Page 7 of In a Bind

Chapter Five

Raini

I rodeto catch up to Zane. I had no idea why I'd decided to tease him so badly. At first I'd considered that I was subconsciously doing it just to piss off Mindy, but now that he was riding ahead of me with his shoulders and jaw tense with anger, I was feeling bad.

"So what part do you play in the company?" I decided to make small talk and hopefully repair some of the damage I'd done.

"You mean other than sell sex toys?"

"No, I know that's not what you do. I'm sorry about being so flippant. My dad tells me I inherited my lack of tact from my mom. She was always a tell it like it is kind of person." My voice trailed off as I thought about riding the same bike path with my mom the summer before she died. We had been the best of friends. I was always much closer to her than to Mindy.

Zane stopped hyper concentrating on the road in front of him and finally looked my direction. I loved his face. It was the kind of face that just drew you in. "I guess you were pretty young when you lost her."

"She died just three days after my seventeenth birthday. It was like someone took my lifeline, the thing I always held onto when I was happy or sad or distraught, and just cut it in half. I was completely lost without her. Dad did the best he could, but it wasn't the same."

"That must have been hard. I lost my dad when I was just four."

"Wow, that's terrible."

"Not as bad as losing a parent at seventeen. I was just too young to understand what had happened. He was there one minute, helping me learn to ride a bike, and the next, he was gone. The concept of death was still so foreign to me, I couldn't quite figure out that it was forever. For a long time, I kept expecting him to just walk in one night and drop his metal lunch pail on the counter like he had every other night before that."

We turned to ride across the grassy knoll leading back to the ranch.

"Marketing. That's what I do for the company. I'm in charge of marketing. Your dad says you're studying art."

I laughed. "Let me guess, he said it with an eye roll."

Zane glanced over at me. "You know your dad pretty well."

"I do." We reached the storage shed and walked the bikes inside. I wasn't sure if I'd done permanent damage to our very short friendship with my earlier teasing but I hoped not. I wasn't sure why I felt that way.

"Well, thanks for inviting me along for the swim." Even though the earlier snarky conversation had turned to a more thoughtful dialogue on the ride home, Zane's voice was still a little distant. I'd managed to turn him off completely. And while my earlier invite might partly have been to piss off Mindy and partly an attempt to make this weekend less boring, now I was feeling disappointed that I'd blown it with him so quickly.

We walked back to the party that was still going full swing on the patio and in the pool area. The midday sun was pouring down on the ranch, and the guests probably wouldn't head inside for hours. As much as I always hated to give too much credit or compliments to my sister, she'd done a spectacular job setting up the weekend. Dad would remember it for a long time.

A nice looking couple was standing at the outer edges of the patio area with their plates of food. The man, a guy who fit the tall, dark and handsome cliché perfectly, lifted his sunglasses to reveal a nice pair of hazel eyes. "There you are. Where did you run off to?"

"We were on a bike ride," Zane explained. "Trey, Georgie, this is Carter's daughter Raini."

Trey's face shot toward me as if my name had triggered the sudden interest. My dad had, no doubt, told him stories about me.

"Raini, of course, your dad talks about you all the time."

"Well, believe everything he says," I quipped. "Unfortunately, it's all true. Now, if you'll excuse me I have to shower and make the rounds or my sister will have me sitting at the kid's table during the birthday dinner. It was nice meeting you, Georgie. Love the name."

"You too," she replied.

I meandered across the patio but stopped briefly to glance back at the man with the copper red hair. He seemed to sense I was looking his direction. Our eyes locked through the crowd for a long moment and then I headed inside.

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