Where the Heart Is Read online

  With that JoLynn drew Brian off toward the end of the living room where sunlight struggled to filter through chiffon curtains. Breathlessly she began describing the marble statuary she wanted for the anteroom and side yard.

  Neither Cain nor Shelley really noticed that both of them were now alone. They were intent on a moment of mutual anger.

  And discovery.

  “Actually, I’ve always considered myself more of a connoisseur,” he said.

  “Ah, yes,” she murmured. “Of women, assuredly.”

  Before he could say anything, she kept talking in the clipped voice of a fashion-runway announcer.

  “Though you aren’t a handsome man yourself, you doubtless require that your women be perfectly stunning, objectively superb—a trophy, as it were.”

  His eyes widened, then narrowed.

  She smiled and kept on talking, ticking off items on her fingers.

  “Undoubtedly your women have to be more decorative than Greek sculpture and ever so much more flexible in bed. They must also,” she added casually, “be blessed with the intelligence and insight of a clam.”

  “Bright and beautiful, too,” Cain said.

  His smile was genuine and very male, leaving no doubt that he approved of Shelley.

  “To believe that compliment, I’d have to line up with the clams. I have, Mr. Remington, a rather exact appreciation of just how ‘beautiful’ I am.”

  He laughed softly. “Call me Cain.”

  “Wise of you to limit my options.”

  “In name-calling?”

  “Yes.”

  But she felt her irritation giving way to her own sense of humor and the laughter gleaming in gray eyes that were no longer aloof.

  “You’re rather a renegade, aren’t you?” she asked, smiling despite herself.

  “Depends on who you—”

  JoLynn’s high, piercing scream sliced through Cain’s words. As one, he and Shelley turned and raced toward the sound.

  Chapter Two

  JoLynn was at the far end of the living room. When Cain and Shelley ran to her, they saw at the same instant a dusty-rose-colored snake curled in a patch of sunlight on the floor.

  JoLynn shrieked again.

  With a single clean motion, Cain lifted the woman and spun her out of reach of the snake. As soon as he put her down, he straightened and turned to deal with the reptile.

  Then he froze in shock.

  Shelley was already bending over the slender snake. While he watched in disbelief, she picked the creature up as calmly as though it was a ribbon dropped by a careless child.

  Brian made a sound that in a woman would have been described as a tiny shriek.

  “Sh-Shelley, what the hell!” he stammered.

  JoLynn made meaningless sounds and grabbed at Cain’s arms. Without looking, he handed her over to Brian. When she wouldn’t let go of him even then, Cain absently brushed off her hands.

  All of his attention was focused on Shelley. She was standing in a cataract of sunlight with the long reptile coiled easily in her hands.

  “Relax, Brian,” she said without looking up from the snake. “This one’s a pet.”

  “How can you be s-sure?” her partner demanded.

  “It didn’t faint when JoLynn screamed,” Cain offered dryly.

  Shelley fought not to smile. In the end, she gave up and bent her head over the snake to hide her amusement.

  “It’s all right,” she managed after a moment. “Really, Brian. This specimen is a lovely, relaxed, well-fed rosy boa constrictor.”

  JoLynn screamed again.

  Casually Cain clapped a large hand over her perfectly painted mouth.

  Brian swallowed hard. “A boa? They eat people!”

  “Only in bad movies about the Amazon,” she said. “This particular species of boa likes dry country and field mice.”

  Deftly she wrapped the snake around her arm. As she worked, she held the rosy boa’s head in a firm yet gentle grasp.

  It was obvious to Cain that the snake wasn’t going anywhere without her permission. It was equally obvious that the snake was quite at ease.

  The boa’s dark, forked tongue flicked out repeatedly, “tasting” Shelley’s skin with a snake’s unusual olfactory equipment. Reassured by her warmth and the matter-of-fact handling, the boa settled in and snuggled itself around her arm like the good pet it was.

  “Where did it come from?” Brian asked in a shaken voice.

  “The bedroom down the hall would be my guess,” she said.

  “Why? Was it hungry?”

  “All this snake wanted was something warm to snuggle up with.”

  “Smart snake,” Cain said.

  She ignored him.

  “I’m warmer than a glass cage in a dark corner of a bedroom,” she explained to Brian, “so the boa is perfectly happy to curl around my arm. He doesn’t have snaky designs on my body.”

  “Maybe he’s not so smart after all,” Cain said.

  “Maybe he’s a reptilian Einstein,” she retorted.

  Slowly she traced the cool length of the snake with her fingertip. Its whole body was smooth and supple, muscular and resilient.

  “Very healthy,” she said approvingly. “Whoever owns it knows how to take care of reptiles.”

  JoLynn made emphatic, muffled sounds.

  Warily, Cain removed his hand.

  “Billy!” JoLynn rasped.

  Nothing was left of her normally wide-eyed, childlike expression. Her skin was unnaturally pale. Her only color was two hot spots of color high on her cheeks.

  “I’m going to kill that sneaky son of a bitch! I told him not to bring that thing in my house!”

  Shelley tried to think of something tactful to say. All she could think was that if JoLynn was the boy’s mother, “son of a bitch” was an apt description.

  Not tactful, she thought. Keep mouth shut. For once.

  “Kill it!” JoLynn demanded, turning toward Cain. “Kill it right now!”

  Shelley backed up and put a protective hand between him and the snake.

  “That’s not necessary,” she said. “It’s not harming anyone.”

  The front door slammed.

  “Mother, it’s Billy,” called out a voice. “I’m back from the beach.”

  As the boy yelled, he rounded the corner into the living room. He was wearing a minimum bathing suit and a maximum coating of sand.

  The first thing he saw was his ashen mother.

  The second thing he saw was his favorite pet clinging boalike to a strange woman’s arm.

  His lips formed a word usually reserved for adults.

  Cain cleared his throat in time to muffle the boy’s curse.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Billy said, hurrying into the room. “Really! He’s gentle and clean and he doesn’t have any bad habits.”

  “Must be a female,” Shelley said to him, smiling.

  “Nope. Male.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Hates nail polish and hair goop.”

  She barely managed not to look at the boy’s brightly polished and heavily gooped mother. Struggling not to laugh out loud, she stroked the snake again, enjoying the subtle rose patterns of its scales illuminated by the late-afternoon light.

  “He has lovely manners,” she said, emphasizing the gender. “What do you call him?”

  “Squeeze, what else?”

  Shelley smiled and then laughed out loud. The laugh was like her smile—warm, open, nothing held back.

  Cain took an involuntary step toward her, like a cold man walking toward fire. The combination of intelligence, approval, and humor in her expression was more intriguing to him than all of JoLynn’s carefully concocted female allure.

  “Squeeze,” Shelley repeated, snickering. “He certainly does.”

  Full realization dawned on Billy. He walked over and stared at Shelley. He was exactly at eye level with her, a tanned boy with light brown eyes, dark blond hair, and an expression too seri
ous for someone his age.

  “You aren’t afraid,” he said in disbelief. “Even a little bit.”

  “Disappointed?”

  His brown eyes widened. Then he grinned.

  “I’m Billy,” he said, holding out his hand. “Who are you?”

  “Shelley.”

  She gave him her left hand because her right was full of contented snake.

  “Boy, your kids sure are lucky,” he said, pumping her hand. “Can you believe it? A mother who isn’t afraid of snakes!”

  He shook his head, awed at the possibilities.

  “Cain,” JoLynn said in a harsh, trembling voice, “kill it!”

  “Aw, Mother,” the boy said, turning toward, her. “You don’t mean that.”

  “The hell I don’t.”

  The words wiped all humor from Billy. He stared at his mother for a stunned moment, then at Cain’s unreadable expression. Slowly, almost hopelessly, the boy turned toward Shelley.

  She raised an eyebrow and looked right at Cain. Though she said nothing, her entire posture made it clear that he would take the snake from her only if he was ready to drag it from her unwilling hands.

  “It’s just for two months, Uncle Cain,” the boy said.

  His words were for Cain and JoLynn, but his eyes pleaded with Shelley.

  “I can’t take him home because Dad is overseas,” Billy explained quickly to her, “and the housekeeper won’t allow Squeeze to live there unless I’m there, too, and I’m here, not there, because I’m here.”

  “I won’t allow the snake in my house at all,” JoLynn said, her voice harsh. “Evil creatures.”

  Shelley winced. The other woman’s reaction to the snake wasn’t just another part of her ultrafeminine appearance. JoLynn’s skin was pasty and she was sweating visibly. She was genuinely terrified of snakes.

  “I want it dead.” JoLynn shuddered. “Slimy beast! How can you bear to touch it?”

  “Its skin is drier than ours,” Shelley pointed out gently.

  Her tone made it clear that she was accustomed to snakes and to people who feared them.

  JoLynn’s lips moved. No words came out.

  “Truly,” Shelley said. “Have you ever touched a snake?”

  Although she hadn’t moved, JoLynn made an odd sound and backed up in a rush.

  Brian’s arm wrapped soothingly around his client.

  “Kill it, Cain,” JoLynn demanded. “Kill it now!”

  Billy glanced appealingly at his uncle and started to speak.

  “Shelley?” Cain asked.

  Then he turned and looked at her.

  She stared up at him for a moment, smiled slightly, and nodded. She looked toward Billy again.

  “Would you let me keep Squeeze for you until you move back in with your dad?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “No.”

  “Uh, he only eats live mice,” Billy said hesitantly, torn between honesty and a desire to save his pet.

  “I know.”

  Her voice was as gentle as the fingertip that stroked the boa’s relaxed coils.

  “You do?” the boy asked. “How come? Do you have snakes?”

  “No, but I grew up with them. My dad is a herpetologist.”

  As she spoke, she walked slowly toward Billy’s room, drawing the boy after her and removing the snake from JoLynn’s sight.

  Billy fell in step beside Shelley, eager to have his pet out of his mother’s reach.

  “Do you know what ‘herpetologist’ means?” Shelley asked.

  “Yeah. Someone who studies reptiles.”

  “Especially snakes.”

  “Poisonous snakes, too?” Billy asked.

  “Mostly, in Dad’s case.”

  Cain followed with a gliding, silent stride, listening intently. He felt as he once had in wild country, when he had been expecting one kind of rock formation and found instead a glittering vein-of pure gold. The rush of discovery went through him like an electric current, sharpening every sense.

  “Dad is fascinated by what he calls ‘sand ecology,’ ” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Shorthand for how reptiles adjust to the very dry places of the earth. As it happens, a lot of desert snakes are poisonous. Really poisonous. They seem to go with deserts the way lack of water does.”

  “Like in the Mojave Desert?”

  “And the Sahara, and the Negev, and the Sonora,” she said, walking into Billy’s bedroom. “While I was growing up, we lived in most of the great deserts of the world.”

  “Oh, wow! I’ve always wanted to live in a desert.”

  “You’ve got a leg up on it in southern California. Without our imported water, we wouldn’t last a month.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Cain said, his voice deep, amused.

  Shelley whirled around, startled. She hadn’t heard him follow her down the hall.

  “For a big man, you’re very light on your feet,” she said tartly.

  “You’re rather surprising yourself.”

  She stood on tiptoe and looked over his shoulder. “Where’s JoLynn?”

  “Mother doesn’t come in my room anymore,” Billy said. “She hates it.”

  “Mmm,” was all Shelley could think of to say.

  The boy began unwrapping the well-named Squeeze from her arm. Or trying to. The snake liked his warm perch.

  “My room makes Mom mad,” Billy explained. Then he shrugged. “A lot of things make her mad. Especially Daddy. Hey, let go.”

  He tugged firmly at his pet’s warm coils.

  Squeeze didn’t budge.

  “C’mon, loosen up,” the boy said. “It’s time to go back in the tank.”

  Squeeze, well, squeezed, reluctant to give up his private source of heat.

  Cain leaned close and spoke too softly for Billy to overhear. “A snake after my own heart.”

  “A constrictor?”

  Yet even as Shelley said it, she realized that she didn’t feel confined by Cain’s closeness.

  “A connoisseur of warmth,” he corrected.

  “Squeeze!” Billy said in exasperation. “Let go!”

  “Here,” Cain said.

  He bent even closer to her. Then he took Squeeze’s head in one deft, gentle hand and used the other hand to pry off one coil after another.

  The snake had absorbed enough of Shelley’s body heat to become lively and surprisingly fast. Deprived of one source of warmth, Squeeze looped quickly over and around Cain’s hard, bare forearm and began “tasting” his new perch. The reptile’s forked tongue looked very dark against the sun-struck bronze of the man’s hair.

  Cain sighed but didn’t object to the intimacy.

  “Hey, you’re not scared either,” Billy said. “Did you study herpetology, too?”

  “No, but I was once a boy who liked snakes.”

  Billy looked up. Way up. “That musta been a long time ago.”

  “Centuries, at least.”

  Shelley snickered. Laughter died when Cain switched his glance to her.

  His eyes were so close to hers that she could see the tiny flashes of blue and shards of black that gave contrast to the icy gray iris. She could also see the sudden expansion of his pupils as they dilated, and the tiny, sensual flare of his nostrils when he inhaled her perfume.

  Though he hadn’t touched her, she felt all but surrounded by him. She felt the warmth of his breath caressing her lips, smelled the clean, sharp male scent of him, and sensed the heat from his body like a promise given in silence.

  When his glance shifted to her lips, a shiver of awareness coursed through her.

  “Shelley,” Brian said from the doorway, “if you’re serious about taking that fu—” He stopped abruptly and looked at Billy. “If you really mean to take that, er, creature with you, you’ll have to get a cab.”

  She nodded indifferently.

  “I won’t have that fu—damned—snake in my car,” Brian said flatly.
/>   “No problem,” Cain drawled.

  The tone of his voice sent something shivering over Shelley’s nerves. She licked her lower lip.

  His eyes followed the moist pink tip of her tongue.

  “You don’t even know where she lives,” Brian objected.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll take Shelley wherever she wants to go.”

  “That takes in a lot of territory,” her partner retorted.

  “So do I.”

  There was a taut silence. Then Brian shrugged with a motion that was more angry than casual.

  “Great,” he said. “I’ll take JoLynn to The Gilded Lily to look over Shelley’s stock. Okay, Shelley?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine, huh?” Brian goaded. “Are you sure about that?”

  Reluctantly Shelley tore her attention from the light gleaming in Cain’s eyes, making them as deep and mysterious as twilight lakes.

  “What’s to be unsure about?” she asked.

  Brian shrugged again and turned away.

  “Don’t bother showing JoLynn anything that isn’t in high school art history books,” Shelley added. “That’s her comfort zone.”

  Her partner’s finely curved mouth shifted into a double-edged, frankly sensual smile.

  “I’ll be very, very soothing,” he assured her. “She’s had a rough day.”

  Shelley glanced up quickly at Cain, looking for traces of jealousy.

  She didn’t find any. Apparently he didn’t hesitate to leave JoLynn trembling in Brian’s expensively clad, sympathetic arms. Considering her partner’s Olympian good looks, either Billy’s “uncle” Cain truly wasn’t jealous of JoLynn or he was supremely confident of himself.

  Or both.

  That, along with his casual handling of Squeeze, intrigued Shelley. Despite the conventional wisdom that said only women were afraid of snakes, she hadn’t found many men who would approach snakes except to kill them.

  “That’s nice of you,” she said absently to her partner. “We’ll meet you at the shop after I get Squeeze set up in my house.”

  “Don’t hurry,” he said, searching Cain’s face with the same intensity that Shelley had.

  “We won’t,” Cain assured him.

  Her partner muttered something and stalked down the hall without saying good-bye.

  “Boyfriend?” Cain asked very softly.

  “Worse than that. Partner.”