She hadn’t answered his question. Also, he didn’t know what hogwash was, exactly, and scowled at the water while he considered it. Dammit, he’d have to Google it. “Why here, Sheri?”
She walked away. He followed after her, leaving enough space for her to be alone with her thoughts, but not so much he couldn’t watch the way her tempting behind shifted as she meandered. “Well, I’ve travelled around for years. I find people, stay with them, I try to help them. It’s what I do. I think you and I have a lot in common and I might be able to help you.”
He recognized honesty in her tone and nodded, even though he didn’t feel it encompassed the full truth—instead grazing over it with superficial grace. She stopped in the shadow of a black walnut and faced him again.
“Unless you plan on cleaning my house, I can’t think of a single thing you can help me with.”
“It’s a big project, but one step at a time, like I said. I like a challenge.”
He wasn’t sure if she referred to cleaning his house or remodeling him.
Alone with her, in the shadow of a pretty tree, he noticed the bucolic glory around them. The sun sliced lazy patterns in the grass, inviting peace, as birdsong rang out across the breeze. Bugs buzzed around with the economy of motion only those with a short lifespan ever really mastered—and the intimacy of the moment struck him. He turned away from all of it and strode back to the house.
She hadn’t really answered his questions, not really, but he’d better spend his day writing than wandering around poking at her for answers she obviously wasn’t willing to give.
Yet.Chapter Four
If she had to guess—which she did, since Radcliffe mostly avoided her all day—the room he’d offered for her to work in might have once served as his bedroom. Lacking the full clutter of the rest of the house, the room held boxes and piles of stored items alongside a single twin-sized bed.
Nothing hung on the walls behind the boxes. She hauled them out one by one to reveal blue paint and a baseball border. The border was missing entirely in places, falling off in others, but she could imagine what the room looked like when Radcliffe had been a boy.
No toy boxes though. A single desk, which she planned on snooping in—he did tell her she could clean up, after all—and the bed seemed the only remnants from the room’s former purpose.
Once she’d hauled the boxes out to add them to the precarious stacks in the living room, she focused on scrubbing. She found disinfectant, mopping and scrubbing supplies, and window cleaning fluid, and went to work.
Before long, she wore a sheen of sweat and dust, and the room smelled lemony fresh. Uninterrupted by dust, the light streamed into the small space, inviting and comforting after the gloom of the rest of the house. Hands on hips, she surveyed the space. Once she’d removed the last lingering bits of border, the paint cleaned up fairly nice. She’d like to hit it with some nice warm yellow paint—a harvest kind of color—or maybe a cool mint green because it would make the space look bigger and more welcoming. The window was a wide, heavy thing and, if she remembered correctly, she’d seen some storage shelves she could haul in here—once she’d cleaned off a questionable amount of dust—and cover with pillows to make a faux window seat.
The twin-sized bed still lurked and she glared at it. It needed to go.
“You found the floor.”
Squeaking, she jumped and pressed a palm to her chest to slow her racing heart. “You scared the crap out of me.”
If she didn’t know better, she’d guess he smiled before he covered the expression with a hand. “Then don’t be so damned jumpy. It’s my house, after all, and you’ve stunk it up with cleaning supplies and been quite noisy.”
She snorted and pointed at the bed. “Make that vanish.”
“The bed? Why?”
“Do you use it?” Arching a single brow, she held her ground.
“Well no, but it is part of the room.”
“Do you plan to use it?”
“No, but—”
“Why are you keeping it?” Packing up her cleaning gear, she didn’t meet his gaze, not wanting to seem confrontational while digging for answers.
The pause before he answered lengthened so long that she thought he might have left the room entirely. Instead, he stood, gazing out the window, his back turned to her. “My first response would have been that it’s not mine. Then again, all of this is now mine. There is a burn pile in the back yard…if you can haul it out there, you may dispose of it.”
Without another word, he fled the room.
Since she’d broken new ground with him, she wasn’t willing to let him escape the battle front. “Wait, Radcliffe!” Capturing his arm, she jerked when his gaze landed on her, reminding her she’d promised not to touch him. She tried to snatch the hand back but he moved faster, surprising her again.
In one move, he’d caught her hand, spun and pinned her to the wall with his size. Telling herself the move was aggressive, that she should be nervous, reminding herself she was alone with him and he was little more than a stranger didn’t seem to do a damn thing to her actual response.
Her breath caught and her eyes locked with his. She licked her lips, almost inviting him to steal a kiss.
He didn’t, simply holding her in place, head bent so only inches separated their faces. “You wanted me to wait?”
She tried to remember the thread of the conversation, dragging her thoughts together like kindergarteners hopped up on too much sugar set loose on a playground. “I—”
He arched a brow, shifting so he caged her with his arms, the scent of him shockingly not bad—masculine and tempting. Almost as intriguing as the cobalt of his gaze and the sardonic curl of his lips. “What for?” he demanded.
Swallowing, she found her voice. “I don’t remember.” He was too close, too big, and her response to him too unexpected.
Lips curled into what had to be a small smile, he turned and vanished around the corner, leaving her to sag against the wall. Only once she was again alone did she remember what she’d meant to ask him. Punching her fist on her leg, she glared in the general direction of his office. “You did that on purpose!” she yelled before stomping back to her new workspace.
She’d wanted to ask him what he meant about it not being his stuff. Dammit.
Well, there was always the next time.
Deciding not to overthink her response to him, she set back to work—she really wanted to investigate the desk.
The initial search online for information about his uninvited houseguest only created more questions rather than answering any, so he decided to delve deeper.
The blinking cursor blinked on, not yet swayed by his attempt at changing the scenery to remove writer’s block, so there wasn’t a whole lot else for him to do with his day. Or so he told himself while ignoring an inbox full of blog requests, conference information and other email flotsam of writerly life, to continue probing the Internet’s knowledge of Sheri.
She wasn’t active on social networks, which struck him as unusual in this day and age. Most of his work happened in cyberspace and having a very public social media presence was a must for the creative arts, or so he understood. Yet, other than a defunct membership to an art-sharing site that was years old and her website, Sheri was invisible on the Internet. Radcliffe didn’t have an aversion to further searching, however, so he hit the newspapers.
Birth record, traffic tickets—all information he could gather off the web and he did without the slightest hesitation or fear of impeding on her personal space. When he started a family tree on an ancestry site to further dig into her history, he might have hesitated for a brief second…
But only that. He could access more newspapers faster that way.
He didn’t expect the obituary listing her as beloved fiancée.
The screen glowed back at him. The man in question
died young—only twenty-four—after a long battle with illness. Which posed even more questions.
What kind of illness? How had having a fiancé die that young change a woman? Did she mourn him? Was she suffering from Florence Nightingale syndrome or had she dated him prior to his illness? She was creative—an artist. Where were the pieces she’d created in memory of her lost love?
What made a woman who’d been in a committed relationship with a dying man land in a grocery store asking a strange author she didn’t even read if she could stay with him?
Punching his desk in frustration, he rubbed his eyes to remove eyestrain. Hours of work, hours of intensive research, and he’d ended up with more questions rather than more answers.
A glance at the clock showed it was about dinner time, and the scents trailing in through his closed door suggested his roommate was cooking or had cooked something recently. His stomach rumbled in response to the stimulus. Standing and stretching, he strode toward the kitchen to see what she had gotten into.
Humming, her back turned to him while she danced in front of the stove, she looked remarkably fitting in his kitchen. She’d changed out of her dusty clothes from earlier and instead wore a denim skirt and T-shirt. Her feet were bare, toes painted a bright red, on his obviously recently scrubbed floor. A nearby stand held an iPod and music whispered out—not so loud that he’d hear it from his office.
When she belted out the line to the movie musical playing on the speakers, he couldn’t stop his smile. While the sound on the device might be soft enough not to be heard from his office, her off-key warbling could probably be heard all the way to town.
He shouldn’t have pinned her to the wall like an errant butterfly earlier. He’d instantly regretted the mistake, but the desire to touch her, to taste the tempting mouth that curved so easily from emotion to emotion, rode him constantly. He’d said he wasn’t a hero from one of his books…
He wasn’t. The fantasies he crafted watching her bob around the stove, singing in that tight little skirt, were far from heroic. Would she scream and flee, leaving his house and removing the enigma she brought with her, if he came up behind her and pulled that tempting ass firm against his body?
Or would she relax into his embrace, tilting her head back so he could sample the mouth that teased his thoughts even when she wasn’t in the same room?
Since he couldn’t seem to keep his raging libido from forcing possibilities into his mind, he cleared his throat to get her attention.
She spun, splattering spaghetti sauce onto the freshly washed linoleum. “Crap,” she muttered. “Sorry. I’ll clean that up.”
He grunted, moving to the sink to wash his hands. Since she’d been the one to mop the floor she currently sullied, he wasn’t going to complain about a bit of sauce.
“Are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” he answered.
“Well, you’re in for a treat then. I made my grandmother’s famous sauce. You had tomatoes out in your kitchen garden—which was a wreck, by the way—so I’m guessing me cooking them up won’t cause you any undue duress.”
Her nervous babbling didn’t do a thing for his raging hormones, so he moved to sample the so-called famous sauce.
He didn’t expect her to smack his hand like a child sneaking a taste of dinner.
It actually made him pause, sauce-covered fingertip midway to his mouth, to stare at her.
“You smacked me.” He waited for her response, reveling in her wide eyes and shocked expression, which said she’d surprised herself as much as she had him with her automatic swat.
She’d helped others, prided herself on following her calling and helping them, and never fought shards of attraction. She’d helped others without fumbling, without straying from her path.
She’d helped others without swatting them like disobedient children.
Nothing about this case was working out as she planned. She berated herself and didn’t even bother to attempt conversation with Radcliffe as she finished getting the dinner on the table. Not that he seemed to mind. After she’d smacked him, he simply looked at her. She didn’t apologize—it would have been a lie, something to say because of expectations rather than an honest feeling, and she anticipated his derision. When she said nothing, simply gaping at him like a landed fish, he raised a single brow. After another couple beats, he slowly finished bringing his finger to his lips to suck off the sauce.
Which shouldn’t have come across as erotic. He was eating spaghetti sauce off his finger, for God’s sake, not sucking on her clit. She was a big girl and even if she hadn’t been in a relationship for quite a while, she had a battery-operated buddy and wasn’t afraid to buy more batteries. Yet…
Her nipples hardened at the sight of him sucking that digit.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
And she’d smacked him. How would she increase his trust in her to the point that she’d be able to help him if she kept acting irrationally around him?
“You’re thinking so loud I can practically hear you.”
Startling, she jerked at the sound of his voice. She’d been so wrapped up in tearing herself apart she’d almost forgotten he still leaned on the counter. “Sorry. So, well, here’s dinner.” She cleared her throat. Way to be interesting, Sheri. Keep stating the obvious.
“Thank you.” He stood by a chair, waiting until she’d slid into her own seat before taking his.
“You’ve got manners.” The instant the words slipped out, she wanted to smack her forehead. Vocal diarrhea because he set her on edge, made her nervous and jittery and excited her all at once. Double damn.
His lips did that half-smile thing, the almost-but-not-quite smile she was beginning to recognize as his way of showing mild amusement. “Although I prefer not to spend more time in society than absolutely required, I am aware of the culture we’re immersed in, yes.”
She snorted. Trying to cover it with sipping her water didn’t work since those laser-like eyes focused on her, demanding more. “Sorry, that was impolite.”
“Honest. I respect honest. What was the snort for?” He forked up a bite of pasta and ate it, still considering her like a bug under a microscope. The wildfire attraction she battled didn’t seem to be fazing him in the least, the bastard.
“I’m starting to think you use big words to try to distance yourself, like throwing them out will be a maze no one will want to wander through in search of meaning.” Trying to ignore his hulking presence, still slouched and dark, seemed akin to ignoring the sun, so she simply took a deep breath and began to eat.
She’d given up on him answering when he made her jump again by speaking. “I’d never really considered it, but it’s possible. And it works, so I probably won’t put a lot of effort into changing my pattern, if it is true.”
Sipping water, she mulled over that response.
“Enough about me, tell me why you’re here.”
“I told you why I was here yesterday.” Dismissing his question with a wave of her hand, she started to fork up another bite when he captured her hand.
Her fingers went lax at the unexpected touch and she dropped her fork to the plate with a clatter. “Don’t tell me lies, Sheri. I let you into my home. Tell me the truth.”
His hand withdrew and he went back to eating, but she swallowed hard. She never told the people she worked with what she was doing until after, until they didn’t really need her anymore.
Then again, this wasn’t a normal case and nothing was going like it should be.
Twirling her fork in the pasta, she weighed the idea and decided it couldn’t hurt anything.
“One condition.” He apparently liked rules, giving her a few that first day. If she wanted to crack his façade, find the man underneath and help him, perhaps she’d need to play it his way. “I’ll answer your question if you answer one of mine.”
His jaw clenc
hed and he hunched back over his plate.
Blowing out a shaky breath, she went back to eating too. Her reaction to him was inexplicable. Like some teenager with their first crush, she was hyperaware of him, wanted him to give her a full smile, was shattered because he simply touched her hand? The sheer ridiculousness of the situation—
“Fine.”
Although she’d thrown out the gauntlet, she hadn’t really expected him to pick it up. “Why did you say the things in the house weren’t yours? Whose are they, if not yours?”
The baring of his teeth made her close her eyes. She knew before he spoke what his answer would be.
“That’s two questions. Are we doing two for two, then?”
Filling her mouth with another bite, even though her heart hammered in her chest, gave her a moment more to think. Chewing slowly, she rinsed it down with water. How bad could his two questions be anyway? It wasn’t like she had anything to hide, and if she did, he wouldn’t know enough to ask pointed questions this early on. “Yes, two for two.”
“Because it still doesn’t feel like they’re my things. And my mother’s.”
The rapid-fire response sent the gears of her mind whirring. She could look up his mother on her tablet when she got upstairs, possibly unravel part of the mystery of Radcliffe McQueen and—
“Now, for my questions. Why are you here?” He drained his water and raised a brow.
Sighing, but foreseeing that question, she answered him with the honesty he’d asked for. “I’m an artist, like I said, by trade. My real calling, though, has been helping people. I’ve been doing it for years, travelling around the country and finding people—like yourself—that are hiding from reality, that want to be part of society, but for whatever reasons aren’t sure how or don’t think they can. I help them find a reason to trust people, to laugh and to love and to move on. I consider it personality renovating.” Smiling at him, she waited for the typical response, but he didn’t give it to her, instead sneering at his empty glass.
While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 Page 3
