Sleeping Arrangements

Spenser was crouched at her side, fingers tangled in her hair. She felt a physical click run through her system as his gaze locked with hers, bringing her closer to wakefulness.

“You know, you’re incredibly beautiful when you sleep.” His voice was soft and low. She opened her mouth in surprise and he immediately covered it with his own. Someone was moaning softly. Addy was afraid it was her. Her brain struggled to recall how she’d gotten into this situation.

Spenser had been explaining something about the will, the house and the money…. His teeth nipped at her lower lip and he pulled her closer. Something about living here for six months…but there was more, she was sure of it….

With a near shriek of rage, Addy tore her mouth from Spenser’s and shoved hard at his shoulders.

“Did you say that I have to be married?”

Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Silhouette Desire. As always, we have a fabulous array of stories for you to enjoy, starting with Just a Taste by Bronwyn Jameson, the latest installment in our DYNASTIES: THE ASHTONS continuity series. This tale of forbidden attraction between two romance-wary souls will leave you breathless and wanting more from this wonderful author—who will have a brand-new miniseries of her own, PRINCES OF THE OUTBACK, out later this year.

The terrific Annette Broadrick is back with another book in her CRENSHAWS OF TEXAS series. Double Identity is an engrossing page-turner about seduction and lies…you know, all that good stuff! Susan Crosby continues her BEHIND CLOSED DOORS series with Rules of Attraction, the first of three brand-new stories set in the world of very private investigations. Roxanne St. Claire brings us a fabulous McGrath brother hero caught in an unexpected situation, in When the Earth Moves. Rochelle Alers’s THE BLACKSTONES OF VIRGINIA series wraps up with Beyond Business, a story in which the Blackstone patriarch gets involved in a surprise romance with his new—and very pregnant—assistant. And last but certainly not least, the engaging Amy Jo Cousins is back this month with Sleeping Arrangements, a terms-of-the-will story not to be missed.

Here’s hoping you enjoy all six of our selections this month. And, in the months to come, look for Maureen Child’s THREE-WAY WAGER series and a brand-new installment of our infamous TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB.

Happy reading!

Melissa Jeglinski

Senior Editor

Silhouette Desire

Sleeping Arrangements

Amy Jo Cousins

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AMY JO COUSINS

loves words of all kinds, and her love of reading naturally led to a love of writing. Amy also has a passion for languages and there’s nothing she likes better than learning a new language and using it to explore the history of a foreign country, whether standing on the beaches of D-Day in Normandy or outside the Olympic Stadium in Munich.

Her collection of books is slowly crowding her out of her home, although her cat seems more than willing to fall asleep upon the various piles. Other than that, Amy loves learning how to do anything that takes her outdoors and away from her computer including kayaking, sculling, rock climbing and landscape water painting.

For the Albinack boys— Bruce Edward, Matthew McKinley and Finley Edward. You set the bar high, fellas.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

One

“I admit I didn’t expect a professional appearance, but I thought at least you’d be clean.”

The crisp voice crawled like ice down Addy’s spine, drawing her up straighter with each word. Pride and irritation kept her from turning around to respond to the man who’d walked into the law office behind her.

She brushed a hand reflexively over her filthy blue jeans. No sense even trying to straighten her ratty curls. Running her fingers through her hair wouldn’t remove the caked mud, although, according to the mirror in her pickup truck, she was fairly sure she’d managed to pick out all of the twigs. The rest of her muck-covered body was definitely a lost cause.

“I told your assistant this was a bad time for me, but she insisted this was the only appointment you had available.”

Sharp footsteps on the worn linoleum floor allowed her to pull her body to the side, avoiding the man’s passing. As he moved to stand behind the scarred wood desk, she got her first glimpse of the man who’d been leaving increasingly irritated messages on her answering machine over the last month.

She wondered if Mr. Spencer Reed ever cut himself on the sharp creases in his pants. Certainly the suit he wore as if it had been hand sewn for him by a London tailor was worth more than her entire wardrobe. Even his horn-rimmed glasses looked more stylish than anything she’d ever owned. Ignoring the demon in her mind that whispered of a blond Christopher Reeve in Clark Kent mode, she let her gaze roam casually over his face and body in a manner calculated to return insult.

Dark blond hair waving in deliberately casual disarray indicated an excellent barber. His cheekbones screamed good breeding, and that firm mouth surely never uttered words unless it was to bend courts and clients to his will. The emotionless ice-blue gaze made it difficult to look away. She reminded herself that she’d always found her family’s uniformly dark eyes to be warm and welcoming. This man, she thought, was easily summed up by a few of her least favorite words.

Slick. Cultured. Upper-class.

Because she couldn’t stomach hypocrisy, even her own, she admitted that a couple more words could be added to that list. Compelling. Coolly handsome. The seduction of assurance. If he bothered to turn on the charm, she’d probably be a lost cause.

The mismatch of his appearance with the ratty look of his office momentarily sparked her curiosity. Mr. Sharp-Dressed Man just didn’t fit in with these worn and tatty surroundings. She forced herself to ignore the temptation to speculate on his circumstances.

The trust fund on legs was still speaking. She dragged her attention back, annoyed further that he seemed to take no notice of her rudeness.

“I am very busy, and most people find ten o’clock to be a perfectly civilized hour for a business meeting.”

“I’m not most people.”

“Clearly.”

Addy kept a throttling grip on her temper. She wished she possessed the same control over the flush she felt heating up her cheeks. Her awareness of being inappropriately dressed combined with his implication that his time was far more valuable than hers had kindled a fire of embarrassment and anger that she knew he read on her face.

“Listen, Mr. Reed. You called. I came. What’s so important I had to interrupt my job for you?”

“Your job. Would that be ladies’ mud wrestling?”

Her vision blurred. Addy was dimly aware that she might have spit at him in her struggle to get the sharp-edged words out fast enough. She glanced at his stunned silence then grabbed the closest solid object. Only his quick grip on her arm stopped her from pitching his etched-marble nameplate at his elegant face.

“I’m sorry.” The words took a long moment to penetrate the haze of her anger. “I’m sorry. That was completely uncalled for and very unprofessional. I’ve had a long, frustrating morning, but that is no excuse for taking out my bad temper on you. Can we begin again? I’m Spencer Reed. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

His outstretched hand across the desk was meant as a peace offering, she supposed. And the lopsided grin was meant to be soothing. She managed to keep her mouth shut, but enjoyed thinking about where he could stick his charm.

“Save it for someone you can still make a good impression on,” she snapped. “What do you want?”

He sighed and eyed her briefly over the tops of his glasses, as if debating whether to continue his apologies. She caught herself before she could ask him to take the glasses off so she could see if he looked as good without them as he did with them on. After a moment, he shrugged and lifted a stack of legal documents off the corner of his desk. With a gesture, he indicated the armchair facing the desk.

Addy shook her head. Whatever business he had with her, she preferred to hear it standing. Getting cozy was not an option.

“I hope I’m not the bearer of bad news,” he said slowly. “Last month Mrs. Adeline O’Connell passed away in her sleep.”

A glancing wave of shock made her falter for a moment. Although she’d not seen the woman since she was a baby, Addy was her great-aunt’s namesake. She hadn’t known of her death. Carefully schooling her face to blankness, she replied briskly.

“My condolences to her family.”

“You are her family.” The stern look he shot at her felt like a scolding.

“Mr. Reed, the last time I saw my great-aunt, I was in diapers. I haven’t heard from her since, and I certainly don’t consider her a part of my family.” She clipped the words out as she glanced at the men’s watch on her wrist. There was still time to return to her crew and try to clean up the disaster she’d left behind at the construction site.

“Perhaps you don’t. However, Mrs. O’Connell apparently considered you a part of hers. The reading of her will took place immediately after her funeral, and she has left you a significant bequest.”

With one hand, he plucked a document off the top of his stack and placed it on the desk in front of her.

“Is that what this is all about?” Her astonished laugh echoed in the sparsely furnished room. “I could have saved us both a lot of trouble if you’d bothered to mention that in your messages.” She pushed the papers right back at him. “I’m not interested in anything that woman wanted to give me.”

“Don’t be too hasty, Ms. Tyler. Think of it as your Free Parking jackpot.”

It took her a moment to place the Monopoly reference.

“Oh, shut up.” The words she’d repressed at the mention of Adeline O’Connell burst out of her like an erupting volcano. “That woman treated my mother like dirt her entire life. She took pleasure in hurting people. Took pleasure in trying to make people feel ashamed of themselves.” She grabbed her backpack from the floor, where she’d originally dropped it. “I wouldn’t take anything of hers if you plated it in gold and tied it up with a pink ribbon. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m out of here.”

She swung the heavy pack on her shoulder and whirled to stalk out the office door. His footsteps followed hers more quickly than she would have expected.

“Ms. Tyler.” Her name in his mouth rang with the command of an order to halt and his palm smacked against the door, holding it shut. She stopped with her hand on the knob, but refused to turn and face him. “There is a monetary bequest of nearly fifty thousand dollars, and also a property.”

These words did move her.

He was so close that her shoulder brushed against him as she turned. She was shorter, and resented having to look up at him. She also resented that being this close to him, closer than was comfortable, and knowing that his hand held the door shut behind her, was making her pulse race. She was dancing on a thin line between dislike and desire.

“Don’t insult me.” She let the words drop like individual stones into a still lake. “Your apology was not accepted and neither is hers. Not everyone can be bought.”

His lake-blue eyes narrowed and dropped as he tilted his head a little bit.

“You know, when you’re not behaving with all the polish of a truck driver,” he said after a moment, “you are quite unfairly beautiful.”

She pulled her shoulders back and turned her face away from him, all of a sudden sure that he would kiss her in a moment if she didn’t move. They stood frozen for silent seconds. She felt more than heard him exhale and realized she was holding her own breath as he dropped his hand from the door.

The moment had passed, which allowed her to face him again.

“Don’t fool yourself, Counselor. I’m not for sale.”

With those words, she yanked the door open and slammed it behind her. The resounding crash she left in her wake was the most satisfying moment of her morning.

She would have been even more pleased if she’d managed to shut the door before his parting shot chased after her.

“Everyone is for sale, Ms. Tyler, in my experience. Particularly women.”

In the parking lot outside the nondescript office building, she cranked the key in the ignition and pulled onto the street, tires squealing in sympathetic anger. She took the corners tightly and the straightaways at speed, with two monologues battling in her head. Her conscious mind bowed to her will, focusing on the difficulties she’d faced this morning with the clearly inaccurate geographic survey of her latest engineering project. The shopping center was a tricky design, involving floodplain issues that demanded absolute accuracy. Repeated problems had forced her to the drastic step of going out to the site herself with the surveyors and wading through the January snowdrifts. A heretofore unrecorded runoff stream, hidden under layers of Chicago winter snow, had landed her on her butt in cold, not-quite-frozen mud. She still blamed Mr. Spencer Reed for putting her in the position of embarrassing herself with his insistence on interrupting her workday.

In contrast to her willed focus, her subconscious made clear her total lack of control, as thoughts of that man and his insulting offer continued to pop into her head throughout the day. During a meeting with one of her project managers, Addy caught herself comparing the brassy highlights of the man’s strawberry-blond mop to the rich, gold glints she remembered in Spencer’s hair. When she took a half hour to review a new proposal, the first residential property she’d been offered, she blinked herself out of a fantasy that the property Reed had mentioned might be a house as intriguing as the one she was being asked to work on. Even her lunch break was interrupted by constant thoughts of the witty, sarcastic comebacks she imagined herself using on the attorney in a world where her off-the-cuff remarks would outmatch his.

Stop it. Just stop it. She crumpled up the remains of her Italian sub sandwich in its wrapper and pitched it neatly into the wastebasket in the corner of her office. I’m not interested in anything that man has to say.

It was depressing, however, that Spencer was the first man in aeons to spark anything other than boredom in her. Not her type at all, but still…there was something about the arrogance, not to mention the body, the face and the very mussable hair, that made her want to get down on the floor and wrestle with him.

She shook her head once and commanded her sex drive to sit down and shut up.

And stop calling him Spencer, she berated herself. You don’t call your enemies by their first names.

“Adeline Tyler, don’t you dare tromp through my house in those mucky boots! Get back out on the porch.”

Her mother’s voice came rocketing out of the house before Addy had edged more than the toe of one boot over the threshold of the front door. By the time she bent down to begin unlacing her undeniably filthy boots, Susannah Tyler was planted firmly in the doorway, barricading the entrance until the offending articles were removed.

When the freezing air hit her toes, Addy realized that even her socks were soaked.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, and stepped into the welcoming embrace, returning it with a fierceness that had her mother narrowing her eyes in concern.

“Hi, yourself.” The concern switched gears as Susannah noticed the debris that had transferred to her own neatly pressed blouse and jeans. “Maybe I should take the rest of your clothes while we’re at it.”

“I’ll take you up on that, but can I come inside first?” Addy asked, grinning, as she swung her mother gently around by the shoulders and stepped into the warmth of her childhood home. The boots, she left on the porch.

“Get in, get in.” Her mother handed Addy a pair of slippers as she hustled her into the guest bathroom off the hall, disappearing and then returning moments later with a thick terry bathrobe. “Good Lord, girl. What happened to you?”

“Ladies’ mud wrestling,” she answered with a laugh, and stripped out of her clothes. Her mother accepted them gingerly with one hand. The bathrobe felt wonderfully clean. “It’s my new career.”

“And to think we could have saved all that money on your college tuition,” her mother called as she headed back toward the kitchen. “There’s coffee on, if you want some before you take a hot shower.”

“Absolutely.” She stepped into the sheepskin-lined slippers and followed her mother to the rear of the house. Through the smattering of architectural courses she’d taken for her own pleasure on her way to attaining a degree in civil engineering, she knew that her family’s home was a perfect example of the Chicago bungalow, one of thousands clustered around the city. But in her heart, the house was unique. She’d spent two-thirds of her life in this house and now, as she did each time she came home, she walked slowly through the rooms, pausing in each one to savor the memories evoked by every square foot of space.

And the photographs. Nearly every table, most of the walls, any shelf with a spare inch of space on its ledge, held collections of the pictures that tracked the Tyler family in their continuing lives. Maxie in fabulously outrageous Halloween costumes. Tyler, two seconds before carrying out his threat to tackle the photographer. Herself, Sarah and her mother caught off guard in dozens of moments.

Most of all, though, what caught her were the pictures of her father. Michael McKinley Tyler had been killed in a car accident when Addy was eight years old. Maxie hadn’t even been born yet. Addy knew she was the only one of his four children who could remember him clearly, remember his wickedly flashing dark eyes and the music he could pour out of his saxophone like a liquid-gold rain in their small living room. So she took special pleasure in the recognition that flowed warmly through her with every picture of his smiling face.

“Hi, Daddy.” She blew a kiss at a photo of her father wailing away on the sax in the smoky darkness of a jazz club. Having greeted the house, she followed the dark aroma of French roast to the kitchen.

“Still the same as you remember?” her mother asked as she cracked the oven door and peered inside. Two mugs waited, steaming, on the butcher-block table.

Addy wrapped cold hands around the heavy ceramic mug and inhaled deeply, drawing in the rich scent. She’d first tasted coffee the day she turned six and the only thing she’d wanted for her birthday was to be allowed to watch her dad play with his band. Perched sleepily on a chair in the corner of the club, up far past her bedtime, waiting for the late set to start, her mother had let Addy sip a milky café au lait to stay awake. Smoke, jazz and coffee were inextricably linked for her from that night on.

“I think I’d run screaming out the door if you ever redecorated.”

“Your brother and sisters would have me committed. But before they invade, how was your day? Other than finding your true career path in mud wrestling, that is.”

“Disturbing.” Her mother’s raised eyebrow encouraged her to continue. Addy bit her lip and tried to find the right words for her questions. In the end, the simplest way seemed best. “Mom, did you know that Great-Aunt Adeline died?”

Susannah briefly closed her eyes and dropped her head beneath the light of the stained-glass lamp hanging above the table. When she looked back at Addy, her eyes, and her words, were calm. Measured. “Yes, I’d heard.”

“Why didn’t you tell us? Tell me?” If she hadn’t known, Addy was sure her siblings were equally in the dark.

Her mother paused before speaking.

“You wouldn’t even remember meeting her. You were just a baby. But I used to send her pictures of you. Your brother and sisters, too, but I always hoped she’d feel some kind of bond with you at least. Since you were named for her.” She shrugged. “I honestly didn’t think you would even hear about it.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Addy murmured, mostly to herself.

“Who told you?”

“Aunt Adeline’s attorney.”

“What?” Confusion battled surprise on her mother’s face.

“Apparently you were more successful than you thought. I’ve been named in her will.” Addy’s irritation blossomed anew at the mere thought. She knew her anger was a mixed-up tangle directed at both her great-aunt and Spencer Reed, but she resolutely shut thoughts of the disturbingly attractive man out of her head. “Maybe she thought she could buy her way back into your good graces on her deathbed.”

Ceramic mug met wood tabletop with a forceful clatter.

“Watch your mouth, Adeline Marie Tyler.” Her mother’s voice crackled with real anger. “You may not live under my roof anymore, but in this house we don’t disrespect the dead, or their last wishes.”

Susannah jumped up and paced the tile floor, eventually stopping to yank plates and water glasses from a cabinet. She turned and thrust the stack of plates at her eldest daughter. “If Aunt Adeline changed her feelings at the end and then died before she found a way to tell us, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Go set the table.”

Addy stood and took the dishes, but remained stubbornly in one spot.

“I don’t want anything from her. She meant nothing to me.”

Her mother cupped a hand against Addy’s cheek, brushed a tangle of curls behind one ear. Gentleness rested in her touch.

The shrill peal of the telephone rang through the house.

“Answer that. Set the table. You’ll figure the rest out later.” Her mom patted her cheek and turned back to the stove.

She set the plates down in the dining room before heading to the tiny phone table in the hall. Answering the phone with her mind on other things, she was confused by the voice she heard. She moved the handset away from her ear, stared at it for a moment and then put it back.

“Excuse me? Who is this?”

“Spencer Reed, Ms. Tyler. I wanted to let you know—”

“How did you get this number? It’s not even mine.”

She could hear the impatience in his words and pictured his lips thinning as he pressed them together. “There are a lot of ways to get information if you’re willing to pay for it. But in the case of your mother’s home phone number, your aunt gave it to me years ago.”

“Great-aunt,” she shot back, not willing to let him claim an ounce more family intimacy than absolutely necessary. “It would have been kinder of her to use the number herself and call my mother just once in the last twenty or thirty years. Speaking of which, why doesn’t this bequest go to my mother? She’s the nearest relation. Or why not my brother and sisters, too? Why just me?”

He paused before speaking. She could picture him leaning back in an oversize leather chair, looking up at the ceiling. He would treat even her snippy questions with serious thought, she knew—and wondered why she was so certain of that.

“Maybe she thought it was too late to make amends to your mother but not too late to try with you. And you are her namesake. She felt that connection.”

His voice had softened with the last words, but she refused to be drawn in on such a sentimental appeal. “How would you know? Are you in the habit of quizzing your clients about their intentions? Don’t you just have to witness things and perhaps insult the client as a side benefit?”