he was blocked from view as Max stepped in front of her. She leaned to peer around him.
“Are you okay, miss?” the man demanded, glancing about wildly. She assumed his eyes had adjusted to the dimmer interior lighting, for it was obvious from the way they suddenly widened that he’d gotten his first good look at Max. His prominent Adam’s apple rode the column of his throat as he swallowed audibly.
For good reason. Max was six-four if he was an inch and probably weighed in the vicinity of two-twenty.
Every ounce of it solid muscle.
But Harper had to give the resort guest credit. He was clearly outmatched, yet while he looked as though he’d give a bundle to go back out the way he’d come in, he instead moved closer and ordered firmly, “Step away from her, sir.”
“Oh, for God sake,” she heard Max mutter, and hysterical laughter bubbled up Harper’s throat. She swallowed it down as she watched Max do as directed.
Then she looked at the resort guest. “I’m okay,” she said soothingly. “It’s really not what you must think.” She ran him through her mental database. “You’re Mr. Wells, right? I believe your wife is in my sunset yoga class.”
“Sean Wells,” he agreed, shedding some of the tension that caused him to all but vibrate.
“This is Deputy Bradshaw,” she said. “I screamed because I had my earbuds in and he startled me.”
Sean relaxed a bit more, but he shot Max a skeptical look as he took in the bigger man’s khaki cargo shorts, black muscle shirt and the tribal tattoos that swirled down his right upper arm from the muscular ball of his shoulder to the bottom of his hard biceps. “You don’t look like a deputy.”
The dark-eyed gaze Max fixed on him froze the other man in place. “It’s my day off,” he said with “Just the facts, ma’am” directness.
Harper had no idea why she found that so damn titillating.
“I just came by to ask Ms. Summerville to dinner,” he added, and shock whipped her head around.
She gaped at him. “You did?” Crap. Was that her voice cracking on the last word? She hardly ever lost her poise. But in her own defense, during their previous encounters she’d gotten the impression Max viewed her as a mental lightweight. She would have sworn, too, that she hadn’t even registered on his Attraction-O-Meter.
“Yes.” Dull color climbed his angular face. “That is, Jake sent me. Jenny’s having a dinner party tonight and wants you to come.” Glancing away, he leveled an are-you-still-here look on Sean Wells.
The man immediately mumbled an excuse and melted out the door.
“Thank you,” Harper called after him, then quirked an eyebrow when the deputy turned back to her. “You sure know how to clear a room.”
“Yeah.” The shoulder with the tattoo lifted and dropped. “It’s a talent of mine.” He gave her a level look. “So, what do you want me to tell Jenny? You in or you out for tonight?”
“I’m in. What should I bring?”
“You’re asking me? I’m the guy who usually shows up with a six-pack of beer.”
She grinned at him. “I’ll call Jenny.”
He didn’t smile back—yet something in his expression lightened, which might have been his version of one. Hard to tell, since his deep voice contained its usual crispness when he said, “Good idea. I’ll leave it to you to let her know you’re coming, then. So.” He gave her the terse nod she remembered from their earlier encounters. “Sorry about scaring you. I guess I’ll see you tonight.” He turned for the door.
“I guess you will,” she murmured to his already retreating back. She trailed in his wake as far as the screen door and watched through it as he strode down the path. She didn’t turn away until he disappeared around a bend.
Wow. Nothing, not even the photograph she’d seen of him in the dossier the Sunday’s Child’s investigator had sent her, could adequately describe the sheer impact of the man in the flesh.
Then a small smile curved up the corners of her lips, and she shook her head. “At least this time he didn’t call me ma’am.”
* * *
MAX BANGED THROUGH the door to the upstairs room that his half brother, Jake, used as a workspace. Striding right up to the long desk where Jake sat, he stopped, slapped his hands down on its surface and leaned his weight on them. “She said yes. She’ll come.” He sternly ignored the way his heart rate continued to rev from those brief moments spent with Harper. “I still don’t know why the hell you couldn’t just invite her yourself—it’s your fiancée’s party.”
“Like I told you, bro.” Jake dragged his attention away from the computer monitor he’d been studying. “I’ve been home four lousy days, and they’ve got me on one of the tightest deadlines of my life.”
“What’s their big rush?” he demanded, all jazzed up and more than willing to take it out on his younger half brother. God knew that had been their mutual M.O. up until a few months ago. “Hell, you only lasted ten days of the three weeks you were supposed to be gone before you turned around and came home again. Shouldn’t they have all kinds of extra time?” Pushing back, he folded his arms over his chest and gave Jake an assessing gaze. “For a guy who was in such a red-hot rush to get out of Razor Bay, you sure seem to have developed a taste for it.”
“Yeah.” Jake smiled. “You can blame Jenny and Austin for that.”
“No fooling.” Max’s half brother had come back this spring to claim his newly orphaned, then-thirteen-year-old son Austin, whom he’d walked away from when he was just a teenager himself. His plan to haul the kid back to New York with him had hit the skids when he’d instead fallen head over heels in love not only with Austin but with the Inn’s manager, Jenny Salazar, who had been a sister to his son in everything but blood.
Thinking about their relationship set off the “something’s not adding up” instincts Max never ignored. “Why do you think Jenny decided on a dinner party when she knows your deadline?”
“Beats the hell outta me.”
He found that hard to believe and simply fixed Jake in his best cop gaze.
And was tickled to see his half brother squirm.
“Okay,” Jake said, giving the monitor a concentrated attention Max found suspicious, considering how rapidly he opened and closed the photo thumbnails, “I may not have stressed to her how short my deadline is.”
“Seriously? Didn’t stress or didn’t mention it at all?”
“I might have forgotten to mention it.” Jake essayed a negligent shrug, then gave up pretending to work. “Hey, if Jenny wants a party, then a party she gets.” His smile was so fatuous Max was embarrassed for him.
“Okay. But getting back to your cut-short trip, what’s National Explorer’s hurry?”
“Unlike you, they never really expected it to take me the entire three weeks to do the job. And it was always understood
