Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling (25 page)

“You don’t think I’m a good painter? Think again. I painted houses during summer vacations when I was in college. I got paid by the job, not by the hour. I suppose you do, too? That’s good, because I can help you get done sooner. Got a spare brush? Oh, I see one.”

“Azure,” he began, thinking he’d better set things straight because this pretense of his had gone too far.

She walked to a radio in the corner and switched it on. “I want to do
something,
” she said over the music, which was loud and lively. Then she bent and dipped her brush
in the paint, slapping it on the wall with a professionalism that put his meager effort to shame.

He liked it that Azure had a helpful side, but when he glanced at his watch, he realized that the painters—the real ones—would return in a matter of minutes if his calculations were correct. There was only one thing he could do, he figured, and that was to paint as fast as he could, the sooner to get them out of there.

Plus there was something about those coveralls and the way they curved around Azure’s delectable derriere that made working beside her a pleasure.

Or
correction: make that behind her.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: tiffany

i’ve been trying to reach you on your cell but you don’t answer. tiffany called me today and told me that she and paco are on the outs!!! :-) :-) :-)

so what are you up to? have you found any frogs to kiss? dorrie

“W
HEN
I
WAS WORKING MY WAY
through college,” Azure said as she dipped the brush into the paint again, “I worked odd jobs. Painting, wallpapering, dog walking. Mowing lawns. House-sitting.”

The music blaring from the radio seemed to have loosened them both up. “I’ve never sat on a house,” Lee said conversationally. “Is it more comfortable than sitting on a handle from a car door?”

She caught the sly mote of humor in Lee’s eyes. “Definitely, but let me tell you about baby-sitting. It’s—”

“I’ve actually sat on a baby before. It was in a dark movie theater, and I was munching my popcorn as I moved down the row after the movie had started. I saw an empty seat, and I sat down. It wasn’t until the mother yelped that
I realized that the seat wasn’t really empty and that I was about to squash this kid in a baby carrier.” He laughed. “I thought the mother was going to kill me.”

Azure rolled her eyes. “Did you do any harm to the kid?”

“No, the baby was sound asleep and the mother yelled before I sat. I felt so bad about the whole thing that I went and bought the mother and her other kid a couple of cartons of popcorn. The kid wanted to go home with me. He was so cute that I almost let him.”

“You like children?”

“Yeah, a lot. I noticed at the wedding how you took care of that little girl, by the way. I thought it was a nice thing to do.”

“She was crying,” Azure said. “Anyone would have helped.”

He wielded his brush vigorously, moving closer. “No one took notice of her but you.”

“Someone would have seen to her eventually.”

“I thought she might be a member of your family.”

“No, there are no small girls in the family at present, only my sister Isis’s young stepsons. You may have noticed them at the reception—they were the ones who were doing their best to take a dive off the roof. They’re a handful. And then of course, my father had eyes only for his lady friend, who none of us had seen before, and my mother was holding forth telling about her job decorating cakes baked in the shape of sex organs, and—”

“Would you mind repeating that?” Lee said, stopping work entirely and trying without success to wipe the incredulous expression off his face.

“I certainly would mind repeating that! I mean, wouldn’t you? If she were your mother? It’s bad enough that Mom
changed her name and left my father for a new life in Sedona, Arizona.”

“Why’d she do that? If you don’t mind my asking?”

She concentrated on her painting. “Why should I? Everyone in our family has been asking ever since it happened. She and Dad were active in the community—Mom chaired a community action committee, and Dad led a Boy Scout troop. All I can say is, I think Mom was bored. We kids had already flown the nest, so her leaving didn’t inconvenience us, but my father was devastated.”

“I can understand that,” Lee said slowly.

“
Soooo,
Dad now teaches ballroom dancing on a cruise ship.”

Lee appeared reflective as he climbed a ladder to cut the paint in at the ceiling. “Have you ever appreciated how interesting your family is?” he asked, looking down at her.

Azure began to lay off the last section of wall she’d finished. “Interesting? I’ve been fighting against their eccentricities all my life. Karma and her fruity-granola New Age lifestyle never made much sense to me, and Mary Beth, my sister who is the assistant rabbi, seems to think about nothing but religion. Isis is probably the most normal, but she lives way out in California, and when she was twenty-two, she married a man who already had a family, so none of us sees her much.”

Lee thought about his own family and wished in that split second that it was more like hers. “You’re lucky,” he said with conviction. “You don’t know how lucky, that’s all.”

“I’m lucky that none of them live in Boston near me,” she retorted, laughing as she said it.

He concentrated on the delicate business of painting the top edge
of the wall without getting paint on the ceiling. “You and your sisters should be glad that your parents didn’t try to force you all into a mold. They obviously didn’t want you to be cookie-cutter images of each other. You were each allowed to develop in your own way, to be anything you wanted to be. That’s a kind of gift, Azure.”

She appeared thoughtful. “I suppose that’s true, but I still remember that when I was a teenager, all I wanted to be was like everyone else. I didn’t want to have a sister who in her spare time did nothing but study for her bat mitzvah, and I didn’t want anyone to know that our family was vegetarian, which pretty much cut out having classmates over for dinner. I certainly didn’t want anyone to know that Karma kept a statue of Buddha in the room we shared and—horrors!—insisted on sleeping in the nude.”

“Do you suppose she still does?” Lee asked with frank admiration.

“You’ll have to ask Slade. Who knows?”

“It—um—isn’t a family custom, I take it?”

“No!”

He climbed down from the ladder. “Just thought I’d ask.”

“You’re much too nosy.”

“I’m interested in how other families work,” he said. “Mine was nothing like yours.”

“I would have thought,” she said consideringly, “that they might be very much like mine.”

Lee’s father, a businessman with international interests, had valued a college education so highly that he hadn’t spoken to his only son for a full two years after Lee quit college to start Dot.Musix. He’d felt abandoned by his dad at a time when, brimming over with excitement for his new venture, he could have used some family support. He didn’t want to get into all that at present, so all he said was, “My
father is a dictator. He doesn’t care much for anyone who colors outside the lines.”

Azure caught a hint of something in his tone that made her look at him sharply. “I’ll venture a guess that you’ve colored outside the lines all your life,” she said.

“You’d be right about that,” he replied. “I was a nonconformist from the word go.” He could have added that he’d also captured first place in his school’s science fair two years in a row and that he’d won awards for citizenship and lettered in swimming. Those were things that he seldom told anyone, and in this case, he didn’t want to reveal too much.

Azure stopped to finish drinking the rest of the iced tea in the bottle, tossing it in a trash barrel when it was empty. “I was supposed to be a nonconformist, considering that I had a pair of ex-hippies for parents, but I struggled to give the impression that I came from a quote-unquote normal family.”

He shot her a wry look. “Well, if you ever want to start a support group for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Parents, give me a call.”

“I’m not so sure mine were dysfunctional. Peculiar is more like it, and I’ve been struggling to be different from them all my life.”

“And pretty successfully, too,” Lee offered. “You’re so staid, so dignified.”

At the moment, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her feeling had become one of playfulness, and wearing sloppy painters’ coveralls, Azure felt anything but dignified. She realized as soon as Lee spoke that she had actually been having fun as they performed this chore, and one part of her wanted him to know that. Another part of her wanted to hang on to her sedate image, but as she tapped the paint
off the end of the brush into the paint can, the fun-loving part overwhelmed the dignified part and she felt a surge of an unfamiliar emotion that she identified as glee.

“I’ll show you staid,” she said as she straightened. “I’ll show you dignified.” And with that she reached out with her brush and very slowly and deliberately painted a green stripe right down Lee’s back.

He froze in surprise, and for a moment she thought she had made him angry. But then he turned, and with the light of hilarity springing into his eyes, he dipped his paintbrush and, as slowly and deliberately as she had done, he painted a wide stripe down her front.

She took this in for a split second. Then, “Oooh,” she said. “You don’t look so good in green. I bet you’d look a whole lot better in mauve.”

“Mauve?”

“Mauve,” she said firmly. She walked to the other side of the room and pried the top off a can of mauve paint that had been opened and almost used up. A fresh paintbrush sat beside it, and she swirled the brush through the paint before setting off toward Lee at a dead run and slapping the paint across his chest. She couldn’t help laughing at the stunned expression on his face as he looked down at the mauve paint, now dripping onto the floor.

“Oh, you think you’re such a great painter, right? Here’s great,” and he ran his brush down one sleeve of her coveralls.

“Green is not my color,” she said with mock hauteur. “I look a whole lot better in something brighter, cheerier.”

“There’s nothing brighter and cheerier than yellow,” he said, reaching down and peering into a discarded can. “And there’s just enough here to
brighten you up quite a bit.” He swiped a bit of paint out of the bottom of the can and headed toward her.

Moving swiftly, he bent and wiped the paintbrush on her coveralls at knee level. While he was doing that, she took the opportunity to daub some mauve on the back of his neck.

He danced away to the beat of the music from the radio, putting his hand to the back of his neck and staring at it when it came away covered with paint. “How dare you! When I couldn’t defend myself!”

She couldn’t help laughing at the way his eyes glittered with the light of revenge, and she ran around to the other side of the ladder. He followed, but she dodged him, keeping the ladder between them as a shield.

“I’ll get you back,” he warned. He looked around. “There’s a can of black paint over there. What do you say we open that one up?” He was laughing as he said it, and she began to giggle.

“You look like a clown,” she said.

“So do you. Or worse. Whose idea was this, anyway?”

Suddenly the music stopped. A voice boomed out from the doorway leading to the back room. “That’s what I would like to know,” said the man who had entered and pulled the plug on the radio while they weren’t looking. He was at least six foot two and had burly arms and a shaved head.

Azure dropped her brush with a clatter. Lee cleared his throat as he tried to figure out if he knew the guy. It wasn’t Dave Edelson, the general contractor on the job, with whom he’d had dinner only a few nights ago. It wasn’t the painting
subcontractor, either, because he had met him once in Dave’s office. Still, the man looked vaguely familiar.

“Who are you?” he asked, stepping forward.

“I’m the one who should be asking questions. Who are
you
and what right do you have to be here?”

“He’s only doing his job, and I’m helping,” Azure said. She had a sudden horrified vision of being dragged down to the police station and having to call Harry Wixler to bail her out.

Lee shot her a look that she figured meant he wanted her to be quiet. She had no intention of doing so, but then Lee started to unzip his coveralls.

“You and I should step outside so I can explain,” Lee said to the guy.

“You can explain right here,” the man snarled. “You and your girlfriend with the green hair.”

Azure felt her hair; sure enough, the back of her ponytail was damp, and her hand came away green.

By this time, Lee had divested himself of his coverall and was walking toward the bald man, looking conciliatory and putting on a friendly face.
Charm,
thought Azure.
He’s got tons of it. Well, if his charm can get us out of this, who am I to criticize?

“It’s like this,” Lee said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder and urging him toward the back door. The man didn’t seem to like being urged anywhere, but Lee made himself look as nonthreatening as possible and continued to move the guy along.

Once they were outside, Lee breathed a sigh of relief and backed off. “I’m Lee Santori,” he said. “I own this place.”

“Yeah? And I’m president of the United States. Believe it?”

Lee suddenly recalled where he’d seen this man before, but he was interrupted before he could remind him.

The
guy stuck his jaw out in an attitude of belligerence. “Well, I don’t believe you, either. What I’ve heard around town is that Lee Santori lives on a yacht out there in the bay. He doesn’t run around in beat-up old cars,” and here he jerked his head toward the Mustang, “or bring his girlfriend over here to vandalize the place for fun.”

“I saw you in Dave Edelson’s office last week,” Lee said, dragging his wallet out and opening it to his driver’s license. “That’s me right there,” he said, tapping the picture. “I
am
Lee Santori.”

With distrust written all over his face, the guy peered closely at the picture, glancing dubiously up at Lee and back again. “That looks like you, all right.” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What’s going on?”

Lee folded the wallet and stuffed it back in the pocket of his shorts. “A little fun and games,” he said, winking at the guy. “This is how my girl gets her jollies. You know?”

This statement earned him a look of rank skepticism. “By painting each other?”

Lee shrugged, adopting a man-to-man stance. “Sure.”

“You’re really Lee Santori?”

“You saw the picture, man.”

A long pause, and then the guy held out his hand. “I’m Jake Gruber. I work for Dave. I came to check on the painters because I thought they might be slacking off. Dave wants this job finished on time.”

“I appreciate that,” Lee said. He reached for his wallet again. “And I’d also appreciate it if you’d let us finish up here at our own speed and make sure the painters clean up any mess.” He peeled a couple of hundred-dollar bills off the stack in his wallet and pressed them into Gruber’s hand.