Some Like It Hot (4 page)

“That’s enough, Brandon,” Max said, but it was the look that Harper aimed at the youth that made the boy squirm. It was a thousand-yard stare she’d perfected when she was twelve, a nonthreatening but cool gaze that made the recipient completely question the wisdom of uttering the words that had warranted it in the first place.

“Sorry,” Brandon muttered.

“Not a problem.” She gave him a slight smile that was warmer without encouraging him to repeat his blunder. Then she turned back to Max. “This won’t help for today’s event, but I could tell you how to make your next pancake breakfast more profitable. And while I can’t promise anything until I talk to Jenny, maybe she’d let us offer the occasional supervised use of some of The Brothers’ resources.”

Max dug his wallet out of his back pocket, fished out a card and handed it to Harper. “Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll talk about it. But for now, you should go enjoy the rest of your day off.”

Sliding the proffered card into her own back pocket, she nodded, recognizing a dismissal when she heard one. “I’ll do that.” She glanced at the teen still stacking dishes next to her. “It was nice meeting you, Jeremy.” She nodded at the other boys who had stopped working to watch her.

Then she strode to the kitchen door and let herself out.

“Dude,” she heard one of the boys say as the door closed behind her. “She’s hot. Why’d you let her get away?” There was a beat of silence, then, “Oh, man. It’s not because she’s black, is it?”

Harper froze. Omigawd.
Was
it? That hadn’t even occurred to her, maybe because she’d spent the majority of her life in Europe where race wasn’t as big an issue—or at least didn’t have the history that it had in the States. But for all she knew—

“
Hell,
no,” Max’s voice said emphatically. “Listen, kid, men don’t hit on every hot woman they see.” He was quiet for a moment, then said slowly, “Besides, did she strike you as the kind of woman who would
welcome
me hitting on her?”

Yes! Embarrassing as it was to admit, she definitely would welcome that.

“Nah, I guess not,” the boy said.

“Oh, for c’ris—” Harper cut herself off, blew a pithy raspberry and stalked over to her car.

Her feet hurt from being on them all morning and she was cursing having worn her tallest wedged espadrilles as she blew through the front door of her cottage. Loggins and Messina played “
Your Mama Don’t Dance”
on the cell phone she’d deliberately left behind, and she crossed the room and snatched it off the little coffee table.

“Hi, Mom.” She kicked off her shoes and headed straight for the mini-fridge, where she pulled out a nice cold bottle of raspberry-green-tea-flavored artesian water. She rolled its cold plastic across her warm forehead.

“Hey, Baby Girl.”

Ever since her dad had died—and that had been a few years ago now—she and her mother had been at odds more often than not. So, hearing the nickname gave her a rush of pleasure. Tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder, she twisted the cap off the bottle and drank half of it down in one large swallow.

“For heaven’s sake, are you gulping something in my ear? Did your Grandma Hardin and I not teach you better manners than that?”

Harper tried not to feel resentful, she really did. She was thirty years old, for God’s sake; long past the age to be either scolded like a child or react as if she were one.

She inhaled and blew out a quiet breath, and
still
a vestige of attitude she simply couldn’t expunge colored her voice when she said, “Sorry. I just spent three-plus hours serving pancakes for a Cedar Village fund-raiser, and I’m tired and thirsty.”

There was an instant of silence. Then Gina Summerville-Hardin said softly, “How did that happen?”

Oh, God, it had been so easy, Harper still couldn’t quite believe it. She’d almost fallen off the picnic bench at Jenny’s dinner party when Max had presented the opportunity. “My boss’s boyfriend’s half brother is Max Bradshaw.”

The sudden silence was so absolute that Harper began to wonder if they’d lost the connection. “Mom?”

“Yes, I’m still here. The same Max Bradshaw who’s on the Cedar Village board?”

“Yes.”

“I was quite impressed with his dossier, being both a deputy and a veteran and all. He sounds like a very responsible man. Still, I must say I’m stunned at the coincidence.”

For a few seconds, her thoughts got hung up in that touch they’d shared over the sangria pitcher. Then she shrugged it off. “Well, Razor Bay is pretty small. It’s tougher to maintain my anonymity in a one stoplight town, but the upside is it’s easier to get to know the players, as there are just plain fewer of them. But, man. I thought I was lucky to get the job at The Brothers.” A dry laugh escaped her. “I had no idea
how
lucky.”

She’d taken the position because it was right up her alley, considering it was the kind of job she’d done before her dad’s death had pulled her into the nonprofit charity her parents had started when her father retired his engineering degree. But primarily she’d taken it because ever since she
had
joined the fold, her year-round job had become assessing the worthiness of the less-established charities applying for grants from Sunday’s Child. In this case Cedar Village had submitted a request to the family foundation for a grant that would enable them to hire an additional counselor, fill the gaps in their supplies and fix the roof on the classroom building where the boys kept up with their education even as they learned the skills they’d need to reenter society as fully functional young men.

Her dad was the one who had originated the policy of anonymous evaluations after his first few trips to meet grant applicants had resulted in lavish dog and pony shows presented strictly to impress him. He’d decided a better way to get the true measure of how a charity was run was to assess them anonymously in their day-to-day business.

“I still don’t understand why you took that job at all,” her mother said, pulling Harper from her reverie. “It doesn’t take you thirteen weeks to make your assessment.”

“Mom, I told you—the only other reason to be in a town this size would be to take a vacation, and who’d believe a single woman on vacay had a sudden yen to volunteer at a home for delinquent boys? How would she even hear of it? Besides, I kind of
needed
a vacation.”

“So you took a job?”

Harper bit back a sigh, because they’d had this conversation before. “I took a
fun
job, and it’s a break from lying to people. That
is
a vacation.”

“Yet you’re lying to these people, too, aren’t you?”

Harper was suddenly so weary she could barely hold her head up. What the hell had happened to them that they were so far apart these days? “Yes, Mother. You’re absolutely right. I’m a liar no matter what I do.”

“Darling, I didn’t mean it that way. I simply think if you’re unhappy, you should let someone else do that job and come home.”

“I’m
not
unhappy.” Yes, she got tired of the subterfuge sometimes, but she genuinely got the reasoning behind it. And she loved the new places, new people aspect of it. Loved getting to help charities that made things easier for kids. But her mother, who wanted her to quit traveling and settle down, would never believe that.

And she really didn’t feel up to justifying her choices yet again. “Whoops. There’s the doorbell. I’ll talk to you soon, Mom.”

“Harper, wait—”

“Gotta go. Bye.” She disconnected. Then, blowing out an unhappy breath, she tossed the phone on the table and flopped back on the couch.

This was the right way to do things, she assured herself. Her dad had done it so, and she still trusted his judgment unswervingly. As for the niggle of doubt her mother’s words had created?

Taking a steady, calming breath, she flicked it away.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
AX
WAS
ON
his way to Harper’s cottage the next evening when a movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Glancing left, he expected to see someone lounging in the inn’s hot tub. Instead, the spa appeared empty. Then another tiny shift along the water’s already bubbling surface drew his focus, and he saw a woman free-floating, only her neck and head supported by the edge of the tub.

Her warm, gorgeous coloring seized his attention, and it never even occurred to him to question her identity. He knew who she was by the hot jolt of electric pleasure that sparked through his veins. Veering off the path, he made a beeline for the little oasis of plantings where the tub resided just outside the inn’s pool house. This made things both simpler and more difficult.

Simpler because he wouldn’t have to be alone with Harper in her tiny bungalow. And harder because, well, hell—look at her. Close up, he could see the light brown skin of her breasts, framed by the deep V of her black-and-white patterned halter top, rising out of the bubbling water. The uppermost curve of her long, smooth thighs and her orange-tipped toes broke the waterline, as well.

He shook his head impatiently. He’d sworn to himself he would meet with her tonight and
not
think about sex.

Yeah, it was a stupid promise, but his word was his word, dammit. “
How
could you have made the pancake breakfast more profitable?” he demanded as he stopped at the tub.

And watched her give a start and damn near go under before she righted herself. Her head came up, and her shoulders shot out of the water as her butt lowered to sit on the submerged seat. And he realized she hadn’t merely been überrelaxed. “Aw, crap. Did I wake you?”

“What? No, of course not.” She yawned widely, then dropped the dripping hand she’d raised out of the water to cover her mouth and gave him a tiny lopsided smile. “Well, maybe. What time is it?”

He consulted the big tank watch on his wrist. “Going on eight.”

“It was around a quarter ’til when I climbed in the tub, so I guess I did drop off for a bit.”

He couldn’t help it; deputy was pretty much his default mode. “You know it’s not safe to sleep in a hot tub, right?”

“Yes, Papa.” She started to roll her eyes but apparently thought better of it, for she went all faux solemn-eyed on him and offered a polite smile instead. “Is there something I can do for you?”

A raft of dirty suggestions popped to mind, but since he wasn’t a damn fourteen-year-old—even if that was the way he invariably felt around her—he wisely swallowed them. Particularly since he didn’t know why he’d come to grill her in the first place. Hell, hadn’t he given her his card so she could be the one to get in touch with him?

Whatever his reasons for showing up unannounced, here he was, so he might as well make the most of it. Hooking a hip on the corner of the tub, he braced his other foot against the grass and ignored the splashed water soaking into the seat of his jeans. “You said yesterday morning you could tell me how to make the next pancake breakfast more profitable. How would you do that?”

She merely looked up at him for a moment. Wreathed in steam, moisture beaded her face, and her hair, pulled atop her head in a high ponytail, curled wildly, crazy little corkscrews plastered damply to her temples and nape. “Buy me a Coke and I’ll tell you.”

Good idea. A nice cold drink might cool him down, help him quit thinking about licking the water drops sliding down her silky-smooth cleav—

He surged to his feet. “Be back in a sec.” Fishing his wallet from his back pocket, he crossed to the vending machine in the ice machine room attached to the pool house.

Moments later he was back. He popped the tab on one icy can and handed it to Harper, then opened his own and knocked back half of it as he resumed his perch on the edge of the tub.

She took a long swallow herself and used the tip of her tongue to absorb a drop of soda from her upper lip as she lowered the can. Setting it aside on the little shelf that filled the gap between the back of the hot tub and the pool house’s outer wall, she focused her attention on him.

“One way to make your breakfast more profitable,” she said, “is to host a silent auction. That can be as elaborate or as simple as you want, but you have a captive audience in the people who come to eat, and everyone loves the idea of getting something at a bargain price.”

Pushing against the foot planted on the ground, he straightened. “Is it hard to do?”

“Not really. It can be time-consuming, but that’s where volunteers like me come in. You use us to solicit donations from local businesses and set up a table or two to accommodate the acquisitions. We can also help with things like deciding on a price to start the bidding for each item and at what increments to increase and make individual sheets for them—”

“Wait, wait. Explain what you mean. And pretend I don’t have a clue.”

She laughed. “Because you don’t?”

“Yeah.” His own mouth crooked up in a smile. “I’m a cop—and before that a marine. Stuff like this is way outside my experience.”

“Okay.” She scooted to the edge of her submerged seat. “Say Wendy at Wacka Do donates a haircut and she usually charges thirty-eight dollars. You’d make a sheet that says Haircut at Wacka Do’s, value thirty-eight dollars. And since it’s a service and not, say, a pretty gift basket that visually pops to catch a potential bidder’s attention, you might want to add a photo of Wendy doing a haircut, or a styled wig on a wig stand. You with me so far?”

“Yep.”

She took another sip of her pop. “Regardless of the visual, the sheet needs a starting bid, so say three-fifty or around ten percent of its value, with fifty-cent or one-dollar increases. Now, if your brother were to donate one of his photographs, on the other hand, you’d have a much higher value amount because he’s well known in his field. That would make both the starting bid and the increments higher. See?”

“Yeah, I do.” And he liked the idea. No one else in town was doing anything like it. “So you just flop the stuff down on a table and you’re good to go?”

“God.” Her mouth quirked up. “You’re such a guy. The idea is to try to make the presentations as striking as possible to capture as much bidder interest as you can. You also need to give people enough time to both look at what’s offered and to bid again if someone trumps them. And have a clear end time. Then you’d need someone responsible to collect the money, but that’s pretty straightforward. The winner simply brings the sheet to the cashier and pays the final bid amount on it. And since it’s for a charity, you don’t have to deal with collecting sales tax—although I’d double-check that one in case Washington state differs in that respect.”

“That’s so cool. What else you got?”

She blinked those olive-green eyes at him. “’Scuse me?”

“You said ‘for starters.’ Does that mean you have even more ideas?”

“Oh, honey.” Stretching her arms out along the tub’s rim, she tipped her head back and let her torso float up to the surface again. Smooth skin stretched over toned thigh muscles and all that beautiful cleavage as her various curved parts cleared the roiling water. Raising her head again, she caught him dead to rights checking out the entire kick-ass package and sank back beneath the water. “I’ve got a million of ’em.”

“Excellent.” He grinned and settled in, feeling truly comfortable with her for perhaps the first time since they’d met. Hell, she had pointed it out herself; he was a guy. When guys were presented with tits and gorgeous legs, they looked. They sure as hell didn’t apologize for it. “Let’s hear ’em.”

“Was the community center space donated?”

“Yeah. We had to put down a damage deposit, but we got it all back. Well, except for the cost of replacing some broken glasses.”

She grinned at him. “Yes, I was having my tray refilled when that happened. Did you solicit the food and the paper goods?”

“Huh?” That straightened him up. “No. We got a rebate from the pancake manufacturer for fund-raising, but it never occurred to us to ask The General Store to donate it.”

“Next year make a list of everything it takes to put on the fund-raiser, then try to get as much of it donated as possible. I’m guessing your boys are from places other than just here, right?”

He nodded. “We don’t actually have any kids from Razor Bay—they’re mostly from the Silverdale or Bremerton areas. But some come from as far away as Seattle or Olympia.”

“From what you’ve said about some of the boys’ home lives, parental involvement might be far different from the families I’ve worked with. But if any of the parents do actively engage in their kid’s recovery—especially if they live in the nearby areas since the regional aspect works best—get them to hit up their local grocers, printers, party stores—anyplace that might contribute something you’d otherwise have to buy. The idea is to funnel as much profit back into the program as possible, right?”

“Absolutely.” The timer for the jets clicked off, but for once his attention didn’t go to her suddenly much more visible body. He gave her a puzzled look. “How do you know so much about this?”

“I’ve had a bazillion temporary jobs, and one of them was taking over an auction coordinator position for a private school when the one they had was put on bed rest during the final trimester of her pregnancy.”

“And you just—what?—knew what to do?”

“No.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Far from it. I didn’t have the first notion how an auction was run. Luckily for me, several of the parents who’d spent their PIP hours working on the auction did, and they taught me.”

“What the hell are PIP hours?”

“Oh, sorry. It stands for Parent Involvement Program. Most private schools designate a given number of hours parents are expected to volunteer at their kids’ school.” She stood up and water cascaded down her. “Hand me that towel, will you?”

Sweet Mother Mary.
His good intentions went up in smoke, but screw it—he claimed the guy defense again. Fumbling for the towel folded near his feet, he handed it over, then simply stared as she patted herself dry. He’d assumed she had on a bikini, which until tonight he’d pretty much considered the gold standard of sexy beachwear.

The one-piece suit that molded faithfully in all the right places was hands-down sexier. The band beneath the black-and-white bra part tied around her neck and behind her back like a bikini top, but was attached to a solid black body that was cut in toward her waist, low on her back and high on her thighs. And its wet spandex clung to every luscious inch it covered.

“Hooyah,” he breathed when she turned three-quarters away from him, propped a foot on the edge of the tub and bent to dry her lower leg. He had to physically restrain himself from reaching out to stroke the sweet, firm curve of her ass. He cleared his throat and sternly recalled the topic they’d been discussing before her rise like Venus from a fucking shell had blown it from his mind. “Why didn’t one of those parents just take over?”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “You’re a logical thinker, aren’t you? And hiring someone familiar with the program would make sense...if even one of them had been in the market for a short-term job that was about to transition from part-time to ten-hour days.”

That got his mind back in the game. “I thought you said it wasn’t that difficult!”

“The scenario I propose for Cedar Village isn’t. But the kind of auction I did for the school was held in an Atlanta hotel, featured a sit-down meal and included enough items to fill a ballroom. It also employed an auctioneer at a live auction for the high ticket items. That’s a much more time-consuming endeavor.”

She climbed from the tub and balanced gracefully on one foot while raising the other to towel it dry. Upon finishing both feet, she turned, crossed her arms beneath her breasts and pinned him squarely in her sights. “So, have I demonstrated enough experience to volunteer at the Village?”

Luckily for him, it was dim out here, so the blood he felt surging up his throat and onto his face likely didn’t show. He’d inferred that she might have nothing the home could use yesterday—or that the boys would make mincemeat of her, because he’d been rattled by the microsecond spent all but wrapped around her when he’d stepped in to help with the leaning tower of glasses. Rattled—and wanting nothing more than to avoid running into her at the one place he felt most like himself.

But he’d known when she’d made Brandon squirm with nothing more than a look that she could hold her own with the Cedar Village boys. “Yes,” he said honestly. “And then some. Do you want a regular schedule—” which he’d prefer so he could arrange, for both their sakes, to be elsewhere “—or—”

“I’d rather come when I can, if that works for you. My hours at the inn change week to week and sometimes even day to day.”

“Sure.” He pulled out his wallet again and searched through it for a Village card. Locating the one he knew was in there somewhere, he pulled it out and extended it to Harper. “Sorry this’s so battered, but the director Mary-Margaret’s name and number are on it. She’s the one to talk to, but I’ll let her know about our conversation on Thursday, which will be the next time I’ll be there, so she’ll know who she’s talking to when she gets your call.”

“Thanks, Max.” She pulled a vivid red cover-up over her suit and slid the card in its pocket, then gathered her room card and the still half-full can of pop from the little shelf. “I’ll give her a call on Friday.”

“Are you headed back to your place?”

She nodded. “Yeah. It’s been a busy day—I’m going to call it a night.” She looked him over. “You have to be pretty whipped yourself. You slaved over a hot stove and rode herd over teenage boys for a good part of yesterday, and have obviously worked today.” She indicated his department uniform and holstered gun.

He shrugged. “What can I say—I’m tough.” One hand hovering just above the small of her back, he gave her an
after you
sweep of his free fingers. “Come on. I’ll see you to your place, then I’m gonna head home, myself. I’ve got a beer calling my name.”