inside,” he decided. “I’ll get everyone a hot drink and we’ll discuss how much Delia will pay me to kick Cade out on his tough rear end.”
“We’re not kicking anyone out.” Zoe was still watching Delia. “Honey, you know we can’t. He’s a part of this family now, and when you think about it, whatever is bothering you, you’ll realize we can’t hurt his feelings.”
“Feelings?” Worry and stress hardened Delia’s voice. “If he didn’t have to be here, he’d be long gone, having easily forgotten all about us.”
The sound of someone male clearing his throat came from behind her. “Well, that’s flattering.” The voice was hauntingly familiar.
Delia groaned, wished for the night to be even darker so that she could vanish. She turned and saw Cade standing there, leaning his big body against the doorjamb, his arms casually crossed over his chest. “You must not think too highly of me,” he said quietly, his unsmiling eyes on hers, “if you think I could easily forget anything about you.”
It was embarrassing. Ridiculous. Silly even. But she could think of nothing to say, couldn’t even find her legendary cool, so she did the only thing she could.
She grabbed her shoes, squared her shoulders and walked right past him, as well as Zoe and Ty, into the night.
And for once, she was grateful for the icy air because it cooled her heated cheeks.
But not her dreams.
Oh, she definitely has a bee in her bonnet, Cade thought as he came upon Delia on her hands and knees in the dining room the next day, scrubbing a stubborn stain on the hardwood floor.
Her hair was loose and shining, and her backside… He took an extra-long moment to admire the way it shimmied and shaked as she worked. Her long legs were tense with strain, and for an insane moment he wished they were tense and strained…around him.
He had no idea what was running through her head, but he could safely bet his last dollar it wasn’t anything close to his own lusty thoughts. “A penny for your thoughts,” he ventured.
She stiffened, making him smile. God, she was so easy to rile.
“Hell,” he said, grinning at her uptight pretty little spine. “I’ll give you everything I have for them.” Opening his wallet, he pulled out a bill. “How about five bucks?”
She sat back on her heels, wearing her queen-to-peasant expression that never failed to stir his blood.
Off-limits, McKnight, he reminded himself. Way off limits.
Still, egged on by some perverse need to see her ruffled out of her cool calm, he waved the money. “What do you say?”
Her lips, wide and oh-so-kissable, tightened. She looked away, but not before he caught a flash of…vulnerability? When he frowned and looked again, it was gone. Which was good. Delia wasn’t vulnerable, no more than he was, well, able to settle down. “Hey, if anyone’s upset about last night, it should be me. It was my reputation you were slandering.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I certainly didn’t mean for you to hear.”
But not sorry she hurt his feelings, he noted, torn between the sting of that and humor at her fierce pride.
She was so in control.
He wondered what it would take to have the city girl lose the reins on that tightly held control. He couldn’t help the possibilities that tumbled through his head, starting with a hot deep wet kiss. Yeah, that would do it nicely. He could picture it—her long blond hair falling around him, brushing his bare belly, his thighs. Her lush lips would curve gently, her eyes molten as she softened with desire.
But Delia wasn’t soft at all. She was staring at him, her frosty-blue eyes narrowed, her body taut as a bow.
He should walk away.
And yet he couldn’t. He’d known the three of them, Zoe, Maddie and Delia, for far too long to do that now. In spite of himself and his past, he’d grown to care for them, felt responsible for them coming so far from their home city of Los Angeles to the wilds of Idaho.
But it was more than that, and though he wasn’t willing to name it, Delia seemed to be at the bottom of it. He hardly knew her, he understood that. She had a knack for hiding her true self, for being incredibly stingy with emotions. He understood that, too. Though he hated it, it made him all the more curious, and there was nothing worse than a curious investigator.
In spite of needing to be far away from here and from this woman who drew him as no other had in too long, he worried about her. “You seem uptight today.”
“I thought I was always uptight.”
“Well, there’s uptight and then there’s uptight.”
“I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t, for whatever reason, and he knew it. He’d known it the other night when he’d found her in the dark in the kitchen, with tears in her huge blue eyes.
He had other cases to be obsessing over, had a whole other life, in fact, and yet the Triple M haunted him.
Delia haunted him.
She was staring down at her cleaning supplies as if they held the greatest interest.
Cade knew his instincts were razor sharp. They’d saved his life more times than he could count, and they were screaming now. “Ownership of this place would be incredible,” he said carefully, seemingly out of the blue, but he’d had a hunch.
She flinched before she could control it, confirming his guess.
Bingo. “You know I’m doing my damnedest to get proof of that ownership,” he said softly. “Whether it turns out to be you or Maddie.”
“I know.”
He tried a different tack. “Your father—tell me about him.”
“I have an idea.” She’d risen and now grabbed her broom and started sweeping. “Let’s talk about you, instead,” she said.
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re one big mystery.”
“My past isn’t relevant to this case.”
“And therefore doesn’t need to be discussed?”
“Exactly. Now tell me about your father.”
“You’re a hard man, Cade McKnight.”
“From you, Delia, I take that as a compliment.” He was surprised when she smiled. “Your father?” he repeated patiently.
“You mean, could he have been Ethan Freeman?” She’d given up trying to get information out of him, whether because it wasn’t important to her, or because she knew he wasn’t about to indulge her curiosity, he had no clue.
“We’ve already discussed this,” she said, leaning on her broom. “All I ever knew was what my mother told me when I was five, just before she took me to the foster home.”
And had left her there, without a word. What kind of mother, Cade wondered, would just dump her child like that? He came from a large loving family of six. His mother would no more give up a child than her own right arm. And even when Cade had walked away from that family, his heart destroyed, she’d never turned her back on him, instead, had badgered and badgered until he’d come back to the fold.
Delia set aside the broom and lifted one of the three windows. Immediately a cool breeze hit them. Delia’s sweater plastered itself to her lush form. Cade tried not to look, he really did, but she was so beautiful.
And remote.
“She said he was an undercover cop on assignment,” Delia continued in that low husky voice, the one that screamed sex.
Or maybe it was just his own mind that