Forgetting her cut, she put her hands over her eyes, appalled by the direction of her thoughts. Shocked by the heat of a flush on the back of her neck, by her swelling breasts, by the sensitive pinpricks that rose on the flesh of her inner thighs.
The air in the room shifted, so she supposed he was moving, but for a man so big, he was graceful and silent. She’d never noticed that about him before.
“Juliet.” Closer now, his voice. “Juliet, honey.”
Honey
. When was the last time a man had murmured an endearment to her? This man had never. This man must be rocked to the soles of his size twelve feet—God, somehow she’d even noticed his feet and made a determination of their size!—if he was talking to her like that.
And touching her like this. Because he was peeling away one of her hands. The hurt one. Like a coward, she only squeezed her revealed eye tighter shut.
His palm cradled her fingers. The calluses on his skin made an erotic scratch along her knuckles. “You’ve cut yourself. What happened? Did something startle you? Did some
one
startle you?”
You
.
Me
. She had no idea which was more accurate. But she did know she couldn’t keep pretending she wasn’t standing in her kitchen with a naked man.
Her heart still whomping inside her chest, she opened her eyes. Oh. Not naked. Not naked any longer.
He was staring down at her, a line between his black brows and concern in his blue eyes. Around his neck was the strap of a butcher-style apron. It was printed with green vines and red roses. It barely covered the flesh between his dark nipples and its ruffled hem hit him at mid thigh.
She remembered buying it at one of the boutiques in the Malibu Country Mart, thinking it would look cheerful hanging in her kitchen. Wrapped around him, it should have looked ridiculous. The sight should have made her smile, if not out-and-out laugh. Instead, she could only think that on the other side of the apron he was—no, don’t go there.
Too late. His first-class buttocks were back in her memory, that vision of him as he churned, naked, through the water. His muscles flexing, creating a tantalizing scoop on the right, scoop on the left.
“Oh, God.” She put her free hand to her forehead.
One corner of his mouth ticked up. “I know, I know. I’d be ready to thank the Lord, too, if someone presented me with such primo blackmail material. If I let you take a picture, will you tell me what’s going on?”
“I have absolutely no idea what’s going on,” she answered, with all honesty. Her voice came out a little rusty, and his fingers tightened on hers, like a brief embrace. “Not beyond the fact that there’s a man dressed like Rachel Ray in my kitchen.”
One of his eyebrows winged up. “So
she’s
the one they call ‘The Naked Chef?’ ”
“No.” She rubbed her forehead again. “No. It’s . . . oh, it’s all so complicated.” So completely unexpected.
“Not so bad. Nothing we can’t fix with a Band-Aid.” He was looking at her cut hand again. While all she could think of was that what really needed fixing wasn’t going to be helped by any item stored in her medicine cabinet.
Because something momentous had just happened to her tonight. Her defenses had dropped away, and the resulting clatter had awakened something inside her—or perhaps it was she who had awakened. In any case, Juliet Weston didn’t feel like herself, which made sense, after all, since she’d just learned she wasn’t who she’d always thought she was.
But the why of this current situation didn’t matter, not when the what was so clear to her. The what—
oh, God
—was this: With her protective shell gone, she was overcome by a sudden and raging sexual attraction for the naked non-chef standing on her tiled floor, holding her shaking hand. He affected her just that much. Her whole body was trembling in reaction to him.
Him. Noah Smith.
The man who lived in the guesthouse across the pool. The man who worked for her and who before that had tended to her dying husband.
The younger man.
He shouldn’t go back to her, Noah thought, pulling on jeans and shoving his feet in a pair of ragged running shoes. He should stay in the guesthouse and mind his own business, leaving Juliet alone to deal with whatever it was that had spooked her.
But hell, before finishing college and attending three years of law school, the Army had schooled him long and schooled him well in keeping focused on the mission. And his mission—but no, not his obsession, damn it—was Juliet Weston.
For her—no, for the
mission
—he’d done some things, and then not done some others that were secrets he expected to take to his grave. He didn’t regret a one, but he was now bound to her in a way she didn’t know. That’s why when he’d heard the strange sounds from her supposedly vacant kitchen—she’d said she was going to be gone for a couple of hours—he’d rushed in wearing nothing more than his protective instincts.
Probably scared the bejesus out of her, a big wet body decorated by only an infantryman’s meat tag tattoo. Naked Noah.
Except he couldn’t claim she’d looked at him with any particular awareness then or before. From the pleasant yet detached manner she always exhibited he supposed she considered him along the lines of a convenient piece of furniture.
While she’d never struck him in the least like a chair or a table or a desk.
Just another reason to keep to his side of the pool.
He glanced out the window to assure himself all was well. There was no reason to go back there. To her.
Except a stealthy figure was just now creeping over the wall to position itself outside Juliet’s kitchen windows.
Christ! What now? Kidnapper? Peeping Tom? Didn’t matter. His Army training said OP-FOR and he was going after this particular opposition force with everything he had.
Noah was through his door and across the flagstone deck before the intruder could take another step.
“Hey!” he yelled, grabbing the stranger by his shirt collar to yank him around. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The lights from the pool glowed greenly on the other man’s face. Like Noah, he was close to thirty, and dressed in jeans, the cotton shirt that was crumpled in Noah’s fist, and lightweight hiking boots. Two cameras hung around his neck. Noah twisted the shirt collar tighter and the guy stumbled closer.
“What are you up to?” he demanded again.
“Easy, easy,” the stranger said, not attempting to fight Noah’s grasp. “I’m a friend of the lady’s.” He gestured toward the kitchen windows. “She invited me over.”
“You and your cameras?”
“She . . . she asked me to take some pictures.” The stranger’s voice was low, his smirk suggestive. “You know.”
Noah didn’t want to know, but hell, he had to find out, didn’t he? “Juliet?” He pitched his voice louder. “Juliet!”
The fixture over the back door flipped on and then she stepped out, hesitating there as the light turned her wealth of fine, straight hair from its usual caramel color to a brighter gold. When Noah had blasted into the kitchen earlier, it had been down around her shoulders, but now it was pulled away from her face by a thin band. It looked damp around the edges as if she’d just splashed water on her skin. The lashes surrounding her amazing eyes—one green, one blue—were spiky with wetness.
She blinked as she gazed at the two men. “Noah?”
“Is this a friend of yours?” he demanded, not easing his grip on the other dude’s shirt. “Did you invite him over?”
Juliet blinked again.
Shit,
Noah thought.
Maybe she had
. For God’s sake, she’d been a widow for eleven months and her husband had been dying for many, many before that. It would be natural to want someone to spend time with, and there was no reason to be pissed that if she wanted a man she hadn’t turned to him. She was the quintessential uptown girl and officer’s wife, while he, after all, was the hired help, the enlisted guy, the piece of furniture from across the pool. But did she have to torture his imagination by wanting pictures, too?
Because, God, imagined freeze-frames were overtaking his gray matter. Juliet out of her pants and sweater and into a black teddy, lace playing peek-a-boo with his gaze so he glimpsed a shell-pink nipple here, the crease that separated her long legs from her hips there. Now a backside shot, Juliet peering over the creamy, elegant blade of her shoulder, the sweep of her delicate spine leading to the taut hump of her ass. One set of ruby-tipped toes in the air.
Trying to banish the thoughts, his eyes closed and his hand tightened on the photographer’s collar. He barely recognized the grating sound of his own voice. “Well?”
“I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Juliet and the stranger spoke together. Noah’s eyes popped back open. “What?” Loosening his grip a little, he shook the man he held. “I thought you said she invited you over.”
“I thought she was somebody else!”
Noah’s eyes narrowed. “You forgot your friend’s address?”
“She used to live here, anyway. I know this used to be her house.”
Puzzled, Noah stared at the guy for a long minute.
“Oomfaa,” Juliet put in quietly. “Remember, Noah? She owned it before me.”
Oh, Christ. The realtor had revealed that “One of the Most Famous Actresses in America,” nicknamed Oomfaa by the Malibu community, had lived here before Juliet had moved in. Which meant that the guy with the cameras was likely one of the—
“Paparazzi,” he said with disgust, letting go of the man’s shirt and shoving him away at the same time. “I hear they guarantee celebrity sightings at the Malibu Starbucks. Get out of here.”
The man shrugged his shoulders and pulled on the placket of his wrinkled shirt. “Wrong. Now the best spot is The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. But I’m looking for Oomfaa in particular. Do you know where she moved? I heard she’s for sure in Malibu.”
Noah rolled his eyes. “As if I would tell you.”
The guy slid his hand in his front pocket. “There’d be money in it for you. I sell my stuff to that website—I’m sure you know it—Celeb!.com. I pay for tips that pan out.”
“I don’t want your money,” he said, shooting a glance at Juliet. They both knew that the actress had moved just across the canyon.
The paparazzo followed his gaze. After a heartbeat, his pose went from casual to alert. He pivoted to face Juliet. “Wait a minute. I
do
know you.”
When his hands moved toward his cameras, Noah wrapped his fingers around the straps hanging from the guy’s neck. “No pictures. Don’t even think about it.”
The photographer pointed his forefinger at Juliet instead. “You married America’s Hero.”
That’s what the media had dubbed General Wayne Weston—America’s Hero. With his Hollywood looks, his West Point education, and his well-documented bravery, he’d been a military man that the populace—and more important, maybe, the politicians on both the right and the left—could be proud of. When he’d retired, the world assumed he was going to run for public office. The highest office.
And win.
“They called you the Deal—”
Noah’s hand jerked to the other man’s throat. “That’s—”
“Okay,” Juliet interjected. “Let him say it. And let him go.”
Shit. He gentled his stranglehold, but didn’t completely ease off. “Juliet . . .”
“Then I’ll say it for him,” she put in, her voice matter-of-fact. “They called me the Deal Breaker.”
Shaking his head, Noah dropped his hand. It was true that when the general had married his very much younger wife, both of the parties had dropped him like a hot political potato. Where before they’d been courting him to run on their tickets, now they couldn’t back away fast enough. Rumor had it that when he’d mentioned his plans to wed a woman thirty years his junior the national committees had said the bride was out or their support was gone.
Wayne Weston had chosen marriage.
The media and the people hadn’t taken very well to losing their favorite presidential contender. But had they blamed the hierarchies of the parties or even their hero himself? Hell, no. They’d blamed Juliet.
“Then they called me the Happy Widow.”
Every muscle in Noah’s body clenched. He hated that part of the story most of all. He’d been there in the last months of the general’s life and in all the months since. Not once had Juliet been happy.
Not goddamn once.
But because she hadn’t been at Wayne Weston’s side in his last hours, unfounded, anonymously sourced rumors had been swallowed by the hungry-for-content twenty-four-hour media machine, to be regurgitated into cruel sound bites like the Happy Widow. And here, right beside Noah, was a representative of that slanderous, libelous, salacious fourth estate.
Hey
, he thought, cheering a little.
And I’ve been trained to kill.
“You’d better leave,” he told the man in a low voice, deciding even a dolt like this one deserved a warning. “Now.”
The guy was smart enough to shuffle back.
But Juliet intervened once again. “Celeb!.com, you said? Don’t they have a companion TV show in the new fall lineup?”
“Well, yeah,” the photographer replied, shooting Noah a wary look. “
CC! on TV
. Celeb!.com on television. You a fan?”
“We happy widows have to fill our hours somehow,” she answered, without a hint of irony in her voice. “Maybe they’d like to do a piece on the general’s book.”
Noah rocked back on his heels. It all made sense to him now. General Wayne Weston’s autobiography was hitting the shelves next month. Apparently Juliet wasn’t above chatting up a slimy paparazzo if she thought it might gain attention for her late husband’s book. Noah knew she counted on the publication of the general’s life story repairing the damage to his reputation that had been the result of their marriage.