Make Me Lose Control (10 page)

Then their attention was claimed by London, who appeared around the side of the cabin. She glanced up at it, her lip curling. “Well, this one’s really a dump, isn’t it?”

Jace scowled at her. “Where have you been? Don’t think you can wander off when it comes time to work.”

“Sheesh.” The girl’s brows lifted, disappearing behind a hank of too-black hair. “Why are you so grouchy?”

“Don’t ask,” her father muttered, then stomped off.

London looked at Shay, the question still in her eyes. “Oh, you know,” Shay said vaguely, trying to smooth over the situation, “he probably needs a snack.”

The girl’s frown said she considered the excuse a pretty poor one, though she did start off in her father’s footprints. Shay held back, glancing one more time at the cabin, seeing it through a stranger’s eyes. “It
does
look like a dump,” she muttered.

But the thought evaporated as her gaze shifted to the spot where she and Jace had tangled. As she recalled the powerful force that propelled them together, as she relived the taste and burn of that prolonged, passionate kiss, her heart once again thrashed in her chest.

Her stomach felt like a dinghy adrift on rough waters.

It made her wonder how she would manage to soothe her own unsteadiness.

* * *

J
ACE
LOOKED
DOWN
from the ladder he was using to reach and remove the rotting siding of one of the dilapidated Walker cabins. Across the clearing, London was raking brown needles into piles, though she kept stopping to adjust the work gloves he’d bought for her. Still, she was halfway-industrious, and he was glad to see it was too hot for her ubiquitous black sweatshirt. She’d abandoned it for the black T-shirt she wore beneath.

Shay was in even less. Hiking boots, cut-off shorts, a tank top. Work gloves protected her hands, too, as she retrieved the shingles he let fall and tossed them into a wheelbarrow. Naturally, the task caused her to bend over a lot, denim cupping the round globes of her ass.

Jace wondered if she’d go away if he told her just the sight of that made his dick hard.

Christ.

Fact was, she was driving him nuts. He couldn’t be around her for thirty seconds without wanting to push her up against a wall and push his tongue into her mouth. After yesterday’s blistering kiss, he’d looked forward to some sweat-inducing, muscle-tiring menial labor, imagining it would refocus his physical urges in another direction.

That was not happening.

He inserted the claw end of the short crowbar he held between the shingles. Barely a yank, and the wood crumbled into pieces and fell to the ground. Too late, he realized that Shay was right under him.

“Are you all right?”

“No problem.” Sunglasses protected her eyes and she didn’t seem to mind brushing debris from her crown of bright hair and off her shoulders. She looked up, a frown turning down her lips. “It’s pretty bad, huh?”

“Pretty,” he murmured, staring into her face. There was a flush on her cheeks and a sheen of sweat on her throat. Instead of leaping to the ground to taste it with his mouth, he forced his gaze back to the house and his mind off her lovely features and long legs.

Okay, he was thinking about her lovely features and long legs. Clearing his throat, he attacked again with the crowbar. When the next shingle fell, he remembered something he’d wanted to follow up on before.

“The dark side?” he asked.

She scooped up the shingle. “Say again?”

“The dark side. Yesterday Ryan Hamilton asked if you’d come over to the dark side.”

“Oh. That.” She gave him a quick glance. “Thirsty? Would you like a bottle of water?”

Suddenly he was parched. And curious because she was clearly trying to avoid the subject. “Yeah.”

He came down from the ladder just as she returned with a sweating bottle from the cooler they’d brought along. “Thanks.” Half of it went down in one go. “Dark side,” he prompted, when she took her own bottle away from her lips.

She sighed. “Promise you won’t think we’re all crazy.”

Crazy was his reluctance to climb back up on the ladder and put much-needed distance between them. Instead, he reached out to push her dark shades to the top of her head so he could look into her eyes, their cool blue icy and beautiful. “Go ahead and tell me.”

“First you should know the Walkers aren’t in agreement about what to do with this property.”

“Obviously Poppy’s all for the resort, as are you, it seems. Your other sister and brother...?”

“Claim the place is cursed.”

He laughed.

“I’m serious,” Shay said. “Family legend says one of the logger forebears did something—causes differ upon the telling—and he and his property were damned for all time.”

Jace finished his bottle of water and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. When he looked back at Shay, she’d restored her sunglasses to their place on her nose. Hiding, he thought. Why?

“You can’t possibly believe in a superstition like that,” he said, climbing back onto the ladder.

“Maybe sometimes I do,” she replied, her voice pensive.

He frowned down at her. “Why’s that?”

“I told you about the fire.”

“It’s a constant threat in these mountains.”

“I was here—at the property—when it happened.”

That startled him. He found himself on the ground again, and when she turned away from him, he tugged at her elbow to bring her around. “Tell me,” he said.

Lifting a shoulder, she stared down at her toes. “I was twelve. Accompanied Dell Walker—Dad—on a routine trip to do some maintenance work. He got out his tools...and I...I wandered off on my own, into the woods.”

Some instinct made Jace glance up, his gaze searching for his daughter. Tension that was just beginning to tighten his neck eased when he saw her, digging through the cooler. She had to be roasting in all that unrelieved black, he thought. He looked back at Shay. “You were in the woods...?”

She hesitated, giving him time for second thoughts. Why was he grilling her? He had a load of his own problems and issues. Instead of excavating her past, he should be thinking of the job in Qatar that he’d promised to return to. Or he would be better served mining his brain for some persuasive words that would get his daughter to the boarding school he’d picked for her, without muss or fuss.

But Shay was inspecting the dusty leather toes of her boots again, her head down. Hiding once more. Second thoughts evaporated.

“You were in the woods...?”

“Summer storm,” she said, her voice low. “Lightning. It’s common enough for fire to suddenly break out.”

“I’ve already experienced that myself,” he pointed out. And would likely remember his nights at the Deerpoint Inn for the rest of his life.

“Dell—Dad—saw the flames crest a nearby ridge.”

Jace lifted his head, taking in the craggy mountains ringing them. In his imagination, a line of fire topped a nearby peak and raced downward. “Jesus.”

“Maybe if he could have taken off right away, driven to the highway quick enough to alert the fire crews...”

“But he couldn’t leave you,” Jace supplied. Of course, the man had to gather his daughter before leaving the property. “That was a no-brainer—”

“I should have stuck close to him, instead of wandering off on my own.”

“You couldn’t know,
he
couldn’t know—”

“But I know
now
how it turned out.”

“You were just a kid, Shay. And it was a freak accident of nature.”

“Not what happened afterward.” She pinkied her sunglasses off her face and swiped a hand over her eyes.

His stomach jolted. Was she crying? He couldn’t handle tears. But he couldn’t escape up the ladder quite yet, either. “What went wrong next?”

She pressed a hand beneath her nose, leaving a streak of dirt on her cheek. Jace stared at it, his hands fisting, willing himself not to snatch her close in order to brush it away, stroke that smooth skin clean. He didn’t like a single thing marring Shay—not her flesh, not her psyche—but he wasn’t the kind of man who knew how to provide such tender service. That would be a kind soul, not a man hardened by a crappy childhood and then a solitary life.

Officer All-Good.

It killed him to think that, but it was true.

Shay started speaking again. “The resort amenities burned to ash, leaving behind only the cabins below the ski slopes and Dell’s deep wish to rebuild.”

“Okay,” Jace said carefully.

She swiped beneath her nose again. “It wasn’t possible. He was already in deep with an investor who refused to pony up another cent. There wasn’t enough insurance, either. Dad didn’t surrender, though.”

Her head turned, so all he was given was her profile, with its clean, delicate lines. “Within a year he’d died of a heart attack. Stress, we believe.”

He opened his mouth to say—what? London called out instead.

“Can we eat?” she asked. They’d brought sandwiches in the cooler. “I’m starving.”

Shay latched on to the idea and was already hurrying away from him. “Great idea. Let’s set it up on the porch over there.”

Jace followed slowly, mostly glad for the reprieve. By the time he mounted the steps to the picnic they’d made on the wooden floor, Shay was chattering away about the lessons they would begin on Monday. Naturally, London appeared less than enthused.

Warily, Jace eyed the tutor. The only time he’d known her to be a chatterer like that was the night she was drunk and floating her gloom balloon. He supposed she wished she hadn’t shared the story of the fire and her father with him.

The day heated up as they ate their lunch. The food and the temperature made Jace lethargic and even Shay finally wound down. The three sat in semicompanionable silence, picking at the green grapes in the plastic bowl centered between them.

It was weirdly almost family-like.

The weirdness must have been catching, because London suddenly vaulted to her feet. “It’s hot as hell—”

“Don’t say hell,” Shay corrected automatically.

The girl rolled her eyes. “The temperature’s hot as h—”

“Don’t say it,” Shay warned again.

“Hot as hell.” Jace met his daughter’s gaze. “I’ve got no problem with that.”

She gave him the second smile he’d seen from her since he’d returned to her life. Wow, he thought, he’d give her a lot of four-letter words for more of those. Which he supposed was additional proof he’d make a lousy parent.

“I’m going to cool off,” she said, and leaped from the porch.

Jace’s gaze followed her to a spigot and a curled hose nearby. London flipped on the water, and as the flow came out of the plastic, she bent down to thumb the nozzle. Then she lifted it overhead, creating a fountain of drops that rained down upon her.

“Nirvana. Heaven. Paradise,” she yelled, her hair going even inkier as it became saturated. She twirled in a circle, going faster and faster.

Jace had started to grin at her antics, but the smile died as a memory sliced through him. That little park across from her mother’s flat. London, a ragged doll under her arm, insisting they have a tea party on the grass. He’d played pretend with her, even lifting his pinkie while holding his make-believe cup like any proper Brit would do. Later, when he’d managed to make a chain of dandelions into a crown with his big fingers, he’d held her hands and spun, causing her short legs to leave the ground.

Jace, making his little girl fly.

He closed his eyes, willing the pain and the memory away.

But before it did, he got a face full of chilly water. His eyes shot open, just as Shay let out a shriek. Looking over, he saw she was dripping, too.

“London!” he yelled, and the second syllable was drowned by another blast from the hose.

She went after Shay again, of course. They both leaped to their feet as the girl cackled and kept on spraying. His gaze met Shay’s. “You go right,” he said.

“You go left,” she answered.

They took on the kid together.

Retribution wasn’t really all that painful. London was mostly wet already, but by the time they were done, she was a laughing, completely sopping mess. They were all cooler, however.

And Jace was feeling...almost mellow. Shit. Almost content.

He turned off the spigot and put his hands on his hips. “Enough goofing around. Let me finish the south wall and we’ll say we’re done for the day.”

London gave an extravagant shrug. He glanced over at Shay, then felt his belly tighten as he took her in. She was as drenched as the girl, the thin cotton knit of her tank plastered to her skin. Oh, boy. Wet T-shirt contest all the way.

He could see the outline of her bra. Her nipples were taut points.

He grabbed the hem of his shirt. “Do you want my—”

“Heck, no,” she said, waving him off. “It feels good.”

Swallowing, Jace forced his gaze from her and his steps back to the ladder. London returned to her rake. Shay, her face turned upward, stood waiting for more shingles to come down.

Trying to tamp down his lust, he remembered her last words before lunch. He had to say something about that, didn’t he? “I’m sorry about your father,” he said.

She hesitated a moment. “One more little factoid about my past...Dell wasn’t really my dad.”

One more
little
factoid? “What exactly do you mean?”

“Money was always a struggle for the Walkers. Lorna and Dell went through a rough patch and Dell took off for a mining job in South America, leaving Mom behind with my brother and sisters. While he was gone, she...well, she had an affair and wound up pregnant with me.”

“Ah.” He hadn’t a clue what to say, to do. “But Dell came back...?”

She addressed her bootlaces as she bent to retie them. “He did. By then the affair was over—my bio father was married and not the least bit interested in paternity rights, as he had other kids—so when Dell returned to the mountains a few months after I was born, he and Lorna patched things up.”

“That was good?”

“Very good.” Shay straightened. “Dell was still a dreamer and still lousy when it came to money, but my mother and he seemed to be very happy for the rest of their lives together.”