by Lisa Plumley
“A wild guess.” He readjusted the angle of his foot on the coffee table, grimacing at the pain the movement brought him. He didn’t want to be a baby, but his toe hurt like hell. It would be a bitch driving back home.
“If I move in for the next couple of months—say, until the new year—it’ll be good for both of us,” he said. “You’ll be able to put your renovation money to its intended use—restoring your house. And I’ll already be here, so working on your renovation will be a snap. As a bonus, I won’t have my mother hovering over me while I’m in town, trying to make me eat my vegetables as if I were still six years old.”
She smiled. “With my mom, it’s milk. ‘Does a body good!’ I think I’ll need to be completely gray-haired before she believes I’m a grownup.”
They laughed. Sam leaned forward. “Do we have a deal?”
Holly still looked hesitant. “What about my design plan? We didn’t exactly agree on renovation ideas, you know.”
“Tell you what. All I ask is you let me make my case for an alternate design. If you don’t like it, okay. We’ll go with your idea instead. The decision’s all yours to make.”
“Very gracious of you…considering it’s my house under discussion here.” Holly smiled. “Just kidding. That sounds like a workable compromise to me. When do you want to start?”
“Let’s hammer out the details tomorrow over breakfast.”
At her nod, he had another suggestion. “Shall we seal the deal properly?”
“Properly?”
“With a kiss.” He felt his grin widen. “Shall we seal the deal with a kiss?”
She stared at him for a second. Then, laughing, Holly put out her hand. “Are you a slow learner, or what?”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying.” He accepted the handshake she offered, then reached for his boot. “Now that that’s done, I need to ask you a favor.”
“Umm, sure. What is it?”
“Would you drive me to the doctor? I think my toe is broken.”
Chapter Three
“Oh, my God!” Holly bent over and peered at Sam’s foot more closely. Now that he mentioned it, his toe did look a little…unusual.
“Umm, you know the cartoon where the coyote has an anvil dropped on his foot and it blows up like a big furry balloon?” she asked, poking tentatively at his stockinged toe.
“Ouch! Yeah?”
“That was actually pretty good, compared with this.”
“You’re making jokes now?”
Holly glanced at him. His eyebrows drew together, making him look surprisingly fierce. Clearly, he was not amused.
“You are! You’re making jokes at an injured man’s expense,” Sam said. “I can’t believe it.”
Okay, so her jokes never did go over very well. That didn’t mean she couldn’t try to cheer him up, she reasoned.
“I’m sorry. I really am.” She actually did feel fairly awful about smashing his foot with the design book. It had seemed like a good strategy at the time. She could hardly just let him maul her right in her own kitchen, could she? Great kisser or not, she barely knew him.
“Wait here,” she told him, heading to the kitchen to get the phone. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m a cripple, where am I going to go?” Sam grumbled as she passed him.
Men acted like such babies when they were hurt. Holly felt bad about it, but it had been an accident, after all. She hadn’t meant to really hurt him.
“I do not have furry coyote toes, either,” he called from the living room.
Hiding a grin, she dialed Brad’s pager number. There were some advantages to having a boyfriend who was a doctor, even if the two of them were temporarily separated. She was sure he’d agree to come over and have a look at Sam’s injured toe. Brad liked to feel he was rescuing people. It was one of the things that made him a good doctor.
Plus, a house call would save her and Sam a drive to the emergency room and probably a three-hour wait for a doctor there. And if Brad just happened to get a look at her hunky new roommate when he dropped by, well…what was wrong with that?
When Holly returned to the living room with a bottle of pain reliever, the rest of the wine, and Sam’s wineglass, he eyed her warily.
“Here.” She tapped some of the medicine in her palm and handed it to him. “This ought to help a little.”
He squinted at the label, then up at her. “How do I know you’re not trying to poison me?”
“Fine.” She dropped the medicine back in the vial and snapped the lid on. It wasn’t until Holly glanced up again that she realized Sam had been joking. He was smiling at her, giving her the same charm-oozing smile she’d accused him of using on the waitress. Suddenly the room felt too warm, their position too intimate, his appeal too dangerously real.
Too bad that smile worked so well on her, too.
The phone buzzed in her hand. Grateful for the opportunity to think about something else besides Sam, Holly answered it.
“Holly! I told you not to page me unless it was an emergency,” Brad squawked in her ear. She’d forgotten how loudly he spoke on the phone, how overwhelming his presence could be, even from a distance.
“It is an emergency.” She covered the phone with her hand and mouthed, “It’s Brad” to Sam. He looked interested, if a little confused.
“The Bad Boy himself?”
Holly frowned and waved her hand at him to be quiet.
“Can you come over here, please?” she asked Brad. “I think my new roommate has a broken toe. I was hoping you’d take a look at it.”
“I’m a G.P., not a podiatrist. Can’t you just take her to the emergency room? It’s getting late, and I’ve got appointments in the morning.”
She couldn’t believe he was arguing with her over this. “He’s really in a lot of pain,” Holly said, doing her best to ignore the way Sam was scowling at her and waving his hands. She might have known not to make the awful admission he was in pain, especially to another man.
The phone line was silent. “Brad? Just come on over, okay? For Pete’s sake, I’m sure Sam will pay you, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
She could practically hear Brad’s interest sharpen. “Sam?”
“My roommate. I told you someone was moving in, remember? Don’t tell me you forgot…”
He hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t believed her in the first place. Holly could hear it in his voice as Brad went through some lame explanation about how rushed he’d been the last time they talked. She smiled, feeling less and less unspontaneous by the second.
“Elevate the foot,” Brad said. “I’ll be there shortly.”
The line went dead. Holly blinked, then replaced the phone in its stand. She turned to Sam. “He’s on his way.”
“It’s broken, all right.” Brad pinched Sam’s bare big toe between his fingertips and waggled it a little.
Sam turned gray, but remained silent. Good thing, too. He appeared to be biting back several choice words. Holly doubted whatever came out of his mouth would be polite.
“Try to stay off of it as much as you can,” Brad said. “Call my office if the swelling doesn’t go down or if it feels more uncomfortable, rather than less.”
He straightened, pulling his car keys from his pants pocket. As he turned to leave, Holly grabbed his arm to stop him.
“Let you know if it gets uncomfortable? That’s it?” she exclaimed. “You’re just going to pack up and leave now? What about medicine, what about a cast?”
She looked from Sam to Brad and back again. She’d arranged poor Sam on the sofa as comfortably as she could, with his bare foot propped on both pink-fringed throw pillows. It might have been a mistake to use two pillows—she’d somehow elevated his toe to roughly nose-height. Holly made a mental note to try a single bed pillow instead and turned to face down Brad.
Horribly enough, he looked about to laugh. “I can’t put a cast on a toe, Holly. A broken foot, sure, but not a broken big toe.”
“Must
be tough to maneuver around all those other toes, eh Doc?” Sam quipped from the sofa.
Holly didn’t find Sam’s pain funny in the least. “I want you to do something right now, Brad. There must be something you can do.”
Sighing, Brad took off his glasses, holding them in one hand while he rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Brad!”
“I’ve done all I can.” He handed one of his business cards to Sam, shaking his head sympathetically. “What did you do to him, anyway, Holly?”
“Me?”
Sam looked at her with renewed curiosity.
“Yes, you.” To Sam, Brad added, “Watch out. This woman’s a walking recruiter for personal injury lawyers. One time she knocked a ladder out from under me when I was changing a light bulb, up near this ridiculously high ceiling. I took the whole light fixture down with me.”
They all glanced upward. “I just bumped into the ladder,” Holly protested.
“Another time she threw a cast iron skillet at me.” Brad spread his thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. “Missed me by that much.”
“I did not! The handle was hot, and I let go of it too quickly, that’s all.” As an aside to Sam, she explained, “I was concentrating on a new recipe. I told him to stay out of the kitchen.” She glowered at Brad.
“Naturally, it’s not limited to other people. Did Holly tell you about the time she bashed herself with a garlic press? Gave herself a really bad bruise on the collarbone,” he went on blithely. “I wouldn’t have thought kitchen utensils were so dangerous.”
To his credit, at least Sam didn’t laugh. Most people laughed at the garlic press story.
“Then there was the time—”
“That’s enough for now,” Holly interrupted, steering Brad toward the front door. “Thanks for stopping by. Let Thomas know I’ll be calling him tomorrow to get a second opinion on Sam’s toe, would you?”
Thomas White was Brad’s partner, the doctor he shared office space with. Brad would have preferred his own office, Holly knew, but he couldn’t afford to go it alone yet.
“Thomas is an obstetrician,” Brad told her. “Toes are hardly his specialty. Take my word for it—all that’s required is rest. Sam will be fine.”
Sam waved from the sofa. “Thanks, Doc. And thanks for the warning, too,” he added with a grin, nodding toward Holly.
She scowled. So much for making Brad jealous with her new roommate. Instead, Brad and Sam seemed intent on doing some sort of male-bonding thing, although she couldn’t imagine why.
They had nothing in common, aside from gender. Brad was a successful doctor, respected by his peers. Sam was…not. Brad was organized, neat, ambitious, and blessed with model-quality good looks. Sam was…actually kind of scruffy-macho-looking, and if he were any more relaxed, he’d be asleep.
And now he was her roommate. Holly hoped she’d done the right thing. Closing the front door behind Brad, she went to check on Sam in the living room.
“You and Brad don’t go together very well,” he remarked.
The pain reliever she’d given him must have taken effect, because he seemed in much better spirits than he had earlier.
“What makes you say that?” Holly fluffed up the throw pillows in the brown armchair Brad had been sitting in, then bent to brush a piece of lint from the edge of the sofa.
“For one thing, you didn’t give me your business card ten minutes after we met,” Sam replied, dropping Brad’s beige engraved card on the coffee table.
She scooped it up and put it beside Sam’s wineglass, where he’d be sure to remember it later. “I didn’t do your bookkeeping, either,” she pointed out in Brad’s defense. “If I had, you can be sure I’d have given you my card, too.”
“Okay, then, for another thing, you wouldn’t have embarrassed a friend for the sake of a funny story.”
“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Holly lied. So what if she was a little sensitive to Brad’s teasing? It would have been much more embarrassing to admit her embarrassment. Besides, when she and Brad went to parties together, everyone else seemed to find his jokes funny.
“Anyway, how do you know I wouldn’t?” she protested. “You don’t know—maybe I go around lampooning my friends all the time.”
Sam grunted noncommittally. “I doubt it.”
Holly raised her eyebrows.
“I can’t explain it,” he said with a shrug. “But I still think it’s true. The two of you don’t mesh.”
She didn’t know how true that could be when he couldn’t even explain it properly. She shrugged right back at him. “You’re wrong. Brad and I are perfectly well-suited for one another.”
“Well-suited?” He made a face.
She’d definitely have to think up another phrase to describe her relationship with Brad.
“Yes. Brad is exactly the kind of man a girl dreams of. Even my mother loves him.” It was true. Her mom had all but hired the Goodyear blimp to broadcast the news when her daughter had begun dating Brad the Doctor.
Sam looked up at her. For once his expression was serious. “Do you love him?”
Despite everything, Holly hadn’t expected that. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I? Brad and I had planned a nice life together.”
What a strange thing for him to ask. She leaned closer to Sam, intent on picking up the wine bottle so it wouldn’t leave a ring on the coffee table. The next thing she knew, he’d caught hold of her arm and was gently pulling her down.
“Sounds real cozy,” Sam said. “Like a stockbroker’s convention.”
Holly had to brace one hand on the sofa back to keep from toppling onto his lap. Their faces were only inches apart.
“And anyway, you can’t ‘plan’ love,” he added quietly. “Brad doesn’t deserve your loyalty.”
“It’s not just—”
Sam pressed a fingertip to her lips to quiet her. She was too surprised by the tenderness of the gesture to move away.
“I had to know,” he said. “I had to ask, because even though we just met this morning, I’m already crazy about you. I had to know if there’s a chance for us to—”
Crazy about her? How could that be? Stunned, she tried to pull away. His hand on her arm held her still for the rest of his words.
“—if there’s a chance for us to be together. I know this sounds crazy. I always thought love at first sight was just another name for lust, but now…well, now I think maybe it’s more than that.”
“Sam—” Her voice failed her. Holly took in a huge breath and tried again. “I don’t—”
“I do want you.” His voice was quiet. Serious. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t. But that’s not all there is to this.”
His gaze shifted from her eyes to her face. He moved his hand higher, stroking his thumb across her cheek in a tiny caress. The way he looked at her was somehow curious, appreciative, and unmistakably honest, all at the same time.
This couldn’t be happening. Holly pushed away from the sofa, away from him.
“You’ve had too much wine.” She grabbed the wine bottle and nearly clobbered his injured foot with it in her rush to get away from him. “Maybe too much pain reliever, too. I’m sure you won’t remember any of this in the morning.”
Sam didn’t move. “Yes, I will. I didn’t have that much wine. And even if I didn’t remember it, you would. You’d remember, and wonder, and pretty soon we’d be right back here talking about it again. So we might as well deal with it right now, don’t you think?”
Holly thought she might be hyperventilating. “This is insane,” she managed to say. Then she made good her escape to the kitchen, leaving Sam stranded atop his pillows and—she hoped—unable to follow her.
She didn’t know what to do. He’d seemed perfectly sane earlier. Holly set down the wine bottle, saw that her hand was shaking, and hugged both arms around herself to keep that unsteady feeling from spreading to the rest of her.
It didn’t work.
Clarissa wouldn’t have p
ushed so hard for this roommate arrangement if her cousin really was unbalanced, would she? No, of course not. Clarissa had known Sam since childhood. Surely he couldn’t have hidden some kind of crazed love-at-first-sight tendencies for that long.
Maybe this was just Clarissa’s twisted idea of a practical joke. It was possible. Holly had been the unwitting victim of a number of her best friend’s schemes. Usually they were funny only to Clarissa. Sidling to the doorway, she peered around the corner at the back of Sam’s head, fully expecting him to be convulsed with laughter that the joke had gone over so easily.
He wasn’t laughing.
Okay, so that wasn’t it. Turning, Holly finished the last dregs of red wine straight from the bottle and thought about it some more. Maybe Sam was one of those people who fell in love easily. Maybe he’d just broken up with another woman and he was on the rebound, wanting to salve his ego with the nearest skirt-wearing remedy. Maybe this was simply another attempt to get her into bed, since the kiss hadn’t worked earlier.
More likely, she was blowing the whole thing way out of proportion, she chided herself. Straightening her shoulders, she headed back to the living room and sat in the chair across from Sam. She folded her hands in her lap, then gave him her most level-headed look.
“I don’t believe in love at first sight,” she said.
“Me, neither,” Sam replied, just as evenly. “At least, I didn’t when I woke up this morning.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she went on.
He nodded. “I know.”
Holly flung both arms wide. “See? You’re proving my point!” She’d finally met somebody who was even worse at arguing than she was. “It’s impossible. We barely know each other. You can’t love somebody you don’t really know.”
Sam grinned. He did that a lot, she’d noticed. Unlike Brad. Brad had really missed his calling as one of those guards at Buckingham Palace who were never allowed to smile.
There she went again, comparing the two of them. That had to stop. It wasn’t fair to anyone.
“We should get to know each other better, then,” Sam said.
For some reason, those words made her feel even more panicked than before. Determined not to show it, Holly said, “Well, we’re going to be roommates. I guess we’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted.”
