But he would have probably noticed the mutant dog that stared at him with a happy yipping sound. And that same dog leaping into his lap. Normally he would have minded the interruption to a nice, quiet morning. But that interruption was coupled with Stacy’s smile as she walked around the side of the house, so he could hardly mind too much.
“Sorry about that. I’m telling you, that dog loves you.”
Barrett patted the dog’s nearly bald head, finding it wasn’t bald, but covered with fine, silky hair. “I guess he has to go back to the shelter today.”
She scrunched up her face. “Well, no. The assistant director boarded five dogs yesterday, which means Weasel Boy’s cage is now occupied, and he’s too small to be put in with any of the other dogs. Which means I’m stuck with him until they find a home for another dog and free up a cage. And I wouldn’t mind so much being stuck with him, except—” she glanced at the dog on Barrett’s lap “—it means you’re stuck with him, too.”
Elmo tilted his head and gave a melodic whine. Something about that plea twanged a chord in his chest. He shrugged. “I suppose he can hang around here for the day.”
“Really? That’d be great. Otherwise I’d have to leave him in the house, and he’d whine up a storm. That’s what he did last night, whine and whimper for you. Kept staring at the door. I even let him sleep with me, just so he’d feel better.”
Barrett glanced at the dog again, because looking at Stacy while she was talking about whining and whimpering for him was doing strange things to his body. Then he actually envied the dog for snuggling up with Stacy all night, and that had him looking at her again. Sunshine slanted down over her, glinting off her brown hair and making her purple spandex leggings look nearly fluorescent. Her calves were muscular and shiny from what he guessed was suntan oil. Her arms were set off by the white tank top she wore. She was squinting, and then she shaded her eyes with the flat of her hand against her forehead.
“I have something for you,” she said, coming closer. He could smell the light coconut scent that obliterated the fruity scent she usually wore. And since when did he notice scents?
“I made it for you last night. What do you think?”
She shook out a white T-shirt and smiled as he read the words in serious script. Alcohol and Calculus Don’t Mix. Never Drink and Derive. “Cute, huh?”
He smiled. “Yeah…cute.”
She walked closer and handed it to him. “You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to. You’re probably not even a T-shirt kind of guy. It was just for fun.”
He held it up, wondering how long she’d worked on it, and what she’d thought about when she’d made it. “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “It was nothing. I’ll leave you alone so you can get your work done. Let me know if Weasel Boy bugs you, and I’ll come get him.”
He liked watching her walk. There was a bounce to her step, and of course there were the curves of her behind to consider, too. Elmo whined, and Barrett reluctantly drew his gaze to the dog. Happy with just that moment’s worth of attention, Elmo curled up in his lap with his dog sigh. No way was Barrett going to tell Stacy the dog was bothering him. He set the T-shirt over Elmo like a blanket and settled in to work.
Thirty minutes later, a persistent noise penetrated his consciousness. It was time to get a glass of chocolate milk anyway, and perhaps a bowl for Elmo, too. And to find out what that high-pitched buzzing noise was.
The noise, it turned out, was Stacy up on her flat roof with some loud contraption blowing leaves out of the gutter. Since she hadn’t noticed him yet, he figured it was all right to watch her for a minute or two. As she wrestled with the blower, it blew her hair into wild disarray. She wore sunglasses that occasionally caught the sun in a blinding flash. She moved around on the roof with ease, stepping toward the gutter where she aimed the nozzle and blew pine needles and debris over the edge.
In fact, she seemed to be…dancing. That’s when he noticed the headphones. She wiggled her hips and pursed her lips, mouthing the words to a song. Then she twirled with the blower close to her. It blew her hair straight up until she swung it out again.
She was dancing with the leaf blower. And while he should find that preposterous, he found himself smiling.
He forced himself to go into the house before she caught him staring. A woman like Stacy could make him believe things could work between a man used to his comfortable world of research and grants and a woman who wanted romance and worked with dogs. The only thing she lacked to make her perfectly wrong for him was a baby.
He and Elmo enjoyed their chocolate milk out on the lanai, and then Barrett went back to work. He wanted to glance toward Stacy’s place, but he congratulated himself on keeping his focus.
Elmo wandered away only long enough to attend to his canine business before returning to his place in Barrett’s lap. He did the strange air-licking thing for a few minutes and then settled down. Barrett laid out the pertinent field notes he had made over the last year as he’d trekked through Everglades National Park logging tree snail data. He glanced at the calendar and calculated the remaining time he had left. He had virtually no time between this project and the next. He knew his father was disappointed that he hadn’t remained working on Everglades projects for the university. But that wasn’t what called to him. Would he ever find the one thing that kept his interest indefinitely?
The blower noise had grown louder since he’d been in the house, though he couldn’t see Stacy on her roof anymore. Focus on the tree snails, he told himself. If he kept his focus, he could probably complete his project on time. The papers were laid out so he could gather the data he needed from each sheet in order. He got into a rhythm for a while.
Elmo’s head came up a second before the papers on the table spiraled into the air and drifted gently down around and into the pool. The noise stopped abruptly, and he turned and looked up to see Stacy on his roof with her hand over her mouth.
“I’m so sorry!” She set the blower down, stood too fast and lost her balance.
He scrambled to position himself beneath her. She tumbled over the edge of the roof but hung onto the gutter. Without thinking, he wrapped his arms around her to help ease her to the ground. Only he didn’t want to let her go.
She was warm and soft and firm all at the same time, and she smelled delicious, coconuty and sun-warmed. His arms were anchored around her stomach, and his hands brushed her bare waist. A catchy tune pounded from the headphones that were dangling around her neck. He thought about dancing with her, but that would be sillier than…than holding her for much longer than was strictly necessary.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” she said.
For someone who had studied time, who knew the measurement of time remained constant and absolute, those moments felt longer than usual. She turned to look at him. “Barrett, we’ve got to get your notes out of the pool!”
The notes. Of course, how could he have forgotten? She slid down his body to her feet, tossed the radio headphones on the table and pivoted toward the pool. Twenty or more pages floated at the surface, the ink dissolving before their eyes. Stacy slid into the pool and started retrieving them.
“I’m so sorry. You must think I’m a klutz.”
He grabbed the papers he could reach from the edge. “What were you doing up there, anyway?”
“Gene asked me to do their gutters the next time I did mine. I wasn’t going to do the gutter above you, because I was afraid this would happen.” She was plucking papers as she spoke. “I glanced down to see where you were, you know, to make sure I didn’t bother you, and…lost my balance. I never lose my balance. Granny said I had the balance of a monkey.”
The word monkey came out all garbled. The water was up to her mouth as she walked toward the deep end where most of the papers ended up. She wasn’t going to be able to reach them. So he did something impulsive, maybe for the first time he could remember. He got into the pool with her.
The water was cool as it
enveloped him. “Here, I’ll get these.”
“You didn’t have to come in here. I’m the one who scattered them into the pool.” She sounded breathless as she treaded water.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and held her up, facing him. “It’s…” He forgot about the cold water, the papers and whatever he’d been about to say. Like when he’d held her as she’d hung from the roof, his body awakened as her body brushed against his. Her skin was cool beneath his hands.
“It’s what?” she asked in a breathless voice.
“Hmm?”
“You said, ‘It’s.’ You never…finished.”
Their faces were inches apart as he pulled her flush against him. Beads of water dotted the pink lip gloss she wore. Why did he have the insane urge to lick them off? He wanted to kiss her, wanted it with every molecule in his body. He felt an intense desire to take her mouth and see if it tasted as good as it looked.
Her brown eyes were large as she watched him. Her breath was coming in short puffs, soft and barely audible. If he didn’t consult his logic here, he was going to be in big trouble.
Logic.
“Tree snails,” he said, and moved her toward the edge of the pool.
She grabbed onto the edge when he abruptly moved to retrieve the rest of the papers. “Pardon?”
He started reciting snail names with each piece of paper he snatched out of the water. “Delicatus. Elegans. Floridanus. Lucidovarius.” He had exactly four days, four hours and twenty-nine minutes to complete this project. All right, he was focused again, his mind firmly on deadlines and Stacy’s bottom as she pulled herself out of the pool…“Septentrionalis.” He took a deep breath when he grabbed the last piece of paper and turned around. “Nipples.”
At first he wasn’t aware of what he’d said, only that she was sitting on the edge of the pool, and her white tank top was close to transparent. She glanced down and jerked her arms across her chest. Only then did he realize exactly what had come out of his mouth.
Not a snail name.
Not even close.
She jumped to her feet and set the wet papers on the edge of the table. “I’d better go before I die of embarrassment altogether,” she said, her arms still fastened to her chest.
“I’m sorry—”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I’m going now.”
Barrett had reached the side of the pool, where Elmo was waiting for him. They both watched her stalk around the hedge and heard her door slam shut.
He was completely baffled. First that she’d affected him in such a profound way. And second that she’d blamed herself for his faux pas. It made no sense.
It made even less sense than his having gone in the pool fully clothed, shoes and all.
STACY LOOKED at herself in the bathroom mirror. Yep, there they were, showing right through the white material like brown beacons. No wonder the word had slipped out of his mouth! Gawd, could she be more embarrassed? Probably not. First sending his notes afloat and then this. He must think she was something else. He probably had some technical word for her, some fifty-cent word she wouldn’t understand.
The only redeeming factor in the whole pool incident was when he was reciting those snail names. She had to be the only person in the world to be turned on by snail names. That probably made her a disturbed woman, but she could handle that. Of course, it more than likely had something to do with the fact that Barrett was reciting them, though why he’d been doing it just then was a mystery.
She peeled off the tank top and tossed it in the hamper. Okay, the other redeeming factor was when he’d held her against him in the pool. The water sure wasn’t cold anymore after that. No, sirree. And if she’d been in her right mind, she wouldn’t have thought for a minute that he was going to kiss her. She wouldn’t have imagined the hunger she saw in his eyes. He was only holding her up in deep water, being nice. What he was probably thinking was that he’d like to throttle her for distracting him from his project yet again, and worse, for waterlogging his notes.
That’s what she’d really seen, annoyance, not hunger. He’d probably been reciting those snail names to keep his temper at bay like other people counted to ten.
She stripped out of her leggings and left them in a wet pile on the bathroom floor. A glimpse of her boyish figure reinforced her misunderstanding. No way could this body entice that man.
She threw on shorts and a T-shirt and wandered into the living room. If Gene and Judy’s home was regurgitated Florida, her home was granny style. The sturdy furniture was made to last more than a lifetime. Granny had had it since her early days of marriage. The colonial style would never be outdated. Brown sculptured carpet hid the stains and wear. Beiges and browns were neutral. For some reason Stacy had never quite understood, Granny liked mushrooms for a decor accent. The kitchen clock was shaped like a mushroom, and if that weren’t bad enough, there were tiny mushrooms at the ends of the minute and hour hands. A mushroom statue sat on the coffee table. Though she wasn’t enamored of the fungus, she couldn’t bear to part with anything Granny loved.
When the doorbell rang, she found Nita standing on the front step.
“Hey, Nita. Nice shirt.”
Nita wore one of Granny’s classics: Coffee, Chocolate, Men—Some Things Are Just Better Rich. “I want a word with you, young lady.”
“Uh-oh. Maybe you’d better come in.”
Nita made herself comfortable on the afghan-covered couch while Stacy searched her mind for whatever favor or task she’d forgotten to do. Nothing came to mind as she sank into the brown chair Granny thought looked like an upside-down mushroom. “Okay, what’s up?”
“I know you’re lying. Out with it.”
“Lying? About what?” At first she wondered if Ricky had spilled about the donor insemination. But technically she hadn’t lied about that, just omitted information. Then it must be about—
“You know exactly what I’m talking about—your so-called romance with Barrett. I think you’re pretending to be in love with him to throw us off his trail.”
Well, that had been the idea. Unfortunately, it was becoming truer every time she saw him. And as hard as it was to lie to someone who was like family to her, she had to think about the mess she’d made of Barrett’s notes. She owed him. “We’re not pretending.”
“Then how come he was jogging all by himself this morning? If you were really keeping company with that man, you’d be jogging with him. I know you. You wouldn’t let him go out there alone with all these women just waiting to send their daughters and granddaughters out jogging with him, if you know what I mean. That’s how I know you’re lying.”
Stacy swallowed hard. She hated jogging. It made her breasts feel like overused tennis balls.
“I was going to jog with him this morning, as a matter of fact. But he went earlier than we’d planned, and he was nice enough not to wake me up. Who’s planning on ambushing him?”
Nita just lifted her shoulder. “Couldn’t say for sure. But I’ve heard talk. Plans,” she added in a low voice. “I’d be keeping a close eye on him, that’s all I’m saying.”
Oh, boy.
7
STACY STOOD at Barrett’s door early that evening looking very serious in blue jeans and a pink short-sleeved sweater. “Barrett, we have a problem.”
“Does it have something to do with the can of dog food you’re holding?”
She lifted the can. “This is dinner.”
At his horrified expression, she followed his gaze to the hand she held up. “This is for Elmo!” She lifted the bag in her other hand. “This is our dinner. Subs from the deli. Not a hint of processed ham or cream of mushroom soup anywhere.”
She smelled fruity again, and he forgot about her declaration of impending doom. He followed her into the kitchen where she found a bowl and scooped something foul-smelling into it. It reminded him of the Tater Tot casserole.
“How’s it going between you two?” she asked, nodding toward the dog.
“We have an understanding. I let him sit on my lap, and he doesn’t whine.”
She set the bowl on the floor and gestured to Elmo.
He didn’t budge.
“Come on, it’s your favorite. Savory salmon.”
Elmo looked at Barrett.
“Go on,” he said, and Elmo dashed forward and consumed it.
Stacy placed a plastic lid on the can. “How does it feel to be adored like that?”
“I’m growing to like it.”
She looked at him, and he felt that strange tickle in his stomach.
“I’ll bet you are.” Her gaze shifted downward to his shirt. “You’re misbuttoned.”
She was right. “After my shower, I was deep in thought…about the tree snails,” he lied. “Sometimes I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing when I’m immersed in thought.”
She started unbuttoning his shirt. “We have a problem that might affect your uninterrupted time. You see, they don’t believe we’re attracted to one another.” She stopped when she finished undoing the buttons and was staring at his chest. She made a funny sound deep in her throat and quickly started buttoning the shirt. “Jogging. We have to go jogging together. That’ll be easy. And we should probably hold hands a couple more times, just to show them. Why am I buttoning your shirt for you? I don’t know.” She took a step back.
“Because you’re nice?” he offered, though he hoped it was more than that.
“Yes, that’s it. I wasn’t even thinking…” She glanced toward his chest again and then shook her head. “What I was thinking was we could go for a stroll together and eat dinner in the park. You, Weasel Boy and me. Holding hands. Think you can handle that?”
“Sure.”
She studied him for a moment. “You don’t seem very bothered by it. I thought, because it’s going to cut into your work schedule, you’d be annoyed.”
He shrugged. “I can work all night if I need to.” Besides, he’d become immersed in a side project, and that was what he’d been thinking about when he’d put on his shirt. He’d pulled up his study on romance and found it dry and lacking in actual fieldwork. He’d gone over his notes on his subjects, the feelings they’d talked about having—tickle in the stomach, distracted, fantasizing—all things he’d been experiencing since meeting Stacy. He’d decided that even with all his interviews, he hadn’t come away understanding romance at all. To be accurate, he needed to do hands-on research. Posing as a couple was perfect fieldwork.
Driven to Distraction & Winging It Page 7