“Jase says he’s cool.”
“Which doesn’t mean he can’t be hot. Come on, T.C., spill it. What’s he like?”
A good question. “He only arrived last night, so it’s hard to say,” she replied carefully.
“You think he’ll keep the place?”
“Why would a city slicker like him want a place out here?” Judy scoffed.
“Joe wanted a place out here.”
“That’s different. He bought the place.”
“This geezer might like it here, too.”
T.C. shut her ears to the speculation that flowed back and forth across the bar. She was still stuck on the “What’s he like?” question and discovering that she might have misjudged him a teensy bit. Today she had discovered a real man beneath the smooth talker. That man had tended to her injury with a gentle efficiency, had helped Jase shovel muck for half the afternoon, and had worried enough about her security and comfort to move her back into the house and to change the phone number.
And which man changed your perception of how a kiss should be, Tamara Cole? Was that the real man or the smooth talker?
T.C. frowned into her beer and hoped it was the smooth talker, the one she’d left smiling for Lissa, honey. The one who had tricked her into shopping for him, who teased her in the kitchen with his soft touches and smarmy lines. Yes, she decided, with a reinforcing nod, the kiss had to be Mr. Smooth Talker.
Because if it was the real man, she was in big, big trouble.
Five
“Anyone in particular you’re trying not to wake?”
The amused question startled T.C. into dropping the boots she’d been carrying, and she jerked her head around so sharply something pulled in her neck.
Oh, great! Whiplash is exactly what I need.
She lifted a hand to rub at her stiff neck and glared at the man responsible. Propped in the doorway to the office, a mug in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other, he looked far too awake for five-thirty in the morning.
“You want me to do that for you?” His velvet-coated drawl stroked her sleepy senses to immediate complete wakefulness; the thought of his strong, supple hands on her neck sent them into hyperactivity.
No!
No more touching. Last night she had decided that the best way to defuse the Nick-factor was to avoid all nonbusiness-related situations. “I didn’t expect you to be up this early,” she admitted.
“My body clock’s taking a while to adjust. I was awake before three, but then I crashed at ten.”
So there had been no need to stay out late. Damn, she wished she had known that.
“Did you enjoy your evening?”
“Very much.” Which wasn’t so much a lie as a relative truth. When Dave had finally arrived after a difficult emergency procedure, they’d ditched the restaurant in favor of takeout. Dave fell asleep halfway through the combination of chow mein and cop show. T.C. had finished the food, channel-surfed into the early hours and worked on convincing herself that she preferred comfortable and stress-free to unpredictable and edgy. Like, say, the Shiraz-and-steaks-with-Nick alternative she had turned down.
Nick straightened away from the door frame and waved his mug. “Coffee’s not long made.”
Filling her nostrils with the strong fresh aroma tested her resolve, but she shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll just grab some juice and keep going.”
She retrieved her boots and headed for the kitchen, remembering at the last minute to dispense with the sneaking.
“Do you always start this early?” he asked from close behind.
T.C. almost dropped her boots again. “Usually.” As she grabbed a glass and swung across to open the fridge, she felt the warmth of his lazy inspection all the way to her toes.
“Sure you don’t want coffee?”
Leaning further into the refrigerator’s cooling depths, she mumbled a negative reply and tried to recall what she was looking for. When she slammed the door shut in exasperation, she found him still watching her, and the refrigerator’s chilling effect immediately evaporated.
With a barely articulate “See you later” she dispensed with the glass, snatched an apple from the fruit bowl and bolted.
“Is that breakfast?” he asked as he followed her to the back door.
“I don’t like to eat early,” she lied. “I catch up later, after fast work.”
“Fast work happens to be my specialty.”
With a mental eye-roll, she explained how her version of fast work referred to exercising the horses fast, in full race harness, as opposed to their slow work or jog days. “Jase and I usually do fast work first thing.”
“Jase will be a little late today, but I’ll—”
“What do you mean, a little late?”
“Ten. Eleven.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter either way.
“It would have been nice to know this.”
“I tried to tell you last night, but you bolted before I could finish.”
True, but that didn’t make it any easier to digest. “Please check with me before you go giving him any more time off,” she said stiffly.
“Sure.” His drawl sounded smoothly agreeable, but as she bent to pull on her boots, T.C. caught a coolness in his eyes. “In case you’re interested in why, his mother wants him to take her to the cemetery.”
The cemetery. T.C. closed her eyes as a cold wave of remorse crashed over her. It was the anniversary of Jase’s father’s death in a work accident, and she should have remembered. She should have given Jase the time off. He should have asked her.
As she followed Nick out into the predawn chill, her legs felt stiff and uncooperative, as if in physical response to her mental wretchedness. Jase had worked with her for more than two years, his mother Cheryl for longer, yet he hadn’t come to her.
Had she become so unapproachable? So closed that he would prefer to ask a stranger?
She glanced at the stranger walking beside her, recalled his instant rapport with Jason, and her own bitter response. Shame burned through her, stopping her in her tracks.
“I wish I’d known—I would have taken them out there myself, or at least given Jase the day off.”
“He only took a couple of hours because I insisted.”
“I’m such a hard boss?”
“He thought he’d be letting you down.”
She closed her eyes briefly, struggled against the savage lash of emotion, didn’t know what to say. She didn’t deserve such loyalty—lately, she had done nothing to deserve it.
“Come on. The sooner we get started, the sooner we get to eat breakfast.”
T.C. didn’t move. She needed alone; she needed composure. The last thing she needed was Nick’s unsettling presence. “There’s no need for you to do this.”
“Yes, there is. I promised Jase.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have time to teach you what I want done. I’ll be quicker on my own.”
He stared down at her for a minute that seemed like ten. “It doesn’t hurt to accept help, Tamara.”
“I would accept your help—if it was a help.”
He let out his breath in sharp exasperation and looked off into the distance. “We need to resolve this partnership bind. D’you suppose you can fit that into your busy schedule?”
His voice held all the warmth of a winter southerly, and it cut through T.C. just as surely. His approval didn’t matter, she told herself, but the appointment did. “This afternoon? After I finish work?”
“Perfect.” With that he turned on his heel and strode back the way they had come. T.C. held her breath until he disappeared beyond the bank of melaleucas lining the house-yard. He was gone, out of her hair for the best part of the day. She couldn’t have planned it any better.
So why did she feel such an intense desire to call him back?
It took Nick all morning to deal with the paperwork Melissa had e-mailed, and finishing it was about the only enjoyable part of the exercise—that and knowing s
he would now get off his case.
His partner could be a real pain in the butt…when she wasn’t being brilliant. With a wry grimace, he recalled the set down she’d given him yesterday when, in her words, she finally got him to answer the bloody phone. Dealing with her from this far away had its advantages. Like he could call her Lissa, honey without getting swatted around the ears. She hated endearments almost as much as she hated the way he abbreviated her name.
So why had he answered the phone that way? To get up her nose, or because he wanted to prove a point to Tamara?
The point being?
That he didn’t give a flying fig about her decision to eat with the on-again off-again boyfriend. That he would be just fine on his own, thanks for asking.
With an impatient shove, he propelled his chair away from the desk and let it swing in a half circle. He stretched his arms high, cracked his knuckles and ignored the temptation to look out the window. He would not check up on her, even under the guise of seeing if Jason had arrived yet.
She had made it clear she didn’t want his help. She’d made it clear she didn’t want anything from him, and although she appealed to him on many levels—the courage she’d shown in confronting him that first night, her fierce loyalty to Joe, the incredibly stimulating touch of her hand…oh, and the way she kissed—she was way too prickly, too complex.
A thousand headaches in the making.
Just as soon as he had made a partnership-breaking deal, he would be on the first plane back to his life—the life he had made for himself. With a resolute nod he turned back to the desk and the box-file George had handed him before he walked out of their meeting.
“Crunch time, Niccolo,” he muttered as his glance slid over the solicitor’s label: Estate Of The Late Joe Corelli. Ignoring the sudden tightness in his chest, he slipped on his reading glasses and extracted the first wad of papers.
It was almost seven before T.C. forced herself to sit down in the living room—much later than she had anticipated, but by the time Jason had arrived that morning she had been way behind schedule. She had wanted to talk to him but couldn’t find the words, and that sat badly with her throughout the afternoon, so every small task had seemed to take twice as long. Then she had needed a good long shower, and if she tried hard enough she could even justify changing her clothes three times before deciding on her usual combination of jeans, tank top and flannel shirt.
She could justify all night long, but when it came down to it, she was a coward. This conversation with Nick would likely decide her future—whether she stayed in the place she had come to accept as home, or whether she would be forced to ring that Perth trainer and take the alternative he offered. Yet she feared she wasn’t up to it. It surprised her that she had found the nerve to knock at the office door, to push it open a fraction, to inform Nick she would be in the living room. She hadn’t waited for his reply; she hadn’t even looked in. She had pulled the door shut and kept on walking.
Maybe her father had been right. Maybe she was a little girl playing in a man’s world.
Before she could sink into that mire of self-pity, Nick strolled into the room. Watching him move, so loose limbed and full of masculine grace, had the usual effect. Her pulse thudded, the air in her lungs turned hot and thick, and the soft denim of her much-washed jeans felt harsh against her skin, her buttoned cuffs too tight for her wrists.
“This is for you,” he said without preliminary. “I think you should read it before we talk.”
Read what? She blinked, noticed the guarded expression on his face before she noticed the envelope in his hand. The warm flush under her skin prickled with a strong sense of déjà vu.
Another letter from the grave.
She needed to run her tongue twice around her dry mouth before she could speak. “Where did this come from?”
“It was in the papers George gave me. I only went through them this afternoon.”
“What do you mean…in the papers? Was it hidden? Didn’t anyone know it was there?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.” When she didn’t take the envelope, he dropped it in her lap. “I’ll leave you to read it in peace. Then we’ll talk.”
He left abruptly, leaving T.C. staring at the envelope until Joe’s big boldly printed T.C. blurred into her father’s spidery version. She sat up straight and shook her head.
“What is wrong with you? Why don’t you just open it?”
There was no reason not to. This time there would be no bitter recriminations, no reminders of what a disappointment she had been as a daughter…or because she’d been a daughter. No terse words informing her that the family home, the stables and all the horses, had been left to an uncle she barely knew.
She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, as if that might contain the hurt, stop it spreading from the deep-seated knot in her heart, and with a deep, shuddery breath she ripped into the envelope. Her trembling hands smoothed out the single sheet of vellum. Only then was she capable of opening her eyes.
Nick figured she needed privacy, and he wanted to try to reach George one last time. Not that talking to him would do any good—he would simply deny any knowledge of the letter. He had been obstructive from the get-go, but that was no surprise.
That was George.
Still, he jabbed out part of the number he’d dialed enough times in the past hours to know by heart, but then he pictured Tamara staring at the envelope, her face as pale as if Joe himself had appeared before her. With a harsh curse, he jammed down the receiver and went looking for her.
He found her sitting on the verandah steps, framed by the pale light cast through a foyer window. The dog clutched in her arms inspected Nick with solemn eyes, but Tamara didn’t look up, and he knew she’d been crying.
Hell!
She sat hunched forward, body language screaming keep away, but whispering hold me. With a sense of fatalism riding him hard, he sat down next to her, close enough to feel her stiffen defensively.
“My shoulder’s here if you need something to cry on,” he offered.
“I’m not crying.” She swiped the back of one hand across her eyes.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind a wet shoulder.”
“It’s not okay. Crying is weak and foolish and female.”
Nick snorted. “Anyone who’s tried to sneak into your stables in the middle of the night knows you’re not weak. Definitely female, but never weak.”
“You forgot foolish.”
Nick smiled at her churlishness. “Yeah, well, some might consider what you did foolish. Others would call it brave.”
When her tense posture relaxed fractionally, he felt a disproportionate degree of satisfaction. “You want to talk about what Joe had to say?”
“What did he tell you?” she asked carefully.
Nick shook his head, not understanding.
“In your letter… He did leave you a letter?”
“No.”
She turned toward him slightly, enough that he could see the frown creasing her brow. “You’re his son—you’re family. Why would he write to me and not you?”
“Perhaps you were closer to him than any of his family.”
She made a disbelieving little noise, then shifted restlessly, as if even considering that notion didn’t sit well with her. “The first years I worked here, I didn’t know him at all,” she said softly. “He didn’t stay over much, just came for a day whenever he could, rang maybe once a week. After his wife died, he started staying weekends, occasionally longer. I can almost see why people might have thought we were…” She cleared her throat. “It was only this last six months that he stayed most of the time.”
“Did he know he was…?”
Dying.
The unsaid word hung heavily between them. To Nick, the air felt morbidly thick. That was why breathing was so damn difficult.
“I don’t know,” she replied in that same slow, considering voice. “He said nothing to me. I don’t think anyone
knew how sick he was.”
No one had said a word, not to him at any rate. Big surprise! He had returned from a month in Alaska to a coldly formal solicitor’s letter. The memory was as keen as the day he slit the seal on that innocuous looking envelope.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice so gruff he barely recognized it as his own. “I didn’t know anything until it was all over.”
When she placed her hand on his arm, Nick didn’t shake it off. This time he accepted the firm, warm contact. He accepted it, and he waited for some cloying words of sympathy to break the peculiar bond he felt with this woman he barely knew, but who knew exactly how to touch him.
She surprised him by saying nothing.
They sat like that for a long time, their silence comfortable and comforting. Then her hand moved on his forearm. It was simply a shift in pressure, hardly a caress, yet it aroused his senses in a heartbeat. The sweet fragrance of some flowering shrub filled his nostrils, the hoot of an owl sounded preternaturally loud on the still night air, and she drifted closer, her eyes luminous in the ambient light.
His lips were only a whisper away when Ug bounded to life in her lap. T.C. turned her head sharply, and his lips grazed across her cheek. She laughed awkwardly, then sprang to her feet, dusting the backside of her jeans. “I have to go double-rug the horses. The nights are getting cold.”
Before he could reply, she was steaming off down the path. He had to raise his voice to be sure it would reach her. “How are we ever going to organize anything if you keep running away?”
She slowed, her dark silhouette wavering against the silvery outline of the stable block. “I have to rug up,” she insisted.
“We have to discuss our partnership.”
She lifted a hand and rubbed it through her tumbled locks, and he heard her faint, frustrated sigh. “Then why don’t you come help me?”
T.C. ran a hand under Monte’s rug, then stepped back while Nick threw a second, heavier, blanket over the top. Accepting his help hadn’t hurt, and he had been right on another account. She had to stop running away. They had to discuss how they would handle this partnership. Before she could change her mind or find another excuse to procrastinate, she blurted, “My half share in Yarra Park is Joe’s idea of insurance.”
Addicted to Nick Page 6