The Bliss Factor

by Penny McCall

  He rose just as the first flush of dawn pearled the eastern horizon, cat-footing it to the doorway of Rae’s bower, which she’d insisted on leaving open. In case there was a problem, she’d said with a meaningful look at him, as if he were a two-year-old who needed watching. He figured it was really all those years of sleeping in a tiny trailer. She probably couldn’t stand being closed in.

  She certainly slept like a woman who treasured her space, sprawled across the bed, her skin rosy with sleep, her rich red hair tousled. She looked so relaxed Conn almost wished she could stay asleep. Waking her meant watching that pinched look settle around her mouth and eyes. She only thought she was happy, but then, he could say the same of himself. Why else would he lose his memory and not want to get it back?

  And that, he thought as he eased quietly away from her doorway, was a question for another time. The sun would soon shine in what promised to be a cloudless sky, the birds already sang in the trees, and the neighbors had yet to emerge.

  He went out the back door, stepping barefoot onto the well-clipped ground covering behind her house. Gardens surrounded the lawn, and the Hummer sat on the paved area to his left where Rae had parked it, everything enclosed by a tall wooden fence with stone posts. It was all peace and perfection. And then the sounds of an intruder came from Rae’s carriage house.

  Between heartbeats Conn snapped from relaxed to ready, slipping across the grass, his footfalls silent as he rounded the yard. He approached the small building from an angle that wouldn’t expose him to either the door or the windows, creeping up to the side of the carriage house, the wall chilly against his shoulders as he eased around the front corner, far enough to spy the intruder. Which turned out to be an old man clad in a robe decorated with swirls of burgundy and midnight blue and gold down to his spindly bare ankles, his feet shod in deep red velvet slippers with fur lining.

  “Do you require assistance?” Conn asked him.

  The old man spun around and whacked him over the head with a clear sack filled with metal, glass, and plastic containers, cocking back for another blow.

  “’Swounds!” Conn caught the arm holding the sack and the collar of the conjurer’s robe, then quickstepped him into the house, the old guy sputtering objections and digging his heels in the entire way to Rae’s bedroom door. Even without factoring in the age difference, it was no contest since Conn had at least a foot and fifty pounds of muscle on the other man.

  Rae must have heard the commotion because she sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chest, blinking and rubbing her eyes. “I know, you’re hungry,” she said around a yawn, clearly not entirely awake. “I’ll scare up something for breakfast if you give me a minute to wake up.”

  “Breakfast?” the old man said before Conn shook him and he decided it might be a good idea to hold his tongue, even though it was too late because Rae went still, just her head swiveling to land on Conn, shift to the old man for a beat or two, then move back to Conn. She didn’t look happy about the situation. Conn got the distinct impression she was blaming him.

  “Mr. Pennworthy?”

  He drew himself up, as much as he could with a relative giant clutching the collar of his robe. “Your house-guest has accosted me. I’d like to borrow your phone to call the police.”

  “It looks like you’ve already borrowed a few things from me,” Rae said. She tossed the covers back, long, bare legs swinging over the side of the bed, distracting Conn enough that he almost let the thief go. “I thought we agreed you could steal my returnables, but the paper is off limits.”

  “Alchemy must not provide a decent livelihood in this time,” Conn put in.

  “Alchemy?”

  “Aye, and magic.”

  Rae looked Mr. Pennworthy over from head to toe, grinning. “He’s not a magician, well, not the kind you mean. He’s a CEO—he runs a big company. Considering his track record with my newspaper, I don’t doubt he’s familiar with creative accounting, but I’d bet he’s been honest since Sarbanes-Oxley weighed in after Enron.”

  Conn caught about every other word.

  Mr. Pennworthy apparently understood it all—and took offense to it. “I will not stand here and be discussed by the likes of you as though I were a common criminal.”

  Conn smiled politely. “Some cultures cut off a man’s hand for stealing. The Moors, the Infidels we battled in the Crusades, even some of the titled lords where I come from.”

  Mr. Pennworthy took one look at Conn’s face and gave a little bleat of fright.

  Rae rolled her eyes. “We’re not going to cut anything off.” But she took her newspaper away from him. “Go home, Mr. Pennworthy.”

  He squared his shoulders when Conn let him go, straightened his robe and, the bag of returnables cradled tightly in his arms, sidled away from Conn, picking up speed as he got out of arms’ reach.

  “I will retrieve the containers, if you like,” Conn offered.

  “What I’d like is a cup of coffee,” Rae said. She pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen.

  Coffee Conn understood, although preparing it seemed to belong to his area of lost memory. He followed her, watching carefully while she measured aromatic grounds into a small white paper bowl and placed it into a machine sitting on her counter. Water followed, and in seconds steaming hot coffee spilled out into the glass pot below.

  He closed his eyes and inhaled, and when he opened them again, she’d replaced the large pot with a mug, switching back again when the mug was full and holding it out to him.

  “It’s going to be strong,” she said.

  He wrapped his hands around hers on the mug and met her eyes. “I like strong.”

  Watching her react to his touch was fascinating. Color flooded her face and she seemed to soften. Her eyelids fluttered as her breath sighed out. She never broke eye contact, though, even as she pulled her hand from beneath his and covered her desire with irritation.

  “You also like to eat,” she said, and turned her back to get another mug as if nothing had happened.

  Conn took it as a challenge, and he had never backed down from a challenge. He couldn’t say how he knew that; it probably had something to do with all the fighting in his memory flashes, along with the way he’d reacted to the two altercations the day before. Or maybe it was the feeling building inside of him, the urge to win that had him saying, “You feel attraction toward me. Why do you deny it?”

  “Because I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours, for starters.” She turned, a package of bread in her hands. “You live the kind of life I couldn’t wait to leave behind, and then there’s the memory loss, which is a pretty big problem by itself, but you don’t seem to care if you ever get it back, which is the bigger problem if you ask me. If I accept your memory loss is real I have to wonder what happened in your past that you don’t want to revisit.”

  He thought about that, a muscle working in his jaw. Rae felt bad for pushing him. But he wasn’t meeting her eyes, either.

  “Is anything familiar to you?” she asked, opening the bread and popping two slices into the toaster.

  “Yes and no. Things seem familiar, but when I attempt to build on a shred of recognition it only slips away.”

  “Don’t try to remember, just answer without thinking about it. How old are you?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Where do you come from, do you have family somewhere?”

  He shrugged.

  “Wife, kids, parents, siblings?” God forbid he had a brother. One of him was almost too much to imagine. “You must at least have a feeling when you hear these questions, a gut reac—”

  “I do not,” he ground out, scrubbing his hands back through his hair. “Why do you seek to tally and measure?”

  It felt pretty damn important that he didn’t have a wife. But the toast popped up just then, saving her from blurting that out. He might be struggling with his memory, but he had a very agile mind otherwise. He wouldn’t miss the implications. And take advantage of her
for them.

  “It’s what I do,” she said instead, turning away from him to butter the toast. “I’m a CPA—Certified Public Accountant.”

  “And what does a . . . certified public accountant,” he repeated carefully, “do?”

  “Tally.” She put the toast on a paper towel and carried it to the small table in her breakfast nook. “Measure.”

  He sat, picked up a slice of toast and studied it. Not a lot of toast at the Renaissance festival, she thought.

  “You ate everything else in the house last night, so this will have to do for breakfast. We can go to the market later.”

  He took a tentative taste, then ate the rest of the toast in three bites. Rae sighed, putting two more slices in the toaster.

  “Tell me more about your work,” he said. “What do you tally and measure?”

  “Money. Profit and loss for businesses, income for people. I keep track of that income, calculate what taxes a person or business owes so they don’t get in trouble with the government.”

  “The king must have his share. That, at least, has not changed.”

  “We don’t have a king, contrary to the opinions some of our elected officials hold of themselves, but I guess it amounts to the same thing.”

  “Then you are a steward.”

  “In a way.” She ferried more toast to the table.

  “Do you have a man?”

  “No.”

  “For someone who wants roots, you have not established any. You have a home, but no husband, no family.”

  Rae went back to her toast production line, dropping two more slices into the toaster and buttering the ones she’d just removed. “I’ve been busy,” she said, “and we’re supposed to be talking about you.”

  “I have precious little to report of myself.”

  “Then I suggest you spend some quality time with your brain, see if you can tap into your memory banks,” she said, dropping the last two pieces of toast in front of him. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  Conn looked toward the bathroom, back at her. “And you expect me to concentrate on a task I already know cannot be accomplished? I have always been a man of action.”

  “Typical,” she said. Not that she should be surprised that he was a man who thought he could muscle his way through a problem; he had all the right equipment for that particular mindset.

  “I could be of service to you. In my time it was common to have an attendant when you bathe. To wash your back.”

  “This is your time,” she reminded him. “Come anywhere near that bathroom and you’ll be getting conked on the head again, whether it helps your amnesia or not.”

  “I would not impose myself on you.”

  “Of course not.” Rae was worried she’d impose herself on him, and then where would she be? Satisfied, a traitorous little voice whispered. Probably several times. “But it wasn’t my back you were thinking of.”

  He grinned. “Perhaps not only your back.”

  chapter 8

  RAE THOUGHT OF HER BACK THE ENTIRE TIME she was in the shower. It was better than the other body parts she wanted to think about, most of them belonging to Connor Larkin. And it was better than not thinking. Not thinking left her with feeling. Feeling might lead to acting, and acting wasn’t a good idea. Acting was the furthest thing from a good idea she could imagine, no matter how incredible acting was in her imagination.

  The steaming shower didn’t help, so she washed and rinsed in record time, then dressed in jeans and a cotton sweater. A low-cut, vee-neck, cleavage-baring sweater . . . Right, like that wasn’t a blatant invitation, and issuing an invitation to a man who invaded people would probably be a bad idea. Not that being invaded by him didn’t have its attractions. But it also had its repercussions, and a few moments of pleasure—Okay, she thought, picturing Conn and his . . . attributes, an entire night of pleasure wasn’t worth a moment of the hell she’d put herself through for getting dragged into her mother’s odd little world.

  She whipped the sweater off, pulled on a square-necked camisole and replaced the sweater, checking to make sure there wasn’t even a hint of cleavage. She almost never left her hair down to air dry, but this situation definitely called for it, since primping seemed to fall under the heading of actions with seriously misguided ulterior motives.

  “The bathroom’s all yours,” she said when she came out, careful not to look at him—or offer him help. If he didn’t know how the shower worked she wasn’t about to show him, not when the water wasn’t the only thing that might get turned on.

  And then she had to get her mind off what he was doing in there. The only thing more dangerous than thinking of Conn was thinking of him naked and wet, soap suds rinsing down the long, lean lines of his body, muscles flexing as he bent—

  She snatched up the portable phone, just the thought of calling her boss enough to drag her back from fantasy to reality.

  “Hello, Mr. Putnam,” she said, not surprised to find him in the office, even though it was barely six A.M. She should have been there, too. Everyone worked twelve-hour days at quarter’s end.

  Mr. Putnam’s silence told her he was thinking the same thing.

  They can’t live without me, she reminded herself. At least not in the short term. “I won’t be in today,” she said, flying high on self-delusion.

  “Not ill, I hope,” he said with the same amount of sympathy he’d show a client past due on their bill.

  “I’m fine, but something has come up.”

  “What?”

  “Well . . . it’s personal.”

  “Then perhaps I should ask who?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “It must be something very important to take you from your work at one of our busiest times.”

  She took a deep breath, blurting the rest of it out in a ripping-off-the-bandage kind of way. “I’ll need to work at home for the next week. Or so.”

  Silence. Heat flooded her face, stress spiking her blood pressure high enough to blast the top of her head off.

  “Problem?”

  She swung around, coming face to chest with Conn, which took the heat out of her face—and sent it rushing elsewhere. Thankfully, Mr. Putnam had traded in the cold, disapproving silence for a cold, disapproving lecture, droning on about responsibility and accountability, not just to her clients but to her employers, since, surprise , her special request gave him another excuse to send the not-making-partner message.

  And it all sank in. It just couldn’t compete with Connor Larkin’s bare, damp muscles. It took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to let her gaze wander down. She was pretty sure only a waterlogged towel stood between Conn and full frontal nudity, which would lead to complete carnal knowledge, and while that would be good—heck it would probably be mind-blowing—it wasn’t what she needed to learn about Connor Larkin. And who gave a damn, she thought, her willpower no match for her curiosity, not to mention the hot, melting desire to—

  “Ms. Blissfield, are you still there?”

  She whipped around, pried her tongue off the roof of her mouth, and said, “Yes, Mr. Putnam. I’m sorry, I understand this is a problem, but—”

  “Is it one of your parents?”

  “Um, no. Not directly.”

  “Because I received your message that your mother called. Something about an emergency.”

  Rae looked over her shoulder, then lowered her voice. “It’s, uh, my plumbing. In the basement.” And now she could never invite her boss to her house, because she didn’t have a basement. But she’d realized too late that he’d wonder how she could work from home with no plumbing. That was the problem with lies. They tended to multiply. “It’s a mess, Mr. Putnam, and I can’t let it go or it will just get worse. And I have to be here for the plumber. I know it’s a bad time, but I promise my work won’t suffer.” And she was rambling because her eyes had dropped to Conn’s chest again. She lifted her gaze to his mouth, found him smirking at her, and it took the wobble right out of her knees.
“I’ll be in later to get my files.”

  “Very well,” Putnam said and then hung up.

  She disconnected as well, stifling a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, Connor Larkin was way too observant, and way too in touch with his inner Freud to miss her reaction.

  “This man you spoke with has made you unhappy,” he said.

  “Not in the way you think. I work for him. It’s our busy time. Under normal circumstances he wouldn’t let me take any time off.”

  “So you lied to him.”

  “I made up an excuse.”

  “To keep me entertained.”

  And out of trouble.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Conn asked her. “About the entertainment?”

  Rae let her eyes drift down to the towel. “No,” she said, pretty sure what his suggestion would be, and not all that sure she’d turn him down if he made it.

  RAE SENT CONN OFF TO GET DRESSED. HE FOLLOWED instructions. Unfortunately, he chose to come back as a sixteenth-century armorer, complete with buff-colored suede pants and knee-high boots. And no shirt.

  “Why are you wearing that?”

  “You told me to put my clothes on, but I will gladly take them off—”

  Rae brushed past him, stomping into the spare room. There, on the chair, were the jeans and T-shirt he’d worn the day before. She picked up the duffel from the floor. It was empty. “Mom,” she snapped out.

  “Annie said there was no need to thank her.”

  “I’ll bet.” Rae dropped the duffel and gathered up the jeans and T-shirt, tossing them to him. “Put these on.”

  “But—”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, all the people who went to Holly Grove had shirts on.”

  “Some of them just barely,” he said with a leer she didn’t find charming, or even amusing, probably, in part, because she knew he was thinking of the teens and twenty-somethings with their belly-baring, strappy, low-cut tops. Typical man, being led around by the codpiece.