On Saturday morning, Jace took a steeper route up the mountain. His body was in sync with his mind again, which was good news. Time to push it, to move at the extreme limit of his control, keeping his steps deliberate all the same, just this side of too far. If the past couple days had showed him anything, it had been that he didn’t want to lose his edge.
Or maybe they’d shown him that he needed to be where he was, to be out of the game. He didn’t want to say that living a regular life was flat. He didn’t want to think it.
Well, maybe just a bit. Maybe so.
You could bungee jump, of course. You could skydive. But when your last jump had been into a hot zone, drifting down, much too exposed, into hostile territory under cover of darkness—well, the watered-down version didn’t really cut it. It would be like going to the Renaissance Faire aged thirty-five, fencing with your carefully blunted sword and shouting things like, “Die, scurvy knave!” while you kept an eye out in case a pretty girl noticed. Not quite the same.
On the other hand, needing to fight—and possibly to kill—in order to feel alive was a dark place to be. That was also true.
He was on his way back down the mountain now, his long legs eating up the ground. Just past the shuttered ski lodge, he saw the sign.
Coming Soon
Sinful Mountain Cross Country Ski Resort
Was that a done deal, then? He’d heard that a good-sized section of Forest Service land was up for lease to the development company, but he hadn’t heard that it had happened. He gave a mental shrug and kept going. He was far enough down the mountain for that not to affect him, other than that once it happened, winter would bring more traffic and more crowds, and before it happened, he’d see a lot more construction. He was antisocial enough to avoid the crowds.
He was flying now, past a couple empty ski cabins to left and right, his mind clicking over in the way it was supposed to do, homing in on that one ambush scene halfway through the book.
Something wrong there, because he’d rushed it. He needed to draw out the suspense more. To let the reader feel, to let himself feel, the hair literally rising at the back of his neck, because he saw and heard and smelled what a civilian wouldn’t, and he paid attention.
He was still rewriting in his head when he heard the commotion. Animal noise, and heaps of it, like a barnyard was revolting. Tobias started to bark, adding his voice to the mix, until Jace snapped, “Quiet.” The dog subsided, but Jace could still see the tension in him. What the hell? He ran faster.
The two of them rounded the bend in the road, and he saw the woman.
The blonde. His closest neighbor, the one who lived just up the mountain from him.
She wasn’t in her garden this morning, even though he’d have expected to see her there as usual, maybe trimming the lavender bushes that were exuberantly attempting to overhang the winding brick walk to the front porch of her storybook-perfect cottage. Or maybe doing… something, whatever a person did, to the giant pink flowers that were bent over on their stems by their own weight like drunken sailors.
Yeah. Normally, she’d be doing something garden-appropriate outdoors, and he’d nod at her, notice once again that she was pretty, wonder how many lacy items of clothing she actually owned and why he wasn’t stopping to find out, and know why.
It was that edge. That last step before the darkness, when you were flirting with going too far. He wasn’t saying it was a good thing to need, but it had to be there, or his feet didn’t stop.
She was too perfect. Even her perfect house made him itchy. She was too good for him, or he was too bad for her, and his feet knew it.
So why were his feet slowing now? She was down closer to the road this morning, in the barnyard that ended in a wooden shed, painted white with a roof of green metal, and all of it as neat and tidy as the rest of her place. Cutesy, he guessed a woman would call it. Naff, he’d call it. She looked soft and sweet, like always, in every way but the wellies, the knee-high black rubber boots that would have been at home in Queensland. At this moment, though, even as he turned up her drive like he’d been drawn there, she was stripping off a pale-pink cardigan with jerky, impatient movements and hurling it toward the fence. It fell short, landing in the dirt, but Jace didn’t pay too much attention.
You could say that the stripping-off had refocused him. Because underneath the sweater, she was wearing a white tank top with multiple skinny criss-crossing straps that showed off a trim but muscular upper back, an apron that tied around her waist with a giant pink bow and somehow managed to say come-on-boy-let’s-go in a way no apron should, and a pair of gray leggings that traced absolutely every curve of an absolutely spectacular arse.
Normally, with her, everything was flowers, lace, or both. She was missing some ornamentation today, but she still had the apron. Why she was wearing it in a barnyard was anybody’s guess. And why her clothes, or she, or something had made him stop was another question.
Maybe because she’d cut her hair, and it looked—free. You could even call it “wild,” falling not quite to her shoulders in wavy blonde abandon.
Unfortunately, she also seemed to have gone round the bend. What he’d thought at first was some kind of bizarre farmyard game was something else. She’d always looked serene before. Sweet. Seriously not his type. Now? She just looked seriously pissed off.
As he approached, she spat out a string of words that didn’t match her girly pink apron one bit and lunged at one of the two knee-high milk goats that were running crazy patterns around her, bleating up a storm. Three baby goats barely bigger than cats, meanwhile, scampered along the fence separating them from their mothers and took turns jumping straight up in the air and leaping over each other like they were on springs. If goats could be said to be shouting encouragement, that was what the babies were doing. And that wasn’t all. What looked like an entire flock of chickens were running around the enclosure as well, flapping their wings and cackling like maniacs. If it had been a battlefield, it would’ve been one that had turned to custard.
Even as he thought it, the woman shouted, “Son of a bitch,” feinted one way, and leaped the other, hitting the ground and taking down the black-and-white goat in a tackle that would’ve done justice to a rugby forward. The goat thrashed, the other goat bleated and leaped around some more, the babies bounced up and down like they were on a trampoline, Tobias barked, and Jace wanted to laugh.
It wasn’t every day you watched a woman go mad.
Her day had started out so well, too.
She’d woken to the sounds of the country. You’d think it would be quiet. It wasn’t. Birds, mostly, calling from near and far. Squawks. Chirps. Trills. Lily could’ve said what they were, but Paige wasn’t a bird person. To her, it just sounded noisy.
A couple other sounds, she recognized. A faraway complaining almost like cats, but not. And a whole lot of cackling.
Right. Goats. Chickens. The shop. All of it her responsibility now. Easy, though. Practically a vacation. Piece of cake.
The first hurdle had been the closet. Or what some people would call a closet. Paige would call it a “room.” Lily’s cottage, which looked more like a gingerbread house than any real house ought to look, had a second story that was maybe half sloped-ceiling bedroom, featuring a front wall of windows that practically invited the mountains inside. The other half? Some of it was a compact seafoam-green-and-cream bathroom so excessively and extravagantly decorated it made Paige sweat, and the rest was closet.
In Paige’s apartment, she had a door that opened to a rod holding her clothes, with her shoes lined up on the floor. She also had a dresser. Boom. Done. Here, rods ran at all heights, with shelves and clever drawers and cubbies above and below. Shoe racks. Boot shelves. Organizers for belts, for scarves, for jewelry, for lingerie. Felt-lined hangers held clothes that shaded from cream to pink to purple to red to blue, and every. single. frigging. item was flowered, or lacy, or silky, or something other than “jeans and a T-shirt.” Which was fine when it was on Lily. But Paige hadn’t considered that she’d be wearing all of this and nothing else.
Had she looked in the wall of drawers? Why, yes, she had. Lily had leggings. Many, many leggings. Some of them had lace around the ankles. Surprise! Lily had jeans, too. Artfully ripped, absolutely form-fitting. Clearly much more expensive than the leggings.
It wasn’t like Paige didn’t know her twin’s taste. But she’d assumed that Lily had some way to dress less-than-perfectly for farm chores. She could swear she’d seen overalls before. Cute ones, with flowers on them, but still. Where were they? She longed to call her sister and demand to know where she kept the good stuff, but she knew what Lily would say. “You can do everything in pretty clothes that you can do in ugly clothes.”
By that point, her stubborn side had set in anyway. She was supposed to dress up to milk goats? Fine. She’d dress up. She’d wear the leggings from yesterday, though, just in case. They needed washing anyway, because she’d spilled coffee on them on the plane. And if she didn’t have milk for her coffee and cereal? That was all right, too. She was Heidi now. You got the milk from the goats. She wasn’t a picky eater. She was a cop.
She’d milk the goats, gather the eggs, get beautiful, and make breakfast like a farm girl. She’d watched Lily milk. It was two goats. Fifteen minutes max, and she’d be back in the house.
Too bad the goats hadn’t gotten the memo.
She hadn’t had to deal with any of this last night. One of Lily’s neighbors had been looking after the animals, which included keeping the three new kids with their mothers during the day, the hungry kids eliminating the need for an evening milking.
“Ashley will have them fed and have the kids separated for the night by the time you get there, so all you have to do is milk in the morning and then open the gate so the kids can go back with their mothers,” Lily had said. “And feed and water them, of course. Clean the stalls eventually. But if you decide you don’t want to milk at all, you can just leave the kids with their mothers at night after you feed them, too. Nobody will know.”
Now, while Paige stomped around the barnyard in knee-high rubber boots, a lacy sweater that kept getting in her damn way, a polka-dot apron, and a tank top that wasn’t appropriate to the season but had been the closest thing to “normal” she’d been able to find, she thought about what a good idea it would have been to forget all about goat milk. All these quick motions were hurting, too. Which meant they were good for her. Suck it up.
Anyway, you couldn’t let the goats just win. Not an option. If this was a power struggle? It was two goats that barely came past her knees. She could take two goats.
If only they weren’t so damn tricky, that is. She’d started out talking to them like Lily, practicing her Lily-switcheroo on them. Sweet. Kind. They looked at her, bleated, and started running around in circles like they were in on the secret and they weren’t having any. Their tiny babies, clearly possessed by Satan, urged them on from their pen, and Paige felt a whole lot less guilty about the three of them having been separated from their mothers all night.
She stripped off the pink sweater, because it was annoying her, threw it toward the fence, and watched it land in the dirt. “You’re full of milk! I’m the milker!” she shouted at the black-and-white goat who was, for some mysterious reason known only to Lily, named Tinkerbelle. Paige had forgotten all about her Lily-impression and was standing like a cop again, her hand going to her hip out of habit.
No weapon in her apron pocket or anywhere else, though. Anyway, if she shot the goats, Lily would kill her. She wasn’t shooting the goats. She just wanted to intimidate them. Unfortunately, you couldn’t shout, “Get on the ground! Now!” at goats. She knew. She’d tried. She’d tried to catch them, too, but it was way harder than it looked. She lunged, and Tinkerbelle jumped daintily back. When she lunged again, Tinkerbelle jumped the other way.
Watch the subject. Track her moves. Anticipate. Somewhere close by, a dog was barking excitedly. A fat orange chicken ran between Paige’s feet like this was a group project, making her jump, and her self-control slipped a bit more.
She let it all go. She breathed. She focused. All right. It was a dance, and Tinkerbelle was her partner.
Right. Left. Right. And… NOW. She hit the animal with full commitment and an expulsion of breath, went down, rolled, and held on. Then she blundered her way to her feet, her arms straining to hold sixty pounds of squirming goat and her leg threatening to buckle under her, and said, “That’s right. We’re milking, motherfucker.”
The voice came from behind her, low and amused.
“Need a hand?”
She whirled, staggered, and Tinkerbelle went flying like a projectile, straight into the man. He caught her in a move so fast Paige barely saw it, and he held on.
The dog, an enormous, handsome Ridgeback, was still barking. The black goat, Edelweiss, was still running in circles, her heavy udder banging against her legs. The baby goats were still bouncing and bleating. The chickens were still scattering and cackling. And a man with hair as black and shiny as a raven’s wing and a beard as dark as sin was looking at her with a sardonic gleam in his eyes. His blue eyes, she realized with a shock that went all the way through her. The blue of… of something very blue. Some jewel.
Who was this? Strong neck, faded blue T-shirt stretching over too much broad, lean chest, black running shorts slung over slim hips, long, muscular legs. Muscular arms. Big, sinewy hands wrapped around the goat as if that goat wasn’t going anywhere. Which it wasn’t.
His whole self sent one message. Ready and waiting. Ready for what, she wasn’t sure. But this was a man with every bit of the confidence she’d just lost. She straightened up, got her own stance back, and said, carefully not gasping, “Thanks. Give her to me.”
Mr. Wonderful smiled some more. One-sided, like he didn’t do it much. “Tobias,” he said, which she thought was his name until he added, “Sit. Quiet.” The Ridgeback got on his butt fast and shut up, like everybody had to do what this guy said.
“Where?” her new boyfriend asked her, and she blinked at him. He lifted Tinkerbelle a few inches. The goat had apparently decided she liked him, because she was snuggled up like she’d found sanctuary. Some females had no self-respect.
“Oh,” Paige said. “Barn. Uh, shed.” Who was this guy? Was she supposed to know him? “In here.” She led him under the shaded entrance, focusing on keeping herself from limping, and not thinking about her polka-dot black-and-white apron with the huge, flirty pink bow in the small of her back. The one he’d be looking at right now.
Wait. She was Lily. Sweet, dammit. She headed over to the milking stand, which the goats were supposed to jump eagerly up onto, saw the dish and the stanchion, and thought, Oh, wait. That would’ve been a good idea. Bribery. Somehow, she was reaching for the grain bin, because her body knew where it was. Too bad it hadn’t told her earlier. She sprinkled some grain in the treat dish beyond the stanchion, and Tinkerbelle, whom the pirate had set down, jumped up on the stand and stuck her neck through the opening like she’d wanted to be there all along.
“Oh, now you cooperate,” Paige said. Tinkerbelle started munching the grain, and Paige grabbed a baby wipe from the box, started wiping down her udder, and reached for the… the other cup, the one you used first, for the dirty milk you got at the beginning. How did she remember? She just did. She wasn’t sure how long the Lily-magic would last, though, and the pirate was making her jumpy anyway. She told him, “Thanks. I appreciate it. I was, ah, on vacation, and they got, uh, unused to me. I’m fine now, though.”
“Yeah?” he said, leaning back against the wall and watching her too closely, making her fully aware that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the stretchy tank top. “Haven’t been caring for them yourself before, either?”
Breathe. “Yes.” She tried a serene Lily-smile as she took hold of Tinkerbelle’s teat and squeezed. And nothing happened. She tried again, pulling harder, Tinkerbelle shifted and kicked out with a hind leg, and Paige grabbed the cup just in time. Why wasn’t it working? “I sprained my hand, though, on my vacation. Paragliding,” she improvised wildly. “I didn’t realize milking with it would be so tricky. Goats sense weakness, apparently. It’s thrown me off. I’ll just skip it today, put the babies in with their mothers.”
“Paragliding, hey,” her new friend said. “That’s what’s wrong with your leg as well, I’m guessing. I was just thinking about doing something like that, dangerous as it would appear. You’ll have to tell me about it. I could give this a go, if you like.”
Great. How was she going to talk about paragliding? She’d made it up. Talk about goats. Now. “You mean the milking?” she asked. “Not that easy. It takes some practice. I’m fine.” Lily had said that—about the practice—which was why Paige hadn’t planned on an audience. Also, she’d have to have sprained both hands, because surely Lily milked with both, and the pirate looked like he knew it. For a horrible moment, she thought he knew about the switch, but that was impossible. Before Paige had changed her hair, their mother had been the only one who’d been able to tell the twins apart with any reliability. And being an identical twin wasn’t something you spread around, especially to attractive men. It tended to distract them from the uniquely-you part of the deal.
Not possible, she told herself again. He can’t know. While she was thinking it, the pirate had grabbed a wipe and used it on his own hands. The dog flopped down on the cement floor with a sigh as if resigned to staying a while, Paige handed his master a stainless-steel milking dish without a word, and he began to fill it.
“I didn’t realize you knew how to milk a goat,” she said. That seemed safe to say, and she needed to find out who he was somehow. She still couldn’t figure out if they were supposed to be acquainted.
“No reason you would,” he said. Which meant—what?
“Grow up on a farm, did you?” she asked. She discarded a few other gambits, like Remind me how to spell your name. Why, so she could scratch their names in the dirt with a stick and draw a heart around them? She didn’t know if he’d even met Lily. If he had, why wouldn’t her twin have mentioned him? It wasn’t like he blended. He was too supersized for this barn, for this town. “Readiness” all but crackled off him.
Cop. He had to be. With that hair, though? That beard? He was sitting on the stool now, his hands coaxing the milk quickly out of Tinkerbelle, and the sleeve of his plain blue T-shirt had fallen back to reveal the tip of a dagger, extending just past the ridged contour of his triceps.
Not a real dagger. A tattoo. But the hair on the back of her neck was still standing on end. Nothing she could put a name to. He wasn’t a gangbanger. That wasn’t a prison tat. Too well drawn. But he was dangerous. Dangerous, and milking her goat.
Undercover? In Sinful, “undercover” would be a plaid shirt and a Budweiser cap, not running shorts and too much presence. Fed, maybe? Something about him said, “Law enforcement, and on the sharp end.”
All of that took fifteen seconds to flash through her mind, and then he was pinning her down with those diamond-hard blue eyes and saying, “You’ve mucked up your pretty clothes. Pity.”
Serene. Sweet. Pretend you don’t notice the hard. She smiled at him Lily-style and said, “They all wash the same. And I have extras.”
“That one’s choice, though,” he said. “Not something I’d have expected to say. Reckon it depends on the apron.”
He wasn’t staring at her body, he was milking. But she knew what he was thinking. “Could be,” she said, and left it. Lily would have smiled and said something else, something cool, but leaving the door open for more if she liked him. Paige wasn’t that subtle.
He was finishing off on Tinkerbelle, and Paige was standing here like a statue, staring at the tip of that dagger and the tantalizing tattooed ribbon she could see halfway up its blade. A motto, probably, but what did it say? Thug Life? She’d bet not. She shook it off, took the milk container from the pirate, set it carefully aside as Tinkerbelle jumped down, then pulled a plastic tub from a top shelf without realizing she knew it was there, took out a treat, and held it out for Tinkerbelle. The goat gobbled it down, butted her head affectionately into the pirate’s thigh, earning her a scratch on the head, and made room for Edelweiss, the all-black goat, the other half of the Demonic Duo, who was hopping up now for her turn as if she’d only been waiting to be invited.
Right. Paige poured more grain into the dish and decided to let the Goat Whisperer go for it.
“What made you decide on goats?” he asked when he’d begun milking Edelweiss.
Paige recognized the question for what it was. Interrogation of the more devious kind. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Probably the same kind of thing that brought a man like you to Sinful.” He glanced up, startled for the first time, off-balance, and she thought, Oh, that got you, did it? She added, “Sometimes you’re just at that point in your life, aren’t you?” She gestured at his sleeve. “Needing a change. What is it? The tattoo?”
He hesitated for a long moment, then said, “My unit.”
“Nice. What accent is that?” Maybe she was supposed to know, but that wasn’t the vibe she was getting. She was getting, First time we’ve talked. Almost stranger, but not quite. It was definitely weird. And the hair was still standing up on the back of her neck. Good way or bad way, she couldn’t quite tell, except that the tingles were also running right down her body in sharp little jabbing shocks, and she knew what that feeling meant. It meant, Oh, yeah, baby, look at me just like that.
She remotely remembered, anyway.
“Aussie,” he said, his mouth tightening in a very satisfactory hard-man way before he turned his attention back to Edelweiss.
Paige considered touching his arm. The lightest brush of her finger on that sleeve, shoving it up just the tiniest bit, revealing the rest of that dagger and feeling the muscle twitch at her touch. She’d have done it, too, except that she wasn’t quite sure what the response would be. Too much coiled energy about him. Too much edge. Too fast a reaction time. She had a feeling that if she did it, she could end up on her back on the ground, and not in a good way.
Well, maybe in a good way.
You do it, she told herself, and you just tossed Lily into the deep end. Because this guy doesn’t do anything casually, and he doesn’t go quietly if he wants more. She tore herself away from him and went to get the kids, who’d given up on their mothers once they couldn’t see them anymore, selfish little jerks, and were instead taking turns jumping over each other. When Paige opened the gate, though, the babies tumbled inside, where two of them ran straight to Tinkerbelle and started drinking like they’d been starved. Meanwhile, Paige took a few deep breaths, picked up her sadly grimy sweater, thought about the delicate cycle and hoped the sweater wasn’t a dry-clean deal, got herself together, and when the pirate walked out again with Edelweiss and the dog following him like a pair of baby ducks, said, “Thanks.”
“No worries.” He stepped closer and picked up her hand, and she froze.
He lifted his head, and the brilliant blue eyes met hers, so close that she could see the web of lines around them, like he’d stared into the sun too many times.
Something went zing.
Surely that didn’t happen. Not that fast. He said, “Sprained, eh.”
She thought about taking him down. She wondered if she could. “Yes.”
“Better tomorrow, you reckon? Or should I come again?”
“Ah… sure, if you like.”
“Same time? Do you have a…” A swift glance down at the apron, which, at this moment, felt like all she was wearing. That was how much she could tell he liked it. “A job you’re going to?”
“Yeah.” Whoops, that wasn’t too Lily-like. “Yes,” she said with a smile. “In fact, I own Sinful Desires. The lingerie shop in town,” she hurried to add, because it sounded like an adult store when you said it like that instead of seeing the name printed in curly script on a white sign with gold trim.
A twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Goats and lingerie? Call me surprised.”
“Believe me,” she said, “so am I. And here I was not putting my hand on you so I could see your dagger, because I was going for ‘remote.’”
Fail on the Lily, but he didn’t know Lily, she was more than sure.
“Next time,” he said, “put your hand on me.”
That stare again. “Hmm,” she said, somewhere between Lily and Paige. “We’ll see. I’m Lily, by the way. And I’m sure I should remember your name, but I don’t.”
“I remember,” he said. “That it’s Lily.” A look that could cut steel, and her heart skipped a beat despite herself. What was she missing?
“And you’re…” She paused for his name, and he most unhelpfully didn’t provide it. “From Australia.”
“Queensland. Land of snakes and crocs and every sheep-shagging joke you ever didn’t want to hear.”
“Wild man, then.”
“So they say.” He whistled, short and sharp, and the dog, who’d been sniffing around the baby goats in a tolerant sort of way, came over fast. Not “bounding,” because surely this dog never did anything as undignified as bounding. Returning, that was it.
“See ya,” Mr. Hard-and-Hot said. “Lily.”