Michael had to stop by the legal offices some distance out of town to run some issues by the project attorney. Char went in with him, but in the end, she spent most of the time sitting back and waiting while they went over questions that had nothing to do with her work. She was leafing through a magazine, but that was just a front. Sitting there, she had plenty of time to mull over some of the things Michael had said to her on the beach.
She was revising her original opinion. She liked the man. She liked him better than any man she’d known for a long, long time. And that wasn’t just because he was the most attractive specimen she’d been this close to in just about forever. There was more to it than that, and she was only beginning to sort out her feelings in order to deal with it.
To begin with, he was so darn honest. When he had turned to her and admitted the way she made him feel, she’d been stunned. Where was the casual disinterest most men affected? Where was the bravado, the facade of machismo? He’d been so open about it, she’d been stumped for anything to say herself.
And at the same time, he had deeper issues that he wasn’t revealing at all. She knew she’d seen evidence of that in the troubled look in his eyes. There was something in his background behind his rather rigid views of women—something he didn’t want to talk about. And that made him all the more intriguing.
But mostly she’d been impressed by the way he’d zeroed right in on the truth about her. Most people were fooled by the brash and sassy persona she put on. Men seldom looked further than the projected exterior. But Michael had seen it. He’d looked underneath and uncovered the truth about her. He might even understand her and the things that made her tick a little bit. Could that be true?
Now, wait a minute, she told herself skeptically. You’re taking this a little too far.
Still, the things he’d said—the way he’d known what she really was… Heck, she usually put up such a good front that she fooled herself half the time. To have him see right through that was unusual, she had to admit.
“Lucky guess,” she muttered to herself.
But she didn’t really believe that. She knew it was more.
Finishing his conference with the attorney, Michael rose and turned, his hazel gaze meeting hers. A little tingling current of joy shimmered through her.
Oh, no you don’t, she thought to herself sternly as she rose, as well, and preceded him to the exit. Keep your irrational exuberance to yourself.
They were soon back on the highway, but they ran into very bad traffic because of an accident, and when Char used her cell phone to call the repair shop, they said her car wasn’t ready. So it was getting very late by the time they got back to Rio de Oro, and Char was getting antsy about her kids.
“They’re going to be wondering where I am,” she said, fidgeting. “Could you do me a big favor? Could you please…I mean, would you mind…well, would you take me to pick them up?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
She bit back laughter. Here she’d been so hesitant to ask him, and he’d answered as though it were nothing at all. Maybe she was taking this antipathy he seemed to have to her children too seriously.
Or maybe not. When he pulled his car into a parking space in front of the preschool and turned off the engine, she smiled at him.
“You want to come in with me?”
“No, thanks.” He gave her a dubious look. “I’ll wait out here while you wander through the many levels of Dante’s inferno in there.” He pretended to consult his watch. “If I don’t hear from you by 1800 hours, I’ll send in a SWAT team.”
“Very funny.” She gripped the door handle but she didn’t open the door. “You know what I think?” she said, turning to look back at him. “I think you’re scared of kids.”
“What?” He met her charge with disdain.
“That’s it. You’re scared.” She could see by his reaction that she’d at least got his attention, and maybe even his consideration. “You wouldn’t dare go in where all those little crumb crunchers are swarming. Would you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He waved away her charges. “I can handle kids.”
“Can you?” Her tone was lightly taunting and she knew it was having an effect. “Then come with me. What do you think they’re going to do, nibble away at your ankles?”
He frowned at her quite fiercely, but she was now sure that his bark was worse than his bite.
“Come on, scaredy-cat. I dare you.” She smiled wickedly. “I double-dare you.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then shook his head and groaned, slumping down in his seat. “Ah, no, Char. Not the old double dare.”
“Worse. I double-dog-dare you.”
That last one got him. He met her sparkling gaze and he couldn’t resist. For some reason, he could not stop himself. He had to stay within the range of her marvelous voice, and when she got out of the car, brimming with the confidence that he would be coming, too, he found himself getting out with her.
It was a risky move. The sound of children permeated the atmosphere, and once he was inside the gate, kids were everywhere. He gazed around, feeling a sense of distaste. Grubby, smelly, noisy little monsters, weren’t they?
“Come on,” Char was saying, beckoning to him from a brightly lit doorway.
He followed her into the classroom, steeling himself and wondering why he’d let himself get roped into this. Then he saw Ronnie, his red hair wild, his blue eyes huge, his mouth open in a round circle of wonder.
“Ricky, look!” Ronnie cried, pointing. “The man’s here.”
Char reached out to comb his hair down with her fingers. “Ronnie, sweetie, please call the man Mr. Greco. That’s his name.”
“Gecko!” Ronnie gave him a little salute, hand out, and a wide grin to go with it. “Hi, Mr. Gecko.”
“Hi, Ronnie,” he said, and he had to admit the excited greeting warmed him. Just a little. He looked at Ricky, but the boy was looking down at his wooden puzzle on the table, carefully pretending Michael didn’t exist.
Suddenly he had a strange feeling he was seeing himself as a kid. In a flashback of time, he remembered feelings long suppressed. And he knew without a doubt that Ricky’s studied disinterest was a cover for something hurting deep down inside.
But there wasn’t time to analyze that. The teacher was a young blonde who took one look at Michael and practically swooned into his arms. She began chattering to hold his attention and didn’t let up for the next five minutes. Other parents stood waiting and she concentrated all her attention on a man who hated kids.
“Go figure,” Char whispered to herself, shaking her head. But she soon drew Michael over to look at the children’s paintings of the day.
“These are the pictures they’ve made of what they want to be for Halloween,” the pert little teacher told them, coming along and seemingly unable to take her eyes off Michael.
“Here’s Ricky’s,” she said, pointing to a typical Ricky picture of himself in a tiger suit.
Char nodded appreciatively. She’d been working on those darn tiger suits for weeks. The boys had been planning for their trick-or-treat night for just as long.
“We gotta be tigers, Mama,” Ronnie had told her from the first. “Roar!”
“And here’s Ronnie’s painting,” the teacher chirped.
Char stared, stunned. What? There wasn’t a tiger in sight on this one. Instead, there was a little stick figure boy dressed in a white shirt and dark slacks, carrying what looked suspiciously like a little briefcase in his hand.
“What is this, Ronnie?” Char asked him.
“My Hall’ween,” he said happily.
“I thought you wanted to be a tiger like Ricky.”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head and pointed at his painting. “I want this.”
Char saw weeks of sewing going down the drain. “And just who are you supposed to be?” she asked him.
Ronnie looked at her, eyes shining. “Mr. Gecko,” he said brightly, as though that were the most natural thing in the world. He grinned at Michael. “See? Like him.”
Michael met her gaze over the heads of the two boys and gave her a feeble grin. “Can I help it if kids regard me as a role model?” he asked her, but his eyes told her he understood. This was not necessarily a good thing.
And as they wandered back out toward the car, he noticed something strange. Although the shouting and running in the halls still seemed very annoying, the two little boys he was ushering out were a couple of pretty good kids. Definitely superior to all the others. You might almost say, he sort of liked them.
Michael worked very late that night, mostly doing things that weren’t really critical, just to avoid going back to the beautiful old Victorian house where he knew Char was dealing with her boys and getting ready for bed herself. He couldn’t face her again so soon. To face her would mean he would have to think through what the hell he was doing. And he wasn’t ready to do that. He didn’t want to think over what a day they’d had together—how it had been the best day he’d had in years. He didn’t want to remember how Char had looked dancing in the water, how she’d felt to his touch, how she’d tasted. He’d been happy with her in a way he hadn’t thought he could be anymore. It was too dangerous to think about. He had to make himself stay away from her.
“What goes up, must come down,” he reminded himself. It didn’t pay to let yourself get too happy.
Finally, it was after midnight. He thought it ought to be safe by now. Walking into the house, he soaked up the quiet. The only lights still on were low and left on to keep people from breaking their necks on the stairs. Everyone was asleep. It was almost as though he was alone in the place.
A nice hot shower would burn the kinks out and wash away some of the tiredness that dogged him. Stopping in at his room, he picked up a towel and his robe and headed for the bathroom at the end of the hall. And that was when he made his first mistake. He forgot about the “knock three times and pause” rule. In fact, he didn’t knock at all. Instead, he jerked open the bathroom door.
“Hey!” Char cried, hugging a big white towel to her steaming naked body and gazing at him through the mist that filled the room. “Close the door!”
And he did. The only trouble was, he took a step before doing so and landed inside the bathroom rather than out. She stared at him and he stared at her. Her hair was wet, sticking to her rosy skin in strands. The big fluffy towel covered all the relevant areas, but the fact that she was naked beneath it was intoxicating to his senses. He’d vowed to stay away from her, but somehow fate had managed to throw her into his lap, anyway. What was a man to do? Resistance seemed futile. Dropping his own towel and robe on the counter that ran along one side of the room, he took another step toward her and reached out to catch a stream of warm water that was running down her arm with his index finger.
She looked up into his eyes and didn’t back off. “I think you made a wrong turn somewhere,” she noted dryly.
He grinned, cupping the back of her head in his hand as he lowered his lips to hers. “How can it be wrong when it feels so right?” he murmured, and then his mouth covered hers.
She opened to him. There was nothing shy or hesitant about her response. Her hands were busy holding the towel tightly to her body, but her mouth was his for the moment, warm and pliant and arousing. He had never tasted anything so sweet and ripe and luscious. He could have gone on kissing her for as long as he could have held off the need to take things further, but she was already pulling away.
“Country-and-western songs aside, this is not a good idea,” she said a bit breathlessly.
His shirt was damp and sticking to his chest in places and he enjoyed the evidence of where he’d been. “Believe it or not, I didn’t do this on purpose.”
Her mouth quirked and she tossed her head. “Well, that makes all the difference, of course.”
He grinned, trailing a finger down her cheek and reveling in the warmth of her skin, the heat radiating from her slinky body. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“No,” she answered promptly, blue eyes flashing. “It doesn’t give either one of us an excuse.”
One dark eyebrow rose in question. “Either one of us?” he repeated.
“Either one of us,” she said simply. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but the temptation thing is mutual. I seem to have this insane level of attraction to you.”
He’d known that, but just to have her say it caused a hot feeling of deep satisfaction to spread through his chest.
“What are you talking about?” he teased. “I remember what you said about me when you didn’t know I was listening. I thought you said I had a ruthless mouth.”
She laughed softly. “Oh, you do.”
“And my eyes are too close together.”
She gave an embarrassed smirk. “Well, that was a slight exaggeration.”
“What about the shifty-look thing?”
“‘Shifty’?” She tried wide-eyed innocence. “I thought I said ‘nifty.”’
“Right.”
He was kissing her again. He couldn’t stay away when she was so close. She was kissing him back and he was actually beginning to think thoughts of taking this further. He had an insatiable hunger to see every curve and cranny of her beautiful body, to run his hand over every inch, and maybe his tongue as well. He could already feel what it would be like to make love with her, to join her body with his and dig deep for that illusive fulfillment that made life worth living. He was so close. After all, it wouldn’t take much to get her to drop the towel and…
“Hello? Chareen? Are you in there?”
The male voice, so close, made them both jump and jerk apart.
“Y-yes,” Char answered quickly, eyes wide now with shock.
“Hi. It’s Bob. Just wanted to make sure you were okay. I thought I heard voices.”
Her horrified gaze met his and Michael groaned softly. It was Bob Jenks, the engineer from Santa Barbara who sometimes stayed on the second floor when he had a late assignment.
Char gathered her wits together and managed a semicoherent answer. “Oh…I was just…singing.”
To Michael, she whispered, “It’s like Grand Central Station around here. Do any of you realize it is after midnight?”
“That was it,” she called out again. “I was singing.”
“Okay,” Bob called back. “You going to be much longer?”
She glanced at Michael and made a face. “Uh…no. Are you waiting for the shower?”
“No, not really. It’s just—well, the water running in the pipes and all. It goes right past my bed and it sounds like a river. I heard it and I just wanted to make sure.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She gave Michael a desperate look and whispered, “What if he waits for me out there?”
Michael grinned and whispered back. “Then we’ll just walk out together like two grown-ups.”
“In your dreams!” she hissed at him. Aloud, she called out, “Well, everything’s okay.”
“Okay,” he answered. “Well, good night.”
“Good night,” she called hopefully.
Footsteps sounded, loud at first, then fading along the floorboards. She looked at Michael, her eyes shooting daggers. “Now see what you’ve done?” she whispered.
Michael was trying hard not to laugh aloud. “I haven’t done anything. It’s old insomniac Bob out there, skulking around in the halls, looking for women….”
“This is not funny,” she said, eyes darkening as she began to realize how this meeting might look to others. “After all, I’ve got my kids to think about. I can’t be having sexy encounters with my kids just a few feet away. It isn’t right.” She looked at him for understanding of her position.
But Michael felt stung by her tone and he answered defensively. “I didn’t realize you were such a moralist,” he muttered.
“Just one of my odd little idiosyncrasies,” she snapped, glaring at him. “We sweet, old-fashioned girls are like that.”
“You’re making my point for me, aren’t you?” he said coolly.
She turned away, disappointed. Was he really just like any other man, only on the lookout for a quick roll in the hay? She’d thought he was different. Reaching for her robe, she turned her back to slip into it, pulling the sash into a tight knot at the waist.
“I’m getting out of here. Stand back so no one can see you when I open the door.”
“Whatever you say.”
He watched her go, watched the door close with a finality that seemed symbolic, and he said a hard oath under his breath. But, what the hell? He deserved it. He’d known better than to mess with a woman like Char. He’d known from the beginning exactly where her loyalties lay. What had he expected to happen, after all?
This only confirmed his conviction that he should stay away from her. Far, far away.
But there was the morning breakfast promise to get through. True to her word, Hannah had cooked her heart out and Michael couldn’t insult her by hurrying through the meal. Instead, he enjoyed it.
The room was bright with sunlight streaming in through the lacy curtains. Green place mats, beautiful yellow china, heavy sterling silver flatware, a vase full of orange Iceland poppies in the center of the table, all combined to give the morning a special feel.
“Hannah, you’ve got a mind like a steel trap,” he told the older woman, making her beam with pleasure. “You’ve fixed me every one of the items that I mentioned to you yesterday. Didn’t leave a thing out.”
She popped another helping of French toast on his plate. “When it comes to fixing food for people, I know my business.”
“You certainly do. This is delicious.”
He’d come down early, hoping to get this over with and be out the door before the rest of the house arrived for breakfast. But the food was so good, he was still hanging around, even as the others began to drift into the room. There was nothing like a satisfying meal to bring on a feeling of well-being—even when it wasn’t deserved.
He was just about to reluctantly get up and leave, when Char ushered her boys into the room, and he realized he’d better stay for a few more minutes, or his departure would look a little strange. Char gave him a fleeting smile just before she sat in her chair, but after that her attention was all on her children.
He knew he should go, but he was feeling so mellow after his wonderful breakfast that he lingered over coffee and found himself chatting with two other boarders at the table, one an engineer from Dallas named Ralph Boortz, and the other a contract worker from Seattle named Simon Jeter. But his attention was on Char and the way she was dealing with the boys. She was a damn good mother from what he could see of it. Just why that made him feel proud of her, he wasn’t sure. After all, that was part of what had warned him off the night before.
“Those two redheads remind me of my boys at home,” Ralph said as he grinned at Ricky’s attempt to balance a spoon on his nose. “Boy, I sure do miss them. Hope to get home to see them in about a week or so.”
“How many do you have?” Char asked him as she deftly took the spoon and put it out of Ricky’s reach.
“I’ve got two boys, too. And three girls.”
“Oh, my, a whole crew.”
“Yeah. We have a great time. They’re all good kids. Everywhere we go we’re like a small herd moving through.”
Char smiled at him. “I’ve always wanted a whole passel of kids, too. Six was once my goal.” She chuckled, remembering. “I’d especially like to have a girl or two myself. But I’m pretty happy with these two.”
“How about you, Greco?” Ralph asked in a friendly manner. “Got any kids?”
“No,” he said shortly, taking a long sip of coffee.
But his mind was still on Char’s answer. So she wanted a passel of kids. He should have known she would. If he was still kidding himself about there being any chance at all of a relationship with her, that certainly nipped it in the bud. His mood, which had been so mellow, turned ugly, and something began tying his stomach into knots.
“Mr. Greco isn’t a ‘kid person,’ as he is constantly informing me,” Char said. Her glance touched his and then skittered away.
“Well, that’s too bad,” Ralph commiserated in his hearty way. “What happened? An unhappy childhood or something?” He shook his head, not seeming to expect an answer. “That’ll do it,” he told Char. “I once had a friend who hated kids. Turned out he’d been abused when he was young.”
“I wasn’t abused,” Michael said icily, wiping his mouth with the napkin and rising from his chair. “Everything doesn’t conform to the junk-psychology that’s popular on TV talk shows,” he added. “Some things just are.”
He caught Char’s gaze as he left the room, and for one tense moment he thought she saw right through his pretense. But then he realized she couldn’t possibly. How could she know what it had been like for him as a child? He’d lied when he’d said he wasn’t abused. Abuse could be emotional. It didn’t have to display wounds that bled. He knew damn well his problems today stemmed from his childhood. But you couldn’t change what had happened to you. So who the hell cared, anyway?
Anger burned in him, but in the next few moments, something happened that put it out like a bucket of water on a campfire flame. He rounded the corner to where he’d left his things in the foyer, and there was Ronnie, who had obviously sneaked out ahead of him, holding his briefcase with two hands wrapped around the handle.
“Here you go,” Ronnie said, smiling sweetly at him. “Go to work, Mr. Gecko!”
Michael took the case from the child and looked down at him, suddenly feeling as though something were swelling in his chest. “Thanks, Ronnie,” he said. His voice was just a little shaky and he had to resist an impulse to ruffle the kid’s hair. “See you tonight.”
“See you tonight,” Ronnie echoed, and raced to the window seat where he could watch the front walk.
Michael was aware of the boy watching him all the way to the car, and just before he got in, he turned and waved. Ronnie waved back. And why that put a smile on his face and a song in his heart, he didn’t know. But he was humming to himself all the way to work.