That Old Feeling

Jake was more than a business associate, more than his boss. He was Clint’s friend, his mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father. Jake had once seen something in a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks and had believed in that something until it had come true.

Jake had offered no explanation for the imminent arrival of his eldest daughter, but Clint had assumed Brandy’s penchant for adventure mixed with mischief had left her in some kind of mess and that she needed to hide out until it blew over.

Well, there was no hideout quite like this one.

He’d been hiding successfully from the pain in his life for over a year and planned to keep on doing so.

He felt a small hand on his leg, and his daughter pulled herself to standing, swung behind his leg and then peeped out at Brandy with caution and reserve. Her diaper drooped nearly to her knees and her face showed telltale signs she had been sampling the dirt—again.

That feeling of inadequacy swept over him. He was a man accustomed to being in charge, but being entrusted with the care of his infant daughter had thrown him into an entirely different arena. He was like a man in a foreign land, lost, uncertain of which direction to take, having no grasp for the new language of his new world. He was fighting, as was his instinct, not to let it show that with his tiny daughter he came face-to-face with his own weaknesses and uncertainties every day.

But he was a disciplined man, and so he was careful not to let any of this slip onto his features. Brandy had a gift for sniffing out weakness and exploiting it. On her nineteenth birthday, just a little bit tipsy, hadn’t she seen his greatest weakness?

“So, you’re a shy one, are you?” Brandy said, still at Becky’s level, crouched easily on her haunches, her voice a rich imitation of a brogue.

The baby shrank even farther behind his knee.

Without warning, Brandy grabbed his other knee, ducked behind it, and peeped out at his daughter.

He felt shocked by her touch, the fire in her fingertips where they bit into the flesh below his knee. There was no mistaking, even from this brief encounter, that the oldest of the Misses King was not a child anymore.

And she had been a most dangerous child. How much more dangerous would she be as a full-grown, full-blooded woman?

He gazed down at her, the thick, rippling richness of the dark hair cascading over slender shoulders, the swell of her breasts under the thin fabric of a black tank top held up on the whim of two tiny little straps. She was wearing low-slung sweatpants that rode a little too low with her crouched like that and that clung to the delectable curves of her athletic legs.

She stuck out her tongue at his daughter, crossed her eyes.

Becky tried valiantly to make herself invisible, but not before he caught a ghost of a smile tickle her lips.

“Excuse me,” he said, inserting enough ice to sink the Titanic into his voice. “Would you mind letting go of my leg?”

“Becky,” Brandy said sternly, “you heard the man. Let go of your father’s leg.”

His little girl’s eyes went very round and she let go instantly.

“I meant you!” He scooped up Becky, and she buried her face in his chest.

“Oh,” Brandy said innocently, but thankfully, she unhanded his leg, rose easily, and stuck out her hand. Her eyes danced with amusement.

“Of course you meant me, Sober-sides. How are you?”

He shifted the minuscule weight of the baby from the crook of his right arm to his left and took Brandy’s proffered hand with a certain reluctance. He felt the heat and unexpected strength of her grasp, and let it go instantly.

“Fine, thank you,” he said, his tone clipped.

“A conversationalist as always,” she said. “Becky, how on earth are you learning to talk around this man of many words?’

How had she managed to hit such a sensitive spot after only seconds of being here? Was his daughter supposed to be talking more than she was? At just over a year, she had mastered da-da and poo-poo. That was it. The whole vocabulary.

“I thought I’d put you in the cottage,” he said abruptly. “It’s private.”

The thought of having her under the very same roof was a little more than he could handle.

Aware that the diaper was definitely a little far gone, Clint led the way across the clearing and down a small stone path with as much dignity as he could given that something warm and wet was leaking onto his arm. At the end of the path was a small guest cottage.

“It’s adorable,” Brandy said with genuine enthusiasm, as if she didn’t have an upscale apartment in New York and a house in Bel Air, as if she hadn’t stayed in palaces and five-star hotels all over the world. “Does it come with seven little men? And a prince?”

Seven men and a prince. He’d known she had become a dangerous woman.

“No,” he said tersely. “No men, no prince, no maids, no cook, no dishwasher, not a single amenity that you are used to.”

His voice crackled with unfriendliness.

Which, naturally, Brandy did not hear or chose not to hear.

“You have no idea what I’m used to,” she said cheerfully. “I slept with bugs as big as my fist in Brazil.”

“I remember you used to be scared of bugs,” he said, then could have kicked himself at the memory he had just conjured. Brandy, fourteen, in a much-too-skimpy bathing suit by the pool, standing on one of the deck chairs, pointing at some huge black insect that had crawled out of the filtration system.

He’d done the gentlemanly thing, dispatched the bug. When it had looked like she planned to leap into his arms in gratitude, he’d told her, coldly, her bathing suit was inappropriate.

But the part he remembered the most clearly was not the bathing suit or the bug. It was her saying softly, “Don’t tell anyone I was scared. Please.”

From that moment on, it was as though he knew a secret about her, a secret that made the heart he wasn’t supposed to have ache every time she did one more foolhardy or death-defying stunt.

Had she really conquered that long-ago fear of bugs? He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know one single thing about her.

Except what her lips tasted like.

“You must be very tired,” he said, abruptly, damning her silently for how little had changed between them. “You’ve come a long way today.”

“I’m never tired,” Brandy said.

Of course not. She was a woman who would have you believe she could handle seven men and a prince and anything else life threw at her, including bugs as big as her fist. Only, looking at her, he saw something flicker in her eyes, and wondered how much of it was all a front. He cut off that line of thought before it made her even more dangerous than she already was—which was plenty dangerous.

“Did you want me to bring your things from the car?”

She tossed him the keys, her expectation of being waited on as unconscious to her as breathing. She went up the cottage steps two at a time and burst in. Somehow he didn’t want to see her gushing over the cuteness of the accommodations. Still hefting the soggy Becky on his arm, he went up to the parking area behind the house.

A Ferrari, no less, and crammed floor to roof with her things as if she were thinking of staying for a long, long while. He counted three full-size suitcases and two overnight bags. There were several dresses hung in bags. There was a tennis racket, a riding helmet and a new blow-up dinghy that hadn’t been taken out of the box.

He didn’t have a tennis court or horses. There was no place, that he was aware of, within a hundred miles where a woman could wear dresses like that. The lake water wouldn’t be warm enough for weeks yet to risk capsizing her floating device in it.

Resigned, he set the baby on her padded rear and kept one eye on whether or not she was trying to ingest rocks while he began unloading Brandy’s vehicle.

“She’ll be bored in ten minutes,” he reassured himself as the pile of her belongings became a small mountain on the ground beside him.

So, she’d get bored, and then she would leave.