That Old Feeling. Cara Colter

Brandy said.

      Of course not. She was a woman who would have you believe she could handle seven men and a prince and anything else life threw at her, including bugs as big as her fist. Only, looking at her, he saw something flicker in her eyes, and wondered how much of it was all a front. He cut off that line of thought before it made her even more dangerous than she already was—which was plenty dangerous.

      “Did you want me to bring your things from the car?”

      She tossed him the keys, her expectation of being waited on as unconscious to her as breathing. She went up the cottage steps two at a time and burst in. Somehow he didn’t want to see her gushing over the cuteness of the accommodations. Still hefting the soggy Becky on his arm, he went up to the parking area behind the house.

      A Ferrari, no less, and crammed floor to roof with her things as if she were thinking of staying for a long, long while. He counted three full-size suitcases and two overnight bags. There were several dresses hung in bags. There was a tennis racket, a riding helmet and a new blow-up dinghy that hadn’t been taken out of the box.

      He didn’t have a tennis court or horses. There was no place, that he was aware of, within a hundred miles where a woman could wear dresses like that. The lake water wouldn’t be warm enough for weeks yet to risk capsizing her floating device in it.

      Resigned, he set the baby on her padded rear and kept one eye on whether or not she was trying to ingest rocks while he began unloading Brandy’s vehicle.

      “She’ll be bored in ten minutes,” he reassured himself as the pile of her belongings became a small mountain on the ground beside him.

      So, she’d get bored, and then she would leave.

      “She’ll last two days,” he bet himself, and felt his black mood lift slightly. “Three at the outside.”

      “Poo-poo,” the baby commented, but he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him, or if she was “pooh-poohing” him. She was a female after all, and even a pint-sized member of the fairer sex was probably blessed with intuition. Perhaps his wee daughter sensed that the thing he was worst at—besides choosing girl clothes for a one-year-old—was predicting how anything was going to go once Brandy King was in the vicinity.

      Chapter Two

      It was the dawn of day four, and Brandy King was still happily ensconced in his little guesthouse.

      “I’m losing my touch,” Clint decided. The baby was still asleep, and he usually enjoyed these quiet moments before she awakened, sipping his coffee, planning his day, enjoying his garden.

      The love of gardening was a bit of a surprise. His father would have turned over in his grave to see his eldest son so content with dirt on his hands, and flower gardens growing around him. Clint himself had been unable to decipher the pull of it.

      But this morning he looked out his kitchen window to the back of his property, not to his gardens in the front. No, he was focused on where her red Ferrari was still parked and he was aware his jaw hurt, as if he had been clenching it in his sleep, not surprising given the tension his houseguest made him feel.

      Every morning, he got up hoping that car would be gone, hoping that some time in the night it would have occurred to her how bored she was and she would have left.

      He had predicted two days—three—at the very outside, and he’d been wrong.

      The thing was he was rarely wrong about human nature. That was the strength he gave Jake and Auto Kingdom; that was the skill behind his meteoric rise in the company.

      A tumultuous childhood, filled with the rage and pain of his parents, had given Clint a rare and valuable gift. At the time, he had not recognized it as a gift. His ability to look at a person and judge instantly whether they were a friend or a foe, to be able to feel with one-hundred-percent accuracy the mood in a room, to be able to read the truth in a person’s eyes, no matter what their lips were saying, had been a survival tool.

      That survival tool had been one in an arsenal of survival skills that had kept him and his younger brother, Cameron, out of harm’s way. That usually meant his father’s foul temper and fists, but they had both grown to manhood in a mean neighborhood where book-learning was scorned and street smarts were everything. Clint knew how to use his mind, and he knew how to use his fists, and he grew up using them both with regularity.

      He would have never guessed it would be the unerring instinct about people, rather than his ability with his fists, that would decide his future. But Jake King had spotted him in a group of young apprentices working at one of Auto Kingdom’s tire shops, talked to him for a few minutes, and his destiny had changed. He had moved, at first uncomfortably, into a world where he had been certain he did not belong. It had not taken him long to figure out that, under the masks, most men were the same. And that became his job. To unmask men.

      “What’s your measure of that man, Clint?” Jake would ask at some high-level meeting.

      Clint could always tell. The light in the man’s eyes, the way he stood, the way he interacted with others, the grip of his handshake. Inevitably, Clint found himself at more and more meetings, more and more a part of the Auto Kingdom decision-making process, more and more part of the inner circle, more and more Jake’s right-hand man.

      But now, taking another sip of his coffee and balefully eyeing the red Ferrari, he admitted he was losing his touch, not that “the touch” had ever been applicable to Brandy. Reading her would be like trying to read the wind. She was elusive and mysterious, one minute all woman, the next a wonder-filled child.

      He had read wrong, been sure she would have been gone by now. But, if she was bored, she was pretending not to be, though sniffing out subterfuge was usually one of his specialities. She liked the baby and seemed to have a genuine way with her, which surprised him. He would not have put Brandy and a baby together in an equation that worked. But then who was Brandy, really? Did anyone know? Since her arrival, she always seemed to be full of laughter and mischief, as if life itself entertained her even when there were no tall buildings to leap off.

      “One more day,” he said. He hoped so. Not that he didn’t appreciate her interest in Becky, but Brandy was disruptive without half trying. She didn’t cook and she didn’t pick up after herself. She walked around in boyish outfits that had never been meant to contain feminine curves and that were strangely alluring because of that.

      He was ever conscious she was his boss’s daughter, off-limits for that reason alone, though if he wanted more reasons, he could find them. She was too young for him. She was frivolous. Though he and Jake had never discussed it, Jake probably expected his daughters to marry into the social circle he had spent his life earning his way into. It was one that Clint, for all he had won Jake’s respect and loyalty, did not fit into mostly because he lacked any desire to be a part of those worlds of pure wealth and power.

      Still, Brandy did make Clint’s solemn little girl laugh, but what kind of price was he willing to pay for that?

      His own peace of mind was in jeopardy—his aching jaw was a constant reminder of that—and he prized his peace of mind more highly than anything.

      It was hard to be around a woman who was so vital and alive without feeling these uncomfortable, and totally inappropriate, stirrings of awareness.

      Without remembering, dammit, what her lips had tasted like all those years ago.

      She had forced him into trying to be invisible on his own property. He felt like the man servant, Jeeves, looking after her but trying to be unobtrusive about it. Trying to maintain his own space and sanity, while she tried to tease him out of it.

      He hadn’t tested Brandy’s love of Becky as far as a diaper change. He brightened, a man with a plan. If she showed no sign of going, he’d ask her to handle one of those. Poo-poo with any luck. That should have the princess packing her car and driving back up that road….

      Clint heard a deep rumbling, and frowned.