enough to stay under their roof. Water under the bridge didn’t come close.
“I’ve booked a suite at the Moonlight Inn for the duration,” she said, softening the refusal with a smile. “I’ll be perfectly comfortable there.”
“Your comfort isn’t my concern.”
Harper’s smile slipped. “Then what, exactly, is your concern?”
“Gray’s comfort. Dee-Dee’s and Weston’s. And your sister’s. Lola’s had a room ready for you here for some time now, on the assumption you’d arrive sooner. Not with only days to spare.”
Harper had been in transit for over twenty-four hours. And was still a mite tender after the rare, personal unpleasantness that had tinged the last negotiation job she’d completed in London.
All she wanted was to see her sister. To hug her sister. To see for herself that Lola was as deliriously happy as she said she was. And to do so beyond the long reach of the Chadwicks and their associates.
Tangling with a passive-aggressive Cormac Wharton hadn’t been on her radar. Yet he’d just up and slapped her with the trump card; the only thing that would make her change her mind: sisterly guilt.
Jaw aching with the effort to hold back all the retorts she’d like to fling Cormac’s way, Harper turned to her driver, her voice sweet as pie as she said, “Change of plan, Sam.”
Sam squared his shoulders before flicking Cormac a dark glance. “Are you certain, ma’am? If it’s still your intention to leave, all you have to do is ask.”
She glanced at Cormac right as his mouth twitched. Nothing more than a flicker, really. Yet it did things to his face that no other smile in the history of smiles had the power to do; pulling, like an insistent tug, right behind her belly button.
“Thank you, Sam,” she said, deliberately turning her back on the younger man. “You’re a true gentleman. But if my little sister wants me to stay, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Sam clicked his heels together before heaving her suitcase and accompanying bags to the ground. She feared hauling them up the stairs to the Chadwicks’ front door might do Sam in, so before he could offer she pressed a large tip into his hand and sent him on his way, hoping she’d made the right choice as she watched the car meander slowly up the long gravel drive.
“I think you have a fan there,” said Cormac, his voice having dropped a notch.
Harper tuned to Cormac and held his gaze, despite the butterflies fluttering away inside her belly. “Where is my sister?”
“Catering check. Wedding-dress fitting. Final song choices. None of which could be moved despite how excited she was that you were finally coming home.”
Harper bristled, but managed to hold her tongue.
She was well aware of how many appointments she’d missed. That video-chatting during wedding-dress-hunts wasn’t the same as her being in the room, sipping champagne, while Lola stood in front of a wall of mirrors and twirled. That with their parents long gone from their lives she was all Lola had.
Lola had assured her it was fine. That Gray was such a help. That the Chadwicks were a total dream. That she understood Harper’s calendar was too congested for her to have committed to arriving any earlier.
After all, it was the money Harper made from her meteoric rise in the field of corporate mediation that had allowed Lola to stay on in the wealthy coastal playground of Blue Moon Bay, to finish high school with her friends, to be in a position to meet someone like Grayson Chadwick in the first place.
And yet as Cormac watched her, those deep brown eyes of his unexpectedly direct, the tiny fissure he’d opened in Harper’s defences cracked wider.
If she was to get through the next five minutes, much less the next week, Cormac Wharton needed to know she wasn’t the same bleeding heart she’d been at school.
She could do this. For Harper played chicken for a living. And never flinched.
“You sure know a lot about planning a wedding, Cormac,” she crooned, watching for his reaction.
There! The tic of a muscle in his jaw. Though it was fast swallowed by a deep groove as he offered up a close-mouthed smile. “They don’t call me the best man around here for nothing. And since the maid of honour has been AWOL it’s been my honour to make sure Lola is looked after too.”
Oh, he was good.
But she was better.
She extended a smile of her own and placed a hand on her heart as she said, “Then please accept my thanks for playing cheerleader, leaning post, party planner and girlfriend until I was able to take up the mantle in person.”
Cormac’s mouth kicked into a deeper smile, the kind that came with eye crinkles.
That pesky little flutter flared in her belly. She clutched every muscle she could to suffocate it before it even had a chance to take a breath.
Then something wet and cold snuffled under Harper’s coat and pressed against the back of her knee. With a squeak, she spun on her heel to find Cormac’s beautiful dog standing behind her. Panting softly, tail wagging slowly, it looked at her with liquid brown eyes that reminded her very much of its owner.
She was surprised to find a soft, “Oh,” escape her mouth.
“Harper,” Cormac’s voice rumbled from far too close behind her, “meet Novak. Novak, this is Harper.”
“Novak?”
“After the great and glorious Kim.”
“The actress? From Vertigo?”
A beat, then, “One and the same.”
Spending more of her life in planes and hotels than her high-rise apartment, Harper didn’t see a lot of dogs these days, so wasn’t sure of the protocol. What could she do but wave? “Hello, Novak. Have we been ignoring you?”
Novak’s tail gave a quick wag before she sat on her haunches and—No. Surely not.
“Is she...smiling?” Harper asked. “It looks like she’s smiling. Can dogs even smile?”
She looked over her shoulder to find herself close enough to Cormac to count his lashes. There were millions of the things...long, plentiful as they framed those deep, molten-chocolate eyes.
When she didn’t look away, his eyes shifted slowly between hers, lingering a beat before shifting back. Then he smiled. Turning her thoughts to dandelion fluff.
Then suddenly he was leaning towards her, a waft of sea salt, of summer, tickling her nose. Then he leant down to grab a couple of her bags, hefting the long handles over his shoulders as if they weighed nothing, and the moment passed.
She reminded herself—stridently—that he might look like the boy she’d thought worthy of secret teenaged affections, but those affections had gone up in smoke when she’d discovered he had it in him to stick in the knife. And twist.
Harper
