"I just finished the first shock treatment," he explained. "And I'll have to do it again tomorrow, if it needs it. Until then, you need to stay out of the water." He grinned. "And before you ask, no quick dips, no wading, no wriggling your toes around in the shallow end. Nothing where you get wet. You got that?"
"But why?" I asked sullenly. "It looks terrific."
"Because the chemicals I just used are toxic."
"Oh, come on, now, "I whined. "We take in chlorine every day, don't we? In our drinking water?"
"No more questions," he said, a bit sternly, from my point of view. "Just promise me you'll stay out of the pool until I tell you it's safe."
"So, what could happen, really?" I persisted. "Like if someone were to just sort of fall in—accidentally, maybe? Would their skin be burned, or…"
He sighed. "Think burning eyes, pimply skin rashes, nausea, diarrhea, projectile vomiting.... You want me to go on?"
"No," I agreed grudgingly. "I'll try to…I'll stay out of the pool."
"Good, because I forgot to mention one of the most painful things that could happen to someone who just happened to fall in—accidentally."
I rolled my eyes heavenward. "And what might that be?"
"She could, and probably would, get her butt blistered."
Missing his meaning at first, I looked down at the close-to-sparkling water of the pool with renewed respect. "Good God," I gasped. "Can pool chemicals really do that?"
"It's possible, but your pool guy will definitely be more than happy to do it. Stay out of the damned pool until I tell you different."
I made a face. "You don't need to threaten me," I said haughtily.
"Try not to think of it as a threat, Gidget, sweetie. Think of it as a promise."
With that and a quick wink, he walked away, but when he turned his head slightly, I could see that the smug sonofabitch was grinning. And for this, I'd tossed my dignity to the winds and gone virtually topless?
I was embarrassed enough by what had happened at the pool that I couldn't sleep at all that night. Not completely humiliated, exactly, since it had all been sort of playful—even the spanking threat—but embarrassing, nonetheless. I'd been trying, in my usual inept way, to be seductive, and also, as usual, I'd blown it.
Chapter 4
By morning, my embarrassment had turned to irritation, and from there, to anger. Please try to remember, dear reader, that I have never claimed to be reasonable and mature when it comes to things romantic—or much else, for that matter. The truth is, that even at the advanced age of thirty-three, I didn't have a lot of experience in the seduction business. Not only was I shy, but for most of those years, I'd been searching—in vain—for someone who would like me for what I really was and not for what I was pretending to be in order to please him. It may sound like a dumb, self-defeating way to go looking for love, but I have a feeling that's how a lot of people waste their dating years—and end up married to entirely the wrong person. Which was probably why my own dating history had been a mixed bag of basically okay but never great. My two long-term affairs hadn't been all that long-term, and both of those had ended more with a whimper than a bang. There were no ugly words exchanged in any my relationships, and no nasty break-ups, just a lot of mutual, unspoken and slightly morose agreements that we probably weren't right for each other.
My problem was that, from the very first moment I began talking to Dan, I had this very strong feeling that we were right for each other. I'd never had that happen, before, and after the first few days, I was convinced that he was beginning to feel at least a little bit the same way about me. And if he wasn't, then he had to be as blind as a bat. And that made me mad as hell and determined to do something about it. I had spent far too many years fishing in the wrong pool with the wrong bait.
When I went down to my own pool, around noon, the water was sparkling in the hot sun and clear as glass. Dan was nowhere to be seen, so I decided that it was probably safe to go in for a brief swim. Okay, so I didn't really think that it was totally safe. I mean, I wouldn't allow a little kid to paddle around in it, but an adult? Why the hell not—for just a few minutes and covered from head to toe with sunblock?
But first, I needed to change into my adorable new bathing costume and get refreshments.
Twenty minutes later, with a big fluffy towel, a paper plate of Oreos, and a freshly made pitcher of lemonade, I came out of the house, ready for my first swim in Pauline's very own freshly cleaned and sanitized pool. After putting my short hair into a crooked ponytail, I jumped in and swam two laps without stopping. The water was cold but wonderful. I was having a grand time playing mermaid—until the pool guy arrived and spoiled everything.
I was swimming face down, studying the cracks at the bottom of the pool and wondering how swimming pools managed to survive California earthquakes, when an unseen hand reached in and dragged me out of the water by my improvised ponytail.
"What part of 'stay out of the pool' didn't you get?" a very familiar voice demanded. My ears were full of water and my eyes were burning slightly, but I didn't need either of those senses to know who was yelling at me and to know that I was in big trouble.
Seconds later, while I was still rubbing my eyes, he turned the hose on me, full force.
"How much water did you swallow?" he inquired irritably, dropping the big fluffy towel over my head. He didn't seem to notice that I was choking and gagging and spitting water all over him while simultaneously trying to look alluring.
So, instead of answering the question, I got defensive—and cute.
"Not a lot, "I replied sweetly. "Except for the two large glasses I had with lunch, that is." I pointed to the pitcher of iced lemonade I'd brought from the house. "I made it way too sweet, but after I topped it off with a few cups of pool water, it's a lot better. Sort of tart and tangy." I swirled the big spoon around in the pitcher and filled my empty glass with lemonade. "You should try it," I said, handing him the glass. "It's ever so much more refreshing. I think all that chlorine cut the sweetness."
"Thanks," he said, inspecting the suspect lemonade. "But I'm trying to cut back on toxic chemicals in my beverages." He set the glass back down on the table and started to walk away, but when I bent over to collect my wet towel and muttered a well-known expletive under my breath, he took my elbow, flipped the bikini bottoms down a few inches, and dealt my bared backside three resounding whacks with the wooden spoon—still dripping with lemonade.
I shrieked, of course. Not just because I was shocked, but because being smacked across the naked behind stung like blazes. I reached back to defend my unprotected hindquarters from a second sneak attack, but he was already halfway to the gate.
"You can consider those three swats a down payment on my fee," he called over his shoulder. "I'll take five dollars off your bill for each of them. You've got three days to pay up, or I collect my sixty bucks in the same way—and add a couple of smacks as accrued interest."
"I hate you!" I yelled.
He turned around and grinned at me. "No, you don't. You're crazy about me, but if I don't get that sixty bucks in three days, I can promise, you're going to like me a whole lot less. And don't try ditching the spoon. I've got a half-dozen just like it in my little kitchen. The last tenant liked to play at being a chef."
Okay, so he had my number. I've never been very good at hiding my feelings, and once again, my coy little attempts to seem disinterested had failed.
The only upside of being exposed as an inept flirting fraud, I finally decided, was that I was now free to work full time at simply getting him into bed. Forget the romantic niceties and head straight for the best way to a man's heart—which my experience had shown isn't his stomach. And unless I was even worse at the mating game than I thought, it wasn't going to be all that hard. The swats had been a bit painful, but whether unintentionally or by design, he'd landed all of them in what I think of as a highly erogenous zone.
And sure enough, he called later that afternoon t
o ask me to have dinner with him at one of the best restaurants in town—Henry's Hamburger Hut.
"If you can still sit down, that is," he remarked cheerfully. "If not, we can always eat standing up—at that little taco stand next door to the laundromat."
"The Hamburger Hut will be fine, "I said sweetly. "I'll bring a nice, soft cushion."
I came home with mustard on my blouse and a pretty good case of indigestion, but I had no complaints at all about the company. I'm not sure you can actually fall head over heels in love with someone while sharing a pair of greasy cheeseburgers, but that's what it felt like.
When we got home that night, he politely declined my invitation to come in for coffee, but he did kiss me goodnight at the front door—very passionately, I might add, and with one warm hand cupping my breast. Not all that I had hoped for, but a promising start.
I couldn't sleep again, that night, mostly because I kept going over every single word Dan had said to me during our first 'night on the town.' I was hoping to find something to suggest that he was beginning to feel at least a little bit about me the way I did about him. His goodnight kiss had seemed wonderful when it happened, but now, several hours after the fact, my natural inclination to assume that I was a dud in any romantic situation was making it hard to see the kiss as anything more than a friendly gesture. Friend with just a touch of benefits? Which meant—to me, anyway—slightly more than platonic, but essentially patronizing, with a bit of sex thrown in so I wouldn't feel slighted when he failed to ask me out for a second time.
In addition to being kept awake by my usual romantic insecurities, the bedroom was stifling, making falling asleep impossible. I couldn't even open the damned window, of course, because the rusted hulk of the ancient air conditioner was still sitting there, useless, but preventing even a trace of a breeze from slipping through its filthy plastic grill. Dan had promised to remove the beast and install a new unit when he could get to it, but tonight, the room was miserably hot and totally airless.
So, why, I thought suddenly, don't I simply remove the old unit by myself and open the window to let in whatever breeze there was. How hard could it be? It's not like I could make the stupid thing any more broke than it already was. All I needed to do to get some fresh air in the room was pull the behemoth's rotting carcass out of the window and lower it to the floor.
Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're saying to yourself, "She's like five-feet-tall. How the hell does she expect to lift something the size of a refrigerator?"
Aha! But, you see, that's why I toddled downstairs to the kitchen to get the sturdy little wooden stepstool I used to reach things in the upper cabinets. Back upstairs, I placed the stool directly beneath the window, intending to maneuver the monster AC unit across the windowsill a couple of inches at a time, then rest the weight of it against my stomach just long enough to let it (the air conditioner, that is,) settle—slide, really—down onto the stepstool. Clever, right?
You know that old adage that says we learn more in life from our bad decisions than from our good ones? (Actually, I think I may have made that one up, but I'm here to tell you that the advice therein is absolutely true.)
In my defense, I think what happened in the next few seconds may have had more to do with the AC's center of gravity than with a poor decision on my part. (That, and all those inscrutable laws of physics that I knew nothing about, having flunked dumbbell physics in high school two years in a row.) How could I have known that the only thing holding the rusted hulk in place was the window itself, in sneaky collusion with the little metal bar on the top of the behemoth? (Well, that, and—as I would learn later—two small, rusted outside brackets that had long since disintegrated.) Anyway, the moment I wrenched the lower part of the window frame free of the maybe fifty years of encrusted paint and caulking, the hulking AC unit gave one loud groan, and began to move very slowly backward—sort of like the newborn but doomed Titanic moving down a Belfast slipway and into history.
I made one futile attempt at grabbing the hulk before it lurched over the sill and to its death—a lucky miss, as it turned out, since I was spared the indignity of being dragged out the window and waking up either dead or with every bone in my body crushed to pulp. The sound the monster made on impact was impressive, more like an explosion, really, and when I peeked down over the splintered windowsill at what had once been the patio, I was astonished. Who knew an air conditioner had so many parts?
The casualties? Aside from the assault on my hearing and already fragile mental health, that is? A lot of shattered flagstones, one flattened, grotesquely twisted table, two matching and soundly squashed wrought iron chairs, twenty feet of brick wall, and five artificial potted geraniums in varying garish colors. The rusted exterior housing of the hulk had more or less vaporized into a suffocating cloud of reddish-brown dust that was now beginning to settle on the sparkling surface of my freshly cleaned swimming pool like some alien form of mutant algae.
The pool guy was not going to be happy.
So now, not only were my romantic fantasies of Dan making fiercely passionate love to me on their way down the proverbial pool drain, I might be facing a few disagreeable and far less romantic moments with him— and with that big lemonade spoon.
I was in the middle of a debate with myself about whether to call my 'local contact' and request an extraordinarily fast emergency transfer—to darkest Peru, maybe—when I saw a dark figure leap over the tall wooden fence between the Spencers' backyard and mine and run toward the rear of the house. I would have screamed, but with all the dust floating around the bedroom, all I could manage was a kind of hoarse croak. Maybe two seconds after that, there was a tremendous crash from downstairs, accompanied by the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass.
The Iceman, my mind screamed, or one of his bloodthirsty thugs!
And then, miraculously, I heard Dan's voice, shouting my name—well, Pauline's name, anyway. Since it seemed like an appropriate occasion to do something I've never done before in my entire life, I fainted.
Chapter 5
Moments later, Dan was kneeling beside me, with a worried look on his handsome face and his warm hand on my forehead. "Are you all right?"
I nodded, sat up very carefully, and began a garbled and unnecessarily long explanation of what had happened—in order to stall the inevitable. I was expecting him to explode every bit as loudly and colorfully as the Rusted Hulk in the Garden had, but all he did was listen quietly and heave a deep sigh.
"Yeah," he said finally and unconvincingly. "It's the kind of thing that could happen to anyone—I guess."
"So," I inquired sweetly. "I don't get spanked?"
He sighed again. "No, not for this, but I'm still thinking about setting your ass on fire for scaring the shit out of me."
He helped me up from the floor, and together, we went downstairs to survey the damage. The back door had been torn from its hinges and lay on the floor in two splintered pieces, with all its tiny windowpanes broken.
Outside, the carnage was even worse. The patio looked like a war zone might look, if one of the combatants had been dropping air conditioners instead of bombs. Dan reached into the yawning crater where the rusted workings of the dead behemoth had buried itself and picked up what remained of one of the patio chairs.
"Well," he said, shaking his head. "You can kiss your security deposit goodbye, that's for damned sure."
At that point, there was a knock at the front door, but when I started inside to answer it, Dan grabbed my arm, pushing me down behind what was left of a long-deceased rose bush.
"Wait there and stay out of sight until I find out who it is and what they want," he ordered in a harsh whisper.
"Why do I have to—"
"Just do it, damn it!"
So, I did it, which surprised me, since as a committed feminist, I tend to get snippy when a man starts giving me orders. The events of the evening had apparently left me more shaken up than I realized, though, and at this juncture,
I seemed perfectly willing to leave things to a strong Alpha male—the knight in shining armor who had just kicked down my back door to rescue me, whether I needed to be rescued or not. I hadn't told him that I was part of the Witness Protection Program, due to be being pursued by a hired killer, of course. Not only had I been sworn to secrecy, but I had a feeling that sort of information could easily throw cold water on what I hoped was a budding romance.
From my hiding spot, I could overhear only part of the conversation. Two cops, evidently summoned by a neighbor upset by the mushroom cloud drifting over his yard from my exploding air conditioner. A mixed residue of vaporized rust, disintegrating metal particles, and common dirt was apparently beginning to settle on his brand-new patio furniture and retractable awning. I could tell that Dan was doing his best to keep me—the responsible party— from being questioned, but it didn't work. A couple of minutes later, the two officers were poking around in the ruins of my patio, at the center of which was a gaping hole the approximate size and exact shape of a very large air conditioning unit.
"Are you the homeowner?" The taller cop inquired, nudging a twisted chunk of copper coil with the toe of his boot.
"No, I just rent this house," I explained, hoping he wouldn't notice that my hands had begun to tremble.
The cop nodded as he pulled a small notepad from his hip pocket. "Who owns the house?"
"I'm not really sure," I stammered. No one at the DOJ had instructed me what to say in a case like this, so I tried to wing it—with mixed success. "I found the house through a realtor…in a newspaper ad," I said weakly.
I was waiting nervously for the obvious next question—the name of the purported realtor—when the cop stopped scribbling and returned the notepad to his shirt-pocket.
"You'll need to report this to someone, you know. Your neighbor says he's going to file an insurance claim, for sure."
Hero Undercover: 25 Breathtaking Bad Boys Page 82
