Tempting as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  “I didn’t know it myself,” Lily said. “Is Brett around? I wouldn’t barge in, but it’s urgent.”

  “Let me check,” the woman said. A little excited, but businesslike once more. Rafe liked Montana.

  Two minutes later, he was shaking hands with a good-looking bloke whose hair was mink-dark and expensively smooth, and whose dark trousers and white shirt hadn’t come off a rack. He could have been a producer, he could have been a high-end realtor, or he could be a developer. Which he was.

  If Lily were selling her house, Rafe didn’t care what she said, he was stepping in and making his case.

  How far are we going here, mate? he asked himself, following both of them to an office overlooking historic-charming false-front wooden shops and hanging flower baskets, then taking a seat in a leather visitor’s chair. He answered himself, too. As far as it takes.

  At some point, you had to throw your hat into the ring. If this was that point, it was. The realization brought a certain reckless elation with it, like catching that monster wave, popping up on your board, and going for it. Daring all. The wipeout, the shark, or the thrill. Whatever came.

  For now, he listened as Brett Hunter told Lily, “I heard about your face. I’m sorry. You and your sister could be forgiven for deciding that Sinful was hazardous to your health. Except, of course,” he went on when she would have said something, “that you love it.”

  Another man would have looked at Rafe. Hunter didn’t. He focused on Lily. Smooth was hardly even the word. Courteous wasn’t, either. Interested might do it, though.

  Yeah. Definitely. Hunter’s interest in Lily stood out to Rafe like it was written on a sign. And, he’d swear, Hunter could feel his own pushback, twice as hard and darker, too, none of it any weaker for being unexpressed.

  Lily said, “I’m not here to sell you my land. I’m here to offer it as collateral. I want to borrow some money from you, and I want it today. Tomorrow at the latest. If you can’t give it to me, I have two other sources. Also available tomorrow.”

  Hunter leaned back in his chair. “Interesting. How much are we talking about?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” Lily said, as smoothly as if she hadn’t sweated coming up with that amount, which Rafe would bet she had. “Against what you’re leasing from me. A lease I can always cancel in the future, by the way.” She said it with a smile, but again, not really. “I know how sharp you are.”

  “Uh-huh,” Hunter said. “Term?”

  “Five years,” she said. “No penalty for early repayment, because I’d be hoping to pay it back sooner. But I want five years.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Five-point-five percent interest.”

  “Four-point-five,” she shot back.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Current bank rate is five-point-two on a home-equity loan.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Which would make me stupid to pay five-point-five.”

  “Except that you need it today.”

  “Except that I have two other sources, and you actually want the collateral.”

  Hunter looked at Rafe. “Two sources, of which you’re one and your brother’s the other. Which would be at zero percent, let me guess.”

  Rafe leaned back himself and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s right.”

  Hunter told Lily, “I’ve got my own ideas about why you’d rather pay me interest than get the money on easier terms. Suppose you tell me why you need it so urgently, though. Help me get excited about my investment, since I’m not actually in the lending business. Expanding the shop? Could be a good move.”

  Lily hesitated, then said, “No. I’ve thought about that, but…no. Not now. I need to add another bedroom and a half bath—well, a shower to my downstairs half bath—on my house, and I need to do it fast.”

  “Why?” Hunter asked.

  Lily said, “Because…there’s this little girl.”

  Hunter’s expression changed. “Tell me about her.”

  Lily paused again, then explained. About Bailey and her grandmother, about Chuck and the hospital and pneumonia and foster care, and the rules that said you needed two bedrooms.

  “And you’re going into debt to save her,” Hunter said. “Even though you’ve known her for a couple weeks. Even though she’s one of thousands of kids like that.”

  “She’s not ‘one of’ anything,” Lily said. Fierce again, and sure. “She’s Bailey, and she’s special. But what child isn’t special? What child is disposable? No child, that’s who. No child. Do you know the starfish story?”

  Hunter cocked his handsome head. Barely. “Tell me.”

  “A man is walking down a beach,” she said. “The tide’s too low, and thousands of starfish are lying there on the sand, drying out. Dying. The beach is littered with them. He sees another man near the shore, picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the water. He asks him, “Why would you do that? There’s no point. You’ll never save them all.” The man looks at him, picks up another starfish, throws it back, and says, ‘I saved that one.’”

  Silence for a long minute, and then Hunter said, “Tell me what you have in mind for your floor plan.”

  She took a breath and shook it off, then went back to business. So much more than she gave herself credit for. A loving heart and a gentle soul, a strong mind and a steady spirit. A woman for a lifetime. “Give me a piece of paper and a pen,” she said, “and I’ll show you.”

  She was sketching, then, and they were talking. About doors and windows, about adding a shower, and where you’d do it. “If you go on and extend the bath out here,” Hunter said, taking a fine-point Pilot from a holder on his desk and adding a few lines to her drawing, “you can have a window, which would make more sense. Frosted glass with a screen, and a tub instead of just a shower. Kids like tubs. Storage here, too. Shelves and drawers. You’re going to need that.”

  Five minutes more, and they both sat back and looked at their final sketch, drawn onto a clean piece of paper. Lily said, “That works. Thanks. So will you lend it to me? Four-point-five percent?”

  “Five percent,” Hunter said, “and one of my crews on it. She’s in foster care, and they won’t consider you until your place is done? My crew, then, and my foreman. We knock it out in ten days max, and I loan you the cost of it at five percent. Five-year term. My secretary will email you the papers tomorrow. It won’t be thirty thousand, though. More like twenty. Maybe less.”

  “Ten days?” Lily asked. “How could you do that?”

  Hunter smiled, finally. Plenty of charm there, and something else now, too. Warmth. “Because they work for me, and I only hire the best.” He stuck out his hand across the desk. “Deal?”

  This time, Lily didn’t hesitate. She put her hand in his. “Deal.” And then she sat back, and so did he. She laughed, then teared up. “Thank you. I can’t say…I can’t…thank you. You don’t know what this means.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I do.” No smile now. “I had a wife once. I had a little girl, too. For an hour.”

  There it was. The twist at the end that punched you in the throat. The hair on the back of Rafe’s neck stood up, and Lily’s face twisted. “Brett,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “So was I. You’re right. Kids aren’t disposable. Sometimes, though, it seems like the world can’t wait to throw them away. We’ll keep this one.”

  Lily’s shop was busier than it had ever been. Bailey was still in foster care. Rafe was still in Sinful.

  Why, then, was Lily reclining in a white leather armchair, alone in the forward-most of three suites inside the most luxurious executive jet she’d ever seen, a porcelain mug of herbal tea on the polished walnut table in front of her, noise-canceling headphones muffling the sound of the engines, and halfway across the Pacific? A very good question whose answer was, in a word, “Rafe.”

  Or possibly two words. “Rafe and Martin.”

  All right, three words. The real reason, or the last straw. �
�Remodeling.”

  When the cameras hadn’t left the day after her meeting with Brett Hunter, when Charmaine Hopkins, the social worker, had told Lily that Bailey’s foster mother had complained, and that Lily couldn’t go back to see her again? She’d set her shoulders and dealt with the consequences of her actions. She’d put makeup on her eye, gone back into the shop, and found comfort in focusing on her customers, on her business, on her life. She’d channeled the serenity she’d lost over the past couple days, had smiled, had talked about a flattering new style, run to find another size, tagged a new shipment. She’d coped.

  When she’d gone home, though, and her driveway had been full of pickup trucks and her house full of the sound of sledgehammers, an industrial vacuum, and men’s voices? When cardboard had covered her kitchen floor and dusty boot prints had covered the cardboard? When Brett’s foreman, an enormous, bearded man named Travis, with a loud voice and an easy laugh, had said, “Boss says do it quick, so we’ll have ’er knocked out for you tonight, and start framing tomorrow”—

  She’d been excited. Of course she had. She’d been more grateful than she could say. But her living room furniture and flooring had still been covered by canvas tarps, and her entire downstairs had still been a staging area. Two-by-fours and drywall, oak flooring and ceramic tile in stacks, and a shower stall where her easy chair should have been.

  She’d ordered new furniture online while crouched into a corner of the porch, invisible from the road. A double bed, a desk and chair, a chest of drawers, a bookshelf, a small armchair for reading and a cute area rug, bedding and curtains and curtain rods, all arriving in five days or less.

  She’d gone with “hope.” She’d gone with “prepared for the best outcome,” and had done her utmost to ignore the discombobulation. If she was rattled by the temporary loss of her cozy, organized, perfectly neat retreat, how must Bailey be feeling?

  Rafe had shown up, faithful cameraman in tow, when she was milking the goats, and he’d brought another picnic basket with him. She’d opened the front door, after the chores were done, and taken him on the world’s quickest inspection tour, which involved three steps into the living room, and he’d eyed the chaos and said, “I’m not telling you what to do, but you surely can’t be planning to stay here while they do this.”

  “I thought I could,” she admitted, “but not so much.” She pressed a hand to her head and tried to laugh. “I need a Tylenol, but it was in the downstairs bath, and now it’s in a box. When I had the house built originally, I lived in a trailer. Can you get a trailer for a week?”

  “Could live in Ruby’s,” he said, a smile lurking around his eyes. “I hear the back door’s unlocked.”

  She did laugh, then. “No, thanks. I should get a motel room. But I checked around, and all the decent stuff in town is booked, between it being the high season and our posse of followers. I found something in Kalispell, but it makes it tricky with the animals.”

  He led the way out onto the porch, sat defiantly in the porch swing in full view of the cameras, pulled the picnic basket toward him, and opened a beer. “I could offer the obvious,” he said. “That you could stay with me. But I’m guessing that’s been considered and rejected.” He was working on the wine bottle now. Lily wished it didn’t look quite so good, the most temporary of Band-Aids.

  She hesitated, then said, “Obviously, I’m grateful for the offer.”

  “But you don’t like the cabin,” he said, pouring her a glass. “Especially not upstairs.”

  “Stupid,” she said.

  “No. Natural. You almost died there.” He sat back in the swing and handed her the wine. “And don’t say it,” he said. “You can keep it at one glass. One’s pretty reasonable. Or you can drink half and dump the rest.” After that, he sat there, his clever fingers twirling his beer bottle and a faint frown on his face, until she asked, “What?”

  “You don’t want to be rescued.” The words came out slowly. “You don’t want a crutch. But what if…”

  “What if what?” She took a sip, and sighed. It was so good. Half a glass, then. A temporary indulgence, not a crutch.

  “You don’t want to go stay on the houseboat for a week or so, either, I’m guessing,” he said, “until your house is finished, because, besides the shop and the goats and the garden, you don’t want to get in Jace and Paige’s way. That place isn’t very big, and Jace is an insufferable bastard when he’s finishing a book. One-track mind, or two tracks at most, because he cares about Paige. And Tobias. But even that’s a stretch, and I happen to know he’s two weeks out from ‘The End’ right now. Best avoided. Also, you don’t want to bring the press to them. Identical twins! Tragic shooting! The Killer Cop and the Trophy Wife! Blonde, beautiful—and deadly!”

  Lily made a face. “Not to mention the hero and the superhero. All four of us are tabloid fodder all the way, and somebody’s going to lose their temper. Not Jace, probably, but Paige? Oh, yeah. Why do people have such a thing about identical twins, anyway? Not just women. Men are…”

  She broke off, and he looked at her more sharply, smiled with that rueful edge that killed her, put a hand out to brush her cheek, cameras or no, and said, “Nah, baby. No fantasies about you and your sister. It’s all about you.”

  She let out her breath. “You did not know I was thinking that.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “I did.”

  “You’re freaky,” she informed him. “You do realize that.”

  His laugh rang out in the evening air, and she smiled herself and felt so much better.

  “Right,” he said. “Because I can read your mind, I know you’re dying to escape, especially since you can’t see Bailey, and she’s still stuck in the house of horrors. I found out, by the way,” he added too casually, “that her grandmother’s stable, and they’re cautiously hoping to get her off the ventilator in the next couple days. When she does leave hospital, though, she’ll end up in a nursing home for a bit. Best-case scenario.”

  She sat up straighter. “Rafe. Really? How do you know?”

  He gave a shrug. “Not everybody’s as discreet as they ought to be.”

  “Especially,” she said, “if a certain werewolf brings up the best flowers in the gift shop and thanks the staff for everything they’ve done for his aunt, then leans a forearm on the counter, possibly, shows off his muscles and his smile and his charm and his eyes, and chats to them about a tragic family misunderstanding, and how glad he is that it isn’t too late, because his mum’s pretty cut up about it. If he takes the time to describe his mother’s romantic childhood, camping out with her beloved little sister in the high country, hearing wolves howl in the light of the full moon and seeing wild mustangs racing across a mountain meadow. After putting his jeans in the dryer on High to get them even tighter.”

  He was laughing for real now. “All true except the dryer. I didn’t think of that. And I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

  “I am in the fashion business,” she said. “Working men don’t wear their pants that tight. You think you were uncomfortable on a horse before …I’d say you’d stuffed a sock down there yesterday, except that I happen to know you don’t have to stuff.”

  The light in his eyes could tempt a worshiper right out of the choir. “Aw, baby,” he said, “I’m glad I do it for you. I think you’re very pretty as well.” And this time, she had to laugh, too.

  “So,” she said, taking one more sip of Chardonnay and letting the mellow light of a midsummer Montana evening, the song of a yellow warbler, the gentle sound of the wind in the pines and the faint tinkle of wind chimes, enter her bones and still her jangled nerves. “Where are you going with this? The last time I talked to Paige, she said Jace told her, ‘Rafe was born to save.’ That could have been snarky, except that Jace is never snarky. He meant it.”

  “And you don’t need saving,” he said, his eyes serious again. “You’ve already saved yourself. But even a strong woman can use a little help sometimes from the man who loves h
er. At least I hope so.”

  She leaned her head back and let the words sink in. He reached for one of her curls, rubbed it between her fingers, and said, “Especially if helping makes him feel better, too.” Then he leaned over, kissed her gently on the mouth, smiled into her eyes, and said, “Which it would.”

  That was why she was in the white leather armchair, and the view outside was of an impossibly bright, star-spangled Southern Hemisphere sky.

  Rafe was feeding her animals, keeping Chuck, and weeding her garden. Martin was selling nightgowns and getting excited about the gorgeous new line from the Little Bra Company. “Petite breasts,” she’d heard him declare like an evangelist to a customer yesterday, like he knew all about it, “aren’t out there in the cold anymore, honey. Bigger isn’t better anymore, and you have a beautiful figure. Let me show you a couple of these. You’ll die.”

  The customer hadn’t died. She’d bought bras in three colors, though. Martin, Lily had to concede, was very good, and Hailey hadn’t minded being left in charge.

  “Can I confess something, hon?” she’d said when Lily had broached the subject to her, still half-apologetic. “I love it when you leave.” She’d laughed, given Lily a one-armed hug, and said, “Oh, my gosh. Sounds terrible. But I like getting to come up with my own ideas, and I’m proud when you trust me. I’ve never wanted to boss anyone around, and I still don’t, but I sure do enjoy that.”

  “Bailey, though,” Lily had said to Rafe in a last-ditch effort to come up with a reason this wouldn’t work.

  “If something happens with Bailey,” he’d said, “if she’s moved someplace else, if her grandmother dies after all, if they need you again for your application—if any of that happens, we can have you back here in twenty-four hours. All you have to do is sit back and let Martin work his magic. He’s done favors from Montana to Mexico and Tunisia to Tahiti, and in case he hasn’t told you, there’s an assistant’s network out there that puts the CIA to shame. If Martin can’t get you spending a stay in Byron Bay as easily as spending a dime, he’s lost his touch, and he hasn’t done that.”