Staring at the lip gloss wand, I let a question fall from my mouth that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
“Have you…kissed him?”
She tilted her chin and got a coquettish look.
“A lady doesn’t tell.” For a second she batted her eyelashes. “But since I’m not a lady, and since you’re probably never going to have the bliss of conquering a man worth having, I’ll let you in on my little secret—tonight is the night.” She giggled, sounding like she was sixteen, not thirty, and also not a complete tramp. “He said he doesn’t kiss married women. But we’ll see.”
She spritzed her neck with designer fragrance fraught with gardenias and shook out her skirts, making them rustle as if she were Scarlet O’Hara herself.
Mo-No left me a jealous wreck in the wake of her perfume.
While she and Henry danced the night away at the yachting club, furious energy fueled me as I scrubbed the tub, vacuumed, wiped glass, and folded laundry. Meanwhile, my thoughts went on a rollercoaster worthy of one of those theme parks on the mainland meant for teens.
Up zinged my stomach into my throat—he hadn’t kissed her yet! Down it fell into my gut—she was filing divorce papers after a week of dating someone younger and hotter than Bainbridge. Flippity-flop, Henry didn’t kiss married women. Flump, I hadn’t actually planned out how to spring the news on Mo-No about Henry’s real identity as a bus station hobo.
Just how was I supposed to do that without shaming him at this point?
I got out the oven cleaner and sprayed it in the bottom to let the chemicals soak in.
As the degreaser settled, my soul went soaring over California when I thought about the fact not only Monique-Noelle had been snared by Henry’s charm, but the whole town was ready to crown him king. Then it fell into the breakers where it got smashed to bits when I realized someone actually might get hurt, and not just Mo-No, by this ruse.
Super-kerplunk, she was ready to drop Sylvie without a backward glance.
And then came one last, mostly-unrelated resounding clunk: Polly had secured a dissertation research topic for me that would turn me even further into someone who used people; in particular, I’d be using—as research—the one man on earth I found myself most inexplicably and irrevocably drawn to. Moreover, it was a topic I didn’t think of myself, and didn’t want to do.
Why was it that the one time I hadn’t submitted my own idea of a research plan, it got accepted? My heart was not in this topic. Well, make that my heart was too much in this topic. Meanwhile, my educational degree was doomed.
The clock struck midnight just as I finally put the last stack of folded shirts in my drawer, when I heard a soft knocking in the other room.
I opened the front door, and there stood Henry in his tuxedo.
“Can I come in?”
ACT II: Scene 11
Show Me
SAN NOUVEAU ISLAND, CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS
Wherein our hero makes a bit of a move (not a big one, alas, but still, a move) on the girl he obviously likes. Yeah, that girl, not the other one. Whew, right?
“Henry.” I might have stuttered his name, as the sight of him in a tuxedo again shot me through the time-travel slingshot back to our first night together. “I thought you were at the charity ball at the yachting club.” My heart hammered in my chest. Embarrassed, I shoved my hair out of my face and tried to straighten my shirt. I probably looked like The Girl Who Did Housework right now, while he looked like he’d just stepped out of The Bachelor Australia.
No one should be allowed to look that good this late at night, when a girl’s defenses were down.
A little voice whispered that I should not let him in. If he’d come home from a date with my boss, and then made a straight track to my bungalow and Mo-No found out, I was dead. As in, doornail dead.
“I heard you were king of the moment sailing between the haystack rocks today, and I was afraid they’d never let you leave.” I let him into my apartment and I brought him a drink of juice from the refrigerator.
“It mercifully ended.” With a single motion, he tugged at the knot of his tuxedo’s bowtie, loosing it and tossing the black ribbon of fabric onto my coffee table. “I hope you don’t mind.” He undid the top button at his neck.
Oh, I didn’t mind.
Much.
Suddenly I didn’t feel nearly as tired as I’d felt a few minutes ago after riding the roller coaster of emotion all evening. In fact, I could jump right back on one now, if needed—one that made my stomach go loop-de-loop.
Which acrobatics it already had handled. In spades.
“Make yourself at home,” I said plunking down in the corner of the couch, not too close but not too far from Henry—far enough that I wasn’t crowding him, but still near enough that I could catch his scent now and then when the oscillating fan sent it my direction. “Kick your shoes off, put your feet on the coffee table.”
He looked at me like I’d just spoken with the tongues of angels.
“You don’t know how badly I needed to hear that right now.” In two seconds his shoes were off and his feet up. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“Perhaps you’d also like an aspirin.” It was none of my business whether or not he’d fulfilled Mo-No’s wishes for a third-date kiss. I was a fool for letting it bother me.
“That’d be ace.” He opened one eye and looked my way. “Was my Mo-No headache that obvious?”
“Only to the well-versed in its particular pounding effects.” I came back with pain reliever and a refill for his juice. “For me, I think it springs from tension induced right about here.” I pointed to the place where my neck met my shoulder. “The way her voice is pitched, this muscle tenses reflexively.”
Henry tipped his head side to side, stretching his neck. “You know, you’re exactly right. That’s where it hit me hardest, too.”
Without letting myself over-think it, I went and stood behind the couch and put my hands on his neck to massage out the kink I’d become all too familiar with over the past half a year.
“Oh, yeah. That’s it. Right there.” He groaned, but slowly I felt the knot come out of him, and he sank back against the couch. “You’ve got magical hands.”
“I don’t, but since I’m the one who threw you under the Mo-No bus, the least I can do is try to mitigate some of the pain.”
“Can I just sit here and detox for a few minutes? Your presence is quite healing. You don’t mind, do you?”
Nuh-uh. Not a bit. As long as I could keep touching his skin, he could stay here hours and I’d never complain. But there was something he’d said a couple of times in conversation that had me wondering. Part of me yelled, Don’t ask! You don’t know what can of worms you’re opening!, but another part just wanted to dig around a little, see if there was something more I could find out about Henry’s past, even if it felt impolite to ask him directly how he came to be at the bus station.
“Can I ask you a question or two? They might be personal.”
“Sure. I’ve been waiting to get a little more personal with you.” He gave me one of those looks, accompanied by a cocky, Errol Flynn grin.
“Hey, I’m actually trying to be serious here,” I said through laughter. “Park the flirting for a bit, would you?”
“You bring it out in me, Elizer.”
Again with the bone-melting Elizer.
“Fine. Never mind.” But then I went ahead and asked him anyway. “The other day, when we met, you said you knew something about hopeless causes, and later when we were golfing, you said you’d spent some time in the rough.”
How was I supposed to ask about his past without sounding awkward or like I was prying? I wanted to express a sympathy without making him feel like I pitied him—because I didn’t. Honestly. The more I got to know this guy, the less I could feel any kind of pity, and the more I felt curiosity. It was different.
Instead, I wanted to be warm and interested in him, but not overwhelm him
with too many questions about his past, which might embarrass him.
I walked a tightrope.
“Well, compared to what a lot of people have gone through in their lives, maybe my referencing hopeless causes or the rough as something I was familiar with was a little dramatic.”
Wow. He was so humble! How could he consider homelessness and being lost and confused in a bus station overly dramatic? That sounded to me like the rough, if anything did.
“I doubt that.”
“Well, I’ll admit, when I was hanging on by my fingernails on the side of that canyon wall but only halfway up and out of grip and energy, and nowhere to go but death at the bottom of the drop if I let go, it felt like a hopeless cause.”
What a nice analogy for the struggles he’d seen.
“What gave you the strength to go on?” I had to ask. There’d been times in my life, like when I thought about giving up on my Ph.D. dream, when I wanted to give up and let go, fall to the bottom and die there. “Where did you get your hope?”
“One, a visceral will to live. We all have that. But two, I didn’t want to let my granddad down, or dishonor all the work he’d done. If I didn’t meet with the geneticist, his whole life’s work could be for naught.”
Oh, we were back to the geneticist again, although there seemed to be a twist now involving his grandfather’s life’s work. Henry’s mind must swirl with color in there, fanciful and entertaining. I stifled a sigh.
“While he lived, it seemed like a lost cause. I was determined to keep it alive.”
“What was it?”
“You want to know more about that, eh?” Henry reached behind him and took my hand, relieving me from masseuse duty. He tugged me over the back of the couch. I plopped down right beside him, and he put his arm around me. I fit rather well, despite my height. “I guess I was being kind of vague. Sorry about that.”
“No. I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, I don’t mind. It’s your private business and—”
“And I want you to know about it, Elizer.” He reached his free hand over and turned my face to look at him. His gray eyes captured me, and I saw the doors of a thousand churches in them. “I want you to know all about me.”
“Really?” I breathed, sucking the word inward. “All?” I bit my lower lip. He stared at it, I could tell where his eyes fell. He might kiss me. He might. My breathing got shallow. I didn’t care whether he’d kissed Mo-No tonight. If he had, it’d been against his will. This moment’s kiss would be all about him and me and no one else.
“When I was a boy, my grandfather had an idea. It was a big idea, and it was going to change the world.” Henry’s eyes lit, and I realized up to now I’d never really thought about Henry having a grandfather. “I loved him and totally believed in his idea. He was my granddad. He could do anything. If he’d told me he could build a flying car, I would have totally believed it.”
He traced a circle on my upper arm with the hand around my shoulders. My synapses were all going wild, snapping and crackling.
“That’s how I felt about my grandfather, too, so I totally get that.” Grandpa Galatea had immigrated from Europe and put down roots in California, bought land, bought animals, built a cabin. He was a jack of all trades, and master of quite a few.
“Well, his big idea he worked on all his life. We lived nearby, running the family business, so my dad got involved in grandpa’s idea, too. And then I did. I even went to school and studied hard so I could make grandpa’s idea work.”
“This all sounds hopeful, Henry, not at all like a lost cause.”
“The lost cause comes in when I recall that my grandfather died before his idea could really come to fruition. He never saw his dream happen.”
Now that was sad. “You’re not saying it seemed like a wasted life.”
“No, no. Not at all. In fact, he spent it well—best of all on his children and family. But, as far as he knew, his life’s work never panned out.”
“And you experienced his time ‘in the rough,’ so to speak, vicariously through him.”
“It’s not to say I haven’t had a few challenges of my own, but yeah. Granddad’s apparent failure drove me to try everything I could to make it right for him.”
The pertinent question blurted out before I could think it through. “And you think you’ve got a chance of doing that on his behalf?”
Henry tilted his head to the side a moment. “You bet I do.”
His excitement broke the near-kiss’s spell over me, but not in a bad way. Suddenly, I was seeing this new side of Henry. I’d hit on a topic near to his heart, and the way his confidence burst out of him, I burned to know exactly what that effort on his grandfather’s behalf entailed.
“How?”
“Part of it I’ve already accomplished. Not just in the Alps, all over Australia.” Oh, so we were back in Oz now—plus the Alps. I tried not to pull a grimace as the cocoon he’d spun around me unraveled a little. “Dad and I have had phenomenal success getting the breeding stock out. Stations all over have bought it. We’re about to go global, so long as I can get the right information from the geneticist here.”
Oh, dear. That doctor-talk again.
“The patent is waiting on the DNA.”
“The patent. On the DNA.” I know my statement sounded dubious. I should have reined in my skepticism. Oh, but things had been going so well. His love for his grandfather was just palpable, and I found myself swooning when Henry talked about doing everything in his power to honor his granddad’s memory.
“Yes, the one we isolated when my granddad found the mutant. Its offspring all had marbling.”
Mutants. Marbling. It all sounded so bizarre, and yet he shared it with so much confidence and enthusiasm, I knew he saw it all as real as the trees on the island. And who was I to criticize, when I had phobic hang-ups of my own? To me, the waves hitting the rocks beneath that cliff the other day seemed inevitably bound to reach up and snatch me into the briny deep, though logically I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
“So we bred it again and again, and after a while, we’d developed something that took off. Now we just need to bring it to the geneticist here in the States. That’s my mission.”
His mission. Marbled mutants.
Why was it when I finally found a guy with what seemed like all the qualities I’d want in a man—kindness, self-sacrifice for a child he’d never met, a love for dogs similar to my love for dogs, patience with someone as inconsiderate as Mo-No, not to mention the way he’d calmed me down when I’d been panicking on the cliffs that day—that he turned out to be teetering on the edge of sanity.
And why didn’t that seem to matter nearly as much as it had a few days ago?
For a guy this devoted to a cause, I might be able to put up with insanity. A little insanity went a long way toward making life spontaneous and fun. Predictability was the shovel of the grave of a relationship, wasn’t it? Never had I met a guy who surprised me, in delightful ways, more than Henry Lyon.
Plus the teeth.
I was in so much trouble.
I closed my eyes and ventured to rest my head on his shoulder. After a second, he tipped his head over to rest against mine. It fit so well, like well-worn tennis shoes. I couldn’t bear to move away.
I might fall asleep here, in his embrace.
“So, Elizer,” Henry said, breaking the silence but not the magic sparkling around us. “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about tonight?”
The future? Our children and what we’ll name them?
“Past relationships,” I said, probably being a fool. The truth was, I didn’t have any idea whether Henry had someone in his life. He might even be married, for all I knew. This thought made me extricate myself from his arms and slide so I could look in his eyes. “Maybe I should word it present relationships. Well, Mo-No excluded.” I frankly didn’t even want to know whether her wish for a kiss on the third date had come true tonight. I’d gotten over that halfway thro
ugh scrubbing the tub.
“Absolutely, we exclude Mo-No.” He tossed her name away, as if it were an empty Coke can. He slid back toward me again, closing the distance I’d created, and I felt his breath caressing my shoulder. “I’ll tell if you do.”
Oh. I hadn’t bargained on his turning it around on me. That was short-sighted.
“Fine, you go first.”
“Oh, no. I’m a firm believer in the old adage ladies first.”
Biting my lower lip, I filtered through my memories of love gone wrong over the past years, and finally I launched with the cold truth.
“I dated around quite a bit at the university when I was in my undergraduate years, but never anyone steadily. I never wanted to get serious with anyone I ever met.” Until now. “During grad school, no one has turned my head.” Until now. “I’ve been surrounded by people who are just so different from me, from how I grew up. I guess even though I came to L.A., I want what I had. What my parents have. That calmer life with the outdoors and the animals and all of that lifestyle.”
“You’re not finding someone to fit that description in Los Angeles?”
“Don’t laugh at me. I know the biggest problem is I’m in the wrong dating pool, surrounded by fast lane guys with money in their sights and no sense of the slower pace I now realize my soul craves.”
Henry reached over and pushed aside a lock of hair that had fallen into my eyes while doing housework. His hand lingered at my earlobe, and our eyes met. Our breaths synchronized.
He might kiss me.
“Eliza, you never cease to amaze.”
“What, because I’d rather live in the country and not on an island full of the wealthiest people on earth?”
“That, too.” He leaned in, his eyes closing, and nuzzled my neck. Hot lava seared through my veins. “You smell like scented soap.”
It was probably the cleaning products.
My Fair Aussie: A Standalone Clean Romance (Millionaire Makeover Romance Book 3) Page 14