Texas Heroes: Volume 1 (63 page)

Her laughter touched places in him that felt…undiscovered. Untouched. Almost young again.

What the devil was he doing, showing her one of his favorite haunts? She would come to her senses anytime now, realize just how different they were, and demand to be taken back. And Shorty’s would never be the same refuge.

But they were here. If she did—
when
she did—he’d deal with it. But that was later. This was now. “When you taste Shorty’s donuts, you’ll be forever marked. You’ll be able to find your way back like a homing pigeon. These donuts change you at the cellular level.”

“Hip level, you mean.”

It took a minute for her remark to register. He laughed. “You’re too skinny, anyway. A few extra pounds won’t hurt you.”

For a second, what might have been hurt raced over her features. “If I’m too thin for you, that’s not really my problem, Devlin.”

Ah, princess to peasant. Back on familiar ground.

“You’re beautiful and you know it. I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with a woman’s hips being curvy. You’re not supposed to look like a boy. Your body was built to make babies.”

She went silent for too long.

Dev swore silently. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean—” Hell, he should just quit talking. He never had the right words with her.

Then she touched his hand lightly. “It’s okay. I was just…thinking. You’re right, you know. The circles I move in, well…I think we’ve gotten a long way from the basics.” She glanced down. “I forget that sometimes—that fitting into this season’s size four isn’t what nature designed my body to do.”

When she looked up, there was something fragile in her face. Dev wanted way too much to take her in his arms right then. “Do you want children, Lacey?”

“Oh, yes,” she said softly. Her look turned inward.

“Then why haven’t you married by now? Had a dozen kids? I can’t imagine you haven’t been asked—” He tried for a grin. “Even before Dr. Blondie.”

She looked down at the hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I was married, once.” Then she frowned, grasped the door handle and stepped outside.

Dev followed her lead, rounding the car and coming to stand before her. He knew about the marriage, of course, but only that it had been annulled, not why. He kept his tone gentle. “Can I ask what happened?”

She shot him a sideways glance he couldn’t decipher. “I made a mistake.” A look of immense sadness swept over her face.

Dev gripped her shoulders. “Maybe he didn’t deserve you.”

Her head rose as shock tripped across her features.

Just as quickly, the Margaret DeMille mask dropped into place. She shrugged elegantly and stepped back. “It was a long time ago.” Then Lacey glanced around them. “I don’t see any donuts, but I could swear I smell them.”

Let it be, Dev. Just a job, remember?

But that didn’t seem to stop him from wanting to hold her. To do whatever it took to erase the sadness that dogged her when she didn’t have her mask fully on. To protect her from her own vulnerability.

But if he couldn’t give her comfort, he could at least give her donuts. He crooked his arm. “This way, madam.” He leaned down and waggled his eyebrows. “But the chocolate ones are mine.”

Lacey took his arm, and her smile almost reached her eyes. “Not if I get there first.”

Dev led her down the side of the building to a nondescript door. He knocked five sharp raps, then waited. Lacey looked at him curiously, but he merely shrugged. “He’ll get here, don’t worry.”

As if he were prophetic, the door opened just then. Shorty’s broad smile peered out of his grizzled, coffee-colored face. “Well, bless my soul, if you ain’t a sight for sore eyes.” Then he caught a glimpse of Lacey and whistled low. “Dev, my man, you comin’ up in the world. Mornin’, ma’am.” He tipped an imaginary hat.

Margaret DeMille would freeze Shorty dead for such familiarity. To Dev’s relief, Lacey only smiled shyly. “I guess it is close to morning, isn’t it? Are you really making donuts at this hour, you poor man?”

Shorty shot a glance at Dev. “Hear that, boy? ‘Poor man.’ The woman has proper respect for my hard work, unlike some people I know.” He winked at Lacey and held out his arm. “My name is Shorty, ma’am. Come along and I’ll treat you to the best donuts that ever hit your tongue.”

To her credit, Lacey only hesitated a second, then took his arm like they were old friends. “Please call me Lacey.” She smiled back at Dev, the devil in her eyes. “I like chocolate donuts best.”

Dev stopped dead in his tracks when she stuck out her tongue at him. He laughed out loud.

“Then ol’ Dev’s luck just ran out ’cause I’ll feed a beautiful woman every chocolate donut in the place. You go on back to the car now, Dev. Me and your lady, we’ve got some fat to chew, most of it about how bad her judgment is, bein’ here with a young rascal like you. She needs a mature man to treat her right.”

Dev snorted. Shorty was mature all right—seventy if he was a day. A comeback was on his lips—

When Lacey giggled.

Giggled
. Like a teenage girl. When she glanced back at him, her eyes sparkled.

Dev could only stand there, holding the door in wonder. He’d half-expected to shock her by bringing her here—instead she was stealing his donuts.

His heart lightened, and he moved to follow them. “Oh no, you don’t—you’re not giving away my donuts, Shorty. She can’t even find her way back here without help.”

Shorty snorted as they walked. “She won’t need to if she’d run away with me and leave your sorry butt behind.”

Lacey giggled again. Shorty’s deep chuckle joined her as he brought her through the door to his domain, seating her with a flourish at the scarred table Dev had haunted for many a dawn when he was a kid throwing papers.

“Go turn that batch, Dev, while I make this pretty lady some fresh coffee.”

Dev saw Lacey’s surprised glance and shrugged. “I spent half my teenage years here, helping Shorty make donuts in return for all I could eat.”

Shorty called back. “The boy had a hollow leg. Ate twice as many as he ever made, I promise you that. Snitched more when he thought I wasn’t lookin’, then headed out on that paper route early every mornin’.”

Lacey looked surprised again. “You were a paperboy?”

“Yeah.” Dev waited for it to sink in that after his father’s death, he had lived not far away, in a part of town where she wouldn’t be caught dead after dark.

Instead she rose and came to stand beside him, watching. “Was it hard, having to get up so early? What about school?”

The last thing he wanted was to discuss those years with her. He pointed to the donuts floating in the boiling grease. “Better stand back. This can splatter on you.”

But Lacey just moved closer, watching him turning two at a time as Shorty had taught him. “May I try turning one?”

Dev shot her a glance. She was serious. He shook his head. “That dress is too expensive to ruin.”

“The handles are long enough. I’ll be careful.” She glanced up at Shorty. “May I?”

Shorty was watching both of them, his look assessing Dev as much as Lacey. “Don’t know why not. Show the lady how it’s done, boy.”

Dev glanced around, saw Shorty’s spare apron hanging nearby. With quick steps, he snatched it down and returned to slip it over Lacey’s head, then stood behind her, realizing it was far too big for her.

So he wrapped the strings around her narrow waist twice, then tied them behind her, the rich scent of her perfume tracing through the sugar-laden air.

And he recognized that his hands were unsteady with the need to touch the sweet line of her hips, to pull her back against him and bury his face in her hair, to kiss her nape.

Shaken, he glanced up and saw sympathy in Shorty’s eyes. It pulled him back to what was real, what made sense. He didn’t know this Lacey who had layers and hidden depths, and the bald fact was that he probably never would.

But tell that to the rebel inside who had never cared very much what was sensible—or forbidden to him.

He pulled her back slightly to his left side, shielding her with his body while he demonstrated the fine art of judging when a donut is done. He pulled two out, flipped them neatly into the chocolate glaze, then went back for more. Then he reached for the first two and flipped them up on the shelf above, where the glaze dripped back into the pan. Then he handed the sticks to Lacey.

She worried at that lush lower lip with her teeth while she concentrated, and Dev was hard-pressed to pay attention to the donuts. She executed the first two perfectly, her smile of triumph real and bright. When she turned toward him to exult, her breasts brushed lightly against his arm, and Dev felt it all the way down to his bones. She froze but she didn’t move away, her gaze locked on his.

Shorty’s voice cut through the haze. “Coffee’s done.”

Dev and Lacey all but leapt apart. Dev cleared his throat and turned back to the dough. “If we want more, we’d better get cracking. Shorty does his the old-fashioned way, and he’ll have people standing in line when morning comes.”

A tiny frown winked between her elegant brows. Dev saw the confusion in her eyes and wished he could make himself walk away from her right now. There was nothing confused about his body’s response to hers, nothing at all.

His mind was another matter altogether.
Light and easy, Dev. Remember who she is, who you are. What she did
.

So he busied himself finishing a batch for them, studiously trying to forget that she stood a heartbeat away. Then they each loaded a stack of paper towels with the fruits of their labor and moved to the table where two cups of coffee sat, leaving Shorty behind to go on with his work.

Dev watched her closely as she took her first bite of a donut almost too hot to touch.

Lacey closed her eyes in bliss, moaning softly. Dev’s body tightened at the sound. Then those witchy silver eyes opened, and she licked her lips. “That is the single best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. Pure, raw sin. It surely must be illegal.”

Her smile was little short of wicked. “I’m going to eat at least a dozen.” She took another bite, and a breathy sigh escaped.

One glistening drop of chocolate lingered at the corner of her mouth. Dev fought the bittersweet temptation to lean across and kiss the chocolate away.

Instead, he forced himself to take a bite of his own, but he might as well have been eating sawdust. It didn’t matter, though. He’d eaten a thousand of Shorty’s donuts. Lacey’s delight was more than enough.

So they talked and drank coffee and ate more donuts than either could count. Shorty popped over and visited between batches, but mostly Dev and Lacey talked about everything under the sun.

Everything, that is, but themselves, perhaps she as eager as he to avoid the minefield of their past, of the differences between them. She kept their breakfast talk superficial, switching topics with the ease of an accomplished hostess…but as time wore on and the first touch of giddiness faded, she inched back into being more Margaret DeMille’s daughter than the woman who’d run across the lawn in high heels. He wished he could figure out how to bring the jailbreak girl back.

Then the first deliveryman showed up, and they could stave off real life no longer. The magic island of the night was vanishing as dawn approached.

In silence, Lacey rose and worked at the ties of her apron, but Dev could see that his hasty knot was about to defeat her. “Here, let me.” He turned her back toward him and tried to maintain his distance. The ball was over…and he was about to turn back into a pumpkin.

His fingers grew clumsy, and it took him far too long. He could tell by her rigid posture that the real world was sinking back into Lacey’s consciousness too fast, the knowledge of what she’d done at last hitting her.

“Just a minute more,” he muttered, and wished they had hours. Finally she was free and he had no excuse to touch her again.

As she lifted the apron over her head, she avoided his gaze. “I’ll take this back to Shorty.”

He could only stand and watch.

Lacey spoke with Shorty for a few moments, then lifted to tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Behind her back, Shorty smiled sadly at Dev.

He saw it, too.

In a reverse kind of Cinderella story, the almost-real girl who’d laughed with them…was turning back into a princess.

On the drive back, Lacey sat still and quiet, and Dev could think of no way to bring back the ease of those few precious hours.

Pulling into her drive, Dev knew he shouldn’t have done it. He had only complicated things more by stealing her away, by discovering that she could be real. That she had a clever humor carefully hidden under all those layers of politeness.

Lacey might not understand it, but far more deadly than her beauty was the giggle that should have belonged to a teenage girl. Something had happened inside his chest each time he heard it.

Damn. He liked her.

That was something he’d missed the first time around. He’d started out using her to get revenge on her father, then fallen too quickly into hormone-drenched teenage lust. Somehow, the desire for revenge had faded as lust had turned to something more tender when he wasn’t looking.