Blackberry Summer (14 page)

She swallowed again, her gaze shifting from him to the dog, then out the window at the rain-soaked darkness before returning to him.

“That would be great. Thank you. There are still far too many things I’d like to do but can’t right now, you know?”

He thought of pressing her back on her pillow and burying his hands in her hair and then kissing that
delectable mouth. “I think I have a fair idea,” he said dryly. “Come on, Chester.”

Riley wasn’t quite sure how he managed it, but somehow her dog managed to look excited beyond all his inherent basset gloominess. He opened the kitchen door for him and Chester hurried out into the rain.

Riley stood waiting for him, grateful for the cool, wet air to clear out the rest of his cobwebs. He was also grateful he had the next day off so he could try to sleep in a little, though he had a feeling Claire would show up in his remaining dreams.

That beat the hell out of the alternative, though. He would far rather dream about her than those vivid nightmares about his undercover work or about the accident.

As he waited, he did a quick inventory of her lawn in the glow from the porch light.

“Looks like you’ve lost a few branches from the wind earlier,” he said after he’d let the dog back inside, dried him off a little with a towel hanging by the door and then returned to Claire’s family room.

“Oh, drat,” she muttered.

Who said
drat
these days? he wondered, charmed all over again by her.

That silly word was a firm reminder to him, as if he needed one. Anyone who said
drat
instead of the blue curses he would have uttered was far too sweet for someone like him. He had too many black marks against his soul to deserve a woman like Claire Tatum Bradford.

“I guess that’s what happens when I live in a house surrounded by hundred-year-old trees. Do you think
they’re too big for Macy and Owen to clean up when they get back from Denver with Jeff and Holly Sunday night?”

“I couldn’t see all that clearly in the dark, but from what I could tell, I think you’re going to need a chainsaw for a couple of those limbs.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sure I can find someone to help me.”

He hesitated for just a moment, obligation fighting against his better judgment. He had to make the offer, even though some part of him knew spending more time with Claire wasn’t a good idea. But he was in Hope’s Crossing now and that’s what people did in a small town. They helped each other when they could. Beyond that, he owed her. If not for him, she could be taking care of her own branches.

“It’s been a few years, but I’m sure I can remember how to fire up the Stihl.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. “You’re far too busy, Riley. You don’t have time to be cleaning up my yard. I’ve got a man I hire to help with the heavy repairs and yard work around here, Andy Harris. If he can’t do it, Jeff could probably take care of it after he brings the children home.”

He tried to picture the entirely too smooth doctor dirtying his hands with his ex-wife’s yard work with his young, lovely wife at his side. The image wouldn’t quite come together.

“I’ll round up a chain saw and come over later in the morning. Would eleven work?”

“Riley…”

He didn’t want to argue anymore, not when it was
taking all his concentration to keep his hands off her. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said shortly. “Do you need anything else before I leave?”

“No. I… Thank you.”

“What are friends for?” he murmured, then let himself out of her warm, pretty house while he still could find the strength to leave.

S
HE SHOULD
NOT
BE DOING THIS.

As the hungry growl of the chain saw cut through the afternoon, Claire sat in her blasted rolling chair, Chester at her feet, sneaking another peek through the filmy curtains at her bay window, like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Only instead of spying on her neighbor burying a body in the garden, she couldn’t seem to stop watching the very attractive male currently wielding that chain saw on her downed tree limbs.

Something was seriously wrong with her.

Riley had made short work of the storm debris over the last hour. When he finished, he had poked his head in the door to inform her—not to ask, apparently, because he didn’t seem to care when she objected—that he was going to trim a few of the lower hanging limbs and any others that had been weakened by the harsh winters and heavy snows in Hope’s Crossing.

She had tried to insist she could hire a tree service, but he had only smiled and headed back out to work.

She shouldn’t be gawking at him, noticing the way his T-shirt clung to his chest and the muscles that rippled in his back as he stacked and loaded the larger chunks of branches onto her woodpile.

This was Riley. Alex’s pest of a brother, the one who used to jump around corners to scare them at every opportunity, who used to cover the spray nozzle handle on the sink so anyone who turned the faucet on would be drenched, whose favorite summer activity had been lurking in wait for them to sunbathe in the backyard so he could sneak out and soak them with the garden hose.

He was
definitely
all grown up, six feet and change of hard muscles.

You were the subject of many a heated fantasy… I had a crush on you from the time I was old enough to figure out girls didn’t really have cooties.

She still didn’t buy it. He had to have been yanking her chain. Still, his words had chased themselves around and around in her head since that strange conversation in the early hours of the morning.

She sighed and Chester raised his head, his eyes curious. “Sorry. Go back to sleep. Just reminding myself what an idiot I am.”

He barked once as if in agreement, then rested his head on his paws again as Claire suddenly became aware the throb of the chain saw had stilled.

She searched the backyard for Riley and found him kneeling near the trunk of her favorite old honey locust. The bright orange chainsaw case gaped open on the ground and he was fitting the saw back in.

Was he finished? Yes. A minute later, she watched him close the case and then stand up again and head for the house. Only by sheer luck and Chester fortuitously lunging out of the way, she managed to wheel away from the kitchen window just seconds before he
rapped on the back door and then opened it without waiting for her to answer it.

He filled her house, large and masculine, in the space that had become rather girly since Jeff moved out.

“That should take care of your arboreal needs for a while.”

“Until the next big windstorm anyway. Thank you. I appreciate all your help.”

He shrugged. “No big deal. I had a free morning. Anyway, I’d rather be outside doing yard work than holed up in my office down at the station filling out reports.”

“Will you have some lunch? I made a couple of sandwiches.” She pointed to the table with more than a little embarrassment. The sandwiches she’d made looked clumsy and crooked on the mismatched china, all she could find in the dishwasher. She couldn’t reach up into the cupboard easily, so she’d been forced to make do.

Riley didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with her efforts. He gaped at the table and then looked back at her.

“You’re in pain and can barely move, Claire,” he exclaimed. “The last thing you need to be worrying about is feeding me.”

“I’m feeling fine. Great, actually.” She didn’t add that she had felt more useful making that pitiful excuse for a sandwich than at any time since the accident. “Anyway, it’s only a sandwich, Riley. It’s not like a five-course meal Alex would fix or anything.”

“Thank you, then,” he said after a pause. “It looks
delicious and I am starving. I should probably wash some of this dirt and sawdust off first, though.”

“The bathroom’s down the hall, first door on the left.”

When he returned a few moments later, his hair was damp around his face and a couple of water droplets still clung to his neck.

He looked completely delicious. She, on the other hand, was not at her best. She had chosen a plain cotton dress with tiny sprigs of blue flowers, something easy to pull over her various medical hardware. She had pulled her hair back in a headband and even put on a little makeup, but her spruce-up efforts seemed rather pathetic.

He slid into a chair at the table and looked around her sunny, comfortable kitchen.

“I have to say, this place has really changed since the last time I saw it, back when that scary-mean Mrs. Schmidt lived here.”

“She wasn’t scary
or
mean. Just old and lonely.”

“Do you always look for the best in people?”

She could feel her face heat. “If you take the time to see past the gruff, you can usually find something good.”

“Maybe you should try being a cop for a day or two. That would probably change your perspective.” He picked out a pickle spear from the jar she’d managed to wrangle down off the shelf of the refrigerator and took a chomp out of it.

She sipped at her water. “No, thank you. I’ll stick with my bead store. I like being foolish and naive.”

“I didn’t call you either of those things. I actually think it’s…sweet.”

She didn’t want to be sweet. Not when it came to Riley.

“So tell me about the house,” he said. “How did you come to be the proud owner of Mrs. Schmidt’s crumbling old brick pile?”

“I’ve dreamed of living here from the time I used to walk past it on my way to school,” she confessed.

“Even as creepy as it used to look, with the grime and the cobwebs and the shutters falling off their hinges?”

“I could always see past all the dusty corners to the gem inside. The bones were good and I knew with a little elbow grease, this place could truly sparkle.”

“So you came back to town ready to make your dreams come true.”

“Something like that. Mrs. Schmidt died a few months before Jeff finished his residency and was ready to open his practice. When we started looking around for houses, her children were just a week or so from putting it on the market. Our real estate agent put us in touch with them and we bought it just like that.”

Jeff hadn’t wanted an old house. He had wanted to build their own place from the very beginning, something modern and airy, but she had convinced him this was the perfect place to raise their children.

Her own ignorance still shamed her. She hadn’t wanted to see how different—and how distant—she and Jeff were becoming over the years.

“Did you gut the whole thing?” Riley asked.

“Close enough. It took about a year of hard work to make it the home we wanted.” And while she had been stripping layer after layer of wallpaper, painting, refinishing old woodwork to create a warm, lovely home for her family, her marriage had been crumbling around her feet without her noticing.

“I can’t imagine how much work you must have had to throw at it.”

“Yes, but just like I tell my kids when they’re complaining about their homework or having to clean up after Chester, we value the things for which we have to work the hardest.”

“True enough.”

She took a small bite of her sandwich, thinking how much better it would have tasted if she could have made her famous five-spice mayonnaise, but she hadn’t been able to reach into the cupboard for the ingredients.

“Do you find the place too much to keep up since the divorce?”

“Ask me that in the fall when I’m trying to harvest the garden—assuming I can even put in a garden this year—and rake the leaves and prep the house for winter.”

“So is that a yes?”

“My mother pushed me to sell after…well, after Jeff moved out, but I couldn’t bear to lose it after we’d worked so hard on the renovations. I didn’t want to lose
everything,
you know?”

She hadn’t meant to say that. The words just slipped out before it was too late to call them back.

Riley’s gaze narrowed, his features suddenly dark
and extremely sexy. “I’m just going to come out and say this. The man was an idiot not to see what he had.”

Goose bumps shivered down her arms at the intense look in his eyes. She stared at him for a long moment, tension coiling between them and a glittery awareness floating in the air like dust motes in a sunbeam.

She set her water glass down, wondering if her face could possibly be as red as it felt, and tried hard for a casual smile. “Thank you, Riley. That’s a very sweet thing to say.”

“Nothing sweet about it, Claire.”

His voice was a low rasp in the kitchen. Before she could stir her brain to function, to speak or move away or
something,
he reached out a roughened thumb and caressed her jawline. Heat surged through her, wild and fluttery, and she wanted to lean into his skin like her silly dog nudging her hand for more petting.

“Claire,” he said softly, and then his whole hand curved around her chin and he tugged her forward slightly and kissed her.

His mouth was hard, warm and tasted of the outdoors. Beautiful and slightly wild. He didn’t rush the kiss, his mouth just barely moving on hers, and everything inside her seemed to sigh a welcome.

She felt as if she had been frozen solid for years, as if she had been waiting like the mountains for the sun to finally come out after long days of darkness. She closed her eyes, relishing the scent and the taste of him, the strength and heat of his fingers, the brilliant, delicious heat bursting through her.

Don’t stop,
she thought.
Oh, please, don’t stop.

He made a low sound in his throat and deepened the
kiss and she leaned into him as his mouth slid across hers, as his hand tugged a little in her hair….

Through the soft haze wrapping around her, Claire was vaguely cognizant of a jarring sound, a door shutting somewhere in the house and then a voice that didn’t belong in this lovely moment she was having.

“Hey, you,” she heard Alex call out from the entryway. “What’s Ri’s pickup doing outside full of branches?”

She froze for only a second, her eyes flashing open. Her gaze locked with the intense aspen-leaf green of his—now somewhat dazed—then Claire scrambled back and picked up her sandwich, trying not to notice how her hands trembled.

She was just in time. An instant later, Alex walked into the kitchen. “Hey. Here you are.”

“Right. Um. Here we are. Hi.”

Chester, who adored Riley’s sister, jumped to his feet and headed over for a little love, which she freely dispensed, though her gaze wandered from Claire to Riley.

Claire knew her best friend well enough to feel more than a little trepidation when her gaze narrowed. What could she see? Were her lips swollen? Her hair messy? She wanted to check but couldn’t with Alex still studying her with the scrutiny she usually reserved for fresh produce at the farmer’s market to serve at the restaurant.

Claire drew in a shaky breath to quickly divert her, but for some reason, Alex apparently decided to say nothing.

“Hey, little bro. This is a surprise. What are you doing here this lovely May day?”

“Claire had a little tree damage from the wind last night. I was just taking the chain saw to the worst of the downed branches.”

“Well, wasn’t that neighborly of you?”

Riley didn’t seem fazed by the slight sarcastic tone in his sister’s voice. He smiled blandly, although Claire thought his expression still looked a little shell-shocked. “I do my best.”

He had far more experience even than she did deflecting the sometimes-formidable moods of Alexandra McKnight, Claire remembered.

“Would you like a sandwich?” Claire asked quickly.

“Maybe.”

When Claire reached down to maneuver the blasted chair toward the refrigerator, Alex stopped her with a hard glare and a foot in front of one of the wheels.

“If you dare try making me a sandwich, I just might break your other leg,” her dearest friend in the world snapped.

“Oh, come on. I can make a sandwich. I made one for me and Riley.”

“Leave me out of this, please,” he said in an amused voice.

“You should be in bed, not in here babying my little brother.”

Was that what she was doing? She risked a look at Riley and found him watching her, an unreadable expression on his features.

Claire cleared her throat. “I’m not babying anyone. All I did was make a sandwich.”

“Which you don’t need to do for me. If I’m hungry, I’ll make my own damn sandwich.”

“Just for the record, I didn’t ask her for anything,” Riley said. “The deed was done when I came inside.”

“But then, you’re never one to turn down a meal. Or anything else, for that matter.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Riley asked, his expression suddenly dangerous.

Claire didn’t want to deal with their bickering right now, when she was already feeling unsteady and weak.

“You know where everything is,” she said. “Knock yourself out.”

“I will.”

While Alex moved around the kitchen pulling out ingredients—with much more fluid, efficient movements than Claire ever could, even before her injuries—she sat petting Chester and trying to avoid meeting Riley’s eyes.

So they had kissed. What was the big deal? She had every right to kiss anyone she wanted. She could start a queue of eligible men right here in the kitchen, line them out down the sidewalk and into the street if that was her heart’s desire.

Not that she knew that many men she might be interested in kissing. Her divorce had been final for two years and she’d gone on exactly one date, an awkward affair with a widowed insurance adjuster from Tellu-ride she met in line at the grocery store.

The whole thing had been a disaster from the mo
ment he showed up at her house with his three children in the backseat.