Part of the Bargain

“I would,” Jess replied with a smile that was at once tender and evil. And then, without so much as a word to his father and brother, he walked away.

“What the hell did he mean by that?” barked Stacey, red in the face.

The look Libby gave the boyishly handsome, caramel-eyed man beside her was hardly friendly. “You’ve got some tall explaining to do, Stacey Barlowe,” she said.

The senator, a tall, attractive man with hair as gray as Ken’s, cleared his throat in the way of those who have practiced diplomacy long and well. “I believe I’ll go up to the house and see if Ken’s got any beer on hand,” he said. A moment later he was off, following Jess’s soggy path.

Libby straightened her shoulders and calmly slapped Stacey across the face. “How dare you?” she raged, her words strangled in her effort to modulate them.

Stacey reddened again, ran one hand through his fashionably cut wheat-colored hair. He turned, as if to follow his father. “I could use a beer myself,” he said in distracted, evasive tones.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Libby cried, grasping his arm and holding on. The rich leather of his jacket was smooth under her hand. “Don’t you dare walk away from me, Stacey—not until you explain why you’ve been lying about me!”

“I haven’t been lying!” he protested, his hands on his hips now, his expensively clad body blocking the base of the dock as he faced her.

“You have! You’ve been telling everyone that I… That we…”

“That we’ve been doing what you and my brother were doing a few minutes ago?”

If Stacey had shoved Libby into the water, she couldn’t have been more shocked. A furious retort rose to the back of her throat but would go no further.

Stacey’s tarnished-gold eyes flashed. “Jess was making love to you, wasn’t he?”

“What if he was?” managed Libby after a painful struggle with her vocal cords. “It certainly wouldn’t be any of your business, would it?”

“Yes, it would. I love you, Libby.”

“You love Cathy!”

Stacey shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”

“Don’t say that,” Libby pleaded, suddenly deflated. “Oh, Stacey, don’t. Don’t do this….”

His hands came to her shoulders, fierce and strong. The topaz fever in his eyes made Libby wonder if he was sane. “I love you, Libby Kincaid,” he vowed softly but ferociously, “and I mean to have you.”

Libby retreated a step, stunned, shaking her head. The reality of this situation was so different from what she had imagined it would be. In her thoughts, Stacey had laughed when she confronted him, ruffled her hair in that familiar brotherly way of old, and said that it was all a mistake. That he loved Cathy, wanted Cathy, and couldn’t anyone around here take a joke?

But here he was declaring himself in a way that was unsettlingly serious.

Libby took another step backward. “Stacey, I need to be here, where my dad is. Where things are familiar and comfortable. Please…don’t force me to leave.”

Stacey smiled. “There is no point in leaving, Lib. If you do, I’ll be right behind you.”

She shivered. “You’ve lost your mind!”

But Stacey looked entirely sane as he shook his handsome head and wedged his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Just my heart,” he said. “Corny, isn’t it?”

“It’s worse than corny. Stacey, you’re unbalanced or something. You’re fantasizing. There was never anything between us—”

“No?” The word was crooned.

“No! You need help.”

His face had all the innocence of an altar boy’s. “If I’m insane, darlin’, it’s something you could cure.”

Libby resisted an urge to slap him again. She wanted to race into the house, but he was still barring her way, so that she could not leave the dock without brushing against him. “Stay away from me, Stacey,” she said as he advanced toward her. “I mean it—stay away from me!”

“I can’t, Libby.”

The sincerity in his voice was chilling; for the first time in all the years she’d known Stacey Barlowe, Libby was afraid of him. Discretion kept her from screaming, but just barely.

Stacey paled, as though he’d read her thoughts. “Don’t look at me like that, Libby— I wouldn’t hurt you under any circumstances. And I’m not crazy.”

She lifted her chin. “Let me by, Stacey. I want to go into the house.”

He tilted his head back, sighed, met her eyes again. “I’ve frightened you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

Libby couldn’t speak. Despite his rational, settling words, she was sick with the knowledge that he meant to pursue her.

“You must know,” he said softly, “how good it could be for us. You needed me in New York, Libby, and now I need you.”

The third voice, from the base of the hillside, was to Libby as a life preserver to a drowning person. “Let her pass, Stacey.”

Libby looked up quickly to see Jess, unlikely rescuer that he was. His hair was towel-rumpled and his jeans clung to muscular thighs—thighs that only minutes ago had pressed against her own in a demand as old as time. His manner was calm as he buttoned a shirt, probably borrowed from Ken, over his broad chest.

Stacey shrugged affably and walked past his brother without a word of argument.

Watching him go, Libby went weak with relief. A lump rose in her throat as she forced herself to meet Jess’s gaze. “You were right,” she muttered miserably. “You were right.”

Jess was watching her much the way a mountain cat would watch a cornered rabbit. For the briefest moment there was a look of tenderness in the green eyes, but then his expression turned hard and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “I trust the welcome-home party has been scheduled for later—after Cathy has been tucked into her bed, for instance?”

Libby gaped at him, appalled. Had he interceded only to torment her himself?

Jess’s eyes were contemptuous as they swept over her. “What’s the matter, Lib? Couldn’t you bring yourself to tell your married lover that the welcoming had already been taken care of?”

Rage went through Libby’s body like an electric current surging into a wire. “You don’t seriously think that I would… That I was—”

“You even managed to be alone with him. Tell me, Lib—how did you get rid of my father?”

“G-get rid…” Libby stopped, tears of shock and mortification aching in her throat and burning behind her eyes. She drew a deep, audible breath, trying to assemble herself, to think clearly.

But the whole world seemed to be tilting and swirling like some out-of-control carnival ride. When Libby closed her eyes against the sensation, she swayed dangerously and would probably have fallen if Jess hadn’t reached her in a few strides and caught her shoulders in his hands.

“Libby…” he said, and there was anger in the sound, but there was a hollow quality, too—one that Libby couldn’t find a name for.

Her knees were trembling. Too much, it was all too much. Jonathan’s death, the ugly divorce, the trouble that Stacey had caused with his misplaced affections—all of those things weighed on her, but none were so crushing as the blatant contempt of this man. It was apparent to Libby now that the lovemaking they had almost shared, so new and beautiful to her, had been some sort of cruel joke to Jess.

“How could you?” she choked out. “Oh, Jess, how could you?”