“There isn’t enough support in the attic floor joists to sustain a fireplace that massive.” He listened, shook his head. “We found them the Riker and we’re putting a glass floor in the foyer. They didn’t want a second story, they wanted vaulted ceilings and enormous open rooms and five bathrooms and a home theater and a gym.”
He shook his head again. “I understand that, Kipp, and I support their vision, but unfortunately that ceiling won’t. How would they get to the second floor? A staircase would completely block the view of the lake. Did you explain that to them?” He looked more closely at the blueprint. “You and I both know we can do it. We also both know it would entail major design changes, and those are costly and time-prohibitive.” He listened for a few more moments, mumbled something Madeline didn’t hear then flipped the phone closed.
“Trouble?” she asked.
He turned at the sound of her voice and gave her a smile that put her in mind of long kisses and late nights. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he said.
She sauntered closer. “Have you been up long?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. The coffee should be ready by now.”
His hair waved over the tops of his ears, a little too long to be considered civilized. Folding down his collar, she said, “I’m not sure I’m good for you. When I arrived on Friday, you were an early riser, clean-shaven and unwrinkled.”
“Believe me, you’re good for me.” Riley’s grip tightened possessively on her upper arm. He should have been exhausted. At the very least, he should have been sated. Instead, he found he wanted her all over again.
He reminded himself that the clients were flying in. So, with great reluctance, he let his hand fall to his side.
Felix and Gabriella Braxton’s newest movie had premiered at a film festival in Chicago over the weekend. As long as they were so close, they were going to hop aboard their airplane and take a look at the progress Merrick and Dawson Enterprises was making on their lake house. Riley and Kipp needed to come up with a preliminary solution to their newest demands before they arrived.
Watching Madeline pour coffee into a mug in the kitchen, he said, “For some reason, I don’t want to go to work today. Any idea why that might be?”
She took a sip before handing the cup to him. Filling another for herself, she said, “If memory serves me correctly, I can think of several.”
That attitude, he thought, that all-knowing, sexy as hell grin. He wanted to sample it, all of it, all of her, from her provocative smile to her warm, pliant body. Making a sound of frustration, he said, “You’re only here until Friday. I hate to waste a minute of it at work.”
Madeline averted her face to hide an instant squeezing hurt. She couldn’t fault Riley for reminding her that this was temporary. He’d laid out his parameters from the beginning. Five days, he’d said.
She had no experience in flings. Yesterday Riley had said he didn’t do forever well. Did anyone have forever, really? Perhaps all anyone could do was seize the moment and leave the future for another day.
“Late yesterday I arranged for a moving company to come today to cart off the furniture,” Riley was saying. “I’ll have to reschedule.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, surprising both of them. “I can organize the movers.”
“You don’t mind?” he asked.
“Not at all. In fact, I’d enjoy it. Just tell me what you want to keep.”
“Surprise me,” he said from the dining room where he was gathering up blueprints.
“Wait,” she said, getting between him and the back door. “I don’t even know your taste.”
His eyes were a deep, dark brown this morning, warm enough to slip into. “I’ve got to tell you, right now, my taste is leaning toward blue-eyed blondes. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He kissed her hard. A moment later he was gone.
Dazed, Madeline carried her coffee to the table. Tracing the now-familiar scorch marks with one finger, she wondered if it was too late to tell Riley about his heart. What could she say to make him believe that her reason for coming to Gale had been a sincere wish to see that something beautiful had come from something dreadful? How could she prove that she hadn’t orchestrated any of this, from their first encounter at the construction site to last night in bed?
He’d left an imprint on her heart just as surely as he’d left one on the table, but she was afraid it was too late to try to explain. She hadn’t planned to meet him any more than she’d planned to fall in love with him. She sighed, for even the goals she had set out to accomplish weren’t going well. The dog still didn’t have a name, and Riley couldn’t feel his new heart.
Just then a loud knock rattled the front door. Moving a curtain aside, she saw a white moving van in the driveway. Riley had scheduled the movers. She supposed that was progress.
The dog got off his green pillow and looked at her in silent expectation. “All right,” she said on the way to answer the door. “This morning, we’ll oversee the movers. It’ll be a labor of love for both of us, won’t it?”
Felix and Gabriella Braxton didn’t bring mayhem with them wherever they went. They produced it the same way they produced blockbuster movies, with incredible finesse, great brilliance and temper tantrums worthy of Oscar nominations.
Riley had picked the Braxtons up at the airstrip. He’d duly admired Felix’s private plane and listened patiently to their latest dreams for their lake house. Now, the clients were in another area at Merric and Dawson headquarters, and Kipp was leafing through the sketches Riley had made, first one, then another, and another. Finally he threw the entire stack into the wastebasket next to Riley’s desk.
“You’re right,” Kipp said. “That house was designed around that view, and every one of those new sketches blocks it in one way or another. There’s no good place for a staircase in that great room.”
Riley leaned back in his chair and shrugged at his closest friend and business partner. The building that housed Merrick & Dawson Enterprises had been a furniture factory in another incarnation. Located on the outskirts of Traverse City, its wall of windows overlooking the bay was completely impractical six months out of the year. Clients loved it. And clients were the reason they were in business.
From the beginning Riley and Kipp had left the cookie-cutter subdivisions with their fake dormers and postage stamp lots to other developers. While property that had once been deemed useless by anyone who wasn’t a farmer or orchard grower was suddenly catching on like wildfire by developers, Riley and Kipp had taken a risk, choosing to specialize in one-of-a-kind houses. Fifteen years ago, real estate was the new frontier. Resorts and gated communities had sprung up from Chicago to Mackinaw City. Now, with the economy in its greatest downturn in nearly three-quarters of a century in every corner of the country, developments sat half-finished, the exposed wood twisting and rotting in the elements.
These past few years, Riley and Kipp had altered their strategy to include energy-efficient windows and furnaces and green materials, and were busier than ever. Because their building sites were often well away from metropolises, they rarely had to deal with city planning committees and annexation meetings. They did, however, have to cater to the whims of their decadently wealthy clients.
“Are you going to say something?” Kipp groused. “Or are you just going to sit there, looking like you’ve just climbed out of a woman’s bed?”
Riley gave Kipp a rare smile.
With a dawning look of understanding, Kipp scratched his chin and said, “No wonder you’re so mellow.”
Actually, it was Riley’s own bed he’d climbed out of, but he didn’t kiss and tell.
“It’s that blonde nurse, isn’t it? I figured she’d be good for you.”
Riley couldn’t help thinking about the way Madeline had looked this morning, her blue eyes sleepy, her face pretty and pale, and her lips naturally pink and utterly kissable. Her clothes had been slightly disheveled, and the color the silver lining o
f a cloud. He was getting philosophical, for until he’d met her, he hadn’t believed something as poetic as a cloud’s silver lining existed.
Madeline Sullivan was five feet five inches tall, and a very nice five feet five, at that. She wore her clothes well. A lot of women were five-five and looked good in light-colored sweaters and skirts that rode low on their hips. Thoughts of them didn’t flood into his mind when he was in the middle of a three-engine fire at work. Which meant it wasn’t Madeline’s hair or clothes that made it impossible to get her out of his head. It was the way he’d felt since she’d burst onto the job site on Friday.
Work had been his constant these past eighteen months. It was the one area of his life that hadn’t changed. The business of designing and building incredible and unique houses kept him in form, kept him fit, kept him focused. Normally the challenge of unforeseen problems, consultations and solutions energized him. Today, he wanted to drive straight home, turn off his phone, draw the blinds and spend the day in bed. With Madeline.
“Well? Are you going to tell me about her?” Kipp prodded.
“No. Do you think you can handle this?” Riley asked. “Without me, I mean?”
Kipp steepled his fingers beneath his chin. The clients were with the company’s resident designer. Arlene Straus knew wainscoting and scraped hickory floors, cultured stone, imported marble, solid granite, gourmet kitchens, lighting and fixtures better than any designer Kipp had ever met, including Riley’s stepmother. Nobody pushed Arlene around. She’d just gotten back from getting a custom latte for Gabriella.
“Go on,” Kipp said. “I can handle Felix and Gabbie.”
“They’re in the movie business,” Riley said, finding his feet.
“Yes, I know.”
“I’ve been thinking about this. Scenes in movies are shot out of sequence. Drive them out to their property and show them their lake house as if through a camera lens. Take them up on the plywood deck and stand where their great room is going to be and let them see the view of Lake Michigan and the dunes and the distant towns. If they still want a stairway in the middle of that, we’ll give them a stairway. But watch your back. Gabriella is a groper.”
“Yeah, I know. She caught me unawares half an hour ago practically right under her husband’s nose.”
Riley left, and an hour later, Kipp could hardly believe how easy it had been. Felix and Gabriella had not only embraced the idea of driving to their property, they’d considered it an adventure to climb a fifteen-foot ladder so they could stand in their new vacation home on the shores of a freshwater ocean and imagine where they would arrange their furniture to best utilize those views.
Leaving them to their discussion, Kipp wandered to the far end of the building and lit a cigarette. He tried not to wonder where he would be if his mother hadn’t dumped him off at the Merrick Estate seventy-five miles south of here all those years ago. Riley treated him like a brother, but Kipp never forgot where he came from. From the beginning, Riley had had his back. Kipp would take a bullet for him. It had been a relief to see him looking almost happy this morning.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. If anybody had been looking, they would have seen him smile as he said hello to Riley’s mother. “No, he’s gone for the day, Chloe.” Kipp took a draw on his cigarette while he listened. “He was at the office earlier. Yes, I saw him with my own two eyes. I wouldn’t lie to you. Riley’s fine. Fit as a fiddle.” Kipp grimaced, for Chloe Merrick could wring the truth out of him better than anybody he knew. “As far as I know, he was going home. He has plans, Chloe. I’m sure he’s—”
Chloe didn’t let him finish before saying goodbye and hanging up.
He instantly punched in Riley’s number to give him a heads-up. It went directly to voice mail. Riley had already turned off his phone. Damn.
Kipp didn’t hear Gabriella saunter up behind him. By the time he felt her pat him on the ass, it was too late. He’d jumped, and swore. “We need to put a bell on you,” he said to the green-eyed movie director with the cute little body that belied her actual age.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’m just glad it wasn’t your husband. That would have been awkward.”
“You have a way about you,” she said, intelligence in those green eyes. “You make flawed people feel accepted.”
“And you make unsuspecting men nearly jump off buildings.”
“We all have our gifts. Did Riley run off and leave you here all alone?” she asked.
“Something came up.”
“A family emergency?”
Kipp thought about Chloe’s phone call. “God I hope not,” he said, and he meant every word.
“There, there. This isn’t so bad, is it?”
Riley was almost past the bathroom off the hallway when he remembered he hadn’t taken his pills this morning. He backtracked, dumped the proper dosage into his hand, and downed them all.
“See? It’s better when you just relax and let it happen, isn’t it?”
Medicine had never been easier to swallow. That might have had something to do with the mental picture Madeline was painting for him. He put the lids back on the bottles once again before following that voice, that sexy, crooning voice.
He found her in the master bathroom. At some point she’d gone back to the cottage and changed. She now wore blue jeans and if he wasn’t mistaken, the T-shirt she’d bought at a gift shop in Charlevoix yesterday. She was bent over the tub, her hair wet in places, soggy towels beside her, water everywhere. In the middle of the bathtub sat one wet brown dog.
The dog turned beseeching eyes to Riley.
“Don’t look at me,” Riley said. “I can smell you from here.”
Madeline glanced over her shoulder and saw Riley leaning in the doorway, one shoulder resting along the frame, arms and ankles crossed. “He rolled in a rotten fish. How do you like the house?”
“It looks good.”
She was pleased he liked it. It had taken two men less than two hours to cart away the furniture. They’d even helped her arrange the pieces she’d instructed them to leave behind. It seemed to her that Riley had mentioned that one of his stepmothers was an interior decorator. Maybe one of these days he would ask her to finish decorating.
“You left the mahogany table in the kitchen,” he said.
She nodded and lunged for the dog. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell the movers to take the table that had sustained Riley through so many sleepless nights. “You’re not tumbleweed. You’re a tree.”
“I guess that explains that.”
She smiled to herself, but didn’t elaborate. “Your dog doesn’t like baths or men in white coveralls,” she said as she finished lathering dog shampoo into the thick brown coat. “He parked himself in front of the door and growled—he growls as if he means it—every time the movers tried to come in. I finally had to ask them to take off their coveralls.”
“You asked the movers to undress before coming in?”
“They were wearing clothes underneath.” She took the handheld nozzle and began to rinse the soap suds down the drain. Of course the dog shook, spraying water everywhere.
Again.
Riley was there suddenly with two more towels. He had him towel dried in almost no time. With his fur sticking up all over, the dog walked stiff legged from the bathroom to sulk.
“And the orange-and-green sofa?” Riley asked, dropping the soggy towels into the bathtub. “I can’t wait to hear your reason for leaving that in the living room.”
She rose slowly, drying her arms. “After last night that has sentimental value. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Do I look like I mind?”
She smiled because he looked good. “Now I’m the one who needs a shower.”
He reached around and turned on the water in the large, walk-in shower. “I can help with that.”
He peeled her wet T-shirt over her head, turning it inside out in the process. She helped him out of his shirt, and they
both did away with their pants. In almost no time they were both naked and she was gliding her hands up his chest, sliding her arms around his shoulders. At the same time, his arms went around her waist, bodily lifting her off her feet. She wrapped her legs around his waist, their mouths joined.
They moaned through openmouthed kisses, warm water pouring over them from above, getting in their eyes and bouncing off their shoulders, running down their backs, making their skin slick.
Her arms went around his neck, the action bringing her breasts close to his mouth. She was wanton, her long-dormant sexuality newly awakened to every sound, every touch, every sensation. She pressed closer to him, her ankles locked behind him, her breathing ragged, her eyes closed to the onslaught of rushing water, her heart open to the joy he brought her, her body open to the passion unfurling from him to her, and back again.
Madeline never knew she could make love without her feet ever touching the floor. It was hot, hard and fast. With steam curling from every direction, her heart was brimming and so full she wished this idyllic week never had to end.
Eventually they were going to have to rouse themselves out of bed and get something to eat. Madeline’s hair had dried after that incredible shower an hour ago.
“Is this normal?” she asked.
“Is what normal?”
Her breast had come uncovered, and she caught him looking at it, already distracted. Smiling to herself because she secretly liked how easily she could distract him, she said, “This. Sex. Does the average person have sex, you know, so often?”
“This,” he said, laving her exposed breast with his tongue, “is far above average, so far above average I’d call it magnificent.” He moved to her other breast. “Supremely spectacular—superhuman, even.”
She giggled, and it came out sounding wanton and breathless. “Braggart.”
“I was talking about you.”
It was all it took, and she was with him again, lips to lips, chest to breast, hip to hip, hearts beating, breaths ragged, hands seeking, bodies straining in that age-old rhythm that carried from the dawn of time.
The Wedding Gift Page 10