“Will you hold this?” She handed him the bag of cookies, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a key chain loaded with keys, dangling it in front of him. Where the hell had those come from? Were those her keys? When he looked in her eyes he had no doubt that on at least some level, she was enjoying herself. “I don’t need you to find a scenic route,” she said. “I need you to find Rand’s car. We’re taking it.”
WHY WAS KYLE LOOKING at her that way? She had never seen him so ruffled. Well, she had seen him irritated yesterday. And this morning, during that impromptu kiss, the unflappable Kyle Sanders had certainly seemed a little, uh, flapped. Her ears started burning, just thinking about it. But why did he look so horrified?
“Are you stealing Rand’s car?” he demanded.
That explained the look.
Eager to clear up this misunderstanding, she said, “No, no. I got his keys from a pegboard in the office, and since we don’t have our cars, I thought we could take his.”
His expression had changed to one of annoyance, which looked a lot better on him. He walked over to her and grabbed for the keys, which she held behind her back. She was still a little miffed that he’d taken her weapon from her in the woods.
“He’s not using it,” she protested. “And if by some miracle he gets out of the hospital today and has to drive somewhere, he can take mine.” She took another welcome sip of coffee. “You want a ride, I’m getting you a ride. My own problem right now is figuring out which particular Chevrolet it is.”
He folded his arms across his chest. His dark-brown hair was ruffled, his green Polo shirt was wrinkled, and there were a couple of grass stains on his shorts. Lord, he was handsome. “You don’t know?”
“No, but I’m going to find out.” She started with the first row, pointing the lock mechanism at a white Lumina and pushing the Unlock button. Nothing. Okay. She went down the row.
Kyle cleared his throat loudly and she looked up to see him, two rows down, arms still folded, leaning against a fuschia Cavalier. Two Serene Dynamics bumper stickers bookended the license plate, and a Serene Dynamics air freshener hung from the rearview mirror. “Oh,” she said, walking toward him. “I didn’t think cars came in this color.”
“I think it’s a custom job,” Kyle said.
Laura tried the lock. “This is it,” she said, hearing the click. “So you’re in?” When he didn’t say anything, she turned on him, exasperated. “You said I should have more whims.”
His eyes were dangerously blue today, she noticed, as he walked toward her. “Grand Theft Auto is not a whim,” he said. He waved the bag of cookies at her. “A whim is don’t eat a healthy breakfast.”
“I already didn’t do that,” she said. “Give me one of those.” She took a cookie from him.
He swallowed a few bites of his own cookie before he spoke again. “I meant, stay out too late.”
“Did that, too.”
When he looked at her again, she couldn’t read him, but she hoped he wasn’t thinking what she was thinking. Make out in the woods with your attractive co-worker. There was a whim. Boy, was it ever a whim. He took a step toward her, and she backed away. She had kissed him this morning thinking that there was still a place for both of them at Harris Associates. Okay, she hadn’t been thinking that, exactly. She hadn’t really been thinking at all. But now that she was thinking about it, she knew that although she owed it to Harris to get him out of trouble, she owed it to herself to keep her emotions out of this rivalry. No matter how good a kisser Kyle happened to be.
She had backed right into the door, and now she opened it quickly, starting to get in the front seat.
“Wait a minute,” Kyle said. He still looked attractively troubled. “If I’m going, I’m driving.”
One leg half in the car, she turned to him and shook her head. “No, I can’t let you do that, considering that neither of us has a driver’s license. If we get stopped, pretend you’re my hostage.”
He glared at her. “Oh, yeah, Laura, that’s going to look really good. Get in the passenger seat.”
Ah. It was a guy thing. Relieved that he now seemed involved in her plans, she got out and moved to the other side, handing Kyle the keys as she did so.
He slid in behind the wheel. “How do we get to Bellamy Island?”
“I’m sure Rand has a map of Georgia in here,” she said, popping open the glove compartment. The car’s interior was tidy and clean, but also overpowered by the sickly smell of the air freshener was making her sinuses flare. She pointed at it. “You couldn’t leave that here in the parking lot, could you?”
“And add littering to my sins?” Kyle asked. “Why not?”
As he opened the door and set the air freshener down in the gravel, Laura quickly located the map.
“What made you so sure he would have a map?” Kyle asked.
“I have one,” Laura said. “Don’t you?”
“In case I turn off the interstate in the wrong direction and wind up in Florida? No.” She watched him study the map for a minute, as she tried to identify the odd feeling she was having. If this situation weren’t so serious, she would almost suspect that she was having fun.
“Okay,” Kyle said finally. “It’s about four hundred miles. He’s got a full tank, so pray that he gets good gas mileage. How we get back, I don’t know.”
Laura put her mug in the cup holder. “Harris will front us some money. And if we need a little more gas before we get there, then I’m sure Rand has an emergency ten or twenty stuck in the glove compartment somewhere.”
“What makes you think that?”
She looked at Kyle. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t even have a working glove compartment,” he said, shaking his head. “Fasten your seat belt.”
He got the car out of the retreat’s grounds without Andrea or anyone else running out of the office to stop them. So far, so good. On the same road where she and Kyle had passed each other, she saw a limo heading for Serene Dynamics. Their car.
Kyle’s arm knocked against her several times as he fiddled with the radio, until finally, flustered, she said, “Here, let me” and took over trying to find a classic rock station. Almost any topic seemed too charged for this small space, whether it was their ordeal yesterday, or the ordeal with Harris yet to come. Everything led her right back to thoughts of their rivalry which wasn’t supposed to be a rivalry, and the kiss that had complicated it.
Finally, she settled on talking about their nieces, and stories about Haley and his niece Jessica carried them into the afternoon, as the landscape outside shifted from the thick mountainous regions to the flatter lands nearer the eastern coast of the state.
She was impressed by how much time he seemed to spend with Jessica, and told him so. “Well,” he said. “My dad watches her after school, so if she’s eating dinner there, sometimes I head there from work.”
“So your dad’s retired?”
Kyle looked uncomfortable. “I guess you could say that.” He seemed to struggle with wanting to say something, and she waited. “He, uh, informally retired when he was in his early forties. My mom had gone back to school and gotten a really great job, so he started cooking and cleaning and hanging out with us.” He shot her a fierce glance, as if he dared her to say anything negative about it.
“I think that’s great,” she said, thinking of her own dad and how he had seemed to put his job ahead of her and her sister and mom, and how he had taught her to do the same. “Had he just burned out?”
“He was burned out,” Kyle agreed, then said, in a lower, tougher tone. “And I guess he’d burned a lot of places out on him.” As if suddenly aware that was revealing too much, he said, suddenly, “So, is your niece feeding your cat this weekend?”
Laura was baffled. “I don’t have a cat.”
He turned to stare at her, obviously puzzled, and she resisted the temptation to tell him to keep his eyes on the road. “I could have sworn you had a cat.”
Cat owner
ship. Just the sort of thing you would expect from an uptight spinster such as herself. Never mind that she had kissed him with abandon or stolen him a car. It hadn’t altered his opinion of her at all. “I don’t even like cats,” she said, which was not technically true, but he didn’t have to know that.
He looked disappointed. “You don’t like cats? Are you allergic to them?”
“No, I’ve just never had one.”
“Every household should have a cat, if only to keep the dog in line.”
“You don’t have a dog or a cat,” she said.
“No, and I don’t have kids, either, but I’ll have them all someday.”
She looked out the window at the green grass and Queen Anne’s lace springing up by the interstate, fighting the sudden vision of Kyle with two little blue-eyed mini-Kyles, a boy and a girl, flanked by a gold cocker spaniel and a fat white cat. He would be a good dad, she thought, somewhere between the slacker he considered his own dad and the workaholic who was hers. Her vision was nice, except that it wouldn’t be complete without a beaming wife. A beaming, unrepressed, whimsical wife.
A sudden feeling of loneliness hit her in the stomach. “We should eat,” she said, opening the glove compartment again and rummaging through it until she found a twenty, tucked away between the pages of the car owner’s manual.
“Okay,” he said, looking at her curiously. “Do you care if we stop at a place where we can get gas, too?”
Laura usually made pit stops only at fast-food chains, but that sounded stuffy, so she said it was fine. He pulled off at the next exit, and after putting five of the twenty into the car, asked her what she wanted from the deli inside.
“A slice of pizza.” She headed for the ladies’ room, taking one last look back to see him standing in line, more than easily the best-looking guy in the whole place.
Out of your league, Laura, out of your league, she chided herself. Sure, he had kissed her, but she was crawling on top of him at the time. More proof that he was an opportunist. What would she do with a guy that good-looking, anyway? It had been way too long since she had been kissed, and if she were honest with herself, she knew she’d never been kissed like that. She needed to have started with someone further down the dating food chain, someone more bland and boring and safe.
She fretted about all this while she washed her hands in the bathroom and inspected her hair in the mirror. A skinny young woman in a tank top was fumbling with a machine on the wall. “Damn,” she said, as it spewed something out. She turned to set it on the edge of the sink next to Laura. “I got the wrong kind.”
Expecting something else, Laura looked at the small wrapped package, which sported the word latex. A condom. A condom machine in the ladies’? Was this what she had missed by never using gas station bathrooms?
“He only likes ribbed,” the woman explained, as Laura simply nodded, drying and redrying her hands on the paper towel she had grabbed from the dispenser. The girl pocketed her second purchase and left, the first packet still sitting there.
Laura stood and stared at it for a while. There was no question that the next woman who walked in here would need it more than she did.
The door opened, and a small, elderly woman with a cane entered. Okay, maybe not. Laura grabbed the packet and stuffed it into her jeans pocket, smiling and nodding at the woman as she left. Hah. Who was repressed now?
5
KYLE WAS ON HIS second hot dog and Laura still hadn’t returned to the car. Was it his imagination or had she acted strange about the cat thing? A cat hater. Who would have thought? He’d had this picture of her in his head, longer than he cared to remember, of her going home to a tortoise-shell cat, a spot of life in an orderly apartment. It wasn’t a lonely picture—Single Woman’s Only Friend, the Cat—but a tempting domestic one. But it wasn’t true.
He’d never bothered to ask Laura personal questions before. He knew the dress sizes of the other women in the office, but with Laura, he had pieced together gossip and added his own imagination to make a portrait. That was a stupid way to operate, and he’d never done it with anyone else. What was so different about Laura Everett? It was almost as though he’d been afraid to build a real relationship with her. Why?
Certainly no one whose ears were as red as Laura’s were could have looked less threatening. Or more adorable. “Thanks for getting the food,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat. “Why are you staring at me?”
“Your ears are all red.”
She grabbed at them, nearly upsetting the pizza from its place on the dashboard. “Are they? I guess the sunburn’s just now showing up, huh?”
“I don’t think it’s sunburn,” he said. He put down his hot dog and touched one ear, moving her hand as he did so. “Does that hurt?”
“No,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Does this?” He leaned over and kissed her ear. She shifted in her seat and he was suddenly kissing her mouth again, and although he had decided the kiss this morning had been a fluke, he had hoped it wasn’t the first and last time to taste Laura’s lips, to feel her heartbeat next to his. His tongue teased her mouth open and she responded with a small sigh that sent his body reeling. Laura, he realized, kissed like a natural born kisser who hadn’t gotten a chance to practice in a while. That he alone was going to get to be the one to experience Laura’s charms sent a sort of proprietary thrill through him. A caveman kind of response: mine, mine, mine.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he had never felt anything that was both so comforting and so exciting as the weight of those arms around him.
She was the one who broke off the kiss. Her ears were now an even brighter red. When she looked at him, her hazel eyes completely serious, he felt an ache of responsibility for how open and honest and vulnerable she was.
“Let’s not talk about it,” she said.
Huh? “Not talk about what?”
“Why we’ve been kissing,” she said. She lifted her arms from him, took a sip of the shake he’d placed in her cup holder and then held it to her face for a second. “You know and I know that I like to overanalyze things, but Harris is counting on us, and I can’t use my brain trying to figure out why we suddenly can’t keep our hands off each other.”
“Because we’re attracted to each other?” Kyle ventured.
She frowned at him. “You’re talking about it.”
“Sorry,” he said. He took a sip of his own shake, and handed Laura a pack of M&M’s to open up. He steered the car back on the interstate. “If you’d like to kiss again without talking about it, let me know.”
He heard the ping-ping-ping of dozens of M&M’s hitting the car floor.
Laura was rattled. Again he felt that caveman feeling of triumph, but it was tempered somewhat by the realization that she had also rattled him. He glanced over at her. Did she even know what she’d done?
Around four o’clock she pointed out the long bridge that would take them across to the semiexclusive Bellamy Island. Seeing a pay phone in the parking lot, he pulled into the last chance gas station at the foot of the bridge.
“More M&M’s?” Laura asked. After she had individually dusted off each piece of fallen candy, they’d made quick work of the bag.
“No, I need to call Brandi,” he said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. What he wouldn’t give for a shower and a shave. “We’re going to go into the hotel and claim that Harris asked us to come and that’s it okay for our rooms to be charged to the corporate tab. It would help if Brandi called beforehand.”
“So you have to sweet-talk Brandi,” Laura said, nodding.
Yes, he almost said, then decided he was insulted. “I do not have to sweet-talk Brandi. I just have to ask her nicely.”
“You flirt like crazy with her,” Laura said. “And she flirts back.”
“That’s just not true. She has a very serious boyfriend. It’s her nature to be lighthearted and friendly.”
“There’s friendly and then there’s friendly,”
Laura said.
He grinned at her. “Why, Laura, I didn’t know you cared.”
She busied herself refolding the map. “You’re talking about it,” she warned.
“Do you want to listen in on my conversation with Brandi?”
She waved him away, and he got out of the car and went over to the pay phone, trying to punch in his calling card number and watch Laura at the same time. On the second try he shifted his body and his attention away from her, finally getting the numbers in the right sequence. The afternoon sun was hot, and he could smell the tangy ocean breeze rolling toward him.
He prayed that Tricia and Brandi wouldn’t have taken advantage of Harris’s absence to leave early. They hadn’t. Without going into the details of the New Horizon deal, he explained to Brandi what had happened at the camp and what he and Laura needed her to do.
“Am I going to get in trouble for this or are you going to smooth it all over?” Brandi asked.
“I’m smoothing already,” he said. He heard the car door open behind him and turned to see Laura getting out. He watched as she basked in the fresh sea smell, her attention distracted by a small spaniel that reached her from the end of its owner’s leash. After asking if she could pet it, she bent down, the dog covering her with kisses.
“Kyle? Are you there?” Brandi asked.
“Yeah. What were you saying?”
“I was asking you if Laura was getting on your nerves.”
Laura smiled at the dog’s owner, who didn’t, Kyle could see from here, wear a ring on his left hand. Picking up women by carrying a cute dog around—what a tired trick. Kyle had used it just last week, taking his niece and her pug to the park in his sister’s neighborhood.
Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business Page 22