self—to be noticed by him, to be cared about him—had not disappeared with her braces and her first bra.
Not even close.
She blinked. And then again, hard. “No one calls me that,” she said. “No one calls me Gracie.”
She thought she sounded childish and defensive. She didn’t want him to know he’d had any kind of effect on her.
Why couldn’t she just have said, “Hello, Rory. Nice to see you”? Why couldn’t she have just said that, all her years of hard-won polish and sophistication wrapped around her like a protective cloak?
Because he had caught her in a terrible moment. Running after renegade ponies, her shoe broken, her hair clasp lost, her strap sliding around and her dress stained beyond repair.
If she’d known he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, she would have invited him to the office she was so proud of on the main street of downtown Mason.
Where she could have been in complete control of this reunion!
“What do they call you?”
His voice was deep and sure and sent unwanted shivers down her spine.
Miss Day would have sounded way too churlish, plus she was wobbling on one shoe, and feeling damp and disheveled and not at all like the cool professional woman she wanted him to believe she was.
“Grace.”
“Ah.”
She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, his gaze probing, those deep green eyes feeling as though they were stripping away her maturity and success and exposing the vulnerable and gauche girl she was so startled to find was alive and well within her.
“Graham’s the only one who called me that. Everyone else called me Grace. Even my parents.”
“Graham and me,” he reminded her.
Gracie-Facie, pudding and pie, kissed the boys and made them cry …
On those rare occasions when Rory Adams had noticed her, it had been to tease her mercilessly.
But that boy who had teased—the one with the careless grin, and the wild way—seemed to be gone. Completely.
Why couldn’t her inner child be so cooperative?
“So, how’s life?” he said.
As if he’d just been walking by, and happened upon her. Which she doubted. When she’d talked to him a week ago, she’d told him she didn’t want to see him.
She should have guessed that would not have changed about him. He was not a man who had had to accept no for an answer very often. Especially not from those of the female persuasion. She should have guessed he would not accept it from her.
“The same as when I talked to you a week ago,” Grace said stubbornly. “Fabulous.”
This was not true. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
“Except for the ponies,” he commented dryly, but he she had a feeling he wasn’t buying it, and not just because of the ponies. Not for a second.
Couldn’t he see that her dress was perfectly cut fine linen? That the shoe he had handed her was an expensive designer shoe? Couldn’t he see that she was all grown up and that she didn’t need any help from big, strong him to get her through life’s hurdles?
Of which, at the moment, she had more than her fair share.
“Fabulous,” she repeated, tightly.
“You look worried,” he said after a moment.
And then he did the darndest thing. He took his thumb, and ever so gently pressed it into her forehead.
Where she knew the worry lines had been building like storm clouds for a whole week!
Ever since Serenity had arrived with her entourage. Ponies. Tucker.
There was a momentary sensation of bliss: a momentary desire to lean into that thumb and all it offered. Someone to lean on. Someone to talk to. Someone to trust.
Hopeless illusions that she, of all people, should have left far behind her. The end of her engagement really should have been the last straw.
Had been the last straw, Grace told herself firmly. Her business was everything now. Everything. She had laid herself out on the altar of romantic love—and had been run through by love’s caprice—for the last time.
She was not leaving herself open to hurt anymore. She had made that vow when her fiancé of two years, Harold, had bade her adieu. Vowed it.
And then, as if to test that vow, Serenity had come.
And now Rory was here. This man appearing in her life, her entertaining the notion it would be nice to hear his opinion about Serenity—or feel his whiskers scrape her face—those were tests of her resolve.
When he had phoned, she had contemplated asking him a few questions, but in the end she had decided not to.
And the deep cynicism that permeated his expression should only confirm how right she had been in that decision.
Because he could lay her hope to rest. Dash it completely before it was even fully formed.
Hope was such a fragile thing for her.
Hope was probably even more dangerous to her than love. But still, not to hope for anything at all would be a form of death, wouldn’t it?
She was not about to trust her hope to someone like him. And yet, there it was—the temptation just to tell him, to see what he thought.
Not to be so damned alone.
Recognizing the utter folly of these thoughts, Grace slapped his thumb down from her forehead. “I’m not worried.”
No sense giving in to the temptation to share confidences, to tell him she’d spent years building up her business. One incident like this, and it could all crumble, word spreading like wildfire that she was unprofessional, that she’d had a disaster.
Thank goodness the party had been over, the last of the pint-size revelers being packed into their upscale minivans and SUVs when the ponies had made their break for it. Hopefully the park people—or the press—wouldn’t come along before she got this cleared up.
But that was only the immediate problem, anyway, although all her problems were related at the moment.
“Didn’t the ponies come with a pony person?” he asked.
Ah, that was the other problem. The pony person was exactly the secret she wanted to keep.
“The pony person is, um, incapacitated. Not your problem,” she said, flashing him a smile that made him frown. She had been aiming for a smile that said, This? Just a temporary glitch. Nothing I can’t handle.
And she had obviously missed that smile by a long shot. Grace hoped he didn’t catch her anxious glance toward the parking lot.
Thankfully, she’d had the trailer the ponies had arrived in moved way across the parking lot into the deep shade of the cottonwoods on the other side. She had not wanted the partygoers to bump right into it in its decrepit condition.
“Maybe we’ll meet again under different circumstances,” she said, hoping he would take the hint and leave.
But he did not have the look of a man who responded to subtlety, and he had caught her glance toward the parking lot. Now he was looking past her. She moved in front of him, trying to block his view, but it was no use. He looked over her head, easily.
Not a single person at the party had mentioned the trailer. It was as if they hadn’t seen it at all.
But then, most people weren’t like him.
And Rory Adams had become