Summer Heat

by Carly Phillips

  But he didn’t have time to dwell on it this morning. He had to go scour Red Creek for rentals. Last night, Lance had discovered that Alonzo was living in a motel. Thanks to the ski slopes within easy driving distance and the almost insane upswing of the economy lately, rents were outrageous—not easily in the reach of even a well-paid construction worker.

  Lance washed shaving cream from his face. His help this morning wasn’t unselfish by any stretch. Lance had worked with adobe makers in Houston and San Antonio, and none of them had come close to the exquisite work Alonzo could do. In addition, Alonzo had the rare ability to teach his craft to others, and run a crew reliably and with good humor.

  Lance didn’t want to lose him.

  Unfortunately, a dozen calls, and even the yanking of a few strings, turned up nothing. With the first snows around the corner, all the rentals in the area were locked up tight. Lance found one available property—a luxury home a half hour away that rented for three times what Alonzo made in a month.

  Finally, driven by desperation, Lance called his mother to ask about the guest house that sat on their land. She hesitated for one long moment, and then said, “Let me meet him first.”

  So Lance picked up Alonzo with the vague promise that they’d look at rentals after a while, but he wanted to go by and see his mother first.

  Louise answered the door, wearing an apron over her plump curves. Flour dusted her. “Y’all come on in. I have to get these muffins out of the oven. My timer just went off.” Leaving the door open, she hurried off.

  “Oh, you’re in for a treat,” Lance said with a grin. “She’s one of the best cooks in the state.”

  “Yeah?” A curious expression, half amused, half surprised, was on Alonzo’s face. “I miss good food.”

  “Don’t tell her. She’ll have you fat as a hog in two weeks flat.” He gestured for Alonzo to enter. “My mother loves to cook—but even more, she likes to feed people.”

  Alonzo smoothed his mustache, raising one devilish black eyebrow. “An old-fashioned woman.” He winked. “I like that. You young ones, you don’t know yet what’s important in a woman.”

  Lance thought of Tamara. For a fleeting second, he tasted her lips on his own. Then his mind snagged on the way her house had seemed so warm and comfortable and easy to be in the night of his father’s funeral. He remembered awakening, fed and soothed, in her chair, covered by a blanket she had placed over him.

  The memory gave him a strange twist in his gut. He frowned. “You might be surprised,” he said to Alonzo.

  They followed Louise to the kitchen, where she was taking out a tray of enormous, steaming blueberry muffins. Lance’s mouth watered instantly. “Those look good. Don’t tell me you’re making them for some museum tea or something.”

  “No sir, they are not.” She gave him her sunniest smile. “I made them for you and your friend.” Putting the tray on top of the stove, she took off her oven mitt and held out a hand to Alonzo. “You must be Alonzo Chacon. I’m Louise Forrest. My boy has been singin’ your praises for weeks now. I’m glad to meet you.”

  Alonzo moved forward, and took the outstretched hand. With a courtly gesture, he bent over it and planted a kiss lightly to the knuckles. “They did not tell me you were so beautiful,” he said.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. Chacon,” she said briskly, taking back her hand.

  “No flattery,” Alonzo said, inclining his head with a smile. He touched his hand to his chest. “From the heart.”

  To Lance’s amazement, his mother blushed faintly, the color washing over the clear, smooth cheeks in a way he found touching. “Y’all sit down in the dining room and I’ll bring the muffins. Lance, you grab the butter. The real butter, now.”

  “I know, Mom.” She didn’t allow margarine to taint her bakery goods.

  He carried the ceramic butter dish to the table. “Why do we get blueberry muffins? What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion,” she said airily, and Lance knew something was up. “I was hoping you might be able to help me with an errand this afternoon. The new museum curator is coming in today, and I want to be there to go over things with her.”

  Lance buttered a muffin, waiting for the other shoe. “But—?” he prompted.

  “Well, I promised Mrs. Jordan I’d help her with her shopping. You know she can’t drive anymore, not since that little accident last summer—”

  “Little accident, my eye.” Lance snorted. “She took out three parking meters and the front window of a dry cleaner’s shop.”

  Alonzo’s eye twinkled, but he was absorbed in his muffin.

  “Anyway,” Louise continued, “she needs to go to the grocery store. I know she’s fussy, but you’re so patient with her, and I was hoping you might do it in my place.”

  Lance shrugged. “Okay.”

  Louise reached over and patted his arm. “You’re such a good man. What would I do without you?” She looked at Alonzo. “You know, when he was a child, I could always count on Lance to run any errand I needed, even when he had to ride his bike all the way down the hill.”

  “Down was never the trouble. Up was the killer.”

  Alonzo neatly blotted his mustache. “Delicious!” he pronounced. “I eat too much food from restaurants. And food needs a woman’s hand, you know?”

  “Are you always so charming, Mr. Chacon?”

  He winked. “Yes.”

  Louise chuckled and pushed the basket closer to him. “Well, it’s always a pleasure to feed a man who appreciates it. Help yourself.”

  Happily, Alonzo picked out another muffin. “Gracias.”

  * * *

  While getting dressed Saturday morning, Tamara was appalled to find she had a hickey on her neck. A hickey! Leaning into the mirror, she touched the red mark with embarrassment and a certain heat. She hadn’t even noticed that Lance had been nibbling that hard.

  Her skin showed bruises easily. Maybe he’d only been—

  She sank down to the bed, her hand over the bruise, suddenly awash in sensual memories. His mouth, moving over her neck, supping at her flesh as if he were starving. His hands down her back, on her bottom, against her ear.

  She closed her eyes. She was in so far over her head! Lance Forrest was out of her league on every imaginable level. He was gorgeous and rich and experienced. What in the world did he even find to like about her?

  With a sigh, she dug through her drawers, looking for something that might be used to cover up the mark. All she could find was a soft cotton turtleneck that was a bit too warm for the weather. It was fall, but the day was bright and sunny. In the mountains, Indian summer might mean anything from fifty to eighty degrees.

  “Mommy!” Cody said from the doorway. “Are we ever going to go?” Saturdays were the only days Tamara had to spend long hours with her son. She combined trips to the park or the hills with whatever small errands she needed to run. They often stopped to have a cup of chocolate at the diner when they were finished, and Cody loved it. He looked forward to Saturdays all week long.

  “I’m almost done, honey. Watch the rest of your show, and I’ll be ready.”

  “Hurry!”

  Tamara kissed his blond head. “I will, sweetie.”

  He ambled off, and Tamara tossed on the turtleneck with a pair of jeans, and hurried through her makeup. It was only as she caught sight of herself in the mirror in the living room that she remembered why she wore this shirt with something over it. She stopped, frowning. It wasn’t particularly tight, or revealing—after all, how revealing could a long-sleeved turtleneck be?—but it always seemed to do something wild to her figure. The soft fabric clung lightly to her every curve, and the color was vivid.

  “You look really nice, Mommy,” Cody said. He lifted a hand and rubbed her arm.

  Tamara smiled at him. “Thanks.” What was she so afraid of, anyway? Wasn’t she just whining to herself last night about wanting to look good?

  Yeah, but that was before Lance had kissed her.
Before he brought alive every sexual longing she’d ever even thought about having.

  Oh, honestly! she thought with exasperation. She had to stop this. With a wry grin at Cody, she said, “C’mon, kiddo, let’s go have some fun.”

  * * *

  Cody played in the park, on the swings and merry-go-round and the slides, tumbling and running and hollering. Afterward, they had their cocoa at the B & B Café.

  And all day, men flirted with Tamara. At first, it puzzled her. It wasn’t something that happened to her very often. Never had. Valerie always told her she put out touch-me-not signals.

  As the day wore on, Tamara wondered in some confusion if Lance had found the “on” button. Something had certainly changed. The old man at the gas station, who never wore his teeth and shaved maybe every third day, gave her a gummy smile and a wink with her change. A biker guy in the park, who might have looked dangerous in his leathers and long hair without the bevy of toddlers he rolled with in the grass, smiled at her every time she happened to glance his way. Even a young man, barely out of his teens, looked over his shoulder as he walked by.

  Must be the turtleneck, Tamara thought.

  Their last stop for the day was at the supermarket for coffee. She ordinarily avoided Saturdays at the market, but there were things in life she wouldn’t do without.

  As she turned the corner, Cody spied the carnival. “Oh, Mommy, look!” he said in the voice of awe reserved for children under five, and fourteen-year-olds in love. “A carnibal! Can we go?”

  Tamara eyed the Ferris wheel and tented booths set up in the vacant lot beyond the grocery store, wondering how she’d missed its arrival. “I don’t know, Cody.” She did a few quick calculations, wondering if she dared take some of the tips from her earnings last night to do this for him. She had one week to gather the funds for the phone bill, or they’d cut her off.

  But she did have a week and she worked every day between now and then.

  “Pretty please with sugar on top?” Cody wheedled. He knew he’d won, and the bright blue eyes twinkled in his cherubic face. Tamara suddenly saw Lance in that twinkle, and wondered if he had been this adorable as a child.

  “We’ll go,” she said. “But first you have to go home and take a nap. It’s more fun at night, when all the lights are on, and everything looks pretty.”

  “Yippee! And we can get cotton candy!”

  She patted his knee. “Yep, cotton candy. Pink for me.”

  “Blue for me!”

  “You’ve got it, kiddo.” She spied an empty parking space in the crowded lot. “Let’s go get my coffee and get you home for a nap, and after supper we’ll go to the carnival.”

  As they entered the busy store, Tamara was caught suddenly by the strangeness of the place again. While she’d been growing up, Red Creek had been a sleepy, nowhere little town on the way to the ski resorts. This market had then been ten aisles wide, with maybe two variations of brands available, and the customers had been ranchers in pickup trucks, and plain-speaking natives in sensible clothes. Once in a while, a glamorous type from Denver or Aspen were forced to spend the night at the Sleepy Owl Motel, but they cleared out as soon as possible.

  The wild expansion of the last few years had begun while Tamara was away at college, and the changes it had wrought still occasionally took her by surprise. The market was truly a supermarket these days, with twenty five aisles of high-gloss floors. The customers were young, or trying to remain so as long as possible, and took fitness very seriously in their newfound home. High end sportswear abounded. The ranchers, in their worn boots and Western-cut jeans and broken-in hats, looked as out of place as a coal stove in a gourmet kitchen.

  But there wasn’t any other place to shop. And thanks to the rocketing rise of land prices, some of those laid-back ranchers were pretty well-off themselves.

  Tamara liked some of it. In the coffee aisle, she could choose from scores of brands, packaged or loose, whole bean or ground. The produce aisle groaned with exotic offerings of every imaginable variety, and the magazine aisle carried everything from confessions to Martha Stewart.

  Still it dazzled her at times. Today she swung Cody’s hand next to her, ambling through and watching people covertly. She took Cody to the coloring books and let him pick through them, all the while covertly admiring a woman in her late forties who wore black leggings and had the rear end of a sixteen-year-old.

  A voice said playfully in her ear, “She’s not your type, I’m afraid.”

  Lance. Tamara looked up, fighting the rush of welcome and heat she felt at the sound of his voice in her ear. He looked as touchable as always, blond and clean and gleaming, with just enough of a rakish air to be interesting. “I was just wondering,” Tamara said, “what she has to do to keep looking like that.”

  He inclined his head, admiring the woman’s long legs and firm bottom. A slow grin crossed his face and he gave Tamara a wicked look, raising one approving eyebrow. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s worth it.”

  Tamara chuckled. It was hard to argue with that logic.

  An elderly woman with her glasses on a chain over her blue cardigan thrust a handful of coupons into Lance’s hands. “I don’t have time for all your flirtin’ today, boy.” She poked a bony finger at the top coupon. “See if you can find that brand for me. I’ll swear, these glasses still aren’t right.”

  Lance shot Tamara a bright glance from the corner of his eye. “Mrs. Jordan, this is Tamara Flynn. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “How do you do, young lady,” the woman said, looking over her glasses. “Is that your boy there?”

  Tamara nodded. “This is Cody. Cody, say hello to Mrs. Jordan.”

  Cody looked up. “Hi.” Caught by something on her sweater, he leaned closer. “Cool pin!”

  “It’s a poison pin!” She exclaimed, and bent over to show Cody the antique pin with its empty container.

  Tamara stood there in the florescent-lit aisle, trying to pretend she didn’t notice Lance’s shirt was open to the third button. She tried not to notice how alluring she found the tendons of his neck when he turned his head, or that he smelled of something spicy. She tried to pretend her gaze didn’t skitter over his smiling mouth every ten seconds and fall on his hands, so broad and strong, the rest of the time.

  She really tried not to notice the way he was looking at her, a little shyly, when he thought she wouldn’t notice, or that his gaze traveled all over her.

  But both of them looked up at the same instant. Tamara was swept into the bright jeweled blue, snagged hard on the half-sober, half-teasing way he looked at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she couldn’t look away, and so they just stood there looking at each other for a long time. Tamara wondered if he was remembering the kiss last night, as she was—

  He touched her hand with his index finger. Covertly, so only she would know. “Would you let me take you and Cody to the carnival tonight?”

  The words didn’t penetrate for a minute. “The carnival?” she echoed.

  His grin flashed then, that irascible, devil-may-care grin that went straight through her. “You know, the one right outside here? I figured it might be something you could do with your son, so you wouldn’t have to find a baby-sitter.”

  Damn him. For an irresponsible wild man, he was awfully considerate sometimes. Or was that good? Tamara couldn’t remember. He also made it very hard to think rationally.

  “That would be great,” Tamara heard herself say. “I can’t stay out late, though.”

  “That’s fine. How about if I come get you around six?”

  “Make it seven, so I can feed him before we go.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll buy you both supper.”

  “Me?” Cody said, having learned everything he could from Mrs. Jordan about her pin. “Can I have one of them big hot dogs?”

  “‘May I,’” Tamara said automatically. “And ‘one of those,’ not ‘them.’”

  Cody rolled his eyes, and Lanc
e ruffled his hair in the classic male gesture of affection. “Listen to your mom. And yes, you may have one of those hot dogs.”

  Mrs. Jordan poked Lance’s arm. “Enough, young man. I don’t have all day.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lance said, and moved off, allowing Mrs. Jordan to lean on him as they went down the aisle.

  Tamara watched them go, struck by the rarity of a man that patient. Maybe she’d been wrong about him. It sure looked that way.

  Then Mrs. Jordan glanced over her shoulder, and there was no mistaking the expression on her wizened face.

  Pity.

  Tamara blushed. Even old Mrs. Jordan knew Lance’s reputation as a ladies’ man—and she thought Tamara was his next victim.

  Tamara lifted her chin. Mrs. Jordan didn’t know anything.

  Chapter Nine

  Louise Forrest loved carnivals, always had. She liked the smell of them—cotton candy and dust and frying onions. She liked the tubes of neon in candy colors and the tinny music and the crowds of people. Most of all, she loved the feverishness of the combination, the excitement.

  Tonight was no different. She and her youngest son, Tyler, had brought Curtis out to ride the kiddie rides. They stood by the baby Ferris wheel, waving at the three-year-old cheerfully when Louise caught sight of Lance and a woman coming closer.

  Louise grabbed Tyler’s arm. “Who’s the woman your brother is with?”

  “I knew he wasn’t going to leave her alone.” His mouth thinned. “That’s Tamara Flynn. She’s a bartender at the Wild Moose.”

  “Is that her child?”

  “Yeah.” Ty gave his mother an odd look. “Why?”

  Louise pursed her lips and looked at Curtis, who was now free of the Ferris wheel and bolted toward them, blond hair flying, face full of glee. Then she looked at the boy walking alongside Lance, bubbling about something.

  No, she wasn’t mistaken.

  The boys could be twins.

  Louise raised her gaze to the dark-haired woman’s face, and in a fleeting instant before the girl covered her expression, there was pure, terrified panic.