He got her around the hood of the car and into the passenger seat before anyone had quite realized what was happening.
“Winston,” he said firmly.
Winston scrambled nimbly into the car. Rafe closed the door behind him, circled back around the front of the Porsche, and got behind the wheel. He twisted the key in the ignition, wrapped one hand around the gearshift, and pulled out of the station onto Bay Street before the crowd could react.
When he checked the rearview mirror, he saw a row of excited faces. He knew only too well that the news about his gas station proposal would be all over town by five o’clock that evening.
He glanced uneasily at Hannah. She was blinking rapidly and dabbing at her eyes with a hankie, but she appeared to have the potential flood of tears under control. Winston rested his muzzle on her shoulder.
“Sorry about that,” Rafe said eventually.
“Oh, shut up.”
He tried to look on the positive side. At least she hadn’t said no.
Chapter 22
The letdown was far worse than the anger or the tears. It bordered on outright depression, Hannah thought. She retreated to the upstairs veranda as soon as she was inside the house. Rafe did not try to stop her.
Half an hour later, stretched out in a wicker lounger, with Winston hovering loyally beside her, she tried to sort out her mangled emotions and jumbled thoughts. She gazed at the restless surface of the bay and told herself that she had overreacted. She had, in fact, come unglued in a way that was most unusual for her.
Obviously she had been under more stress lately than she had realized.
She had every right to be furious with Rafe for that scene at the Eclipse Bay Gas and Go, she decided. But why had she let events get to her like that? She had been screaming at Pete Levare. She had nearly burst into tears in front of all those people.
What was the matter with her?
The answer was out there, but she knew she did not want to deal with it. She almost welcomed the sound of Rafe’s footsteps behind her. Anything was better than looking at the hard facts of her situation.
“You okay?” he asked.
She took some satisfaction from the fact that he sounded worried.
“I’m pissed,” she said.
“Yeah. I know.” He handed her a glass of iced tea. After a second’s hesitation she took it from him. He seemed relieved. He lowered himself onto a wicker chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “It was my fault.”
“We’ve already established that.” She examined the glass in her hand. The tea was not ordinary black tea over ice. It was a luscious green-gold in color. There was a sprig of mint draped artistically over the rim and tiny little mint leaves frozen inside each ice cube. A crisp straw poked over the edge of the glass. An impossibly thin slice of lemon floated in the crystal-clear depths. “There’s no little paper umbrella,” she said.
He examined the glass critically and then shook his head once, decisively. “An umbrella would have been over the top.”
“Just like that scene at the gas station.” She sipped the tea through the straw. It was perfect. Cold, strong, and invigorating. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Ask me to marry you in that dumb, tacky way.”
“You sure you want to reopen that conversation?”
“I want an answer.”
He looked out at the silver surface of the bay. “All right. I wanted to marry you the day you got out of the car here at Dreamscape, but I knew you wouldn’t take a chance on me. At least, not right away.”
Tea sloshed over the side of her glass. She sputtered wildly, “You what . . . ?”
He did not respond to her interruption. Instead he plowed ahead with a sort of dogged determination. She got the feeling that having launched himself on this venture, he was bound to see it through to the conclusion, even if that conclusion was ill-fated.
“During the past few days I thought maybe we were getting closer. Making progress.”
“Having sex, you mean.”
He nodded agreeably. “That, too. But I didn’t want to push it.”
“The sex?”
“The relationship.”
“Oh, that.” She scowled. “Why not?”
“Mostly because I figured you’d get nervous and back off.”
“Me? You’re the one who claims to have a deep-seated fear of having inherited a genetic tendency to screw up relationships.”
“I had every right to play my cards close to the chest. I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with. After all, you told me you’d drawn up a new list of qualifications for a husband. Hell, you wouldn’t even tell me what was on the revised version.”
She dropped her head against the back of the lounger. “That stupid list.”
“Yeah. That stupid list. Worrying about it has been a real source of stress for me, Hannah.”
Her hand stilled on Winston’s head. “It has?”
“That damned list has driven me nuts. At any rate, this afternoon at the gas station when you started to tell everyone that the subject of marriage had never even come up between us, I guess I got a little irritated. Hell, I lost my temper.” He paused. “And whatever common sense I’ve got.”
She slowly lowered the glass. “Are you serious?”
He turned his head back to look at her. “Dead serious.”
“You’ve been thinking about marriage since I first got here?”
“Before that, if you want the truth.” He looked down at his loosely clasped hands for a moment. When he raised his head again his eyes were bleak. “Maybe since I got the news about Dreamscape from Isabel’s lawyer and realized that you were still single.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “What put the notion of marriage into your head? Did you have some crazy idea that it would be the simplest way to deal with our inheritance?”
“Hell, no. Marriage is not a simple way of handling anything. I know that better than anyone.”
“Then why?” Her voice was rising again. She’d have to watch that. She was a Harte, after all.
Rafe’s jaw tightened. “It’s hard to explain. It just seemed right somehow. When I got the letter from the lawyer things started to fall into place. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted. It was as if I’d been groping my way through a fog bank for years and suddenly the fog evaporated.”
“What, precisely, do you want?”
He spread his hands. “Nothing too bizarre. You. The inn and the restaurant. A future.”