Ally cast him another sidelong glance. “What did I tell you about treating me like a patient?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Believe me, this isn’t a therapy session for me,” he answered, still stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry, Ally,” he said then.
Ally turned her head enough to look at him more squarely as his hand went back to the seat cushion.
Disappointed, she pretended not to notice. “You’re sorry for treating me like a patient?” she asked, confused.
“No, I’m sorry for my own mishandling of getting you here. I blamed you, too, and I was out of line. I guess I always want to believe that any family is better than none and I like Estelle, so I thought you weren’t appreciating what you have in her. But now…” His hand returned to cup the back of her head. “A lot of people would have just left her hanging out to dry and figured it was what she had coming, but that isn’t what you’ve done. I admire that, and I’d say Estelle is lucky to have you.”
Ally grinned at him. “Praise from her this morning and from you tonight—this really is my day.”
“We should come up with something better to do than looking at assisted-living facilities on Ally Rogers Day,” he joked.
“I think it’s too late for a parade,” she countered with a laugh.
“Guess I’ll just have to think of something else,” he said with sexy insinuation in his voice.
He leaned toward her then, pausing a split second with his face close to hers, giving her the opportunity to stop him if she didn’t want a repeat of last night’s kiss.
But that kiss of the night before had stayed with her during the last twenty-four hours. So she merely smiled a tiny, coy smile in that instant before his mouth touched hers.
She raised one of her hands to his face as his lips parted and enticed hers to do the same. She pressed her other hand to the wall of his chest, feeling the hard muscles just beneath his T-shirt. His free arm came around her to hold her, to pull her nearer as his tongue began to toy with hers. Mouths opened wider and that kiss became something a whole lot more involving, more intimate.
Ally’s right hand slipped from his face around to the back of his neck, testing the coarse texture of his hair. Her left went from his chest to his back where she pressed her palm to the expanse of his broad shoulders and closed what scant distance there still was between them so that her breasts barely brushed his chest.
But still, more than anything, it was that kiss that held her attention. Deep, plundering, and ripe with passion, it wasn’t the kiss of a contained, controlled professional, but the smolderingly sexy kiss of a hot-blooded man with nothing on his mind but her.
Somehow she’d turned enough to be sideways on the swing and he was easing her backward. And she was willing to go. To lie down, to have him lie beside her, to go on and on kissing and touching and who-knew-what-else.
But that was when Ally remembered where they were, that her mother was just inside the house, that Estelle could come down to the kitchen at any moment for a glass of water and see them there in the backyard, going at it like two teenagers.
And as much as she didn’t want to stop this—and, oh boy, did she not want to stop this—she brought both of her palms to Jake’s chest and gave him just enough of a nudge to get the message across that they should cool it.
He was clearly no more eager than she was, because he went on kissing her slightly more chastely for a few minutes longer. Then there was a break, a kiss, another break and another kiss before the third break brought a heavy sigh from him and he sat up straighter, taking her with him.
“Is the porch light going to flash to warn us to knock it off?” he asked in a low voice that let her know he knew what had been going through her mind.
“I’m afraid it could at any time,” she said. “And believe me, you don’t want that. It comes with a raging Estelle saying she won’t have anything like that going on right under her nose.”
Jake grinned a crooked, devilishly evil grin. “Anything like what?” He played dumb.
“Anything like French kissing and ruining my reputation—she’s always been very keen on my Reputation with a capital R.”
“Or she could worry about you ruining my Reputation-with-a-capital-R,” Jake suggested.
Ally laughed. “That’s probably more likely.”
Taking his cue, he stood to leave. “I better take off before you get caught corrupting me.”
Ally stood, too—but not before drinking in the sight of him once more, towering above her with that perfectly proportioned body and that slightly wayward mane of hair silhouetted against the porch light they’d been joking about. And like the previous night, she had a flashing thought of asking him up to her place to start that kiss all over again. To take it even further…
For the second time she managed to refrain, but it didn’t escape her that resisting it tonight was a struggle.
“I’ll walk you out,” she offered.
“Nah, my keys are in my pocket. I’ll just go around the house.”
He laid a hand to the side of her face and kissed her again, then said, “Don’t forget tomorrow night. Dinner at my friend Nina’s with her family and Bubby.”
It was the invitation Bubby had extended to all of them when Ally and Jake had returned home today. Bubby and her granddaughter wanted to cook for them.
“I guess so,” Ally said uncertainly.
“I’ll pick you two up,” he added.
She noted that he didn’t ask if it was okay. Not that it wasn’t. At that moment it was just a good thing he wasn’t ordering her to do more, because she doubted she could have denied him.
“We’ll be here,” she said.
Another kiss. This one a little hotter than the one that had preceded it, sending the message that there were still things churning in him the same way they were still churning in her.
But then that was it. Jake whispered a husky good-night and left.
Ally watched him go, her gaze dropping from wide shoulders to narrow waist to hips and a to-die-for rear end that swayed just enough with each stride of long, thick legs…
Only when he disappeared around the side of the house did she realize that she’d been holding her breath.
She released it, but as if that had been keeping her bottled up, when the air went out of her other things were set free.
Namely a terrible yearning to be back in Jake’s arms with his mouth on hers.
And she couldn’t help wondering where things might have gone from there if she hadn’t stopped him.
Because the man did have a talent for starting on a sour note and ending on a sweet one.
And the sweet notes were getting better and better.
Chapter Nine
“Don’t tell me you aren’t interested in seeing my bat mitzvah pictures for the hundredth time,” Nina Hanson teased Jake when he joined his old friend and her husband in their kitchen Monday evening.
Ally and Estelle were in the other room chatting with Bubby, who was thrilled to have a new audience for her show-and-tell.
“Not that you weren’t a cute kid,” Jake answered, “but I have seen those pictures often enough for them to be burned into my brain.”
“Poor Ally,” Nina commiserated, laughing, too. “I should go in there and save her.”
“I wanted to talk to you guys about her,” Jake said before his friend could leave the kitchen. “Although David is really who I need to talk to about her, so if you don’t want in on it, Nina—”
“Oh, no, you’re not getting rid of me if you’re talking about Ally—this dinner was designed for me to meet her and find out everything I can about her and what’s going on with the two of you. I’m not skipping anything.”
Jake and Nina spoke on the phone almost every day, so they’d touched base more than once since the Friday-night dinner. He was well aware of Nina’s suspicions that he was attracted to Ally. So far he’d been skirting the issue and he continued to ignore it now.
Instead, in a mock aside to her husband, he said, “I figured that would keep her around.”
Then he got to the point.
“Nina has been telling me about the problems with the two Taka hotels.”
David sighed, clearly frustrated. “Things are bad at both sites, that’s for sure. I got an anonymous e-mail today suggesting that our decorator is actually on Drake Thatcher’s payroll. Whoever sent it claims that Thatcher has promised Riki—Riki is the designer’s name, just Riki, no last name,” David interrupted himself to explain before going on. “Anyway, the claim is that Thatcher has promised Riki the decorator job for the Thatcher Group hotels if Riki does enough damage to us. And he’s done plenty—all the interiors on the San Francisco project are so far behind that it’s going to be a killer to catch up. It looks like Tom and Helen will have to beat the bushes for a new designer.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Jake said. “Nina told me you might be looking for a new decorator and I may have a solution for you.”
David’s surprise was apparent. “No kidding? How?”
Jake poked his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the living room where Bubby was showing family photographs. “Ally,” he said simply.
David Hanson’s eyebrows arched even higher. “I know she’s a designer, and she lives in L.A., which could be convenient for the San Francisco site. But we want to hire one person to do all the hotels and we need someone based in Chicago. Granted, in the final stages the decorator spends a lot of time on-site, but otherwise it’s better to have someone Helen can work closely with, and in order for that to happen, they need to be here.”
Helen was Helen Taka-Hanson, David’s sister-in-law. After the death of her husband, she had been instrumental in putting together the merger that had brought Hanson Media into business with Taka Corporation, a Japanese conglomerate. In the process she’d also helped bring the Hanson family together again. Since then she’d gained another husband—Mori Taka—as well as guided the family into launching the new hotel chain, and she continued to play a pivotal role in the business.
“Working out of Chicago is actually why I wanted to talk to you about Ally. A client as big as the Taka hotel chain would give her the chance to relocate.”
“Would she be willing to do that?” Nina asked.
“I can’t say for sure—”
“But you’re hoping,” Nina goaded.
Jake didn’t take the bait. He merely repeated himself. “Ally understands that her mother needs her, only she says that with her clients primarily on the West Coast, she can’t move because she’d be leaving her livelihood behind. That’s when I started to think that this might solve everyone’s problems—you would get a new decorator in a hurry, Ally would get a substantial foundation to establish her business in Chicago, and Estelle would get Ally close by.”
“Not to mention that you would get Ally close by, too.” This from Nina again.
David thought for a minute and said, “You could have something there. Of course, the decision would be up to Helen—this is her field, not mine—but I can talk to her in the morning before my plane takes off. If she’s interested she can call Nina and between the two of you, you can put Ally in touch with Helen.”
Jake nodded, satisfied that he’d set the wheels into motion.
“I haven’t said anything about this to Ally, though,” he said. “And it’s probably better if we don’t until you talk to Helen—”
“You haven’t discussed this with Ally?” Nina exclaimed in disbelief. “Don’t you think you’re overstepping your bounds to be doing this without talking to her first?”
“I wouldn’t want to get Ally’s or Estelle’s hopes up if Helen has her heart set on someone else,” Jake reasoned. “Estelle would be disappointed and Ally could get her feelings hurt, and I don’t want either of those things to happen if they don’t have to.”
David looked to Nina, who shrugged in what appeared to be reluctant concession to that. Then he said to Jake, “Helen is out tonight, but I’ll leave her a message to let her know I need to talk to her first thing tomorrow, before she gets any further with the search for a new designer. If she isn’t interested in Ally, Ally won’t have to know and feel rejected.”
“Or realize what you two big men are doing behind her back,” Nina muttered. “And then no more business,” she warned as her husband headed for the telephone.
“Then no more business,” David agreed.
As David began to make his call, Nina and Jake moved into the dining room. But they could see into the living room from there and Bubby was still showing family photographs.
“I say we wait here until they’re finished,” Nina said.
“That gets my vote,” Jake agreed. They went to the sideboard where trays of appetizers were already showing a dent, and helped themselves so it wasn’t too obvious that they were avoiding the pictures.
“I really like Ally,” Nina said as they nibbled bruschetta. “Which is another reason I think you should talk to her about this job before putting her name on the table.”
That barely registered with Jake, because he couldn’t keep from looking over his old friend’s head at the lady in question.
The evening was casual and Ally was wearing sandals, a simple A-line skirt and what seemed to his untrained eye to be one tank top over another—the outer layer plain but lower cut, the other higher at the neckline so a strip of lace could peek above and entice the hell out of him.
All he knew was that she looked great with her hair falling free to her nearly bare shoulders, that he’d spent the whole workday wrangling his thoughts away from images of her to concentrate on his patients, that he’d counted the number of therapy sessions he had to get through before he could be with her again, and that even now that he was with her again, he was itching to be alone with her again.
But he kept that to himself. To Nina, he said only, “She’s a decent person. I was wrong about her in the beginning.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that every time we talk you seem to have more positive things to say about her.”
There was an underlying note of humor in Nina’s voice and Jake recognized that it was at his expense.
“And now here you are, trying to arrange things so she moves back to Chicago,” Nina added.
Jake shrugged and it made Nina laugh.
“Oh, don’t act all Mr. Cool with me. You can’t keep your eyes off her. You hang on every word she says. I half expect to find you drooling over her. You’re worse off than you were with Claudia.”
Jake tore his gaze from Ally to frown at Nina. “Should I be worried that you’re hallucinating?”
“What you’re worried about is Ally going back to L.A. And why would that be unless you’ve got it bad for her?”
“Maybe for Estelle’s sake?” he theorized.
Nina laughed again. “Yeah, right,” she said facetiously. “For Estelle’s sake.”
Jake just grinned at his friend. He wasn’t fooling her, so he decided to stop trying.
“I’ve got it pretty bad,” he confessed, thinking that if he aired out the attraction it might dissipate. Some, at least. And at the rate it was growing, anything that might cut it down to size was worth a try.
“I’m not even sure why,” he confided to Nina.
“Could it be because she has big, beautiful green eyes?”
And a knock-’em-dead face and body to go with them…
“It can’t be all about looks—Claudia had looks, if you’ll recall.”
“Ally seems nice. Caring. Sweet. Considerate.”
“And buried in her job—like Claudia.”
“It wasn’t only that Claudia was buried in her job—if you’ll recall,” Nina reminded him. “In fact, what split up the two of you was less that than the other things.”
“True.”
But it remained to be seen if those other things proved true of Ally, too. So far it could go either way.
“And i
f you’re worried that Ally is buried in her job,” Nina said, “why are you trying to get her hired as designer for the Taka hotel chain? That’s big-time work.”
“But it’s work she’ll mainly do from here.”
“Okay. So let’s say we get her here. Then what’s the plan?”
“No plan. Just get her here.” Where the most he’d have to go without seeing her was a workday…
“Yeah, I’ve got it pretty bad,” Jake repeated, more to himself than to his friend.
Nina moved to stand beside him where she could look at the scene on the sofa, too.
“Well, I’m all for you and Ally getting together,” she announced.
“Just think,” Nina added, “with Estelle and Bubby being close friends, and you and I close friends, if you and Ally and Estelle were family we could be one big happy—”
Jake cut her off by laughing wryly and playfully hooking his arm around her neck. “Don’t go getting ahead of yourself, Hanson. Just because I like Ally doesn’t mean I’m ready to jump in with both feet and play house the way you did.”
“I did not play house with David,” Nina protested, referring to the fact that she had been her husband’s live-in assistant before they’d fallen in love and gotten married. “And I could only wish that things would work out for you and Ally the way they worked out for David and me.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said.
Even as he surprised himself with a fleeting thought that that might not be so bad…
Ally glanced up from Bubby’s family albums, hoping Jake and Nina might be back soon to rescue her.
But they were in the dining room, and Jake was pulling the other woman into his side with a sort of neck hug. They were smiling, laughing. The familiarity between them, the affection, was unmistakable.
There was no reason to be jealous, Ally told herself. Jake, Bubby and Nina were all close. Within minutes of meeting Nina and David Hanson it was apparent that they were a loving, devoted couple and that their family was important to them. Jake was probably merely showing Nina the kind of innocent affection a brother might show a sister.
Designs on the Doctor Page 9