by Gina Wilkins
“Man.”
“Yeah. Real waste.”
“Maybe just one date?”
Teague chuckled and shook his head. “Not worth it. She might look hot, but she’s cold as ice. And she glares at me as if I might carry Ebola or something. I’ll just settle for looking.”
Mike tsked sympathetically. “You want to go to Snuffy’s tonight? Might find someone there who’d let you do more than look.”
After giving it a moment’s thought, Teague shrugged. Hadn’t he just been telling himself he needed to get out more? Do a little opposite-gender socializing? “Sure, why not? I’ve just got to wade through this paperwork first.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
“Four, five hours,” he replied glumly.
Because he knew his co-worker wasn’t exaggerating, Mike nodded, stood and ambled toward the office door. “Just head over to Snuffy’s later, when you’re ready. We’ll meet up there.”
Putting hands to keyboard, Teague ordered himself to focus on work. He’d have a good time tonight, he promised himself. Thoughts of the ice princess down the hall wouldn’t even cross his mind.
By coincidence, Dani drove into her parking space at almost exactly the same time Agent Sexy pulled into his own space late Saturday afternoon. She locked her aging compact SUV even as he pushed the button on the remote lock to his small black sports car. They moved toward their apartment building at the same time, reaching the door simultaneously.
Nodding pleasantly, her neighbor held the door for her. Tucking her large canvas tote bag under her arm, she murmured a thank-you and stepped past him. They strolled together down the hallway. Expecting the guy to take the stairs, as was his habit from what she had observed—only coincidentally, of course—Dani stopped to press the elevator button for herself.
She was rather surprised when Agent Sexy stopped with her.
“Long day,” he explained, as if noting the question in her expression. “Stairs just seem like too much trouble right now.”
She nodded and glanced up at the illuminated numbers, noting that the elevator was stopped on the fourth floor. Come on, she thought. Hurry up.
“You know, I moved in here almost four months ago, and I’ve never introduced myself to you,” he said conversationally. “I’m Teague McCauley.”
So now she had his name. Yet something told her she would still think of him as Agent Sexy.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, because she was expected to respond to the introduction.
“And you are Danielle Madison,” he murmured. The ironic twist to the words made her aware that he was mocking her a little for not introducing herself in return.
“How do you know my name?”
“I must have heard it around somewhere,” he replied, his expression bland.
She looked at him suspiciously. “I believe I’ll take the stairs,” she said, edging that way.
The elevator doors opened just as she finished speaking.
Agent Sexy—er, Teague McCauley, she corrected herself—stepped inside and held the doors for her. “Might as well ride now.”
She thought about turning and hurrying toward the staircase. But then she remembered that she didn’t let any man intimidate her now. And besides, this guy was safe enough, she assured herself, stepping into the car and turning her back to him. He was her neighbor. An FBI agent. Nothing to worry about, as long as they kept their interactions fleeting and impersonal.
“Got big plans for the weekend?” he asked in the tone of someone making polite small talk.
She kept her eyes on the closed doors in front of her. “Not really.”
“Me, either,” he said, even though she hadn’t asked. “I was thinking about going to a club or something tonight.”
She knew he worked a lot, just from those casual observations of his activities. She doubted that he’d had a free Saturday night in the past month or more, since she’d occasionally seen him coming in late in the evenings looking as though he’d just put in a rough twelve or fourteen hours on the job. Certainly not giving the appearance that he’d been out clubbing or socializing.
Though she avoided clubs like the plague these days, she couldn’t blame him for wanting an evening out on the town. He was youngish—early thirties, maybe? Only a few years older than herself. Certainly attractive. Looked healthy enough. He shouldn’t have any trouble at all finding companionship for the night. It occurred to her only then that she’d never seen him bring anyone home with him. No one. Not that he was home that much, really, but she’d have thought he’d have a friend over. A date. Someone.
And then she realized that in the past year she’d lived in her apartment here, she’d rarely invited anyone inside, either. She hadn’t made many friends since she’d moved to Little Rock. Didn’t date very often, and usually chose not to extend those dates past her doorstep. Her apartment had become her refuge. Her sanctuary. Maybe Teague McCauley felt the same way about his place?
She wondered if this conversation was leading up to him asking her out. Maybe to join him for an evening in the clubs. If so, she hoped she would be able to politely decline without making it awkward when they ran into each other in the hallway from now on.
The elevator stopped on the third floor and she stepped out, bracing herself for him to try to delay her. Instead, he turned toward his own apartment without looking back, saying over his shoulder, “See you around.”
“Um, yeah. See you.” Suddenly aware that she was staring after him, she hurried to her own door, chagrined at her behavior.
Wouldn’t her brother have laughed if he’d seen that exchange? She closed herself into her tidy, if inexpensively furnished living room with a frown of self-derision. She’d honestly thought Teague McCauley, aka Agent Sexy, had been angling to ask her out. She’d wasted several minutes mentally practicing polite rejections and it turned out he hadn’t been interested after all. In fact, she thought he’d made it fairly clear that she didn’t ever have to worry about that from him. Apparently, she wasn’t his type.
Clay, her twenty-one-year-old brother, had often accused her of vanity. Of thinking she was “all that,” as he had put it. And at the time he’d said it, he’d been right. That was back when she’d been a pampered daddy’s girl. Before her doting father dropped dead just over three years ago of a heart attack at forty-five. And before Kurt Ritchie had taken away almost all of Dani’s pride and self-respect.
God, she’d thought she was special. Pretty. Talented. Popular. Privileged.
What she had really been was spoiled. More needy than she’d realized. And so foolishly, dangerously gullible.
Maybe she’d been unknowingly slipping back into her old habits. Maybe the safe, ingratiating men she’d dated lately had made it easy to gravitate back into her old ways of thinking. If so, Teague McCauley had actually done her a favor with his lack of interest in her, she decided as she changed out of the blouse and slacks she had worn for work and into a comfortable pair of black yoga pants and a long-sleeved pink T-shirt.
Let him have his noisy clubs and eager women. She planned on a delightfully quiet evening with a good book, her favorite music and her own company. Which was exactly what she wanted, she assured herself firmly.
Someone tapped lightly on her door just as she headed for the kitchen in search of a light dinner. She froze, deciding immediately that Teague had come to ask her out after all. Maybe he’d just been giving her time to stew about his apparent indifference.
Very clever, she thought with a frown. If he thought playing hard to get was the way to pique her interest, he would just have to think again….
“Oh. Mrs. Parsons,” she said, blinking at the little woman in the hallway outside her apartment. And didn’t she feel like a fool for the second time in twenty minutes? “Is there something I can do for you?”
The petite, white-haired woman, whom Dani had always guessed to be somewhere in her early seventies, nodded. “I’m trying to rearrange some furni
ture and I wonder if you’d mind giving me a hand with my bookcase. It’s a bit heavier than I thought.”
Dani had helped her neighbor before, a time or two. Bringing in groceries. Reaching something on a shelf that was over the little woman’s head. Changing a lightbulb. She never minded, figuring the woman asked as much out of loneliness as necessity. Mrs. Parsons had only one son, and he was a busy business owner who lived in Arizona, visiting only a couple of times a year. To her very vocal disappointment, he hadn’t bothered to provide her with any grandchildren.
“I can try to help you, Mrs. Parsons, but if it’s very heavy, we’ll have to find someone else to help. The maintenance guy, maybe.”
Mrs. Parsons nodded. “I think we can manage it. It’s just a matter of getting it started in the right direction.”
Still skeptical, having seen the woman’s heavy furnishings, Dani followed her neighbor to the apartment next door.
Teague was rather pleased with himself when he walked across his living room an hour after he’d arrived home, headed again for the door. His hair was still wet from his shower, and he’d donned a plain white shirt and jeans, nothing fancy for tonight. He’d considered staying in once he’d gotten there, thinking an evening of crashing in front of the TV with a sandwich and a beer sounded pretty good after such a strenuous couple of months on the job. Instead, he’d talked himself into going to meet Mike. He’d gulped the sandwich, substituted soda for beer and then made himself change and shave for an evening out.
He was too young—and too sexually deprived—to keep living like some sort of workaholic monk. When riding an elevator with his uppity-but-good-looking neighbor was the high point of his social life, it was definitely time to do something drastic. He supposed hanging out with his friend in a singles’ club, hoping to meet someone interested in a no-strings evening of fun, was better than nothing. Marginally.
Still, he couldn’t help being amused by the way Dani had looked when he’d walked away from her in the hallway. He’d known very well that she’d more than half expected him to ask her to join him at the club he’d mentioned. When he hadn’t asked—when he had, instead, walked away as if doing so had never even crossed his mind—she’d been more than a little piqued, despite her efforts not to let her reactions show.
Now that had been fun.
He suspected it was past time someone rattled the princess a little. Showed her not all men were eager lap puppies hoping for a crumb of attention from her.
He was just reaching for his keys when someone suddenly pounded on the other side of his door.
“Teague? Mr. McCauley? Are you there? We need your help!”
Dani, he thought immediately, all but leaping for the door. What the…?
She stood in the hallway, her dark-blue eyes wide, her long brown hair tumbled around her shoulders. “We need your help,” she said.
And despite everything he had thought about her earlier, he merely nodded and followed as she turned to rush away.
Chapter Two
Rather than leading Teague to her apartment, as he had expected, Dani rushed to Mrs. Parsons’s open door across the hall from him. Following, he stopped in the doorway, looking in amazement at the mess inside. “What on earth happened here?”
Wondering why he hadn’t heard the crash—he must have still been in the shower when it happened—he scanned the room from the heavy bookcase lying facedown on the floor to the broken knick-knacks scattered across the carpet. A fragile-looking straight-backed chair had been knocked over when the bookcase fell, and books and magazines were tumbled all around.
Mrs. Parsons stood in the middle of the chaos, wringing her hands. “I can’t even get to my bedroom,” she said. “The bookcase is blocking the door.”
“She wanted to move the bookcase a few inches to the left,” Dani explained in a low voice. “I tried to tell her it was too heavy, but she just grabbed it and pulled.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, thank goodness,” Mrs. Parsons said with a mixture of gratitude and sheepishness. “Dani pulled me out of the way just in time. I should have listened to her.”
“If you could just help me lift the bookcase so she can get to her bedroom, I’ll help her clean up the mess,” Dani said to Teague. “She and I can’t lift it by ourselves. We took everything off the shelves before we tried to move the case, but wouldn’t you know we set them on the floor right where it fell. There’s no telling what all is broken under there.”
Relieved that they were unharmed, he nodded. “Mrs. Parsons, stand over there, where you won’t be in any danger of being stepped on or bumped into. Dani and I can handle this.”
“All right. I’ll, um—I’ll make coffee,” she said, and bustled toward the kitchen before Teague could stop her.
“I’m sorry,” Dani said with an apologetic expression. “I know you have plans for this evening, but it scared me so much when the bookcase fell. I thought for sure it would land on her. Then afterward, I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask for help in lifting it.”
“Not a problem,” he assured her, kneeling to take one corner of the heavy oak case. “Can you handle that side? Just to keep it steady while I lift.”
She nodded. “Right here?”
“Yeah. Lift with your knees. You don’t want to hurt your back.”
“I know.”
The princess obviously didn’t like being given instructions, even for her own good, he thought, judging by her rather curt tone.
With Teague doing most of the heavy lifting, they managed to set the case upright. “Where do you want it, Mrs. Parsons?” he asked. “I’ll slide it into place for you.”
“Right there,” she said, coming back into the room to point to a position half a foot down the wall from where the case stood now. “Just far enough so I can set this chair beside it.”
He placed his shoulder against the end of the bookcase and shoved, bracing the front with one hand so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the earlier catastrophe. “There?”
“Just a little more.”
Seeing Dani’s expression of sympathy, he smiled and pushed again.
“Right there,” Mrs. Parsons said in satisfaction. “That’s just right. Oh, dear, look at this mess.”
“I hope nothing too valuable was broken,” Teague said, reaching down to pick up a porcelain poodle that had been snapped neatly in half.
“Thank you, dear, but most of it is just stuff I’ve picked up here and there. Junk, really.”
Noting the regret in her eyes when she picked up the pieces of a porcelain rose, he said gently, “It doesn’t look like junk to me. I would guess these were things you treasured.”
She blinked rapidly, then turned toward the kitchen. “The coffee should be ready. I’ll pour. Just leave those things, Dani. I’ll put everything in order later. Come have coffee. And I have snickerdoodles. I made them myself.”
“I’d love to have coffee and cookies with you,” Dani said, placing unbroken curios on the shelves of the bookcase. “But Mr. McCauley has plans for the evening.”
“I always have time for cookies,” Teague corrected her on an impulse, following the women into the kitchen. “And the name’s Teague, by the way.”
“Oh, this is nice.” Mrs. Parsons beamed as she set a heaping serving plate on the table and pulled three mugs from a wooden mug tree. “I don’t have company very often.”
Thinking of the near disaster that had precipitated this impromptu visit, Teague felt a little guilty that he hadn’t made more of an effort to speak to his obviously lonely neighbor when he passed her in the hallway. “I don’t have homemade snickerdoodles very often,” he said, putting two of the cinnamony cookies on the flowery dessert plate she’d set in front of him. “This is a real treat for me.”
Dani had taken only one of the cookies for herself. She poured a drop of cream into her coffee. “I was just here last Monday, Mrs. Parsons,” she reminded the older woman. “We had pecan pie when I helped you bri
ng your groceries in, remember?”
“Oh, yes. We had a lovely visit, didn’t we? I told you all about that nice young single man who goes to my church. You really should let me introduce you, Dani. I think you’d like him.”
Looking a little embarrassed, Dani studiously avoided Teague’s eyes. “Thank you, but as I told you then, I really don’t have time to meet anyone new right now. Between work and classes, I have very little free time for socializing.”
“Oh, you’re too young to work all the time. That’s what I was telling Hannah yesterday when she brought a package up for me. She’s the young woman who moved in next door to you a few weeks ago, Teague. Have you met her yet?”
“No. I’ve seen her a couple of times, but we haven’t introduced ourselves yet.”
“She’s a first-year medical student. All she does is study, study, study.” Mrs. Parsons shook her head in disapproval. “She’s only twenty-six and she keeps her head buried in those books. I told her she needed to take a little time to enjoy her youth while she has it, but she just smiled and said she would take time to enjoy life after she gets her degree. Just like you, Dani. You girls and your ambitions—there’s more to life than careers, you know.”
“What are you studying, Dani?” Teague asked.
She took a sip of her coffee, then set her mug down as she replied. “I’m taking music education classes at UALR. Minoring in psychology.”
“Yeah? We have something in common. I have a business administration degree from UT, but I also minored in psych. Always thought it was really interesting.”
“University of Texas?” Mrs. Parsons asked.
“Tennessee,” he corrected her.
She shook her gray head in disapproval. “Oh, goodness. You’re a Vol?”
He chuckled, remembering the red porcelain razorback figurine that had survived the crash in her living room. “Yes, ma’am. I guess you’re a UA fan?”
“Oh, yes. I never miss watching the Razorbacks when they’re on the TV. But I won’t hold it against you,” she assured him magnanimously.