Some Like It Hot

Hell, it wasn’t like he’d been bothered by Mom’s flatly stated warning that he’d better not expect an invitation to any of that kid’s parties anytime soon. She hadn’t been wrong. And even if she had been, aside from the subject of his father, he’d mostly blown off Angie Bradshaw’s negativity. If he’d allowed it to stop him from doing things or going after what he wanted, he would’ve been paralyzed a long time ago.

Because, face it, the woman bitched about everything, and had from the moment his dad had left them for Jake’s mom.

But coming back to Harper, well, he oughtta cut himself some slack. He’d done all right earlier today. Besides, she hadn’t been all that aloof when he’d caught her shaking her very nice butt and singing along with music only she could hear. She was also smiling and laughing with Tasha now as they carried out more salads, bread and a fruit platter and arranged them on the table. When she was like this, she radiated a friendliness, a charisma, that was electric.

“Meat’s done,” Jake said and piled steaks onto a platter.

Jenny carried out a pitcher of sangria damn near as big as she was, and Mark went around to the side of the cottage to call the kids who were setting up a croquet course there. For the next several moments pandemonium reigned as people took seats at the table.

Max sorted everyone out as the food was passed around. There were the teens Austin, Nolan and Austin’s girlfriend, Bailey, plus Nolan’s little brother. The unattached females consisted of Tasha, Harper and Sharon, the latter of whom he really didn’t know all that well since she’d married a local who had graduated a good fifteen years ahead of him. They’d divorced a couple of years ago, and she had stayed to run the housekeeping department at the inn while the local had moved to Tacoma. Then there was him, Jake and Jenny, Mark and his wife, Rebecca, and Wendy, who owned Wacka Do’s Salon on Harbor Street, and her new guy, Keith somebody or another.

The platters completed their circuit, and the laughter and chatter quieted down as everyone dug in.

A while later Tasha leaned forward to look down the table at Harper. “I saw the advertisement in the new brochures for the sunset yoga class you teach. I could use something like that. I’m not nearly bendy enough.” She appraised Harper. “You, on the other hand, look real flexible.”

Harper flashed the smile that changed her entire look. It was wide and heart-shaped and showcased not only bright teeth that looked as though someone had sunk a fortune into them, but a flash of the healthy gums in which they were anchored, as well. “You should drop in sometime,” she said. “I doubt Jenny would mind that you’re not an inn guest, since she told me you’re her bestie.”

“Oh, please.” Jenny, who was sitting next to Tasha, grinned. “Be my guest.”

Her friend gave her a friendly bump, but continued to address Harper. “You know, I’d definitely take you up on that—if it wasn’t right in the middle of my busiest time.”

“That’s right. You’re the owner of the pizza parlor in town, aren’t you?”

“Yep. Bella T’s.”

“I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I hear it’s fabulous.”

“Best pizza anywhere,” Austin’s friend Nolan said through a mouthful of corn on the cob.

Mark tousled his son’s hair but smiled at Harper. “The execution could have been more elegant, but the sentiment is dead-on.”

“Then I’ll definitely have to make the effort to get in there.” She looked at Tasha. “Let’s talk after dinner. We can probably come up with a time that’ll work for both of us.”

“What did you do before you came here?” Mark’s wife, Rebecca, inquired.

“A little of everything—much to my mother’s dismay. Since we came back to the States I’ve taken a number of temp jobs. I’ve worked at Nordstrom’s, for a little college press and a remodeling company and did a stint as a contracts coordinator for a midsized construction company—”

Max didn’t plan his interruption, but he couldn’t help himself. “Why were you out of the States?” And who is we?

She tilted her head and looked into his eyes. “Would you like the long version or the short?”

“Long,” all the women said in near perfect synchronicity.

“O-kay.” Her olive-green eyes were mostly blocked from sight behind the dense lashes that formed little crescents when she laughed. “My folks met when they were in college and married within two months. Mom is Cuban, African-American and Welsh. My daddy was the only child of an old Winston-Salem family. It was no longer the South of the Sixties in those days, but his parents still weren’t thrilled with his marriage. In fact, they went so far as to suggest he annul it.”

She shook her head, a small, reminiscent smile curving up her lips. “You’d have to have known my dad to appreciate what a mistake that was. Grandma and Grandpa did know better, but I guess they panicked, probably worried about what their friends would say.” She made a wry face. “Anyhow, Dad’s response was to pack his newly minted civil engineering degree and move Mom to Europe. We lived all over the world. I was born in Amsterdam and my brother, Kai, in Dubai.”

“Wasn’t that hard?” Jenny asked. “Constantly having to pick up and go?”

“No, it really wasn’t. I was not only a daddy’s girl but a chip off the old block. He and I loved getting to see new places and meet new people. Kai and Mom weren’t as thrilled with the constant upheavals.” A faint shadow flitted across her eyes. “I think that’s why my mother’s having trouble with the fact that I continue to travel. She and my brother were beyond happy to settle down after we moved back to the U.S. It bothers her that I haven’t done the same.”

Tasha planted her chin in her hand. “Did your folks ever reconcile with your grandparents?”

“Yes. Quite early on, actually. I don’t personally remember the rift, just the stories about it. By my first memory, they’d come to love Mom almost as much as Dad did. And they were the greatest grandparents.” Her smile lit up the room and made something in Max’s chest ache.

Jake, who traveled extensively for his magazine, asked Harper about some of the places she’d been, and they compared their impressions from locations they’d both visited. Max sat silently listening...and working overtime not to give in to jealousy. God knew he’d spent far too many years doing exactly that—being resentful of his half brother—already.

But the sophistication of Harper’s upbringing dredged up old insecurities. It was a universe removed from the way he’d been raised, and chewing over the contrasts between their worlds, watching the ease with which Jake conversed with her, it was hard not to regress to feelings he’d thought safely in his rearview. He could feel them crowding in, however, demanding attention. He pushed them back, because damned if he’d allow the same tangled morass of twisted emotions he’d once had for his half brother to regain the purchase they’d claimed when he was a kid. He wasn’t giving way to them now that he and Jake were finally in a good place.

Their mutual father had left Max and his mother when Max was just a toddler. If Charlie Bradshaw had simply left town as he had when he ultimately deserted Jake and his mother, as well, things might have been different. Or if Max had had a different kind of mother...

He gave an impatient twitch of his shoulders. Because neither of those things had happened. Charlie was one of those men who was all about the current family. In Max’s case that had meant Jake and the second Mrs. Bradshaw. He’d seen the old man with them around town sometimes. It had been damn hard to miss, given the size of Razor Bay. So he’d witnessed Charlie acting the way Max assumed a dad should toward Jake, while he might as well have been the incredible Invisible Boy, so concealed had he appeared to be from his father’s sight.

Even with his mind mired in the past, he was aware of Harper across the table, and he tracked her movements as she reached for the pitcher of sangria. The container was still fairly full, the distance wasn’t optimum for her reach and he watched its weight immediately tip forward as she picked it up. Surging to his feet, he leaned across the table to steady the pitcher and slapped his free hand over hers on the handle to correct the forward momentum.

It was as if he’d grabbed the business end of a live wire. Heat streaked like lightning through his veins, and it wouldn’t have surprised him in the least if someone started slapping at his head and yelling that his hair was smoking. He wondered if she felt it, too, or if this began and ended with him. She’d gone very still, and those big eyes were locked on him and rounded in the same O as her lips. But, hell, that could very well be due to the sheer speed of the events from her reach for the pitcher, to its tipping, to him leaping to the rescue like a tattooed, beefed up version of Dudley Do-Right.

The instant the pitcher touched the tabletop again—this time nearer her where its entire weight wouldn’t be dangling from her hand with no arm muscle behind it for support—he yanked his hands clear. Thumped back into his chair.

He did his best to ignore the residual electricity zinging through him from the feel of her skin. Making a point of not looking at her again, he deliberately forced his thoughts back to the relative safety of his old animosity toward Jake.

His mom sure as hell hadn’t helped the situation. Not that he’d seen that at the time; it wasn’t until he was old enough and distanced enough to view the situation with an adult’s perspective that he’d realized if Angie Bradshaw had been a different kind of woman, he probably wouldn’t have suffered much damage from the desertion. Hell, he’d barely been two years old when Charlie had moved out. Most of the memories of actual time spent with his father had come through the home movies Charlie had left behind.

His mother, however, wasn’t a big believer in letting things go. Rarely had a day gone by that she hadn’t reminded him of what they’d lost. All he’d ever heard were acid-etched stories of the slut who’d stolen his father away, and of his little shit of a half brother who had gotten everything that should have been his.

It hadn’t helped that in school his half bro had been a serious student and run with the kids of Razor Bay’s movers and shakers, while he had pulled average grades, run with a wilder crowd and frequently gotten into trouble.

No wonder he was so fucked up when it came to the silver-spoon girls. They were simply the female version of Jake.

“Max?”

The sound of Harper’s voice snatched him from his stroll down memory lane, and as his awareness raced to catch up with his inner musings, he realized his name hadn’t been the first word she’d directed at him. Looking at her across the table, he felt the same crazy-ass clench of his heart he experienced every damn time he laid eyes on her.

And clearing his throat, he lied without compunction. “Sorry. I was thinking about work for a minute there. What did you say?”

“I was just asking what you did with the rest of your day off after I saw you.”

Okay, this was something he actually liked talking about. “I went out to Cedar Village.” He was surprised to see startled recognition in her eyes and raised his brows. “You’re familiar with it?”

“I’ve heard it mentioned, although I can’t remember where. It’s a...boys’ camp?”

Jake snorted, and Max gave her a one-sided smile. “Don’t mind him, he thinks it’s more like a reformatory. It’s actually a group home for troubled kids—boys. And, yeah, most of them have been in trouble. But, so was I at their age and—”

“Look how well that turned out,” Jake deadpanned.

He grinned at the sarcasm in his broth—half brother’s voice. “I know, damn good, right? For instance, unlike Mr. Shutterbug here, instead of playing with cameras, I have a real job.”

Harper was staring at him, and his smile faded, his self-consciousness resurfacing. But damned if he’d allow it to short-shrift his responsibility to the Cedar boys. He rolled his shoulders. “Anyhow, a lot of these kids come from dicked-up backgrounds—broken homes, substance-abusing mother or father or sometimes both. None of our boys’ parents are physically abusive, but some are purposefully neglectful, while others simply have to work killer hours just to put food on the table or hang on to their house. A few of the boys actually come from warm, involved families—they just lost their way for a while or fell in with the wrong crowd. In every case, they need the attention, the stability that the counselors out there provide.”