Page 96 of Tempting as Sin
He was laughing for real now. “All true except the dryer. I didn’t think of that. And I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
“I am in the fashion business,” she said. “Working men don’t wear their pants that tight. You think you were uncomfortable on a horsebefore…I’d say you’d stuffed a sock down there yesterday, except that I happen to know you don’t have to stuff.”
The light in his eyes could tempt a worshiper right out of the choir. “Aw, baby,” he said, “I’m glad I do it for you. I think you’re very pretty as well.” And this time, she had to laugh, too.
“So,” she said, taking one more sip of Chardonnay and letting the mellow light of a midsummer Montana evening, the song of a yellow warbler, the gentle sound of the wind in the pines and the faint tinkle of wind chimes, enter her bones and still her jangled nerves. “Where are you going with this? The last time I talked to Paige, she said Jace told her, ‘Rafe was born to save.’ That could have been snarky, except that Jace is never snarky. He meant it.”
“And you don’t need saving,” he said, his eyes serious again. “You’ve already saved yourself. But even a strong woman can use a little help sometimes from the man who loves her. At least I hope so.”
She leaned her head back and let the words sink in. He reached for one of her curls, rubbed it between her fingers, and said, “Especially if helping makes him feel better, too.” Then he leaned over, kissed her gently on the mouth, smiled into her eyes, and said, “Which it would.”
Thatwas why she was in the white leather armchair, and the view outside was of an impossibly bright, star-spangled Southern Hemisphere sky.
Rafe was feeding her animals, keeping Chuck, and weeding her garden. Martin was selling nightgowns and getting excited about thegorgeousnew line from the Little Bra Company. “Petite breasts,” she’d heard him declare like an evangelist to a customer yesterday, like he knew all about it, “aren’t out there in the cold anymore, honey. Bigger isn’t better anymore, and you have a beautiful figure. Let me show you a couple of these. You’ll die.”
The customer hadn’t died. She’d bought bras in three colors, though. Martin, Lily had to concede, was very good, and Hailey hadn’t minded being left in charge.
“Can I confess something, hon?” she’d said when Lily had broached the subject to her, still half-apologetic. “I love it when you leave.” She’d laughed, given Lily a one-armed hug, and said, “Oh, my gosh. Sounds terrible. But I like getting to come up with my own ideas, and I’m proud when you trust me. I’ve never wanted to boss anyone around, and I still don’t, but I sure do enjoy that.”
“Bailey, though,” Lily had said to Rafe in a last-ditch effort to come up with a reason this wouldn’t work.
“If something happens with Bailey,” he’d said, “if she’s moved someplace else, if her grandmother dies after all, if they need you again for your application—if any of that happens, we can have you back here in twenty-four hours. All you have to do is sit back and let Martin work his magic. He’s done favors from Montana to Mexico and Tunisia to Tahiti, and in case he hasn’t told you, there’s an assistant’s network out there that puts the CIA to shame. If Martin can’t get you spending a stay in Byron Bay as easily as spending a dime, he’s lost his touch, and he hasn’t done that.”
Martin hadn’t. He’d handed Lily a boarding pass and said, “Pack a suitcase, get on the plane to Seattle when this says, and then relax.” She’d been met at Sea-Tac baggage claim by a smiling womanwithouta cardboard sign, who’d taken her suitcase over her protests, then whisked her to an executive-jet terminal. An offer of champagne—because it was always champagne—that she hadn’t accepted, and she’d boarded this absolutely beautiful white jet, owned by a production company Rafe had never worked with. “But, sweetie,” Martin had explained, “they sure do want him.” A stop in LA to drop one group off and pick another up, and they were on their way to Sydney, and from there, the pilot had told her, “just a hop” up to the Gold Coast Airport.
None of it had been the least bit hard. The opposite, obviously. And she was tired anyway. Life catching up. She got up to figure out how to recline the chair into a bed, and halfway through, a flight attendant had folded it down in about three quick movements, then pulled out a sheet, an extra pillow, and a quilt, and made it up.
Lily didn’t need luxury. Not anymore.
Then appreciate it,she told herself, snuggling in and pulling her second pillow into her body, since she didn’t have Rafe’s warmth there.
You couldn’t run away from problems, but she wasn’t doing that. She was taking a break.
Lily was a little disoriented, despite the luxury of the transport, by the time she’d walked across the tarmac, collected her baggage, and submitted her passport. She didn’t have any idea, she belatedly realized, how she was getting to Rafe’s house. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
A lurch of anxiety that was absolutely ridiculous, the result of more than thirty hours of travel, of waking up on the other side of the world with the sun in exactly the wrong place for your body clock, and most of all, of not directing her life herself for the first time in three years.
She knew all the reasons, and she felt it anyway. The tightness in her chest, the clutch of fear. Then she walked through huge glass doors that opened with a pneumatic hiss, saw one of the only three people she knew in Australia, and something in her untwisted again.
“Lily. Welcome to Oz.” Willow Sanderson, Rafe’s cousin, a tall redhead with pale, porcelain skin absolutely unsuited for the strong Australian sun, gave her a hug.
“Hi.” Lily was laughing, and she was trying to pretend she wasn’t a little teary, too. “It’s so good to see you. I didn’t know you’d be here. I had this sudden, horrible thought that I was going to have to drive on the left without warning, in someveryexpensive car that Martin thought I needed.”
Willow had hold of Lily’s suitcase already, was wheeling it toward the doors. Outside, Australia’s Gold Coast was all blue sky and sunshine even in winter. “No dramas,” she said, “not unless youwanta car. If you do, give Martin a ring, and I’m sure he’ll get somebody to deliver one. If not, though, there’s a bike at the house you can use, and the shop and the caff just a hop, skip, and jump away. Heaps of food in the fridge as well, though, so you should be good.” She tossed Lily’s suitcase in the back of a white panel van with an ease that belied her slim frame and said, “Chin up. Forty-five minutes and we’re there. Rafe says you need a break, and there’s no place better for it. I’d tell you how many times I’ve used his place to escape some rotten choice of bloke and the disastrous consequences, but it’d be embarrassing.”
Lily asked, “Did you drive all the way from Brisbane to get me, though?”
“Yeah,” Willow said. “No worries, though. I don’t have a job until tomorrow.”
“You’re a…I’m sorry,” Lily said. “I never found out.”
“Caterer.” Willow merged onto the motorway. “Which is a flash way of saying ‘Cook.’ Never mind.”
An edge there, surely. Lily focused on that, because it was always an easier place to put her attention. And because Willow, with her patrician looks and unexplained connection to her cousins, had been a puzzle even during the two days Lily had spent in Australia before. “Jace said you grew up with them,” she said. “Which sounds interesting. Challenging, too, maybe. A whole lot of personality between those two.”
Willow smiled, passed a car going twenty kilometers an hour too slowly—probably tourists, clutching in terror, their first time driving on the left—and continued heading south, past a cluster of tall apartment buildings that didn’t look anything like Lily would have imagined in a coastal resort. So far, this didn’t look terribly different from Southern California, freeway and all, and she suppressed a pang of disappointment that was nothing but ungrateful.
“You could say that,” Willow said. “Or you could say that they’re the best non-brothers a girl who loses her parents could hope for. I was twelve when I went to live with them. They were fourteen and seventeen, something like that. Jace was a bit scary even then, but he was kind. Think anybody at school gave me stick? Not once Jace looked at them, they didn’t. Rafe was something else. Rafe’s the reason I’m still single.”
