by Arlene James
Chapter Five
“Hungry?”
Amy and Mattie looked up from the floor. Mattie was folding the last freshly laundered load of bath towels. Amy was merely trying to gather the strength to get up and walk to the shower. She shielded her eyes from the glare of a sparkling clean overhead light fixture and studied him. He looked as fresh and fragrant as the towels that Mattie was folding. His bright blue T-shirt hugged his muscular torso like a second skin, its hem disappearing behind the snug waistband of dark, crisp jeans. His inky hair had been brushed back from his forehead. His bronzed jaw looked freshly shaved. His smile was dazzlingly white. She couldn’t tell for certain, but she suspected that his yellow-green eyes glinted with humor, and she suspected that he was silently laughing at her. She couldn’t blame him.
She knew that she must look a sight, her hair and clothing plastered to her with sweat, her face slack with exhaustion, her body stiff with soreness. In fact, she imagined that she and Mattie together were as bizarre a pair as could be seen in town. She imagined them as they must look, she worn to a frazzle, Mattie decked out from her spiked head to her toes in fluorescent lime green, and suddenly laughter was bubbling up. It started, really, as a wiggly grin, then became chuckles and sputters and, as the others began to join in, hard, erupting guffaws.
“What?” Evans kept saying. “What’d I say?”
Laughter gave Amy the energy to shake her head and sit up. “No, no, it wasn’t you. I mean, look at us, a drowned r-rat and a p-p-peacock!” She flipped her hand upward from her brow, copying Mattie’s “plume.”
Mattie gasped, then aimed a playful slap at Amy’s leg. “I do not look like a peacock!”
“You’re right,” Evans said, his solemn tone completely spoiled by the sputters of fresh laughter. “M-more like a p-parrot!”
“Da-ad!”
“And Amy!” he gasped, doubling over. “What’d you do to her? Use her to clean the bathtub?”
Amy caught a picture of herself slithering around inside the tub while Mattie sprinkled a cloud of scouring powder over her and went off in fresh gales of uncontrollable mirth. Mattie must have gotten a glimpse of the same scene for she suddenly clamped both hands over her mouth and collapsed at Amy’s side. They rolled around on the floor for several minutes, howling, while Evans crouched before them and shook his head. After some time, the humor began to fade. Mattie sat up and wiped her eyes, smearing kohl over her cheeks. “Ahem, I think it’s the ammonia fumes,” she said seriously enough to set Amy off again.
It was only seconds before the laughter receded this time and Amy was able to sit up and add her theory to the mix. “It’s exhaustion, pure exhaustion.” She sighed with the passing of the hilarity and wiped her own eyes with grimy hands.
“I think you’re both delirious with hunger,” Evans pronounced wryly, “which is precisely why I’m marinating chicken breasts for the grill. What do you say to that with a tossed green salad and steamed corn on the cob?”
“Are you inviting me to dinner?” Amy asked, thoroughly surprised.
He canted his head, grinning. “You’re not as tired as you look. Yes, I am inviting you to dinner.”
The comment about her looks, while suggesting nothing she didn’t already know, produced a certain insecurity that sent a hand to her hair. She dropped it at once. What did she care, anyway? He was just her next-door neighbor, after all, an acquaintance, a casual friend. He tilted his head in the opposite direction.
“Well? What do you say? Want to take a chance on my cooking or not?”
“He’s a good cook,” Mattie said, “at least when it comes to the grill.”
“Hey!” Evans objected. “I can steam an ear of corn.”
Mattie rolled her eyes and looked at Amy. “We have an electric steamer. You just pour the water in and turn it on.”
Amy grinned mischievously. “And what about the salad?”
“Ready-made,” Mattie confided dryly.
“Well, I put the chicken in marinade,” Evans insisted.
“Bottled,” Mattie said succinctly.
Evans threw up his hands. “I give up! This is the thanks I get for using my night off to provide sustenance for the two of you.”
“Your night off you say?” Amy chirped. “Well, that’s different.” She elbowed Mattie to clue her into the joke, and Mattie caught on at once.
“Oh, he’s a much better cook on his night off,” she said.
Evans pushed up to his full height and aimed a pretend glare down at the two of them, his hands on his hips. “Oh, you’re too cute. Chicken goes on in ten minutes, and twelve minutes after that, I eat.”
“Twenty-two minutes!” Mattie exclaimed. “That’s not enough time to shower and get ready. We have to wash and fix our hair and—”
Amy gritted her teeth and bounced up to her feet. “We’ll be there,” she said. “Thanks.”
Evans’s grin was quick. “You’re welcome.” He pointed a finger at Mattie. “Twenty-two minutes.”
Amy was headed for the shower before he got through the front door. Mattie went into a panic. “Amy, help me finish these towels!”
“Leave ’em!” she called, wrenching on the water. “I’ll finish them later.”
“A-my!” Mattie protested.
Amy went back to the bathroom door and stuck her head out while she shucked her shorts. “You heard him,” she shouted, peering down the hall. “Twenty-one minutes and counting.”
Mattie made a frustrated sound and continued folding towels, hands flying. “I hate to leave things undone!”
Amy ignored her and ripped her T-shirt over her head. In two seconds she’d stripped off both panties and bra and was stepping behind the plastic curtain into the tub. When she stepped out spare minutes later and wrapped herself in a towel, she was amazingly rejuvenated. A quick check revealed that Mattie had gone. The towels were folded and stacked on the living room floor. Amy smiled at that. The kid was just a tad obsessive, but Amy couldn’t deny that she had benefited greatly from Mattie’s preoccupation with cleanliness and order. She decided to do something extra nice for her, a bonus of sorts. Maybe she’d give herself a bonus, too. Heaven knew she’d worked harder these past few days than ever before in her life.
Her stomach growled as she toweled her hair, reminding her to hurry. She ran to the bedroom, ripped underclothes from their drawers and jeans from their hanger and jumped into them. Was it her imagination or were these jeans a little roomier than before? She shrugged and threw on a collarless gold silk blouse with short sleeves and buttons up the front. She put her bare feet into tan, fringed flats, slipped on her watch, and hurried back to the bathroom to take a dryer to her hair and apply some light makeup, including clove-colored lipstick and fawn brown eye shadow. Her hair didn’t seem to want to cooperate, so she dried it a little more and whipped a brush through it until it crackled and flowed away from her face in gentle, fluffy waves. A glance at her watch told her that she was running a minute behind. She ran out, leaving all the lights on and the door unlocked.
She went straight to the Kincaids’ backyard and found Evans there turning chicken breasts over a gas grill with a long, gleaming fork. “Smells great.”
He turned and flashed her a smile. His eyes went wide and his brows sprang up. “Well, look at you! No more drowned rats around here, I see.”
She wrinkled her nose, feeling conspicuous and not the least unhappy about it. “I know I looked really awful. Some women, like my sister, Joan, manage to perspire prettily. I, on the other hand, sweat like a pig.”
He laughed and said, “Well, you’d never know it to look at you now.”
She looked down at herself. “Thanks. I think I’ve even lost a little weight. Oh, well, I’ll probably gain it right back.”
He sent her a look over his shoulder. “I don’t see why. Exercise seems to agree with you. Why not keep it up?”
She shrugged wryly. “What would you suggest? That I sweep and mop the street four or five times a w
eek?”
He laughed again. “Nothing so productive. Why not do what I do and run three or four times a week?”
She pondered that a moment, wondering if he was inviting her along on his runs. “I might,” she said finally.
That seemed to satisfy him. He took up a small platter from a wheeled metal table at his side and forked the three chicken breasts onto it. “I thought we’d eat inside,” he said, shoving the platter at her. “It’s still pretty warm out.”
“Suits me,” she replied, turning toward the house.
He cut off the gas and locked down the hood of the grill, then quickly gathered up the fork and a kitchen towel from the table and followed after Amy. He was right on her heels by the time she came to the door, and he reached around her to open it for her. In doing so, his chest bumped her back. The touch so jolted her that she bobbled the platter. His arms came around her, fork, towel and all, as he attempted to steady the plate. An unfamiliar mix of emotion and sensation flashed over her, both mesmerizing and paralyzing.
It was as if she felt him in every cell of her body, and for a long moment she could do nothing but feel. Then Evans dropped the towel and brought his arm snug against her, his hand splayed across her midriff. Sensation as red-hot as the iron briquettes in the gas grill jolted her into sudden action. She jerked away, the platter all but hugged to her chest, and stumbled into the kitchen. Evans’s hand clamped down on her arm and turned her toward him. From the look of incredulity on his face, she knew that he was as stunned by that brief connection as she was.
“Amy?” he rasped, that one word becoming a loaded question.
Mattie ricocheted into the room, her chatter muffled by the towel she was in the process of wrapping around her head. “Best I can do,” she was saying. “When you don’t give a person time to catch her breath, you get—Why, Amy! It certainly doesn’t take you long to get it together.” She put a hand on her hip, the little jumper she was wearing hitching well up her thigh. “You ever think of dying your hair? You know, adding a little drama to the package?”
Evans released Amy abruptly. “Don’t be silly, Matilda,” he snapped. “There’s nothing wrong with Amy’s hair.” He turned away and moved to the counter. “I thought we’d eat in the kitchen. Anybody mind? Get the salad out of the fridge, Mattie, and don’t forget the dressing. Pick a chair, Amy, and put the platter on the table.”
She did exactly as instructed, moving as if by rote. Her mouth was too dry to speak, her heart still pounding wildly in her chest. She thought inanely that she ought to run home, that it was dangerous for her to be here, but she didn’t want to run. She didn’t want to hide. For once, she wanted to be part of the game. She wanted to be right here. She wanted to belong, and if her heart was pounding, it was because the feeling was so new and because she was exhausted. It was a pleasant exhaustion, though, the exhaustion of accomplishment, of new beginnings already begun. She pushed the unnamed fears away and relaxed, laughing as Mattie teased Evans about his cooking skills. Soon she was enjoying herself immensely, that haunting moment of electric awareness safely filed away in the very back of her mind.
Evans smiled at Amy and pushed his plate away. He’d thought for a time that she was going to bolt, but then Mattie had started to jabber and he’d felt Amy relax. He was glad, more glad than he wanted to be. But he wasn’t one to fight the inevitable. He’d felt this coming for some time. More and more, lately, he’d found himself contemplating the widow Slater and what it would take to get under that prickly exterior to the soft heart that he suspected she protected beneath it. He told himself as they laughed over dinner that perhaps they had been waiting for each other without even knowing it. He didn’t think he was wrong in suspecting that the loss of her husband was a wound only freshly healed, despite the time that had passed. If he had believed in coincidence, he might have said it was a trick of fate that had brought him here, but his faith in God left no room for fate or mere happenstance. Was this the woman God had sent him in answer to his repeated prayers? He thought wryly that perhaps he ought to have asked for a woman with a less complicated emotional makeup, but then he remembered something that Andie had told him.
A man, she had said, might assign only a part of his emotional strength to love and consider that his all, reserving the remainder of his devotion for things and events, accomplishments and pleasures;
but a woman loved with the true weight of her emotions whether she wanted to or not. She had told him, too, how glad she was that he held nothing back, for a woman like herself, who loved with a depth and breadth of emotion frightening in its scope, would live in hell with a man who could not or would not give back the same intensity of feeling. Without that emotional sustenance, Andie had insisted, such a woman would wither and die inside. Might not the same thing happen to a very emotional woman, he wondered, without anyone to love? That being so, he asked himself, which case applied to Amy?
The next moment he told himself it didn’t matter. He had no doubt that she had been deeply wounded, that she had withdrawn into herself. The exact cause didn’t seem important. What mattered was that he could help her open her heart to love again. He was suddenly sure of it. He didn’t stop to think that in prying open Amy’s heart, he was opening himself to a sort of pain he had never before, in any substantive way, felt—the pain of rejection.
It was Mattie’s yawn that told him the evening should be brought to a swift conclusion. He smiled at her with the kind of fondness he too often failed to show. She looked like a little girl tonight with her face washed clean and her hair soft and shiny black. This was who she really was. He stifled the urge to tuck her into bed and said instead, “Why don’t you turn in, Mattie-girl? You must be tired to the bone.”
She shook her head wearily. “I’ll just help you clean up first.”
She reached for a plate, but he snatched it out of her hand. “I’ll take care of this as soon as I take care of the two of you. Now, I want you to get to bed while I walk Amy home. Don’t worry, I’ll clean up the kitchen as soon as I get back. Okay?”
“Okay, Dad.” She got up, went around the table, and kissed him on the cheek. “Good night.”
“Good night, babe.”
“Good night, Mattie,” Amy said.
She left the room on another yawn, making both Amy and Evans chuckle. Amy shook her head fondly. “She has been an invaluable help to me, a dictator, but invaluable.”
“I guess that’s one trait she inherited from me,” he admitted sheepishly.
“Well, you can add meticulousness to the list,” she informed him smartly.
He put his elbows on the table and ran his fingers through his hair. “Is this list going to be a long one?”
She smiled. “I’ll let you know.”
He smiled back. “You do that.”
He tried to hold her gaze, to tell her without words that he was glad to know she had granted them some sort of future, but she dropped her head, and if he wasn’t mistaken, actually blushed. Suddenly she bolted from her chair. “I’d better be getting home.”
“I’ll walk you,” he said, coming to his feet.
“No, you don’t have—”
“I’ll walk you.” Instinctively he had imbued his voice with the tone of command.
She looked up sharply, one delicate brow cocked in obstinate denial. For an instant, mischief sparkled in those bright blue eyes, but then something far more cautious chased it away, and she jerked her gaze from his, nodding in acquiescence. She moved quickly toward the door, but he caught up with her on the porch, skipped the steps and was waiting for her as she descended.
He caught up her hand and wrapped it around his forearm, holding her close to his side. As before, awareness tingled between them, but he followed her lead and ignored it as they strolled across his yard, out his gate and along the back of his garage to a small break in the hedges that marked the boundary of Amy’s property. He followed her through the space in the shrubbery, his hand sliding down her arm then
dropping to her waist as he joined her on the other side.
“Thank you,” she said simply as they drew near the small back stoop that led into her kitchen.
“For what?” he teased silkily. “For walking you home? For dinner? For loaning you my daughter?”
“All three,” she said lightly, “and every other kind, caring thing you’ve done.”
“I don’t want thanks,” he told her in a near whisper.
“Well, you have it, anyway.”
“I’d rather have this,” he said, halting and drawing her to him. His hands lit on her shoulders, then skimmed up her throat to cup her face, tilting it slightly before his mouth came down over hers.
The jolt of electricity that he felt as their mouths blended nearly knocked him off his feet. He swayed and moaned, instinctively deepening the kiss, his arms dropping about her as his tongue slid into her mouth. Her hands crept around his waist, and he felt the heat in his groin that marked the rush of blood that came with arousal. He stepped closer, drew her tighter against him, enveloped himself in the velvet of her mouth. Only when she wrenched away did he realize that she had been pulling back for some moments, her hands wedged against his chest. He released her at once, stunned by this turn.
“How dare you!” she said, her chest heaving with gasps of breath.
He had to close his mouth and swallow before he could speak. “Amy, I—”
“I don’t want to be pawed and kissed, not by anyone, and certainly not by you!” she cried.
Icy cold swept him and then white-hot anger. “I apologize,” he said stiffly and turned on his heel.
“Damn you!” he heard her sob behind him. “Why can’t you leave me alone? Just leave me alone!”
