Rock Solid

Two

Talk about trouble.

Cash scooped up another serving of lasagna, even though he’d barely tasted the first serving. All through dinner he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Ms. Alexandra Jeannine Woolf. Any other time, that big name of hers would have amused him. The first time he’d heard it—on the phone—he’d unconsciously assumed that she’d be physically substantial like the size of her name. Instead Lexie couldn’t weigh much more than a sack of potatoes…but that wasn’t to say she wasn’t one potent female package.

One worrisome potent female package.

He’d already inhaled the physical details. Lips like ripe-soft peaches. Eyes like luscious, liquid chocolate. Nothing exactly unusual about her hair—it was short and wildly curly—but the color was a glossy raven-black, a striking contrast to her porcelain pale skin.

Cash gulped down some iced tea. He’d been baby-sitting executives and business hotshots for almost a decade—long enough to recognize the labels she was wearing. More men than women came to Silver Mountain, but the women who chose to stay here invariably had The Look. Expensive. Tasteful. Whatever they wore, you never saw on anybody else. And nothing, naturally, was ever practical for outdoor mountain life.

Because he never forgot his responsibilities, Cash glanced around the dining table. A half hour before, dishes were heaped groaning-full, scents steaming around the long trestle table. A quiet was starting to fall, though, as the group filled up. Instinctively he picked on his shyest guests and said something to Mr. Farraday—the banking mogul seated to his left—and then something else to Stuart Rennbacker, the CEO on his third stay at Silver Mountain, who was still wolfing down the lasagna as if there was no tomorrow.

Cash wasn’t about to neglect the guests, and dinner was when everyone loosened up and got to know each other. Still, part of his attention never left Lexie.

For the third time since dinner began, she dropped a fork. On this cool May night, she was wearing a white angora sweater that snuggled her breasts better than a guy’s fantasy…but no pricey sweater was going to help make her unklutzy.

She laughed at something his son said, and Cash felt his stomach clench. Not with nerves—because he was never nervous—but with worry.

Maybe she was wearing two-hundred-buck slacks, but there was nothing about her laugh that sounded snobbish. She was skinny, short and built skimpy upstairs and down—which, damn it, happened to be his favorite shape on a woman. Even more aggravating than that, she laughed from the belly. In fact, her laugh took up her whole face, crinkled her eyes, showed off a mouthful of superb white teeth—except for the tiny crook in her eyeteeth, which actually only made her look more adorable. And that damn laugh could make any guy’s head spin around—even if it weren’t for the cute little boobs and the dark-chocolate eyes and that sexy mouth. She laughed like she meant it. She laughed like she loved life. She laughed like she would exuberantly let go once the lights were out with the right man.

Get a grip, McKay.

He tried. He said something to Farraday and Rennbacker again—then Whitt, one of the guests who was leaving tonight. By the time his gaze strayed back to Lexie, she was dribbling a forkful of peas, half on her plate, half on the floor, because she was bent down, giving all her attention to his son. She didn’t care about the peas. She looked straight at Sammy when she talked to him. Other people didn’t always do that to a kid. Grown-ups—especially the executive type of upper class grown-ups—had a habit of saying nice, polite things to a child while their eyes wandered around the room seeking more adult interests. Not her.

She liked kids.

Hell, Cash thought morosely. She wasn’t just a little trouble. She was potentially Serious Trouble.

He never had to warn himself to be careful around women. The female of the species had always been the bane of his life. That wasn’t to say his hormones couldn’t go into a wild tailspin for a woman with looks and brains—and brains were usually his worst downfall. He did turn on for a woman with a quick mind. But he was thirty-four, after all. Women-battle-scarred enough to recognize heartache before it had the chance to level him.

His weakness, though, was how people treated Sammy. And Lexie, so far, was treating Sammy like he was the most terrific boy she’d ever laid eyes on. As if the kid were more important and more interesting than anything or anyone else on the planet—which he was, Cash thought. Only what that half-pint brunette didn’t know was that Sammy never—repeat, capital n Never—took to a strange woman.

Sammy, at age eight, was as woman-battle-scarred as Cash was.

Suddenly Keegan stood up at the far end of the table, his ponytail neatly clipped at his nape, a kitchen towel hooked in his belt loop in lieu of an apron. “Anyone up for dessert? I’ve got a big fancy chocolate mousse. Or a blackberry pie.”

Although Lexie demurred from dessert, the others nearly rioted with enthusiasm—no surprise. Everyone except Lexie knew that Keegan could bake dirt and make it taste delicious. The kid was being wasted, working on his Ph.D., when guys were paying a fortune for someone with his old-fashioned wife qualifications. But once dessert came in—typically—the room instantly quieted down, which enabled Cash to watch her in action with Sammy again.

And again, worry started pumping adrenaline through his veins. It wasn’t that he minded her talking to Sammy in any way. The problem was that the inconceivable was happening. Sammy was actually initiating conversation with her, too. And seemed happy to be talking to her besides.

Cash had to strain to catch some words, and finally hooked into part of their conversation. Lexie was obviously answering a question.

“Well, sure, I’ve got a picture of my family that you could see…just a second.” When she started digging in her wallet, naturally, her napkin whisked down to the floor. Then a spoon dropped.

Sammy filched the photo she handed him, and then blinked in surprise. “Like this is your mom and dad? Are you kidding? You look way different than everybody else.”

Cash happened to accidentally glance over just then, and he blinked, too. Usually there was nothing exciting in anyone’s family photos, but this one really was startling. The snapshot framed a family picnic in suburbia somewhere, summer, a hot day, with Lexie sitting cross-legged on the grass. She was flanked by four people her own age—two young men, two young women—and then two older adults standing up. Everyone looked related except Lexie. The others were all Nordic blondes, unusually tall and noticeably athletic and broad shouldered. And then there was Lexie—small, slight and dark, a changeling with those exotic oval-shaped eyes….

“Well, Sammy, the reason I don’t look like them is because we’re not related by blood. I’m adopted. I lost my mom and dad when I was really little, like three years old.”

“You’re adopted?” Sammy repeated, making Cash immediately tense, his slice of blackberry pie forgotten. She had no way of knowing this was an uneasy subject for the kid, but he did.

“Yes, hon.”

“So…what happened to your mom and dad? Did they die or leave you or what hap—?”

“Hey, champ.” Cash’s voice was as lazy and easy as a western summer breeze, not clipped, not showing even a trace of nerves. “I’m sure Ms. Woolf understands that you’re just being curious, but it makes most people uncomfortable to be asked personal questions. You can ask her where she lives, stuff like that. General questions.”

Cash tried never to duck a parenting issue just because there were outsiders around, because outsiders were around their lives all the time. So when he had to correct Sammy, he did his best to teach and explain a reason rather than to make him feel criticized. This time, though, Sammy wasn’t up for hearing any lessons.

“But Cash, I just wanted to know how she got to be adopted—”

“It’s all right,” Lexie said swiftly, before Cash could say anything else. And to Sammy, she bent her head again. “It’s not a secret or uncomfortable thing for me, hon, even though your dad’s right. It could be for some people. But I don’t mind answering you. My mom and dad died. They were killed the same night in a robbery—and it was pretty terrible—but after that, a wonderful family took me in, the Woolfs. They loved me as much as my first mom and dad did, and I love them enormously the same way, so everything turned out just fine.”

“Well…” Sammy shoveled in a giant spoonful of mousse, some of which even made it inside his mouth, while he seemed to think this over. “I wasn’t just being curious. I was int’rested because I’m almost an orphan, too, only not exactly. I never had a dad. ’Course, I never wanted a dad, either.”

“No?” Lexie asked gently.

“No. Because I have Cash, and nobody’s dad could ever be better’n Cash. It’s just us guys against the world. We can do anything because we help each other.”

“That sounds really wonderful.” Again, Lexie’s voice had softened to butter.

“Yup. It’s wonderful. But I can’t be an orphan like you because I have a mom. In a way it’s the same, though, because you lost your mom, and my mom doesn’t want me. Sometimes she calls and pretends to be nice and all, but she never comes here. What I think is, I’m so much trouble that she just doesn’t want nuthin’ to do with me—”

Swiftly Cash scraped back his chair and stood up. “Well, I want you, champ. In fact, I couldn’t run this place without you. Come on and help me in the office for a minute, okay? If you’ll all excuse us.”

Sammy charged into the office, his face all lit up as if he were hot-wired to a joy button. Come hell or high water—or work—Cash spent private time with the boy every day, and before Sammy spilled any more private family information to strangers, he figured it was a politically good time to do their male bonding thing. Not that he was protective of Sammy…but he’d have used an elephant gun on a mosquito that dared threaten the boy. And not think twice.

So first, there was Sammy-time. And then he had to sit down with Keegan to go over the week’s schedule. After that, George was driving Whitt into Coeur D’Allene, which meant that Whitt’s bill needed settling and the guest seen off and George given directions. Then the bills needed to be pawed through. Hell, there was always a ton of stuff that needed doing at the end of the day.

But the new guest preyed on Cash’s mind. It wasn’t because he felt any unsettling, special pull for her—at all. In any way. But Sammy seemed to, and Sammy hadn’t talked to a woman like that in three months of Sundays. Probably longer. And since it was her first day, it was natural enough that he’d try to track her down and make sure she was settling in.

Only she wasn’t in her bedroom.

He tried the lodge living room, where the boys were playing pinochle. When he didn’t find her there, he checked the barn, the gym and hot tub building, the general grounds. Sammy had been stashed in bed by then, tucked safely in their private quarters, Cash wearing a pager so the squirt could always reach him…but in the meantime, he was running out of places to track down Lexie.

Eventually he found her—on the third floor in the library. When he first poked in his head, he saw the lights turned on, but no sign of a body. Once upon a time the library had been an attic, but he’d put up skylights and shelves and then a widow’s walk balcony with a mountain view. From then on, the room had become a favorite for everyone. Sammy had unearthed the one-horse sleigh in one of the old barns—which was completely worthless as a sleigh—but they’d fixed it up together to make a couch-type seat for reading. The old claw-foot bathtub was stuffed with giant pillows—that was Sammy’s favorite reading spot. And most of the men seemed to either pick one of the Abe Lincoln rockers or one of the clunky, chunky Morris chairs. Not her.

There was no hearth or wood-burning stove up here, because the threat of fire was too high, but Cash had wired in abundant electric heat and added rugs to warm up the place. It was her feet he spotted first. They happened to be naked feet, distinctly girl sized, with the toenails painted a candy-apple red—such a sassy, sexy red that he had to grin. There was just no way this one was ever gonna go for a flannel-shirt type of lifestyle.

He strode in and peered over the couch edge, his gaze tracking the trail of bare feet waving in the air to where she was lying flat on her back on a scruffy old rug. She’d bunched the couch blanket under her head, making it into a pillow, and her expensive white sweater and fancy slacks looked as out of place as china at a rodeo.

“You had to lay on the floor? All the chairs too big for you?” he asked humorously.

“What can I say? I’ve always been a floor-sitter.” She smiled at him over the spine of a beaten-up old book. “Were you looking for me?”

“Not to bug you if you’re happy reading. But I wanted to be sure you were settled in okay.” Hell, his pulse was already rattling from just looking at her. Those small breasts disappeared completely with her laying flat, but there was just something about that lithe, compact body that made his hormones buck. It wasn’t some out of control thing. He was no adolescent. But damnation, there was something about her that really soared his wings.

“I’m settled in fine. Although I’m glad you stopped by. I was worried about you.”

“Worried about me?” Cash hunkered down in one of the Morris chairs, leaning forward, not getting too comfortable—but the idea that this half-pint city vamp could have worried about him couldn’t help but arouse his sense of humor.

“Yeah.” She eased up to a sitting position, leaning back against the old corduroy sofa. “I picked Silver Mountain carefully. You have an outstanding reputation. The way I heard it, even the most burned-out, exhausted executives leave here feeling recharged and reenergized. Two of the men claimed they felt as if you’d shaved ten years off their lives.”

“Big exaggeration,” he said wryly, “but you’ll get some experiences you can’t get in an office. I promise you that.”

She nodded. “I like your whole program or I wouldn’t be here. But I’m afraid you’re going to fail with me. And I don’t want you to feel badly when that happens. It won’t be your fault.”

He raised his eyebrows. “How come you’re so positive the program isn’t going to work for you? You haven’t even given it a shot yet.”

“And I will. Believe me, I’ll try two hundred percent. It’s just that I’ve never been able to do anything athletic…so I don’t want you to worry that your teaching skills or your program ideas are at fault. It’ll just be me screwing up. Not you.”

Well, if this wasn’t a damnably strange conversation—but she’d sparked his competitive spirit now. She was right. He hadn’t failed with anyone yet, and he certainly didn’t intend to start with one half-pint brunette. “How about if we don’t worry about failures or successes quite yet? We’ll just take it slow, see how you do tomorrow.”

“Okay. Sure…although maybe I should mention—the only thing I just know I couldn’t handle in your program is the mountain climbing.”

“Heights aren’t your thing, huh?” He cocked his head. “A while back, maybe last year, I think I saw an article about you. The Pixie with the Midas Touch, something like that?”

She winced. “Man, I hate that label. But yeah, that article was about me—except that the journalist slanted it to make me sound way more hotsy-totsy than I am. I started investing in the stock market when I was fourteen. Just birthday money. Nothing extraordinary. But somehow any stock I bought developed this nice habit of doubling, until that ‘Midas Touch’ tag started to follow me around. I couldn’t shake it. Anyway…” She motioned around the library, as if hustling to divert the conversation away from herself. “This is an incredible home you have here. Was the lodge in your family? Is that how you happened to create this retreat for executives?”

From a stranger, he usually minded nosy questions. But not from her. He’d specifically tracked her down—not just to feast his eyes on that sassy mouth or skinny little body. But to clear the air on where he was coming from—and find out for sure where she was. “Yeah, the house was in the family. My great-gramps trekked to Idaho back in the Silver Rush. There’s still a petered-out silver mine on the property, although it was never worth much.”

“So you grew up here?”

“Yes, although not by choice. When I was a kid, the only thing on my mind was city lights and getting out of here. But we lost both my dad and my gramps in the same logging accident, so I grew up as the only male around. My grandmother gave me a sense of honor I couldn’t shake. Family first. That was her cardinal principle, and about the time my mom died and left me the property, I was stuck with it. No point putting it on the market—who in his right mind would want to buy it? There’s nothing up here but mountains and eagles. And I was living in Boise then, making good money—and spending it even faster. In fact, that’s how I got my Cash nickname, because I never could hold onto a dime. And to tell you the truth, I never cared.”

The start of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She was enjoying the yarn spinning. “So the lodge was in your family…but you had absolutely no reason to want to be here.”

“Exactly. Except that I have one younger sister, Hannah. And somehow she missed all the family lessons about that honor-first business. She got pregnant with Sammy. Took off to find her so-called fiancé after Sammy was born and it seems she still hasn’t found him, because Sam’s eight now and he’s still with me.”

Compassion seemed to soften and darken her eyes. “I loved watching you two together. You’re obviously close.”

“Cut-and-dried, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for him. He may only be my nephew, but I love him like a son.” He used his drawling, lazy voice. Reliably that tone tended to relax people, which helped when he had to say something tough. “Somehow the place has turned into a real male bastion. I swear I’d hire women—there’s no reason in hell the staff has to be all male—but there just doesn’t seem to be any females dying for jobs in this neck of the woods. And yeah, for sure, we have women guests, but they’re only here for a short time. Which is why I brought this subject up, so I could tell you the lay of the land as far as Sam. He can be a little sensitive around women.”

“He’s a darling.”

“Yeah, I think so. But with females, he’s not long on trust. He just doesn’t believe any woman is going to stick around for him. The guests come and go. His mother’s flightier than wind. And when I saw him talking to you at dinner—”

“You got worried?”

“Not worried. But he doesn’t do that. Warm up to women strangers the way he did with you. He usually avoids all females like they had cooties. So if he starts to form an attachment, I’m just asking you to be careful. He acts like a pretty tough little kid, and he is. But he can still get hurt.”

“I’m glad you told me.” Her eyes met his. “Just for the record, I’d shoot myself before deliberately hurting a child. Just in case that was the message you were trying to get across in that gentle way of yours.”

She cut her gaze away from his so fast that Cash felt a sharp slash of guilt. “Hell. Did I hurt your feelings? Keegan says I’m as subtle as a sledgehammer on my good days.”

“I was teasing you, not complaining. And it wouldn’t matter if you hurt my feelings or not. I’d do the same thing in your shoes—say whatever needed saying to protect a vulnerable child in my care. I loved watching the two of you together.” Swiftly she glanced at her wrist. “Good grief, it’s almost midnight. I’m keeping you up, and me, too. I just came up here to find a book.”

She grabbed the book, then uncoiled and leaped to her feet, then swooped back down—apparently—for her shoes. Cash saw her suddenly flying around, but when he stood up from the chair, she seemed nowhere near him. He wasn’t exactly sure how a shoe suddenly hurtled out of her hand. Or why the book dropped. Or how the crown of her head somehow managed to ram into his chest, throwing both of them off balance.

Instinctively he grabbed her, his hands closing around her upper arms until she steadied. And she steadied fast enough, but she was still red-faced and laughing when she tilted her face.

“Cripes, I’m so sorry. I warned you I was clumsy, didn’t I?”

“Don’t worry about it—um…” She started to bounce down to reach for the fallen shoe again, and almost jabbed a sharp elbow in his crotch. Startled, he grabbed her arms again—as gently as he could—and tried to tactfully lift her a few inches safer distance from him. “How about if you let me get your shoes and the book? And don’t move for a second.”

“Scared I’ll do you injury, huh?”

“I think you’ve got incredible potential as a defensive end. Although I’m afraid defensive ends don’t usually come in your size.”

She chuckled. But then her laughter faded. As if someone flipped a switch, Cash was suddenly conscious of the sudden hush in the room, the dark shadows and intimacy of lamplight, the scent of books…and her perfume. It wasn’t pixieish and gamine like her, but a soft, sexy, exotic scent, spices he didn’t know, flowers he couldn’t name. The perfume made him uneasy, but that wasn’t why he shifted on his feet.