by J. R. Ward
As he hobbled down to the house, he pictured her rising up on tiptoe so she could meet him in the eye and keep arguing with him. Not many people fought to get closer to him when he was pissed off. His crew tended to duck and cover when his temper got pounding, and even Reese had backed away.
Cassandra’s strength as she’d met him head-on had been a surprise. He’d always known she was lovely and smart, but had never considered her tough. Naturally, the hard edge turned him on even more. He could appreciate lovely. He could respect smart. But strong made him tingle all over.
As if his libido needed the help when it came to her.
When he got to the house, he pulled back the plastic sheet and stepped into the kitchen. Cassandra was bent over the propane heater, shutting it off.
“Hey.”
She wheeled around, putting her hand to her throat. After a quick glance at his face, her eyes refused to meet his. “You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
“Have you come to check on our progress?” She picked up a clipboard, folded back a couple pages and made a note.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I owe you an apology.”
That got her attention. Her eyes shifted to his. “You mean for Monday? You already gave me one if memory serves.”
“I was way out of line. I’m sorry.”
She pulled on a parka, juggling the clipboard between her hands. “So you said. Are we done?”
He stepped in her path. “You’re still angry.”
“Yes, I am. Now get out of my way.”
“Cassandra—”
“I am not a problem,” she snapped.
“What the—what are you talking about?”
“As you left on Monday you said I wasn’t your problem. Well, you’re right about the first part. I’m not your anything, not your friend, not your colleague, certainly not someone you need to worry about. But I’m also not a problem. I take care of myself, I always have, ever since I was sixteen. Hell, even while I was married to Reese, with all his money, I paid my own expenses. So I am no man’s problem, got it?”
Alex dragged a hand through his hair. “Ah, hell—”
She propped her clipboard on her hip and leaned against some exposed wall studs. “You know, I’m curious. What exactly do you think is so awful about me? Just be honest. I mean, after I leave this job, I’m never going to see you again, so why don’t we let it all out. I’d like to know why you’ve always disliked me.”
Alex cursed, a low, vile word that made her laugh harshly.
“Not up to it?” she said in a brisk tone. “Funny, I always assumed you played honest. Big tough guy like yourself. Not afraid of anything.”
“Damn it, woman, will you give me a minute to collect my thoughts?”
“Oh, so there’s a list.”
As he blew out his breath, she shook her head.
“God—” She stepped around him. “—Goddamn you, Alex.”
He put his arm out, stopping her. “You’ve got it all wrong, Cassandra. About you and me.”
“How so? Are you going to tell me you haven’t avoided me all these years? That you haven’t glowered every time you saw me on a dock waiting for the two of you to come in? You jumped ship to get away from me, remember? On that cruise through the Bahamas. You couldn’t wait to get off that boat, and don’t pretend I wasn’t what drove you away.”
Alex clamped down on his molars. He was an inch away from letting the whole sordid mess fly. His obsession, his love, his hunger. But it wouldn’t be fair to burden her with all that. Like she needed to know he was crazed for her. And had…
Killed her husband.
He squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting her to read the sins in his stare.
“At least you don’t deny it,” she said softly.
He listened to her leave: the footsteps, the flapping of the plastic, the Range Rover’s engine turning over.
He didn’t open his eyes until he was all alone.
* * *
The next morning, on Saturday, Cass headed to the site. She was going back to Manhattan for the holidays early the following day and she wanted to put in another good bunch of hours before she left.
Plus she had a lot of frustration to work off.
As she got out of the Range Rover and walked over to the house, she didn’t bother looking at the shop. She wasn’t going to look at it again.
Not anymore.
For too long she’d been determined to bang her head against the wall that was Alex Moorehouse. And it was hard to own up to the fact that yesterday she really had wanted him to tell her she’d read him wrong. She’d honestly hoped he’d say there was no basis for what she believed was true.
When he hadn’t been able to, she’d been stupidly hurt. Again.
Enough was enough. Alex’s particular brand of disapproval triggered every need-to-please strand in her DNA. But they were going in circles and she wasn’t a masochist. At least not an infinite masochist. She was giving up. Letting go.
Stamping a big WHATEVER on the situation and walking away.
She went into the house, turned the heater on, started the generator and headed upstairs. The bathrooms were essentially cleared out. All she wanted to do to them today was remove the molding around the windows and doors and take off the wainscoting on the walls. It was the perfect kind of small job for her. She just needed a hammer, a chisel for leverage and time.
She picked the biggest of the baths to begin with. After turning on a space heater, she took off her parka, put her bag of lunch down and started in the left-hand corner of the room. Finding a rhythm in her work was a blessing, and as it always was when she was alone at a site with nothing but boards and tools and quiet, the hours flew by. Toward the end of the day, she’d gotten so much done she thought she might as well take up some of the tile on the floor, as well.
The sun was setting when she decided to call it quits. Her shoulders were sore, her back stiff and the satisfaction of looking over the piles of boards she’d taken off wiped away all of the discomfort.
She’d done a good job. Made progress.
Downstairs, she shut off the propane heater and the generator. As she lifted the plastic to leave, the cold rushed in and reminded her that she’d left her parka up where she’d been working. She ran back to the bathroom and grabbed the jacket. Just as she was leaving, the scorched particleboard under her feet let out a shriek. She looked down at a section where she’d removed some tile.
It happened so fast. One moment she was fine, the next, her foot broke through the board and she was through the floor up to her thigh.
While she caught her breath, she waited for the pain to tell her what, if anything, had been broken. The dull thudding in her upper leg suggested she was going to be bruised, but she was able to move her foot, and there was no awful feeling of wetness as blood welled.
Thank God for her long underwear and her jeans. The two together had saved her from getting torn up.
Planting her palms on the floor, she tried to lift herself out of the hole and failed. After a day spent popping boards off the wall, her shoulder and back muscles were spent and she couldn’t get much leverage, not with her free leg splayed out behind her. The layers she wore were also part of the problem. All that fabric was crammed into the hole, trapping her.
She eyed the window. The sun was almost down. What little heat there was in the house was evaporating quickly, the temperature dropping inside and out.
Taking a deep breath, she yelled, “Alex! Alex! Can you hear me?”
Chapter Eight
Alex looked up from the desk and frowned. Something was off. Something…
He cocked his head to the side, trying to loosen his neck. His nape was tingling as if someone were standing right behind him, even though he was by himself.
His witchy sense was kicking in, although damned if he knew why. He looked around the workshop. Everything was in order and his phone wasn’
t ringing with some kind of emergency.
Maybe it was just a draft.
As he bent his head the other way, he smiled a little. His crew hated whenever he started cricking his neck. Usually it meant trouble was coming. Or had arrived but just hadn’t introduced itself yet.
He looked back down at the sailboat design he was working on. He’d finally decided to stop fighting the urge to play around with his father’s old plans. And after having gone through all of them, he’d decided they were really good. With some tweaking, a few of them could be spectacular.
Sometime later he took a stretch and checked his watch. Seven o’clock. Time to eat again. He went over to the little refrigerator and started lining up the cans of Ensure. With those, plus the three chicken breasts he’d boiled that afternoon and some pre-washed lettuce he had, he’d pull down about twelve hundred calories. Not bad, but he was going to have to squeeze in a couple more PowerBars before he went to bed.
He was rubbing the back of his neck, annoyed by the persistent twitchy feeling, when his cell phone went off. He checked caller ID before answering.
“Hey, Libby. What’s up?”
The older woman’s voice was edgy. “Have you seen Cassandra?”
“Isn’t she home with you?”
“She should have been. About two hours ago.”
As his nape went into a crazy spasm, fear condensed in his chest cavity. He looked out the window at White Caps. The lights were off and he couldn’t see where she parked her car from this vantage point.
“I’m going over to the house,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
He grabbed his parka, clicked on a flashlight and headed out as quickly as he could. The Range Rover was parked where it usually was, but there were no sounds from inside the house. The silence made the cold air seem so much colder.
Pulling back the plastic, he called out, “Cassandra?”
“Alex?” Her thin, ghostly voice drifted down to his ears.
He flipped the flashlight up. Her leg was dangling out of the kitchen ceiling.
“Cassandra!” Punching his cane into the floor, he went upstairs, cursing his cast and the way it slowed him down.
He found her in one of the bathrooms. In a space that was as frigid as the outdoors.
“Th-thank God.” She shuddered. “Alex…”
Without nailing her eyes with direct light, he did a quick assessment of her. She had one leg stretched out behind her, the other through the floor up to her hip. A parka was wrapped loosely around her upper body, but it was so cold, the thing obviously wasn’t doing much good. Her teeth were chattering, and the color was sucked out of her cheeks.
He kneeled down, carefully positioning his lower leg. “Does anything feel broken?”
“I can bend my knee a little. Ankle, foot and t-toes flex without pain. I think all the layers I’m w-wearing helped me from getting cut, too. I’m just not strong enough to p-pull myself free.”
“Any problem with your spine?”
She shook her head. “I have f-feeling everywhere. Or I did before the c-cold took it away.”
He put the flashlight down. “Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to grab you under your arms. I want your hands on my shoulders, but don’t pull yourself up, let me do the work. You’re going to go limp, understand? The less tense you are, the easier this will be. Any questions?”
Cassandra looked up at him. “You’ve rescued people b-before.”
Yeah, but not like this. His hands were shaking so badly he had to hide them from her.
“Any questions?” he repeated.
“No,” she said in a small voice.
He got close to her, slipped his hands under the parka and gripped her body. God, she was so small. His palms spanned her rib cage.
“You ready?” he said into her ear.
“Alex?” she whispered.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go slow. I’m going to try not to hurt you.”
“I’m glad you c-came. I was calling your n-name.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he took a deep breath. “Okay, honey. Here we go.”
He called upon all the brute strength of his upper body, marshaling the heavy muscles of his shoulders and biceps to lift her weight. Her breath caught and she let out a groan. But she moved.
“How you doing?” he said through clenched teeth. His bad leg was screaming in pain, but he wasn’t about to stop.
“F-fine. Thank you.”
Alex eased back and she came with him until she was free. With a twist, he laid her out on the floor and stuffed her arms in her parka, zipping her inside. There was a brief silence between them as he leaned over her, breathing deeply, and she stared up at him, lying perfectly still.
He brushed a tendril of hair back from her face.
You are not going to kiss her, Moorehouse. Don’t you dare.
His head dipped down. As she shivered, he pulled himself up short, appalled. He needed to get her the hell out of this house and warmed up. He did not need to waste time doing something he shouldn’t do even when she was perfectly well.
“I want to check your leg before you try and stand on it, okay?”
She nodded, burrowing into her coat.
Keeping his hands impersonal, he ran them over her ankle and calf, bending the bones a little. She winced when he got to her thigh.
“How bad’s the pain?”
“Just a bruise kind of thing. And, no, I don’t need a doctor.”
He tried to ignore the fact that his hand was way up on the inside of her leg, but the intimacy was too loud for him to drown it out. God, he was a bastard. The poor woman was freezing cold; he could feel her trembling. And he was thinking about sex?
Men truly are pigs, he thought.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. Now, there was a lie. His body was on fire. “Let’s get you out of here. Light-headed?”
She shook her head and sat up, pushing him away when he would have helped her. She awkwardly got to her feet and reached for the wall. As she swayed, he wondered how he was going to keep her upright when he had so little balance himself.
Except before he even got off the floor, Cassandra turned away and started for the stairs.
Alex palmed his cane, wondering why she’d rather go it on her own when it was clear she was so unsteady.
“I want to take you to Gray’s,” he called out while struggling to get up off the floor. “Cassandra! Wait!”
He caught her on the stairs only because she was taking them slowly.
“I’m taking you to Gray’s,” he said to her back.
“That’s okay.” She stumbled and caught herself on the banister. “It’s not far.”
The hell he was going to let her get behind the wheel. “I’ll drive you.”
“Not with that c-cast you won’t. The Range Rover is a stick shift. Reese liked to t-trailer boats behind it.”
“Why are you racing out of here? Will you—damn it, Cassandra! Stop.”
They came into the kitchen. While she went for the clipboard and her cell phone, he headed to the door, blocking the exit.
As she came up to him, she looked right through him. “Pl-please get out of the w-way, Alex.”
She was so cold her lips were blue.
He widened his stance. If she wanted out, she was going to have to break through him. “You’re coming up to the shop. You’re getting under the hot water. Then maybe I’ll let you drive home. Otherwise, I’m calling Spike to come pick you up.”
“Three words,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Not. Your. Problem.”
He cursed with a nasty, dark word. “There’s no fricking way I’m letting you drive in this condition.”
Her shoulders sagged. “I d-don’t want to argue with you.”
He took her arm. “Good. Let’s go.”
“Alex—”
“Now.”
When she followed him past her car and up to the shop, he was relieved.
Once they were inside, he led her right over to his bed, forcing her down gently, getting her as close to the potbellied stove as he could. Moving quickly, he put some more wood on the fire and went into the bathroom. After the shower was running strong, he picked up the wet towel he’d used after his workout and shut the door so the room would warm up.
“Water should be ready in a minute.” He tossed the towel into the laundry duffel and went over to the desk. He dialed Gray’s.
“Libby?” he said when the woman answered. “I have her. She’s fine. Just warming up. No, she’s okay. She’ll be home in a while.”
He hung up and looked across the room.
Cassandra was shivering more now that she was out of the cold.
“Let’s get your boots off,” he said, going over to her. He leaned on his cane and lowered himself to her feet.
“I can do it.” But when she reached down, her fingers skipped over the laces.
He removed her Timberlands, being careful with the one on the right. Then he stripped off her socks.
She had very pretty feet.
He curled his hand around her ankle and he felt the bones again, sliding his palm under her pant leg and up her calf. Her long johns prevented him from knowing how smooth her skin was. Which was just as well.
When she went dead still under his touch, he knew she was hiding something from him.
“Where’s the pain?” he asked in a low voice. “Cassandra?”
He looked up. Her eyes were watching him from under lowered lids.
“Cassandra, where does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t. Not really.”
Yeah, right. Then why was she so motionless? “Look, I know you don’t think you need a physician, but tomorrow you should go see Doc John.”
“I’m driving back to Manhattan tomorrow. First thing in the morning.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“The holidays.”
“When will you be back?”
“Right after New Year’s.”
God, that was forever. “Do you need help getting to the bathroom?”
She shook her head and started to shrug out of her parka. Her hands were clumsy as she took it off and he eyed her flannel shirt. The thing was buttoned to the neck.
