Toys was an understatement, Charlotte discovered when she wandered over.
The space looked like an FAO Schwarz annex.
There were LEGO blocks, Lincoln Logs and several games, including, she saw at a glance, Sorry, Candy Land, Monopoly and Clue. There were stuffed animals, action figures and—no lie—a Big Wheel. There was even—
“Mommy, look! It’s a doll baby, Mommy! A DOLL BABY!”
Harry, who’d apparently found heaven on earth, pulled out a pink-pajama-wearing doll that was half as big as he was and snuggled it to his chest, loving on it. His eyes rolled closed and he swayed, looking like a future father of the year.
“His name is Jeremy,” Harry announced.
The adults caught each other’s eyes and tried not to snicker.
Charlotte decided that, since she was the mother, it was her job to tackle this tricky subject.
“Ah, Harry,” she explained gently. “Usually girl babies wear pink and boy babies—”
Harry stared up at her, the picture of angelic innocence with those big gray eyes. “Mommy, it doesn’t matter.”
“You’re right,” Charlotte agreed, feeling that familiar swell of love in her chest for this little darling. “Doesn’t matter.” She shifted her attention to Jake, who’d been an avid observer of this interchange. “Toys, eh? Did they come with the black leather furniture and sixty-inch TV in this bachelor pad?”
Jake ducked his head, but not before she caught a telltale glimpse of rising color across his cheeks. “Well, you know. Kids need stuff to play with, right? What if they get tired of the pool?”
From out back came the raucous sounds of laughing, shrieking and splashing.
“Good thinking,” Charlotte said. “Most kids don’t enjoy pools for long.”
Jake snorted and dimpled, looking oddly boyish and vulnerable. “You’re right. It’s too much, isn’t it? It’s been so long since I was in a toy store, I just got...carried away. It was a lot of fun. You should see the flying helicopter I got myself.”
Harry, who’d been kissing Jeremy’s cheek, looked up. “FLYING HELICOPTER?”
Charlotte put a restraining arm on his shoulder. “Later for that.”
“And I, uh, put those little plastic protectors in all the plugs.”
“What?”
“Just in case Harry, you know, runs around trying to stick forks in the plugs or something.”
Charlotte’s jaw hit the floor. The idea of Jake the Player putting this much effort into their little afternoon visit was overwhelming her brain’s electrical circuits.
Jake seemed to be waiting for her approval. “It’s way too much, right? You can say it.”
What could she say when confronted with such unexpected generosity?
“It is way too much. And incredibly thoughtful. Thank you for thinking of the kids.”
Jake stared at her. “Anytime.”
“Let’s go, little man.” Her mother, perhaps sensing a shift in the wind, jumped to life and tugged Harry’s hand, leading him toward the glass doors, through which they could see a beautiful deck with several tables covered with red market umbrellas. “Let’s go to the pool and see if we can find any kids your age. You folks take your time,” she added over her shoulder, giving Charlotte a pointed look. “No rush. I’ve got things under control.”
With that, they disappeared outside, leaving Charlotte alone with Jake.
Neither of them seemed to know what to say to each other.
“So,” Jake began. “About that, uh, moment we had the other day...”
There was an apologetic note in his voice, but she didn’t need to hear it.
They had chemistry, she and Jake, and they would manage it like the professionals they were.
They had to manage it.
“It’s fine,” she interjected.
His brow quirked. “Fine?”
“We had a moment, but we’re past it now, and it’ll never happen again because we’re professionals. The end.”
Jake’s brows had flattened into a thick and forbidding line across his forehead.
“The end,” he echoed, low.
“Yes,” she said crisply, pivoting on her heel and heading for the deck, which was, with any luck, safer than being alone inside with a Jake who looked like he wanted to either throttle her or swallow her whole. “The end.”
And she slipped outside, well aware that this was the second time this week that she’d walked out on Jake, and he was not the sort of man—not at all the sort of man—who’d tolerate her evasions for long.
* * *
“Harry Evans Miller,” Charlotte called from the edge of the pool, “you come out of there right now. Right. Now.”
Harry, who was now flopping around in the kiddy end, making sure to come close enough to taunt her but still stay well out of arm’s reach, frowned at her.
“No!” he said snottily.
Charlotte’s blood, which had been merely simmering up until now, hit a full rolling boil that was not helped by her audience of amused onlookers. In addition to the other staffers’ kids floating nearby, there were her coworkers in the pool and sitting around at the tables, gorging on cookies and cakes and any other food they could get their greedy hands on. There were also her mother, who was hovering at her elbow, eating one of Jake’s amazing ribs, and, worst of all, Jake, who’d been horsing around with all the kids, but who now swam over to hook his elbows on the pool’s ledge at her feet and watch the unfolding drama.
They’d been out in the hot Indian summer sun for two hours already, and Harry had been in the pool pretty much the entire time, except for a quick five minutes when she’d tempted him out with a hot dog. He’d be nice and tired tonight, which meant he’d sleep well, and that was great.
On the other hand, if he got overtired, which he was in real danger of doing, he’d be a cranky nightmare.
And they really needed to get going because Saturdays were her big days for getting caught up on her schoolwork, and she had tons of reading and studying to do.
Plus, being here at Jake’s house was really doing a number on her.
“You want me to grab him and pull him out?” Jake asked, keeping his voice low so that Harry couldn’t hear.
Charlotte, who was hot and agitated, fumed. Then she divided her gaze between two things she didn’t want to look at: her bratty son, who was now staring her in the face while skimming his arms across the water and getting her feet wet, despite her stern warnings for him to stop doing just that, and Jake, the sexiest man ever to put his board shorts on one leg at a time.
God, he was killing her.
He’d shed his T-shirt hours ago, which meant she’d had plenty of time to ogle him behind the cover of her dark sunglasses. His body was rippled and lean, just muscular enough, with hard bulges in all the right places, which included a butt that formed a perfect half circle. He’d swum a few laps, his long and contoured arms slicing through the water with ridiculous ease, and he’d even demonstrated his butterfly stroke to one of the teenagers and it had been, like everything else about Jake, a thing of beauty.
Now he stared up at her with skin that was a sun-kissed red and water droplets tracing paths down his broad shoulders and torso that she longed to trace with her tongue.
All of which really pissed her off.
With the schoolwork and her out-of-control son, didn’t she have enough on her plate at this moment without having to fight her own overactive hormones, as well?
And she couldn’t even use her vibrator to take off the edge tonight, unless she made a special stop at the drugstore for batteries.
“No,” she snapped at Jake. “Thanks.”
“But—”
“He needs to mind when I tell him something,” she added, well aware that she�
�d been rude, and it wasn’t Jake’s fault that he had her panties in a bunch; he’d just been born that way. “I’ll figure this out myself.”
Jake didn’t look convinced. “But with power struggles—”
She folded her arms across her chest and glared down at him, cutting him off. “I’m sorry. How many children do you have? None, right? So why are you talking?”
Jake threw up his hands and glided back in the water, his eyes aglint with dark amusement. “Okay, then. I’ll just keep my unwanted opinions to myself.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte huffed.
“Honey,” her mother whispered in her ear, “why don’t I just get a cookie and lure him out with—”
“No. I will handle this.”
Shaking her head sadly, Mama also backed off.
“Harry,” Charlotte called, holding up three fingers, “this is your final warning. One...two...three.”
Harry stuck his tongue out at her.
For one arrested second, a hot red haze of public humiliation blocked her vision and made her face burn to cinders. Well, shit, she thought. What the hell was she supposed to do now?
And then she saw a smug two-year-old smile spread across Harry’s face.
“Oh, hell, no,” she muttered, and jumped, fully clothed, into the pool to get her son.
* * *
Charlotte emerged a few seconds later, soaking wet, grim-faced and dignified. Her chin was hitched up, as though she didn’t have a squalling and thrashing toddler under her arm, and Jake had never admired her more.
Harry had, in the end, been easy to catch. He’d been so astonished to see his mother dive into the pool that he hadn’t scurried away, and that was his fatal mistake. Apparently the boy was as stubborn and proud as she was, because he made quite the humiliated racket.
“I don’t wanna go!” And then, in case anyone in the greater Philadelphia area hadn’t heard him the first time, “I DON’T WANNA GO!”
Charlotte, ignoring this ongoing protest, hooked him under her arm in a football hold and climbed up the steps, out of the pool.
The adults in the group, apparently recognizing a brilliant act of parenting when they saw it, broke into a round of cheers and applause. The kids, predictably, booed.
Charlotte nodded and raised her free hand in thanks. “I appreciate it, guys.”
“Speech! Speech!” someone called.
That cracked her—and everyone else—up.
“Okay,” she said finally as Jake climbed out of the pool behind her. “Knock it off.”
Mrs. Evans hurried forward and took Harry, whose shrieks were now approaching a piercing frequency that only dogs, bats and dolphins would be able to hear. “I think you’ve had enough, young man,” she told Harry sternly. “I’m taking you to change your clothes. And then we’re going to have a long talk about your unacceptable behavior.”
Harry hooked his bright red face around his grandmother’s shoulder and hiccupped his sobs into submission. “Nooo!” he wailed. “I don’t want a talk.”
“Then you’d best apologize to Mr. Hamilton,” Mrs. Evans snapped, not missing a beat. “Because this isn’t a very nice way to act after he invited you to his pool, fed you a delicious lunch, showed you his fish and let you play with Jeremy.”
Harry tugged on his ear and raised his head to regard Jake with wet chipmunk cheeks and tragic eyes that were drowning in tears. “Sorry.”
Jake’s insides melted into a sticky goo along the lines of hot candle wax. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s been a long day.”
“Can I still hold Jeremy?” Harry asked, his lower lip trembling with misery.
Jake opened his mouth, about to tell Harry that he could have Jeremy, all the toys inside the house, and all the cookies and hot dogs he could eat, if only he’d stop crying and tearing him up inside, but Charlotte, apparently fearing something along those lines, cleared her throat.
“We’ll see about Jeremy,” she told Harry, now examining towels on the nearest lounger. “Maybe if you behave while Grammy gets your clothes back on, you can hold Jeremy again before we leave. But we are leaving. Okay?”
Harry, the picture of toddler heartbreak, dropped his head back onto Mrs. Evans’s shoulder, nodded, popped his thumb in his mouth and held Jake’s gaze as Mrs. Evans snatched up the diaper bag and headed into the house.
Jake watched them go, quite certain that he’d just lost a big chunk of his heart to a kid that wasn’t even his.
“I’m really sorry,” Charlotte said quietly.
Jake glanced back around. “Huh? Sorry? For what? Having a normal kid?”
“Disrupting your nice picnic. Poor kid control. Wearing clothes in your pool. Pick one.”
“Well, now you raise an interesting point. Because most people wore a bathing suit.”
“I didn’t want to get my hair wet,” she said glumly, reaching up to wring said hair and splattering water onto the deck. “You don’t have a towel I can borrow, do you? These are all wet.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
He started to lead her inside, but she checked herself at the glass door. “What?”
“I don’t want to drip on your nice floors.”
He snorted. Like he cared about a little water. “You women are strange creatures. I’m dripping, too, in case you hadn’t noticed. Let’s go.”
They headed inside and down the hallway, with Charlotte’s shoes squelching behind him, and paused while he checked the linen closet. No towels; he’d grabbed all of them earlier and left them poolside for the guests.
“I have some in my bathroom,” he told her. “Just did the laundry.”
“Good. And may I congratulate you on your superlative climate control?”
The air-conditioning, he realized, was making her shiver. “I like to keep it cool around here. In case any polar bears drop by.”
“They’ll feel right at home.”
From the powder room at the other end of the house came the distant sounds of Harry whining and Mrs. Evans scolding. Charlotte paused, glancing over her shoulder.
“God bless Mama,” she said fervently.
“How do you do it?” he asked her.
“What?”
“Discipline Harry when he needs it. Those big teary eyes were killing me.”
“Wake up,” she commanded, snapping her fingers right in front of his face. “If you show weakness to a toddler—” she slashed her hand across her neck “—it’s over for you, man. He’d eat you for a snack along with his Goldfish and animal crackers.”
Their mutual laughter trailed off and died as they turned into his spacious bedroom.
He had no idea what she was thinking.
All he could think about was how much he’d love to have her, naked, sweat-slicked and panting, in his king-size bed.
“You’re neat,” she noted, looking around the room.
“True.”
He made up the mahogany four-poster first thing every morning, and the nightstands, leather chairs and benches were, he figured, too nice for him to use as dirty clothes racks. He had matching taupe curtains, duvet and pillows, and the sisal rug kept the hardwood floor from being too cold for his tootsies if he used the bathroom in the night.
“You have a beautiful house,” she told him.
He knew that, of course, having worked really hard to earn the house. All of his guests, as they had arrived today for the barbecue, had told him how great his house was.
So why did Charlotte’s compliment, above all others, make him this unreasonably happy?
He cleared his throat and tried to tame his grin. “Thanks.”
He gestured to the bathroom door, but Charlotte had paused to check his nightstand reading. Her lips curled into a bemused smile.
“Jacques
Cousteau, eh?”
“Well, you know,” he said, distracted both by her proximity to the bed and the way her filmy wet dress clung to her toned legs and round ass. He noticed she was wearing black bikini panties. “I like fish and all.”
“And Jules Verne.”
She picked up the leather-bound volume and turned to face him, flipping through it.
Ah, shit. Now that she’d dropped her arms, he saw the way her dress and bra had gone sheer. Her breasts—two big ovals with pointed nipples the color and shape of Hershey’s Kisses chocolates—were on prominent and breathtaking display.
And she evidently had no idea.
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” she said brightly.
His mouth was dry, his tongue thick. “What else?”
The thing he needed to do, he decided with the only bit of his brain that was still functioning properly—a tiny little back corner that was grinding along at about 10 percent, maybe less—was stop staring, find her a damn towel and get her, and her adorable family, out of his house as soon as possible.
Yes.
Because he was trying to do the honorable thing for once in his life, which was nothing less than Charlotte deserved.
The honorable thing. Which did not, he was pretty sure, include tossing Charlotte onto his bed and ravishing her for a week or two.
So he hurried into his Italian-tiled bathroom, clicked on the light and reached for the shelf that held his thick white bath sheets. He’d just grabbed one, shaken it out and turned back to the door, when Charlotte arrived and caught a glance of herself in the huge mirror.
She went beet red and crossed her hands over her breasts.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped.
Something came over him in the superheated silence that followed as their gazes met and locked.
Maybe it was her embarrassment when, as far as he was concerned, her being nude or nearly so, here, with him, was the most natural and inevitable thing in the world.
Maybe it was exhaustion at fighting what would ultimately be a losing battle at keeping his hands to himself.
Maybe it was, simply, the realization that he was a strong man who could control a lot of things in his life, but his growing feelings for Charlotte Evans would never fall into that category.
Case for Seduction (Kimani Romance) Page 12
