Good Guy Heroes Boxed Set

by Julie Ortolon

  He watched her without judgment, not goading, not pressuring. Just waiting.

  “Could we walk slower?”

  His eyes lit first, then he smiled. “Yeah, I think we could manage that.”

  She smiled back, feeling oddly happy, as they started more sedately for the edge of the water.

  “Thanks, Bette.” The quick words sounded almost ill at ease, as if he expected her to jump on them. “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss walking on Oak Street Beach. I’ve done it every summer since I was fourteen.”

  “Summer, huh?” She made as if to pull her suit jacket closer around her, though the lake breeze felt good against her heated skin. “I suppose you do everything at the last minute?”

  “Everything.” He drew her close, then let loose her hand to loop an arm around her shoulders in a chill-chasing gesture.

  Disconcerted by the immediate response she felt, she dredged up extra disapproval to lace with her teasing. “I suspect you’re one of the people they show on the TV news, lining up to beat the midnight postmark for your tax return.”

  “I’ve met some very interesting people in that line.”

  She couldn’t repress a grin at his blatant self-satisfaction, but it faltered as he turned his head and contemplated her. His face was too close, his eyes too observant, his mouth too … tempting. “Bet you’d never be in that line, would you?” His eyes dropped to her lips, and she felt as if her heart and lungs were operating at double time. He blinked. “And I suppose you have your Christmas shopping done by Labor Day?”

  “Of course.” She’d never been prouder of producing two steady words.

  He gave a histrionic shudder, and she laughed. Everything had returned to normal. Almost.

  “Some years,” she confided, “I get really crazy and wait until Halloween. But I’m always done, totally done, by my parents’ anniversary the first week of December. That way I can enjoy the holiday. And you, I suppose, are probably out there on Christmas Eve madly buying.”

  “Of course. The insane rush is half the fun of Christmas, as long as you go about it with the right attitude. You can’t be buying to meet some quota, you have to be looking for the exactly right gift.”

  They’d reached the water and turned to follow the narrow path of sand that had been hard-packed by restless waves and gentle tides.

  “Why can’t you look for the exactly right gift before December 24th?”

  He leaned toward her intently. “But that’s just it. What if you get what you think’s the right gift on December 14th and then find the perfect present on the 24th? Do you return the gift you bought on the 14th or do you pass up the perfect present?”

  She shrugged, and his arm rose and fell with the gesture. It made them seem connected, that her movement affected his. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On if you have the receipt. On how hard it is to get back to the store where you got the l4th’s present or if that present might be something someone else would like or maybe even something you need yourself.”

  He groaned. “All those ‘ifs.’ I save myself all that. On the 24th, it is the perfect present, like it or not.”

  They’d stopped in unspoken accord. They stared out across the water.

  Bette was aware of how the concentrated glow of lights from downtown illuminated the right side of Paul’s face, and lights strung along the city’s Gold Coast were nearly as strong on her left side. Between existed a shadowed world that seemed to leave the city and its everyday life far behind. This world between had only the light of the moon to reveal it, a strange light that could make the ordinary extraordinary and mask the dangerous.

  She smiled slyly at him. “Of course you realize, don’t you, that by the time you go shopping on the 24th, you’re just looking at my leftovers. I’ve already snatched up all the perfect presents.”

  His wounded expression drew a triumphant chuckle from her that he joined with easy, warm laughter.

  It was crazy. The whole thing. Walking on a beach in her work clothes in the middle of October - even if the weather seemed a flashback to August - with a man she’d known exactly thirty hours, and whose drawbacks easily reached double digits.

  And enjoying it. A lot.

  Crazy.

  Paul turned to her, a slight pressure from his arm shifted her shoulders so she faced him. The grin still lifted his lips and fizzed in his eyes. She watched that, so fascinated by the amusement that always seemed near the surface with him that she was hardly aware when he lowered his head and brought his mouth to hers.

  Her last thought, a flash, really, was how like Paul Monroe it was to kiss her with a grin still molding his lips. She felt the teasing joy in the gliding pressure of his skin against hers.

  How different this was from the night before. Then he’d drawn out the moment before their mouths met like an extended question. Now he swept into the first kiss, and a second, without hesitation.

  She felt a sensation of warmth that came from one arm still around her shoulder, and the other across her lower back, drawing her to him and out of the lake’s cooling night breeze. A sensation of heat that came from the insistent sweep of his tongue against her lips, edging her nearer to some elemental furnace.

  “Bette.” She heard the faint request in his voice, even as he muffled it against the skin of her cheek, jaw and throat, and when his mouth came back to hers, she parted her lips.

  Her hand rested high on his shoulder, so the tips of two fingers grazed the side of his neck. The fingers of her other hand wound in his hair where it topped his jacket collar. She clenched them tighter, waiting.

  He took her top lip between his teeth, not quite nipping.

  She sighed, and his tongue lingered on her lips, finally slipping inside, exploring thoroughly. She felt the glide of his tongue against the sharply smooth ridge of her teeth and gave a small, smothered gasp of impatience.

  Then he was done with teasing, meeting her tongue and drawing it back into his mouth.

  She had the notion that her nerve endings had retreated from her limbs and brain, leaving them weightless and empty. But there seemed nerve endings to spare in other parts of her body, the parts in contact with his. His flesh seemed to pass through layers of his clothes and hers, and into her skin.

  He shifted, bringing her into closer alignment, so her breasts absorbed the firmness of his chest. He settled her into the narrow cradle created by his wider stance, and she recognized the sensation of another male firmness.

  For an instant, an instant without consequences, without responsibilities, she felt only a responsive softening and warming.

  But she had spent too much of her life following step after careful step toward a specific end not to know that with such incendiary steps as these, one thing would most definitely lead to another.

  She pulled away from his mouth with a gasp that was partly driven by a need for oxygen and partly by disappointment at the separation.

  A step backward got her nowhere because his arms held her fast, and pushing her hands against his chest got no results. For a breath, her mind acknowledged her situation, alone on the beach with a man strong enough to hold her against her will. Perhaps she would have felt fear if she hadn’t realized that the deep, uneven breaths he pulled in as he rested his cheek against her temple were his method of regaining equilibrium.

  He’s shaken, too, she thought.

  His reaction steadied her, making her own responses seem less extreme. She was also, at some level, grateful he hadn’t let her go. She wasn’t sure she could have stood alone in those first seconds.

  When, with a last long breath, he loosened his arms, she stepped clear of the heat.

  With quick, unconscious movements, she straightened her jacket, twisted her blouse into line, smoothed her skirt and ran her fingers through her hair. Only when her hands moved to her lips, a reflexive reaction to the burning sensation there, did she feel Paul watching her. His gaze slanted at her from the side.

&n
bsp; She stopped her gesture half-made.

  “I, uh -” She cleared her throat, and started again. “I think we’d better get back now.”

  For a man so full of teasing words and easy talk, he could be amazingly quiet. She couldn’t even be sure if she heard or imagined the half sigh before he spoke a single word. “Okay.”

  They started across the sand toward the lights of Michigan Avenue. He seemed content to let silence stretch between them. She wished he wouldn’t. It gave her too much time to wonder what he was thinking, why he was so uncharacteristically - What? Almost solemn?

  Was that how he felt after kissing her? Solemn?

  If she’d learned anything about Paul Monroe over the past two evenings it was that solemnity lived outside his philosophy of life. She felt like a thundercloud at a picnic, and fought the ridiculous urge to shed a few raindrops.

  “Well, one thing for certain.”

  His voice made her jump, but she welcomed it and, as they emerged into the brighter lights and firmer ground of the city’s streets, she gladly supplied the line he’d demanded. “What’s that?”

  “I definitely won’t be doing my Christmas shopping early this year.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t really care, but as long as the wryness had returned to his voice, she’d encourage him.

  “Who can think about Christmas when they just went through a heat wave?”

  *

  THIS TIME WHEN they pulled into her driveway, she was ready.

  She wasn’t sure how she’d respond if he repeated last night’s soft caress, not after tonight’s disconcerting taste of another kind.

  Even though their conversation during the drive had been innocuous and friendly in the extreme, with no hint of a reference to the embrace on the beach, she’d take no chances.

  So she laid a cool hand on his forearm to forestall his turning off the ignition, yanked it back as if she’d been burned, forced a cheerful goodnight and practically sprinted to the door. She stood inside again, listening for long, heart-thudding moments until he backed up and drove away.

  Not until she slid between the crisp clean sheets did she shake those moments on Oak Street Beach long enough for other considerations.

  Leaving work early - and any time before seven was early for her - and getting home too late to do any work Wednesday had put her behind. Today made it worse.

  She’d have to keep a strict schedule to catch up. Especially since she’d earmarked Sunday for attending real estate open houses to get a fix on the market. And added to her duties Monday would be getting Paul to decide on a temporary assistant.

  She frowned. When Jan first came into Top-Line Temporaries, she’d described her boss’s aversion to schedules and long-term planning. “Short-term planning, too, most of the time,” Jan had added. Cheerfully and amid all the teasing of the past two evenings, he’d confirmed it.

  Someone who couldn’t commit himself to buying a present because something better might come along surely wouldn’t commit himself to a woman.

  She rolled to her side and punched the already plumped pillow. Not that it made any difference. Paul was a client. Period. A client with whom she would have a few business conversations, but would likely never see again.

  If she was smart.

  *

  SHE WAS SMART, but her heart was a moron. That was the only explanation for the way it started pumping at high speed and depleting her oxygen stores when she opened her front door to Paul Monroe at 3:25 Sunday afternoon.

  This morning she’d pored over real estate ads. This afternoon she’d attended open houses. She’d studied the market for months, honing her prerequisites in a house, her must-haves and should-haves. This, her first foray into inspecting houses, constituted the next step. After several Sundays sampling the market, she would target specific areas. Then would come the nitty-gritty of offers, contracts and mortgages.

  Once she completed that, it would be time for the next step.

  She slipped off her shoes, tucked her feet under her on the couch. She wanted a husband, a family. Just turned thirty in July, she had time. It wasn’t as if her biological clock were about to expire. But she didn’t want to let that pass her by. She saw the life her brother was creating with his wife and children and, although she wouldn’t want a carbon copy, there were elements she longed for.

  Setting up the business had been first; it was progressing well. Then a house. Once she’d accomplished that, she’d be ready for the next step. She’d be ready to look for the right kind of man.

  Gray eyes flecked with green smiled into her imagination. She glowered at them, and the startlingly clear memory of the man they went with.

  Paul Monroe was not the right kind of man.

  But he is some kind of man , commented a previously unheard-from voice inside her. The voice had backing from a hundred-thousand nerve endings that retained vivid memories.

  Damn. She thunked her feet down on the floor. Damn.

  All right, maybe she did find him physically attractive.

  Really, it couldn’t be called more than that after one kiss. One kiss, in the moonlight, on a deserted beach. A fluke. It had to be. Because, heaven knows, nothing in his haphazard approach to life or business agreed with her ideas.

  She picked up one of the real estate listings from the pile on the coffee table while the TV wrapped up the Bears game she’d mostly missed. For now, what she had to do was consider the information on the houses she’d seen. With her shoes kicked off and a soft drink at hand, she would concentrate on comparing cost per square foot and making notes of her impressions. She settled back.

  The doorbell sounded.

  Barefoot, she carried the listing sheet and her pen to the front door. She nearly dropped them both.

  “Paul!”

  She’d missed him. That realization hit hard.

  Afternoon sun bronzed his breeze-ruffled hair and seemed to add a special glint to those gray eyes flecked with green fire. He wore a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, a lightweight insulated vest in green and jeans that had been worn to a state that looked as soft as she knew they’d feel. Her cheeks burn at catching herself thinking about touching his jeans - with him in them.

  “Hi. How ‘bout those Bears, huh?” Without waiting for her to invite him in, he walked right past. “I like the running game this year, don’t you?”

  “What are you doing here?” She’d trailed him into the living room. His intent gaze took in her house as if he thought he’d be tested on it. The absurd urge to tell him she’d bought this furniture to go into an eventual family room and she had her eye on an elegant couch bubbled to her lips, but she turned it sternly back.

  “I came to get you. You look great.”

  At his warm tone, she glanced down to see if she’d been transformed, like Cinderella going to the ball.

  No, she still had on a surplice-wrap top in a soft raspberry color, tucked into the gathered denim skirt. Her simple leather belt matched her discarded loafers and she wore plain gold hoops in her ears as her only jewelry. In deference to the warm weather she hadn’t even worn hose. Clean and comfortable was about the most that could be said for the outfit.

  “Get me?” She ought to be taking control of this conversation.

  “Yeah. You’d better put a jacket on. It’s going to get cool tonight. I think Indian summer’s about to come to a screeching halt.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He glanced up from turning off her TV, and she saw the devilment in his eyes. The only thought her brain could form was the refrain she had come to associate with Paul Monroe: Uh-oh.

  “The weather.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about - the weather.” He scooped up her navy cardigan sweater from the arm of the couch and her purse from the floor and held them out to her. Numbly, she accepted them. But she also shook her head, and that helped clear some of the cobwebs.

  “Paul, we didn’t m
ake any arrangements to see each other today, and I have things I need to get done -”

  “What you need is a jack-o’-lantern, and I intend to see to it. C’mon, you’d better put your shoes on, too.”

  “No.”

  He looked at her bare feet, over to her loafers, then at her face. “I don’t know, Bette, I think your feet’ll get awfully cold, but if you don’t want to wear shoes …”

  “Not no to the shoes. No to leaving with you.” There, that sounded firm enough. So why did she feel so rotten? Had those glints in his eyes dimmed?

  “I thought you’d like a pumpkin.” His tone was matter-of-fact, but she felt as if she’d just kicked his puppy.

  “I would like a pumpkin, but -”

  “Good, I know a great pumpkin farm not too far from here.”

  *

  AN HOUR LATER she stood, bemused, amid pumpkins of every size, shape and construction, and thought that if Linus of “Peanuts” fame was right that a Great Pumpkin with magical powers did exist, then Paul Monroe had a direct line to the big orange guy.

  That was the only explanation she could come up with for how she had come to be here. One minute she was sitting in her living room checking real estate listings and the next minute she was a passenger in her own car - “You said the hatchback’s better for hauling, and we’re going to have a lot of pumpkins to haul,” had been Paul’s explanation when he snagged her keys - and the minute after that she stood here in pumpkin land, laughing.

  She’d laughed so much in the past half hour that her sides ached.

  She would never again look at a pumpkin without remembering the outrageous personalities Paul had assigned to the gourds they’d collected. Then he and the man running the pumpkin stand had indulged in a round of good-natured wrangling over price that had set her off again.

  “Boy, remind me never to have you around when I’m haggling,” Paul ordered after they’d settled their orange army on the car’s deck, separated and cushioned from one another by sweet straw from the stand operator.

  She smiled out the window, not bothering to respond.

  She felt too content, as golden and glowing as the afternoon, as mellow as the approaching dusk. Fading sunlight gilded the hardier leaves still clinging to branches while their fallen brethren wove an orange and gold coverlet. The trees rose high and straight, arching their limbs in the bare outline of what had been a summer canopy.