Page 37 of Sexy as Sin
He didn’t ask her to stay, just thanked her for dinner and for washing up, polite and remote once more. She wanted to ask him to come out from behind the wall, and to tell him she liked the man she’d seen when he had, but she didn’t know how. Instead, she drove home anddidn’tanalyze the evening with Azra.
Just before she went to sleep, she got his text.
That got a little intense. Could have been the music. Could have been the night. Could even have been the woman.
She didn’t need to text him back. She’d see him tomorrow. Even as she thought it, her thumbs were flying.
I liked what I saw.
When Brett got up at six-thirty, he thought,I get to shower tonight,washed up with agonizing slowness, put on some of the clean clothes Willow had folded for him the night before, wished they weren’t PJs, and went to work. His leg didn’t hurt as much as yesterday, and he wasn’t as tired as yesterday, either. Nothing but upward movement from now on.
Start again. Start from here.Two sentences. Six syllables. Exactly like every other morning. He didn’t need to think about a woman’s skin, luminous in the light of dusk, or about laughing green eyes. He definitely didn’t need to think about her mouth, which was tipped upward at the corners even in repose, like she’d always smile more easily than she’d do anything else. He definitely didn’t need to think about all the life in her, or about how it had pulled him into saying too much, making himself that vulnerable.
Pain pills had a lot to answer for.
The house coffeemaker came with the kind of metal coffee pods he usually didn’t mess with. Luckily, he didn’t have to, because Willow had made him cold-brewed coffee and left it in the fridge. He poured some over ice and drank it standing up, because carrying things, he’d discovered, was the hardest part of this. If they could spill, they were even trickier.
Never mind. Standing up was good for him. He put the French toast casserole into the oven and started on the painstakingly slow process of opening windows, something else that was good for him. The cottage had air conditioning, but he loved the touch of the breeze and the sound of the outdoors. He always had. He also had the physical therapist coming at ten, and the hours before then were his best chance to catch his U.S. contacts still at their desks.
He was already on the phone when the crunch of tires on pavement announced a visitor. She leaped up the stairs like a woman with vitality to spare. Yellow sundress over bare skin, flip-flops, red hair in a damp braid that had soaked the back of her dress to the waist. He looked up from the speakerphone, from which Brandon Calverson was saying, slightly anxiously, “Pre-construction sales reached sixty-seven percent in January,” which Brett already knew from the graph in front of him.
Willow flapped a hand at him, then opened the oven, checked her casserole, and washed her hands before slapping a frying pan on the stove and beginning to peel and slice a banana. He was getting caramelized bananas for breakfast, apparently. He kept talking to Calverson. “Increase the ad buy by fifteen percent, and do another round with the media.”
“We’re tracking well,” Calverson said. “Up ten percent over projections.”
“Do it anyway.” Brett didn’t let himself get impatient. Calverson was young and eager, and you didn’t squash that enthusiasm, you fostered it. “Those units are desirable, that’s the idea. Hard to get. We keep our foot on the gas all the way, and next time, they’ll jump faster.”
A few more words, and he hung up, then checked the call off his list. “Hi,” he told Willow. “I didn’t know you were coming this morning.”
“And you’re busy,” she said, her hands, like the night before, never stopping. “That’s OK. Go ahead and don’t mind me. I was surfing, then buying fruit and veg a few kilometers up the road for the event I’m doing today. I thought about you here alone and realized, how does he carry the plate to the table? I’m doing your bananas, since I’m here anyway, and then I’ll fix your plate and be off again. Things to do, mate.”
He wanted to tell her to stay, but he had a call scheduled in two minutes, and it would be a long one. He said, “Thank you,” pulled up the email he needed, jotted some notes on a legal pad, and dialed the number.
Fifteen minutes later, he was still on the phone, his carefully arranged plate and a hot mug of coffee were on the table, and she was gone.
Stupid,Willow thought, driving down the hill.Stupid, stupid, stupid.She may have banged the steering wheel a time or two with her fist as well.
Men wanted... poodles. Salukis. Afghan hounds. Elegant, mysterious, and a little aloof. She was a Golden Retriever, and men didn’t want a Golden Retriever. If she hadn’t known that already, Gordy had told her. And yet, time after time, there she was, bounding into the picture with her tongue practically hanging out, begging, “Be my friend! Throw the ball! Let’s play! I love you!”
The man hadhiredher. To turn up every night for three weeks and cook, and keep him company “if you like.” Which was, no matter what she’d thought the night before, just a polite man being polite.
She’d been taken in by the rumpled look, the vulnerability. That wasn’t him. He was a very rich, endlessly guarded man who lived half a world away, a dozen years her senior and a few light years more sophisticated. If she kept throwing herself at him, she was going to end up humiliated, no matter how kind he was.
So, yes, on the minus side, she felt like a bloody idiot. On the plus side, she managed to go into Nourish’s kitchens and, in the midst of prep for her ladies’ lunch, tell Amanda, “I’d like to take a look at the books. Time for me to educate myself. Could you give me the login and the password, please?” in as offhand a way as you could ask for. She might be lame at business, but she didn’t have to be a Golden Retriever.
Amanda kept filling tiny chocolate cups with mousse. “I’ll check with Tom. He was planning to do some data entry today.”
“You don’t need to do that.” Willow whisked lemon juice, aioli, mustard, and salt and pepper together in an enormous stainless-steel bowl, then added eggs, almond meal, cornmeal, and chopped mint and beat it into cohesiveness. “It doesn’t have to be... finalized, or whatever you call it. I’d just like to take a look.”
“Closed,” Amanda said with a tight smile. “That’s the word. I wouldn’t even be able to tell you whether he’d entered all the invoices. It makes no sense at all to look at them until the month closes. Honestly, Willow, you don’t need to worry about this.”
Willow concentrated on folding fresh crabmeat into her mixture. “I’m not trying to take over that side of things, no worries. I’m familiarizing myself, that’s all.”While somebody’s here who’ll know what the bloody hell he’s looking at,she didn’t say. When February was “closed,” whatever that was? Brett would be in Montana. Or wherever else he lived.I live many places,he’d said.
She began to form her crab cakes into patties and checked the temperature of her pans. Perfect. A snap pea salad in a simple vinaigrette, some radishes for crunch, and that was the luncheon half done. Melon and blueberry cups made with cubed yellow watermelon, orange cantaloupe, and some red watermelon and kiwifruit for contrast, and vanilla cupcakes topped with perfectly piped chocolate buttercream. Light, delicious, and perfect.
Brett might love that, too. Shellfish could be too rough on his delicate system, though, and then there was the fact that not everybody was mad for it. They were missing out on some of the best things in life, but there you were. Peopleweremad. She’d resisted looking up Lewiston, Idaho, online last night, because she hadn’t needed to dive further into Brett-obsession, but she had a feeling it wasn’t a culinary wonderland. He probably put tomato sauce onto all his food, except that he’d call it ketchup. She probably had him built up higher than he really deserved.
Yeah, right.
