Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (14 page)

“To yield readily—easily—to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you,” he said to her, as if such a thing were a crime.

“To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either,” she answered back.

The words
Speak English, damn it!
made up the lingering refrain in her mind when her alarm woke her from sleep to the darkness of a winter morning at six o’clock.

She dressed in a hurry and skipped breakfast when the smell of brewing coffee caught her in the hall.

She wasn’t avoiding him. Not exactly. After all, she’d admitted that she knew they’d end up in bed together sooner or later and explained that she needed some time to figure out how to do that without getting too tangled up in emotions. She just hoped that putting some space, both figurative and literal, between them might cool the fire in both their pants for a little bit.

“No yielding without conviction,” she said aloud as she opened the front door and braced herself against the icy air.

That was going to be her new motto all right. No yielding without conviction.

As it turned out, she wasn’t given the chance to be tempted. For the next week, even when she started coming home early or leaving late for work—not trying to run into Spencer, of course—she didn’t catch a glimpse of him. It seemed he was as determined to give her some space as she had been initially to have it. She gladly ignored her personal problems at work, diving into technical problems of solving floodplain issues and satisfying the Army Corps of Engineers, who supervised such matters.

But by the time the weekend rolled around, she was feeling unjustifiably neglected and starting to get irritated again.

When Saturday morning dawned bright and unseasonably warm after a week of gloomy weather, she decided to take a page from Spencer’s book. She left a note propped against a brewing pot of coffee, snagged a couple of the dozen rubber doggy balls rolling around the house, hooked a leash on Elwood and headed out.

He found her a half hour later in the park down the street.

The coffee had lured him out of bed, and when the caffeine had finally woken him up to coherent thought, he’d read her note. He’d hoped that avoiding Addy for a few days would draw her back into conversation with him. Smiling, he’d folded the card in one hand, wrapped the other around his mug and headed back upstairs to dress.

At the park, his approach went unobserved. Addy was laughing out loud as she watched Elwood tumble head over heels in a vain effort to brake himself as he overtook the red rubber ball she’d pitched for him. Both the dog and the woman were filthy, evidence of multiple spills in the muddy, melting snow, but it was clear that neither of them cared a bit. When Addy stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled, Elwood raced back to her, ball clenched in his drooling mouth, and then danced away as she tried to grab it from him.

“Elwood, come here! Here! You silly dog!” she shouted at him. She chased him for a few steps and then stopped. “Come! I can’t throw it for you if you won’t give it back.” The dog slinked toward her, teasing in his offer to hand over the ball, and then leapt away again as she stooped for it. Then he spotted Spencer and galloped over to him, barking around a mouthful of ball all the way.

Elwood skidded to a halt at his feet and promptly dropped the ball. Spencer bent over and ruffled the dog’s wet fur, thumping him lightly on the sides a couple times in praise.

“Good dog.”

“Traitor.” She was grinning at him as she jogged over, even as she stuck her tongue out at the dog. “I’ve chased him for a good half mile every time before he lets me throw the ball.”

Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, and dark curls rioted from under the edge of her knit cap. Her eyes squinted until she shaded them from the glare of sunlight reflecting off snow, and when she knelt down in the muck and hugged his goofy, drooling dog, Spencer didn’t think she had ever looked sexier.

“Down, boy.” The words were directed as much to himself as to the dog when Elwood jumped up and planted two wet paws on his chest.

“Gorgeous day, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Your throw.” She glanced down at the ball resting next to his boot.

He scooped it up and tossed it to her, the dog’s tail thumping him in the legs in anticipation of another run.

“Be my guest.”

She whipped it high and long with a pitcher’s arm that told him she’d spent hours on a baseball field as a kid.

“Nice arm.” She cocked her head at him, still grinning. He decided she could do with a little teasing. “At least you don’t throw like a girl.”

“Little League All-Star Pitcher, three years running,” she said and took off sprinting after the dog. And just like that, they were back to being friends again. If he occasionally caught her eyeing him the way she’d gauge a scale in the produce department of a supermarket, trying to figure out if she had bagged too much or not enough, he ignored it and threw the ball for Elwood again.

Back at the house, they ate lunch together, devouring sandwiches while standing in the kitchen, too hungry to head for a table. Then they separated to their own pursuits, Addy to work on the detailed plan of the house she’d begun drawing up in her spare time and Spencer to the never-ending review of documents that flowed over his desk. But not before they both casually mentioned that they’d probably be hungry for dinner around seven.

Dinner was a pizza delivered with a Mason-Dixon Line split of toppings, all the meats on one side, all the veggies on the other. Addy dug into her sausage-, pepperoni-and ham-encrusted pizza, eyeing his green peppers, olives, tomatoes and mushrooms dubiously.
The Maltese Falcon
was playing on the public television station.

“Whatever floats your boat,” she said and settled into her corner of the couch with a napkin in her lap.

The next morning, they took Elwood for a long walk along the frozen lakeshore and chatted amiably about their upcoming weeks. When Maxie showed up that afternoon, Sarah in tow and protesting loudly about the interruption of her study time, Spencer said hello and then ducked into the office off his bedroom, leaving the women to themselves as Addy showed them around the house. The sound of their laughter and conversation sometimes reached him through the walls and he surprised himself by finding the noise charming rather than disruptive.

A tap on his door signaled a polite interruption.

“Sorry to bother,” Addy said as she stuck her head in the room. “Do we have a step stool?”

“No bother. What for?”

She grinned and ducked her head a little.

“I showed my sisters the trapdoor to the attic and we’re all dying to see what’s up there.” She shrugged and looked sheepish. “I think Maxie hopes we’ll find some kind of long-lost treasure.”

He leaned back from his desk and stretched hugely. “Come on, ’fess up,” he said through a sudden, jaw-cracking yawn. “You’re hoping for it, too.”

She pursed her lips, then gave it up and shrugged, laughing. “You never know what you’ll find unless you look.”

“Indeed.”

He scraped her head to toe with one scorching glance and had the pleasure of watching her blush.

“Back of the pantry door. It’s hanging, folded up.”

Her quick escape from the room left him grinning as he turned back to the drily written documents on his desk. Five minutes later, when the chatter from the hall transformed into shrieks and shouts leaking through the ceiling above his head, Spencer gave up pretending that he didn’t want to join them in their discoveries and went in search of the three sisters.

The rickety wooden ladder that hung unfolded from the open trapdoor looked ancient in design and dust, but seemed sturdy enough when he shook it on its hinges. He knew the sisters had made it successfully up, could hear them dragging around what sounded like enormous pieces of furniture, but he was twice the size of any one of them. Hoping he wasn’t going to end up breaking his neck, he set one foot on the first tread and started to climb.

Poking his head into the attic at last, he sneezed immediately. Great buffalo clouds of dust were roaming, awakened by the zeal with which Maxie, Sarah and Addy rummaged in a metropolis of stacked boxes and trunks.

Looking up from where she knelt over a box of purely awful nylon cardigans from the fifties, Addy caught sight of Spencer eyeing them.

Like an orderly at a mental hospital, debating whether it was safe to approach a bunch of inmates gone on a rampage, she thought, and called out to him.

“It’s safe, I promise. Just don’t stand still and drape a sheet over yourself or Maxie may attack.”

“Hey!” Her baby sister popped up from behind a drunken pile of small, round boxes. Perched on her short, dusty curls, a Jackie O. pillbox hat complete with veil tilted precariously on top of an emerald-green silk turban. “If he’s not a hatbox, he’s safe.”

Spencer finished his climb into the attic and made his way through the maze to where Addy knelt.

“And the carnage begins.”

“Yup. God, look at these, they’re awful.” She held up a sweater that felt like knitted Teflon and had enormous yellow flowers appliquéd over a burnt orange background. “Indestructible, I bet. This cardigan will still be around when humans have vanished from the face of the earth. Unfortunately.”

He knelt down next to her, ran a hand over the next sweater in the box and grimaced at the texture. “Found any buried treasure yet?”

“Not exactly.” She smiled at him and then sneezed. He followed suit two seconds later. Dust swirled. “Maxie’s in rapture over the hats, but most of the rest seems to be decades of canceled checks and receipts. Interesting to a sociologist, I’m sure, but not so much for us ordinary humans hoping for nineteenth-century ball gowns or ribbon-tied bundles of old love letters.”

“Too bad.”

She started to stand up, accepted his helping hand to pull her upright, even though her ankle wasn’t bothering her these days. “Well, I don’t think Great-Aunt Adeline was much of the love-letter type.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“The love-letter type?” Her hand still rested in his. He hadn’t let go, and she couldn’t seem to find the urge to pull away, even though she knew she was smudging him with grit and dirt.

“I don’t know. No one’s ever written me a love letter before. At least, not since sixth grade.” Her sisters were only ten feet away, but it felt as if she were alone in the dimly lit, slope-ceilinged room with him. She thought of the small stack of note cards hidden away in her sock drawer, then shrugged. “I like to think I would be.”

“Interesting.” His thumb was rubbing over the ridge of her knuckles, until he suddenly dropped her hand and walked away. Stopping at the top of the ladder in the floor, he called out, “Lunchtime, ladies. Any requests for sandwiches from the deli?”

As her sisters shouted out their orders and thanks, Addy stood there squinting with narrowed eyes at Spencer, who ignored her.

Interesting?

The man starts a conversation about love letters, decides it’s
interesting
that she might be the love-letter type and then just walks coolly away and thinks about lunch?

He was definitely trying to drive her insane.

Sarah popped out from behind a hidden branch of the maze, lugging a six-foot-tall tarnished silver birdcage on a stand behind her.

“Look at this! Isn’t the wirework beautiful?”

“Beautiful.” Addy’s voice was steamroller flat. When Sarah cocked her head to one side and gave her a quizzical look, she shook off her immobility and stepped over the box at her feet to her sister. She put some life back in her words. “Really, it’s gorgeous. Why don’t we try to bring it downstairs and see if we can clean it up?”

Putting all thought of love letters from her mind, she spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying her sisters’ company, pulling Sarah aside to tell her how much she was enjoying
Pride and Prejudice
and getting her next recommendation at the same time. When the light began fading from the sky, they hit the showers, a sister in each guest room. Being much the same size, Sarah and Maxie raided Addy’s closet for clean clothes to wear to their mother’s for dinner.

Spencer joined them, of course, and the weekend ended quietly with him following Addy up to the second floor, back at home, and heading right past her to his bedroom. He turned at the door for a minute, smiled at her where she stood at the top of the stairs and said good-night.

The door closed behind him and she wondered why she felt as if she was missing something. She went to bed and had troubled dreams of incompleteness and Elizabeth Bennet looking for a vanished Mr. Darcy, whose pride she had wounded through an insistence on her own misguided perception of him.

Swearing off nineteenth-century romance novels when she woke in the morning, she began her day determined to be thankful for this newfound sense of friendship with Spencer and leave it at that. And indeed her days fell into an easy pattern of long hours at the office, with the occasional shared evening meal with Spencer at home. Some days, their busy
schedules meant they didn’t see each other, but they both continued in the unspoken but now comfortable habit of leaving each other little notes. He asked her if she could let the dog out when he knew he’d be staying late at the office. She offered him a choice of blow-’em-up action or slapstick comedy when she decided to rent a movie for the evening.

And through it all, even through late-night movie marathons that ended with them both asleep on the couch until one woke the other and they stumbled off to bed, Spencer never made a move in her direction. The hum of sexual tension could still be felt far below the surface, but she might as well have been his best buddy for all he showed his awareness of it.

Addy told herself to be glad. He was only doing what she’d asked of him and it was probably for the best that she didn’t get more tangled up with this man who would be gone by summer’s end.

Then she called herself a fool for not believing a word of her own lecture.