Flirting with Disaster

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Maggie said emphatically. “Why would I be ashamed of this? It’s been fabulous.”

  “Fabulous, huh?” He grinned, looking pleased with himself. “I certainly thought so. You do have a way about you, Magnolia.”

  “Very amusing,” she replied, fighting a smile. “But it has to end sometime. We can’t hide out down here forever, as attractive as that sounds to me right this second. Besides, you should see whoever it is you need to see and then we should get back home.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I hardly think we’re rushing. We pretty much locked ourselves away in here for two days.” She grinned seductively as she slid her bare foot up his calf. “I’d say we’ve taken our time getting to know each other a whole lot better, wouldn’t you?”

  “We’ve made some progress,” he conceded with a renewed glint of desire in his eyes. “We can always do better.”

  “And I’m sure we will,” she agreed crisply. “But now it’s time to get back to the real world.”

  “I wasn’t aware we were on a timetable.”

  “We’re not,” she said impatiently. “But we both have responsibilities.” Until she’d gone into hiding after her aborted wedding, she’d never stayed away from work for more than a couple of days, and now, with so much going on, wasn’t the time to start. With Brian still on the loose, it wasn’t right to leave Ellie and Vicki on their own to deal with him if he went on another rampage.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Josh agreed with unmistakable reluctance. He gave her a deliberately enticing grin. “But we could play hooky one more day without our respective worlds falling apart, couldn’t we? I don’t have any work to do on Amanda’s house till Saturday, and I’m sure Ellie has your shop under control.”

  On the one hand, Maggie thought, his effort to keep her here away from their cares was flattering. On the other, something was screaming in her head that she shouldn’t trust his motives one bit.

  “I’m sure Ellie is doing just fine, but the gallery is my responsibility. Are you so anxious to stay because this has been so incredible?” she asked. “Or is there some specific reason you want to stay away from Charleston as long as possible?”

  Before he could answer, the truth suddenly dawned on her. “That’s it, isn’t it? This has all been a ruse to keep me away from Charleston,” she declared, not sure whether she was more furious with him for deceiving her, or herself for being stupid enough to fall for it. To think the trip had all been a calculated ploy was enough to ruin the fabulous time they’d had.

  Her accusation didn’t seem to faze Josh. His expression remained perfectly bland.

  “A ruse? Where do you come up with this stuff? What makes you think I was trying to keep you away from Charleston?” he inquired without rancor. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you were convinced I’d go after Brian myself if the police didn’t drag him into custody immediately,” she charged, gathering steam as she mentally filled in the blanks for herself. “This whole trip has been about protecting me, about keeping me from doing something stupid. Well, what about Ellie? Did you ever consider the possibility that she might be the one who needs protecting?”

  “Taken care of,” he said calmly.

  “How? What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s someone looking out for her and the gallery every minute,” he explained.

  That was some comfort, she admitted, though only to herself. Still glowering at him, she said, “Which left you to guard me.”

  He still refused to confess. “And here I thought the past couple of days were all about you and me having some pretty amazing sex and a few gourmet meals.”

  “We could have had sex and great food in Charleston,” she retorted.

  “And I suspect we will,” he said, amusement dancing in his eyes.

  “Not if I find out you lied to get me down here,” she said. “If you ever get lucky with me again, it’ll only be because I decide not to kill you.”

  He held up a hand. “Hold on a second, Maggie. How do you propose to prove whether I lied? You’re the one who wanted to bring that desk to Geoffrey. I agreed to bring you. For all I know, you’re the one who had ulterior motives. Talk about a ruse! You could have lured me here just to get my pants off.”

  Her temper streaked into the stratosphere. “Don’t you dare try to turn this around and question my motives,” she said. “I could have had that desk down here and been back in Charleston by midafternoon. You were the one with all the big talk about romance.”

  “You weren’t objecting that strenuously about an hour ago, or a few hours before that, or day before yesterday,” he reminded her.

  “A real gentleman wouldn’t throw that back in a lady’s face.”

  He laughed, then quickly swallowed it. “Sorry.”

  “If you say I haven’t been behaving like a lady, I will personally dump hot, scalding coffee over your head,” she threatened and meant every word of it.

  “Then I certainly won’t say that,” he said solemnly.

  “Do you have any idea how much you’re annoying me right now?”

  He nodded. “Even I’m not dense enough to miss your point,” he said.

  She frowned at that. “Nobody ever said you were dense.”

  “Sorry. I must have misinterpreted. I was beginning to think I was nothing more than some sort of sex slave with devious motives.”

  She threw her napkin at him as she flounced into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The man was infuriating. Absolutely, positively infuriating! Sex slave, indeed.

  It wasn’t until she stepped under the shower that she permitted herself to grin. The whole sex-slave thing was an interesting concept. It was certainly a lot less threatening than what was really going on. The truth was that as infuriating as Josh might be with this whole protective mode he was in, she was beginning to fall just a little bit in love with him because of it.

  Not one single man before him had ever thought she needed help or protection or even a shoulder to lean on. Heck, until Josh, she hadn’t thought she needed any of that. She’d always prided herself on her competence and her ability to handle any crisis.

  But she was discovering that sharing life with someone else—the good and the bad—made everything better.

  “What’s the word from Detective Ryan?” Josh asked Cord, keeping his voice low. He’d called as soon as he heard the shower running in the bathroom. Since things were rapidly spinning out of control here, he needed an update on what was going on back in Charleston. He wanted to know what sort of danger Maggie might be in when she got back, since it seemed inevitable that they were leaving here today.

  “Brian’s still among the missing,” Cord said. “I don’t like the fact that there’s been no sign of him. Something weird’s going on. I can feel it. Can you keep Maggie away for a few more days?”

  “I’ll be lucky to keep her away a few more hours,” Josh confessed with disgust. “She’s onto me. She figured out why we’re here and she is not happy.”

  “Then you must not have been doing something right,” Cord suggested.

  “Oh, believe me, I got that part right. I just couldn’t figure out any way to shut off her brain the rest of the time. Somewhere between the waffle and the strawberries and whipped cream, she got to thinking.”

  “I suppose that mind of hers would be a terrible thing to waste,” Cord said, not even trying to contain his amusement. “So, you’re coming back today?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure one of us is with her at all times to make sure she doesn’t go off on her own in search of Brian. Or to make sure he doesn’t get to her. Something tells me he’s just biding his time.”

  “To be honest, I don’t think she’s going to let me anywhere near her for a while,” Josh admitted. “She considers my motives suspect.”

  “Then we’ll get a whole crowd of people together and tell them what’s going on
. We can see to it that she’s never alone.”

  “We can’t pull the people we’ve got keeping an eye on Ellie,” Josh reminded him. “She’s determined to make up for what happened at Images. She can be as impulsive as Maggie. She might get some crazy idea to go after Brian herself. Even with all he’s done, I’m not sure she understands how dangerous he really is.”

  “I talked to Vicki,” Cord said. “On the surface she seems like a bit of a flake, but I trust her to keep an eye on things. Ellie’s not going anywhere alone if Vicki has anything to say about it. And the police have kept their promise to keep a close eye on the gallery in case Brian shows up there. There’s been a cop nearby every time I’ve gone past the place. There’s another one patrolling the area around Ellie’s loft.”

  “Then I guess we’ve done what we can,” Josh said, though it was small comfort. If only he were half as certain that Maggie wouldn’t come up with some outlandish scheme that would put her in danger.

  “Of course, there might be one more thing you could do,” Cord said thoughtfully.

  “What’s that?” Josh asked at once. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe.”

  “You could arrange for a flood at that motel of yours,” Cord said. “I don’t think it would take much to put your room underwater.”

  “Which would accomplish what?” Josh asked. “There are other rooms.”

  “Insist they’re all booked,” Cord said. “Maggie won’t check.”

  “And my mother’s room?”

  “Too small for the two of you,” Cord said.

  Lord knows that was true enough, Josh thought with a shudder. “Okay, and then what?”

  “You throw yourself on Maggie’s mercy. She’ll take you in. I can almost guarantee it.”

  “It’s the almost that terrifies me,” Josh said. “I could be sleeping on the street with a suitcase filled with soaking-wet clothes.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Cord said confidently.

  “I don’t know. Maggie’s pretty furious with me right now.”

  “Then I suggest you mend fences on the way home so she’ll be feeling all sympathetic when she hears about your sad plight later today.”

  Josh was filled with doubts. As desperate as he was to stick to her like glue, he didn’t want to risk antagonizing her with yet another deception. When this mess was over, he wanted the two of them to have something left.

  “You really think she’ll fall for this?” he asked Cord.

  “I think she’ll ask to see the flooded-out room, but yes, I think she’ll take you in,” Cord said with certainty. “She has a big heart. Besides, you’ve been locked away with her in that hotel room for two days. Surely she must see some redeeming qualities in you.”

  Josh grinned, despite his skepticism over Cord’s plot. “Not to brag on myself, but I think we get along just fine as long as we never leave the bed. It’s when Maggie starts stirring around that things get a little dicey.”

  “Then I think your mission is obvious. Get her back up here and back into bed.”

  “You make it sound like a slam dunk. For a man who’s known Maggie as long as you have, shouldn’t you know better than that?”

  “I have confidence in you,” Cord said. “Keep me posted on how it’s going. Meantime, I’ll rally the troops.”

  “Does that include Dinah?” Josh inquired worriedly.

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Then you might want to keep a few of the details of your plan to yourself. In my experience, this is the kind of thing women can’t wait to share with their best friends. They consider it their duty to stand together against a common enemy—us.”

  “You have a point,” Cord conceded. “I’ll just give Dinah the bare facts about the importance of keeping Maggie from doing anything foolish. I’ll enlist her aid. She knows how Maggie’s mind works. She could be a big help.”

  “Good idea,” Josh said, relieved. He heard the water cut off in the bathroom. “I’d better go. We’ll talk once I’m back in Charleston.”

  “Call me if you need any help in making sure those pipes in your motel room suffer a major leak.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Josh said wryly. “Nadine could make that happen with a couple of straight pins. The only thing left of those pipes is the rust.”

  He saw the handle on the bathroom door twist. “Gotta go,” he said, then hung up the phone and feigned sleep.

  “Who were you talking to?” Maggie asked as she walked into the bedroom.

  “What?” he murmured groggily.

  “Oh, stop it. I know you were on the phone. Who were you talking to?”

  Josh sighed and sat up. “I was just checking in with Cord.”

  She didn’t look as if she believed him. “And you didn’t want me to know that because?”

  “Because I knew you’d jump to the wrong conclusion and assume we were conspiring against you,” he said.

  “Weren’t you?”

  “No, we were going over the list of people he wanted me to see while I’m here,” Josh claimed, amazed at how readily the lies tripped off his tongue. “I should be able to catch up with most of them while you’re going over the desk restoration with Geoffrey.”

  Her face revealed undisguised skepticism, but she finally nodded. “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes. How about you?”

  “I can be ready then,” he agreed, pushing down the desire to try to tempt her back to bed. He might succeed, but she wouldn’t thank him for it. “Just let me take a quick shower.”

  She nodded, her cheeks turning pink when he climbed out of bed buck naked and walked into the bathroom.

  “Nothing you haven’t seen before,” he said as he passed her and shut the bathroom door.

  “It’s not going to work, you know,” she called after him.

  He opened the door and poked his head out. “What’s not going to work?”

  “You’re not going to lure me into that shower with you.”

  “Did you hear me try?”

  “No, but I know how your mind works,” she claimed.

  “Not half as well as I know yours,” he retorted. “If I wanted you in this shower with me, I’d be more direct.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  He walked into the bedroom, scooped her into his arms and carried her into the bathroom and stepped straight into the tub, then turned on the shower. She was sputtering with indignation when he finally lowered her to her feet.

  But then he lathered up his hands with soap and skimmed them across her breasts, and the protests died on her lips. The fifteen-minute timetable they’d been on pretty much went up in flames.

  Maggie couldn’t recall a time in her entire adult life when she’d been more sated…or more exasperated with the man responsible. Josh was sneaky and clever and seemed to know exactly how to make her body respond. He was thickheaded, however, about the way her mind worked. Unfortunately, in his arrogance, he didn’t accept that.

  She knew what he’d been up to in the shower. Okay, besides that! He’d been stalling. He and Cord had probably devised some new scheme to keep her from reneging on her promise to let the police track down Brian. Josh was no doubt buying time till they could put their plan into action.

  She was more convinced of that than ever when he dropped her off at Geoffrey’s, then disappeared with some halfhearted promise to be back as soon as he could. She’d been waiting for him for two solid hours and she was just about ready to rent a car and drive back to Charleston on her own. That would serve him right.

  “Maggie darling, if you don’t mind me saying so, you seem a little agitated,” Geoffrey said, regarding her with amusement. “Did you and that gorgeous man have a little spat before you got here?”

  “No, but we’re going to have a humdinger of a spat when he finally gets back,” she said grimly.

  “Why is that?” Geoffrey asked.

  “He’s up to something.”

  Her old friend looked h
orrified. “You mean like sneaking off to be with another woman?”

  “Good grief, no,” she said.

  “Then what else matters?”

  “He’s trying to keep me away from Charleston. He thinks it’s for my own good.”

  Geoffrey shook his head in disbelief. “Speaking as someone who is quite happy to be away from Charleston,” he said, “I’m not sure I see the problem, especially given the way you’ve always fought with your mother over your right to live life on your own terms.”

  “For once, this has nothing to do with my mother. It’s about Josh trying to save me from myself. He’s got this whole macho protective thing going on.”

  Geoffrey frowned. “Why would you need protecting?”

  “It’s a long story,” Maggie said.

  Geoffrey poured them both a cup of tea. “Do tell. It seems we have plenty of time.”

  Maggie summarized what she’d been through with Brian and his destruction of the gallery. “Josh doesn’t want me back there till the guy’s in custody.”

  “Because he’s afraid that next time, this Brian will harm you,” Geoffrey concluded.

  “That, or that I’ll take the law into my own hands and go after him. Believe me, if I knew where he was, I’d be tempted to do just that.”

  “Then I’m on Josh’s side. Stay right here, darling. There’s no need for you to risk your pretty little neck.”

  “The man destroyed things that mean something to me,” Maggie said indignantly. “You saw that desk of Great-Grandmother’s. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. How can I allow him to get away with that?”

  “You don’t. You let the police handle it. He’ll pay.”

  Maggie gave Geoffrey a rueful look. “I’m not sure I’ll get the same satisfaction out of that.”

  “No, but in the civilized world, we have to make do,” he said. “Now let’s forget about that awful man for a minute, and tell me about you and Josh. Are you in love with him? He seems like the type you’ve always fallen hard for.”

  Maggie sighed. “You think so?”

  “Well, of course. Sexy, handsome, dangerous. Does he have issues, too?”