Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “You don’t fill in,” Amanda said. “There’s no filling in. Who’s going to do all the work for this wedding if she doesn’t, I’d like to know? I’m already down a waitress, because Martina’s ill as well.” Brett inclined his head at the door, and she turned as if she didn’t know what he was talking about and said, “What, Tom? He’s not helping in the kitchen. He does enough. And just who the bloody hell are you to be telling me how to run my business?”

  “I’m the man who’s in love with your partner,” Brett said. “The one who’s going to take her away from here, if I can. You’ll have a fight on your hands to hang onto her, so if I were you, I’d go through that door again, come back in, and start over. Do it right this time. I’ll be listening, and so will she. Try harder.”

  Yeah, he’d said it.

  Amanda didn’t come back in again. Willow wasn’t surprised. Of course Amanda was shocked. Of course she was disappointed. And of course Willow herself still wanted to curl up and die. Not from the sickness this time, but from knowing she’d caused it. With all her training and all her effort—still, somehow, it had happened, and it was her responsibility.

  What was she meant to say to Brett? She had no clue. Her skin was prickly all over, and she couldn’t tell if it was from illness or emotion, or even what kind of emotion it was. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to pull up the sheet and hide from everything, and she was much too close to crying. Again. She needed to pull her head in and get herself under control, and it wasn’t feeling easy. A few bouts of breathing in and out, and she could finally say, “Thanks. That may help with whatever happens next.”

  “No problem,” he said, and that was all. Clearly, he had said it for effect, which was what she’d figured all along. Nothing new here. Nothing disappointing. Everybody had their own lives, and you weren’t front and center in them. She’d known that since she was twelve, and if she were honest with herself, she’d known it long before that. Men didn’t fall in love for keeps in a week, either, especially not men like Brett, and if they did, it wasn’t with women like her. He’d dated his wife for three years. His beautiful, brilliant wife. Nobody had ever called her brilliant in her life. The idea would have made her snort if she hadn’t been so tired. Besides, if she knew Brett at all, she knew that he was a cautious, controlled man who didn’t succumb to whims. And who’d brought six condoms on a short business trip in case he met somebody pretty. Call that a confident man.

  “Do you think there’s a way to find out about those two people?” she asked him. None of the rest mattered now. “Except that I don’t know their names. The older lady will be Mrs., ah . . .”

  “Attenborough,” Brett said, like a man who never forgot anything.

  “But I don’t know the other one’s name,” she said. “The pregnant one.”

  “I’ll ask,” he said. “It’s not that big a hospital.” He gathered his crutches and stood, and she thought that she should probably be sorry that she was making him run around the corridors in his state, but couldn’t manage it.

  She’d made people sick. Possibly dozens of people. She needed to know.

  Fifteen minutes later, she had her IV out and was checking into the wisdom of sitting up with the help of a nurse when he came back in, looking not one bit tired and absolutely unruffled.

  “Not much change,” he said, setting his crutches against the wall and leaning against it himself. “I talked to the groom. Attenborough. I explained that you were in here suffering from the same thing, and told him you were going to get to the bottom of how it could have happened. I also told him how upset you were. His daughter’s being kept as a precaution, his mother’s stable but guarded, and he and his wife didn’t get sick at all. I said it couldn’t have been the meat, then, since surely they both ate that, and you didn’t. Or the dessert, either. I got his number and asked him to call if there was any change.”

  “Thank you,” she said, tried to think things through logically, and gave up. She wanted to ask what Calvin Attenborough had said about her, but she was fairly sure she knew. It didn’t matter anyway. It had happened, and she needed to find out why. Tomorrow. Just now, all she wanted was to lie down again. She also wished, as she slid off the bed, clutching at her shirttails, and leaned against it for support, that she had something else to wear. Getting into a car was going to be awkward.

  Oh.

  “I could ring Azra,” she said, “for a lift. I just realized that we don’t have a way to get out of here.”

  Brett said, “I’ve got it handled,” then turned to the nurse and asked, “What do you think about letting us borrow a sheet to get Willow home?”

  “Hospital property,” she said.

  Brett smiled at her. He had a great smile, or maybe it was that way he had of focusing on only you. “But you can let us borrow it. I’ll bring it back in an hour, if you need it in the laundry tonight.” He looked at her name tag. “Vanessa. One hour. Scout’s honor. What do you say?”

  The nurse, a middle-aged lady who should probably have been more resistant, was trying not to smile back, but she wasn’t succeeding. “Oh, go ahead. And I don’t believe you were ever a Scout.”

  He laughed. “You’re right. But I’m extremely honorable. I have a driver outside to take us home, and I’ll have him return this to you as soon as he does.” He was already trying to wrap it around Willow, not the easiest job one-handed.

  She said, “I can do it,” and did her best to arrange it around herself like a skirt. How had he known how large her semi-nakedness had loomed just then? Was he actually psychic? That was a daunting thought.

  The nurse had to help, in the end. “We’ll tuck in the bit that has the hospital’s stamp on it,” she said. “Dunno what I was thinking. Take care your friend does bring it back.” When the aide was helping Willow into the wheelchair, though, the nurse leaned over, adjusted the sheet some more, and told her in an undertone, “I’d keep that one.” And she thought, Yeah. For two more weeks. After that, she closed her eyes against the vertigo, let herself be rolled down the passage, and tried not to think about her reputation, her career, her judgment, and her heart.

  She’d get some sleep, and then she’d get it all sorted. She’d find a way. There was always a way, and she always bounced back.

  You bounced back, or you fell apart. She was bouncing back.

  Brett’s driver Dave was standing in the pickup lane, holding the SUV’s door, when Brett followed Willow’s wheelchair out into the warm night.

  As usual when his emotions got involved, he deliberately slowed everything down to binary form, yes/no, and focused on the next decision.

  “You think you’re calm, but what you really are is cold,” Nia had flung at him during that last terrible day, just before she’d walked out the door. “You don’t feel, you only think. A woman needs a man to feel.”

  She’d apologized for that later, and he’d said, “Never mind. If that was what you thought, I obviously wasn’t conveying what I should have been.”

  She’d sighed and said, “There you are again. Brett. This is why I left. Do you ever have an unfiltered thought? An unfiltered emotion?”

  No, he thought now. It’s how I’m made. Something he’d have sworn he’d come to terms with years ago. “Put her in the front seat,” he told the aide, who was hovering on the pavement with the wheelchair. “You could lean the seat back for her, if you don’t mind.”

  He didn’t face the next challenge until they were both in the car, he’d got himself slewed around so his left leg was on the seat, and Dave, whose previous efforts for him had mainly involved messenger duty, but who hadn’t complained about getting called out of bed for this, asked, “Where to?”

  “My place,” Brett said, and Dave nodded and pulled out of the lot. Good. Brett liked quiet drivers.

  Australians didn’t tip. Too bad, because this night deserved a tip. Gift certificate, then.

  An effort for another day, because Willow spoke for the first time in five minutes,
but what she said was, “I should go home.”

  He kept it calm. “I’d rather you stayed with me. It’s already two in the morning.”

  She hadn’t even reacted to what he’d said back there. He knew she’d heard. He spared a moment to think about her lack of expectations and what they said about her history, and then about the potential awkwardness of being the kind of guy who said too much too soon—the kind of guy he’d never been in his life—and refocused, because that was the kind of guy he was. “Two people are in the hospital with this thing, and Azra has a job to go to in the morning. What if you’re sick again?”

  “You remember her name,” Willow said. “Here’s a test. What’s her job?”

  He laughed. He knew how worried she was, and he had a pretty fair idea of how bad she still felt, but she was still trying. “Too easy. Clothing designer, working with a surfer-chic company whose name I unfortunately do not recall. Specializing in snaps up the sides of T-shirts and men’s briefs in a size too large. In the waist, of course. And I’d like you to stay. I’ll feel better about it.”

  Willow didn’t say anything, but she didn’t tell him to take her home, either. In fact, she didn’t speak for the rest of the drive down the back roads, nearly empty in the wee hours, which were apparently the only time that Byron Bay’s laid-back craziness subsided, and headed up the winding driveway. Dave pulled to the gentlest of rolling stops and said quietly to Brett in the rearview mirror, “She’s asleep, mate. Want me to carry her in?”

  “No. But come up and wait on the porch a minute, please.” She’d hate being carried unless Brett were doing it, and he couldn’t do it. He got himself out of the car, opened her door, touched her shoulder, and said, “Willow. We’re home.”

  “Oh!” She jumped, then rolled her head back, swallowed, and said, “Right. Right. Coming.” After that, she climbed out of the car, hitched her sheet around herself, and made her barefoot way through the gate, up the stone stairs, and into the house. “Oh,” she said, standing in the middle of the living room. “Sheet.” She unwound it, swaying on her feet, and handed it to him. “Thank you. I’ll go sleep in your guest room. Just in case.”

  “No,” he said, “you won’t. Go back to my room and lie down.” He grabbed the sheet as best he could, opened the door, thrust it at Dave, and said, “Take that back to the ER and tell them thanks very much for the loan. Also, what’s your hobby?”

  Dave, a stolid hulk of a man who doubled, Brett suspected, as a bodyguard, blinked at him. “My hobby?”

  “Yes. What do you do when you’re not working?”

  “Watch the footy, then,” Dave said.

  Brett waited a moment for it to sink in and make sense. It didn’t happen. “Uh . . . foot races? Foot modeling? Foot fetish?”

  Dave stared at him like he was nuts. “The footy, like. The football.”

  “Soccer?” Brett hazarded.

  More astonished staring. “Nah, mate. Soccer’s for mung beans. I’m from Geelong. Aussie Rules, of course.”

  Giving Brett, again, zero clue. “Got it,” he said. “Thanks. See you Monday.”

  “Ten-fifteen,” Dave agreed. Brett’s follow-up with the surgeon. By which time, he would have figured out what Aussie Rules meant, and where Geelong was. Not to mention the meaning of “mung bean.”

  It really was a different country.

  She woke up late. At least she thought it was late. Not five-thirty, anyway, even though the unfamiliar room was shrouded in dimness.

  It took her a second. It took her, in fact, moving to sit up and feeling the uncharacteristic weakness.

  Right. She’d been poisoned by the food she’d cooked, she was in Brett’s bed, and she wasn’t making meatballs for the Haier-McGill wedding right now. It was time to deal with all of that.

  At least she wasn’t repellent anymore. A few hours ago, she’d been sitting on Brett’s bed feeling exactly that when he’d come in from the front of the house. “I’ll sleep in the guest room,” she’d offered again. “I’m disgusting.”

  In answer, he headed into the bathroom, and she thought, Yeah, mate. You don’t even have an answer, because there isn’t anything honest you can say, and considered how much she needed to stand up and how hard that felt, only to have him come out again holding something.

  Folding toothbrush.

  “I felt about twenty times better in the hospital,” he said, “once they gave me one of these. This is the one I used on the plane. Nearly new.” He tossed it to her, and she reached for it and missed. It landed on the bed, and then the rest of the things did. The PJ pants and T-shirt he tossed next, which unfolded in midair.

  “I need a shower,” she said. “I don’t care how I feel, I’m not getting into bed with you without one.”

  “Then let’s go do it.”

  “You holding me up?” she asked with a look at his leg.

  “I’d say,” he said, pulling off his T-shirt, which she was too weak to appreciate properly, then sitting on the bed beside her and getting the PJ bottoms off, “that we’re holding each other up. Works for me.”

  He’d done it, too. He’d given her a few minutes’ head start, then had come into a bathroom that not only redefined “luxury” but was bigger than her living room and kitchen put together, opened the glass door of an enormous Carrera marble shower stall, where she was standing under the spray of one of the many showerheads, and eased himself to sitting opposite her, on the marble bench that ran across one entire wall. After that, he lifted a spray wand off its holder, pressed a button on the wall beside it, and said, “Come over here and choose a scent for us.”

  The heat and the ecstasy of being clean at last were reviving her a bit, but she was more than ready to sit down. He scooted over, indicated the line of tiny bottles in a custom-built niche, and said, “I don’t know which.”

  “You take scented showers?” she asked, trying for some sauciness that was hard to come by.

  That hint of a smile. “First time. Which one?”

  Lavender. Eucalyptus. Lemongrass. Tea tree. A few blends. She lifted something called Beg Me, unscrewed the cap and took a sniff, and said, “This one. We’ll be girly and sexy.”

  Brett reached across her and tipped in a few drops just as a hiss and a puff announced the arrival of a cloud of steam, and she laid her head back, breathed in the scent of baby powder and flowers, and said, “It’s meant to be an aphrodisiac, ylang-ylang. Sandalwood in here, too, besides orange blossom and rose. Nice. Pity you’ll never want me again.”

  He said, “Mm,” smiled some more, and put an arm around her. “I’ll give you the rest of the night off, maybe.”

  “Cocky, mate,” she said, but rested her head on his shoulder anyway, because it was there, and it was so solid.

  “Definitely.” This time, she could hear the smile. “When I first saw you, I thought—strong. Beautiful. Capable. Took me a little while to see the feminine side. It’s like a present I keep getting to unwrap all over again.”

  “Never had a manicure, though.” She was getting sleepy. This fragrant steam—it was bliss. “Never had a purse collection. Barely had a purse. My uncle was a sergeant in the Army. My aunt gardens and raises chickens and hard men. Dunno if she’s ever had a manicure, either. I’m betting ‘no.’”

  “Is that the definition?” He kissed her on the temple and smoothed her hair back, and she let her body melt into the warmth. “Because I’d say it’s French toast and flowers, and a pretty dress on a pretty girl. The way you smile at me, the way you laugh, and the way you make me feel like a man.”

  It wasn’t fair. She needed to keep her composure, and her distance. Most of all, though, she needed to go to sleep. It had been a bad, bad night, and she had so much to deal with. So why, when she was wrapped up in his arms once again, between cool, crisp white cotton sheets with a thread count far above her pay grade, the open window letting in a breeze that carried off all the worst parts of the day, did she feel like sparkles and unicorns?

 
Like life was a rainbow, and it was beautiful?

  It was morning now, though, and she had things to do. She used Brett’s toothbrush again, dressed in her clothes from the evening before, which he’d laid over the end of the bed—she wished he’d stop being so perfect, because it was confusing her—and went out in search of him. Him, and a cup of tea.

  He wasn’t in his office, and he wasn’t in the living room. Outside, then? She made her cuppa, took a sip, found her tote bag, and located a hair elastic. Which was in a clear plastic food storage bag along with her phone and wallet. She should get a purse, if she were going to spend time with a multi-millionaire, but this was so much more practical. You could see everything in it, and when it got dirty, you swapped it out for a new one. How good was that? She twisted her hair into a knot, fastened it with the elastic, took her tea, and went out onto the front porch.

  Brett was in a basket chair with a cup of coffee and his laptop in front of him, his fingers moving fast, looking completely focused. She asked, “You busy?”

  He said, “One sec,” hit a few more keys, shut the lid, and said, “Nope,” and she felt a surge of warmth, somewhere down deep. “Come give me a kiss and tell me how you’re feeling.”

  She set her mug down beside his, and he put an arm around her waist, pulled her to sit on his good thigh, and kissed her. Slow and sweet and soft, tasting like coffee with cream. She had one arm around his shoulders to keep her balance, her toes pushing off the stone-floored porch, and the other hand around his head, and he had both hands on her like that was where he wanted them.

  “You know,” she said when he let go of her mouth long enough to allow her to say it, “this was one of the first things I thought about you. That you’d like a woman in your lap.”