her way over to Matt, she on her side of the bar, he on his.
“Hi, handsome. A smile will really dress up that pretty face of yours.”
Without asking, the bartender set a whiskey neat down in front of him.
Matt accepted the drink with a slight nod of his head. “Thanks, Daisy. But I don’t have anything to smile about.” Throwing back the contents of the shot glass, he set it down empty on the counter a moment later. “Hit me again.”
Daisy reached for the bottle and poured. “Hey, go slow on that. Don’t want to make extra work for the sheriff now, do we? What’s the problem?”
He raised his eyes to hers. Suddenly he missed Rose’s eyes. He cursed her soul to hell for what she’d done to him. “Nothing,” he muttered moodily. “Everything.”
“That about covers it.” Haley watched him down the second drink and held off offering the third. At this pace, Matt Carson was working himself up for one powerful hangover.
“Yeah.” He laughed without any humor. “I thought I had all the bases covered, too.” He stared down at the empty glass—empty, like the way he felt. “But she fooled me.”
“She?”
Matt nodded, hating this impotent way he felt. Where the hell was she? He leaned in over the counter, his voice low. The bartender was forced to lean forward to hear him.
“She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere.”
Haley thought back to the woman who had been in the Grill two days prior. With the same troubled look in her eyes. It didn’t take a genius to make the connection.
“She?” Daisy asked. “That wouldn’t be Rose Wainwright, now, would it?”
Matt looked at her sharply, then glanced around to see if anyone had overheard. Not likely, not in this din. “How did you—?”
Daisy’s mouth curved in a comforting smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to anyone. I know all about that family feud of yours. Big waste of time if you ask me. But no one’s asking me.”
The hell with the feud, the hell with everything else except the woman who’d twisted his gut up so bad, it felt like a pretzel. “I’m asking you about Rose. Was she here? When? What did she say?”
The bartender nodded. “Day before yesterday. And she said she was leaving.”
“Leaving?” Then he was right, she had gone. “Where did she say she was going?”
“New York.”
“‘New York’?” he echoed.
His first inclination was to say she had to be mistaken. New York wasn’t the kind of place someone like Rose would go. But then he remembered. She had an aunt who lived in Manhattan. Beth Wainwright, that was her name.
Relief swept over him like a giant wave. Rose hadn’t just disappeared into thin air. He knew where she was. And he was going to get her back. Grateful for the help, Matt leaned over the counter, took hold of Daisy’s shoulders and kissed her soundly on the mouth.
“Thanks.”
She pretended to fan herself. “Don’t mention it.” And then she winked. “Pleasant though that was, that doesn’t take the place of a tip, you know.”
Standing up, Matt pulled a twenty out of his wallet and tossed it onto the counter. “Keep the change,” he told her. “And thanks.”
For the first time in two days he knew where he was going.
The doorbell pealed incessantly, intruding into the mood that was enshrouding Rose.
Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to shake loose of it. It hung about her like a coat of heavy iron malle. Her aunt had been nothing short of wonderful, insisting on taking her “fun” places, as she called them, and determined to make her smile. Rose tried her best not to show the older woman how deeply unhappy she was, but she had a feeling she wasn’t fooling her.
She supposed that eventually the raging battle would die down to an occasional minor skirmish and Matt Carson would entirely cease to matter. In about a million years or so.
“Would you get that, darling? I have my hands full of caviar,” Beth called from the kitchen.
Rose didn’t even stop to ask. Her aunt’s eccentricities were becoming normal.
Though she didn’t feel like talking to anyone, she couldn’t very well return Beth’s kindness with surliness.
“Of course.”
She supposed, she thought as she turned the lock and pulled on the doorknob, that she should welcome any distraction.
Except this one.
Rose’s mouth fell open.
Matt Carson was standing in her aunt’s doorway.
Three
Matt’s was the last face Rose had expected to see in New York. For a split second she thought she was hallucinating. Her head and heart were so full of him that she thought she was just projecting his likeness onto someone else.
But he was real.
And he was here.
It took several beats to get her flustered heart under control. She willed herself to remain calm. “What are you doing here?”
The entire trip from Texas he’d rehearsed what he’d say to her, editing, augmenting, changing words up until the very last moment. Now that he was standing in front of her, his mind went blank and he said the first thing that came to him. The truth.
“Looking for you.”
She wasn’t going to fall into his arms, she wasn’t. That would only set her back. She’d gone through this once, said goodbye and ended it. She wasn’t up to dancing the same slow dance again.
“Well, you found me.” She gripped the doorknob tightly, ready to swing the door closed. “Now go away.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He felt his anger, his hurt, flare up dangerously high. “I am not going to go away. Hell, woman, I’ve come over a thousand miles to talk to you.”
He was standing there, looking better than any man had a right to. All she wanted to do was to throw her arms around him and tell him she was carrying his baby. Their baby.
Somehow, she found the strength not to.
“Then you wasted your time and your money because there’s nothing to talk about.” She squared her shoulders, doing her best to sound cold, but hating the way the words tasted in her mouth. Telling herself that it was all for the best was wearing very thin. “I said it all back in Mission Creek.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. He struggled not to push his way in. He hadn’t come all this way to
