Paradise County (26 page)
“If I were you, I’d let my hair loose before we go in here,” Neely said seriously as they walked under the yellow security lights. The rooms were still being cleaned, apparently. A Mexican-looking woman in a tired gray uniform pushed a white laundry cart along the paved inner sidewalk in front of the rooms. A man with a push broom swept debris from the parking lot.
“Why?” Alex asked as they reached the door. Through the heavy glass she could see a man in a white shirt sitting behind the reception desk.
“’Cause you’ve got a hickey.” Neely touched a spot right under Alex’s ear. “Right here.”
Eyes widening, Alex clapped a hand to the spot. It was an automatic reaction. Obviously it was too late to hide… .
Neely laughed. “Gotcha. So you did do Daddy Studmuffin. I knew you did.”
Alex’s hand dropped as she glared at her sister. “Neely, you little brat,” she said with some venom, and pulled open the door.
Her sister was still laughing as she followed her inside the Dixie Inn.
I
t was nearly midnight, and Joe was seated at his kitchen table, paying bills by lantern light. He’d been to bed, but it hadn’t taken. Tired as he was—and he was so tired his eyeballs felt grainy—he couldn’t sleep.
He knew the reason, of course: Alexandra Haywood. Charles Haywood’s little princess had been all her father had ever claimed, and lots more that Joe was sure Daddy had never even thought about.
The sex had been mind-blowing. For her, too. He’d known it, even before she’d told him so.
The best sex I’ve ever had.
He could still hear her voice saying it. The memory made him hard.
Damn it to hell.
What, exactly, was his problem? he asked himself for what must have been the dozenth time. He’d just had the mother of all sex sessions with the most desirable woman he’d run across in some time. He wasn’t all bent out of shape just because, post-coitus, she’d called him by her lout of an ex-fiancé’s name. No. He wasn’t that childish. Or that jealous-natured.
But he was, definitely, bent out of shape. He’d been irritable with the
kids, which he always tried his damndest not to be. He’d been impatient with the horses. He’d growled at his father. He’d been unable to sleep.
Which all added up to a major funk. And the cause of it was Alex. He knew it, and knew precisely why, too, even if he hated to face the truth.
She’d gotten under his skin.
From the moment he’d first laid eyes on her, at Charles Haywood’s funeral, he’d been struck by her beauty. Then she’d marched up to his barn, and her boss-lady manner had raised his hackles even before she’d gotten around to firing him. Later, at Whistledown, he’d felt sorry for her.
If it had ended there, that would have been fine. He would have acknowledged feeling a certain degree of attraction for a beautiful, bitchy woman presently kind of down on her luck, and left it at that.
Then, of course, she’d had to come running to him with her tales of burglars and ghosts, and his control over events had gone downhill from there.
He’d wanted her in his bed from about midway through that ill-advised shower. It had been clear that she was willing, no, wanting, too. But he’d been careful to keep his distance, careful not to do anything he was sure to regret. Even earlier today, when she’d cried all over him in Whistledown’s barn, he’d been strictly hands-off, for which he’d been ready to award himself a medal. And he would have continued to keep his hands to himself, too, because he had known that in the long run it was better that way.
But then she had kissed him, and at the sweet, hot touch of her mouth all his calm good judgment had been blown straight to hell.
Wasn’t there a saying about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach? Well, whoever had thought that one up was dead wrong. The way to a man’s heart was through his dick, and anyone who didn’t know that didn’t know crap about men.
She was beautiful in just the way he liked, slim with high, firm breasts that were as real as the nose on her face. He liked blondes, and her hair was silvery, and if that wasn’t her natural shade it was close to it. The evidence was the ash-brown down of her pubic hair. He liked sassy
women, too, women who weren’t afraid to look him in the eye when necessary and tell him to go take a long walk off a short pier.
Most of all, he liked women who liked men, and weren’t afraid to show it in bed.
On that last count, she met the gold standard.
She’d made him so hot that he’d taken her three times and still been ready to do it again. Until she had called him by her last lover’s name, that is.
Even now, he was having trouble concentrating on his work because he could not get the image of her naked out of his head.
Naked and begging, to be precise.
Spread-eagled beneath him and squirming like a worm on a hook and begging him to come in.
Where do you want it?
Inside me.
Fuck. No, not fuck. Shit, damn, something else. Anything else. He was now so hard that he was physically uncomfortable, and he still couldn’t seem to keep the damned woman out of his head.
Naked.
Begging.
Stop it,
he ordered himself fiercely. If he wasn’t careful, Princess Alex would have him panting after her like a lapdog, and that just wasn’t going to happen, not if he could help it, and he could. Falling that hard for another woman was the last thing he ever meant to do. Especially a woman who was basically using him to get over another man, who was in town for a limited amount of time, and who was his boss’s daughter, or boss, or however the hell you wanted to look at it, to complicate the situation.
He had panted that way after a female once, lusting with all the force of a boy’s first wild passion. He’d lusted his way right into falling in love. And that, of course, was how the whole damned nightmare that had been his marriage had begun. He’d been crazy for Laura, his boyhood sweetheart, his wife, the mother of his kids; Laura, who had slept with everything in pants before, during, and after their marriage, who’d boozed and
drugged and partied until booze and drugs and partying had meant more to her than he and the children ever had; Laura, who’d left him and the kids so many times that he had lost count before she had finally taken off for good; Laura, who’d first broken his heart, then left it encased in a hard shell that he was determined no woman was ever going to crack open again.
Not that he had sworn off sex: he hadn’t. Or women, either. Unfortunately, women were necessary for the kind of sex he liked. But the women he saw knew up front that if they wanted to keep seeing him, they had to keep it light.
Getting hot and heavy with another woman was not part of his game plan. He liked things just the way they were, with his kids and his horses taking center stage and women and sex on the side.
So his black mood was his own fault, Joe knew. He’d caved to unholy temptation, taken what he wanted, and now he was paying the price.
At least she was leaving tomorrow. In all likelihood, he would never see her again.
That was a good thing, he told himself. And refused to consider why it made him feel so bad.
“Dad?” The voice from the doorway made him start almost guiltily and look around, even though it was as familiar to him as his own: Eli. Joe watched as his tall son, who looked enough like him to be his much-younger, hipper clone, padded barefoot across the floor toward him, rubbing his eyes with both fists. From the time he was a toddler, Eli had always rubbed his eyes that way upon first waking up. The memory brought a half-smile to Joe’s lips.
“What are you doing up? It’s after midnight, and you’ve got school tomorrow.” His voice was gruff. He was still a little ticked at Eli for putting the ATVs away covered with mud. The fact that, ordinarily, such a transgression would have earned his son no more than a mild
clean ’em up tomorrow
was not lost on him, but he’d been too grumpy to remind himself of that when he’d yelled at Eli earlier.
“Is everything okay?” Eli stopped beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder and squinting down at the checkbook in front of him and the
bills and notices scattered across the tabletop. Eli’s long hair flopped over his face, and he tucked it back behind one ear with a long-fingered hand.
It struck Joe that his kid was rapidly turning into a man.
“What do you mean, is everything okay? Sure everything is okay.” He looked up at Eli with a frown. His son could not know about his turmoil over Alex—God help him if the boy did. A father’s sex life was something that no kid, even if he was almost a man, needed to be privy to.
“Neely told me about you losing your job at Whistledown. She said her sister came down here to tell you.”
“Oh.” For a moment Joe said nothing more, simply staring up at his son as he tried to think how to reply to that. “Well, yeah, Miss Haywood did say something along those lines.”
Eli’s expression turned earnest. “If things are going to be tight, I could get a job and help out. I’m old enough. I’m sixteen.”
“Eli.” For a moment Joe felt like standing up and giving the kid a hug, but that was not really the kind of thing he did, not since Eli had started getting so big. He settled for patting the hand on his shoulder. “You don’t need to get a job. Everything’s going to be fine. Yes, I’m probably going to lose the job at Whistledown, because the Haywoods are having financial problems. But it won’t be for a while, because I have a contract that runs through a certain date. And in the meantime I’m going to take steps to make sure that we don’t lose any income when it happens. Believe me, there’s nothing for you to worry about, so go back to bed.”
“What about you?”
“What? What about me?”
“Are you coming to bed?” Eli gave him a fleeting, teasing grin. “You’re getting kind of old, you know. Old men need their sleep.”
Joe made a sound that was partway between a snort and a laugh. “Eli, if I wanted a mother hen I’d move your grandpa in. Yes, son, I am coming to bed. Just as soon as I finish up here. Now go on. I’m fine, everything’s fine. Go to bed.”
Eli finally went. But Joe stayed up for a long time, unable to sleep.
Unable to get Alex, naked and begging, out of his head.
T
he sound of laughter made him prick up his ears. The predator glanced around and saw, under the yellow security lights, not one but two beautiful blondes. They were getting ready to enter the building, and he was almost dazzled by his good fortune.
Two beautiful blondes, right here at ground zero. God, he thought, had surely smiled.
Maybe, just maybe, if God was in a really good mood and the stars were aligned just right and all that crap, he could keep one or both of these girls. He was getting tired of Cassandra anyway. She didn’t laugh anymore. She didn’t cry anymore, or even act scared anymore. She wasn’t much more fun than one of those life-size blow-up dolls with a vagina, which, incidentally, he had tried when he was younger and found unsatisfactory. Time to think about replacing her.
If these girls filled the bill, he could replace Cassandra tonight. Send her up to join her Eric in a blaze of glory while his new playmates watched. Showing them right off the bat what would happen if they weren’t good girls was always best. After that kind of demonstration, they never gave him any trouble. In fact, they were usually almost pathetically eager to do exactly what he said.
But, as it turned out, God was in a playful mood, as He sometimes was. As soon as he learned the identity of the blond beauties, the predator realized that. Alexandra and Cornelia Haywood. If that wasn’t some kind of cosmic joke at his expense, he didn’t know what was.
He’d been in their house last night. Of course, when he’d finished topping his evening off with Cassandra and climbed up out of the subterranean depths for a quick shower, he hadn’t even known that the house was occupied. Subtle clues—well, not so subtle, really, a purse in the kitchen—had tipped him off to the presence of at least one woman, and he’d gone to investigate.
He was an opportunist, after all. If God handed him a woman on a plate, who was he to say no?