Bachelor Untamed - Brenda Jackson [3]
Her face had tinted in embarrassment, and she looked everywhere but at him, mostly glaring over at her friend. “I asked you a question, El,” he said, when she didn’t say anything.
She drew in a deep breath and then glanced back over at him and said. “I can explain, Uri.”
He shook his head. “No explanations. Just answer the question. Was that kiss about a dare between you and your friend here?”
“Yes, but—”
Not giving her a chance to say anything else, he snatched up his fishing rod and angrily began walking off the pier. He got halfway, turned back around and said directly to Ellie, “The next time I come to Cavanaugh Lake, I’m going to make sure that you aren’t here.”
And then he turned around and kept walking, while wishing that he could forget the sweet taste of her lips.
Chapter 1
Ten years later
“To Flame, with all my love. D.”
Ellie Weston studied the elegant sprawling handwriting across the bottom of a framed picture on the wall in her aunt’s bedroom.
She lifted a brow. Aunt Mable had probably purchased the painting at one of those garage sales she’d enjoyed getting up on Saturday mornings to drive forty miles into Knoxville to attend. In fact, Ellie had noticed several new paintings in all of the bedrooms, as well as the living room. However, this particular one caught Ellie’s eye because it wasn’t one she would have expected her unmarried seventy-year-old aunt to be attracted to.
Ellie studied the painting some more. It was a colorful piece of art that showed a faceless but very naked couple in a risqué embrace. So much in fact, that upon closer study it appeared they were having sex.
She felt a heated blush stain her face as she stepped back and glanced around. It seemed that rather recently her aunt had gotten a new bedroom suite—a king-size Queen Anne four-poster bed in beautiful cherry mahogany. The bedroom suite had a romantic flair that Ellie liked. And there was a matching desk in one section of the room with, of all things, a computer. When had her aunt entered the computer age? Ellie hadn’t been aware she’d owned one. If she’d known, they could have been staying in contact by e-mail.
To Ellie, her aunt’s two-story house had always seemed too large for one person. It had a spacious layout that included a huge living room, a bathroom, dining room and eat-in kitchen downstairs, and four bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs. The wood paneling had been removed and the walls had been painted an oyster white. The bright color actually made the entire interior appear larger, roomier.
Had it been five years since she had last visited her aunt here? Although she had stopped coming to the lake house when she’d turned twenty-one, she and her aunt still got together every year when she could convince Aunt Mable to come visit her in Boston, where she had moved after college. It had worked well for the both of them. It gave her aunt a chance to leave the lake and visit someplace else, and it gave Ellie a chance to not dwell on the most embarrassing memory of all her visits here.
She had stopped speaking to her best friend Darcy for an entire month after that kissing incident with Uriel Lassiter, regardless of the number of times Darcy had told her how sorry she was for getting carried away with her excitement. In the end, Ellie had accepted full responsibility for ever accepting Darcy’s dare in the first place.
And it was her fault that Uriel had kept his word and had made sure their paths never crossed at Cavanaugh Lake again.
She had not seen him in ten years. He had been out of the country, unable to attend her aunt’s funeral last month, but her parents had mentioned getting a nice floral arrangement from him.
Ellie shook her head, remembering that Uriel’s parents had gotten a divorce two years ago. Who would have thought the Lassiters would ever split? And according to her parents, Carolyn Lassiter was now involved with a