by Cindy Gerard
“I think, Mr. Barone, that you tell a very good story.”
“Daniel. And I was just putting things into perspective. We’re not so different, you and me—well, except for the male/female thing,” he clarified with another grin. “And you’re looking much more comfortable now, by the way.”
“I am. Thank you.”
Okay. Mission accomplished. He could go now. A smart man would.
He, evidently, was not a smart man.
Had he really done that? Daniel asked himself later. Had he really said: “How about thanking me with something cool to drink before I hit the road?”
Evidently he had, because the next thing he knew, her cheeks were pink again.
“Oh, of course. I’m sor—” she started, then caught herself. “I should have offered,” she amended. “I have tea or— Let me think. Tea,” she finally decided, dimpling beguilingly.
“Iced?”
She nodded.
“Works for me.”
And it did, he realized when she’d invited him in with a sweep of her hand and flicked on another light. It worked just fine, although he still didn’t have a scrap of insight as to why.
This wasn’t his thing. She wasn’t his type. Yet here he stood, shutting the door behind them while she disappeared into what he suspected was her kitchen. For several moments, he stood in cool silence and the pale glow of lamplight, one of which she’d evidently left on for the cat.
Daniel walked over to the window seat. Golden eyes set in a placid, furry face tracked his every move.
“Nice kitty?”
The cat set its tail in motion in quick, impatient snaps and gathered itself on the balls of its feet.
“Maybe not,” Daniel concluded having seen that same tail flick on a cheetah just before it attacked.
He decided to leave well enough alone and check out his little owl’s nest instead.
His little owl?
He shook off the absurd notion and looked around him. Her living room was small but carefully decorated in sea greens and silver grays and a sort of pinkish color he thought he’d heard his sister refer to as mauve. The fabrics were— Hell, he didn’t know. Something soft and shiny. Chintz, maybe. Definitely not brocade. He shrugged, out of his element, although he recognized brocade when he saw it because every piece of furniture in his mother’s sitting room at the brownstone was upholstered in it. He’d been warned from the time he’d been old enough to reach it that he was not to put his sticky fingers on the brocade.
The walls were painted a rich, frothy cream; the floor was polished hard wood partially covered by a plush area rug with roses or cabbages or something that mirrored the colors in the furniture and the drapes that she’d tied back from the windows.
From the glass-globed lamps to the white tapers and delicate pieces of pottery set in artful clusters around the room, the effect was all very feminine, and yet, the room felt very comfortable. A little fussy for his tastes, but still warm and inviting. It surprised him to realize that he sort of liked it.
It was also very romantic. Like her? he wondered. Did Phoebe Richards hide a romantic side behind her utilitarian clothes and no-nonsense haircut? It would explain the dreamy look he’d seen on her face as the streetlights flashed across her features on the drive across town.
To the castle.
Her words had made him grin. They made sense now. Made more sense when he crossed the room to inspect the contents of her overflowing bookcase. He lifted a book out of a stack and smiled again.
Definitely a romance if the covers were to be believed. This one appeared to be a sweeping saga of a manly man and a virginal woman, with a royal crest and towering turrets in the background. He put the book back and discovered more of the same, along with a large collection of contemporary romantic suspense and several classics. Wuthering Heights. Camelot. Romeo and Juliet.
He felt another tug of tenderness for the woman who ate plain vanilla ice cream by herself on a Friday night, a traditional date night in Boston culture. At least it had been before he’d thrown a few things in his duffel and set out to see the world almost eight years ago.
A swift surge of anger boiled up when he thought of Jason Collins. The man was a predator. He was also slime. He was having a problem piecing together any scenario in which Phoebe Richards would be linked to him, and yet they had a history.
Daniel worked his scowl into a smile when Phoebe appeared in the doorway, a tall glass of iced tea in each hand.
“Hey, thanks.” He drained half the glass. “That hits the spot. And this is nice.” He lifted his glass to encompass the room. “Very nice.”
She attempted to hide her pleasure and pride over his statement behind a dismissive smile. “Only twenty-five more years of monthly payments and it’s mine, all mine—corroded pipes, peeling paint and all.”
He realized then what it was about her that captivated him so, besides the fact that she was pretty and refreshing and as tempting as the promise of the ice cream that was responsible for their chance meeting. Phoebe Richards was a real person. She didn’t have it in her to be anything else. Her earlier admissions of nervousness and now her smiles were as honest as her heart. It was a rarity in his world, where most women either jockeyed for a favorable position or wanted something from him. Phoebe hadn’t even wanted a ride home.
She crossed the room to the bay window where the cat waited with watchful eyes. She greeted him with a gentle scratch to the top of his head then stroked a slender hand lovingly down the length of his back. When the cat arched into her touch, Daniel damn near groaned, picturing himself the benefactor of that silky caress that was not only adoring but unconsciously sensual.
Well, there was a new wrinkle. He was jealous of a damn cat. Jealous. Of a cat. If he thought about it, it was probably as degrading as hell. He decided not to think about it.
“Guard cat?” he asked, shaking himself away from the concept and the picture of her hand stroking the tabby.
“Keeper of the kingdom,” she said with a small smile.
The smiles were coming easier for her now, and kind of like potato chips, he was afraid that he wasn’t going to be satisfied with just one.
“He’s also ruler of the roost. Arthur has made the rules and I’ve played by them since the day I brought him home from the pound three years ago.”
“Lucky cat,” he said, then looked up to find her watching him watch her hand continue to pet the purring feline.
He cleared his throat.
She dropped her hand self-consciously, her cheeks pinking prettily.
“Um, please, sit down,” she offered and perched tentatively on the edge of a side chair. “I’m not usually so lax in the manners department.”
And he wasn’t usually so easily distracted by beguiling eyes and a pretty face that got prettier by the moment. It was time to exercise the better part of wisdom.
“Actually, I need to take off,” he said, then immediately felt like a skunk when her face fell in disappointment.
Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe, he thought, helpless against another swell of tenderness. You are too open, too vulnerable. No wonder she made such an easy target for a creep like Jason Collins.
“Do something for me, would you?” he asked after hiding his unsettling reaction by finishing his tea in a long swallow. “Find someplace other than a frog to hide your house key. And get some decent locks on your doors, okay? You need a dead bolt,” he added and with grim determination walked to the front door. “Better yet, get a professional to come in here and set you up with a complete security system.”
She set her untouched tea on a glass-covered end table and rose, wiping her palms on her shorts. “I’m fine. Really. But thanks for your concern.”
So formal. So much denial.
He frowned down at her as she joined him by the door. “The guy is a problem, Phoebe. He’s not going away. I know his type. You’ve hurt his pride, banged the hell out of his ego. Level with me. This isn’t the first time he
’s hassled you, is it?”
He could see her struggle to deny it, but just as he figured, her basic honesty wouldn’t let her.
“He’s called during the night a couple of times. Harassed me at work. But he’s never approached me like—well, like he did tonight.”
“Which only shows that he’s building up a head of steam.” He expelled a troubled breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever taken any self-defense classes?”
She seemed to find his question amusing.
He tilted his head. “And that’s funny because…?”
“It’s funny because in my world and my line of work, self-defense is rarely an issue. I’m a librarian,” she clarified. “We tend to level fines not karate chops.”
Of course. Pretty, shy little Phoebe was a librarian. This was too good.
“A librarian,” he said, smiling into a face that was trying to decide if he was going to tease her about her profession. He sincerely hoped she didn’t have a family farm to lose, because if it came down to a poker game, she was a goner.
“Boston Public,” she added, sounding a little defensive. She relaxed and expanded when she realized that he liked the idea. “The children’s library.”
“Why is it that they never had librarians who looked like you when I was checking out National Geographic in the eighth grade?”
Her eyes softened, warming to his smile. “National Geographic, huh? For the articles, I suppose?”
“Oh, absolutely.” He was barely aware that he’d moved toward her.
She was very aware. Her gaze was watchful, her eyes overbright.
“It never occurred to me,” he said, shrinking the distance between them to little more than an inch, “that there might be pictures of bare-breasted women between those scholarly pages. Imagine my shock when I found them in magazine after magazine after magazine.”
“Imagine,” she echoed with a tentative smile.
He was making her nervous again. Not an uncomfortable kind of nervous. An aware kind of nervous that painted her cheeks with a rosy blush. He liked her reaction—maybe a little too much.
“And did those very same magazines prompt you to—” she paused, sounding as breathless as a marathon runner at the finish line “—to embark on all the adventures that have made you so famous?”
His hands were on her shoulders now. They were small and fragile and yielding beneath his palms. It hadn’t been a conscious decision on his part to place them there. Just as it hadn’t been a conscious decision to draw her toward him. Yet he was very conscious of her eyes that had softened to a melted caramel and were watching his face with an intriguing mix of apprehension and desire.
“Absolutely. I’ve been searching for wisdom and—” His gaze dropped to her mouth, then lower, to the soft mounds of her breasts that rose and fell beneath her cotton top. The tight little beads of her nipples pressed enticingly against the fabric, mere inches away from his chest.
“And insight?” she suggested on a whisper. “Inspiration?”
“Inspiration, yeah. That’ll work.” He lifted a hand, trailed the back of his fingers along the rise of her cheek. “I’ve got to tell you. At the moment, I’m feeling truly inspired.”
“Oh.” Behind her glasses, the heavy sweep of her lashes lowered to brush her cheeks. Lush. Seductive. Inviting.
This was a mistake.
It didn’t feel like a mistake, though, as he lowered his head, even though the word banged around in the left side of his brain like a pinball. What it felt like was a little bit of heaven to be this close to her, to claim the kiss he’d been fantasizing about since she’d turned around with her ice cream and blinded him with her smile.
He touched his mouth to first one corner of hers and then the other, telegraphing his intentions, offering his little bird the opportunity to fly away.
She didn’t fly. She didn’t even fluff a wing. She didn’t go anywhere. Before she had a change of heart, he aligned his mouth with hers and took his need all the way home.
Honest, he thought again as he sank into the luxurious warmth and the dewy fresh taste of her. She was so honest with her response. Everything that she was flowed into her kiss. Innocence, guilelessness, openness. And wonder.
The lingering taste of vanilla flavored her mouth, richer than the sweetest cream. Her lips were petal soft, like summer roses. The sigh that soughed out when he slid his hands down her arms then wrapped them around her, married hesitation with restlessness. And when he asked her to open for him with a gentle nip of his teeth to her lower lip then the questing glance of his tongue, she hesitated for only a heartbeat before inviting him inside.
The tenderness he felt for her shifted, like a hot wind, to something more intense, more demanding. Heat. Hunger. Need. A desire so much stronger than anything he’d ever experienced tightened in his chest then crept, by inches, toward his groin.
Too much, the rational half of his brain warned.
Not enough, the other half insisted when her small hands clutched lightly at his waist then rose in a slow, sensual sweep up the length of his back.
Good Lord, he thought, forcing himself to lift his head and break the contact, only to dive back for more when her dreamy amber eyes and kiss-swollen lips asked for his return.
Trouble.
He was in it. Deep. And sinking deeper.
It was way past time to walk away. And in about a hundred years, he was going to. But right now, right now, he was simply going to kiss her.
With a will he’d rarely, if ever, had to call on, he finally ended the kiss. Cupping her shoulders to steady them both, he tipped his head toward the ceiling and gulped in a bracing breath. A long moment spun out, tempting him back toward the minefield before he found his bearings and with it his voice.
“Well,” he said, hearing a gruffness that he had to ignore if he was going to get out of this before he took more than a kiss.
More than a kiss was out of the question. For him, absolutely. For her, without a doubt. Phoebe Richards needed and deserved ten times more than he had it in him to give.
“Well,” he said again and fabricated a smile that could have been directed at his maiden aunt. “So much for inspiration.”
“Um.” Her eyes were closed. She had a shell-shocked look about her as she stood there, swaying a little on her feet.
“Yeah.” He couldn’t have agreed more. “Look, Phoebe—”
“Wait.” She opened her eyes with a little shake of her head. “I—I think I know this part. It’s late. You’ve got to go, right? And I’ve got to work tomorrow, so it’s time to call it a night. It’s okay. Really. No harm, no foul.”
Well. She certainly made that easy. So why did he feel so low?
Because her mouth was as tempting as Original Sin. Because her eyes were whisper soft and searching. A hundred emotions played behind them, one of them was regret.
“You’re going to be okay now, right?”
She nodded once, then again.
“And you’ll—”
“—see about new locks.” She forced a thin smile. “Yeah. I’ll check it out.”
Now was not the time to question his good fortune. He wrapped his fingers around the doorknob. “Okay. Well. It’s been nice meeting you.”
Her head bobbed again in jerky agreement. “Sure. Me, too. I mean, you, too. It was nice meeting you, too.”
He watched her face for a long moment before he tugged open the door and walked outside. At the end of her sidewalk, he turned back, studied the incredible face that he’d never see again and swallowed back an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Goodbye, Phoebe.”
She pressed her cheek against the edge of the door, smiled. “Bye.”
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
She nodded. “Thank you again for helping me out.”
And then she closed the door.
Well, that was the end of that, he told himself as he walked to his car. Yet he sat behind the wheel for a full minute before turni
ng the key. And when he finally shifted into reverse and backed out of her driveway, he experienced an unsettling notion that he was making a huge mistake by driving out of her life.
“Mistake for whom, Barone?” he wondered aloud as he sat at a stoplight and waited for it to turn green.
That was the issue, wasn’t it? He had no question that it was the right thing to do for her. With the exception of Collins, she had a nice, orderly life going for her. She didn’t need him blowing holes in it. And he would. When he left—and he always left—he’d leave her less than when he’d found her. So he didn’t want to start something he couldn’t end without hurting her.
He wasn’t conceited but he wasn’t blind. He’d seen—hell, he’d felt the way she’d reacted to him. It would have been so easy to talk her into bed. But Phoebe was too sweet, too real and too good to love and then leave in the morning.
So yeah. It was the right thing for her.
For the first time in his life, though, he wondered if leaving a woman—leaving this woman—was the right thing for him.
Four
“It couldn’t have been that bad, sweetie.” Leslie Griffin, stylish at sixty with her chic auburn hair and trim figure, grinned sympathetically the next morning as Phoebe pounded her forehead softly on her desktop at the library.
“It was worse than bad,” Phoebe moaned, flattening her cheek on the infamous back issue of the Boston Globe that lay open in the center of her desk. She expelled a heavy sigh. “If I managed to string more than three words together in any semblance of a coherent thought it would have to have been ‘I’ and ‘um’ and ‘sorry.’ I am such a putz.”
Wearily lifting her head, she snagged her glasses, slipped them on and slumped back in her desk chair. “I have this chance magical meeting with the most gorgeous man in Boston—strike that—the most gorgeous man in the world—and I make a run at Moron of the Century. What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. Good grief, that scene with Jason would be enough to knock anyone for a loop. The creep. I can’t believe he’s still hassling you.”