“Heard on the weather report that it’s supposed to rain,” he said, looking at the hole in Kate’s roof. “Supposed to get colder, too.”
Kate peered up at the patch of sky showing through the ceiling and groaned. It really wasn’t fair that misfortune had singled her out. She wasn’t such a bad person, she thought. A little disorganized and maybe just a teensy bit self-centered. So she wasn’t such a great neighbor, but hey, she’d been busy. And it wasn’t as if she’d been an awful neighbor. She was quiet most of the time, and she usually parked in her own parking space, and she almost always said hello to him….
The alarm rang on her bedside clock. Simultaneously, an alarm went off in the kitchen. Kate smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Oh, damn!”
Dave reached for the clock. “What’s going on?”
“I’m late!” Kate rushed to her closet and grabbed a garment bag. “That’s my late alarm. I’m awful with time. When the alarms go off it means I have only half an hour to get to the Kennedy Center and dress. Special matinee today. I knew I’d forget!”
She snagged her big leather purse from the dresser and took off at a dead run. She got halfway down the stairs, turned, and popped back into the bedroom. “Dave, can you take care of this for me? And lock up the house when you leave. And thanks for the pizza.”
She was gone. Dave and the insurance man stared out the open bedroom door in silence, unconsciously holding their breath. They resumed breathing at the sound of a car being gunned from the curb.
The insurance man blinked and smiled in amazement. “Is she always like this?”
“Probably.”
By the time Kate returned, it was pouring. She dashed from her car and huddled in the dark alcove of her front door, searching through her purse for her key.
The concert had been followed by a mandatory reception and dinner that had seemed interminable. She’d mentally cracked her knuckles when the consommé was served, tapped her foot relentlessly through the chicken almondine, and bolted down her poached pear in raspberry sauce. When rain had softly pattered against the windows, a variety of emotions had run through her. She’d been relieved that it wasn’t a good night for rapists to go prowling around looking for houses with holes in their roofs, concerned that, in addition to everything else, she now had water damage—and had an undeniable yearning for David Dodd’s no-fail layer cake.
She shivered as rain drizzled down her neck and soaked into the back of her sweats, and she wistfully longed for the black coat the cleaner had destroyed. The coat had been like Little Bear’s porridge. Not too hot, and not too cold. It had always been just right. Not too long, not too short. It had fit her perfectly. And now it was gone… just like her roof. Damn.
She wedged her music case between her leg and the door, protecting it from the elements out of habit. She found the key and let herself into the foyer, for the first time in her life feeling slightly insecure in her own house. Her haven, her sanctum sanatorium was vulnerable. It had been violated by a pod. Whatever that was.
“A pod!” she said aloud. “A big, stupid pod.”
She shook the rain from her hair and apprehensively trudged upstairs, hating the feeling of doom that had descended on her since she’d entered the house. Don’t get paranoid about this, she told herself. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime freak accidents, and now that she’d gotten it out of the way, the coast was clear. She was in good shape for the next hundred years. Still, it was creepy to have something drop out of the sky into your bed.
She switched the light on in her bedroom and pressed her lips together at the sight of the quilt. It was dead. It smelled like wet fowl, and water dripped from the ceiling with a depressing splat onto the soggy lump of torn coverlet and massacred feathers.
Something thumped overhead. Footsteps on her roof. The sound of a heavy object being dragged toward her. She searched for a weapon, finding only a hairbrush, flannel nightgown, empty yogurt cup. In desperation her hand closed around a cut-glass perfume atomizer.
“Whoever’s up on my roof better not come any closer,” she announced, and aimed the atomizer at the hole. “I’ve got Mace.”
David Dodd peeked over the edge and grinned down at her. “That’s not Mace. That’s a perfume atomizer. The best you could do with that is strip me of my masculine body odor.”
“You have to use your imagination.”
“Un-huh.”
She squinted into the darkness of the third floor. “What are you doing up there?”
“Trying to fix your roof. I’d have had it fixed sooner, but I had to drive all over town trying to find a big enough piece of plastic.” He disappeared, and a slab of wooden slats was shoved halfway across the opening.
Kate recognized it as a section of the six-foot-high privacy fence that separated their backyards.
“Hope you don’t mind that I used part of the fence,” he said, inching it into place. “It’s hard to get a lumber delivery on Saturday night.”
He walked around the perimeter of the hole and reached forward to tug the wood into place. Then there was the sound of tarred paper tearing and David Dodd dropped like a stone, through the hole in the roof, through the hole in the second floor ceiling and landed with a whump that knocked the air out of him, flat on his back, spread-eagle on the soaking-wet, smashed-in bed.
Chapter 2
Kate was afraid he was dead. He lay motionless on the bed, eyes closed, his body encased in a yellow slicker, his hands limp in small pools of gray feather water. She felt the breath clog in her throat, felt anguish smothering clear thought.
“Lord, no!” she whispered, rushing to his side, acting on instinct, never noticing the wet mattress she crawled across. She straddled his inert form, tugged at the raincoat zipper, and put her hand to his heart. “Dave!”
He opened his eyes. “Mmm?”
She almost collapsed in relief. “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”
If he was dead, then this had to be heaven, because the Mystery Woman was sitting astride him, her warm hand pressed against his chest, her nifty butt resting on his thighs. Black dots floated in front of his eyes, and he struggled to regulate his breathing.
Kate leaned closer. “Your heart is racing under my hand.”
He gritted his teeth and thought that was nothing compared to what was happening under the center seam of her sweatpants. He firmly grabbed her and lifted her, leaving wet handprints on the sleeves of her shirt.
“I’m okay. I was just stunned for a minute.”
He sat up slowly, flexing his arms and legs, amazed that nothing seemed broken. Tomorrow he’d probably feel like a truck had run over him. Rain drizzled onto the top of his head and dripped off the tip of his nose. He set his mouth in a grim line and narrowed his eyes. “Outta my way, woman. I’ve got a score to settle with this roof.”
“You’re not going back up there.”
“Damn right I’m going back up there. Hell, us hero types don’t let a little thing like a broken back stop us. When there’s a damsel in distress, we go for it. Grab the gusto, full speed ahead, man the torpedoes.”
Kate followed him up to the third floor and unlocked the trapdoor that led to the swing-down stairs and roof access. “Be careful!”
His face lit up. “Would you care if I got hurt?”
“Of course I’d care. I mean, you’re my neighbor.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, uh, you’re a nice person.”
“That’s true.” He leaned toward her. “Anything else?”
Kate pushed the bangs back from her forehead, shifted from foot to foot. He had a terrific voice, she thought. It had turned deep and rumbly, very sexy, very comfortable, very intimate. The sort of voice that made her feel as if she’d known him for a thousand years. The sort of voice that said that as far as he was concerned, she was the only woman on the face of the earth. And his eyes confirmed it. They were frankly admiring and slightly predatory.
“Do you live alo
ne?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Not married?”
“Nope.”
“Engaged?”
“Nope.”
“You aren’t gay, are you?”
His mouth curved at the corners. “No. Want me to take a blood test?”
“Maybe later.”
The husky resonance returned to his voice. “That sounds promising.”
“You shouldn’t get your hopes up. I’m impulsive and emotional—about everything but sex.”
“Sex is serious stuff, huh?”
“You bet.”
“Good. I’m a serious kind of guy.”
Kate smiled. “I know. I could tell that from the literature you select for yourself. You ever read anything besides X-Men?”
“Spider-Man.”
“Is that how you got up on my roof just now? Spider-Man techniques?”
“Our roofs are joined together. I walked from mine to yours.” He sighed. “Speaking of roofs…” He put his foot on the bottom rung of the swing-down stairs. “If I fall through your ceiling again, feel free to stimulate me back to life.”
“You mean like cold water, a slap on the face?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of mouth-to-mouth, loosening my clothes…”
Kate watched him disappear into the darkness and decided he was a little outrageous. She liked that. She was outrageous, too. Outrageous felt comfortable to her.
“What are you doing out there?” she yelled. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’ve got the fence in place. Now all I have to do is cover it with the plastic and put a few bricks around to hold everything down.”
The third floor of Kate’s house was nothing more than a stairwell and one huge room. Sound echoed off the curtainless windows and hardwood floors, and light from the bedroom below splashed in crazy patterns against the bare walls. “This is not a pleasant sight,” Kate said, when Dave returned. “This is… horrible. Like in horror-movie horrible. And my bedroom is even more depressing.”
Dave watched water drip from the edge of his slicker onto his shoes. “I need to get dry. And you need to cheer up. How about we both go over to my house for a while.”
“I don’t know. I feel sort of guilty about leaving my sinking ship.”
He nudged her down two flights of stairs toward the front door. “Your ship isn’t sinking. And it won’t mind being left alone. Trust me. I know about these things.”
“Oh, yeah? How do you know?”
“I’ve been left alone, and I never minded.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Never?”
“Almost never. Actually, I hated it, but that’s because I’m a person, and this is a house, and I don’t think houses mind so much. I suppose you don’t own a raincoat.”
“No. I had this really great black coat, but it got ruined at the cleaners today. I used to have an umbrella somewhere…”
The coat was ruined. What a shame. Dave could hardly keep the smile from spreading across his face. He took his slicker off and wrapped it around her. “Just make a dash for it. My door’s unlocked.”
His house was almost as narrow as hers, but its mood was entirely different. Two forest green wing chairs filled the alcove created by the half-turret facade. A large overstuffed plaid couch had been placed across from the chairs, and a dented copper milk-jug lamp cast warm light around the front room. Embers of a dying fire glowed in the small black marble fireplace. Kate closed her eyes and inhaled. Charred applewood and fresh-baked spice cake.
“Every house in America should smell like this,” she said. “This is Mom’s apple pie.”
“Actually, it’s a generic box mix with two eggs and oil added.”
Kate followed him to the kitchen at the back of the house and sniffed the layer cake cooling on wire racks on the counter. “This smells great. You baked this for me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Are you impressed?”
She picked a crumb from the counter and nibbled it. “Absolutely. You fix roofs, you bake cakes, you feed pizza to distraught women.” She watched him drop a handful of beans into a coffee grinder and add water to the electric coffeemaker. “You grind your own coffee beans.” She plopped into a ladder-back chair. “What else do you do?”
“That’s about it.”
“What sort of job do you have?”
“I’m… between jobs.”
She’d never been between jobs. Music stretched like an invisible continuous thread weaving its way through the fabric of her life. Friends, houses, coats, and cars had come and gone, but her job was constant. Her job was to make music, and to make it perfectly wonderfully. The concept of a worthwhile person being between jobs was difficult for her to grasp.
“Have you been between jobs for very long?” she asked.
“About six months.” Bulldog, he thought grimly. He could see it in her eyes. She was going to sink her teeth into him and hang on until she had him figured out. He imagined she did that with music. She was probably a holy terror. “You’re a musician?”
“Yup.”
“What instrument?”
“Cello.”
He flipped the cake onto a plate and handed Kate a butter knife. “How about if you frost the cake while I take a shower.”
A stab of panic raced through her. “I don’t know how to frost a cake.”
“Do you know how to open a can?” He set a large can of chocolate frosting on the table next to the cake.
“Son of a gun.” She smiled. “What will they think of next?”
He took the slicker from her and hung it on a wall hook. “Your sweats are wet at the cuffs and knees. I’ll throw a dry pair down to you.”
Kate nodded acknowledgment and peeled back the easy-open lid. “This is amazing,” she said. “Look at this—frosting in a can.” She took a big glob of brown gunk on the tip of her knife and swirled it across the cake. “I love it!”
Dave looked at her in amazement. “Haven’t you ever been in a supermarket?”
“Sure. But I never thought to look for frosting in a can. I’m always in such a rush. When I was a kid all I did was practice, practice, practice. I guess my mom made cakes, but I never paid much attention. There weren’t cooking facilities at the conservatory, and when I took up housekeeping with Anatole we had lots of money and bought ready-made cakes. We bought everything ready-made.”
“What does this Anatole person do?”
“Plays the oboe. He’s wonderful.”
Dave raised an eyebrow. “Wonderful across the board? Or wonderful on the oboe?”
Kate slopped more frosting on the cake. “On the oboe. He’s a genius. Of course I’m a genius, too.” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and left a smear of icing traveling down her cheek. “But I’m not as great a genius as Anatole.”
Dave was developing a fast dislike for Anatole. Where’d he get off being a bigger genius than Kate? Dave wanted to make an insulting remark, but he stopped himself. He should think of an intelligent response. Something civilized. “Must have been hard having two geniuses living in the same house.”
“It was bloody awful.” She looked up at Dave with sudden insight. “You know, I didn’t really mind the hysterics and the clashes in personality. I minded the loneliness. We were like ships passing in the night. Separate entities, never really touching, self-absorbed. And it wasn’t any fun.”
Her face lit in a smile that took David Dodd’s breath away.
“Neither of us knew about frosting in a can,” she said.
“Guess there’s all kind of genius,” he said, feeling foolishly happy. His wet shoes squished water onto the kitchen linoleum, and he wondered if anyone else felt the earth shift in its orbit.
Kate opened one eye and directed an oath at the person pounding on her front door. She snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag Dave had loaned her, but the pounding continued. She looked at her watch. Seven-thirty. What idiot was pounding on her door at seven-thirty in the mornin
g? Didn’t they know she was tired? Didn’t they know she’d slept on the living room floor because it had the upgraded rug? The pounding stopped and was replaced by strange scuffling, scratching sounds on her small front porch. Kate sat up in the bag and watched a little old lady inch across the front window. The woman was standing spread-eagle on the wide outdoor window frame, clinging to the raised brickwork, and she was looking in at Kate. She reminded Kate of Piglet when the wind had picked him up and plastered him against Owl’s tree-house window.
“My name’s Elsie Hawkins and I’ve come to see about the room you’ve advertised in the paper,” the women shouted through the glass, “but I’m not going to sleep on no floor. They make everybody sleep on the floor here?”
Kate unzipped the bag and padded barefoot to the foyer. It had stopped raining, and it had turned cold. The wind whipped through her flannel nightgown when she poked her head out the front door. “What are you doing on my window?”
“No one was answering the door, so I thought I’d get up here and take a look at the place.”
Kate crept out onto the porch. “Well, here I am. I’m answering the door. You can get down now.”
“No I can’t. I can’t get down.”
“Wonderful. Okay, I’ll try to give you a hand. Just hang on.” Kate swung a leg over the wrought-iron railing and grabbed the back of the old lady’s coat. “Gotcha! Try to work your way over to me.”
“I’m going to fall.”
“No you’re not. I’ve got hold of you.”
“That’s the problem, you ninny. You’re pulling me off the ledge.” Elsie reached out and grabbed a handful of nightgown in a last-ditch effort to keep her balance, but it was too late. A moment later both women were lying in a heap in an eighteen-year-old azalea bush.
David Dodd stood on the rain-splattered brick sidewalk with a bag of doughnuts in his hand. “If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, I’d never have believed it.”
Kate tugged her nightgown down over her knees and struggled to free herself from the bush. “Where’d you come from? Why do you always arrive after a disaster?”