by Rachel Lee
“Blaine?”
He looked at her.
“Is there some kind of prohibition in this city or county against government workers...” As it struck her what she was about to ask, she fell silent and wished she had a huge eraser for the words that had slipped past her lips.
“Prohibition?” he repeated. “Depends on what you mean. Against relationships?” He paused, then spoke carefully. “Our fire chief is married to our arson investigator.”
“Oh.”
“And our sheriff is married to the county librarian. I don’t think it’s encouraged, but I’m not aware of any rule against it.” He took a very large bite of his pizza, as if to make it impossible to talk.
Diane quickly picked up her tea, noting for the first time that it was served in a dainty, flowered teacup, and took a couple of sips. “This cup is beautiful,” she said, trying to escape the awkwardness she had generated.
“That crockery was me gran’s, too,” he said, sounding as if he hadn’t quite swallowed that last huge bite. “Remarkable woman.” Then his voice cleared as he finished swallowing. “And she’d have swatted me for talking with my mouth full. Anyway, a grand woman by my estimation. She taught me a few things.”
Grateful for the subject change, she managed a smile. “Like?”
“Like, if you want something, go fer it or you’ll never be getting it.”
Her breath stopped in her throat. He hadn’t changed the subject at all, and he knew exactly where she’d been headed. Or at least thinking about heading. God, the man was a devil, reading her thoughts as if they were on a marquee above her head. Except that she was probably more transparent than she wanted to believe.
He rose from the couch. “I think I’ll have a bit more of that pizza. How’s your tea? Want me to warm it?”
Feeling safe again, she passed him her cup and saucer and focused on the baby sleeping in the playpen. Daphne was all that mattered. Her daughter. She didn’t need any additional complications.
Except that Blaine Harrigan was turning into a complication she wanted very much to add to her life. “You said you were having trouble with the historic overlay?” Safe subject.
“Some. And I told you I want to take you out this week to see the road we’re supposed to pave. It’s in the plan, so the planner ought to take a look at it before we start. The best we can do now that it’s getting cold is oil and gravel. You know anyone who likes oil and gravel road surface?”
“When it hardens...”
“Ah, but getting there.” He placed another cup of tea beside her. “It’s crap, is what it is. For three or four months, the road department gets a constant stream of calls about the gravel dinging paint and glass. The plows won’t be able to touch it until it’s really hardened in, and given the time of year, how likely is that? I ask you, who in their right mind decided that needed to be done now?”
She stared at him in some amazement, or maybe it was amusement. She’d never imagined him on a rant like that.
He put his fresh cup of tea on the table between them and the paper plate full of steaming pizza on his lap.
“Someone ordered it?” That rather surprised her. “Who?”
“One of your board members. Ask me why. I don’t know, but there’s something in it for him as sure as I’m sitting here. Thirty-five may be young, but I’ve been around a bit, and things like this don’t get ordered out of the blue for no reason. But since it’s in the plan...” He shrugged. “Not much of an argument I can make except it would be better to wait until next summer.”
She hesitated. “But I could make a better argument?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned a bit toward her. “But you can sure take a look at the plan overlays. I’d like to know if there’s something...special about a piece of land out there. Something that isn’t part of a ranch, or that’s been sold recently. Or has been put on the market.”
“The clerk’s office would be a good place to start.”
He nodded. “I’ve got the parcel number. It must be a fairly large piece because of subdivision.”
He was right about that. Subdividing parcels to sizes below thirty-five or forty acres could get awfully expensive, so unless there was a big profit to be made, it didn’t happen. She wondered what the hell was going on out there.
“But it’s Friday night,” he said suddenly. “Let’s leave work for Monday. If your landlord gets the heat fixed tomorrow, I’ll help you put that crib together for Daph.”
She smiled. “It almost seems superfluous. She’s sleeping well enough in the playpen.”
“She’s also small right now and easy to lift. In a few months, I venture you’ll be glad to be lifting her out of a crib.”
He had a point. Then, without consciously making the decision, she went to sit beside him on the sofa. “Mind?” she asked.
* * *
Did he mind? All she did was sit beside him, not even close enough to touch, and he felt as if skyrockets were going off inside his head. Ridiculous, since they’d been close before while dealing with Daphne, but this was different. She had elected to be close to him, without the baby as a reason.
“Of course I don’t mind,” he said roughly. His thoughts danced back to their earlier conversation about prohibitions against relationships. She had brought it up. Was she thinking about it?
He wasn’t stupid. He knew that some women found him attractive. They always had. He also knew that it rarely lasted. Even good-looking Irish guys came with flaws. For that matter, so did most women.
“You know,” he remarked, trying to keep the moment safe unless she wanted it to become something more, “I used to think that somewhere out there was a perfect woman I’d find one day.”
“Not Ailis?”
“Her perfection lasted a couple of weeks. Hormone surges wear off, especially when they’re not reciprocated.”
He was pleased to hear her chuckle quietly. “They do,” she agreed.
“But over time I figured something out. I’m not a total eejit.”
She glanced at him with a faint smile. “Not even a bit of a one.”
“Of course I am. Everyone has a bit of eejit in them.”
She turned a little in her seat and looked at him more directly. “This thing you figured out?”
“Oh, yeah. Sounds so obvious when I say it, but most things do. My blinding insight was that nobody’s perfect. Nobody at all. Pointless to be thinking that someone had to be perfect. Truth is, someone only has to be perfect for me. And me for her.”
Her golden eyes searched his face. “Perfect how?”
“Like two puzzle pieces. They won’t be the same shape, they’ll stick out in different places and have divots in others, but they fit together. In other words, I needed to be looking for someone whose quirks fit mine. A complementary relationship.”
“No success, I take it?”
“I haven’t been looking hard, to tell ya the truth.” He thought about it for all of two seconds, then reached for her hand. When she didn’t pull it away, he dared to lift it to rest it on his chest. “Gettin’ older, I guess. What seemed so important fifteen years ago isn’t dominating my decision making anymore. You?”
She surprised him by leaning into his shoulder. “Me neither. I am so glad to be done with my teens and early twenties. Now there’s time for other things in my life. It’s not essential to have a date for Friday night anymore. That used to seem so important, long ago. In fact it feels like another time, another life.”
He nodded slowly, trying to tamp down his more primitive urges. Here he was talking about not being as randy as he once had been, but feeling as randy as he ever had. Dangerous. Folly. He needed to keep this intellectual. Sure, and hadn’t he been trying to do that since this woman had entered his life? “I remember. Then it became more important to have friends. Which is not to say I don�
�t like sex.”
Was he mistaken, or did her color heighten a bit? “Same here.”
“It’s what pulls us together, sometimes,” he said, trying for a philosophical stance he was far from feeling. “It’s also not enough by itself.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment, Daphne started waking with a quiet but irritated cry. “It’s that time,” she murmured. “Almost eleven, right?”
He craned his neck a bit so he could see the numbers on the microwave clock. “You’d be right about that.” Babies had wonderful timing. He’d known that for years. He almost laughed, but was afraid that he might be misunderstood after the conversation they’d been having. Intellectual, all right, but dancing around the edges of dangerous territory.
Although he might enjoy getting dangerous with this woman...as long as she was willing.
Diane was diapering like a pro now. Blaine disposed of the soiled diaper while the bottle of formula heated a bit in a pan of warm water. Daph had decided to be fussy. Diane paced with the child in the crook of her arm and bounced her gently, all the while talking softly to her.
It wasn’t working.
“She must be famished,” he remarked. Without waiting for permission, he popped the cover off the fresh bottle and shook a couple of drops on his wrist. “It’s ready.”
Diane accepted the bottle with thanks and soon Daphne was working on it with great intensity, a little frown between her brows. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen his sisters or brothers frown at this age, but he couldn’t remember.
Diane, however, still hadn’t completely recovered from last week’s excitement. “I hope nothing’s wrong,” she murmured.
“She’s probably just a bit out of sorts. They do have moods, Di.”
Her head jerked up to look at him, and then a laugh escaped her. That apparently annoyed Daphne, because she pulled her mouth from the nipple and let out a cry. It wasn’t a problem, however, because as soon as the bottle was offered again, she took it. Trying to hold it with her own two little hands.
“Before you know it,” Blaine remarked, “she’ll be feeding herself, running around in short tight skirts and even shorter shorts and wondering what she ever needed you for.”
Diane flashed a grin. “I wasn’t thinking that far down the road.”
“No, but I saw enough of ’em grow up to have a notion how fast it happens. Kind of amazing, actually. You’re living on your own clock, doing a hell of a lot of things with your life and every time you pause to look, you realize they’re taller, smarter and more smart-mouthed...”
“Oh, stop,” she said, humor making her voice tremble. “That’s a long way away.”
“Just keep tellin’ yersel’ that.”
When Daphne was finished with her bottle, Blaine offered to take over. “I didn’t realize how much I’d missed this,” he remarked as he lifted her against his shoulder and took his turn at pacing with her.
“She certainly looks wide-awake now,” Diane remarked. “It’s a whole different view from back here.”
“Usually is.”
His old mates back home, and maybe even some of his buddies here, might have found it a bit odd for him to be going all soft over an infant and wanting to hug her like this. Ah, well. Sometimes he thought men could be absolute eejits about the things that mattered. Besides, he’d seen enough tough nuts crack when they had a kid of their own. Funny how that worked.
He decided to talk about something safe for now, something that would give him the opportunity to settle his urges. “If that heater gets fixed—or even if it doesn’t, actually—want to take a scenic drive into the mountains tomorrow? I mentioned that old gold-mining town and the scenic road they want to build. Regardless of whether they do a damn thing about it, it’s still a grand drive, and the daffodil will probably sleep through the whole thing, giving you a break.”
“Sounds wonderful.” She smiled. “I’d like to see it.”
“Can’t go walking around the ghost town. Too many tunnels under it, and some are collapsing. If they want to make that a tourist destination, some work is going to be required to make it safe. But it would be a draw, I admit. It already is for the brave of heart. Anyway, don’t look at it as part of the job. Just enjoy it. It’s a beautiful drive this time of year.”
At last Daphne settled and seemed ready to go back to sleep. She waved her arms and legs a few sleepy times, as if trying to hang on to wakefulness, but it didn’t work. Almost as soon as she returned to the playpen, she drifted off into sleep.
Blaine and Diane wound up back on the couch watching her. After a bit, Blaine laughed quietly. “They tend to be the center of attention. Listen, I put fresh sheets on the bed when I got up this morning. It’s yours. You have to be getting tired.”
He saw it then, that hesitation, as if she didn’t want to leave the daffodil that far away. Typical mom stuff. It probably killed her to leave the girl in day care. He guessed Diane was being subsumed by her new maternal role. Normal enough, but it wouldn’t leave room for much else.
Aw, to hell with it, he thought. Nothing quite like the wrong time. “You must be knackered. If you don’t want to use my bed, let me get you some blankets.”
And what the devil had he been hoping would happen, anyway? The pull he felt toward this woman didn’t mean she felt the same, even though he’d sometimes sensed it. Hell, she’d even asked about relationships between employees, so she was thinking about him at least a little.
He wasn’t ordinarily shy about taking a stab at it, to see if there was any reason to continue, but this time he felt incredibly awkward. First off, he had to work with her, and a mistake of this kind could create problems all the way down the long corridor of time for both of them. Second, there was Daphne. He’d become remarkably fond of the tyke, and he didn’t want to be obliged to stay away.
He opened the hall closet and began to pull out a blanket and pillow for Diane so she could be comfy on the couch. Then he changed his mind. Enough with all the dithering. She could speak for herself. Him holding one-sided arguments inside his head wasn’t likely to settle anything.
He shoved the blanket and pillow back, then strode down the hall. Diane hovered over the playpen, at once beautiful and almost sylphlike. Looking at her now, it was hard to imagine the mountains of determination that had brought her to this point: a successful urban planner, a mother to her cousin’s child. She might look fragile at this moment, but this woman was made of steel.
When she realized he was just standing there, she looked up from the baby. “Blaine?”
“Will ya come ta bed wi’ me?” His accent had burst out of its confines, and he didn’t care.
She could have had any reaction at that point and he wasn’t sure any of them would have surprised him, from throwing him out of his own place to announcing she was moving to the motel.
But she chose none of those answers. Instead she glanced down once more at Daphne, then rounded the playpen until she stood right in front of him. “I think that’s the most romantic proposal I’ve ever had.”
“I doubt it. It wasn’t romantic at all. It was the words that popped out of me addled brains. And you’re the one addling them.”
Her smile seemed to hold a cat’s contentment. “I like the sound of that.”
He was still dealing with his surprise that she hadn’t told him where to stuff it, his coming on to her like that. “I need to work on it.”
Her smile deepened. “Just one promise, Blaine.”
“And that?”
“If we mess up everything tonight, we act like it never happened. I don’t want to lose your friendship.”
And with that she set off all the fireworks in his head until he felt like Marco Polo making the biggest discovery of all: gunpowder. “I can promise that.”
Hell, he’d managed to carry on as if Ailis h
adn’t told him where to leave his head, and in front of his best lads, too. Yeah, he could promise that, but damned if he was going to allow it to happen. No muck-ups tonight.
He’d had enough experience with women to feel safe in promising that.
“The main thing,” he muttered, “is to listen.”
“What?” The word sounded as if it had been surprised out of her, but he was past talking. Hell, he’d been past talking for hours now. He’d done his best to keep that ball rolling, to prevent anything risky from happening...but here he was, walking right into it and feeling the heat growing between them like an explosion about to go off.
Only one dim bulb was on in the room, just enough to prevent a catastrophe in the middle of the night.
But despite the lack of light, his gaze drank her in, every detail, from the gentle mounds of her breasts that were just hinted at beneath her flannel shirt to the delicate curve of her neck.
The day he’d first seen her, frazzled as she’d seemed, he’d tried hard not to notice the way the silky folds of her blouse draped over her, suggesting without shouting.
Every move she had made in that outfit, from her blouse to her slacks to the stray blond hair that had teased her cheek, had reached out to him like an invitation.
He’d buried his reaction almost before he knew he was having it. He had perhaps let thoughts of this day trail across his mind from time to time, but had firmly squashed them. He didn’t need an announcement to understand that she must be nearly overwhelmed between a new job and a new baby. She didn’t need additional complications.
Yet here she was, her golden eyes dimmed in the poor light, clearly longing for him yet getting more nervous as he stood here like a dolt letting the moment wash over him in its myriad sights, sounds and feelings.
“I’ve wanted you,” he said as quietly as he could, the sounds emerging from the depths of his chest, “from the moment I saw you.”
Her smile returned, looking less nervous. “While I was frazzled with a baby? You had to take over the diapering. What man finds that sexy?”