Highly Charged!

by Joanne Rock

  Ignoring the blinking light on his answering machine, he grabbed some laundry from the dryer, knowing his buddies were calling to check up on him. They’d made noises about having a shindig tomorrow night—a party he should probably attend even though he wasn’t much in the partying mood these days. Making quick work of feeding the stray, Brad wondered if he could talk his neighbor into taking in the dog. Hell, if he could talk her into a kiss he’d be happy. One kiss from her would be enough to keep his crappy dreams at bay. At least for one night.

  Judging from the resistance he’d sensed in her initially—because she clearly wouldn’t have accepted help from him if she hadn’t been hard-up—she’d only offered dinner tonight out of gratitude. Somehow, the sparks that had flown between them when they’d first touched had put her on guard. She had seemed to shove aside the obvious attraction and he wasn’t sure why. But he had no intention of letting her ignore the heat simmering whenever they got near each other.

  She had no idea how much he needed that kind of distraction.

  As he ducked through the hedgerow he heard an engine rev. The rumble of an old V-8 motor and a vibration beneath his feet emanated from somewhere near Nikki’s place.

  What the hell?

  Shoving through the branches, he was just in time to see the shadowed outline of an old pickup truck spin a doughnut and burn rubber on the middle of her lawn.

  “Hey!” he shouted and took off toward the vehicle, pain slicing up his injured leg as he ran. He ignored it.

  With no headlights on, the truck careened dangerously close to the house as it sped toward the road, spitting chunks of sod. He heard the crash of broken glass.

  Growling, the stray mutt passed Brad, picking up on his pissed-off vibe at the intruder. Brad was still a good fifteen yards away when the truck hit the main road and gathered speed.

  Nikki.

  Giving up the chase, he ran toward the front door instead, the burn on his leg still stinging like hell. The dog kept after the truck, barking like a junkyard hound all the way up the deserted county road.

  “Nicole!” Brad called, pausing long enough on the porch to assess the damage.

  A window was broken on the far right corner. The bastard in the truck must have hurled a brick or a rock before he took off.

  “I’m okay.” Nikki’s voice was surprisingly close. A moment later, her pale face appeared at the broken window pane. “There’s a rock on the living room floor.”

  “Don’t touch it.” He shoved through the front door; it was swollen in the frame, the wood sticking on all sides. Inside, a glow came from the back of the house, but the front remained dark. “Are there any lights in here?”

  He had his phone out to call the cops, still listening for the truck in case it returned.

  “Here.” She sounded shaken in the second before she clicked on a lamp in the hall.

  They were half a step apart and he was in midjog. Her arms went out as a buffer before he collided with her, but all that accomplished was to seal her forearms between their bodies as he pinned her against a wall. The feel of her curves imprinted itself on his body. The scent of earthy, sweaty flesh…

  A damn fine opportunity wasted since he needed to find out who was harassing her.

  “Sorry.” Straightening, he blinked past the retinablinding lamp as his eyes adjusted.

  She still clutched a pair of tongs in one hand from her efforts at the grill. But no matter the circumstances, he was left with an impression of her long, lithe body against his. The memory of silken hair and soft breasts teased the edges of his consciousness as he assessed the damage in the living room.

  Shards of glass glittered everywhere on the dusty hardwood floor. Moonlight spilled in the jagged hole, highlighting spiderweb cracks radiating out in every direction on the old-fashioned single pane. While he examined the mess, Nikki phoned the police. She disappeared for a few minutes, her voice growing softer as she gave them the details of the incident. Brad guessed she was storing their dinner in the fridge as she moved around the kitchen, banging doors and cabinets before returning to the living room.

  She took a seat on an abandoned piano bench in one corner, the stray dog at her feet, carrying a hunk of boneless chicken with his head held high as if he’d won first prize. The mutt settled close to her, squaring the meat between its front paws before digging in. He wasn’t one bit surprised that Nikki had fed the stray without a second thought, never blinking at another animal around the house, although she was careful to keep the dog from the broken glass.

  “You don’t seem all that surprised about the rock through the window.” Brad leaned on the doorframe with one shoulder, studying Nikki’s face as she clutched her cell phone in one hand. She was pale and obviously shaken, but there was also a sort of resigned determination. “Is this the first time anything like this has happened here?”

  “Actually, it is. But I’d been warned that Chloe’s family was not happy to see me inherit the house.” She relinquished the phone, setting it on the bench alongside one long, lean thigh.

  “I remember Chloe referring to her relatives as a bunch of ‘greedy grabbers,’ to use her term. Do you think they’re the kind of people who would go to criminal lengths to scare you off?”

  In the distance, he could hear a police siren and knew she’d only have to re-tell the story when they showed up. But it pissed him off that someone would harass her and he wanted to personally ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

  “I don’t know. There was a lot of grumbling at the reading of the will. The family was mad when her stepfather left it to her in the first place, rather than his biological kids, but the house had been purchased by Chloe’s real mother before she abandoned Chloe as a girl.” She wrapped her arms around herself as she stared at the broken glass, looking too damn vulnerable in spite of the fact he knew she could operate heavy machinery and bulldoze unsuspecting garden sheds. “The general consensus is that I’m a usurper in the same way Chloe was. They think I don’t deserve the house or control of Chloe’s literary legacy.”

  “Did any of these relatives threaten you personally?”

  Her dark gaze swung back around to him as the sirens grew louder and a flash of lights circled the room from the cop car pulling in the driveway. The exposed-wood ceiling beams were bathed in the red-and-blue glow.

  “No. In fact, several of them helped me move in a couple of weeks ago. But Chloe’s oldest stepbrother, Harold, is a local town councilman and he encouraged me to change the locks as soon as possible, implying he couldn’t vouch for everyone in the Ralston clan.”

  Their conversation was cut short by a knock at the door. Nikki rose to admit two uniformed officers while Brad waited on the periphery to give his statement.

  He’d started work here today to distract him from his enforced downtime and to take his mind off disturbing dreams. The enticement of a sexy next-door neighbor had been more than enough temptation. But a threat to Nikki’s safety?

  Today’s prankster didn’t know who he was dealing with. Because when Brad turned the full focus of his training and determination on the person responsible, the guy would be sorry he ever messed with a woman for whom Brad felt oddly protective. He had two weeks’ worth of resentment about an op gone wrong just looking for an outlet.

  A little retribution seemed right up his alley.

  BY THE TIME THE POLICE had finished, Nikki could smell the scent of barbecue chicken back on the grill.

  The thoughtfulness of that simple act speared past the defenses she liked to erect around men who were too handsome for their own good. How could she stay strong against someone who wanted to feed her after a long, tiring day capped off by vandalism?

  That would be a feat she couldn’t tackle tonight.

  Nikki wound her way through the house sorely lacking in furniture but crammed full of clutter, toward the back door. She really needed to start culling Chloe’s possessions to make room for her own, but it wouldn’t be easy to part with anything. A
s a kid, Nikki had compensated for her lack of a real home by collecting artifacts from every place she ever visited, in an attempt to surround herself with happy memories if not security. Chloe had been the same way, and their combined hoarding legacy created a staggering amount of material goods. Nikki squeezed past a box of Mexican corn husk dolls she’d made while attending a summer camp as a teen and stepped out onto the back patio.

  Brad manned the grill in the moonlight with that cute dog of his at his feet. The torches she’d lit earlier still burned in a ring around the flagstones, illuminating the wrought-iron table and a couple of place settings he’d resurrected from the kitchen counter. A bowl of grapes from the fridge served as a centerpiece next to a halfmelted candle he’d stuffed in an empty wine bottle.

  His efforts touched her.

  “Thank you.” She slid into a seat at the table to thwart her sudden urge to fling her arms around him. In one day, this man had accomplished more on Chloe Lissander’s neglected property than she’d managed in the last week. He’d relocated the most menacing reptile she’d ever seen, chased off a trespasser and waited with her until the police arrived. Now, he had dinner ready when she was starving and exhausted. No matter that she’d cooked it originally. She could think of boyfriends in her past who wouldn’t have bothered to reheat a leftover for her sake.

  The buggers.

  “Thank you. The hard part was already done.” He took the chicken off the grill and served it straight to their plates, next to foil packets of veggies and cobs of corn speared with oddball little corn holders shaped like smiling lobsters that had belonged to Chloe. “Plus, I figured the scent of our dinner might chase off the cops once the visit devolved from investigating to blatant flirting.”

  She was so entranced by the taste of barbecue sauce that it took her a minute to catch his surly tone.

  “Flirting? Those two?” She tried to recall one comment that could have been considered remotely personal and failed. “They didn’t use my first name once in the entire conversation.”

  Brad poured tall glasses of tea for both of them while the night music of crickets and whip-poor-wills picked up volume. The scent of his soap mingled with the smell of dinner as he leaned closer.

  Memories of the other time she’d seen him after a shower—her semi-accidental voyeurism—shot a flood of heat through her veins. She should have known she’d meet her neighbor face-to-face one day. Should have anticipated this overheated situation. But since he was around the house so rarely, Nikki had just assumed he would ship out before they ever got around to an introduction.

  She licked her lips and hoped her heart would quit lapsing into hyperactive mode.

  “Are you kidding? All those questions about where you lived before and what you teach at the university were total curiosity on the younger guy’s part.” He used his fork to tear open the foil veggie packet, releasing a puff of steam into the night. “How much you want to bet he emails you next week and asks to take one of your classes?”

  Nikki realized she couldn’t recall what either of the officers looked like. How had Brad taken such careful note of what went on, especially since he’d stepped away long before they were finished?

  “Too bad I’m not in the market for a man.” Better to make that clear straight from the gate—to herself as much as Brad. No matter how much she might find a certain male appealing, she wasn’t planning on acting on it.

  Brad Riddock would be out of her life faster than a blink, a fact which she couldn’t ignore. How many times had she been dumped off on relatives as a kid, only to have her parents promise they’d return by Christmas and then New Year’s and then maybe for her birthday in February? She’d fallen for those promises too many times, wanting to believe they’d missed her as much as she’d missed them when they’d left on one exotic adventure after another. But the truth was, they hadn’t.

  And while she’d sorted through a lot of that hurt during her adult years to become a stronger person, she knew better than to bring that sort of heartache back into her life. Especially when her plate was full with responsibilities to Chloe.

  “Why? Is the cop your type?” Brad’s blue eyes caught the moonlight, dangerous and alluring.

  She swallowed hard at the sudden vision of what it would be like to kiss him. Touch him.

  “Actually, no. But he should be my type. I’m trying to stay away from the guys who need saving.” She pointed toward the recovering blue jay and chipmunk in their cages on the patio. “I have a problem with trying to solve the world’s problems, one broken wing at a time. But I think the police officers were only asking about my past to find out if the trespasser was someone local or if it could have been someone I knew before I moved here.”

  “It’s someone who doesn’t want you to stay in this house.” His flat assessment sounded so certain.

  “Why do you say that?” She agreed one hundred percent, but she had her own reasons.

  “The damage done was meant to discourage you from working on the house. The torn-up patch in the yard will cost time and money to fix. The broken window ensures you don’t feel safe in addition to the expense to replace it. I’d say it’s an attack on the property as much as you.”

  Her last bite of chicken leg turned dry in her throat at the thought of someone escalating a campaign to chase her out. Damn it, she’d never had a real home before. She wouldn’t let anyone scare her away from this one. She’d stayed up late on this very patio with Chloe on summer nights, sharing stories from their past and dreams for the future. That time had been magical for her and no amount of vandalism could steal that warmth in her heart when she walked through this place.

  “Chloe hinted there were people in her life who wouldn’t want her missing diaries to be published.”

  “Why?” Brad shook his head. “Do you know what’s in them?”

  “Chloe said those years had been too special for her to share with the world yet, but that one day her story would finally be revealed.” Nikki had been over and over her final conversations with the older woman before her death, never making full sense of the bits and pieces she’d heard since the hints at a young romance had been at odds with the later diaries’ depiction of a wild and sexually adventurous decade from her mid-twenties to late thirties. “She was in and out of consciousness the last few days of her life. I sat with her whenever I wasn’t on campus because she did so much for me through the years—cheered on my writing, gave me exclusive interviews to nail down a doctorate that was a shoo-in for publication. So I wanted to do whatever I could for her at the end since her family was less than supportive.”

  Nikki liked to think she and Chloe had been family to each other. Her chest tightened to think about how fortunate she was to have had Chloe in her life—someone who cared when her dissertation committee gave her a hard time or her short-lived relationship with a history professor burned out. Nikki’s own parents were in the mountains of Peru the last time they’d contacted her—four months ago to email condolences on Chloe’s death.

  “She didn’t have any kids, did she?” Brad glanced toward the bushes at the edge of the property where lightning bugs blinked on and off.

  Clearing her throat, she dragged her eyes away from him and focused on the lightning bugs.

  “No kids. At least, she doesn’t acknowledge any. A rumor persists that she had children living overseas since she spent many years in Europe after World War II. But I don’t believe it for a second. She was far too loving a person to distance herself from any blood relative. The gossip is just another bit of the drama from a life lived unconventionally. Her books were part of the fuel for the women’s movement with the way they embraced a more sexually free lifestyle.”

  She couldn’t begin to explain all the convoluted drama of Chloe’s life. Chloe’s sensual memoirs accounted for her popularity as much as her novels. She’d chronicled many passionate encounters using carefully hidden identities to protect the people those relationships were based on. The edited dia
ries—at least five of the seven—had already been published with names changed to protect the innocent. But Chloe had promised her fans that after her death, all seven of the diaries—in their original forms—would be available to her readers.

  “So when you say her family wasn’t supportive, who are we talking about? Siblings?”

  She sensed a methodical mind at work as Brad formulated a picture of Chloe’s family. Better to focus on his brain than the appealing lure of his physique. Beneath the table, their feet vied for rights to the same real estate, occasionally bumping or brushing against each other. She felt edgy from those small touches, twitchy from the desire to lay her hand in the center of that broad, hard chest. With an effort, she recalled his question.

  “Two stepbrothers—Harold and Norman Ralston. She didn’t know her real father, and her mother married her stepfather when Chloe was three years old.” Nikki had cringed at the stories Chloe had told about her early life—stories that would have landed her in child protective services today. “Then the mother abandoned the family when Chloe was eight, leaving her to be raised by the stepfather’s revolving girlfriends in a household with no blood relatives.”

  In addition to all the material help Chloe Lissander had given Nikki, her life had been an inspiration to help Nikki forgive her parents for emotional scars that couldn’t compare to what her mentor had endured.

  “Yet she inherited the house over her stepbrothers?”

  “Apparently Chloe’s mother paid for the house. Giving it to her daughter after the stepfather’s death was his way to make amends, perhaps.” Nikki shrugged, never having been able to wade through the family politics effectively. The Ralston family was well known in this part of Virginia, with Harold the patriarch a longtime councilman and active member of every local club and volunteer organization. He was staid and somber to Chloe’s wild and unconventional. The two had never seen eye to eye.

  “And you think these stepbrothers could have reasons for not wanting you here beyond the obvious land grab?” He cleaned his plate and shoved it aside, giving her his undivided attention.