Читать книгу Bachelor Mom - Jennifer Greene, Jennifer Greene - Страница 9

Three

“You give me fever... when you kiss me ...” It was tough to belt out rock and roll when you couldn’t carry a tune to save your life and had to whisper because the boys were sleeping—but brownie making wouldn’t be the same without a song. Gwen cracked two eggs and plopped them in the bowl.

“I know you’re gonna treat me ri-i-i-ight...” She checked the recipe for the amount of sugar. One cup. That struck her as a little stingy, so she heaped in some extra. “Louie, Louie...” Oops, she was pretty sure those were lyrics to some other oldie, but no matter. There was still a hip-swinging beat to that one, too. Only drat, she’d forgotten to preheat the oven.

Holding a wooden spoon dripping sugar and chocolate, she swiftly pivoted around ... and almost had a heart attack when she saw Spence in her screen doorway. “Eek,” she said weakly.

Even in the muzzy darkness beyond the screen, she could see his effort to control a smile. “Sorry, I really didn’t mean to scare you. I was just about to knock—but then I decided you looked too busy for company and maybe I’d better head back home.”

It took a second to gather her scattered wits...but then she grinned. “Now tell the truth. My singing just terrfied you speechless, didn’t it? Come in, come in. I promise I’ll quit. I’ll even pour you a glass of lemonade...” She glanced at her hands, spattered with chocolate and flour. “Well, maybe you’d better pour your own lemonade.”

“You do look busy—”

“I am. The brownies are for Ms. Peter’s class tomorrow—she’s Josh’s second-grade teacher, and I caught wind it was her birthday. Figured it was a good idea to start the school year by buttering her up. There’s nothing more boring than making brownies by yourself, though, so I couldn’t be happier to have some company. What’s up? April isn’t sick, is she?”

“No, she’s fine, sleeping like a log.” Spence stepped inside. Even in casual khakis and old sandals, he made her pulse rate accelerate to zoom speed. “She came home from school—it’s only the second day, mind you—and tells me she now knows how to read. Nothing to it.”

Owen chuckled, then motioned where he could find the glasses. “There’s fresh-squeezed lemonade on the first shelf in the fridge...and April’s so bright, I wouldn’t doubt she moved past Dick and Jane in the first fifteen minutes. What a darling she is.”

“I think so, too, but actually, I heard she poured several handfuls of sand down Jacob’s shirt this afternoon. I figured I’d better find out if the McKennas were in hot water at your house.”

So that’s why he’d stopped over? Head down, she started ladling brownie batter into the baking pan. “No problem. I found the sand when I threw Jacob in the bathtub tonight, but believe me, dirt and Jacob isn’t any news to our septic system. And what’s a little sand between friends? Apparently Jacob paid her the ultimate compliment by telling her she played as well as a boy. No offense meant to your gender, but I bopped him with a towel. I swear my two came out of the womb thinking sexist... do you want to lick the bowl?”

“Lick the bowl?”

Gwen had long suspected that the whole world treated Spence like a hotshot—because he was. She always meant to kowtow the same way and treat him like the intimidating business tycoon he was, only she’d never mastered how to do it. “Hey, it’s fine with me if you’re too grown-up to get your hands sticky. Personally I don’t think anything beats brownie batter, but—”

“I’ll take the bowl off your hands.”

She chuckled. “You’re gonna do me a favor, huh? But maybe this is a bad idea. You’ve got a white shirt on, and Mary Margaret’ll skin you alive if she has to get chocolate stains out of it—”

“I’ll handle Mary Margaret. I haven’t had brownie batter in a dozen years.”

“Well, you poor baby...” He hovered like a four-year-old until she had the batter poured in the pan-then promptly and greedily absconded with the bowl—and the wooden spoon. Sheesh, who’d have dreamed this would go so easily, she mused. Last night she’d been mortified at the thought of having to face him again, when obviously she only had one choice. To be herself and to act like normal.

She grabbed a soapy sponge. Something about making brownies always took out her whole kitchen. There were drips of chocolate on the pecan cupboards and a dusting of flour everywhere on the coral Formica counters. Working around Spence at the island bar, she swiped and scrubbed with the sponge. She was conscious that her feet were bare, her face as scrubbed as a kid’s, and he’d probably been around women all day dressed in elegant business suits. Her oversize brown T-shirt and red shorts were ancient and looked it—but he’d seen her look worse.

Come to think of it, he’d never seen her looking anything but worse. At the moment she doubted he’d notice if she were wearing red satin or gold lamé. His head was buried pretty deeply in the chocolate bowl. “Good grief. Doesn’t Mary Margaret ever make you brownies?”

“She bakes. We had a mystery pie last night. I didn’t have the courage to ask what it was. Definitely not brownies, though. And definitely nothing like this. How’s your head?”

“My head?”

“No headache? I only had one experience with dark sweet rum, way back in college, but I remembered it being pretty lethal the next morning.”

She’d hoped—she’d so earnestly prayed—that he’d forgotten all about last night. “Well, I woke up this morning with a fairly good head pounder. Bad enough to convince me that if I were going to take up a vice, it’d be something besides alcohol.” She added swiftly, lightly, “I can hardly remember anything that happened last night after the first sip.”

“No?”

“Nope. Not a thing. I slept like the dead, though, that’s for sure....” She finished her cleanup and perched on the kitchen stool next to him, still drying her hands on a watermelon-print towel. Not that she was in a hustle to change the subject, but the winning horse at the Derby couldn’t have hustled any faster. “Did you have a good day? Market some good business deals?”

“Had a great day. Marketed up a storm. So...did you have any time today to shop for some Victoria’s Secret underwear?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Last night...” He frowned, as if trying to recall her exact words. For a man who’d been salivating for chocolate seconds before, suddenly he seemed to have forgotten all about the brownie bowl. “You were talking about turning over a new leaf and becoming ‘reckless.’ I’m pretty sure you mentioned that a shopping trip to Victoria’s Secret was part of that agenda... whoops. Has Gwen disappeared on me?”

He reached over to peek under the kitchen towel she’d flopped over her head.

“Nope. She’s still here,” he announced gravely.

“She’s hiding under the towel because she’s dying of embarrassment,” Gwen said dryly. “I was counting on you to be a gentleman and forget everything I said last night. I never meant any of it—”

“I thought you made all kinds of good sense.”

“Good sense?” She pulled the towel off then, if only to see his face. She assumed he was pulling her leg, yet his expression—bewilderingly enough— seemed sincere and serious. “I dipped into half my supply of cooking rum for the annual rum cakes I make around the holidays. Far as I recall, I barely swallowed the first sip before I quit making any sense.”

“Well, I guess I came over for nothing, then, because that was exactly what I wanted to talk with you about. I thought maybe we could help each other.”

“Help each other?” Gwen didn’t mean to keep parroting him, but so far—beyond feeling eternally grateful that he hadn’t brought up that blasted kiss—she seemed to be having a major problem following the conversation.

Spence pushed aside the bowl and lazily propped his long legs on the opposite kitchen stool. “You sounded... trapped. I understand how that feels, Gwen. My life is my daughter right now—and I don’t want it any other way. But besides her and work, there doesn’t seem to be any free time in a day. Single parenting is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.”

“You’re not kidding,” she agreed.

“But even loving it, you can feel trapped. At least I do, sometimes. I imagine you feel just as buried under the same mountain of single-parent responsibilities.”

“I do,” she agreed again, still unsure where he was leading.

“Well, I don’t think it’s selfish—or weird—that you feel like you need to break out sometimes. Maybe you were teasing about doing something ‘reckless.’ But I think it’s a pretty human, healthy need to crave some time to yourself. And it occurred to me...”

“What?”

He lifted a hand in a boyish gesture. “It just occurred to me that we’re both in the same boat. It’s really hard for a single parent to pull off any free time-without a fellow conspirator. I’m guessing you don’t hire many baby-sitters?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Me, either. I’ve got Mary Margaret during the day for April, but I really hate leaving her with strangers in the evening just because I selfishly need some time off. I mean... I want to give my daughter that personal time, or at least know she’s with someone who really cares about her. Strangers don’t cut that mustard.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” Gwen said honestly. “I hate leaving the boys with baby-sitters. Even though I’m home, I’m either working—or running hard—during the day. It’s not the same as real time with them, and especially because of the divorce I feel they need that time in the evenings. I just feel really selfish and guilty if I leave them.”

“Yeah. I understand. But I kept thinking about how our kids play together all the time, have a good time with each other, so it’s not like any of us are strangers. If we combined resources, it seems to me it could help us both. Which is to say—if you want an ally, I’m volunteering to be one.”

“Well, Spence, you’ve got an ally right back. But I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking about doing....”

“I never had any set plan. I was just thinking... why don’t we try something?” He shrugged his shoulders, and then as if the idea had just popped in his head, suggested, “I’ve got an early workday tomorrow, should be home by four. How about if you just plan to take off, do whatever you feel like doing. I’ll take the kids, do dinner, keep ’em busy until bedtime.”

The thought of four hours free—actually free—danced in her head like a vision of sugarplums and gaily wrapped packages at Christmas. But a lot of years had passed since she believed in Santa. “I can’t possibly ask you to do that,” she informed him—and herself—firmly.

“You’re not asking me to do anything. I’m offering. And you can offer back the same way. Hey, if it doesn’t work out for the kids in a good way, we just won’t do it again. But I can’t see how we’ll know unless we try out an experimental run, do you?”

“No,” she said hesitantly.

“So we’re on for tomorrow? I’ll pick up your boys around four?”

“Well...okay, I guess. As far as I know, there’s no reason why that timing wouldn’t work out....”

She’d barely, hesitantly, agreed before Spence up and left. It was late, of course. Time for any parent of young children to be packing it in, and Spence never visited for more than a few minutes. Still, Gwen found herself at the kitchen window, hands on her hips, until he disappeared into the night’s shadows.

She felt... odd. Her pulse was charging, her nerves kindling awareness—but that was just hormone nonsense, she suspected. Even a woman in a coma would probably notice those liquid brown eyes and that slow, wicked grin of his, and the kiss last night had naturally upped her sexual awareness quotient around Spence. No man had ever made her feel wicked before.

If she hadn’t been a card-carrying Good Girl for thirty years, maybe he might have affected her less potently. But she’d liked that kiss. Liked that wicked, reckless feeling. Liked him—suddenly, personally, and way too much.

Still, her deplorable lack of control over her hormonal response to him didn’t seem to completely explain the chugging, charging, uneasy beat in her pulse. Spence was turning into a serious friend. No one else, not even her sisters, understood how much or how long she’d felt trapped. Spence’s perception had come as a surprise, like finding a kindred spirit, and he’d been so nonjudgmental and undersranding....

Abruptly the oven timer buzzed. Swiftly Owen whisked out the brownies and set them on the rack to cool, then glanced at the clock and mentally shook her head. The boys would be raring wide awake by six-thirty. It wasn’t time to think. It was time to crash. She’d be crabbier than a porcupine if she didn’t catch some shut-eye.

She turned out lights, checked on her monsters, then climbed into a Miami Dolphins T-shirt and burrowed between her lemon-yellow sheets. That quickly, the whole house was dark, quiet and peaceful.

Yet she tossed. Then turned. Sleep refused to come. Those uneasy warning bells kept clanging in the back of her mind.

Spence’s whole plan about helping each other sounded wonderful. She craved some free time right now. She needed the space to figure out who she was and where she was going with her life. Josh and Jacob thought Spence was “majorly cool,” and likewise, she was crazy about his daughter. For fellow single parents to help each other was the best of all worlds, because they both shared the same concerns.

It was just that she felt ... steamrollered ... into the plan. Spence couldn’t help being a dynamic, take-charge type of man. But Gwen was just coming to understand that hiding in a steamroller’s shadow was exactly what she had done with Ron. It was all too easy to let a lion lead—if you were a mouse. And by making a man her whole life, she’d not only bored one husband straight into divorce court ... she’d become boring to herself, somehow lost any concept of her own life in the process.

She needed to be careful. Infinitely careful not to fall seriously for Spence. Eventually she’d look for love again—after she mastered this independence business and learned to stand up for herself. But she already knew that she was a disastrous failure with steamrollers. Spence could never possibly work for her.

Falling for him would be her worst nightmare.

Spence decided he was going to put up his feet and read the newspaper—as soon as he quit pacing the floors. The kitchen clock read 8:20. He always had a full quota of energy, but he’d never been a nervous man. There was no earthly reason for him to be wearing a path between the kitchen, hall and living room.

The house was quiet. Dead quiet. Mary Margaret had long gone home, and all three kids had hit the sack around eight. They were already asleep. He’d checked. Josh and Jacob were camping in the spare bedroom, and April was sawing zz’s on her pink pillow. The plan, in the morning, was for him to wake up the boys in time for them to flash over to their own house to get dressed for school. The boys had loved the idea of sleeping over, and that way Gwen didn’t have to fret about getting home at some exact time.

She could dance until dawn if she wanted to, Spence had told her.

He’d even meant it.

Sort of.

There was no reason to expect her home, he told himself irritably. No reason to be prowling around the house when he was whipped after a long day. He could dive into the paper or a book. Pour himself a drink. Call his younger sister. Turn on his computer and work on a new advertising program that had been biting on his mind all day.

All those ideas struck him as stupendous, but he was still pacing a road between the kitchen and living room when he finally heard a sound just before nine.

She whisper-knocked on the front door and poked her head in. “Spence, are you there?” she said softly. And then she saw him in the far doorway, grinned and sprinted inside. “Were the boys good? Everything okay? How were the kids for you?”

“It went fine. They had a great time together. And you don’t have to whisper—the bedrooms are in the far wing, and I looked just a couple minutes ago. All three of them are sound asleep.” Once Spence got that informational chitchat out of the way, he said what was on his mind. “Holy kamoly.”

“Uh-oh. I look weird, huh?” Owen dropped an armful of packages in a noisy crinkle and crunch of paper, then straightened back up.

“You don’t look weird.”

“Too much putting on the dog? Too much makeup? Too wild ... ?”

The only thing “wild” Spence noticed was the wild, vulnerable uncertainty in her face. Deliberately he circled around her with narrowed eyes. As he circled, her cheeks flushed. Nervously she pulled on an earring, then the other earring... and started talking faster than he could draw breath. “I just thought it’d be fun. To have a make-over. And once I had all that new makeup on, it seemed like I might as well try a haircut and a little different hairstyle. And I haven’t actually bought clothes—except for the boys—in a month of Sundays. The stores were showing a bunch of new stuff for fall....”

She finally trailed off. Spence understood he was expected to say something. And he would. As soon as he found his voice again.

He’d known she was beautiful. She just didn’t have a flashy type of beauty—or any awareness of her allure. Still didn’t.

But Spence did. And the changes in her tonight only put an exclamation on a declarative truth he already knew. Her hair had been short before, but now it was feathery, framing her face in soft spikes, giving her a tousled, sexy, French look. Something about her eyes looked darker, more dramatic. The new silk blouse wasn’t fancy, just a blouse, but the cream color set off her golden skin and the coral cameo she had pinned at the throat. The skirt was swishy and long and cruelly hid those damn fine legs of hers, but the style was pure female. Pure her.

“You look stunning,” he informed her seriously.

“Hardly that.” But she laughed, both nervously and with a little relief in there, too. “It was kind of fun. Just...goofing off. And you’ll never believe what happened.”

“What?”

“These two guys whistled at me on the escalator. You know what else?”

“What?”

“Another guy tried to pick me up in the parking lot. I was just walking toward my car when he was walking toward his. When he started talking to me, I thought he was just being nice, you know, the way friendly types wander into conversations when you’re stuck in lines or in elevators or wherever? But good grief, he asked me out. I almost had a heart attack.”

So did Spence. “Got a taste for the reckless life, did you?”

She chuckled. “Maybe not reckless on a parachute jumper’s terms, but I haven’t wasted an entire afternoon since ... well, since I can remember.”

“Getting out was good for you.”

“Yeah, it really seemed to be.” She seemed surprised when he wrapped her hands around a glass of fresh-squeezed limeade. In between breakneck pacing around the house, Spence had more than enough time to make it. And since she was still hovering by the door, close to her packages, he figured she was planning on leaving lickety-split unless he did something to stall her. “I should check on the boys and go, really—”

“You’re welcome to look in on the boys, but I bet it’d feel real good to kick your shoes off for a minute and relax?”

“Well...”

She was thirsty, he could see. And he didn’t have to coax her that hard into crashing for a few minutes on his saddle leather couch. She even slipped off her shoes and curled her legs under her. Either the shopping or turning herself into a sexy femme fatale had clearly temporarily zapped her quota of nervous energy.

His quota of nervous energy, by contrast, had soared somewhere near the stratosphere.

He switched on the lamp behind her, creating a soft pool of cream light, and kept a steady conversation going about his activities with the kids—dinner at Ponderosa, the three-against-one soccer game in the backyard, the finger-painting marathon the monsters had put him through at the kitchen table.

He had Gwen chuckling, but he also saw her gaze absently stray around the room. She’d been in his house dozens of times, but never in the formal living room before. Both of them had always been more inclined to pop in and out of each other’s kitchens for the type of casual, neighborly conversations they usually had. Now, though, she glanced around, noticing his Pakistani burgundy-and-cream rug, the Indian-carved teak coffee table, the Oriental prints on the walls and the man-size leather furniture.