Nothing But Trouble (10 page)

Handing her a glass of white wine, he smiled down at the picture. “College graduation.”

“Sisters?” she asked, pointing at the three pretty girls. Two of them had Brandon’s dimples, and all had his dark hair, as did his father. His mother was blond, but she’d bet her last dollar that color came out of a bottle.

“Yes. Judy, Joanne, and Meredith.”

“Your family looks nice,” she said as she set down the picture.

“They’re not bad.” The fond smile on his face proved the understatement. “How about you? Brothers and sisters?”

She shook her head, her throat suddenly closed.

“Only child?”

“Wel , I had a little brother for about an hour.”

His dimples disappeared. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well, me too.”

He took her arm and led her to the couch that probably cost more than her entire apartment. “What happened, or don’t you want to talk about it?”

Shrugging, she said, “Not much to say. My mama had trouble, and she and my brother died almost at the same time.”

“Oh, God. I didn’t know you lost your mother, too. I’m so sorry.”

She was mortified to find tears trying to leak out. She blinked hard. Her father had told her at the time that strong girls don’t cry, and she was hel bent on at least fulfilling that requirement of his. Lord knew she hadn’t fulfil ed any others.

“There wasn’t really any reason for you to know, was there?”

“No. But I’m sorry just the same.” He reached over and ran his fingers through her hair, which felt real y good. “How old were you?”

“Six.”

“Six.” He shook his head. “So it was just you and your dad?

Or did he remarry?”

“No, it was just him and me.” She tried to smile, but it didn’t come out all that successful. “I was a real disappointment.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“Trust me on that one. If I ever did anything right, I didn’t hear about it. I was nothing but trouble to him.”

“Laura, you’re an amazing woman. Why don’t you know it?” She laughed. “Amazing? Give me a break.”

“From where I’m sitting, you look pretty damn amazing.”

She ducked her head. “You’re just saying that because you want me to seduce you.”

His laugh rumbled out of his chest in the sexiest way she could possibly imagine. “Wow. You’re good. Guilty of that, too.

The seducing part, not the saying part.”

One of the three crewmen on the boat knocked discreetly at the open doorway between the salon and gal ey. “Bran? Ready for the appetizers?”

Brandon glanced back, smiling. “Bring ’em on, Juice. And some wine.”

Bran?
Laura knew nothing about the ways of the rich, but at least in movies the help was a lot less familiar with their employers. More formal y dressed, too. Al three that she saw were wearing plain old jeans and T-shirts that didn’t even match.

She waited for Juice to deposit a delicious-looking and smel ing casserole with a side dish of various crackers before commenting. “Do these guys live on the boat?” she asked, mouthwatering as she watched him slather dip on a cracker.

“Usually,” he said, then held the cracker to her mouth.

“What is that?”

“Artichoke dip.”

“Yum,” she said, then parted her lips and took a bite. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

He finished off the cracker and smiled. “My recipe.”

Laura almost choked. “Oh, please, don’t tel me. Are you a master chef or something?”

He swal owed and shrugged. “I enjoy cooking.” He chuckled softly. “When I was growing up, no matter how much homework I had, I had to stay in my room from five until eight—when supper was served—every evening, studying.”

“You ate supper at eight o’clock?” she asked, staring at him incredulously.

“Uh, yes. Something wrong with that?”

“Must be a rich people thing. I had to have supper on the table by four-thirty, or else. Hell, I was in bed by eight o’clock.”

She waved. “Sorry to interrupt. Go on with your story.”

He was looking at her kind of funny, but then he sighed and added, “Anyway, it took me maybe an hour or two at most to finish homework, if I even had any. So I’d sneak down the back steps to the kitchen and sit and talk to Lily, our cook, while she prepared supper. I was fascinated by the science of it all. It reminded me of chemistry class . . . Add just a little of this or that to the ingredients, and you get a completely different outcome. After a while I’d make suggestions, and sometimes they worked and sometimes they bombed, but Lily always let me try. Hence, my love of cooking.”

“Weren’t you afraid of getting caught if your mother walked in?”

That got a bel y laugh from him. When he final y stopped chuckling, he commented, “I don’t think my mother to this day knows where the kitchen is in the house.”

Laura shook her head. “Night and day.”

“Excuse me?”

“You and me. Like night and day.”

“Wel , maybe in our childhoods. But you know what?

Without the two, you don’t get an entire day.” He stroked her arm. “So tel me why you had to be in bed by eight.”

“Because I had to be up by four.”

“Holy sh—four A.M.? Why?”

“Chores,” she said shortly.

“Did you live on a farm or something?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

The idiot grinned. “What kind?”

“Corn, hay, alfalfa, mostly. Sweet potatoes, too.”

“That’s neat.”

She glared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

His eyebrows raised, and he shook his head. “Why would I kid about that? If it weren’t for farmers, you and I would be foraging for our supper tonight. I have a great deal of respect for them.”

“You sound like my father,” Laura groused. “He always called farming ‘noble.’”

“Your father’s right.”

Irritated that this man and her father would agree on anything, she decided to change the subject. “What is it you do, anyway? Working for the family?”

“Right now I’m happily unemployed,” he boasted.

He’d begun uncorking the wine, so he missed Laura’s frown. Her ex had been happily unemployed too, the bum.

“Yeah, wel , I guess when you’re rich you can get away with it.”

He stopped working the cork and glanced up, apparently hearing an edge in her voice. He searched her face, then laughed.

“Well, it’s not what you think.” 

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it is.”

Shaking his head, he popped the cork. “I’m not a lazy drifter, Laura. I’m just relaxing for a few weeks between graduation and honest employment.”

“And what’s this honest employment going to be?” she asked suspiciously, still pretty certain he’d start right off in a cushy job in his parents’ undoubtedly successful business.

“I’m going to work for the Newport D.A.’s office,” he said, handing her a crystal goblet of burgundy.

She almost dropped it. “You’re a lawyer?”

“That’s right,” he said, clinking his glass to hers.

“You cal that honest work?”

Brandon grinned. “Let the lawyer jokes begin.” He sipped his wine before saying, “Well, I’d like to think so. After all, I’m going to work to put the bad guys behind bars.”

“Wel ,” she conceded, “as lawyers go, I guess prosecutors aren’t as bad as some others.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said dryly.

“But,” she added, pointing at his nose, “they stil go to school to learn to twist facts to suit them.” She eyed him up and down, then smiled. “Now that I think about it, it just might be the perfect profession for you.”

He made a valiant effort to appear offended, but the dimples gave him away. “I have to tel you, my mother wouldn’t agree with that sentiment in the least. She was pretty horrified by that decision.”

Laura cocked her head. “The decision to become a lawyer, or to become a public servant?”

Setting down his wineglass, he slathered another cracker and offered the entire thing to her. She eagerly accepted.

Best-tasting dip she’d ever had.

“Wel ,” he said, after eating another cracker himself. “The lawyer part was never in question. As far back as I can remember, it was a given I’d get an MBA
and
go to law school.

No, her problem is definitely with the public servant part.”

Laura sipped slowly while she tried to find the best way to form her next question. She couldn’t imagine her life being directed for her, even into adulthood. “Did you want to be a lawyer?” she asked, going for blunt.

His wineglass went still halfway to his lips. It was a long moment before he answered. “Wel , when I was younger, I wanted to be a fireman.”

An image of him returning home al sooty, and Laura drawing him a bath and washing every inch of him with a cloth bloomed in her head. She quickly shook the fantasy away. As if
that
would have ever happened. “Al young boys want to be a fireman at some point or another. Later on, what did you want to be?”

“You know, I hadn’t thought about it much, because it al had been decided by then, but in college I took a criminology class that intrigued me beyond belief. I really envied those that went on to major in the field and then joined law enforcement in some capacity. Especially for an FBI crime lab.”

“Well, look at it this way—as a prosecutor you’l probably be working with crime labs all the time.
Law & Order
is my favorite TV show, and from what I see, those prosecutors seem to be experts on al that stuff.”

Brandon’s smile was soft and breathtaking. He reached out and ran his finger down her nose. “What an astute little saloon owner you are, Laura Tanner. Why do you think I chose that kind of lawyering?”

And for some reason Laura couldn’t figure out, suddenly the occupation of criminal prosecutor became the most noble profession she could imagine.

* * *

IN THE NEXT few hours Brandon slowly came to realize he was on the best date of his life. Over the five-course meal he’d personal y planned—but Juice had prepared—he and Laura talked about everything from books to movies to their opinions of public schools versus private ones, and how wel or badly each prepared their graduates to go on to college.

“I’m beginning to see a pattern here,” he said, as he enjoyed watching her finish her meal. The woman could really pack it away. He enjoyed that about her, too.

She swallowed a bite down with a sip of water. “What’s that?”

“Everything returns to higher education with you.”

Her lashes lowered, and her only answer was a shrug.

“You’re passionate about it,” he pointed out.

“I just believe anyone who wants the opportunity should have it.”

“Did you get the opportunity?” he asked gently.

Her eyes flashed. “Not yet. But I will.”

Had he just unleashed a miniature tiger? “What do you want to study?”

“Everything,” she said with conviction.

Brandon had to laugh. “You’re going to be in school a long, long time.”

She pushed her plate aside and crossed her arms atop the table and leaned forward. “I hope so. I want to know it al .”

He wanted to lean forward and kiss her and soak in that passion, transforming it into another kind altogether. To resist temptation, he leaned back and swirled the wine in his glass. “I think you know a lot about plenty of things already.”

She waved. “That’s just dabbling and smal stuff I’ve learned from newspapers and books. I mean, I want to know how to understand Shakespeare. He’s a wordy, convoluted fel ow, if you ask me. But there has to be something good in his work, and I want to find out what it is.

“I want to learn calculus and physics and computer science and English literature and study every possible topic under the sun. I’m sure I won’t like them al , but I sure want to try them all.” “I want you,” he said, because he just couldn’t help it.

Laura peered at him through narrowed eyes, sipped her wine, then peered again. “You want sex. It wouldn’t matter if it were me or a couch pil ow.”

“You’re wrong about that. Couch pil ows don’t talk back.”

Her goblet clinked on the table. “You’re expecting me to talk back?”

“I sure hope so.”

She laughed. “You’re in trouble, Brandon. I don’t like sex enough to even consider uttering a word, other than maybe, ‘Get it over with.’”

Now he sat forward. “What if I bet you a mil ion dollars I could get you to sing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ while I ravished you?”

She stared at him for two seconds, her jaw slack, before she launched a baby carrot at him. He ducked just in time.

Straightening to check and see if she was brandishing more food or other implements, Brandon saw she was unarmed, except for the angry looks she was sending his way. “What?” he asked desperately.

“I could take being attracted to you! I could take maybe liking you enough to be wanting to get barn-loft close with you.

But thinking you could make me sing the national anthem at a time like that is the most arrogant, ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. How arrogant are you? And how many women have you had, anyway?”

He didn’t have a clue what “barn-loft close” meant, but it sounded intriguing and worthy of checking out. So did just about every other thing Laura said.

Brandon stood, his chair clattering behind him, and held up his hands. “Do you want me to take those questions in order?

And wil you guarantee not to throw food at me while I do?”

“I’m not guaranteeing anything!”

He held out his palms. “How about a peace treaty? You know al about those. You gave a lecture on the subject for at least thirty minutes during the escargots and the salad.”

“Snails. Call them what they really were. You just made me eat snails.”

“You loved them. And you knew what they were. And, I might add, you gobbled them up.”

“That’s real gentlemanly of you.”

“A reality check, that’s all.”

“I was just sort of being polite eating those things,” she said, sticking her nose in the air and glaring at him with chal enge flashing in her eyes.

He wasn’t about to contradict her. But he loved her qualifiers. The woman didn’t like lying, he was certain, so she stuck a word in here and there that satisfied her sense of honor.

It was really, really adorable.