Without a speck of makeup on, aside from the mascara she’d applied this morning so people would know she really did have eyelashes—even if they were so pale one might be excused for thinking otherwise.
She swiped on some lipstick, knocked on the door and let herself in. “Hey,” she called out over the laughter and voices coming from near Max’s unfinished kitchen. “Sorry I’m so late. But I brought a couple bottles of red to make up for it. And some homemade guacamole and veggie-tray fixings.”
She strode in sight of the long table full of people and spotted her bestie, Jenny, first, sitting next to Jake. “Hey, girlie,” she said, then greeted the Damoths and Mary-Margaret, who headed the Village, and their hosts Max and Harper and Harper’s mom. But she stopped dead in full-out shock as her eyes met the velvety dark gaze of a golden-skinned, chiseled-faced man. Images of a younger face flashed across her mind’s screen with lightning speed even as the heat of remembered kisses, caresses, sizzled through her veins, and she blinked, certain she was seeing things.
But, no. Dear God. It wasn’t, shouldn’t be possible, but it really was Diego NoLastName, the rat bastard who’d landed her in a Bahamian jail cell back when she was younger and stupider—or at least stupidly naive—and the last person she’d ever expected to see again. Yet there he sat at Max and Harper’s table, all black hair, black eyes and dark stubble, looking muscular, vital and bigger than life.
Her brain began buzzing with the staticky sound of a radio dialed half a notch off its station, and her hand went lax. The reusable cloth bag she’d stuffed full of wine and party food dropped to the floor, then tipped on its side.
She barely noticed when its contents scattered in all directions.
* * *
HOLY SHIT. THE SCENE unfolding around him went into slo-mo, and Luc Bradshaw came half out of his chair along with every other person around the table. Everyone seemed to be exclaiming and generally making a commotion in their desire to help the long-legged woman who’d stooped to gather the bottles of wine and plastic containers that rolled and skittered across the floor.
To him it was muffled white noise. He stared down at her bent head and unconsciously rubbed his diaphragm over the lower lobe of his left lung. When had all the air in here turned the consistency of Jell-O?
Jesus. It was Tasha.
Like he hadn’t known that the instant she’d blown into the room. Still, how many times this week had Jenny, his newly discovered half brother Jake’s fiancée, mentioned her BFF Tasha? His damn heart had seized a little every time he’d heard the name, even knowing Jenny was talking about someone other than the Tasha he’d known. It wasn’t until maybe two hours ago that he’d finally reached the point where it didn’t start up a chain reaction in his chest. So you’d have to excuse the hell out of him if for a second there he’d actually believed he was imagining things. Because what were the odds?
Damn good, it turned out. For this was his Tasha. Of all the women in his past he would have been perfectly content to see disappear without a trace, she had never been among their ranks.
He watched her vivid blue tank top beneath the cropped hem of a little sweater pull free from her shorts’ waistband, exposing a slice of pale satiny skin as, sitting on her heels, she stretched to grab one of the runaway bottles. Then he gave her a comprehensive survey from head to toe, concentrating for a moment on her round rump. She was quite a bit more...womanly now than the barely legal girl he remembered.
He swallowed a snort. Well, big surprise; it had been seven years since he’d seen her. So, yeah, she had a little more curve to her. But she still had no hips, and by no stretch of the imagination would anyone call her voluptuous.
Those riotous curls of hers were different, too: more sleekly defined than he recalled. But her long-lidded pale blue-gray eyes and that pillowy mouth with its fuller upper lip hadn’t changed a bit.
So screw the minor differences. She could have grown a mustache, sprouted a hairy mole and packed fifty pounds on her long frame, and he would still know her anywhere. He hadn’t the slightest doubt in his mind that this was the girl he’d spent two days and one memorable night with in the Bahamas.
“Tash!” Jenny moved to squat alongside the tall strawberry blonde, and it was as if the speed and sound of a movie had been switched back on. “Are you okay?”
Strawberry blond. He’d discovered after his night with her that that was what people called the pale red-gold color of her hair. Staring at her, he felt his entire face light up with a delighted smile.
It died an abrupt death when she suddenly raised her gaze and looked straight at him. His entire body recoiled as if a fireball were hurtling straight toward his head, and he dropped back into his seat. Because those eyes, that expression.
If looks could kill, he’d be sliced and diced into tiny bite-sized bits of steak tartare. What the fuck?
She glanced back at Jenny and apparently didn’t level that scary look on her as well, because there was no recoiling on Jenny’s part.
“No,” Tasha said in answer to the are you okay? question as she handed the little brunette first one wine bottle, then another. She must have gathered the rest of the containers as well, for she rose to her feet and extended the cloth sack to Gina, an elegant, slightly darker version of her daughter, Harper, who was Luc’s other half brother Max’s woman.
Christ. All these relationships were making his head hurt.
“I’m so sorry,” Tasha said as the older woman accepted the bag. “I hate the thought of both you going back to Winston-Salem and me missing your party, but I don’t feel so hot.”
“Yes, you look quite pale, dear,” Gina agreed, reaching out to give Tasha’s forearm a soothing rub. “You go home and go to bed. Hopefully you can sleep off whatever this bug is.”
“It’s not the flu, but bug sure seems like an appropriate word for it.” Tasha shot him another lightning-fast malevolent glare, then said a touch grimly to the older woman, “I suddenly feel like a hairy, nasty spider is crawling up my spine. I haven’t felt this awful in almost a decade, and what I’d like to do is shoot the bastard between his beady little eyes.”
Twisting to set the wine on the table, Jenny narrowed a thoughtful gaze on Luc, then turned back to study Tasha for a second. “Poor baby. You want me to drive you home? Jake can bring your car back in the morning.”
Luc watched a look perilously close to panic flash across Tasha’s face. Or maybe he only thought that was what he’d seen, because when he blinked, she appeared perfectly calm.
Tasha patted Jenny’s hand. “No, I’m fine to drive. I’ve just been burning my candle at both ends since tourist season started, and I guess it’s finally caught up with me. I desperately need some sleep.”
“Good thing you’ve got an extra helper in the works,” Jenny said.
An edgy laugh escaped Tasha. “Ah, yeah, about that. It turns out that’s not going to happen.” She suddenly seemed ready to wilt as she shoveled long, pale fingers through her hair. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” She looked away from the little brunette to the rest of the company gathered around the table.
Well, except for him. Now that she’d finished eviscerating him with her death-ray stare, she evidently had no desire to even glance his way again.
“I’m sorry for the drama,” she said to the group at large, then focused her attention on Gina once more, bestowing on her the sweet, generous smile that had been branded on Luc’s brain for seven long years. “Have a safe journey home,” she said, giving the other woman a hug. When she pulled back, she gazed at Gina with warm-eyed affection. “I’ve just loved getting to know you. I really hope you’ll come back soon.”
“Oh, I intend to, darling,” Gina said. “My favorite daughter lives here now.”
“Uh, Mom?” Harper said dryly. “I’m your only daughter.”
Gina gave an elegant shrug. “But you’re still my one and only Baby Girl.”
Harper’s olive-green irises all but disappeared beh
ind the lashes-fringed crescents her eyes became as she grinned. “That’s true.”
Tasha exchanged a few more pleasantries with the guests. Then between one moment and the next, she’d said her goodbyes, strode out through the kitchen and was gone.
Luc pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “Okay if I grab myself a beer?” he asked Max.
“Help yourself,” his half brother invited even as Harper said, “Here, let me get it for you” and started to rise to her feet.
No! his mind snarled. But he hadn’t spent more than a decade in deep cover for the DEA for nothing. He flashed her the friendly charmer’s smile that years of practice had rendered second nature and merely said, “Please, Harper, you don’t need to wait on me.”
“Yeah, Harper,” Jake said. “He’s family. Which means he can do the dishes, too.”
“Or at least fetch my own drink. Anyone else want anything while I’m in there?”
No takers chimed in, and he left the room with an unhurried stride that nevertheless ate up the distance between the table and the back door. Silently letting himself out, he spotted Tasha heading toward the end of the attached garage, with the obvious intention of making a beeline for the parking apron around front. Clouds the color of a day-old bruise hung low in the sky, but for the moment at least, it was dry, and ignoring the few back steps, he dropped directly to the lawn, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.
He could move fast and silent as ground fog when the need arose, and he came up on Tasha’s flank just as she rounded the end of the garage. He moved into its shadow one step behind her and reached out, his fingertips brushing her arm. “Hey, Tasha, wait—”
With a gasp, she whipped around. Wild panic flared in her clear gray eyes, and watching her suck in a breath and open her lips, Luc knew she was about one second away from screaming down the house. Snaking a hand around her nape, he clamped his free palm over her mouth to keep her from cutting loose with a screech that would bring everyone inside stampeding to her rescue.
Not that there was anything she needed rescuing from—Jesus, he would never hurt her. All the same, he really didn’t want his deputy sheriff half brother thundering down on him. He didn’t doubt for an instant that if Max heard a woman scream, he would be out here in a red-hot hurry, his big-ass service pistol drawn.
“I’m sorry,” he said in the most soothing, nonthreatening voice he could summon. Her lips were soft and her skin warm beneath his hands.
He shoved the tactile sensations into a far corner of his mind where they could just wait to be examined when his concentration wasn’t demanded elsewhere. “I didn’t mean to scare you—I just want to talk to you for a minute. I’m going to let go of you now, okay?”
He obviously didn’t follow through with the promised action quickly enough to suit her, for she narrowed her eyes at him as if to say, Then get on with it! Wondering if they’d be right back where they started, he gave her a hard-eyed stare back. “And you won’t scream, either, am I right?” It was a command, not a question, and he stared into those crystalline eyes without blinking.
She hesitated a second, then dipped her chin in a slight nod.
Slowly, he released his light grip on the back of her neck and lifted his hand from her mouth.
Tasha promptly knocked his hand aside and scrubbed the back of hers over her lips as if they’d come into contact with hazardous waste. Pushing past him, she marched back into the rear yard before turning to face him. “If you want to talk to me, you can damn well do it out here, where people can see us,” she said.
He nodded. But what the hell—why was she so mad? He wasn’t the one who—
Being on the business end of another of her eat-shit-and-die glares chopped the thought in two, and he was still regrouping when she demanded, “So who are you pretending to be today, Diego?”
He kept his wince strictly internal, but...hell. She had him on the ropes with that one, since he could hardly say he hadn’t been pretending to be someone else when they’d met. So he simply gave her a level look and said calmly, “My real name is Luc Bradshaw. I’m Max and Jake’s half brother—”
“Oh, please,” she said in disgust.
He blinked, baffled by her. “What do you mean, oh, please? At least give Max some credit. Don’t you think he had me thoroughly checked out?”
She made a rude noise, and his brows came together. “I’m not sure what your problem is. All you have to do is look at the three of us together—the general consensus here seems to be that there’s a strong family resemblance. So why would you doubt that I’m—”
She got all up in his grill—and it didn’t say much for him that he found it kinda hot. “Look,” she said, eyes narrowed to burning slits and her long, narrow nose mere centimeters from his own. “I don’t know who you are, buddy, or what your game is. But you stay the hell away from me, you hear? How dare you come here impersonating Jake and Max’s brother?” She poked him in the chest—but before he could grab her finger, she dropped her hand to her side and took a large step back.
“Tell you what,” she said with a calmness that didn’t match those eyes. “I’m feeling pretty generous, so if you pack your bags and get out of town—tonight—I’ll let bygones be bygones.” She gave him the slitty-eye-of-death look again and said, “If you’re smart, you’ll take that offer and go, because it runs counter to everything my gut’s telling me to do.”
Trying to reconcile this woman with the sweet, laughing girl he remembered—and failing miserably—he shook his head. “Say what?”
“You have trouble understanding English, Diego?”
Apparently so, because he didn’t have the first idea what she was talking about. Rather than telling her that, however, and demanding to know what her problem was and exactly what it was she thought she knew, he instead heard himself say, “My name is not Diego. I know I told you it was, but I was undercover with the DEA at the time, and my continuing good health precluded telling anyone my true identity. But I am Luc Bradshaw, son of Charlie Bradshaw. Half brother to Max and Jake.”
“Oh, good, you stick to that story. In fact, I really hope you do. Because if you’re still around tomorrow, I’ll enjoy nothing more than going to Max and telling him you’re nothing but a lousy drug dealer named Diego Who-the-hell-knows-what. And then, Dee-A-Go, he will haul your skeevy butt off to jail.”
He froze. He’d spent most of their short time together mining for every piece of her story he could get—while keeping his own to himself. He hadn’t told her much more than that he was on vacation and didn’t want to spend it talking about work. The one time she’d pushed for details, he’d turned on the charm and steered the subject in another direction. So how the hell had she tumbled to his cover story?
He didn’t have time to figure it out before she stepped back and shook that pretty cloud of hair behind her shoulders. “And if that happens,” she said in a voice edged in tungsten, “trust me, I’ll have only one regret.”
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he stared down at her. Taking in the flushed cheeks and electric eyes, he thought it was a damn shame that he was still so attracted to such an obvious head case.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “What would that regret be?”
“That unlike the tiny hundred-and-two-degree black hole of a Bahamian jail cell where I spent the two most terrifying nights of my life, thanks to you,” she said flatly, “American jails are probably downright plush.”
Then, before he could ask so much as one question, she whirled on sandaled feet and stalked back into the murky shadows thrown by the side of the garage.
Leaving him wondering what the hell had happened the night they’d spent together.
CHAPTER TWO
“TASHA RENEE RIORDAN, you’ve been keeping secrets from me. When the hell did you get the chance to meet Luc Bradshaw and why do you dislike him so much?”
Tasha stared at her friend openmouthed. She had barely opened her door to Jenny’s knock bef
ore the question knocked her back a step as if it were an honest-to-God battering ram catching her squarely in the chest. Jenny crossed the threshold at the same time that Tasha remembered to breathe. And breathing was good, if a bit tricky around the ragged rhythm her heart was banging out. But she tried her best to sound calm and collected when she said, “What? I met him yesterday. You were right there, Jen.”
“Don’t kid a kidder, sweetie. You looked at him as if you knew him. So when on earth? I didn’t think you’d come up for air long enough to leave Bella T’s.”
She tried to keep it to herself; she really did. But this was Jenny, to whom she told everything, and she simply caved. “I met him seven years ago.” She shoveled her fingers through her hair and stared at her friend. “It knocked me for a loop when I walked into Max’s last night and saw that Max and Jake’s so-called brother is the Diego I told you about from my Bahamas trip.” Admitting it out loud was both scary and a relief. There was no taking it back now, but neither was it a secret any longer, pooling its corrosive acid in her stomach.
Assuming more importance than it should warrant.
Jenny’s face promptly went serious, showing why she was Tasha’s best friend. “Oh, crap, Tash. How is that possible? And yet...you were too...not you, with all that bug stuff and shooting it between the eyes and the I-hope-you-die-from-a-raging-case-of-herpes looks you gave him.”
“Oh, God.” They reached the breakfast bar dividing the small galley kitchen from the body of her living area just as her leg muscles turned to pudding. She sagged onto one of the stools and stared at her best friend as the petite brunette climbed onto the stool next to her. “It shocked the hell out of me to see him sitting there cool as you please at Max’s table. But...dammit, Jenny. I hate that I was so obvious.”
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