He felt as if he’d just been invaded. “There’s no need for you to do that,” Quade told her as he followed her into the kitchen.
“Trust me, there is. After doing nothing but thinking all week, I really need to do something physical to help me balance it all out. You’d be doing me a favor.”
He couldn’t figure out if she was being serious or not. All he knew was that she was wearing a sweater that nearly matched the walls he was painting. The garment caressed her curves and drew his eye to the low neckline. He would really be better off if she weren’t here, distracting him.
“I sincerely doubt that,” he told her, placing his hand on the roller and ready to take it out of her hand.
Except that she was holding on.
He saw amusement enter her eyes. “Why do you make it so hard for people to be nice to you?”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t want to owe anyone.”
Or form bonds, because bonds broke. And when they did, it hurt too much. It was better his way. If you moved through life in a solitary fashion, you didn’t expect anything. No expectations, no disappointments. It was as simple as that.
Or so he thought.
But apparently she had other thoughts on the matter. With a snap of her wrist, she pulled the roller out of his hand.
“There’s no charge, no tab. I’ll owe you, okay?”
His eyes swept over her. “You’ll get paint on your clothes.”
MacKenzie looked down for his benefit. “These were going into the rag bin soon anyway. They might as well accomplish something useful before they go.”
He blew out a breath. “Have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“In my line of work, it helps to be able to cover your back at all times.”
Resigned to having her help him, at least for a little while, Quade popped the lid off the can of paint he’d been using and poured a little more into the tray. He took her words at face value. “This Dakota, she a hard task-master?”
“Dakota?” she echoed incredulously. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “Dakota Delaney is the sweetest, most generous person in the whole world. I was talking about management.”
She waited for him to set the paint container aside. The second he was finished pouring paint into the tray, she immersed her roller, moving it around until the last shred of pink disappeared beneath an ocean of light blue.
MacKenzie carefully removed the excess before applying the roller to the wall. “Since I’m shorter than you, I’ll take the bottom of the walls. You take the top.”
The division of labor sat well with him. There was no way he would have allowed her to climb up on the ladder he’d borrowed from the super. “You give orders like a general.”
MacKenzie laughed as she selected a section of wall and got started. “Hey, Napoleon was approximately my height.”
She was right, she thought as she spread with growing gusto the color along the wall. It did feel good to do something with her hands, to let her mind drift, emptied of strategy meetings and schedules.
Needing more paint, she crossed back to the tray and dipped her roller in. She glanced toward him. Quade was using a pole extension, his strokes reaching all the way up almost to the ceiling. For a second, she watched him move. He was graceful, she thought and wondered if he knew that. Probably not. He didn’t strike her as someone who paid much attention to himself, only to the details of whatever he was doing.
She thought of what he’d just said. “Was that your polite way of saying I’m bossy?”
“Just an observation.” Looking in her direction, he saw that MacKenzie had stopped painting and was looking at him. Now what? He raised his brow in a silent query directed at her. Missing the peace and quiet that had been here only minutes ago.
“You can smile,” she said.
“What?”
“Just now, when I asked you if you were saying that I was bossy, I saw a glimmer of a smile on your lips.” She grinned, doing something very odd, very unsettling to his stomach. “Nice,” she pronounced.
Impatience clawed at him. Trouble was, he wasn’t exactly sure just what it was that he was being impatient about. The work was getting done, perhaps even faster than he’d anticipated. And he had nowhere else to be, nothing else to accomplish today. So why did he feel like a man about to miss his train connection, the last one out for that day?
“What are you talking about?” he heard himself all but snapping. Why was she babbling about smiles? If she wanted to help him paint, then she should paint, not talk. Not distract.
She placed her feelings in a full sentence. “You look nice when you smile.”
Perversely, he pulled his lips into a frown. “I wasn’t aware that I was smiling.”
She expected nothing less. It was there and then that she decided she was going to find out his story. Just because he was guarding it so zealously. “You were. And you should do it more often. Doesn’t make you look nearly as scary.”
About to apply more paint to his roller, he stopped a second and glanced at her. And then moved his roller back and forth in the paint. If he let her, she was going to make him come to a grinding halt.
“You think I look scary?” he asked.
“Definitely.” She turned her back to him so that he couldn’t see the grin playing on her lips. “I think all the dogs and small children under four feet in the neighborhood have all scattered and run away.”
“Doesn’t seem to have scared you off.”
“I’m not under four feet,” she pointed out.
Something else to lament, he thought. Slapping his roller against the wall, Quade attacked it with a vengeance.
The conversation for the next two hours continued in the same nebulous, scattered way. Quade found himself growing progressively more entertained and amused. The annoyance he’d wrapped around himself as almost a shield was dissipating and fading.
He had no idea what to make of it, only that he felt naked.
At one point, he turned around after receiving no answer to one of his very few questions. MacKenzie had suddenly turned a very translucent shade of white. Rather than set it down somewhere, he dropped his roller to the newspaper-covered floor and hurried over to her.
“What’s the matter?”
The room was spinning and she had no idea why. All she knew was that she wasn’t going to faint like some stereotypical pregnant woman. That would have been too unreal.
Yet she was having trouble hanging on to her surroundings. An encroaching blackness was threatening to swallow everything up. She was aware of his hands around her, forcing her to the floor.
A wolf in research physician’s clothing? Had she made a stupid mistake, trusting him?
She struggled to sit up, feeling weak. It took no effort to keep her down.
“Lie still, damn it.”
“You’re going to have to improve your foreplay,” she said with effort.
“Foreplay?” The situation was worse than he thought. The woman was delirious. Had the paint fumes gotten to her? But the window was open. It made no sense—and neither did she.
He felt her pulse. It was beating like a percussion soloist. “Do you want to go to the emergency room?”
His words were coming to her from some distance. She struggled to get closer to them and farther from the abyss.
“You’re a doctor… Doctor me….”
“Delirious,” he pronounced out loud.
“Air,” she told him, grasping onto consciousness and holding on for all she was worth. “I just need some air. Paint fumes—”
He’d breathed in the same paint and felt nothing except for a small, vague headache behind his eyes. But then, he knew that people reacted differently to the same stimulus. He did as she asked, crossing to the large bay window that looked out on the courtyard and pushed it all the way open instead of just partially. A cool breeze immediately pushed its way in, its long, thin probing fingers moving everywhere.
She t
ook a deep breath. The darkness around her receded as if it had never existed. She started to sit up, only to find that he was still pushing her back down.
“Quade, I can’t just lie here like a strange conversation piece. You’re going to have to let me sit up sometime.”
He frowned, taking her pulse again. It had settled down considerably. And her color was returning. He sat back on his heels. “What the hell was that all about?”
There was no way she was going to tell him the truth. Instead, she clung to her story. “I already told you, it had to be the paint fumes.”
“C’mon, I’ll walk you home,” he offered.
“I’m fine now,” she insisted. “And there’s not that much left to do.”
“Good, then I can finish it myself.”
“And rob me of the pleasure of looking at a job well done? I don’t think so.” Using his shoulder for leverage, she pushed herself up to her feet.
“Have you always been this pigheaded?”
“I prefer to think of it as attractively determined.”
He gave her a look. “The word is pigheaded.” Quade ground the words out.
She shrugged casually. “Your place, your rules.”
“Then—”
She knew where it was headed before he said anything. “But I am finishing this up with you. How about we compromise? If I get woozy again, you can give me the bum’s rush home.” She smiled up at him, fluttering her lashes. “Deal?”
He had no choice but to agree. But he watched her for the remaining half hour like a parent afraid his four-year-old was going to dart across the traffic-laden street. He noted that because of that, she got more done than he did.
“Tired?” he asked her when she finally put down her roller.
She rotated her shoulders. “Yes, but in a good way. Sorry about before. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
He made no comment on her statement, feeling it was best to leave it alone. To deny that she had momentarily frightened him would have been a lie. She’d gotten so pale, as pale as Ellen had been toward the end. It had brought back too many bad memories for him.
He nodded toward the chair in the middle of the room.
“Why don’t you sit down—rest? I can order a pizza.” Even as he heard himself make the offer, he was stunned to realize that it was coming from him. She was about to leave and he was actually postponing her exit rather than encouraging it. Maybe the paint fumes had affected him, too.
It was tempting. A very small part of her still felt like collapsing, though she felt a lot stronger. It was all due to the pregnancy, she guessed. Ever since its onset, she was constantly experiencing all these highs and lows. Energy would no sooner spike then vanish, sending her into some pit or another until she pulled herself out again, only to be bowled over by another surge.
She eyed the chair, then shook her head. “No, if I do that, I might not be able to dig myself out again.”
She weighed, what, maybe a hundred pounds? Probably not. “I don’t think I’d have to rent a crane to help you to your feet.”
Not yet, anyway, she thought. But soon enough.
“Thank you for sharing that image. No, I’d better just get going.” The thought of a hot bubble bath had popped into her head in the last few minutes and now that was all she wanted.
Belatedly he realized he should be walking her out, even though the entire trip was accomplished in less than one heartbeat.
“Thanks for your help,” he said, following her to the door.
“Even though I talked your ear off?”
“They’re still on,” he assured her.
She turned to face him, pretending to check out his ears just to make sure. “I guess they are at that. Don’t forget to talk to your boss about the fund-raiser idea,” she reminded him.
He nodded. “Right.” But as she turned away again, he noticed something. “Hey, hold it.”
She stopped abruptly. “What?”
“You have paint on your face.”
Was that all? She laughed. “And probably in my hair and everywhere else.” Some of it had probably been sustained when he’d placed her on the floor. “What can I say? I really get into anything I do.”
The image that brought to mind was not one that had anything to do with painting. Instead, he could suddenly envision her making love. With utter and complete abandon.
He shut down his thoughts. “No, just on your cheek,” he told her. Quade fished out a handkerchief. Taking her chin in his hand, he turned her head so that her cheek faced him and began to wipe it. “Don’t worry, the handkerchief’s clean.”
“I wasn’t worried.” Her voice was soft, low, as the breath inside her lungs slowed to a crawl.
Suddenly aware of what he was doing, and just how intimate it felt, Quade dropped his hand to his side. “It’s gone.”
MacKenzie looked at him, wondering if that wild charge of electricity that had suddenly materialized out of nowhere had manifested itself to him, as well, or if she was the only one standing out in the middle of this thunderstorm.
Chapter Nine
“Thank you.”
MacKenzie’s own words echoed in her ears as she stood looking up at Quade.
If she didn’t leave, she was going to make that same mistake again. The one she’d made the night of Aggie’s dinner.
Even now, she could feel everything inside her urging her on. Urging her to kiss him again. He was going to think she was some kind of desperate female, never mind the fact that she was pregnant and had no business kissing a man who was not the father of her baby.
Besides, kissing was how this whole thing had originally started, MacKenzie reminded herself, trying vainly to hold her ground. Kissing led to other things and she was in no position to move on to “other things.”
There were a thousand reasons for her just to walk out the door—quickly—but not a single one of them could get her to move her feet. They remained glued to the rug. As glued as her eyes were to his.
A small, ragged breath escaped her lips.
Later, when he could look back at this with some measure of sanity, Quade would realize that he was operating on automatic pilot. He really couldn’t be blamed for what happened. Something inside of him had risen up, desperate to recapture that small island of time from his past when he had actually felt happy.
When he had felt whole.
He framed MacKenzie’s face in his hands and lowered his mouth to hers, reclaiming that island, if only for just a moment.
The instant his lips met hers, he felt a surge flash through him. In its wake came a validation that this wasn’t wrong, that this was right.
Inside of him, strange, wonderful sensations were rallying, linking up with his past and the memory of things the way they used to be when he’d felt hope.
She tasted warm, delicious and tantalizing. He urged himself to deepen the kiss, to ride out the wave and discover just how far it would take him.
He was free-falling and the ground was a thousand miles away.
The rush was incredible.
But then the rush vanished. Guilt and fear found their way into his consciousness, banking down the wondrous sensations and shoving them back into the dark recesses where they had been housed.
He drew his head back and looked at her. There was a bemused smile gracing the blurred outline of MacKenzie’s lips.
It took effort to speak without sighing. Her toes still felt curled. In a way, she was surprised that the room was still there and that she was still in it. For a moment there, she’d felt airborne.
“I think you just burnt off all the paint that might have been on my body.”
The observation was so strange, he found himself laughing. Though she’d aroused some of the same passions inside of him, she was a world apart from Ellen. Heaven knew she hadn’t responded to him the way Ellen would have, with a gentle sigh and a silent invitation in her eyes. Humor had never been part of their relationship. They had had warmth and understan
ding and love, but not humor. To him, Ellen had always felt like a softer, kinder extension of himself.
As for this woman who had spearheaded her way into his life, well, he didn’t know what sort of a label to pin to her. He was sure that he had no business kissing her like this no matter what his body was begging him to do.
Feeling strangely shaken, Quade stepped back, putting distance between them. But not between the sensations she had drawn out of him. They hadn’t been banked down, not completely. And they were reconnoitering for another attack. One he couldn’t afford to let happen.
“I didn’t mean…” he began, not quite sure what it was he was going to say, only that he wanted to promise her that this wasn’t going to happen again. Promise himself that it wasn’t going to happen again.
But he didn’t get the opportunity.
MacKenzie laid a finger to his lips, stopping him from saying anything else. “Don’t spoil it.” It was half an entreaty, half an instruction. “It’s okay.”
Whether she meant that his kiss was okay or his regret over the same, Quade hadn’t a clue. He had the feeling he should just walk away and ignore the whole thing. Ignore the stirrings that he felt because that way, he could avoid certain disaster. He’d loved Ellen and loving her was both the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Best because he’d had a piece of paradise, worst because he now knew the difference and was keenly aware of the loss.
MacKenzie pressed her lips together, trying to withdraw gracefully. “Don’t forget to ask your boss about having a fund-raiser.”
He stared at her for a second, then realized what she was referring to. Not only had he forgotten about the fund-raiser but he’d very nearly forgotten his name, where he was and how he’d come to be there. For a diminutive woman, she packed one hell of a punch.
“Right,” he muttered.
Quade barely remembered shutting the door after she left. He was too busy struggling to shut away the feelings that had tried to break free.
Quade didn’t get a chance to talk to his superior at Wiley Memorial on Sunday. After briefly meeting him last Tuesday and formally welcoming him to the institute, Adam Petrocelli had taken off for a business conference. Petrocelli’s secretary told Quade that he was expected back in the middle of Monday afternoon, but that his schedule was packed with meetings.
She’s Having a Baby Page 10
