And yet she’d known his name.
That’s when he heard the odd rumble, and realized there was a huge mass of teeth and muscle standing behind Danielle.
Growling. Not a friendly, how-do-you-do growl, either, but a should-I-eat-your-face-or-your-heart-first sort of growl.
Nick had faced guerrilla warfare, crash landings in unfriendly territories, typhoid fever and countless other emergencies, but he’d never quite imagined himself going like this.
He took a better look at the dog, or what he hoped was a dog, as it was past hip height to Danielle. Its short muzzle was black, and at the top of this inky mask, two mahogany-brown eyes peered out below a thick, simian brow. The shorthaired coat was a riot of brown-and-black tiger stripes.
Yep, just a dog.
The next thing Nick knew, he’d been hit in the chest with what felt like a bowling ball. No, make that a
Nick stared into the brown, bloodshot eyes and realized the dog was about as tall as he was. There was a huge tongue, lots of drool and really bad breath. That’s about all he caught before Danielle lugged the thing off him.
“Sadie,” she admonished. “You’ve got to stop greeting people like that.”
Nick straightened and ran a hand down his shirt, grimacing when he encountered great globs of…slobber.
“Well, she’s a bit nearsighted. She likes to get close to see your face.”
“Uh-huh.” Nick glanced down at the biggest, beefiest dog he’d ever seen. “I thought she was interested in eating me.”
“Oh, no! Sadie is the sweetest thing, she’d never hurt anyone.” Proving so, she bent and cupped Sadie’s huge jowls in her palms, smiling a smile that seemed both indulgent and infinitely sad. “She’s had a rough time of late, that’s all.”
And so had Danielle, Nick guessed. He knew little about her other than she’d headlined his every wet dream for several happy years, but his instincts were never off. Something was wrong, he could see it in the exhaustion in her eyes, in the way she carried her lithe body. Hell, he could practically smell it on her.
And everything within him wanted to ask her about it. Could he help? He’d done so once, though he’d always wondered how things might have been different if she’d let him do more. It did startle him how easily and instantly he fell back into that pattern of wanting to save her.
But damn it, he was on vacation. No rescuing fair maidens in distress required. He was going to just hang out, take some pictures, get some recreational sex if he could, and do whatever came to him that didn’t demand much thought.
And yet it was utterly beyond him to ignore anyone’s problems. Just as he opened his mouth to ask her about it, she closed off her expression to his questing gaze. “So,” she said. “Who’s taking the pictures of Sadie?”
“You’re looking at him.”
“Oh. Can we get started? I’m a bit…strapped for time.”
2
NICK EYED SADIE with a wariness that might have amused Danielle under any other circumstances, but this wasn’t just a whim. And she really was strapped for time, even if she wanted to stop time and just stare.
Nick Cooper. God, she’d always wondered about him, wondered if… No. She couldn’t go back. What was done was done.
“I don’t suppose I can talk you into waiting,” he said. “As I mentioned on the phone, my sisters-”
“No.” As she half expected the cops to come haul her away, and as she hadn’t yet proved ownership of Sadie, she had to press on. “I can’t wait.”
His eyes had always been amazing, almost hypnotic in their fathomless green, and now they landed on her, slowly assessing. Certainly kind, certainly compassionate, but she didn’t need kind and compassionate, she needed those pictures.
“So why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” he said after a long beat.
So he was still intuitive, still willing to put aside everything else and come to her aid. But she was no longer a lost, frightened, desperate seventeen-year-old. She didn’t need his help, she needed his camera. “Nothing’s wrong.” To go along with her denial, she forced a smile.
He looked her over for another long, unsettling moment. As before, taking his sweet time. And as before, leaving her squirming because she had no idea what he saw when he looked at her like that.
But he simply nodded. “Okay, then.”
Danielle followed him down the hall toward one of the studios, still oddly unnerved at the sight of him. Whatever he did with himself, it involved his tall, leanly muscular body, which looked like one fully honed muscle. He wore jeans, faded and soft-looking, though there didn’t appear to be one single soft thing about him. They clung snugly to his backside and thighs, the fabric of his shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes off him.
While she was staring stupidly, wondering how the boy she’d known had grown up into this picture-perfect man, he happened to glance back, and caught her.
He smiled, a friendly, no-secret-meaning-attached-to-it smile, and it was so simple, so contagious, she almost smiled back.
Ridiculous as it seemed, this man wasn’t just a blast from her past, but something else, something deeper, something she didn’t want to face after everything else. He was dangerous to her mental well-being, and she instinctively knew it.
“I’ve wondered about you,” he said. “About where you’d be, what you’d be doing.”
While that made her tingle in even more awareness, she shrugged it off. “Nothing special, really.”
“You had special written all over you,” he said. “Still do.”
She’d been on her own for…well, forever. She needed no one. Especially now, after Ted. So she couldn’t possibly be looking into his timber-green eyes, suddenly yearning to throw herself against him and beg for help.
Just because her life had gone to hell in a hand-basket was no reason to fall apart at a familiar face. No reason at all. “I haven’t thought about high school in a long time,” she said.
“I try not to think about it at all.”
She could believe it. By some grace of God, she’d been popular in those days. It had always baffled her. She’d been born on the wrong side of the tracks and had worked at a fast-food joint until all hours of the night helping her mother keep a roof over their heads. As a result, she hadn’t had the best of grades, and yet she’d hung with the “in” crowd-at least on the days she’d been coherent enough to socialize and not falling over in exhaustion.
They hadn’t always been the nicest of kids, her group, but for whatever reason they’d accepted her. But it still bothered her to think about how many others they’d taunted or been cruel to, for no good reason other than they could.
Nick had been one of those other kids.
She remembered him well. He’d been gorgeous even then, though back in those days he’d been tall, lanky to the point of skinny, and tough. Very tough. Way too much so for her crowd to try to break through his wall of resistance. They’d tormented him-not that he’d ever given an inch or even let them know he was bothered.
She herself had never done anything to him, but it shamed her that she’d stood in the presence of kids who had-boys who’d tried picking a fight, girls who’d snubbed him.
Nick hadn’t appeared to care, going on as if they hadn’t existed. Until that one night when she’d needed him, and without question or rebuke, he’d been there.
Just as he was there for her now.
No doubt, he was a world removed from the boy he’d been. No longer did his shoulders look too wide, his chest too broad for the rest of his body, which had gone from too skinny to oh-just-right.
