Grateful for her empathy, Natalie crouched and gathered the rest of the newspaper from the floor. “Do you think Jonah will believe me when I tell him how important this is and how much I need his help?”
“I’ve never known him to turn his back on someone in need.”
“I’m counting on that.”
The older woman surveyed the living room one more time. “But I’ve never seen him make such a mess of his apartment, either. He’s not acting like his usual self these days.”
“I don’t expect this to be easy,” Natalie said. “But whatever happens, I appreciate your help in letting me wait for him in his apartment. I was afraid if I came to his door he wouldn’t let me in. But I doubt if he’ll throw me out once I’m here. I should get a chance to say my piece.”
“Unless he thinks you’re a burglar who’s climbed in the window. You’d better speak up quick.” She chuckled again and handed over the sections of the newspaper she’d picked up. “For your scrapbook.”
Natalie made a face.
“Someday you’ll want these.” Her dark eyes twinkled. “For your bambinos.”
JONAH EMERGED from the subway at midnight, bone-weary and convinced that tonight he would finally sleep. The late-afternoon fire had been a hell of a blaze, but what mattered was that they’d put it out and miraculously without casualties. The insurance companies would have huge damage costs, but in Jonah’s mind, structural damage was inconsequential if no lives were lost.
The fire had played havoc with everybody’s schedule including his, but what the hell. He didn’t have anything in particular to get home for. In a way, he dreaded going back to the apartment with its memories of Natalie. His shift at the station had come as a welcome relief, and although he didn’t wish fires to happen, fighting this one had worked off a lot of his tension.
He should have cleaned the place before he left for work, should have wiped out all the evidence of her being there so he wouldn’t have to face it tonight. But he hadn’t, and he was too tired to handle it now. He might end up sleeping on the couch if the pillows on his bed still carried the scent of her perfume. In the morning he’d tackle the job of removing anything that would stir up memories. Thank God he was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to miss her right now.
Or so he figured. But when he entered his apartment house and started up the stairs, he remembered the clasp of her hand in his and the brush of that furry white coat. He felt again the perfection of her mouth and saw the surrender in her gray eyes just before they made love. Damn. He’d thought he was too tired to ache like this. Apparently not.
He wanted her to be there in the apartment waiting for him. He imagined the comfort a man could find in her arms after long, punishing hours at a demanding job. And he cursed himself for being a fool. The sooner he gave up that kind of fantasy, the happier he’d be.
When he opened his apartment door he wondered how her special scent could still be there after several days. His imagination must really be playing tricks on him if he—
He stopped in his tracks and stared at the rumpled figure asleep on the couch. Dear God, it was a homeless person. After all his assurances to Natalie that giving out keys was no problem in this building, one of his neighbors had presumed on his good nature and allowed some poor old guy into his apartment on this cold, rain-drenched night.
Jonah had to hope that if a neighbor had let the vagrant in, they’d also decided he was harmless. Although Jonah pitied the poor soul in his ill-fitting clothes, and although he didn’t intend to send him out into the cold, he’d sleep better having a conversation with the guy before turning in.
Watching the figure huddled on the couch, he gave the door a shove.
As it slammed shut, the vagrant bolted upright…and his tousled mop of hair shifted.
Jonah’s breath caught as familiar gray eyes blinked at him and a lock of blond hair slipped out from under what was obviously a black wig. His heart began to pound. “Natalie?”
“What time is it?”
“After midnight. Natalie, what in God’s name are you—”
“Where have you been?”
He blew out a breath. He’d fantasized coming home to the warm welcome of her arms. He hadn’t pictured being given the third degree. And he definitely hadn’t pictured a mustache. “What are you doing here, and what’s up with the disguise?”
“I didn’t want anyone to recognize me coming into your apartment.” She touched her mustache. “Is this still straight?”
“Not exactly.” He was beginning to absorb the idea that she was here, that she’d deliberately come to see him and that she’d even taken care to protect his privacy. She hadn’t answered his question about why she’d come, but he could only think of one reason. She wanted to make amends.
He should be cautious. He should ask a whole lot of questions before desire short-circuited his brain. But damned if he wanted to be cautious. He just wanted her. In his exhausted state, all the reasons why that was a bad idea deserted him, driven away by the thought of holding her, kissing her, being deep inside her again.
“Why don’t you take off the mustache now that you’re safely here?” He tossed his coat over a chair. “In fact, I’ll help you.”
“No!” She put a protective hand over the fuzzy thing. “It’s too hard to put back on.”
He sat down on the couch. “We’ll figure something out in the morning.” He reached for her. “I wore one of these for Halloween once. I’ll bet I can—”
“Don’t.” She backed away from him. “Please leave my mustache alone. I need it.”
“Right this minute?” He gazed at her in bewilderment. “I hate to break it to you, but I’ve figured out who you are.” Damn, but she looked cute, though. He edged closer. “And kissing a woman wearing a mustache doesn’t really appeal to me.”
“I don’t want you to kiss me.” She stood up and her pants fell down. “Oh, dear.” She grabbed for the pants as a pillow slid out from under her shirt and plopped to the floor. “Everything’s coming apart!”
He tried not to laugh. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! It took me forever to get this arranged, and now I’ll have to do it all over again.” She pulled up her pants. Clutching a handful of the material to keep the trousers up, she started to reach for the pillow on the floor.
He grasped her wrist. “I figure you’ll have to do it all over again, anyway,” he said quietly.
She looked into his eyes and sucked in her breath, making her mustache flutter.
He couldn’t help grinning at the picture she made. He might be willing to work his way around that mustache, after all, if she was so hell-bent on keeping it. He stroked the inside of her wrist with his thumb. “Don’t tell me you disguised yourself and came all the way over here in the middle of the night just to talk.”
Her heated gaze said she wanted him, but she pulled away from his grip. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“You just want to talk.” He couldn’t believe it. Maybe this was another game. He forced himself to lean back against the couch, willing his raging hormones to settle down. “About what?”
She abandoned the pillow and sat down at the far end of the couch. “There’s something I didn’t tell you Sunday morning.”
He braced himself. For a woman who was so open and honest in his bed, she sure had a lot of secrets out of it. “Such as?”
“After my father died, my mother became very depressed.”
“That makes sense. You said they were married a long time.”
She fixed him with a piercing gaze. “No, I mean very depressed. She took no interest in anything, wouldn’t get dressed, barely ate. Her only activity was putting together jigsaw puzzles, and the pieces began to peel because she’d cry the whole time she worked on them.”
She had his attention now. Briefly he considered she could be making all this up, but she’d have to be one hell of an actress to fake her concern as she described her mother’s condition. Besides, th
e detail about the jigsaw puzzles wasn’t something a person would include in a lie.
“I tried everything,” she continued. “In fact, Bobo was one of my failed experiments. I ended up taking him to live with me because she wasn’t giving him anything more than the basics. Then when you saved him from the lake, she commented that you’d make a good romance hero.”
He was afraid that’s where she was headed with this story. He got an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. “So you said.”
“I didn’t think anything about it, but a week or so later she told me she’d started writing a book. She hasn’t let me read it, but I’ve seen the stack of pages. More than that, I saw the change in her. It was miraculous, Jonah.”
As he felt the trap closing, he tried to find a way out. “So it’s her first try at something like this?”
“Her first serious try.”
“Then I don’t suppose there’s much chance she’ll get the book published.”
“Oh, there’s an excellent chance. She’s a good writer. Unfortunately for her talent, my father was a literary critic for the Times. After she saw the way he ripped apart books by well-known writers, she didn’t dare finish her own novel and submit it for publication. She swore me to secrecy, so I don’t think he ever knew about her dreams.”
Jonah shook his head. “That’s too bad.”
“But understandable. I loved my dad, but he was an intellectual snob who didn’t think a book was any good unless it had a dismal ending. My mother liked romances with happy endings. She and my dad had a running argument about whether escapist fiction had any place in literature. What I’m saying is that she knows publishing because of my father, and she knows the romance market from her own reading.”
“Oh.” Jonah felt that door slam and searched for another. “Listen, I’m sure there are lots of guys down at my station who would love to help her. I can give you several names. I’m sure the chief would cooperate.” He’d relish getting the chief involved, come to think of it. The chief owed him.
“I tried to convince her of that.” She gazed at him. “But it’s as if you’re her talisman, Jonah. She seems to believe that a connection to you will give her book the spark it needs to get published.”
The knot in his stomach tightened. “So that’s why you spent thirty-three thousand dollars on me.”
“Yes, but—”
He held up a hand. “The yes part is enough for now. Why didn’t you tell me all about your mother from the beginning?”
“I should have.”
“Yes, you should have. That first night in the cab, you should have spilled the whole story.” And he never would have kissed her, he thought. He’d thought her motivation was to be with him, and he’d been turned on to that, no matter how much he’d tried to deny it and make fun of her extravagance. Instead, she’d spent the money for her mother, not because she’d lusted after him. That made all the difference.
“I wanted to get to know you first,” she said. “My mother’s very vulnerable right now. Harsh criticism could stop her in her tracks, so I had to make sure you weren’t the kind of guy who would make fun of her efforts.”
“And getting to know me included sleeping with me?” Anger sharpened his tone, but he couldn’t help it.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
“There’s a very effective way you could have stopped it. You could have said no.”
“I should have.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I was very selfish.” She looked down at her lap and murmured something else.
“I didn’t catch that.”
She glanced up, her eyes brimming with misery. “I was having too good a time! So I sacrificed my mother’s project because I couldn’t bear to take a chance that when I told you, you wouldn’t make love to me.”
He was across the couch immediately and took her by the arms. “Then it wasn’t all part of the plan? You made love to me because you wanted to?”
“How can you even ask?”
“Oh, Natalie.” Just as he’d decided to kiss her, mustache and all, she wiggled away from him and scrambled off the couch.
“But we’re not doing it again!” she said, backing away.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because this time I’m here because of my mother. And all I want to know is whether you’ll help her.”
She was like a dog with a bone, and he might as well face this thing. “Will she make sure that I’m not recognizable as the hero?”
“I promise she will. I’ll make sure of it. After what I’ve been through in the past few days, I really understand your position on that.”
“Then I’ll help her.”
Natalie’s face lit up like the Fourth of July. “Thank you, Jonah.”
He stood and started toward her. “And now that I’ve agreed to help, would you please take off that mustache?”
“No.” Her eyes darkened with regret. “Because we’re not making love. It can only mess things up. I don’t want you to think I’m taking mental notes for my mother’s book, and you could easily think that and abandon the whole program. I’m not taking that chance.”
She had a point. But he didn’t want to acknowledge it when it would mean not making love to her tonight or any night in the near future. “Listen, Natalie—”
“Will you still help, even if I don’t go to bed with you?”
That got him. “Of course! What sort of guy do you think I am?”
“Thank you, Jonah. I’m very, very grateful. Oh, there’s one other thing. I’ve told my mother that I bid on you because I was crazy about you. So now she thinks that we’re sweethearts. Your helping her is only a by-product of us being lovers.”
“So I’m not supposed to touch you, but as far as your mother knows, we’re going at it hot and heavy?”
“That’s right.”
He passed a hand over his face. He must be insane to get involved with this crazy deal. “Okay.”
“Great. As soon as I get the pillow fixed right and the wig straight, I’m leaving.”
“The hell you say! I’m not letting you wander around out there by yourself at one o’clock in the morning.”
She paused, as if she hadn’t thought about that situation. “I’d planned for it to be earlier when I went home. Why are you so late?”
“A fire. It took a lot of us to get it out.”
Her gray eyes clouded. “Are you okay?”
“Tired, but okay. You’re staying here until morning, Natalie. I don’t want any argument on that. You’re so worried about your mother. How would she react to knowing you were out alone in that crazy disguise at this hour?”
“You’re right.” She sighed. “But if I stay, we can’t make love. I’ve thought it all through, and I’m sure it’s the right decision. Please help me keep my promise to myself.”
He groaned. She knew exactly how to get to him. “Then take my bed tonight. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“The couch is fine for me.”
“No, it’s not. There’s no door on the couch.”
“But—”
“Natalie.”
“Okay, okay.” She started toward the bedroom.
He watched her toddle back there in her strange getup and he ached to go with her. But she didn’t want him to. He hated thinking she might be right about this, but he had a suspicion she could be. He wouldn’t want to think about her mother’s book while he made love to her, but he probably would anyway, and he’d wonder if everything they did would end up in print. “Lock the door,” he said.
She nodded and kept going.
12
NATALIE RATED IT the worst night of her life. She took off the wig, coat and trousers and slept in her shirt. The mustache drove her crazy, but the worst part was lying in the bed where she’d made such wonderful love with Jonah. At least twenty times during the night she left the bed and started to unlock the door.
It was an old lock and required some wiggling, and after she’d s
truggled with it for a couple of seconds she’d come to her senses and remember why she must not go to Jonah. He’d agreed to help her mother. That fragile gift was balanced on a narrow ledge, and any sort of motion on her part could cause it to fall and shatter. With a sigh she’d go back to his bed to toss and turn for another hour.
At dawn she got dressed. The pillow was in the living room, so she decided not to bother incorporating it into her costume. She tightened her belt to cinch up the waist of the trousers as best she could. Once she got the wig on, it looked okay, but the mustache had a bad case of bed-head, with one side smashed like an accordion. She tugged and patted before finally giving up and creeping out into the living room.
The sight of Jonah looking cramped and uncomfortable as he lay asleep on the couch nearly undid her. He’d used his jacket as an inadequate blanket, and her pillow was under his head. She fought the urge to go over and kiss his unshaven cheek, but that would lead to more complications.
She should never have made love to him in the first place. There must have been a point before they’d climbed into bed Saturday night when she’d known he could be trusted with her mother’s project. She could have asked him then and avoided all this mutual frustration and pain. But she hadn’t recognized that point and once it was gone, passion had taken over.
She decided to leave the pillow, not trusting herself to wake him up. She found a pad of paper and a pencil by the telephone in the kitchen and wrote down her mother’s name, address and telephone number. She hesitated, wondering what else to write. Finally she scribbled thank you and signed her name.
Tiptoeing into the living room again, she left the pad of paper on the coffee table and leaned down to pick up her derby from where it had fallen on the floor beside the couch.
His hand shot out and grabbed her with such suddenness that she lost her balance and he pulled her easily to her knees beside him. “Going somewhere?”
Her heart thumped rapidly at the dark intensity in his eyes. “Home,” she murmured.
His grip tightened. “Without saying goodbye?”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
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