Crush (6 page)

Morgan and his nattily dressed assistants brought the first course and set it before them, and then retreated from the room. Lucas enjoyed escargot avec garlique. It was one of his favorite dishes, and he was starving. But as he stared at the arrangement of steaming, buttery delicacies on his plate, he realized that his hunger wasn’t for food.

“Miranda?” he called.

“Yes?” She called back.

“Are you enjoying your escargot?”

“Yes. It’s very…snaily.”

“Very well, then.” He set down his cutlery and began twiddling his thumbs. He listened to the sounds of Miranda’s knife and fork moving against her plate.

“Miranda?” Lucas called again, this time startling the guilty Miranda in the middle of using her spoon to catapult snail bits into the gigantic floral arrangement.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’ve got Fenway Franks in the kitchen.”

Miranda smiled. Whatever tension and unease she had felt vanished as she laughed out loud.

Chapter 3

The “kitchen” turned out to be a stadium-sized cooking arena. The wood-fired grill in the center of the space was large enough to accommodate a baby whale when all the pits were lit, and the stone hearth built into one wall was taller than Lucas and as wide as a bus. Conventional appliances lined the wall opposite the hearth; they, too, were of commercial, rather than residential, size. The kitchen was dark and empty when Lucas brought Miranda into it.

“Where’s the chef?” Miranda asked as Lucas flipped a half dozen switches to illuminate the vast space.

“This is the old kitchen.” He opened one of the stainless steel doors of the refrigerator and began searching various compartments. “Conwy has three kitchens. This one, one in the staff’s lodge and one off the keep. This one is used only on special occasions. For holiday and record release parties, wedding receptions and the like.”

“Will your chef be upset that we didn’t eat his fancy dinner?” Miranda hopped onto a counter and watched Lucas. He finally found the Fenway Franks and displayed them for her with a tease of dimples that made her sweat.

“He’ll recover.” He turned the hotdogs over in his hands. “How does one prepare a Fenway Frank?”

Miranda scooted off the counter and took the package from him. “Usually, you boil them in a gallon of two-week old hotdog water. Do you have a small saucepan?”

“Probably.” He set about looking for one. He opened a cabinet beneath a wide counter and began rummaging through the cookware.

“There’s one.” Miranda pointed to the rack above the butcher-block cutting table. “It’s the perfect size, but I can’t reach it.”

Lucas, who was eight inches taller than she, reached up and easily unhooked the small pot. His movement hiked up his sweater, giving Miranda a glimpse of his taut lower abdomen and defined obliques. Miranda’s hormones roared into overdrive. Nothing appealed to her more than nicely sculpted obliques, the muscles that created that delectable ridge of flesh right above a man’s hips and anchored a tight and toned torso. “Do you have buns?” she asked.

Lucas, his eyes sparkling, handed her the saucepan. “Of course.”

“I meant…” She waved a hand, floundering for words and hoping to fan the sudden heat rising in her face. “You know what I meant.” She took the pot and the franks to the stove.

“You’re very pretty when you blush.”

Miranda felt a whoosh of heat, and it took her a beat to realize that it was coming from the stove. Lucas was standing beside her, and had turned on the burner. “How did you know that I liked hotdogs?”

“Your friend Bernard told us.” He watched Miranda use a paring knife to split the wrapper on the franks. She pulled each one from the package and dropped it into the pot, and then filled the pot with water at the sink. “He was quite helpful. In fact, he provided more information about you than we actually needed.”

Miranda set the pot over the gas flame. “Such as?”

“You were born on a Monday at Mercy Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland.”

“Anything else?” She faced him and set a hand on her hip. Her sweater slipped.

Lucas clutched at the insides of his pockets to stop himself from reaching for the inviting peek of skin. “He told us that you have a sister, Calista, who’s marrying a baseball player in June.”

“Who’s this ‘us’ you keep referring to?”

“Me and my publicist, actually. He acquires things for me. What I want, it’s his job to get.”

Miranda turned away from him and stared at the simmering franks. “So am I just another acquisition?”

He stepped behind her and gently settled his hands on her shoulders. When he spoke, his words warmed her right ear. “Yes, in that you are something that I absolutely had to have. No, in that I’m not looking for a casual encounter.”

She raised her head. Lucas didn’t move. He spent a moment breathing her scent, infusing himself with the jasmine sweetness of her hair and skin.

Miranda closed her eyes and enjoyed his proximity. But for the movement of her chest and shoulders as she breathed, she kept perfectly still. She would practically be in his arms with the tiniest movement, and that was the last place she wanted to be. Lucas might belong only to her for this moment, here in his old kitchen, but he wasn’t really hers, and never could be.

Lucas pulled away from her before he reached the point where he would never be able to do so. “I’ll get those buns.”

By the time he retrieved hotdog rolls and plates, Miranda had collected the condiments. The boiled franks steamed on a plate while Miranda and Lucas pulled stools up to the butcher-block table. Miranda was horrified when Lucas set his hotdog in a bun and then attempted to eat it with a knife and fork.

“That’s got to be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” she remarked. “It’s a hotdog, not filet mignon. Get your hands dirty.” She picked up her well-dressed frank and took a hearty bite.

“You’ve got mustard on the corner of your mouth,” Lucas told her.

She used the heel of her hand to wipe away the mustard then licked her hand clean. She couldn’t have charmed Lucas more if she had deliberately tried. He followed her example and chomped his frank in half in one bite.

“My God,” he exclaimed. “This is the best hotdog I’ve ever had.”

“Really?” Miranda was pleased.

“It’s also the only hotdog I’ve ever had,” he admitted around a second bite. “What’s it made of? It’s meat, yes?”

“Some say they’re made of pork or beef, others say raccoon tails and possum lips.” Miranda couldn’t keep a straight face when Lucas stopped chewing and looked at her, his eyes wide. “I’m kidding,” she giggled. “These are all beef.”

“There’s a relief. I once ate roasted spiders in South America, quite by accident, of course. The experience put me off my grub for a week.”

“Ugh. Is that the worst thing you’ve ever had in the course of your travels?”

“Your American beer runs a near second. It’s weak as spit, and your pubs serve it cold, as if it were lemonade.”

“I can’t have you insulting American beer. When he was giving you my life’s story, did Bernie tell you that the one and only time I ever got drunk was on a single spit-weak American beer on my twenty-first birthday?”

“I apologize,” Lucas said. “And please know that the quality of American women more than compensates for the deficient quality of the beer.”

“I suppose you’ve sampled both quite extensively?”

“The beer, yes.” He went to the refrigerator again and withdrew a bottle of sparkling white wine. “As for the women, don’t believe everything you may have read about me in the gossip pages.”

“I don’t read gossip columns.”

“Beautiful and smart, too,” Lucas smiled.

Another irritating blush crept over Miranda’s skin. Lucas busied himself with cutting the foil on the wine and easing out the cork. It shot into the air and landed on the other side of the room, near an ancient wooden door held shut with a thick wooden beam. Miranda jumped at the sound of howling, followed by loud, eager scratching and sniffing on the other side of the door.

“Those are my pups,” Lucas said. “I haven’t seen them in three weeks, not since we began the Karmic Velocity tour. Would you like to meet them?”

“Sure.” She left her stool. Lucas took the wine and Miranda grabbed the two glasses and followed him across the kitchen.

“This is the Hound Room.” He tucked the wine beneath his arm so he could use both hands to heave the sturdy beam off of its brackets. He opened the door to the darkened room, and Miranda’s first instinct was to climb up on his broad shoulders.

“What the hell is that?” She almost shrieked when a pair of silvery-green eyes at the level of her chest approached her.

Lucas turned a knob and brought up the lights. “These are my pups.”

Miranda was pinned to the wall by a “pup” that was easily a foot taller than she, if it stood on its back legs. “P-P-Pups?” she gasped, eyeballing the dog and the rest of its pack. “They’re going to get
bigger
?”

Lucas snapped his fingers and the dogs sat with military precision. Their tags chattered as they quivered with joy at seeing Lucas. “They’re Irish wolfhounds. Reg here is leader of the pack.” He scratched Reg’s ears. The dog’s soulful eyes closed in utter contentment, and the dog sniffing at Miranda left her to nose Lucas’s free hand, placing her head under his palm. He kneeled to give her a good rub under her neck. “This is Sionne, Reg’s wife. The other four, Emrys, Saeran, Owena and Spot, are their children.” As he said the names, the “children” came to him, each of the gangly, long-legged beasts receiving a huge dose of their master’s affection. “Walks?” Lucas said.

The full-throated howls of six Irish wolfhounds rattled the walls of the stone room. Miranda, a wine goblet in each hand, grabbed Lucas’s arm. He grinned at her. Rather than making her shrink away in embarrassment, his smile encouraged her to hold him a bit tighter.

“Are you afraid of dogs, Miranda?”

“Dogs, no. Ponies with fangs take some getting used to.”

Lucas steered her through a sea of tall dog. He removed the bar from a second heavy door and swung it open. Reg and his family bolted onto a gravelly stretch of moonlit beach and Lucas and Miranda followed slowly behind.

The view stole Miranda’s heart. The dark, orange-pearl moon was partially shrouded by a thin layer of broken clouds and seemed to sit directly before them on the dark sand. The dogs ran at the moon, and Miranda had no doubt that they were capable of dragging it home for their adoring master.

“Did you plan this, too?” she asked.

“What? Walking the dogs?”

“This night. The way the moon scatters its light upon the black waves. The way the breeze holds just enough warmth to feel like a kiss on my skin.”

Lucas gazed at her in awe.

“What…,” she said self-consciously. “Do I still have mustard on my face?”

“You have a poet’s eye, Miranda,” he said. She blushed yet again, and this one, by moonlight, made Lucas take one of her wine glasses so that he could hold her hand. “Your words paint beautiful pictures.”

“It’s easy, when beauty is right in front of you.” And it was. It was in the ocean blue of his eyes and the sultry curves of his lips. It was in the shape and strength of his hand as he offered it to her, to help her over a particularly rocky part of the beach.

“How is it that you decided to become a sportswriter?” he asked.

“My dad used to play baseball, so I grew up with sports, and I like the newspaper business. Women are becoming so dominant in the sporting world, on the field and off. Women’s gymnastics and figure skating have always been popular, and female tennis and softball players galvanized their sports. But now we have women’s professional basketball, we had soccer and now we’re dabbling with football. Of course, the
Herald-Star
doesn’t give women’s sports the space they deserve, but I’m working on changing that.”

“What sports do you like most?” Lucas stopped at a large outcropping of rock overlooking the sea. He leaped onto it, and took Miranda’s hand to help her up.

“To play or to cover?”

“Both,” he said as they sat.

“I like covering baseball and women’s college basketball. I like playing basketball and tennis, when I can make the time. I was pretty good at volleyball and softball when I was in school.”

“I played football—soccer, to you—and rugby in school.” He poured the wine and handed a glass to Miranda. “I was quite good, actually.”

“Hey, soccer is football to me, too. To half of me, at least. My mother is from Brazil. We used to go there in the summers when my dad retired and started scouting for the major leagues. I follow the Brazilian national team—”

“
Canarinho
!” Lucas declared.
“
‘Little canary.
’
”

“That’s right,” Miranda said. “Because of the yellow jerseys they wear for home games.”

“There’s a saying about football and Brazilians,” Lucas started. “‘The English invented it, and…”

“…the Brazilians perfected it,” Miranda finished. “No truer words were ever spoken.”

“So you’re a staunch supporter of Team Brazil?”

Miranda took a sip of her wine and nodded. “I like a few of the African teams, too. Cameroon’s been so innovative in the past few years, and Ghana’s coming up, too. I love watching soccer matches. Soccer players have the best ass—” She caught herself mid-syllable and finished with, “accents.”

Lucas took off his sweater and folded it. He invited Miranda to use it as a cushion, which she accepted, once she could think straight.
I must be drinking this wine too fast,
she thought after watching him take off his sweater had made her jaw drop.
It’s not like he was topless,
she told herself. But just thinking of that image set her cheeks on fire. As he sat in his white T-shirt with the night breeze playing in his hair, Miranda knew that she had to get a hold of herself, and fast. “Did you always want to be a singer?”

“Actually, I tossed about the notion of being an architect. I was keen on building things when I was in school. Music was always a hobby I happened to do well at. Then came our first single, and the hobby became a career.” He gazed out upon the waves and watched them break against the shore. “I have the best job in the world. I get paid an obscene amount of money to do what I like. Few people have that luxury.”

“You seem as though you have regrets.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Miranda studied his profile, and thought she saw a hint of sadness in his face. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve been incredibly lucky with my music for twenty-two years. My band mates are my best friends. I’ve got more money than I’ll ever know what to do with. I’ve got nothing to complain about, but…”

“But?” she encouraged, sitting closer to him to offer what comfort she could.

He turned and looked at her, and his gaze sent a blazing current of longing directly to her heart. “It’s a lonely life.”

“Millions of people all over the world adore you. You live in a castle with a staff of what, about two hundred? All you have to do is snap your fingers and you’d have an instant party.”

“Do you really think it’s that easy for me?”