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“I didn’t feel right staying in the house,” she said stiffly.
“Couldn’t you find anywhere better than this?”
“I didn’t have any—” She stopped abruptly, changing tack with a forced casualness that didn’t fool Nick for a second. “I needed to be here, near the horses. It’s no big deal.”
“George should have told me you were living here.”
Except how could he, when Nick hadn’t given him a chance? When he’d grown so frustrated by the man’s smoothly evasive replies that he threw his hands in the air and walked out, jumped in his car and drove straight here?
He scrubbed a hand over his face and wondered what had happened to his logic, which seemed to have gone missing…probably to the same place as his usual even temper. He adopted a more reasonable tone before he continued. “If I’d known you were living here, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see your light.”
“So that’s why you came down here.” Her smile was edged with relief, as if she’d needed an explanation…or because the conversation had taken a safer turn. “Something woke me, but I wasn’t sure what, so I turned the light out again. When I heard you outside, it scared about a year off my life.”
“Sorry about that. I guess we both had the wrong handle on each other.”
Whatever the reason for her smile, it sliced a swathe through Nick’s irritability, made it possible for him to smile right back at her. And he found something in her expression, in the slow color that highlighted her cheekbones, that reminded him what sort of a handle they’d had on each other in the close darkness of the breezeway. Her hands sliding over his shirt, touching his jeans. His hand on her belly, her breast. Heat licked through him like wildfire, doing more than sear his blood vessels. It surprised the hell out of him.
Jet lag, he reminded himself as he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and cleared his throat. “You want to pack a few things—what you need for tonight?”
She stiffened visibly. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re not staying here.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable here.”
Her mutt, which had fallen asleep on the foot of her bed, chose that moment to whimper and twitch. Nick snorted. “Your dog isn’t even comfortable here.”
“Must we discuss this now?”
“No. We can discuss it later…after we’ve moved you.”
When he started toward her, she held up a hand. “Look, it’s the middle of the night. I don’t want to fight with you, and I don’t want to have to make up another bed. Okay?”
Nick dragged a hand through his hair. Unfortunately he could see her point. “Fine,” he conceded. “But tomorrow you’re moving out of here.”
“Shouldn’t sorting out this ridiculous bequest be our first priority?”
Nick frowned at her choice of adjective. Unexpected, yes. Unusual, maybe. Overly generous, definitely. “You think it’s ridiculous?”
“It makes no sense.”
“You can’t think of any reason why Joe would leave you a million-dollar bequest?”
All the color leached from her face as she stared back at him. In his world, a million dollars didn’t turn a hair; to Tamara Cole, the figure was obviously staggering. Buying her out would be as simple as writing a check, Nick realized. So where was the satisfaction that always accompanied knowledge of a sure thing, a deal all but closed? As she continued to stare at him, wide-eyed and unblinking, he noticed she looked more than stunned. She looked as dead beat as he felt.
“Sleep on it, green eyes,” he advised as he headed to the door. “We’ll talk later.”
“Nick.”
He stilled, one hand on the doorknob. Now why should the sound of his name on her tongue cause his pulse to pound? All his responses seemed shot to bits tonight.
“I’m sorry about before, about mistaking you for a burglar.”
Nick turned, caught her looking at him with that same expression as before, the one that made him think about hands in the dark and the sweet little body hidden beneath unflattering flannel. He stared back, a slow grin on his lips and a fast burn in his gut.
“I’m not.”
After the door clicked shut, T.C. rested her overheated face against the cool windowpane and one hand against her overstimulated heart. No man’s smile should be allowed to have such an effect, and especially not a man so out of her league.
It wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t unexpected.
From his photos, she knew the man was gorgeous, from Joe’s stories she’d learned of his charm, but nothing could have prepared her for Nick Corelli in the flesh. Nothing could have prepared her for that blue gaze sliding over her like a silk blanket, warming her, sensitizing every cell in her skin, as he murmured “I’m not.” As if he had enjoyed their tussle in the dark, as if the surge of attraction she had felt so intensely was mutual. As if a man who could take his pick of the glamorous, the beautiful and the smart, would be interested in her.
As if!
With a snort of derision, she turned her face against the windowpane and looked outside in time to see the house windows light up one by one, marking his progress through the entry hall into the living area, and then on to the bedrooms. A tug of alarm pulled her hard up against the glass. Which would he choose?
“Please. Not my room, not my bed,” she breathed. “It’s enough knowing you’re in my home.”
Whoa! When, precisely, had she started calling Joe’s house her home? Sure, she had lived in it the past five years, but only because Joe insisted, only because he was the kind of man who brooked no argument.
“You think a house like this deserves to be empty? You think I want to come here to an empty house after a whole week spent with too many idioti for any one man’s patience?”
The backs of her eyes pricked at the memory of Joe’s words, and she pressed her lids tightly closed. She hadn’t cried once in those god-awful months since she’d finally learned of her boss’s terminal illness, and she wasn’t going to start shedding tears now.
If you don’t want to be treated like a girl, don’t cry like one. That came straight from her father’s concise book of lessons, right after There’s only one thing a man like that could want from a girl like you.
She had been young and reckless when she learned the harsh truth of her father’s words. She had given that one thing to a rich, smooth-talking, heartbreaker named Miles Newman, and after he laughed at her words of love and moved on to the new stable girl, she’d dried the last of her girl-tears and thrown away the handkerchief.
Never again would she trade her self-respect for something she mistook for love. Never again would she mistake the flashfire of physical attraction for something more. Oh, she wanted there to be somebody—a special person to share her life, to love and to cherish—but she didn’t need the palpitations and the heartache and the tears. She needed strength and stability. She needed respect and understanding and companionship. Until she found a man with those qualities, she would make do with her own company.
Except at this moment her own company was making her edgy and unsettled. She swung away from the window and started to pace her room, but that activity did nothing to ease her restlessness. The quarters she had accepted as adequate now felt cold, dank and claustrophobic. The clutter she stepped over and around every day now looked like a sad chaotic mess. She jammed her eyes shut and cursed Nick Corelli for this new perspective, then cursed herself double-time for caring. His opinion of her living conditions shouldn’t matter one blue-eyed damn. But when she opened her eyes they were focused on her bed, and she could still see his long denim-encased legs spread across it. She could still imagine his body heat seeping into the covers.
With a growl of frustration she strode to the door and hauled it open. A horse whickered softly across the way, instantly easing the tightness in her chest. She pulled the door to behind her and moved surefootedly toward the lone equine head that loomed over its stable door.
“Hey, Star.” She smiled as she rubbed the proffered jaw, then let her fingers dwell on the velvet warmth of the animal’s muzzle. Warm, familiar, soothing. She felt her tense muscles relax another degree, felt her smile kick up a notch. “Don’t you ever sleep?” she crooned as she ran her other hand along the mare’s neck and under her blanket, automatically checking for warmth.
The mare stalked off with an impatient shake of her head, then circled the box with her long graceful strides. She, Tamara Cole, owned half of this fabulous animal. Shivering with a flash of intense excitement as much as the cold, T.C. shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “No,” she told herself firmly. “You know you can’t accept it.”
And if she didn’t accept it, what would happen? She wondered if Joe had considered that possibility and if he had made some provision, named some alternate benefactor. Nick hadn’t mentioned it, but then, he hadn’t mentioned much at all, and she had been too stunned to think coherently.
Now a whole crowd of questions scrambled for answers. Why had George told her to carry on as usual, knowing she was now a part-owner? Why had Joe made her a part-owner, knowing she would likely refuse the gift? Why had he specifically requested she learn the news from Nick?
Frowning, she turned to lean her back against the stable door. It didn’t surprise her that Joe hadn’t left Yarra Park to any of his Melbourne-based family. Neither George nor any of his sisters had ever shown any interest in the property—in fact, they had bemoaned their father’s obsession with horses. An old man’s eccentricity, George had called it, with a condescending twist of his lips.
Nor did it surprise her that he had singled out Nick, the only one who had chosen his own career path in preference to a ready-made position in a Corelli company. At first that decision had caused a rift, but ultimately Nick’s independent success had earned his father’s respect and admiration. It made sense that Joe would consider Nick worthy of his beloved property, but would Nick appreciate the magnitude of the gift?
T.C. snorted. He called it a consolation prize, for heaven’s sake.
Frankly she couldn’t see what he would want with a fledgling standardbred training establishment at the opposite end of the world from his New York base, and if he didn’t want his half, what should she do about hers?
She blew out a breath and shook her head slowly. “Gee, Joe, it’d be really good if you could help me out here…if you could tell me what you were thinking when you drafted that will.” Of course, no magical answer boomed out from beyond the steel rafters. “Seems like I’ll have to do this the hard way,” she told Star, knowing exactly how difficult that would be.
First she would have to deal with her treacherous body’s intense physical response to Nick’s presence, and then her awestruck mind might kick into gear and form some meaningful connection with her mouth. Maybe then she would be capable of asking all the questions that needed answering before she could decide what to do.
Three
T.C. intended posing those questions the next time she saw Nick. She planned to stiffen her backbone, look him in the eye and say, “Nick, I need to know your intentions.”
She was pleased with that forthright opener, composed the next morning while she and Jason, her stable hand, exercised the first half of their team. And when it was time for a coffee break, she took her mug to an upturned bucket in the breezeway, tilted her face toward the midmorning sun and fine-tuned her intonation.
“Nick, I need to know…Nick, I need to know…”
Then Nick sauntered into the barn, and her plans, her intonation and her backbone, turned to mush. He wore a polo shirt in the same azure-blue as his eyes, and faded jeans that hugged him in all the right places. The warmth that flooded her body had nothing to do with the sun. Her heart stalled, then bounded into overdrive. She felt all the same jittery reactions as when she stepped a horse onto the track before a big race, but she didn’t look away. She couldn’t not watch his lazy loose-limbed approach. Talk about poetry in slow motion. If he’d been a horse, she would have labeled him a fabulous mover.
“Is this the new boss?” Jason asked.
T.C. nodded, swallowed, inhaled once, exhaled once. By then Nick was close enough for her to notice his shower-damp hair and the rested look about his eyes. It was obvious his sleep hadn’t been disturbed by spicy aftertones clinging to his pillow!
Somehow she managed to mumble the necessary introductions, and Nick shook Jason’s hand. “You must own the one-two-five out front.”
Very smooth opening, T.C. thought with a cynical twist of her mouth, seeing as Jason was mad-keen on his newly acquired dirt bike. They swapped notes in that rev-head shorthand T.C. had never understood, and when Ug snuffled noisily out of her morning nap, Nick hunkered down to tickle her behind the ears. With a fatuous look of bliss clouding her mismatched eyes, the dog promptly rolled onto her back.
T.C. snorted. She bet females did that trick for Nick Corelli all the time.
“What do you call her?” His gaze lifted from the prone dog and met T.C.’s over the rim of her coffee mug.
“Ug.” Jason supplied the answer, which was just as well, because the smiling warmth in Nick’s eyes had struck T.C. dumb. Behind the subterfuge of sipping coffee, she attempted to unravel the knot in her tongue.
“Strange name.” He smiled right into her eyes, and that uncooperative tongue looped itself in a second half-hitch. Luckily Jason came to her rescue again.
“When Joe first brought her home—he found her down the road a bit—T.C. said she wanted to call her Lucky, because she was lucky Joe found her. But Joe says ‘There’s nothin’ lucky about a dog that looks like that.’”
“So how did she get to be Ug?” Nick asked.
“Joe said ‘I’d call her plain old ugly,’ and it just sort of stuck. Except T.C. shortened it to Ug.”
T.C. smiled at the familiar anecdote. She felt like she might finally be capable of speech. “You look like you slept well,” she said, by way of a start.
“Like a baby.” His smile deepened the creases on either side of his mouth, and it struck her that he must smile a lot. “Any more of that coffee around?”
“I’ll get it,” Jason offered. “Um, you want milk or anythin’?”
“The works.” Somehow T.C. wasn’t surprised. She figured Nick would demand the works in all kinds of ways. “Plenty of milk, at least two sugars. Thanks, Jason.”
As the kid bustled off, Nick hoped the coffee wasn’t already bubbling away in a percolator. He wanted some time alone with Tamara. He pulled up the bucket vacated by Jason and sat. “You know, I’d still be sleeping like a baby except the phone rang.”
She stopped fidgeting with her mug and went very still. “I didn’t hear it. I guess we were down at the track. Was the call for me?”
“I can’t say. There was no one there.”
She cradled the mug in both hands as if to steady it, declared, “Probably a wrong number,” then swiveled around to peer down the alleyway. “I wonder what’s keeping Jason?”
Nick gritted his teeth. Her evasiveness was already roughing the edges of his patience. “If it was a boyfriend calling,” he suggested slowly, “I might have put him off.”
“If I had a boyfriend, he’d know not to call when it’s short odds I’d be down at the track.”
When he met her hostile glare, Nick felt a perverse satisfaction, and it had nothing to do with the no-boyfriend revelation. Finally he had her attention. “Seems to me there’s something funny going on with your telephone. No one there this morning, off the hook yesterday.”
“Geez, T.C.” Neither had heard Jason’s approach. He stood there, shaking his head reproachfully. “Did you leave it off the hook again?” He handed Nick his coffee. “She did that the other day, too.”
The warning glare she directed at Jason told Nick his instincts were spot on. “Perhaps you had better explain.”
“Explain what? I knocked the receiver off the hook and didn’t notice. You got a wrong number. End of story.” With a dismissive shrug, she turned to Jason. “You can show Nick around while I finish the jogging.”
Nick stopped her intended exit with a hand on her shoulder. “Have you been getting nuisance calls?”
When she shuffled from foot to foot without answering, Nick increased the pressure on her shoulder. Over the top of her head he met Jason’s worried look and smiled reassuringly. “How about you carry on with the horses while I sort this out?”
As Jason set off, whistling cheerfully, he felt her tense up beneath his hand. “You’ve been here less than twelve hours and you’re giving directions to my staff?”
“Our staff,” he corrected.
She let out her breath in a soft whoosh. “We have to talk about that.”
“Yes, we do. But first we’re going to settle the phone business.”
She bit her bottom lip, and Nick waited a count of ten while she considered. “So, okay, there has been the odd anonymous call.”
“How long has this been going on?”
She shrugged. “A couple of weeks. On and off.”
“A couple of weeks! Have you reported it?”
“Look, there’s nothing to report. No threats, no heavy breathing. Probably just kids mucking about. It’s no big deal.”
“No?” Nick swore beneath his breath, then out loud when the penny dropped. “That’s why you attacked me last night. You thought I was the caller. What if you’d been right? What if I had been some stalker hell-bent on hurting you? Did you think of that before you confronted me with that damn fool toy?”
“I can look after myself. I’ve been looking after myself—”
“Is that what you think you were doing when you ran your hands all over me last night?” He grabbed her hand and pulled it to him, forcing her to touch him, then to stroke down his chest from collarbone to waist in one long, slow sensuous caress. “When you touched me like this?”
She recoiled as if she had contacted a live wire, then stood blinking her huge green eyes at him. She rubbed the hand he had used to demonstrate his point down her thigh as if trying to remove his imprint from her skin.
That notion was as powerfully erotic as her actual touch.
With a proud lift of her chin, she drew herself up as tall as her diminished height allowed and met his gaze. “I did not touch you like that,” she said with quiet dignity.
