby, and no one could construe it as a come-on.
“Trent? Please don’t bother with the tents tonight. They weigh a ton, and you shouldn’t—”
To her surprise, he was sitting at the center tasting table, with a bottle of peach schnapps and a shot glass laid out before him on the recycled-wine-barrel surface. The recessed lighting her grandfather had installed overhead picked out blue-black diamonds in his hair, but the rest of him was mostly in shadow.
“Oh.” She stopped at the foot of the stairs. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be trying to find the tents.”
“No.” He lifted the bottle and topped off the glass. “Just stealing a little home-made painkiller. If I took the stuff Doc Marchant left, I’d be a zombie tomorrow.”
She glanced at his hand, which had a small bandage on the palm, and then his leg, which he had stretched out before him in an ever-so-slightly unnatural position. His jeans covered the cut on his calf, so she couldn’t judge how bad it was.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“Nothing the schnapps won’t cure.” He jiggled the bottle, sending little white fairy lights scampering over the brick walls. “This stuff packs a punch.”
She knew it was true. When her grandfather had run out of money less than halfway through stocking these Malaysian mahogany racks, she’d found him down here almost every night, brooding over his laptop, researching wines he’d never buy and getting plastered on peach schnapps.
But although liquor had always made her grandfather meaner, it seemed to be mellowing Trent. His voice sounded almost warm, as if the drink famous for thawing out Alpine skiers had finally cut through the ice inside him, too.
“I heard Doc Marchant had to sew up your calf.” She cringed, imagining. “Nineteen stitches, is that right?”
Trent shook his head. “That sounds like Zander’s usual hyperbole. It was only six stitches, and only because Marchant is a worrywart. I’ve had worse cuts from sliding down rocks at Green Fern Pool.”
She would have believed him, except that she’d seen the blood.
She still wasn’t sure how it had happened. The memory had the disjointed quality of a nightmare. She’d just met Richard on the back porch when she heard the crash of something heavy and metallic slamming into the ground. And then, before she could identify the cause, she saw Trent tumble from the ladder.
Without thinking, she flew down onto the lawn, her heart racing. She called out his name. No pausing to consider her dignity. No wondering whether he’d want her help.
Pure reflex. Pure gut.
The ladder wasn’t all that high, thank God, and it was clear immediately that there was no grave danger. While she knelt in the grass beside him, trying to still her heart and catch her breath, he pulled himself to his feet and shook himself off with a smile.
Within seconds, Zander, too, came running from the other side of the yard. The two men walked off together to check out what they insisted was just a scrape.
The message had been clear. Trent hadn’t wanted her to fuss over him then, and he certainly wouldn’t want it now.
“Well, I guess I should go,” she said after an awkward pause. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t trying to haul out those tents. I was headed—”
She hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable about mentioning bed, for fear it might sound like an invitation. But the hesitation was conspicuous, too. “Headed upstairs.”
He looked amused, though he didn’t say anything.
Argh. She leaned her head against the cool bricks and shut her eyes for a second. Did every road lead to sex?
“I wanted to tell you…I’m really sorry about the ladder,” she said, eager to change the subject. “As you can see, I’ve had to let a lot of the repairs and maintenance slide lately.”
“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I won’t sue.”
She couldn’t help smiling back. “That’s only because you know there’s nothing to get.”
He raised one eyebrow, toying with his empty shot glass with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No money, maybe.”
The cellar’s extravagant, Internet-monitored thermostat and humidity control system had long ago been disabled, but suddenly the temperature in the shadowy room seemed to drop ten degrees. Susannah looked at his fingers, and something about their slow grace made her shiver.
The way he looked at her…
There was no mistaking what he meant.
Suddenly she realized what a foolish mistake she’d made, letting guilt send her down here. She knew he hadn’t given up his plan to make her pay, and wasn’t this the perfect spot, with its cool seclusion, the musty smell of old wine and the sticky sweet scent of peaches? He must have known she’d come. He’d waited here, like a panther, in the dark.
And she’d fallen right into the trap. She was the moronic horror movie heroine who, even knowing there was a killer in the house, still decided to investigate the spooky noises in the basement.
“But then,” he went on, “money hasn’t ever been my weakness.”
His voice made her shiver, too. She crossed her arms in front, holding them by the elbows, trying to warm herself. “Trent, I really should go to—”
“To bed. Yes, I know. We can do that, too, if you like. Later.”
“That isn’t what I meant. You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”
“I think we understand