Take Me Tender

by Christie Ridgway

  His sweat had smelled good, too.

  Running his hand through his glossy black hair, he cleared his throat, then darted her an almost-shy look. “You said on the phone yesterday you wanted an estimate?”

  She cleared her throat, too, and ran her palms along the soft velour covering her thighs. “Yes. Um. Well. The thing is, my father is ultimately going to scrape the house.”

  “Your father owns it?”

  “Yes. Bradley Ryan.” She waited a beat for the man’s reaction. Her father was one of the most prolific television producers in history, second only to the late Aaron Spelling.

  Jorge shrugged, which surprised her for a moment, and then she realized that as a businessman in Malibu, he likely worked for any number of L.A. legends. “But you have the authority over this project?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He’s out of the country for a few months and wants me to do what I can to get it ready for the bulldozers.” Shanna supposed her father’s expectations of her were pretty low on that score, but she wanted to prove him wrong. Six months before, she’d turned thirty-three and the woman she’d seen reflected in her mirror had frightened her. She’d been the biggest party girl of her generation, but the apex of her fame was ten years gone, leaving nothing behind but a woman who’d never really worked, who’d never wed, and who now hadn’t a single serious reason to get up in the morning.

  Obsessing over Jay was yielding her nothing. He looked as taken by his private chef as she’d been with the idea that they could be a couple, and at the moment she felt as empty and lonely as this neglected old house.

  “What can I do?” Jorge asked.

  “Nothing—” Shanna started to say, but then stopped herself, flushing. Of course he couldn’t fix her, but there was a reason she’d called him. “I mean, there’s a bunch of overgrown brush between this lot and the next and in the front courtyard a couple of palm trees that might be worth saving. Can you take a look?”

  “Sí.”

  With a hand, she gestured toward the narrow hall. “Let’s go out the front.”

  Framed photographs had been left hanging in the hallway, and Jorge slowed to look them over. “No one wanted these?”

  Shanna shrugged, then glanced at them herself. “Someone in the Pearson family planned to fix the place up but then lost interest when my father made his offer.” It had been an offer generous enough for them to leave behind cans full of new paint and what looked to be photos of a Malibu long gone.

  Some black-and-white, others colored, they centered around life at the beach. Adults and children gathered by firesides, stretched on beach blankets, built sandcastles and human pyramids a few feet from the frothy surf.

  Jorge halted in front of one of the photos. “This is you,” he said.

  “What?” Shanna stepped close to him and followed his long, tanned finger to focus on a photo from…Fourth of July, maybe? In the background was a reasonable sand facsimile of the Statue of Liberty and in front of it a passel of kids wearing red-white-and-blue bandannas and wide grins.

  There was Jay, one of his sisters, a couple of the Pearson kids, and some others she didn’t recognize. Standing front and center, her arms almost outstretched as wide as her smile, was a white-haired urchin covered with so much sand she looked like a piece of chicken ready for frying. Shanna inhaled, taking in another breath of Jorge’s soapy-clean scent. “You really think that’s me?”

  Had she ever been that full of happiness?

  He bent down and brought his face near the photo for a better look. “Sí,” he said. “I think so, yes.”

  From the corner of her eyes she watched him inspect the picture. His dark lashes were unfairly long and curled at the very tips and she remembered the soft, curling hair of his chest that she’d glimpsed last week before he’d buttoned his shirt. There’d been tattoos on that wealth of dark skin and at the memory of them, and of all that hard, masculine flesh that had taken the artist’s needles, her heart jittered again.

  She took a quick step away.

  His gaze jumped to her face, and he straightened, shuffling back. For a moment she thought he looked as embarrassed as she felt. “Those palm trees?” he prompted.

  “Sure. Yes.” She practically ran through the front door.

  He took his time studying the trees and the other growth that had been allowed to overrun the courtyard. With a frown, he pulled out a notebook and pen to jot down figures and a few words.

  “Spanish,” she said out loud.

  Jorge looked over at her. A smile crossed his face and she couldn’t help but admire his strong, white teeth. Oh, yes, he was a good-looking man. “You thought Swedish, perhaps?”

  She laughed. “I’m not that silly. I was just commenting that you write things for yourself in Spanish.”

  “I was born in a little village outside of Mexicali, which is just over the border in Mexico. Still have many relatives there. It’s where I started school, too, since we didn’t come north until I was nine.”

  She’d lived in the United States her entire life and probably didn’t speak her first language as well as he spoke his second. “And yet you’ve gone on to build a successful business.”

  He looked away again and his hand went to the buttons that kept his polo shirt closed. “I had my share of trouble. We moved to the barrio in East L.A. when we first arrived and it wasn’t always a good place for children. Especially teenagers.”

  “And you think Malibu is?” Shanna shook her head. “Too much can be almost as dangerous as too little.”

  “Then maybe we have more in common than first appears,” Jorge replied.

  Yeah, right, Shanna thought. They were about the same age, but that was the beginning and the end of what they had in common. He was a successful, self-made man, and she was the spoiled, do-nothing daughter of another. Without knowing what to say, she picked at the peeling paint on the trim around the front window. It fell to the cobblestones, as thin and brittle as her heart felt in her chest.

  “Ms. Ryan…”

  Her head jerked around. “Shanna. Please call me Shanna.”

  “It’s such a pretty name.”

  Embarrassed, she laughed again, and lifted another shard of paint from the sill with her fake nail tip. “It came from one of my mother’s favorite romance novels.”

  “Ah. Like all parents, she hoped her daughter would find love.”

  But what had Shanna found instead? When she was younger, there’d been men who made appropriate playmates in the world of the L.A. clubs and red-carpet parties. But they’d drifted on to ever-younger Hollywood women and the ones who phoned her now had more in common with her father—their age, anyway—than they had with her.

  For a few months she’d thought, hoped, Jay…Tears stung the corners of her eyes and she squeezed them tight, holding in the pain.

  “Shanna. Shanna.” Jorge’s hand landed on her shoulder. It was warm and gentle. “Can I help?”

  Scooting away from his steady touch, she rubbed the back of her hand against her cheek. “You are helping. I could really use that estimate.”

  He was silent a moment and she wondered if she’d offended him somehow. “Sí. Sí,” he said, his voice stiff. “The estimate. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

  “That would be great,” she said, though she sounded miserable. She felt miserable. Lifting her head, she looked next door at her house—no, the house she lived in…it belonged to her father, of course—and tried to imagine herself inside her deep marble bathtub, hot water penetrating its slick cold surfaces, hot water finding a way to warm her inside, too.

  But the place next door was never warm, not really. And she rattled around it like an ice cube in an empty highball glass. More loose blue paint floated through the air as she ran her finger over the Pearsons’ sill.

  A memory burst into her mind. That Fourth of July, the one pictured in the hallway. That had been her, she remembered now, wearing that banana-yellow bikini and grinning like a happy, sand-encrusted
goblin. She’d been a happy, sand-encrusted goblin that day. The Pearsons had a tradition, she recalled. The kids invited to their party put on a Fourth of July parade on the beach, marching through the sand dragging wagons or riding thick-tired bicycles, accompanied by dolls, dogs, and whatever else they could decorate in red, white, and blue. Jay had dragged his youngest sister behind him on a boogie board, while Shanna spun in cartwheels beside them.

  Unlike a lot of Malibu celebrations, the Pearsons’ party hadn’t been martinis and hors d’oeuvres, but beer and hot dogs burned by real dads and served by real moms and not by butlers and nannies. She couldn’t remember another quite like it—had they started going to Maui in July?—but that day, that day had been so perfect.

  “It’s going to be a shame to tear this home down,” she said aloud. “It was a very happy spot.”

  “Does your father really need it?”

  “My father doesn’t need anything. But what he wants…” She shrugged.

  “What do you want, Shanna?”

  To feel warm. Needed. Important.

  To be a person, and not a sponge.

  To have a home. Her own home.

  “I could buy this place,” she heard herself say.

  His eyebrows rose. “Qué?”

  “I have money. I used to model on occasion, believe it or not. I did a commercial or two.”

  “For that candy bar. Decadence.”

  Heat climbed up her throat. It had run for three or four years. Shanna between satin sheets with chocolate melting on her chin and running toward her barely covered cleavage. Her head tilting back, her mouth open for the phallic-shaped candy bar.

  Jorge shrugged. “They played it on the Spanish language stations, too. ‘Take a taste of sin.’”

  Her face burned hotter. “I made money from that.” She knew she sounded defensive.

  He shrugged again. “Bueno. Especially if it’s enough to buy this house from your father.”

  Would he sell? Maybe, if she showed him how nice it could be again, even though not up to the standards of the marble monstrosity next door, of course. “But it’s not enough to pay for all the work it needs, too.”

  “It’s a small house. What it needs doesn’t look major to me. Do it yourself.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  He cocked his head toward the house. “There are paint cans inside. Start with them. Go to the hardware store and buy some paint scrapers and brushes.”

  “But I…” Have Pilates classes and nail appointments and…and…nothing. I have nothing. I know how to do nothing. Tears stung her eyes again.

  But she was supposed to be calm and in charge. A woman of business.

  A woman of value.

  Yet she’d felt as empty as this old house for so very long that even Jorge Santos’s beautiful eyes and steady gaze couldn’t change that.

  Eight

  Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.

  —NIGELLA LAWSON, CULINARY WRITER

  Monday morning, Nikki was back in Jay’s kitchen, cutting a pineapple for the massive fruit salad she planned to set out for the scheduled meeting of NYFM’s editorial staff. She’d already served Fern one of the granola and yogurt parfaits she’d prepared, and then overheard the teenager on her cell phone telling her boyfriend, Jenner, that she was shopping with the girls that day.

  Nikki blew out a sigh. She could put away at least one worry for the moment.

  Then Jay appeared on the back deck, shirtless and wet, a half-naked reminder of all the other worries that were front and center in her mind—as they had been all weekend she’d been home alone with Fish.

  Jay knew she wasn’t attracted to girls.

  Worse, he knew she was attracted to him.

  Worse than that, he was attracted right back.

  Casting him another sidelong look, she fell right into admiring everything so maddeningly unforgettable about him: his lean muscles, his golden skin, the charming smile he beamed her way when he caught her watching. She remembered the touch of his hot tongue on her naked nipple, and as if he did, too, his smile widened.

  He was too damn good at this.

  Scowling, she jerked her focus back to the cutting board and almost wished she hadn’t hurried home on Friday night after they’d returned to his house from the restaurant. While it had allowed her to break free of him at a crucial moment, maybe if she’d stuck around some new plan would have occurred to her. As it was, she was now stymied as to how to handle the situation.

  Stuck.

  Without a single idea of what to do about the man she wanted as a reference, not a lover.

  As he opened the sliding glass door to step inside, she kept her gaze on the golden yellow triangles of pineapple she was piling into a bowl. The one thing she had going for her was how well she kept her distance from other people. Until she came up with a better plan, she’d pretend there was a wall between herself and Jay.

  The problem with that, of course, was that he didn’t see the same imaginary bricks she was so busy cementing together. He came into the kitchen and so far into her personal space that when he reached around her for a coffee mug, the damp underside of his bare arm slid against her shoulder.

  She jumped just like when he’d put his hand over her mouth Friday night—at times her instincts would balk at a man’s sudden moves—and then shuffled left so that she had more air.

  “Nice weekend, cookie?”

  Small talk. She could do that, though she wasn’t good at it. “Sure. Spent a few hours at the martial arts studio working on my black belt, taught a self-defense class at the local Y, then polished all sixteen pairs of my steel-toed boots that you won’t let me wear to work.”

  He leaned back against the countertop, regarding her with a lazy gaze. “Oooh, scary. But you’re a better chef than you are a storyteller. I’m betting you actually caught up on your backlog of cooking magazines, pampered yourself with a pedicure, then watched some sappy chick flick on Lifetime while you practiced your new hobby.”

  Her You Make Me Blush painted toenails curled into the soft soles of her flat sandals. “It was Pulp Fiction on the He-Man channel, I’ll have you know, and what makes you think I was knitting?”

  He lifted the little pile of needles and yarn she’d forgotten she’d left on the opposite counter. Eleven skinny inches of knitted rows dangled. “What the hell is this, anyway?”

  At the moment, Nikki didn’t have a clue. As she became more facile with the activity, though, she’d found it soothing to continue stitching row after row until what had started out as a swatch was something…well, something else. “I’m making you a tie,” she lied.

  The horror reflected on his face was delicious. Maybe she had a way to put him off after all.

  She smiled at him, so saccharine it was sure to leave an aftertaste. “You’ll use it, won’t you? That’s the kind of thing I particularly appreciate in a man—if he wants me in his bed, that is.”

  The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of the NYFM staff and Nikki blessed their promptness. She liked leaving things between herself and Jay just like this—him speechless and her secretly smug.

  He passed her on his way to the entry, snagging a shirt he’d flung over a chair. Then he strode back, and snatched up her knitting again. With a thoughtful look on his face, he wound the length around his strong wrist.

  His gaze caught hers. “Sure, cookie. I’ll be happy to use this as a ‘tie.’ It’ll come in handy when I knot your hands to the headboard before administering my patent mind-blowing orgasm.”

  Evil man.

  Because he left her like that—him blatantly smug and her secretly…thrilled.

  No!

  Because he was so not going to be administering any orgasms. So not. And he was never going to tie her down—that was certain.

  Still, she appreciated the buffer the incoming staff of eight presented. They filled their plates in the
kitchen, then lounged around the living room and spilled onto the deck. After the group ate, they congregated for business talk with cups of coffee while Nikki cleaned up and put the leftovers away.

  Their meeting finished about the same time she did, and most of the group went onto the sand to kick around a soccer ball. The lone female in the group, a scrappy-looking woman with a freckled face and short wisps of black hair, came back in the kitchen for more of the cheddar and cayenne crackers Nikki had baked over the weekend and served with paper-thin slices of deli meats.

  “Do you give out your recipes?” the staffer, Michelle, asked, munching on a handful of the cheesy bites.

  “Sure. When it comes to cooking, nothing I know is confidential.”

  “Good. Because then maybe you’ll also let me interview you for a piece I’m writing about the behind-the-scenes of a busy restaurant.”

  “That’s not what I do now,” Nikki pointed out.

  “General background stuff is all I’m looking for. It’s a ‘through my eyes’ article. I’ve lined up a few days at a top-tier kitchen next week.”

  Nikki eyed the small woman. Scrappy, yes, and she supposed working with a bunch of guys at NYFM had prepped her some, but…“Kitchens have a very male-dominant atmosphere.”

  Rolling her eyes, Michelle jerked a thumb toward the soccer players on the sand. “You think the dudes out there don’t forget I’m female at least four times a day? I’ve been told enough jokes about the farmer’s daughter and her hoo hah to fill that ocean out there.”

  “In a restaurant kitchen, they’ll never forget you’re a woman.”

  “Aaah.” Michelle took one of the stools drawn up to the kitchen bar and pulled out the other, indicating Nikki should sit. “Come on, sister dear, dish.”

  Sister. Nikki didn’t have one of those or really any close girlfriends either. She thought of Cassandra and the dress she’d borrowed and would have to return soon. Before Friday, she’d not once shared someone else’s wardrobe.

  “Nikki?”