скачать книгу бесплатно
Megan kinked a brow. “Why this interest in your least favorite teacher all of a sudden?”
Rebecca picked up a few pieces of chopped hazelnuts with the pads of her fingers. “No reason,” she said before licking her fingertips and shrugging. “He’s my landlord. That’s all.”
“You never could lie to me,” her friend said in a singsong fashion.
“Meggie, give me a break here,” she said, dropping her shoulders. “For old times’ sake, just answer the question.”
“I’ve already told you. He’s a history professor at Follett College now. He’s working on his second book about ancient civilizations. I think this one’s about the Incas.”
“Megan Sloan,” Reb said in a tone reserved for misbehaving pets, bad drivers and best friends who weren’t getting the message. “I meant his private life.”
Megan reached for a container of chocolate-dipped hazelnuts and began circling the top of the cake with them. “You know he’s from over in Daleville. Well, about nineteen years ago his brother got a girl pregnant, then died before he could marry her. Mr. Hanlon’s been helping them out over the years. This niece, her name’s Penny, is all he has left since both his parents are dead. Lately Penny has been giving her mother fits.”
Rebecca tapped her nails on the faux marble as her friend went on about the girl’s troublesome adolescence.
“Megan, I know all about how difficult teenagers can be. I believe I was the poster child for that particular condition five years in a row. What I want to know about is his private private life.”
Setting aside the container, Megan rested her elbows on the counter and dropped her chin into the cups of her hands.
“Reb Barnett, what scandalous vengeance are you planning to wreak on poor old Professor Hanlon now?”
“Old? He’s not old, he’s—” What was she defending him for? He’d left her standing in his driveway with her hard-won image of a mature woman, not to mention a bath towel, around her ankles. None of her reactions had made any sense then, and they weren’t making any more sense now.
“Meggie,” she said quietly, rubbing her temples, “I’m trying to sort out a few things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. He looked at me in an odd way.”
“Gee, you don’t think that had anything to do with him discovering you swimming naked in his pool, do you?”
Staring at the packages of gourmet coffees behind her friend, Rebecca absently ran her tongue over the edges of her teeth. “I think that was part of it.”
Megan pushed up from the counter. “You’re not joking, are you? Something’s going on between you two, isn’t it?”
Her friend’s last question sounded like an indisputable fact and a disturbing one at that. The idea of being attracted to her former teacher was still an outrageous one to her, too. Opening her hands and raising them palms up, she gave an exaggerated shrug. “Nothing is going on. I just saw the man for the first time in ten years and…”
“Sounds to me as if you just saw the man for the first time. What are you planning in that deliciously devious mind of yours?”
Rebecca gave a quick look around at the young college crowd hunched over their cappuccinos and caffé lattes before turning back to Megan. Scissoring her hands over the cake, she announced, “I have never thought of him in that way.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Megan said, in a deceptively demure voice. Lifting the cake, she placed the holiday dessert into a prefolded box then winked at her friend. “Because knowing you, you could have gotten him arrested.”
“Very funny,” she said, helping with the flapping box top. “I hope you don’t think I’m thinking of him in that way today…” The sound of her own nervous laughter made her wince. “I mean…that’s so…”
“Ah, Reb, you used to be so articulate when it came to Mr. Hanlon. Now you can’t seem to put together a complete sentence about the guy.” She pressed her palm to her chest. “Did I mention he’s divorced?”
“Divorced?” Reb repeated, unable to ignore how instantly hungry she was for more information. And how suddenly hesitant she was to ask for it.
“Four years ago, so I think we can safely say she’s out of the picture. But imagine what his wife would have said if she’d found you naked in—”
“Dear Lord, I never considered the possibility that he could be married,” she whispered.
“Really? Well, the important thing now is to think of him as available.”
Available? The idea that she would be romantically interested in Show-No-Mercy Hanlon wasn’t even funny. It was crazy.
“I swear, Meggie, that skinny-dip meant nothing more than a little secret revenge for all he put me through ten years ago. Now that I’ve seen him…now that he’s seen me, all I want to do is prove to him that I’ve changed. That I can handle myself in a mature fashion,” she said, her voice rising as she did from the stool. “That I’m not the self-indulgent, trouble-making heathen he once thought I was. That I’m dependable, presentable and charming as hell,” she said, whacking her hand on the countertop. “What are you smiling about?”
“You’re serious about that?”
“Damn straight,” she said, flicking back an errant lock of hair that had tumbled over her forehead.
“Great. Then you can start demonstrating all those admirable qualities to him tonight.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, kinking one brow.
“Raleigh Hanlon called me from Daleville this morning and asked if Piece Of Cake could cater desserts for a get-together at his place. I guess he’s been so busy with his niece he’d forgotten he’d agreed to host the faculty’s first holiday party. You’d be helping me out if you’d take this job. You see, I have umpteen calls to make for the reunion committee and I’d already promised Paige I’d teach her Chickadee group how to make pine cone Santas tonight.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You want me to serve cake to a bunch of professors?” Rebecca asked, picturing her usually glib tongue tied in self-conscious knots. The thought of so many graduate degrees under one roof was beyond intimidating when she thought of the simple high school diploma she almost didn’t receive.
“You’ll have the undying gratitude of my five-yearold.”
“Guilt can move mountains, Megan, but I don’t know…”
“Reb, just think, you’ll have the opportunity to impress Raleigh Hanlon…with all your clothes on this time.”
An hour later Rebecca stood at Raleigh Hanlon’s back door with his jacket around her shoulders. She was hugging a huge poinsettia plant to one hip and holding a shopping bag in her left hand. With her right she tinkered with the black bow tie her friend insisted had to be worn with the official Piece Of Cake caterer’s uniform. The slender grosgrain ribbon wrapping primly around the starched stand-up collar of the pleated tuxedo shirt was the last thing Raleigh Hanlon would expect to see her wearing. She looked down at the rest of the uniform. The red plaid cummerbund and black, pleated trousers actually looked kind of cute. Cute? She winced. She was about to walk into Show-No-Mercy Hanlon’s house looking cute. “Reb Barnett,” she whispered, as she knocked on the door a second time, “if the old gang could see you now.”
A second later the door opened and, without looking up, Raleigh was waving her in. He was speaking with considerable emotion into the telephone wedged between his shoulder and chin.
Rebecca remained on the doorstep taking in the details of the man who was totally absorbed in his conversation. His burgundy-and-blue tattersall shirt was rolled up at both wrists, exposing his Swiss Army watch and his handsomely muscled forearms. Unlike her miniature bow tie, his long navy blue one draped either side of his unbuttoned shirt framing a healthy amount of dark, crinkly chest hair. As if to counterpoint the vibrant signs of his masculinity, a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses were perched near the end of his nose. Biting back a smile, she thought about what fun she could have had with those glasses ten years ago.
“I can’t agree with you more, sweetheart,” he said as he glanced at the paper in his hands. “But, Penny, I don’t think your mother’s being unfair about your curfew. I—don’t hang up, young lady. Damn—!” He clicked off the phone and placed it firmly on the wall hook.
“Megan, I’m glad you’re here—” His harried expression changed to a blank one the moment he saw who it was. Hesitating, he strained for a look over Rebecca’s shoulder before refocusing on her uniform. “Is this one of your practical jokes?”
Jokes! Maybe this wasn’t her leather miniskirt and combat boots from ten years ago, but she wasn’t naked, either. Brushing back a lock of hair from her forehead, she swallowed hard and reminded herself that she was here to demonstrate the new and improved Rebecca Barnett. Nothing he could say would cause her to become unglued. Her gaze dropped to the opening of his shirt. As for that hairy chest of his…that might take considerably more restraint than she’d prepared for.
“I volunteered for this job when I found out Megan had made plans with her daughter,” she said, aware that that wasn’t exactly how she came to be standing on his doorstep. Lowering her gaze further down the front of him, she felt it melt into a genuine stare when she got to the dark whorl of hair above his navel. Blinking her way out of the hypnotizing sight, she made herself look at his face again. “I had to come back across town, anyway.”
Resting a fist on his hip, he lowered his chin to deliver a challenging stare over his reading glasses. “Is that so?”
She tapped her nails against the red-foiled flowerpot and narrowed her eyes. Her voice was suddenly stronger. “I live here. Remember?”
“And you’re working for Megan Sloan now?”
There it was again: that skeptical edge to his voice that said he wasn’t sure about any of this. That maybe there was more she wasn’t telling. And perhaps a trip to the principal’s office might be in order.
With a long-suffering sigh, she answered him. “Just for tonight. And you can stop sounding so concerned. I haven’t pebbled the cookies.”
He waited five thoughtful seconds before he appeared to succumb to the inevitable. Folding the sheet of paper he’d been holding, Raleigh slid it in his shirt pocket. The action managed to tug his shirt sideways, exposing a flat, dark nipple surrounded by another whorl of dark hair.
“Of course you haven’t pebbled the cookies, but Megan knows exactly how I like these things done. Not too formal—”
“She explained everything to me. So if you’ll get those desserts and the containers from the van,” she said, whipping his jacket from her shoulders and shoving it against his naked midsection, “I’ll get started.”
Closing a hand over the bunched tweed, he gave her a stiff nod. “Dining room’s through that door over there.”
Even though she’d managed to cover the tempting sight of his well-muscled, hair-roughened chest and abdomen, achy heat was already pooling between her thighs. Making an effort to appear unfazed, she breezed by him into the dining room.
“You are not going to get to me, Hanlon,” she murmured to herself as she plunked the poinsettia on the credenza and pulled a tablecloth out of the shopping bag. Giving the rectangle of white damask a snapping shake, she spread it over the table, then began smoothing it into place. “So what if you happen to have mankind’s most gorgeous chest and nipples that make my fingers itch? The idea of you and me ever…it’s…just impossible,” she said to herself in an angry whisper.
But as she kept picturing his exposed chest, her efficient moves to straighten the cloth slowed then stopped. Tilting her head, she stared at the white-on-white design in the tablecloth. The soft, lustrous swirls reminded her of the patterns in his chest hair. Tracing one swirl and then another with the pads of her thumbs, she began imagining the rougher texture of his hair, the heat of his skin below and the steady thumps of his heartbeat. When she realized she was holding her breath, she drummed both sets of fingers against the cloth and shook her head. She really had to start dating again now that her tour business was doing so well. Pushing up from the table, she reached for the potted red flowers and plunked them on the center.
With more determined effort, she went looking for dessert plates. While she was kneeling beside the opened credenza door, Raleigh came into the room.
“I put everything but this in the kitchen,” he said over the cake box. “Finding everything you need in there?”
“I think so,” she said, stopping to watch him settle a cake box on the table. In an unguarded moment he lifted the lid and leaned down for a quick sniff. Closing his eyes, he took a longer one. His obvious pleasure mesmerized her, then quickly made her blink. Of course, everyone had a sensual side, she’d just never thought about him having one.
Biting back a smile, she reached inside the credenza. “Megan said the dessert plates are supposed to be in here, but all I keep pulling out are these old photo albums.”
Raleigh dropped the lid over the cake, then quickly kneeled beside her. “I’ll take those,” he said, removing them from her grasp and setting them out of her reach.
Before she had time to lower her hands, he was ducking his head near her lap to peer inside the credenza. Her heart skipped a beat and then another. Minutes ago she wasn’t sure he was going to allow her into his house; now he’d positioned his face inches from the most intimate part of her anatomy. His clean male scent, mixed with his light, woodsy after-shave only added to the stunning immediacy of the moment. She held her breath as visions of them tangled together on the floor moved through her mind. In this position it would be so easy to sink her fingers into his hair and…
“Here we go.” Pushing aside a soup tureen, he pulled out two stacks of gold-rimmed, red dishes. “Twenty ought to do it.” Moving back on his heels, he set the dessert plates on top of the furniture then stood up.
“Well, thank you,” she said, forcing herself to stare at the albums on the floor while she waited for her heart to reestablish a normal rhythm. Before that medical miracle had time to happen he took her hands, still raised in midair above her thighs, and pulled her to her feet.
When he held on a few seconds longer than necessary, the courteous act began snowballing into something altogether different. She tried telling herself it was the casual way his unknotted tie slid over her hands that gave the moment its intimate feel. The sensation of fine quality wool on her skin reminded her of a caress. Gentle. Masculine. And, because it had been ages since she’d had a lover, leaving her wanting more. She looked up as he looked away.
“My cleaning lady stored those albums in there by mistake,” he said, still inexplicably holding on to her hands.
The oxygen in her body seemed to be disappearing-probably feeding those sparks zipping up her arms, through her heart, into her stomach and then, heaven help her, even lower. He looked back at her as she parted her lips to draw in an extra breath.
“Are you all right?” he asked, letting go of her hands to place his around her elbows.
“I’m fine…just stood up too fast,” she said, fighting the compelling desire to lean her cheek against his chest and her forehead against that tuft of hair where he still hadn’t finished buttoning his shirt!
“Back to work,” she announced, reaching for the first stack of plates with shaky hands. Why wasn’t he saying something? Or moving away? Or taking her in his arms and kissing her silly? She squeezed her eyes shut. Was she losing her mind? What had gotten into her? Tonight was her opportunity to show him she’d changed.
“Yes, back to work,” he finally said, as he leaned down to pick up the photo albums from the floor. “I have more notes to go over before people start arriving.”
“Don’t let me bother you.” She kept her eyes on the gold circle rimming the red plate in her hand as he walked into his library.
For the next twenty minutes she kept herself busy by folding napkins, preparing coffee, mixing the cranberry punch, setting out the dessert buffet and pretending that what she’d felt when he’d been so close was nothing more than a fluky moment of hormonal insanity.
After setting a pitcher of milk on the table next to a matching sugar bowl, she glanced across the hall into the library where Raleigh paced before the fire. He’d put on music, a Bach concerto, if she wasn’t mistaken. As he read through his paper, she found herself pressing her hand to her midsection. If what she’d felt was nothing more than one fluky moment of hormonal insanity, why were her hands still tingling? Her throat still dry? And that disturbing heat still pooling where it shouldn’t be? After all these years what was it about him that she suddenly found so compelling?
She walked across the carpeted hall to the open pocket doors of the library. Without a doubt he was an attractive man. Standing well over six feet, he was broad shouldered, classically handsome and, unlike most indoor career types, sporting a healthy tan. His thick, dark hair threatened to spill over his forehead in a little-boy tousle of loose curls.
As he braced a hand on the mantel and worried over his paper, she folded her arms, leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and quietly sighed. Who the heck was she kidding? Raleigh Hanlon was the best-looking man she’d ever laid eyes on. And there he was, in his leather-bound, gold-stamped library, so absorbed in his professorial studies that he didn’t even sense her presence.
Angling her head into the room, she strained to take in his floor-to-ceiling, book-lined shelves, his leather wing chair with the worn spot where he rested his head, and his framed degrees and certificates filling half a wall. Masculinely appointed, impressively erudite and with a tried-and-true sense of permanency, the room appeared to be a perfect representation of the man standing in it. And just as awesome to her.
She nibbled on her lip as that unwelcome sense of inadequacy sent a cold tentacle to her stomach. Before the feeling took a stronger hold, she stood up and lifted her chin. Even if her poor high school performance had kept her out of college, over the last ten years, through hard work and pure determination, she had managed to achieve just about everything else she’d wanted in her life. She had nothing to be ashamed of.
“I set aside a piece of cake for you,” she impulsively announced.
Against the Bach playing in the background, her voice sounded like a carnival barker’s. She was certain Raleigh thought the same when he removed his glasses and looked up at her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Or maybe that look was meant for something else? Had she splashed the cranberry punch on her clothes? Had they fallen off? What was wrong?
The crackling flames in the fireplace were the only sounds she heard above her pounding heartbeat. And then he smiled. That funny, forgiving kind of smile that said everything was all right. The kind of smile she’d never seen on Show-No-Mercy Hanlon.
“Which cake?” he asked.
“The one you were sniffing,” she said, relaxing enough to notice his shirt was finally buttoned and his tie knotted. “The hazelnut with the Frangelico frosting.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding slowly. “You don’t miss much.”
She smiled back as she let her gaze wander the room again. This time the place didn’t feel as threatening. “Where’s your Christmas tree?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your Christmas tree? The ceramic angels on the mantel? The candles in the windows?” Pointing upward she added, “The mistletoe? Megan said this was the first holiday party of the season, but it’s hard to tell you’ve looked at the calendar.”
He looked around before giving her a halfhearted scowl. “Isn’t that poinsettia enough?”
She scowled back. “No,” she said and they both laughed. As the sound died he kept on looking at her. When she didn’t say anything, he slid on his reading glasses and lifted up his paper.
“That must be some interesting paper,” she said, grasping at the mundane comment because she was already missing the moment they’d shared.
He brushed a piece of lint from the top of his pant leg then looked at her again. “I’m sure you wouldn’t find it very interesting.”
She forced a smile to cover the raw sting of his words. Was it so obvious to him that she hadn’t furthered her formal education? “Maybe I would. Try me.”
“Have you studied the history of the Incas?”
“Well, not formally,” she said, raking her fingers through her hair. Why were her palms sweating? He wasn’t giving her a test on the subject, but if he were, she would probably pass the darn thing with flying colors.
“Not formally?” he repeated, motioning for her to come in and take the chair by the fire. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve read a bit on my own,” she said, wondering if she should tell him how many hours she’d studied preColumbian history before leading a tour group through the ruins at Machu Picchu and the archaeological dig site on the northwest coast of Peru. The last thing she wanted to do was sound as if she were bragging, or worse, defending herself.
Raleigh raised a brow as he watched her enter the room. “Amazing. When you were my student I practically had to glue a history book in your hands in order to get you to read it.”
“That’s a good ten years in the past.”
