Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3) (26 page)

“Good to know. I’d considered trying that, but…I’m not that much of a drinker.”

“You know what I’m talking about?”

She laughed easily. “Of course I do, Luke.”

“Damn.” He put his hand on the doorjamb, not asking to come in, not even getting any closer, but still…there. “You’re good. A regular mind reader.”

“I told you I’m nothing of the sort.” She crossed her arms and looked up at him. “If you think you’re coming in here, you’re wrong.”

“It’s not a booty call,” he said, the words still a little singsong in his head.

“No kidding.”

“It’s not even a ‘good night, I’ll see you tomorrow’ call.”

“I know that.”

He inched closer. “But can I kiss you?”

She leaned right into him. “No.”

“’Cause you think I’m drunk?”

She didn’t answer right away, but held his gaze. “If I kiss you, Luke McBain, you know exactly what’s going to happen.”

Everything. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Very slowly, a smile tipped her lips as she lifted her hand and put one finger on his chest. He braced for the nudge backward, ready for her to give him an easy shove out the door. But instead, she started drawing a slow, slow line down.

“We’d kiss for twenty seconds, and you’d be up my T-shirt.”

Exactly what he’d been thinking. How did she do that?

Her finger traveled an inch lower. “Then you’d walk me backwards into my apartment, and we might make it as far as the sofa.” She made a little circle over one of his ab muscles. Then another circle. Then another.

Every circle made him a little…bit…harder. “And then?” he croaked.

“Then I’d probably start dragging your pants off, because I’m kind of tired of imagining what’s in there.”

She was…imagining? Her imagination made him grow two inches.

“And then…you know.”

“No.” But, holy hell, he wanted to know. Had to know. “What?”

By now her finger was over the top of his zipper. A hair’s breadth from his engorged cock.

“I’d probably want to…put you in my mouth.”

His knees practically gave way. “In your…” His voice sounded like sandpaper. Desperate, anxious, horny sandpaper. “Mouth.” Please. He swallowed against his desert throat, not wanting to beg. At least not yet.

“And then…” Her finger pressed on the head of his dick, and he almost exploded at the pressure.

“Then?” He fought the need to rock into her, to kiss her quiet, and get this scene she was describing underway.

“Then…you tell me. Are you leaving? Are you staying? Are you scared? Are you ready? Can you handle it, Luke McBain?”

“Hell yes, I can handle it.”

“You can handle sex, I have no doubt.” She opened her hand and pressed it against his erection. “But what if it’s more than that? What if you really are The One?”

He didn’t answer, staring at her, no blood in his brain, no sense in his heart, nothing but her hand and her question and her right to know.

“And what if…” She continued, stroking over his pants, slowly. So, so slowly. “What if I am The One for you?”

Everything froze. Her hand. His heart. His cock. And time…that stood still, too, while she waited for an answer.

An answer he didn’t have.

She moved her hand away, torturing him with the sudden loss of pressure. “When you’re ready to answer that question, I’m ready to make love to you.” She stepped back into the shadow of her apartment and closed the door in his face.

No, it was not a booty call. It was a call to action…but was he man enough to accept it?

Chapter Twenty

Montgomery Land Technical Services couldn’t have been more different from GeoTech. The company was housed in a ten-story office building in Naples, with a clean and spacious reception area decorated with sleek works of art and a professionally dressed receptionist who offered Luke a cup of coffee while he waited to meet with Sam Montgomery, the VP of engineering he’d been e-mailing about his samples.

Sipping the hot brew to work off the remnants of a hangover and a very uncomfortable night of cold showers and hot thoughts, Luke picked up a geotechnical trade publication and flipped through the pages, but the articles and ads faded as he pondered Ari’s question over and over again.

What if I am The One for you?

What if he didn’t believe in that shit, he thought, letting his throbbing headache answer for him.

But what if she was? What if there was something to her crazy, woo-woo intuition? Then shouldn’t he know for sure?

“Mr. McBain?” A tall, blond woman in a form-fitting gray suit approached him, her heels snapping against the polished oak floor, her hand extended in a warm greeting. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Sam Montgomery.”

Really. He set the magazine down and stood to greet her, taking in exquisite cheekbones carved under smoky blue eyes, deep-red lipstick, and the wink of a sizable diamond floating over the hollow of her throat.

Holy fracking shit. It was like Cerisse had come back to life and shown up at an engineering firm in Florida. He swallowed hard, the banging in his head like a steel rod against a lead pipe.

She gave him an easy smile as she must have read his surprise. “My father is the other Sam Montgomery,” she said with the slightest Southern drawl. “I mean, if you were expecting someone more seasoned. And male.”

He laughed softly. “Not at all. You look like…someone I know.”

Her smile said she wasn’t buying it, but with a smooth gesture, she ushered him through an etched-glass door that led back to the offices. She wasn’t quite as tall as the woman he’d once guarded—and loved—and her hair wasn’t the same natural color of wheat in the sun. But this lady certainly reminded him of Cerisse, and looking at her brought up a million unhappy memories.

Her laugh, her eyes, her look of sheer shock when the bullet—

“I feel like this analysis took longer than it should have since you paid for a rush,” the woman said.

“Not at all,” he replied, forcing himself to think of the business at hand and not the coincidence that the engineer was a dead ringer for his ex-lover. “But I am anxious to see the results.”

She turned and gave him an unreadable look, her expression so much like Cerisse’s he almost stumbled. What a coincidence. Except…was there any such thing as a coincidence? Was this the universe sending a message to him?

The universe. Good God, he was turning into Arielle.

“It was a small sample but not quite an easy job. We worked all weekend.” She gestured toward a sun-washed conference room, where several files spread across the center table, along with a sleek laptop and the bag of shells he’d left to be analyzed.

“But the results are fascinating,” she added as she took a seat and indicated he should do the same. “How did you manage to gather such an eclectic mix of soil and shells?”

“I didn’t gather it, exactly,” he said, glancing at the files and the brightly colored computer-generated images on the screen. “The original core sampling was done by GeoTech, hired by the previous general contractor.”

“Ahh,” she nodded knowingly. “We’ve had to step in on those cases before.” She gave an apologetic tilt to her head. “I mean no disrespect to the firm, but they are not as thorough as some of our clients would like, though I understand their prices are quite, well, competitive.”

In other words, the work by Ken Waggoner’s shop was of piss-poor quality and cheap.

She waved a hand toward the computer. “So it’s very smart of you to spend the money for a second opinion and to use our thermal dyna analysis technique, which I am fairly certain GeoTech has not incorporated into their systems yet.”

He smiled, thinking of the warehouse, and Michelle, smoking up a storm around the samples. They didn’t have thermal anything. “Not yet,” he agreed.

Her eyes twinkled with shared humor and no small amount of flirtation. Which only made him feel a little sicker than yesterday’s whiskey.

“But since they ran the core sampling and know exactly where this source material came from, I have no doubt they were able to find out how interesting this particular sample really is from a geotechnical standpoint.” A little color rose in her cheeks as she held his gaze, direct and warm. “Which, I’m going to admit, turns me on. But I’m just your average geotech geek.”

She wasn’t average anything, and she knew it. Standing to open one of the files, she leaned down, affording him the slightest glimpse of her cleavage. He took a millisecond to appreciate the view, then looked down at the file, surprised at how little interest he had in checking the woman out.

And not because she reminded him of Cerisse. He simply wasn’t interested. He wanted…someone else. And, hell, someone else was all he wanted.

Why didn’t he have the nerve to tell her that last night?

“I guess I misunderstood when I got the assignment, though,” she said, yanking him back to the moment. “I was under the impression this land was in Florida, in Mimosa Key, right off the coast here.”

“That’s exactly where it’s from.”

A frown tugged at her pale brows as she glanced at a file, then back up at him. “Then are you certain these were properly logged at the GeoTech lab?”

The trailer lab? Michelle had handed him the bag right out of a bin at GeoTech. Could it have been something from the wrong job? Misfiled? Mislabeled? Misplaced? All of the above were possible at that place. “Why don’t you tell me what you found?”

She turned the computer so he could see the screen. “These are shells, every one of them from the East Coast of the United States.”

“That’s good.”

She gave him a questioning look. “How’s that?”

“I want this to be a shell mound,” he said honestly. “Anything else and I might have some environmental issues. You are certain that nothing in this sample could be”—he had to say it—“bones?”

“One hundred percent certain,” she said, unfazed by the idea. “We can immediately recognize the difference in the molecular structure and by the calcium carbonate deposits. These are seashells, but they did not come from Mimosa Key.”

“How can you tell?”

“The computer analyzes shell consistency and a number of geographical ‘fingerprints,’ if you will, such as the residue of water, the amount of salt, and the dirt included, and of course currents and general shapes of the shells.”

“I realize dirt can be different from various parts of the world, but shells?”

“Oh, shells are like little GPS trackers in the sand everywhere,” she told him. “Again, calcium, water deposits, even the organic parameters of the exoskeletons tell us where the tiniest shell came from.”

Organic parameters of exoskeletons were making his headache worse. He indicated the computer. “So what did you find?”

“That the farthest south this sample could have come from is Maryland.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. What’s more interesting is that this sample included shells from Canada and Maine and quite a few from the New England coast. It was a veritable geographic potpourri.”

And none of it had come from Mimosa Key, Florida.
Damn it.

He leaned back, trying to digest this information. Either GeoTech made a mistake and he had to go back and get another sample, or he needed to order a whole new core sampling.

“How long would it take to get you guys out there to do the whole job over again?”

“Oh, not long at all.” Her eyebrows flicked with interest, making him wonder if it wasn’t only rocks and shells that turned on Sam Montgomery. Maybe the owner’s daughter got a commission for new business, too.

And maybe that’s why he was getting a song and dance about shells from Maine and Maryland.

For one crazy second, he wished Arielle were right here beside him, using her keen intuition to tell him whether he should trust this woman.

“Would a week throw off your construction schedule?” she asked.

“Yes, it would,” he admitted. “Let me give it some thought.”

She stood, closing the file. “This is your copy. Compare it to the report from the other firm and let me know how you’d like to proceed, Mr. McBain.”

“Luke,” he corrected, taking the file. Their hands touched, but he felt nothing other than a vague sense of disloyalty. Not like with Ari, when he crackled like he was licking live wires every time they barely brushed each other.

“I have to say, you look surprised at all of this,” she said.

At some of it. “It’s the usual can of worms no builder wants to open.” But he had to have answers. He couldn’t start without answers.

What if the other firm was completely bogus, and the core sampling was wrong, and there really was an Indian burial mound under that hill, and Cutter didn’t give a shit?

Then what?

Then he could kiss Arielle good-bye. And all he wanted to do was kiss her…more.

How did that happen? He didn’t know, but he had to find out.

* * *

A kindly old museum docent led Ari to Dr. Marksman’s lab, which ran along the back of the Mound House business offices, surrounded by books, art, tools, and multiple computers all running different analyses and date-testing software. He was on the phone when Ari arrived, but he eagerly gestured her in and to a chair and mouthed for her to give him a second.