He closed the door gently behind him, feeling as though he’d just escaped something too terrifying to contemplate.
* * *
“OH, MY GOD, Luke, don’t take the corners so fast!” Catherine screamed as the Hideous Harley did a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet skim around another corner. Clinging to his waist, she gripped his belt buckle with both hands. The seat felt obscenely wide between her thighs.
“Lean, Cat. Lean.”
She leaned, sure her helmet must have brushed the gray asphalt as they cornered at an impossible angle.
Luke hadn’t given her time to dry her hair. The moment she’d dressed in jeans and another of his oversize sweatshirts, he’d hustled her down to the parking garage, ignored his well-preserved 1977 Jag, climbed onto his enormous black demon motorcycle, handed her the spare helmet, revved the engine and instructed her to hold on.
If she’d been holding him any tighter, she would have been in front. The speed scared her speechless, no easy feat. Nevertheless, she’d better learn to love the wind tugging her hair from the helmet, biting into her face and making her nose and eyes run. Luke loved his bike.
His house was an hour south of San Francisco, down narrow, windy, stomach-churning coastal roads. Catherine squeezed her eyes shut and buried her icy nose against his leather-clad back, remembering the first time he’d taken her up behind him. She’d been ten. He was seventeen.
He’d only taken her because Dad had insisted she get the first ride on his new bike. She’d been terrified. Luke had been furious at her for being such a baby and had screamed blue murder at her for three blocks. The wind had caused her eyes to tear. And Luke and Dad had had a huge, yelling, door-slamming fight when they got back.
“Loosen up a bit, Catwoman. I can’t breathe.”
Since Catherine hadn’t drawn a proper breath in more than an hour, she ignored his request. He felt warm and solid in her arms. “Are we there yet?” she whined like a five-year-old.
She felt Luke’s laugh vibrate through her body like dark, sinfully rich chocolate. Oh, yes. She’d made the right decision coming to San Francisco. Yes, indeedy.
* * *
“STOP HERE FOR a sec,” Catherine demanded an hour later as the bike turned from the tarred road parallel to the ocean onto the as-yet-unpaved gravel of Luke’s new driveway. The fog had burned off, leaving sparkling spring sunshine glinting off the Pacific in the distance. Catherine inhaled the fresh briny air deep into her lungs as she let go of him and flung her leg over the bike the moment he brought it to a stop.
She stood, took off her helmet, then shaded her eyes with one hand against the sun, waiting for her heart to take up its normal rhythm after being glued to Luke for miles.
While the soft whoosh of the ocean sounded behind her, she forced herself to check out his house, as opposed to analyzing which body part felt what from the close encounter of the third kind with Luke’s body.
Constructed of weathered redwood, tucked into the surrounding trees on a bluff overlooking a sliver of beach and the vastness of the ocean, the single-story house already had a look of permanence. Wonderfully gnarled, windblown cypress trees dotted the front yard.
“It’s going to be magnificent, Luke.”
Unaccountably, she felt the sting of tears, and rubbed the end of her nose with her palm. The house had been a goal of his for as long as she could remember. From the second he’d decided he wanted to be an architect, Luke had vowed to build his house from the ground up with his own two hands. A strangely permanent idea for a temporary kind of guy. Catherine wondered if Luke realized how at odds owning a house was with his playboy lifestyle.
While Luke loved the intricate curlicues and elaborate bits and pieces of Victorian houses, he’d explained to her once that he needed the clean, uncluttered lines of more modern architecture to cleanse his palate when he came home.
She noticed the enormous bay window in the living room. A window she’d suggested one rainy winter’s night as they’d pored over the first version of his blueprints years ago. She doubted if he suspected how many of her own dreams had been woven into his house plans.
Gravel crunched under his workboots as Luke came up behind her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. They stood silently for several moments looking up the slight incline to the house. Catherine was excruciatingly conscious of him behind her. She felt each finger on her shoulders, the warmth of his tall body shielding her back from the hair-ruffling breeze. The air smelled of salt spray and fresh lumber. But most of all it smelled of sun-warmed Luke in leather.
His proximity had already caused her stomach to coil into knots. After an hour of straddling his rangy body she needed to put some distance between them. She stepped out of reach and smiled over her shoulder. “Let’s walk the rest of the way so we can get the full ambiance.”
Luke grimaced and Catherine grinned. If Luke could ride instead of walk, sit instead of stand or call instead of write, he was a happy man.
“Exercise is good for you. It can’t be more than half a mile.”
“These are workboots,” he told her, “not walking boots. I have to save my energy for bossing you and Nick around.”
She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll walk. You ride. You should be an interesting-looking specimen once you hit forty. Flabby. Weak. Pasty. Probably sickly. That’s okay,” she said cheerfully, “you won’t be the first man to wear a waist cincher.”
Luke sighed, then knocked back the kickstand with his toe and rolled the bike beside her. “I go to the gym four times a week.”
Catherine laughed. “You go there to pick up women.” Luke’s indolence had been a family joke. Yet there’d been nothing soft about the stomach muscles she’d felt when she’d clung to him on the bike, or the hard, tight muscles in his behind pressed between her thighs. There wasn’t a flabby muscle on Luke’s six-three frame.
“I pay the dues. I can do whatever I want.”
He probably bench-pressed two blond gym bunnies. He might give the impression of being lazy, but Luke was no slouch in the flirtation department. Catherine had seen him in action. How many women, despite knowing Luke’s views on marriage, wanted him anyway? But she wasn’t going to dwell on that today. She was the woman he was with on this beautiful spring day. And she was going to enjoy every moment of it.
On either side of the slightly rolling topography, weeds, shrubs and vines tangled with thick trunks of oak, pine and cypress. There wasn’t another house for half a mile. The only sounds were ocean breezes and insects in the long grasses.
“Nick’s late,” Luke commented as he detoured to angle the monster bike through a patch of sand, parking it against a prefab shed off to one side of the half-finished front porch.
“You work the poor guy like a slave. We barely got here ourselves.”
“He’s cheap, but he’s good.” Luke squinted in the wind that ruffled his dark hair. He sent her a grin. “And he’s bringing lunch. Now, if I could just get him to give up some of his active social life, I might have this house finished next month as planned.”
“It’s a long commute,” she said casually. A month? My God, there was no way she could pull this off in a month. Could she?
“Well, the office won’t be practically across the street as it is now, but an hour’s commute these days is nothing. Come on, I want to show off everything before Nick gets here.”
Catherine followed Luke slowly as he walked up the wide, shallow redwood steps onto a deep porch. He bounced lightly, testing each tread. His fingers lingered as he trailed them up the simple banister beside the front steps. He took pride in his craftsmanship and it showed. Luke had a hedonistic pleasure in textures. He always had. She was jealous of the attention the wood was getting.
Catherine