by Cindy Gerard
“Phoebe, sit down. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Six
“A proposition?” There was enough skepticism in her eyes to launch a congressional inquiry. But when he reached for her hand, she let him pull her down on the sofa beside him.
“What do you say we do something about this nonconfrontational aspect of your personality?”
She snorted rather indelicately and managed to detach her hand from his. “Short of a lobotomy, I’m not sure there’s a whole heck of a lot to be done for it at this late date.”
“We can use the lobotomy as a backup plan, but in the meantime, I had something a little less Dr. Frankensteinish in mind.”
“Like?” She tucked her feet, which were now bare, beside her hips on the sofa, effectively creating a wall of resistance between them. He wasn’t sure if she was doing it intentionally or if it was just natural. Either way, he decided it was a good thing that one of them was throwing up barriers.
“Like how about I teach you?”
“To perform a lobotomy?”
He gave her a hard look. “To defend yourself, woman.”
She eyed him with caution. “But that would mean—”
“Confrontation. I know. Scary as hell, right? But think about it. It will be me teaching you, not some stranger.”
She scrunched up her face, tilted her head and, to his way of thinking, looked adorable. “This might be a good time to remind you that until last night, we were strangers.”
“I know,” he agreed and, hiking a knee up on the sofa, faced her. He met her eyes in earnest. “But, Phoebe, do I really seem like a stranger to you? I mean, haven’t you felt it, too?”
“Heartburn? Yeah. I thought it was the pizza.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m talking about a connection. We click.”
“We do?”
“We do. At least we have since you got past the Barone syndrome.” When her frown deepened, he drove his point home. “Do you know how refreshing it is to be able to sit and talk—just talk—with a woman who doesn’t have some ulterior motive for spending time with me?”
She bit her lower lip, considering. “Is this the part when I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh, you poor maligned little sex object you’?”
“Now, see? That’s what I’m talking about. I can’t think of a single other woman I could have this conversation with.”
“Because of that maligned-sex-object thing?”
He grinned. “Because you’re a real person who doesn’t necessarily want anything from me. I feel comfortable with you.”
She looked down, plucked at the gauzy fabric of her dress. “Like you feel comfortable with a pair of old shoes, huh?”
His gaze snagged on all those buttons. He let out a breath, shook his head and tried to think about shoes, old shoes, not perfect breasts with tight little nipples that pressed provocatively against gauzy yellow fabric.
“Kind of like a friend,” he said, grounded again, after he zeroed in on the pretty red toenails that peeked out from the folds of her skirt and reminded him how much he could hurt her.
Her head came up. “A friend?”
He tilted his head. “Don’t say we don’t know each other well enough. Time isn’t necessarily the qualifying factor in friendships.”
“So…” She plucked at the skirt again. “You want to like…hang out with me?”
“Yeah. I want to like…hang out with you,” he mimicked. “Maybe go to a movie sometime. Take in a ball game. And like tonight, go out for pizza and then sit on your sofa and listen to jazz and just be…”
“You?” she suggested softly.
“Yeah. Just be me. Am I so far off base here?”
“No. No, you’re not off base,” she said after a while.
Their eyes held for a long moment before she pasted on that prickly smile he’d come to recognize as a precursor to one of her wiseass remarks.
She didn’t disappoint him.
“So, buddy, you wanna pop the top on a brewski and watch some porn?”
He wiped a hand over his face, shook his head. “You’re a funny lady, you know that?”
“That’s me. Barrel of laughs.”
“You are. You make me remember why I like my life, why I like what I do. My family—God love them—they want me to come back to the fold, join the Barone law team and settle down. They start on me the moment I walk in the door and pretty much keep it up, with apologies and love, until I blow out of town again.
“I don’t have to worry about that with you,” he continued when the frown that had been threatening to crease her wide, intelligent forehead finally furrowed. “You don’t have any expectations of me. You don’t have any designs on me. You don’t want me to change or to settle down. And I like that. I really, really like that.
“What I don’t like,” he added, sobering, “is the thought of you being vulnerable to Jason Collins.”
She had nothing to say to that, but that was okay because he had plenty to say on the subject.
“So, what do you say? Let me, as your friend, give you something back. Let me teach you how to take care of yourself. Just a few lessons. Simple stuff. And I promise I won’t let you hurt me.”
That finally got a crooked smile out of her. “Well, gee, if you’re going to take all the fun out of it…”
He laughed again, then against his better judgment reached for her hand and folded it in his. “Please, Phoebe. Please let me do this for you.”
“‘Please, Phoebe. Please let me do this for you,’” Phoebe mimicked Daniel’s words as she straddled the potter’s wheel in her basement studio the next afternoon.
“‘Let me, as your friend, teach you how to take care of yourself.’ Not ‘Let me lay you out on the table and make wild monkey love to you.’”
“You could have said no,” she grumbled, bracing her elbow into her hip as she leaned into a five-pound lump of clay and tried to focus all her concentration on centering it on the wheel.
That was the key in throwing pots. You had to center the clay before you continued the process of opening, drilling and forming it into what she’d decided, in this case, was going to be a vase for Leslie.
“You could have said, ‘Look, Daniel, you’re really a nice guy and I understand that you don’t want any place—let alone any woman—tying you down, but what I want from you involves lip locks and the horizontal tango, not karate chops and pepper spray.’”
She slumped back on her stool, let out a deep breath. Lord, she had it bad. She’d never considered herself a sexual person, certainly not a sexually aggressive one, and yet she didn’t have a single thought about Mr. You’re-a-funny-lady Barone that didn’t involve him naked and stretched out over her, or under her or inside her.
An electric rush of arousal shot from her breasts to her belly and lower as the erotic picture played out in her mind. Hopeless. From the first moment she’d laid eyes on that incredible face, looked into his sky-blue eyes, heard his gravel-and-honey voice, she’d wanted him.
Now it was worse. Now she knew him. Knew his kindness, his sense of humor, his white-knight tendencies. And now she wanted him more—for the beautiful person he was inside as well as out.
And he wanted to be her buddy.
Yippie-Skippie.
She should have sent him on his merry way last night with a firm no thank you.
“But no,” she muttered aloud, “you had to develop latent masochistic tendencies.”
Yep. She definitely had them because she’d finally heard herself say, “Okay. Teach me to break shins and how to bloody noses. Teach me to be bad, Barone. I’m ready to knock some heads.”
He’d laughed, of course, and said he’d see her today at three o’clock for their first lesson.
Well, she thought, leaning back over the clay, she hoped that he’d gotten more sleep last night than she had or they could huff and puff and simply blow each other over. She’d pretty much spent her night sifting through a hundred scenar
ios that involved Daniel Barone and how she was going to survive being his friend.
“Like this ball of clay, Grasshopper,” she said, à la an old but, thanks to cable reruns, never-forgotten TV series, “life must first be centered before moving on to the more defined and refined aspects of substance and form.”
So much for centering. Thanks to Daniel, she was about as far from dead center as a cross-eyed archer.
“I don’t want to be his friend,” she whined aloud as she let up on the foot pedal to stop the wheel. After dipping her hands in a bucket of cool water, she leaned back over the clay. She sent the wheel in motion again, set the bottom and then the top of the vase. Then she began to count through her slow, gradual upward pull.
One–one thousand.
He was coming over in less than an hour.
Two–one thousand.
After Sunday mass and dinner with his family.
Three–one thousand.
He was going to show her how to defend herself.
Four–one thousand.
“Fudge,” she muttered when she torqued her pull. The wall thinned due to her uneven pressure and the top collapsed into the bottom of the vase. Staring at the disaster, she let up on the wheel and slumped back in her chair, defeated.
Lord help her, he wanted to teach her self-defense and she just didn’t think that she had any defenses left.
Phoebe answered the doorbell wiping her hands on a grimy towel and wearing a white butcher’s apron covered in what looked like mud. Whatever it was, Daniel realized that it was also smudged on her chin and her cheek and on the shoulder of a white T-shirt that had definitely seen better days. She’d even managed to smear some of it on the frame of her glasses.
“You’re early,” she accused with a flustered scowl made all the more endearing by the flush that spread from her forehead downward to disappear beneath the round neck of her shirt.
“Sorry. I guess I am.” He checked his watch. “A little. Did I catch you— Just what the hell did I catch you doing?” he asked on a laugh then couldn’t resist teasing her. “Wait, I get it. It’s mud-pack time. Right?”
She looked a little self-conscious then shrugged. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
“You’re a potter,” he said, incredulous, as she led him down her basement steps and into a room lined with metal shelves and cluttered with equipment. Pottery in various stages, from recently thrown, to drying, to bisque fired, to an array of beautifully finished pieces glazed in a rainbow of stunning colors, filled the basement studio.
In the center of the room was her potter’s wheel; off to one side, an electric kiln. On the other side of the room, an old stereo system took up an upper shelf, while a hodgepodge of tools and sponges, boxes of clay and things he didn’t recognize and couldn’t define filled the rest of the spaces.
“Those pieces in your living room—you did them?”
“Guilty.”
“You’re good.” He walked over to a display shelf and admired a pitcher molded of elegant lines and fluid grace. “Really good.”
“It’s just a hobby and, trust me, I’m strictly an amateur,” she insisted without a speck of false modesty. “But I’m getting better.”
He turned around and grinned at her. “A woman of hidden talents.”
She avoided his eyes by fumbling around behind her to untie her apron then slip it over her head. “A woman with mud under her fingernails,” she said, giving them a passing glance.
“And on your face.” Before he stopped to think about it, he touched his thumb to her cheek, brushed lightly at the smear of dried clay.
Her skin was very soft—and suddenly very hot beneath his touch. His gaze dropped to her mouth and he remembered another kind of heat. Another kind of softness that involved that mouth, wet and willing and sexy as hell.
“Well,” she said, stepping away, an effective reminder of the lines that he, himself, had drawn and of the places that were off-limits. “Look all you want. Just, um, let me jump in the shower quick and I’ll be ready to learn some bloodcurdling yell or something equally self-defensive or offensive or…something.
“Oh, wait—” She stopped and turned back toward him, her eyebrows pinched together. “Is this going to involve sweating? Because if there’s sweating involved, maybe—”
“No sweating,” he promised. “Go ahead and take your shower.”
She opened her mouth, shut it, then without another word turned and headed up the stairs. He stood there a long time, looking at her pottery and thinking about the shape of her tidy little butt packed into a pair of old, faded jeans as she’d walked away from him.
It was, without question, a very fine butt. But it was attached to his very fine friend and he had no business thinking about it the way he’d been thinking about it—bare and filling his palms. Just as he had no business thinking about anything involving him and her and sweating.
He dragged a hand over his face.
Look all you want, she’d said. To that, he added the qualifier, but don’t touch.
So he touched her pottery instead. He could see something of her in every piece. Delicate yet enduring. Whimsical and elegant. Romantic.
He let out a long breath, raked his hands through his hair and wondered just why the hell he was here messing with her life. And then he thought of Jason Collins and he knew exactly why.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Daniel said as they faced off in a small room off her studio that was partially finished into what Phoebe liked to think of as her future den. So far, all she’d been able to afford was a cheap, tight-napped tweed carpet and drywall. The ceiling still wasn’t finished. An old desk that housed her aging computer and a couple of folding chairs were the only pieces of furniture.
“I want you to think about a few things before we get started on the actual physical techniques.”
Oh, Phoebe was thinking, all right—and some physical techniques came to mind that had nothing to do with self-defense. He stood before her in another one of his seemingly endless supply of black T-shirts that hugged his chest and broad shoulders, and a pair of those windbreaker-type jogging pants, and she thought about a lot of things. Not enough of them involved getting out of this lesson with her sanity intact.
“First off, you need to be aware.”
Got that covered, she thought dismally, way too aware of the way his biceps strained at the cotton of his shirtsleeves.
“Awareness of where you are,” he continued, thankfully not aware of her wayward thoughts, “and of what could happen is one of the most important self-defense mechanisms anyone, man or woman, can have in place. And never, ever, act or look like an easy target.”
“But I am an easy target,” she pointed out.
“Not anymore, you’re not.”
“You mean I’ve already passed some test and didn’t even know it?” She batted her lashes with staged brightness.
“I mean that starting today, things are going to be different. Phoebe, a woman can prepare against any number of threats by simply thinking about normal everyday items as potential weapons. If you’re inside, for instance, chairs, ashtrays, bottles, even ordinary kitchen utensils can all be used as weapons.
“Okay, what?” he asked with narrowed eyes as she battled a grin.
“Oh, I was just picturing a scenario that involved taking someone out with a wire whisk. Okay, okay,” she said hastily when he planted his hands on his hips and glared. “It was just a thought.”
“Outdoors,” he continued, his voice and face stern, “look for bricks, sand, sticks. Your car keys can gouge, your cell phone can be used as a club. Think about what’s in your purse. A pen or a long-tailed comb can cause a lot of pain and give you that window you need to run away. Hair spray can temporarily blind.
“And then there’s this.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a small canister about twice the size of a tube of lipstick. “Pepper spray.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said demurely, accepting it li
ke a cherished gift.
He angled her another hard look. “Are we going to get serious anytime soon?”
She rolled her eyes, wobbled her head. “Okay, fine. We’re serious.”
“Look, I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to joke your way through this because it scares you. You can get past the fear, Phoebe, if you build a little confidence in the belief that you can take care of yourself.”
Properly chastised, effectively sobered, she nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry. No more fooling around.”
It was hard, but she managed to make it through the next hour or so listening to him talk, watching him show her things that she wouldn’t in a million years have equated to self-defense tactics. Most of them were basic and so painfully simple that she felt foolish for not having had a better awareness.
“All right,” he said after they’d reviewed and discussed to his satisfaction. “How are you feeling about all this now?”
“Better. Really,” she said with a thoughtful nod and realized that she meant it. “Thanks.”
She did feel better—right up until the time he said, “We’ll save the next lesson for another time.”
“What? Wait.” Panic in the form of a herd of butterflies winged its way from her tummy to her throat in .005 seconds flat. “What next lesson?”
As it turned out, there were several “next” lessons over the coming week. Daniel stopped by after she got home from work on Monday, Wednesday and again on Friday. Multiply his visits by eighty-seven, subtract twenty-three and add five thousand four hundred and fifty, and that’s how many times Phoebe’s heart had stopped on each one of those momentous occasions. Mainly because there was sweating involved in these sessions, and there was contact.
“How do you know all this stuff?” she asked, afraid there was no end.
“I listen, I learn. I took classes,” he said, somehow managing to “kindly” imply that everyone should.
“Okay, we’re going to work on a kung fu move,” Daniel said on Friday night as he stood before her in black gym shorts and, of course, another one of his black T-shirts. He was also barefoot.