Blue Clouds

by Patricia Rice

  Lillian watched Pippa’s chin-length hair bounce as she stalked away. Redheads always had a temper, even if they were artificial redheads. Until today, Pippa had done an excellent job of hiding it. Lillian wondered how much to attribute to Natalie’s abrasive presence stripping Pippa’s polite veneer, and how much was fear of her own emotions. She figured it was a little bit of both.

  It probably wouldn’t help if Lillian told the poor confused child that she’d married Maxim Wyatt for love and it hadn’t made a whit of difference. In retrospect, buying a spouse seemed a much more logical and intelligent way of acquiring one. It hadn’t worked in Natalie’s case because Natalie already had money. But Pippa didn’t. And from what Lillian could tell, Pippa needed the security—financial, emotional, and physical—that Seth could offer her. She couldn’t see any reason why Seth couldn’t buy what he wanted, and if she knew her son, he wanted Pippa.

  Lillian believed in giving her son anything he wanted.

  ***

  Seth glared at his wine cabinet and wondered if indulging wouldn’t help. He took a gulp of his lukewarm coffee and grimaced.

  The architect who had designed the balcony overlooking the mountains and valley probably hadn’t intentionally designed the acoustic effect of the pool below. Seth doubted if anyone but him knew how well voices carried through his open balcony doors. As a kid, he’d amused himself by eavesdropping on adult conversations, until they’d become so unbearably hostile that he’d quit opening his doors at all. He shouldn’t have given in to the impulse to throw them open as Pippa was so fond of doing.

  At least his mother hadn’t succeeded in buying Pippa as she had bought Natalie. Pippa had acquitted herself quite nobly, if a trifle naively. His mother’s motives didn’t hold up half so well. She was still at it, building gilded cages for him to beat his wings against. She’d never understood how her suffocating confinement had warped him.

  Actually, Seth was rather surprised that his mother would stoop to enticing a glorified secretary into marrying him. Generally, she stuck to her version of wealth and sophistication. He didn’t want to analyze Pippa’s influence on his mother. He wasn’t given to marrying his secretaries.

  He wasn’t given to sleeping with them either, but he had with this one. And he’d do it again, if she’d give him the chance, even knowing it was a mistake. Pippa was the kind of woman who expected marriage as the next step in a relationship. He had enough women complicating his life without adding a wife.

  Sex, he could manage. Sex with Pippa might even become habit-forming. But that was all it would ever be. Circuses and sex, he amended. Pippa would teach them about circuses and laughter.

  Besides, as Natalie had so lovingly pointed out, life with him was dangerous. He’d made enemies even before he’d inherited his father’s wealth and power. He’d made a career of making enemies. Psychiatrists had accumulated fortunes analyzing his penchant for self-destruction. He could have explained it to them if they’d wanted to listen. They hadn’t. No one had. So he’d gone on getting himself beaten up until he’d learned better ways of fighting back.

  Now that he could retaliate, he didn’t need psychiatrists, parents, or anyone else. Except Chad.

  For Chad, he’d do anything. He just hoped it didn’t involve marrying Pippa Cochran. He’d hate to see another rose wither and die in his presence.

  Chapter 25

  “What this place needs is a good rainstorm,” Pippa declared, flinging open the balcony doors of Chad’s room on another perfect sun-drenched day.

  “Why?” Chad asked with interest. Most of the adults in his life were fairly predictable, but Pippa was more like a character in some book, always saying or doing something unexpected. He’d read the Pippi Longstocking book his father had recommended, but Pippa wasn’t poor and didn’t do things that she shouldn’t. Or at least, Chad didn’t think she did.

  And the Pollyanna book had been really disgusting. Anyone who wandered around looking for the bright side of being crippled had a few knots in her plumbing and needed a good shrink. But Pippa could be like both characters sometimes. Maybe he could write a book about her. It would give him something to do with that word processing stuff on his computer. Writing all those words by hand would take forever.

  Chad coughed and Pippa swung around to plump up his pillows.

  “Why?” she returned his question. “Don’t you like rainstorms? All that ferocious thunder and lightning shaking the sky, the clouds billowing up, the sheets of rain turning everything into a green jungle, and then afterward, when the birds sing and everything kind of sparkles, and the clouds turn blue and pink and light up like a rainbow—you don’t like that?”

  Chad wrinkled his nose and stared at her. “Clouds don’t turn blue and pink. Clouds are black or white.” Adults said weird things sometimes. He didn’t like thunder and lightning; he wasn’t about to admit that. But a blue cloud, that he’d like to see.

  She handed him his juice and medicine, and he swallowed them, watching to see how Pippa would wriggle out of that one. His father never lied to him. He knew Chad was too smart to buy the lies other kids believed. But his mother lied all the time. Maybe that was what women did.

  His mother had said she’d take him home with her. He didn’t know if he particularly wanted to go, but it might be interesting to have a mother for a change. He might be able to stay up and watch monster movies then. His dad and Pippa wouldn’t let him.

  But he didn’t think Pippa usually lied. He hadn’t caught her at it yet, anyway. Still, he knew clouds weren’t blue. He had nothing better to do some days but stare out his windows and watch those white puffs change shape.

  “Maybe you don’t get rainstorms out here like we have back home.” Pippa took his cup and set it aside, then handed him the schoolbook he was supposed to be working on. “That would be a shame. Maybe I should take you back to Kentucky with me and show you a real thunderstorm. They’re kind of scary sometimes, but afterward, with all those pretty colors lighting up the sky, it’s like a movie. I’ve always thought those blue clouds were like a rainbow, a promise that the next day will be better for having let the rain fall. And it always is. Everything is always greener, and the flowers bloom prettier. Here, every day is the same. It’s nice, but not as dramatic.”

  He sort of liked it that Pippa talked to him as if he were an adult, but sometimes, she wandered a little farther than he could follow. He wrinkled his nose at the book in his hand. “Lightning burns the hills and covers everything with smoke. It stinks and looks nasty. And the clouds are always gray the next day. Clouds don’t have colors.”

  She finger-combed his hair and Chad thought he shouldn’t like it, but he let her do it anyway. That was the kind of thing mothers were supposed to do, but his didn’t.

  “Clouds do so have colors,” she whispered. “Just like circuses have clowns. I’ll show you someday.”

  He lit up at that thought. “Can I see a circus?”

  She grinned that Pippa smile he really liked because it meant they were both going to get in trouble with his father. He loved his dad, but he was so stiff sometimes he needed to be shaken up. And Pippa had a way of doing it that almost made his father smile, too. Chad liked it when his father smiled, but he hadn’t been smiling much lately.

  “I’m working on it, kid. Will a fair do if I can’t find a circus?”

  “What’s a fair?” he asked suspiciously. “Have they got clowns?”

  She shrugged. “Out here, who knows? But they have Ferris wheels that almost touch the clouds. Won’t that do?”

  “Yeah! I want to ride a Ferris wheel!”

  “I kind of thought you might. Now get to work, kid. You’re way too far behind.”

  “Am not.”

  “Am too.”

  “You can’t say ‘am too,’” they responded in unison.

  Chad grinned and snuggled into his pillows. So, maybe his father was looking gloomy and his mother was acting strange, but he was going to a fair and Pippa li
ked him. The world wasn’t all bad.

  ***

  Meeting Chad’s tutor on the stairs, Pippa smiled a greeting at this return to normalcy and proceeded toward her office.

  Seth sat in her desk chair, scowling at the computer screen as the phone rang incessantly, all the little lights flickering at once. Behind him, in his office, workmen pounded and sawed and shouted obscenities at each other.

  If she wanted thunderstorms, Pippa decided, she didn’t have to look any farther than Seth’s face. Any moment now, lightning would shoot from his fingertips. He’d already combed his black curls into a rat’s nest, and toffee wrappers littered the rug. She couldn’t imagine how he kept his trim figure and still ate candy like other people drank water. She tried not to notice the little ball of affection bouncing around inside her as she watched him at work.

  He glared at her through narrowed eyes, daring her to come between him and whatever he was doing. When she merely shrugged, he pounded the keyboard some more. It didn’t look as if he were obtaining any satisfaction from whatever appeared on the screen. The foolish man hadn’t figured out that he was rich enough not to have to do what he didn’t want to do. He seemed to have this insane urge to carry every responsibility people dropped on his shoulders.

  He needed to be needed, just like her.

  That was when she knew the bouncing tingle in her stomach was a good deal more than just affection. Damn, spend a night in a man’s bed, and it opened a real Pandora’s box of chaotic emotions.

  She wanted to rumple his hair and kiss his cheek and send him out to soak up some sunshine by the pool. She’d be better off running like hell.

  “You must have a hundred and ten rooms in this mansion. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you just sent Doug in to buy a new computer and set it up in some other room?” Pippa inquired, with a vague hope of distracting her wayward thoughts.

  “He has to go into L. A. to buy it and I need these reports now. And the telephone company can’t come out to add a new wireless router until next week. I need the DSL.”

  “Fine, I’ll just sit here and file my nails and watch you work.” She reached over his shoulder, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out her nail kit.

  He grabbed her arm, jerked her forward, and kissed her so hard, she had to grab his shoulder to steady herself.

  The little bouncing ball of affection flamed into a volcano. Pippa dug her fingers into Seth’s shoulders as his tongue fanned the flames. The jelly in her spine turned to pure molten lava.

  Pippa would have landed in Seth’s lap in another second, but one of the workmen in the other room dropped what must have been a two-hundred-pound cannonball. They shot apart as if they’d been bombed.

  Shaking slightly, Pippa pressed her fingertips to her mouth. The permanent ache she’d developed in her lower belly widened with a growling hunger she feared he could hear. He hadn’t even touched her breasts, and still they tingled. With sudden insight, she realized she’d worn this V-neck dress with her laciest bra for a reason she hadn’t admitted until now. That discovery alone ought to have had her running as fast and hard as she could, but instead, she stood frozen, staring down into the narrow slits of Seth’s eyes as he stared back.

  “I’m not Chad, Pippa. Don’t push me, or I’ll take you down with me.”

  Going down with him sounded real fine. Pippa forced her gaze to focus on his face and not elsewhere.

  “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know?” she mocked. She didn’t know any other way of responding.

  “You’re pushing,” he warned.

  And she was. She knew it. She was playing with fire, and enjoying every damned minute of it. She’d never recognized sexual power before, but she could feel it rushing through her veins now. One word, one look, and he would be on her like a tick on a dog. The image should have cured her of this obsession, but it didn’t.

  “I don’t want to push,” she said tentatively. That much was the truth. He just drove her to it. “But I can’t be Miss MacGregor either. I don’t have it in me. Maybe it’s time I left.”

  Seth popped out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box and pressed her back against the desk with his arms propped on either side of her. The position was almost as intimate as if they’d been in bed, and Pippa gasped for breath as she met his gaze. She should be terrified. Seth’s greater strength made him more dangerous than Billy had ever been, but she didn’t think the heightened pounding of her heart had much to do with fear.

  “I haven’t taught you all the kicks yet. You can’t leave.”

  Given her current position, that was as absurd a statement as he could utter. But this evidence that Seth’s convoluted mind was still at work reassured her. He hadn’t turned into a mindless animal. He wouldn’t physically attack her. His boundaries were just a little warped.

  “I think you’d better let me go before your mother walks in,” she warned quietly.

  An almost malicious gleam lit his eyes at that reminder. Deliberately, he leaned closer and nibbled at the corner of her lips. Pippa’s willpower plummeted to her shoes. He could have taken her right there and then, and she wouldn’t have murmured one word of protest. Maybe she was a sucker for dangerous men.

  He smiled briefly and stepped back. Seth was almost human when he smiled. She wanted to stroke his mouth and stare at it forever.

  “We weren’t just drunk the other night, were we?”

  Oddly enough, she actually followed his erratic train of thought. Inching along the desk and out of his space, Pippa tried to look calm and worldly. She wasn’t used to this kind of talk. Where she came from, people didn’t talk about things like this.

  “We weren’t drunk,” she replied with a little more calm than she could have managed while pressed against him.

  “Good. And it isn’t harassment if we both feel the same way?”

  He sounded as if he were asking for the Fielding report. If she hadn’t seen the smoke in his eyes, she might have answered in the same manner. As it was, she floundered for a reply.

  “I don’t think it is,” he answered for her. “You can push me as easily as the other way around. And your job doesn’t rely on it either way. Desire is just something that’s happened, and we have to deal with it.”

  “Deal with it,” she answered stupidly. She hadn’t come in here expecting to deal with it. She’d had to deal with one too many explosions lately. She’d hoped for normalcy for a change. She should have known normalcy for this household was one explosion after another.

  “All right, I’ll wait until I’ve taught you how to throw me over your shoulder, and then we’ll deal with it,” he announced with the kind of satisfaction reserved for a problem solved.

  “Throwing you over my shoulder right now would help.” Pippa quit retreating and sought solid ground.

  In response, Seth offered a smoldering look that nearly brought her to her knees. A look that said he knew he’d almost brought her to her knees. A masculine expression of pride and power and something else, something that kept her from kicking him where it hurt, something almost possessive and affectionate and a dozen other things that whirled wildly in her imagination.

  “Honesty helps,” he said flatly. “You can go ahead and say it, you know. I’m a bastard, this is a mistake, and you’ll slap me silly if I come any closer. It won’t change anything though.” Self-doubt flickered briefly behind his eyes.

  “You’re so sure of that?” she snapped.

  “Actually, no.” Seth looked thoughtful for a minute, then searched her face. Apparently finding what he sought there, he shrugged. “Want to slap me and find out?”

  “No,” she answered adamantly, backing away. “We won’t try anything ever again. It was a mistake the first time, as you’re proving now. We have absolutely nothing in common. Chad is almost well. I think I’d better start looking for a new position.”

  “Let’s stick with the honesty, Pippa,” he admonished, crossing his arms and leaning against the desk, giving her space. “Your boyfriend ma
y have just tried to blow you up. Outside of these grounds, you’re fair game. You’re not going anywhere. You might want to send me to hell, but you’re not afraid of me. You know damned well I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.” He stopped and looked thoughtful again, giving her a considering look. “What you’re afraid of is what you want me to do.”

  “Score one for you,” she replied bitterly, then swung on her heel and stalked out.

  Seth stared after her in astonishment. He’d been right. For once in his life, he’d actually been right about a woman. Pippa Cochran actually wanted him. Not his money, not his reputation, not his power. Him. Physically. In bed. For no good reason at all.

  It was as if someone had come along and unlocked the door of his cage and thrown away the key. The possibilities were limitless....

  No, they weren’t.

  His shoulders slumped as he slid back into the chair. If he had any conscience at all, he couldn’t take her up on what they both wanted. This had to be the meaning of hell, given the opportunity for everything he’d ever wanted, he had to refuse it. For Chad’s sake, for Pippa’s sake, for his own sanity, he had to let her fly where she would, and sooner or later, it would be out of this house.

  The best he could hope for—all he really wanted—was a brief affair. He could handle that. Could Pippa?

  Chapter 26

  “Meg, this is nuts. Why do I do this to myself? Am I really that desperate?”

  Meg looked worried, but she spoke in her usual reasonable tones, as if Pippa were one of her children. “Well, there’s no law against having a fantasy fling. I’ve never had the opportunity myself, since George is the only man I’ve ever looked at. You’re more adventurous than I am. You deserve a little fun in your life right now, Pippa.”

  “Fun?” Pippa cried. “Seth isn’t fun. Seth Wyatt and his insane asylum are a nightmare.”

  Meg breathed a sigh of relief. “Then you’re not nuts. You’re seeing things perfectly clearly. Maybe you just need some more normal outlet for your sex drive. Taylor Morgan has a brother who’s just recently come through a divorce....”