by Cherry Adair
If she was any other woman... But she was Cat. He’d bite off his own foot before he’d hurt her. This was not a woman a man played with. Cat was a keeper.
There wasn’t a drop of blood in common between them. Their relationship was a state of mind. One he’d better keep remembering. She thought of him as her brother, he reminded himself grimly. Therefore Cat was off-limits. A no-no. Absolutely forbidden fruit.
“I hope it’ll be soon, Luke.” She pulled the towel from her head. “I’m not getting any younger, you know.”
“Who is?” He’d tied the laces too tight, but he walked to the door anyway. When he turned back he managed to look just at her hair. Wet and wild, it tangled around her face and bare shoulders, and lovingly clung, like wet flames, to the upper swell of her—
“Hurry up and dress, will you? It’s past ten and my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”
He closed the door gently behind him, feeling as though he’d just escaped something too terrifying to contemplate.
* * *
“OH, MY GOD, Luke, don’t take the corners so fast!” Catherine screamed as the Hideous Harley did a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet skim around another corner. Clinging to his waist, she gripped his belt buckle with both hands. The seat felt obscenely wide between her thighs.
“Lean, Cat. Lean.”
She leaned, sure her helmet must have brushed the gray asphalt as they cornered at an impossible angle.
Luke hadn’t given her time to dry her hair. The moment she’d dressed in jeans and another of his oversize sweatshirts, he’d hustled her down to the parking garage, ignored his well-preserved 1977 Jag, climbed onto his enormous black demon motorcycle, handed her the spare helmet, revved the engine and instructed her to hold on.
If she’d been holding him any tighter, she would have been in front. The speed scared her speechless, no easy feat. Nevertheless, she’d better learn to love the wind tugging her hair from the helmet, biting into her face and making her nose and eyes run. Luke loved his bike.
His house was an hour south of San Francisco, down narrow, windy, stomach-churning coastal roads. Catherine squeezed her eyes shut and buried her icy nose against his leather-clad back, remembering the first time he’d taken her up behind him. She’d been ten. He was seventeen.
He’d only taken her because Dad had insisted she get the first ride on his new bike. She’d been terrified. Luke had been furious at her for being such a baby and had screamed blue murder at her for three blocks. The wind had caused her eyes to tear. And Luke and Dad had had a huge, yelling, door-slamming fight when they got back.
“Loosen up a bit, Catwoman. I can’t breathe.”
Since Catherine hadn’t drawn a proper breath in more than an hour, she ignored his request. He felt warm and solid in her arms. “Are we there yet?” she whined like a five-year-old.
She felt Luke’s laugh vibrate through her body like dark, sinfully rich chocolate. Oh, yes. She’d made the right decision coming to San Francisco. Yes, indeedy.
* * *
“STOP HERE FOR a sec,” Catherine demanded an hour later as the bike turned from the tarred road parallel to the ocean onto the as-yet-unpaved gravel of Luke’s new driveway. The fog had burned off, leaving sparkling spring sunshine glinting off the Pacific in the distance. Catherine inhaled the fresh briny air deep into her lungs as she let go of him and flung her leg over the bike the moment he brought it to a stop.
She stood, took off her helmet, then shaded her eyes with one hand against the sun, waiting for her heart to take up its normal rhythm after being glued to Luke for miles.
While the soft whoosh of the ocean sounded behind her, she forced herself to check out his house, as opposed to analyzing which body part felt what from the close encounter of the third kind with Luke’s body.
Constructed of weathered redwood, tucked into the surrounding trees on a bluff overlooking a sliver of beach and the vastness of the ocean, the single-story house already had a look of permanence. Wonderfully gnarled, windblown cypress trees dotted the front yard.
“It’s going to be magnificent, Luke.”
Unaccountably, she felt the sting of tears, and rubbed the end of her nose with her palm. The house had been a goal of his for as long as she could remember. From the second he’d decided he wanted to be an architect, Luke had vowed to build his house from the ground up with his own two hands. A strangely permanent idea for a temporary kind of guy. Catherine wondered if Luke realized how at odds owning a house was with his playboy lifestyle.
While Luke loved the intricate curlicues and elaborate bits and pieces of Victorian houses, he’d explained to her once that he needed the clean, uncluttered lines of more modern architecture to cleanse his palate when he came home.
She noticed the enormous bay window in the living room. A window she’d suggested one rainy winter’s night as they’d pored over the first version of his blueprints years ago. She doubted if he suspected how many of her own dreams had been woven into his house plans.
Gravel crunched under his workboots as Luke came up behind her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. They stood silently for several moments looking up the slight incline to the house. Catherine was excruciatingly conscious of him behind her. She felt each finger on her shoulders, the warmth of his tall body shielding her back from the hair-ruffling breeze. The air smelled of salt spray and fresh lumber. But most of all it smelled of sun-warmed Luke in leather.
His proximity had already caused her stomach to coil into knots. After an hour of straddling his rangy body she needed to put some distance between them. She stepped out of reach and smiled over her shoulder. “Let’s walk the rest of the way so we can get the full ambiance.”
Luke grimaced and Catherine grinned. If Luke could ride instead of walk, sit instead of stand or call instead of write, he was a happy man.
“Exercise is good for you. It can’t be more than half a mile.”
“These are workboots,” he told her, “not walking boots. I have to save my energy for bossing you and Nick around.”
She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll walk. You ride. You should be an interesting-looking specimen once you hit forty. Flabby. Weak. Pasty. Probably sickly. That’s okay,” she said cheerfully, “you won’t be the first man to wear a waist cincher.”
Luke sighed, then knocked back the kickstand with his toe and rolled the bike beside her. “I go to the gym four times a week.”
Catherine laughed. “You go there to pick up women.” Luke’s indolence had been a family joke. Yet there’d been nothing soft about the stomach muscles she’d felt when she’d clung to him on the bike, or the hard, tight muscles in his behind pressed between her thighs. There wasn’t a flabby muscle on Luke’s six-three frame.
“I pay the dues. I can do whatever I want.”
He probably bench-pressed two blond gym bunnies. He might give the impression of being lazy, but Luke was no slouch in the flirtation department. Catherine had seen him in action. How many women, despite knowing Luke’s views on marriage, wanted him anyway? But she wasn’t going to dwell on that today. She was the woman he was with on this beautiful spring day. And she was going to enjoy every moment of it.
On either side of the slightly rolling topography, weeds, shrubs and vines tangled with thick trunks of oak, pine and cypress. There wasn’t another house for half a mile. The only sounds were ocean breezes and insects in the long grasses.
“Nick’s late,” Luke commented as he detoured to angle the monster bike through a patch of sand, parking it against a prefab shed off to one side of the half-finished front porch.
“You work the poor guy like a slave. We barely got here ourselves.”
“He’s cheap, but he’s good.” Luke squinted in the wind that ruffled his dark hair. He sent her a grin. “And he’s bringing lunch. Now, if I could just get him
to give up some of his active social life, I might have this house finished next month as planned.”
“It’s a long commute,” she said casually. A month? My God, there was no way she could pull this off in a month. Could she?
“Well, the office won’t be practically across the street as it is now, but an hour’s commute these days is nothing. Come on, I want to show off everything before Nick gets here.”
Catherine followed Luke slowly as he walked up the wide, shallow redwood steps onto a deep porch. He bounced lightly, testing each tread. His fingers lingered as he trailed them up the simple banister beside the front steps. He took pride in his craftsmanship and it showed. Luke had a hedonistic pleasure in textures. He always had. She was jealous of the attention the wood was getting.
Catherine swallowed hard, remembering the night of her dateless junior prom. Luke had come to spend that weekend with his father. Exuberant as always, he’d burst into her room and found her crying. He hadn’t known what to do with a weepy female, and had plucked the hairbrush out of her hand. More, she’d been sure, for something to do with his hands than to console her, he’d ended up brushing her hair for hours as they talked. Luke looking at the back of her head, Catherine watching his face, unobserved, in her vanity mirror across the room. She never did remember what they’d talked about, only that it was the first time she’d experienced sexual awareness. For her, it was the night their relationship had changed forever.
That was the night she’d realized she loved him.
Her ponytail brushed between her shoulder blades and she shivered, remembering the sensual pleasure of Luke’s fingers in her hair, against her nape.... Get a grip here, she warned herself sternly, as she waited for him to unlock the massive oak door. Before she followed him inside, she bent to pull a weed that had managed to grow through the wood slats.
“Gonna plant that in a pot?” Luke turned, indicating the two-foot weed clutched in her hand, soil trailing from its roots.
His smile tangled up in Catherine’s heart. Sunlight stroked his dark hair and magnified his strong, unshaved jaw. His long, lean body looked breathtaking in washed-almost-white jeans and a short leather jacket. He looked handsome, disreputable and too sexy for a small-town girl from Oregon. Yet she wanted him more than her next breath. She held out the droopy weed. “Got a pot?”
“And a window,” he said dryly. “Here, give me that. I’ll take you on the twenty-dollar tour.” He took the plant, tossed it outside, then brushed off his hands.
“Twenty bucks, huh?”
“And worth every penny. Careful where you walk. Not all the nails are countersunk in the subflooring.”
The square entry echoed their footsteps as she followed him into a large room filled with sawhorses, paint cans, lumber scraps and other paraphernalia of construction. Sunlight streamed through the plastic-covered windows. The room smelled of fresh wood, mudding compound and dust. She sidestepped boxes of nails and a mountain of Sheetrock to cross the room.
“Wow. This fireplace looks great.” Catherine ran her hand lightly over the enormous natural stones, then glanced at him over her shoulder. “Did you carry even one of these monstrous rocks?”
He gave her a horrified look as he removed his jacket, tossing it onto a stepladder. “Are you kidding? What do you think Nick is for? Poor spindly fellow, he needed the exercise.”
Catherine shook her head. “You’re terrible. What was the bet?”
“Who could eat the most soft pretzels.” He puffed out his chest, stretching his black T-shirt over hard muscle. Catherine’s mouth went dry. “I ate twenty-three.”
“Gross. You must have been sick as a dog.”
“Well, yeah. But it was worth it.” His grin was infectious and her heart leaped ridiculously as he laid his arm across her shoulders and stood beside her, looking at the wall of stone with pride. “There are over two hundred fieldstones embedded in that thar li’l ol’ fireplace.”
Reaching to the cathedral ceiling, and about fifteen feet wide, it hardly qualified as little. She shook her head, used to Luke’s and Nick’s ridiculous but harmless bets.
“When are you two going to stop that nonsense? You’ve been betting on anything and everything since fifth grade.”
“We did a sealed bet when we’d stop.”
Catherine shook her head again and slipped casually from under his arm. The back of her neck tingled and her knees felt wobbly as she strolled over to the plastic-covered bay window.
“Oh, Luke, this is absolutely glorious. Look at this view. Are there any deer out there, do you think?”
“Several. I saw a doe and her fawn last weekend.”
He walked over and leaned against an exposed stud, his arms folded as he watched her from hooded eyes. A stud leaning against a stud. How appropriate. Uncomfortable under his scrutiny, she shifted without looking at him.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course,” she said brightly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You just seem...I don’t know...different.”
“Different? How?” Since when?
“I don’t know.” He looked as puzzled as he sounded.
Excruciatingly aware of him watching her, she didn’t know where to look, what to do with her too-large hands and feet.
“There’s Nick! Is that his new car? I’ll go out and help him carry whatever he’s brought for lunch.”
If she took a breath in there, Luke didn’t hear it. She dashed out of the room, fiery ponytail bobbing against her shoulders, her sneakers echoing in the vast, empty room. Luke stared at her retreating back, avoiding the view of her tight little butt in retreat.
He shook his head and followed her outside. Just in time to see her fling herself into Nick’s open arms.
Scowling, Luke jogged down the stairs, gave a cursory glance at the screaming red BMW parked beside his bike, and dug into his back pocket. When Nick caught his eye over Cat’s head, Luke flashed him the twenty in his hand. The top of Cat’s head reached Nick’s jaw. Luke didn’t like the way they had their arms looped about each other’s waist as they strolled toward the house together.
He’d seen that look in his partner’s eye about seven million times. Luke wanted to gently set Cat aside and pummel his best friend’s and business partner’s face into the dirt. Twice, for good measure. He settled for a meaningful glare.
Nick grinned. Still holding Cat under one brawny arm, he snagged the money out of Luke’s fingers. “Thank you kindly, son.” He chuckled, stuffing the bill into his front pocket.
Cat glanced from one to the other and raised one red eyebrow.
“License plate. Has two threes in it,” Luke explained, keeping abreast with them on the steps and porch, but unable to squeeze through the front door. He glared at Nick, whose mockingbird-blue eyes held the devil today.
All three of them paused on the threshold.
“We could try it single file,” Cat offered seriously, her head doing the tennis match waltz to see who was going to cave first.
“No,” Luke and Nick agreed. Nick pulled a quarter out of his pocket. “Call it.”
“Tails.”
The coin caught the light as it twisted in the air, then landed on Nick’s palm. “Step back, pardner. The lady’s with me tonight.”
Luke scowled as he followed them into the living room. There wasn’t that much heavy lifting to do. He could have done without Nick’s help today.
CHAPTER THREE
“WELL, HONEY, AREN’T you absolutely, outrageously gorgeous?” Nick released Catherine’s waist, only to capture both her hands. He held her in front of him, arms spread wide, their fingers entwined, as he checked her out from head to toe, and all ports in between. She gave him a frank stare back. She’d adored him for almost twenty years. Almost as long as she’d known Luke. It puzzled
her why, when Nick was a truly delicious hunk of manhood, she’d never felt any of the sparks that ignited at just the thought of Luke.
“In eight months,” she teased, “I had two more calls from you than I did from Luke. I had to come and see for myself if you guys were behaving yourselves.”
“I gotta tell you, sweet thing, if I’d known you’d get even more beautiful, I would’ve called three times a day.”
Catherine pulled her hands free and gave him a mild look. “Three times a day, huh? What on earth would we talk about?”
“Your fantastic hair.” Nick reached out and fingered a few strands near her face, then lowered his smoky voice. “Your skin, your eyes, your mouth—”
“Hey, Stratton, give it a rest. Cat’s immune to your dubious charms.”
Although Catherine felt the pulse of Luke’s presence in the room, she managed to ignore him and to encourage Nick. “More. More.”
Nick’s answering grin revealed two long, sexy dimples in his lean cheeks. His dark hair had a tendency to curl. He kept it cut short, reminding her of the profile on a Greek coin. He was a clotheshorse, and his tall, spare body looked good in whatever he wore. Today he’d dressed in Dockers, his only concession to work a pair of immaculate workboots. His lavender golf shirt made his blue eyes look violet.
He grinned wickedly at Luke. “We’re going to have to keep Princess under lock and key while she’s visiting, won’t we?”
“I’m not visiting.” Catherine pushed his hand away from her hair, which he’d been absently fondling. “Dragon over there is letting me stay with him until the house is ready.”
Nick stuck his hands in his pockets and gave Luke a level look. “Is that so?”
“I’m not going to be moving in before the turn of the century unless you two get to work,” Luke told them shortly, dropping the last torn piece of sandpaper he’d been shredding to join the others at his feet. He cast Nick a mildly belligerent look.
“Please tell me my portfolio is still in your capable hands?” Nick begged with utmost sincerity. Four of Catherine’s savvy trades had made his new Beemer possible.