Bluer Than Velvet

by Mary McBride

  “It’s Sam, Janey.”

  She didn’t sound surprised, but then he always returned her calls as quickly as he could. She had called, Janey told him, to cancel the roast chicken dinner she had promised to fix him that evening. As soon as she said it, Sam realized he’d forgotten all about it. He put another mental black mark in Laura McNeal’s column.

  “No problem,” he said. “We’ll do it some other time.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Janey sounded distracted. “The reason I need to cancel dinner is because Samantha’s not feeling too well. She’s running a temperature and her eyes look kind of glassy.”

  “Poor baby.” Sam meant it. His three-year-old goddaughter, Samantha, was one of the few bright spots in his life these days. Still, Janey had a tendency to overreact even to a sniffle. “Give her a hug for me, will you?”

  “Sure.” Janey was so quiet then that Sam almost thought she’d hung up until she said softly, “Sam?”

  “What?”

  “How long is that…that person going to be there?”

  It took a second for her question to register. “Laura, you mean?”

  “Oh. Is that her name? She claimed to be one of your clients.”

  “Yeah. She is. She’s on the run from an overly aggressive boyfriend. I couldn’t think of any place else to stash her.”

  “I see. So she won’t be staying there too long, then?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Sam said.

  “Well, I’d better go take Samantha’s temperature again. Maybe we can do that dinner next week. Bye, Sam.”

  She hung up so abruptly that Sam didn’t have time to say goodbye, much less ask if there was anything he could do for Samantha. He was debating driving the four miles to Janey’s place when he heard a crash downstairs.

  Laura pulled a footstool over to the fireplace and stood atop it in order to dust the mirror over the mantel. The big mirror had probably been hanging there for decades relatively undisturbed, but the instant she touched it with the feather duster, it fell.

  The damned thing took out every knickknack on the mantelpiece before it crashed to the floor. And Laura, wobbling precariously on the three-legged footstool, wasn’t far behind. She landed hard in a field of broken glass.

  Mirror glass and Venetian glass and art glass.

  Carnival glass.

  Depression glass.

  Man, wasn’t that the truth!

  With the breath knocked out of her, Laura just sat there. She picked up a cup handle, pondered it dismally while she heard Sam come barreling down the stairs. A second later, he cannonballed into the living room, pointing a gun at her.

  “Go ahead. Shoot me,” she said mournfully. “I deserve it.”

  “What the hell were you doing?” he asked, setting the pistol on a table and advancing toward her across the smithereens. “Are you all right?”

  Laura nodded. “I was just dusting. It doesn’t seem to be my forte. I’m so sorry about all…” She gestured wanly to the broken glass that surrounded her. “…this.”

  In a effort to get up, she braced her hand on the floor only to get a sliver of glass stuck painfully in her palm. “Ouch. Dammit.”

  “Don’t move,” Sam ordered as he crunched across the shards.

  He towered over her a moment—a colossus—his legs in the gray sweats looking like two cement highway supports. Then, the next thing Laura knew, he had swept her up in his arms.

  “I’m so sorry, Sam.” She tilted her head against his damp sweatshirt. “I know how much all this old stuff means to you, how attached you are to it.”

  “I’m not attached to it.” He crunched more glass underfoot as he carried her into the hallway. “It’s just here. That’s all,” he grumbled. “And I’m here.”

  So you are, Sam Zachary, Laura thought as he stood there holding her as if he never meant to let her go.

  So you are. And so, it seemed, was she. For the time being, at least.

  She told herself to treasure the moment, wallow in it even, because in her experience, men always meant to let her go.

  Well, except for rotten Artie.

  Chapter 5

  Sam spent the rest of the day working on his garden out in back of the house where the little city slicker was loathe to go. He had planned to use the rototiller to break up another forty or fifty square feet of ground, but after holding Laura’s lush body in his arms, he figured a couple hours of hard labor was what he needed to banish the feel of her from his senses and the thought of her from his brain.

  Even after the clouds moved in and the rain began to splatter down, he continued to drive the spade deep into the earth, turning over the clay soil, adding mulch, and working it all into a soft, friable loam. Every once in a while he’d hear the sound of broken glass tinkling into the trash can just outside the back door, but not once did he look in that direction. Well, once. Okay, maybe twice. But never for more than ten or fifteen seconds.

  He felt so damned disloyal. Like one of the stray ing husbands in his case files. He’d spent the past two years in an emotional and physical limbo, and now, a mere twenty-four hours after Laura walked into his office, that limbo had turned to lust. He was ashamed of the heat that he couldn’t cool off, no matter what he did, and the need that he couldn’t deny.

  When the rain increased from soft patter to outright pouring, he took his tools to the shed then went back into the house, eventually discovering Laura curled up on the front porch swing.

  “Nice rain,” she said softly.

  “We need it.” Sam angled a hip onto the wooden railing. If they remained six feet apart as they were at the moment and only discussed the weather, he figured he could handle it.

  She stretched her arms over her head, which caused her T-shirt to pull out of her jeans, revealing a few inches of sleek midriff.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  Oh, yeah. Sam’s gaze jerked back to her face. “Famished.”

  “Let’s call out for a pizza. My treat.”

  He laughed. “Do you have any idea how close the nearest pizza place is?” When she shook her head, he gestured over his shoulder and said, “About seventeen miles as the crow flies.”

  “Oh.” It was her turn to laugh. “Sorry. I keep forgetting I’m out here in West Overshoes,” she said, riffling her fingers through her blond hair as she gave the swing a push.

  “Southwest Overshoes, technically,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  There was a low roll of thunder in the distance. Laura shivered and appeared to sink farther into the cushions, as if making herself a smaller target, and once again Sam found himself wrestling with the urge to wrap his arms around her. Dammit. He wished he’d stop doing that. He needed to get his mind on something else. Abruptly, he levered off the porch rail.

  “What do you like on your pizza?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said I’ll fix us a pizza. What do you like on it?”

  “Oh.” She blinked. “You mean fix a pizza from scratch?”

  “Yep. What do you like?”

  “Well, anchovies and black olives, actually.”

  Sam sighed. Why the hell had he asked? “How about sausage, green pepper, and onions?”

  “Sure. That’d be fine, too. What can I do to help?”

  “Just drape yourself over a chair, sip a little wine and keep me company,” he said.

  She laughed. “I can do that.”

  “Yeah. I was pretty sure you could.”

  While Laura thought it was kind of cute to make a pizza from scratch, she thought that pureeing homegrown tomatoes to make the sauce that had to simmer for nearly an hour was going a bit overboard. Way overboard, in fact. Hadn’t he ever heard of Prego sauce? she wondered.

  As ordered, she sat in the kitchen, sipping her wine and keeping him company. But by the time Sam dipped his wooden spoon into the pot, tasted the sauce and deemed it “just right,” Laura was half blitzed.

  Not only that, but the st
orm was getting worse. The wind seemed to be really picking up and thunder was rattling the windowpanes. She hated storms. They terrified her. They always had.

  When she was little, her father used to wrap his big warm arms around her for protection, and sing funny songs that made her forget about the storm. Then, after he disappeared, Laura took to hiding in a cobwebby corner of Nana’s attic, pretending she was as small as a mouse, if not invisible. Her mother and Nana kept telling her that she shouldn’t be so afraid, that the house was grounded, but she didn’t know what that meant or how it could keep her safe the way her daddy’s arms once had.

  Now a nearby snap of lightning and simultaneous thunder almost brought her out of her chair.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said, glancing over his shoulder from his stalwart post at the stove. “The house is grounded.”

  “Oh, good.” She still didn’t know what that meant or why it ought to make her feel any less afraid.

  Laura poured a little more liquid courage in her glass, then went to the freezer for a few ice cubes, hating to water down the good red wine, but knowing that by the time the pizza was done, she would be, too, if she didn’t take a few precautionary measures.

  She leaned against the refrigerator a moment, trying to look as casual and unconcerned as Sam, then reminded herself this was a huge electrical appliance, probably capable of delivering a gazillion watts right into her hundred fifteen pound, highly conductive frame, so she returned to her chair at the table.

  Another bolt of lightning hit. The lights flickered.

  “Mind if I wander down to the basement?” she asked, her hand already on the knob.

  By the time Sam replied, “No. I don’t mind. Go ahead,” she had flipped the wall switch and was halfway down the stairs.

  Like most basements, this one was half creepy and half comfortably inhabited. Laura turned right toward the paneled room with its antiquated red-and-green checkerboard tile floor. She wasn’t surprised by the big recliner chair or the rowing machine or the treadmill. The piano, however, was rather unexpected. It was a beautiful, old mahogany spinet with delicately carved legs.

  On closer inspection, she could see that there wasn’t a speck of dust on it. The lesson book propped on the music stand was open, its pages full of red penciled notations, some dated as recently as this week. Laura closed the book enough to read the title. You’re Never Too Old—Teach Yourself Piano in Twenty EZ Lessons.

  “Oh, Sam,” she murmured softly. Her Superman P.I. wasn’t just a gourmet cook and a master gardener. He played the piano, too. She smiled now, suspecting that stashed away somewhere in the house was a needlepoint pillow in progress or a macrame plant holder Sam worked on in the dead of night.

  Overhead, she heard the muted crash of thunder. The lights flickered again. Then they went out. Laura was swamped in darkness.

  “Sam!”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Sam!” she called again, to no avail.

  Okay, don’t panic, she told herself. It’s just dark. That’s all. It was so dark she didn’t dare move for fear of tripping over the rowing machine or breaking her neck on the treadmill.

  “Sam!”

  No answer.

  Laura swallowed hard, but it didn’t do a thing to dislodge the panic that was closing her throat, preventing her from calling out again. There was only one thing she could think of to do.

  She felt her way to the piano bench, sat, found middle C, and proceeded to bang out her own version of an SOS—the world’s loudest, and probably worst, rendition of “Chopsticks.”

  Sam ducked his head and came sideways down the narrow stairs, following the beam of his flashlight.

  When the electricity had cut out, he’d been upstairs searching for candles, telling himself repeatedly that he was taking wise precautions in a storm rather than trying to do something as hopelessly romantic as a candlelight dinner. In the sudden dark, the first thing he’d done was offer silent thanks for the gas stove where the pizza was baking. Then the silence was broken by the bashing of piano keys in the basement.

  She was still bashing them as he made his way down the dark stairs.

  “You can stop now,” he yelled.

  When she didn’t, he aimed the light right at her and yelled again, “Laura, it’s okay. You can stop now.”

  She turned in the light, her blue eyes dilated and wide with fear. “I called and I called, Sam. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I’m right here.” He sat next to her on the bench, nudging her over a few inches with his hip. He put the flashlight atop the piano, its beam angled away from them into a far corner of the room.

  Laura tilted her head against his shoulder and slid her arms around his waist. “I’m such a wimp,” she said, “but storms just terrify me.”

  “It’s okay. You’re safe,” he said, suddenly questioning his own safety, as well as his ability to batten down his increasing, improbable desire for this woman. Not knowing what to do with his hands, Sam placed them on the keyboard. Then, feeling like a total jerk, he began playing the last piece he had committed to memory. Liszt’s “Liebestraum.”

  The sweet, dreamy chords drowned out the rumbling sound of thunder overhead.

  “That’s beautiful,” Laura said on a long sigh, her head still on his shoulder, her arms still clamped around him.

  Sam knew it wasn’t. He was grateful Laura didn’t seem to pick up on the tremor in his fingers or notice his amateurish hesitation in three-quarter time. If they’d been dancing, he thought, this was the equivalent of stepping all over her feet.

  “It sounds like a lullaby,” she whispered. “What is it?”

  “Liebestraum,” he said, still playing. “A dream of love.”

  An EZ piece, he thought disgustedly. The watered-down beginner’s version of the waltz his Jenny used to play so perfectly, so effortlessly. Ah, God. What was he doing, wanting somebody else?

  “Mmm. It’s a lovely dream. You’re good, Sam.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, coming more or less to his senses while he stabbed out a crude “Shave and a Haircut,” and sat up straighter in order to shrug off Laura’s lolling head and disengage her arms.

  He reached for the flashlight. “Come on. The pizza should be almost finished by now.”

  “This is fabulous,” Laura said, licking her fingers while she eyed the untouched piece on Sam’s plate, where he had just conclusively tucked his napkin. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”

  “Go for it,” he said, pushing the plate her way.

  Laura reached between the two candles burning in the center of the kitchen table and snatched up her fifth piece of what had to be the world’s greatest pizza. The crust was to die for, and the sauce! All the fussing and that interminable hour of simmering had definitely paid off.

  “You should start a franchise, Sam,” she said, plopping an errant strand of mozzarella back onto the slice.

  His response was a fairly wan smile that hardly crinkled his eyes at all. In fact, he’d been pretty subdued, almost distant, ever since coming up from the basement. He probably considered her a total wimp for the way she behaved in the storm. Lois Lane, no doubt, ate lightning and thunder for breakfast.

  But his distance had a sadness in it, too, and Laura suspected it had something to do with the song he had played on the piano, but when she’d asked him if it brought back memories, he made it pretty clear that, even if it did, he didn’t want to discuss them. Not with her, anyway.

  She kept having to remind herself that theirs wasn’t a personal relationship. It was purely professional. She had hired Zachary, S. U. to keep her safe from Artie Hammerman. He wasn’t some gigolo, after all, whom she’d retained to wine and dine her, to get her all hot and bothered.

  Artie! Laura realized all of a sudden that she hadn’t thought about him in hours. She even kept forgetting that her eye was now a stunning combination of purple and black and blue, and soon it would be turning a spectacular and queasy greenish-yell
ow. Little wonder Sam didn’t find her all that attractive. Even in the candlelight, she must’ve looked like a featherweight who’d lost a recent bout. Well, she supposed she had.

  With her appetite suddenly gone, she put the last bit of pizza back on her plate. The storm had slackened to simple rain. She wasn’t terrified anymore. Maybe it was time to be brave. About everything. About everyone.

  “I probably ought to be coming up with some sort of plan for dealing with Artie,” she said. “I don’t want to take advantage of your hospitality or over-stay my welcome. Plus, to tell you the truth, Sam, I can’t afford you all that much longer. What was it you quoted me? A hundred dollars a day?”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said. A little grin tipped up the corners of his mouth. “Never decide anything by candlelight, Laura. That’s my motto. You’ll always regret it.”

  As if on cue, the lights came back on and the refrigerator resumed its low, reassuring hum. Both Laura and Sam laughed softly. Sam cupped his hand around a flame and blew out one candle, then the other.

  “We’ll come up with some kind of a plan tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll clean up the kitchen. Why don’t you just go on to bed.”

  From his tone, Laura got the distinct impression that Sam wasn’t just being polite. He wanted to be alone. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy, but she faked a yawn just to make him feel better.

  “Good night, Sam. See you in the morning.”

  “See you in the morning,” he echoed, sounding not at all enthusiastic about the prospect.

  He saw her well before morning.

  In fact, just a little after midnight, another storm front rolled through, nearly as violent as its predecessor. Sam hadn’t been able to fall asleep, so he lay in his bottom bunk listening to the wind as it lashed the branches of the pines and pin oaks that surrounded the house, worrying about the gazing ball in the sideyard but not enough to rush outside to retrieve it, hoping Laura was sound asleep and unaware of the fierce lightning and thunder.