She straightened abruptly, turning with a look that said, Hey pervert. Eyes up here.
Mirror. Shit. She'd seen where he'd been looking. The back of his neck grew hot and her bruised cheek grew darker.
"What do you want to talk about?" She slanted a dour look as she passed him on the way to the door.
Good work, Roy. He ran his hand over his rain damp hair, then dried it on his thigh as he followed her down the hall to the kitchen.
The house was one of those raised bungalow floor plans that had been all the rage about forty years ago, with two bedrooms and the rest of the living space upstairs and a full basement that savvy owners, over the years, had turned into rental suites.
She dug a resealable bag from a drawer and opened the freezer side of the refrigerator, filling the bag with ice. As she wrapped the bag in a tea towel, she prompted him with a look to answer her question.
"Dad was leaving some paperwork with Grady." He pushed his fists into his pants pockets, feeling overdressed, which was strange for him. Power suits were always a comfortable uniform for him.
But there were so many shadows of suspicion in the one eye Paige showed him, as she covered her cheek and leaned on the counter to face him, he felt at a disadvantage.
A very unusual sensation for him.
"This is his third heart attack," he pressed on. "Each time the factory gets by without him while he recovers, so... Dad's thinking it's time to-"
"Force him into retirement. So you can take over at the factory. I wondered why you were here."
"Why can I never visit my parents without everyone thinking I want to take over Roy Furnishings?" He covered his annoyance at that recurring accusation with a smile of patient boredom. "No. I have my own company, including a contract that starts Monday in Texas. Consulting," he added when she quizzed him with a lift of her shaped brow. "Operations management. I help businesses in trouble turn themselves around."
He was surprised she didn't know that.
"So your father wants to run the factory by himself? Alone?"
"He did it before Grady bought in. He can do it again." Will, Sterling assured himself. He was here to make sure of it.
Paige's mouth pursed in thought. "Your father always regretted letting Dad buy in, didn't he?"
He'd loathed it, loathed her father, but Sterling doubted saying so would encourage her to sell. He spun it. "Grady is a helluva salesman. Dad gives him credit for that, but Dad realized as time went on that he likes autonomy. It would mean a lot to him to own it outright again."
She nodded, mouth still pouted like she was waiting for a kiss, but her gaze was stuck in the middle distance. She was only half here, which annoyed him. He wanted her full attention.
Really wanted it.
Focus. Shit. She was married. And he had an axe to grind with her. He gave his head a shake.
"Listen. I came home to see you, to make sure what happened between us won't affect Dad's buyout of Grady's share."
"Really?" She lowered the ice pack.
He shrugged. "It's time to forgive and forget, don't you think?"
Her surprise became something softer. An optimistic wonder that was so damned pretty it made his animosity slippery and hard to hold onto. It put him in danger of Doing It Again. Letting her get to him.
"You came all this way, after all this time, to apologize?"
He hesitated. "I, uh, think we should let bygones be bygones, yeah."
Her brows came together, and her eyes narrowed. "Are you apologizing or not?"
He was willing to do almost anything to facilitate that buy-back, but.... He opened his palms, laughed a bit. "Come on, Paige. I was the one who was beaten and banished. But, hey, no hard feelings."
"Oh, my God. You came here to forgive me, didn't you?" She choked out a noise and pushed the ice pack back against her face. "You're something else."
He opened his suit coat, growing hot. Prickly. The old reel of frustration and anger and contempt played through him. That weird, stunned shock that not only didn't she like him, she had actually gone out of her way to hurt him. Everyone loved him. He hadn't done anything to deserve being set up, but she and her brother had taken pains to sick Grady on him and it still infuriated him.
He held onto his temper and firm, calm tone as he said, "Whatever problem you had with me fifteen years ago, I wanted to make sure we got past it, so it wouldn't affect Dad now."
"Oh, please. I got past it," she said, moving into the dining area to push in a chair. "I got past being broke after you labeled me a slut and made it impossible for me to get a job in this town. I got past years of people talking behind their hands every time I came back here. I'm even prepared to get past you coming into this house with me today, no doubt stirring up all of that stupid talk again with every neighbor peeking past her curtain. It's people like your father, making remarks in the frigging hospital, where everyone can hear it, who aren't getting over things. If you think one of us is going to cause a problem in the buy-back, I suggest you start with him. In fact, you should go do that now."
He didn't move, only watched her through the space over the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room as she hustled around stacking bills into a pile.
"So you're not going to try to stop your father from selling his shares back to my Dad?"
She sent another baleful look at him from her one eye. "I'm not going to let Dad sign anything while he's in the hospital stoned on morphine. You wouldn't either. But I don't hold grudges."
"You just said you blame me for the talk about you, but I had nothing to do with it," he pointed out.
"You told your mother I had sex with you! And that you weren't my first!" Her tone rang with, What the fuck?
"That's not what I said." He held up his hand, still feeling a pinch of guilt over the way his mother had interpreted his ‘I didn't get her virginity' remark: that he'd completed the act, but there'd been no virginity to be had. "And people were talking already, Paige. You started that yourself."
"No. That's not fair." She held up a finger, stern and strong and with an anger that was deep enough and genuine enough to earn his full attention. "I was a kid, being teased by my brother and his friend about still being a virgin. They turned it into me wanting to lose my cherry to you and you're the one who made it real by showing up and making me think you liked me." She pushed the ice pack back onto her face and turned her head to hide her expression behind it.
He had liked her, in the way that was ninety-percent youthful lust. But he'd barely spoken to her before that evening.
"I guess putting it out all over town is what everyone expects from a Fogarty, though. So that made it okay to call me a whore?"
"Paige." She was exaggerating.
"Men offered me money. Men. A forty-year-old stranger propositioned me in the grocery story. Do you have any idea how scary that is when you're seventeen? So, yeah, thanks for coming all this way to forgive me for that. You're a helluva guy, Sterling."
She flipped him her middle finger then went the long way around the partition and came back into the kitchen, opening the freezer again to pull out a loaf of bread.
He drilled holes in her back, trying to ignore the unease crowding out his righteous anger.
"Maybe I should thank you," she said, turning with a magnanimous smile that went flat very quickly. "Since Dad finally took out a loan and sent me to Seattle, once he heard I was the town bike."
He winced. "You didn't act like a virgin," he reminded in a mutter and watched her eyes bug out.
"I kissed you back so I deserved to be treated like a paid sex provider? Called out as a slut and turned down for honest work?"
No, he begrudgingly acknowledged, squirming at the picture she was painting, but she had kissed him back. She'd seemed damned willing to have sex with him in his car in her father's driveway.
He could still recall the way his heart had pounded like a pile-driver from the moment her brother had said, ‘She wants you to be the one.' He'd been planning to just ask her on a date. Somehow a few laughing, excited comments had turned into a kiss and that had turned into so much trembling heat pressed against him, he'd nearly lost his mind.
Did she have any idea how much of a betrayal it had been when the yank on his collar had come, as Grady had dragged him from the car and wailed on him? She had set him up for that insanity. Had to have.
"You and your brother wanted to take me down a peg. That's why you set up your Dad to find us like that."
"I didn't know Dad was here!" She made a contemptuous noise then needed two tries to put the bread in the toaster. "Lyle brought his car home from work to fix it and I thought Dad was at the bar or something."