All Shook Up

by Susan Andersen

  Edwina had changed all that, and for several months it had been like living in his most closely held fantasy. She’d treated him the way he’d imagined real kids were treated. Which had made the betrayal all the more bitter when Edward’s watch had suddenly disappeared and she’d all but accused him of taking it. He hadn’t taken kindly to that, and as ridiculous as it was, the ghost of that outrage lingered on like nuclear waste with an infinite half-life.

  So if there was one thing he knew for damn sure, it was that even though the Lawrences seemed like a decent family, nobody just relinquished their rights to valuable property with the cheerfulness they’d just displayed. He slammed out of the cabin and headed up the trail to the lodge.

  They had to be up to something. And he planned to find out what it was.

  The front-desk clerk had just warned Dru that J.D. was headed for her office when the door opened and he walked in. Watching him close it behind him and turn to face her, she said into the phone, “The package beat the message, Joy, but I appreciate the attempt. While I have you on the line, would you tell Housekeeping that I’m making up my order and need their report by this afternoon? There’s a lag time on the coffee packets for the rooms, so I particularly need to know about that.” She settled the receiver back in its cradle and marked a check next to “Housekeeping.”

  Then, ignoring her increased heart rate, she rose and plastered a pleasant smile on her face. “Hello, J.D. Did you come to be shown the road to your cabin?”

  “No. I came to be shown the books.”

  His remark was so unexpected that she simply blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

  “The books. Ledgers that record all the financial data of an enterprise. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

  “I know what books are,” she said with hard-won composure, and came out from behind the desk. “I’ll get them for you right away.” She headed for the cabinet.

  “Both sets.”

  Her spine snapped erect and she swung back to face him. “I don’t know what type of business you’re accustomed to dealing with, Mr. Carver, but Star Lake Lodge has one set of books, period, and those are meticulously kept.”

  He took a large step forward, and her office suddenly shrank down to a single wall comprised of his shoulders and chest. She tilted her chin up, but took an involuntary step back, then was furious that he could intimidate her so effortlessly. When he promptly took another step forward, she stood her ground. “Are you planning on stalking me around my office?” she inquired coolly. Then she lost it. “Who the hell taught you your manners, anyway? It certainly couldn’t have been Great-aunt Edwina.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw. “No, the lesson I learned from Edwina was that talk is cheap, and in the end there’s only one person I can depend on—myself.”

  “Indeed? You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t cry big, sloppy tears over how misused you were. Because it seems to me that Edwina’s talk wasn’t all that cheap—for here you are, aren’t you? Half-owner in our lodge.”

  He took another step closer. “And that bothers you, doesn’t it, sweetheart?”

  She deliberately chose to misunderstand. “That you’re bad-mouthing the woman who made it possible?” She ignored her reaction to his proximity this time and thrust her chin up. “Yes, I can honestly say I find that rather tacky.”

  For a moment those don’t-fuck-with-me eyes of his went hot with some emotion Dru couldn’t pin down, and she felt a burst of triumph that she’d managed to push one of his buttons. It was only fair, considering he seemed to have a natural facility for pushing all of hers.

  Then his eyes went cool and distant. “Well, see, that’s the thing about us lowlife types,” he growled, stepping forward again. “Tacky is mother’s milk to us, and we live for the opportunity to get something for nothing.” He ran a rough-skinned fingertip down her cheek, leaving a streak of heat in its wake.

  Dru jerked her head back, but he just moved in closer. “And we don’t particularly care who we have to step on to get it, either,” he said in a low voice. “You might want to keep that in mind.” His thumb rubbed her lower lip open, but he drew his hand back before she could slap it away. Giving her a slow once-over, he smiled insolently, and she saw that he didn’t have bad teeth at all. They were maybe the slightest bit crooked—but very white and strong-looking.

  The moment she dragged her gaze back to his eyes, he lifted an eyebrow. “The books?”

  Blood thumping furiously in all her pulse points, Dru stalked over to the cabinet and pulled out the ledgers. A moment later she slapped them in his hands. “Here. These cover the past three years. Don’t spill food on them and don’t lose them.”

  “Guess that means I’d better not eat my peas with my knife again, huh?”

  Embarrassed by her own snide rudeness, she resumed her seat, snatched up a pencil, and tapped it impatiently against the desktop, hoping to give the impression of a woman too busy for this nonsense. “Just be careful with them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He gave her a bumptious salute and, with surprising grace for someone wearing several pounds of boot leather on each foot, strode out of the office.

  Dru remained fuming at her desk long after he had gone. Things between her and J.D. were shaping up like Trouble with a capital T, but she had a bad, bad feeling that his being aggravating as all get-out was the least of her problems. She was more worried about the way she felt every time he was near.

  Oh, man, she didn’t like this; she didn’t like it one damn bit. The only other time she’d responded to a man with this sort of gut-level reactiveness had been with Tate’s father. It hadn’t been nearly as visceral with Tony, either, and just look where that had led.

  She’d been eighteen years old and away from the lodge for the first time since coming to live with Sophie and Ben when she’d met Tony. College had been exciting and full of promise. She’d felt like such an adult, and when she’d fallen for Tony at the end of her freshman year, she’d thought life just didn’t get any better than this: first time out of the gate, and already she’d found her one true love.

  For the end of that school year and all of her sophomore year, she and Tony had been inseparable. They’d done everything together: studied, played, talked, and laughed. And they’d made love—Lord, how they’d made love! The only thing they hadn’t done was argue, and she would have sworn theirs was a match made in heaven. Then, on the last day of spring finals, she’d discovered she was pregnant.

  She’d also discovered that heaven wasn’t the place where this match had been made. For the next day, Tony was gone.

  She’d been left to berate herself as ten kinds of a fool. She could hardly believe she’d been so careless and that all her dreams were dust as a result. She’d been laid low with morning sickness, scared over how it was going to affect the rest of her life, and terrified to tell her aunt and uncle.

  Except for three agonizingly long weeks, however, it hadn’t occurred to her not to tell them. During those weeks, while bitterly resenting the baby she carried, she had given serious consideration to having an abortion. It had seemed like the most practical solution: one that would keep Sophie and Ben from ever knowing how irresponsible she had been, and restore her life back to its even keel. But when she’d thought about it emotionally…

  She’d girded her loins and told her aunt and uncle she was going to be a mother.

  They were wonderful. She’d dreaded seeing the disappointment in their eyes, but they’d given her their wholehearted support without a single remonstrance for the foolish risk she had taken, or for the gossip she’d created in tiny, backwoods Star Lake. And Tate was the love of her life—she’d never regretted her decision to raise him herself. But it hadn’t been a walk in the park, and she now knew better than to take careless risks. Her life was never again going to get turned upside down the way it had been eleven years ago.

  So she didn’t care how hot J.D. Carver was, or how he made her heart pound and her bones go weak. He wasn�
��t going to just waltz in here and screw up the nice, safe life she’d made for herself and her son.

  3

  Dru’s uncle stepped out of the gift shop just as J.D. passed by. Both stopped, and J.D. braced himself when he saw Ben glance at the stack of financial ledgers that he carried. But Ben merely said, “Settling in okay?”

  J.D. nodded.

  Ben slid his hands in his pockets and studied the younger man curiously. “So, the lawyer who read Edwina’s will said you were in construction?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is a busy time of year for that industry. Did you have any trouble getting away?”

  “No.” J.D.’s laugh was short on humor. “The company I worked for folded when its owner went to prison.”

  “Ouch. What’d he do?”

  “Substituted a whole lot of substandard material to save himself a few bucks.”

  Ben winced. “Nasty business. So how’d they catch him? Somebody blow the whistle?”

  “Yeah.” J.D. looked him in the eye. “Me.” Lankovich had subbed inferior materials on an astounding number of projects, it turned out, but J.D. hadn’t known about the others at first. It was discovering his boss had subbed materials on the job he’d headed, making his painstakingly built building unsafe, that had driven J.D. to turn him in.

  Watching Ben’s jaw drop, he said defensively, “I didn’t want to turn the guy in—Lankovich was good to me, and he gave me my first shot in construction. But it was either that, or live with the consequences if people got hurt or even killed because I kept my mouth shut.”

  “I’m not judging you, son. You did the right thing, which isn’t always the easy thing. I imagine you must have made a lot of people proud, though.”

  J.D. couldn’t prevent the rude noise that slipped up his throat. “In my part of town, you don’t rat out your employer, so what I made a lot of people was angry. Lankovich’s kid, who fancies himself a real hard-ass, made it his mission in life to make me pay. Most everyone else froze me out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said sincerely. “That must have been tough.”

  Hell yes, it’d been tough. Robbie Lankovich had dogged his every move, and men J.D. had thought were friends had turned their backs whenever he came near. He’d never been in a position like that before, and hoped he never would be again. But he only shrugged. “Yeah, well. Shit happens.”

  “So did the kid who fancied himself a wise guy find a way to make you pay for turning in his father?”

  “No.” His smile was colder than an Arctic wind. “He gave it his best shot, but his pretensions are a hell of a lot more impressive than his abilities.”

  They exchanged stilted conversation for a few moments longer before J.D. edged away. He took the financial books into the Eagle’s Nest, a small combination bar and cafe at the end of one the corridors off the lobby. It was a two-tiered room suspended over the valley, with long, floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a breathtaking view where the mountain dropped away. It also boasted a small balcony, tucked into the angle where the windows wrapped around the corner, but the French doors leading to it were taped off with an UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign. That immediately drew him, and he saw that the balcony’s entire front railing had broken off. He tested the knobs on the doors, wanting a closer look, but the doors were bolted.

  “It’s locked for safety considerations, sir,” said a voice behind him, and J.D. turned to see the man who had been behind the bar earlier.

  “We had a record snowfall last winter,” the bartender said as he gathered a couple of plates and glasses and swabbed down a nearby table. “Caused that section to give way.”

  “My guess would be it didn’t take much. Looks like the wood was rotted.”

  The bartender nodded. “Between snow season and spring and fall rains, it doesn’t get much opportunity to dry out, so most of the railings and deck surfaces are replaced every couple of years. Can I bring you something from the bar, sir?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have a Corona.”

  The man went back to the bar and J.D. grabbed a table near the windows. It was too late for the lunch crowd and too early for happy hour, so he had the place to himself. He nodded his thanks when the beer was delivered a few moments later, then opened the oldest ledger to start tracking the lodge’s financial history.

  He found it hard to concentrate, though, because his mind kept wandering back to Dru. He wasn’t sure if he had won that skirmish between them or lost it. He wasn’t exactly the smoothest act in town when it came to women, but he’d never had one look at him as if he were the last standing Neanderthal, either. He had to admit, though: it had given him a primitive satisfaction to rattle her cage.

  And where the hell had that come from?

  He’d gone to her office with every intention of having a businesslike conversation. But then she’d given him that phony smile, and with an instinctive screw tact combativeness, he’d jumped straight on the offensive. When she’d looked at him as if he’d just crawled up out of the gutter and made that crack about his tackiness, his last good intention had gone up in a ball of flame.

  She was no pushover, though. He’d thought she would be, had thought that he could utilize a little time-honored Rat City physical intimidation to back her down. But those big round eyes and soft, round body ought to come with a truth-in-advertising disclaimer—because she hadn’t hesitated to call him on it. And except for that one backward step, she’d demonstrated her willingness to duke it out right where she’d stood, toe-to-toe with him.

  And suddenly his quest to find out what the hell she and her relatives were up to had turned into something that felt a helluva lot like foreplay.

  He straightened in his seat. Jesus, man, are you out of your mind? He’d been blowing smoke when he told her he lived to get something for nothing, but that’s exactly what he’d been given—and how often did that happen to a guy like him? He planned to make this opportunity work for him. Playing I-know-I-can-make-you-want-it-as-much-as-I-do games with his new partner was not the way to go about it, and he was not screwing this up.

  God knew there was nothing left for him in Seattle. Not even Butch, who had always been the closest thing he’d had to family.

  And yet…

  Standing, J.D. dug his phone card out of his wallet and walked over to the pay phone by the rest rooms. Even if things weren’t the same between them, he should at least let Butch know where he was, and give him a number in case the cops needed to get in touch with him.

  He and Butch had gone through the foster system together when they were kids; they had even occasionally ended up in one of the group homes at the same time. But it was out on the streets, where they’d both spent far too much time, that they’d gotten to know each other best. And just before J.D.’s sixteenth birthday, Butch had saved his ass from a headlong spill off the roof of a building they’d been messing around on.

  It didn’t matter that the game responsible for the near-accident had been instigated by Butch; it was understood that, from that day forward, J.D. owed him. Their corner of the city had rigid codes about these things, and it wasn’t uncommon for a running score to be kept of who owed what to whom. The law might be an unwritten one, but it was ironclad.

  So J.D. had appreciated all the more that Butch had never tried to collect on their old debt. It was a rare quality in their neighborhood, and it had always meant a lot to J.D. that his friend hadn’t even seemed to realize he had a marker that could be called in at any time.

  Then, last week, Butch had disabused him of the notion.

  J.D. almost hung up the phone then and there, but dogged perseverance made him punch out the remaining two numbers. It wasn’t like he hadn’t always known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that his credit could be called in at any time. But he’d still felt disillusioned when Butch actually did it. It changed the tenor of their friendship.

  Dammit, this was a mistake. J.D. started to hang up, but the phone at the other end of the line was picked u
p. “Yell-oh!”

  Suddenly hearing Butch’s voice raised a morass of conflicting emotions, and for a moment J.D. didn’t say anything. Butch had always been so many things that he was not. He was a fun guy to be around, for starters. Even as a kid, he’d been quick with a joke and even quicker with ideas for entertaining ways to pass the time. Grown up, he’d maintained a knack for making people laugh that J.D. envied.

  He was one of those guys to whom people just naturally gravitated. Women loved his ass, and it didn’t seem to matter that he was married to the Psycho Bitch from Hell, who’d snatch any woman bald-headed she caught throwing so much as a sideways glance his way.

  “What?” Butch’s impatient voice broke into his reverie. “You got something to say, spit it out. I don’t have time for this sh—”

  “Hey,” J.D. said. “It’s me.”

  “J.D.?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was an instant of dead silence. Then: “Where the hell are you, man? I tried to call you, but your line’s been disconnected, and when I went by your crib it looked deserted, but I couldn’t tell if that was permanent or if you were just out for the day.”

  He sounded agitated, and J.D. heard rustling and crackling over the line. He could picture Butch pouring his change from hand to hand, the way he did when he was nervous.

  A small kernel of unease unfurled in J.D.’s gut. “I gave the place up—it was time for a change.”

  “Yeah? So where are you?”

  There was something just a bit too anxious about the inquiry. “What’s wrong?”

  “Huh? Ain’t nuthin’ wrong,” Butch replied, speaking too fast. “You dropped outta sight and I’m just wondering where the hell you’ve gotten yourself off to, is all.”

  Like hell. They went weeks without seeing each other and Butch had never given a damn before. “You’re up to something, Dickson. What is it?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Has it got anything to do with that business with the cops?” The business that had changed their friendship forever? J.D.’s gut knotted more.