by Rachel Cross
Jesus, keep me near the cross.
He closed his eyes, swallowed with great difficulty, and tried again. “Would you happen to be from the agency?”
“The agency?” Her voice was lusty and low, and woke up his nuts in four tiny syllables. He hadn’t expected her to sound like that.
Shit, what next? Would she open that bag and take out rope, a whip, and a blindfold?
Actually, that wouldn’t be so bad. He might actually like that. It’d be better than her just lying there like a lump. That’s what all the rest did. That’s what they thought the Wolff wanted.
He pulled the bottom of his undershirt up and wiped his sweaty forehead. “The employment agency,” he said in a strained voice. He let the shirt fall in time to see her furrowing that pretty brow.
“Oh. Do you need help?” Her eyes widened. “Did your stomach just growl? It was loud.”
Nope. He rolled his tense shoulders and took several long, deep breaths. There. That was better. “That’s usually why people contract agencies, so, yes.” He smiled at her, and for once, it was genuine. He couldn’t tell if she was a ditz or if she was just that kind of person who liked to double- and triple-check things so she didn’t make an ass of herself. Either way, her consideration was endearing. Sweet, even. He didn’t have enough sweet in his life.
“Then I’ll help you.” She slipped by him, brushing his side as she passed and he drew in a long whiff of her essence.
Plain old clean, no perfume. Maybe that wasn’t a costume after all.
He shrugged, shut the door, and followed her through the corridor. He stopped when she halted at the living room entryway.
She scanned the room at her left, around to the large open kitchen in front of them, and then the dining room he never used at the right.
She set her duffel bag—olive canvas that seemed incongruous in the possession of such a soft woman—onto the floor beside the console table and turned to face him. “What do you need help with?” She loosened the buttons at her cuffs and rolled up her starched sleeves.
“Oh, you’re serious.” He laughed, and put up his hands. “Hold on. We need to do a bit of an interview first. You might not want to work for me. Folks say I’m difficult.”
He growled at people, for fuck’s sake.
“Are you?” she asked.
“I made you ring three times, so what do you think?”
She cocked her head to the side a bit. “I think you’re probably careful.”
“I think you’re smart.” He rested his hand on her back and nudged her toward the kitchen. As soon as he touched her, he wanted to skim his fingers lower, and wrap his arm around her trim waist, but that would have been entirely inappropriate. Too proprietary, even though for some reason she felt like she was his.
Well, he knew the reason.
There was a reason he’d asked for plain. He’d just have to get through the next fifteen minutes without acting on that base impulse, or else the interview would devolve very quickly into a trial by fire.
This woman shouldn’t be affecting him so much. She wasn’t his type. He must have been desperate. His mother said that’d happen—if he kept himself away from people.
He pulled out one of the frou-frou upholstered chairs his designer-slash-mother had picked out, and she sat gracefully into it, crossed her legs at the ankles, and folded her hands on her lap.
Manners. Nice.
“Would you like something to drink? I’ve got water, orange juice, Cheerwine, real wine, beer, and about forty-seven coffee pod flavors courtesy of my mama.” He grimaced. His mama had her own damned house. He’d bought it. She still insisted on marking her territory in his. “What’s your poison?”
“Um.” She rolled her eyes up to him and blinked. “I’ll have what you’re having, I suppose.”
“It’s 11:00 a.m. Good girls aren’t supposed to get knackered before noon.”
Very slowly, red bloomed across her face and down her neck, and he grinned all the while, loving the spectacle. Making a woman blush nowadays was getting harder and harder. They were all so jaded, but this one didn’t seem to have those issues.
He liked making her blush. Knowing he could breach her walls gave him a thrill, but he’d have to be careful. He wasn’t cruel, after all.
“I’m just playing with you. Coffee? It’s cold out.”
“I’ve never had it, but I’ll try it.”
His smile snapped in. She’d said what now?
“You’ve never had coffee? Where’d you grow up, Utah?”
The red came back, and she cast her gaze to the floor. “Close.”
Oh boy. This really wasn’t going to work. He was the kind of man who stayed up until 3:00 a.m., watching Van Damme movies wearing only his boxer briefs and sucking down a case of Natty Light, and she didn’t even drink coffee?
“Well, don’t let me corrupt you.”
She looked up and gave him the tiniest smile, but for the way it made him feel, it may as well have been a French kiss. It put a squeeze on his heart he’d never felt before.
He swallowed, and took a couple of steps back. He could get addicted to that smile.
“I’d like to try it. My brothers were trying to talk me into it, and I think they’ve worn me down enough now.”
“In that case, I’ve got just the thing.” He opened the cabinet over the coffee maker, glad to have the distraction from her remarkable face, and plucked out a chocolate hazelnut coffee pod and popped it into the machine. He never drank those fussy flavors but his mama insisted on buying ‘em anyway, and Swiss Miss here would probably appreciate it. “So, what’s your name? That’s a good place to start this interview.”
“Julia. Julia Tate.”
“Nice to meet you, Julia. I am, obviously, Calvin Wolff.” He bumped the coffeemaker lid closed and pressed the power button.
“Calvin.” She said the name as if it were foreign to her—as if she didn’t know it. Didn’t she?
“What kind of information did the agency give you about me before they sent you out here? Long drive from Asheville.”
“None.”
Fuckers. Oughtta really fire them this time.
“Do you know anything about me at all?”
She gave her head a slight shake, and he turned to the cabinet again, this time pulling out a mug. He set it beneath the dispenser and pushed a few buttons and the stream of hot coffee poured down.
Maybe it was good she didn’t know anything about him. Most people knew too much of the wrong stuff.
“Okay.” He leaned his butt against the counter and crossed his arms. “Stop me if you’ve heard any of this already. I pitched pro baseball for five years. Led my team to four consecutive World Series games, and we won the last two of those. I quit while I was at my peak. Immediately after I retired, I walked away from a small plane crash with only minor bruises, and now people think I’m some kind of magical golden boy.”
“Are you?”
He set the coffee mug onto the table and nudged the sugar container toward her.
“Magic? No, I don’t have any of that. Wish I did, sometimes.” He paused in front of the refrigerator, and rested one hand on the handle. If there were magic in play, he wouldn’t have been born cursed. That’s what it was. A curse. His parents called it genetics, but he’d always called a spade a spade. He was a born werewolf. What was so fucking magical about that? He couldn’t go out in public without snapping at people, thinking they were all out to steal his kibble. And he had to defend his territory, right? Didn’t matter if it was just a corner table at Starbucks. He liked that table. It was his.
His mama had caught him baring his teeth at this one sommelier who’d turned his pointy Learjet of a nose up at Calvin because he hadn’t liked the brand of beer he’d ordered.
Mama had kicked Calvin’s shin under the table and hissed, “Keep it up, and the county’s going to come for you with an ambulance and straitjacket. Take a mate! You’re going to choke to death on your own t
estosterone.”
He’d growled at her, and she opened her menu, pushed up her reading glasses, and said in a little singsong voice, “Can’t wait to say I told you so.”
Well, he didn’t want to find a mate. Mates meant little wolfie babies, and to Hell with that. He’d never condemn another generation to this curse. Sometimes? Being a wolf sucked hard, especially when he was supposed to be the alpha.
Really, he’d been left with few options. Since he didn’t want to court a bitch, and as he was forbidden to share that part of himself with a human, he’d had no choice but to quit baseball and hole up until the season of mate imprinting lapsed.
The way he figured it, he only had twenty or so years left in solitary confinement. It would be a piece of cake.
That line of thinking had him wondering. Did her boyfriend know she was interviewing with The Wolff? Last thing Calvin needed was some knuckle-dragging three-tooth yokel to come out to his woodland sanctuary and …
… well, ask him for an autograph, probably. He was Calvin Fucking Wolff.
“So, got hot plans for Valentine’s Day?”
He watched her count one, two, then three teaspoons of sugar into her coffee before she looked at him and asked, “Is that today?”
“All day long, honey.” He pulled the door open and grabbed the creamer. “Lady like you doesn’t have a valentine? I don’t believe it.”
He was glad she didn’t. Probably wasn’t a man out there that deserved her.
“I’ve never had one. Where I come from, they don’t really do commercial holidays, so this is all new to me.” She accepted the creamer with both hands, and her fingers skimmed his on the pass-off.
Soft hands.
He imagined them pressed against his chest, and her on his lap with that skirt hiked up …
He shuddered.
“Are you cold, too?” she asked, and cocked her head to the side in that charming way again.
He’d never paid much attention to women’s little tics and habits before now, but then he’d never really had to. Usually, the ones he met talked a damn blue streak and he could barely get a word in. With this one here, though, he felt like he was struggling to glean whatever he could about her. He didn’t usually work so hard. Didn’t want to work so hard.
“No, not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “Are you cold?” Shit, of course she was cold. She’d been out in the rain without a coat. “Here, wear this. I’ll turn the heat up.” He took off his flannel overshirt and draped it over her shoulders before taking brisk steps to the thermostat. When he returned to the kitchen, she had her hands wrapped around the mug and was staring at his paper-strewn counters.
“How do you find anything in here? How do you cook?”
“Easy.” He eased into the chair beside her and counted off on his fingers. “I don’t look, and I don’t cook.”
“That’s why you called the agency?”
“Yep. As of right now, the Schwan’s delivery guy keeps me fed, and I’d rather buy more clothes than do laundry.”
Her eyes went round.
Yep. He was that rich. Good-looking baseball players got endorsement deals. Simple truth. Well, his mama said he was good-looking, anyway. She might have been a lick biased.
Pretty boy or not, though, he was smart enough to know he wouldn’t stay rich if he kept living the way he did. His accountant had run the numbers. It would be cheaper to hire live-in help than to outsource everything. He’d expected the agency to send him a Mr. Belvedere or a Mrs. Garrett—some no-nonsense professional who wouldn’t agitate his dingbat of a wolf.
“Listen, I need to get organized. I don’t want to hear that fuckin’ yap-yap-yap from my accountant again this year. He doesn’t like it when I claim big deductions and don’t have the receipts to back ‘em up.”
“What else do you need help with?”
“Well, Julia, you tell me what you can do, and I’ll tell you if it needs to be done.”
She started itemizing things like “baking” and “gardening,” but really, he tuned out and just watched her lips move.
What he was really thinking was, Screw the interview, the only thing I want you to do is me.
She was ringing every one of his bells and pushing each of his buttons, and she hadn’t even had to flash a tit to do it.
He raked a hand through his uncombed hair and watched her stir yet another spoonful of sugar into her mug. She was taking her coffee the wrong way, and he thought that was the cutest thing he’d seen since the baby elephants at the zoo in Asheboro. His wolf wanted to curl around her and keep her safe from the world, and that was a problem.
His wolf had never asked—hey, how ‘bout that one?—before, and Calvin suspected even if he’d told the furry dingbat no, the wolf wouldn’t take that for an answer.
He blew out a breath. “Hey. Need to make a phone call. Be right back.” He backed toward the office, keeping his gaze locked on her.
She poured a little more creamer into her mug and looked up to nod at him. She looked good in his shirt … in his house.
He turned on his heel and tamped down the growl rumbling in his chest.
“Chill out, asshole,” he muttered under his breath, and he didn’t know if he was talking to the wolf sharing his psyche or himself.
Chapter Three
Julia was studying the backside of the dishwasher detergent bottle when Calvin’s prickling energy made the hairs of her neck stand on end. The same thing happened whenever one of her brothers was nearby and she hadn’t heard their approach.
Odd.
She rubbed her exposed skin and turned to meet his narrowed stare. She didn’t know the man as far as she could throw him, but already, she could tell that wasn’t a good look. She fixed her face into a grin and held up the detergent. “Where I come from, dishwashers are twelve-year-old girls, and not machines.”
“And where did you come from, exactly?” He leaned against the counter a few feet from her and crossed his arms over that broad chest.
His biceps bulged impressively when posed like that. They didn’t make ‘em like that where she came from, with the exception of John, but John obviously had help from an outside gene pool. She was starting to like the outside world.
Calvin’s long fingers drummed against the sides of his arms and she watched them, entranced. Big hands.
She’d started to become a bit woozy from the blood rushing to her head when he cleared his throat.
She drew in a breath and uncapped the detergent. “Um, an unincorporated community near Kofa, Arizona.”
“Good to know, but that wasn’t what I was asking. How did you end up here at my house? Called the agency to find out how much having you on the payroll would set me back, and they said they didn’t send you.”
Drat.
She didn’t dare look at him. She just squirted the dish goop into the little square receptacle and then screwed on the cap.
“Want to guess what they told me, Miss Liar Ingalls Wilder?”
She cringed, stabbed the button that said Power Wash, and pushed the dishwasher door shut. “I don’t need to guess.”
“I bet. So, what’s with the scheming? You trying to set me up for the okie-doke?”
“What in blue blazes does that even mean?” She nudged the under-sink cabinet door closed with her knee, and gathered up all the righteous indignation she could muster. She crossed her own arms over her chest and stuck her chin out. “I never explicitly said I was from the agency. That was your assumption.”
“And you didn’t disabuse me of the notion. That’s what my lawyer calls lying by omission.”
“Don’t you dare call me a liar! I may be a lot of things, but that’ll never be one of them.” She hated herself for letting her voice approach that stratospheric pitch, but her integrity was one of the few things she owned outright. What kind of succubus would she make if she couldn’t even tell a decent lie?
“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” He scoffed. “Or is it blo
omers? What do you have under that skirt, honey? I bet you’re wearing see-through mesh with bows at the sides.” He cocked his head to the side, and his grin went feral. “Or maybe a thong printed with little cartoon cacti.”
“You’ll never find out.” She turned her back to him, huffing, and picked up the dishrag. Sticky countertops. Dirty floors. How hard was it to clean up after himself? Was he raised by wolves or something? With that attitude, maybe he was.
“Pity. You know, if you just wanted an autograph, I could have given you that on the porch. You got me to open the door. So, congratulations.”
She tossed the rag in the sink and glowered at him. “Autograph? What would I do with your name on a piece of paper? Certainly, not even a … a … “
What had Charles called Claude a day ago when he’d eaten the last of the jerky?
She closed her eyes and searched her mental file cabinet for the word.
She snapped her fingers when she remembered it. “A douche!”
Calvin raised an eyebrow.
She pointed at him. “Not even a douche like you would be so pompous to think such a thing has value.”
He dropped his chin to his chest and stared at her through narrowed eyes, but his shoulders shook with laughter. “Are you kidding me? This some kind of candid camera program where you come in to get me all riled up and show the folks at home what a douche I am in private?” He scanned the corners of the room, ostensibly for the nonexistent camera.
“There are no cameras in here.”
“Oh, there are a couple, but that’s neither here nor there. If you don’t want an autograph, and you’re not from the media, then what do you want? Child support? I’m usually pretty careful, but there may have been a time or two when I was twenty-two and too drunk to remember the morning after.”
Now her jaw dropped. “We’ve never made love.”
“Made love, she says. La-di-dah.” He made a twirling motion with one hand. “How ‘bout sex? Have we had any of that?”
Her hands balled into tight fists on her lap, and she ground her teeth, counting away her anger. She wasn’t going to let this man enrage her. There must have been something redeemable about him besides his looks, or else he wouldn’t have come onto Charles’s radar screen as appropriate for her.