Night Scents (14 page)

He'd have no regrets, Clate thought with another sharper, deeper jolt, even as he eased back from their kiss. He slid his hands down along her hips, finally noticing her outfit: a high-collared, simple black dress right out of a mourning scene in a John Wayne movie. "What the hell do you have on?"

"One of Hannah's dresses." Her voice wasn't shaky, even if her eyes were shining, fiery with desire. "Actually, she's never worn it. It was one of her first efforts, and she got the size wrong. It fits me okay—"

"Why one of Hannah's dresses?"

"I don't own anything all black."

Matter-of-fact. As if that explained everything. Clate noted, his hands still light on her hips, that she wasn't nervous or intimidated by him, just boldly buying herself time. "This is right up there with bee balm and hummingbirds as far as tall tales go, Piper."

"Hannah also believed the dress would bring me good luck. I figured, why not? But obviously she was wrong." She screwed up her face, frowning at him. "Don't you ever sleep?"

"Uh-uh. You're not blaming me. You're the one in the wrong here. I heard you yell."

"I hit a tree root and banged my shovel against my ankle. And that was a stifled yell, not a full-blown yell. You must have already been awake."

"Why did you run?"

She blinked at him as if she were dealing with a moron.

Clate grinned. "Knew what would happen, did you?"

"You know, for a man who doesn't want any more complications in his life—"

"This wasn't complicated, Piper." He let his hands drop to his sides. "This was damned simple."

"For you maybe," she said under her breath.

"All right. Two questions. One, why would you need to wear black? Two, why would you need luck?"

"Same answer to both." She squared her shoulders and tilted up her chin, and he wondered if she had any idea how beautiful and sexy and ridiculous she looked in her nineteenth-century, ill-fitting black dress. "I didn't want you to catch me. You seem to have this thing about trespassers."

"That's why I had the signs posted."

"I know that, but Hannah—" She gave her head a toss, her hair, straight and thick, had been whipped into tangles by the breeze and her race across his yard. "Hannah insists you posted the signs to draw me over here."

"I'd never even met you when I decided to post my land."

"That wouldn't matter to her."

No, he thought with a resigned sigh, it wouldn't. The woman was an eccentric, her grandniece one in the making. "It's all part of our destiny?"

"I think so."

"Why the shovel?"

She hesitated. "I needed it."

He wasn't letting her off the hook, not this time. "For what?"

Her eyes leveled on him, steady, gleaming in the soft starlight. But she didn't answer him.

"You managed to dig your valerian root the other night with a trowel. What were you planning to dig up tonight, a whole damned tree?"

"Actually, no." Her voice was cool, just a hint of annoyance. "If you really must know, I was digging for buried treasure."

He thought she was being sarcastic and bit off a hiss, but then he saw that she was perfectly serious. Buried treasure. He inhaled sharply. "Hell." It came out as a low growl of exasperation, irritation, resignation.

"Well, I'll just get my shovel and head on home."

"Uh-uh. No way." He pointed toward the Frye house. "Inside."

She looked mystified. "For what?"

He could think of a thousand answers to that one, not one related to buried treasure and the whims of an eighty-seven-year-old. His thoughts must have revealed themselves in his expression, because Piper took a step back, wariness flashing in her eyes, a little thrill. lie saw a wink ol what must have been a while petticoat, and his gut twisted at the image of dispensing with nineteenth-century undergarments as well as a nineteenth-century dress before getting to her trim body.

But he reined himself in and said, "I'll make coffee, and you can tell me about your buried treasure."

"It's not my buried treasure, it's Hannah's."

"All the more reason you're going to tell me about it."

She tilted her head back, staring up at the stars scattered across the night sky, contemplating her response. She had a choice, and she knew it. As determined as he was, Clate couldn't drag answers from her that she had no intention of giving him. Finally, she leveled her gaze at him once more. "You have decaf?"

"What?"

"You might never sleep," she said, turning her back to him as she started up the sloping lawn, "but I need my eight hours or I don't function well. I'm teaching open-hearth cooking in the morning. I don't want to burn myself on a cast-iron kettle because of lack of sleep." She paused, glanced back at him, her chestnut hair trailing down her back. Right then, she could have passed for an old-fashioned, horror-picture-show witch herself. Beautiful, tempting, dangerous. "Coming?"

"Right behind you, sweetheart," he muttered through clenched teeth, and followed her up the rise.

Chapter 7

As she poured extra milk into the steaming mug of coffee Clate had handed her, Piper decided Hannah must have put something in her tea yesterday. It was the only explanation for why she'd agreed to wear a nineteenth-century getup and dig for treasure when Clate Jackson was home—why she'd kissed him.

She felt drowsy yet edgy, watching him move about in a kitchen as familiar to her as her own. His dark sweatshirt made his shoulders seem even broader and more muscular. He looked rugged, physical, his presence in Hannah's old, quaint house incongruous. But he owned it now. She was on his turf.

The stove clock read two-forty-five. Her class in open-hearth cooking was at eleven. Time enough to tell Clate what she would tell him—she wasn't yet sure exactly what that would be—and get a few hours' sleep.

He dropped onto the chair opposite her and settled back, the muscles in his jaw tensing as he looked at her. Finally, he sighed. "Trust me, Piper. I'm not in to burning bamboo shoots under the fingernails. I'd like to know what's going on, and that's all. You want to tell me about this buried treasure?"

She sipped her coffee, inhaling its strong aroma, painfully aware of what kind of loony figure she must cut in her nineteenth-century black dress and white petticoat.

"You do have a choice," Clate said in that quiet, deceptively reasonable drawl. He had his emotions under tight control. Whatever had propelled him to kiss her with such hunger, such ferocity, was well banked down. "Either your forays onto my property stop or you explain them."

She shot him a look. "Meaning you'd have me arrested for trespassing."

"Meaning exactly that."

"Even after what happened out there?"

His grim expression lightened, and a sexy half-grin reminded her that she wasn't the only one who'd enjoyed the experience. "Piper, it was only a kiss."

She pursed her lips. "You're a cad, Clate Jackson. My brother dropped off a magazine article about you, and it as much as said so. You're rich, successful, driven, but a cad."

"It didn't say 'cad.'"

"That's my interpretation." She sounded high and mighty and a bit nineteenth century even to her own ears, but she didn't care. "It indicated you wouldn't hesitate to take advantage of a woman who found herself in an unfortunate position."

He was unmoved. "You didn't find yourself in an unfortunate position, Piper. You put yourself there."

She peered at him over the rim of her steaming coffee. "Only because I tripped."

"Uh-uh." That rasping drawl wasn't so easy and reasonable now. "Because you deliberately dressed yourself in black from head to toe and snuck onto my property in the middle of the night. You made your choice."

She sniffed. "It wasn't my choice to kiss you."

He had the audacity to laugh.

"I'm not saying I objected or have any regrets, but..." She trailed off, suddenly realizing she wasn't getting anywhere. He held the cards. Every damned one.

"But what?" he asked.

She squirmed on her rickety old chair. He wasn't about to let her mount a graceful retreat. "I don't think I need to spell it out. You pounced, Clate. Let's just leave it at that."

He stretched out his muscled legs, at ease. "Honey, that wasn't pouncing."

"It was in my judgment, and right now, my judgment is the only one that counts."

"Piper." He leaned forward, the light shifting on his face, his eyes, making what he was thinking even more difficult to read. "Can you honestly sit there and tell me you know which one of us started that kiss?"

She clamped her mouth shut and refused to answer. She didn't care if she seemed like a prude. She should have refused to discuss this topic altogether, but it was too late—too late to stop the memory of the taste of his mouth, the heat of his tongue, the feel of his arms around her.

Her throat went dry. She managed to shake her head. "But it doesn't matter. Nothing would have happened if you'd just stayed in bed and let me do what I came to do."

"Piper, we did what we did because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Period, end of story."

She had to admit that kissing him
had
felt right, that it still did.

"And if you ever don't want me to"—he smiled slightly, sexily —"pounce, all you have to do is say no."

She acknowledged his words with a curt nod and drank some of her coffee. Three o'clock in the morning and she was sitting in Clate Jackson's kitchen. The Nashville magazine had profiled him as hard edged, sexy, driven, a man who fiercely protected his privacy. He had started in construction at age sixteen, doing grunt work. At twenty-six, he had his own company. With relentless commitment, long hours, an eye for calculated risk, and an ability to pick and motivate good people, he had defied his doubters and become one of his city's most successful businessmen. Now, he owned an exclusive hotel, exclusive office buildings acclaimed for their character and beauty as well as their functionality. He had built a house in a private location on the Cumberland River. Always, profit was at the center of what he did. His integrity was unquestioned, but no one pretended Clate Jackson wasn't capable of playing hardball if he felt the situation called for it.

There was no mention of his family, parents, siblings, cousins, what he'd been before age sixteen, beyond a cryptic line that said he didn't discuss his past.

He pushed his chair back, its legs scratching on the pineboard floor and lurching Piper back into the present. Three o'clock in the morning, Clate Jackson's kitchen, she in one of Hannah's
Little House on the Prairie
dresses. They'd have had a heck of a time with all the buttons and hooks and eyes if they'd decided to make love out in the moonlight. Of course, maybe they wouldn't have bothered disrobing.

Warmth spread through her. It was wild thinking. Insane.

"Tell me about your aunt's buried treasure," Clate said, giving no sign he had a clue of what she was imagining.

Piper cleared her throat, glad for the distraction. For years her father and brothers had drilled into her the necessity and the advantage in keeping her emotions in check and her mouth shut. She was accustomed to doing what she had to do without a lot of introspection and angst, without expecting anyone else to understand.