Page 499 of Summer Heat
Despite Tamara’s efforts to get Valerie counseling, three months after Cody was born, Valerie drove herself off a high mountain road. It was ruled an accident, but Tamara knew better. When September came—the start of what should have been her senior year—Tamara was the adoptive mother of a baby son. Eric, disgusted with what he called her “provincial values,” deserted her.
Tamara had stayed in Red Creek.
With a jolt, Tamara realized she’d been standing under the water for a long time. Her neck was still stiff, but better. She picked up the shampoo bottle—an expensive salon brand that was one of her few luxuries. Squeezing a tiny dot out in her palm, she began to wash her hair.
Now, she faced a moral dilemma. After almost four years of blaming Lance for everything, Tamara discovered he wasn’t some dark evil man who’d stolen Valerie’s virtue and deserted her. Not at all. He was what they would have called a rake in the old days, an unapologetic good-time Charlie who had no intention of ever settling down, but loved all the women he met along the way.
Which put Tamara’s long-nursed plans of revenge in a new perspective. In the first place, she didn’t quite know what sort of revenge she had meant to take. Her fantasies of making Lance pay had always been rather vague. She supposed she’d imagined making him fall in love with her, then breaking his heart, as he’d broken Valerie’s.
The reality of his compelling physical presence made that seem a little absurd.
Valerie had planned to use Cody to get her revenge. In her more rational moments, Valerie had continually talked about it, her sapphire eyes cold and glittery. She planned to milk Lance Forrest of his money, using his own blood.
Tamara wouldn’t do that. Cody was too precious to be used. Period.
So what possible revenge could there be? She had no money or power. Lance wasn’t the kind of man who usually noticed her, so the seduction and broken heart angle were out. It was embarrassing that she’d even believed she might have a chance.
But then a vision of his wicked, promising grin flashed over her imagination.
What would it be like? Seducing him? Touching his golden skin, his sun-kissed hair, kissing his sensual mouth?
She shivered. Don’t even think about it.
There was another angle she did have to think about. Cody.
Should Lance know about his child? Did he have any rights to a child he didn’t even know existed?
No. Given his ways, he probably had dozens of children scattered around. One more wouldn’t make any difference.
Wearily, she rinsed shampoo out of her eyes, then blinking, looked for the soap. The bar she used was over on the sink. Cody’s crayon sat in the soap dish, and she picked it up with a giggle. What the heck.
She drew blue lines on her tummy, as he had. And down her arms, and her legs, feeling like a wild Scot. Remembering a movie she’d seen, she drew a line down the middle of her face, and rubbed blue crayon over the left side, and left it like that while she conditioned her hair. She wondered vaguely what battle she was preparing herself for.
But she knew. As her hands moved on her body, she remembered Lance Forrest’s big masculine hands, with their square, strong fingers. Her nerves tingled at the thought, tingled in her stomach and her knees and along the back of her neck. Tingled in anticipation.
She was preparing for a battle with herself. With her need to be touched like a woman. She ached to be stroked and pleasured, to be held and tended. It had been such a very long time.
And in that single moment, she knew she was going to do it. She was going to let Lance Forrest pursue her, keeping herself just out of his reach until he was in her clutches.
Then she would walk away, as he had walked away, leaving three broken lives behind him. For Valerie, for Cody and most of all, for her own broken dreams, she would do it. She
would seduce Lance Forrest.
* * *
The morning of the funeral, Lance laid out his black suit, an Italian number a woman in Houston had picked out for him. He dressed carefully. Snowy shirt, silk socks, his good shoes. Before dawn broke, he got in his Fairlane, and went to the funeral home to say his goodbyes privately.
It was what people did, wasn’t it? But the minute he stepped inside, Lance knew it was the wrong thing for him. The wrong way for him to bid farewell to his father. He shook his head at the funeral director and left.
He drove to a lake a few miles from town. And there in the outdoor stillness of morning, Lance felt his father. Here was where Lance stood with his old man, learning to fish. Here was where his father had told him everything he considered important. Here is where would Olan Forrest would linger.
Lance put his head down. He wanted to weep, but the tears wouldn’t come. What kind of son couldn’t shed tears for his father? He could feel them, thick and hot in his throat, but they were stuck there. He hoped they didn’t all come out in a humiliating rush at the funeral.
It had felt like the right thing to do, coming out to the lake. His father would be glad that Lance had worn the Italian suit, and the shoes that had cost more than a month’s rent on his Houston apartment. Olan would be glad to see him here like this, straddling easily the two things the older man had valued most—money and nature.
It was an odd combination, but Lance’s father had loved having money. Lots of it. And he took pride in the fact that he’d earned every penny himself, doing a man’s work, not some sissified thing like banking or playing the stock market. He hadn’t been the best father or husband in the world, but on his own terms, in his own way, he’d done what he set out to do.
And Lance had loved him.
