Page 93 of Sexy as Sin
“I need to...” Her hand was still in her hair.Wait,she thought.What?She knew it was too soon. Anybody would say it was too soon. Why didn’t itfeeltoo soon? “Whatever other decision I take,” she decided to say, “Ineedto get this sorted. It doesn’t sound like much to you, I know, but it’s everything I had. Almost every cent. All my... dreams. Hopes.”
“Do you know,” he asked, “what my first investment was?”
“No.”
“A run-down old brick factory that I turned into lofts. Huge windows, a great location near the river in Spokane, where I was living then—why does everybody want to live by water?—and a whole lot of funky. The rats’ nests dropped the price quite a bit. Fortunately, I’m not scared of rats. I worked on that thing every night. Every weekend. Did most of the renovation myself, right along with the guys I hired. About half of everything I’ve ever learned about financing, about where people want to live and how they want to do it, about costs and the building trades and how to manage both, and sure as hell about risk, I learned on that building.”
“How old were you?” she asked. “And I’m not fussed by too many animals myself, if they’re not venomous or actively trying to kill you, which they so often are in Queensland.”
“Twenty-four when I bought it. Regional sales manager for the paper company. Hotshot. Smooth talker. I got myself a balloon loan for way more than any bank should have lent me, with one almighty payment that was going to come due, and that balloon hung over my head like you wouldn’t believe. I was excited every day, my heart in my throat, and I was terrified, too. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thinking,I need to get the pest guys to drill those exploratory holes right now.And other times, I was waking up and grabbing for a notepad by the bed, writing notes I could barely read in the morning.Stainless steel appliances.That was before stainless got to be a thing.Garden courtyard under trees. Community.I sweated every minute of that project, but you know what’s weird?”
“No,” she said. “What’s weird?”
“I’ve thought, since then, that I kind of miss those days. I know I can do it now. Is it more comfortable? It sure is. Am I going to be personally trapping rats? Probably not. Am I going to lose my shirt? Nope. But it’ll never be as thrilling as when I leased that first unit. Second floor, on the river side. I could close my eyes right now and tell you exactly what that unit looked like, and the tree that was outside the window. It was a maple. Having those trees trimmed took a whole paycheck, but they sure looked gorgeous in the fall. I knew those trees and those windows and that red brick would sell the units, if I did the rest right, and they did. I shut my eyes, and I jumped. I believed.”
“It’s not easy,” she said. “And I’m not going to get rich at it. So why do I still want to do it?”
“Because that’s how we’re wired. Besides, if it were easy, everybody would do it. It’s kind of like surfing, I’m guessing. Or like skiing, something I know more about. You could try skiing sometime. You could even try it today. You’ve got to have the courage to throw yourself off that mountain, but you’ve got to have the skill to get to the bottom, too.”
“Always a first time, I guess.”
“Yep. Or a second time, even. Sometimes, the second time’s even harder, because you know exactly how scary it can be. Maybe you wiped out bad the first time around. On the other hand, maybe that means you’ve learned something about how to do it right. Failure doesn’t have to just mean failure. Sometimes, it's the door you have to go through to get somewhere better.”
The pilot looked out from the cockpit again, but if Brett noticed, he didn’t show it. His gray eyes were sober, and he was all the way focused on her when he said, “First time, second time, any time. If you’ve got the guts to go for it, and you want it bad enough? You can make it. You can believe.”
She wasn’t going to fly back in the Residence. That was pretty firmly in the “no” column.
“Above my touch,” she told Brett later that morning, when he was ringing his assistant to arrange her transport, and she was trying not to fall into the luxury of being that spoiled. “Not something I need, if I don’t have you to sleep with, and not something I want to get used to.”
They were having coffee before he headed into the office, on a pale-brown suede couch set on an enormous Persian rug in another spectacular house, this one on the edge of the flat expanse of white that would be the lake in summer, with forested hills rising beyond. Or mountains, depending how you defined them. A huge river-rock chimney to one side held a gas stove, with another one on the chimney’s other side, in a room that Brett had set up as his office.
There was another double stove upstairs in the master suite. In that space, the chimney column separated the bedroom area from a pedestal bath that sat in a niche beside more floor-to-ceiling windows. The tub had a gold-framed antique mirror hanging behind it, and aged Persian carpets in muted shades of gold, rose, and green covered the wide-plank, dark wood floor. A modern but comfortable-looking sectional couch in tan leather in the corner gave you someplace to retreat, if you were too fatigued from your long soak to make it to the bed, or if you just wanted to lounge and read a cooking magazine. This house was more rustic and homier than the Portland loft, but the kitchen was nearly as good, with cream-colored cabinets and granite countertops veined with beige, cream, and chocolate. It needed a wall of ovens instead of the range to be perfect, but she loved it anyway.
Above her touch or not, she was dying to try that bath. She’d bet Brett wouldn’t use it if he lived here until he was ninety. Unless, of course, somebody got in there with him. There was heaps of room, and, she was realizing, being warm and cozy and naked in a room with a fire blazing, while the snow fell outside, might be a sexy thing in itself. If she stood, for example, in front of those windows, looked out like she didn’t know he was watching, let her dressing gown drop to the floor, and lifted her hair to pin it for the bath, using the dark reflection as her mirror? If she did all of that slowly enough, he’d get in the bath with her. Possibly after a detour to the couch. Or just standing there, watching the reflection of their bodies pale against the dark glass as he touched her. He loved to look at her naked, and she loved watching him look.
If she kept on like this, he was going to have to give her one ofherfantasies for her birthday. He’d enjoy hearing them. He’d enjoy choosing one even more.
Get serious.“You live on the water,” she said, instead of telling him about her naughty plans for his flash bath. She’d tell him over dinner, after she’d made him something he absolutely couldn’t resist, and got him to drink a glass of wine with her, maybe. She’d found a good shop in Portland with a very knowledgeable owner, and had hidden two bottles in her suitcase. Wine in that bath, in front of the fire? That would be a luxury, and he’d have candles for emergencies, surely.
Focus.“This view can’t be comfortable,” she told him. “Why did you buy this house? I love it, but it’s mad, for you.” Considering that the entire end wall of this room, with its peaked, beamed ceiling, was windows, and nearly half of the side wall as well. There was an entire deck out there that, she’d bet money, he’d never set foot on.
“I didn’t just buy it,” he said a little sheepishly. “I built it. Because it’s the best, that’s why, and it’s comfortable, other than the view. It’s my homiest house. I’m a little bit over stainless steel and floating staircases by now, to be honest. Besides, it’s going to appreciate. It already has.”
“You’re seeing nothing but water in summer, surely.” He understood fears. Why did he insist on minimizing his?
He picked up a remote on the most beautiful coffee table she’d ever seen, a sort of wave shape in a light cherry accented by pale inlaid strips, and pushed a button. Cream fabric shades rolled almost silently up from the bottom of all the windows, where they stopped halfway. “Lake view,” he said, “all gone. Very useful feature.” And smiled.
She did go skiing after she’d dropped him off at his office, taking a lesson that he’d set up for her, and it was awesome. Not entirely like surfing, but not so different. The same rush, and the same way of balancing yourself, then swooping into what Nature had given you with all the confidence you could muster, carving out your path. Not so much colder than winter surfing, either, if you were outfitted well enough, and she was, thanks to that credit card. She didn’t even get snow down her back or her boots when she fell, and she fell heaps.
On Saturday, she went again, on her own this time, and pushed it. Brett was right. Shoving off the mountain was a leap of faith, even more exhilarating because you’d wiped out last time you’d tried.
Afterwards, she drove to Lily’s lingerie shop, picking up coffees and smoothies along the way, because it was always better not to arrive empty-handed. The shop was busy, which was surely good, so she spent a happy hour in the back room playing a board game with Lily’s daughter Bailey, with the goofiest, gangliest dog she’d ever seen snoozing at their feet, and tried not to feel like it was home.
Rafe was off filming, transforming his sweet, sexy self into hard-man Delta Force soldier Matt Sawyer in a New Mexican approximation of the Middle East, but that didn’t affect Lily’s welcome, since she greeted Willow like the almost-sister-in-law she’d longed for all her life. She was so pregnant, she looked about to pop, even though the baby wasn’t due for a month, and she was glowing with it. Rafe’s absence clearly wasn’t stopping Lily’s shop assistant Hailey from treating Willow like family, either, because she took one look at Willow during a break in business and said, “Excuse me, hon, but that’s the wrong bra for you. I wouldn’t say it normally, of course, but here you are, and Brettdidcall and say that if you happened to come by... Well, he’s a man who’s been wishing he had a woman to spoil, that’s been obvious to me for a long time, and if I were you, I’d go for it. Heck, if I were thirty years younger and not married,I’dgo for it. Since you’re here anyway, let’s find you something better. I can think of about five bras right now that’d be darling on you, with that beautiful slim figure.”
By the time Hailey was halfway done “finding a bra,” the hooks of Willow’s dressing room were crowded with hangers full of bras, undies, and nighties whose prices made her head spin. Right now, she was wearing a short ivory silk dressing gown with averywide band of lace at the bottom that, when you turned around, ended halfway down your bum. Hailey said, with mischief in her eyes, “This style’s called ‘Love Me Forever,’ and that looks like it’s just about right, because, honey, that thing on you? He’ll take histime. It’s got a matching panty. Here you are. That’s going to be just gorgeous. Don’t you think, Lily?”
“Oh, yes,” Lily said, taking a break from re-hanging stock. “That’s perfect with your hair. This look was Rafe’s idea, by the way, Willow. He said, short robe and thong, and any man would be all done. He pulls on that bow, and he’s got everything he wants. We had it in the window. He said it would make men want to shop, and he was right.”
