Bungalow Nights (Beach House No. 9) Page 5

  Vance gave her a second look. If his libido was reawakened, how about Addy? She smelled like strawberry soap, was sexy in a handle-with-care kind of way, and he’d made no pledges to her papa. Maybe she’d consider a summertime fling....

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Frowning, her green eyes crossed. “Is there something on my nose?”

  “Just a sprinkle of freckles,” Vance said, shaking his head. “They’re cute.” But they did nothing for him, he realized, damn his perverse horny urges. Punishing him for his misspent youth, he supposed, through an uninvited and inconvenient fixation on Layla.

  As if on cue, the brunette cleared her throat. “I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you, Addy. I have some free time on my hands and I was thinking I could spend some of it helping you with your research.”

  Addy halted her spoon midtwirl and looked up. “You’re interested in the silent film era?”

  “Uh...I could be.”

  Vance decided Layla was more nervous than he thought warranted. He hadn’t been that out of line. One little cupcake comment that he’d followed with a lighthearted apology shouldn’t send her screaming for the books. He narrowed his eyes and saw her throw him a quick nervous glance, her face coloring.

  She cleared her throat again. “Tell me some more about what you’re investigating.”

  With her spoon, Addy gestured around the cove. “This place was magic in the heyday before the talkies. All the palm trees and tropical vegetation? Trucked in. Coastal California hillsides are normally sage scrub and manzanita. Thanks to the creek running through here, though, everything from the banana plants to hibiscus bushes took hold. Et voilà, a South Seas atoll for pirate stories, a rainforest for cannibal movies and, in one particularly famous case, Cleopatra’s ancient Egypt.”

  Obviously Addy was enthused by her subject. Using her spoon again, she pointed down the beach. “There’s a small room attached to the art gallery beside Captain Crow’s that’s an archive for business papers and memorabilia from Sunrise Pictures—the company that operated out of the cove. I’m the first scholar given access to all of it.”

  “Fascinating.” Layla darted another glance at Vance, then her tongue came out to touch that top-heavy upper lip.

  Off-limits, he reminded himself. And you’re way past your days of reckless rule-breaking. Even if the rules are of your very own making.

  Layla smoothed the skirt of her dress with her palms. “Well, if you could use me, I’m free after my morning baking’s done.” Again, she slid him a look.

  Huh, Vance thought, not knowing what to make of the strange vibe he was getting from her. It wasn’t just wary, it was...

  “While I’m here, I’d like to keep myself very busy,” she continued. “Very, very busy.” This time she studiously avoided his gaze.

  And then he finally got it.

  Hell, he thought, surprised by his own thickheadedness. He could probably blame that on Blythe, too—it was only natural to distrust his instincts when it came to women after receiving that letter from her ending with “and I hope this won’t cause any unpleasantness between us.”

  But now he couldn’t ignore what his gut was telling him. The lust bug that had bitten him so bad? Looked like it had sunk its teeth into Layla, too. This hot-for-you thing went both ways.

  Dammit.

  “So what do you say, Addy?” Layla asked. “Can you use my help?”

  The other woman shrugged. “If you want, but are you sure you’ll have time with what you and Vance have on the calendar?”

  Layla’s blank look said what he didn’t have to. Addy groaned. “Vance hasn’t told you about that yet.” She turned to him. “I’m not normally so stupid, you know. It’s Baxter.”

  Vance’s brows rose. “What does my cousin have to do with it?”

  Addy jumped to her feet and started muttering. “I saw him yesterday, okay? Well, you know that. It’s just, he... Never mind.”

  Still muttering, she stalked back into the house, slamming shut the glass door behind her. Vance and Layla both stared after her, and then he shifted his attention to the colonel’s daughter once more. After a moment of tense silence, she met his gaze.

  Her tongue touched her top lip and he worked not to notice it. “Do I want to know about this ‘calendar’?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing bad,” he assured her. “And not so time-consuming that you can’t hang with Addy if you want, or just spend time soaking up the summer air.”

  Layla stepped a little closer to him, her wariness apparently lifted for the moment. “That sounds nice,” she admitted. “I haven’t taken any days off from cupcakes since we bought the truck.”

  “Your dad said you deserved a vacation. He wanted this one for you on the beach.”

  She drew closer, her eyes searching his face. “You...There was time? He really had time to talk to you about me?”

  “Yeah.” Vance softened his voice. “He wasn’t in physical pain, Layla. I was able to make sure of that.”

  He saw her swallow. She stepped closer yet, sank again to the cushion beside him and pushed her hair away from her temples with both hands. Then they dropped to her lap. “What’s this calendar all about?”

  Her father’s face flashed in his mind, sweat-streaked and pale, but determined as he fumbled with the precious papers in his headgear.

  Isn’t she beautiful, Vance? You’ve got to do something for her. You’ve got to do something for my girl.

  He’d sworn he would, and nothing as temporary or as ill-advised as surrendering to his baser urges would get in the way of keeping his word. “Your father gave me a piece of paper he always kept with him—a list of things he wanted the two of you to do together. Things he thought he’d put off for too long.”

  “Oh, Dad.” Her thick lashes swept down to hide her eyes. She brought the back of her hand to her nose. “I’m not crying. Tears always upset him—Uncle Phil, too—so I don’t do that.”

  She was worming her way under his skin again, this stoic little soldier. Under other circumstances, Vance would have put his hands on her. As a medic, he understood the comfort of human touch. But right now it didn’t seem wise. “I pledged to take his place—to do them with you,” he said.

  She slanted him a glance. “And what are they exactly?” she asked, her voice thick.

  “A surprise. Are you okay with that?”

  Her laugh sounded more sad than amused. “He liked surprises, the goof.”

  This time Vance allowed himself to reach out. His fingers caught in her hair and he managed to tuck a piece behind her ear. “He called it his ‘Helmet List,’” Vance said, softly. “And I promised to share it with you.”

  As his hand fell, Layla caught it with hers, squeezing. And God, the sexual thrill was there, undeniable, but the buzz that goosed his libido also sent an electrical current toward the center of his chest. It was some kind of weird sorcery. Because the heart he thought Blythe had stomped dead thumped once. Twice. In that instant reanimating, like Frankenstein’s monster bolting upright on the table.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BAXTER SHOT HIS CUFFS, smoothed his palm along the silk of his striped tie and then peered around the doorjamb into the small room. Narrow windows ran along its roofline and the walls were decorated with framed movie posters and black-and-white stills, all looking to be from the silent movie era. At the room’s center sat chairs arranged around a rectangular table, a closed laptop resting on its surface. No one was inside. He frowned. The salesperson of the adjacent art gallery had directed him here.

  It was where he was supposed to find Addison March.

  Baxter’s glance landed on his Cordovan loafers and he frowned again, noting the dry film of fine sand along their shiny tops. It took him just a moment to withdraw his white handkerchief from his back pocket and dust the particles away.

  When he straightened, he saw movement across the room, at the closet entrance he’d missed on first inspection. Backing out of it was Addison Marc
h’s ass.

  Addison—Addy, she’d told him she liked to be called all those years ago—March had a very fine ass, and he leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and allowed himself a moment to admire it as she dragged a carton into the main area, her body bent nearly in half, her feet shuffling backward, her denim-covered bottom leading the way. He wasn’t aware he did anything to give himself away, but suddenly Addy froze. A moment passed. Then, instead of rising to a stand, she turned her head and glanced around her bent elbow.

  Her green eyes caught Baxter’s gaze.

  With a yelp, she leaped a couple of feet into the air. Upon landing, she spun to face him, her hand covering her heart. “You scared me!”

  Oops. He should apologize, Baxter thought. That’s what he’d come to do, after all, though not for startling her. He’d come to talk about That Night. That Night he’d thought he’d purged from his mind until seeing her yesterday afternoon.

  She frowned at him. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  He took a step into the room. “Hello?”

  Without a greeting of her own, she returned to dragging the box from the closet. It was unclear how heavy it was, because Addy was such a little thing he figured a ream of copy paper could make her break a sweat. His mother had worked hard to instill in him good manners—even though he might have ignored some of them after That Night—so now he moved quickly to come to her aid.

  “Let me help,” he said, reaching around her. She ignored him, though, her backward trajectory putting that cute ass on a collision course with his crotch. It was Baxter’s turn to leap.

  She gave him another around-the-elbow glance. “I’ve got it.” With awkward tugs, she dragged the carton toward the room’s table, then left it to return to the bowels of the dim closet.

  He followed her, noting the stacks of cartons inside. “Do you want all of them out?”

  Rather than answering the question, she said, “I’ve got it.” Again.

  It annoyed him. He was here to make things right between them and her stubbornness wasn’t helping. His arm bumped hers as he shouldered past. “Just point to the one you want.”

  At her silence, he threw a glance over his shoulder. “Well?”

  She had an odd expression on her face. Then she cleared her throat. “Honest, I don’t need your help. They’ve been in there a long time, Baxter. They’re dirty.”

  “I’m not afraid of a little grime.”

  “Really?” She tilted her head. “Because you look a little...prissy.”

  Insult shot steel into Baxter’s spine. He played mean and stinky roundball with his old high school buddies on Saturday mornings. He regularly signed up for 10K races—beating his own time the past five outings—and just last month he’d participated in the Marine Corps’ mud run. Nobody he knew had caught him taking that yoga class and he’d only agreed to it because the woman he’d been dating at the time had promised banana pancakes afterward.

  Wait—were banana pancakes prissy?

  The internal question made him glare at Addy, even as he noted the self-satisfied smirk curling the corners of her mouth. Without a word, he turned back around and started stacking boxes and hauling them from the closet.

  “That’s enough,” she finally said. “This is a good start.”

  He paused. After the first few he’d stopped to remove his suit jacket and roll up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. His hands, as she’d predicted, were gray with filth and there were streaks of it on the starched cotton covering his chest. Addy, on the other hand, was hardly marred. With a pair of colorful cross-trainers, she wore soft-looking jeans rolled at the ankle and a T-shirt advertising a film festival in Palm Springs. Her white-blond hair stood in feathery tufts around her head and her cheeks were flushed, but Baxter thought that was Addy’s normal state.

  She’d appeared...excitable to him from the very first.

  As if his regard made her uncomfortable, she shifted her feet. “Don’t blame me if you’re mucked up. I told you this wasn’t work for a guy in business wear.”

  He blamed her for things, all right—sleepless nights, a guilty conscience—but not for the state of his clothing. “What exactly is all this stuff?” He popped the lid off the nearest box and eyed a stack of yellowed paper. “Why would you be interested in it?”

  Her pale brows met over her nose. That feature was small like the rest of her and he repressed an urge to trace it with his forefinger. “You must have been in another world yesterday afternoon,” she said.

  “Huh?” Baxter knew exactly where he’d been yesterday afternoon. Face-to-face with the woman who had been his singular out-of-character event. His lone antimerit badge. The one and only time he’d gone off the BSLS—Baxter Smith Life Schedule.

  She shrugged. “I talked about all this at lunch and I suspected then you weren’t listening. Vance calls you All Business Baxter, so I suppose while your body was sitting at Captain Crow’s, your brain was back at your desk or something.”

  Or something. His brain had actually been recalling a summer night nearly six years before. The night of the Smith family’s annual Picnic Day, a noon-through-night celebration at their avocado ranch. Open to the public, it featured food, drink and a dance band. Lights were strung everywhere...except in the dark shadowy corners where kisses could be stolen.

  And peace of mind lost.

  Addy gave him a strange look, then bent to ruffle through the box he’d opened. “I’m a grad student in film studies. My thesis focuses on the history of Sunrise Pictures—the company famous for its silent films made here at Crescent Cove.”

  She peeked into another box, then lifted it onto the tabletop. “That closet is supposed to hold everything from the studio’s business records to the original scripts to the correspondence from movie stars of the time. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “I made a deal with the descendant of the original owner of Sunrise. I’ll spend the month cataloging what I find in return for unlimited access to the material.”

  “Oh,” Baxter said again, because he wasn’t listening with any more attentiveness than he had yesterday. Then, he’d been unbalanced by the flood of memories seeing her had invoked. He hadn’t liked the feeling. He was a sensible, rational, always-on-an-even-keel sort of man. Seeing Addy had reminded him of the night that impulse had overridden common sense. The night that he’d done things and said things without considering the consequences. With no regard to the Schedule.

  Afterward, the memories had preyed upon his conscience. Finally, he’d managed to assuage the reawakened guilt by promising himself he’d right things with her someday. The very next time he happened to see her.

  Which had taken much longer than he’d expected to come about.

  But that time felt too short now because broaching That Night with this near-stranger didn’t seem as if it would be an easy thing.

  With a little cry of pleasure, she yanked out a handful of old-looking postcards, the ends of her hair seeming to vibrate with enthusiasm. Six years ago, she’d had masses of the stuff, curling like crimped ribbons away from her scalp and then floating in the air toward her elbows. The slightest breeze had wafted the fluffy strands over her features and across her chest, and he’d had to part it like clouds to find the heart shape of her face.

  She wore a different style now, and he recognized an expensive cut when he saw one. The platinum locks had been sheared to work with her hair’s texture, the curled pieces a frame for her smooth forehead, her pointed chin, her amazing green eyes. It was short enough to reveal her dainty earlobes and her graceful neck.

  As she dug back into the box, he saw her swallow, the thin skin of her throat moving in the direction of her collarbone. A dandelion, he mused, with that fluff of hair and slender stem of neck. One wrong breath and he’d lose her on the breeze.

  As if she heard his thoughts, she jerked her head toward him. “What?” she asked, catching him staring.

  Hi
s brain scrambled for something he could say. He couldn’t just launch into his apology, could he? “Well...” Glancing away from her questioning expression, he took in the boxes and tried remembering what she’d told him about them. “What made you pursue...uh...film studies?”

  She was staring at him.

  Had he gotten it wrong? “Or, um, film studios?” God, he sounded like an idiot.

  “Film studies.” She returned her attention to the box. “I love movies. Always have, since I was a little kid.”

  “I remember that.”

  Her head whipped around. “You couldn’t. You didn’t know me then.” She looked anxious at the thought he might.

  Baxter couldn’t figure out why. He frowned, searching back in his mind for a picture of Addy as a schoolgirl. But his memory stalled on her at nineteen, heat rushing to his groin as he pictured her blushing cheeks, her sun-kissed shoulders, her—

  Stop! he ordered himself, shaking the images from his head. He shoved his hands in his pockets and cleared his throat. “I remember you getting a boatload of DVDs as birthday presents. Your parents threw a big bash for one occasion and invited the entire neighborhood. Vance and I breezed through...” His words trailed off as her face turned scarlet.

  She rubbed her palms on the fabric of her pants. “It was my thirteenth. I can’t believe you came to it.”

  “We were probably hoping to score some cake and make our mothers happy.” He studied her still-red face. “The memory doesn’t seem to be a pleasant one for you.”

  “I didn’t like being the center of attention at that age.”

  Baxter frowned, thinking back again. “Yeah, I remember the party, but I don’t remember you there.”

  “Good,” Addy said, her voice fervent. She half turned from him, her focus back on the box.