“Please,” Max said. “I came and got you when I got his call, didn’t I? Even though I knew you’d probably dick it up.” He looked at Luc. Six months ago he likely would have questioned this guy’s story. But from photos he’d seen of Charlie, he could see hints of their father in him. The full mouth was Charlie’s and so was the shape of his jaw.
For a moment he heard his mother’s strident voice in his head going on the way she used to do about some tramp and her little bastard running off with Charlie—then laughing bitterly and saying the only good part was how it had left that other tramp and her oh-so-precious brat in the same boat that Charlie had long ago left them. Her constant bitching had made him detest the unknown boy almost as much as he’d hated Jake in those days, and he waited now for the old rage to surface.
It didn’t. Instead, Luc’s word family resonated in his mind. Why should he cut himself off from exploring what was what with the guy? By blood at least, the newly discovered Bradshaw really was family—and it wasn’t as if Max was overburdened with relatives. His and Jake’s years-long rivalry had kept them from getting to know each other as real brothers until the past few months, and he actually felt a lick of anticipation at the idea of maybe forging some kind of relationship with Luc, as well. So he looked at him across the table.
“Jake’s easy,” he said. “Me, not so much. I can’t say I’d be willing to give you a kidney anytime soon. On the other hand—” his shoulders hitched “—what the hell. I suppose I wouldn’t mind getting to know you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“JENNY THINKS WE’RE overdue for our Ladies’ Night skinny-dip.”
Harper wrenched her wandering attention back to Tasha. Part of her had been aware of Tash and Jenny kidding around with the kind of ease that could only come from a long, knows-everything-there-is-to-know-about-each-other friendship and had vaguely wondered what that must feel like. Mostly, however, she’d been thinking about the proposal she was contemplating running by Max. Belatedly, Tasha’s words sorted themselves into a coherent sentence in her mind, and she gaped at both women. “Excuse me?”
Jenny grinned. “That got your attention,” she said beneath the conversations and clatter of a crazy busy Saturday night at Bella T’s. “We need to get Tasha away from here for a while. She’s been working flat-out this weekend—hell, for most of the summer, really. And it feels like forever since we’ve gone skinny-dipping.”
Tasha nodded. “Not since last year. We’ve let this entire summer slip by without going once.” One of her waitresses came up with a question, and she stepped away for a minute.
Harper turned to Jenny. “You truly go skinny-dipping?”
“Sure.”
“Buck naked?”
Jenny laughed. “That’s kind of the definition.” She studied her. “Haven’t you ever been?”
“No.”
“I’ve lost count of how many times Tash and I have gone. It started the first year I moved to Razor Bay.” She smiled reminiscently. “We were sixteen and thought we were pretty daring.”
“Let me assure you, as someone who’s never once considered swimming without a suit, there’s no ‘thought’ about it—you’re positively daring.” And wasn’t it interesting how this subject tied in so neatly to her recent ruminations?
She’d been thinking a lot about roots lately. Which was rather funny, considering that as little as a week ago, she would have unequivocally sworn she was against them, at least for herself. Settling down equaled...well, not dying exactly—
Nerves zinged like an electrical shock up her spine, making her involuntarily startle. But, please. Be honest with yourself, if no one else, girl. That’s precisely what you equate it with.
What she had always equated it with, especially since her father’s death.
But even with such thoughts circling the periphery of her mind, it was exactly the sort of continuity and connection her new girlfriends enjoyed—this doing something with a friend year after year the way Jenny had outlined—that she had been thinking about with increasing curiosity.
And what it might feel like to stay in one place long enough to experience something like it.
“So, are you in?” demanded Tasha, who had sent the waitress on her way and turned back to them. She looked directly at her.
Harper had participated in her share of daring adventures in far-flung places over the years. But they had always involved keeping her clothes on. “When were you thinking of going?”
“Tonight.”
“Ah, gee, too bad. I’ve got flotilla duty tonight.”
Jenny simply looked at her. “You already arranged and checked out all the boats to the guests scheduled to watch the fireworks, right?”
“Yes.”
“Saw all those guests into the boats and on their way to the bay?”
“Yeeeees.” Sensing a pitfall in admitting it, she dragged out the word. She’d done precisely that, of course. But she suspected a catch in saying so.
“Didn’t Jed and Norm go along to supervise the actual transportation to and from the log boom?”
She nodded. “But you know I have to be at the dock to check all the boats back in and do a head count after the fireworks are over.” Part of her was relieved she wouldn’t be available to go skinny-dipping. But another, perhaps larger part, the one that adored being introduced to new adventures—and perhaps even more importantly, that adored these two women—was a bit disappointed.
“Then you’re in luck, sweetie.” Tasha gave her a knowing smile. “Because we plan to go while everyone’s in town watching the show. We’ll have you dressed in plenty of time to get those boats checked back in.”
“Oh.” She could actually feel the wry twist to her smile. “Busted.”
Her friends laughed. “I plan on closing Bella’s and walking out the door at nine on the dot,” Tasha said. “Let’s meet at the inn’s boat dock at nine-thirty.” She looked at Harper. “Wear your suit. Ever since Jenny started working at the inn, which was, oh, like the second she moved to town, we’ve always either swum out to the float or taken one of the boats out to it. You already know the boats are all taken tonight, but we won’t strip off until we’re there. It cuts way down on the risk of exposure.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“Buck up, baby—you’re gonna love this.” Jenny shot her a trust-me smile. “I’d put money on it.”
An hour later, flanked by her friends, Harper found herself diving into the canal from the inn dock as the summer sky began to rapidly lose its grip on the late evening Pacific Northwest twilight. This wasn’t like riding the shoulders of a hot-skinned male on an eighty-degree day where a dip in the shockingly cold water was refreshingly welcome. As they edged into September, the evenings had rapidly begun relinquishing the days’ warmth, replacing it with an almost autumn nippiness, and every muscle in her body clenched when she hit the water. As she swam out to the anchored float, however, those same muscles began to acclimate. By the time she was within a few feet of it, she no longer felt chilled to the bone.
It wasn’t yet fully dark, but she had learned over the course of the summer that even when the last of the light faded, which it would do mere moments from now, on a clear night like tonight the sky was more often a deep midnight-blue than black. Stars grew more brilliant as the sky grew darker, and the Milky Way washed a pale swath across the heavens. The moon was a meager sliver that had barely cleared the trees behind the inn. Yet even without its illumination, the mountains across the canal didn’t disappear into the night sky. Instead, they sketched rugged silhouettes against it. Down on the water, however, all was stygian, even the few boats still anchored offshore visible only as murky shadows.
She reached the free-floating dock a few strokes ahead of Jenny and Tasha and swam around it to put its solid bulk between herself and the lighted grounds of The Brothers Inn a hundred feet away. Treading water, she unfastened the halter ties of her bathing suit and worked its wet fabric down her
body, freeing her breasts, her stomach, guiding it over her hips and struggling to peel it away from her butt. When she’d finally slid it down her legs and over her feet, she tossed the garment on the float’s deck. It hit with a soft, sodden slap.
As her friends’ bathing suits, a bikini top and bottom from Jenny and Tasha’s one-piece, followed her own onto the float, she kicked her legs.
And experienced the difference that the lack of a flimsy piece of material could make. “Oh.”
Jenny’s teeth flashed white in the night. “I know, right?”
“Oh, that’s amazing.” She smiled and kicked them a bit more vigorously. “I like it.”
“Toldja.”
For twenty minutes they played with the full-out zeal of slightly demented children, and Harper discovered the freedom of horsing around with friends. Jenny and Tasha were maniacs, and she soon learned it was dunk or be dunked. She did her best to emerge as the dunker more frequently than the dunkee, and while the results were mixed, it was wonderful fun. Bare butts momentarily flashed as the three of them dove beneath the canal’s mirror-smooth surface in what was often the opening salvo in a sneak attack on whoever could be caught off guard.
Occasionally, one of them would climb onto the float and stand naked in the night for a thrilling moment before diving back into the cold shock of salty, buoyant canal water. Jenny’s dark hair adhered sleekly to her skull, wrapped around her throat and clung like seaweed to her small breasts. Harper’s and Tasha’s shrank into wet, tight curls.
The three of them settled down when the first big ball of color exploded over the bay in extravagant sparks that started out green, then turned to orange, then white. Harper floated on her back, watching the show. She was dividing her time during a lull in the pyrotechnics between tracking a satellite’s movement across the sky and trying to figure out if the slightly larger, ultra bright stars near the moon might actually be Venus and Jupiter when she became aware of the soft rhythmic lapping of oars in the water. She dropped her legs to tread water. “Hey,” she said softly to the other two women, who were also floating peacefully. “Do you hear that? I think someone’s coming.”
“Whoa, mama,” a masculine voice said. “Are my eyes deceiving me, or is that naked women?” The tone was hopeful, then sadly resigned when he added, “And me without my camera.”
“Jake Bradshaw,” his fiancée said sternly, “what the hell are you doing out here?”
“Sightseeing. There’s too many damn boaters out to see the fireworks, and we got tired of trying to maneuver around them. Decided to take a little tour instead.”
Jenny must have spotted the second shadow that Harper had just noted in the rowboat slipping closer through the black water. “Is that Max with you?”
Harper could have told her it wasn’t. Not only was he working tonight, but while the shadow looked very fit, it didn’t have Max’s breadth through the shoulders. She edged up to the dock, wondering if she could reach her suit without exposing herself—and if so, if she’d be able to wriggle into it in the water.
“Nope.” Humor laced Jake’s voice. He shipped his oars. “This would be Luc, the newly discovered other Bradshaw.”
Great. A stranger. She felt more naked and vulnerable by the moment.
“They can’t see anything,” Tasha said in her ear.
Anchoring herself to the float with one hand, Harper turned toward the sound to find the other woman also clutching the dock next to her.
“I know it feels like they can, but trust me,” Tash murmured. “Jenny and I have been doing this for years, and I doubt a spotlight would penetrate more than an inch or two beneath the surface of this water at night. They don’t even have a flashlight.”
She nodded her thanks. Hearing that made her feel a little less exposed.
So did Jenny’s uncompromising, “Well, take your long-lost Bradshaw, turn your damn boat around and row on out of here. Now.”
Jake leaned over the oars he’d pulled into the boat. His amusement was clear when he murmured, “Now, why would I want to do that, love?”
“Because if you don’t,” the little brunette said with a suspicious reasonableness that had him sitting back up, “I’ll haul myself up on the float and give you—and your newly discovered brother—an eyeful.”
“Time to go, Luc.” Jake slid the oars back into the water, their rubber cuffs engaging the oarlocks with a muffled thunk. Dipping one oar deep, he hauled hard on it and whirled the boat a quarter turn so that the other man’s back was to the women. His voice drifted to them as he put his back into rowing toward the boat dock. “See you at home, baby.”
The other man laughed, and Tasha stiffened beside her.
Harper looked at her. “What it is? Are you okay?”
“Yes. Of course. It’s just...for a minute there the new Bradshaw brother sounded exactly like—” Tasha gave her head a sharp shake. “No. Clearly my imagination’s run amok.” She hauled herself up onto the float and rapidly donned her bathing suit.
Then she picked up Harper’s, shook it out and extended it toward her.
Harper hesitated.
“It’s safe,” Tasha said. “Even if they look back, the most they’ll see is shadows.”
Jenny materialized next to her and pulled herself onto the decking, so Harper did the same. Shivering in the chilling evening air as she worked the recalcitrant bathing suit up her body, she thought longingly of the towels Jenny had packed, which were back on the inn dock.
But she grinned at her friends. “What an amazing night,” she said. “I’m so glad you included me. Last one to the hot tub has to fetch the wine from my place.” As she dove into the water, the last thing she heard before the water closed over her head was her friends whooping their approval.
* * *
“I’VE ONLY GOT a few minutes.” A frown gathering his brows over his nose, Max slid into the booth next to Jake and across from the newly arrived Bradshaw. The Anchor was packed to the rafters—and every damn person in it looked annoyingly happy.
Jake gave him a look. “Whoa, what’s put a bug up your butt?”
“No bug.” Or not that big a one, at least. “You called. I’m here. You didn’t tell me cheerful was a requirement.”
“O-kay. You still on duty or something, while everyone else is playing?”
“No. I just got off.” But he’d been low-grade moody and a lot edgy for most of the day and wasn’t feeling sociable, to say the least. Still, a guy didn’t take out his crap mood on his half brothers—at least not more than he just had. He supposed he owed it to both of them to go through the motions and at least pretend to be friendly.
So he raised a brow. “Sorry if I seem distracted. But FYI, I have plans a helluva lot more satisfying than hanging with you two.”
But for how much longer, Slick?
That was the question, wasn’t it? Harper would be leaving town in—what?—two days, maybe three at the most? Not that they’d actually done anything as mature as discussing her timetable, but that was what he’d understood upfront. And he was trying real hard not to let the knowledge drag his mood down any lower than it already was. But, hell, it hardly took a genius to figure out what had given his irritability its chops in the first place.
When they weren’t burning up the sheets, working their jobs or at the Village, he and Harper had managed to go out on a few dates. They’d mostly shared meals at a couple of Silverdale restaurants. But they’d talked about everything under the sun. Hell, he’d been downright chatty at times, even going so far as to tell her how differently he’d handle the department if he were sheriff. She made him laugh more than anyone he’d ever known.
A throat cleared across the narrow table, and, looking up, Max found Luc studying him. It disconcerted the hell out of him to look into a face with so much family resemblance when the guy was still a virtual stranger.
His new half brother slanted him a look. “Your plans happen to include one of those naked chicks Jake and I didn’t qu
ite get to see tonight?”
Max jerked his head back slightly in surprise. But he merely turned a look on Jake. “What the fuck, bro?”
“You can spare us ten minutes for a beer,” his brother replied in a tone that brooked no argument and hailed Sally. Then he shrugged. “Luc and I got tired of all the people out on the water when we rowed out to see the fireworks, so I took him to check out the inn from the canal. You know how pretty it is all lit up at night.”
He nodded, but thought grumpily, Get on with it.
As though Jake could read his mind, he did. “We came across Jenny, Tash and Harper skinny-dipping off the float.”
“Which, nice as that inn is,” Luc said drily, “was a helluva lot more interesting.”
The waitress delivered a Ridgetop Red to the table without first taking his order, courtesy, no doubt, of Elise, the bartender, who was still jonesing over his upgraded taste in beer.
“No shit?” he demanded after Sally ascertained the other Bradshaw boys had everything they needed and left to answer another patron’s summons. “The three of them were Full Monty?” What red-blooded man’s spirits wouldn’t raise at the thought of naked women? “I would’ve paid to see that. Had to be one kick-ass peep show.”
“Or it would’ve been, if we could have seen something besides shoulders,” Luc said. “I’ve got excellent night vision, but that’s some seriously dark water.” Then he grinned. “You should have seen Jake, though, when his woman threatened to hop on the float and give me an eyeful if we didn’t go away. He all but screamed like a girl and rowed us away so fast we probably carved a permanent wake.”
Jake’s arm shot across the table, his fist punching Luc in the shoulder. “Screamed like a girl, my ass.” Then he laughed. “Okay, I’ve gotta admit that was pretty brilliant on her part. It didn’t even occur to me to call her bluff. I only knew that I’d have to rip Luc’s eyes out of his head and feed ’em to the fish if he saw her. And wouldn’t that put a crimp in this little family reunion?”
“Uncle Sam taught me to be real good with all manner of weapons,” Max said, deadpan. “So I could probably go you one better had the two of you actually seen Harper wearing nothing but her pretty skin.” Then he gave Jake a faint smile. “Still, it’s hard to beat a good eyeball ripping.”
Some Like It Hot Page 24
