phantom standing at the end of her lounge chair.
“Hey,” said a young male voice that sounded as if it were consciously striving to be cool. The phantom moved, dropping down onto the chaise next to her, where he turned into a long, lanky teen with slicked-back dark hair and pretty hazel-green eyes. He swiped his forearm over his dripping forehead as his gaze skittered from her breasts to her bare stomach to her legs and back up to her face.
“Hey, yourself,” she said, and cast an inward sigh, waiting for the tired pickup line that was sure to come.
“Where are your dogs?” he asked, glancing around as if expecting them to pop out of the neatly maintained grounds surrounding the pool enclosure. “You shoulda brought ’em down with you.”
It was the last thing she’d expected, and she flashed him a grin that was purely spontaneous. All right, a fellow dog lover—not an adolescent jerk, at all. You gotta love a male with the good taste to be a cut above the average Joe. “No pets allowed at the pool, I’m afraid,” she said, and gave the teenager a discreet once-over.
He was going to be a big man someday, but he hadn’t yet bulked up beneath his lightly tanned skin. He still had that slightly undernourished, awkward look some still-growing adolescents got. She’d bet the bank, though, that one day he’d fill out to be an all-around hunk. And given those poet’s eyes, she imagined that even now he drove the little girls wild.
She stuck out her hand. “I’m Carly, by the way.”
He got tangled up in the towel he’d wrapped around himself as he leaned forward to thrust out his own hand. Dull color promptly stained his cheeks, but he extricated himself with a minimum of fuss and shook her hand firmly. “Niklaus.”
“Nice to meet you, Niklaus. How do you know about my dogs?”
“I saw you with them on your balcony last night.”
At midnight? “From where, toots? The courtyard?”
“Nah.” He jerked his chin in the general direction of her building. “I’m your new neighbor.”
“No kidding?” She regarded him with interest. “I didn’t realize any of the units were even on the market.”
“They probably aren’t. I just moved in next door with my uncle. You might know him.” His voice changed, taking on a slightly resentful tone. “Wolfgang Jones.”
“That’s your uncle?” The Iceberg had a family? That was so…human. And here she’d thought he’d sprung fully grown from the loins of Medusa.
Niklaus nodded and Carly said, “When did that happen?”
“My grandma brought me to Vegas earlier this week, but we stayed at Circus Circus so I didn’t move in until last night.”
And Wolfgang had had the balls to accuse her of being irresponsible? She would never leave a kid all by himself in a strange apartment on his first night in residence. She had half a mind to hunt him down and tell him so, too.
Fortunately she still had a few working brain cells in the remaining half. But she couldn’t prevent herself from asking, “Where’s your uncle now?”
“Dr. Gloom?” Niklaus shrugged. “Upstairs, I guess. Probably starching his shorts.”
She grinned. Oh God, she and this kid were going to get along so fine. It was almost too bad that he wasn’t twenty years older—or that she wasn’t into cradle robbing. Otherwise she might have found her soul mate.
Still, she supposed it wasn’t copacetic to foment rebellion between relatives, so she reeled in her goofy grin and slapped her best I-gotta-be-the-adult-here expression in its place. “Now, now, I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice person,” she said, and even managed to sound as if she meant it. If you like the I’ve-got-a-plan-for-everything—right-down-to-my-own-orgasm—type.
The latter thought kicked the slats out from under her amusement, since it brought with it a much too vivid recollection of the morning’s events. That was a memory she had no desire to revisit.
It also had nothing to do with Niklaus, who was looking at her with the sort of hesitant longing she usually associated with her rescued pets.
There was just no way she could turn her back on that. She’d never been able to with the furry contingent, and she didn’t have the heart to ignore the teen’s obvious need for a friend, either. The poor kid was a stranger in Las Vegas, and within the next couple of days would probably have to contend with being the new kid on the block at a new school, as well. And as if that weren’t dreary enough, he was saddled with the most humorless male in the known universe as his guardian. Who on earth had thought that was a good idea?
She rose to her feet and looked down at the teen. “I’m going to go take a quick dip,” she informed him. “Then if you want to, you’re welcome to come upstairs to meet my babies.”
“You’ve got kids?”
She laughed. “No. That’s what I call my menagerie. And as I said, you’re welcome to come on up and meet them.”
A killer smile flashed across his face and he hopped to his feet with touching alacrity. “Sweet!”
“You think so, huh?” She smiled at his eagerness. Then a thought popped into her mind, and her smiled widened. “So, tell me. Do you happen to speak German?”
“Yeah, sure. Grandma’s from Bavaria, and both Mom and Uncle Wolf speak it so I learned as a little kid. Why?”
“Because you’ve just been enlisted to help me train Rufus.”
They looked at each other. Then, as one, they grinned and said in unison, “Sweet!”
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