by Tawny Weber
“Watch for cars,” she warned again, reaching up to grab the closest branch.
“What do I do if I see one? Whistle? Throw myself across the driver’s window to hide their view?”
There might be a few drawbacks to having a BFF with a smart mouth, Eden decided as she levered her body onto the first branch.
“Just give me enough warning so I can hide,” she said as she gained her balance and slowly stood upright to reach for another limb.
With Bev’s voice droning in the background, covering everything from the fact that she’d never learned to climb a tree to the insanity of grown women acting like squirrels, Eden scurried higher.
A minute later, she was one branch away from Paisley.
“Hi, sweet kitty,” she said in a soft singsong voice. “Are you up here playing Queen of the Jungle? You should be—you look like royalty.”
She kept the soothing tone going, her outstretched fingers in constant motion to get the cat’s attention.
It worked. After a few seconds and a cautious sniff, the exotic white cat was nudging her broad forehead against Eden’s knuckles.
“Oh, aren’t you sweet.”
Unable to resist, Eden gave herself a moment to cuddle and pet the pretty cat before tucking her under one arm and slowly lowering herself until her butt met the branch. Like scooting down a rickety ladder, she went one branch at a time, with plenty of cuddling in between. Finally she was close enough to hand the cat to Bev.
“Why don’t you put her in the car,” Eden instructed, her belly flat against a wide limb that was about six feet from the ground. “Crack the windows, and there’s a bottle of water and portable pet dish in the trunk. If you’ll sit with her, she’ll probably drink a little.”
Despite her earlier opinion that the cat might be evil, Bev didn’t hesitate to reach out and cuddle the gray-spotted feline. Paisley gave a meow of protest, and threw an injured look toward Eden, but didn’t try to escape. Eden waited until her friend and the cat were safely inside the car, treats and water dispensed, before she lowered herself to the next branch.
There. She smiled her relief. Almost down.
It was the smile that did it, she figured.
Because she went from enjoying an easy descent to being suddenly trapped in the space of a heartbeat. Like an anchor, something held tight, so she couldn’t move.
Breathless, Eden twisted to see what was wrong.
Then scowled when she saw that the strap of her shoe was caught on a branch. Eden tugged. The shoe stuck. She tried to slip it off, but the branch was too rough, scratching painfully against the soft flesh of her instep.
A minute later she added cursing to the mix.
“Haven’t we been here before?” a husky voice asked.
Oh, hell. Eden froze. She hadn’t even heard a car. Please, oh, please, let him be talking to someone else.
“That is Eden up there, right?” the voice asked.
Double hell.
She shook her head, hoping the move would shift the curtain of hair from blocking her view.
Her heart, already pounding like a freight train, sped up. What little was left of her breath escaped her lungs in a rush.
She twisted her torso, angling herself sideways to make sure the face matched the voice.
Gorgeous green eyes, a tanned complexion over sculpted cheekbones and a strong jawline. Wide, full lips stretched in a smile that bordered on laughter. And the sexiest man-dimple she’d ever seen.
Her eyes widened and she gave a long, lusty sigh.
Didn’t it just figure? At least she’d tucked her skirt in so she wasn’t flashing him. Sure, she might have a few dozen fantasies about sharing her undies with this particular man. But this position wasn’t featured in a single one.
So she did what she always did when caught in an uncomfortable situation.
She smiled and made the best of it.
“Hi, Cade.”
3
“DO YOU DO THESE THINGS just to keep me in practice?” Cade asked, grinning at his favorite perpetual-victim, her silky brown hair a dark curtain over a face he knew would be sliding into a sheepish smile.
Eden Gillespie always looked sheepish when she had to be rescued. Something, if he’d ever considered it, he’d have figured she’d have outgrown. He eyed her legs, smooth and bare all the way to the top of her hot-pink panties thanks to the way her dress was hanging. Her arms were wrapped around the tree limb and one foot dangled while the other was caught in a snarl of branches and leaves. Clearly he’d have figured wrong.
“Consider it my welcome-home present,” she muttered, blowing a puff of air so her hair cleared enough that he could see the resigned amusement in her big brown eyes.
That was one of the things he’d always admired about Eden. She could laugh at herself. So many of the girls he’d grown up with, and the women he’d dated for that matter, took themselves and life way too seriously. They were so worried about controlling the impression they made, they didn’t let themselves just live.
Without thinking, his eyes shifted back to Eden’s legs. Long and sleek, they wrapped around that big, hard branch. He frowned at the scrapes and faint reddening of her tender flesh, for the first time ever tempted to kiss away a boo-boo. All the way up to her panties. Practical cotton, he noted, his mouth going dry, but in a fun, sassy color. Since she was facedown on the branch, the curve of her butt was perfectly highlighted in that pink fabric. His fingers itched to touch, to see if her curves were as firm as they looked.
Whoa. Not cool, he lectured himself. Lusting after the sweet girl next door was walking an awfully close line to settling down. Nothing wrong with it in the big picture, but in his personal rulebook? Totally out of the question.
“Want some help?” he offered, wondering how many times now he’d had to hurry these rescues along because of a hit of inappropriate lust. After all, he was pretty sure he’d been hauling her out of scrapes since his pre-teen days. But it’d only been since that rescue, when he’d seen her naked, that the sight of her made him instantly horny. He sighed with relief. There, now he was only a standard guy, not a weird pervert with a superhero complex.
“I can do it,” she muttered, tugging her foot to try and loosen it from the branch. Her shoe, a cute little black strappy thing, was good and stuck. She sighed and slanted him a rueful look. “But maybe you could just unhook my shoe for me?”
Cade didn’t bother arguing. He reached up and pulled the twigs from her foot. Then he wrapped both hands around her surprisingly narrow waist, easily lifting her from the overhead branch. It was like doing a military press, he thought with a grin as he lowered her body toward the ground.
Except he hadn’t counted on her shocked reaction. She gasped, struggling a little as if wanting him to let her go. Since he wasn’t about to drop her three feet to the ground, he shifted. Her breasts skimmed his chin. He froze. Other than to gasp and grab on to his shoulders for support, so did she.
Cade had felt the same energy pounding through his body when he held a live grenade. Danger, excitement, all senses on full alert.
Wrong, his brain screamed. Eden was the sweet girl next door. The same girl he’d been rescuing for years. She wasn’t supposed to inspire this degree of lust. The kind that made him want to take her, right there against the tree. He didn’t care that they’d only said a dozen or so words to each other in years, or that her friend was over there, face pressed against the window of the wrecked car, watching.
It was neither of those things that had Cade ignoring the hot need in his belly, or his body’s demand that he taste her, touch her.
It was the flutter of Eden’s lashes. The way her pulse trembled in her throat. The tiny trembles of her fingers where they dug into his shoulders. He, and his wicked desires, were out of her league.
So, nope. Not giving in to the need.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself up to that limit line.
Grinning, he slowly brought his ar
ms down. He didn’t let go of his hold on her waist, so her body had to slide, in one long glorious trip, down his.
His eyes never left hers. There was something heady, intense, in seeing the heat flare, then her gaze blur with passion.
As soon as her feet hit the ground, she pushed away like he was fire, too hot for her to touch.
“Thanks again,” she said as she stepped backward. Her foot caught on a root and would have sent her sprawling if he hadn’t grabbed her.
“Babe, I live for these moments,” he told her in a husky tone, only half-teasing. Because he really did. Eden always made coming home fun.
“Me, too.”
The look on her face, a mix of horror and chagrin, said loud and clear that she had, as usual, spoke without thinking.
He should let her off the hook.
It wasn’t like he was going to give in to the heat between them. Ever since his first romp at the tender age of fourteen, he’d made it a point to stay relationship-free and keep his sexual encounters easygoing and simple. There was nothing simple or easygoing about Eden.
Except looking at her. That was as simple and easy as breathing. And talking to her. He’d never had any hesitation there. Listening to her laugh was pure pleasure.
Hell.
“C’mon, I’ll give you a ride home,” he said, his words a little gruffer than he’d intended.
“I can get home.”
Cade didn’t bother arguing. He just pointed to her fender, wrapped around that tree as intimately as he’d like to see Eden wrapped around his body.
“Oh. Yeah.” She sighed, looking from the fender to her friend, then to Cade. Her gaze shifted again to the cat, then his car. Finally she shrugged. “Thanks. We appreciate the ride.”
As soon as both women—and the feline—were settled in his borrowed BMW—the quiet redhead in the back and Eden and her rescue cat in the front—he started the car.
“So, you still seeing Kenny Phillips?” he asked, hoping like hell she’d say yes.
“Not anymore.” She did that cute little nose-wrinkling thing then shook her head. “He never quite forgave me for breaking his foot.”
It’d been Kenny’s screams that’d caught Cade’s attention a couple years back, leading him to rescue a stunning, naked Eden. Cade was still baffled by that situation, since Kenny was nothing if not a missionary kind of guy. How the hell did a guy break his foot having standard, missionary sex? You’d think it’d take a swing, a tube of body lube and a few leather straps to reach that level of risk.
“I don’t think you lost out on much. Dating is a full-contact sport,” he told her with a laugh.
Unlike a lot of women, Eden didn’t get that speculative, how interested are you in playing the game with me look in her eyes. Instead she just shrugged.
“I guess Kenny decided to sign up for a lower-risk league, then,” she informed him as she rolled her ankle first one way, then the other. “And he took most of his teammates in town with him.”
“Wimps,” Cade muttered. What kind of jerks blamed the girl for their own incompetence? Sure, Eden was a little accident prone. But she was sweet and sexy in that girl-next-door way. She was fun and easy to talk to, and unlike so many others around town, she didn’t play the user game. A guy would be lucky to date her. If he was interested in dating, that is.
“So you’re saying you wouldn’t be scared?” Eden challenged. Her chin was high and her tone light, but he could see the vulnerability in those gold-flecked brown eyes.
“Sweetie, unless a woman straps an explosive device around her waist and insists we go dancing, there’s not much that will scare me.” Cade laughed.
“So you’d date a girl who had a reputation for being a little clumsy?” she asked quietly.
Well, how the hell had he missed that trap? Cade frowned, even as a gurgle of horrified laughter came from the backseat.
“I don’t base my dating choices on things like that,” he sidestepped. Then, to further cement the keep out message, he added, “Really, I don’t see myself dating at all in the next little while. Between the old man in ICU and my grandmother needing me, I figure I’ll be pretty tied up until I return to base. Gramma said something about some deals my father was trying to wind up when he had the heart attack, something with important timing. I’m probably going to have to take care of that, too.”
Ah, silence.
He had no idea what’d caused it, but he’d take the stilted quiet over tap dancing around a verbal trap any day. Other than the uncomfortable shifting her friend did in the backseat, nobody made a sound. Even the cat quit purring.
Still, by the time they reached Eden’s place, less than a mile up the road, tension tight enough to bounce coins off rippled across the back of Cade’s neck. He drove down the long, circular driveway, his discomfort slowly fading as he noted how rundown the Gillespie place had become. The immediate yard around the huge house was still tidy, but beyond the fence, weeds were brushing the trees. Even the once vivid white paint on the shutters was graying, chipped and curling.
One of the outbuildings looked like the roof had collapsed and someone—probably Eden—had built a crude wire fence to pen up a goat and what looked like a horse-size dog.
“Thanks for the rescue. And the ride,” Eden said when he stopped in front of wide bank of steps leading to her front door.
“Anytime,” he told her. “Just try to keep your accidents scheduled for my visits home. I hate to think of you hanging from a tree and only wimps here to save you.”
She laughed, the pained discomfort chased away by amusement. “Would you believe that I usually manage to rescue myself when you’re not around?”
Cade considered that for a second.
Then he shook his head. “Nope.”
Her cheeks warm with a pretty pink wash, Eden gave him a sweet look from under her lashes. The kind of look that should make him feel protective. Or manly, like a superhero.
Not horny like a sailor on leave.
Time to go, he decided.
Leaning one elbow on the seat, he angled himself around.
“It was nice to meet you,” he told the quiet redhead in the backseat. She gave him a wide-eyed, about-to-hyperventilate look.
Because he was a SEAL, trained in multiple ways to kill men and defend his country? Or because of his high school rep and near rock-star dating status?
Then the redhead blushed.
Yep. Rock star.
“Cade?”
He looked at Eden with a friendly smile, ready to politely brush off her thanks.
She was staring at the cat on her lap, as if one glance away would send it leaping out the window.
“Did you maybe want to get drinks with me? Sort of a welcome-home and thank-you combination?”
Drinks? Unless that meant standing in line together to each buy their own bottle of water at the corner market, drinks were a really bad idea. Drinks were code word for tiptoeing into dating territory. A precursor to, part of or windup from something more intimate.
A huge mistake.
It wasn’t that Cade didn’t date. And he was nowhere near being a monk. But here in his hometown, the rules were different. Here, the women tended to see him as Robert Sullivan’s son. The guy who’d get the key to the Sullivan coffers. A great catch.
Not that women didn’t have an agenda outside of Ocean Point, as well, but usually that had more to do with being able to say they’d been with a SEAL. Being a notch on a woman’s lipstick case, he was okay with. Being the target of her engagement ring search, he wasn’t.
Still, this was Eden. He’d need to let her down easy.
“Sure,” he heard himself say instead. “A drink sounds good.”
His momentary chagrin at giving in to the urge fled quickly at the look of surprise on Eden’s face and the delighted shock on her friend’s.
She’d expected him to say no. To be a wimp.
Her friend had figured the same, hopefully without the wimp part. He kne
w his rep, and the status-obsessed focus of a lot of the country club set that Eden ran with. The Sullivans were big shit around town. The Gillespies barely danced around the fringe. From the time he was fourteen, he’d heard hundreds of lectures on dating, all focused on the girl’s last name, never her first. God, he hated that. That, and the way everyone always gossiped, judging each other’s worth by who they dated or the limit on their credit card. Hell, before he hit the end of the driveway, he’d bet her friend would have texted twenty of her best friends to tell them the news.
Within ten minutes, forty more people would probably have texted her back with varying degrees of shock, denial and outright horror at the idea of a Sullivan lowering himself to date a woman like Eden. One who lived in a rundown house, whose sexual encounters resulted in broken bones and who wrecked cars to rescue cats.
Who didn’t date for status.
Who liked him for him, not because of his last name.
Who made him feel like the hero she always teased him about being.
Any intention Cade had of retracting his agreement disappeared. He was going out for that drink, and he was going to make damned sure that Eden—and anyone else who might be curious—knew he was glad to spend time with her.
“Tomorrow night?” she asked, her casual tone at odds with the tension in her eyes.
“Six okay?”
She gave a tiny frown, her arched brows drawing together for a second before she nodded. Then she leaned down to grab her purse, gathered the cat closer and reached for the door handle.
“Let me,” Cade offered. Giving in to rare mischief, he grinned, then leaned across Eden’s body to open the passenger door from the inside. He let his forearm brush, ever-so-lightly, across her breasts. She gave a tiny gasp, her doe-eyes rounding with shock. Her scent wrapped around him, earthy and sweet at the same time, like honeysuckle at midnight.
He forgot about the woman in the backseat, ignored the purring mass of fur draped across Eden’s lap. All he cared about was the woman staring up at him like he’d hung the moon, lit the stars and made the sun rise when he whistled.
Without thinking, he leaned down and brushed a whisper-soft kiss over her shocked mouth.