In a last-minute concession to vanity, Rachel sponged as much of the stain from her T-shirt as she could, using a solution of baking soda and water to neutralize the odor. Then she applied a pale lipstick and ran a brush through her hair. That was when the buzzer rang and she heard Sherman’s lackadaisical voice. “That Marzinski fellow’s on the way up.”
With anyone else, Sherman would have called for permission. Oh, Joe was slick, all right. He could manipulate and maneuver anyone. Including her. Including Sherman, Including Gladys Rink, which was nothing short of astonishing.
She went to answer the knock at the door.
“Hi, Rachel. Where’s that baby? Where’s little Christ mas Noel?” Gladys had brought an armload of baby toys, I all new. Behind Gladys stood Joe, his face solemn.
“Chrissy’s in the bedroom,” Rachel said as she pointed the way. Gladys took off like a shot, leaving her staring at Joe. He was staring, too, his eyes hungry. He looked as if he couldn’t get enough of the way she looked, and in that moment she wished she’d taken more pains with her appearance.
“Let’s go,” Joe said without preamble.
“I didn’t say I’d go anywhere with you. I have to catch up with my work.” Even to herself she sounded priggish and self-righteous. And she didn’t really want him to go away. It was just that she was so torn, so confused.
“What do you have to do?” he asked tersely.
Rachel didn’t want Gladys to hear this exchange, so she grabbed Joe and pulled him into the kitchen. “Don’t you have a condo crisis you can control? Why do you have to try to control me?” she hissed at him.
“I don’t mean to control you. Get your swimsuit on, ’ll go to the beach.” He looked tired, and there were circles under his eyes. He also looked undeniably handsome and male in the extreme.
“If that’s not control, then what is?”
Joe rolled his eyeballs. “All right, so I’m controlling you. What’s wrong with that, if it’s something we both want?”
“I didn’t say that’s what I wanted,” Rachel said, but she did want to be with him.
Gladys marched into the kitchen. “What time is Chrissy’s next feeding? I’m so glad you asked me to take care of her because goodness knows I needed something to do. All my tennis partners have family in town for the holidays, so I’m odd woman out.” She took one look at Rachel and Joe glaring at each other and said innocently, “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Rachel said through gritted teeth, and she went to put her swimsuit on. A suitably modest one.
“I don’t need you to create problems for me,” Rachel said to Joe as they waited for the elevator. “Gladys is going to carry news of our argument far and wide.”
“So let her,” Joe said.
“You don’t understand. News spreads like wildfire in this building. They’ll have us married by the time the story makes the rounds.”
“Any problems with that? We’re about to be engaged.” Joe grinned at her, and she looked away, chagrined at what she’d just said. Whatever had made her mention marriage? This whole thing was getting out of hand.
And it got worse as they passed through the lobby, hustling past the curious gaze of Sherman and a couple of residents whom Rachel didn’t recognize. Inwardly she cringed at the thought of everyone knowing her business. She only hoped that Mimi didn’t call to wish anyone happy holidays only to be informed that her granddaughter was hanging out with Joe. Mimi would be thrilled to know that Rachel had a man dancing attendance at last. She might even cut her trip short to come home and meet him.
“We’ll get sandwiches at the sandwich shop, eat them on the beach,” Joe said, appropriating her elbow and urging her toward the row of shops across the street from the Elysian Towers. Rachel allowed herself to be steered, not knowing how else to handle this. She kept thinking about how warm Joe’s lips had been last night, but even the memory of that wasn’t enough to make her forget about his rejection afterward. Well, she had rejected him once, and he had rejected her once, so it was a draw. Why he had suggested this outing she couldn’t imagine.
In the deli, Rachel settled on a pastrami sandwich, and Joe ordered roast beef. Joe swung the white paper bag containing their lunch as they walked through the condo parking lot, past the Nativity scene, along the boardwalk that wound through the landscaping of sea grape trees around the swimming pool and down to the beach.
“We can sit in the chickee,” he said, indicated the palm-thatched shelter built of cabbage-palm trunks in the manner of the Seminoles, and Rachel agreed. It wasn’t until she was sitting across the wooden table from him, the sandwiches spread out between them, that she realized her heart was pounding as if she’d been running a mile.
She probably should have been running. Running away. But instead she picked up her sandwich and took a bite, striving to act and look normal.
“Rachel, I had to talk to you. In the clear light of day. Without people around.”
She chewed and blinked at him. It wasn’t as if she could answer, her mouth being full of pastrami and rye bread. The sandwich was a little heavy on the mustard, now that she thought about it.
“I like you, Rachel. I like you better than any woman I’ve met in a long time. I don’t know why you don’t like me. I’m stumped, to tell you the truth.”
Rachel watched a man parasailing over the ocean. He glided into the water, and she wished that everything was as easy as his parasailing looked.
“So could you clue me in? I mean, if I’m doing something that you hate, I’ll fix it. Okay?”
Rachel swallowed and forced herself to focus on Joe’s face. “You’re not doing anything I hate,” she said. “You do things I like, in fact.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Joe. I’m not ready for any kind of relationship, that’s all.”
Looking slightly relieved, Joe finally picked up his sandwich. “If that’s all it is, when will you be ready?”
Rachel shrugged. “I’m not sure. I have some things I have to work out.”
Like why I want to kiss you and why I don’t want to kiss you, all at the same time. She knew this would sound idiotic if she said it, so she kept quiet.
Joe took another bite. “What kind of things?” he ventured after a while.
Rachel didn’t know where to begin. “Personal ones,” she said at last.
“Personal,” he repeated.
Rachel nodded. The man who had been parasailing was being picked up by a boat. She wished she were parasailing today. She wished she were anywhere but sitting across from Joe and being grilled on subjects she didn’t want to discuss.
“That’s not a good enough answer,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve found the woman of my dreams and she tells me that she’s not interested in me because she’s dealing with personal issues. Well, where I come from, we help each other with problems. We don’t walk away when things get difficult.”
After he called her the woman of his dreams, Rachel more or less lost track of what else he was saying. How could she be the woman of his dreams? He hardly knew her.
“You hardly know me,” she blurted.
Joe carefully set his sandwich down. He stood up and walked around to her side of the table and eased down on the bench beside her.
“I know enough,” he said gently. “I know you are kind and caring and thoughtful and that you make great chocolate-chunky brownies. I know that when I look at you, it’s as if you were made to my exact specifications. I decided that as soon as I saw you sloshing through the water in the lobby with a baby in your arms.” He picked up her napkin and wiped something from the corner of her mouth. “Mustard,” he explained.
He’d known from the first moment he’d seen her that she was made to his specifications? What kind of blather was this, anyway? She wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d like to hear more of it.
“You don’t know everything about me,” she protested, t
he blood pounding in her ears.
“I know I like this,” he said, and slowly his face came toward hers, adjusted position, was so close that she held her breath. And then his lips closed over hers, and so help her, she responded in kind. She forgot the parasailor, the people on the beach beyond, the tall tower of the condo above. She was helpless to break the kiss nor did she want to. She only wanted to go on kissing him, and that was impossible. One kiss might be permissible, but she couldn’t continue kissing him out here in plain sight of everyone, especially the Elysian Towers busybodies, any one of whom might walk past at any moment.
He was the first to pull away. “You see? We’re something special, Rachel.”
She struggled to regain her composure. She felt a blush of heat rising from her throat to her face and tingling behind her ears. “I must taste like pastrami,” was all she could think of to say.
Joe chuckled deep in his throat. His eyes, so unusual and so all-knowing, sparkled in their depths. “Yes, you do, and it tastes good to me.”
Unable to listen to any more of this, Rachel got up and tossed the remains of her sandwich in a nearby garbage can. She started walking toward the condo, then, thinking better of being confronted by Gladys while her cheeks were still flaming from Joe’s remarks, she switched paths abruptly and headed down the boardwalk toward the sand. Joe was right behind her, a beach towel slung over his shoulder.
The beach was cast in bright noon light. A number of snowbirds, tourists in town soaking up their midwinter fix of sunshine, were identifiable by their pale skins. Some of them sported sunburns, sure to be painful later.
When Rachel struck out from the boardwalk, she had to swerve around a couple of children who were lobbing a large beach ball back and forth. One of them overthrew his mark, and Joe picked up the ball and tossed it back to him before catching up with her.
“This looks like a good place to settle,” he said as they reached the top of a dune. “I’ll spread the towel out and we can sit down.”
Not knowing what else to do, Rachel sat down beside Joe on the towel, her arms circled primly around her knees. She’d stay a few minutes, blurt some excuse to go back, hide out in the condo exercise room while her heart rate calmed down.
“I think I’ll go for a swim,” Joe said. He stood up and took off his shirt and then his shorts.
“Fine.” Acting as nonchalant as she could, she gazed off into the distance where another parasailor was preparing to go aloft. She didn’t want to look at Joe, who was now wearing only a brief swimsuit.
“You’re going, too. Unless you can’t swim.”
“Oh, I can swim, all right,” she said, and then he was pulling her to her feet, toward the ocean, into the waves.
Joe plunged beneath the surface while Rachel, knowing when she was bested, paddled a more sedate breast stroke in between wave swells. She kept glancing back over her shoulder at Joe’s dark head, wet and slick as a seal’s in the water. He swam with a powerful stroke; was there anything he didn’t do well?
At least he was ignoring her. She had rolled over on her back and was floating toward shore when Joe suddenly broke through the surface of the water beside her. He flicked the hair out of his eyes with a quick motion of his head and grinned at her. Beneath the water, she caught a glimpse of his broad chest. She firmly averted her eyes.
“Rachel, will you go out with me tonight? Someplace special?”
She stopped floating and sought the security of the ocean floor with her feet. “I don’t know, Joe.”
His lips twitched with amusement. “We are almost engaged, you know. Don’t you think it’s time for our first date?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” She felt like a parrot, absurdly repeating the same thing over and over.
“We’ll go dancing, and I’ll show you the lot where I want to build my house. I’ve never shown it to anyone before, Rachel. Will you go with me? Please?”
She didn’t know why, but she looked into Joe’s eyes, read the earnestness there and thought about it no more than five seconds before she said, “Yes.”
The sea glittered in the sunlight, and she caught a glimpse of dark fish sliding through the clear wall of a wave.
“Good,” said Joe. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
Now it was her turn to swim fast and furiously, but Joe kept up with her every stroke of the way. The water felt silky against her skin, like a lover’s caress.
Not like a lover’s caress, she thought. It’s just water.
But the thought lodged in her mind, and she kept thinking about how it would feel to be touched by Joe Marzinski in an intimate way.
HE PICKED HER UP after she’d written out instructions for Gladys Rink, who was delighted to be asked to baby-sit again.
“That Joe Marzinski, he’s a good catch,” she told Rachel after Rachel had said she was going out with him.
“Mmm,” said Rachel, knowing that she’d better remain noncommittal, because if she didn’t, Gladys would be more than happy to spread the news that Rachel and Jœ were hitting it off.
“You know he’s a natural-born manager. That’s what they say around here, anyhow. And he’s got a head for business. After the problems his parents had with him growing up, I’d say it’s a good thing.”
Her antenna went up instantly. “What problems?” asked Rachel, but at that point Chrissy started to fuss and then erupted in a series of hearty bellows, which Gladys insisted on comforting.
“Oh, he was some sort of young hoodlum. I didn’t live here then, but you know how people talk. It couldn’t have been anything much, he seems like such a good person.” In an abrupt change of topic, Gladys said, “You’d better get ready, dear. Leave Chrissy to me.”
After a few futile attempts at trying to pry Chrissy away from Gladys, Rachel had gone to take a bath—a scented bath. She’d rubbed her skin with fragrant lotion and given herself a pedicure, all because of Joe. Her sense of anticipation built to the point where she had to stop and take a few deep breaths, reminding herself that this was just Joe she was going out with. Just Joe, and he’d seen her at her worst. But she wanted to look her best for him now.
As Joe was on his way up to the apartment, Rachel kissed Chrissy goodbye and told Gladys where she kept extra cans of formula and where she would find a fresh box of clean diapers, and Gladys said she was going to take Chrissy to her own apartment later, and didn’t Rachel look nice, and then Joe arrived and spoke pleasantly to Gladys before whisking Rachel away. It all happened so fast that Rachel was out of breath before they even got in the elevator.
Rachel had piled her hair on top of her head for the evening, and she wore a saffron-yellow dress with a low-cut bustier bodice curving into a short skirt of crinkle-pleated silk that made her waist look narrower than it had ever been. Yellow was, of course, Mimi’s favorite color, and her grandmother had splurged on the dress for Rachel’s ill-fated meeting with Buford, the boat captain. On that night, the only time she’d ever worn the dress, Sherman had paid her a compliment, which went something like, “Wow, I mean wow!” Which was probably the doorman’s ultimate form of praise.
Rachel would have been the first to admit that it was a pretty dress and that the yellow brought out the golden flecks in her eyes. “Wow, I mean wow!” Sherman said again, and Joe grinned.
“I think that means you look fantastic. And you do, by the way,” Joe said.
On the way to the parking lot, she studied Joe covertly from under her lashes. She had been aware of his blatant masculinity from the start, but tonight he was an arresting figure in his blazer worn over a casual shirt open at the throat, a man over endowed with sheer vitality. She was, she realized, proud to be seen with him.
Joe’s car this time wasn’t the Condo Crisis van but a brand-new BMW, blue in color, and he popped open the sun roof after asking Rachel if she minded. She didn’t, not at all. Maybe a healthy dose of the night breeze from the ocean would cool her cheeks, which were flushed without the
benefit of blusher.
Traffic was heavy on the slender spit of the island with cars bearing license plates of other states. “Tourists,” Joe said as they waited at a stoplight. “Say, I don’t want to fight crowds in the restaurants. How about if we go to a little place over on the mainland? The seafood is the best anyplace, and mostly locals eat there.”
Rachel agreed and remained silent as Joe drove over the bridge. She was dizzily aware of him next to her, of his aftershave lotion, of the shape of his hand as he shifted gears. Her thoughts were in a tumult. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop thinking about how his hand would feel if it were to drop a bit lower and graze her knee. The thought brought her a fierce aching pleasure that she banished as soon as it surfaced. She wasn’t supposed to want. She wasn’t supposed to feel. But want she did, and feel, too. So help her, she wanted to feel more. Her lips tingled as she thought about the probability that this evening would end in a kiss or maybe more.
They pulled up in front of a low-slung building on the outskirts of town. It had a cedar-shake roof and tasteful low lighting accentuating the shrubbery.
“It’s called Palmetto Alley, and they have the best Florida lobster on the east coast,” Joe said with a grin as he handed her out of the car. She preceded him into the restaurant, where they were greeted by the proprietor, an old school buddy of Joe’s. He gave them the best table, one overlooking a pond.
Joe called for a bottle of wine, and they both ordered lobster. After the waiter, who turned out to be another friend of Joe’s, had left, Joe leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. He seemed relaxed and expansive, which was in sharp contrast to her own mood. She felt tightly wound and more nervous by the minute, and she was sharply aware that since learning to live alone she had lost the knack for being with someone, one on one.
Over wine they spoke in generalities—the weather, the holiday, Joe’s friend and how he’d come to own the restaurant. This put Rachel slightly more at ease, and after a while she found that she was tentatively enjoying the wine, the ambiance and Joe. Especially Joe, who guided the conversation with such skill.
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