Hot and Bothered Read Free Page A

veins.
    Paul gazed at her, completely bewildered. She had no car trouble and wasn’t fishing, so why was she paying a month’s rent on a broken-down trailer? He tried again. “Are you an archeologist or anthropologist or sociologist?”
    “Good Lord, no! Why would you think that?”
    If she were doing an academic study of some kind, it would explain the incongruities she presented. But he was prying. For a man who had vowed years back not to care anymore, he was doing a lot of nosing around with this woman. He shrugged. “No reason.”
    A funny look came over her face, as if she just realized her surroundings. “I’m on a … vacation of sorts. This is such a beautiful cove. I couldn’t resist staying here.”
    Paul had had a good deal of bull pushed at him in his time, but this one smelled the worst. If Judith wasn’t a person in trouble, then he hadn’t been an L.A. cop for ten years. She gazed at himexpectantly, clearly hoping he’d accept her at her word. If he cared, he told himself, he wouldn’t.
    “People say that when they come here,” he said, determined not to care. Unfortunately, the words tasted like ashes in his mouth. Something caught his eye. Rosa was returning with the water. “You better tell Rosa to stop using the water. It’s trucked in only once a week for the people.”
    She slumped. “I suppose you’re right.”
    “I am.”
    Rosa had other ideas when told they shouldn’t be cleaning. She spat them out in voluminous Spanish. Paul had spent most of his life speaking the language, nearly exclusively over the past three years, but natives still spoke it at a pace that was faster than the American ear could truly follow. Rosa’s point, however, was made. The trailer would be cleaned.
    “I’m sorry,” the woman said helplessly. “I don’t understand—”
    “She says the trailer needs to be cleaned,” Paul said.
    “
Sí
,” Rosa added. “It must be cleaned for the pretty lady.”
    “Thank you,” Judith said, “although how you can say I look pretty is beyond me.”
    Paul could say a lot on the matter, but he didn’t. He wasn’t supposed to care. Yet when he stared into Judith’s hopeful eyes, something that had hardened to steel inside him took a direct hit. Cracks were beginning already. The feeling wasone he didn’t like. “It’s your money, lady,” he said, and turned and walked away.
    Judith stared after the strange man, surprised by his abrupt rudeness. He had asked her all kinds of questions that she had been foolishly answering, when suddenly the faucet of curiosity had been shut off.
    He’d been so damned attractive up close that she’d just babbled on in her worst way. His face was lean, with a wonderful square jaw and the dark reddish tan of someone who spent his time in the sun. His lips were so perfectly formed, they could have been carved by Michelangelo. The first lines of maturity radiated out from his eyes, putting him easily in his mid-thirties. And those eyes, she thought, so dark and fathomless. She’d been left wondering what went on behind them at the soul.
    Thank goodness, Rosa had argued about the water. She could not imagine how she would survive a night in the trailer in its current condition. The thought of the dirt … and worse …
    She shuddered, thinking that she would have lain down like a lamb in front of a lion with that man. Rosa had saved her from disaster. But that was the whole point of being there, to stop being a pushover.
    What the water cost didn’t matter. She had plenty of money with her.
    She smiled without humor. Whoever had said money could buy happiness was wrong. Money had never made her happy. In fact, it had made her unhappy in many ways. She would give it all up—the Collier wealth, even the name—just to be left alone, but she knew she couldn’t do that. People were now depending on her to make the right decision when the time came.
    She wondered what that man had thought of her, especially as grimy as she