Free All Shook Up by Susan Andersen Page B

smile spread across her face.
    Jenna, the banquet coordinator, whooped. “Way to go, Dru! I’ve never seen a conference sold so smoothly.”
    Dru shrugged, but the grin didn’t leave her face. “This place sells itself. Where else you gonna find views like this to go along with such an impressive package of meeting rooms, meals, and activities? Especially during ski season.”
    “Throwing trail passes for their families into the package was brilliant, though.”
    “Yeah, I thought that was pretty good, too.” Dru laughed and reached out to squeeze Jenna’s arm. “That array of menu samples you set up in the conference room certainly didn’t hurt, either. Good job.”
    Moments later she was headed up the trail to J.D.’s cabin, still jazzed on the satisfaction of a job well done. How blessed she was to have a career she loved so much.
    Arriving at the clearing, she swept her gaze across the area—and spotted J.D. Carver without his shirt on.
    She stopped abruptly, as if an invisible force field had dropped out of the sky in front of her. Heart rate racing like an Indy 500 contender, she licked her lips several times in a futile bid to get back a little of the moisture that had left her mouth.
    Bare, J.D.’s tanned shoulders looked even wider than they had in his ubiquitous white T-shirts. His back was long, damp, and muscular, and it tapered beautifully down to the sweat-soaked waistband of the jeans riding low on his hips.
    He swiveled to plant a knee on a board braced atop a long sawhorse, and muscles bunched and elongated in his arms and back as he leaned forward to mark it with a pencil. He stuck the pencil behind his ear, and a tangle of dark hair shone in his armpit when he raised his arm higher to swipe perspiration from his forehead. Dru caught a glimpse of the silky hair fanning his chest; then he shifted slightly and she gawked like a schoolgirl at the fuller view it afforded her, helplessly tracking the narrowing growth pattern of dark hair down his hard stomach.
    He slid the board out until the mark he’d made linedup with the end of the sawhorse, the end hanging out beyond it. When he suddenly jerked his chin in a peremptory, c’mere gesture, she jumped guiltily. But he wasn’t even looking in her direction. Tate trotted down from the porch, where—to her eternal shame—she hadn’t even noticed him. He slid under J.D.’s bowed stomach and chest, his back to the man’s front as he assumed an identical posture of one knee on the sawhorse, the other foot planted on the ground. He leaned forward to brace his left hand on the board just before the end of the sawhorse, and Dru smiled at the serious expression on his face. He must be in heaven to be included in such a guy activity.
    Then J.D. bent the elbow of his braced arm, dipped, and came up with a round-bladed, jagged-toothed saw in his free hand. Tate wrapped his hand around the handle, J.D. covered it with his own, and with a press of his finger against the trigger, the saw suddenly roared to life.
    Dru’s spine snapped straight. What the hell was he thinking? Tate was much too young to be handling hazardous power tools. A scream of outrage roared up her throat, but she bit it back, terrified it would startle her son and cause him to jerk his braced hand forward into the path of the screaming teeth that were passing a mere hairsbreadth away from his fingertips. The instant the lumber tumbled to the ground and the saw whined into silence, however, she shot across the clearing.
    Tate, who had hopped down to pick up the piece of wood, saw her first. “Hi, Mom! We’re rebuilding the porch roof.” J.D.’s head snapped up, but Dru hadn’t thefirst idea what he was thinking as he watched her approach.
    Her inclination was to snatch her son to her and inspect him head to toe for injuries. But she forced a few deeps breaths and reached for a measure of calm, then plastered a smile on her face. “I can see that. But J.D. is going to have to get