As Hot As It Gets

by Jamie Sobrato

  “Yes, because I’m not going to answer.” Claire stalked over to the window and frowned at the sky, which had the nerve to be looking absolutely breathtaking at that moment, alight with the soft early evening glow that invited romantic strolls with lovers.

  For some immature reason, she wasn’t keen on having her actions over the weekend examined under Lucy’s magnifying glass.

  “You are such a liar,” Lucy said, sitting down on Claire’s bed, ever the patient friend. “You know you’re dying to tell me every scandalous detail of your weekend with him.”

  Under normal circumstances, Lucy would have been right. Claire supposed she couldn’t exactly tell her best friend nothing about the weekend.

  “I guess things just got a little out of hand. I might be violating some kind of brother-in-law, sister-in-law bond if I tell you everything.”

  Lucy started looking a little queasy. “I don’t want you to tell me everything. Just the important stuff.”

  Claire gave up and sat down beside her, reclining back on a pile of pillows. “Okay, important stuff to you means, am I in love? Have we set a wedding date yet? The answer to both those questions is no.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything more from you. I was hoping you’d say something like, ‘We really like each other. We’ve finally stopped arguing long enough to see that we have a lot in common.’”

  Claire started to protest, but then she realized Lucy was right. When they weren’t arguing—and even when they were—she had fun with Mason.

  Now what the hell was she supposed to do with that annoying little fact?

  “I’ll admit he’s not the complete jerk-off I originally thought he was.”

  Lucy peered at her from the corner of her eye. “And?”

  “And we may have experienced a few pleasant moments over the weekend.”

  “Pleasant enough that you might both have dinner at the same table as Judd and me tonight?”

  Claire shrugged. Her plans for pre-dinner sex clearly weren’t going to happen now. “Sure, I think we can sit through dinner together.”

  It would just give them the energy they needed to do what would happen later, when they finally got each other alone.

  “Well, then I have instructions to hurry you down to the seafood restaurant near the resort entrance. We’re supposed to meet Judd there in twenty minutes.”

  Claire got dressed while Lucy filled her in more on how she’d managed to convince Judd that they needed to take a vacation on such short notice, but Lucy was a notoriously bad liar. There was some important fact she was leaving out of the story.

  Claire turned and watched Lucy as she paced impatiently around the room. It wasn’t like Lucy to pace impatiently or talk a mile a minute. Something about her had changed, that was for sure, and Claire couldn’t begin to name what it was.

  MASON HAD WATCHED Judd and Lucy exchange knowing glances all through dinner, so when they both announced at the same moment, “We have some news to tell you,” it didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

  Claire looked up from her bananas Foster. “What kind of news?”

  “We’re pregnant!” Lucy said, beaming.

  Claire froze with a spoonful of banana and ice cream hovering inches from her mouth, her eyes wide. “Pregnant?”

  “Yes! It’s a little sooner than we expected, but we’re so excited, we thought we’d fly out here to tell you both at the same time.”

  “Congratulations!” Mason stood up and hugged Lucy, then Judd, and sat back down as he let the news settle in his brain. He was happy for them, and he loved the idea of having a kid in the family. But…

  But what?

  He was also suddenly feeling a little off. Like he’d eaten some bad seafood. And then he realized what was bugging him. If his little brother had kids first—just as he’d gotten married first—and if Mason continued on his current path toward eternal bachelorhood, he’d eventually become one of those eccentric old guys who never married and never had kids.

  That fact hadn’t really bothered him when it was just the opinions of his peers he had to consider, many of whom were still swinging singles. But now there’d be a kid in the family, possibly more than one. And when viewed through the eyes of a child, his eternal bachelorhood could seem…well, odd.

  He’d be Weird Old Uncle Mason.

  He wasn’t sure that’s who he wanted to be.

  “Mason? Are you okay?” Lucy asked.

  He snapped out of his daze. Claire had gotten up to hug Judd and Lucy too and was offering them her congratulations.

  “I’m fine, really. I guess I’m just getting sentimental over my little brother having a baby. Have you told Mom yet?”

  “I’m not even sure where she is right now,” Judd said. “Pakistan?”

  Mason shook his head. “I got an e-mail from her last week. She’s in Bali.”

  After their parents’ divorce, they’d had occasional awkward visits with their father that had eventually ended when he married again and started a second family. Neither of them had heard from him in nearly fifteen years, so that left their mom as the person to tell about major life events like a baby.

  That is, if she were ever around to hear the news. She’d spent her retirement years globetrotting, and her distance was part of what had kept Judd and Mason close. They stuck together through everything, and Mason realized with a start that he wanted to be around to watch Judd’s kid grow up.

  Which would mean living in Arizona.

  Near Claire.

  The bad-seafood feeling came back with a vengeance.

  Judd, Lucy and Claire were discussing due dates and baby names and such, so they didn’t notice what must have been the shade of green Mason was turning. He decided if he didn’t want to seem like a complete jerk, he needed to snap out of his funk and get into the baby talk.

  “If it’s a boy,” he joked, “I’ll cast my vote for the name Mason—strong, distinctive, simple—”

  “Actually, Lucy already suggested that,” Judd said, much to Mason’s surprise. “I told her it would give you too much of a big head.”

  If Mason wasn’t mistaken, he would have sworn Claire was working just as hard as he was to disguise a queasy feeling over the whole notion of parenthood. He watched her as she neglected the dessert she’d been attacking only minutes ago. After their dessert plates were cleared away, he was sure he saw relief on her face when Lucy said she was tired and wanted to go back to their room to get some rest.

  “I’ll see you in the morning then,” Claire said, standing up from the table a little quicker than everyone else.

  They said their goodbyes to Judd and Lucy and found themselves alone on Escapade’s main promenade that led down to the beach. It was dark out now, but the resort’s walkways were lit, and the sound of the ocean beckoned.

  A few hours ago, he’d had little on his mind but getting Claire alone in her room, but now… A walk seemed more appropriate given his weak stomach.

  “Want to go for a stroll on the beach?” he asked as Claire brushed a wild curl out of her eyes.

  “I’d love to.” She was wearing a slinky white dress with a sweater draped over her shoulders, so he took the liberty of removing it and helping her into it.

  After a few minutes of walking, he said, “You seemed a little shocked by the baby news.”

  “I wasn’t the one turning green.”

  Mason laughed. “I’m actually thrilled for them. I don’t know why the news threw me so off-kilter.”

  “I’m thrilled for them, too.” She looked down at the sand and hugged her arms around herself as she walked. “I guess it’s just that when you’re our age and someone you’re close to has a kid, then it makes you think, you know?”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  Mason knew better than to have the kid conversation with a woman he wasn’t planning to marry, but he and Claire were so far from being an actual dating couple that he felt safe asking, “You want to have kids someday?”

&nbs
p; She shrugged. “I’m not opposed to the idea of procreation. I guess I’ve always assumed I would someday when I’m too old to worry about stretch marks.”

  “Which will be when? When you’re eighty?”

  “Something like that.”

  She smiled, and he found a whole new reason to like her. She could talk about kids without getting that glazed, desperate, my-clock-is-ticking look so many women got.

  “How about you? Any paternal urges?”

  “I’m pretty much with you on the whole parenthood issue, except for the part about stretch marks, of course. I’ve always considered it one of those events that would happen in the unforeseeable future.”

  “Do men get stretch marks?” Claire asked, giving him an easy out.

  He should have felt relieved. Instead, he sort of wished they could keep going with the soul-baring conversation. But this was Claire, after all. Claire, who’d leave as soon as she’d gotten her fill of him. There was no sense in getting too friendly.

  “I don’t know, but you’re welcome to search me later.”

  She laughed. “I can say with confidence that you do not have a single stretch mark. Not that I’ve been looking for them, but I would have noticed something like that.”

  They continued up the beach in the direction of Mason’s suite, and he was happy to realize his bad-seafood feeling had disappeared. He was starting to enjoy Claire’s company out of bed just as much as he enjoyed it in bed, and that was an interesting development.

  Interesting, but probably not important.

  “LITTLE BROTHER, I’M DAMN glad you’re here,” Mason said as he leaned against his desk.

  Judd sat in Mason’s office chair, staring at the computer as he scrolled through employee files, looking for anything fishy to narrow down their pool of dominatrix suspects.

  “Has resort security come up with any leads on who’s working for this Mike D. guy?”

  “A few employees with criminal records as of this morning, but nothing solid.”

  “I promised Lucy I wouldn’t spend our whole vacation working on this, but I do want to help you. Can you schedule a meeting between me and your security guys, so we can share information?”

  “Definitely. If you talk to my assistant on the way out, she’ll call them and get you set up.”

  “I’ve spotted a couple of former strippers on your payroll. That’s one place to look further. If they’re willing to take their clothes off for cash, then maybe they’re willing to go a step further.”

  “Good thought.”

  Judd sat back in the leather chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Who on your management team do you trust, and who don’t you trust?”

  Mason frowned at the question. “I can’t say I completely trust anyone. The resort’s only been open two months, so I don’t know anyone that well yet.”

  “Anyone you definitely don’t trust?”

  “No, can’t say there is. Why would you look at management first?”

  “It takes some kind of management skill to organize an underground ring of any illegal activity and have it be successful. Maybe Mike D’Amato was just the front man, and someone else was or is running the show.”

  “Who says they’re successful?”

  “We don’t know. I’m just guessing here,” Judd said, turning his attention back to the employee database.

  “I think I’ve got a solid management team, but I’ve been wrong before.”

  “You have any disgruntled ex-girlfriends here on the island?” Judd said.

  “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

  “I’m dead serious. The way you piss off women…”

  “I haven’t pissed off a single woman since Natasha,” Mason said, referring to his ex who’d tried to ruin the Fantasy Ranch.

  Judd looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

  “Okay, not counting Claire.”

  “Claire counts.”

  “She’s not a girlfriend.”

  Or was she?

  “Then what exactly would you call her?”

  A pain in the ass, was his first thought.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  And that was the truth. He had no idea what label to put on Claire, no inkling what she meant in his life, no way to measure the hurricane-like impact she had on him.

  She was just Claire. Completely indefinable.

  “I’d call her the woman who’s going to haunt you the rest of your life if you don’t get serious and make peace with her.”

  “I’ve made about as much peace with her as any one man can make.”

  “Peace and sex are not the same thing,” Judd said.

  His little brother knew him too damn well.

  “Who says I ever have to get serious about any woman? I’m doing just fine as is. No need to mess with perfection.”

  “You call this perfection? Living on a little island where your only relationship possibilities are either the one-week variety or the kind that involve screwing people who work for you?”

  “The one-week variety is my favorite kind, and I consider employees off-limits.”

  Judd held up his hand in defeat. “Fine, if you want to keep on kidding yourself…”

  “So now you’re going to be a father, and you have to start acting like my dad, too?”

  He grinned. “Looks that way.”

  “Don’t think you’re getting out of being the little brother that easily. I can still kick your ass.”

  “Let me see you try it.”

  Mason gave Judd a playful smack on the side of the head. A second later, Judd was up out of the chair, his head butting into Mason’s stomach. He toppled him onto the ground and then put him in a headlock.

  They wrestled around on the floor beside the desk, alternately laughing and muttering curses, neither of them stronger than the other. For a few minutes, Mason could imagine they were still kids, without a care in the world other than beating the other’s ass.

  “Okay, damn it. You win,” he finally said.

  “You’re still a wuss.” Judd stood up and offered Mason a hand.

  “And you’re still a big pussy.”

  “I might be a pussy, but at least I know my boys can swim.”

  Mason laughed. He may not have had any strong paternal urges, but there was that ever-present male desire to know for sure that he could father a child if he wanted to. “You got me there, man.”

  “But seriously, I have to tell you, I want you to be the baby’s godparent. Lucy and I both do.”

  He blinked at the sudden serious turn the conversation had taken. Not what he’d expected, and it nearly knocked him down with its gravity. “Whoa. You sure about that? I mean, I don’t know anything about kids or being a godparent.”

  Judd clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll learn, bro.”

  “Well, if you’re sure…”

  “I wish you’d move back to Arizona, you know. I miss playing ball with you, and I want you around to teach the kid to play.”

  Mason swallowed a lump in his throat. “I’ll probably be spending more time in Arizona again soon, once I’ve got Escapade running the way I want it.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Hey man, you’ve helped me enough today. You’d better go spend some time with that wife of yours.”

  Judd glanced at his watch. “You’re right. I told her I’d be back to go to the beach with her by now.”

  “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Mason watched as Judd left the office, closing the door behind him. Alone again, a vague feeling of discontent settled in his belly. Discontent that his brother was suddenly trying to sell him on Claire and on the whole convention of settling down.

  And discontent that for once, Judd’s argument wasn’t sounding so crazy.

  12

  CLAIRE HAD BEEN AT Escapade for five days, and still she wasn’t ready to leave. She’d spent every night with Mason, trying her damnedest to get her fill of
Mason—trying to prove to herself that she absolutely was not a victim to his charms—and she was finally starting to admit to herself that maybe her plan just wasn’t going to work.

  Now that Judd and Lucy were there, too, she had company during the day most of the time, so it shouldn’t have been too hard to get her mind off of Mason. But it was. When she wasn’t with him, she was thinking about him, and when she was with him, she was thinking about him.

  She was beginning to think psychotherapy might be the next logical step.

  Now she was at one of the resort’s bars with Judd and Lucy, while Mason was at some sort of business-related meeting. He’d told her the day before that the whole dominatrix problem had been dealt with, and he’d thanked her for her help. Maybe that had been his subtle way of letting her know she could leave any time now, but her body wasn’t taking the hint.

  “So,” Lucy was saying to her, “are you and Mason having dinner together with us again tonight?”

  “You two have got to stop it,” Claire said, feeling like a zoo animal under Judd and Lucy’s scrutiny.

  “What?” Judd asked, suddenly Mr. Innocent.

  “The matchmaking! Mason and I are not going to get together, so just give it up.”

  Judd smiled. “Let me just say for the record that I have been completely opposed to any and all matchmaking efforts from the start and have not willingly or knowingly participated in said efforts.”

  “Right.”

  Lucy took a sip of her virgin piña colada, pretending not to hear the conversation.

  “Lucy, tell her!”

  She peered over the rim of her glass—another bad actor at work. After taking another drink, she set the glass down. “Not that I’m admitting to any matchmaking efforts myself, but I can say with certainty that Judd has not willingly participated in any such thing.”

  “You two are impossible.” Claire propped her elbows on the bar, looking across at the patrons on the other side. A scattered group of men and women chatted, laughed and drank. Claire should have felt happy and energized. Here she was at a beautiful resort with two of her favorite people in the world, yet she felt anything but carefree.