could ever tame.
Nonsense, she told herself. Utter hogwash.
She drew in a deep breath and reprimanded herself firmly for her moment of weakness. She had been taming the untamable her whole life!
She was here on assignment for her father. Her assignment was to bring back the Clint they knew. But regarding him now, across the space of his well-manicured yard, she wondered if anyone had ever known him—or ever would.
But she had a third realization. She was also on assignment for herself.
Get over it, once and for all. It was probably this silly infatuation with Clint that was preventing her from jumping at Jason’s proposal.
She would lay her childish heartbreaks and hopes to rest. She would see Clint McPherson through the realistic eyes of a mature woman and tame that thing inside of her that wanted him.
Her exact words on her nineteenth birthday, if she recalled, and of course she did, in every excruciating and humiliating detail.
He looked at her for a long time, his expression unreadable, but certainly in no way welcoming. There was an impenetrable shield in his eyes, and his lips remained in a firm line. He folded his arms over the expanse of his chest, formidable, the lines of his face and body totally uninviting. Yet for all the rugged barriers set up by his body language, the unyielding expression on his face, the question that crowded her mind was How could a man approaching forty look so damned good?
Well, all you had to do was look at the men in Hollywood: Harrison, Tom, the other Clint. Some men aged well, like wine, and he was one of them.
Unfortunately.
She forced herself to move forward. She was good at this—looking over the side of a cliff or off the edge of the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper—and grinning with reckless abandon, as if nothing mattered to her, as if she knew no fear.
She strode toward him. “Hey,” she said. “Sobersides! Long time, no see.”
He inclined his head toward her, acknowledgment; his eyes narrowed, no smile. Not that she had expected one. He hated being called Sober-sides almost as much as she hated being called Brandgwen.
Before they could really take up their battle stations, the shrubs parted beside him and a gurgle emerged, followed by a baby, on all fours, her face dirty, her diaper swollen.
Brandy slowed her advance, entranced. Thirteen months. She knew the baby’s age, exactly.
Clint’s focus had shifted to his baby, too. That hard light in his eyes and the grim lines of his face softened, and for the briefest moment she caught sight of a vulnerability so immense it shook her to her core. But his face closed again, almost instantly, and she looked quickly away, almost terrified by the fact she might have glimpsed tenderness in him.
It seemed to be a good strategy, given the insanely wild beating of her heart. Brandy got down on her knees before his daughter.
The child was beautiful, her eyes the same tawny color as his, her shoulder-length hair a riot of messy red curls, freckles spattered across her fair skin. She put her thumb in her mouth and drew enthusiastically on it, her eyes narrowed.
Brandy glanced from the father to the daughter.
They were eyeing her with identical expressions of wariness, as if an enemy had trespassed the sanctuary of the clan camp.
“Brandgwen.”
She winced when he said her name, and at first he thought it was the gravel in his voice, but then he remembered she hated that form of her name. She preferred Brandy. Well, that was okay. He preferred almost anything to Sober-sides. A simple thing—the exchange of greetings—and yet already he could feel the friction between them.
He had not seen her for a long time, and he felt the shock of her presence, the subtle electricity of her. Of course, he had seen her in photographs, more recently in newspapers and magazines that could not seem to get enough of the oldest and youngest King girls. Just last month, he had caught a glimpse of her on the evening news after she had performed another outrageous stunt.
The cameras had caught the wild tangle of her hair, the devil-may-care quality of her grin, the jauntiness of her wave.
But had missed—as every photo and film sequence seemed to miss—her astounding essence.
Brandy King was not a pretty girl. Her features were too strong, much like her father’s, and the cameras had an almost cruel capacity to capture her lack of traditional beauty. Photographed, she always managed to look intensely ordinary, a plain Jane with an attitude. She also played down her absolutely stunning curves by dressing like a boy.
Photographs, even interviews on television, always totally failed to capture her fire, that mysterious something that was extraordinarily sensual and compelling.
Up close and personal, it was a different story. Her eyes, as sapphire as that lake when it changed color at dawn, glittered with that inner spark, an unsettling combination of mischief and passion. Her hair was dark and thick and shiny. It didn’t look as if she had run a comb through it anytime today, and when she saw him looking at it, she registered his look as disapproval, and tossed her hair with the spirited defiance of a wild horse tossing her mane. That grin was reckless and devil-may-care and totally disarming.
The simple truth was that Brandgwen King meant trouble.
She always had.
Yet when her father, Jake, had called and asked if she could stay with Clint and Becky at the lake for a little while, how could he refuse?
Jake was more than a business associate, more than his boss. He was Clint’s friend, his mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father. Jake had once seen something in a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks and had believed in that something until it had come true.
Jake had offered no explanation for the imminent arrival of his eldest daughter, but Clint had assumed Brandy’s penchant for adventure mixed with mischief had left her in some kind of mess and that she needed to hide out until it blew over.
Well, there was no hideout quite like this one.
He’d been hiding successfully from the pain in his life for over a year and planned to keep on doing so.
He felt a small hand on his leg, and his daughter pulled herself to standing, swung behind his leg and then peeped out at Brandy with caution and reserve. Her diaper drooped nearly to her knees and her face showed telltale signs she had been sampling the dirt—again.
That feeling of inadequacy swept over him. He was a man accustomed to being in charge, but being entrusted with the care of his infant daughter had thrown him into an entirely different arena. He was like a man in a foreign land, lost, uncertain of which direction to take, having no grasp for the new language of his new world. He was fighting, as was his instinct, not to let it show that with his tiny daughter he came face-to-face with his own weaknesses and uncertainties every day.
But he was a disciplined man, and so he was careful not to let any of this slip onto his features. Brandy had a gift for sniffing out weakness and exploiting it. On her nineteenth birthday, just a little bit tipsy, hadn’t she seen his greatest weakness?
“So, you’re
