by Nora Roberts
“I hope never to see another vacuum cleaner bag. Ever had one rip on you?” He shuddered deliberately and made her laugh. “Anyhow, Ethan had this brainstorm. I’m at loose ends, Phillip needs something to occupy him if he’s going to be staying here—though he figures on commuting to Baltimore for now. So we’re going into business.”
“Into business? What kind of business?”
“Boat building.”
She lowered her cup. “You’re going to build boats?”
“I’ve built plenty—so has Ethan. And actually, though Phil went over to the suit-and-tie life, he’s done some himself. The three of us worked on the skipjack that Ethan still sails.”
“That’s fine for recreation, for personal use, for a hobby. But to consider starting a business, a risky one, at the very time when you’re trying to take on a minor dependent . . .”
“He won’t go hungry. For Christ’s sake, Ethan holds his own on the bay, and Phil’s got that desk job in Baltimore. I could get busywork, but what’s the point?”
“I’m only pointing out that a venture of this nature would consume a great deal of money and time, particularly during the first months. Stability—”
“Isn’t every damn thing.” Annoyed, he set his coffee down and began to pace. “Shouldn’t the kid learn there’s more to life than nine-to-fiving it? That there can be choices, that you can take a chance? How good is it for him if I’m stuck in that house dusting furniture and hating every goddamn minute of it? Ethan’s already got one client, and if Ethan brought this up you can believe he’s weighed it from every angle. Nobody thinks things through as much as he does.”
“And since you felt you wanted to discuss this with me, I’m simply trying to do the same. Weigh it from every angle.”
“And you think it would be better if I went out and got some nice, stable, time-clock job that brings in a nice, stable, time-clock paycheck every week.” He stopped in front of her. “Is that the kind of man who appeals to you? The kind who reports in at nine five days a week, who takes you out to dinner on a rainy night and lets you get away at a reasonable hour without even trying to convince you to take off what there is of that dress?”
She took a minute, reminding herself it wouldn’t solve anything if both of them lost the battle with temper. “What appeals to me, what I wear, and how I choose to spend my evenings aren’t the issues here. As Seth’s caseworker, I’m concerned that his home life be as stable and happy as possible.”
“Why should me building boats make him unhappy?”
“My question regarding this idea of yours is whether your attention will be taken away from him and turned toward this new business. A business that you would, I imagine, find exciting, challenging, and interesting, at least for a time.”
His eyes narrowed. “You just don’t think I can stick, do you?”
“That’s yet to be proved. But I do think you’ll try. What worries me is that you’re not trying for Seth, you’re trying for your father. For your parents. I don’t think that’s a count against you, Cam,” she said more gently. “But it’s not a point in Seth’s favor.”
How the hell did you argue with a woman who insisted on dotting every i? he wondered. “So you think he’s better off with strangers?”
“No, I think he’s better off with you and your brothers.” She smiled, satisfied that she had shut him up for the moment. “And that’s what went into my report. This idea of starting a boat-building business is something new to think about, and I hope none of you intends to rush into it.”
“Do you sail?”
“No, I’ve never tried it. Why?”
“I’d never been on a boat in my life until Ray Quinn took me out.”
Because he remembered how those eyes of hers could warm with compassion, he decided to tell her how it had been for him. “I was scared to death, but too tough to admit it. I’d only been with them a few days, never figured I’d stay. He took me out on this little Sunfish he had back then. Told me the air would do me good.”
All he had to do was think, and the image of that morning came clear as sunlight in his head. “My father was a big man. The Mighty Quinn. Built like a bull. I knew that little boat was going to tip over, and I’d probably drown, but he had a way of getting you to do things.”
Love, Anna thought. It was pure and simple love in his voice. It attracted her, she admitted, every bit as much as that toughly handsome face. “Could you swim?”
“No—but I still hated it that he made me wear a PFD. Personal flotation device,” he explained. “Life jacket. Figured it was for sissies.”
“You’d rather have drowned?”
“Hell, no, but I had to make him think so. Anyway, I sat in the stern, my stomach clutched. I was wearing these sunglasses my mother—Stella,” he corrected, for she’d been Stella then—“had dug up somewhere because my eye was pretty banged up and the sunlight hurt.”
He’d been beaten, abused, neglected, she remembered, when the Quinns had found him. Her heart went out to the little boy. “You must have been terrified.”
“Down to the bone, but I’d have choked on my tongue before I’d have admitted it. He must have known that,” Cam said quietly. “He always knew what was in my head. It was hot, and the humidity was up so that every time you took a breath it was like swallowing water. He said it would be cooler when we moved out of the gut and onto the river, but I didn’t believe him. I figured we’d just sit there and fry. The boat didn’t even have a motor. Christ, he laughed when I said that. He told me we had something better than a motor.”
He’d forgotten his coffee, and even the point of the story drifted away in the memory. “We headed out across the water, slow and easy at first, the boat rocked when we turned into the bend, and I figured that was it. Game over. This heron came out of the trees. I’d seen it once before. At least I like to think it was the same one. It winged right over the boat, wings spread to trap the air. And then we caught the wind and that little sail filled. We started to fly. He turned around and grinned at me. I didn’t even know I was grinning back until I split my lip open again. I’d never felt like that before in my life. Not once.”
Without thinking, he lifted his hand and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Not once in my life.”
“It changed you.” She knew that single moments, both simple and dramatic, could alter courses forever.
“It started to. A boat on the water, and people who were giving me a chance. It wasn’t much more complicated than that. It doesn’t have to be that much more complicated here. We’ll have the kid swing the hammer, put some sweat and effort into building a boat. If it’s going to be a Quinn operation, that includes him.”
Her smile came quickly, fully, and to his surprise, she patted him on the cheek. “That last part said it all. It’s a gamble. I’m not sure if it’s the time or the place for one, but . . . it should be interesting to watch.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?” He eased forward, nudging her back against the counter. “Watch me?”
“I don’t intend to take my eyes off you—on a professional level—until I’m assured that you and your brothers provide Seth with the proper home and guardianship.”
“Fair enough.” He moved in just a little closer, just a fraction till two well-toned bodies brushed. “And how about on a personal level?”
She weakened enough to let her gaze skim down, linger. His mouth was definitely tempting—dangerous and very close. “Keeping my eyes on you on a personal level isn’t a hardship. A mistake, maybe—but not a hardship.”
“I always figure if you’re going to make a mistake . . .” He put his hands on the counter, caging her. “Make it a big one. What do you say, Anna?” He dipped his head a little lower, hovered.
She tried to think, to consider the consequences. But there were times when needs, desire, and lust simply overpowered logic. “Hell,” she muttered and, cupping her hand at the back of his neck, dragged his mouth down on hers.
It was exactly as she wanted. Hungry and fierce and mindless. His mouth was hot, and it was hard, and it was almost heathen as he crushed down to devour hers. She gave in to it, gave all to it, a moment’s madness where body ruled mind and blood roared over reason.
And the thrill snapped through her like a whip, sharp, painful, and with a quick, shocking burn.
“Christ.” His breath was gone, his mind was reeling. Reflexively, his hands dug into the counter before he jerked them away and filled them with her.
Whatever he’d expected, whatever he’d imagined didn’t come close to the volcano that had so suddenly erupted in his arms. He dragged a hand through her hair, the wild, curling mass of it, fisted it there, then plundered as if his life depended on it.
“Can’t,” she managed, but her arms wound around him, banded around him until it seemed his heart wasn’t merely thundering against hers but inside hers. Her moan was a rumble of desperate, delirious pleasure that sounded in her throat exactly where his teeth nipped, then scraped, then dug greedily into flesh.
The counter bit into her back, her fingers bit into his hips as she dragged him closer. Oh, God, she wanted contact, friction, more. She found his mouth with hers again, plunged blindly into the next kiss.
Just one more, she promised herself, meeting, matching his reckless demand.
Her scent seduced his senses. Her name was a murmur on his lips, a whisper in his mind. Her body was a glorious banquet melded to his. No woman had ever filled him so quickly, so completely, so utterly to the exclusion of all else.
“Let me.” It was a plea, and he’d never in his life begged for a woman. “For God’s sake, Anna, let me have you.” His hands ran up her legs, those endless thighs. “Now.”
She wanted. It would be so easy to take, and be taken. But easy, she knew, was rarely right.
“No. Not now.” Regret smothered her even as she lifted her hands to frame his face. For a moment longer, her mouth stayed on his. “Not yet. Not like this.”
Her eyes were dark, clouded. He knew enough of a woman’s pleasures and his own skills to believe he could make them go blind. “It’s perfect like this.”
“The timing’s wrong, the circumstances. Wait.” Someone had to move, she decided. To break that contact. She sidestepped, let out a shaky breath. She closed her eyes, lifted a hand to hold him off. “Well,” she managed after another moment, “that was insane.”
He took the hand she’d raised, brought it to his lips and nipped his teeth into her forefinger. “Who needs sanity?”
“I do.” She nearly managed a genuine smile as she tugged her hand free. “Not that I don’t regret that deeply at this moment, but I do need it. Wow.” She drew in another long breath, pushed her hands up through her hair. “Cameron. You’re every bit as potent as I expected.”
“I haven’t even started.”
The smile widened. “I bet. I just bet.” She eased back a little more, picked up her rapidly cooling coffee. “I don’t know as that episode’s going to make either one of us sleep easier tonight, but it was bound to happen.” She angled her head when his eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Most women, especially in your position, would make excuses.”
“For what?” She lifted a shoulder and promised herself her system would level again eventually. “That was as much my doing as yours. I wondered what it might be like to get my hands on you from the first time I saw you.”
Cam decided he might never be the same again. “I think I’m crazy about you.”
“No, you’re not.” She laughed and handed him his coffee. “You’re intrigued, you’re attracted, you’ve got a good healthy case of lust, but those are entirely different matters. And you don’t even know me.”
“I want to.” He let out a short laugh. “And that’s a big surprise to me. I don’t usually care one way or the other.”
“I’m flattered. I’m not sure if that’s a tribute to your charm or my own stupidity, but I’m flattered. But—”
“Damn, I knew that was coming.”
“But,” she repeated and set her cup in the sink. “Seth is my priority. He has to be.” The warmth that was both compassion and understanding came into her eyes, and it touched something in him that was buried under that healthy lust. “And he should be yours. I hope I’m around if and when that happens.”
“I’m doing everything I can think of.”
“I know you are. And you’re doing more than most would.” She touched his arm briefly, then moved away. “I have a feeling you’ve got more inside you yet. But . . .”
“There it is again.”
“You’d better go now.”
He wanted to stay, even if it was just to stand there and talk to her, to be. “I haven’t finished my coffee.”
“It’s cold. And it’s getting late.” She glanced toward the window where raindrops ran like tears. “And the rain makes me wonder about things I shouldn’t be wondering about.”
He winced. “I don’t suppose you said that to make me suffer.”
“Sure I did.” She laughed again and moved to the door, opened it wide to make her point. “If I’m going to, why shouldn’t you?”
“Oh, I like you, Anna Spinelli. You’re a woman after my own heart.”
“You’re not interested in a woman going for your heart,” she said as he crossed the room. “You want one who’s after your body.”
“See, we’re getting to know each other already.”
“Good night.” She didn’t evade when he pulled her in for another kiss as he walked out the door. Evading would have been a pretense, and she wasn’t one to delude herself.
So she met the kiss with teasing heat and honest enthusiasm. Then she shut the door in his face.
And then she leaned back against it weakly.
Potent? That wasn’t the half of it. Her pulse was likely to stay on overdrive for hours. Maybe days.
She wished she didn’t feel so damn happy about it.
SEVEN
Cam was scowling at a basket full of pink socks and Jockey shorts when the phone rang. He knew damn well the socks and underwear had been white—or close to it—when he’d dumped them in the machine. Now they were Easter-egg pink.
Maybe they just looked that way because they were wet.
He pulled them out to stuff them in the dryer, saw the red sock hiding among the pink. And bared his teeth.
Phillip, he vowed, was a dead man.
“Fuck it.” He dumped them inside, slapped the dryer on what he hoped was broil and went to answer the phone.
He remembered, just in time, to turn down the little portable TV tucked in the corner of the counter. It wasn’t as if he was actually watching it, it certainly wasn’t that he was paying any attention at all to the passion and betrayals of the late-morning soap opera.
He’d just switched it on for the noise.
“Quinn. What?”
“Hey, Cam. Took some doing to track you down, hoss. Tod Bardette here.”
Cam reached into an open bag of Oreos on the counter and took out a handful. “How’s it going, Tod?”
“Well, I have to tell you it’s going pretty damn good. I’ve been spending some time anchored off the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Nice spot,” Cam muttered over a cookie. Then his brows shot up as an impossibly gorgeous woman tumbled into bed with a ridiculously handsome man on the tiny screen across the kitchen.
Maybe there was something to this daytime TV after all.
“It’ll do. Heard you kicked ass in the Med a few weeks ago.”
A few weeks? Cam thought while he munched on a second cookie. Surely it had been a few years ago that he’d flown across the finish line in his hydrofoil. Blue water, speed, cheering crowds, and money to burn.
Now he was lucky if he found enough milk in the fridge to wash down a stale Oreo.
“Yeah, that’s what I heard too.”
Tod gave a rich chuckle. “Well, the offer to buy that toy from you still holds
. But I got another proposition coming at you.”
Tod Bardette always had another proposition coming at you. He was the rich son of a rich father from East Texas who used the world as his playground. And he was boat happy. He raced them, sponsored races, bought and sold them. And collected wives, trophies, and his share of the purse with smooth regularity.
Cam had always felt Tod’s luck had run hot since conception. Since it never hurt to listen—and the bedroom scene had just been displaced by a commercial featuring a giant toilet brush, he switched off the set.
“I’m always ready to hear one.”
“I’m setting up a crew for La Coupe Internationale.”
“The One-Ton Cup?” Cam felt his juices begin to flow, and he lost all interest in cookies and milk. The international race was a giant in the sailing world. Five legs, he thought, the final one an ocean race of three hundred grueling miles.
“You got it. You know the Aussies took the cup last year, so it’s being held down here in Australia. I want to whip their butts, and I’ve got a honey of a boat. She’s fast, hoss. With the right crew she’ll bring the cup back to the U S of A. I need a skipper. I want the best. I want you. How soon can you get Down Under?”
Give me five minutes. That’s what he wanted to say. He could have a bag packed in one, hop a plane and be on his way. For men who raced, it was one of life’s golden opportunities. Even as he opened his mouth, his gaze landed on the rocker outside the kitchen window.
So he closed his eyes, listened resentfully to the hum of the pink socks drying in the utility room behind him.
“I have to pass, Tod. I can’t get away now.”
“Lookie here, I’m willing to give you some time to put your affairs—pun intended,” he said with a snorting laugh, “in order. Take a couple weeks. If you’ve got another offer, I’ll beat it.”
“I can’t do it. I’ve got—” Laundry to do? A kid to raise? Damn if he was going to humiliate himself with that piece of information. “My brothers and I started a business,” he said on impulse. “I’ve got a commitment here.”