Читать книгу Love's Nine Lives - Cara/Cassidy Colter/Caron - Страница 11

Bridget stared at the big man, and she was struck again by how his big, powerful hand was making her teacup—a lovely Royal Doulton that she had inherited from her grandmother—look like a toy.

He was having the same effect on her sofa. With his huge frame jammed into the corner of it, a sofa she had always been perfectly content with suddenly seemed as though it belonged in a dollhouse.

In fact, Justin West, in the short time he had been there, was having the unfortunate and powerful effect of making it seem as if her whole life was make-believe, as if she had been playing with toys and imaginary friends and here was the real thing.

Justin West was real, all right. The man was one hundred per cent real—huge, handsome and infuriatingly male. She had felt addled from the moment she had opened the door, looked way up and seen him push his fingers through the chocolate silk of his hair. His eyes had been absolutely mesmerizing—a mix of gold and green, with a light burning in them that even she could see was frank male appreciation.

That light said Justin didn’t see her as little Miss Librarian, despite the severity of her hairdo and the straight lines of her skirt. Somehow he had seen through all that as if it was nothing more than a disguise—a role she played. He had seen her as a woman, and something shockingly primal in her had answered back.

Oh, not in words, thank God. In awareness. She had felt as though she sat on her edge of the couch practically quivering with nervous awareness—the easy play of his muscles; his scent, wild and intoxicating as high mountain meadows; the light in his eyes; the husky, deep sensuality of his voice.

Which was dreadful, of course. Because it went without saying that Justin West was the kind of man she absolutely loathed: full of himself, sure of his own attractions, shallow as a mud puddle. He would be just like all those athletic boys in high school and college who had known she was alive only long enough to poke fun at her. Justin West was one of the happy heathens of Hunter’s Corner.

Any small and secret hope that he might be different somehow than the other redneck men of this town were dashed. If Justin was really different she would have seen him at the library where the more refined citizens tended to gather. And she had never seen this man in her library.

This man thought the cat door was some sort of joke. He was making fun of her, just the way all those handsome, cocky boys in high school and beyond had always made fun of her.

Miss Priss. Four-Eyes. Brainiac.

As if there was something shameful about being smart. The painful taunts came back as though he had uttered them…and so did her feeling of helpless fury, not that she would ever allow him to see it. In her experience, showing vulnerability only made things worse.

With as much dignity as she could muster she said, “I don’t know what guys you are talking about, Mr. West.”

“Probably Harry Burnside, right?”

“Harry Burnside?” she said coolly. “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Yeah, right.” But doubt flickered across his features, and he looked down at her carefully prepared folder and frowned. “Well, come to think of it, I’m not sure Harry could spell infestation. Or rodent.”

“And this is a friend of yours?” she asked, her tone deliberately controlled, faintly judgmental. Given the unsteady hammering of her heart, she was quite pleased with herself.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He looked at the document, then back at her intently. His frown deepened. “And Fred would never be party to a plan like this, no matter how good the prank was.”

“You think my cat door is a prank,” she said, and she could hear the dullness creeping into her own voice. “I think it would be a good idea for you to leave now.”

He looked at her sharply, his gaze too all-seeing.

Was that pity she saw crowding the male arrogance out of his handsome features? She got up, nearly knocking over her teacup. She folded her arms over her chest and then released one just long enough to point at the door.

“Get out of my house,” she ordered.

He swore softly—a word only a barbarian would use—got up and moved toward her. He towered over her, and she knew if she moved one inch, he would think he had succeeded in intimidating her.

“Are you telling me this is for real?” he demanded. “I am insulted that you would think this was anything but real,” she said. She heard the hurt in her voice and tried to cover it by pointing at the door once more, more forcefully than the last time.

“You’re insulted?” He took a deep breath, looked away from her, ran a hand through his hair and then looked back. “Okay, Bridget, it looks like I made a mistake. I thought the guys hired you to play a prank on me.”

“Was that an apology?” she asked. “If so, I seem to have missed the I’m sorry part.”

Her breath caught in her throat. The man was looking at her lips! As if he found her aggravating and unreasonable and knew of only one way to solve that difficulty!

Well, he probably did only know one way. These types of men had limited methods of communication. Though he did have amazing lips, now that she was focused in that direction. The top one was a firm, hard line, but the bottom one was full and puffy. He wouldn’t dare kiss her!

But if he did, she wondered what it would taste like. Feel like.

“Get out,” she ordered again, but she could hear a despicable weakness in her own voice, and apparently he could, too, because he made no move toward the door.

Instead he folded his arms over the enormousness of his chest and gazed down at her, aggravated.

“Just for the record, you aren’t the only one who got insulted here. Lady, I have built whole houses on a handshake. I am not signing a twelve-page contract to build you a stupid cat door.”

“Stupid?” she said huffily.

“Yeah, stupid,” he said.

“Fine,” she said stiffly. “I wouldn’t offer you this job if you were the last man on earth. I will find someone to build my door who has enough integrity that signing a contract doesn’t frighten them. And who doesn’t think my project is stupid! And who doesn’t think I’m an eccentric old—”

“Okay,” he said, mercifully preventing her from having to say it—that she was an old maid. “Nice meeting you. Have a nice life.”

He went to move by her and then paused, sending a wary glance at the couch to see if his work clothes had marked it. Bridget actually felt a treacherous softening for him when he looked relieved to see they had not. He edged his way to the door.

“Look,” he said, an infuriating note of protectiveness in his voice, as if he was the big, strong guy and she was the frail, feeble woman. “Be careful.”

“Of?” She tapped her foot and looked at her watch.

“Anyone who needs those kind of instructions for such a minor piece of work is going to be nothing but trouble.”

“I’ll judge that for myself, thank you.”

“I’m just telling you this because Fred would probably kill me if I didn’t.”

“I am eternally in your debt,” she said, but he missed the sarcasm entirely and kept on talking.

“You can buy a cat door at the local hardware. If someone charges you more than fifty bucks to install it, they’re cheating you.”

“I don’t want the kind from the hardware,” she said tightly.

“Why the hell not? They’re not R28, but I’m sure they work fine.”

She debated telling him the truth. She did not want to, and yet the words just slipped out of her mouth. “Conan might get stuck.”

She felt an instant sense of having betrayed her cat.

Justin turned and studied Conan. “Why do I get the feeling if that cat was any bigger and I was any smaller, he’d have me for supper tonight?”

He doesn’t like you. He’s a good judge of character. But she retained any dignity she had left by not saying it.

“Okay, so you want a custom cat door. No more than a hundred and fifty bucks. The fence is the bigger job. I wouldn’t pay more than fifteen hundred for it, including materials. Two thousand if it’s cedar.”

She felt good manners entailed she should say thank you, but she didn’t.

The thought evaporated instantly when he spoke again anyway.

“And don’t show that SOW-COW thing to anyone. No self-respecting contractor will want to work for you. It makes you look like a nitpicking perfectionist.”

A nitpicking perfectionist? That was at least as hurtful as being called Four-Eyes. Miss Priss. A brainiac. Old maid.

“And let me warn you, there are plenty of contractors out there who aren’t the least self-respecting. Crooks, who would milk a girl like you for all you had.”

“I did a lot of research to prepare that document,” she said with all her dignity. “And I’m not a girl.”

“I’m telling you that SOW COW spells one thing—T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” He looked her over, put his hand on the doorknob and then grinned at her with seducing and wicked charm. “And so do you,” he said.

Then he was gone.

Bridget snapped the front door closed behind Mr. West and then turned her back and leaned her full weight against it as if she had just narrowly escaped…well, something.

She wasn’t quite sure what.

Or maybe she was.

Though she firmly ordered herself not to, Bridget drifted over to her front window and peeked around the edge of the curtain.

She watched as he leaped into a truck that she probably would have needed a stepladder to get into.

Despite her firm orders to her mind not to think about his body, she remembered it in sharp detail: him sitting on her couch, the large muscle in his forearm jumping every time he took a sip of tea, his jeans molded over the ridged muscles of his thighs, his chest huge and solid under a stained T-shirt. He had probably done that on purpose, made those muscles leap, the swine.

“Well, who is swooning over the swine?” she demanded of herself. The truck started with a roar and pulled away from the curb in a spray of gravel.

He would do everything too fast. A blush heated her neck and her cheeks as her mind flew with that one. “I just meant,” she told herself sternly, “that Justin West is a man of rough edges and no refinement whatsoever.”

He had insulted her and treated her like an idiot.

“I’ll show him,” she told Conan. “You wait and see.”

Conan opened an eye and regarded her, looking unconvinced.

But Bridget went right to the phone book and made a list of every contractor in the county. In the morning she would check them out with the Better Business Bureau. Within a week she would have a cat door, and Justin West would be a faint, unpleasant memory.

Only that wasn’t quite how it worked.

Because a week later she was no closer to getting Conan his cat door. After submitting her prospectus by fax or courier to over a dozen contractors, she had been laughed at, sworn at and hung up on.

Even when she reluctantly retired her SOW, no one had the time to do such a small job. The one quote she was given seemed outrageous, and it didn’t even include an automatic cat-door opener. She was reluctantly grateful that Justin had given her a guideline for the pricing of her project.

To make matters worse, Conan seemed to be getting fatter. How could he be gaining weight? She was only putting out a limited amount of the diet food, and he barely seemed to be touching that. She could see the poor cat was depressed. She now saw he needed to be outside.

“Oh, Conan,” she said, touching his head. “The hair will grow back where the bandages tore it off. And you lost a whole two ounces this week. I’m sure of it.”

The cat seemed to know she was lying, just as her inner self knew it was totally untrue that she had not found Justin West just about the most maddeningly attractive man she had ever met.

The house was in darkness and Conan lay sprawled on Miss Daisy’s favorite green Victorian armchair, relishing the amount of orange hair he was successfully grinding into the fabric. Some things were off-limits even to him—this chair and the countertops to name a few—but he considered his trespass a legitimate part of his ongoing protest campaign. As soon as he was certain she was asleep, he would make his nightly raid.

Meanwhile he contemplated how life had deteriorated from the dieting doldrums to just plain hell. Starving wasn’t good enough. Oh, no, now he had to be bald, too. The bandage removal from his head had taken huge patches of his head fur with it. It was an absolute assault on his dignity.

As if coping with the diet and hair loss were not bad enough, Conan could feel the most subtle shiver in the air since that nasty nail pounder had made his appearance to discuss the cat door. The man had been rather dirty, he’d been rude and he’d been unreasonable to poor Miss Daisy. Still, Justin Pest meant trouble, Conan sensed that as easily as he could sense the coming of a storm. Why else would his fifteen-minute collision with their lives still be creating ripples?

And creating ripples it was! Since that unfortunate incident, Miss Daisy had not been herself. She seemed constantly agitated, possibly because her attempts to “show him” had been largely unsuccessful. Conan had gotten to the point where he crept into the other room while she did her nightly relay of phone calls to yet more contractors. Her humiliation was painful.

Mostly since it meant she had forgotten on three and a half separate occasions to fill his food dish. Even if it was with diet gruel, the oversight was unnerving. So was the fact that she had been neglecting to scratch his belly on demand and wandering past him as if in a trance, her rumpled list of contractors clutched in one hand.

Judging by Miss Daisy’s volatile reaction to the barbaric cat-door contractor, most inexperienced cats would say that Justin Pest didn’t stand a chance of worming his way into her life. But cats were equipped with a sonar called instinct, and Conan had felt something powerful, perhaps even untamable, in the air between Miss Daisy and the nail pounder. The man did possess a certain powerful ease with himself that a cat had to admire.

History had an unfortunate way of repeating itself, and Conan had lived through this particular scenario before. In his past life, he’d lived satisfactorily with a female of the human species, too. Oh, she had been no Miss Daisy—rather a washout in both the affection and culinary departments, actually—but she had been adequate. She’d opened and closed the door of her trailer home pretty much on demand, kept the litter box reasonably clean and kept the food dish full. Bargain-basement cat food, but at least not diet.

Then some canine-reeking slob had begun to make appearances. And then he had moved in. Before Conan had really adjusted to that, along came that nasty, smelly, screaming baby. And out went the cat.

“Babies and cats don’t mix,” his previous owner had told him as she’d tossed him from the car into a dark, filthy alley. “Cats have a history of smothering babies, so you have to go.”

Of course, this statement was totally unfounded. Conan blamed that particular vicious rumor on those witch-hunting activists four hundred years ago. They had actually published a falsified drawing of a cat sucking the life out of a baby. Human history was rife with wackos! Not to mention barbarians.

Needless to say, although Miss Daisy’s reaction to Justin Pest had seemed void of potential for the type of relationship that created yucky, stinky little humans, there was something about her behavior Conan found disturbing.

Among a cat’s many, many strong points was superior intuition. And Conan’s intuition had gone on red alert when Justin Pest had entered the room. It was not like Miss Daisy to be so fidgety. And what had he glimpsed in her eyes every time her gaze had locked onto one of that man’s many bulging muscles? Hunger.

Ah, yes, and Conan had become an expert on hunger.

Still, he could sense a very dangerous energy between the two. Miss Daisy had not been alone in sneaking peeks. Unless he was very much mistaken, Conan suspected Justin had liked her kneecaps. And more!

They were just a little too aware of each other in that way. Of course, it manifested as sparks, words spoken with a little too much heat.

Defense mechanisms. Thankfully Miss Daisy’s defense mechanisms could rival those around Fort Knox. Hopefully they would protect a poor little cat who had already been abandoned once due to the inconveniences of human love.

It was really too depressing to think about, so Conan lifted his head off his paws and listened. Silence. The house was at rest.

He slithered from the chair and made his way on silent feet to the kitchen. Miss Daisy was in such a state of mind, she was not aware of the enormous butter consumption her household was suddenly suffering.

She had carefully weighted the fridge door with sauce bottles and such so that Conan could no longer open it himself. She had also hidden his nondiet treats and food. Even the diet ration was stored in an inaccessible cupboard above the fridge.

Well, if she was determined to make him resemble a POW rather than a beloved pet, he was called to action. It was not enough to just sulk angrily, especially since she seemed somewhat oblivious to his moods this week.

With all her cat-food-hiding precautions, Miss Daisy had somehow overlooked the fact that she kept the butter on the counter.

Each night Conan delightedly helped himself, making sure to keep the half-pound portions in a reasonably square shape. However, in Miss Daisy’s recent state of mind, he doubted that she would have noticed if the butter looked like Swiss cheese in the morning. But the risk of losing his source of saturates produced caution.

He had just had his first lick when he heard a sound. He catapulted from the counter just as the kitchen light was flipped on.

She padded out in her housecoat and slippers. He looked at her, all wide-eyed innocence, not that she seemed to notice.

“It’s too late to phone,” she mumbled to herself.

Not for pizza, it isn’t. Conan rubbed himself against her legs. She reached down absently and petted him and then retrieved a package of graham wafers from the cupboard.

“Not that he looked like the type that would go to bed early. Did he?”

Oh, God. Conan did not even have to ask who.

“Naturally I wouldn’t hire him after how he behaved—”

Good.

“—but Fred says he’s the best in town. Very fast. His work is apparently impeccable.” She sank down on a chair and buttered a cracker. She popped the whole thing in her mouth and swallowed. Conan had the ugly feeling she hadn’t even tasted it.

“I said I wouldn’t hire him if he were the last man on earth,” she reminded herself.

Exactly, Conan thought, and a better decision you have never made.

“He is the last man on earth,” she wailed, unfolding her list of contractors and studying the crossed-out names bleakly. She picked up the phone.

Drastic measures were called for! Conan leaped on the counter and buried his face in the butter.

“Conaann!”

He hadn’t heard such genuine distress since he had launched himself at the window. His face covered in butter, he leaped from the counter and raced down the hall.

After a full second he realized she was not following. He crept back down to the kitchen and peered around the corner at her.

The butter would be stored now, under lock and key, just like everything else. He had gambled with his last card in hopes of distracting her and he had failed utterly. Because she had the phone in her hand and a look of fierce determination on her face.

“My cat is acting bizarre,” she muttered, obviously working up her courage and her conviction.

Bizarre? Excuse me? Who was forgetting to fill the food dishes?

“Conan needs a cat door.” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop, unaware that Conan had crept back and was watching her.

“Mr. West?” she said. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you? It’s Bridget Daisy here.” She tucked the phone under her ear and scraped the butter into the garbage. She closed the lid with a snap. “We need to talk about the cat door.”

But Conan was sadly aware that whatever transpired between Bridget and Justin Pest next, the cat door was only an excuse.

Still, he had lost the battle—and the butter—but not the war. Surely he was a crafty enough cat that he could get rid of this new threat to his and Miss Daisy’s world? That world was topsy-turvy enough with the whole diet thing, never mind adding the complication of a barbarian.

If he played his cards right, Conan thought there was a possibility he might get his cat door first before dispatching the barbarian.

Who needed butter when the world was full of purple finches?

It had been a bad week. Conan had been starved, he was bald and now he had been unfairly labeled bizarre. Still, all cats had been blessed with a gift that the great philosophers and spiritual leaders of the ages tried, largely unsuccessfully, to emulate.

No one could detach from their difficulties and immerse themselves in the pure joy of the moment quite like a cat. Conan lifted his paw to his face and removed some of the lovely pale yellow substance that clung there. He licked it delicately and sighed with bliss.

Ah, Foothills. His favorite creamery.