by Hailey North
David opened his mouth, then snapped it shut.
Tony, from his stance near the refrigerator, shot Penelope a mental thumbs-up. She’d stood up to Hinson and played up to him. Not a bad effort for a woman caught between two strong personalities. Not only did she possess hidden fire, but hidden steel as well.
As if to prove that point, Penelope grasped his elbow and steered him to the door. “Thank you for coming by,” she said, once again in that formal tone of hers.
“Anytime you need me,” he said, checking to make sure Hinson hadn’t stayed in the kitchen, “just call.”
Sure enough, Hinson followed, looking every inch the hawk circling its prey.
Almost as soon as he put one foot in front of the other, Penelope dropped her hand from his elbow. She clearly wanted him out, which was just as well. He’d overstayed his welcome, and with a guy like Hinson, that could mean trouble for Penelope. He only wished she’d toss them both out at the same time.
At the door he paused and said to Hinson, “You and I go back a ways, and I want you to know I actually hadn’t met Ms. Fields before today, when she fainted at my feet on Canal.”
Hinson narrowed his eyes. “No? What a shame.” He slipped an arm around her and ruffled her hair. “She’s a terrific girl.”
Penelope smiled a stiff little smile.
Tony wondered what women saw in the guy. And girl was definitely not the word he’d use to describe Penelope; she was all woman.
A complex woman he’d like to get to know.
“Catch ya later,” he said, then halted with one foot out the door. Trained to see and hear the most subtle of indications of something amiss, he’d detected a shifting of the bedroom door. There—again it edged backward, only by a few inches, but enough to alert Tony to the presence of someone behind the door.
Hinson had his hand on the doorknob now, obviously eager to claim time alone with Penelope.
Rather than taking the hint, Tony slouched into his good old boy posture, resting one shoulder against the doorframe, giving himself a moment to analyze the situation.
What if they weren’t alone? There could be an intruder, or potentially even more serious, maybe Penelope had another man stashed in the bedroom. She’d hinted at such a thing earlier.
If Hinson found out and lost his temper, it wouldn’t be pretty. Penelope didn’t look the type, but then, Tony reminded himself, she didn’t carry the profile of a petty thief, either.
Shit. Tony hated being the man who tried to do the right thing.
Penelope shifted from foot to foot, glancing from him back to Hinson.
“Before I go,” Tony said, straightening his body and checking for the .22 he carried in the leg pocket of his khaki shorts, “I think you should know there’s someone else in your apartment.”
“No, there’s not,” Penelope snapped out her response.
Tony raised his brows at her defensive reaction. So she knew.
Hinson stilled the hand he’d been smoothing over Penelope’s hair. Tony read the awareness of danger in the other man’s body as he shifted onto the balls of his feet and freed his arms. He also, Tony noted, unbuttoned with a swift motion his pretty-boy jacket.
No doubt he carried a piece under that coat.
“Would you mind explaining yourself?”
Even now Hinson had to talk like an overpaid lawyer, Tony thought, then cocked his head toward the bedroom.
“There’s no one in my apartment other than the three of us.” Penelope hedged backward, moving protectively toward the bedroom door. “And if you don’t mind, Mr. Olano, that is one person too many.”
“Ooh,” Tony said, grinning at Penelope, which only seemed to set her back up more, “Sticks and stones . . .” As he spoke, he loosened the Velcro opening of his shorts pocket.
Hinson shadowed Tony’s movement toward the bedroom.
Penelope raised her hands. “Stop.” Tony detected a flush to her cheeks and a sparkly light in her eyes he could swear hadn’t been there earlier. What was she hiding? How many layers of deception did this lady have built up?
In a lazy voice, Hinson said, “Why, Penelope, what if a burglar has broken in and is hiding in your bedroom? What if there’s a desperate character in there waiting for us to leave so he can ravish you and—” He slashed a hand across his throat.
Penelope touched her shapely throat with a hand that trembled slightly. Tony saw the nervous motion and knew she was lying to them.
He exchanged looks with Hinson and nodded. As odd as it was for the two of them, enemies for life, to be acting in accord, they lunged together past Penelope and, with guns drawn, burst through the bedroom door.
Chapter 6
“Guns!” Penelope raced after the two guys. That the man with bedroom eyes wielded a gun didn’t surprise her. But David? That was so out of character she couldn’t quite grasp that he’d whipped out a gun that looked even bigger and deadlier than the one Olano had produced.
“Are you guys nuts?” Poor Mrs. Merlin! Her heart might stop from fright. It struck Penelope that she’d never be able to explain to the woman’s family that they only needed a six-inch coffin, and she bit back a hysterical laugh.
They had the closet and the bathroom door open wide. Olano had gone to his knees beside the bed. David had pulled the drapes and stood checking the windows that led to the balcony.
The cookbook and remote control lay on the bed where Penelope had left them, but no sign of the diminutive Mrs. Merlin existed. Penelope wrinkled her brow and poked the carpet with the toe of her house slipper. Had she imagined the entire incident? Had she gotten so out of control with her fantasy life that she’d created the creature in her mind and projected her into the basket of napkin rings?
Olano had risen from the floor beside her bed and was staring at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. David, too, had turned around and was walking toward her. Penelope backed toward the door of the room. Surely they couldn’t get mad at her. They were the ones who had overreacted.
But she might as well not have been in the room. David advanced on Olano, his face gone pale, a dangerous glint in his eye. “Pleased with yourself, Olano? Trying to show off for Penelope, trying to show her what a hot-shot cop you used to be?”
Olano, fiddling with his gun, didn’t even look up until after he’d slipped the weapon back into his pocket. Then he shot a glance at David. “Forget it,” he said.
He turned to her and Penelope realized with a swift shot of clarity she didn’t want him to go.
“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then sketched a salute and strode out of her apartment.
Out of her life.
David slipped his gun back under his jacket, and Penelope shivered. Walking toward her, he said in a low voice, the harsh tone belying the smile on his face, “Want to tell me how you know Tony Olano?”
So his first name was Tony. Penelope tested the name in her mind. She liked it. And it suited the man with bedroom eyes.
David put his arm around her and drew her down to sit beside him on the bed.
Penelope wondered whether Tony was short for Anthony. Of course it would be. Anthony Olano. She made a face, thinking it sounded like a mobster sort of name. Maybe that was why he gave off an air of danger, but David had called him an ex-cop.
Pressure on her shoulder, a tiny bit stronger than a squeeze, brought her mind back to her bedroom. Not only was David holding her too tightly for her comfort level, they were sitting on her antique quilt. She tried to edge away, but David held her close to his side.
Tipping her chin up, he gazed steadily into her eyes in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, as if he could read every thought that swirled behind her eyes.
“Olano,” he said, not letting go, “is a very dangerous man. Not someone a woman like you, particularly a lawyer, needs to be associating with.”
So he was dangerous. Penelope realized with surprise that that trait attracted rather than repulsed her. “What did he do?”
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Hinson let go of her chin. She kept her gaze fixed on his face, watching his expression shift and his eyes narrow as he said, “Olano was a cop who just couldn’t mind his own business. Always butting in, never following procedure.” David gestured around her bedroom. “Look what he did today. Same sort of impulsive behavior. Thinks he’s spotted a crime and barges in. Not the sort of cop that makes for true law and order.”
Penelope started to comment that David had rushed right into the bedroom alongside Olano, but she held her tongue. David didn’t look too open to criticism at the moment.
“And the funny thing is that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and was bounced from the force in disgrace.”
“What—” Penelope started to ask for specifics, the lawyer in her uncomfortable with such a vague description.
“Forget Olano,” David interrupted, putting both his arms around her.
Penelope knew he wanted to kiss her. She’d let him kiss her once before, but kissing while sitting on her bed smacked too much of an invitation she wasn’t ready to offer David yet, if at all.
He stroked a hand over her hair. “What happened to that chic French braid?”
She stiffened. Of course he’d noticed how uncharacteristically unkempt she appeared. Pulling her hair into a semblance of order behind her neck, she said, “Fainting is hard on one’s looks, you know.”
“So I see,” David said, reaching for the neckline of her blouse. “Maybe you should slip into something fresher.”
She caught his hand with hers. “David . . .”
“Yes?” Twisting his head down to hers, he covered her lips with his. His mouth was hot and demanding and Penelope knew she should respond. But all she could think about was her sweaty armpits. And the gun he had holstered under his jacket.
His tongue broke through the barrier of her lips and Penelope squirmed against him. There must be something wrong with her, a fear she’d carried within her for years. Men who wanted her, she didn’t want. Men she wanted never looked twice at her.
She stifled a sigh and tried to force herself to return David’s kisses.
He didn’t seem to notice her lack of involvement. One hand working on a blouse button, he pushed her back on the bed, his slender body not crushing her so much with weight as with her wild thought that if she didn’t make him get off her that very instant, he’d refuse to stop.
She pushed at his shoulders with her hands. He worked one button free, then the one below it, and slid his hand inside toward her breast. She twisted her mouth from his and said, “David, don’t. This isn’t right. It’s not the right time.”
He raised up on his hands and stared down at her, breathing hard. Before he could speak, Penelope sniffed and said in alarm, “Do you smell smoke?”
David kept looking at her as if he wanted to ignore the question, ignore her request to stop. Penelope shivered. The smell of smoke grew more definite.
Finally he lifted his body off hers and stood at the edge of the bed. “Something is definitely burning.” Then he laughed and added, “Something besides me.”
Penelope blushed. Well, it wasn’t her fault he’d gotten all worked up. She jumped from the bed and ran toward the kitchen. Had she left something on the stove or in the oven? She didn’t think so.
However, flames danced above the stove. “Firecrackers and figs!” She raced for the fire extinguisher she kept under the sink, yanked the pin, and aimed it at the blaze.
David walked slowly into the room behind her.
Penelope already had the fire damped. She tiptoed toward the stove. David moved behind her and looked over her shoulder. Inside the sauté pan atop the stove were the shards of what looked like a heap of toothpicks. And sure enough, the holder where she kept toothpicks handy for testing her baking sat empty.
David looked from the pan to her and back again.
Penelope lifted her hands, all innocence. She certainly hadn’t started the fire in the pan.
But she knew who had. And she knew why. That incense stick must serve as more than a pole-vaulting aid.
“David,” she said, in a voice she forced into sweetness and light, “would you mind awfully if we rescheduled dinner? I’ve just had too much excitement today, what with fainting from the heat and that dangerous man following me home, and now this. . . this spontaneous combustion.” She didn’t add and what with you throwing yourself on me and not even taking off your gun first! She wanted him out of her apartment, and apparently so did Mrs. Merlin.
And Penelope wasn’t one to ignore help when it came to her aid. What had Mrs. Merlin said earlier? Something about don’t question the gifts of the goddess?
“Of course not, Penelope.” David adjusted his jacket and shot his cuffs. “You may be right. This may not be the best time for us. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Penelope smiled, relieved he’d taken the rebuff so well.
He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Again, she didn’t feel the way she thought she should. But maybe it was wrong of her to expect to experience shooting stars with every kiss.
Yet in her fantasies she felt so alive she just couldn’t believe the feeling didn’t exist in reality. Penelope sighed, walked David to the door, and wiggled her fingers good-bye.
She shut it after him, then leaned her back against the door’s solid surface, thankful to be alone. Or almost alone. “Thank you, Mrs. Merlin,” she called. “You can come out now and I promise you anything you want for dinner.”
“Now, that’s music to my ears!”
Mrs. Merlin’s voice sounded from the kitchen. Penelope ran over and saw her flour canister pushing itself away from the counter wall. From behind it inched Mrs. Merlin, all-purpose incense stick in hand.
The woman said, “Honestly, some men just don’t know when to take no for an answer, do they?”
Penelope smiled at her newfound ally. “Thanks for coming to my rescue. But David would have stopped.”
Mrs. Merlin snorted. “Honey, when you’ve been on this earth for as long as I have, maybe you’ll get a better grasp of human nature.”
Wanting to believe David would have stopped, Penelope didn’t argue the point. “How did you manage this diversion?”
Mrs. Merlin patted her incense stick. “Fastest vaulting I’ve ever done. With this baby I just might set an Olympic record.” She winked. “And the toothpicks were just too, too handy.”
“Well, thanks, but you might have burned my house down, you know.”
“Phifil! Better to take that chance than let that man have you for dinner.”
Penelope nodded. “Good point.”
“Besides,” Mrs. Merlin said, “it’s only my candle spells that seem to end up causing trouble.”
Penelope started the water to boil for the pasta and whisked together the sauce ingredients she’d prepared earlier. “Oh, you mean like shrinking yourself to six inches tall by mistake?”
“Yep. Only I’m quite certain that if you measured you’d find I’m actually six and a quarter inches.” Mrs. Merlin had inched the top off the sugar bowl and stuck a finger in for a taste. “I sure am hungry,” she said. Sucking on her finger, and talking around it, she said, “Your Tony wouldn’t have forced himself on you.”
“How do you—” Penelope looked over from where she stirred the sauce. “He’s not ‘my Tony.’ But how do you know that?”
“His aura was much too violet and he has very old eyes.”
“You saw him?”
Mrs. Merlin nodded. “When he looked under the bed.”
The spoon stopped in mid-rotation. “He saw you under the bed and didn’t say a word?”
“Like I said, he’s the kind of man who would’ve stopped the first time you told him to, no matter how much he wanted to keep going.”
Penelope hugged her arms to her sides, unaccountably pleased by Mrs. Merlin’s words.
“Besides, I only winked at him.”
“Right.” Penelope let the whisk slow under her hand
. “I’m sure he thought you were some sort of voodoo doll.”
Mrs Merlin smiled a most superior smile. “I suppose that’s why he winked back at me.”
“He did what?” The whisk quit moving.
“I am awfully hungry.” Mrs. Merlin circled a tiny hand over her belly.
Penelope frowned and tried to remember the look on Olano’s face when he’d risen from beside the bed, but she drew a blank. She’d been concentrating on the way he rose all in one motion, more graceful than a panther bunched to spring. The man with bedroom eyes moved with the speed and grace of a big cat, and distracted as she was, she hadn’t been able to read the expression on his face.
The sauce burbled under her unseeing gaze as she pictured the man with bedroom eyes.
Tony Olano.
She sighed and for a moment forgot that he annoyed her. For a moment he became the man she’d imagined earlier, standing beside her as she accepted the Best New Chef award. She felt the warmth of his touch when he placed his hand in hers, a warmth that traveled up her arm into her heart. She glowed with accomplishment, but most of all with the feelings he ignited in her.
“You’re never going to feed me, are you?” Mrs. Merlin dusted her hands together.
Penelope jerked back to her surroundings. “Why do you say that?”
“Just look at that sauce.”
“Oh, no!” The once-beautiful alfredo sauce lay scorched and thickened into paste under her perfectly still whisk. Just when would she learn to keep her mind planted firmly on planet Earth?
“I don’t suppose you have any oatmeal?”
“Oatmeal with Caesar salad?”
Mrs. Merlin held forth her hands in a begging gesture. “You have salad, I’ll have oatmeal.”
“Sure.” Penelope did have a box of Quaker Instant in her cupboard. Every so often she tried to force herself to eat some, thinking she’d better offset all the rich creams and sauces she loved to devise in the kitchen. So she’d pick up a box with the rest of her groceries, then let it sit at the back of the cupboard until it was so stale she felt compelled to toss it out.
Oatmeal reminded her too much of her childhood.
