Chapter Eight
“Woman spazzing out on YouTube.” Who would have thought you could type that in and find anything. It might have been mildly amusing if that woman hadn’t been her. Sweet Mother of God, how many hits had the damn thing received? Surely that comma in the views tally was in the wrong place.
After lunch with Phi, they’d picked out some bed linen without too much more fuss. A woman shopping for pillows had given her a glare, but that was about it. Pippa waited for Phi to go and have her afternoon nap before she braved YouTube. She’d stopped watching the clips and reading the articles after her abortive early attempts to set the record straight.
Pippa hit play. Five minutes later she was ready to puke. Seeing it again brought it all back. Shit, Ray had stitched her up good. He’d always been a skillful editor but this shit was masterful. No wonder women reacted like they did. She wanted to slap herself. Ray made her look hard, callous, and ruthless. She looked like she’d stripped Allie of her dignity and made her crawl. No great surprise that Allie didn’t want anything more to do with her.
Pippa watched it again. And felt even sicker. She paused the clip and studied her face. The camera caught her looking bitter and angry. Her eyes slitted and her mouth contorted viciously.
Someone had to have that original footage, and be prepared to give it to her. Flipping through her contacts, she weighed them up as she went. Maybe one of the cameramen? She tried texting this time.
“Hey.” Matt stood in her bedroom doorway in jeans and a plain green tee. Her pulse did a weird flip thing as he smiled, soft and gentle and glad to see her. “What you doing?”
“Watching the woman who spazzed out on YouTube.” She pushed her laptop across the bed toward him. “Have you seen it?”
“Yup.” He stepped into the room, making it shrink around him. Pushing the computer closer to her, he perched on the end of the bed. They couldn’t teach what he did to denim around the thighs. “You didn’t say it, that’s all I need to know.”
Damn, if that didn’t make her chest warm and tears prick the back of her lids.
His strange, lion eyes held her gaze. Honest, true, steady. Men like this were rare, nonexistent in her life of the last ten or so years. Her voice came out all gummed up and she cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
He stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “It wasn’t meant to make you sad.”
“It was nice.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged and dropped his eyes. “So, I’m here to look at your ceiling.”
“Oh.” She stared up at the ceiling. A muddy stain oozed over the plasterwork. “It’s not leaking now.”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head, the suntanned column of his throat inviting a girl to bury her face there. “It’s not raining, either. Do you think there could be a connection?”
“Smart-ass.” She laughed, and it lifted some of the nasty fog in her head. Matt could always make her laugh. “I haven’t watched it since the first time it aired.”
“What made you watch it now?” He had this way of being, not judging or trying to fix things, that made him easy as hell to talk to.
Pippa spilled her day with Phi. “And I still have these tabloids calling me, all the time. They want to print my side of the story.” As if! She made a rude noise. “And I finally made it onto The Tonight Show, as the opening joke.”
He pulled the corners of his mouth down and shrugged. “You said it yourself, this shit will go on until they find something better to talk about.”
“It can’t come fast enough.”
“You know.” He got to his feet. “I think we’re going to have to speed up the timeline on your whole hard-to-get thing.” The subject change left her wrong-footed and struggling to make the mental leap.
“Normally, I would ask a couple more times. Maybe even do a bit of begging.” He shrugged. “In a totally not desperate way, of course.”
“Of course.”
His eyes glittered, alive and alluring. “You would eventually be overcome by my manifest charms.”
“Manifest charms? That’s a lot of charms, Meat.”
“Yeah, well.” He grabbed her hand and hauled her off the bed. “You hang out with Phi long enough and shit rubs off.”
“What are you doing?” She dug her heels in before he dragged her out of the room.
“We’re doing the date thing, right now.”
Pippa looked down at her baggy sweats. “I don’t think so.”
“You look fine for what I have in mind.”
And what was that exactly? That wicked gleam was doing nice things to her libido. “I didn’t say I would go on a date with you.”
“True.” He stepped right into her, heat coming off his big body in waves. “But we agreed that my charms would do the trick in the end and you would anyway.”
Her body swayed toward him as if they were connected somehow. “I didn’t agree to that.”
“Sure you did.” His eyes burned almost gold, liquid and hot. “Or you were about to, which is the same thing.”
Going out with Matt or sitting on her bed feeling sorry for herself. No real contest. “Where are we going?”
“I’m working on it.” He kept hold of her hand, a snug, right fit that radiated all the way up her arm.
“How about working on the leak?”
“Already taken care of.” He led her into the hallway. “Phi,” he yelled. “I’m taking Pippa out. Don’t wait up.”
“C’est merveilleux,” Phi called back.
“Whatever that means.” He frog-marched her down the stairs and into the kitchen. Snatching up a pair of runners, he handed them to her. “I insist on footwear.”
“Okay.” She slipped them on and trailed him to his truck. “How’s the date plan coming?”
His grin started in his eyes and spread down to his full mouth like sunlight across the yard. “Do you still plan everything?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
He shook his head and smirked. “Don’t worry about this plan, I think I’ve got it.”
“As long as it involves alcohol.”
“Figures.” He snorted and opened the door for her. “Now I have to spring for a six-pack, and the gas.”
“You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“You bet ya.” He slammed the door and jogged round to the driver’s side. “We have to make a couple of stops and then it’s off to Lovers’ Leap for you.”
“No.” Pippa stared at him. Caught between a laugh and a sigh. Lovers’ Leap, the high school make-out spot up above the Coleman farm.
“The view is spectacular.” He failed the innocent look right out.
“Uh-huh.” They drove out of the yard, through Phi’s “verdant thicket” and onto the main road. “Just so you know, I’ve never been to Lovers’ Leap.”
He snapped his head round before turning his gaze back to the road. “You are kidding me, right? Every girl in town has been to Lovers’ Leap. Some of them should be paying rent by now.”
“Not every girl.” She adjusted her sweats over her ankles. Some girls got the reputation for being stuck up. Even in a town where teenage boys vied for the attention of the small pool of girls at their disposal, some girls never got asked to go parking at Lovers’ Leap. And why was this bugging her anyway? High school was years ago. Maybe because she’d been secretly hoping a boy would ask all through high school. Say, someone who was hot, popular, rumored to be in line for a college football scholarship, a senior not scared off by a fancy way of speaking, and a bit of a stick up the ass.
Well, he’d asked now. Or rather, dragged her into the car and was taking her there. God, her teenage heart would be swelling like one of those pink helium balloons they decorated the school gym with for the Valentine’s stomp. At least the parts of that teenage heart that still clung to its romantic notions of love and forever. “They didn’t ask because I intimidated them,” she said.
A smile curled the corners of his mouth. “You mean because you were stuck up.”
It didn’t hurt when he said it with that smile. “That, too.”
“And just so you know,” he said. “My brother would have totally asked, but he was too chickenshit.”
Deep inside, awkward teenage Pippa perked right up and tossed her ponytail.
“I know Nate wanted to.” He frowned and gave it a bit of thought. “And Eric, for that matter, but he was a junior and scared you’d be freaked out.”
“Eric?” The second Evans, good-looking like all of them, but super smooth and a little scary. “I wouldn’t have gone with Eric. But Nate.” She hummed as if giving it serious consideration. “With that whole bad-boy vibe he had going. Even though he was in my year, and maybe lacked the cool factor of Eric. I—”
“Should quit now.” His jaw stuck out, not seriously pissed, but a little miffed for sure.
“I was going to say, I was holding out for the older Evans anyway.”
“Me?” He stared at her, hard.
Her cheeks heated. “I had a bit of a crush on you.”
He grinned and stared out the windshield. “I know.”
“What?” Cocky son of a bitch.
His grin morphed into a laugh. Warm, deep with a little husk hanging on the end. “You used to go all cute and pink when I spoke to you.”
“How would you know, you never spoke to me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Outside the science lab, you were practicing for some debate thing, and I was on my way to practice.”
Pippa had to think hard. “You can’t have that one. All you did was that chin thing.”
“I’ll have you know, a lot can be said with that chin thing.” He did it right then.
“What was that saying?”
“That was ‘hey.’”
“Then that’s what you said.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I did this one.” He did the identical chin lift thing again.
Pippa laughed. “It’s the same.”
“It’s not. Watch.” He did it again and she got nothing. They could be at this all night. Her earlier grump had disappeared like smoke. Being with Matt was an instant panacea to self-pity.
He pulled into the lot of Bets’s Grocery. “I’ll be right back.”
“The truck’s still running.”
He stopped with one foot on the ground. “And?”
“The environment.” Pippa rolled her eyes.
“I didn’t want my date getting hot and grumpy.” He gave her that killer smile. Okay, so no eco-warrior, but so sweet. “My date gets grumpy and I don’t get lucky.”
He jogged away before she could work up a snappy comeback. She nearly hung out the window and yelled that he wasn’t getting lucky anyway. Two reasons why not: First, the parking lot was busy and the denizens of Ghost Falls would love that. And second, she hadn’t decided if he was or was not yet. Which made it a damn good thing he hadn’t asked her to go parking in high school or God alone knows where she might have ended up. Given the depth of her confused crush at the time, the back of his truck wasn’t a far stretch.
Ten minutes ago, she’d been holed up in her room in Phi’s house, wallowing in the sucking mud that was her life. She laid her head back on the rest. The hum of the engine lulled her, and the cool air felt great on her heated face.
Matt appeared at the grocery store door, his hands filled with bags. He nodded greetings across the parking lot as he strode toward the truck. Big, long-legged, loose-limbed, like he had his own soundtrack playing behind him. JT’s “SexyBack” popped into her head. Yup, that was Matt. A rush of warm air came in through the door as he opened it. “Bets says to say hi.”
Pippa nearly rolled her eyes. This town. She would lay money on Bets squatting behind her older-than-God cash register peering through the security monitors to get an eyeful of what happened next. “I feel like I should flash her or something.”
Matt laughed and leaned over to put the bags on the backseat. “As much as I support that idea, it might kill her.”
Pippa snorted. Bets and her three-pack-a-day habit would outlive them all. She could hear the old woman now. She slumped into a close approximation of Bets’s posture. “Matt Evans was just in.” Cough, wheeze. “Had that uppity Turner girl with him.” Cough. “Turner is what they christened her and Turner is what I’ll call her until some man changes her name.”
Matt stared at her. “That is scary good, and totally not hot.”
She grinned at him; her Bets was some of her best work. She peered around him at the bags. “So, what did you get?”
“The finest in romantic fare that Bets had to offer.”
Romantic? She really liked the sound of that and she shouldn’t. She didn’t do romance. Romance led to love, and love led to people walking out without looking back. “A pack of Bud and a couple of Twinkies?”
“Something like that.” He smiled and kept his eyes on the road.
They passed the town square, the lights to the sheriff’s office still on. The Nate she remembered had been the town rebel. “Just how did Nate get to be sheriff anyhow?”
Matt glanced in the same direction. “He got into some trouble the year after he finished high school.” His jaw tightened. “Bigger stuff, way bigger than I could deal with.”
“And your mom?”
Matt shrugged. “She doesn’t handle stuff like that well.”
Nope, Cressy Evans didn’t. She’d left the messy stuff to her oldest son. He must have been about twenty-three then. Already running his dad’s business for four years.
“Nate was hit hard by Dad dying. He was always a bit wild, but that drove him over the edge. For a while there, I thought we might not get him back.” Matt turned his attention back to the road.
Pippa heard the stuff he didn’t say. He’d been worried about his brother, not able to handle the situation, and with nobody to turn to. “What happened?”
“Old Sheriff Wheeler got involved.” Matt took the turn out of town onto Rural Sixty. “He gave Nate a choice, go to jail or go to the Academy.” Matt shrugged. “Nate made the right choice. The smart choice. Did a few years in Salt Lake, then came home when Sheriff Wheeler got sick.”
“Cancer, right?”
“Yeah.” Matt shook his head. “Liver. Took him so fast. It was like he was fine one day and then, nine months later, we were burying him.”
“But Nate’s appointment is new. He wasn’t sheriff when I was last here.”
“Just this year.” No mistaking the pride in Matt’s voice. “We had another sheriff for a while, but he didn’t take to Ghost Falls, and Ghost Falls wanted Sheriff Wheeler back. When the election came up, a whole bunch of people pushed Nate to run. He did and we now have one of the youngest sheriffs in the state.”
“And Eric? What’s he doing?”
Tension crept into Matt’s posture. A subtle tightening around his shoulders. “Eric is in Denver, big property developer. We don’t see a lot of him.”
She gathered as much from the conversation she’d caught between him and Nate. “And Isaac works with you?”
“Yup.” He said it quickly, slamming the door on that line of questioning.
It was better that way. Talking families and their issues smacked of involvement, and this was not that. The road wound through the mountains, breathtaking in their rocky rise against the darkening sky. “And you? Why aren’t you married?”
He relaxed and flashed her a grin. “You asking because you’re interested?”
“Interested in you answering the question, yes.” It was hard to keep a stern face when he gave her that panty-melting grin.
“Didn’t have much time for dating when I was learning the ropes of the business. I owe Phi everything for that.” He slowed for the turn to the Coleman farm. “And you know about the woman shortage in this town.” Shortage yes, but they’d have to be dead not to see the possibilities in Matt Evans. “All the women I liked were married by the time I got around to getting serious. Or moved away.”
He slid a sly glance her way and she laughed. Smooth-talking son of a bitch. It got her every time. The truck jounced over the rutted road through the scrub oak. She clung to the dashboard, glad for the truck. “Was it always this bad?”
“Sure.” Matt laughed. “I think it’s Coleman’s way of trying to keep the teenagers off his land. I’m convinced he comes out here and roughs it up every spring.”
“People still park here?”
“I dunno.” He eased around a bend. “It’s been a while since I was up here.”
He slowed for another hairpin and Pippa gasped. The view was unbelievable.
Matt stopped the truck and she stared. The road ended with the steep side of a canyon. Beyond it rose the wall of the Wasatch Mountains in every direction. Snow still clung to the higher reaches, laying a white carpet between the thin scattering of trees. “It’s beautiful.”
“And mostly wasted on a bunch of horny teenagers.” Matt’s face was still and carved as he stared at the view.
He turned to her, his eyes unreadable. Matt moved constantly, laughing, making her laugh, busy and always doing. The moment of stillness had a strange intimacy to it. It wrapped around her like an embrace, warming a place inside she’d almost forgotten about. A girl she didn’t think she knew anymore. And Pippa panicked. No other word for the wash of soul-numbing fear that took her with it. She whirled around and grabbed for the bags. “What did you buy?”
“Provisions,” he said.
In the crackle of plastic and opening of beer bottles, she got it under control. Tucked that part of her firmly where it belonged and accepted a sub, still warm in her fingers. “It seems Bets is branching out.”
“There was a rumor earlier this year that another grocery store was coming into town. Bets upped her game.”
Bread! Dear Heaven, carbohydrates. You had to love them. Pippa sank her teeth into the sub and chewed slowly.
Matt watched, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Good?”
“Great.” She took a huge bite and he had to wait a bit for her reply. “This must be the first sandwich I’ve eaten in years.”
He grunted. “That’s too long.”
“Tell me about it.” And cheese, real cheese that melted on your tongue. “This is so good.”
He gave a small huff of laughter. “Who’d have thought Pippa Turner was a cheap date.”
She didn’t care. The sandwich and the beer were enough to keep her happy for the rest of the night. She took a swig and savored the ice-cold bite of hops on her tongue. “Ray would disagree with you.”
“Huh.” He made short work of his sandwich and crumpled the wrapper in his huge fist.
“My ex, Ray.” The sudden need to share didn’t seem odd, sitting here with Matt, drinking beer, eating subs, and looking at the most incredible view she’d seen in years. Maybe ever. “He says I’m a tough date, always did. He used to like that about me.”
“What changed?”
“I got older.”
Matt swung in his seat to look at her. “Wanna say that again?”
“I got too told for Ray.” Saying it aloud dragged the claws right through her gut. She was thirty-two, thirty-fucking-two. “He wanted something younger, easier to control.”
“Jerk.”
It made no sense, but she was laughing. How did he make her laugh when baring her soul? “That about sums it up.”
“And he deserves to lose you for it.”
The intimacy crept back into the truck. A little tingle that started at the base of her spine and edged up to her nape. It sparked and jolted her nerve endings awake and made her brain stutter to a halt. Pippa breathed in, out, and went with it. “You think?”
“I think.” He jammed his beer in the cup holder. “You’re the real deal, Miss Pippa St. Amor. You’re classy, clever, funny, and kind.”
“I’m not kind.” Is that the way he saw her? Thrilling, and a little intimidating. How did a girl live up to all that?
“Yeah, you are. The way you talked to the women in my office. The thing that bugs you the most about that YouTube thing? The other woman. Your dick of an ex laid you bare, stripped you down and shoved you in front of the nation to be hated. That gets to you, sure it does. You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. But what gets you more is that the woman with you in that clip got hurt too.” He turned sideways and laid his arm over the back of the seat. His fingertips brushed the ends of her hair. “And you take care of your grandmother.”
“Not like you do. You’re here all the time for her.”
His finger curled around her nape, sensitizing the skin and sending tingles straight to her nipples. “I owe Phi, as well as the fact that there’s nobody else on this planet like that old broad. But you, you just love her and you make sure she knows it in a hundred different ways.”
“This is not me you’re describing.” He wouldn’t be saying this if he spent a day with her in LA. It got hard to think with the stroke of those long, callused fingers on her neck.
“Sure it is. You call when you can. The little gifts you send her all the time that tell her you’re thinking about her. She shows them to me.”
“You take care of your family.” The waiting for him to move churned through her tight belly.
“We’re not talking about me.”
“What are we doing?”
His other hand took her beer and placed it in a cup holder. “Not sure about you, but I was getting ready to make my move.”
“You’re taking a long time.”
“Just setting the scene, smoothing the way.” A slight pressure on her nape brought their faces closer. His breath stroked warm and yeasty over her lips. “I forgot to add something to your list of finer qualities.”
“What’s that?” He had a beautiful mouth, the top lip fine and clearly etched, the bottom plumper and made for sinking your teeth into. “You’re so hot, you make me ache.”
Oh dear Lord, aching like she was? Not possible. His mouth brushed hers. Soft, seeking. Pippa increased the pressure, opening her mouth beneath his.
With a groan, he cupped the side of her jaw with his free hand and angled her head, taking the kiss deeper. His tongue brushed into her mouth, firm and demanding.
Heat shot straight between her legs at the silky glide of his tongue against hers. She tasted the slight tang of beer and male musk. Shit, she’d almost forgotten how great a man tasted. He exploded through her senses, nipples tight, moisture flooding her core. Raging, unsatisfied, and, yes, aching need. Her breasts swelled, between her legs a pulse pounded to get closer. She fisted her hands in his shirt and held on.
Her knee hit the gearshift but she kept on going. He had what she needed wrapped in denim and cotton and she was getting close to it. Her ankle banged against the driver’s door, but she got it around him. Tucked her legs in between hard bits of plastic and metal and Matt. All of Matt, hot and hard beneath her thighs.
Her core grazed his erection. Her sweatpants thin enough to feel how hard he was beneath his jeans. Shit, she did this to him. And he made her so wet it was nearly embarrassing. If she could give a crap about anything else, but his mouth, his tongue, his hands fisted in her hair. The steering wheel pressed her tight to him, hard at her back. Matt even harder at her front.
His hands slid beneath her shirt, rough and warm on her back, his fingers digging into her skin and letting her know she did it for him, too.
The horn blared and Pippa leaped. Teeth scraped, and she nipped his lip, hard enough to bring the salty copper of blood to her tongue. “Shit.” Her breath came out in pants that mingled with his in the tiny space between them. “Sorry.”
“Totally worth it.” His tongue darted out and licked away the tiny spot of blood. “Pippa Turner, you were well worth waiting for.”
A warning bell tolled in her mind, but very softly. “Don’t get all sappy on me, Meat.”
“God forbid.” He nipped her bottom lip. “You’re too stuck up for that.”
She laughed. “Yeah, but I’m not easy. Second base and no further.”
He frowned and hummed as if in thought. “Okay. For the sake of clarity though, what exactly is second base?”
“Nothing under my clothes.” Pippa needed to slow this down. Kissing Matt could get out of control too fast, and she liked this. She could handle this much.
He cupped her breasts and she gasped as the heat shot through her. “So this is okay?”
“Uh-huh.” It came out as a breathy moan as he brushed her nipples with his thumbs.
“I can work with this.” His mouth slanted over hers in another drugging kiss.