Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  He considered a minute. She liked that about him, that he thought things through before he talked, maybe because it was so different from how she operated. He was also the least defensive man she’d ever met. It wasn’t that he had no ego; it was that it was too strong to be easily threatened. “Don’t you think, though,” he said slowly, “that there’s something more democratic about that? This is great, obviously, the two of us here looking at all of this, but there are only the two of us. Is it really so wrong to bring it to more people? Isn’t the other way actually more elitist, if you’re saying that only the right people should be allowed to enjoy it?”

  She started to say something, then stopped, and he smiled at her and said, “Yeah. Developers get a bad rap, and some of that’s probably deserved. But if you do it right, if you preserve enough open space and design thoughtfully for the environment, there could be some positives to it, too. What’s your favorite part of this, here and now? Or I’ll ask it another way. What’s the part that reminds you of the best times, of why you moved here?”

  “You’re doing more of that listening again,” she pointed out, trying not to fall into the seduction of his deep, calm voice and his ever-present interest. And, no, she was not telling him the best part of this, here and now.

  “I am,” he said. “Because I’d like to know.”

  “It’s the sky. You’d think it was the sea, but it isn’t. It’s the sky.” Second-best, anyway. The blue had turned darker, the pink-tinged clouds more purple, and here and there, a star had appeared. She pointed westward. “Just there, two fists above the horizon. That’s Sirius. Brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere sky. My dad loved the stars. We’d eat dinner outside as well, just like this, on the veranda. My mum would read Arabic poetry aloud, as beautiful and . . . and complex as this song, and my dad would point out the stars as they rose. Not the same, of course, as it was the Northern Hemisphere, but the feeling’s the same. The warmth of the night, and the look of the sky.”

  “The Dog Star,” Brett said. “When you look at it through a telescope, it’s like a purple star garnet, and the rays are just that bright. State gem of Idaho, by the way, if you’re taking notes. In India, it’s named after a dog, too, though the dog has a different name, I can’t remember what. Interesting, I always thought, that it would be the same animal. His story is associated with loyalty, and not what you’d expect, the dog’s to the man. It’s the loyalty of the man to the dog.”

  “That’s good,” she said, knowing it was lame, but she didn’t have the right words, or she couldn’t say them. “And I can’t believe you happen to know the story of that star in Indian legend.”

  “I didn’t remember the dog’s name, though. That could be a comfort.”

  How could gray eyes be that warm? “So do you have a dog, then?” she asked. Is that why you remembered that?”

  That drawing back again, as obviously as if you’d touched him and he’d retreated into his shell. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Lame again, but what did you say?

  A long pause, where she looked at the moon and wished for the ease again, and Maria Callas sang something slow, sad, and heartbreakingly beautiful, her voice soaring across the folded hills like it had wings. And then Brett said, “I did once. A big black-and-white mutt named Scout. Stupid name. Great dog.”

  She was very nearly holding her breath, willing him to go on, and finally, he did. “He was with my dad and me out on the boat. Out on the river. You can’t always put a dog in a boat, especially a small one, but like I said—he was a good dog.”

  “And something happened to him,” Willow said.

  His face was so bleak, she shivered despite the warmth in the air. “He died trying to hold my dad up. After I let go.”

  Surely his chest hurt as much as hers right now. “And you didn’t get another dog?”

  “No.” He half-stood, and she knew why. He’d gone where he hadn’t wanted to, and he needed to move, but he couldn’t. So she did instead, standing and collecting their plates, then handing him his crutches.

  “I’ll go,” she said. “I have an early day tomorrow, and you’re tired. Your breakfast and lunch things are in the fridge, covered in cling film with the instructions on sticky notes.”

  He didn’t ask her to stay, just thanked her for dinner and for washing up, polite and remote once more. She wanted to ask him to come out from behind the wall, and to tell him she liked the man she’d seen when he had, but she didn’t know how. Instead, she drove home and didn’t analyze the evening with Azra.

  Just before she went to sleep, she got his text.

  That got a little intense. Could have been the music. Could have been the night. Could even have been the woman.

  She didn’t need to text him back. She’d see him tomorrow. Even as she thought it, her thumbs were flying.

  I liked what I saw.

  When Brett got up at six-thirty, he thought, I get to shower tonight, washed up with agonizing slowness, put on some of the clean clothes Willow had folded for him the night before, wished they weren’t PJs, and went to work. His leg didn’t hurt as much as yesterday, and he wasn’t as tired as yesterday, either. Nothing but upward movement from now on.

  Start again. Start from here. Two sentences. Six syllables. Exactly like every other morning. He didn’t need to think about a woman’s skin, luminous in the light of dusk, or about laughing green eyes. He definitely didn’t need to think about her mouth, which was tipped upward at the corners even in repose, like she’d always smile more easily than she’d do anything else. He definitely didn’t need to think about all the life in her, or about how it had pulled him into saying too much, making himself that vulnerable.

  Pain pills had a lot to answer for.

  The house coffeemaker came with the kind of metal coffee pods he usually didn’t mess with. Luckily, he didn’t have to, because Willow had made him cold-brewed coffee and left it in the fridge. He poured some over ice and drank it standing up, because carrying things, he’d discovered, was the hardest part of this. If they could spill, they were even trickier.

  Never mind. Standing up was good for him. He put the French toast casserole into the oven and started on the painstakingly slow process of opening windows, something else that was good for him. The cottage had air conditioning, but he loved the touch of the breeze and the sound of the outdoors. He always had. He also had the physical therapist coming at ten, and the hours before then were his best chance to catch his U.S. contacts still at their desks.

  He was already on the phone when the crunch of tires on pavement announced a visitor. She leaped up the stairs like a woman with vitality to spare. Yellow sundress over bare skin, flip-flops, red hair in a damp braid that had soaked the back of her dress to the waist. He looked up from the speakerphone, from which Brandon Calverson was saying, slightly anxiously, “Pre-construction sales reached sixty-seven percent in January,” which Brett already knew from the graph in front of him.

  Willow flapped a hand at him, then opened the oven, checked her casserole, and washed her hands before slapping a frying pan on the stove and beginning to peel and slice a banana. He was getting caramelized bananas for breakfast, apparently. He kept talking to Calverson. “Increase the ad buy by fifteen percent, and do another round with the media.”

  “We’re tracking well,” Calverson said. “Up ten percent over projections.”

  “Do it anyway.” Brett didn’t let himself get impatient. Calverson was young and eager, and you didn’t squash that enthusiasm, you fostered it. “Those units are desirable, that’s the idea. Hard to get. We keep our foot on the gas all the way, and next time, they’ll jump faster.”

  A few more words, and he hung up, then checked the call off his list. “Hi,” he told Willow. “I didn’t know you were coming this morning.”

  “And you’re busy,” she said, her hands, like the night before, never stopping. “That’s OK. Go ahead and don’t mind me. I was surfing, then buying fruit and v
eg a few kilometers up the road for the event I’m doing today. I thought about you here alone and realized, how does he carry the plate to the table? I’m doing your bananas, since I’m here anyway, and then I’ll fix your plate and be off again. Things to do, mate.”

  He wanted to tell her to stay, but he had a call scheduled in two minutes, and it would be a long one. He said, “Thank you,” pulled up the email he needed, jotted some notes on a legal pad, and dialed the number.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was still on the phone, his carefully arranged plate and a hot mug of coffee were on the table, and she was gone.

  Stupid, Willow thought, driving down the hill. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She may have banged the steering wheel a time or two with her fist as well.

  Men wanted . . . poodles. Salukis. Afghan hounds. Elegant, mysterious, and a little aloof. She was a Golden Retriever, and men didn’t want a Golden Retriever. If she hadn’t known that already, Gordy had told her. And yet, time after time, there she was, bounding into the picture with her tongue practically hanging out, begging, “Be my friend! Throw the ball! Let’s play! I love you!”

  The man had hired her. To turn up every night for three weeks and cook, and keep him company “if you like.” Which was, no matter what she’d thought the night before, just a polite man being polite.

  She’d been taken in by the rumpled look, the vulnerability. That wasn’t him. He was a very rich, endlessly guarded man who lived half a world away, a dozen years her senior and a few light years more sophisticated. If she kept throwing herself at him, she was going to end up humiliated, no matter how kind he was.

  So, yes, on the minus side, she felt like a bloody idiot. On the plus side, she managed to go into Nourish’s kitchens and, in the midst of prep for her ladies’ lunch, tell Amanda, “I’d like to take a look at the books. Time for me to educate myself. Could you give me the login and the password, please?” in as offhand a way as you could ask for. She might be lame at business, but she didn’t have to be a Golden Retriever.

  Amanda kept filling tiny chocolate cups with mousse. “I’ll check with Tom. He was planning to do some data entry today.”

  “You don’t need to do that.” Willow whisked lemon juice, aioli, mustard, and salt and pepper together in an enormous stainless-steel bowl, then added eggs, almond meal, cornmeal, and chopped mint and beat it into cohesiveness. “It doesn’t have to be . . . finalized, or whatever you call it. I’d just like to take a look.”

  “Closed,” Amanda said with a tight smile. “That’s the word. I wouldn’t even be able to tell you whether he’d entered all the invoices. It makes no sense at all to look at them until the month closes. Honestly, Willow, you don’t need to worry about this.”

  Willow concentrated on folding fresh crabmeat into her mixture. “I’m not trying to take over that side of things, no worries. I’m familiarizing myself, that’s all.” While somebody’s here who’ll know what the bloody hell he’s looking at, she didn’t say. When February was “closed,” whatever that was? Brett would be in Montana. Or wherever else he lived. I live many places, he’d said.

  She began to form her crab cakes into patties and checked the temperature of her pans. Perfect. A snap pea salad in a simple vinaigrette, some radishes for crunch, and that was the luncheon half done. Melon and blueberry cups made with cubed yellow watermelon, orange cantaloupe, and some red watermelon and kiwifruit for contrast, and vanilla cupcakes topped with perfectly piped chocolate buttercream. Light, delicious, and perfect.

  Brett might love that, too. Shellfish could be too rough on his delicate system, though, and then there was the fact that not everybody was mad for it. They were missing out on some of the best things in life, but there you were. People were mad. She’d resisted looking up Lewiston, Idaho, online last night, because she hadn’t needed to dive further into Brett-obsession, but she had a feeling it wasn’t a culinary wonderland. He probably put tomato sauce onto all his food, except that he’d call it ketchup. She probably had him built up higher than he really deserved.

  Yeah, right.

  Focus. Not on food, and not on a man you can’t have. On maths. She’d always rather think about food. That was why she was in this spot. “The login and password will do me,” she said, shutting her mouth on the torrent of explanation that wanted to escape.

  “We change it all the time,” Amanda said. “Security reasons.”

  “Whatever the latest is.” Willow forced her voice into calm even as every part of her wanted to back down.

  Amanda sighed. “I’ll check to make sure and write it down for you, how’s that?”

  “That’s perfect,” Willow said, took a breath, and thought, Thanks, Hunter. I owe you one.

  Which she would not repay by barging into his house unannounced again. He was deliberate. She wasn’t. That didn’t mean she couldn’t learn.

  Saturday evening at eight-thirty, and Brett was still working. Working, and waiting for Willow.

  He could have eaten hours ago. She’d made his dinner in a slow cooker today, because she was working herself, catering a dinner party. She’d fixed him another Moroccan dish, a lamb stew whose heady, meaty aroma had been tantalizing him all day. Something about the spices slowly mingling with the juices, he guessed, because nothing about the complex layers of scent filling the house was harsh.

  He didn’t have to wait, but he was waiting for her anyway. Two reasons: that she’d promised him something special tonight, and that he was tired of this.

  For the last two nights, the laughing, quicksilver woman he’d met on the beach had vanished. She’d come over every evening, and this morning, too, had made him the best food he’d eaten in his life and even stayed for dinner with him, had asked about his day and answered his questions about her own, but after that? She’d cleaned the kitchen meticulously, practically using a toothbrush to get into the crevices, and then she’d left. Every time.

  The first night, he’d thought she was tired, but last night, he’d realized it was something else, probably having to do with her showing up unexpectedly on Wednesday morning and him being on the phone. Which was ridiculous, as much interest as he’d shown, but then, getting dumped could make you vulnerable.

  That was the third reason he was waiting for her. He didn’t like the shadowed expression he’d seen on her face, and he hated suspecting he’d caused it. Tonight, he was going to do something about it, even if it was just watching a movie on the couch with her. He wanted his movie. He wanted his girl.

  So she’s vulnerable, and you’re going to exploit that, because she’s pretty and you’re bored? Half of his mind, the ruthlessly honest half, kept asking the question.

  No. Because I don’t want her hurt, the other half answered. It was probably a lie and made no sense, and he knew it. He went back to his spreadsheets instead.

  He’d left the house today, at least, thanks to his driver, Dave’s, help, to meet with his Australian partners. The first phase of the development was already twenty percent sold in advance on the strength of their event, the architect’s plans, the slick marketing package they’d put together, and the site itself, but developments didn’t coast on momentum. You had to goose them along with a mixture of patience and assertiveness for which there was no formula, because the mixture varied with every day and every site.

  Meanwhile, the financing was at a sticky point. Graham McDougall, his CFO, had looked even more mournful than usual on their call this morning, making Brett wonder for the thousandth time whether Graham had been voted Most Likely to Become an Undertaker in high school. After that, Rose Williams, his VP of Marketing, had told him in her faint, lilting Caribbean/British accent, “The bank’s board needs face time, Brett. They’re terrified about the rise in the Australian dollar, and they’re wondering who exactly wants to buy a luxury home in the dusty Outback, with kangaroos hopping in the red dirt and crocodiles wandering down the middle of the road. They’re out of their comfort zone, and they need you to come back and paint them the beau
tiful, sophisticated picture. They want you to explain to them that it’s a mixture of England, Abu Dhabi, and Wyoming, but with good beaches and more sharks. I’ve tried, but they don’t want me. They want you.”

  “Two weeks,” he’d answered. “Meanwhile, you’ve got the ball, and we both know that you can carry it. Let’s run through the numbers again. And I just thought of something. I’m going to get hot-air-balloon footage and put it to music. This is about the prettiest place in the world. All I have to do is show it to them.”

  “They’d like it better if you were in the basket of the balloon,” she said. “Narrating the script, too. Do hot-air balloons still use baskets? Showing them that Brett Hunter charm, sweeping them off their feet.”

  “Did I mention that I’m on crutches?” He didn’t hate heights like he hated water, but he didn’t have a pressing need to go up in a hot-air balloon, either. Willow would probably love it. He’d send her. Willow up in a hot-air balloon with all her enthusiasm and life force, her red curlicues of hair blowing around her, talking in that voice like music about surfing and the birds and the flowers and the freedom? That would sell luxury homes.

  “Think about it,” Rose said. “That’s all I’m saying. It’ll help.” Which was why he’d hired Rose in the first place. Confidence was easy to find in a salesperson. Humility to look beyond herself for the best solution? Much rarer.

  That was all very well and good, but he knew he should be in Portland. And Seattle. And Sinful. And many other places. And all the same, that other stubborn part of him was right here, parked in his cream-colored recliner with his leg stuck straight out in front of him, listening to a kookaburra laughing like a maniac and the harsh calls of cockatoos coming to roost in the eucalyptus trees, watching the sky turn pink out the window and the occasional wallaby hop its slow, grazing way across a field with all the casual nonchalance of a cow in a pasture, thinking that Australia truly wasn’t like anywhere else on earth and he was a little bit in love with it, and waiting for Willow.