“Does that matter?”
She sighed, irritated. “I’ve had calls from four high school quarterbacks this week, and I didn’t like any of their questions.”
“High school is definitely behind me,” he responded, then asked in spite of himself, “What did they ask you?”
Clearly aggrieved, she said, “Well, one of them asked if I like leather. The other questions weren’t repeatable.”
Trying not to laugh, Thor said, “Your ad is a bit… suggestive.”
“It is? But I spent so much time on the wording just to get the proper effect!” she wailed softly.
“The effect you got was far from proper. What, by the way, is the ad all about? You’ll notice,” he added virtuously, “that I’m not leaping to conclusions.”
“I’ll bet you leaped to plenty before you picked up the phone,” she muttered, and then sighed again. “You see, it’s my dog.”
“Your dog?” Thor echoed.
“Uh-huh. My landlord found out. That is, he’d known that I had a dog, but he got all upset with me last week. Said something about not realizing that I fed it hay. Anyway, I can’t keep my dog in this apartment anymore.”
“I see.” The matter was, indeed, becoming plainer to Thor. “Which is why you advertised for a large man with a house in the country.”
“Right.” She sounded relieved. “I mean, a small man would feel intimidated by a Dobe, don’t you think?”
Thor, whose mind couldn’t instantly identify Dobe to conjure a picture, agreed wholeheartedly. “Certainly. I suppose you’ll want to know how large my house is?”
“You mean, you’re interested?”
“Of course.” Thor looked around at his large, spotless living room and heard his housekeeper banging pots in the kitchen. Ah, well. He could keep the dog outside; he needed a watchdog anyway. Pepper’s voice intrigued him; he would have offered to look at a Bengal tiger if she’d asked. “Are you selling the dog, or—”
“Oh, no!” She was shocked. “I wouldn’t do that!”
So she was just finding the dog a good home. Odd how some people felt better about giving away their pets rather than selling them. “I see. Well, Pepper—” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, but you didn’t tell me your last—”
“Oh, everybody calls me Pepper,” she assured him cheerfully “Who are you, by the way?”
Thor found himself smiling. “Thorton Spicer. My friends call me Thor.”
“I’ll bet you have red hair.”
Surprised, he confirmed her guess. “Yes, I do, but how did you know?”
“Vikings,” she said cryptically, then went on as if no explanation were necessary. “Do you have a large house?”
“Four bedrooms, two baths, living room, den, study—”
“That sounds perfect! Land?”
“Fifteen acres.” He was growing more and more amused. But he warned himself not to develop a mental picture of Pepper; whenever he did that, he was always disappointed. Of course, his mind was already busy drawing. Pepper, it decided arbitrarily, was about five feet tall with blond hair and big blue eyes. He told his mind not to be so damn sure. She was probably six feet tall with black hair and played hockey.
“Perfect!” The little breathless voice sounded delighted. “Oh, but, you’d better—”
“See the dog,” he finished dryly. “Yes, perhaps I’d better. I’m heading into town this afternoon; if you’ll tell me where you live, I’ll stop by.”
She gave him clear, precise directions to her apartment building, which rather surprised him; she had sounded a bit feather-headed. Then she finished with, “You can’t miss it”— which made him immediately distrust the directions. But he promised to drop by around three o’clock.
Before she could respond, there was a loud crash from her end, and she said hurriedly, “Oh, heavens! Brutus! What’re you—? Look what you’ve done! Um, I’ll see you at three.”
Thor found himself listening to a dial tone, and assumed in amusement that the last sentence had been intended for him. He hung up the phone, chuckling quietly. Well, it would certainly be interesting meeting Pepper. And he did need a watchdog. Brutus? He scaled his mental image of a Dobe up a few inches. Obviously a large dog. And why did the name keep ringing warning bells in his mind?
“Your lunch is getting cold,” Mrs. Small told him dourly from the doorway of the room.
Mrs. Small wasn’t. By any stretch of the imagination. She was only a little over five feet tall, but made up for the lack in other areas. All other areas. And she was the exception to the rule that all plump people were jolly souls. In five years Thor had never seen her so much as smile. He’d even given in to the lesser side of himself and tried a few practical jokes, only to be told coldly that he was too old for such nonsense.
Thor looked at her now and decided not to tell her about the possible addition to his household. “I told you not to bother,” he said instead.
“No bother, as long as you eat it.”
He wondered vaguely if Mrs. Small would ever call him by his name. Either of his names. She never had. He was almost terrified of the woman. “I’m coming,” he said hastily, noting that her habitual frown was assuming thunderous proportions.
She deepened her glare, nodded briefly, and turned away.
Thor sighed and got to his feet. He headed for the dining room—Mrs. Small would never feed him in the kitchen!— wondering if Pepper would live up to his mind’s optimism.
At exactly three o’clock Thor was standing before the door marked 3-B and silently bracing himself to be disappointed. He looked down at his neat dark slacks, white shirt, and sport jacket, and thought wryly that most people probably didn’t care how they dressed to meet a dog. But then… he was meeting a woman. At least he hoped she was a woman.
He made a mental note to write to the friend from his college days, who now ran a rather lucrative dating service. If Jim hadn’t tried inserting peculiar ads in newspapers, he was missing a good bet….
Thor knocked on the door. A deep-throated “Woof!” and various other indefinable sounds came from within. Then the door swung open.
“Come in,” a sweet, breathless voice invited. “If you’re Thor, that is.”
“I’m Thor,” he managed, stepping inside automatically. The door closed behind him while he tried to collect himself. It wasn’t easy; his mental picture of Pepper had been uncannily on target.
Since she was in socks only, he could gauge her height nicely; if she was stretched on a rack for ten minutes, she might possibly be five feet tall. Her hair was so light that silver was the only color that could describe it, and it fell nearly to her hips. Her face was finely drawn and delicate, and flattered the word beautiful. Only her eyes varied from his image, and he was glad they did; plain blue could never begin to compare with that glorious pale violet.
And—though tiny she certainly was—the mature and somewhat startlingly voluptuous curves filling out her jeans and knit top belonged only to a woman.
“I’m glad you found the place,” she was telling him in that ridiculously intriguing little-girl voice. “Would you like to sit down, or—”
A loud thump from somewhere in one of the other rooms interrupted her, and she half turned from Thor, exclaiming fretfully “Oh, damn, he got out!”
Before Thor could ask the foreboding question in his mind, a two-pound fury hurtled across the carpeted floor, uttering a hysterical yapping sound, and attached itself ferociously to his trouser leg. On closer inspection the fury turned out to be a Chihuahua that would have had to be dipped in milk and rolled in bread crumbs to weigh two pounds. It was light brown in color, and obviously possessed the temper and general disposition of a drunken marine.
In patient silence Thor shifted his weight onto his unencumbered leg and raised the other about a foot off the floor. The fury clung tenaciously, growling and trying fiercely to bring down its intended prey entirely unperturbed by the fact that it was hanging in midair. Thor returned the fo
ot and attached dog to the floor and lifted his eyes to Pepper. She was, he noted, looking down at the tiny dog with a fondly exasperated expression.
“What’s it doing?” Thor asked politely.
Pepper looked up, surprised. “He’s attacking you, obviously. He’s an attack dog.”
Thor looked hard for mockery on the lovely face, and found only solemnity. “Oh. Do you mind calling him off?”
“Well… I can’t.”
“You can’t?” Thor decided that if both Pepper and this Lilliputian canine thought that it was an attack dog, who was he to argue? “I thought there was a command to call them off.”
“There is,” she agreed cheerfully. “It’s ‘break.’ But Brutus ignores it; he always has.”
Incredulously Thor dropped his gaze to the tiny creature. “This is Brutus? You can’t tell me your landlord objects to this little mite!”
“Of course not. Fifi’s the problem.”
“Fifi?” Thor decided that he had wandered through Alice’s mirror by accident. The scary part was that he was enjoying it. “Uh… where’s Fifi?”
Looking surprised again, Pepper half turned and gestured toward the couch a few feet away. Thor’s gaze followed her pointing finger, and he immediately understood her surprise; his only excuse for having missed seeing the creature until now was that he’d been too fascinated by Pepper to look at his surroundings.
“Fifi” was a respectably sized mountain of short gleaming black and tan fur, quivering from pointed little ears to stub of a tail. It was lying on its belly with its face thrust underneath the couch, and a quick and rough calculation told Thor that it would be nearly three feet tall on all fours.
It was a full-grown and heavily muscled Doberman pin-scher, which Thor had always considered one of the wickedest-looking dogs in creation. And it weighed every ounce of a hundred pounds.
The landlord’s horror, he reflected, was now perfectly clear. He tried to picture the expression on Mrs. Small’s face when she saw Fifi and hastily abandoned the effort when the first fleeting image came to his mind.
“Fifi?” Pepper called softly, and the dog quivered even more, not moving an inch.
“What’s it doing?” Thor asked curiously.
“She’s hiding.”
“What’s she hiding?”
“Herself.”
“But I can see—”
“Shhh!” Pepper made a hasty gesture to silence him. “She thinks she’s hiding. Since she can’t see you, she thinks you can’t see her.”
Thor decided to let that pass; for the life of him, he didn’t know how to respond. He realized suddenly that he was still being savaged. “Look, can you get this dog off my leg? I’m going to look a little peculiar walking around with him attached to me like this.”
Pepper looked down at Brutus, frowned for a moment, then stepped closer. She bent over and swatted the tiny dog firmly on the rump. Immediately he whirled to contend with the surprise attack, and she snatched him up and tucked him under her arm. Apparently still blind with rage, Brutus was on the point of sinking his teeth into her arm when her voice stopped him cold.
“Don’t… you… dare,” she told him in an unexpectedly icy tone.
Pointed ears that were overlarge on the tiny head perked up, and there was such a ludicrously expressive “Oh, it’s you!” look on the dog’s face that Thor burst out laughing. Brutus immediately threw a snarl his way, clearly trying to save face.
“What do you feed him—gunpowder?”
“Of course not. I told you he was an attack dog.” She waved a hospitable hand toward the small living room they were literally standing in. “Why don’t you sit down? On the couch there, by Fifi. She’ll come out once she gets used to your voice.”
Thor went over to the couch, making a lengthy detour around Fifi’s ample rump to sit a prudent distance away from her. He was taking no chances.
Pepper sat across from him in a chair, holding the ever-growling Brutus firmly in her lap. “Are you still interested?” she asked wryly.
Looking at her instead of the dog, Thor murmured, “More than ever.”
If she heard anything in his voice to suggest that it was she, rather than her dog, that Thor was interested in, Pepper didn’t show it on her face. She was completely natural, and obviously didn’t possess a single coquettish bone in her body.
And she didn’t, Thor reflected thankfully, weigh him with a speculative and unnerving eye, as so many women seemed to do these days. He wondered suddenly if she were as old as her body suggested.
“How old are you?” he demanded abruptly.
Pepper seemed neither surprised nor offended by the question. Instead, she released a long-suffering sigh. “Et tu, Brute? I’m twenty-eight.” At his obvious surprise she added dryly, “I have to carry a special police identification card because nobody ever believes that. Shall I show it to you?”
Thor grinned. “No need; I’ll take your word for it.”
“Thanks. And you never told me how old you are, by the way.”
“Thirty-four. And nobody ever disbelieves that.”
She studied him with a total lack of self-consciousness. “I can see how they wouldn’t,” she said ingenuously. “You have a rough sort of face; it has a history.”
Thor immediately felt at least ten years older than he was. History? Glancing aside to collect his thoughts, he found himself under scrutiny from a pair of panicky brown eyes that widened in even greater panic and then disappeared. Fifi was hiding again. Thor looked at Pepper, and she shrugged, giving him a rueful smile.
“She’ll get used to you.”
“She’s a coward,” he observed dryly.
“Well… I guess you could say that. She barks once and then hides.”
Thor remembered the deep-throated bark he’d heard. “Uh-huh. Some watchdog she’s going to make.”
Pepper smiled at him happily, the bottomless pools of her violet eyes oddly riveting. “Are you saying that you want her?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Definitely But I don’t know about taking her with me today. She’s so nervous, and my car—”
“What kind of car do you have?”
“A Corvette.”
Pepper winced. “That’ll never do. Tell you what. I have a van, so why don’t I do the relocating? We can come tomorrow.”
Convinced that Pepper wouldn’t abandon her pet totally, Thor nodded and smiled. “Sounds great. You can help her with the—uh—transitional period.”
“Wonderful! What time tomorrow shall we come?”
“Any time after noon.”
“We’ll be there.” Pepper looked down at the huge, quivering dog, and smiled fondly. “I’m sure she’ll be braver in the country.”
Thor blinked and then looked down at the dog as well. He’d nearly forgotten about Fifi. “Uh…yes. I’m sure she will be.”
two
GRAY EYES, PEPPER THOUGHT, LEANING BACK against the closed door and staring absently across the room. He had gray eyes. Combined with his red-gold hair and deeply tanned skin, the gray eyes were startling. They were also sharp, intelligent, and held a lurking twinkle.
Releasing her pent-up breath in a long sigh, Pepper bent to set Brutus on the floor. She saw that her hands were shaking and wasn’t surprised by that. But she was surprised by her reaction to Thor Spicer. At twenty-eight she’d ruefully decided that she would probably remain unattached, because she had not, in all her travels, met a man whose voice set her heart bumping and raised goose bumps on her flesh.
Almost reluctantly she lifted an arm and examined her lightly tanned skin. Uh-huh. Gooseflesh. And heaven knew her heart was bumping against her ribs as though she’d been running.
Still leaning against the door, she watched Fifi rise, shake herself, then wag a happy bobtailed rear end and follow Brutus toward the kitchen and their food dishes. Pepper shook her head slightly. What had her brilliant newspaper ad gotten her into? Simply because she’d wanted to find Fifi a good home
with a kind man…
The truth floated into her consciousness gently, unthreat-eningly: like most of the schemes and plans her active mind spawned, this idea had looked innocent and logical on the surface. Experience had taught her that her “logical” plans generally possessed hidden pitfalls. However, she’d never given up her scheming just because of a few minor stumbling blocks.
Cal’s voice surfaced suddenly in her mind, a little desperate and a lot wild: “You’re dangerous, you know that? You’re ruthless and, God, who’d guess it by looking at you?”
Pepper grinned to herself. That had been wailed at her just moments before Cal’s wedding to Marsha five years ago, and just after a long and somewhat involved courtship in which Pepper had played a vital role. Matchmaker. She was good at that.
After all, Cal and Marsha were still married, and very happily so from the looks of it. And the other matches she’d engineered over the years were still going strong, not a divorce or separation in the lot.
This time Johnny’s voice popped into her mind: “Let’s all band together and get Pepper settled; it’d be poetic justice! She’s the only one of the gang still footloose and fancy-free.”
Absently Pepper moved over to sink down on the couch, drawing her legs up and tucking her feet under a cushion. The gang was indeed all settled. Most within driving distance of one another in the Northeast; she, herself, was the farthest north at the moment, living in Maine. Her original college crowd numbered nearly a score—and that wasn’t counting the strays she’d happened across on her travels and brought home to be matched with her friends.
Ruthless? She thought about that for a moment. Certainly she was ruthless. But she would never do anything to hurt a friend—which was probably why she had so many of them. She was also a helluva lot smarter than she looked, and perfectly capable of taking care of herself even in the turmoil of Third World countries.
So, being a smart and ruthless lady, she had never yet hesitated to go after what she wanted, be it a seat on a booked airline or some trinket requiring haggling in a language she didn’t speak.
But a man? No, she’d never gone after a man. Heaven knew she had plenty of male friends spread out over the world. But no gooseflesh. Until now.