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“What if it doesn’t?” he asked to keep her there.
“Then you’ll be fined,” she said. She started back across the street. “Have a good night, Mr. Santini.”
“You too, Cass.”
Damn that woman. Underneath that prim and proper exterior lurked a temptress. A woman who liked to laugh and tease. He wanted to see more of that lady, he decided.
Cass held the phone against her shoulder and secured the leftover dinner in plastic wrap. Closing the refrigerator door with her hip as she started the dishes, she said, “I’ll stop by first thing in the morning, Dana.”
Cass thought about her friend and co-chair for the PTA bake sale. Dana’s son Jeff was in Andy’s class, but the two boys didn’t get along.
She hung up and stared out the window. Dusk had deepened into night, and the imitation gas street lamps were sparking to life. She liked this quiet neighborhood with its old houses.
Andy sat on the front porch doing his homework, and Cass quickly finished the dishes before joining her son. He had wanted to invite Mr. Santini to dinner, but Cass had put Andy off. Rafe’s influence over Andy was getting out of hand.
Rafe didn’t encourage Andy, but her son was hungry for masculine attention. The other day Andy had used a swearword that her son knew warranted strict punishment. She’d also seen her son leaving his shirt off and swaggering when he walked. The same way Mr. Santini did.
Rafe had included Andy in a softball game the previous Saturday. Her son was still talking about it and asking her every evening when he could join Little League football or baseball. Andy was obsessed with getting involved in sports and mimicking their new neighbor. Cass knew she had to put a stop to things and quickly.
The loud barking of Tundra announced the arrival of Rafe before he rounded the corner. Cass told herself not to look. That he was a temptation in those ridiculously skimpy running shorts, but her gaze was drawn to him all the same. If Rafe was an example of how men could look by running a few miles every night, men across America would be hitting the streets.
Cass pretended she didn’t notice Rafe. He waved to Andy as he jogged up the walk. Tundra breathed heavily at his feet. Andy set his pencil aside and gave her a pointed look. “Mommy?”
Andy never phrased out questions when just a word or a look would get the point across. She debated for a moment and decided that the husky wouldn’t hurt her son. She nodded slightly and Andy beamed with pleasure.
“Can I play with Tundra, Mr. Santini?”
“Sure,” Rafe sat down on the bottom step as Andy bounded off the porch.
Cass watched her son toss a stick to the dog, and soon the animal and boy were playing on the lawn. “Would you like something cool to drink?”
“Got any beer?” he asked. He smelled of sweat and male muskiness. Cass wanted to lean closer to him, to feel him surrounding her, to inhale the scent that was subtly Rafe. She wanted to taste the sweat that glistened on his arm and to experience this man in a way that she’d thought she’d forgotten.
“No. Iced tea would be better for you.” She couldn’t help the way she’d been raised, and drinking except at family celebrations and holidays was strictly forbidden.
“Not if it’s sugary.”
Always a comeback, she thought, enjoying the game as much as he did. “Like beer has any nutritional value.”
“What it lacks in nutrition it makes up for in taste.”
He had to be kidding, beer tasted like...well like beer, nothing else even came close to that taste. “My tea’s not sweet.”
“Than I’ll take you up on that offer.”
She fixed them both a glass of tea before returning. This would be a good time to ask him to stop including Andy in games. There were a few man-type things that she didn’t know how to handle, and this was one of them. How did you politely tell a man that he wasn’t the right type of influence on your son?
Quite honestly there were more than a few things she didn’t know about raising a son. Teaching Andy to color in the lines and to use the potty was easy compared to coaching him on ignoring bullies. She didn’t want Andy to grow up being afraid of other boys, but at the same time she wanted him to be someone who used his mind to settle arguments, not his fists.
“Thanks,” Rafe said as she sat down next to him on the step.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, trying to ignore the heat radiating from his body.
He took a long swallow of tea and then bounded to his feet. “Hey, Andy. Have you got a football around here?”
The boy shook his head. “Why?”
“Basketball is against the rules. I thought we could toss the pigskin around.”
“Mommy?”
“If Mr. Santini has a ball than I don’t object to your catching it,” she reluctantly agreed. Tossing a ball wasn’t the same as playing in a game, she reassured herself.
“As it happens, I do,” Rafe said, grinning at her.
“All right!” Andy dropped the stick he’d been tossing to the dog and followed Rafe across the street.
Santini had been in their lives for only a short time, but already he had a lot of influence over Andy. She watched her son staring up at Rafe and wondered how a man who spent most of his time with beautiful women and fast cars would react to blind hero worship.
She started to call Andy back, but Rafe was showing him how to hold the football. Cass watched her little boy come one day closer to manhood, and a part of her wanted to die. She’d carefully guarded Andy, but she had the feeling that soon he would throw off that protection.
Rafe helped Andy the way a father would help a son. Showing him things that only a man could. Cass felt convinced that Andy was becoming too attached to their neighbor. Her son was using Mr. Santini as fill-in father.
She couldn’t picture Rafe in the role of a dad. He treated Andy kindly, but sometimes he acted as if her son were an alien being. Having Andy underfoot had to be trying for a man like Rafe.
Cass watched them playing ball in the front yard and forgot that Rafe wasn’t the fatherly type. He seemed perfectly at ease with her son for perhaps the first time since they’d met. She couldn’t believe this was the same man who roared out of the neighborhood once a day in his Jaguar convertible.
Her heart ached as she watched them playing ball. She wanted the scene to be real. She needed a man to share her life and Andy’s. She knew that Rafe wasn’t that man but it was still hard to stop her heart from hoping.
She went inside to prepare a snack for Rafe and Andy, knowing they’d be hungry when the game wrapped up. There was something homey about preparing iced tea for two sweaty males, Cass thought with a smile. Tundra snoozed under the oak in the front yard and Cass felt content for the first time in years.
Three
Rafe tossed the football to Andy and watched the kid jump to catch the ball. The boy had the potential to be a dedicated athlete. The desire to succeed burned brightly in his eyes. He had the innate skill that few possessed and seemed to enjoy every sport that Rafe introduced to him. The grin on Andy’s face erased much of the apprehension Rafe usually felt when dealing with the boy.
Rafe hadn’t been around children for the majority of his life. In fact the last time he’d been with other kids was—he searched his memories—hell, not since he was a boy.
Kids were foreign entities that Rafe didn’t deal well with. They were crying, sticky little people that always talked loudly. But Andy Gambrel was different. Andy had a sense of maturity seldom found in one so young.
The other kids in the neighborhood were older than Andy, and Rafe had watched the boy playing alone over the last week. Something about the solitary way the boy had amused himself generated a sort of sympathy in Rafe. No child should be left to himself like that. Rafe never had been, and for some reason he didn’t want Cass’s son to be, either.
Andy tossed the ball back to him, and Rafe caught it one-handed. “Have you ever gone to a basketball game, Andy?”
“No, we’ve been down to the Bob Carr auditorium for plays and musicals though.” Andy scrunched his face in a look of pain. “Sometimes we see people going to the Magic games.”
“What show did you see?”
“A French play Les Misеrables,” Andy said, correctly pronouncing the French title. “It was okay for the first twenty minutes, but all that singing was boring. Mommy really liked it. She even cried.”
Rafe chuckled.
“I bet the Orena—the Orlando Arena—is great.”
The touch of envy in the boy’s voice was barely audible, but there. Rafe wondered if Cass realized how much her son wanted to go to a game. Probably not, or she would have taken him. She was a good and caring mother, even if she was a bit overprotective.
“Have you seen the Magic play?”
“Yeah,” Rafe said. “I have season tickets.”
“Oh,” the boy said, so softly and wistfully that Rafe bit back a grin. The kid wasn’t stupid and had an understanding of manipulation that would have made any father proud.
They tossed the ball back and forth a few more times. “You want to go to a game sometime?”
“Wow, I’d love to. But Mom would never let me go. She’s still ticked about the softball game last weekend.”
Cass had to loosen up. Her son was starting to develop into a man, and she was fighting him every step of the way. “What’s wrong with the softball game?”
“I wasn’t exactly honest about what we were doing,” Andy confessed.
“We’ll see if she wants to go with us,” Rafe suggested.
“You think she might want to?” Andy asked.
No, Rafe figured she wouldn’t want to go, but saying no to her son was going to be hard. “It can’t hurt to ask.”
They rejoined Cass who brought out more iced tea and freshly baked bran muffins. Cass reminded him of every ideal that American men had about a mother. She was kind, firm and caring. She baked, cleaned and was at home when Andy arrived from school.
At the same time she had a sexy little body that made Rafe think of long hours spent in bed. That was why he kept coming back. Why he put up with her lectures on using correct grammar and not cussing. She was Rafe’s ideal of the perfect woman, which is why he would never allow himself to have a relationship with her. No man would ever have just a fling with her. She was the kind of woman a man made a commitment to. A commitment was the one thing he couldn’t offer her.
“Cass, I asked Andy to join me at a Magic game tomorrow night, and I’d like for you to come with us. What do you say?”
Her gingery eyes widened with speculation, and he saw the refusal written there before she opened her mouth. “Thank you for asking, but Andy and I wouldn’t be able to find tickets to the game. I hear they’re sold out.”
Tricky lady. She always had an excuse handy, but this time he was prepared. “I have season tickets.”
She glanced at her son, and Rafe could see her weighing the consequences of declining. She sighed, and it was not a welcoming sound. “Well, then I guess we’d be happy to go with you.”
Cass spent the morning pretending not to notice Rafe. Andy had talked about the impending basketball game all the way to school. She had the feeling that this was going to win her son a lot of points with his friends. Not many second-graders were invited to go to see the Orlando Magic play.
Cass sighed. By nature she was calm and unflappable, but Rafe Santini had a way of making her forget to be calm and unflappable. He’d put several wood cutouts across the front of his lawn of a woman bent at the waist with her frilly drawers showing. In front of his porch he’d placed large, plastic flowers in florescent blue, orange and green. He had the most hideous looking yard on the street.
The complete craziness of the yard was at odds with the man who patiently taught her son to play catch and the finer points of basketball. This was the man who wanted to needle her because she made him remove his basketball hoop.
Rafe’s multidimensional personality kept her on her toes. The sexy man made her nervous and achy in places that she hadn’t thought of in a long time—secure emotional places that she’d forgotten. He made her feel vulnerable, and that wasn’t necessarily bad because Rafe also made her laugh again.
She liked his sense of humor, which was almost always present. She liked the deep well of patience he showed with Andy. And most of all she liked the way he dug in and finished a job no matter how dirty or tedious. She just plain liked him and that was dangerous.
He worked on his house in denim cutoffs that should have been illegal. The faded material clung to his legs, revealing every muscular inch. His backside had originally drawn her attention, and she stared at him now as he hefted a box of shingles onto his shoulder.
He sang a lively country tune about trashy women and bopped along to the music. He had his own style, she thought with a grin. If one could call it style. She giggled out loud, picturing Rafe in one of the trendy men’s magazines.
As usual he wore no shirt, though she tried not to notice. Why couldn’t he have a paunch around the middle? Or a soft belly and flabby legs? Was that too much to ask?
She watched his muscles ripple with each movement of the hammer. Cass stared at his back until she realized what she was doing. Get a grip, girl, she admonished herself.
Rafe waved at her, and Cass knew she’d been caught staring up at him. She raised her hand in acknowledgment, and he just grinned in a way that made her want to run in the house and hide.
Cass forced her attention back to the Victorian Renaissance chair she was reupholstering for Mrs. Parsons. Rafe’s decadent image haunted her. She hated to think she was turning into a slavering sex fiend, but the man refused to stay out of her mind and his naked chest wasn’t helping.
The hammering stopped, and Cass scowled as she glanced up again. Rafe worked on a two-man job by himself. He rolled out the tar paper and hammered in the tacks before starting the process all over. At the rate he labored, the small section he was reroofing might not be finished until tonight.
Cass finished adding the trim to the chair, then stood and brushed the fabric threads off her khaki shorts. Her mother had raised her to be neighborly, and that meant offering help. She crossed the quiet street and shielded her eyes against the sun.
“Hello, Santini.” She wanted to put distance between them, and using his last name helped her to think of him as a buddy.
Rafe finished securing the section he was working on before glancing down at her. “Morning, Gambrel.”
That he didn’t mention her earlier gawking earned him points for tact, which she honestly admitted she’d thought he lacked.
She wished she’d changed into jeans before coming over. For some reason Rafe seemed to be glaring at her legs. Cass was generally happy about the way she looked, but now she thought about the extra five pounds she hadn’t lost since Christmas last year. “Do you need some help?”
“No,” he said, and rolled out another section of tar paper. “I roof in my sleep.”
Feeling put in her place, she wanted to escape. Her conscience demanded she make one more offer of help. “Wouldn’t two hands make the job go faster?”
“Yeah, I guess it would.” He sat back on his heels. “You’re not feeling guilty, are you?”
The twinkle in his eye warned her he was up to no good. But like an unsuspecting mackerel being lured to a fisherman’s hook, she swallowed the bait. “Guilty about what?”
“Sitting under the shade of the porch while I labored out in the hot sun.”
“Santini, don’t you know better than to give the help a hard time?” she asked before walking back toward her house.
“I guess not, Gambrel.”
She stopped and glanced over her shoulder. “Should I stay?”
“Yes, ma’am, please.”
The polite tone to his words made her think he might be teasing again. She took a step toward the ladder intending to climb up to the roof. “Hang loose, Gambrel. I’ll be right down.”
In a matter of minutes Rafe was at her side. “You’ll need a tool belt and a hammer.”
“I thought I’d just hand you things and hold them in place.” She really didn’t know that much about home repair.
“What things, Cass?” He poured roofing tacks into one of the pockets on the leather tool belt.
“Nails and stuff.” She fidgeted, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
