Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (9 page)

It was the most enjoyable evening he’d spent in years, but as night finally arrived, as the sunlight waned and the fire in the hearth burned low, filling the cozy little cabin with warmth and a soft yellow glow, the tension began to thicken between them.

Charity was pretty and sexy, the all-American girl with the peaches-and-cream complexion and freckles on her nose. With her rosy cheeks and luscious mouth, she was every man’s ideal sweetheart. He wanted to take her to bed, and it must have shown on his face.

Certainly it was evident in the fit of his jeans. Unlike his disastrous date with Sally, he’d been hard for most of the evening. His mood turned sour. He wanted to have sex with Charity, but that was all he wanted. Anything beyond satisfying his lust wasn’t part of his plan.

Charity must have noticed his change of mood because her mood shifted as well. “It’s getting late,” she said, rising from the sofa and glancing toward the door. “We both need to get some sleep.”

There wasn’t much chance of that for him. Part of him was eager to leave, to get as far away from temptation as he could manage. The more he got to know her, the more certain he was that she wasn’t the type for casual sex. The other part wanted to haul her into her tiny bedroom and make use of Mose’s old iron bed.

Instead, he thanked her for supper and started for the door. Unfortunately, as he reached it, his mouth opened up and words spilled out that he hadn’t intended to say.

“You said something earlier about wanting to know more about the animals and the land up here. I could show you around a little … if you’re interested, I mean.”

She worried her bottom lip and he remembered how sweet it tasted. Desire tore through him so fierce he had to fist his hands to keep from reaching out for her.

“I wouldn’t want to impose.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “It’s a little late to worry about that, isn’t it? You moved in next door. You started running that damnable dredging machine. You’ve already imposed on my peace of mind.”
Not to mention what you’re doing to my body.
“Why stop with that?”

Her lips twitched. “Point well taken. In which case, I suppose I may as well accept your offer and let you show me around. When do we start?”

He thought of spending more time with her, thought of the lust he was fighting right now and inwardly groaned. The hell with it. It was too late to back out now.

“You don’t work tomorrow or Sunday, right? Why don’t we start in the morning? We’ll hike up to a little lake I know not far from here.”

“Sounds good—if you promise not to make it an endurance competition. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“You look like you’re in pretty good shape to me.” He couldn’t stop his eyes from a thorough perusal of her body, and a jolt of heat slid into his groin. He cleared his throat. “It really isn’t that far.”

Charity smiled. “All right, then—tomorrow it is.”

He nodded, already regretting his impulsiveness. “We’ll have breakfast at my place before we leave. Six o’clock too early?”

“On Saturday? Are you kidding? Saturday and Sunday are the only days of the week I get to sleep in.” She sighed. “But I really do want to see the country, so I guess I’ll have to tough it till Sunday.”

“Six, then.” He stood for a moment in the doorway, wanting her, knowing he had to leave. “Like I said, thanks for supper. Good night, Charity.”

“Good night, Call.”

He closed the door behind him, pissed at himself for not kissing her.

And damned glad he hadn’t.

Six o’clock on a weekend was ridiculously early. Charity almost turned over in bed and pulled the pillow over her head. But she’d told Call she would be there and she was curious about him, intrigued by the thought of what she might discover in the house where he lived.

Last night had been surprisingly pleasant. Call had been a perfect gentleman. He’d been interesting and charming, smiling more easily than he had when she had first met him, though he never once ventured into the personal side of his life.

Charity hadn’t pressed him. They were only fledgling friends, after all. Considering what had happened last Sunday, even that tentative relationship was somewhat strained. But she hadn’t missed the incendiary sparks in those intense blue eyes whenever he looked at her last night. They made her light-headed, made her stomach clench with desire, made her want to accept what he so obviously wanted to give her.

For a while last night, she’d been able to pretend indifference. He was simply a neighbor, she told herself. She was grateful for his help with the bear. But as the evening progressed, her eyes kept straying to the heavy bulge at the front of his jeans. She kept looking at his mouth, remembering the burning heat of it moving over hers.

By the end of the evening, if he hadn’t left when he did, she might have asked him to stay.

God protect me from marauding bears and men with beautiful, pain-ravaged eyes.

She had never been so madly attracted to a man—or more certain that any sort of involvement would be a terrible mistake. Call was still recovering from the loss of his wife and child. True, it had been four years, but for some people grief lasted a lifetime. Call wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, and considering her dismal record with men, neither was she.

Charity sighed as she dragged herself out of bed, slipped on the silky long johns she had ordered from a Winter Silks catalog, then pulled on her jeans. Call Hawkins, with his lean, hard body, burning eyes, and scorching kisses, posed more of a danger than any man she had ever met.

And yet she was drawn to him in a way she couldn’t explain. Thoughts of him stayed with her as she dressed in a turtleneck tee shirt, pulled a warm flannel shirt on over it, and tucked both into her jeans. With her hair drawn into a ponytail, she grabbed her jacket off the back of the sofa and headed for the door. At the last minute, she remembered the pepper spray, raced back and snagged the can off the counter, then crossed the porch and headed for the path along the creek.

Call opened the door before she had time to knock.

“You’re only five minutes late,” he said lightly. “For a woman, I consider that right on time.”

“Actually, for a woman, it’s fifteen minutes early.”

He chuckled. “Come on in.”

His cedar-sided, wood-framed house wasn’t all that big, but it was masculine, tastefully done, and expensively furnished. The dark brown sofa and chairs in the living room were made of butter-soft leather, the tables polished walnut, the floors wide-planked and covered with patterned rugs.

He gave her a quick tour, showing her the guest bedroom with its own private bath, and the powder room just off the entry.

“Pretty impressive.”

“It’s comfortable.”

“Compared to Mose Flanagan’s cabin, I’d say that’s an understatement.”

They didn’t linger in the master bedroom, but she felt a little tickle of heat at the sight of the big, king-sized bed. With its sleek wooden headboard, suede-trimmed orange-and-brown wool duvet, and matching suede pillows, it looked more than a little enticing. There were large framed pictures on the walls, mostly landscape lithographs of the mountains and rivers of the North. She noticed there wasn’t a single family photo anywhere in the room.

Call led her into the kitchen—black granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

“Propane?” she asked, enviously eyeing the stove.

“Yeah. There’s a thousand-gallon tank out back. A-One refills it every couple of months. I don’t like it to get too low.” He led her over to the breakfast area and pulled out one of four chairs at the walnut table.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“In my other life I never could eat this early, but Maude insisted. Now I wake up starving.”

“Good. I made pancakes and bacon. There’s coffee in the pot. The cups are in the cupboard overhead.”

“I thought Toby was chief-cook-and-bottle-washer.” She poured them each a cup.

“He is, but the evil genie weakened and gave him the weekend off.”

She laughed.

“Actually, unless I need him, Toby spends weekends with his mother down in Dawson.”

“He seems like a really nice kid.”

“He’s a great kid. We met kayaking one summer. He had a little trouble his senior year in high school. Got arrested for drinking and fighting. Lost his scholarship to college. He’s walking the straight and narrow now. He’ll be going to school in Calgary this fall. I think he’s going to be okay.”

He didn’t say he was paying for Toby’s schooling, but Charity had a suspicion that he was.

They ate breakfast, which was surprisingly good, making general conversation. Afterward, she helped him wash off the plates and put them in the dishwasher.

“Before we leave,” she said, “are you going to satisfy my curiosity and tell me what’s in that big metal building attached to the house?”

“Why don’t I just show you?” He reached over and caught her hand. His grip was strong and solid and a tingle ran up her arm. Leading her through a door in the kitchen, he stepped into a large, carpeted, wood-paneled room and flipped on a switch. An overhead fluorescent light illuminated the room below.

“You run your generator all day long?”

“Don’t have to. The place is solar-powered. The panels are on the back side of the roof.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “All the modern conveniences.”

“You might say that. I told you I like my peace and quiet.” He led her farther into the wood-paneled room. “This is my office. The rest of the building is a garage, but this is where I work.”

“You work?”

Amusement lifted a corner of his mouth. “You figured I just sat around all day and watched satellite TV?”

With that rock-hard body, he was hardly a couch potato. “I thought you were retired. You offered to triple my purchase price so I knew you had some money. I figured you spent the day dog-sledding or something.”

He sat down in a black leather chair behind a built-in walnut desk and flipped on the switch to one of three computers that were stationed around the room.

“Actually, I only started working again last year. I was getting bored, I guess. I started doing some consulting for Inner Dimensions, the computer game company I used to own. I stay in touch with American Dynamics—that’s the firm I ran before I quit—and in the last six months, I’ve started working on some projects I was involved in before I moved up here.

She ran a hand over the surface of his polished walnut desk. “Like what, for instance?”

“Well, before I left San Jose, I backed a little company called Datatron. It only has a handful of employees and for years they didn’t accomplish anything spectacular. A few months back, I started dabbling with the company again, infusing a little fresh capital. I hired a couple of young programmers with some very innovative ideas.” He clicked the mouse and the Web page for Datatron flashed up on the screen, its insignia a three-dimensional D, rotating in bright yellow and blue.

“What’s it do?”

“Datatron collects information off the Internet and turns it into market intelligence. By using sophisticated software to search the Net, it compiles data on a specific market product or company.”

“Sounds interesting,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screen. “How’s it work?”

Call moved the mouse, bringing up another page. “Say we take something simple, like fish sticks. In a matter of hours, Datatron can discover everything you want to know about the product. Who produces them, who buys them. Which brands sell best. What sort of advertising those companies use. That’s just an example, of course. The product can be simple or extremely complex. But the fees Datatron charges are reasonable, and the companies who pay for the service save millions in labor and time.”

“And they get this stuff by tapping into information on the Web.”

“That’s right.”

“Kind of like spying.”

He smiled. “I guess you could call it that, though we stay within legal parameters. As a matter of fact, lately we’ve taken some considerable flak in that regard. I guess some people don’t like the idea that we know what they’re doing.”

She watched his big, dark hand working the mouse. “I don’t think I’d like it, either.”

“There isn’t much they can do about it. As long as we don’t pierce their firewalls, what we do is completely legal.”

Charity dragged her gaze away from that strong, male hand and looked up at him. “Is that a note of pride I hear in your voice?”

He smiled. “To tell you the truth, this was kind of my baby. It’s been fun to watch it moving forward again.”

“I see.” She saw more than he knew, but Call didn’t mention his wife or the accident that had brought him up here, and Charity didn’t ask. “So … one part rustic woodsman, the other sophisticated entrepreneur. I wonder which is the real you.”

The remnants of his smile slowly faded. The haunted look she had seen before returned to his eyes and she wished she could call back the words.

“I’ve been interested in business since I was in high school. But there are times I wish I’d never invented that game, never become successful, never gone to the States in the first place. Things might have been different if I had just stayed up here.”

She knew what he was thinking. She was beginning to recognize the darkness in his eyes, to know it meant he had returned to the past, remembering his wife and daughter. She ached at the pain he couldn’t quite hide.

Charity glanced around the office. Like the rest of the house, it was tastefully done: furniture of polished walnut, the floor covered in deep-pile, light-brown carpet, the equipment state-of-the-art. But also like the house, it was stark and impersonal, as if its occupant wanted to erase the past and live only in the present.

She paused when her gaze lit on a wall of bookshelves filled with computer games. Above it hung a screen nearly four feet wide with a pair of control sticks mounted beneath it.

“All right,” she teased, “now I know what you really do all day.”

Some of the darkness faded from his features and the muscles across his shoulders relaxed. “Actually, I do spend part of my day playing games. Right now, I’m giving Inner Dimensions some feedback on a game called King Cobra.”

Her eyes lit up. “Can we play it?”

He shook his head. “No way. Not today. I promised to show you the country and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” He opened the office door and waited for her to walk out.

Charity glanced wistfully over her shoulder at the gigantic game board. “Okay, but I’m not letting you off the hook. It isn’t like there’s all that much to do up here. One of these nights, we’ll have to play.”

Call’s expression changed and the blue of his eyes seemed to glow. “Yeah,” he said, “one of these nights we’ll definitely have to play.”

Charity’s stomach contracted. She didn’t think he was talking about computer games.

Something happened. She wasn’t sure what.

By the time they left the house, Call’s mood had shifted again. His congenial attitude turned brooding. His jaw was set, the muscles across his shoulders rigid, his blue eyes intense. She wasn’t sure what had caused the change, and the harsh set of his features warned her not to ask.

She wished she hadn’t agreed to come on this hike as much as he obviously wished he hadn’t offered to take her. Still, she continued up the trail, trying to pretend she was somewhere else, anywhere but with him.

At first the climb was easy. A meandering path that started in the forest behind Call’s house and gently sloped upward, zigzagging back and forth across the mountain, giving her an astonishing view of the snow-dusted, granite-domed mountains surrounding the valley like a crown. A little farther up, they wove their way deeper into the forest and the soft scent of pine enveloped her. Bluejays squawked in the branches and played tag overhead.

Everywhere she looked, beauty surrounded them, and though the trail was a little bit muddy, it wasn’t that difficult to climb. She watched Call’s broad back, watched his long legs moving like pistons up the trail ahead of her, and wished they could have made the climb in the genial mood they had briefly shared that morning.

Instead, he seemed a different, harder man than he had been before.

Charity sighed and walked faster, trying to close the gap that continued to widen between them.

Call looked back down the trail. “Come on, you’re falling behind.” They were nearing the crest of the hill. At the top, they would start down, making an easy descent to the lake in the bottom of a narrow, pine-covered valley.

Call waited till Charity caught up with him, then started walking again. He wanted to get there as quickly as he could, then get her back down the hill to her cabin. He wanted to kick himself for volunteering to take her in the first place.

Dammit, the woman was driving him crazy. Just watching her climb the hill made him hard. Hell, he’d been hard off and on since breakfast when he’d watched her lick syrup off her lush bottom lip. Then they’d prepared to climb the trail and he had helped her into the straps of the small daypack he loaned her—a mistake that caused her perky little breasts to rub against his chest and sent a shot of lust straight into his groin.

He had let her see his office, which he wished he hadn’t done, and she’d surprised him with her interest. Susan had never had the slightest interest in his work. She was a housewife and mother, all she had really ever aspired to be and exactly what he had wanted in a wife.

Nothing like Charity Sinclair, who had traveled thousands of miles on some wild, harebrained search for adventure. And yet he couldn’t help but admire her for doing something she had always wanted to do.