“I’m wearing my overalls,” she said. “I’m dirty.”
“Both true,” he said. “And yet you’re still cute. Reckon I have no taste, or no sense. Fair warning.”
“Mm.” The osprey was still hovering, only occasionally flapping its wings. “Is any of Australia like this?” she asked. “All I’ve seen of it are the places we went. Brisbane and the Whitsundays.”
The air was cooling now that the sun had dipped lower, and the breeze had picked up. Soon, they’d need to leave. He knew it was a question she’d asked because it was a safe one. Impersonal. And yet he didn’t keep it there, somehow. “Yes and no. Aussie’s so much older than this. Ancient geologically, anthropologically, every way. Everything’s worn down by time, and most of the mountains are going to stop below the treeline. But there’s something the same about it, too. Byron Bay, where my house is—it’ll soothe your heart. Just like here. The sea on one side, and the hinterland on the other. Green as anything, paddocks and hills and the mountains behind. Waterfalls and pools, and more birds than you’ve ever seen. You hear them calling in the canopy all day, and the tree frogs and cicadas, too. It’s a noisy place, Aussie. When the sun goes down, the sky turns more colors than you knew there were. The birds will come in a mob, then, flocks of them, whirling and calling like you’ve never seen. Whole clouds of cockatoos, of parrots, coming home to roost in the gum trees. The roos and wallabies come out at the same time, too, like they’re claiming the place. You sit out there with a beer and watch that, and you’ll know you’re lucky to be there, because it’s the best show there is. The changing of the guard. So—yeah. Maybe a bit like this at that. Different place, same feeling.”
“You love it,” she said. He’d swear she wasn’t thinking a bit about herself. She saw him, she heard him, and she was paying attention. There was no monster under her surface. “I’m surprised you left.”
“Ah, well,” he said. “Heaps of desert and jungle as well. That part’s not so nice. Jace and I grew up on Army bases. Not generally situated in the highest-rent districts. And when you do films, it’s the UK or the States, not Byron Bay. But it’s a nice place to visit. In fact, it’s my favorite.”
She hummed her agreement, and then the quiet settled in. The osprey was hovering, and then it was plummeting, so fast you could barely blink. It broke the surface with barely a splash, then came back up and took off again, wings flapping hard.
“Home to the nest,” Lily said. “He’s got a fish, did you see? He’ll have a mate and fledglings there still. We have birds here, too. Not as many. They tend to come in pairs. They’re fierce, but they’re loyal.”
“Pair bond’s a beautiful thing,” Rafe agreed. “Though it shouldn’t be. A bird is what its nature makes it. I’m guessing she’s not in any doubt, though, that he’ll come back to her.”
“I’m guessing she’s not,” she said.
He said, laying out each word with caution, “Speaking of pair bonding. I’m also guessing that the real story of how you came to marry Antonio is different from the one he tells.”
“Half true,” she said. “The best kind of lie. One of us didn’t want kids, as it turned out. It just wasn’t me.” She closed her takeout container over the remains of her trout. “I’d better be getting back. I need to feed my animals and put them to bed.”
Well, that had shut down the conversation quickly.
Rafe was quiet on the drive home. He’d obviously said enough. Chuck wasn’t, of course. In fact, Lily ended up sitting in the rear seat with him. “I’d better keep him back here,” she’d said, and he’d thought, Back off, mate, and said, “No worries.” When they got back to her house, Rafe took her bike from the back of the SUV, and then unloaded a sack of dog food, waiting with it under his arm while she unlocked the back door, then setting it down in her enclosed back porch. Which was, no surprise, neat and tidy, lined with shelves and high cupboards.
“Thanks,” she said. “I can bring the rest in myself.”
“Chuck’s drooling again,” he said. “Would you like me to open this bag for you before he floods you out of the place?”
“Well…sure,” she said. “OK. I’ll go get his dish.”
A repeat of the frantic gulping and the licking the bowl along the floor followed, and then Rafe was following Lily through a pretty if diminutive kitchen and into a tidy, absolutely feminine cottage-style sitting room, all greens, pinks, and floral prints, where he set the dog bed down near an ornate brass stove set on a pretty flagstone hearth.
“I need to go back out and take care of my animals,” Lily said. “Thank you for dinner. And for buying too much of our Chuck supplies. It wasn’t necessary.”
“Maybe not,” Rafe said. “Maybe it just felt like it.”
She hesitated a moment, and it was like that time before, and completely different. His hand came up to touch her cheek, and that was all. He said, “No worries, Lily. It’s friends. It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“I want it to be…friends,” she said, and then said it again. “I want to be friends.”
“Then that’s what you’ll get,” he promised. “Friends.” Something softened in her face, and he thought again, Back off, mate, and dropped his hand. He had a feeling he was going to be saying that heaps of times. For a few weeks, in fact.
It was going to be a long few weeks.
“If you really will come get Chuck in the morning,” she said, “I’ll be grateful. I leave for the store around nine-thirty.”
“Then I’ll come by around nine,” he said. “See you then.”
Once again, Lily was jumpy. At seven-thirty in the morning, dressed in her other pair of overalls and her rubber boots, she was leaning into the chicken run, setting up food and water containers, and still feeling that same flutter of nerves in her throat, and everywhere else, too. Whatever kind of flutters you wanted to call them, they were a holdover from last night, and yesterday afternoon, and every minute she’d spent with the werewolf. Or thinking about the werewolf.
Disaster calling. She was nowhere close to the kind of cool woman who could have a sexy fling and then treat her fellow flingee as family for the next fifty years or so, and flinging was what Rafe did.
A black nose poked into the doorway beside her, followed by an energetic shove against her thigh. It was so unexpected that she yelped, jumped, and hit her head on the heavy green-wire roof of the run as her poultry scattered, squawking out their indignant protests, their tail feathers waggling.
“Back,” Lily said, putting her hand onto Chuck’s muzzle and shoving him out of the doorway. He wagged his tail hopefully, drew his furry forehead up, and stared at her with such a “Who, me?” expression on his face that she almost laughed. She didn’t, though. She pointed at the ground and said, “Down.” At which he sat, cocked his head, and beseeched her forgiveness some more. One fuzzy ear up and one down.
“Goofball,” she said. “Oh. Treat. We’re both learning.” She reached for a piece of kibble, said, “Down” again, drawing her hand down in front of Chuck’s face while he drooled in the dirt. When he finally hit the deck, she said, “Good boy,” gave him the treat, and picked up the leash. She was going to have to do every bit of this with his leash around her wrist or under her foot. “Congratulations, dopey,” she told him. “You’ve convinced them all that you’re a coyote. On the plus side, you didn’t bark at them. Down. Stay.”
More quizzical eyebrows. More hopeful tail. But he stayed while she finished the chickens, then trotted beside her to the penned yard where she kept her goats. Where her morning instantly turned into a Frisky Fun Time, once Tinkerbelle and Edelweiss, her ridiculous pair of Nigerian dwarf goats, decided that Chuck was exciting, and Chuck announced that he was delighted to oblige. She’d swear that goats enjoyed misbehaving, at least hers did. It was like there was a Naughty Prize, and they were competing for it.
Did she get Tinkerbelle, the black goat, onto the stand and milked eventually? Yes, she did, because she was calm. She
was serene. And most importantly, she could still outwit a goat.
She thought that while Chuck lay down and jumped up and lay reluctantly down again, wagged his tail, and uttered the occasional joyful bark. She thought it while Edelweiss ran laps around the shed and the barnyard with her full udder banging against her legs in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable, interrupted by the odd vertical leap like she’d seen a snake. While Tinkerbelle shifted restlessly on the milking stand, and Lily got her milked anyway, because, yes, she was just that good.
And then Tinkerbelle jumped down and it was Edelweiss’s turn. The troublemaker.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, missy,” she told the black-and-white animal, grabbing a snack from the bucket and holding it temptingly on the other side of the metal stanchion that would hold the goat in place. “Let’s go.” She held her gaze until Edelweiss jumped up, then said, “That’s right. Who’s in charge? I’m in charge,” and tied her in.
Which was just fine. Edelweiss started eating the feed in her bucket, and started letting down her milk, too. Until Chuck’s cold black nose made another unwelcome appearance.
You could hardly blame Edelweiss for kicking him. A lady didn’t let just anybody touch her milk-producing area. She landed a pretty good shot to Chuck’s shoulder, and he yelped and jumped back. Which meant that Lily had to grab his leash again.
“Down,” she told him for approximately the seventeenth time, one hand reaching for a dog treat. “And you stay still, miss,” she told Edelweiss, keeping her other hand on the goat’s flank. “You all need to stop being so silly. We are not putting this off. We are doing this now.”
She was going great. She had it under control. Until Tinkerbelle came charging back into the shed, both Chuck and Edelweiss jumped, and Edelweiss kicked the pan of milk straight onto Lily’s lap.
All of that explained why, at quarter past eight and running way behind, she was opening the door to the back porch with a soaking-wet crotch while juggling a half-full milk bottle, two dirty milking pans, a basket of eggs over one arm, and Chuck’s leash. She leaned inside and set everything on a shelf, yanked off a rubber boot that had been through the muck wars, and thought, Plenty of time. To get showered, made up, dressed, polished, and composed before Rafe came by to get Chuck.
At the exact moment she thought it, her cell phone rang from inside the kitchen, Chuck jumped up and barked in her ear, and she jumped, too, and started to head inside.
Wait. She still had one muddy boot on, and it wasn’t Paige on the phone, or she’d have felt it. Whoever it was could wait. Probably a telemarketer anyway, or her assistant Hailey, telling her she’d be in late.
Then why were you running in there? And why is your hand shaking?
She was standing on one stockinged foot just inside the porch, tugging her other boot off, when Chuck suddenly lunged backwards. She flailed, knocked against the items on the shelf, and, as she fell backwards, saw seven beautiful brown eggs sail free of their tumbling basket like they could fly.
Which they couldn’t.
It was too much. She lost it. “Damn it to hell!” she yelled. “STAY!” The last word was a shout, and Chuck immediately stuck his tail between his legs and dropped to the planks of the porch. And Lily realized she hadn’t fallen, twisted around, and saw a pair of running shoes.
Rafe. Of course.
He was behind her, holding her up, his hands under her arms. On her breasts, in fact. Now, he got her upright again and asked, “All right?” He still had a hand on her upper arm, and she tugged her foot free of the boot, looked at the mess, looked at him, and started to laugh.
“Oh, man,” she said at last, on a gasp. “You are so bad for my life. Chuck…” She let the leash go. “Eat it up.”
He went for it, shells and all. Chuck was going to have one very shiny coat.
“Won’t that make him go after the eggs in the coop?” Rafe asked.
“No,” she said. “Different thing. It’s the dog version of the three-second rule. In a dog’s case, it’s the any second rule. If it falls on the floor? You wait to be invited, and then you go for it.”
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. She clearly thought back, because she sighed and said, “Well, yeah. My own rule, too. You wait to be invited. And I’ll point out that you just groped me.”
“By accident,” he said. “While performing a heroic rescue.” It hadn’t been his best moment when he’d seen her falling backwards, about to hit her head and who knew what else, but he’d caught her, hadn’t he? And if he’d noticed afterwards that she wasn’t wearing a bra, and that she was the kind of soft that said it was natural, and the kind of round that said it was brilliant—
He said, “I’ve already forgotten what it felt like.”
“No, you haven’t. It was the phone, and Chuck, and…” She stopped, possibly because he was staring at her again. She looked down and sighed. “No, I did not have an unfortunate accident. Well, I did, but that’s goat milk. So far, I’ve maintained my continence. That’s about all I’ve maintained, though. God knows my dignity’s gone. Why are you here?”
She made him smile so much. “I tried calling you a couple times, and then I thought I’d just stop by, because you were probably out doing your farm things. I called just now, in fact, and then I saw you on the porch. I thought I’d take Chuck on my run with me and wear him out in case he ends up hanging about in the porno store today. Wouldn’t want him to chew the magazines out of restlessness.”
“There are no magazines.” She was trying not to smile herself, but it wasn’t working.
“Not even in the back room?”
“Especially not in the back room. The back room has never been one bit exciting. And, yes, would you please take this terrible dog?”
He grinned. “Yeah. I will. You want to know something?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “I don’t know. Do I?”
“I’ve now seen you absolutely, positively not at your best, twice in a row. In dirty overalls, and…well, you’re pretty special just now, too. And if being with me in your work clothes is meant to signal that you don’t care about attracting me, I think you’re going to have to be more direct, because I’m still attracted.”
Her hand flew to her face. “What? What do I have on me?”
“Nah. I just told you, you’re all good.” He took Chuck’s leash and said, “Let’s go, boy. Time to hit the mountain. I’ve got a riding lesson at ten, and the clock’s ticking.”
Bailey dropped her bike on the ground in front of Clay’s cabin and headed up the stairs. She could hear Chuck barking. She was supposed to come get him. Clay had said so.
It was scary to knock. Clay wasn’t like her mom’s old boyfriend, Ray, though. She didn’t think so, anyway. She could get Chuck really fast, and she could ride downhill fast, too. Chuck liked running fast. Dogs could run forty miles an hour. Some dogs, anyway. She didn’t know how fast that was, but the speed limit signs in town said 25, and Chuck could run faster than the cars. She knocked.
Clay opened the door. He was drying his hair with a towel, but he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, not underwear or anything, so that was OK. Chuck ran right past him, his tail practically knocking Bailey over, and she laughed, dropped down, and gave him a hug. It was better for Chuck to have a dog bed, but she’d really missed him last night. It had been nice to know that he was right under the trailer. Like a watchdog, except he didn’t bark that much. He knew he was supposed to be quiet so her grandma wouldn’t kick him out. She didn’t like people talking so she couldn’t hear the TV, and she wouldn’t like Chuck barking, either.
“Hi,” Clay said. “Good news. I took Chuck on my run, which hopefully means that he’s only half crazy now. Be careful riding down the hill with him. He can’t go as fast as you on his leash.”
“Oh.” Bailey looked at Chuck doubtfully. Maybe downhill was more than forty miles an hour. “I could walk my bike, I guess.”
“Do you have a bike helmet?” Clay
asked. “If you do, you ought to be wearing it.”
Grownups always wanted to ask about your clothes. She didn’t want to make him mad, but she wasn’t sure what to say, so she just scratched her mosquito bite and looked at Chuck.
“You know what?” Clay asked. “I’ve got an alternative proposal. Ride to Lily’s shop, and I’ll take Chuck down in the car in a few minutes.”
“OK,” she said. “Except…he might be sad if he doesn’t come. He’s sort of my dog.”
“Yes,” Clay said, “he is. I’ll bring him to you, I promise.”
“OK,” she said again, because he had hold of Chuck’s harness, and he wasn’t going to let him run with her, even though Chuck liked to run. “Bye.” She got on her bike. She couldn’t sit on the seat and reach the pedals going uphill. The cool thing about going downhill was that you could sit down and go fast.
Hailey said, “Who’s that outside?” and Lily jumped again.
She had to get this under control. When she’d finally looked in the mirror after Rafe had left, she’d had hay in her hair and chicken droppings on her cheek.
Chicken. Droppings. She didn’t care what he’d said. There was no possible universe in which she’d been attractive.
“Who?” she asked Hailey, and kept hanging a new shipment of garter belts. Which, yes, did feature plenty of ribbons and lace, but so what? This was her livelihood. Also, she happened to be wearing something rather nice, and to be composed. That would be a much better picture to show him, if that was what Hailey was talking about.
“He can’t sit on the curb like that,” Hailey said, “It’s not safe.” She opened the door.
What? Why would Rafe be sitting on the curb? Lily abandoned her rolling rack of stock and headed to the door.
Wait a minute, though. What was Rafe thinking? If he was supposed to be hiding out up here, he needed to stay out of Sinful. The brown contact lenses and golden-brown hair weren’t all that effective, especially not with anybody who knew he was Jace’s brother, which was at least half the town. Besides, Hailey was a big Rafe Blackstone fan. When Lily had come back from Australia, Hailey had peppered her with questions. What was he like? Did he really look that good, or was that the camera? How tall was he? Lily wouldn’t be surprised if Hailey had pictures of him pinned to her secret bulletin board in her craft room. Or possibly a Pinterest board entitled, “Hot Guys.” Featuring firefighters with waxed chests.
Tempting as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 2) Page 13
