Addicted to Nick

Frankly she couldn’t see what he would want with a fledgling standardbred training establishment at the opposite end of the world from his New York base, and if he didn’t want his half, what should she do about hers?

She blew out a breath and shook her head slowly. “Gee, Joe, it’d be really good if you could help me out here…if you could tell me what you were thinking when you drafted that will.” Of course, no magical answer boomed out from beyond the steel rafters. “Seems like I’ll have to do this the hard way,” she told Star, knowing exactly how difficult that would be.

First she would have to deal with her treacherous body’s intense physical response to Nick’s presence, and then her awestruck mind might kick into gear and form some meaningful connection with her mouth. Maybe then she would be capable of asking all the questions that needed answering before she could decide what to do.

Three

T.C. intended posing those questions the next time she saw Nick. She planned to stiffen her backbone, look him in the eye and say, “Nick, I need to know your intentions.”

She was pleased with that forthright opener, composed the next morning while she and Jason, her stable hand, exercised the first half of their team. And when it was time for a coffee break, she took her mug to an upturned bucket in the breezeway, tilted her face toward the midmorning sun and fine-tuned her intonation.

“Nick, I need to know…Nick, I need to know…”

Then Nick sauntered into the barn, and her plans, her intonation and her backbone, turned to mush. He wore a polo shirt in the same azure-blue as his eyes, and faded jeans that hugged him in all the right places. The warmth that flooded her body had nothing to do with the sun. Her heart stalled, then bounded into overdrive. She felt all the same jittery reactions as when she stepped a horse onto the track before a big race, but she didn’t look away. She couldn’t not watch his lazy loose-limbed approach. Talk about poetry in slow motion. If he’d been a horse, she would have labeled him a fabulous mover.

“Is this the new boss?” Jason asked.

T.C. nodded, swallowed, inhaled once, exhaled once. By then Nick was close enough for her to notice his shower-damp hair and the rested look about his eyes. It was obvious his sleep hadn’t been disturbed by spicy aftertones clinging to his pillow!

Somehow she managed to mumble the necessary introductions, and Nick shook Jason’s hand. “You must own the one-two-five out front.”

Very smooth opening, T.C. thought with a cynical twist of her mouth, seeing as Jason was mad-keen on his newly acquired dirt bike. They swapped notes in that rev-head shorthand T.C. had never understood, and when Ug snuffled noisily out of her morning nap, Nick hunkered down to tickle her behind the ears. With a fatuous look of bliss clouding her mismatched eyes, the dog promptly rolled onto her back.

T.C. snorted. She bet females did that trick for Nick Corelli all the time.

“What do you call her?” His gaze lifted from the prone dog and met T.C.’s over the rim of her coffee mug.

“Ug.” Jason supplied the answer, which was just as well, because the smiling warmth in Nick’s eyes had struck T.C. dumb. Behind the subterfuge of sipping coffee, she attempted to unravel the knot in her tongue.

“Strange name.” He smiled right into her eyes, and that uncooperative tongue looped itself in a second half-hitch. Luckily Jason came to her rescue again.

“When Joe first brought her home—he found her down the road a bit—T.C. said she wanted to call her Lucky, because she was lucky Joe found her. But Joe says ‘There’s nothin’ lucky about a dog that looks like that.’”

“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.