Winning His Heart: The Millionaire's Homecoming / The Maverick Millionaire

He turned from her quickly, grabbed a dishcloth from the sink and began to clean up the mess.

That was David. All the time she had known him he had always stepped up to the plate, done what needed to be done.

Especially after the danger of having her finger nibbled, Kayla knew she needed to send him on his way, even if he hadn’t received any of the promised ice cream—unless you counted that one taste.

“According to what I read in Lakeside Life,” Kayla said, “you have better things to do than help me with my messes.”

“Don’t believe everything you read.”

He got a chair and climbed up on it and began to tackle the mess on her ceiling. She saw his shirt lifted and she saw the hard line of his naked tummy.

That hunger unfolded in her, even more powerful than before.

“You should go home.” It was self-protection and it was desperately needed!

“I’ll just give you a hand with this first.”

Kayla wanted to refuse and found that she couldn’t. It had been so long since she had had help with anything. Someone to share a burden with was as least as seductive as the sight of his naked skin. For so long she had carried every burden, large and small, all by herself.

An hour later her kitchen had been restored to order. Every surface shone. David had even ferreted out yellow cream in the toaster and wiped it from the inside of the light fixture.

But if the kitchen shone, they were a mess!

“I hope that isn’t a Slugs and Snails shirt,” Kayla said, but now that she was looking, she could see the distinctive small snail over the left breast.

“Of course it is,” he said, glancing down at the yellow blotches that she was fairly certain had already set on his very expensive shirt and shorts. “My company was their start-up investor. I always use the products of the companies we invest in.”

A reminder that the man standing here, in her kitchen, covered in yellow stains, was the CEO of a very prestigious company!

He misread her distressed expression. “I’m sure the stains will come out.”

“You don’t know the first thing about dandelions, do you?” she said, sadly. “When you do your laundry, that stain is not an easy fix.”

“I don’t do my own laundry,” he said, a little sheepishly.

It was a further reminder of who she was sharing her kitchen with. “Well, you could tell whoever does it to try lemon juice.”

“Is that why you smell like lemons?” he asked. “Because this is not your first experiment with dandelions?”

He had noticed her scent. Somehow it was headier than dandelion wine.

So when he said what he said next, she should have resisted with all her might. But she didn’t have a single bit of might left in her.

“I was on my way down to the lake to swim. Why don’t we just go jump in? Like the old days?”

A small smile was playing across the sensuous line of the mouth she had been foolish enough to touch.

She knew exactly what he was talking about. The last day of school, every year, all the kids in Blossom Valley went and jumped in the lake, fully clothed.

And suddenly he did not seem like the CEO of one of Canada’s most successful companies. David seemed like what she needed most in the world and had tried, pathetically perhaps, to find in a dog.

He seemed like a friend, and nothing in the world could have kept her from going and revisiting the most carefree time of her life by jumping in the lake with him!

“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll grab my lemon juice.”

They didn’t go to the public beach, but snuck down a much closer, but little-known lake access, between two very posh houses.

He stood patiently while she doused the stains on both their clothes with lemon juice. She set down the empty bottle and then rubbed the lemon into the stains. His skin beneath the fabric struck her as velvet over steel.

She heard his sharp intake of breath and looked up. He was watching her, his lips twitching with amusement but his eyes dark with something else.

Kayla gulped, let go of his shirt and backed away from him, spinning.

“Race you,” she cried over her shoulder, kicking off her flip-flops and already running. With a shout he came up behind her, and they hit the cold water hard. He cut the water in a perfect dive, and she followed. The day was already so hot that the cold water felt exquisite and cooling.

The water had been her second home since she had moved here. Beaches and this lake were the backdrop to everything good about growing up in a resort town.

It seemed the water washed away the bad parts of their shared past, and gave them back the happy-go-lucky days of their youth. They gave themselves over to play, splashing and racing, dunking each other, engaging in an impromptu game of tag, which he won handily, of course. He tormented her by letting her think she could catch him, and then in one or two powerful strokes he was out of her reach.

Kayla had known, when she had seen David run the other night, that he had lost none of his athleticism. But the water had always been his element.

His absolute strength and grace in it were awe-inspiring.

That and the fact his wet shirt had molded to the perfect lines of his chest. His hair was flattened and shiny with water, and the beads ran down the perfect plane of his face.

But the light in his eyes was warmer than the sun. That awareness of him that she had been feeling all morning—that had been pushed to the breaking point when she had scrubbed at his lemony shirt—was kept from igniting only by the coldness of the water.

Finally, gasping from exertion and laughter, they rolled over and floated side by side, completely effortless on their backs, looking up at a cloudless sky, the silence compatible between them. Even the awareness that had sizzled seemed to have morphed into something else, like the rain after the electrical storm, calm and cooling.

Finally, she broke the silence.

“I know you didn’t lie about him,” she said quietly. “David, I’m sorry I called you a liar.”

It felt so good that he said nothing at all, rolled his head slightly to look at her then rolled it back and contemplated the blueness of the sky.

The cold of the water finally forced them out. On the shore, she inspected his dripping clothes. The dandelion stains were unfazed by her lemon treatment.

“That will have to be your paint shirt,” she said, just as if he was a normal person who actually painted his own home when it needed it.

“Good idea,” he said, going along with her. Then, “For two relatively intelligent people, one of us could have remembered towels.”

“Watch who you’re calling relatively intelligent,” Kayla said, and shook her wet hair at him.

“This is a private beach,” a voice called.

They looked up to see a woman glaring at them from her deck.

In their youth, they would have challenged her. They would have told her there was no such thing as a private beach. That the entire lake and everything surrounding it to the high water mark—which would take them up to about where her lawn furniture was artfully displayed—belonged to the public. In their youth, they might have eaten their sandwiches on her manicured lawn.