by Jackie Braun
“Is that coffee?”
He drank deeply before replying, apparently having noted the reverence in her tone.
“Yes it is.”
“Black? No sugar or flavored creamer or anything?”
“Why mess with a good thing?” he replied, and she agreed completely.
“You wouldn’t happen to have more of it?”
“An entire pot. Just made it before I came out for my morning walk.” He sipped it again and she swore her mouth began to water. “Ground the beans myself. Starbucks, French roast.”
She couldn’t help it. A soft moan escaped her lips. He raised his eyebrows when he heard it, but he made no comment.
“I don’t suppose you’re feeling…neighborly?”
He smiled, and Marnie told herself it was only the promise of caffeine that had her pulse shooting off like a bottle rocket. Certainly, it wasn’t the more than six feet of gorgeous man standing five yards in front of her, wearing tan cargo shorts and a wrinkled white T-shirt that appeared to be on inside out, as if it had been pulled on hastily.
“Is that a yes?” She tipped her head to one side and offered a slow, sensual smile in return. Two could play his game, she decided.
His gaze lingered on her lips before dipping lower, lower. She almost felt caressed by his thorough, frank appraisal. And she figured she had him.
Marnie didn’t believe in false modesty, so she would be the first to say she looked damned good in this swimsuit, great even. It hid the small tummy she’d gained since Noah, the little pouch that no amount of sit-ups seemed to eradicate. She’d come to grips with that and had decided to work around it. Accentuate the positive, as the saying went. And so she did. The neckline scooped low to show off her full breasts, and the bottom was cut high at the hip to reveal every inch of her long and slender—if a bit pale at this point—legs.
She’d planned to carry this suit and dozens of other flattering ones in her mail-order business in what she now thought of as her other life. And even though she’d purchased it three years ago, this was the first time she’d actually worn it outside the confines of a fitting room or in her bedroom, where she’d taken pleasure in modeling it for her husband just a month before the accident.
J.T.’s voice snapped her back to the present.
“Sorry, I’m not in a generous mood today.”
He didn’t bother to hide his smile after he took another satisfying gulp.
She scowled at him. All that flirting wasted.
“Just today? I got the feeling that was a permanent state for you,” she snapped.
“Why are you here?”
“Again with the questions,” she groused, sliding her feet out of her sandals and dumping her sunglasses onto the towel.
“I haven’t liked any of the answers so far,” he shot back.
“Your problem.”
The breeze tugged at her hair when she turned away from him and started toward the water.
“I meant it about the undertow,” he called after her.
She was hip deep in the chilly water before she replied, “Yes, but did you mean the part about not coming in to save me?”
J.T. watched her dive under the next wave. Her dark head emerged a few feet away and then went under again. He scanned the surf between large rock formations, anxious for a glimpse of her, but spotted nothing.
“Damn!” he muttered, setting his coffee down on one of the rocks and tugging the shirt he wore over his head.
He was in the water, swimming frantically toward the spot where he’d last spied her, when he heard laughter. Treading water, he turned and saw her standing on the beach.
Holding his coffee cup.
She raised it in mock salute before bringing it to her smiling lips. Afterward, she called, “You make a mean cup of joe, J.T.”
She was still laughing as he swam to shore. By the time he reached her towel, where she sat reclining on her elbows, wet skin glistening in the morning sun, his coffee cup had been drained and J.T. had worked his way past irritated to the upper end of irate.
“That stunt was incredibly low, not to mention stupid. If there had been an undertow, I could have drowned trying to save your sorry butt.”
“I beg to differ.”
“About the undertow?”
“No, about my butt. It is anything but sorry,” she said.
He opened his mouth, then snapped it back shut. He wanted to argue with her. Really, he wanted to. But she had a point. In fact, he’d spent several hours the night before lying in his bed thinking about the very butt in question as well as the rest of the package that, when put together, made up one mouthwatering woman.
Still, he wasn’t letting her off the hook, no matter how fine he found that derriere.
“I’d like an apology.”
She tipped down her sunglasses and regarded him over the top of the dark lenses. Even without a hint of makeup, she had the most incredible eyes. They made him think of molasses. They were that dark and rich, and when she blinked she did so slowly, as if it were an effort to close the lids.
“I’ll admit to being ruthless when it comes to my morning coffee, but you will recall that I asked you very nicely to share before resorting to trickery.”
“Trickery? Try thievery.”
She shrugged as if to concede the point. “Call the cops.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” he demanded.
“No. That’s not all.” She glanced at the hem of his soaking wet shorts. “You’re dripping on my towel.”
She had the audacity to slide the sunglasses up the bridge of her nose and lay back on the towel.
J.T.’s control was the stuff of legends. He never lost his cool, not during the most heated of board meetings, not even during his divorce settlement, when Terri’s team of lawyers had hovered like vultures over his self-made fortune and tried to pick off what they could.
But looking down at the smug raven-haired woman, he lost something. He didn’t think. He didn’t consider the consequences—something his attorney would ream him for were Richard Danton present. No, J.T. acted. Bending down, he scooped Marnie up from her towel and headed toward the ocean, intent on dumping her into the churning surf.
That’ll teach her to mess with me, he thought.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she cried.
Oh, he had her plenty surprised. She squirmed in arms, cool wet flesh sliding against cool wet flesh until the friction generated heat.
Lots and lots of heat.
And now she wasn’t the only one surprised. Beneath his anger, he felt it, that low tug of something he didn’t want to feel at all. But there it was, and there was no denying its existence.
Marnie wasn’t a small woman. Tall, long-limbed, nicely curved in all of the areas that counted. She filled up his arms almost as well as she filled out her bathing suit.
And, she had one hell of a right hook he realized too late.
It connected solidly with his jaw, staggered him so that they both wound up sprawled in the sand. A wave came up, cool water drenching the pair of them, but this was hardly like the scene in From Here to Eternity. Neither of the actors in that movie had taken one on the chin before going down.
“What was that for?”
“As if you need to ask,” she spat, disengaging her legs from his and then rolling to her feet.
She glared down at him, an angry Amazon. God, he’d never seen any woman look half as sexy. And that thought made him more determined to ignore his traitorous libido.
He didn’t have time for this distraction in his life right now. He had enough on his plate with the Justice Department breathing down his neck, interviewing disgruntled former employees of Tracker Operating Systems and subpoenaing records and assorted other company paperwork. That’s why he’d come to Mexico—to get away, to think, to plan. And then Marnie LaRue had sashayed into his life, listening to the same Motown music he preferred and muddling up his brain with her mile-long legs a
nd lush sweep of lashes.
He’d be damned if he could get a bead on her. She was after something, had to be. But he still couldn’t figure out what. A job? An interview? A ring?
Still, he’d give her this: she certainly had a different approach than the others.
He rubbed his sore jaw and, though he berated himself for it, admired the view as she stalked away.
They steered clear of each other for the better part of the day, which was easy to do since Marnie spent most of it in town. She called her parents and talked to her son, who, as she’d suspected, had already renegotiated his bedtime and met his candy quota for the month.
The man from whom Marnie had rented the house apologized for the lack of electricity, but confirmed what she had suspected: it might well stay out for the remainder of her visit. So she purchased bottled water, some wine and more ice for the small cooler she’d brought with her from her parents’ house, determined to make the best of her brief holiday.
This time the man’s niece, who worked at a resort in Los Cabos, was in town to do the translating. She spoke English easily, with the side benefit of a lovely accent that lent a lyrical quality to even the most mundane words.
“My uncle wants to know if you’ve met the other American?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve met J.T.”
A few young women sitting at one of the tables in the café giggled at the mention of his name.
“Ignore them,” Marisa suggested. “All of the women around here have a little—how do you say?—crush on J.T.”
“He’s something, all right. I met him in here first, as a matter of fact, and we’ve run in to each other a couple of times since then. He still has electricity,” Marnie said. “Why is that?”
“Generator,” Marisa replied.
Her curiosity got the better of her. “Does he live here? Year-round, I mean.”
“Not year-round, no. He’s American, like you. He just comes for visits.”
“But does he own that place?”
“Yes. He has been coming to La Playa de la Pisada for a couple of years. Very mysterious.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Some say he is crazy.”
“I can vouch for that,” Marnie muttered.
“Others say he is a drug dealer.”
“Drug dealer?”
Marnie couldn’t picture that. The guy was a royal pain in the fanny, but he didn’t seem like some sort of sleazy lawbreaker despite that wad of bills he carried. He was as suspicious as all get out, but would a drug dealer wade into the ocean intent on saving the life of someone he didn’t even like?
“Si. Me, I do not believe it. I think he is a booty hunter.”
“A wh-what?” Marnie sputtered.
“Booty hunter,” Marisa replied sincerely.
“Lot’s of men are,” Marnie said on a laugh. “But I’m thinking you mean bounty hunter.”
“Ah, that is the word. Si.”
“What makes people think he’s a bounty hunter?” Marnie asked, intrigued.
The other woman shrugged, but leaned in closer.
“He seems to do a lot of watching and driving. And a friend of my cousin has been inside his house. He hires her from time to time to come in and clean. She says he has all sorts of impressive equipment and computers. And last week, just after he arrived, she was there freshening up the sheets when she heard him on the telephone talking to somebody about justice and being a tracker.”
Bounty hunter? Marnie thought it seemed farfetched. But he fit the image she’d always had in her head when it came to the people who went after bail jumpers: Big, brawny, a little on the rogue side. And might that explain why he was so curious about who sent her? Did he think she was up to no good? Or, did he think she was out to collar some criminal before he did?
Marnie LaRue, bail bond agent. The very thought had her smiling. Then she set aside her mirth. The mysterious J.T. was none of her concern, she decided and headed back to her heavenly slice of golden beach, listening to Aretha’s soulful voice all the way.
When evening rolled around again, Marnie still did not have electricity. She glanced down the beach at the light already visible through the windows of J.T.’s abode. She really didn’t want to spend another night in the dark with nothing to eat but charred hotdogs. She didn’t particularly like the man, but she could tolerate him if it meant at some point she could ask to borrow his shower. And, after her conversation in town with Marisa, she had to admit she was even more intrigued by him. She decided she would go over, act nice and see if that got her foot far enough in the door to feel the brisk spray from a showerhead before she had to leave.
In the meantime, she would ignore the fact that J.T. had her hormones on full alert. It was a fluke, pure and simple. It had to be since the last time she’d felt this way, she’d been seventeen and head-over-heels smitten with Hal LaRue.
Marnie smiled absently, thinking about those golden days of the not so distant past when she had shamelessly wheedled and maneuvered in order to get what she most wanted.
And what she had most wanted was Hal.
She’d been the one to actually ask him out for their first date. She’d been a senior in high school at the time and she figured she’d waited long enough for him to get around to it. She’d set her sights on him when they were both juniors. She’d been a cheerleader, the homecoming queen. He’d been captain of the…chess club.
Okay, so most people hadn’t understood the attraction. But Marnie had found his brains as sexy as the way they were packaged: beneath tidy blond hair and behind wire-rimmed glasses that drew attention to a pair of serious, soulful dark eyes.
His physique leaned more wiry than brawny, which made sense since he ran cross country, but he could quote Shakespeare! None of the other boys Marnie dated would have known Hamlet from a ham sandwich, but Hal—Mr. Valedictorian, Mr. Quiz Bowl captain and a member of the debate team—had.
Someone with his brains could have gone anywhere, done anything. But he’d graduated from high school, attended Michigan Technological Institute in nearby Houghton for a while, and then he’d come back to tiny Chance Harbor on Lake Superior’s shore, three semesters shy of obtaining his degree.
“I don’t want to move to some unfamiliar city and work at some impersonal company,” he’d told her in that simple, straightforward manner of his. “Odds are good that’s exactly what I’ll wind up doing. Mechanical engineers aren’t in high demand in Chance Harbor. But this is where I want to live and raise a family.” He’d waited a heartbeat before adding, “With you.”
Marnie sighed now, remembering with bittersweet clarity the way their life had unfolded perfectly according to plan—at first.
Hal had gotten a job with the county and bought a small house within a stone’s throw of the biggest of the Great Lakes. He’d worked his way up to a department head by the time he finally asked her to marry him. Marnie had been twenty-seven by then and she’d said yes without hesitation. Slow, plodding Hal. For a while there, she’d thought she might have to pop the question herself.
In the end, they had only celebrated two wedding anniversaries before he’d died. And now she’d marked three anniversaries without him.
She glanced across the beach again, thinking about J.T. and the inappropriate tingle of attraction she’d felt when she’d first met him. What was it about him that called to her? He had that golden god thing going for him, sure, but even if she were in the market for a man, which she most certainly was not, Marnie wanted someone who was capable of stimulating conversation as well as mind-blowing sex. She’d had both with Hal. She’d never settle for less.
The memories, bittersweet and poignant, almost stopped her from leaving the house. As it was, she stepped back inside, telling herself it was just to get a sweater to pull over her T-shirt and shorts since it had grown chilly out as daylight waned.
A year ago, Marnie would have spent the remainder of the evening wallowing in unhappy thoughts peppered with what-ifs
and if-onlys. Tonight, determination had her shrugging into the sweater, grabbing a bag of potato chips she’d brought from Arizona and the bottle of wine she bought earlier that day, and walking out the door. She was alive. She needed to act that way, not only for herself, but also for Noah.
Besides, it was really all about the possibility of a shower and nothing more, she told herself, intent on ignoring that fluky flutter in her belly.
Still, she didn’t miss the irony that as she crossed the stretch of beach she was quite literally walking out of the darkness and toward the light.
CHAPTER THREE
J.T. WAS scowling when he opened his door. He wore a long-sleeved lightweight pullover with a discreet designer insignia embroidered on the front and a pair of faded jeans in deference to the temperature dip. But his feet, tanned and the tops sprinkled with golden hair, were bare.
He leaned against the jamb and crossed his arms. “Come to apologize?”
Marnie had, thinking that might be the best way to wheedle a shower out of him, but she would be damned if she was going to now and have him believe she had somehow been shamed into it.
“Peace offering,” she said instead, holding out the chips and wine.
He didn’t invite her inside. He came out instead and closed the door firmly behind him before she could glimpse much of the interior. Still, she wondered, had those countertops been made of granite or marble? His place definitely was a huge step up from hers and Marisa had said he owned it.
“Are you coming?”
She watched one sandy eyebrow lift, as if he were daring her to comment or ask a question. She swallowed both.
“Lead the way,” she said instead.
A small wicker table and chairs took up most of a small patio on the side of the house that faced the ocean. J.T. accepted her gifts and headed toward it, turning his chair so that he was looking at the water when he sat.
The sun had almost set. It was but an orange glow melting onto the ocean’s relatively calm surface. And if not for the light that spilled from between the blind slats of the window behind him, Marnie might not have been able to make out his expression. But she could. His jaw was firmly clenched, as if her presence irritated him. He didn’t exactly invite her to sit and join him, but she did anyway.