Sweet Dream Lover

by Karen Sandler

  “It’s really good to see you, Kat. You look great.”

  For about three seconds she let the compliment wash over her, then logic took over. Terminal bed head hair, wrinkled suit suffering a power outage, and her face... Maybe that explained his fascination with her mouth. With the last of her Sweet Cinnamon lipstick faded, her mouth had vanished in her face and he was searching for it.

  His gaze drifted down again, no doubt riveted by that empty space between her nose and chin. The least she could do was say something to give him a point of reference.

  “Thanks,” she said brightly. “You look good, too.”

  With the inanity of her comment ringing in her ears, she inched toward the door. “We should go.”

  “Wait.”

  He put his hand on her again, just above her elbow. Who would have thought the crook of her arm would be such an erogenous zone? Even through the baggy sleeve of her jacket, she felt the heat of his palm, the imprint of each finger. She remembered with crystal clarity just what his touch could do to her.

  Why couldn’t it have been as easy as this? Why couldn’t they put their animosity aside and just enjoy great sex? There wouldn’t have been much depth to their marriage, but at least they’d have had a rollicking good time. That should have been enough.

  It would have never been enough. Her heart a stone in her chest, she prodded him to finish. “What?”

  His gaze searched her face and the stone threatened to crumble. “I just wish...”

  She didn’t want to hear the rest. She couldn’t. Kat tugged away, turning her back on him and hurrying out the door. The first slap of chill Seattle evening air cleared her mind and cooled her body. When she heard the restaurant door open then close behind her, she spared Mark only the briefest glance before heading for her car.

  The rest of the crowd was still chatting in the parking lot and it took a full five minutes to say good-byes and climb into cars for the trip home. Fritz dragged a large, battered Louis Vuitton suitcase from Norma’s trunk and a second, smaller one from the front seat before bidding her farewell.

  Kat unlocked her car, then leaned against it to speak to Fritz. “Where are you staying?”

  “I, ah, forgot.” He didn’t quite meet her gaze. “To make a reservation. At a hotel. Where I would be staying. If I’d remembered, that is.”

  She tried to follow his circular logic and failed. “Why not stay with your dad?”

  He shrugged. “Gone somewhere.”

  “Surely he wouldn’t mind if you stayed at his place.”

  “I don’t have a key.”

  Fritz’s flat statement took Kat aback. She had keys to both of her parents’ and stepparents’ houses. Just in case, as her mother liked to say.

  How could Fritz not? Kat opened her car door and hit the unlock button. “Get in. If you promise to behave yourself, you can stay in my spare room.”

  “Thanks, Kat.” Grinning, he tossed the large suitcase in the trunk of her Camry. The smaller Louis Vuitton he settled carefully between his feet in the front seat.

  As she took surface streets to her condo on Melrose, she wondered if Fritz even had the money for a hotel room. Then she dismissed that thought. He was wearing an Armani suit. It was two or three seasons out of style and a bit big for his slender frame, but an Armani nonetheless. He must be doing fine.

  They pulled up to the condo and into the parking garage below. Easing her Camry into her space, she killed the engine then reached in the back for her purse. She caught Fritz staring at her. “What?”

  “Just wondering...”

  “What?” Kat said.

  “Why don’t you trust Mark?”

  The simple question plunked inside her like a pebble in a well. And like water moving in reaction to that pebble, emotions rippled through her. Irritation, defensiveness, despair. It was the same damn question her shrink had asked those first few tumultuous months after the divorce.

  She gave Fritz the same answer she’d given the shrink. “It has nothing to do with trust. We are simply incompatible.” She ducked her head down as if finding her purse required an extensive search. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Purse in one hand, she reached for the small Vuitton suitcase at his feet. “The trunk’s popped. You take the big one and I’ll get that little one.”

  He pulled the bag out of reach. “Thanks, no.”

  “I’m not hauling that monster suitcase in the trunk.”

  “I’ll get them both.”

  Who was hiding something now? “Whatever.”

  Luggage retrieved and car alarm activated, they headed for the elevator. Up in her condo, Kat occupied the next half-hour getting Fritz settled in the extra room, providing him with bedding and pillows and pointing out the bathroom.

  When she crawled into bed at last, Rochester curled on the pillow beside her, she could finally let go of the craziness of the day. Her muscles relaxed as she stretched out on the cool sheets, and her mind quieted.

  If only she could push Mark from her thoughts. Again and again his face intruded, the wisp of sadness in his eyes, the tone of regret in his voice. Then Fritz’s question... Why don’t you trust him? Before now, the answer had always seemed so clear. Because he’s a man, and men can’t be trusted. But now that justification seemed petty and childish.

  Troubled, Kat tossed and turned for hours, finally falling into a fitful sleep near morning.

  Chapter 3

  Kat woke to find a reproachful feline face looming over her, four paws digging into her chest and belly. Rochester glared, yellow eyes fixed on her in a feline mind meld. “Feed me” radiated from that baleful gaze.

  As she nudged Rochester off and climbed out from under the jumbled covers, she knew a moment of sheer peace. Saturday stretched out before her, a quiet day of rest. Light slanted through her bedroom window, the rare sunny morning filling her with well-being.

  She was about to stride from her room in her hip-length babydoll when a clatter in the kitchen brought all of yesterday back to her. An infuriating, but all-too-appealing ex-husband. An impossible fund-raising campaign. And Fritz, a one-man disaster area, who had single-handedly thrown her life into disarray.

  And who was elephanting around in her kitchen, making enough noise to raise the dead. Rochester, thumping his twenty- plus pounds to the floor, crept to the bedroom door, then looked back over his shoulder. Disgust clear in his face, he shouldered open the door and stalked from the room. A moment later, Rochester’s spitting hiss marched in counterpoint to another crash and Fritz’s yelp of alarm.

  Kat threw on jeans and T-shirt in record time, raced through her morning bathroom routine, then headed for the kitchen. Calamity awaited her. Dirty dishes covered every inch of counter space in her compact kitchen, something that might have been pancake batter was baked on to the coils of her electric stove. Fritz was backed up against the refrigerator with a hissing, growling Rochester holding him at bay.

  “Rochester, knock it off.” Kat scooped up the black and gray mass of fur, staggering a bit under his bulk as she headed for the laundry room. A bowl of cat crunchies placated Rochester for the moment.

  In the kitchen, Fritz still held his ground, leaning against the refrigerator, a spatula in his hand. A goopy white smear marred the front of his navy polo shirt. “Do you need a special permit for a cat that size?”

  “Rochester is harmless.” Kat reached over and turned off the stove as the pancake batter smoked. “You want to tell me what you’re doing in here?”

  Fritz swiveled his head from the laundry room door to her, staring for a long ten seconds before he answered. “Making breakfast.” He blinked, tried on a smile. “As a thank-you for letting me stay.”

  Surveying the mess, she wished he’d been a little less grateful. A plate holding three charred circles caught her eye. She lifted a blackened disk. “Ever made pancakes before?”

  “No, but it looked easy enough. The box said just add water.”

  Kat ran
a spoon through the watery mixture in a bowl by the stove, feeling much more cheerful about her stunted cooking skills. She could at least make pancakes from a mix.

  She picked up the box and dumped in another two cups. “Tell you what. If you clean up a bit, I’ll finish these.”

  Fritz handed her the spatula, then headed for the sink. Over the sound of running water, he asked, “Did you sleep well?”

  She poured a portion of pancake batter onto the griddle. “Like a baby,” she lied. “Why do you ask?”

  Fritz dumped a handful of utensils into the soapy water. “Thought I heard you outside my door a couple times during the night.”

  “The condo’s haunted.” She’d been pacing up and down the hallway, trying to tire herself out. “Restless spirits. I hope they didn’t keep you up.” She looked back over her shoulder at him.

  He looked pensive as he swished through the water with his fingers. When he noticed her watching him, he reached into the water for a dish and scrubbed it vigorously. “I slept fine.”

  “So...” With a twist of the wrist, Kat turned the pancakes. “How’s your dad doing?”

  He didn’t answer for so long, Kat wondered if he’d heard her. “He’s great,” Fritz said finally with patently false cheer. “Doing really well.”

  Her cousin had no idea about his dad, Kat realized. The idea stunned her. So accustomed to the sometimes overwhelming familial closeness of the Roths and Denhams, Kat couldn’t imagine a father so isolated from his son as Neddy was from Fritz.

  She would have pressed him further, but Rochester reappeared, licking his chops as he savored his breakfast. Fritz danced aside as the cat passed him, but the Maine coon had apparently finished expressing his opinion of the interloper. He leaped onto one of the chairs in the breakfast nook and proceeded with his morning wash, his disinterest in Fritz blatant.

  “You don’t like cats?” Kat asked.

  “They don’t like me.” Keeping one eye on Rochester, Fritz gave the dish in his hands a perfunctory rub with the sponge. “They can smell my fear.”

  Kat laughed. “Unless your fear smells like tuna fish, Rochester couldn’t care less.”

  “I’ll keep my distance, just the same. No point in taking chances.” He set the dish, still soapy, into the drainer.

  “You have to rinse that.” She waited until he retrieved the dish and held it under the running water before rescuing the pancakes from the griddle. “So when did you see your dad last?” As the silence stretched, she set aside the plate of pancakes. “Fritz?” She caught a bleak look on his face before he turned away.

  Her telephone bleated, the ringing pattern signaling she had a visitor downstairs. She grabbed up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Kat?” Mark’s low voice dragged her heart to a stop, then slapped it into high gear. “I’m here.”

  “Mark?” A tremor stretched his name into two syllables.

  “For breakfast. Remember?” He laughed. “It’s only been an hour since Fritz called. You can’t have changed your mind since then.”

  Kat whirled to spear Fritz with her gaze. He smiled at her, unrepentant. To Mark, she said, “Come on up.” She tapped out a code on the phone to release the door.

  Turning off the stove, Kat advanced on Fritz, giving him the evil eye. “How could you invite Mark for breakfast without asking me first?”

  Fritz’s eyes widened in innocence. “You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  She growled at him, nearly toe-to-toe now. “You have gone beyond annoying. You have trespassed into downright irritating and exasperating.”

  Fritz laughed. “You like men who irritate you.”

  “The hell I do!” A loud rapping at the door spun her around, sent her stomping into the living room.

  Fritz followed along at her heels. “You like men who rile you.”

  “I do not!” Giving Fritz a dark look, she reached for the door.

  “Wait.” Fritz put out a hand to stop her. “I’d rather Mark not know I’m here.”

  “I want him to know you’re here. I want him to know breakfast was all your idea.”

  “Wait. Please.” He peeled her fingers from the doorknob. “When I called him I implied I was staying at the Hilton.”

  Shifting his bare feet, he looked away a moment, then back at her. “I just don’t want anyone else to know I didn’t have a place to stay.”

  Mark knocked again. Kat shouted through the door, “Just a minute, the dead bolt’s stuck.” Then she turned to Fritz. “You just forgot to make a hotel reservation. Otherwise you would have had a place to stay.”

  “Yes. That’s right, I did forget. But no one else needs to know that.”

  Kat studied Fritz’s face, his guileless blue eyes, and wondered what he was keeping from her. “Get back in the spare room.” She waved him down the hall. “Go on, shoo.”

  As he ducked into the bedroom, Kat unlocked the dead bolt, tugged at the door. Mark stood just outside, six-foot-one of tantalizing male.

  ”Hello, Kat.” His low voice trilled up her spine, scattering her thoughts.

  As she gazed up at him, she had to struggle a moment against the knee-jerk ache in her chest. Damn, why did he always have to look so yummy? “You’re right on time.”

  As he stepped inside, his familiar scent drifted toward her, drenching her with memories. The pattern and rhythm of his touch, the flavor of his skin. She squeezed her eyes shut to banish the images.

  “Taken to wearing men’s shoes?” Her eyes flew open. “What?”

  He pointed to a pair of Hermès loafers under the entryway table. Kat remembered Fritz slipping them off last night when he’d first come in.

  Mark nudged the shoes with his sneaker-clad foot. “Not really your style.”

  She shut the door, then faced him, chin tipped up. “How do you know they’re not my lover’s?”

  Something flickered in his face, an emotion she couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Are they?”

  She didn’t have to answer. They were divorced, both free agents. Witness his cozy luncheon yesterday with the blonde. She could have a hundred lovers; it wouldn’t be his concern.

  “No.” Bending, she picked up the shoes. “Excuse me a moment.”

  She took the well-worn loafers down to the guest room and cracked the door open wide enough to toss them inside. When she returned, she found Mark in the kitchen, leaning one shoulder against the refrigerator, chewing on what had to be a stone-cold pancake. She couldn’t seem to take her eyes from the line of his jaw as it worked, the white teeth nipping another bite from the rolled-up cake.

  He finished the flapjack and crossed his well-muscled arms over his chest. The black T-shirt he wore clung faithfully to the lean lines of his body. His faded denim jeans seemed to have a love affair with his legs.

  “Who were you talking to earlier? Before you opened the door?”

  She’d forgotten the subtleties of his smile, how it could be sweet one moment, hot and seductive the next. Right now it seemed a cross of both and it pulled at her heart even as it teased her more basic instincts.

  She shook her head to dispel her treacherous reactions. “No one. The cat.”

  His gaze strayed to where Rochester slept peacefully on a kitchen chair. Kat backpedaled. “I mean I would have been talking to the cat if he’d been in there. So really I was talking to myself, I suppose.”

  She expected him to press the issue, to fall into the familiar pattern of parry and thrust that always escalated into a fight. Instead he shrugged, reaching for another pancake.

  Kat snatched up the plate. “You don’t need to eat them cold. I’ll make some more.” Switching on the stove again, she poured a generous dollop of batter onto the griddle.

  She could feel Mark watching her as she fussed over the giant pancake. When he spoke, his voice caressed her ears. “I confess I was surprised at the invitation this morning.”

  “I was, too,” Kat muttered. She threw a glance at him over her shoulder. “That you
agreed to come, that is.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Kat tried a laugh; it came out sounding sickly. “I’m a lousy cook for starters.” She shoved the spatula under the pancake, flipped it. It folded in half and she had to rearrange it on the griddle to restore a passably round shape.

  “Your cooking doesn’t scare me,” he said.

  Something in his tone turned her toward him. There was a cryptic message in his eyes, a mystery she couldn’t decipher.

  Wouldn’t decipher. “I figured you’d had enough of me last night.” She hefted the pancake from the griddle, slapped it on a plate.

  “I’ve never had enough, Kat.”

  That struck straight to the core. Her hand trembled as she handed him the pancake. He set it aside on the breakfast nook table where Rochester eyed it with speculative interest.

  She waved at him. “Go ahead and sit down. I’ll get the syrup.”

  The plastic bottle of pancake syrup sat so far back in the cupboard she had to drag out the stepladder to reach it. Then she turned too fast with the bottle, and nearly toppled off the ladder.

  She’d never seen him move so fast, grabbing hold of her as she swayed. “Are you okay?” he asked, his hands spread at her waist, steadying her.

  Wonderful, she thought. Better than I’ve been in a long time. “Fine, thanks.” She edged away from him and descended the ladder, thrusting the syrup at him. “Here you go.”

  As she busied herself with putting away the stepladder, then with pouring pancakes for herself, she sensed his gaze on her. She was grateful they’d never lived in the condominium together, that memories weren’t clinging to every surface as they did in the guest house on his parents’ estate. She could barely stand to be in the same room with him without the past intruding.

  She flipped her pancakes, focused on the golden brown circles as if her life depended on it. “Seeing anyone new?” She would have swallowed her own tongue if it could have pulled the question back down her throat. Her skin prickled and burned as she waited for his reply.

  Silence beat out the seconds...one, two, three... “Are you?”