he won’t soon forget.”
“Give him hell, Miss Collins,” Barney said on a giggle.
“You can count on it,” Cassie promised, then turned on her heel and headed for the garage with the relieved security officers trailing after her.
After waving goodbye to her obliging dream team, Cassie opened the door to her silver Lexus sedan, placed the black-and-white scoundrel on the passenger’s seat, then slid behind the wheel.
“So, you belong to the famous Nick Hardin, do you?” she said, looking over at the mutt who was responsible for turning her peaceful Saturday morning into a full-blown disaster. “Well, thanks to you, my scruffy little friend, we’ll see if your obnoxious master still has a sense of humor after this vulture picks his bones clean for the damages you’ve caused this morning.”
IT TOOK LESS THAN five minutes for Cassie and her hostage to make the short trip to the old Tudor mansion Nick Hardin had purchased some six months earlier. When she reached the gate to the aging estate, Cassie pulled into the winding driveway that led up to the house. She had always loved the charm of the old place, especially the brilliant rhododendrons and the multicolored azaleas that lined both sides of the driveway. The old Jeep and the big Harley-Davidson motorcycle that were parked haphazardly in the driveway, however, looked as out of place as the radio talk-show host had been since he moved into her neighborhood.
Eager to give the cocky old coot an up-close-and-personal look at the legal system he was always complaining about on his stupid radio program, Cassie switched off the engine and grabbed the furry scamp sitting next to her. Marching straight to the front door, Cassie paused on the stoop and pressed the doorbell long enough for the blast to wake the dead. When her adversary failed to appear from within his fortress, Cassie reached for the bell again, but the squirming captive in the crook of her arm saw his chance and wiggled from her grasp.
“You come back here this minute,” Cassie yelled.
The naughty little maverick bounded around the side of the house and Cassie dashed after him. Charging through the back gate in hot pursuit, she almost had the miniature monster in her grasp, but a loud splash from the backyard pool brought her to a sudden stop. When she looked up, her eyes widened in disbelief as the lower half of a nude male body slipped beneath the surface of the shimmering blue water.
Ignoring her own gasp, Cassie willed herself to move, but the instincts that kept screaming run didn’t relay the message to her addled brain fast enough. Before she could flee, a bronzed phantom with an upper torso reminiscent of the Incredible Hulk’s broke the water’s surface gracefully with muscled forearms stretched out before him.
Cassie watched in awe as Adonis himself made long, purposeful strides across the water in her direction. This can’t be Nick Hardin, she kept assuring herself, but she’d never actually seen Nick Hardin before, not even a picture of him. It was his politically incorrect attitude that led Cassie to believe he would be much older than this Greek god she had just caught in the buff. In fact, the mental picture Cassie had always put with that deep baritone voice on the radio was one of a middle-aged hippie who was still trying to cling to the lost age of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Please, God, let this Chippendale refugee be Nick Hardin’s pool man, Cassie prayed silently, aware that the naked stranger was now swimming dangerously close to the shallow end of the pool.
To her relief, he stopped when the water was still waist-high, ran a hand through his unfashionably long hair, then stared back at Cassie with eyes the color of midnight. “Well, good morning,” he called out boldly. “I’d given up hope of the Biltmore Forest welcoming committee dropping by, but if you’re the representative it was well worth the wait.”
The second she heard that too-familiar baritone voice, Cassie felt a searing flush spread straight to the center of her cheeks. Squaring her shoulders, she sent him the type of icy stare that she usually reserved for the courtroom. “You’re Nick Hardin?” she managed to say, already knowing the answer.
“Guilty as charged,” he admitted with a cocksure grin. “And you are?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Hardin, but I’m definitely not the welcoming committee,” she informed him curtly, then pointed to the black-and-white half breed who was running up and down the edge of the pool, yapping at his master. “I brought your dog home, because…”
“Hey, if the mutt’s been in your garbage, I’m sorry,” Nick interrupted. “I found the little bandit at a garbage dump when he was only a pup. It’s a bad habit of his I can’t seem to break.”
The overwhelming knowledge that the degenerate dog had credentials even worse than she imagined instantly erased any curiosity Cassie had about the part of Nick Hardin’s body that was still under water. “Oh, I assure you, your dog’s crime is much more serious than raiding trash cans,” she remarked tersely. “Your mutt, as you call him, dug a hole under my fence this morning and accosted a world-champion show dog.”
Cassie watched an amused look cross his painfully handsome face while he digested her statement. At about the time Cassie decided Nick Hardin was actually contemplating the seriousness of the situation, he burst out with the same gregarious laughter he’d exhibited when she called to complain about his stupid lawyer jokes.
How dare he laugh about his own negligence! Reaching for the first thing that caught her eye, Cassie grabbed a towel from a nearby deck chair and flung it in her tormentor’s direction. “If I were you, I’d get out of the pool and get dressed, Mr. Hardin,” she informed him curtly. “I doubt you’re going to find things so funny when we discuss the extensive lawsuit I intend to file against you.”
NICK CAUGHT THE TOWEL easily, but remained in the center of the pool, watching his exquisite guest stomp back around the side of the house. He’d always been a sucker for cutoffs, and this lady had a delectable little fanny that filled out the short cutoff jeans to perfection.
When he’d first surfaced from his dive, Nick decided his fuzzy head from his night out with the boys the previous evening was responsible for conjuring up the vision of loveliness he found standing beside his pool. When he started swimming in her direction, however, the shocked deer-in-the-headlights look she gave him convinced Nick that his visitor was real.
In no longer than it took to shake the water from his face, he had absorbed every detail of her more-than-pleasing appearance. She was literally stunning, even in cutoff jeans and a baggy T-shirt that had Run for Fun splashed across the front. Not that the loose-fitting T-shirt concealed her well-endowed bosom from Nick’s prying eyes, because it didn’t. No more than her extremely short cutoffs kept him from committing her long, perfectly shaped legs permanently to his memory.
The only problem seemed to be her age. Though her manner of speaking and the way she carried herself suggested she was older than she looked, her teenager-type attire and her slightly askew ponytail made Nick suspect she was barely past twenty. Enticing or not, women on the low side of twenty were much too young, even for a thirty-something rake such as he.
Pulling himself out of the pool, Nick wrapped the wet towel around his waist, then wandered into the house, oblivious to the dripping water that trailed across the expensive parquet floors. The last thing he needed to start his weekend off was another irate neighbor. He had left the rat race in Atlanta, seeking peace and solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains, only to find when he arrived in Asheville that he’d traveled back in time fifty years. The upper-crust socialites who shared his lovely locality had been appalled by his long hair, outraged by his refusal to adhere to their silly rules and dress codes, and mortified by the big Harley-Davidson that had always been Nick’s
