Sweet Dream Lover

by Karen Sandler

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Okay, not a mistake,” he conceded. “They set us up, but it’s not such a terrible idea. We both get a quiet weekend.” Together, he added silently, alone. As his heart did a joyful two-step, he inched his hand toward her.

  Turning to dump her envelope on top of his, she shifted, edging her hip just a shade closer. “I don’t have time for this.”

  He walked his fingers along just beyond her periphery, intent on ambush. “Neither do I. But maybe that’s the point. The family knows how busy we are, how much we need a break. They figured this was the only way we’d take some time for ourselves.” His fingertips were millimeters from paradise.

  “But why together? Why would they—” She grabbed his wrist, halting his incursion. “No.”

  He turned his hand to wrap his fingers loosely around her arm. “No, what?” he asked, playing ignorant.

  “No touching.”

  “Who says I was going to touch you?”

  “You’re touching me now.” She tugged; he held on. “Let go.”

  “But you touched first.”

  “Mark, for crying out loud.” Her fingers grew lax, her eyes widened. “Was this your scheme?”

  He pulled his hand back. “What?”

  “Did you set this up?” She jumped from the bed. “Dragging me all the way up here to—”

  “No!” He scrambled to his feet. “I told you, my mother I was supposed to come.” He winced at the double entendre.

  “I can’t believe this!” She pivoted away, pacing the short length of the tiny bedroom before striding back toward him. “You used my father to get me up here alone!”

  “I had nothing to do with it!” He felt like an idiot standing there in his underwear, so he grabbed his slacks and yanked them on. “I’m just as much a victim here as you.”

  She stomped back into the bathroom. “I don’t care whose harebrained scheme this was. I’m going home.”

  He retrieved his mint green polo shirt from beside the nightstand. “I’m right behind you.”

  She emerged from the bathroom fully dressed in rumpled shirt and slacks, juggling toiletries. Tossing the stray odds and ends into her suitcase, she cast an evil look his way once or twice.

  His patience as fragile as spun sugar, Mark returned her ire glare for glare. Snatching up his suitcase and his shoes, he hustled from the room in search of the shaver and toothbrush he’d left in the downstairs bathroom. If she thought he’d carry her suitcase down for her, she was sadly mistaken.

  All his belongings stuffed back into his bag, he set the suitcase by the door and went poking around the kitchen for a flashlight. She’d have to tote her own barge and lift her own bale, but he was too much of a gentleman to leave her to poke around in the pitch-black night for her car.

  She stopped halfway down the stairs when she saw him waiting for her. “I thought you’d already be gone.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.” He brandished the flashlight. “I thought you’d need help finding your car out back.”

  “You didn’t need to bother,” Kat said. “The front porch light is enough to see my way to the carport.”

  “Which would be fine if your car were parked there, instead of in the back,” Mark said. She didn’t even remember where she’d left her car?

  “What are you talking about?” She started down the stairs. “My car’s in the carport.”

  Was she trying to piss him off? Mark counted to ten. “I know you’re tired, Kat, and I can understand how you might forget where you left your car.”

  “I remember exactly.” She tossed her head as she closed the distance between them. “It’s in the carport.”

  “The carport was empty when I arrived.”

  “You’re out of your mind!” Kat shouted. “My car is there.”

  Her hand fisted and she looked ready to slug him. He would have welcomed the contact, would have enjoyed a wrestling match if only to let go of the anger between them and channel it into something physical.

  Then her suitcase slipped from her hand to clunk on the floor. “Oh, my God...”

  She raced for the front door, fumbling with the knob a moment before she could turn it. Leaving his suitcase behind, Mark took off after her. As they trotted to the periphery of the porch light’s illumination, he switched on the flashlight.

  She stopped short and he bumped into her. He would have apologized if his brain hadn’t gone into a numbing shock.

  The carport was empty.

  Chapter 6

  From the front passenger seat of her Geo Metro, Norma watched Fritz guide Mark’s BMW roadster down the secluded dirt road where they’d already hidden Kat’s Camry. She hadn’t had this much fun since Ronald, the stinker, left her for the bimbo. Just being with Fritz, participating in his harebrained schemes, made her feel like a teenager.

  She supposed, technically, she and Fritz were committing grand theft auto, or whatever they called it on those cop shows that had kept Ronald glued to the TV. To her way of thinking, helping along the path of love took precedence over the niceties of car theft. She was sure there wasn’t a judge in the nation who would convict her.

  Besides, they weren’t stealing the roadster and the Camry. They were merely relocating them. She and Fritz would relocate them right back where they belonged at the end of the weekend. They just wanted to force a little one-on-one between Mark and Kat, help them remember what they’d been missing in the two years since their divorce. By Sunday evening, Norma was sure they’d come to their senses and reconcile.

  Fritz shut off the engine on the BMW, then climbed out and stood beside the car. Realizing he couldn’t see her in the darkness of the thick woods, she switched on the Geo’s headlights, then quickly shut them off again. They couldn’t risk being seen.

  In a jiffy, Fritz was climbing inside behind the wheel of the car, his rakish grin warming her heart. He was such a sweet boy, and such a gas to be around. Her two daughters, Lisa and Sarah, only in their twenties, weren’t nearly as carefree and happy with life as Fritz. She supposed they took after their morose father, who never seemed to find much to enjoy about life, at least until he met the bimbo.

  Fritz put his hand up for a high five. “We did it!”

  As she slapped palms with him, Norma could just make out the bright white of Fritz’s grin. “I thought my heart would stop when Kat almost caught us.”

  They’d only just turned on the dome light to retrieve a Diet Coke from the cooler, not realizing Kat was about to pass them. When they saw Kat’s car slow, Norma had quickly snapped off the switch.

  Fritz took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “But you saved the day.”

  What moonlight there was threaded wanly through the trees and Norma wished she could see Fritz’s expression better. It felt so good to hold a man’s hand again, even though the man in question was barely past puberty.

  When he didn’t let go right away, Norma would have thought she’d feel awkward linking fingers with such a young sprout as Fritz. But the connection warmed her, set off a little spark of joy inside.

  Human contact, that’s all it was. She’d had precious little of it in the last few years. Any woman likes being touched, even if the toucher was half her age.

  Fritz finally pulled away and wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel instead of around her hand. “Well, now what?”

  Norma sighed, already missing those long, slender fingers. “You don’t know?”

  “I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “Do we go home?” Norma crossed her fingers. She most definitely didn’t want to go home to her lonely little house.

  “Uncle Phil expected I’d stay, just in case. He gave me a company credit card.”

  “So we go back into Ashford and find a room until Sunday.”

  He brushed her shoulder. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  A fluttery feeling started up in her stomach. “Why would I mind?” The words came out all breathy. She cleared her t
hroat. “A trip away from home is a luxury for me.”

  A peculiar thought burst into her head and she almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it. Her and Fritz sharing a room. Being out in these dark woods must have affected her brain.

  Thank goodness he couldn’t see her blushing in the dark. “Let’s get going. I’m sure we can find a couple rooms somewhere in Ashford.”

  As he drove slowly back down the dirt road, Norma clutched her hands in her lap. An odd little feeling seemed to be brewing inside her, an entirely crazy and inappropriate emotion. She put it down to the nutty adventure she’d embarked on with Fritz, but deep down, she was afraid the strangeness growing inside her was a horse of an entirely different color.

  * * * * *

  Kat stared at the empty carport, thinking maybe if she looked long enough, she’d see her Camry there hidden within the shadows. But the vacant spot just stayed vacant and her stomach sank past her toes as she realized her car was well and truly gone.

  She was dimly aware of Mark directly behind her, his heat soaking into her back in the frigid night air. “Who would steal a car out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I don’t know.” The way he’d gasped out his response, you’d think it was his car that had been stolen.

  She took a deep breath, and ordered her brain cells back into some semblance of normalcy. “Okay, this isn’t a total disaster. We’ll use your cell phone to report the theft, then take your car back to Seattle.”

  “My cell phone.” She heard him swallow. “My car.”

  Why was he parroting her? Was he trying to annoy her? She turned to face him and his shell-shocked expression sent alarm through her. “Mark, what is it?”

  “My cell phone was in the roadster,” he said, his voice too high. “And the roadster...”

  She grabbed his arm. “What about it?”

  He pointed at the empty carport, at the spot she’d parked her Camry. “I left it here.”

  She was exhausted, shaken, frappéd and fricasseed. That was why Mark wasn’t making sense, why he looked so freaked. Her own mind, her own perceptions couldn’t be trusted.

  She kept her grip on Mark, registering the reality of his warm skin, and gave his arm a little shake. “You can’t have, Mark. If you had, it would still be—”

  The memory hit with the impact of a ton of cashew brittle dropped on her head. The glimmer of a car in the thick of the woods. Then the sound of an engine starting just as she drifted off to sleep. And again later, when she was dozing on the toilet.

  “Them!” she gasped.

  Mark’s synapses were right behind hers. “They took the cars.”

  “Our parents?” She shook her head, unable to grasp the magnitude of her family’s perfidy. “Drove all the way up here to steal our cars?” Sagging against the cool metal of the carport’s aluminum support, she covered her face in her hands. “This is a nightmare.”

  “It has to be a prank.” Mark raked his hair, rumpling it. Her fingers itched to touch it, just once. “Your dad’s idea of a joke.”

  “What about your mom? What if she never talked to Patti? What if she made that up?”

  Now he looked ready to tear out a handful of hair. “Why would my mother make up something so nutty?”

  “How would I know?” She pushed away from the post, flinging her arms out. “Maybe she heard about the management retreat and had some screwy notion that if she sent you up here, then you and I would...that we’d...well, I don’t know, something about putting us together.”

  He closed in on her, towering over her. “So your dad’s innocent in all this.”

  She tipped her chin up primly. “Of course.”

  “And your management team is...where?”

  That was one little glitch she hadn’t worked out. She fluttered her fingers in the general direction of Ashford. “Somewhere in town.”

  “How do you know your father didn’t set this up?” Mark asked. “Convinced my mother to run the sales seminar at the cabin, and all the while plotting this scheme.”

  “My father wouldn’t do that!”

  “So it’s just my mother who’s completely whacked.”

  Guilt twinged at her. She liked Mark’s mother. “Not whacked, just...creative.”

  Like a brooding statue, he stared down at her. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet, she had to strain to hear the words. “I’m here for a sales seminar. I have the packet upstairs to prove...”

  Sudden speculation lit Mark’s expression. Those same wheels started turning in Kat’s mind.

  The words slipped from both their lips simultaneously. “The packets.”

  “I left mine upstairs,” Kat said.

  “Me, too.” Mark did an about-face.

  They hotfooted it back to the cabin, Mark just a step ahead of Kat. She had her key out first, he opened the door once she’d unlocked it, let her go ahead of him. Side by side, they nearly ran up the stairs.

  The packets sat stacked on the still-mussed bed. Kat dithered. “Which is which?”

  Mark grabbed the top packet. “Who the hell cares?” Pulling his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, he ripped the envelope open.

  Kat snatched up the remaining packet and just about shredded the foo-foo lavender paper in her impatience to inspect the contents. The cover letter accompanying the two thick folders inside sailed to the floor. As she leaned over to retrieve it, Mark muttered a string of epithets that would earn him two rosaries his next trip to the confessional. When she scanned the letterhead herself, she let loose a few choice words Rabbi Satenberg would never approve of.

  Kat met Mark’s gaze over the incriminating letterhead emblazoned with Creating Loving Relationships in an overwrought font. All the nasty convoluted pieces thunked into place. “They were in this together,” Kat said.

  Mark nodded, his expression grim. “We’ve been had.”

  * * * * *

  Okay, there’s an upside to this, Mark told himself. A weekend with Kat. That ought to cheer him up. Sure, he was still pretty tweaked to discover CLR had more to do with sex than sales. And he had an overwhelming urge to call his mother and give her a sizeable piece of his mind. No matter how enjoyable the outcome, she’d had no right to orchestrate him the way she did.

  That is, he’d call her if he had a phone. Which he didn’t, since his cell was in his car and the cabin didn’t have a phone.

  But the sour look on Kat’s face just before she’d collapsed on the bed certainly sapped the pleasure from the prospect of spending two days with her. At least he assumed it would only be two days.

  “You don’t suppose they’d leave us here past the weekend,” Mark ventured.

  Hunched over, head in hands, she turned long enough to glare at him before sinking into despair again. The scattered papers from the CLR folders lay in disarray around her. She’d dug through the mess of introspective crap for nearly fifteen minutes in a fruitless effort to unearth something related to management connectivity or matrix interactivity or whatever the hell she was searching for. She’d come up empty.

  Her voice was muffled as she spoke through her fingers. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Kat, rumpled and at the end of her rope, still looked so hot it was all he could do to keep from joining her in that bed. “It’s nearly two a.m. There’s no sense in doing anything tonight. We’ll go get our suitcases, I’ll get you comfy downstairs and we’ll work this out in the morning.”

  She dropped her hands. “Downstairs? I’m sleeping up here.” No way was he using that other bed. “Not unless you’re sleeping with me, babe. I’ve got dibs on this room.”

  She scrambled from the bed, knocking half the CLR paperwork to the floor. “I got here first. How can you have dibs?”

  “Because...” Because I can’t sleep downstairs without remembering how you felt in my arms. “Because I’m taller, and I need a...uh...longer bed.”

  “This bed isn’t longer. It’s a queen. The one downstairs is a king.”
>
  “The circulation’s better.” He waved a hand at the window. “You know I need good circulation.”

  She stared at him, no doubt wondering if he should be committed. She might have called the men in white coats if she’d had a phone.

  She edged between him and the bed, and she spoke in the careful, reasoned tone one used on the unhinged. “I’m sleeping here, Mark. You’ll have to go downstairs.”

  Leaping toward her, he feinted left, then right, trying to get around her. She saw through his subterfuge and jumped on the bed before he could get to it, splaying herself across it. He climbed on board, squeezing into the space her lean body didn’t occupy. But she wouldn’t give any ground and before he knew it, he was sprawled on top of her, both of them spread-eagled.

  Now this was interesting. Kat panted and gasped for breath, her hair mussed, a lock of it trailing in her mouth. He’d ended up between her legs and Mr. BVD stood at full attention. If she raised her knees just a little, he’d be right where she wanted him.

  Except of course she didn’t want him there, and when she raised her knee, it wasn’t to make friends with Mr. BVD. He rolled off her an instant before she made contact.

  “Sorry,” he gasped out, breathless at the near miss. “I didn’t mean to.” Except he had, if he was being perfectly honest.

  She looked a little stunned as she sat up, her breasts still saying hello from under her shirt. She gave him a sidelong glance as she admitted, “I don’t want to sleep downstairs.”

  He pulled himself up and leaned against the headboard. “Yeah.” That was sufficiently ambiguous that she wouldn’t be able to tell if he was wimp enough to feel the same way or was just being empathetic. “So what do we...”

  “We flip for it.” She shifted to dig in her slacks pocket and he wanted to dive in there with her. Producing a slightly warped gold foil–wrapped chocolate coin, she held it out in her flattened palm. “Call it.”

  The chocolate coin flew up, launched with a flick of her thumb. “Heads,” he called as gravity pulled the quarter back down.

  She grabbed it and slapped it on the back of her hand. When she revealed the coin, he saw Roth Confectionery embossed on the side.