She slapped five dollars down on the bar, but even in the few seconds that transaction had taken, the scene seemed to have gotten away from her. The stranger had Gramps easily pinned under one shoulder, and the two of them seemed to be headed for the door whether she came or not. Loren snatched up her purse and scurried ahead of the two men, opening the door, blowing away yet another wisp of auburn hair from her face. Her features were flushed, her eyes silvery gray. There was stubbornness in the lift of her chin. No matter how desperately she needed the giant’s help, she felt wary. This character was a simple Good Samaritan the way she was a linebacker for the Detroit Lions.
Behind her, in the two minutes it took to reach the van, Gramps was trying to tell his life story. Hurriedly, she unlocked the side of the van and swung both doors open. She waited, unconsciously lifting one foot after the other, in the slushy parking lot. It was wickedly freezing; a bitter gust of wind strained at her coat, slashing it open to reveal the powder-blue wool skirt hugging the curve of her thighs. The man who called himself Buck glanced briefly at her, then he was busy settling her grandfather in the back of the van. Gramps was still talking.
“Buck just said he’d come to dinner, Loren. Knows all about the horses, he does, the sulkies… A good man, don’t think I can’t tell. Exactly the kind of man you nee—”
“Yes, Gramps. ” Oh, Lord! she thought.
“I like him, Loren. Got stranded here without a car, he did. We’ll help him out. Buck, you take care of my Loren, now…”
Buck—or whatever his name was—finally came out of the van as Gramps was dropping off again. He turned to her, apparently waiting. Surely, he hadn’t taken any of the conversation seriously. What was he waiting for?
“Thank you. I really appreciate your help.” He was still waiting. She tried to laugh. “Of course you must have a car,” she informed him.
Something flickered in his eyes, an expression of humor that quickly turned grim again. “Is your grandfather likely to be ill on you?” But he didn’t wait for the answer. “Actually, I do seem to be stranded here for the moment. Why don’t we just get your grandfather home? I’ll take care of myself from there.”
“Well…” She didn’t believe him. That man had never been stranded, but still she found herself wavering. There were times when it was no joke getting her grandfather home and into the house. She sighed unhappily. A very bad decision was probably in the making, but he was there. “Perhaps if you would just ride home with us in case he… I would pay you,” Loren said swiftly, “and I’ll also give you the taxi fare back to…wherever it is you’re going.”
Another fleeting expression of amusement crossed his face. “I think I can manage…without your having to pay me anything.”
“It would only be fair,” she insisted. What exactly was he finding so funny? She changed her mind completely about asking him a second and a half later. The van wasn’t particularly fancy, but there was a couch in back and carpet up to the two front seats. Ample room—at least until the huge stranger came up to sit next to her after closing the doors. He took up an incredible amount of space. His long legs barely had stretch room, and the crown of his rusty head almost touched the ceiling. She started the engine with misgivings. She must have been temporarily insane to accept this man’s unexpected offer of help with Gramps. “Listen,” she started firmly.
“He reminds me of someone. My aunt Emma,” the man mused as he turned down his coat collar and relaxed, his eyes staring straight ahead. “I used to dread her Saturday afternoon teas. Prim and proper as England she was, until tea time. By the time she was through putting medicine in her cup, she could swear like a soldier and snore like a dragon. Just on Saturdays, mind you.”
Unwillingly, Loren found herself almost smiling. So this hulking stranger had a little empathy and a lot more perception than most people. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who had this sort of problem.
“Now Aunt Emma was straight-laced Boston to the core. Only on Saturdays did she suddenly get a French accent,” the man continued gravely.
Loren did smile then, relaxing. “Gramps’s ancestry is English and French. We’re only Irish on Friday afternoons.”
She swung out of the driveway and faced a steady stream of Friday Livernois traffic. Detroit traffic had a distinctive personality, particularly on the expressway headed toward the northern suburbs. It was kill or be killed, with no one particularly interested in the outcome. Too preoccupied to concentrate on her driving, Loren heard a horn blare behind her as she rapidly switched lanes; but by the time she glanced in the rearview mirror, it was to check on Gramps rather than the irate driver. A semi truck loomed ahead of her, and she swerved again, passing on the right this time, trusting that the rest of the cars behind her would understand. “I do appreciate your stopping to help,” she told the man beside her. “Most people wouldn’t have.” She paused. “My sister will be home…and the housekeeper. As soon as we get to the house, I’ll phone a taxi for you.”
“If we get there in one piece.”
“Pardon?” Her eyebrows lifted pertly in inquiry.
He motioned her eyes rapidly back to the road. “You can either pass that car ahead or hit him.”
He needn’t sound so critical. Crossly, she speeded up and passed the turtle-slow car. “Better?” she said stiffly.
“My mother used to tell me that we’re all on earth on borrowed time, but I had a little longer rental in mind. How did you ever pass driver’s training?”
“Gramps bribed the cop,” she said smoothly.
It shut him up quite nicely, but she couldn’t miss that slash of a smile. He really wasn’t a brawler type at all when he smiled. In fact, with those beautiful eyes… He was staring at her so intently that she flushed and quickly riveted her gaze on the highway, deciding she had imagined that certain kind of interest in his eyes. It was impossible. She didn’t need a mirror to know she undoubtedly looked as though she’d just come very close to unraveling—which she had. “As I said,” Loren repeated, “we have a live-in housekeeper. She does have a bad back, though, and if you wouldn’t mind helping me get Gramps into the house…”
“I heard you the first time. There’ll be an audience, so I should stop thinking about robbery and rape. Immediately.”
She lapsed back into brooding silence. Very funny. But the man was not what he seemed. Out of work, perhaps; but he spoke in educated accents and was too damned quick on the uptake for comfort. This association wasn’t going to be a long one. She carried few scars from her short-term marriage seven years ago, but there was a lingering wariness when she couldn’t place a man. And since placing men was her job, the enigmatic Buck was beginning to get under her skin. She put on her professional voice as she turned off the expressway. “It’s a rough economy for everyone these days,” she said with impersonal sympathy. “Have you been out of work long?”
Those bushy eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think I’m out of work?”
She shrugged, stopped for a red light and reached down to turn off the heater. “In that bar in the middle of a Friday afternoon? Construction?” she guessed.
“I—At times.” He hesitated, and she could feel his eyes on her, a little too shrewd for comfort. “I was in the bar to meet an old friend I went to school with. When we were teenagers, it was a different kind of place. Not better, just different. I hadn’t been back there in so long…”
“Of course,” she said smoothly. She believed part of his story. She could visualize him as a black-leather-jacketed teenager with a fake ID, busy being tough. But the rest of what he was trying to convey, that he was not normally in a bar on a Friday afternoon…well.
“Somehow I had the feeling you weren’t going to believe me,” he murmured wryly.
“I never said that!”
“You didn’t have to.” He paused. “Could you try to believe I haven’t been in a brawl since I was sixteen?”
“Really, I…”
“It’s a big lag, between sixtee
n and thirty-six. I can’t decide which is more ridiculous—the image of you in that bar looking like a virgin in a brothel or the image of me trying to remember how to land a left hook in the face of the meathead who was hassling you. Not that I find either image amusing,” he said flatly.
She floundered in the quick little silence that followed, flashing back to the moment when he’d come up from behind her and the trouble had dissipated like docile little waves on a quiet sea. She could pinpoint it as the moment her hands had stopped shaking. He sounded angry that she had been in the bar in the first place; she didn’t know what to make of that, but she groped rapidly to take charge of the conversation again. “I used to think that anyone who really wanted work could find it, but that certainly hasn’t been true lately.”
“I take it you’re gainfully employed?”
“I’m a personnel manager. Though for how long… I’d like to say I could offer you a job, but with things as they are…” She felt an involuntary surge of compassion toward him. Whatever else he was, he didn’t look like a man who enjoyed being on the unemployment line.
“It’s perfectly all right.” The gravelly voice had a sudden cryptic undertone. She glanced at him curiously, but then a horn beeped behind her. The light had turned green.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” she said quietly.
“You didn’t. But why do I keep getting the feeling that you feel safer thinking I’m on the welfare rolls?”
His half-smile seemed mocking, and she didn’t care for his tone at all. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said crisply. “First of all, I feel perfectly safe. Obviously. You just went out of your way to help me, at a time when most people would have looked the other way. So—”
“I’m glad,” he said swiftly.
“Pardon?”
“That you feel so safe.”
She refrained from gritting her teeth. All right, she didn’t feel safe. She felt absolutely stupid driving home with a perfect stranger twice her size sitting beside her. But he didn’t have to rub her nose in it.
“Tell me about your training in karate,” he consoled her. “It might make you feel better.”
For an instant, she bristled with an absolute fury, but it subsided just as quickly. Totally against her will, she found herself chuckling. “Four years,” she said blandly. “A black belt, of course. I’ve won world tournaments. Not karate, judo—you know, the bigger the opponent, the harder he falls? It’s a distinct disadvantage for the enemy to be larger; you use his weight against him, you see…”
When she was done describing her mythical judo skills, he was laughing. They both subsided into silence. “Feel better?” he asked after a time.
For no rational reason, she did, she realized, frowning. Was it because despite herself this man intrigued her, or because she was relieved that they were going to be on her doorstep within the next five minutes and she would be rid of him?
Chapter Two
Loren was uniquely conscious of Buck’s appraisal as she turned into the winding driveway that led to the Shephard house. At first glance, the grounds implied wealth and grace, but a closer scrutiny revealed that the paved drive had pocked and not been fixed, that the old asphalt tennis court hadn’t seen a tennis ball in a very long time and was now so overgrown it was no longer likely to. The house rose in two old-fashioned stories, an overhanging eave with pillars in front, the southern side shaded with maples and white oak in the summertime. The garage was separate, and though it was capable of holding four cars, her van wouldn’t fit under any of the low ceilings. Not that she would bring this to Buck’s attention, she thought as she drove the van up to the front door for the ease of getting Gramps out.
But surely as he looked at the house, Buck couldn’t help noticing that the paint was peeling rather wretchedly in spots. She’d managed the doors and lower windows the summer before, but painting the rest of the house had eluded both her salary and ability. Yet despite its dilapidated air, she loved the place more than she loved any human being, barring Gramps, and she could never let it go.
Buck’s eyes had been scanning ever since they turned into the private driveway, and Loren felt a moment’s unease. If he wasn’t scrutinizing the peeling paint, he could very well be thinking there would be valuable heirlooms to steal in a house like this. The thought faded as he got out of the van. He just didn’t seem like a thief. Danger came from that giant in other ways… In a moment, he had the side doors open and was angling out a newly talkative Bill Shephard.
Loren opened the front door and stepped in just ahead of them. “Angie?” she called. On inspiration, she added, “Joan?” Even a fictitious housekeeper had to have a name.
The hallway was square, leading to a massive dining room on the right and a living room on the left. The entire downstairs was carpeted in a soft moss green that had been plushly elegant at one time; with the careful placement of furniture Loren had hidden most of the threadbare spots. Duncan Phyfe tables in the living room were matched by traditional couches and chairs in cream and a light federal blue. It was a huge room, and perhaps to someone more affluent than her unexpected guest, the furnishings would look a bit sparse, making it obvious that pieces had been sold as the need occurred. She didn’t personally mind the austerity, and anyway, beyond were the open French doors to the library, a room that radiated her favorite kind of clutter—books, paintings and roomy furniture meant to curl up in.
“Angie?” She sighed when there was still no answer. She felt uncomfortable having to motion Buck upstairs with Gramps; had her sister been there, she would have felt less uneasy.
Buck seemed to wield the frail old body of her grandfather as if William Shephard weighed less than a sack of potatoes; the old man had fallen asleep again. Loren led the way up, feeling increasingly awkward. The stranger hadn’t even seen the kitchen, and now he was on the way to the bedrooms.
“It’s the last door on the left…” There were six bedrooms and three baths, massive, old-fashioned rooms that led off the ballroom of a hall. The doors were all oak and heavy with crystal knobs. High-vaulted ceilings and alcoved cubbyholes… For some ridiculous reason, she wanted the stranger to like the place and not notice the holes in the carpet or the barren spots on the walls where paintings had obviously been taken down.
Whatever his thoughts, they undoubtedly flew out of his mind at the sudden emergence of a tall blonde bombshell clothed in a pale pink slip with a brush in her hand from one of the bedrooms. Loren glared at her sister, but Angela ignored her basilisk gaze as she said, “Honestly, Loren, I am sorry about this afternoon. I got home from classes at noon, and I was so tired—oh!” As the sweetest blue eyes heaven made were bestowed on the towering virile form of the giant, appreciation promptly replaced shock. Curiosity and perhaps amazement followed as Angela looked at Loren with raised eyebrows. You? her look seemed to say.
“In there.” Loren motioned Buck irritably to her grandfather’s bedroom. It was hardly a moment for introductions.
“I won’t be here for dinner, Lor. I’m going out with David, so you won’t have to cook for me. I knew you’d find Gramps. I really think this time you should consider—”
“No!”
Loren followed Buck into the bedroom. When her grandfather was flat on the bed, she started taking off his shoes. Buck was working on the buttons of his suit coat. And Angie, Loren noted, appalled, was casually in the doorway as if she were fully dressed. “It’s been the most dreadful day. The hot water’s out again—and I was just going to do the dishes. So I couldn’t do that or take a shower… Do you need any help?” she asked virtuously.
By now Gramps was already beneath a blanket. Loren straightened up, brushed her hair away from her face and honored her sister with a level stare. “Behave yourself,” she said evenly. “His name is Buck, and he’s already seen that you have an outstanding figure, so unless you want to freeze to death, you might as well put on some clothes.”
Angela’s eyes widened. “You’re certa
inly not in a very good mood.”
“No,” Loren agreed, “I’m not.”
“Well then, I’ll just leave you two to have a cup of coffee or something.” Her eyes lingered one more appreciative moment on Buck, then she asked with a frown, “Who’s Joan? I thought I heard you calling—”
“Our housekeeper,” Loren said flatly.
One could not accuse Angela of being slow. “Oh,” she said brightly, reaching out to pat her sister’s shoulder as if to comfort the demented. Then she sashayed barefoot from the room with a swivel of one pink satin hip.
Loren turned to find a silent Buck with a peculiarly contorted face. He was standing with his hands jammed comfortably in his pockets, his shock of rusty hair rumpled from the wind, his stark green eyes all over her like a camera. She had the peculiar impression that he was close to either laughter…or anger.
“I’m Miss Prim, and that’s Miss Hot and Heavy. In case you haven’t guessed. Anyway, welcome to the household, Buck,” she said wearily. “Somehow, I even have the insane urge to offer you a cup of coffee. But please don’t steal anything, okay? I’m too tired even to call the police if it came to it.”
The kitchen was a huge square with a thousand cupboards and the most inefficient of all possible working settings, but the room was light, and the huge old oak table had character. Except for Angela’s excess of dishes, the room was spotless. Impatiently, Loren went first to the sink and filled it with soapy water. She set the dishes in to soak, not to make a suitable impression on the man who had followed her to the kitchen, but simply because she couldn’t stand dirty dishes.
Buck moved behind her, lifting the teapot to make sure it contained water, then turning on the burner beneath it. “Coffee and cups?” he questioned quietly.
“You’ll have to move the kettle to the back burner. That one doesn’t work,” she said irritably. “Cups are just above you, and instant coffee’s on the side there.”
Kisses From Heaven Page 2
