Led into Temptation Page 6

  Who the hell was she that she could have this effect on him? He’d been observing her for two weeks and he’d known he was attracted. But shouldn’t there have been some sign, some warning that she was the kind of woman who could tempt a man to throw aside all logic, all intellect?

  All thought of his job?

  Her eyes were wide, and he could read the innocence as well as the desire. Was that part of what drew him? Mesmerized him? Anger simmered through him. Not at her but at himself. Whatever hold she had on him, he was going to have to figure it out.

  “Here, let me help you with those.”

  They both turned as Tess dropped to her knees and gathered up the scones. Neither of them moved even after Tess had hurried away. Dane noted that it was Naomi who gathered herself first and, using the edge of the table for support, rose to her feet.

  His body was still pulsing, his blood pumping when he stood. And he wasn’t the only one, he realized when he spotted the pulse hammering at her throat. She was feeling at least something of the turmoil that was brewing inside him. That was some consolation. Not much. If what they were feeling wasn’t mutual, it would be a lot easier to handle.

  “I’m sure I haven’t answered all of your questions yet, Father,” Naomi said.

  “No,” Dane agreed. Not by a long shot.

  “I think a tour might be in order.” She glanced at her watch. “Unfortunately, I have an errand to run in town this morning. How about I meet you back here around one-thirty and personally show you some of the highlights that Haworth House has to offer? There’s one spot along the beach that can’t be missed, especially if you’re thinking of spiritual reading and meditation.”

  “Sure.”

  The smile she gave him was brief, professional, but as she walked back into the hotel, he noted that her gait wasn’t quite steady.

  His would be, he hoped. In just another few moments. It was only then that her words sunk in. She’d invited him to a private spot on the beach. And he’d agreed to go with her.

  Shit.

  Would a priest have agreed to do that? Better still, would he be able to do that and keep his hands off her? He’d barely restrained himself from kissing her within sight of everyone in the courtyard a few moments ago.

  Silently, Dane cursed himself as he drew out his wallet and dropped a bill on the table. What would or would not happen on the beach was the least of his worries right now. She was running an errand in town, and that might prove the perfect opportunity for Davenport to contact her.

  5

  AVERY HAD BEEN absolutely right about rides in convertibles, Naomi decided as she pulled in to a small municipal parking lot near the pier. A fast drive with the top down had allowed her head to clear. It had also managed to pull all the pins out of her hair. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she studied her reflection and barely recognized herself. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair windblown.

  But that was just the tip of the iceberg, she thought as she grabbed the purse she’d borrowed from Jillian and locked the doors. Something had shifted inside of her when she and Father MacFarland knelt to get those fallen scones. When he’d taken her hand and nearly kissed her, she’d recognized the man she’d seen standing below her window in the courtyard. It was as if Dane MacFarland was really two men—the friendly but reserved priest and the sexy man she’d seen last night wearing nothing but a towel.

  Perhaps all priests had those two sides to them—the spiritual advisor and the man.

  It was the man who’d nearly kissed her. And there was a part of her that was beginning to get tired of nearlys.

  On the fast ride from the hotel, she’d had some time to think and she’d reached a conclusion. Limiting the fantasy of seducing Dane MacFarland to her diary and hoping that it might trigger another erotic dream was the way she’d handled her infatuation with Father Bouchard. Good grief! She was nearly twice as old now, and there had to be a more adult solution.

  And that was as far as she’d gotten.

  Because she wasn’t seriously considering making the fantasy a reality. Was she? Pressing a hand against the jitter of nerves in her stomach, Naomi headed across the parking lot. Baby steps, she reminded herself. All she had to do for now was follow Jillian’s advice and shop. When she reached the sidewalk, she paused a minute to take in the view.

  The pier and the restaurant Avery had taken her to the day before were to her right. A few of the tables on the patio were occupied. Her glance strayed to a man in a large straw fisherman’s hat. There was something vaguely familiar about him.

  For a moment, she narrowed her eyes and studied him, taking in the worn jeans, the T-shirt with torn-off sleeves, the muscled arms. He held something in the palm of one hand, and as she watched, he lifted it. Sunlight glinted off metal. Some kind of lure, she supposed. Then he casually tipped it from one palm into the other and back again.

  Familiarity stirred again. And then it clicked. She’d seen Michael do the same thing. The last date they’d had, he’d played with the key chain he’d given her in the same way. She passed her gaze over the man again, and this time she noted the tattoo on his upper forearm.

  Good lord, was she becoming paranoid? The conservative Michael Davenport would never have a tattoo. And a lot of men probably used that same gesture.

  Deliberately, she glanced beyond the patio of the restaurant to a sandy curve of public beach crowded with chairs and colorful umbrellas. Gulls cried overhead. Children laughed as they raced through the frothy waves that pushed relentlessly against the shore.

  Farther out in the water, a couple of fishermen lounged in small boats, their lines bobbing gently in perfect rhythm with the movement of the waves. As one of their lines dipped, Naomi shaded her eyes and watched the man straighten and begin to let out more line. The back of her neck prickled.

  She barely stopped herself from whirling around. Instead, she turned slowly and pretended to casually scan the street to get her bearings. Though his tackle box still sat on a chair, the man with the tattoo was gone.

  To her left lay the main street of the town, stretching inland a couple of blocks from the pier. As she crossed the wide, paved street, the few pedestrians strolling along the sidewalk didn’t so much as glance her way.

  She spotted a bank with a clock tower, a professional office building that housed a real estate office, a law firm and an art gallery. Ahead of her, on the corner, was a coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds, that offered shady sidewalk seating beneath a pretty green-striped awning.

  Two customers sat outside. One had his back to her and wore a baseball cap. He dug in the duffel bag in the chair next to him and took out a book. The other man, large and round with a grizzled beard, was scribbling on a folded newspaper. Working a crossword puzzle, she guessed. Neither of the men paid her any attention as she walked past them, and the prickling sensation didn’t reoccur.

  In the next block up, she saw Book Traders—a bookstore, candy store and touristy gift shop. It was just the kind of place that Michael Davenport would have been drawn to.

  Annoyed that she’d let her ex-fiancé intrude on her thoughts once more, she whirled and cut a diagonal path across the street, heading to the boutique Jillian had recommended. Discoveries sat directly across from the coffee shop, and she would have made her way there earlier if it hadn’t been for the feeling that she was being watched and her paranoid need to study everyone on the street.

  The display window intrigued her immediately. It was free of the usual mannequins. Instead, a silky cloth the color of the sea flowed over tiered shelves and merchandise was artfully arranged on each one. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the lingerie. A lace bra and matching panty in a lemony color lay as if the wearer had just carelessly discarded them. Next to them, other bra-and-panty sets in a rainbow of colors were stacked neatly.

  Her own underwear was as practical as the clothes she wore over them. But the bits of frothy lace in the display window were pure fantasy. A sudden image flashed into her mind. She s
tood on the balcony of her room wearing nothing but the yellow lace bra and panties. Across from her, Father Dane MacFarland stood on his balcony wearing nothing but that skimpy towel. And it was the man who looked at her, not the priest, and even in her imagination that heated gaze made her head spin. For an instant the sensation was so intense that she had to put her hand against the glass to steady herself.

  Get a grip, Naomi. A fantasy was one thing, an obsession quite another. Drawing in a deep breath, she ordered herself to focus on the window display. She’d come here to shop.

  T-shirts and shorts were arranged closer to the front of the window. There wasn’t a neutral color in the bunch. Tucked in a far corner was a small ancient-looking sea chest with a cornucopia of fashion jewelry pouring out of it. Here, too, color seemed to be the order of the day—turquoise, coral, peridot and garnet.

  Against a sunny yellow backdrop, two sundresses in splashy prints hung from hangers. One had a halter top, the other spaghetti straps with little bows. Beneath each sat strappy sandals in a coordinating color. Naomi glanced down at her sensible black shoes with medium heels.

  Definitely drab.

  As she stepped into the interior of the dress shop, she stopped and blinked, recalling that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s world went from black and white to Technicolor.

  A petite woman with short brown hair and the face of a pixie hurried out from behind a cash register, her hand extended. “Hi, I’m Molly Pepperman. Welcome to Discoveries.”

  Naomi took the offered hand. “I’m Naomi Brightman. I believe you’ve met my sister Jillian.”

  Molly’s face lit up. “Indeed, I have. She said you might stop by. You can browse to your heart’s content. Or you can put me to work. When I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up to dress the stars for the red carpet.”

  “I think I should put you to work. Not for any red carpet. But I’m in desperate need of a complete wardrobe makeover.”

  The woman rubbed her hands together, beaming. “You’ve just made my day.”

  Naomi glanced around the store. It was a large space, but in spite of the variety of the inventory, it didn’t appear crowded. “Where do we start?”

  “At the foundation, naturally,” Molly said. “But first we’re going to take a little tour of the store and you can let me know what catches your eye. A dress, a color, a bracelet. Anything.”

  Naomi frowned. “A fashion sense is not my strongest suit.”

  “Let me worry about that.” Molly grabbed a basket. “Think of it as being in a grocery store. You just tell me what you like.”

  Naomi took another look around. “What about those sunglasses?”

  “Excellent choice. Very Jackie O.”

  The fact that Molly hadn’t laughed, or worse, snorted at the fact that her first choice had been sunglasses, made Naomi straighten her shoulders. “On second thought, I don’t want them.”

  “Okay.”

  She met Molly’s eyes. “Sunglasses are for hiding and I’m through with that.”

  Molly beamed a smile at her. “Then you’ve come to the right place. What else strikes your fancy?”

  Naomi swept her gaze around the store. She could do this. “The very first thing that caught my eye was the matching bra and panties in the window—the yellow ones.”

  “And you claim you have no fashion sense. Those are just in.” Molly urged her toward the front of the store, pulled the backdrop aside and scooped up the lingerie.

  “I like the blue ones, too.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  As Molly added them to the basket, Naomi again experienced the prickling sensation at the back of her neck. She snapped her head up and scanned the street in front of her. The coffee shop was kitty-corner to Discoveries and one of the men she’d seen earlier was gone. The other appeared to be totally focused on his crossword puzzle.

  “Anything else while we’re in the window?”

  Naomi turned back to the display. “The turquoise print sundress and sandals.”

  “They’re my favorite, too.” Molly added the sandals to her basket and slipped the sundress off its hangar. “We’ll worry about sizes later.”

  After they’d walked through the entire store, Naomi watched as Molly unpacked her basket and hung everything outside a small dressing room.

  “What do you think?”

  What she thought was that nothing she’d chosen looked anything like the old Naomi Brightman. “In Boston, I would have had to run the gamut of a mall to put all of this together. And I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to buy any of it. How do you manage to offer such a wide range in a small store?”

  “My great-grandmother opened this space as Pepperman’s General Store back in the thirties. So we’ve always stocked a variety of products. When I came back here after graduating from fashion school in New York, I talked my grandmother into letting me make some changes. Now we only cater to women—or to men who want to shop for women.”

  “What should I start with?” Naomi asked.

  “The bra and panties. I know they’ll fit so go ahead and try them on. I promise, it will make all the difference. Once you get those on, I’ll hand you something else.”

  Naomi stepped into the dressing room, closed the door and studied herself as she began to slip off her clothes one piece at a time, folding each garment carefully and putting it on a nearby bench. She wished it were going to be just as easy to discard old habits, old ways of thinking.

  Once she’d slipped into the lemon-colored bra and panties, she appraised herself in the mirror. There was definitely something…different about her. Stepping closer, she tried to figure it out. The garments were thin and transparent. As she turned to one side, then the other, she felt the slight scratch of the lace against her skin and her nipples. Her whole body tingled with heightened awareness.

  It was the same face, the same body. But not quite…

  “What do you think?” Molly asked through the door.

  “I look like me.”

  “But…”

  “I don’t feel like me.” She traced her fingers along the lace that left the top of her breasts bare and then ran them down her sides to where the edge of the bikini stopped high on her thighs. “I feel sexier.”

  Molly’s laugh drifted over the top of the dressing room door. “What else?”

  Naomi remembered seeing the lingerie lying discarded on the rippling blue silk in the display window. The bra and panties had looked as if someone had just stripped out of them and tossed them aside. And the fantasy that had been teasing at the edge of her mind ever since blossomed.

  Closing her eyes to picture it more clearly, she once more imagined that she was at the window of her balcony just as she had been the night before. Across the courtyard, Dane MacFarland stood at his phone with nothing but the damp towel hitched low at his waist.

  Only this time when he turned and his eyes locked on hers, she did more than stare back. She stepped out into full view on her balcony. Though she hadn’t thought it possible, his gaze seemed to grow more intense. Then with her eyes steady on his, she lifted her hands and unhooked the bra. The sensation of the lacy fabric sliding down her arms and breasts was enhanced by the searing heat of his eyes as he followed its progress.

  Trembling now, she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the panties and pushed them slowly down her hips. Fire and ice shimmered along her nerve endings as the panties slipped to the floor.

  When he stepped onto his balcony, the intensity of the pull she felt had her moving closer to the mirror. Dizzy with desire, she swayed and flattened her palms against it to remain upright. Then she leaned her forehead against the coolness of the glass.

  “Naomi?”

  “Yes,” she managed to reply. With great effort, she opened her eyes. She was back in the dressing room, and the lemon-colored lace lay at her feet.

  “They’ve done research on why women wear sexy underwear—whether it’s for the men in their lives or for the
mselves,” Molly said. “And they discovered that the majority of women wear sexy lingerie for themselves.”

  Naomi gave her reflection a sideways glance. Not entirely true. From first glance, the sexy undergarments had triggered thoughts of a man. One man.

  “I’ll bet you that if you put that business suit back on, you won’t see yourself in the same way. And you won’t feel the same way.”

  She already felt different. The old Naomi hadn’t ever fantasized about stripping for a man. She’d certainly never done it in real life. And it wasn’t just any man she was imagining herself getting naked for. It was a priest.

  Guilt and pleasure flooded her, making her fumble as she refastened the bra. “I’m going to take these in every color you’ve got.”

  “Done.”

  “Now hand me the sundress and the shoes.”

  Molly opened the door and passed them in. “One question.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to know who the lucky man is.”

  Naomi pulled the sundress over her head. It was the one with the spaghetti straps. The material had no sooner settled into place than she imagined herself untying one of the straps and then the other. “How do you know there is a man?”

  “You have a look in your eye. Is it seduction or revenge?”

  “Maybe a little of both,” Naomi said as she stepped into the sandals. She studied herself in the mirror. The reflection was a far cry from the woman who’d stepped into the dressing room in that dull business suit.

  And maybe this didn’t have to do with a man at all. Maybe it was high time she did something just for herself. And her fantasies about stripping for Dane MacFarland? Well, she still had time to sort that out.

  DANE SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY in his seat. The hard-on had been with him ever since he’d seen Naomi and the petite brunette take two sets of lingerie out of the display window. To top it off, since she’d abruptly left the courtyard that morning, he felt he’d been playing catch-up. And it was his own damn fault. He’d spooked her when he’d taken her hand and come close to kissing her. Hell, he’d spooked himself.