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  “What plan?” the first man asked as they began to walk away.

  “Well, he figured if he sweet-talked that gal who was pushing it—you know, the one who runs the Superette—and threw in a little loving to boot, she’d come around and see things his way. You know what that guy’s like when he pours on the charm. Ain’t a woman alive who can resist Liam Jones once he gets going.”

  “Well, looks like this Julia person did, though,” his friend commented as their voices faded away.

  Julia stood there, staring at the sign as the two men walked away. But this time, she really didn’t even see it. Her vision was blurred with angry tears and she was unable to move—afraid to move because she felt physically sick and was afraid that one wrong step and she was going to throw up.

  Literally.

  Did everyone know about Liam’s “plan”?

  Was she the laughingstock of the town?

  But she’d thought he loved her—

  She’d thought—

  Damn it, she hadn’t thought and that was the problem, Julia upbraided herself. She’d gone leading with her heart, not her head in this.

  More than that, she’d convinced herself that someone like Liam—the eternal “bad boy”—could have feelings, actual feelings for someone like her.

  Just how stupid could she be?

  Taking in a slow, deep breath and then releasing it, Julia did what she could to try to get hold of herself and her shattered ego. All she wanted to do was to crawl into a hole and die, but she couldn’t indulge herself and just take off to cry this huge, searing, gaping pain away.

  If she didn’t turn up at the store soon, her mother would come looking for her and she couldn’t have that sweet woman finding her like this.

  Damn, but this hurt.

  She’d remained in Horseback Hollow, giving up her dreams and her education, to provide support, someone to lean on, for her mother. In short, a solution to Mother’s problem.

  Solutions weren’t supposed to generate their own set of problems.

  At least, she wasn’t going to create any problems, any waves. She was not going to let her mother see her cry or suspect that she’d just had her heart literally cut out of her chest.

  All right, she’d survive this, she consoled herself, using the back of her hand to quickly wipe away the telltale tracks of her tears. Besides, she still had the restaurant to look forward to.

  Somehow, that seemed like a very small consolation prize in comparison to what she’d thought she’d had in the palm of her hand just a few short minutes ago.

  Served her right for believing that love actually conquered all. All it had conquered, to her huge regret, was her.

  *

  “I think you better get down there and exercise a little damage control—or maybe a lot,” Toby told his brother without any preamble as he walked into Liam’s stable looking for him.

  Liam looked at him, surprised to see his brother here. They had no project set to do and as far as he knew, Toby was busy with work on his own place.

  Obviously what he was talking about seemed important enough to Toby for him to come out here looking for him. He could have saved himself a trip.

  “If you’re talking about that restaurant coming here, I’ve decided not to fight it anymore.” Liam grinned, thinking of last night and the way Julia had felt in his arms.

  As though he had come home. Julia was his “home.”

  He finally, finally understood what it was that his brother Jude found so compelling about this thing called love, real love. The real thing—and this felt like it was—was absolutely, mind-blowingly wonderful. He was only sorry that it had taken him so long to find it—especially when it turned out to be right under his nose.

  “No, I’m talking about your little plan coming to light,” Toby stressed, disapproval imprinted on his handsome features.

  Liam stopped mucking out the stall and stared at his younger brother. “What little plan? What are you talking about?”

  Toby sighed. He didn’t like to have to say this out loud. It seemed beneath Liam somehow—even though it sounded like the “old” Liam. “The plan to seduce Julia and get her to see things your way.”

  Liam frowned. He didn’t bother saying he’d gotten caught in his own trap. That was self-evident to him and anyone in his life who mattered. Right now, there was something more important on the drawing board.

  His eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?” He wanted to know. While he’d initially intended to make Julia come around through unorthodox methods, he had never said a word about it to anyone that he knew of. If someone was shooting off their mouth about it, it had to be from pure conjecture, not something he’d actually said.

  It pained Toby to have to say this to his brother. He’d seen a change in Liam these past two weeks. A change for the better. He was less caustic, far more cheerful. He’d actually caught Liam whistling a time or two. He didn’t want this new, improved Liam to just disappear.

  “Buck Holt was shooting off his mouth about your plans to ‘seduce’ Julia to one of his friends and you know how fast word spreads around here.”

  He could feel his heart quickening with anxiety. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t said anything to Buck. This was bad.

  “You think Julia knows?”

  “Unless she fell into a coma early this morning, yeah, I think she knows. What the hell were you thinking, trying to pull off something like that?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” he protested. “And I didn’t try to pull it off. I abandoned that harebrained scheme before I ever tried to do anything with it.”

  Toby looked at him skeptically. “Before or after you slept with her?”

  This was getting to be positively unnerving. Did everybody know everybody else’s business? “How do you know about that?” Liam demanded.

  He hadn’t told anyone he’d slept with Julia. Had she confided in someone? It didn’t seem likely, but right now, everything was in such a state of confusion for him—not to mention red alert—that he didn’t know what was up and what was down.

  “Wasn’t exactly hard to figure out,” Toby told him. “She had that ‘touched by Liam Jones’ glow that three-quarters of the girls in the graduating senior class had. Don’t forget, I was right behind you in high school,” he reminded Liam.

  To his surprise, Liam tossed aside the rake he was using and hurried out of the stable to where he had left his truck parked early this morning, after taking Julia back to her home.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Toby called out, raising his voice.

  “To see about that damage control you mentioned,” Liam shouted over his shoulder.

  Gunning the engine, Liam threw the transmission into overdrive and all but flew the entire distance from his ranch to Horseback Hollow and the Superette.

  He had to make this right, he thought. This just couldn’t end like this, here, today.

  It couldn’t.

  This had to be what they meant by that saying about sins coming home to roost. Liam didn’t consider himself a sinner per se, but he had pretty much taken what he wanted out of life and enjoyed all the advantage of being handsome coupled with an ability to say exactly what women wanted to hear.

  Oh, he never lied, never made promises he had no intentions of keeping just to get what he wanted, but that didn’t exactly make him noble, either. Everything had come easy to him because of his looks and his charm. And the irony of it was that the one woman he really, really wanted he was now in danger of losing because of his past behavior—and someone’s big mouth.

  Maybe not, he tried to console himself. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Maybe Julia wouldn’t believe that he had tried to get her to come around by seducing her—

  Why not? a voice in his head asked.

  Be honest. Hadn’t that really been the plan to begin with? To get her to come around to his side using any means that he could?

  It wouldn’t matter that the moment he began to be ar
ound her, everything had drastically changed. Wouldn’t matter that he’d gotten caught up in her, in wanting to be with her.

  In wanting to see her happy.

  The damage was done and that would be all that she’d see, all that she would focus on. She was, after all, only human, not a saint.

  He should have leveled with her from the very start, Liam lectured himself. But he hadn’t wanted to risk it. Instead he had hoped that if he’d let things ride, they would eventually go his way because everything else always had.

  And since he had eventually found himself on the same side of the debate about the restaurant as she was, he felt that there was no point in letting Julia know that he had had less than honorable intentions when he’d undertaken this whole campaign.

  The truth was highly overrated, he couldn’t help thinking.

  Look what the truth was about to do to him—it was going to torpedo the first real love he’d ever felt right out of the water.

  Part of him wanted to lay low and wait for this to blow over. But that was the coward’s way out and beneath him, he silently insisted as he watched his speedometer edge up to eighty.

  It wasn’t worthy of him—or of her.

  He arrived in town faster than he’d thought possible. Drawing his courage to him, Liam parked his truck across the street from the Superette and got out. His knees shook as he walked toward the Superette, trying to figure out just how he was going to say what he needed to say to save what they had between them.

  His mind temporarily went blank for ten terrifying seconds.

  This had to work. Even if he had to get on his knees, this had to work. He couldn’t think about it going the other way.

  *

  The bell tinkled, announcing his entrance. Julia automatically glanced toward the door.

  Damn it, Julia thought, her heart wasn’t supposed to leap up like that anymore at the sight of Liam, not when she knew what was behind that smile, behind those compelling blue eyes that had come close to being her undoing.

  She had to remember that Liam didn’t care about her. He’d probably spent the morning laughing about the way she’d become almost like the proverbial putty in his hands. He had tried to play her and he had almost made her into a laughingstock.

  The thought stung something awful.

  She wanted Liam to feel what she was feeling, to know the pain of hurt, the sting of humiliation.

  At a loss how to begin to broach this smoothly, he just stumbled in with an apology. “Look, Julia, I didn’t mean to—”

  Her eyes were frosty as she looked at him. “If you’re trying to apologize, there’s no need to.”

  He wasn’t going to take the easy way out. He could see that he’d hurt her and she was angry. “Yes, there is. I—”

  “There’s no need to,” she repeated, continuing as if Liam hadn’t tried to interrupt. “Because, obviously, what you were attempting to do didn’t succeed. Not that it was a bad plan,” she allowed loftily, totally confusing him given the expression on his face, “but you didn’t count on the fact that two can play that game.”

  His confusion only intensified. It felt as if someone had taken his brain to use as a tennis ball and had just lobbed it far into the air.

  “What are you talking about? What game?” he asked.

  Because people were beginning to stare, she tugged Liam over to the side, away from prying eyes. “To keep it simple, we can call it ‘victory by seduction.’ I think that rather sums it up nicely, actually.” Her eyes bored straight into him. “You think that you’re the only one who uses seduction as a tool to persuade an unwitting person of something?”

  He stared at her, dumbfounded. What was she saying?

  He didn’t have long to wait for an answer. “While you were trying to play me, I decided to turn the tables on you and seduce you into seeing things my way.” Her smile was cool and never even came close to reaching her eyes. “And, seeing as how the vote went my way and the sign for the new restaurant went up this morning, I’d say I turned out to be better at this little ‘persuasion’ game than you were.”

  She pretended to laugh even though the sound tore at her throat.

  “In all fairness, I guess you didn’t realize that I had it in me—but I did,” she told him. “So you see,” Julia concluded, “there’s no reason to apologize. What you did just activated what I had to do. And I did it. You didn’t oppose me and now the restaurant’s going to be built.”

  Was she being truthful? Had she really played him, gotten him to come around by playing up to him, by making him think of nothing else, want nothing else, but her?

  Liam felt as if someone had rammed a knife into his gut and then twisted it. Hard.

  “Congratulations,” he rasped.

  “Thank you,” she replied in the same dead tone he’d just used.

  She turned away, walking back to the register, pretending that she was needed back at work.

  Julia didn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that he was walking out. She heard the bell signal his departure. It almost sounded mournful to her.

  Victory had never felt as hollow as it did this minute.

  That was okay, she told herself. She’d get over this by and by.

  In about fifty years or so.

  Until then, she thought, squaring her shoulders and marching to the register, she had customers to wait on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Five days went by. Five long, agonizing days that seemed to drag by in slow motion, leaving long, jagged, painful scars in their wake.

  Julia found she had trouble concentrating. It wasn’t that she would drift off; it was more a case of her mind going blank with nothing for her to catch hold of. That, at least, was more merciful than other moments when she would berate herself for being such a fool. For being so incredibly naïve.

  She’d been smarter, she told herself as despair would start to fill every nook and cranny in her being, when she had been in high school than she was now. Back in high school, she’d made a point of deflecting Liam’s attention that time it had been directed at her.

  Granted, when he had asked her out, it hadn’t really come across as a full-fledged attack on her defenses, but at the time she’d been more than relatively inexperienced. And yet she’d been smart enough to say “No” to him when all the other girls in school had cried a breathless “Yes!”

  She might secretly have been a little miffed when he didn’t try to get her to change her mind and had just shrugged in response to her rejection, but she’d been proud of herself then. Proud of the fact that she hadn’t just followed the crowd like some brainless lemming and gloried in whatever small crumb of attention Liam would have been willing to give her at the time.

  The bottom line was that she’d been discerning and she had made her mark on him by being the only one who’d turned him down, the one who hadn’t worshipped at his feet.

  And where did that get her? Years of unconsciously wondering what it might have been like to be with him? Being ripe for his romantic advances when they finally materialized in full force? That didn’t exactly seem like much of a triumph to her.

  And now what?

  Now that she felt like a hollowed-out shell of her former self, what exactly was she to do with herself? Now that she knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of his touch, his kiss, his exquisite lovemaking, where did she go from here?

  How did she go on knowing that the very best was behind her and that she had nothing but emptiness in front of her?

  Frustrated, Julia wiped back one offending tear, silently forbidding herself from shedding any more.

  A lot of good that did, she thought unhappily. She was just grateful they had closed for the evening and that there were no customers to witness her meltdown.

  No one, that is, except for her mother.

  Julia turned her head away, hoping her mother hadn’t noticed the telltale tears before she had a chance to wipe them away.

  But she should
have known better. Her mother was one of those legendary eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head mothers and was almost always one step ahead of her.

  “I hate seeing you like this,” Annie told her, her voice throbbing with sympathy. She had given Julia five days to deal with whatever was going on in her life, but she couldn’t bear it any longer and broke her silence as they closed up the store. “Maybe if you tried to talk to him—”

  “No!” Julia snapped, then flushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you,” she said in apology. “But really, Mom, I’m fine.”

  “No,” her mother replied quietly but firmly, “you’re not.” She pointed out the difference. “When your marriage to Neal ended, you were fine. A little sad, yes, but you mustered on just as I knew you would. You didn’t look the way you do now—”

  Carrying the dairy products to the refrigerator in the storeroom, Julia sighed. “Mother, you’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m observing,” Annie corrected. “And if anything, I’m understating the situation.

  “You and Liam looked good together. Were good together,” her mother stressed. “Some mothers sense things like that,” she explained, “and I sensed it about the two of you.”

  Yeah, well, it was an act, all an act, Julia thought. And she, and her mother apparently, had fallen for it.

  “He fooled us all, Mother. Liam is a very good actor.”

  But Annie shook her head. Her still vibrant red hair was cut short and swished around her face as if to underscore the sentiment she expressed.

  “Not that good, Julia. My vision isn’t colored by a desire for you to marry well or to nab a wealthy husband. My only, only requirement was—and is—for you to follow your heart, which was why I wasn’t all that overjoyed when you told me you were marrying Neal.”

  The corners of Julia’s mouth curved sadly. She’d expected her mother to be overjoyed by the news that she was going to marry the affable lawyer. Seeing sadness in her mother’s eyes had only confused her.

  “I remember,” Julia said quietly.