Addicted to You (22 page)

“I’d appreciate it if you stopped calling my hair ‘stuff,’” she managed around the large bobby pin she’d stuck in her mouth.

He caught a rebel tendril at her neck and ran it between his thumb and forefinger, watching in fascination when it coiled again as he released the tension.

“There’s even more of it than I thought . . . before having touched it, I mean,” he said gruffly.

Katie went still in the process of inserting a pin when she saw the expression on his face as he studied the errant curl. A second later, she thought she’d imagined it when he turned and pushed back the shower curtain.

“I’ve wanted to do this for more years than you probably care to know,” Katie told him a minute later.

Rill glanced up from where he’d been watching her work up a lather on his chest beneath searching, sensitive fingertips.

“
Don’t
tell me you wanted to get naked with me in the shower since you were fourteen years old,” he said, a smile in his voice. “That really is more information than I want to know.”

Katie laughed. “No, I did not want to take a naked shower with you at some innocent age.” She continued her discovery of his body, worshipping every nuance of bone and muscle. When she brushed a fingertip over a nipple, thrilling to the way the flat, dark brown disc beaded beneath her, her smile faded.

Rill, naked and wet with warm water, was no laughing matter, after all.

“But I’ve wanted to touch you for a while now,” she admitted huskily, her eyes still on his stiffening nipple. She inhaled slowly, searching for courage.

“In fact, I’ve wanted you for years.”

He placed both his hands on her shoulders. Katie continued to stroke him with a soap-lathered hand in the silence that followed, too intimidated to look up at him. Actually, too scared to breathe, given what she’d just admitted. When he didn’t respond for what seemed like an eternity, she glanced up. Her mouth fell open when she saw the stiffness of his facial muscles.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“I . . . Yes,” Katie mumbled, confused by his intensity. “Does it really surprise you?”

He didn’t speak, just stared down at her, unmoving. The water hitting the tub floor started to sound like a loud crashing noise in her ears.

“You say this has been going on for years?” Rill clarified.

Katie glanced away from his penetrating stare. “Is that so terrible? I never acted on the attraction, obviously. Not while . . . Eden was alive.” She said the last hesitantly, not sure how Rill would take the mention of his dead wife while they stood together naked in a hot shower. “I know this isn’t easy for you to talk about, but it’s not easy for me, either.”

“I had no idea,” he said starkly.

She looked up at him, surprised.
“None?”

He shook his head slowly.

For some reason, his admission deflated her. Was she so substandard as a female that a man like Rill couldn’t sense her desire, no matter how hard she tried to mask it? Was she
so
“not his type” that Rill never had even considered her as an attractive woman who admired him . . . wanted him?

His expression had grown grim. Damn. Why had she spoken when all had been going so well between them?

“What’s wrong?” Katie asked slowly.

He shook his head and turned, letting the warm water rinse the soap off his body.

“Don’t tell me you drove across the country like this because you have some kind of a crush on me.”

His words seemed to echo around in her skull like her brain had suddenly vacated it and left an empty, hollow space.

“
Crush?
Why do you say crush? What? I’m incapable of any meaningful feeling? The extent of my emotional range is a
crush
?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Rill replied, but Katie didn’t like the way he averted his gaze.

“Well, what it is that you’re saying, exactly? Because I’m pretty sick of being cast as the perpetual teenager in a
fucking
John Hughes film!”

He turned to her, obviously shocked by her explosion of anger.

“I only meant that I suspected there was some other reason for your impulsivity in driving all the way here from California. That’s all. I knew you weren’t telling me the whole story.” Something seemed to occur to him and he straightened. “Jaysus. Don’t tell me you drove all the way out here because you
planned
on this happening.” He waved significantly between their naked bodies.

Katie’s scalp and spine tingled with fury.

“I told you why I drove here: because you’re my friend, and I love you, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you here all alone, destroying yourself.”

He nodded his head slowly. “And you thought offering me your body might be a way to jump-start me out of my funk, is that it?”

Anger sent her blood to a low boil. “I didn’t come here with the intent of seducing you. But what if I had? Are you upset about the idea of my intentions, or are you more upset that us getting together possibly
could
be the thing to kick some common sense into that thick head of yours?”

For a moment they faced off while the steam rose around them. A shadow of uncertainty flickered across his face. He swallowed thickly, and Katie wondered if he was about to apologize. The man certainly knew how to shove his foot in his mouth. She wasn’t to find out Rill’s intentions, however, because at that moment a man shouted from the kitchen.

“Rill? Katie?”

Her eyes sprang wide.

Rill’s expression flattened with shock.

“It’s
Everett
,” Katie hissed incredulously.

Five minutes later, Katie came downstairs from the dormer
bedroom to greet her brother. She felt somewhat more composed for his unexpected presence than she had standing nude and furious in the shower with Rill. Rill had whispered to her to wait in the bathroom while he went out to meet Everett.

She’d taken one look at Rill’s initial shocked, and then, grim expression as they stood there in the shower and knew they wouldn’t be greeting her brother arm in arm.

She followed the sound of low male voices onto the front porch. The air felt crisp and cool on cheeks that were still warm from steam and phenomenal sex. Everett turned at the sound of the screen door squeaking open. Her brother grinned at her, white teeth flashing in the dim light.

“What are you
doing
here?” she demanded as she returned Everett’s hug.

“I could ask the same of you,” Everett replied. The hall light illuminated his handsome, classically cut jaw and smiling mouth as he stepped away from their hug. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. Golden-brown whiskers darkened his jaw. He’d pulled a gray newsboy hat down low over his brow, shadowing his upper face. Everett loved hats, and had a vast collection of them. Most people assumed it was an affectation, but Katie knew he wore them to hide what was perhaps his most famous feature—his tousled blond hair. He wore it relatively short, but in the front, around his face, it was so light that it caused double takes from a hundred feet away.

Not that Everett needed any help in the garnering-attention department, Katie thought grumpily. She and Everett had always been very close. She knew that most of the women alive on the planet would sacrifice their firstborn to be near Everett Hughes.

Katie’s reaction to her brother’s presence at that moment was quite the opposite of the general female population’s.

“I came to see after Rill, that’s all,” she replied briskly, avoiding glancing at the tall, brooding shadow to the right of her. Rill’s latest accusation—that she’d come here with the mercenary purpose of seduction in order to flip him out of his funk—still smarted and stung. She gave her brother a wry glance.

“What? You couldn’t trust my judgment, either? Is that why you’re here?” she asked sourly.

Everett looked politely taken aback. “Retract the claws, Katie. Mom and Dad told me about you coming out here, and I thought I’d come join the two of you. Rill’s my friend. You’re my sister. I needed a vacation. These are beautiful woods. What’s so shocking about me coming for a visit? I need the fresh air.”

“Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

“Not really,” Everett said pleasantly. “Haven’t you?”

Katie’s fake smile melted into a frown.

“Rill’s made it clear how he feels about visitors. We’ll just have to cheer him up a bit, make him remember why he should appreciate us,” Everett blathered on amiably. Katie gritted her teeth. Her brother was playing the part of a cheerful, perennially clueless friend to perfection. Give him an English accent, have him say
old chap
, and he might be reprising his BBC role as the handsome, lovable, doltish aristocrat in
Lord and Butler.
Everett was an excellent actor, but Katie could see through this particular role perfectly.

She couldn’t tell if Rill was sweating it or not, but he needn’t worry about whether or not Everett knew what they’d been doing before he arrived. Everett knew, all right. He must have picked up some message in Rill’s call to her mother and father; some code a parent couldn’t quite catch. Hadn’t Rill said something stupid to her father like Katie wasn’t
safe
in the house with him?

The awkwardness of their delayed greeting likely only confirmed her brother’s suspicions.

“There’s not enough beds in the house,” Rill said.

“It’s a good thing we Hughes have skins thicker than a walrus, or we might actually get our feelings hurt by all this rudeness,” Everett said.

“Speak for yourself,” Katie mumbled.

“What’s that?” Everett asked.

“Nothing.”
Great,
Katie thought. That flat, lifeless quality was back in Rill’s voice. Next thing she knew, he’d be back to hitting the bottle. Katie didn’t need to see Rill’s expression to know that he definitely did
not
want her to pipe up and tell Everett that he could have her bed, as she’d be all too happy to join Rill in his.

“No problem. I’ll take the couch,” Everett continued. “I slept on it last time, anyway; remember, Rill? There was no heat up in the upstairs bedroom. So . . . what have you two been up to?”

Katie sensed the sparkle in her brother’s eye, even though her view of his upper face was obscured by his hat. Rill’s shadow went entirely still at Everett’s question. Rill’s obvious unease in this situation made Katie want to kick one of the intact posts on the front porch railing.

“You’re timing is impeccable, Everett,” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Everett replied lightly, ignoring her sarcasm. “So what about it, Rill? I’ve had a long trip. Why don’t we go down to that little pub down in Vulture’s Canyon and get a beer so I can unwind a little.”

“Everett,”
Katie exclaimed in disbelief. “Rill hasn’t been drinking lately. What are you trying to do? Ruin everything?”

“Aw, Katie, give it a rest. He just wants to talk to me. Maybe I’ve got a word or two for him, as well,” Rill said woodenly as he clomped down the front steps.

Katie glared flaming knives at her brother, but he only smiled.

“No worries, Katie. Leave it to me to take care of him.”

“If you’re his caretaker, we might as well purchase his casket now.” She sighed when Everett smiled and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Don’t do anything stupid, Everett. The last thing he needs right now is a drinking buddy,” she whispered when he remained with his head bent. “He really has been doing better.”

“I just want to talk to him, that’s all,” Everett said softly, all signs of his old-chap act gone. “I’ll wait to talk to
you
in the morning about what the hell kind of stunt you’re pulling.”

“It’s
not
a stunt.”

Everett surprised her by removing his cap. He studied her, serious and somber. After a moment, his eyebrows went up in quiet surprise.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I can see that.”

All her annoyance at her brother faded when he said those five words. Her uncertainty remained, though.

She continued standing on the front porch even after the two men had gotten in a car and driven down the hill.

Fifteen

“Where’s Rill?” Katie asked when she stumbled bleary-eyed
into the kitchen the next day and saw her brother sitting at the table reading a newspaper. Katie had glanced down the hallway when she came down the stairs and seen Rill’s bedroom door wide-open, so she’d assumed he was up.

Everett set down the paper and took a swig of his coffee. Katie noticed he was wearing the newsboy hat again, a white T-shirt, horrid knee-length sweat shorts, black socks and white Converse tennis shoes. With his tall, lean body and careless elegance, he actually managed to make the ensemble look quirky chic instead of atrocious, which it would have been on any other human on the planet. If Katie thought Everett was trying to be cute on purpose, it would have annoyed her, but she knew the truth. Almost everything Everett did was effortlessly perfect, right down to the fact that he typically couldn’t care less about perfection.