Lassoed by Fortune

The next moment she’d suddenly put her hands against his back and began to push him toward the door.

She managed to move Liam a few stumbling feet only because she’d caught him by surprise. But once he regained his balance, Liam employed his full weight as a counterforce and there was no way she could budge him more than a couple of shaky inches.

“I just want to say one more thing—” he began.

Exhausted by her effort to move him any farther toward the door, Julia dropped her hands to her sides. “I’ll hold you to that,” she told him sharply.

“How are your folks going to feel when this store is forced to close down?” His tone was surprisingly mild as he put the question to her. He looked like a man who felt he’d scored his winning goal and was just waiting for the fact to sink in with the opposing team.

Julia, however, looked at him as if she thought he’d just lost his mind.

“Why would this store be forced to close down?” She wanted to know his rationale.

Like a parent introducing a new concept to a child, he began to patiently explain. “Hey, chain drugstores aren’t going to be the only thing that’ll be turning up here once you open the floodgates and start ‘building the town up.’ Big chain supermarkets will be horning their way in here, too.” Liam paused to look around the grocery store that had remained relatively unchanged for most of his lifetime. He found that rather comfortingly reassuring. “And this store, with its neat little aisles and limited selections will be boarded up faster than you can say ‘I told you so,’” he concluded.

“I wouldn’t be saying ‘I told you so.’” There were small, sharp daggers coming from her eyes, all aimed at his heart—if he actually had one. “That would be your line,” she retorted.

“Yes,” Liam agreed, grinning from ear to ear. “It would be.”

The strange thing about that grin, Julia later recalled, was that it didn’t seem to reach his eyes. In her experience, any smile or grin that was genuine in scope always included the eyes. Without the eyes being involved, the person who was smiling was only trying to fool people as to his mind-set.

Sometimes, she couldn’t help thinking, they were out to fool themselves, as well. The first time she noticed the difference between real smiles and ones that were entrenched in deception, consciously or otherwise, was when she’d caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror on her wedding day.

Her eyes hadn’t been smiling then, either. At the time, she was doing what she felt was the “right thing.” It had taken her three years before she’d admitted that to herself.

“Look,” she told Liam, “either buy something or leave. I’ve got work to do and I don’t have time to let you go on badgering me like this because you’re so small-minded you can’t see that you either progress or wither and die on the vine. And you might be content to let Horseback Hollow stagnate, but I want it to flourish.”

He looked at her for a long moment, as if he was debating saying anything to her or not. Finally he said, “There’s a third alternative in that multiple choice of yours.”

She didn’t see it and couldn’t imagine what his point was. “Enlighten me,” she told him.

He laughed at her choice of words. “That’ll take a lot longer than I have right now. But let me just tell you what that third choice is.... It’s maintaining the status quo.”

That was just theme and variation of one of the two choices she’d presented to him.

“In other words, stagnating,” she declared. But before he could say anything further to contradict what he’d just labeled his so-called “third” choice, Julia started talking rapidly to get her point across.

“Nothing ever remains the same, no matter how much you might want it to. Change is inevitable and you can’t stop it or stand in its way. But you can guide it,” she emphasized.

Liam frowned as he shook his head, the ultimate immovable object to her irresistible force. “Sorry, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than that to convince me to surrender to the boys with the deep pockets. I’d rather just go my own way.”

“Why don’t you?” she said encouragingly. The next moment she’d crossed the floor to the door and held it wide open for him, her meaning clear. “Nobody here will stop you, that’s for damn sure.”

Rather than do exactly that and just leave, Liam pulled himself up to his full height and seemed to just loom over her, his bearing fully emphasizing just how much taller than her he really was.

“No, but someone should really stop you,” he told her in a voice that was completely devoid of any humor. “Before it’s too late and we all wind up suffering the consequences.”

Again Julia raised her chin defiantly, her eyes flashing as she barely managed to suppress her anger.

“It’ll take a better man than you to do it,” she informed him hotly.

“Maybe,” Liam allowed, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t try.”

Before Julia could ask him just what he intended to do, Liam did it.

Did something he hadn’t even foreseen himself doing—at least not in the heat of this exchange. Although if he were being completely honest with himself, he would have had to admit that he had envisioned exactly this transpiring more than just once or twice in his head—as well as in his unguarded dreams.

One second they were exchanging glares and hot words, the next it was no longer just the words that were hot.

It was the two of them.

Liam had caught her by her shoulders and brought his mouth down on hers.

There was the argument that doing this was the only way to stop her from talking and, more importantly, from espousing the so-called cause she seemed so intent on pushing.

There was a whole host of arguments and half-truths he could have told himself about why he had done what he’d done. But deep in his soul, he knew that there was only one real reason he was doing this.

Because he wanted to.

* * *

Rather than embracing the cause that was so close to her heart, after a beat, to her dismay, Julia found herself embracing him instead. Found herself weaving her arms around Liam’s neck as best she could, raising herself up on her tiptoes so that she could lean her body into his.

She had to have lost her mind; there was no other explanation for behaving this way.

Yet, as upset as doing this made her, Julia just could not make herself pull back or break away from Liam and his lethal lips.

Not even the tiniest bit.

Not when the very blood in her veins was rising to an alarming temperature and the room was spinning around her faster than Dorothy’s house when it was snatched up by the twister that had sent it whisking off to Oz.

Julia realized that her heart rate had quickened to the point of doubling and the very air seemed to have disappeared right out of her lungs.

Heaven knew that she’d been kissed before, more times than she could possibly count. And of course she’d made love before, as well, but this... This was some kind of new, crazy sensation that she had never, ever encountered before and although she knew, knew in her heart, that whatever this was, was bad for her, she just couldn’t make herself pull away and stop.

Not yet.

A few seconds from now, yes, but not yet.

* * *

Liam was completely convinced that he had succeeded in utterly losing his mind. There was no other reason for what was going on.

He wasn’t that eighteen-year-old hotshot that he had once been anymore, wasn’t that cocky high school senior who reveled in the adulation he saw in every single high school girl’s eyes when she looked at him.

Back then, he’d thrived on those looks and those girls.

But right now he would have been hard-pressed to remember any of their names. They all seemed like just so many interchangeable entities, feeding his fragile young ego and providing a release for all those wild, raging hormones that plagued so many boys at that age.