Addicted to Nick

“So how did she get to be Ug?” Nick asked.

“Joe said ‘I’d call her plain old ugly,’ and it just sort of stuck. Except T.C. shortened it to Ug.”

T.C. smiled at the familiar anecdote. She felt like she might finally be capable of speech. “You look like you slept well,” she said, by way of a start.

“Like a baby.” His smile deepened the creases on either side of his mouth, and it struck her that he must smile a lot. “Any more of that coffee around?”

“I’ll get it,” Jason offered. “Um, you want milk or anythin’?”

“The works.” Somehow T.C. wasn’t surprised. She figured Nick would demand the works in all kinds of ways. “Plenty of milk, at least two sugars. Thanks, Jason.”

As the kid bustled off, Nick hoped the coffee wasn’t already bubbling away in a percolator. He wanted some time alone with Tamara. He pulled up the bucket vacated by Jason and sat. “You know, I’d still be sleeping like a baby except the phone rang.”

She stopped fidgeting with her mug and went very still. “I didn’t hear it. I guess we were down at the track. Was the call for me?”

“I can’t say. There was no one there.”

She cradled the mug in both hands as if to steady it, declared, “Probably a wrong number,” then swiveled around to peer down the alleyway. “I wonder what’s keeping Jason?”

Nick gritted his teeth. Her evasiveness was already roughing the edges of his patience. “If it was a boyfriend calling,” he suggested slowly, “I might have put him off.”

“If I had a boyfriend, he’d know not to call when it’s short odds I’d be down at the track.”

When he met her hostile glare, Nick felt a perverse satisfaction, and it had nothing to do with the no-boyfriend revelation. Finally he had her attention. “Seems to me there’s something funny going on with your telephone. No one there this morning, off the hook yesterday.”

“Geez, T.C.” Neither had heard Jason’s approach. He stood there, shaking his head reproachfully. “Did you leave it off the hook again?” He handed Nick his coffee. “She did that the other day, too.”

The warning glare she directed at Jason told Nick his instincts were spot on. “Perhaps you had better explain.”

“Explain what? I knocked the receiver off the hook and didn’t notice. You got a wrong number. End of story.” With a dismissive shrug, she turned to Jason. “You can show Nick around while I finish the jogging.”

Nick stopped her intended exit with a hand on her shoulder. “Have you been getting nuisance calls?”

When she shuffled from foot to foot without answering, Nick increased the pressure on her shoulder. Over the top of her head he met Jason’s worried look and smiled reassuringly. “How about you carry on with the horses while I sort this out?”

As Jason set off, whistling cheerfully, he felt her tense up beneath his hand. “You’ve been here less than twelve hours and you’re giving directions to my staff?”

“Our staff,” he corrected.

She let out her breath in a soft whoosh. “We have to talk about that.”

“Yes, we do. But first we’re going to settle the phone business.”

She bit her bottom lip, and Nick waited a count of ten while she considered. “So, okay, there has been the odd anonymous call.”

“How long has this been going on?”

She shrugged. “A couple of weeks. On and off.”

“A couple of weeks! Have you reported it?”

“Look, there’s nothing to report. No threats, no heavy breathing. Probably just kids mucking about. It’s no big deal.”

“No?” Nick swore beneath his breath, then out loud when the penny dropped. “That’s why you attacked me last night. You thought I was the caller. What if you’d been right? What if I had been some stalker hell-bent on hurting you? Did you think of that before you confronted me with that damn fool toy?”

“I can look after myself. I’ve been looking after myself—”

“Is that what you think you were doing when you ran your hands all over me last night?” He grabbed her hand and pulled it to him, forcing her to touch him, then to stroke down his chest from collarbone to waist in one long, slow sensuous caress. “When you touched me like this?”

She recoiled as if she had contacted a live wire, then stood blinking her huge green eyes at him. She rubbed the hand he had used to demonstrate his point down her thigh as if trying to remove his imprint from her skin.

That notion was as powerfully erotic as her actual touch.

With a proud lift of her chin, she drew herself up as tall as her diminished height allowed and met his gaze. “I did not touch you like that,” she said with quiet dignity.

“You might as well have,” Nick muttered, and grimaced at the uncomfortable tightness of his jeans as she turned on her heel and walked away, her backbone rigid, head held high. He watched her until she disappeared out the front of the barn, and then he shook his head in disgust.

Well, hell, didn’t that little demonstration come off a treat?

All he had managed to prove was how easily she could fire up his temper and heat his blood. He had come out here this morning to get the phone business sorted, to smooth over their rocky start with some getting-to-know-you dialogue, then to move her back into the house. After lunch he wanted to check the balance sheet valuations to ensure the offer he made to buy her out was fair. And after dinner, once business was out of the way, his getting-to-know-you plans were aimed purely at pleasure.

So far he had barely managed to tackle item one on his list—not exactly a grade-A start. Then he relived the touch of her hand, recalled the hot spark in her eyes and the soft color in her cheeks, and he smiled. He had some work in front of him to get to that last pleasurable item, but it would be worth the effort.

Yep, it would take both work and flexibility, and when Jason came by leading a horse, Nick saw an opportunity to adapt his plans. Chances were he would learn more from the kid in an hour than he could finesse from Tamara in a day.

“Need some help?” he asked as Jason tethered the animal to a hitching rail.

“You know how to bandage?”

Nick counted four rolls in Jason’s hands and smiled easily. “I’m a quick study. You show me the first one, and I figure I can manage the rest.”

T.C. eased Monte’s leg down, stretched out the kink in her back and tried to prevent her gaze straying to the other end of the barn. What were they laughing about this time? They’d been at it for more than an hour, chatting easily, laughing with nerve-grating regularity, Jason obviously reveling in his role as teacher to Nick’s student. Their rapport shouldn’t rankle. Nick could spread his charm from here to the back of beyond, but as long as he didn’t try it on her, what should she care?

With a last disgruntled glance in their direction, she stooped down, took Monte’s leg again and eased it between her knees, determined to refocus on rasping a level surface for the horseshoe. She managed to concentrate for all of three minutes before she heard the slow tread of approaching boots, then the scrape of a drum against concrete. Looking back beneath her arm, she saw the outstretched length of denim-clad legs as he took a seat.

Ignore him, she warned her body, but to no avail. Already her muscles had tightened in unconscious response to his proximity, to the notion of him watching her. So okay, she told herself, the man unnerves you, but he’s right there, not six feet away, and it’s about time you started on that list of questions. But as she shifted the words about in her mind, forcing them into some sort of logical order, her tension must have transmitted itself to Monte and he shifted his weight, almost overbalancing her.

By the time she righted herself and calmed Monte, she had decided this was neither the time nor the place for this conversation. Much too important for casual asides between hammer blows, she justified, attacking Monte’s hoof with renewed fervor because she wanted the job finished—quickly. She could practically feel the touch of that warm blue gaze on her backside every time she bent into her task, but she clenched her jaw firmly, determined not to show how much he disconcerted her.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked after she had steadfastly ignored him for several minutes.

“Rasping.”

“I can see that much.”

“Glad your eyesight’s not a problem,” she mumbled.

“Nothing wrong with my eyesight…fortunately.”

She let the horse’s leg down and tsked with disgust as she strode to the anvil seated on a nearby workbench and started bashing at the horseshoe. “Haven’t you anything better to do than ogle my backside?” Bash. Bash. Bash.

“You think I was ogling?”

She stopped hammering long enough to cast him a long-suffering look.

“I hardly ever ogle a woman with a hammer in her hand. Too dangerous.”

She almost smiled at that. Almost. Nick wondered why she fought the urge, wondered what it would take to hear her laugh out loud. He had a feeling he would enjoy seeing her emotive eyes brimming with laughter even more than he enjoyed them sparking with irritation.

“I hope it doesn’t bother you, me sitting here, watching you.”

“Actually it does.” Tossing the hammer aside, she turned around to face him. “I’m not used to having anyone watch me work.”

“Joe didn’t?”

“He…he didn’t make me feel uncomfortable.” And Nick did. He could see the uneasiness in her gaze, in the restless way she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, in the way she scuffed the toe of one boot against the ground.

“You must have gotten along pretty well with Joe,” he said before she could turn away again. He didn’t mind if her discomfort was due to her awareness of him, but he did want her comfortable enough to talk with him. Joe seemed like the place to start.

“Because he left me so much?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

One corner of her mouth curled cynically. “No?”

“No. You say you weren’t lovers, but obviously you were closer than the usual boss-employee.”

Their eyes met and held, and he saw a flicker of something—maybe surprise, maybe relief, maybe some kind of yielding—before she looked away. He saw her swallow, then take a deep breath, before she spoke in a slow, measured voice.

“Joe gave me this job at a time when I really needed it, and he did so against everyone’s advice. I knew horses, but I’d never managed a stable this size. I was young and inexperienced, plus I was female. But he went with his gut instinct, and he gave me the job.” A ghost of a smile curved her lips and touched Nick somewhere deep inside, somewhere he didn’t even want to identify. “I made sure he never regretted that decision, and he appreciated the extra effort I put in. We weren’t lovers, but we built a bond.”

“Of mutual respect?”

She looked up then, and the intensity in her eyes smacked him hard, midchest. “I don’t know about the mutual, but I do know how much I respected Joe. I admired him, I loved him, I wished he was my father.” The last phrase came out in a breathy rush. Then, as if she regretted letting on so much, she turned her head and looked away.

“You said Joe gave you a job at a time when you really needed it. You were broke?”

“In more ways than you can imagine.”

Silently Nick willed her to go on, to tell him something of the past that shadowed her voice.

“I won’t bore you with the long story. Suffice it to say my esteem had taken a pounding and this job was exactly what I needed. I’m not talking about finding employment or the money—it was the responsibility and the trust. It was his belief in me.”

She turned abruptly and stomped back to the horse, leaving Nick standing there weighed down by the intensity of her words and his own memories. He had experienced that same aching need. Hell, he’d spent the first eight years of his life with no one caring for him, let alone believing in him, so it had taken him a long time to recognize those gifts as the most precious Joe had given him when he took him into his family and called him his second son.

“Yeah,” he muttered hoarsely to himself. “I wish he’d been my father, too.”

He found her back at work, nailing the shoe with businesslike efficiency, as if she had already shed the emotion that still knotted Nick’s gut. That irritated him almost as much as how she had walked away. He watched her swat a fly from the horse’s belly, and with half an eye noticed the animal had worked its lead undone. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere—in fact, it looked like it had fallen asleep. What was it with her animals and sleep?

“Why don’t you get a farrier to do that?” he asked.

“Pay someone to do something I can do? I don’t think so.”

“Why do something so tough and painstaking when you can pay someone to do it?” he countered.

She looked up, her eyes sharp with disdain. “That’s not my way of doing things.”

Trying to prove her toughness, Nick guessed. Not because she was young and inexperienced, but because she was female. There was a story here, a history he suddenly needed to know. “What is your way, Tamara?”

No answer. Okay. He would try a different tack.

“How did you learn to farrier?”

“My father taught me.”

“Your father’s a horseman?”

“He was.”

That was it. No further explanation, and, dammit, her reticence intrigued him as much as it irritated him. “So you followed the family tradition into horse training?”

In one smooth movement she turned, drew the horse’s leg forward and rested the hoof on her thigh. “I chose this profession because I love it. Tradition had nothing to do with it.”

Nick inspected her closely drawn brows, the flare of her nostrils, her tense grip on the hammer. “For someone who loves her job, you don’t look like you’re having much fun.”

Eyes almost crossed with consternation, she glared up at him, but before she could respond the horse swung its head and nipped her neatly on the backside. She yelped and leaped sideways, and when Nick grabbed her shoulders to pull her aside and then to steady her, he noticed the tears flooding her eyes. He also noticed that she wasn’t rubbing her behind but was sucking her thumb.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

She slid the thumb from her mouth, and Nick felt the most unexpected rush of heat. Unexpected and unwarranted, given the circumstances. It was those lips, that damn pout.

“Here, let me see.” Gently he took her hand and inspected the blood oozing from the base of her thumb. The sharp end of an unclinched nail had obviously dug in. “Do you have first-aid supplies?”

“It’s only a scratch.”

He silenced her with a look. “Sit down and don’t move.”

His authority didn’t come from a raised voice but a certain don’t-argue timbre. It had worked on Ug the previous night, and it worked on T.C. now. She sat on the drum. She didn’t move. And when she looked up to find him standing, feet spread, hands on hips, glaring down at her, she told him where to find the first-aid kit.

“It’s in the lunchroom—in the cupboard next to the fridge.” She indicated the general direction with her good hand. He nodded grimly, pivoted, then stopped short when confronted by the ugly end of Monte. T.C. watched in amazement as he smacked the gelding’s rump to turn him around, gathered up the lead and retethered it to the hitching rail before striding off.

Like he did it every day.

She didn’t want to admire the man’s competence—she had spent the last half hour deliberately not admiring anything about him—so she turned her attention to her thumb. Gingerly she wiggled it back and forth, reminding herself that the pain was all his fault.

If he hadn’t disturbed her sleep, she wouldn’t be so fuzzy-headed. If he hadn’t forced her to touch him, her senses wouldn’t be chock-full of memories of his hands on her. If he hadn’t distracted her with his questions, she would have noticed Monte was loose.

So let him play Mr. Competence if he wanted. Maybe then he would go off and do something else—like leave her in peace.

Unfortunately his idea of playing Mr. Competence involved hunkering down in front of her and steadying himself with a hand on each of her knees. She could feel every degree of his body heat radiating through his long fingers, through her jeans and her skin, all the way into her flesh. For a man who moved with such lithe grace, he seemed to take an inordinate length of time to regain his balance and remove his hands.

Not that T.C. gained much respite. She had scarcely recovered her equilibrium before he picked up her hand, placed it palm-up in one of his and bent over to inspect her injury.

She stared at her hand lying in his. How small and soft it looked compared with his—exactly as he had described it in the early hours of the morning. She disliked that thought as much as she disliked the hitch in her breath as his thumb stroked across the center of her palm, tracing her lifeline. Or was that her heart line?

She closed her eyes and dragged in a breath, but instead of badly needed oxygen, her lungs filled with his soft musky scent. Dimly she thought about leaning forward and burying her nose in his neck…but then something akin to liquid fire hit her thumb, and she rose clean off the drum.

Nick steadied her with a hand on her elbow. “Sting a little?” he asked as he reapplied the antiseptic-soaked swab.

“Try a lot,” she muttered shakily.

He leaned closer, so close that when he looked up, she could make out tiny flecks of gold in the blue of his irises. Then he smiled that brilliant world-tilting smile, and she couldn’t help but return it.

“Good girl,” he murmured, and for some dumb reason the admiration intermingled with concern in his eyes brought a thick lump to her throat. Tears welled in her eyes. To her chagrin, one spilled over and rolled down her cheek. She scrubbed at it with the back of her free hand, bit her lip, chanced a glance from beneath her lashes.

The hand on her elbow tightened for a second; then he bent over the first-aid kit at his feet. “We need to get this covered up.”

He took longer than necessary to fix a plaster to her wound, as if he knew she needed time to collect herself and that she would find her tears humiliating. The thought of such insightfulness threatened her composure all over again. She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate on the pain—except there didn’t seem to be much of that anymore.

“All right now?” His thumb gently stroked the inside of her wrist.

T.C. nodded, although she wasn’t all right. For a start, there was that thumb stroking fire across her oversensitive skin. She knew his intent was solicitous rather than sensuous, but her senses weren’t listening to reason. He moved, or she moved, or maybe the air around them moved, for she caught another heady whiff of his scent.

Burying her nose in his neck suddenly seemed like the only thing to do. With eyes still closed, she must have actually leaned in his direction, because the drum tipped forward and she would have toppled right into his lap but for a last second reflex that saw both her hands curl around his upper arms, her injury forgotten.

“Hey, no need to throw yourself at me.”

His quip should have defused the awkwardness. T.C. did try to smile back, but her lips wouldn’t cooperate. The sensation of taut muscles beneath her hands had turned her mouth desert-dry. She tried another smile, considered removing her hands, but couldn’t manage either simple task.

And when she moistened her lips, his gaze followed the movement. His smile faded. There was a moment of intense gravity as they studied each other, and T.C. felt as if she was suspended in time and motion. As if her senses were too packed full of everything-Nick to allow anything else in.

Nearby a horse snorted, breaking the spell, and one corner of Nick’s mouth kicked up. She could have escaped then, if she had wanted to. She didn’t. She sat still, completely enmeshed in the slow-motion sequence. His hand reached toward her. His fingers combed a slow path through her hair, to her nape. He drew her face to his, gradually and surely, until their lips finally met.

His were warm, their touch soft and restrained, as if he were savoring that first contact as much as she. It was no more than lips meeting, touching, retreating, returning, yet it was the most exquisitely sensual indulgence of her life.

She whimpered low in her throat. His hand tightened on her neck, drew her mouth closer, while he slowly—oh so slowly—tasted his way around her lips, enticing them open, inviting her response, causing a cascade of delight to ripple through her body. He was leisurely, almost lazy, but he was very, very thorough. Around the edges of her hearing something jangled vaguely, but she shut it out, focusing all her senses on the complexities of a kiss she had never known existed.

Until he pulled away from her clinging lips.

Then she recognized the metallic strike of shod hooves on concrete, heard a low tuneless whistle, the clink of a steel bit. Jason returning from the track.

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