“Down, boy.” The words were directed as much to himself as to the dog when Elwood jumped up and planted two wet paws on his chest.
“Gorgeous day, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Your throw.” She glanced down at the ball resting next to his boot.
He scooped it up and tossed it to her, the dog’s tail thumping him in the legs in anticipation of another run.
“Be my guest.”
She whipped it high and long with a pitcher’s arm that told him she’d spent hours on a baseball field as a kid.
“Nice arm.” She cocked her head at him, still grinning. He decided she could do with a little teasing. “At least you don’t throw like a girl.”
“Little League All-Star Pitcher, three years running,” she said and took off sprinting after the dog. And just like that, they were back to being friends again. If he occasionally caught her eyeing him the way she’d gauge a scale in the produce department of a supermarket, trying to figure out if she had bagged too much or not enough, he ignored it and threw the ball for Elwood again.
Back at the house, they ate lunch together, devouring sandwiches while standing in the kitchen, too hungry to head for a table. Then they separated to their own pursuits, Addy to work on the detailed plan of the house she’d begun drawing up in her spare time and Spencer to the never-ending review of documents that flowed over his desk. But not before they both casually mentioned that they’d probably be hungry for dinner around seven.
Dinner was a pizza delivered with a Mason-Dixon Line split of toppings, all the meats on one side, all the veggies on the other. Addy dug into her sausage-, pepperoni-and ham-encrusted pizza, eyeing his green peppers, olives, tomatoes and mushrooms dubiously. The Maltese Falcon was playing on the public television station.
“Whatever floats your boat,” she said and settled into her corner of the couch with a napkin in her lap.
The next morning, they took Elwood for a long walk along the frozen lakeshore and chatted amiably about their upcoming weeks. When Maxie showed up that afternoon, Sarah in tow and protesting loudly about the interruption of her study time, Spencer said hello and then ducked into the office off his bedroom, leaving the women to themselves as Addy showed them around the house. The sound of their laughter and conversation sometimes reached him through the walls and he surprised himself by finding the noise charming rather than disruptive.
A tap on his door signaled a polite interruption.
“Sorry to bother,” Addy said as she stuck her head in the room. “Do we have a step stool?”
“No bother. What for?”
She grinned and ducked her head a little.
“I showed my sisters the trapdoor to the attic and we’re all dying to see what’s up there.” She shrugged and looked sheepish. “I think Maxie hopes we’ll find some kind of long-lost treasure.”
He leaned back from his desk and stretched hugely. “Come on, ’fess up,” he said through a sudden, jaw-cracking yawn. “You’re hoping for it, too.”
She pursed her lips, then gave it up and shrugged, laughing. “You never know what you’ll find unless you look.”
“Indeed.”
He scraped her head to toe with one scorching glance and had the pleasure of watching her blush.
“Back of the pantry door. It’s hanging, folded up.”
Her quick escape from the room left him grinning as he turned back to the drily written documents on his desk. Five minutes later, when the chatter from the hall transformed into shrieks and shouts leaking through the ceiling above his head, Spencer gave up pretending that he didn’t want to join them in their discoveries and went in search of the three sisters.
The rickety wooden ladder that hung unfolded from the open trapdoor looked ancient in design and dust, but seemed sturdy enough when he shook it on its hinges. He knew the sisters had made it successfully up, could hear them dragging around what sounded like enormous pieces of furniture, but he was twice the size of any one of them. Hoping he wasn’t going to end up breaking his neck, he set one foot on the first tread and started to climb.
Poking his head into the attic at last, he sneezed immediately. Great buffalo clouds of dust were roaming, awakened by the zeal with which Maxie, Sarah and Addy rummaged in a metropolis of stacked boxes and trunks.
Looking up from where she knelt over a box of purely awful nylon cardigans from the fifties, Addy caught sight of Spencer eyeing them.
Like an orderly at a mental hospital, debating whether it was safe to approach a bunch of inmates gone on a rampage, she thought, and called out to him.
“It’s safe, I promise. Just don’t stand still and drape a sheet over yourself or Maxie may attack.”
“Hey!” Her baby sister popped up from behind a drunken pile of small, round boxes. Perched on her short, dusty curls, a Jackie O. pillbox hat complete with veil tilted precariously on top of an emerald-green silk turban. “If he’s not a hatbox, he’s safe.”
Spencer finished his climb into the attic and made his way through the maze to where Addy knelt.
“And the carnage begins.”
“Yup. God, look at these, they’re awful.” She held up a sweater that felt like knitted Teflon and had enormous yellow flowers appliquéd over a burnt orange background. “Indestructible, I bet. This cardigan will still be around when humans have vanished from the face of the earth. Unfortunately.”
He knelt down next to her, ran a hand over the next sweater in the box and grimaced at the texture. “Found any buried treasure yet?”
“Not exactly.” She smiled at him and then sneezed. He followed suit two seconds later. Dust swirled. “Maxie’s in rapture over the hats, but most of the rest seems to be decades of canceled checks and receipts. Interesting to a sociologist, I’m sure, but not so much for us ordinary humans hoping for nineteenth-century ball gowns or ribbon-tied bundles of old love letters.”
“Too bad.”
She started to stand up, accepted his helping hand to pull her upright, even though her ankle wasn’t bothering her these days. “Well, I don’t think Great-Aunt Adeline was much of the love-letter type.”
“Are you?”
“What?”
“The love-letter type?” Her hand still rested in his. He hadn’t let go, and she couldn’t seem to find the urge to pull away, even though she knew she was smudging him with grit and dirt.
“I don’t know. No one’s ever written me a love letter before. At least, not since sixth grade.” Her sisters were only ten feet away, but it felt as if she were alone in the dimly lit, slope-ceilinged room with him. She thought of the small stack of note cards hidden away in her sock drawer, then shrugged. “I like to think I would be.”
“Interesting.” His thumb was rubbing over the ridge of her knuckles, until he suddenly dropped her hand and walked away. Stopping at the top of the ladder in the floor, he called out, “Lunchtime, ladies. Any requests for sandwiches from the deli?”
As her sisters shouted out their orders and thanks, Addy stood there squinting with narrowed eyes at Spencer, who ignored her.
Interesting?
The man starts a conversation about love letters, decides it’s interesting that she might be the love-letter type and then just walks coolly away and thinks about lunch?
He was definitely trying to drive her insane.
Sarah popped out from behind a hidden branch of the maze, lugging a six-foot-tall tarnished silver birdcage on a stand behind her.
“Look at this! Isn’t the wirework beautiful?”
“Beautiful.” Addy’s voice was steamroller flat. When Sarah cocked her head to one side and gave her a quizzical look, she shook off her immobility and stepped over the box at her feet to her sister. She put some life back in her words. “Really, it’s gorgeous. Why don’t we try to bring it downstairs and see if we can clean it up?”
Putting all thought of love letters from her mind, she spent the rest of the aftern
oon enjoying her sisters’ company, pulling Sarah aside to tell her how much she was enjoying Pride and Prejudice and getting her next recommendation at the same time. When the light began fading from the sky, they hit the showers, a sister in each guest room. Being much the same size, Sarah and Maxie raided Addy’s closet for clean clothes to wear to their mother’s for dinner.
Spencer joined them, of course, and the weekend ended quietly with him following Addy up to the second floor, back at home, and heading right past her to his bedroom. He turned at the door for a minute, smiled at her where she stood at the top of the stairs and said good-night.
The door closed behind him and she wondered why she felt as if she was missing something. She went to bed and had troubled dreams of incompleteness and Elizabeth Bennet looking for a vanished Mr. Darcy, whose pride she had wounded through an insistence on her own misguided perception of him.
Swearing off nineteenth-century romance novels when she woke in the morning, she began her day determined to be thankful for this newfound sense of friendship with Spencer and leave it at that. And indeed her days fell into an easy pattern of long hours at the office, with the occasional shared evening meal with Spencer at home. Some days, their busy schedules meant they didn’t see each other, but they both continued in the unspoken but now comfortable habit of leaving each other little notes. He asked her if she could let the dog out when he knew he’d be staying late at the office. She offered him a choice of blow-’em-up action or slapstick comedy when she decided to rent a movie for the evening.
And through it all, even through late-night movie marathons that ended with them both asleep on the couch until one woke the other and they stumbled off to bed, Spencer never made a move in her direction. The hum of sexual tension could still be felt far below the surface, but she might as well have been his best buddy for all he showed his awareness of it.
Addy told herself to be glad. He was only doing what she’d asked of him and it was probably for the best that she didn’t get more tangled up with this man who would be gone by summer’s end.
Then she called herself a fool for not believing a word of her own lecture.
The weather continued unseasonably warm for Chicago as the weeks passed, spring deciding to skip the usual late-April blizzards that reminded Chicagoans not to break out their shorts and tank tops until after Memorial Day. After the second or third sunny, if chilly, weekend in a row with no snow on the ground, Addy decided to take a chance and plant some summer bulbs in the garden at the base of the front porch.
She raided a nursery of their stock of daylily and dahlia bulbs on the way home from work on a Friday. The spring light hung softly in the sky that evening as she ruled lines representing the garden on graph paper and orchestrated the placement of each bulb in the thawing ground. When she threw her pencil down at midnight, she crumpled the paper in her fist and admitted that she was only distracting herself from listening for Spencer to come home. She finally fell asleep, still listening for him.
In the morning, determined not to spend the day as she had the evening, mooning over him, she lazed in bed until ten, reaching the final chapters of Pride and Prejudice. She’d been unable to uphold her vow to give it up and stopped now, a handful of pages from the end, because she didn’t want the story to come to a halt.
Finally bouncing out of bed, certain she’d heard Spencer leaving with Elwood earlier, she headed down to her garden, making a brief pit stop in the kitchen to snag a couple of granola bars and stuff them in her pocket. Outside, the ground proved to be harder than she’d expected, so she went in search of a shovel. There was a disreputable-looking shed at the back of the property that seemed likely to contain gardening tools.
Rounding the corner of the house, she skidded and cart-wheeled her arms as she slipped on the edges of what looked like a lake of mud and water.
Parked in the middle of this new geological feature was an enormous blue plastic tub, in which sat a happily soapy Elwood, a crown of bubbles slipping off the back of his wet head as he barked at the sight of her. Spencer’s back was to her, presenting her with the fine prospect of his naked torso, bare to the waist. She spied his sweatshirt draped like a flag over a nearby bush. He’d caught some sun during what was obviously bath time, and the faint flush of color only added polish to the muscles sliding under bare skin.
Stop drooling, girl. It’s nothing you ain’t seen before.
That she’d been wondering for the past several weeks if she’d see it again made the “stop drooling” command difficult to follow. She swallowed hard before she spoke.
“Bath time?”
Spencer shaded his eyes when he turned, a hose in one hand dripping water.
“Wanna join in?”
“No, thanks.” It was a beautiful day for late April, but it wasn’t that warm. She glanced back at Spencer’s face and caught the instant that a very bad idea took shape in his mind. “Don’t you dare.”
“Dare what?” His fist tightened for a second on the nozzle and a jet of icy cold water blasted the soggy earth at her feet. “Oops. Must’ve slipped.”
“Reed, I swear to you—” And she took off shrieking as he aimed the nozzle at her butt and soaked her pants. Passing the tub, she scooped a softball-size sponge out of the water and nailed him in the chest with it, but she had no more ammo and he had the hose. Thirty seconds later, she was drenched, clothes plastered to her skin, facing him with murder in her eye.
He walked up to her, ran a finger down her nose and flicked water droplets off it. Dropped his gaze to her chest.
“I’ve never had my own private wet T-shirt contest before.” She was immediately aware of her breasts, wet cotton molded around nipples hard with the cold, and shivered, anticipation overriding the chill.
He knelt at her feet as the dog trotted over to say hello, and looked up at her, squinting in the sun.
“You’d better go inside and change. Wouldn’t want you to catch cold.” Rising, he strolled back to the tub.
Her jaw dropped.
She waited until she was inside the house to let out a shriek of raging frustration.
“Do I have to hit him over the head with a two-by-four?” Her shout echoed in the empty house.
When she took matters into her own hands, she decided no one could blame her. A woman could only be pushed so far before she needed to jump a man’s bones just to get thoughts of him naked out of her head.
The click of the catch releasing beneath Addy’s hand as she turned the knob to Spencer’s bedroom was loud in the quiet house at midnight. Holding her breath, suddenly nervous now that she was actually going through with it, she eased the door open and slid through, closing it softly behind her. Moonlight glowing through the window picked out the straight edges of furniture. The long, low line of a bureau. A high, spindle-backed chair. The straight columns of his canopyless four-poster bed.
The curved lines of Spencer’s form facedown on the bed, a sheet slung low over his hips, one arm buried beneath a pillow, the other flung out at his side.
She stepped to the side of the bed and watched him. The rise and fall of his breath was visible, slow and even. His face, softer in sleep, looked gentle. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. With a soft expulsion of breath, she dropped her shoulders. Glanced at the bedside clock. 12:05 a.m.
She couldn’t do this. She turned to leave.
And found herself halted by the sudden shackle of a hand gripping her wrist.
“Where you going?”
His voice sounded sleepy but his eyes were wide open and resting on her as she stood between the bed and the window, backlit by the moonlight. She was conscious of every inch of her bare skin exposed in the skimpy tank top and cotton boxers she wore. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Just stopping in to say hi?”
She heard in his voice the willingness to let her walk out of the room if she said yes. And suddenly it was very easy, simple even, to find the right words.
“As you pointed out to me once before, Mr. Reed,” she said and stepped closer to the bed. “We are married.”
Eight
When she yielded, she yielded with conviction.
The slightest tug on her hand had Addy tumbling into his bed. Spencer rolled over as she fell forward so that she landed on top of him, breasts flattened against his bare chest, elbows planted on either side of his head.
His head framed between her forearms, she leaned above him and watched her shadow dim the silver edging of moonlight on his features. She lowered her head and traced the lines from memory with her mouth, skimming her lips over the edge of his jaw, the arch of his brow. Ran the tip of her tongue lightly over the outline of his lips, until his open mouth surged up to capture hers. His arms, loose around her waist, tightened almost painfully as he hugged her to him and rolled over until she lay beneath him.
She spread her legs wider as he settled between them, and shifted her hips until the hardness of him settled on just the right spot.
“God.” The words came between swooping attacks on her face and neck with his open mouth. “I thought you were never going to get here.”
“I wasn’t sure you still wanted me to show up.”
Her hands were urgent in their need to feel the heat of him, sculpting the curves and planes of his hard back down to a narrow waist and hips. Reaching farther, she found nothing but skin.
The man slept naked. Praise be. It saved time.
“Not sure?”
He reached down and braceleted her wrists with his hands. Dragged them up over her head until she was forced to lie still and pay attention to what he was saying. Unbelievably, he was laughing.
She could feel his body shaking against some very sensitive areas.
“Addy. Sweetheart.” His teeth were a pale flash above her as he smiled. “I’ll probably have a five-hundred-dollar water bill next month from all the cold showers I’ve been taking.”
“You have been awfully clean lately,” she said and licked her lips, tugging to free her hands. Spencer braced himself above her on one arm, the other still clasping both of her wrists. All she could think of was that he wasn’t kissing her.
Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) Page 13
