Desire by Design

by Paula Altenburg

  He still wore his running gear.

  “Have you been here all day?” she asked, incredulous, her sleep-fogged brain not operating at one hundred percent. God, she hoped her breath didn’t smell as bad as it tasted.

  “I figured I might as well stay. You were asleep, and it was nice and quiet here.” His unwavering eyes fastened on hers. “And I had a lot of reading to do.”

  Eve remembered all the files she’d dumped on him. At least he’d put his time to good use.

  A box on the kitchen table caught her attention. Her voice rose an octave. “You ordered pizza?”

  “It was either that or eat peanut butter on pita bread, which was all I could find in your cupboards. I saved you some,” he added.

  “I haven’t had time to buy groceries lately.” Eve tried to figure out how she’d slept through a pizza delivery. She didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. “You’re probably in a hurry to get back to your hotel,” she said.

  If so, no one would ever know it. He propped one hip against the tiled countertop. “Could I have a cup of coffee first?”

  He’d made fresh coffee.

  Eve was at a complete loss as to how to handle this situation. It wasn’t often she had architects sit around her house and watch her sleep. The clock over the kitchen sink chimed the hour. It was ten o’clock. At night.

  She began to back out of the kitchen, bumping into a wall in the process. “Of course. Have your coffee. But I need to grab a shower. I’m sure you could use one, too.” The twist of his lips made her wish she’d thought her words through. “Would you mind letting yourself out when you’re finished?”

  “With the coffee or the shower?” he asked.

  Eve didn’t dignify that with a response. She turned and raced for the stairs, taking them two at a time, then skidded to a stop at her open bedroom door.

  Her wardrobe was back in its proper place and her clothes were all neatly folded and stacked in piles on her bed.

  Including her underwear.

  She felt her whole body blush, right from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair. He’d put his time to even better use than she’d thought.

  Her black dress was draped across the foot of her bed, and her breath caught. The dress had been with her coveralls, and in her coveralls was her divorce decree. She scrambled around until she found the coveralls, then searched the pockets for the document. She found it, then took it and tossed it in the trash. She had her own copy in a security box at her bank.

  Maybe Matt hadn’t seen it.

  Her lips trembled. The last thing she wanted was to answer questions about Claude, especially from a man who was critical of his own mother’s poor judgment in men.

  She grabbed clean clothes, fled to the bathroom, locked the door, stripped, and hurled herself into the shower. Hot water streamed over her as she rested her aching forehead against the glass enclosure. Her brief marriage was a mistake she thought she’d put behind her, but circumstances were suddenly making it impossible for her to keep it there.

  When she was scrubbed and freshly dressed in skinny jeans and a clean T-shirt, she pattered slowly downstairs to see if Matt had taken her not-so-subtle hint and gone back to his hotel.

  He hadn’t. He was reading the newspaper at her kitchen table, his large fingers scrunching its edges into fan-like wrinkles. She steeled herself for a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer as he pushed the pizza box across the table toward her.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Starved.”

  She eyed the box greedily, trying to remember when she’d last eaten, then took a slice of pizza and bit off a mouthful before pouring herself a cup of coffee with hands that still shook a little. Matt knew her bedroom had been trashed, that she wore multi-colored Brazilian boy-brief underwear, and there was the possibility he knew about Claude, too. She and the architect were certainly becoming well acquainted.

  Matt folded the newspaper and set it aside carefully. “Did you know that my hotel room costs three hundred dollars a night?”

  The ice maker on the refrigerator gurgled, and Eve frowned, confused, her train of thought interrupted. Whatever she’d expected him to say, that wasn’t it.

  “If you’re worried about money, a room with your uncle would be free,” she pointed out cautiously, scarcely able to believe her good luck. If he wasn’t going to mention the mess he’d cleaned up in her bedroom, then neither was she.

  “I’m not worried about the money because I’m not paying for it. You are.” Matt drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “It’s coming out of the budget for City Hall.”

  “Bob is spending three hundred municipal dollars a night on a hotel room rather than put you up himself?” Eve was so outraged she forgot about everything else. “I don’t care if he is your uncle. The man’s a moron.”

  “I’m still not convinced moron is the right word,” Matt mused. “Besides, a hotel room is always in my contract. I like my privacy. I need the space to work in and to be able to keep in touch with my own offices.”

  She played with the crust of the partially eaten slice of pizza in front of her. “Bob’s house is huge. You could have all the privacy you wanted.”

  Matt raised an eyebrow. “Would you want to stay with him if you had any alternative?”

  “Good point,” she conceded, and reached for her cup.

  “If you want to save budget money, maybe you’d consider renting me a room instead,” he suggested.

  And Eve, already on edge, upset her coffee all over the newspaper.

  Chapter Six

  Matt grabbed a handful of paper towels off the roller beside the sink and mopped up the puddle of coffee.

  Eve’s baffled brain tried to process his suggestion. Rent a room to Matt Brison? Bob Anderson’s nephew?

  She could think of a dozen reasons why she wasn’t going to do it. She’d grown up with three older brothers and a father, and she’d spent two immeasurably long weeks living with an unstable husband. She worked with men every day. Under no circumstances did she want them infiltrating her private space. Her home was where she got away from it all.

  But then she remembered her home was no longer a haven, and that ticked her off, which was good. She’d rather be angry than scared.

  “Renting me a room makes a lot of sense,” Matt was saying. He began to list off his own reasons. “You have a home office already set up. You use the same computer-aided drafting program I do. We’ll be working closely together anyway. And,” he added after a brief, meaningful pause, “it might not hurt for you to have a roommate around here for a while.”

  If that was an opening for her to talk about the neatly folded underwear in her bedroom, Eve wasn’t taking it.

  “My house isn’t very big,” she said.

  “I won’t take up much room. I’ll stay out of your way,” Matt promised. “Besides, I’ll be traveling back and forth to Toronto. You’ll never even know I’m around.”

  Eve felt the first flutters of panic. “I don’t cook.”

  “Believe me, I’ve already noticed.” He lifted the pizza box and wiped up the coffee that had seeped under it. “I don’t mind doing the cooking. I’m quite good at it when I have something to work with.”

  He tossed the soggy paper towels into the proper recycling bin under the counter, earning himself a few roommate points for environmental responsibility.

  She already knew what her mother would think if she let him move in, and that shifted the score into a negative range. She shuddered inside. And after Bob had found them trampling his bushes, she had a good idea what he’d think, too.

  And then there was Claude.

  That scored Matt the winning goal. Maybe he was right. Maybe it would be a good idea for her to have a roommate for a while.

  Eve tried to ignore the knot of nervous tension building at the nape of her neck. His reasons for moving in made more sense than hers for keeping him out. It would be a temporary situation. She’d save budget
money. She’d have someone around in case Claude came back. She might even get a decent meal or two out of it, without having to use speed dial.

  And she might be able to convince Matt not to design some awful steel monstrosity that would get Sullivan Construction in trouble with the zealous public action groups determined to preserve the historic integrity of the city.

  Relief evaporated her tension. Those were all good reasons for letting him stay. They’d be roommates. It was no big deal.

  She had a mental flash of how he might look coming out of her shower, dressed in nothing but a towel.

  “Okay,” she said. “But we need to set some house rules.”

  …

  House rules, Eve discovered, could only cover so much.

  Even after a few days of trying to get used to Matt, she still wasn’t comfortable sharing her space. She used any excuse she could find to spend even less time at home than she had before he moved in.

  The other volunteers at the youth center’s Internet café had trickled out around suppertime, but Eve had wanted to finish this one last coat of paint so she could start cutting trim for the large, street-front windows.

  Fumes from the thinner stung her nose as she stirred a can of ecru paint beneath the bright glare of a bare, 100-watt bulb in the soon-to-be main meeting area. She poured the paint into a tray and dipped her roller, ignoring the prickling sensations between her shoulder blades. She’d done this dozens of times in the past, but it was getting late, and it wasn’t the greatest neighborhood for catching a cab. She’d gotten a ride here with one of the other volunteers and hadn’t planned on staying after everyone else left, but she didn’t want to go home too early, either.

  She ran the roller as far up the wall as she could reach, tiny paint drops splattering her coveralls. She couldn’t deny it felt good having someone else in the house with her at night. She wasn’t always listening for every little noise, and so far Matt was an exemplary roommate. He was tidy, unobtrusive, and fed himself.

  That meant the problem had to be her. She felt awkward around him, not so much uneasy as a bit too aware of his presence. She wasn’t sure why. He’d done nothing wrong.

  Maybe that was it. He was a little too perfect, and she was waiting for the illusion to crack.

  Shortly before midnight, she finally called it a night and packed in her roller. The building groaned as she tapped the lid back on the can of paint.

  She could no longer ignore the creaking sounds the old building made or the sensation of being inside a giant goldfish bowl. Blinds on those large, open windows would be a nice touch. She made a mental note to approach Bob for a personal donation. If he could toss away three hundred municipal dollars a night on a hotel room for his nephew, then he could find some spare change of his own for window treatments for a youth project that he’d initiated.

  The building groaned again, and Eve stiffened, along with the fine hairs on the backs of her arms. The large windows reflected the café’s interior, but through the reflection a slight movement caught her eye. Someone was lurking in the shadows across the street, watching her.

  Chunks of construction debris crunched beneath her boot heels as she dashed to flip off the lights, plunging the room into a thin darkness illuminated only by the faint glow from the streetlights outside. She was going to talk to Bob about the lack of decent lighting in this ratty neighborhood when she approached him about the blinds. No wonder it had such a lousy reputation.

  She ducked behind a large stack of unused Gyprock sheets, telling herself not to panic. Maybe she’d imagined the movement, although her instincts screamed that she hadn’t.

  With construction dust tickling her nose, she felt around until she found the nail gun she’d left on the floor. There was no way she was going to wait for a cab now. The driver would be in no hurry to come to this neighborhood at this time of night.

  Eve grew angry then, but mostly at herself. She wasn’t big, she wasn’t all that strong, but she wasn’t defenseless, either. She wasn’t going to cower in the darkness and wait for something to happen.

  She clutched the nail gun to her chest and glanced at the luminous dial on her watch. Then she found her briefcase and Blackberry, hesitated for a moment, and reluctantly punched in some numbers.

  …

  Matt propped his feet on the coffee table and prepared to take a bite of his salami sandwich, checking his watch for what must have been the fiftieth time and wondering where Eve might be so late at night.

  Sharing a house with her wasn’t turning out quite the way he’d anticipated. He’d given her three days to get used to him, and still, Eve didn’t observe any of the common courtesies normally extended when two people cohabited. She didn’t tell him where she was going. She didn’t call when she was going to be late. And he found her habit of drying her delicates on the curtain rod in the shower to be more than a little disconcerting. He couldn’t get fantasies involving lacy panties out of his head.

  What bothered him the most, however, was that she’d never mentioned the break-in, the trashed bedroom, or the crumpled-up divorce decree.

  And the wary way she watched him made him very careful of the way he treated her. Whatever had gone wrong in her marriage, Eve had been burned, and despite Matt’s best efforts, she didn’t want to trust him.

  He balanced the sandwich and plate on his stomach and chewed thoughtfully.

  She didn’t have to trust him, but it was about time he insisted she show him a little consideration. They didn’t need to advertise he was living with her, but he should have worked it into the house rules that he had no intention of being treated like a dirty secret.

  His uncle’s reaction to him moving out of the hotel hadn’t been much more encouraging than Eve’s. When Matt had explained to him it was a matter of convenience, that Eve had all the equipment he needed in her home office, Uncle Bob had been indifferent.

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Mattie,” he’d said. “Never in a million years would I think there’d be any other reason for you to be rooming with Eve.”

  Matt had no idea what that comment was supposed to mean.

  He’d given up trying to work. He had the design well in hand, although he wasn’t about to let frugal little Eve get a look at it yet. He didn’t want her complaining about the budget before his uncle had the funding in place. Besides, Matt had some ideas of his own as to where to cut costs. She was in for a surprise. And he was prepared to be entertained by that, because it was no big secret that Eve liked to win.

  He polished off the sandwich and headed into the kitchen to get a glass of water. The phone rang as he walked by, and he grabbed it, breaking the third house rule on Eve’s one-sided list. The small act of rebellion gave him a sense of satisfaction. “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry. I must have the wrong number,” a woman said.

  Matt wondered if he should identify himself, then decided against it. Let Eve do her own explaining.

  “If you’re looking for Eve, then this is the right number. But she’s not home right now.”

  “Oh.” A long silence. Then, “This is her mother. Could you tell Eve her father and I are coming up to the city for a few days at the end of the month? We thought we’d stay with her, but if there isn’t a spare room…”

  In a two-bedroom house there wasn’t likely to be, but he could always move back into a hotel for a few days. He could even fly back to Toronto to do some business in his office, something he’d been putting off because he hadn’t wanted Eve to be alone in the house. This might provide the perfect opportunity.

  “There’s plenty of room,” he said. “She’d love to have you stay here.” He figured the odds on that being true were fifty-fifty. Okay, maybe not that high.

  “We’ll look forward to meeting you, then,” her mother said.

  That sounded ominous. Maybe Eve’s rule about not answering the phone was a good one after all.

  He shrugged it off, but the next time the phone rang, he w
aited for the answering machine to pick it up.

  “Matt? Are you there?” Eve’s voice was muffled, like she was in a closet or maybe whispering.

  Matt’s heart bounced like a basketball off his rib cage. Something was wrong or she wouldn’t be calling for him. He snatched up the receiver.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “You sound funny.”

  “At a job site, working on some renovations. I was going to walk home, but hadn’t planned to be here so late. My car keys are on a hook by the front door. I don’t suppose you could come and get me?”

  That threw him. Had she been working late at construction sites for the entire past week?

  He scraped his fingers through his hair. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I can always call a cab, but I’d rather not if you can come instead. Cabbies don’t really like to come down here at this time of night, and sometimes you have to wait a long time to find one who will.”

  As she reeled off the address for him, Matt wrestled with an overwhelming urge to shout at her. He might not know the city well, but he read the papers, and he knew the parts to steer clear of. The fact it was hard to get a cab there at night should have told her a few things. One of them was that she shouldn’t be walking around that area in daylight, either.

  He could yell at her later. The important thing now was to get her home. And when he did, her house rules were going to undergo some serious modifications.

  He didn’t know how long it would take him to get to her, but he made a quick estimate, wanting to give her some sort of reassurance and a timeframe. She sounded afraid—and that terrified him.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  …

  He made it in less than ten.

  He parked the car in front of a fire hydrant, ran to the building entrance, grabbed the heavy steel door, and jerked it open. Why wasn’t the door locked? And what had happened to all the lights?