He hated being the object of pity, the widower whose lovely wife had died so tragically.
Now that two years had passed, he didn’t notice those sympathetic looks as much. Either he’d grown impervious to them or people had come to accept that time rolls on, like it or not. He no longer had a refrigerator full of casseroles brought over by concerned neighbors and it was only rarely that somebody would stop him in the grocery store, rest a hand on his arm and ask him how he really was doing.
Hope’s Crossing was home, for him and for the children. His family was here, the job he loved, friends and neighbors who cared about him and about his kids. He could do a whole lot worse.
When he reached Iris House, he followed the sound of shrieking to the side of the house, where he found Lucy on her back in the grass being attacked by both Faith and Carter, who had apparently teamed up to tickle her.
Crystal sat up on the porch on the swing, grinning at the assault while Max played with a chew toy next to her.
Seeing his children so happy and light sent something curling through his insides, something sweet and warm and lovely.
Just hunger pangs, he told himself
Daisy whined and Lucy looked up at the sound. For just an instant, their gazes locked and he caught his breath. She looked happy, too, and so beautiful it was hard for him to look away.
“Oh. Hi.”
She quickly disentangled from the children and climbed to her feet, brushing off grass and leaf bits from her clothes.
“There’s Daisy,” Faith exclaimed. “Hi, sweetie!”
She held out her hands for the puppy and immediately set her down beside the puppy’s littermate.
“Look! She remembers him!” Carter exclaimed.
The puppies brushed noses and nipped playfully at each other.
“You ready to get your grill on?” Lucy asked after a moment of watching the puppies play with each other.
“Sure.”
“I started the coals a while ago. They should be all set. Come in the house and you can find whatever tools you need.”
She led the way around the house to the back door, which led directly to the kitchen of Iris House. He followed, enjoying the fluid grace of her movements entirely too much.
Inside, she pointed him to a cabinet that held grilling tools and then pulled out a container from the refrigerator with a couple of chicken breasts marinating in some kind of herb-infused liquid.
“Everything else is ready to go. I already made the salad and the potato wedges have been soaking in ice water, which is the secret to good oven-baked fries.”
“Good to know.”
She gave a rueful laugh. “Hey, I have to savor my successes where I find them. I’m not that great in the kitchen, though I’ve discovered Crystal is something of a budding chef. You have to get her pancake recipe. To die for.”
He was aware of the sweet seduction of being alone with her here in the kitchen, of the mouthwatering scent of her, the sway of her hips and the softness of her curves as she reached into a high cabinet for a serving plate.
After all the prep work was done, he was more than ready to escape to a little fresh air and sanity.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asked.
“Looks like.”
“I’ll send the kids and puppies to the backyard to keep you company while I’m in here finishing up.”
“I don’t mind being on my own.”
She sent him a searching look, and it took him a moment to realize what he’d said—and that he was beginning to mind it very much.
“I’ll send them back,” she said again.
The barbecue was a good, sturdy model he remembered using a time or two when they would come up and share a meal with Annabelle.
True to her word, Lucy sent the kids and puppies to the patio just as he was setting his steak on the grill, which took a few minutes longer than the thinner chicken breasts. The hot dogs only took about a second on the flames.
By the time he was done grilling, the sun had slid behind the mountains, though it wouldn’t be full dark for another hour. With the sunset, though, the temperatures immediately began to drop so Lucy set the big kitchen table for their meal.
Dinner was noisy, chaotic, delicious—and the most enjoyable evening he’d had in a long time. Lucy, Crystal and Faith talked about books while Carter interjected the occasional knock-knock joke.
“How’s the house coming?” he asked during one of the rare conversational lulls, when everyone was nearly finished eating.
“Ugh. Don’t remind us,” Lucy’s sister said with a groan. “We have hauled so much stuff out of here and we have tons more to do.”
“Big house, big job.”
“You’re telling me,” Crystal said.
“Everything seems to be moving along nicely. Dylan and Sam Delgado are coming next week to do a little work for me. Fortunately, the structural changes we need are minor. Bumping a wall out here, expanding a closet there. Genevieve and I have just about agreed on the design schemes for most of the bedrooms.”
“Hey, maybe Brendan can help us in the green bedroom,” Crystal suggested.
Lucy gave him a speculative look. “You know, that’s not a bad idea,” she said.
“Help you with what in the green bedroom?” he asked, not a little uneasy at that look.
“It’s a job that takes someone with muscle.”
“I’ve got a couple.”
She cast him a sidelong look, and he thought he saw a hint of color brushing her cheekbones.
“Yes. Yes, you do.” She cleared her throat. “I need somebody to help me move a bed. It’s in a room that was hardly ever used. I think Annabelle just tossed all the furniture in there she didn’t want to throw away, and one of the beds is blocking access to a closet. We need to clean out said closet but, hard as we tried, we couldn’t budge the thing this afternoon.”
“I can try as soon as we’re done.”
“I’m finished now,” Faith said. “That was really good, Aunt Lucy.”
“Thank you, honey, but your dad did most of the work.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said with her sweet smile.
“You’re welcome.”
“Can I have another hot dog?” Carter asked.
“You already had two, kid,” Brendan said. “I didn’t grill any more.”
His son’s face fell.
“Oh, wait. I have dessert,” he suddenly remembered. He rose and headed to the counter where he’d left the reusable grocery bag he had brought from his house. He reached inside and pulled out the pie tin and carried it back to the table.
“Now that is an impressive trick.” Lucy grinned. “How can I get a magic pie bag?”
“Sorry, but you have to have a father like mine who drops them off at your house for no discernible reason.”
Crystal snorted. “Like that’s ever going to happen.”
Lucy and Crystal shared a rueful look, and he felt a wave of sympathy for them. Really, he felt bad for everyone who didn’t have a father like Dermot.
“This is one of Pop’s specialties. Caramel apple.”
“Ooh, that sounds delicious,” Crystal said.
He sliced pieces for everyone. Lucy ate hers with a deep enjoyment he found both amusing and uncomfortably arousing.
He was entirely too aware of every movement she made, each breath, each swallow. How was he supposed to handle this?
“Look at how cute the puppies look,” Faith exclaimed when they were nearly done with the pie. “They’re sleeping.”
The puppies were cuddled together, chin to rump.
“We should probably feed Max again,” Crystal said.
Lucy checked the clock above the stove. “You’re right. It’s
about time.”
“The kids and I can do that and clear up in here,” Crystal said. “You two go see if you can move the bed.”
Okay, his imagination went off into all kinds of twisting directions with that innocent statement. He tried to tamp down the images as he followed Lucy up the curving staircase of the house. Up and up they went to the very top floor of the house, an area he didn’t remember ever seeing.
“These were the servants’ quarters originally,” she told him. “I’m going to have Dylan and Sam knock out a wall and make the four small rooms into two larger spaces.”
“They’ll do good work for you.”
“Well, the closet has to go, so I have to clean it out before they get here.”
She opened the door to a room dominated by a massive four-poster bed that was entirely too large for the space. It wasn’t completely blocking the closet, just limiting access, so the door wouldn’t open all the way.
“Wow. That’s a big bed.”
“I love it and want to use it in here once we have a room of the proper proportions. If you can help me move it three or four inches to the left, that should be enough to open the door.”
He figured it wouldn’t be that tough, but on his first try, the thing wouldn’t budge.
“Wow! What’s it made of? Lead? Don’t be surprised one day if it falls through all three floors below while you’re entertaining guests in the parlor.”
“Don’t even joke about that!” she exclaimed with an expression of horror at the very idea. “With my luck, it would probably fall just as my father walked in and sat down.”
“I guess you and your dad don’t have the greatest of relationships,” he said, pausing the muscle-straining work of moving the bed to take advantage of the opening she had just handed him.
“That’s a mild way of putting it, yes.”
“So you came to live with Annabelle when you were in high school. Where did your mom fit into the picture?”
She looked startled by the question, as if she hadn’t expected it, but she slumped against the bed and seemed to choose her words carefully. “She...wasn’t well through much of my childhood. Looking back, I think she was clinically depressed and self-medicated with alcohol and drugs and anything else that made her forget her pain a little. That’s a little easier to see when you’re thirty-one than it is when you’re twelve.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Everybody’s got stuff, don’t they? My dad got tired of it and left us when I was about thirteen and moved in with Pam—that’s Crystal’s mom—about five minutes later. She was twenty-one, not all that much older than I was. I lived with my mom but the situation there got worse and worse. She took one too many valiums a couple years later, and they couldn’t get her stomach pumped in time, so I moved in with my dad and Pam.”
He knew some of this. Jessie had told him Lucy had had a rough break in the parent department—but he had also had the impression Jess wasn’t completely sympathetic to her cousin.
Lucy still had her father, a wealthy and successful attorney, while Jess’s dad had left her and her mother destitute when he died unexpectedly, which is why she and her mother had come to Iris House to live with Annabelle.
“So you rebelled.”
“In just about every conceivable way,” she said, gazing up at the old-fashioned brass chandelier in the room. “The last thing Pam wanted to deal with was a moody, unpredictable, troublemaker of a stepdaughter, so one day my dad brought me here to Annabelle. She gave me a home and a stable center.”
“Just like you are giving Crystal.”
She made a face. “Except Annabelle knew what she was doing while I’m completely floundering.”
He wasn’t sure how she could be so confident about some things but so self-deprecating about others. He supposed it was part of what made her such a fascinating puzzle.
“From my perspective, you’re doing okay. Your sister seemed happy enough tonight. Very different, in fact, from that day at the grocery store, when she looked like the chip on her shoulder was going to fall off and crush half of downtown. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Better than fine. Give yourself a break, for once, why don’t you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You know, I do believe that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Yeah, probably. He hadn’t been exactly warm to her over the years when he knew how much she disliked him.
“Don’t let it freak you out. I’m sure I’ll go back to being an ass as soon as we leave the room.”
“I don’t think you’re an ass,” she said, her voice low.
“No?”
She shook her head slightly, that tantalizing brush of color on her cheekbones again. She looked at him, eyes huge and impossibly green, and he saw that mysterious something in her expression again, there and then gone again.
It wasn’t quite an invitation, more like a simple acknowledgment of the currents simmering between them. They were alone with that awareness of each other in a small room dominated by a huge bed. The realization sent heat surging through him and a deep aching hunger.
She swallowed and that color rose higher. He saw a wild little pulse flare in her throat suddenly, and with a sense of inevitability, he reached a thumb out to cover it and lowered his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LUCY CAUGHT HER BREATH, frozen in place as his mouth brushed against hers once then twice, ever so gently.
Oh. Oh, yes.
Some part of her had been waiting in glittery anticipation for exactly this since the instant she had looked up from her spot on the grass with Crystal to see Brendan riding past with the children earlier.
All evening long, her mind had been whirling, replaying their last heady kiss over and over until she couldn’t seem to think about anything else.
It seemed inevitable, somehow, as if both of them had only been preparing for this moment.
Those first soft kisses were only a teasing prelude. He came back for more, his mouth firm and insistent this time, and she sighed as he deepened the kiss, tugging her against him.
She curled her fingers against his chest, soaking in the impact of all those hard muscles.
He smelled delicious—some kind of outdoorsy soap with notes of sage and leather and some other indefinable masculine scent she guessed was simply him. She wanted to bury her face in the crook of his neck and just inhale.
That would mean sliding her mouth away from his, however, and why in the world would she do that, when his kiss tasted even better than he smelled?
He slid his tongue along hers and everything inside her shivered with delight.
She wrapped her arms around his neck to pull him closer, and he took that as an invitation to lower her onto the bed as he continued those fierce kisses that consumed all reason.
She didn’t want this moment to ever end. Why couldn’t they just lock the door and stay right here, while the old house settled around them and dust motes floated in the air?
They couldn’t. Some tiny bit of common sense tried to push itself to the forefront of her mind, but she was a little busy at the moment and didn’t pay it much mind.
“Lucy,” he murmured, his voice ragged and sexy as his hand teased her skin just above her hip bone.
How could she have ever thought him taciturn, distant, cold? He was all fire and flame, heat and hunger. She kissed him, her tongue tangling with his as a slow, steady ache burned through her.
That little corner of her mind picked up a distant sound, the slam of a door somewhere several floors below them, but it seemed to echo through her head.
They couldn’t do this. Not here. Not now.
Crystal was down there with two children and two puppies and any moment now, any one of them might decide to come up here to see what w
as taking them so long to, um, move a bed.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, but she finally wrenched her mouth away. “Brendan. You have to stop.”
He stared at her, and the hazy arousal in his gaze sent little sparks shooting through her. “What?”
“The kids,” she murmured. “Crystal. They’re going to come looking for us in a minute.”
As she watched, the arousal on his expression slowly gave way to reality. After a moment, he eased away from her and sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders tense and his expression twisted into one of stunned disbelief.
“What is wrong with me?” he growled. “I touch you and I completely lose control.”
She sat up, as well, rearranging clothing and trying hard to return her breathing to something that didn’t sound as if she’d just finished a half marathon into the mountains.
“Losing control means something’s wrong with you?”
His jaw flexed. “With you? Yes. Isn’t this a little weird to you? The way we ignite when we’re together?”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. You were Jess’s cousin. Her best friend. You loved her.”
Of all the things she might have expected him to say, that hadn’t been on the list. He was upset because of her relationship with Jessica? If she hadn’t been Jess’s friend, would he be more enthusiastic about this heat between them?
“Both of us loved her,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Nothing will ever change that. She’s inside each of us. Why does that necessarily mean it’s weird if we are, er, attracted to each other? Especially considering we had a little history together before you ever met Jess?”
* * *
HE STARED AT her and for one terrible instant, she wondered if he had forgotten. In all the years since, they had never referred to it. She had never seen the point in telling Jessie about it and she had to wonder if Brendan ever had.
How humiliating would it be if he didn’t know what on earth she was talking about?
Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) Page 19