The Majors' Holiday Hideaway

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Because I’m not the boss of plants. Let Daddy brew some coffee.

Nine o’clock.

He’d forgotten about sleeping in. He hadn’t known his body was still capable of it—but it sure was. He rolled onto his back and ruffled the dog’s ear. It was the first silver lining of this week of enforced bachelorhood: sleeping late. He wouldn’t set an alarm for a week. He’d take the dog back to the neighbors’ house today and see if he slept later than nine tomorrow.

The neighbors’ house. India. Beautiful, gray-eyed India.

An awareness traveled over his skin, crossing his chest, his stomach, lower. He could call it lust, but it wasn’t anything as base as simply getting hard. It was a sense of electric anticipation, a sizzle of energy washing over all of his skin, waking up every inch of his body—his fingertips, his eyelids, his scalp. It was as if the image of her in his mind’s eye had all his senses reaching out, all the cells in his body searching for her.

He caught his breath at the foreign sensation. Too electric. Too aware. He sat up and pushed off the sheets.

The dog jumped off the bed and faced him, tail wagging in excitement.

“Let’s just call it lust, okay?”

Aiden could handle that. That, he remembered how to do. He’d taken a woman he’d known for a while to Dallas for a weekend...when? Months ago. She liked to say they were friends with benefits, but he’d still insisted on paying for the tickets to the Aerosmith concert. The dinner. The hotel room. Lust was basic—he could definitely handle that.

The dog barked once in approval. Aiden had sat up, so the dog wanted him to stand up. “I hear you, boy. Let’s get you fed and walked, and I’ll take you to meet your new house sitter.”

If anticipation prickled down his spine, touching each and every vertebra, it was simply lust.

He could handle it.

* * *

India was beside herself with anticipation.

She was on alert, ears tuned with almost painful eagerness to any sound in the driveway, until, at last, she heard the low sound of an engine, the slam of a door. Wait for it...

When she heard the metallic sound of a tailgate being lowered, she hit the button to open the garage door. Why make the man walk up the bricked path to knock on the formal front door? He was parked by the garage, and she was already certain he was going to want to test her fuse box. The question was, would she test her courage and flirt her way to a little more? A lot more? Would she? Could she?

The garage-door opener turned a heavy chain. The door lifted slowly, its new wheels rolling smoothly in their tracks. India hastily gave her hair one last fluff and tried to strike just the right pose: casual, yet sexy. She was wearing jeans, yet her hoop earrings were sized to be stylish, not subtle.

I can do this. Why not? Consenting adults, safe sex. I’ll never see him again after a week. No embarrassing scenes with a former lover. No awkward evenings avoiding each other at an embassy dinner. No running into him at a café as he dated the next woman. A perfect holiday fling, if Nicholas was willing and able.

The rising door revealed the toes of cowboy boots, then denim that bunched a little at the ankles. More denim—up, up, revealing that hot body inch by inch. The man had certainly looked able yesterday.

I can’t do this. Wasn’t this how porn movies started? The electrician came over and the lonely housewife greeted him at the door, her hair fluffed up and her lip gloss on? Oh, dear God, I’m imitating a porn movie. I can’t do a porn movie.

India held her breath. Flirting. She was just going to flirt a little, see where it went. That, she could handle.

As the garage door rose, the denim got a little wider at the waist. The shirt covered a little bit of a paunch...

Wait. No.

The rising door revealed narrow shoulders, a weathered face and a white beard. A friendly smile. “Mornin’, ma’am. I’m Nicholas Harmon. Pleased to meet you.”

“Nicholas Harmon,” she echoed, her voice a little high-pitched as arousal and disappointment stretched her nerves to the limit. “Of course. Nice to meet you, too.”

“Let’s see what’s going on in the house.”

Nothing.

Glumly, she followed him into the kitchen after he pulled a toolbox out of his truck bed. It was a good thing she hadn’t been trying to recreate a porn movie; she would have given the man a heart attack if she’d been standing there in lingerie.

Lingerie. Good one. She didn’t own any lingerie. She wore skin-tone bras with lightly padded cups to ensure her nipples never showed through the white business shirt of her uniform.

The memory of a lacy, teal bra sent a little lick of anger through her system, shaking her out of her glum state.

Nicholas stuck some kind of metal probe into the outlets, informed her they were dead—yes, I’m well aware of that—then started unscrewing outlets.

India leaned against the marble kitchen island and read Helen’s note again. A landscaper was coming two days from now to plant a pair of cypress trees, one on either side of the front door. That couldn’t be her man; hers had been working on bookcases. The same day, a shower door was going to be installed in the hallway bathroom—allow three hours. A gutter hadn’t been installed correctly on the west side of the house. They were coming to reinstall it three days from now. Helen had written that India didn’t need to be home for that one.

India ran down the list, frowning. There was no mention of bookcases, no trim carpenter scheduled to spend a day this week. Maybe he was supposed to have finished yesterday, before she’d arrived.

After Nicholas fixed the wiring and screwed the outlets back into the wall, she walked him out to the garage and gave her best nonchalant nod to the stack of planks. “When does the carpenter come out to finish the bookcases?”

“I don’t know anything about bookcases. There’s nothing in the plans about built-in bookcases.”

“But the carpenter was here. Yesterday.”

“He wasn’t one of my subcontractors.” His friendly face got a little less friendly. “I’ll be calling Tom and Helen about that. There aren’t supposed to be any workers in here that I didn’t hire. That’s very clear in the contract. I hire all the subcontractors.”

Great. Some house sitter she was, getting the general contractor all riled up so he’d call the homeowners on their honeymoon. “They must not be built-ins. That was my assumption. I’m sure Tom and Helen didn’t hire anyone to work on the house behind your back.” Then she pinned him down with her don’t-screw-with-me glare. She was, after all, an army officer. “Tom and Helen aren’t the kind of people who’d dishonor a contract with you, are they?”

He looked away first. “You’re right, you’re right. Well, I’ll be off now.”

“Thank you for coming out so quickly.”

Nicholas left.

India returned to the kitchen.

The silence settled in, broken only by the hum of the fridge as it cycled on. A kitchen clock with an art deco pendulum ticked steadily.

She sat on a bar stool at the cool marble countertop. Thank goodness she hadn’t laid out a little Bloody Mary station here. She’d considered putting out the Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce that she’d seen in the fridge, the tomato juice and the vodka, so the hot bookcase man could make his drink as hot as he liked it.

Oh! Do you like Bloody Marys? I was just going to make myself one when you drove up. Help yourself to whatever you want. In her mind, she sounded like a seductress. Show me what you like.

In reality, she wasn’t that kind of seductress, and she knew it. Fortunately, before Nicholas had arrived, she’d decided to put away the two glasses she’d placed rather obviously by an outlet. At least she hadn’t had to awkwardly offer a glass of tomato juice to a general contractor who resembled Santa more than a hot guy in a tool belt.

The clock kept ticking.

India had already unpacked. She’d showered. She’d eaten. She had time on her hands, time to be alone with her own thoughts. It was what she’d thought she wanted, but now it didn’t seem like much of a holiday. A holiday was supposed to be a change from one’s normal life, something different, something exciting to explore. But she was alone and, as she stared out the kitchen window at empty land, she realized that was nothing new.

Brussels was such a lively city, it was easy to feel like she was connected to people. She was surrounded by people. She ate at sidewalk cafés that jammed little chairs so close together, she sat shoulder to shoulder with people. She went to the market with a crowd of people. She crammed into the elevator with other people at NATO headquarters. She had a boss. She had subordinates. She even had a boyfriend.

But she’d been alone, just as alone as being the only human for miles, sitting in an empty four-bedroom house on acres of empty land. She had no one to share her thoughts with here, but she didn’t share her thoughts with strangers at sidewalk cafés, either. The only thing she talked about at the market was the price of endive. At work, she addressed her superior as “sir.” Her own team called her “ma’am.” Her boyfriend was awake while she slept, and now she knew that when he slept, it was with someone else.

Her stomach churned.

Was she so desperate for a human connection that she would have offered sex to a stranger this morning? A total stranger?

She dropped her face into her hands and wallowed in her own foolishness for a moment.

Foolish—but she’d been undeniably excited as she’d waited for him to arrive. So alive with hope for...something.

Whoever he was, he’d said he’d come back to finish before Christmas. He might not return until Christmas Eve day, when she’d be on her way to San Antonio and the house would be full of cold air and noxious fumes. Nicholas had said the workers wanted to get started by seven in the morning, so they could finish by lunch, what with it being Christmas Eve and all, ma’am.

The week stretched ahead of her, six more nights. Helen had warned her there would be nothing to do here, hadn’t she? It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours yet, and India was already feeling stifled in a house big enough to hold four of her apartments.

She supposed she could start perfecting her own Bloody Mary recipe. Sure. Drinking alone wouldn’t be depressing at all. She could add some salty tears in there for flavor. Ha ha ha.

Outdoors, the weather was about ten degrees warmer than Brussels, but the sunshine was ten times as bright. Texas was known for blistering hot summers, but that meant it had sunny winters, too. India checked the coat closet and found Helen’s red, double-breasted peacoat.

She might as well go out and be lonely in the sunshine.

Chapter Five (#u34d815ff-7d69-5859-b003-7b6aa34a7a08)

The only sign of civilization was a bridge.

The house sat on two acres, India knew from all the conversations she’d had with Helen this past year, but the view from the flagstone patio sloped away for miles beyond the property line. The undeveloped land really did look the way Texas looked in cowboy movies. The ground was mostly brown; the sparse trees were struggling to hold on to their green despite the approaching winter. India wasn’t certain what sagebrush actually was, but she assumed it was the random shrubs that dotted the landscape. There was a single tumbleweed, too, off in the distance, a slow-rolling ball of sticks that could have been a movie prop.

The open land under the blue sky would give a person a sense of serenity, perhaps, if that person wasn’t her. She was feeling small and lonely. Wilderness didn’t exactly chase that feeling away.

India headed for the bridge. The classic wood structure was only wide enough for people on foot, like her. It crossed a creek than ran down the length of the property. The golden-beige brick house stood somewhere beyond the other side of the bridge, she was certain. Helen’s note said the neighbors had taken the dog overnight to give India a chance to sleep off her jet lag. That meant the neighbors must be experienced with jet lag themselves—and must be very kind, as well. How lucky for Helen to live near people like that. How lucky for India last night.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t rare luck. Maybe neighbors like that were common here. There were a lot of ex-military people in an army town, and military folks understood travel, deployments, hardship tours. They understood how far a kindness like watching a pet could go. At home, India was the only soldier in her apartment building. If she lived here, she would be surrounded every time she went into town by military and former military—like the bookcase guy.