“The simple truth is that you don’t fit into my future. At least, not in a romantic way. I’d like to think of you as a friend. A very platonic friend.”
The corners of his mouth tightened almost imperceptibly, and his brown eyes darkened. “I’d like to think of you as a friend. I’d also like to think of you as a lover.”
She pressed her lips together. “You’re not cooperating.”
He unfolded his arms and walked toward her. “Nope.”
She edged around the table. “How dare you just disregard my feelings? I’ve been totally honest with you.”
“And I’m being honest with you. I want you, Megan Murphy. And I’m going to do everything I can to get you.”
“Holy cow.” Megan knew it was a dumb exclamation, but her mind was the texture of Timmy’s rice pudding. Her body was in a state of hormonal riot, and her mind had completely shut down. No one had ever said anything like that to her before.
“Maybe we should dump the honest approach,” she said, reaching for her fleece-lined jean jacket, slipping her arms into the sleeves while she moved toward the door. “Maybe I should go home now.” If she could, she silently added. Move, legs, move!
Pat closed the space between them. He took her jacket lapels in his hands and gently pressed her against the front door. “Not going to stay for pie?”
“This isn’t fair,” she said thickly. “You have a bogus nose.”
He grinned down at her. “A bogus nose?”
“It’s the sort of perfect little nose you find on the boy next door. It’s…um, innocent. I shouldn’t have paid any attention to it. I should have sized you up by your backside. You have a killer behind.”
A killer behind! he thought. He couldn’t wait to go upstairs and take a look at it in the mirror. All these years he’d assumed his smile was his best feature, and now he found out he had a killer behind. “Say good night, Gracie.”
“Good night,” Megan whispered.
He buttoned her jacket, letting his fingers brush against her breasts as he worked his way down. Then he leaned against her and kissed her deeply and slowly. “See you in the morning,” he said, opening the front door.
Megan took a step backward into the cold night and shivered. The next morning she was going to answer the door fully dressed, she vowed, even if it meant staying up all night or sleeping in her clothes.
Pat rested his forehead against the closed door and decided that the next morning was an eternity away. And it would take him that long to understand Megan Murphy. So many contradictions and secrets, and he was totally enthralled by her.
“Hunter,” he said, “you’re in deep trouble.”
Chapter 4
The historic district of Williamsburg was roughly the shape of a long rectangle. At the west end of the rectangle was a small commercial shopping area, Merchants Square. Just beyond that, at the very end of Duke of Gloucester Street, sat William and Mary College. On Friday afternoon, Megan parked in the Merchants Square parking lot and pulled the collapsible stroller from the back seat of the big maroon car. She set Timmy in it, adjusted his harness, and gave him the new yellow blanket Pat had bought.
During summer months Merchants Square was filled with people browsing through the shops and eating at the outdoor cafés. Today, the sky was winter gray, the wind whipped Megan’s hair across her face, and the tourists browsed at a rather fast pace. The stroller clattered over the brick sidewalk as Megan headed for North Boundary Street.
She tucked her flyaway hair into the collar of her navy pea coat and reread the address she’d written on a slip of paper. Turning left off North Boundary, she began looking for house numbers in a neighborhood of small bungalows, which were rented mostly by students and a few young faculty members. She stopped at a large gray clapboard house and studied the dark windows of the small apartment over the attached garage. A ripple of unidentifiable emotion passed through her. Fear? Anger? Relief? She didn’t know what she felt. She lifted Timmy from the stroller and walked to the outside stairs leading to Tilly Coogan’s apartment.
“What do you think, Tim? You think Mommy’s home?”
Timmy held the blanket tight to his chest. “Mum,” he jabbered.
Megan pressed her lips together. Mum had flown the coop, she thought grimly. Mum was nowhere to be found. She wondered if Timmy knew that. It was only natural that he missed his mother, and yet he seemed like a happy, well-adjusted child. Megan supposed children were flexible at this age. Or perhaps it was a reflection of Timmy’s personality that he could take things in stride.
She knew it was an empty gesture, but she knocked on the apartment door anyway. There was no answer, and she tried the door and the window beside it. Both were locked. There had been no word from Tilly, and Megan was worried. She was beginning to wonder if the girl would return. After caring for Timmy for five days, she couldn’t understand how Tilly could have left him, even for an hour.
She took a stack of letters from the black metal mailbox and riffled through a week’s worth of junk mail. Tilly Coogan must have led a lonely existence in Williamsburg, she thought. No one to take in the mail, and only letters addressed to “Occupant.” She stood looking at the blank window for a few minutes, as if at any time a light might be switched on or the phone would ring. Neither of those things happened, and Megan finally turned with a sigh and walked back to Duke of Gloucester Street.
At five o’clock the twilight was heavy over the darkened buildings. Duke of Gloucester Street was almost empty as the shops closed for the day and the lantern-style streetlights blinked on. Megan paused briefly at Bruton Parish Church and listened to the faint strains of organ music.
Her life had always been very secure, she realized. The little brick house in South River, New Jersey, had been a lot like the practical pig’s house. It had held up against all the huffing and puffing of childhood. Her father had been a policeman. In South River that was as safe as being a shoe salesman, and only slightly more prestigious. Her mother was a housewife, plain and simple. It was what she wanted to do, and she did it well. They’d had a twenty-foot Criscraft in their driveway and a gas barbecue in their back yard. Her father had regarded growing grass as a moral obligation, right up there with church on Sunday and sparkling white socks on Monday.
Megan’s finely arched brows drew together in a frown. She’d spent her whole life worrying about freckles, for crying out loud. This poor kid in the stroller didn’t have a father. He didn’t have a little brick house. He didn’t even have a mother anymore. He had Megan and Pat, and that fact raised frightening questions in Megan’s mind…questions without answers.
She continued past the miller and the silversmith. Anne Hedgeworth stood on the steps of the wigmaker’s shop and waved. She wore a white ruffled pinner, a colonial headdress, and an apricot dress with lace at the shoulders and cuffs. Megan waved back, marveling at how Anne always looked so attractive in the fancier costume of the Williamsburg upper class. At the end of the day, Anne’s stomacher was precisely buttoned and her pinner in place, an accomplishment Megan suspected she could never achieve.
“There’d always be a button popped at my waist from too many sugar cookies,” she told Timmy. “And I can’t manage a mobcap. What would I ever do with a pinner? Anne looks pretty, but I think I’m destined to be a peasant.”
She turned at the alley leading to the Raleigh Tavern Bake Shop. The bakery was closed for the day, and inside two women bustled about, cleaning trays and packing away Sally Lunn loaves and Queen Ann tarts. They saw Megan and Timmy looking in the window and hurried over with a cookie for Timmy.
Getting a free cookie at five o’clock had become a ritual for Timmy and Megan. For the past three days she had taken Timmy for a walk along the quiet streets, gotten a cookie from the women at the bakery, and gone to Patrick’s house to share the evening meal. Usually it was a disaster. Gray chicken cooked in the microwave. French fries that bubbled over and set the stove on fire. Thank goodness they hadn’t burne
d the house down. The night before, they’d made shoe-leather steak. Tonight they were playing it safe with canned chicken noodle soup and bagels with cream cheese.
It was five-thirty when Megan reached Pat’s little white house. The air over Nicholson Street was fragrant with the smoke from blazing fireplaces, and the windows of private residences glowed golden in the encroaching darkness. Usually she was the first to arrive at Pat’s, but today the lights were shining in every window, upstairs and down, and the cheerfully lit house reminded Megan of a giant jack-o’-lantern.
Pat was setting the table. He looked up and grinned when she opened the door. “Hope you’re hungry. I’ve gone to all the trouble of opening a can and slicing a bagel.”
He wore jeans with a hole in the knee and a powder-blue-and-white rugby shirt, and Megan thought he looked much more tasty than the soup he was heating. She took off Timmy’s coat and put him in the high chair. “You’re home early.”
“Had some cancellations.” He filled Timmy’s three-section baby plate with green gook, red gook, and brown lumpy gunk.
Megan grimaced when Pat handed her the spoon. “Do I have to do this?”
“I did it last night.”
“Is that red gook smashed beets?”
“Yup.”
She reluctantly sat opposite Timmy. “This isn’t fair. I hate smashed beets. He had smashed beets for lunch yesterday, and it took two showers to get them out of my hair.”
Pat had a sexy rejoinder to make about showers, but he bit his tongue. He’d been very careful since Tuesday night. He’d declared his intentions, and now he was waiting. Not very patiently, he admitted, but he was determined to give Megan a few days to get to know him. Besides, falling in love was more than sex. It was conversation at the dinner table, confidences shared, support offered, and comfortable quiet times. His mind knew this to be true, but his body was pushing for sex.
Timmy plunged his fist into the red gook, and smashed beets flew everywhere.
Megan didn’t even blink. She’d been through all this before. Beets dripped from her nose and clung to her hair. Her khaki safari shirt looked as if it had measles. Pat turned back to the soup, but Megan could see his shoulders shaking with silent laughter. She smiled stiffly and offered Timmy a spoonful of beans. He ate three spoonfuls and sneezed. Now Megan had green interspersed with red.
Pat wiped the beets off her face. “It’s not so bad, honey. It looks…colorful. Needs a little orange, though. Maybe I should give you some squash.”
“I’m going to give you squash in a minute. I’m going to squash your nose.”
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” he said, trying to look serious. “It’s so cute.”
“Hmmm. You think your nose is cute?”
“I know it’s cute. My whole face is cute. You can’t imagine how awful it is to be thirty years old and still be cute.” He set a plate of carrot sticks and green-pepper slices on the table. “Old ladies stop me in the supermarket and pinch my cheek.”
“That is pretty terrible.”
He munched on a carrot. “I always wanted to be handsome, masculine, enigmatic—but I ended up cute.”
He was all those things, Megan thought. When you got to know him, he was handsome and incredibly masculine and even enigmatic. Cute was just a first impression that later gave way to more complicated qualities. She gave Timmy a bottle of milk and took his supper plate to the sink. She poured herself a glass of orange juice, turned toward the table, and stepped in a splotch of beets.
“Yow!” she shouted as she slid across the floor. She landed with a solid thud on her rear.
Pat studied her now juice-soaked shirt. “I was only kidding about the orange. You really didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”
She pressed her lips together and glared at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked belatedly. “Did you get hurt?”
“I’m fine, but I’m disgusting. I never realized being a mother was so dangerous.”
He gently helped her to her feet, then put his arm around her shoulders and steered her to the stairs. “I have a great idea. How about if you take a nice, hot, relaxing shower, wash all the beans away, get dressed in one of my clean shirts, and I’ll mop up the floor?”
She dug her heels in at the foot of the stairs. “Wait a minute. Is this a trick to get me up to your bedroom in a naked condition?”
“That’s insulting. Boy, that really hurts. What kind of a person do you think I am?”
“Desperate? Perverted? Lecherous?”
“Besides that?”
Megan smiled at him. He wasn’t desperate, perverted, or lecherous. He’d been very nice. For three days now he’d been a perfect gentleman. A little too perfect, she admitted. She missed getting swept off her feet by his passionate kisses. She knew it was all for the best, yet still, it had become a tad frustrating. It was like waiting for an earthquake that never happened. You were relieved, but you were also strangely disappointed.
Ten minutes later, she stepped out of the small upstairs bathroom and admired Pat’s bedroom while she towel-dried her hair. These two rooms occupied the entire top floor of the cottage. The bedroom was directly under the eaves, so that the roof sloped on two sides, and two dormer windows looked out on the street. Window seats had been built into the alcoves, and their chintz teal cushions matched the puffy down quilt on the queen-size cherry-wood four-poster. The upper half of the room was papered in a small, Williamsburg teal-and-cream print. Below the chair rail the walls were painted creamy white. Two large pewter-and-glass chimneyed candlesticks sat on the low cherry dresser.
It was the most romantic bedroom Megan had ever seen. It was a room for loving long into the night, she thought dreamily, until the candles were melted stubs and the lovers were sated and comfortably entwined under the feather quilt. She had such a strong feeling of belonging in the room that the thought of Pat lying under the quilt without her brought a painful lump to her throat.
Dumb, Megan, she told herself. Really dumb. You’re going to let that good, solid brick wall you’ve built around yourself crumble because the guy sleeps in a room with wallpaper and a pineapple bedstead.
Kitchen sounds drifted up to her. The refrigerator opened and closed, spoons clanked on glass bowls, and there was a soft splat followed by an expletive. “What happened?” she called down.
“I dropped a damn egg on the damn floor, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again. I wish you’d get down here. I have something to ask you.”
She put her jeans back on and helped herself to a blue plaid flannel shirt hanging in Pat’s closet. It all felt very intimate, wearing his shirt, using his shower. Downstairs their baby would sleep in his crib by the fireplace. And Pat was making domestic sounds in the kitchen, waiting to ask her something. Lord, what could it be? The Big Question? He’d already told her he wanted her. It was all a little sudden, but sometimes love was like that. Mr. and Mrs. Hunter. Megan Hunter. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was over the edge.
“Are you around the bend?” she asked her reflection. “Mrs. Hunter? Don’t you ever learn?” She stomped down the stairs. “Just because I’m wearing your shirt, don’t think I’m going to marry you.”
He stared at her, blank-faced.
“Wasn’t that what you were going to ask me?”
“No. I was going to ask you to crack the eggs for the gingerbread. I keep making a mess of it.”
She looked at the brown dough in the big bowl on the counter. “Sure, I get all the tough jobs.”
“So why don’t you want to marry me?”
“Nothing personal. I don’t want to marry anyone. I’m a free spirit. I’m the wind. I’m a saucy strumpet.”
He grinned. “Do you know what a strumpet is?”
“Not exactly.”
He whispered the definition in her ear.
“Hmmm,” she said. “Well, I’m not one of those.”
He draped his
arm around her shoulders. “What about it, Windy? Will you crack my eggs?”
“I suppose it’s the least I could do, since you’ve mixed everything else together.”
An hour later, Megan took the last cookie sheet out of the oven and set it on a wire rack. “This isn’t going to work,” she told Pat. “You’ve already eaten half of the cookies. We’ll never get enough for Thanksgiving at this rate.”
“I can’t help it. They’re great. Besides, I’m not the only guilty party.”
She planted her fists on her hips. “I ate one cookie. One!”
“Yes, but you’re wearing half a dozen.”
She examined her shirt. It was caked with cookie dough and smudged with flour. “I’m not a neat cook.”
He tweaked her nose. “You’re an adorable cook.”
So they were back to nose tweaks, she thought, pouting. Fine. “I’m going home.”
He looked disappointed. “I’ll make cocoa and popcorn if you’ll stay awhile longer.”
“I can’t. Tomorrow is Saturday. I have to work tomorrow.” That much was true, but she could have stayed. She was just in a snit because he’d tweaked her on the nose. Men were so fickle. One minute they were slobbering all over you in a fit of passion, and the next thing they didn’t want to marry you. The hell with them.
“Where’s your car?” he asked. “I didn’t see it when I parked in the garage.”
“It’s at Merchants Square. I went to see Tilly’s apartment.”
“She’s not home.” He plunged his hands into his pockets. “I check on her every day.”
Megan glanced over at the little boy sleeping by the fireplace. “What happens if Tilly doesn’t come back?”
Pat leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I’d adopt him, honest to goodness I would, but it’s not that easy. I’m not sure of the law. I think he’ll be made a ward of the state, probably placed in a registered foster home until relatives can be located. Even if I tried to adopt him, it would take a year for the paper work to be done, and I probably wouldn’t get him, because I’m not married.”