Читать книгу Playing Games - Dianne Drake, Dianne Drake - Страница 10

Still Later, and Not a Creature Was Stirring, Except…

DRIP…DRIP…DRIP. Roxy shifted her stare from the computer screen, where she was designing the Rose Palace—her future home on the Sound—to the leaky kitchen faucet. An upright, with a nice, graceful, swan-curved neck and one handle. Drip! “Damn,” she muttered. She’d called that maintenance guy about it twice now. Begged him to come de-drip the durn thing. She’d been pretty blunt about how much it was annoying her, too, and how she really needed him over there as soon as possible. Which was yesterday, when it wasn’t even so much of an annoying drip as an occasional one.

So what if her call did have the dual purpose of drip-busting and getting an up-close and personal look at the man? Preferably from behind. Admittedly, she’d watched him a time or two. Or more. From the peephole in her door, from the elevator, in the lobby. He was the kind worth stopping and staring at. Gorgeous bod. Tight. She was betting six-pack abs under his T-shirt. A real appealing package in her 3D life—dull, dreary, dismal—even if all she got to do was look. Looking was good, though. Safe. Uninvolved. Easy.

Too bad she hadn’t taken that road the first time. But the appeal of a starving artist had seemed romantic at age twenty. Wore off fast, thank heavens. Funny how her working three jobs so that he could stare out the loft window and think about painting had a way of doing that.

So now she only looked. And Mr. Handyman was a looker well worth the effort. She was thanking her leaky swan-necked for choosing to slaver at that propitious moment, even if, so far, the plumbing Galahad had not come running to her watery rescue. All things considered, she thought she’d been pretty patient about waiting for him to haul his lethally fabulous butt through her front door to obliterate that damned dribble. But now it was getting ridiculous. The drip was running amuck and Roxy was actually more interested in a solution than the butt! Such a sad state of affairs. And pathetic.

Pathetic but true, Roxy. Admit it. Here it was, 3:30 a.m., and the damnable drippity-drip was so loud she just knew her snoopy neighbor on the other side of the wall would start banging out a Beethoven symphony. From day one in her apartment—was it only a month now?—he, she or whatever had pounded whenever Roxy sneezed, blinked, or when the light in her fridge came on. She did try hard to stay mouse quiet. Didn’t wear shoes, listened to music only through headphones, didn’t swing from the chandelier. The wee hours had always been good to her, and getting home at two-thirty every morning all wide-eyed and raring to do anything other than sleep furnished her with oodles of time to design her new house.

Until she moved in here. And Mr. Gorgeous Handyman cruising the hall in his drop-dead tool belt didn’t offset the inconvenience of having her nights interrupted by the Pounder.

Her house…. Roxy smiled, just thinking about it. It would be good. Better than that, it would be all hers with her own personal brand on every single aspect of it. She liked that, the total control, at least at this stage of the planning. The house that Roxy built, or would build, as soon as he got over here and took care of that demon drip from the very bowels of hydrous hell. It was driving her insane right now, not to mention ruining her creativity! And just when she was all set to choose between marble or granite on the…no, wait. That couldn’t be right. Marble or granite dining room chairs? Where’d the bathroom vanity go?

That demented demon drip stole it!

Roxy’s gaze shifted back over to the culpable faucet, the one devising its next move against her, and she scrunched her face into an I-dare-you-to-drip-one-more-time glare. Fat lot of good that did, because at that very moment the fiendish faucet morphed itself into a living, breathing entity, one blatantly defying her to do something about it. Okay bitch, you asked for it. Take this… Drip! One single, solitary drip! A laugh! That’s what it was. The faucet Lucifer was laughing at her. Ddd…ri…ppp! This time an exclamation point after the laugh! “That does it,” she snapped. Roxy stormed across the kitchen floor and smacked the faucet with her open palm. “Ouch,” she squealed, pulling her hand back and shaking it. Didn’t phase the drip at all. In fact, the dribbles started coming in punctuated pairs. Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Double-drip dare ya!

Of course, Pounder on the other side of the wall started right up.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord for ear-plugs, please,” Roxy muttered, pulling open her junk drawer to see if anything in it was up to the task of silencing the one-handled dribble monster. A wrench, a sledgehammer, a stick of dynamite! As she expected, though, there wasn’t a single, solitary usable thing in there—only a red plastic flashlight with dead batteries, naturally, some emergency candles with no matches, of course, and a fistful of wooden skewer sticks, not that she’d ever skewered a thing in her life. Well, maybe Pounder once or twice…in her dreams. But nothing labeled drip-fixer.

Frustrated that a pipe wrench hadn’t magically materialized when she needed it, Roxy started to slam the drawer shut, but caught herself in the nick of time, gently pushing it back into its place lest the wall-banging dervish on the other side started all over. Then she glared at the dreaded wall, “I hate this place, I hate this place.” Close her eyes, click her heels three times and maybe she’d land in the Rose Palace.

But mercifully, this apartment was only a temp—a refuge from the rodents and roaches and fleas, oh my! in her former apartment. And it was a quick hop to work as well—a stopgap until the Rose Palace was built, which she hoped wouldn’t be more than a year down the road. Provided he, the fixer of drips, ever got his pipe wrench over here.

Drip…ka-drip…ka-drip…drrrripppp…

“Okay, that’s it!” Roxy didn’t care what time it was. She’d already been reasonable with the guy, it didn’t work, so now it was time for him to come play on her turf during her hours. And she had his number. Right at the top of an important phone numbers list stuck to her fridge, just below her fave food deliveries—pizza first, then Chinese. So, he was about to make a little home delivery himself, substituting tool belt for pepperoni, and a pipe wrench for egg roll. It was time for Mr. Dazzling Derriere to get over there and prove just what he was good for, other than filling out his jeans in some really unbelievable ways.

“Six-three-three,” Roxy repeated the phone number from the list as she dialed. “You’d better be home…with all your tools ready to go.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the countertop as the first four rings went by unanswered. By the sixth ring, she was tapping her right foot. “Two more rings, then I’m going to…”

“Hello.” The voice was a little jagged, a little thick, a whole lot gruff. And sexier than anything she’d ever heard at 3:38 in the morning. Or any other time of the morning, for that matter. This guy could be worth two truffles, she thought. But I’ll trade you two truffles for one fixed drip. That’s how desperate she was!

“Is this building maintenance? You are the handyman, aren’t you?” She didn’t even know his name. Hadn’t bothered asking. No need, since enjoying the marvelous view had been more than enough for her—until now.

“Call back in the morning.”

Certainly not a very friendly response for someone who dealt with the public, Roxy thought. “In the morning I’ll need an ark. You don’t happen to have one handy, do you? Or some bailing buckets?”

“Huh?”

“My faucet’s leaking. More like gushing all over the place. By morning my apartment’s going to be flooded.” Well, maybe that was a slight exaggeration, but demented drips called for desperate measures. “I need someone to come over here right now to fix it, before it starts leaking through the floor into the apartment below.” Well, maybe another teensy, weensy exaggeration. But if that’s what it would take to get him over there…

“Do you know what time it is, lady?” He was making no attempt to hide his irritation. “Because if this isn’t an emergency…” Bordering on downright hostile. But still so sexy she was thinking junk food. Always the infallible substitute.

“Well…” Roxy shrugged, then looked at the bug-eyed, tail-ticking cat clock on the wall. “Yep, I know exactly what time it is. I know what time it was when I called before—both times. And I called at respectable times then—you know, during the day, when you had that message on your voice mail saying to leave a message, that you’d call right back. But that didn’t work, did it? Since you never called back, and you never came over. So this time I thought if I called in the middle of the night when you’d probably be sleeping, I could wake you up and talk to you directly.” Roxy shut her eyes, trying to conjure up his sleeping image. Dark and brooding, hair tousled, sheet coming up only to his waist. Strong arms, naked chest…He wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing under the sheet because men like that always slept in the nude. Or they should, anyway. Damn waste of a lot of good maleness if they didn’t. God, she needed a Twinkie. “And since you’re up right now, why don’t you come on over here and do something about the drip? Okay?” With or without clothes.

“I’ll put you on the list for first thing in the morning,” he grumbled.

A turndown? He was actually refusing after she pleaded her case so eloquently? Well, that wasn’t good enough. If she had to suffer the drip, so did he. Roxy gritted her teeth for the next round. “Which is when? Nine o’clock? Ten o’clock? It can’t wait that long. It’s already oozing through the floorboards. You’ll be getting a call from my downstairs neighbor any minute.”

“Then go stick your finger in the dike, lady. That’ll hold it until morning.”

Roxy’s foot began its impatient tapping again. At this rate there really would be a flood before he got over there. “So, will a bribe work on you?” she blurted into the phone. Drip, drip. “Anything I have, short of sexual favors.” Of course, if he came over there the way she’d pictured him in bed… “Just please, come and take care of it right now. Okay? Or bring me a pipe wrench so I can do it myself.”

“You ever used a pipe wrench, lady?”

“Well, no. But how hard could it be? You clamp it on the pipe then twist.”

“All that leaks isn’t in the pipe.”

“Hey, I’ve got plenty of Bob Vila tapes and I know how to use them.” The only response to what she thought was a reasonable request was an audible, and very vexed, sigh. So she continued. “And if you let me use your tool I’ll promise not to ever call you at three-thirty in the morning again.”

“Three-forty,” he grunted. “And no way in hell are you touching my tool.”

Touching his tool…Boy, oh boy, the ideas that came with that. The ideas and the images. You wish I’d touch your tool, Mr. Handyman! “Three-forty,” she agreed. “So if your tool is off-limits, that means you’re coming over and doing it yourself. Right?” It was beginning to sound promising, from a purely plumbing perspective, of course.

“Who the hell are you, and where the hell do you live?”

So he wasn’t very friendly. Brooding and temperamental types were good, too. Especially when they packed a pipe wrench. And right now, the wrench was all she really wanted. “Roxy Rose. Apartment five-B.”

“Five minutes.” Then he hung up.

Five minutes—just enough time for him to get dressed. Damn! Another fantasy shot to pieces.

On her way from the kitchen into the dining nook she used as her office, Roxy passed by a large hall mirror and stopped, then hopped up on a plastic step to appraise her face. Whoever had hung that mirror must have been hanging it for Amazon women, because in her full five-foot-two glory she could just barely see her face. In fact, the mirror chopped her off at the nose, giving her a clear shot only of her eyes and forehead. So she’d bought the step. Easy solution. Just the way she liked things—easy.

Roxy smiled at the reflection and pushed her tangle of uncombed hair back from her face. “It’s a natural look, trendy-chic,” she always claimed, when friends asked why it was sticking out in odd directions, different odd directions. Truth was, she didn’t like the bother of fixing it, and she’d owned that disarrayed look long before it had become trendy-chic. “Oh well,” she sighed. “It’s not like this is a date.” Besides, no one had ever accused her of being a trendsetter—not in Roxy-mode. Roxy was no-fuss, nomuss, no makeup, with no particular concern over it. Trendy was Val’s gig, one she used for special appearances, photo shoots and the like. Geez, those mugs of her on the city buses. All over Seattle. Here a Valentine, there a Valentine, everywhere a Valentine. And all those billboards. Yikes! There were certain stretches of road she assiduously avoided because she loathed and detested being looked down upon by the pseudo-her camouflaged up to fit the public perception.

Hopping off the step, Roxy wondered if now would be a good time to get Mr. Beautiful Buns to lower the mirror, since he was already going to be there with his tools. Does-n’t hurt to ask, she decided, kicking her step back to the wall. Probably wouldn’t hurt to throw on a tighter T-shirt, either.

“WHO’S THERE?”

“It’s three forty-five, lady. Who do you think it is?”

“Can you show me some identification please—slip it under the door?”

“Lady, the only ID I have on me is my pipe wrench. So open up or I’m going back to bed.”

Smiling, she knew what ID she wanted to see. Yeah, like she’d really ask him to turn around so she could take a look. Only in your dreams, Rox. “Well, hold out that pipe wrench where I can see it,” she said, opening the door an inch. And there it was, his tool thrust right out there at her, and right behind it bare chest. Bare chest every bit as good as his backside. The she-gods were loving her tonight because this was pure, glorious male potency at its best. “Okay, I’m going to trust that that’s a pipe wrench.” Not that she had even looked at the wrench.

“It’s a pipe wrench, lady, so do you want me coming in and using it, because I’m two seconds away from going back across the hall to bed. Which is where I should have stayed in the first place.”

Mercy, mercy, please come in and use it. “Across the hall, as in you’re my neighbor?” Through the crack in the door, Roxy’s eyes wandered from his chest, down the low-riding jeans to his bare feet then back up to his chest. Hairless—somewhat surprising, since men with black hair usually had a fine mat on their chest. But his chest was boldly bare, showing off his flat, rippled stomach. Oh, my heavens, a six-pack! “I guess I’ve just been too busy to meet—”

“Your leak, lady?” he interrupted, his lack of interest in neighborly chitchat made abundantly clear by his testy intonation.

Roxy’s eyes went back up to his face. Except for the furious scowl it wasn’t bad—not bad at all. Probably the first time she’d looked past his…endowments, and she sure liked what she was seeing. Whiskey-brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and that nighttime shadow of stubble. Now, that would be something real nice to wake up to. She remembered waking up to Bruce. He looked more like the bad end of a mop in the mornings. “Please come in…um…neighbor.” She unlatched the chain, opened the door and pointed to the kitchen. “It’s through the living room…”

“I know where the kitchen is,” he snapped, his testiness booting up another notch.

“I guess you would…did you mention your name, by the way?”

“Ned,” he grunted in passing. “Ned Proctor.”

“Well, Ned Proctor. Welcome to my apartment.” Stepping back as he whooshed by, Roxy caught a trace of his scent. He smells great, too. Could this get any better? He was like a fresh splash of something bold and virile, unlike her one and only date in the past three months. What was his name? Michael? Or was it Rupert? Whichever…he’d shown up smelling like an array of discount cologne samples, and she’d sneezed her way around the first block with him before jumping out of his car and hoofing it all the way home—in the fresh air. It took a whole month for her aching sinuses to completely recover from that redolent attack.

“It’s been driving me insane,” she said, watching from the doorway while he tried to manipulate the faucet’s single handle to stop the drip. “And that won’t work. I’ve tried.” For Ned, it was scarcely dripping now. Barely one drop every five seconds, and a puny little drip at that. An ugly plumbing conspiracy meant to make her look silly.

“You couldn’t have lived with that drip until morning, Mizzz Rose?” Glancing down at the floor, he shook his head, letting out the impatient sigh she was already coming to know quite well. “It’s not exactly pouring over, getting ready to flood the apartment below, is it?”

“I’m on…a project. All the dripping was breaking my concentration.”

Frowning, Ned glanced across at Roxy’s makeshift, make-a-house desk area next to the pantry. “It needs a washer, and I don’t have a washer.” He tucked his tool in the waistband of his jeans and headed for the door. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Come on, Ned. I’ve been calling you for days.”

“One day, two times,” he grunted. “And you were on the list.”

“Well, I don’t want to go back on the list.”

“First thing in the morning.”

“I sleep all morning.”

“Then I guess you’ll know what it’s like to be awaken during a sound sleep, won’t you?”

Not to be thwarted on this, the night of her bathroom design, Roxy scooted in next to Ned and yanked at the faucet handle impatiently, hoping to…Well, she wasn’t sure what she hoped to do other than what he wasn’t doing—which was fixing it. But the only thing that happened was a drip that doubled in both frequency and resonance. “So, now what?”

“I’d tell you to live with it, but that’s not going to get me back to bed any quicker, is it?”

“My contract said maintenance emergencies twenty-four seven. All I need is a lousy washer.”

“All you needed was a lousy washer, lady. Heck if I know what it needs now, and I’m not going to find out until morning. What time did you say you get up?”

“Ten.”

“Then I’ll be here at eight.” He grinned at her. “G’night.”

“But what about the leak?”

“Wrap a towel around it, for Pete’s sake.” He pulled the pipe wrench out of his waistband and handed it to her. “I’ve changed my mind…be my guest.”

The wrench slipped from his hand and landed with a hollow thunk on the old wood-and-linoleum countertop. “Well, now you’ve done it,” Roxy warned, her face poker-straight.

“Done what?” he asked.

“Ten…nine…eight…seven…” Pounder next door started up on the five count, and the beat went on for nearly half a minute. “That,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I was warning you about. And this.” She opened a drawer then shut it, not particularly loud, either. With that came the encore, a sequence half again as long as the first chorus, accented, at the end of the performance, by one last clap that knocked an old, black trivet right off Roxy’s wall and into the sink. “So like I was saying, Ned,” Roxy continued, without missing a beat, “it’s driving me nuts—the dripping—and I have a lot of work to do tonight, and if you can please stop it for me, I’d be grateful.”

“How often does that happen?” he asked, nodding at the wall.

Roxy shrugged. “Not more than three, four times a night.” Grinning, “Someone over there’s a Listening Tom. Too bad for them it’s only my kitchen and not my bedroom.” Yeah, right. Sounds from the Roxy Rose boudoir were guaranteed to put anybody to sleep, including Roxy Rose herself.

Ned cleared his throat, turning back around to face the sink. “And what do you do every night to annoy her? Georgette Selby’s her name, by the way. She’s eighty-two. Sweet. Bakes chocolate chip cookies. Used to be a schoolteacher.”

“Normally, it’s just breathing.” Roxy grabbed up the pipe wrench, but he yanked it away from her. “Once in a while I eat Twinkies, and I have this little TMJ thing in my jaw…it sort of pops occasionally.”

Stepping back over to the sink, wrench in hand, Ned bumped into Roxy. “I’m going to bend down now, Miss Rose. Take a look under the sink. If you don’t mind moving back…”

Did she mind stepping back to get a better look at him bending down? About as much as she minded chocolate and orgasms and lots of money. “Just trying to see what you’re doing so I can do it myself next time. So tell me what you’re doing,” she said, struggling to reign herself back in.

“Turning off the water at the valve. That’ll stop the drip and when I get back over here at seven-thirty…”

“Eight.”

“Seven, I’ll get everything fixed up the right way.”

“Think it’s gonna work for tonight? No more drip?” The valve handle was tight and she watched him put extra muscle into his next twist—translating into something so sexy on his backside that it almost made Roxy squirm right out of her skin. Damn those baby-making hormones, anyway. They sure were in overdrive tonight. Success now, the rest later, she reminded herself. “Need another…” a slight tuchus wiggle caused her to gulp “…another tool?” she sputtered. Okay, Rox. Success now, blah, blah, blah. Remember?

“There!” he declared, rather than answering her question. “That should hold it, temporarily.” Ned’s head had barely cleared the open space under the sink when the valve groaned a plumbing obscenity, then let the full force of a geyser rip, shooting water everywhere—the walls, the ceiling, Roxy, Ned. Springing to his feet, Ned yanked the faucet handle, only to have it break off in his hand. No simple fixes now. It was a full-out water cataclysm in need of some instantaneous plumbing surgery, and Ned’s only surgical instrument or know-how, it seemed, was a pipe wrench that clunked to the floor when he leapt back from the deluge.

Scrambling to avoid the fat force of the spray, lest she be caught up in a full-frontal wet T-shirt look, Roxy darted into the bathroom, grabbed up an armful of towels, and dashed back into the kitchen only to find Ned standing there in the middle of Niagara Falls clutching a cell phone, staring down at his pipe wrench. “Don’t just stand there,” she cried. “Stop it. Turn something. Or plug something up.”

Ned shrugged. “The plumber will be here in a few minutes.”

Shaking her head, Roxy stared at the kitchen wall, awaiting the inevitable. And sure enough, before she could even blink, Georgette “Pounder” Selby commenced doing her thing, this time, it seemed, with two fists, and perhaps, a foot.