Читать книгу Lucy And The Loner - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 9

Two

Lucy nudged a black, sodden, still-smoldering lump with the toe of her borrowed sneaker, and wondered what the sooty blob had been before succumbing to the fire. The teapot her mother had ordered from England and loved so much? The box that had held her father’s fishing lures? The piggy bank full of quarters her grandmother had given her for her twelfth birthday? It was impossible to tell.

She tilted her head to the right to contemplate the object once more, squeezed her eyes shut to fight back the tears that threatened, and inevitably replayed in her mind the events of the night once more.

So much of what had happened was just a blur of unrecalled chaos now, and she guessed there were some things she would never quite fully remember. She supposed she was lucky neither she nor Mack had been hurt beyond a little smoke inhalation and the jerky handling necessary to save their lives. Ultimately, confident she was perfectly all right, Lucy had declined the complementary ride to the hospital that was evidently the consolation prize when one’s house burned to the ground. But she’d made an appointment with the vet for Mack this afternoon.

Perfectly all right, she repeated to herself. Oh, sure. She was perfectly all right. Just fine and dandy. Hey, she wasn’t going to let a little something like losing all her worldly possessions spoil her day. No way. She shivered and tried not to think about how badly this whole episode could have turned out if it hadn’t been for the big blond firefighter.

What was his name again? she wondered. Oh, yeah, Boone Cagney. Boone Cagney who had emerged from smoke and fire to carry her and Mack to safety, then hopped back up on his big red truck to disappear into the night. Without a word, without a trace, without even realizing the magnitude of what he had done.

Lucy sighed deeply and stared at the sparse remains of her house. Gone. Everything. Just like that. The track and field hockey trophies from high school that had lined her bedroom windowsills like soldiers. The airplane models she had built so passionately as a child. Her favorite pair of blue jeans—the ones it had taken four full years to get faded just the way she liked them.

Odd, the things people felt wistful about once those things were gone. And now Lucy had nothing.

Actually, that wasn’t true, she reminded herself. As she had told Boone Cagney, she did still possess the two things that were most important to her in the world—Mack and Stevie. And, of course, there was the truck she’d just bought a few months before and that she’d never been able to fit in the cluttered, cramped garage. But her house, her furniture, her clothes, and everything else she had ever owned—all the physical trappings that made Lucy Dolan Lucy Dolan—all that was gone forever.

She hugged the teddy bear tighter to her, rubbing her chin over the worn spot on top of his head that had become worn by that same gesture for thirty-four years, and wondered how she was going to take care of Mack—not to mention herself—now that she had nothing else left.

“Lucy?”

She turned at the sound of her name to find her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Palatka, wringing her arthritic hands in worry. It was she who had made Lucy put on the sneakers some time ago, but the older woman had been unable to get her young neighbor to do much more in the way of self-preservation. Lucy was still wearing the clothes she’d managed to throw on before making her escape, but she was only now beginning to realize that the T-shirt and boxer shorts were damp and cold and offered no protection from the chill morning air. In spite of that, she scarcely noted the goose bumps mottling her flesh.

“Come to the house and have some breakfast, dear,” Mrs. Palatka said. “You need something to warm you up.”

The white-haired, warm-hearted woman looped a surprisingly sturdy arm around Lucy’s waist and squeezed hard. Mrs. Palatka hadn’t changed out of her night clothes yet, either, and beneath her winter coat fluttered a red flowered muumuu emblazoned here and there with big purple letters that spelled out, Aloha from Waikiki! Coupled with her huge, purple, fuzzy bedroom slippers, limp from the morning dew, she looked almost as much the part of a refugee as Lucy did.

“Come on,” she said again. “You’re going to catch your death out here. You need a hot shower and some hot food. And you can borrow some of my clothes until you get settled.”

Recalling that Mrs. Palatka’s wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of synthetic Capri pants and fluorescent halter tops for the full-figured gal, Lucy battled a smile. “That’s okay, Mrs. P.,” she told her neighbor. “I keep my work clothes in the truck. They’ll do for now.”

Wordlessly, she collected a few things from the cab of her pickup, then allowed herself to be led to the house next door. She listened passively to the soothing words her neighbor offered about thank God no one had been hurt and it was a good thing Lucy had insurance and tomorrow was another day and everything would work out fine, just wait and see.

She put herself on automatic pilot and let Mrs. Palatka ply her with hotcakes and sausages and coffee. Then she mechanically showered, letting the hot cascade pelt her back, watching with an odd melancholy as the black, sooty water swirled down the drain. She pulled a faded green, hooded sweatshirt over her head and stepped into a pair of equally faded, baggy denim overalls, donned her work boots, and felt a little better. Only when Lucy was seated on her neighbor’s couch with nothing more demanding to do than stare out into space did the enormity of her situation finally register.

She had no place to go. No one to turn to.

Except for Mack, Lucy was completely alone in the world. She was an only child, having been adopted as a toddler, and her parents had died within a few years of each other by the time she was thirty-one. With only a handful of cousins she’d met maybe two or three times in her life scattered on the other side of the country, Lucy essentially had no family left. And the Arlington, Virginia, house where she’d grown up, the only house she’d ever really known, was nothing now but a pile of ash.

All she had left was Mack, who had pretty much been her only family for more than three years—ever since he’d shown up as a shivering, soggy handful of skin and bones at her back door, following a monstrous thunderstorm the morning after her mother’s funeral.

Lucy had taken his timely appearance to be a sign. As silly as it might sound to others, she’d always had the feeling that Providence had given her Mack to love and care for, because she’d had no one else left for that after her mother’s death.

That was why she owed such a huge debt to the firefighter who had rescued him. By running back into a blazing house, Boone Cagney had saved the only living creature in the world Lucy needed and loved, the only living creature in the world who needed her and loved her in return. Without Mack, her life would be hollow, joyless and lonely. Boone Cagney had saved Lucy’s family. He had saved her life.

She inhaled a broken, battered sigh and released it in a shudder of breath. From nowhere Mack jumped up onto the couch and bumped his head against her elbow, then nuzzled close before curling up in her lap. Lucy smiled and rubbed her hand along his back and under his throat, and the thrumming of his steady purr reassured her some.

As long as she had Mack, she told herself, everything would be okay. Somehow, some way, she’d put her life back together again. She’d just have to force herself to focus on the future and not dwell on the past. Piece of cake, right?

She sighed furtively and decided not to think about it for now. What consumed her thoughts instead was the huge debt she owed to Boone Cagney. And although Lucy prided herself in the fact that she always paid her debts, the settlement of this one eluded her. Everything she owned was gone. Her financial savings were meager at best. Whatever she received for her house from the insurance settlement was going to have to buy and outfit a new place for her to live.

All she had was a tattered teddy bear whose inherent value would be useless to anyone but her, and Mack, with whom she would never part, no matter how grave the debt. She simply had nothing to offer the big, blond firefighter who’d saved Mack’s life, she realized morosely. Unless, of course, she wanted to give him herself. But why would he want something like that? No one else ever had.

The hand stroking Mack’s back gradually slowed, then stilled altogether as a hazy idea rooted itself in her brain. Actually, she thought, that just might work. There was a way Lucy could repay Boone for everything he had done for her. There was something she could give him that would settle the debt in some small way.

She could give him herself. Sort of.

Now all she had to do was figure out how to wrap herself up all nice and neat and make him accept her small token of gratitude. Unfortunately, Boone Cagney didn’t seem like the kind of man who was open to receiving gifts, whether they were owed him or not.

“So what do you think, Mack?” she asked the cat who had moved into her lap, tucked his legs up under himself, and curled his tail around his body quite contentedly.

Mack opened one eye, clearly disinterested, then closed it again, sighed with much satisfaction and purred louder.

Lucy thought some more as she rubbed Mack behind the ear. “I guess if he’s not the kind of guy who accepts things easily,” she murmured, “then I’ll just have to be a bit more persuasive than usual.”

Mack grunted in his sleep, though whether the sound was one of agreement or dissension, Lucy couldn’t tell.

“That’s okay, Mack,” she said softly to the slumbering animal. “I’ll take care of everything. You just be yourself.”

Boone had finally managed to slip into a restless slumber when a rapid knocking at his front door awakened him with a start. Jerking his head up from the pillow, he squinted at the blurry green numbers on his clock, then swore viciously when he realized he’d only been in bed for a little over an hour. With another muffled curse, he collapsed back onto the mattress and mentally willed the intrepid intruder to go away.

But the pounding only reverberated through his house again—louder this time. So he sighed his resignation and rolled out of bed, then stretched lethargically before scrubbing two hands through his hair. Because he was expecting to send his uninvited caller on their way right quick, he didn’t bother to put on a shirt, and instead padded barefoot across the bedroom, wearing only a pair of faded navy blue sweatpants.

Man, it had been a bitch of a night, he thought, rubbing a knot at the base of his neck. It was a terrible thing to watch a person’s house—a person’s home—go up in flames along with all their worldly possessions. He supposed he’d never get used to that part of the job. The only thing worse than seeing something like that happen was seeing something like that happen to someone you cared about personalty.

The thought stopped him dead in his tracks. Whoa, he instructed himself carefully, rewind. Cared about personally? He couldn’t even remember the name of the woman whose house had burned last night. How the hell could he care about her?

The pounding erupted again, so he shook the thought off and returned to his slow progress down the hall. Prepared for an unwanted solicitation or an unexpected delivery, he jerked the front door open with a growl, only to find that the woman he had been thinking about only seconds ago had materialized from his ruminations and stood on the other side.

Although it was common enough for women to cross the street just so they could walk by a fire station, Boone couldn’t recall a single incident where one had actually come to a firefighter’s house. Although now that he got a better look at her, he decided it might not be such a bad tradition to start.

“Hi,” she greeted him with a bright smile. “Remember me?”

For a moment he couldn’t say a word. He could only stare into those compelling blue eyes that had lingered in his thoughts until sleep had claimed him. No, he suddenly remembered, that wasn’t exactly true. Even in sleep, those eyes had haunted him.

“Yeah, sure I remember. You okay?”

She nodded anxiously but said nothing to confirm her condition for sure.

Boone nodded vaguely in response and forced himself to pull his gaze away from her eyes. Inevitably, though, it roved relentlessly over the rest of her. Cleaned up, he noted, she looked a little sturdier than she had the night before. Cleaned up, she looked a little heartier. She looked older, too, probably near his own thirty-six years, and much less fragile and commanding of care. Last night, she had seemed close to crumpling into a hopeless, helpless heap of despair. But now...

Now, he realized, in spite of the baggy, masculine, obviously borrowed clothing that hung on her body like sackcloth, she actually looked quite...fetching.

Although her bangs were long—nearly down in her eyes— her black hair was cut shorter than his own. The style might have been boyish had it not topped such utterly feminine features. Her lashes seemed even darker than her black hair, a stark contrast to the pale blue of her irises. Her cheekbones were well-defined and stained with pink, though Boone knew without question that the color didn’t result from any manufactured cosmetic. Her full lips, too, were blushed with color, though again, he could see that heightened emotion, and nothing more, caused the flush.

Dropping his gaze lower, he also saw that she bore a nasty bruise on the left side of her chin that reached to her mouth and swelled a small portion of her lower lip. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he curled his forefinger lightly against her mouth and brushed it gently over the injury. Vaguely he noted the warm breath that danced over his fingers. Vaguely he marveled at how soft her skin was. Vaguely he realized how much he wanted to touch her in other places, to see if they were warm and soft, too.

Her lips parted a mere breath, but her pupils expanded to nearly eclipse the blue of her irises. Only when he noted her reaction did Boone fully understand the intimacy inherent in his gesture, and the strangely erotic path his thoughts had suddenly begun to follow. He yanked back his hand with then speed of a viper and shoved it down to his side. Then he tried to meet her troubled gaze with as much indifference as he could fake.

He was about to say something else—although he couldn’t quite remember what—when she seemed to throw off the odd spell that had descended and snatched his hand back up to inspect it. Until then, he had forgotten about the jagged red line that rent his thumb from the cuticle nearly to his wrist.

“Oh, my God, did Mack do that to you?” the woman asked, stroking the pad of her thumb delicately over the wound.

Boone jerked his hand out of her grasp, uncomfortable with the way his skin warmed under her touch. But all he said in response was, “Yeah.”

She reached for his hand again, and when he snaked it back to his side, she looked positively dashed. “I am so sorry about that. Mack would normally never scratch someone. Really. He was just scared last night. He wasn’t himself.”

Boone expelled a dubious sound. “Yeah, I’m sure. Just tell me his shots are all up-to-date.”

“Of course they are,” she assured him. “Honest, he really is the sweetest creature in the world. If you got to know him, you’d realize that.”

Boone tried to keep his voice impassive when he replied, “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”

“I mean it. If you want—”

“You look a little battered yourself,” he interrupted, lifting his chin to indicate the contusion that marred her otherwise flawless complexion. “Did you have that checked out by a doctor?”

She shook her head, then touched the bruise and her lower lip with considerably less care than he had, working her jaw as if testing the damage. “It wasn’t necessary. It’s not as bad as it looks. I think it must have happened when I was coming down the stairs,” she added. “I don’t really remember much of what happened. One minute I was waking up in bed, the next I was standing in the yard holding Mack, watching my house burn to the ground.”

“It’s not unusual for people to experience that kind of thing when they’ve been through something like that,” Boone told her.

She nodded quickly, and he began to understand that the action wasn’t so much born out of her agreement with anything he said as it was her complete uncertainty about the situation.

“The insurance guy has already come by, can you imagine?” she hurried on. “I had no idea they’d be that efficient. Unfortunately they’re not quite as efficient at issuing checks. He could only give me an advance for now. Still, it’s better than nothing, right? And they already found the source of the fire, too,” she added, her obviously forced cheerfulness beginning to fade. “It was my clothes dryer. Of all things...”

She chuckled, but the sound was strangled and uneasy and accompanied by a sparkle of moisture in her eyes that she hastily swiped away with the back of one hand.

Although he couldn’t imagine why he cared, Boone heard himself ask, “Is there anything you need? Do you have someone to stay with? Family in the area?”

She sniffled and shook her head. “No. My folks passed away a few years ago, and I’m an only child.” She hesitated for a moment before amending, “Actually, I do have—”

She physically shook off whatever she was going to say, and as quickly as she’d changed the subject before, she changed it again. “The advance will cover anything I’ll need right away—clothes, food, that kind of thing. I’ve got a room at the Arlington Motor-on-Inn. Don’t know how long I’ll have to stay there, though.”

Boone nodded, his mind reeling at the dizzying wealth of information she’d imparted in that one quick announcement. And for some reason, he felt oddly cheated that there wasn’t some small thing he could offer to do for her. The reaction was more than a little strange. He hadn’t wanted to do something for somebody in a long time. Not since he’d offered himself heart and soul and lock, stock and barrel to his fiancée—or rather, his ex-fiancée—and received a good, swift kick in the teeth for a wedding present.

“Mind if I come in?” the woman asked, squashing the usual bitterness that generally rose with memories of Genevieve before it could rise to the fore. She held up her other hand to display a fast-food-issued cardboard caddy that held a bag of doughnuts and two plastic cups of coffee. “I went by the firehouse to look for you, but the guys there said you got off at eight and had already gone home. They also said you wouldn’t mind if I stopped by, as long as I brought you some coffee and doughnuts when I did.”

She grinned brightly, but it was clear that she was still none too certain about the response she was likely to receive from him.

“They, uh...they told me where you live,” she added, her smile falling somewhat. She seemed to think it was very important that he have that information. “I, um...I didn’t even have to ask for your address. They wrote down directions and everything. One of them even drew me a map.”

Boone gazed at her for a minute, trying to picture the scene at the station as it must have unfolded. Twelve randy firefighters ogling an attractive woman with eyes the color of a tropical sky. Yep. Must have been interesting.

“They told you I like coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?” he finally asked, somewhat mystified about that particular part of the story.

She bit her lip a little anxiously. “Actually, um...what they said was that you’d love to have me this morning, because you always like a little something, uh—” She cleared her throat indelicately, and the pink in her cheeks turned to red. “They said you like something, um, hot and sweet...in the morning. I just naturally assumed what they were talking about was—”

“I see,” he interrupted her before she could finish. Oh, yeah. He was going to have a little chat with his brothers down at the station. Pronto.

Reluctantly Boone stepped aside for her to enter, and she sailed past him on a breeze redolent of Ivory soap. The scent was appropriate for her. She seemed like the clean-cut, eat-all-your-vegetables, go-to-church-every-Sunday kind of woman. In other words, not at all his type. Not anymore, anyway.

“Look, lady—” he began as he closed the door behind himself.

“Lucy,” she corrected him over her shoulder. “Lucy Dolan. Where’s the kitchen?”

“Lucy,” he repeated obediently. “Keep walking. At the end of the hall turn right.”

He hesitated for a moment, then halfheartedly followed her to the room in question and found her making herself way too comfortable way too quickly. Without asking for permission to do so, she searched his cabinets until she located his dishes in the one by the sink, and carried two plates to the small oak table. Then she unpacked two doughnuts—presumably one for him and one for her—and took a seat at one of the chairs. Too tired and bemused to protest, Boone pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, then removed the plastic lid from the cup of steaming, fragrant coffee and brought it to his lips for a sip.

Fortified by even that small gesture, he lifted his doughnut for consideration before taking a bite. When he swallowed, he said, “This is about that debt you said you owe me last night, right?”

She nodded as she bit into her own doughnut, but was obviously too polite to speak with her mouth full.

“I told you that you don’t owe me anything,” he said. “But it was nice of you to bring me breakfast. Thanks.”

She swiped at a dusting of powdered sugar on her upper lip, then licked a scant dribble of jelly from the corner of her mouth. The gesture, although more than a little stirring—for him, anyway—seemed nervous, but he couldn’t imagine what she might have to feel uneasy about.

“Actually,” she said, decorously hiding her mouth behind her hand as she spoke, obviously embarrassed by his scrutiny, “this is about that debt, but you can’t possibly think that I’d consider a bag of doughnuts sufficient repayment.”

“Why not? All I did last night was my job. And I didn’t even do that well enough to save your house. Or much of anything else, for that matter.”

“You did a lot more than save my house,” she told him. “You saved my family. You saved me.”

“I saved your cat, you mean. You were almost out the door by the time I got there.”

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Well, as much of his hand as she could cover with those child-sized fingers of hers. They were good hands, though, he noted. Sturdy with short, blunt nails and seemingly no special care. They were working hands, plain and simple. Boone liked that. Genevieve’s hands had Jooked like something out of a diamond advertisement. He’d never been able to understand women who seemed to make a career out of grooming their hands as if they were thoroughbred horses.

When he looked up at her face again, Lucy was studying him with an intensity that made him uncomfortable. And as much as he wanted to look away, he found that he just couldn’t.

“Like I said,” she told him softly, “you saved my family.”

Her cat was her family? he wondered. Her cat? Hell, even he wasn’t that alone in the world. Not really. Not like that.

He pushed the thought away and focused on Lucy instead. His gaze drifted to the angry blue discoloration on her chin again, and he wished he could have arrived at the scene of the fire sooner—before she had taken her spill. Nothing should mar skin that beautiful, he thought, especially something like a bruise.

Then he reminded himself that thinking such things had gotten him into trouble in the past. And he could no more afford that kind of trouble now than he had been able to then. Playing the sucker once was bad enough. No way was he going to get taken in like that a second time.

“I saved your cat,” he reiterated.

“And me, too,” she reminded him. “You carried me to safety.”

“I just happened to be the one on the scene,” he said, explaining away the action before she could interpret it as heroic. “I was just doing my job. Anyone else in my situation would have done the same thing. It was no big deal.”

She shook her head in obvious disappointment, then withdrew her hand from his and wrapped it around her cup again. For a moment she only stared silently down into its dark depths. Then she said softly, “That’s okay. I don’t expect you to understand about me and Mack.”

When she looked up at him again, a stark sadness glittered in her eyes. “But the fact of the matter is that last night you ran into a burning house—a burning house, for Pete’s sake— to save my cat. A cat that means more to me than you can imagine. And for that I owe you. Big.”

Boone wondered if she’d feel the same way if he told her the reason he’d returned to that inferno to retrieve her cat last night was because he’d thought he was going back to save a child. What would she say if he confessed that had he known what he was risking his neck for was a cat, he probably would have just sat out on the lawn and let the damned thing be toasted into a kitty waffle?

Ultimately he decided it was probably better to keep that information to himself. It was one thing to brush off a woman’s concern for a debt that didn’t exist It was another matter entirely to make her want to strangle you with her bare hands.

“And I’m going to pay you back for what you did,” she told him again. “I promise you I am.”

When Boone Cagney said nothing in response to her assurance, Lucy fidgeted a bit in her chair. Hoo boy, she thought. She’d really managed to get herself into it this time. Last night, in the chaos and panic of the moment, she hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to her rescuer’s looks. But now, seated here in the picture of domestic bliss at his kitchen table, sharing doughnuts and coffee as if it were something the two of them did every morning, she realized he was a lot more attractive than she had recalled.

Not handsome, really. His features were too irregular, too unconventional for that. But definitely very attractive. His heavy-lidded eyes gave him a deceptively calm appearance, but there was a fire burning in their green depths that was too vivid, too bright, too hot for her comfort. His thick, dark blond curls might have been considered tousled on another man, but on this man, their dishevelment seemed more the result of anarchy.

His mouth, however, was what drew her attention most. Lush, mellow and evocative weren’t words Lucy would normally use in relation to a man who seemed so hard and unrelenting, but they all sprang immediately to mind when she gazed at Boone Cagney’s mouth. It spoke promises of incomparable sensuality without him ever having to utter a word.

She lowered her gaze when she realized she was staring at him. Then she felt her face heat up at the blatant hunger that hummed in her midsection at the sight of his naked chest and the rich scattering of dark blond curls that swirled from his shoulders to his belly and beyond. Lucy had never much gone for the overdeveloped, muscle-bound type. And although Boone Cagney was clearly a man who worked out and took care of his physique, he was no bulging neckless wonder like so many body builders seemed to be.

His form was solid, but in no way overdone. Swells of well-defined musculature corded his torso, and sculpted curves of sinew whipped around upper arms that were truly things of beauty. His forearms, too, were lean and hard with muscle, and an involuntary tremble shook her when she realized those arms were what had carried her to safety the night before.

Figures she’d only be semiconscious during something like that, Lucy thought wryly. That was the way her luck always seemed to run. Then again she wondered if any woman would remain at all coherent when arms like those pinned her to a body like that.

Had she remembered how attractive he was, she might have reconsidered the proposition she was about to make. But she was resigned now to what she was going to do. Because she simply could think of no other way to repay him for all that he had given her.

“You don’t have to pay me back,” he insisted in response to the promise she scarcely recalled making.

That was another thing about him that made her nervous. That voice. So low and husky, so slow and sexy. He rolled over every word leisurely, thoroughly, as if each one were an erotic vow of the most carnal variety. It was the voice of a man who would be quick to seduce and slow to satisfy. Every time Boone said something, it sent a ripple of hot delight buzzing right through Lucy’s libido.

She ignored his assurance to the contrary and told him, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”

“Lady... Lucy—” he immediately corrected himself when she opened her mouth to do it for him “—like I keep telling you, it’s not necessary to pay me back for anything. Okay?”

Instead of succumbing to his tone of command, Lucy hurried on before she had a chance to change her mind. In a rush of words so quick they almost sounded like one, she told him, “Here’s the deal. I’m giving you myself for one month.”

When the only response she received was a silent stare of complete incomprehension, Lucy tried again. “I’m yours to do your bidding, at your beck and call, for four weeks.”

But still he seemed not to understand.

Finally, in an effort to make it as clear as possible, Lucy took a deep breath, met his gaze as levelly as she could and told him, “For the next thirty days, Boone Cagney, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. Because for the next thirty days, I’m going to be your slave.”