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Authors: Cate Cameron

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BOOK: Just a Summer Fling
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She smiled as she lifted her face out of the water and looked up at him. “You’re here early. Is there a mulch emergency?”

“Just trying to get the dock fixed before it’s covered with people.”

“Should I stay in the water, out of your way?”

“No, it’s fine. One person won’t be a problem.”

She didn’t climb out right away, though. She floated on her back, her eyes closed, as he tried not to look in her direction. He was there for a job.

He had the old boards unscrewed and stacked by the time she climbed up the ladder and wrapped a towel around herself.

“You’re up early, too,” he said. If he’d thought about it he’d have kept his mouth shut, but he’d been distracted by trying not to watch the towel as it edged down over her breasts. “Especially since you were drinking yesterday.”

“Swimming’s the best hangover cure I know,” she said with a smile. “Nice cool water, and I swear the pressure of it against my skull helps squish my brains back where they’re supposed to be.”

“That seems medically unlikely.”

She shrugged. “I don’t ask questions, I just feel grateful that it works.” She settled onto the diving board and leaned back, her eyes closed again, her face turned toward the sun.

He worked quietly for a couple minutes, then glanced over to find her watching him. “You know what you’re doing, huh?”

He frowned. “It’s not too tricky. Take out the old boards, put in the new ones. They’re already cut to the right length, even.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

“You already do.” He held his cordless drill out toward her. “I’m using this as a screwdriver. I just place the board, slap in a couple screws, and it’s done. You want to try?”

She didn’t answer right away, then said, “Yeah, I kinda do. Is that okay?”

“Sure, if you want. There’s not much to mess up.”

She practically skipped across the dock, and stood so close to him he could smell the clean lake water in her hair.

“This trigger controls the drill. Push it gently for slow, or speed it up by pushing the trigger all the way in.”

She took the drill, played with the trigger a little, and then they crouched down and he held a board in place while she drove in a few screws. “That easy?” she asked, a pleased grin on her face.

“That easy.”

“Can I do one all by myself?”

“Be my guest.”

So he took her place on the diving board and she found a board and fit it into place. She didn’t look totally natural. She dropped one screw and it fell between two slats, landing in the lake below with a soft splash, and she looked up at him with an almost comic expression of guilt.

“It’s not a big deal,” he reassured her. “They don’t cost much, and one wood screw won’t hurt the lake.”

She nodded and went back to work, and when the board was attached she turned to him with a triumphant grin. “Look! I did that!”

“Nice work. Looks secure.”

“Holy smokes.” She was still beaming. “I can’t believe how proud I am!”

“Neither can I,” he admitted with a laugh. “You want to keep going, or should I take over?”

She looked tempted, then shook her head and held the drill out to him. “You’d better take over. I want to go out on top, before I mess something up.”

They traded places again and Josh quickly finished the remaining boards. He was done. It was time to go. But for some reason he was reluctant to leave.

“Hey!” Ashley whispered excitedly. “Look! I saw those guys before. Are those loons?”

Josh looked out at the lake. He kept his voice low as he said, “Yeah. A nice little family, huh?”

“I saw them yesterday, too!”

“You come back next year, you’ll probably see the same ones. At least the parents. They fly south for the winter, but they come back to the same lake every year.”

“Yesterday it looked like . . .” Ashley frowned. “I was going to look it up on the Internet, but I got distracted. But it looked like the babies were riding on the mom’s back. Do they do that?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why. . . . They do it more when the water’s cold, so maybe it’s to help them stay warm? But I guess it would be good protection against predators, too.”

“Predators? Who eats baby loons?”

“Turtles. Big fish. Hawks, probably.”

Ashley looked toward the lake as if she were worrying about an attack.

“I’ve been on this lake for thirty-one years and I’ve never actually seen it happen,” Josh said. He didn’t want to ruin the poor woman’s vacation with imagined loon carnage.

Ashley relaxed a little. “Did we count any of those on our list of Vermont hazards last night? We haven’t gotten to ‘T’ yet. Maybe that should be ‘turtles.’”

“Or ‘S’ for ‘snappers.’ There’s some nice little turtles up here who wouldn’t hurt anybody, not even a baby loon. It’s the snappers you want to watch out for.”

“I think ‘S’ should probably be reserved for ‘snakes.’ Anywhere snakes live, they should be the number one ‘S’-related hazard.”

“Fair enough,” Josh agreed. He didn’t mind snakes himself, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue.

They watched the loons in companionable silence for a few more minutes, and then the dock vibrated a little as someone stepped onto the gangplank. They both turned.

“Well, you’re up early!” Jasmine said with exaggerated cheer. She had a glass of orange juice in her hand, and Josh knew from past experience that it would have at least champagne but more likely vodka in it. Ashley might swim to control her hangovers, but Jasmine preferred a hair of the dog approach. Just one more thing Josh wished he had no reason to know.

Ashley and Josh had been speaking quietly enough that the loons had come quite close, but with Jasmine’s arrival they were heading away. Josh figured it was time for him to follow their example. “I got the boards replaced,” he said, nodding at the wood beneath their feet. “And I’ll be by on Wednesday, probably, for the mulch.”

“Wednesday.” Jasmine pronounced the word as if it had an unpleasant taste. “You’re here today. Why not today?”

“Church,” Josh said. He hadn’t been inside a church since the last wedding he’d attended. And Jasmine would know his Sunday routine as well as he knew her hangover cures. But he didn’t think she’d want to explain how she’d come by that knowledge, not with a witness. So he smiled blandly at her then nodded in Ashley’s direction. “Snakes and turtles,” he said. “But I think we missed a couple letters in the middle somewhere.”

“Next time,” she said.

He knew better, but he smiled anyway, then gathered the discarded boards and tucked them under one arm while he carried his toolbox with the other and headed off the dock. He tried not to react at all when Jasmine followed him.

When they reached the top of the stairs she said, “So you two are still being adorable, are you? With your little game?”

“We just can’t help it, I guess. We were born that way, you know?”

“Well, I hope Ashley doesn’t think that
our
game is still in play.”

“Whose game?”

“Ashley’s and mine.” Jasmine looked at him and her face transformed into the first genuine smile he’d seen from her in ages. “Oh, Josh! She didn’t tell you?”

Anything that made Jasmine that happy was going to make someone else sad, and Josh had a pretty good idea who the “someone else” would be in this situation. “So hopefully I can do the mulch on Wednesday. Might not be until Thursday, though.”

But Jasmine wasn’t so easily distracted. “I’m surprised she didn’t mention it to you, with all the giggling you two have been doing together.”

Josh was pretty sure he hadn’t been giggling, but he was at the truck now, tossing the wood into the back and not bothering to secure his toolbox as carefully as he usually did. He wasn’t going to engage with whatever Jasmine was up to, certainly not to debate whether he’d been laughing. Then he turned and saw Jasmine leaning against the driver’s door. She wasn’t going to let him leave until she said whatever it was. He braced himself and she smiled wickedly.

“I bet her she couldn’t fuck you.” Jasmine waited for a reaction, but Josh was pretty sure he managed not to give her one. Jasmine’s shrug was over-casual. “She’s having a bit of a tiff with her boyfriend at home, and I thought she could use a little distraction. For all your failings, Josh,
you’ve always been a good distraction that way. So I thought you might be good for her, but she wasn’t interested. I mean . . .” She ran her eyes down Josh’s ragged clothes. “Not really her type, obviously. But with the bet? The girl’s a competitor, I’ll give her that. That’s what made her come over to you in the bar.”

It was just one more sleazy interaction with Jasmine. Just one more opportunity for her to poke at him, looking for holes in his armor. This wasn’t anything new. There was no reason for Josh’s stomach to be churning.

“I need to get going,” he said, but she didn’t move from her spot by his door. He could have picked her up and set her aside without any trouble, but she was a client and he was on her property. He supposed he could have gone around to the passenger side and worked his way across the cab, but it would have been awkward, especially with her laughing at him the whole time. So he just stood there and waited.

“She’s a movie star, Josh. Did you honestly think she’d be interested in you without a little outside encouragement?” Jasmine smiled sweetly.

And he managed to return the expression. “No, not really. I mean, you and me? Yeah, okay, that made basic sense. But someone like Ashley? Totally out of my league. We were just talking about loons, Jasmine. Nothing for you to be jealous about.”

He saw her eyes narrow and knew he’d gone too far. But he just couldn’t make himself care. She had more money than God and she had a lot of influence with the Lake Sullivan summer people. She wasn’t a good person to have as an enemy. But she was an even worse person to have as a friend.

“Excuse me,” he said, and she stepped aside, letting him climb into the truck. He watched her in the rearview mirror as he pulled away. She wasn’t moving, just standing there, staring after him. Planning her revenge, he was sure.

Damn it. He’d worked so hard to keep his cool around her, and he’d managed it for so long. And then he’d blown it with one stupid conversation.

He didn’t want to think about what had made him so angry. Didn’t want to think about Ashley and her stupid grin when she’d attached the board to the dock. So she’d been playing around. So she hadn’t really wanted him. Big deal. He’d known she was trouble, and he’d stayed away. He’d done the right thing. He was fine. Just fine.

He wondered how long it was going to take before he started believing the lines he was telling himself.

Three

“SO, WHAT’S THE
mulch
for
?” Ashley tried to sound light and relaxed, as if she hadn’t been compulsively watching the driveway for days, waiting for Josh’s pickup to appear. But when he’d finally shown up, he hadn’t smiled at her like he had on the dock. There was none of the warmth, none of the casual joking. He’d just nodded in her direction and then gotten to work.

And now, even after she’d strolled over and greeted him with enthusiasm, he still wouldn’t look at her. He was shoveling wood chips from the back of the truck into a wheelbarrow, and apparently that was a job that required his full attention. “The mulch goes on the paths,” he said without expression.

She made her laugh a little louder than it normally would be so she could be sure he heard it. “Yeah, I got that! But
why
does it go on the paths?”

He stopped shoveling at least for a moment, but he still didn’t look at her. “I have no idea,” he admitted. There was
a tiny bit of expression in his voice and she was thinking about counting it as a victory, but then he swung down out of the truck bed, graceful and light despite his size as he landed on the rocky ground, and he said, “You should go find Jasmine. It was her plan, so she’d hopefully know why she wanted it.”

“Okay. I’ll ask her when I see her.” There was that topic of conversation closed off. “Do you need any help with anything?”

“I charge by the hour for jobs like this,” he said, taking the handles of the wheelbarrow and heading along the path into the woods. “If you helped, you’d actually be taking money out of my pocket.”

She hadn’t thought about it in those terms. “Well, do you want me to get in the way, then?” She was pretty sure he would have been charmed by her smile if he’d bothered to look in her direction. “I could drag this out for so long you could buy a new truck!”

“There’s nothing wrong with my old truck.” And with that he was out of earshot and the conversation was over.

She could have gone after him. This was the McArthurs’ property and she was their guest. If she decided she wanted to hang out in the forest, she’d be absolutely within her rights to sit right on top of the damn path Josh was trying to mulch. But a tiny sprout of self-respect poked up through the muddy soil of her infatuation and wrapped around her ankle to keep her from chasing after the man.

She should go back to the cottage. She was an early riser, at least compared to the rest of the guests, but she could hang out in the kitchen with the housekeeper, or take a mug of coffee down to the dock, or . . . anything, really. Instead, she pretended to be fascinated by a weird brown growth on a nearby tree trunk. She reached out to touch it. Surprisingly hard. What the hell was it? She crouched down to see it from underneath and wondered if she could break it off the tree
to see how it was attached. But she didn’t want to damage it. Or the tree. It really was quite interesting.

This was her strength as an actress, she knew. When she first started with a role, she was just pretending. Just playing make-believe, like a kid. And then, like a kid, she’d slip away from reality a little, away from her own life and into something else. GiGi, her great-grandmother, had been a stage actress, famous in her time, and she’d been the one who encouraged Ashley to act. She’d shown Ashley how to find one thing, one prop or gesture or idea, and how to focus on that and let everything else fill itself in. “Magic Time,” she’d called it. “Okay, Ashley, is that how a bear would walk? So you walk like that. Walk like that, and let Magic Time happen. Soon, you’ll be the bear.” Ashley had been cast in
Mayfair Drive
three days before GiGi had faded away in her sleep, and Ashley had always been so happy that the old lady had been around long enough to receive the phone call from Ashley to share her success.

Now, in the backwoods of Vermont, Magic Time had come unbidden, as it sometimes did. Ashley had acted like someone who cared about growths on trees, and all of a sudden, she
did
care. She heard the soft rolling of the wheelbarrow behind her and couldn’t help asking, “What
is
this thing? It looks like a huge mushroom, but it’s hard. . . .”

“Conk,” Josh said. He paused, as if fighting with himself, then apparently lost the battle and added, “That’s what we call them, at least. I think they’re a kind of fungus. They eat away at the tree, making it rot inside.”

“So they’re bad?” Ashley stroked the smooth, warm skin of the conk.

“Circle of life,” Josh said. “They’re not good or bad; they just are.”

“But they’re bad for the tree?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. He looked at her then, his amber eyes cool. “They’re parasites, I’d say. They find a weakness and
work their way inside, and then they get strong while the tree weakens. It takes a long time, but it happens. Eventually it’ll kill the tree.”

The words were innocuous enough, but there was something about his gaze that made her feel like she was being accused of something. Was he . . . was he calling her a parasite? Comparing her to the conk? She frowned at him in confusion and with the beginnings of irritation, but he was already turned back to his task. “How come you’re acting like a virgin who got felt up at the dance?” she demanded. So much for her attempts to be charming. “I messed up a bit at the bar but we got past that, then we were friends at the dock, and now you’re pissy again?”

“I’m at work,” he said. “I’d like to concentrate on that, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re shoveling wood chips. That takes your full mental energies?”

“Maybe you heard Jasmine threatening to fire me and blackball me with her friends? I’d like to make sure she doesn’t have any reason to do that.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t.”

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

Well, no, she supposed she wasn’t. But, still. “The job doesn’t really seem that demanding.”

She knew as soon as she’d said the words that they were wrong, and sure enough, he straightened and stood for a moment, controlling his temper. He kept his face turned away from her as he said, “I’m just a simple country boy, not all sophisticated like you big-city folk. A job like this is about all I can handle.”

Shit. “I didn’t mean your job
in general
doesn’t seem demanding,” she tried. “Just this one part of it. And, I mean, it’s not like
my
job is all that complicated, if you’re just looking at it from the outside. I play make-believe for a living, right?”

“And for a hobby, too, from the looks of things.”

Neither of them spoke after that. She wasn’t quite sure what he was accusing her of, but she was definitely tired of the attitude. She wanted to fight back, demand clarification and an end to the snide remarks. But instead she stepped away from the tree with the conk and headed for the house. She was on vacation. She didn’t need this crap.

*   *   *

JOSH
refused to feel bad about it. At least, he tried to refuse, and when that didn’t work, he refused to
admit
he felt bad about it. That was something.

He wished the mulch job
was
a little more demanding, so he could let it distract him from his thoughts, but Ashley had been right. Shoveling wood chips really didn’t take a lot of brainpower.

He kept his back to the cottage as much as he could and his eyes down when he couldn’t, but he hadn’t figured out a way to turn off his ears. So he heard the sounds of the cottage coming alive, guests and hosts meeting for breakfast on the deck, talking and laughing. There was no problem with him doing work while the McArthurs entertained. They were
always
entertaining, after all, and he was a common laborer, invisible to the wealthy unless they decided they wanted to see him. There’d been a time when they
had
wanted to, but after a year or so of politely refusing all of their invitations, they’d gotten the message and allowed him to sink back into safe anonymity. But he could hear
Ashley
, her voice sweet and clear, and he wished . . .

He had no idea what he wished for. He just wished things were different. But they weren’t. So he concentrated on his work, and when he finished he loaded the wheelbarrow into the now-empty bed of his truck and headed for the driver’s-side door.

“Josh!” A man’s voice from the deck.

Josh looked over and raised a hand. He tried to ignore the stab of guilt he always felt when dealing with Jasmine’s husband. “Hey, David. That’s one load done, but I’ll need to do another.” He moved closer as he spoke, trying to seem relaxed. “I’m supposed to be down the road for a meeting at ten, but I can come back here early afternoon, if you want. Or else tomorrow.”

“This afternoon would be best. Jasmine wants this job done.”

“Okay.”

“She asked me to speak to you, Josh.” David came a few steps closer, but he was still on the deck. Any of the guests who wanted to hear him would be able to. “She’s not too impressed with the service we’ve been getting lately.”

Josh kept his face blank, trying not to think about the exact nature of the
service
Jasmine wanted him to provide. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I think I’ve been getting everything done pretty fast. If someone else has an emergency, like a leak or something, I need to fix that first. But otherwise, I’m on schedule.”

David shrugged. “She’s also concerned that you’re not behaving professionally. I know you used to be part of . . . well, you used to be friendly with Jasmine’s crowd up here. Right? She’s concerned that maybe you’ve gotten a little confused about your place in all this.”

Josh kept his mouth shut. Cal Montgomery was on the deck, one of the few locals rich enough to fit in with the summer crowd. He was standing next to Ashley, both of them listening without looking in his direction. Josh tried not to guess what either of them was thinking about it all. He waited to see if David had more to say, then stepped backward. “I’ll bring the rest of the mulch this afternoon.”

“And you’ll give us priority service in the future,” David said. “How many of your clients came because we gave them to you? So you’ll give us priority, and you’ll watch the way
you speak to my wife.” He smiled, but his gaze didn’t leave Josh’s face. The man was some sort of big shot in Hollywood business, and he was clearly used to giving orders.

Josh wanted to just walk away. He remembered Jasmine’s complaints, back when they’d been spending time together. David’s numerous affairs, which were apparently common knowledge all over town. David’s controlling behavior, Jasmine’s fears that he was going to trade her in for a newer model . . . Looking back, Josh knew she’d used her vulnerabilities as a tool to seduce him, but he didn’t think they’d been completely manufactured. No, nothing with Jasmine was ever that simple. And now, staring up at David, Josh was supposed to pretend he didn’t know any of that and was just a recalcitrant handyman.

It would be so easy to just walk away. But damn it, he wasn’t fired yet, and he needed this job. Not just this one, but all the others that came with it. So he stared at David, and David stared back, and Josh had no idea which one of them was going to blink first.

Then Ashley was there, looping her arm gently through David’s and smiling as if he was her hero. “Are you still interested in kayaking this morning?” she asked sweetly. “I was just going to go out, so if you’re ready.”

It looked like David was going to brush her off, but then Cal stepped forward and said, “You’re probably tired, David. Don’t worry, I’d be happy to show Ashley around the lake.”

David frowned, clearly not wanting to seem like he wasn’t strong enough for a little kayaking. “No,” he finally growled. “I can take her.” He turned without another word, and Josh was dismissed.

He tried not to watch Ashley guide David away. Tried not to notice the way her head tilted toward him, her hair falling to brush his arm. Damn it, he knew how that hair would feel bunched in his fist, the soft thickness of it, the way he could use it to tilt her head just right. And the way
she’d smile up at him as he did it, her green eyes dancing with . . .

With what? That was the problem. With desire? Or with amusement, laughing at his weak will and inability to stay away from her? It was all just a game to her, he reminded himself. Just a game to all of them. But he wasn’t playing.

BOOK: Just a Summer Fling
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