Private Affairs

About the Author

Multi-award-winning, bestselling authors Lori Schlachter Karayianni and Tony Karayianni are the power behind the pen name TORI CARRINGTON. Their over forty-five titles include numerous Blaze®mini-series, as well as the ongoing Sofie Metropolis comedic mystery series with another publisher. Visit www.toricarrington.net and www.sofiemetro.com for more information on the duo and their titles.

Private Affairs

Tori Carrington

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Dear Reader,

First loves, second chances; there’s just something thrilling about this popular theme, isn’t there? We thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it in this second book in our PRIVATE SCANDALS series … stamping it, of course, with our own sizzling-hot brand!

In Private Affairs, sexy Palmer DeVoe returns to Earnest, Washington a different man than he was years before. Only one thing remains the same: his bone-deep need for first love Penelope Weaver. And it appears absence only makes the sex grow hotter. Despite all the heartache Penelope has endured, Palmer is the one who introduced her to white-hot sex and heart-pounding love … and proves he’s still more than capable of providing and stirring both. Her physical reaction to him gives her away every time their paths cross. But can she handle it if he leaves again …?

We hope you enjoy Palmer and Penelope’s sizzling and sometimes heart-wrenching journey toward sexily-ever-after. We’d love to hear what you think. Contact us at PO Box 12271, Toledo, OH 43612, USA (we’ll respond with a signed bookplate, newsletter and bookmark), or visit us on the web at www.toricarrington.net.

Here’s wishing you love, romance and HOT reading.

Lori & Tony Karayianni aka Tori Carrington

We dedicate this book to our online friends everywhere: you know who you are!

Interested in joining the fun? Check us out at www.

facebook.com/toricarrington or www.twitter.com/toricarrington.

And, as always, to Brenda Chin, a warm and wonderful constant in an ever-changing world.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Copyright

1

HOT. SO VERY HOT …

She lay against the picnic blanket and restlessly watched as he fanned his hand across her trembling belly, taking in her nakedness after he’d popped the buttons down the front of her dress. The material glided from her skin. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which left him to concentrate on the scrap of pink cotton that kept her from being completely at the mercy of his hungry gaze. He slid his thumbs under the thin straps at her hips, slowly, ever so slowly, sliding her panties down until she was finally free from them. She moved to close her legs and he made a small sound of objection, instead coaxing her to open to him. She wriggled as the summer sun and his attention warmed her delicate flesh.

Then he was touching her …

Fingers stroked, probed, invaded, bringing her a pleasure that surely couldn’t be real …

He leaned in, covering her mouth with his.

Too wet … too cloying …

She turned her head and he licked her ear instead.

No, no, she wanted to whisper. Down … there …

Penelope Weaver awakened with a start. Panting. Only it wasn’t she who was out of breath. Or even the man that had been featured in her dream, as he was so often lately.

Instead, she stared at the blurry outline of her golden retriever/border collie mix and blanched away from his awful breath.

“Thor!”

Penelope sat up. It took a few moments to gather her wits about her. She wasn’t lying on a picnic blanket in Old Man Benson’s field just outside town, but was rather in her own bed in her room in the house on Maple Street. The summer sun cut a path across her body, but it was early evening and she was fully dressed.

And the too wet kiss hadn’t come from her fantasy man, but rather her eight-year-old dog.

Bleech.

She picked up the wind-up alarm clock from the nightstand. Just after 7:00 p.m.

Just after seven!

Barnaby Jones would be there to pick her up any minute.

She sprung from the bed and rushed to the shared bathroom in the hall. She must have fallen asleep when she’d gone in to stretch out on the bed. It had been a long day at the small café she owned and ran on Main Street and she’d needed to rest her feet for just a few moments.

The café. Even now it seemed odd to refer to her shop as such. She’d originally opened the place to sell her tapestries and called it Penelope’s Possessions, but when the lumber mill had closed down four years ago it had taken much of what made downtown Earnest a draw for visitors with it. Businesses had closed, storefronts were empty. She’d adapted, offering her wares on the internet, but the shop itself had gradually become a coffee shop. Not a difficult transition seeing as she’d always made a good cup of coffee and thanks to her grandmother and great-aunt, there was an endless supply of baked goodies.

Now it was simply known as Penelope’s.

She considered her curly dark hair in the mirror, fluffing the flattened back, and checking the liner around her brown eyes. Aside from a slight crease in her right cheek, she didn’t look any the worse for wear. She took a deep breath and straightened the front of the dress she had on. A dress not unlike the one featured in her picnic dream. Only it really hadn’t been a dream, had it? It was a memory. A recollection of a time that had passed long ago. Yet still had the power to steal her breath away.

She turned to hurry back out into the hall and nearly tripped over Thor.

“You’re going to be the death of us both,” she murmured, edging around him.

Of course, the reason he was shadowing her every move was because there was no one else home to bother. The quiet was almost deafening. She walked into the living room, where the only sound was the hum of the laptop her grandmother had left on in the corner. The house’s silence reminded her that the reason why no one was home was that the other inhabitants hoped she would get laid tonight.

Penelope groaned inwardly. Her grandmother and great-aunt were her roomies as well as two busybody, interfering old women whose sex lives were far more interesting than hers.

Interesting? That would require that she actually had a sex life to be uninteresting. But she hadn’t had one of those since …

She swallowed hard. Well, since around about the time of the dream she’d just had.

With quick jerks, she powered down the computer and closed the offending monitor, smoothing her hand over the top where it sat on an antique, accordion-front desk. From inkwells to laptops. There was a story in there somewhere. Perhaps on the different mediums meddling family members employed when trying to matchmake for younger family members.

It was summer in Earnest, Washington, and the sun wouldn’t fully set for another two hours or so, but the mature trees that surrounded the quaint Victorian house filtered the light, making the house dim. She switched on a lamp and then moved back toward the hall and the kitchen, incapable of sitting to wait for the man who would arrive to take her out for their fifth date.

She frowned as she checked the dishwasher. Barnaby Jones wasn’t so bad. He was even cute in a Vince Vaughn kind of way. Tall, broad-shouldered, easy going. But the town sheriff had yet to make her feel a twinge of what her dream had conjured up. There was a time or two when she’d actually orgasmed while asleep, the memories were so powerful.

Either that, or she was an inexcusably sorry individual.

At any rate, the good-night kiss Barnaby had given her at the end of the past two dates had left her feeling curiously … sisterly to him. And not in the Nietzsche way, either.

She hated to break it to her grandma Agatha and her great-aunt Irene, but there wasn’t going to be any sex had in this house tonight, no matter how quiet and available.

She did appreciate the clean set of sheets Aggie had put on her bed in preparation for “the big event,” however. The fresh scent of line-dried cotton was likely responsible for her drifting off.

As for the dream …

Well, she wasn’t going to think about that now. Or connect the current frequency of them to the fact that the man in question had been spotted back in town. And forget his possible nearness having anything to do with her mixed feelings about Barnaby. She hadn’t seen him in nearly fifteen years. He no longer influenced anything she did or thought or felt.

Thor whined at her feet.

Penelope twisted her lips. “What is it, boy? You have water. Food …”

Probably he wanted to go outside.

She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t such a bad idea. She could check her roses and the vegetable garden while she was out there with him.

She opened the back screen door with a muted squeak and Thor bounded out, her following on his heels. The door clapped shut and she stood looking at a garden that had changed very little in the thirty years she’d lived there. Oh, the trees might have grown a little taller, and the wooden privacy fence at the back of the property was only a few years old. But the same perennials dotted the landscape, the vegetable garden was in the same spot as it always was. And the enclosed, intimate gazebo at the far end of the yard was exactly the same but for a couple of coats of white paint.

She found herself drawn to the structure in which she’d spent so much of her teenaged years, bypassing her roses and not stopping until she stood in the arch looking in at the overstuffed cushions that had supported her while she read countless books … and had also been the setting for many of her dreams.

Her hand went to the side of her neck, feeling oddly exposed at that one moment. It was almost as if someone was watching her.

“Hello, Penelope.”

She swiveled so quickly she nearly lost her footing on the wooden steps.

And Palmer DeVoe reached out to steady her …

BEAUTIFUL …

No matter how many times Palmer had anticipated this moment, this particular point in time when he’d finally come face to face with Penelope Weaver after so many years, he could never have imagined the completely visceral feelings that would roll through him like a thousand rippling Pacific waves. Need, want, fear emerged one by one, then were washed away by the next emotion.

In his mind’s eye, Penelope was still the fresh-faced young woman with the warm smile and deep dimples and slender body. His first sexual encounter, his high school sweetheart, and yes, he admitted, his first love.

Now she was an earthy, sexy, curvy woman who somehow reached even deeper inside him, searching for something he was afraid wasn’t there for her to find.

Her curly hair was a little shorter. Her face a little fuller. But her smile was just as warm. Her dark eyes just as probing.

Palmer still held her arm where he’d steadied her. They both looked down at where their skin connected. He lingered a bit longer, marveling at her softness.

Then, as if by mutual agreement, he removed his hand and she stepped beyond his grasp at the same time.

“I heard you were in town,” she said quietly.

Rarely in his memories of her did she speak. Instead, her image was like a series of snapshots of her in various poses, most of them under him.

Now, her voice flowed over him, intoxicating.

He nodded toward the gazebo behind her. “Now that’s a familiar place.”

She glanced over her shoulder and blushed. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that she’d been thinking about him, about them, when he’d walked up.

He hadn’t planned to stop; he’d merely been walking by—as he’d had on several prior occasions—when he’d spotted her standing there like a ghost from the past.

Penelope moved through the yard toward the back door of the house and he watched her go, the material of her dress hugging her in all the right places.

He’d known running into her at some point was inevitable. While he’d visited his hometown a couple of times in recent weeks, he was now living here. At least for the foreseeable future. Which meant facing a great number of people from his past.

“This isn’t a good time, Palmer,” she said quietly.

He squinted at her through the waning light. “I would have called, but …”

A sad attempt at humor that fell flat on its face, where it belonged.

He cleared his throat. “I hadn’t meant to stop. I was walking back from Main on my way to Foss’s bed-and-breakfast …”

She nodded. “I guessed as much.”

She looked at him in a way that made him feel she was sizing him up and that he came up short.

“You look good, Palmer,” she said simply.

“So do you.”

Her smile was self-conscious. “I don’t mean … physically.” She made a small sound. “It looks like you’ve done well for yourself.”

And he had, hadn’t he? He’d accomplished everything that he’d hoped to when he left Earnest for Boston. More.

Why was it, then, that he suddenly sensed he’d achieved nothing?

“Hello?” a man’s voice called from inside the house.

Penelope looked in that direction, apparently surprised.

Palmer grimaced. While he hadn’t asked for the information, many townspeople that he’d encountered seemed to deem it important to fill him in on Penelope and her actions. He’d learned that she was still single. That she owned a small shop down on Main, one of the few that had managed to stay open in the struggling town of four thousand. He’d walked by it a few times after closing and had stood staring inside at the colorful tapestries on the walls and displayed on easels.

In all the conversations he’d had, not a one of them had mentioned a man being in the picture.

But of course there would be. Why would he even think differently?

“Have you visited your father yet?” she asked, speaking to him rather than the man seeking her out.

He suspected she knew the answer to that. Just as he knew many secondhand details about her, she’d probably plucked the details of his movements since he’d been back from the same grapevine. Not that it was a state secret, but he was pretty sure that everyone knew he had yet to see his old man.

The back door opened and a familiar guy walked out. A guy who towered over him by several inches and had made it his business to stop by the industrial trailer that currently served as his offices. Sheriff Barnaby Jones had let him know in no uncertain terms that he intended to keep an eye on what was going on.

At the time, Palmer couldn’t help sensing that there was a certain trace of animosity in the sheriff’s attention.

Now he knew why.

Penelope hurried toward the man. “Barney! Hi.”

The sheriff’s gaze seemed a little too intimate for Palmer’s liking as he took in Penelope and complimented her on her dress. Then his attention fell on Palmer where he stood just inside the side garden gate. His expression changed.

“Barnaby, I’d like to introduce you to … an old family friend,” Penelope said. “Palmer DeVoe, this is Barnaby Jones.”

Palmer crossed to shake the other man’s hand. “I believe we’ve already met.”

“Yes, we have.” The sheriff seemed to say it in warning.

Penelope appeared to pick up on the undercurrents passing between them and stepped in.

“Barney and I are attending the fair in Lewisville,” she said, and then looked confused, as if she couldn’t understand why she’d shared that. “It was … nice to see you, Palmer. I hope you enjoy your visit. You haven’t been home for a while and I know everyone is happy to see you.”

Palmer squared his shoulders under the scrutiny of the sheriff and turned a full-wattage grin on Penelope. “Visit? I’m not visiting, Penelope. I’m back.”

2

THE INACCURATE COMMENT had earned exactly the response Palmer was looking for. But that meant little when Penelope had walked inside the house with Barnaby, leaving him alone to see himself back out the garden gate.

“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

The quote from Confucius that his mother had liked to parrot trailed through his mind as he walked toward the B and B. He slid his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, considering the words of the other woman he had loved and lost. But this time to death.

Janice DeVoe had been so sweet that his father had once remarked that a body didn’t need sugar in his coffee when she was in the room. Of course, that had been long before things had turned sour. And before she’d gotten sick with an illness that she’d denied until it was too late.

She’d been fond of telling stories about her only child, the unchallenged sunshine of her life, of how he proclaimed nearly from the instant he could speak that he was going to be someone important, the richest man in the world and, if he could fit it in, president. And she’d encouraged him in whatever direction he wanted to go.

Until she lay near death, considering the son she’d loved so dearly … and the father that had initially been amused by the special mother-and-son bond, and then increasingly jealous of it.

That’s when Janice had spoken the quote one last time, calling on both of the men in her life to reconcile their differences and come together. Told them they would need each other now.

Then she was gone and he and his father had stared at each other, virtual strangers.

Shortly thereafter, Palmer had left. And aside from brief phone calls around the holidays and on birthdays, they’d barely spoken since.

Now, Palmer neared the corner of Maple and Elm streets and he stopped before crossing. Not because of traffic. There was none at this time on a Friday night. But because instead of walking straight toward the B and B he could turn right and within three blocks be on the street on which he’d grown up and had not been back to since he was nineteen.

“I’ll be in the area next week,” he’d said to his father during a recent phone call.

Thomas had made a sound. “I’ll alert the media.”

There had been no invitation to visit. No indication that he’d like to see him. Just a sarcastic remark that Palmer had left hanging in the air between them.

Before he knew that’s what he was going to do, he made that right and took the route he had taken so very many times before. Within minutes he stood in front of the house his mother had taken such pride in. A place he might not have recognized if not for the tilting, rusty mailbox at the unpaved curb that bore the family name.

The simple, one-story clapboard house had at one time been painted a brilliant white with powder-blue shutters. The flower beds had been full of color, the shrubs neatly trimmed, the grass mown. Now everything looked abandoned, as if the only owner had been his mother and no one had lived there since.

Palmer opened the gate that hung half off its hinges and stepped slowly up the weed-choked gravel path. The shrubs had grown unevenly to nearly halfway up the front windows and a newspaper sat on the cracked concrete front steps. He picked it up, verifying that it was today’s, and then leaned forward to knock. The screen door was so grimy that he hadn’t noticed the front door was actually open until he heard his old man’s gravelly voice as clearly as if he were standing next to him.

“What the hell do you want?” he called. “If you’re selling something, I ain’t buying.”

More words followed but they were said quietly and apparently not meant for whatever visitor stood outside the door.

How easy it would be just to turn away. To leave and pretend he’d never visited.

Palmer reached for the door handle only to find it was locked.

“I asked what in the hell you want.”

The old man stood directly on the other side of the screen door now, staring out at him.

Thomas DeVoe didn’t recognize him.

And Palmer wouldn’t have recognized him if not for the fact that he knew he was at the right house.

While his father had been tall, he seemed to have shrunk a few inches. Or maybe it was the way his shoulders curved forward as if unable to hold himself completely upright anymore. The three-day stubble on his face made it look even more haggard than it probably was, and his graying hair spoke of the fact that he was at least a month late for a visit to the barber’s. He wore a tank T-shirt that was more gray than white and his slacks would have fallen from his thin hips if not for the belt pulled tightly around them.

Palmer lifted the paper to wave at him. “Hi, Pops.”

Thomas squinted at him, the stench of liquor seeming to emanate from his every pore.

“I only have one son and you’re not him,” he said, and then reached to close the door.

No matter where you go, there you are …

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” Barnaby asked Penelope for the third time in an hour.

Penelope slid her hand into the crook of his arm as they walked the fair paths, the scent of corn dogs and cotton candy filling the air along with the happy shrieks of children enjoying the carnival rides.

“I’m fine,” she assured him.

Which was a bald-faced lie. She wasn’t fine. Her mind was still on the scene in the backyard before her date had arrived. And her body still hummed as if Palmer had touched her with more than his gaze.

She suspected the dream she’d had before encountering him hadn’t helped. But it was more than that. Putting together the Palmer of her past with the man of the present hadn’t been nearly as difficult as she’d thought it might be.

So many people she’d attended high school with had changed dramatically. Facial features had broadened or narrowed, grown fuller or thinner, some so much so that she often didn’t recognize them. Not Palmer. She could have picked him out instantly. Even in a crowd like tonight’s, her gaze would have immediately homed in on the man who was even more attractive now than he had been then.

Damn him.

“Would you like an elephant ear?” Barnaby asked.

Penelope squinted at him. “Pardon me?”

He pointed to a nearby food booth.