Читать книгу Some Like It Hot - Susan Andersen - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

LAUGHTER, DEEP, LOUD and masculine, rolled out of the community center kitchen and across the counter where Harper had just picked up her industrial-sized platter of pancakes. She froze for an instant, and the chatter and clatter of crowded tables full of hungry pancake diners faded away as she searched the packed kitchen for the laugh’s source.

Not that there was any doubt as to whose large chest that had come out of. She’d only heard it once before, and God knew it hadn’t been directed at her. But no one who’d ever heard Max Bradshaw laugh would mistake it for anyone else’s. Even someone as new to Razor Bay as she was grasped it was a rarity. Hell, a simple grin from him at Jenny’s dinner party earlier this week had all but knocked her on her butt. His laugh was a steamroller that threatened to flatten her.

She needed to keep in mind that all this interest was one-sided. And, c’mon, how hard could it be to do so—she only had to remember Max’s assistance at Jenny’s when she’d tried to pick up the sangria pitcher from too far away and had nearly poured it all over the picnic table instead. His touch when he’d wrapped his hand around hers had all but electrified her—exactly the way it had the first time they’d met when she’d touched his bare forearm. It wasn’t possible for a man’s skin to be any hotter than anyone else’s. So why did her mind insist it was?

She gave her head a subtle shake. The answer to that hardly mattered, so there was no sense even going there. Because if she’d been electrified, he had shaken free so fast you would’ve thought she was toxic waste, and he without his hazmat suit. Charm had always come easily to her, but either her ability abandoned her around the good deputy or he was immune. Either way, her mad skills were wasted on him.

She located him now over by the gargantuan stove, standing head—and in most cases shoulders, as well—above the boys around him. He looked like a Hell’s Angel with those brown-ink tribal tattoos, his disreputably torn blue jeans and that brilliantly white, batter-splattered T-shirt that clung damply to his big shoulders and muscular chest. The faded blue bandanna tied around his dark hair only added to the image.

But his face was alight with whatever amusement had set him off, his teeth flashing a white bright enough to rival his T-shirt’s, and most of the teens gaped at him as if he were a rock star. Given the absorption with which she was staring at him herself, she could hardly blame them. If their interactions with the guy were anything like her own admittedly limited exchanges, they, too, were likely more accustomed to seeing him sober and serious.

Forcing herself to get back to the business at hand, she turned away to carry her tray over to one of the long tables in her area. “Who’s ready for more pancakes?” she demanded cheerfully.

And only glanced over her shoulder once to make sure that Max was no longer visible from this vantage point.

A largely male-voiced roar of enthusiasm from the patrons greeted her question, and she laughed and chatted up people as she dished out fresh stacks to everyone who indicated an interest.

“How’s the syrup holding up?” she inquired at one point and, being told that it was getting low, waved one of the teen volunteers over to exchange a full dispenser for the almost empty one. She summoned two other helpers as well to refill empty glasses from the pitchers of water and orange juice they manned.

“Megan, Joe, hello!” She forked pancakes onto the plates of two guests from the inn who had been in her guided kayak tour the day before. “I’m so glad you made it.”

Joe grinned. “Seriously good pancakes. We’re glad you told us about it.”

She laughed. The pancakes were decent but nowhere close to seriously good. But they were plentiful, and the atmosphere in the hall was loud, cheerful and fun, all of which she suspected contributed to the food tasting better.

She ran out of pancakes halfway through the next table and almost mowed down Tasha on her way back to the kitchen for another refill. “Oh, hey, sorry.” Reaching out, she steadied the other woman’s tray, which unlike her own was loaded. “I wasn’t looking where I was going—I was too busy marveling at the pancake-eating contest over there.” She indicated a table on the stage at the end of the cavernous hall.

“I know, it’s always kind of like watching jackals taking down a gazelle. You really want to look away, but find you can’t.”

“So this isn’t just an impulsive boys gone wild event? They’ve done this before?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s an annual event.” Tasha tipped her head toward the wiry little guy in the middle packing away an amazing quantity of pancakes. “Greg Larson will likely win. He almost always does. But every now and then, just often enough to keep things interesting, we have an upset.” She shrugged and looked at Harper. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m doing great. Upbeat crowds like this give me oomph.”

“Well, lucky you, Energizer Bunny.” The strawberry blonde gave her a weary smile. “I had a long shift at Bella’s last night that ran late, so I’m starting to wilt. And I’d sure like to know how the hell Jenny managed to weasel out of this detail.”

Harper shrugged. “She said there was too much to do at the inn.”

“Yeah, that’s the story she fed me, too.” Tasha raised her brows at Harper. “You buy that?”

“Not for a minute. Oh, not that the inn isn’t really busy, because it’s definitely jumping. But while I haven’t been around forever like you natives, I get the impression that Jenny thrives on the summer madness.” She looked askance at Tasha, who nodded her agreement.

Harper hitched a shoulder. “That being the case, and going by the fact that Jake’s not here, either, my guess would be that they’re sneaking some time together to make up for him being out of town.”

“Yep. That’d be my take, too.” Tasha really looked at Harper. “You know what? You and I should have a girls’ night one of these days. Jenny can join us if we can pry her away from Lover Boy, but right now she’s deep into that all-Jake-all-the-time stage, so I don’t hold my breath over that happening. What do you say? You in?”

“Absolutely.” One disadvantage to all of the traveling she’d done in her formative years was that she’d spent considerably more time with adults than people her own age. The upside, of course, was that it had resulted in far more sophisticated experiences than she likely would’ve received otherwise. But after the age of twelve she hadn’t had what most women would consider real girlfriends. Watching Tasha and Jenny together made her feel she’d been missing out.

“Good.” Tasha glanced down at her loaded tray. “I’d better pass these out while they’re still lukewarm. I’ll give you a call, okay? And this time I really mean it. I kind of let the yoga thing get away from me.”

Harper executed the particularly French shrug she’d picked up during the eighteen months she and her family had lived in Clermont-Ferrand. “Believe me, I know how that goes.”

They parted ways, Tasha plunging into the crowded room and Harper heading back to the food service counter that divided the hall from the kitchen.

She chatted up one of the boys on the other side while he refilled her tray with more pancakes. He’d just finished loading up when a horrendous crash of glass smashing to smithereens made them both jump as if someone had unexpectedly fired off a shotgun next to them. Her head swiveling in the direction of the sound, she focused in on two teenage boys standing in a quickly dissipating wreath of steam from the open door of a huge dishwasher. As she watched, one shoved the other.

“Look what you made me do, you dumb shit!” The shover gave the other, larger, teen another shot to the chest.

“Who the hell you callin’ a dumb shit, ass cap?” The bigger boy pushed back, making the first kid stumble back several paces. Following up his advantage, Big Boy dogged the retreating boy’s footsteps, thrusting his face into the other youth’s. “You’re the one who backed into me, you stupid fuc—”

“That’s enough.” Max’s deep voice cut through the obscenity, and suddenly he was just there, reaching between the boys to separate them. “Sometimes accidents are just accidents. Jeremy, grab the broom.”

“Why the hell do I have to sweep up his mess?” Big Boy demanded.

“Because we work as a team and I asked you to,” Max replied evenly, giving the teen a level look that had Jeremy slouching away. The remaining boy snickered.

Max turned to him. “I wouldn’t be too smug if I were you, because you’re not off the hook. Go get a dustpan and the mop. After you pick up the glass Jeremy sweeps, you can mop the area.”

“Hey!” The slighter boy adopted a belligerent stance. “He only hadda do one thing. How come I gotta do two?”

“Rules of the road, Owen.” Max’s voice was matter-of-fact yet somehow as calming as cool water poured over scorched earth. “Jeremy wasn’t wrong, you know—you picked up a huge tray of glasses, then backed up without once looking behind you. And the guy going in reverse is always at fault.”

“That sucks!”

Max reached out and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Maybe so. But rules are rules, kid. Go grab the dustpan and mop.”

The boy grumbled but did as he was told. Harper picked her tray up off the counter and turned away.

Great. Like it wasn’t bad enough that she already harbored a fascination for this guy. Why did he have to go and be good with kids, as well?

She didn’t understand this damn attraction; it was so not her general M.O. She’d never gone for the big, physical guys—she was usually drawn to older, more sophisticated men. But Max Bradshaw... Lord, whenever he was near she felt like a vampire trying to do the stay-on-the-straight-and-narrow-blood-bank thing.

All the while scenting a juicy vein.

And if that didn’t make everything more complicated, she didn’t know what did. Like things weren’t convoluted enough already...considering the job with The Brothers Inn wasn’t her sole reason for being in Razor Bay.

“You prob’ly better move, lady,” the boy who had refilled her tray suddenly said, shaking her out of her reverie.

“What’s that?” She blinked, then, following his gaze, glanced over her shoulder. Other volunteers, awaiting their turn, had begun stacking up behind her. “Oops.” She flashed them her friendliest smile. “Sorry.”

Picking up her tray, she threw herself back into dishing out pancakes.

When the last patron left, Harper nearly did, as well. She had wiped down her tables and straightened the chairs. And since she’d tucked her driver’s license into her back pocket so she wouldn’t have to deal with a purse, she was good to go.

But looking into the kitchen, she saw Max and his crew still hard at work cleaning up. She could see the boys had about reached their limit of volunteerism, and, with a quiet sigh, she rounded the end of the counter and crossed the kitchen to the teen who was about to carry a stack of plates on which he’d precariously balanced more glasses than was safe. He was the larger of the two boys Max had separated earlier, the one she’d privately labeled Big Boy.

“Let me give you a hand with that,” she said, reaching to pluck the glasses off the plates and efficiently stacking them into two towers.

“Thanks, lady.” The teen pulled an overhead cupboard open and shoved the plates in. He jerked his head to the cupboard next to his. “Glasses go in there.”

“I’m Harper.”

“Jeremy,” he said in a voice that didn’t encourage her to get chatty.

“Nice to meet you.” Stepping alongside him, she reached up to set the glasses in her right hand on the shelf. Apparently she’d stacked them just a little too high, however, for the bottom of the uppermost cup bumped the edge of the cupboard and began to tilt back toward her.

Warmth radiated against her back, even though nothing actually touched it. At the same time a suntanned, white-cotton banded biceps came into her peripheral vision, and Max Bradshaw’s deep voice said, “Hang on, let me take a couple cups off the top.”

It only took him a second, but that moment stretched languorously as a cat after a long nap, her senses bombarded with his heat, with the salty, slightly musky scent of him mixed with that of pancake batter and laundry soap. She eyed the up-close view of the tail end of his tattoos undulating from beneath his sleeve hem with the movement of his arm, then transferred her attention to the muscles and tendons that flexed in his forearm, his rawboned wrist and long hand as he swiftly slid a couple of cups from the stack she still held aloft, dropped them onto the one in her left hand, then removed four or five of those and put them in the cupboard.

“There you go.” He stepped back and Harper put the rest of the cups alongside the minitower he’d placed on the shelf.

Exhaling softly, she glanced at him over her shoulder. “Thank you. You seem to have a knack for rescuing me from glassware accidents-about-to-happen.”

He stilled for a moment, and something hot and fierce flashed in his eyes. Or perhaps she only imagined it, because in the next instant he gave her a faint smile, polite nod and a murmured, “My pleasure.”

Oh, trust me, it was mine, as well.

Probably a less than brilliant idea to go there, however, so she shook the thought aside and injected some starch in her spine. Then, seeing an opportunity and not shy about taking advantage of it, she turned to him fully. “Listen, I only work three-quarter time at the inn. I’d love to volunteer some of my free hours to Cedar Village.”

“Yeah?” He studied her through shuttered dark eyes. “What do you have to offer?”

“I don’t know. What do volunteers generally do? I’m pretty much a jack-of-all-trades. But what I really rock at is organizing activities. And fund-raising.” When he continued to simply look at her with level, noncommittal eyes, she shrugged impatiently. People usually jumped at her fund-raising skills. “If that doesn’t work for you, I could always just provide a woman’s touch.”

“I wouldn’t mind a woman’s touch,” drawled a blond boy who was swabbing down the counter a few feet away, and his tone told Harper he wasn’t thinking motherly thoughts.

“That’s enough, Brandon,” Max said, but it was the look that Harper aimed at the youth that made the boy squirm. It was a thousand-yard stare she’d perfected when she was twelve, a nonthreatening but cool gaze that made the recipient completely question the wisdom of uttering the words that had warranted it in the first place.

“Sorry,” Brandon muttered.

“Not a problem.” She gave him a slight smile that was warmer without encouraging him to repeat his blunder. Then she turned back to Max. “This won’t help for today’s event, but I could tell you how to make your next pancake breakfast more profitable. And while I can’t promise anything until I talk to Jenny, maybe she’d let us offer the occasional supervised use of some of The Brothers’ resources.”

Max dug his wallet out of his back pocket, fished out a card and handed it to Harper. “Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll talk about it. But for now, you should go enjoy the rest of your day off.”

Sliding the proffered card into her own back pocket, she nodded, recognizing a dismissal when she heard one. “I’ll do that.” She glanced at the teen still stacking dishes next to her. “It was nice meeting you, Jeremy.” She nodded at the other boys who had stopped working to watch her.

Then she strode to the kitchen door and let herself out.

“Dude,” she heard one of the boys say as the door closed behind her. “She’s hot. Why’d you let her get away?” There was a beat of silence, then, “Oh, man. It’s not because she’s black, is it?”

Harper froze. Omigawd. Was it? That hadn’t even occurred to her, maybe because she’d spent the majority of her life in Europe where race wasn’t as big an issue—or at least didn’t have the history that it had in the States. But for all she knew—

“Hell, no,” Max’s voice said emphatically. “Listen, kid, men don’t hit on every hot woman they see.” He was quiet for a moment, then said slowly, “Besides, did she strike you as the kind of woman who would welcome me hitting on her?”

Yes! Embarrassing as it was to admit, she definitely would welcome that.

“Nah, I guess not,” the boy said.

“Oh, for c’ris—” Harper cut herself off, blew a pithy raspberry and stalked over to her car.

Her feet hurt from being on them all morning and she was cursing having worn her tallest wedged espadrilles as she blew through the front door of her cottage. Loggins and Messina played “Your Mama Don’t Dance” on the cell phone she’d deliberately left behind, and she crossed the room and snatched it off the little coffee table.

“Hi, Mom.” She kicked off her shoes and headed straight for the mini-fridge, where she pulled out a nice cold bottle of raspberry-green-tea-flavored artesian water. She rolled its cold plastic across her warm forehead.

“Hey, Baby Girl.”

Ever since her dad had died—and that had been a few years ago now—she and her mother had been at odds more often than not. So, hearing the nickname gave her a rush of pleasure. Tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder, she twisted the cap off the bottle and drank half of it down in one large swallow.

“For heaven’s sake, are you gulping something in my ear? Did your Grandma Hardin and I not teach you better manners than that?”

Harper tried not to feel resentful, she really did. She was thirty years old, for God’s sake; long past the age to be either scolded like a child or react as if she were one.

She inhaled and blew out a quiet breath, and still a vestige of attitude she simply couldn’t expunge colored her voice when she said, “Sorry. I just spent three-plus hours serving pancakes for a Cedar Village fund-raiser, and I’m tired and thirsty.”

There was an instant of silence. Then Gina Summerville-Hardin said softly, “How did that happen?”

Oh, God, it had been so easy, Harper still couldn’t quite believe it. She’d almost fallen off the picnic bench at Jenny’s dinner party when Max had presented the opportunity. “My boss’s boyfriend’s half brother is Max Bradshaw.”

The sudden silence was so absolute that Harper began to wonder if they’d lost the connection. “Mom?”

“Yes, I’m still here. The same Max Bradshaw who’s on the Cedar Village board?”

“Yes.”

“I was quite impressed with his dossier, being both a deputy and a veteran and all. He sounds like a very responsible man. Still, I must say I’m stunned at the coincidence.”

For a few seconds, her thoughts got hung up in that touch they’d shared over the sangria pitcher. Then she shrugged it off. “Well, Razor Bay is pretty small. It’s tougher to maintain my anonymity in a one stoplight town, but the upside is it’s easier to get to know the players, as there are just plain fewer of them. But, man. I thought I was lucky to get the job at The Brothers.” A dry laugh escaped her. “I had no idea how lucky.”

She’d taken the position because it was right up her alley, considering it was the kind of job she’d done before her dad’s death had pulled her into the nonprofit charity her parents had started when her father retired his engineering degree. But primarily she’d taken it because ever since she had joined the fold, her year-round job had become assessing the worthiness of the less-established charities applying for grants from Sunday’s Child. In this case Cedar Village had submitted a request to the family foundation for a grant that would enable them to hire an additional counselor, fill the gaps in their supplies and fix the roof on the classroom building where the boys kept up with their education even as they learned the skills they’d need to reenter society as fully functional young men.

Her dad was the one who had originated the policy of anonymous evaluations after his first few trips to meet grant applicants had resulted in lavish dog and pony shows presented strictly to impress him. He’d decided a better way to get the true measure of how a charity was run was to assess them anonymously in their day-to-day business.

“I still don’t understand why you took that job at all,” her mother said, pulling Harper from her reverie. “It doesn’t take you thirteen weeks to make your assessment.”

“Mom, I told you—the only other reason to be in a town this size would be to take a vacation, and who’d believe a single woman on vacay had a sudden yen to volunteer at a home for delinquent boys? How would she even hear of it? Besides, I kind of needed a vacation.”

“So you took a job?”

Harper bit back a sigh, because they’d had this conversation before. “I took a fun job, and it’s a break from lying to people. That is a vacation.”

“Yet you’re lying to these people, too, aren’t you?”

Harper was suddenly so weary she could barely hold her head up. What the hell had happened to them that they were so far apart these days? “Yes, Mother. You’re absolutely right. I’m a liar no matter what I do.”

“Darling, I didn’t mean it that way. I simply think if you’re unhappy, you should let someone else do that job and come home.”

“I’m not unhappy.” Yes, she got tired of the subterfuge sometimes, but she genuinely got the reasoning behind it. And she loved the new places, new people aspect of it. Loved getting to help charities that made things easier for kids. But her mother, who wanted her to quit traveling and settle down, would never believe that.

And she really didn’t feel up to justifying her choices yet again. “Whoops. There’s the doorbell. I’ll talk to you soon, Mom.”

“Harper, wait—”

“Gotta go. Bye.” She disconnected. Then, blowing out an unhappy breath, she tossed the phone on the table and flopped back on the couch.

This was the right way to do things, she assured herself. Her dad had done it so, and she still trusted his judgment unswervingly. As for the niggle of doubt her mother’s words had created?

Taking a steady, calming breath, she flicked it away.