“You forget that I’m in the Secret Service. The back of that monster folds down, remember? Useful for bicycles, surfboards, and anything else that might crop up in the course of a busy man’s day. You hold them off. I’ll be back.”
Why would you do this? she wanted to ask as he left. Fast, but not running. He probably never ran, not unless he’d planned to and was dressed appropriately, in which case he’d win the race in the last hundred meters, because he’d have moved up one by one on the flashy leaders and overtaken them.
She answered herself, too. It’s his event, he wants it to succeed, and, clearly, he takes the long view. He doesn’t look for blame, he looks for solutions. Which anybody would do. Anybody who’s as bright as this man. Which is almost nobody.
Pity her stubborn heart refused to believe it.
Also, she still didn’t know his name.
One thing Brett could say about his ocean warrior. She had resilience. By the time he got back from Woolworth’s with the back of the SUV loaded down, she had a drink in the hand of every early arrival and the servers circulating with trays of nibbles, toothpicks, and cocktail napkins. Some kind of wonton cups, it looked like, and savory tartlets, all of it finger-and-napkin food. She’d draped streamers of red crepe paper at waist height around the open-sided white marquee and fashioned bows at the corners, as if ready for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Inside, the tables nearly groaned under temptingly arranged platters, and more than one guest was sneaking a look like a kid at a birthday party wishing it was time for cake. Remembering Willow’s rendition of French toast, Brett couldn’t blame them.
He was a disciplined man with a disciplined waistline, though, and he tried to view food as fuel. When you came from a long line of loggers, you knew that the pleasures of the flesh were temporary, and inadvisable to the point of disaster if they made you unfit. Best to resist.
After an inquiry of one of the waitresses, he found Willow hidden in the trees beside her van, piping whipped cream onto tiny two-bite tarts of the sweet variety. She’d dressed like her servers today, in a white blouse and black pants. It wasn’t nearly as appealing a look on her as a bikini or a sundress, and the hair she’d coiled into a firm knot at the nape of her neck seemed unhappily confined and begging to be set free.
Of course, that could have been his imagination. It had proven fairly unruly today. It could also have to do with being in Australia, a country where “discipline” didn’t seem to be the governing principle, and also, possibly, with the faint sweetness that hung in the air here. Or it could be red hair, nearly translucent skin, sunshine, flowers, and the memory of a sundress falling off a woman who’d been born for pleasure.
He said, “The cavalry has arrived,” and she jumped, missed with her cone of whipped cream, and spoiled a lemon tart.
“You scared me,” she complained, but she was laughing. “How’d you go? I realized, after you’d left, that people could eat everything I made with their fingers if they had to. Going without plates might be pushing it, though.”
“Come see.”
“Eat this first. Please. I need to know that it works.” She picked up the spoiled lemon tartlet and held it for him. “Smells good, doesn’t it?” she said when he didn’t bite. She waggled it in front of his nose, her green eyes teasing. “Come on. It’s dee-li-cious. You know you want it.”
All right. So he had another of those tricky moments when he was accepting a tiny morsel of temptation off her fingers, all melt-in-your-mouth butter, silky sweet-and-sour lemon curd, and whipped cream, then watching her eat the rest, then stick her index finger into her mouth and suck off the residue while she looked into his eyes and smiled. Slowly. Any man would have had issues with that.
“Good, huh,” she said, her smile growing wider at his expression.
“Yeah,” he managed to answer, and wondered exactly how hot it was out here. She turned away to wash her hands in a portable sink, and he took a breath and got himself under control again.
This day was important. This day was the main purpose of the trip. It was the kickoff in the football game, your best chance to establish your position. He had a joint venture and investors back home to think about, and this deal was out of their comfort zone. Big, expensive, and risky. He didn’t need to add anything to the list. He was a man who focused on the plan, and this was the plan. You decided and you moved on, and he’d already decided.
Entangled. Partially.
And so forth.
While he was still wrestling with his libido, she covered her trays, shut them back into a refrigerated compartment in the van, and then walked down the hill with him. He’d driven around to the far side of the marquee, away from the crowd, and had backed the SUV up as close as he could manage. She took a look at the contents and said, “Oh, perfect on the buckets and flowers. You are so good. Or you could be amazing. I’m going with ‘amazing.’”
“Tell me where,” he said, trying not to let that sink in too deeply, “and I’ll start moving them in.”
“You have guests. I can get one of the staff to help.”
“I have partners, too, and they’re already on the job. I’ll do it. Ten minutes. Maybe I’m like your gift-wrapped marquee, and I need to make an entrance. The star attraction.” He grinned at her hastily muffled snort of laughter. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. And seriously,” he added as he reached for galvanized buckets and an armful of sunflowers and Asiatic lilies in fiery red and orange, “it may work, especially as I’ve been realizing you’re right. I’m overdressed. I’ll need to turn that into an asset. I’m the serious guy who’s bringing the serious money. Something like that.”
“You could take off your jacket.” She’d hopped up inside the SUV and was loading up on buckets and flowers. “And your tie. You’d be closer to ‘not weird,’ anyway. We’re fairly casual around here. It’s a surf town, money or no.”
“Nope. I’m going to roll with it. Here’s a useful phrase. ‘I meant to do that.’ And on that note, they were out of the flag tablecloths, so I improvised.”
“No worries,” she said, and kept moving. “We’re rolling with it.”
She worked fast. He had a hard time keeping up with her. Within ten minutes, she had makeshift bouquets arranged, along with the white wine, in her unconventional galvanized-pail ice buckets, and the tables looking cheerful and inviting. And when he brought her the flag-bedecked paper plates and hot-drink cups, she laughed.
“Awesome,” she said. “Lemons into lemonade and all. We have a theme party here. I meant to do that. See? I’m practicing.”
“One more thing.” He brought it out. A half-dozen packs of bunting flags, the Union Jack and the Southern Cross on each jaunty triangular piece, to hang around the edges of the tables and the marquee entrance. “Also,” he said, showing her, “a staple gun. Better than flag tablecloths, that’s our new position. I’ll staple, and you do your next thing. When you’re ready to open the gates to the mob, bring me a scissors, and we’ll have the mayor declare the marquee open.”
“You’re good.” Her hands kept moving, tweaking flowers and arranging food, as he stapled, and the whole thing began to look cheerful. Less like a function, and more like a party.
“No,” he said. “I’ve just had a lot of things go wrong over a lot of years, until it’s not even ‘going wrong’ anymore, it’s just a curvature in the plan. There’s always some answer, some way out, and most people won’t care unless you do. Most people won’t even notice.”
“Ah. The Julia Child approach. She’d say, if you can’t flip the potato pancake or your chicken falls on the floor, turn it into something else lovely. Never apologize, and never explain. What do people want? They want to eat and drink delicious things, and they want to have fun. They don’t care what your original plan was.”
“Exactly. Which is why we’re having a picnic.”
She smiled at him, and something in him caught and held, stuck in that smile and that face and that voice. “And we have aweso
me sweets,” she said, “if I do say so myself. Julia also said that a party without cake is just a meeting. Do you like sweets, Mr. Hunter? Did you like mine?”
He’d stapled all the way around the tables. He needed to do the entrance, then get out there. But he was a foot from her, and how could he go? Her skin was flushed, and tiny tendrils had already escaped the severe knot of hair. “Yes,” he told her. “I think you know I do. I like sweets, and I liked yours. I try not to eat them, though. Too decadent. Too self-indulgent.”
“Mm.” The smile got a little more assured. “I may get you to try some more of mine all the same. I’m very, very good with sweets. The trick is to make them delicious, of course, but then to go that step too far. The magic happens when you take things over the top. Bananas are fine. Caramelized bananas with vanilla bean whipped cream, though, the bananas heated into creaminess and coated with all that crackling burnt-sugar crunch? They’re pure sin. Looking at them, smelling them, tasting them. That’s when you’ve got pleasure.”
Entangled, he told himself. Wrong.
It wasn’t working.
“Mr. Hunter?”
He closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them and turned.
“Yes, Wendy?” he asked the PR woman. She was efficient, he’d give her that. If she reminded him of his fourth-grade teacher, that wasn’t her fault. It also wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t liked his fourth-grade teacher. She’d been all about the rules, like they’d been set down by God, whether that was how many paragraphs your book report had to be or that you could only be absent four times a quarter without your grade dropping. She’d thought order mattered more than fairness, more than progress. He’d disagreed then, and he disagreed more now. Part of him, however well disguised, would always be that rebel pushing it too far.
“The partners are asking where you are.” Wendy’s gaze flicked between him and Willow. “And they’re eyeing the food as well.”
“Good.” He grabbed a chair and lifted it over the crepe-paper barrier. Something to stand on. “Nothing like anticipation to whet the appetite. I need to put on the finishing touches anyway. Let me know when you’re ready, Willow,” he said, turning back to her and wishing, despite every better intention, that she’d unbutton one more button on that plain white blouse. Or that he could do it. Slowly. “We’ll see how the anticipation pays off, and whether we can get this group all the way to ‘pleasure.’ I’m betting on yes.”
Three hours later, Willow was so far from pleasure, it wasn’t funny. She’d also gone from “hot” to “lava flow.”
She didn’t wear makeup on jobs. She might have dark-red brows and lashes that wouldn’t feature on any magazine page, but too bad. “Melting” might be a wonderful state for a romance heroine, but it wasn’t a flash look on your face. Byron Bay in summer wasn’t as hot as Brisbane—thank the sea breeze for that—but the humidity generally hovered around the ninety-percent mark, and today, it was all but dripping off the trees. Her trousers and white blouse were as wet as if she’d been swimming in them, bits of hair were stuck to her forehead and the nape of her neck in absolutely unbecoming fashion, and her face, she was positive, was giving beetroot a run for its money.
The event, though, was surviving much better. Two huge fans at opposite corners of the marquee, connected to a portable generator hidden discreetly nearby, kept the air moving, and the guests circulated as easily from the shade of the trees back and forth to the drinks table and the dessert bar. Her lemon curd and chocolate mousse tartlets in shortbread were down to a final lonely half-dozen, and best of all, the ice blocks had been a smash hit, turning Australia’s moneyed elite into kids for a few wonderful minutes. Lime juice decorated Tommy Bahama shirts, women had mopped their partners’ red juice mustaches with serviettes printed with the Southern Cross, and everybody had started to have fun.
Julia, as always, had been right. A party without dessert was just a meeting. What they had here was a business function that had turned into a party.
“All we need is a sprinkler to run through,” a voice at her elbow said, “and we’ll have achieved full aspirational-lifestyle mode.”
She took a swipe at her dripping face with a tea towel, stuck it back through the waist strap of her black apron, and said, “Funny, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think something so simple would work so well. That was my leap into the dark. Ice blocks. My legacy.” She worked while she talked, consolidating the remaining tarts onto a single tray, rearranging the table one more time, and casting an eye over her servers. She needed to get Jamie and Crystal moving. Jamie was useful with ice-carrying and tub-emptying and so forth, but otherwise, he wasn’t much chop, and he and Crystal didn’t exactly reinforce each others’ work ethics. Unfortunately, Jamie was Amanda’s husband’s nephew, so there you were.
“It is funny,” Hunter said. “I don’t know about Australia, but back in the States, we spend fifty weeks a year with our noses to the grindstone, all for the sake of those couple weeks when we can go to the lake, watch fireworks from the dock, eat Popsicles, and float on an air mattress like we’re ten again. Except that when we actually were ten, we couldn’t wait for our lives to be full of exciting grown-up times, with a heavy focus on blonds and martini glasses and penthouse apartments. We glossed over the grindstone part. Except me, of course.”
She had to quit working, then, and look at him. “Except you? Because you’re on your Jet Ski every weekend already, with a blond and a martini glass?”
He smiled. “Nope. I don’t like the water, remember? Because I like to work. Or because I choose to work. It’s all in how you look at it.”
“That’s a bit bleak.” She wondered why he was telling her this. If he’d had seduction in mind, it might make sense. If she were a different person, at least. I’m a busy man, baby. A rambling man. But we’ll take the good times while we can. Here, have a diamond. Except that he’d turned her down, and she wasn’t that person, so none of it made sense. “One second,” she told him, giving up on figuring it out. She headed over to the other side of the marquee and told Jamie and Crystal, “Make another round outside, please, with sparkling water refills, and remind them there’s tea and coffee in here.” They’d removed the wine an hour ago. Australian drunk-driving laws were no joke, and the narrow, winding roads of the hinterland were seriously unforgiving.
Jamie gave her a stare that nearly reached “insolent,” and Crystal said, “We were just going.”
“Awesome,” Willow said. “Don’t let me stop you.” Jamie was, alas, in addition to lazy and related to the owner, extremely good-looking in a Black Irish sort of way, his blue eyes and black hair and the dimple in his chin making him more desirable as a waiter than he deserved. He’d tried flirting with her at the beginning. It hadn’t worked. He’d seemed surprised.
She watched them go, then headed back to Hunter, who was, after all, the client. He couldn’t possibly be interested in her at this point, with all her dripping sweatiness, so she’d work on the “relationship management” part of the deal.
This was part of Nourish’s big leap, branching out from small-time weddings, and she’d made it happen. She happened to know that Omnivore, the trend-setting Brisbane firm she’d worked for until this year, had gone after this gig, and they hadn’t been the only ones. The consortium hadn’t even broken ground yet, and surely there were many, many more high-end functions to come, and a whole lucrative corporate world beyond that. Byron wasn’t getting any less fashionable. Nourish had won the job on their menu, despite Amanda’s nervousness, and this was her chance to nail down their advantage.
The PR woman had said ninety-five dollars a head, though. Where had that come from? It seemed too high. She’d never been on the business end of things, but wasn’t that high?
Not the right time to explore that. Right now, she needed to focus on the human element. She told Brett, “I cannot believe you still look that cool.” There, that was neutral. Friendly. Feeding him the lemon tartlet had been over the top, no
matter how much of a rush it had given her to suck whipped cream from her finger and have him watch her do it. She’d be better off cultivating the Aussie partners instead, even though they’d barely looked her way so far.
Ignoring the caterer, though, was a sign that the event was going well. The verdict on the food would come from the guests, not from schmoozing. You couldn’t auto-generate word of mouth.
Or so she told herself, because did she head off to start that cultivation? She did not. She stayed here. Maybe she wanted to look at those gray eyes some more. That was something you didn’t see every day. Or maybe she wanted to sneak a chance to relax, and client or no, he was a relaxing bloke to be around. At least when he wasn’t looking at her with that hint of humor and more than a hint of heat, making her wonder what was under the clothes. Under the calm. That confidence came from somewhere.
“Fresco suit,” he said. “It’s a weave. Merino wool. Italian fabric. Cooler than linen, if you believe it.” He smiled. “I won’t tell you what my shirt looks like underneath it. Always best to keep your secrets. Want to take a walk with me?”
“Uh . . . working?” Why had he said exactly what she’d been thinking? Could he tell what she’d been thinking?
“Winding down,” he suggested. Which was what she’d just told herself. Indeed, the crowd was dwindling in fairly rapid fashion. “Everybody’s had their Popsicles and is headed back to the air conditioning, or maybe to the beach. I happen to have some idea how your day’s gone so far, and your staff and my partners seem to have things under control for the moment. Ten minutes. Everybody deserves one break.” He must have seen her wavering, because he added, “I might need a break myself. I’ve done this tour twenty times today. Maybe I want to look at how pretty the view is instead of trying to sell it. Also, I could be tired of being charming, and you might feel the same way.” He reached into the tub and pulled out two ice blocks, red and green, and waggled them at her. “Let’s cool off. Indulge me.”
Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3) Page 5