Free The Temptation of Sean MacNeill by Virginia Kantra

shoulders were. Maybe mailing her monthly check to Carmine Bilotti had been enough to satisfy the racketeer. Maybe Sean's blunt intervention hadn't provoked him into sending the debt collectors after her like Hollywood hit men. Maybe. And maybe she was as blind as an owl in daytime because she didn't want to see what a mistake it would be to get involved with somebody like Sean MacNeill.
    What did she tell her high school students? Sex doesn't solve your problems. It just hands you a whole set of new ones.
    She pulled a face at the mirror. Let them put that on a T-shirt.
    Rinsing the toothpaste from the sink, she went along the hall to kiss her children good-night.
    Chris bounced into bed as she came through the door. Rachel smiled. "Teeth all brushed?"
    "Yep."
    She glanced at the narrow empty bed on the other side of the room. "Where's Lindsey?"
    "I, uh…"
    Secrets, again. They were everywhere, wrapped around the fragile pieces of their lives like the paper they'd used to pack up the contents of the old house. Don't tell on Lindsey. Don't worry the children. Don't burden Mama.
    "Chris," she warned.
    He squirmed under the covers. "She went to see Sean."
    Oh, no. "To see Mr. MacNeill? Why?"
    "Well, you said I shouldn't bother him anymore. And I finished that comic book, and I thought maybe he'd let me have another one."
    And so he'd begged or bribed Xena Warrior Pre-Teen into marching over there for him. Rachel sighed. "Oh, Chris."
    "You didn't say she couldn't."
    "No, but I thought you both understood… Never mind." Why should her children be any more able to resist Sean than she was?
    She brushed Chris's hair back from his face and kissed his forehead. "'Night, honey. God bless you."
    "God bless." His arms came around her neck.
    Tears rushed to her eyes at the simple contact. Oh, God, she was some kind of emotional mess when a reminder of past cuddles could make her weepy. No wonder she'd been all over Sean MacNeill. She was obviously starved for human contact.
    How humiliating.
    "Sleep tight," she said with effort, and went to collect her daughter.
    Myra was singing softly along with the radio in the kitchen. Rachel opened the screen door—it didn't stick anymore—and stepped over the newly installed threshold onto the porch. She could almost hear her mother say it. So nice to have a man around the house.
    And it was, damn it. Nice to have the gutters cleaned and the dripping faucet silenced and the radiator level checked on her mother's car. Nice to meet his wicked dark eyes in the morning and hide her blush behind a coffee cup, and feel, for brief seconds, as if she wasn't one of the walking dead.
    She stood a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the moonless night. Above the dark trees a nimbus of humidity wrapped each star, and from them, a chorus of cicadas rose and fell like the sea at high tide. The big overhead doors of the garage stood open, spilling light and paint fumes and admitting the warm evening breeze.
    Bugs, too, probably, Rachel thought, deliberately resisting the pull of the soft summer night.
    But mosquitoes didn't seem to bother the man kneeling on the tarp-covered floor. Under the white shop lights, Sean was painting a tall, narrow cupboard with even brush strokes, his face hard with concentration and his dark hair escaping its stubby ponytail.
    Yearning took her by the throat, not so much for the man as for the girl who might have let herself fall for him, the girl who might have believed in that teasing smile and those concerned eyes and the strength implicit in his wrists and his voice.
    Stupid, Rachel scolded herself. She hadn't been that girl for a long time now. She started down the walk.
    She was halfway to the gravel drive when she spotted Lindsey, like a ghost from her own childhood, curled up on the dragon-claw sofa, watching Sean paint.
    "You're dripping," Lindsey said.
    The brush lifted, paused, and then resumed. "No, I'm not. Don't you have homework to do?"
    "You asked me that already. I