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Originally published by Bantam Loveswept, 1989
All rights reverted to author, 1999
Revised by author, 2001
Copyright 2002
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three
She had three habits that were rapidly driving him over the edge. The first was her soft murmuring. Who was she taking to? Buck wondered. Why didn't she speak up? Why didn't they both speak up? That too-quiet voice whose words he could never quite make out had him grinding his teeth.
Of course, that she was doing whatever it was she was doing on the far side of a fence didn't help. Especially when the fence was eight feet high and made of solid boards, and would have blocked his view even if he hadn't been confined to this damned wheelchair. The second habit was her laughter. It bubbled. It floated and it soared. Sometimes, it wrapped itself around him and clung -- like now. He tried to close his ears to it, but then his mind was drawing pictures again. This time she appeared as curvaceous, voluptuous, with warm olive skin. Pouty French-girl lips, a narrow waist and a sweet, round tush that begged to be patted added themselves to the mental image. She had dark curly hair and her eyes were shadowed behind thick, gold-tipped lashes. She...
She giggled and the picture changed abruptly. Unbidden came the image he'd conjured up when he'd first heard that giggle, a petite blond with ponytails curling parenthetically around her ears, tickling a pointed chin. On another occasion, she'd wakened him with a ripple of wicked laughter naughty enough to raise even his brows, a redheaded, freckle-faced hoyden laugh. But the one that really sent his libido into spasms was the sultry, sleepy laugh, filled with promise. It was an early-in-the- morning laugh, a reach-across-the-bed laugh, a come-and-show-me-last-night-was-real laugh, and it was sexy as hell. Not that he was in any shape to do anything about it if he did meet her, but dammit, he wasn't dead.
Charlie could have warned him. He could have said, "Hey, Buck, use my beach house for your convalescence, but let me warn you, there's this woman next door who'll drive you nuts. She laughs a lot and talks to herself but it's her other habit that's gonna drive you straight to the liquor cabinet."'
As though it had been waiting for the thought to give it substance, the woman's third nasty trick made itself known. Buck drew in a deep breath.
Chili con carni. Oh Lord, how good it smelled! At least today he'd been spared another form of cruelty: homemade bread. That had been on Monday, early, while he was still lying in bed trying to recover from hearing that sexy laugh. At that point, he'd been sure there must he three or four women over there; how could she be baking bread and making love at the same time? He still wondered.
But Tuesday...that had been terrible! Tuesday she baked cinnamon rolls. He hadn't even thought about cinnamon rolls for something like twenty years, and then there he was wallowing in the smell of them, remembering brown sugar all sticky and warm and the inside of his mouth slick with melted butter, the raisins plump -- and juicy, the lightly crusted dough soft and yeasty inside and permeated with the sweetest spice in the world.
He'd just begun to get over that when she spent the entire afternoon frying chicken. Wednesday, at the crack or dawn, she'd hit him with the fresh bread routine again and then there was roast beef. Today, Thursday, there had been no bread, so presumably she saved that for alternate days. Instead, today she'd baked pies. It was enough to make a grown man cry...or climb walls -- including eight-foot fences.
Refusing to do the first and unable to do the second, he reached out with his good arm and hooked his wheelchair closer. With difficulty, he hitched his long body forward on the lounge chair where he spent much of the day, and half hopped, half fell, into the wheelchair. It rolled back. Damn. He'd forgotten to set the brakes again. Last time he did that, he ended up with one wheel in the soft soil of the rose bed and had the devil of a time getting out.
It was the same soft soil that prevented his getting close enough to the fence to put an eye to a knothole, he was thinking wryly, when an unholy ruckus broke out on the other side of the fence.
***
Darcy was almost asleep in her chair, her feet up on another one, an empty lemonade glass on the table, when World War III began with howling and spitting and frenzied barking. Then, before she could dive for shelter, her four-month old kitten with three thousand claws was up on her lap, over her shoulder, onto her head, and gone before she could even blink. She reeled back in her chair in time to see Sasquatch's little tuft of a tail disappearing up the maple tree by the fence.
As the terrier from a mile down the road made gargantuan yet futile attempt to follow the cat, Darcy grabbed him, ran to the gate and dumped him out. "And stay there, you little thug," she yelled. Although this wasn't the first time he'd chased the kitten; it was the first time he'd treed her.
A heavy wooden ladder leaned against the shed and Darcy struggled to haul it over to the fence. With the ladder in position, she climbed up and into the branches of the maple where the kitten's piteous wailing continued unceasingly.
"Okay, Sas. Okay, baby, I'm here now," Darcy said soothingly. "Come on, sweetheart. Easy does it. Atta girl, onto my hand...No, dammit, don't back up!" Drawing in several calming breaths, Darcy tried to keep her tone even and relaxed, keep her voice soft and quiet, wooing the little cat to her, reaching gently, slowly, sneakily, knees wrapped around a branch that was tapering damned fast, bending under her and creaking alarmingly. But...just...one...more...inch...and her hand would be --
"Arrrgh!" she shrieked as the creaking became a sharp crack, the tapering branch disappeared and a terrified kitten made a mad leap for security onto Darcy's neck, hanging on all the way down.
Whump! Darcy was on her back, gasping for breath, staring at her legs and feet over her head, propped on the sloping hack of a chintz-covered chaise lounge. She didn't feel damaged, but she was winded and her neck burned where the kitten had clung.
She drew in a couple of deep breaths and slowly pulled herself together. By the time she was able to speak, Sasquatch was sitting on her stomach; relaxed, calmly washing her face -- and purring. "Is that all you can say? 'Prrt?' After almost getting me killed?"
"All I can say," said a deep masculine voice, "is that I'm glad I got out of that chair when did. Are you all right?"
Darcy turned her head and saw him, three thoughts occurring almost simultaneously: that he had the longest, thickest lashes she had ever seen, that no man with his right leg and left arm both in casts should look as healthy as this one did, and that she had seen his handsome, bearded face before. She sat up gingerly.
"I...I think so," she said in reply to his question, noticing that he was staring at her oddly, almost disbelievingly.
"You live over there?" Frowning, he waved his arm toward the high fence.
Buck couldn't believe it. Was this his fantasy come to life? How could she be? Her medium-brown hair hung in a braid over her left shoulder, tattered and twig-decorated, its end curled near the crook of her elbow. Her face, without a trace of makeup, had a dusting of freckles on nose and cheekbones. She had small, bare feet planted on the grass and small, square hands clutching a gray kitten to her breast. She returned his scrutiny with very ordinary, almond shaped hazel eyes -- eyes that narrowed at his tone.
"Yes, I'm Darcy Gallagher. I live next door."
"You live alone?" Maybe he had to reassess. Maybe there were two or three or even more women over there. This one couldn't be the one he had built all those dreams about.
"What?" Her gaze, flickering with ice now, swept over him. "Was it an impertinent question like that which got you into the state you're in?" she asked.
He scowled at her. "Huh?" He heard himself say that with an element of disbelief. What was the matter with him? Never in his life had he been so inept in his dealings with a woman.
"That was a rude question," she snapped impatiently. "And one which no woman in her right mind answers these days!"
"Oh come on," he said, rapping his knuckles on his leg cast. "Do I look dangerous?"
Something flickered again in her eyes and for a moment he thought she was about to say yes, and run out of his yard. Either that or leap back into the tree from which she had dropped. Instead, she said. "Maybe not at the moment."
Then, much to his surprise, she added, "But you do live dangerously, don't you. Mr. Halloran?"
"You know me!" he said, and it wasn't a mere statement, it was an accusation.
Her grin was all imp. "Not personally, Mr. Halloran. Do you meet so many women you can't keep track of who knows you and who doesn't? And if being recognized is such a trauma, why do you spend so much of your time being interviewed by TV reporters, magazine writers, and radio-show hosts?"
"I just didn't expect to be recognized here," he said huffily. Dammit, women didn't laugh at him. Not unless he was being funny. And he damn well wasn't. Not today.
He noticed her eyes had narrowed and felt, suddenly, like backing his chair up a few feet. "Here, Mr. Halloran?"
He had to brazen it out. "Yes, Newport, Oregon isn't exactly..."
"Exactly what?" she prompted when he let his sentence fade out and shrugged. "A thriving metropolis? Of course it's not. We don't pretend it is. We don't want it to be. However, we do have television, radio, and papers. We also have a population roughly equivalent to that of London and Tokyo combined during the summer months when all of you superior beings from elsewhere so graciously offer us your presence and attempt to educate us out of our woeful lack of sophistication."
She swept by him, but he was serpent-fast, capturing her wrist and swinging her back, halting her in mid-stride.
"Whoa! Hold on!" he said. Her skin, warm and soft, felt tender to him and his fingers wrapped around her wrist with room to spare. Her startled gaze flew to his, and the fear in them forced him to let her go at once.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have grabbed you like that. I'm also sorry I stepped on your tail. I certainly didn't mean to. All I was trying to say was that Newport -- the entire coast, for that matter -- isn't exactly a mountain-climbing capital. I didn't expect to be recognized."
"I see. Are you in hiding, Mr. Halloran?"
"My name is Buck," he said, smiling. "I'm not so much in hiding as not wanting to be bothered."
She tilted her pert little chin up and took a step away. "Of course. I'm sorry I bothered you."
He got a loose grip on her wrist again. "You don't bother me. No, that's not quite true," he surprised himself by confessing. "You do. You've been bothering me all week."
Buck swept his gaze over her from her hazel eyes to her small nose and pink mouth. She still held the kitten in her other arm. Her arms, he noted, were nicely rounded and a lovely shade of golden tan. Her waist was slim, as were her hips. For a moment he let his gaze linger on her legs, bare beneath a pair of yellow shorts.
"Would you like for me to turn around...real slow?" she asked, and, feeling suddenly guilty, he looked back up at her face, finding her eyes flashing with temper. For some reason, that amused him. "That won't be necessary," he drawled. "But would you do me one favor?"
She fixed him with a narrowed, wary stare and asked, "What's that?"
His hold on her wrist tightened slightly as he began to slide his hand up her forearm. "Laugh," he said softy. "Laugh for me."
She snatched her arm free of his clasp. She didn't laugh. She didn't even smile. She tilted her chin and said, "I'd tell you to take a hike, but since you're so obviously disabled, I'll do it myself. Good-bye. Mr. Halloran."
"Wait!" he said, wondering again how he was managing to blow this meeting so thoroughly. He couldn't seem to say the right thing to save his soul, and she was refusing to wait, was striding away with a movement amazingly strong and graceful in a woman so tiny. Swinging his chair around, he tried to follow her, but she was quick and his chair was cumbersome. As she stepped into the rose bed, she thrust out a hand and the apparently solid fence parted for her, a portion of it swinging open on creaking hinges.
Buck was wide-eyed with surprise as the gate swung shut once more. With the possible exception of three slate paving stones set into the of the rose bed, there was no clue that a gate ever existed. He sat there staring at the solid fence, wondering if he had dreamed up the whole incident, dreamed up the woman and her cat and the feel her bones under his hand. So small and fragile-almost insubstantial. That was it. She was a ghost, a nymphet sent to test him. And he had the sinking feeling that he'd flunked.
"Well, nymph, will you be back?" he asked.
The sound of his own voice in the emptiness only emphasized his loneliness. In the distance he heard a door slam, an engine start, and then the sound of tires crunching on gravel. With his own heartbeat echoing in his ears, Buck rolled half onto the nearest of the slate slabs, wondering if he could use them to bridge his way into the yard next door. His right wheel slipped off into the soil and he quickly backed out of the rose bed.
"I will see you again," he muttered. "Dolly. No, Daisy?" Dammit, what did she say her name was? Daphne? That wasn't it, either. Hell! Since when was he in the habit of forgetting people's names -- especially a woman's?
And a plain woman at that. She was a very ordinary woman, so how could she have affected his brain so badly? She hadn't. What was he thinking? It was nothing more than the aroma of chili con carni making him hungry that gave him this light-headed feeling.
With a sigh, he turned his chair and went into the house for another solitary, tasteless meal out of Charlie's deep freeze, heated up in the microwave. Or he could order Chinese, pizza, lasagna...There were alternatives to starvation. Whatever he decided to eat, though, it was not going to be chili. He didn't think he could stand the comparisons he'd be forced to make.
On Friday morning Buck was back at the site of the invisible gate, drawn by the aroma of baking bread. He cast a glance at the slate pieces; weighing the risks. They were high. There had to be another way.
The driveway and the road that ran behind both houses was out: Charlie had warned him of the conditions he'd encounter--potholes, loose gravel, soft sand. The last of those obstacles also blocked him from going visiting via the beach that fronted both homes. No. Dammit he had to get through that gate. And somehow he would.
In a small shed, he found a stack of cement blocks that, laid end to end, side to side, in a couple of rows would have been ideal. They were simply too heavy for a one- armed man, though. Even one with his strength.
By mid-afternoon he was back at the gate all but whimpering and drooling over the scent of chocolate cake, and those risky slates were looking safer and safer by the minute.
If he could just make a casual entrance and say -- say what? "Something smells good..." Hardly, but he'd never had any trouble initiating a conversation with a woman before, had he? He could do that and then comment on how good the cake smelled. Surely she'd offer him some. Hell, if he worked it right, she might even invite him to dinner. Again, he eyeballed the distance between stones, angled his chair and rolled forward.
A man could but try...
***
Eventually Charlie stopped laughing. "A woman," he said in response to Buck's disjointed and mumbled explanation of why his chair was stuck in the garden. "I might have known. You shouldn't be let out on your own, buddy. Even with a busted arm and leg if there's a woman around, you still have to try to get into her bedroom."
"It wasn't her bedroom I wanted to get into," Buck laughed, feeling better now he was back on even keel and rolling smoothly along a path across the lawn. "It was her pantry." But even as he said it he found himself recalling the fragility of her wrist, the swinging walk so good to see -- and remembering how the sound of her laughter had been such a turn-on even before he saw her.
He became aware that they were up the ramp and inside the house and that Charlie was speaking to him. "What?" he said.
"I said there's nothing wrong with you except boredom. Should I let slip to Paula where you are?"
"No!" Buck's own vehemence surprised him. "Remember? I'm not seeing Paula anymore. It's Marilyn now."
"Paula's having a hard time accepting that," said Charlie. "She's the one who phones me daily for news of you."
"She'll stop," Buck said and shrugged. "And don't let anything slip to Marilyn either. I'm not that bored. Or if I am, it's with frozen dinners. I'd kill for steak and lobster and baked potatoes with sour cream and...and cinnamon rolls."
"Cinnamon rolls? What brought that on?" Charlie looked perplexed as he walked across the room and handed Buck a Scotch.
"That damned woman next door. Haven't you ever smelled her cooking and baking? God, it's enough to make you gain weight just breathing out there in the yard."
"So that's what you were mumbling about getting into her pantry. What is she, some kind of grand-motherly old dolly who cooks just to keep her hand in?"
"She cooks, all right, but she's no granny." Buck went on to explain in detail the torture he had endured. Charlie listened, intrigued. He hadn't spent enough time at the house to meet his neighbors. In fact, he'd understood from the real estate agent that there was no one there except on weekends, before summer vacation started.
"Maybe I should go and meet this neighbor," Charlie said. "Could be she'd invite us both to dinner. What did you say her name was?"
"I didn't," Buck said curtly, before remembering that Charlie was not only his good friend, but also his host. "I mean, she told me, but I can't remember it."
"Oh. Didn't make much of an impression?"
Buck hesitated. It wasn't fair to say she hadn't made an impression on him. She had. But his overall memory was of an ordinary, plain sort of woman, and there was no point in his discussing her with Charlie. Charlie's tastes, like his own, ran more toward the extraordinary.
"So what about her?" Charlie asked.
"Okay," said Buck. "Small. Hardly weighs more than that kitten she was rescuing. Good thing, too, or she'd have gone right through that chaise. Brown hair. Hazel eyes." Charlie was waiting, clearly expecting more, and Buck added, almost in spite a himself, "Great legs."
"Yeah. You always were a leg man, weren't you?" Charlie took a long sip of his drink, looking slyly a Buck over the rim of his glass. "Well? What else?" Charlie was not a leg man.
Buck shifted restlessly in his chair and shrugged. For some reason, he didn't want to discuss the woman next door with Charlie. And also, for some even odder reason, he wanted to belt Charlie for asking. Instead, he belted back his Scotch. Setting his glass down with a thud, he rolled to the other side of the room and the stairway wheelchair lift that would carry him to the bedrooms above. "If you want to eat out tonight, I'll spring for dinner."
Charlie unfolded his lanky body and grinned at his incapacitated friend. "I guess you were too busy trying to stay upright in the roses to notice my new Porsche. If you think you can fit your cast in it, you're on. Otherwise we'll have to make do with what I can scrape up."
What Charlie was able to scrape up with two hands was far superior to what Buck could have managed on his own, yet Buck went to bed that night still feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Not hungry, exactly, he thought, but lacking something he couldn't put a name to.
It was dawn when he awoke, the first sleepy twitterings of the birds in the maple a quiet kind of music. He listened for a few minutes before sitting up abruptly and saying aloud, "Darcy! That was it. Darcy Gallagher." Then, satisfied, he lay back down again and slept.
***
"What?" Darcy rolled over, blinked at her clock and tried to decipher the time. Had someone called her name? Had Buck Halloran called out to her? No, of course not. She was dreaming again. Damn that man. What right did he have to enter into her dreams and disturb her sleep? She tossed restlessly, flipped her pillow, and punched it into a different shape before putting her head down. It didn't help. The man's silver-gray eyes still haunted her, along with his ridiculous lashes. Again she visualized him in that wheelchair, one leg covered by the cast, but the other brown and muscular and covered with golden hair, several shades lighter than his raisin colored beard and mustache, which were in turn a shade or two lighter than his hair.
With a sigh, she wandered what it would be like to kiss a man with a beard. The thought was more disturbing than any of her thoughts had been for years, so she sat up, swung her feet over the side of the bed and went to shower.
It wasn't fair, she told herself as she finished breakfast. Weekends were supposed to be her time to rest and relax, get some sun. And dream her own private dreams. But the man she had met on Thursday was making rest impossible for her. "Well," she mur- mured to the kitten that was nibbling the last crumbs of Darcy's toast. "Like Dad always says, recreation's as good as rest. Since I won't be getting any of the one, maybe I should settle for the other and wear out the body."
How she succeeded! At nine that evening when she arrived home it was all she could do to stay awake long enough to let Sasquatch out into the yard for twenty minutes and clean the litter box. Then, having showered off the odor of horse, she tumbled into bed and slept dreamlessly. Sunday, she took advantage of the low tide and dug her limit of clams before hiking for miles along the beach, stopping now and then to admire a sandcastle or visit with friends. She not only accepted a dinner invitation for that evening, but took on a new client family for the summer. That night she was again ready to drop into bed early, sure she wouldn't waste the night dreaming stupid dreams about a man she had met only once, dreams that left her feeling sad and lonely and yearning.
Sasquatch woke her early Monday morning, pouncing and nudging and licking. Sleepily, Darcy laughed, and wrestled with her pet before leaping up to start a new day - - a new week -- maybe the one in which she would become a mother.
***
Buck was awake far too early that Monday, in his estimation. Rolling awkwardly off his bed, he was just shifting his weight into the wheelchair when be heard that sleepy, sultry laugh again. He stopped breathing while his mind grappled with the fantasy he had dreamed up a week ago and the reality he knew now. Long and slinky she was not. Sensuous and sultry were in doubt. But still that laugh had the power to tingle through his body and set him on fire in places where he'd prefer to have ice packs at the moment. And then she spoke.
"Now don't kiss my neck like that. It tickles."
Talk about effective ice packs! He put his chair into motion, but not quickly enough to miss her saying, "Come back here, you rascal. You started this and you aren't running out on me now."
Maybe the other guy wasn't, but he, Buck Halloran, damned well didn't have to sit around and listen to that kind of conversation. He slammed the bathroom door, cutting off her warm chuckle. He was no voyeur.
He washed, awkwardly as usual, trying not to picture her, but it was futile. There she was, a plain, ordinary small woman, maybe twenty-eight years old, with medium brown hair, remarkable only in its length, average hazel eyes, a little nose and a chin that verged on stubbornly square. Her figure, he remembered, wasn't bad at all. There just wasn't much of it. He groaned as his mind's eye provided him with the entertaining image of his own large, brown hand cupping and covering one of her small, pale breasts. Her breasts would be pale, wouldn't they? Yes. And too small!
He snatched his mind away from there, concentrating on getting his body clean, not easy when he could only stand, precariously leaning on the sink, for seconds at a time before collapsing into his chair. How he longed for a shower, or even better, a long session in his whirlpool bath. Inevitably, that thought conjured up the warm and sultry laugh once more and again a picture of her draped itself across his mind. She was leaning back, her head on his shoulder, one slender leg lifted as she soaped her calf and then he took the sponge away from her and --
"For Pete's sake," he muttered. "What am I doing? All right, she may be on the small side, but let's face it, she does have damned good legs." He'd always been turned on by long legs, the longer the better. Not that she was in any way long-legged. It was just that in proportion to the rest of her, her legs were long...and smooth...and sleek, and slender, and golden, and firm. His mind chattered at him as he recalled staring at those legs for a full sixty seconds before he even began to wonder if she'd been hurt tumbling out of that tree.
Oh, yes, Charlie was right. No two ways about it. He was one bored mountain climber. For the first time he began to have serious doubts about the sanity of this solitary convalescence he'd thought would be simply great, even if not what the doctor ordered. The doctor, in fact, had been totally against it.
"What happens if you run into difficulties?" he had asked.
"I've been able to push buttons since I was a little kid. My friend's cabin has a telephone."
"And if you're outside? Can't get to a phone?"
"Ever hear of cell-phones, doc?"
"Okay, let's say the battery's dead."
"There's nothing wrong with my lungs."
As he recalled that conversation, Buck was reminded of Friday when he had gotten into difficulties outdoors -- with the cell phone inside, naturally -- and had sat there for three hours, helpless in his canted-over wheelchair, rather than call for help. Of course, he'd known Charlie was coming. But what he didn't know was if Charlie hadn't been expected, could he have brought himself to ask the woman next door for help? How would he have felt, watching her coming through the gate, active, mobile, maybe laughing at him and his predicament? He'd have felt lousy, that's how. And what would he have said, assuming he even heard her over there and knew she was home. "Hey, there, you with the cat, your neighbor's stuck in the sand, spinning his wheels."
And that's exactly what he was doing now, even thinking about her; spinning his wheels. She was over there on the other side of that fence with another man -- in bed. And he was here, alone, barely able to wash himself. With a snort of disgust Buck managed to complete that task and then rested for a moment, teeth clenched, as he wondered why it was so difficult to make himself open the bathroom door. If they were still over there murmuring to each other, he didn't have to listen, did he? No. He could just roll right on by and onto the elevator platform.
What did assail him was not seductive murmuring, but the scent of fresh-baked bread and he moaned, pounding his fist on the arm of the chair.
"Darcy," he said as the elevator carried him downward, "Darcy Gallagher. Something is going to have to be done about you, and soon."
***
Darcy showered quickly, singing to herself, dressed in a faded pink short terry jumpsuit and brushed her hair back, tying it with a ribbon rather than braiding it. As she ran down the stairs she could feel it swinging against her shoulders and back. Unbidden came the thought: Is that what a beard would feel like on my skin?
Suppressing the notion, she turned on the two largest ovens before pouring a bowl of cereal for herself, and a dish of milk for the kitten. By the time she had finished eating. the ovens were warm and ready for the bread she had left to rise slowly all night.
The screened, walk-in cooler, built out onto the patio, with slatted shelves for cooling baked-goods safe from marauding crows and other scavengers, such as brothers and nieces and nephews, had been, along with the rest of the renovations to the kitchen, Gran's last gift to Darcy. She had insisted on the best; the big, glass-fronted ovens, the walk-in freezer in what had once been the pantry, and professional size utensils. "If you're going to do a professional job, you need the right equipment," she had said, her enthusiasm shining within her as she involved herself in Darcy's new career.
How she missed Gran! Darcy thought as she rinsed the clams and put them on to steam. The two years without her had been lonely, but in a way, she kept Gran alive by using her recipes every day.
Now, doing just that, she diced vegetables and put them on to simmer in clam nectar and tomato juice flavored with subtle touches of oregano and garlic. The chowder was part of today's lunch menu, and favorite with all her clients except for Mr. Johnson. He disliked anything from the sea. For him, she'd heat up a small meat pie.
With a frown, she wondered how Buck Halloran was managing his meals. Did he have help? She'd heard no voices over there on the few occasions she'd had time to sit outside. Briefly, she felt a surge of resentment when she considered her weekend, and how driven to flee she'd been both days, just to keep the damned man out of her imagination. Who cared if he had good meals? He must be eating enough. Even one handed, surely he'd be able to open field-rations. Wasn't that was mountaineers thrived on when they were out in the boondocks? And Buck Halloran had made it clear enough that he thought Newport, Oregon, qualified as the boondocks in every way, just as he she, a resident, qualified as a hick, a rube. Laugh, he'd said. Laugh for me. Did he think all quaint locals were performing seals? Well, she had news for him. A performance by Darcy Gallagher was worth a whole lot more than a smile from Buck Halloran, even with those thick-lashed, sexy eyes of his. Nope, as far as she was concerned, he could starve.
She tried to put him right out of her mind and get on with her work, but he kept popping up like a crazy, moving target in a shooting gallery -- and she could never shoot him down to stay.
It was late when she got back from her dinner rounds. Everyone had wanted to talk. She let the kitten out and stared balefully at the thirty dozen cookies in the cooler waiting to be boxed, labeled and frozen. Briefly, she considered leaving them for morning, but that would only be one more task on top of tomorrow's job. Before she ate, or after? Before, she decided, hauling plastic containers out of a cupboard and lining them up on the counter near the cooler. Quickly, she labeled them; ten dozen each of jumbo raisin, butter caramel and chocolate chip. With deft efficiency, Darcy began sliding cookies into boxes, clapping on lids and setting them onto the cart until the containers were all filled except one. She frowned and recounted. There were only nine dozen chocolate chip cookies and she knew perfectly well she had set ten dozen out to cool. Had someone been in while she was away?
Her mind replayed her arrival home. She had used her key to unlock the back door. She'd had to unlock the patio doors to let Sas out. The front door was on automatic lock all the time. That left the screen of the cooler itself, and Darcy began to get mad.
"Damned kids," she muttered, marching outside to find the hole she was sure had been cut in the screen. But what kids? There were none nearby. Nor, she found, were there any holes in the screen.
"Okay, so I can't count," she said aloud. "So I'm going crazy. I only made nine dozen chocolate chip cookies." Unaccountably -- or perhaps not so unaccountably -- she found herself blaming her next-door neighbor. He had distracted her, changed her from properly efficient to sloppily careless. She scooped up the kitten and went inside, viciously sliding the door shut as if it were a guillotine and his head was under the blade.
Too tired and too disturbed to care about food, Darcy went up to bed, determined that the man would never distract her again. The next morning when she set thirty-one pies out to cool -- fourteen chocolate chiffon, twelve coconut cream, and five lemon -- she counted twice to be sure. There they were, thirty-one pies, ready to be packaged when she came back from her lunch rounds. Except that when she came back, there were only thirty.
"All right!" Darcy yelled at the kitten, which blinked innocently. "What the hell is going on around here?" Again, she checked all the doors and all the windows. The only open windows were on the second floor and it would take an experienced burglar to get up there. And what professional thief would take cookies and pies? Just for good measure, Darcy went outside and checked the screen of the cooler once more. Not a break, not a breach, not a mark.
Darcy felt goose bumps rise on her arms. "Dammit, Sas, I'm getting uneasy about this. What if someone has a key?" Someone did. Every member of her family did. Suppose one of them had lost it and whoever found it had figured out it was to her door? All the horror movies she had ever seen started reruns in her mind.
"I'll have to get all the locks changed," she said, clutching the kitten, staring warily at the big old house. It no longer seemed such a haven. A thought chilled her even further. What if someone had slipped in undetected one day and was hiding inside? In the attic, or the cellar? A weirdo! A weirdo with a sweet tooth? she asked herself. But no. The cookies and pies were just what she had noticed were missing. There could have been other stuff taken. The freezer was full, everything was labeled. She had made it so easy for him! It didn't take a genius to heat something up in the microwave and clean up the mess and hide again before she got back. But then, why not take cookies and pies out of the freezer? Why take something she would be sure to miss?
He was trying to scare her! Abruptly, there came the memory of someone having spoken her name in the early morning hours a few days ago. Another chill prickled her skin as she realized that he wanted her to know he was there! What if he was upstairs now, looking at her? Had the curtain moved there, in her parents' room? That was the room nearest the stairs to the attic. She could feel eyes on her. Her skin crawled. But why would he want her to know he was there? A demoralization tactic. And it was working! She tried to fight down the panic that grew with every moment, but it came rushing in like a spring tide.
"The police. Call the police," she told herself, but her feet refused to carry her into the house where the unknown lurked. Darcy backed up, under the sheltering branches of the maple. If she could get to the van she could escape, but to get there, she'd have to expose herself again to being spotted from those upper windows. What if he had a gun? She crowded back farther under the tree and ran into the ladder she'd left there after rescuing the kitten last week. With a sob of relief, she recognized her escape route.
Tucking the kitten inside her blouse, she mounted the ladder and scrambled up. Moments later, she was dangling from a branch on the other side, swinging back and forth searching out a place to land.
Behind her, Buck Halloran's voice rang out. "For crying out loud," he bellowed, sounding enraged, "don't you know this damned gate swings both ways?"
Hand over hand, Darcy turned, still hanging from the branch. For a long, silent moment she stared at him, then, with an inarticulate yell, she dropped.
Her flexed legs absorbed the shock of her landing, but nothing could absorb the other shock Darcy experienced as she stared at the man sitting in a tilted-over wheelchair in the garden, grinning sheepishly -- and holding on his lap one chocolate chiffon pie, a screwdriver, and a staple gun.
With a strangled cry, Darcy released Sasquatch and stepped forward on unsteady legs until she was standing over Buck Halloran. Her sobs of fury were dry catches in her throat as she reached out and grasped his shoulders, shaking him as hard as she could. "You?" she managed to choke out, "It was you? You stole my cookies? The pie? You rat! You louse! You low-down dirty skunk! How could you do that to me? Why did you do it? What did I ever do to you? You're a monster, a...a -- "
Words failed her and with another inarticulate shout, she snatched the pie off his lap, hauled off and let him have it. As his startled, frozen face disappeared under a wash of viscous chocolate filling and crumbled crust, Darcy shoved past his chair and through the gate. Her knees failed before she even made it to a chair and she collapsed to the patio, shaken by gusts of loud and stormy weeping.
"Hey, cut that out! Darcy! Stop it! Dammit, will you be quiet and pay attention to me?" The loud and angry male voice finally cut through Darcy's sobs. "Quit that bawling, woman! I'm the one with the stuck chair, the pie-covered face and the broken bones, and since you're responsible for the first two, the least you can do is get me out of here!"
"What the hell do you mean, I'm responsible?" she demanded; anger whipping through her as she scrambled to her feet and yanked open the gate. The surge of adrenaline that had prompted her to fling the pie at him, and caused her stormy weeping, allowed her to wrest his chair out of the garden and back to the firmer surface of the patio. Spinning him around, she confronted him once more.
"How dare you say I'm responsible for your getting stuck? You stole from me! You terrified me! I thought there was an intruder in my home, dammit! I live alone over there and there are seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, a living room, family room, dining room, kitchen and den, to say nothing of a huge, dark attic full of trunks and wardrobes and odd partitions where anyone could hide for a hundred years! And a cellar as big as Idaho with a million little nooks and crannies. And all the doors and windows were locked. The screen on the cooler was intact, yet still there was stuff missing and it was you, you cheap thief, and you have the gall to call me responsi-"
He hooked his good arm around her and swung her onto his lap, his fingers, edged with plaster cast, clapping over her mouth.
"Darcy!" His was compelling, as were his eyes. "Stop it now. Stop." He held her until she stopped fighting went limp, shuddering as she tried for calm, then he let her go. She staggered away from him, but he took her arm again, gently. She tried to speak, but her voice had frozen and her breath was caught in her lungs. His hand on her arm was strong, and she had known that strength before, just as she had known his eyes, concerned and caring. That was why it seemed so right and normal now, because it felt as if it had happened a thousand times before.
Her breathing resumed, jerkily, and with her free hand she wiped at her eyes.
"Come and sit down," he said coaxingly, his thumb caressing the inside of her wrist. "You're shaking so hard I'm afraid you'll fall."
Of course she could have resisted if she'd wanted to. She could have refused, but she didn't want to do either. Wheeling himself with one strong hand, he led her to the chaise, and she let her weak legs fold until she was seated. He rolled his chair close, his extended leg alongside her, his hand still clasping her wrist. Pulling her arm free, Darcy wrapped it, with her other, around herself, her knees pressed tightly together to keep them from knocking. She stared at him and sniffed inelegantly.
"I'm truly sorry," he said. "I honestly never considered that you might be frightened. I thought if you even noticed -- which I thought doubtful, you have so much -- that you'd figure out right away where it had gone and come over here to murder me. I was hoping that would happen. I thought we'd have a laugh about it, I'd pay you for your desserts, and then we'd be friends."
"Friends?" she asked, her voice husky from crying and shouting. "Why?"
He blinked those incredible lashes at her. "Why? There has to be a reason? Why not?" He shrugged his powerful shoulders, and smiled. Darcy's insides did strange gymnastics. "Couldn't it be simply because I like the sound of your laughter? And, while we're on that subject, what is it that keeps you so amused?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Every morning, you wake me up with your chuckles. I can hear you during the day, too, when I'm sitting out here. You have more different styles of laughter than a whole harem of women. It's been fascinating. And puzzling. What's so funny?
She couldn't help it. She laughed. "My kitten. Sasquatch. He's crazy. He's always getting into fixes, or doing silly things. He's a constant source of amusement."
She thought for a moment he looked relieved as he nodded. "I see. Okay, then, can we be friends? I like kittens, too. Is that reason enough for you?"
"I...guess there doesn't have to be a reason," she said, and added to herself: Except...I sense danger. But there was no way she was going to admit that, and besides, what harm could there be in a man as incapacitated as he was? He might flirt, but if it got to be too much for her, she could simply walk away. He sure couldn't follow her. Especially if she locked the gate on her side.
"So you took things from me in order to become friends?" she asked, beginning to regain some of her equanimity.
"Put like that," he said, "it does sound sort of weird."
"That's exactly what I thought: Someone weird was in my house," she said. Suddenly, her voice wobbled as she recalled her terror. "An intruder who was hiding, waiting for me." She broke off, shuddering.
"Don't," he said gently. "There is no intruder, Darcy. And the only weirdo is me. I really don't know what made me do it except every day you've been sending the most tantalizing aromas over here until I was going mad with starvation."
"I worried about that," she said, half to herself, then met his gaze. "I wondered how you were managing for meals."
"You worried about me?" He seemed enchanted by the notion.
Darcy shrugged to downplay it. "Just about how you were getting fed."
He smiled broadly and the chocolate on his face cracked. Licking his mustache, he said, "The hard way, but it's damned good stuff."
In spite of herself, Darcy returned his smile as something inside her warmed and grew. She watched as he awkwardly struggled out of his blue short-sleeved shirt and used it to wipe his face, then to rub at his hair. She felt a laugh bubbling up as the chocolate streaked his face and stiffened his hair into a punk rocker's style. His beard lay flat and matted by the goop, and all the rubbing in the world with that shirt wasn't going to clean him up. As if the same thought had just struck him, he dropped the soiled garment onto his lap and shrugged those shoulders of his again. Only this time, they were bare.
They were broad. She'd already known that. They were bronzed like his exposed leg. She'd expected they would be. They were muscular and shapely and totally masculine. But that was no surprise either. What was a surprise was the shocking tightening of the muscles in her lower belly, the twinge that was close to pain, but completely painless, that made her mouth dry and her palms become damp. For a wild moment she imagined her hands caressing the skin that looked as if it would feel like velvet. Darcy's eyes swung guiltily to his face and she suspected he knew the direction her thoughts had been taking. He had that smug, superior male look about him.
"You really like cooking, don't you?" he asked. "I mean, cookies, pies, cakes, bread, cinnamon rolls! If you only knew what you did to me with those cinnamon rolls! And then there was roast beef, chili con carne -- and did you make clam chowder yesterday?"
Amazed, Darcy said, "Are you a mountain climber or a professional sniffer? Maybe you could go to work for the drug squad, check suitcases at the airport."
He grinned. "I'll stick to the mountains, if it's all the same to you. It was probably starvation making my nose more sensitive." He shrugged...again.
This time, she wasn't ashamed of looking. "Starved seems like a mild exaggeration."
"Perhaps, but with nothing but prepackaged, precooked -- might as well be called predigested -- junk or stuff I can order in for the last week and a half, I've been suffering, let me tell you."
"Why did you come here?"
"To convalesce." He shrugged and she made her hands stay still.
"Alone? Why all alone if you can't look after yourself properly?"
"I hated the hospital, and my house has five steps up to the front door. If I'd gone there, I'd have been...trapped. Here, I figured could manage. My friend Charlie, who owns the place, brought me over and dropped me with a lot of food he figured I could handle. He was right, but sort of unimaginative."
"And my cooking odors made you miss what you were missing even more, right?"
"Never cooking odors," he said. "That sounds like yesterday's cabbage, or stale fish. What you produce is airborne ambrosia."
"Flattery being the way to get invited to dinner?' she smiled and then laughed outright at his obvious discomfiture. "Gotcha!" she crowed.
He nodded. "Well, sort of. The first time I tried to get through that gate I was going to tell you how great your cake smelled and hope you'd offer me some. I got stuck. That was Friday. Luckily, Charlie came along to get me out before nightfall."
"You got stuck like that once before and yet you tried it again?"
He lifted those shoulders in another shrug and Darcy bit her lip. What was he, some kind of compulsive shrugger?
"That's the way I am," he said "That's the way mountains get climbed."
"In search of chocolate cake?"
"Only the first time. The second time I was responding to chocolate chip cookies. That was when I got the brilliant idea of using the center-board of the dining room table and making a -- Hey, what's so funny?" Buck glared at her. He was not accustomed to being laughed at unless he'd made a joke, and then his glare faded, and he just plain stared.
She sounded like his fantasy hoyden, the one with the delightfully wicked chortle, but she didn't look like that fantasy at all. Her hazel eyes were still hazel, but they were alive with flecks of gold that danced and swirled like sunlight on a pond. How could he have classed those eyes as ordinary?
"I'm sorry," she murmured, becoming aware of his complete stillness. "It's just that sailboats have center boards. Dining tables have extension leaves." She did a doubletake. "You used -- ?"
He shrugged. "It was all I could find. Charlie'll understand."
Darcy raised her brows. "Good friend?"
"The best. I should have gotten him to build me a path over the weekend but...but there wasn't time," he finished, sounding a bit lame. Darcy wondered why.
"There once was a path there," she said. "Mr. Thomas, who was a good friend of my grandmother's, used to live here, and he was in a wheelchair. The place has changed hands a couple of times since he died. Somewhere along the line, the stones must have been taken up. They may not have realized there was a gate in the wall. It's hard to see."
"No kidding." Buck said. "There are some paving stones in that shed over there, but I can't do anything with them. Not one-handed."
Darcy didn't try to hide her amusement. "You were that desperate for chocolate chip cookies?"
"At that point, it was the cake I was after. The center...er, extension leaf was inspired by the cookies."
"You obviously made it over and back with them," she noted. "So what went wrong today?"
"Today I got careless and cocky. Hell, I'd made it with the cookies, figured out how to get them out of captivity by releasing the screen, then stapling it shut, and I'd made another trip over and back with the stapler. It was -- you'll pardon the expression -- a piece of cake."
Darcy groaned. "I can pardon your theft more easily!"
"And do you?" he asked, his hands wrapping around hers, his fingers moving as if trying to memorize the shape of her bones. Darcy felt breathless and had to swallow hard before she could answer.
"Sure," she said huskily, feeling lost in the depths of his eyes. Gently, she pulled her hands out of his. What was the matter with her? Why was she letting herself have a physical reaction to this man who was a fabled charmer? How many other women had been turned to mush by the caress of his long. powerful fingers? A hundred. More! And each one had probably felt that at least for a moment or two his pleasure in the contact was perhaps even greater than hers.
"Why do you do it, Darcy?"
Buck took her blank look for lack of understanding and asked, "Why do you spend so much time cooking?"
"That's my job. I'm a cook." She smiled, and dimples flashed, surprising him. One was slightly higher than the other and they transformed her face into something so far from plain he wondered how he had ever thought her so.
"I," she went on, placing her hand over her heart and deepening her voice to its best soap opera tones, "I am the Secret Chef."
"Secret?" he hooted with laughter. "Some secret, when you pump enticing aromas around the neighborhood. Why do you call yourself the Secret Chef?"
"It started as a joke. My friend Lenore was having her in-laws for dinner for the first time and was in a tizzy about what to serve them; cooking's not her game. It is mine, so I cooked the whole meal here and delivered it to her house in time for dinner." She grinned at the memory. "Of course, Lenore is too honest and couldn't accept her in- laws' compliments without telling the truth. Her mother-in-law called me the next time she was entertaining and it sort of snowballed from there."
"You're a caterer."
She shook her head. "I almost ended up that way, but it wasn't what I wanted. I wasn't even sure then that I wanted to cook for a living. I was working in a drugstore, and cooking on my days off. Then I got the idea of cooking for people who needed help. In the winter, I have only four households, but just the other day I accepted my tenth client for the summer months."
"Really?" he said. He had a vision of her catering to men, all of whom were entirely too grateful for her services. She was crazy, going into their homes that way. Anything could happen! "You have ten people to cook for?"
"Oh, more than that. Ten households. Two are elderly couples, one is a stroke victim and another suffers from severe arthritis. Those are my year-rounders; I have six more families during the summer.
"We're talking here about families without mothers, right?" God, not only grateful men, but pathetic, motherless children, too? She could be trapped in an impossible situation before she even knew it!
"Why families without mothers?" she asked.
"Mothers cook," he said succinctly.
She lifted her brows. "Mothers also work outside the home -- all year round, just like fathers. Why shouldn't they get real vacations, too?"
"Oh. Well, since you put it like that...but my mother always cooked when we were at our cottage. She said she enjoyed it. Besides, that gave Cook a bit of time off, too."
Darcy's laugh was bright and clear and one he had heard before but again it failed to conjure up one of his fantasies. Instead, he could only gaze at the reality before him, a reality of gold-highlighted eyes, deep dimples, white teeth and a long, graceful throat as she tilted her head back. It was an enthralling reality and one he could have gazed at longer, but she stopped laughing and faced him again.
"Spoken like a true product of wealthy parents."
He felt himself flush. "Okay, okay, so I'm a thoughtless slob who doesn't know how the people of the real world live."
"Hey, I didn't say that."
"But it's what you meant."
"No. I was kidding. I'm sorry I laughed at you."
He captured her gaze -- and held it, smiling slowly, shaking his head ruefully. "That's okay. You can laugh at me anytime, Darcy Gallagher. You are lovely to look at when you laugh. And lovely to hear."
She didn't act coy. She didn't blush. She didn't turn away or scoff. She simply smiled widely and said, "Thank you," and Buck felt as if someone had whacked him in the chest with a sledgehammer. This woman had been given compliments before -- lots of them. She knew how to handle them graciously. Who had taught her all that self- possession? Who had loved her so well? The thought came winging in from nowhere and it startled him.
"Do the people you cook for really manage to eat all you produce every day?" he asked, wondering what had happened to his self-possession. He was unaccustomed to casting around blindly for a topic of conversation in order to keep a woman by his side.
"Much of what I've been cooking lately is going into the freezer for later use. I'm no crazier than anyone else about slaving over a hot stove in July and August. Even now it's too hot to have the ovens on past noon. So I start early."
"I have noticed that," he said dryly, smiling until he remembered her early morning murmurings so quickly followed by bread-baking aromas. If he were the one she'd been murmuring to, the bread would still be unbaked.
"Will you take me on?" he asked. "As a client?"
Darcy's knew her eyes had widened as she stared at him. She swallowed hard. She felt herself leaning away from him, as if she were afraid. But that was silly. What did she have to be afraid of? She didn't know, but it was there, a feeling -- elusive, tantalizing, like a whiff of half-remembered perfume snatched away by the wind before one can identify its name. And it did leave her breathlessly scared. But was that any reason to turn down another client? Especially one she had reason to believe would really appreciate her efforts? "I guess I could," she said. "You'll probably be gone before most of my summer people arrive..."
She left the sentence in the air and Buck apparently heard it as the question she didn't really want to ask. "I plan to spend the summer here, but once I have this cast off my arm, I'll be able to get by on my own if you're too busy for me."
She wanted to tell him that she doubted if she'd ever be too busy for a man with lashes like his, but that would have been extremely foolish. She nodded her agreement.
"Thank you, Darcy." They discussed terms and he pronounced himself very happy with the deal. "I promise I'll try not to trouble you too much."
Really? she asked silently, her eyes on his while something inside her responded too readily to his ardent gaze.
Aloud, amazed at her own thoughts, she said as levelly as she could manage. "I think you should go and get that pie cleaned off. There's one very interested yellow jacket making preliminary sweeps around your head. And where there's one interested critter, in this part of the world, there's sure to be others right along after."
His dismayed stare rested on his broken arm, the cast covering all but the tips of his fingers and thumb. "Jeeze," he said. "Now, a shampoo. That's going to be tough. I've made do up to now with a wet face cloth, but that won't take care of...this." He touched the sticky chocolate with his good hand.
He fixed her with his gaze. "Darcy, you know we've got a real problem here."
She knew at once what he was saying and shook her head, looking frantically around for Sasquatch, getting to her feet, backing away from him. He relentlessly followed with his chair, with his appealing eyes, his chocolate-coated beard and hair- and his yellow jacket, which had been joined by two others.
The thought of getting close enough to give him a shampoo was mind-boggling. The intimacy of it appalled her. Putting her hands anywhere near those thick, luxurious curls would be madness! Insanity. Real, looking-for-trouble idiocy -- and Paul and Gloria Gallagher's little girl Darcy was no idiot.
"Oh, no. No way!"
"Hey, come on, who got me into this state?" he asked, and she had to grant that he had a point, but...
"Whose fault was the whole thing in the first place?" she demanded, feeling her mouth curve into a reluctant smile, feeling the muscles low in her abdomen tighten again and feeling herself saying yes with every inch of her being.
"Oh, all right." she said. After all, how hard could it be to shampoo a man's hair?