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The sound of Jay’s chair scooting against the floor yanked her back to the present. As he approached the coffeemaker with his empty mug, though, her focus drifted to the teen couple again. The girl looked both attracted and repelled by the boy, and Nikki could remember that same sensation, too.
“What do you think?” a voice asked.
“It has the feeling of a train wreck,” she murmured.
“What?”
Nikki started and turned to look at Jay. “I’m sorry. You were saying…?” Despite herself, she flicked another glance out the window. She wasn’t one to insert herself into someone else’s business, she of the keep-your-distance DNA, but the dynamics she read in the body language of the two on the sand unsettled her.
Once upon a time she’d been young like that, with the intense, older boyfriend whose demands had for a while made her feel safe and loved.
Until they made her feel small and afraid. Weak.
She wiped damp palms along the sides of her pants and forced her attention back to Jay.
He was studying her face as if he didn’t have anything better to do with his time. Thoughts of the teen couple, her past, anything but the way he was watching her evaporated in the sudden heat in the air. Nikki’s cheeks flushed at his still-lazy perusal and as the burn traveled down her neck toward her breasts she dropped her gaze from his. Naturally, it first landed on his bare skin and she desperately jerked it farther downward, seeking cover.
There. The waistband of his shorts. Secure territory.
But the loose garment was even looser now, hitting just below his hip bones to reveal the saliva-stealing sight of the lines that traced from his lower hips toward his lower groin. Thanks to Colleen and one rainy, dead night at Fleming’s, Nikki knew those were the inguinal ligaments. A clunker of a label for the part of a man’s body that drew one’s eye from his lean hips to his…well.
In the break room, Colleen had called up on a laptop the infamous, naked-to-there photo of a pop star. Her forefinger had followed the interesting pathways. “A glimpse of these make my nipples go hard every time,” the younger woman had confessed.
Nikki now couldn’t disagree. Hers were tightening in a way she didn’t—
Jay cleared his throat.
Oh, God. Embarrassment burning her neck, she glanced up, because his eyes had to be a safer place to look.
But the expression in them only made the heat in the room spike. It tasted like ozone, and incongruous chills broke over her skin again. She was aware of her mouth like she’d never been before—he was staring there—it felt swollen and her lips stung as more goose bumps chased across her skin. Her heart sped up, drumming in her chest to spread the astonishing news throughout her body: Hey! Look at this! That fantasy thing a few minutes ago wasn’t a fluke. The girl’s getting turned on.
But she never got turned on—never like this.
Jay spun back toward the counter, clearing his throat again. “You’ll have to leave your Doc Martens at home,” he said, his voice abrupt.
“Huh?” She stared at his back as her head gave a woozy revolution, rattled by her body’s response and his sudden snap of the sexual connection. “What?”
“You want the job, don’t you?” He named a sum that was in line with what she’d expected. And more important, what would keep her solvent for the next thirty-one days.
Relief tasted sweet, but she quickly swallowed it down. “Yes, I want the job…” It was what she’d come here for, what she needed, but there was that kiss, his attraction, the way two minutes ago sex had seemed to bubble up between them without the slightest effort on her part. And sex had always meant effort—if not satisfaction—on her part.
The last thing she wanted in her life right now was a man, even the temporary kind that he obviously was and the only kind she let herself sample when she felt the need to prove she was at least semi-normal. She heaved in a calming breath. “But…”
His back still turned, he toyed with his coffee mug. “It’s only until the end of August.”
“The end of August,” she echoed, sounding stupid.
“It should be enough time to take care of that other problem.”
What was he talking about? What other problem? Her mind wasn’t keeping up. But the month was doable, wasn’t it, no matter what her worries?
“Like I said, though, Doc Martens and such are out. I’m going to insist you dress like a girl.”
Nikki glanced down at her plain shirt, khaki pants, soft rubber clogs. She’d chosen them because they were close to a cook’s uniform without being one. She hadn’t wanted to presume. But now it seemed he was presuming—
“Shanna will never believe I’d go into even a casual thing with a girl who dresses like a guy. That might be how you signal your sexuality, cookie, but that’s not the signal to be sending when you’re with me.”
“Oh, no—”
“Oh, yes. When she showed up I tried to rush you out as a one-night stand, but it was you who implied we had something more.”
“As your cook!”
He turned around. “So cook up something a little spicier. Surely you can fake it.”
Fake it? Did he think she’d faked the way the temperature had jacked up fifteen degrees when he’d been looking at her a few minutes before? She swallowed. “Come on. You’re telling me you think…you didn’t feel—”
She shut her mouth. Maybe he hadn’t felt the heat the way she had. Maybe it had been completely one-sided. She was sexually handicapped enough, she had to admit, not to be certain.
Seriously, though. Even if the attraction didn’t run both ways, surely, surely he didn’t believe…
Footsteps pattered on the wooden deck. They both turned to see someone—that young girl Nikki had watched on the beach—let herself into the house through the sliding glass door. She looked at the two of them, one over-plucked eyebrow rising.
“Cuz.” Jay acknowledged the newcomer with his coffee cup. “Just in time.”
The girl shrugged one shoulder with the universal nonchalance of teendom and came into the kitchen to reach for a juice glass beside the sink. The contents of Nikki’s stomach curdled as she noticed a dark bruise on the girl’s slender wrist.
“Nikki, this is my cousin, Fern, the one I mentioned was living with me while her parents and mine are on a cruise through Europe.”
Fern filled her glass with water.
“And Fern, meet our latest lesbian chef.” He threw Nikki a smile. “Who’s coincidentally my new girlfriend.”
Fern showed no sign of surprise, though Nikki was rendered speechless by the no-frills, all-chills introduction. There it was. Nikki Carmichael, professional bachelor Jay Buchanan’s new lesbian chef girlfriend.
Okay.
Well.
Apparently she’d gotten the job she needed—and way more than she’d ever anticipated.
Three
Move to California. Malibu is paradise.
—DAVID GEFFEN, RECORD EXECUTIVE, FILM PRODUCER
Jay carried out to the deck a second round of long-necked beers. Lifting his foot, he popped off the tops with the bottle opener the shoe manufacturer had conveniently embedded in the arch of his beach sandal. Then he dropped into a chair and passed a beer over to the man seated beside him.
“Gracias.” Jorge Santos took a long pull, then slouched lower in his chair and propped his ankle-length work boots on the railing in front of him.
Jay followed suit, closing his eyes against the rays of the setting sun that were washing over his right shoulder and the right side of his face. Malibu’s coastline faced south, allowing the waves generating from the southern hemisphere to reach shore with organization and power, contributing to half its status as the West Coast’s surfing mecca. The other half was thanks to the goofy Gidget-style movies filmed here in the 1950s. Just up the way and past the pier was the Surfrider Beach Hollywood had made famous, and today there were dozens of modern Moondoggies out on the water making their California dream come true.
It was summer in paradise and it didn’t seem right that a single guy had to spend even a single second being so pissed off at himself.
And Jay had been pissed off at himself all morning and all afternoon. He guzzled down a quarter of his beer.
“I’ve got a question for you, Jorge,” he said.
“Mexican men only talk about their kids and soccer.”
“Neither one of us has any kids.”
“I don’t think the U.S. will ever take professional soccer as seriously as the NFL,” Jorge replied in his precise English.
“Do I seem stupid to you?” Jay asked, ignoring the soccer gambit. He opened his eyes a slit, but couldn’t see the other man’s expression beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat, the same as the ones worn by the lifeguards in their blue-painted towers.
“Stupid? Only, hermano, if you think low-scoring games will ever truly engage an American man’s competitive spirit.”
Jay continued ignoring the smart-ass. “I hired myself a new chef today.”
“Bueno. There’ll be better leftovers for me to mooch in your refrigerator. I’m tired of gnawing on steak bones.”
“I think I made a mistake, though. You should have let me hire your sister like I wanted after I tasted her tamales.”
