by Tami Hoag
Shaken, she muttered a naughty word under her breath and stepped back from him, dragging her own hands through her sheared locks, as if to remind herself of who she was and why she was here. “I have to go back home,” she said softly.
She turned without looking at Jake. He was bad luck. He was a temptation that had come to test her resolve. He was too handsome to not want and wanting was something she had done too much of already. Contentment was what she had come to Mare’s Nest for.
She fixed her gaze on the big old beach house and the dogs sunning themselves on the steps. Her vision had blurred and she realized with surprise that tears had sprung up in her eyes. She took a step forward but was held back. Jake’s big hands closed on her upper arms, his grip strong but gentle enough to take her breath away.
“Dixie? What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice soft with concern. “What did I say?”
“Nothing. I just have to get back, is all.”
“Now who’s in too big a hurry?” he whispered, giving in to the urge to draw her back against him—not into an embrace, just close enough so he could catch the faint scent of lilies of the valley that drifted from her skin. His hormones had decided Dixie La Fontaine was irresistible; his logical brain was not being consulted on the matter. He was losing sight of his objective, but for the moment he didn’t give a damn.
His hands moved on her upper arms in a soothing motion as he murmured, “I don’t always know the right thing to say.”
Dixie forced a laugh. “That must be inconvenient for a writer.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
He turned her then and looked down into her face, into eyes full of uncertainty. The wind caught at strands of her hair and whipped them across the soft curve of her cheek. Jake brushed them back, his thumb skimming the corner of her mouth, sending heat through them both.
“Will you tell me the right thing to say, Dixie?”
Answers swirled in her head. Fanciful answers, romantic answers, suggestive answers. She banned them all from being spoken. The truth was, she didn’t know what to say, either. Her feelings were caught in a whirl. Yesterday her life had been as calm and safe as a reflecting pool. Today it was like the ocean, tumultuous, unpredictable, and she had the distinct feeling she was in danger of going in over her head. She found herself wanting a man she shouldn’t want, thinking of things she had left behind, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop the wanting.
It wasn’t just sexual. Despite everything, despite their differences and despite reason, there was something about Jake Gannon she genuinely liked. The tenderness in those summer-blue eyes. The gentleness in his hands. His readiness to protect her from Fabiano. Under the golden boy exterior, beneath the perfectionistic tendencies, there was a nice man, a man worth knowing, a man worth saving, a man worth—
“I guess maybe I should have been a mime,” he murmured. “I’m not half bad at showing what I mean.”
In the time it took Dixie to snatch a breath Jake lowered his head and pressed his lips to hers. She leaned against him, dropping the beer can, her hands coming up to grip the sweatshirt that clung to his chest. Her head fell back, offering no resistance, inviting him to take her mouth. He tasted warm and slightly salty from the spray of the sea. He tasted like something she had craved a long time and denied herself. That it would have been safer for her to continue denying herself was a fact she paid no heed to, not when he was this close, not when he was holding her. His nearness canceled caution.
A groan rumbled in his chest beneath her hands. She answered it with a sigh, her lips parting, granting him access to her mouth. He deepened the kiss, slowly, patiently; exploring, not claiming; tasting, not devouring. It was a kiss of discovery and wonder, and when he lifted his head that wonder was reflected in his eyes.
“Wow,” he murmured. “I guess it’s true what they say—everybody loves a mime.”
“Everybody loves a clown,” Dixie corrected him, her gaze locked on his. “People throw pennies at mimes.”
“Who cares,” he growled, bending down toward her again.
Madness threatened to overwhelm him. He would have given his last nickel for another taste of her. If he hadn’t thought Fabiano would come charging out to try to rip him limb from limb, he would have pulled her down onto the sand and made love to her right there with the surf washing over them. This kind of sudden passion wasn’t like him. It was crazy and wild. It was wonderful.
As he lowered his mouth toward Dixie’s waiting lips, he caught a flash of silver, a glimpse of a svelte form in the corner of his eye. Jake jerked his head up, his gaze focusing on the beach house.
“What?” Dixie asked dazedly, blinking.
Jake let go of her and took two steps toward the house, staring at it as if it had just materialized out of thin air. Dixie’s knees wobbled and gave out and she sat unceremoniously on the wet sand.
“I saw—” Jake cut himself off. He had been about to bolt and run, but the elusive vision had disappeared and the distant roar of an engine indicated she would be gone entirely by the time he arrived on the scene. He wheeled around and it took him a second to realize Dixie was sitting down—and glaring at him. “I saw someone come out of your house.”
“It was probably Sylvie,” she said, struggling to her feet.
“Not unless Sylvie has grown three feet of platinum-blond hair since we met half an hour ago.”
“There are such things as wigs, you know,” Dixie grumbled, grimacing as she dusted off the seat of her pants. Wet sand clung to her fingers. The damp had already seeped through her sweatpants into her panties. It felt disgusting.
“Why would she put on a wig?” Jake demanded. “Her hair looked fine to me.”
“I don’t know. Why do people do what they do?” she snapped crossly. “I don’t know why. She just might, is all. My great-uncle Nub used to like to cut up bleach bottles and make hats out of them. Why would anyone want to do that? Maybe Sylvie just got a wild urge to wear a wig.”
He gave her a long, steady look. “And maybe that wasn’t Sylvie.”
Dixie ground her teeth. Darn it all, she would have to get saddled with a mystery writer, a man who probably saw clues in his breakfast cereal, a nosy California perfectionist who wouldn’t rest until he’d put everything in its place.
“I’ll bet you were the kind of kid who had to take every blessed thing apart to see how it worked,” she grumbled.
Jake looked down at his sneakers and snarled a little under his breath. Every machine he had ever managed to take apart had never been the same again. It wasn’t something he cared to discuss.
“Would you mind giving me a lift into town?” he asked abruptly. “I need to buy some groceries.”
Dixie smacked a hand against his back in a gesture of phony camaraderie that left a damp sandy print on his sweatshirt. “Why would I mind?” she said with a smile that looked more ferocious than friendly. “I’m such a sport. I wouldn’t mind at all. You’re a guest here. You need something, you just ask your perky pal, Dixie,” she said, spitting out each P like a bullet.
Jake stared at her as she trudged toward the house. The lady was steamed.
Because he’d caught sight of her mystery guest or because he’d reneged on the second kiss?
He wasn’t sure which answer would please him more.
SIX
HE HADN’T CAUGHT sight of the woman in town on Saturday. He’d kept an eye peeled as he strolled the three aisles of Harper’s Grocery and as he’d followed Dixie around in the hardware store while she shopped for toggle bolts and ten-penny nails. There had been no sign of his quarry on the street or anywhere around the Cottages during the rest of the day. But that night there had been another aerobics exhibition on the other side of the shade at the attic window.
Sunday had brought similar lack of luck. Jake had turned down Dixie’s rather cool offer of a ride to church, hoping the woman in the attic would emerge while she thought everyone else was gone. But such had not been the
case. He ended up spending most of the day in a deck chair on the porch of his cottage, rereading his manuscript and being stared at by Dixie’s array of motley cats. Fabiano had strolled over for a beer in the afternoon and met Jake’s query about someone else living in Dixie’s house with a blank look. All in all, it had been a pleasurable way to spend the day. He’d enjoyed the sight and sound of the sea and stretching out in a chair with his book. But it had not been very profitable as far as attaining his objective.
Dixie had avoided him all day like the plague and he had allowed her the distance. He didn’t quite understand what was going on between them, either. The attraction was pulling his mind off his work, distorting his focus, and that made him uncomfortable. He had always gone after a goal with single-minded determination. Now he felt as if he were drifting in two directions at the same time.
If Dixie was hiding Devon Stafford here, then she’d had amazing success for a year. There had never been a clue in any of the tabloids. Not one person had uttered a word of suspicion about the actress hiding out along the Carolina coast. Greece had been scoured by reporters, and Mazatlán, and Monte Carlo. No one had ever mentioned Mare’s Nest. Of course, Dixie had admitted Mare’s Nest didn’t attract many strangers. Hiding a runaway star may not have been such a difficult undertaking. Or perhaps Ms. Stafford had only just come here. For all anyone knew, the actress could have been constantly on the move, staying nowhere long enough to be found out.
Devon Stafford. He’d found her. He could feel it in his gut. The connection to the La Fontaine name, the aerobics demonstrations, the glimpse of that famous hair and figure…it had to be her. Why would an ordinary person go to such lengths to hide herself?
Jake had tried to further substantiate his guess by digging through his files for the names of the relatives Dixie had mentioned and for a mention of Dixie herself. But little was known about the star’s early life. Her manager had decided from the outset that mystery would further her allure, so Stafford had revealed little about her background. He knew her real name—Dee Ann Montrose—and her mother’s maiden name: La Fontaine. But that was about it and for that he had searched long and hard. He had found no mention of Great-Aunt Suki and her gall-bladder problems. No mention of Great-Uncle Nub and his penchant for bleach bottle hats. No mention of a curvy spitfire of a cousin named Dixie.
Dixie, who was taking her own sweet time emerging from the house. Giving her cousin a good head start, no doubt. He’d heard a car roar out of the yard half an hour before and had just caught a glimpse of silver hair whipping out the open window of a classic pink Thunderbird as it sailed down the road. He’d cursed his immobility and called Dixie for a ride. They’d agreed to meet at the Bronco by eleven. She had yet to make an appearance, and it was already a quarter past. Punctuality was apparently another trait they didn’t share.
Sitting in the truck, Jake thought he should be annoyed, but he couldn’t find it in him. In fact, he admired Dixie’s loyalty. She was determined to deny the existence of another person in her house, no matter what. If the mystery woman had fallen out of a window and landed on Jake’s head, he imagined Dixie would try to cover up with a screwball explanation.
It wasn’t like him at all. Since arriving in Mare’s Nest he had spent more time wondering about what made Dixie tick than wondering about Devon Stafford. Wondering about the shadows that sometimes passed through Dixie’s eyes, about the tears that had welled there briefly before he’d kissed her on Saturday morning. She had secrets and Jake wanted to know what they were. As always when presented with a mystery, the wheels of his mind whirred like crazy, turning over facts and clues, hunting for scraps of information and impressions he’d stored away.
All the gears were working…on the wrong mystery.
“This place is affecting my mind,” he mumbled, shaking his head in sad amazement.
He glanced around the wasteland of the front seat to distract himself. There was a little pile of seashells on the floor, the remnants of a bag of junk food, three soda cans, and an earring. Frowning, he turned his attention to the colorful bead necklaces hanging from the rearview mirror like exotic fruit. He hefted them in his palm the way he might test a bunch of grapes for weight, rolling the smooth beads between his fingers.
Tiny printing on red beads caught his eye. There was one letter in dark ink on each bead. “2 D 4 luck J.” A little heart had been drawn on the bead following the J.
Luck for what? Who the hell was this J character?
Jake would never have labeled the twist of emotion in his chest jealousy. He wasn’t the type. He was practical and controlled, not given to bursts of jealousy. And jealous of what? That a woman he had just met, a woman who was his opposite in most respects, had a life outside their brief acquaintance? Absurd.
What he was feeling was impatience. He checked his watch, heaved a sigh, tapped his toe on a soda can.
At long last the door to the beach house opened and Dixie sauntered down the steps and across the yard, pausing to pat several of her dogs. Jake watched her, his heart warming at the sight of her, cute and curvy in her old jeans and a hunter green turtleneck that molded her breasts, her expression soft.
He shook his head, a wry smile lifting the corner of his mouth. “I’m falling like a ton of bricks,” he muttered, amazed:
He never fell for women. He experienced attraction that gradually strengthened into something more. He established reasonable relationships with rules and bounds. He never fell. He never lost control that way. The idea that Dixie was stripping that famous control away, without even trying, irked him a little. It also excited him.
“Sorry you had to wait,” she said without a hint of repentance in her voice as she settled herself behind the wheel of the Bronco. “But I had to wash my hair and I ran out of cream rinse and then Mavis Randall called and she just goes on and on, talking about her bunions and bursitis and all. There’s just no end to human suffering where Mavis is concerned. I swear.”
Jake let out a measured breath, schooling himself to be patient and trying not to notice the way Dixie’s dark green sweater hugged her breasts. “No problem. I didn’t mind the wait.”
Dixie bit down on a smug smile. The heck he didn’t mind. If he clenched his teeth any harder that gorgeous jaw of his was going to crack. She had dragged her feet out of pure orneriness and she probably should have been genuinely apologetic, but she wasn’t. It would do him good to get off schedule every once in a while.
“You might as well get used to it anyhow,” she said.
“Used to what?”
“Waiting. We have our own pace down here. The word ‘hurry’ never made it into the Southern vocabulary. It’s not much like California.”
“So far, I’d say it’s not much like any place I’ve been on this planet,” Jake said.
Dixie reserved comment and put the Bronco in gear. She kept waffling between thinking a dose of Mare’s Nest would do Jake good and simply wishing him gone, reformed or not. The issue would probably be academic once he got a load of Eldon. He’d bolt for the nearest phone and call a tow truck up from Charleston to rescue his precious Porsche and then he’d be out of her hair for good.
Why did that idea bring more anxiety than relief?
Criminy, she thought, nibbling her lip. After all she’d been through, she was finally going to lose her mind—over a man.
“So, when do you think you’ll have it finished?” Jake asked.
Eldon stood back from the Porsche, wiping his hands on a rag only marginally cleaner than his greasy fingers. He chewed some on the stub of his cigar, then pulled it from his mouth and spat on the floor of the garage, all the while making a series of faces that could have won him a spot on a laxative commercial. Behind him stood Junior, a misnomer if ever there was one. Junior looked like an oak tree with a face. He had a vacant look that suggested he bent tire irons over his head for recreation.
“Well,” Eldon drawled, “could take a week. Mebbe two. All depends on how long i
t takes for that hose to get here.”
Jake looked longingly at his Porsche, nestled beside a battered pickup that reeked of an active farm career. He cast a sideways glance at Eldon and thought that for the first time since he’d broken his arm at the age of eight he might actually cry in public.
Eldon was built like a fireplug, fiftyish with a friar’s ring of thin red hair and eyes that were mere slits in his fleshy face. He was Pigpen grown up and gone bad. His coverall looked like something that should have been taken out and burned. He chewed some more on his cigar stub, sniffed, and spat.
Jake’s first urge was to have the car hauled elsewhere, some place where the help didn’t look like extras from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. But he squelched that urge. He needed to stay in Mare’s Nest and it was suddenly important that he leave the car in Eldon’s grimy hands.
This was a test. He could feel Dixie’s eyes on him, knew that she expected him to cut and run. Blasted hormones. He was going to leave his eighty-thousand-dollar automobile in the hands of a hillbilly version of Mutt and Jeff just to impress a woman with his toughness. He could take it. Maybe Andre would swoon at the sight of this place, but he was Jake Gannon, he was an ex-Marine, he was only going to break out in a cold sweat and go weak at the knees.
“That—” Jake broke off and cleared the tightness from his throat, then continued in his usual decisive tone. “That’ll be fine. No hurry. I can write here as well as anywhere.”
Eldon’s face took on a scowl. He pulled an enormous wrench from his pocket and slapped it against his palm. “You’re a writer?”
“Yes,” Jake said evenly, eyeing the wrench with amusement.
Eldon took a step closer and Junior loomed right up behind him, thick brows drawing low over unblinking eyes. Jake stood his ground with deceptive calm; a lazy, dangerous smile turned the corners of his mouth.
“It’s okay, Eldon,” Dixie said, pulling herself away from the Porsche. “Jake’s a mystery writer, not a reporter.”
