Tempted by the Single Dad, page 6
One person’s loss could be another person’s gain.
He could feel her thoughtful eyes on him, scanning, picking up the things he was not saying. He felt as if she could see, or sense, the sinking in his stomach and the tightening in his heart.
“We’ll make sure there are no wrong impressions,” she promised.
We. As if they were a team.
“I’ll stay out of your way,” she promised again. “If they happen to meet me, we’ll just have to explain the mix-up over the contract. There will be no doubt in their minds that we are not involved in some casual fling. Besides, I think it would be pretty obvious to them, or anyone really, that a guy like you wouldn’t be involved with someone like me.”
Now she had his full attention. He could feel a frown pulling down his brows.
“Why would you say that?” he asked cautiously. That was certainly not what he had felt when he held her last night.
And not what he had felt at all when she had thrown her arms open to the spray of water from the garden hose, transforming her into a goddess of the night and sea.
He had felt the very real danger of some chemistry building between them.
“Oh, you know,” she said breezily, “corporate king, beach-dwelling, barely-making-it musician.”
“Corporate king?” he sputtered, vaguely insulted. “That’s a weird conclusion to arrive at. It can’t be the way I dress. You’ve seen me in shorts and sandals, and my pajamas, for Pete’s sake.”
“Ha. GQ on vacation. I bet you have a corner office, in a glass building with a stunning view. You probably built some kind of empire, from the ground up. Computer tech of some sort.”
He could feel his brows knitting closer together, and made a conscious effort to relax them. “Did you do an internet search on me?”
“Aha! I’m right, then. I might have tried to do an internet search. Just to make sure there was no abduction afoot. Do you know how many Sam Walkers there are?”
“I have no idea.”
“Thousands. No, it’s the flashy car in the driveway, legal beagles ready to defend your contracts...everything about you radiates wealth and power. You send out the unmistakable tycoon vibe—”
“Tycoon? Me? I get a picture of a bunch of people stranded on a tropical island, and the tycoon being the snotty one who won’t get his hands dirty.”
“I was thinking something more current. Like the tech wizard, Mitch Jones. He’s the guy who invented that app—”
“I know who he is,” he said drily.
“Or that guy who created the company that morphed into the big search engine—”
“Henrich Pfitzer,” he said.
“See? You know him. I knew it. Computer tech billionaires. They’re your tribe.”
“I don’t know him! They are not my tribe. I don’t have a tribe.”
“Yes, you do.”
He thought of telling her his “tribe” had shrunk quite a bit in the past eight months. Popsy and Cody. He was barely at the office anymore, running things remotely, putting good, good people in charge. But she didn’t know that, and what’s more, she didn’t need to know that.
“It’s the I have arrived tribe,” Allie told him, “whereas, I, on the other hand...”
She lifted a slender shoulder in wry self-deprecation that was somehow heart-wrenching.
Or would be if you had a heart, which he reminded himself, sternly, he no longer did.
“Anyway, it would be more than obvious to the casual observer, that you and I would be a terrible combination. Unworkable.”
He should have found that conclusion a relief. Instead he found it somewhat distressing and found himself studying her. Sam became aware some hurt practically shimmered in the air around her.
Something—or more likely someone—had stolen her confidence from her.
He hated that. But he acknowledged he would be the worst possible choice to try to fix it. He had failed spectacularly at marriage. After the demise of his marriage, Sam had embraced a play-hard lifestyle. His sister had been fond of telling him that he had the emotional depth of a one-celled organism.
And all that was before more grief and a troubled nephew and a depressed dog had turned his life and his world upside down. It shocked him that he still projected the old him: wealthy and powerful, self-assured with the world at his feet. That’s not what he was anymore.
He was a man who woke up every morning with a new sense of drowning in his own inadequacy.
You didn’t grab onto someone else when you were drowning.
He knew that from a brief stint as a lifeguard when he was a teenager. A drowning person just pulled others down, too.
And two drowning people? Catastrophe.
“I don’t see that we have a choice,” she continued when he was silent. “We’ll have to share the accommodation.”
As if it was that simple: as if there was no history. No her coming at him with Harold, and no red bathing suit.
Last night, after the house had gone quiet, he had heard a door squeak open. And then another.
He’d gotten up and looked.
Popsy had always only been loyal to two people. Cody and Sam’s sister.
Last night, the dog had managed to open the door of Cody’s room and Sam had peered through the partially open door of Allie’s to see the dog snuggled up with her on her bed.
Both door latches were worn out.
“You needn’t worry,” she assured him brightly, as if his worry at the brief but compelling history between them was written all over his face. “At all. Even if I was your type—so obvious I’m not—I’m not in the market for a relationship. Been there, done that.”
She rolled her eyes as if her been there, done that meant nothing, but if he was not mistaken, that was a badly bruised heart she was wearing on her sleeve.
He shouldn’t ask. But he did. “How old are you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you seem awfully young to have given up on happily-ever-after already.”
“I’m twenty-three,” she said, as if that was plenty old to have given up on romantic dreams.
“To be frank, you look like a poster child for picket fences and baby carriages, like those are the things that would make you happy.”
“What a terribly old-fashioned thing to say.” Bright spots rose up in her cheeks that told him he had hit a nerve.
“Ah, me and Thurston Howell are like that,” he said. “Old-fashioned tycoon types.”
“So, we both have some misperceptions we have to give up. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“And where are you at with happily-ever-after?”
He was annoyed by the question, but in fairness, he had started it.
“I gave it a try,” he admitted, reluctantly. “I was married. I’m pretty good at math, so I should have realized, statistically, a fairy-tale ending was a long shot.”
Why had he felt compelled to reveal that? For a frightening moment, he thought she was going to probe that, delve into his very private life. He could tell she was tempted. But, in the end, she didn’t.
“My point exactly,” Allie said. “I gave it a try, too. So, if we’ve dispensed with the personal part of the roommate arrangement, maybe we could move on?”
“To?”
“I can’t seem to find the actual contract that you signed with my grandmother. Do you have a copy of it?”
“Not with me. It will be at my office. I can have someone send it, if you want. Is there something in particular you need clarified?”
“I was wondering if you already paid my grandmother or if I can look forward to some funds?”
He suspected this was still about the relationship she was not planning on having with him. She wanted him to be aware of all the chasms that separated them, finances probably being the biggest one.
And she wanted it to look as if all she really cared about was the money, as if that was why she was agreeing to sharing her cottage with him. She wanted it to look as if she was capable of keeping this relationship strictly business.
“So Paris is completely off the table?”
“Completely,” she said firmly. “I can’t go anywhere else. Not right now.”
He saw it. For one second, he saw something flash through those clear eyes. For all her brave front and businesslike tone, it was apparent Allie was terrified of going out into the larger world.
“My grandmother used to say the cure for anything is salt water,” she said, though he was not sure which of them she thought needed curing, her or him.
“Salt water?” he asked, softly.
She looked at him. “It’s a quote, she found in an old Reader’s Digest from the thirties. Along with her fabric collection, my grandmother’s closets are stuffed with those. The quote is, ‘The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears or the sea.’”
It confirmed what he had glimpsed: something in her was afraid, hurt, broken. Seeking a cure, even in the brittle yellowed pages of old magazines. He should have known how deep the fear was in her when she tried to clobber him with Harold!
He didn’t know the why of it—why such a beautiful young woman was hiding out here. He didn’t actually want to know the why of it. He was shocked to find out there were enough pieces of his heart left intact to break some more. For her. Someone who was practically a stranger to him.
Suddenly, he saw the truth of it: if he insisted on her moving out, if he followed the letter of the law and enforced his contract, she was not going to see how sensible it was, how it would protect them both.
She was going to see it as more proof that the world was out of her control, that bad things could happen to her without warning, that this place where she felt safe was not safe, either.
He was not the man to fix whatever had gone wrong for her. He knew that. But he knew, as a person who had found out exactly that hard truth about the world—that there was no safe place—he could not make it any worse for her, either.
Sam took a deep breath and looked out over her shoulder again, at the perfect stretch of beach. The beachcomber had paused and was digging through the sand. He held something up to the sun, and it glittered gold.
Sam had been holding on to this place, in his mind, thinking long, summery days of sand and water could help Cody. Help them create the bond he felt was absent. Help them become a family, of sorts, or let go of that notion altogether. He had counted on this place, so special in his world, to help him know what to do.
The complication to his plan, Allie, turned and looked at the stretches of golden sand and gently lapping waves, too.
If she was prepared to keep it all business, so was he. That was his specialty, after all, business. It was apparent she needed the money.
But it was her words, not her need of money, that he was thinking of. Sweat, tears or the sea.
Her words held a promise of something. Hope.
Which, of course, was the most dangerous thing of all.
So, maybe not the wisest thing to share a space with her but, as she had pointed out, they could avoid each other.
They could use the beach as an extension of the house. Though Sam did not consider himself intuitive—at all—he had a deep sense of Cody needing the beach, that carefree place of sandcastles and kites and leaping waves.
Besides, he didn’t have any choice, really.
Life had been showing him that lately. He didn’t always have choices. He hated that. He hated feeling powerless, as if the most important things in life could be wrested from his control in an instant.
“Okay,” he heard himself saying. “I thought these days were well behind me, but let’s be roommates.”
She held out her hand to shake on it.
He hesitated, and then took it. The full danger of what he was letting himself in for was in the delicate strength and vulnerability of her touch.
And yet, somehow in that touch, too, was a sense of having, impossibly, found something gold in a vast expanse of sand.
He sighed. One more complication in a life that was already way too complicated.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THERE, ALLIE THOUGHT, it was official. They were roommates.
She felt something when they shook hands. A jolt. A tingle. She couldn’t deny that. But she had spoken the absolute truth to him: she was done with chasing happily-ever-after. She hated it that he saw picket fences and baby carriages in her, as if wisps of her unrealistic dreams clung to her like a mist.
But he was done with dreams, too. He’d been married. And it hadn’t worked. For some reason that surprised her, maybe because of what she’d seen in his interactions with Cody in just this short time.
He didn’t look like a man who gave up on love. He didn’t look like a man who would take a vow and then break it.
But whatever, life had made him cynical and her cynical and what could be more perfect for both of them?
Except there was something about Sam Walker’s desperate I’ll-never-give-up-on-you love for his nephew that had just cracked open some barrier around her heart that she would have sworn was made of stone.
And that jolt she had felt when their hands touched? That was a power she might be very foolish to feel she could control. So, yes, the best plan was avoidance.
Easy for two weeks.
Strictly business.
“So do you owe me anything?” she asked, crisply.
He told her how much he owed her and her mouth fell open. It was everything she could do to prevent herself from dancing a little jig. She didn’t care how much she had to suffer for the next two weeks. It was worth it.
* * *
Three full days later, Allie realized she might have been a little overconfident in assessing her own ability to suffer the inconveniences of having two roommates thrust into her world, one totally adorable, and the other totally sexy.
Oh, they had managed to work out the small details of living together. Sam was startled that the television was gone, but adjusted quickly, and played morning cartoons for Cody on his tablet. They provided their own groceries and the top two shelves of the fridge were his, the bathroom was set aside at seven each night for Cody’s bath, she surrendered the porch and went for a walk and swim every afternoon so that Sam could have it to read during Cody’s nap time.
But still, sharing quarters with an absolutely gorgeous man, a sweet small child and a dog who could melt the heart of Attila the Hun, all the while maintaining a suitably aloof distance, was difficult.
The house took on their presence.
When Sam noticed things that needed repair, he just did it, casually, without fanfare, and with a certain enviable male confidence, as if wielding a hammer and a screwdriver so naturally was just what real men did, as if it was nothing to get things ship-shape.
The evidence of the men in her life was suddenly everywhere: a shirt left on the swing, large flip-flops beside small ones at the back door, a small truck on the table, a partially completed Lego structure on the back deck, a load of underwear left in the dryer.
A radio was left on. She had long since stopped listening to the radio, but thankfully it was on a classical station, no gossipy chit-chat. A book, a memoir of surviving the Second World War, not a suspense thriller, was left open on its spine on the table on the back deck. She told herself she hated people who left books open on their spines, even while she looked at his reading material with way more interest than she should. She overheard him having conversations with his office that underscored that he was as confident and powerful in that world as he was adorably inept in his “daddy” role.
She felt like a detective collecting clues to who he was.
And who Sam was, was in his voice as he read stories to Cody. It was in the kitchen, where she saw that his culinary skills were clumsy, and ran to peanut butter on crackers, frozen fish sticks and fries, order-in pizzas.
It was watching from the porch as the two of them, Sam and Cody, headed across the beach, in the morning. Cody’s little chest and face glistening white with generously applied sunscreen, his shoulders covered by his Superman cape. As far as she could tell, Sam wore no sunscreen at all.
It was feeling her heart squeeze at the sight of the small hand in a large one, towels tucked under Sam’s arm, sand toys and buckets held firmly in his free hand. It was feeling something sigh within her when they returned, sleeping pale boy over Sam’s broad, sun-kissed shoulder, as he juggled all their other items, the sand-encrusted Superman cape tied around his own shoulders.
But Sam Walker, not just as a daddy, but as a man, also emerged. The scent of him. The encounters. His hand accidentally brushing hers as they both reached into the fridge. The shared laughter when Popsy licked a spill off the floor.
She had practically smacked into him this morning when he had come out of the shower dressed only in a towel.
It had done things to her pulse that were not in the Roommates Rules of Order.
Now, within hours, she had nearly smacked into him again in the same hallway. This time he was wearing only shorts. “Thought you were out,” he said, by way of apology.
She had been out.
“I thought you were out,” she said. She had come back in that red bikini they had a shared history with.
“Cody needed the bathroom.”
There they were, nearly naked together again. It seemed criminal that he was so perfectly made, his skin turning golden from the beach days. She wanted to touch it.
Some unmistakable heat sizzled in the air between them.
“Thanks for fixing things,” she said, trying to find safe ground. “The front door bell, the kitchen faucet, the cupboard doors.”
“It’s nothing. I used to do it for Mavis, too.”
