her. His body had been denied satisfaction, and now he was itchy, restless.
One thing he knew for sure.
Kissing Mazie Tarleton was an experience he planned to repeat. Some way. Somehow. Maybe she didn’t know it, but J.B.’s intentions were crystal clear.
Now that he had touched her, tasted her, there was no going back...
Mazie wanted to go straight home and take a long cold shower, but it was too early in the day to be done with work, and besides, Gina was expecting her to return.
There was no choice but to brazen it out.
Which was not easy when a girl was commando under her skirt.
Fortunately, the shop was swamped with customers. Mazie barely did more than wave at Gina and say hello to her other employees before she was pulled into the fray. Thank goodness for tour ships that dispatched groups of passengers ashore, eager to tick off items on their Christmas lists.
At last, the furor subsided. Mazie sent two of her employees on lunch break. She glanced at her watch. It was almost one.
Mazie had advertised heavily during the last year in several of the cruise lines’ brochures. Her print ads were paying off, despite the digital age. Today, she’d had several customers come in clutching their maps of the historic district. All That Glitters was clearly marked, along with the small rectangle showcasing a beautiful necklace and the store’s phone number with other contact info.
She glanced in one of the larger cases. “We’re going to need more sweetgrass basket charms in gold.”
Gina nodded. “Yep. One lady bought six of them for her granddaughters. I’ll call Eve this afternoon and place an order.”
They were eating pizza standing up, a common occurrence. Gina swallowed a bite and grinned. “Don’t keep me in suspense. How did it go with Mr. Gorgeous? Did you like the building?”
“Honestly, I did. The place J.B. wants us to have was originally a nineteenth-century bank. He was showing me the vault when we had a little accident and got locked inside.”
Gina’s eyes rounded. “You got locked in a bank vault with J.B. Vaughan? God, that’s so romantic.”
“Um, no. Not romantic at all.” You couldn’t call what happened with J.B. romance. Sexual frenzy, maybe.
“So it was too scary to be romantic?”
The other woman’s crestfallen expression might have been funny if Mazie hadn’t been walking on eggshells. She wasn’t going to betray J.B.’s secret weakness. Instead, she skirted the truth. “Not so much scary as tense. We were awfully glad to get out of there when Jonathan showed up.”
“So are you going to take it? The building, I mean? Will it work for our purposes?”
“It’s perfect. Doesn’t mean I’m ready to give J.B. what he wants. Surely there’s another way.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re contrary?”
“You,” Mazie said, finishing her meal. “Every other day.” She wiped her hands on a napkin. “My...conversation with J.B. got derailed when my brother showed up. I’m sure I’ll hear from him soon. J.B., that is.”
“And what will you say when he asks you again?”
Mazie flashed to a mental image of the real estate developer’s chest. His tousled hair. His eyes, heavy-lidded with desire. Her throat tightened. Her thighs pressed together. “I don’t really know.”
Unfortunately, the afternoon crowd picked up, and Mazie never found a moment to scoot home and restock her wardrobe. By the time the shop closed at five, she was more than ready to call it quits.
The Tarleton family had lived for decades on the tip of a small barrier island just north of the city. They owned fifteen acres, more than enough to create a compound that included the main house and several smaller buildings scattered around.
An imposing, gated iron fence protected the enclave on land. Water access was impossible due to a high brick wall Mazie’s grandfather had erected at the top of the sand. The beach itself was public property, but he had made sure no one could wander onto Tarleton property, either out of curiosity or with dangerous motives. Hurricanes and erosion made the wall outrageously expensive to maintain, but the current Tarleton patriarch was by nature paranoid and suspicious, so security was a constant concern.
At times, Mazie felt unbearably strangled by her familial obligations. Perhaps that was why being around J.B. felt both dangerous and exhilarating all at the same instant.
She punched her security code into the keypad and waited for the heavy gate to slide open. She and Jonathan both wanted to move out, but they were trapped by the weight of love and responsibility for their father. She suspected her brother kept an apartment in the city so he could have a private life, but she didn’t pry. Someday she might find a place of her own, as well.
She had let the long-ago debacle with J.B. cast too long a shadow over her romantic life. Heartbreak had made her overly cautious.
It was time to find some closure with J.B., one way or another. Time to move on.
The house where she had grown up was a colossal structure of sandstone and timber, on stilts, of course. Supposedly, it had been built to withstand a Category Four hurricane. Though the family home had suffered damage over the years, the original structure was still mostly intact.
An imposing front staircase swept upward to double mahogany doors inlaid with stained glass. The images of starfish and dolphins and sea turtles had fascinated her as a child. When she grew tall enough, she liked to stand on the porch and trace them with her fingertips.
The sea creatures were free in a way that Mazie couldn’t imagine. All her life she had been hemmed in by her mother’s illness and later, her father’s paranoia. Jonathan and Hartley—when they had been in a mood to tolerate her—had been her companions, her best friends.
And J.B., too.
The Vaughan family was one of only a handful in Charleston as wealthy as the Tarletons, so Gerald Tarleton had condoned, even promoted his children’s friendship with J.B. But Mazie was younger, and Hartley was a loner, so it was always Jonathan and J.B. who were the closest.
Mazie had adored J.B. as a child, then had a crush on him as a teenager, and finally, hated him for years. No matter how she examined her past, it was impossible to excise J.B. from the memories.
Mazie found her father in the large family room with the double plate-glass windows. The ocean was benign today, shimmering shades of blue and turquoise stretching all the way to the horizon.
“Hi, Daddy.” She kissed the top of his curly, white-haired head. Her father was reading the Wall Street Journal, or pretending to. More often than not, she discovered him napping. Gerald Tarleton had been an imposing figure at one time. Tall and barrel-chested, he could bluster and intimidate with the best of them.
As he aged, he had lost much of his fire.
He reached up and patted her hand. “There you are, pumpkin. Will you tell cook I want dinner at six thirty instead of seven?”
