RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (59 page)

He wanted to kiss her again. And she wanted to let him.

“Taryn is probably awake by now,” she said, then was embarrassed by the huskiness of her voice.

“I doubt it,” he said. “She can be a pretty sound sleeper.”

She needed to go now, while she could.
Move.
The warning registered in her mind but she couldn't seem to make her feet cooperate. With a funny sense of inevitability, she saw Brodie walk around his desk to stand in front of her.

“Evaline,” he murmured. Just that, only her name, and she was lost. She didn't resist when he pulled her to her feet or when he curved one hand around her cheek, his fingers warm on her skin, or when he lowered his head and his mouth found hers.

He tasted delicious, of cherries and a hint of chocolate, probably from that thin slice of cake he'd had for dessert after lunch. Somehow she had always known chocolate would eventually be her downfall but this wasn't quite what she'd expected.

Where their first kiss had been slow and easy, this one was…
more.
More sensual, more intense, more demanding.

More…
wow.

His tongue licked at the seam of her mouth and she couldn't resist parting her lips, drawing him closer, pressing her body to his as he deepened the kiss.

Oh. My. He was an extraordinary kisser. Who would have thought serious Brodie Thorne would kiss a woman with this knee-weakening intensity that made her want to throw every shred of common sense down the mountainside, crawl right into his lap and stay for a week or so, just learning the mysteries of his clever mouth?

Somehow—she was only vaguely aware of the logistics of it—he shifted their position until she was perched on the edge of the desk and he was standing between her legs. The heat of him was intoxicating. It seeped through her skin, warming all those cold and empty places inside her.

They kissed for a long time and might have continued indefinitely, heedless of Taryn or Mrs. O. or anything else, except a phone suddenly bleated softly between them.

He drew back a little, his eyes murky and aroused and filled with regret. The phone rang again and she scrambled back a little way on the desk. “Aren't you going to answer that?”

“I don't think so. Who knows what I might say? I'm not sure I have a functioning brain cell in my head right now.” He paused and gave her a long look. “This is going to be a problem, isn't it?”

She swallowed hard, wanting nothing more than to sink back into him. She had a job to do here, she reminded herself, and it didn't include kissing her employer until she forgot everything, including her patient.

“Depends how you define
problem.
”

He sighed and moved away from her, much to her regret.

“I know how much I owe you. What you're doing with Taryn is amazing. She's showing real progress and I don't want to do anything to screw that up.”

“It was only a kiss, Brodie.”

“A pretty spectacular one, as far as kisses go.”

She refused to feel flattered by that. Or so she told herself. “Don't worry about it. For some reason I don't quite understand, we happen to have this…vibe…between us. It's completely insane. I get it.”

“Not
completely
insane,” he murmured.

“Sorry?”

“You're a beautiful woman, Evie. I've been attracted to you since the day you showed up in Hope's Crossing.”

“You have not. You hated me when I came to visit your mother the first time!”

“
Hate
is a strong word.
Distrust
fits better. I tend to be protective of the people I care about. I was looking out for my mother, wondering at your motives for befriending her. I won't deny that, but even when I was suspicious of you, that didn't stop me from having, uh, completely inappropriate thoughts about you. For one thing, I've been wondering for months how all that wondrous hair would feel if I ever had the chance to slide my fingers through it.”

She shivered, enthralled by his words even as she knew she ought to tell him to shut up now, while she still had half a chance of walking out of this room without kissing him again. She didn't, though, and her penance was that he continued to seduce her with those low, murmured words.

“Having you here in my house has only intensified my attraction to you. Not only that, but I'm beginning to see someone even more amazing on the inside. Strong and kind, clever, compassionate, funny. How could any man in his right mind not be dying to kiss you?”

She hitched in a ragged little breath, wanting desperately to jump back into his arms again.

She couldn't. If he knew she had allowed Charlie in his house, he wouldn't see her as any of those things. More like manipulative, devious, seditious.

The reminder compelled her to ease away from him. What was the word he'd used?
Inappropriate.
This whole tangling of tongues thing was completely inappropriate, especially given her deception.

With a great deal of effort—and no small amount of regret—she eased away from him, scooting to the side of the desk and standing again. “I'd better go check on Taryn.”

His expression was rueful. “Yeah. It's going to be a problem.”

“Not if we don't let it be. Let's just pretend this kiss and the one the other day never happened. Whatever the catalyst—stress, proximity, whatever—they were both mistakes. Yes, I'm attracted to you. I'm sure if I stood on Main Street and took a poll, half the women in town would be able to say the same thing. But I can't afford this kind of…distraction…right now. I'm here to help Taryn transition to her home-based program. That's all. This is a critical time in her therapy and we would both do better to focus on our objective here.”

“Our objective. Right.”

“Taryn needs my attention right now. Her occupational therapist is coming this afternoon so I need to go make sure she's ready.”

They never
had
discussed possible candidates to replace her, Evie realized as she left his office and walked down the hall toward Taryn's rooms. Let him figure it out himself. She wasn't about to head back into his office right now—not when it was taking all her strength to walk away.

CHAPTER NINE

I
T
WAS
ONLY
A
KISS
.
A simple merging of mouth against mouth, with a jumble of highly compatible pheromones thrown in to make things interesting. More than a week later, Brodie was still trying to convince himself of that—and still trying to talk himself down from trying it again.

Evie had made it abundantly clear she wasn't interested, despite the tension that seemed to shiver in the air whenever they were in the same room. Her priority was Taryn and she considered this attraction between them merely a distraction.

Under other circumstances, he might have appreciated the irony that Evie Blanchard—of the bleeding heart and the hippie-chick clothes and the zeal for beading—was the one being brisk and businesslike here.

He knew she was right. Beyond that, while they might share an attraction and he was coming to see her in a much more favorable light as he watched her care for his daughter, on the most basic of issues they were highly incompatible. He craved structure and order and calm. Evie was the complete opposite of all those things. She was color and chaos, passion and heat.

And yet. There was a softness about her, a fragile vulnerability, that called to him even though he knew it was, in her words, completely crazy.

He hadn't been able to stop thinking about her for more than a week. In the middle of a business meeting, he would remember the particular curve of her mouth, that sexy little hitch in her breath, the sweet, wildflower scent of her, and his thoughts would scatter like the aspen leaves that were turning gold now as August faded towards September.

The smartest thing, the only thing, had been to avoid her—and he'd done his best for more than a week. He had mostly stayed away from the house during the time he knew Evie was likely to be there, choosing to move more of his work responsibilities to his office in downtown Hope's Crossing.

The only time he'd spent more than a brief moment with her had been a week earlier, Wednesday, when Evie had agreed to sit in on another interview for Taryn's rehab therapist. This candidate had been perfect—fresh out of physical-therapy training, enthusiastic, energetic. Evie had approved of her right away. He wondered if her alacrity was indeed due to Stephanie Kramer's credentials or if Evie was that anxious to return to her job at the bead store.

Stephanie had been excited to take the job but because of other commitments she couldn't start until the following week. With obvious reluctance, Evie had agreed to stay on another week, until after Labor Day.

For Taryn's sake, he was relieved since his daughter's progress the last ten days had been nothing short of miraculous. She was taking several steps at a time unassisted and her vocabulary and sentence structures—while still a little hesitant—were head and shoulders above where she'd been before she'd come home.

He was deeply grateful for Evie, though her continued presence at his home also meant another week of his keeping as healthy a distance as he could manage.

Even when he stayed away, he wasn't doing a very good job of maintaining focus in the rest of his life.

Right now, for instance, he was supposed to be in a meeting with his attorneys for a rehab project he was considering in a section of tiny crumbling houses in the Old Town area of Hope's Crossing. Instead, he had been forced to leave them all waiting so he could run home like a kid who'd left his homework on the kitchen table instead of stuffing it in his backpack to take to school.

Evie's arrival that morning, along with her gangly yellow-haired Labradoodle, had distracted him so much as he'd been on his way out the door that he'd completely forgotten a pile of vital contracts he needed for the meeting.

His plan was to slip into his office, grab the contracts and leave again without anybody being the wiser. No witty banter with Evie, no soft exchange of confidences, and definitely no more of those delicious kisses.

Too damn bad for him.

The house was quiet. He knew this was the morning Mrs. Olafson usually went to the grocery store but he might have expected to hear Taryn and Evie rocking out in the therapy room to the music Taryn liked to work to, or playing the game system the Angel of Hope had sent, or at least laughing and talking about something, as they tended to do.

Nothing. Just silence.

The van had still been parked out front so he knew they hadn't gone anywhere. Curious, he couldn't resist peeking his head into her suite of rooms, and found them empty. Maybe they were out in the pool, though late-August mornings in the mountains were cool enough for sweatshirts, at least until the sun burned off the mist. He kept the water comfortable for his own laps and could usually swim until the first snowfall. Since the all-season cover for the pool was set to be installed in a few weeks, he could swim all winter if he wanted.

Once Evie was out of his house and his mind, he probably wouldn't need the relentless distraction of laps.

If they weren't swimming, they could have gone for a walk. Evie liked being outside. He wouldn't exactly call her a nature girl but she definitely thrived on sunshine and fresh air. He could understand that. Being outside helped him think more clearly, probably because of the ADD.

Forgetting these contracts seemed an entirely too familiar habit, one he had worked hard as an adult to overcome. School had been a nightmare for him of missed homework and forgotten assignments, notes from teachers, frustration all the way around. His father had despised that weakness in his son and couldn't understand why Brodie couldn't just put his mind to it and succeed.

He'd tried. The only saving grace for him had been sports. When he was swimming or skiing or running, all the connections in his brain seemed to click along just fine.

Now that he was an adult, he'd managed to come up with techniques to block out the chaos in his head but sometimes when he pushed himself too hard or worked outside his comfort zone, he could still stumble. These contracts were a perfect example. He should have remembered them. The meeting was his main priority for the day and he'd known he needed the contracts. He had even set them on the corner of his desk, after vetting them the night before, in plain view so he wouldn't forget them.

By now, he should have known his own weaknesses well enough to have had the foresight to slide the contracts into his laptop case when he'd finished with them. Since he hadn't, here he was, burdened with the complication of having to run home for them.

He located them quickly and stuck them under his arm, then decided to run into the kitchen for a slice of the banana bread Mrs. O. had made earlier. Though it had filled the house with the delicious nutty scent, he'd left in too much of a rush to enjoy it then.

The window was open above the sink in the kitchen and he heard a muffled bark from outside, saw a shadow of movement. Ah. There they were. He should have known. The backyard, with its sweeping views of Hope's Crossing, had become a favored spot for Evie and Taryn.

He had twenty minutes before his rescheduled meeting, which left him just the right amount of time to say a polite hello and then leave before he could cross any more boundaries with Evie, he decided.

The morning was cool but pleasant as he opened the door leading to the deck. He closed it behind him with a snick, then turned back around. “Good morning,” he started to say, but the words and everything else inside him seemed to stutter to a grinding halt and he only got out the first consonant.

For a full thirty seconds, he could do nothing but stare, shock paralyzing his thoughts, and then fury washed over him, fierce and hot.

“What the hell is this?”