A Difficult Woman

“Yeah…?”

The voice on the phone was thick with sleep.

“Matt?” Tara said cautiously.

“Tara.” His voice was instantly alert. “What time…?” She heard fumbling and then he muttered an expletive. “Sorry…I overslept. Give me twenty. I’ll be right over.”

He hung up before she could reply. Fifteen minutes later he was at her door, his hair still damp from a shower. He hadn’t shaved and the dark stubble gave him an entirely different look. An incredibly sexy look.

Tara suddenly realized she was staring and stepped back, letting him in.

“So what’d you do last night?” she asked as she led the way to the kitchen. “Tie one on?”

“I was up late.”

He didn’t look so much hungover as exhausted, so she let the subject drop and tackled the matter at hand. “I’d like to get the porch finished and the gazebo fixed and painted, but…” She paused, studying him with a slight frown. “I need you to adjust the height of the new doors before you do that, so that I can stain them.”

She had bought several solid wood doors to replace damaged and missing ones in the house, only to find that while the doorframes were consistent in width, they were not consistent in height. In fact, some of the frames weren’t even true and it was going to take finagling to get the doors to hang and swing correctly. It wasn’t something she wanted to leave until the last minute.

“Show me what you got,” he said. She watched as he crossed the room to the porch door, thinking, in spite of herself, that he wore those worn-out Levi’s very well and wondering why she hadn’t noticed it before.

Until he’d taken on Eddie, she hadn’t realized his long lean body was almost solid muscle. That awareness was having a definite effect on the way she was looking at him now, so she was glad he didn’t have the ability to read minds when he glanced over his shoulder and caught her staring.

“Do you want your breakfast?” she inquired innocently.

“What kind of shape is it in?”

Tara grimaced.

“I think I’ll hold off until lunch.”

Tara was impressed that he didn’t expect her to cook another meal for him. She led the way to the prefab metal shop where the doors had been stacked. The shop had a woodstove and a cement floor and was, all in all, a comfortable place to work. Her aunt Laura had been an artisan who specialized in pottery and soap-making, but she had done a little of everything and had collected quite an assortment of woodworking tools.

Matt went immediately to the table saw, inspected it, then moved on to the tools hanging on the pegboards lining the wall.

“Find what you’ll need?”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hands in his back pockets. Tara’s eyes automatically followed.

She had to stop doing that.

“The doors each have a sticky tab on them, telling where they’ll be hung and the measurements of the frame,” she said briskly. “I’ll be wallpapering the parlor. Lunch is at noon.”

Matt Connors nodded. He reached for a saw and Tara headed for the door, glad to have made an escape before he caught her gawking at his butt again.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS FUNNY HOW wallpapering always seemed like such a good idea until she was actually doing it—and hanging paper in an old house that had spent almost a century settling only added to the fun. At least she knew enough now, after that first horrendous experience in her own bathroom, to avoid stripes.

Tara soaked and folded the first strip of vintage rose paper into a book, then hung the plumb bob and drew her reference line. Classic rock played on the radio and she hummed under her breath as she positioned her stepladder and tackled the first strip, applying it to the wall, then smoothing it from the top down to the newly stained and varnished wainscoting.

“One down,” she murmured as she stood back to view the colors.

“How many to go?”

Tara jumped at the unexpected voice.

“How long have you been there?” she demanded. She shouldn’t have left the front door propped open, but she’d never had trouble with vermin before.

“You really do need to work on your manners, Tara.”

“Speaking of which, you should knock before you slither into someone’s house.”

Ryan tilted his blond head back, looking down his nose at her, his perfect lips curved into a perfect smile. Perfectly nasty, that is. Tara gave him her best smirk in return. It made her shudder to think how she’d once been taken in by this guy. Used and discarded. And the kicker was that most of the populace of Night Sky still bought into Ryan’s charismatic golden boy facade. They assumed that any trouble between her and Ryan had to be her fault. She was a Sullivan, he was a Somers.

But Tara wouldn’t let him upset her, because that was exactly what he wanted to do.

“Filed any restraining orders lately, Ryan?”

That hit the mark. His eyes narrowed, but his voice was smooth as he said, “Again, that manners thing, Tara.”

“Why are you here?”

“Why do you think?”

“To harass me?” Tara suggested, her eyebrows going up.

Ryan regarded her for a long moment. “Now why,” he finally asked in a much too quiet voice, “would I want to harass you? What possible reason could I have?”

He moved another step closer, so that he was only inches away—so close that Tara could feel the warmth from his body, smell his expensive aftershave. And suddenly it was all she could do to hold her ground. Memories, sharp and painful, flooded her.

She hadn’t expected the reaction and it threw her, but she fought to pull herself back together. Ryan had no idea how traumatic their physical encounter had been to her. He was so egotistical that he’d actually thought that she’d want to do it again.

Through sheer willpower, Tara forced herself to look Ryan in the eye. And then she noted with some satisfaction that she had left a pretty good bump on his once classic nose.

“Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Ryan said sarcastically. “I remember now. Your lies. My job.”

“I had nothing to do with you losing your job,” she said bluntly. And it was true. She’d had nothing to do with his being fired from his cushy job with the accounting firm in Elko, where he’d hoped to become a partner. Jack had. But Ryan didn’t know that and she wasn’t going to tell him.

“You’re a liar, Tara.”

Tara simply shifted her weight as she waited to see what was coming next. She didn’t have to wait long.

“Actually I’m here because of the crass attempts you’ve been making to embarrass my father in public.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, I think you remember raving in the bank about my father trying to steal your house.”