Slippery When Wet

by Kristin Hardy

  His arm tightened. “Why is it you’re always trying to run away in the mornings?” he murmured, pulling her back into his arms.

  “I really should check in with the office. We’re open today.”

  “Don’t your agents have keys?” he asked, brushing his hand over her breast.

  She shivered. “Yes.”

  “Then leave them to their own devices for once. Every so often you get a day off. It’s the perks of being the boss.”

  “I should still get going,” she said, trying to squirm away.

  Dev leaned over her and planted his elbow on her far side. “Are we going to have to have that conversation all over again?”

  “What conversation?”

  “The one where we establish that we’re both still very far from done with each other and that we should probably just keep going with this until—”

  “Until what, the end of the week?” she threw it in with an attempt at flippancy. “You make it sound simple.”

  “Isn’t it? We enjoy each other’s company,” he slid a hand along her hip, “we enjoy each other’s bodies. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I don’t want to get involved. I like you, Dev, but I don’t want to get tied up in a bad situation.”

  His eyes flashed then with a look she couldn’t quite decipher. “Who says it’s going to turn bad?”

  Taylor swallowed. “Look, I’ve been married. Things were good, then we got married and they turned bad. You’ve been engaged. Things were good and then they turned bad. Maybe long-term commitments aren’t a good thing for either of us.”

  “Committed pessimist, hmm?”

  “A realist,” she corrected.

  “Hardly. Look, just because we’re in bed together doesn’t mean we’re locked into anything. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Let’s just enjoy today.”

  She wanted badly to agree but it sounded too easy. “Swear we’ll stay away from the long-term stuff?”

  “We’ll take it day to day,” he said. When her frown didn’t abate, he gave her an exasperated look. “Okay, how about this? I promise that I won’t propose to you. Is that good enough?”

  She nodded, still uneasy.

  “Good.” He moved one of his legs in between hers. “Now let’s get back to the part about enjoying one another’s bodies.”

  12

  TAYLOR STARED INTO DEV’S kitchen, hands on her hips. “Normal people don’t have sawhorses in their kitchens, you know,” she remarked.

  “They’re useful.”“Or bare concrete floors. Sinks, though, they usually have sinks.”

  “I like to think of myself as a man who doesn’t get caught up in convention,” he said lightly.

  She smiled. “So what are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to move that wall over there back so that I can add a laundry room, and cut a pass through in this one so you can get to the dining room. That nook over there is going to be an area for a wine rack.” He looked around as though he already saw it in front of him. “And the usual renovation stuff, rip out the old lath and plaster and hang new Sheetrock, refinish and reinstall the cabinets, add a venting system, new appliances, new flooring.” He ticked them off on his fingers.

  Taylor raised her eyebrows. “Sounds like you’ve got a job ahead of you. Did you know you were going to do all this when you bought the place?”

  “Oh, yeah. I came into it planning to do a top to bottom renovation.” Dev shrugged. “I’m a builder. That’s what I do.”

  “Doesn’t it ever get to be too much, building all day and then coming home to work on this place at night?”

  “No.” His eyes lit. “When you do a place like this, it’s like you can hear it saying thank you. Come in here and look at this.” He seized her hand and led her down a hall to where glass-paned French doors opened into the living room, a spacious, gracious room that was one of the few he’d finished. The brass and milk glass light fixture hung from an ornate ceiling medallion. On the hearth of the marble-topped fireplace sat an antique-looking brass fire screen. Bay windows overlooked the street and out into a side yard with a maple tree taller than the house. On the floor, warm swaths of glowing oak showed at the edge of the Persian rug. “This was covered in wall-to-wall carpeting when I bought the place. I didn’t even know it was under there. I patched a few places and refinished it and look at it,” he said, kneeling down to smooth a hand over the lustrous wood. “That’s the kind of surprise that you get in a place like this. The kitchen cabinets are solid maple. Once I get the paint off and get them sanded down, they’re going to be gorgeous.”

  Watching the satisfaction in his face made her heart stutter a bit. “You really love this place, don’t you.”

  He looked suddenly bashful. “Shows that much, huh?”

  “It’s like it has a life and a voice of its own that only you can hear. I don’t see how you could look at a new house after being in a place like this.”

  Dev snorted. “All Melissa wanted to do was sell it and buy a new one in a subdivision somewhere. Look at this.” He pointed to the mantel and she stepped closer to look. The fuzzy sepia tone image showed gracefully ornate lines of a house so new that the shrubs and trees were still dwarfed. A horse and carriage sat alongside it, along with a man in a bowler hat and muttonchop whiskers. “I got this from the historical society. It’s this house, about two years after it was built, or so they guess.”

  There was something magical about looking at the image and knowing that she stood inside the house nearly a century later. “It’s like owning a little piece of the past.”

  “Like being entrusted with it, more like,” Dev said, staring at the picture. “You take care of it while it’s yours and pass it on.”

  “Do you ever mind all the work?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not all work. Tearing the walls out is kind of fun. I mean, when was the last time someone handed you a crowbar and told you to punch a hole in the wall?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  He waved her back toward the kitchen. “I told you I had to strip out the old lath and plaster. That was going to be my job for the weekend. Look.” He picked up a clawed tool. “You give it a swing, let it bite into the wall and hook it back.” A gaping hole appeared. He did it again and studs appeared. “Give it a try just once,” he urged. “For the hell of it.”

  It did look like fun, she had to confess. Tentatively she took the tool from him and thumped it against the wall. It barely dented the plaster.

  “Come on, put your back into it. Pick it up with both hands and really let ’er rip.”

  Taylor lifted it up and swung and the tool punched into the wall.

  “Now give it a yank.”

  When she did, a section of the wall came loose.

  “Now do it again.”

  She did, laughing and waving the plaster dust away from her face. “Well, this is a morning after like I’ve never had. Good thing I had jeans. Can we do it some more?”

  He stared at her. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Like you said, how often does a person get to do something like this? Besides, if you don’t get this done, you’re never going to be able to cook again.”

  “That’s not exactly a hardship.” His tone was dry. “I wanted to spend time with you this weekend.”

  “So spend it with me,” she said simply. “Teach me how to work on the house. It’s like doing volunteer work for the historical society.”

  “Well, if you’re serious, we should get you in long sleeves and a dust mask.”

  “Put me to work, chief.”

  THEY SAT FACING EACH OTHER on upended five-gallon paint buckets, drinking bottled water in the evening light. Taylor looked at Dev and smiled.

  “What?” he asked.“I’m just thinking now I know what you’ll look like when you’re seventy and your hair is white.”

  He shook his head and a drift of plaster dust fell out of it. “So how does it feel to be a homewrecker?” Dev pulle
d a rag out of his pocket and dampened it with water, then wiped it over her face to mop off the worst of the plaster. “Mmm, kabuki makeup.”

  “Is it me?” She tilted her head.

  “I’m thinking a shower is probably a better move.”

  “You just wanted to get me naked so you can grope me.”

  “No—but now that you mention it,” he said, looking at her consideringly.

  Taylor unscrewed the cap from her bottle and took a swig of water. “That was fun, tearing things down.”

  He gave a short laugh. “It’s always faster and easier than building them, that’s for sure.”

  “But you like the building part best.”

  “It gives you something you can be proud of,” he said, wiping the plaster off his own face.

  It made her like him even more. “So what got you hooked on construction? Did you grow up building things?”

  “Grow up building things?” Dev paused. “No. I was sixteen and I needed a job. Talked the foreman on a local site into hiring me as a cleanup boy. I stayed out of trouble and soaked up everything they’d let me and it kind of went from there.”

  What kind of sixteen-year-old “needed” a job, she wondered? “Why renovation? Did you grow up in an old house?”

  He was silent long enough that she wondered if she’d said something wrong. “Yeah, I grew up in an old house. It was too far gone for renovating, though. Then again, our whole family was.”

  He’d opened the door. It took her little time to decide to walk through it. “In what way?”

  “In just about every way you can think of,” he said, elbows on his knees. “My mother left when I was about eight. We just came home from school one day and she was gone….” His voice trailed off.

  “I’m so sorry,” Taylor murmured, watching him closely. How would it have felt, she wondered, to come home and find an empty house, a mother who wasn’t coming back? Unimaginable, she thought. For better or worse, her family was always there, one of the constants in her life.

  “My dad never got over it,” he said, picking up a broken piece of lath and tracing patterns in the drift of plaster on the bare concrete floor. “He never believed in anything after that, except maybe his bottle.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Dead,” he said abruptly. “Killed in an accident on the docks when I was about twenty.”

  For an instant, Taylor couldn’t think what to say. “I’m sorry” seemed so inadequate. “He’d have been proud of the man you’ve become.”

  “I don’t know.” Dev examined the pattern of swirls he’d made between them. “We didn’t exactly see eye to eye.”

  “That kind of thing matters less as time goes on and blood matters more.”

  “Maybe.” He broke the lath in half and tossed the pieces into an oversize garbage can sitting to one side. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

  She hesitated, then took the leap. “Why did your mother leave?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure any of us knew. I thought I did,” he said reflectively. “When I was a kid I knew that she left because of my father. It was something he hadn’t done. If he’d just tried, if he’d loved her enough, she’d have been happy enough to stay.”

  Her heart broke for that little boy, alone and confused. “But you don’t believe that now?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. The earliest stuff I remember is us laughing and happy. I don’t know if that was real or just the kiddie version of reality. Maybe that happened before life started tightening the thumbscrews on them. Two kids is a lot more work than one, you know.” His voice drifted off into momentary silence. “It just seemed like the older I got, the more she was unhappy, with my dad, maybe, or with being a mom. Maybe she didn’t like being settled down or she didn’t like being broke. I think about it now and I figure she was probably mostly unhappy with herself, but she couldn’t figure out how to leave that so she left us instead.”

  “Did you ever talk with your dad about it?”

  Dev shook his head. “He pretty much shut down when she left. Anyway, I blamed him too much to ever have a conversation about it. By the time I’d stopped blaming him, he was dead.”

  “What about the rest of your family?”

  “There isn’t any worth mentioning except my sister, Mallory. She took it harder than I did when my mom left. She figured it was because of her.”

  “Kids often do.”

  He smiled faintly. “Not me. I figured Pop didn’t love my mom enough or she’d have stayed.” He gave a short laugh. “That’s why I kept trying with Melissa. Every time we’d fight, I’d think that if I could just love her enough and help her, she’d get past her devils and it would work. I didn’t want to quit.” He fell silent and picked up another splinter of lath.

  “I know about not wanting to quit,” Taylor said softly.

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “That’s my family rep. I’m the one who gets an idea and drops it.”

  “You haven’t dropped your business,” he pointed out.

  “Yet. I think they’re always waiting for me to. My grandmother left us all a little bit of money in a trust fund. My mother was appalled when I used some of mine to start the agency. She said I was throwing it away.”

  “But now you’re profitable.”

  A corner of her mouth curved up. “They call it my little hobby.”

  He rubbed his knuckles against his jaw. “Tough crowd.”

  “I come from a family of overachievers…you know, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?”

  “And you were none of those, I take it?”

  “I might have been interested in Indian chief if I’d gotten to wear feathers,” she said with a faint smile. “No, I think they all love me, I’m just a little more…feckless than the others. They stuck with the plan, I followed my nose. And I did the unpardonable, by quitting school.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is that why you want to go back now?”

  “Not really. I’m just ready to learn now. I wasn’t then. Back then, I was only there because it was expected.”

  “If it didn’t fit you, what’s the point?”

  If only the question had been that simple, she thought, remembering the acrimonious fights. “In my family, if you don’t have a degree, you’re like some sort of alien. Scientifically interesting, but not one of them.”

  “Everyone has to follow their own path.” Dev reached out to tangle his fingers with hers. “You were smart to please yourself.”

  “Not so smart,” she murmured, and the shadows drifted into her eyes again.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, watching her closely.

  Taylor shook her head briskly. “Old baggage.”

  “Everybody’s got baggage. It goes with the territory. It’s not the baggage, it’s how long you decide to carry it.”

  And what had she done with hers, she wondered. Let it weigh her down even as she tried to move on with her life. Let it shadow her. Let it keep her in the box Bennett had tried to build around her rather than be herself. She hadn’t really started to tread the final road back to who she was until Mexico.

  Until Dev, she realized, suddenly shaken. The casual lover she’d taken had wound himself far deeper into her life than she’d ever thought possible.

  Outside, a sudden breeze sent tree branches rattling and scraping against the window.

  Taylor shifted uneasily. There was no need to panic, she reminded herself. They were only having a light affair. No strings. Nothing permanent. She cleared her throat. “Well, I’d say we could tear down some more walls, but I think we’ve done enough for today.”

  Dev looked at her, then nodded. “I guess I can only expect so much slave labor before I have to give some compensation. How about if I take you out to dinner, instead?”

  “Sure,” she said distractedly and went into the downstairs bathroom to wash her hands.

  IT WAS HIS FIRM POLICY never to ask a person what they were thinking, but the
play of expressions he’d just seen on her face made him wonder. First shadowed, then pensive, then simply startled. What was going on in her head? Not, he reminded himself as he began picking up construction detritus, that it was any of his business. He didn’t have license to pry.

  And yet, somehow that fact just made him want to know all the more.“I think after making you work on my house all weekend that I owe you a weekend away somewhere,” he said, almost before he realized he was going to say it. “What do you say to getting out of town for a few days?”

  Taylor came out of the bathroom drying her hands on a frayed blue towel. “Where did that come from? Don’t you want to finish your house?”

  He just chuckled. “Darlin’, this house isn’t going to be finished until sometime next year. I’m in no hurry. You said you’d never been to Newport, and I’d think you’d like it. Do you have plans next weekend?”

  She tilted her head and looked at him. “Why do I get the feeling that there’s a catch?”

  “I suppose there is,” he said sheepishly. “My sister’s getting married next weekend in Newport. I want you to go with me.”

  “A wedding.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You just want company on the drive, right?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to go without sex for two days,” he said lightly.

  A slow smile spread over her face. “That would be a hardship, now that you mention it.”

  “See. I’m trying to be proactive.”

  “It’s impressive.”

  “I’m a trained professional. Don’t try this at home.”

  She gave him an appraising look. “I don’t know. You know bringing me to a wedding makes me the hot topic for your family.”

  “That would be my sister, remember?”

  “Still, if you want me to be an escort for you, you’re going to have to make it worth my while,” she said, amusement ripe in her voice.

  A corner of his mouth twitched. “And how do I do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know. What does it involve? Is this one of those all-weekend-long wedding orgies?”

  “Not if my sister has anything to say about it. There’s a rehearsal dinner Saturday night and the wedding is Sunday. Other than that, we can do what we please,” he said, raising her hand to his lips. “Oh, and I have to pick up a bed.”