“I’m going to check on my patient.” When Sawyer looked confused, she added, “Your brother.”
Sawyer’s gaze razored through the window, his body growing taut. Tension enveloped the small kitchen. “I’m surprised he’s still around. I figured I’d wake up one morning to find him gone.”
“I’ve only met with him twice, but he seems determined to get his hand better.”
“So he can head back to Seattle at the earliest opportunity no doubt. Not sure why he agreed to come home. He shook off this town—and us—and I can tell he hates being back. He’s been at it with our daddy’s old truck almost since he landed.”
She wanted to respond to the bitterness in Sawyer’s voice. Tell him how Cade had worried over him so long ago. Worried about keeping him safe and fed, worried about his grades and girls, worried about the pain he hid behind his ready smile. She didn’t say anything and escaped out the back.
The sun had dropped to the top of the trees, but the heat hadn’t abated. The air had surrendered and lay heavy and dense and unmoving. Bugs swarmed in pods that darted back and forth with one mind. She waved a hand in front of her face to ward off the gnats.
The opposite bay doors had been opened, too, giving the garage a barn-like feel. The sun shone through the back, and she shielded her eyes with a hand. Cade was hunched over the engine compartment of the rusted old red-and-gray truck, elbow deep in hoses and metal. Country music played from a portable speaker sitting on the cab. His blue jeans were faded and ripped at one knee, and his white cotton T-shirt was half-tucked. Both were dirty.
Cooler air circulated around her legs from two box fans set up to give some relief from the heat. When she was within ten feet, he straightened and propped his hip on the grill of the truck. “Well now, this is a surprise. Did you miss me so much you came out for a house call?”
She’d learned early on how to hide her truths behind a wall of confidence. No one had guessed that behind her smiles she wrestled with demons. But Cade seemed possessed with X-ray vision, her smiles no match for him. She reverted back into an unsure teenager confronted with her crush. She pulled at her blue-and-white-striped skirt. The inches of fabric between the hem and her panties seemed to shrink exponentially.
She made a few word-like noises before her tongue began working again. “Of course I didn’t miss you. Next session, I’ll see what I can do about your inflated head.”
His smile was fleeting, and she had the feeling he wasn’t in the habit of using it often.
“I came to give Tally an invitation to the Tarwaters’ fund-raiser. Maybe you can talk her into going.”
He used his shirt like a rag, black stripes of grease decorating the hem. “Let me see.”
She held it out. His fingerprints dirtied the creamy parchment envelope as he pulled out the invitation written in black embossed letters. “Mr. and Mrs. Tarwater invite you for an evening of entertainment and charity,” he read in an exaggerated posh accent. “What’s the entertainment?”
“I assume that’s code for food and drink. If there’s music, it’ll be Frank Sinatra. Maybe the Eagles if things get wild.”
“Sounds fun. Maybe I’ll come if Tally doesn’t want to. Represent the Fournettes.” He tossed the invitation on top of a red metal tool cabinet with at least a dozen drawers, half of them open and filled with various nuts, bolts, and tools.
“It’s black tie. Did you pack a tuxedo?”
He spun a wrench in his hand and grinned. This time his smile stuck around longer, as if muscle memory were kicking in. His bottom two teeth overlapped slightly, but otherwise his teeth were straight and white against his dark beard. “I expect I can rustle up something to wear. Uncle Delmar has a powder-blue tux with ruffles I might squeeze into.”
“To see Mrs. Tarwater’s face…” She laughed and came closer to peer at the engine compartment. “Are you going to get this old thing running again?”
He rubbed his hands down his jeans before nesting the wrench around a nut and tightening it. The muscle of his biceps flexed. She pulled at her skirt again.
“It was Daddy’s.” The simple words hid a wealth of feeling she could sense roiling behind his blank expression. She didn’t answer but stood beside him while he worked, the silence between them strangely comfortable.
The tools seemed extensions of the long, dexterous fingers of his right hand. He moved with a grace and economy of motion that was hypnotizing. The effect was like watching an artist or musician at work. A hollowness grew in her belly, and her voice came out hoarse with a longing she couldn’t identify. “You’re good with your hands.”
His head startled up. A slow, knowing smile lightened his face and he winked. “So I’ve been told.”
What began as hero worship after he saved her from Sam had gradually turned into a teenage crush. The fantasies she’d harbored had been more along the lines of a Disney movie, unrealistic and innocent. Besides one quick brush of his lips on her cheek at the very end, they’d never kissed. She wasn’t sure what she’d meant to him so many years ago or why he’d kept coming back upriver every full moon.
One thing had become painfully clear. Instead of withering over the years, her feelings had only lain dormant, breaking ground as blatant, very grown-up lust. Was he aware of the electric currents snapping around them?
She sashayed around him, and his head swiveled to follow her progress. Pushing a pile of papers aside, she scooched to sit on a stainless-steel desk and tried to channel the sexiness of a Victoria’s Secret model when she crossed her legs.
He didn’t react in any way.
“Tally told me you hold patents on some mechanical … thingamagigs.” She didn’t want to admit she’d pored over the magazine article she’d stumbled upon more than once. The accompanying picture showed him preparing to throw himself out of a plane. It bolstered the image of a man used to taking risks in all aspects of his life.
He buried himself back under the hood, his face in shadows, but a fair amount of humor threaded his words. “I prefer the more technical term, ‘doodad.’”
She uncrossed her legs and swung them, a nervous energy pulsing with every beat of her heart. The edge of the desk bit at the backs of her thighs. Had his face moved the tiniest amount toward her? He straightened, polished his wrench on the bottom of his shirt, his gaze fixed north of her shoulders.
“You sell your patents to the highest bidder?” she asked.
“Actually, I license my designs. That way I retain rights and make money over the term of the patent.”
“And companies are willing to pay to use them?”
“Darlin’, they fight over my designs. My business partner and I play one against the other to drive the price up. We’re ruthless. I’m ruthless.” A warning was in his voice.
From what she’d read, he was ruthless. Maybe she should be scared. She wasn’t. She was fascinated. “That’s amazing. Where did you learn how to…” She shrugged, not sure how to finish. The facts of his past didn’t seem to line up with the reality of the man he’d turned into.
“What? Negotiate or design engines?” He spun the wrench in his good hand over and over as if he was unaware of his actions, the habit so ingrained. “Daddy taught me the basics of car repair. Then, afterward … I learned real quick we couldn’t afford a mechanic when things broke. It came natural. I may have dropped out of high school, but I made good grades. I could have gone to college, but I had to keep us together. Keep Tally’s and Sawyer’s lives as normal as possible.”
What about your life? she wanted to ask. A hint of the desperation he must have felt threaded a now familiar defensiveness through his voice. She wanted to hop off the table and give him a hug.
“I read repair manuals in my spare time. Then, when Sawyer went to study engineering, I would flip through his books when he came home on weekends. By then, though, the theory wasn’t as useful to me. I’d taught myself how to take any engine apart and put it back together. I could see how to make them better. So I
did.”
She had no doubt the simplicity of his declaration masked years of hard work and sacrifice. “Why did you settle in Seattle?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the opposite of Louisiana. Cool. No gators or bugs big enough to eat you.” His voice was teasing, yet the message was disconcerting.
The opposite of Louisiana. “Also no family.”
“No family.” Was he even aware of the hollow loneliness reflecting in his eyes? Then, it was gone and she wondered if she’d imagined it. His voice lightened. “Some might consider that a good thing.”
Questions swirled. After everything he’d done for his brother and sister, why distance himself so thoroughly? But it was a different question that burned its way up her throat and out. “Do you have a girlfriend up there?”
“No one special.”
“What does that mean?”
He raised his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth tilting into his beard. “Means I’m not a monk, but no woman is crying her eyes out that I’m not around.”
She huffed, but the answer satisfied her. Her cotton skirt was scrunched around her upper thighs and she wiggled, pulling the hem down. This time she was positive his gaze dropped to skim down the length of her legs. The temperature rose a few more degrees.
“I should go.”
“Actually, I could use your help.” He opened and closed his bad hand. “I’ve been working for two days straight and can barely feel my fingers. But I’m so close to firing her up.”
“Cade, I swear.” She slid off the desk, took his hand, and massaged her thumbs along his palm. “What did I say about pushing yourself too hard, too fast?”
“I can’t help it if I like it hard and fast.” While the innuendo was clear, a self-deprecating humor kept him from sounding creepy.
“How old are you? Twelve?”
“The heat is deep-frying my brain cells. Apparently, I’m reverting. Even had a fight with Sawyer earlier about the truck.” Cade’s smile morphed into a grimace. “I can’t damage my hand any worse, right?”
She hesitated, sensing the set-to with his brother loomed bigger in his worries than he wanted to admit to her. With that added to the odd hostility in Sawyer’s voice earlier, she surmised the Fournette family reunion wasn’t all hugs and happy tears.
“You won’t make things worse, but I hate seeing you in pain.” His hand jerked in hers, and her impetuously whispered words unscrambled themselves in her brain. God, was the heat dumbing her down, too? “I don’t like seeing any of my clients in pain.”
“You take your job pretty seriously, huh? Go above and beyond the call of duty?”
She should drop his hand yet couldn’t unlatch her fingers, couldn’t stop touching him. “What did you need help with?”
“I … What?”
She raised her gaze, slowly, deliberately, letting it linger on the broad expanse of his chest under the thin T-shirt, then onward to his neck where his throat muscles worked and to his mouth where his tongue dabbed the middle of his bottom lip. Air from the fan caressed her legs, fluttering her skirt. The syncopated whir settled into a hypnotic rhythm with the soft music. Closer, closer, closer.
“You needed me?” Her voice was husky, and she lifted her gaze the last few inches to meet his, the green as dark and beautiful as a magnolia leaf.
“I do need you.” His whisper hooked her a step closer. His eyes flared and he cleared his throat. “I mean I need your help with my nuts.”
“Your nuts?” She dropped his hand and startled back a step.
“Of the nuts-and-bolts variety.” They both glanced toward his crotch. He scrubbed his hand over his head. Red tinged his cheekbones even as a small laugh stuttered out.
His smile lightened the mark so many desperate years had left and her lips mimicked his instinctively. She would put on a clown costume and hit herself with a cream pie if she could keep a smile on his face forever. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it couldn’t be good.
“I’d be happy to help with your nuts.”
A booming laugh exploded from his chest and triggered a landslide in her stomach. As his laugh reduced to a chuckle, he gestured her over. She stood facing the engine block. He moved up behind her, not quite touching her, but she was aware of him nonetheless, the hairs on the back of her neck reaching for him.
His arm came around her, his biceps brushing hers, the wrench extended. She took it out of his hand, the metal warm from his grip. He braced his hands on the truck’s frame, caging her in. The rasp of his jeans on her bare legs had her shuddering a breath in and out. Even in her wedge sandals, he topped her by a few inches.
He pointed into the dark recesses next to a set of parallel hoses. “It’s down there.”
She stuck her hand in the crevasse and felt around, the wrench clanging in her clumsy attempt. “I’m not sure…”
He tucked himself right behind her and put his hand over hers. Everything about him overwhelmed her senses. His scent was car grease and sweat and soap. A combination she would have never thought was sexy, but he wore it well. So well, in fact, she turned her face to where his arm covered hers and took a deep breath.
His body branded her through the layers of cotton, hard and hot. Desire streaked through her body like the first cut of lightning before a storm. She wanted to drop the wrench and turn in his arms. She didn’t. That sort of behavior went against her habit of staying safely removed.
Her dating history was sketchy at best. Sporadic dates with men who assumed her friendly yet distant manner was a version of playing hard to get. None of them had ever earned her trust, leading to a series of short-lived relationships. She hadn’t been sorry to see any of them go.
“Do you feel it?” His breath caressed her ear, and she turned her head, wanting more.
God, yes, she felt it. Felt every inch of him, felt the powerful draw to him despite the years, felt her body spark. Was it simple lust or was something older, more primal, at work between them? Her instincts were trumping her ingrained habits.
“The nut is under my finger. Can you feel it? Fit the wrench around it, and I’ll help you torque it.” He turned toward her, putting them nose to nose. Black grease fanned from the corner of one eye and had settled into a long groove along his forehead as if highlighting the hard years.
“I feel it.” Her whisper barely penetrated the heavy, humid air around them. Her brain instructed her to move, to do her job with the wrench. All she could do was stare at the way the coarse hairs of his beard perfectly framed his lips.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She was as okay as someone emerging from a coma. Disoriented and confused. “I’m just peachy.”
“All righty then.” His lips quirked. “You ready to get on it?”
She startled, her butt bumping into his pelvis. “Get on it?”
“Torque the nut?”
“Yes, yes.” Through sheer luck, she managed to seat the wrench around the nut. He made encouraging grunting noises that didn’t help her concentration one little bit. When she gave him the go-ahead, he wrapped his good hand around hers and pulled.
“Excellent. That should do it.” He backed away.
The air around her thinned and the pressure fell, making it easier to think rationally.
“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” he asked. “You can hand off the invite to Tally.”
“Not sure Sawyer wants me around.”
The grease-streaked furrow on Cade’s forehead deepened. “You and Sawyer feuding?”
“Not exactly. The dueling festivals have pitted one side of Cottonbloom against the other and your brother and Regan are the field generals.”
“And you and Regan are still best friends, I take it.”
“Since kindergarten.”
“But you and Tally have become friends, too, right?”
She and Tally probably had more in common than she and Regan did. The biggest being neither one enjoyed heart-to-heart talks. Their friendship involve
d the gym, the girls at risk program, and superficial chats about pop culture and their unexciting love lives.
She shrugged an answer. “I love Regan, I do, but your brother knows how to make her lose her mind.”
“Based on Sawyer’s rants and his increased whiskey consumption, seems like she can return the favor. He wants that grant money from the contest.”
“So does Regan. They both want the best for their sides of Cottonbloom.” She refused to throw Regan to the gators, but she wasn’t certain her friend’s vehemence to produce a spectacular festival wasn’t born out of years of nurtured hate toward the Cottonbloom Parish commissioner.
Cade held out a hand. “You’re not Regan, so Sawyer has no reason to object.”
Her lungs ceased moving air in and out as past and present blurred. She remembered Cade standing on the bank in an identical pose, younger, clean shaven, and undeniably the same. She also remembered the solace she’d found in the simple touch. The moment took on a significance far beyond an invitation to stay for dinner.
She’d touched him during their physical therapy sessions, and he’d been pressed against her, his hand around hers not two minutes earlier, yet her fingers trembled as she reached for him. His hand engulfed hers. He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb, and the rough calluses along his palm rasped against her skin. The electric sensations zinging up her arm shocked her lungs into an erratic rhythm.
He didn’t speak or tug her toward the house. Maybe the seismic shift affected him as well. The silence was full of memories. Even the bugs had quieted. The green of his eyes darkened like clouds moving in from the horizon, and mysteries lurked behind the storm.
Chapter Seven
A shiver ran up Cade’s spine in spite of the oppressive heat. With her hand in his, the two of them existed in a state of limbo he didn’t understand. At eighteen she’d grown into an achingly pretty girl—one he’d started to think about as more than a surrogate sister—but the beautiful, complicated woman she’d become bemused him.
Although she was confident, hints of the vulnerability he’d first seen in her at thirteen were still there. She was in turns refreshingly honest and closed off. Her deflection about her mama the day before had not gone unnoticed. Calling her on it seemed dishonest considering he’d sidestepped more than one question she’d lobbed in his direction.
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