“She’s an acquired taste, I agree.” Chloe glanced at the privacy hedge separating Maine Lane and Genevieve’s mansion. “And while I don’t condone murder, she is my mother, so could you make it quick?”
She was joking.
“I’m trained in advanced torture techniques. It’ll be everything but quick.” He was not joking.
“Good for you, but as self-centered as she is, what did Genevieve ever do to you?”
Those dreamy eyes narrowed, revealing a devil inside. It was borderline scary. It was also, regrettably, straight-up sexy.
He smirked without answering, then grabbed the hammer, flipped it in a tight circle, and adeptly caught it. “You were just leaving, right?” It was more suggestion than question.
Turning his back, he pounded a long metal pin into a hinge, making a racket as he reattached the door, the noise pollution a sign she was dismissed.
Only, Chloe didn’t take orders.
“Don’t forget to add more putty,” she shouted, supervising.
Or more like ogling.
He was hammering on the highest hinge of a ten-foot-tall door, his inked bicep bulging and his faded T-shirt riding up, exposing tanned skin, washboard abs, and a delicious happy trail leading down inside his jeans. Hate was the only thing keeping her from dropping to her knees.
Hate . . . and Riverhead.
The ear-splitting echo of steel banging on steel stopped, with Chloe caught eyeing him below the belt.
She saw his near-naked body this morning, but from a disappointing distance. Watched from the porch of the carriage house as he dove into the frothy surf at the ass-crack of dawn, forgoing a wetsuit despite the cool water temperature, then returning one agonizing hour later, shaking his sopping hair.
No big deal, she’d taken him for dead and resisted calling the Coast Guard at the thirty-minute mark.
Not for beginners, a morning swim in the rough Atlantic. But then again, he’d always loved the water. Didn’t fear its intensity and power the way she did.
He rivaled it.
“I’m making bourbon-spiked banana chocolate muffins tomorrow night,” she said, offering a reason for leering. “For a bridal shower on Friday. I’d save you some, but you look like the type who counts calories. Let me guess . . . your favorite food is kale, right?” Because that body took discipline.
He gave her a once over, then shrugged. “I’d eat your muffin.” Or not, his indifference added.
“How romantic.” She mimicked his earlier words.
But his anti-compliment caused a fluttering down below, in her lonely lady region. A dry, desert wasteland that flooded whenever Jameson Maine was near.
He wasn’t extending a legitimate offer to service her, though. He was goading her, and she understood why.
Fighting was easier than facing the past.
“You look nice,” he murmured as the skirt on her flowy dress tossed up in the morning breeze. “Not as stuffy as yesterday. That outfit was power. This one is pretty. No balls to bust today or an innocent man’s house to steal?”
The sarcasm was gone. He was almost . . . cordial.
“Innocent, my ass,” she said, watching him rummage through a toolbox. “And as long as you fix my front door properly, no balls for me to bust today. But there’s always tomorrow.”
He didn’t smile as she intended. Just made himself busy with that toolbox.
“Actually, I have a meeting with a new bride this morning, and she’s the strict black-tie type. Expects, uh . . . stuffy, as you put it. Then I need to rush back here for a meeting with a landscaper. There’s a half-dead oak in the back yard that’s in danger of falling on the house. I’m dressing to accommodate both.”
“The oak with my parent’s names carved into it?”
Jonah + Lydia 4-ever
When she nodded, he scrubbed a hand down his face. “Jesus, everything here is dead.”
She suddenly realized how exhausted he looked.
“Did you get any sleep last night?”
He threw her a warning glare. One that meant back off.
“I saw you this morning,” she pressed. “Or what some would consider still the middle of the night. Out for a casual swim in shark-infested waters.”
“There aren’t any sharks in that water, Chloe.”
“Oh, but you were in that water. The biggest, baddest shark of them all.”
Jonah, a proud father, had shared Jameson’s known military accomplishments whether she wanted to hear them or not. Chloe was proud, too, albeit reluctantly. She was also petrified for him. What they knew of his missions was scary. What they didn’t know, even scarier.
And despite those terrifying acts being rooted in duty and valor, he could be declared a lethal weapon. A danger to society.
A menace to Chloe Morgan, specifically.
“Try to get some rest this afternoon, okay?” Her concern was genuine. “I know it’s hard to be here without Jonah, but lie down and close your eyes. Even if you don’t sleep, it’s still rest.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem it.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the half-fixed door as if about to perform surgery.
“It’s too fucking hot to sleep,” he finally muttered.
“Don’t you live in Florida?” She looked at the plates on his truck, parked in the spot where Jonah usually had. “You’re not used to the heat?”
“Tampa Bay heat. The Libyan Desert heat. It shouldn’t be this hot in The Hamptons in September. Sweating my ass off, even on the back porch.”
The back porch.
Screened in, offering relief from the mosquitos on a hot, summer night. A daybed tucked into the corner, relief from the stifling house when the dilapidated air conditioning failed to keep up.
It also offered a cozy corner for two teenagers in young love when they needed a change of scenery from their normal hideaway. The carriage house. She wondered if he remembered those stolen nights, the cover of darkness their ally.
“You can’t be sleeping much better in the carriage house.”
Yeah. He remembered.
“I watched you play in the most dangerous pool there is, at four in the morning. And I’d been up for a while.”
“The most dangerous pool there is isn’t the Atlantic. It’s the Persian Gulf.”
“Did you swim in that?”
He nodded. “A few of those times, for my life.”
“No wonder you can’t sleep. Memories of those sharks.”
“Yeah. Memories,” he mused, glancing at the carriage house. Then he went back to his door repair, conversation over.
“Okay, then,” she said, lingering when she needed to be at her appointment. “Guess I’ll be on my way.”
He made a sound that could have meant goodbye. It also could have meant go fuck yourself. Probably the latter, but either way, she turned to leave.
“You said last night you hated me.”
Thrown by the gravity in his tone, she paused.
“Do you?” He asked the question with hooded eyes.
Chloe looked for signs of residual love in that dark gaze. Didn’t see any. Looked for the boy she used to know from the back porch. The carriage house. Didn’t see him.
“Truthfully?” she asked, teetering on the edge of a cliff.