Black Gold by Ruby Laska Page A

yours."
    "But I—we could—you can't—"
    By the time she finished sputtering, they had arrived at the tree house. With a trace of regret, he set her down. She blushed and dusted imaginary dirt from her skirt.
    "You think you can handle the climb?" he asked. "Because otherwise, way I see it, we got two options. You can either come up piggyback, or I can lower down the rope and—"
    "I'm fine," Regina said, refusing to look at him. She took a deep breath and grabbed the first of the boards nailed to the tree generations ago, when Mimi's departed husband had been a little boy. She put the toe of her shoe tentatively on the board near the bottom of the tree and boosted herself up. She kept going, and Chase enjoyed the view of her hips straining against the fabric as she edged up the trunk.
    A few feet up, her shoe slipped on the board and she gave a startled squeak.
    "Easy, girl," Chase said, automatically reaching for her. He found himself with one hand on the small of her back and another cupping the rounded cheek of her ass. It was both firm and deliciously soft, even through the nubby fabric of her skirt, and he couldn't resist tightening his fingers on her flesh.
    She kicked him, her heel grazing his shoulder.
    "Hey!" he yelped as she scurried the rest of the way up to the platform above his head with no further hesitation. "An inch to the side, and you could have taken out my jugular! Those heels should be classified as deadly weapons!"
    "Then you shouldn't have assaulted me," Regina called over her shoulder, disappearing into the little wooden structure.
    Chase stood for a moment, his fingers tingling from the feel of her. "I was just trying to save you from falling," he protested. He was rewarded from silence from above.
    It was true, though. Well, at least until the moment when he had her in his hands. God, had it really been so long since he'd held a woman that even a handful of scratchy fabric could get him hot?
    He shook his head and headed up the trunk.
    It was awkward going, because the boards were nailed close together. Chase guessed that Earl Brackens had been only ten or twelve when he found the scrap lumber and nailed it into place up in the tree. It was a good tree, made for dreaming away summer days, and if young Earl's carpentry skills had left a little to be desired, it had taken Chase only a single afternoon to sand down the splinters and pound the popped nails back into place and patch a few holes. He'd told himself he was doing it for Harry—but the younger Dawkins was more of a skateboard kid than a tree house type. Besides, at fifteen, he had better things to do than while away his afternoons high in a tree.
    Chase, however, had never had a tree house. By the time he was ten, he'd had fois gras, champagne, and smoked his father's cigars and stolen peeks of his father's girlfriends' lacy underthings in the suitcases they left out in the adjoining rooms. But he'd never ridden a bike or gone to a Cub Scout meeting or joined a pickup ball game.
    It took Chase most of his twenties to make up for all the things he'd missed. The day he turned eighteen, he took a job as a dishwasher and a room in a run-down house where he bartered household chores and handyman projects for rent. He learned soccer from some of his restaurant co-workers and listened to ball games on the radio. He bought a secondhand bike and learned to ride in a parking lot after dark, too embarrassed to ride in public until he could stay on the bike without falling. He learned to cuss and ogle women and smoke cigars and play cards, and when he started picking up singing gigs a few years later, he learned to drink whiskey and wear a hat and charm a woman twice his age.
    But there were still holes in his past—none as painful as the knowledge that he'd been little more than an albatross to his dad, who acknowledged his absence with a monthly call to ask if he needed money and if he'd considered going to college yet and then got off the phone