he hadn’t thought much of after the heat of the moment. “Goodbye, Luke.”
“Yeah. Bye,” he said.
He stared at her so long that he made her even more uncomfortable, and awkward enough to realize she still found him the most tantalizing male she’d ever come across. Blasted female hormones.
It hit her that she’d made children with this man. Shock flared inside her. The boys had been just hers for so long she’d forgotten that one day… She looked at Luke again, considering. One day she was going to have to tell this hunk, this person with whom she had nothing in common, this gorgeously unreliable specimen who claimed he was just a drifter…that he was a father and that they, together, were parents.
“Let’s do lunch sometime, okay?” Luke said, and Pepper shook her head.
“I don’t think so.”
He hesitated. “Dinner? Coffee? For old times’ sake?”
She walked behind the protective barrier of an island countertop. “There are no old times’ sakes for us.” Please don’t let him remember us rolling around groping each other as lusty teenagers. I want to be a bookwormish memory to him.
“There’s something about you I can’t quite remember—”
“There’s nothing,” she told him. “Nothing at all.” Pointedly, she looked at her watch. “I’m sorry. I must get home.”
“Family?”
She put on a coat. “Yes.”
He reached to help her, brushing her cheek in the process. Tingles ran through Pepper, making her grit her teeth. “Please,” she said, turning to face him. “I like to do everything myself.”
His grin was, slow and sexy. “I know what I was trying to remember about you.”
She held her breath.
“Some of our classmates secretly voted you Most Likely to Be Town Spinster. I guess they were wrong.”
She glared at him. “As long as you’re proud of being the town drifter, I’ll be proud of not being the town spinster.” She steered him out the door, shut it and locked it. When he turned and stared through the window at her, clearly surprised to be shoved into the cold, Pepper put a Closed sign up, then went out the back way.
She had a lot to think about.
LUKE WENT AROUND to the back of the clinic and watched Pepper get into her car. She was prettier now than in high school, though she’d been cute then in a studious sort of way. Her features had a warm glow of maturity now, giving her an appealing femininity that was new and refreshing to his jaded eyes.
He’d been lying, of course. He well remembered the last time he’d seen Pepper Forrester. His body remembered how she’d wrapped herself around him with innocent sighs of pleasure. A man didn’t forget that much passion, no matter how distant the memory might be.
He also knew she’d been lying, pretending she didn’t remember what they’d been to each other. A woman who gave her virginity to a man never let go of the knowledge that it had happened, for better or for worse. He hoped her memories of that afternoon—and of him—were kind ones, and his guilty conscience and ego wondered if perhaps the reason she dismissed him now was because the memory wasn’t a sterling one she’d recorded with happiness.
He hoped that wasn’t the case. He’d always prided himself on making women happy.
She got into her car, a serviceable minivan, which surprised him. It was almost a matronly vehicle, far too maternal for such a sexy woman. He would have imagined her, with that hair and her peaches-and-cream complexion, in some sort of fancy roadster. She was, after all, from the wealthiest family in Tulips. A little spoiled behavior from the only female of the Forrester clan wouldn’t have surprised him; the age and make of her vehicle did. The general’s daughters wouldn’t be caught dead driving or even riding in such a vehicle, unless it was an emergency and they had Gucci sunglasses to hide behind. He chuckled to himself. Pepper was a refreshing surprise to him.
Yet he couldn’t afford to linger over pleasant memories of his boyhood. His father—the reason he’d been called home—waited for him, no doubt with dragon’s breath ready to sear him. There was no putting it off any longer, so after Pepper had ridden away in her mommy-mobile, Luke turned to go.
Suddenly, a thought made him spin back around. A mommy-mobile was for a woman who had children, of course. She was married, and he hadn’t even bothered to scan her finger for a ring. Not that it mattered, he decided. He wasn’t the marrying kind himself.
Her van pulled up beside him as he prepared to walk back to the Tulips Saloon and try to hitch a ride off the old fogeys.
“I’m going to regret asking this,” Pepper said, “but where’s your car?”
“Not here. I had a taxi drop me off in town. I was stalling, to be honest,” he said.
She looked regretful. “So you need a ride.”
“If you’re offering.” He raised his brows and waited, hopeful she’d say yes.
She sighed. “This is so not a good idea.”
He grinned and climbed in. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” He chuckled when she rolled her eyes. “We can catch up on what has happened in the past many years of our lives.”
“No, thanks.”
Stiffly keeping her walls up, he noted. That was okay with him. He liked a woman who didn’t throw herself at a man. “You could at least ask something about me.”
“And feign interest in the answer?” She shook her head. “I’m giving a drifter a lift, nothing more.”
Okay, she was starting to hurt his feelings. “I don’t think I’ve ever met such a resistant female.”
“I hardly know what to say to that. The obvious reply, too obvious, is that you haven’t met many bright females. But I prefer to take the high road and tell you that I’m not resistant, I’m merely busy.”
“And have a lot on your mind.”
“Exactly.”
God, he wanted to touch her. She’d jump right out of her straight-laced skin if he did. Luke looked out the window, his ego flattened and his enthusiasm for baiting her declining. “I guess I’ll relieve you of my horse’s-ass attempts at socializing for the moment, then.” He leaned back, closing his eyes for a second. Truthfully, it was kind of nice to be around a woman who didn’t want a thing from him.
He relaxed and made himself stare out the window so he wouldn’t keep annoying a woman whose naked body, he remembered, was quite beautiful.
PEPPER TRIED TO DECIDE what had made her turn back around and pick up Luke. What drove her to dance on the fiery edge of an emotional volcano? He was every bit the dark-haired scoundrel with easy charm he’d always been; if anything, time had put a glossy veneer of sophistication on him that made him more dangerously sexy than ever. The cocktail was devastating to her heart, Pepper noted, analyzing her overrapid pulse and trembling,
