She stretched out on the satin sheets—that her late husband had insisted they use—and let her bare skin enjoy the silky softness. Now that she wasn’t married, she’d taken to sleeping nude and loving it; that was part of her statement of independence.
She reached for the phone on its second ring.
“Ms. Middleton, please. Luke Hickson speaking.”
Currents of dizziness attacked her, and it seemed as though her head had lost most of its weight. “This is Kate, Captain Hickson. Is…is something the matter?” She hated the unsteadiness of her voice. The man must be used to having women roll over for him. Not this one.
“I hate to disturb your rest, but it’s occurred to me that you need a new lock and key for your store, and you need it now. With the simple padlock I put on it, a criminal wouldn’t need much imagination if he wanted to open it.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We can take care of it, but you have to be present. I can pick you up in half an hour.”
“Thanks. I’ll be ready.”
What next? She wanted to stay as far away from that man as she could get, but fate seemed to have other plans. She phoned Madge Robinson, the building superintendent.
“Madge, I have to go out for…I don’t know…an hour or two. Could you please keep an eye on Randy for me? He’s asleep.”
“In that case, I’ll go down to your place. It ain’t smart to leave a child his age alone. Be right there.”
She met Luke in the lobby and knew she’d never hear the end of it, because Madge was standing in the garden, though she should have been inside with Randy.
“Who’s with your boy?” Luke asked after handing her the new keys to her store.
She told him and waited, since it was clear he had something else to say.
“He needs a strong male hand. Where’s his father, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She hated talking about herself. Although he’d asked without seeming to probe, that didn’t make her more comfortable. “I’ve been a widow for fourteen months. Randy is showing the results of his father’s pampering and overindulgence. Sometimes he’s very unruly.”
“I can see that.”
He had a way of looking at her intently, of focusing on her as if she were the only other living creature on the planet. Suddenly, he smiled, and her heart flipped over like a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler. She took a deep breath to steady herself.
“You didn’t get any rest, but…well, since we’re out here, do you feel like having a decent meal with me?”
Stunned at the unexpected invitation, she gazed up at him, judging his intent.
His smile widened. “I’m harmless. Besides, everybody in town knows me, so I can’t possibly abduct you and get away with it. What do you say?”
An infectious grin, his sparkling white teeth against his dark brown skin, gave her a warm feeling, and the twinkling mischievous challenge in his beautiful gray eyes provoked in her an oddball sense of devilment, a wickedness she hadn’t felt in over ten years.
In a reckless moment, she said, “Harmless? Luke Hickson, you’re about as harmless as a hungry lion among a herd of antelope.”
With his jacket open and his hands in his pants pockets emphasizing his six-foot, four-inch height and his imposing maleness, he gave his left shoulder a quick shrug. “I expect I’ve been likened to less admirable things, but when a charming woman tells me to my face that she thinks I’m dangerous, there’s no telling what will pop into my head.” He grinned again. “You willing to risk it?”
Primed for the game, she looked him up and down. “Oh, I don’t know. What kind of ideas get into your head?”
His eyes flashed fire, daring her. “You might be surprised.”
If he thought she’d back off, he was in for a surprise. “Good. I love surprises.”
His left eyebrow shot up. “And challenges, too, no doubt.”
She pulled on the long strand of hair that hung beside her right ear. “Oh, I thrive on those.”
“Ever pushed your luck too far?” he asked, his voice low and dark.
She couldn’t remember when she had last enjoyed flirting with a man, giving him back as good as she got. And a sharp-looking brother, at that. She pulled a curtain of innocence over her face and smiled. “Maybe. I don’t think so, though I’ve been told I have got an angel on my shoulder. So who knows? Where’s this place that serves a good meal?”
When he stepped closer and touched her elbow with a single finger, she looked around and then glanced up at him. He wasn’t smiling, and she knew she’d given herself away.
“If you’re checking to see who’s around in case you want to play, we’re alone in front of your store, four feet from a streetlight.”
The thought of playing with him, as he put it, sent a riot of sensation through her body, but she steeled herself against his intoxicating virility. “I don’t make a spectacle of myself, Captain. I just like to—”
“Tease?” His grin lacked its previous playfulness. “I like to tease, too, but I know when to draw the line. You’d better watch it. Your kind of funny stuff can get out of hand. Oh, yes. Let’s cut the formality, Kate. We’re way past that now. There’s a nice restaurant about six blocks away. I’ll drive us.”
“Sure you want to have a meal with this child?”
A frown marred his otherwise perfect features. “Child? What do you mean, child?”
She lifted her nose just enough to let him sense a mild reprimand. “I don’t suppose you make a habit of lecturing to adults.”
She couldn’t manage more than a wide-eyed stare as he ran his hand over his hair, gave her a sheepish grin and finally shrugged his left shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go.”
His hand on her arm was not impersonal as it had been when he took her and Randy to the police station. His grasp now bore an intimacy, a possessiveness, and it had a tenderness that made her want to feel his hands skimming her arm. Sensing danger, she told herself to remember to ask him about his wife and children, and to stay out of his company.
Luke had a premonition that dismissing her from his mind and his feelings wouldn’t be as easy as he’d thought, that handling his reaction to her would prove as tough a test as any he could remember. Her dignity, charm and impish ways fascinated him, and something in her eyes seemed to hide the wisdom of the ages and to promise him anything he would ever want.
He watched her read the menu, and wondered what was taking her so long. There wasn’t that much to read.
Very soon, it became clear that she hadn’t been reading. She didn’t take her gaze from the menu, which hid half of her face. “Luke, why aren’t you having dinner with your wife and children?”
That set him back a bit, but the question told him much about her. He closed his eyes briefly. “Kate, I’m a widower, and have been for six years. My wife and I weren’t fortunate enough to have children.”
She folded the menu, laid it on the table beside her plate and looked at him. “I’m sorry. Did you want children?”
Getting into that would drag him down as sure as his name was Luke Stuart Hickson. “Yes, I did. More than anything. What happened to your husband?”
So he didn’t like talking about it. Well, that was a kind of pain she could understand. She told him of Nathan’s death, and why she’d resettled in Portsmouth. “I was teaching here when I met Nathan. So it was Portsmouth or Charleston, where I grew up, and I didn’t think I could raise Randy and make a living for us in South Carolina. I want him to have every opportunity.”
He tapped the two middle fingers of his left hand on the table. “If he doesn’t get strong discipline, the opportunities you provide him with won’t mean one thing.”
She knew she had her hands full undoing the damage caused by Nathan’s pampering. He’d mistaken that for love, but she had recognized it as a substitute for the guidance their child needed.
“I know I’ve got my hands full with Randy, and I’m trying. But he threatens to call his pat
ernal grandparents and tell them he’s being abused, the way he tattled to his father whenever I made him stay in his room. He’s smart beyond his years, Luke. I haven’t told them where we are yet, and with his attitude and a few other problems, I’m not sure I want to.”
He seemed to meditate for a few minutes before he said, “Enroll him in our Police Athletic League. Most of those boys aren’t with their fathers, so we give them the discipline they need.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to turn Randy loose with a group of underprivileged boys. Medicine that cured one ailment could cause another that killed. “We’ll see. I—”
“Some of those boys are from homes just like Randy’s, and all of them have learned to respect their mothers, so don’t be huffy about it. It may be just the help you need.”
One more indication that this man should not be taken for granted. And he said what he thought. “I may give it a try,” she said, mostly to change the subject.
“The sooner, the better.”
The waiter arrived to take their orders, and she breathed a long breath of relief. “I’ll have the leek soup and roast beef,” she said to the waiter, then glanced at Luke. “What are you wrinkling your nose for?”
He spread out his hands in a gesture of innocence. “With all this good food—stuffed crabs, crab cakes, Cajun-fried catfish, rolled veal in wine sauce with wild mushrooms, if you want to get fancy—why would anybody ask for roast beef and mashed potatoes?”
Why, indeed? If he thought she’d tell him that she hadn’t read the entire menu because he disconcerted her, he could think again. She caught the waiter’s sardonic expression.
“If you’d like to change…Captain Hickson eats here regularly. He may suggest something.”
She looked from one to the other and controlled her tongue. “I ordered roast beef because I like it. I’d also like a glass of Châteauneuf du Pape. You do carry French wines, don’t you?”
She’d known Luke Hickson exactly ten hours, but she would have bet her life that if she looked at him she’d see a grin on his face. He didn’t disappoint her.
“Yes, ma’am,” the waiter replied. Then he took Luke’s order of broiled mushrooms and crown roast of pork and moved away as quickly as possible.
“Aren’t you having wine?” she asked Luke.
His grin turned into a full laugh—and what a laugh. If she had any sense, she’d get out of there. The man was like a time-release drug.
He sobered up and answered her question. “I’m driving, so I don’t drink. I’m a cop, remember? By the way, do you drive?”
She told him she had a Ford Taurus, but that she drove because she had to and not because she enjoyed it. They finished the meal, and he leaned back and watched her. She folded her hands in her lap, unfolded them, smoothed her hair, and then pushed aside the clump that hung over her right ear. Finally, discombobulated beyond measure, she told herself to relax and went on the attack. “Luke, would you please stop staring at me? You’re making me uncomfortable.”
Horrified, she could see that his look of innocence was not feigned. He leaned forward, appeared to reach for her, then pulled back his hand. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I was enjoying being here with you. I don’t often have the company of a woman who wants nothing from me except time and good conversation.”
She believed in being honest. “I’m sorry, too. I’ve got a ten-year layer of social rust, plus I’ve had a lot more of my own company than was good for me. I’m out of practice, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Shall we go?”
“You’re wonderful company, rust or no rust,” he said, his grin hard at work. “I do want to ask if you have any idea who that man was who robbed you. If a criminal intends to shoot after committing a crime, he doesn’t usually let himself be talked out of it.”
“He seemed young, not more than twenty-five. I didn’t see his face, though, because he wore a hood. I’m wondering if my in-laws didn’t find out where we are and put someone up to it. They don’t want me to succeed. I’m sure of it.”
He sat forward, his posture rigid, as if he sensed approaching danger. “Your in-laws? If they’re wealthy upstanding citizens, would they hire a hit man? Somehow, I doubt it.”
“Then why would he have put the gun away when I told him he was frightening Randy and begged him to spare us?”
Luke drummed his fingers on the table. “Beats me, but I’ll get to the bottom of it. Be sure of that.”
He stood, looked down at her, and extended his hand to assist her from the booth. She took his hand, but released it as soon as she was safely on her feet. Inwardly, she laughed at herself. Why would a thirty-eight-year-old woman let a man make her jittery? She’d been married and was the mother of an seven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake. She stood straighter and held her shoulders back.
“This has been wonderful. Actually, it’s my first night out since I’ve been here. And what do you know? I think I stepped out with the king of the hill.”
He had the grace to be embarrassed. “Come on now, Kate. You’re exaggerating.”
The waiter didn’t bring a bill, and she decided not to ask for one. Since he ate there regularly, he probably had an account with the restaurant or someone had slipped him the check. In any case, he didn’t seem the type who’d split the bill with a woman the first time they ate dinner together. A few April sprinkles dampened them as they strolled half a block to Luke’s car, but he didn’t hurry. She’d already noticed that Portsmouth inhabitants, like the Charlestonians among whom she grew up, took their time about most things. He walked with her to her apartment door, and her nerves started a wild battle with one another. She didn’t think he’d ask to come in, but…
“I’ve enjoyed this evening with you, Kate. I enjoyed it a lot. I hope we’ll get better acquainted.” Before she could say a word, he winked, turned around and headed down the hallway.
“Luke,” she called. “The dinner was wonderful, and so were you.”
He waved, opened the building’s front door, and disappeared into the night. She stared at the hall that led to the building’s lobby and shook her head. She knew herself as a conservative woman, one whom Nathan Middleton in his perverted gentility had taught to wait for the man to make the first move. In a flash, she realized that Nathan had discouraged, even rejected, her advances early in their marriage until she’d stopped making them. Ultimately, he had set the tone of their relationship and called all the shots. Ultimately, she hadn’t cared.
Maybe she was about to find out who she was, or to rediscover herself. She couldn’t figure out what had gotten into her. She’d dared Luke, flirted with him and challenged him, and she wasn’t even ashamed. Ashamed? She’d enjoyed every second of it. But he’d kept his counsel, and she suspected he’d just let her know that he didn’t go in for casual good-night kisses, not even pecks on the cheek. It was just as well. If he’d kissed her, she’d probably have landed on the clouds. She had always wanted to fly with a man, and the woman in her knew instinctively that Luke Hickson could take her with him on wings of ecstasy. However, she’d been certain of that once before, and in ten years of groping for fulfillment, she’d gotten nothing but emptiness, a painful kind of loneliness—a thousand disappointments, like a field of scentless roses or an orchard of flowering cherry trees that bore no fruit. She didn’t feel like retracing those steps.
Luke propped his left foot on the step stool he kept in his walk-in closet and pondered his sudden urge to look at his family album. Why, after a dozen years or more, did he need to see pictures of his late parents and of him and Marcus as growing boys? He put the photo album back in its place without opening it, clicked off the light and wandered into the den. It wasn’t a time for nostalgia. He’d loved and cherished Eunice, and until her horrifying demise, they’d had a wonderful marriage—a happy marriage, comforting and companionable. But, he realized all of a sudden, it had been unexciting. Kate Middleton exhilarated him. And she had a streak of wickedness that brought out something
strange in him, a kind of wildness with which he was unfamiliar. He’d controlled it, but he’d give anything to know what would happen if he felt it again and let himself give in to it.
He knew the danger of taking up a woman’s challenge, and she’d practically dared him to show her the man that he was. Not that he was gullible; he’d walked away from more glittering pitfalls. What got to him was the thin layer of sadness beneath her jocular manner. That, along with her wit and charm, made him vulnerable to her, piqued his curiosity and made him want to know everything about her. He went to the refrigerator, got a can of beer and took a few swallows. An inner urging told him to bide his time, and he knew he’d better listen.
He snapped his fingers as he remembered her fear that her in-laws might be trying to prevent her from succeeding with the bookstore. It didn’t quite wash, but to be on the safe side, he’d assign a detective to watch that block first thing Monday morning.
When Kate walked into her living room, she found Madge Robinson snoring in front of the television and Bugs Bunny savoring a carrot while he plotted mischief. She awakened the woman by turning off the TV.
Madge jumped up. “I didn’t expect you’d be back in no two hours. If I went anywhere with Captain Hickson, I’d keep him half the night, too.”
She didn’t have much patience with busybodies. Madge Robinson had known she’d been with Luke because she’d walked to the edge of the garden and peered through the hedge, snooping. “Mrs. Robinson, it’s only nine-fifteen, and I’d hardly consider that half the night. Did Randy give you any trouble?”
Madge sat down and flicked the television back on. “I didn’t see the rest of Bugs. No, Randy didn’t give me a speck of trouble. I went to my place and got him some ice cream, and he went to bed as peacefully as a lamb, just like he promised.”
Just what Randy needed, someone else to pamper him and cajole him into doing what he knew he should do. “You mean, you bribed Randy to go to sleep?”
Madge glued her gaze to the television. “That tiger’s gonna catch Bugs if he ain’t careful. What? Oh. It was better for him to sleep than give me a hard time. Besides, he was tired, anyway. Poor kid said he hadn’t slept all last night.”
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