“Yeah. Well, you tell him it’s not that easy. ’Cause I won’t ever, ever forget you. And I won’t ever let you forget me, either.”
“Don’t make this harder, Joey. Please—If you and I hadn’t dated, Ben would still be alive.”
“Is that what they say? What he says?”
“I can’t hurt them any more than I already have, especially Daddy, especially right now.”
“It’s not like I planned Ben’s death or I wanted to get you pregnant,” Joey cried. “I didn’t want to hurt them. I love you.”
He felt her fingertips flick through his thick, black hair that had probably dried into unruly tangles and then withdraw as if she were afraid to touch him because she wanted to so much. “Daddy says I’ve gotten into more trouble than ten kids.”
“You haven’t gotten into nearly as much trouble as me, babe,” he said, attempting his old teasing tone.
“Daddy says you’re a bad influence.”
The soft finality in her stone-calm voice as she kept quoting her daddy killed something inside him.
“I thought you loved me.”
Slowly she unlaced their joined fingers and shut her eyes.
“Heather—”
Tears leaked through her lashes and wet her white cheeks.
“Heather ....”
She bit her lips.
“Don’t do this, babe. Don’t leave me. You know I can’t make it without you. You’re all I’ve got. All I ever want. You’re everything.”
The door opened. “Fasano, you’ve had your time with her. Now get the hell out of here before I sic the law on you.”
Her father was standing beside Laurence Roth in the doorway. Her other relatives were peering at him like he was some kind of wild beast they’d run to ground and were about to slaughter.
“You all think you know so much. You don’t know her. You’re killing her. You’re killing both of us.”
“Get out, Fasano, before I lose my patience. You’ve already cost me one child. You’d better leave quick, boy, before I decide to use my considerable power to break you for what you’ve done to Heather.”
“Joey....” Her pleading whisper came from behind him. Joey turned back to Heather. Her eyes were closed, and tears streamed silently down her cheeks. “Go....”
He’d hurt her. He’d made her cry. Her family had never thought he was good enough. She’d always hated having to sneak around to see him. Now, because of Ben and the baby, they really hated him.
He’d lost her. How would he go on? He wasn’t rich or important like they were. She was everything to him. Everything.
More than anything, he wanted to take her into his arms and hold her till she stopped crying. He wanted to press his head into her breasts, to rock her back and forth, to never let her go. Travis Wade would probably kill him if he touched her.
Joey tossed his head back at a cocky angle and swaggered past Wade and Roth with the silent, insolent pride of a kid who had nothing else.
Joey didn’t know where he was going.
Without Heather, he didn’t care.
All he knew was that he was leaving Texas. And he wasn’t coming back till he was as rich and powerful as all of these arrogant bastards.
Then he’d make them pay.
One
A lot of smart people don’t believe in the devil, but Heather Wade knew better. Because sure as shooting, the very same devil who sent the snake to Eve also sent Joey Fasano slithering her way. It was easy for other rich girls whose daddies were senators to be good. It was hard for Heather.
Impossible when Joey was around. He brought out the worst in her. That’s why she’d fallen in love with him as a girl.
That’s why she was determined to forget him now that she was a full-grown woman on the verge of matrimony.
Tall and broad-shouldered, black-eyed and black-haired, Joey Fasano had been born sinfully handsome. He’d been as smolderingly intense as a box-office sensation years before he became one.
Maybe some seven-year-old little girls would not have found the various sorts of devilment he proposed in his hideout as exciting as she. Not all would have thought it a lark to snatch the Reverend Scott’s wife’s lacy panties off her clothesline after Joey pointed out how they snapped like a fat pirate’s pantaloons in the wind. But then it never did take much more than a sexy wink and devil-may-care grin to show her how much more fun the crooked path with the likes of him was than the straight and narrow with more staid folk.
And now, six years after she’d given that gorgeous snake in hunk’s clothing up for good, whose scalding eyes should be burning a hole out of her television screen and setting her blood afire?
Ignore those coal-bright dark eyes fringed with dense sable lashes.
Ignore how they made her feel singed to the core and shivery and alive for the first time in years.
Somehow the way Joey looked at her was more real than anything in her bedroom, more substantial than the Aubusson carpet she was curled up on, more sensual than the glass of red wine and the tall, black bottle beside the untidy pile of bridal magazines stacked on her low table, more tantalizing than the red chiffon skirt that fell so softly over her long, shapely legs.
She stared at that shock of black hair tumbling across his dark brow, her wayward heart thumping as eagerly as a hungry rabbit’s who’d seen a carrot. Every time Joey whispered her name, she punched the pause button and gasped for breath.
Turn him off. Go to bed.
No way.
This wasn’t the first time her life had swerved disastrously off course because of Joey. Not that she was about to admit, even to herself, that it had.
One minute she had been a normal bride-to-be returning home from one of those stuffy society affairs. Bored and tired, she’d stepped into her vast bedroom with the familiar, rose wallpaper, high ceilings, antebellum furniture, and tall windows. Then she’d punched a button on her answering machine and her mother’s shrill voice had jolted her into this new reality. Until then Heather had convinced herself she really could marry Larry Roth and make Daddy, who was up for re-election, very happy.
That was before Joey Fasano, bad-boy movie star, had stomped back into her life with his usual vengeance.
Except for Joey, nobody had ever known, least of all her parents, what to make of their mercurial, free-spirited, unpredictable daughter. As a baby she’d gotten into so much mischief during naptime—like the afternoon she’d pushed a stool to the stove, stood on her tiptoes, and turned on the gas jets because they smelled funny—that her mother had been forced to tie a net over her crib.
Not that a net and a few red satin tie-downs could contain a spirit as lively as the nimble-fingered Heather’s. The very next afternoon she escaped her netted prison and poured all the soap powder onto the bathroom floor and played in it like it was a sand pile.
If the adult Heather had a bad case of bridal jitters after her mother’s message, maybe it was natural under the circumstances.
It isn’t every night that your old boyfriend, who just happens to be the sexiest movie star in the universe, wins an Oscar and throws your life into a tailspin. Leave it to Joey to clasp that golden statuette to his heart and confess to millions in that low, choked voice that he couldn’t forget her.
Not that she’d caught his memorable performance live. No, to please her mother she’d hosted