“Whoever gave you this tux has excellent taste.” She ran her fingertips over the finely woven wool. “I’ve seen designer tuxes that aren’t this nice.”
“It’s Calvin Klein.”
“Who did you get it from? The concert pianist in unit C?”
“Got it at a yard sale.” He wryly smiled as he moved a step or two past her, farther into the living room. “So tell me what’s broken and how I’m supposed to use a tux to repair it.”
The picture of girlish innocence, she tucked a fingernail between her teeth and started for the darkened kitchen. Carter followed her, enjoying the view every step of the way.
Khela was cuter than hell in a sleeveless white tank, denim shorts and white Keds with white anklet pom-pom socks. Carter’s thick eyebrows shot upward. He hadn’t seen anklet pom-pom socks since he used to watch the girls’ tennis team practice in high school. It was nice to see that they still made them, and that pretty girls with sexy legs still wore them.
Not that Khela Halliday was a girl. Falling into step behind her, he had no trouble seeing that she was most definitely a woman, confirmed by her supple curves and gentle swells in all the right places.
“You’re staring at me,” she said, not turning around.
“You’re scratching,” he observed, setting his toolbox on the spotless counter of the center prep isle.
She clenched both hands into fists, forcing herself to quit raking her nails along her inner forearms. “I have a condition,” she said uneasily, inwardly cursing herself. “Half the time, I don’t even know that I’m scratching.”
He took her right arm and examined it, lightly stroking his fingers along the red weals her scratching had produced. Khela’s skin responded, adding a fresh crop of goosebumps to the angry stripes joining her wrist to the crook of her elbow. “What is it?” he asked.
“The Ebola virus,” she deadpanned. “I’ll be dead by morning.”
He snatched his hand away before logic kicked in. She’d be a bag of skin filled with liquefying organs if she had the Ebola virus. She would not be standing before him as flushed and pretty as a figure in an Impressionist painting. “Is something bothering you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“A lot of people get hives when they’re stressed out,” he explained.
“How ’bout you get to fixing my busted hotbox and leave my ugly welts to a dermatologist?” She pointed to the light fixture centered in her ceiling fan. “The lights went out for no reason.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his expression and tone frosty as he went to the light switch and flipped it.
Khela took a deep breath to settle her nerves. She hadn’t meant to snap at him, and she wished she could take her obnoxious remark back. He had come, so far so good, and he had a great tux, double good. Now all she had to do was ask him. “Mr. Carter?”
He raised an eyebrow as he went to the utility closet built into the wall next to the stove. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Stop calling me ‘ma’am’,” she complained irritably. “I’m younger than you are.”
He opened the closet and unlatched the tiny steel door concealing the circuit breaker. “You don’t know how old I am.”
“You’re thirty-two.”
“Guess my weight, I’ll give you a prize,” he teased. “How did you know my age?”
“Daphne.” Everything she knew about him came secondhand from Daphne, who would perch on a counter or lean against the wall and chitchat with him while he made his repairs.
Daphne was the reason unit A required so many little tweaks and adjustments lately. Breaking things was more fun than simply calling Carter and inviting him over for coffee and conversation like a normal person. Not that Khela should be throwing stones at that particular glass house. A normal person would be able to speak to Carter as easily at home as she did out on the street.
Even though she had lived in the brownstone he maintained for so long, she hadn’t had cause to run into him often. She worked from her loft bedroom, which doubled as her office, and she could go for days without leaving her unit. Only since Christmas, when Daphne had been visiting and seen Carter shoveling the sidewalk, had Carter become a more frequent presence in her apartment.
There was something about him that rendered her guarded when he was in her home. He seemed too comfortable, as though he owned all he surveyed. When he turned his lovely, disquieting eyes on her, she felt as though she were his property. She should have been offended, but she wasn’t. That fact alone was enough to send her into hiding whenever Daphne schemed to get him to unit A.
Khela shook off her feelings of anxiety to watch Carter work. She guiltily stared at the smoky-gray glass floor tiles as Carter surveyed the circuit board. He immediately zeroed in on the problem. The switch powering the kitchen was in the off position. He flipped it to on, and the instantaneous reaction launched his testicles into his neck.
Every appliance lined up on Khela’s long black granite counter was zapped to life: the blender, toaster, mini flat-screen television, radio, electric can opener, food processor and sturdy Kitchen Aid mixer whizzed, blared, screeched, whirred, grated and clanged in a cacophony of ear pollution that had Khela and Carter dashing around the room, hitting switches and buttons and snatching plugs from outlets.
When the only noise left was the whir of the ceiling fan, which spun in a blur at its fastest speed, Carter grabbed Khela’s wrist and pulled her to the circuit breaker. “The next time you want to get me up here, don’t turn on every dang appliance in the place. Just flip any one of these switches. You could have shorted out my whole building with this little stunt.”
He released her wrist, gently brushed her aside and closed the door to the circuit board. He had his toolbox in hand and was heading for the door when Khela overtook him and blocked his way.
“Your accent becomes stronger when you’re angry,” she blurted. “Alabama, right? Decatur?”
Too late, he tried to hide the fact that he was impressed with her guess. “I was born in Decatur but I grew up in Speake.”
“I’ve got family down South,” she explained. “You learn not to confuse the Decatur speech with that of Tuscaloosa or Mobile.”
“You got a good ear, Khela.” He tried to nudge past her. “Are you holding me hostage, or…”
“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she awkwardly apologized. “Earlier. When you asked about my hives.”
“Not a problem.” He tried to step around her, but she glided into his path, holding her hands up.
“Mr. Carter, please. I’d like to speak to you for a minute.” His forward momentum carried him right into her waiting palms, and the heat of her delicate hands through his T-shirt stopped him clean. “I do have something on my mind,” she admitted. She abruptly dropped her hands, sticking them deep in her pockets as though punishing them for enjoying the feel of the hard muscle under his shirt.
“Does that something have anything to do with my tux?”
She nodded. Her ponytail danced and Carter wondered what that hair would feel like tickling his bare chest.
“I have an event to go to tonight,” she explained. “It’s formal, and it’s business-related. I’m expected to maintain a certain image, and I can’t show up without—”
“A date,” he finished for her.
“Right.” She swallowed nervously.
“So you’re asking me on a date.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “No!” she quickly corrected, gesticulating madly. “No, this isn’t a date. It’s a favor. A great big-ass favor that I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for if you agree to do this for me.”
He turned a shoulder toward his tux to hide a sly smile. “Why do you want me?”
Because you’re so frickin’ hot! was her first response, which she suppressed only by biting the corner of her lip. She also couldn’t tell him that the sight of him in his worn jeans made the backs of her knees sweat, or that the offhand, casual smiles that came so easily to his se
nsuous mouth made her thighs quiver. If he only knew that his scent was the one she recalled on particularly lonely nights when she sought a moment or two—or three—of battery-assisted tension release. “You have the right look,” she said lightly. She scratched the back of her right hand and started pacing the living room.
“Miss Halliday?”
She stopped pacing, stopped scratching. “You can call me Khela.”
“What time should I pick you up, Khela?”
She dazzled him with a smile of relief and gratitude. “The event organizers are sending a car for me at seven.”
“That really doesn’t give me much time to get home and slap on that tux.”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Didn’t Daphne tell you?”
“She said you lived nearby,” Khela recalled, although nearby could be any number of towns—Somerville, Mattapan, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain. Boston was one of the smallest big cities on the east coast.
“I live across the street,” Carter said. “In the white limestone with the dark green awning.”
“That explains how you get here so fast when Daphne calls,” Khela reasoned. “Do you take care of that building, too?”
“Sure do,” he said.
“That’s a nice trade-off,” Khela said, assuming that he lived in a Commonwealth Avenue townhouse for free as part of his compensation for his superintendent services.
“I’d better get a move on it,” he said. “I’ve got a quick repair in another unit before I wrap myself in this tux.”
The apples of Khela’s cheeks deepened in color, and Carter had the feeling that her blush did not bode well for him. “Actually,” she said, slanting her gaze away from his, “if we’re going to do this right, you’ll need a little more than just a tux…”
“How much more?” he asked warily.
“Do you have a suitcase?”
* * *
Carter slung his weekender into the trunk of the limousine blocking one of the two lanes of westbound traffic on Commonwealth Avenue. Typical Boston, the inconvenienced drivers forced to pass in the one remaining lane communicated both displeasure and interest through loud, sustained honking.
Inside the limo, Khela sat with one leg elegantly crossed over the other, her hands neatly resting on the clasp purse balanced on her knee. She leaned forward and wrapped her knuckles smartly on the tinted window to speed the driver along. “How long can it take to stow a duffel bag?” she muttered irritably.
Looking more carefully out the window, she saw that the limo driver was laughing and talking to her date.
She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. I have a date, I have date! she sang in her head. He was her super, but no one at the convention would know that. She was tempted to knock on the window to signal him to get into the car. The drive to the Harborfront Regency Hotel was short, but Boston traffic was unpredictable, and Khela didn’t want to risk being late.
The driver slid into his seat and Carter entered the cabin. He positioned himself on the long bench seat, his back to the driver and facing Khela. They had agreed to meet at the car, so Khela was getting her first good look at him. And damn, did he ever look good.
She’d intended to school him on some of the authors he would meet, but her intentions evaporated in her contemplation of him. As good as the tux had looked lying across the back of her sofa in its drycleaner’s bag, it looked a thousand times better on the man in front of her. He sat with the masculine elegance of James Bond, one leg hung lazily over the other, his right elbow propped on the armrest. Above his warm brown eyes, his hair had been combed off his face, the left-side part executed with almost surgical precision. His cuff links—surely imitation platinum, and the best she’d ever seen—glittered in the glow from the track of pale amber lights circling the roof of the cabin.
When he opened his mouth, Khela half expected him to offer her a medium-dry martini—shaken, not stirred. Instead, he offered an apology.
“I’m sorry I dawdled back there,” he said as the driver smoothly eased the limousine into traffic. “Jerry makes a lot of runs to and from the brownstone, so I see him fairly often.”
“Was he surprised to see that you were a passenger this time?” Khela uncrossed her legs and, after carefully rearranging the long skirt of her diaphanous gown, brought her feet up to the seat and made herself more comfortable. To Carter, she looked like a contemporary Aphrodite in repose upon the dark aniline leather.
He cast an amused glance at the privacy screen between them and Jerry. “Nothing much surprises Jerry.”
Carter was thankful she had heard none of Jerry’s snickered speculations as to why it had taken Carter so long to “bag” Khela, or his lascivious suggestions as to what activities they would engage in during the course of their “lovers’ getaway.”
Without disabusing Jerry of his pornographic notions, Carter had responded to his comments with good-natured chuckling. He was spending the weekend with Khela, but she’d made it perfectly clear that this was a legitimate business trip, not a monkey-business trip.
Not that Carter would mind a little monkeying around.
The pale apricot of Khela’s gown imparted a warm honey glow to her bare arms and shoulders. The dusky-peach blooms in her cheeks came from nature rather than from a makeup counter; Carter knew that because they intensified in color the longer he stared at her. When she dipped her head, dangling diamond baubles at her ears glittered, and graceful tendrils of her upswept hairdo caressed her long neck.
He shook his head ruefully. From ingénue to starlit goddess…this possibly could be the longest weekend of his life.
“Exactly what kind of convention is this?” he asked, eager to think of something other than the way the subtle spice of her perfume made his heart jog faster.
“Ro—” she started, catching herself mid-word and finishing with “iting.”
“Ro-iting?” Carter repeated with a James Bond-worthy lift of an eyebrow. “Never heard of it.”
“I’m a writer, Mr. Carter, and we’re going to a big writing thing.” A rapidly spreading blush softened her prim delivery. “It’s the East Coast Writing Association Convention.”
“Hmm,” he grunted quietly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Khela was suddenly second-guessing her decision to bring him with her. To her own ears, the East Coast Writing Association Convention sounded like a gathering of authors wandering from vendor to vendor collecting pens, bookmarks and other promotional schwag from industry folk. There was that aspect to it, but there was the other side—the reason Association members turned out almost in full every year: the writers.
Every year, fiction and nonfiction authors in every genre arrived en masse in the host city to reconnect with distant friends, attend workshops devoted to their craft and career, celebrate their successes, and bemoan their failures, all in the company of their fellow artists. The pens, notepads, tote bags, T-shirts and complimentary books just happened to be dandy fringe benefits.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I knew you were a writer, but I didn’t know that you were so big.”
Stung, Khela stared at him. She’d been amazed and gratified that he had accepted her invitation, but now a stab of regret made her head slightly achy. It wasn’t her style to flaunt her career or her success, but for reasons unknown even to herself, she wanted him to be impressed. She would have settled for interested. Or at the very least, she’d hoped that he would have asked her about her work.
But in all fairness, they didn’t know each other, not at all. He had come to her apartment fairly regularly lately grateful for her flirty friend. Khela smiled to herself, imagining Daphne’s reaction when she saw her favorite super transformed into super sexy.
Chapter 2
“Men are the weaklings, the cowards, the frauds!
Women don’t need to be rescued, it’s that men need to be heroes!”
—from Secrets and Sins by Khela Hallid
ay
Daphne’s pop-eyed, wide-mouthed reaction to the sight of Carter in his formalwear was nothing compared to Khela’s increasing amazement—and alarm—at his performance as the evening progressed. From the moment he helped her from the limo and onto the red carpet in front of the Harborfront Regency, he had been gracious, charming, and had displayed the manners of a royal consort. He was the first man under the age of sixty that had ever pulled out her chair to seat her for dinner.
He was too good to be true.
He was also one of only two men seated at the head table, and the only one of her ten tablemates who wasn’t a romance author.
Garland Kenny, who wrote lavish medieval historicals for Warrington House under the name Margaux LaPierre, was almost two feet shorter and a hundred pounds heavier than Carter. Garland seemed just as captivated by him as the eight women were.
“All this industry talk must seem terribly boring to you, Mr…?” Garland ventured halfway through the first course—an endive salad with caramelized onions, apples, spiced pecans, goat cheese and sherry-walnut vinaigrette. “I’m sorry, but Khela neglected to give us your name,” he smiled, revealing two rows of ultra bright capped teeth.
“Forgive me, Garland.” Khela leaned over her untouched salad. “This is—”
“Carter Radcliffe,” Carter interrupted smoothly, with a devilish grin at Khela. Her expression of mortification and the reappearance of another ferocious blush made him take one of her hands in both of his and pat it as he undertook an explanation. “When Khela and I first met, she thought Carter was my last name. She called me ‘Mr. Carter’ for years before she realized that Radcliffe is my family name. She still calls me Mr. Carter from time to time. But only when she’s feeling particularly fond of me.”
Mr. Fix-It Page 2
