King's Million-Dollar Secret

The house was quiet … blessedly so, after a full day of hammers crashing into walls and wood. The decimated kitchen echoed with their voices, and outside, the afternoon was fading into twilight. There was a feeling of intimacy between them that maybe only strangers thrown together could experience.

She looked at him, taking her time to enjoy the view, and wondered. About him. About who he was, what he liked—and a part of her wondered why she wondered.

Then again, it had been a long time since she’d been interested in a man. Having your heart bruised was enough to make a woman just a little nervous about getting back into the dating pool again.

But it couldn’t hurt to look, could it?

“So if you weren’t doing construction, what were you doing instead?”

He glanced at her, long enough for her to see a mental shutter slam down across his eyes. Then he shifted his gaze away and ran one hand across the skeleton of a cabinet. “Different things. Still, good to get back and work with my hands again.” Then he winked. “Even if it is for the Kings.”

He’d shut her out deliberately. Closing the door on talking about his past. He was watching her as if he expected her to dig a little deeper. But how could she? She had already told him that she felt curiosity was overrated. And if she asked about his past, didn’t that give him the right to ask about hers? Katie didn’t exactly want to chat about how she’d been wined, dined and then unceremoniously dumped by Cordell King either, did she?

Still, she couldn’t help being curious about Rafe Cole and just what he might be hiding.

“So,” he said after a long moment of silence stretched out between them. “Guess I’d better get going and let you get busy baking cookies.”

“Right.” She started forward at the same time he did and they bumped into each other.

Instantly, heat blossomed between them. Their bodies close together, there was one incredible, sizzling moment in which neither of them spoke because they simply didn’t have to.

Something was there. Heat. Passion.

Katie looked up into Rafe’s eyes and knew he was feeling exactly what she was. And judging by his expression, he wasn’t much happier about it.

She hadn’t been looking for a romantic connection, but it seemed that she had stumbled on one anyway.

He lifted one hand to touch her face and stopped himself just short of his fingertips tracing along her jaw. Smiling softly, he said, “This could get … interesting.”

Understatement of the century.

Two

“Meeting’s over,” Lucas King muttered. “Why are we still here?”

“Because I’ve got a question for you,” Rafe answered and looked up at his brothers. Well, two of them, anyway. Sean and Lucas, his partners in King Construction. Just looking at the three of them together, anyone would know they were brothers. They all had the King coloring, black hair and blue eyes. Yet their features were different enough to point to the fact that they each had different mothers.

But the man who had been their father had linked them not just by blood, but by fostering that brotherly connection in their childhoods. All of Ben King’s sons had spent time together every summer, and the differences among them melted away in the shared knowledge that their father hadn’t bothered to marry any of their mothers.

Lucas, the oldest of the three of them, was checking his watch and firing another impatient look at Rafe. Sean, typically, was so busy studying the screen of his cell phone while he tapped out messages to God knew who, he hadn’t noticed that Lucas had spoken.

The brothers held weekly meetings to discuss business, to catch up with whatever was going on in the family and simply to keep up with each other’s lives. Those meetings shifted among each of their houses. Tonight, they were gathered at Lucas’s oceanfront home in Long Beach.

It was huge, old and filled with what Lucas liked to call character. Of course, everyone else called it outdated and inconvenient. Rafe preferred his own place, a penthouse suite in a hotel in Huntington Beach. Sleek, modern and efficient, it had none of the quirks that Lucas seemed so fond of in his own house. And he appreciated having room service at his beck and call as well as maid service every day. As for Sean, he was living in a remodeled water tower in Sunset Beach that had an elevator at beach level just to get you to the front door.

They had wildly different tastes, yet each of them had opted for a home with a view of the sea.

For a moment, Rafe stared out at the ribbons of color on the sunset-stained ocean and took a deep breath of the cold, clear air. There were a few hardy surfers astride their boards, looking for one last wave before calling it a day, and a couple was walking a tiny dog along Pacific Coast Highway.

“What do we know about Katie Charles?” he asked, taking a swig from his beer.

“Katie who?” Sean asked.

“Charles,” Lucas said, irritation for their younger brother coloring his tone. “Don’t you listen?”

“To who?” Sean kept his gaze fixed on his cell phone. The man was forever emailing and texting clients and women. It was nearly impossible to get Sean to pay attention to anything that didn’t pop up on an LED screen.

“Me,” Rafe told him, reaching out to snatch the phone away.

“Hey!” Sean leaned out and reclaimed his phone. “I’m setting up a meeting for later.”

“How about instead you pay attention to this one?” Rafe countered.

“Fine. I’m listening. Give me my phone.”

Rafe tossed it over, then turned his gaze to Lucas. “So?” Rafe asked. “You know anything about Katie Charles?”

“Name sounds familiar. Who is she?”

“Customer,” Rafe said, picking up his beer and leaning back in the Adirondack chair. “We’re redoing her kitchen.”

“Good for us.” Sean looked at him. “So what’s bugging you about her?”

Good question. Rafe shouldn’t have cared what Katie Charles thought of the King family. What did it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Still, ever since leaving Katie’s house earlier, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. And it wasn’t just the flash of heat he felt when he was around her that was bugging her. She was pretty, smart, and successful, and she hated the Kings. What was up with that?

“Katie Charles,” Lucas was muttering to himself. “Katie Charles. Kitchen. Cookies.” He grinned and said, “That’s it. Katie’s Kookies. She’s building a real name for herself. She’s sort of a cottage industry at the moment, but people are talking about her.”

“What people?” Rafe asked, frowning. “I’ve never heard of her before.”

Sean snorted. “Why would you? You’re practically a hermit. To hear about anything you’d have to actually talk to someone. You know, someone who isn’t us.”

“I’m not a hermit.”

“God knows I hate to admit Sean’s right. About anything. But he’s got a point,” Lucas said, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “You keep yourself shut up in that penthouse of yours most of the time. Hell, I’m willing to bet the only people you’ve actually talked to since last week’s meeting are the room service operator and the crew you worked with today.”

Rafe scowled at Lucas, but only because he didn’t have an argument for the truth. He didn’t have time to date every model in the known universe like Sean. And he had no interest in the corporate world of movers and shakers like Lucas. What the hell else was he supposed to do with his time?

“Oh, yeah,” Sean said with a grin. “I forgot about that bet you made. How’s it going, being back on a job site?”

“Not bad,” Rafe admitted. Actually, he’d enjoyed himself more than he had expected. Being on a site with hardworking guys who didn’t know he was their boss had been … fun. And there was the added plus of being around a woman who made his body tight and his brain fuzz out. Until, of course, Katie had confessed that she hated the King family.

“So,” Sean asked, “if you had such a good time, why do you look like you want to bite through a box of nails?”

“You do look more annoyed than usual,” Lucas said with a shrug. “What’s up? And what’s it got to do with Katie Charles?”

“Neither of you knows her?”

Sean and Lucas looked at each other and shrugged. “Nope.”