Playing the Playboy (9 page)

“You’re planning to stay here until things are settled?”

“Yes. I can take care of myself, so you’re welcome to ignore me if you’d like.”

“Ignore you?” She was breathless, and her cheeks were overly warm.

She didn’t know who this man was. He certainly wasn’t the friendly, open charmer he’d been in the days before. Or the intimate, tender lover he’d been last night.

He wasn’t tense, wasn’t concerned, wasn’t revealing any sort of emotion at all.

And it hurt.

It hurt that what was so important to her was obviously not important to him.

“You can’t do this,” she said at last, her voice a little raspy. She felt like she could cry again, at the end of her emotional rope, but she used every thread of her willpower to keep from doing so.

She wasn’t going to cry. She wouldn’t be that weak and helpless.

She’d spent her whole life making sure she wasn’t.

“Actually,” he said, smiling slightly, “I can. I wouldn’t suggest you round up help to throw me out. Assault really wouldn’t help your case.”

She gaped at him.

He arched one eyebrow in a way that made her want to slap him. “Did you need anything else?”

“Why are you doing this? This inn means nothing to you—
nothing
. But it means everything to me. Why are you
doing
this?”

She hated the plea in her voice, but she couldn’t suck the words back in once they were spoken.

Andrew glanced away, for just a moment his bland mask cracking almost imperceptibly.

His voice revealed nothing when he replied, “The inn belongs to my family, and my family means something to me.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, but she knew enough about him to know the words were true.

“So you’re really going to stay?”

He smiled again, the empty mask returning. “I’m really going to stay.”

***

Andrew felt like an ass.

He knew he’d hurt Laurel, and he knew his insistence on staying was both rude and inappropriate.

It was what he had to do, though, so he was determined to not let guilt or sympathy get in his way.

It wasn’t Laurel’s fault they were trapped in this situation, but it wasn’t his fault either. She would never understand how he’d gotten here, and trying to make up with her would only put the Damons at a disadvantage later.

So he was going to get through this with as little friction as possible, hopefully by staying out of her way.

Sometimes the simplest path was the only one to take.

But, two days later, Andrew was getting cabin fever.

Staying in his room would make the most sense. He’d stocked up on enough ready-to-eat food to last him several days, and he had everything else he needed.

But he didn’t like to be cooped up. There was only so long he could talk on the phone to Morris Provost about the best legal and financial strategy for the inn without screaming in frustration.

So, that afternoon, he gave up and went out for a run.

He doubted Laurel would throw his stuff out again, since she knew he could easily get back inside.  If she hired a locksmith to redo the locks with something he couldn’t get past so easily, he would see the work being done, since he wasn’t planning to go far. He had a pretty good sense of her finances by now anyway, and he didn’t think she’d deplete her meager funds with something so unnecessary.

So Andrew took a jog around the property.

It wasn’t a very good place for running—since it was mostly stairs, short flat stretches across small terraces, the garden, and the pool deck, and—in certain places—a length of cliff to scale down since he couldn’t get in the buildings.

He needed exercise, however, and this was better than nothing. He’d prefer to run on the road or out to the beach he’d gone to with Laurel a few days ago, but he couldn’t risk being gone that long.

Laurel was smart. She might think of something he hadn’t to get rid of him.

The day was hot and humid, so by the time he’d gotten around the property twice, he was soaked with sweat. He was planning to go around at least twice more, since he had a lot of energy to burn, but he paused when he heard a sound coming from the small lean-to built against the kitchen wall in which they kept the tools. The tools were all spread out on the ground outside.

It sounded like hammering, so—out of curiosity—he walked over to look into the rickety building, incongruous because it was wood when everything else was made of white-washed stone. At one point, the lean-to had been painted purple, but the color was faded now.

He’d been half expecting Hector so was surprised to find out he was wrong. Laurel was inside, dressed in a red tank top and a pair of faded jeans that hugged her long legs and ass in a very tempting way.

Andrew had cause to notice this fact, since she was standing on a stepladder, hammering a nail into a plank at the top of one of the walls, and her ass was much closer to the level of his eyes than usual.

Her hair was pulled into two braids again, like it had been the morning he’d found her gardening. It made her look young and girlish, which was a sharp contrast to her strength and competence as she hammered with skilled efficiency.

He’d noticed the lean-to was dilapidated the other day when he’d done an inspection of the property, but it bothered him that Laurel was having to fix it herself.

She obviously didn’t know he was standing behind her, watching her, so he cleared his throat softly so he wouldn’t take her by surprise.

She made a startled sound and took an automatic step back, losing her balance.

He jumped forward to catch her before she fell off the ladder.

She dropped the hammer.

It landed on his toe.

He grunted at the sudden pain and jerked in surprise. Since her weight was resting on his, she fell against him.

They both ended up on the dirt floor.

“Damn it, Andrew,” she muttered, trying to scramble off him but not having any success. “Why must you always sneak up on me that way?”

He tried to sit up, but Laurel was sitting on top of him, her ass pressed against his groin. All he could manage was raising his shoulders up by bracing himself on his elbows.

“I wasn’t sneaking up on you,” he objected. “You’re the one falling off ladders and assaulting me with hammers.” His voice was stretched but not with annoyance. His sense of irony had been tickled, and now he kind of wanted to laugh at the awkward tumble.

Her wriggling on top of him was giving his body the wrong idea, however, and he didn’t want her to notice.

“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t startled me.” As she spoke, she managed to climb off, ending up on her knees on the ground beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said with a relieved exhale, sitting up fully at last. “You’ll have to try harder to injure me next time.”

His mouth twitched slightly with amusement he couldn’t quite repress, but he didn’t laugh since he didn’t think she would appreciate it.

For a moment, there was an answering smile in her brown eyes. Then she must have remembered how much she resented him. The smile was quenched and replaced by something chilly and bleak.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Getting some exercise. I just heard someone working in here and wondered what it was. Why are you doing this kind of work?”

She frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Shouldn’t Hector do things like this?”

“He does a lot of the handy work, but there’s a lot to do and he can’t do everything.”

“This just needs to be rebuilt. A few quick fixes aren’t going to do it.”

She tightened her lips before she answered, “I know that. But I can’t afford for it to be rebuilt right now, since I don’t have any income from guests. I’m just doing enough to brace up the supports so it doesn’t completely fall down before I can have it rebuilt. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work.”

She stood up and turned her back to him. He saw her wiping her hands and arms on her jeans, and he realized she’d gotten his sweat on her skin.

For some reason, that knowledge did something uncomfortably primal to him. Particularly since she wasn’t immediately running inside to wash it off.

He hauled himself up, telling himself whatever caveman still lurked inside him shouldn’t be indulged in that way. He was about to leave but glanced back at her one more time.

She was a tall woman, but she looked small as she climbed the ladder. Small and young and alone.

He turned again to leave but then shook his head. There was another stepladder lying on the ground outside—a three-step one rather than the five-step one she was using. He opened it and moved it over to the wall where she was working.

She was trying to hold the new brace up with one hand as she hammered it in with the other. It was a very difficult maneuver and shouldn’t be done by one person.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, as he climbed up the other stepladder and reached for the plank to hold it in place.

“You need help.”

“I don’t need help. Go away.” She glared at him, a nail in one hand and the hammer in the other. He was holding the piece of wood in place now.

“Since I believe this property belongs to us, I’m more responsible than you for the upkeep. Why shouldn’t I help?”

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“That’s not a good enough reason. You can do it with me, or you can not do it at all. I’m not going away.” He had to force his voice into a basically even timbre, since he was growing increasingly annoyed at her irrational stubbornness.

He’d never met anyone who was so clear-sighted about some things and so obtuse about others.

She stared at him for a long minute, indignation simmering in her eyes. Then she made a face and muttered, “Fine.”

Together, they added the extra braces to the walls.

Andrew made the mistake of making an idle comment about how a property of this size needed a lot of upkeep. Laurel took his perfectly innocuous words as an insult, assuming he was hinting at all the things she wasn’t doing well on the property.

So she demanded that he tell her everything he thought was wrong.

He never should have told her. He knew better. He was never so unwise in dealing with people, always instinctively knowing what they wanted to hear.

He was annoyed again by then, however, at her insulting assumptions about him, so he blandly listed all the issues he’d noticed in his inspection earlier that week.

It was like he’d made fun of her child.

“You arrogant ass,” she gritted out. “I know about all of those things, and there are good reasons for them not being done. Tourists come here for the quaint character, and that would be destroyed if I rebuild the stairs from the road as some kind of modern monstrosity. The wall belongs to the place next door, so I can’t build it up higher to mask the noise from that place. The water just started to act up, and I don’t have money to get the work done because, thanks to you, I haven’t been able to take in paying guests this season. And I have a whole plan for expanding two of the buildings to add more guestrooms, but that’s a huge renovation and I haven’t had the chance to do it yet. So don’t you dare stand there and act all superior, as if you could take care of this property better than I have.”

Andrew didn’t respond to her tirade—just kept working and wondering what had happened to his lauded people skills. He’d known his comments would upset her, but he’d said them anyway.

Somehow, for some reason, she’d really gotten under his skin.

To try to redeem himself, he asked what she had in mind for expanding the buildings. She peered at him suspiciously and, evidently believing his question was genuine, she explained everything she’d planned.

They were good ideas. She’d obviously put a lot of time, thought, and research into them. He told her so, but she didn’t appreciate his condescension.

At least, that was what she told him.

After that, Andrew just gave up on conversation. Despite the conflict, they worked well together. She clearly knew what she was doing and, like everything else, she did it with an efficiency that left no wasted time or unnecessary steps.

They’d gotten more than halfway done when she surprised him by saying, “When did you learn to do this kind of work? I wouldn’t have thought a Damon would know anything about handyman work.”

“My parents weren’t rich, and I didn’t move to my uncle’s until I was almost eleven.”

“Oh. Well, your parents might not have been billionaires, but I can’t believe you had to do a lot of manual labor as a kid.”

He gave a half-shrug as he picked up a board and held it in place so she could hammer in the nails. “They weren’t on the brink of poverty, no, but I did normal chores.”

“Mowing the lawn and taking out the trash?”

“Pretty much. One summer, Harrison got it in his head that he could make a lot of money by mowing all the yards in our neighborhood.” He smiled at the memory, feeling uncharacteristically nostalgic. “He bullied me into helping. He made me go around and drum up business, since I was more outgoing than he was. I was too young to know how much work we were in store for, so I asked everyone. You wouldn’t believe the number of yards I’d lined up to mow every week. I was so stupid. The first week we started, it took all day every day to get them done.”