Lucas shifted the two brown-paper grocery bags to one arm so he could reach the latch, then pushed the front door open with his foot. He assumed his uptight guest was still asleep, which was why he was surprised to see her bounding down the stairs, all bright eyes and smiles and already dressed for the day.
“Good morning,” she said in a tone that was far too cheery for such a dreary morning. “Still raining, I see.” She squinted toward the bay window in the front room. “It’s so dark. You can hardly tell it’s daytime. Guess it will have to be an indoor day.”
So many words in such a small amount of time.
He kicked the door closed behind him. “You’ve got a lot of energy for someone who hasn’t had a cup of coffee yet.” He wasn’t sure which prospect sounded worse, a day trapped inside with the uptight city chick of last night or a day trapped inside with this bouncy, cheerful version.
“How do you know I haven’t had coffee?” she asked. Still far too happy.
He nodded to the bag in his right arm, sending water from the hood of his coat streaming into the already soggy paper. “Because it’s in here.”
She reached for the bag. “Let me help.”
That was the last straw. “Okay, what gives?” he asked as she relieved him of one of the bags.
“What gives?” Her eyes were wide and innocent, and all at once Lucas noticed how green they were. So green they looked like they weren’t even real but had been colored with of one of Maddie’s markers. Had her eyes looked like that last night?
“What gives with the attitude?”
“What do you mean?” She turned and started down the hallway toward the kitchen. As she walked, his gaze instinctively shifted to the sway of her hips. He might have been on a “chick fast,” as his college buddies now referred to his life whenever they called, but he was still a man with a pulse walking behind a very sexy woman, uptight pain in the ass or not. He knew it made him a bit of a jerk to be such a dick to her one night and then get a semi the next day just from watching her walk down the hall, but he couldn’t help it. There was something about her that got his blood pumping, and not just in anger.
He’d barely slept the night before, alternating between being pissed at his sister for going behind his back, pissed at the city woman for being so damned annoying, and pissed at himself for thinking she was so smoking hot.
When she’d shown up in his house the first time, he’d been what his grandfather called “spittin’ mad.” So mad, in fact, that he’d hardly given her a second glance. But then she came back. Every inch of her had been soaking wet, from her auburn hair to her overpriced shoes. But it was the way her sweater clung to every luscious curve that was permanently seared into his mind.
“Lucas?”
His head snapped up to meet her raised brows. “Huh?”
“You asked what gives. With what?”
“Um, with you.” He slid behind the island in an attempt to hide the evidence while he tried to get his dick under control and set the remaining grocery bag on the counter.
“Me?” she asked. Her voice was a few octaves too high, which meant either she was nervous or hiding something. Unless… For a moment, he wondered if maybe it was because he was having the same effect on her. Her cheeks were a bit flushed, after all, and in his experience that usually meant one of two things: either a woman was working out or turned on. But then he remembered the way she’d looked at him last night. Like he was some naughty schoolboy who should be sent to his room to clean it up. Hmm, naughty schoolboy. Now there’s a fantasy he hadn’t thought of since college. Christ, what was wrong with him? Two years without sex, that’s what.
“Yeah, last night I was the bane of your existence and now today you’re all”—he waved his hand back and forth while he searched for the right word—“perky.”
Her eyes grew wide. “Perky?” The way she looked, you’d have thought he’d said she had perky tits. Which she did by the way, but that wasn’t what he’d meant. Dammit, now it was all he could do not to stare at her boobs. Forget college, he’d gone clear back to high school.
“Nice, cheerful,” he said, trying to dig himself out. “You even offered to help me.”
She softened. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot last night—probably because of the storm, I don’t know—but either way, here we are, stuck with each other.” The tone of disgust those words would have conveyed the night before was conspicuously missing. “At least until the storm passes,” she quickly added. “I figure there’s no sense in making it worse by fighting the entire time.”
“A truce?”
“An uneasy one, I’m sure.” She let out a nervous laugh. “But yeah.”
“Deal,” he said.
She stuck out her hand.
“You want to actually shake on it?” This was possibly one of the strangest women he’d ever met. And that was saying something, considering his sister. But to go from an uptight bitch one night to a cheerful sweetheart the next morning was nearly Jekyll-Hyde territory. Then again, maybe she was nuts. He’d heard stories about crazy people on the hosting site’s owners’ blog, but he’d never really considered the possibility that he’d end up with a nutjob in his house. Leave it to his sister to book him a woman who was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
She stood there, expectantly, during his entire internal debate, her hand stuck out and her lips curved into what seemed like a genuine smile. Fine. He could play Hyde, too, if that’s what she wanted.
Lucas took her hand. Her grip was firm, not timid like some girls, especially the ones who liked to play all delicate, but like a woman who was confident in who she was and what she was doing. A woman who shook hands over business deals on a regular basis. A woman who would give one hell of a hand job.
Jesus.
Lucas dropped her hand, then headed to the pantry with one of the bags of food, which also gave him an opportunity to adjust his fly because that semi was now full blown.
“Need any more help?” she asked, interrupting his attempts to run through the Braves’ starting lineup while his dick headed to the locker room for a cold shower.
“Nah, all good.” He emerged from the pantry to find her perched atop one of the kitchen stools. “Did you eat?”
Her eyes darted to the box of cereal he’d left on the counter. “No, not yet.”
No dig on the Loops? She must have been serious about the truce, because even Maddie would have had something to say about the end-of-the-box crumbs.
“Gotta admit, I was a bit stumped over what to get a vegetarian for breakfast. I mean, are eggs okay? If not, I have oatmeal.” At the store, he’d been mainly concerned about getting a few items that weren’t most commonly found on a kids’ menu, but now he found himself wanting to make her something she might actually enjoy.
“Eggs are fine. I’m not a vegan.”
“So just a run-of-the-mill veg head?”
Her head fell back on a laugh that was not at all what he expected. Based on their first meeting, he would have expected her laugh to be a harsh, shrill sound. Not something so delicate and joyful. “Sorry,” she said when she caught her breath. “I’ve just never heard that slang before. But if you want to be specific, I’m a pescatarian.”
The look on his face must have been as blank as his brain was at the moment because she offered more of an explanation.
“It means I eat fish but not meat, and that I also eat dairy and eggs.”
He clapped his hands together. “Then a veggie omelet it is.” Omelets were one of the few items Lucas cooked with complete confidence. It was like the meat loaf of breakfast, if you really thought about it. Just throw everything in a bowl, mix it up, and cook it. “But first, coffee.” He cringed as he heard the words coming out of his mouth. Sophie had a light-up sign on the counter in her kitchen that said exactly that. But first, coffee. It even had a motion sensor that caused it to blink when she walked into the room in the morning. Needless to say, it was annoying as hell. He’d ridiculed her when she set it up, and nearly every day since then, but now there he was quoting the damn thing. Judging by the smile on his guest’s face, she’d seen a similar sign or meme or T-shirt and knew exactly what he’d done.
To his surprise, she didn’t bust his balls. Instead she complimented his coffee choice.
“Nice blend,” she said, picking up the silver pouch.
“You don’t have to seem so shocked.”
“What can I say? I half expected instant.”
Not too much of a stretch, given the hospitality level to date. “I may eat frozen pizza,” he said, feigning offense. “But I’m not an animal.”
They both laughed—and not in a forced polite way, but a genuine laugh shared between two people who’d found a common ground. No coffee pun intended.
Lucas reached into the cabinet above the stove and pulled out a chrome-and-glass French press.
“Wow, now I’m really impressed. Most guys would just use a Mr. Coffee.”
Lucas stilled. The French press had been Jenny’s idea. She thought it would give their little inn a more sophisticated vibe. She’d intended to buy something to grind her own beans, too, but she never had the chance. There was so much she never had the chance to do…
“You okay?”
He looked up to meet his guest’s gaze and was surprised to find it filled with genuine concern. “Yeah, why?” he asked, trying to shake off the fog that encased him far too often.
“You just looked really serious all of a sudden.”
“Well, coffee is serious business.” He opened the silver pouch and began to scoop grounds into the glass carafe. “I got this,” he said. “Why don’t you go relax—rain or not, it’s still your vacation—and I’ll let you know when the coffee and eggs are ready.”
* * *
Go relax.
The words felt more like a dismissal than hospitality, and for the life of her, Paige couldn’t figure out why. Sure, they’d had a horrible first meeting, but this morning things had seemed better. Friendly even. She’d even go so far as to say her host had been a little flirty. She’d definitely caught him looking at her boobs. Then again, most guys looked at Paige’s boobs. She’d spent her teenage years hunched over in an attempt to minimize them. But in college all that had changed. She decided to embrace her curves, and by the time she was in her midtwenties, she was actively dressing to accentuate her ta-tas. Not at work though. Never at work. But this wasn’t a business situation, and Lucas Croft was definitely not a client, although he could certainly use the benefit of services like hers. But truth be told, even the compulsively organized clean-freak side of her could look the other way for an afternoon with her handsome host in her four-poster bed. Hell, she’d even get down and dirty with him on that mattress on the floor.
Mattress on the floor.
What was she thinking?
The whole reason she’d come downstairs ready to propose a truce was because of what she’d seen in the bedrooms upstairs. Whatever had happened to the woman and child in the photographs, one thing was certain: Lucas Croft was a man in pain. One, who from the sounds of it, hadn’t even wanted to be back in the innkeeper business. Given all that, she could hardly hold his rude behavior against him. Nope. Instead there she was, thinking about him holding her against him.
It was official: she was a horrible person.
Maybe he hadn’t noticed the way her nipples hardened when he stared at her chest. Or the way her cheeks flushed when his hazel eyes locked on hers. Of course some of that flush was due to nearly being caught snooping around his house. She was lucky she hadn’t sprained her ankle hightailing it out of that bedroom.
Lusting after her heartbroken host and snooping through his house? Yeah, she was making the folks on Big Brother Island, or whatever that show was called, look like upstanding citizens.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. It was her mother, which made perfect sense seeing as how the woman was the Beetlejuice of bad decisions. Without fail, every time Paige had so much as a questionable thought, let alone action, her mother would call or text. She swore the woman had some sort of sixth sense. At least Paige didn’t have to say her mother’s name three times. That, and the fact that her head didn’t spin in a three-sixty on her shoulders.
Are you really on vacation?
Leave it to her mom to get right to the point. No “How are you, darling?” or “Have you been sleeping okay?” Not even the quintessential mother question: “Have you been eating?” Then again, Paige’s mother wasn’t like most moms. She didn’t fill her days worrying about whether her kids got a good night’s sleep or if they ate three square meals. She was far too busy worrying about her own life to spend much time worrying about the lives of her two adult children. Except of course when her Beetlejuice/Spidey senses started to tingle. Then she was laser-focused.
Paige’s mother had been the first woman in her family to go to college, let alone law school. But she’d no sooner accepted a job with a big New York firm than she met the love of her life, a man who thought the Chicago suburbs would be a far better place to raise a family than the Big Apple. So Janice Parker said no to her dream job and followed the man she loved to a sleepy commuter town where he rode the train to work and she stayed home with the kids. The decision had been mutual, yet Paige always had the feeling that her mother was haunted by the life not lived. So much so that she was nearly manic about making the most of the path she’d chosen instead.
At first, that mania was focused on Paige and her brother. But as she and Martin grew older and there was less for her mom to do, she became almost obsessed with making sure her two children were happy, independently functioning adults. Marty was married and living in California, where he owned his own home and had two kids and a dog, so Janice had been able to check the proverbial box next to his name. She’d nearly been able to mark Paige “sorted” as well. Until her fiancé decide to sleep with her boss, messing up Janice’s motherhood completion timeline.
It was as though marriage was the ultimate graduation from childhood, although whether it was Paige graduating or her mother, she was never fully sure. Either way, her mom’s plan to join her father in early retirement had been derailed by a loser who couldn’t keep it in his pants. Her mother had been so upset, you’d have thought she was the one who’d been cheated on, not Paige. But not in the way you’d expect. “Don’t you think you could give him another chance?” Most moms would have wanted to claw the guy’s eyes out, but not Janice Parker. Not when she’d been this close to having both of her kids married off, happily or not.
That was when Paige made two important decisions. First, when it came to her mom, everything in life was going to be absolutely fine. At least on the surface. The woman had given her and Marty the prime of her life. If she needed the second act to herself, then far be it from Paige to stand in the way of that. It was ridiculous, really. Having a husband wasn’t some magical fix-all for life, but to Janice it meant that she didn’t have to worry about her daughter. And while it was doubtful a walk down the aisle would be happening for Paige anytime soon, she could still give her mom the peace of mind that everything was right in her world.
The second decision Paige made was more of a promise to herself. She would never change her life plans over a man. Ever.
Her phone vibrated in her hand. This time all that was sent was a question mark. It was her mother’s not-so-subtle way of nudging her for a reply.
Yes, Paige replied. Then added, How did you know that?
She knew the answer even before the little bubbles of her mother’s typing filled the screen. “Sammy,” Paige said out loud just as his name popped up on the screen. Two seconds later, her phone rang in her hand.
“I just hate texting,” her mom said. “I can talk so much faster.”
“Everything is fine, Mom.” They were the same words she said every Monday when her mom called for her weekly check-in.
“Well, you hadn’t mentioned anything about a trip last week, so when Samuel picked up your office line…”
“Sorry, it was all so last minute.” Paige kicked herself for not thinking to text her mom over the weekend, which would have avoided all this. “But like I said, everything is fine. I just decided to treat myself to some R and R.”
Her mother sighed in relief. “Thank goodness. For a moment, I was worried maybe you’d gone to rehab and your assistant was covering for you.”
Paige’s jaw fell open. Rehab? Her mother might have tried to bury her head in the sand for life’s day-to-day stresses, but when she surfaced, she took the art of worrying to a new high. “I promise, everything is absolutely perfect. I will even send you a photo of the adorable little inn I’m staying at.”
“Great. Have fun.”
And then she was gone.
Paige opened her phone’s browser to grab a photo from the inn’s website to send to her mother. An actual picture would have revealed a pigsty engulfed in a monsoon, and that would have given her poor mother a coronary. Just like Paige’s life, everything about the inn had to be absolutely fine as well.
She paced the length of the porch. There really wasn’t much to do indoors when you weren’t allowed to work.
She thought about calling Sammy back, but if she did, she would no doubt end up spilling her guts about everything she’d seen on her house tour—okay, okay, snoop fest—and everything that had been said (and unsaid) during her morning conversation with Lucas, who was well within earshot. Plus, it had barely been an hour since her last call. She didn’t want to seem totally inept at this whole vacation thing. So instead of calling her assistant, she shoved her phone back in her pocket and stared at the gray horizon through rain-splattered windows.
A few moments later, Lucas served her a quite respectable omelet and a more-than-respectable cup of coffee. She ate her breakfast alone on the glass porch, which was also where she spent the better part of the day. Her host had told her to help herself to any of the books stored inside the wicker cabinet. So after rearranging the inn’s small library by the color of the books’ spines, she did exactly what she told Sammy she was going to do: curled up in a rocking chair with a comfy pillow and a cozy throw and read a steamy novel. She couldn’t help but wonder if the woman who’d slept in the now-dusty bedroom had selected the reading material for the inn, or if maybe it had come with the house when they bought it. Either way, she doubted Lucas had selected a book called Scoundrel of the Manor.
Unlike breakfast, dinner was served in the formal dining room. It was a surprisingly delicious lasagna made with zucchini and mushrooms, which Paige scarfed down in record time since breakfast had apparently been lunch as well. Lucas ate his meal in the kitchen, or so she presumed, which meant Paige once again dined alone. It shouldn’t have felt so odd really. She dined alone nearly every night at home. But there she had her cat—who, while not much of a conversationalist, was at least a warm body in the room—and a constant stream of HGTV. At the inn, there was nothing but an eerie silence, broken only by the sound of the storm or the occasional clank of pots and pans. Plus, at her apartment there wasn’t another person who was also eating alone in the next room. The whole thing was beyond strange.
After dinner she was back to the porch, this time with a mug of hot cocoa to accompany the Scoundrel’s tales. Turned out even a scoundrel had the capacity to love, which was no surprise given the genre’s requisite happy ending, but what did surprise her was that it was nearly midnight when she finished reading. She took great pride in the fact that she’d made it through a whole day and night of self-imposed relaxation, but was dreading the thought of doing it all again the next day. With any luck, the rain would ease up enough for her to at least explore a little bit of the island.
Paige put the book in the cabinet and was about to head up the back staircase when she heard a noise from the front room. She made her way down the narrow hallway, past the curio cabinet and the banister, noting that the latter was now peanut butter free. Thank God for small victories, she thought.
She paused before rounding the wooden casement that marked the entry to the room, choosing instead to steal a quick peek. The room was dark except for the light of one small Tiffany-style lamp that sat perched atop an ornate cabinet. Lucas sat in a tufted chair with only his profile visible to her. He held a photo album in his hands, with two more stacked on the floor beside his feet. Under normal circumstances, she’d have gone on in and made a bit of small talk by asking about the photos. But something about the way Lucas sat, his shoulders tense and his head down, told her that this was not a situation that called for chitchat. It was as though he was engrossed and anguished at the same time. Over what, she couldn’t say for sure, although she suspected it had something to do with the woman in the photo that sat behind her in the curio. She turned, her gaze falling on the frame tucked behind the driftwood. Clearly that was the woman who had lived in the room upstairs. But Lucas didn’t wear a wedding ring anymore. Did she leave him or, worse, was she…
Paige stopped herself. There was absolutely no reason for her to go all Nancy Drew. Lucas Croft was her host, not her friend and certainly not her date. What may or may not have happened in his personal life was none of her business. So instead of joining him in the living room, she merely watched him for a few moments more, then turned and went up to bed.