Tempting as Sin

by Rosalind James

  Doesn’t matter what you want, mate. You don’t make these rules, and Jace is marrying Paige. You can’t move that bloke with artillery, which gives you exactly one option here. Harden the fuck up. He carried the tray out to the front porch, set it on a tiny purple café table, and sat down with her.

  Conquering the inner man, one spoonful of yoghurt at a time.

  It took Lily a long time to get her courage up. It wasn’t all that easy to eat, either, not with Rafe sitting opposite her, his beautiful hand resting on the handle of his coffee mug. How could a man’s hand look that good? That strong and capable, and that sensitive, too? Almost graceful. It reminded her of the way he’d stopped kissing her just this side of roughly and had started kissing her softly instead, once he’d reached her neck. Hungry, and so careful. Exactly how clever would his hands be? Exactly how slowly would he go?

  You are so far gone, getting this turned on by a man’s hands. She asked, “How did you get that scar on your knuckle?”

  Coward, half of her said. Easing into it, the other half argued. Conversation. She touched the white upside-down V on his first knuckle lightly with her fingertip and felt his whole body freeze. Even though he couldn’t be reacting as strongly as she was. He was a player. He was a lightweight. That was no secret. That was why this could work. If she’d learned anything in life, it was that you didn’t get everything.

  Chuck was wandering around and peeing on trees, which was good. It would keep the deer and coyotes away. She thought it, and she forgot it, because Rafe said, “Snakebite.”

  “What? No.” She forgot about Chuck, and about everything that had kept her awake last night, too. “Seriously? Or is it one of those things where you actually slammed your hand in a car door, but this is your story in the bar?”

  “Excuse me?” He was laughing, though. “Nah. No worries, it wasn’t that sexy. A love bite from an Eastern Brown, back when Jace and I were kids, playing rugby in somebody’s back garden amongst the killer wildlife.”

  “As one does.”

  Those crinkles around his eyes were really more than a woman should have to resist. He wasn’t wearing his contacts yet, he’d taken off his sunglasses, and he’d slipped back into the Australian accent. It was disconcerting looking into his real eyes, hearing his real voice, and having him focus all that magnetic force of personality on her. She’d long since pulled her hand back, but she still felt him. His hand had been warm under her fingers, like he burned a little hotter than everybody else.

  He said, “Well, yeah. If one’s a Queenslander, one does. I was trying to tackle Jace. When your brother’s three years older and a beast anyway, that isn’t easy, but an Aussie never says die. I was hanging onto him, and he was falling. I looked down, because that was where I was headed, straight for the turf. Jace was looking ahead, like always, stretching for the try line—which was the washing line. Imaginary try line, that is, under the washing line. But because I was looking down, I saw this bloody great snake with its body raised up the way they do, beside the post, starting to move. Aggressive fella, the Eastern Brown. It was going for Jace’s belly, and it was like I saw it on a photo. Freeze frame, even though it was anything but. I don’t know what I thought I’d do. Shove it away, something like that. Instinctive, I guess. Unfortunately, so was the snake. It bit me, the nasty bugger. Then it bit me again. Not the best day of my life.”

  “It bit you again? Where?”

  He shifted sideways in his chair and lifted the sleeve of his gray T-shirt all the way to his shoulder. Which, as she’d happened to notice already, was just one part of a torso that would have made him a fortune selling underwear. A fortune he didn’t need.

  She forgot that when she saw the other scar. On the back of his shoulder, a curving white line stretching along his tanned skin, fully four inches from end to end. “Got me good,” he said. “Second most venomous snake in the world, and as far as I’m concerned, the nastiest. Another snake sees four people walking along a track and slithers away. The Eastern Brown gets four for the price of one, bang-bang-bang-bang. It hurt like billy-o. Jace told me I cried like a little girl. There’s gratitude.”

  “But how is that scar so bad from one bite? What happened?”

  “What happened was that Jace finished scoring his try, finally noticed that I had a bloody great snake hanging off my body, pulled it off me and threw it into the bush, and somebody ran for their mum. The ambos came, and I got the antivenin. I scared my mum and spent a few days in hospital, having surgery on some bits of myself that had died from the poison and eating ice cream. They said I could have all the ice cream I wanted. Turns out I wanted heaps.” He’d let his sleeve fall again. “You don’t usually die from that bite unless you’re well out in the bush. In the Outback, hours from anywhere? Now, there, you can die. I’m being casual, you see, whilst secretly hoping like fury that you’re impressed by my accidentally acquired snakebites. Men never get much past thirteen, I reckon. Personally, I keep regressing.”

  She laughed, but that scar…“How old were you?”

  “Nine.”

  “I guess I know why you and Jace seem so protective of each other.”

  He looked up fast. “You do?”

  “It’s obvious. It could be I hated you when you were aiming that at Paige, but it wasn’t about Paige, was it? It was about Jace.”

  Silence for a long moment, then Rafe said, “He’s got medals for things he can’t talk about. He made it back from that, and it wasn’t easy. I don’t know how much more hurt he can take.”

  Her throat had tightened. Too much honesty there. Too much emotion. “I guess I’d know about that,” she said, knowing her voice was unsteady. “Since I feel exactly the same way about my sister.”

  “You think she’s stronger than you are, even so,” he said. “Tougher than you. Braver than you. I think you’re wrong.”

  “How do you…” Lily had to stop for a minute. “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think? Could be because I’ve felt the same way. Let me ask you something, though, because I keep thinking it’s at the heart of you. Who’s paying your bills?”

  What? This was so not where she’d intended to go. She was wearing her robe. Her short, silk robe. She was desperately out of practice at this. Or maybe it was just that she was thirty-one years old, with skin that absolutely couldn’t be described as “dewy” anymore, especially not to a man like Rafe, with all his opportunities for comparison. She kept forgetting that pesky fact. She said, “Nobody’s paying my bills but me. And that’s the way I want it.”

  “And whatever Antonio says,” he said, “it isn’t the truth.”

  She did not want to talk about this. She especially didn’t want to know what Antonio was saying about her. She didn’t need that in her life anymore. Also, she needed to get dressed and ready for the shop, since that was how she paid her bills. Instead, she said, “I should get us some more coffee.”

  “Or,” he said, “you could stay here and tell me the truth. Why are you in Montana? What happened?”

  “Why tell you?” she asked. “Seriously, why? There’s no point anymore. It’s the past.”

  “Because there’s this thing,” he said, his expression much too intense, “between you and everybody else, hanging there like a curtain. It’s everything Carrera’s said about you, everything you think might somehow be true. You can’t push it away, and you’ve given up trying. You’re still there behind that curtain, though. I can almost see you.”

  She tried to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “You'd know about that, I guess, considering what’s been happening to you.”

  He moved a hand impatiently. “Maybe a bit, and no. Nothing like as bad. It’s not about me. Who I am, for better or worse, is out there to see for anybody who cares to look past the tabloids. Who you are, though—that’s something else. You’ve hidden it away.”

  She twirled her coffee mug between her hands and didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to tell him anything. May
be she wanted to, though. All those months of hearing the whispers and not being able to contradict them, and the friends who hadn’t been friends at all. How ashamed and broken she’d been, her life torn out by the roots. She said, “Maybe I believed I got to take a shortcut, though. Maybe I believed I deserved wonderful things just because I was pretty. Maybe that’s on me. Did you think of that?”

  “If you did,” he said, “I reckon you’ve paid the price.”

  Wow. That one was a gut punch. “Maybe I did. All right, then. Here you go. Why am I here? Because I got this land in the divorce. It was an ugly time, and I needed to get back to real things. A garden. Animals. I needed to make a little piece of the world more beautiful, at least that was how I felt. I traded a big chunk of the prenup money—which wasn’t that much, because there were no kids—” She had to stop a second, but then she went on. “I traded it for the land. Too much of it, in fact. Antonio was happy to tell me I’d been stupid, and that I’d had a bad lawyer, too, after the deal was signed. I needed the land more than money, though. More than security, even though I was terrified.”

  “Security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Rafe said. “Or maybe it is. There’s security in surviving, I reckon, and in knowing you can do it again.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said. “I keep not expecting this much…listening, and losing my balance. Or maybe it’s just that your eyes are the right color.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh. Why you seem even more focused than usual. You feel more real. I think it’s your eyes. And your accent.”

  “I told you,” he said. “That’s only the outside.” It wasn’t. He was all the way here, and if he was faking this, he was good. She’d swear he wasn’t, though. Maybe it was the snake story, so much less heroic than he could have made it, and actually so—well, heroic.

  She said, “Maybe so. Anyway, Antonio had bought this land with me early on, because we’d come through here once, and I’d loved it. It was sort of a present, like the piece of jewelry he’d give me after every film. I sold all of those. Those were mine. That still makes me happy, because I think, now, that they were supposed to make me feel like he’d been thinking of me, to make me ignore the tabloids, and to make it seem like he cared about—other things. Things that mattered to me, that were hard to take.” Whoa, she thought. Do not go there. She plowed ahead. “So—yes, he bought the land. Afterwards, he was sorry. A stupid town that was going nowhere, and a sign of how naïve I was, what a foolish romantic, to want to buy in such a backwater. Sinful wasn’t much then. I could say that I thought it was a good investment, that I saw the change coming, but really, I just loved it. It was the exact opposite of the life I’d had, and the opposite of the life I’d thought I wanted.” She looked into those silver-blue eyes and gave Rafe what he wanted. She gave him the truth, or at least one piece of it. “It’s what I said. I thought I’d be glamorous. I thought I was destined for some fancy life. I got it. It wasn’t that great.”

  “No,” he said. “So often not.”

  “I wanted quiet,” she said. “Peace. My own choices. I’d had a shop in New York, and Antonio had always…” She swallowed convulsively. “Laughed about it. I was…when I was with him, I was so small. I loved my shop, though. I wanted to try again, try it for real, risk it for real. It scared me so much, worse than Paige has ever been scared, I’m pretty sure. You’re right about that. And that was why I had to do it. I used more than half of the money on the house and still needed a mortgage, and I worked with the guys and learned how to do everything I possibly could to make that money go further. I sourced everything myself, and I kept the place tiny, so I could use remnants. My flooring is left over from a lake house down in Kalispell. My cabinets are from a house that somebody modernized. And on and on. We built the house, and then we built the shed and did the fencing, and I built the chicken coop, and there you go. The fencing was a diamond necklace. That must have been some affair.”

  Did she sound bitter? Probably. Too bad. Building that fence for her animals—Antonio hated animals, with their hair and their mess and their noise—with that necklace money? That had felt good.

  Rafe said, “And then you did the shop.”

  “The shop…” She sighed. “Man, the shop was scary. I couldn’t get a loan. The shop took everything I had left, and more. It took my credit card, and it maxed it out. It had been a jewelry store, so fortunately the outside was already pretty. I bought most of the fixtures secondhand and put as much as I could in by myself, and then I gambled on buying high-end stock. Boy, did I ever gamble. For the first year, I couldn’t hire help. I worked all the time. I tried everything I could think of, and it wasn’t enough. I kept hearing these voices at night saying I was going to fail, telling me I wasn’t bright enough for this, I wasn’t tough enough for this. I almost did fail. You want to know why I have a garden and fruit trees and goats and chickens? It’s not just a hobby. It’s because I can very nearly feed myself with it. The second year, it got better. Now, I even have solar panels. I can feed myself and my animals, I can pay Hailey, and I can breathe. But the difference is—this time, I earned it, and nobody can say anything else. Every one of those breaths I can take now, I earned.”

  She was being too dramatic, and she knew it. The words had just poured out. But he couldn’t know how it had felt to lie there at night, think about the bills, and sweat. To have put all her money and all her efforts on one turn of the roulette wheel. To watch the wheel spinning, spinning, spinning, dreading the moment when it would stop in the wrong slot and everything she had, everything she’d tried to become, would be raked away. To try to believe in herself when believing was so hard, and it was so easy to think that Antonio had been right all along.

  Those early months, when too many women had walked by on the sidewalk, hesitated, and then walked on. The way the tears had risen, and the way she’d forced them back and tried something new. Tried something else. The way she’d told herself, Find another way. The way she’d clawed her way up and out of that looming credit-card debt, handhold by handhold. The way she’d stared bankruptcy down, and the way she’d won.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see that.” That was all, but her breath came out in a rush. She must have been holding it.

  “Now do we get to have more coffee?” she asked, trying to make it lighter. “That’s all the sharing I can handle for one day.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. We do. And maybe you’ll tell me why you were thinking about that deal we made to make fools of ourselves, and not to care. The night you danced on stage with me and sang by yourself.”

  “Really?” She got up and plucked his coffee cup off the table, but she had to smile a little, didn’t she? “That’s what you remember best about that night? It was great, but I thought we were being honest.”

  “You’re right,” he said, standing up himself. No smile now. “What I remember best? That’s easy. I remember kissing you.”

  Lily looked at him, and he tried to read her and failed. And then she headed into the house, and he picked up the tray and followed her. Chuck stopped policing the goats’ activity and came along, tail wagging, hoping for a run he was sadly not going to get.

  That curtain wasn’t there anymore, and finally, he was seeing her. He saw the shame that lingered, the doubts that wouldn’t leave. Unfortunately, he also saw her walk away. She had that swing on her porch, the kind of thing you could sink into with a woman in your lap while you kissed her and touched her and made her feel so good. Except not.

  He set the tray down inside, on the tiny breakfast bar, and she stood in the kitchen in her silky robe and her bare feet and said, “I need to get ready for work. But this was so not my plan.”

  “Oh?” he asked. “What was your plan?”

  She glared at him, or as much as Lily could glare, and he said, “What?”

  She’d started to bung dishes into the dishwasher, but now, she turned to face him again. “How am I supposed to do this?” she asked.
“How?”

  “Uh…” He scratched his cheek. “Do what, exactly?”

  “Right,” she said. “OK. I’ve got it. You’re a gentleman. We got a little carried away yesterday because of lingerie and me flirting too much, but you’re over it, and anyway, I asked you to stop, and you stopped, so that’s great. Now we’re practicing being in-laws. Sharing stories. Getting to know each other. Great. Fine.” She pulled her hair back with one hand again. Her robe had opened a bit, and he could see that bra. The purple, and the lace. He could see the swell of her breasts above it, too, and the creaminess of her skin. He could see too much.

  “Pardon?” he asked, yanking his gaze back up to her face. “I’m over what?”

  “Obviously,” she said, “my skin isn’t as good as it used to be. I knew that already. Are you going to take the dog, or what?”

  “Wait.” He wanted to come around the counter. He didn’t. “You’re going to have to back up. I’m confused as hell. Your skin? Your skin’s just bloody fine. Am I meant to look at it, or not look? Because I’m looking.”

  “I was trying to…” She held her arms out from her sides, then let them fall. “I thought, last night—Oh, man, I can’t. This is stupid.”

  “Lily.” He was starting to smile. “Are you trying to make a move on me?”

  More glaring. “Yes. What do I have to do, write it in the sand in a big heart? Do you think I open the door in my robe for the UPS man? Flash him while I reveal my deepest secrets?”

  He laughed, then said, “Sorry. Ahem. Sorry.” He scrubbed his hand over his face to try to hide the grin, but couldn’t. “You could look at me from under those lashes of yours and say, ‘You know, Rafe, I think I changed my mind, because I kept thinking about you last night, and maybe you thought about me, too. Maybe you lay awake and sweated with how much you wanted me. Maybe you could kiss me again, take off my clothes, and touch me nice and slow, so I’d know for sure.’ That would do it.”