Love on the Line (6 page)

He put the cleaver exactly where she pointed and pressed. Again it glanced off.

“A pickaxe would be my tool of choice here,” Ryan said through clenched teeth. Though there was humor in his voice, he couldn’t believe he’d been bested by a squash.

“I heard that,” Belva said as she strode over to him. “Those are my prize Burgess Buttercups.”

She took the cleaver and lined up a squash in front of her on the cutting board and muscled the cleaver in between the ridges. To his delight, she had no more success opening the squash than he had.

“Okay, so maybe not a pickaxe,” Ryan said, keeping any gloating out of his voice. “But maybe you have an ax nearby? Or a different species of squash?”

Belva puffed up like a cornered adder. “These make the best soup.”

He trusted her on that. He’d had a bowl of her soup at the diner.

“I’ll set you up outside,” she said. “Cara, let Molly take over there. Help Mr. Rea with these darn squash.”

“Please, call me Ryan.”

Belva gave him an assessing look that could’ve halted a Cape buffalo stampede. He was used to being called Rea—some guys on the team did it and he’d asked the kids to call him Coach Rea—but
Mr
. Rea? It bugged him coming from an adult.

“Follow me,” Belva said.

As he watched the swing of Cara’s hips as he followed her and Belva out into the back garden, Ryan squelched a smile and thanked the heavens for his brusque, Italian, cleaver-wielding angel of mercy.

Belva set them up with some squares of cardboard and handed Ryan a battered but serviceable ax.

“I don’t suppose I have to show you how to use this,” she said, squinting into the sunlight. She reminded him of his grandmother. Only his grandmother didn’t put the fear of God into him like Belva did.

“No, ma’am, you don’t.”

“I’m too old to be running around doing away with volunteers, so don’t go letting any of those seeds scatter in my garden.”

He wasn’t sure if she meant doing away with him or the squash seeds that might escape and sprout unplanned. Whichever was true, he’d be careful not to rile Belva.

But as he knelt beside Cara and saw how the dampness from the steam had made her blouse cling to the curve of her breasts and felt the heat from her body, he didn’t much care what Belva or anybody else thought. For the next few hours, he’d be in heaven. As the breeze stirred and wafted the scent of honeysuckle and woman to him, he was sure of it.

Cara scooped seeds from the fifth squash Ryan had opened. The man wielded an ax as if he’d done it all his life. Maybe he had. She knew little about him. Sure, everybody in town talked about his All-Star status as the Giants’ hot, young center fielder, but that was about it. Except she’d seen the Bugatti. But the flashy car didn’t fit with the down-to-earth guy who helped out with the local team and came to lend a hand with community canning.

Maybe she should’ve warned him that the sessions were hard work. She still felt a little guilty about taking him up on his offer. But this was Belva’s first year without Roy around. Having Ryan there not only helped, it filled the gap Roy left. Sort of. That she’d converted Ryan’s obvious interest in her to lure him to participate wasn’t
such
an underhanded ploy. After all, helping out the ladies of Albion Bay wasn’t Gulag duty.

But she hadn’t counted on the visceral, physical presence of the man. Or on her reaction to him. She’d always thought ads and commercials with manly men doing manly activities were aimed at women other than herself.

She’d been wrong.

When he took off the apron and then removed his T-shirt, folded it and laid it on the ground, she felt her heart stutter. Never had she imagined that real men had six-pack abs. And the fine line of golden hair that dipped into the top of his jeans hadn’t been airbrushed on.

The man was lip-smacking hot.

And focusing on him took her mind off the looming deadline that rattled through her thoughts even when she was trying to forget about it.

Blushing, she turned back to scooping seeds from the squashes he’d expertly split open and tried to turn her mind to the task at hand. Ryan worked fast. Or maybe time had sped up. Within what seemed mere minutes he’d surrounded her with perfectly halved squashes. Cara’s arms were tiring as she scooped out the seeds and tried to keep up with him.

“Break time,” Belva said as she arranged a tray of lemonade on a table near the door. She surveyed the pile of cleaved, seeded and hollowed-out squashes. “Not bad for beginners.”

Ryan laughed.

Cara had seen him smile but hadn’t heard him laugh. Part of her wished she still hadn’t. Ryan Rea had one of those laughs that went beyond words to wrap into a woman’s heart and leave her wanting more. He could prove to be real trouble if she let him.

He rested the ax against an oak tree at the garden entrance and walked over to pour out two glasses of lemonade.

“You don’t say much,” Ryan said as he handed her a glass.

His fingertips brushed hers, and her pulse leaped. Maybe she’d gone too long without a man, but she couldn’t just import one into Albion Bay, even if she wanted to—it’d be the talk of the town. And since she’d left her life back East behind, there weren’t any prospects there. There were a couple of interesting men in the city, but getting close to any of them would just pose problems she wasn’t ready to face.

She sipped her lemonade and told herself it was just good manners to engage Ryan in conversation. She swallowed the tart, cold liquid and dug around in her mind for a safe question.

He squatted down on his haunches near where she sat cross-legged surrounded by the scooped-out squashes. “Where’re you from?” he asked before she came up with a question of her own.

The advantage to being the one doing the asking was that she could move the flow of words toward or away from difficult subjects. But some topics were just so basic, they came up no matter how carefully she orchestrated the conversation.

“I grew up in a small town back East,” she said.

That much was true. That fact that her family basically owned the entire town of Hudson Manor and that most of the townspeople worked for her family’s estate was a detail no one needed to know. Nor was the fact that when she hadn’t been in Hudson Manor, she’d lived in her family’s sprawling three-floor apartment that soared high above Fifth Avenue in New York.

“My mom’s from Boston,” Ryan said, gulping down the last of his lemonade and wiping the sweat that had beaded on his face onto his forearm. “Is it always this warm out here in September?”

“It’s the most beautiful time of year.” She tried not to stare at the planed muscles of his chest. “I’ve tried to explain how lovely it is at this time of year to... to my friends. I’ve never succeeded.”

Thank God for conversations about the weather. Always a safe topic.

“It’d be hard to describe the light out here,” he said with a dreamy stare out across the hills behind Belva’s place. “Sometimes when I walk the beach and see the light dancing on the water, and the colors it fires on the hills, it takes my breath away. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Between the effort she was making not to stare at his body and the disarming way he had of describing exactly what she hadn’t been able to put to words, she was feeling more than a little unsettled. Maybe the weather wasn’t such a safe topic after all.

He unfolded from his crouch with astonishing ease and walked toward the table that held the lemonade. Cara tried even more unsuccessfully not to focus on the sweat glistening down his back and highlighting the stretch of muscles that rippled as he moved.

His powerful yet graceful movement brought to mind the panther she’d seen in Guatemala. The panther had surprised her and her guide that morning. If they hadn’t been upwind, one of them might’ve been breakfast. Maybe it was the thrill of being in a presence that had no regard for her as anything other than intruder or prey, or maybe it was the sheer beauty of the panther’s primal movements, but the memory had seared deep. Her chest tightened as she remembered the rush of awe and fear as she’d crouched, unmoving, and watched the panther circle, sniff the air and then prowl off into the jungle.

That Ryan called up the same energy she’d felt staring into the eyes of that big cat made her haul in a deep breath and try to gain perspective. She was seeding squash in a small town on the California coast, for goodness’ sake. No danger or panthers here.

But as Ryan turned and walked toward her, her breath caught and her pulse pounded. His jeans had that worn-in, perfect fit that hugged his thighs, and they sat perfectly poised on his hips, resting just below the vee of muscles that disappeared below the line of his belt. And just below the buckle of that belt, his jeans pouched out, holding what she could only imagine lay beneath. He was easily an advertiser’s dream. No amount of professional fussing could’ve created the casual, devastating effect of a real man—vital, toned, misted with the sweat of work and obviously very comfortable in that devastating body.

She shifted her eyes to the ring of squash that circled her and shivered with the want coursing in her veins.

“You want more?”

His question startled her out of her fantasy. It took her a moment to register that he was nodding toward her near-empty glass.

Another display of him walking to the table just might do her in. Though she was thirsty, she shook her head.

“No, thanks.”

She looked down and picked up the spoon she’d been using to scoop out the squashes. She dug the spoon into the curve of a squash and fought through the images he’d conjured, tried to drag her attention back from her ridiculous loss of control and toward the thread of the conversation. The polite thing to do was to ask about his life. That questions about him turned the conversation away from her was a bonus.

“Where are you from?”

“East Texas. I grew up on a ranch. Sometimes I think East Texas doesn’t suit my mom, being that she’s an easterner,” Ryan added, “but my dad will never move.” He took a long draw from the glass he held. “He’s a stubborn man.”

A mother from Boston explained why Ryan’s accent had little of Texas in it. To her ear, Ryan’s speech was a refreshing mixture of melodic Southern drawl and the flatter, more articulated consonants and vowels of the Northeast. And his voice had a deep, velvety quality, almost mesmerizing. He could’ve been a hypnotist or a radio personality. She’d listened that night he’d bantered with Cain at the ball game and tuned in as he’d joshed with the kids. His voice seeped into her like warm, golden honey and made her want to hear more. She liked it. Maybe a little too much.

And she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that more than his voice had shown up in her dreams. Now that she’d seen how hot he was and felt her blood sizzle just having him near, her dreams would likely take on a whole new dimension.
That
she could look forward to. Dreams were safe. No trouble there.

But she sure didn’t want to get into a loop of questions about families; that always proved to be rocky territory.

“We’d better get back to work or Belva will have our heads,” she said, angling for an ease in her tone that she didn’t feel.

She picked up another of the squashes he’d cracked open and hoped the slight trembling in her hands didn’t show as she began to separate the seeds from the bright orange flesh.

Ryan put his glass down on the slate path and took up the ax.

“How long have you been living out here?” he asked. He angled a perfect swing and split a squash.

Hiding her identity to preserve her freedom had proven to be a greater challenge than she’d expected. Though she longed to share the connection, the closeness that wove the people of Albion Bay into a thriving community, she had to keep her distance. Some days her deception exacted a very high price.

“Three years next month,” she answered. Some questions could be more easily answered than others.

He picked up his T-shirt and mopped at the perspiration that glistened along his neck and arms. She’d never seen a man with arms like his, not up close. It was a look that movie stars worked hours in the gym to perfect, but as Ryan swung the ax again and executed a perfect severing of a squash, she knew that actors, no matter how well trained, never came close to approximating the body of a man whose strength was an integral part of his everyday life.

He shot a glance her way, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight. At least she thought the glint was from sunlight. Maybe he was one of those guys who just had lively eyes. But to her, Ryan’s eyes seemed to dance with a mysterious merriment.

“Perk told me you’ve been a big help on the town planning committee,” he said.

“I’ve been to a few meetings,” she responded, grateful for conversation that took her mind off the effect he was having on her.

“I’d rather face a wild pitcher with a ninety-eight-mile-an-hour fast ball than sit through a meeting,” he said with a grin. “Perk said the town needs a medical clinic. You helping with that?”

“I’ve been trying,” Cara answered honestly. “The clinic’s a sore spot. Albion Bay is twenty miles from the closest medical help. Twenty long and rutted miles to a tiny clinic that’s only open during the day. And closed on holidays.”