Naughty Neighbor

  “I can’t see anything in here to help us,” he finally said.

  He scooped Spike off the table and replaced him with a tossed salad he took from the refrigerator. Spike dangled bonelessly from the crook of Pete’s arm. He slowly opened his eyes, yawned, and yowled. Pete speared one of the steaks from the broiler, flopped it onto a plate, and set cat and steak on the floor.

  Louisa couldn’t keep the astonishment from her voice. “You’re giving him an entire steak?”

  “Hey, this guy’s a stud. He has to keep his strength up.”

  “Is that good for him? I mean, shouldn’t he be eating cat food? You know, a balanced cat diet?”

  Pete put a potato and a steak on a plate for Louisa. “We don’t eat steak every night. Sometimes we eat fish. Sometimes we order out for pizza. His favorite is hamburger with a lot of fried onions. We eat that a lot.”

  Tell me about it, Louisa thought. Everything in her apartment smelled like Pete’s fried onions. The odor had permeated her wallpaper. His apartment, she noticed, had no such problem. His apartment smelled fresh and clean, slightly of coffee. She glanced at the vent over the stove. It was busy sucking away the broiler smoke, no doubt sending it directly down to her kitchen.

  He put a container of sour cream on the table and topped her wine. “How about Maislin’s staff? Do we have any information on them?”

  Louisa pulled another folder from the cardboard box. She gave the folder to Pete and attacked her steak.

  Pete read while he ate, but he didn’t find anything useful.

  “That was great,” Louisa said. She looked at her wineglass and wondered how it had gotten empty.

  Pete took a quart of chocolate ice cream from the freezer and set it in the middle of the table. He gave Louisa a sterling silver iced-tea spoon and kept one for himself.

  “Let’s go over this again,” he said, digging into the ice cream. “Why is everyone so touchy about this pig?”

  Louisa took a spoonful of ice cream and let it melt on her tongue. It was smooth and rich. It was the brand she couldn’t afford, the one that clogged arteries with butterfat. Already, she could feel her thighs expanding. She took another spoonful, closed her eyes, and murmured approval. “This is wonnnnderful ice cream,” she said, her eyes slightly glazed.

  Pete stared at her. She was practically orgasmic. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t be better. I lovvvvve ice cream.” She had a large mound of ice cream on her spoon. She aimed it at her mouth, but it fell onto the table. “Oops,” she said. “I think it’s the wine. It sneaked up on me.”

  Pete smiled. She was snockered. “You’re not much of a drinker, are you?”

  “Am I acting silly?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I tend to get uninhibited when I drink,” she said.

  “Oh boy.”

  “And then I get tired. Wine always makes me tired.”

  “How long would you say we’ve got between uninhibited and tired?”

  “Not long. Minutes, actually.”

  “Is there anything you’d especially like to do while you’re in the uninhibited stage?”

  “Eat more ice cream.”

  He spooned ice cream into her. “Anything else?”

  “We could talk. There are some things I should say to you.”

  “You really know how to bust loose when you’re uninhibited, don’t you?”

  She smiled at him. “I have my moments.”

  “Is this one of them?”

  Louisa waved her iced-tea spoon. “I was a late bloomer.”

  He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward. He had a feeling this was going to be interesting.

  “In fact, I didn’t bloom at all until I was in college. And even then…” She sighed and dabbled in the ice cream carton. “I had this silly idea that I should be in love before I…you know.”

  “It’s not a silly idea.”

  They both paused, each surprised he’d said such a thing.

  “Do you make love to women you don’t love?” she asked.

  “Only if it’s an emergency.”

  She made an effort to focus her eyes on him. “That’s not a serious answer.”

  He reached across the table and took her hand. He turned it palm up and kissed the soft center. “I don’t think either of us would like the serious answer.”

  Heat radiated outward at the touch of his lips on her flesh. “Have you ever been in love?”

  It was a complicated question. Certainly, there’d been women about whom he’d felt deeply. And there were a few voluptuous females early on who turned him inside out and left him flopping around like a beached flounder, struggling to survive. But he couldn’t honestly say he’d ever been in love. Lately, he’d begun to wonder if he was capable of loving someone.

  “No,” he told her. “I’ve never been in love.”

  “Me, either,” she said, yawning. “I thought I was once, but it was just wishful thinking.” She rested her head on the table and fell asleep.

  Pete stared at her. He’d never seen anyone nod off on a glass and a half of wine before. He scooped her up and carried her to the couch. She was dressed in a soft pink suit and heels. He didn’t know what to do with her. He had a strong temptation to loosen her clothes in the interest of comfort, but he resisted. She’d probably get the wrong idea and think he’d done it just to fondle her. She’d probably be right.

  He covered her with a quilt and went about the job of cleaning the kitchen. When he was done, he sat across from her on the coffee table and watched her sleep. She looked like a little girl, he thought. Her cheeks were flushed, her mouth soft and pouty, black lashes curved against her fine translucent skin. Her hair curled around her face in casual disarray. His throat felt tight and his heart ached with an emotion he couldn’t identify. The ache in his groin was less confusing. He knew what was causing that. And he knew it was a lost cause.

  Chapter 4

  Louisa awakened to the aroma of bacon frying and the unpleasant sensation of having a crushing weight on her chest. The weight turned out to be Spike. He opened his yellow cat eyes and stared at her for several seconds before his lids dropped closed. Louisa shifted under him, and he growled low in his throat. Two masculine hands reached over Louisa’s head and lifted the cat off her.

  “Morning,” Pete said.

  Louisa tilted her head back to see him. “What happened?”

  “You had a glass and a half of wine and fell asleep.”

  She took a fast survey of her condition. She was on his couch, fully clothed, under a quilt. “Have I slept here all night?”

  “Yup.”

  She sighed. “I’m not very good at drinking.”

  She tugged at her skirt and swung her feet onto the floor, still swaddled in the quilt. “I make up for my alcohol intolerance with my temper. I inherited the belligerent gene.”

  He handed her a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a plate heaped with bacon and scrambled eggs.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said.

  He slouched in a chair across from her. He wasn’t feeling especially maternal. He was feeling sexually frustrated and emotionally unstable. He’d spent the better part of the night staring at his bedroom ceiling, wondering what the hell he was doing with his life, wondering what it was about Louisa Brannigan that had him suddenly feeling dissatisfied and lonely.

  He could easily have awakened her and shuffled her off to her own apartment, but the simple truth was, he liked having her in his living room. Spike was a good friend, but he was small. He didn’t fill the apartment the way Louisa did. Pete liked the way Louisa sighed and rustled when she slept. It was a comforting sound…like a crackling fire on a cold day, or rain against a windowpane.

  She drank the juice and munched on a strip of bacon. “It feels strange not to have to rush off to work.”

  “What’ll you do today?”

  “Get my car fixed. Then I suppose I should start thinking about getting ano
ther job.”

  “I have a deal for you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “It’s a good deal.”

  “I bet.”

  “I want to stick with this pig thing, but I’m running low on time. I have rewrites to do on a screenplay that’s going into production next week.”

  She took a bite of egg. “And?”

  “And I’ll give you a month’s free rent, if you’ll hold off taking another job for a few days. I have my own file on Maislin. I’d like you to go through it and see if you can find a connection between him and Nolan Bishop. Then I’d like you to go to the Post building on L Street and read back issues on either side of the pig story. See if you can talk to any of the reporters that covered the story.”

  The offer appealed to Louisa. The detecting part sounded like fun, and she couldn’t turn her nose up at a month’s free rent. Her savings account was going to be fast depleted without a job.

  “Okay, it’s a deal. What am I searching for at the Post?”

  “I don’t know. Keep an open mind.”

  She finished her breakfast and stood to leave, groaning when she looked down at her rumpled suit. “I’ll take a fast shower and get right to work.”

  It was almost noon when Louisa finished reading Pete’s file on Stuart Maislin. Spike was back to sleeping on the kitchen table, amidst the piles of news clippings and handwritten notes. Pete was slouched in a padded office chair, staring at the computer screen. He leaned forward and began typing. The soft click of computer keys carried across the room.

  Louisa crossed her arms on the table in front of her and watched him, thinking writing was a very quiet, very solitary profession. She’d expected the creative process to be more flamboyant, but Pete Streeter went about his rewrites in an orderly businesslike fashion. There was no hair pulling, no ranting, no empty whiskey glasses littering the work area, or balled-up, discarded sheets of paper spread across the floor. Sometimes his lips moved, but the sounds he made, if any, were soft, polite murmurings as he listened to the music of his written word. All this was very much at odds with the image she’d formed of him, and she found herself fascinated by this serious, introspective piece of his personality.

  He finished his typing, stood, stretched, and looked over at Louisa. He raised his eyebrows in silent question.

  “I’m done,” Louisa said.

  “Find anything?”

  She tore the top two sheets off a yellow legal pad. “I have two pages of possible connections between Maislin and Bishop. Most of the connections are pretty obscure.”

  He moved behind her to pour himself a cup of coffee. “What looks good?”

  “Actually, nothing looks good. It’s possible that Nolan was just bowing to Maislin’s wishes.”

  He looked at her over the rim of his coffee mug. “Is Nolan that much of a wimp?”

  “He’s that much of a politician. There’s a lot of information here on Maislin’s finances and business associates. Why?”

  “I have an option on Judd King’s book, Power Players. It suggests misconduct among some of the most influential members of Congress. The book is fiction, but supposedly King knew what he was talking about. He died three weeks after the book hit the stores. Brain tumor…maybe. When I took the option on the book, I decided I needed to gather background information. Maislin’s profile fits one of the men in King’s book.”

  “How does the pig figure into all of this?” Louisa asked.

  “I haven’t a clue.” He took a jar of chunky peanut butter and a jar of marshmallow fluff from the refrigerator. He set out a couple plates and a loaf of white bread.

  Louisa slid a glance at the gooey marshmallow and peanut butter.

  “Lunch,” Pete said, smearing a thick coating of marshmallow onto a slice of bread. “This stuff is great. You can use it in everything.” He added a slice of peanut butter bread and slapped the two halves together. He put the sandwich on a plate and set it front of Louisa. He poured her a glass of milk and gave her a banana.

  Louisa bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. She felt as if she were back in grade school with her Snoopy lunch box and red plastic thermos. “Thank you,” she said politely.

  Pete gave a sandwich to Spike. Then he made another for himself, settling into the chair across from Louisa.

  “This is an interesting sandwich,” Louisa said, struggling to keep her tongue from sticking to the roof of her mouth. She drank half a glass of milk and secretly felt her fillings to make sure they were intact.

  “If I get bogged down in a script, peanut butter and marshmallow always picks me up. It’s sort of inspirational.”

  Louisa continued to chew. It wasn’t bad, but it needed chocolate. “So, did you eat this all the time when you were a kid?”

  “Never. I was too tough to eat this sissy food. I ate burgers and beer and bologna sandwiches.”

  “I mean when you were seven.”

  He stared at her and for a moment his face lost its usual animation. His eyes seemed flat, his mouth tightened. Then the humor returned. “I was talking about seven.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Pretty much. My mother died when I was five. I was raised in an all-male household.”

  He thought back to the ugly yellow clapboard house on Slant Street in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. It hadn’t been a terrible childhood, but it hadn’t been great, either. Mostly, it had been lonely and lacking the soft touches a woman brought to a home. By the time he was in first grade, his two older brothers had already quit school and gone to work in the steel mill with his dad.

  Back then, in his neighborhood, nobody cared about latchkey kids. Kids grew up fast on Slant Street, and it didn’t matter that no one was home to supervise homework. The future was preordained: The men worked in the mill. They married young, and there were no subtleties to the mating process.

  It was a matter of personal pride and masculine obligation for every Slant Street male past the age of puberty to get his hand and whatever else he could manage under as many skirts as possible. When a girl got pregnant, she singled out her best prospect, they got married in full regalia at St. Stanislaus, had the reception in the firehouse, and settled into the tedium of premature old age.

  And that would have been his future, Pete thought, but thanks to his good luck, none of the women who’d gone past his doorstep had gotten pregnant. And by the time he was eighteen, his reputation was so bad, his police record so lengthy with misdemeanors that he couldn’t get a job in the mill. Take it to the limit. Never do anything halfway. He’d been a truly rotten kid. Even his own brothers, who’d been pretty bad in their times, couldn’t touch him.

  Louisa finished her sandwich and ate her banana. “You ever been married? You ever live with anyone?”

  “Only Spike.”

  That explained it. She was beginning to understand the origin of some of his more annoying habits. He was severely lacking in female guidance. He didn’t know any of the niceties of life. Dollars to doughnuts he left the toilet seat up.

  She put her dishes in the dishwasher and stacked the files in the cardboard box. “I’m off to the Post.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “Mean dogs, dirty old men, drunk drivers…” He sighed with disgust at his own foolishness, grabbed hold of the front of her baggy University of Maryland sweatshirt, pulled her to him, and kissed her.

  She tasted like dessert. Life didn’t get much better, Pete thought. This was the filet of existence. He opened his eyes and realized she was staring at him.

  “Something wrong?”

  Her face had turned scarlet. She looked down at the sweatshirt still bunched in his hand. “You’ve accidentally unhooked the front closure to my bra.”

  His grin was lazy, his eyes soft with a mixture of sensuality and amusement. It had been no accident. He had one of the most talented thumbs in the country…maybe in the world.

  “Sorry,” he said, releasing the shirt. “Gue
ss I got carried away.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He was finally in love. No doubt about it.

  Louisa buttoned her navy pea coat up to her throat as she left the Post building and walked west to the Farragut North Metro station. She would have been done with the papers a lot sooner if Pete hadn’t kissed her after lunch, she thought. Her mind had been stuck on it all afternoon. The kiss had been warm and friendly with just a suggestion of passion. In fact, it had been almost playful. Just what you’d expect from a man who ate marshmallow goop for lunch.

  Still, it had surprised her. She’d been mentally prepared for a different sort of kiss…a much more aggressive sort. She’d been ready to firmly reject his advances, and it hadn’t been necessary. She reluctantly admitted she was experiencing an emotion that felt a lot like disappointment.

  She took the escalator to the underground lobby, bought a fare card, and passed through an electronic gate, telling herself there was no reason to be depressed just because she didn’t inspire flaming passion in the man. After all, she’d told him on several occasions how much she disliked him. And she’d warned him against groping. It was just that she didn’t know what to make of the kiss, she told herself. It had been so…happy.

  She was still thinking about the kiss when she knocked on his front door a half hour later.

  “Reporting in on the newspaper assignment, sir,” she said when he opened the door, the theory being when discombobulated over a sexual attraction, resort to juvenile behavior.

  He closed his front door behind her, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled her to him by her lapels, and lowered his mouth to hers. It was a hello, welcome-home kiss. It was an I-like-you kiss. It was pretty damn happy. It was grossly disappointing. All lips and no tongue and much too short. Louisa swayed a little when he stepped away from her. “Darn,” she said.

  “Something wrong?”

  “You unhooked my bra again.”

  “Must be a faulty clasp.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t trust you.”

  “Boy, Lou, that really hurts. Here I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day, making a nutritious home-cooked meal for you, and I get nothing but insults.”