Her Best Friend's Lover Page 3

  His editor had called and was nagging him about some kind of deal with a cable network, after he’d told her for the millionth time, absolutely no. He’d sliced his hand when he’d changed his oil the other day. How he’d managed that would forever remain a mystery. He had been working on cars for more than twenty years, and ten of it had been as a fucking mechanic. So how in the hell how he managed to slice his hand open while doing an oil change?

  This morning, out of the blue, his computer had crashed, taking God only knew how much information and work with it, since he sometimes forgot to back up his work on disc.

  His gut churned queasily and he dropped to the couch, throwing his arm over his eyes. To top it all off, in his back pocket was a letter from Abigail Lightfoot, Nikki’s daughter. Stepdaughter, technically. A feeling of foreboding had filled him when he had seen the letter, setting all alone, in his mailbox.

  After putting it off a few more minutes, he went and snagged a bottle of beer from the fridge, opened the letter and settled down to read the childish scrawl.

  Thirty minutes later, the letter lay saturated in a puddle of beer. A leather-bound journal lay open on the floor, sketches done over the past years spilling out of it.

  Three empty beer bottles lay on the floor. He had realized that this was not an occasion for Miller, so he dug out the Irish. A pint of whiskey sat on the table. With an unsteady hand, Dale took another swig from the bottle, his eyes tearing up as it burned its way down his throat. While he could usually handle a couple of beers without a problem, he had passed drunk several swigs earlier.

  The only real problem being that he generally lost the time between getting tipsy and waking up.

  Another baby. Their fourth.

  Damn it, it hurt to think of Nikki cuddling a baby to her chest, to think of the love that would be shining out of her eyes, directed at some bastard who didn’t deserve her. Wishing himself into that mental picture, knowing it was just his imagination, hurt even more, so he washed that thought away with another swig of whiskey.

  And so on, and so on.

  Lauren stood in front of the canvas, paintbrush poised over it, ready to work her magic. She closed her eyes, trying to summon up an image to put on canvas, immortalized through strokes of her brush.

  But the magic wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there since she had tossed Dale’s apology in his face and thrown him out of her life. Heaving a sigh, she set the brush and her palette down, thrusting her hands through her hair.

  Clasping them behind her neck, she turned to stare out over the backyard.

  It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t love her. He had given his heart long before he had ever met her. But that hadn’t kept him from caring for her, or from being one of the best friends she’d ever had.

  The past week had been empty; the days had lost their color and the magic had slipped from her hands. Two canvases had been ruined, relegated to “file thirteen.”

  Even her plants were suffering. She killed the mums she had been transplanting. The dogwood she planted the previous fall had suddenly died and none of her efforts to save it had brought forth any results.

  And Lauren couldn’t get his expression out of her head, the way he had looked at her that last time before he had walked silently out of her house. Like she had walked up to him out of the blue and plunged a knife in his heart. Those mournful, deeply hurt blue eyes haunted her at night.

  Walking into the living room, she threw herself face down on the couch. She couldn’t do it. Even if he was only a friend and never anything more, she couldn’t live without Dale Stoner in her life.

  Damn it all to hell and back, she thought viciously. She felt like she was compulsively beating her head against a wall of cinderblock. It was painful, she hated it and wanted desperately to stop, but couldn’t.

  But the fact remained unchanged, regardless of how much she might wish otherwise.

  This past week had felt as though half of her entire soul was missing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Two hours later, she had a tin of fresh chocolate chip cookies in her hands and a penitent look on her pretty face as she headed out the front door. Lauren had dressed carefully, hiding the fading bruises on her arms with a ruffled poet-styled shirt tucked into a pair of her favorite jeans.

  Around her neck she wore a silver chain, an amethyst wand hanging from it to rest in the hollow of her throat. Dale had given it to her the past Christmas.

  She had a little apology speech already prepared and was fully ready to eat crow, if necessary. But she would do it her way.

  Her first knock brought nothing but silence from the house. Starting to deflate, she knocked again. What if he wasn’t home? And after she went to all the trouble to prepare herself for this, a humiliating experience to be sure. But then she heard crashing from within the house and muted cursing. When the door opened, the stench of whiskey washed over her and she stood there, staring in bemusement at one very drunk man.

  His tousled golden hair fell in a tumble over his forehead, and a sexy little scowl darkened his face. His shirt was hanging loose and unbuttoned over a lean tanned belly. A light scattering of golden hair trailed down to disappear in the vee of his unsnapped jeans.

  Oh, hell. Can’t I just have one taste? she thought frantically, much like a child denied an ice cream cone.

  Lauren hesitated a moment, unsure of her ability to speak. She was afraid that if she tried, all she would utter was incoherent babbling. Her heart danced wildly around in her chest, and unconsciously her tongue darted out to lick her lips.

  Oh, please. Just one bite?

  Glaring at her, Dale slurred, “What? Are you here to beat me over the head again? Helluva thing to do, kick a man when he’s down.” He started to slam the door, but she caught it easily, coming out of her daze and slipping inside. She followed him as he stalked out of the anteroom, veering left into the living room.

  Inside the arched entranceway, she paused, shocked.

  “Ah, I came over to apologize,” she started, cautiously setting the tin down as she looked all around. The oak coffee table had been upended. The normally neat living room was a disaster, empty beer bottles all over the place, scattered pieces of paper and pictures lying on the floor. She knelt over one that caught her eye. A hand drawn sketch of a woman nursing a baby. The love that had been poured into the picture told her who it was, even if ‘Nikki’ hadn’t been printed below the picture.

  Every line had been carefully, lovingly done from the dimple that winked in the left corner of the woman’s mouth to the little curls of hair that graced the infant’s head. She closed her eyes against the dagger in her heart and carefully scooped up the papers—more drawings and letters—then she righted the coffee table and gathered them together in a pile, setting them on the surface before raising her head and looking into Dale’s bleak eyes.

  A humorless smile pulled up one corner of his mouth as he repeated, “Apologize, huh? Yeah, fine. You make your pretty little apology and get the hell out, ‘kay, Lauren?”

  “Dale, what’s happened?”

  “Whaddya mean, what’s happened?” he asked, lifting a half empty bottle of whiskey to his lips. Lauren’s belly tightened as she watched that tanned throat work, imagined him drinking from her lips the way he drank from that bottle. She forced her attention back to his words.

  “Lemme see.” Ticking his statements off on his fingers, he started, “First, my best friend damn near gets raped, and blames it on me. Guess she got a good ‘nough reason. Then the girl I’ve been dating decides she’s ready for marriage and unless I want to be the one, I ain’t to call no more. My damn editor won’t leave me alone.” As he counted, he spilled whiskey from the nearly empty pint. “I slice my damn hand wide open during a freaking oil change. What in the hell am I changing the oil in my car for anyway?” He studied the ugly red gash on the back of his hand with a dark scowl.

  His deep southern accent thickened as his face grew darker. “And?”

&n
bsp; He cut himself off, reaching for one of the drawings on the table. The first one Lauren had picked up, of Nikki nursing a baby. “And what?” Lauren asked softly, going to sit beside him, taking his hand in hers.

  It tightened on hers as he whispered, “And she’s pregnant.”

  “Nikki.” Lauren said.

  “Yeah. Nikki.” he replied, his voice gone flat.

  “Dale, why are you doing this to yourself?” she asked, knowing he’d never be able to answer.

  He gazed up at her with dazed eyes, clearly befuddled.

  “She loves him, Dale. She can’t help that,” Lauren said, taking the picture from him and turning it face down before catching his cheek and forcing him to look at her. Holding his face in her hands, she stared in to his eyes, her own heart breaking. “She loves him,” she repeated slowly. “Love doesn’t follow logical rules. We don’t always love who we want to, or who we ought to. You have to let her go. She’s beyond your reach now.”

  “What in the hell do you know about love?” he snapped, jerking free from her gentle touch.

  She smiled sadly. “A lot more than you would think, Dale. I know what it’s like to love somebody you can’t have. And I know how hard it is to let it go, to carry on life as normal while that person lives a life that doesn’t, and never will, include you.”

  Shoulders slumped, Dale stared dejectedly at his hands, trying to tune out the sound of her voice.

  “I know what it’s like to love somebody who doesn’t love you back, Dale,” she repeated. With a delicate shrug of her shoulders, she quietly finished, “You won’t be able to replace her with somebody else, Dale. The women you date deserve better than to be treated as a substitute for the one you really want.”

  “Who the hell are you to give me advice on my love life?” he demanded, slamming down the whiskey. The potent amber liquid splashed out of the bottle, spraying Lauren with droplets as Dale surged to his feet.

  With a steady hand, Lauren wiped a trickle of liquor from her face before rising and meeting Dale’s turbulent gaze with her own. “You don’t have a love life, Dale. You have a sex life, in which you pretend every woman you sleep with is Nicole Kline. And you have a dream life, where you imagine yourself in his place, the father of her children, the love of her life.”

  His eyes closed and he turned his head away. “I can’t put her out of my mind, Lauren. I try, but I can’t,” he said, his voice tight and shaky. “Do you know how he treated her? What he did? They were going to be married, for pity’s sake, and just a few months before the wedding, he knocks another woman up. So he married that bitch and left Nikki alone. He broke her fucking heart, but when his wife died, he figured he could get Nikki back.

  “He didn’t deserve her!”

  “If she had been mine, I would have cherished her every day of my life, she never would have been hurt the way she was. I would have treated her like a queen and I never would have hurt her.”

  Very calmly, very succinctly, she said, “Bullshit.”

  His head snapped up and his startled gaze flew up to meet hers. “Excuse me?” he said, his voice going cold once more. Glacial ice had already formed in those blue eyes.

  “You can’t love somebody without hurting them from time to time. You’d be a fool to think otherwise. Pain is a part of loving. Without it, we’d probably take all the good things for granted.”

  “I would treasure her. I love her, damn it!”

  “You worship her,” Lauren countered. “You’ve put her on a damn pedestal and would kneel at her feet if you could. She is the cursed princess from one of your kid’s tales, Dale. You’ve told me this story before, buddy. I know all about the betrayal, all about her rough childhood, and all about how you fell in love with her only to lose her to him. You don’t love her.

  “You want to rescue her, help her put her life together and coddle her. But she’s a real woman, with real needs. She doesn’t need worshipping and she doesn’t need to be treasured. That makes her sound like some kind of possession. She needs a man to love her as a woman, not as an ideal.”

  “What in the hell do you know about it?” he demanded, stumbling to the side and nearly tripping over the coffee table. With a growl, he shoved it, sending the whiskey sailing through the air and the heavy oak table upended on the floor. “What in hell do you know about love? You don’t even let a guy within ten feet of you.”

  “That’s because I don’t have anything to offer one. My heart belongs to somebody and I don’t believe in casual sex.” Lauren turned her gaze away so that Dale wouldn’t be able to read that he was the one who owned her—heart, mind, body and soul.

  Her elegant shoulders lifted and fell in a casual shrug before she loosely linked her hands in front of her. “Dale, I’d rather be alone, just me and my wishes, than to fall into bed with every other guy who comes along. I might forget for a little while, but then it’s over. I’d be even more lonely than I was to begin with.”

  Dale sat silently staring at the puddle of spilled whiskey that was seeping into his deep, plush carpet. How could she so accurately describe it? he wondered. How did she know about the ache that lived within him?

  He scowled as the answer came into his drunken mind. Because, as she had told him, she was in love with somebody who didn’t have the sense to love her back. “Better off without him,” he announced, wishing for another swig from the bottle.

  “Pardon?”

  He grinned foolishly at her and mimicked her formal, regal tone, “Pardon?” before laughing. “That’s what I love ‘bout you, Lauren. You’re such a damn lady, even with a drunk ass idiot.” He glanced around the room, wondered if he’d actually drunk enough to make it spin or if the fault buried below Kentuckiana had finally started shifting. “Better off without him,” he repeated. “Probably ain’t good ‘nough for ya, anyway.”

  Arching a slim black brow at him, she agreeably said, “Probably not.”

  “This place is a damn sty,” Dale said, his foul mood gone in the blink of an eye. “What kind of pig lives here?”

  “Hmmm, I wonder,” Lauren murmured, tucking her hands into her pockets to keep from reaching for him. He was so damned adorable. So damned sexy and rumpled.

  He chuckled under his breath and dropped back down on the dark gray couch, staring up at her. Her face was turned sideways, studying the unholy mess, treating Dale to a clear view of her perfect profile. Clear ivory skin, deep smoky eyes, wide lush mouth. “You sure are pretty, Lauren,” he said, grinning up at her. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Thank you,” she said politely, a smile tugging the corners of her mouth as she turned her head to look at him. “Of course, I realize your judgment is a tad bit impaired right now.”

  “Tad bit, my ass,” he muttered, enjoying the sensation of the room spinning around. The only thing in focus was Lauren, with her watchful gray eyes and amused smile. Dale lowered his gaze to her mouth—that wide, lush mouth, curved up in amusement. Carefully, concentrating on each separate movement, he rose to his feet.

  “Why don’t I fix you something to eat and then clean up this mess?” she asked, sidestepping neatly when he reached for her, then positioning herself at his side as he tried to steady himself.

  “Not hungry,” he told her, a sweet smile on his face. He reached out, stroked his hand down the satiny skin of her cheek. “Soft,” he murmured, turning his hand around and stroking his knuckles down her jaw to her neck.

  “So are we friends again?” His gaze, bleary and bloodshot, wandered over her face. “You here to make me feel all better?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m going to fix you something to eat so you don’t wake up with a hangover the size of Kansas,” she said steadily, even though her heart started tripping when his eyes started to linger, none too subtly, on her mouth.

  “Don’t wanna eat,” he sulked, reaching up to touch his index finger to her bottom lip. “Not unless you’re on the menu.”

  Drunk or not, he knew heat in a wo
man’s eyes. And what he saw flare in her gaze was a damn forest fire. He moved up, aligning his body next to hers. With a slow, wicked grin, he asked, “So whaddya say? Can I eat you?” Lowering his head, he lapped at her neck, one long slow stroke of his tongue that set his mouth ablaze, craving another taste.

  “Back off, Dale,” she said, taking a quick step back.

  “Hmm,” he murmured, following each retreating step. “Why don’t you kiss me and make me all better, beautiful?” he asked, knowing exactly where he wanted her to kiss.

  A reluctant, amused grin tugged at her mouth but she shook her head. “Fuck off,” she ordered, dodging him yet again.

  “I’d rather fuck you,” he replied, reaching out and catching hold of her hand.

  “You need to eat, take some aspirin and go to bed,” she told him. “Otherwise you are going to wish you were dead in the morning. You’ll feel better about all this tomorrow.”

  “Not hungry,” he repeated. “And I can feel better now, if you’ll just let me.” Curving his hand around the back of her neck, he drew her to him, leaned down and pressed his mouth to the corner of hers, nibbling. “Hmm, that’s better, baby.” Dale was pretty certain he was doing something he shouldn’t. But he was drunk enough, needy enough. Damn it, lonely enough. And here was Lauren. He thought he had lost her; sweet, gentle, logical Lauren who could put his chaotic mind to ease just by being there.

  “Dale,” Lauren said, her voice shaky now, as well. “Dale, stop it.”

  “Why?” he asked absently as he moved from the corner of her mouth to her stubborn chin, then down to her slender neck. Lauren fit against him perfectly, he noted. Curve to curve, she fit against his body as if she had been made specifically for him. Why in hell had he been focusing on delicate little women that he had to bend over to kiss?

  “You’re lonely. I’m lonely. Maybe together, we won’t be so lonely.” A little warning light went off in some distant corner of his clouded mind, but he easily ignored it, intently feasting on the taste of soft smooth flesh.