He’d just given away far more than he’d intended. She was probably picturing him as a kid, slouching around the campus at his prep school, friendless and homesick for a place he’d never really lived.
“I guess boarding schools wouldn’t be a great place to grow up,” she said.
“Not really. But I could see where a small town might be tough too.”
She sighed. “There’s nothing there. No jobs. No money.” She sipped at her beer, then licked the foam mustache off her upper lip. “And poverty sucks.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” There was no bitterness in her voice; they were both just stating facts. “When you don’t have money, you don’t have options. You get trapped.”
“So how’d you get out?”
“Scholarschlip. I mean scholarship.” She slumped back in her chair and traced her finger down the side of her cup, revealing the golden liquid through the condensation. “I went to Vassar.”
“Well, they sure put a sheen on you.”
“Yeah, they did.”
“That was a compliment.”
She smiled, which was definitely an improvement over scowling into her beer.
“Thanks. But I’m still the same person underneath, you know? And places like this remind me of that.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “Telling Mike what I think of him felt really good.”
“You miss cutting loose.”
“I miss my old self. I watch every move these days. I have to test every word before I say it, make sure I’m still in character. I miss saying what I think, being myself. I miss being fun.”
***
Sarah felt like her thoughts were a runaway horse, breaking through fences and running for freedom. She’d never told anybody these things before, but somehow telling them to Lane felt right.
“It must have been hard—getting out,” he said.
“It was.”
“Bet you broke a lot of hearts.”
“No. I didn’t get attached to anyone. No boyfriends or anything. I didn’t want anybody to tempt me to stay.” She didn’t know why it suddenly felt so important to explain things to this man. Maybe it was because he straddled both worlds: her old world of cowboys and country and her new world, which consisted mostly of Carrigan Corp. these days. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“But you did.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. “You hurt yourself, hon. The person you used to be.”
“It’s no big deal. People change every day. It’s how you survive. I built a new image for myself, just like I’m building a new image for Carrigan.”
“So your life is like a publicity campaign. Everything planned out and calculated.”
She’d never thought of it that way before. He was right. She controlled every aspect of her life like she was producing a movie, and that meant she was faking it 24/7. There was a tension inside her that simmered just below the surface, a panicked, desperate feeling that needed an outlet. She’d been able to tamp it down until tonight, but somehow he’d opened a door to her true self. Maybe it was being here in the beer tent. Dressed like everyone else, she felt like one of the crowd, anonymous and strangely free.
Or maybe it was that kiss. Lane was watching her with those ice-blue Carrigan eyes, focusing on her face as if reading the thoughts behind her expression.
“Do you watch the bulls like that before you ride them?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“You look like you’re trying to figure out how hard I’ll buck. I’ll save you the trouble. I buck hard. So you can stop watching me like you’re going to break me or something.”
“I don’t want to break you.” He put his hand on hers. “I was trying to figure out how I could gentle you a little bit.”
She felt the hard shell around her heart crack like the candy coating on an M&M. Lane moved his thumb over the soft spot on her wrist and she felt suddenly vulnerable. Melts in his hand, not in his mouth, she thought. No, melts in his mouth, too. His mouth…
“What are you thinking, Sarah?”
She tossed her hair and looked away. “Thoughts.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
Crazy thoughts. Sexy thoughts. Leaning into him, she caught that masculine scent cologne companies could never quite manage to cram into a bottle. The light bounced off the sun-bleached streaks in his hair and sculpted his face, highlighting a scar that ran from his temple to the top of his right cheekbone. Without thinking, she reached up and traced a finger down the length of it. The band stopped playing just then and everything in the room seemed to freeze, as if time had been temporarily suspended.