“Do you mind?” Cassie expostulated, the flush deepening on her cheeks.
“I’m sorry. Can’t I say you look tired when you do?” Meg replied, looking innocent. “Go make yourself comfortable on the sun porch, and relax.”
Cassie was going to have to find a moment alone with her sister and explain that Bobby Serre wasn’t likely to respond to an unsubtle ten-ton Mack truck attempt at matchmaking when he’d remained seriously single even in the midst of a bevy of aspiring starlets and models. More important, the Bobby Serres of the world weren’t her style. Although Jay had turned out to not be her style, either. Perhaps she need a dating consultant to steer her in the right direction.
As they entered the house, two towheaded children came charging down the hall, screaming, “Cassie! Cassie! Cassie!”
Dropping her purse and kicking off her heels, she stooped to meet them, braced for the impact. But she was smiling. Just seeing them made her instantly happy.
“What did you bring us?” they screamed in unison, wiggling in her embrace. “Where’s our toy?”
“Mind your manners,” their mother scolded.
“I came from work,” Cassie said, not taking offense at the children’s mercenary outlook. Her favorite aunts had always brought her neat presents. “I’ll bring you something next time.”
“How about these?” Bobby drew out a small brass compass and a flashlight pen from his shorts pocket.
Immediately deserted for the lure of shiny objects, Cassie and Meg watched the Serre charm captivate an age group normally considered outside the purview of international sex symbols. Two-year-old Luke and three-year-old Zoe stood wide-eyed and mesmerized as Bobby squatted down before them and showed them the mysteries of the compass and pen. He spoke in a soft, low tone; let them each manipulate the light and spinning dial; and explained in child-speak how to make both work before giving the children their prizes.
“I’m impressed,” Meg said as her children ran away clutching their offerings. “I’ll rescue them later.”
“Don’t bother. They’re expendable. And thank you for having me to dinner. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal for a long time.”
“We’re just waiting on Willie. Oz is out of town.”
Cassie met Bobby’s searching glance. “Oswald is Meg’s husband, but don’t even consider calling him Oswald unless you can take on a three-hundred-pound ex-linebacker.”
Bobby grinned. “Got it.”
“Oz’s mother was looking for some inheritance from a rich uncle,” Meg explained. “When the uncle was seventy-five, he married a waitress who was young enough to be his granddaughter and left his money to her instead. A little like—”
“Don’t you dare say it,” Cassie warned.
“Okay, fine, go have a drink.” Meg nodded toward the kitchen. “I’ll check on dinner and the kids.”
* * *
SLIPPING HER HEELS back on, Cassie led Bobby down the hall and into a sun porch that overlooked the backyard as well as the neighbor’s backyards in the spanking-new housing development fashioned out of a former cornfield.
“Nice,” Bobby said, taking in the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“If you’re the sociable type. Meg says you can see what the neighbors are eating when they sit on their patio. But Meg gets along with everyone—don’t look at me like that. We can’t all be extroverts.”
“Or linebackers. I understand.”
“You were a receiver, weren’t you?” she said, moving toward the sweating pitcher of lemon drops atop a Lucite tray on an old wicker table Meg had refurbished.
“About a hundred years ago.”
“Before you became the James Bond of the art world.”
“Hardly. It’s a job, that’s all. One I happen to enjoy.”
“Rumor of your particular style of enjoyment titillates a great many in the humdrum world of museum curators.”
He grinned. “I didn’t think you cared.”
Picking up a martini glass, she glanced over her shoulder. “I don’t. I’ve sworn off men for the next millennium.”
He was surprised her words struck him as a personal challenge. It took a second or two to rein in his libido. “That’s what a divorce can do to you,” he blandly noted.
“Speaking from personal experience?” She poured the lemon drink into her glass.
“Not exactly.”
“Stupid me. You’re a man.”
He could have explained that he and Claire should never have married, which made their divorce slightly less nasty. He could have explained that slightly was a relative word. He could have explained that he was pissed for a very long time when the inevitable had happened. Although he guessed Cassandra Hill wouldn’t have cared to hear that his libido was immune to any of the emotional fallout. The sexy redhead with the killer legs who Arthur had saddled him with would have felt vindicated in her blanket condemnation of the male sex. And strangely, he wasn’t in the mood to piss her off completely—the obvious reason for that making him vaguely uncomfortable.
Not that it mattered if he decided he wanted her.
A decidedly inauspicious thought under the circumstances—here in her sister’s house. Although his libido seemed immune to providence as she bent over slightly to set the pitcher back down—displaying a fraction more of her long legs under her short skirt . . . giving him an instant hard-on.
Fortunately, childish screams echoed through the house just then, the high-pitched sound capable of quelling even his fired-up libido. When Cassie turned around with a drink in her hand, he was able to say in a relatively neutral voice, “If we’re going to work together, we should probably avoid personal subjects.”
“So I shouldn’t mention that phrase, ‘You seem happy to see me.’ ”
He grimaced. “Your skirt’s too damned short.”
Her brows rose. “Your lack of control is my fault?”
“What’s your fault?” Meg entered the room carrying a tray of crab canapés.
“Nothing’s my fault. I lead a faultless life,” Cassie said with a smile as Bobby half turned to hide the bulge in his shorts and moved toward the drink table.
Meg lasered her sister with a reproving look. “Don’t argue with him. He’s nice to my kids.”
“I’m not arguing. I never argue. I’m the least argumentative person on the face of the earth.” Half pleased at Bobby Serre’s reaction when he was more familiar with bedding international models, she avoided the alternate thought that perhaps any woman would do and allowed her vanity an unblushing moment of glory.
“How much have you had to drink?” her sister suspiciously inquired.
“Not enough.” Lifting her glass to her mouth, Cassie emptied it down her throat, because beyond her fleeting moment of self-conceit, she was finding it difficult if not impossible to resist the image of Bobby Serre’s hard-on when she hadn’t had sex for a very, very, very long time. And what she had seen even at a glance was super large.
“Watch her for me,” Meg ordered, setting the canapés on a side table and glancing at Bobby. “She can’t hold her liquor.”
Cassie swallowed. “Can to.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.” Why did she always revert to a childish vernacular in the presence of her sister?
“Hmpf.” Meg nodded at Bobby. “See that she doesn’t have more than two,” she said, walking from the room.
A small silence fell.
Bobby turned around and lifted his drink in mocking salute. “As if. Right?”
“I don’t need a keeper,” Cassie muttered, carefully not looking south of his waist.
He noticed and almost said, You can look. Everything’s back to normal. “Tell me about it,” he said instead. “I have an older brother.”
“You’re kidding. Someone gives you orders?”
It took him a moment to answer because she’d moved to a wicker chair, sat down, and crossed her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and his libido
was right back up there in ramming speed. “He tries, but I don’t see him much,” he said in a carefully constrained tone, sitting down as well for obvious reasons. “He lives in Hawaii.”
“Why?” After his talk about Montana, she’d recalled the working ranch there; it was part of his showy biography for public consumption.
Don’t look at her legs. “He likes to surf.”
A simple answer to a simple question, but way the hell out of her sphere of reference where glamorous lives were relegated to her TV screen. “Is he married?”
In that wary tone of voice men had when the word married came up in conversation, he answered, “He’s married.”
“Kids?”
“Four.”
“Wow. So you’re the brother without family values.”
“I don’t see you with kids.”
“Don’t go there.”
“Sorry. Sore point?”
“One of many with my ex-husband who perceived the world as his own personal amusement park.”
“While you were the stay-at-home, making-pies kind of wife?”
“Why are we having this conversation?” He could shove his sarcasm.
“You asked about my brother.”
“So did you really find what’s her name—the DeBeers widow’s painting behind a sofa in Hertfordshire?”
He smiled faintly at her politic shift in conversation. “Yes. It was her favorite Rubens—the self-portrait with his first wife. The banditos dumped some of the other pieces in a ditch if you can believe it.” He relaxed. Talking about art was a helluva lot safer than thinking about fucking her. “Most art thieves don’t have much of a clue what they’re doing—you know, hammer and crowbar guys, like those in Norway who stole The Scream and tried to sell it to two detectives from Scotland Yard. On the other hand, there are the occasional professionals like those who copped the Corot from the Louvre during prime visiting hours. That painting disappeared from view. Into some drug lord’s hacienda, I suspect. Your top button’s undone again.” He gave himself points for not responding to that glimpse of cleavage.
“It’s not on purpose, okay?” she quickly replied, re-closing the button. “It wasn’t this morning, either. Arthur might have thought otherwise, and I wouldn’t want you to be equally deluded. Clear?”
“As crystal.”
“Good,” she crisply said, rising from her chair. “And for your information, I can so hold my liquor, so don’t give me any grief over another drink.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” he murmured, just as a voice from the doorway exclaimed, “Wow and double wow. Introduce me, Cassie.”
“Willie Peterson, Bobby Serre. And stop panting, Willie. It’s embarrassing.”
“Is he yours? Do you allow poaching?” Willie asked, striding into the room like a suntanned example of intense strength training and a daily eighteen holes of golf.
“Go for it.” Between Meg and Willie working Bobby Serre, it was going to be a very long evening. Cassie took note of the number of drinks left in the pitcher. She was probably going to need them.
Bobby had come to his feet, and Willie put out her hand as she reached him. “Tell me you golf, and I’ll know I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“Sorry,” Bobby said with a grin, taking her hand. “Only when I absolutely have to.”
“You probably do other things really well though,” Willie purred.
He laughed and smoothly slipped his hand free. “Meg tells me you were in the money at the Women’s Open. Congratulations.”
“Mommy, I want dompass, too!” a peevish toddler proclaimed, running into the room. “Duke has dompass! Won’t give me none!”
Willie turned to her son, Cole. “Look, sweetie,” she said, pulling her keys from her purse and holding them out to him. “You can have these instead.”
A pouty toddler face was instantly transformed. Taking the offered key ring with a wide smile, Cole immediately jammed the attached whistle into his mouth and proceeded to blow so hard his little face turned red.
“Darling, please—take it outside!” Willie shouted above the earsplitting shrillness. “Show it to Luke and Zoe!”
Cassie’s ears were still ringing as the outside door slammed on Willie’s son. “What a darling little boy,” Cassie said with a smile, hoping her eardrums weren’t permanently damaged.
“He looks like Todd, doesn’t he?”
“The perfect image.” Too polite to ask why he looked like Todd when Willie was single, Cassie said instead, “He has your high spirits, though.” Social lies weren’t really lies at all, but a means of avoiding rude statements.
“Isn’t he just perfect,” Willie cooed with that inexplicable blindness of parenthood.
“Too perfect for words.” Was she smooth or what? “How about a drink?”
Over drinks Willie explained the particulars of her win at the Women’s Open before Meg came to fetch them for dinner—the children having been corralled and seated at the table.
Meg had one of those childproof dining room sets with a solid maple table and heavier-than-usual Windsor chairs that wouldn’t tip no matter what acrobatics three rambunctious toddlers attempted. Conversation at dinner was almost nonexistent unless constant haranguing and remonstrances to “sit still and eat or you won’t get dessert” counted. Which only worked for the briefest period of time before Meg caved and decided lemon sherbert and sugar cookies would serve as the primary food groups that night.
“Why don’t the children eat outside on the picnic table?” Willie suggested so calmly Cassie wondered if she was partially deaf and blind. “Cole just loves picnics. I’ll help you settle them down, Meg.”
A sudden silence descended once the dining room cleared, the debris from three children’s meals the only evidence a toddler tornado had passed through.
Cassie lifted her brows. “I’ll bet you’re sorry now you wanted chicken pot pie.”
“Kids don’t bother me.” Bobby reached for another roll. “You haven’t seen my brother’s brood. Pass the butter, will you?”
“Are you brain-dead? Cole apparently has never heard the word no, and Luke and Zoe were close to dancing on the table.”
“At least they didn’t throw their food.” He was buttering his roll with a detached air of calm. “Count your blessings.”
“You know children who throw food?”
“Oh, yeah. Watching four nephews under ten can get dicey at times.”
“Jeez, I’m losing my James Bond image here.”
“Just as well,” he murmured, forking up some chicken pot pie. “I lead a pretty normal life.”
“Except for the villas in Europe, the starlets, and the parties on the Riviera.”
He looked up, his fork poised near his mouth. “I guess.”
“Which means you don’t lead a normal life at all.”
He didn’t answer for the time it took to chew and swallow. “Depends on what’s normal,” he said mildly.
“Shopping for groceries, eating at McDonald’s, mowing the lawn.”
“Do you mow the lawn?”
“I’ve been known to mow a lawn.”
He smiled. “Rider or push mower?”
“Okay, I admit, the kid down the block mows the lawn.”
“I have a rider out West—but then I have a pretty big yard.”
“And you actually mow your lawn?” she challenged.
“When I’m home, I do.”
For some reason she didn’t want to hear it; she would have preferred the larger-than-life Bobby Serre she could dismiss as unattainable. She didn’t want him to be too normal and maybe within reach if she was standing on a really high ladder. It made it harder to talk herself out of noticing how good he looked and how pleasant he seemed and how she’d probably be the ten thousandth female who wanted to sleep with him this week. She’d better stop drinking because she hadn’t seriously thought of sleeping with anyone since Jay had served her divorce papers.
Unfortunately, the troubl
esome voice inside her head took that opportunity to point out without any sense of propriety that perhaps she’d finally passed the stage of grieving over her marriage and was ready to move on to the next stage. You know, the one where men like Bobby Serre could really serve a useful purpose—in terms of getting on with her life. In like, moving on.
In like, trading her anger and resentment for a good lay.
“If you’re not going to eat your roll, do you mind if I do?”
Actually, I do, she thought, coming back to the scene of destruction on her sister’s dining room table. She minded that he could eat seven rolls and three chicken pot pies and two servings of mayonnaise-laden cole slaw and not have an extra ounce of body fat on his buff body. “Not at all,” she lied, handing over her roll because she wasn’t about to expose her insecurities and lustful thoughts by actually speaking the truth.
Although, in her slightly mellow frame of mind after two lemon drops and a glass of wine, she allowed herself the pleasurable sensation of feeling lust for the first time after months of celibacy. She wasn’t quite certain if it was the lemon drops and the glass of wine or the gloriously handsome man smiling at her across the table or whether she’d finally run out of outrage. But there it was—LUST—in (eight-point) caps. Definitely not good, her voice of reason reminded her, throwing off the warm, cozy blanket of alcohol-induced mellowness. Remember, he said he wasn’t interested.
SO FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, DON’T EMBARRASS YOURSELF.
Instantly sobered by the terrifying image of public rejection, Cassie smoothed the napkin in her lap, sat up a little straighter, and said in a voice so neutral she could have been the female spokesperson for the nuclear energy industry explaining on the six o’clock news that no danger existed despite the recent meltdown at a nearby facility, “I picked up the list of temps from Emma this afternoon and started to make notes for you.”
He did a double take but recovered smoothly and continued tearing her roll in two. “Good. I appreciate your initiative. Fill me in on the various personalities on the way home.”
“Don’t go home until you’ve had dessert,” Meg declared, coming back into the dining room with two servings of sherbet—apparently in her best company mood, serving dessert last. Setting down the dishes, she began clearing the children’s mess.