Just Trust Me, A Brother's Best Friend Novel (Carrington Cousins Book 2)

by Amy Summers

  "Mark all of the above," he muttered to himself, shifting his position and wondering, fleetingly, if he was going to get up with a very stiff back in the morning.

  But this was all very strange. He'd heard her voice on the telephone and he'd gone out of his mind, like an idiot, like a crazy person.

  He sighed, closing his eyes. He'd turned thirty this year. Maybe he was going through some sort of early mid-life crisis. It didn't make any sense for him to go into a tailspin because of Madison Carrington. She was beautiful, sure, but so were a lot of other women. So was Mia, for Pete's sake.

  But he had to admit, Madison was different. She'd appeared like a vision in the night. She was exotic and romantic, and at the same time, she wasn't for him, and he knew it. To a guy who came from where he came from, her kind was poison. He didn't want her. He didn't want her at all. So why couldn't his libido quiet down and leave him alone?

  Because no matter how much he tried to deny it, she knocked him out. TKD. No contest.

  She was like a vision, ideal and untouchable. He'd never seen a woman before who came so close to perfection.

  He suddenly remembered that he'd seen Madison's room in the house in the Hamptons. Even ten years later the memory stuck with him. It had been a beautiful room. Perfect—all white and pink and lace—as though it had belonged to some storybook child who couldn't possibly be real. A perfect world for a perfect woman.

  He remembered he'd been slightly repulsed by all that perfection, and had turned to go. His jacket had brushed against a porcelain figure of a dancer sitting on the corner of the low bookcase. Before he could catch it, it had crashed to the ground and smashed into a hundred sharp pieces of glass.

  Russ's mother had been showing him the room. She'd been gracious, not letting on for a moment that his accident bad caused her any annoyance. But two days later, as he was preparing to leave, he'd glanced in the room again, and there was a new porcelain figure, exactly like the old one. Everything obviously had to be perfect at all times.

  What a contrast to his own world. Or should he say worlds? After all, he'd grown up in two of them—the large, loving, rambunctious family of his mother's midwestem clan, and the quieter, simpler life he'd lived in Los Angeles with his hard-working father, clinging to the edge of poverty. Neither world would have known what to make of a woman like Madison, or the kind of life she'd led. No one ever kept a perfect bed for him, just in case he might want to revert back to childhood again. Just the thought of it made him smile in the dark.

  But beautiful as she was, Madison was no piece of brittle purity, no ice princess. There was flesh and blood beneath the lovely exterior and a vivacious flash of temper behind the sparkling blue eyes. And, he had no doubt, a reservoir of passion hidden just below the surface. The thought of making love with her set his heart pounding again. And he knew he had no right to think things like that.

  Who was the man she was running from, anyway? Her husband? A lover? A woman as beautiful as Madison would always have a man around.

  A shutter banged. The wind off the ocean was picking up. It banged again and he threw back the covers, forcing himself to his feet. He walked softly through the apartment, moving to the window and latching the shutters to stop the noise. Then he turned to go back to his makeshift bed.

  He hadn't meant to look at her. He'd done fine going in, walking right by the bed without a glance. But on his way back out, he couldn't resist.

  She lay between her two children like a modern-day Madonna, her eyes closed, her breathing even. Something turned in his chest, like the twist of a knife, and he realized he was reaching for her, reaching out his hand to touch her golden hair. He jerked his hand back, repelled by his own impulses, and turned away.

  It was worse than he'd thought. His body was playing traitor. He only hoped he could make it until he got the three of them off to the airport the next day without making a fool of himself.

  Chapter 3

  Someone was snoring. The snoring was rattling the bed. Madison reached out groggily to push him, stop the snoring. But instead of a big, hard man, her fingers made contact with a skinny little backbone, the vertebrae sticking out like the spines on a dinosaur, and her eyes snapped open.

  "Oh, Chris." She sighed, and gave his back a quick rub before turning to face her other child.

  The room was barely beginning to get light. The sky she could see around the edges of the blinds in the window was purple. A new day.

  "We're going home," she whispered, though both of her children slept. Stretching with a yawn, she smiled into the gloom. Home. It sure sounded good.

  Slowly she assimilated her new reality. She was in Russ's friend's apartment, and she was running away from Armand. Again.

  Fear tingled along the rough edges of her nerves. And that was new. She hadn't been afraid of Armand before. Now she knew she would never be able to trust him again.

  What if they didn't make it home? What if he caught them?

  Just days ago she would have scoffed at these qualms and she would have said to herself, what could he possibly do to us?

  Now she knew.

  She was lucky she'd had this place to run to. David made a great protector. He was big and strong and self--assured-she couldn't have found a better man if she'd tried. It was too bad he didn't like her, or anything about her. She knew he was going to be very happy to get rid of them. And she would oblige just as quickly as she possibly could.

  But first she was going to need him to do some babysitting for her. She smiled, thinking of what his reaction was going to be to that idea. But she had very little choice. She couldn't take the children with her and there was no one else in Puerto Vallarta she could trust with her most precious cargo.

  Sounds were filtering up from the cafe below. David was already awake and working downstairs. She slipped out from between her two sleeping children and made her way into the bathroom, washing her face and tying her hair up in a knot on the top of her head. She thought about putting the powder blue jumpsuit on again, and made a face. David was going to have to help her find something else to wear, something that Armand wouldn't know, something that would let her blend into the general population. A disguise.

  The kids were still asleep when she emerged, and she decided to run down and ask David if he knew anyone she could borrow some clothes from.

  She found a pair of shorts to slip into and then padded down the stairs, past the tall windows letting in the golden rays of the morning sun, and into the cafe.

  He didn't see her at first. He was leaning over a huge kettle of soup, staring down into the murky depths as though he'd lost something in it. One strand of silky dark hair had fallen over his eyes. He wore a blue green print shirt over the chest that had looked so good glistening in the lamplight the night before, and tight, faded jeans over his muscular legs. He was a good-looking man. But it was the apron that made her smile. It seemed incongruous, this great big strapping man leaning over a hot stove, cooking.

  "Good morning," she said, amusement in her voice.

  He looked up and for just a moment, she saw the real David Coronado, his face sweet and open and full of pleasure. And then the hardness clamped down again, and be looked away.

  She sighed. So it was going to be that way, was it? Well, she could give as good as she got. Moving on into the kitchen, she plunked herself down on a stool at the counter and smiled at him. He was really going to love the babysitting plan.

  It wasn't until he looked up from the albondigas soup he was stirring and saw her coming toward him through the cafe' that he realized what a good thing it was that he hadn't had a nightgown to loan her. She looked utterly delicious in his shirt, cute and cuddly and seductive as all hell. Her legs looked long and smooth, and her breasts...

  Good Lord, why did she have to have breasts, too? Wasn't a pretty face and a sexy voice bad enough?

  He quickly turned his attention back to preparing for lunch, turning from the soup to the cutting board, and grunted an
answer to her greeting, but his mind was still full of the picture he'd just taken in.

  "Excuse my casual attire," she murmured, obviously aware of the effect she was having on him.

  Excuse it? How the hell was he going to excuse it? He hardly dared look at it. But no matter how much attention he tried to pay to cutting up tomatoes for salsa, the picture that had seared into his mind remained.

  She looked just like one of those shirt ads, or a scene from a movie where the hero and heroine wake up in a penthouse suite overlooking Central Park in New York, looking as though they'd made love all night. Her eyes were just a little bit sleepy, her body just a little bit gorgeous. The cleavage between her breasts showed where the crisp cotton shirt was buttoned low, and her hair was piled on top of her head, wisps flying out around her face. Any man who found someone like this in his bed in the morning...

  Whoa. Hold on. She's Russ's sister, he told himself in grim silence, staring hard at an onion he was about to eviscerate. "No lust allowed."

  "You don't really do this for a living, do you?" she was asking.

  It took effort not to look up and meet her eyes, but he managed it. "What? Cook?"

  She nodded. "I'm sure you do it very well," she hastened to add. "But it just doesn't seem ..."

  "No," be said shortly, taking a very shiny, sharp knife and making mince meat of the cilantro, just as he'd done to the onion, getting satisfaction out of every crushing blow. Hah. Die, small green things.

  "I'm a landscape architect," he said aloud. "I have my own firm in San Diego."

  "Really?" She leaned forward, enjoying watching him work, her chin in her hand. "I live in San Diego, too, in La Jolla."

  "Do you?" He stabbed a ripe tomato right through the heart and watched it bleed. He wasn't always so rough with the vegetables, but he had to get rid of his frustrations somehow.

  "Yes." She went on breezily, not seeming to notice the mayhem going on right under her nose. "Right now I'm staying at my parents' summer home there."

  The summer home that jutted out from the cliff, overlooking the waves. He'd seen it. The place was about as far from his middle-class residential section as earth was from the mountains of the moon. La Jolla, indeed. He took a fork and mashed the salsa as though it were an enemy he'd been chasing for a long, long time.

  She quit trying to make conversation, which was even worse. He went on smashing food while she sat and stared at him, and the silence grew as heavy as a wet blanket draped between them. Finally he couldn't stand it any longer, and he looked up, meeting her gaze, disconcerted to find her eyes full of amusement. What the hell did she think she was laughing at?

  "Would you like some coffee?" he asked gruffly.

  She nodded, her tongue moistening her lips as she tried to hold back a smile. "I would love some. Thanks."

  He poured it without looking at her again.

  "Thank you," she said softly, but he didn't answer.

  She took the cup in her hands and sniffed the aroma with sensual pleasure. Glancing up, he saw the look on her face and felt his stomach muscles contract, and everything below it followed suit. His fingers tightened around the knife. He needed something else to attack, but slashing tortillas to ribbons might strike her as a little strange.

  "So you come down every summer to help your grandparents out?" she asked, seemingly as tired of the silence as he was.

  "If I didn't come," he said, throwing scraps into the paper liner of the garbage pail—throwing them hard—"they wouldn't take a vacation. There's really no one else who could run it for them this way."

  "What a nice thing to do," she noted softly.

  He glanced at her as he washed off the cutting board with hot, hot water. "I enjoy it. I do it as much to get away for a while as anything else. It's not just to help them."

  She laughed. "Oh. Sorry if I implied you might actually have a soft spot."

  Sure he had a soft spot. Couldn't she see it? It was right on the top of his head.

  But enough of this. He turned and looked her full in the face, leaning both hands on the counter before her. He couldn't take much more of this pussyfooting around. He didn't like being teased. Maybe she didn't know she was teasing him. Maybe she was just chatty. Well, if she wanted conversation, he would give it to her.

  "You want to talk?" he said evenly. "Okay. Let's talk about what you're doing here in Puerto Vallarta. That is, if you've had time to straighten things out in your mind."

  He held her gaze with his own and something sparked in the shimmering blue of her eyes. For a moment he thought she was going to snap back at him. But she held her anger in check this time. Slowly she nodded.

  "Okay, David," she said calmly. "I guess it's time I told you everything."

  He waited, face hard and expressionless. She bit her lip and avoided his eyes for a moment.

  "Have you ever heard of Armand Alexiakis?" she asked at last.

  He frowned. "Wasn't that the name of the Greek millionaire you married?"

  "You knew about that?"

  "Russ said something about it once."

  She looked down at her hands. "Yes. Well, 1 did marry him."

  He knew that. Hell, there were two kids sleeping upstairs to prove it.

  "Was he the one you were with on the yacht?"

  She nodded and he looked away. The woman had a husband. That made the way he was feeling about her even worse.

  "So., .what happened? You had a fight?"

  She took a deep breath and went on. "Weil, we're not married anymore. But he was the one I was with."

  "Really?" He felt as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out of him, like a bad balloon. It took effort just to stay where he was and face her. No longer married. What do you know?

  "I divorced him almost three years ago," she said, and he looked up in time to catch the bleak look on her face. ' 'But he is the children's father."

  David nodded. Russ had mentioned his sister's disastrous marriage. Normally, he shied away from divorced women. They were so often bitter, or they wanted to prove they were still desirable and came on too strong. But Madison... hell, what was he thinking of? Divorced or not, she was poison. He had to remember that. Swallowing hard, he listened to what she was saying.

  "And when he invited us down to visit him here, I thought it would be a good chance for Jill and Chris to get to know him. They hadn't seen him for years."

  "And now he wants you back," David guessed. It only seemed logical.

  She hesitated. "Yes. In a way."

  "And you don't want to stay with him."

  "Exactly."

  He nodded slowly. "Was he trying to force you to stay?"

  "Yes. He... he was getting obsessed with it. He frightened me."

  You could hardly blame the guy for getting uptight about the situation. Still, he had no right to scare her.

  "Well, we'll get the three of you on a plane this afternoon, and you won't have to worry about him anymore. I assume you have security at your house in La Jolla?"

  "Of course. But you see—he'll probably be watching the airports. And the banks. I'm going to need a disguise."

  "What?" He looked at her again, wondering if there was something about her he hadn't noticed before—like a screw loose.

  She saw the skepticism in his eyes, and she frowned. "I'm serious, David. I tried to leave day before yesterday, and he threatened me. I don't dare risk seeing him again." She paused and looked at him earnestly. "Don't you see?" she asked desperately. "If he got hold of the children, he might not give them back. He could... blackmail me."

  David nodded slowly, his nerves sizzling from the sound of her low, husky voice. Okay, he could buy that. He'd heard of things like that before. Rejected husband grabs kids to make ex-wife reconsider. Maybe she was right to be careful.

  "That's why I need you to baby-sit for me," she said, watching his eyes for his reaction.

  The eyes widened in horror. "Baby-sit?" Hadn't he heard this one before? "Oh, no. I'm not
really good with kids. I tell you what. I know plenty of girls in this neighborhood who would..."

  She was shaking her head emphatically. "No. You're the only one I can trust, David. That's why I came to you. Armand will have his men out all over the place." She leaned forward. "It won't be for long. I just have to go to the bank and arrange for funds to be transferred so I can get new airline tickets."

  Baby-sitting. He felt sulky. He didn't want to do it. "What happened to the old ones?"

  "Armand has them. I couldn't very well ask for them back as I was slipping out the back way. I shouldn't be too long at the bank, but I can't take the kids with me. Armand's men would spot us for sure. I need some clothes, something that looks local, and maybe a wig"

  He shook his head. Caution was one thing, but she was really going over the top with this one. "Madison, are you sure you aren't carrying this a little far? I mean, the man can't be everywhere."

  Her eyes were clear. She didn't look like a nutcase. "No, but his men can. They'll search all of Puerto Vallarta for us. Believe me, David, I know him."

  She stared at him hard, her eyes wide with candor. He had no doubt she believed every word she said. Still, it just seemed a bit too melodramatic to him.

  "I know he'll be watching every place he can think of, every place he thinks I might visit," she said again. "That's why I can't take the children with me. They'd be a dead giveaway."

  His mouth twisted. He was going to have to baby-sit, that was clear. Still, he thought the whole thing was a little ridiculous.

  "Should we expect spies coming in here, too?" he asked, half joking.

  "Oh, no, I don't think so," she replied with a fleeting smile. "It would take him a while before he'd suspect I was in this part of town. When we were together, our life-style was pretty extreme and he got the idea I couldn't live any other way. I'm sure he'll be concentrating on the four-star hotels."

  Well, that was really laying it on the line. His head went back at her words, but she didn't notice the reaction in his eyes. Still, what was he so upset about? She was only stating the obvious. They came from different worlds. And she was only visiting in this one. And not for long. The sooner she left and his pulse got back to normal, the better.