A Very Daring Christmas (The Tavonesi Series Book 8) (11 page)

Buster, the little black-and-white cat belonging to the neighbor, slunk in through the French doors facing the sea. He ribboned through her ankles, purring.

She rubbed Buster behind his white-tipped ears. His purr was more like a rumble, but she loved him. When her schedule settled down, she was definitely going to get a cat of her own. But one that would get along with Buster.

“I wasn’t thinking, was I, Buster?”

But she had thought. And thought hard. Right after she’d awakened from the hottest dream she’d ever had. A dream that starred Jake Ryder front and center in a performance that would’ve made her blush if she’d been awake. Just the memory had heat rising up her neck.

The sound of the front-gate buzzer made her jump and spill her glass of iced tea across the table, sending Buster running out the door. The tea towel she grabbed soaked up most of the liquid. Ignoring the now soggy tablecloth, she pressed the button on the intercom. The sturdy gate and latch were the two bits of security her agent had insisted she install.

“Flower delivery.” The laughter in Jake’s voice reached in behind her shoulder blades and lifted some of the tension lodged there.

“Wrong house,” she said as she buzzed him in.

She rounded the corner at the side of the cottage and stopped just sort of colliding with him.

He ducked to avoid hitting his head on the low-hanging eaves.

“Hadn’t thought of flowers as body armor.” He laughed and then held out an armful of blossoms—orchids, tuberoses, zinnias, delphiniums and full-headed heirloom rose blooms.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, taking the bundle into her arms. “Thank you.” She dipped her nose into the flowers and inhaled. Even through the aroma of the blooms, she was sure she could scent Jake.

Male. And a male she wanted more than was good for her.

He whistled as he took in the view. “That’s one amazing sight.”

She’d never tire of the view down the coast, of the soft green lawn rolling toward the cliffs and disappearing into the vast horizon of the sparkling blue sea. But sometimes it took a visitor’s stunned reaction to remind her just how unbelievably awesome her little cottage on the cliffs above the cove really was.

“Compliments of my grandmother. She once said leaving this place to me was to make up for delivering me into the hands of my mother.”

She stopped. Now wasn’t the time for family confessions. It was
never
time for family confessions. Especially with the family she had.

“I’ll just put these in water. Although as huge as this is, I might have to fill my neighbor’s kiddie pool to house them all.”

His easy laugh as he followed her into the cottage loosened another knot binding her belly.

“All the places around yours are huge,” he observed from the doorway.

“This is the last holdout on the north side of town. This cottage has been in my family for generations. It used to be a mechanic’s garage, back in the early 1920s.” She tapped her foot on the linoleum. “Still has the hard cement floors. But the glory of it is the view and the private stairs to the small cove below the cliff.”

She found a champagne bucket and stashed the flowers in it. Spread them with her hands. Elliott had never brought her flowers. He’d have his agent send them, and they’d always felt like a bribe. Or an apology. Or both. The flowers Jake had brought reminded her that she had an apology to make. To him. Dragging him into her press hell hadn’t been on the agenda.

“It isn’t much,” she said, noticing him taking in the cottage interior as she reentered the main room. “Just a sleeping alcove, a tiny kitchen and a small bathroom with a shower that would seem small even to an RV owner.”

But it was hers. And though she’d worried all morning, now that he was here and she was sharing her special hideaway with him, it just felt right. And that felt foreign. She had a ways to go before she could scrape the sludge off her heart and trust her instincts.

“This your mom?” Jake held out a glamor shot of her mother from the seventies, one of the few she hadn’t sent to storage.

“In all her glory. She won the Oscar that year.”

“Runs in the family.” It wasn’t a question, but his tone was probing.

“She wasn’t thrilled when I got my second Oscar, since I bested her record.” Cameron picked up the soaked dish towel from the table and ducked into the kitchen to wring it out in the sink. “It’s not easy when Hollywood is all you have. She’s still recovering from her fall from star billing.”

“I imagine being a star is hard at any level.”

She returned from the kitchen with a wad of paper towels and blotted at the tablecloth. “You would know.”

He turned from where he’d been staring out the doors toward the sea. “No, Cameron, it’s different for me. Maybe it’s because you represent the power of story in people’s lives. You become a sort of portal to the soul, if you get my meaning. Because of the stories. Watching movies and living the events of the characters in them is almost a religious experience for some people.”

“From what I’ve seen at the few ball games I’ve attended,
baseball
is a religious experience.” Was she actually arguing the merits of baseball with him? Maybe her common sense had taken a vacation.

He laughed. “At least people don’t fight wars over baseball. The experience is more of a bonding. Even rabid fans of rival teams find common ground in the game itself. There’s a lot of love in baseball.”

Stories as a portal to the soul?
Love
in sports? What kind of guy talked about such things? The only topic Elliott had wanted to discuss was his next PR move.

In contrast, Jake reached in under her radar and rearranged her understanding of the world with his insights. And the aching yearning he fired in her? She needed to get a handle on that and fast.

“Let’s walk down to the point. You can see Dana Cove. The tide pools and ocean here have been my true home for longer than I can remember.”

She poured two fresh glasses of iced tea and handed one to him. They walked across the sloping lawn, past the small blue canvas cabana and down to the point overlooking the cove. The beach below them was dotted with the umbrellas of the few families who hadn’t yet gone home to their dinners.

“In an hour, we’ll most likely have the whole cove to ourselves.”

“That is the best prospect I’ve heard all day.”

She heard the whisper of desire in his tone. But if she was going to enjoy any part of this day, she needed to get her apology off her chest. The need weighed on her and nagged under her thoughts. She wanted to relax into this time with him, and to do that, she needed to clear the air.

“Jake, I’m so sorry about last night. I mean, I’m not sorry about last
night
, but I’m sorry about the whole tabloid thing.”

“You can’t be responsible for everybody in the whole world. Especially not Peeping Tom idiots.
I
should’ve been more careful.”

“No,
I
should’ve known the coast wasn’t as clear as it had looked—it almost never is these days. I hadn’t meant for you to get dragged into that part of my life.” A long draw of the iced tea didn’t wash away the chagrin needling in her chest.

He spoke before she could.

“What I was trying to say up there in your cottage is that sports fans, well, they’re different. At least baseball fans are. And playing for them is a humbling experience. When I first hit the majors and got a taste of the buzz, I thought the clamor was all about my performance. About me. I got caught up in the hype. But guess what? It’s all about the fan experience, not me. I know that now.”

He pointed to a family making their way up the public path a short distance away. “See that guy down there? In the Giants cap? People like him are the ones paying me to do my job.
They’re
the reason I get paid to do what I love. Sure, players are important. But the
game
is the reason we all come to the diamond. Love of the game.”

He took a sip of his tea and shook his head. “Sports fans have respect. They get the concept of boundaries, and they respect them for the most part. They know it’s about the game. But you? You touch people in a different place with your work, a powerful place. And the media exploits that power. The media entices people to think they can have a piece of you when they write those gossipy stories. And unstable people who read that stuff, who knows what goes on in their heads? I doubt all the hyped-up hearsay serves them. It obviously doesn’t serve you.”

It was as though he’d reached in and untangled the mess of thoughts she’d been harboring about the tabloid press and just that easily made sense of them.

“No one ever put it so clearly,” she said. “I mean about the whole storytelling business. I want to portray deep stories, stories that can lift people’s spirits, stories that entertain and help people leave their worries behind for a while. And if I’m lucky, I hope to inspire new meaning or new perspectives. It’s why I love what I do. But sometimes I think I just can’t take it anymore, having two lives, one public and one private. Trying to guard one from the other. Or even trying to find some comfortable common ground in between.”

“From what I saw when I watched one of your films last week, luck has nothing to do with your performance.”

He’d checked out her work. Millions of people had seen the films she’d starred in—but Jake taking the time to watch one? How could that feel so darn personal? She bit at the inside of her cheek to stop herself from asking which film he’d watched. And tried to pretend she wasn’t dying to know.

“My agent told me to be more proactive,” she said. “That if I fed stories to the tabloids through my PR agency, like my friend Angelina does, then maybe they’d back off on the more personal stuff.”

His eyes narrowed, shuttering. “Terrible advice. The press goes for the sensational angle no matter what you feed them. They play to the market. I’m not comfortable anywhere near that territory. It’s why I stay as far away from publicity as I can.”

The cool tea slid down her throat, but the truth of his words burned a path of unease straight to her belly. She nestled her glass into the grass at the edge of the cliff and motioned toward the stone stairs leading down to the beach. “Want to see the sea caves at the other end of the cove?”

“What about my surfing career? I saw a couple of boards beside your cottage.”

The sparkle in his eyes had returned.

“My cousin’s boards. He’s on the semipro circuit. But these are yellow-flag waves. You’d be crazy to go out in them on a surfboard. There must be a storm offshore.”

“You mean I have to stick to baseball? I thought maybe I’d develop a career to fall back on.”

“We could bodysurf.”

His eyes widened, and then he grinned. “You’re on.”

She showed him how to close the curtains to the sleeping alcove so he could change. She shimmied into her bikini in the tiny bathroom and then grabbed a batik pareo wrap and a towel from the cabinet next to the shower stall.

When the curtains parted and he stepped out from behind them, she sucked in a breath. She’d seen him at the beach without his shirt, but the board shorts didn’t hide the roping muscles in his legs. He looked like a god who had stepped down from Olympus to grace the earth. And the devouring look roving over her body had her feeling very much like a mortal in the face of a power she just might not know how to handle.

“I think I’ll like bodysurfing. At least the uniform is pretty darn appealing,” he said with a wink that felt like a touch.

A nervous laugh escaped her. And a quick flick of her wrist had her wrapped in the pareo and leading the way down to the cove.

“You know about using your arm to steer?” she asked as they descended the last of the stone steps to the beach. She dropped the towel and her pareo to the sand, aware of his eyes on her, exciting her as much as any touch ever had.

“Nope, complete novice. And in your hands.”

“The trick is to get your head and shoulders down below your hips and legs.” She pantomimed the move. “That will help you channel the power of the wave with your body.” She was stammering and suddenly feeling ridiculous.

She was coaching a world-class athlete about how to move? But it wasn’t just that. He’d swiveled to copy her, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the way his muscles rippled with the power and grace of a wild creature. Everything about Jake called to a wild place in her. The wild place that she’d worked most of her life to ignore. She’d seen what following those impulses led to, but she had underestimated the force of desire that he called up in her.

“Lead on.” He gestured toward the rolling surf.

Right.

“Once gravity pulls you into the wave, your head and shoulders will come up,” she shouted as they plunged into the calm between a set of rolling waves. Because of El Niño, the water was warmer than usual for December, but still bracing. “And don’t back down,” she added. “Once the wave has you, you have to be one hundred percent committed.”

“My strategy for life,” he said, grinning.

“The wave will suck you back at first. Stay with it, and then you’ll feel the forward thrust.”

She took the first wave, caught the curl and cut through the back just before it broke onto the sand. With a triumphant whoop, she dove through the next wave and swam out to where he was treading water, observing.

“Is it too late for me to admit that the biggest wave I’ve ever been in was at the water park when I was seven?”

“Way too late. You have to play your hunches to catch the good ones. You’ll get the feel of it. But if at any point you want to pull out, just use your shoulder facing the wave and give a few strong kicks. You’ll pop out the back of the wave. If not—”

“I’m on it.”

After he’d made a few swift kicks, the wave caught him up. But he didn’t pull out in time, and the wave had him locked in its watery embrace with no intention of letting go. She knew the impact of the body slam he was about to experience and winced.

He came up near the tideline, sputtering and shaking sand out of his hair. He rubbed at his shoulder where the sand had scraped it raw.