Make Time For Love

by Louise Clark

  Faith looked at the scattered newspapers in some despair. “Yeah, well, okay.” As she began to gather up the sections realization dawned. “You want to use my shower!”

  “Aye, that I do.”

  “Andrew, you can’t! I have a date tonight. I need to use the shower.”

  His gray eyes narrowed. “A date? With a man?”

  “Of course with a man and he’s coming to get me at seven.” She dumped the papers into a magazine basket. “That’s not much time, so go away.”

  “I will not!”

  “What? You have to!”

  “I do not.”

  Frustrated and very, very worried that he was going to mess up her evening with Cody, Faith said, “For the love of Pete, Andrew, I have a date! Go away!”

  Andrew shrugged and headed for the stairs. “I’ll be quick, lass, see if I’m not.”

  Groaning, Faith scuttled after him. “Andrew, don’t you dare go up those stairs! I want you to go home. Now!”

  “That I will not do, lass.” He took the stairs two at a time with Faith hurrying after him.

  “I’ll leave!” she shrieked, desperate. “I’ll walk out of this house and go to my mother’s.” Though Chloe’s house was only a short distance from Faith’s, it was far enough that Andrew would be in deep trouble if Faith did go there. For if Faith stepped out of the house, leaving Andrew behind, he would disappear back into the past, in whatever state of dress—or undress—he happened to be wearing.

  At the top of the staircase he turned slowly. “You would not do that to me, Faith.”

  Faith admitted to herself that he was right, but she raised her chin and said, “Try me.”

  Andrew gritted his teeth. “Fifteen minutes is all I need. Fifteen minutes!”

  “You’ve never showered and shaved in less than an hour,” Faith retorted, following him to the bathroom door.

  “That’s because I always stop for a visit with you! Fifteen minutes, Faith. That’s all I ask.”

  He was looking woebegone now, his expression so like that of a hopeful puppy that Faith almost laughed. She managed to keep her expression disapproving though, as she said, “Okay. I’ll finish sorting out the living room and get my outfit ready. But when I knock on the door, Andrew, the bathroom is mine. Understood?”

  He shut the door at the same time as he said, “Aye!”

  Faith headed down to the living room to the sound of running water and Andrew singing.

  It was twenty after six when Andrew sauntered into her bedroom, a towel around his hips. “What did you do with my clothes, then lass?”

  “I put them in the spare bedroom,” Faith said. She’d changed out of the slacks and tailored shirt she’d worn to work and was clad in a dressing gown. “Andrew, don’t take forever to dress. I don’t want you here when Cody arrives.”

  Andrew leaned against the doorjamb making it impossible for Faith to leave her room without brushing past him. “Is that the name of the fellow you’re walking out with tonight?”

  “It is,” Faith said, somewhat impatiently.

  Andrew crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s he like then?”

  “He’s taller than you are and he packs a lethal left hook.” Andrew’s brows climbed up toward his dark hair. “Andrew, I don’t have time to chat. Not tonight. Come back tomorrow and we can compare dates.”

  “I might just do that, Faith my girl,” he said. But he straightened and cleared out of the doorway. Faith dove past him, heading for the shower.

  Twenty minutes later she was putting on her makeup when there was a tap on the bathroom door. “Faith, I’ll be going now. You’d best hurry, though. Your young man is waiting for you in the front parlor.”

  Oh, no! Shock held her immobile. She stared into the mirror, seeing a wild-eyed young woman with pale skin and long blond hair framing her face and spilling over her shoulders. As her eyes grappled with an image she couldn’t comprehend, her mind scurried around like a trapped and very frightened rabbit.

  Cody Simpson was here, in the living room? Cody had met Andrew? She began to move. If Cody was in the living room he would see Andrew disappear as he stepped back into the past. “Andrew, wait!” she shrieked.

  There was no answer. She flung on her robe and charged out the door. Only to find Andrew lounging against the banister, silently laughing so hard he was holding his sides.

  She stopped in her tracks. “Cody’s not here, is he?”

  Andrew took a deep breath and collected himself. Still he didn’t attempt to talk. He simply nodded agreement.

  He was dressed in his best clothes, all ready for his date with Mary Elizabeth, while Faith was still in her dressing gown, her makeup half-done, her nerves fried, all because of him. Faith made a growling sound in her throat and flew at him. Andrew, his face still alight with mischief, dove down the stairs and into the living room. Faith was close behind him, yelling that she would make him pay for this. He reached his magical spot and—poof!—he was gone.

  Faith stood for a moment, panting, then the clock on the mantle bonged the quarter hour and she realized with horror that Cody would be here in fifteen minutes and she wasn’t dressed, her hair wasn’t brushed, and her makeup needed finishing. She raced back up to the bathroom.

  She had completed her makeup and flung on a green knit dress that accented her dark blond hair when the doorbell rang at precisely seven o’clock. Faith groaned. She still needed to add stockings and do something with her hair.

  She ran down the stairs and jerked open the door. And stared.

  Now she knew why Cody had insisted that he pick her up, rather than have them leave from the office. He was dressed in a suit. A gray suit that fit his long, lean body very nicely indeed. Beneath the tailored jacket was a white shirt and a tie. A tie? If she wasn’t looking at it right now, she’d never have imagined that Cody Simpson would own a tie, let alone wear one. A tie. Who’d believe it?

  “Hi,” he said, his gaze sweeping the length of her.

  Faith swallowed. “Where are my manners? Cody, come on in.” She took a quick, nervous look at the living room. “Into the kitchen. I’m running a bit late. Make yourself at home. I won’t be more than a minute or two.”

  Chapter 11

  She walked with a definite swing to her step. He liked that about her, the way she moved, the way she handled her body. As Cody followed Faith across the hall to the kitchen he watched the sweep of her long blond hair as it cascaded over her shoulders and halfway down her back. He shouldn’t be thinking about running his fingers through that thick golden mass—it was way too soon in the relationship for that—but he couldn’t resist letting his imagination run riot. It was probably the most wicked he’d be all evening.

  She left him in the kitchen to look after himself as she rushed off to finish her prep for the evening. That surprised him. Faith Hamilton had a fearsome reputation at NIT for her organizational skills. If you wanted a problem sorted out, if you were looking to get something pulled together from nothing in no time at all, you went to Faith. He’d assumed she’d be waiting for him when he arrived tonight, perfectly groomed with not a hair out of place. He certainly hadn’t anticipated a flustered woman eyeing him sideways as if she wasn’t sure what to expect next.

  He pondered this behavior as he investigated her fridge to see if she had stashed a bottle of beer inside as compensation for abandoned dates while she hid away in the bathroom prettying herself up.

  There was no beer, but he did find a bottle of designer water. He decided that would have to do, but when he went searching for a glass, he discovered a bottle of merlot beside some wineglasses. Now this was more like it. He put the water back in the fridge.

  Very orderly, he thought, as he took down a glass and the bottle of wine. It tallied with his idea of Faith Hamilton. But it didn’t fit the charming bundle of nerves who was now in the bathroom primping.

  He leaned against the counter as he sipped the wine, speculating. Her kitchen was neat, the counters cl
ean, the table clear. Again, the sort of thing he would expect of her.

  Faith’s kitchen was nothing like the disaster area that was his kitchen. His kitchen was cluttered, the table piled high with—stuff. He liked his kitchen. It faced west and got a generous share of afternoon sun. Because of the light, because he liked light, he did a lot of his work at his kitchen table. The result was that it was covered with papers, books, pens, pencils, paper clips, a computer he was repairing, and anything else that caught his interest.

  His laptop sat at one end and when he needed the table for a meal, on those odd occasions when he actually ate in, he closed down the laptop and used the small clear space it left behind for his plate. When he finished eating he returned the computer to the spot. As an effective use of limited space he felt it was a system that worked remarkably well.

  This big kitchen, with not an article out of place, was a resounding statement about the woman who lived here. It said she was tidy and organized and liked it that way. It asked—no demanded!—to know why he even thought dating her would be a good idea.

  He drank some more merlot.

  Since the day when she’d come up to his office he’d been thinking about Faith Hamilton. Strike that. He’d been more than thinking of her. He’d been fantasizing about her curvy body and those beautiful gray-green eyes of hers. He’d teased her into losing her temper and watched those eyes flash with a passion that had nothing to do with work. Faith Hamilton might like to have everything done correctly, but he’d proven she had limits and she could be pushed to them and past them with remarkable ease.

  As if his thoughts of her had brought her to him in the flesh, Faith bounded into the kitchen, her gray-green eyes wide and anxious. She’d added shoes, sensible ones with low heels, and she’d twisted her hair up into some sort of knot in the back, much to his disappointment. She peered around the room carefully, looking at him and around him. “Is everything okay? Nothing to worry about?”

  Cody glanced around the tidy room. What was there to worry about in a room that was so neat and scrubbed that he couldn’t see any need to clean it again for the next year and a half? Still Faith seemed to be so concerned he decided to tease her a bit to see what she would do. He pointed to a corner near the sink. “There’s a spider web over by the window.”

  He expected her to shriek and demand to be rescued from the danger of the spider the way his ex-wife used to. Or to haul out the broom and have a go at eliminating the spider web right now, before they left for the evening.

  Instead she shrugged. “It’s an old house. I get lots of spiders.”

  Now Cody was intrigued. As he watched her take a deep breath to calm her agitation, he wondered with considerable satisfaction if being with him had shaken her so much that she was showing another side to her personality. He rather hoped that was what was happening.

  He downed the merlot in the glass and set it on the counter. “I raided your cupboards,” he said, waving at the bottle and the now empty glass.

  A smile lit up Faith’s lovely heart-shaped face. “I’m glad you did. Sorry I ran out on you like that. I planned to be ready by seven but…” She didn’t bother to state the obvious. Instead her smile turned enticing and she held out her hand. “I’m ready now. Shall we go?”

  The prospect of catching her hand in his was enough to get Cody moving. He levered himself away from the counter and took what she offered. Her hand was warm in his, the skin smooth and supple.

  As soon as his fingers closed around hers, she tugged, hard.

  “Good, we’re off. Don’t worry about the lights. I always leave them on. I like to come home to a brightly lit house.” She dragged him through the hall, pausing briefly to peer into the living room, before she grabbed her purse from the hall table.

  As she looked into the living room Cody looked too, but he could see nothing beyond a perfectly ordinary room. He wondered if the newspapers dumped casually into a basket were the reason for her apparent concern. If so, curvy body or not, they were doomed. Any woman who cared so much about keeping her space that tidy was off his Christmas list.

  When they were out the door and in the car she sagged visibly. “Are you okay?” he asked, somewhat alarmed.

  She took a deep breath and smiled, although it seemed to him that it took considerable effort for her to relax. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I got a little flustered when I wasn’t ready on time.”

  He made some polite comment, but that really worried him. A woman who got upset because she was late was too tense for him. He was always late. Heck, some days he hardly knew where he was, let alone what time it was. In order to make it to Faith’s house on time tonight he had set the alarm on his watch to ring every half hour from five o’clock on. He had been on edge and jumpy all afternoon. Running by the clock was just not his style.

  He put the car in reverse, turning to check as he backed out of the drive. “I thought we could go to Mel’s place.” On the street he glanced at Faith. She was staring down at her watch, for heaven’s sake.

  She looked up, frowning. “Mel’s? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before.”

  It was Cody’s turn to frown. Mel’s place was one of the most popular restaurants in Boston. She must have heard of it.

  “It’s in Beacon Hill, in an old house…”

  “La Renaissance? Mel’s place is La Renaissance?”

  “Yeah.” Cody concentrated on driving. The evening was not going as he’d predicted. He worked in variables and probabilities. When the data didn’t produce the kind of results he expected, he needed to back away from the problem and ponder it until he figured out where he went wrong. Clearly he didn’t have time to do that now, but he was definitely going to have to reassess once he’d dropped Faith at her home tonight.

  “So who’s Mel?” Faith asked, considerable amusement in her voice.

  Mel Stewart had become a good friend. He was a brilliant chef, a creative genius with food. “He owns the restaurant,” Cody said. It dawned on him that he knew that, but he shouldn’t expect Faith to. He added hastily, “To me Mel Stewart is La Renaissance and I forget that other people don’t see it that way.” They stopped at a light and he took the opportunity to look over at her.

  Faith smiled that wide generous smile of hers and said, “Well, I can’t complain about being taken out to La Renaissance. Thank you, Cody.”

  Her comment shot a burst of warmth through him. He didn’t analyze it, he just went with the pleasure it brought him. He decided this was going to be a terrific evening after all. He was going to enjoy himself, even if Faith did have the tidiest house he’d seen since he moved out on his own.

  Cody Simpson was not a jerk.

  Faith ruefully admitted that to herself about a half-an-hour after they’d arrived at La Renaissance. He had a beautiful smile that made her tingle right down to the tips of her toes. His use of it had put her so at ease that she’d shoved Uncle Andrew’s visit and Ava Taylor’s ultimatum into a back recess in her mind. She was here with a very sexy guy and that was all she wanted to think about.

  Mel Stewart stopped by their table to chat. La Renaissance took up the ground floor of a wonderful old brick building on Charles Street. The owner’s front-of-the-house visits were something the restaurant was known for, but the esteem with which Mel Stewart, the creative chef, held Cody Simpson, the practical computer scientist, was obvious. “How do you know Mel?” she asked when she and Cody were once more alone at their table.

  Cody was cutting into his appetizer, a chunk of Ahi tuna served with compote of red peppers and corn that had been artistically mounded beside it. A sprig of oregano adorned the top and two slender pieces of crisp bread completed the display. “I like food and I don’t cook much,” he said, before he popped some tuna and compote into his mouth.

  “Well, the food here is certainly wonderful.” Faith had a bowl of creamy soup in front of her, a combination of carrot and squash that was heavenly.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Cody
said. He picked up his glass and considered the wine, a white that blended perfectly with both the fish and the soup. “So I came here a lot. Mel visited my table to chat the way he does and pretty soon he noticed that I’d become a regular. So instead of chatting about the weather, we got to talking about each other.”

  It sounded so simple. “And that’s the way the friendship started.”

  Cody took a sip and nodded. “Then one day Mel was complaining that he needed to control costs and the system he was using wasn’t giving him the data he needed. I was between jobs so I offered to write him a more efficient program.” He stopped and shrugged, then ate some more tuna.

  “And so you did.” She smiled at him. He grinned back a little ruefully.

  “Yeah, as much as I could. You should see Mel’s kitchen. It seems chaotic if you don’t know anything about running a restaurant kitchen, but it’s pretty organized—at least that’s what Mel tells me. It looks like a disaster area to me. Mel claims my program has helped immensely.” Cody laughed. “I have to take his word for it.”

  Faith looked around the restaurant. The décor was spare and simple, with clean modern lines that utilized chrome, white linen and glass. The modern design provided an elegant contrast to the gracious proportions of the heritage construction. The servers moved through the three large rooms that made up the restaurant with a quiet efficiency. “It’s hard to believe that behind closed doors the kitchen is so totally different from the eating area.”

  Cody laughed. “Yeah, you’d have no idea looking around here, would you?” He shot her a questioning look. “It’s sort of like people. You get an idea of someone and then they go and do something totally unexpected.”

  Faith’s heart skipped a beat. “Unexpected?”

  “Sure. You know, the mild mannered guy who suddenly throws a rock through his neighbor’s window. Or the woman who lives in the suburbs bringing up the kids, but was once an exotic dancer.”

  Faith choked back a laugh. “There are a lot of those?”