Mad About Max
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Penny McCusker
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Chapter One
“Please tell me that wasn’t superglue.”
Sara Lewis tore her gaze away from the gorgeous—and worried—blue eyes of Max Devlin, looking up to where her hands were flattened against the wall over his head. Even when she saw the damning evidence squished between her right palm and her third-grade class’s mangled Open House banner, she refused to admit it, even to herself.
If she admitted she was holding a drained tube of superglue in her hand, she might begin to wonder if there’d been any stray drops. And where they might have landed. That sort of speculation would only lead her to conclusions she’d be better off not drawing, conclusions like there was no way a stray drop could have landed on the floor. Not with her body plastered to Max’s. No, that kind of speculation would lead her right smack-dab into trouble.
As if she could have gotten into any more trouble.
She’d been standing on a chair, putting up the banner her third-grade class had created to welcome their parents to Erskine Elementary’s Open House. But her hands had jerked when she heard Max’s voice out in the hallway, and she’d torn it clear in half. She’d grabbed the tube of glue off her desk to save the irreplaceable strip of laboriously scrawled greetings and brilliant artwork, and jumped back on her chair, only to find Max already there. He’d grabbed one end of the banner, then dived for the other as it fluttered away. Now he was spread-eagled against the wall, clutching both ends of the banner, trapped by Sara and her chair.
She’d pulled the ragged ends of the banner together, but just as she’d started to glue them, Max had turned around and nearly knocked her over. “Hold still,” she’d said sharply, not quite allowing herself to notice that he was facing her now, that perfect male body against hers, that heart-stopping face only inches away. Instead, she’d asked him to hold the banner in place while she applied the glue. The rest was history. Or in her case infamy.
“Uh, Sara…” Max was trying to slide out from between her and the wall, but she met his eyes again and shook her head.
“Just a little longer, Max. I want to make sure the glue is dry.”
What she really needed was a moment to figure out how badly she’d humiliated herself this time. Experimentally, she stuck her backside out. Sure enough, the front of her red pleather skirt tented dead center, stuck fast to the lowermost pearl button on Max’s shirt—the button that was just above his belt buckle, which was right above his—
Sara slammed her hips back against his belly, an automatic reaction intended to halt the dangerous direction of her thoughts and hide the proof of her latest misadventure. It was like throwing fuel on the fire her imagination had started.
Max’s breath whooshed out, hot and moist against the inner slopes of her breasts. She didn’t waste time wondering how she could feel his breath right through her heavy angora sweater. It made perfect sense, considering that his face was buried between her breasts, his mouth right at the bottom of her breastbone.
Too bad the sweater wasn’t a V-neck, Sara caught herself thinking, a low, cleavage-baring V-neck. Her front-clasp bra would have posed no problem to a talented man like Max Devlin, and his mouth was there anyway. Blood rushed into her face, then drained away to throb deep and low, just about where his belt buckle was digging into her—
“Sara!”
She snapped back to reality, noting the exasperation in his voice, even muffled as it was by the regrettably turtle-necked sweater. Reluctantly, she arched away from him. The man had to breathe, after all.
“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. In fact, that tone amazed her, considering that she was pressed against a man she’d been secretly in love with for the better part of six years.
“There always is, Sara,” Max said, exasperation giving way to amusement. “There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for how Mrs. Tilford’s cat wound up on top of the church bell tower.”
Sara grimaced.
“There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Jenny Hastings went into the Crimp ’N Cut a blonde and came out a redhead. Barn-red.”
Sara cringed.
“And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the new stained-glass window in the town hall looking more like an advertisement for a brothel than a reenactment of Erskine’s founding father rescuing the Indian maidens.”
She huffed out a breath, indignant. “I only broke the one pane.”
“Yeah, the pane between the grateful, kneeling maidens and the very happy Jim ‘Mountain Man’ Erskine.”
“The talk would die down if the mayor let me get the pane fixed instead of just shoving the rest of them together so it looked like the Indian maidens were, well, really grateful.”
“People are coming from miles around to see it,” Max reminded her. “He’d lose the vote of every businessman in town if he ruined the best moneymaker they’ve ever had.”
Sara huffed out another breath. It was a little hypocritical for the people of Erskine, Montana, to pick on her for something they were capitalizing on, especially when she did have a perfectly good reason for why it had happened, why bad luck seemed to follow her around like a black cloud. Except she couldn’t tell anyone what that reason was, especially not Max. Because he was the reason.
One look at him and all she could think about was how it would feel to have his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, the long, solid length of him pressing her down into a soft mattress or a haystack or against a wall…Sara glanced away from the white-painted cement block just inches from her face, but she couldn’t hide from the truth.
She loved a man who’d closed off his heart, a man who tossed up a barrier whenever a woman got too close to him. Except for her, Sara thought. He seemed perfectly content with her friendship, and she was too afraid of losing it to ask him for anything more, so she did her best to hide her feelings and, while she was concentrating on that, something embarrassing always happened.
But that wasn’t really the point, Sara reminded herself. The point was that she was superglued to Max Devlin.
“I’m sorry, Max.”
She didn’t have to elaborate. He looked down to where her skirt and his button were getting up close and personal, then at her face again. His expression, raised eyebrows and half smile, said it all.
“At least the superglue isn’t dripping anymore.”
“Sara, Sara, Sara,” he said with a chuckle that resonated through her ribs and did serious damage to her heart. “What am I going to do with you?”
She could have told him, if her breath hadn’t backed up in her lungs, if the thought of what she wanted him to do to her didn’t have all the blood draining out of her brain so she couldn’t even put words to the images that haunted her nights and dazzled her days. She would have told him, if she’d had the courage.
“Unstick me,” she said, then found herself almost wishing she was talking about more than her skirt.
Six years was a long time to love a man who only considered her a friend, a long time to love that man’s son as if he were her own. A long time to dream…Without Max there would be a huge hole in her life, but Sara wanted more than a friend. She wanted a man to sit down to dinner with each night, a man to share her joys and sorrows, a man to give her children of her own. The longer she held out for the impossible, the longer she would be ignoring the possible.
She stared down into Max’s laughing eyes and accepted that she was just too stubborn to believe anything was impossible.
“Is the banner all right?” Max asked.
Sarah took one last rewardingly deep breath and glanced up. Somehow she’d managed to repair the off-center tear so well, even she could barely see the seam from less than a foot away. “Move your hands,” she said.
Max dropped his arms, rolling his shoulders and whistling out a breath.
Sara eased her hands off the banner, first one, then the other, keeping them within easy slapping distance, just in case. The paper sagged a bit in the middle, then settled. She let out her pent-up breath. “It’s holding.”
“I’m sure glad to hear that.”
She let her arms drop, forgetting that she was standing on a child’s classroom chair. Max caught her around the hips just as she lost her footing on the slippery wooden seat.
Sara froze. Not just her body—her heart stopped, she quit breathing and time, as she knew it, ground to a halt. Her eyelids fluttered down, her gaze accidentally colliding with Max’s, eyes as blue as the flame of a Bunsen burner. He flexed his fingers, and every nerve in her body shrieked back to life. Her heart lurched into an unsteady rhythm, the blood pounding where his fingers bracketed her hips. Purely out of self-defense, she braced her hands on his shoulders and tried to climb down from the chair. Away from him.
The wash of cool air on her thighs stopped her. Of course, she thought, closing her eyes and heaving out a shaky breath, she was still joined to Max by the bonds of holy superglue. She longed to get naked with him, but not in her classroom, mere moments before twenty-five third-graders and their parents were due to arrive for Open House. She had to get out of this embarrassing situation before someone saw her. If that meant giving Max a close-up of her shockingly unteacherlike black satin panties, so be it.
Max wasn’t as anxious to put her modesty on the line as she was. “Uh, I think you should stay where you are,” he said, his hands tightening on her hips, his wary eyes on the way her hemline rose when she tried again to step down from the chair.
“Half the town is going to walk in that door in a few minutes.” Or a few seconds, Sara corrected, as the sound of voices and footsteps drifted in from the hallway, reminding her that her clock was at least five minutes slow.
Peep show and Max’s hands be damned, she jumped down from the chair and leaned to the right, grabbing the scissors off her desk. Max’s mouth dropped open, but Sara didn’t give him time to react to seeing a lethal weapon in the hand of someone who couldn’t walk straight half the time. She snipped, and in a show of grace and balance the likes of which no ballet dancer could have duplicated and no one in Erskine would have believed her capable, she raced to the peg across the room, grabbed her art apron off the hook and slipped it over her head, tying it and turning just as sixty pounds of eight-year-old launched himself into her arms.
“Hi, Sara—I mean, Miss Lewis,” Joey said, his arms tight about her waist.
Sara’s heart melted, all her self-consciousness draining away. “Hi yourself, Mr. Devlin.” She hugged Joey back, then let him go, her smile coming more easily and sincerely as she welcomed the students and parents streaming into the classroom. This was where she belonged, where she felt competent and confident, no matter what.
She didn’t look at Max again, didn’t have to assure herself that he’d found a way to cover that damning swatch of red pleather sticking to his shirt button. If anyone saw it and figured out why she was wearing a paint-blotched apron, he’d be just as embarrassed as she would.
“Hey, Sara—” Joey tugged on her sleeve, too, just in case his exuberant words didn’t get her attention.
“Hey, Joey.” She ruffled his sandy-brown hair, so much like his father’s. Max Devlin had it all in the looks department—sun-bleached hair that made her hands itch to brush it from his brow, sparkling blue eyes and a smile that always made her breath catch. His son was going to be just as big a heartbreaker when he grew up.
“Dad let me sleep over at Jason Hartfield’s last night.”
“Good for you.” And for Max, Sara thought as she hunkered down. Joey was the only family Max had; he rarely let the boy out of his sight for anything other than school. She was glad he’d realized that Joey was old enough to go farther afield than the old bunkhouse she rented on their ranch. And that he’d been wise enough to let him go. “Did you have a good time?”
“The best. We went hiking and had a bonfire and stayed up late watching scary movies and eating popcorn. It was almost ten o’clock before Mrs. Hartfield made us turn off the light.”
“Ten o’clock. Wow,” Sara said, suitably impressed. “And I’ll bet you were still up at five in the morning to help Jason with his chores ’cause that’s the kind of friend you are.”
He blushed, his grubby tennis shoe tracing the ribbons of color wound through the dark blue background of the new carpeting. “It was no big deal,” he mumbled. “Hey, did Dad tell you he gave me a colt of my own? He says I’m old enough now.”
He was growing too fast, Sara thought, her heart aching with love and pride, and a slight pang at how quickly time was passing. Not long ago he’d been a toddler she’d sung lullabies to, then a preschooler with such an appetite for knowledge that she’d had to teach him to read so she wouldn’t spend every spare minute reading to him. She’d battled back the same tears of pride and joy on his first day of school, and every milestone since, that she was experiencing now.
If there’d been any justice in the world Joey would have belonged to her instead of a woman who wanted fame and fortune badly enough to trade in a good man and a wonderful son for minor roles in B movies. But life didn’t work that way, and Sara counted herself lucky just for the blessings she’d been given.
Joey tugged on her sleeve, waiting until she focused on him again. “I named my colt Spielberg, Sara. He’s six months old and Dad’s going to help me raise him. I get to feed him and brush him—Dad says that’s so he’ll get used to me and start depending on me. And when Spielberg is two, Dad’s going to help me saddle-break him.”
“What a lucky kid you are.” Sara smiled and nudged him with her elbow, eight-year-old style, so he wouldn’t get embarrassed again. “If you want, I’ll lend you my video camera and you can document the whole thing.”
Joey’s eyes widened. His fondest wish was to become a movie director—which explained the colt’s name. “Would you really do that?”
“Absolutely. The camera just sits around most of the time, and I know you’ll take good care of it.”
“If he doesn’t, I’ll ground him for life,” Max said as he came to stand beside his son. He put one hand on Joey’s shoulder and reached the other out to her.
Sara took it, let him help her to her feet, then hung on to him when she wobbled unsteadily.
“You okay?” Max asked.
“My foot’s asleep,” she lied, letting go of his hand even though she had the perfect excuse to keep holding it. Most of the adults in the room were watching avidly, and she wasn’t about to give them any more entertainment than she had to. “Joey was just telling me about Spielberg—the horse, not the director.”
“Yeah,” Max chuckled. “I guess he caught the movie bug from his mom. You sure you want to hang that name on him, pal?”
“Yep,” Joey said matter-of-factly, then changed the subject between one breath and the next. “Hey, Sara—”
“Miss Lewis,” Max corrected, his deep voice sending shivers down Sara’s spine.
“Sorry, S—Miss Lewis. Dad and me’re going to the church hall for ice cream after the Open House. Are you coming, too?”
“Um…” Sara usually avoided the town dances, ice-cream socials and potluck dinners, afraid she’d do something clumsy and wind up ruining everyone’s time. She glanced at Max and knew that he knew what she was thinking. His sympathy made her want to cry, though it felt more like frustration than gratitude. “I don’t think so, Joey.”
“But everyone in town will be there, Sara. You can drive over with Dad and me in the pickup.”
“Sara has her own car,” Max pointed out.
“That would be dumb when we’re all going to the same place,” Joey said.
Max shrugged and gave Sara a resigned smile. “I think Joey wants you to come have ice cream with us.”
Not as much as she did. The three of them in the cab of Max’s pickup, headed to a town gathering, was like a picture of heaven to her. Like they were a real family… “I’ll think about it,” Sara said, knowing she’d already given it way too much thought for her own good. That dream was so big a part of her life that she was very careful not to indulge herself too much, in case she stepped over the line between fantasy and reality.
“Okay,” Joey said, his face lighting up when he spied the Hartfields coming in the door. “Jason’s here,” he said, all but dancing with excitement, then catapulting across the room to greet his friend before Max had time to do more than nod.
Sara glanced over at Max, whatever she’d been about to say incinerated when she caught him staring at her apron—right about the place where that little diamond-shaped hole in her skirt would be. Which reminded her…She let her gaze drift up, casually, to where the matching bit of red pleather was, or should have been.
“I tucked it down below my waistband,” Max said by way of explanation. “The shirt is so tight on the back of my neck I feel like it’s trying to saw its way through my spine, but what’s a little paralysis compared to a lady’s honor?”
Sara risked a glance at his face. He was smiling, his eyes sparkling like the sun on water.
She looked away before she did something stupid, like tell him just how desperately she loved him. “Thank you,” she managed to choke out.
“No problem,” Max said with the same kind of offhanded shrug his son used so often. “You getting a cold?”
Sara cleared her throat and kept her eyes off him so it wouldn’t tighten up again. “I guess I must be.”
“You should go home early, fix yourself a whiskey, lemon and honey and tuck yourself into bed with a hot-water bottle.”
“That sounds like just the cure.”
“Dad!”
“Gotta go, Sara. You take care of yourself.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Sara mumbled, looking up in time to see Max saunter off toward his son. And he knew just how to saunter, she thought as she watched his long, strong legs carry him and his jeans-clad backside away from her.
“You should tuck yourself into bed with something hot all right, but if I were you, I’d try the doctor rather than his cure.”
“Janey!” Sara glanced around, worried that someone had overheard her best friend—her only friend, aside from Max—and the one person she could confide in about Max. Without Janey Walters’s friendship, unquestioning support and wicked sense of humor, Sara knew she’d have gone off the deep end years ago.
“Relax,” Janey said. “I’m not about to let anyone hear me talking like that. I have a reputation to uphold in this town.”
“So do I,” Sara said glumly.
“Aw, poor Sara.” Janey stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy, and put her arm around Sara’s shoulders. “People just pick on you because you’re an outsider. One of them city gals,” she added in an overdone drawl.
“I’ve been here almost six years,” Sara muttered. “When do I get to be one of you folk?”
“When pigs fly,” Janey said matter-of-factly. “Either you grow up around here or you marry someone from around here—then you get accepted by default. It’s tradition.”
Sara felt even more dejected by that. “I can’t change the past, and it doesn’t look like I have much hope for the future, either.”
“Don’t take it so hard. Everyone knows you’re the best thing to hit this town since government ranching subsidies. Wondering what you’ll do next is more entertaining than anything on TV, and more lucrative, too.”
“Thanks,” Sara said on a heavy exhalation. “I’d managed to forget about the pool.”
Mike Shasta, owner of the Ersk Inn, had run the betting pools in town longer than anyone could remember. There were the normal sports, and things like who was going to have the prize bull at the county fair that year. Of course pretty much everyone voted for themselves in that one, and few of the ranchers had time to sit around watching sports, especially during the summer, so the baseball pool had never been what Mike called successful. Hockey came in the winter, so it typically did the best of all the sports pools.
But never as well as the Sara Lewis pool.
The Sara Lewis pool was a big white sheet of poster board that hung on the wall of the Ersk Inn, with dates across the top and times down the side, forming squares for each sixty-minute interval. People paid five dollars to put their name in a square, hoping they’d be lucky enough to choose the occurrence of her next accident. As technology went, it wasn’t exactly state of the art, but that poster board did the job. As a matter of fact, it got a lot of attention, Sara had heard. As if making a fool of herself every few weeks wasn’t enough, practically the whole town spent a good portion of their leisure time hoping she’d do it again and keeping a sharp eye out to make sure they didn’t miss it when she did. If anyone but Max had known why she was wearing a paint-stained art apron at Open House…
It didn’t bear thinking about. Much as she loved Janey and trusted her silence, Sara wouldn’t even tell her best friend that she’d accidentally superglued herself to Max. Of all the things she’d done, this was the most humiliating yet.
All she had to do, Sara told herself, was get through the rest of the evening with no one the wiser. It couldn’t be all that hard, and as the evening progressed, it seemed as if she might just pull it off. No one asked about her apron, and the scavenger hunt she and the children had set up was a big success, every parent ending up with a prize all the more precious for having been made by their own child’s hands. Sara stayed away from Max, which meant that she kept her composure.
And missed the moment when he let the cat out of the bag.
A school event was no different from any other social occasion in town. The women gathered in one corner to trade recipes and organize the next potluck. The men gathered in another to discuss the price of beef and swap fish stories. Aside from Joey, if there was anything in the world Max liked more than his ranch, it was fishing. And if there was one thing universal to great fishing stories, it was exaggeration.
Max apparently lifted his arms to lend credence to his latest one-that-got-away tale, and the red pleather-decorated button popped right out of the waistband of his pants.
It was the sudden hush from that corner of the room that first caught Sara’s attention. She glanced over in time to hear The Question.
“Hey, Max, what’s that on your button?”
Sara really didn’t blame Max. It was an accident, and if there was anything she understood it was accidents. Just like she understood when he fumbled for an answer, his gaze automatically shooting to her.
That stereotype about big, dumb cowboys was just that—a stereotype. As if it had been choreographed, the circle of men turned and looked at her, back at Max’s traitorous button, then back at her, this time their eyes dropping inevitably to her skirt—or what could be seen of it behind her apron. Her big, concealing apron.
The room erupted in shouts, questions about who had the winning square and laughter. Parents and students from the surrounding classes crowded in, attracted by the pandemonium, until the room was overflowing. Sara found herself at the front of the room, standing right beneath that troublesome banner as the whole embarrassing story came out.
After one glance at Max, his only assistance to shrug apologetically, Sara let everyone laugh and tease her good-naturedly, smiling and going along with the jokes. She caught sight of Jenny Hastings, her hair cropped boyishly short except for the tiniest fringe of barn-red. If Jenny could withstand the fallout of one of Sara’s episodes, Sara could surely take it—within reason.
She let the ribbing go on for a full fifteen minutes, then held up her hands, her sudden willingness to talk bringing an instant hush to the room. “All that matters is that we saved the banner,” she said, looking up at the item in question—just at the moment it decided to come loose.
The superglued center seam parted with a quiet whoosh, the two sides of the banner floating down right over her head. As if that wasn’t enough, the tacks she’d used to hold up the corners suddenly popped out, wreathing Sara in ten feet of white paper that smelled like crayon and felt like the weight of the world settling on her shoulders.
She slumped back against the blackboard, listening as everyone filed out of the room. Even when Max offered to help her, she sent him on his way. As accidents went, having a paper banner over her head wasn’t so bad. At least it hid her tears.
