“Have I told you how much I loved the roses?” she murmured in his ear.
He smiled, eyes still closed. “You’ve certainly been trying to convince me for several days that someone sent you roses.”
Again, she tried to pull back, and this time he let her, just to see the sudden laughter in her eyes. Her lips were moist, her cheeks all high color. “They were sent anonymously,” she said gravely.
“I’ll kill him.”
She laughed then, a private laugh not loud enough for anyone else to hear. “They were beautiful. They’re still beautiful.”
“Are they?”
“You know something?” She dropped her eyes to his collar, and started to straighten it. Her smile hovered, then vanished. “No one’s ever given me roses,” she said casually.
“The world’s full of fools, then,” he murmured. As he very obviously had been for a long time. If so little romancing made her so much more responsive, he was suddenly aware how badly he’d failed her before. And that there was endless sensual potential in this lady…if he could just convince his own body to be patient.
Unfortunately, his hormones were tired of all his patience, and were rioting within him, demanding release. A faint frown creased his brow, immediately erased when she looked up at him. “Ready to leave?”
Her eyes met his. “Yes.” Surely he couldn’t fail to understand what she was saying yes to?
She was just a little nervous as he started to drive. Something this good…she just didn’t want the bubble to break. Outside there was a marvelous wind, chasing October’s leaves from the trees, keening through the darkness. Clouds blocked and unblocked a view of the moon, as if they were playing a child’s game of peekaboo.
She tensed again just slightly as they neared Alan’s office. Her car was there and had to be picked up, but it wasn’t a night she wanted to be separated from Alan, even for a minute, before they got home. Still, seconds later they passed the office, and her brows flickered up in surprise. “Did you forget my car?”
“For now.”
Smiling, she curled up on the seat and relaxed. He felt as she did. Her eyelids fluttered sleepily down to half-mast for the drive, and opened again only when the car stopped. Abruptly, her lips parted. Expecting to see her apartment, she saw dark woods weaving in moonlight and the dead end of a narrow road.
Alan switched off the engine, leaned back against his door and smiled at her. “I’ve got an important question to ask you,” he said softly.
Her heart thumped in triple time. “Yes?”
“I want to know all about you, Caro, and I was just realizing I don’t know much about your childhood. Can you start with your earliest memory, and go on from there?”
Well, she’d always advocated getting to know each other, hadn’t she? Biting back a sigh of frustration, Carroll began to tell Alan about her nursery-school days.
***
Yawning, Carroll pushed open the classroom door and flicked on the light. Bleary-eyed, she surveyed the purple unicorns dancing on the walls, the plush red rug in the center of the floor and the box crammed with stuffed animals in the corner. There was no desk. As a speech therapist, she didn’t believe in pushing a classroom atmosphere on the kids.
On this particular morning, the sandman had left a gritty feeling in Carroll’s eyes, and the self-righteous corner of her brain was chiding her for arriving at work on half power. Three hours of sleep just wasn’t enough. Furthermore, she had the sneaky feeling that if she looked in a mirror, she’d see a fairly idiotic grin on her face.
Yawning again, she set down her container of orange juice and a paper bag that smelled suspiciously like doughnuts, then took off her coat. Beneath, she wore jeans and a white sweater with clowns embroidered on the front of it. She’d chosen to wear cloisonné dangling earrings that were shaped like little balloons in rainbow colors. Cathy loved balloons and lots of color, and Cathy was her first student this morning.
Blinking sleepily at the clock, she noted that she had, thank heaven, fifteen minutes before the child would arrive. She flopped down on the rug with the little girl’s speech folder in her hand. The file absorbed her attention for a moment. Born with a hearing problem, Cathy had angelic blue eyes and a froth of blond curls. She was four. Five months ago, when her mother had first brought her in, Cathy had taken one look at Carroll and screamed bloody murder. The mother had been beside herself.
Carroll had not. Most kids hated speech therapy and with reason. A child who had failed to talk built up a fear of trying to speak, and that was exactly what Carroll had to ask her students to do—try. Risk failing. Fail. Try again, and again, and again. Speech was easy to teach. Building self-confidence in children with fragile egos was the tough job, and Carroll loved it.
But right now she couldn’t keep her mind on Cathy for more than three seconds at a time. Alan’s face kept intruding on her consciousness. She hadn’t gotten home last night until after two, and then she’d gone home to a lonely bed. Not what she’d been expecting when they’d left the medical conference.
A wistful smile curved her lips. She still felt hung over from laughter. On a lover’s lane, they’d shared embarrassing stories from when they were kids, critiqued nearly all the flavors on the Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream menu, shared other passions and peeves…heck, she didn’t know what they’d talked about. They’d just talked and kept on talking.
Somewhere between 1:30 and 1:35 a.m., Carroll had come up with the amazing discovery that there was a tremendous difference between loving someone and being in love. She’d always loved Alan. Alan was easy to love. But last night she’d watched herself doing things that no sane person would do. Laughing at stories that couldn’t possibly be funny to anyone else. Not caring that the hours were ticking by when she knew she had to work in the morning. Enjoying an awareness that her body was perpetually turned on just from being in the same universe with him…
She didn’t have masses of sexual experience, but she’d used the word love before and meant it. Still. Something had always been missing—not loving, not the ability to love, but that crazy, yearning, restless feeling of being in love.
A scrub brush probably couldn’t wipe the silly smile off her face. Helplessly, she yawned again and tried to get serious. When a shadow darkened the doorway, she looked up, prepared to see Cathy, and instead saw the reason for her silly smile.
Alan looked wretched. There were pouches beneath his eyes; the lines around them showed white as they always did when he was overtired; and under his jacket, he was wearing a shirt she’d never seen before—a red shirt. Not his color. It didn’t matter. Six whole hours they’d been separated, far too long in her current state of lunacy. She smiled. He smiled back. “Hi,” she said softly.
“Hi back.”
Rather abruptly, she remembered that she was a mature, rational woman and leaped to her feet. “Alan, what on earth are you doing here?”
“Came to see you.” He stifled an exhausted yawn, and reached for the buttons of his jacket. “It occurred to me last night how often you’d seen my office—when I’d never seen where you work. I’ve wanted to for weeks, Caro. And I was pretty sure you’d told me you were always here on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and that the school encouraged visitors…”
“We do. We don’t want the kids to feel isolated or different, and having lots of people around can help them feel less sensitive about their problems.” She stopped abruptly; the subject couldn’t be less relevant. “Alan, you must have had patients this morning.”
“I did. One came very early, two canceled and one was rescheduled for this afternoon.” He tugged off his jacket, looked for a place to hang it. The only option appeared to be a child-size coat tree. His sleeves trailed on the floor. “You don’t mind if I come in and watch you, do you?”
“No, of course not, but…” She saw her hands fluttering up, and stopped them. There was no reason to be flustered. She was delighted he was here, just surprised. “I’m afrai
d I haven’t got a very exciting schedule this morning. If I’d known you wanted to come, I’d have asked you on a day when I had something more interesting. We’ve got some fantastic new testing equipment—”
“But then, I didn’t come to see equipment. I came to see you.” Since he certainly hadn’t a prayer of sleeping the night before, he’d spent the wee hours of the morning alternately reading a book called Love Foods for Successful Lovers and making a list of ways to woo Carroll. One of the things on that list was coming here.
Watching her work hadn’t exactly fit his list of heroic, exciting things a man should do for his woman, but it did have to do with love. Not just loving her, but proving it to her. He really was interested in her work and always had been, but the night before, it had occurred to him that he’d failed to show her his interest. “I promise not to get in your way.”
“I wasn’t worried about that.”
He glanced around. “Where do you want me to sit?”
“Umm.” She gave him an apologetic glance. “On the floor, I’m afraid. Or I could bring in a chair for you…”
“I’ll be just fine right here,” he assured her, and settled cross-legged on the far corner of her red rug.
She looked at him uncertainly. “That isn’t going to be comfortable.”
“Sure it is.”
“Are you positive? I mean…”
A little girl poked her head in the doorway; she was dressed in OshKosh overalls and a fuzzy purple sweater. Alan’s heart turned over, seeing the hearing aids in her ears. She wasn’t much bigger than a minute, and she took one look at him and hurled herself at Carroll.
Carroll was prepared, arms ready to swing her up in a hug. There wasn’t a sound for a few minutes, as the two carried on a rapid conversation in sign. Alan gathered very quickly that he was unwanted, that the child knew whatever was in the white bag on the shelf was a treat for her, and that she was in the habit of collecting a favorite stuffed animal from the corner before they started work.
He cleared his throat in embarrassment. In coming here, he’d wanted to show Carroll he cared about her work. It had stupidly never occurred to him that his presence might make her job more difficult.
“Doughnuts after speech,” Carroll insisted finally. “Down we go, Cathy. Work time…but first I want you to meet Alan.” The child pulled tighter on her arms. Carroll shot Alan a wink and smoothly rushed on. “Alan brought some orange juice just for you this morning, and some doughnuts. He’s having problems with his s’s, and you’re getting so good with them I thought you could help him.”
The little girl looked suspiciously at Alan, who nodded gravely. Slowly, she consented to being slid out of Carroll’s arms to the floor. She made another gesture in sign to Carroll, who firmly shook her head.
“From now on, we’re going to communicate in speech.”
Orange juice was served, spilled, cleaned up and put aside. By then the blond urchin was batting her eyelashes at Alan and edging closer. Fifteen minutes later, the tyke was sitting on his lap, and they were both pretending they were snakes, making long hissing sounds.
“No, not quite,” Carroll said gently. “Watch my mouth now. Watch my teeth. See how my teeth come together when I make the s sound?”
Alan watched her mouth. He watched her teeth. He made s sounds. Then k sounds. And then d sounds.
An hour later, Cathy was succeeded by Melissa, who had a lisp. At midmorning, Melissa was succeeded by Philip, a gangly six-year-old with a milk mustache, who had a tendency to stammer. Then there was Jimmy, who couldn’t master the l sound.
At first, Alan was fascinated. Carroll was such a pro. Nothing shook her. Melissa insisted on working upside down—literally standing on her head. Philip dissolved in tears. Carroll battled discouragement, temper tantrums, fragile egos and plain stubbornness. She was the most beautiful battle-ax of a teacher he’d ever come across, he thought lovingly. Nothing deterred her from smoothly, gently prodding the recalcitrant little ones into mastering their speech lessons. At first amused that she’d made him part of her class, he understood shortly thereafter that he’d better toe the line. Helping the children came first. He had no doubts that she’d make the President of the United States sit down on the carpet and practice consonants if he dared to darken the door.
After several hours, though, Alan’s legs were cramped, he’d earned two rainbow stickers on his wrists, and the tedium of repetition was getting to him. As lunchtime neared, he was dying. His right leg had developed a charley horse. His jaw ached from forming sounds. He’d had three cups of orange juice spilled on him.
“Llllll,” Caro repeated. “Make the tip of your tongue touch the roof of your mouth, Jimmy. There now, look at Alan. See how his tongue tickles the top of his mouth?”
Alan obediently demonstrated by parting his lips and making his tongue touch the roof of his mouth for the fifteenth time. He was going to last the rest of the morning. He was. He was interested in her work, and he was going to prove it to her. In the meantime, he tried to stretch his cramped leg. Jimmy, looking for any excuse to be distracted, stopped working to frown at him. Alan kept his leg exactly where it was, and refrained from looking at his watch.
Finally, the boy left. Carroll bounced up from the carpet with a brilliant smile. “He did it, didn’t he?” she crowed. “He came in here believing he’d never master that sound!”
“You did it,” Alan corrected.
She waved her hand dismissively. “He did,” she insisted, and stood there gloating so hard he wanted to kiss her.
“Who’s next?” he asked instead.
“No one—lunchtime.”
“Darn.” He shook his head and slowly, carefully, straightened his legs so he could stand up without pain. Blood cascaded to his feet in an icy waterfall of feeling.
“You really enjoyed it, Alan? You weren’t bored?” Her eyes danced with both eagerness and sudden anxiety.
“Bored, are you kidding? I just can’t believe how fast the morning went. Only wish I could stay for the afternoon session.” The fibs rolled glibly from his tongue. Who cared? He couldn’t stop looking at her. Caro was glowing, within, without, all over.
“I know you can’t. You’ve got appointments; I never expected you to spare this much time.” She sprinted over to him and surged up on tiptoe for a kiss. “Thank you for coming,” she said softly.
She tasted like orange juice, sticky fingers, and Caro. She’d also rarely been the first one to offer a kiss. “Dinner tomorrow.” He kissed her nose. “My place.” He kissed her chin. “Pick you up at seven?”
“I’ll be ready.”
Outside, Alan hauled fresh air into his lungs and turned his face up toward the sunlight. Then he strode to his car with a step that was uncontrollably cocky, cramped muscles or no cramped muscles. It was working. He was going to win her. He was even beginning to enjoy turning himself inside out to do it. And if Caro liked surprises, he had a few more up his sleeve.
He was determined to grow old beside that woman, and just as determined to make her happy.
Chapter 5
At seven-thirty the next evening, Carroll stepped ahead of Alan into his apartment. “You still didn’t say who was cooking tonight…as if I didn’t know,” she said teasingly.
“So you think you know. As it happens, the kitchen is completely off limits to you tonight.” Alan hung up both their coats, casting a critical eye on his living room.
Everything was set up as planned, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it just wasn’t enough. The picnic lunch, the roses, necking in a deserted hallway—they’d worked. Carroll was blossoming in front of his eyes. Unfortunately, the small successes had made him see that huge ones might be possible if he could just manage this business of courting her properly. If he was man enough. If he could completely change, be a different kind of man for her…
He caught her soft spaniel-brown eyes on him, banished his lingering worries, and grinned. “I see that look in your eyes, but y
ou’re dead wrong, kitten,” he said lazily. “I not only cooked dinner, but it’s ready and waiting for us.”
Dropping her purse on an end table, she raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I see. You’ve hired a catering service,” she said blandly.
“No.”
“Your mother came over earlier to put something in the oven while you were picking me up?”
“No.”
“Good Lord. You’ve kidnapped some poor woman, and you have her tied to the stove?”
“No.” He planted a kiss on the tip of her nose, a delectable nose that was just a little pink from the cold outside. Her lips were equally tempting, and if her eyes didn’t stop reflecting shy invitations, he was going to be completely diverted from his higher purpose. Dammit, a true hero should be able to get his mind off making love to her for at least two minutes at a time. A true hero would successfully whet his lover’s sensual appetite until her need was beyond control and her desire reached a fever pitch…exactly what he wanted to do.
Exactly what he was going to do if it killed him. Teasingly, he patted her fanny. “You can stop looking so sassy. I’ve discovered over the last two weeks that any man can learn to cook.”
“I’m terribly sorry for doubting you,” Carroll said gravely, and resigned herself to a burned dinner. Alan was a whiz at making toast. To give him full credit, he wasn’t bad at ordering a pizza or bringing in Chinese food, either.
It hardly mattered, when dinner was the last thing on her mind. Alan was wearing a pirate-style black shirt she’d never seen before. She was becoming used to the new and unexpected additions to his wardrobe; reading the new sensual look in his eyes was something else. One minute they were laughing and talking the way they always had; the next she felt lavishly, mysteriously studied by those rich blue eyes of his. It was enough to make a sensible woman’s toes tingle.
Weeks before, she would have scoffed at the thought. These days she was inclined to sweep a lot of issues under the rug because of those toes, yet her feelings weren’t frivolous but fragile. His continued attentions made her feel loved as she’d never imagined feeling loved. She wasn’t so egotistical as to think she was as fascinating, beautiful and scintillating as Alan’s eyes kept assuring her she was, but inside she felt newly rich, as though every nerve ending now had a coating of luster.
No More Mr. Nice Guy Page 6