Too Hot to Handle: A Loveswept Classic Romance (12 page)

Matt’s words kept running through Callie’s mind as they loaded the van. There’d been a time when she’d led the same kind of vagabond life, before she came to the valley. First with Tyler, and then, after the divorce, on the craft-show circuit.

Keeping on the move had seemed the best way to close out the past. Now the past didn’t seem so important, because Matt filled the present with so much happiness.

They piled the center section of the van with baskets and wreaths, and both of them avoided mentioning the fact that they were keeping the back section—the section with the TV and the plush couch—empty. After they finished loading her crafts, Matt threw a small canvas sports bag under the van’s cocktail table. Callie placed her own small bag beside it.

She suddenly felt a strange awkwardness about going. Making love with Matt at the cabin seemed warm, natural, harmless. But this trip to Helen had become an intimate weekend venture that seemed full of dangerous commitments. And other problems. How would Matt react to the cheap little inn where she usually stayed on these jaunts?

“Well stop by the garage and tell John Henry where
we’re going,” Matt said as he opened the passenger door and motioned for Callie to get in.

“We will?” Callie’s concern over John Henry’s reaction was mirrored in the panic on her face, and found an outlet in her next statement. “I’ll drive, Matt. This is my trip, and I’m more familiar with the route.”

“No way. This is my van, Caroline, and I’m a disgustingly macho man when it comes to driving. I’ve studied the map, and I won’t get lost. I know where I’m going. I always do. I’m organized, remember? Get in!”

“Do you have a map? Have you got enough gas? Tires okay? It’s a long, rough drive.” She walked around the van, scrutinizing it. Then she felt Matt’s hand on her arm. He tugged her to the passenger door. Callie glanced at his face and saw it was set in hard lines.

“Yes. Yes. And yes. Quit treating me like a dumb city bumpkin,” he ordered. He opened the door and jerked his head brusquely. “Get your fanny in.”

She’d nettled him, and it gave her a grim sense of victory. She didn’t really want to drive the van, but she needed to let him know that he wasn’t in charge, no matter what he thought. Callie smothered a sharp retort and stepped up into the plush velvet interior. She wouldn’t argue.

It was Matt’s van, after all. And it wasn’t his driving that was worrying her, it was their new status as a couple. She began to feel claustrophobic.

From the time Matt threw William an extra ration of hay and closed the gate behind them, until they reached John Henry’s garage in dusty, tiny Sweet Valley, Callie quietly attempted to assess her unsettled emotions.

“ ’Morning, folks,” John Henry said wryly. He shifted a match stem from one side of his mouth to the other, and Callie noticed that it didn’t move a bit after that. John Henry couldn’t hide his intense curiosity as long as that matchstick acted as a barometer, she thought with grim amusement.

“Stopped by last night, but nobody came to the door,” he told them. “Figured you folks must have been busy, or something.”

Callie felt her face flame, and she looked into the back of the van, pretending to check the baskets packed behind her seat. Busy? Heavens, they’d probably been napping in each other’s arms when John Henry came by. She wanted to hide under the seat. She felt as if her grandfather were standing right beside John Henry, peering at her with a knowing expression.

Matt climbed down from the van and slapped John Henry’s back jovially. Callie had to admire him; he was completely composed. “Sorry we missed you, John Henry. We owe you a dinner.”

“We” owed him a dinner. Callie repeated those words in her mind. Matt was closing in, telling the world that they were together for good now. He wanted John Henry to know, that was obvious.

“Where y’all headed?” John Henry asked politely.

Matt answered before Callie had a chance. “We’re delivering a load of Callie’s wares to Helen for a festival that’s coming up.”

“John Henry.” Unwilling to let Matt do all the talking for the two of them, Callie searched for something to say to reclaim her identity. “If Lacey comes by here looking for me, tell her to let herself in the cabin. She knows where the key is. She might not
show up, but then again, she might. It’s about time for her to be working the fairs around here.”

“Fine. I’ll tell her. I’ve been meaning to talk to her about a few things anyway,” he said absently as he studied Callie’s face.

“Now, John Henry, you keep your interfering hands off Lacey’s life,” Callie ordered with a firm nod. “She isn’t at all interested in your theories about matchmaking and men.”

John Henry winked at her. “You and Matt gonna take in the sights of Helen, are you?”

“We’re planning on it,” Matt answered first. Callie sighed in defeat. He gave Callie an “okay, you win” look, got a gauge, and began checking the van’s tires. “Well be back Sunday,” he called to John Henry.

“Sunday, huh?” John Henry said. He leaned his head into the van. “You take care, now, Callie,” he whispered. “I know what I said earlier about your needing a fellow. I wouldn’t want it to get out, but I’ve been known to be wrong about things once or twice. You be sure you know what you’re doing.”

There was definitely a worried frown on John Henry’s forehead. Callie leaned forward and planted a kiss in the middle of it. “Everything’s all right, you old dear, and I’m trying to learn to love somebody. Don’t worry about me,” she whispered. “I’ll be careful.”

“You feel all right? You look a little flushed.”

“This is different for me,” she whispered. “Letting myself depend on somebody. I feel … cautious.”

“Funny, that’s what Doc Campbell said about you when I asked him what you were doing in his office in the middle of the afternoon yesterday. All he’d tell me”—his voice was low in her ear—“was that you were a great believer in being cautious.”

John Henry looked at her closely, and then, when she thought her face couldn’t burn any hotter than it already had, he winked at her, pulled his head out of the window, grinned, and added, “Have fun. You deserve it.”

“What was all that whispering about?” Matt asked as he guided the van onto the steep two-lane road heading north.

“Just words to the wise from an old sage. You know John Henry. A busybody’s always got to have the last word. I hope Lacey doesn’t come here while I’m gone. John Henry has that look in his eye again. He’ll be sending men up to court her.”

The van moved smoothly along the highway, and soon they were climbing deeper into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Helen was a hundred miles northeast of Sweet Apple, and Callie normally would have made the trip in under two hours. But Matt seemed in no hurry. His steady pace and the comfortable silence that filled the van gave Callie time to think, yet it wasn’t easy to concentrate.

She stole a glance at Matt, and found there was a broad grin on his face.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “I’m thirty-five years old, and this is the first time in my life I’ve ever played hooky from work.”

“Hooky? Surely you don’t work seven days a week, do you?”

“Saturday, Sunday, and straight through the week. For as long as I can remember, since high school.”

“Why on earth did you work that hard while you were in school? Especially since you come from a wealthy family.”

He drove for a second without answering. Finally,
his voice low, he said simply, “I told you a lie about my father’s leaving me a lot of money, Caroline.”

Callie looked at him with a puzzled frown. “Why, Matthew?”

“I don’t like melodrama any more than you do. The story sounds like something out of a soap opera, and I figured you wouldn’t believe me. So I just let you think my father gave me a bundle.”

“Tell me the truth,” she said softly.

“My father died when I was fifteen. Shortly after he died I learned that everything was gone. His partners in the paint company had taken it all.”

Callie heard the bitterness in his voice. “I’m sorry, Matthew.” She reached out and touched his bare arm in concern. “Go on.”

“His beloved company, which he’d spent every day of his life building up to the point where it was ready to pay for itself, was nearly bankrupt. It killed him. He really died of grief.”

“You said his partners took everything. How?”

“They outvoted him, and he was forced to sell the plant to a big conglomerate. Afterward he found out the conglomerate intended to use the plant as a tax write-off. They eased out most of the workers, let the business go to hell, then closed it down.”

“And your dad got sick pretty soon after that?”

Matt hesitated for a moment, slowed the van, and looked at her. “He killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.”

“Oh, Matt.” She hurt as if she shared Matt’s soul. Callie closed her eyes. I do share his soul, she thought. And she understood his painful memories all too well, because they were an echo of her own.

“And your mother, Matthew?”

“My mother?” He shook his head. “She died a year later. Might as well call that suicide too. She killed herself grieving for father.”

“Oh, Matthew. How did you manage?”

His knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel. Finally he answered in slow, simple words that measured how hard this was for him. “I lived with a foster family, and I did the only thing I knew how to do. I worked. I worked my way through high school, college, and graduate school. I worked nonstop until I’d managed to get back everything my father lost, and then some.”

He sounded apologetic. “If power and wealth and rigid organization are important to me, Callie, it’s because of the past.”

“Matt,” she whispered unevenly, “do you think you could pull off the road, into that clump of trees up ahead?”

“My Lord, Caroline, you’re white as a sheet.”

Sudden concern for her erased the pain on Matt’s face as he maneuvered the van off the interstate and down the bumpy, overgrown road into a thicket of pine trees. He hurried around to the side of the van, opened the door, placed his hands around her waist, and started to lift her out.

“You need some fresh air,” he told her.

“No. I need you.” She kissed him tenderly and tried to smile. “I just need to hold you.”

He guided her into the back of the van, and they lay down on the soft couch. She began to cry gently.

“I hurt for you,” she told him as he crooned soft words against her ear and held her. “I hurt for you so much.”

She opened her body and her heart to him, and he accepted both with the hunger of a starving man.

• • •

Matt was right. The van was much more efficient than the convertible, and wonderfully private as well. It was nearly an hour before they started up the road again.

The sky was a fresh, cloud-smeared blue. The crisp mountain air caught Callie’s hair and shaped it into a dark mist around her face. She felt peaceful. She could tell from Matt’s smile and his frequent glances at her that he’d found peace too.

They passed through several truck stops before Callie’s stomach finally sent out a protest that Matt couldn’t ignore. He glanced over at her again, his smile still going full force.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Looking at me and smiling.”

“I just can’t keep my eyes off you. I’ve never known anybody who created such joy by simply being herself. I want to sit and stare at you. I want to yell to the world. I
am
going to yell to the world.” He stuck his head out the window and roared at a startled man driving an open-cab Jeep, “This is Ms. Caroline Carmichael, who craves my body and makes my soul delirious!”

The Jeep driver shook his head and returned Matt’s grin with one of his own, and a thumbs-up sign of approval.

Callie chuckled softly. “It’s hard to believe that this is the same man who stood on my porch a few weeks ago. You need a haircut and a shave. You must be intoxicated by mountain air.”

“And you,” Matt retorted seriously, “haven’t once mentioned a new cause. I think you’ve run out of things to save, preserve, picket, or protest.”

“But Matt, I haven’t had to look for a cause since I’ve had you. There’s an old saying—‘Don’t wish for water when you’re drowning in it.’ ”

There was a sudden cold silence in the van. Matt’s fingertips drummed on the steering wheel. “You mean that’s what I am to you, just a new cause, a new project of sorts?”

“Of course not,” she amended hastily. “That wasn’t what I meant. But”—she tried to think out her answer, her honest answer—“I suppose it is. Being with you has been a beautiful, wonderful experience that is new for me. Is that so wrong?”

He didn’t know how to answer. Was he going to say that he wanted to be more than a wonderful new experience? He drew a deep breath. It was time to slow down and consider the options, to quit pretending that he was simply playing hooky. Where was this weekend jaunt going to get him?

“Matt? Matt!”

“What?” He jerked himself back to the present.

“I hate to have to tell a master of planning and organization that he just missed the exit, but unless we’re going to start a Tennessee adventure, you’d better turn around and go back.”

Matt glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that not only had he driven past the exit he was to have taken, but the speedometer was recording a number much higher than he’d thought. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t like to drive fast—he’d been known to put the Corvette into superdrive when he was alone on a long stretch of road—but never when he had a passenger in the car.

He looked over at Callie’s teasing expression and choked back what he’d been about to say. Her eyes,
wide with mirth, clearly indicated she was waiting for an explanation.

“Guess it’s a side effect of some kind, Caroline Carmichael. You’ve got me going in circles.”

“Good. You need to loosen up. Even John Henry thinks you’ll ‘come around.’ ”

“Oh, no”—he chortled—“you won’t get me on that one. Talking with you is like dealing with William. I never know what you’ve got on your mind.”

“Good. Does that mean I’ll get some strawberry ice cream too?”