Just the sight, just the memory made him smile.
Neely Robson be damned, he’d done the right thing buying Frank’s houseboat. It already felt more like home than his penthouse ever had.
He went out onto the deck and had a look at Robson’s painting project. The ladder was still there. She’d cleaned up the paint and brushes and they sat in a neat row on one of the built-in benches around the edge of the deck.
He studied her choice of color in the light of the morning sun. She’d painted over a gunmetal grey with a softer more silvery shade of grey. It surprised him. He’d have expected her to go for pink. Or purple. Or some other gaudy touchy-feely color.
The grey wasn’t bad. It would weather well, soften in the sun and it fit in well with the surroundings. He hefted the paint can to see that there was plenty left and was pleased that there was. She’d taken down the gutters and painted them. He’d hang them back up, then take up where she left off. But first he had to go to the grocery store and buy some food.
He went back inside and plucked a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge—left over from the one he’d finally ordered last night—and ate it while he reconnoitered, getting a feel for the rest of the boat.
With Robson glaring at him—and clearly upset—he hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over his new purchase.
He’d gone upstairs, then stripped off his wet clothes, showered and changed—so he had a good idea what the bathroom was like, and was grimly pleased upon looking around to discover that she hadn’t overrun it the way his sisters were doing to his at that very moment.
But he hadn’t wasted time upstairs. Once he was cleaned up, he came back down, opened up his laptop and set up his printer on the desk in the living room and settled down to do some work.
Begin as you mean to go on, his grandfather had always advised.
It was cliché, of course, but it was true, as well. And Seb had long ago learned the wisdom of it. It had helped him cope with the bevy of new “mothers” his father brought home. It had stood him in good stead at work.
He never tried to please. He worked hard and he always kept his own counsel. It made life simpler that way.
If people didn’t like him, too bad.
Neely Robson didn’t like him.
As if he cared. He didn’t like her much, either.
And it would be a damn good thing when she and her menagerie were out from underfoot.
With luck, by the time he got back from grocery shopping, she’d already be packing.
Neely had never been a Boy Scout.
She did, however, believe in the motto: Be Prepared.
So she was prepared, when she let herself in the front door that afternoon, to lay a proposal on the line to Sebastian Savas.
She’d thought it all out after she’d left Frank’s. Maybe he was right. Maybe by now Sebastian had buyer’s remorse. Maybe he woke up this morning seasick. Well, probably not. But she could hope.
In any event, she spent three hours at the public library—because she wasn’t going home—reworking her finances, then calling her mother in Wisconsin to say that things would be a little tight for a few months. Lara wouldn’t care. She never thought of money anyway.
And then Neely came back to the houseboat, prepared to make Mr. Cold-Blooded Businessman an offer he wouldn’t refuse.
She wasn’t prepared to walk into the living room and find herself staring out through the plate glass window at a very different man entirely.
In the seven months she’d worked for Grosvenor Design she had never seen Sebastian in anything other than a suit. Sometimes he took his coat off and she saw his long-sleeved dress shirts. And once, on a job site, she’d seen his collar unbuttoned and his tie askew. Last night, of course, she’d seen him in a suit—dripping wet.
Even after Harm had knocked him in the water and he’d showered, Sebastian had come back downstairs wearing another dress shirt and a pair of pressed dark trousers. Okay, he hadn’t worn a tie. But big deal.
She’d told Max once that she thought Sebastian had been born wearing cuff links.
It didn’t seem far-fetched. He wore his cool, calm demeanor like a suit of well-fitting armor. And his well-pressed, totally-together look promised the icy aloofness and consummate unapproachability which was, with Sebastian Savas, exactly what you got.
So who was the guy with the bare tanned feet and faded blue-jean-clad muscular legs braced against the upper rungs of her ladder?
Neely stopped in her tracks. But even as her body stopped dead, her gaze kept right on moving up—until it was well and truly caught by the sight of several inches of hard flat masculine abs peeking out from beneath a sun-bleached red T-shirt.
There was even an arrow of dark hair visible until it disappeared into the waistband of the jeans as the man wearing them reached up and slapped paint on the wall above the window.
Neely wet her lips. She swallowed. Hard. And swallowed again.
Her heart seemed suddenly to be doing the Mexican Hat Dance in her chest. She forced herself to take a breath—and then another—as she tried to regain her equilibrium.
It was what came of being an architect, she told herself, still combating light-headedness. They just had extraordinarily well-developed senses of appreciation for physical beauty, for strength and economy and power all wrapped up in one neat, um, package.
Perhaps not best choice of words.
On the other hand, quite possibly the most accurate, she thought as her gaze fastened on the bulge beneath the soft denim right below his waistband and framed between the rungs of the ladder.
Her face flamed and, deliberately, Neely squeezed her eyes shut tight.
She didn’t see the kittens tussling right in front of her. And of course, she stepped on them.
“Mrrrrooowwwww!”
“Oh, help!” Neely stumbled, shrieked, caught herself against the back of the sofa and jerked open her eyes just in time to hear the paintbrush clatter to the deck and see Sebastian—who else?—skim down the ladder like a fireman on his way to a four-alarm blaze.
His gaze locked on her even as he reached down to scoop the brush up off the deck and toss it in the paint tray.
“What the hell—?”
“It’s n-nothing. N-nothing,” Neely said hastily.
“If it was nothing, why’d you shriek? What happened?”
“Nothing happened!” Face still burning, Neely crouched down and snagged up the kittens, clutching them to her chest and gently kneading their small squirming bodies to make sure they weren’t hurt.
Sebastian jerked open the door and glowered accusingly. “Don’t tell me you were shocked to see me. I live here.”
That wasn’t what had shocked her. She cuddled the kittens closer. “I stumbled,” she said. “I landed on the kittens.”
He looked skeptical, but finally he shrugged. Why did his shoulders look even broader in a T-shirt than in a dress shirt? Unfair.
“You should watch where you’re going,” he told her.
“Obviously.” And she wasn’t about to tell him why she hadn’t been. Instead she buried her face in their fur and took a few more deep breaths until finally she lifted her gaze again and said, “You don’t have to paint.”
He rolled his shoulders. “It’s my boat. Or were you going to say it’s your paint?”
Neely pressed her lips together. “It is, actually.