It's a Wonderful Wife (19 page)

“I don't wear pajamas.”

The smile faltered briefly, but she quickly recovered. “With your closest neighbor being three miles away, you can walk to work buck-naked if you want. At least until you start embarrassing your children.”

“And when it's raining?”

“Then I guess you won't have to bother showering before you leave home.”

Yup, inexplicably, unequivocally sunk. “So where is this office I'm going to enjoy commuting to supposed to be?” he asked as he looked around. He looked back at her and sighed. “And please tell me it won't cost as much as a cargo ship to build.”

She pulled a roll of tape from her jacket pocket, then started tying the end of the tape to one of the grade stakes. “I'm afraid both of those concerns are your problem. Since Stanley obviously didn't know what big-time executives need for an office, I guess he left it up to you to decide what it looks like and where you want it built.” She headed to another ground stake near the base of the cliff, unrolling the tape as she walked. “I only know that if I spent a good chunk of my day staring out my office window talking on the phone, I'd want a lovely view.” She stopped walking. “So long as it's not on top of the high ridge.”

“Why not up there?” Jesse asked, despite knowing he wasn't going to like the answer. “If I can't have that view from my house, I should at least get to enjoy it at work.”

“Sure,” she said as she started walking and unrolling again. “If you don't mind ruining a perfectly beautiful island. Or,” she went on as she wrapped the tape around the stake and headed to another one, “if having that view for
work
is more important to you than having campfires and sleeping out under the stars up there on hot summer nights with your family.”

Damn, she was good. “Wait. You sketched a clubhouse rising up out of the ground; why can't we hide my office the same way, and I'll only raise it when I'm working?”

She stopped in mid-step and turned to him. “How deep
are
your pockets? Or can you operate out of an office the size of a bathroom? Speaking of which, it's nearly impossible to set plumbing in solid granite.” She arched a brow. “Or are you planning to whiz in the woods?”

Not really sure how he'd lost two arguments to her in two days, Jesse folded his arms over his chest and looked around again. “So where should it go?”

“Wherever you want it to go,” she said as she went back to walking and unrolling. “So long as it's not anywhere near the sheltered cove where I beached my skiff.”

“Why not there?”

“Because you and Paul are going to spend this summer building a treehouse
there.
”

“Excuse me?”

She used her teeth to break off the tape, shoved the roll back in her pocket, then tied the end of the tape to the final stake—the fact that she wasn't looking at him making Jesse suspicious. “Since I can't imagine you sitting at your campsite counting seagulls all summer, I thought you might enjoy designing your future children a treehouse—you know, like the one on Treasure Island?—and hiring Paul to help you build it.” She darted a glance in his direction when he said nothing, then shrugged again. “Or you could start laying out some island paths.”

“Am I supposed to build this treehouse,” he said dryly, finally realizing what she was up to, “before or after I pick a site for the office that I'm
also
supposed to design?”

She wanted to get rid of him. The only part he wasn't sure about was if he was bugging her sexually or messing up her creativity.

She turned and planted her hands on her hips again. “I'm certain the first thing they teach competition-crushing executives is how to prioritize. But I suggest you start with the treehouse before you attempt to design an office.”

Figuring there was only one way to find out, Jesse walked straight up to her and touched a finger to her cheek. “Any suggestions on where I should start,” he said quietly, “since I could write what I know about treehouses on the face of a dime?”

He found himself touching empty air when she shot over to a pile of grade stakes. “You . . . ah, start with the tree,” she said—sounding like she'd swallowed a frog—as she scooped up several stakes and then hugged them against her chest like a shield.

Oh yeah, definitely sexually flustered. Which might be a problem, he realized, if it interfered with her creativity. Hell, if he didn't leave her alone with her tape and stakes and three-dimensional imagination, he could find himself living in an unpretentious
hovel
.

“Are you saying you and your brothers never built a treehouse?” she asked from behind the safety of her stakes. “What did you do as kids if you didn't run all over Rosebriar's twelve hundred acres playing war and building clubhouses to hide in to read your
Playboy
magazines?”

“We . . . After our parents died in our early teens, we mostly studied and followed Bram to the office to learn the business.”

“And before you were teens?” she whispered.

He shook his head with a grin. “We used Rosebriar as one big giant clubhouse and tried out our pranks on the poor staff before springing them on Bram.”

“You played
inside
?”

“Not always. Sometimes we went sailing, and for five summers after our parents died, Bram and Grammy Rose took us to a falling-down cabin on a lake up in the Adirondacks.” Where, come to think of it, they had tried to build a treehouse—until a branch had broken and Bram had gotten a concussion, scaring them so badly they'd never gone near that tree again.

“Was it always just you and your brothers?” she asked. “Didn't you ever have friends over? Or join clubs at school or participate in sports?”

“Not after we went to live at Rosebriar. Hey,” he said at her stricken look, “we had wonderful childhoods.”

“You played with staff. And you studied and worked all through your teens. My God, you were more smothered than I was.”

“We were as happy as three kids who'd lost their parents could be. No, dammit, we were
happier
.”

“And are you still happier now?” she asked softly.

“What in hell kind of question is that?”

She smiled sadly, a picture of calm to his growing anger. “Do you ever travel other than for business, Jesse? Or have any hobbies? Do you hunt? Fish? Skydive?” She shifted the stakes to free one hand and gestured at the woods behind him. “Or do you go around buying islands on which to build safe, insulated cocoons for your future children?”

“No,” he snapped, “I buy them so women—and their cats—can hide out from loan sharks who have the hots for them.” He turned and walked away before he said or did something he'd regret, swiping his jacket off the tree on his way by, even as he found himself wondering how he'd lost
another
argument to her.

He was just scaling the ass-bruising ledge again when it finally dawned on him what was going on, and Jesse stopped and scrubbed his face with a groan. Every time he tried to talk Cadi into seeing something his way, she somehow managed to turn the discussion back on
him
.

Further proving she really did know him better than he knew himself.

It was as if she saw him as two distinctly different men: Jesse the family man and Jesse the big-time, competition-crushing executive. And whenever she found herself butting heads with the
executive
, she simply started asking the man she'd designed the house for a bunch of questions he either couldn't or didn't care to answer. Would
he
willingly place himself on an island with a virtual stranger without any means of escape? Would
he
put an office in a home he was building for the sole purpose of instilling wonderful memories in his children? And would
he
like someone butting into a project he was working on, or, if he couldn't come right out and tell the jerk to get lost, would he simply find something else for him to do?

Hell, forget giving Cadi his seat on the board of directors; if he let her anywhere near Tidewater, Sam and Ben would give her
his job
.

•   •   •

Cadi watched Jesse disappear up the path leading to his campsite, not sure what had just happened. All she'd wanted was to prevent him from redesigning her—okay, his—house, but she was afraid doing so may have just cost her a friendship she'd been coming to cherish.

Good Lord, she might not have ventured far from home growing up, but at least she'd had friends. So how was it possible that a highly educated, financially privileged, well-traveled man didn't realize there was more to life than work? Was he truly expecting to bring his family here every summer, only to stand in the window of his soundproof office talking on the phone while catching glimpses of his equally friendless passel of kids running wild on the safe little cocoon he'd built them? When Jesse had asked Stanley to design a house that would instill wonderful childhood memories in his children, at the time Cadi had thought he'd been looking to relive his own childhood, whereas now she wondered if he wasn't trying to rewrite it instead.

Only the guy didn't seem to know how to go about it; not if he didn't understand he actually had to
participate
.

SIXTEEN

Cadi didn't hear from Jesse for a full forty-eight hours after he'd stormed off in a huff, and then it had been a text—he'd gotten the antenna up as promised, apparently—asking if she'd please come to his campsite at her earliest convenience for a quick lesson on driving her fast, safe, sexy new runabout. So right around this time yesterday morning she'd abandoned the second story layout she'd been wrestling with and bolted for the north end of the island, not even glancing back when she'd heard poles falling like dominoes behind her. Because really, that old skiff she'd bought scared the bejeezus out of her far more than it did Jesse. In fact, she'd nearly kissed him that evening on the high ridge when he'd pointed out that buying her a better boat would allow him to save face with the townspeople, his added argument that he'd been planning to buy one anyway allowing her to accept without actually conceding.

Cadi remembered reaching his campsite yesterday and standing on the rise above the beach trying to catch her breath and pressing a hand to the stitch in her side, utterly amazed at what one very determined man with very deep pockets could accomplish in forty-eight hours. She also remembered snorting, wondering what had made her think she'd needed to come up with a project to keep Jesse busy enough to stay out of
her
business.

Good God, there had been a huge barge anchored just off the point of land at one end of the beach driving pylons for what she'd realized would be a permanent deep-water dock, a crew of four men anchoring a series of floating docks—stretching no less than fifty feet into the water to accommodate the rise and fall of the tide—next to the gravel landing ramp at the other end of the beach, and two men installing solar panels next to an antenna just above where
another
crew was building the abutment for the deep-water dock. And if that hadn't been enough to make her head spin, she'd noticed a transport barge chugging toward Hundred Acre from the mainland, which she'd later learned was carrying a shiny new ATV, enough lumber to build a treehouse big enough to hide a dozen
Playboy
bunnies, and Eva Dean and her daughter, Samantha.

All of which was why it had taken Cadi a good ten minutes to spot Jesse standing in
her
shiny new runabout, along with a man holding what appeared to be a half-rolled-up set of plans they were looking at while drifting near the pylon-driving barge. It wasn't until the man had gotten on the barge and Jesse had idled up to his new floating dock that he'd spotted her sitting on a rock on top of the rise, her chin resting in her hands, still watching in amazement.

He'd waved her down, placed her at the wheel of the center console the moment she'd boarded, then stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders—which she was too excited to notice felt wonderfully warm and strong and steady. After explaining all the fancy electronics he apparently thought were needed to cross three miles of water, Jesse had walked to the back of the boat and sat down—Cadi still too excited to notice how bummed she felt now that his hands were gone—and told her to give it a test run over to the mainland and back.

Good Lord, it hadn't taken one tenth the time it did in her skiff, and they were back on the island tying up to the floating dock just as Jeff Acton was nosing his barge onto the gravel landing beside them. Having spotted Eva Dean and her daughter standing at the rail smiling at them, Jesse had given Cadi a very long, very husbandly kiss—that she certainly hadn't been too excited to savor. He'd then jumped out of the runabout and walked up the dock and over to the landing to graciously help the women down the barge's metal ramp. After saying hello and apparently meeting Samantha for the first time while Jeff drove the ATV down the ramp and parked it on the beach, Jesse had then gotten on the barge and Jeff had backed away without off-loading the lumber, then turned and headed toward the southwestern end of the island.

Left to deal with their guests, Cadi had sat the women in lawn chairs she'd dragged over to the rise overlooking the beach. She'd then run inside the camper she was supposed to be living in and, after a bit of frantic searching, had come back out carrying three plastic tumblers of Tang and a package of Double Stuf Oreo cookies. With her guests politely munching and sipping the odd offering, the three of them had chatted about fashion and families and first years of marriage while watching all the various crews working.

It wasn't until the empty barge reappeared nearly two hours later and they headed down to meet it that the women had gotten around to apologizing for popping in unannounced, blaming their rudeness on wanting to say thank you in person for the mushrooms Eva had received that morning. Jesse had helped them climb the ladder onto the barge from the floating dock, and as they'd started back across the reach Eva had shouted that since they had cell phone reception now, she'd make sure to call before she came out again. And Cadi wasn't certain, but she thought the woman also shouted something about stopping by the bakery first.

Taking advantage of the fact that one of the workers needed to talk to Jesse, Cadi had escaped to her campsite to take a nap, exhausted from two hours of smiling and nodding and trying to remember all of her and Jesse's lies.

It was now ten o'clock the next morning, and twenty minutes ago she'd received a text from Jesse asking if she would like to join him for a campfire up on the high ridge this evening. A second text had followed shortly, offering to bring her home on the ATV so she wouldn't have to make that treacherous hike back in the dark. So here she was sitting on top of the lower bluff facing nearly a dozen cockeyed poles pretending to be second-story walls, trying to decide if she should go. The problem was that her heart and brain couldn't agree with each other.

Yes, go,
her heart had been whispering for the last nineteen minutes, apparently having needed all of one minute to decide.

No, no, absolutely no,
her brain had started shouting even before the second text.

Give me one good reason why not,
Heart had just now asked Brain.

Because even a country bumpkin would know what that invitation is really about, and if we have sex with him, you're going to start wondering if he can't be our Mr. Right,
Brain said.
And then where will we be if you're broken when we meet our for-real Mr. Right? Heck, we might as well stay in Whistler's Landing and get a dozen more cats.

I agree with Heart,
a voice Cadi had never heard before piped in.
I say we go.

“Hey, who are you?” Cadi asked out loud, only to glance around and then close her eyes on a groan. Really, she'd been talking to Wiggles way too much.

I'm your lady parts,
the newcomer drawled.
And I hope you know I have a stake in this decision, too. I mean, really, it's been six freaking years. Or don't any of you care that I'm turning into a dried-up old prune down here?

I care,
Heart whispered.
That's why I'm saying yes. We all need the practice for when we meet our real Mr. Right.

And I can't think of anyone I'd rather practice on,
Lady Parts purred.

Yeah,
Heart sighed in agreement.
And if we go into this knowing it's not going to lead anywhere, we'll all walk away happy.

Brain snorted.
You fell half in love with the man while I was designing his home, and living on his island these last three weeks sure as hell hasn't helped. So what do you think will happen if we actually have sex with him? And you, Lady Parts; what happens if you can't even remember how, and you make a complete fool of us? You get to go dormant again and Heart gets to go hide in a corner, which leaves me to deal with the embarrassment.

I don't care,
Lady Parts growled.
I say we vote. I vote we go!

I vote we go, too!
Heart shouted as it started racing.

Brain said nothing.

Cadi looked down at her phone and reread the text message that had awakened her at six this morning:
Problem solved. You can go home now, Cads. I'll return next week.

Except she had an even bigger problem now, because she didn't want to go home.

Cadi reopened Jesse's text message. She took a deep breath and typed,
I'll meet you on the high ridge at seven o'clock,
and quickly hit send.

Now you've done it,
Brain muttered
. Just don't any of you come crying to me when Mr. Wrong stops by to say hello next summer with his beautiful, sophisticated, pregnant wife and finds us still in our pajamas hunched over one of Pinky and Kerr's bold, modern models.

•   •   •

Jesse thought about tossing another stick on the fire, but decided he'd better ration the firewood he'd lugged up on the ATV right after Cadi had texted him back this morning, as he'd hate to have to call it an early night just because he ran out of wood. He smoothed his hand over the other half of the triple-folded blanket he was sitting on, making sure a sneaky pebble hadn't crawled under it since the last time he'd checked. Satisfied Cadi wouldn't get a bruised behind, he opened the cooler to make sure the fire wasn't melting the ice under the
one
bottle of bubbly red Moscato, which he hoped was supposed to be served chilled, and decided the ice would probably last longer than the wine did once he popped the cork. He closed the cover and ran his fingers through his newly cut hair, then checked his watch and saw that Cadi was running a little late for their third date.

Not that
she
was counting, Jesse thought with a grin as he scanned the cozy scene he'd created, since she didn't really know about their first two. But he was pretty sure he'd read somewhere that if a guy managed to make it to date three, it was perfectly acceptable to see if the woman might be interested in more than just kissing.

He snorted, remembering all the women who hadn't waited until the end of date
one
to let him know they were interested. Hell, his town car hadn't made it past Aubrey Henderson's gate before Pamela had crawled onto his lap and stuck her tongue down his throat. Oh yeah, he'd bet a year's salary she'd subscribed to all those wedding magazines the very next morning.

Jesse suddenly stilled when he spotted Cadi standing at the edge of the woods below, and then scrambled to his feet, wondering how long she'd been watching him. Obviously realizing he'd spotted her, he saw her take a deep breath and start walking up the barren ledge with all the enthusiasm of someone going to a hanging. He sighed and started down to meet her, also wondering if he shouldn't have brought
two
bottles of wine.

Then again, maybe he could interest her in a glass of Aberfeldy.

“Did you take a tumble on that mossy ledge?” he asked when he saw the mud on her knee. He held out his hand to help her up the steep slope, only to find himself holding an ungodly heavy backpack that also had mud on it.

“I tried taking a shortcut,” she said, continuing up the ledge unaided. “Turns out that little ravine the trail crosses becomes a big ravine toward the center of the island.” She stopped and held her hands over the fire for a few seconds, then sat down on the triple-folded blanket and began brushing the mud off her knee. She stopped brushing and shot him a smile when he sat down beside her. “I'm sorry I'm late.” She gestured at the backpack he'd set on the ground beside him. “But maybe you'll forgive my rudeness when you see what I brought you.”

“Is there a scraped or bruised knee under that mud that I should take a look at?” he asked as he lifted the heavy pack onto his lap—remembering too late the bottom of it was also covered in dry mud. “Did you hurt yourself when you fell, Cadi?”

“I didn't fall. The mud splashed on me when I dropped the backpack just as I started climbing out of the ravine.” This time her smile was derisive as she nodded at the pack again. “One of the plastic flutes cracked, but the wine survived.”

Jesse slid open the zipper, barely stifling a snort when he reached inside and pulled out a bottle of wine and laid it on the blanket between them, then reached inside again and pulled out a
second
bottle. Hell, he was going to have to see about buying this stuff by the case.

“Keep going,” she said after he pulled out the two plastic wineglasses. He set them beside the bottles and reached inside the pack again. “I still have one more to give you,” she added when his hand emerged holding five books. “I had to order it, but it's in now and I'll pick it up the next time I go to town.”

He tossed the empty pack on the ground beside him, then held the stack of books so he could read their spines and saw they were all New England field guides: one on birds, one on seashore creatures, another on the night sky, one on wildflowers, and a general guide on forests and wetlands.

“I . . . ah, thought they might come in handy when you explore Hundred Acre with your kids,” she said rather huskily when he said nothing. He sensed more than saw her shrug. “Or for your guests to learn about the island's environment.”

“Thank you,” he said, his own voice sounding a bit thick to him.

She shrugged again when he looked over at her. “They're just books.”

“If you had to order one and it's in,” he said, setting them on his lap and picking up the bird guide and leafing through it, “then you must have purchased these before I showed up.”

“Um, yeah. My plan was to leave them in the camper for you to find when you got back
a week from now
.”

He stopped leafing and looked at her.

She picked up one of the bottles of wine and started peeling the foil off the neck. “If you don't mind, I'd like to use the runabout to go into town tomorrow morning.”

“You're going to have to,” he said with a chuckle, “since your old skiff is halfway to becoming a pirate ship that's laying siege to a treehouse.” He set the books on the ledge, then took the bottle away from her when she kept twisting the cork wire in the wrong direction. “And you don't have to ask my permission. The boat's yours to use whenever you want. Tell me,” he added as he took off the wire and started wiggling the cork, “if my assistant told you I'd be gone three weeks when you called
three weeks ago
trying to find out when I would be returning to Maine, how come you weren't expecting me to show up for another week?”