Triple treat (12 page)

"Is—is there something wrong?'* she asked tentatively.

"I came over here to ask you that question." Tyler couldn't take his eyes from her.

She was wearing a short little robe of blue silky material that matched and enhanced her already-too-entrancing blue eyes. The robe was belted with a thin blue sash whose knot did not look all that sturdy. One swift pull and the knot would be history; the robe would fall open, exposing her to him. Tyler wondered what she was wearing under it. He wondered why and how he managed to keep catching her in nightclothes. Nightclothes that were invariably modest and unrevealing yet stimulated his imagination and his hormones to raging levels. It was an additional torment—just what he didn't need!—in this ongoing look-and-don't-touch game of theirs.

"This place is lit up like a Christmas tree," he said thickly. "You have every light in the place on."

"Not every light," Carrie countered. "The babies' room is dark. They're sleeping."

She fiddled with the sash of her robe while Tyler watched closely. Was the knot loosening? He peered hopefully.

Carrie felt the knot of her tie belt coming undone and quickly tightened it. Tyler was staring at her with those enigmatic green eyes of his. She had to remind herself to exhale.

"Do you want to come in?" she asked at last, her voice soft and a little uncertain.

Seven

Tyler did not want to come inside. Clearly, nothing was wrong here. He should go home and get some sleep and let Carrie get on with whatever it was she was doing at this hour. She certainly had enough light to do it by.

Instead he stepped inside, gripped by an ironic sense of the inevitable. It was as if he were a metal filing and she were a magnet. He was drawn to her, so attracted that he couldn't pull away. A humbling admission, particularly after tonight's fiasco with Gwenda. Worse, his traitorous body was tightening with unmistakable anticipation. The virile response which had defied Gwenda's amorous advances had been achieved effortlessly by merely looking at Carrie. Tyler broke into a sweat, and it wasn't due entirely to the lack of air-conditioning.

"What's going on, Carrie?" he asked roughly. "Why are you still up? It's three—"

"I know what time it is," Carrie interrupted. "I couldn't sleep, so I—"

"Put on every light, except in the children's room?" His voice deepened. "What's the matter, Carrie?"

"I have a bad, bad case of the creeps," Carrie said. She headed toward the kitchen and Tyler followed her, watching her open the old-fashioned wooden bread box that sat on the counter.

She took out a book. "I put this in here because even the sight of it bothers me," she confessed sheepishly. "Ben said it was a thriller. A real page-turner, he called it. I started to read it after I put the kids to bed and it scared me so much I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even turn off the lights."

Carrie looked at the cover and shuddered. "I'm not usually the nervous type, but this—" She gazed up at Tyler, her blue eyes wide. "It's about a brilliant, sadistic serial killer who breaks into houses at night and—"

"Just the sort of thing a young single mother who lives alone ought to read at bedtime," Tyler cut in caustically, frowning his disapproval. "It doesn't surprise me that it's on brother Ben's recommended reading list, though. After all, his other leisure-time activities include vandalizing classic cars."

Carrie frowned. "I'd rather not talk about that."

"You'd prefer to return to our earlier topic? That would be homicidal psychopaths. Makes brother Ben seem downright wholesome, doesn't it?"

Tyler took the book from her, glanced at the sinister cover and the blurb that promised "horrific terror and spine-chilling suspense." He threw the book into the trash can with a dramatic flourish. "I suggest you switch to romance novels, Carrie. There is a wallfull to choose from at any Tremaine bookstore. They won't keep you up at night."

"Sometimes they do," Carrie said frankly. "For entirely different reasons, though."

Tyler arched his brows. "Horniness rather than horrific terror?"

"But you're wide awake, just the same."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Tyler laughed shortly. "At this point, I think I'd prefer horrific terror. Maybe I should retrieve that book from the trash. The spine-chilling suspense might take my mind off... other things."

"Didn't your date cooperate tonight?" Carrie feigned sympathy that she did not fed, trying hard to ignore a piercing stab of jealousy.

Tyler removed his coat and draped it over the chair. He loosened his tie, unfastened the top buttons of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves to his elbows. Carrie watched him silently, trying to anticipate his next move, wondering how she could manage to stay cool and calm when her nerves were already in a heightened, jangled state.

"May I have something to drink?" he asked politely.

Carrie stared at him. As a highly anticipated next move, his request was ridiculously anticlimactic. "Of course. What would you like?"

"Anything as long as it's cold. I'm starting to dehydrate. It's about a hundred degrees in here tonight."

"I closed all the windows and bolted them," she admitted.

"Let me guess—the killer in the story gained entry through his victims' open windows."

Carrie nodded. "He took an open window as a sign that he was welcome to come in."

"Hmm, kind of like Dracula, but not as classy without the cape, fangs and alternative bat identity."

"Ifs not funny." Carrie shivered. "Fll never feel safe opening another window unless I live in a high-rise on the twentieth floor."

She poured Tyler a glass of lemonade loaded with ice cubes, then poured one for herself. They sat down at the kitchen table. "How did you know I had a date tonight?" he asked curiously.

"By what you're wearing. You look like prime date material."

"Somehow I don't think my date tonight would agree/ ' He took a long drink of the lemonade. "Gwenda—that's the name of my unfortunate date—was quite solicitous at the end, however. She kindly pointed out that my problem was probably temporary and due to stress and that I shouldn't let it drive me to do anything foolish." He felt his sense of humor, temporarily obliterated by the night's events, beginning to return.

Carrie looked mystified. "What problem?"

"Gwenda supplied me with the number of a suicide hotline. Just in case," Tyler continued dryly. "She said she knows how hard men take such things. I know she meant well, but hard was not a particularly tactful choice of words."

Carrie's jaw dropped. "You mean you didn't...you couldn't..." She lifted her hand to her mouth.

"If you're smiling, I swear I'll pour the contents of this glass, including the ice cubes, down the back of your robe."

"I'm not smiling," Carrie said, trying to rearrange her lips so that she wasn't. "Gwenda's right, you know. We learned in nursing school that it's not uncommon for men to experience a temporary., .that—uh—there are many different factors that might cause..."

"There is no problem, not with me," Tyler growled. "Come over here and see, if you don't believe me. Better yet, come over here and feel."

"I believe you," Carrie said quickly. "You've never displayed any evidence of a—a—problem around me."

"And that, my friend, is an entirely different problem with ramifications all its own. Why, for example, do you turn me on while I'm sitting here drinking sickeningly sweet lemonade in a stifling kitchen discussing serial killers while Gwenda—in a setting made for romance—completely turned me off?"

Carrie felt a warm glow spread through her. "Am I supposed to answer that or is it simply a rhetorical question?"

"What it is, is some sort of weird cosmic joke, and I think it's being played on me."

Carrie smiled at him, that incomparable smile of hers that lighted her face and made her blue eyes shine with jewel-like brilliance. Tyler gazed raptly at her. Her smiled seemed to touch his soul in some deep recess that had never before been reached.

They both looked away at the same time, breaking their gaze but not the warm, intangible bond that seemed to connect them.

"Is the lemonade really sickeningly sweet?" Carrie asked solicitously. "If you'd rather have something else—"

"Oh, I'd rather have something else, all right." Tyler stretched his legs full-length under the table and his knees touched hers.

Carrie did not move. She refused to behave like a skittish virgin, especially after he'd already caught her acting like a high-strung scaredy-cat, spooked by her own imagination.

"But you won't give me what I'd rather have," Tyler drawled. "Will you, Carrie?"

"Not unless it involves something liquid in a glass."

"I figured as much." Tyler drained the contents of his glass and stood up. "If I leave now, are you going to be able to get to sleep or are you going to lie in bed frozen with fear, listening for a maniac trying to jimmy your windows open?"

Carrie winced. She'd been doing exactly that until she couldn't stand it anymore and had gotten up and turned on all the lights, deciding that it was a perfect time to do all those household chores she hadn't had a chance to do during normal waking hours.

"Your face and your eyes are very expressive," Tyler said. "Or else my people-reading skills are particularly acute tonight. You'd like me to stay."

"Tyler, we've been through all this before." Carrie sighed. "I can't go to bed with you."

1 'Honey, you couldn't pay me to spend the night in that unair-conditioned sweatbox you call your bedroom. Fll bunk with the triplets in the only habitable room in the house. Just give me a pillow and I'll sleep on their floor/*

"Oh, I couldn't possibly let you—"

He took her hand and dragged her from the kitchen, flicking off the light as they left the room. "It won't be a first. I've spent my share of nights sacked out on the old fraternity house floor during my college years. And heat bothers me much more than the lack of a mattress."

Though a fan oscillated valiantly, her bedroom was as intolerably stuffy as he'd expected. Tyler escorted her into it, staying just long enough to collect the quilt and pillow that she gave him. Sleuth, the big striped tabby, was sprawled across her bed and didn't stir when Carrie slipped between the sheets.

Another first, Tyler mused. This was certainly the night for them. The pleasure of his company in bed had been rejected in favor of a cat's. He slipped quietly into the nursery and spread the quilt on the floor. The room was blessedly cool and dark, except for the dim glow of a small star-shaped night-light plugged into the wall socket.

Before he lay down, Tyler walked to each crib and peered at the sleeping child within. Emily was on her tummy, all tangled up in a pink blanket, Dylan lay on his left side, his small arms wrapped around a rather bedraggled plush lamb, and Franklin was flat on his back, his thumb in his mouth. They looked so small, so innocent. Three babies, helpless and dependent. And the one all three depended on was their mother, their only parent. Carrie.

Tyler closed his eyes and visualized Carrie in her own bed, just a door away. She looked too young to be the mother of three children; she was small and soft, and when she batted those big blue eyes of hers, she looked as innocent as her little daughter. But Carrie was not helpless or dependent.

Quite the contrary. The lady could take care of herself and her own, she'd made that quite clear*

So what was he doing here, sacked out on the nursery floor, while she cuddled with her cat in the room next door? Carrie hadn't asked him to stay but he knew that she'd wanted him to. She had allowed herself to depend on him. Tonight, she had needed him. And what, he mused, had he found so irresistibly appealing about that?

He thought about it as he stripped to his boxer shorts, tossing his clothes onto the small plastic chair near the wall. People often wanted and needed things, both tangible and intangible, from him because he was Tyler Tremaine and he had all the trappings and influence and power of the Tremaine name and wealth behind him.

In his personal life, the same held true. Women wanted to be seen with him because of who he was and where he could take them, for the entries he could provide. He knew he had a handsome face and a good body; he'd also been complimented on his charm. But he never kidded himself about the power of the name Tremaine. With it, he could look like a troll and have the personality of a fanatical terrorist, but his popularity wouldn't suffer a bit.

But he couldn't remember anyone ever wanting him, just him. Tyler, shorn of the Tremaine and all that his surname entailed. Not until tonight.

Being here tonight had nothing to do with being a Tremaine. Tonight he was simply a man whose presence ensured a young mother peace of mind against the demons that her idiot brother's choice of reading material had inspired. Tonight, the act of being was enough. He wasn't wanted or needed for favors, deals, sex or money. It was enough that he was simply here, lying on the floor. Just being.

Through the years, he had passed through many different stages and phases; Tyler vaguely recalled some of them as he stared at the three cribs surrounding him. He decided

this current phase of his was the most inexplicable and unfathomable by far. And he fervently hoped it was a very temporary one.

"Uh-oh!"

The syllables, loud and distinct, penetrated Tyler's consciousness, jerking him awake. He opened his eyes just in time to see a blue toy pig flying out of the crib to his left.

"Uh-oh!" Franklin called again. The toddler was standing up in his crib, beaming down at Tyler. Having hurled the pig, he tossed out a bright red teddy bear.

Tyler sat up. "Good morning to you, too." He tossed the pig and the bear back into Franklin's crib. The little boy laughed heartily and threw them back, along with every other stuffed occupant of his crib. There seemed to be an astonishing number of them. Tyler kept throwing the stuffed animals back until he realized that this was a game with no signs of ending.

By this time, Franklin's boisterous laughter had awakened Dylan and Emily. They both stood in their respective cribs, watching the fun. When the green lamb came sailing out of Dylan's crib, Tyler realized that unless he called an immediate halt, he was going to be inundated with every single toy the triplets could get their busy little hands on.