“I might.” Her mouth curved again. How would that mouth feel, curving under his own? He wanted to find out more than he knew he should. “A lot sooner than I would have said yes to Bradley.” She paused, as if weighing her words, then said, “Yes.”
The word sizzled between them, waiting for a response. Lance’s mouth felt dry as he forced the words out. “I’ll keep it in mind if I ever get a grant.”
He saw the waitress approaching their table. She looked obviously surprised that McCloud’s dinner partner had changed. Her bewildered expression amused him. Welcome to the club.
Opening the menu, Lance skimmed the two sides, trying to remember what Thompson had mentioned he’d enjoyed when the firefighter had eaten here. He found it on the second side and asked the waitress for a serving.
“Make that two.” Closing her menu, Melanie handed it to the woman. Lance raised a questioning brow. “I trust your judgment,” Melanie explained as the waitress walked away. “Besides, I’m easy.”
Was she? Lance wondered. Was she “easy”? And just how easy was easy? He knew she was certainly easy on the eyes, growing progressively more so with every passing minute. The more he saw of her, the more he liked what he saw. Which, Lance upbraided himself, he shouldn’t allow to become a habit.
“Don’t let that get around,” he commented, as if whether she did or not was really a concern of his. What did it matter to him if people, if men, thought she was easy. She was no one to him.
And he intended it to remain that way.
She laughed softly, the low, throaty sound going right through him, landing in his gut. Disgusted with his very physical reaction, Lance attributed it to the scotch and soda.
“Why not?” she asked. “I think life’s too complex as it is. Some things should be easy. Talking, making friends—”
Her statements were far too blanketing for his liking. “Acquaintances,” he corrected, contemplating the last jumbo shrimp in his cocktail glass. He didn’t much care for the taste. Lance saw the way she was eyeing it and decided that the shrimp might as well go to someone who would appreciate it. He held it out to her. “Making acquaintances is easy, at least for someone like you.”
To his surprise she didn’t take the fork. Instead she took his wrist, holding his hand steady as the last bit disappeared between her lips. Stirred, he had to concentrate hard to remember what he was saying. “Making friends is another matter altogether.”
Slipping her fingers from his wrist, Melanie sat back again. “Not really, not if you leave yourself open.”
His pulse was unsteady, he thought in annoyance. Served him right for having that drink. It was much too strong for an empty stomach to handle properly.
And her words were much too soppy for his stomach to handle, he thought. Her sentiment was hopelessly naive. “If you leave yourself open, someone is liable to walk all over you with very muddy shoes.”
He said that with much too much conviction, Melanie thought. The teasing note left her voice as she leaned forward again, her attention riveted to the man sitting across from her. For the briefest moment she saw the sadness in his eyes before the curtain dropped again.
“Did someone?”
The sympathy she was silently offering made him uncomfortable. “Did someone what?”
She had her answer in his tone, she just didn’t have the specifics. “Walk all over you with muddy shoes?”
Did she take some sort of perverse pleasure in always turning things around? “We were talking about you,” he reminded her tersely.
He’d slipped, Melanie thought, and given her a glimpse into his world, into his pain. For now, she pretended not to notice. He didn’t trust her enough to share yet. But he would.
“Well then, no,” she answered, “no one has. And I have a lot of friends to show for it.”
“Lucky you.” He couldn’t help the sarcasm that spilled over.
“Yes.” Her eyes held his and he realized that she was deadly serious. “Lucky me. Do you have a lot of friends?” Were there people in his life who meant something to him besides his aunt? People he might be shutting out for some reason? Questions began to multiply in her head.
He gave her a black look. It was an absurd question. “No.” He’d been a loner for as long as he could remember. Even before his father had walked out on him. That was why the wounds Lauren left behind had gone so very deep. Because he’d opened himself up to her, trusted her. Loved her.
And been a fool.
Melanie believed him, and the emptiness was almost too much to bear. “Well, you have me.”
Did she really think it was that easy? “We’re not friends,” he pointed out gruffly. “We barely know each other.”
Oh, but I know you, Lance. I know the pain you’re feeling and 1 want to make it better.
Her smile was warm, gentle. How could there be so many facets to just a simple curving of her mouth, he wondered, trying not to let himself be drawn in.
“Now, there you’re wrong,” Melanie contradicted cheerfully. “I know what you do for a living and where your office is. I even know your aunt’s favorite movie.” She knew just what his comeback to that would be and headed him off. “And as for me, you can ask me anything you want.”
His eyes narrowed. Couldn’t she take a hint graciously? “And what if I don’t want to ask you anything?”
Melanie merely smiled as she sipped her drink. “Oh, but you will.”
He wanted to deny it, but he had an uneasy feeling that she was already right.
But the kinds of questions he wanted to ask her would only lead to trouble, and he wasn’t in the market for trouble. He wasn’t in the market for friends, either, but she seemed to be determined to be his. He couldn’t understand why that seemed so important to her.
Lance pointed to the amber liquid in her glass. It was almost gone. “If you ask me, you’ve had too much to drink.”
She grinned, her eyes dancing wickedly. “I almost never get high on ginger ale.”
“Ginger ale?” he echoed. He’d assumed that she was drinking white wine. The waitress had served it in a wineglass.
“Ginger ale.” Melanie held the glass up to him to inspect. Lance held up his hand, refusing it. She set the glass down on the table. “But life, however,” she continued, “well, I get high on that all the time.”
Was she for real? A part of him almost wished she was, but he knew that was impossible. Nobody was this uncomplicated and still functioning in the world. “There’s a word for people like you.”
“Yeah, I know—optimist.”
“I was thinking of nuts.”
She looked into his eyes and then laughed. “No, you weren’t. The word that occurred to you was probably a lot more potent than that. Am I right?”
“Yeah.” Stymied, Lance threw back the rest of his drink. It went down, smooth as silk. As smooth as he figured her skin would feel when he touched it.
If, he amended, not when. If he touched it. Which he wasn’t planning to.
The hell he wasn’t.
She was scrambling his brain, he thought darkly. He didn’t need this. “You’re right.” It was as if she could read his mind. “And just how did you arrive at that conclusion? Is this some ‘divine’ power you have, or have you just driven a lot of people nuts?”
It had nothing to do with her effect on him, it had to do with what she could see in his eyes, Melanie thought. What she could hear in his tone. Nuances were very important in the world she’d come from. “I’ve been around a lot of people in my life. You can’t help getting good at reading them after a while.”
“You can if you ignore them.” Ignoring everything around him except what related to his work was second nature to him. And comforting in an odd way. But he still didn’t miss the fond note that entered her voice and found himself wondering just what sort of childhood she’d experienced, growing up the way she had.
She folded her hands in front of her and leaned her cheek against the linked fingers, studying him. Wishin
g he could trust her. “That’s the difference between us right now, Lance. I like people.”
He picked up on her phrasing. “What do you mean, ‘right now’?”
“Just what I said. I think at bottom, you’re like me. Something just got in the way.” She believed that with her whole heart.
“Common sense.” One of the first lessons he’d been taught as a firefighter was to know when to get out of a burning building before it collapsed. It was time to get out. “And common sense says I should be going.” Pushing his chair back, he began to rise.
He felt the light pressure of her hand on his, felt the electricity as it passed from her to him, a hundred-pound woman stopping a one-hundred-eighty-two-pound man cold in his tracks.
“Stay.” The word whispered along his body more gently than a caress. He struggled to ignore its effect. “We’ve already ordered, and I hate eating alone.”
He looked at her, leaving his hand trapped where it was. “You’re not alone. You’re surrounded by all these people.” He nodded at a table. “Why don’t you go and make them your friends?”
She knew what he was doing. Trying to push her away, to make her angry enough to give up. She wasn’t about to let him get to her. Not on that level. On a different level, he already had. He’d stirred her compassion to a high point. “I’d rather concentrate on making you my friend.”
He read things in her eyes, things he didn’t believe in. Things he told himself he was only imagining. Women like Melanie didn’t exist. They were an illusion, created by a mind that needed to believe.
“Why?”
She told him honestly. He wouldn’t have accepted anything less. “Because I think you need one. A good one who’ll listen.”
What gave her the idea he’d bare his soul to her? “I’m not talking.”
She looked into his eyes. “Not with your mouth.” A movement in the distance caught her eye. “Look, our dinners are coming.” He still looked as if he was going to leave. “I promise, for the remainder of the meal, I’ll be good. We’ll talk about anything you want to talk about.”
“And if I don’t want to talk?”
She lifted her shoulders, letting them fall beguilingly. “Then we’ll eat.”
Yeah, like he really believed that. Still, he didn’t have any other place to be, and the leftovers in his refrigerator had probably turned by now.
He made up his mind. “Fair enough, I guess.”
Melanie only smiled. One battle down, a hundred to go.
She’d lied.
To be fair, she did try to keep her word. She did try to let him lead the conversation. Except that he didn’t, preferring to see how long she could hold out. By his watch, she’d struggled with herself a full five minutes, maybe five and a half, before finally breaking down and talking.
If he were being totally honest, he had to admit that he didn’t mind all that much. Listening to her talk, as long as the conversation didn’t center on him, was like listening to the music made by those early-morning birds he remembered hearing when he and his father used to go fishing.
The memory caused him to pull up abruptly, his breath catching. He hadn’t thought about that in years. Hadn’t thought about all those summers he’d gone fishing with his father.
But even as he tried to push the memory away, it refused to leave. Instead it came at him from all sides, squirming in through the gaps. Bringing with it a bittersweet feeling he didn’t want.
His mother, getting up early Saturday morning and pretending to grumble as she made sandwiches for his father and him, sending them both off into the predawn darkness with a warm thermos of soup, a basket of sandwiches and a dose of love.
He and his father, sitting on that damn, rocking rowboat for hours, watching the sunrise over the lake and, like as not, catching nothing.
Sunrises on the lake were so beautiful, the center of his chest used to ache just looking at them.
He felt an ache now, but it was a different sort of ache. It was the kind of ache you felt when you knew something was dead.
It was dead. All that had happened to someone else. Someone else who knew what it was like to believe in happiness going on forever.
Someone who wasn’t him.
His expression was stony. Melanie set her fork aside. “Oh, God, I’ve bored you to tears.”
Snapping out of it, Lance looked at her. She’d said something, but he hadn’t heard. “What?”
“You drifted off.” A self-deprecating smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Was I really that bad?”
“No.” He shook himself loose of the memory’s grip. It wasn’t easy. Bits and pieces had woven themselves into his consciousness. “I was just thinking about something, that’s all.”
Not just “something.” He’d gone almost pale. Melanie knew he wouldn’t appreciate her pointing that out. She swallowed the temptation to ask.
The waitress approached with the bill, and Melanie took out her charge card, ready to place it on the small silver tray beside the itemized statement.
He caught her hand before she could reach up to do it. “What are you doing?”
She looked at Lance in surprise. “Paying for the meal.”
“Put that away,” he growled. Releasing her wrist, he fished out his wallet.
“But I told you, dinner was on me.” They’d already discussed it. Or rather, she’d made the offer in order to get him to stay. But he hadn’t refused.
“Put that away,” Lance repeated.
She didn’t want to argue with him and spoil what was left of the evening. Despite his reluctance to remain, she’d had a really nice time... and made, she hoped, just the tiniest bit of headway.
“Okay. Thank you.” Tucking the card back into her wallet, she quickly fingered the bills she had there, mentally counting them. “I can always use some of the money to pay for the fare.”
“The fair?” Now what was she talking about? Was there some fair in town she was going to try to drag him to?
“Yes.” Still counting the ones, she didn’t look up. “For the cab.”
She wasn’t talking about a fair, she was talking about cab fare. It still didn’t make any sense to him. “What cab?”
Melanie closed her wallet and deposited it into her purse. “Well, my ride home is probably halfway back to New York by now. I have to get home somehow.”
He’d assumed that she’d driven here in her car. “I thought you said you were meeting Shaffer in front of the restaurant.”
“I was supposed to,” she agreed, “but there was a slight change of plans. Bradley insisted on picking me up at my apartment. When he arrived, he wanted to spend a little ‘quality time’ with me before coming here.” She touched the tip of her tongue to her lip, and Lance wondered why he found that so impossibly sexy. “That was the first inkling I had that this was not going to turn out to be the date of the century.”
She was being awfully cavalier about the situation. The slime might have tried to force himself on her. Didn’t she think of these things? “What were you going to do when he took you home?”
She’d had that all figured out by the time they arrived at the restaurant. “Run like crazy and lock the door behind me before he could get to it.”
He could see her doing it, too. He didn’t realize he was smiling when he told her, “Save your money. I’ll take you home.”
She would like that, she knew. But she didn’t want him to feel obligated. “You don’t have to.”
He got up, one hand on the silver tray, one hand on her arm. He took charge of both. “McCloud, shut up. I said I’m taking you home, and I’m taking you home. Now that’s the end of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Right, like she would dutifully accept anything, he thought darkly, walking to the hostess desk with her.
But it wasn’t the end of it. It was just the beginning,
Lance had that sinking feeling even before he pulled up in front of her shop. Even before he walked her to her d
oor. This wasn’t going to be the end of it, even though it should be. Why wasn’t he turning around and leaving?
She didn’t have to fish for her keys. She knew just where they were. On a ring attached to the inside of her purse. For the moment she left them there as she turned her body into his and looked up at him.
“Would you like to come up for a few minutes?”
The moon was out, and with it more stars than he ever remembered seeing. The street, so busy during the day, was almost eerily quiet as he stood there with her. The cool breeze he’d unconsciously expected hadn’t materialized. Instead, there was a warm one in its place. Warm, like the feel of her breath along his throat as she asked the question.
Yes, he would, he thought. He would like to come up. More than that, he wanted to stay the night.
That was just the damn trouble.
No, she was. She was trouble with a capital T. Lance knew when to draw the line in the sand. He just hoped he had the good sense not to cross it.
Still, he wasn’t moving toward his car, wasn’t leaving. He was scarcely even breathing. “You’re not going to run like crazy and lock the door?”
Slowly, her eyes on his, she moved her head from side to side. “You haven’t given me any reason to.”
But she’d given it to him, he thought. Lots of reasons to run like crazy and lock the door to keep her out. And himself in.
“I’d better go,” he muttered.
She didn’t want him to go. She wanted him to stay. But she didn’t want him doing anything he didn’t want to do, either. It wouldn’t count then.
“Thank you for rescuing me. I had a much nicer evening than I thought I would when I first left the house.”
There was just enough light to play off her skin, making it silvery. His knees were doing strange things. He wanted to touch her. “Doesn’t take much to please you, does it?”
They were standing close, so close that she could almost feel his heart beating. Could feel the heat of his body whispering to hers. “Like I said, I’m easy.”
Yes, he thought, she was. Easy. Very easy to allow under his skin.
Before he could think and stop himself, Lance wove his fingers into her hair.
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