by Diana Palmer
“I prefer cardinals and blue jays.”
“They’re still birds,” Violet said on a laugh.
He felt as if his feet were off the floor as he looked at her. Smiles transformed her oval face, made it bright and radiant—almost beautiful.
“Do you hire a gardener, or do you work in the yard yourself?” she asked, enthusiastic about the mass of flowering shrubs around the front yard.
“I do it,” he replied. “I need to unwind from time to time.”
“Yes, gardening is good for stress,” she admitted. “I go through a lot of it myself. But I plant vegetables in our little garden, and I can or freeze them for the winter.” She stopped suddenly, embarrassed, because the garden was a necessity for Violet and her mother, who had to budget furiously just to make ends meet. She doubted seriously if Kemp had ever budgeted in his life.
“I don’t grow vegetables,” he confessed. “Unless you count catnip, for the cats, and some herbs. I enjoy cooking.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Mama can do it, but I don’t like to let her. She favors cast iron cookware, and it’s heavy.”
“She shouldn’t be lifting it,” he agreed. “I hope you’re hungry.”
She smiled. “I didn’t even eat breakfast.”
He smiled back. “Come in, then. It’s all ready.”
He opened the front door and let her walk in. There was a long hall with an elephant umbrella stand and a coatrack, with rooms opening off it on either side.
“Down the hall, to the left,” he directed as he closed the front door.
The hall was painted a pale blue, with a chair rail in a darker shade, and wallpaper up to the crown. There was a pale blue carpet as well.
“You’re probably thinking that it’s hard to keep clean,” Kemp remarked as he followed behind her. “And you’re right. I have a cleaning crew come in to steam it frequently.”
“I love the color,” she remarked. “It reminds me of the ocean.”
He laughed out loud. “It’s the color of Yow’s eyes,” he added. “And she knows it. She loves to sprawl on the carpet. Mee prefers the couch or my bed.”
Violet caught her breath as she walked into the formal dining room. There was a cherry wood table, already set with linen and crystal and china, and beyond it was a kitchen that would have been any cook’s dream. There was a tile floor, modern appliances, a huge combination sink, and a counter big enough to use for dressing half a steer. Over the sink was a large window overlooking the pasture and forest behind the house.
“I’ll bet you enjoy working in here,” she remarked.
“I do. I like enough space to move in. Cramped kitchens are the very devil.”
“Indeed they are, and I could write you a book on them,” Violet confessed. “I bump into the refrigerator or the stove every time I turn around at home.”
“What would you like to drink?” he asked, opening the refrigerator. “I’ve got soft drinks, iced tea, or coffee.”
“I love coffee, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
He grinned at her. “I always have a pot warming,” he said.
He got down two china cups and saucers and poured coffee into them. “Cream and sugar on the table.”
He carried them to the places, which were already set, amid platters of fish, vegetables, fresh rolls and even a cake.
“This looks wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“I counted on your being punctual,” he said with a glance. “You always are.”
He seated her, and then himself.
“I like to make a good impression,” she told him.
He chuckled. “Help yourself.”
She looked around curiously as she helped herself to trout and rolls and a potato casserole that smelled delicious. “Where are the cats?”
“They’re shy around people they don’t know,” he said nonchalantly. “They’ll show up when I cut the cake. They beg for cake.”
“You’re kidding!” she exclaimed.
He laughed. “I’m not. You’ll see.”
They spoke about the upcoming election and the local political gossip during the meal. Violet was impressed with his culinary skills. He was an accomplished cook.
“Have you always been able to knock out a meal?” she wondered aloud.
“I was in the Army—special forces,” he replied simply. “I had to learn how to cook.”
“You were in Cag Hart’s division, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “So was Matt Caldwell. A lot of local guys turned up there.”
She didn’t know how far to push her luck. Someone had told her that he didn’t like to talk about his unit’s participation in the earlier Iraq conflict. But he got up to slice cake and two Siamese voices grew louder.
“See?” he asked, when the cats appeared on either side of him, their faces lifted as they meowed, sounding for all the world like little children.
“They have unique voices, don’t they?” she asked, fascinated.
“They do. And Siamese have one other peculiarity—they can reach completely behind their heads. They have claws and they aren’t shy about using them,” he added with a warning glance. “Go slowly, and everything will be all right.”
“Do you give them cake?” she asked.
He laughed. “Tiny little bites,” he said, confessing. “I don’t want to make them fat…”
Violet flushed red.
He ground his teeth and looked at her soulfully. “I didn’t mean that the way you’re taking it, Violet,” he said gently. “I don’t think you’re fat. You look exactly as a woman should look, in every way.”
“You said…” she began.
“I took a bad day out on you,” he replied, “and I’m sorrier than you know. It was a vicious thing to do. I made you quit, and I never meant to.”
For an apology, it was wholesale and flattering. She looked at him without blinking. “Really?”
He relaxed when he saw the combined pleasure and fascination in her face. She made him tingle just by looking at him. He wanted to drag her out of her chair and kiss the breath from her body. The thought shocked him. He stood with the knife poised over the cake, just staring at her.
The flush grew. She felt her heart racing like mad in her chest. Her lips parted as she tried to breathe normally.
“A lot of it was the way you dressed,” he said tautly when he managed to drag his eyes back to the cake. “I like the new wardrobe. It fits properly. Baggy dresses and blouses aren’t flattering for a full-figured woman.”
She didn’t take offense. He was looking at her as if he wanted, very badly, to kiss her. As he slid a piece of cake onto a saucer and put it in front of her, she looked up into his pale eyes with pure lust.
It had been a long time between women, but Kemp hadn’t forgotten the way a woman looked when she wanted to be kissed. Absently, his lean hand went to the back of Violet’s chair and he bent toward her confidently.
Her intake of breath made him hesitate, but only for a second. His other hand came up to her softly rounded chin and he tilted it up, just a fraction. “Don’t make such heavy weather of it,” he whispered as his mouth hovered over hers. “I want to kiss you as you much as you want me to.”
“Re…really?” she choked.
He smiled gently. “Really.”
His lips teased over her full mouth, nibbling her upper lip while he tasted it with a lazy stroke of his tongue. Violet jumped and shivered. The contact was completely out of her experience. She’d dated a few boys, but she didn’t seem to appeal to any of them physically. This was different. She wished she knew what to do, so that he wouldn’t stop.
He lifted his head and looked into her rapt, expectant eyes. She was breathing like a distance runner. Her breasts were shaking under the whip of her pulse. He’d thought she was at least a little experienced, but it seemed he was wrong.
His thumb moved to her lower lip and tugged it down gently as his head bent again.
“We have to start somewher
e,” he breathed as his mouth opened against her full, soft lips.
Violet shivered. Her hands went to his arms, her fingers digging in. He was muscular. He didn’t look muscular in his suits, but she could feel the strength at this range. She moaned, a whisper of sound that drew his head up.
His eyes met hers, and there was no teasing in them now. They were intent, darker, hungry.
Her fingers lifted to his cheek, hesitantly. “Don’t…stop,” she pleaded in a soft, shaky whisper.
A muscle in his jaw tensed. He bent again, his own heart racing. “Violet,” he whispered.
This time the kiss wasn’t teasing, tender, or brief. He ground his mouth into her soft lips. She moaned again, and this time her hands met behind his neck and dug in. His mouth grew demanding.
There was another moan, but this one wasn’t passionate.
His head jerked back. Violet reached down and grabbed her ankle just as Yow drew back, hissing.
“Yow!” Kemp exclaimed, moving around the chair to shoo the cat away while he knelt and examined Violet’s ankle. It was bleeding. “I’m sorry! I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world!”
“I must have stepped on her tail, poor thing,” Violet faltered. It was exciting to kiss Blake Kemp. It was equally exciting to have him at her feet, concerned for her.
“You were kissing me,” he corrected. “They’re jealous of any attention I pay to other people.”
“This has…happened before?” she asked miserably.
“Yes. Well, no, not like this,” he said. “Mee sank her teeth into Cy Parks one day when he was having coffee with me in the kitchen.”
“I see,” she began.
He gave her a wicked grin. “I wasn’t kissing him.”
She burst out laughing.
He stood up, pulling back her chair. He tugged her to her feet and suddenly swung her up into his arms. She gasped and clutched at his shoulders.
He raised an eyebrow rakishly. “Now it’s my ankles that will be in danger. I have to clean that and put antiseptic ointment on it,” he mused as he turned and carried her down the hall toward the bedrooms.
“I’m too heavy!” she protested.
“You’re not,” he assured her. He looked down at her in his arms. He felt several inches taller. She was delightful close up. He enjoyed kissing her. He’d liked to have done it again, but this wasn’t the time.
He put her down on the vanity in the huge, blue-patterned tile bathroom. There was a whirlpool bath and an enormous space that held commode, vanity, chair, and a linen closet, as well as a large medicine chest.
He fumbled in the chest for what he needed, tugged a washcloth out of a drawer and proceeded to clean and bandage the wound.
Yow peered into the bathroom, her blue eyes huge in her triangle-shaped face.
“No tuna for you tonight, young lady,” Blake told her firmly.
She flattened her ears and hissed at Violet.
“And none tomorrow, either,” he added curtly.
Yow turned her back and flounced out. Mee, in a conciliatory tone, meowed at the door and walked in, watching the byplay curiously but without much antagonism.
“Beautiful girl,” Violet mused, lowering her fingers for the cat to sniff.
Mee sniffed them, rubbed her face against them, and then wrapped her lean body around Violet’s legs.
“You can have tuna,” Blake told the cat.
The purring grew louder.
Violet stroked the cat, but her eyes and her heart were on Blake’s bent head as he put a sticky bandage over the scratch.
“It should be fine,” he said.
“Of course it will be,” she assured him, smiling down as he finished. “Thanks.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said again as he gathered up the first aid supplies and put them away. “Yow’s spoiled.”
“I love cats,” Violet said, still stroking Mee. “I’d have loved to have some, if Mama wasn’t allergic.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without mine. Although there are times when I’m tempted to try,” he added, with a glowering look toward the door where Yow had reappeared and was hissing again.
“You live alone,” she said. “It’s natural that they’d resent strangers.”
He bent down and drew her gently to her feet. “You’re no stranger,” he said huskily as his eyes searched hers. “I don’t think you ever were.”
She felt such elation that she could hardly get her breath. Just weeks ago they’d been mortal enemies. Then, suddenly, they were almost intimate. It was a shock. It was…wonderful.
“Your eyes can’t hide anything,” he murmured, bending toward her.
She glanced worriedly at her ankles, and he laughed.
He picked her up again, shifting her in his arms. “Feel safer?” he murmured, staring at her mouth.
“Much,” she agreed, and her arms tightened boldly around his neck.
With a long sigh, he bent his head and kissed her, very tenderly. His teeth nibbled at her lower lip until her mouth opened. He took immediate advantage of the opportunity, and she felt her whole body go hot as he dragged her closer, so that her full breasts rubbed against his muscular chest.
He groaned, and the kiss grew hotter, longer, more passionate. His arms contracted hungrily.
She gave him back the kiss with more enthusiasm than expertise, but he didn’t seem to mind. She sighed under the hard crush of his mouth and sank into dreams. It was sweeter than she’d ever dared hope it might be.
She felt as if her whole body was shattering with pleasure.
Blake’s head lifted. He turned it, listening. That hadn’t been her imagination. Something really had shattered. “Yow!” he growled.
He put Violet down and rushed back down the hall ahead of her. He made it into the dining room just in time to see Yow feasting on Violet’s piece of cake, on the floor, in the ruins of the saucer it had been placed in.
“Yow!” he bit off.
The cat jumped back and hissed at Violet. For good measure she hissed at Blake, too, and ran quickly out of the room.
Mee, seeing an opening, rubbed against Blake’s legs while she eyed the cake on the floor.
Blake picked up the saucer pieces. While he was putting them into the trash, Mee grabbed up a piece of cake and trotted into the kitchen with it.
“That cat,” he was muttering.
Violet was chuckling, happier than she’d been in years, despite the cat’s antagonism. It was a rare look at Blake’s private life, at the man he was when he wasn’t working. She liked what she saw. His affection for the cats was obvious, even through his frustration with Yow.
“They’re very different, aren’t they?” she asked while he took the lion’s share of the cake away from a frustrated Mee and put it in the trash, too.
“They’re maddening from time to time,” he admitted. “But I suppose they’d taste terrible, even if I do have infrequent visions of serving them up in a casserole.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” she exclaimed, laughing.
He shrugged. “Well, not sober,” he confessed.
She grinned at him, her whole face radiant with the sudden, new relationship that was building between them.
She looked so pretty that Blake stopped what he was doing and just stared at her. Why hadn’t he realized how pretty she was? he wondered.
Violet saw the look and was mesmerized by it. She stood staring back at him, while time stood still around them.
Five
Violet folded her hands in front of her, self-consciously. “I really like your house,” she said, for something to break the silence.
He smiled. “I’m glad.”
“I like the cats, too. In spite of everything,” she added. “It’s only a scratch.”
He glowered toward the doorway, where Yow was looking in again. Mee was still twirling around Violet’s ankles. “We’ll have to work on Yow’s social skills. Maybe she lacks proper company. I might buy her a dog.”
“You wouldn’t!” Violet exclaimed, laughing.
He gave her a wicked look. “A big, ugly dog with a bad attitude,” he added.
“You’d turn up in court as a defendant.”
“Not unless Yow can afford legal representation,” he assured her.
She laughed. It was amazing how carefree she felt with him, a man who’d intimidated her from their very first meeting when she’d worked for him. He was another man entirely away from the office.
“Well, there’s still cake,” he pointed out. “We’d better get it while we can, before Yow tries again.”
“What kind is it?” she asked as she seated herself at the table again.
“Pound cake. It’s the only cake I can do myself.”
“My favorite kind, too. I can make a layer cake, but I like these better.”
He put a slice on a plate, and a fork, in front of her. “More coffee?”
“Please,” she replied.
He poured more coffee and they settled down with their cake, but she noticed that Blake kept a careful eye on the doorway in case Yow made another appearance.
He wouldn’t let her help with the dishes, insisting that he could do them later. Instead, he walked her out onto the porch and settled her beside him in the porch swing.
“I love this,” she said. “We used to have a porch swing, before we lost everything,” she mused. “I loved sitting in it, especially in the spring and summer. We had a big yard with pecan trees and a mesquite tree, and Mama had a flower garden, very much like yours.”
He slid his arm behind her head and curled his long fingers comfortably into her hair. “It must be hard for both of you.”
“We’re getting by,” she said softly. “I don’t really mind. I’m just sorry about Daddy, and how he died.” She looked up at him. “You haven’t heard anything about the autopsy yet?”
“Maybe next week,” he replied. “I’ll tell you the minute I know for sure. Then we’ll both break it to your mother.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said.
He bent and touched his lips to her forehead. “I’m a kind man,” he murmured, laughing softly. “I don’t even kick cats when they deserve it.”