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Mala sank into her desk chair after he left, only then noticing her answering machine was flashing. She really should get Caller ID one of these days, but right now it was ranked way on the bottom of a depressingly long to-do list. She halfheartedly punched the play button.
A hang up. Just as well, since she didn’t think she could conduct a logical conversation right now if she tried.
Eddie stomped up the stairs to the apartment, his forehead knit so tight, he thought it might stay that way. And he wasn’t breathing right, either. Doggone it—what had he been thinking? In the space of a half hour, he’d managed to break every single rule in his book, number one being, “Don’t get involved, bonehead.”
He batted open the door—nobody’d bothered to lock it, seeings as he was coming right back up, anyway—and went inside, jerking back the drapes and opening a living room window to air out the place some. Not that he hadn’t been in places that’d smelled a far sight worse….
Shoot, it must’ve embarrassed the life out of Mala, showing him the place in this condition. Women tended to get their drawers in a knot about stuff like that. And this one’s drawers, he imagined, thinking back to when he used to watch her scurrying from class to class, her arms always loaded with about a dozen books, had probably been knotted since she was three.
Those eyes of hers…damn, damn, damn. Fierce and questioning and scared and so incredibly honest, even behind that puny veil of control, it knocked him clear into next week.
Hell, Eddie was the last person to think about reassuring some woman he barely knew that things’d work out. About reassuring anybody. He didn’t much believe things did, for the most part. But he was at least used to dodging the crap life seemed determined to fling in his path. If Eddie didn’t like the way things were going, he could pretty much just up and walk away. Mala Koleski, though, wasn’t the type of person who could do that. Not with two kids, especially. He could tell that right off, and he admired her for it. Which was why Eddie couldn’t help thinking that here was someone who deserved whatever it was she wanted.
That she needed to know that.
Still, what the Sam Hill had come over him, getting all personal like that? And then, even worse, admitting he was attracted to her? Eddie rammed a hand through his sorry-looking hair, then just held it there, even though most of his brain cells had long since left the building. Sweet heavenly days, he’d never wanted to kiss a woman so bad in his life. And he sure had never wanted to take one in his arms and tuck her head against his chest and just…hold her.
He slipped off his jacket, threw it on the sofa, then went on back to the bedroom to make up the bed. It smelled much better in here, thank heaven. Like freshly washed linens.
And Mala.
With a groan of frustration, Eddie sank onto the edge of the bare mattress, scrubbing a hand across his face.
Okay, so he’d admitted his attraction because something told him it’d been a long time since anyone had let Mala Koleski Whatever-Her-Married-Name-Was know she was attractive. That a woman didn’t have to look like those emaciated Hollywood actresses for a man to get turned on. So he figured she should know that she was worth a man’s time and attention, doggone it. Even if he couldn’t be that man for more than about two minutes.
But that was okay, since he figured hell would freeze over before she’d take him up on his offer, such as it wasn’t. Women like her just didn’t do that, get involved with strays like him.
A weird, empty kind of feeling swelled inside him, vaguely familiar but definitely unwelcome. He got up, trying to shake it off, but it followed him right into the bathroom like an overloyal puppy.
“Go away,” he actually said out loud, but it didn’t. He looked over at the sink as he draped the thick, soft towels over the bar next to the john, saw the new bar of soap she’d left out for him.
The emptiness torqued into an sharp, nasty ache.
“You can’t,” he said to his reflection. “She can’t.”
He yanked open the cupboard door under the sink, found a whole mess of cleaning supplies. Dumping a thick layer of cleanser into the tub, he set to scrubbing it, thinking it’d been a long time since he’d entertained the idea of wanting something he couldn’t have.
Chapter 3
The Monday before Thanksgiving, Mala lay in bed, half-asleep, trying to fight off that itchy, icky feeling you get when Something Bad is about to happen.
“Mama! Guess what!”
She burrowed down farther into the pillows. “Unless there’s a van outside with balloons all over it,” she said, “go away.”
“Ma-ma!” Like Tigger, Carrie boing-boinged up the length of the bed, and it occurred to Mala that the only time her bed shook these days was when small children were jumping on it. Which, while a dispiriting thought, didn’t qualify as the Something Bad because that wasn’t something that was going to happen. It already had. “It’s a snow day!”
That, however, definitely made the short list. But after marshalling a few more brain cells, Mala decided that, nope, that wasn’t quite it, either.
Not that this wasn’t bad enough—if it were true—since that meant, being as the kids were already off for Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday…and Saturday and Sunday…she’d only have two kid-free days to do five days worth of work. Swiping her hair out of her face, Mala hiked herself up on one elbow, trying to get a bead on Carrie’s beaming, bobbing face. Her curls were a radiant blur in the almost iridescent glow in the many-windowed, converted porch she used as her bedroom.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Uh-uh. We got like a million feet of snow in the yard! You can go look! I already listened to the radio and they said the Spruce Lake schools were closed! We don’t have any scho-ol, we don’t have any scho-ol!”
Mala suppressed a groan as she glanced at the clock radio by her bed. Seven-ten. Far too early for so many exclamation points.
In footed, dinosaur-splashed jammies, Lucas unsteadily tromped across the bed, dropping beside Mala with enough force to rattle her teeth. “I’m cold,” he said, wriggling underneath the down comforter next to her, his beebee—as he’d christened his baby blanket at eleven months—firmly clutched to his chest.
“It’ll warm up in a few minutes,” Mala said.
Carrie skootched down on Mala’s other side, planting her ice-cold feet on Mala’s bare calf.
“Cripes, Carrie!”
“The heat’s not on.”
Damn. The furnace pilot must’ve gone out again. That made the second time this week. Not that it was that big a deal to relight it, but she supposed she couldn’t put off having somebody come out to give the ancient furnace a look-see any longer. Especially as she had a tenant. A tenant who, bless him, hadn’t yet complained about freezing his butt off in the mornings.
A tenant who, bless him, had made himself scarce since the night he moved in.
Except in her dreams.
Lucas snuggled closer, smelling of warm little boy and slightly sour jammies. Ah, yes…reality. As in, kids and clients and recalcitrant furnaces and laundry and meals to fix and mother’s and brother’s and well-meaning friends’ worried looks to dodge. And vague, itchy-icky feelings of impending doom.
Running away sounded pret-ty damn attractive, just at the moment.
Just at the moment, she wondered what it would be like to be able to come and go whenever you pleased, not having to answer to anyone, not be tied down to any one place for longer than a few months.
Carrie threw her arm around Mala’s middle, leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
Not having a child—or two—to come get in bed with you on a cold, snowy morning and remind you that you were the center of their universe.
She hugged and kissed first one kid, then the other, then gently swatted Carrie’s bottom through the bedclothes. “C’mon, move over—I gotta get up.”
“C’n you make pancakes?”
“Maybe. After I get the furnace going.” Mala struggled out from underneath the covers, static electricity crackling as she yanked at her flannel nightgown to dislodge it from the bedding. Half hopping, half stumbling, she stuffed her feet into her old shearling slippers as she made her way across the carpet to the window to see just how generous Mother Nature had been.
Yup—she rammed one arm, then the other, into her terry cloth robe, glowering at the vast expanse of white outside her window—it had snowed, alrighty. Not a million feet, but at least one, gauging from the pile of the white stuff on the picnic table. Oh, joy.
It was still flurrying, although the faint blue patches in the distance meant the storm would probably break up before noon. But with this much snow already on the ground, Mala thought on a huge, disgusted yawn, nobody was going anywhere, at least not until some kind person took pity on them and plowed the street. Which could be Christmas, with her luck. Whitey was probably sitting in the nice dry attached garage, chuckling. Man, she’d sell her soul for something with all-wheel drive.
The ceiling creaked slightly under the pressure of Eddie’s heavy, deliberate footsteps overhead. She heard the upstairs door slam shut, followed by the sound of boots clomping down the outside stairs. She edged back from the window and watched him plod through the soft snow toward the second garage out back in just his jeans and that denim jacket of his, and she felt her brow furrow in concern that he wasn’t dressed warmly enough.
Lord. She was such a mother.
He had the day off—the restaurant was closed on Sundays and Mondays—and she found herself wondering what he’d do, since his Camaro wasn’t any more snow-worthy than her sissy little Escort. Not that it was any of her business. She just wondered.
Mala suddenly realized he’d come back out of the garage and was looking in her direction through the light snow, his gaze steady in an otherwise expressionless face. She doubted he could see her, not from that distance and with it still snowing, but it was as if he knew she was standing there.
Heat dancing across her cheeks, Mala backed away, just as a sudden shaft of sunlight turned the flurries into whirling, glittering confetti. And as if in a dream, Eddie began trudging across the yard toward her window, the sparkling flakes settling onto his thick, curly hair and broad shoulders like fairy dust, at such odds with the serious set to his mouth. When he got to within a few feet of the window, he stopped, then mimed shoveling.
Mala raised the window, the brittle cold instantly goose-bumping her skin. Lucas crawled out of the bed and wedged himself between her and the windowsill. One little hand arrowed into the soft drift. “Honestly, Lucas—” Mala snatched back his hand, then wrapped him in her enormous robe and hugged him to her stomach, like a mother hen enveloping her chick. “You could just come around to the door, you know,” she said to Eddie, her breath a cloud.
His gaze snapped back to her face. “Waste of time, seeing’s as you were already standing there. So, you got a snow shovel?”
“You don’t have to—”
“I need to dig out my car.”
“Oh, of course.” She shivered. “Yeah, there’s one in the shed.”
He turned, glanced at the wooden shed huddled against the back fence, then angled his head back to her. “It locked?”
She shook her head. He nodded, then trooped away.
A half hour later, she was standing in her living room after her shower, staring at the TV and contemplating the possibility of being sucked into the perpetual springtime of Teletubbieland—but only if one could exterminate the Teletubbies first—when she heard the rhythmic scraping of metal against cement outside and realized she’d been had.
Eddie hadn’t exactly planned on shoveling the entire walk when he’d gotten up this morning. After all, he was just the tenant. Wasn’t his responsibility. But then he got to thinking about it, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. And since not too many opportunities to do the right thing crossed Eddie’s path, he figured he might as well take advantage of it. You know, just in case St. Peter asked him for a list or something down the road.
Didn’t hurt that the exertion had the added benefit of taking the edge off his run-amok libido.
It didn’t make a lick of sense. There she’d stood, no makeup, her hair every-which-way, wearing some kind of sack with a bigger sack thrown over it, and his blood had gone from frozen to boiling in about ten seconds. And she was just as close to forty as he was, to boot. In fact, in the stark light, he’d even seen a few strands of gray in her dark hair. Yet she opened her mouth, and that morning-gravelly voice of hers spilled out of the window at him, and all he could think was, whuh. He’d been trying to put a finger on just what it was about her that turned him inside out for the past half hour—okay, for the past week—but he was no closer now than when he’d started.
The sidewalk was looking pretty good, though.
Eddie straightened, letting his back muscles ease up some, then wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve before it froze to his forehead. Underneath the denim jacket, he had on three layers of clothes, and now he was overheated. His breath misted in front of his face as he squinted in the snowfall’s glare, taking in Mala’s neat little neighborhood, a conglomeration of one-and two-story houses, some frame, some brick, most with porches. Yards were small to average, tidy, liberally dotted with snow-flocked evergreens. Fireplace smoke ghosted from a few chimneys, teasing the almost bare limbs of all the oaks and ashes and maples, slashes of dark gray against the now crystal-blue sky. A few blocks off, a small lake, embedded in a pretty little park, twinkled in the sunlight.
It was a nice town, he supposed. If you liked that sort of thing.
From the back, he heard the kids yelling and laughing; Mala must’ve just let them out. Eddie went back to work, listening to them whooping it up over his shoveling, trying to ignore the ache of pure, unadulterated envy threatening to crush his heart. Still, it was a good thing Mala was doing, giving them the freedom to be happy in spite of what their daddy had done.
She was a good woman, he thought, almost like it was a revelation. And his thinking that had nothing to do with his breath-stealing sexual attraction to her. It had everything, however, to do with why he needed to stop thinking about sex every time he thought about Mala Koleski.
The front door opened. He bent farther over the shovel, but not before he noticed she was wearing baggy blue sweats over a gray turtleneck. She clunked down the steps in those clogs of hers, something clutched in her hand.
“Here. You might as well use these.”
Eddie looked over, noticed her hair was still damp, like she hadn’t taken the time to dry it properly. Then he saw the gloves in her hands. Turned away. “Those your husband’s?” Down the street, someone else came out of his house, shovel in tow.
“I would’ve burned them if they had been. No, they’re a pair of my father’s. He left them here a year ago. We couldn’t find them, so he got another pair. Of course, then they turned up. So, anyway…” She pushed them toward him.
They were good gloves. Pigskin, maybe, lined in fur.
He shook his head. “I can’t take those.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. What am I going to do with them?” When he didn’t reply, she added, “Borrow them, then, if I can’t dislodge that bug from your butt. But in case you haven’t noticed, this is Michigan. In November. It gets cold.”
Eddie lifted his gaze. “Says the woman standing out in twenty-degree weather with wet hair.”
Stubbornness vied with amusement in those cat’s eyes of hers, softened by the breath-cloud soft-focusing her just-washed face.
“Who’d be back inside by now if you’d stop arguing with me.”
He took the gloves, put them on. They fit perfectly.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
“You’re welcome. And thanks for shoveling. I appreciate it.”
Eddie grinned. The gloves felt real good, he had to admit. “I take it this isn’t one of your favorite chores?”
She smiled back. “You might say that—”
A child’s scream blew the moment all to hell. They both turned in time to see Lucas—at least, Eddie thought that’s who it was, it was hard to tell with all the clothes the kid had on—barreling through the side gate, bellowing his head off. Carrie followed, her hatless curls fire in the sun, yelling nearly as loudly.
Mala’s hands flew up. “Geez, Louise…what now?”
“Carrie hit me in the face with a snowball!”
“I did not! It hit your shoulder!”
“There’s snow in my eyes!”
“That’s ’cause it bounced! But I didn’t throw it at your face!” She whirled around to her mother. “I swear!”
“You’re lyin’! An’ it hurt!”
Carrie stomped her foot, her rage-red face clashing with her hair. “It did not, crybaby! The snow’s too soft to hurt!”
“All right, the both of you,” Mala said, her hips strangled by a pair of snowsuited arms, “that’s enough. Okay, honey,” she said to Lucas, cupping his head as he hung on to her for dear life. “You’ll live. But honest to Pete, Carrie, how many times have I told you not to throw snowballs at him?”
“He threw one at me first!” the girl shrieked, her arms flying.
“Did not!”
“Did so!”
“I t-told you to stop and you wouldn’t! You jus’ kept throwin’ ’em and throwin’ ’em, an’ I ast you to stop!”
Her mouth set, Mala glared at her daughter. “Carrie…?”
The ensuing silence was filled only by the sound of someone else’s shovel rasping against their sidewalk. Then, “You always take his side! Always!”
In the space of a second, Eddie saw weariness add five years to Mala’s face. “That’s not true, Carrie—”
“Yes, it is! He’s the baby, he always gets his way! Ow!”
