Читать книгу The Naughty List Bundle with The Night Before Christmas & Yule Be Mine - Fern Michaels - Страница 12

Aye, Griff. What in heaven’s name do ye think yer doin’, lad?

No stern admonition or sudden return of sanity was going to save him from what he’d begun. If he were honest with himself, the desire for the kiss, for her, had been far more the drive behind seeing her again than anything having to do with his coming inheritance, Lionel, or Hamilton.

“’Tis no’ meant to persuade you,” he murmured, a breath away from her lips. “I simply want to taste—” He paused for one brief moment, looked into her eyes, and liked to think it was his integrity finally showing up, needing to make certain she was a willing participant in the mutual exploration…but, in all honesty, unless she’d shoved him off, he’d have stolen a sip anyway. He’d just wanted to watch her while he did so.

In the end, he was rewarded in a way he couldn’t have foreseen, and never would have expected.

“It won’t,” she whispered, those plum perfect lips brushing the barest hint across his. “Since we’re being direct, I’ll admit I’d like to know what you taste like, too.”

The punch that breathy little admission delivered ignited the sparks already licking between them.

He took her mouth, and not in the gentle, seductive manner of a man who meant to stake his claim slowly, building trust and need at the same time. He took her mouth like a man half-starved for the taste of her, as if he’d been deprived of it for so long, he had no restraint, no civility left in him.

And, true to her claim, she responded with equal fervor.

Trays clanged, metal clashed, as he sank his hands into her hair and bent his head to hers, pushing her back against the worktable. He slid his tongue between those lips, then she did the same between his, both of them tasting, dueling, demanding. It was like plundering heaven. She tasted spicy, sweet, and dark, like something forbidden and exotic, known only to him, the lucky bastard who’d uncovered the buried treasure first.

Her fingertips flexed hard against his scalp as she held him where she wanted him, taking his tongue, taking him, then giving in return, taunting, teasing, until he wasn’t sure whose gasps were whose, and whether the vibrating growls were coming from deep inside his chest or from the one plastered so tightly against it.

Some shred of sanity prevailed long enough for him to pull her up and off the worktable before they destroyed another entire night’s work. He tugged her against him as he spun them around and pushed her up against a pair of oversized, stainless-steel doors.

The chill of the cooler doors made her gasp, but when he pulled her away, she grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him right back close again. He was grinning when he took her face in his hands and claimed her mouth all over again.

She was tugging off his tie, and he was busily undoing the buttons on the front of her starched white baker’s coat, when a shrill, insistent beeping sound went off, startling them into leaping away from each other—as if they’d been doing something wrong.

Only it hadn’t felt at all wrong to him. Quite the opposite, in fact. Surprisingly so. “What is that?” he asked, a little dazed, breathing heavily.

“Cakes,” she panted, pushing back the hair that had spilled down out of her bun. Silky, dark brown curls clung to her flushed cheeks. “Ovens.”

“Don’t,” he said instinctively, when she started to gather the tumbled waves and knot them back up. He reached out, as if he had all the right in the world, and brushed aside a damp curl. The tips of his fingers caressed the smooth skin of her cheek. Her lips parted slightly, drawing him to trace his fingers across her bottom lip. He felt the slight tremble there, heard the catch in her throat. And his hunger for her surged right back, with a renewed vengeance.

He took a step toward her, crowding her back against the doors again. He watched her pupils expand, saw her throat work, knew that if he cupped her breasts, her nipples would be rock hard. The thought of peeling that starched linen from her body, and whatever else was beneath it, sent him from launch to orbit in a second.

“Th-the cakes,” she stammered as he slid one hand behind her neck and tilted her mouth up to his again. She sidestepped, half stumbling out of his reach. “They’ll burn.” She scraped her hair back and, with less than steady hands, managed to get it into some semblance of a knot.

“Right,” he said, letting his hand drop. He watched as she darted across the room, then leaned back against the closest worktable. He lowered his chin and closed his eyes with a deep sigh. “Well done, boy-o,” he muttered. “Well done.”

It was her sudden hiss that brought him fully alert again. “What?” He was half across the room before she answered.

“Nothing,” she said tightly, then quickly clattered the cake pans she was juggling onto the waiting cooling racks. She dropped the oven mitts and curled the fingers of one hand into a fist.

The cakes were a rich golden yellow, and their warm, sweet scent made his empty stomach growl. But he was more concerned with the color of her hand.

“Did you burn yourself?” He closed the distance between them. “Let me see, I can—”

She shooed him back as she shifted to the other oven in the smooth, almost graceful manner of someone who had danced between them many, many times. She handled the mitts better and was more purposeful, sliding out one tray at a time and placing them on a different cooling rack.

He didn’t push her about the burn, he just got out of her way. “Do you ever tire of the scent?” he asked. “It’s wonderful, and, along with your fresh roast, quite like paradise would smell, I imagine.”

She didn’t respond. He noted she didn’t look at him, either. He should just let the moment go. Only he didn’t want to. Hence his lame attempt at conversation. He thought her lack of response was because she was busy unloading her ovens, arranging cooling racks, and rearranging the hot racks inside the ovens. But once those tasks were complete and the beeping timer had ceased, she made herself enormously busy arranging the hot pans just so on the cooling racks, then going over to the refrigerated units and burying her head inside one, then another, rooting around…but coming out empty-handed.

“It’s the one memory of my grandmother’s place, of my childhood, that stays with me,” he persisted. “The scents, I mean.” Then he abruptly snapped his mouth shut. He didn’t like her withdrawing, had wanted to keep her in the moment with him, but he had no earthly idea what had made him blurt out that little tidbit. He didn’t mind sharing the personal stories of those he’d helped over the years. He considered those stories triumphs, business successes. He didn’t share stories about himself. And definitely not about his childhood. Other than surviving it, there was nothing worth mentioning.

In fact, he should take the annoying intrusion of those blasted timers as the signal they surely were. A signal that it wasn’t the time, nor the place, and she was most definitely not the woman to be distracting himself with. He had a very specific job to do. One that, if done properly, would become the single most important thing he’d done to date. Definitely the most meaningful. That opportunity was everything he’d dreamed his future could be. He’d tackled bigger jobs, even more prestigious ones, at least as far as the initial stages of the Hamilton project went. But it was very different from all the others. Because it was personal. It was his.

Where he could go with it, where he could take it, if he worked hard, and made the right decisions…went beyond his wildest dreams. And he’d allowed himself to dream pretty big. He’d had to. The last thing he needed at such a precipitous moment was a reminder of where he’d come from.

And yet…he’d been the one to bring it up. Even more startling to him was that he hadn’t been lying. It was the best memory of an otherwise brutal childhood. The very best. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it in a very long time. Because it was hard, if not impossible, to think about one part…and not all the rest. A long time ago, he’d needed to use those memories, every vile one of them, to motivate himself when things were hard, or when he thought his wits weren’t going to be enough to get him where he wanted to go.

They had to be enough—the only other things he had were his fists. He knew, all too keenly, what it felt like to fight his battles with those. That sure as hell wasn’t going to be his future.

“Look at me now, Da,” he murmured beneath his breath. “Look at me now.”

“What kind of restaurant did she run?”

He jerked his gaze up, and his mind away from that path. He shouldn’t be here. He looked at her then, trying, struggling, to regain the perspective that was as natural to him as breathing. The perspective that steered him single-mindedly toward his goals. Being with her…wanting her as he did, was not the way to get there.

So, when he quite readily said, “Irish pub, actually,” he knew with absolute certainty that somewhere between sipping her coffee and kissing her lips, he’d lost his mind.

“I know Sean’s place over in Willow Creek is absolutely wonderful. Warm atmosphere, good hearty food, great music on the weekends. I’ve always felt a warm welcome there. Was your grandmother Gallagher’s place like that? There’s more than one Gallagher place in Ireland, I know. Sean talks about his extended family all the time,” she added.

She was nervous, he realized. It was the only explanation for her sudden chattiness. Welcome to the party, luv, he thought, making no move to leave, as he bloody well knew he should.

“Aye, there are several. I grew up in West Cork.” He’d started to say his branch of the family was from there, but skipped it. He was still unresolved about the information that had been kept from him all his life. A life that could have been improved far, far sooner had he known the truth. “Our pub was down by the waterfront, so it brought in an interesting…clientele.”

She opened the cooler doors again, and came out with a large container. “Here,” she said, handing it to him, then turning around to get another, and still another.

He put the first carton on a rolling tray beside the worktable. Apparently…he was staying.

“Sounds like an interesting childhood,” she said. “Did you spend a lot of time in the pub? Or were you too busy going to school or”—she paused for a moment as she reached over the worktable, trying to set it back to rights, then glanced at him as she finished—“playing sports?”

He saw her gaze roam over his face. He knew exactly what she saw. And what she thought. Probably wasn’t far off in her assessment. Most people assumed he’d earned his scars and odd bumps the hard way, by putting his fists up first, and thinking later. In actuality, he’d earned them a far, far harder way, but he never corrected the assumption.

“I worked in the pub my whole life, or as long as West Cork was my home, anyway. Everyone in the family did.”

“Did you resent it?”

He caught her gaze then, and realized she wasn’t asking idly, or making empty conversation. She was looking at him, and her expression was one of sincere curiosity.

“Because I think I would have,” she went on, when he didn’t immediately reply. “At least a little.”

“I loved being in the pub,” he said quite honestly. It was when he’d been the safest. For him that meant the happiest. “Not so much the bar itself, but the rest of it. Families came, no’ just the men to play darts or lift an ale. Everyone we knew was there at one point or another over the course of the week.”

Memories tugged at him, and he was quite surprised to realize that not all of them made him flinch and want to look away. It had been a very long time since he’d pulled them out and looked them over. Up until a year ago, he’d avoided thinking about the past. He’d gone home then, leaving Dublin for Cork for a brief spell, when he’d found out about Lionel Hamilton. About being a Haversham by blood.

And not a Gallagher.

“That sounds kind of nice, actually,” she said.

“What did your parents do?” he asked, partly because he was curious, and partly because he needed to think a bit more about his past before he shared it with her.

“My father worked for Hamilton Industries as an account manager. My mother ran a daycare in our home. My grandmother—on my mom’s side—helped out with that. My folks both died when I was three, so I don’t have any real memories of them, other than the pictures and the endless stories my grandmother told me. She raised me after they were gone.”

He set the last carton on the rolling tray, then walked over to her. “You’ve experienced a lot of loss in your life, Melody Duncastle.” He laid his palm on her shoulder, turning her toward him. She didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry for that.”

“It was a very long time ago,” she said, “but thank you.”

“Your grandmother, she’s gone as well now?”

She nodded. “Also a long time ago. Right before I started law—uh, college.” She looked from his hand to his face. “You’re very affected by that. By loss. You were before, when I spoke about Bernadette passing away.”

She was right about that, he supposed, though he’d never thought about it. He’d had far too few people to care about in his life, and even fewer to care about him. He was sensitive to the bond of love, cherished it for the special and unique gift it was, and knew how critical the loss of it truly could be.

He had no earthly idea how he’d come to that moment, that conversation, that topic. But there he was. It was just as surprising as the fact that he was doing absolutely nothing to forward his personal agenda with her—getting her on his side of the Hamilton project.

He supposed exposing himself, talking about things he’d rather leave unspoken, might have been seen as a tactical maneuver to gain her sympathy and her trust.

But even he wasn’t cold enough, calculating enough, to mine his own past for gain. He’d go to many other lengths before trying that one. Hell, he might even accept defeat first.

“I know what it’s like to have, and to have lost,” he told her. “I’ve seen my share of it. Experienced it. It’s never a good thing.” It was the first lie he’d told her. Not all loss was for the worse. “Not for those left behind, anyway.” That was a half truth, at best.

She stopped rolling out what looked like a slab of rose-colored modeling clay and turned to face him fully. Her gaze was direct, probing, and highly disconcerting. No one ever looked at him like that. “Is that why you do what you do? To help people gain rather than lose?”

It was a valid question. Stunning, because she very well might have a point. But he’d never put it together like that. Mostly because he didn’t spend much time analyzing his past, or himself. “I have a knack for figuring out ways to make things, places, more attractive. When things are eye-catching, they attract attention. It’s a simple law of nature. And it’s…I don’t know. I guess it always seemed quite obvious to me. How to improve things, how to make them more successful. But no one else seemed to see it. I could never figure out why.”

“So it’s like a puzzle to be solved for you.”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

“Did you do that for your family? Help make the restaurant a success? Is that what launched you in that direction?”

He snorted before he could stop himself. “Hardly. Although it was certainly where I’d first noticed what could be done.”

“So…why not help them?”

“For the very same reason you don’t want my help,” he said, with a dry smile. “They like things just as they are.”

To her credit, she looked at least a little abashed, and nodded to concede the point. “But they are still doing well.”

“On their own scale of measure, I suppose, aye.”

“But not yours.”

He didn’t respond to that, simply held her gaze steadily. She knew the answer to her question.

“So, do you ever think their logic might apply here? That we’re fine the way we are?”

“Cork, and my family’s business there, or, more to the point, all of the family businesses, are doing fine without my help. Aye, that is the truth of it. I’d thought to take all of our independent restaurants and pubs and unify them.”

“You mean, like making a chain out of them?”

“As you term it here, something like that, yes. The Gallaghers could have doubled their successes and provided more security for their countless offspring. Were any of them truly visionary, they could have taken it far, far beyond that.”

“But they didn’t want to. And, maybe more to the point, they didn’t want you doing it for them.”

“Correct on both scores.” He purposely broke the intimate link their connected gazes seemed to have forged and turned his attention to the rolling cart. “Now, what can I do to help?” he asked, blatantly changing the subject.

“I’m sorry if my questions trespassed on territory you’d rather leave untouched.”

“’Tis all right. But perhaps we’ve wasted enough time and should be seein’ to getting these wee cakes frosted. I used to be a fair hand in the kitchen when I was a boy, so if you give me a bit of direction, I imagine I can do a passable job.”

She didn’t respond right away, and he could feel her gaze on him. It should have felt awkward or uncomfortable. But it was neither. He realized he felt comfortable with her in a way he’d never felt with anyone else. He wasn’t entirely sure why. She was hardly nonthreatening, certainly not naïve. She was clever, smart, and very likely to poke and prod at things he’d rather she didn’t. She would not be easily steered and definitely not readily controlled.

Yet, he’d never found himself so drawn to a woman, so swiftly and easily smitten. Maybe it was because of the challenge she presented. Not just from a business perspective, but also from the personal one. He never let anyone in. Not ever. No exceptions. Yet, he was falling all over himself to spill out each and every one of his deepest, darkest secrets. And he had more than the average share.

Perhaps it was because her interest was sincere; she truly wanted to understand him. He didn’t feel judged when he offered up an answer. Instead, he simply felt more clearly understood. That was…well, quite an intoxicating thing. Something he hadn’t realized he even wanted for himself. He’d never much cared what anyone thought of him, only of his ability to meet their business needs.

It led him to wonder what her needs were…and if there was any chance in hell he could be the one to meet them.