No Strings Attached
Not that there didn’t seem to be dozens more in the wings just waiting to take up the mantle. Still, he could only do what he could do—and he was ready to take them down, too. So whoever Tasha was or wasn’t doing shouldn’t matter.
Which didn’t explain why he was leaning so far over the railing trying to keep her in sight that he was in imminent danger of tumbling over it and landing on his head on the street below.
“Shit.” He straightened away from the balustrade and took a giant step back to drop into one of the chairs, his eyes narrowing as it creaked beneath his weight. Tasha sure did have a thing for wicker furniture.
He wasn’t what you’d call an avid view guy, but he had to admit that this one was pretty damn sweet. Yesterday’s rain squalls had apparently blown out to sea, for the rugged mountain range across the narrow band of water etched its craggy peaks against a cloudless blue sky. Some kid on a Sea-Doo was rrrEAR-rrEAR-rrEARing in relentless loops out in the canal, and Luc caught a glimpse of one corner of the local inn’s float that he and Jake had rowed out to the evening that Tasha and both of his half brothers’ women went skinny-dipping from it. If he’d known then that it was his Tasha—or okay, not his-his, but at least the Tasha he’d once known—he would have tried a helluva lot harder to see through the shadowy night and stygian waters. Short of X-ray vision he would’ve failed, but he’d have tried. Now a group of kayakers paddled past the area down toward the state park.
He felt restive. Edgy. Tired of his own company. Climbing to his feet, he slapped his jeans pocket to make sure his room key was still there. Retrieving it, he let himself out of the room, then locked up. He might as well walk down to the inn and see if Jake was around. It beat the hell out of this little memory-lane jaunt his mind kept wanting to take off on.
It didn’t occur to him that he probably should have called first until he crossed the porch of The Sand Dollar, the largest of the cottages scattered around the evergreen-dotted grounds of The Brothers Inn. Then he rolled his shoulders and knocked on the front door. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, man. He was here now, wasn’t he? He rapped out another rhythm.
“Keep your shorts on,” he heard Jake’s irritated voice say from the other side of the door. Footsteps approached, and the door whipped open. “There better be a fucking fire, because I’m in the middle of someth—” He blinked at Luc. “Oh, hey, it’s you.” Stepping back, he opened the door wider. “C’mon in. You, I actually wanna talk to.”
“Yeah?” It was stupid to feel the warm fuzzies because some guy he hadn’t even known existed six months ago maybe wanted to get to know him as much as he wanted to get to know both his recently discovered half brothers. As a newly orphaned only child, he envied their obvious closeness and the way Jake had jumped to Max’s defense, especially when it came to their mutual father, more than once now.
“You want a beer?” Jake asked. He glanced down at his pricey watch, which, along with his green silk T-shirt, honest-to-God pressed cargo shorts—who did that?—and razor-cut sun-streaked brown hair, screamed well-put-together-rich-guy. “It’s not too early for a brew, is it?”
“Hell, no. A beer would be good.” Surreptitiously checking his own plain cotton tee to make sure it was still clean, he followed his half brother into a small galley kitchen.
Jake fished a couple of Fat Tires out of the fridge and handed one to Luc. “So,” he said, popping his bottle’s top and snapping his fingers to send it winging toward the sink, “I hear you and Tash have a lurid past.”
He started. “Where the hell did you hear that?”
“Jenny is Tasha’s best friend, remember? She went over this morning to find out what was with her yesterday, because she claims Tash wasn’t acting like herself.”
It was small of him, but he gritted his teeth over Jake’s casual use of Tasha’s nickname when she’d forbidden him to use it.
“I hear Tasha claims you’re a drug dealer and that she got arrested for drugs you had in your vacation rental.”
“Fuck.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his shield for the third time this day, flipping open its wallet and holding it out to the other man. “I was undercover, and I didn’t even know she’d been arrested until yesterday.”
Jake took the badge out of his hand and studied it. “DEA, huh? Max will be interested in this.”
“He already knows—he came to see me at my hotel in Silverdale earlier.”
A slight smile crooked Jake’s lips. “That’s our boy. Not much gets past him.” He returned the shield. “Why don’t you just show this to Tash?”
“I did! She said IDs could be faked.”
Jake laughed. “Yeah, she was pretty hot under the collar when she called Jenny about getting together at the Anchor for some girl time.”
“She’s at the Anchor? With your fiancée?” It wasn’t as if he was relieved or anything. He merely had a new resolve, and he took a step back. “Well, listen, I’ll let you get back to that middle-of-something thing you were working on.”
“So you can go to the Anchor without me?” Jake demanded. “Screw that.” He disappeared into another room, but almost immediately returned. Shoving a wallet into his back pocket, he said, “You do get that she’s there to trash your good name to her girls, don’t you? You’re not exactly gonna be welcome.”
A corner of his mouth ticked up. “Yeah, why can’t they be levelheaded like us?”
“I know, right? Women are a mystery, but it’s some esoteric female thing, the logic of which only they understand.” He sobered. “Just be prepared, bro. You’re already on shaky ground.” They stepped out onto the porch, and Jake locked up. “Where’s your car?”
“On Harbor Street. I walked over.”
Jake shrugged. “I’ll drive, then.” He led Luc to his SUV. Opening the doors with his remote, he paused to look at Luc over the top of the car. “You know, you really oughtta move into the inn so you don’t have to do so much backing-and-forthing between the Bay and Silverdale.”
“I don’t need a place at the inn. I just moved into the studio above Bella T’s.”
“No shit?” Jake shot Luc a big-ass grin. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“AW, HELL,” TASHA said morosely, “it’s not like I didn’t know better than to hook up with Diego/Luc/whatever-he-wants-to-call-himself in the first place.” She knocked back a long swallow from her glass of the house red, then looked at Jenny and Harper seated on the other side of their booth at the Anchor. “I knew not to go there. But instead of paying attention to my instincts, I went ahead and hooked up with him anyway.”
“How would you know better?” Harper asked with the near-British inflection that made her sound so boarding-school refined. “Did he have Lying Drug Dealer written all over him?” Her black ringlets shivered and swayed as she tipped her head to study Tasha. “And what, precisely, does such a person look like?”
“Beats me. I only meant that I hadn’t intended to hook up with anyone on that vacation. It was just my bad luck that the one time I broke my own hard-and-fast rule, it was with a guy who landed me in a Bahamian jail.”
It felt odd to have told yet another person about that time in her life. Her imprisonment in the dark, cramped cell had been the single most terrifying forty-eight hours of her life—its minutes stretching like dog years as she’d wondered if she would ever see the light of day again. When they finally did let her go, she’d wanted only to forget and had kept the incarceration a closely guarded secret, relating her experience to no one but Jenny. Now, after maintaining a stony silence for seven years, in less than twenty-four hours she had not only blurted it to Luc last night but had just told Harper, as well.
But although she may have known Harper for only a couple of months, her new friend was fast becoming important to her. And she’d deserved to hear about her prior relationship with Luc if she was ever to understand why Tasha was so furious with him now.
Raucous male laughter exploded from a table over by the window, but Harper didn’t spare so much as a glance in the group’s direction. She leaned into their own table. “You were on vacation,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you want to meet a hot-looking man?” She gave Tasha a knowing look. “And I think we must admit that Luc Bradshaw is that, yes?”
Oh, yeah. He is definitely that. Not that she intended to say so aloud. She did, however, dip her chin in the tiniest acknowledgment.
“It all stems back to her mama,” Jenny said and raised a hand to hail the cocktail waitress. Catching the woman’s eye, she circled an index finger over their glasses, indicating refills all around.
“Your mother wouldn’t approve of you having a vacation fling?” Harper inquired. “Is she quite strict, then?”
Both she and Jenny laughed. “No,” Tasha said. “Quite the opposite, actually. My mom was known around here as the whore of Razor Bay. She moved to Olympia almost six years ago, yet there are still a few people who like to throw her reputation in my face every now and then.” She shrugged. “Of course, they’re morons. And don’t get me wrong, I love my mom. But she and I are nothing alike.”
“No fooling,” Jenny said and turned to Harper. “Nola, Tash’s mom, lives strictly in the moment—I don’t think I’ve ever seen her give a microsecond’s thought to what might happen tomorrow. Tash, on the other hand—she’s a whole nother animal. She is the most goal-oriented person I’ve ever met.”
Harper gave Tasha a bright olive-green-eyed gaze, then turned in her seat to study Jenny. “I know you two have been friends for a long time. But I don’t believe I’ve ever heard exactly when or how you met.”
“It was my second day at Razor Bay High School when we were sixteen,” Jenny said with a fond smile at Tasha. “I was new in town, and Tash stepped in when some kids started giving me shit about my father’s well-publicized incarceration for a Ponzi scheme—which we will talk about another time,” she added with a little grin when she saw the light of curiosity in her biracial friend’s eyes. “I just loved her from the start, because she had even less standing in that school than I did, yet instead of covering her ass and walking on by like any right-thinking individual would have done—”
Tash snorted and Jenny flashed her a grin.
“—she just jumped right into the fray. We went from that to bonding over the pizzas she made in her mama’s single-wide and a mutual determination to move beyond our circumstances.” Shaking her head, Jenny smiled ruefully. “I thought I had plans at the time. But Tash already had a full-fledged, neatly typed business plan for Bella T’s in her underwear drawer.”
It was true, so Tasha merely shrugged. But then she slapped a hand against the scarred wooden tabletop and straightened in her seat. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a while and it seems to me that calling my mother a whore is kind of unfair.” She made a waving motion as if to erase her words. “Oh, not that she hasn’t slept with an astounding number of men. But I can tell you that it was never for money. I’m not even convinced it was because she loved sex all that much.
“I didn’t understand for the longest time why she constantly slept around the way she did, and God knows I had to live down her reputation from the day I was old enough to understand what people meant when they said Nola Riordan was a slut. But not long before Jenny came to town, I began to realize that Mom views each new sexual encounter as a potential love match. And I’m talking Luuuv with a capital L.” Her tone leaned toward the sardonic, but it couldn’t be helped. “Against all evidence to the contrary, my mother sincerely, consistently and faaar too optimistically believed—”
“Believes,” Jenny interrupted.
“Right, and I have no doubt always will believe that each new relationship is going to be the real deal. She’s convinced that this time the prince will ride in on his white charger to sweep her off her feet. That this new lover will be The One.”
Harper propped her chin in her hand and sighed. “She’s a romantic.”
“No kidding.” Tasha made a rude noise. “Mom is definitely all about the fantasy.” She had a sudden flash of Nola coming back to the trailer late at night, lipstick smeared and hair mussed, smelling of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. Her mom would wake her up and pull her out of bed to whirl her around the room. “He’s going to take us away from this rattrap, baby,” she’d promise. “Just you wait and see.” God. How many times had she heard a riff on that tune?
Enough that she’d quit believing by the time she was nine or ten. Or younger.
“You don’t believe in romantic love?” Dropping her hand, Harper sat back. “Please, tell me it isn’t so.”
“Okay,” Tasha agreed amiably. “It isn’t so. At least to the extent that I’ve watched you and Jenny fall in love and can see a genuine magic to your relationships with the Bradshaw boys. I just don’t think it’s in the cards for the Riordan women.”
“Don’t be silly,” Jenny said. “Of course it is.”
“Excuse me if I don’t find it all that silly, Jen,” she snapped. “But not everyone’s as lucky as you.” She took a deep breath, gave her best friend a grimace of apology and said in a more moderate tone, “I’m sorry. That was stupid. But how many years did I watch Mom’s crazy quest for her prince and not believe? All of them, right? When I decided to unclench my grip on a bit of my hard-saved pizzeria money to take that trip to the tropics, all I was looking for were some white sand, blue sky memories of sipping mai tais in the shade of a palm tree. And, okay, maybe a few good photographs to lord over you.”
“You know I was crazy jealous, too,” Jenny said. “I hated that I couldn’t spare the money from my college tuition to go with you.”
Reaching across the table, she gave Jenny’s hand a squeeze, because she did know, and she had been way too crazy defensive just now. Then she got back on subject. “So, I wasn’t a believer. Then I met Diego. And for a few brief days I got it, you know? Finally, I understood what Mom had been chasing all those years with her perpetual search for love. From the moment we met, it was just so...effortless. He made me feel smart. Beautiful. And, God, so, so golden.”
Which had simply made the crash that much more devastating. And diligently as she tried now to prevent it, she felt her expression harden as she met her friends’ gazes. “It’s pretty clear I have my mother’s crappy taste in men. So, no, I’m not looking for love. Ever.” Seeing her friends’ distress, she tried to lighten the mood. “I wouldn’t mind having hot sex once in a while, though. My brushes with that have been pitifully few and far between.”
“Guys find you hot, and you know it,” her best friend disagreed mildly. “So I’m thinking that if you really wanted to, you could have sex a lot more often than you do.”
“Okay,” she conceded slowly, “maybe.”
“Men do seem to stare at you as if you’re a Playboy foldout,” Harper said.
“I know. It’s weird, right? I don’t get it.” She grinned at Harper. “My ego’s quite healthy, so I’m not saying that because I consider myself a dog. Heck, at times like this afternoon when I’ve put a little effort into it, I think I look pretty damn hot, too. But except for my boobs, which are very nice, if I do say so myself, my body is a long way from sexpot-curvy. Plus, I’ve got this head of crazy-ass hair.” She grasped a couple of handfuls and gave them a tug, then gave Harper’s equally curly mop a rueful smile. “Well, I hardly need to tell you about that. And thank God I’ve finally found some great products for it. But then there’s my damn upper lip.”
“Which men seem to find fascinating,” Harper said.
I love your mouth, Luc’s voice whispered in her head. She shut it down fast. And sighed. “Yeah, a lot of them do. And I’ve made my peace with it. I took a lot of grief for my lips when I was a kid, so it took me a long time to realize they aren’t actually freakish.”
Harper opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jenny suddenly straightened on the bench seat beside her.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Don’t look now, but Jake and Luc just walked in.”
Tasha’s heart gave a solid thump against the wall of her chest. For a good half hour after she and her friends had settled into their booth at the Anchor, she had half expected Luc to show up hot on her trail. Which was ridiculous when she actually thought about it, but she had seen the look in his carbon-dark eyes when he’d stared down at her from the veranda above Bella T’s, and the seed had been planted. Away from his presence, however, her tension had relinquished its grip on her shoulders.
Each new bit of her story that she’d related to Harper had also helped her to unwind. Growing up in a town the size of Razor Bay, it was a given that everybody knew everybody else. It had been kind of nice to share a little of herself with someone who didn’t already know nearly every blessed thing about her.
Now, curse Luc Bradshaw’s hide, she was tense all over again. “Dammit, why did he have to come in here and ruin everything? Are they coming over?”
“Maybe. I think so.” Jenny exhaled sharply. “No. I know they saw us, or at least Jake did. But they’re headed toward the back.”
Since they’d just passed into her line of vision, she nodded. “I can see that. Oh. Looks like they’re going to play some darts.”
She didn’t want to watch Luc, and she didn’t mean to. But she was facing that end of the tavern, and as Harper had said, it was hard to deny he was one hot-looking man.
She couldn’t seem to look away.
“For God’s sake, what is this, the official Bradshaw family rendezvous or something?” Jenny suddenly demanded, and her tone had Tasha finally tearing her gaze away from Luc, who was flashing those soft creases in his lean cheeks at the cocktail waitress serving him and Jake their beers. Pig.
Not that she gave a great big rip if he flirted with someone else or anything.
Preferring not to examine the validity of that claim too closely, she craned around in time to see Max pausing a few steps inside the Anchor, no doubt to let his vision adjust to the change in lighting. He looked around, and it was obvious when he spotted the guys. Then he located the three of them in their booth.
And, weaving his way through the half-filled tables, he strode over to them. “Ladies,” he said to Tasha and Jenny, giving them each a nod. Then he turned his attention to Harper. “Hey there, sweetheart.” Bracing his knuckles on the tabletop, he gave her a tender smile, then leaned down and kissed her. Straightening back up, he glanced over at Tasha. “I have some information on Luc for you,” he said. “You want to step outside with me?”
She considered it for maybe two seconds, then shook her head. “You can say what you have to say here. I’ll just tell them anyway.” Her voice was cool, but her pulse was tripping like Timothy Leary at the height of the psychedelic Sixties. Curious, she studied him. “How would you even know I wanted information on him?”
“I noticed last night that you were upset with him,” he said. “And Harper mentioned that you said something about him not being Luc at all but someone named Diego. It set off my spidey senses.” Faint color washed across his sharp cheekbones when they all looked at him, and he hitched his massive shoulders. “I’m a cop,” he said with what for Max was near-defensiveness. “My suspicions tend to be raised when somebody I know says a newly discovered relative isn’t who he’s told me he is. So I paid Luc a visit in his hotel room this morning to find out what was going on.”
“At last,” she said. “Someone who doesn’t simply take him at face value.”
“Yeah, well, you might not be as happy about this. Or, hell, maybe you will. I don’t know. But he’s not a drug dealer. He’s with the Drug Enforcement Administration.”
“Oh, please,” she said dismissively. “Did he show you his badge, too? I’m kind of disappointed in you. You must realize that anyone can buy anything on the internet these days.” But her stomach had begun to roil. Because if Max thought it was genuine—
It probably was.
“Anyone can maybe buy a knockoff that fools the general public,” he agreed easily, but in that deep, no-nonsense voice that just seemed to carry more authority. “But I’ve seen my share of badges in both the Marines and my time in the sheriff’s department and his looks legit. Besides, I called an old Marine buddy who’s now with the DOJ. He ran Luc and confirmed it. Guy’s DEA, Tash.”
“Thank you for letting me know. You’re a good friend.” She climbed out of the booth with stiff gracelessness. “I’ve gotta go.”
“No,” Jenny protested, but something in Tasha’s face when she turned her head to stare at her best friend must have warned Jenny off, for the petite brunette merely said quietly, “Must you?”
She couldn’t help herself; she glanced down the room to where the other two Bradshaw brothers were. Luc stood with his back to the dartboard and, even as she watched, sent a dart flying over his shoulder. It stuck in the fat above the double ring. She couldn’t hear Jake, but she was fairly sure he’d informed Luc of his score from the way Luc laughed.
Then he suddenly looked at her.
She started and jerked her attention back to Jenny. “Yes, I really must. When I found out that Luc was the one who’d rented Will’s apartment, I left the kitchen at Bella’s half cleaned. It needs to be finished before I open tomorrow.”
“I’ll help you.” Jenny started to slide out of the booth.
“No.” Tasha took an abrupt step back. “No. I love you for offering, but stay. Have a glass of wine with your fiancé.”
She was so happy that her best friend had found happiness with Jake. Glad for Max and Harper, as well. But she didn’t think she could bear to be around all that happiness right now. Not when she was so steeped in misery.
Her gaze glanced off Jenny’s, and she hoped her smile didn’t look as frozen as it felt. “I’ll talk to you soon,” she whispered. Then she whirled on her heel and made her getaway.
* * *
LUC GRABBED MAX by the arm as the other man made his way to the bar. “What the hell did you say to her?”
Max glanced down at the hand on his biceps, then transferred his gaze to Luc’s face. The you-don’t-wanna-be-doing-that cop look in his eye, coupled with the size and heft of his half brother’s muscle beneath his fingers, made Luc reconsider, and he dropped his hand to his side.
“Good to see you, too, bro,” Max rumbled, then met his gaze with the straight-shooter directness it hadn’t taken Luc long to figure out was Max’s default mode. “I told her I was damn near a hundred percent certain your DEA badge was real.”
“But...isn’t that a good thing?”
“You’d think so, right? But I guess not, because she looked like she’d just been kicked in the stomach. Maybe you being legit makes it somehow worse in her eyes. Because if you were the supposed good guy, how did she end up in jail—and why didn’t you lift a finger to help her?”
“I didn’t know about it! I gotta go talk to her.” He started to push past his half brother, but Max stepped more fully into his path. The guy was big and solid, so Luc had no option but to stop. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it. “What?”
“You need to take a big step back here. Just think about this for a minute—and try to look at it through Tash’s eyes. Something damn traumatic happened to her seven years ago, but she’s had time to put it behind her and move on.”
Realizing he’d been doing more reacting than thinking, which wasn’t his usual M.O. at all, Luc shook out his hands. “Then I show up.”
“Not only show up but are related to her best friends’ men. Which means there’s going to be no avoiding you. And Tasha just said something about you moving into her studio apartment? How the hell did you swing that?”
“I didn’t have a clue about Tasha when I sublet it from Will—I actually arranged it last month when I discovered you lived in Razor Bay. From the time I found out I had brothers, I’d been looking for you and Jake. I didn’t know when I found you, though, that Jake lived here, too.