The Way You Look Tonight (5 page)

He took a seat at the kitchen counter and finally noticed the big stainless-steel bowls drying by the sink. "What are those for?"

"Chocolate." She smiled at him, a beautiful smile that did nearly as many strange things to his insides as her curves did. "I make truffles for a living."

"You and your grandmother were always making chocolate," he remembered, hating the way the light in her eyes dulled when he brought up her grandparents.

"It was her favorite hobby. Mine, too," she said with a small smile as she clearly worked to push away her grief. She ran her fingertips over the homemade wood cover on the old recipe book. "My grandfather made this for my grandmother by hand and even etched in their initials in this heart on the front. I’ve been meaning to take it somewhere to see if I can get this crack fixed, but I haven’t wanted to actually let it out of my sight for long enough to let anyone touch it." She opened the book and showed him a truffle recipe in her grandmother’s handwriting. "After my grandparents passed away, I decided to move here and turn her dream into a reality for both of us. Every day as I’m making my truffles, I think about the daily ritual we had of eating one perfect piece of homemade chocolate." Her eyes grew even softer. "That initial taste of it on my tongue. That slow melt that felt like it was awakening my entire body. The decadent, sumptuous taste that lingered."

Just hearing Brooke talk about eating chocolate was the most sensual experience of his life. And as she turned to pull eggs out of the fridge and flour from a nearby cupboard to make the pasta she’d promised him a short while earlier, Rafe had to work like crazy to get his body and brain to obey his order to back the hell off of wanting her.

"What—" He had to clear the lust from his throat. "What were you doing before and where?"

"Human resources in Boston."

He thought about that for a second and decided that, while human resources should have fit with Brooke’s naturally cheerful personality, he couldn’t see her in an office building wearing a tailored suit. Her laughter would have been stifled by four walls and forced air.

"You can only imagine how thrilled my parents were when I decided to chuck in my climb up the corporate ladder for truffles. Evidently they didn’t send me to an expensive college to make candy for a living," she said with a laugh before leaning forward as if she had a secret to share. "They don’t even like chocolate. Can you believe it?"

All he had to do was lean in a couple of inches, and he could have kissed her. Just pressed his lips to hers to see if she tasted as good as she looked.

"That’s crazy," he said, but he wasn’t talking about her parents not eating carbs. No, he was reminding himself that kissing the incredibly sweet girl next door was nuts.

"You like it, don’t you?" Her voice now held a husky tone that reverberated right to his groin.

Idiot that he was, he couldn’t make himself look away from her big green eyes. "Like what?"

As her full lips parted again, he nearly lost hold of his control when she said, "Chocolate."

Knowing he’d give away his lust if he spoke again, he nodded instead.

Unfortunately, when she smiled at him, it did just what the huskiness in her voice had. "Good. Then maybe you can be my taste tester this summer for the new recipes I’m working on."

Rafe could easily picture Brooke holding out a chocolate-covered fingertip for him to taste. Of course, in his vision she also happened to be completely naked. His mouth watered, his groin hardened further, and he had to pick up his beer and down it in one long gulp before he could answer her.

"I don’t know anything about chocolate."

"Actually, it’s better if you
don’t
. There’s nothing worse than an overeducated palate trying to dissect everything. I don’t care about prestige or awards. All I care about is bringing people pleasure."

Just the word
pleasure
from her gorgeous mouth had him as turned on as he could ever remember being. Again it struck him that any other woman would have been doing this to arouse him on purpose. But Brooke was simply beginning to roll her pasta dough through the pasta machine, looking bright and pretty in her grandparents’ kitchen.

What the hell was wrong with him, thinking there had been anything she’d said or done so far tonight that was meant to turn him on? All this time he’d thought he was better than those rich assholes he investigated who thought with their dicks and screwed anything they could get their hands on. But he couldn’t even be friends with a pretty girl without mentally stripping her naked.

"In fact," she said, "the best way to do a taste test is blindfolded." Giving him a playful glance, she reached into a kitchen drawer and held up a clean kitchen towel. "This would probably work if you’re game to try a few of my new chocolate recipes later tonight."

Rafe immediately shook his head. "I’m happy to try out your new recipes, but I won’t wear a blindfold."

"Oh," she said as she carefully put the towel back into the drawer. "Okay."

How could he explain to her that he didn’t trust anyone enough anymore to willingly let them take away one of his senses? Figuring it was best to change the subject at this point, he said, "Last I knew, you were an eight-year-old who swam like a fish." Somehow he needed to remember to look at her as that little girl, rather than the gorgeous woman she’d become.

"And you were a fourteen-year-old boy who got into more trouble than anyone else." He was glad to see her smile come back so quickly. "I’ll bet you still do."

Her question should have been light, but the idea of getting into trouble with her had his body heating back up in all the places he’d been trying to force to cool down.

Focus.
That’s what being this close to Brooke was going to be about. Holding focus on anything except how pretty she was, how soft her skin looked, how sweet her mouth would taste, how surprisingly sensual it was watching her manipulate the pasta with her bare hands...

What the hell had they been talking about? Oh yeah, what they’d been up to during the past eighteen years. Rather than answering her question about trouble, while ignoring the slight burn from the scar across his ribs that proved he hadn’t yet learned how to walk away from it, he asked, "Where do you sell your chocolates? Do you have a store in town?"

She shook her head. "I supply boxes to local grocery and gift stores. But," she added with a smile that held obvious pride and excitement, "I just took on a new partner who will be opening a retail store in Seattle."

Rafe knew better than to stick his nose into someone else’s personal life or business affairs unless they’d hired him to do just that—no one wanted advice they hadn’t asked for—but Brooke was a friend. And he couldn’t stand the thought of her being taken advantage of.

"Congratulations. What kind of things is your partner taking care of?"

"All the financial stuff," she said, as if it were no big deal that she’d turned her money over to someone else’s care. "Distribution channels. Packaging. Running the retail store."

"You trust her that much?"

"Him," she clarified, before adding, "And yes, he was a colleague of my father’s at Harvard, and has a great reputation in the food retail world. Why wouldn’t I trust him?"

Rafe could think of a hundred possible reasons, but before he could start laying them out one by one, she began to slide the spaghetti strands into a pot of water she’d put on to boil and asked, "Now that you’ve heard my long and winding story, tell me all about yours."

"I run a private investigation agency."

"I should have guessed that," she said with a wide smile. "Talk about the perfect job for you."

"What makes you think it’s perfect for me?"

She gave him a strange look, as though she couldn’t believe he was asking her that. "Whenever we played hide-and-seek, you always won, because you were able to put together clues no one else could."

"That’s just a kids game, Brooke. And you were always giggling and giving yourself away."

Her laughter—all grown up now and layered with sensuality he couldn’t manage to miss—washed over him. "You haven’t forgotten your nickname, have you?"

"No, but I was hoping you had."

"Not a chance,
Tracker."

He groaned. "Remind me to strangle Mia the next time I see her for ever coming up with that."

"I’m sure no one outside of your family and mine knew it," she assured him, "although no one has ever forgotten the way you found that scared little boy in the mountains."

His parents had just told them they were losing the lake house. Rafe had escaped to the mountains to try to run off the painful thought of losing the one place that truly felt like home to him. He’d found the local search and rescue crew trying to locate a missing boy whose family was on vacation at the lake. As far as they knew, the kid had been chasing after his dog when he left their rental house. The dog came back home, but the boy didn’t. The crew had been afraid that the skinny five-year-old wouldn’t make it through the night in his T-shirt and shorts. Young enough to run, and to keep running after as many dead ends as he needed to, Rafe had used his tracking skills to locate the little boy. Forty-five minutes later, he’d found the kid shivering with dried tear tracks on his cheeks.

"Being a P.I. in Seattle seems like the grown-up version of what you always used to do."

Rafe had spent his life watching people ignore every clue around them. But Brooke, it seemed, didn’t miss a single one. Which also meant it was unlikely that she’d missed his clear attraction to her.

"Although I do have one question for you." He braced himself for her to say all the usual things people did, such as asking him for exciting stories that he hadn’t felt like telling for a long time. "Can you teach me to pick a lock, too?"

Feeling like it would be corrupting her to teach her something like that, he said, "You don’t need to know how to do that, Brooke."

Strangely, she looked a little disappointed by his answer, but instead of pushing him on it, she asked, "How long do you think you’ll be able to be away from your office?"

"A few weeks. I’ve got a half-dozen great employees who will be running the place for me while I’m here."

She gave him an expectant look, as if she was waiting for him to tell her more about his P.I. career, but Rafe didn’t feel like talking about it. He hadn’t told anyone about his discontent with his career. Not his employees. Not his friends. Not even his family. He’d simply continued doing his job, even though he could no longer remember why he’d ever wanted to do it in the first place.

Fortunately, instead of asking him questions he didn’t want to answer about why he hadn’t gushed about his job, she said, "I was so surprised when your family sold the house. I missed you all so much."

It suddenly hit him that she must not know what had happened. "That winter after our final summer here, my father lost his job. He couldn’t find another job that paid anywhere close to what he’d been making."

He didn’t tell her the bank had actually taken the house...and that the stress of barely being able to keep them afloat on savings and then loans from friends had turned his father completely gray.

"I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it wasn’t too long until things turned around for your family."

"Eventually Dad got another job." At lower pay for a boss he didn’t see eye to eye with. "And Ian started working while he was in college, which helped." His oldest brother had walked away from the chance to play pro football to help out their family, but Ian had done it without a word of complaint.

Brooke didn’t seem surprised to hear it. "Ian was so much older, but he always made sure that the bigger kids on the beach weren’t messing with me and Mia."

That was his oldest brother to a T. He took care of the people he loved—no matter the cost to himself.

"What is he doing now?"

"Ian has pretty much singlehandedly taken over the business world with his venture capital fund. He’s brilliant at picking which businesses to get behind.”

“Is he in Seattle, too?”

“No, he’s living in London right now."

"I so wish I hadn’t fallen out of touch with all of you. What about everyone else?"

"Mom and Dad retired a ways back." Again, because Ian had pretty much forced them to. Not that they minded working in the garden and going out sailing with the club on one of Dylan’s boats.

"Are they still blissfully in love?"

From the way she asked the question, Rafe could guess that Brooke was a believer. Not only that love was possible...but that it could also last a lifetime. What would she think if he told her stories from his job about men and women who promised each other forever, and then split at the first sign of trouble?

Still, for all of his cynicism, Rafe had to admit, "They are."

She looked extremely pleased to hear it. "I can still remember the way they would walk down the beach holding hands and kiss when they thought no one was looking. And how they would sneak off to be alone while you guys were busy roasting marshmallows over the campfire. It was so romantic."

"What was romantic to you was gross to their own kids," he informed her, but he didn’t disguise the affection in his voice when he spoke about his parents.

She laughed at that, but said, "I never saw my parents kiss. The only time they ever seemed truly passionate around each other was when they were debating legal cases or supply-and-demand curves. I don’t think I would have minded seeing a little romance now and again. Speaking of romance," she said, before pausing for a moment in which her cheeks flushed slightly, "what about you and your siblings?" Her smile seemed a little too bright as she asked, "Are any of you married? Kids?"

"Well, Ian was married for a short while, but right now we’re all wild and free."

"Wild?"
She almost seemed to choke on the word.

"Mia has half the men in Seattle wrapped around her little finger, and she doesn’t give a damn about any of them."