by Joss Wood
She might have her fair share of problems but Mac had his too.
He wasn’t always who she expected him to be, Rory admitted. Sure, he could be overconfident about his abilities and about the effect he had on her, but he was also honest enough to admit that their attraction was a two-way street. She affected him just as badly. She didn’t know Mac well, not yet, and because he was so damn reticent, she probably never would. But she did know he wasn’t the arrogant jerk he’d been ten years ago. He was ambitious and determined, but he wasn’t selfish. He was smart and loyal and, yes, infuriating.
It was a surprise to realize that she liked him. A lot. And that liking had nothing to do with his masculine face and sculpted muscles.
There was a great deal more to Mac McCaskill than his pretty packaging. Dammit.
With every conversation they shared he shattered another of her preconceptions. If they continued these conversations, she’d start to like him a little more than she should, and there was a possibility she would feel more for him than lust and attraction.
She couldn’t let that happen. She would have to try to ignore him, try to avoid him. Because falling in lust with him was one thing, falling in like with him was another.
Falling in love with him would be intolerable.
So she simply wouldn’t.
* * *
A week after landing in San Juan, Rory and Mac watched the sun go down in the small fishing village of Las Croabas. She was full to bursting from demolishing a massive bowl of crab seviche. She was relaxed and a little buzzy. The single glass of wine couldn’t be blamed for that, she thought. No, it was a combination of the spectacular sunset—God was painting the sky with vivid purples and iridescent oranges—and the equally magnificent man who sat opposite her, hair ruffled by the balmy evening breeze.
A lovely sunset, a rustic restaurant, a really hot guy with a girl eating dinner...they could be an advertisement for romance, Rory thought. There would be no truth in that advertisement. Mac hadn’t laid a finger on her since they’d arrived in Puerto Rico and he hadn’t kissed her again. Truthfully, she hadn’t given him any opportunity to do either as she’d made a point of spending as little time with him as she possibly could without shirking her duties.
But a girl had to eat, and over dinner she’d intercepted a couple of intense looks from him, which made her think he’d catch her if she decided to jump him.
Which she wouldn’t. But the will-he-won’t-he anticipation was, admittedly, very hot and incredibly sexy.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Mac said.
That sounded ominous, Rory thought. “What is it?”
“There’s a hurricane on the way.” He lifted his seviche-filled fork to his mouth.
“A big one?” she squawked, half lifting her butt off her seat and whipping around to inspect the horizon. It was still cloud-free. Shouldn’t there be clouds?
Mac shrugged. “Big enough.”
“How big is big enough?” Rory demanded. How could he eat? A natural phenomena was about to smack them in the face. “When will it arrive? Should we evacuate? Are there bunkers?”
Mac sent her a puzzled glance. “It’s a hurricane, not a nuclear bomb, Rorks.”
“You’re not giving me any information!” Rory wailed. She tried to recall what she’d read about preparing for a hurricane and, unfortunately, it wasn’t a lot. Or anything at all. “Don’t we need to put boards up or something?”
“I’ve arranged to have some guys come over tomorrow to put the boards up. Stupid, because I could do them if it wasn’t for this arm!”
“I’m sure I can do it,” Rory bravely suggested. She didn’t know if she could but she thought she should offer.
Mac smiled at her. “No offense, Rorks, but it’ll take them a couple of hours and it would take you two weeks.”
“Why do people always say ‘no offense’ and then go on to offend you?” Rory grumbled.
“How often have you wielded a hammer?”
Rory lifted her nose at his smirk. “I pound in my own hooks to hang pictures.” Well, she had once and had lost a fingernail in the process. Troy then banned her from using tools. He’d fixed her cupboard door, replaced the broken tile in her shower, fixed the leaky pipe under her sink. Troy also changed the tires on her car, made a mean chicken parmesan and removed spiders. He’d be her perfect husband if he only liked girls. And if she was even marginally attracted to him.
“Liar,” Mac said cheerfully.
His ability to see through her annoyed the pants off her. Actually, the way he looked, his deep voice, his laugh—all of it made her want to drop her pants, but that was another story entirely. “Tell me about the hurricane!”
Mac dug his fork into his salad. “I’m not sure what you want to know. There’s a hurricane approaching. It’ll probably hit land around midnight tomorrow night. There will be wind, rain. We’ll be fine.”
Rory scowled at him. “You are so annoying.”
Mac’s lips twitched. “I try.” He dumped some wine into their glasses, picked hers up and handed it to her. “Drink. We might as well enjoy the gorgeous night before we die.”
Rory rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to be a smart-ass, there has to be some smart involved. Otherwise you just sound like an ass.” She took the glass from his hand, looked into his amused eyes and sighed. “I’m overreacting, aren’t I?”
Mac lifted his glass to his lips, sipped and swallowed. “Just a little.” He sent her another quick, quirky smile. “We’ll be fine. If I thought we were in danger, I’d be making arrangements to get you out of here.”
Rory nodded and took a large sip of her wine. Okay, then. Maybe she could cope with the hurricane. She glanced at the sky. “Tomorrow night, huh?”
Mac lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb across her bottom lip. He lingered there, pressing the fullness before moving from her lip and drifting up and over her cheekbone. She watched as his eyes deepened, turned a blue-black in the early evening light. Rory tossed a look at the beach and wished she could jump up from the table and walk—run—away.
She’d been doing that for the last week, finding any excuse to avoid him. She left his presence when she felt the spit drying up in her mouth, when she felt the first throb between her legs. Because Mac spent most of his time shirtless, she’d spent a lot of time walking away from him. She’d run to the beach, run on the beach, had started canoeing and snorkeling again. She’d also taken a lot of cold showers.
She was so pathetic.
“You can’t run off in the middle of a meal,” Mac told her, his eyes dancing.
Rory lifted her nose and tried to look puzzled. “Sorry?”
“You’ve been avoiding me, running away every time something sparks between us,” Mac said conversationally, dropping his hand from her face and popping an olive from his salad into his mouth.
“Uh—”
“You’re not alone. Every time you do therapy on me, I have to stop myself from grabbing you and kissing you senseless.”
Rory groaned and dropped her chin to her chest.
Mac twisted his fingers in hers. “Your hands touch me and I inhale your scent—you smell so damn good—and my brain starts to shut down. It’s not just you, Rory.”
Rory picked up her glass and sipped, trying to get some moisture back into her mouth. “Ah... I’m not sure what to say.”
“Avoiding each other makes it worse. It’s driving me crazy. I barely sleep at night because I want you in my bed.” Mac’s voice raised goose bumps all over her skin. “What are we going to do about this...situation, Rory?”
Rory touched the top of her lip with the tip of her tongue and her eyelids dropped to half-mast. Couldn’t he see the big fat take-me-now sign blazing from her forehead in flashing neon?
She blew out
a breath and sent him a rueful shrug. Mac seemed to have a hard time taking his eyes off her mouth. He was enjoying the anticipation, too, she realized when his gaze slammed into hers, his eyes hot and filled with passion.
“How the hell am I supposed to resist you?” he demanded.
Rory rolled her shoulders and gripped his wrist.
“I don’t do relationships,” Mac growled.
“I don’t either,” Rory softly replied. “But I can’t stop wondering whether we’ll be as good together as all the kisses we’ve shared suggest.”
Mac shot up and with one step he was standing in front of her and pulling her to her feet. Keeping his injured arm hanging at his side, he used his other arm to yank her into his hard chest. His mouth slammed against hers. His tongue slid once, then twice over her lips, and she immediately opened her mouth and allowed him inside. He tasted of wine and sex and heat, and Rory pushed into him so she could feel her nipples touch his chest through the thin fabric of their cotton shirts. She sighed when his erection nudged her stomach, and she linked her hands at the back of his neck to stop herself from reaching down and encircling him. Kissing in a public place was one thing, but heavy petting was better done in a more private setting.
“You taste so damn good,” Mac muttered against her lips, his hand sliding over her butt. “And you feel even better.”
“Kiss me again,” Rory demanded, tipping her head to the side so he could change the angle of the kiss, go deeper and wetter.
“If I kiss you again I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to stop,” Mac replied, resting his forehead on hers.
“Who asked you to?”
Mac half laughed and half groaned. “You’re not helping, Rorks.” He stepped back and pushed her hair, curly from the humidity, from her eyes. “Let’s take a step back here, think about this a little more. Make damn sure it’s what we want.”
Rory glanced down, saw the evidence of his want and lifted an eyebrow. “We both want it, McCaskill.”
“Yeah, but what we want is not always good for us,” Mac said, suddenly somber. He picked up her hand and rubbed the ball of his thumb across her knuckles. “We’re here for a little while longer, Rory. I don’t want to muck this up. There are consequences.”
“I’m on the pill and I expect you to use a condom.”
“Noted. But those aren’t the consequences I’m worrying about.”
Rory cocked her head. “Okay, what are you talking about?”
“I don’t want either of us to regret this in the morning, to feel awkward, to feel we’ve made a colossal mistake.” Mac looked uncharacteristically unsure of himself as he tugged at the collar of his white linen button-down shirt. “Taking you to bed would be easy, Rory. Making love to you would be a pleasure. In the morning we’re both still going to be here. You still need to treat me and we have to live together. I don’t want it to get weird between us.”
Those were all fair points. “Anything else?”
Mac looked around them, frowned and rocked on his heels. “We’re flying under the radar here but if just one person sees us, snaps a photo—we’re toast. If it gets out that you’re my physio, or that we’re sleeping together and you are my ex’s sister, it’ll be news.”
She hauled in a sharp breath. Wow, she hadn’t even considered that.
“The media will go nuts and you’ll be at the center of it, like Shay was,” Mac added.
The thought made her want to heave. She’d never felt comfortable in the limelight and couldn’t think of anything worse than being meat for the media’s grinder.
“They will wonder why you—the best physiotherapist around—are treating me and why are you doing it in secret. They’ll dig until they find out the truth,” Mac said.
Rory dropped her head to look at the floor.
“Are you prepared to risk all that, Rory? Can you deal with the consequences of the worst-case scenario?”
“It won’t happen.” Rory bit her bottom lip.
“Probably not, but what if it does? Can you deal?”
“Can you?” Rory demanded. “You have more to lose than I do.”
“Yeah, don’t think that I haven’t realized that,” Mac muttered, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb. When he opened his eyes, she saw the ruefulness, the touch of amusement, in his gaze.
“Yet I still want you. I’m really hoping to get over it,” he added. His tone invited her to help him break the tension, to get over this awkward, emotion-tinged moment. He picked up his wineglass, drained the contents and looked at his empty glass. “See, you’re driving me to drink.”
Rory bumped her wineglass against his. “I feel your pain. You should try living inside my head.”
Mac dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. “Help me out and be sensible about this, Rorks. I’m relying on you to be the adult here because I have little or no sense when it comes to wanting you.”
Well, that comment didn’t help!
Seven
The next day Rory stood on the beach in front of the house and knew Mac was watching her from the balcony, his good hand gripping the railing, his expression brooding. She tilted her face up and looked for the sun, now hidden behind gloomy, dark clouds. She’d been, maybe obsessively, glued to the Weather Channel, and she knew the hurricane was about twelve hours away. It would slam into them later tonight.
The wind had already picked up and was whipping her hair around her head and pushing her sarong against her thighs. The sea, normally gentle, was choppy and rough, and foam whipped across the surface of the ocean. It looked nothing like the warm friend who had been sharing his delights and treasures with her on a daily basis.
Everything was changing, Rory thought. She picked a piece of seaweed off her ankle, tossed it and watched the wind whisk it away. Like she’d have to face the hurricane, she couldn’t run away from Mac anymore. She couldn’t hide. She couldn’t avoid him or the passion he whipped up in her.
He was right, she had a choice to make...hell, she’d already made the choice. She knew it. He knew it... If she gave him the slightest hint, like breathing, he’d do her in a New York minute.
What she had to do now was stand strong and ride the winds, hoping she’d come out with as little damage as possible when it all ended. Her desire—no, her need—for him was too strong, too compelling. She just had to ride the crazy as best she could and hope she could stop the lines between lust and like—she absolutely refused to use any other L word—from smudging together.
She turned and looked back at the house and across the sand, across the shrubs that separated the beach from his house, their eyes met. Even at a distance she could see and feel his desire for her, knew that hers was in her heated eyes, on her face, in every gesture she made.
She couldn’t run away anymore so she ran to him, into that other hurricane rapidly bearing down on her, one that was even scarier than the one approaching from the sea.
She couldn’t wait another second, another minute. Her resistance had petered out. Her need for him was greater than her desire to protect herself. This was it, this was now...
Rory picked up the trailing ends of her sarong and pulled the fabric up above her knees and belted across the sand. The wind tossed her hair into her eyes and she grabbed the strands blowing in her face, holding them out of her eyes so she could watch Mac, watch for that moment when he realized she wasn’t running away from the storm but running to him, running into the tempest she knew she’d find in his touch.
He wasn’t an idiot so he caught on pretty quickly. She knew it by the way he straightened, the way his appreciative glance became predatory, anticipatory. But he just stood on the balcony, waiting for her to fly to him. She knew he was waiting for her to change her mind, like she’d been doing, to avoid the steps that led from the path directly to whe
re he was standing. He was expecting her to veer off and enter the house, access her room via the second set of stairs farther along.
She wanted to yell at him that she wouldn’t change her mind, that she wanted him intensely, crazily, without thought. She hurtled up the steps and bolted onto the balcony, skidding to a stop when he leaned his hip against the railing and jammed his hand into the pocket of his expensive khaki shorts.
What if she’d read the situation wrong? What if he’d changed his mind? Rory flushed with embarrassment and dropped her gaze, looking at her cherry-red toes. She’d picked the color because she thought it was vibrant, sexy, because she could imagine him taking her baby toe, exquisitely sensitive and tipped with red, into his hot mouth...
Rory let out a small moan and closed her eyes.
“You okay?” Mac asked, and when she heard the amusement in his voice she flushed again. God, she must look like an idiot. She was an idiot.
“Fine.”
Mac’s penetrating gaze met hers. “On the beach, you made a decision.”
She rocked on her heels. “Yep.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep.”
He didn’t move toward her. Was he waiting for her to make the first move? Unsure, it had been so damn long since she’d danced this dance, she looked around for a temporary distraction because she had no idea what to do, to say. “Storm is on its way.”
Mac’s eyes didn’t leave her face. “I know. Are you scared?”
Of this? Of liking you too much? Of making a mistake? Absolutely terrified.
“I’m a hurricane virgin,” she admitted, trying for a light tone but hearing only her croaky voice.
“I have a plan to distract you,” Mac softly stated, moving so he stood so close to her that his chest brushed her cotton shirt. He pushed his thigh between her legs as he placed his wineglass on the table next to him. “But in order for the distraction to work we have to practice, often.”
Rory closed her eyes in relief and smiled. “Really? It’ll have to be very good to distract me from the storm.”
