Too Hot to Handle: A Loveswept Classic Romance (7 page)

“Hah,” she answered. “Don’t change the subject.” They shared a benignly challenging look for a moment. “Dinner,” she ordered. “It’s getting late.”

“Right,” he said finally, in a tone that let her know he planned to ask about her ex-husband again later.

Matt filed Tyler away under subjects to be examined at his leisure. For now, he was too intrigued by the smokehouse. Every spare space in the room was taken up with vines, ribbons, and bright bolts of fabric, a kaleidoscope of warm colors. He lifted two very large baskets lined with the bright fabric and carried them outside, depositing them beside a stack Callie obviously had been working on recently.

“What do people use these for?” he wanted to know.

“Oh, to hold magazines, or wood, or pine cones. They usually put them beside their fireplaces for decoration.”

“Won’t William eat them if we leave them here?”

“What, eat roots and vines, like other goats? Not
William. He prefers more tasty morsels.” She ringed her arms with the last of the door wreaths and stood looking around the room. “Your accommodations, sir, are prepared. I’ll give you linen and a pillow later. Let’s go have dinner.”

“You mean William only destroys automobiles and wildflowers?”

“And other things that I won’t mention. Just don’t leave this door open if you want to have a complete set of clothes in the morning.”

Matt whistled as he followed her to the cabin. Maybe he’d lose his clothes some other way tonight.

The rising sun was beginning to turn the sky a soft lavender when Matt finally gave up on the daybed and on any hope of sleep. He pulled on the old gray shorts he’d found behind the bed, obviously left by one of Callie’s friends. The shorts were too snug, but they’d do for a little while.

Wearing his white undershirt and his jogging shoes, he padded outside. There was a cool, crisp freshness in the air, and Matt sat on the smokehouse steps, taking in the tranquility of the valley.

Even though the dawn was lovely, he didn’t want to be out there to see it. He wanted to be inside Callie’s cabin. After the night before, a night of good food and good conversation and laughter, he wanted to be in her oversized bed, under the bright-colored quilt. The woman had all sorts of save-the-something-or-other posters on her bedroom walls, but he didn’t
care. It looked like a cozy, cheerful place. He wanted to be cuddling that freckled body with the full breasts.

Matt felt a wave of regret catch at the muscles in his stomach and tighten them into a shivery knot. He had to stop thinking about Callie as if he were some … some love sick goat.

“Arrrgh. I don’t want to think about goats,” he muttered, looking around carefully for William.

Matt tied the laces on his shoes. Groaning at the thought of the upcoming activity, he stood up and jogged, loose-limbed, across the yard to the driveway. He stopped and turned, jogging in place while he took a look back at Callie’s cabin.

He was immediately reminded of a Christmas-card catalog he’d gotten the year before from a company in Oklahoma. The cards carried a western theme of mountains, rustic cabins, and sanctified wilderness.

He was always drawn to the scenes because of the permanence and peacefulness they pictured. Now, here in a little valley at the base of a mountain chain in north Georgia, he prayed that permanence and peace had come to life for him.

Callie was frying thick slices of country ham when she heard footsteps outside the back door. “Come on in the kitchen. Breakfast is almost ready,” she called.

“I assume you’re talking to me, not William,” Matt answered.

“Oh, William doesn’t like ham. He never eats anything he’s known personally, and this ham came from a pig of Tom Hicks’s. You want orange juice or my specialty?”

Getting no answer, she turned around. Matt stood in the doorway, his head cocked at an angle and a humorous look in his eyes that told her he was considering a rakish answer to her question.

“Good morning,” he said slowly.

Her heart skipped a beat and her knees quivered at the sight he presented.

“Good morning,” she finally managed to say.

His light-colored hair was damp and thick. He filled the doorway, and his head barely cleared the top frame. His T-shirt clung to the muscles that rippled in his stomach as he raked his fingers through his hair.

And the shorts. Oh, dear. Callie forced her gaze away from their brevity. They barely covered the essentials, and the slits in the sides hinted at the hollows in his lean haunches. Those shorts were definitely not boring. Definitely not.

“Your specialty?” he asked in a throaty voice that made her feel suddenly warm all over.

“My special apple juice,” she explained hastily. “Red apples grown right here in the valley, canned by Tom Hicks’s wife last fall.”

He peered at the stove. “What, no alfalfa sprouts?”

“Now, look, I fed you pot roast and mashed potatoes and peas with butter last night, so you know I’m not a fanatic about health food. Sit down, city slicker.”

He settled on a rickety stool and watched her as if she’d hypnotized him. Which she had.

She was wearing a short culottes outfit in a bright cotton print. The leg hems and the edges of the sleeveless bodice were decorated with ruffles. Her thick hair tangled with the bodice ruffles in an enchanting
way. The outfit must have been out of style for ten years, Matt thought, and on any other woman it would have looked silly. On Callie it looked great.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“No.” He made himself sound comically disgruntled. “I dreamed about William. I wanted to dream about you.”

“What did William do?”

“He was in my garage in Atlanta. He methodically bashed each of my antique cars. They were covered with wildflowers, and he ate the flowers before he left. He had a laugh just like Walter Brennan’s. It was a nightmare all right.”

Callie giggled so hard that she had to put her spatula down for a moment. Wiping her eyes, she gazed at Matt tenderly.

“You made all of that up, you disgusting liar,” she told him with glee. “What an imagination you have. That’s great.”

Matt grinned at her. He had never considered himself an imaginative person. Her compliment flattered him immensely.

“Thanks.”

He continued to enjoy the sight of her. The short, wide legs of the culottes proved to him that he had an active imagination; in fact, an overactive imagination. She poured a small glass of apple juice, placed it before him, and turned back to the stove.

He watched her move around the kitchen. There was an intimacy between them, a warm, gentle feeling of friendship, even though it was new and still fragile.

The night before, he’d wanted to make love to her, and she’d known it. He’d wanted her in the swing
beside him, nestled against the curve of his shoulder, her thick, dark hair tickling the base of his chin as they moved slowly back and forth. That was what he’d planned.

He’d gracefully gotten her out to the porch, even had her sitting by him in the swing, when a sudden invasion of mosquitos big enough to carry off William descended, and they’d been forced to end the evening. She’d given him a flashlight and a rueful smile that said she had her own regrets.

“Sorry you didn’t sleep well,” she told him now. “Was the bed awful?”

“No. But at about three
A.M.
I debated whether to elope with Ruby.”

She chuckled. “What stopped you?”

“The fear that I’d encounter William if I went outside the smokehouse.” They both laughed. “So what’s on for today?” he asked, taking a swallow of the crisp, cold fruit juice. “This is great. Tastes like cinnamon.”

“Well, as a guest, you’re on your own for a while. I have to clean out the barn. The garden needs fertilizing.”

“I see. Nothing like good physical labor to work out my city tensions. Good idea.”

“Your help isn’t necessary, Holland. I don’t think you’ve had a lot of experience with cow manure.”

“You’re right, Carmichael, but I can learn.”

“It’s very old manure. You love old things, so maybe you’ll want to collect a sample to take home.”

“Hah.”

Smiling, Callie placed an oversized red plate filled with scrambled eggs and ham on the counter beside him, then sat down on a stool nearby, with her own
plate. On the counter between them she placed a plate of buttered toast and a large mason jar of luscious-looking preserves.

“Dig in, Matthew. The bread’s homemade. The eggs are courtesy of Esmeralda, the ham you already know about, and the homemade strawberry preserves are courtesy of William.”

“Wait a minute. I can understand everything else, but what does William have to do with the preserves?”

“Last year he ate all the strawberry plants, so I didn’t have any preserves. This year I fixed the garden gate so he couldn’t get to the strawberries. I have to keep him away from the preserves too.”

Matt took a thick slice of toast and spread it generously with the thick, sweet berries. “Does he prefer preserves on toast, or straight from the jar?”

“Oh, he likes them straight out of the jar if he can get into the jars when I’m cooling them on the windowsill. I learned about his sweet tooth when he knocked off half of my first batch.”

“What else do you do, Callie? You garden. You’re an artist. You obviously sew, if all the matching cushions and quilts around here are any indication, and you cook like a dream.” Matt chewed the salty ham and swallowed it with obvious relish. “Has it occurred to you that you’d be a perfect mail-order bride for some settler from the early west?”

“Mail-order bride?” she chortled. “I’ve been called a lot of things, Matthew Holland, but never a mail-order bride. Tell me about you. About your house in Atlanta. About all the girlfriends I’m sure you must entertain there.”

Matt blinked. The intrusion of his Atlanta life into
the cozy kitchen was wrenching. He lifted his shoulders uneasily.

“Go on, tell me,” she insisted. “Suppose we were eating breakfast at your house. Tell me where we’d be sitting. You do live somewhere, don’t you? Let me see.” She licked her lips and stared off into space. “You have the penthouse apartment in that elegant building near the Peachtree Plaza downtown. Or … you have one of those big, old-money homes off West Paces Ferry in Buckhead.”

“No,” he retorted, “not even close. I live in a new-money house I built up in Roswell. Very suburban. And in the summer, when I eat at home, I usually eat at a glass-topped table by the pool.”

“Ah-hah! I knew it. By the pool. And you eat fresh fruit, croissants, and eggs benedict.”

She took a bite of egg, and Matt lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched the motion of her lips. “No, I usually eat shredded wheat and milk, the same thing I’ve been eating all my adult life.”

“Ah, continuity and regimentation, of course. And I’ll bet while you eat you watch the gardener as he tends your roses and flower beds. And I’ll bet you have a housekeeper and at least one maid. And a Jacuzzi. You shop at the best places, only Lenox Square or the Galleria. You never, ever ride public transportation. You order all your Christmas presents from the Neiman-Marcus catalogue, or from some upscale mail order outfit like the Banana Republic.”

The sharp scrutiny in her blue eyes was softened by an impish smile. Matt was annoyed that she understood his life-style so well.

“Go on,” he told her. “You’re accurate—I’ll admit
it. I feel like I’m from a family of insects you’ve studied all your life.”

“Ah, the ‘Furry-Legged Up-and-Coming Money-Maker,’ ” she said without malice, nodding. “I come from the same family. That’s why I understand the habitat so well.”

“But you don’t have furry legs,” Matt pointed out drolly. No, she had incredibly smooth-looking legs, he added in silent appreciation. They begged for a man’s touch.

“Ah, but I mutated from the family, you see,” she explained, smiling. “I lost the characteristics.”

“What are the sexual habits of my breed?” Matt asked, leaning toward her and smiling coyly. “Can I make whoopee with members of the mutant order?”

Callie’s eyes turned darker. “That remains to be seen.” After a potent moment of silence, she looked away and began slicing the ham on her plate.

“So,” she murmured. “After breakfast you take a swim in your Olympic-sized pool, then you put on your silk suit and have your chauffeur drive you into town, where you have an office on an upper floor of some huge glass tower that reflects the sun like a mirror.”

Matt finished the last bite of his ham and shook his head. “Wrong. I drive myself, and my office is in the paint plant, over in the industrial section of west Atlanta. Hardly anybody ever sees it. And many times I find myself wearing coveralls. My big lunch-time hobby is scraping paint from under my fingernails.”

He playfully whirled a piece of toast at her, and she caught it. “When I do have a visitor,” Matt continued, “he or she is taken to a special reception
area to wait while I put on my silk suit and pointy-toed shoes. I work, Callie Carmichael, and I work damned hard, right alongside my employees. My father left me money, so I can’t claim to be a self-made millionaire. But he didn’t leave me success or a good reputation. I made those things myself.”

Callie lowered her eyes to escape the tense, defiant look he gave her. “I see,” she murmured, and cleared her throat. “Now. About your girlfriends. Shall I tell you what I suspect about the social life you lead, Mr. Holland?”

“I wouldn’t miss your wild theories for the world. Go ahead.”

She indicated his tight shorts with a slight nod in their direction. “Dressed in alluring and highly masculine jogging clothes, you trot along the quaint suburban roads of your native Roswell. Fashionable women, some mere college girls and others of full maturity, get cricks in their necks and nearly cause traffic accidents as they drive past you, craning to stare. Some do more than stare. They stop; they flirt.”

She paused, leaned her chin on one hand, and looked him steadily in the eye. “You meet them later, at chic contemporary bars and intimate restaurants. After one or two respectable dinners, perhaps a night at the Academy Theater or a concert at the Fox, you invite them home. The gardener, the housekeeper, and the maid are discreet. They’re accustomed to seeing you and your lady friend of the day at breakfast. It’s no big deal. None at all.”