Taste of Lacey (23 page)

“What is it?” Lacey asked, puzzled. “I have to go.”

Lisa crossed her arms and arched one silky eyebrow. “Your eyelids are swollen, your hair is a mess, and snot is running from your nose. And you think you’re going somewhere looking like a raggedy mess and a half? I don’t think so. Up the stairs.”

Two hours later—dressed to Lisa’s standards, showered, layered, and intimately trimmed—Lacey stood in front of Rye’s door, her hand poised over the doorbell to ring it for the second time. She still had the key he’d given her, but she wouldn’t resort to using it. When she and Lisa had circled the parking garage, the Jeep and the Range Rover were both in their respective parking spaces, so she assumed he was home. Hoped he was. Now she needed to get past her nerves.

When he still didn’t come to the door, her heart sank. What if he hadn’t answered because he was entertaining another woman? That she couldn’t take. Imagining him with someone else was one thing; seeing it in person would be asking too much. Just as she was about to leave, the door opened, and he stood in the threshold.

Oh,
Rye
. Dressed in a sport coat and a white button-down with worn jeans, he looked better than the most edible dish on her signature menu. He also looked like he was headed for a night out.

“Rye, hello,” Lacey started and cleared her throat. “I was, ah… I came to see you, but I see you’re about to leave,” she muttered before turning to walk down the hall.

“What do you want, Lacey?” Rye asked, his voice terse.

She stopped turned short and rotated toward him. “I wanted to see you. To apologize. For everything.”

Rye stood straight and pushed his hands deep into his jeans pockets. He gave a quick nod. “No apology necessary. We fucked for a while, and now it’s over. Right?”

She stood and looked at him while her heart burst into millions of pieces. They couldn’t have a civil conversation anymore. He had moved on, and she’d lost a lover as well as a friend. She still had to fight, though.

“Can you forgive me, Rye? Can we at least be friends again?”

Rye didn’t say a word. The little muscle twitching in his jaw was his only movement, and from experience she knew it indicated his aggravation. He didn’t want to save their friendship.

“Well, I don’t want to keep you from…whatever you were doing,” she said. “Or wherever you were going.”

He was quiet for a moment, but then he spoke. “To Lakeview.”

“What?”

“I was going to Lakeview to let my mother feed me, because she thinks I’m wasting away.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her voice thick. “I screwed up so bad.”

Rye tightened his lips, but he remained silent.

“I didn’t mean any of those things I said. I’d never felt about anyone the way I felt about you, and I didn’t know how to handle it. You more than anyone should know I have a hard time dealing with things I can’t rationalize. Including us,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

He didn’t respond. Instead he pushed the door open and went inside. When he didn’t slam it closed, she followed and sat on the edge of the sofa.

Rye exhaled and paced in front of the fireplace. Finally he stopped and looked at her. “How the hell did this happen, Lacey? What we had was so good, but it wasn’t enough. And none of it means a damn thing without trust.”

Lacey grimaced, her heart aching because it seemed they weren’t getting anywhere. “It wasn’t you I mistrusted,” she said. “I didn’t trust me. I didn’t believe I was enough to keep you happy. I was scared, but I’m not anymore.”

“How could you not know? Every touch, every kiss, every time I hopped on a fucking plane to get back to you as soon as I could should have made it clear you were enough. Hell, I’d never made love in my life until you, but it didn’t keep you from walking when you thought the fire was getting too hot.”

He was right. And the misery she’d suffered since was nothing compared to what would come. When she visited Lakeview, she’d look across the way at his parents’ house and wonder how he was doing. Was he happy? Was he in love? Judging by the mask of disgust on his face, she’d always be on the fringes.

It was too late.

The breath she’d been holding swooshed out in a defeated rush, and she rose to her feet. Her legs had the consistency of cooked noodles, but she braved the few steps required to take her closer to him.
Oh, God, he smells so good
. His manly scent wafted toward her nose, and she wanted to bask in it, but filling her lungs today wouldn’t last a lifetime. She pulled the deed Lisa had given her from her purse and handed it to him.

“You put this property in my name. I can’t let you do that. This is your dream. You can’t just give it away like I did.”

He frowned and looked at the folded document warily. “And what dream did you give away, Lacey?”

“You,” she said, her voice shaking.

Rye closed his eyes and tilted his face to the ceiling. After the longest minute of her life, she heard the paper drop just as his arms went around her. A sob escaped her throat, and she circled his neck with her arms. When she buried her face in his shoulder, she tried to inhale particles of his very being, wanted to get drunk on his scent.

“It didn’t have to come to this,” he muttered as she brushed his cheek with her lips. It felt like heaven.

“I know. I was such a fool.”

“Never a fool. You were cautious but over the top. You have to trust me. Depend on me.”

“I do. I just didn’t expect that the love of my life would be my brother’s best friend.” She moaned when his arms tightened around her.

“I love you, Lacey.”

Her heart swelled until it overfilled her chest cavity and infringed on her lungs. Her entire being rejoiced at the possibility that she might have a chance with him. “You love me?” she whispered as she leaned back to looked into his eyes. There was no use in fighting her tears.

“Yes. You should have known,” he said, his tone brusque and low.

“And I love you. Always.” She gave a tremulous smile at his look of relief. “Do you forgive me?” God, she hoped so, because she didn’t know if she could survive not touching him all over. She was starved for him.

“As long as you recognize I’m more than capable of taking care of you. I
will
take care of you.”

“Oh, thank God, Rye,” she cried and held him tight. “Would you be willing to meet with my mother and Kyle? They both want to talk to you.”

He gave a quick nod. “When the time is right, I’ll listen. I missed you so much. Don’t ever fucking leave me.”

“Does this mean you want me to stay?” she asked through her tears.

“You damn well aren’t going anywhere now that I have you back.”

“I’m so glad, because Lisa dropped me off. It would have been so embarrassing to have to call her to pick me up,” she admitted.

He fused their mouths together. She frowned when he pried her arms from his neck.

“I have something to show you.”

The next thing she knew, they were in the parking garage. When he went to unlock the Range Rover, she stopped him. “I know a way to prove how much I really love you.”

She reached for his keys and selected the largest black square on the ring. “Lisa spent an hour on my hair so I could look decent enough to come see you, but, let’s ride in the Jeep. With the top down.”

Rye reared his head back and gave a throaty laugh before helping her in the vehicle. Mercifully, though, he kept the top up. He must really love her as well.

“Plus I wanted to exorcise the presence of that blonde woman you had in here,” she said.

Rye frowned. “What woman?”

“The one I saw you with. At your mom’s.”

He chuckled. “That was Jensen’s roommate. She had visited for the weekend, and I was taking her to the airport.”

“Oh,” she said in an embarrassed whisper.

“Since you won’t come out and ask, there hasn’t been anyone else.”

Giddy with relief, Lacey smiled large enough to light up the interior of the Jeep. “Me neither.”

“Not even the guy at the karaoke bar?” he grunted.

Lacey’s eyes widened. “The one I sang with? And how’d you know about that?”

“Don’t worry about how I know. Who was he?”

“I have no idea. We’d both signed up for a duet and happened to be paired together. Monica made me do it. She threatened to quit the Thymes if I moped around for a second longer.”

They turned into the neighborhood across the way from Lakeview. The moonlight reflecting off the water, making for a gorgeous night. Perfect for lovers.

“What are we doing at a vacant lot?” Lacey whispered as though she was afraid talking any louder would alert someone to their presence.

He gave one of his lopsided grins that melted her panties every time. “You asked me if we could go somewhere I’ve never ‘fucked, sucked, or—’”

She screamed and cupped his face in her hands. “This is it, isn’t it? This is the property Lisa brokered for you?”

He smiled and led her to the spot smack in the center of the roped-off parcel of land. Nothing surrounded them but lots of grass, beautiful magnolia trees, and calm waters. Facing her, he held both her hands in his and rubbed her palms.

“This spot will be our bedroom once we build our house. It’s the center of the property and the heart of our home. We’ll laugh here,” he paused and gave a sly smile, “we’ll make lots and lots of love here. Knowing you, we’ll probably do a fair amount of arguing as well.”

“This is where we’ll make babies and where we’ll just hold hands when we’re too old to care about making love.” Without letting her go, he bent until he was on one knee in front of her. “This is where I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I’m in love with you. I knew it the very first night we spent together. Maybe I didn’t handle it the best way, didn’t communicate how hard I was working to provide stability for us, but that’s what I was doing. Before then, every road I traveled led me to you, and you are it for me. Lacey Marie Bishop, will you be my wife?”

She knelt in front of him and squeezed him as tight as her love strengthened her to. “Yes, Rye. Yes, I’ll marry you,” she said through her tears.

He shocked the breath out of her when he reached into his pocket, pulled out a velvet box, and slid a spectacular princess-cut diamond ring on her finger.

“Oh my God, Rye! Where’d that come from? It’s gorgeous!” In the moonlight, the brilliance and beauty of the symbol of commitment was evident.

“I’ve been carrying it around the past couple of weeks. If you hadn’t come to me, very soon I was coming to get you. It was getting harder and harder to function without my heart.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Rye was getting on her last nerve. He’d given her the same answer on the phone, and now he was repeating it in person.

“No.” Rye didn’t even look up from the documents in front of him. He’d been working from daylight to dark managing two major projects, which didn’t leave a lot of time to help Lacey plan a wedding. Pinnacle’s commercial development department had won the bid for the new simulation center, plus Kyle and company, in way of apology, were also building the new house.

“What do you mean, no?” Lacey frowned, propping hands on her hips.

“You are not getting six more months to plan our wedding. You’ve got two months, max, and that’s being generous.”

“You can’t be serious! We are having a formal ceremony; do you have any idea the amount of work involved to make that happen by then?”

He shrugged and moved his ruler to another area on the paper. “As far as I’m concerned, we can call the preacher and get married today.”

Blood rushed to her face. It took everything in her not to knock the smug look off the face of the stubborn man she was going to marry. If he was lucky. “And have to explain our elopement to my mother, who is driving me crazier than any psychotic client I’ve ever had in the month since we got engaged? No way.”

His jaw hardened until the muscle started jumping. “Sixty more days is all you get, and your time’s ticking. You do this for a living; make it happen,” Rye advised, his arrogance on ready display.

Fury shot through her and required all the restraint she could muster to keep calm. “It’s easy for you to say. All you have to do is choose a groom’s cake, and you haven’t even completed that one task.” She bristled. Really that was unfair considering how much he had helped her in the past and how full his hands were right now, but oh well.

“Okay,” he said, giving her his full attention for the first time since she’d walked into his office. “What kind of cakes do grooms usually have?”

“Normally it’s a chocolate cake with or without filling shaped like something you love, like a football or a fish or a guitar or whatever. We have to let the pastry chef know what you want as soon as possible.”

A devilish glint sparkled in his eyes. “It can be my favorite thing?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“I want it in the shape of a cat with cream filling.”

“A cat? You don’t like cats!”

“Yes, I do. That way I can eat some chocolate pussy and lick some sweet cream before our honeymoon,” he said with a straight face. He’d teased her without mercy since she’d told him about the phrase.

“What you fail to recognize, smart-ass, is you won’t be the only one eating the chocolate pussy. Lots of men at the reception will want a piece,” she said through clenched teeth before leaving without saying good-bye.

* * * *

It had taken a week, but she’d finally engaged a wedding planner. After several more days, the planner had secured contracts with another caterer, a photographer, dress designer, and florist. Lacey’s relief was almost tangible when it seemed she’d be able to pull her dream wedding together without losing her mind. Or harming her fiancé. Ironically, with the tight planning window Rye had given her, she hadn’t spent much time with him the past couple of weeks.

She jumped when her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Paula.

“I didn’t want to bother you, but I need your help. Rye is driving everybody insane. He’s acting worse than when you two broke up,” Paula whispered as if she was afraid of being overheard.

Lacey sighed and rolled her shoulders in an effort to relax. “Don’t worry, Paula; I’m actually in your building. I need to take care of something real quick, and I’ll be there. Take a long lunch, and by the time you get back, I promise he’ll be a lot more cordial.”