Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “I’ve never done that before,” she confessed. It was so easy, somehow, to tell him your secrets.

  “Mm,” he said. “I think I knew that. You excite the hell out of me.”

  She smiled against him, kissed his chest, ran her hand down all the muscle of his upper arm, and said, “Same. And we forgot the condom.”

  His hand stopped. “Huh. You’re right.”

  “Let me guess. You don’t do that.”

  “No. I’m careful, though, I promise. Tested recently. Careful always.”

  “Reckon you know that I am, too. I have a bad feeling that I said something to you about that in a weak moment.”

  “And if it’s anything else,” he said, “I’ve got that, too.”

  Her breath stopped. What did that mean? “I’ve got an IUD in.”

  “Oh.” She’d swear that was disappointment she heard, like she could see through his chest and into his heart, the same way he could see her. “Well, that’s fine, then, I guess. And by the way—I have an appointment with the surgeon Monday morning. We’re leaving after that.”

  “We are?”

  “Yeah. Getting you away from second thoughts for a week. After that, we’ll see.”

  What did that mean? She’d just thought that she could see his heart, but how much of that was wishful thinking? “Where are we going?”

  “Many places across the West. Portland, Oregon. Lewiston, Idaho, because I need to see my mother, and I’d like you to meet her. And Sinful. That one’s in Montana, but you knew that. You might have a chance to see Rafe.”

  “That’d be nice. You aren’t worried about what my cousins will say, though? Rafe wasn’t best pleased with this idea.” She was dancing around, just like before, feeling her way.

  “Rafe,” Brett said deliberately, “can give us his opinion. That doesn’t mean we have to take it.”

  “Must be nice to be you.” She kissed his chest again and wondered how much the sex had hurt him. It had been more athletic than before, but it seemed to her that his pain was less, that he was moving better, but since he never complained, it was hard to tell.

  “Not always nice,” he said. “I’m the only me I’ve got, though, so I’m stuck with it. What do you think about meeting my mom?”

  “I think that’d be awesome.” She let the truth of it fall out, there to see. Too late now to think about protecting her heart. “We could go see my aunt and uncle on Sunday, if you liked, since I find myself at leisure, and you may want to see more of Australia than this house.” Sounded casual. Didn’t feel like it.

  A moment before he answered. “I would. Let’s do that. There’s also the matter of a Montana winter.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You don’t want to go back to your place, because you don’t want Azra’s mom coming after you. That little duffel you brought doesn’t have clothes for snow in it. Doesn’t have clothes for me to take you out the way I need to before we leave, for that matter.”

  “Uh . . . no. To both things. I don’t want her thinking she can keep hanging around, and that she’ll find Azra through me.”

  “We’ll take care of that in Brisbane, then. Autumn’s got to come sometime, even here, and surely somebody in Australia wears something besides shorts. We’ll get you Portland-ready, at least. Otherwise, you’re going to get off the plane and turn around to get back on it again. The Montana aspect, we’ll take care of when we get to Portland.”

  “That’s endless assurance, mate. You buying my clothes now?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  She sighed. “Since I’m pretty well skint other than your money, which I’m saving, since I’ve just talked myself out of a job, I’ll take it. I’m not a good shopper, though, money or not.”

  “Mm. On the other hand, you’ve got somebody nearby who’s on pins and needles herself and scared to leave the house, I’ll bet, and who’s very, very good at finding you beautiful things to wear. Maybe Azra needs a trip to Brisbane, and a chance to feel useful. We’ll take everybody to dinner by the river, how’s that? I know a place.”

  Sunday noon, and Brett was discovering that Willow was as competent at driving as she was at every other physical activity. He’d given Dave the day off, but he’d taken the car. It was more comfortable than anybody else’s.

  She was also nervous. After she’d gotten done chatting with Azra, who’d insisted on riding in the back seat because of his leg, she’d fallen silent. At first, he’d thought she was navigating the traffic, which was busy enough, but when she’d made it onto the quieter suburban streets, he decided it was something more.

  He checked behind him. Azra had put headphones in, being discreet, no doubt. He only had a couple minutes for this, so he’d better make it good.

  “You’re nervous,” he said. No sense in burying the lead.

  Willow jumped. Physically jumped. “Oh! You startled me. Maybe a bit.”

  “You know . . .” He couldn’t help smiling. “Talking to people is my job.”

  “And you’re great at your job.” She was smiling back, at least a little.

  “Not to get all arrogant about it, but that’s what they say.”

  This time, she laughed. “If it were just my aunt . . . I don’t bring people home. Men home. They’re going to think it’s . . . that it means something more than just an outing. We don’t actually have to do this.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “We do. And they’re going to be right, as far as I’m concerned. Why do you think I finally got a haircut?”

  That flustered her some more, and she drove another block before she burst out with, “And why in the world did you say that walking the golf course with him would be fine? Passing over the fact that it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, since you can’t possibly golf right now, even if you could normally, so what’s the point—you’ve never seen my Uncle Colin walk. Ex-sergeant-major, in case I didn’t say.”

  “You did say. It’s nine holes and maybe two and a half miles, flat crutch tips are a thing, Dave’s been taking me to his gym—you didn’t know that, did you?—and what else am I going to do, come shopping with you? Also, I’m a property developer. Of course I can golf. Normally.”

  Two hours and four holes later, though, he was sweating it some. Willow had been right. Her aunt was as easy, casual, and cheerful as Willow herself. Her uncle was something else. Also, the temperature might be in the mid-eighties, but the humidity was set on “steam shower,” and he’d sweated all the way through his blue polo shirt and was now working on the khakis. Grass-tested flat crutch tips or not, it wasn’t easy to keep up with the three men striding over the ground like it was a race to get there. Two ex-military, one civilian with a point to make, and Brett, doing his damnedest not to bring up the rear.

  Willow’s uncle was a broad-shouldered, lean-hipped man in his sixties with a posture so upright, you couldn’t imagine him bending over, and with hair clipped so close to his head, you could barely see that it was graying. No compromise to age, or to anything else. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine him as an action star’s father, and it wasn’t any kind of stretch at all to imagine him as the father of a special forces soldier. Brett placed a crutch into a sneaky dip in the ground and had an awkward moment, and ex-Sergeant-Major Blackstone naturally chose that moment to turn and ask, “All right?”

  “Yep,” Brett said. Apparently not convincingly enough, because the other man slowed his pace a fraction and said, “Let them go on. Geoff takes bloody ages anyway. If I’m not there to watch, I won’t feel my blood pressure rise. He had a bypass last year. Thinks that’s an excuse.”

  Brett laughed out loud, and Blackstone looked at him out of the corner of shrewd brown eyes and didn’t smile. Brett wondered if he could. The surface of that face would probably crack. “You think I’ve been testing you,” the older man said.

  “Oh, yeah.” Brett hadn’t slowed down yet, and he didn’t do it now. “But then, I was expecting you to.”

  They passe
d a dozen kangaroos grazing among the trees who decided to register their protest at being interrupted by hopping a few desultory feet away. Their appearance had startled Brett at first, and so had the huge white ibis who wandered the links as casually as pigeons in the park. On the other hand, it was a foreign country. There were probably giant bats in those trees at night, too.

  His wildlife musings were cut short by Blackstone saying abruptly, “Willow’s mum was my elder sister. A love match, obviously, even if I never understood the bloke, or her either, come to that. I’ve pounded sand in heaps of hot places too close to the equator. So has Jace. Didn’t make either of us burn to set up house there. People aren’t the same, Fiona would tell me now, and you can bloody well say that again. Anyway, there they were, and then Willow came along after everybody’d reckoned there wouldn’t be kids. Not that anyone paid much attention to her.”

  Brett would always rather listen than talk. He already knew what he thought. He wanted to know what other people thought. So instead of diving into some declaration, he asked, “What was she like?”

  If his face had been allowed to show an expression, Blackstone would have been showing surprise. He’d been expecting the declaration, clearly. Or possibly Brett screaming and running. After a moment, he said, “I was a drill sergeant at one time. Saw heaps of kids. Got to know how they’d turn out, mostly. Willow was that skinny farm kid from the Outback, the kind you’d swear would drop out in the first week if you didn’t know better. When you have them queue up on the first day, that kid never shoves up anywhere close to the front. He’s always got an Adam’s apple that sticks out too far and ginger hair, and you never hear him say a word. Willow didn’t have the Adam’s apple, but same idea.”

  “And how does that kid turn out?” Brett asked.

  Another quick, sidelong glance. “Surprises you, usually. Does everything you ask. Turns back to help his mate who’s stuck on the obstacle course. He’ll be the one still standing at the end of the run, too, ready to give more, when half of them have dropped. When things turn to custard, he’s got his rifle out and is going about his business. Never looks the flashest, but he never gives up and never backs down. He doesn’t know how. And he’ll fall on a grenade to save his mates. It’s never the useless ones who’ll do that. It’s the ones you can’t afford to lose.”

  “And you don’t want Willow to fall on a grenade.”

  “She’s done it too many times. You’re splashing some serious lolly around, mate. Sending her shopping. Taking all of us out tonight, someplace posh, I’m sure, to make an impression. Flying her out to the States, and I reckon it’ll be first class. What happens when the plane’s on the ground again and the glamour bit’s over? Who’s helping her put the pieces back together then?”

  “I’m guessing here,” Brett said, “that the Air Force is inferior to the Army, and that a captain’s useless without a good sergeant to explain how things actually work. A position I agree with, by the way. And that wealthy men are soft, disloyal, probably dishonorable, and generally flawed until proven otherwise.”

  He got a faint snort of laughter, at least that was what he assumed that sound was. “Could be.”

  Brett could take offense, except that he couldn’t. If he was asking for the right to stand by Willow, which he pretty clearly was, of course her uncle wanted to know if he could do it. So all he said was, “I may not be exactly what you think. Even those recruits can surprise you, I’ll bet. I’m a self-made man, and I don’t consider myself better than anybody. I’m from nothing and nowhere, but I’m in love with your niece, and if there’s a grenade to fall on, I’ll be the one doing it.”

  If he’d thought that would be enough, he’d been wrong. “Easy words,” Blackstone said. “But I’m listening.”

  “Right, then. My father worked in a pulp mill, and so did my uncle and two of my cousins. The cousins still do. My grandfather was a logger, and I did my time in the mill myself. Turns out I’m good at sales, though, and I’m better at making money. I’m not in the mill anymore, and I don’t apologize for that.”

  Blackstone made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, then said, “You have houses, Rafe says, which doesn’t thrill me, whatever you imagine. But then, Rafe has houses himself, and he’s not too bad. What sort of house do your parents live in?”

  Ah. Nice trick question. “My mother’s still in the house I grew up in, which I’ve fixed up exactly as much as she’s allowed me to. My father died when I was twelve.”

  “Self-made is right, then.”

  “Yes.” They’d made it to the next hole at last, but Blackstone waved the other two men on and kept walking. No rest for the wicked.

  The next question wasn’t the one Brett was expecting. “Property developer. Not a career practiced by saints. How many corners do you cut doing it?”

  This guy wasn’t stopping until Brett was turned inside-out. He’d go ahead and do it. It wasn’t actually scraping your soul over sandpaper, it just felt that way. “Not too many,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. The day he died, I had to confess something to my dad. I’d cheated on a test at school, I’d been caught doing it, because I wasn’t nearly as sneaky as I thought, and I had a note from the teacher that had been burning a hole in my backpack all weekend. I’ve never wanted to do anything less than to hand over that note. We were out fishing in the river, and I’d stuffed it into my pocket before we left. It was Sunday. Last chance. I finally got those words out with a hand shoved into my dog’s fur, hanging onto the last time my dad would think I was the son he wanted. The last part of it was, ‘I made a mistake, Dad. I’m sorry. It was a mistake.’ And for the record, I’ve never told anybody that.”

  “Hmm,” Blackstone said. “What did he say?”

  “Said exactly what you would have, I’d guess. ‘That wasn’t a mistake. A mistake’s when you cast your line and it hooks in the trees. When you aim your cast at your sister, that isn’t a mistake. It’s a wrong choice. What you did was make the wrong choice.’ Man, I thought I couldn’t feel lower. And then he said, ‘Are you going to make that choice again?’ I said, ‘No, sir,’ and that was it. I made more wrong choices in my life, but I didn’t make that one. He said something else, too. ‘Never do anything you wouldn’t want to see printed in the papers.’ That’s been a pretty good life guide, I find. Also, ‘Keep your good name as clean as you got it, and you’ll be able to pass it on again the same way.’”

  “My dad,” Blackstone said, in a surprising turn, “told me this one. ‘Never buy a car from a man who cheats on his wife. Cheaters cheat.’”

  “Another excellent rule,” Brett agreed. “Here’s mine. Don’t do business with anyone who cheats at golf. Great test, golf. For example, the way you’re kicking my ass right now.”

  If he’d expected Blackstone to laugh, he’d been wrong. “So you’re not a cheater, and you’re not a liar.”

  “That’s it. Pretty low bar, if you ask me, but I pass that one. I’m a tough negotiator, though, and I usually get what I want. I’m willing to work harder for it, I’m a pretty smart guy who knows when to jump and when to walk away, and I know how to keep people from putting up their defenses. And I believe that character is destiny.”

  “Hmm,” Blackstone said again. “You said your dad died that day. What happened?”

  This was the worst round of golf Brett had ever not-played. If he’d wondered what he’d do for Willow, he was starting to get some idea. Where was the part where the guy asked about your prospects? His prospects were great. His past? Not so much. “He drowned,” he said. “The dog drowned, too. I didn’t make the right choices then, either.”

  “You didn’t, huh,” Blackstone said. “What should you have done?”

  “Got his waders off. Swum down underneath him and tried harder. It was a bad day, six or seven years later, when I figured that out. I’m a slow learner sometimes, but the idea takes hold eventually.”

  “Could’ve killed you, too.”

  “Coul
d’ve been worth it. I can tell you that my dad never would’ve let go. You could say I learned my lesson.”

  They walked on. Coming up to the sixth hole, and, Brett devoutly hoped, the end of this.

  “So now you’re rich,” Blackstone said. “Good-looking bloke. Charming. Intelligent. And over forty, that’s for damn sure. How is it you’re not married already?”

  “I was. It didn’t take.”

  “Kids?”

  He had to take a breath, and then he had to force the crutches on. “We had a little girl. She died shortly after she was born.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So you see, there’s this.” Time to stop, face the guy, and take the bull by the horns. For one thing, he was probably going to succumb to heat stroke in about five minutes. Last chance.

  When Blackstone’s sober eyes were locked on his face, though, it was impossible to tell anything but the truth. In that way, Willow’s uncle and his own dad were exactly the same. “I’ve done enough things and seen enough things in my life,” he told the other man, “to know when I’m seeing what I want. I’ve taken enough risks to know when it’s time to take the leap. And I’ve lost enough to know how to hold on.”

  Willow wondered how it had gone with her uncle. When she, Azra, and Aunt Fiona had come home from four long hours of shopping in Queens Plaza, once she’d been dragged to one over-lit, intimidatingly glamorous store after another in a pastime infinitely more exhausting than the longest day of catering, Brett had been sitting on the patio sipping from a glass of ice water, wearing gray dress trousers and one of his pristine, tailored white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, his feet bare, looking absolutely relaxed.