Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  “I did.” Her heart was trying to run away with her.

  “I abandoned two trolleys full of things I needed in a store back there,” Jace said. “I didn’t want to buy things to put into a house where I’d be alone. If I’m going to all that trouble, I want to put them into a house that might at least get a visit from the woman I love. Though I’d rather she lived there with me. If I’m putting it on the line here, and it seems I am.”

  “But you… you didn’t like living in the city.”

  “I didn’t like living in New York. I didn’t want to go to cocktail parties. Do you go to cocktail parties?”

  “No. I might go to a barbecue sometimes with cops, though.”

  “Research,” he said. “Works for me. And it could be I’ll like San Francisco better than New York. Or someplace around there. You never know until you try. There’s a place where people live on houseboats, hey.”

  Something was happening in her stomach. She was either happy or nauseated. One or the other. “Sausalito. North of the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “Sausalito. How far is that from your station?”

  “Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Depending on traffic. Really? You’d… you’d do that?”

  He pulled out his phone. “I saw this one. While I was waiting in the queue at the airport.” He looked up, his eyes shining blue. “Nearly missed the flight. But then, I’ve always been a lucky fella.” Then he was clicking around and showing her. “End of the pier. Got a view of the mountains. Or hills, more like. What are these?”

  She looked. “Marin County. Hills. It’s… that’s nice.”

  He nodded. “Hills. And water. I need a view, you see, to write. I don’t need many things. A laptop. Tobias. Coffee. And maybe you. But I do need to look out at something that isn’t manmade. The sea works.”

  A houseboat. Jace. And Tobias. In another minute, she really was going to need that oxygen mask. “I should tell you, though,” she said. “I don’t think I’m good at being in love.”

  “Luckily,” he said, “I find I am. At least I seem to know how to do it. Could be I’m a natural. And what do you mean, you’re not good at it? Who was that standing over Charlotte last night, telling her, ‘I have a shotgun. Move and I’ll blow your head off?’”

  She was going to laugh. The most dramatic moment of her life, and she was going to laugh and wreck it. “That’s not what I mean. That’s not the way people are in love.”

  “Says who? It worked for me.”

  He went to put his phone away, and she said, “Wait. Let me look. Oh. That is cool.”

  “Well, I thought so. I was a little proud of thinking of it, to tell you the truth. You don’t have to live there with me. If you need to go slow, you do. I just thought one of us had better have the guts to give this a go. Could be I’ll even be able to drag you along. If not? I’ll know I did my best. You want to know my philosophy of life, since you’ve told me yours? The ‘every minute counts’ thing?”

  “Yes.” That bubble of laughter was trying to rise again.

  He seemed to know exactly how she was feeling, because those lines around his eyes deepened with the smile he was holding back. “Do your best. There you are. My philosophy. So here I am. I’m doing it. If I fail, I fail. But meanwhile—I’ll be here doing my best. What do you think? Want to give it a go with me?”

  “Yes,” she said. She did laugh, then, and he smiled right back at her. Tough, bearded face, black hair, blue eyes. Scars and muscle and sinew, and something more. A tender heart that beat just for her. “Yes. I think I could give it a go. I think I could. And… Jace.”

  “Yeah?”

  His hand finally took hers, and she clasped it, held onto him, and said it. “Thank you for coming after me. I’m scared, but I’m going to try. I’m going to put it on the line and try my best. Because it counts. Because I love you. And you’re worth the risk.”

  Ten months later

  The end of March, and it was rainy in San Francisco. Paige should have been patrolling in the downpour. Instead, the temperature outside hovered right at eighty degrees, and she was getting dressed for the day in about the most beautiful house she’d ever seen. There were worse things in the world than a long, low house on a private white-sand beach in north Queensland, with a curved infinity pool flowing over the edge of nothing, lush strands of hot-pink bougainvillea climbing stone walls, green palms waving in the summer breeze, and an endless turquoise sea beyond dotted with white sails. Not to mention a motor launch moored at a private dock in case you managed to rouse yourself enough to do some snorkeling. Jace was normally a low-key guy, but this time, he’d pulled out all the stops.

  She should still be nervous. She had been nervous when she and Lily had been flying all the way to Australia with Jace, and she’d known she was going to have to meet his whole family. He hadn’t taken her to meet his parents at Christmas, because they hadn’t had enough time. Instead, the two of them had spent the holiday at the Montana cabin. They’d cooked and eaten Christmas dinner with Lily, and Jace had seemed happy to share the day with her twin.

  “I don’t know,” Paige had said lazily on Christmas night, stretching out after dinner on the new leather couch with her legs draped over Jace’s lap and Tobias curled on the rug beneath them. They should be playing a board game or something, but she seemed to want to go to sleep instead. “Maybe I’m feeling queasy because there are still scary people in Sinful, but I think it’s just that I ate too much ham. And whatever that white thing was.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Jace said. “I told you, that’s not a ‘white thing’. That’s a pavlova. Of course, it’s meant to be eaten for summer Christmas, when the strawberries would be sweeter. But a pav’s a pav all the same.”

  Lily said from her spot curled up in the easy chair, “Not that many scary people here, not anymore, now that Charlotte’s in that facility. You have to feel sorry for her today. What must her Christmas be looking like? It has to be a prison in itself, being locked into your mind when it works that way. The personality disorder sounds horrible enough, but I can’t imagine having hallucinations, something you absolutely can’t control telling you that you have to hurt people. Terrifying. When I think of her holed up with her sleeping bag in that freezing-cold ski cabin with no power and no water, looking down at Jace’s house with her binoculars and all that anger—” She shivered. “Awful.”

  “Mm,” Paige said. “I find I can’t be quite so sympathetic. I’ll let you do it for me, how’s that? Since you’ve got the pink aura and all.”

  “I think yours is getting pinker, though,” Lily answered. “And I know we still have some bee killers around, but I don’t have bees anymore, so I’m not worrying.”

  “Chicken killers, too,” Paige said. Jennifer Turner and her husband hadn’t left town after the beehive escapade, choosing to keep their gym and ride out the wave of bad publicity after their nocturnal activities had become known.

  Lily said, cynically for her, “Chicken releasers, that’s all. Nobody thinks what they did was all that awful, since Charlotte did all the violent parts. All they did was jump in there when they heard Jace had a stalker, and he started being seen with me. Nobody would even have known that Charlotte wasn’t responsible for the chickens and bees if you and Jace hadn’t caught Jennifer and Hal in the act. A lot of people probably thought I deserved it, and those that didn’t? Half of them have probably joined the gym just to check out all the excitement. Besides, when the new resort opens next winter, Jennifer and Hal will be in a great spot. They probably still think Brett is going to lease them the space for their spa, because they imagine he’s good-natured enough to overlook a tiny little lapse like a brick slipping out of somebody’s hand and going through a window. Like, ‘Whoops! How did that happen?’ They don’t see what’s underneath his smile. He didn’t get where he is by being stupid.”

  “Interesting,” Jace said. “So are we getting the rice ready?”

  Lily only smiled. “I
can like him. That doesn’t mean I have to marry him. I don’t have to date him, either. I’ll just be Paige’s cheering section.”

  Paige wanted to say something, but she didn’t. Lily had been exactly right all those months earlier. Being with the wrong person was worse than being alone. Being with the right person, though? That was something entirely different. Especially when he didn’t always want to talk, but he always wanted to cook. And go for a run in the redwoods on Mt. Tam with her on her days off, and teach her to sail. There was nothing so exhilarating, she’d discovered, as a fast, bumpy ride through the Golden Gate with the boat heeled all the way over to one side, feeling like you were about to capsize but knowing that it actually wasn’t going to happen, because Jace knew how to ride that edge all the way to the limit without the needle ever dipping into the red. Safe but thrilling. It was a fairly wonderful concept, and not just in the bedroom. It was pretty good in the bedroom, too, though. Every fantasy you’d ever wanted to explore, with none of the scary downside, like adventure camp for grown-ups. You didn’t get much better than that.

  She hadn’t started out living with him, of course, when he’d closed on his houseboat in record time. She’d just come for visits. Visits that had turned into “maybe one more night,” then another one, then a row of new hangers suddenly appearing like magic in Jace’s closet, not to mention a bathroom drawer that “you might as well put your things into. Neater, hey.” He was a very sneaky man, and it hadn’t been nearly as hard a decision as it might have been to let her lease go.

  He’d been right about something else, too. It was a lot nicer to buy things to put into a house you were sharing with somebody you loved. Or, rather, two houses, since he’d held onto the cabin. Jace turned out to be a good online shopper, or her version of it. Which meant choosing fast and pressing the button instead of asking her to decide. Or, worse, asking her to shop.

  Now, on Christmas, he looked at her, rubbed his hand slowly over her leg, and said, “What?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she answered. “Just that I love you. And that I’m glad Charlotte didn’t kill any of us, because I wouldn’t be nearly as happy right now.”

  “Good to know,” he said, smiling into her eyes and making her heart do that funny little flip. “This would be a good time to ask Lily and you if you can get a week off in, oh, call it March? My parents were pretty disappointed to miss having us for Christmas. March could be a good time, though, I’m thinking. Good for you, baby, since most people won’t be taking a holiday then, I’d think. And off-season for Lily as well.”

  “You can’t want to take me,” Lily said.

  “But I do,” Jace said. “Meeting the family’s always a bit fraught. If it gets too much for Paige, she can switch with you and let you carry things for a while. I always have an ulterior motive.”

  Jace had taken them first to his parents’ home in Brisbane, a compact little house on a hillside with frangipani and hibiscus blooming in the garden and a man who looked like an older, even more imposing version of Jace presiding over the dinner table. Sergeant Major Colin Blackstone, to be exact, a man who looked like he’d been forged from iron and hardened in the fire. Paige was used to tough men, but all the same, she’d been glad to have Lily with her until she’d gotten to know him a little better.

  Jace hadn’t made her sit around and be uncomfortable, though. He’d taken her and Lily to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on the first day, where he’d watched a sheepdog show with them, then queued patiently so they could snuggle a koala. The look on Lily’s face when she’d done it had been well worth the wait.

  Jace had said quietly to Paige, “She looks like that’s her baby doll.”

  “Yeah,” Paige had answered. “Lily’s always wanted to be a mom.”

  “But not you?”

  “You pick your moments for the good questions, don’t you?”

  “Could be. Put it that I’m interested.”

  Her heart had started to beat much too hard for a woman looking at sleepy marsupial cuteness. “I don’t know,” she’d answered honestly. “It always seemed like if I did it, I’d be doing it alone. I don’t want to do it alone.”

  “Mm,” he’d said. But the attendant had been gently prising the snoozing koala off Lily’s shirt, and the moment had been over.

  He kept doing things like that, too. Two days ago, he’d taken Paige on a long morning run along the winding horseshoe bends of the Brisbane River, under cliffs and through the bougainvillea walk of South Bank, then across the bridge into the Queen Street Mall and out for a coffee in the turn-of-the-century opulence of the Brisbane Arcade. Afterwards, they’d wandered the elegant stone corridors under the stained-glass panels and window-shopped. “The only kind of shopping,” Paige had tried to joke, “that I can actually stand. We’re not exactly dressed for it, though.”

  “No worries,” Jace had said. “We won’t go in. We’ll just have a wander round. I need to get an idea somehow. Your birthday’s barely a month away, and I’d never get you someplace like this if we weren’t on holiday. I’m seizing my moment.”

  She might have gotten a little breathless again, but he’d been nothing but casual, pointing out diamond earrings and opal pendants. Definitely not dragging her into stores to try on rings. She’d shoved down the stupid, sneaky edge of disappointment that had risen unbidden, as if she’d expected a romantic proposal in their running shorts from a man she’d known less than a year. Even if he was the most wonderful man in the world.

  She’d relaxed, eventually, and enjoyed the moment. Holding Jace’s arm, because being up close to that muscle was one of her favorite places wherever they were, and saying, “The opals are really pretty.”

  “But?” he’d prompted, moving her along to the next store. Half of this building seemed to be jewelers, each more exquisite than the last. It was a heady spot.

  She’d stopped, and he’d said, “Yes?”

  “I hate to admit it,” she’d said, “but I love those pink stones. I should like opals best. Opals are Australian, and they’re more my thing, right? All of them so different, and different shapes, too. But that is just so pretty. Way prettier than a diamond, don’t you think?”

  “Pink sapphire,” Jace had said. “No worries. You have good taste, is all. Especially against the diamonds, wouldn’t you say? No reason you can’t like something just because it’s pretty and feminine. You get to have that if you want. We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.”

  She’d laughed and said, “Nope. We sure don’t,” and had felt so light, she could float away. Exercise endorphins. Really good coffee. Beautiful jewelry. Vacation. And Jace. That was all.

  Five minutes later, he’d asked, “Had enough?” And they’d left. No champagne. No earrings. Which she didn’t need. He was right. Looking was fun. And her birthday was only a little more than a month away. She might even get a pink sapphire pendant. Maybe that one with the carved rose-gold setting, even. Maybe so. She’d be willing to dress up for that.

  Yesterday, they’d all flown up to the tiny Whitsunday Airport. The two of them, Lily, and Jace’s parents. A helicopter had met them there and flown them over sugar-cane fields and palms, the noise of the machine’s flight sending kangaroos and wallabies bounding away beneath them like some kind of ad for Australia, delighting Lily—and Paige, she had to admit—beyond measure. The pilot had taken them over a winding coastline, past endless white-sand beaches and over the paler spots in the turquoise water that were coral reefs, and when they’d reached the house called Heaven’s Gate? Jace’s brother Rafe and his cousin Willow had already arrived.

  Paige had met Rafe before. Lily hadn’t. Maybe that was why Lily had been extra-quiet since. Which Paige had to admit she didn’t understand.

  This morning, she’d gone into Lily’s bedroom, which featured the same ocean view as all the others. A half-dozen sulphur-crested cockatoos were raising a ruckus outside, perched in a tree, and as they watched, a brightly-colored parrot swooped down into a date palm, followed
by another.

  Lily said, “So what do you do if he fails the test?”

  Paige smiled. “Tease him mercilessly, of course. He’s getting a little smug, especially since I’ve been being myself all this time. I want to see, that’s all. Come on. The boat’s going to be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Maybe I’ll stay here and hang out by the pool,” Lily said.

  Paige paused in the act of pulling her swimsuit up over her hips. “What? Why? It sounds like fun. Jace said the boat was fast. An adrenaline ride, he said. Don’t you like his parents? I know his dad can be a little gruff, but he’s not that way underneath. Just think how sweet Jace is. That didn’t come from nowhere. And his mom’s great.”

  “No,” Lily hurried to say. “Of course they’re both wonderful, and I like Willow, too.”

  “Ah,” Paige said, finally getting around to pulling up her swimsuit. “Rafe. So he’s a movie star. He’s not that bad. You have to admit he’s charming.”

  “You’re right,” Lily said. “It was silly. Never mind.” She finished getting dressed, picked up her bag, handed the other one to Paige, and said, “Ready?”

  “Thanks,” Paige said. “I didn’t want to do it without you. It feels like an awfully big family.”

  “I know,” Lily said. “But I’m here. Let’s go do it.”

  Jace was sitting out on the terrace by the pool with Rafe, his parents, and Willow, having another coffee before they set out, when the twins came walking out together.

  “Bugger me,” Rafe muttered under his breath.

  “Overwhelming,” Jace agreed, “isn’t it?” He sat back and took them in. Two blondes, their golden hair gleaming in the strong Australian sun. Paige had somehow never gotten around to dying her hair back to brown, to his secret relief. They were both wearing swim costumes, sandals, and filmy little skirts tied well below the navel, but there was quite a difference.