The Tempted

“She works for my parents. That doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”

“Sure it does.” She picked up her clothes.

“Wait,” Jared said impulsively. “Don’t go yet.” He hadn’t met a girl he’d found this interesting in ages.

“I have to go. My mother sent me over here to make sure the house was locked up after everyone was gone. But since you’re here, you can look after things yourself. You don’t need me.”

You’re wrong, Jared thought. He did need her. He hadn’t been a bit lonely until she showed up, but now the prospect of spending the evening alone…without her… “Look. We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot here. Stay, and let me make it up to you.”

“How?”

“We could just hang out for a while. There’s no one here but me. I could fix you dinner, wait on you for a change.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And what would you expect in return?”

He hesitated a fraction too long. The towel she’d been clutching slipped a bit, and Jared’s gaze dipped.

When she saw the direction of his stare, her face flushed bright pink. “In your dreams, buddy.”

“Hey,” he said to her retreating back. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She turned at that.

He nodded toward the soggy rose that still clung to her hair. “You’ve trespassed on private property and stolen one of my mother’s prized roses. Serious crimes that usually entail dire repercussions. But if you stay and have dinner with me, we’ll just forget all about it.”

She gave him a hard, measuring look. “There are two things you need to know about me, Mr. Spencer. One, I don’t respond well to threats.” She reached up and snatched the rose from her hair, tossing it to the ground at his feet. “But here. By all means, take back the rose. I don’t care much for the expensive hybrids anyway. All show and no substance, if you ask me. Like some people I know.”

“Ouch.” He grinned. “That hurt. What’s the second thing I should know about you?”

She gave him a sly smile. “Don’t worry about it. You’re never going to get close enough to need that information.” And with that, she disappeared inside the pool house to dress.

As last lines went, it was a good one, and Jared had been left staring after her, intrigued, amused, and aroused as hell.

She’d stolen his heart that day, but it wasn’t until the end of the summer that he’d learned what an accomplished thief she truly was.

Scrubbing his face with his hands, he leaned his head back against his chair and closed his eyes. But strangely enough, it wasn’t Tess’s image that troubled him. It was the little girl’s picture in the paper that haunted him. The missing child. For some reason, Jared couldn’t get her out of his head.

“WHAT ABOUT THE BANK?” Tess’s mother asked at dinner that night. She looked tired tonight, Tess thought. Joelle Granger was still a young woman, not yet fifty, but Emily’s disappearance had aged her. The lines in her careworn face had deepened, and her light brown hair had seemed to gray overnight. Like Tess’s, her hazel eyes were rimmed with shadows.

She, Tess, and Melanie Kent, Tess’s best friend, were seated around her dining-room table, but no one felt like eating, even though the chicken casserole was one of Joelle’s specialities.

Tess stared at her plate. Wherever Emily was, had she been given food? Or was she hungry, her little stomach swollen and knotted in pain?

Tess pictured her little girl, weak from hunger, too sick even to cry out…

Overcome by the images, she pushed away her plate. “I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t eat a bite.”

“Try to force something down, honey. You can’t keep doing this.”

“Maybe in a little while.” The thought of food made Tess nauseated, so she tried to concentrate on something else. “I went to the bank this afternoon after I talked to Naomi Cross. There’s nothing they can do. I don’t have enough equity in my house to use as collateral, and there’s nothing in the business worth liquidating.” Tess’s cleaning service had been built primarily on her own blood, sweat and tears, commodities not necessarily valued by a loan institution. “Mr. Cobb was very nice, but as he pointed out, he isn’t running a charity organization.”

Melanie gasped. Her lovely features contorted in anger. She’d always reminded Tess of a classical painting with her large, lost eyes and brooding mouth. “He didn’t say that!”

“Not in so many words, but that was the implication.” Tess rubbed her forehead. “I understand their decision. I do. It’s business. They can’t afford to take on hard-luck cases, but my daughter’s life is at stake. You would think—” She broke off, shoving back her chair as she began stacking plates.

“Leave the dishes,” her mother scolded. “I’ll take care of them later.”

“No, Mama, let me do them. I need to keep busy.”

When her mother started to get up, Melanie said quickly, “Keep your seat, Joelle. I’ll help Tess.” Grabbing the plates, she balanced them in her lap as she deftly guided her wheelchair toward the kitchen.

“You girls don’t have to do that,” Joelle protested. “I’m perfectly capable of washing my own dishes.”

“You’ve done more than your share of dishes,” Melanie insisted, referring to Joelle’s long tenure as the Spencers’ housekeeper. “You deserve a little pampering.”

But even though both Joelle and Tess had installed ramps and made their homes as wheelchair accessible as possible after the accident, Joelle’s cramped kitchen was still hard for Melanie to navigate. She unloaded the dishes in the sink, then moved back to give Tess room to work.

“I’m just in the way,” she muttered.

Tess glanced over her shoulder as she started the dish water. “Stop that. You’re never in the way, and you know it. I don’t know what I would have done without you these last weeks.”

Melanie bit her lip. “I just wish I could have done more. I wish I could have prevented this. Oh, Tess, when I think about the way she looked that afternoon—” She broke off, her blue eyes filling with tears. “If I’d just waited with her a little longer…”

Melanie was the librarian at Fairhaven Academy, and she always stopped by every afternoon to see Emily before Tess picked her up from school. On that particular day, she’d been one of the last people to see Emily before she disappeared.

Tess sighed. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. And besides, there were other teachers on the playground that day. They didn’t see anything, either.”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing. I meant what I said earlier. I don’t know how I would have gotten through this without you.”

Melanie’s eyes softened. “We’ve always been there for each other, haven’t we?” Melanie’s rehabilitation after the accident six years ago had been a long and painful ordeal, but contrary to what she’d said, Tess hadn’t been there for her. Not for a long time. And for that, she’d never quite been able to forgive herself.

She forced a smile. “We’ve been through a lot together, that’s for sure.”

“Too much,” Melanie said with a grimace, tucking her silky blond hair behind one ear.

Tess turned back to the sink, squirted soap into the hot water and began washing the dishes. As she worked, her mind drifted back in time, to the summer her and Melanie’s lives had been linked—and changed—forever…

Friends since childhood, Tess had always been the more practical of the two, the more studious, the one who never got into trouble while the impetuous Melanie seemed to hover on the brink of one disaster after another.

So it had come as a surprise to both of them when, in the summer after their junior year in college, Tess had been the one to fall in love, and with a man totally unsuited for her.

Jared Spencer was older, for one thing. More sophisticated. More worldly. Tess sometimes wondered how she had ever let him get under her skin the way he had. He wasn’t her type at all. She’d always held nothing but contempt for the southern aristocracy with their customs and attitudes and machinations.

But in spite of her disdain and no small amount of resistance, Jared had finally gotten to her. He’d pursued her arduously and won her over, and sometimes still, in looking back, Tess wondered why he’d been so persistent. Was it a simple case of the forbidden fruit? Had she, the housekeeper’s daughter, been an irresistible temptation to rebel against a lifetime of expectations?

Melanie, perhaps not to be outdone, or perhaps because the Spencer charisma had enthralled her, too, had promptly gotten involved with Jared’s younger brother, Royce, although she’d kept the relationship a secret. Tess hadn’t suspected a thing until she’d opened the door one night, and Melanie had collapsed, hysterical, into her arms.