What a Woman Needs (8 page)

“Oh, Sherman, yes,” growled Bryan as he directed the kids to form a circle around the dog. “Come on, guys, get ready to grab him when he bolts.”

Bryan shifted his weight back and forth, ready to pounce, and oh, what it did to his butt. And Beth wasn’t looking away.

Then he lunged and the physical perfection that was Bryan was nothing compared to him coming to her rescue yet again—even when he slipped, taking a header onto the pile.

And it was that and the fact that he managed to keep hold of her squiggling pet that sent his knight-in-shining-banana-peel status up a whole bunch of notches.

B
RYAN
used the fluffy pink towel Maggie had insisted on lending him before he’d headed into the shower, and tried hard not to look around Beth’s bathroom when he finished. To imagine her in here, showering. Wet. Covered in suds.

Or not.

Okay, he wasn’t doing very well on that front.

He scrubbed his head with the towel. Ah, that smelled like her. Not perfume, just an inexpensive bottle of shampoo, but combined with her natural scent . . . Bam! Got him right in the midsection.

As had that almost-kiss earlier.

He should have done it—well, no, he shouldn’t have. There was too much baggage. His included. But, damn, he’d wanted to. Especially when he’d been within one tiny step of tasting her. Of holding her in his arms and discovering all the sweetness he knew was inside of Beth. Of feeling her against him, how her body would match the contours of his, how she’d fit into his arms. There’d be fireworks. He knew it. He didn’t know how he knew; he just did. He hadn’t felt fireworks in, well, years. Even with all the beautiful women he’d dated, he knew Beth would eclipse all of them if he only had the chance to take her in his arms and kiss her.

But he didn’t and he’d better suck that up and deal with it, not stand here mooning over something that would just complicate things. He wrapped the towel around his hips and looked for something to put on. Sadly, he doubted his uniform was out of the laundry yet, but he couldn’t very well go walking around her house in a towel. He wasn’t stupid; he worked hard at keeping his body in this shape and knew what it looked like. Knew the effect it had on women, and while he was glad of it around Beth, Kelsey . . . not so much.

Beth’s robe was hanging on the back of the door. Of course it was pink.

He shrugged. Real men could wear pink, and hell, he was already in this fluffy towel with a cat’s face on the edge; a pink robe was almost an afterthought.

Too bad it was too small.

Bryan pulled the one sleeve off. He’d gotten it up to his bicep. Beth might be the perfect height for him, but she wasn’t built like him. And thank God for that.

He shrugged and opened the bathroom door.
Don’t look at her bed
.

Uh, yeah. That didn’t work.

The bed had the covers pulled up but not tucked in. The pillows were on the chair beside it. She’d gotten up in a hurry to rescue Sherman. Had she been wearing those short shorts she’d shown up in outside to bed? Or did she sleep in the nude? She hadn’t been wearing a bra—that much he knew for certain and it’d tortured him throughout his shower.

He readjusted the towel. Yeah, that was pointless. A towel was not going to hide his growing erection.

Which meant that,
of course
, that was the moment her bedroom door opened and Beth stood there with clothing in her hands.

Which she dropped.

Bryan bent down to pick them up, almost smacking into her.

“I, uh . . .” Beth did that adorable hair-behind-the-ear move and the really hot lip-licking thing she had no idea would affect him as it did.
He
didn’t know it’d affect him as it did—like a wave of lava rushing over his head and shooting straight to his groin. Good God, he wanted her.

Reason enough to back away. Which he did.

Of course the towel fell off when he did so.

Bryan scrambled to catch the thing somewhere by his knees, blushing for the first time in his life at his nudity.

“Oh. Shit. Sorry.” The damn towel had shrunk two sizes in two seconds, and it was twisted around on itself so that if that pitifully narrow thing actually covered him, he’d turn in his man card.

Beth’s blush matched the robe perfectly.

“Oh, geez. Here.” She thrust out a piece of the clothing. Bryan snatched it from her and plastered it over his groin. Great. Nothing like standing in front of her holding his junk with his ass hanging out the window behind him.

He prayed there weren’t any reporters out there. This picture would go viral in an instant.

Beth stood up and tried to avert her eyes—but he caught the quick glance to his nether regions.

Which caused said nether regions to get mighty interested.

Great. Nothing like holding your
erect
junk in front of the woman who’d made it that way.

Thank God, she turned around. “Those are, uh, were Mike’s. He wasn’t as, um, tall as you, but they should still fit. Until your uniform’s dry.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll just leave you to . . . get dressed.”

He didn’t want her to go.

Thankfully, some shred of common sense prevented him from blurting that out, and he waited until she closed the door behind her before he moved.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about wearing her husband’s clothes.

Dead husband’s
.

Right. That distinction was important. He didn’t hit on married women. Widows, on the other hand . . .

No, he didn’t hit on widows, either. Hell, he didn’t hit on anyone. He didn’t have to. They all hit on him. But he hadn’t taken up any married woman’s invitation and so far, none of his lovers had been widows.

Beth could be the first.

He yanked on the shorts. Maybe wearing her dead husband’s clothes
was
a good idea; it’d keep him from making an ass out of himself around her. Seriously, he was not going to start something with Beth. She had too much going on in her life to handle a casual fling, and a casual fling was all Bryan was able to do at this point in his life. Especially with a mom from surburbia.

A little tap sounded from the door. “Bryan?”

He whipped the T-shirt over his head. “Hang on, Maggie. I’ll be right there.”

He gathered up the towel and hung it in the bathroom to dry, then opened the door to find Maggie standing there with a hopeful expression on her face.

Just like Kelsey’s and her three friends’ behind her. How many groups of friends did this kid have?

“Hi, Bryan.” Kelsey gave him a flirty little tilted-head smile that would be devastating to twelve-year-old boys. Beth was going to have her hands full in a few more years.

The kid needs a dad
.

Bryan sucked in a breath. He needed to go clean a toilet or something. Get his mind off that asinine notion.

“We were wondering if you’d, you know, take some pictures with us?” Kelsey asked.

“Yeah, it’d totally make everyone jealous,” said one of the girls.

“And my mom, too. She thinks you’re hot.”

Bryan worked hard to plaster a smile to his face. This conversation had to be inappropriate on so many levels.

“Sure, girls, but let’s take this downstairs, okay?” The bedroom was
not
the place to do a photo shoot. His agent would have a coronary.

The girls giggled and moved toward the stairs en masse in that odd way teenage girls did. Maggie rolled her eyes and shook her head as she reached for his hand. “Raquel’s weird. All she talks about is boys.” Maggie’s sigh spoke volumes on her thoughts about the subject. “Boys are annoying.”

Bryan’s lips twitched. Ah, the blunt honesty of a child.

“Well, ’cept you,” Maggie said, stopping at the top of the stairs. She patted his hand with her free one. “You’re not annoying. You’re nice.”

His heart melted right then. He was surprised it wasn’t sliding down the stairs, her words touched him so much. Because she meant them. Kids her age were brutally honest—and that truth could hurt or warm the heart.

He hiked her into his arms and rested his forehead against hers for a few seconds. “Thanks, Maggie. I think you’re pretty special, too.”

She patted his cheeks and gave him a kiss on the nose. “Now we’re special buddies. That’s what my daddy used to do with me before he died.”

Bryan’s heart melted the rest of the way and he could only nod. Hell, he even had to blink a few times just so she wouldn’t see him tear up.

He carried her down the stairs, making his steps a little extra bouncy so her squeals of delight would wipe away the heavy emotion she’d tucked inside him. They could both use her laughter.

Kelsey was waiting not so patiently in the family room, trying to act all grown up and cool around her friends. How he remembered those days. It was tough growing up with one parent, and with the way her father had died . . .

He’d done his research after that first night. Read all the press coverage. Saw the suspicion that Mike Hamilton had been under in the days after his death. It couldn’t have been easy for Beth, trying to deal with his death
and
taking care of her kids
and
handling the press coverage. The press could be ruthless, especially if they smelled a story. And they had. He’d found himself getting angry as he’d read the speculation that, in the end, had turned out to be pointless. Mike had been cleared of any wrongdoing and his record remained untarnished—as it should be.

Bryan hoisted Maggie onto the sofa and walked over beside Kelsey. Her shoulders went back. Her head went a little higher.

Then he put his arm around her. Her
cool
quotient grew exponentially; he could see it in her friends’ awed looks. Good. If he could do this for her, putting on an apron was worth it.

“Okay, girls, I’ve got a few minutes to do this. Who’s taking the pictures?”

“Oh, uh, right.” Kelsey’s face fell.

“I can!” Maggie raised her hand, her little face so full of hope Bryan was halfway into a wince because he knew what was coming when Kelsey shook her head.

“No way, Mags. I’ll get Mom.”

His wince turned into a smile he couldn’t contain.

He tried to tamp it down when Beth showed up, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, looking so June Cleaver it ought to make him run in the opposite direction, but didn’t.

She stopped short when she saw him, and the look she gave him was
far
from June Cleaver.

He had to talk himself out of his body’s natural response.
Teenage girls
became his mantra. Nothing better to kill the effect Beth had on him.

The photo op went from “a few minutes” to a good half hour as the girls warmed up to him and stopped being star struck.

Then their moms showed up.

Beth answered the door when he was finishing up with the last photo and she walked back into the living room with an apologetic look on her face. “Um, Bryan? The moms were wondering if they could, well . . .”

“Sure. No problem. But why don’t we go outside, ladies?” He did like meeting his fans and he knew as well as anyone that his looks were the draw. He had no illusions about that, and he worked on his looks for just that reason. They’d gotten him noticed, but he had to work at his craft to keep the jobs coming in. He didn’t want to be a pretty boy joke when all was said and done. Which was why he was trying to segue out of action hero roles. No one won an Oscar for those. It was solid acting that came from portraying emotionally complex characters that got the Best Actor awards, and that was something Bryan had had his eye on since his first SAG role.

He posed on the deck for enough pictures to fill a magazine for an entire year, answered a ton of questions, and fielded a few not-so-covert invitations with his usual noncommittal good humor, all the while very aware that Beth was hovering in the background, glancing his way every so often.

She hadn’t forgotten about the almost-kiss. Good. Well, maybe that was good. He
had
almost overstepped the boundaries and that would so not be good. For either of them.

No shit, Sherlock. Does she look like the type who goes around kissing random guys?

Jealousy churned in his gut, which surprised him because he’d never been the jealous type. Call it arrogance, but if a woman wanted someone else, he wasn’t about to beg. The reality was, he had them lined up.

But with Beth . . . He didn’t get it. She was everything he
didn’t
need at this point in his life, just when his career was posed to go to that next level. His agent was counting on a new romantic lead role to give him an all-roles credibility. To be able to play emotional as well as action roles. He was going to be seen as a jack-of-all-trades and make it really big.

The last thing he needed was to pine away for a mom of five in middle-class America. This was his time to shine. To make his mark. Not be tied down with roots so deep he’d never be free.

Tied down
?
Tied down? What the hell are you saying, Manley?

He didn’t know and he didn’t want to know. Bryan plastered a big, charming, movie star smile on his face and looked at the last mom of the bunch. He swung her into his arms in a classic romantic pose, knowing it’d hit the Twitterverse within minutes and start the speculation about his upcoming film. It was all about the publicity. And always would be.

 • • • 

B
ETH
couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy as Lori wrapped her arms around Bryan’s neck and hung on. Beth wanted to be the one there. Which was silly. Ridiculous. She actually had a date tonight and Bryan was only posing for a photo op, not sweeping Lori off her feet to ride into the sunset with a happily ever after. Bryan wasn’t cut out for this world. This life. He was made for bigger and better things. The glitz and glamour of Hollywood. Weeks in the south of France at film festivals. Award shows and red carpets and interviews . . .