Guilty Pleasures (8 page)

“I’ve tried. Believe it or not, I’m a cautious man. About some things.”

“What things?” she asked as the cork popped from a bottle
of ch
ardonnay. He was no connoisseur of wines, but Dusty was, and he never ga
ve up trying to educate Nasty.

“Let’s just say I don’t take chances with the really important stuff—like getting involved with a woman.” He poured two glasses of wine and gave her one.

“Why is the boat called
April?”

“For a friend of a friend. She was very brave. She died. I never knew her, but I wanted to do this for the people who did.”

Polly looked thoughtful but didn’t comment further. She drank some wine. “I tried to persuade myself I shouldn’t come looking for you.”

“I’m glad that didn’t work out.” She wasn’t oblivious to
him. Not oblivious at all. “If you hadn’t come to me, I don’t know how much longer I
’
d have held out.”

“In spite of Festus’s announcement the other day? You didn’t stick around afterward.”

The wine didn’t do much for him. He leaned against one end of the banquette and swung the glass by its rim. Words
needed to be carefully chosen. “You didn’t want me to stick around, Polly.”

She considered that.

“You told me you had business to attend to.”

“Until Festus dropped his little bomb, nothing would have made you go away. That’s how it seemed.” Her color heightened. “Then all I had to say was that I ought to go home, and you couldn’t get away fast enough.”

True. He’d needed to think things through. “You didn’t ask me to stay.”

“How could I? I hardly knew you—hardly know you.” Her voice faded away.

“But it does feel as if you know me, doesn’t it?” he said gently. “I feel as if I’ve known you a long, long time. Polly, your business is your business. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“Don’t I? Is that your way of saying you want to start something with me, and you don’t care whether or not I’m free?”

Was that what he’d meant? “No. It’s my way of saying that
I
want to start something with you if you want to. And I don’t think you’re the kind of woman who’d do that if she
…
Hell, I don’t know what I mean.”

“I’m not married.”

He exhaled through pursed lips.

“Do you believe me?”

Nasty gazed at her intensely blue eyes. “Yes, I do. But what was all that about? The call. Your friend Festus sounded as if he believed the guy. The
nice
guy.”

Her regard wavered. “I don’t know. Freaky things happen in this business. People get fixations on you. It’s one of the trade-offs.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it either. But I do like this job. Apart from Bobby, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s changed our lives. Before we were
…
” She averted her face. “None of that matters. Forget it.”

“Is this the guy who made the other calls? The ones to your answering machine, or whatever?”

Polly scooted around and got to her feet. She toured the saloon, smoothing wood paneling, studying the black-and-white etchings he’d collected over the years. And while she stepped from one to the other, she hummed something complicated classical, maybe. “Places you’ve been?” she asked tapping a picture frame.

He’d let her avoid giving answers for a while. “Yes.”

“Paris. Sydney.” She pointed to the next picture and raised a brow in question.

“Amsterdam,” he told her. “Then Hong Kong, Wellington, Bogota, Madrid. London, of course.”

“You’ve traveled a lot.”

“It used to go with the job.”

“When you were in the Navy.”

“Yeah.” The less said about that the better.

Her gaze dropped to his left ankle. She didn’t comment on the scars, hadn’t mentioned his limp.

“Ugly, huh?” he suggested.

“No. But it must have been painful when it happened.”

“It’s over now.” And he was lucky to be both alive and relatively unscathed. “You are getting threatening calls, aren’t you?”

She laughed.

He wasn’t convinced. “Aren’t you?”

“No, not really. It’s just silliness.” She returned to pick up her wineglass and stood near Nasty. “The guy who said he was my husband. Sam Dodge. He’s Bobby’s father.” The announcement was defiantly delivered.

“But you’re not married anymore?”

The shutter came down. Her eyelids lowered hiding her expression—except for the fixing of her mouth in a tight line.

“You could have told me the truth before.”

“I didn’t owe you the truth. I don’t owe you anything.”

“True.” But she was here, and she’d already let him know
she’d come to set the record straight—and that she was less than indifferent to him.

She rested an elbow on one crossed arm and touched the glass to her lips.

He felt her, felt her body heat, the tension in her muscles, her rigid stance. And he felt her awareness of him.

Nasty set down his own glass. He shrugged away from the banquette and stood over her, very close.

Polly’s fingers tightened around the glass. Her lashes flickered and a nerve near her left eye.

Half-expecting her to run, he touched the tips of his fingers to that fascinating pulse at the base of her throat.

She held absolutely still.

“I’m not the enemy,” he told her.

The breath she took was deep.

He took the glass away and put it down beside his own. “You don’t believe me.” Was that what he was seeing—feeling? “That first night on the docks
…
You decided I was making these calls, didn’t you?”

She looked at him then, and he absorbed the shifting emotions he saw, the wavering between suspicion and wanting to trust.

“I’ve never called you on the phone. When I do, you’ll know it’s me.”
Her pulse beat hard. The skin he touched was soft and warm. She had come to him. “You are frightened by these calls, aren’t you? They aren’t just something that goes with the territory? These are different?”

Still she hovered on the edge of believing her instincts.

“You came to me alone. You’d be no match for me if I was the kind of man to take advantage, but you came here. Are you willfully stupid or are you trying to persuade yourself I’m a good guy?”

The look she aimed at him held everything she felt, doubt, anger, confusion, fear, the need to trust. She needed to trust him. He took her hand in his and she didn’t resist. Polly Crow needed
a friend. Whatever roles the people in her life filled they didn’t fill the one that had brought her to him this morning.

Nasty sat on the end of the banquette seat. He tugged gently on Polly’s hand until she let him bring he
r to stand between his knees.

Today she wore her hair loose. Straight and silky, it swung forward over her shoulders. Dark lashes contrasted with the honey color of her hair and her light skin. The hand he held trembled and she tightened her fingers around his.

“You and I
are on the same side, Polly.”

She raised her eyes to his. Such searingly blue eyes, so vivid he almost had to look away.

“Friendship would be a good place for us to start.” Whatever it took, he was going to break through her defenses. She wanted him to, or she wouldn’t be here. “Do you need a friend Polly
?
”

At last she broke her silence. “I’ve got friends.”

“A different kind of friend.”

Her throat moved. “I stopped thinking about it a long time I
ago. I thought I had anyway.”

“Would you like
to make that clearer for me?”

She raised her free hand as if to push back her hair, but made a fist and settled it on his bare shoulder instead.

She d
idn’t look away from his face.

Neither did Nasty look away from hers. “What did you stop th
inking about a long time ago?”

“I don’t know how to say it.”

“You’re not frightened of me, are you?” He’d frightened a lot of people in his time, but only people he’d wanted and needed to frighten—Polly wasn’t one of them.

“I’m frightened of me. Of what I’m feel
ing. I haven’t let myself… I
haven’t let myself think about—about me, I guess. It’s been easier that way.”

“Polly—”

“I’m not sorry for myself.” The defiance was there again. “It’s just the way it is—the way it’s had to be. I had to make
my way. For Bobby and for me. I’ve had a lot of luck, too. Some really good people have come my way.”

One by one, he loosened her fingers. Her hands were longfingered but narrow—the nails short. Graceful but capable hands. He turned her palm upward, stroked it with his thumb. “Should
I
be scared to be here with you?”

“I think you know you shouldn’t.” The feelings were new to him, feelings he’d never expected to have, never even considered having. “No more scared than I am with you.”

The fist on his shoulder unfurled, and she spanned the muscle there, rubbed tentatively to the base of his neck and back.

His erection was instant. So was the desire to pull her into his arms. Sexual urge and tenderness. These weren’t the reactions he’d practiced dealing with. Survival required different skills. But this was another kind of survival, wasn’t it?

If she knew the power of his response to her she’d run. “This Sam Dodge. Your son’s father”—he didn’t want to call the man her ex-husband—“does he keep in pretty close touch?”

“No. I haven’t seen him for several years.”

“I’m glad.” Pretending indifference wasn’t in the cards anymore. He’d already declared himself.

“It’s fine with me. Bobby still thinks about him, though. I know he does. Children need to feel wanted—by both of their parents.”

“Sometimes one is as good as it gets,” he said. A reflex. He didn’t want the topic to get personal. “Did Sam reach you on the phone?”

She hesitated before saying, “Yes. We talked.”

Cautiously, trying not to think about Sam Dodge, or the fact that just the sound of the man’s name made him jealous, Nasty bowed over Polly’s palm. He pressed his lips there and closed his eyes. If she bolted, he’d just have to start all over again. Polly didn’t bolt.

He felt her hold her breath.

She smelled of roses, the wild kind that grew in hedges in old gardens—in the sun.

When he kissed the base of her thumb it jerked. At the touch of his lips on the inside of her wrist, she drew in a sharp breath.

And he drew in just as sharp a breath when she stroked his hair so very lightly. She stroke
d his hair all the way to his
nape, and her fingertips stayed there.

He tensed all the way to his gut. Concentration got tougher. “Did you get together with Sam?” He had no right to push her for the personal stuff.

“Not yet.”

Yet. “He’d be a fool not to want to get back with you.”

“Sam and I never worked. We never could. He’s in Florida, and I haven’t invited him to come back here.”

A man couldn’t be blame
d for feeling satisfied when he
got
the answer he wanted. “I’m glad you decided to come to me.”

“Are you?” she said. “We don’t know much about each other.
I
don’t know anything about you.”

“You know some,” he told her, raising his head. He glanced at the rise of her breasts above the low neckline of her dress, at her throat—and into her face. “I told you I’m thirty-six. Ex-Navy. Co-owner of Room Below—and this boat. A car. Not much else. I never was interested in things.”

“What did you do in the Navy?”

He’d never be able to tell her, not really tell
her.
“I
was
a
SEAL.”

She frowned, then her expression cleared. “Oh, sure. Diving, right?”

Among other things. “Yes, diving.”

“I used to be a cook.”

It was his turn to frown, before he laughed. “A cook? You?”

“A very good cook,” she told him. “For an artists’ colony in Bellevue, the one my mother manages now. A friend of mine, Bliss Winters—she’s Bliss Plato now—she owns it. She was very good to me when nobody would take a chance.”

“I can’t imagine anyone saying no to you.”

Pleasure tinged her smile. “I can be flattered, you know.”

“Most of us can. What did Sam want?”

Her smile faded instantly. “According to him, just to talk. For old times’ sake.” She made a disbelieving sound. “As if I’d want to remember any times with him.”

“Weren’t there any worth remembering?”

The question earned him a direct stare. “No. Not one of them. I was never married to him.”