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Anna’s insistence surprised Sage as much as the numbers. She would have expected the other woman to pinch pennies wherever she could and she had to admit she was impressed that she refused to take advantage of Will’s generosity.
“You’ll take a discount and that’s final,” he said firmly. “You’ll never find another contractor who will treat Brambleberry House with the same loving care.”
“You guys can hash this out better without me,” Sage announced. She wasn’t sure she could spend any more time in Abigail’s apartment without breaking into tears. “I’m tired and I’m hungry. Right now all I want to do is fix some dinner and take a long, hot soak in the tub with a glass of wine. You can give me the details tomorrow.”
“I’ll walk Conan tonight. It’s my turn,” Anna said.
She nodded her agreement and headed up the stairs to her veggie burger and silence.
Chapter 4
This was the reason he wanted The Sea Urchin so desperately.
Eben leaned his elbows on the deck railing off the back of their beach house watching dawn spread out across the Pacific the next morning, fingers of pink and lavender and orange slicing through the wisps of fog left from the rains of the night before.
The air smelled of the sea, salty and sharp; gulls wheeled and dived looking for breakfast.
He was the only human in sight—a rare occurrence for him. He wasn’t used to solitude and quiet, not with chattering Chloe around all the time. He wasn’t completely sure he liked it—but he knew that if he could package this kind of morning for all his properties, Spencer Hotels would never have a vacancy again.
Normal people—people very much unlike uptight Californian businessmen—would eat this whole relaxation thing up. The Sea Urchin would be busy year-round, with people booking their suites months, even years, in advance.
He sipped his coffee and tried to force the tension from his shoulders. Another few days of this and he would be a certifiable beach bum, ready to chuck the stress of life in San Francisco for a quiet stretch of shoreline and a good cup of coffee.
Or maybe not.
He had never been one to sit still for long, not with so much to do. He’d been up since four taking a conference call with Tokyo in preparation for a series of meetings there next week and in two hours he would have to drive the ninety minutes to Portland to meet with his attorneys.
Despite the calm and beauty of the morning, his mind raced with his lengthy to-do list.
In the distance he saw a jogger running up the beach toward town and envy poked him. He would give his coffee and a whole lot more to be the one running along the hard-packed sand close to the surf, working off these restless edges.
Others found calm and peace in the soothing sound of the sea. For Eben, a good, hard run usually did the trick. But with Chloe asleep inside, that was impossible. He couldn’t leave her alone in a strange place, even if he left a note and took his cell phone so she could reach him.
The jogger drew closer and recognition clicked in at exactly the same moment he heard a bark of greeting. A moment later, Sage Benedetto’s big gangly red dog loped into view.
The dog barked again, changed directions and headed straight toward him. After an odd hesitation, the big dog’s owner waved briefly and followed her animal.
Though he knew it was foolish, anticipation curled through him like those tendrils of fog on the water.
She was still some distance away when the dog nuzzled his head under Eben’s hand, looking for attention. He had never had a pet and wasn’t very used to animals, but he scratched the dog’s chin and was rewarded by the dog nudging his hand for more.
When Sage approached, he saw she was wearing bike shorts and a hooded sweatshirt with an emblem that read Portland Saturday Market across the front.
She looked soft and sensual in the early morning light, like some kind of lush fertility goddess. Her exotic features were flushed and her hair was in a wild ponytail.
She looked as if she had just climbed out of bed after making love all night long.
His insides burned with sudden hunger but he hid his reaction behind a casual smile. “Great morning for a run.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think?”
“I was just now pondering how much I’d love to be out there doing the same thing if only Chloe weren’t asleep inside.”
She gave a sudden delighted smile that made him feel as if the sun had just climbed directly above his beach house. Before he could catch his breath, she grabbed the coffee mug straight out of his hand and sipped it, pressing her mouth exactly where his own lips had been.
“Problem solved. I’ll stay here in case Chloe wakes up and you can take Conan.”
She made a shooing gesture with the hand not holding his coffee. “You two boys go on and run to your little hearts’ content and I’ll go back to sleep for a few moments.”
She slid into one of the wide, plump rockers on the deck and closed her eyes, his mug still cradled in her hands.
She was completely serious, Eben realized, not quite sure whether to be amused or annoyed. But with a sudden anticipation zinging through him, he couldn’t help but smile. “At least come inside where it’s warm while I throw on some jogging shoes.”
She opened her eyes and her gaze flashed down to his bare toes then back at him with an inscrutable expression on her features. “I’m fine out here, but if you would feel better having me inside in case Chloe wakes up, I have no problem with that, either.”
She followed him inside to the living room with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the shore.
“Nice,” she murmured.
He was intensely aware of her, more than he had been of any woman in a long, long time.
He was also cognizant of the fact that they were virtually alone, with only his daughter sleeping on the other side of the house, something he didn’t want to think about.
“Give me five minutes to grab my shoes.”
She was already nestling into the comfortable leather couch that faced the windows, her eyes already closing, her muscles going slack. “No problem. Take your time. This is perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
He threw on his shoes quickly and hurried back to the family room. She gave all appearances of being asleep. He watched her for only a moment, entranced by the wisp of honey-colored hair curling over her cheekbone.
When he realized he was gazing at her like some kind of Peeping Tom, he hurried out the door to the deck and whistled to Conan, who was busy marking every support of the deck.
The dog stopped mid-pee, barked with an eagerness that matched Eben’s and the two of them set off down the beach.
With a sense of freedom he hadn’t known in a long time, he ran on the hard-packed sand, dodging waves and the occasional long, ragged clump of kelp. The dog raced right along with him, easily matching his stride to Eben’s and in no time they had a comfortable rhythm.
By the time they reached the headlands on the north end of the beach, he felt loose and liberated, as if the jog had chased all the cobwebs from his mind.
He paused for a moment to enjoy the full splendor of the sunrise slanting out across the water while the dog chased a couple of seagulls pecking at something in the sand.
After some time, Eben checked his watch with some regret. “We’d better hustle back. Some of us need to go to work,” he told the dog, who tilted his head with a quizzical look then barked as if he understood exactly what Eben had said. The dog turned and charged back down the beach the way they’d come.
The beach had been largely empty on their way north but on the run back, they passed several other joggers and beachcombers, all of whom greeted him with friendly smiles—or at least offered smiles to Conan.
Several called the dog by name and gave them curious looks that Eben deflected with a wave. All the locals were probably wondering who was running with Sage Benedetto’s dog but he didn’t have the breath to enlighten any of them, even if he’d wanted to.
“Wait out here,” he ordered the sandy dog when they reached the beach house, his breath still coming fast and hard. Conan flopped onto the deck and curled his head in his paws, apparently content to rest.
He let himself into the house and found Sage exactly where he’d left her, sound asleep on his couch.
A quick peek into Chloe’s room showed him she was still asleep as well, the blankets jumbled around her feet.
He closed her door with gentle care and returned to the family room. Okay, so he hadn’t worked all the restlessness out of his system, apparently. Some of it still simmered through him, especially as he watched Sage sleep on his couch. She looked rumpled and sexy, her lashes fluttering against the olive skin of her high cheekbones and the slightest of smiles playing over those lush lips.
What was she dreaming about? he wondered, hunger tightening his insides.
Maybe it was a reaction to the blood still pumping through him from the good, hard run—or, he admitted honestly, probably just the delectable woman in front of him—but Eben wanted her more than he could remember ever wanting a woman.
He cleared his throat, again fighting back his heretofore unknown voyeuristic tendencies. “Uh, Ms. Benedetto. Time to go. The run’s over.”
Her mouth twitched a little in sleep but her eyes remained stubbornly closed. She made a little sleepy sound and rolled over, presenting her back to him, looking for all the world as if she were settling in to nap the morning away.
Now what was he supposed to do?
“Sage?” he said again.
When she still didn’t respond, he sighed and reached a hand out to her shoulder. “Sage, wake up. You have to go to work, remember? We both do.”
After a moment, she heaved a long sigh and turned over again. She blinked her eyes open and gazed at him in confusion for a moment before he saw consciousness slowly return like the tide coming in.
She sat up, gave a yawn and stretched her arms above her head. Eben swallowed and did his best to remember how to breathe.
“I have to say, that had to be just about the best jog I’ve had in a month,” she murmured with a sleepy, sexy smile.
She rose, stretching again with graceful limbs, and Eben stared at her a long moment—at the becoming flush on her features, at the wild tangle of her hair, at her slightly parted lips.
He sensed exactly the instant his control slipped out the window—when she smiled at him again, her head canted to one side. With a groan, he surrendered the battle and reached for her.
She was soft and warm and smelled of the leather sofa where she had been sleeping and an exotic spicy-sweet flowery scent that had to be purely Sage.
He told himself he would stop with just a tiny taste. He had taken her dog out running, after all. Didn’t she owe him something for that? Stealing a little morning kiss seemed like small recompense.
He didn’t expect her mouth to taste of coffee and mint and he certainly didn’t expect, after one shocked second, for her to make a low, aroused sound in her throat then wrap her arms around his neck as if she couldn’t bear the idea of letting him go.
From that point on, he lost all sense of time and space and reason. His foolish idea of giving into the heat for only an instant with one little taste went out the window along with the rest of his control.
The only thing he could focus on was the woman in his arms—her intoxicating scent and taste, the texture of her sweatshirt under his hands, the soft curves pressing against him.
He needed to stop, for a million reasons. He barely knew the woman. She barely knew him. Chloe could wake and come out of her room any moment. He had just jogged three miles down the beach and back and probably smelled like a locker room.
All these thoughts flickered through his mind but he couldn’t quite catch hold of any of them. The blood singing through him and the wild hunger burning up his insides were the only things that seemed to matter.
He deepened the kiss and she sighed against his mouth. He was intensely aware of her soft fingers in his hair, of the other hand curving around his neck. Even with the heat scorching him, the wonder of feeling her hands on him absurdly drew a lump to his throat.
How long had it been since he’d known a woman’s touch? Brooke’s shockingly sudden death from an aneurysm had been two years ago and he hadn’t been with anyone since then. Even for months before her death, things had been rocky between them. He knew he had failed her in many, many ways.
The specter of his disastrous marriage finally helped him regain some small measure of control.
He stilled, then opened his eyes as the sensation of being watched prickled down his spine.
Not Chloe, he hoped, and swept the room with a glance. No, he realized. Sage’s big red dog watched them through the wide windows leading to the deck. And if Conan had been human, Eben would have sworn he was grinning at them.
Though he ached at the effort, Eben forced himself to break the kiss and step back, his breathing uneven and his thoughts a tangled mess.
“Well. That was…unexpected,” she murmured.
Her color was high but she didn’t look upset by their heated embrace, only surprised.
He, on the other hand, was stunned to his core.
What the hell was he thinking? This kind of thing was not at all like him. He was known in all circles— social, business and otherwise—for his cool head and detached calm.
He had spent his life working hard to keep himself in check. Oh, he knew himself well enough to understand it was a survival mechanism from his childhood—if he couldn’t control his parents’ tumultuous natures, their wild outbursts, their screaming fights, and substance abuse, at least he could contain his own behavior.
Those habits had carried into adulthood and into his marriage. In the heat of anger, Brooke used to call him a machine, accusing him of having no heart, no feeling. She had to have an affair, she told him, if only to know what it was like to be with a man who had blood instead of antifreeze running through his veins.
This new, urgent heat for an exotic, wild-haired nature girl sent him way, way out of his comfort zone.
“My apologies,” he said, his voice stiff. “I’m not quite sure what happened there.”
“Aren’t you?”
He sent her a swift look and saw the corner of her mouth lift. He didn’t like the feeling she was laughing at him.
“You can be certain it won’t happen again.”
A strange light flickered in the depths of her dark eyes. “Okay. Good to know.”
She studied him for a moment, then smiled. He wanted to think the expression looked a little strained but he thought that was possibly his imagination.
“Thank you for taking Conan jogging for me. I admit, I’m not crazy about the whole morning exercise thing. I’m trying to warm up to it but it’s been slow going so far. I thought after a month I would enjoy it more, but what are you going to do? It seems to cheer him up a little, though, so I guess I’ll stick with it.”
He couldn’t seem to make his brain work but he managed to catch hold of a few of the pieces of what she said.
“You’re telling me your dog is depressed?” he asked, feeling supremely stupid for even posing the question.
“You could say that.” She glanced out the window where Conan still watched them and lowered her voice as if the dog could hear them through the glass. “He misses his human companion. She died a month ago.”
The dog’s human companion had died a month ago and Sage had been jogging with Conan for a month. Even in his current disordered state, he figured the two events had to be connected.
“She left you her dog?”
“That and a whole lot of other problems. It’s a long story.” One she obviously had no intention of sharing with him, he realized as she headed for the door.
“I’d better go. I’ve got thirteen eager young campers who’ll be ready to explore the coastline with me in just an hour. I’m sure you’ve got things to do, people to see, worlds to conquer and all that.”
His mouth tightened at the faint echo of derision in her voice, but before he could defend himself from her obviously harsh view of his life, she opened the door and walked out into the cool morning air, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the dog, who jumped around as if he hadn’t seen her in months.
Just now the animal looked far from the bereft, grieving animal she had described. She patted his sides, which had the dog’s eyes rolling back in his head. Eben couldn’t say he blamed him.
