their criminal activities was the problem.
Her embarrassment. And her anger. It was beginning to bubble over the edges now.
"If you want the job, Tea, and you said you did, then why are you turning your back on the opportunity? Life's a lot sweeter if you live it the way you want."
Why did his voice sound like the devil's in her ear? But he was right, of course. There was no real reason to refuse if it didn't bother the client.
Though wasn't working on the house where the man purported to have killed her father once lived weird?
No weirder than her father's family having then killed him.
She put her hand to her head, trying to clear her thoughts, trying to tamp down the past that seemed to be rearing its ugly head so often lately.
"Why would you deny yourself something you really want to do?" Johnny asked softly.
He was talking about self-denial again. But it wasn't that. It was bargains she'd made between herself, her conscience, and God. Deals to make up for all the other things she'd done.
But didn't she deserve to have something for herself? And couldn't she, like Johnny, be a live-in-the-present, look-forward-to-the-future kind of person? Doing this design job was that chance for success she'd been waiting for.
It was also her chance to remake the Caruso name. And maybe - just maybe - it was even more fitting to attempt that here.
Coming to the swiftest decision of her life, she held out her hand, palm up.
He cocked an eyebrow.
"Keys," she said. "It's time we go inside."
He reached slowly into his pocket. "Yes," he said. "I suppose it is."
The lock turned easily. She led Johnny across the threshold, never once looking back.
***
"If I believed in wishes anymore, this would fulfill every one of them," Tea declared, taking yet another tour between the kitchen and living room.
Johnny followed, as grateful for her final decision to be his designer as he was for her enthusiasm about the house. With her waxing on about the "simple lines flowing from one room to the next," and the glass walls that "brought the indoors out and the outdoors in," he hoped she wouldn't notice the tension that had stretched his nerves and tightened his muscles the instant he'd crossed the threshold. At any moment he expected this first time in the house to force another flashback on him.
Keeping his attention honed on Tea, he watched her turn a circle, the skirt of her dress rising to show off her legs. The sight was enough to tease him with thoughts of her incredible ass, just a few feet higher up. God, he wished she'd stop with the old-maid clothes. Something a little shorter, something a little tighter, and he wouldn't be able to experience a thing beyond this mine-all-mine lust she seemed to bring out in him.
She was chattering again, but she'd moved from the middle of the room toward the opening that led to the bedrooms. The dim hallway beyond snagged his attention, and he peered in the direction of where he'd once slept.
"I studied the blueprints you gave me," she was saying, and now her voice warred with the heavy backbeat of the Beastie Boys' song, "Fight for Your Right to Party," that was playing in his memory. "The original architecture called for just the L-shaped main house arranged around the patio-pool courtyard. The golf course and the lagoon were put in by... by the next owner."
The next owner. She meant Giovanni Martelli. The Beastie Boys played louder, never content as quiet background music. The golf course had been playable the summer Johnny had come to visit, he remembered, and the lagoon walls constructed though waiting for water when he'd left.
His palms began to sweat, and he focused on Tea in desperation as she moved to the windows opposite the glass walls that looked onto the pool. "The guest bungalows were built by the second-to-the-last owners, Michigan snowbirds, for the visiting families of their adult children."
The guest bungalows. Okay, the guest bungalows. He could think of them, concentrate on them. "Cal is moving into one of those today," Johnny told Tea.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. "He is? Already? I thought I'd get a chance to - "
"We ordered the bare minimum furnishings to be delivered. Temporary stuff that we'll dispense with once the replacements you order arrive. But we need a place to work and to sleep and hotel rooms get old, fast."
And he had to face the nightmares if