Some Like It Hot (12 page)

Gina sighed. “You always have fun. And heaven forbid that you should stay anywhere a moment longer than necessary.”

Gritting her teeth, Harper sighed, as well. Hadn’t her mom just been urging her to find someone else to do her job so she could come home for a visit? “Maybe we should call it a night.”

“Yes, I suddenly find myself quite tired,” Gina agreed. “We’ll talk again soon, though. I love you, darling.”

“I know you do, Mama. I love you, too.”

They said their goodbyes and disconnected. Harper sat in the darkness on her porch for a long time afterward, just rocking and rocking.

And wondering how they’d come to grow so far apart.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
ASHA
CALLED
EARLY
the next morning. “What’s your schedule like? We need to coordinate,” she said, sounding much more cheerful than when Harper had left Bella T’s yesterday. “You, me and Jenny are going to Max’s house.”

“Yeah?” Harper didn’t question the happy little burst of energy that buzzed through her. She simply smiled into the phone. “He finally broke down and invited us, huh?”

“Ah, not exactly.” Tasha laughed. “You may have breeched the walls, but according to Jake, if Jen and I wait for an invitation, we’re all going to be plucking our chin hairs in the nursing home without ever having seen it. So we decided to invite ourselves. Here’s the deal, though, kiddo—it needs to be this morning. Jenny called Amy Alvarez, the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and found out Max’s shift starts at noon.”

“It’s Friday, that shouldn’t be a problem.” Harper climbed up to the loft. “I’ll check to be sure, but I don’t usually have anything in the morning because people are getting ready to check out—and check-in for the weekend people isn’t until three.” She crossed to the dresser and picked up her schedule. “Yes, nothing until five.”

“Great, that’s what Jenny thought, too, so we’ll pick you up at nine. Jake said we should take Max some oatmeal and a carton of milk. He wouldn’t say why, and he’s probably just messing with us, but we thought we’d stop at the General Store to pick some up anyhow. See you in an hour.”

Clouds had rolled in by the time Jenny pounded on her front door. “Hey, you ready?” the petite brunette demanded when Harper opened it. “You might want to bring your stuff in,” she said, waving at the notebook, whose pages were riffling on the seat of one of the rockers. “The wind’s picking up.” She gave it a closer look as Harper retrieved it. “Hey, is that Razor Days stuff?”

“Yeah, but nothing noteworthy. I was trying to brainstorm some ideas last night but was too upset over a call from my mom to really concentrate.”

“Is everyone okay?”

“Yes. That is, nobody’s sick or anything. Mom and I just have differing philosophies about how I should run my life, and it’s been getting in our way more and more often the past couple of years.” Since her dad died.

“Families can be a bitch,” Jenny said solemnly.

“They absolutely can.” She waved it away. “But let’s not talk about that. Let’s go horn in on Max’s morning.”

Jenny laughed. “Yes, let’s do that. I’m so excited.”

Harper shot Jenny a curious look as she grabbed her purse and locked the door. “Haven’t you known Max most of your life?”

“We’ve been acquainted since he left the Marines and took the deputy job,” Jenny said as they headed down to the lot where Tasha had parked between Jenny and Jake’s cottages. “But to me he was just this big, unsmiling, not very talkative guy. I didn’t bother looking deeper until Jake came back to town. Now I’m getting to know Max as an adult, and I’ve discovered I like him way more than I ever would have dreamed. I always thought he was kind of humorless, but he’s not. He might not be the chattiest guy in town, but he can be funny as hell when he and Jake get to insulting each other. And I really, really want to see his place.”

The drive to Max’s house didn’t take long now that Harper knew where it was, and after a quickie stop at the store they drove straight there. Pulling up to the end of Max’s drive, they sat in the car for a moment looking at the darkened house.

“Not at home, you think?” Tasha said.

“His SUV’s here,” Harper pointed out.

“Only one way to find out for sure.” Jenny opened her door. “Grab the bag, Tash.”

They all climbed from the car and walked up onto his porch. Jenny knocked on the door.

There was no answer, and she knocked again with more emphasis.

Something crashed on the other side of the door, and Harper heard Max’s voice swearing. A second later, the door swung open.

“Omigawwwd,” one of them breathed, although Harper couldn’t have said for sure who.

Max filled the doorway, bleary-eyed and sullen-mouthed, his hair flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He was all brooding angles, from his sharp cheekbones to the rawboned massiveness of his shoulders, wrists and big-knuckled hands.

But that wasn’t what had her and her friends gaping at him. No, that would be the fact that the only thing saving him from total nudity was a pair of black boxers.

The man was built, there was simply no two ways about it. His shoulders barely cleared the door’s lintels and he was hard-bodied and so damn
male,
with solid curving muscles, soft standing veins snaking down his inner arms and dark body hair on his calves, forearms and chest and in a stripe that arrowed from the latter to bisect his muscular abs, then disappear beneath those low-slung boxers. The welts the nasty drunk had carved on his neck the evening he’d broken up the roadhouse catfight had faded to the faintest of pink lines.

But they flashed Harper straight back to Max’s kiss. That. Hot. Perfect. Kiss.

“Dear Lord,” she murmured, “I think I’m having heart palpitations.” Which surely weren’t brought on by the mere memory of the kiss they’d exchanged that night. It had to be Max’s body. Sure, she had seen him half-naked the day she’d caught some of the Skins and Shirts game at the Village. But his size, the pure, stunning impact of his masculinity
,
was even more potent up close.

“What time is it?” he demanded, then turned up his wrist to peer at the silver tank watch strapped to it. “Oh. Guess it’s not as early as I thought. I need coffee.” He turned and shambled toward his kitchen, leaving the front door open.

The women looked at each other. Tasha fanned herself, and they all grinned, then followed Max into his house.

They found him in the kitchen opening and slamming cupboard doors. “Coffee, coffee, where the hell did I put the coffee?”

Jenny unscrewed a lid, then the stopper from a thermos Harper hadn’t even noticed the little brunette had. Striding up to Max, who was still pawing through the cupboards, she waved its opening beneath his nose. “I’ve got coffee.” She looked over at Harper. “Find him a mug. I have a feeling this little cap/cup thingie isn’t going do the trick.”

Max snapped around. “Oh, God, you’re a lifesaver. Dump my brother, sweetheart. Marry me instead. You can bring me coffee every morning.”

“Tempting proposition,” Jenny said drily. “But I’m afraid I must decline.”

He gave her a sleepy smile that had all three women freezing.

Tasha was the first to inhale. “Wow,” she breathed on her exhale.

He turned his head to look at her. “You say something?”

“Um, I did.” She dug in the sack she’d carried in and pulled out the cylindrical box of Quaker Oats. “Want some nice, hearty oatmeal?”

“Hell, no.” He shuddered. “Have you ever
eaten
that stuff? It’s got the consistency of paste, and I’m not exactly a wallpaper kinda guy, which is about the only thing it would be good for.”

“Then why on earth did Jake say—?”

“I think I might be able to answer that.” Harper indicated the three cupboards she’d opened in search of a mug. Handing Jenny the one she’d pulled from the last cupboard, she looked at Max. “It’s amazing you’ve got that body given what I just saw in these.”

He straightened and for the first time looked a little self-conscious. Then interested. “You like my body?”

“A lot more than I like what you have in your cupboards.”

His thick, black brows lowered over densely lashed eyes, and he blew out a disgusted breath. “Why is everyone so damn interested in my diet?”

Because two of the three cupboards she’d opened had been packed with Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops cereals, what her brother, Kai, called Toes food: Doritos, Fritos, Tostitos and Cheetos, both regular and hot, as well as two kinds of potato chips, a jar of Cheez Whiz, a big bag of frosted animal crackers, a couple—

Drawing a deep breath, she put a lid on her internal inventory. She and Tash and Jenny had already descended on him unannounced and rousted him out of bed, and he’d been pretty darn decent about it. Insulting his eating habits might be pushing her luck. So she merely said, “You’ve got a lot of junk food in your cupboards, including what looks like a year’s worth of peanut butter cheese crackers.”

“Hey, peanut butter is good for you.”

“But a lot better if it comes without the trans fat-filled crackers. Why do you eat like that?”

“Dunno.” His big shoulders hunched. “I just always have.”

Oh.
Crap
. Meaning his parents likely had never made much effort to feed him properly. And here she was treading all over the fact and making him feel bad for something he’d probably had indoctrinated in him from the cradle. She waved a dismissive hand. “And it’s not important—or at least not why we’re here,” she forced herself to say cheerfully. “Hello, Mohammad.” She indicated herself and her friends. “Meet your mountains.”

He looked at her as if she was speaking Swahili—which she could if she wanted to. “What?”

“Jake’s been lording it over us that he’s seen your house and we haven’t,” Jenny jumped in. “So we need a tour. It’s your God-given duty to cut your brother’s bragging rights off at the knees.”

“Ah. It is.” Clearly starting to mellow, thanks to the coffee he’d drained from the mug Jenny had handed him, Max nodded. “Got it. You’re right. And it will be my pleasure, as well.”

“
That’s
the charmer we all know and love.”

His mouth ticked up in a wry, one-sided smile. “Look around while I go put on some clothes.”

“Please,” Harper murmured under her breath as she watched the bunch and flex of the muscles under his skin as he strode from the kitchen, “don’t bother on our account.”

“Amen, sister,” Tasha agreed with a snort of surprised laughter as the three of them moved into the living room. But since Harper had been there before, she ignored the architecture and furnishings in favor of checking out the little things. Max didn’t have a wealth of personal items lying around, so when she came across a sheet of paper on a side table next to the big leather chair, she drifted over for a closer look. As her friends rhapsodized over the fireplace she’d admired on her prior visit, she craned her head to read it.

It was a driver’s license renewal reminder and, curious to see how old Max was, she looked for the birth date.

“Oh.”

“Got all the information you need?” Max’s deep voice spoke over her shoulder, and she felt it reverberate all the way down her spine. By the minty fresh scent wafting her way, she deduced he had taken the time to brush his teeth.

Working hard not to jolt, she slowly straightened and gave him her most charming smile. “You have a birthday coming up. How old will you be?”

“What? You somehow missed that?”

“I did. You were too fast for me to read beyond the month and day. So...forty?”

“Cute. Thirty-four. How ’bout you? Twenty-six?”

“Aw, you sweet talker, you. I’m thirty.”

Jenny and Tasha came over to claim Max for their tour then, and Harper trailed in their wake, mulling over an idea as she eyeballed Max’s butt and listened to the conversations with half an ear.

It seemed like mere minutes later that they were saying their goodbyes and climbing in the car. As she clicked her seat belt on, the idea she’d been kicking around solidified.

“I’m going to throw Max a surprise birthday party,” she said. “You think he’ll mind if I do it in his house?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE
WEATHER
GREW
worse over the weekend and turned into a full-out squall, with whipping wind and rain on Sunday. Monday was better; the sun had been out more often than behind the intermittent cloud cover, but every now and then rain blew in out of nowhere.

The Cedar Village boys clearly didn’t care. They got to use the inn’s roped-off swimming area, with its free-floating dock and a low springy diving board, and were just happy to be there.

Max was happy to watch Harper. Clad in the black-and-white bathing suit she’d worn the night he’d run across her in the hot tub, she sat on the side of the float that she’d rowed Owen to with the rest of the boys swimming in her wake like—in her words—a big bunch of ducklings. Now, lazily fluttering her long, toned legs in the crystal water, she encouraged the boys to do the biggest cannonballs they could.

When Malcolm did his from the spring board, bouncing twice on the end before going high and tucking into a tight ball, the splash was so huge it drenched Harper from the top of her head to where her feet and shins disappeared into the canal. Her hair first flattened, then sprang up into tight, soaked ringlets—and to a man, they all stared at her in openmouthed horror and held their breath, awaiting the explosion. Because what guy hadn’t been exposed to the seamy underbelly of a woman whose do they’d destroyed?

Women took their hair damn seriously.

Malcolm, who had resurfaced, treaded water. He engaged Harper in an ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit stare down, just daring her to dress him down. But his wide, brown shoulders inched up toward his ears.

Harper blinked saltwater from her eyes, squeegeed about a pint of it from the ringlets framing her face, then wiped away the rivulets trickling down her cheeks. She met the teen’s ’tude with a cool-eyed once-over of her own. “That’s it? That the best you’ve got?”

The boys’ laughter was perhaps disproportionate to the actual humor of her words, but Max totally got it. A lot of these kids came from truly dysfunctional homes and weren’t accustomed to receiving the benefit of the doubt—or, hell, even a rational response half the time to their so-called transgressions. So they laughed just a little too long and loud in relief. And given permission to make the biggest splash they could, they threw themselves into attempting to outdo each other. Even Owen, the not-so-great swimmer whom Harper had outfitted with a lifebelt, leaped off the dock and tucked himself into a ball around his flotation device, hugging bony knees to his narrow chest. His splash wasn’t the biggest, but the smile on his face when his lifebelt bobbed him back to the surface said it might as well have been.

The boys grew sillier. And louder, their shouts and laughter magnified by the body of water surrounding them. They were happy and unself-conscious.

Until the three girls showed up.

They swam out to the float, and one by one hauled themselves up onto it. They had the look of sisters, all blonde, blue-eyed and pretty, ranging from around ten to maybe sixteen. Max couldn’t have said exactly what it was—the white straight teeth, the pricey-looking, well-made bathing suits?—but there was an air of privilege about them that suggested they probably came from money. And the minute they began pulling themselves out of the water, the boys quieted.

For all the attention the oldest girl gave them, they might have been transparent. The middle girl, whom Max pegged for about fourteen, sent the boys covert glances but took her cue from her big sister. The youngest shot them an enormous, all-inclusive smile.

“Hey,” she said, friendly as a puppy. “I’m Joely. These are my sisters Meeghan—” she indicated the middle sister “—and Brittany.”

The boys returned her greeting and introduced themselves, but the disdain coming off the older sister made them subdued. Max feared that would soon be replaced by attitude, which he could already see brewing on Harry’s face. The fifteen-year-old’s sessions in anger management had barely ended, and Max feared that in a real life situation, he might not be able to recall all the coping mechanisms he’d learned to help deal with it. And if that happened, if the kid had an outburst, it would likely be the end of Jenny letting the Village use the inn’s facilities. He looked at Harper, hoping to hell she had an idea for saving the outing, because he was coming up blank.

But he’d barely met her own concerned gaze when little Joely, with her megawatt smile, said, “Hey! Can you guys do this?” And she performed a handstand on the edge of the float that culminated in her flipping feet-first into the water.

Like Harper and her cannonballs, it got the teens’ competitive juices flowing, and with the same speed that things had gotten deadly quiet, suddenly everyone was talking trash and catcalling. Soon they were trying to outdo each other. Jeremy, who tied with Malcolm for the most athletic of the boys, held his handstand, then lifted one hand a few inches off the decking, replanted it and lifted the other, before straightening both arms to flip himself into the canal.

The tide had been steadily going out, and the water grew shallower, which soon put an end to tricks from the float. Instead, the kids started horsing around in the water, and the next thing Max knew, Joely was up on Malcolm’s shoulders and Owen was on Jeremy’s and the two were doing their best to push each other from their perch and into the water.

“Oh, boy,” he muttered, thinking he should probably call a halt to it before it spiraled out of control and someone got hurt.

But Harper laughed, grabbed him by the wrist, and started splashing toward the kids. “Let’s show them how it’s done.” She’d only gone a few steps, however, before she stopped and turned to him. “Why am I walking when I can be riding?” she demanded and smiled up at him, all burnished skin and white teeth in the sunlight. “Give me a hand up.”

He ducked beneath the water and tapped her legs to move them farther apart. They were smooth against his hands and smoother still when he situated himself between them and came up out of the water with her on his shoulders.

She whooped and clutched at his head. Water lapped his waist and, wrapping his hands around her thighs, he waded toward the kids in deeper water.

Owen knocked Joely off Malcolm’s shoulders as they approached, and Max reached down to haul her to her feet, concerned again about stopping this. The girl merely laughed, however, as Malcolm plucked her up and swung her back up onto his shoulders.

“We’re on their team,” Harper declared and grinned at the little blonde. “We girls gotta stick together.”

For sheer brilliance, Joely’s return smile put the sun, which had finally quit playing hide-and-seek to come out in earnest, to shame.

“You’re goin’
down,
Ms. Summerville!” Owen crowed. “Me and Jeremy, we’re unstoppable! Plus, that means that we got Harry and Edward on our team.”

“Ha! Prepare to drink brine!” she replied. “Because we’ve got both brawn—” she gave Max’s shoulder a pat and Joely followed suit on Malcolm’s “—
and
brains.” With a modest twirl of her hand, she indicated herself and the little girl.

“’Scuse me?” Max squeezed the firm thighs beneath his hands. “
You’re
the brains and I’m the brawn?”

She gripped a handful of his hair to tilt his head back and leaned over to grin upside down in his face. One of her breasts flattened against his skull. “I know! Perfect, right?”

Hell, yeah.
She could bill herself any way her little heart desired. He was just happy to have her legs draped around his neck and her smile directed his way. Tearing his gaze away, he quirked his brows at the boys. “Let the games begin.”

“And may the odds be ever in your favor!” Owen grinned at the laugh
The Hunger Games
line got him.

The next thirty minutes were among the top five best half hours of his life. There was just something about hot sun, cold saltwater, mostly blue skies and laughing kids.

And Harper. Because, face it, a large part of his enjoyment stemmed from her. She had a real knack for fun, for making the people around her feel as if they were a part of something special. And that was in
addition
to having his hands on her sleek legs, feeling her weight shift and her skin rub against his as she hand wrestled their opponents. That and hearing her laugh, loudly and from the belly, not only when she won a round but when she got knocked from his shoulders into the water...well, it made for a damn good time. Especially when she squeezed those thighs around his head.

It made him wish he could swivel it a hundred and eighty degrees like Linda Blair in that old classic movie,
The Exorcist.
Okay, she had done an actual three-sixty. Sue him if he had a few stops along the way in mind.

Which was
not
a smart thing to be contemplating, surrounded as he was by all these kids. Because pretty soon they’d have to vacate the cold water, and the fact that he was half-hard probably wasn’t what he wanted the boys—and sure as hell not that sweet little girl, who had informed them she was eleven-and-a-half years old—to see.

“Joely!” snapped big sister Brittany from the shore where she and the other one—Meeghan—had moved to lie on beach towels a while ago. She eyed the younger girl sourly over the towel she was in the midst of folding. “C’mon. We’re going back to the inn.”

“Go on without me,” Joely called. “Tell Mom I’ll be in in a while.”

“No.”
Brittany’s voice brooked no resistance. “You come with us
now.
”

Joely sighed and gave one of Malcolm’s dreads a tug. Reaching up, he plucked her off his shoulders, then set her gently on her feet in the water. Left with no excuse to keep Harper on his own, with a regretful slide of his hands down her smooth legs, Max squatted so she could climb off, as well.

The little blonde looked up at Malcolm, then around at the rest of them. “Playing with you guys is the most fun I’ve had all week,” she said with a sweet smile. Rushing over, she gave Harper a fierce hug. Then she turned and waded slowly toward the beach.

Malcolm watched her until she joined her sisters. “That’s one seriously fly little dudette.”

“No shit,” Owen agreed, and Jeremy added, “You ask me, she got all the personality in that family.”

“You know what, guys?” Harper waded up to the boys. “I am so proud of you. You all were great today, and you can bet I’m passing that along to Jenny.”

“Who’s Jenny?” Edward asked.

“She runs this inn.” Harper quirked a brow. “In other words, the woman who says if you get to come back again or not.”

“And you’re gonna tell her we were great?”

“I am. I’m going to tell her that you were super great. Times
infinity
great.”

“
Ex
cellent.” Edward nodded. “Then we’re proud of you, too.”

* * *

L
ATER
THAT
DAY
, Harper organized a volleyball game, finished up a tide pool exploration she’d held for a group of kids and headed up to her cabin to make some private calls. Her first was to Max’s place of employment.

She’d never been so aware of a man as when she’d sat on his shoulders and felt the hot grip of his hands on her thighs, the shift of solid muscles beneath her legs, her butt. At one point, he’d turned his head just as she’d tightened the grip of her legs around his neck, and rough stubble had scraped her inner thigh. She was more accustomed to smooth-shaven men—Max included, at least when he was in uniform. But there was just something very sexy about that coarse rasp of prickly hair against soft skin.

“Razor Bay Sheriff’s Office,” a voice said in her ear as her call was answered.

She gave her head a shake and wrested it back to the matter at hand. “Hi, is this Ms. Alverez?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You probably don’t know me, but I’m Harper Summerville, the activities—”

“I do know who you are,” the woman interrupted. “This is Razor Bay, honey—everyone knows, or at least knows about, everyone else. And call me Amy. What can I do for you?”

“Direct me to the person who schedules personnel days off, please?”

“That would be me.” Harper could almost hear the other woman’s shrug over the airwaves. “This isn’t exactly a metropolitan branch of the sheriff’s department. So, at the risk of repeating myself, what can I do for you?”

“Schedule a day, or at least an evening off for Max Bradshaw.” She gave the dispatcher the date.

A beat of silence went by, then... “Excuse me? Max
always
works his birthday.”

No.
That was just plain wrong. But she shook off the instinctual displeasure that stabbed her upon hearing it and merely said in a mild tone, “Not this year, hopefully. I’m planning a surprise party for him, and it’d be just too sad if the surprise was on me because he had to work. On his
birthday.
”

“It totally would,” Alverez agreed. “I’m changing it right now, because that’s the coolest thing I’ve heard in a month of Sundays. Max is one of the good guys, and I swear it seems as if nobody ever does anything for him. And you don’t have to worry that I’ll spoil the surprise. I can come up with a logical reason for the switch.” There was a tiny pause, then: “It just so happens that I have that night off, myself. Can my husband and I come, too?”

“Yes! That would be brilliant! And, please, if you know anyone else who’d like to attend, let me know. I’m just getting started on this, so I don’t have any details for you yet. But I’ll let you know as soon as I get organized.”

Once they disconnected, she switched gears and gave the party’s venue some thought. She’d really had it in mind to hold it at Max’s place, but the truth was, it would be damn difficult to pull off. He was in law enforcement, for pity’s sake; how likely was he to leave his place wide open while he worked long hours in a highly visible job? And even if he did, how would they get him back there again?

Okay, she could probably utilize Jake for that. Given the way the half brothers razzed each other, he’d no doubt be all over pulling the wool over his brother’s eyes. But even if he managed it, the cat would be out of the bag the moment Max saw a bunch of cars parked in his yard. Hell, as a deputy he probably knew a lot of them by sight.