Jennifer Greene - Irresistible Stranger

Griff came up behind them, greeted Mary Belle’s coy flash of eyelashes and inviting smile with his usual Southern boy charm. But Lily had long figured out he could flirt in his sleep; it didn’t mean anything beyond an unshakeable kindness to women. Behind the courtesy, though, she could see the tired circles under his eyes, the smudges of dirt that tracked his clothes, dusted his shoes. He was one wiped-out cookie.

Still, he looked better than earlier, when she’d worried he was absolutely at the end of his rope-even though he’d denied it to the death. She wouldn’t make that mistake again, suggesting he had human qualities, like anger and frustration. Those sharp edges were definitely gone. Now he just looked as if he could crash the instant he sat down-if given the chance.

Lily had been thinking about that all day. Whether she was going to give him that chance to rest.

Or whether she was going to do something she’d never done in her life. Take a petrifying risk. Hurl good sense to the winds. And make love with a man for no reason beyond that she terribly, totally, irrevocably…

Wanted to.

“So you finally get to escape from here?” she asked him.

“Finally is the operative word.” Griff couldn’t believe she’d stuck it out through the whole afternoon.

“Hey! Quit looking at me! I’m wilted. More than wilted. Hair went flat, clothes went wrinkled, the whole body went droopy.”

“You’re kidding, right?” She looked beautiful. The more he was around her, the more he was becoming addicted to the fresh cheeks and huge, dark eyes, and all that thick, silky hair. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was damned close to impossibly appealing. “Wait a minute. You weren’t listening to Mary Belle, were you? Promise me now, you’ll never let that woman get near you with a pair of scissors.”

She chuckled. “I’m desperate for a major trim, but I’m an easy cut. Otherwise, that woman’s sense of style would be more than a little…daunting.”

He laughed-for the first time all day. And realized that his neck and shoulders were unknotting for the first time all day, too. He steered her under the overhang, for the shade, aiming for his EOS. “Thanks for hanging out this afternoon. Couldn’t have been fun. I owe you.”

“Yup, you do. I expect diamonds and rubies and stuff. But for right now, I have a more immediate plan.”

“What?”

“You drop me off at the B and B. I’m going to shower and crash. You go straight home, turn off all phones, and crash yourself.”

He waited. “That’s the whole plan?”

“Well, maybe you should also lock your door so nobody can bug you.”

“Hmm. I have a different plan.”

“What?”

They reached his car. He clipped open her door. “I drive you to your B and B. You get a change of clothes-like a swimsuit, a towel. We go back to my place. We can either shower first, or skip the shower and head straight for the hot tub-but I have in mind putting ice cubes in it. Have something ice-cold to drink. Followed by something ice-cold to eat.”

“All right, all right, all right. You can have me. Body and soul, and skip the rubies. Just the words ice cold are enough to bring sentimental tears to my eyes.”

“You’re easy, Lily.”

“Yeah. I’ve been told that before.”

He’d bet the bank she hadn’t. He’d bet the bank there’d never been one thing any guy had ever found easy about Lily…which might be part of the reason he was so damned mesmerized.

At the B and B, she only took a few minutes, flew out the door with Louella flapping on her tail, urging a plate of cookies on her, talking nonstop, waving wildly at him.

He only had eyes for Lily. She dropped a sack in the backseat-big enough to hold a bathing suit and changes of clothes. But somehow, in those few minutes upstairs, she’d turned into another woman. The shorts had been replaced by a sundress, all white and yellow, the daisies at the hem fluttering around her knees.

Her legs were bare.

Her eyes were softer than chocolate.

Her lips were noticeably free of lipstick.

And she’d pulled up all that thick, silky hair with combs.

“What?” she said, when she piled in and yanked on her seat belt. Instead of starting the car, she’d caught him looking at her.

“Nothing. Just wiped out after that long day,” he said, but tiredness was the last thing on his mind. He kept trying to remind himself that she was a teacher. Not that teachers couldn’t be gorgeous, but it was hard to think of them as femme fatales. And that was just it. She wasn’t. He could readily picture her in front of a bunch of kids, laughing, scolding, hugging the little ones, playing games. Not seducing guys. Not making guys melt at her feet just for a smile.

Yet somehow, there was something in her eyes, the way she looked at him, the way she smiled at him-that messed with his head. Was still messing with his head.

He had to make another stop to pull off the rest of his evening plan, but within an hour they were back at his place. The hot tub was set on lukewarm, the pool jutting over the hilltop. She emerged from her shower with a towel concealing her suit, and immediately saw the spread on the patio table. Plates and bowls were set in a bed of ice. Fresh shrimp with a sharp red dip. Chilled chardonnay. A plate of cheese, crackers and caviar. Lime sorbet in a sterling icer. Fresh peaches. It wasn’t exactly a normal dinner, but the food was all bite-size, no fuss.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m in love with you. I know, I know, that’s what all the ladies say.”

“It is. I can’t help if I’m wonderful.”

“Yeah, that’s your press all right.” She plopped the towel on a lounge chair, touched a bare foot to test the temperature in the tub, and then sank in with a groan loud enough to wake the sky. “Speaking of your press, though-I heard under the table that you’re some kind of high-brow math whiz.”

There, for a moment, he felt reassured. She wasn’t perfect. In fact, when she started prying and probing and using that weird intuition of hers, she could be downright annoying. He didn’t have to worry about a permanent attachment to a woman who just never let anything rest. Right? “Hey, I already confessed I had a degree in math.”

“Yeah, but you never said you used it to do really top-secret, fancy work.”

“Who told you such an outrageous story?” Apparently, he wasn’t supposed to notice how fast she’d dipped that curvy figure out of sight. He could pretend when he had to.

“I never kiss and tell. But I picked it up from a lot of sources. There was a tall, gray-haired woman-your insurance agent? I heard her talking about making sure all your math computers were extra-protected at home, that maybe you needed more coverage or security for your work in progress. Then one of the kids-I think Jason-was telling the other boy who works for you about how you were going to cure ‘really, really bad diseases’ with math. How you were working for somebody in secret-”

“Sheesh,” he said disgustedly. He popped a cold shrimp in her mouth, handed her a sweating-cold chardonnay, and slipped into the water himself. The lukewarm water hit his battered, knotted muscles like a balm. Still, he turned a scowl her way.

“It’s all right, Griff. Don’t worry. I’m just a lowly teacher. I didn’t understand anything, really.”

“You managed to add two and two and come up with different answers than almost anyone knows around here.”

“Why is it a secret?”

Another reassurance, he thought. She wasn’t just smart. And nosy. She could be downright relentless-so relentless that he couldn’t think of a single way to avoid answering her. “If someone was working on, say, a hopeful new medicine-a drug that could cure a serious type of disease-then that medicine could conceivably be worth a lot of money. So it might make the most sense, security-wise, for the computations and analyses, and all the trick problems associated with mathematically testing the possibilities, to be done off-site. It’s mostly computer work. Calculations, probabilities, that kind of thing. There’s no reason it has to be done in an office or inside company walls. In fact, it’s probably better done in a private facility, where there are no distractions in sight, no one tempted to steal it.” He looked at her. “Particularly if no one has a clue where such work is being done.”

She took a bite of the cracker mounded with caviar, grimaced, gulped down some wine, and aimed for the tray of cheeses. “It’s just hard to grasp,” she admitted. “That your ice-cream parlor is such a front.”

“It’s not a front.” She’d offended him again. Not just because his ice-cream deal was real, but because a “front” implied gangster-type behavior. Like he had something to hide that was wrong.

“Okay, okay, bad choice of words,” she said gently. “It’s still difficult to grasp. You’re so adorable, it’s just really hard to think of you as being geeky. Major geeky.”

Okay. He’d had enough of her playing with him. He’d stuffed down enough food, had quenched his thirst, was de-stressed from the frustrating day. He had more than enough energy to tackle her now. “You said you’d had quite a morning, that something happened…”

“It did.” There, that wicked grin of hers faded out. She leaned her head back, sank in water to her neck. “I talked to Mr. Renbarcker-the man who owned the mill back when?”

He listened-to how she’d managed to discover Webster Renbarcker was in town, how she’d located him, what he’d had to say. He watched her face, watching her expression lift on hearing what a good man her father was, what good care he’d taken of the sick mill owner.

“And that’s just the thing, Griff. Mr. Renbarcker was positive my father would never have set a fire. My dad loved the mill, loved him, loved us. Mr. Renbarcker talked about how my dad was prepared to stay to the end, that he’d socked away a financial safety net… So it doesn’t make sense that my dad felt such despair when the mill closed. He knew it was going to close. He knew how sick Mr. Renbarcker was. There was nothing to throw him into a depression. If anything, he no longer had to feel responsible, but was finally free to go on and do something else.”