Читать книгу Cut To The Chase - Julie Kistler, Julie Kistler - Страница 13

AS HE WATCHED HER walk away, Sean stayed where he was, juggling a mystifying mix of feelings. First was attraction. Which was really strange. He couldn’t remember ever being knocked back by this kind of steamy chemistry the first time he met someone. Especially not a furtive and secretive pregnant woman with a bad attitude and worst case of morning sickness. How could that be attractive? And yet on her it was. Amazingly so.

It was his job to notice things, and he definitely saw the same feelings staring back at him from her eyes. Sparks of excitement and awareness were there every time she glanced at him, in the way her gaze seemed to flicker up and down his body, in the way her pretty pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips.

In short, she kept looking at him like she wanted to eat him up with whipped cream and a cherry on top. And it made him want to find the spoons.

“She’s pregnant, you idiot. With someone else’s kid. You can’t be attracted to her.” Frustrated, he swore out loud. He had no clue how to handle that one.

But there was also relief. Yes, he was relieved she’d claimed never to have met his father, and yes, he believed her. He’d spent his adult life judging whether people were telling him the truth, plus there was that “uncanny knack” thing. Both common sense and intuition told him that her panic at having been found out was real, but so was her confusion when he’d mentioned his dad.

If he’d decided once upon a time that he was about eighty percent sure she was the tootsie Bebe had seen in the park, now, after talking to her, he was about ninety percent sure she wasn’t.

Okay, so if he analyzed his feelings, he found attraction and he found relief. But there was also frustration, not just the sexual part, but because he couldn’t figure her out. At all. And he found himself really, really needing to do just that.

“Thank God she’s not messing around with the old man,” he said out loud. “But then… Who the heck is she?”

She’d mentioned a fiancé in New York, but she had no rings. And what was she doing in downstate Illinois, pregnant and alone, with nothing better to do than hide behind a terrible disguise as she sat on the Quad and moped? He’d watched her long enough to be sure she wasn’t teaching or taking a class or even doing research at the university’s famous library. All she did was hang out under trees, eat junk food, stare into space, and go back home. So what did it get her to be in Champaign-Urbana instead of back in New York or wherever she lived? Why the obvious disguise? And why was she giving off sexual energy that knocked his socks off? As well as other, murkier vibes that made him think she was in trouble with a capital T?

“She’s got the vibes all right,” he muttered, trying to get his mind off the total package of curves and conundrums he found so fascinating. There was just something about this woman, something hungry, something haughty, something…hot.

He could feel the heat down to his bones.

She wasn’t blatant at all, but there was a major league come-on happening that he wasn’t sure she was even aware of. Provocative and innocent, all at the same time. It was a potent package.

Still letting the questions tumble around in his brain, Sean adjusted his position so he could keep her in view. She had the hat back on, but not the coat, and he had to say, now that he had the back view, that he could personally attest to the fact that she provided some very nice scenery. The swing of her hair, the frisky way she walked… And her butt. Sweet. It wasn’t polite, but he couldn’t take his eyes off that round bottom, temptingly displayed in some kind of shiny grayish pants that were cut just low enough and tight enough to display delicious curves.

She was in a hurry now, bending over to stuff things into her tote bag, offering him an even more tantalizing view. Sean groaned. He had a habit of sitting back, judging, sifting through the facts with all due deliberation, but this was one time he really wanted to just leap into action.

Whatever was going on with her, he liked what he saw. A lot. And every instinct he had was telling him to follow up, press on, keep this connection humming, even if it was strange and weird and convoluted. Let’s see, so far, he’d spied on her, practically leered at her, and mistaken her for what his mother had called a “cheap piece of Christmas trash,” while she’d made her way through forty-seven packets of saltines and then possibly thrown up on a tree.

He was in the wrong place with the wrong woman; she was pregnant and toting a whole lot of baggage. Not exactly an auspicious beginning.

Thankfully, she didn’t stay in that beautiful bottoms-up position long, hustling away from the Quad as if that reporter from the Enquirer she was afraid of were nipping at her heels. As she disappeared past the Foreign Language Building, down the campus street that he knew would lead her home, Sean set his jaw. Whoever she was, she was certainly a whole barrel of contradictions.

If her life was such a mess that she needed to sit under a tree and ponder it every day, why did she hand out advice to strangers with such practiced ease? When she’d whipped into guidance-counselor mode, all that Ann Landers-meets-Dr. Phil stuff about the Calhouns going in for family counseling and opening up lines of communication, she’d seemed like a whole different person.

Sean knew very well it was none of his business if an unknown woman with a penchant for advising strangers decided to leave her fiancé and have her baby alone, wherever she chose, in whatever clothing and hair color she chose. But there were so many facets of this mystery he found fascinating. Like Julian, the missing fiancé.

“Julian,” Sean said derisively. “Who has a fiancé named Julian?”

But posing that question made him think about its implications. He narrowed his eyes. She had mentioned people named Julian and Shelby, as well as The National Enquirer. He was steps away from his hotel and his car. If he wanted to find out who the common denominator was between Julian, Shelby and the Enquirer, all he had to do was find the public library and a computer and run a quick Google search. What would it take, three seconds?

Making up his mind, Sean turned in the opposite direction, back toward the Union, keeping his hands in his pockets and his pace steady. No point in hurrying back and calling attention to himself. Julian, Shelby and The National Enquirer. Piece of cake. He liked having a path to follow, an investigation to begin. It made him feel a whole lot less unsettled. And he expected to have all the info he needed in no time at all.

SAFELY BACK AT THE sweet little house she was subletting, Abra was stewing. It wasn’t as if stewing were a new thing for her, just that she had a new subject to stew about. Instead of angsting over the baby and Julian and her career and where she could possibly go from here, now she was worried about one Sean Calhoun, how much he knew, and when he knew it. And where she could possibly go from here.

“Damn it, anyway,” she swore, getting up from the kitchen table to root in the fridge. She was starving again. She had a taste for ice cream, and nothing but Chunky Monkey, with the banana and the chocolate and the walnuts, would do. Of course she had none. She’d already eaten four pints of the stuff in two days, and she was going to have to make a run to the grocery store for more. But she didn’t have a car, so she was limited to what she could carry on foot or on the bus. At the moment, she was going through this particular ice cream faster than she could store it.