Some Like It Hot

by Susan Andersen

She promptly pressed her feet against the porch deck to stop the rocker and sat up straight. Of course that wasn’t the reason. She adored traveling. Maybe occasionally she got a little weary of mostly living out of a suitcase, but after a brief respite—like this job—she was always raring to go again.

  “Fine, then,” her mother said. “I’ll say no more. But it would be nice if you’d carve a little time out of your schedule to visit Kai and me. And I know your grandparents would appreciate seeing you, as well.”

  “I will, Mama. I promise. I know my trip to see Kai graduate university was way too rushed because this job was scheduled to begin. But I’ll spend a couple weeks with you when it wraps up—I promise.”

  “We’d all like that.”

  “I doubt Kai cares one way or the other.”

  “Of course he does!”

  Harper let her silence speak for her. Gina held out for an instant, then laughed. “All right, he’s a little wrapped up in himself, his job at the foundation and his ever-changing string of pretty girls.”

  “In that order, I bet.”

  “He’s a twenty-two-year-old male, darling—that’s typical of the species. Well, except for your father,” Gina added in a warm, God-you-had-to-love-the-guy tone. “He was the least self-absorbed twenty-two-year-old I ever knew.” Then her voice turned brisk. “But back to Kai, his self-absorption doesn’t mean he doesn’t love the stuffing out of you.”

  “Oh, I know that. I just won’t hold my breath for him to kill the fatted calf when I visit.”

  “Your grandma and grandpa and I will see to that.” As if putting a period to that portion of their conversation, Gina suddenly said, “We haven’t really talked about anything except our obligatory disagreement and Cedar Village. Have you done anything in Razor Bay just for fun, Baby Girl? Something aside from your jobs?”

  The warmth in her mother’s voice and the feel-the-love family nickname loosened the slight reserve with which Harper had been dealing with Gina in recent years, and she found herself talking about Jenny and Tasha and Jake and Austin. Max’s name might have popped up a little more often than her other friends, as well, but that was only because of his connection with Cedar Village.

  Without mentioning Mr. Handsy, she related her night out at The Voodoo Lounge and told her mother about both the fun jobs she performed for the inn and the added responsibility that Jenny had asked of her. Her enthusiasm was such that she’d sipped her way through the remainder of her wine and talked herself dry before she finally came up for a breath.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to go on so.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Gina said. “You sound like you really like it there—that you like those people.”

  “I do.” But a little surge of guilt that her affection for Razor Bay and the friends she’d made was somehow disloyal to the critical job of vetting the foundation’s charities that her father had felt so strongly about made her rush to add, “Not that I plan on staying here past Labor Day. Still, it’s really fun for now.”

  Gina sighed. “You always have fun. And heaven forbid that you should stay anywhere a moment longer than necessary.”

  Gritting her teeth, Harper sighed, as well. Hadn’t her mom just been urging her to find someone else to do her job so she could come home for a visit? “Maybe we should call it a night.”

  “Yes, I suddenly find myself quite tired,” Gina agreed. “We’ll talk again soon, though. I love you, darling.”

  “I know you do, Mama. I love you, too.”

  They said their goodbyes and disconnected. Harper sat in the darkness on her porch for a long time afterward, just rocking and rocking.

  And wondering how they’d come to grow so far apart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TASHA CALLED EARLY the next morning. “What’s your schedule like? We need to coordinate,” she said, sounding much more cheerful than when Harper had left Bella T’s yesterday. “You, me and Jenny are going to Max’s house.”

  “Yeah?” Harper didn’t question the happy little burst of energy that buzzed through her. She simply smiled into the phone. “He finally broke down and invited us, huh?”

  “Ah, not exactly.” Tasha laughed. “You may have breeched the walls, but according to Jake, if Jen and I wait for an invitation, we’re all going to be plucking our chin hairs in the nursing home without ever having seen it. So we decided to invite ourselves. Here’s the deal, though, kiddo—it needs to be this morning. Jenny called Amy Alvarez, the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and found out Max’s shift starts at noon.”

  “It’s Friday, that shouldn’t be a problem.” Harper climbed up to the loft. “I’ll check to be sure, but I don’t usually have anything in the morning because people are getting ready to check out—and check-in for the weekend people isn’t until three.” She crossed to the dresser and picked up her schedule. “Yes, nothing until five.”

  “Great, that’s what Jenny thought, too, so we’ll pick you up at nine. Jake said we should take Max some oatmeal and a carton of milk. He wouldn’t say why, and he’s probably just messing with us, but we thought we’d stop at the General Store to pick some up anyhow. See you in an hour.”

  Clouds had rolled in by the time Jenny pounded on her front door. “Hey, you ready?” the petite brunette demanded when Harper opened it. “You might want to bring your stuff in,” she said, waving at the notebook, whose pages were riffling on the seat of one of the rockers. “The wind’s picking up.” She gave it a closer look as Harper retrieved it. “Hey, is that Razor Days stuff?”

  “Yeah, but nothing noteworthy. I was trying to brainstorm some ideas last night but was too upset over a call from my mom to really concentrate.”

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “Yes. That is, nobody’s sick or anything. Mom and I just have differing philosophies about how I should run my life, and it’s been getting in our way more and more often the past couple of years.” Since her dad died.

  “Families can be a bitch,” Jenny said solemnly.

  “They absolutely can.” She waved it away. “But let’s not talk about that. Let’s go horn in on Max’s morning.”

  Jenny laughed. “Yes, let’s do that. I’m so excited.”

  Harper shot Jenny a curious look as she grabbed her purse and locked the door. “Haven’t you known Max most of your life?”

  “We’ve been acquainted since he left the Marines and took the deputy job,” Jenny said as they headed down to the lot where Tasha had parked between Jenny and Jake’s cottages. “But to me he was just this big, unsmiling, not very talkative guy. I didn’t bother looking deeper until Jake came back to town. Now I’m getting to know Max as an adult, and I’ve discovered I like him way more than I ever would have dreamed. I always thought he was kind of humorless, but he’s not. He might not be the chattiest guy in town, but he can be funny as hell when he and Jake get to insulting each other. And I really, really want to see his place.”

  The drive to Max’s house didn’t take long now that Harper knew where it was, and after a quickie stop at the store they drove straight there. Pulling up to the end of Max’s drive, they sat in the car for a moment looking at the darkened house.

  “Not at home, you think?” Tasha said.

  “His SUV’s here,” Harper pointed out.

  “Only one way to find out for sure.” Jenny opened her door. “Grab the bag, Tash.”

  They all climbed from the car and walked up onto his porch. Jenny knocked on the door.

  There was no answer, and she knocked again with more emphasis.

  Something crashed on the other side of the door, and Harper heard Max’s voice swearing. A second later, the door swung open.

  “Omigawwwd,” one of them breathed, although Harper couldn’t have said for sure who.

  Max filled the doorway, bleary-eyed and sullen-mouthed, his hair flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He was all brooding angles, from his sharp cheekbones to the rawboned ma
ssiveness of his shoulders, wrists and big-knuckled hands.

  But that wasn’t what had her and her friends gaping at him. No, that would be the fact that the only thing saving him from total nudity was a pair of black boxers.

  The man was built, there was simply no two ways about it. His shoulders barely cleared the door’s lintels and he was hard-bodied and so damn male, with solid curving muscles, soft standing veins snaking down his inner arms and dark body hair on his calves, forearms and chest and in a stripe that arrowed from the latter to bisect his muscular abs, then disappear beneath those low-slung boxers. The welts the nasty drunk had carved on his neck the evening he’d broken up the roadhouse catfight had faded to the faintest of pink lines.

  But they flashed Harper straight back to Max’s kiss. That. Hot. Perfect. Kiss.

  “Dear Lord,” she murmured, “I think I’m having heart palpitations.” Which surely weren’t brought on by the mere memory of the kiss they’d exchanged that night. It had to be Max’s body. Sure, she had seen him half-naked the day she’d caught some of the Skins and Shirts game at the Village. But his size, the pure, stunning impact of his masculinity, was even more potent up close.

  “What time is it?” he demanded, then turned up his wrist to peer at the silver tank watch strapped to it. “Oh. Guess it’s not as early as I thought. I need coffee.” He turned and shambled toward his kitchen, leaving the front door open.

  The women looked at each other. Tasha fanned herself, and they all grinned, then followed Max into his house.

  They found him in the kitchen opening and slamming cupboard doors. “Coffee, coffee, where the hell did I put the coffee?”

  Jenny unscrewed a lid, then the stopper from a thermos Harper hadn’t even noticed the little brunette had. Striding up to Max, who was still pawing through the cupboards, she waved its opening beneath his nose. “I’ve got coffee.” She looked over at Harper. “Find him a mug. I have a feeling this little cap/cup thingie isn’t going do the trick.”

  Max snapped around. “Oh, God, you’re a lifesaver. Dump my brother, sweetheart. Marry me instead. You can bring me coffee every morning.”

  “Tempting proposition,” Jenny said drily. “But I’m afraid I must decline.”

  He gave her a sleepy smile that had all three women freezing.

  Tasha was the first to inhale. “Wow,” she breathed on her exhale.

  He turned his head to look at her. “You say something?”

  “Um, I did.” She dug in the sack she’d carried in and pulled out the cylindrical box of Quaker Oats. “Want some nice, hearty oatmeal?”

  “Hell, no.” He shuddered. “Have you ever eaten that stuff? It’s got the consistency of paste, and I’m not exactly a wallpaper kinda guy, which is about the only thing it would be good for.”

  “Then why on earth did Jake say—?”

  “I think I might be able to answer that.” Harper indicated the three cupboards she’d opened in search of a mug. Handing Jenny the one she’d pulled from the last cupboard, she looked at Max. “It’s amazing you’ve got that body given what I just saw in these.”

  He straightened and for the first time looked a little self-conscious. Then interested. “You like my body?”

  “A lot more than I like what you have in your cupboards.”

  His thick, black brows lowered over densely lashed eyes, and he blew out a disgusted breath. “Why is everyone so damn interested in my diet?”

  Because two of the three cupboards she’d opened had been packed with Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops cereals, what her brother, Kai, called Toes food: Doritos, Fritos, Tostitos and Cheetos, both regular and hot, as well as two kinds of potato chips, a jar of Cheez Whiz, a big bag of frosted animal crackers, a couple—

  Drawing a deep breath, she put a lid on her internal inventory. She and Tash and Jenny had already descended on him unannounced and rousted him out of bed, and he’d been pretty darn decent about it. Insulting his eating habits might be pushing her luck. So she merely said, “You’ve got a lot of junk food in your cupboards, including what looks like a year’s worth of peanut butter cheese crackers.”

  “Hey, peanut butter is good for you.”

  “But a lot better if it comes without the trans fat-filled crackers. Why do you eat like that?”

  “Dunno.” His big shoulders hunched. “I just always have.”

  Oh. Crap. Meaning his parents likely had never made much effort to feed him properly. And here she was treading all over the fact and making him feel bad for something he’d probably had indoctrinated in him from the cradle. She waved a dismissive hand. “And it’s not important—or at least not why we’re here,” she forced herself to say cheerfully. “Hello, Mohammad.” She indicated herself and her friends. “Meet your mountains.”

  He looked at her as if she was speaking Swahili—which she could if she wanted to. “What?”

  “Jake’s been lording it over us that he’s seen your house and we haven’t,” Jenny jumped in. “So we need a tour. It’s your God-given duty to cut your brother’s bragging rights off at the knees.”

  “Ah. It is.” Clearly starting to mellow, thanks to the coffee he’d drained from the mug Jenny had handed him, Max nodded. “Got it. You’re right. And it will be my pleasure, as well.”

  “That’s the charmer we all know and love.”

  His mouth ticked up in a wry, one-sided smile. “Look around while I go put on some clothes.”

  “Please,” Harper murmured under her breath as she watched the bunch and flex of the muscles under his skin as he strode from the kitchen, “don’t bother on our account.”

  “Amen, sister,” Tasha agreed with a snort of surprised laughter as the three of them moved into the living room. But since Harper had been there before, she ignored the architecture and furnishings in favor of checking out the little things. Max didn’t have a wealth of personal items lying around, so when she came across a sheet of paper on a side table next to the big leather chair, she drifted over for a closer look. As her friends rhapsodized over the fireplace she’d admired on her prior visit, she craned her head to read it.

  It was a driver’s license renewal reminder and, curious to see how old Max was, she looked for the birth date.

  “Oh.”

  “Got all the information you need?” Max’s deep voice spoke over her shoulder, and she felt it reverberate all the way down her spine. By the minty fresh scent wafting her way, she deduced he had taken the time to brush his teeth.

  Working hard not to jolt, she slowly straightened and gave him her most charming smile. “You have a birthday coming up. How old will you be?”

  “What? You somehow missed that?”

  “I did. You were too fast for me to read beyond the month and day. So...forty?”

  “Cute. Thirty-four. How ’bout you? Twenty-six?”

  “Aw, you sweet talker, you. I’m thirty.”

  Jenny and Tasha came over to claim Max for their tour then, and Harper trailed in their wake, mulling over an idea as she eyeballed Max’s butt and listened to the conversations with half an ear.

  It seemed like mere minutes later that they were saying their goodbyes and climbing in the car. As she clicked her seat belt on, the idea she’d been kicking around solidified.

  “I’m going to throw Max a surprise birthday party,” she said. “You think he’ll mind if I do it in his house?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE WEATHER GREW worse over the weekend and turned into a full-out squall, with whipping wind and rain on Sunday. Monday was better; the sun had been out more often than behind the intermittent cloud cover, but every now and then rain blew in out of nowhere.

  The Cedar Village boys clearly didn’t care. They got to use the inn’s roped-off swimming area, with its free-floating dock and a low springy diving board, and were just happy to be there.

  Max was happy to watch Harper. Clad in the black-and-white bathing suit she’d worn the night he’d run across her in the hot tub, she sat on th
e side of the float that she’d rowed Owen to with the rest of the boys swimming in her wake like—in her words—a big bunch of ducklings. Now, lazily fluttering her long, toned legs in the crystal water, she encouraged the boys to do the biggest cannonballs they could.

  When Malcolm did his from the spring board, bouncing twice on the end before going high and tucking into a tight ball, the splash was so huge it drenched Harper from the top of her head to where her feet and shins disappeared into the canal. Her hair first flattened, then sprang up into tight, soaked ringlets—and to a man, they all stared at her in openmouthed horror and held their breath, awaiting the explosion. Because what guy hadn’t been exposed to the seamy underbelly of a woman whose do they’d destroyed?

  Women took their hair damn seriously.

  Malcolm, who had resurfaced, treaded water. He engaged Harper in an ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit stare down, just daring her to dress him down. But his wide, brown shoulders inched up toward his ears.

  Harper blinked saltwater from her eyes, squeegeed about a pint of it from the ringlets framing her face, then wiped away the rivulets trickling down her cheeks. She met the teen’s ’tude with a cool-eyed once-over of her own. “That’s it? That the best you’ve got?”

  The boys’ laughter was perhaps disproportionate to the actual humor of her words, but Max totally got it. A lot of these kids came from truly dysfunctional homes and weren’t accustomed to receiving the benefit of the doubt—or, hell, even a rational response half the time to their so-called transgressions. So they laughed just a little too long and loud in relief. And given permission to make the biggest splash they could, they threw themselves into attempting to outdo each other. Even Owen, the not-so-great swimmer whom Harper had outfitted with a lifebelt, leaped off the dock and tucked himself into a ball around his flotation device, hugging bony knees to his narrow chest. His splash wasn’t the biggest, but the smile on his face when his lifebelt bobbed him back to the surface said it might as well have been.

  The boys grew sillier. And louder, their shouts and laughter magnified by the body of water surrounding them. They were happy and unself-conscious.