“You don’t have to conform,” she said quickly. “Just follow the rules and guidelines. Is that so hard?”
He dropped his hand from the gearshift to cover her thigh, feeling the tensed muscle under the fabric of her pants. “Rules and me, we’re not such good friends.”
She made no move to slip out of his touch. “Think of it as a game, Jack. You like games. You let them think you fit the mold, and the sale goes through and everybody’s happy, but you are still doing the work your clients hire you to do.”
“You make it all sound so simple and sensible.”
“That’s my job,” she said. “And remember, you’re doing this for a good cause.”
He threw her a sideways look, catching the way the wind pulled some strands of dark hair out of the twist she had it in, whipping them across her face. One got caught in her lip gloss and he reached over to tug the hair that stuck to her moist lower lip. “Believe me, if the cause wasn’t good, I’d turn this thing around and we’d spend the weekend in a whole different direction.”
“Let me guess. Horizontal?”
He shrugged. “Or standing up on the widow’s walk on top of the house, watching the sunset over the ocean. Or maybe here in the old Jeep, right back there.” He pointed his thumb over her shoulder and saw her fight a smile. “Then again, there’s always the sailboat Reggie has down at the harbor, so we could do it bouncing on the water.”
“Oh, I’ve never been sailing before.”
“Good, we’ll go over to Cape Cod later this week.”
“Cape Cod? Could we make it there and back in one day?”
He shrugged and narrowed his eyes. “It’s about four hours over, even against the wind. But we can stay at my sister’s in Rockingham. Assuming she’s not in the hospital having a baby.”
“She’s pregnant?”
He nodded. “Yep. Having a girl. You want kids, Lil?”
If the change of subject threw her, she didn’t flinch. “I’m pretty busy keeping myself afloat to think about kids.”
Translate that into too busy climbing the corporate ladder in order to make big bucks. “That’s cool.”
“And you?”
Unlike her, he wouldn’t bother with a euphemism like “I haven’t met the right person” or “Someday.” He just told the truth. “I like to get up and go whenever I please. Kids and a wife would probably cut into that.”
He turned the Jeep onto the main road of Nantucket’s precious town, eyeing the rows of brick and whitewashed clapboard, and the packed narrow road. As he slowed down, an SUV pulled out about twenty feet in front of him, leaving a nice big vacancy.
He grinned at her. “The parking gods love me.”
“Great. How about the shopping gods?”
“I don’t call on them too often. But there’s the Toggery,” he said, indicating the only upscale men’s store he knew on Nantucket. “Of course, I’ve never been in there, but I believe that building houses enough suits and ties to make your conservative little heart go all aflutter.”
She turned to him, beaming. “Perfect. And thank you for being so agreeable to this.”
“I’m not agreeable. Believe me, I have an ulterior motive.”
“What’s that?” she asked, climbing out of the car.
“I heard they have nice big dressing rooms.” He winked. “So you can, you know, help change me.”
She laughed, but he could tell she wasn’t sure if he was serious or not.
Lily loved the store the minute she entered it, loved the rich smell of good fabric, the comfort of natural hardwood under her feet, the low-key attitude of the staff and even the soft jazz music in the background. She could dress Jackson Locke very nicely in here.
She glanced at the changing rooms and noticed they were small and not very private. Relief quietly battled disappointment. Not that he would really…oh, yes he would.
She launched into a full attack on the racks and stacks, assessing quality, cuts and sizes with a shrewd eye while Jack followed along, throwing out the occasional quip and gripe. But for the most part, he cooperated.
“You like this, don’t you?” he asked as she chose and discarded garments to match the vision she had in her head of an ad agency president.
“I used to be a professional shopper,” she said absently, narrowing her eyes at the collar of a shirt, then glancing at him before deciding against it.
“Used to be?” He stayed close to her as she moved down a line of suits, touching the fabric, frowning at colors.
“For other people,” she corrected, almost laughing at the idea that she could afford to shop like this for herself. Someday, but not yet. “That was my job, as a personal shopper.”
“Is that how you put yourself through college?”
There was no way to stop the automatic response of heat to her face. Her clients were all college educated, all from white-collar backgrounds and fine families. While she…wasn’t. And regardless of the fact that she was doing everything to change that, some shames, she knew so well, never really die.
“No,” she said, turning to hold the pale blue shirt up to him, high enough to cover her face. “This might be good for you.”
He lowered the shirt. “So where’d you go to school?”
“I didn’t. Nope. Too much purple in that blue. Clashes with your eyes.”
He rolled the very eyes that clashed and followed her to the next shirt. “Where do you live, Lil?”
“Outside Boston.”
“Boston? Did you grow up there?”
More heat rushed to her face. “Around the area.”
“You don’t have the slightest Boston accent.”
She chose another shirt and handed it to him. “Here. I’ve worked on getting rid of it.”
He set it back down. “No tab collars. Why did you want to get rid of a New England accent?”
Because it sounded so poor and blue-collar. “It’s better for my job to have what you call a ‘TV accent.’ None at all.”
“And how did you go from personal shopper to executive image consultant?”
They were off her childhood, and she felt safer. “Well, it just sort of evolved,” she said, moving to a rack of ties and holding the suit jackets out. “I’ve always liked to watch and observe people, and I took some corporate transformation workshops and read a lot of books and I decided to launch the business.” She turned to him, narrowing her eyes. “The dressing room’s over there. Here.” She handed him a stack of clothes and urged him in the other direction. “Get started, Jackson.”
“You don’t want to undress me?”
More than anything. “Just change and let me see how that looks on you.”
A few minutes later she heard him clear his throat as he stepped out of the dressing room. She turned from tie racks she was browsing, and almost gave in to a full body shudder, lifting a fist to her mouth with a soft “Oh.”
A three-thousand-dollar suit fit as though the designer had custom-made it for him. The dark jacket hung open, the crisp white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and his feet, of course, were bare.
Even with the flop of long hair hiding one eye and that sneaky half smile, the suit transformed him from bad-boy sexy to big-boy powerful.
“Wow,” she whispered. “Whoever said clothes make the man was—”
“Naked.” Stepping around her, he padded barefoot to a three-way mirror and looked at each angle for less than a nanosecond. “Yep. Fine.” He turned away from the image. “We done now?”
“Stop,” she said, grabbing two neckties and heading straight toward him. “You really need to relax and enjoy the experience.”
“That’s what my dentist says.”
She held up one tie to his chest, then the other. “Yellow is conservative,” she said, switching them again. “But, oh, there’s something about this pink. You don’t have issues with pink, do you?”
“I have issues with ties.” He took one and twisted it around her wrist. “Unless there?
??s a headboard and some knots involved.”
Wordlessly, but unable to keep the smile from her face, she reached up to slide the pink one around his neck.
“Because,” she said as she buttoned the collar. “It says a lot about a man who is confident enough to wear a pink tie.”
“It says you’re an idiot for wearing a noose.” He slid two fingers behind the button and pretended to choke. “Why would anyone put one of these things on? What purpose can it possibly serve?”
“Besides their original utilitarian purpose of hiding buttons and finishing the look of the suit, the right tie sends a message of control and power and impacts how others perceive you and your ego.”
He tugged again, nearly wrecking her perfect half Windsor knot. “What you mean is the bigger the tie, the bigger the thing it points to?”
She patiently continued the knot. “Sexuality is part of your overall aura, yes.” She patted his chest and stepped back to look at him. “That works very nicely,” she said, turning him around so he was facing the mirror again. “Look at you. You’ll wow them in London.”
“I’d rather wow them with a good TV spot for their top client,” he muttered as he started to shimmy out of the jacket. “That’s what they should care about. Bag it up and let’s get out of here. I have somewhere else I want to go.”
She pulled the jacket back over his shoulders. “We’re not done. You need more suits. Several shirts. A few ties. And shoes.”
“I have shoes. I wore them here.”
“You need a complete wardrobe, Jack, and you wore five-year-old docksiders here.”
“Six.” He managed to get the jacket off and fling it onto a nearby chair, and he had the tie loose around his neck in one fast move as he returned to the dressing room.
Two minutes later he emerged back in jeans, the black T-shirt and the half-dozen-year-old docksiders. He dumped the stack of clothes into her arms. “I wear a size twelve shoe. I trust your judgment on style, although please no wingtips. I’ll see you when the sun goes down.”
She fought to keep her jaw from dropping. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere I can breathe.” He placed the car keys on top of the pile of clothes she held. “I’ll get myself home. We’ve met your agenda for today—new wardrobe. If I spend one more minute in here, I’ll do something crazy. Trust me, Lil. You don’t want to see that.”
Before she could respond, he was out the door, leaving her with an armful of clothes and a heart full of certainty that Jack Locke was one man that no woman could ever really have and hold. And for some reason, that made her chest ache.
Six
J ack tapped once on Lily’s bedroom door, then eased it open. “You dressed, Miss Manners?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad.”
She stood at the dresser, wearing cotton pants and a pastel sweater, brushing out her long hair.
“You were right,” she told him. “We couldn’t get into that restaurant.”
She set the brush down and turned around with a silky-smooth toss of long black hair. The sweater dipped to a sweet V neck and narrowed at a tiny waist. Sexy, classy and so completely wrong for what he had in mind.
“I have a better option,” he assured her.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked.
He pulled a very large tissue-topped shopping bag from behind his back. “Picking up some things you’ll need tonight.”
Eyeing the bag, she squinted at the Ladybird logo. She’d seen the store that afternoon…and had been tempted to enter. “Lingerie?”
He shrugged. “What else would you expect from me?”
She scooped up a jacket and her handbag from the bed. “I thought doing the unexpected was your secret weapon. Didn’t you tell me that?”
He didn’t set the bag down, but let her pass and walked with her to the stairs.
“So what do you have in mind tonight?” she asked, a sneaky smile on her face as she glanced at the bag.
“The unexpected.”
She didn’t respond to that, and as they walked to the car, he talked about Cape Cod, telling her about the small town where he grew up, in Rockingham, where his sister still lived, married to his best friend from high school. She asked questions about his parents, now retired in Florida, but, he noticed, she provided only vague answers when he tried to ask about her own childhood. Not for the first time, he suspected Lily Harper had some secrets.
“You know what I like best about Nantucket?” he asked as they turned onto a winding road, heading toward the wilder, less populated southeastern hills of the island.
“God, everything.” She inhaled a deep breath of the crisp autumn air that wrapped around them. “Look at that view of the ocean.”
Beyond them, the Atlantic Ocean darkened as night fell, deepening the golds and russets of the trees and taking the sky from plum to navy with each passing minute.
“I love the cranberry bogs,” he said.
“The cranberry bogs? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
“Didn’t you say you grew up around Boston?” he asked, surprised. “You’ve never sailed and you’ve never been to a cranberry bog? What kind of a New Englander are you?”
She shifted in her seat and didn’t answer, so he dipped his head to peer out the windshield. “Look down there. It’s perfectly flooded in September, a sea of cranberry ready for harvesting.”
He pointed to the dip in the landscape where green and gold suddenly morphed into acres of deep ruby red, all mysteriously shifting like quicksand under a thin wisp of fog.
“Is that a cranberry bog?”
“I can’t believe you’ve never been in one.”
She coughed a laugh. “In one? I thought only the farmers were allowed to go in.”
He turned slowly to burn her with a look. “The best things in life, Lil, are the ones that aren’t allowed.”
Throwing the Jeep into gear, he rumbled down the road, then pulled off at a break in the trees that very few people knew about.
“I found this place the first time I came to Reggie’s house about eight years ago,” he said. “The beach is great, the hills are nice, but this is like the beating heart of the island.”
Thirty-foot oaks and evergreens blocked what was left of daylight as they rumbled on, the fog deepening as they got lower and closer to the bog.
As the Jeep jostled, Lily hung on to the door, throwing Jack a few uncertain glances. But Jack just smiled back, then rounded the bend, stopped the car and waited for her response.
“Oh, my God!” She literally gasped, standing slowly to look over the windshield and take it all in. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
For acres, the soon-to-be harvested fruits floated in a sea of crimson. Translucent waves of white fog hovered like ghosts over everything, the first streams of a three-quarter moon adding an eerie light to the tableau. The heady, sweet aroma of cranberries permeated every molecule in the air, so achingly full of life and ready to burst that he could practically drink the taste with each breath.
“Hold on, now,” he instructed, taking her hand to guide her back into the seat. “We’re going to circle the bog.”
He reversed to get traction on the dirt road, then threw the car into four-wheel drive and hit the accelerator. Cranberry-infused wind slapped their faces as they picked up speed.
“It smells so good,” she said, closing her eyes to inhale.
“Now for the fun part.” He flicked a knob on the dash and killed the headlights, washing the world in darkness.
Lily let out a little strangled cry of surprise as blackness descended. He knew the road—well enough, anyway—and tapped the gas pedal to roar forward.
Instinctively she reached for his hand.
“Don’t be scared, Lil,” he called over the wind, threading his fingers through hers. “I won’t let you get hurt.”
She didn’t answer, but she squeezed hard and he could feel her pulse jumping madly under her skin. r />
Moonlight bounced off the fog to light their way and he drove through the brush and trees with confidence, circling the bog, dodging the branches and, not surprisingly, laughing with her at the thrill of it.
He stopped at a point that jutted into the bog like a little peninsula, not much more than a dirt mound and a few small trees surrounded by a sea of floating cranberries.
When he cut the motor, the silence was total.
“This, Lily,” he said with a reverence he felt down to his bones, “is life without walls.”
Her gaze moved from east to west, taking in nature’s watercolor. “It’s beautiful,” she finally said. “I’ve never seen anything so ethereal, so spooky and stunning at the same time.”
He smiled, satisfied that she got the appeal of one of his secret places. The click of insects, the whisper of leaves and an owl’s hoot echoing over the bog were the only sounds. Except their slow, steady breaths.
“You know what’s interesting about a cranberry bog at this time of year, right before the harvest?” he asked. “The underwater bridges.”
She gave him a quizzical frown. “What are they?”
“Well,” he said, turning to grab the bag he’d shown her earlier. “The water is between two and six feet deep, with a gazillion cranberries floating along the top.”
“Yeah?”
“And in order to harvest without a boat, which not all the workers used to have, you have to climb in and find the underwater bridges and walkways. Which is what we’re about to do.”
She drew back. “We are?”
He held the bag toward her. “Here you go.”
“You want me to wear lingerie into the bog?”
He chuckled. “Just a bag, sweetheart. The only one I could find to carry hip waders and steel-toed shoes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, Lil. It’s moonlight, it’s sweet fruit, it’s scary and adventurous and…” He leaned across the console to whisper in her ear. “It’s my turn to introduce you to some new things.”
She choked softly. “Walking through cranberry bogs?”