Rugged Fire [Rugged Savage Valley, Colorado 4] Read online

  “So I guess now we should get down to numbers?” she asked, pulling a new packet out of her leather case. She slid it across the desk to him. When he pulled it from her, his fingers brushed against hers. She snatched her hand away and dug through her bag for another one. While her head was down, he clenched his hand, holding on to the sensation she’d left tingling across his skin.

  She snapped her face up and plopped her paper down on the desk, but her eyes landed on his clenched fist. He quickly relaxed his hand, but it wasn’t fast enough. She’d caught him, and her eyes lingered on his straightened fingers for a moment. Then those violet orbs slowly worked their way up his arm and shoulders to land gently his face. Thankful for the concealing bulk of the desk, he felt his cock getting itself worked up again.

  How could her gaze wreak so much havoc upon his usually austere control?

  Their eyes held for a long moment, but then she blinked, stuttering nervously and tucking her hair back. “So what you’ll see if you turn to the third page is that I’ve broken down all the expected expenses and included past costs as a projection tool. I’ve listed how much I’m willing to invest of my own money. I’d even be willing to put the deed to my house down as an asset.”

  Seb studied her numbers without saying anything. Mostly he wanted a moment to compose his thoughts, but he could see Lianne fidgeting out of the corner of his eye.

  The she spoke in a soft, tentative voice. “Look…I know it seems like a large sum, but I truly believe in my products. I think they’re healthier and safer than a lot of beauty products available to women. I already have a solid base of loyal customers, and I know…I know that if I could just get this started, I’ll make it work.”

  He thumbed through her packet, but she’d already more than impressed him. How could such a logical, sane creature be related to the Strongs, he wondered. With her honey-blonde hair, elf-like features, and steadfast eyes, she seemed almost otherworldly to him, and he wondered if the rumors about her mother being a witch had some truth to them. He didn’t find it hard to believe. “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll pull up your credit report and discuss everything with Will. We both have to review the business plan before any loans are approved. It’s part of the legal stipulations our fathers put on our inheriting the bank. But what I can do is promise to get in touch with you before five this evening to let you know one way or the other. Does that sound acceptable?”

  Her generous lips stretched into a shaky smile, and she nodded. “I think I can make it until then without going bonkers.”

  Seb felt his lips twitch but didn’t let himself laugh. He’d already revealed too much interest as it was. “So I’ll speak with you later.”

  Holding out her hand, she said, “It was nice to see you again, Seb. Maybe I’ll see you around town?”

  He nodded, taking her hand and giving it one solid pump and then releasing it. Just as it had the first time, her hand had left his tingling. “I’ll talk with you later.”

  She frowned at him but then began gathering her paperwork and laptop and stuffing it all into her leather case. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she gave one last awkward good-bye and then tugged open the glass door. After she had slipped through, he walked to the window in the office and watched her climb into her car.

  Once she’d turned on the engine, she sat for a long moment staring at the steering wheel. Then her shoulders straightened, and she pulled out of the parking lot. He watched her car putter down Main Street until it disappeared from sight.

  * * * *

  “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

  Lianne had read the same forty words approximately seventeen times over the last two hours. She was sprawled on her couch with her head on the armrest and Austen propped comfortably on her stomach. However, her eyes kept wandering above the book and toward the window. Her thoughts floated away and up into the clouds. She simply could not exist in words or in reality. She wanted to run and jump and skip through ideas, through dreams and impossibilities. If only she got the loan. Everything hinged on that.

  She checked the time on her phone. Seb had said he’d call her before five, but it was already three. She sighed and returned her eyes to the pages of Emma.

  A few minutes later, her front door swung open. She rolled her head back over the armrest. Her housemate and best friend, Jamie Norman, dangled upside down from the floor as she closed the door behind her and then shed her coat. When her keys and purse had been placed on the rack next to the door, she turned to face Lianne.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Jamie asked, placing her hands on her hips.

  Lianne giggled and then lugged her head up. She rolled over on her stomach and put her chin on the armrest. “I’m wallowing in nervous listlessness.”

  “Oh dang, you had your meeting today at the bank. How did it go?” Jamie ran over to the couch. Lianne rolled back over and moved her legs out of the way. When Jamie had settled into the cushions, Lianne stretched her legs out again over Jamie’s lap.

  “It went pretty well, I think. I didn’t forget anything, and I didn’t stutter or trip up on anything. But, really, what it all boils down to is if the Carsons think I will be able to repay the loan.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. If they don’t see how amazing you are, they are fools.”

  “But the thing is, I’m normally really good at deciphering people’s responses to me and to what I’m saying, but Seb—that’s who met with me—I couldn’t read him. And now I’m afraid that he didn’t like it, or that maybe, he didn’t really get it.”

  Jamie patted her knee. “Lianne, you’re the only person I know who would stay up until three in the morning to practice her presentation one more time even though you’d already given it to me seven times in a row.”

  “Sorry about that,” Lianne said with a sheepish smile. “I hope you weren’t too terribly tired today for work.”

  “Yeah right. Even if I was tired, I love working at the vet clinic. Dr. Ashley is so nice, and he doesn’t get annoyed when I ask him questions.” Jamie turned to look out the window. “Not like some people we know,” she said darkly.

  Lianne frowned. She knew Jamie was thinking of her father, Ulysses C. Norman. He currently resided in Denver, but he’d never really been the supportive, family-values type of dad. Just the fact that Jamie lived here with Lianne was a source of contention between them. He’d wanted his daughter to work in some cushy job in his huge, corporate conglomeration. Instead, Jamie had taken a position as a lowly vet tech at Savage Valley Veterinary Clinic.

  “Well, looking at the bright side,” Jamie said, perking up and turning to face her again, “we can always get my dad to back you if you don’t get the loan.”

  They both broke into a fit of laughter. Ulysses C. Norman was the last person Lianne would ever ask for money. And Jamie would go to the devil himself before asking her father for money.

  Lianne’s old-fashioned telephone suddenly rang from across the room, its white and gold handle shuddering on the frame. After flying off the couch and across the living room, she leapt into one of the chairs next to the window, curled her legs up under her body, and then shot Jamie one nervous glance before picking up the handle.

  “Lianne Seward speaking.”

  “Hi, Lianne. This is Sebastian Carson from the bank.”

  “Hello,” she said, squeezing the curled wire of the telephone tightly between her fingers.

  “I’m just going to cut to the chase. After reviewing your file with my brother, we have decided to grant you a partial approval.”

  “A what?” She looked over at Jamie, who was sitting up straight on the couch, face rapt and attentive.

  “What that means is that you will be getting a loan, but it won’t be for the amount that you’ve requested. We l
ove everything I saw from you this morning. You show a real initiative and drive. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you are aware, the economy is in an unstable place, so loans in particular have to be considered very seriously. We would have liked to grant you the full amount. But it’s not just our money that we would be gambling, and ultimately, we have to consider the good of the bank. That being said, we’d like you to know that if you need anything, any help making connections or contacts with distributors, equipment companies, anything you need, we are more than willing to assist you.”

  Seb’s words flew into Lianne’s ears and then clashed and clanked around in her head for a while. Their echoing clamor left her deaf for a long moment. She had to force her way through them, slashing through their confusion, shoving through their dense midst, until she found words of her own to answer.

  “So…I’m not getting the money?” She clenched her eyes tightly closed. Disappointment washed over her, and it took everything she had not to crumple under the weight of it.

  “You are getting the money, just not as much as you asked. We reviewed your proposal and had to make cuts where we thought costs could be reduced. We’ll send you the revised version via e-mail, and then if you’d like to discuss anything, we are always here.”

  Lianne listened numbly to the rest of Seb’s instructions, but mostly, she felt an overwhelming sense of failure moving through her body. It was heavy and thick. It began in her gut and spread its leaden weight outward into her blood and her limbs until even the skin stretching over her face felt heavy with it.

  When she hung up, Jamie had a concerned look on her face. “You didn’t get it?”

  Lianne shook her head.

  “Oh, no, sweetie!” Jamie jumped off the couch and ran over to hug her neck. When she pulled away, her sympathy had been replaced with anger. “Those bastards. You know, I thought they looked like a couple of arrogant pricks. When I went to open my checking account when I first moved here, they just stood behind the counter and watched everyone. And then the only time either of them spoke was to correct one of the tellers or something like that. I mean, they just give off this ‘I’m better than you’ vibe, you know? Gosh, I want to wring their necks!”

  Lianne shook her head. “No, no. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll figure out a way to get you this money. I don’t care who those jerks think they are, I believe in you, and I know that you are gonna start an awesome company and sell awesome Savage Valley honey products and then rule the world.” Jamie hugged her again.

  Lianne sighed. “Thanks for your vote of confidence, but that’s not what I meant. I meant, no, they didn’t not give me the loan.”

  Jamie jerked away. “Wait…what? Say that again?”

  “They approved my loan, but only partially. I’m not getting the full amount.”

  “But you are getting some?”

  Lianne nodded.

  “How much? Like, is it enough to get going still?”

  “I don’t remember the exact amount. They’re going to send me an e-mail.”

  “Lianne!” Jamie shoved her. “You scared me! I was ready to break their noses for you. But this is good news.” Hopping up from her kneeling position in front of Lianne’s chair, Jamie marched toward the kitchen. “We should cook up a big meal and maybe scrounge up a little something, something to celebrate.”

  Lianne rolled her eyes. She knew that “something, something” was just a nicer way of saying Jamie wanted to go see the Yeats twins. Lianne had warned her to stay away from those two, but as soon as Jamie realized they had a bad-boy reputation, she’d latched herself on to them. Lianne suppressed a shiver. If only Jamie knew what they really were, she might not be so quick to bat her eyes at them.

  Growing up in Savage Valley and being a cousin to one of the original families to lay claim to this land, Lianne knew just what kind of critters were lurking about. Her cousins Noah and Carter were bear-shifters. Noah had told her when she was seven years old, trying to intimidate her into doing something that would get them into trouble. When she wouldn’t do it, she distinctly remembered Noah puffing up his chest and saying, “Oh yeah, well, I’m a bear-shifter, and one day I’m gonna turn into a bear, and then I’ll make you do it.”

  Lianne had, of course, tattled on him, thinking he was telling lies, but then her mother took her over to the Strongs, and they all had a family discussion about the history of Savage Valley and how bear-shifters came to exist. And nipping at the tail end of that shocking discovery came a second revelation—Savage Valley also had mountain lion-shifters. And that was what the Yeats twins were, lion-shifters.

  Thinking about twins and shifters, Lianne’s mind drifted to her meeting that morning with Seb. She hadn’t mentioned to Jamie just how agitated she’d been throughout. It wasn’t nerves, though, that had made her squirm in her seat and dart her eyes away from Seb’s every time he held her gaze.

  She’d had a crush on the Carson twins since she was approximately twelve years, three months, and twenty-six days old. She’d been walking along the creek out toward Noah’s house when she’d heard two laughing male voices. She thought it was Noah and Carter, so she headed toward them, assuming they had gone for a swim and intending to join them. When she rounded the bend in the creek, however, Seb and Will were both swimming in the nude in one of the deep pools. She quickly darted behind some shrubbery and watched them splash around in the water. They were six years older than her, and she had never seen a naked man before.

  She didn’t know what that tingling in her lower parts meant, but she knew that she liked it.

  After she’d been watching them swim around for a while, Will climbed out of the water, and Lianne gasped at the magnificent, frightening sight. But Will’s head snapped toward where she was crouching in the bushes.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. She held still for a long moment, and eventually he’d shrugged and turned away. She’d never forgotten the sight of both of their big, muscled forms splashing and swimming so effortlessly in the water. In college, she hadn’t thought of them much, but the moment she’d stepped into the bank that morning, all of her old feelings came tumbling and rushing through her blood.

  “Actually, Jamie,” she called to her friend who was still rummaging through the pantry and the fridge, “I think I’m going to head up to the attic.”

  Jamie popped out of the kitchen. “The attic?”

  “Yeah, I mean, just because I didn’t get the full amount, I can’t let something like that stop me, right?”

  “Right. But what does that have to do with the attic?”

  “Well, I was thinking that maybe if I got that cleaned up, I could make that into my lab. It’d be perfect in terms of ventilation and space requirements. And maybe if I can start doing some bulk orders, I’ll be able to raise the money for a store myself instead of relying on a loan.”

  “Okay, yeah, maybe,” Jamie said, nodding. “But let’s at least have one little night to celebrate.”

  “I kind of want to get started now. I want to start putting together a new cost projection chart with the attic scenario. Maybe I can have that ready for Seb by this weekend.” She pulled out a notebook where she kept ideas and written data from her leather case.

  “Oh no,” Jamie whined. “You’ve got that crazed look in your eye.”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry.” Lianne had already started working out some preliminary calculations. After she checked that e-mail from the Carsons, she’d have a better idea of what she was working with, but the attic might actually be a darn good idea.

  “Well, if you’re going to be crunching numbers all night, I’m going out.” Jamie sashayed to her room, shaking her head. “One of us needs to have a life, at least.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lianne called after her, laughing.

  A few hours later, after Jamie had headed to Catdaddy’s, Lianne thought she should go ahead and start going through the boxes up in the attic. She walked up the stairs to her room, put on some
old sweats, and then pulled the ladder down from the ceiling. She crawled up, grabbed the closest box, and then brought it down to her bedroom.

  Most of what she found was paperwork that she didn’t need anymore. She found all of her mother’s tax forms, plus various other receipts and documents that her mother had seen fit to keep. She also found a few boxes of her mother’s clothes. Lianne had donated most of her mother’s clothing to consignment shops after she passed away from cancer two years before, but there were about two boxes’ worth of things that she just couldn’t let go of—dresses or shoes or jackets that smelled of Lianne’s childhood, of being wrapped up and held by her mother’s deep, unrelenting love.

  When she went back up to the attic for yet another box, she lugged an old yellow trunk toward the ladder. Her back was aching from all the lifting and ladder climbing, so she thought this one would probably be the last one for the night. After some maneuvering and a bout of panicked cursing when she thought the handle had broken, she got the unwieldy thing down the ladder.

  She dragged it next to her bed and then opened it up. “Oh my goodness,” she whispered, sucking in a breath and running her fingers over the tops of dozens and dozens of notebooks. She pulled one out at random and flipped it open. Her mother’s handwriting scrawled its way from the top to the bottom. There were tiny ink illustrations and notes made in the margin.

  Today I have vowed not to think of him. I didn’t remember his face when I made a sandwich for Lianne. I didn’t hear his laughter down the hall when I mopped the kitchen. I didn’t even imagine his hands on my shoulders while picking weeds from the garden. Tulips are his favorite, he once said. I think the garden looks cleaner without them.

  Lianne quickly flipped through the crinkly pages, looking for a name, looking for more details. Her mother had never told her who her father was. She knew practically nothing about the man, but from a cursory glance, it looked like her mother had filled pages and pages up with him. She pulled out another notebook to see if it, too, had scribblings about her father.