Page 95 of Tempting as Sin
Why, then, was Lily reclining in a white leather armchair, alone in the forward-most of three suites inside the most luxurious executive jet she’d ever seen, a porcelain mug of herbal tea on the polished walnut table in front of her, noise-canceling headphones muffling the sound of the engines, and halfway across the Pacific? A very good question whose answer was, in a word, “Rafe.”
Or possibly two words. “Rafe and Martin.”
All right, three words. The real reason, or the last straw. “Remodeling.”
When the cameras hadn’t left the day after her meeting with Brett Hunter, when Charmaine Hopkins, the social worker, had told Lily that Bailey’s foster mother had complained, and that Lily couldn’t go back to see her again? She’d set her shoulders and dealt with the consequences of her actions. She’d put makeup on her eye, gone back into the shop, and found comfort in focusing on her customers, on her business, on herlife. She’d channeled the serenity she’d lost over the past couple days, had smiled, had talked about a flattering new style, run to find another size, tagged a new shipment. She’d coped.
When she’d gone home, though, and her driveway had been full of pickup trucks and her house full of the sound of sledgehammers, an industrial vacuum, and men’s voices? When cardboard had covered her kitchen floor and dusty boot prints had covered the cardboard? When Brett’s foreman, an enormous, bearded man named Travis, with a loud voice and an easy laugh, had said, “Boss says do it quick, so we’ll have ’er knocked out for you tonight, and start framing tomorrow”—
She’d been excited. Of course she had. She’d been more grateful than she could say. But her living room furniture and flooring had still been covered by canvas tarps, and her entire downstairs had still been a staging area. Two-by-fours and drywall, oak flooring and ceramic tile in stacks, and a shower stall where her easy chair should have been.
She’d ordered new furniture online while crouched into a corner of the porch, invisible from the road. A double bed, a desk and chair, a chest of drawers, a bookshelf, a small armchair for reading and a cute area rug, bedding and curtains and curtain rods, all arriving in five days or less.
She’d gone with “hope.” She’d gone with “prepared for the best outcome,” and had done her utmost to ignore the discombobulation. Ifshewas rattled by the temporary loss of her cozy, organized, perfectly neat retreat, how must Bailey be feeling?
Rafe had shown up, faithful cameraman in tow, when she was milking the goats, and he’d brought another picnic basket with him. She’d opened the front door, after the chores were done, and taken him on the world’s quickest inspection tour, which involved three steps into the living room, and he’d eyed the chaos and said, “I’m not telling you what to do, but you surely can’t be planning to stay here while they do this.”
“I thought I could,” she admitted, “but not so much.” She pressed a hand to her head and tried to laugh. “I need a Tylenol, but it was in the downstairs bath, and now it’s in a box. When I had the house built originally, I lived in a trailer. Can you get a trailer for a week?”
“Could live in Ruby’s,” he said, a smile lurking around his eyes. “I hear the back door’s unlocked.”
She did laugh, then. “No, thanks. I should get a motel room. But I checked around, and all the decent stuff in town is booked, between it being the high season and our posse of followers. I found something in Kalispell, but it makes it tricky with the animals.”
He led the way out onto the porch, sat defiantly in the porch swing in full view of the cameras, pulled the picnic basket toward him, and opened a beer. “I could offer the obvious,” he said. “That you could stay with me. But I’m guessing that’s been considered and rejected.” He was working on the wine bottle now. Lily wished it didn’t look quite so good, the most temporary of Band-Aids.
She hesitated, then said, “Obviously, I’m grateful for the offer.”
“But you don’t like the cabin,” he said, pouring her a glass. “Especially not upstairs.”
“Stupid,” she said.
“No. Natural. You almost died there.” He sat back in the swing and handed her the wine. “And don’t say it,” he said. “You can keep it at one glass. One’s pretty reasonable. Or you can drink half and dump the rest.” After that, he sat there, his clever fingers twirling his beer bottle and a faint frown on his face, until she asked, “What?”
“You don’t want to be rescued.” The words came out slowly. “You don’t want a crutch. But what if…”
“What if what?” She took a sip, and sighed. It was sogood.Half a glass, then. A temporary indulgence, not a crutch.
“You don’t want to go stay on the houseboat for a week or so, either, I’m guessing,” he said, “until your house is finished, because, besides the shop and the goats and the garden, you don’t want to get in Jace and Paige’s way. That place isn’t very big, and Jace is an insufferable bastard when he’s finishing a book. One-track mind, or two tracks at most, because he cares about Paige. And Tobias. But even that’s a stretch, and I happen to know he’s two weeks out from ‘The End’ right now. Best avoided. Also, you don’t want to bring the press to them. Identical twins! Tragic shooting! The Killer Cop and the Trophy Wife! Blonde, beautiful—and deadly!”
Lily made a face. “Not to mention the hero and the superhero. All four of us are tabloid fodder all the way, and somebody’s going to lose their temper. Not Jace, probably, but Paige?Oh,yeah. Why do people have such a thing about identical twins, anyway? Not just women. Men are…”
She broke off, and he looked at her more sharply, smiled with that rueful edge that killed her, put a hand out to brush her cheek, cameras or no, and said, “Nah, baby. No fantasies about you and your sister. It’s all about you.”
She let out her breath. “You did not know I was thinking that.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I did.”
“You’re freaky,” she informed him. “You do realize that.”
His laugh rang out in the evening air, and she smiled herself and felt so much better.
“Right,” he said. “Because Icanread your mind, I know you’re dying to escape, especially since you can’t see Bailey, and she’s still stuck in the house of horrors. I found out, by the way,” he added too casually, “that her grandmother’s stable, and they’re cautiously hoping to get her off the ventilator in the next couple days. When she does leave hospital, though, she’ll end up in a nursing home for a bit. Best-case scenario.”
She sat up straighter. “Rafe. Really? How do you know?”
He gave a shrug. “Not everybody’s as discreet as they ought to be.”
“Especially,” she said, “if a certain werewolf brings up the best flowers in the gift shop and thanks the staff for everything they’ve done for hisaunt,then leans a forearm on the counter, possibly, shows off his muscles and his smile and his charm and hiseyes,and chats to them about a tragic family misunderstanding, and how glad he is that it isn’t too late, because his mum’s pretty cut up about it. If he takes the time to describe his mother’s romantic childhood, camping out with her beloved little sister in the high country, hearing wolves howl in the light of the full moon and seeing wild mustangs racing across a mountain meadow.Afterputting his jeans in the dryer on High to get them even tighter.”
