by Lori Foster
At first, Luna had been more than pleasant, flirting in a way that Joe now realized was a natural part of her nature, not a come-on for him personally. She’d looked at him with those slanted, golden eyes, and he’d seen what he wanted to see: an invitation.
Under normal circumstances, Joe kept a clear head at all times. But with Luna, nothing felt normal. In so many ways, she shot his perspective all to hell. On that particular day, she’d turned to set the meal on the checkout counter, presenting Joe with a perfect view of that delectable rear end, and without even thinking about it or the possible consequences, he’d … touched her.
That is, if you could call a pat, followed by a fullpalm squeeze, a mere touch. Soft, warm, resilient … He’d gotten one handful and immediately wanted more. A whole lot more.
But Luna had gone rigid, and from one second to the next Joe found himself wearing his lunch instead of getting to eat it. She’d stormed out without giving him a chance to apologize or explain or coax her into a better mood.
It hadn’t been easy, but Luna had eventually forgiven him. After all, the chemistry was there, as undeniable to her as it was to him. At Zane’s wedding, Joe had finally managed to ease her into one long, wet, blistering kiss that had haunted his nights for three months now.
After that, he’d tried repeatedly to get her alone. Hell, he’d even tried being on his best behavior. Not that his best was all that good. At thirty-six, he’d had a lot of time doing just as he damn well pleased. And the jobs he’d had—bodyguard, bounty hunter, private dick—had only made him meaner, a little nastier. It came with the territory and in some cases was outright necessary.
But for Luna, he had tried and had been damn uncomfortable in the process.
And still she’d turned him down.
Joe mentally rubbed his hands together. Now, however, fate had thrown her for a loop, and according to Zane, she needed someone exactly like him. Someone unscrupulous, someone hard, fearless. Someone who could kick ass when necessary.
He needed to recuperate before he undertook the ass-kicking part. But for Luna, for a chance to appease his overwhelming lust, he’d manage.
Luna looked very undecided, so Joe held himself still, even held his breath, and after half a minute, just when he thought he might suffocate waiting for her to make up her mind, she came to him.
She sat on the side of the bed, hip to hip. “You’ll behave, Joe.”
“Absolutely.” Joe waited, but she didn’t say anything more. “Yeah?”
She looked at him, scowled, looked away.
Oh, now this was good. “Shyness?” he taunted in a low tone. “From Luna the loony? Luna the goddess of the moon? Luna the—”
“All right!” Brows drawn, expression stern, she said, “I have two kids.”
Joe choked. And damn it, given his injuries, choking hurt. He held his ribs and wheezed and tried to catch his breath. Surely, he’d misunderstood. Zane had claimed she had a problem that only he could handle, and Luna herself said she needed him. But Joe assumed they meant to deal with a threat of some kind, a pushy boyfriend, an impatient landlord, even something financial. He could handle any and all of those. But kids? What the hell did he know of kids, other than that he didn’t want any?
Finally, eyes watering, Joe sputtered, “The hell you say? Must’ve been one quick birth.”
“Are you going to be serious or not?”
Joe clutched his aching ribs. “Believe me, sweetheart, I’m as serious as a nun on Sunday.”
She drew a big breath. “I have a cousin who passed away two years ago. She left two kids. No one knows who their father is, so now they need a guardian.” She stared at her hands in her lap, and for a moment, it appeared she might actually cry.
Typically male, Joe felt himself melting. There was just something about a tearful woman that made a man feel more like a man, protective and strong, the conquering hero ready to comfort the vulnerable little lady. And when that little lady happened to be Luna … Well, she was usually so brazen and self-assured it really threw him to see her like this. If he weren’t so beat up and sore, he’d pull her close and hold her, snuggle her into his chest, rub her back … That’d be real nice, for sure. But odds were if he got her that close, especially while she was being all soft and female, he’d do something to get himself slugged.
Better not try it.
But while he waited for her to compose herself, he could at least hold her hand. Her nails were painted fuchsia, and she wore several silver rings. Small-boned, her hand felt delicate in his.
Shit. He hadn’t wanted to think of Luna as delicate. He wanted to think of her only as sexy. Hot. Provoking.
His.
He’d had a lot of fantasies about her needing him, but not like this. Not all the emotional stuff. This time the groan was silent, caused by a cramp in his brain, not his body.
“How did she die?” He kept his tone gentle, low.
“A stupid car wreck. She left one night for groceries and never came home again.” Luna sniffed. “They’ve been through the wringer, Joe.”
He tilted his head, trying to see her averted face. Teasing her seemed his best recourse. “I swear, if you cry, I’ll fall apart, too, and then where will we be?”
She snorted at that. In the next instant, she shed the vulnerability, once again as cool as the other side of the pillow. “They’ve been through several guardians, but no one permanent. I spoke with Willow, Chloe’s daughter, for about half an hour. She sounded almost … desperate. I don’t like that.”
“Chloe was your cousin?” Joe stroked her knuckles with his thumb, marveling at how soft she felt, distracting himself from the emotional issues trying to crowd his brain.
She nodded. “We met once or twice when we were younger, but I barely remember her at all. I didn’t even realize she’d passed away. No one notified me of the funeral.”
“So why are they contacting you now?”
“I’m all that’s left. Willow isn’t quite fifteen yet, but she sounds much older. She’s been trying to take care of her younger brother and deal with the constant changes. It’s too much. I have to go there.”
“Course you do.” Joe gave her hand a squeeze. He couldn’t imagine what Luna thought he might add to the equation. Hell, he wasn’t a family man, but he also wasn’t a complete bastard. “So where do I fit into this?”
“Then, you’re willing to help?”
He gave her a level look for that ridiculous question. “You mean you don’t know? And here I thought you were Luna, goddess of the moon, all powerful, all seeing …”
Again, she looked ready to hit him.
Joe laughed. “Come off it, honey. You assumed before you came here that I’d help, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked.”
She acknowledged that with a shrug. “All things considered, I thought I could probably count on you.”
Ah ha. A cocky grin tilted his mouth. “You mean because of the sexual chemistry between us.”
Far too serious, Luna gazed at him. “No. I meant because deep down, you’re one of the best men I know.” Her gentle voice took him by surprise. “Zane certainly trusts you.”
Now damn it, that threw him completely off guard. He’d had all kinds of sexual banter ready to go and she had to hit him a low blow by complimenting his oft-maligned character.
While Joe mentally fumbled, Luna went on unfazed. “But before you agree, you should know that the kids are a handful. Willow hinted that they’d riled some of their neighbors with harmless pranks, and now some people are … well, blaming them for all kinds of things and generally giving them a hard time.”
“A hard time, huh?” Joe smirked. It had to be more than that or Luna wouldn’t be trying to coerce him along. She wasn’t exactly helpless herself, and in the normal course of things, he had no doubt she could handle a few annoying neighbors. She’d sure handled him, and in the process, she’d made it more than plain that she wanted nothing to do with him. It said something about her present
situation that she’d come to him now.
It also emphasized her faith in his abilities. You’re one of the best men I know. Now, didn’t that beat all? She wasn’t here because she wanted him, but out of some misconstrued notions on his nobility. Joe clenched his teeth. She was sure to be pissed when she found out that he didn’t have a noble bone in his body, and it wouldn’t really be fair—to her or to the children—for him to get involved.
But how bad could a couple of kids be? They were little people, right? Limited in their destructive abilities. Neither he nor his sister had married yet, so they were a long way off from supplying any babies to the family, much to their mother’s annoyance. But between his four cousins, there was a gaggle of kids ranging in age from eighteen months to nearing fifteen. Joe enjoyed them whenever he visited. Kids could be charmers, as long as they weren’t his kids.
Having made up his mind, he pushed away his ever-present physical discomfort and faced Luna. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“It?”
“The scoop. What have the rugrats done? How much trouble are they in?”
“I don’t know that I’d really call it trouble,” she hedged. “There are just a few people hoping to run them off.”
“What kind of people?”
Luna looked him over, then said, “Big people.”
“Big, huh?”
“And scary.”
He grinned. “That right?”
“And mean.”
“I am not mean.”
“I didn’t say you are. I said the people bothering the kids are mean.”
“Right. And you figure you’ll fight fire with fire by shoving me under their noses?”
It was her turn to grin. “However imposing and unscrupulous they are, you have to be more so, Joe. I’ve seen you in action when you were helping Zane, and I’ve heard all the stories your cousins have told. You can handle anything and anyone.”
“Probably.” Then with a frown: “But I am not mean.” Why it mattered so much that she understood that, Joe couldn’t say.
“You’ll be perfect. Those bullies won’t know what hit them.”
“You still haven’t told me what’s being done. Why are bullies bothering them?”
Luna frowned at a particularly ugly bruise below Joe’s left pectoral muscle. She looked as if she wanted to touch him, and Joe waited, hoping she would, even though he knew he wasn’t up to a romp at the moment. But Luna simply lifted her gaze back to his face. “Willow said it’s because their mother was never married, and now they’re orphans.”
“And no one has any idea who the dad is?”
“No. He’s never paid child support, never been around. I didn’t want to dig, but Willow volunteered that there wasn’t a dad, and never would be.”
“Damn.”
“Sad, huh? How can a town blame children for being illegitimate or orphaned? Yet, none of the guardians have ever made a move to adopt them. They just keep drifting away, abandoning the kids for one reason after another.”
It sickened Joe, but he knew that small towns could be really funny about that sort of thing. In so many ways, they were worse than big cities. At least in a big city you could be anonymous and no one gave a damn who you were or what you did. “Who’s the guardian now?”
“An aunt. She’s sticking around just until I arrive, but she made it clear that she’s impatient. There was another cousin before her. I’m told his wife got a job transfer and they didn’t want to lug the kids along. Before that was a semiretired great uncle, who claimed the kids were too troublesome. The aunt is the third one. Now she wants to get married, and her fiancé doesn’t want to be saddled with two children.”
Imagining how young kids must feel without any stability, Joe scowled. But to have Luna take over…
As a bona fide free spirit, Luna was too exotic, too bold and far too sexy to be a mother. Not only that, but she worked as a psychic, or rather a psychic’s assistant. There were plenty of times when Joe thought she had legitimate woo-woo ability. On several occasions, she’d seemed to know more than she should, especially about him.
As if she’d read his mind, Luna flipped her hair and forged on. “I’ve already passed the background check, but I’ll have to do the home study once I’m settled there. I’m not overly concerned because while I might not be the ideal mother—”
“You said it, not me.”
With no interruption to her explanations, Luna pinched him on the arm, making him lurch. “—CPS is way overworked, and anytime kids can be placed with a relative, they tend to bend over backward to see it happen, or so the social worker told me. Even though I’m a distant, unknown relative, I’m still preferable.”
“Yeah? Preferable to what?”
A golden fire lit her eyes, alerting Joe to the possibility of another pinch. He caught her hand to deter her. “Does the social worker know about your propensity for causing pain?”
“Don’t be a baby, Joe. I didn’t hurt you.”
True enough. Added to his other various aches and pains, a mere pinch was negligible, but God knew he didn’t need any more.
“I’m going to move there.”
Thrown off guard once more, Joe asked, “There where?”
“North Carolina.”
Joe gave a start of surprise. Well, hell. Luna already lived over an hour south of him, in Thomasville, Kentucky. Any more than that was just too damn far for his convenience. He’d have to find a way to talk her out of relocating.
He wanted her in his bed. For how long he hadn’t decided yet. But until he did decide, he wanted her within reaching distance. Kids he could handle. Bullies he could handle.
Never knowing how it felt to have Luna under him … Now, that was too much to consider.
Chapter Two
“Maybe we should talk about this.”
“My mind’s made up. They’re alone, Joe. Two whole years they’ve lived with uncertainty, going from one adult’s set of rules to another. At first, I thought to bring them here, but the house was given to them free and clear in the will, with the proviso that the guardian live there.”
Joe frowned over that. Why would their mother insist the kids stay in the same area? Surely, she knew how difficult it would be for most adults to relocate. Added to the automatic responsibilities of raising someone else’s children, it was a lot to ask.
Picking up on his thoughts yet again, Luna said, “I bet Chloe meant the house as an incentive. You know, like free rent, since the mortgage is paid off. She probably didn’t want it sold because it’d be too easy for a guardian to sell it, spend the money, then leave the kids again. Besides, the kids have had enough change. It’s their home and they shouldn’t have to move. For the past two years, it’s been the only constant in their life.”
Luna sounded so set on leaving, something close to desperation crept in on Joe. He shrugged it off and scowled. “What about your life here? Your job with Tamara, your friends, your family?” What about me? He didn’t say it out loud, and even thinking it made his guts cramp. But damn it, he wanted to matter to her a little.
Her shrug was negligent, unconcerned. “My family is already scattered around the country, and we’ve never been close. Believe me, it won’t matter to them what I do.”
“No?” The idea of relatives not caring seemed alien to Joe, but then he came from a big, close family. That thought brought another, and he realized he really didn’t know much about Luna’s background.
Luna shook her head but didn’t elaborate. “I can find work anywhere, and I can always visit Tamara and Zane and the others.”
Disgruntled, Joe rolled his eyes. Obviously, the thought of being out of his reach didn’t distress her one iota. But he’d find a way to change her mind about that. “So what’s my role in this? You want me to beat the shit out of anyone giving the kids a hard time? Will I need to hurt anyone?”
Luna looked amused by his offer. “Give it up, Joe, because I’m not buying it.”
“What?” His innocent act was a bit rusty, but he thought he’d pulled it off.
“Zane already warned me that you’d say something stupid like that. He said you take every opportunity to exaggerate your own reputation.”
Zane ruined all his fun. But Joe still remembered a time when Zane had accused him of being a hit man, so apparently he’d bought into the reputation at least a little. Joe grinned. “So what is my role?”
“I just want you there for backup and to intimidate the more aggressive people.” Luna looked him over, her gaze lingering on his chest, his shoulders. Her eyes warmed and her brows lifted in feminine approval. “Even battered and bruised and moaning with every other breath, I can’t imagine too many people dumb enough to take you on.”
Joe gave a wolfish grin. “Yet you never hesitate.”
Affronted by the suggestion that she might be dumb, Luna said, “I believe I’ve avoided you.”
Joe subtly kicked the sheet lower. Apparently, not subtly enough because her eyes shifted, then stayed glued to his abdomen. “Avoided me?” he asked, to keep her from noticing that he’d noticed her looking. “So that wasn’t you with me in the dark hallway at Zane’s wedding, kissing me and clawing my back and arching up against me and—”
She was off the bed in a flash. “A touch of modesty wouldn’t hurt, you know.”
“Modesty is for wimps.” He kicked the sheet farther away. It couldn’t go any lower without baring him completely.
Being a stubborn witch, Luna refused to look. “All right. So, I kissed you. It was a momentary lack of sanity.”
Joe nodded in mock sympathy. “I have that effect on a lot of women.”
Her eyes got glassy with her determination to stay on northerly ground. “Which is why I came to my senses and walked away.”
It gave Joe a lot of satisfaction to point out one irrefutable fact. “But you’re back.”
“Only out of necessity.” As if she couldn’t help herself, her gaze flicked over him. Her breath caught; her cheeks warmed. Softly, she said, “There’s no denying it, Joe. You’d be a treat. But I don’t intend to be one more notch on your bedpost.”
