"All the more reason you're going to tell me about it."
She tilted her head back, staring up at the stars scattered across the night sky, contemplating her response. She had a choice, and she knew it. As determined as he was, Clate couldn't drag answers from her that she had no intention of giving him. Finally, she leveled her gaze at him once more. "You have decaf?"
"What?"
"You might never sleep," she said, turning her back to him as she started up the sloping lawn, "but I need my eight hours or I don't function well. I'm teaching open-hearth cooking in the morning. I don't want to burn myself on a cast-iron kettle because of lack of sleep." She paused, glanced back at him, her chestnut hair trailing down her back. Right then, she could have passed for an old-fashioned, horror-picture-show witch herself. Beautiful, tempting, dangerous. "Coming?"
"Right behind you, sweetheart," he muttered through clenched teeth, and followed her up the rise.
* * *
Chapter 7
As she poured extra milk into the steaming mug of coffee Clate had handed her, Piper decided Hannah must have put something in her tea yesterday. It was the only explanation for why she'd agreed to wear a nineteenth-century getup and dig for treasure when Clate Jackson was home—why she'd kissed him.
She felt drowsy yet edgy, watching him move about in a kitchen as familiar to her as her own. His dark sweatshirt made his shoulders seem even broader and more muscular. He looked rugged, physical, his presence in Hannah's old, quaint house incongruous. But he owned it now. She was on his turf.
The stove clock read two-forty-five. Her class in open-hearth cooking was at eleven. Time enough to tell Clate what she would tell him—she wasn't yet sure exactly what that would be—and get a few hours' sleep.
He dropped onto the chair opposite her and settled back, the muscles in his jaw tensing as he looked at her. Finally, he sighed. "Trust me, Piper. I'm not in to burning bamboo shoots under the fingernails. I'd like to know what's going on, and that's all. You want to tell me about this buried treasure?"
She sipped her coffee, inhaling its strong aroma, painfully aware of what kind of loony figure she must cut in her nineteenth-century black dress and white petticoat.
"You do have a choice," Clate said in that quiet, deceptively reasonable drawl. He had his emotions under tight control. Whatever had propelled him to kiss her with such hunger, such ferocity, was well banked down. "Either your forays onto my property stop or you explain them."
She shot him a look. "Meaning you'd have me arrested for trespassing."
"Meaning exactly that."
"Even after what happened out there?"
His grim expression lightened, and a sexy half-grin reminded her that she wasn't the only one who'd enjoyed the experience. "Piper, it was only a kiss."
She pursed her lips. "You're a cad, Clate Jackson. My brother dropped off a magazine article about you, and it as much as said so. You're rich, successful, driven, but a cad."
"It didn't say 'cad.'"
"That's my interpretation." She sounded high and mighty and a bit nineteenth century even to her own ears, but she didn't care. "It indicated you wouldn't hesitate to take advantage of a woman who found herself in an unfortunate position."
He was unmoved. "You didn't find yourself in an unfortunate position, Piper. You put yourself there."
She peered at him over the rim of her steaming coffee. "Only because I tripped."
"Uh-uh." That rasping drawl wasn't so easy and reasonable now. "Because you deliberately dressed yourself in black from head to toe and snuck onto my property in the middle of the night. You made your choice."
She sniffed. "It wasn't my choice to kiss you."
He had the audacity to laugh.
"I'm not saying I objected or have any regrets, but..." She trailed off, suddenly realizing she wasn't getting anywhere. He held the cards. Every damned one.
"But what?" he asked.
She squirmed on her rickety old chair. He wasn't about to let her mount a graceful retreat. "I don't think I need to spell it out. You pounced, Clate. Let's just leave it at that."
He stretched out his muscled legs, at ease. "Honey, that wasn't pouncing."
"It was in my judgment, and right now, my judgment is the only one that counts."
"Piper." He leaned forward, the light shifting on his face, his eyes, making what he was thinking even more difficult to read. "Can you honestly sit there and tell me you know which one of us started that kiss?"
She clamped her mouth shut and refused to answer. She didn't care if she seemed like a prude. She should have refused to discuss this topic altogether, but it was too late—too late to stop the memory of the taste of his mouth, the heat of his tongue, the feel of his arms around her.
Her throat went dry. She managed to shake her head. "But it doesn't matter. Nothing would have happened if you'd just stayed in bed and let me do what I came to do."