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 swallowed hard, remembering the night of her dateless junior prom. Luke had come to spend that weekend with his father. Exuberant as always, he’d burst into her room and found her crying. He hadn’t known what to do with a weepy female, and had plucked the hairbrush out of her hand. More, she’d been sure, for something to do with his hands than to console her, he’d ended up brushing her hair for hours as they talked. Luke looking at the back of her head, Catherine watching his face, unobserved, in her vanity mirror across the room. She never did remember what they’d talked about, only that it was the first time she’d experienced sexual awareness. For her, it was the night their relationship had changed forever.
That was the night she’d realized she loved him.
Her ponytail brushed between her shoulder blades and she shivered, remembering the sensual pleasure of Luke’s fingers in her hair, against her nape.... Get a grip here, she warned herself sternly, as she waited for him to unlock the massive oak door. Before she followed him inside, she bent to pull a weed that had managed to grow through the wood slats.
“Gonna plant that in a pot?” Luke turned, indicating the two-foot weed clutched in her hand, soil trailing from its roots.
His smile tangled up in Catherine’s heart. Sunlight stroked his dark hair and magnified his strong, unshaved jaw. His long, lean body looked breathtaking in washed-almost-white jeans and a short leather jacket. He looked handsome, disreputable and too sexy for a small-town girl from Oregon. Yet she wanted him more than her next breath. She held out the droopy weed. “Got a pot?”
“And a window,” he said dryly. “Here, give me that. I’ll take you on the twenty-dollar tour.” He took the plant, tossed it outside, then brushed off his hands.
“Twenty bucks, huh?”
“And worth every penny. Careful where you walk. Not all the nails are countersunk in the subflooring.”
The square entry echoed their footsteps as she followed him into a large room filled with sawhorses, paint cans, lumber scraps and other paraphernalia of construction. Sunlight streamed through the plastic-covered windows. The room smelled of fresh wood, mudding compound and dust. She sidestepped boxes of nails and a mountain of Sheetrock to cross the room.
“Wow. This fireplace looks great.” Catherine ran her hand lightly over the enormous natural stones, then glanced at him over her shoulder. “Did you carry even one of these
