Sweet Home Carolina

by Rice, Patricia

  “These colors will never sell,” she said, plunging his heart to the dirt and walking all over it. “But the designs.…” She flashed him a look of awe and delight that let him breathe again. “They’re more than I imagined,” she said in excitement. “I can’t believe.… They’re even better than the French toile. Is it possible…. I know it’s not historic, but….”

  Zack frowned. “It must be historic. That is the point.”

  “Maybe. Yes.” She shuffled the design pages until she uncovered one depicting a scrolled tapestry of feathers and leaves. “Who is to say this had to be done in mustards or olives just because they were fashionable in 1780?”

  “But look.…” He pulled another page from the stack. “The toile and the brocade were made to go together.” He glanced around. “Is there a place to lay these out?”

  “Inside.” She produced a key from her jeans pocket and climbed up the rickety back porch steps.

  Watching the enchanting globes of her denim-clad posterior swing up the steps immediately distracted him from the job at hand. He’d been the perfect gentleman for a week while she drowned him in the soft scents of vanilla and jasmine bath powder. He’d resisted kissing her every time she turned her big eyes questioningly to him, or her pouty lips parted to chew on a pencil eraser. He felt as if he’d spent forty days and nights in the desert without food and water, and Amy was an oasis forever out of his reach.

  And she was letting him into her house, alone, just the two of them.

  What would she do if he reached for her once they were out of sight?

  Entering the dilapidated kitchen, Zack scratched any thought of lovemaking. He wouldn’t take any woman on that cracked and filthy linoleum or even on the aging Formica counter. He should have insisted that she come back to her real house with him, where there were beds.

  And Luigi.

  Sighing, Zack set aside the fabric designs for the moment and turned his professional interest to the architecture of the Craftsman cottage. “The original built-in china cabinet is still here,” he said with approval, running his hand over the painted corner cabinet in the large kitchen. “I wonder what wood is under here?”

  “You want the grand tour? It takes a lot of imagination to see beyond the deterioration,” she said tentatively, as if she’d been laughed at before for the suggestion.

  He hesitated. Once upon a time, he and Gabrielle had bought an old flat. He’d loved stripping off the paint to find the majestic mahogany beneath. They’d breathed paint stripper and stain and sealers for a year. He’d been young and foolish and deeply in love —

  Love was an irrational emotion. He wasn’t going there these days. Oddly, the thought saddened him.

  “I know, it’s a dump.” With a shrug, Amy began laying out the designs across the Formica.

  He could hear the excitement leach out of her voice at his hesitation. She was much too perceptive, this fascinating partner he’d acquired. Catching her arm, Zack steered her toward the next room.

  “It will take much work,” he suggested, gazing upward at the sagging false ceiling, speculating about the antique crown molding that might be hidden behind it.

  He tried not to think too hard on how Amy fit next to him, as if she were an extension of himself that he could draw closer anytime he wished. What he wanted was sex. Perhaps he could steal a little kiss.…

  As if she read his mind, or suffered the same frustrated tension throbbing in him, she pulled free to grab a discarded two-by-four off the floor. He admired the way her jean shorts shaped to her rounded bottom, then ducked as she whacked the lumber against the sagging ceiling.

  “I’ve been itching to do this,” she said with satisfaction, pounding until it shredded and fell, filling the air with dust.

  “You are mad! You will kill both of us!” He grabbed her elbow again and dragged her toward the clearer air of the kitchen. “You must hire professionals to do this sort of thing.”

  “I can’t afford professionals. I’ll buy a mask and cover the ceiling with plastic before I tear up any more, I promise. I just wanted to see what was under there.”

  She tried to shake free and return to the front room, but this time, Zack didn’t let go. If she meant to be reckless, so did he. Instead of pampering her like a precious princess, he pulled her tempting curves up against him, catching both arms so she couldn’t wallop him with her timber.

  “You will have to wait for the dust to settle before looking,” he murmured, gazing into her eyes as they widened. Was that interest or fear he saw there? Only a taste would tell.

  He lowered his mouth to hers and licked lightly at her lips. She gasped but did not retreat.

  Her weapon fell to the floor as he deepened the kiss. He hummed with gratification when she wrapped her arms around his neck and caressed his nape. Her mouth and tongue were as hungry as his. All week, they had been resisting this. Released from the torment, at last, he could not get enough of her. Why had he thought he must protect her from what was so natural?

  He raised her to her toes and crushed her against his chest, needing to have all of her in his arms. She didn’t hesitate. Her hips moved against his, inspiring more than hope with the rush of his blood southward.

  This was neither the time nor the place, but there might never be another opportunity. Zack slid his hand between them to cup the fullness of her breast, and nearly expired in pleasure at her moan of pleasure. That he had the power to make this willful, wonderful woman desire him accelerated his demands.

  He knew all the practiced moves to seduce a woman, but none of them applied here. That this woman whose intelligence he respected returned his desires fanned the fire of need burning within him. Amy wasn’t a cunning seductress out to get what she could. Her hungry whimpers filled him with a sense of satisfaction he hadn’t experienced in years. He would be the lover she’d never had, the teacher she needed to free herself, and she could teach him to be himself again. They were perfect for each other.

  He claimed her mouth with his tongue, and she dug her fingernails into the fabric of his shirt. He wanted to take her slowly, enjoying every minute of her surrender.

  He lifted her to the kitchen counter so he could open her shirt buttons. She instantly took advantage to run her hands beneath his polo shirt. Pure pleasure flowed everywhere her fingertips slid over his skin. He almost dropped her at his body’s sharp ecstatic reaction when she tweaked his nipples.

  Unfastening her front bra clasp, he returned the favor, inciting the aroused buds of her breasts. She cried out with an eagerness that told him better than words how long it had been since a man had touched her in such a way.

  “Amy,” he murmured, kissing her cheek, her hair, then working his way down her throat to his heart’s desire. “I have been wanting this for so long. Tell me you are ready.”

  She dug her hands into his hair and arched into him, speaking without words.

  Just as Zack closed his mouth upon her breast, a pounding on the front door jarred them back to reality.

  Willing the intruders to go away, he suckled, drawing her sweet-scented flesh deeply into his mouth until she cried out with the pleasure of it.

  “Ames! Don’t make me walk through that grass in these heels!” came a shout from the front porch, accompanied by more pounding.

  “Mommy! We got creams!” a childish voice added.

  Amy groaned and pushed Zack away. Her breast was still wet from his mouth as she hastily fumbled with her bra. Panting, Zack returned her to the floor and rested his forehead against hers while he brushed her hands away, fastening the clasp with tenderness, then caressing the skin exposed at the top with gentle fingers, sending further shivers of desire down her spine.

  “Tonight,” he said roughly. “We will go out. You are permitted dates, are you not?”

  Amy was too terrified by what they’d done to answer. The reasons she should say no were pounding at the door. The children didn’t need to have their security torn in two when Zack left. She d
idn’t need her heart torn again. But despite all logic and common sense, she wanted to say yes, yes, please.

  She tried to button her shirt, but her hands still felt the heat of Zack’s hard chest, and her fingers wanted to curl into the soft nest of hair she’d discovered there. He was all hard angles and wide, muscular planes, and she desperately longed to explore a man who could lift her off the floor without effort.

  She ached in places she’d forgotten existed. She wanted Zack with every ounce of hormones in her, and they were multiplying rapidly.

  “We will do this, Amy,” he said decisively for her. “It is just a matter of time. It might as well be tonight.”

  “I can’t. I’m watching Flint’s boys tonight,” she said with genuine regret as he pushed aside her shaking fingers and buttoned her shirt. Before he could pose any further objections, she shoved away and raced for the front door. She prayed the mess in the front room accounted for her rumpled state.

  She finally figured out the front lock and opened the door while Zack wisely remained out of sight. “Ice cream!” she cried, sweeping Louisa up in her arms and stealing a lick of her cone before Jo could say a word.

  “Did you decide to destroy the place before you moved in?” Jo asked, swinging into the room in heels and shiny capris topped by a fringed halter. She gazed up at the hole in the ceiling, apparently not noticing Amy’s frazzled state.

  “I wanted to see if there was crown molding on the ceiling. Am I late? Elise just left, and I thought I had time to look around.”

  “Elise? Isn’t that Zack’s Bentley out there?”

  Ha, as she’d suspected, Jo wasn’t completely innocent. Amy frowned at her sister, but Jo wasn’t paying the least attention. She was picking past the debris to the Art Deco staircase.

  “He stopped by with the new designs.” She’d forgotten all about them. How could she have forgotten the town’s entire future? He had her head so turned around she didn’t know up from down. “We were spreading them out on the kitchen counter. You want to see?”

  “Is he decent?” Jo asked, arching an eyebrow expressively. “If he is, he’s not the man I thought he was.”

  Amy heard a cough from the kitchen and could envision Zack choking on laughter. The rat. She hid her blush behind Louisa’s curls. “Your aunt Jo is a naughty, naughty girl.”

  Louisa nodded eagerly. “Bad girl,” she cried gleefully. “Go to your room.”

  “You’re raising a parrot, you know that, don’t you?” Grinning, Jo stepped over fallen plaster, diverted from the stairs by the cough in the kitchen. “You decent in there? Coming through!”

  If Amy hadn’t already spent a lifetime enduring her extroverted sister’s embarrassing behavior, she would have sunk through the floor right now. Instead, she followed resolutely, wondering what she could possibly have been thinking to let one little kiss get so far out of hand.

  She ought to be steering a wide berth around her boss instead of inviting him inside an empty house, out of sight of the world.

  Amy Warren, you did that on purpose, she scolded herself. She wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  But some small part of her reveled in discovering her newly rebellious streak. She’d been the Good Girl for far too long.

  “You’ll have to drive a Ford truck if you want to sneak around with my sister,” Jo said jovially upon locating Zack in the kitchen.

  He leaned against the counter, arms crossed over his broad chest, looking as if he wore plaster dust in his hair every day. “I do not need to sneak,” he countered. “If I wish to have a business conference with my executive manager, I have every right to do so without being accused of sneaking.”

  He was protecting her, Amy realized in admiration. Of course, he was probably accustomed to cheating wives and that sort of thing, but still, it was sweet.

  “See there,” she said in satisfaction, setting Louisa down on the counter, “I’m a fancified business executive and get to make decisions. You’ll have to quit treating me like your waitress.”

  Jo laughed. “You are talking to the Queen of Wrong Choices, folks. Don’t give me that guff. I’ll take the kids to church tomorrow. Lightning won’t strike if you two don’t show up.”

  Amy wondered if it would be counted as first-degree murder if she took the two-by-four to her sister’s extravagant blond hair and dented her scalp a time or two.

  Zack grinned in appreciation. “Wrong choices?” he inquired, deftly avoiding all the verbal pitfalls Jo opened to go after the safe one. The man was a first-class conversation manipulator.

  “You and Amy can have a long talk about all my faults tomorrow. For now, I have to drag her out of this house to feed our starving kids while Flint and I play hooky for a while.” She glanced at the display of fabric designs with disinterest. “These will return the mill to operation? Ugly.”

  “We’ll make them red and add sequins for you, Jo.” Amy carefully stacked the sheets of valuable historical designs, some of which hadn’t seen the light of day in a century or more. She wanted to study them when she had a chance. “You’re welcome to join us for supper, Zack. Where’s Luigi? I can feed him, too. I’m just firing up Flint’s grill.”

  Since they’d closed the café’s dinner business, she’d been fixing meals up at the house. She had to break that habit by next week, when strangers moved in. Where would Zack live then? Or would he be gone now that he’d accomplished what he set out to do?

  He accepted her invitation to the cookout with a devastating grin.

  Amy didn’t know whether to be relieved or afraid. After what had just happened here today, perhaps he ought to go down to Asheville and seek his own kind.

  From the heated look in his eyes, Zack had marked her as the kind he sought. She didn’t know how she should feel about that. She was a one-man woman, wasn’t she?

  Remembering how he’d made her feel, she briefly closed her eyes and admitted the truth. She would take Zack any way she could have him.

  She, Amy the Proper and Emotionally Suppressed, was ready to embark on an affair.

  Twenty-one

  “Mommy, doorbell!” Josh chimed in company with Jo’s doorbell, running to join Amy and Louisa in the kitchen. He’d been playing upstairs with Flint’s boys but must have decided to check on the progress of supper.

  Amy nervously brushed her hands off on a towel. “Why don’t you take Louisa outside on the swings? I’ll be right out in a minute.” She headed down the open hall of the cabin’s cathedral-ceilinged front room. Flint and Jo needed wide open spaces for the boys and their music, or their house would probably bust at the seams, she reflected.

  If she concentrated on the familiar, she wouldn’t have to worry about seeing the man with whom she had become much too intimate this afternoon. She blushed just thinking about what they had done, and how they could have been caught doing it. But her breasts burned to do it again, and she was wishing she owned sexier underwear. She brushed a wayward lock of hair back from her heated cheek.

  “Aunt Amy, can we put the hamburgers on? We’re starved!” Johnnie called from the loft balcony, where a stereo boomed.

  “Start carrying the salads out to the picnic table, and I’ll put the burgers on in a minute,” she called back. “Keep an eye on Louisa and Josh until I get there.”

  The pounding of teenage shoes on the back staircase spoke of hunger and not eagerness to obey her command, but she’d counted on that. She preferred to have all the kids out of the house when Zack came in. She wanted at least a minute alone with him to steady her bouncing nerves. Her pulse pounded like a love-struck adolescent’s.

  She bit her lip to add color before she opened the door — and almost fell backward as Evan stormed in.

  “Who is that guy and why is he staying in our house?” her ex demanded, stalking into the big front room as if he owned it.

  Evan’s size used to reassure her. She’d loved him for being her bulwark against the world’s storms. Now she saw how he used his bulk to intimidate,
and she refused to be intimidated. Hands on hips, she remained at the open door, studying the situation rather than bothering to respond similarly to his angry outburst. Evan had obviously gone to their house first — without calling. Tracking her to Jo’s had no doubt strained his sociability.

  “I didn’t expect you this weekend,” she replied mildly, casting a glance to the gravel drive where a Bentley rolled to a halt next to the Beamer Evan had kept in the divorce. She thought she was seeing the scenario now, and she couldn’t resist smiling, wishing she’d seen how that battle had gone down. “And the house is mine, not yours, if you’ll remember correctly. I can do with it what I will.”

  Wearing tan tailored trousers and a black knit golf shirt that molded to his athletic shoulders and six-pack abs, Zack strolled up to the porch, not a feather ruffled by the obviously irate earlier encounter with Evan at the other house.

  “Are you living with that creep?” Evan shouted. “I’ll not have my kids in the same house with — ”

  “A foreigner with too many teeth and headlights you will punch out?” Zack finished for him in his clipped European accent. Carrying a bottle of wine, he winked at Amy, draped his free arm across her shoulders, and raised his eyebrows at her furious ex. “He is like a bull in a.…” he glanced around at the cabin’s huge paneled living room, “in a barn?”

  Amy tried not to giggle. She had a house full of kids and a grill that would burn out if she didn’t get food on it soon. She’d grown up admiring the testosterone wars fought over Jo, but she was too busy to appreciate male idiocy now. “The kids are out on the swings, Evan, but they’re not expecting you. I can add a hamburger to the grill, if you want one. I assume you’ve met Zack?”

  “You haven’t explained what he’s doing in our house, Ames!” Evan shouted.

  She disentangled herself from Zack’s much too masculine and proprietary hold to return to the kitchen. His spicy aftershave had her stomach rumbling. Or other parts lower. She needed to remember that Evan likely had fifty pounds and four inches over Zack, but Zack packed an athlete’s power and muscle. A war would not be pretty.