“I was just being neighborly,” Carter said, his calm a bit too measured.
“Watch where you’re walking, hillbilly, unless you want that pretty face rearranged.” The man cracked his big knuckles, displaying a chunky Boston University ring.
“Thanks for the advice, son, but don’t you have some binge drinkin’ and a date rape to get to tonight?”
Beer and baseball was a common recipe for brawling in Boston, a fact Carter had learned during his college days. His reflexes were much faster than those of the intoxicated collegian, so he easily ducked the fist the kid threw at his face. The kid’s momentum carried him forward and he crashed into a parked car, setting off its alarm. His laughing companions scooped him up and carted him away before the car’s owner arrived to deactivate the alarm.
Carter and Detrick turned into the parking lot.
“You need to work things out with that writer,” Detrick said, breaking his silence as he unlocked the passenger door of his yellow Jaguar XK for Carter. “I can’t go through this again. I won’t.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ ’bout?” Carter asked.
“When you walked out on Savannah, you brawled with anybody for any reason, every chance you got.” He pointed to a faint scar above and to the right of his right eyebrow. “Exhibit A. Remember this? I got it the night I had to pull you off that loudmouth in Hooters right after you saw Savannah for the last time. The only time you break out the fisticuffs is when you’re pining for a woman.”
“I ain’t pinin’ for nobody,” Carter said sullenly as he climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“Says you,” Detrick challenged him. “I pity the fool you run into if your big cake date with her doesn’t work out!”
* * *
“What are you reading?”
Carter glanced up from the pages of his dog-eared paperback to see a man staring at him. The black eyes set deeply in his dark brown face glittered merrily, reminding Carter of a leprechaun. “Uh,” Carter began, slowing his pace on the recumbent bicycle next to the inquisitive stranger’s, “it’s a book.”
“No! Really?” the stranger said sarcastically, rolling his eyes. He decreased the resistance on his own bike, slowing his pace so he could talk and work out at the same time.
“A friend of mine wrote this.” Carter flashed the cover. “It’s just a book. And she’s not really a friend; she’s more of an acquaintance. Well—”
Carter’s fellow bicyclist held up a hand. “No need to explain. I actually like a good romance novel myself. One of my best friends is a romance novelist. Victoria Ronaldinho?”
“Sorry,” Carter said.
The man reached over and grabbed the book, taking a long look at the cover. “A Curious Affair,” he read aloud, and then grunted his approval. “That’s Khela Halliday, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Carter began his cool-down, slowing his bike from twenty miles per hour to fifteen. “You know her?”
“I’ve read a couple of her books,” the grinning stranger said. “I loved Satin & Secrets, her follow-up to Satin Whispers. That girl has a knack for creating heroes that you just want to take home and lick from head to toe.”
Carter chose not to picture that image. “Is that right?” he said. “You don’t find them a little…unbelievable?”
“In what way?”
“Well, take Satin & Secrets, for example. Do you really think a man would just drop everything—his job, his friends, even his dog—to pack up and go chasing halfway around the world to find a woman who might not even love him?”
“If he knows what’s good for him, he’d better,” the stranger said bluntly. “I lived in the United Kingdom for a few months, and my significant other was running his design house in New York City. Long-distance relationships are for the birds, not fairies! When that man showed up one day with an ultimatum, I had a real-life romance novel moment of my own.”
His curiosity getting the better of him, Carter slowed his bike to eight miles an hour. “Oh yeah? What happened?”
“That man showed up and said all the right things. He said, ‘Bernard, we need to close the distance between us.’ That man crossed the ocean to bring me home, and we’ve been together ever since. There would be millions more happy women on this planet if more men read books like those.” The man chuckled. “Hell, there’d be a lot more happy men, too.”
Carter’s fellow gym rat looked him up and down, his gaze lingering on the muscles exposed by the torn sleeves of Carter’s T-shirt before moving slowly down his well-defined arms. “Unless my gaydar has short-circuited, you are one of the last men on earth I’d expect to find reading a romance novel.”
Carter’s feet came to a stop, but he kept them on the bike pedals as he spent a moment catching his breath. “This is homework,” he panted. “I’m more of a Tom Clancy kinda guy.”
“Oh, I know what kind of guy you are,” the stranger said knowingly. “Whoever she is, I hope she knows that you’re willing to sit up in the middle of Boston’s toniest gym studying a romance novel for her.”
“I’m reading a romance novel by her,” Carter muttered.
“Son, you are as sneaky as you are handsome. You know, they say that the way to a writer’s heart is through her words.”
Carter dismounted and tossed a thick white sweat towel across his shoulders. He took a couple of steps toward the rows of weight machines and then turned back. “Is that really what they say?”
“If they don’t, they should,” the stranger chortled.
* * *
Carter stared at his reflection in the mirrored wall, concentrating on maintaining the proper form as he pulled the cables that hoisted the weights that would work the perfectly carved caps of his deltoids and lats. If he noticed the Lycra-wrapped gym bunnies in full makeup drifting slowly past him, he gave no indication of it.
In groups of twos and threes, they paused at the huge piece of equipment he worked at. A tall, busty blonde stood close to the mirror, making a production of rolling up the cuffs of her skin-tight exercise Capri pants. Her rear end protruded toward Carter, her invitation as blatant as that of a female baboon in heat.
Carter paid her, and the others like her, no attention.
“Need a spotter?” a perky brunette in a Patriots half-shirt asked, appearing behind Carter.
“Thanks, but I’m good,” Carter told her on a sharp exhalation that helped him return the weight stack to its original position.
The brunette followed him to the next machine, one on which Carter could work his biceps and triceps. He sat on the black foam bench and leaned forward to reposition the pin in the weight stack.
“Wow,” the woman said, watching Carter’s movements. “You curl fifty pounds?”
“Sure looks like it,” Carter said. He began his set, scowling slightly when the brunette sat behind him on the bench.
“There are better ways to work up a sweat, you know,” she said close to his ear. “I’m right down the street, at the Holliston.”
Carter let the weights clang back in place. The Holliston, one of downtown Boston’s ritziest addresses. The woman had serious coin if she called the Holliston home. Carter picked up his sweat towel from the floor and mopped his face and the back of his neck. There was a time in the fairly recent past when he would have hightailed it back to the Holliston faster than a chicken on fire.
But things had changed since he’d spent time with Khela at the auction last month. The pretty brunette was just the latest in a string of pretty brunettes, and blondes, and redheads, none of whom held any appeal for him. Carter mustered a polite smile of refusal.
“I appreciate the invite, but I can’t,” he said, directing his response over his shoulder.
“Oh, come on,” the woman playfully purred, resting her chin on his shoulder and wrapping her arms around his middle. “If you show me your muscles, I’ll show you mine.”
Slowly standing, Carter extricated himself from the woman’s grasp.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, calling on the power of his accent to make his refusal more palatable. “You’re as pretty as a summer sky, but I’m afraid I can’t go anywhere with you today.”
She perched prettily on the weight bench. “What about tomorrow?”
Shaking his head, Carter grabbed his towel and his paperback and headed for the locker room.
“Howdy, cowboy!” called a slender girl who looked no older than eighteen. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”
In the span of time it took the young lady to disengage herself from the headphones connected to the CD player built into her elliptical trainer, Carter tried to peck her name from his brain. By the time she’d stopped the machine and hopped into his path, he was at least certain that her name ended in ‘ie’.”
“Hey, Carter!” she greeted shrilly, tugging at his sweat-dampened T-shirt. “I was hoping to run into you.”
Clinging to his arm, she leaned close to him and spoke directly into his ear. “I’ve been coming here every day for the past three weeks, hoping to catch you here. I can’t stop thinking about our night on your roof.”
She took his hand and squeezed his fingers until his knuckles cracked. “You made me see stars with that telescope of yours.” She grazed his groin with her knee, causing him to jump.
“Hey, now, uh…you,” he stammered, “let’s try to control ourselves here.”
“I’m free tonight—if you want to stargaze some more.”
Carter’s blood chilled a degree or two. There were details, other than her name, he hadn’t remembered about this woman. Had her smile always been so wide, so hungry and so full of teeth? Had the shine in her eyes always been this bright and feral?
Everything about her seemed exaggerated and unpleasant. He didn’t even like her smell, and there was nothing wrong with her floral scent other than it lacked the spice and individuality of Khela’s.
Carter shook his head slightly, more aware than ever of how flat and unappealing every woman looked to him now. “I’ve got plans tonight, honey,” Carter said, inching away from the overeager woman. “Sorry.”
“Another time, then?” she asked hopefully, backing toward her vacated machine.
Before turning the corner leading to the locker room, Carter looked back and saw the toothy woman turning her high-wattage grin on fresh prey. He was tall and stacked with muscle. She thrust out her chest and touched the man’s shoulders and arms.
For a second, Carter thought the twinge of emotion he felt in his gut was jealousy. But then he quickly realized that he was completely wrong, and that the truth was more troubling. He wasn’t jealous. He was interchangeable. The women in the gym treated him the way most women did, as though he were a piece of meat of no use other than satisfying their most indelicate appetites.
A pretty Asian exiting the women’s locker room almost bumped into Carter, and the appraising look she gave him as he apologized made him open his sweat towel and drape it self-consciously over his chest as he ducked out of sight into the men’s locker room.
Chapter 7
“Her gaze copied their bodies, fusing with his to lock them in that place in the heart and head where love, lust, passion and romance intersect.”
—from Sybarite Seeks Same by Khela Halliday
Khela used the back of her wrist to swipe sweat from her forehead. After leaning her mop against the wall, she emptied the bucket of dingy water into the Toto toilet, which she’d already scrubbed until it sparkled, and inhaled deeply. Murphy’s Oil Soap was one of her favorite scents, and it was perfect for Carter’s visit.
Along with her cake, he’d purchased an evening with her, presumably to share her creation. Although she’d begrudged being bought through Carter’s five thousand-dollar donation to the Literacy Fund, her efforts to make the night perfect surprised her.
“Not perfect,” she corrected, giving the almond-colored marble counter one last polish with a cleaning cloth. “Just good enough.”
This isn’t a date any more than the convention weekend was a date, she told herself. She crossed the room to get to the shower stall, where she started a powerful stream of hot water. I’m gonna shower, I’m gonna dress and then I’m gonna slap some cake on a plate and call it a night.
She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. “May as well use the good stuff,” Khela said indifferently, reaching past the everyday deodorant soap to grab her eponymous body gel. She smoothed it over her legs and, noting their less-than-silky texture, she decided to use a depilatory cream rather than a razor. “Save me the trouble of shaving for awhile,” she reasoned.
Khela found perfectly innocuous reasons to take tweezers to her eyebrows, tidying their graceful arches, and to paint her finger- and toenails, a task she completed solely for herself, and not because Carter might come into contact with her hands or see her feet in the course of the evening.
By the time she had chosen a cotton halter dress with a floral print, selected for comfort, not because of how it prettily displayed her back and arms, she had managed to convince herself that the evening with Carter was a business meeting like any other.
Any other that would take place within twenty yards of her bedroom.
She gave her head a hard shake, clearing it of dangerous thoughts linking Carter with her bedroom. A quick glance at the big analog clock in the kitchen prompted her to give the dining area a quick once-over. Carter had never been late for any of his maintenance appointments; she doubted he’d show up tardy for a real date.
She slapped her forehead. “It’s not a date,” she said adamantly. “It’s just another business arrangement.”
Khela tended to this business arrangement with the same care she would have shown any other. Every detail was as perfect as she could make it—bone-white china, crystal glassware and silver cutlery sparkled on the dining room table, the cake was in her warming oven along with a shallow pan of water to keep it from drying out. An Israeli muscato chilled in the refrigerator, and India.arie’s rich, evocative voice complemented the orange glow of the sunset tinting Khela’s tall, wide windows.
At seven on the mark, the doorbell rang. An unpleasant jolt of anxiety shot through her, forcing her to take deep breaths as she slowly made her way to the door. It’s just Carter, she told herself as she turned locks and unlatched the security chain. He’s been here a dozen times. She worked her face into a wide, nervous smile and swung open the door. This is no big deal. It’s just—
“Carter,” she sighed at the sight of him filling the doorway. “Hi.”
He was just Carter, but Carter elevated in the weeks since she’d last seen him.
He wore jeans, leather uppers and a blue-striped button-down. His right hand rested in one pocket, the left gripped his clean-shaven jaw. He was the very picture of casual indifference from the nose down, but his eyes told a very different story.
Unblinking, they raked over Khela, making her wish for the barest of moments that she’d done something more with her hair other than pull it into a ponytail.
His greeting surprised her. “You look stunning,” he said.
It was a simple statement of fact that temporarily robbed Khela of her ability to speak. “Thank you,” she responded, once she regained control of her tongue. “Come in.” She stepped aside to allow him to enter.
“The cake is in the kitchen,” she said. “Go ahead and seat yourself and I’ll—”
“Lookin’ to get rid of me quick, huh,” he said over his shoulder as she followed behind him.
“No, it’s just that I made the cake a few hours ago, and I’m worried about the quality of the product you’re getting.” She hurried ahead of him and turned into the kitchen.
“Need a hand?” He paused in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room area. “I’ve got two good ones, and they ain’t busy at the moment.”
“Please, just have a seat.” Khela shoved her hands into black oven mitts. “I can handle this.”
The insta
nt Carter stepped away, Khela collapsed against the stainless-steel door of her refrigerator. She suddenly felt as though she’d had the oven on all day. Rushing to the kitchen window, she shoved it open and let the breeze cool her flushed face and soothe her nerves.
“I can’t handle this,” she whispered anxiously.
He had been to her place dozens of times to flirt with Daphne and handle some dubious repair. This time shouldn’t be any different, even if he had dropped heavy coin for the honor of spending time with her.
And that’s the difference, Khela silently admitted. The only thing broken around here tonight is me, and he’s here because he wants to be. After another moment of quiet contemplation, Khela was forced to admit a deeper truth. And I’m glad.
With truth came a sense of ease that allowed her to focus her thoughts and get on with the evening. She carefully centered the cake on a black platter and set a silver cutter alongside it. Everything else she needed was already on the table—or sitting at the head of it.
Khela exited the kitchen carrying the cake before her. She made it all the way to the table and placed the platter in front of Carter before her palms began to sweat.
“Aren’t you joining me?” he asked, catching her wrist.
She expected the question, seeing as how there was only one table setting. Gently pulling her wrist from his grasp, she answered him. “This is your party. You paid for this cake, and I’m supposed to serve it to you. There’s nothing in the rules that says I have to join you.”
Carter held her gaze a little too long, certainly long enough for Khela to see the flash of disappointment in them. He issued a short, decisive sigh, and said, “Fair enough. Rules are rules. So is this a chocolate cake?” Leaning forward, he studied it a bit closer. “It looks kinda strange.”
“It’s not chocolate,” Khela said uncomfortably, picking up the cutter.
“Is it vanilla?” Carter sat up straight as she bent over the table to cut the cake, inhaling the vanilla nuances of her perfume.
“Nope.”
“Lemon?” he asked hopefully.
Mr. Fix-It Page 11