“Mmmm. And why do I get the uncomfortable feeling you’re enjoying it?”
“It’s curious. Sort of exciting.”
“It could be dangerous.”
She’d had the same thought. She liked to think of herself as a fairly bold person, but she wasn’t foolhardy. After weighing the dangers, she made a decision. “That’s why I’m sleeping with you tonight. You don’t mind, do you?”
He almost dropped his sandwich in his lap. “Sleeping with me?” Oh, wonderful response, Dave. Lord, he was such a cluck!
“I didn’t mean with you. I meant here. In your guest room. On your couch.”
“Sure. I knew that was what you meant.”
Kate grinned at him.
He grinned back. “You sort of caught me by surprise.”
“We could let Elsie think we were sleeping together, then she wouldn’t be insulted.”
Her suggestion fueled the fantasy he’d started months before, and he thought about the zipper running the length of her dress and how easy it would be to slide that zipper down. Oddly enough, tonight it evoked old-fashioned family images. A husband lovingly helping his wife to dress while children waited to go on an outing. Or a husband breathlessly easing the dress from his wife’s shoulders, letting it fall of its own weight, rustling as it dropped to the floor in a crumpled pool of black and white material. The fantasy was so powerful it almost made him dizzy. He could hear the zipper move along its tracks, see the look of expectation on her face. Feel his heart pounding in his chest.
The latter was no figment of his imagination. The prospect of Kate sleeping under his roof had his pulse racing. He knew it was nonsense. Kid stuff to have these romantic notions. She wasn’t going to come creeping into his bed in the middle of the night. It was too soon, and they both knew it. Nevertheless, the need was there, humming below the surface, an itch that wouldn’t go away.
Her hair was tousled, but the dress still looked starched and prim. She was covered from neck to toes, and Dave couldn’t for the life of him understand why that seemed so seductive. Under the white organdy there was the barest outline of her bra: an imprint of beige lace against soft ivory breast. He was sure the memory of that vision would have him thrashing sleeplessly in his bed all night.
He raised his eyes to hers, and knew he’d broadcast his thoughts as surely as if he’d spoken them out loud. There’d been plenty of times in his life when he’d had to hide his emotions, and there were those times when he’d fabricated emotions he didn’t feel. This wasn’t one of them. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have controlled or disguised the feelings he had for Kate. He flashed her a smile that was 10 percent embarrassment and 90 percent warning.
“Good idea. We wouldn’t want Elsie to get insulted,” he said.
Kate swallowed, but the sandwich felt stuck in her throat. She wasn’t sure of his exact thoughts, but his eyes were smoldering. He took her breath away. And the smile was alarmingly obvious. “Now that I think about it further, I might be safer in my own house…”
Dave tipped back in his chair, good-natured amusement replacing deeper emotions. “You could be right, but it’ll be more fun if you stay here. We can make popcorn and stay up all night telling ghost stories.”
Chapter 4
A Street houses seemed impossibly narrow from a pedestrian’s point of view, but thanks to ten-foot ceilings and the limited number of rooms, the interiors were surprisingly spacious. Dave had chosen the front room with the half-turret alcove for his upstairs bedroom, and converted the remaining second floor room into a sitting room.
It was a comfortably masculine room, Kate thought, slouching into the luxurious oxblood-leather couch. She had changed into a pair of borrowed sweats and thick wool socks and, following Dave’s lead, had propped her feet on the coffee table.
They sat side by side with the popcorn bowl between them, their eyes glued to the TV, their minds finely tuned to each other’s breathing patterns. It was a new feeling for Kate. She’d known other men and shared varying degrees of intimacy with them. And none had been so intimate as Anatole. But she’d never experienced this type of pull.
It didn’t occur to her to label it love at first sight. In her mind love at first sight was something that happened to Cinderella and Fred Astaire. Love at first sight was when two strangers locked eyes across a crowded ballroom, and the whole rest of the world faded away. Singing and dancing were necessary elements to love at first sight. The feeling she had for Dave was more like locking wire carts at the supermarket. Some humor, some annoyance, and an inability to separate the damn things.
The truth was, she didn’t want to unlock her cart from Dave’s just yet. She felt drawn to him. But more important, under the restless energy of sexual attraction was security, comfort, and satisfaction. How she could derive those stable emotions from an unemployed bum, she couldn’t begin to guess.
From the corner of her eye she watched the rise and fall of his chest, studied the set of his mouth, and happily concluded he was going through similar agonies. He wanted to touch her, just as she wanted to touch him. She was almost sure of it. And she didn’t mind acting on assumptions, since he looked as if he was not going to make a move. “Dave?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you going to kiss me, or what?”
He grinned at her. “I didn’t want to be pushy. I was afraid you might go home.”
“Not a chance. You’re stuck with me. I’m no Chicken Little, but I’m not unnecessarily brave either. I have a very strong sense of survival.”
“And you’ve decided I’m less dangerous than Pistol-Packin’ Elsie?”
“Something like that.”
Their eyes held and measured. “I’m not sure my male ego can handle that.” But he was secretly flattered.
Kate laughed. “Your male ego seems pretty healthy to me.” She sank farther into the couch. “Anyway, it’s not just Elsie that has me spooked. It’s the house. It’s always felt empty, even when it was filled with furniture. When Anatole and I lived there, our furniture was all very sterile and very modern—just like our marriage. Anatole liked it that way, but I never felt comfortable. Now that I’m alone the house still feels”—she searched for a word—“stern. There’s no whimsy to it. It doesn’t feel friendly. Maybe that’s why I’ve never gotten around to furnishing it. It’s a terrific house, but not for me. Now that it has a hole in the roof, it feels downright creepy.”
She looked at Dave’s sitting room walls, which were lined with old photographs and bookshelves filled to brimming, and she smiled with lazy contentment.
“Your house feels good. Warm and cluttered with life.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Your house feels safe because you’ve made it a home, a haven. My house is just a tall, narrow building that attracts disaster.”
She sat straight up with the force of a sudden decision. “I’m going to sell the dumb thing. I don’t need all that room. And I can’t afford the mortgage payments without Anatole. And I’m definitely not the landlord type.”
Dave took the popcorn bowl and set it on the table. “Where will you live if you sell your house?”
“I’ll find another house. One that’s more suited to me.”
He slid his arm across her shoulders and pulled her close. There was strength to her, he thought. Even as a little girl, as a young musician, she’d known focus, discipline, and passion. It had made her resilient and proud and vital. But there’d been a price. She’d never iced a cake, probably never thrown a football, never papered a bathroom. She lived all alone in an empty house that might be more representative of her life than she realized. He rested his cheek against her silky curls and felt emotions warring inside him. Lots of desire. And an equal amount of protective tenderness. Wonderful, Dave, do you want to protect her from yourself? He smiled behind her back, feeling foolishly euphoric.
She snuggled into him, her breasts firmly pressed against the wall of his chest, and her hand splayed at the base of
his ribs. He couldn’t remember a woman ever seeming so right in his arms. He’d been wanting to hold her since he’d first seen her in the awful black coat. He’d always imagined there’d be fireworks. The brittle, bright light of a sparkler. A flash of fire. But he’d been wrong. When he held Kate it was slow heat. Relentless, inexorable heat. The sort of heat that turned a man molten… and when he cooled down he would never be in exactly the same shape as before.
He nuzzled the curls at her temple and kissed her just above her ear. When she turned her face to him he felt the air burning in his lungs. Her lips were parted in expectation, her eyes were trusting, and a pink flush had spread across her cheeks. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he knew it would sound ridiculous. How could he be so desperately in love with someone after only twenty-four hours?
He kissed her with insatiable, almost painful hunger. Lord, if he felt like this now, where would he be in ten minutes? He’d be done, he thought ruefully. He’d set a new land-speed record for making love.
He pushed himself away from her and held her at arm’s length. “Time-out.”
“Is it hot in here? Maybe we should open a window.”
He looked at her face and saw she was just as rattled as he was. “You think this is infatuation?”
She rose and walked to the window. “I think this is hell!” She threw the window open and stuck her head out for air. “I have to tell you, Anatole never made me feel like this. Anatole was… holy cow, look at this.”
Dave joined her at the window. Outside, a bright beam from a flashlight moved through a neighboring yard, sweeping its length and breadth. Then the light was extinguished, a dark figure scaled what was left of the privacy fence, and the light jiggled across the next yard. Dave pulled Kate away from the window and drew the curtains. They looked at each other with raised eyebrows, exchanging sobering thoughts. “Elsie should have shot higher,” Dave said finally.
“We should call the police.”
“That guy’ll be long gone by the time the police get here.” He gave her a fast kiss and wheeled away. “Stay here! I’ll be right back.”
“Dave!” He was gone, down the stairs, out the front door. “Damn.” Kate flew down the stairs after him. Stay here! Was he kidding?
She was halfway down the street before she realized she wasn’t wearing shoes. She looked at her sock feet, whispered an oath, and stopped dead. She saw Dave round the corner. He was going to meet the guy with the flashlight head-on when he got to the last yard on the block. And he might need help. She wasn’t sure what sort of help she could provide, but she took off at a run, mindless of the cold pavement under her feet.
She turned the corner and saw Dave waiting in the shadow of Frank Schneider’s ivy-covered seven-foot fence. The Schneider house was dark and obviously empty. There was the subdued sound of someone quietly scaling the fence from the other side of the yard and lithely dropping to the ground. Through the slats in the wooden fence, Kate saw the flashlight switched on again.
She heard footsteps pattering down the narrow gravel alley separating the abutting backs of yards and someone rattling the locked back door to Frank Schneider’s fence. When the door wouldn’t open, a four-letter word carried across the fence to her. It was Elsie.
Dave and Kate reached Elsie just in time to see the barrel of the .45 glint malevolently as she blasted the lock off the door and kicked it in John Wayne style. A man burst through, knocking Elsie into Kate and Dave. Another shot rang out, a car pulled up to the curb, the man with the flashlight jumped into the car and sped away.
Dave held on to the fence for support and stared down at his foot. The tip of his right shoe had been blown off. “I’ve been shot!”
“It was an accident,” Elsie said. “My trigger finger slipped when that creep knocked into me.” She looked at his shoe and snorted. “That don’t hardly count for nothing. It barely nicked you. Can you move your toe?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it can’t be too bad.” She shook her head. “They don’t make men like they used to.”
There was a low growl and the Schneiders’ pit bull appeared in the doorway of his doghouse.
Kate took a step backward. “Ohmigod, we woke up Daisy.”
Dave turned toward the growl. The ground seemed to shake with stampeding pit bull feet, he saw a flash of white teeth, and felt the jaws of death clamp on to the bottom of his jeans. Daisy? This foaming, homicidal hound from hell was named Daisy?
“Hold still!” Elsie ordered. “I’ll shoot the privates off the beast.”
Dave gritted his teeth. “Elsie, you better be talking about dog privates!”
Daisy planted her feet, gave a yank, and tore the lower half of Dave’s pant leg off. The dog viciously shook its prize, gave Dave one last cursory glance, and slunk back to its doghouse with the shredded denim.
Elsie glared at the departing dog. “Man, that is one dumb pit bull. Satisfied with a piece of your pants. Dang.”
Dave closed the door and propped a garbage can against it. “You sound disappointed, Elsie.”
She looked at the gun in her hand. “It’s all them missed opportunities.”
The thought of Kate on the couch flashed through his head. “Yeah, missed opportunities are always depressing.”
“Well, I gotta go home and get some sleep. I got burgers to fry in the morning,” Elsie said.
Dave looked at Kate’s feet and scooped her into his arms. “Next time you chase down desperadoes, remember to wear shoes.”
“I was in a hurry.”
Dave opened one eye and looked at his bedside clock. Five-thirty and someone was playing music. Someone was playing it loud.
“Damn.” It was the only word he was capable of forming. He freed himself from a tangle of sheets, lurched out of bed, and kicked at the clothes on the bedroom floor until he located a pair of jeans. It had to be Kate, but why was she creating this racket in the middle of the night?
He tugged the jeans over his hips and ran a hand through his hair, making it even more rumpled than it had been. Narrowing his eyes against the bright light in the hall, he thumped down the stairs and padded barefoot to the kitchen, where he found Kate seated on a straight-backed chair with her cello between her legs and a cassette player at her feet.
She glanced up and felt her heart flip. Anatole always looked perfect in the morning. His short blond hair was never out of place, his pajamas barely wrinkled, his chin clean-shaven from the night before. Dave looked like a wild animal. His hair was mussed and curling over his forehead in bangs, like a little boy’s. But that was where the little boy stopped. Everything else about him was man. His sleepy brown eyes seemed a little annoyed. His soft, full mouth slightly belligerent. His five o’clock shadow sent chills down her spine. His shoulders were broad, his stomach flat, his jeans sat low and mean on his hips, suggesting that was all there was—just jeans. She stared at him openmouthed, her bow poised in midair.
His voice was low and raspy and threatening. “Lord, Kate, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night and you’re peeling the paper off the walls with Bach.”
She had to swallow before she answered. Get a grip, she ordered herself. She’d seen half-naked men before, hadn’t she? But nothing like this, she thought. None that growled and meant it. “It’s not Bach.”
“Why aren’t you asleep?”
“I sleep in only on Sundays. Today is Monday, and on Monday I get up at five and practice until seven, then—”
“The hell you do.” He punched the OFF button on the tape player, snatched the bow, laid it on the kitchen table, and gently pulled the cello from her. Seemed to him there were better things to put between your legs at five-thirty in the morning, but he refrained from saying so, congratulating himself for his restraint. In one swift movement he had her on her feet, then slung her over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get some sleep.” He stomped up the stairs, extinguished the hall light
, and dumped her into his bed. Before she could scramble out he was next to her, a heavy leg thrown over hers, his arm wrapped around her chest. “ ’Night.”
“ ’Night? Are you crazy?”
“No. I’m cranky. I’ve won the lottery, and I don’t get up at five in the morning. Not for anyone. Not if I can help it anyway.”
“Are you planning on ravishing me?”
“I’m planning on pinning you down so you can’t make any more noise until I’m ready to get up.”
“Sounds boring. You sure you’re not going to ravish me?”
He looked at her from under lowered lids. “Do you want to be ravished?”
“Um, no.”
“Then stop wriggling under me.”
She looked at him coyly. “My wriggling bother you?”
His hand tightened on her arm. “Your breathing bothers me.”
Downstairs, the brass door knocker thunked, and Kate propped herself up on one elbow. “You expecting company for breakfast?”
His response was an oath, barely audible and impressively versatile. He rolled out of bed and went to the window. “Looks like a carpenter.”
“A carpenter! I need a carpenter. Don’t let him get away.”
Kate was down the stairs and at the door before Dave had even turned around. She unlatched the chain, popped the dead bolt, and threw the door open. “Yes?”
He was five-foot-eight with the neck of a linebacker and arms like Popeye. He had red hair, a red beard, and a tool belt hung low on his hips. “Howdy. I’m looking for the lady who owns the house next door. You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Mark Beaman. My sister’s married to Nancy Berk’s brother.”
Dave ambled over and held out his hand. “Nancy Berk is Howard’s wife.”
“Yeah. Howie called me up last night and said the lady here had a problem with her roof and needed it fixed right away. He asked me if I could help you out.”
Dave blinked at him. “It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
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