The cat twined around the man’s legs, finally putting his front paws up on the corded arm that was propped across the raised knees, the beer Evans was working on dangling loosely from his fingers. The man lowered his head and rubbed it against the tom’s. She knew enough about cats to know that was a special sign of favor, a form of greeting felines employed between themselves—but only if there was a certain level of trust between the cats involved.
Eventually, as she watched, the can Evans was holding was crushed by the fingers of his strong right hand and pitched, overhanded, with unerring skill, to clatter against the oak, falling to join the others scattered around its base. Wimsey, who had been taking a moment to wash an apparently bothersome ear, shied away at the unexpected sound.
Seemingly unaware of the cat’s frightened retreat, the man leaned his forehead against his knees, his hands locking, almost protectively, over the top of his head. His body seemed to curl inward into an upright fetal position. In the nighttime stillness, Becki could even hear the noise he was making, soft and yet strangely harsh. He was laughing, she realized. So bombed he was laughing—all by himself in the summer moonlight. At least he was that kind of drunk, she thought, smiling, and not the violent, pick-a-fight variety.
Apparently hearing the same strange noises, Wimsey approached the seated man again, this time more cautiously, once again wary. He pushed his broad, triangular face under Evans’s arm, nosing upward. The man loosened his hands, reaching out with one to gather the tom under the belly and bring him into the warmth of his chest. He bowed his head again, this time resting his face against the softness of the cat’s unresisting body.
It was, however, what Becki had clearly seen when the man had reached for the cat, his face lifted briefly into the revealing light of the summer’s moon, that created the sudden hard tightness in her throat. What she had glimpsed was the undeniable glint of moisture on John Evans’s cheeks.
She put her forehead against the coldness of the pane of glass, and for some reason felt her own eyes fill. Men didn’t cry in her world. Despite the talk of the sensitive nineties man, no one she knew would be comfortable watching a man cry. Especially a man like John Evans.
She couldn’t explain how she knew that those tears were unusual, an unaccustomed release for the man who sat under the sheltering oak, holding the warm body of a living, breathing fellow creature against his chest. Perhaps that gesture had touched her heart because she, too, had at times used Wimsey’s fur as a repository for her feelings. Cats respected secrets, and she had known he would never betray her emotional breakdowns. As he would not betray those of this man who, in the brief time she had known him, had seemed to be almost emotionless. Which she now knew he was not.
This was something she should not have seen. Some midnight violation of his privacy that she would not intentionally have made. There was nothing she could offer this man, crying alone in the darkness of the summer’s night, the sounds he had made too harsh, too full of pain, a strong, masculine pain that didn’t find the release of tears easy. There were no words of comfort he would want to hear. None he would accept. The best she could do would be to return to the bed she had left, leaving him to the primitive connection he had made with the scarred and wary tom.
She put her palm lightly against the glass, letting her fingers slide slowly down its pleasant smoothness. A gesture of farewell, perhaps. Apology. She didn’t know. She only knew that she would never tell anyone what she had seen tonight—too agonizingly private to expose. What other secrets John Evans guarded behind that grimly beautiful face she might never know, but this one, at least, was safe.
SHE WOKE AT THE USUAL time, five-thirty, although Sunday’s schedule would have allowed her to sleep much later. She no longer seemed able to sleep much past dawn. Maybe the press of responsibilities weighed too heavily on her. Her mother had often called her that—the responsible one.
She lay a moment, thinking about the previous night. Using her feet, she pushed the sheet off her legs, turning her face toward the screen window where the morning light was beginning to appear. She wondered suddenly if John Evans was still sitting beneath the oak that grew so near the property line separating the two houses. And for the first time she wondered if Josh had heard the cans hitting the tree, if he might possibly have risen to investigate those sounds as she had.
For some reason she didn’t want her son to be aware of the painful drama she had watched unfold in the moonlight. She raised up enough to see the empty length of the headboard. Wimsey had not returned to finish the night here. She was glad that the cat was not the coward she had been, glad that he had chosen to stay with the man who had wept, alone and pitilessly revealed by the cold moonlight.
She rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed, slipping her feet into the terry slippers on the floor beside it. Rubbing her eyes, she retraced the path she had taken the night before into the still darkened kitchen, her slides making a soft dragging sound over the wooden floors. She looked out the glass of the back door.
There was no one there. No broad-shouldered figure sat beneath the oak, and she was relieved. However, the beer cans were still clustered like unnatural acorns around the base of the other tree.
Despite the fact that she had not taken time to pull on her robe, she took out the clean garbage bag she had put into the kitchen can the night before, and carrying it with her, opened the door and moved in the dawn silence across her lawn to the tree on the property next door. Bending, she began to gather up the evidence of John Evans’s Saturday-night toot.
She had made some headway with the cans, a little surprised at their number, when a hand touched her arm, bare and exposed in the sheer sleeveless gown she wore. She jumped, her startled gasp audible. Turning, she found herself confronting her neighbor. Unshaven, blue irises surrounded by a revealing array of red lines, still wearing the same aged denims and white T-shirt, John Evans stood unsmiling before her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“I didn’t want Josh to see these,” she admitted, blurting out the truth in her haste to make some explanation of why she was picking up his beer cans from his lawn.
The bloodshot eyes moved quickly to the windows of her house and then, still silently questioning, back to hers.
“I think he’s made his fascination with you apparent,” she added.
He could figure out the rest. She was protecting her son from finding out the man he had picked to admire, out of all the more acceptable male role models that surrounded him, had feet of clay. Josh had heard enough anti-liquor diatribes from the pulpit and from his grandparents and great-grandparents that she knew this would disturb him, despite her own knowledge that it probably didn’t mean anything. She had seen no other evidence in the months Evans had lived next door that the previous night’s binge was customary.
His lips tightened slightly, and he glanced down at the cans still scattered at their feet.
“Did I wake the boy?” he asked.
His voice was deeper, husky with early morning hoarseness. Or rusted from lack of use, she thought.
“His name is Josh,” she said, a little challenging. He certainly knew that, although he usually avoided referring to him by name, tried to avoid addressing him at all. You could at least have put out your hand and touched him the day he helped you measure, the day he so eagerly invited you to dinner, she found herself thinking. You touched the cat. Why not my son who thinks you’re some kind of superhero? Why not respond in some way to a child who is trying so hard to reach you?
His lips tightened again at her reminder that he knew the boy’s name.
“Josh,” he said softly, his concession surprising.
“No, you didn’t wake him,” she admitted. For some reason there was a tiny emphasis on the last word. She hadn’t meant for it to be there, but it was, perhaps a residual anger from the rebuke she had intended. You didn’t wake “the boy,” but I watched what went on out here last night. I s
pied on what you would certainly never want anyone to see. She didn’t think the decision to let him know that had been conscious, but he was astute enough to read her tone and to know what she’d just revealed.
“I’m sorry for the noise,” he said after a pause, blue eyes still examining her face.
“It’s okay. It wasn’t really the cans that woke me,” she clarified. “It was Wimsey.”
“What?” he asked, confusion clear.
“Wimsey. My cat.”
“Wimsey?” he said again, and despite the unsmiling sternness of his mouth, there was a trace of amusement in the question.
“Lord Peter Wimsey,” she explained, an explanation she had made a score of times. Wimsey seemed such a strange name for the squat, powerful body and marred head of the tom.
“Because he’s blond?” he asked.
He was the first person who had recognized the name, obviously familiar with the fictional English detective for whom she had named the ginger cat. She glanced up at him in surprise and found his gaze direct and openly amused now—direct and open for the first time since she’d met him.
“And elegant,” she said softly. She was almost embarrassed to make that claim. But he was—the cat was powerful and elegant and able to take care of himself.
“An aristocrat,” he offered.
“Maybe not, but at least smart.”
He smiled at her, the movement beginning at the corner of his lips and edging slowly across. Something turned over in her belly, shifting hotly. She couldn’t quite decide if the sensation was pleasant, and while she stood, trying to figure that out, he spoke again.
“At least smart,” he agreed.
She returned his smile, unconscious of the upward tilt of her lips, and became aware for the first time that she was wearing nothing but her nightgown. Aware because she could feel her nipples tightening, brushing upward against the soft, cool fall of the aqua nylon, its thinness offering little concealment of the body beneath. Or of its reaction.
She faked a shiver, crossing her arms over her breasts, using her hands to rub along the uncovered length of her upper arms. Her right hand carried with it the swinging white garbage sack with its cargo of cans. Their soft clink was a distraction, and his gaze moved to follow the sound. She felt rather than saw his eyes trace quickly over the low neckline of her gown, before they shifted again to her face.
“I’ll get them,” he said, holding out his hand for the sack.
She hesitated a moment and then, realizing that it really was his business, she handed him the bag, exposing again the shape of her breasts, pushing too obviously against the gown. She could feel the heat of her blush climbing under the skin of her throat and into her cheeks.
“Thanks,” she said, suddenly breathless.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his gaze following the upward creep of blood until it stopped, her cheeks touched with color beneath the smooth olive skin. “I’d never hurt you.”
It was such a strange thing to say. She had not been afraid that he’d hurt her, despite the fact that they were alone in the faint light of dawn. Despite the fact that she knew he was still probably a little drunk. Even if he’d slept, as she had, after the incident she’d witnessed, he had drunk enough that he was certainly not yet stone-cold sober.
For some reason she didn’t react when the hard, callused palm touched her elbow and then trailed slowly up her arm. At least she didn’t react outwardly. Except to stop breathing, savoring the glide of its caress. He held her eyes with his, waiting for her to tell him no, maybe, but the word wasn’t in her head. It ought to be, she knew, her rational mind operating independently of her body. And it was her body, her physical reaction, that was in charge now. She was enjoying what he was doing. The feel of his hand. There was nothing unpleasant or frightening about it, no matter that there should be. She should not be allowing this.
“You’re cold,” he said softly. He halved the distance between them, still leaving space between their bodies, but he was close enough now that she could feel the heat of his. Pleasant. And his smell. Hot, like the sun he’d worked under all day yesterday finishing her deck. The masculine aroma of a clean body and honest work done in the out-of-doors. It was how the men of her childhood had smelled, like her grandfather had smelled when she was a little girl.
She didn’t move away from him, didn’t want to, didn’t believe that her body was capable any more of stepping back from the warmth he offered. Instead, ridiculously, she remembered how it felt to be held, to be enclosed in strong arms and sheltered against a broad chest. Those memories should have only reinforced the idea of stepping back, of moving away from this man about whom she knew nothing, but instead they drew her, reminding her that this was the way men and women were supposed to be. And were supposed to feel.
His hand had stopped on her shoulder, and then it lifted to cup her face, his thumb sliding along her lower lip, his spread fingers gentle against her throat and the curve of her cheek.
She expected him to say something. Some compliment. Some inane comment, but when his mouth moved it was not to speak. It began to lower toward hers, opening slightly, so that his lips eased over hers and his tongue slipped inside her mouth. No preliminaries. Nothing but the desire that had sprung suddenly between them. She wanted his mouth on hers, and as it lowered to satisfy that longing, she was aware of her lips parting in anticipation.
Insane, her brain warned, but the images of the week during which he’d worked in her backyard, quick glimpses she’d stolen through the protection of the den curtain, intruded. Muscles moving smoothly in the broad shoulders and strong back, their strength tapering to a narrow waist. His long arms reaching upward or the perfect curve of his hip as he bent for materials. The grace of motion unthinking. Unaware of the audience.
His lips were soft, but his tongue was hot and demanding, pushing into her mouth and melding with hers, which was suddenly just as seeking, just as hungry, hungry from months of being aware of him and from years of being alone. Of living without the power of a man’s embrace. Some women didn’t need this, she knew, or at least they said that, but she had enjoyed the physical aspects of her marriage. And she enjoyed John Evans’s kiss. Hot and tremblingly erotic.
He was trembling, she realized, his arms holding her now as if she were fragile, enclosed in the strength of his body, his mouth still examining hers, ravaging emotions she shouldn’t feel, shouldn’t need. She put her hand up, thinking she should offer some protest. It fluttered without purpose against his shoulder, finding the hard reality of the muscles that shifted under the soft cotton.
She couldn’t want to touch him, she thought, trying to find some rationality, some reason, in the madness. Her fingers brushed over the roughness of his unshaven cheek, and then slipped naturally to the back of his head, threading into the fair hair, a little long and curling through her fingers, as if hungry for their touch. As his mouth had been hungry. And hers. Needy. God, she was so needy.
Her fingers automatically pulled his head downward, urging a closer contact between them, wanting more, unashamed now of the lift of her nipples against his chest. She felt the small, gasping inhalation he made when their pearled hardness touched his chest, but her own breath was harsh also, almost panting. Too revealing of what she felt.
His mouth left hers and traced downward, open, to her throat, the moisture it left on her skin hot. She turned her head to give him access to the low, exposed neckline of her gown. His lips moved, no longer floating over her skin, but pulling across it, wet and demanding. Her fingers locked in his hair, her body heaving suddenly with the depth of the breath she took when his mouth found the dark valley between her breasts. He hesitated, his lips lifting slightly away from her skin, allowing the cool morning air to touch where their sweet heat had been.
“Please,” she begged softly.
“Please what?” he demanded, his mouth lowering again to her throat. “Tell me you want this.”
“Yes,” she
said. Insane, her brain cautioned again. This is insane. You don’t even know this man. You know nothing about him. Nothing…
Perhaps her body had stiffened. Perhaps she had made some involuntary or unconscious movement backward, away from him. Whatever she had done, she hadn’t meant to do, but his head lifted. He stepped back, releasing her so suddenly that her trembling knees almost gave way. Her hand moved quickly to his shoulder to find her balance.
He was looking into the woods that stretched across from the two houses, absolutely still now, silent. Watching and listening. His wariness was back so strongly that despite the emotional turmoil in her body, she was aware of it. She glanced over her shoulder to the dense undergrowth he was staring into. She could see nothing, no movement. Only dawn stillness. There appeared to be nothing there to attract his attention. Nothing that demanded the searching intensity of the ice-blue gaze that examined every foot of the edge of the woods exposed by the road that ran between the houses and the forest.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She knew how Josh felt.
Drawn to him and then pushed away. Like moth and flame. Burned, she thought, examining the analogy. Burning.
At her question, his eyes had returned to her face. Whatever had been in them before, its force frightening her for the first time, disappeared, deliberately controlled, restrained by his will. He glanced once more at the silent woods behind her, and then he met her eyes again.
“This is crazy,” he said softly. “Get the hell out of here,” he ordered, his voice suddenly harsh. “Get the hell away from me.”
Bewildered, she stepped back, removing her hand from his body as if it had been physically scorched.
“What—”
“Go home,” he ordered. “Now.” He took her shoulder and turned her toward her own yard. The fingers that had been so gentle against her throat bit into her flesh now, grinding down into her collarbone, pushing her away.
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