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“Stop!” she shrieked. “I’ll tell you!”
“’Bout time,” he said, breathing heavy, straddling her hips. Crossing his arms with a look of utter victory, she wiped the smirk off his face by pulling her best wrestling move, flipping him off of her and square into the recliner.
“Ouch!” he complained. “What’d you do that for?”
“You told me to spill,” she said with a sweet smile. “You just never said what.”
“Anyone ever told you you’re mean?”
“Been hearing it ever since I gassed my first water bug.”
“That is pretty harsh,” he said, leaning back against the recliner.
“My perfect sister thought so, too.” But for as long as she could remember, Charity hadn’t had a problem with any aspects of her predominantly male-oriented world—even if it meant gassing her own insect specimens. It wasn’t something she liked thinking about, but she used to be a girly girl, hanging out with her mom and big sister while her twin brother, Craig, was tight with their dad. Then Craig had died when they’d been only seven. He’d fallen out of a tree house he and their dad had built that past summer.
It had taken her father a year and another summer to recover from Craig’s death, and Charity liked to think that in large part, she’d been the reason Dad had begun to live again. Trouble was, in her heart of hearts, she knew that to her father she’d stopped being a daughter and had assumed the role of surrogate son. She’d taken up softball, stamp and bug collecting. Even as an adult, she still very much enjoyed her bugs—the hobby her father launched. The activity was calming. The camaraderie of sharing exciting new acquisitions with her dad—even if it was now mostly over the phone or Internet, seeing how he and her mom lived in Wyoming. The best part of the pastime was the order it brought to her world, where chaos typically reigned—at least where Adam was concerned.
Charity’s dad was her hometown’s sheriff, and he’d encouraged her to follow in his footsteps. And because she loved him—never again wanted to see hollow loss in his eyes—she’d done just that and made him proud. Sometimes, she feared, at the expense of her own dreams.
Don’t get her wrong, she loved her work. Her work meant the world to her. It’s just that lately she’d started wanting more. Which was where her whole baby craving came in.
The more she’d hung out with her dad and other guys, the easier it’d become. For most of her life, she felt more at home with guys than girls. Most guys, that is. Until meeting Adam. Adam bore the distinction of being the one man who made her crave being a woman. Therein lay the rub, seeing as how he thought of her as just another guy.
“Yeah,” he said. “That lady doc today? She reminded me of your sis. Lots of makeup and hair that looked like it wouldn’t budge in a stiff breeze. Could’ve been a fifty something hottie if she’d taken the know-it-all stick out of her butt.”
Charity winced. Would Adam talk like that around a real girl? Not that she wasn’t a real girl with all the requisite parts and needs, but—
“You want me to call in a pizza?”
“I thought the poor lady doctor with the stick in an unmentionable spot gave you an assignment?”
He shrugged, then reached for the cordless phone she’d left on an end table. He pressed the talk button. “Oh, man. It’s dead. Bug, how many times do I have to tell you to put the phone back on the charger?”
“Sorry. Use your cell. Better yet, call from your own apartment.”
“You know I like it more here. Besides, I’m under stress. You have to help me.”
He was under stress? Ha! He didn’t know the meaning. Staring out her fourth-floor condo’s window at a steady autumn rain, she massaged her left hand with her right.
“Okay?” Adam asked.
She glanced his way, wishing she still didn’t feel breathless from having him all over her. What would it feel like to have him on top of her for a purpose other than tickling? “Uh-huh,” she said in response to his question. “Lately, the rain seems to make me stiff. Must be getting old, huh?” She grinned, but the statement held a sad truth. No, she wasn’t ancient, but at thirty-five, if she wanted more from her life—husband, kids, house—it was time to get on with it.
From the same table where he’d found the dead phone, he grabbed a tube of pear-scented lotion her sister, Stephanie, had given her for her birthday. The only reason Charity had even opened it was because she’d run out of her usual generic brand.
He flipped open the green tube’s top, waved it under his nose. “Nice.” Glancing at the label, he whistled. “Victoria’s Secret. La-di-da.”
From her spot on the floor a few feet from him, Charity lunged for the lotion, but missed when he held it over her head. “Do you always have to be such a spaz?” she asked.
He flashed her one of his slow grins that were so breathtakingly gorgeous. They were really starting to tick her off. “As a matter of fact,” he said, squeezing a dollop of lotion into his palm. “Yes, I do have to be a spaz. Which is precisely why you love me, right?”
Why did he do this? Spout words that to him meant nothing but to her—
She lost all capacity to think when he took her hands in his. He’d rubbed his hands together first, warming the amazing-smelling lotion, then smoothing it into her skin, methodically massaging each finger until she was nearly purring from pleasure.
“How’s that feel?” he asked.
“G-good.”
“You okay?” he asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“I dunno. You seem tense.”
How would he feel if the tables were turned? If he’d loved her for as long as he could remember, then some buttinski shrink told her to start dating other men? But that was the problem. They weren’t dating, and Adam didn’t love her. So, yes. She was tense. Crazy tense. Which led her to say, “That’s good. On my hands, I mean. You can stop.”
“Sure?”
She nodded.
He released her, and once again she could breathe.
“I left my cell in the truck, so let me run out and get that and I’ll call in an order. What do you want? The usual?”
“I guess.” Look at them. They were like an old married couple—without the sex. Only, if Adam were hers, she’d want to—well, you know—every night of the week!
“You’re grinning again,” he said, pulling on a leather jacket before heading out the door. “When I get back, you’d better tell me what happened today, or else.”
If by “or else,” he meant he’d tickle her again? Charity would gladly take her chances.
SATURDAY NIGHT, Frederika, a Puerto Rican swimsuit model Adam met Friday afternoon while she was doing a promo thing at his favorite sporting goods store, glowered across the table at him. “Are you on purposefully trying to ruin our evening?”
“Um, no,” he said, putting down his menu. It’d been two days since his shrink-mandated order to find himself a date. He’d done just that, and look, on his very first try, not thirty minutes into the evening, already it was a disaster. “Why?”
“First,” she said, slapping down her menu, as well. “You show up dressed like…” With exaggerated Latin flair, she waved her hands. “A hobo—”
“A hobo?” He glanced down at his jeans and T-shirt. “This is one of my best tees. I even ironed it.” Sort of. Seeing how he’d yanked it out of the dryer while it’d still been warm.
“And this place…” she said with a roll of her tongue, eyeing Ziggy’s red walls lined with sports memorabilia and the light fixtures that’d been rigged from basketball halves. She probably wasn’t much into the all-sports radio blaring, either. “Could you no have afforded better? And now, you tell me we must have beer with dinner, not wine? And your car was…how you say? Fill-thee.” Her speech’s grand finale was a theatrical shudder.
“Sorry,” he said, nose back in his menu. Cheese-burger or ribs? Tough call.
“You should be sorry. Do you know how lucky you are to be with me? I could get another man just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I deserve better. You show me good time or I’ll call my brother Rico. He tell you how to treat a woman.”
Adam inwardly groaned.
“Well?” his date said, lifting razor-thin eyebrows. “You ready to take me to a nice place?”
Where Adam wanted to take her was straight back to her apartment, but a vision of his glowering shrink made him try to please.
“ADAM?” Charity opened her door as wide as the security chain would allow. “What’re you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Only for homebodies like you,” he said. “For normal people it’s 8:00 p.m. So? You going to let me in?”
She closed the door to unfasten the chain, then opened it again, wishing she’d had the foresight to put on real clothes.
Once he’d helped himself to her sofa, then flicked on the end table lamp, he asked, “What’re you wearing?”
“It’s a nightgown.”
“No,” he said with a wink. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was negligee. Your sis give you that to go with the Victoria’s Secret lotion?”
“Yeah, what of it? I wouldn’t even be wearing it if all my sweats weren’t in the laundry.”
“I’m not complaining,” he said. “Looks good on you. You should wear it again sometime.”
“F-for you?”
“Like friends with privileges?” He winked. “Hell, yeah!” A jab to her ribs showed her he was just joshing. So why wouldn’t her pulse slow down? “Hey, you wanna order pizza? I’m starving.”
She dropped onto the far end of the sofa, pulling her knees up to her chest, then wrapping her arms around bare legs, wishing the ivory satin-and-lace baby-doll-styled number had a couple more yards of fabric. “Thought you had a swanky dinner date tonight with that swimsuit model?”
“I did. But she didn’t like Ziggy’s Burger Barn, so I ended up having to take her to Swenson’s—and you know how pricey that place is. I shelled out fifty bucks a head for an ounce of beef and a few mystery green squiggly things. Oh, and there was some freaky mushroom pile, drowning in gravy and carrot sprinkles. But she didn’t like that, either. I was going to stop back by Ziggy’s after taking Freddy home, but after all that mind-numbing talk about her hair, clothes and nails, I found myself craving pizza—and you.”
“Flattery like that will get you everywhere,” she teased, plucking ten or so insect catalogs from the sofa so he could park himself beside her. “Well? You going to order?”
“Sure. The usual?”
“You know it.”
He snatched the cordless phone from the coffee table, placed an order for a large pan pizza with the works, gave his credit card number, then hung up. Wandering into the kitchen, he grabbed a bag of potato chips from her snack cabinet. For an average person, this might’ve seemed odd, but Adam ate more than anyone on earth, so chips after a swanky dinner and before pizza was pretty much his norm. After popping two Hostess cupcakes, as well, he said, “And, hey, while we’re waiting for the grub, I’ve got something I’d like to run by you.”
“Shoot,” she said, returning to the stag beetle she’d been pinning before Adam’s interruption.
“Here’s the deal…” He sat beside her, then reached for her hands. As focused as she’d just been on pinning her new acquisition, the shock of him again taking her hand so intimately jolted her to a whole ’nother place—the fantasyland she’d spun of the two of them. Her first instinct was to yank herself free, but instead she froze, like the last time he’d pulled this stunt, selfishly indulging in the decadence of being held. “In the middle of this date with a strange, high-maintenance woman I knew after being alone with her for five minutes I never wanted to see again, I had a great idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Glad you asked,” he said with a grin so potent, it took Charity a second to find her next breath. “The company shrink told me I had to date, right?”
“Yeah.” He was still massaging her hands, flooding her with tingling pleasure.
“Well, the doc didn’t say a thing about who I had to date—just that I had to go out with someone.”
“And?” Charity said, blaming trace formaldehyde fumes for the dizzying heat.
“And—you’re going to love this—so I figure, why don’t I just go out with you?”
Chapter Two
Charity hadn’t yet recovered from Adam’s first ludicrous statement, when he kept going. “The beauty of this plan,” he said, “is that not only do I get the doc off my back, but you’re not going to expect anything of me, right? We can hang here. Or have nice, cheap dinners at Ziggy’s. The way I see it, it’s a win/win for both of us, seeing as you’ll get free grub.”
Charity snatched back her hands.
“No,” she said, pushing herself up from the sofa. “I’m too busy.”
In front of the now-dark view of Mount Hood that’d been the reason she’d forked over too much for this condo, she crossed her arms and tried hard not to give in to the knot swelling at the back of her throat.
“Too busy?” Adam laughed, leaving the sofa to join her. “What do you do besides hang out with me?”
“That’s the point,” she said, good and mad not only at his presumptuousness, but at herself for letting their relationship—or lack thereof—get to this level. She was tired of being his buddy. His pal. Dammit, she wanted to at least be his girl. And if she were totally honest with herself, in her wildest dreams, what she really wanted was to someday be his wife. Have his babies. “Is it so wrong of me to want more?”
“More?” He coughed. “What’s that mean?”
“Want me to spell it out?”
“Might be nice.”
“Okay. First off, do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been on a date?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Over three years. And that’s just sad. Night after night, I sit here, listening to all your problems, Adam, and never once do I saddle you with mine.”
“You could,” he said, grinning, landing a friendly slug to her upper arm. “You know I’d be here for you—anytime. Come on, give me a few. I’m all ears.”
“All right, for starters, I’m around men all the time, yet they don’t see me as a woman, but just another guy. I know I’ve got to do something to change that perception, but just the thought is overwhelming.”
“Huh?” Sitting again, he leaned against the sofa back. “Are you PMSing? You’re acting a little mental.”
“Thanks,” she said. She was really on a roll. “That helps a lot. Okay, next problem—since you mentioned PMS—I just had a physical, and my doctor asked if I plan on starting a family. Next, she launches into this speech on how if kids are something I want in my future, I might want to get on with it. She then proceeded to point out just how drastically the odds of fun stuff like birth defects increase the older women get. Geesh, I’m only thirty-five, so I ask, aren’t women having babies at fifty? But then—”
“Whoa,” Adam said, making a T with his hands. “Time out. You? Want babies? As in someone a foot tall calling you ‘Mommy’?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
He sobered. “Not at all, it’s just…Well, I never thought of you in that way.”
“What way?”
“You know…nurturing. Tucking little humanoid beings in for the night. Making sure they take their vitamins in the morning, helping with homework. When are you going to have time for you? And work? Let alone me?”
“Adam?” The laugh crinkles at the corners of his eyes had her smacking him over the head with her ladybug throw pillow. “You’re such a jerk.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But you’ve always been one of the guys. It never even occurred to me you’d go the family route.”
“Family route? You think a dream I cherish is some stupid route?”
