That Old Feeling

“I’m losing my touch,” Clint decided. The baby was still asleep, and he usually enjoyed these quiet moments before she awakened, sipping his coffee, planning his day, enjoying his garden.

The love of gardening was a bit of a surprise. His father would have turned over in his grave to see his eldest son so content with dirt on his hands, and flower gardens growing around him. Clint himself had been unable to decipher the pull of it.

But this morning he looked out his kitchen window to the back of his property, not to his gardens in the front. No, he was focused on where her red Ferrari was still parked and he was aware his jaw hurt, as if he had been clenching it in his sleep, not surprising given the tension his houseguest made him feel.

Every morning, he got up hoping that car would be gone, hoping that some time in the night it would have occurred to her how bored she was and she would have left.

He had predicted two days—three—at the very outside, and he’d been wrong.

The thing was he was rarely wrong about human nature. That was the strength he gave Jake and Auto Kingdom; that was the skill behind his meteoric rise in the company.

A tumultuous childhood, filled with the rage and pain of his parents, had given Clint a rare and valuable gift. At the time, he had not recognized it as a gift. His ability to look at a person and judge instantly whether they were a friend or a foe, to be able to feel with one-hundred-percent accuracy the mood in a room, to be able to read the truth in a person’s eyes, no matter what their lips were saying, had been a survival tool.

That survival tool had been one in an arsenal of survival skills that had kept him and his younger brother, Cameron, out of harm’s way. That usually meant his father’s foul temper and fists, but they had both grown to manhood in a mean neighborhood where book-learning was scorned and street smarts were everything. Clint knew how to use his mind, and he knew how to use his fists, and he grew up using them both with regularity.

He would have never guessed it would be the unerring instinct about people, rather than his ability with his fists, that would decide his future. But Jake King had spotted him in a group of young apprentices working at one of Auto Kingdom’s tire shops, talked to him for a few minutes, and his destiny had changed. He had moved, at first uncomfortably, into a world where he had been certain he did not belong. It had not taken him long to figure out that, under the masks, most men were the same. And that became his job. To unmask men.

“What’s your measure of that man, Clint?” Jake would ask at some high-level meeting.

Clint could always tell. The light in the man’s eyes, the way he stood, the way he interacted with others, the grip of his handshake. Inevitably, Clint found himself at more and more meetings, more and more a part of the Auto Kingdom decision-making process, more and more part of the inner circle, more and more Jake’s right-hand man.

But now, taking another sip of his coffee and balefully eyeing the red Ferrari, he admitted he was losing his touch, not that “the touch” had ever been applicable to Brandy. Reading her would be like trying to read the wind. She was elusive and mysterious, one minute all woman, the next a wonder-filled child.

He had read wrong, been sure she would have been gone by now. But, if she was bored, she was pretending not to be, though sniffing out subterfuge was usually one of his specialities. She liked the baby and seemed to have a genuine way with her, which surprised him. He would not have put Brandy and a baby together in an equation that worked. But then who was Brandy, really? Did anyone know? Since her arrival, she always seemed to be full of laughter and mischief, as if life itself entertained her even when there were no tall buildings to leap off.

“One more day,” he said. He hoped so. Not that he didn’t appreciate her interest in Becky, but Brandy was disruptive without half trying. She didn’t cook and she didn’t pick up after herself. She walked around in boyish outfits that had never been meant to contain feminine curves and that were strangely alluring because of that.

He was ever conscious she was his boss’s daughter, off-limits for that reason alone, though if he wanted more reasons, he could find them. She was too young for him. She was frivolous. Though he and Jake had never discussed it, Jake probably expected his daughters to marry into the social circle he had spent his life earning his way into. It was one that Clint, for all he had won Jake’s respect and loyalty, did not fit into mostly because he lacked any desire to be a part of those worlds of pure wealth and power.

Still, Brandy did make Clint’s solemn little girl laugh, but what kind of price was he willing to pay for that?

His own peace of mind was in jeopardy—his aching jaw was a constant reminder of that—and he prized his peace of mind more highly than anything.

It was hard to be around a woman who was so vital and alive without feeling these uncomfortable, and totally inappropriate, stirrings of awareness.

Without remembering, dammit, what her lips had tasted like all those years ago.

She had forced him into trying to be invisible on his own property. He felt like the man servant, Jeeves, looking after her but trying to be unobtrusive about it. Trying to maintain his own space and sanity, while she tried to tease him out of it.

He hadn’t tested Brandy’s love of Becky as far as a diaper change. He brightened, a man with a plan. If she showed no sign of going, he’d ask her to handle one of those. Poo-poo with any luck. That should have the princess packing her car and driving back up that road….

Clint heard a deep rumbling, and frowned. A large vehicle was obviously laboring up the other side of the rise, and he turned his attention to his road.

Sure enough, an enormous truck—a moving van from the logo on the side—lurched over the crest of the hill, geared down noisily and began its descent into his backyard.

A moving van?

Had he misread the situation that badly? Not only was Brandy not leaving, but she was settling in more permanently?

“God give me strength,” Clint muttered, taking his coffee cup and going out the back screen door to meet the truck.

It had pulled to a halt in the parking area, which was not designed for trucks.

A redheaded kid with a pack of cigarettes stuck in the arm of his T-shirt rolled down the window and grinned at him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s a hell of a trip for a tramp.”

A tramp? Clint felt relief wash over him. He wasn’t quite sure what the kid meant by a tramp, but obviously he was at the wrong address, an easy enough mistake to make along the lake roads.

“You have the wrong place,” he said.

“Brandy King’s house, right?”

Fury, red-hot, boiled up in Clint. Okay, she was reckless and a brat and annoying as all get out, but nobody was calling her a tramp in his presence. He wasn’t the least bit happy that his first impulse was to open that door, yank the kid out, and plow a fist into his face. He’d always known that part of himself, the fighter, was only buried, not banished.

But before he got to step one, he heard a cheery hello called out and turned to see Brandy coming around the corner of the house. She looked like she had just tumbled from bed, her hair springing around her head, uncombed, her clothing rumpled, her feet bare.

Unless Clint was mistaken, which was possible given his record of the last few days, she was wearing her pajamas, a pair of bright yellow low-slung pants with a drawstring waist and a skimpy narrow-strapped top that didn’t quite cover her belly button.

Which was pierced.

The morning air was chill, and her nipples were hard against the thin fabric of the top.

“God in heaven have mercy,” Clint muttered.

The young deliveryman said, “You’re not kidding.”

Clint’s hands formed fists at his sides and the fury deepened within him, especially when he turned back to the driver and saw the look of lascivious male interest on his face as Brandy sashayed toward them.

The younger man’s eyes met his, and apparently the street fighter Clint had once been was riding pretty close to the surface because suddenly the truck driver was examining his bill of lading instead of Brandy.

“Another gorgeous morning,” she said, arriving at the truck, completely unaware of the explosive tension in the air.

“Maybe you should go get a sweater,” Clint said tersely.

She looked momentarily puzzled, then caught on. She flashed him a careless grin and then folded her arms over her chest.

He cursed under his breath, took the bill of lading that the truck driver handed him and signed it without looking.

This is exactly what he’d always disliked about Brandy. He knew control was essential to life, to survival, and yet around her, he never quite knew what was going to happen next, or worse, how he was going to react to it.

“Please tell me you aren’t moving here,” he said, and he saw the hurt look before she carefully masked it.

“Sober-sides! You mean you aren’t enjoying my company?”

“If he isn’t, I will,” the young driver said hopefully, and then ducked his head at the killing look Clint gave him.

“Aren’t you the sweetest thing?” Brandy gushed, making Clint unsure which of them he wanted to kill first.

She thought the kid was sweet, the kid thought she was a tramp. Hadn’t she learned anything about the real world from all the years she had spent gallivanting around it?

That was the problem. He was a man who had learned to fight as naturally as he had learned to breathe. And that part of him had never been completely laid to rest, though it was buried under layers of refinement, education, wealth.

But Brandy brought his primal, rough instinct so quickly to the surface it was as if it had never been tamed at all.

He slid her a look. It would be impossible to call her beautiful and yet she was an undeniable presence. Electricity and pure energy seemed to crackle in the air around her. The young driver was acting like a fly caught in her web.

“Have you got something to unload?” Clint snapped.

“Oh, yeah. The tramp.”

“Maybe you better explain to me what you mean by that,” Clint ordered edgily, sliding Brandy a look to make sure her bosom was still covered.

“The trampoline. I’m to deliver it and put it together. Where did you want it?”

“A trampoline,” Clint repeated, stunned. All that fury and protectiveness wasted on a misinterpretation? He didn’t misinterpret things. He really was losing his touch, and it was her fault. He turned to Brandy. “A trampoline?” he demanded, as if the driver had said he was unloading an order of M-16s instead of a child’s toy.

“I got one for Becky,” Brandy told him, inordinately pleased with herself.

“Could I see you for a minute?”

He took her elbow and took her out of earshot of the young man who was a little too avidly interested in her.

“Do you think maybe you could have asked me before you went to all this trouble?” he asked.

“Oh! It hasn’t been any trouble. I mean it has been, because you should see what you have to go through to get a trampoline to the way-back-beyond, but it was kind of fun and I didn’t have anything better to do.”

“I don’t want Becky to have a trampoline,” he said, with all the firmness he could muster, given that the scent of her was wrapping itself around him, as sweet as sunshine on lavender, and nearly as drugging.

“You don’t want her to have one?” she exclaimed, as if he were an ogre who lived under a bridge. “You can’t mean that!”

“They are extremely dangerous toys. Do you know how many serious injuries are caused by trampolines every year?”

“No,” she said, tossing her hair defiantly, “but why am I not surprised you would have those statistics at your fingertips?”

“She’s barely pulling herself to standing. She does not need a trampoline!”

“Oh, Clint, let her have it, for God’s sake. We’ll be careful. I promise. You can make all kinds of rules around it. She’ll never be on it by herself, ever. I won’t do anything dangerous. I promise. No flips, or anything like that.”

“You aren’t happy with just trying to break your own neck all the time? You have to try and break my daughter’s?”

“Clint! The poor child should be walking, shouldn’t she? It will help her strengthen her legs. Besides, she hardly ever laughs. You guys need my help around here.”

She was hitting him in his sensitive spots now.

Should Becky be walking? He didn’t know these things, and the family doctor told him not to worry, but he worried. Should she be laughing more? Was she missing everything it was to be a child because she was stuck here with a man who knew so little about children? Once, he had thought fierce love should be enough. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe his daughter did need a trampoline.

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