Some Like It Hot (18 page)

“Am not!” she said, knuckling a tear away.

“Well, I am,” Harper said, clambering to her feet and hauling Jenny in for a hug.

A few minutes later, as the women got busy pulling out food and plates and all the other stuff they considered essential for putting together a meal, Max and Jake finished roughing in a fire pit with a circle of stones, then laid the wood. Jake squatted to light it, but paused to look over his shoulder at Max.

“I asked Austin to be my best man,” he said in a low voice. “But I’d sure like it if you’d be my groomsman.” He gave him a sly smile. “I know how much you like to dress up, and this is your opportunity to rock a tux.”

The fact that Jake wanted him to be part of his wedding gave Max an odd, warm feeling in his chest. But he merely said roughly, “I’m in.”

“We’re also going to figure out a place in the inn to set up dancing and—”

“Jake,” he interrupted, “I’m in.” Looking down at his brother, he smiled, feeling really good. “You had me at the tux, bro.”

* * *

“Y
OU
SURE
CAN
plan a party,” Max said as he helped Harper haul her picnic paraphernalia into her tiny cabin. “First my birthday party and now this. That was one hella good picnic and bonfire.”

“It was really great, wasn’t it? And I’m starting to think having it tonight was good timing on our part, too.” She looked at the trees that were beginning to rustle in the freshening wind. “Look how fast those clouds are blowing across the moon. I wonder if a storm’s coming in.”

“Hmm,” he said. He wasn’t interested in the weather.

What
did
interest him clearly showed on his face because her lips suddenly quirked up, and she raised her eyebrows at him. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.” He thumped the Styrofoam cooler down on the floor and nudged it out of the way with the side of his foot. He was reaching for her even before he fully straightened. Snaking an arm around her waist, he yanked her to him with an enthusiasm that would have sent her bouncing right off him again if he hadn’t hurriedly angled his arm up her back. As it was, it flattened her breasts against his chest, which was A-OK with him. Burying his nose in her hair, he pressed his mouth to that sensitive hollow behind her earlobe. “I’ve been wanting to do this all night.”

She made a rude noise. “Stop the presses,” she said with wry humor. “You always want to do this.”

He touched the tip of his tongue to the pulse beating beneath her soft, scented skin. “You say that like it’s a
bad
thing.”

“Aw, nooo,” she crooned and, wrapping her arms around his neck, walked him backward. It didn’t take many steps before his back hit a wall.

Yeah, baby. I just love me an aggressive woman
. But pleased as he was, he gave her the most demure expression he could drum up. “Be gentle with me.”

A laugh sputtered out of her. “Oh, I will,” she promised, leaning back to give him a good, long look. “Or I’d planned to, anyway. But, you know—” she took a half step back and grabbed a fistful of his T-shirt in each hand and worked it up his torso, baring the muscles of his abs, his pecs, which tightened beneath her appreciative gaze “—on second thought,” she said as he raised his arms to facilitate the shirt’s removal, “maybe I’ll go all dominatrix on you instead.” She stood on her toes to pull it off over his head, then tossed it aside. She splayed her fingers through his chest hair and looked him in the eye. “So, maybe you should be afraid. Be very afraid.”

“Oh, I am,” he assured her, reaching for the tiny buttons that ran from neckline to hem on her little red sundress.

She slapped his hands away. “It’s my turn to be in charge.”

“Hey.” He held his hands away from his body in a classic, I’m-just-a-harmless-guy gesture. “You’re the boss.”

“Oooh.” She wiggled. “I am, aren’t I? This is going to be fun.” Leaning in, she kissed the side of his throat.

She worked her way down his neck, leaving damp kisses in her wake. Reaching the hollow of his throat, she lapped at his pulse, which was racing like a treed cat’s. As her teeth scraped over his clavicle, she worked her hands between them to start opening her own buttons.

Groaning, he reached for her.

“Hands at your sides, mister!”

“Daaaaamn,” he breathed, tucking his chin to watch her mouth’s possum-paced approach to his nipple.

Finally, her lips reached it, a lush cupid’s bow pursed over the silver ring that glinted through his chest hair. She raised her gaze to watch him looking down at her. “Is this what you want?” she whispered and lowered her mouth.

He hissed his approval as warm suction pulled at the sensitive nub. Her lips pulled back and he saw the ring clasped between her teeth.

She gave it a little tug, and all the breath left his lungs in a loud “Hah!” Then—

“All right, baby, that’s it!” He reached down to lightly squeeze her cheeks between his thumb and forefinger, loosening her grip on the nipple ring. Sweeping her up, he tossed her over his shoulder. Within moments, he’d packed her up the loft ladder and was flipping her onto her back on her bed.

He was frantic to get inside of her, but as he looked down at her on the patchwork quilt, she gave him a big pleased-with-herself smile, and the bolt of tenderness that shot through him took his breath away.

Climbing onto the bed, he straddled her hips and reached to undo the buttons that she’d failed to unfasten near the hem of her sundress. Slowly, he peeled it open like a kid with his one and only gift on Christmas morning. Then he simply stared at her spread out beneath him in all that sleek skin and a delicate, scanty white bra and panties set.

“You are so beautiful,” he murmured, sliding down to lie atop her. He lowered his head to kiss her.

Slowly. Tenderly.

And was rewarded by the near silent “Ohhhhhhhhhhh.” She sighed into his mouth.

He took his time, kissing her slow and deep and thoroughly before sliding down to distribute openmouthed kisses along the length of her throat and over her collarbones. He dragged his mouth down her chest and used the tip of his tongue to outline the full upper slopes of her breasts where they rose out of her demicups. Pushing up, he admired the tight thrust of her nipples through the so-sheer-it-barely-existed fabric before bending his head to lock his lips around one. He sucked, a triumphant satisfaction roaring through his veins as a high-pitched whine sounded in her throat.

Her back arched, pushing the fullness of her breast against his face, and he reached behind her to unfasten the back clasp. The bra’s flimsy cups folded in on themselves, and he slid his hand beneath the cobweb fabric and over the bare skin of her right breast to tweak the diamond point of her nipple as he continued to worry the left with his mouth.

Moaning softly, she reached between them and cupped his cock through his jeans, and he hissed in a breath through his teeth.

“I want back in charge,” she panted and pushed at his shoulders.

Obligingly, he rolled onto his back alongside her. Harper promptly climbed onto her knees and straddled him. She peeled her bra off and dropped it over the side of the bed, then scooted down and planted a kiss on his sternum before moving lower yet. She reached for his fly button.

Oh, shit, was she going to...?

“You said you wanted to see my hair wrapped around your—”

Oh, yeah, she was. She undid his fly, and he lifted his hips so she could push his jeans and boxers down his thighs. His cock sprang free, and he shoved up on his elbows to watch as she lowered her head over it. She shook her hair, and it danced over his hard-on, three or four curls wrapping around his dick like pornographic tentacles.

Wrapping her hand around his erection, she squeezed his cock, sliding it through a tight grip exactly the way she’d told him she wanted to do the first time they’d made love. She glanced up at him.

Then opened those lush lips around him and sucked the head into her mouth.

His breath exploded from his lungs, and in sheer reflex his hips shot up with a sudden power that startled her hand free. The lack of brakes thrust him deep into her mouth to hit the back of her throat.

“Shit!” He’d had more control—and sure as hell more finesse—when Christi Tate gave him his first blow job the day after his sixteenth birthday. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.”

He dropped his butt back on the bed, which pulled her lips, which had gone slack, back up to the head of his cock.

She coughed and glanced up at him.

He grimaced an apology, and she gave him a tiny it-happens smile in return. Then she closed her lips around him once more and gamely sank her mouth damn near to the base of his shaft again with a tight, membranous suction that made his eyes glaze. Plunging his fingers into her curls, he stared at her lips wrapped around his hard-on as she moved her head up and down. He tried to keep his hips still, but found them moving in counterpart.

Then all of a sudden he was way too close, and his hands tightened around her skull the next time her head rose, preventing her from taking him in again. “Off-off-off-off.”

They were the hardest words he’d ever said. But he wasn’t going there unless she flat-out told him that’s the way she wanted to finish him.

She raised her head, licking her lips, and he groaned. He had to displace her to fumble at his Levi’s, which had worked their way around his calves, and get his wallet out of his pocket. He passed it to her. “Condom.”

She fished it out and rolled it down his length, then threw a leg back over his thighs like a biker chick mounting a Harley. He thumbed his dick into position and watched as she lowered herself over it, then as it sank into her inch by inch.

“Ohhhhh,” she breathed, her eyes fluttering shut.

Then they opened up again, and she raised back up until he was almost unseated. And slapped back down.

“Jesus, Harper!” He gripped her lush ass and lifted her up again. Groaned as she dropped back down.

“It feels so
good,
” she moaned. “You fill me so full, and I can feel you literally
dragging
against me when you pull out—
God!
” Her demonstration when she raised her hips again clearly put her on the ragged edge, and she looked down at him, all flushed cheeks, slumberous eyes and bee-stung lips. “I’m gonna come, Max. God, I’m so close and—”

He worked his thumb and forefinger between plump, slippery lips and pinched her clit.

She screamed and slammed down one last time, those hot interior muscles clamping around his cock like a lubricious Chinese finger puzzle.

And it was all she wrote. Without time to move so much as a centimeter, all that muscular milking along his dick made him erupt like a fire hose. All he could do was sink his fingers into the full firm cheeks of her ass, shoot his hips up off the mattress and groan his satisfaction as she ground against him in return.

Minutes or aeons later, they collapsed like soldiers whose horses had been shot out from under them. And as Harper draped bonelessly atop him, her face pressed against his hot throat, he came to an uneasy realization.

The sex was out of this world, but,
damn,
it was the woman who got to him every time. Her humor, her heart, her...hell. Everything. And it was time to quit fooling himself.

He was knee-walking in love with the girl.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“O
H
,
FOR
—!”
H
ARPER
felt like
throwing
something when she got her mother’s answering machine. The last time she’d called it had been Gina’s personal assistant, Kimberly, who had put her off with some lame excuse.

“This is the last message I intend to leave, Mom,” she said with hard-won civility after the beep. “I’m through dancing to your tune. If I don’t hear back from you by noon tomorrow, I’m informing Cedar Village myself.”

A soft click indicated the phone on the other end had been picked up. “You will do nothing of the sort,” her mother stated categorically.

“Seriously? You were
lurking?
Since when does Gina Summerville-Hardin resort to hiding behind her personal assistant and answering machines?”

Her mother ignored the question, clearly focused on getting her point across. “You will not inform Cedar Village,” she reiterated. “We have a strict protocol for grant approval notification—”

“Which includes you notifying the receiver of the grant in a timely manner once I’ve given you the green light,” she rebutted firmly. “
You’re
the one who has blatantly, inexplicably ignored the foundation’s protocol, Mother. Not I. And not only is it aggravating beyond belief, it’s
cruel.
I’m...ashamed of you.”

It was hard to wrap her mind around, but she was so disappointed in her—her
mother,
for pity’s sake, whom she loved—that it was all she could do to draw her next breath.

“Harper...”

“These people run an amazingly effective organization on a shoestring, and I doubt they can predict beyond a fiscal quarter or two at a time whether or not they’ll be able to remain in business. I’ve seen the progress they’ve made with these boys, and I honest to God do not understand why you’re messing with them this way. But it stops now, Gina.” She had never in her life addressed her mother by her given name, but for this moment she simply couldn’t acknowledge the familial connection. “Either you inform them that we’re giving them that grant or I’ll do it myself.”

“Darling, listen—”

“No. I’m so angry with you I can barely see straight. If you have a problem with the way I live my life—which, frankly, at my age I should be well beyond having to account to you about—then take it up with
me.
Don’t take it out on a struggling charity that’s manned by decent people knocking themselves out six ways from Sunday to keep it alive.”

“Please, Baby Girl. Let me expl—”

She sucked in a sharp breath and pretended she’d heard neither the plea, nor her mother’s pet name for her. “I have no desire to see our relationship permanently torn apart, so I really need to hang up before I say something I can’t take back. But for the love of God, Gina. Do the right thing.”

She disconnected and stood breathing heavily as she stared blindly at the wall. Then, with the power of all her unhappiness and frustration fueling her aim, she flung her cell phone at the couch so hard it bounced straight back toward her.

Lunging for it, she caught the darn thing before it crashed to the floor, then collapsed onto the couch, clutching it against her churning stomach. “Shit,” she whispered. “Shit, shit,
shit!
”

She and her mother had certainly had their disagreements in the past. Quite a number of them, actually. But this one felt different.

This felt dangerously as if it might be the finishing splinter. The one that planted that final wedge between them.

* * *

“H
ER
LEGAL
NAME
is Harper Louisa Summerville-Hardin,” said the brusque voice of Max’s old marine buddy Kev Conley at the other end of his call. “But from everything I can tell, she only goes by Summerville. Not just for this current gig in your town, Max, but all the time. She seems to be an upright citizen—she’s never been arrested or gotten into trouble of any kind that I can see. She’s had a few speeding tickets, but those have been promptly paid.”

Okay. That’s good news.
He picked up the paintbrush he’d been using to finish up the exterior trim when his phone had rung. Between one thing and another, he’d never quite gotten around to completing it when he’d stained the body of the house. Then he blew out a soft breath and asked the question that had really been gnawing at him. “Is she in a relationship?”
Saynosaynosay no.

“Nope,” Kev said, and Max sagged in relief. “It doesn’t look like she’s been what you’d call serious about anyone since college.” Paper rustled through Max’s receiver. “She travels a lot and has had a shitload of temporary jobs.”

“I know about those.”

“She also draws a salary from a charitable foundation called Sunday’s Child. Several of her temp jobs seem to be related, in that they appear on the list of charities the foundation endows.”

His brush skittered off the narrow edge of the window frame he’d been painting and slopped black paint across the warm neutral color called Smoked Oyster that he and Jake had picked out for the shingles. Setting the brush down, he wiped off the glob with a rag he’d dampened earlier and tossed on the ladder’s shelf.

All the while trying to ignore the acid chewing holes in his gut. “Son of a bitch,” he said—and it had nothing to do with the small mess he’d made. “That I didn’t know.”

“Does it mean something to you?”

“Yeah, although I’m not quite sure what yet. Cedar Village, a group home for troubled boys that I give time to here, applied for a grant from Sunday’s Child.”

“Huh. Guess you’re gonna have to have a talk with the lady about why she’s there.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

But he didn’t rush off to do so the minute he said goodbye to Kev. Picking up the paintbrush again, he turned his attention back to the trim, determined not to let his mind wander down the path leading to all things Harper.

Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. Because, dammit, she’d been deceiving all of them since the minute she’d rolled into town. Not only him, but Jake and Jenny and Tasha and Mary-Margaret. Hell, why stop there? She’d lied to the entire fucking staff at the Village
and
the boys. He would have liked to have believed there was another explanation, but what else could you call it when she hadn’t told a soul about her true purpose for being there?

Nothing else, that’s what. Yeah, sure, maybe in the beginning, when they were all strangers, she’d had a valid reason for hiding her purpose for being here. But they weren’t strangers now. Hell, no, not after she’d wormed her way into all their lives, apparently without compunction. The woman was a stone liar, and she’d been fucking him in more ways than her Oscar-worthy performances in bed.

He tried with superhuman will not to let it, yet still it triggered all those old insecurities he’d struggled with as a kid of not measuring up. Of not
mattering.

No, dammit.
Infuriated, he took his paintbrush into the kitchen where he threw it in a produce bag, wrapped it up tight, then put it in the fridge. He washed his hands and slapped them dry on the seat of his cargo shorts.

He wasn’t a kid any longer, and he’d worked too damn hard to outgrow his troubled past to let her devalue him this way. He couldn’t change the fact that she’d been lying to him all along, but he could sure as hell let her know he was onto her. Patting down his pockets, he located his keys in the right front one and fished them out as he headed for the door.

His head was filled with too much white noise to recall what Harper had said her schedule was today, but he wasn’t exactly bowled over with surprise to find her rental parked in the lot and her cottage looking mighty damn deserted. She’d probably taken some group out to do something fun.

She was nothing, he thought bitterly, if not fun.

He found a spot in the shade to park his SUV, climbed out and strode over to check her place. As he’d thought, she wasn’t there and he returned to the parking lot. Leaning a hip against the vehicle, he drummed his fingers on its finish as he glared into the woods and tried to empty his mind.

It didn’t work worth a damn, and he hiked himself up onto the hood of his car. He’d give it another fifteen minutes, and if she hadn’t shown up by then he’d go kill some time at The Anchor. He had an uncharacteristic yen to knock back a few—maybe even more than a few. But he was on duty tonight, so he’d content himself with nursing a single bottle.

But maybe he’d treat himself to a six-pack to drink when he got home.

He heard the sound of a door closing from around the front of Harper’s cabin—or possibly the one closest to it—and slid off the hood. Inhaling and exhaling deep, controlled breaths, he attempted to shove down the anger that kept crowding out everything else. Dammit, he was a trained professional in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department; he knew better than to let his emotions rule.

Yet they kept shoving their way to the forefront anyhow.

When he rounded the cottage and saw that Harper’s front door was open, he stopped to get his shit together. The last thing he needed was to go all caveman on her ass. He had to be calm. Rolling his shoulders, he shook out his hands. Cracked his knuckles. Then, sucking in another breath, he held it deep in his lungs for a moment before slowly blowing it out.

“Be cool,” he coached himself under his breath as he silently climbed the steps to the little porch across the front of her cabin. “Do not lose it, dude, whatever you do.”

He spotted her as he approached the screen door; she had her back to him and was bent over the couch, pawing through a stack of folders.

Instead of going all icy and reticent as he would have done even a few short months ago, his blood began to boil through his veins, his heart to thunder in his chest.

This was a mistake; he had to get the hell out of here before he made a giant fool of himself. He stepped back.

And knocked his size thirteen shoe against one of the rocking chairs.

Straightening, she turned to squint through the screen. Then that smile of hers, the one that flashed pretty white teeth and a glimpse of pink gums and turned her eyes into upside down crescents, broke over her face. “Max! What a nice surprise—I didn’t expect to see you.”

How the hell could he feel two such disparate emotions at once? Her professed enthusiasm at seeing him made his heart warm even as it caused his temper to flare. He pulled open the screen door and stepped inside. “I had an unexpected surprise of my own a while ago.”

“Did you?” She took a step toward him. “A good one?”

“Not so much.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. What was it?”

“I got the results of the background check that I had run on you and it turns out—”

“Excuse me?” Her eyes went chilly behind suddenly narrowed lashes. “You ran a
check
on me?”

“I did. Wanna know what it said?”

“Since it’s my background we’re talking about, I probably know better than you what it said. And I must admit I’m still hung up on the fact that you abused your position in the sheriff’s office to—”

“Oh.” A bitter laugh escaped him. “You’re good, turning it around on me like
I’m
the one to break the faith. But guess what, baby? I didn’t use departmental resources. I had an old marine buddy who worked for a P.I. before he joined the few, the proud—”

“Why?”
She took another step in his direction.

“Because my cop instincts said something was off with you—just wasn’t a hundred percent right. Occasionally your behavior just made me suspicious.”

“What?”
She looked at him as if he were an escapee from an insane asylum, and his anger burned cold and righteous.

“You don’t think so? Well, let’s look at the facts.” He ticked up a finger for the first point on his mental list. “Hanging up every damn phone conversation you were in the middle of whenever I walked into the room—”

“I was talking to my mother!” Rushing over, she gave him a stiff-armed shove, then made a sound like steam escaping a teakettle when it didn’t even rock him back on his heels. “My
mother!
”

His logically laid out bullet points went up in smoke. “You were lying to everyone in town!”

“Because I’ve found, as did my father before me, that the charities I’m sent to evaluate behave differently with Harper Summerville-Hardin of the Sunday’s Child Foundation than they do with plain old Harper Summerville, and it takes longer to figure out what’s the genuine article and what’s simply part of a big old dog-and-pony show set to impress. And I hung up every time you came into the room because I approved Cedar Village for the grant the night of the baseball game with the kids, and for some reason my mother has been dragging her feet with the notification and I didn’t feel I could tell you until she gave me the go-ahead.
Or
argue with her about it with you in the room.”

She drilled his chest with her finger. “But you know what? If you found my behavior so darn suspicious, why didn’t you just ask me what the heck was going on? I probably would have broken the unwritten rule at Sunday’s Child and told you.”

“Probably,” he said with cynical disbelief. “Or...not.”

“You’ll never know, will you?” A laugh that was short on humor and long on animosity escaped her. “In any event, you could have saved yourself the expense of your big investigation into my oh-so-suspicious background. I had it out with my mother just this morning. I told her I would inform Mary-Margaret—and you and Jake and Jenny and Tash and anyone
else
who’s interested—if she didn’t get off the dime and do so herself before noon tomorrow.”

Suddenly, she stepped back. “But why am I explaining myself to you? In fact,
screw
you, Deputy Bradshaw. I wasn’t breaking any laws or running a big scam. I was merely doing my job in the exact same manner that I’ve assessed every other potential grant applicant. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

He rubbed at the pain in his chest, but found it a whole lot deeper than a massage could reach. “No,” he said with stiff formality. “I obviously never meant a damn thing to you, Ms. Summerville-Hardin, so I guess you don’t owe me anything at all.”