She looked back at him in surprise. “Of course, he won’t. This is your house, not his. He may be a bit protective around the van once he realizes that we’re staying here, but he won’t attack you inside your own house.”
Thor watched the little dog guardedly for a moment, then realized that Pepper knew what she was talking about. Brutus showed no disposition to savage his host, but set about immediately getting acquainted with the house.
“Let’s have that drink first,” Thor murmured finally. “Afterward I’ll show you around the house if you like.”
“I like.” She smiled and then obeyed his slight gesture, preceding him and stepping down into the sunken den. Looking around the neat room, Pepper sighed with pleasure. It was decorated in shades of brown and rust and contained the comfortable overstuffed furnishings appropriate for a big man. “I don’t know about the rest of the house, but this room is terrific.”
“Glad you like it.” Thor moved toward an unobtrusive bar in the corner by the bay window and sent a questioning glance toward her. “What’s your poison?” he asked, his mind only half on the query as he realized how right she looked in his home. It was a very disconcerting observation.
“Oh, whatever you’re having.”
He paused for a moment. “I’m having whiskey. Straight.”
“Fine.” She laughed at his expression. “Thor, I’m old enough to drink, you know. In fact, those who know me best claim that I have a cast-iron stomach.” Wandering over to stand before the lovely rock fireplace, Pepper continued to smile at him. He seemed to be concentrating on fixing the drinks, and his next abrupt question nearly caught her off guard.
“Why did you advertise for a ‘preferably single’ man?”
Pepper waited to answer until he looked at her and appreciated the wry expression on her face. “Well, I hardly think a wife would welcome my camping out on her doorstep, do you? Of course … there’s always the possibility of a girlfriend or fiancée objecting.” It was a question, and Pepper didn’t bother making any bones about it. The stakes were too high.
Thor picked up their glasses and carried hers across to her. When he handed her the glass, he shook his head slightly, and there was a tiny smile in his eyes. “Not in this case. My job takes me away from home too often to encourage… long-term relationships.”
Pepper was quick to hear the note of constraint in his deep voice, so she passed on asking the next logical question. So he was touchy about his job, eh? Well, she could find out about that later. She raised her glass in a slight toast. “Then there’s no problem.”
His glass clinked softly against hers. “No problem at all.”
She knew very well that he realized she hadn’t initially planned on moving herself as well as the dog out here, and hoped that her mention of the landlord’s having thrown her out would cover that. However, the whole situation was still full of holes, and her biggest hope was that Thor simply wouldn’t question it.
Feeling suddenly breathless under the gaze of steady gray eyes, Pepper turned away and went over to sit down on the comfortable couch. The phone on the end table beside her set up a train of thought, and she looked across at Thor. “By the way, do you mind if I let my friends know where they can reach me by phone?”
“Of course not.”
She grinned. “It’s only fair to warn you. They’re a talkative bunch. I’m liable to get calls pretty regularly. I’d hate to tie up your line.”
Leaning against the mantel and watching her with a faint smile, Thor shrugged. “That’s okay. I have another line in my bedroom for… important calls.”
Again Pepper let the subject pass without a question, although she nearly had to bite her tongue to do it. “Great. Oh—we never settled on the rent.”
“There’s no hurry.” Glancing toward the doorway, he found himself under scrutiny from Fifi’s ridiculously worried brown eyes, and had to chuckle. “Unlike your former landlord, I won’t kick you off the place.”
“Whatever you say.” Pepper sat back and sipped her drink slowly, wondering how to say what had to be said. She hesitated to assume an interest that had not yet been put into words, but she would have been less of a woman than she was to misinterpret the look in Thor’s gray eyes.
His seemingly offhand remark about his work had told her two things, and she was sure that one meaning, at least, had been deliberately sent her way. He probably hadn’t realized that she’d picked up some undercurrent concerning his job. Definitely, though, he had meant her to understand that long-term relationships weren’t a part of his plans.
That didn’t daunt Pepper; either he would change his mind or he wouldn’t. And this man, she knew intuitively, would neither be pushed or led down the aisle. He would take that trip of his own free will, or he simply wouldn’t go. And she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said suddenly, and immediately looked surprised, as if he hadn’t intended to say those words aloud.
Pepper felt her heart give a bump, and sternly tried to control it. He had given her the opening she needed, and she had to take advantage of it. She looked down at the drink in her hand, then steadily back at him.
“I’m not very comfortable with oblique comments, Thor. I’m not very good at tiptoeing verbally around a subject. And since this situation is a bit out of the ordinary, well… I’ll be blunt.” She felt herself smiling wryly. “My friends say I’m good at that.”
“Not interested, huh?” he asked lightly but Pepper could feel his sudden tension. She didn’t answer the question directly.
“I have rules, Thor.”
“Rules?”
She looked at him steadily, and the honesty in her eyes told him that she was serious, that she meant whatever she was about to say.
“Rules. They’re my rules, and they have nothing to do with morality. It’s only that I know what would or wouldn’t work for myself. And an affair wouldn’t work for me.”
“I see. Commitment.”
Pepper dropped her gaze to the glass in her hand, and when she went on, her voice was quiet, musing. “There have been occasions during the last ten years when the opportunity was there. But something inside of me always said that what was right for the moment wouldn’t be right for long. And I don’t like regrets. Life’s too short for regrets.”
Watching her, Thor felt suddenly that there was a very definite reason for her last almost inaudible sentence. Her eyes were hidden from him, but her face was very still, and her voice seemed to have come from a great distance. She had some reason to avoid regrets, he thought, and wondered what it was.
She looked up suddenly, the violet eyes blurred for a moment. Then they were clear, and she was speaking in the same quiet, thoughtful voice as before.
“Commitment…yes. Something that’s right for more than just the moment. Usually when people talk about a commitment between a man and woman, they mean marriage. Well, marriage seems to be entered into very lightly these days by a lot of people. But I don’t happen to believe marriage is something you decide on with the idea in the back of your mind that it’s a contract easily and amicably dissolved in court if it doesn’t work. When I say ‘till death do us part,’ I expect to mean just that.
“And I am looking for that kind of permanence, Thor. I don’t know if I’ll find it—how can I know that? But one thing I do know: If I climb into a man’s bed, or he climbs into mine, it has to be with the knowledge that I think I’ve found what I’m looking for. And he has to feel the same way.”
She laughed suddenly and shortly in wry amusement. “And if that puts me in the company of dodos and dinosaurs”—she lifted her glass in a slightly mocking toast—“then here’s to things past… but not forgotten.”
After a moment Thor lifted his glass in an answering toast. In doing so, he was silently complimenting her honesty. But, more than that, he was admiring clear-sighted knowledge. She knew what she wanted, and she was unwilling to settle for less. And how many people
, he wondered, were that lucky? How many people were spared blind searching because they had the foresight, the certain knowledge, of what they were searching for?
He watched her sip her drink, remembering suddenly the stillness of her face and the remark about no regrets. That expression had been oddly in contrast to his first impression of her. But, then, he had been constantly revising his first impression with every moment spent in her company. And the question that escaped him now was a little rueful, and more than a little bemused.
“How many women are you, Pepper?”
She looked at him, something unreadable flickering in her eyes. And then she was smiling, her smile as twisted and rueful as his own. “As many as I have to be.” She finished her drink and set the glass down on the end table beside the phone.
“That admission is a challenge to any man,” he pointed out softly. “Like looking at a diamond with countless facets, or a puzzle with countless pieces. Something that has to be—must be—understood.”
“Some puzzles can’t be solved because they’re interpreted different ways by different people.” Pepper looked intently at him, determined in her innate honesty that he wouldn’t think her rules were easily overcome. “Like the Lady and the Tiger. If you were that man, Thor, and you opened the door your princess had told you to open, what do you think you would find?”
Thor looked at her searchingly, aware that she was telling him something. And he felt that what she was trying to tell him was important. Slowly he said, “I think if I opened the door she told me to open, I’d find the lady behind it.”
Pepper rose to her feet, sliding her hands into the pockets of her jeans and shaking her head slightly. “And I think you’d find the Tiger. Princesses—women—were ruthless in those days, Thor. We still are. Abstract reasoning doesn’t appeal to us much. We decide things by feelings more often than not. Our own feelings.”
“What are you telling me?” he asked bluntly. “That your rules are yours, and therefore inviolable?”
Pepper laughed suddenly. Only a few candles had been lit, but already she saw her way clearly. And, true to her nature, she stepped forward boldly to begin the journey.
“What I’m telling you, Thor, is—be warned. If you decide to study the diamond’s facets, or put the puzzle together, you may be biting off more than you can chew. Lord, we’re mixing metaphors right and left. Because while you’re looking for solutions, I might very well decide that you’re just what I’ve been looking for.”
Thor was slowly beginning to smile. “And so?”
“And, so, I’m a ruthless woman. I hate to lose.” Pepper smiled at him very sweetly. “I’d chase you to hell and back, O god of thunder. And not even Odin—or your magic hammer—could save you.”
three
THOR’S LAUGH BEGAN AS A RUMBLE DEEP inside his chest, growing slowly into the delighted sound of pure enjoyment. She’d flung the gauntlet at his feet, the little witch! She’d neatly picked up his earlier hint of no long-term involvement, flatly laid down her own rules, and then gently dared him to match wits with her. Challenged him … and he’d never had a more intriguing challenge.
Still chuckling, he put his empty glass down on the mantel and moved slowly toward her with the unthinking grace of a cat. “You realize, of course,” he told her conversationally, “that I can’t possibly ignore your challenge.”
“The thought did occur,” she murmured, watching his approach and still smiling. Not quite as calm as she appeared, Pepper was tautly aware that this would be the moment of truth. In the next few minutes one of two things would happen. Either she would know that she’d been wrong about her feelings for this almost stranger—in which case she would fold her tent and steal quietly away—or she would discover that the feelings would indeed be there. And there would be no turning back.
“I’ve always loved challenges. I would have wanted to open Pandora’s box,” he said, halting less than an arm’s length away and looking down at her with lazily smiling eyes.
“Never know what might jump out at you,” she warned softly, tilting her head back to look up at him.
Thor reached out slowly, one large hand nearly encircling her neck, his thumb brushing along her jawline. “I think,” he murmured as his head bent toward hers, “I’ll take my chances.”
Pepper didn’t know what she had expected. A pleasant tingle, perhaps. A firecracker or two. She’d even wondered if Marsha had been right with her “Bells, my dear—ringing their little clangers off.” But, being realistic, she had expected nothing so drastic. Just a sign, a preview of marvelous things to come.
What she got was the main attraction, and she very nearly forgot who had challenged whom.
For a still, timeless moment his lips rested on hers with the weight of a feather and the force of a sigh. Warm, undemanding, faintly questioning—and she was astonished at her response. The shivering tingle began somewhere near her middle, sweeping outward in ripples of curiously hot-cold sensation. She was only dimly aware of her hands leaving the pockets of her jeans and sliding up around his neck, helpless to prevent her lips from parting and inviting his exploration.
And the hot-cold sensation blazed suddenly white-hot, sizzling through her veins and scorching nerve endings as he abruptly accepted her invitation. His lips slanted across hers with driving hunger, demanding, compelling, sapping the strength from her legs.
Pepper was conscious of an aching emptiness within her, a throbbing hollowness she had never felt before. It seemed to fill her being, hot and hurting with an unfamiliar pain. She felt driven to be closer to him, hungry to touch him and have him touch her.
The sensations frightened her in their intensity; they swept aside logic and rationality to leave only raw emotion. But what frightened her even more was that the raw emotion was stronger than fear, stronger than her ability to fight it. She couldn’t break away from him even with her instincts for self-preservation clamoring a desperate warning.
Those instincts told her that she’d met her match this time, that the stakes were higher than she had known. Her challenge had left her vulnerable to an intensity of feeling she’d not been prepared for, and she wondered dimly what price would be demanded of her this time for the reckless chance she had taken.
Then the fire in her veins blazed over fear, and she was conscious only of her need for this man. She had no strength left, no power over her own body. She was weightless and adrift on a churning sea, and there was no life preserver to save her from drowning….
Thor’s lips left hers as she was going down for the second time, and he drew a deep breath as if he, too, had nearly drowned.
Pepper stared dazedly into storm-clouded gray eyes and, incurably honest, said exactly what she was thinking. “Pandora’s box. I think we’re both in trouble.”
“I think you’re right,” Thor said a bit raggedly. “Good Lord, for such a little thing, you pack one hell of a punch, lady.”
“You know what they say about dynamite.” She wondered idly how she could possibly be having a perfectly rational conversation while looking eye-to-eye with a man who’d just demonstrated the Fourth of July in the middle of October…. Eye-to-eye? That wasn’t right!
Leaning a bit sideways, Pepper looked down and realized only then why she felt so weightless: she was being held a good foot off the floor for Pete’s sake. Returning her gaze to Thor’s still-bemused face, she requested politely, “Could you put me down, please?”
“No,” he said simply.
Pepper stared at him. “Why not?”
Thor kissed her very lightly. Then he kissed her lightly again, wearing the pleased expression of a man who has discovered a wonderful new hobby. “Because, like Brutus,” he murmured, “I ignore the command to ‘break.’”
She bit her lip to hold back an ill-timed giggle. “I did say please.”
“I can’t seem to hear that either. Although, if it were stuck in the right sentence—”
“Forget it, chum.” She unlocked one
hand from his hair and waved a threatening finger beneath his nose. “Remember the Alamo!”
He lifted an eyebrow. “No quarter?”
“No quarter. No mercy. One of us is going to break. And, as the man said, it ain’t gonna be me.”
“Want to bet?”
“We already did.”
“True.”
“Are you going to put me down?”
“No.”
“You’re vulnerable, you know. There are pressure points in your neck. And, of course, I could always resort to the old both-hands-clapped-to-the-ears trick. It shatters the eardrums, I’m told.”
Thor looked at her consideringly. “You’ve learned to take care of yourself.”
“Yes.” She didn’t elaborate.
“I get the feeling you’ve had an interesting life.”
“Perhaps. But, interesting or not, I have no intention of discussing my past while dangling in the air.”
“Will you discuss it if I put you down?”
“Maybe.”
“Uh-uh.” Thor shook his head. “If I’ve learned anything at all about women it’s that ‘maybe’ means a variety of things, none of which is ‘yes.’”
“You’ve learned that, huh?”
“I’ve also learned that in these days of women’s lib and whatever, a man needs every edge he can find or steal. And since I happen to be considerably larger than you, I plan to use that advantage every chance I get.”
“Are you going to turn me over your knee?” she asked interestedly.
“Don’t give me ideas.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Pepper drawled. “Never give the opposing side a gun; it leads to uncomfortable things. Like defeat.”
“You don’t like to lose?”
“Not if I can help it.” She stared at him and frowned. “We seem to have digressed somewhat from the point.”
“What was the point?” He kissed her again.
Pepper fought for breath and cleared her throat determinedly. “The point. Ah. This macho attempt to use your muscles—that’s the point. It’s unfair.”