Liza let herself into Jake and Eamon’s apartment, kicked he door shut with her foot and let her belongings slip silently to the floor. She was physically exhausted, mentally drained and soaked to the skin besides. Catching a cab uptown hadn’t proved to be as easy as she’d thought. Apparently no one wanted to pick up a half clothed woman clutching an enormous bear and a briefcase. She’d resigned herself to walking at least part of the way here, when the heavens opened up and spit out raindrops the size of cats. If it weren’t for some cabbie that’d given her a ride without charging her a penny she’d still be wandering up Sixth Avenue muttering to herself like a madwoman.
Now, too tired to do anything as practical as shower, all she wanted was a warm bed. Rather than turn on any lights she’d have to backtrack to turn off, she clomped through the dark apartment in her sodden slippers without managing to bang into anything. Standing by Jake and Eamon’s bed, she shrugged out of her trench coat and let it slide to the floor. She toed off her slippers and slid into one side of the nice, warm, king-sized bed. Maybe it was a bit too warm, she mused as she settled under the lightweight covers. Or maybe in her wet, chilled state, it only seemed so.
Then something beside her moved. She recognized it immediately as the form of a nude man, because it draped itself half over her before she had time to move out of the way. She shrieked and scrambled from the bed. An instant later, one of the bedside lamps flickered on, momentarily blinding her. From the bed, a familiar voice said, “Liza? What are you doing here?”
Oh, God, she should have known it was him. Just what she needed on top of everything else. She shoved her feet into her slippers. “I didn’t know you were here.” She snatched up her trench coat. “I’ll go now.”
She pivoted and hurried from the room, putting on her coat as she went. She heard him calling to her but she ignored him. She simply couldn’t deal with him right now. But the hall light flicked on and a moment later he pulled her back with a hand on her arm.
“Liza, will you please tell me what’s going on? What happened?”
Liza blinked, trying to find somewhere for her eyes to focus. How he’d managed to slip on a pair of jeans that fast, but he’d only managed to zip them halfway and his chest was bare. She settled on his hand wrapped around her wrist. “Nothing a good night’s sleep and a new apartment won’t cure. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.” She tried to pull away from him, but his grip didn’t budge.
“Where exactly are you planning to go at this hour dressed like that?”
“I’ll get a hotel room.” Or she would if he ever let go of her arm.
“Why?”
“I cannot share this apartment with you.”
“Why not?”
She shot him a droll look. Maybe he’d forgotten what happened the last two times they’d been alone together, but she hadn’t. And those times they both at least started out clothed.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Even I’m not up for any fun and games at the moment. It’s four o’clock in the freaking morning.”
When he put it like that, her reticence did seem ridiculous. The whole situation was ridiculous. Since she had to agree with him that not much good could come from her wandering the streets as she was, she had to give in. “I’ll be in Dani’s room.” She broke free of his grasp, hurried to Dani’s room and shut the door.
Too drained for anything else, she fell on Dani’s bed, pulled a corner of the covers over her and was instantly asleep.
###
The next morning Jim sat on the living room sofa nursing his second cup of coffee. Although it was nearly eleven o’clock, Liza slumbered on. He decided to let her rest, though the temptation to wake her was strong. He didn’t know what had caused her to flee her apartment in her nightgown and slippers in the dead of night, but possibilities circled in his brain none of them good. And the items she’d brought with her—he could understand her purse, laptop and portfolio, but for what earthly reason had she dragged that bear along? Its presence here suggested she hadn’t been thinking clearly when she left.
Or when she got here for that matter. He’d been as surprised as she to find themselves sharing the same bed. He’d been dreaming about her and then there she was. At first he thought he was imagining things. Part of his reason for latching on to her was to prove to himself that she was real.
But she wanted nothing to do with him. Despite her denial, he suspected she did believe he’d taken advantage of her and wanted to protect herself from more of the same. Granted, he hadn’t given her much reason to trust him, but it still stung that she would rather risk God only knew what on the street than stay in the same apartment with him.
He sighed, starting to worry about her now. Letting her sleep didn’t mean he couldn’t check on her. He went to the smaller bedroom and slid the door open. She lay on her side with one arm flung over her head and the other hanging off the side of the narrow bed. One cover of the blanket was curled toward her as if she had used it to cover herself. If so, it wasn’t doing its job. During the night, her gown had ridden up exposing the length of her slender legs. Jim swallowed as his body hardened just from the sight of her. No wonder she didn’t trust him; he couldn’t even trust himself.
Leaving the door open he went to Jake and Eamon’s room. If nothing else, she’d need something to wear. Jake’s clothes had to be at least two sizes too big for her, but they would have to do for the moment. He found the necessary articles along with a hairbrush and left them at the foot of the bed. He left the room again, this time shutting the door behind him. After pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee, he went back to the sofa to wait.
He was on the verge of falling asleep again when the sound of the bedroom door opening brought him back to consciousness. A couple of seconds later, Liza walked into the room. She’d pulled her hair into a short ponytail. That combined with the too large clothes lent her a fragile look. The first words she said to him were not hello or good morning, but “Where are my slippers?”
“You mean those two rags that looked ready for the garbage heap?”
He’d meant to tease her. He hadn’t thrown out her slippers, he only meant they needed to be. But her face crumbled and her eyes glistened with unshed tears. Her shoulders drooping, she pivoted in the direction she’d come.
He was off the sofa and after before she’d taken two good steps. He took her hand and led her toward the sofa. “Come here, sweetheart.” He sat on the sofa and pulled her down next to him. He pulled her to him and pressed her cheek against his chest. “I didn’t really throw out your slippers.”
She surprised him by going to him without protest, but she pulled away from him long before any tears she might have needed to shed had been spent. She sat back and surveyed him with dry eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t do that very often.”
She’d barely done it now. “I didn’t mind.” He remained silent, waiting for her to elaborate and tell him what happened last night. Since none was forthcoming, he asked, “Is there any hope you’re going to tell me why you showed up here last night?”
“None whatsoever.”
That was blunt. “Why not?”
“Because in my experience, if you tell a man you have a problem, he can’t just listen and mouth sympathetic nonsense like a woman would. A man wants to fix things for you. Ergo, since there’s nothing for you to fix, there’s no need for you to know.”
How did anyone, man or woman, argue with logic like that. “How about if I promise to just say, ‘There, there’ and nod in appropriate places?”
She turned her head and glared at him. “Let’s not and say we did.”
He chuckled. “You do realize you are leaving me to think whatever I want.”
“That’s you’re prerogative. As soon as you tell me what you did with my slippers, I’m going.”
She stood to leave, but he grasped her arm and pulled her back down. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re not leaving here until you tell me what happened. Does this have anything to do with your former fiancée?
“Ryan? What makes you think that?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Of course not. The last time I saw him was the same time you last saw him. What has he got to do with anything?”
Jim gritted his teeth. He supposed he should be thankful that Gilchrest wasn’t responsible for whatever brought her here. But that didn’t get him any closer to learning what did happen. “Look, Liza, I realize we didn’t leave it on the best of terms, but I hope we can at least be friends.”
“Why would you want that?”
“I figure we don’t have much choice. For Jake and Eamon’s sakes, at any rate. Do you think either of them will tolerate us not being on speaking terms? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do anything to ruin their happiness. They’ve both waited long enough for it.”
“You fight dirty, do you know that?”
He offered her a tight, fake smile.
“Fine, if you must know, my apartment building just burned to the ground.”
A fire? In all his imaginings he’d never considered that.
“Were you hurt?”
“No, but everything I own was in that apartment.”
And now she feared she’d lost it all. He patted her thigh. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
She sighed and all the bluster seemed to have gone out of her. She looked away from him. “Thanks. And thank you for letting me stay here last night.”
“What did you expect me to do? Toss you out on the street? And let Eamon find out you’d come here in trouble and I let you leave here alone? No thank you. My brother already thinks the day they handed out common sense I overslept.”
She chuckled. “I know how you feel. Jake is under the impression that I’d fall into complete dysfunction without her.”
Considering Jake could barely get to work on time on her own, that notion surprised him. “How’d she get that idea?”
She shrugged. “What do you do when someone you love needs to be needed?
“Consider yourself lucky. Try living with a brother whose a control freak and most of what he wants control of is you. I don’t think I‘m what he expected when the folks told him he was getting a baby brother.”
She laughed as he expected her to. “What do you know, we have something in common: other people’s expectations to live up to.”
“Or not, as the case may be. We probably have something else in common. Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
“There’s a place around the corner that probably won’t poison us. Feel up to it?”
She nodded. “If the police department gets around to letting us in today, I gave them my cell phone number to call.”
###
As it was a reasonably warm day with a light breeze blowing, they decided to sit at one of the restaurant’s outdoor tables decorated in a red and white check pattern. Liza opened the menu the waiter presented to her and scanned the list of Italian specialties.
“Anything look good?”
“Several things.” She lifted her gaze to meet his. “But I think I’ll settle for the penne.”
He folded his menu. “Sounds good. I’ll have the same.”
When the waiter returned, Liza watched Jim as he gave the waiter their order. Despite having made love to him, she knew very little about him, not even what he did for a living that allowed him all this time to spend with her on a Monday afternoon She knew it had to be something artsy considering he’d once served as art director for his family-owned magazine that Eamon now ran, but what she had no idea.
After the waiter left, he turned back to her. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
She blinked, unaware until then that she’d been staring at him. “I was wondering, what do you do?
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You mean for a living? I’m a photographer.”
“A photographer as in your work is hanging in a gallery?”
“Some of it is, but mostly I do commercial work. Does that surprise you?”
She tilted her head considering him. Her answer, if she gave one, would be yes and no. She didn’t know him well enough to make that determination. And despite his in-your-face persona, she suspected that he, like the camera, was capable of hiding more than it showed. How did you get into that?”
“By accident, really. My mother believed that all young boys should have a hobby, something to keep them occupied, probably to divert us from abusing ourselves as adolescents. While Eamon tinkered with his magic sets and trick handcuffs, I took pictures.”
“Of what?”
“Mostly Mrs. Obermeyer who lived across the street and liked to sunbathe in the nude on her back porch. Needless to say, this defeated the purpose of the camera in the first place.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight, I think. Or maybe nine. Young enough that no one suspected what I was shooting until the photolab called to say they didn’t develop those sort of pictures.”
She shook her head. Whatever tendencies toward women he’d formed at an early age. “Shame on you.”
“Yeah, well you would have felt sorry for me if you saw me after my mother got a hold of me. All I can say is ouch!” Without missing a beat, he added, “I hope you don’t mind that I ordered us some wine.”
“Not at all.” For a moment she wondered about his abrupt change in subject, until she noticed the waiter approaching their table. No she didn’t mind him ordering them some wine. With all that had happened to her in the last few days—and the natural affect the man seated across from her inspired—she wouldn’t mind something to take the edge off. But some wine was a couple of glasses of the house Chardonnay, not a bottle the waiter opened with such flamboyance as to telegraph its expense. Was Jim trying to impress her? More likely, the man just liked a good bottle of wine.
As the waiter withdrew, she sipped from her glass. The wine was delicious, not too dry or too sweet, the way she liked it. She set her glass on the table, unwilling to turn him loose as a subject of conversation yet. “I take it you switched to a more appropriate subject matter.”
He shrugged. “For a while and then I sort of forgot about it. I stumbled back into it when I was at NYU, majoring mostly in taking up space. Some ambitious friends of mine had entered a regional advertising competition and needed someone to take some shots for their slide presentation. I was the only person they knew who owned a decent camera. I was persuaded to help out.”
She wondered if he were aware of the wicked grin that spread across his face. She could imagine what brand of persuasion had been used. “And that started you back on your career path?”
“That and the fact that one of the judges of the competition, an ad agency art director, liked my work. He hooked me up with a studio that did commercial photography. I found my niche and Eamon got to save the money he was wasting on my tuition.”
He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine. “Turnabout is fair play. What do you do for a living?”
“At the moment, nothing. I got fired from my job two weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry. What did you do?”
“Believe it or not, I was an employment counselor.”
“Seems like you should have been looking for your own job.”
“Maybe. Actually, I volunteered to get fired.”
His eyebrows lifted. “I wouldn’t have figured you for a martyr complex.”
“I don’t. I knew Daphne, my boss, had to fire someone. With most of the world looking for employment online, there simply weren’t enough clients to sustain us. Although I’d been there the longest, I knew I’d probably be the one to go. Unlike the others, I didn’t have a family to support or a sick mother to care for. I saw the handwriting on the wall, but this way I got to be noble about it.” She shrugged.
“Do you regret your decision?”
She sighed, surprised at how adeptly he’d seen into her soul. “I regret it had to come to that. But God, do I miss that job, the people I worked with.” And she realized something else. “Do you know this is the first time I’ve been unemployed since I was fourteen years old. I lied and said I was sixteen in order to get a weekend job in a shoe store.”
“Why so young?”
Liza gulped a mouthful from her glass. Now she’d gone and done it. She rarely spoke about her mother to anyone, not because she hadn’t loved her. She had, but the two of them hadn’t exactly gotten along. Liza had never told anyone, not even Jake, that her real reason for wanting that job was that the hours required were on Saturday and Sunday, the days her mother was off from work. Since her mother could appreciate an industrious daughter, it had been an easy ruse for Liza to pull off. But how did you put a nice face on that?
Luckily, her cell phone rang, making an immediate response unnecessary. After a brief conversation with a representative from the fire department, she hung up the phone. She looked at Jim, who she’d felt watching her during her time on the phone. “The fire turned out not to be as bad as they thought. They’re letting us in for two hours today to get our belongings.”
“If the fire wasn’t that bad, why can’t you stay?”
“They’re not sure yet, but they think the building might have sustained structural damage. That will need to be fixed before we can move back in.” She scrutinized the disappointed look on his face. “Why? Ready to get rid of me?”
“Not at all. But I had been planning on going back to Florida in a couple of days.”
“So go. I told you that you don’t have to babysit me. As far as Jake and Eamon go, we just won’t tell them. I’ll be back home by the time they get back, so what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
“If you say so.” The waiter chose that moment to appear with their food. “Do we still have time?” Jim asked.
She nodded. “They wouldn’t be letting anyone in for another hour. “
“But something tells me you’re anxious to go, though.”
“It’ll be nice to get into some of my own clothes, at least.” She plucked at the shoulders of the T-shirt she wore. “I can’t even fill out one of Jake’s tops.”
He winked at her. “Baby, didn’t anyone ever tell you more than a mouthful is wasted?”
Despite herself, heat stole into her cheeks and it was difficult to hold his intense gaze. “Other than from one of my equally poorly endowed sisters? No. Besides, I thought all you men were obsessed with the breast.”
“Not all of us. I’m a leg man myself. Nothing beats a good drumstick.”
Smiling, she shook her head, grateful he’d diffused the heat of their conversation with humor. But her appetite had dried up. A feeling of foreboding gripped her making it impossible to muster the urge to do more than push her food around on her plate.
After a few moments, Jim tossed his napkin on the table. “Are you ready to go?”
She nodded. Ready to go, but not sure she was ready for whatever awaited her at home.
