He held out his hand. "Come on, let's go for a walk."
Libby stared at his hand, horrified. "I'm still a little weak." He was continually throwing her off balance.
He caught her wrist and exerted enough pressure to bring her to her feet. "I think I can manage to keep you upright." He looked down at her from his superior height. "You need to gain a little weight, Drake. You aren't anorexic, are you?"
She sucked in her breath, feeling her blood pressure rising alarmingly. She hated the fact that she was small. She would have loved to use the word petite, but she was just plain small. She was a stick, a miniature Hannah without the breasts. And all her life, never had that fact bothered her more than when she was around Ty, the quietly handsome-in-a-nerdy-genius-way boy she'd had a crush on since the first day he'd entered her seventh-grade classroom. She hadn't even seen him in several years and here she was, self-conscious all over again.
"I'm virtually overwhelmed by your extraordinary compliments, Derrick," Libby said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She would not--would not--let him see how his casual dismissal of her feminine qualities still had the power to hurt her. "A woman always loves to hear she looks starved and unhealthy, thank you."
She made the mistake of looking up at him, her gaze locking with his.
He was watching her with a look she'd never seen in a man's eyes before, at least not when those eyes were directed at her. He looked hungry, like a predatory wolf. She swallowed hard and turned her face back toward the ocean. She just couldn't look at him and be rational. Everything he said annoyed her. He was the only person in the world who could get her riled, yet for some logic-defying masochistic reason she craved him. She always had.
"I never said you looked bad, Drake. It was merely an observation and genuine concern over your health. I hadn't realized you were so sensitive." He slid his fingers over her wrist to capture her hand, tugging until she came with him. "I noticed the paint on your house. It's very unusual."
She blinked up at him, more flustered than ever, trying desperately to follow the conversation. Her head was beginning to hurt. "The paint? Oh. The paint. What is it with men and paint?"
"Pardon me?"
"Damon, Sarah's fiance, was quite interested in the paint as well. He never got around to examining it."
"Really? The first thing I did was take a sample of it."
"You chipped the paint off of our house?" Libby nearly stopped in her tracks, but he kept walking as if it were the sanest thing in the world to peel paint off other people's houses.
"Of course. Don't you want to know if an ancestor of yours found a preservative that would benefit the entire world? Even if he chose to keep it to himself to defraud the townspeople into believing it was magic, you would have the chance to set the record straight."
Libby felt a powerful rush of emotion so uncommon to her that it actually took a second or two to identify. Anger. Genuine, riled-up, I'm-so-not-a-good-girl anger. She yanked her hand away from him. "First of all, Derrick, most of my ancestors who lived in Sea Haven were women, so it's far more likely one of them found the preservative, if there is one, not a man. Women actually are quite capable of mastering science you know."
He didn't look at all impressed by her outburst. He reached out to tuck a strand of dark hair behind her ear, fingers lingering on her face. "As I recall, for the most part, you were nearly as good as me in the sciences."
"For the most part?" she repeated through clenched teeth. "I totally kicked your butt the second semester at Harvard."
"I don't think so, Drake, you never even came close. That aside, the preservative is important. Paint in the salt air never lasts long. Did you know that the ancient Egyptians used varnishes and enamels based on beeswax, gelatin and clay at least as early as 3000 B.C.?"
"Fascinating," Libby said through her clenched teeth. "Did you know the druids of ancient times also knew how to produce durable protective coatings using ox blood and lime?"
He smiled down at her, not noticing her tone. "I remember when I was a kid and Sam first pointed you and your sisters out to me. You all awed me. The Drake sisters, the royalty of Sea Haven. You were all so beautiful. I wondered how you got your hair to be so shiny and why you were always laughing. It was a long time ago and your hair is still shiny and you still always laugh when you're with your sisters."
For a moment Libby thought the ground had shifted, she was suddenly so unsteady on her feet. She was ready to put him on a rocket to Mars and then he had to go and say something like that. "You thought of us as royalty?"
"Everyone thinks of you as royalty."
"Oh, right. That's just what Irene was thinking when she bashed me over the head with her purse. Elle told me she had a picnic smacking me around." Amusement crept into her voice.
The small note of laughter, of shared fun, startled him. There had always been awkwardness between them. His mouth softened, began to curve into a smile, but her choice of words hit him. Once again he brought her to a halt, pulling off her dark glasses and looking her straight in the eye. "You don't remember her hitting you with her purse? Your sister had to tell you about it? Did she give you a concussion? Is that what's been wrong with you? Damn, Libby, you should have said so. You should be sitting down."
"I'm perfectly fine. And I don't want to talk about that." She took the sunglasses back and pushed them onto her nose, frowning at him.
Ty had a very odd and disturbing compulsion to lean down and kiss the frown right off her face. He hesitated, not wanting to further annoy her, but weighing whether he should try insisting she return to her chair.
"You either have a little bite of disapproval in your voice when you talk to me or you get that frown," he said instead. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over her lips as if he could erase her expression. Her breath was warm on his skin, her lips soft. His stomach tightened and his groin hardened in instant reaction.
"I do not," Libby denied, but even she heard the note of disapproval. "What do you expect when you do things like that?" She had to pull away from him. That light touch, oddly intimate, set her pulse racing. She was just too darned old to act like a ninny just because he was really gorgeous. Libby pressed her lips together to keep from blurting out something ridiculous, like "shut up and just let me stare."
"Like what?"
Now he sounded amused and she clenched her teeth together. "Did you come here just to make me crazy?" She suppressed a groan and the need to cover her face. He always managed to reduce her to an idiot within five minutes of conversation. She was just too aware of him as a man. She could feel his body heat, or maybe it was her own body heat. Her temperature was definitely rising. He was definite bad boy material and try as she might, Libby was not bad girl material.
"Do I make you crazy?" He sounded pleased.
This time she took off her glasses to glare at him. "You're doing it deliberately, aren't you?"
His smile fascinated her. She hadn't realized he could smile. Most of the time he looked focused and brainy, oblivious or arrogant and too superior for words. Now that she'd seen his smile she was really gone. Libby shoved her glasses back on and tried not to be affected by his looks. It was so shallow. She wasn't a shallow person, was she? Because he just wasn't all that nice.
He took her hand and continued walking down the beach to the tide pools without answering her. He kept her off balance and instead of taking charge and ending things, Libby found herself content to walk with him. His stocky body made her feel ridiculously feminine, something else she wasn't going to admit to her sisters. She didn't hold hands. She couldn't remember holding a man's hand, but she liked walking with him, the feel of his fingers wrapped tightly around hers. He stopped to examine a crab and tucked her hand against his chest.
"Hermit crabs are fascinating. The right claw is larger and a different shape than the left. They use it for protection and holding food while the left is used for eating." A mischievous grin crossed his face and lit his brilliant blue eyes. "Th
e male drags the female around with him using the smaller claw, much like a caveman." He twisted his fingers in Libby's silky hair. "All the while he fights off other males with his large claw, holding on to his mate until she's ready to molt and becomes receptive and fertile." He tugged experimentally on Libby's hair.
"Fortunately, I'm not a female crab," she said.
"You're crabby," he pointed out. He allowed the strands of silky hair to slip through his fingers.
Her heart jumped. "I actually had two hermit crabs as pets and they must have both been males because they didn't drag each other around. They were named Toothbrush and Toothpaste. They escaped and went on a suicide mission right off the deck. I cried for a week."
His eyebrow shot up. "You cried over a crab?"
"Well, of course, they were my pets."