Trying to ignore the treacherous leap her heart gave at the sight of that enthralling, intimate smile, Julie hastily sat up. “Your friend—Dominic Sandini—he didn’t die,” she told him, wanting to put his mind at ease about that immediately. “They think he’s going to be all right.”
“I heard that.”
“You did?” Julie said cautiously. It occurred to her that he might have heard it on the radio while he was dressing. If not—if he remembered her telling him that—then it was mortifyingly possible he might remember the other things she’d said in those unguarded minutes when she thought he was beyond hearing. She waited, hoping he’d refer to the radio, but he continued watching her with that smile tugging at his lips, and Julie felt her entire body grow warm with embarrassment. “How do you feel?” she asked, hastily standing up.
“Better now. When I woke up, I felt like a potato being baked in its own skin.”
“What? Oh, you mean the bedroom got too hot?”
He nodded. “I kept dreaming I’d died and gone to hell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the fire leaping around me, and I was pretty sure of it.”
“I’m sorry,” Julie said, anxiously searching his face for any sign of lingering ill effects from his exposure to the elements.
“Don’t be sorry. I realized very quickly that I couldn’t really be in hell.”
His light-hearted mood was so infectious and so utterly disarming that she reached up to lay the back of her hand against his forehead to test his body temperature without realizing what she was doing. “How did you know you weren’t in hell?”
“Because,” he said quietly, “part of the time, an angel was hovering over me.”
“You were obviously hallucinating,” she joked.
“Was I?”
This time, there was no mistaking the husky timbre in his voice, and she pulled her hand away from his head, but she couldn’t quite free her gaze from his. “Definitely.”
From the corner of her eye, Julie suddenly noticed that a porcelain duck was turned the wrong way on the mantle beside his shoulder, and she reached out to straighten it, then she rearranged the two smaller ducks beside that one.
“Julie,” he said in a deep, velvety voice that had a dangerous effect on her heart rate, “look at me.” When she turned to look at him, he said with quiet gravity, “Thank you for saving my life.”
Mesmerized by his tone and the expression in his eyes, she had to clear her throat to stop her voice from shaking. “Thank you for trying to save mine.”
Something stirred in the fathomless depths of his eyes, something hot and inviting, and Julie’s pulse tripled even though he didn’t attempt to touch her. Trying to switch the mood to one of safe practicality, she said, “Are you hungry?”
“Why didn’t you leave?” he persisted.
His tone warned her that he wouldn’t allow a change of subject until he’d gotten answers, and she sank down onto the sofa, but she looked at the centerpiece on the table because she couldn’t quite meet his searching gaze. “I couldn’t leave you out there to die, not when you’d risked your life thinking I’d drowned.” She noticed that two of the white silk magnolias in the centerpiece were bent at awkward angles and she obeyed the automatic impulse to lean forward and fix them.
“Then why didn’t you leave after you got me back here and into bed?”
Julie felt as if she were wandering through a field filled with land mines. Even if she had the courage to look at him and blurt out exactly how she felt about him, she couldn’t be certain the announcement wouldn’t blow up in her face. “For one thing, I honestly didn’t think of it, and besides,” she added on a note of relieved inspiration, “I didn’t know where the car keys were!”
“They were in my pants pocket—the pants you took off me.”
“Actually, I . . . I didn’t think of looking for the car keys. I suppose I was simply too worried about you to think clearly.”
“Don’t you find that a little odd given the circumstances that brought you here?”
Julie leaned forward and picked up a magazine that was lying half off the table and laid it fanlike atop the other two, then she moved the crystal bowl of silk flowers two inches to the left, to the precise center of the table. “Everything has seemed pretty odd for three days,” she hedged cautiously. “I can’t begin to guess what would be normal behavior in these circumstances.” Standing up, she began straightening the throw pillows she’d disarranged during her nap. She was bending down to pick one up from the carpet when he said in a laughter-tinged voice, “That’s a habit you have, isn’t it—straightening things out when you feel uneasy?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I’m just a very tidy person.” She stood up and looked at him, and her composure slipped a notch toward laughter. His brows were raised in mocking challenge and his eyes were gleaming with amused fascination. “All right,” she said with a helpless laugh, “I admit it. It is a nervous habit.” As she finished putting the pillow where it belonged, she added with a rueful smile, “Once, when I was nervous about failing an exam in college, I reorganized everything in the attic, then I alphabetized all my brothers’ stereo records and my mother’s recipes.”
His eyes laughed at her story, but his voice was puzzled and solemn. “Am I doing something that makes you nervous?”
Julie gaped at him in stunned laughter, then she said with a lame attempt at severity, “You’ve been doing things that make me extremely nervous for three solid days!”
Despite her censorious tone, the way she was looking at him filled Zack with poignant tenderness: There was no trace of fear or suspicion or revulsion or hatred anywhere on her lovely, expressive face, and it seemed like a lifetime since anyone had looked at him like this. His own lawyers hadn’t really believed he was innocent. Julie did. He’d have known it just by looking at her, but the memory of her words at the stream, the way her voice had broken when she said them, made it a thousand times more meaningful: “Remember when you said you wanted someone to believe that you’re innocent? I didn’t completely believe you then, but I do now. I swear it! I know you didn’t kill anyone.”
She could have left him to die at the stream, or if that was unthinkable to a minister’s daughter, she could have gotten him back here, then taken the car and called the police from the nearest phone. But she hadn’t. Because she really believed he was innocent. Zack wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her how much that meant to him; he wanted to bask in the warmth of her smile and hear her infectious peal of laughter again. Most of all, he wanted to feel her mouth on his, to kiss her and caress her until they were both wild, and then to thank her for the gift of her trust with his body. Because that was the only thing he had to give her.
He knew she sensed a change in their relationship and for some incomprehensible reason, it was making her more nervous than she’d been when he was holding a gun on her. He knew that just as surely as he knew they were going to make love tonight and that she wanted to almost as much as he did.
Julie waited for him to say something or to laugh at her last jibe, and when he didn’t, she stepped back and gestured toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” she asked for the second time.
He nodded slowly, and her hand stilled at the husky intimacy she thought she heard in his voice. “Starved.”
Julie told herself very firmly that he had not deliberately chosen that particular word because it had been used during their quarrel last night in a sexual context. Trying to look innocent of all such thoughts, she said very politely, “What would you like?”
“What are you offering?” he countered, playing verbal chess with her with such ease that Julie wasn’t at all certain if all the double meanings to their exchange existed only in her fevered imagination.
“I was offering food, of course.”
“Of course,” he solemnly agreed, but his eyes were glinting with amusement.
“Stew, to be specific.”
“It’s important to be specific.”
>
Julie elected to make a strategic retreat from the strangely charged conversation and began backing away toward the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. “I’ll put out the dinner things and serve the stew over there.”
“Let’s eat here by the fire instead,” he said, his voice like a soft caress. “It’s cozier.”
Cozier . . . Julie’s mouth went dry. In the kitchen, she worked with outward efficiency, but her hands were trembling so hard she could hardly ladle the thick stew into bowls. From the corner of her eye, she saw him walk over to the stereo and flip through the stacks of CDs, loading them into the revolving tray; a moment later, Barbra Streisand’s lilting voice filled the room. Of all the CDs in the cabinet that ranged from Elton John to jazz, he’d picked Streisand.
Cozier.
The word swirled around in her brain; she reached for two napkins, put them on the tray, and then, with her back to the living room, Julie braced her palms on the counter top and drew a long, steadying breath. Cozier. By his definition, she knew perfectly well that meant “more conducive to intimacy.” “Romantic.” She knew it, just as clearly as she knew that the situation between them had altered irreversibly from the moment she chose to stay here with him rather than leaving him at the creek or bringing him here and calling the police. He knew it, too. She could see the evidence: There was a new softness in his eyes when he looked at her and a smiling tenderness in his voice, and they were both utterly shattering to her self-control. Julie straightened and shook her head at her foolish, futile attempt to deceive herself. There was nothing left of her self-control, no more arguments that mattered, nowhere she could go to hide from the truth.
The truth was that she wanted him. And he wanted her. They both knew it.
She put silverware on the tray, slanted another glance at him over her shoulder, and hastily looked away. He was sitting on the sofa, his arms spread out across the back of it, his foot propped casually atop the opposite knee, and he was watching her—relaxed, indulgent, and sexy. He wasn’t going to rush her, and he wasn’t a bit nervous either, but then he’d undoubtedly made love thousands of times with hundreds of women—all of whom were much prettier and unquestionably more experienced than she was.
Julie stifled a compulsive urge to start reorganizing the kitchen drawers.
Zack watched her return to the sofa and, bending down, place the tray on the table, her movements graceful and uncertain, like a frightened gazelle. Firelight gleamed on her heavy chestnut hair as it spilled forward over her shoulders from a single side part; it glowed on her soft skin as she arranged the place mats and bowls. Her long, sooty lashes cast fan-shaped shadows on her smooth cheeks, and he noticed for the first time that she had beautiful hands, the fingers slender, nails long and tapered. He had a sudden poignant memory of those hands clasping his face to her at the stream as she rocked him in her arms and pleaded with him to get up. At the time, it had seemed like a dream in which he had merely been an uninvolved spectator, but later, after he staggered into bed, his recollections were clearer. He remembered her hands smoothing blankets over him, the frantic worry in her lovely voice . . . As he looked at her now, he marveled anew at the strange aura of innocence about her, then he suppressed a puzzled smile at the realization that, for some reason, Julie was assiduously avoiding his eyes. For the last three days she had opposed, defied, and challenged him; today, she had outwitted him and then saved his life. And yet, for all her dauntless courage and her spunk, she was amazingly shy, now that the hostilities between them were over. “I’ll get some wine,” he said, and before she could decline he got up and returned with a bottle and two stemmed glasses.
“I didn’t poison it,” he remarked a few minutes later when he saw her reach automatically for the glass then yank her hand away.
“I didn’t think you did,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. She picked up the glass and drank some, and Zack noticed that her hand was shaking. She was uneasy about going to bed with him, he decided; she knew he hadn’t been near a woman in five years. She was probably worried that he was going to jump on her the moment they were done with their meal or that once they started making love, he’d lose control and finish in two minutes. Zack didn’t know why she should be concerned about all that; if anyone should be worried about his ability to pleasurably prolong the act and perform well after five years abstinence, it was him.
And he was.
He decided to try to reassure her by engaging her in some sort of pleasant, casual conversation. Mentally, he rifled through those topics of immediate interest to him and reluctantly discarded the subject of her beautiful body, her gorgeous eyes, and—most reluctantly of all—her whispered statement at the stream that she wanted to go to bed with him. The last reminded him of the other things she’d said to him in the bedroom this afternoon, when he hadn’t been able to shake off his numb paralysis and respond. Now, he was almost certain he hadn’t been meant to hear most of them. Or else he’d only imagined some of them. He wished she’d talk about her students; he loved her stories. He was about to try to get her to talk about them, when he realized she was giving him an odd, curious look. “What?” he asked.
“I was wondering,” she said, “that day—at the restaurant —did I really have a flat tire?”
Zack struggled to suppress his guilty smile. “You saw it with your own eyes.”
“Are you saying that I ran over a nail or something and didn’t realize my tire was going flat?”
“I wouldn’t say it happened exactly like that.” He was pretty certain she suspected him now, but her face was so marvelously bland that he had no idea if she was playing cat and mouse with him or not.
“How would you say it happened?”
“I’d say that the side of your tire probably came into sudden contact with a sharp, pointed object.”
Finished with her stew, she leaned back and fixed him with a level look that would have shamed an instant confession and apology out of any recalcitrant eight-year-old male. He could almost see her, standing outside her classroom with a wrongdoer, looking at him with exactly that same expression. “A sharp, pointed object?” she speculated, lifting her brows. “Like a knife?”
“Like a knife,” Zack confirmed, trying desperately to keep his face straight.
“Your knife?”
“Mine.” With an impenitent grin, he added in a boyish chant, “I’m sorry, Miss Mathison.”
She didn’t miss a beat. Raising her brows, she said drolly, “I’ll expect you to fix that tire, Zack.”
The only thing that quelled his shout of laughter was the sweet shock of hearing her finally say his name. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. It was unbelievable, Zack thought, his entire life was in dire chaos, and all he wanted to do was burst out laughing and drag her into his arms. “I don’t have to write a three-page essay on why I shouldn’t have done it, do I?” he asked, watching her huge indigo eyes shimmer with answering amusement as she looked pointedly at the bowl he’d just pushed aside. “No,” she said, “but you’re on KP tonight.”
“Aw, gee!” he replied, but he stood up obediently and picked up his bowl. As he reached for hers, he added, “You’re mean, Miss Mathison!”
To which she firmly replied, “No whining, please.”
Zack couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing, turned his head, and surprised her with a quick kiss on her forehead. “Thank you,” he whispered, choking back a chuckle at her flustered expression.
“For what?”
He sobered, holding her gaze. “For making me laugh. For staying here and not turning me in. For being brave and funny and incredibly lovely in that red kimono. And for making me a wonderful meal.” He chucked her under the chin to lighten the mood a split second before he realized the expression in her shining eyes wasn’t embarrassment.
“I’ll help you,” she said, starting to stand.
Zack put his hand on her shoulder. “Stay there and enjoy the fire and the rest of your wine.”
> Too tense to sit still, waiting to see what would happen next, no, when it was going to happen, Julie got up and walked over to the windows. Leaning her shoulder against the pane, she gazed out at the spectacular panorama of snowcovered mountaintops gleaming in the moonlight. In the kitchen, Zack touched the rheostat on the wall, dimming the lights on the beams above the living room to a mellow glow. “You’ll be able to see outside better that way,” he explained when she threw a questioning look over her shoulder at him. And, Julie thought, it was also much cozier with only the dimmed lights and the glow from the fireplace to illuminate the room. Very cozy and very romantic, especially with the music playing on the stereo.
31
ZACK SAW HER SHOULDERS STIFFEN imperceptibly when he came up behind her at the windows, and her unpredictable reactions to him began to genuinely unnerve him. Rather than turning her into his arms and kissing her, which was what he would have done if she were any other woman he’d known, he hit on a more subtle method of getting her where he wanted her to be. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he met her gaze in the window, tipped his head toward the stereo, and said with teasing formality, “May I have the next dance, Miss Mathison?”
She turned, her enchanting smile aglow with surprise, and Zack’s spirits soared crazily simply because die was pleased. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets to keep from touching her and said with a wry grin, “The last time I asked a teacher to dance, I was more properly dressed for the occasion in a white shirt, maroon tie, and my favorite navy blue suit. She turned me down though.”
“Really? Why?”
“She probably thought I was too short for her.”
Julie smiled because he was easily 6’2” tall, and she thought he was either joking or else the woman had been a giant. “Were you really shorter than she was?”