All the Possibilities (7 page)

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same time.

He'd know how to protect her if something threatened. He knew how to take her to the brink of an abyss she'd so cleverly avoided. And Shelby was too aware that he could take her over the edge.

But his mouth was so tempting, his taste so enticing. And dusk was still holding back the night sky. She gave herself to it longer than she should have and not as long as she

—

wanted to.

"Alan

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"

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moment while his arms and hers kept their bodies pressed close. There was strength in his face

a face she could trust. But there was so much between them. "We'd better go,"

—

Shelby murmured. "It's nearly dark."

The Ditmeyers' home was lit though there was still color in the western sky. Shelby could just see the riot of phlox in the rock garden as she stepped from the car. Her mother was already there, Shelby discovered when she caught a glimpse of the diplomatic plates on the Lincoln in the drive.

"You know Ambassador Dilleneau?" Shelby offered her hand to Alan as they stepped onto the walk. "Slightly."

"He's in love with my mother." She brushed her bangs out of her eyes as she turned to him. "Men are, typically, but I think she has a soft spot for him."

"That amuses you?" Watching her, Alan pressed the doorbell.

"A little," she admitted. "It's rather sweet. She blushes," Shelby added with a quick laugh. "It's a very odd feeling for a daughter to see her mother blush over a man."

"You wouldn't?" Alan skimmed a thumb over her cheekbone. Shelby forgot her mother altogether. "Wouldn't what?"

"Blush," he said softly, tracing her jawline. "Over a man."

"Once

I was twelve and he was thirty-two." She had to talk

just keep talking to

—

—

remember who she was. "He, uh, came to fix the water heater."

"How'd he make you blush?"

"He grinned at me. He had a chipped tooth I thought was really sexy." On a quick ripple of laughter, Alan kissed her just as Myra opened the door.

"Well, well." She didn't bother to disguise a selfsatisfied smile. "Good evening. I see you two have met."

"What makes you think that?" Shelby countered breezily as she stepped inside. Myra glanced from one to the other. "Do I smell strawberries?" she asked sweetly.

"Your lamp." Shelby gave her a bland look and indicated the box Alan carried. "Where would you like it?"

"Oh, just set it down there, Alan. It's so nice to have just a few friends in," Myra continued as she tucked an arm through each of theirs. "Gossip is so much more intimate that way. Herbert, pour two more of those marvelous aperitifs you must try

—

it," she added to both Shelby and Alan. "I've just discovered this marvelous little blackberry liqueur."

"Herbert." Shelby walked over to the Justice and gave him a smacking kiss. "You've been out sailing again." She grinned at his sunburned nose. "When are we going to the beach to wind-surf?"

"The child almost makes me believe I could do it," he commented as he gave her a squeeze. "Good to see you, Alan." His face folded into comfortable grandfatherly lines that made people forget he was one of the top judiciary figures in the country. "I think you know everyone. I'll just get those drinks."

"Hello, Mama." Shelby bent to kiss her mother's cheek when the emerald clusters on Deborah's ears caught her eye. "I haven't seen these before I'd have borrowed them

—

immediately."

"Anton gave them to me." A delicate color seeped into her cheeks. "In appreciation

—

for that party I hostessed for him."

"I see." Shelby's gaze shifted to the trim Frenchman beside her mother. "You have exquisite taste, Ambassador," she told him as she offered her hand. His eyes twinkled as he brought it to his lips

a trait that made up for the ears as far as

—

Shelby was concerned. "You look lovely as always, Shelby. Senator, a pleasure to see you in such a relaxed atmosphere."

"Senator MacGregor." Deborah smiled up at him. "I didn't realize you and Shelby were acquainted."

"We're working on disrupting an old family tradition." He accepted the glass the Justice offered.

"He means feud," Shelby explained at her mother's blank look. She sipped the liqueur, approved it, then sat on the arm of Myra's chair.

"Oh

Oh
," Deborah repeated as she remembered. "The Campbells and the MacGregors

…

were blood enemies in Scotland

though I can't quite remember why."

—

"They stole our land," Alan put in mildly.

"That's what you say." Shelby shot him a look as she sipped again. "We
acquired
MacGregor land through a royal decree. They weren't good sports about it." Alan gave her a thoughtful smile. "I'd be interested to hear you debate that issue with my father."

"What a match," Myra said, brightening at the thought. "Herbert, can you just see our Shelby nose-to-nose with Daniel? All that red hair and stubbornness. You really should arrange it, Alan."

"I've been giving it some thought."

"Have you?" Shelby's brows lifted to disappear completely under her frizz of bangs.

"Quite a bit of thought," he said in the same even tone.

"I've been to that wonderful anachronism in Hyannis Port." Myra gave Shelby a brief pat on the thigh.

"It's right up your alley, dear. She's so fond of the

well, let's say unique, shall we?"

—

"Yes." Deborah sent Shelby a fond smile. "I could never figure out why. But then, both of my children have always been a mystery. Perhaps it's because they're so bright and clever and restless. I'm always hoping they'll settle down." This time she beamed the smile at Alan. "You're not married either, are you, Senator?"

"If you'd like," Shelby said as she studied the color of her liqueur through the crystal, "I could just step out while you discuss the terms of the dowry."

"Shelby, really," Deborah murmured over the sound of the Justice's chuckle.

"It's so difficult for parents to see their children as capable adults," the Ambassador commented in his light, soothing voice. "For myself, I have two daughters with children of their own. Still, I worry. How are your children, Myra? You have a new grandson, don't you?"

Nothing could have been better calculated to change the subject. Shelby sent him a faint admiring nod and watched his eyes twinkle as Myra began an enthusiastic description of her grandson's first tooth.

He'd suit her, Shelby decided, watching her mother from under her lashes. She was the type of woman who never felt quite whole without a man. And she'd been shaped and polished into a political wife years before. The gloss was still there. Elegant manners, elegant style, elegant patience. Shelby gave a little sigh she didn't even hear. How could she and her mother look so much alike and be so very different? Elegance had always seemed a silk-lined cage to

Shelby

and a cage equaled restrictions no matter how it was formed. She still

—

remembered too many of them.

The bodyguards

discreet, but always there. The carefully screened parties, the

—

sophisticated alarm systems, the intrusion of the press. The security hadn't saved her father, though a photographer had gotten an award-winning picture of the gunman

—

seconds too late to do any good.

Shelby knew what was behind the elegance; the state dinners, the speeches, the galas. There were a hundred tiny fears, a millennium of doubts. The memory of too many political assassinations and assassination attempts in hardly more than twenty years. No, her mother was made for the life. Patient, with a rod of steel beneath the fragile skin. Shelby wouldn't choose it, nor would she let it choose her. She'd love no one who could leave her again so horribly.

Letting the conversation flow around her, Shelby tilted back her glass. Her eyes met Alan's. It was there

that quietly brooding patience that promised to last a lifetime. She

—

could almost feel him calmly peeling off layer after layer of whatever bits and pieces made up her personality to get to the tiny core she kept private. You bastard. She nearly said it out loud. Certainly it reflected in her eyes for he smiled at her in simple acknowledgment. The siege was definitely under way. She only hoped she had enough provisions to outlast him.

Chapter Four

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Shelby put in a very full week, dominated by the creative overload she experienced every few months. Kyle managed the shop for three days running while she closeted herself in her workroom, to sit for hours at the wheel or with her glazes. If she started at 7:00 A.M., Shelby still had enough juice to toss clay until late into the night. She knew herself well enough to understand and to accept that this sort of mood struck her when she was having trouble blocking out something that worried her.

When she worked, she would focus both mind and emotion on the project in her hands, and in that way, whatever problem she had simply ceased to be a problem for that amount of time. Normally when she'd run out of steam, she'd come up with a solution. Not this time.

The impetus that had driven her most of the week dried up late Friday night. Alan was still lodged in her mind. He shouldn't have been. Shelby could tell herself that as impatiently as she liked, but it didn't change the fact that he was as firmly in her thoughts as he had been when they'd last been together.

It hadn't mattered that she'd managed to keep the rest of the evening at the Ditmeyers'

casual. Alan had still stopped her in her tracks with one of those slow, devastating kisses at her side door. He hadn't insisted on coming in. Shelby might have been grateful for that if she hadn't suspected it was just part of his planned siege. Confuse the enemy, assail her with doubts, leave her with her nerve ends tingling. Very clever strategy.

He'd been in Boston for several days

Shelby knew because he'd called to tell her he

—

was going, though she'd given him no encouragement. She told herself it was a respite. If he was a few hundred miles away, he couldn't be popping up on her doorstep unexpectedly. She told herself when and if he popped up again, she'd keep the door locked. She wanted badly to believe she could.

Then halfway through the week the pig had come

a big lavender stuffed pig with a

—

foolish grin and velvet ears. Shelby had tried to toss it into a closet and forget it. He seemed to know that the way to get to her was through her sense of the ridiculous. She hadn't thought he had one

he shouldn't have, but there it was. What was a man who

—

had such stuffy, straight-line views on rules and order doing buying stuffed animals anyway? She'd nearly softened. It was nice to know he was capable of such a gesture, particularly since it was so out of character. It was nice to know that she was the one who brought out that side of him. But

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her resolve with a silly toy that was meant for children or softheaded women. She called it MacGregor and kept it on her bed

a joke on both of them, she thought.

—

The pig was the only MacGregor she was going to sleep with.

But she dreamed of him. At night, in her big brass bed, no matter how hard she had worked, no matter how many friends she had been with, it always came back to Alan. Once she imagined there were a dozen of him, surrounding her town house. She couldn't go out without being captured; she couldn't stay in without going mad. She woke cursing him and his sieges and her own fertile imagination. By the end of the week, Shelby promised herself she wouldn't accept any more deliveries and would simply hang up when she heard Alan's voice on the phone. If reason and patience hadn't gotten through to him, downright rudeness would. Even a MacGregor had to have some common sense.

Because of the schedule she'd put herself on the week before, Shelby had given Kyle the keys to the shop with instructions that he open up at ten on Saturday. She was sleeping in. There wasn't any need to go into her workroom, even if some of the creative juices had still been flowing. In the past few days, she had accumulated enough inventory to last for weeks. Now she would put as much thought and energy into being lazy as she had put into slaving.

Shelby heard the knock on the door, and shifting under the sheets, considered ignoring it. Still half-asleep, she tumbled out of bed. It simply wasn't in her makeup to let a ringing phone or a knock go unanswered. Because she tripped over the robe she'd thrown on the floor the night before, Shelby remembered to tug it on as she walked from the room. With her eyes narrowed protectively against the sunlight, she opened the door.

'"Morning, Miss Campbell. Another delivery."

The boy who had brought her both the strawberries and the pig stood in the doorway and grinned.