Chapter 18
“Out! Both of you.” Kathryn was seething with rage, barely controlling the tears that were about to fall. There was little disguising the hurt and humiliation she felt at seeing her erstwhile roommate in the company of a primarily naked brunette, in her apartment, covered in nothing but her massage lotion—and her sheet, having had every pore and orifice no doubt lovingly tended to by the masterful fingers of Walker Hart. Shame on me, Kathryn thought bitterly, for practically losing my heart to this undeserving son-of-a-bitch!
Valerie struggled to find her clothes. Kathryn refused to allow the stranger the dignity of getting dressed in private. “Who told you that you could use my bathroom?” Kathryn snapped, as the attorney tried to scuttle in there with her pile of lingerie and coatdress pressed against her statuesque body.
Well, she’s not much better looking than I am, Kathryn thought in the fleeting moment she allowed herself to compare the invader’s body to her own. The brunette had a good six inches of height on her. So, she was leggier, but who cared—unless Walker was a leg man. The tart looked like a low-rent former beauty queen, with a cancer cabana tan and an expensive wardrobe.
“Valerie Adams—Kathryn Lamb,” said Walker, in a futile attempt to make polite conversation. “Valerie is an attorney—doing some work for Six in the City—for my mother.”
“And I’m sure you gave her all the Six she needed,” Kathryn snapped. She picked up Walker’s rumpled blue oxford cloth shirt from where it lay puddled on the floor near the corner of the couch. It was still warm. “Out! Both of you—now!” She tried to deliberately rip the shirt. If she couldn’t rip Walker’s face off, this was the closest she was going to get; but thanks to Ralph Lauren, the fabric refused to give and her moment of melodrama was destroyed.
Walker’s companion composed herself as she dressed, albeit with most of her dignity stripped away. A quick shpritz of Ysatis behind each ear, and a third one in her ample cleavage, and the lawyer was ready to depart.
“Call me, sugar,” Valerie drawled, bestowing one of those Miss America vaseline-on-the-teeth smiles on Walker, who was trying to remain aloof. Valerie’s voice dripped molasses. “We still have some unfinished business. I haven’t yet had the chance to thoroughly go over your briefs.” She extended her hand to Walker and they exchanged a firm handshake. Then she turned the Southern charm school smile on Kathryn. “You have a good evening,” she said, with no trace of a honeyed drawl.
“You’re going with her,” Kathryn said firmly to Walker, after Valerie had closed the apartment door behind her. She attempted to steer his massive frame toward the door, but he planted his feet.
“Not until we talk through this thing.”
“Mr. Hart, there is nothing to talk about. You make me sick. Against my better judgment, I allowed you to stay in my apartment while your roof is being repaired. You make yourself comfortable on my furniture, eat my food, consume my booze, get in my way when I’m getting ready for dates that you have set up for me—good GOD! You even crash on my bed, and sleep beside me, and tell me how much you want to make love to me— and you have the gall—the audacity—the temerity—to abuse everything I have done for you—my space, my trust , damnit!” Kathryn flung the blue shirt at Walker, fighting the tears.
He tried to smooth out the wrinkles, sniffed the collar.
“Looking for her scent?” Kathryn spat. “Go! Get out! I have nothing else to say to you, unless it’s of a professional nature. You owe me two more dates after Glen Pinsky, for a total of six match-ups, since your fix-up with Eddie Benson nearly got me killed. I don’t know how many guys looking to settle down are expecting to spend their golden years with a woman who was picked up for soliciting in Hell’s Kitchen.”
“Can I get a word in edgewise?” Walker asked evenly.
“No. You don’t deserve to. What could possibly be your excuse for what you did tonight? I feel violated, for Chrissakes.”
“I didn’t think . . .”
“Damn straight, buckaroo. You didn’t think.”
“I didn’t think you’d be home from your date as early as you were.”
“So that gives you the right to get laid in my apartment, using my furniture, my music, my linens, my liquor? You’re a piece of work, Walker Hart.”
“It was just a massage. In my defense, I wasn’t planning to get laid. Besides, you want to find a man to marry, right? And if I recall correctly, since we don’t share the same goal, you opted out of getting involved with me for that very reason. That’s how this whole thing started.”
Kathryn grabbed one of the sherry glasses and took a large swig. It burned her throat. Her fingers were itching to hurl the glass at him, but she would have had to clean up the mess herself. “Now it’s my fault that you brought that woman here? Is it my fault, too, that I had the lousy timing to walk in on you at a critical moment in the development of your friendship? And don’t change the goddamn subject! What whole thing?”
“You and I, Kitty. Us. If we had decided to . . . you know . . . I never would have invited Valerie back to the apartment. But you were out on a fix-up with Glen, so—”
“Walker. There is no ‘us.’ And don’t you ever call me ‘Kitty’ again! This is my apartment, not ‘the’ apartment. I live here. Not you. Not us. You are a guest here. Or rather, you were. It’s over. You abused your privileges. Now, go.” God, I sound like my mother, Kathryn thought.
Walker revisited his defense. “You want to get married. That’s why you came to Six in the City. Therefore, what you do with your social life is my business, because it is literally my job to find you a husband. I don’t want to get married. What I do with my social life is my business. I am a professional acquaintance of yours who became a friend.”
“You sound like a lawyer. And, buster, you made your social life my business when you brought that ‘ho’ into my home. You and your goddamn slutty attorney goddamn deserve each other. Friends don’t take over other friends’ beds and tell them they want to make love.”
“I should hope they do.” Walker smiled.
How could he smile at a time like this? What was the man’s problem? “Are you deliberately choosing to be obtuse?” Kathryn challenged. “Bringing your tramp back to my apartment was wrong. There’s no other way around it. You want to get laid, I don’t want to know about it. Rent a room, for Chrissakes! I don’t deserve what you did to me.”
She threw the bedsheet that he and Valerie had used for the aborted massage. Walker caught it over his arm.
“Wash it,” Kathryn said in a low voice. “Now. The laundry room is open ’til eleven. Or burn that and buy me a new sheet. Of the same quality. It’s a hundred percent cotton, two hundred and fifty threads to the inch. And when you’re finished with the dryer, bring this back to me, folded neatly. Then get the rest of your stuff and go back upstairs to your own apartment.”
“But the ceiling—”
“I don’t care if New York’s bravest find your lifeless body covered in wet plaster tomorrow morning.” Kathryn glared at Walker, seething with rage and hatred.
Walker perched his large physique on the arm of the velvet sofa. “Does this tirade mean you love me?” he asked quietly.
“What?!”
“If you didn’t care about me, you wouldn’t be this upset.” He reached out his arms to her, but Kathryn held her ground on the opposite side of the room. “I’m truly sorry, honey,” he continued. “What I did was really stupid. I wasn’t thinking, honestly.”
“ ‘Honey,’ ” she practically spat. Kathryn waved her hand at him dismissively.
“No. Don’t cut me off, Kathryn. It was a thousand percent wrong to bring a woman back here. My brain switched off. I admit it.”
“Look, Bear. It isn’t that easy. I don’t forgive you. I don’t want your excuses or lame reasons why you had to rip a strange woman’s clothes off on my living room floor.”
Walker reached for the other sherry glass and took a sip of the Harvey’s. He was tr
ying to appear calm, but he desperately needed the drink, and holding the glass kept his hands still, the better to conceal his anxiety. “What I didn’t realize until now—what I didn’t see—and I’m going to say this, and then I’ll leave—is—based upon the intensity of your reaction to seeing me with Valerie— that you love me . . .” There, I’ve said it, he thought to himself. He was pretty sure he was right, but he still had a knot in his intestines. And he was too chicken to admit to Kathryn that he felt exactly the same way about her. What if she rejected him outright? Better that she acknowledge that she did love him but still refuse to be his lover, than to destroy his theory—and his hopes.
“What you didn’t see?” Kathryn retorted. “You’re myopic. You’re seemingly oblivious to your own insensitivity. And I trusted you. You need glasses, buddy, if you can’t see what’s been going on here. And don’t you dare put words in my mouth.”
“If I had thought that there was more here than mere friendship, I guess what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t have brought Valerie back at all.”
“I suppose that passionate kiss in the produce aisle the other night was just a friendly gesture on your part as well. You said you thought I ‘needed it,’ so I guess it was a part of the Walker Hart Community Service Program for Pathetic Redheads.” When he didn’t respond, Kathryn altered her tack. “I’m going on dates, remember?” she said, trying to keep her voice from betraying her true emotions. “If I were in love with you, then I wouldn’t be scouring the city looking for a wonderful, kind, considerate, smart, funny, handsome man to marry.”
“Which reminds me,” Walker replied. “How was your date with Glen Pinsky?”
Kathryn resented his change of subject, but she was tired of going in circles with him. What was she going to say in response to Walker’s statement that she loved him? Yes, I do, you moron, but you’re not remotely interested in the one thing I want more than anything, so I have no choice but to look elsewhere. If he didn’t understand at least the second part of the equation, he was truly denser than she thought him capable of being.
“Glen is a very interesting man,” Kathryn said flatly.
“Ohh.” Walker reflexively stroked his jaw. He was waiting for Kathryn to elaborate.
“He seems gentle . . . well-read, certainly. We’ll see where it goes.”
Walker felt a pang of jealousy. He had met Glen, of course, made the bachelor’s videotape, and was well acquainted with his file. In fact, he’d re-reviewed its entire contents when Kathryn told him that Glen would be one of her bachelors. What did that undernourished, pale-faced pipsqueak have that he didn’t?
“Goes?” Walker swallowed, and Kathryn detected his anxiety. “So does that mean you’re having a second date?”
“I suppose so.” Kathryn smiled like a cat with a bowl of fresh cream. How else could she torture Walker? “I don’t see why not. Perhaps catch a concert, or a movie. He wants to take me home to meet his mother.”
Walker’s expression changed, his eyes widening, his jaw slacking a bit.
“Well, I know it’s a bit odd that the man is probably forty years old and still lives with his mother, but have you seen an English teacher’s salary lately?”
Walker frowned.
“What’s the matter, Bear? Can’t take it that I actually got a nibble, a shot at grabbing the brass ring? On the fourth try, I’ve gotten past the first date. You should be happy that you may score another successful match.”
“Glen told you he lives with his mother?”
“I think so. I mean, he kept talking about how he wanted to take me home to meet her.”
“You never saw Glen’s videotape, did you?”
“No, I never got the chance. When he phoned and said he was an English teacher and we seemed to have so much in common, I figured I’d found out enough from our telephone conversation. I didn’t feel the need to rush over to your office and watch the videotape.”
“So you never saw his file, either?”
“You’re talking about the papers we filled out when we came in to register, right?”
“Those are the ones. So, Glen said to you that he lives with his mother. Present tense. Lives.”
“Yeah, he did. I think. Where are you going with this, Walker? You’re beginning to make my skin crawl.”
“Glen Pinsky’s mother has been dead for six years.”
Kathryn felt a wave of nausea run from her throat down to the pit of her stomach and back up again. She lurched forward and ran into the bathroom.
“It’s right in his file. I just re-read it on Tuesday. Because I knew he had called you. Kitty?” Walker tentatively stepped toward the bathroom, but Kathryn, who was kneeling in front of the toilet like it was an altar, pushed the door toward him, trying to close it in his face.
Walker spoke softly. “Kitty? Let me in.”
“You’re not allowed to call me that anymore.” She retched, then collapsed onto her bottom, embracing the cool porcelain base of the bowl. Her voice was a stunned whine. “You set me up with Norman fucking Bates!” With great effort, Kathryn pulled herself to her feet, opened her medicine cabinet, let out another pained wail, then sunk back down to the floor.
Walker gently knocked on the closed door. “What’s the matter? Is there anything I can do? Besides change that light bulb over the sink?”
“No aspirin and my head is going to explode,” came the muffled voice from the other side.
“My mother takes that holistic homeopathic crap and I never get headaches, so I doubt there’s any upstairs, but I’ll make a deli run and pick some up for you.” Kathryn was silent. “Kitty? Is that okay? I’ll go get you some aspirin right away. Anything else you need?” he asked with genuine concern.
“No, Bear. I wanna die.”
It seemed like an eternity had come and gone between the time Walker left the apartment and when he returned only fifteen minutes later.
Walker gently opened the bathroom door and found Kathryn curled up in the fetal position on the mint green throw rug. “Sorry,” he said when she looked up at him expectantly. “I had to buy these to get the aspirin.” He withdrew a bouquet of snapdragons from behind his back, and fished for the small packet of aspirin in his pocket. “I got a larger bottle, too. Just in case.”
Walker’s gesture bowled her over, especially since, to the best of her recollection, she’d mentioned her favorite flower to him only once before, and they were in the middle of a fight at the time. What made the act seem so incredible was that not only had he apparently been listening to her at the time, but he had actually heard her, processed the information, stored it up for future retrieval, and recalled it at a crucial moment. In Kathryn’s experience with men, where whatever she said to them always seemed to go in one ear and out the other, this was a legitimate first. If she hadn’t been in love with Walker five minutes ago, that little stunt just did the trick.
“Bear . . . that is just about the sweetest thing . . . that’s really adorable.”
Walker knelt and kissed her forehead. “You looked like you needed something to cheer you up a bit. You deserve more than snapdragons but it was the best I could do right now.”
“Well, it worked like gangbusters, you son-of-a-bitch.”
“Hey, I thought we’d stop abusing my mother for a while, okay?”
“How can I stay mad at you when you remembered my favorite flowers?” Kathryn groaned.
Talking a washcloth from her towel bar, Walker soaked it in cold water, then sat by Kathryn’s side and applied the cold, wet cloth to her forehead and temples. She stretched out her arms, and pressed the pulse points on her wrists against the cold tile floor.
“One of us isn’t very good at this,” Kathryn whimpered weakly. “This mating-dating game. This is supposed to be your job—at least for the time being—and you set me up with a rock musician who’s just looking to shag an American chick and get his green card; a laconic vice squad detective, who—if I could get past his lack of conversational abili
ty and the flying bullets, and overlook my false arrest while in his company—might truly have been a swell guy; a movie star who was using your dating service as research for his next flick—never mind that we are women and not experiments—and now . . . you fix me up with the lovely and talented Glen Pinsky who wants me to meet his mother—who it turns out is no longer on this plane of existence. Thank God, Glen didn’t invite me to take a shower at his place!”
Walker reached over to stroke her hair, but this time Kathryn brushed him away. “You’ve got a great track record, Walker Hart. How much did your mother pay you to run her business into the ground, and are you as successful with the rest of your clientele as you are with me?”
“I’m very good at what I do,” he said somewhat defensively. But it sounded hollow. He was not especially happy to be running his mother’s business. He was doing it as a favor and couldn’t wait for her to reclaim it.
While Kathryn lay more or less inert on the bathroom floor, Walker thought about why he was consistently screwing up Kathryn Lamb’s fix-ups. He scrolled through his mind, trying to recall if there had been other clients to whom he had felt something of an attraction. A few names popped into his head, but there hadn’t been anything like the instant chemical reaction that he’d felt when Kitty had entered his world.
Where the rest of his life was concerned, he was one of the most celebrated businessmen on the planet. Since he had temporarily taken over the management of Six in the City, he had scored on average, one match a month that led to the altar. Not a bad track record, he thought. But with Kathryn he’d let his own curiosity about what it would be like to be with her get in the way of his ability to perform the services for which she had trustingly engaged him. She was right: he didn’t want what she wanted—yet he wanted her. And that wasn’t fair to either of them.
What was he doing to himself, and to her, by letting his desire for an involvement get in the way of everything? Rationally, he knew he couldn’t keep her for himself. As much as he wanted to stroke her crazy coppery curls and soothe her fears—and make love to her until they lost their minds—even Kathryn could not drag him before a clergyman or judge to say those dreaded “I do’s.”
Miss Match Page 19
