Forbidden Love

So that left you, he thought, forcing his attention from the faintly exasperated look she gave him. Standing there in her little tank top and shorts, the long lines of her body firm and lithe, her feet bare, she didn’t look much older than the seventeen she’d been when he’d last seen her. Only, when he’d met her when she was seventeen, her hair had been long and streaked from the sun, her skin had looked like golden satin—and it had felt as soft as silk.

He’d known how soft her skin was even before he’d felt it under his hand in the nursing-home parking lot.

The memories drew a scowl. They were unwanted. Pointless. Dangerous.

Ruthlessly shoving them aside, he crouched down, knees cracking, to inspect a lower cabinet. “This would have been easier if it hadn’t been left to dry,” he muttered, pushing his thumbnail into the plate-sized blotch. “To do these right, the doors need to be taken off, stripped and sanded.”

Looking straight ahead, all he could see was the long length of her shapely legs. Feeling his gut tighten, he jerked his glance upward.

He fully expected to see dismay or displeasure. What he saw in the delicate contours of her face was contemplation.

“Should I strip them all? Even the ones that aren’t messed up?”

“If you want them to match, yeah. You should.”

“Okay,” she said.

Just like that. No questions. No hesitation. Just “Okay.”

Amazing, he thought, rising.

“You can use the same stuff I gave you for the floor. But take the doors into the sunroom or outside. The ventilation is better. Are there any sawhorses around here?”

“I have no idea.” Amy glanced in the direction of the storage shed on the far side of the house. She hadn’t a clue what was out there.

“The job will be easier if you use them.”

She gave him a nod, then saw the muscle in his jaw jerk as he waited, giving her a chance to ask any questions she might have. He was clearly only doing what her grandmother had asked of him—showing her how to best clean up the paint. So she told him she’d be sure to look for sawhorses, and watched his glance settle where her arms crossed over the odd little knot of nerves jumping in her stomach.

He said nothing else. He just gave her a look she couldn’t read at all and, having complied with her grandmother’s request, he headed to the porch for the extension cord. Within minutes, he’d shattered the early-evening stillness with his power saw as he cut a five-foot-wide chunk out of the beautiful porch railing opposite the dining room’s double doors.

He worked until dusk, pounding stakes, running strings, loosening two circles of soil with a pick. Then he left without saying a word.

He also left a pair of his sawhorses for her on the back porch.

Chapter Three

Amy climbed down from the ladder, stripped off her gloves and hoped fervently that she’d be able to put her grandmother’s kitchen back together now that she’d dismantled it. She’d taken all the doors off the cabinets on the sink side of the room and stacked the dishes and glasses that had been in them on the delft-blue table in the breakfast nook. The stained glass pieces that had hung in the window were over there, too. Newspaper covered the counters to keep the thick goop she’d spread on the cabinet’s center supports from dripping onto the Formica.

She was winging it here. Other than to help a friend paint her baby’s nursery, the only painting projects she’d ever tackled involved finger paints or watercolors with her first graders. It wasn’t the painting she was concerned about, anyway. It was the stripping and sanding part she knew nothing about. The directions on the can of solvent seemed explicit enough, though taking off the doors had presented a challenge, until she’d found the proper screwdriver.

She was just grateful to be busy. As long as she was busy, she wasn’t worrying about whether or not her mother was still annoyed with her, or wondering how long she could put off talking to the man who’d arrived nearly two hours ago and started to work without bothering to tell her he was there. She needed to thank him for the sawhorses. She just wasn’t overly anxious to approach him.

Aside from that, since he hadn’t made any effort to talk to her, it was apparent that he wanted only to do his job.

He wasn’t wasting time doing it, either. While she’d climbed around on the counter, taking down the stained glass and painting on the solvent, he had dug two holes the size of beach balls twenty feet out from the side porch and centered a short length of four-by-four in each hole. He was now filling the holes with concrete he’d mixed with a hoe in a wheelbarrow.

As she looked out the window now, she could see him wiping his forehead with his forearm. Unaware of her, he turned, his back to her as he shoveled more concrete around the support. He made the task look effortless, but beneath the gray T-shirt straining against his shoulders, strong muscles flexed and shifted with his every move.

It took little imagination for her to picture how beautifully developed those corded muscles were. The cotton and denim he wore molded to him, betraying a body formed as perfectly as the Greek sculptures she’d once studied with such dedication. She’d even created those compelling lines herself in art classes with handfuls of clay, shaping, perfecting, struggling to get every line and curve right. The human body had fascinated her. Its movement. Its expressions.

Nick had fascinated her, too, and by the time she had entered college he had become her own standard of perfection. As she’d worked the clay, she had imagined the feel of those muscles beneath her hands, the strength in them, the smoothness of his skin. She had imagined the corrugated plane of his belly, the leanness of his hips, and how it would feel to be held against his very solid chest.

Watching his biceps bunch as he lifted more cement, she wondered the same thing now.

The breath she released sounded faintly like a sigh.

The one she drew caught, her eyes widening as she realized she was remembering how she’d once fantasized about him. Conscious of the fact that she was doing it again, she jumped back from the sink.

The ceiling fan rotated slowly overhead. Turning it up a notch against the lingering heat of the day, she headed for the refrigerator and pulled out a can of diet cola. With the cold can pressed to the skin above the U of her pink T-shirt, she swallowed a flash of disbelief and guilt and tried to decide between grilled chicken breast or a hamburger for dinner. It was nearly eight o’clock. If she didn’t fix herself something decent to eat soon, she’d wind up doing what she’d done last night and settle for an apple and Oreos.

The disconcerted sensation that had jerked her from the window eased with the diversion. What replaced it was an equally discomfiting sense of obligation. She still needed to talk to Nick. To thank him.

Since putting it off would only give her more time to dread it, she grabbed another can of cola and closed the fridge with her hip. He might not be interested in talking to her, and she still thought him terrible for what he’d done to her sister all those years ago, but she couldn’t ignore the need to return his thoughtfulness. Not just for leaving the sawhorses. But for what he was doing now—pushing himself so an elderly lady could return to her home.

The metallic clank of colliding metal greeted her as she walked onto the porch outside the dining-room doors. Beyond the gap in the porch railing, she saw Nick turn from where he’d just tossed the shovel and a hoe into the wheelbarrow. A dusting of fine gray powder coated his work boots, his worn jeans sported a frayed hole above one knee, and a streak of something dark bisected the Manhattan Athletic Club logo on his faded gray T-shirt.

She was wondering if he’d belonged to the prestigious-sounding club when he’d lived in New York when his eyes, blue as lasers, locked on hers.

Caution immediately clouded his face.

“You look thirsty.” Aware of the faint flutter of nerves in her stomach, she walked to the edge of the porch, her sneakers silent on the wide yellow boards. She held out a can of cola. “I noticed that your water bottle is empty,” she said, nodding toward the clear plastic container on the strip of lawn between them and the driveway. “I hope you don’t mind diet. It’s all I have.”

Warily eyeing the can she held, he walked over to where she stood in the center of the gap.

She was thinking about telling him she hadn’t poisoned it when he reached up.

“Diet’s fine. Thanks,” he murmured, taking what she offered.

“Are you about finished for the day?”

“Just about. I just need to wash out the wheelbarrow and clean up the tools.” He popped the top on the can, the sound sharp against the evening stillness. The sun skimmed the treetops, slanting long shadows in what was left of the hour before dark. “The footings didn’t take as long to put in as I thought they would. If I’d brought lumber with me, I could have started framing the ramp tonight.”

From the self-deprecating frown that creased his brow as he raised the can to his mouth, it was apparent that he wished he had realized how quickly the work would go. The hour he could have put into the project now would have put him that much closer to getting the job finished.

Not wanting to hold him up now, she figured it best to do what she needed to do so he could leave. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said, watching him tip back the can and swallow. “For leaving the sawhorses,” she explained. “That was very kind of you. But especially for what you’re doing for Grandma. It can’t be easy working all day then coming out to do this.”

He’d drained half the can before he lowered it. Contemplating its pull ring, he muttered, “It’s not a problem.”

“I appreciate it, anyway.”

“Then, you’re welcome.”

“Did you have dinner before you came here?”

The question was out before she realized she was going to ask it, much less have time to consider where it would lead.

Nick looked caught off guard by it, too.