No Strings Attached. Susan Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ pleasantries with the guests. Then between one moment and the next, she’d said her goodbyes, strode out through the kitchen and was gone.

      Luc pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “Okay if I grab myself a beer?” he asked Max.

      “Help yourself,” his half brother invited even as Harper said, “Here, let me get it for you” and started to rise to her feet.

      No! his mind snarled. But he hadn’t spent more than a decade in deep cover for the DEA for nothing. He flashed her the friendly charmer’s smile that years of practice had rendered second nature and merely said, “Please, Harper, you don’t need to wait on me.”

      “Yeah, Harper,” Jake said. “He’s family. Which means he can do the dishes, too.”

      “Or at least fetch my own drink. Anyone else want anything while I’m in there?”

      No takers chimed in, and he left the room with an unhurried stride that nevertheless ate up the distance between the table and the back door. Silently letting himself out, he spotted Tasha heading toward the end of the attached garage, with the obvious intention of making a beeline for the parking apron around front. Clouds the color of a day-old bruise hung low in the sky, but for the moment at least, it was dry, and ignoring the few back steps, he dropped directly to the lawn, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

      He could move fast and silent as ground fog when the need arose, and he came up on Tasha’s flank just as she rounded the end of the garage. He moved into its shadow one step behind her and reached out, his fingertips brushing her arm. “Hey, Tasha, wait—”

      With a gasp, she whipped around. Wild panic flared in her clear gray eyes, and watching her suck in a breath and open her lips, Luc knew she was about one second away from screaming down the house. Snaking a hand around her nape, he clamped his free palm over her mouth to keep her from cutting loose with a screech that would bring everyone inside stampeding to her rescue.

      Not that there was anything she needed rescuing from—Jesus, he would never hurt her. All the same, he really didn’t want his deputy sheriff half brother thundering down on him. He didn’t doubt for an instant that if Max heard a woman scream, he would be out here in a red-hot hurry, his big-ass service pistol drawn.

      “I’m sorry,” he said in the most soothing, nonthreatening voice he could summon. Her lips were soft and her skin warm beneath his hands.

      He shoved the tactile sensations into a far corner of his mind where they could just wait to be examined when his concentration wasn’t demanded elsewhere. “I didn’t mean to scare you—I just want to talk to you for a minute. I’m going to let go of you now, okay?”

      He obviously didn’t follow through with the promised action quickly enough to suit her, for she narrowed her eyes at him as if to say, Then get on with it! Wondering if they’d be right back where they started, he gave her a hard-eyed stare back. “And you won’t scream, either, am I right?” It was a command, not a question, and he stared into those crystalline eyes without blinking.

      She hesitated a second, then dipped her chin in a slight nod.

      Slowly, he released his light grip on the back of her neck and lifted his hand from her mouth.

      Tasha promptly knocked his hand aside and scrubbed the back of hers over her lips as if they’d come into contact with hazardous waste. Pushing past him, she marched back into the rear yard before turning to face him. “If you want to talk to me, you can damn well do it out here, where people can see us,” she said.

      He nodded. But what the hell—why was she so mad? He wasn’t the one who—

      Being on the business end of another of her eat-shit-and-die glares chopped the thought in two, and he was still regrouping when she demanded, “So who are you pretending to be today, Diego?”

      He kept his wince strictly internal, but...hell. She had him on the ropes with that one, since he could hardly say he hadn’t been pretending to be someone else when they’d met. So he simply gave her a level look and said calmly, “My real name is Luc Bradshaw. I’m Max and Jake’s half brother—”

      “Oh, please,” she said in disgust.

      He blinked, baffled by her. “What do you mean, oh, please? At least give Max some credit. Don’t you think he had me thoroughly checked out?”

      She made a rude noise, and his brows came together. “I’m not sure what your problem is. All you have to do is look at the three of us together—the general consensus here seems to be that there’s a strong family resemblance. So why would you doubt that I’m—”

      She got all up in his grill—and it didn’t say much for him that he found it kinda hot. “Look,” she said, eyes narrowed to burning slits and her long, narrow nose mere centimeters from his own. “I don’t know who you are, buddy, or what your game is. But you stay the hell away from me, you hear? How dare you come here impersonating Jake and Max’s brother?” She poked him in the chest—but before he could grab her finger, she dropped her hand to her side and took a large step back.

      “Tell you what,” she said with a calmness that didn’t match those eyes. “I’m feeling pretty generous, so if you pack your bags and get out of town—tonight—I’ll let bygones be bygones.” She gave him the slitty-eye-of-death look again and said, “If you’re smart, you’ll take that offer and go, because it runs counter to everything my gut’s telling me to do.”

      Trying to reconcile this woman with the sweet, laughing girl he remembered—and failing miserably—he shook his head. “Say what?”

      “You have trouble understanding English, Diego?”

      Apparently so, because he didn’t have the first idea what she was talking about. Rather than telling her that, however, and demanding to know what her problem was and exactly what it was she thought she knew, he instead heard himself say, “My name is not Diego. I know I told you it was, but I was undercover with the DEA at the time, and my continuing good health precluded telling anyone my true identity. But I am Luc Bradshaw, son of Charlie Bradshaw. Half brother to Max and Jake.”

      “Oh, good, you stick to that story. In fact, I really hope you do. Because if you’re still around tomorrow, I’ll enjoy nothing more than going to Max and telling him you’re nothing but a lousy drug dealer named Diego Who-the-hell-knows-what. And then, Dee-A-Go, he will haul your skeevy butt off to jail.”

      He froze. He’d spent most of their short time together mining for every piece of her story he could get—while keeping his own to himself. He hadn’t told her much more than that he was on vacation and didn’t want to spend it talking about work. The one time she’d pushed for details, he’d turned on the charm and steered the subject in another direction. So how the hell had she tumbled to his cover story?

      He didn’t have time to figure it out before she stepped back and shook that pretty cloud of hair behind her shoulders. “And if that happens,” she said in a voice edged in tungsten, “trust me, I’ll have only one regret.”

      Shoving his hands in his pockets, he stared down at her. Taking in the flushed cheeks and electric eyes, he thought it was a damn shame that he was still so attracted to such an obvious head case.

      “Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “What would that regret be?”

      “That unlike the tiny hundred-and-two-degree СКАЧАТЬ