“Be sure you get the señorita dried off quickly. Otherwise she might catch a cold.”
Maria left Adam standing with the towel in his hand and a smug grin on his face.
Once the housekeeper was gone, Adam turned back to Tate. And quickly lost his smirk. Because if the T-shirt had been revealing before, it was perfectly indecent now. He could easily see Tate’s flesh through the soaked cotton. The cold water had caused her nipples to peak into tight buds.
His mouth felt dry. His voice was ragged as he said, “Here. Wrap yourself in this.”
Only he didn’t extend the towel to her. He held it so she would have to step out of the pool and into his arms. When he encircled her with the terry cloth she shivered and snuggled closer.
“I’m freezing!” she said.
He, on the other hand, was burning up. How did she do it to him? This time, however, he had only himself to blame. He felt her cold nose burrow into his shoulder as his chin nuzzled her damp hair. The water had released the lilac scent of her shampoo. He took a deep breath and realized he didn’t want to let her go.
Adam vigorously rubbed the towel up and down Tate’s back, hoping to dispel the intimacy of the moment.
“Mmm. That feels good,” she murmured.
His body betrayed him again, responding with amazing rapidity to the throaty sound of her voice. He edged himself away from her, unwilling to admit his need to her. In fact, he felt the distinct necessity to deny it.
“I’m not going to make love to you, Tate.”
She froze in his arms. Her head lifted from his shoulder, and he found himself looking into eyes that warmed him like brandy.
“Why not, Adam? Is it because I’m not attractive to you?”
“Lord, no! Of course you’re a beautiful woman, but—” Adam groaned as he realized what he had just admitted.
“I am?”
What had those brothers of hers been telling her, Adam wondered, to make her doubt herself like this?
“Is it because I don’t dress like a lady?”
His only objection to the clothes she wore was his reaction to her in them. “Contrary to what you might have heard, clothes don’t make the man—or the woman.”
“Then it must be the fact that I’m a virgin,” she said.
Adam felt himself flushing. “Tate, you just don’t go around talking about things like that.”
“Not even with you?”
“Especially not with me!”
“Why not?”
They were back to that again. He turned her so he had an arm around her shoulder, and began ushering her across the courtyard to her bedroom. “I think it’s time you got out of those wet clothes.”
Tate’s impish smile reappeared. “Would you like to help me?”
“Not on your life!” He opened the sliding glass door and gave her a nudge inside. “I’ll meet you in the office in fifteen minutes and you can show me whatever bookkeeping wonders you’ve accomplished today.” He turned and marched across the courtyard, fighting the urge to look back.
Once she was alone in her room, Tate let the towel drop. She stared at herself in the standing oval mirror in the corner and groaned. She looked like something the cat had dragged in! No wonder Adam hadn’t been interested!
Tate sat down on a wooden chair to pull off her wet boots, then yanked her T-shirt off and struggled with the wet zipper of her jeans. She peeled her silk panties down and quickly began replacing her clothing with an identical wardrobe. All except the wet boots, for which she substituted a pair of beaded Indian moccasins Charlie One Horse had given her for Christmas.
While Tate dressed, she reviewed the events of the past three weeks since she had arrived at the Lazy S. Teasing Adam had begun as a way of making him admit the sexual attraction—and something more—that existed between them. But she had discovered that kidding some folks was like teasing a loaded polecat. The satisfaction was short-lived.
Tate hadn’t been enjoying the game much these days, mainly because she had begun to suffer from the sexually charged situations as much as Adam. The problem was, on her side at least, her heart followed where her hormones led.
She would give anything if Adam was as interested in her as Buck seemed to be. The lean-hipped cowboy had been asking her every day for a week if she would go out with him on Saturday night. Well, maybe she should. Maybe if Adam saw that somebody else found her worth pursuing, he would get the same idea.
Tate had a cheerful smile on her face by the time she joined Adam in his office. He already had the computer on and was perusing the statistics she had input there.
“So what do you think?” she asked, perching herself on the arm of the large swivel chair in which he was sitting.
“It looks good.” Of course his office wasn’t as neat as it had once been. There were half-filled coffee cups amidst the clutter on the desk, and a collection of magazines and a dirty T-shirt decorated the floor. A bridle and several other pieces of tack Tate was fixing were strewn around the room.
But he couldn’t argue with what she had accomplished. Tate had set up a program to handle data on each head of stock, providing a record that would be invaluable in making buying and selling decisions. “You didn’t tell me you knew so much about computers.”
Tate grinned and said, “You didn’t ask.” She leaned across him and began earnestly discussing other ideas she had regarding possible uses of the computer in his business.
He started automatically cleaning the debris from his desk.
“Don’t worry about those,” Tate said, taking a handful of pebbles from him. “Aren’t they pretty? I found them down by the creek.” She scattered them back onto the desk. “I play with them while I’m thinking, sort of like worry beads, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
Adam forced himself to concentrate on what she was saying, rather than the way her breast was pressed up against his arm. By the time she was done talking about the projects she had in mind, she had shifted position four times. He knew because she had managed to brush some part of his anatomy with some part of hers each time she moved.
Tate was totally oblivious to Adam’s difficulty, because she was having her own problems concentrating on the matters at hand. She was busy planning how she could make Adam sit up and take notice of her by accepting Buck’s invitation to go out tomorrow evening. She just had to make sure that Adam saw her leaving on the date with the auburn-haired cowboy.
Her thoughts must have conjured Buck, because he suddenly appeared at the door to Adam’s office.
“Need you to take a look at that irrigation system to see whether you want it repaired or replaced,” Buck said.
“I’ll be right there,” Adam replied.
Buck had already turned to leave when Tate realized she had the perfect opportunity to let Adam know she was going out with another man. “Oh, Buck.”
Buck turned and the hat came off his head in the same motion. “Yes, ma’am?”
“I’ve decided to take you up on your offer to go dancing tomorrow night.”
Buck’s face split with an engaging grin. “Yes, ma’am! I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock if that’s all right, and we can have some dinner first.”
The thunderous