Eric didn’t appear to have the same enthusiasm for a trip down memory lane as his wife, and grunted as he took a sip of his beer.
Isaac’s gaze locked on Sam’s. They were losing him.
“How about a compromise?” Sam said. “There’s a double bed in the spare room under all the junk. It won’t take Isaac and me long to shift that stuff out of my spare room into the garage and my garden shed. You’ll get the true Kiwi hospitality benefits in spades here with us, right, Vee?”
“Absolutely. We insist. You’ll be so much more comfortable in our spare room.” If Sam didn’t know better he’d have sworn the idea of the Wrights staying with them—at least for tonight—didn’t bother her at all.
“We’ll get stuck in.” Sam rose with a pointed look at his brother, who had a buttload of explaining to do.
“Why don’t you go and help?” Julia squeezed Eric’s leg. “Then Vee and I can discuss forty-eight-hour labors and perineum tears without you rolling your eyes.”
“Perineum tears are the worst,” Vee said.
Eric chuckled, laying his hand over his wife’s. A silent moment of communication passed between them, and Sam watched with almost a scientific interest at how the man’s attitude seemed to mellow in an instant.
Eric set down his beer and stood at the same time as Isaac. “Trust me, male ears are much too sensitive for that kind of information. You’d be doing me a favor letting me help out.”
“No complaints here,” said Sam. “I don’t even know what a perineum is, let alone what happens to it when it tears. Sounds nasty.”
Vee shot him a sharp grin. “Now that’s a female anatomy instant fail.”
Julia giggled and shooed Eric away from the couch toward him and Isaac. “You can give him a 101 course later.”
Vee’s smile slipped and her eyes comically widened. Heat punched into his gut at the thought of mapping out every square inch of her anatomy. Something of his thoughts must’ve been silently communicated to her as a pale rose flush appeared on her cheeks.
Isaac elbowed him in the back as he circled past his chair on the way inside. Taking the hint, Sam sauntered to the open French doors.
“I am a quick study,” he said, ducking inside before Vee thought to toss the contents of her wineglass over him.
With Ruby asleep in her room and the Wrights retired to his now-cleared spare room, Sam had run out of rooms in which to avoid Vee. Unless you counted the guest bathroom. But that was currently occupied by Julia who’d cheerfully apologized and warned them in advance that she hoped not to wake them during the night with her many trips to the ‘restroom,’ as she called it.
Right now he was keeping his mind—and hands—off Vee while he methodically stacked the dishwasher, sorted bottle recycling, and wiped kitchen and dining surfaces until they shone. He hadn’t done so much domestic maintenance since, well, the last time he’d tried to impress a woman. Nothing killed the mood faster than week-old dishes piled in the sink and dried tomato sauce on the counters when you were about to get some hot kitchen sex.
Not that sex was on his mind. Nope.
He slid a sideways glance toward Vee. She was also cleaning her ass off in the living room, picking up Ruby’s toys and straightening already straight couch cushions. A couch that was out of the question for sleeping on tonight thanks to the risk of being caught by one of the Wrights. And with the emergency patch-up job he and Isaac had done with Eric—aiming both barrels of Ngata charm at the man—he wasn’t going to screw it up now.
After the first load of crap to Sam’s garage, Eric had discovered Sam’s surfboard hobby and gone into raptures over his current project, a longboard. Out came the stories of surfing at South Padre Island during spring break, and apparently all was forgiven as the man ran his hands lovingly over the balsa wood. With promises of doing mates’ rates on a board which he’d ship back to the Wrights’ home in LA, Eric had gone to bed with his wife a happy man.
Sam, who didn’t have a wife but a pretend girlfriend that seemed intent on cleaning the house from top to bottom, wasn’t quite so happy.
The toilet flushed and a minute later the spare room door clicked shut in the deathly quiet house. A few cicadas chirruped outside, overpowering the constant white noise of the ocean’s waves. He gave the counter one more token swipe and set the cleaning cloth aside.
“Guess we should call it a night.” He leaned a hip casually against the counter. “My toothbrush is still in the guest bathroom, so the en suite’s all yours.”
Vee sidled out of the living room, keeping her gaze locked on a spot just to the right of his shoulder. “Thanks. I’ll have a shower now and miss the morning rush.”
Listen to them, so accommodating.
She scurried past him and he audibly tracked her movements through the master bedroom and into his en suite bathroom. The click of the lock engaging was loud in the silence. Message received and understood.
He brushed his teeth and wandered into the bedroom. Sounds of spray hitting tiles from the en suite in his ears, Sam stripped off his T-shirt, remembered to dump it in the laundry hamper rather than on the floor, and eyeballed his bed. His painstakingly hotel-neat made bed.
Another reminder that Vee was just a guest in his house.
After an uncomfortable night tossing and turning on the fold-out couch, stretching out in his own bed seemed like the most tempting idea in the world. He shot a considering stare at the en suite door and sighed, turning around to his closet and the pile of clean linen and extra blankets. He made a functional resting place for himself on the floor beside the bed with his winter duvet inner as a mattress and a spare pillow. Like yesterday, it was too damn hot for anything covering him.
Figuring Vee would be more comfortable if she didn’t see him sprawled on the floor in nothing but his boxer briefs, Sam switched off the bedroom lights and lay down. And felt every one of his thirty-three years as the down-filled duvet did little to disguise the hardwood floor beneath. Ah, well. It wasn’t like he’d have gotten any more sleep if he’d been sharing bed space with Vee.
Speak of the devil…the en suite door cracked open and the light extinguished, leaving both rooms in perfect blackness. He thought he heard a soft sigh as she entered the bedroom but he didn’t have time to analyse the tone of it because—shit—something smacked into his foot and then a flailing mass of soap-and-shampoo-scented woman fell on him. Her knee narrowly missed his nuts by inches. Something hard connected with his thigh, another something nearly dislodged his Adam’s apple, and another squishier, weightier female body part landed on his stomach and knocked the wind out of him.
In one of the chick flicks an ex-girlfriend had made him sit through, Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock collide after a shower and fall naked together on the floor. At the time he’d thought Ryan Reynolds was a lucky son of a bitch. Now, not so much.
Sam wheezed out a groan as Vee swore and apologized in the same breath. She practically burned rubber as she scrambled off him and onto the bed. To add insult to injury, she flicked on the nightstand lamp. He clapped a hand over his eyes and rolled upright, his thigh aching from what he suspected was her kneecap and his chest feeling as if he’d bench pressed above his weight limit.
“What the hell are you doing there?” she whisper-growled.
“Being a bloody gentleman and letting you have the bed.” He split his fingers open to glare at her.
Rookie move.
Vee was crouched on hands and knees peering over at him, her breasts swinging unfettered inside last night’s sleep tank, the amount of cleavage shown blinding his retinas more than the lamplight.
He twisted around and smacked the lamp’s off switch before Vee noticed there were more than bruises rising below his waistband. He slid back to a prone position and laced his hands behind his head. Above him came a huffy response that was pure feminine indignation.
“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” she said, “but you’re on the wrong side. I always sleep farthest fr
om the door.”
He heard her peeling back the covers and the rustle of her bare legs against the sheets. She wore a different pair of sleep pants tonight. In the few seconds before her breasts commanded his full attention, he’d spotted smooth tanned thighs and cute shorts with the Wonder Woman logo on them. He grimaced, staring at the ceiling in the dark. It was a wonder the woman hadn’t killed him yet because he was starting to think death by erection was a distinct possibility.
“My mind-reading ability must be on the fritz,” he said. “And why do you have to sleep on that side?”
“That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? If a knife-wielding madman sneaks in he’ll stab the other side of the bed first.”
“Into the poor unfortunate bastard sleeping next to you.” Yeah, there was an ulterior motive slipped into that flippant statement. Had she been sharing her bed with anyone recently?
“If a guy isn’t willing to take a knife from a psychopath for the privilege of sleeping in my bed, then he doesn’t deserve to be there in the first place.”
“You’re that good in the sack, eh?”
She made a soft hum of amusement. “You have no idea.”
He couldn’t dredge up a PG-rated response, and since his dick was still hard enough to support a circus big top, any more verbal foreplay probably wasn’t a great idea. Not if he wanted any sleep tonight. He slanted a glance toward the bed above him, but it was too dark to glimpse anything but a darker shaped shadow on the white pillowcase.
“Bit of a screwup my Auntie Rae made. I thought the shit would really hit the fan for a moment there.”
“Oh, I know,” Vee said quickly, as if leaping at the chance of a neutral topic. “And with Julia being pregnant, she really did need a proper bed to sleep in.” She clicked her tongue softly. “Being thirty-two weeks’ pregnant in the heat of summer is not fun.”
“I can imagine.”
She snorted and rolled over, the darker shaped silhouette moving closer to the bed edge above him. “You and every other male who has no idea what it feels like having a five-pound alien minus the tentacles bouncing on your bladder all day.”
He chuckled. “You should put that slogan on one of your T-shirts.”
She huffed out a laugh, and damned if his nose—and dick—started twitching with the sweet, soapy scent of her.
“Julia’s pretty keen travelling with her husband so late in the pregnancy, even though her obstetrician gave her clearance,” she said. “She insisted on coming, she told me. Apart from Australia and New Zealand being on her bucket list, she said she couldn’t bear to stay in LA without Eric for almost a month.”
“It’s a long way to fly, but I’m glad she’s here. She saved our collective asses with him before.”
“They’re a cute couple. She grounds him somehow, provides a safe harbor for him when he starts to get stressed,” she said softly. “It’s clear he adores her in return.”
The pull of her tugged him over to his side to face her. This close he could hear the whisper of her slightly uneven exhales. A safe harbor sounded nice. The only sanctuary he knew was with tools, and wood, and his own sweat. He didn’t know if a woman could ground him, only how he could ground himself into a woman. He pulled a face in the darkness. Yeah, back to sex again.
“Wait ’til they’ve spent nineteen days trapped together on their ocean liner cruise back to LA next week. See how loved up they are by the time they hit Honolulu. Eric’ll end up as a luau. Spit-roasted sucker.”
She flipped onto her back with a low, husky laugh. “Careful, Sam, your starry-eyed romanticism is showing.”
“My bad.” He blew out a sigh and rolled over to face the wall. Vee wasn’t the only one to use humor as a tool to deflect self-scrutiny from time to time. Seconds ticked by and he wondered if she’d started to drift off, even though the room felt as hot as Hades.
“My parents are still happily in love after forty years together, and yours have been married how long?”
“Thirty-six.”
He could imagine her nodding in companionable agreement.
“And with you three siblings, that’s quite a feat,” she said. “As it was for my parents putting up with five squabbling daughters and only one son.”
“Relationships lasted longer back in our parents’ and grandparents’ day. If it broke, you figured out a way to fix it. You didn’t throw something away; you tinkered with it until you got it going again. Leftover attitude from the war days.”
“Now, not so much. It’s easy come, easy go. It’s complicated or too freaking hard, so trade in the old for a new model.”
The way Vee’s dumb as a sackful of rocks ex-fiancé had traded her in, right when she’d needed him most. His gut clenched at the hurt buried just under the surface of her words.
“Anyway”—she yawned loudly and the sheets rustled again—“let’s call this slumber party quits. I’m off to dream about a Hawaiian cruise. ’Night.”
“Good night.”
Sam continued to stare at his bedroom wall. His heartbeat thudded in his ears, drowning out her soft breaths which grew slower and slower. He wasn’t a poster boy for the domesticated male like his father and older brother, but he wouldn’t walk out on his baby mama with barely a backward glance either.
He wanted to tell her that not all men were assholes like Patrick, but it wasn’t his place to dredge up that kind of shit. He squeezed his eyes shut. Telling her she deserved better because she was a warm, strong, intelligent, and wickedly sexy woman that any man should be thankful to have in his life—and in his bed, knife-wielding maniac included—was the job for a real boyfriend.
Not a fake one.
Chapter 8
Vee’s internal alarm didn’t need to go off that morning, because she’d barely got a wink of sleep all night. Likely because her subconscious was still awake wearing night vision goggles, ogling the naked-apart-from-boxer-briefs male stretched out beside the bed. The brief lit-up glance of pecs, abs, and a cotton-knit-fabric bulge that redefined the term packing heat, was enough to etch the picture of male perfection on the back of her eyelids. Made keeping them open a preferable option.
Brownie points to her for rolling out of Sam’s bed on the opposite side without checking him out again in the faint stripe of sunlight appearing under the drapes. She shrugged on her bathrobe in double time and slipped out of the room, heading for the kitchen. Coffee was the first order of business and then she’d get Ruby’s breakfast ready before figuring out what to do for the adults.
She went to the effort of making a real brew with Sam’s French press and a packet of ground coffee beans, the methodical motions of measuring, pouring, stirring, waiting, and finally pressing the floating coffee grounds down in the glass carafe strangely soothing. At home she drank instant. One cup only, and more often than not gulped down when it was half cold since a morning routine with Ruby could quickly become chaotic. Now she took her time pouring the dark, divine-smelling liquid into a cup, then sniffing to her heart’s content. She carried it outside to the deck to watch the dawn’s peachy glow rise above the ocean.
Peace lasted until her fifth sip.
“Mummy! Muuuumy?”
She turned in her seat just as Sam stepped outside with Ruby seated on his hip. He was bare-chested and wearing zipped but unbuttoned jeans, looking as if he were a hotter-than-hell dad who’d just woken up to bring their little girl out for breakfast. A mixed bag of lust, tenderness, and wistful longing slammed into her. Her hand shook, hot coffee splashing over the cup rim and onto her leg. With a muffled “eeep,” she jumped to her feet and plucked the soaked robe away from her thigh.
“Did you burn yourself?” Sam swung Ruby off his hip and onto the outdoor sofa.
The coffee wasn’t hot enough to burn, but it was still hot and wet. She pulled a face and jerked her gaze away from the acreage of bronzed muscles suddenly blocking her view of the horizon. She sat down abruptly. “No, I’m—”
“Let me look.” Sam crouche
d in front of her armchair and brushed her hands and the thin cotton robe aside. “I don’t trust you not to play third-degree burns down,” he added gruffly.
Pink splotches were already blossoming on the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, and oh God, as he ran a finger over one, it didn’t feel like a first aid check to her.
It felt good. Much too good.
She shivered, pressing her lips together to prevent a breathy sound from escaping. Combine the touch of his hands with the broad expanse of his shoulders, right there within touching distance, and her sky-rocketing pulse would require some real medical intervention very soon.
“It’s just a little spilled coffee. I’m fine. Just an oopsie.” She shot a reassuring smile at Ruby.
Sam rocked back on his heels, dark eyes skimming over her legs one last time before their gazes intersected with a clash that reverberated through her, shaking her to the core. Whatever this was, this sizzling energy growing between them, it was the very definition of an oopsie. A big-ass, train wreck of an oopsie just waiting to happen.
Ruby slid off the couch and stood beside Sam. She smacked a little palm on his shoulder blade when he didn’t give her his full attention fast enough. “Beck-fast, Sam?”
“Are you hungry, baby?” Grateful for the distraction, Vee sat and, reaching past Sam, hauled Ruby onto her lap. “Let’s make you something yummy.”
“Eww. Mummy wet.” Ruby screwed up her face and became a wriggling octopus until Vee set her down.
“Why don’t you go and get changed while I make her breakfast?” Sam rose and took her daughter’s hand. “How does a kiwi fry-up of bacon and eggs sound?”
“Bacon!” Ruby tugged on Sam’s hand. “I wuv bacon.”
“Me, too, heihei. Extra for us, eh?” Laughter lines creased his face as he looked down at her daughter.
Vee’s breath locked in her throat. Train wreck ahead, she told herself as she hurried back to the bedroom.
Break Your Heart_A Small Town Romance Page 10
