Tempting as Sin

by Rosalind James

  “Oh, no,” Lily said. “No. I own Sinful Desires, the shop in town.”

  “The porno store?” Ruby sat up a little straighter. “You’re kidding.”

  “I told you so,” Bailey muttered from where she was standing beside Rafe.

  “It’s not a porno store, actually,” Lily said, holding onto her composure. “Nothing so exciting. It’s a lingerie shop. We specialize in bra fittings, things like that.”

  Ruby said, “Huh. I went to school with Hailey Daniels. Hailey Robinson, now. She was always a little out there. Always reading, and she had weird friends. Who knows where that led her. Kind of like Bailey.”

  “Oh,” Lily said, “I wouldn’t say that Hailey’s out there. I know I couldn’t run the shop without her. And I’ve already noticed that Bailey has a curious mind. That’s a good thing, surely.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ruby said, “maybe so and maybe not. Didn’t help her mom all that much. Curious’d herself right into prison, and right into every drug there is, too, her whole damn life. Curious’d herself right up to every loser guy she ever met. Curious’d her so much, it finally killed her.”

  You could call it a startling remark. Beside Rafe, Bailey had gone still, but Ruby didn’t seem to notice. She just took another squinty-eyed look at Rafe. He should practice that look in the mirror. Very Western-sheriff. She went on, once she’d given him the message, “A little less curious and a little more minding your own business, that’s what I say. I mind my own business, and that’s what Bailey ought to be doing.”

  Rafe would guess that Lily was biting her tongue hard. He knew he was, and he didn’t even know the “out-there” Hailey Robinson, matriarch of the porno store.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter,” Lily said, standing up. Ruby just nodded, but something flickered in her eyes, and Rafe realized the bravado was partially a front. Lily would have seen that, too. She said, “We won’t keep you from your program anymore. I hope you’ll let Bailey visit. If you want to come up and check out my place, that’s fine, too, of course. Any time you want to drop by.”

  “Of course she can visit,” Ruby said. “Why shouldn’t she? Just kick her out if she bugs you. She talks a lot, but other than that, she’s a good kid.”

  Lily said, “All right, then. Thank you.” She stood up and turned to go, and Rafe thought, finally. Real life was one thing. This was something else. “Oh,” Lily said, turning back. “I almost forgot. Do you mind if Bailey rides her bike with me to Walmart?”

  Ruby had already turned her show up. Now, she lowered the volume and said, “What?”

  “We were going to ride our bikes to get dog food,” Lily said. “Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” Ruby said. “I don’t care.”

  It was a ways out to Walmart, all the way to the edge of town. Lily was glad for the time.

  She’d had her moments, growing up, of feeling sorry for herself. She’d been crazy.

  This must be the kind of thing Paige dealt with every day. Lives this marginal, and kids who’d never known anything else. She wanted to…hit somebody. She wondered how Paige kept from doing it.

  Right on cue, her phone rang. And because she could walk and chew gum at the same time these days, she pulled it out of her pocket and answered it. “Hey, sweetie. I was just thinking about you.”

  “Uh-oh,” Paige said. “Did Rafe show up? Jace just told me he was heading up there ahead of schedule. Casually. I said you might have wanted some notice, and he said, ‘They seemed fine with each other in Aussie, at least towards the end.’ He’s an idiot.”

  “Oh, no,” Lily said. “It’s fine. Yes, he showed up, and that’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine?”

  “I don’t know,” Paige said. “You tell me.”

  “Can’t talk now,” Lily said. “I’m riding my bike.”

  “Are you kidding? Hang up. You have no idea how dangerous that is.”

  Lily laughed, shoved the phone back in her overalls pocket, and thought, I was more than crazy. I was delusional. She hadn’t just had parents. She’d had a twin.

  Plus, when Rafe had passed her and Bailey five minutes earlier, Chuck had still been barking.

  She’d bet Rafe’s retreat, or whatever he called it, wasn’t going one bit the way he’d planned. She’d never been big on revenge before, but she found she could get on board with this.

  Rafe said, “Good news. I think my ears have stopped ringing.” He and Lily each had a shopping cart. He tried to remember when he’d last been in this kind of store, and couldn’t. And he wasn’t minding a bit.

  Bailey was sitting in the car with Chuck. In the shade, with the windows open halfway. “He’s scared,” the girl had said. “He might try to break out or something.” That gave Rafe a few minutes with Lily. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with them, but he’d think of something.

  Just now, he was telling her, when she would have lugged a forty-pound bag of dog food into her cart, “Why do you think I’m here? Stop that.” He lifted it into his own cart, then said, “I’m getting another one for my place,” and did it. “In case you’re not home.”

  “Put them in my cart,” she said. “I’m paying for this.”

  “Do me a favor. Chuck’s a shared dog. That means we share this.”

  “Shared between Bailey and me.”

  “Not what you told Ruby.”

  “Well, I had to say something about why you were with us, and that was all I could come up with.”

  “Oh? Not a shared dog after all, then? You don’t want me to come get Chuck tomorrow morning so you can get to the porno store? And I see that smile. What are we looking for?”

  “Harness,” she said, going through items on a rack like a personal shopper in a department store. “Instead of a collar for now. His neck’s still raw. He must have been tied with a rope, poor baby. Plus, if he doesn’t know about riding in a car, I’m betting he doesn’t know about walking on a leash. This will help train him not to pull. And I can’t believe that’s what people call my beautiful shop.”

  “Another reason,” Rafe said, “that I should come get him. He wouldn’t want to get into your car, and I’d be taking him on leash walks every day. I’m very good with animals. Comes of being half animal myself. Oh, wait. That’s not actually me.” He sorted through leashes as he talked. He might not know everything about dogs, but he could do this. Leather, he reckoned. Leather was always better.

  Lily put the harness in her cart and said, “As soon as he starts pulling, you stop walking. And that leash is fine, but I’m buying it. Put it in my cart. Also, you’ve lost Clay again. I’m just saying.”

  “Oh.” He switched accents. “Nope. If we’re sharing, we’re sharing.” He didn’t think that I’ll be happier if you’ll let me buy this for you was going to work, even though it was the truth, and never mind why. “As for the accent, it must be being with you here after being in Aussie with you. It doesn’t normally happen.” Actually, it never happened. Staying in character was his job. Why did he keep reverting to…himself?

  “You’re wondering why I’m being friendlier with you than I was back in Australia,” she said. “Not to mention back in Jace’s houseboat. And in the car. Oh, man. None of that has been easy to think about. I’ve never been that harsh in my life, and seeing you again in Australia after I’d done it was nerve-wracking.” She’d grabbed two steel dog dishes and a plastic mat, and he took them from her, threw them into his cart, and raised his eyebrows at her when she sighed.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I was wondering that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good with the change.” You could say that. She pulled him like he was magnetized, and he didn’t mind that, either.

  She asked, “Can you reach me down that dog bed up there? The pale-green one with the walls? Extra large. I have a feeling Chuck is going to be a monster. And here I wanted an elegant dog. Man plans, God laughs.”

  “You realize,” he said as he obliged, putting this one into her cart, because he didn’
t have room, “that you’re setting yourself up to get hurt here with all of this. There’s Chuck, and then there’s Bailey. That’s a sad story all the way. Danger, heartbreak dead ahead. Do you always fall this hard?”

  He met her gaze and forgot what he’d been doing, because she’d gone still. “Hang on,” he said. “That wasn’t a criticism. You have me worried, that’s all.”

  “Worried.”

  He’d swear that he could feel the warmth from her body, even though the air conditioning was set to arctic levels. “Yeah.”

  “About me.”

  “That would be the one.”

  “You don’t have to worry. Nobody has to worry.” She wheeled her cart around and said, “Since we’re here, you should buy groceries. Save yourself a trip.”

  He wanted to take her arm. He couldn’t. “Lily.”

  She stopped, turned, and said, “OK. First—if caring about Bailey and Chuck is setting myself up to get hurt, what’s the alternative? Never caring again, never trying to help, because you can’t help enough, and it hurts too much when you lose that person? That’s the price of living. Or at least it’s the price of caring, and I’ll pay it. If I hurt, I hurt. I can be impulsive. Sure I can. I can follow my heart too hard. I’m tired of apologizing for that. It’s nobody’s problem but mine, and so what anyway? I’ve hurt before, and I’m still standing. I’m right here, and I’m asking for nothing. It’s about Bailey and Chuck, not me, and anyway—I’m nobody’s victim. I’m a survivor.”

  She took his breath. She knocked him back. She was fierce, and she was beautiful. “All right,” he said, once he could say anything. It wasn’t what he wanted to say. That was more along the lines of, You shouldn’t be hurt. That’s nothing but wrong. Exactly the thing he couldn’t say, though, so he didn’t.

  An older lady said, “Excuse me,” her gaze darting between him and Lily, and he moved his cart to the side and was glad he hadn’t taken off the sunglasses, even though they were bloody inconvenient indoors.

  Lily moved her cart, too, but then she focused on him again. “And as far as you and me,” she said, “you’ll be Paige’s brother-in-law in December, and Paige is my twin. We’re going to see each other, and if I can make that less awkward, I need to do it. And maybe I realized that I overreacted, too. We went out, we had fun, you kissed me hard, and you’re really good at it. So what? You’ve kissed hundreds of women.”

  Another shopper, a bloke this time with a kid in the cart, walked by as she said it. His head swiveled. And then he crashed his cart into a battery display.

  Lily was still talking. “I know it doesn’t mean anything. Just because I was at a…certain place in my life, that isn’t on you. And, yes, you used an alias in every way. People do that kind of thing all the time, too. I wasn’t careful enough, but that’s on me, too. Maybe there’s one way I do need not to follow my heart so much. Maybe I need to not be a woman who gets swept off her feet by a man. Again—not as much your problem, or your responsibility, as I’d like to have thought. And Bailey’s in the car. We need to get your groceries.”

  She headed off, and he followed her down aisles and tossed things into the cart. “Women you kiss for the camera,” he said when she’d finally halted long enough for him to say it, “don’t count. It’s a job.”

  “Which would be why,” she said, only the color in her cheeks betraying her emotions now, because her voice had steadied, “actors have affairs with their co-stars. Because kissing somebody, touching somebody, lying over her in bed, lacing your fingers through hers, neither of you wearing anything but a G-string, and pretending you’re having sex with her, doesn’t make you any more likely to follow through. Why is that hard to believe? Oh, yeah. Because it’s stupid. But I’m not stupid anymore.”

  He tipped a carton of raspberries into a plastic bag, then added a second one, and reminded himself that this wasn’t about him, not really. It was about Antonio Carrera, who was a selfish bastard who’d hurt the woman he should have been holding closest. “I do mean that,” he told her. “We don’t all cheat. It’s not about whether you kiss her or not in the film anyway, or whether you do anything else. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Because that scene that gave the audience those tingles, the one where you slid her zipper all the way down her back, where your fingers brushed over her skin, and she gave that shiver? The way her dress fell to the floor? The way you held her shoulders and kissed her neck? The way her back arched and her head went back when you pulled out those pins and her hair fell down, and you wrapped your hand in it? That scene that has your fans rewinding so they can watch it over and over again?”

  Surely she knew all this. He needed to tell her anyway. “Yeah, you took off her clothes and touched her body and kissed her neck. And it was nothing at all like kissing the woman who’s been knocking you out all night in a parking garage in the rain, and wanting to take her home more than you’ve wanted anything in a long, long time. Because you shot that scene twenty-six times. It took four hours. It was bloody hot under the lights. And maybe you liked her and you could joke about it, and it wasn’t that bad. Or maybe you heard her snapping at the wardrobe assistant and the makeup artist between every take, at people who were just as hot as she was and not making nearly as much money, and you had to kiss her neck for six more takes anyway and pretend she was somebody else in order to get some tenderness into it. Filmmaking’s a weird business. It’s all of that, and yet you get closer than you would doing another job, especially on location. You find the people you like, and you…bond. Shipboard romance, you could say, or at least shipboard friendship. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s just that you have to open yourself up in order to be convincing, and that lays you raw. Some actors can separate the professional and the personal. Others, not so much. And some are good actors because they’ve lived their entire lives as mimics, as manipulators, and they’re monsters under the surface. There are those, too.”

  “Who was the shipboard romance this time?” She’d turned away at last, was examining cantaloupe as if she’d be graded on the choice, but her voice wasn’t steady, and neither was her hand. He’d seen her face pale as he’d gone on. She’d seen the monster. She knew him too well.

  “For me?” he said. “Nobody. I’d met somebody I liked, you see. It seems to have colored my view.”

  He got a searching look from wary brown eyes before she selected the lucky winner of “Best Melon” and set it on top of the dog bed. “Don’t tell me that.”

  “I don’t have to,” he said. “I just did. Besides, it was for about eight weeks. I’m not auditioning for penguinhood here.”

  “All right,” she said, “but that wasn’t what I was asking.”

  He finally got it. “Are you asking about Antonio? Do you care?”

  “I’d have said no, but if that was true, why did I ask?”

  She looked apprehensive, but she also looked determined. “Isadora Grant, then,” he said. “The Iron Maiden, with the black armor and all. And, no, I don’t know if it lasted beyond the film. He’s a charming fella.”

  “And did he always do it?”

  He debated his answer, but she’d had enough lying. “I’d say yes. I’ve heard yes. And I think you know yes.”

  The sweep of lashes as her eyes closed for a long second, and then she was turning away again.

  He said, “You know—if we bought a few things, we could have a picnic.”

  Why was he trying? He couldn’t have said. Or he could have. Because he had kissed her against the wall in a parking garage, and he’d watched her sing and dance and laugh, and he wanted to do it again.

  “Uh…why?” she asked.

  “Because we’re practicing being almost related? Because I just got here, and the cabin’s dusty and, thanks to Chuck, probably full of fleas? Because it’s a beautiful day and I haven’t seen the lake yet, and I’m guessing you don’t spend a lot of time relaxing?”

  “Or maybe,” she said, smiling at last, “because Chuck almo
st certainly loves to swim. He’ll drip all over you in the car, though.”

  “Could be,” he said. “And yet I’m still willing to risk it.”

  You’re her hero now? the cautious part of him said. I don’t think so, mate. She just told you that she doesn’t need a hero.

  It’s a picnic, he told himself. That’s all. And knew it was a lie.

  They changed the plan up a little, in the end. For one thing, Lily told him, “If your body’s a temple, I hate to think what a grocery store sandwich is going to do to it. We could order from Wildfire instead. I could go in and pick it up, since you keep forgetting your accent.”

  That was why, an hour later, she’d said goodbye to Bailey outside the grotty little trailer after riding back with her on a street that was surely too busy to be safe, he’d fastened her bike to the back of the SUV, and he’d driven to the restaurant, with its tables on the patio overlooking the lake, its patio heaters, strings of tiny white lights, and wine. Its perfect ambience for convincing a woman with wary, wounded eyes that you were the man for her.

  They weren’t sitting there, of course. Instead, they were sitting on a bench all the way up the lakeside path while the evening sunshine slanted across the ripples in the silver-blue water and the mountains glowed like dark emeralds in the distance, with a soaking-wet Chuck, blissfully exhausted from some ecstatic dog-paddling, snoring at their feet, and Styrofoam takeout containers in their laps.

  Rafe said, his gaze on a bird hovering high over the shoreline to his right, “You know—I didn’t think you’d go for this. Is that an eagle?”

  “Osprey,” Lily said, taking a bite of trout. “He’s fishing. Why wouldn’t I go for it? I told you, I’m not fragile. I’m not Bailey, and I never was. I may have been fragile once anyway, but I’m a whole lot tougher now. Also, it’s obvious that I’m not pursuing some unshakable attraction to you.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked. “I’m thrilled, of course, to hear it, but…” She gave him a skeptical look, and he laughed. “Nah. Not thrilled. But what signal am I meant to be picking up here?”