Four hours later, the last of Charles’s and Alma’s mourning friends had left the reception hall at the church. Jillian had urged platters of food on their friends, insisting that she would never be able to use it all. She’d comforted more tearful people than she could count, gone through the equivalent of ten boxes of tissues, and shed her high-heeled shoes under a table somewhere.

She’d had five offers to get stinking drunk, two concerned friends who offered to stay the night, and one proposition from a slimy guy who’d said he was a friend of Charles’s. The first group was the only one that remotely tempted her.

Leaving the cleanup effort to the bereavement committee from the church, she drove the few miles home and parked in the driveway of her condo. God, she was tired. Every single cell in her body felt bruised; she winced at the effort it took to push open the door and get out. In contrast to her aching body, her mind was numb. It was as though she were wrapped in a thick layer of blankets, the heavy fabric insulating her from reality.

Whatever that was. Reality had taken a vacation the day she got that first frantic phone call from the hysterical housekeeper who had been contacted by the police. There’d been no one else to identify Charles and Alma, and so she’d done it.

They’d died instantly when a drunken driver had slammed into them head-on. There weren’t many things in her life that could compare to the horrible reality of examining the mangled remains of two people she loved. No, compared to that, even being dumped by a fiancé seemed more bearable somehow.

Fumbling for her keys in the dark, she stubbed her toe on the step up to her porch and swore. All she wanted to do was to fall into bed and let the world go by for about ten days—

“Wha—?” She gasped as a shadowed figured rose from the single rocking chair. Her heart roared into double-time, and when she recognized the large shape, it only sped up. “Damn it, Dax, you scared me silly.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry; only amused.

“Go away.” She skirted him, careful not to get too close as she inserted her key in the lock. “I’m tired. You weren’t invited.”

“I’m inviting myself. We have a lot to discuss.” He stepped nearer, and she could see his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “Have dinner with me. Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Only in your dreams, big boy.” She shook her head and tried to hide the quivering in her voice. If he just wouldn’t stand so darn close! “I have plans for tomorrow night. And I’m sure my calendar is full up until, oh, about the year twenty-fifty. Sorry, no time for you.”

She turned the key and turned her back on him.

“Your lease for Kids’ Place is up next month.”

The calm, confident words halted her in mid-motion and she paused. “You did your homework.”

“Sugar’s is up in November. So is The Cotton Gin’s.”

So much for trying to be clever. “And that means what, exactly, to me?” she demanded. Sugar’s and The Cotton Gin were two of the other stores in the shopping center where Kids’ Place was located.

“It means,” said Dax, “that you’re talking to the new owner of the Downington Plaza. The owner who can refuse to renew certain leases if he so chooses.”

It was too much, coming on the heels of the horrendous day she’d endured, and her battered brain refused to comprehend his meaning. Weakly, she sank into the rocker he’d vacated as the implications of his words sank into her head. He owned her building. And he would refuse to renew her lease. “Why?” she asked quietly, swallowing the note of pain. “Why are you doing this to me? You’ve done enough already—”

“I’ve done enough?” The words were a volcanic explosion and she shrank back at the rage spewing forth. “What about what you did? How do you think I felt, discovering my fiancée and my only brother were screwing around behind my back? How do you think I felt, coming face to face with the two of you sharing declarations of love in the same bed I’d been in a few hours before?” He leaned down and put both hands on the rocker’s arms, trapping her against the chair back. “Too damn bad for you I came home early that evening, and pretty damn lucky for me. At least I discovered what a little bitch you are before you got a wedding ring on your finger.”

The silence that crept into the void left behind his words crackled with the remains of his anger. Their faces were inches apart, and she hoped her expression was as hostile as his was. She was too busy controlling her shaking limbs to be sure.

With a sound of disgust, Dax pushed away from the rocker. Turning his back to her, he leaned an arm against the brick wall, resting his bent head against it.

And, despite the fear and fury warring inside her, a part of her longed to go to him and rub the tension from his shoulders, smooth the vertical lines that had formed between his brows, rock him until the sorrow in his heart subsided.

She needed to have her head examined.

Reaching for the most disdainful voice she could muster, she said, “So let me be sure I have this straight. I go to dinner with you tomorrow night or you throw my business and those of several other innocent people out of their stores?”

His shoulders straightened. “If that’s what it takes.” He turned to face her, but she couldn’t see his expression in the darkness. “I met with the family attorney after the funeral. He told me Charles did indeed leave you his shares.” There was bitterness in his tone. “Payment for services rendered?”

She hissed in a breath, grabbed her temper before it got away, and counted to ten. “I have no earthly idea why Charles left that stock to me. It would have gone to Alma if she’d survived him, you know.” Her voice shook unexpectedly as an image of Charles’s practical, soft and gentle little wife appeared in her head.

There was a tense silence. She could practically feel the rage emanating from him. But all he said was, “Since you’re now a company stockholder, you need to know that Piersall Industries is in trouble.”

“What do you mean, ‘in trouble’?” She was cautious, wondering what kind of trap this was.

“In trouble,” he repeated. He stepped out of the deepest shadows and his eyes were deadly serious. “That stock you hold won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on if something isn’t done to turn Piersall around.”

“Something like what?” She didn’t care about the stock, nor the profits from it; she’d succeeded in making her life comfortable without it so far. But as a businesswoman, the idea of a company closing, putting who knew how many people out of work, was anathema to her. And this was the only link she had now with Charles; she wasn’t ready to toss it aside, even to spite Dax.

Without answering her question, he said, “Tomorrow night. Seven. Dress is casual.” He stepped over to her door and twisted the key, opening the door before withdrawing the keys and tossing them into her lap. “Go to bed. You look like hell.”

She couldn’t just sit there and take more of his insults; it had been a long time since she’d allowed any man to get the better of her. “If I look like hell, it’s from having the misfortune to be in the same city with you again.”

She was still sitting in the rocker when he turned the corner and vanished into the parking lot.

Two

She can still wrap you up in more knots than a sailor could, Dax thought. He leaned his head against the back of his seat, putting off the moment of ringing Jillian’s doorbell and seeing the ice in those blue eyes.

He’d been well-prepared for their first meeting yesterday ...he’d thought. Until she’d sprung her little coup on him. He still couldn’t believe she controlled twenty-three per cent of the company’s voting stock now.

Ever since he’d received the brief, stilted facsimile telling him Charles was dead, he’d imagined that first meeting with her. Dax had been shocked to his shoes when he’d seen Jillian’s name on the letterhead; he’d almost conditioned himself to stop thinking of home, and of anyone connected to his past.

Especially her. God, how he’d hated her. It had taken years for him to stop thinking of her every minute, years, and with one damned piece of paper, she was back in his head as if she’d never left. When he’d flown up here from Atlanta, the man he’d hired to investigate her met him at the airport with everything he’d dug up. And as he scanned the doings of Jillian Kerr through the past seven years or so, he’d known he wasn’t going to walk away this time without wringing some answers out of her. Maybe once he knew why she’d agreed to marry him when she’d obviously wanted Charles, maybe then he could finally forget.

A few more phone calls had put him in exactly the position he wanted, and he’d strolled off to the funeral yesterday feeling pretty pleased with himself and primed for a fight. When he’d made his way through the crowd, he’d been ready to rip her to shreds, exactly the way she’d ripped his heart out once.

Only he hadn’t bargained for the compelling reaction his body and his emotions had experienced when he sat down beside her at the service. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her face right away, and it was just as well. He’d been so fixated on the sight of her slender thighs beneath the short black skirt, and the way she’d kept her legs pasted together, with her long, narrow feet in their elegant, unsuitable shoes cuddled side by side on the ground, that he couldn’t have spoken if he’d had to. Memories had swamped him. He could still see her long, slender body, feel the way she’d yielded beneath him, hear the sweet little whimpers she made when he was touching her.

It had taken him every minute of the rest of that eulogy to battle the need back into submission, to keep his hands from reaching out and yanking her against him. And then, when she’d stood and he’d looked directly at her for the first time, he’d been poleaxed by her glowing, youthful appearance. The woman was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake. He knew she’d been around the block more times than a kid on a new bike, and yet she still looked fresh as a flower on a dewy morning.

She’d barely seemed to notice him; he had felt her grief and the determined way she was clinging to control. It only served to enrage him all over again. Apparently, she’d stayed close to Charles all these years; Dax doubted she’d be so emotional if he were the one in that coffin.

That coffin. Regret halted his tumbling thoughts. Somehow, he’d always assumed he and Charles would speak again some day. Dax could never forgive Jillian, but Charles was another story.

He, Dax, knew firsthand just how seductive and irresistible she could be. As a hormone-laden kid, he’d been deeply, profoundly jealous of Charles and the special connections his brother had shared with her. Charles and Jillian were thick as thieves, had been since they were old enough to ride their bikes up and down the hill from one house to the other. They touched each other casually, easily, and even though she’d belonged to Dax since their first kiss, she and Charles had some unspoken relationship that didn’t include him. Their closeness had bothered him more than he’d wanted to admit, even to himself.

Still, he wished he had taken the time to contact Charles during these recent years, when his brother had popped into his mind more and more frequently. He hadn’t even come home for their mother’s funeral four years ago, a move he still regretted. And he’d fully intended to get back in touch with Charles. He’d considered it a dozen times, had told himself tomorrow would be time enough. Now tomorrow had arrived, but time had run out.

Charles...his baby brother. Gone. In his mind’s eye, Dax watched Jillian lay a yellow rose atop the white coffin. A numbing regret swept over him. He’d missed Charles these past few years.

And he’d have liked to have met his brother’s wife. He would have applauded anyone who could steal Charles out from under Jillian’s nose.

He unfolded himself from the sleek little Beamer that had been left at the house since his mother’s death and walked to her door. She opened it after the first ring, as if she’d been standing on the other side waiting on him. Good. He hoped she’d stood there a while.

The punch of awareness slammed into him again at the sight of that angelic face and even though he’d been expecting it, he still could only stare for a moment, drinking in the porcelain beauty that had once been his. She was wearing a fairly sedate, un-Jillian-like twin set and stylish trousers. She’d always dressed to entice, to arouse...before. Of course, that could have changed over the years.

He recalled the curve-hugging black suit she’d worn to the funeral, the suit with the tight skirt that had shown off her slender little butt and lots of long, slim leg. He’d been watching from his car when she’d been helped out of the hearse by two exceedingly attentive men, and he’d endured the painful twist in his gut when she’d clung to one of them as she started across the cemetery. And he’d been mildly surprised to note that her figure had looked every bit as good as he remembered...though “surprise” hadn’t been the primary feeling he’d experienced.

And afterwards, when he’d introduced himself to her family, he’d been shocked as hell when she’d deliberately closed the space between them and pressed herself against his side as if they were intimate companions who touched each other every day. Even though he knew she’d done it to head off more hard words between him and her overbearing brother-in-law, he hadn’t been able to prevent himself from touching her once he’d recovered his wits. He’d slid a hand around her still-slender waist and checked out the firm curve of her hip, and it had been all he could do to stand there when all he wanted was to pull her against him and fill his hands with her.

He suspected that this sudden switch to conservative clothing was for his benefit. She’d probably had to run out and buy it today.

The idea made him smile as he started forward—but she blocked his way. “I’m ready.”

That was it. No greeting, no civil conversation. The imp of perversity that she brought out in him popped up, and he merely stood there, blocking her way, now. “Invite me in.”

“No. You asked me to dinner. Let’s go.”

“Come on, honey-bunch.” He used the endearment deliberately, and her eyelids fluttered once, a subtle flinch that he might have missed if he hadn’t been looking for it. He’d noticed yesterday that the expression he’d once used with tenderness got her back up like a threatened cat’s. “It’s only natural that I want to see how my former fiancée is living. After all, if we’d married, I’d have been saddled with your taste in furnishings for life.” He put his hands on her waist and set her aside, striding into the foyer of her condo, where he made a show of looking around. But his body was doing its Jillian-thing again, and he had to take a few deep breaths to calm the shaky feeling that touching her had produced in his gut. His fingers tingled and his blood felt as if it was racing through his veins. And unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot he could do about the heavy stirring in the part of his body that hadn’t listened when he told himself it was over with her.

This really sucked. He’d met dozens—no, hundreds of beautiful, sexy women over the years. And not one of them could arouse even a fraction of the desire that rode him when he so much as thought about Jillian.

“I’d really like to get this over with. I have to work tomorrow.”

“At your store.” Leisurely, he strolled through a stark, white kitchen that looked as if it didn’t get much use. The only personal touches were a couple of pictures of children—Manna’s? —held on the refrigerator with magnets, and a clumsily painted clay bowl that looked like it had been made by a child. The other items on display looked like they’d been placed there by a decorator for effect. He ran a finger over a blue glazed bowl with apples in it, mildly surprised when he realized the apples were real.

He inspected the dining room, with its smoked glass table and chrome-and-leather chairs. The room was dominated by a huge painting of... “What is that?”

She’d been trailing after him, looking distinctly pouty and disgruntled. At his words, a small smile curled the edges of her lips up in amusement. “It’s a painting.”

He gave her a narrow-eyed look.

She raised both palms and shrugged. “I don’t know what it is. Some days, it looks like a tiger wearing green socks, other days it resembles a garden of orange lilies. Vaguely. It was a gift from an artist and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

“His?” He mentally kicked himself the moment the word came out. It certainly wasn’t what he’d intended to say. What had he intended to say, anyway?

Jillian crossed her arms and leaned back against the door frame. “Yes, his, as in male, man, masculine gender. Believe it or not, Dax, I’ve had a life of my own since your exit, complete with a few—gasp!—relationships along the way.”

He ignored the sarcasm, heading into the next room, which must be her formal living room. An enormous baby grand occupied the alcove in the corner, and sheet music for a complicated arrangement of the love theme from Titanic was open above the keys. Jillian had loved to play, he remembered. Apparently, at least that hadn’t changed. He wandered past the piano to where a tasteful grouping of white love seats and chairs were set before a brassscreened fireplace with white marble columns.

Who did she share that love seat with now? Rationally, he knew she had had no reason to suspend her life after he’d left, but when he thought about Jillian with another man, his irrational side wanted to smash a few pieces of her Lladro collection against the far wall.

A group of brass-framed photos displayed on the mantel caught his eye, and he went closer. Her sister’s family smiled contentedly into the camera in the first one. There was a dark-haired little girl cradled in Ben Bradshaw’s arm and an obviously pregnant Marina glowed with happiness. Regret rose at the cozy family scene, and he swallowed it, moving on to the next image. Slightly behind the first, a second photo showed Marina snuggled against a big blond guy.

Before he could voice a question, Jillian said, “That was her first husband. He was killed in the accident.” There was a soft, sad note in her voice that made him want to reach out and cuddle her, comfort her, but he resisted such a stupid impulse.

The third photo arrested his attention, as did two others following it. The photographer apparently had been waiting for the shot, because the three photos were a sequence. In the first, taken near someone’s pool on a bright, sunny day, an enormous hulk of a guy in nothing but a pair of blue denim cutoffs that bared bulging biceps and thighs like tree trunks was sneaking up behind Jillian. Meanwhile, another broad-shouldered dark-haired man in swim trunks stood with his arm around her naked waist. She was wearing what had to be the skimpiest bikini on the East Coast and even though the man’s hand was only splayed against her back, Dax’s blood pressure rose.

In the second photo, the Hulk had snatched her off her feet and was holding her cradled against his chest as he stood on the edge of the pool. He was grinning like the Cheshire cat. Jillian had his ears in her hands, tugging, her head thrown back and her mouth open in a scream. The third was a marvelous action shot of the pair in midair, free-falling into the pool as sprays of water froze forever for the camera’s lens.

Jillian had moved up beside him. She reached up to trace a delicate finger over the glass, sliding around the outline of the big man. She heaved an exaggerated sigh.

He couldn’t take it, even though he knew she was baiting him. “Someone special?”

“Two someones,” she corrected, smiling fondly at the photo. “Other than my brother-in-law, Jack and Ronan are the men I love most in the world. Even when they conspire to throw me into the pool.”

He gritted his teeth, aware that if he moved right now, it only would be far enough to get his hands around her unfaithful throat. “You never were satisfied with just one of anything.” He hadn’t meant the words in an intimate sense, but as he glanced at her, he suddenly realized they applied to their shared past in another way.

And in the sudden aura of awareness that the words dropped over them, he saw in her eyes that she was thinking the same thing he was. Their lovemaking had always been intense and primitive, and they’d both been young, healthy, in love with lust when they’d been together. A single episode of sex had never been enough for her. As if she were speaking, he could hear her husky voice urging him on and on, begging him for more and more, and protesting that she really couldn’t without meaning it when he moved over her, giving her a second satisfaction only moments after the first.

He looked at her lips. They were slightly parted, the edges of her perfect teeth—courtesy of the braces he still remembered—showing. She was breathing in quick, shallow gulps. He could practically smell the scent of her arousal, and the erection that had been teasing him since she opened the door roared to full, throbbing life. His hand reached for hers, their gazes locking in a desperate, wordless exchange. Taking her small hand in his, he carried it to his chest.

She sucked in a strangled breath, her eyes darting to their hands—

And the tidal wave of sudden, rigid-muscled, bodyshaking rage that possessed him when he thought about her running straight from his arms into those of his brother blasted through him without warning, knocking down any fragile barriers he’d sandbagged against it.

“How many men have those hands touched?” he demanded, as he flung her hand from him.

For an instant, he thought he saw anguish pass over her features. Then, if it had ever been there at all, the desperate emotion in her eyes vanished. Tossing her head to throw back her hair, she smiled. “Dozens. And every single one of them tells me I’m the best thing he’s ever known.”

He could kill her. He really could kill her.

Reading his eyes correctly, she hastily stepped back. But she just couldn’t shut that smart mouth of hers. “You asked for that, Dax. You know you did.” She paused, and weariness drew at her pretty face; again, for a moment, she looked so sad that a little part of his heart almost reached out for her before he shoved it back into hiding. “If I told you the truth, you’d think I was lying, anyway.”

“You aren’t capable of telling the truth,” he snarled. Truth? What truth?

In self-preservation, he transferred his attention to the last photo.

And was shocked speechless for a moment. It was a close-up of Jillian. She was cradling an infant in her arms, a newborn whose blond fuzz barely dusted the tiny head. She was holding the child up close to her, looking into its face, and the tenderness in her expression dug into him like a sharp blade. His hands were shaking and he shoved them into his pockets. Was it hers? Where was it? The sight sent sharp arrows of pain through him again.

That should have been my child.

But she hadn’t loved him enough to have his babies.

As if she’d followed his thoughts, she said quietly, “That’s my friend Deirdre’s first child. He’s a whole lot bigger and a whole lot livelier now, but he sure was precious then.”

His shoulders slumped as the tension leached out of him, and with a small shake of his head for what should have been and never would be, he gave up the inspection and escorted her out the door.

As Dax drove up the hill and pulled into the circular driveway fronting Charles and Alma’s house—or was it Dax’s now?—Jillian steeled herself. The last time she’d been here had been the day after they’d died, when the funeral director had asked her to pick out clothing in which the couple could be buried. God save her from ever having to choose another loved one’s final attire.

“Why are we stopping here?”

Dax gave her an unreadable glance as he killed the engine. “We’re dining here.”

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