“A shower would be heaven but I…”
“Just go. I have more work to do,” he gestured at his computer, “and we’ll have breakfast when you’re dressed.”
He seemed so normal, almost brotherly. It was as if that moment of heat hadn’t happened.
A few minutes later, she reappeared, dressed in his robe, a rueful expression on her face. “I can’t figure out how to turn on the shower.”
Of course. He’d forgotten to tell her about the remote. Hunter strode into his bedroom past his rumpled bed that still held the outline of her body and went into his bathroom.
Liz followed him inside and looked around at the soaker tub, the huge shower, and the vast floor space. “Did it occur to you that you might not need a bathroom the size of a skating rink?”
“This was the only one on sale.” While she struggled to keep from laughing, he said, “You turn the shower on with this remote. You can adjust the temperature without getting in the stall. But you can adjust the temperature when you get inside, too, with that knob.” He handed her the remote. “Do you like it hot?” His eyes played over her face and suddenly, his brotherly air disappeared. The sexual tension sizzled between them.
Two could play this game. “I like it as hot as I can stand it. How about you?”
“Same,” he said, his eyes never leaving hers.
She felt herself breathing, in, out. “Hunter, you need to leave.”
“Do I?” He kept thinking how easy it would be to peel that robe off of her, strip off his own clothes and step into the shower with her. He’d soap her all over…
She kept thinking how easy it would be to slip the tie of her robe loose, drop it to the floor and stand in front of him naked. Then, hopefully with his help, she’d pull that t-shirt up over his head, unzip his jeans and pull his naked body into the shower with her. She’d soap him all over…No. It was too soon. She was fresh from seeing her life flash before her eyes and not thinking clearly. She couldn’t bear it if she let him into her life today and he saw her as an actress he could use and forget and walk away from tomorrow.
“Yes,” she said. “You need to leave.”
“As you wish.” At the door, he said, “I’ll lay out some of Lynne’s clothes on my bed. You can take your pick.”
She let out a long breath. She’d won this round. But how about the next one? It wasn’t a fair fight. She had two opponents…Hunter…and her body.
Feeling warm and clean and smelling better than she had in the last few days, Liz entered the bedroom to discover the promised clothes laid out on the newly made bed. Her choices were three t tops, two skirts, two pairs of pants and…last but not least three bras in white, black and powder blue with matching panties. Her own clothes were nowhere to be found. She’d planned on throwing them away when she got home but evidently Hunter had taken care of that for her. A little high-handed but what else could she expect from him?
The white satin bra was a little tight, but she could manage. The panties fit. She knew the slacks would be too short. Lynne was tall, but she was taller. She pulled the blue t-shirt over her head and wrapped the clever little skirt around her waist. It was adjustable, and she fastened it in the farthest clip. She slipped her feet back into her Jimmy Choo shoes. Thank heaven Hunter hadn’t thrown those away. If he had, she would have had to kill him.
When she came out, he was in the kitchen, looking endearingly domestic. He brought a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon out from the warmer oven and popped a couple of slices of bread in a space age toaster.
“You cook?”
“Just the basics. I found a toaster that made it impossible for me to burn the bread.”
He served it up on a lovely turquoise plate of a retro brand she recognized. Then he got this look on his face, like a kid who’d done something wrong in school. “I didn’t think to ask you if you eat bacon or if you’re a vegan.”
When he was unsure of himself, he was so darn appealing. “Right now, I’ll eat anything if it doesn’t eat me first. This looks delicious.” When he served up the toast, she said, “You wouldn’t happen to have any jelly, would you?”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t use jelly. What kind do you like? I’ll have my chief cook and bottle washer buy some.”
“Grape is good…or strawberry.” She got a sudden vision of Hunter spread out on a bed and her spooning grape jelly into his navel so she could lick it out. Her hormones must have been jolted awake by her near brush with death and now were on high alert, saying, come on, girl. Not that much time left. You need to get something going on here.
Cut the heck out with the visuals. Not gonna happen.
Food. Talk about the food. “The eggs are delicious. Aren’t you going to eat something?”
“I ate while you were sleeping.”
She took a bite of toast. It was lovely and buttery. She said, “You’re just going to stand there and watch me eat?”
“Do you want me to make myself scarce?”
She thought of how nice he’d been, letting her sleep undisturbed in his bed, letting her shower in his Sybaritic bathroom, also undisturbed, although that had been a close call, and now cooking her breakfast.
“I think at this point, I should let you do whatever you want to do. Wow, that came out wrong. I mean you’ve been so kind to me that it would hardly be right to keep you from enjoying the sight of me masticating my food…”
He stepped to the bar, leaned over it and kissed her buttery mouth. The kiss was a sweet, uncomplicated brush of his lips.
Then he whispered in her ear, “Liz. Stop worrying. Much as I’d like to do otherwise, I’m going to feed you and put you in my limo and send you home.”
She wanted to say a plaintive, really? But instead she said, “Sounds like a plan. A good plan.” she added hastily, going back to eating the breakfast he’d made for her. When she’d finished, he did just what he said, and escorted her to her front door.
In her apartment, she went about uncovering furniture. She called to have her water turned on, but she was told that someone had already called it in. Hunter. She hung up the phone with a little smile on her face. Darn man thought of everything. She went to look at her calendar. She had an audition scheduled the next week. So it would be back to her life on the stage. She’d had a lovely interlude with Hunter Cameron and now it was over.
Chapter 9
One day went by, then two, then three. No phone call or text or visit from Hunter. She’d been right to get out of there when the going was good. She’d been right to think he was a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy. Except of course, he hadn’t really loved her.
Saturday rolled around and at her Orff class Liz was greeted with hugs and kisses from Jocelyn and a hug from Terry, and a motherly wrap of the arms by Helen.
The kids all cheered and yelled when they saw her. Jocelyn murmured in her ear, “I had to reassure them every time we met that you weren’t dead or giving up on them. I guess they’ve been deserted a few too many times in their lives.”
“I guess,” Liz said, looking out over those cherub faces. “Well, let’s get started, shall we? Who’s got their mallets way up high?”
“Hunter,” Helen greeted him as he came in the door. “Now I wonder why we’re seeing you here today. Did you come to check up on us?”
To her astonishment and pleasure, he leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Would I check up on my favorite director?” he asked.
The woman blushed. “We’re really happy to have her back.”
“Yes,” said Hunter, hearing the wealth of relief in his own voice.
“Class attendance fell while Liz was on her USO tour,” Helen told him, taking great delight in watching him trying to control his face as he stepped to the doorway and stood watching Liz captivating her class.
“I’m not surprised,” Hunter murmured.
“Staying till the end of the class?” Helen couldn’t resist asking.
“Probably. Will I be in the way if I stand her
e?”
Helen thought about this man who’d just upped his pledge to the center from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand dollars a year.
“I think you should stand anywhere you want.”
No Beethoven and Bach t-shirt today, he saw. Rather a red-white-blue nicely patriotic shirt with a flag embroidered on the front. Even now, she sat telling the kids about the soldiers she’d sung for overseas.
“My mom says war is bad,” one young lad piped up.
“Your mother is absolutely right,” Liz agreed. “But we need to support those guys and gals who are keeping us safe. Let’s go on to our next song, shall we?”
When the class was over, Jocelyn said, “He’s here again. My, he’s taken such an interest in the center lately. I wonder why.”
It had been seven days since Liz had last seen him, but who was counting? Now he just shows up here, she thought. What was he playing at? But maybe he wasn’t here for her. Maybe…
When the kids had gone and Liz and Jocelyn had stashed the instruments away in the closet, Hunter caught Liz’s arm. “Ms. Farnsworth. I wonder if I might offer you a ride home.”
Liz wanted to say no, she really did. But the words that came out of her mouth were, “Of course.”
He escorted her with a hand on her elbow out to the car waiting in the parking lot, a low slung black Porsche convertible with the top down. He opened the door for her and she slid in, wishing she hadn’t decided to dress quite so casually today. But she was always conscious that her kids would come with holes in their jeans so she came with holes in her jeans, too.
“I haven’t called because I’ve been out of town all week, working on a house in Pennsylvania.”
“Hunter, you did tell me that.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”
“You can’t seriously think I’d forget.”
He looked hot as all hell in neatly pressed khaki pants and a sweet little t-shirt that hugged his torso nicely. Kind of like she’d like to do. Then he said, “Instead of me taking you home, how about I take you out to lunch?”
“Hunter, it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“Maybe we could find something to do before then.”
While she stiffened slightly in the seat he said, “I have the blueprints to the project I’ve been working on that I’d like to show you if you’d be interested in seeing them. It’s a restoration of a Victorian house.”
“I’d like that. I love old homes. I’ve just never been able to afford to live in one.”
“Why not?”
Maybe it was time for a little plain truth about her family. “Hunter, my dad is a car mechanic. He has a garage in Rochester and another one in Florida. He used to go to Florida in the winter time and leave me and my sister here with my mother in the cold so we wouldn’t be taken out of school. I haven’t heard from my sister in months. The last I knew of her, she was seeing some guy with a questionable reputation. We’re not exactly a Hallmark family like yours.”
“You think we’re an ideal family?”
“As close as it’s possible to be.”
“I’ll let you go on thinking that…for now.” He swung the car into the underground parking for his building.
“I guess I didn’t really have much choice about where I was going, did I?”
“Yes, you did. But if you said the words, Hunter, I need you to take me home, I didn’t hear them.”
What was it about this man? He had just the right amount of confidence mixed with an inbred politeness that made it impossible to be annoyed with him.
His hand at her back, he followed her into the elevator, an express. She was grateful for that. Standing in this closed space with mirrors all around, looking at his bland face and her own anxious one was not particularly conducive to calming her nerves.
Inside his condo, he led her into a room she hadn’t seen before. It was a true library with real books, not the fake shams she’d seen on television. “Quite a collection.” She read the titles aloud. “History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, The Republic by Plato.
“My father’s books.”
“Have you read any of them?”
“Actually, I’ve read most of them.” Sun poured in the window. The beams found Hunter’s dark head and highlighted those few strands of gray.
“That’s probably how you got those gray hairs, pouring over those heavy duty books.”
“No,” he said, suddenly sober. “I’ve had those gray hairs since I was seventeen.”
The age he was when his father died. She remembered that from reading it somewhere. “We had books at our house, too. My mom bought them at garage sales. We had titles like The Debutante Trapped in the Black Lagoon.”
That made him smile. “I’ll bet that one was on the New York Times best seller list.”
Liz laughed. “You think?”
“What was it about?”
“I suppose it was about a debutante swallowed up by a black lagoon. I never read it. I think Mom did, though.”
He spread out a huge sheet of blue prints with those large capable of hands of his. “Here’s what I wanted to show you. We’re going to put a bay window constructed from reclaimed materials here in the dining room. Here, we have to repair the pocket door that separates the dining room from the living room. We’ll completely rework the kitchen with new cabinets and quartz countertops and install all new appliances including a commercial size refrigerator. That’s after we put a new roof on.”
He was so intent on those blueprints in front of him that she knew that this moment with the sun shining on his bent head and his attention so totally focused, it was going to be terribly hard not to fall in love with this man. If she hadn’t already.
“I know it must be difficult for you to visualize the house when you’re not used to looking at blueprints…” He looked up and he must have seen the dazed look in her eyes. “I’m boring you.”
“Not at all.” She scrambled to call back her wits. “I was just wondering who was going to live in this beautiful house once it’s done.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she wondered if he was reluctant to share this information with her. “Actually I was thinking of taking it over myself as a weekend retreat.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea,” she said brightly. “You’re very dedicated to your work.”
“It keeps me sane.”
“Me, too. I get antsy when I’m between shows.”
“You don’t think you’ll ever give up performing and get married and have a family?” He leaned back and his face was shadowed.
“I guess I hadn’t thought that far. I hate to admit it, but at the age of thirty-two I’m almost at the end of my ingénue years. My role as Anna brought that home to me. The chances of my becoming a grand dame of the theater like Judi Dench or Angela Lansbury are slim to none. And my opportunities to find an eligible male interested in marriage when I work all night and sleep all day are also slim to none. So there you have it. I’m just a ship adrift in the sea of life.” She smiled up at him, trying to make light of her serious words.
“Maybe it’s time for that lunch.”
Ah, yes. The word marriage had shut him down fast. She was disappointed, but not surprised. “Where are we going for lunch?”
“I thought we’d call and have it delivered. I don’t particularly care to be recognized in a crowded restaurant, and I don’t imagine you do, either.”
“True,” she agreed.
He rolled up the blueprints and inserted them in a storage tube, then led the way to the breakfast bar in his kitchen and picked up his cell phone.
“What would you like, Thai? Chinese? Moroccan?”
She hesitated and then said ruefully, “How about a hamburger and French fries? I’ve been back for a week and I have yet to sink my teeth into a good old American hamburger and French fries.”
“You can eat that?”
�
�I think so. I’m pretty capable of picking up a bun and following it with a French fry.”
“I just meant you are so slim…I thought you must exist on lettuce.”
“After the tour, I’m down a bit. I can afford to indulge. You might throw in a salad, if possible. Also ice cream. That’s another thing I haven’t had for a month.”
“What flavor?”
“Mint chocolate chip?”
“My favorite too. I’ll arrange for the food.” He leaned on the counter on those capable, muscled arms that had, at one time she supposed, done construction work. He acted so cool and casual, as if he were her brother. What would happen when they were done eating? Would he simply put her in his car and take her home? Or was he planning on taking her to bed in the middle of a Saturday afternoon with the sun shining in on his big body and…
Chapter 10
Stop. Right. There. Do not imagine Hunter Cameron naked.
Hunter was still behind the bar, working on opening a lovely bottle of Riesling wine. She watched his hands work, thought how capable they looked, tried to squash her fantasy of how those big hands cupping her breasts would feel…and…wait. Did he actually have a black thumb?
He poured the wine out into the flute and handed it to her, then poured a glass for himself. After they toasted, the doorbell rang and their food came. Hunter placed the hamburgers and fries in his warming oven so they could drink their wine.
She sipped from the glass and then set it down on the counter. “So tell me about that,” she said pointing to his hand. “I’ve heard of black thumbs but I thought it was just a metaphor for killing green things like I do. I’ve never actually seen one.”
“I hit it with a sledge hammer years ago. It seems to be one of those things that doesn’t heal.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips.
“Don’t be. I consider it a badge of honor.”
“How many badges of honor do you have?’ She asked the question merely to tease him but he said, “Would you really like to see them all?”
Wanting Hunter: Book 1 in the Cameron Family Saga Page 6