McKettricks of Texas: Garrett (11 page)

He grinned. “Sorry,” he said again.

Julie's gaze dropped. Was he wearing swimming trunks under that bathrobe?

Surely he was.

Wasn't he?

Before Julie could decide one way or the other, Garrett shed the robe, revealing a pair of trunks. He dove into the water and surfaced about a foot in front of her, droplets flying as he gave his head a shake. His eyelashes were spiky with moisture, and his mouth curved into a mischievous smile.

Julie's heart, still pounding from the start he'd given her by switching on the underwater light show, began to slow down a little, find its normal beat.

And then she laughed again, because Garrett did a couple of slow somersaults in the water, as deft as a seal, before surfacing again, this time closer. Close enough to make her breath catch, in fact.

Was he showing off?

No, she decided. Garrett was
reveling,
celebrating his own agility and the water itself.

And there was something so elemental, so sexy about that, that Julie felt a fierce grab of desire, unlike anything any other man had ever aroused in her, in a place so deep inside her that it went beyond the physical.

That was when she knew she was in big,
big
trouble.

A
S FAR AS
G
ARRETT WAS CONCERNED,
kissing Julie Remington was as inevitable as drawing in his next breath. There, in the middle of the pool, he cupped his hands on either side of her face, bent his head and touched his lips to hers—lightly at first, in case she wanted to pull back—and then more deeply when she gave a soft moan and slipped her arms around his neck.

Garrett had kissed a lot of women in his time—he'd enjoyed all those kisses, even thrilled to some of them, but this one,
this one,
seemed to clutch at something deep inside him and hold on, squeezing the breath out of him.

When he finally came up for air, it was out of pure desperation, because his lungs demanded oxygen. He had an odd sense of settling back into himself after being catapulted to somewhere else, and when he opened his eyes and saw Julie staring back at him, looking as baffled as he felt, he laughed.

Julie eased back a little way, although she wasn't out of reach. Pink splotches glowed on her cheeks, and her wonderful chameleon eyes shifted between blue and violet as they drew color from the water.

Garrett longed to pull her close again, kiss her again, hell, do a
lot more
than kiss her. But he didn't move. She
was as rattled as he was—all five of his known senses told him that, and a few besides. If he came on too strong, he'd scare her away, maybe for good.

“What just happened here?” Julie asked, her toned arms moving gracefully as she went on treading water.

Garrett couldn't hold back a grin. He was too damn happy. “I think you kissed me,” he said, though he knew her question had been rhetorical.

He was rewarded by a widening of her eyes and an indrawn breath. “I beg your pardon, Garrett McKettrick,” she said. “
You
kissed
me.
”

“So I did,” he replied easily. “Now that we agree on what ‘just happened' here, let's figure out what comes next.”

“
Nothing
comes next,” Julie said, turning and gliding toward the side of the pool. Gripping the tiled edge with one hand, she looked back at him.

Her spirally copper hair was coming down from the clip on the top of her head, but she didn't seem to notice, and that was fine with Garrett. In the shifting, watery light, she looked like the goddess of ice and fire. There was only one thing he wanted to do more than look at her, and that was touch her, all over, inside and out.

Whoa,
he thought.
Go easy, cowboy.

Julie moved toward the ladder, probably intending to climb out of the pool and flee.

“Wait,” Garrett heard himself say. The voice, though his own, was strange to him, hoarse.

She'd reached the ladder, gripped one of the rungs. Looking back at him over one delectable and faintly freckled shoulder, she bit her lower lip, as though pondering some inner dilemma.

“If you say nothing happens next, Julie,” Garrett told
her, keeping his distance, “then that's the way it will be. You don't have to run away.”

She gave a little burst of laughter, part indignation and part relief, and let go of the ladder, moved away from the side of the pool, though she remained well out of Garrett's reach. Her hair escaped the clip and she raised both arms to attend to the problem, causing her perfect breasts to jut forward.

“Who says I was running away?” she asked.

The kiss had made Garrett hard; the lift of Julie's breasts sent scorching heat pounding through him, rendering him speechless. In a vain effort to cool off, he ducked under the water, considered staying down there long enough to drown himself, and then surfaced again.

When he did, Julie had secured her hair in the squeeze clip, though tendrils spiraled down around her cheeks, her shoulders, the side of her neck.

Garrett wanted to trace the length of that lovely neck with his lips, the tip of his tongue, find her earlobe and nibble at it, make her moan.

He didn't move, though. The water did little to cool his blood; in fact, he half expected the contents of that pool to come to a slow simmer around him.

“So,” he said, “are you seeing anybody?”

Are you seeing anybody?
Talk about hokey. Why didn't he just put on a bad toupee, one of those two-tone jobs maybe, hang a slug of gold chains around his neck, and ask what her sign was?

She smiled. “No,” she said, after considering the question for a long moment. That was it, just “no,” and then she left him to dangle.

Garrett might as well have been a kid again, he felt so awkward. Where, he wondered, was the mover and
shaker, the bring-it-on guy, the smooth operator who could handle anything?

Someplace else, evidently.

Nobody here but a beautiful woman and a country boy making a damn fool out of himself, he thought.

Being a McKettrick meant never knowing when to quit, a trait that could be a blessing or a curse, depending on the situation. Garrett kept talking, when he might have been better off shutting up. “Maybe—we could—well—do something?”

Julie chortled at that—the sound was warm and throaty, made him imagine waking up next to her, deeply rested after a night of frenetic sex, followed by hours of exhausted sleep. She turned, moved to the ladder and climbed up it. Water sluiced off her in iridescent sheets, and her backside swayed slightly. Things ground together inside Garrett, an achy shift in a place where he hadn't known there
was
a place, up to now.

Sitting on the edge of the pool, Julie reached for a towel, wrapped it around her shoulders, idly moved her feet in the water. She was shivering a little.

“What kind of ‘something' do you have in mind, Garrett?” she asked, in her own good time.

She knew, of course, that she was getting to him. And she was enjoying it.

The single mother, devoted to her son.

The teacher, dedicated to her students and her work.

It amazed him that she was the same person as the offbeat girl he'd known in high school.

Julie Remington was all those things, and a lot more besides. There was mischief in her, and fire, and the rare, lasting mystery that just keeps on unfolding, indefinitely. A man could spend a lifetime, he realized with a jolt,
maybe longer, just uncovering all the layers of who she was, what she wanted, what she had to give.

The prospect enticed him and, at the same time, scared the hell out of him. At no time in his life, in no situation, had he ever felt out of his depth.

He did now.

“Garrett?” she prompted, raising one eyebrow slightly.

“I was thinking maybe we could go out to dinner,” he said, and was surprised by his own ability to speak coherently. Inside, all was chaos—collisions, things sparking off each other and igniting. “Maybe to a movie.”

“Dinner,” she repeated, still swinging her legs back and forth. “Where?”

Except for the café at the Amble On Inn, the Silver Dollar Saloon, a snack bar in the bowling alley and a few fast-food places, Blue River didn't have much to offer in the way of restaurants. “Paris?” he asked.

Julie smiled. She probably thought he was kidding.

The weird thing was, he wasn't.

He was thinking “private jet.” Sex in swanky hotel rooms with views of the Seine, room service champagne, more sex.

“Be serious,” she said.

“How about Austin, then?” Garrett persisted, though he made up his mind, then and there, that he would take Julie Remington to Paris, sooner rather than later. “Or maybe San Antonio?”

While he waited for her answer, Garrett let himself imagine what it would be like to pleasure this woman. The thought of her buckling against his mouth or under his hips in the last frantic throes of an orgasm turned his hard-on from problematic to out-and-out painful.

Something sparked in Julie's eyes, putting Garrett in
mind of a tigress, living fierce and free in some jungle. He knew in one dizzying flash of insight—or perhaps it was pure animal
instinct
—that here was a woman capable of throwing her whole self into the fire, of abandoning inhibition, of giving in completely to her own responses and those of the man lucky enough to be making love to her.

If it hadn't been for the little guy, Calvin, snoozing away in his room in the guest quarters, Garrett figured he would simply have gotten out of the pool, whisked the tempting Ms. Remington up into his arms and carried her upstairs, Rhett Butler-style. He'd have had her in the shower first, after peeling away that clinging wet bathing suit and shedding the swim trunks.

But Calvin was a reality.

“It would probably be easier,” she mused, “if I just cooked dinner for you.” She bit her lower lip. “Us. You and me and Calvin, I mean—”

She was as nervous as he was. Garrett found that reassuring.

You and me and Calvin…

Garrett shook off the momentary daze he'd slipped into, thinking about Julie naked in his private shower, warm and slick and, unless he missed his guess, hyperorgasmic.

“Wouldn't you rather go to a restaurant?” he asked. The passing moments, it seemed to Garrett, were marked by the beat of his own heart.

The atmosphere was humid, almost sultry, and the play of lights, having gone through a programmed sequence, slowed and then stopped, throwing the pool and the area surrounding it into something akin to twilight.

“Julie?” he said, low, because she'd been silent for so long, pondering.

She slipped forward, eased back into the water, waited by the side. Either she couldn't speak or she'd chosen not to—Garrett could guess which one.

He went to her, but slowly. Ever so slowly.

“Kiss me again,” she murmured, when he was facing her.

He pressed his mouth to hers, all but pinning her body against the smooth-tiled wall of the pool. Everything in him ached to have her—
here, now
—but even then, lost in that second, deeper kiss, he was careful.

No sudden moves,
he thought.

When the kiss ended, leaving both of them breathless, Garrett kept the hard angles of his frame close against Julie's curvy softness, but without pressure. He said her name again, nibbled at the side of her neck, tasted her earlobe, the way he'd wanted to do earlier, delighted in the little moan she uttered.

“Garrett,” she whispered. He felt her palms flatten against his chest, but she didn't push. “It's too soon—we have to stop, and I don't think—I don't think I can do that if you don't help me out a little here.”

He drew back far enough to leave a space between them, probably no thicker than the fabric of her swimsuit. His breath was ragged, and he gripped the pool's edge on either side of Julie, not to trap her, but to keep himself from sinking.

“Okay,” he rasped out. “Okay.”

She planted a wet kiss in the cleft of his chin, then ducked under his left arm, grabbed hold of the ladder again and climbed out of the pool.

He couldn't bear to watch her this time. That trim waist, that perfect backside—dammit, there was a limit to what one man could take without going crazy.

“Good night, Garrett” he heard her say.

Garrett closed his eyes, rested his forehead against the tile, held on to the pool's edge with both hands. A verbal response was more than he could manage—he merely nodded once, and listened as she hurried away.

After a long time, he returned to his own part of the house, stood in the long living room, with its row of floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over the darkened range. Although he hadn't been around a lot since going to work for the senator right after law school, it wasn't because the quarters lacked creature comforts.

He turned, taking in the huge natural rock fireplace, the full-sized kitchen beyond the dining area. There were two bedrooms, each with its own bath, in addition to the master suite. The apartment covered nearly five thousand square feet, and it had two exits of its own, one leading to the garage on the lower level, one to a set of stone stairs ending in the yard.

After their folks' death, Garrett recalled grimly, one of them—Austin or Tate or himself, he didn't know—had suggested dividing the big house into sections.

The idea had seemed like a good one at the time, Garrett thought now, with a rueful smile. The kind of thing young men tend to come up with, he supposed, when they've just lost their folks and feel a need to dig their roots in deeper and hold on to their piece of ground.

Garrett had draped a towel around his waist before leaving poolside, but he was dripping on the slate-tile floors. He made his way into the master bath, opened the shower door and stepped inside.

The space boasted a stone bench and fully a dozen different sprayers that could be angled to suit.

If Julie had been there, he might have done some fancy
sprayer-arranging, but since it was just him—dammit—he used only the big round one, overhead. He took off the swim trunks and let them hit the shower floor with a soggy plop, and switched on the water.

He soaped and rinsed, but shaving seemed like a waste of time, since he'd have to do it again in the morning.

Scrubbed, smelling of soap and shampoo, Garrett snatched a towel, dried himself rigorously and walked out of the bathroom with the towel hooked around his waist.

He was hungry.

He meandered into his kitchen—since he rarely bothered to stock the shelves or the refrigerator, preferring to cadge meals from Esperanza when he was on the ranch—and checked out the supply situation.

It amounted to meager—or a little less than that.

The fridge was empty except for half a loaf of blue-crusted bread and an egg carton with an expiration date that made Garrett hesitant to lift the lid.

He chucked both items into a garbage bag, nose wrinkled, and headed for the inside staircase, planning to dispose of it in one of the trash bins outside the garage.