by Elaine Fox
She went home, was relieved to find both front porches empty, and let Doug out of his crate to pee one last time. She was just heading for the back door when a face—white and ghostly—popped up in the back-door window.
Lily gave a little shriek and felt pinpricks travel like mercury along her skin, before recognizing the face as belonging to her next-door neighbor, Nathan.
She opened the door. “Oh my God, Nathan, you scared me half to death.”
Doug bolted out the door, growling, and grabbed onto Nathan’s pant leg. Nathan jumped back, holding himself against the house as Doug, sounding fierce as a weed whacker, revved himself up and pulled against Nathan’s jeans.
“Doug, no!” Lily scolded, reaching down and swatting the dog smartly on the behind.
Doug, shocked at the contact, gave a yip and let go, looking up at Lily as if she’d kicked him.
“Go on,” she said sternly, pointing to the yard. “Go!”
Doug slunk down the back stoop and into the yard, becoming nothing but a ghostly figure himself in the moonless night.
“I’m sorry about that,” Lily said. “I’m working on him, but he’s still not very fond of men, though he’s gotten a lot better around Gerald. Do you want to come in?”
Nathan nodded emphatically. “Sure, yeah, thanks.”
They went back into the kitchen, Lily closing the door firmly on Doug.
“So what were you doing out there?” Lily asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know,” Nathan said, scratching his scalp and making his curly hair jump with the movement. “I saw you drive up and wanted to tell you something.”
Lily went to the cabinet, got a tall glass, and filled it with water. She held it up to Nathan. “Want some?”
He shook his head.
She downed half of it on the spot. Her head was beginning to hurt from the margaritas and her tongue felt dry as leather. “So what did you want to tell me?”
Nathan seated himself at the kitchen table. “Did you have a date tonight?”
Maybe it was the margaritas, but she was feeling especially annoyed at Nathan right now, popping up in her window and now being all weird about whatever it was he wanted to say.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“With Gerald?”
“Yes,” she said again.
Nathan nodded and swallowed; she could see his prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall with the effort.
“Were you, uh, out all night? Or did you come back here? Maybe…have a drink or something?”
“We came back, briefly. Then I went out again. Why?”
He swallowed again and looked at the table.
“Nathan—”
He raised his head, his face all puppy-dog eyes and unguarded feelings for her, cutting off what was about to be a curt get on with it from Lily.
“I thought I saw someone outside your house tonight,” he said finally, rushing the words. “Trying to get in the back door. I’m really sorry. I don’t mean to scare you or anything, but I wasn’t sure what or who it was. I just thought you should know. I’m sorry.”
Lily’s blood froze in her veins. Someone trying to get in the back door. So it hadn’t just been the wind that night. Something strange really had been going on.
“Who was it? Someone—a man? What did he look like?” she asked.
“It was a man, I don’t know who. He—he was looking in the windows first, then came to the back door. It was hard to see just what he was doing. It was only about an hour ago, so it was dark. But I could swear he was trying to jimmy the lock or something. He was kind of…bent over.” Nathan hunched his shoulders and held his hands in front of him as if trying to pick a lock.
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Lily demanded.
Nathan blushed. “Be—because I thought, uh, that is I saw you go on your date and I, well, at first I thought maybe it was the guy you went with. Maybe he’d come out into the yard or something, to I don’t know, to get away from Doug maybe.”
Lily laughed dryly at that.
“It wasn’t until he heard me open my door and kind of rushed off into the darkness that I thought it was really suspicious. He went back toward the trees by the alley, so I knew he wasn’t a guest. That’s why I came out and watched a while, to make sure he was gone. And I checked out your door, but it looked okay. Then I waited for you to get home.”
Lily sat down at the table across from Nathan, both hands circling her water glass. How in the world would she ever get to sleep tonight?
“Do you think I should call the police now?” Nathan asked.
Lily sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they could do now. The guy’s been gone at least an hour. And you said yourself the door looks normal.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. But maybe they could send a patrol car. You should just—”
At that moment, a loud bump sounded on the back door, and both Nathan and Lily nearly flipped out of their skins. Doug’s yelping told them immediately that he’d tried to enter and discovered the dog door locked.
“Dammit.” Lily got up and opened the back door. Doug skittered on the back stoop for a minute like Fred Flintstone starting his Stone Age car, then shot into the room like a ballistic missile. Without a sideways glance at Nathan—who’d raised his feet up onto the chair at the sight of his nemesis—he headed for the stairs, and Lily heard him trampling up them as if the very devil was after him.
“Oh my God,” she said, gaping at the wake he’d left. She hadn’t seen him that scared since the night of the wind.
Nathan scooted his chair back and craned his neck to look out the back door. Then he bolted to his feet, chair overturning behind him, and hit the kitchen light switch.
As darkness swept the room, Lily spun. “Nathan, what the he—”
“Shhhh!” he hissed at her. “Who’s that?”
Ten
Brady crossed the darkness of his backyard, unaware of the two pairs of eyes in Lily’s kitchen following his every move, and headed toward the porch. It was a warm night, and part of him wished he had a hammock, so he could sleep outdoors.
No doubt Lily’s wretched dog would eat him alive first thing in the morning, though.
He was barefoot, because he couldn’t find his other flip-flop, just like he couldn’t find his other running shoe the other day, and the new grass felt cool on the soles of his feet.
He looked off across the yard, toward Nathan’s yard and beyond. He’d just freed a cat he’d found tied to a tree, and it had bolted in that direction. He’d lost him in the dark as soon as the animal had leapt the fence between his yard and Nathan’s.
Who in the world would tie a cat to a tree? he wondered. Had it been some kid? Somebody who’d found the cat and hoped to talk his parents into letting him keep it? It had been tied with twine attached to a cheap plastic collar, but there hadn’t even been a bowl of water nearby, so whoever was trying to keep it in one place had done a pretty bad job of it. The thing had been yowling its head off, which was how Brady had found it in the first place. Just over his back fence in the tree-lined lane behind the row of houses. The lane used to serve as an alleyway for deliveries. Now it was just an overgrown, underused pathway.
As he crossed the lawn he looked up at Lily’s side of the house. All was dark. He wondered where she’d gone after the early demise of her date. He also wondered what was wrong with that Gerald guy for bringing her home so early, then leaving, even though she’d looked like a million bucks.
He’d have said the guy was gay, since he was such a snappy dresser, but Brady didn’t get a gay vibe from him. It was more that he seemed asexual. With a giant stick up his ass.
Brady reached the back porch and sat on the old rocker that had come with the place. He leaned his head back, gazing at the sky, and thought about Lily Tyler.
She was a bundle of problems, that was for sure. She fancied herself in love with Mr. Snappy Dresser, had a dog who hated men, and
a father with a rather large, if figurative, shotgun. Add to that a body that wouldn’t quit and the passion to go with it, and you had a woman that a man running away from Crazy Tricia would be a fool to get involved with.
He should write her off, he thought, and see about this Penelope woman Megan Rose had talked about. Except that he wasn’t supposed to be seeing any woman, not until he could form a reasonable friendship with one. And try as he might, he couldn’t characterize what he had with Lily Tyler as a friendship. There was too much sexual tension in the mix.
Brady must have fallen asleep in the chair because he awoke with a start to the sound of lowered voices. He slid slowly upward in the chair and looked across the porch to see two figures in the dark, whispering.
One was Lily. And the other—though this was hard for Brady to believe, and he actually blinked hard several times in order to make sure—was Nathan from next door.
The most shocking part of all: They were embracing.
Lily rode the elevator up to her father’s office, reliving the surreal scene of the evening before. She wished she hadn’t had so many margaritas at Georgia’s. For one thing, she liked to be on her toes when she met with her father. For another, she wished she could remember exactly what had led to that bizarre embrace Nathan had given her when she had walked him out the back door.
In the wake of the scare about someone trying to break into her house, and Doug’s bizarre behavior, Nathan had made the generous—if frightening in and of itself—offer for Lily to come stay with him and his mother. What that would accomplish, Lily had no idea, though it was obvious Nathan thought it would lead to something like domestic bliss.
But as she’d tried to put him off that idea, he’d blurted something about being so worried about her, then he’d latched on to her like some kind of monkey spawn afraid of losing its mother. She’d had to pry him loose and shoo him home before things got even more awkward.
The elevator doors opened, and Lily stepped off, waving to the receptionist as she made her way down the long, richly carpeted hallway to her father’s corner office.
Jordan Tyler wasn’t an exceptionally tall man, but he projected tallness with an immaculately tailored air of power. His high-ceilinged, wood-paneled office with velvet drapes and leather-upholstered furniture, imposing bookcases, and discreet, but full, bar might have dwarfed another man, but Tyler’s ice-blue eyes and nerves of steel made him the most intimidating thing in the room.
He was direct, no-nonsense, and so sure of his superior intellect that others almost invariably questioned their own in his presence.
Including his daughter. Early on, Lily had learned to disguise her intimidation, knowing there was nothing her father loathed more than someone he wanted to respect succumbing to his domination. Still, something inside of her would quiver when her father got angry, try though she might to suppress it.
“So how are things in that frightening little ’burg you moved yourself to?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and interlacing his fingers across his stomach.
They tried to meet once a month for lunch, to eliminate the risk of losing track of each other altogether, Lily assumed, but it was frequently canceled due to her father’s demanding schedule. It was canceled again today, but not until she had arrived, so they were doing an impromptu catch-up in his office before the important meeting he’d had to schedule.
“I don’t know why it scares you, Daddy. Just because it’s small, doesn’t mean it’s small-minded.” She crossed her legs at the ankles, the way her eleventh-grade etiquette tutor had taught her. “And things are fine. Work is going well. I’ve got several very popular classes, including the one on nineteenth-century authors for freshmen that I proposed. I just finished grading the finals, and almost all of them did well. The students really got into it.”
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, nodding, his cool blue eyes bestowing approval on her.
She couldn’t help but feel good under the approbation, even though she felt pathetic for still needing his approval.
She took a deep breath. “So, Daddy, Gerald told me about Hawaii. That he’s having to leave for a few weeks. I understand it’s a great opportunity for him. And it was your idea?”
“In a way, yes, I suppose it was. But mostly he was chosen because he’s done business with this company before, when he was in the West Coast office, you know. So he has the contacts.”
Lily nodded, steeling herself. “That’s good. Although…I have to say I’m a little disappointed. He’s going to be gone practically the whole summer. And we were just starting to get to know each other. You know, as…on dates, I mean.”
Her father nodded and leaned forward, his elbows on his desk. “I know that. I even mentioned that to Gerald, was concerned myself on your behalf, but he didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Is everything going all right with you two?”
Lily blushed. She knew her father wanted this relationship almost as much as she did. And she hated to disappoint him, hated it more than disappointing herself sometimes. What made this worse, however, was that just a few weeks ago she’d been so excited about Gerald’s asking her out that she’d gone on and on to her father about what a great future she believed they could have.
And maybe they still could. He was, after all, talking about marriage. It was just…that awful kiss, that weird date.
“Everything’s going fine,” she said, as calmly as she could. She couldn’t even imagine talking to her father about the merits or import of a good or bad kiss. “As a matter of fact, on our last date Gerald said a lot of positive things about our future. He…he said he thought we were on ‘the marriage track.’”
Her father beamed and leaned back in his chair. “Excellent! I like that in a man. Planning, foresight, open discussion. I hope you told him you thought so, too.” His brows rose, and those cool blue eyes fixed her with their anticipated response.
“Well, of course.” She swallowed and looked down at her hands, knowing she had not done so, exactly. Hadn’t really been given the chance to give her yay or nay to the idea. “I know you and I have talked about how I feel about that. Gerald seemed to think, though, that this opportunity in Hawaii was too good to pass up, even though I registered some disappointment that he was going away for the whole summer.”
During which time she’d be living next door to Temptation Incarnate.
“It is a good origination for him,” her father said, nodding. “It’ll be quite the feather in his cap, you know. And I’m not the only partner who needs to be impressed before he can be brought into our ranks.”
“Oh please, Daddy, you know as well as I do that you’re the only one who counts. whatever you say, goes, and everyone knows it.” She smiled. “But, I’m just wondering, aren’t you impressed enough with Gerald already? I guess I’m not clear what’s holding up his partnership. You do nothing but sing his praises to me.”
“I am very impressed with Gerald,” he said. “And I’ll be more impressed after he lands these clients in Hawaii. It doesn’t hurt a man to have to work hard for what he wants.”
Lily sighed, thinking that he should have to work harder for her too. “I’m sure that’s true.”
“It probably won’t hurt you and Gerald any, either. Let distance stoke the fire a little, honey. There’s no need to rush into this.”
Lily couldn’t help it, she rolled her eyes. “Daddy, I’d hardly say waiting two years for a first date is ‘rushing into’ anything. We were just starting to know each other as, as romantic prospects.” She bit her lip. “And now he’s going to be gone for a month or two. It’s just bad timing, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know why it couldn’t have waited.”
Her father raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that she knew made other men quail. “I know you’re unhappy about it. But you’ve got to let the man make his own decisions, Lillian.”
She looked down at her lap, smoothing the fabric of her skirt. “I know that. Of course I know that. And he has ma
de his own decisions.” Along with a few of hers, apparently.
“Don’t you respect that? You don’t want a man you can walk all over, do you?” He gave her a gentle smile.
She laughed slightly. “No, I really don’t. And I do respect his decisions. I’m just…worried, I guess. I don’t like having to stop things in midcourse.” She squeezed her hands together until her knuckles turned white. “And…you know, Daddy, I feel a little like I’ve done nothing but respect his decisions. I’ve waited on his decisions. Based my life around his decisions and when he’s going to make them. I can’t help thinking: When is it going to be my turn?”
She was suddenly angry, but at whom? She wasn’t even sure. At Gerald for being so self-assured? Her father for being so subtly, yet powerfully, involved? Herself for letting these men walk all over her? She knew that her father didn’t deserve this outburst, but she couldn’t help it. Didn’t she have a right to express her anger?
Of course, it wouldn’t do to make him mad.
The phone buzzed. Lily exhaled silently. She needed to pull herself together. Her father respected control more than anything.
He picked up the receiver. “Yes.” He paused, listening. “Tell him I’ll call him back in five minutes. And get me that file.”
He hung up and studied Lily a moment. “Listen, I understand what you’re feeling, Lillian,” he said. “But you need to get over this idea that marriages are something to rush into. Isn’t that a lesson you learned a long time ago? Don’t overlook your own experience in these matters. Gerald obviously feels that he has things to do, important things to accomplish for his career, before going ahead with a relationship.”
“And career always comes first,” she said, her anger flaring despite her best efforts to quell it.
Her father sighed and, perhaps sensing the depth of her agitation, said, “Honey, it’s not that the job comes first, necessarily, it’s that it’s a balancing act. I myself underwent a tremendous amount of career pressure before I could marry your mother. She understood, and that went a long way toward convincing me that she was the right woman to be my partner in life. Your relationship with Gerald is not going to implode just because he goes away for a few weeks. Take a deep breath and calm down. You’ve got time. You’re, what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”
