Her Man Upstairs

by Dixie Browning

  Marty got out the broom and dustpan while Cole put his tools on the step to go upstairs.

  Hands on his hips, he said, “They’re not foolproof, but at least you’ll have enough of a heads-up to call nine-one-one and get the hell out of the house.”

  They headed back to the kitchen, which no longer reeked of polyurethane and blackened cinnamon. “Outdoors? But that’s where our mythical stalker will be waiting,” Marty protested. She would much rather wrap herself in those strong, tanned arms and ignore the whole crazy mess. “You know what? The trouble is, I read too much. Instead of suspense, from now on maybe I’ll stick to—” She’d been about to say romances, but then, those weren’t the safest reading, either. Not when there was a genuine cover-worthy hero standing only a few feet away. “Biographies,” she finished weakly. “I’m pretty sure I just overreacted.”

  He didn’t say a word. Didn’t have to—his eyes said it for him.

  The first time she’d seen him she’d thought he looked wild, windblown and untamed, like the swashbuckling hero on the cover of a historical romance. Now that she’d come to know him better, he looked…

  That was the trouble. He still looked like a swashbuckler, only now she saw more than just broad shoulders, narrow hips, greenish eyes that saw far too much, and all that shaggy, sun-streaked hair. Now his appeal was all tied up in a hundred small details, like the soapy, salty scent of his tanned skin and his deep raspy drawl. Like the way he held doors for her and helped her in and out of his monster truck. The way his lips twitched and his eyes crinkled when he was amused, but reluctant to admit it. The way he kissed…

  Oh, my mercy, the way he kissed. What on earth was going on inside her small-town, dull-as-mud, semi-educated brain? He should have known better than to start anything he wasn’t willing to finish.

  Because she was willing. Far too willing. The trouble was, the job came with a built-in deadline, and her carpenter came with the job, and any distractions could royally screw up her schedule.

  Right. And don’t you forget it.

  She reminded herself that elevated stress levels were only to be expected under the circumstances. Genuine clinical depression was another thing altogether. She didn’t have time to be depressed. She certainly couldn’t afford a shrink, and talking it over with her best friends wasn’t even a faint possibility. She knew in advance what that pair would recommend.

  Bracing her shoulders, she said, “Okay—for insurance purposes, but I still think all this might be overkill.”

  “Maybe. But like I said, if you hear someone messing around outside, it’ll give you time to call nine-one-one.”

  “Betty Mary Crotts—she’s the night dispatcher—she’s another of my regulars. If she happens to be awake, she’ll probably have her nose in a Regency romance.”

  “All the more reason to keep you safe. Your regulars need you.”

  “There’s just no winning an argument with you, is there.” It sounded almost like a compliment. From the twinkle in his eyes, he knew it, too. Damn him for reading her like a third-grade primer. “Then shall we both get to work? We’ve already wasted half the day.”

  “Wasted?”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, she snatched up her floor-plan-in-progress and stalked off toward the living room.

  They ate lunch separately. Shortly after Cole went back to work, Marty called up the stairway to say she was going to run to the post office and would be back in an hour or so. She didn’t wait to hear his arguments. If a certain Mercedes wanted to follow her while she picked up her mail, plus a few things she needed from the drugstore, all the better. She would damn well force a confrontation and end this silly charade once and for all.

  She slowed down as she passed the Caseys’ brick ranch. They’d driven his car to Florida. Hers was locked in the garage.

  No sign of a Mercedes as she drove to the post office to collect her daily allotment of catalogs and bills. She traded greetings with Miss Canfield, whose tremors were getting worse. “Are you having a garden this year?” she asked.

  “Just beans, tomatoes and okra.”

  “Let me know if you have any trouble with deer. I’ve found something that works pretty well.”

  At the drugstore she smiled and nodded to Mr. Horton who lived in the same trailer park as Faylene. Judging from the books he read, the old man was considerably more adventurous than he looked.

  Marty headed for the middle aisle where she picked up a bottle of ibuprofen and a microwaveable heat pack in case her lower back started acting up again. Passing the cosmetics display, she impulsively picked out a frosted pink blusher.

  And then she saw the condoms.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  All the same, what if…?

  A few minutes later she walked out with the blusher, the back-wrap, a bottle of ibuprofen and a box of condoms. With her cheeks burning like fire, she hardly needed the blusher.

  It was late afternoon by the time she got back home, having stopped by the bank to order checks for Marty’s New and Used at the new address. If everything went according to schedule she would soon be needing them.

  Bursting through the front door, she met Cole coming down the stairs with a stack of broken plasterboard. “I told you to toss that stuff out the bedroom window. You don’t have to be so careful. I can clean up.”

  “No problem,” he said coolly.

  His brusque response did little to quench her optimism. “You know what? I’m going to meet my deadline.”

  He nodded and waited for her to open the door for him. She did, and then stood there like a lamppost, clutching her catalogs and her drugstore purchases.

  “In case you were worried,” she said when he came back inside, “I’m keeping track of all the time you’ve spent on extras.” When he greeted the news with only the lift of one dark eyebrow, she hurried to explain. “I mean stuff that wasn’t in our contract.”

  “Trade it for a few meals. Just remember what I said.”

  What the devil was bugging him? Remember what? She was having trouble remembering her own name at the moment.

  “Oh, you mean if I hear someone trying to break in, I’m to call Betty Mary. Got it.”

  “And then call me.”

  “Why? You’ll be miles away, sound asleep in your boat, and anyway, the local law can handle it. In case they’re late and someone does manage to break in, I’ll lean over the banisters and drop books on his head.” She tried out a perky smile just because he looked so grim.

  “Dammit, Marty, I’m serious!”

  “Well, you don’t have to yell at me. I just meant I could stall him until help arrives. Of course, paperbacks might not do the job. Heavy literature might work better.” She was deliberately being facetious and she didn’t really know why. Because she was embarrassed? Because she was still clutching her packages, including the box of condoms? Because what she really wanted was for her swashbuckling carpenter to ride in on a white stallion, sweep her off her feet and save her from the bad guys?

  That didn’t even make sense. What evildoer worth the title drove around town at twelve miles an hour in an elderly Mercedes? The thing didn’t even have tinted windows.

  As if he had all the time in the world, Cole hooked his thumbs in the low waist of his jeans and waited for a reaction. All eight remaining fingers pointed toward ground zero. When Marty realized she was staring she quickly lifted her gaze in time to see his lips twitch, but when no smile was forthcoming, she thought maybe she’d just imagined it.

  Why the heck wasn’t the man easier to read? He was a carpenter, for Pete’s sake, not one of those superheroes who managed to save the world with one hand tied behind him. The type who could last all weekend in bed without the benefit of any little blue pills.

  “Well. That pretty well settles it, then, wouldn’t you say?” she huffed. It was the best she could come up with. He could take it any darn way he wanted to.

  Oh, yes, that was definitely amusement she saw spark
ling in those eyes. If he laughed at her she’d kill him.

  He didn’t laugh. Soberly, he said, “There’s only one more thing I need to do.”

  She was afraid to ask.

  “You might as well come with me to the marina while I throw a few things in a bag. We can pick up some barbecue on the way back.”

  She took a step back and bumped into the hall bench. Once a klutz, always a klutz. “Oh, now wait a minute, maybe we’d better rethink this—what you said earlier. About spending the night here. Most of my second floor, in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty well uninhabitable.” Since she’d moved into the spare room, her old bedroom—the one that would soon be her new living room—was the repository for roughly a ton of paperback books, not to mention stacks of assorted building material.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  She said, “Ha! I can just see you leaping up to go into action with a hammer and screwdriver against an armed intruder.”

  That drew both a twitch and a twinkle. “Just don’t go dropping any books on my head if I need to use the john in the middle of the night.”

  All she could do was shake her head. Wasn’t being broke and racing to beat a deadline so she could do something about it enough excitement, without throwing in car chases and sexy carpenters? Who the devil was plotting this life of hers, anyway?

  “Another benefit,” he said calmly, “is that I won’t waste so much traveling time. I can get started as soon as we walk Mutt, and work as late as necessary, or at least until you go up to bed.”

  It made sense…sort of. “You really do think I need a bodyguard, then?”

  “Let’s just say it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  “To coin a cliché,” she murmured. “All right, then, but if the perp tries to climb in a window and tramples on my iris bulbs, he’s going to wish he’d tackled some other mark. Believe me, I’m not helpless.”

  This time his amusement was unmistakable. “Right. All those boxes of ammo upstairs. Three guesses which ones you’ve been reading.”

  Even if he was laughing at her, it felt good. A kind of warm-and-mushy-inside good. If she had an ounce of survival instinct, she’d be out of here retroactively, stalker or no stalker. Because the real enemy was inside her gates. A Trojan horse of another color.

  Marty was used to arguing with her female friends. It was the way they bounced ideas off each other when they were trying to come up with the best way to get a couple of needy people together. Nobody’s feelings ever got hurt. With Alan, they’d been too much alike to argue, even before he got sick. More like best friends—or later, like mother and child.

  Arguments with Beau had occasionally been about backgrounds; her lack of one and his illustrious one. More often they had been about money. Win or lose, she’d always ended up depressed. If anyone had told her it was possible to argue with a man and actually enjoy it, she’d have said they were nuts.

  It was after dark when they set off. Cole had hammered and sawed and done his thing upstairs, while Marty had worked on her prospective layout downstairs. Sasha would insist on feng shui along with her three shades of red. Paint was one thing, but Marty didn’t have room for any feng shui. Her biggest concern was having as many books as possible exposed to as many browsers as possible, all without threatening claustrophobia.

  The night was cold and luminous, the three-quarter moon set in a bed of iridescent clouds. They came to a section of soybean fields where the sky was visible practically from horizon to horizon, and Cole slowed almost to a stop. There was no traffic.

  “North Star. Check it out.”

  “Where?” Leaning forward against the seat belt to peer through the windshield, Marty tried to summon up her meager knowledge of astronomy. Thanks to a passing interest in astrology, she knew the names of the planets, but not how to find them.

  “See the Big Dipper over by that dead tree?” He waited until she said she did. “Now draw an imaginary line through the two stars at the end of the bowl and there’s your North Star.”

  “I see it, I see it! I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah,” he said smugly. “That’s what I’m shooting for. I figured once you found out how smart I was, you’d jump to do my bidding without any more backtalk.”

  In the faint light of the dashboard, she stared at his just-this-side-of-handsome profile. “Balderdash.”

  He picked up speed and cut her a quick glance. “Balderdash?”

  “It’s a literary term. It means bull-pucky.”

  “Pucky?” He was openly laughing at her now, teeth flashing white in his tanned face.

  Crossing her arms over her chest, Marty said, “You know very well what I mean.” But then she was laughing, too.

  “Looks like Bob Ed’s entertaining tonight,” he observed a few minutes later as they turned off onto a dirt road that led past the guide’s home-office.

  “He’s surprisingly gregarious for a grizzled old bachelor. I think Faylene might have something to do with it.”

  They drove slowly along the waterfront, past several short piers to the one on the end where a low-profile boat was secured to the wooden pilings.

  “Welcome to the Time Out,” Cole said, quiet pride evident in his tone.

  The deck dipped precariously when she stepped aboard, clutching his hand for balance.

  “Easy there, I’ve got you.”

  “It’s hardly the first time I’ve ever been on a boat,” she said, trying not to grab him and hang on with both hands. “I rode the ferry to Ocracoke several summers ago, and I’ve even been deep-sea fishing.”

  That was the time when one of Sasha’s clients invited the decorator and any of her friends who cared to join her to spend a day fishing in the Gulf Stream. She’d been too busy throwing up to appreciate the thousand-dollar treat.

  “My, it’s…airy, isn’t it?” she murmured, holding tightly to a stanchion while Cole unlocked a door and led her belowdeck.

  When he turned on lights, she looked around, marveling at the way everything seemed to fit together.

  “For an older model, she’s in great shape. I’ve been working on her in my spare time for years,” Cole said as he opened and closed various lockers.

  Marty continued to look around, curious about what it was that led a man like Cole Stevens to live aboard a boat. It could hardly be called a yacht, but his pride was obvious—even touching.

  His hands came down on her shoulder and he shifted her aside in order to open the door to the tiny head. Marty was struck by the same clean, masculine scent she’d come to associate with him. She was no expert on male toiletries, but whatever brand he used, it was nothing at all like the products used by either of her husbands. Alan had favored Old Spice, claiming it reminded him of his father. Beau had doused himself in a potent cologne that she’d quickly come to despise.

  “I haven’t been down this way in months,” Marty said once they left the Time Out and headed back to Muddy Landing. “Not since Bob Ed’s last birthday bash, in fact.”

  Cole slowed outside the guide’s living quarters, where a flickering blue light shone through the windows. Watching basketball, probably. Faylene was an avid sports fan.

  “That’s Faylene’s car. You met her, didn’t you? She’s promised to come once I’m ready to open and help with a final cleaning.”

  “Blond lady in a pink sequined sweatshirt and white tennis shoes? I met her.”

  The description was a lot kinder than some she’d heard. Summer or winter, Faylene’s unique fashion sense tended to raise eyebrows in those who didn’t know her.

  Cole slowed as they neared the turnoff. Where the wooden wharf followed the shoreline, a few commercial fishing boats glowed dimly in the moonlight. At the very end, a sleek, dark-hulled yacht rode quietly on the still water. A couple of cars and trucks, rentals most likely, were parked between a stack of crab pots and a chain hoist. Some marina operators kept a few rentable wrecks on hand for layovers.

  Cole said, “In case you wo
ndered how I managed to bring both my boat and a truck south, this is one of Bob Ed’s rentals. Things are slow, so I got the pick of the litter.”

  “That explains the rod holders on the front bumper, then,” she murmured drowsily.

  “Yep. I troll—I rarely surf fish.”

  This time she didn’t bother to comment, lulled by the sound of the tires and the steady presence beside her.

  “Barbecue?” he asked a few minutes later as he pulled onto Highway 168 again.

  She opened her eyes and yawned. “Sounds good. Tomorrow I need to make a trip to the grocers.”

  “How about we run by after we do the dog in the morning.”

  She was too relaxed to bother arguing. At this rate, she thought sleepily, her remodeling job was going to take a back seat to all the other activities, and as much as she enjoyed them, she couldn’t afford any more delays. “How about you carp while I walk Mutt and do the shopping?”

  “We’ll see,” he said agreeably.

  “Damn right we will,” she muttered, but there was no fire in it. Only slumbering coals. If she didn’t watch out, her priorities were going to be turned end for end, and the worst thing about it was that she found the threat more exciting than frightening.

  Eight

  How’s a woman supposed to concentrate, Marty asked herself, when her sleeping dragon wakes up after a long winter’s nap, only to trip over a sexy dragon-slayer?

  Okay, bad analogy. She didn’t think too clearly this early in the morning. Never had, actually, but now it was even worse. Now she was hungover after wrestling with a night full of X-rated dreams. Inviting Cole to move in with her had been a major mistake.

  Although, come to think of it, she’d never actually issued an invitation.

  Wet-haired and bleary-eyed, she made her way downstairs at a quarter of seven on Friday morning and shoved open the kitchen door. And there he was, seated at her table—the star of all those steamy high-definition dreams.