So long, Ms. Abby Workaholic Stanford. Whoever that woman was, she was about to be obliterated from the map. Abby had always faced her mistakes, chin up. If she could learn to run an ad agency single-handed, she could sure as hell learn to relax. As of the next morning, she intended to become a devil-may-care, disgracefully lazy sloth.
Or die trying.
Gar climbed out of the Cherokee with a scowl. It was a white-satin afternoon. The blazing sun had frosted a glaze on the fresh snowfall, and skiers at the lodge were crowding the slopes in a frenzy to enjoy it. He’d be enjoying it, too—if he could have gotten his mind off that damn blonde.
His eyes narrowed on her Lexus—she clearly hadn’t moved it since last night, because the car had a whipped-cream coating from last night’s snowfall. As he hiked toward her door, he considered that he had a perfectly reasonable excuse for stopping by. He knew her address, but not her phone number, and he’d neglected to give her the name of a garage where she could get a good new-tire deal.
The excuse was as lame as a politician’s promise, and Gar wasn’t particularly fond of making a fool of himself—but it was her own damn fault he was here. It had nothing to do with her gorgeous eyes or his frustrated hormones. At three in the morning, he’d been pacing around, remembering how hard she’d been crying on the side of the road. How vulnerable she’d been. How fragile and breakable she’d looked. How mule-headed-stubborn she’d been tackling the damn tire, beyond all reason or sense. And he’d just felt wrong about dropping her off at the dark, cold condo without knowing if the place was remotely livable or if she was all right.
He reached the carved oak door and rapped hard with his knuckles. That was all he wanted to know—if she was okay. A look at her would do it. Then he’d split. If his excuse of giving her the name of a garage place sounded hokey, what difference did it make? He’d be gone in two seconds….
At least that was the plan.
But the door was suddenly hurled open and she was there, barefoot, in jeans, wearing a cherry-red sweatshirt so oversize that two of her could have fit inside. A fine white dust coated the shirt, her cheek, her nose. Flour, he guessed, since she had a wooden spoon on one hand and a hot pad in the other. Her hair, such a glinting damp gold in the dark, was more taffy in day-light, as fine as silk, curling around her throat in a disheveled pageboy.
“Mr. Cameron—” Her voice was breathless—she’d clearly run to answer the door—and those sexy dark eyes shot wide with surprise when she recognized him.
“Gar,” he corrected her, and swiftly hustled into his pitch. “I don’t want to bother you. But I didn’t know your phone number, and I promised you last night I’d give you the name of a reliable place where you could get that tire taken care of—”
“Well, heavens, that was nice of you to stop. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble—Oh, cripes!” A buzzer caterwauled from another room. She lifted a hand in an exasperated gesture, but she seemed to have forgotten the hand was gloved in a thick hot pad. She barely missed smacking herself in the eye. A nervous laugh seemed to bubble out of her. “I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a mess, making some cookies. You, um, have a fondness for chocolate chip?”
Were rivers wet? Did a man like sex? Did she expect a serious answer to a question like that? “If you’re offering, I wouldn’t turn one down.”
“Well…come in.”
He wasn’t sure if he was being let in only because she was frantic to get to that buzzer before her cookies burned. He wasn’t exactly sure why he came in, for that matter. In a blink, he could see she was all right. Not only did she look rested, she appeared to have more energy than a moving tornado. She looked about ten in those skinny jeans and bare feet, but his male antenna immediately recognized that there was no bra under that voluminous sweatshirt, and he caught a distinctive whiff of that full-of-hell perfume.
She was definitely a full-grown woman.
He tromped in as far as the kitchen doorway, thinking he’d just scratch down the mechanic’s name and exit before he could catch the flu—or anything equally dangerous. But the condition of her kitchen totally distracted him. She flashed him a smile.
“I don’t do this too often,” she admitted.
“No kidding?” At some point, the kitchen had conceivably been pristine—oak cupboards with leaded glass, stove and two-door freezer, teal Formica counters that wrapped the room in a serviceable U, a pricey little chandelier centered over a black glass table. The chandelier still looked virgin-pure, but nothing else had escaped the shambles.
At least five bowls of varying sizes were filled with cookie batter. A few dozen were cooling on the counters on cookie sheets. Cupboards and drawers hung open. Drips and spatters of flour and batter had enthusiastically landed everywhere. Making cookies for her seemed to be a whole-body experience, and it appeared she wasn’t even close to halfway through the project. “Are you baking for an army?” he asked dryly.
Another flash of a cheeky, mischievous grin. “Not an army, no. To be honest, I seem to be making a few more than I originally anticipated. It’s all my sister’s fault.”
“Your sister,” Gar echoed.
“Yeah. I have two. This recipe was my sister Gwen’s, and I should have guessed that anything from her would have quantities to feed an entire neighbor-hood. She lives in St. Augustine….”
She was chasing around faster than a magpie, switching off the buzzer, removing another sheet of cookies, reaching into a bowl to mix another batch at the same time. And blithely spattering more batter and flour dust with every move she made.
“And then I have another sister, Paige, the youngest in the clan. She lives in Vermont, which is where the whole family started out. I’ve been living in L.A. for more than seven years now, though, so I haven’t been around snow like this in a long time. I went out this morning, just for fresh air, found a little grocer at the corner, didn’t even have to drive to get all the stuff I needed for the cookie recipe…”
“Uh-huh. You like to bake, do you?”
“Oh, yes.” Her eyes shifted away from his faster than a card shark’s at a poker table. “I find it’s just the thing when I want to relax.”
“Relax,” he echoed.
“Yup. I used to be one of those hard-core workaholic types. Not anymore. These days I’m so relaxed and laid back that…”
Gar was fascinated, wondering where she was aiming with that whopper of a lie, but her voice trailed off in midthought. No surprise. She was charging around faster than a high-strung racehorse. Another tray of cookies went in. The spatula whirled like a pinwheel as she sliced cooling cookies off another tray. Then she was mixing again. “Good grief, I didn’t mean to talk your ear off. There’s coffee over there in the corner. Raspberry almond. And for heaven’s sake, take a cookie.”
He took three. She wasn’t going to miss them. And then he peeled off his jacket and started rolling up his sleeves. “It looks like you could use some help here,” he said tactfully.
“You like making cookies?”
Not like she did. But at the lustfully enthusiastic rate she was going, the kitchen might not be recoverable in her lifetime. “Lonigran’s is on Pine Street. Best deal on tires, he won’t cheat you, and it’s just two turns from here, about a ten-minute drive.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.”
“I’ll jot down the address on the back of a business card.” His teeth crunched into a cookie. The chocolate was still warm. Almost as liquid and warm as her dark chocolate eyes. Go home, warned every well-honed masculine instinct in his adrenal system. The woman had a batty streak. Something about those eyes was suspiciously, worrisomely haunting. And she watched him chomp down on that cookie with one of those all-knowing, wicked female grins.
“So,” she murmured, “chocolate’s your downfall, is it?”
“I just haven’t had a homemade cookie in a long time,” he said defensively.
“Uh-huh.” That grin was getting broader.
“I don’t smoke.
Rarely drink. Work hard, wash behind my ears, rescue stray dogs. Hell, I was such a model citizen I was boring myself to death…. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I had to find a vice. Who wants to be around a saint?”
“Uh-huh.” She watched him engulf a third one. “How long have you been a hard-core chocoholic?” she asked genially.
“Damn it. My whole life. I can’t shake it for love or money. I’m just crazy about the stuff.”
Laughter pealed out of her. Not laughter at him, but with him. Gar told himself he didn’t know her well enough to laugh, really laugh, with her. And Abby couldn’t conceivably know him well enough to tease him.
But feeling natural with her didn’t seem to take any effort. God knew what she planned to do with all the cookies, but they flipped and mixed and spooned side by side, bumping hips, bumping glances. There was a certain wariness in her eyes. Wariness, but awareness, too. The oven temperature wasn’t the only cause for the heat charging around the kitchen.
He had to move faster than a comet to keep up with her. If time would have obliged him and just stood still for a couple of seconds, Gar figured, he’d have caught his breath, realized it was nuts to be making cookies with a stranger of a woman in the middle of a work day. Actually, he did realize it was nuts. He just didn’t want to leave.
She chattered as fast as she moved, nothing personal or prying, just a steady stream of life stuff. “You said you had a ski lodge?”
“Yup. On the Nevada side of Tahoe.”
“I take it you love skiing? Been doing it long?”
“Had the business about five years, didn’t know a ski pole from a stick when I started. The place more or less fell in my lap originally, as part of a business deal, a company in debt—the lodge was part of the debt owed. So I was stuck with it, but never really spent any time here until a couple years ago.”
“Something made you change your mind?”
“Yeah. A divorce. And a major need to change the life road I was headed down.”
“I can relate to that. Not the divorce—I’ve never been married. But the need to stop and take another look at the atlas, so to speak. I was positive what I wanted to do in my twenties. And I did it. But I was speeding down that road so fast that I was missing the scenery, making wrong turns, didn’t realize I was aim-ing for a place I didn’t want to be.”
“Yeah, exactly.” He didn’t expect her to understand. In fact, she couldn’t. Neither of them had really spilled anything threateningly close to personal—it wasn’t that kind of conversation. But there was a flash of that troubled, haunted look in her eyes, a moment when she just looked at him, and then suddenly she doubled her frenetic pace, charging around the kitchen.
When the oven buzzer droned—for the millionth time—she scrambled to take out the cookie sheet And he noticed the time. “It can’t be four o’clock. I can’t believe I’ve been here all afternoon—or that you didn’t kick me out long before this.”
“Oh, no. You’re not getting out of here that easily, Gar Cameron.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You just wait a second before pulling on that jacket You try and leave without taking a full plate of cookies and I’ll strangle you with my bare hands. Cripes. There has to be something I can wrap them in, somewhere in this kitchen. Don’t you move. You hear me?”
A finger was waggled under his nose. A slim, pampered white finger that was exuberantly caked with cookie dough. “Believe me, you’ve got me too scared to move,” he assured her.
“Good. Power. Threats. I swear it’s the only way to make a man behave. Now…” She hunched down, and eventually emerged with some plastic wrap from a bottom cupboard. Then she bounced to her feet and started foraging in one of the top cupboards. She started pouring a heap of cookies onto a turkey-size platter. The heap turned into a generous mountain.
“You could save a few for yourself,” he said dryly.
“Well, I owe you more than cookies for helping me out last night. And besides that, you’re the one with the addiction. I can’t stand chocolate chip cookies.”
He’d just yanked on his alpaca-and-leather jacket when he stopped. “You don’t like chocolate chip? You made all these cookies and you don’t even—”
“I know, I know. It’s insane. But it’s something I was determined to take up. Insanity. Silliness. Whiling away an entire afternoon doing something aimless and foolish for the sheer pleasure of doing something for no purpose other than fun.” She sighed. “Trust me, I don’t expect you to understand. I just wanted to do something… relaxing.’’
He hadn’t seen her relax for two seconds in the past several hours. It was utterly mystifying that she thought she was. But whatever he understood or didn’t—whatever this whole crazy afternoon had meant—she was standing next to him at that second. Still. Actually standing still.
He never planned to kiss her. But God knew, catching her when she was standing still for a moment was a rare thing that might never happen again.
He’d had fun. For a few hours, he’d forgotten his life, his work, every problem that had ever been on his table. He didn’t know how she’d worked that kind of magic, but at thirty-six, he didn’t find magic too often, anywhere in life. Her face was tilted up to his. Watery sunlight had trapped copper and gold on one side of her hair, sunlight that touched her small blade of a nose, the delicate line of her cheek. The small mouth, red as cherries, curved in the same delectable feminine smile that had been teasing his hormones all afternoon.
And he pounced.
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Chapter Five
One look at the brunette put wings on Abby’s heels. She snatched her purse and shoes, smiled, said something polite, and escaped from the scene somewhere between the speed of sound and the speed of light.
Down in the parking lot, she dived into her brass-cold Lexus and cranked the key. The engine sputtered unhappily. Her Lexus was usually an angel, and she positively didn’t need a car with an attitude tonight.
She cranked the key again. The engine took off that time, and so did she, barreling out into the black-silk night, toward home. She reached over blindly and pushed buttons, lots of them—heat, defrost, fan, radio. Springsteen was crooning the old one about dancing in the dark. She turned the volume up so loud it made her head pound—but that was neither here nor there; her head was already pounding from the lump she’d gotten earlier. More to the point, Abby figured she deserved the headache. Hell’s bells, what she really deserved was another whack upside the head.
Gar clearly hadn’t expected the interruption by the fur-draped brunette, but even her existence underlined an obvious home truth for Abby—she knew very little about Garson Cameron. No thirty-six-year-old man—or woman—was fresh from the sandbox. Grown-ups came with a history, and’ to assume a man was unattached because he kissed her and had dinner with her was damned stupid. Abby wasn’t used to behaving stupidly…and yes, she’d figured out that scene in the lodge room in two seconds flat.
Gar wasn’t precisely attached, because the brunette had eventually identified herself as his ex-wife. The woman’s appearance was still flashing in Abby’s mind like a Kodak photo. Gorgeous hair. Beneath that fur, a dipping-low black dress, pricey, nothing vulgar or tasteless about it, but the fur alone had probably saved her from pneumonia. It wasn’t covering much. The makeup was. Blush and foundation had skillfully covered all flaws—that was wildly assuming the woman had any—and what she wanted had been in her eyes.
She wanted Gar.
Abby’s foot exuberantly leveled the accelerator. At this precise moment, she strongly guessed, the lady was doing her best to seduce him. Whatever the divorce had been about, the woman wasn’t wearing come-to-bed perfume and dressed like that for a little chat. She wanted her ex-husband back.
That was a lot to deduce from a five-second exposure, yet Abby had seen what she’d seen, and really didn
’t doubt her intuition. There was just this sick, thick knot in her throat. Blaming Gar wasn’t an issue. He’d never expected his ex-wife to suddenly appear, never asked for the awkward situation. But the strange, compelling closeness she’d felt with him seemed a measure of how goofed-up her whole thinking was lately. Naturally Gar had a history. How could he not? But she’d never gotten between a man and his unfinished history before, and didn’t intend to now.
That was the stuff you were supposed to get straight before you kissed a man. And for damn sure before you started imagining wild, silly, foolish fantasies that had absolutely no basis in reality…
Abby clenched her jaw. And concentrated on driving. The road curled around like an abandoned shoestring, her Lexus hugging every curve. The bright lights of Tahoe’s casinos and nightlife glowed in her rearview mirror, beckoning with their promise of noise, company, distraction.
She wouldn’t mind a couple hours hiding from herself, but not tonight, when she felt too much like a welterweight who’d lost all ten rounds in the boxing ring. She needed sleep, peace, and a couple of aspirin. She reached the condo in record time. She had just unlocked the door and was just tossing down her purse and keys when she heard the phone ring.
She grabbed the receiver in the living room and, as soon as she heard her sister’s voice, pushed off her boots and promptly curled up on the turquoise sofa. A call from Gwen couldn’t have been more welcome. Gwen was the earth mother of the three sisters, always full of common sense and comfort, and a ton better than sleep, peace or aspirin any day of the week.
Except this time. Gwen had barely thanked her for sending ten dozen cookies before she barreled in with “Listen, I couldn’t seem to find an easy flight into Tahoe—not a fast one, anyway. But I checked, and I could get a flight landing in Reno tomorrow afternoon. That’s close enough, simple to rent a car and drive to you in Tahoe, if you just give me directions—”
The 200% Wife Page 2
