All Shook Up (2 page)

She casually touched his forearm, and a muscle under his skin jumped as if he’d received an electric shock. Face carefully expressionless, he stepped away, slanting a quick look at her.

“Come on,” she said, clearly oblivious. “Your cabin is down this way.” She began to head toward the lake.

J.D. rubbed at the band of heat left behind by her touch. What the hell was that all about? He’d like to
blame it on the fact that he wasn’t accustomed to being touched, but that didn’t explain the similar jolt he’d gotten when he’d turned around and seen her for the first time in the lobby. His initial reaction had been:
want it.
She’d looked so soft and round, standing there. Round eyes, round cheekbones, round breasts, round ass. He didn’t understand it—hadn’t then, didn’t now. She was pretty enough, in a subtle outdoorsy, girl-next-door sort of way. But she sure as hell wasn’t his type, so that covetous shock of awareness seemed out of place.

Rat City didn’t imbue a taste for subtle or girl-next-door, and he liked his women brassy. Big hair, big tits, clothing spray-painted on to show every curve.

Watching her stride down the trail in front of him in her shorts and Keds, J.D. tried to figure out what had caused that uncharacteristic craving. He had to admit she had a body that would probably be dynamite in tight clothing. But it didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t the type to wear it. She was too…fresh-faced. She had that silky, swingy hair, those freckles across the bridge of her nose, those big, guileless, startlingly blue eyes. He’d bet his last buck she wasn’t a woman to hang out in bars, waiting for some stud to come along and buy her a drink, like the barflies he associated with. She looked more like one of those happily-ever-after, put-the-ring-on-my-finger types.

They rounded a curve in the trail and the lake was suddenly laid out in front of them in all its splendor. Shaped like a Christmas stocking, it was placid and blue. The sounds of kids splashing and laughing, the
sprong
of a diving board, and the occasional shrill blast of a lifeguard whistle cut through the silence of the woods.

“There’s a roped-off swimming area and a float around the next bend,” Dru said over her shoulder. She veered onto a short spur trail, and a moment later they emerged from the sun-dappled track into a small clearing, across which stood a cabin with half its porch roof missing. A man who looked to be in his mid-fifties sat with one hip perched on the railing, smoking a cigarette, while a little boy in a Star Wars Phantom Menace T-shirt wielded a light-saber against an imaginary foe.

The kid saw them first and his face lit up. “Mom!” he yelled and, the plastic light-saber clattering to the floor of the porch, launched himself off the steps. A second later he hung like a monkey from Dru’s front, skinny legs around her waist, grimy hands linked behind her neck as he leaned back to give her a huge, goofy grin.

“Whoa, you’re getting way too big for this.” Staggering under his weight, she nevertheless grinned back and kissed him on the nose.

It was a scene like a hundred others J.D. had observed as an outsider looking in. Crossing his arms over his chest, he watched mother and child and congratulated himself on his acumen.
There you go, bud. All that’s missing here is the carpool-mobile.

It doesn’t get any further from your type than this.

S
upporting the warm weight of her ten-year-old son by linking her hands in the small of his back, Dru looked over Tate’s head at her uncle. He was extinguishing his cigarette, and the fact that he’d been smoking in front of Tate could mean only one thing. “Aunt Soph having a menopause moment?” Her normally easygoing aunt’s moods had been erratic for the past several months, and they’d all learned to get out of her way when one was upon her.

“She’s hot-flashing, Mom,” Tate said. “And when Grandpa Ben told her she’d missed one of the cobwebs on the ceiling, she said, ‘How would you like this dust mop up your—’”

“Tate!”

“I wasn’t gonna say it, Mom.” But he clearly relished the idea.

“I got him out of there before she actually completed the sentence anyway,” Ben assured her.

“But I know what she was gonna say,” Tate said with a grin that showed his adult front teeth. “She was gonna say buttho—”

“Don’t
even
think you’re going to slip it by me by attributing it to someone else, bud.”

“Dang.” With another big-toothed grin, he unhooked his legs and hopped down. Turning back toward the porch, he caught sight of J.D. and stopped dead. “Hey. I’m Tate. Who’re you?”

“I’m sorry, J.D.; where are my manners?” Hard as it was to credit, Dru had actually forgotten him for a moment. “This is my son, Tate. Tate, this is Mr. Carver.”

“Just J.D.,” he corrected her and thrust out a callused hand to Tate. “How’s it goin’, kid?”

“Goin’ cool.” Tate took the proffered hand and immediately began grimacing mightily, which told Dru he was doing his best to grind J.D.’s knuckles to dust. He simply loved the adultness of shaking hands, but they couldn’t seem to convince him that a firm grip was all that was necessary for a perfectly manly handshake. He understood the concept when it came to women, but just let a man stick his hand out and Tate immediately turned it into a test of his machismo.

Since J.D. hadn’t exactly proven himself to be Mr. Congeniality, she hurriedly said, “And this is my uncle, Ben Lawrence. J.D. got in a day early, Uncle Ben.”

“I see that.” Ben walked over to join them. “Tate, quit trying to crush his hand—we’ve talked about this
before. Go stick your head in the door and tell your grandma that J.D. is here.” He tousled Tate’s silky brown hair as the boy turned to do his bidding. “Be prepared to duck in case she’s still on the warpath, slick.” His gaze followed the boy until Tate swooped his light-saber up off the porch on his way to the front door; then he turned to J.D. and offered his own hand. “Welcome to Star Lake Lodge.”

Dru watched the two men as they took each other’s measure. Her uncle was older and not as fit as J.D., but he was still damn fine-looking for his age. He’d spread a little around the middle, and his shoulders weren’t as muscular as they once were. But his hair, though mostly gray now, was thick and wavy, and his brown eyes crinkled at the outside corners when he smiled, which he did often.

The same certainly couldn’t be said for J.D. He exchanged handshakes with the sober impassiveness Dru had seen since his arrival. He answered her uncle’s questions civilly enough, but didn’t volunteer so much as an extra word that might make the introductions go more smoothly. He all but bristled with no-trespassing signs, and for some reason it put her back up. Luckily, Tate and Aunt Sophie emerged from the cabin before she forgot herself and said something unforgivably snide.

The fact that she was even tempted to do so brought Dru up short. What
was
it about this guy that tested all the control she’d worked so hard to perfect? This knee-jerk desire to provoke a reaction out of him was not good.

“Grandma Sophie’s herself again,” Tate announced
cheerfully as he pulled his great-aunt by the hand toward the group in the clearing. “I don’t think she wants to put the dust mop up Grandpa Ben’s bu—”

“
Tate!
”

Clearly unfazed by the exasperated warning that came from three separate throats, he gave an unrepentant shrug and pinned his honorary grandmother in place with his laser-blue eyes. “Well, you don’t, do you?”

“No,” Sophie agreed dryly. “I can safely say that impulse has passed.” She walked up to her husband and slid her arm around his waist. Patting his chest with her free hand, she murmured contritely, “I’m sorry, Ben.”

“I know you are, babe.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and hugged her to his side.

Dru was aware of J.D. next to her, still and watchful, and she tried to see her aunt and uncle as they must appear through his eyes.

She’d lived with them so long she could see them only through her own, but she was struck as always by the closeness they radiated. It was simply part of their nature to gravitate together whenever they were in the same vicinity. It wasn’t an excluding relationship, though—their natural warmth extended to everyone they cared about.

Dru’s parents had been restless souls who’d traveled the four corners of the earth. One of her earliest memories was of them parking her with her aunt and uncle so they could go off to see the world and try something new and exciting. When she’d begun school, she’d always dreaded that moment when the bus let her off
at the corner. She’d never known who, if anyone, would be there to meet her. Sometimes it had been one of her parents, but more often than not, it’d been a neighbor picking up her own child, or sometimes no one at all. Long before her parents had died in a hot-air-balloon accident in the Andes when she was nine, Sophie and Ben and Star Lake Lodge had come to represent security to her.

She smiled at the familiar sight of Sophie leaning against Ben. At fifty-one, her aunt looked closer to forty, and her milkmaid voluptuousness and vivid coloring still had the ability to turn the heads of men twenty years her junior. It might have been intimidating if not for the ready warmth of her smile.

Sophie smiled now as she stepped out from under the drape of Ben’s arm and extended both hands to J.D. “Welcome,” she said, grasping his much-larger hands in her own. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to greet you when you arrived. Dru, honey, did you show him the back road so he can bring his car around to unpack?”

“No, but we can do that now if he’d like.” Dru raised an inquiring eyebrow at J.D.

His muscular shoulders hitched beneath the white T-shirt that strained to contain them. “That’s not necessary,” he said brusquely. “I’ve got everything I need right here.” He nodded at the canvas duffel bag resting on the ground a few feet away.

Sophie smiled brilliantly. “Fine, then. Would you like some time alone to unpack and get settled in?”

“Yeah, that would be good.” He hesitated for a moment, then added, “Thanks.”

“We’ll leave you, then. Tate! Come along, darling.”

He came running. “Can I go swimming now? It’s almost three, and that Dean kid in two-eleven said he was gonna go swimming then.”

Dru glanced back as she followed her son and aunt and uncle down the trail. J.D. still stood where they’d left him, his hands thrust in his jeans pockets and his mouth broody. He looked a little lonely as he watched them go, almost…lost.

Suppressing a snort, she whipped around and caught up with Tate, who was slashing the air with his plastic light-saber and talking ninety miles an hour to Sophie and Ben.
Yeah, right
.

If that little bit of fantasy didn’t qualify for Fanciful Thought of the Day, she didn’t know what did.

J.D. tossed his duffel on the queen-sized bed and began to unpack. The cabin was compact, with its one bedroom, one bath, tiny kitchen, and combination living-and-dining room that was divided by an arch with built-in bookshelves. It had all he needed, though, and someone—Sophie Lawrence, he would guess—had even left a vase of flowers on the small table out in the dining room and another one here on the bedroom dresser. His gaze kept drifting to it. Something about that homey touch got to him.

The cabin had been built back in the days before deforestation was a household word, and he got caught up in sheer admiration for the craftsmanship that had gone into the tongue-and-groove walls, the hardwood floors, and the fir-door-and-window jambs and lintels. Then he turned his attention back to emptying the bag
that sat on the faded patchwork quilt of its stack of white T-shirts, underwear, jeans, shave kit, and a few of his more cherished tools.

The canvas duffel was collapsing in on itself by the time his fingers brushed the stack of letters on the bottom. Slowly, he drew the bundle out and stared down at Edwina’s spidery handwriting on the topmost envelope.

He didn’t know why the hell he’d kept her letters all these years. He hadn’t even bothered to open them after reading the first few that had caught up with him, since he’d known good and well what they would say: that Edwina had forgiven him.

For something he hadn’t done, which had been pretty goddamn generous of her. Angered anew by the reminder of an old injustice, he threw the rubber-banded bundle into the wastepaper basket next to the nightstand and stomped out of the room.

A minute later he was back, fishing it out again. God only knew why—he’d be a much happier man if he could simply leave that part of his life in the trash bin where it belonged. But he couldn’t seem to let it go. He threw the letters back in the duffel, slung the bag onto the shelf above the hanger rod in the closet, and shut the door.

But out of sight was not out of mind. He pulled Edwina’s father’s gold watch out of his pocket and ran his thumb over its etched cover. Pressing his thumb on the minuscule catch on its side, he snapped the cover open and stared blindly at its face, seeing only scenes from the past. Trying to shake off the unwelcome memories, he clicked the timepiece closed again and
tucked it back into the watch pocket of his jeans. The first time he’d seen Edward Lawrence’s watch was the day that Edwina had taken him into her home. The watch had lain on a leather-edged blotter on an antique desk in the study off the hallway.

Unfamiliar with that style of timepiece, he’d been drawn to it over and over again. He’d thought it looked like something that would belong to a rich guy, which he’d found totally cool. More than that, though, its age and sense of history had beckoned like a Lorelei luring sailors onto the rocks—though he would have been hard-pressed to verbalize what he’d so admired about it.

Only as an adult had he realized that it had been the watch’s continuity, the fact that it had been in a single family for two generations, that he’d found so awesome. He’d been a throwaway kid who’d never known his father and whose mother had found feeding her drug habit more important than keeping custody of her son, and he was just whacked by the idea of a family not only hanging onto its kids, but saving pieces of its individual lives to pass down to them. Until he’d moved in with Edwina, he’d never possessed a single thing that was his alone, let alone something given him by an ancestor.

Edwina had changed all that, and for several months it had been like living in his most closely held fantasy. She’d treated him the way he’d imagined real kids were treated. Which had made the betrayal all the more bitter when Edward’s watch had suddenly disappeared and she’d all but accused him of taking it. He hadn’t taken kindly to that, and as ridiculous as it was,
the ghost of that outrage lingered on like nuclear waste with an infinite half-life.

So if there was one thing he knew for damn sure, it was that even though the Lawrences
seemed
like a decent family, nobody just relinquished their rights to valuable property with the cheerfulness they’d just displayed. He slammed out of the cabin and headed up the trail to the lodge.

They had to be up to something. And he planned to find out what it was.

The front-desk clerk had just warned Dru that J.D. was headed for her office when the door opened and he walked in. Watching him close it behind him and turn to face her, she said into the phone, “The package beat the message, Joy, but I appreciate the attempt. While I have you on the line, would you tell Housekeeping that I’m making up my order and need their report by this afternoon? There’s a lag time on the coffee packets for the rooms, so I particularly need to know about that.” She settled the receiver back in its cradle and marked a check next to “Housekeeping.”

Then, ignoring her increased heart rate, she rose and plastered a pleasant smile on her face. “Hello, J.D. Did you come to be shown the road to your cabin?”

“No. I came to be shown the books.”

His remark was so unexpected that she simply blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

“The books. Ledgers that record all the financial data of an enterprise. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

“I know what books are,” she said with hard-won
composure, and came out from behind the desk. “I’ll get them for you right away.” She headed for the cabinet.

“Both sets.”

Her spine snapped erect and she swung back to face him. “I don’t know what type of business you’re accustomed to dealing with, Mr. Carver, but Star Lake Lodge has one set of books, period, and those are meticulously kept.”

He took a large step forward, and her office suddenly shrank down to a single wall comprised of his shoulders and chest. She tilted her chin up, but took an involuntary step back, then was furious that he could intimidate her so effortlessly. When he promptly took another step forward, she stood her ground. “Are you planning on stalking me around my office?” she inquired coolly. Then she lost it. “Who the hell taught you your manners, anyway? It certainly couldn’t have been Great-aunt Edwina.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “No, the lesson I learned from Edwina was that talk is cheap, and in the end there’s only one person I can depend on—myself.”

“Indeed? You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t cry big, sloppy tears over how misused you were. Because it seems to me that Edwina’s talk wasn’t all that cheap—for here you are, aren’t you? Half-owner in our lodge.”

He took another step closer. “And that bothers you, doesn’t it, sweetheart?”

She deliberately chose to misunderstand. “That you’re bad-mouthing the woman who made it possible?” She ignored her reaction to his proximity this
time and thrust her chin up. “Yes, I can honestly say I find that rather tacky.”