“I didn’t think we were.”
That was ignored. “It looks as if your houseguest is doing something illegal out there. At least in my daddy’s day, we used to call that kind of device a still. He making moonshine on you?”
“No. He’s making lavender oil…or ‘lavender absolute’ as it’s properly called, I guess. It’s kind of hard to explain the process.” She stared at the glass of cherry daiquiri in front of her, then thought what the hell and took a sip. “First you have to pick the flowers when only two thirds of the florets are opened up. Then…well, come to think of it, the distilling process probably does have something in common with a bootlegger’s still. You put water in one container and the flowers in another. You heat the water hot enough to make steam, and then that’s pushed through a pipe under high pressure through the plant material. The steam works to separate or displace the water from the oil. The oil always…”
“Good grief,” Maud said. “You’re going to make our eyes cross. None of us give a holy damn about the still business, dear, we were just trying to get you talking. You haven’t had a man near you since you came home after the divorce, and suddenly you’ve got this gorgeous hulk living with you-”
“Hunk,” Mary Bell corrected.
“Whatever. The point is that your mother isn’t here, but we all know she’d be hoping that you’re taking advantage of the situation.”
Violet gulped down another sip of daiquiri, feeling cornered. Furthermore, her cats had all hunkered on top of the refrigerator, away from the bawdy, noisy drinkers with their increasingly stiff facial masks. “He’s not
“That’s roofers, dear. I should know. I was married to one for twelve years. He only showed up on time for dinner twice, God rest his soul.” Anne Blayton almost never spoke up, but she’d finished two glasses of wine now. Her mask was starting to crack like old parchment. “He sure was good between the sheets, though.”
“Well, you’ve been through enough husbands, you should be a judge,” Mary Bell said sweetly.
“The point,” Maud said, “is not whether he’s sleeping here or in the cottage, but where he’s not sleeping when the lights go out. Are you deaf and blind, Violet Campbell? Last week, with that ghastly heat wave, I swear the only redeeming part of my day was to drive past here and see him walking in the yard, at least half the time without a shirt. Whooee.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” Violet reached forward to pour a little wine into her now-empty glass.
“Violet, honey, you just added wine to your daiquiri,” Mary Bell said kindly. “You’re just not yourself.”
“I am
The back door opened again. Cameron ambled in. “Hi, ladies. Looks like you’re having fun.” He deposited an empty can in the trash, smiled at the group, stroked three cats and ambled through to the other room.
Four women let out another collective sigh. All of them were smiling hard enough to crack their masks. “It’s time we washed you all off,” Violet said firmly.
That was at least three times he’d walked in this afternoon. Three times, when he’d laughed and joked with the women. It wasn’t that long ago that he would have had a cow and a half over an estrogen-loaded event like this. He didn’t run anymore. He didn’t act terrified-or even surprised-if he wandered into the kitchen and found a roomful of masked women with their bare feet in buckets, sitting in bathrobes in the middle of the afternoon.
It just wasn’t natural. He was beyond being the ideal guy-helping her with everything from dishes to chores, making the whole lavender thing look effortless, doing his own wash, never taking over the remote, bringing groceries in. He’d quit trying to finish the roof, but that was only because he’d completely run out of spare time. Normal men only helped out if they were harassed, blackmailed or wanted sex. Everybody knew that. Cameron seemed to think it was ordinary behavior to pitch in. More confusing yet, he took every damn thing in her life in stride, as if it were all very interesting, instead of the nature of stuff that should have given an alpha guy like him nightmares.
Instead, he’d been giving
As soon as the women were cleaned up and herded out, Violet piled dishes into the sink, added sudsy water and then turned on the dishwasher. A moment later she realized she’d turned the dishwasher on without any dishes in it, and thought she’d either had too much to drink…
Or too little Cameron.
She looked frantically around for the dish towel, but it seemed to have disappeared.
Two weeks ago he’d claimed he wanted to sleep with her. Intended to sleep with her. Imminently soon.
Only, they hadn’t.
He’d been kissing her regularly. Over breakfast. Before lunch. In the middle of the day, if he found her in the Herb Haven with her hands filled with a dried-herb arrangement, he’d take a bite out of the back of her neck, cup her fanny. He’d walked with her in the moonlight. They’d hip-danced doing the dishes after dinner, barged in on each other coming out of the bathroom, fallen asleep watching horror movies on the same couch.
But the damn man hadn’t done one thing about seriously seducing her. She was free! She was cheap! She was available. She had boobs. She wasn’t asking him for a single thing! So what was the matter with the man?
Upstairs, she heard the pipes rattle. He was taking a shower. She opened the refrigerator for some God- unknown reason and found her dish towel. She held the cool towel to her pounding head. The man was turning her into a train wreck. She had to get her life back. She couldn’t remember where her shoes were, her keys, her dishrags. She was starting to become ditsy for real.
Enough was enough. If Mohammed wasn’t willing to come to the mountain, she was darn well going to have to try seducing the mountain herself.
Cameron walked into the kitchen and stopped dead. They’d been sharing KP duty over the past couple weeks, but after seeing the war zone caused by the women’s group earlier, he’d put on clean khakis and a decent shirt, figuring that Violet would want to go out to dinner.
Instead, the women were gone and the kitchen cleaned to within an inch of its life-give or take the cats and cat hair. The old oak table had white quilted place mats, roses floating in a bowl, some kind of wild salad-smelled like lemon-pepper shrimp-puffed-up fresh rolls…
Violet whirled around. “We’re having something I call come-to-Bahama wings. They’re chicken wings without the bones. Kind of hot. A little lime juice, some rum, some honey, some hot peppers… I guess I should have asked you first, but you can handle hot, can’t you, Lachlan?”
“Sure,” he said, but the adrenaline was instantly pumping. Something was wrong. Worrisome wrong. The way she smiled at him raised the temperature in the kitchen twenty degrees. He saw the hot wings and the roses and heard the come-to-mama invitation in her voice.
Everywhere he looked, there were more land mines. And the more he looked, the more he recognized that she’d gone to a ton of trouble, laying all kinds of intricate, tricky traps.
She was barefoot, wearing a skirt that looked like a long, floaty handkerchief. Her midriff was bare, her long hair all scooped up and twisted and sedated with long clips off her neck. Said neck had been doused with some lethal scent-not her usual citrus soap, for damn sure, but something that reached his nostrils from the doorway. The perfume was a drug. That was all he was sure of.
Her lips had been coated with something shiny, and she was wearing a top that looked like another handkerchief. Only the top was actually about the size of a handkerchief this time, such a light fabric that he could clearly make out the plump swell of her breasts and the shape of her nipples.
“Whew, it’s really hot tonight, isn’t it?” she said with a grin.
His bloodstream shot his heart another dose of adrenaline. Yeah, he’d suspected that patience-and celibacy- would pay off eventually. But Violet was usually so warm and nurturing that he’d never figured she’d be the kind of woman to play mean.
This setup wasn’t just mean; it was down and dirty.
“I figured you had such a swamped afternoon that you’d want to go out, pick up dinner. Hell, I’d have helped if I’d known you were going to all this trouble.”
“No trouble,” she said sweetly. “You’ve been working crazy long hours yourself. I decided that we both needed some real food and a relaxing evening for a change.”
“Relaxing,” he echoed, thinking that nothing about this setup was remotely relaxing. On the other hand, even in
