twenty-four hours since he’d walked back into her life? It felt as if he’d been back forever, stirring her up, making her long for things she’d resigned herself to never having.
“You look all done in, darlin’.”
“Now, that is just what a woman wants to hear,” she grumbled as she sank onto the chair in front of her mirror and methodically wiped off her stage makeup. “If you can’t say something nice, go away.”
“Have you forgotten? We have a date.”
She groaned. She had forgotten. Well, almost forgotten. It was pretty much impossible to forget entirely about Harlan Patrick and his expectations.
“Not tonight, please. I was awake most of the night, thanks to you. I’m exhausted. I’ll be lousy company. All I want is a good night’s sleep.”
“You could never be lousy company. Besides, you promised me an evening out,” he reminded her. “Don’t worry. You’ll have time to catch a little catnap on the way.”
Her gaze narrowed at the gleam in his eyes. “On the way to where?”
“Dinner, of course.”
She met his gaze in the mirror, didn’t like what she saw and turned around. “What are you up to, Harlan Patrick?”
“Just think of it as living out a fantasy.”
“Oh, no,” she protested. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
He grinned. “Everybody has a fantasy, darlin’.”
“Yes, but yours and mine can sometimes be worlds apart.”
“Trust me.”
She was troubled by the soft-spoken plea. Harlan Patrick had a way of asking her to trust him, then leading her straight into a whole mess of trouble. He’d been doing it forever.
There’d been more than once when he’d lured her out her bedroom window to go skinny-dipping in the creek out at White Pines. There’d been the time he’d insisted they both needed hot-fudge sundaes at midnight and broken into Dolan’s to get them. When they’d been caught, he’d counted on Doc Dolan’s high tolerance for Adams shenanigans to get them out of the fix they were in. Heck, he’d even told her he had protection the night Amy Lynn was conceived and he had. It was just that their passion had outlasted his supply.
“Harlan Patrick, read my lips,” she said quietly. “I do not trust you.”
He seemed stunned by her response, but as always, his eternal optimism and supreme self-confidence kicked in. “Give it time, darlin’. You did once and you will again.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is simple.”
“No, it’s not. It has never been simple between the two of us.”
That square-cut Adams chin jutted up in defiance. Blue eyes challenged her. “We’ve loved each other forever. What could be simpler than that?”
“We’ve also broken each other’s hearts. If you ask me, that complicates things.”
His expression wavered just a little at that. “Okay, you have a point. Let’s not try to solve everything in one night. You’ll come with me tonight, have a nice dinner, some quiet conversation and we’ll see where it leads.”
He made it sound so easy, so nonthreatening, when his very presence in her life was a danger. With his glib tongue and determination, he could make her believe in anything, even the two of them.
“I don’t know, Harlan Patrick. Another night would probably be better.”
His eyes caught hers, held. “Please.”
In all the years she’d known him, she couldn’t remember him ever using that word before. With strangers, maybe. His family, definitely. But not with her. With her he teased. He cajoled and coaxed. He commanded, but a simple please had always seemed beyond him.
In the end that was what got to her. It hinted at his desperation, maybe even at his willingness to change if that’s what it took to get her back.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I did make a promise. But it can’t be a late night, Harlan Patrick. Val’s with Amy Lynn now, but I can’t ask her to baby-sit half the night. She already works way too hard.”
“Deal,” he said at once. “Now, shake a leg, darlin’. We’ve got places to go, things to do.”
“In the middle of nowhere?” she said, shooting him a wry look in the mirror. “We’ll be lucky if there’s a fast-food restaurant open.”
“I can do better than fast food,” he assured her. “You just wait and see.”
Harlan Patrick packed while she finished dressing. She hid a grin at the sight of him folding everything and tucking it into her bag in nice, neat piles. She would have been satisfied to stuff it all in helter-skelter and worry about the wrinkles later. The man did have a thing about neatness, especially when it