“Lily, sugar, I wish you’d let me do something about that hair,” Mary Belle told Lily.
“I’m dying to get it cut. I just honestly haven’t had time,” Lily said, which was 95 percent true. The only holdback was a sincere worry what Mary Belle might do with a pair of scissors.
“I could give you some real style, honey. Jazz you up some. You need a little more…” Mary Belle made a motion with her hands “…style, if you want to appeal to a man like Griff.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s all right, Lily. I hear everything in the salon. No point in trying to keep gossip from me. And bless his heart, I tried to catch him myself-when I was between husbands, anyhow. Never did work, even though I know he wanted to try.” Mary Belle cocked her head. “Anyhow-y’all give me a call in the morning, I’ll get you in, and that’s a promise. I’ll do you myself. Trained in Savannah, you know…well, hello, handsome.”
Griff came up behind them, greeted Mary Belle’s coy flash of eyelashes and inviting smile with his usual Southern boy charm. But Lily had long figured out he could flirt in his sleep; it didn’t mean anything beyond an unshakeable kindness to women. Behind the courtesy, though, she could see the tired circles under his eyes, the smudges of dirt that tracked his clothes, dusted his shoes. He was one wiped-out cookie.
Still, he looked better than earlier, when she’d worried he was absolutely at the end of his rope-even though he’d denied it to the death. She wouldn’t make
Lily had been thinking about that all day. Whether she was going to give him that chance to rest.
Or whether she was going to do something she’d never done in her life. Take a petrifying risk. Hurl good sense to the winds. And make love with a man for no reason beyond that she terribly, totally, irrevocably…
Wanted to.
Chapter 7
“So you finally get to escape from here?” she asked him.
“
“Hey! Quit looking at me! I’m wilted. More than wilted. Hair went flat, clothes went wrinkled, the whole body went droopy.”
“You’re kidding, right?” She looked beautiful. The more he was around her, the more he was becoming addicted to the fresh cheeks and huge, dark eyes, and all that thick, silky hair. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was damned close to impossibly appealing. “Wait a minute. You weren’t listening to Mary Belle, were you? Promise me now, you’ll never let that woman get near you with a pair of scissors.”
She chuckled. “I’m desperate for a major trim, but I’m an easy cut. Otherwise, that woman’s sense of style would be more than a little…daunting.”
He laughed-for the first time all day. And realized that his neck and shoulders were unknotting for the first time all day, too. He steered her under the overhang, for the shade, aiming for his EOS. “Thanks for hanging out this afternoon. Couldn’t have been fun. I owe you.”
“Yup, you do. I expect diamonds and rubies and stuff. But for right now, I have a more immediate plan.”
“What?”
“You drop me off at the B and B. I’m going to shower and crash. You go straight home, turn off all phones, and crash yourself.”
He waited. “That’s the whole plan?”
“Well, maybe you should also lock your door so nobody can bug you.”
“Hmm. I have a different plan.”
“What?”
They reached his car. He clipped open her door. “I drive you to your B and B. You get a change of clothes-like a swimsuit, a towel. We go back to my place. We can either shower first, or skip the shower and head straight for the hot tub-but I have in mind putting ice cubes in it. Have something ice-cold to drink. Followed by something ice-cold to eat.”
“All right, all right, all right. You can have me. Body and soul, and skip the rubies. Just the words
“You’re easy, Lily.”
“Yeah. I’ve been told that before.”
He’d bet the bank she hadn’t. He’d bet the bank there’d never been one thing any guy had ever found easy about Lily…which might be part of the reason he was so damned mesmerized.
At the B and B, she only took a few minutes, flew out the door with Louella flapping on her tail, urging a plate of cookies on her, talking nonstop, waving wildly at him.
He only had eyes for Lily. She dropped a sack in the backseat-big enough to hold a bathing suit and changes of clothes. But somehow, in those few minutes upstairs, she’d turned into another woman. The shorts had been replaced by a sundress, all white and yellow, the daisies at the hem fluttering around her knees.
Her legs were bare.
Her eyes were softer than chocolate.
Her lips were noticeably free of lipstick.
And she’d pulled up all that thick, silky hair with combs.
“What?” she said, when she piled in and yanked on her seat belt. Instead of starting the car, she’d caught him looking at her.
“Nothing. Just wiped out after that long day,” he said, but tiredness was the last thing on his mind. He kept trying to remind himself that she was a teacher. Not that teachers couldn’t be gorgeous, but it was hard to think of them as femme fatales. And that was just it. She wasn’t. He could readily picture her in front of a bunch of kids, laughing, scolding, hugging the little ones, playing games. Not seducing guys. Not making guys melt at her feet just for a smile.
Yet somehow, there was something in her eyes, the way she looked at him, the way she smiled at him-that messed with his head. Was
He had to make another stop to pull off the rest of his evening plan, but within an hour they were back at his place. The hot tub was set on lukewarm, the pool jutting over the hilltop. She emerged from her shower with a towel concealing her suit, and immediately saw the spread on the patio table. Plates and bowls were set in a bed of ice. Fresh shrimp with a sharp red dip. Chilled chardonnay. A plate of cheese, crackers and caviar. Lime sorbet in a sterling icer. Fresh peaches. It wasn’t exactly a normal dinner, but the food was all bite-size, no fuss.
“That’s it,” she said. “I’m in love with you. I know, I know, that’s what all the ladies say.”
“It is. I can’t help if I’m wonderful.”
“Yeah, that’s your press all right.” She plopped the towel on a lounge chair, touched a bare foot to test the temperature in the tub, and then sank in with a groan loud enough to wake the sky. “Speaking of your press, though-I heard under the table that you’re some kind of high-brow math whiz.”
There, for a moment, he felt reassured. She wasn’t perfect. In fact, when she started prying and probing and using that weird intuition of hers, she could be downright annoying. He didn’t have to worry about a permanent attachment to a woman who just never let anything rest. Right? “Hey, I already confessed I had a degree in math.”
“Yeah, but you never said you used it to do really top-secret, fancy work.”
“Who told you such an outrageous story?” Apparently, he wasn’t supposed to notice how fast she’d dipped that curvy figure out of sight. He could pretend when he had to.
“I never kiss and tell. But I picked it up from a lot of sources. There was a tall, gray-haired woman-your insurance agent? I heard her talking about making sure all your math computers were extra-protected at home, that maybe you needed more coverage or security for your work in progress. Then one of the kids-I think Jason-was telling the other boy who works for you about how you were going to cure ‘really, really bad diseases’ with math.
