She hunted through the pile of papers on her desk until she found his new business card with the office number on it. She dialed, tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for him to pick up. When he finally did, she heard the unexpected sound of a guitar accompanying Tommy’s unmistakable, sexy voice. If she hadn’t been quite so furious, that might have silenced her.
Instead she said in a slow, measured voice, “Get home now, Luke Cassidy, or I won’t be responsible for what you find when you get here.”
Before he could say one way or the other whether he would come, she slammed the phone back into its cradle.
* * *
Luke winced as the sound of the crashing phone reverberated in his ear. Tommy must have caught his reaction, because he stopped strumming his guitar and regarded Luke worriedly.
“Everything okay?”
“Katie seems anxious to see me at home,” he said in what had to be the most massive understatement he’d ever uttered. He’d never heard that particular tone of command in her voice before. He found it exhilarating...and perhaps just the slightest bit worrisome.
Tommy grinned. “Well, well, things must be heating up.”
“You could say that,” Luke said dryly. “Look, I’d better run. We’ll talk more about this music career you want later. Give me a call tonight.”
Tommy’s knowing smile broadened. “Maybe I’ll wait till morning, big brother. Your mood should be real mellow by then.”
Luke decided to let him have his illusions. One of them might as well get some pleasure from anticipating the evening’s prospects. He, unfortunately, knew better than to expect that a welcome mat was being tossed down for him.
As he walked home, he realized his timing in writing that memo to the boarding house residents might have been just a little off. Katie was putting a lot of energy into this campaign to salvage his relationship with his brother and to stave off a court battle for custody of Robby. She hadn’t yet adapted to being married, though she seemed to be getting into the spirit of being a mother. She definitely wasn’t quite ready to adjust to the idea that now she had someone to look out for her best interests.
Nor had she accepted that their bargain gave him some measure of control over the operation of the boarding house. Luke was willing to admit that maybe he’d been a little heavy-handed about trying to take over the financial end of things. But Katie needed to learn that she couldn’t keep letting the boarding house residents pay her if and when they got around to it. He had to stop all the other ways the boarders took advantage of her as well.
Yes, indeed, he knew in his gut that he’d made the right decision in drawing up those rules. His biggest mistake had probably been talking to the tenants directly and posting the notices before mentioning them to Katie. He already knew how testy she could get about anyone trying to usurp her power around the place. She hadn’t exactly welcomed his past efforts.
He found her waiting for him on the front porch, a glass of lemonade in hand that was probably only slightly more sour than her apparent mood. She did not smile when she saw him. She continued to push herself lazily back and forth in the swing as if she were trying to stir up a breeze. Her hair had been scooped up and tied with a scarf. She was wearing an old pair of cutoff jeans and a tank top. Her feet were bare. She hadn’t even bothered with lipstick. She looked...entrancing.
And very, very angry, he decided with some dismay, but no surprise.
Sucking in a deep breath, Luke brazenly plunked himself into the swing next to her. She was apparently too tired to protest or to move.
“Just how mad are you?” he asked eventually.
“Mad enough.”
He decided to go straight to the heart of the situation. “Do you want out of our deal?” he asked. Even as the words came out of his mouth, he realized that that thought had been behind his precipitous actions. In some weird way, he’d been testing her, hoping to discover if she would choose him over the boarding house.
His blunt question drew a startled look. “Do you?”
“No,” he admitted, though he was unwilling to elaborate on just what he did want. He wasn’t even sure he could put it into words or, more precisely, that he was willing to.
Katie sighed. “Neither do I.” She was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke up, she surprised him by saying, “It’s not the way I imagined it would be.”
“What?”
“Marriage.”
“In general or to me?” It was the first time he’d even considered the possibility that she had ever cared for him enough to marry him for all the traditional reasons, rather than the trumped up business deal they’d settled for instead.
“Both, I suppose.”
“That’s because we’re not sleeping together,” he suggested, seizing the most obvious explanation he could think of—and the most convenient, given his own increasingly demanding goal. He would have seduced her right here, right now, if he weren’t certain he’d get a fist in his solar plexus for his efforts.
Katie shook her head. Something in her eyes told him she pitied him.
“You really don’t have a clue, do you?” she asked.
“About what?”
She sighed again. “Never mind.”
Luke dared for the first time to touch the strand of hair that had escaped from her saucy ponytail. He brushed it back from her cheek, his knuckles skimming along skin that felt like satin. A thousand memories stole through him, a thousand sensations from the one night they had made love so long ago.
Was it possible that those were the memories that had drawn him back to Clover? Was it the promised joy of loving Katie that had lured him home, rather than the practical need to solve some legal dilemma that had turned his life upside down? Tommy certainly seemed to think so. He’d even begun to suspect it himself. But how would he ever know for sure? And would it even matter, if he could figure it out?
* * *
What had happened to her life? Katie wondered with a sense of desperation as she struggled to ignore the sensations Luke’s casual, but persistent touch was stirring inside her. A few months ago, she had been leading a quiet, peaceful existence. She had successfully—well, almost successfully—driven Luke Cassidy from her mind. She was operating a business she loved, surrounded by people she cared about. Life hadn’t been perfect, but she’d been content.
She hadn’t even minded so very much that it seemed she was destined to be always a bridesmaid, but never a bride. All those couples—Hannah and Matthew, Emma and Michael, Sophie and Ford and especially Lucy and Max—were family. There would be lots of babies for her to love. Lots of people were not nearly so blessed.
Now her entire household was in an uproar because of the endless regulations Luke had instituted. And on Friday Henrietta Myers would be moving in, which gave Katie plenty to complain about herself.
Where was she supposed to put Luke? She knew perfectly well that he intended to make himself at home in her room. She also knew that her resistance was just about taxed to the limit as it was. If the man climbed into her bed, if he so much as brushed against her during the night, she didn’t have a prayer of staying out of his arms. There was so much heat between them lately, if they were caught in the rain these days they would send up steam.
It seemed to her that that risk was far more dangerous than the prospect of losing her current boarders. She could find new boarders, if she had to. Ginger, Mr. O’Reilly and the others could find adequate accommodations elsewhere, if necessary. But she absolutely could not live with the consequences of making love with Luke knowing that he wasn’t in love with her, knowing that she was merely convenient, rather than the grand passion of his life as he was of hers.
If she was going to take charge of her life again, if she was going to protect herself and her boarders, then she had no choice. She had to remind Luke that this arrangement they had did not include his bullying tactics. Besides, if things worked out with Robby’s custody, for all she knew he would take off.
The disruptions would have been pointless, because she would never enforce them on her own.
When she could delay it no longer, she turned to face him. “I don’t like what you’re doing around here,” she said bluntly, waving the sheet of canary yellow paper under his nose.
Luke stiffened. His hand fell away from her shoulder as if he’d been scalded. The faint teasing glint in his eyes faded as his expression immediately turned somber.
“I know I should have talked to you first,” he admitted. “But I know how you are. You would have tried to talk me out of those rules.”
“Damn right, I would have. The disruptions around here have gotten out of hand,” she said, perversely wishing she could tease his lips back into a smile. She barely resisted the temptation to try, to run the tip of her finger along the velvet skin of his lower lip to encourage it into an upward curve. Touching him right now would be a very bad idea. Very bad.
“Our deal put me in charge of the financial end of running the boarding house,” he reminded her.
“It put me in charge of dealing with the tenants,” she retorted. “As it is, Ginger’s terrified you’re going to evict her. Where would she get an idea like that?”
“I had a talk with her,” he admitted. “I thought she should understand that we’re running a business. I hope you didn’t undermine the message I was trying to get across.”
Katie scowled at him. “I’m sure that’s how you would see it. I told her we would never evict her.”
“She’s never paid one cent of rent,” Luke pointed out in that calm, reasonable way that made Katie want to grind her teeth. “I went back over the books for all the months she’s been here.”
“She’s seventeen years old. It’s more important that she stay off the streets of some big city and finish school. Besides, she helps me out around here.”
Luke shot her a look of total disbelief. “Doing what?”
Katie had to be quick on her feet to answer that one, especially since Ginger hadn’t even been around since she had gone to work at the diner. “She changes the beds, helps with the laundry, straightens up, vacuums, those kinds of things,” she said, blithely ignoring the fact that Ginger probably didn’t even have a clue where the cleaning supplies were kept.
“If she does all that, why do I see you changing sheets, doing tub after tub of laundry and shoving a vacuum around?”
Katie winced. “I said she helps. I didn’t say she did everything. If I paid her a wage, it would more than make up for what she would have to pay for the room. I’m coming out ahead on the deal.”
“Then let’s make her a part-time employee,” Luke countered. “That way she’ll have very specific responsibilities and she’ll be able to pay her own way.”
“What good does it do to give her money and have her give it right back to us? That’s just a bunch of paperwork.”
“It’ll teach her responsibility,” Luke insisted.
Katie tried to make him see reason. “She doesn’t need to feel responsible,” she said impatiently. “She needs to feel like she’s part of a family.”
That silenced him.
Taking advantage of that, Katie plunged on. “Now about Mr. O’Reilly. You talked to him, too, didn’t you? You didn’t just hand him that piece of paper.”
“We had a chat over coffee this morning, yes.”
“A chat? Is that what you call it when you declare that the kitchen is off-limits between meals?”
“But...”
Katie ignored him. “How much can an occasional midnight snack cost? Besides, it—”
“Let me guess,” Luke said resignedly. “It makes him feel like he’s part of a family.”
Katie beamed at him. Maybe he was catching on, after all. “Exactly,” she said, pleased.
He studied her intently. “Do you know what would make me feel like part of a family?”
There was something in his voice that set Katie’s senses on fire. Her gaze locked with his. The intensity burning between them made her tremble. “What?”
“Sharing your bed.”
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. “Oh, no...” she began in a choked voice. The rest of the protest died on her lips when he pressed a silencing finger against them.
As if he sensed she was weakening, he coaxed, “I’m your husband. That’s where I belong. You wouldn’t want me to feel like an outsider in my own home, would you?”
“No, but...”
He lowered his head until his lips hovered over hers, so close his minty breath fanned her hot skin and his purely masculine scent surrounded her. Katie’s breath snagged in her throat. When his mouth finally settled on hers, the whole world tilted on its axis. Suddenly it was impossible to recall what they were arguing about, impossible to think of anything except the indescribable way she felt when Luke touched her.
“Not fair,” she murmured eventually. Her arms seemed to have twined themselves around his neck of their own free will. She couldn’t find the resolve to remove them.
“I don’t recall any mention of fair in the wedding vows,” Luke said, a surprising twinkle appearing in his eyes. That spark chased away the last of the shadows. “I do seem to recall an expression that all’s fair in love and war.”
His expression suddenly sobered. “I want a real marriage, Katie, in every way.”
Love? A real marriage? Her heart pounded ecstatically. Katie studied Luke’s face to see if he realized what he’d said. Or was it one more example of words slipping out with no substance behind them? Just a convenient ploy to lure her into his bed?
Then, again, could it possibly be true that he loved her half as much as she loved him? His enigmatic expression told her nothing. Maybe this was something she was going to have to take on faith. Maybe it required a giant-size risk. She was already in this relationship up to her neck, anyway.
“You can move into our room on Friday, when Mrs. Myers gets here.”
“Tonight,” he argued, evidently not satisfied with the hard-won victory. He sprinkled more persuasive kisses across her brow and onto her cheeks.
“You’re pushing it, Cassidy,” she said without much oomph behind the protest.
“I’m desperate,” he admitted in a way that gave her goose bumps. “Besides, how else will I know you’re not just letting me in because my room is rented?”
His kisses deepened, leaving Katie breathless, her senses reeling.
“Tonight,” she agreed eventually, because if anything, she wanted him in her bed even more desperately than he wanted to be there. Fighting it any longer seemed likely to be an exercise in futility.
“Tonight,” she repeated in a whisper that only hinted at the deep, unspoken yearning in her heart. It would either be the best decision she had ever made...or the worst.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There were too damned many people living in the boarding house, Luke decided about nine o’clock. He and Katie were still surrounded by boarders, to say nothing of his son who was too excited about finally living in his new home “for real” to go off to bed. If Luke hadn’t recognized that it would be opening yet another major can of worms, he would have ordered every one of them back to the Clover Street Hotel so he and Katie could have some privacy.
It was another nerve-racking hour before they all finally began drifting off to their own rooms. Alone with Katie at last, Luke met her gaze and saw a riot of emotions burning in the emerald depths of her eyes. He was sure his own eyes mirrored that same sort of turbulence. He’d been aching for her ever since she’d agreed to let him move into their room that night. Longer, actually. He could trace this hunger back to the first day he’d seen her after his return to Clover.
“Ready?” he asked, holding out his hand.
Gazing at him solemnly, she stood and came slowly toward him. He couldn’t miss her nervous, hard swallow, or the faint trembling as she placed her hand in his.
“Scared?” he asked, surprised.
“Of you?” she said. “Neve
r.”
He found the touch of defiance in her voice amusing. “Of us, then?”
She struggled visibly with her answer before admitting what he could already read in her eyes. “A little. It’s been a long time, Luke.”
“Too long,” he agreed softly, his gaze locked with hers. “Far too long.” He felt a smile tugging at his lips. “For the first time, I actually feel like a newlywed.” Because he wanted her to understand that he was referring not just to their recent wedding, but to the past, he added, “For the first time ever.”
Color bloomed in Katie’s cheeks. “Me, too,” she said with a touching shyness.
Suddenly he couldn’t bear to wait a moment longer. He scooped her into his arms and headed for the stairs.
“Luke, what on earth are you doing?” she demanded, laughing.
“It’s tradition,” he reminded her.
“But you’ve already carried me across the threshold once.”
“That was for show,” he said. “This time it’s just the two of us. Tonight’s the night our marriage really begins.”
With a soft little sigh, Katie settled against his chest. An emotion more powerful than anything he’d ever experienced rushed through him. Tenderness, yearning and something that even his jaded heart recognized as love filled him.
Oh, he knew there were doubts to overcome, hers and his. He knew there were obstacles in their path, not the least of which was the impending custody battle. But suddenly, with every fiber of his being, he recognized that this was where he wanted to be, where he belonged.
And the woman in his arms was the only one he would ever love. Years ago he’d fallen in love with a girl. Today Katie was all grown up, a woman of strength and beauty and generosity. Those qualities had always been there, but they’d matured.
Today Caitlyn Jones Cassidy was a spirited force to be reckoned with. And she was his, legally anyway...as long as he didn’t do something stupid and blow it. Tonight was his chance to cement their relationship. Otherwise he feared that when Robby’s custody was finally settled, when she had lived up to that part of their bargain, Katie could very well walk away. He knew that if she did his life would never be the same.
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