I’m In No Mood For Love

Six

Clare raised her hand and knocked on the red door of the carriage house. Through the dark lenses of her sunglasses, she glanced at her gold watch. It was a little after two in the afternoon, and the relentless sun heated her bare shoulders as she stood on the porch. The temperature hovered at ninety-five, but was bound to reach a hundred.

Earlier, she’d written five pages, walked for half an hour on the treadmill in her spare bedroom, and made a list of names for Leo’s party. For the past few days she’d run herself ragged with planning, but it kept her too busy to think about her life. For which she was grateful, although she’d never admit it to her mother. After she ran the names by Leo, she had to pick up her dry cleaning and buy party decorations. Then she would cook dinner and wash dishes, which she calculated would keep her busy until six or seven. After that, maybe she’d write some more. Each time she thought of Lonny, she felt a little piece of her heart chip away. Perhaps if she kept herself very busy for the next few months, her broken heart would heal and spare her some of the pain.

She was still waiting for an epiphany. A light to be shed on her life and show her why she’d chosen Lonny. A ta-da moment to explain why she hadn’t seen the truth of her relationship with him.

Clare adjusted the small purse on her shoulder. It hadn’t happened yet.

The door swung open. Light spilled across the threshold and shined into the house. “Holy mother of God,” Sebastian swore as he raised one arm to shield his gaze from the sun.

“Afraid not.”

Beneath his bare arm, he squinted down at her through bloodshot eyes as if he didn’t quite recognize her. He wore the same jeans and Molson T-shirt he’d worn the day before. He was wrinkled and his hair stood up in front. “Clare?” he finally said, his voice rough and sleepy, as if he’d just rolled out of bed.

“Bingo.” Light brown stubble shadowed the lower half of his face, and the shadow from his arm rested across the seam of his lips. “Did I wake you?”

“I’ve been up for a few.”

“Late night?”

“Yeah.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “What time is it?”

“About a quarter after two. Did you sleep in your clothes?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Out carousing again?”

“Carousing?” He dropped his hands to his sides. “No. I was up all night reading.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him picture books weren’t really considered reading, but she was going to be nice today if it killed her. Calling him a dickhead the other day had felt good. For a while. But by the time she’d pulled into her garage, the elation had worn thin and she’d felt undignified and gauche. The nice thing-the ladylike thing-would be to apologize. She’d kill herself first. “It must have been a good book.”

“It was interesting.” A ghost of a smile curved his mouth.

She didn’t ask what kind of book he’d read. She didn’t really care. “Is your father around?”

“I don’t know.” He stepped aside, and she walked past him into the house. He smelled like bed linen and warm skin, and he was such a big man, he seemed to dwarf the space around him. Or perhaps it just seemed that way because she was used to Lonny, who stood a few inches taller than her own medium height and was quite thin.

“I searched for him in my mother’s house and he’s not there.” She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and looked at Sebastian as he closed the door. He leaned his back against it, folded his arms across his chest and stared at her feet. Slowly, he lifted his gaze from the toes of her red sandals and up her halter dress with the deep red cherries on it. His attention paused on her mouth before continuing to her eyes. He tilted his head to one side, studying her as if trying to figure something out.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He pushed away from the door and moved by her into the kitchen. His feet were bare. “I just put on a pot of coffee. Want some?”

“No. By two, I’ve usually moved on to Diet Coke.” She followed close behind, her gaze taking in his broad shoulders. The arms of his T-shirt fit snuggly around the bulge of his biceps, and the ends of his sandy blond hair touched the ribbed collar at the base of his neck. There was no doubt about it. Sebastian was a man’s man. A guy. While Lonny had been particular about his clothing, Sebastian slept in his.

“My dad doesn’t drink Diet Coke.”

“I know. He’s an RC Cola man, and I hate RC.”

Sebastian glanced back at her and moved around the old wooden table stacked with notebooks, legal pads, and index cards. A laptop lay open, and a small tape recorder and three cassettes sat next to a BlackBerry. “He’s the only person I know who still drinks RC,” he said as he opened a cupboard and reached for a mug on the top shelf. The bottom edge of his T-shirt pulled up past the waistband of his jeans, riding low on his hips. The elastic band of his underwear looked very white against the tan skin of his lower back.

The memory of his bare behind flashed across her brain, and she raised her gaze to the back of his sleep-tousled hair. That morning at the Double Tree, he hadn’t been wearing underwear. “He’s a very loyal consumer,” she said. The memory of that morning made her want to sink into the floor and hide. She hadn’t had sex with him. While that was a huge relief, she had to wonder what they’d actually done, and how she’d ended up virtually naked. If she thought he’d give her a straight answer, she would ask him to fill in the blank spots.

“More like stubborn,” Sebastian corrected with his back to her. “Very definitely set in his ways.”

But she didn’t believe he’d give her the truth without embellishing it for his own amusement. Sebastian could not be trusted, but that wasn’t exactly news. “That’s part of his charm.” A few feet from him, she leaned her behind against the table.

Sebastian grabbed the carafe with one hand and poured coffee into the mug he held with the other. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“Yes.” With both hands, she grasped the tabletop at her hips and purposely let her gaze once again slide down the back of his rumpled T-shirt and the long legs of his jeans. She couldn’t help but compare him to Lonny, but supposed it was only natural. Besides the fact that they were both men, they had nothing in common. Sebastian was taller, bigger, and surrounded by a thick testosterone haze. Lonny was shorter, thinner, and had been in touch with his feelings. Perhaps that had been Lonny’s appeal. He’d been nonthreatening. Clare waited for the ta-da bells to ring in her head. They didn’t.

Sebastian set the carafe down, and Clare turned her attention to the tape recorder by her right hand. “Are you writing an article?” she asked. He didn’t answer, and she looked up.

Sunlight spilled through the kitchen window across his shoulder and the side of his face. It poured across the stubble on his cheek and got tangled in his eyelashes. He raised the mug to his lips and watched her as he blew into the coffee. “Writing? Not really. More like typing and deleting the same opening paragraph.”

“You’re stuck?”

“Something like that.” He took a drink.

“Whenever I get stuck, it’s usually because I’m trying to start a book in the wrong place or I’m going about it from the wrong angle. The more I try to force it, the more I get stuck.”

He lowered the mug, and she expected him to say something deprecating about writing romance. Her grasp on the table tightened as she steeled herself and waited for him to point out to her that what he wrote was important, and to dismiss her books as nothing more than fantasies for bored housewives. Heck, her own mother trivialized her work. She did not expect better from Sebastian Vaughan, of all people.

Instead of launching into a condescending diatribe, however, he looked at her as he had earlier. Like he was trying to figure something out. “Maybe, but I don’t ‘get stuck.’ At least I never have before, and never for this long.”

Clare waited for him to continue. She was ready for him to jump on the literary bandwagon and say something derogatory. She’d been defending herself, her genre, and her readers for so long, she could handle what he threw at her. But he simply drank his coffee, and she tilted her head to the side and looked at him as if she couldn’t figure him out.

Now it was his turn to ask, “What?”

“I think I mentioned yesterday that I write romance novels,” she felt compelled to point out.

He raised a brow as he lowered the mug. “Yeah. You mentioned it, along with the fact that you do all your own sexual research.”

That’s right. Dang it. He’d made her mad, and she’d said things she wished she could take back. Things that were coming back to haunt her. Things said in anger that she’d learned long ago to keep behind the happy facade. “And you don’t have one condescending thing to say?”

He shook his head.

“No smarmy questions?”

He smiled. “Just one.” He turned and set the mug on the counter by his hip.

She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “No. I’m not a nymphomaniac.”

His smile turned into a chuckle, laugh lines creasing the corners of his green eyes. “That isn’t the smarmy question, but thanks for clearing that up.” He folded his arms across his rumpled T-shirt. “The real question is: where do you do all your research?”

Clare dropped her hand to her side. She figured she had a couple ways to answer that question. She could get offended and tell him to grow up, or she could relax. He seemed to be playing nice today, but this was Sebastian. The man who’d lied to her about having sex with him.

“Are you afraid to tell me?” he goaded her.

She wasn’t afraid of Sebastian. “I have a special room in my house,” she lied.

“What’s in the room?”

He looked totally serious. As if he actually believed her. “Sorry, I can’t divulge that sort of information to a reporter.”

“I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

“Sorry.”

“Come on. It’s been a long time since anyone’s told me anything juicy.”

“Told or done?”

“What’s in your kinky sex room, Clare?” he persisted. “Whips, chains, swings, slings, latex body suits?”

Slings? Holy heck. “You seem to know a lot about kinky sex closets.”

“I know I’m not allergic to latex. Other than that, I’m a fairly straightforward guy. I’m not into being beaten or trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.” He pushed away from the counter and took a few silent steps toward her. “Restraints?”

“Handcuffs,” she said as he came to stand a foot in front of her. “Fuzzy, because I’m a nice person.”

He laughed like she’d said something really amusing. “Nice? Since when?”

So, maybe she hadn’t always been nice to Sebastian, but he loved to provoke her. She straightened and looked up past the stubble on his chin and into his green eyes. “I try to be nice.”

“Babe, you might want to put a little more effort into that.”

She felt her temper rise a bit, but refused to take the bait. Not today. She smiled and patted him on his rough cheek. “I’m not going to fight with you, Sebastian. There’s nothing you can do to provoke me today.”

He turned his face and lightly bit the heel of her palm. His green eyes stared into hers and he asked, “Are you sure about that?”

Her fingers curled against his scratchy cheek as a disturbing awareness curled in her stomach. She lowered her hand but could feel the warmth of his mouth and the sharp edge of his teeth in her palm. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure of anything. “Yes.”

“What if I nibbled…” He raised his hand and touched the corner of her mouth. “…here?” The tips of his fingers slid down her jaw and brushed the side of her neck. “And here.” He slid his fingers down the edge of her halter dress and across her clavicle. “And here.”

Her breathing stopped in her chest as she stared up into his face. “Sounds painful,” she managed as shock tightened her throat. It had to be shock, and not the heat of his touch brushing her throat.

“It won’t hurt a bit.” He raised his gaze from her neck to her eyes. “You’ll like it, trust me.”

Trust Sebastian? The boy who’d only been nice to her so he could tease and torture her? Who’d only pretended to like her so he could throw mud on her clean dress and make her cry? “I learned a long time ago not to trust you.”

He dropped his hand to his side. “When was that?”

“The day you wanted me to show you the river and threw mud on my new dress,” she said, and figured he’d no doubt forgotten that day long ago.

“That dress was too white.”

“What?” How could something be too white? If it wasn’t white, it was dingy.

He took a few steps back and grabbed his coffee. “You were always too perfect. Your hair. Your clothes. Your manners. It just wasn’t natural. The only time you were any fun at all was when you were messed up and doing something you thought you shouldn’t.”

She pointed at her chest. “I was plenty fun.” He lifted a dubious brow, and she insisted, “I’m still fun. All my friends think so.”

“Clare, your hair was too tight then and you’re wound too tight now.” He shook his head. “Either your friends are lying to you to spare your feelings or they’re as much fun as a prayer circle.”

She wasn’t going to argue about how much fun she and her friends were, and she dropped her hand to her side. “You’ve been in a prayer circle?”

“You find that hard to believe?” His brows lowered and he scowled at her for about two seconds before the corner of his mouth tilted up and gave him away. “When I was in college, one of the first stories I was sent out to cover involved a group of evangelicals recruiting on campus. They were so boring, I fell asleep on a folding chair.” He shrugged. “It probably didn’t help that I was hung over as hell.”

“Sinner.”

“You know that old saying about finding something you’re good at and sticking with it.” The other side of his mouth slid up into a wicked smile, leaving little doubt that he’d turned sinning into an art form.

Her heart gave a little flutter, whether she wanted it to flutter or not. And she didn’t. Clare reached for the glasses on top of her head, and her hair slid over her ear and across her cheek. “If you see your father, will you tell him I need to talk to him about the guest list for his party?” she asked, purposely turning the conversation away from thoughts of sinning.

“Sure.” He raised the coffee to his lips. “You could leave the list and I’ll make sure he sees it.”

She pushed her hair back. “You’d do that?”

“Why not?”

Probably because being nice and helpful to her wasn’t in his nature. “Thanks.”

He took a drink and watched her over the top of the mug. “Don’t mention it, E-Clare.”

She frowned and pulled a piece of paper from the bag on her shoulder. Growing up, he’d called her any and every variation of her name. Her least favorite had been Hairy Clary. She set the list on the table and adjusted her purse. She remembered the time she’d thought she was so smart, and had tried to outwit Sebastian by calling him a numb nut. She’d heard the expression somewhere and thought she was calling him a stupid nut…until he pointed out that she was actually calling him a numb testicle. There’d never been any winning with Sebastian. “Tell him these are the people whom I’ve already contacted and who will attend. If he sees an omission, someone I’ve forgotten to include, I need to know ASAP.” She looked up at him. “Thanks again,” she said, and turned toward the door.

Without a word, Sebastian watched her leave. Warm coffee slid down his throat as his gaze moved down the shiny brown hair brushing her bare shoulders and back.

She was so thorough. So tidy. Somebody should do her a favor and mess her up a little. Wrinkle her clothes and smear her lipstick. At the front of the house, the door opened and closed, and Sebastian moved toward the table. That someone wasn’t going to be him. No matter how tempting. She was too uptight for his tastes. But even if she did loosen up, he couldn’t imagine that doing the deed with Clare would ever go over very well with the old man. Not to mention Joyce.

He kicked the chair away from the table and sat as he booted up his computer. The only reason he could come up with to explain his inexplicable attraction to Clare was that (a) he’d seen her naked, and (b) he hadn’t had sex in a while, and (c) her damn book. He hadn’t planned on reading it straight through, but she’d hooked him and he’d read every page. Every well-written, hot page.

On those rare occasions when Sebastian found the time to read something that wasn’t related to his job, he picked up a Stephen King. As a kid, he’d loved horror and science fiction. As an adult it never once occurred to him to reach for a romance. From Chapter One, he’d been impressed with the smooth depth of her writing. Yeah, it had been emotionally overdone in some scenes, so much so that he’d groaned a few times, but it had also been exceedingly erotic. Not the Penthouse Forum sort of eroticism he’d found with some male writers. More of a soft lead by the hand rather than a slap across the face.

The night before, when he’d fallen asleep, he’d dreamed about Clare. Again. Only this time instead of a thong, she’d worn drawers and a white corset. And thanks to the clarity of her writing, he’d been able to picture every damn ribbon and bow.

Then today, he’d opened the door and found her on his doorstep as if he’d conjured her up. To make matters worse, her dress had cherries on it. Cherries, for God’s sake. Like she was dessert. Which had instantly reminded him of the pirate throwing Lady Julia on his big table and licking Devonshire cream from her breasts.

He pulled his T-shirt over his head and brushed it across his chest. He needed to get laid. That was his problem. Only he didn’t know anyone in Boise who could take care of that particular problem for him. He didn’t pick up women for one-nighters anymore. He couldn’t say for certain when sex with a total stranger had lost its appeal, but he figured it was about the same time he picked up a woman in a Tulsa bar and she’d about gone postal on him when he wouldn’t give her his cell number.

His word processing system appeared on the screen, and he tossed his shirt on the floor by his feet. He glanced at his note cards and shuffled a few to the top. He moved them around in rapid succession, setting some aside, then picking them back up and placing them in a different order. For the first time in weeks he felt the beginning flick in his head. He glanced at his notes scribbled on a legal pad, picked up a pencil, and scribbled a little more. The flicker caught fire and he placed his fingers on the keyboard. He moved his neck from side to side and wrote:

I’m told his name is Smith, but it could be Johnson or Williams or any other typically American surname. He is blond and wears a suit and tie as if he plans to run for president someday. Only his heroes aren’t Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Reagan. When he speaks of great men, he speaks of Tim McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Eric Rudolph. Homegrown terrorists who’ve settled in the sediment of the American subconscious, overshadowed and forgotten for now by their foreign counterparts, until the next act of American extremism blows itself onto the nightly news and spills black ink across the nation’s newspapers as blood runs in the streets.

Everything clicked and whirred and fell into place, and for the next three hours the steady tapping of his keyboard filled the kitchen. He paused to refill his coffee mug, and when he was finished, he felt as if an elephant had stepped off his chest. He leaned back in his chair and blew out a relieved breath. As much as he hated to admit it, Clare had been right. He’d been trying to force it, to start the piece in the wrong place, and he hadn’t been able to see. He’d been too tense. Holding on too tight to look at what was so glaringly obvious. If Clare had been in front of him, he would have planted one on her beautiful mouth. Of course, kissing Clare anywhere was completely out of the question.

Sebastian rose from his chair and stretched. Earlier, when he asked her about her research, he’d meant to tease her a little. Knock her off her pins. Get her going, like he had as a kid. Only the joke was on him. He was thirty-five. He’d traveled the world and been with a lot of different women. He did not get all hot and bothered by a romance novelist in a cherry dress as if he were a kid. Especially that particular romance novelist.

Even if Clare was up for a few rounds of noncommital, no strings, hot and sweaty sex-and that was a big if-it would never happen. He was in Boise to try and build a relationship with his father. Something from the ashes, not set ablaze what little progress they’d made by sleeping with Clare. It didn’t matter that Joyce wasn’t Sebastian’s employer. She was his father’s boss, and that made her the boss’s daughter. If shit had hit the fan years ago over a conversation about sex, he hated to think what might hit the fan if they actually had sex. But even if Clare weren’t the boss’s daughter, he instinctively knew she was a one man woman. The problem with a one man woman was that he was not a one woman man.

His life had slowed in the past few years, but he’d spent most of his twenties bouncing from town to town. Six months here, nine there, learning his job, honing his craft, making a name for himself. Finding women had never been a problem. It still wasn’t, although he was a lot more particular at thirty-five than he’d been at twenty-five.

Perhaps someday he would marry. When he was ready. When the thought of it didn’t make him put his hands up in the air and back away from the idea of a wife and kids. Probably because he hadn’t exactly been raised in an ideal situation. He’d had two stepfathers. One he’d liked, the other he hadn’t. He’d liked some of his mother’s boyfriends, but always knew that it was just a matter of time before they left and his mother would once again shut herself in her room.

Growing up, he’d always known that his parents loved him. They’d just loathed each other. His mother had been vocal about her hatred of his father, but to be fair to his dad, the old man hadn’t ever said anything against his mother. Yet, sometimes it was what a person didn’t say that spoke volumes. He didn’t ever want to be stuck in that sort of vicious circle with a woman, and he certainly didn’t want to raise a child in that environment.

Sebastian bent at the waist and picked up his T-shirt from the floor. No, he would never rule out marriage and family. Someday he might decide he was ready, but that day wasn’t even in the pipeline.

The kitchen door opened and his father walked in. He moved to the sink and turned on the faucet. “Are you workin’?”

“I just finished.”

Leo grabbed a bar of soap and washed his hands. “I have tomorrow off, and if you’re not busy, I thought maybe you and me could drive up past Arrowrock dam and drop a hook.”

“You want to go fishing?”

“Yeah. You used to like to fish, and I hear they’re bitin’ up there.”

Fishing with the old man. It could work out to be just what the two of them needed, or it could turn into a disaster. Like shopping for a car. “I’d love to fish with you, Dad.”