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Karen looked a bit reluctant, but Julia was more than happy to veer the conversation into a new direction. Very aware of Mike sitting on the other side of the room, but trying to pretend she had forgotten all about him, Catherine focused intently on her friends as they finished their meals.
Catherine spotted Mike across the apartment compound as she climbed out of her car late the next afternoon. A toolbox in his hands, he was chatting with an older man she knew to be a longtime resident. Other tenants were moving around the parking lot, either walking to or away from their vehicles. She noted that several of them called out greetings to Mike, to which he responded with cordial waves.
He had certainly made himself known during his brief time on this job. She had lived here almost two years and knew the names of maybe three of her neighbors.
Finishing his conversation, he turned her way, saw her and lifted his hand in a wave. She paused in the shade of the oak tree next to her apartment building when he indicated that he wanted to speak with her.
“How’s it going?” he asked as he approached her.
“Very well, thank you. And you?”
“Not bad. I just wanted to tell you I got a B on my biology exam. A high B, just two points away from an A. The professor graded off on one of my essay questions,” he added with a charmingly sheepish smile. “Said I was ‘too vague.’”
She returned the smile, feeling safe to tease him a bit since he seemed to have accepted the comments good-naturedly. “Imagine that.”
He chuckled. “You did try to warn me.”
“Still, a high B is an excellent grade. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” He looked genuinely proud of himself.
“When’s your next exam?”
“Friday.”
“Do you feel good about it?”
He hesitated just a moment before smiling a bit too brightly. “Oh, yeah. Piece of cake.”
Tilting her head, she studied him with a frown. “What will it cover?”
“Classification of organisms. You know, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Real basic stuff that everyone should know by college.”
And yet he didn’t sound at all confident that he did know the material that well. “I’d be happy to quiz you, if you like,” she offered diffidently. “Not that I’m implying you’re not ready, of course, but—”
“You’re sure? Because I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance to you. I really don’t expect you to help me study for every test.”
“I don’t mind,” she assured him. “This is a fairly slow week for me—which is a rarity, actually. I can spare a couple of hours to talk about plantae and such.”
“Eukaryotes, right?”
She smiled again. “Right. When’s a good time for you?”
“I have a class this evening. But I’m free tomorrow evening, if that’s good for you.”
“Yes, fine. I should be home by six.”
“Do you like pizza?”
The non sequitur made her blink, but she nodded. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll bring dinner.” He dug into his shirt pocket, pulled out a card and a pen, and scribbled on the back. “Here’s my cell number, in case something comes up. Don’t feel obligated for this if there’s something else you need to do.”
Even as she gave him her numbers in exchange, she couldn’t imagine anything cropping up that would be more tempting than having pizza and studying with Mike Clancy.
Chapter Four
“Hey, Catherine. You’ll be here this evening, won’t you? Would you mind pulling a couple of plates for me?”
Catherine looked up from her microscope in response to the question the next afternoon. It was from one of the young women she had overheard talking about her last week, commenting about how Catherine never did anything but work, as if she had no life outside the lab.
It gave her great satisfaction to be able to say, “I’m sorry, Brandy, I won’t be here this evening. I have a date.”
“A date?”
Catherine wasn’t flattered by the surprise in the younger woman’s expression. She nodded coolly, feeling little compunction now about misrepresenting her plans for the evening. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”
“Okay…well…have fun.”
“Thank you. I intend to.”
It wasn’t like her to take such pleasure from deliberately misleading someone. But her lips curved into a rather grim smile of satisfaction as she bent back down to her work. It felt good to make it clear that she didn’t actually live here in the lab, with no outside interests of her own.
She really was going to have to start getting out more to make that assertion entirely true.
Catherine usually dressed quite casually—pretty much a necessity for most lab work. Her wardrobe consisted primarily of khakis and camp shirts in muted solids, often worn open over beige or white sleeveless tops. When the weather turned cooler, she swapped the camp shirts for thin sweaters with sleeves that could be pushed up and out of her way.
Occasionally she paired her khakis with more-professional blouses and blazers. When she had to dress up, she wore black slacks with the blazers. She rarely wore jeans or shorts and owned only a few skirts, since bare legs were not usually a good idea in a science lab.
Because her wardrobe was so simple and her choices rather limited, she didn’t spend much time deciding what to wear. She simply reached for a pair of slacks and any of the dozen or so shirts that matched them. She kept her hair in an easy-to-style bob, wore only light touches of makeup and eschewed all jewelry except her functional watch and a couple of pairs of simply styled earrings. She could be ready to leave her apartment in under half an hour.
All of which made it completely out of character for her to dither about her clothing for almost twenty minutes before Mike arrived Thursday evening. She had gotten home from work an hour earlier than she’d expected, giving her plenty of time to freshen up and change before Mike arrived, but for some reason she couldn’t decide what to wear. How silly, considering they wouldn’t be doing anything but studying, and that he wouldn’t notice her clothes, anyway.
She reached for fresh khakis and camp shirt, then paused again. On an impulse, she turned to a shelf on which she kept the two pairs of jeans that she owned. She donned a pair with a snug-fitting yellow T-shirt, then slid her bare feet into a pair of brown leather clogs.
Eyeing her reflection in the full-length mirror attached to the back of her closet door, she wondered if she had made the right choice. She looked more casual than usual. Too casual? Did it appear as though she were trying too hard to look younger?
“What do you think, Normie?”
The cat, who had been playing with a jingling toy ball near her feet, looked up and meowed rather impatiently, as if to tell her to stop being silly. Deciding that he was right, she turned off the closet light and left the bedroom.
Mike was late again, but only by fifteen minutes. The large pizza box in his hand looked as though it was still steaming, which probably explained his tardiness, she decided. Maybe he’d had to wait in line to pick it up. They should have just called for delivery.
A backpack was slung over one shoulder of the Hawaiian print shirt he wore over a T-shirt and faded jeans, reminding her of the “surfer dude” nickname she had given him the first time she’d seen him. He greeted her with a broad, beaming smile that elicited quivers of reaction deep inside her. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She moved to one side. “Come in.”
She closed the door behind him as he bent to scratch Norman’s ears. She wondered if anyone had seen him entering her apartment with the pizza, and if any tongues would wag as a result. She wasn’t accustomed to imagining herself at the center of apartment complex chatter, since her life wasn’t exactly fodder for juicy gossip.
“The pizza smells really good,” she said, making a stab at polite chitchat.
“We should probably eat it while it’s still hot, and then study afterward, don’t you think?”
“That sounds good. What would you like to drink?” she asked, waving him toward the table.
“Do you have a cola?”
“Only diet, I’m afraid.”
“That’ll work. It wouldn’t hurt me to cut a few calories.”
She almost suspected him of saying that just to get her to look at his athletically built body. Even if that hadn’t been his intention, it was exactly what she did. Swallowing a comment about how he certainly didn’t have to worry about his weight—or anything else about his appearance, for that matter—she moved into the kitchen to fetch plates, napkins and two canned diet sodas.
Catherine had been a bit concerned that conversation might be awkward between herself and Mike while they ate, but Mike took care of that. He had a talent for making small talk that she could only envy. Somehow she found herself relaxing and responding almost as easily as she might have chatted with Karen and Julia.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” he urged as he reached for a second slice of pizza. “Where did you grow up? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Did you always want to be a scientist?”
She hesitated a moment to organize her thoughts before answering. “I was born in College Station, Texas, but we moved several times during the next dozen years. My parents are college professors, and they taught in Texas and Virginia and Georgia before settling in Florida when I was twelve. They both taught at Florida State University until Dad retired two years ago, and Mom retired last year. They’re spending six months in Beijing now on a cooperative teaching program with the university there. They’ve been there just over a month.”
“How exciting for them.”
“Yes, they were thrilled to have this opportunity.”
“No siblings?”
“No. My parents had given up on having children by the time I came along.” She remembered that he was the youngest of five siblings. She couldn’t imagine being a part of such a large family. Her own childhood had been quiet and orderly. She had never even had a pet before Norman.
“Was it lonely for you?”
“No, not really. I was very close to my parents and they always saw to it that I had playmates. They enrolled me in very good preschool programs and then excellent private schools as I grew older. Needless to say, they were heavily focused on academic enrichment. I spent every summer in educational camps, studying everything from math to science to foreign languages.”
“And you liked that?” he asked a bit dubiously.
“I loved it,” she admitted with a smile. “I always looked forward to my summer programs. I made friends as well as learned a wide variety of subjects.”
“I spent my summers playing ball and working construction jobs for spending money. When I wasn’t at the ballpark or on a job site, I’d be at the pool with my buddies, checking out the girls in bikinis.”
Illustrating once again how very different they were, even from childhood.
“When did you decide you wanted to be a scientist?” he asked.
“I don’t remember, exactly. My parents always encouraged me to pursue academia.” That, of course, was an understatement, since her parents had pretty much mapped out her future from her birth. Fortunately, she had been perfectly willing to go along with their plans, which had suited her temperament well enough. “I suppose I started focusing on the biological sciences as a teenager, when I began to show a particular aptitude for the subject.”
“So you never looked at anything else?”
“I briefly considered pursuing an M.D., but I decided against that because I’m too much of a control freak,” she admitted. “If I couldn’t make the patients do what I suggested, it would make me crazy.”
“And you have more control in research?”
She had to laugh at that. “No. Research is usually two steps forward, one step back. Or as often as not, one step forward and three steps back. There are a zillion little variables that can affect any experiment, many of which the researcher has little to no control over.”
His gaze seemed to focus for a long moment on her smiling mouth. “That doesn’t bother you?”
What bothered her was the look in his eyes just then, an expression she couldn’t begin to interpret. She cleared her throat silently and said, “I get frustrated sometimes, but I enjoy my work for the most part.”
“Lots of pressure to get results and get published, I would imagine.”
“Oh, sure. Add to that the steady dwindling of grant monies for scientific research, and it’s a fairly high-stress job. But I can deal with that.”
His gaze rose to her eyes again. “Something tells me you can handle just about anything.”
No, she thought with a quick ripple of anxiety. There were some things she didn’t know how to handle at all.
“So tell me more about your upcoming test,” she said a bit too hastily. “Do you feel pretty confident about it?”
A third slice of pizza halfway to his mouth, Mike looked a bit surprised by her abrupt change of subject. “Um—yeah, pretty good. There are a couple of things I’m hoping you can explain a little better for me, but I think I have a good chance at doing well.”
Chagrined at her awkwardness, she stuffed a bite of pizza into her mouth and reached grimly for her glass. She had certainly brought that conversation to an abrupt halt.
Maybe she had better just stick to tutoring.
Mike gathered his books and papers and stuffed them into his backpack an hour and a half later. “Once again, you’ve been really helpful, Catherine. I think I’m ready for the test now.”
Catherine stood just a few feet away, watching him prepare to leave. Norman lay bonelessly in her arms, purring so loudly Mike could hear him from where he stood. “You’ve very welcome. Let me know how it goes, okay? I’ll be curious.”
“Yes, I will.” He was rather pleased by her request, since it indicated a willingness on her part for their budding friendship to continue. He’d thought earlier that perhaps he had blown it by asking too many questions about her. It rather surprised him how important it was for him to keep the lines of communication open between them.
It wasn’t because she was helping him study. He liked her. He admired her sharp mind and her generosity. Her cat. And, he had to admit, her chocolatey eyes, sensual mouth and willowy figure.
He hesitated at the door, a bit reluctant to leave. “I forgot to ask, how did you like that new restaurant the other night? I saw you there with your friends.”
“I thought it was quite good. My friends and I try to get together for dinner at least once a month, and we’re always pleased to find someplace new to eat. I noticed that your group seemed to be having a good time.”
He chuckled. “Those were my sister’s friends, actually. It was her birthday, so she chose who to invite. But I had a good time with them.”
“That beautiful redhead is your sister?” Catherine asked in surprise.
Smiling, he nodded. “That’s Laurie. My sister Charlie was also at the table. You might not have seen her because she had her back to you, but she’s another redhead.”
“Do all your sisters have red hair?”
“Three of the four inherited Dad’s red hair. The other sister, the oldest, Gretchen, has the same blond hair that our mother and I have.”
“Are they all as pretty as Laurie?”
“Well, I think so—but I’m not exactly objective.”
“A very handsome family, apparently.”
