Mac swallowed an unladylike snort and shot a glance across the room at Holly, who was surrounded by her friends. “It’s the thought that counts.”
Mrs. Taylor followed Mac’s gaze and chuckled, a low and smutty snicker that sounded beyond weird coming from the octogenarian’s wattled throat. “Bet I can guess what your cousin’s thinking about when she’s cutting the cake, poor girl.”
Mac nodded as if agreeing with the remark and took a sip of her champagne. “You know”—she gave Mrs. Taylor’s shoulder a companionable rub—“it must’ve been a while since you last saw a man’s twig and berries. Maybe you should look at Denise’s cake one last time?”
Mrs. Taylor’s eyelids flew open, and she barked out a laugh that caused the women around Holly to jump.
“You’re a wee sassy britches, aren’t you? You remind me of myself when I was younger—oh!” The sharklike smile on her face slipped, and she pressed a gnarled hand to her chest. “Oh—my chest feels all queer.”
Mac clasped Mrs. Taylor’s elbow. “Come and sit down.”
Mrs. Taylor tapped with her walking stick to a cluster of chairs and sank onto one with a wheeze and a groan.
“I’ll go get Maggie,” Mac said. “She was in the kitchen last time I saw her.”
“No, no. I don’t want a nurse.” Mrs. Taylor shook her head so hard her lavender-tinted curls quivered, even though the woman smelled as if she’d bathed in hairspray. “I need Doctor Joe.”
The sausage roll she’d eaten ten minutes ago did a slow somersault in Mac’s stomach at the sound of his name. Joe Whelan, the island’s only practitioner, and the one person she always sent a little prayer to the Goddess of Good Juju to avoid when she visited Oban. Normally, her prayers worked, maybe because Joe also seemed to take the same measures to avoid her.
Hey, finally something they had in common.
“I’ll find someone to take you to the medical center, then,” she said.
Mrs. Taylor frowned. “I can’t leave the party, dear, and besides, he won’t be at the center.” She sounded as if she were speaking to someone who always got a joke thirty seconds after everyone else. “He’ll be at the pub with his mates. You’ll go fetch him for me.”
She would? Mac jerked upright. Like hell she would. “Look, I’ll just ask—”
Mrs. Taylor clutched at the folds of her purple dress and uttered a groan. “I feel awful. Please, MacKenna, don’t ruin Holly’s party by letting an old lady have a heart attack on the floor.” She batted her eyelashes at Mac again. “It won’t take you a minute to whip down to Due South and ask him to come.”
Shitshitshit. Mac was fifty-fifty on whether the woman actually was having chest pains, but damn it, Mac wasn’t performing mouth-to-mouth on the wrinkled old grape if she did stop breathing. And since Holly had banned cell phones from her shower—primarily due to the risk of Mrs. Taylor live-tweeting the event—Mac couldn’t take the easy way out and call down to the pub.
“Fine.” She narrowed her eyes. “But he won’t be happy being dragged away from his beer if you’re up to something.”
The shark’s smile returned. “One glimpse of the sexy Irishman’s blue eyes and I’m sure I’ll be right as rain.”
Make that sixty-forty percent sure she was being duped. But Mac toed off her skyscraper heels and kicked them under the seat. “You’d better be. Don’t you dare die before I get back.”
She cast a quick glance toward Holly, who was deep in conversation with her best friend and soon-to-be matron of honor, Shaye Westlake—another satisfied bride of Mac’s wedding boutique, Next Stop, Vegas. Maybe she could…no. Mac straightened her spine and edged along the hall to the back door that led out into a fenced yard. Not even Holly, who was more like her little sister than her cousin, would understand why Mac had spent so much energy flying under Joe’s radar in the four years since he moved to Stewart Island.
Mac skirted along the outside of the hall, the concrete path leading to the street icy cold beneath her bare feet. She wrinkled her nose and grabbed at the skirt of her flimsy dress before it flew up. She hurried along the road with her arms pinned down to her side, the cold southerly gusting over the rolling hills of native bush, direct from Antarctica.
Winter in the deep south…always such a pleasure.
She shivered, cursing herself for forgetting to grab her duck-down coat before leaving the hall. With her luck, she thought as the double-storied hotel, which contained a restaurant and bar, loomed closer, she’d have red Hobbit toes and be hypothermic by the time she arrived. She wouldn’t count on the good doctor’s sworn Hippocratic oath to save her.
Keeping her gaze from meeting anyone sitting inside Due South’s cozy warmth, Mac hurried past the picture windows that overlooked Halfmoon Bay Harbor and climbed the veranda stairs. The pub door opened, and she made the polite but fatal error of holding it while one of the locals, an elderly man she knew only as Wally, walked slowly out. He smiled at her, pinning the door open above her head so she could let go and slip inside. Curse of the short person it was, ducking under armpits.
The half-assed plan she’d concocted on the way down—to ask whoever filled in for Denise the receptionist to pass on a message—bombed when her gaze flicked through the open doorway.
Joe sat at a nearby table, one tanned and ropy forearm stretched out across a chessboard to hover over a black piece. Muscles played along the length of his arm, his biceps flexing under the cotton of his steel-gray Henley. He opened and closed his fingers a few times over a pawn while the man opposite him, Old Smitty, who was another local character, slurped at his beer.
“By the time you make a move, Doc, I’ll be due for my next prostate exam,” Smitty grumbled.
“Thanks for putting that bleedin’ image in my head, old man,” Joe said.
The deep, soft lilt of his voice melted the ice from Mac’s frozen toes as she hovered in the doorway.
“Aren’t you going in?” Wally said.
It could’ve been Wally’s voice or the blast of cold air that hammered the final nail in her too-lame-to-work plan. Or it could’ve been Joe had an incoming bitch I loathe radar that went off inside his head. His hand stilled above the chess board, and his head whipped toward the door, where she stood miserably holding down her skirt, her red toes and probably a cherry-red nose no doubt completing the pathetic picture. His gaze—so blue, so intense that it was like holding a palm over the blue flames of a kitchen burner—skimmed down her body, from her wind-blown haystack hair to her bare feet.
Too late—way too late—to retreat now.
“In or out, miss?”
Crap. Everything around her, including Wally patiently holding open the door, had flown out of her brain the moment she’d seen him.
“In—thanks.”
So much for flying under Joe’s radar. She was now very much on it, and it was unnerving to be the object of his undivided attention. Like a giant, tawny feline who’d spotted a mouse poking its nose into forbidden territory, Joe kept his gaze locked on hers as she crossed on stiff legs to stand by his table.
“Too cold to be running around in your skivvies, love,” Smitty said. “You’ve got goose bumps all over your arms.”
Her skin wasn’t the only thing pebbling. Mac crossed her arms high on her chest to hide the obvious windchill effects. That, and to prevent doing a full-body shimmy from the shivers rattling her tightly clenched teeth. Not that Joe was looking at her anymore.
“You young fellas, no manners,” Smitty muttered under his breath, and then louder, “The girl’s freezing, Doc. Give her your jacket before she catches her death.”
“I’m fine,” Mac said quickly. “Mrs. Taylor insisted I come get you. She’s complaining of chest pains.”
“And where is Betsy having these chest pains? Holly’s shower, still?” Joe kept his gaze locked on the board as he slid his queen onto another square. “Checkmate,” he said without waiting for her answer.
His mouth pulled into a grin solely aimed
at Smitty, but it still gave MacKenna a little quiver in her good parts. Or maybe that was just from the icy breeze slicing into her again as someone exited the pub.
Smitty swiped a disgusted hand at Joe before lumbering to his feet. “Next time, you cocky Irish mongrel.”
Smitty yanked on the collar of the black wool jacket draped over Joe’s chair back. He skirted the table and draped it around her shoulders. “These barbaric Celts, no idea how to treat a lady. You keep it on ’til you get back to the party.” He patted her shoulder and headed for the bar.
The heavy folds of Joe’s jacket settled around her, and other than letting it drop to the floor—which would risk giving the cocky mongrel the impression she was affected by the masculine scent left on it—she was forced clutch the lapels together.
“Yes. She’s still at the shower, but she didn’t want me to call Maggie. She insisted I find you.” Now Mac had heard Mrs. Taylor’s request out loud, the plan sounded highly suspicious to Mac’s ears, and from the upward twitch of Joe’s eyebrows, she wasn’t the only one who thought the old woman was up to no good.
He blew out a sigh loaded with resignation but surprisingly no irritation and stood.
A good seven inches shorter than Joe, she was at the perfect height to note the dark growth of stubble on his throat as his Adam’s apple worked up and down. His fingers tapped an impatient rhythm on the table at his side.
“D’you mind backing up a step, so I can reach my backpack,” he said, “or are you waiting for Smitty to offer my boots for your pleasure, as well?”
Heat sandblasted her face, and she took a giant step backward, peeling off Joe’s jacket at the same time like a matador challenging a bull. “Here. Take it back.”
Light sparked in his eyes. Challenge accepted, his gaze seemed to say.
“No need to cut off that little red nose, MacKenna.”
His tone was light and teasing, as if this wasn’t the first time he’d addressed her by name in years. And the cold must’ve partly iced up her eardrums as she could’ve sworn his lilting voice had even grown a little husky.
“I wouldn’t want to be held accountable for you catchin’ your death,” he added.
He hooked his backpack over his finger and slung it onto one broad shoulder, ducking around her, not waiting to see whether she’d childishly throw his jacket at his retreating back.
Mac studied his loose and easy gait, his free hand relaxed at his side as he strode to the pub’s outer door. Gazing at that level meant an unavoidable view of his men’s-catalog-perfect jeans-covered butt, which made her wistful for the university students back home in Invercargill, a one-hour ferry ride away on the mainland. If only Joe followed the student trend of baggy pants belted below butt cheeks, she wouldn’t be thawing at an alarming rate.
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Other Series by this Author
Bounty Bay Series
Imagine an endless stretch of azure blue water and clean, unspoiled beaches.
Imagine a small town surrounded by ancient native forest.
Imagine neighbors who look after their own, who consider them whānau - family.
Imagine the secret lives, the hidden passions simmering under New Zealand’s sultry, subtropical Far North.
Welcome to Bounty Bay, where the reward of true love is a price only some are willing to pay.
Book 1: Hide Your Heart (Lauren & Nate)
Book 2: Know Your Heart (Savannah & Glen)
Book 3: Teach Your Heart (Gracie & Owen)
Book 4: Mend Your Heart (Natalie & Isaac) Coming 2017
Book 5: Break Your Heart (Vanessa & Sam) Coming 2017/2018
About the Author
Tracey Alvarez is a USA TODAY BEST-SELLING author who lives in the Coolest Little Capital in the World (a.k.a Wellington, New Zealand) where she’s yet to be buried under her to-be-read book pile by Wellington’s infamous wind—her Kindle’s a lifesaver! Married to a wonderfully supportive IT guy, she has two teens who would love to be surgically linked to their electronic devices.
Fuelled by copious amounts of coffee, she’s the author of contemporary romantic fiction set predominantly in New Zealand. Small-towns, close communities, and families are a big part of the heart-warming stories she writes. Oh, and hot, down-to-earth heroes—Kiwi men, in other words.
When she’s not writing, thinking about writing, or procrastinating about writing, Tracey can be found reading sexy books of all romance genres, nibbling on smuggled chocolate bars, or bribing her kids to take over the housework.
Questions or comments? E-mail Tracey at [email protected] or find her on the following social networks:
Website: www.traceyalvarez.com
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Twitter: @TraceyAlvarezNZ
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