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She took a deep breath and walked around the front of the house on a beautiful black flagstone pathway that curved around and then spilled into a huge patio, of the same stone, that ran the entire length of the house. The front was even more impressive than the back. Outside living was obviously the priority here, a wide-timbered staircase led to a multitiered deck. On the first tier was a hot tub, on the second, lounge chairs with thick, colorful, yellow-striped cushions. Outside the French-paned doors leading into the house were a stainless-steel barbecue, a bright yellow umbrella table and matching cushioned chairs. Buckets of flowers were everywhere.
Then she spotted a lone pink bunny, and it seemed sadly out of place among all the sophisticated deck furnishings.
She turned away from the house, shaded her eyes against the brilliance of the sun glinting off the water, and scanned the yard.
A movement in the deep shadows in the farthest corner of the green grass caught her eye and stopped her heart.
Him.
Clint McPherson in the flesh.
Apparently he had not heard her arrival. He was in shorts, crouched over one of the flower beds, a spade in one hand, a bedding plant in the other.
If part of her had hoped that age had been cruel to him, that part of her was thwarted. Even from here she could see the power of his build, the grace and ease of his movement. He was wearing crisp khaki shorts and a navy-blue sports shirt. She could see the muscular line of his legs, the broad sweep of his shoulders, the muscles in his forearms leap and cord with each minute movement.
His hair was longer than she ever remembered it being, touching the collar of his short-sleeved shirt.
But she remembered that hair, thick and wavy, its color a burnished bronze that turned to spun gold in the sun.
The hair had always made her think of him as a throwback to some ancient and fierce Scottish warrior. For even in his business attire—knife-creased pants; white, starched shirt; conservative tie; black, polished shoes—even then, she had always seen that he was not what the rest of them were.
It was not just that he was not flabby or soft; it was that, in the most subtle of ways, he was not completely civilized. There was a look in his eyes of a man who had seen things, felt things, been at the center of things, that were hard and crude, perhaps even cruel. He had carried himself, back then, with the unconscious grace of a predator, alert, powerful, guarded.
He straightened suddenly, and she knew that part of him was unchanged—his instinct had warned him he was no longer alone. He stood and swung around, and Brandy saw the familiar grace and power in every line of his magnificent body.
Her breath caught in her throat and her foolish heart beat too fast.
His face was a study in unrelenting masculine angles. He had a strong nose, pronounced cheekbones; the line of his jawbone was straight and true. His chin, shadowed faintly with whiskers that were bronze tipped, hinted at a cleft. His lips were firm and sensuous.
His eyes were the tawny gold of a lion’s eyes, and every bit as watchful, every bit as ready, as they swept his property now.
She sensed two things immediately.
Her father had been right. Something was wrong. Despite the look of ordered perfection around the lake house, the light that had always flared in those eyes, brilliant and fierce, had an element in it she did not understand. It was as if ice and fire battled within him, and ice was winning.
The second thing she sensed and could not ignore was that her skin was tingling treacherously. She knew that she had wasted her time chanting her mantra all the way here. She loved Clint McPherson in some fierce and primal way she was not sure she could ever tame.
Nonsense, she told herself. Utter hogwash.
She drew in a deep breath and reprimanded herself firmly for her moment of weakness. She had been taming the untamable her whole life!
She was here on assignment for her father. Her assignment was to bring back the Clint they knew. But regarding him now, across the space of his well-manicured yard, she wondered if anyone had ever known him—or ever would.
But she had a third realization. She was also on assignment for herself.
Get over it, once and for all. It was probably this silly infatuation with Clint that was preventing her from jumping at Jason’s proposal.
She would lay her childish heartbreaks and hopes to rest. She would see Clint McPherson through the realistic eyes of a mature woman and tame that thing inside of her that wanted him.
Her exact words on her nineteenth birthday, if she recalled, and of course she did, in every excruciating and humiliating detail.
He looked at her for a long time, his expression unreadable, but certainly in no way welcoming. There was an impenetrable shield in his eyes, and his lips remained in a firm line. He folded his arms over the expanse of his chest, formidable, the lines of his face and body totally uninviting. Yet for all the rugged barriers set up by his body language, the unyielding expression on his face, the question that crowded her mind was How could a man approaching forty look so damned good?
Well, all you had to do was look at the men in Hollywood: Harrison, Tom, the other Clint. Some men aged well, like wine, and he was one of them.
Unfortunately.
She forced herself to move forward. She was good at this—looking over the side of a cliff or off the edge of the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper—and grinning with reckless abandon, as if nothing mattered to her, as if she knew no fear.
She strode toward him. “Hey,” she said. “Sobersides! Long time, no see.”
He inclined his head toward her, acknowledgment; his eyes narrowed, no smile. Not that she had expected one. He hated being called Sober-sides almost as much as she hated being called Brandgwen.
Before they could really take up their battle stations, the shrubs parted beside him and a gurgle emerged, followed by a baby, on all fours, her face dirty, her diaper swollen.
Brandy slowed her advance, entranced. Thirteen months. She knew the baby’s age, exactly.
Clint’s focus had shifted to his baby, too. That hard light in his eyes and the grim lines of his face softened, and for the briefest moment she caught sight of a vulnerability so immense it shook her to her core. But his face closed again, almost instantly, and she looked quickly away, almost terrified by the fact she might have glimpsed tenderness in him.
It seemed to be a good strategy, given the insanely wild beating of her heart. Brandy got down on her knees before his daughter.
The child was beautiful, her eyes the same tawny color as his, her shoulder-length hair a riot of messy red curls, freckles spattered across her fair skin. She put her thumb in her mouth and drew enthusiastically on it, her eyes narrowed.
Brandy glanced from the father to the daughter.
They were eyeing her with identical expressions of wariness, as if an enemy had trespassed the sanctuary of the clan camp.
“Brandgwen.”
She winced when he said her name, and at first he thought it was the gravel in his voice, but then he remembered she hated that form of her name. She preferred Brandy. Well, that was okay. He preferred almost anything to Sober-sides. A simple thing—the exchange of greetings—and yet already he could feel the friction between them.
He had not seen her for a long time, and he felt the shock of her presence, the subtle electricity of her. Of course, he had seen her in photographs, more recently in newspapers and magazines that could not seem to get enough of the oldest and youngest King girls. Just last month, he had caught a glimpse of her on the evening news after she had performed another outrageous stunt.
The cameras had caught the wild tangle of her hair, the devil-may-care quality of her grin, the jauntiness of her wave.
But had missed—as every photo and film sequence seemed to miss—her astounding essence.
Brandy King was not a pretty girl. Her features were too strong, much like her father’s, and the cameras had an almost cruel capacity to capture her lack of traditional beauty. Photographed, she always managed to look intensely ordinary, a plain Jane with an attitude. She also played down her absolutely stunning curves by dressing like a boy.
Photographs, even interviews on television, always totally failed to capture her fire, that mysterious something that was extraordinarily sensual and compelling.
Up close and personal, it was a different story. Her eyes, as sapphire as that lake when it changed color at dawn, glittered with that inner spark, an unsettling combination of mischief and passion. Her hair was dark and thick and shiny. It didn’t look as if she had run a comb through it anytime today, and when she saw him looking at it, she registered his look as disapproval, and tossed her hair with the spirited defiance of a wild horse tossing her mane. That grin was reckless and devil-may-care and totally disarming.
The simple truth was that Brandgwen King meant trouble.
She always had.
Yet when her father, Jake, had called and asked if she could stay with Clint and Becky at the lake for a little while, how could he refuse?
Jake was more than a business associate, more than his boss. He was Clint’s friend, his mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father. Jake had once seen something in a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks and had believed in that something until it had come true.
Jake had offered no explanation for the imminent arrival of his eldest daughter, but Clint had assumed Brandy’s penchant for adventure mixed with mischief had left her in some kind of mess and that she needed to hide out until it blew over.
Well, there was no hideout quite like this one.
He’d been hiding successfully from the pain in his life for over a year and planned to keep on doing so.
He felt a small hand on his leg, and his daughter pulled herself to standing, swung behind his leg and then peeped out at Brandy with caution and reserve. Her diaper drooped nearly to her knees and her face showed telltale signs she had been sampling the dirt—again.
That feeling of inadequacy swept over him. He was a man accustomed to being in charge, but being entrusted with the care of his infant daughter had thrown him into an entirely different arena. He was like a man in a foreign land, lost, uncertain of which direction to take, having no grasp for the new language of his new world. He was fighting, as was his instinct, not to let it show that with his tiny daughter he came face-to-face with his own weaknesses and uncertainties every day.
But he was a disciplined man, and so he was careful not to let any of this slip onto his features. Brandy had a gift for sniffing out weakness and exploiting it. On her nineteenth birthday, just a little bit tipsy, hadn’t she seen his greatest weakness?
“So, you’re a shy one, are you?” Brandy said, still at Becky’s level, crouched easily on her haunches, her voice a rich imitation of a brogue.
The baby shrank even farther behind his knee.
Without warning, Brandy grabbed his other knee, ducked behind it, and peeped out at his daughter.
He felt shocked by her touch, the fire in her fingertips where they bit into the flesh below his knee. There was no mistaking, even from this brief encounter, that the oldest of the Misses King was not a child anymore.
And she had been a most dangerous child. How much more dangerous would she be as a full-grown, full-blooded woman?
He gazed down at her, the thick, rippling richness of the dark hair cascading over slender shoulders, the swell of her breasts under the thin fabric of a black tank top held up on the whim of two tiny little straps. She was wearing low-slung sweatpants that rode a little too low with her crouched like that and that clung to the delectable curves of her athletic legs.
She stuck out her tongue at his daughter, crossed her eyes.
Becky tried valiantly to make herself invisible, but not before he caught a ghost of a smile tickle her lips.
“Excuse me,” he said, inserting enough ice to sink the Titanic into his voice. “Would you mind letting go of my leg?”
“Becky,” Brandy said sternly, “you heard the man. Let go of your father’s leg.”
His little girl’s eyes went very round and she let go instantly.
“I meant you!” He scooped up Becky, and she buried her face in his chest.
“Oh,” Brandy said innocently, but thankfully, she unhanded his leg, rose easily, and stuck out her hand. Her eyes danced with amusement.
“Of course you meant me, Sober-sides. How are you?”
He shifted the minuscule weight of the baby from the crook of his right arm to his left and took Brandy’s proffered hand with a certain reluctance. He felt the heat and unexpected strength of her grasp, and let it go instantly.
“Fine, thank you,” he said, his tone clipped.
“A conversationalist as always,” she said. “Becky, how on earth are you learning to talk around this man of many words?’
How had she managed to hit such a sensitive spot after only seconds of being here? Was his daughter supposed to be talking more than she was? At just over a year, she had mastered da-da and poo-poo. That was it. The whole vocabulary.
“I thought I’d put you in the cottage,” he said abruptly. “It’s private.”
The thought of having her under the very same roof was a little more than he could handle.
Aware that the diaper was definitely a little far gone, Clint led the way across the clearing and down a small stone path with as much dignity as he could given that something warm and wet was leaking onto his arm. At the end of the path was a small guest cottage.
“It’s adorable,” Brandy said with genuine enthusiasm, as if she didn’t have an upscale apartment in New York and a house in Bel Air, as if she hadn’t stayed in palaces and five-star hotels all over the world. “Does it come with seven little men? And a prince?”
Seven men and a prince. He’d known she had become a dangerous woman.
“No,” he said tersely. “No men, no prince, no maids, no cook, no dishwasher, not a single amenity that you are used to.”
His voice crackled with unfriendliness.
Which, naturally, Brandy did not hear or chose not to hear.
“You have no idea what I’m used to,” she said cheerfully. “I slept with bugs as big as my fist in Brazil.”
“I remember you used to be scared of bugs,” he said, then could have kicked himself at the memory he had just conjured. Brandy, fourteen, in a much-too-skimpy bathing suit by the pool, standing on one of the deck chairs, pointing at some huge black insect that had crawled out of the filtration system.
He’d done the gentlemanly thing, dispatched the bug. When it had looked like she planned to leap into his arms in gratitude, he’d told her, coldly, her bathing suit was inappropriate.
But the part he remembered the most clearly was not the bathing suit or the bug. It was her saying softly, “Don’t tell anyone I was scared. Please.”
From that moment on, it was as though he knew a secret about her, a secret that made the heart he wasn’t supposed to have ache every time she did one more foolhardy or death-defying stunt.
Had she really conquered that long-ago fear of bugs? He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know one single thing about her.
Except what her lips tasted like.
“You must be very tired,” he said, abruptly, damning her silently for how little had changed between them. “You’ve come a long way today.”
“I’m never tired,” Brandy said.
Of course not. She was a woman who would have you believe she could handle seven men and a prince and anything else life threw at her, including bugs as big as her fist. Only, looking at her, he saw something flicker in her eyes, and wondered how much of it was all a front. He cut off that line of thought before it made her even more dangerous than she already was—which was plenty dangerous.
“Did you want me to bring your things from the car?”
She tossed him the keys, her expectation of being waited on as unconscious to her as breathing. She went up the cottage steps two at a time and burst in. Somehow he didn’t want to see her gushing over the cuteness of the accommodations. Still hefting the soggy Becky on his arm, he went up to the parking area behind the house.
A Ferrari, no less, and crammed floor to roof with her things as if she were thinking of staying for a long, long while. He counted three full-size suitcases and two overnight bags. There were several dresses hung in bags. There was a tennis racket, a riding helmet and a new blow-up dinghy that hadn’t been taken out of the box.
He didn’t have a tennis court or horses. There was no place, that he was aware of, within a hundred miles where a woman could wear dresses like that. The lake water wouldn’t be warm enough for weeks yet to risk capsizing her floating device in it.
Resigned, he set the baby on her padded rear and kept one eye on whether or not she was trying to ingest rocks while he began unloading Brandy’s vehicle.
“She’ll be bored in ten minutes,” he reassured himself as the pile of her belongings became a small mountain on the ground beside him.
So, she’d get bored, and then she would leave.
