Playing Dirty (16 page)

Cade just stared at her. Damn. Could she be cloned? Because he could sure use someone like her on all his jobs.

Eleven minutes later her phone rang, and after answering it she passed it to Finn. “It’s the utility guy.”

Finn talked for a minute, then hung up. “Power’s disconnected at the source, so I’m in business.” He turned to Cade. “You want to come give me a hand?”

He did, although that mostly meant holding the flashlight as, with a few economical moves, Finn put the meter back together, then calling back the City Light worker to have him restore the power.

Almost simultaneously to the latter, Finn craned around to look up at him. “Disk’s moving again. You’re good to go.”

Ten minutes later Cade watched Finn stroll out the kitchen door with a check he’d had Beks cut him tucked in his back pocket. Euphoric, he looked at his cast and crew sitting around the kitchen.

And gave them a big grin. “All right, people. Let’s get back to work.”

T
ONY SCOWLED
as he stalked along the upstairs hallway. He could not fucking believe it. How the hell had they managed to call the one contractor in town who could immediately figure out the problem was in the meter? He’d risked frying himself for nothing!

Seeing Beks headed his way, he forced a smile. “Hey,” he said as she came abreast of him. “Good work getting everything up and running again.”

“I know, isn’t it great? That Ava is amazing.”

“Ava?” He had to think a second, then said incredulously, “The
kitchen
gal?”

She laughed. “She’s our concierge, Tony. The woman knows everyone in town.”

“That’s…handy.” Not to mention goddamn inconvenient.

Beks gave him a sunny smile. “Isn’t it, though? She’s the best.”

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, all but choking on the words. “The best.”

“H
EY
, A
VA
! Hold up!”

With one hand still curled around the handle of the car door she’d just opened, Ava looked over the top of her Beemer to see Cade loping across the apron and down the driveway toward her. To her disgust, her heart kicked up a beat when she took in the oughtta-be-outlawed blue eyes, rumpled hair and the dark stubble shading his jaw, chin and upper lip.

“What’s up?” she asked as he rocked to a halt on the other side of the car.

He shoveled his fingers through his hair as he met her gaze across the car’s roof. “Beks used my rental to run an errand for me and she just called to let me know she’s hung up on 520. So I told her to take the car home. Can you give me a ride? My place is on your way if you don’t mind going through downtown.”

“Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all that she was legitimately headed in the other direction. “I’m not going home, but I’d be happy to call you a cab.”

His eyes glinted between narrowed lashes. “Got a hot date with your Brazilian boy toy?”

“I’m not sure why you’d think that’s any of your business, but if you must know, I’m on my way to my
parents’ house to inventory their supplies for a party I’m putting together for my father’s birthday.”

“Great.” He opened the passenger door. “I’ll go with you. I haven’t been back to the ’hood in a long time.”

And before she could open her mouth to say, “No, you won’t,” or recommend that he see the “’hood”—good God, what a misnomer for Broadmoor—on his own time, he’d climbed into her car and settled himself. He looked relaxed…and unmovable.

Squaring her shoulders, she smoothed her hands down her hips beneath her open coat from the red belt bisecting her tobacco-colored, crocheted-silk tunic to the garment’s hem where it met a matching-hued pencil skirt. Then, unhooking her purse from her shoulder, she lobbed it into his lap and climbed in the driver’s side.

A few minutes later she had to admit he was a hard guy to resist in the euphoric mood he was rocking tonight. He laughed and joked and must have thanked her four times for getting Finn there so quickly this morning.

“Swear to God,” he said now, “you saved the day. Without Kavanagh, we probably wouldn’t have gotten any filming done—so if you need someone to count the crystal or whatever it is you’re planning to do at your folks, I’m your man.”

“Don’t think I won’t hold you to that.” She wheeled into the entrance to Broadmoor and stopped at the gate-house. Rolling down the window, she smiled up at the guard. “Hi, Mr. Ziegler.”

The white-haired man beamed down at her. “Well, hello, Ava. I haven’t seen you around for a while.”

“I know. My parents have been in Chicago since right after Christmas. I’m stopping by to check on the house and take care of some things before they get back.”

“I wish you well on that,” he said and pushed the button that opened the gate.

She drove through the community, passing lush, green estates, some viewable from the streets, others hidden. Eventually she turned into a driveway and cruised up to the 1929 brick Tudor. Stopping in front of the garage, she turned off the engine.

“Home, sweet home,” she murmured, conflicted as always when confronted with the elegant house in which she’d grown up.

Cade looked over at her. “Lemme guess. This is a George Stoddard design? On—what?—the ninth fair-way?”

Remembering he’d never been here, she nodded.

His face went curiously blank. “My old man was forever hacked off because the only thing available when he bought here was one of the houses built in 1940.”

“Ah,” she said wisely. “Nouveau.” She grimaced. “At least according to my mother. I think stuff like that matters a whole lot more to their generation.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he disagreed as he followed her up the stone path leading to the front door. “I know some old schoolmates who still consider the size of our wallets of paramount importance.”

She hitched an indifferent shoulder. “So, screw ’em.”

Cade looked startled for a nanosecond, then threw back his head and roared with laughter.

Her mouth dropped open as the sound rolled over her, and she had to make a concerted effort to close it. But, God. She hadn’t seen that kind of unguarded humor from Cade since…man…back in high school before the fallout. It caused her to fumble at the front door lock.

She managed to open it about the same time he got control of himself, and when she stepped inside and
held the door for him to enter, he gave her a decisive nod. “Yeah,” he agreed, a small smile crooking up one corner of his mouth as he followed her inside. “Screw ’em.”

Leading him into the expansive foyer, she was aware of him looking around while she entered the security code in the alarm system. She shrugged out of her coat and took Cade’s leather jacket when he did the same, throwing them over the fir banister on the open stairway. “C’mon into the library. We’re on the hunt for candles.”

“This is really nice,” he said as he followed her into the room one door over.

She nodded. “I like that my mother hasn’t fallen prey to the jump-on-the-decorator-du-jour bandwagon that’s rolling through her crowd. Not that the current designer doesn’t do an excellent job. But there’s just something so generic about having all your friends’ houses done by the same person.” She gave him a wry twist of her lips. “All those understated striped draperies, I suppose.
Anyway!
” She led him to the other end of the bookshelf-lined room and pulled open several low cupboards in the built-in unit alongside the corner fireplace. “We’re looking for candles. You start here, and I’ll look in the ones over there.”

“What kind of candles?”

“Just pull out everything you see. I’m still working on my color scheme—so it will depend on what my mother seems to be favoring at the moment.”

“Why not just ask her?”

She snorted. “Clearly you’ve never met my mother. She expects me to design the party without her input—as long as I read her mind and do it her way.”
Annnd I probably shouldn’t have shared that.

Seeing with a glance that there was nothing in the cupboard she was searching, she closed it and rose to her feet. “Keep looking down here. I’m gonna run up to my old room. Mother said something about utilizing the storage space up there.” Ava knew she was more likely to find what she was looking for in the dining room or kitchen, but she found herself in sudden need of a little breathing room.

As she suspected, her old closet and the antique high-boy and matching dresser held seasonal clothing and items. So she simply spent a moment practicing meditation breathing to get her head back where it belonged.

She didn’t know why being here had her undies in such a twist, especially over something she thought she’d reconciled herself to a long time ago. But for some reason it did.

It wasn’t as if her folks were bad parents. They simply loved her in their own way. Of the two, her father tended to be a little more affectionate, but he traveled a lot for work and was hardly ever home.

Neither was Mother, for that matter. As long as Ava could remember, Jacqueline had traveled with him as often as she could. When Ava thought of the people who had been there for all her triumphs and failures, it was always Poppy, Jane and Miss Agnes who came to mind.

“Well, hell,” a deep voice behind her drawled. “I was hoping for pink and girly.”

She whirled to find Cade leaning in the doorway, his hands in his pants pockets. “What?”

The real question should have been,
What the hell are you doing up here?

“I spent a lot of hours once upon a time, imagining you in your bedroom. Dancing naked, mostly.” He
glanced around at the elegantly appointed, mostly beige room and missed seeing her jaw go slack.

She had it firmly back in place when he returned his attention to her. “But I always envisioned the place all pink and girly.” He crooked a reminiscent smile at her. “Like those panties you wore when I looked up your skirt from beneath the bleachers back in the tenth grade.”

For a second her blood chilled the way it had that day at the thought of him seeing her fat thighs and probably laughing about them with those assholes he called friends. But she shook it off as she realized she was reacting to far more than just that age-old embarrassment. Regaining her composure, she sent him a mocking smile. The sudden wariness in his eyes almost made her break into a genuine grin.

“Why, Cade Gallari,” she drawled, strolling over to him. “Who knew a bad boy like you would have so much in common with my mother?”

N
O GUY APPRECIATED
being compared to a chick’s mother, but Cade flashed Ava the easy smile he’d perfected years ago to cover up his real feelings and arched a brow. “Your mama hung out under the bleachers, too?”

“Nope. But she sure had a cow when she came home to find Poppy and I had painted my namby-pamby pink room a purple so deep it was almost black and dyed my stupid frilly comforter to match.”

He looked at her curiously. “You remember the exact day you painted a room?”

“Of course I do. It was the day Kurt Cobain died. I had to do something to honor his memory.” Her dimples suddenly flashed. “And I must say, the new paint job sure made my collection of Nirvana posters pop.”

He studied her. “How come I never knew you were a Cobain groupie?”

“Beats me. Probably because by the time we were assigned as science partners and had a few conversations that weren’t all sniping and one-upmanship it was a nonissue.” With a shrug, she turned away. “But this
isn’t getting my work done. The candles aren’t up here. I’m going to try the kitchen and dining room.”

He followed in her wake, trying without success to keep his gaze from the provocative swing of her curvy hips. When he did raise his eyes, it was to notice the way her milkmaid skin played peekaboo through the holey weave of her top above its matching camisole.

Not that he planned to beat himself up for noticing. Hey, he was a guy, and her shoulders were pretty, her back was long and her waist was little. And that ass. Man, that round bootylicious ass. If a man were a touch less cosmopolitan, his mouth might go dry over the way her straight skirt cupped it so faithfully.

He gave his head a little shake. Because it took more than a killer body to make
this
dude’s tongue hang out. At least that was his story.

And he was sticking to it.

He strolled around the family room for a few minutes while she banged around in the kitchen, checking out the family photos gracing many of the surfaces. The longer he looked, however, the more his eyebrows inched together.

Ava was only in a fraction of the pictures—and a frigging small fraction at that. You’d think as an only child she’d have her likeness plastered all over the damn house. He leaned closer to look at the few that she was in and picked up one in particular that he found half hidden in the back of a grouping.

It was a picture of the two of them and another boy and girl practicing their box step during one of the interminable dance classes they’d been subjected to as kids. He and the other boy were clearly hamming it up for the camera, while the girl looked as if she were counting the dance’s six-beat meter under her breath.
Ava had that fluid, relaxed look of someone who loves dancing—and is good at it. Or at least she did in the version with which he was familiar.

Because in this one… “Am I missing something here?” he called into the kitchen.

“Probably,” she said, rising from behind the counter to look down the length of the family room at him. “But what specifically this time?”

“Why are the only photos of you basically head shots?” He hefted the framed photograph in his hand. “This was taken in cotillion when we were what, eleven? I remember some old dude who used to go around taking shots that our parents bought. My mother’s got this exact same one—except in hers we’re shown full-length. This one’s practically all matting.”

Color flowed up Ava’s chest to her neck and onto her face until her skin competed with her hair for brilliance. If she was embarrassed, however, he couldn’t tell it by her voice. That was contrastingly placid when she said, “You know my mother and her issues.”

While her tone was light, there was a darkness in the back of her clear green eyes, and he narrowed his own to study her. “No, I don’t. I’ve never met your mother.”

“Oh. That’s right, I guess you haven’t.” She essayed an insouciant shrug. “Well, what can I say? Mom finds my weight problems…distasteful.” Raising her chin, she looked him in the eye. “You of all people should be able to appreciate that.”

Aw, crap.
Anger he could have shrugged off, because God knows he’d had enough practice over the years. But the slight wobble in her voice, the flash of vulnerability she tried to hide,
those
threatened to bring him to his knees. He opened his mouth to say something lighthearted to smooth over the moment.

As if he’d ingested some mad scientist’s truth serum, however, he muttered, “I learned my father wasn’t really my father.”

She blinked. “What?”

Shit!
Where the hell had that come from? Telling himself to start backpedaling
now,
he instead heard himself say, “Senior year. Three weeks before you and I—” His hips executed an involuntary none-too-subtle thrust and, unable to believe he’d made such a teen-stud gesture, he stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets and looked at the hardwood floor.

Only to lift his gaze to meet hers again. “That was when I found out the cold, distant sonuvabitch I called Dad wasn’t my father at all—that my mom’d had an affair almost nineteen years before, and I was the result.”

His well-developed survivor instincts howled at him to shut the hell up. It was good, sound advice, yet instead of heeding it, his mind circled back to the way Ava had opened herself up both downstairs and in this very room. It couldn’t have been easy to admit her mother neither quite trusted her professional abilities, nor approved of her body.

He found both concepts difficult to wrap his head around, because regarding her abilities, they were just killer impressive. As for her body…well, anyone with eyes in their head knew her mother’s assessment was insane.

And he decided if she could put herself out there without a safety net, then so could he. “I guess it kind of explained why the old man never liked me.”

He saw Ava staring at him with a what-the-hell-is-this-guy-babbling-about look on her face and really,
really
wanted to shut up then. She already thought he
was the scum of the earth. Did he truly want her to think he was an incoherent loser with daddy issues on top of it?

Yet still he admitted, “I was…blindsided by the revelation. I’d tried my entire life to please the old bastard, but despite agreeing to raise me as his own, apparently every time he looked at me he was reminded of my mom’s infidelity.”

She gazed at him for one second, two. Then she said, “So you were hurt when you discovered the truth.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Although at the time I would have denied it with my last teenage macho breath. Because I was also furious—” with a cold, hard kernel of rage that he hadn’t merely embraced, but had nurtured “—and that was a helluva lot easier to handle. It edged out the pain.”

Yet Ava saw a shadow of that hurt in Cade’s eyes now, and it pulled at her in a way she didn’t like and would give much to deny. She didn’t want to feel sympathetic to his long-ago plight. Not to mention that she wasn’t sure what to do with the information. On the one hand, she was kind of fascinated. But if he thought it bought him a free pass when
she
had paid the price of his anger, he was dead wrong.

And yet—

Sympathy did tug at her. She knew what it was like to feel as if you never quite measured up.

Damned if she was obligated to own up to it, however. With a roll of her shoulders, she demanded flatly, “So you thought you’d share the wealth by throwing me to the wolves?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, Ava, and I’m not trying to justify or excuse it.” He looked her in the eyes. “I honest to God liked you. But I was like a feral dog
during that period, more willing to snap fingers off than accept an extended hand. Everything I’d ever believed about my parents had been obliterated, and I felt like the guys in my crowd were all I had left. So when they came up with that bet, which I’d ignored before, I…agreed to it. I’d wanted to sleep with you for a long time, anyway, so I convinced myself I didn’t care, that if you became collateral damage, I could live with that. Because, hey, I was a bastard, wasn’t I? You only had to ask my old man.”

Dammit, she almost got that. She had a sudden vision of him as he’d been at eighteen, and if she was honest with herself, there had been moments when she’d felt something was…off, seconds when he’d disappear into himself or the chill stillness that would take over his expression for just a moment before he reverted to the laughing, sardonic Mister Cool she was familiar with. He’d been such a high school hottie, though, that she had simply dismissed it as a product of her own insecurity.

Yet even seeing things in hindsight and maybe understanding the reasons behind his actions a little better, the end result still smarted—even as it filled her with an edgy anger. Not wanting him to see either reaction—or that she was more comfortable with the anger than her unwilling sympathy—she gave him a polite smile.

And an equally polite bum’s rush.

“It’s been a long day,” she said with distant courtesy, “and as I said upstairs, this isn’t getting my work done. So paw through those cupboards over there while I finish up in the kitchen, will you? I’m more than ready to go home.”

She managed to mostly keep a room between them after that, until she finally located her mother’s candle
supply in a deep side drawer of the built-in desk in the kitchen. “
Here
they are.”

Cade strolled across the room to peer over her shoulder into the drawer. “That is one helluva lot of candles.” He turned his head to look at her, and his breath first grazed the outer curve of her ear then insinuated itself down its whorls like magical smoke when he demanded, “And this is supposed to help narrow down your choices how?”

As much to get out of range of the sudden sensory overload as from a desire to take a closer look, she bent over the drawer. “See these balsam fir ones?”

“Huh?”

“The dark green with a slight blue tone?”

She could almost feel his eyes burning holes in her back when he said, “Are you messing with me, Spencer?”

“No, look. I’m talking about these.” Bending farther forward, she ran her fingertip across the top layer of a box of tapers and turned her head to glance up at him.

He was studying her butt, and she snapped her fingers. “Hey, up here.”

When she had his unabashed attention, she said, “My mother’s got a mess of this color, so I’m guessing it’s her new favorite. Plus I remember my dad wearing a sweater this shade the last time I saw him.” Her lips curled in a tiny smile. “The man never buys his own clothes. So we’ll take the balsam and these metallics—” she selected some silver and gold pillars and grinned at him “—and we’ve got ourselves a color scheme.”

He stared at her. “How do chicks
do
that?”

“We have uteruses—they give us magic color sense.”

His nonplussed expression made her mood do a one-eighty, and, feeling downright companionable, she
straightened and gave his forearm beneath his pushed-up sleeve a sisterly pat.

Its hair-roughened warmth didn’t feel all that brotherly beneath her fingers, however, and she retracted them. Delicately, she cleared her throat, then directed briskly, “Pull out every candleholder you can find. I’ll figure out which ones I can use and where I’ll need to supplement when I come over to do the linen count.”

He nodded. “I saw some in the library.”

“Excellent. Gather up what you can in there and I’ll go look in the dining room. Let’s put everything we find on the counter in here.”

Twenty minutes later they had quite a collection, and a design for the decorations was beginning to take shape in Ava’s mind. But looking at the assembled hurricanes, candelabras, votive trees and floater bowls, she blew out a tired breath and decided she could work on the details at home. Taking a couple of photos on her phone to help refresh her memory later, she said, “What do you say we call it a day? I’m played out.”

“Yeah, you and me both. Let’s hit the road.”

The moment the two of them were enclosed in what up until today she’d considered a generously proportioned car, she became highly conscious of him again.
Sexually
conscious, dammit. She refused his offer to buy her dinner on the way home, and cited the need to pay attention to the road in order to avoid conversation. But her awareness of him grew by the moment, and it was with relief that she finally pulled up to the curb in a loading zone in front of his building.

“Well,” she said, turning to face him for the first time since they’d climbed in the car, “thanks for your help.”

“Not a problem. I dug seeing your old bedroom—
I’ll forever envision you in a dark purple room with Nirvana posters.”

She pretended the sound that escaped her wasn’t actually a snort. “Yeah, because ’94 decor is so au courant.”

“Hey, it suits you a helluva lot more than the bland beige your mother painted it.” One broad shoulder hitched. “Anyhow, I’ll see you in the morning.” He reached for the door handle.

Yet instead of opening it, he turned back to her, his expression serious. “I really meant it when I said I used to fantasize about you in high school—and I hate that the way I fucked everything up probably makes it hard for you to trust that I’m telling the truth.”

The idea of a teenaged Cade lusting for her tugged at something deep inside her. But it was the look in his eyes that started her heart tripping, tripping, tripping.

Before she could even open her mouth to say…she didn’t know what…he reached across to lightly trace his fingertips over the thrust of her cheekbone and down her cheek. The edge of his thumb brushed the outer curve of her lips, dragging the lower lip open for a second before his hand continued on to her chin, which he lightly grasped. He merely gazed at her for an attenuated heartbeat, his eyes bluer than a tropical sky.

“If you believe nothing else,” he commanded in a low, I’m-not-screwing-around-here voice, “believe this. You gotta be aware that you’re a knockout now, but even then? Baby, you may not’ve measured up to your mama’s standards, but I thought you were—
God,
Ava—so ripe and round and beautiful.” His mouth quirked in that crooked smile. “And seeing you naked remains to this day one of the highlights of my life.”