by Gina Wilkins
Her cheeks warming, Catherine picked up a tray loaded with strawberry tarts. “He’s a friend, and he deserves to be treated with the same respect as my other friends,” she said curtly.
“You’re absolutely right, Catherine.” Karen handed Julia a tray of coffee cups while she picked up a steaming carafe. “He’s a guest in my home, and I want him to be completely at ease here.”
Going on the defensive, Julia followed them to the doorway. “I’ve hardly attacked him. Just asked a few questions to draw him into the conversation.”
Catherine gave her a look that made it clear she didn’t quite buy that innocent disclaimer.
Sitting in the passenger’s seat of Catherine’s car, Mike felt as though he had escaped a painfully awkward situation to blessed freedom. No one was looking at him curiously now, no one was asking him questions, no one was around to wonder what a guy like him was doing with Catherine.
Catherine had been driving with a somber expression that made him wonder what she was thinking. He didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Mike,” she said, finally breaking the silence.
“Mmm?”
“I hope you weren’t offended by the things Julia said tonight. She has become a good friend of mine, and I’m very fond of her, but I’m aware that she can be…difficult. She’s very protective of her friends, and I think she has it in her head that you’re just, I don’t know, using me somehow.”
“Because you make a decent salary and I’m doing maintenance work to pay rent and tuition? Does she think I’m some sort of freeloader?”
“Julia knows that no true gigolo is going to hit on a research scientist,” Catherine said dryly. “We aren’t exactly known for making tons of money. As an attorney, she’s run into more men looking for a meal ticket than I have.”
“Well, you can assure her that I’m not looking for anyone to support me,” Mike said grumpily. “I’ve been paying my own way for almost ten years, and I plan to keep it that way. I might not have anything left over at the end of the month, but I don’t take any handouts, either.”
“Actually, I’m not going to tell Julia anything of the kind. It’s none of her business—and as I said, she doesn’t really think you’re after my money, such as it is.”
“So what is she worried about?”
“Julia has seen too many vulnerable women hurt by men who found it amusing to toy with them for a while and then move on. She’s had a couple of unhappy relationships, herself, and I’m afraid they’ve left her suspicious and a little bitter.”
“And this is the woman you’ve thought of fixing up with Bob?” he asked in disbelief.
Catherine looked away from the road ahead long enough to give Mike a puzzled frown. “What are you talking about? I never said I wanted to fix her up with Bob.”
“He said you have a lawyer friend you want him to meet. Were you talking about another lawyer friend?”
“No. No,” she repeated more firmly. “Bob’s either confused or he’s deliberately misrepresenting the conversation I had with him. He asked if I had any single friends, and I said I had only one close single friend, an attorney, but that I didn’t think they would hit it off.”
Because Bob had a notorious habit of hearing only what he wanted to hear, Mike decided Catherine’s version was the more likely one.
“Good call,” he muttered. “I can’t think of a more mismatched couple than Bob and Julia.”
“Neither can I.”
He wondered if Catherine was asking herself just then if they were as wrong for each other as Bob and Julia would have been. He doubted he was the only one with that question nagging at the back of his mind.
He was becoming discouraged with this whole situation. As strongly as he was drawn to Catherine, there just seemed to be too many counts against them. This was the third time they’d been out, and each time there had been some obvious indications that their lives didn’t exactly mesh. She had hated the haunted house he thought would be so much fun. His sisters thought she was too reserved and intellectual for him. Her friends seemed to think she was either having an impulsive fling with the maintenance guy or being the victim of a manipulative, opportunistic gigolo.
They didn’t say much as she parked the car and they climbed out on their opposite sides. Catherine glanced up toward her apartment and he followed her example, spotting movement in the darkened living room window.
“Looks like Norman’s waiting up for you.”
She nodded. “He’s acted kind of restless lately. Maybe the shorter days are unnerving him.”
“A cat with seasonal affective disorder? Maybe he needs some serotonin-laced kibble?”
She laughed, and the sound pleased him, as it always did when he succeeded in drawing a laugh from her. “Maybe. I’ll see if I can find a kitty shrink in the yellow pages.”
Glancing up at the window again, he frowned. “Looks like your blind is hanging crooked. I hope Norman hasn’t broken it again.”
“He’s probably just been bumping against it. I tied the cords up so he couldn’t accidentally hurt himself with them.”
“I’d better come up and check it out.”
Catherine looked at him, and he sighed. “I’m not looking for an excuse to get into your apartment,” he told her a bit testily. “If you’d rather check the blinds yourself, then call the office if there’s a problem, that’s fine.”
“Don’t be silly. I would appreciate you checking the blinds for me. I just didn’t want you to feel obligated when you aren’t on duty.”
A little sheepishly he muttered an apology for his grumpiness and followed her up the steps.
Meowing loudly, Norman twined around their ankles when they walked in.
“He is kind of wound up, isn’t he?” Mike knelt to stroke Norman’s silky fur, scratching behind the ears and beneath the chin to elicit rumbling purrs of pleasure.
“You’d think he never had any attention,” Catherine said with an exasperated shake of her head.
Straightening, Mike looked at the window blinds. The slats were a little crooked, probably because the cat had been pushing against them either out of boredom or to better see around them, but nothing was broken. He straightened the slats, retied the cords and turned back to Catherine. “Have you been having any other maintenance problems?”
“No. Everything is working satisfactorily.”
“Good to hear.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. He really hadn’t used the blinds as an excuse to get in. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure what to do next.
“Can I get you anything?” Catherine asked, sounding almost as awkward as he felt. “Coffee? Herbal tea?”
“No, thanks. Your friend is a really good cook. She pretty well filled me up.”
Catherine looked pleased. “Karen is a wonderful cook. She loves to experiment with unusual recipes. I wasn’t sure you’d like the food.”
“It was different, but everything was actually pretty good. Well…except for that sort of bluish stuff. No offense, but that was pretty nasty.”
Catherine laughed again, her eyes crinkling ruefully at the corners. “I’ve got to agree with you on that one. What was that?”
“I was afraid to ask. But I noticed that no one ate much of it. Chris scraped his onto Bonnie’s plate when no one else was looking.”
“You’re kidding. I didn’t see that.”
“Neither did Bonnie. She gave him a dirty look when she finally noticed. She hid it under a lettuce leaf.”
“Karen knows not everything turns out as well as she hopes. She has a good sense of humor about it.”
“She seemed nice. Her husband, too. Actually, everyone was decent—except maybe for Julia—even though I didn’t have much in common with a group of professors and orthodontists and pharmacists.”
“You’re selling yourself short again. You just said they’re nice people. Why would it matter what they do for a living?”
He hesitated, then sighed. �
��I guess I’m still smarting over my reunion. There was this girl—er, woman—from my class…”
“Did she say something derogatory to you?” Catherine asked quietly.
He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to tell this story, but maybe it would help Catherine understand a little better why he’d been so sensitive about his career. Why he had been braced for condescension from her professional friends. “She and I had been flirting all day. Drinking a little too much. I had a thing for her in high school, but we’d never hooked up then. The reunion was an all-day thing, and we hung out for a couple of hours. Had a couple of dances that evening and things were looking promising—and then everyone started talking about their jobs. I really thought Marcia knew by then what I did, but I guess it had never come up.
“Someone said something about being a doctor, and Marcia said she was in pharmaceutical sales. That’s when she turned to me and asked what I did. She said she knew I had gone to college to play baseball and she wondered if I’d turned pro.”
“She thought you were still a ballplayer? Wouldn’t that have been mentioned by that point?”
“Like I said, we hadn’t been talking about careers. Up until then, it had all been remember-when stories and gossip about the ones who hadn’t made it to the reunion. I guess she thought I looked the part of a ballplayer. It was a real casual affair and I’d worn a St. Louis Cardinals jersey-type shirt with jeans and athletic shoes. She figured I’d finished college, at the least, and had gone on to some white-collar career. When she found out I dropped out after one semester and had been working construction and maintenance jobs ever since—well, let’s just say the flirting ended fast. She treated me like I had some sort of communicable disease for the rest of the evening.”
“That was very shallow of her.”
“She was always a little shallow. I just thought she’d outgrown it. I was wrong. I even saw her giggling with her old cheerleader friends later, and I figured she was telling them what a loser I’d turned out to be.”
“Mike, you are not—”
He held up a hand to silence her automatic protest. “It wasn’t so much the way Marcia acted that made me think about how I was wasting the best years of my life. It was looking at all the other guys who were doing the same thing. The ones who spend their time drinking and partying, drifting from one dead-end job to another just biding time till the weekend, not caring about the future. I mean, Bob and Brandon are great guys, you know? The best. But when I asked Bob if he’d started thinking about stuff like retirement or health plans or other things that might be headed our way, he just laughed and quoted that old saying about living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.”
“What did you say to that?”
Shrugging, Mike tried to smile. “I asked him where he was going to find a good-looking corpse to leave. It wouldn’t do any good to try to have a serious conversation about stuff like that with him. He just turns everything into a joke.”
“But you have fun with him.”
“Oh, always. Bob’s really a great guy. Wouldn’t hurt a flea. Doesn’t judge anyone, treats everybody the same. He just happens to be happy living in the present and letting the future take care of itself.”
“We both have nice friends. They’re just different, in some ways.”
In a lot of ways, he thought. But their friends were no more different than he and Catherine, themselves.
He reached out to touch her hair, letting the silky brown strands ripple through his fingers. “It’s so much easier when it’s just the two of us, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly. “I suppose it is. We’ve never had any trouble talking when it’s just us.”
“That should mean something, shouldn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t it matter more that you and I get along than anything our friends have to say?”
“Not just friends,” she reminded him, sounding wistful. “You can’t just ignore your family.”
“My sisters,” he said dismissively. “They would come around. My parents would probably love you.”
Even the mention of his parents made her go a little pale. Apparently, it had been too soon to even suggest that she meet them. Catherine was definitely the take-things-slowly type, while he was more of the jump-in-feet-first persuasion. No surprise there, of course.
“Maybe we should just leave everyone else out of this for a while,” he suggested quickly to reassure her. “Maybe we could spend more time together, just the two of us, before we try mingling with our friends again. And Norman, of course,” he added when the cat meowed as if in protest.
She rested a hand on his chest, somberly studying the way her fingers looked against his brown sweater. “We can’t just ignore the rest of the world. We both have lives outside this apartment.”
“Do we?” He slipped his other arm around her, drawing her closer. “When we’re here, like this, I can’t seem to think of anyone or anything but you. All those other people, those irritating complications—they just don’t matter when I’m holding you like this.”
He felt a slight tremor run through her hand. “That isn’t a very sensible way of looking at things.”
“I’m not feeling very sensible right now,” he murmured, looking down at the top of her bent head.
She raised her face then, her darkened eyes meeting his. “What are you feeling right now?”
The answer popped into his head without the need for thought. “Hungry,” he muttered. And he captured her mouth with his own.
Her hesitation lasted only a moment—but still long enough to almost stop his heart. It started again with a hard thump when she raised her arms around his neck and melted willingly into his embrace.
Chapter Eleven
All her life, Catherine had been practical, sensible, responsible. She rarely acted on impulse, never flirted with danger, never, ever allowed her emotions to overrule her common sense.
So, it was entirely out of character for her to take Mike by the hand and lead him into her bedroom, closing the door very firmly in her curious cat’s face. She’d half expected Norman to throw a yowling fit, since he hated nothing more than a closed door in “his” apartment, but for once her pet was discreetly cooperative.
Mike hadn’t said anything, but his gaze was focused intently on her face when she turned to him. The room was in shadows, since she hadn’t turned on the overhead light.
Her furniture almost filled the smallish bedroom—solid, mission-style pieces in light-stained wood, accented with hand-pieced quilts and primitive art. An iron lamp with a three-way bulb sat on the nightstand, turned on the lowest setting to provide a soft glow. Just enough to let her see that Mike’s expression was torn between desire and concern.
“Are you sure about this?”
She slipped her hands beneath the hem of his sweater, letting her palms glide across the warm, smooth skin beneath. She felt his muscles tighten spasmodically in response to her touch, even as her own went liquid. “You aren’t the only one who’s hungry.”
Mike groaned. “I’ve never been strong on either nobility or self-discipline. So if you aren’t…”
She lifted her mouth to his, smothering his reservations in a kiss that let him know she was fully aware of what she was doing. She had made her choice, as uncharacteristic as it was. She wouldn’t be changing her mind tonight.
His sweater fell to the floor, and Catherine caught her breath in response to what she had revealed. The sports and exercise that Mike enjoyed so much paid off in a firm, broad chest and a flat, taut stomach. The only flaw was a jagged, slightly raised four-inch scar that ran along the top of his rib cage. Yet, rather than detract from his appeal, the scar only added a new level of interest.
“Long story,” he murmured, when she touched the scar curiously. “It involves a mountain bike, a patch of mud and a possum.”
“I’d love to hear it,” she said, and raised her mouth to his again. “Later.”
His hands weren’t quite steady when he
helped her out of her jacket. She felt the tremors again when he fumbled at the fastening of her skirt. She liked that. She didn’t want to think this was just another Saturday night for him.
It had been a long time since she’d been naked in front of anyone other than her doctor—and even then she was semimodestly covered with a paper gown. She stayed fairly slim, more from genetics than diet, but she didn’t work out as religiously as Mike did. And while thirty certainly wasn’t old, she didn’t have the body of a teenager anymore, either.
She felt her face flame as Mike unfastened the first button of her shirt. “I’m a little nervous, I think,” she confessed.
“You’re nervous?” He gave her a crooked grin that made her heart clench. “I’ve never done anything like this with a professor before. I’m a little worried that I won’t make the grade.”
She smiled faintly, letting the blouse slide from her shoulders to leave her standing in nothing but a nude-colored bra and matching panties. “I doubt very much that you have anything to worry about on that count.”
He pressed a kiss at the corner of her mouth, his hands making a leisurely cruise from her shoulders down her back to her hips. “Let’s not either of us worry about anything tonight,” he murmured against her lips. “Let’s just enjoy.”
Because that sounded like an excellent plan to her, she pushed any remaining reservations to the back of her mind and wrapped her arms around his neck. The move brought their bare bellies together, and the contact made her knees go weak. He still wore his slacks, and the fabric was crisp against her legs, making her impatient to get rid of them.
Whether because of her admission of nerves or because he was simply taking his own advice to savor this experience, Mike took his time. His hands rested very lightly on her hips as he concentrated on kissing her. Their mouths fused, probed, then separated only long enough to allow them to explore a new angle.
He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to move on, but Catherine was rapidly losing patience. Maybe that was his intention—letting her gain enough confidence to assert herself. If that had been his plan, it was definitely working.