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Chapter Three
Troy’d been watching Karleen off and on for ten minutes or so, going after that poor plot of dirt as though it had offended her deeply. Especially after the boys had accosted her. Not that he could hear the conversation over that god-awful country caterwauling. But after more than a decade of dealing with bank managers, suppliers, advertising agencies and potential investors, he was no slouch at deciphering body language.
A dialect in which his new neighbor was particularly fluent.
The cold, wet bottles soothed his heated palms as he crossed the fifty feet or so. A good thing, since the closer he got, the more agitated her digging became. Well, tough. She still wasn’t his type, but he wasn’t the bogeyman, either. And it bugged him no end that she seemed to think he was. So, okay, maybe he wasn’t exactly racking up the bonus points by invading her space, but considering she’d come out of her house looking ready to bite somebody’s head off, he sincerely doubted he was more than a fly on an already festering wound.
The brim of her hat quivering, she glanced up at his approach. And sure enough, worry peeked out from behind the aggravation simmering in her expression, and he thought, See? Told ya, followed by the inevitable pang of empathy whenever confronted by someone in trouble. Amy used to tease him unmercifully about it, about his always getting far more personally involved in other people’s messes than he should. Some things, he thought as he held out one of the bottles, can’t be helped.
“It’s hotter than it looks. You’ll get dehydrated.”
“Thanks, but I’m good,” she said, stabbing the dirt again. Her jeans sat intriguingly low on her hips, allowing an occasional glimpse of that sparkly belly-button stud, companioned by one of those stretchy tops that were basically just big, blah bras. Although on her, not so blah. In fact, the way the sun licked at the moisture sheening her skin…
Nope. Not blah at all.
“It’s a bottle of water, Karleen. Not my fraternity pin.”
Panting slightly, she shifted her gaze toward him again; fireflies of sunlight danced over her face through the straw brim. He wiggled the bottle. She reached over and snatched it out of his hand. “Fine,” she said, twisting off the top and taking a swallow. “Now will you go away?”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”
Surprise flickered across her features, followed by a head shake. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Bull.”
Now her brows lifted, as well as one corner of her mouth. “You don’t know me from Eve. Why would you care?”
“Consider it a character flaw.”
She met his gaze with a startling intensity that jolted his sex drive awake like a fire alarm. Underneath her T-shirt, her sigh took her breasts for a little ride.
“It’s not you,” she said after a moment, breaking the spell before his tongue started dragging in the dirt. Jeez. “I got a phone call that rattled me, is all.” She shrugged, then set the bottle down by the fence before she went back to work. “Family stuff, nothin’ too serious, and not to put too fine a point on it—” she attacked a particularly obtuse dirt clod “—but it’s none of your business.”
The haze nicely cleared now, Troy took a sip of his own water, then propped the bottle on the top rung of the fence. “Okay, so I didn’t come over here soley to make sure you wouldn’t die of thirst.”
A tiny smile made a brief appearance. “No?”
“No. You were right the other night, when you made that comment about it having been a long time for me. I haven’t even gone out with another woman since my wife died.”
The dirt clod exploded like a supernova; her gaze touched his. “You’re kidding?”
“Nope.”
She stilled, clearly on the alert. “And what does this have to do with me?”
“Well…Blake—the guy who helped me move in?—suggested that maybe I needed someone—a woman, I mean—to practice on before I plunged back into the dating scene.” He lifted the bottle in her direction. “And since you live right next door, he thought maybe you might be that woman.”
Karleen barked out a laugh, then said, “And I can’t believe you’re dumb enough to say that to a woman with a shovel in her hands.”
“I mean to talk to, what did you think I—? Oh.” His mouth flatlined. Maybe the haze hadn’t cleared as much as he’d thought. Good to know the hormones were still flowing, but the perpetual leaky faucet sucked. “Sorry. That didn’t come out exactly the way I heard it in my head.”
She stabbed the shovel into a hard section of ground, balancing on it like a pogo stick until it sank. “Well, if that boneheaded attempt you just made is any indication, your conversational skills could definitely use some fine-tuning. But why me, exactly? Besides the convenience factor, that is.”
“Because I figure if I can handle a conversation with you, I can handle one with anybody.”
That got another laugh, this one a little less scary, and the faucet started dripping harder. After living with a woman for nearly ten years, not to mention four years of celibacy since, Troy knew damn well he wasn’t one of those men who thought about sex 24/7. But as he watched Karleen bend over to snag the water bottle and his eyes went right to her soft, round backside, he realized that it definitely hummed in the background like a computer operating system—unseen but always on.
Her lips glistened from her sip of water. Yeah, that was helping. “You mean to tell me,” she said, “that you haven’t so much as talked to another woman in all this time.”
“Not in the man-woman sense, no.”
“And what’s really pathetic,” she said with a smile that only underscored her words, “is that I actually believe you.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“Although…you’re not doing so bad right now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Got off to a bit of a bumpy start, but you recovered nicely enough.” She took another swallow of the water, then made a face. Troy frowned.
“It’s bottled water, how bad can it be?”
“It’s not the water, it’s that wussy music you’re listening to.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Other than I keep thinkin’ somebody’s about to say, ‘The doctor will see you now’? Not a thing. Music’s supposed to get your juices flowin’, sugar, not put you to sleep.”
Troy let out a slightly pained laugh. “Trust me, between my work and keeping track of my sons and…other things—” uh, boy “—my juices flow just fine, thank you. I want something to calm my nerves,” he said with a pointed glance over at the loud country music issuing from her patio, “not frazzle them more than they already are.”
She’d picked up her shovel again; now she leaned both hands on the end of the handle, striking a pose that could only be described as sassy. Troy didn’t do sassy.
He didn’t think.
“You got somethin’ against country?” she said.
“When it’s loud enough to rattle windows in Phoenix? Yeah.”
Karleen looked back over her shoulder, considering. “I suppose I could turn it down. But…” Then she glanced up at him, the sassiness half melted into something that, once again, sent all those crazy hormones running for cover. “The CD’s almost done, you mind if I let it run out?”
“No, of course not.”
“Thanks. But tell you what…how about we agree not to play music outside at all? Unless the other one’s not around, I mean?”
“Deal. Oh, and sorry about the kids earlier.” When she frowned, he prompted, “About the garden?
The shovel stabbed at the dirt, but she glanced up from under the hat’s brim. “They’re just bein’ little kids, it’s no big deal. And anyway, since it’s not even an issue for at least another month, I’m not worried.”
“You should be. Trust me, those two take bugging to a whole new level. They work as a team—one stops to take a breath, the other one effortlessly fills the gap.”
She laughed, then straightened up, looking in the boys’ direction. “Which one’s which?”
Troy studied her face for several seconds, as if to commit what he saw there to memory. Deciphering could come later. Then he followed her gaze. “Grady’s the bigger, more outgoing one. The instigator. Scotty’s always been more cautious. Unlike his brother, he tends to at least think about things before getting in trouble.”
“Aww…they sound a lot like my friend Joanna’s twins. Real different personalities.” She twisted around, one hand clamped around the handle, the other pointing to a spot a few feet away. “How about we give them their own garden, over there? They could plant a pumpkin vine, kids always get a kick out of that.”
Troy frowned. “You don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s a great idea, but I could easily do a garden for them, too. It looks like the former owners had a plot over against the back wall.”
“Forget it. That soil’s crap, they could never get anything to grow. And I don’t mind. Really. It’ll be fun.”
The conversation stalled. She kept digging. Troy picked up his water bottle. “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” he said, turning away.
“You tryin’ to dig up those old roses along the back?”
He wheeled around far more eagerly than he should have. “Trying being the operative word.” The ancient bush had sent out dozens of treacherous, thorn-smothered runners into the yard. “I’m beginning to think nothing short of napalm’s going to work. But things growing wild bug me. And I want to get as much done around here before I have to go back to work next week.”
She tossed him a funny look, then said, “I was wondering how somebody in your position was able to take so much time off.” When he frowned, she shrugged and said, “Google. And a nosy best friend.”
“Ah,” he said, then responded, “state-of-the-art home office. And besides, I can take so much time off now because I had basically no life for the first five years we were trying to get the business off the ground.” Then boldness struck and he asked, “And what do you do?”
One shoulder hitched. “I’m a personal shopper.”
“Really?” He looked at her house, which while much smaller than his, still wasn’t exactly a mud hut. The overzealous outdoor kitsch notwithstanding. “You must do pretty well yourself.”
Her eyes followed his. “I do okay.” Her brows knitted together for a moment, then she said, pain faintly pin-pricking her words, “Ex Number Three apparently decided letting me stay after the divorce was worth bein’ rid of me.”
“He didn’t like country music, either?”
A laugh burbled from her throat, producing a small glow of triumph in the center of Troy’s chest. A second later, the boys popped up on either side of his hips, positively caked with dirt and looking damned pleased with themselves about it.
A grin, this time. “You sure those’re your kids?”
“Heck, I’m not sure they’re kids at all,” Troy said, using the hem of his T-shirt to wipe the top layer of dirt from Scotty’s forehead. “Mud puppies, maybe. Hard to tell until I hose them down.”
The boys giggled; then, hanging onto his hands, they launched into the we’re-gonna-starve-to-death moans, and Troy looked down into two sets of trusting blue eyes, and his chest twinged, as it did at least a dozen times a day. When he met Karleen’s gaze again, however, the clouds had rolled back across her expression. Heavy, leaden things that promised days and days of unrelentingly miserable weather.
“I think Nate and I had more issues than differing musical tastes,” she said, and her eyes touched his, and a great, big whoa went off in his brain.
A whoa he’d only heard once before, when a certain sleek-haired brunette had glided across his path in front of Northwestern’s library, nearly two decades before.
A certain sleek-haired brunette who wouldn’t have been caught dead with bleached hair, or her midriff exposed, or a belly-button stud, or listening to country music.
“Go feed your babies,” Karleen said softly, jerking Troy back to Planet Earth.
“Uh…yeah. Would you like to—?”
“We’ll talk about the garden when it gets warmer,” she said, then turned her back on him, ramming the shovel into the dirt so hard he could have sworn the ground vibrated underneath his feet.
At 6:00 a.m. three days later, Karleen had stumbled out of bed, slammed shut the window against the din of birdsong and stumbled back to bed. Where now, at eight, daylight sat on her face like an obnoxious cat, prodding her to get up.
Then she remembered that Troy still lived next door and she grabbed her pillow and crammed it over her head, only to realize it was impossible to suffocate yourself.
She tossed the pillow overboard, frowning at her beamed ceiling. Of all the houses for sale in Albuquerque, Troy Lindquist had to buy the one next door to hers. Was that unfair or what? Good-looking, she could ignore. Sweet, she could ignore. Sexy…she could ignore. But all three rolled into one? Lord, she felt like she was running to stay ahead of a raging wildfire—one trip, and she’d be barbecue.
Oh, sure, she could go on about her resolve to stay unattached until her tongue fell out, but neither history nor biology were on her side. Because the whole reason Karleen had ended up with the three husbands—not to mention an appalling number of “gap guys” in between—was her complete and total inability to resist a handsome, sweet-talking, testosterone-drenched male. Especially considering her very healthy sex drive. Which had been sorely neglected for far longer than she’d thought was even possible.
Yeah, it was definitely easier to keep replacing the hamsters. But now she wondered if her singlehood had less to do with any resolve on her part and more to a lack of any real temptation.
And that, she decided as the sun continued its relentless ascent, must’ve been why Mr. My-Mouth-Says-One-Thing-but-My-Eyes-Are-Saying-Something-Else-Entirely had moved in next door. You know, to test her. See if all her talk about reforming was only so much hot air. Still, maybe she couldn’t undo the past, but she sure as heck could learn from it. Although the neglected-sex-drive thing could be a problem.
Especially if it got too close to Troy’s neglected-sex-drive thing.
Karleen kicked off the wadded-up floral sheets and dragged herself out of bed, tugging at her boxer pj bottoms as she padded to the bathroom. Her cheek was creased, her eyes were puffy and her hair stuck up around her head like it’d been goosed. Lovely. She grabbed her toothbrush and squeezed out enough toothpaste for an elephant—
Wait. Was that a knock? She stepped out of the bathroom, toothbrush in mouth.
Rap, rap, rap.
Karleen quickly spit and grabbed her robe, yelling, “Who is it?” as she stomped down the hall, pulling the sash tight. One of these days she was really going to have to do something about fixing the doorbell—
“It’s Troy,” came from outside.
She made a silent Lucille Ball face, rammed her hands through her nutso hair and opened the door. And yep, there he was, even taller and more solid and—dammit—cuter than she remembered. And here she was, looking like a half-molted canary with overachieving hooters. The Volvo was parked in her driveway, full of twins. Who both waved to her, the little buggers. She waved back.
“Oh, hell,” the father of the twins said, “did I wake you?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, yawning, searching his face for signs of revulsion. Revulsion would be good. Revulsion had a way of dampening libidos. And things.
“Sorry to bother you,” Troy said, not looking terribly revulsed, “but I’ve got a huge favor to ask…no! Not to take the kids,” he said when her eyes darted back to his car. “But I’ve got an appointment to check out the Bosque View Preschool and the Home Depot guys were supposed to deliver the new washer/dryer this afternoon, only they called about five minutes ago and said they were coming this morning instead, and I don’t know if I’ll be back by the time they get here. So I wondering if you could possibly let them in…?”
Then a breeze made her shiver, and two layers of thin jersey were no match for the Twin Peaks on her chest, and Troy didn’t even try to avert his gaze and Karleen didn’t even try to pretend not to notice, and his eyes lifted to hers and things got real quiet for several seconds while everybody contemplated what was going on here.
“It’s—” She cleared the dozen or so frogs out of her throat. “It’s okay, scandalizing the Home Depot delivery-men isn’t on my list this morning,” she said, and he said, “Their loss,” and she said, “I don’t have any appointments until after lunch, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Silence. Then: “You’re a lifesaver.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said, and they stared at each other until one of the kids yelled, “Dad-deeee!” and Troy seemed to shudder back from wherever men go when their blood has shifted south and said, “I just didn’t want to rush things. Checking out the school, I mean.”
He glanced back at the boys, totally reverted to Daddy-mode. The mixture of worry and adoration in his expression made her tummy flutter. Or maybe that was hunger. Then his gaze returned to hers. Nope. Not hunger. Not that kind, anyway. “This will be their third day-care situation in six months,” he said, reeking of guilt. “I’m hoping this one will be the last until they start kindergarten. They’ve been real troupers, but I know it’s been rough on them, constantly having their routine disrupted.”
A philosophy to which Karleen’s mother had obviously not subscribed, she thought bitterly.
“Did you say Bosque View?” she now said. “Joanna’s got her youngest there, he loves it. If that makes you feel any better.”
“It does. It sucks, being the new guy in town.”
Tell me about it, she thought as Troy dug a house key out of his pocket and handed it over. “I’ve left a note on the door that you’ll let them in,” he said, backing away. “The machines go in the garage,” he called out, then ducked behind the wheel, and she waved, and then they were gone and she stared at the Troy-warmed key in her hand and felt that wildfire about to singe her pj bottoms right off her butt.
