Wild in the Moonlight

Nine

“Good afternoon, ladies.” Cameron walked into the kitchen. At least he was wearing a T-shirt this time, but after spending two solid weeks in the sun, his bronzed skin in shorts and sandals still made five pairs of eyes instantly swivel in his direction.

“Hi, Cameron!”

“Hi, Cameron, how’s it going?”

“Good to see you, again, Cam!”

Violet rolled her eyes. Two weeks ago, Cameron would have broken out in an alpha-male sweat to see four women, sitting in bathrobes at the kitchen table, slathered in white-purple face masks and sipping wine. Now, he cheerfully fielded their greetings, reached in the refrigerator for a cold soda and promptly hiked back outside.

The tableful of women let out a collective sigh. Once a month, Violet put on a “pamperfest,” not because she needed more to do, but because the products she used invariably brought more customers. Today’s agenda had included a facial mask made from oatmeal and lavender, a foot soak and a conditioner for damaged hair. The conditioner was her own private recipe of geranium, lavender, sandalwood and rosewood, all diluted in vegetable oil, rubbed in the hair and covered in a towel for two hours.

At this point in the proceedings, all four women had the face masks on and the conditioner slathered in their hair. Originally she’d served a cooled herbal tea, but Maud Thrumble-typically-had slipped two bottles of wine onto the table before they’d even started.

“God, he’s such a hulk,” Maud said fervently.

“Hunk, not hulk,” Mary Bell corrected her. “Quit trying to be cool when you don’t know the terms. You’re so old you’d probably have called him a dreamboat in your day.”

“Whatever,” Maud said. She and Mary Bell had never gotten along all that well. “He’s to die for. That’s the point. If only I hadn’t been married for fifty years, I’ll tell you, I’d give him a good run for his money.”

The other two women hooted at this news, causing a bowl of lavender-oatmeal goo to spill and Violet to leap up for a rag.

“Aw, Violet, leave it be. We’ll all clean it up when we’re through.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“No, it’s not.” Sally Williams frowned at her. “You’ve been quiet all afternoon, not like yourself. “What’s wrong?”

“Not a thing. In fact, everything’s hunky-dory. Smooth as silk. Georgy-peachy. Totally copacetic.” In fact, if things got any better, she’d have to smash her head into a door. Edgy as a wet cat, Violet swiped at the spill on the floor, then aimed for the sink. If a woman was going to make a mess, it was her theory that a woman should make a good one. Her entire kitchen looked like a witch’s trash. Clay and porcelain pots of herbs spilled over the counters. Leaves and stems and flowers strewed from the door to the sink. And the pot that mixed the oatmeal and lavender-God knew how she was going to clean it. “What’s not to be happy? It’s a gorgeous day. Life’s good-”

“Enough, already,” Maud said. “It’s that man that’s gotten you down, isn’t it?”

“What man?” She’d never been less depressed, Violet told herself. The last couple weeks had been wonderful. Every day had been sunny. Her Herb Haven business was busier than a swarm of bees. Cameron had taken over the lavender harvest completely, hiring Filbert Green, the local farmer who’d taken care of the land after the parents retired. At this very moment, in fact, there was a crew in the lavender, unseen, unheard, none of whom had bothered her for anything.

Family news had been just as peaceful. Camille had called to wax poetically on the wonders of honeymoons with teenagers. Her mom had called to convey that she and her dad had been going to vacation in Maine and somehow taken a wrong turn; they were headed for New Zealand. And Daisy hadn’t called-which was yet another good thing-because when she connected with her oldest sister the next time, Violet planned to strangle her. Daisy was very good at getting her sisters embroiled with men, but when it came to revealing what she was doing herself, suddenly she took a powder, probably somewhere on the Riviera on a nude beach.

Violet opened the fridge, put the dish rag on the top shelf and closed it. When she turned around, the women were all staring at her.

“What? What?”

“Vi, you’re just not yourself today,” Sally repeated. “Sit down and have some wine, girl.”

“It’s four in the afternoon. If I have wine now, I’ll be curled up on the floor before dinner.”

“Well, something stronger then. How about a little strawberry daiquiri?” From nowhere, Mary Bell lifted a delicate sterling silver flask in the air. Sally promptly zoomed for the cupboard and brought down a glass, then cleared a seat of damp towels so Violet could sit down. “Speaking of alcohol-”

“I didn’t think we were.”

That was ignored. “It looks as if your houseguest is doing something illegal out there. At least in my daddy’s day, we used to call that kind of device a still. He making moonshine on you?”

“No. He’s making lavender oil…or ‘lavender absolute’ as it’s properly called, I guess. It’s kind of hard to explain the process.” She stared at the glass of cherry daiquiri in front of her, then thought what the hell and took a sip. “First you have to pick the flowers when only two thirds of the florets are opened up. Then…well, come to think of it, the distilling process probably does have something in common with a bootlegger’s still. You put water in one container and the flowers in another. You heat the water hot enough to make steam, and then that’s pushed through a pipe under high pressure through the plant material. The steam works to separate or displace the water from the oil. The oil always…”

“Good grief,” Maud said. “You’re going to make our eyes cross. None of us give a holy damn about the still business, dear, we were just trying to get you talking. You haven’t had a man near you since you came home after the divorce, and suddenly you’ve got this gorgeous hulk living with you-”

“Hunk,” Mary Bell corrected.

“Whatever. The point is that your mother isn’t here, but we all know she’d be hoping that you’re taking advantage of the situation.”

Violet gulped down another sip of daiquiri, feeling cornered. Furthermore, her cats had all hunkered on top of the refrigerator, away from the bawdy, noisy drinkers with their increasingly stiff facial masks. “He’s not living with me. He’s just living here. Until the roof for the cottage is done-which was supposed to have been finished a whole month ago. In fact, almost two months ago now. I can’t make Bartholomew show up regularly for work to save my life.”

“That’s roofers, dear. I should know. I was married to one for twelve years. He only showed up on time for dinner twice, God rest his soul.” Anne Blayton almost never spoke up, but she’d finished two glasses of wine now. Her mask was starting to crack like old parchment. “He sure was good between the sheets, though.”

“Well, you’ve been through enough husbands, you should be a judge,” Mary Bell said sweetly.

“The point,” Maud said, “is not whether he’s sleeping here or in the cottage, but where he’s not sleeping when the lights go out. Are you deaf and blind, Violet Campbell? Last week, with that ghastly heat wave, I swear the only redeeming part of my day was to drive past here and see him walking in the yard, at least half the time without a shirt. Whooee.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Violet reached forward to pour a little wine into her now-empty glass.

“Violet, honey, you just added wine to your daiquiri,” Mary Bell said kindly. “You’re just not yourself.”

“I am too myself.”

The back door opened again. Cameron ambled in. “Hi, ladies. Looks like you’re having fun.” He deposited an empty can in the trash, smiled at the group, stroked three cats and ambled through to the other room.

Four women let out another collective sigh. All of them were smiling hard enough to crack their masks. “It’s time we washed you all off,” Violet said firmly.

That was at least three times he’d walked in this afternoon. Three times, when he’d laughed and joked with the women. It wasn’t that long ago that he would have had a cow and a half over an estrogen-loaded event like this. He didn’t run anymore. He didn’t act terrified-or even surprised-if he wandered into the kitchen and found a roomful of masked women with their bare feet in buckets, sitting in bathrobes in the middle of the afternoon.

It just wasn’t natural. He was beyond being the ideal guy-helping her with everything from dishes to chores, making the whole lavender thing look effortless, doing his own wash, never taking over the remote, bringing groceries in. He’d quit trying to finish the roof, but that was only because he’d completely run out of spare time. Normal men only helped out if they were harassed, blackmailed or wanted sex. Everybody knew that. Cameron seemed to think it was ordinary behavior to pitch in. More confusing yet, he took every damn thing in her life in stride, as if it were all very interesting, instead of the nature of stuff that should have given an alpha guy like him nightmares.

Instead, he’d been giving her nightmares.

As soon as the women were cleaned up and herded out, Violet piled dishes into the sink, added sudsy water and then turned on the dishwasher. A moment later she realized she’d turned the dishwasher on without any dishes in it, and thought she’d either had too much to drink…

Or too little Cameron.

She looked frantically around for the dish towel, but it seemed to have disappeared.

Two weeks ago he’d claimed he wanted to sleep with her. Intended to sleep with her. Imminently soon.

Only, they hadn’t.

He’d been kissing her regularly. Over breakfast. Before lunch. In the middle of the day, if he found her in the Herb Haven with her hands filled with a dried-herb arrangement, he’d take a bite out of the back of her neck, cup her fanny. He’d walked with her in the moonlight. They’d hip-danced doing the dishes after dinner, barged in on each other coming out of the bathroom, fallen asleep watching horror movies on the same couch.

But the damn man hadn’t done one thing about seriously seducing her. She was free! She was cheap! She was available. She had boobs. She wasn’t asking him for a single thing! So what was the matter with the man?

Upstairs, she heard the pipes rattle. He was taking a shower. She opened the refrigerator for some God-unknown reason and found her dish towel. She held the cool towel to her pounding head. The man was turning her into a train wreck. She had to get her life back. She couldn’t remember where her shoes were, her keys, her dishrags. She was starting to become ditsy for real.

Enough was enough. If Mohammed wasn’t willing to come to the mountain, she was darn well going to have to try seducing the mountain herself.

Cameron walked into the kitchen and stopped dead. They’d been sharing KP duty over the past couple weeks, but after seeing the war zone caused by the women’s group earlier, he’d put on clean khakis and a decent shirt, figuring that Violet would want to go out to dinner.

Instead, the women were gone and the kitchen cleaned to within an inch of its life-give or take the cats and cat hair. The old oak table had white quilted place mats, roses floating in a bowl, some kind of wild salad-smelled like lemon-pepper shrimp-puffed-up fresh rolls…

Violet whirled around. “We’re having something I call come-to-Bahama wings. They’re chicken wings without the bones. Kind of hot. A little lime juice, some rum, some honey, some hot peppers… I guess I should have asked you first, but you can handle hot, can’t you, Lachlan?”

“Sure,” he said, but the adrenaline was instantly pumping. Something was wrong. Worrisome wrong. The way she smiled at him raised the temperature in the kitchen twenty degrees. He saw the hot wings and the roses and heard the come-to-mama invitation in her voice.

Everywhere he looked, there were more land mines. And the more he looked, the more he recognized that she’d gone to a ton of trouble, laying all kinds of intricate, tricky traps.

She was barefoot, wearing a skirt that looked like a long, floaty handkerchief. Her midriff was bare, her long hair all scooped up and twisted and sedated with long clips off her neck. Said neck had been doused with some lethal scent-not her usual citrus soap, for damn sure, but something that reached his nostrils from the doorway. The perfume was a drug. That was all he was sure of.

Her lips had been coated with something shiny, and she was wearing a top that looked like another handkerchief. Only the top was actually about the size of a handkerchief this time, such a light fabric that he could clearly make out the plump swell of her breasts and the shape of her nipples.

“Whew, it’s really hot tonight, isn’t it?” she said with a grin.

His bloodstream shot his heart another dose of adrenaline. Yeah, he’d suspected that patience-and celibacy-would pay off eventually. But Violet was usually so warm and nurturing that he’d never figured she’d be the kind of woman to play mean.

This setup wasn’t just mean; it was down and dirty.

“I figured you had such a swamped afternoon that you’d want to go out, pick up dinner. Hell, I’d have helped if I’d known you were going to all this trouble.”

“No trouble,” she said sweetly. “You’ve been working crazy long hours yourself. I decided that we both needed some real food and a relaxing evening for a change.”

“Relaxing,” he echoed, thinking that nothing about this setup was remotely relaxing. On the other hand, even in ninety-degree heat after putting out a ten-hour work day, his entire body was hard as stone. Hard, willing and high on anticipation.

However, he hadn’t sucked it up and slept alone the past two weeks just to let her get off this easy. Yeah, he was willing to kiss her feet-and all the way up from there. But he hadn’t deprived himself, or her, without reason. He smiled at her as if his blood wasn’t pounding, ambled up behind her and dropped a soft, slow kiss on the drift of her nape. “What can I do to help?”

He felt her responsive shiver-but she recovered too darn fast. “Nothing but enjoy the feast. Or…how about if you pour the wine? It’s red. I know you’re supposed to have white wine with fish and chicken, but I didn’t have any around…and red is so much more potent, don’t you think?”

Another glossy, sultry smile, another tip of the lashes. He thought, I’ll be lucky to make it through dinner without throwing her on the table and going for it. “Yeah, I like red better than white, too. Hey…”

“Yes?”

Somehow he had to buy some time. He was more than willing to let her have her way. But first he wanted to understand what had motivated all these sudden wicked tactics of hers-not that he wasn’t enjoying them. Just that he figured a few minutes of distracting conversation was a good idea. “I was thinking how crazy it was that we’ve been together every day, yet I never asked you what you did. I mean, I know you moved here after a divorce and set up your herb business. But what kind of work did you do before that?”

“Work?” The question obviously startled her, because momentarily she forgot the sultry-smile, big-eye thing.

“Yeah. I mean, for a living. Were you into some kind of different career before this?”

There went the last of the provocative smile and the hip sashaying. It wasn’t as if she didn’t still look sexy as hell, and then some, but as if she stopped planning it.

She handed him dishes, one after the other, and he carted them to the table. Within minutes they were eating. A half hour later they were on the last bites and their second glass of wine.

“I was a physical therapist,” she told him. “I didn’t have any kind of formal specialty or anything fancy like that. But I mostly worked with kids. Kids who’d been in accidents, lost a limb or use of a limb. Tough road, to get a little one physically and emotionally prepared for life again, after going through a trauma to that extent.”

Cameron shook his head, no longer stalling or playing games. He was fascinated by everything she’d been telling him. “Wow. I can’t believe you never mentioned this before.”

“There was no reason to. I’m not doing it now.”

He hesitated. He could see in her face there was more here. He sensed Violet kept the “more” to herself for reasons he couldn’t fathom. So he pressed. “You quit because you burned out on it?”

“No. Not exactly. Kids tend to hate physical therapy. Actually, adults do, too. It’s not fun. It hurts and it’s hard work. And especially for children who’ve been through a life-changing event, they feel confused and angry about what’s happened to them. Anger, fear, frustration. I can’t explain this, but that’s exactly why I loved the work-at the time. Have some more wings, Cam.”

“I couldn’t eat another bite. So you really liked working with children, huh?”

She snapped her fingers and jumped up. “I’ll bet I can coax you into eating one more thing. How about a little dish of vanilla-bean ice cream? With a little drizzle of raspberry rum sauce over it?”

“Whatever you can handle, I can handle,” he said.

She shot him a look. By then the sun was skating down the horizon, turning the treetops a velvet green and the sky a silky azure. One cat opened her eye at the word ice cream but otherwise the herd was snoozing at a distance, too lazy to even beg.

“Well then, hon, I’ll just dish you up a big dollop of trouble,” Vi promised him.

As if she hadn’t done that from the second he met her. Right then, though, Cameron wasn’t willing to be completely diverted from the bone he was determined to pick. “So…why aren’t you still doing the physical therapist thing?”

He saw a sudden flash in her eyes, the slightest stiffening in her shoulders. “Because when I came home, I started the Herb Haven.”

Which didn’t answer his question in the slightest. “And that’s obviously gone great for you,” he said smoothly, “but you weren’t inclined to find work as a physical therapist in White Hills? Or weren’t there any PT jobs here?”

“No. There’s probably work. There’s a good-size clinic in White Hills. I just-”

“You just what?” He smiled at her as he poured her another glass of wine.

“I just decided that maybe I should stop working with children for a while. Do something else. Everyone doesn’t stay in the same job forever.”

“No, they don’t. In fact, I never got it, why people felt obligated to find one career and stick to it. What’s so wrong about liking change? Wanting to do new things, see new horizons?”

“Exactly. People don’t have just one dream,” she said defensively.

“They sure don’t.” Yet he was almost sure that Vi still did have that one dream about working with kids. Not because he had extrasensory perception. But because there seemed a haunted unhappiness in her eyes, a tension.

“Change is fun,” she agreed. “What’s not to love about new challenges? Doesn’t everybody need to stretch their minds? Not fall into a rut?”

“That’s really true…but, damn, I have the hardest time imagining you falling into any kind of rut. You bring a sense of fun and adventure into everything you do. Other people get bored. You seem to find a spirit of fun in everything.”

She glowed for a second, then jumped up on him again, all flustered. “All right. That’s enough being nice to me. About time we talked about you. In fact, I’ve been wondering-”

“No,” he said mildly, not responding to her words but to her actions. He suspected that she was about to make a deliberately catastrophic amount of noise, banging around the kitchen-an effective way to cut off any further serious conversation. “Let’s leave the dishes for now. How about if we take the ice cream out on the porch swing and see if we can scout up a breeze?”

Typically, she was willing to do anything to get out of dishes so she agreed. She bought out the ice-cream dishes, not little dishes, like she’d claimed, but major masterpieces with her fancy sauce. The smell of rum was wildly sweet and strong, adding to the other nectar smells of the evening. He exclaimed over the dessert. She laughed. Yet it was Violet who spooned one bite and then put her dish on the ground.

Before he could ask another personal question-and, for damn sure, before he could get her to talk about her work with children again-she suddenly stole his dish, too. Set it on the ground in the sun, next to hers. And plopped in his lap.

A guy always hoped to win the lottery, but he didn’t expect it. Her fanny nestled in his lap, as if seeking the exact weight and pressure that would drive him crazy. She found it easily. Before he could even breathe, her arms had swooped around his neck. For all that sudden impulsiveness, though, she leaned closer and only offered him a whisper of a kiss. The graze of her mouth against his was soft, light, silky.

“Hey,” he whispered. “What’s happening here?”

“You don’t want me to kiss you?”

“Oh, yeah, I do.” And all his control buttons snapped. The power outage of ’03 had nothing on this moment. He’d waited and waited and waited to taste her again, and here she was, warm and willing and almost bare, obviously intent on inviting him to take what he’d been craving for the past two weeks.

So he let her test him with that teasing little kiss of hers and then came back, pirate fast, with another kind of kiss entirely. He didn’t want her lips; he wanted her whole mouth, her tongue. He didn’t want a sweet sample; he wanted saliva and combustible heat. He wanted her heart pounding. He wanted her eyes to open wide with awareness and worry-not bad worry, but he was definitely tired to hell of her thinking she was safe around him. He wanted her to know that she wasn’t safe. And neither was he.

He got everything he wanted and then some. When her lashes shuttered open, she looked dazed and more than a little shook up. “Well,” she said faintly, on the gust of a pale breath. “I guess you did want to kiss me.”

But he couldn’t come up with any more easy smiles. “You really thought I didn’t?”

“You didn’t seem to have any problem walking into your own room all these nights. You didn’t even try to-”

“Seduce you?”

“I don’t need to be seduced, Lachlan. I’m a grown woman. But I just didn’t understand what the deal was.”

“Neither did I, chére.” He pushed back a strand of hair that had sneaked free from all those clips holding it back. “I knew I wanted you. I knew you were willing to make love with me. But I kept having the bad, bad feeling that you were going to regret it.”

That startled her. “Why did you think I’d regret sleeping with you? I never said-”

“I know you ‘never said’ anything specific. But you only said you were willing to make love when you pegged me as the kind of man who wouldn’t give a damn about you, wouldn’t stick around.” When she tried squirming and doing her flutter-the-hands thing, he gently cuffed her wrist. “The fact is, I do care. I do give a damn. And nothing I understand about you, sensed about you, made me believe you were being truthful. If you want a short fling, trust me, Vi, I’d be happy to give you one. But I can’t buy it. That you’re going to be okay to just hit the sheets and then go our different ways the next morning. Or the next week.”

She took a hard breath. Then pushed off his lap and stood. So did he. As if the porch had suddenly become unbearably claustrophobic, she suddenly vaulted down the porch steps and started walking. So did he. Restless or not, it was still tepid hot, still too humid to breathe. She didn’t run any farther than the deep shade of the maple, and then she turned on him.

“You want to know the deal, Lachlan? It’s that I have skinny tubes. That’s the deal. The whole deal. The chance of my ever having kids is mighty unlikely.”

Aw, hell. The minute she blurted that out, Cameron wanted to slug himself. God knew how he’d missed it, because immediately he realized she’d given him a ton of clues. Her reproducing plants so wildly. Her endless herd of cats. Her not going back to a profession with children. The way she mothered the two girls who worked for her. He even remembered-now, too damn late-the funny look on her face when she’d first said she didn’t need birth control. “That’s about as unfair as it gets, chére,” he said softly.

“More than unfair. I never wanted fancy things. Forget the riches and jewels and all that. I just wanted a house and kids and a man to love.” Her head shot up, her eyes jewel bright. “And you’re wondering what that has to do with our making love.”

“No. I wasn’t wondering anything. I was just feeling bad for you.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is…maybe there was a time I wouldn’t have been comfortable with casual sex. But that was then. And this is now. I’ve been alone since the divorce. That’s three years.”

“Hey,” he said gently. Hell’s bells, those tears were welling up. And yeah, of course he knew she cried at the drop of a hat. Only, damn it, this time she had reason to cry, a terrible huge reason to cry, and that was way different from seeing her cry at a Kodak commercial. He scooped her close, stroking her back, feeling her shudder back a real sob, afraid that she was going to do it seriously to him this time-cry until they were both drenched.

“I don’t want a husband,” she said fiercely.

“You don’t have to have a husband.”

“I’ve been trying to scare men away for three years. And doing a great job of it.”

“You’re great at being ditsy,” he reassured her, and stroked, stroked, stroked. “But maybe you don’t have to work at it quite so hard. It’s not like every man wants kids-”

“I know that. But I also had a husband who took off the minute he found out I was…flawed. Yes, he wanted kids. And so did I. But we could have made other choices-like adopting or fostering. That’s when I realized it wasn’t as simple as just being about kids. It was about his seeing me differently, seeing me as less of a woman. My feeling like less of a woman.”

He stopped stroking. “Wait a minute. What kind of horse hockey is this?”

“It’s not horse hockey, Lachlan. You asked me what the deal is, and I’m telling you. In the beginning I just didn’t see a reason to get into all this. It wasn’t your problem, wasn’t your business. But you asked so I’m telling you. I want to get into casual sex. With you. I want to know for sure that you’re leaving. That you’re going back to your own life. That I don’t have to worry about how you think about me as a woman, deep down. How you-”

Damned if he was going to let her finish another idiotic sentence. Enough was enough.