Addicted to Nick (3 page)

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.

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.

“You might as well have,” Nick muttered, and grimaced at the uncomfortable tightness of his jeans as she turned on her heel and walked away, her backbone rigid, head held high. He watched her until she disappeared out the front of the barn, and then he shook his head in disgust.

Well, hell, didn't that little demonstration come off a treat?

All he had managed to prove was how easily she could fire up his temper and heat his blood. He had come out here this morning to get the phone business sorted, to smooth over their rocky start with some getting-to-know-you dialogue, then to move her back into the house. After lunch he wanted to check the balance sheet valuations to ensure the offer he made to buy her out was fair. And after
dinner, once business was out of the way, his getting-to-know-you plans were aimed purely at pleasure.

So far he had barely managed to tackle item one on his list—not exactly a grade-A start. Then he relived the touch of her hand, recalled the hot spark in her eyes and the soft color in her cheeks, and he smiled. He had some work in front of him to get to that last pleasurable item, but it would be worth the effort.

Yep, it would take both work and flexibility, and when Jason came by leading a horse, Nick saw an opportunity to adapt his plans. Chances were he would learn more from the kid in an hour than he could finesse from Tamara in a day.

“Need some help?” he asked as Jason tethered the animal to a hitching rail.

“You know how to bandage?”

Nick counted four rolls in Jason's hands and smiled easily. “I'm a quick study. You show me the first one, and I figure I can manage the rest.”

 

T.C. eased Monte's leg down, stretched out the kink in her back and tried to prevent her gaze straying to the other end of the barn. What were they laughing about
this
time? They'd been at it for more than an hour, chatting easily, laughing with nerve-grating regularity, Jason obviously reveling in his role as teacher to Nick's student. Their rapport shouldn't rankle. Nick could spread his charm from here to the back of beyond, but as long as he didn't try it on her, what should she care?

With a last disgruntled glance in their direction, she stooped down, took Monte's leg again and eased it between her knees, determined to refocus on rasping a level surface for the horseshoe. She managed to concentrate for all of three minutes before she heard the slow tread of approaching boots, then the scrape of a drum against con
crete. Looking back beneath her arm, she saw the outstretched length of denim-clad legs as he took a seat.

Ignore him, she warned her body, but to no avail. Already her muscles had tightened in unconscious response to his proximity, to the notion of him watching her. So okay, she told herself, the man unnerves you, but he's right there, not six feet away, and it's about time you started on that list of questions. But as she shifted the words about in her mind, forcing them into some sort of logical order, her tension must have transmitted itself to Monte and he shifted his weight, almost overbalancing her.

By the time she righted herself and calmed Monte, she had decided this was neither the time nor the place for this conversation. Much too important for casual asides between hammer blows, she justified, attacking Monte's hoof with renewed fervor because she wanted the job finished—quickly. She could practically feel the touch of that warm blue gaze on her backside every time she bent into her task, but she clenched her jaw firmly, determined not to show how much he disconcerted her.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked after she had steadfastly ignored him for several minutes.

“Rasping.”

“I can see that much.”

“Glad your eyesight's not a problem,” she mumbled.

“Nothing wrong with my eyesight…fortunately.”

She let the horse's leg down and tsked with disgust as she strode to the anvil seated on a nearby workbench and started bashing at the horseshoe. “Haven't you anything better to do than ogle my backside?”
Bash. Bash. Bash.

“You think I was ogling?”

She stopped hammering long enough to cast him a long-suffering look.

“I hardly ever ogle a woman with a hammer in her hand. Too dangerous.”

She almost smiled at that. Almost. Nick wondered why
she fought the urge, wondered what it would take to hear her laugh out loud. He had a feeling he would enjoy seeing her emotive eyes brimming with laughter even more than he enjoyed them sparking with irritation.

“I hope it doesn't bother you, me sitting here, watching you.”

“Actually it does.” Tossing the hammer aside, she turned around to face him. “I'm not used to having anyone watch me work.”

“Joe didn't?”

“He…he didn't make me feel uncomfortable.” And Nick did. He could see the uneasiness in her gaze, in the restless way she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, in the way she scuffed the toe of one boot against the ground.

“You must have gotten along pretty well with Joe,” he said before she could turn away again. He didn't mind if her discomfort was due to her awareness of him, but he did want her comfortable enough to talk with him. Joe seemed like the place to start.

“Because he left me so much?”

“That's not what I meant.”

One corner of her mouth curled cynically. “No?”

“No. You say you weren't lovers, but obviously you were closer than the usual boss-employee.”

Their eyes met and held, and he saw a flicker of something—maybe surprise, maybe relief, maybe some kind of yielding—before she looked away. He saw her swallow, then take a deep breath, before she spoke in a slow, measured voice.

“Joe gave me this job at a time when I really needed it, and he did so against everyone's advice. I knew horses, but I'd never managed a stable this size. I was young and inexperienced, plus I was female. But he went with his gut instinct, and he gave me the job.” A ghost of a smile curved her lips and touched Nick somewhere deep inside,
somewhere he didn't even want to identify. “I made sure he never regretted that decision, and he appreciated the extra effort I put in. We weren't lovers, but we built a bond.”

“Of mutual respect?”

She looked up then, and the intensity in her eyes smacked him hard, midchest. “I don't know about the mutual, but I do know how much I respected Joe. I admired him, I loved him, I wished he was my father.” The last phrase came out in a breathy rush. Then, as if she regretted letting on so much, she turned her head and looked away.