by Elaine Fox
“This is a change of heart, isn’t it? I gathered from the meeting last week that you didn’t need or want my input.” He gestured toward the wine. “Let alone that you might decide to bribe me for it.”
Roxanne’s cheeks warmed and she looked down at the bottle. He was being somewhat contrary, she thought. “I know what I’m doing with the restaurant. There’s really no question of reverting to Charters’ old, uh, strategies, so I wasn’t looking for input on that. I just thought, because you know the staff so well, I’d ask your opinion about some of them.”
There was a window right next to him on the landing and he leaned one hip against the sill, one thumb looped through the duffle bag’s shoulder strap. Light from an outdoor streetlamp shone through his gray eyes, making his assessing gaze even more penetrating.
“You want me to rat on my coworkers?”
She lifted her chin. What was with him?
“Absolutely not! I would never put you or anybody else in that position.” She put a hand on one hip. “You know, I don’t know where you get off thinking I’m such a bad person just because I happened to buy the place where you work. Is it just because you don’t like anything French? Or is it me? Because all I wanted was to know…was…you, you’re…”
In the middle of this speech her brain finally registered his teasing look. Unfortunately it was a few seconds before she could get her mouth to stop running.
Steve chuckled and straightened from his leaning stance. He moved a couple steps toward her on the landing, his expression amused and, she thought, exasperated. “That’s right. I was kidding.”
“Well.” She nodded once, then took a deep breath. “Well. I hope so.”
Her voice sounded petulant. She wished she’d never left her apartment. Why couldn’t she have deliberated another five minutes about this stupid course of action? Another two minutes? He would have already been gone and this whole conversation would never have taken place.
“I was.”
“Okay.” She swallowed. Keep it light, she told herself. He was; why couldn’t she? “I was just looking for a little psychology, which you bartenders are supposed to be so adept at.”
Tone, Roxanne, tone. She could have smacked her own forehead. She could tell by his face that though her words had said one thing, her manner had said something else. Something derogatory.
“Yeah, we’re pretty savvy at judging people,” he drawled. His gaze judged her where she stood.
“Well, if it makes you at all uncomfortable to talk about your coworkers, then never mind.” She paused, unsure how to end this debacle. “So where are you going?” she asked—though it sounded like she demanded—and waved a hand toward his duffle bag.
He glanced over his shoulder at it.
“Me? I’m going to a friend’s house.” Steve gestured for Roxanne to precede him, so she turned and headed down the stairs ahead of him. “She’s got something she needs help with. Well, not help really. Just, something she wants me to look at.”
Roxanne glanced back at him as they both clopped down the wooden stairs.
“In the garden?” she asked as they reached the landing.
“Garden?” They paused in front of the door to her apartment. “Why do you say that?”
She inclined her head toward the handle sticking out of his bag. “It looks like a hoe. Or something.”
He laid a hand on it. “This? No. Too short to be a hoe, for one thing.” They stood looking at each other a moment. “Well, gotta go. See ya.”
He turned down the hall toward the last flight of stairs, then stopped. “We can talk another time, if you want, about the restaurant. And you don’t need to bribe me with wine. Just let me know.”
“Sure. Yeah, see you.” She watched him go.
He had long legs, she noted as he walked away from her. And an easy way of carrying that bag that looked awfully heavy.
Had it just been her imagination or had he been uncomfortable when she’d asked him what he was doing? Maybe it was because he was seeing a woman, and he’d thought she might be bothered by that. Because she’d brought the wine.
Damn. She clenched one hand into a fist so that her nails bit into her palm. She should have been clearer that she was just trying to be friendly. Business friendly. The last thing she’d wanted was for him to think she was coming on to him.
She opened her apartment door and went straight to the kitchen. She set the bottle firmly on the counter, pulled open the utility drawer and dug through utensils until she found the corkscrew. Then she opened the bottle and poured herself a glass of wine.
She’d drink the whole thing, if necessary. She didn’t ever want to be tempted to share it with him again. He was obviously the type who’d misunderstand. He probably thought every woman was coming on to him. Hell, maybe every woman was coming on to him. He was pretty cute.
But the last thing she, Roxanne Rayeaux, needed was an employee thinking she was making a pass. Because she was not making a pass. Or if she was, it was just a friend pass. A pass at making a friend. Instead all she’d gotten was a cocky, suspicious employee. Not to mention a neighbor who thought he’d just had to reject her.
She took a sip of the wine and let it roll around her tongue a second.
Damn again, she thought. It was excellent.
Steve hopped in his pickup truck and sat for a moment in the dark.
That was weird. Roxanne Rayeaux wanted to share a bottle of wine with him. Ostensibly to talk about the restaurant, but come on. They could talk about the restaurant any day of the week, during daylight hours, at one of the staff meetings—or rather, training sessions—she had set up. Or over lunch.
But at night? With a bottle of wine? Wheels turned in his head.
Surely she wasn’t coming on to him. That just wouldn’t make any sense. She thought he was an unsophisticated beer jockey. Someone beneath her social notice. He’d seen that on her face the night he’d impulsively offered to take her to the Library of Congress and she’d nearly recoiled.
He took a deep breath, fished his keys out of his jacket pocket and started the truck. Despite the cold, the old Toyota purred quietly to life.
What would have happened if he hadn’t been going out? he wondered. Suppose he’d said yes to sharing the wine with her? They’d have talked about the restaurant, maybe gotten a little loose—what with the wine and no food—and…what? Was she lonely? Would she have expected him to make a move of some sort? Would she have wanted him to make a move?
Of course, there was the fact that he didn’t want to make a move on her. She was hot, sure. And smart, he’d give her that. But she was the type to eat men like him for breakfast. High maintenance, all the way. He’d sensed it the moment he laid eyes on her.
He didn’t know her well, but he knew as surely as if she’d told him so that she required her men to live up to an unrealistic standard. And he was really not into living up to other people’s standards, unrealistic or not. Not when he was just figuring out his own.
Which was why he dated women like Lia, who was expecting him. He put the car in reverse and backed out of his parking space.
Technically, he and Lia had broken up a few weeks ago, but they’d both known they’d slide back into something. Such was the nature of their relationship. Break up, take a breather, get back in touch, sleep together, stay together a few months, break up.
Only this time Steve wasn’t sure he wanted to slide back. The only reason he was seeing her tonight was because she was offering him an opportunity that would be otherwise unattainable.
Lia did a lot of housesitting in the historic district and sometimes she let him come snoop around if a place was particularly interesting. Tonight she’d called and told him to bring his metal detector, she was in a house near where a Civil War armory had stood and there would probably be, as she’d put it, bullets galore.
He figured it could be interesting. He’d never used the metal detector, which his mother had gotten him for Christmas and whic
h he and Lia had joked about incessantly afterwards, but there were stories of people making some interesting finds with them. Not to mention that it would please his mother to know he’d finally unboxed it. She was always buying things to keep him interested in history, as she was sure it would eventually lead to a “real career.”
His only hesitation about doing this was that Lia was not above having ulterior motives. She was lonely, he would bet. It was part of the pattern.
But he wasn’t. In fact, before the last time they’d broken up, he’d spent weeks canceling dates and not calling and generally acting like the worst kind of boyfriend ever, to get her to end things.
He wasn’t proud of it, but then he’d never been very good at telling women he wasn’t interested.
With the exception of Roxanne Rayeaux. For some reason that had been easy.
He pulled up in front of the house where Lia was staying and cut the engine. Gathering up his bag from the backseat, he glanced up and down the street to be sure no neighbors were out walking their dog or anything to see him enter the house with a metal detector and bag of tools.
It had taken him a while to convince Lia he was responsible when it came to poking around people’s historic homes. She always questioned what he got out of it. So he wanted to come look, what good would that do him? It wasn’t as if he ever discovered anything. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. How would he explain poking around someone else’s house?
It was a good point. One he couldn’t satisfactorily answer, not without revealing goals he’d rather keep to himself until he was sure he could achieve them.
For now, he told Lia, he just liked seeing if he was right about things. He liked to theorize about historical sites and personages, and if he could find things that confirmed his theories, it would tell him his instincts were right, his research was valid.
That was something he did a lot. Tested himself, to see if he was right. He’d make bets on people at the bar, who they were, what they did for a living, where they were from, and kept a mental tally of how often he was right (most of the time, he was pleased to note).
He rang the bell, but he was not thinking about Lia, or even the possibilities of the metal detector.
No, he was thinking about Roxanne Rayeaux and her bottle of wine. And he was wondering if he was right about her.
Roxanne didn’t get through the whole bottle of wine. She didn’t even get through half before falling asleep on the couch, dreaming that she and Steve were in the restaurant waiting for her ex-boyfriend, Martin. In the dream she was tense, then hysterical when one of the brick walls slumped in front of them, stray bricks tumbling across the floor and dropping from the ceiling to tear the fabric on the new chairs.
Dimly, as she drifted in and out of sleep, she knew she was focused on these subjects because of the remodeling that had just started. That, and the ongoing fear that Martin actually would show up, promising that this time he really would leave his wife for her. The wife she didn’t know he had until they’d been dating close to six months.
She woke up fully after dreaming that George dropped an entire tray full of stemware—wineglasses stacked dozen upon dozen—onto the hard brick floor of a wine cave, the pyramid crashing to the ground in a symphony of shattering glass.
She jerked up on the couch and one hand went reflexively to her neck, which had crimped from her odd resting angle on the pillow. Her eyes swept the room, deducing at a painfully slow rate that it was late at night and she was here, in her apartment in Virginia, and not in her New York high rise.
As she eased herself up off the couch her eyes landed on the box she’d been unpacking before a nap seemed like a good idea. There was the reason she’d dreamed of Martin. In the box she’d found a package of condoms. Martin’s condoms. He had never been without them, always so afraid of a “mistake.” He’d practically begged her to go on the pill—which she couldn’t do because, for her, the pill changed her body too much for modeling—and finally had bought what looked like a case of Trojans, which he left everywhere they might end up getting intimate.
He’d never understood how much that hurt her, his mortal fear of a mistake. And after a while she’d stopped trying to explain it.
She picked up the package and moved purposefully toward the bedroom. Opening up the bedside table drawer, she thought defiantly, Just in case, and tossed them in.
She went back out to the living room, determined to get rid of the last couple of boxes, when she heard footsteps on the wooden stairs outside her door. An automatic hit of panic shot through her and she tiptoed to the front door to look through the peephole. The downstairs door was not open to the public, so if this was anyone but Steve, she should be ready to call the police.
Cheeto trotted up behind her, no doubt hoping to bolt out the door if she opened it. Skip said she should have named the cat Magellan, since he was such an explorer.
For a minute she hovered between standing at the door and going to retrieve the phone, finally opting to stay by the door and see who it was.
The footsteps topped the first flight, then started down the hall toward the second. For a mere moment in the warped lens of the peephole she saw Steve Serrano’s profile as he walked by her door in the light of the hall’s overhead bulb.
It was only a fleeting view, but she thought he looked tired and kind of mussed, as if he’d been doing something physical.
Yeah, physical, she thought, remembering that he was going to a woman’s house that night. Then, unexpectedly, she was assailed by an image of him shirtless and sweaty, bending above her with that dark grin on his face. The image was so sexy and so powerful that heat rushed to her core and she put a hand to her stomach, where a whole flock of birds simultaneously took flight.
For God’s sake, she told herself. Get a grip. It had obviously been far too long since she’d had sex.
She brushed the hair from her forehead and crept away from the door, then turned out the living-room lamp and closed herself in her bedroom. There she lay awake for precisely five minutes before falling into a hot, steamy sleep, filled with images of a lean, naked man with hair just a tad too long, doing all manner of devilish and delightful things to her.
The next morning she awoke with the cat on her head and the sheets tangled around her legs. Rarely had she spent such a restless night.
It was nine before she made it downstairs to start coffee for the trainees. Sir Nigel was coming today to teach them all about French table service and the different glasses and silverware it required.
Also, workmen were coming to install the wine caves and she wanted to be sure they had a clear path through the kitchen to bring them in.
She pushed through the swinging doors from the bar to the kitchen and headed for the coffee service. She had just scooped out some coffee and was filling the pot with water when she noticed a cold breeze on her back.
She turned, expecting to see someone coming in the back door, and froze. A second later the water overflowed the pot onto her arm and she turned back to fumble with the faucet.
After laying the carafe in the sink with a shaking hand she turned back to the rear door, her eyes riveted on the pile of broken glass on the floor.
Slowly, she moved her gaze around the room, her brain putting the pieces together.
Someone had broken in.
Someone must have taken something.
Something must be missing.
Someone could still be here now.
Adrenaline shot through her veins, making her shake.
Last night, she’d awoken because she’d dreamed about breaking glass. But maybe it was this she had heard. Could she have heard this door breaking from her living room?
Her eyes scanned the room. Things were disturbed, little things overturned along the counters. A refrigerator had been pulled away from the wall about six inches. The freezer was not closed tightly. A trash can lay on its side, its contents strewn about the floor. Workstations had obviously b
een messed with—knives and whisks, side towels and clipboards were scattered helter-skelter.
She looked at the floor. Near the door to the office a floorboard had been pried up. One end was split and gnawed-looking.
What in God’s name was going on? What had the intruders been doing in here?
Her mind flew immediately to the theoretical draft of the Declaration of Independence. She almost had to laugh at herself for thinking anyone would take that conversation seriously enough to break in, but it was too odd for this to happen right after that discussion. Plus, there’d been plenty of people around when P.B. had blurted out the possibility that it existed right here in this very building.
She frowned. But to come in and scatter tools on the workstations…to be rooting through the trash…No, this had to be something else.
The mayhem didn’t quite look as if whoever had broken in had been looking for something. More that they’d been trying to do damage. Could the cook have been that angry at being fired? What about the busboys she’d let go?
Her mind flew to the moment she’d woken up last night. Moments afterward she’d watched Steve go past her apartment door on the way to his. Maybe he’d noticed something when he got home. Maybe he’d seen a car pull away, or a person in the back alley. Something he might not have registered as odd last night, but that would fit with what had obviously happened here.
She strode to the office, taking care not to touch anything or trip over the displaced floorboard, and looked at the phone list. Then she grabbed the receiver and dialed his number.
He answered on the fifth ring. A low, gruff hello that sent her reeling back to the dream she’d had last night of him bare-chested and hot with arousal. She blushed as she spoke, angry with herself for being so sexually deprived that she couldn’t keep her mind on a break-in, for God’s sake.
“Steve, it’s Roxanne.”
There was a muffled sound. Then, “Huh? Oh.”
“I’m sorry to wake you.”
