All Shook Up (6 page)

Because he could see she was genuinely upset and he would’ve killed for a mother with half her concern
when he was Tate’s age, he said, “Yeah, okay. I’m sorry. Go do your sales thing. We’ll be fine.”

“Don’t screw up,” she commanded and, turning on her heel, crossed the yard with long-legged strides. A moment later she’d disappeared down the switchback trail.

He slowly unclenched, muscle by muscle. He’d never met anyone who could turn him into one big nerve ending with so little effort the way that woman could. Blowing out a breath, he turned to see Sophie observing him. “I guess I’d better not screw up.” Somehow he managed to keep his tone light.

She rewarded him with an approving smile. “She might sound a tad overprotective—”

He snorted. “She sounds downright hostile.”

“Perhaps. But you must understand that Tate’s the light of her life.”

“Yeah, I’d have to be an idiot not to have figured that out.” He rose to his feet and stood looking down at her. “I guess I’d better go collect the kid and let you get ready for your appointment.” Squaring his shoulders, he sternly slapped down the consternation that nudged him at the thought of having sole responsibility for Tate for the next couple of hours. What the hell did he know about ten-year-olds? It’d been a long time since he’d been one.

As if she’d read his mind, Sophie said briskly, “I’ve been in the inn business for nearly thirty years, and it’s taught me to be a pretty good judge of character. You’ll do fine, dear.”

J.D. found Tate stretched out on his stomach on the floor in front of the television set. “Time to go, sport.”

“Ten more minutes, okay? The show’s still on.”

“Didn’t I hear you promise your mom you wouldn’t use that excuse if she let you watch TV?”

Tate shot him a toothy grin over his shoulder. “Yeah, but that was her. I didn’t promise you—”

“Turn off the tube, kid. We’ve got a porch roof to build.”

“No foolin’?” Tate hit the remote and the screen went dark. He jumped to his feet. “Let’s go!”

They stopped by the garage and J.D. selected a number of tools, including a Skil saw, which sent Tate into a paroxysm of delight.

“Can I saw something?” he demanded, dancing around J.D. as they made their way back to his cabin. “When do we get to cut something?”

“Later,” J.D. said. “First we have to get rid of the damaged portions. Then we’ll build a framework.”

It felt good, getting back to doing what he did best. He’d always found building satisfying, whether it was starting from scratch or taking something old and defunct and transforming it into a thing of function and beauty. As birds called to each other from the trees and the sun rose higher over the clearing in front of the cabin, he tore off the destroyed sections of the roof and tossed them down into the yard. Tate collected them and carted them to the spot J.D. had designated, stacking them in a pile.

By the time he swung down from the roof, sweat had spread wet patches under his arms, across his chest and stomach, and pooled in the small of his back. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it aside. Amusement tipped up the corners of his mouth when
Tate immediately followed suit, exposing a narrow, perfectly dry little chest.

“You’re doing excellent work,” he said, wiping a trickle of sweat out of his eyes with the back of his forearm. “Let’s take a break, whaddaya say?”

Tate swiped his arm across his eyes. “You bet.”

J.D. opened the refrigerator a few moments later and looked inside. He glanced over at Tate. “So what d’ya think, kid—a beer?”

Tate’s eyes lit up and he offered that big-toothed, megakilowatt smile. “Sure!”

J.D. fished out a couple of Thomas Kemper root beers and popped the tops. He handed one to Tate and clinked the neck of his own bottle against it. “Here’s mud in your eye, sport.”

They brought their drinks out into the yard and sat on the grass in the sun. J.D. took a deep swig from his bottle, then lay back and closed his eyes, cradling the cool glass against his bare stomach. He felt Tate do the same and couldn’t prevent the wry smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth.

They lay quietly for several moments. Then Tate said, “J.D.?”

He was aware that the kid had sat up and was now looking at him, but he kept his eyes closed. “Yeah?”

“Are you a bastard?”

J.D. jackknifed to a sitting position, cold anger coursing through his veins. He pinned Tate in the cross hairs of his displeasure. “Is that what your mother says I am?”

“No!” Tate scrambled back. His pop bottle tipped over and rolled twice, root beer glugging out into the
grass. His eyes grew huge, but although his chin trembled once, he thrust it out in a way that reminded J.D. of the kid’s mother. “It’s w-what I am, and I just thought maybe, uh, you were, too.”

J.D. froze.
Good going, Carver. Maybe you oughtta take that temper down to the swimming area, where there’s a whole bunch of little kids you can terrify.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently and reached out to right the pop bottle. He winced when Tate flinched away, and carefully extended the drink to him. “I am sorry, Tate. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“’Kay.” A beat of silence went by; then Tate said tentatively, “That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

“Huh?”

Tate settled himself cross-legged and took a sip of his root beer, visibly regaining his usual ebullient confidence. “That’s the first time you’ve called me Tate. Usually you say ‘kid.’”

“Is that a fact?” J.D. studied the boy. “What the hell makes you think you’re a bastard?”

“I heard Kathleen Harris say it once to Marylou Zeka when I was down at the Pack ’n’ Save in town, and when I asked Mom what it meant, she said that was just a rude word for ignorant people to label me because she wasn’t married when I was born.” He tilted his head to one side. “So are you? A bastard like me?”

“I’ve been called one often enough, but my folks were actually married.” And he was still reeling that Dru hadn’t been. “For about five minutes, that is,” he amended. “You know, don’t you, that there are a lot
worse things you could be? Your mom’s crazy about you, and so are your grandma and grandpa.”

Tate shrugged, as if that were a given. “Sure.”

“Well, I hope you appreciate it, because that’s not exactly small spuds, kid. I might as well have been a bastard, because my father is just a name on a birth certificate to me. He and my mom were both drug users and he disappeared before I was even old enough to remember him.”

“Yeah, my dad did that, too. He left when he found out Mom was going to have me. Mom says he was just a kid himself, and that sometimes kids panic at the thought of that kinda responsibility.”

Pretty damn generous of her to make excuses for the guy, considering the jerk had left her high and dry to shoulder the share of both parents.

Tate wiggled his butt into the grass. “Uh, J.D.?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell Mom I told ya that, okay? When I told her what Mrs. Harris said, she explained about my dad leavin’ because he was scared and all, but she looked kinda sad.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, buddy.” J.D. rose to his feet and extended a hand to pull Tate to his. “I saw a glass-recycling container in the mudroom. Let’s go toss our bottles in it. Then what d’ya say we take a few measurements, so we can get down to the serious business of cutting wood?”

D
ru rose from one of the leather love seats bracketing the fireplace and shook hands with the delegates from the dentists’ association. She calmly watched as they filed past the long, timber front desk and out through the front door, but the minute it swished closed behind them an exultant smile spread across her face.

Jenna, the banquet coordinator, whooped. “Way to go, Dru! I’ve never seen a conference sold so smoothly.”

Dru shrugged, but the grin didn’t leave her face. “This place sells itself. Where else you gonna find views like this to go along with such an impressive package of meeting rooms, meals, and activities? Especially during ski season.”

“Throwing trail passes for their families into the package was brilliant, though.”

“Yeah, I thought that was pretty good, too.” Dru laughed and reached out to squeeze Jenna’s arm. “That array of menu samples you set up in the conference room certainly didn’t hurt, either. Good job.”

Moments later she was headed up the trail to J.D.’s cabin, still jazzed on the satisfaction of a job well done. How blessed she was to have a career she loved so much.

Arriving at the clearing, she swept her gaze across the area—and spotted J.D. Carver without his shirt on.

She stopped abruptly, as if an invisible force field had dropped out of the sky in front of her. Heart rate racing like an Indy 500 contender, she licked her lips several times in a futile bid to get back a little of the moisture that had left her mouth.

Bare, J.D.’s tanned shoulders looked even wider than they had in his ubiquitous white T-shirts. His back was long, damp, and muscular, and it tapered beautifully down to the sweat-soaked waistband of the jeans riding low on his hips.

He swiveled to plant a knee on a board braced atop a long sawhorse, and muscles bunched and elongated in his arms and back as he leaned forward to mark it with a pencil. He stuck the pencil behind his ear, and a tangle of dark hair shone in his armpit when he raised his arm higher to swipe perspiration from his forehead. Dru caught a glimpse of the silky hair fanning his chest; then he shifted slightly and she gawked like a schoolgirl at the fuller view it afforded her, helplessly tracking the narrowing growth pattern of dark hair down his hard stomach.

He slid the board out until the mark he’d made lined
up with the end of the sawhorse, the end hanging out beyond it. When he suddenly jerked his chin in a peremptory, c’mere gesture, she jumped guiltily. But he wasn’t even looking in her direction. Tate trotted down from the porch, where—to her eternal shame—she hadn’t even noticed him. He slid under J.D.’s bowed stomach and chest, his back to the man’s front as he assumed an identical posture of one knee on the sawhorse, the other foot planted on the ground. He leaned forward to brace his left hand on the board just before the end of the sawhorse, and Dru smiled at the serious expression on his face. He must be in heaven to be included in such a guy activity.

Then J.D. bent the elbow of his braced arm, dipped, and came up with a round-bladed, jagged-toothed saw in his free hand. Tate wrapped his hand around the handle, J.D. covered it with his own, and with a press of his finger against the trigger, the saw suddenly roared to life.

Dru’s spine snapped straight. What the hell was he thinking? Tate was
much
too young to be handling hazardous power tools. A scream of outrage roared up her throat, but she bit it back, terrified it would startle her son and cause him to jerk his braced hand forward into the path of the screaming teeth that were passing a mere hairsbreadth away from his fingertips. The instant the lumber tumbled to the ground and the saw whined into silence, however, she shot across the clearing.

Tate, who had hopped down to pick up the piece of wood, saw her first. “Hi, Mom! We’re rebuilding the porch roof.” J.D.’s head snapped up, but Dru hadn’t the
first idea what he was thinking as he watched her approach.

Her inclination was to snatch her son to her and inspect him head to toe for injuries. But she forced a few deeps breaths and reached for a measure of calm, then plastered a smile on her face. “I can see that. But J.D. is going to have to get along without your help for a while. I want you to run along to your grandma and grandpa’s.”

“But, Mom—”

“Now.”

“Aw,
man
.” He kicked at the grass, but accepted the shirt J.D. swept up off the ground and extended to him.

“You did good work, Tate. Thanks for the help.”

Tate’s smile was dazzling. “Yeah, it was major cool. Thanks for the beer.”

“
Excuse
me?” Oh, this just kept getting better and better.

Except for a sulky look, Tate ignored her. “Bye, J.D.,” he said and loped across the clearing.

He’d barely disappeared from view before she swung around and confronted J.D. “What the
hell
is the matter with you?”

He climbed the porch stairs in one huge stride. Infuriated at being ignored, she followed directly behind him, dogging his footsteps so closely she all but tromped on his bootheels.

He grabbed his T-shirt off the railing and swiped it across his chest and arms to remove the sweaty coating of sawdust that covered his torso. He tilted his head slightly when she began to impatiently tap her foot. “Aside from my failure to bring about world peace, you mean?”

“Don’t you get smart with me, Carver! I leave you alone with my son for two lousy hours, and—”

“Twenty-five minutes,” he interrupted. “I know. But you don’t have to apologize. I’m not griping about the overtime, even if it was unscheduled.”

Frustration made her growl deep in her throat. “You’re unbelievable! If Auntie Soph and Uncle Ben hadn’t raised me better, I’d pop you one for pulling stunts like that with my son.”

His dark eyebrows rose. “I take it you have a problem with my baby-sitting skills?” He had the unmitigated nerve to give her a slight smile, and Dru’s blood pressure soared. “I think I did a pretty damn fine job myself. Tate does, too.”

She took a hot step forward, and jabbed him in the sternum with her finger. “You call giving a ten-year-old beer and letting him play with power tools a
fine job
?” Her drilling finger underscored her ire on practically every other word. “If I were a man, I’d—”

“If you were a man, sweetheart, you wouldn’t get away with half the shit you already have.” He grabbed the offending finger in his fist and held it away from his chest. “Don’t go poking at me; I don’t take kindly to it.”

In pure, unthinking fury, Dru, who had never hit another human being in her entire life, swung her free hand at him.

The next thing she knew, both her hands had been captured, and she was being whirled around and thrust against one of the porch posts. Surrounded by the scent of hot, overworked male, she was aware of the hard-skinned hands pinning her wrists above her head,
the muscular forearms bracketing hers, the big body preventing any kind of retreat. But more than any of that, it was the fierce expression in his dark hazel-green eyes that pinned her in place.

“Listen, sister,” he said, thrusting his face close to hers. “You put your hands on me again, you damn well better have friendly intentions.” He pushed back slightly and frowned. “And for the record, I’ve been a construction foreman for more than a dozen years. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s instruct guys in the use of power tools.”

“Tate isn’t a
guy
, you troglodyte, he’s a little boy!”

“Hell, yes, he’s a little boy—and if you’d been paying the least bit of attention instead of reacting like a hysterical mama bear with a threatened cub, you would’ve seen that I was directing the saw, not Tate.”

“That would have been so comforting if he’d lost a finger,” she snapped. “They were within
centimeters
of that big blade!”

“They were behind mine! I would’ve had to buzz off my own fingers before that blade came anywhere near Tate’s, and trust me, lady, I’ve been handling machinery too damn long to make that sort of rank beginner mistake.”

Her heart pounded and her blood thundered through her veins, and she wanted to argue and rage and call him a liar. But she couldn’t truly remember the exact placement of their hands; she’d only known that Tate’s had seemed much too close to that whirring blade. “Fine,” she said through her teeth. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and agree that’s true.”

“Mighty damn big of you.”

“Yes, it is.” She thrust her chin up, only then fully realizing how close they stood. The sudden awareness increased the throb of her already racing pulse and, furious, she added, “But there’s still the matter of the beer.”

“Oh, for chrissake, Drucilla. I gave him
root
beer.”

“Root beer?”

“Yes. I’m not half the lowlife you seem to think I am—hell, I doubt anyone could be. Not to mention that only an idiot feeds booze to a little kid.” Releasing her wrists, he pushed back and gave her a look of disgust. “And that, lady, is something I have never been.”

Her arms dropped to her sides. Okay, she felt like a total fool. Her full-steam-ahead righteousness had fizzled into the humiliation of knowing she’d jumped to an insulting, ill-thought-out conclusion. Rubbing her wrists, she looked at him. Energy radiated off his powerful body and something in his eyes made her heart pound and her breath come short, and it made her want to berate him further, to vilify him for a number of reasons, not all of which had to do with her son.

But one thing was clear; she’d accused J.D. of being careless with her son when she didn’t actually know that to be a fact. Hell. She’d rather smooch a snake, but she was going to have to apologize. Her lip curled in distaste.

She
hated
being wrong.

Watching her watch him as if he were some ravaging beast that had somehow been allowed to wander into her civilized world, J.D. had a sudden urge to give her a demonstration of just what an animal he could
be. The very idea hauled him up short, and he took a smart step backward, thrusting a hand through his hair.

Holy hell. Where did this shit keep coming from? He’d never been a man who got off on forcing his attentions on women, and he sure as hell didn’t understand why this woman could so easily short-circuit his good sense. Tense and angry because he was still hungry for any excuse to lay his hands on her, he turned away.

“J.D., wait,” she said.

He didn’t look back. “So you can tell me again how I’ve screwed up? I don’t think so.”

“No,” she said, but he didn’t wait to hear the rest. He headed for the door, needing to get away and give all these roaring hormones a chance to settle down.

“Dammit, Carver,” she snapped and grabbed his arm. “Will you let me apolo—”

A savage sort of satisfaction burst through him, and whirling back, he backed her against the porch post again. “I warned you not to touch me,” he growled. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Then he clamped his mouth down on hers.

Her mouth was open in surprise or in protest—he wasn’t sure which, and at the moment, he didn’t honestly care. All he cared about was that her lips were soft and full as they cushioned his as if made for that specific purpose, that the warm inner cavern of her mouth was slick, and that her tongue was moist and sweet as he plunged his in to lick up all her flavors.

And then, oh, God, yes,
there
. With a soft yearning sound, her tongue tangled with his, and he groaned
when her hands came up, hot skin against hot skin, to clutch at his shoulders. He pressed her up against the post with his body, and made another rough sound in his throat at the feel of her breasts flattening against his chest.

Seconds, minutes, or hours later, he lifted his head and stared down at her slumberous eyes and swollen mouth. Licking his bottom lip, tasting her there, he canted his head to a new angle and kissed her again, his mouth widening over hers, his tongue dancing deeper. She made a soft little sound low in her throat and slid her hands up to cup his neck. Her legs shifted slightly apart.

His head reared back. “
Yes
.” Breathing like a racehorse at the end of a long stretch, he changed the angle again and then plunged back into the kiss. God, she tasted good. He couldn’t get enough. He skimmed his hands down her back and insinuated them between her body and the post, sliding them onto the lush curve of her butt. Sinking his fingers in, he pulled her up onto her toes and bent in order to line up the soft cotton seam of her shorts with the worn denim fly that was doing its best to contain his hard-on.

“Oh,” she said against his lips and he rocked his hips. “Oh!” Tugging his head back, she panted, “Oh, God. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I know,” he agreed. But he tightened his hands on her butt and pulled her closer, pressing against her insistently. He watched with satisfaction as her eyes drifted closed and her hands urged him closer; then he lowered his mouth again and kissed her until they both teetered on the edge of control.

A small background sound tugged at the last bit of sanity still clinging to his consciousness. He wanted to ignore it, but something in its tone pulled at him. He cracked open one eye.

And saw Tate standing frozen across the clearing, mouth agape, staring at them.

“Shit!” His breath sawing, J.D. yanked his hands off the kid’s mother and leaned back. Fingers tense, palms braced on the post over Dru’s head, he held himself a stiff arm’s length away and stared down at her, struggling to find a semblance of his usual control.

“Hmmm?” She blinked up at him with drowsy confusion. “What?” Reaching out, she lazily traced her forefinger in a zigzag pattern down his chest.

J.D. gritted his teeth against his body’s reaction to her touch. “Tate,” he said, and jutted his chin in the boy’s direction.

Her hand dropped to her side as if she’d just snagged a thirty-pound fly ball out of the air. “
No
.” Taking a deep breath, she turned to look out at the yard. With a moan, she immediately rolled back, her eyes closing. “Oh, my God. What am I supposed to tell him?”

But she didn’t wait for J.D. to offer a solution. Taking a deep breath, she exhaled and forced him to step back as she pushed away from the post. Turning away from him, she went to stand at the head of the shallow set of steps. “Tate? Honey? What—?”