Reilly's Return (6 page)

“All right,” he said. “We’ll be friends first. Get to know each other, then let things follow their natural course.” Which would land her in his bed within the week, he reckoned. Sounded good to him, though he wasn’t keen on waiting that long.

Jayne nibbled her left thumbnail. Shoot, that had been too easy. There had to be a catch, something she hadn’t taken into account. It was at times like these she regretted being right-brain dominant.

Reilly watched her carefully. Apparently she hadn’t counted on him being so progressive-minded. She looked wary, hesitant. Maybe he should throw something in to sweeten the deal, a show of good faith, so to speak.

“I’ll help you out with the play, as well,” he blurted out before he had a chance to consider his impulsive offer.

A cold wave swept over him at the sound of the words in his own ears. Bloody hell! Had he just offered to be in a play? A play was all acting and
no action. He couldn’t be in a play! There wouldn’t be a single car chase or gun battle, no explosions or brawls. He would be forced to really
act
.

Panic in its purest form gelled in his gut. He took a deep breath and willed it away. This was a community theater group not Broadway they were talking about. It wasn’t
Macbeth
they were doing, it was a little romantic comedy. The other people in the play wouldn’t be actors either—at all, he amended hastily. They would be accountants and supermarket clerks. He could handle this. No sweat. It would be a walk in the park, a piece of cake.

Jayne studied the play of strange emotions that crossed Reilly’s face, thinking back to his enigmatic explanation of why he wasn’t now in the Mojave Desert shooting
Road Raider Part III
. Once again she caught a glimpse of vulnerability in him, and it touched her. Darn, she had always been one to take in strays. When Reilly’s beautiful eyes took on that haunted look—however brief—she wanted to wrap him in her arms and take care of him.

What a lot of hogwash, she told herself as the moment passed and he was suddenly the same old Reilly, cocky and full of himself. She had been
imagining things. Reilly needed a caretaker about as much as he needed a third eye.

“You’d really be in my play?” she questioned.

“Sure,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, as if he hadn’t been sweating bullets over the idea just a second ago.

Jayne hugged herself and sighed. She could ill afford to turn him down. Pat Reilly’s name on the marquee would mean a lot of extra money for the theater group and for the young artists. Having Reilly in the play would surely generate interest in the project. People would be eager to get involved and would hopefully stay involved on a long-term basis once they discovered how enjoyable theater was. And this was her chance, wasn’t it? This was her chance to do what she’d dreamed of doing since the first time she’d seen Reilly in a little-known Australian film in which he’d had no more than two dozen lines. This was her chance to direct him, to coax out the phenomenal talent she was sure was lurking under his handsome hide.

She nodded slowly, then tipped her chin up and treated him to a sparkling sweet smile. “All right. We’ll give it a shot.”

Reilly had to fight the sudden urge to give a whoop and do a victory dance. He hadn’t realized how important it was to him that Jayne consent
to see him. The enormous sense of relief that sluiced through him left him feeling almost giddy.

He gave her a roguish grin that flashed his dimple at her. “Good girl, Jaynie. Now let’s go to your place, and I’ll get settled in.”

“You’ll what? Where?” Jayne asked dimly, her head swimming.

Reilly swung the bathroom door open and held it. His expression was as innocent as an altar boy’s as he looked back at her. “I can’t very well stay at a hotel. The minute word’s out I’m stayin’ in town, I won’t have a moment’s peace. Since we’re gonna be mates now, I reckoned you’d let me bunk at your place.”

“Oh, did you?”

Jayne couldn’t help but smile. The stinker! He’d no doubt had that little plan in his head all along. She tried to tell herself deviousness was not an adorable quality, but, somehow, in Reilly it was. At the moment the worst his behavior stirred in her was a deep sympathy for his mother. What that poor woman must have gone through raising Reilly!

“Well, sure,” he said, keeping his angelic look firmly in place. Boy, this was going to be good. If they were staying in the same house, there was no way they could go more than a couple of days
without succumbing to the sexual attraction that sparked between them. His mouth was literally watering at the memory of the taste of her. His fingers itched to trace over her petite curves.

Jayne gave a shrug of acquiescence, picked up her bucket, and sauntered out the door. “Okay.”

Reilly felt as if she’d just smacked him between the eyes with a hammer. “Okay?” he mumbled dazedly. Had she just said okay? He rushed to catch up with her and hovered over her from behind, nearly clipping her heels with his size twelve boots. “Did you just say okay? I can stay at your place?”

“Yes.” Jayne beamed a smile up at him, thinking it was kind of fun being sneaky. Then she turned and continued down the hall toward the exit with a spring in her step.

Reilly shot a look heavenward. His heart was hammering in his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered, raising his hands in emphatic praise to a benevolent God. “That was almost too bloody easy.”

Jayne grinned to herself as she walked ahead of him. “You’ve got that right, mate.”

R
EILLY FOLLOWED
J
AYNE
home, keeping his Jeep a discreet distance behind the red MG—just in case. Jayne’s driving was enough to keep a team of guardian angels sweating. Her little sports car wandered from one side of the winding road to the other as Jayne’s attention swayed from one point of interest to the next. She nearly clipped a pair of bicyclists while admiring the view of the seashore and just managed to swerve out of the path of a tour bus in the nick of time when a sheep at the side of the road caught her interest. It was enough to give a man a heart attack. Even the Australian sheep dog sitting in Reilly’s passenger seat whined in anxiety.

“I know, Rowdy,” Reilly mumbled. “She’s enough to drive a man bonkers.”

Heaven knew she had done it to him, he reflected,
unable to keep his own mind from wandering. Lately Jayne had occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of all else. Now they would find out once and for all if this thing between them was more than passion, more than the lure of the forbidden. Anticipation coiled, warm and tight, low in his belly.

He slowed the Jeep and hit the signal, following Jayne off the coastal highway and onto a private drive that climbed around a hill and cut through a stand of pine trees. The drive eventually widened into a farm yard. Jayne’s car skidded to a halt, and she jumped out as if she’d just won a race.

“Here we are,” she said with forced cheerfulness. Her heart was in her throat. Inviting Reilly here and having him here were two very different things. The farm was so much a part of her that having him on it seemed strangely intimate to her.

Wondering if she’d done the right thing, she wound two fingers into her bracelet. Nothing happened. No buzzing, no warmth, nothing. She smiled nervously at Reilly, then scowled at the bracelet as Reilly climbed down out of his Jeep. The darn thing was getting mighty selective about its premonitions all of a sudden. Great. Just when she most needed the charm’s guidance, the thing had developed some kind of psychic snafu.

She turned her worried gaze to Reilly. There
was a fine layer of dust on his leather jacket, and his golden hair was wind-tossed. He squinted as he looked around, etching lines into the tan skin beside his sky-color eyes. He looked supremely male, rugged and tough, ready to conquer the untamed wilderness and the odd stray female he might find in it. The thought made a little whimper catch in Jayne’s throat. Maybe bringing him here hadn’t been such a hot idea after all.

“So where’s the house?” he asked as his dog jumped to the ground and ran off to explore.

“This is the house.” Jayne swung an arm in the general direction of the building and self-consciously tugged at her wild mane with her other hand, thinking she probably looked like the bride of Frankenstein after the drive up the coast in her convertible.

Reilly stared at the large weathered gray building she had indicated and frowned. “Jaynie, that’s a barn.”

“
Was
a barn,” she corrected him. “I had it converted.”

“I don’t guess I’m surprised by that,” he said with a shrug. It was something Jayne would do. Other women in her financial position would have built themselves a palatial estate with manicured lawns and statuary. Jayne lived in the middle of nowhere in a converted barn.

He studied the building more closely, taking note of the large multipaned windows that punctuated one long side. There was half of a whiskey barrel overflowing with dainty purple and white flowers beside the door. On a wooden park bench beside the flowers a black and orange cat was curled up, its tail twitching back and forth as its yellow eyes glared at Reilly’s dog. Rowdy gave a sharp bark at the cat and quickly dodged away, loping off across the yard.

Reilly’s gaze swept the farmyard, taking in the assortment of other smaller buildings. There was a chicken coop with exotic chickens browsing in the fenced pen around it, brilliant-colored birds with elaborate combs and extravagant tail feathers. Nearer the house stood a small dairy parlor with herbs growing on the sod roof. A large patch of the yard had the beginnings of a vegetable garden sprouting. On the far side of it stood a small stable with a split-rail corral extending beyond. Rowdy stood with his paws on the lowest rail, intently regarding the small herd of shaggy, long-necked llamas on the other side.

A fond smile tugged at the corners of Reilly’s mouth. Jayne couldn’t have sheep or cows, like anyone else. She had to have llamas and chickens that looked like they were from another planet. She probably didn’t even think that was unusual. She was
blessed with an innate naïveté he had heretofore encountered only in young children. But Jayne was certainly no little girl, he reminded himself as the lapel of her jacket gapped away and he glimpsed a small, full, unencumbered breast outlined beneath her T-shirt.

She shrugged and looked around her, her wild hair bouncing around her slender shoulders, the dark strands catching fire in the morning light. “What do you think?”

“I like it,” he said, his voice low and rough, his gaze glued to Jayne. When she looked up at him like a startled doe, he cleared his throat and gave his attention over to the object of her question. “It’s a nice place.”

The farm didn’t much resemble the sheep station he’d grown up on and had thought to spend his life working, but it gave Reilly a sense of home, just the same. It was a simple place. It was a place where a man could smell the earth and feel the clean air on his skin. It was a far cry from L.A. It suited Jayne. And it suited him, he decided.

“How much land have you got?”

“Four hundred acres. It’s mostly wilderness. I always wanted a farm,” she rambled on, poking her nose into the open back of Reilly’s Jeep to see if there was anything she could carry. “I don’t mean to farm it, though. I don’t take to all that machinery.”

She grabbed the handle of an enormous duffel bag and wrestled with it until Reilly gently shooed her aside. He lifted out the battered bag as if it weighed nothing and slung the strap over his broad shoulder. Jayne looked up at him and swallowed hard. He was standing much too close. The twinkle in his eyes and the quirk of his lips made her breath catch.

“I’ve always believed having lots of natural open space around frees a person to become spiritually in touch with the primordial planes of pure existence.” She swallowed hard. “Don’t you think so?”

“Grew up on a farm, didn’t you?” Reilly said, ignoring her mystical prattle.

“Yes. My daddy was a barn manager at one of the big thoroughbred farms in Kentucky. Paris, Kentucky. I always used to pretend it was Paris, France, but—”

“Jaynie?” he questioned softly, his azure eyes dancing. Moving no more than half a step, he had her trapped between his body and the side of the Jeep. “Are you nervous about havin’ me stay in your house?” His voice dropped a velvety octave to a tone that made all Jayne’s nerve endings hum. “What’s the matter? Don’t think you can trust yourself with me sleepin’ in the next bedroom?”

She hadn’t actually allowed herself to think that far ahead. Now that he had raised the question, the
scene sprang to life in Jayne’s fertile imagination: Reilly stretched out, naked, the white sheet tangled around his slim, tan hips, moonlight spilling through the big window and across the bed. All the air seeped out of her lungs in a slow hissing sigh. She was suddenly much too warm inside her clothes.

“We could skip the preliminaries, you know,” he whispered, leaning closer. “I don’t have any objections to us gettin’ to know each other in bed.”

Jayne licked her lips and said nothing. It was really quite frightening how badly she wanted him to kiss her. She had to make a concerted effort to keep the heels of her low boots on the ground instead of raising them up until she was on tiptoes, straining to get her lips closer to his.

The sudden slam of the screen door jolted her as if it had struck her.

“Did you get my Fig Newtons? I’m just gonna
die
if you forgot them again, Jayne,” a distinctly feminine voice with an East Coast accent whined.

Reilly jerked around to glare at the source of the voice, and his mouth dropped open in sheer shock. Standing at the door of Jayne’s house was a girl of about sixteen wearing ragged jeans and a black T-shirt with the logo of a heavy metal band emblazoned across the front. She wore her orange and black hair in a crown of spikes that resembled the
headdress of an exotic lizard. She had a safety pin dangling from the lobe of one ear, and she was very,
very
pregnant. She stared back at him with kohl-ringed eyes that grew wider and wider and wider.

Jayne used the moment of silence to compose herself. She stepped away from Reilly’s Jeep—and Reilly—straightening her oversized jacket and recapturing some of her sense of inner calm. She wasn’t going to be alone in the house with Reilly. Far from it. She concentrated on the sense of relief that ran over her and ignored the disappointment.