by Cherry Adair
“A friend?”
“Someone you know in town. I have plenty of time, if you’d rather start work another day.”
“I don’t know anyone in town. If you don’t want me to stick around, say the word and I’ll be out of here.”
“Wow, you’re touchy this morning. Did you get out of the wrong side of bed? Not my bed, but a bed?”
“I don’t spend the night in any woman’s bed. Unless we’re still fucking when the sun comes up. But I consider that the night before.”
Mia poured a mug of coffee, then added milk and sugar and leaned against the counter as she lazily stirred. He was snippy, and now she felt snippy. “I’ll be sure to make a note of that.”
“I had some errands to run before I got to work. I was going to make baozi, but I wasn’t sure that would be something you’d eat, so I stopped for more bacon.”
His mood switched off and on like a light switch. Mia immediately was wary. She read people pretty well—she had to. Was he hiding something? Lying? It was almost impossible to tell, he had such a poker face. “I’m a pretty adventurous eater,” she said easily, sipping her coffee. “What’s baozi?”
“Chinese dumplings, steamed or fried. Usually stuffed with pork, beef, and vegetables, with a soy- or chili-based sauce. Really good.”
She sat down across from him at the island and imagined she could smell soap on his skin. She also had a quick flash memory of him on top of her right where her plate now sat, and felt her cheeks grow warm.
One look at his face told her that if he remembered that night, it wasn’t having any impact on him now. So be it. After last night she’d felt her guard and natural caution slip down another notch or two. Now her shields were back. “I’ll have to try them,” she said easily, scooping up a handful of blue flower petals scattered on the counter. She put them beside her mug. “I like Chinese food.”
“Ever been there?” he asked casually, holding his coffee mug in one hand as he idly fondled Oso’s ear. The dog stood beside the tall bar stool, front paws on Cruz’s jean-clad knee.
“No, but I’d like to go.” Guy Stokes, head of manufacturing, had talked about opening a manufacturing plant in Beijing for a while, but they’d opted for Korea instead. “You?”
“Chinatown in various places, but never China. But I like Chinese food, too. Big fire there, I heard on the news this morning.”
Mia supposed it was free association, but she checked. “In China?”
“Yeah, some big factory there burned almost to the ground. Three hundred kids under twelve years old who worked there in appalling conditions were killed. Doors to the exits were locked, apparently.”
She pressed her palm to her chest in horror. “God, that’s unimaginable. Aren’t there laws against—well, laws in general there?” Mia could pretty much name every American law pertaining to employee safety, and the ones she didn’t know, her staff did. And before Blush went into another country, laws there were put through the same diligent and rigorous process as at home.
“Kids work in unsafe conditions there. Families need their income—”
“I’ve read about this, Cruz, but can we change the subject? There’s nothing we can do right this second.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Why should we give a flying fuck about little kids being subjected to inhumane treatment a world away?”
“That’s not what I—” She decided then and there to add child labor laws to her taboo polite mealtime conversation, along with religion and politics. “I do give a flying fuck,” she told him mildly. She didn’t like that word, but had used it in and out of context more times in the last twenty-four hours than she’d done in her life. “But not here. And not now. I’d just like to enjoy my breakfast and start the day with something uplifting.”
“We could hold hands and read the Bible together.”
“What’s wrong with you this morning? Do you want to discuss the hideous plight of those Chinese children? Fine. Give me facts, and numbers, and a solution. I have no idea what the hell you want from me, Cruz.”
His expression was shuttered. “I imagine American-Chinese food and Chinese-Chinese food are vastly different.”
Fine. If he was going to be impossible, she’d play along. “Let’s make China a taboo subject, all right? I love Italian food. Preferably while sitting at a café on St. Mark’s Square, pretending not to feed the pigeons.”
“Never been there. Tell me about it.”
They talked about food, and Europe, and the repairs to the house, but the conversation was strained, and Mia had no idea why. He’d been fine before she passed out from climax overload in the early hours this morning. What had happened between two o’clock and nine?
Mia was so relieved when the doorbell rang that she practically catapulted off the high stool. “That’s Marcel. I’ll go and get him started.”
“Make sure the bastard’s sober,” Cruz cautioned. She heard him but didn’t bother to respond as she went to the back door. Blush had hundreds of thousands of employees around the world. Her immediate staff in the San Francisco office was upwards of five hundred people. She didn’t need advice from her handyman about the freaking gardener.
• • •
Latour brought his wife, Daisy, and their little boy, Charlie. Mia found busywork upstairs for Daisy, and sent Latour to get started trimming the trees on the graveyard side of the house. By the time she went back to the kitchen, Cruz was gone, leaving the dirty dishes in the sink for her to wash.
She had a list of projects she should be doing, but she felt lazy and out of sorts. Cruz’s fault for starting her day on a weird note.
Sipping at an ice-filled glass of cold tea, Mia watched the little boy through the kitchen window as he wandered around the scrubby back lawn. The child seemed fascinated by the water.
About to go outside to warn him to stay away from the edge—and the ever-present alligator—she saw Cruz stride across the lawn.
He stood talking to the child for a few minutes, then crouched down behind him. Picking up something from the ground, the man handed it to the child, then guided his arm. It took Mia a few seconds to realize that Cruz was teaching Charlie how to skip stones over the water.
The first couple of stones didn’t go far, but Cruz kept talking and helping the child take aim at just the right angle. Eventually the stones skipped across the olive-green waters of the bayou. Mia smiled as she heard Charlie’s triumphant yell through the open window.
She couldn’t see Cruz’s face, but he ruffled the child’s shaggy hair and kept skimming stones. Mia stood in the kitchen for a good half hour watching them.
Cruz was good with children. A surprise. He seemed too contained, too serious a man, to bother with kids. Maybe it was just women he had a problem with.
Still, a man who had that kind of patience, and a willingness to spend time with a lonely kid, couldn’t be all bad.
Maybe he just had a problem with her.
Chapter Seven
She didn’t want to talk about China. So she did have something resembling a conscience after all. Not much of one, though; she’d seemed more annoyed than appalled at the news of the factory fire. Presumably the kids were expendable and the factory could be rebuilt with little loss of end product.
No biggie.
Fuckit. He’d run out of excuses.
Cruz couldn’t kill her now, with people wandering about the property and going in and out of the house. Latour had brought his wife with him. A rail-thin woman with downcast eyes and nails bitten to the quick, whom he recognized as the waitress from the diner the other day.
Mia hid her surprise at the gardener bringing his family and cheerfully put her to work cleaning upstairs. Latour’s son—six? eight years old?—was a little shadow clinging to his mother’s side.
Cruz actually liked small humans. More than he liked most adults, anyway. Charlie called him “sir” and Mia “ma’am,” when he spoke, which was seldom, and so softly, one had to strain to hear him a
t all.
Cruz had watched the kid shuffling around near the water unsupervised, and had climbed down the ladder where he’d been about to start repairing the roof. The kid looked unhappy. Unfortunately he’d be a lot more unhappy if that gator slid up on the bank to grab some rays and found himself a small, slow kid to dine on.
He’d had as little to do with his own father as possible. In fact, when Cruz approached the kid, he flinched. A familiar and infuriating knee-jerk reaction to someone large and menacing looming over him.
Cruz had immediately crouched low, picked up a stone, and skimmed it over the scummy water, and kept it up as he made idle convo with the kid. Where’d he go to school? What grade? Did he know how to make a stone hop across the water?
He learned a lot in that half hour before Latour came around the house and demanded the kid come and help him.
Charlie’s father got angry a lot. His mom cried. He hated when she cried; it made his insides hurt. When he was big he’d get a job to help Daddy with all the bills, then everything would be okay, and Mom wouldn’t cry so much. And maybe his daddy would like him more, and not be mad at him all the time.
A familiar and painful mirror to Cruz’s own childhood.
He knew how fruitless it was for a child to try to fix the problems of his parents. Latour drank, couldn’t hold a job, and took it out on his wife and kid.
Cruz’s father had been a functioning alcoholic. Violent, mean, and vindictive. He’d killed Cruz’s mother, and Cruz was damned if he’d watch the same thing happen to this kid.
Unlike his own childhood, when his father’s powerful and influential friends had turned their collective blind eyes to the cycle of abuse until it was too late, he’d keep an eye on the Latour family, and if he felt the situation warranted action, he’d step in.
Cruz went back up the ladder to his roof patching as Charlie worked alongside his father, picking up bundles of weeds in his skinny arms while Latour took a Weedwacker to the thick undergrowth on the bayou side of the house.
Cruz looked down on father and son for a few minutes. He added Charlie and his mother to the things he’d have to tie up before he left Bayou Cheniere, Louisiana. I have your back, kid. Count on it.
Mia, he knew, didn’t give a tinker’s damn about kids and their shit-awful plights in the U.S. or in China. She’d lied straight-faced. She was good at it. If he didn’t have proof otherwise, he would’ve believed her.
The news reports he’d found had her in China, at the very plant where the children had died. But she claimed she’d never been there.
Son of a bitch. Cruz took out his frustration by pounding nails into slate shingles, skipping lunch, and feeling highly pissed off, without any mood improvement all day. He usually didn’t think this much about killing people. Once he decided they were worthy of killing, the act of killing didn’t fucking bother him. That he was bothered about killing Mia bothered the living shit out of him. The sun beat down. He scooped his hair back with a scrap of string, then tied his T-shirt around his head to catch the sweat. He enjoyed the sting of sun on his bare shoulders.
“You should at least drink something. It’s hot.”
Startled, Cruz whipped his head around to see Mia, eyes narrowed against the sun, only her head and shoulders visible above the eave.
He snatched the nails out of his mouth. “What the fuck are you doing up here? You’ll break your goddamn neck, woman.”
“Now see? I knew you’d be charming and happy to see me.” Her voice was filled with amusement. “I’ve never climbed such a high ladder before. It’s thrilling, in a terrifying way. Sort of like having sex with you when your hands are on my neck. Although now that I’m way up here, I’m not sure I can get down. I have cold lemonade in the kitchen—not fresh-squeezed; from concentrate—and a sandwich Daisy made, so it’s really good. Are you going to stay up here and pout, or come down and take a break and rehydrate?”
“I’m a man. I don’t pout. I have things on my mind.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“I don’t need therapy. Get down before you fall.”
“Will you come down and eat?”
“When I’m done with this section.”
“Okay. . . .” She let out a little shriek as the ladder slid sideways a few inches. Cruz’s heart slammed up into his throat, and he slid down the slope of the roof—to do God only knew what. She teetered almost forty feet above the ground, and he wasn’t close enough to catch her before she dropped like a stone.
Grabbing the gutter with one white-knuckled hand, she bit her lip, squeezing her eyes shut as she and the ladder wobbled precariously, the metal rungs clattering against the gutter as she struggled to remain upright.
Cruz got close enough to clamp punishingly tight fingers around her wrist and could see the muscles in her arm flexing as she grappled to maintain purchase, feel the torque of the delicate tendons as she fought for balance.
Cold sweat bathed his overheated skin. “God damn it, why would you risk your life coming up here?”
“Hey, don’t yell at me, I’m already having heart palpitations, buddy!”
Who the fuck isn’t? “Can you get down by yourself?”
Sweat gleamed on her pale skin and, wide-eyed, she gave her head a small shake. “Can you magically put me on the ground? I just discovered I’m afraid of heights.”
“Are you serious?”
“I really can’t move.” Her entire body visibly trembled, and she whispered, “Help.”
He glanced over the yard. No one was in sight, for now. He could just push her. She wouldn’t survive the fall, and no one would doubt that this was an accident. If she did survive, he could strangle her, quickly.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Damn it to hell. He just wasn’t ready to kill her. Not yet.
“Stay where you are. Do not move.”
“No problem,” she mumbled, not moving even her lips.
Cruz slid down the shingles until his legs dangled on either side of her, his dick practically in her face.
Although she remained frozen in place, she gave a small smile as she stared at the bulge in his jeans. “Fascinating, but hardly the place, do you think?”
“Not the time to be a smart-ass. I’m going to climb over you. Hold on to the gutter and fucking stay still.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Suddenly you’re good at taking orders.”
“I’m better at giving them.”
Yeah. He knew. “Hold tight and close your eyes.” Without further warning, Cruz swung his body over the edge of the roof. The enormous irony of the situation was not lost on him. He might very well fall to his death saving her sorry ass.
His body slammed into her back as his feet found purchase on a rung several steps below hers. He closed his hands on the rung above her fingers, and got a mouthful of silky shampoo-flavored hair as he pressed her between his chest and the ladder. “Okay?”
“Couldn’t be better.” She rested her sweaty forehead on his forearm and took a shuddering breath. She wasn’t faking it. She was terrified. “Can I open my eyes now?”
“I don’t give a shit. Start moving down. One rung at a time, slow and steady. I won’t let you fall.”
“Wow. Good to know.” She moved one foot down to the next rung in slo-mo as a full-body shudder ran through her. Which ran through Cruz.
She was terrified, so why the hell was his heart beating so hard and fast? “Clearly you didn’t think this through,” he said, giving her time to calm her erratic breathing.
“Clearly not.”
When there was absolutely no sign of another move, he snarled directly in her ear, “Move your goddamn feet. Now!”
“You can huff and puff until the cows come home, Barcelona. But it’s not helping when you sound as though you’d rather toss me down on my head and get this over with.”
No shit. “I have no patience for stupid people who make bad fucking choices. Move this hand down.” He nudged her fist with
his elbow until she released her death grip.
It was a painstakingly slow process moving her down the ladder. “Lean against me and wipe your hand on my pants,” he instructed when her sweaty fingers slipped for the second time.
Death by sweat. He should add it to his repertoire.
She stopped. “Sorry.” Dropping her head back to rest in the curve of his shoulder, she breathed a shuddering sigh. Her hair smelled of tuberose, lemon, and sexy, sweaty woman.
Get the fuck over it. Her. Jesus.
Her white knuckles maintained a shaky death grip on the rungs. “Can’t open my fingers.” Her lips barely moved.
Cruz sighed as he pried one hand off the rung beside her head. She sucked in a breath. “I’ve got you.” Taking her wrist, he swiped her palm down the side of his jeans. Her bones were fragile, slender under his hand. It wasn’t too late. . . .
“Great. Who’s got you?”
“Same person who always does. Me.” Replacing her hand on the rung, he waited until her hold was secure, then switched hands himself and repeated the wipe-off with her other hand. “Halfway there. Move it.”
They were still more than twenty feet from the ground, and the pained squeaks of the wobbling ladder confirmed what he already knew. Their combined weight exceeded the ladder’s capabilities. If he didn’t get her down quickly, they could both topple to the ground.
“I’d just like to stay here another minute or five.”
“Didn’t ask what you wanted. I’ve got things to do. I’m not going to hang from a goddamned ladder sweating for the rest of the day.”
Mia rested her head on the rung near his hand. “I don’t like being scared. I’m usually a very brave, daring kind of woman.”
He waited.
She didn’t move.
“Mia?”
