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“Hey, Molly.”
“Do you not love this weather? You can count on Wisconsin to come up with a day or two of spring a mere two months after the season has started.”
“Then straight into heat waves.”
“Uh-huh. What’s doing? I hear a problem in your voice.”
Darcy smiled. Could a man and woman ever get this close? She didn’t think so. In her opinion sisters and best girlfriends had the stronger connection. “I could use some advice, yeah. There’s this guy…”
“Ooh, let me sit for this one—” the sound of a scraping chair “—I’m listening.”
“He’s painting my house.”
“And?”
“I…want him.” She could see his legs if she stood next to the sink and peered out her kitchen window. She even wanted his legs.
“And you’re calling me because…”
“Talk me out of it.”
“Uh-oh. Out of what? Hang on—Kyle, for God’s sake, have I not said this a hundred times? You can have those after dinner. You want something now, have raisins or a banana, and don’t ‘oh, Mom’ me. You’ll thank me when you’re eighty and still have your teeth and a reasonable waistline—I’m back, Darce. Talk you out of what?”
“Seducing him.”
“Sed—are you out of your mind?”
Darcy recoiled from Molly’s uncharacteristic near-shriek. “I’m calling you, so not quite yet, no. Tell me. Why is it a bad idea?”
“You can’t think of any reason?”
“Mmm, no.” She sighed over his ankles, shins and thighs.
“Not one.”
“Honestly. For starters, he could be a psychopath, sociopath serial killer—”
“True.” Though odds heavily favored otherwise.
“—or have horrible diseases—”
“Ew. True.” Her glorious swelling fantasy deflated a bit.
“—or he could turn out to be one of those stalkers who can’t let a girl alone after he’s had her once, like what happened to Jody—”
“Oooh, true.” She cringed, remembering the hell their friend Jody had gone through after one date with a guy she’d met on MySpace. Police had been involved. ’Nuff said.
See? Calling Molly had been a good idea.
“—or he could be one of those vain, cocky guys who’ll get vainer and more cocky after you land him, and brag to his friends that he got laid on the job by some lonely single chick—”
“Blech. Ptooey.” Darcy made a face like a child given nasty medicine. Fantasy leaking serious air now.
“Or he could be a nice guy who would like you as you really are—a smart, sweet, nice girl—and would be turned off by you initiating sex when you don’t even know him. You could ruin a really good thing that was otherwise meant to be.”
Darcy’s nasty-medicine face smoothed. Now Molly was sounding like her father. And as much as Darcy had adored her father, nothing made her immediately want to be a teenage rebel again more than someone sounding like him.
She’d spent her life as a good girl because Dad refused to have it any other way. The one time she’d tried to express a little of the devil in her with a low-cut, ooh-la-la outfit she’d bought on the sly and sneaked on in the girls’ room before school’s opening bell, her father had found out. Hunky Evan Jacobus had practically drooled on the floor that day at school and the next, when she’d worn another very-unlike-her ensemble she’d borrowed from Tiffany Blatz. Darcy had gulped the male attention like a famine victim’s first meal. See? She wasn’t invisible to the opposite gender, after all.
Evan had even come over that night unexpectedly “to study” and had seen her in her regular appease-daddy clothes, and right in front of her father a question had risen from the murky depths of his teenage brain and emerged from his thin chapped lips. How come she’d been dressing so differently at school?
Daddy had not been amused. Evan didn’t stay long. The clothes were given away to those more fortunate than Darcy.
And then there was Greg whom she’d met at a Summerfest concert before senior year at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, jealous streak a mile wide, threatened by his fifteen-year head start on life. He’d wanted Darcy to look sexy only in the privacy of his or her bedroom, which hadn’t been often enough for her taste. But from his perspective, guys her age were everywhere and Greg didn’t want them looking and he didn’t want her to see them looking and, and, and…
Darcy’s fantasy started to reinflate. “I don’t know. I still—”
“Look, Darce, I know how much you need to feel you’re breaking out of the mode you’ve been in. You’ve had some really tough years and made a lot of sacrifices that took a lot of strength. But selling the house and spending the next eight years moving around the country is plenty adventurous, though I think you don’t realize how much you’re leaving here.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Can we save that lecture for another time? I don’t need that one today.”
“Yes. Okay. Hang on—Annabel, I told you to get ready for gymnastics ten minutes ago and you haven’t even started changing. Go. I’m back, Darce. Man, that girl is going to turn my hair white and she’s only four. What was I saying, now?”
“About me cutting loose.”
“Right. Let’s face it, Greg was about as exciting as a PTA meeting, and you—”
“Hey,” Darcy protested automatically, then frowned. Molly wasn’t usually this cutting. Or this impatient with her children.
“Why else did you break up with him? I’m right. You know I am.”
“Yes, but only I’m allowed to slam him.”
“Okay. How about, ‘Mr. Gregory Hinshaw did not encourage you to explore your own life.’ Better?”
“Much.” Greg had been gentle, wonderful, but yeah, set in his ways was an understatement. Cemented in his ways, maybe.
“That works.”
“So the point is, don’t go overboard now that you’re free. Remember, the kids in college who partied their brains out and ended up puking in the street every weekend were the ones whose parents absolutely forbade them to touch alcohol. Ever.”
Darcy tapped her fingers on the rim of the sink. “I get it, Molly.”
“I’m just saying. I don’t want you to do something so out of character that you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“But it can’t be completely out of character or why would I want to do it?”
“Because you’ve been bent too far in one direction, and now that pressure is released, you’re whipping too far over to the other side. Trust me. You want danger? Throw out a recyclable, or park in a handicapped space—something more in your risk league. Leave seducing strangers to women who can handle the fallout.”
Darcy growled loudly. Now Molly sounded like Dad and Greg. In stereo. Full volume. And unfortunately, even though she might be making perfect sense, out of sheer contrariness Darcy’s desire to make use of Garrett’s mighty spear tripled.
“Hey, you wanted me to talk you out of it.”
“Yeah, I did. I did want you to talk me out of it.” The legs in her kitchen window moved down a step. Darcy leaned over the sink to better admire their straight muscled length, raising her eyes slowly to where he kept the weaponry she was “soooo uncharacteristically” in the mood to test out. “But I’m pretty sure I just changed my mind.”
2
TYLER HOUSTON finished sanding the upper sill of a second-story window, climbed down and moved the ladder to the last one on that floor. For the third day in a row he’d lingered here after the other guys had gone. Partly because rather than being a professional painter like his coworkers, he was a soon-to-be college professor—and yes, he did like the sound of that—earning extra cash over the summer before he started teaching economics at UWM in the fall. The guys kidded him about his snail-speed painting, but after so many years of book study it was a refreshing break to work with his body again instead of just his mind.
As he’d said, that was partly why he stayed late. To catch up. But only partly.
The other “partly” had to do with the woman this house belonged to. He’d been attracted to plenty of women in his life. Some based purely on appearance, seen at a distance or seen up close. Some whose personality appealed and whose looks seemed to morph into loveliness the more he got to know them. But rarely the kind of punch-to-the-gut sizzle he experienced with this woman. Even his attraction to Annie Phillips, his supposed-to-be fiancée who’d busted his heart wide open a year ago, had taken hold of him slowly.
Hardly Mr. Smooth, he still could generally hold his end up in a conversation. He liked people, enjoyed finding out about them, listening to their stories, figuring out what made them tick. Around this woman, he’d been able only to comment moronically about paint. Compliment her color choice. Admire her house. Wax philosophical about wood stain and window glazing. Never even asked her name. Worse, he’d kept laughing nervously—he would not use the term giggle. Bad enough when she had on her sunglasses, but when she took them off and looked at him with those blue-gray eyes…
Of course she’d been completely cool, able to look at him directly, to speak coherently without giggling—er, nervous laughter. Periodically she’d toss her heavy dark hair back as if it annoyed her by continually creeping over her shoulders. Even that was sexy to him.
Earlier today, warmer even than yesterday once the cloud cover passed on to the east, she’d been sitting in her usual lounge chair—in jeans and a large man’s shirt that made him jealous of whoever had given it to her—reading a book and listening to an iPod. He’d managed to avoid looking at her for the most part, but his gaze was jerked over when she’d sat up abruptly, put the book down and started unbuttoning the shirt.
That got his attention. Then the shirt was tossed aside and he nearly gouged the wood of the sill he was scraping when she hiked up the tight, fiery-orange-red top underneath, yanked it over her head and flung it to the side as if it harbored bees.
While his tongue had lolled out of his mouth—figuratively speaking—she’d calmly picked up her book and settled back down.
He’d worked particularly slowly after that, at least until she disappeared back into the house a while earlier. Because underneath she wore a bikini top that she filled out like…like…
Poetic words failed him. “Like beautiful breasts in a bikini top,” was about as lyrical a description as he could manage.
Clearly he’d gone over the edge. Next he’d be like Katie, his younger sister, who claimed to have known the second she met Edwin, now her husband of two years, that he was the love of her life.
Uh-huh.
If Tyler were a different kind of scientist, he’d do research into why and how two people could produce such sparks. Or rather how one person could produce them in another, since he had no way of knowing if the ones he felt were reciprocated.
He started scraping the final window to what must be her bedroom, the sun still out but the air rapidly cooling toward evening. The last few days had been warm, though Milwaukee hung on to chilly nights until close to the start of summer. Last month he’d moved back here to his hometown and only a block away from Ms. Bikini in order to—
The corner of his eye caught movement beyond the old-fashioned slightly wavy glass.
Her. Coming into her bedroom. What was her name? He was dying to know. Something sexy and slightly old-fashioned, like Rosemary. She walked in and passed the window, still in those jeans, low-cut and tight, still in that bikini top, again under the man’s shirt, which flared open when she moved and which continued to make him jealous. Who had given it to her? Was she still involved with him?
Tyler really needed to pay attention to this window or he’d be here all night. And not the way he’d like to be, in Rosemary’s…er, company, but out here standing on a ladder with only a scraper for intimacy.
So he paid attention to the window. He really did. But his peripheral vision was working, too, and kept track of her. Then he had to glance right at her just once, to confirm if what he thought he’d seen was in fact what he thought he’d seen.
Because what he thought he’d seen was her shirt fluttering to the floor.
Yes.
The shirt.
On the floor.
Worse—no, better—no, worse—her hands were now at the fastenings of her jeans. He scraped extra loud, making sure his knuckles rapped “clumsily” on the glass so she’d realize he was there and that he could…
Her jeans traveled down long, long, strong legs, one of which stepped out of them, followed by the other.
…see. He could see. He could do nothing but see. Dark wavy hair streaming down to her collarbone, skin a light shade of gold, broad shoulders, slender waist, toned ass…
Her hands reached around to the back hook of her bathing suit top.
Ho-ly sh—
Wait. He was not behaving like the gentleman his mother had raised.
“Hey.” He tapped on the window. No reaction. He tapped harder. “Hey.”
How could she possibly not know he was there? He didn’t see any earbuds or the cord of an iPod. She must be able to hear him knocking. She must know he was there.
The bikini top slid to the ground. Which meant…
She knew he was there.
He put the scraper down on the sill. Tyler had never been like his late older brother Cam, whom women tried to seduce at various times, like, oh, say, whenever he was awake. If this was business as usual for painters, maybe Tyler should switch careers. Though he hadn’t gotten this…uh, lucky when he’d painted houses in college.
Maybe because he’d never painted for anyone like Rosemary before. Not just beauty, not just body, something else. A familiarity, a sense that he knew her even having just met her. Knew she was a good person, knew he could trust her, knew they had things in common. How could he possibly know any of that? He couldn’t. He was projecting. The connection was purely physical, animal, primal. Her hormones fit his, her pheromones broadcasted to his frequency, her…uh…her…
…breasts, God, her breasts. Naked, they tilted, slid, hung lushly as she bent to pick up her top. His throat became dry. She tossed her hair, arched her back, slid her hands up her stomach to cup, then cover, then caress them.
His throat became drier. Desert dry. His cock swelled. He wanted to touch her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. If he wasn’t put off by the concept of deep, possibly fatal lacerations from broken glass, he’d dive through her window and ravish her.
She swayed dreamily to some inner music, fingering her nipples, smile curving her lips, her body in profile. She still hadn’t looked at him. He still hadn’t looked away.
Her hips started to move, small, then larger circles. He let out a deep helpless groan he hadn’t been planning to let out. He wanted to grab hold of his dictator dick, which was ordering in no uncertain terms that its pain be relieved in whatever way possible, preferably in some way involving the wonder that was Rosemary.
Her hands left her breasts, which suited him fine. The easier to see her with, my dear, and the view was spectacular. Except then her hands took a trip to the sides of her bikini bottoms and began to edge them down, one side a fraction of an inch, then the other, as her hips continued their ’round and ’round and back and forth and forward and back journey, a journey he wanted desperately to join them on because he knew what destination they’d lead him to.
The bikini slid the last several smooth inches down her thighs, knees, calves, ankles and hit the floor. She turned and faced him, making direct eye contact through the glass. Well…eventual direct eye contact. His eyes were busy briefly before they made it up to hers. He was a guy, he couldn’t help it.
Silence. Stillness. Emotions swirling in him—desire, and something softer, like tenderness, which he didn’t understand, hadn’t felt for anyone since Annie, and not even for her this soon after they’d met.
The scraper chose that moment to slide off the uneven stone sill and clatter to the ground. He didn’t blame it. There wasn’t much holding him up, either—with the exception of the obvious, which had no trouble standing straight and proud.
Now what?
Okay, he wasn’t that lame. He knew what. But should he? He was working here; he was her employee in a sense. Maybe she was one of those women who seduced then cried rape. A charge like that could ruin his career.
But he knew she wasn’t. How? He didn’t know. He knew being with her would be carnal and exciting and sweet all at the same time, and he didn’t know how he knew that, either.
He also didn’t know how he was going to face his sister, who’d said all these same stupid and illogical things about her husband hours after they’d met, which had precipitated the most bitter fight he and Katie had ever had as siblings, one that worsened when she’d eloped and one from which they still hadn’t recovered, to both their sadness. But so far, not regret.
