First Time, Forever, page 5
Mac was on the other end of the scale, relishing slurping back long tendrils, in between treating him to dark looks of savage dislike.
He tried to be somewhere in the middle. He thought it was probably the best spaghetti he had ever eaten. Orgasmic. “This is pretty good,” he said.
He offered to help with dishes, but she shooed him away, and he commandeered Mac to help him get the furniture in.
“Amazing how much stuff you can put in one of these,” Evan commented on the U-haul, to nobody in particular, since Mac answered him only in grunts. He took off his shirt, ready to work, and tossed it on the hood of his truck.
Sookie drove by again. He nodded at him. Sookie ignored him, as if he had ended up on this block by accident. As if that were possible in Hopkins Gulch.
“Who is that?” Mac said.
“Sookie Peters.”
“Is he a weirdo, or something? He keeps driving by here.”
“Nah, he’s waiting for me to leave so he can move in on your aunt.”
“Hah. He might as well not waste his time. Auntie Kathy doesn’t go out with people. Not anyone. Not since Howard, the bowwow.”
Don’t ask, he commanded himself. “Who?”
“Some guy she was going to marry. A long time ago. He’s going to marry someone else now.”
So, there was a little more to her winding up in Hopkins Gulch than her nephew’s welfare. He told himself to leave it. “How long ago?”
“They broke up five years ago. I guess ’cause of me.” There was more pain there despite Mac’s practiced indifference. “I mean they still went for lunch and stuff ’cause they worked in the same office.”
It seemed to Evan five years was a long time to nurse something like that. It did not, he told himself sternly, qualify her as a damsel in distress.
He knew he should leave it there, but who knew if the kid would ever talk to him in full sentences again? He tugged a metal bed frame out of the tangle of boxes and furniture. “Don’t you think she gets lonely sometimes?”
“No,” Mac said, vehemently. “She doesn’t. Old people don’t get lonely.”
Evan handed him the bed frame, watched to make sure he could handle it and then took a dresser out and started up the walk.
“How old is she?” He didn’t think she’d appreciate him asking, but he did anyway.
“She’s thirty-four.” The boy was panting a bit.
Good. Wear him right out and he’d be less apt to be looking for trouble.
“That’s not exactly ready for knitting sweaters on August afternoons,” Evan said dryly.
“She does so knit! Well, hooks rugs, same thing. And I’ll bet she’s a lot older than you!”
“A little older than me.” For some reason he liked that picture of her, making rugs.
“Ha. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.” He held open the door for Mac.
“That means when you were in Grade Two she was in Grade Ten. That’s a lot older than you.”
Evan shot him a look. Mac was getting riled. One more good reason to keep everything neighborly. Which was going to be really, really simple. As long as he never again thought of her lips and his on the same spoon.
“Is this your stuff or hers?” he asked, pausing in the hallway.
“Hers. You were eight when she was sixteen. She could have been your baby-sitter.”
“I think I got the point the first time.” He hoped she wasn’t listening. Next trip, he was going to load the kid down a little heavier. Now that he’d got him talking, he was sorry.
“When she was having her first kiss, you were playing with Tonka trucks.”
That big old armchair looked heavy enough to shut him up next trip. Meanwhile they were in her bedroom, and he was thinking of her first kiss, his mind going there despite Jesse, his reminder of kiss consequences, snoring away on her bed. He wondered what it had been like for her, that first kiss. Had it been as sweet and as innocent as pure white lilies coming up at Easter? Had it made her heart pound wildly, and stirred in her longings for things she had never known? He wondered what she kissed like now, now that she had known some of those things?
Was it crazy to be disappointed that he would not be the one to experience firsts with her? Was it crazy to wonder what she would be like in his bed?
Yes.
She was probably mature enough not to even think such things, he thought, retreating from her bedroom as fast as he could. Those were exactly the kinds of things and the kinds of thoughts that made romance so distinctly upsetting.
When it wasn’t being distinctly tantalizing, distinctly world-shaking, distinctly, well, exhilarating.
Sookie was coming around the block again.
Bad timing. Evan stepped out on the road, stopped Sookie, went around to the driver’s side of his truck.
“They’re starting to think you’re a weirdo, Sookie.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Okay. I’m starting to think you’re a weirdo. If you drive by here again, I’m going to haul you out of that truck and finish what I started in Grade Eleven.”
Sookie took off in a shower of dust and gravel.
“What did you say to him?” Mac asked with reluctant admiration.
“Let’s just say I acted my age.” He didn’t say out loud, young. And stupid. Not in the least like a white knight. He was somebody’s dad now. He really needed to try resolving situations with maturity—not by threatening to pound on people. He somehow doubted Kathleen would be impressed with how he had gotten rid of Sookie.
Which was good. The last thing he needed was to be thinking of impressing Kathleen Miles.
His immature mind insisted on adding, in bed or out.
Mac grunted under the weight of the armchair. Evan took on the big old sideboard for himself. Maybe Mac wasn’t the only one who needed to be worked until he couldn’t even think about getting into trouble.
Kathleen looked out the window. Evan had taken off his shirt! Well, why not? He was working hard, and it was unusually hot out, even now with the sun beginning to wallow over that endless prairie horizon.
Why not? Because it could make a woman lose her head. It could make her forget all about her responsibility to a young boy struggling to become a man.
Still, there was no harm in looking. Being on a diet didn’t mean you couldn’t look at double chocolate brownies with hot fudge icing.
He had her sideboard up on his shoulder, and every muscle he had, and that seemed to be a considerable number, was standing out, hard-edged and rippling.
For all that his muscles were straining, he didn’t look as if he was even breathing hard. Not like Mac who was struggling under the weight of her huge old armchair. She thought to protest that Mac had probably done enough today, but the prospect of him just tumbling into bed exhausted instead of wandering around town looking for trouble was too appealing.
Her eyes went back to Evan, the young, raw beauty of his body exerting a magnetic force over her. He adjusted the sideboard, and the muscles in his arms coiled and leaped under flawless skin and fine arm hairs bleached to golden threads by the sun.
His pectoral muscles were deep, and mounded, even his stomach looked hard and muscular. On her way to work, in Vancouver, Kathleen sometimes passed by the glass picture window of a gym, but somehow it was more impressive that Evan looked like this without the benefit of a gym. He undoubtedly possessed this hard, uncompromising man’s body because he did hard and uncompromising man’s work.
Kathleen, she told herself, how do you know he doesn’t go to a gym?
She forced herself out of her trance, and held open the door for them. He brushed by her. If she reached out, half an inch, she could touch him.
“Do you work out?” she asked him.
He set down the sideboard, turned and gave her a quick, incredulous look. “Yeah,” he said. “Every day. From sunup to sundown.”
She wanted to touch him. Never once, in all those years of working side by side with Howard had she wanted to touch him. Not even when the engagement was on.
“Where do you want this?”
“Could we try it under the window?” A complete coincidence it was the spot furthest away from them and would give her perhaps a whole additional second or two to admire him while he was unaware.
He lifted the sideboard with seeming ease, moved across the room.
Be still my foolish heart, she ordered herself. He looked like one of those guys on calendars that the women in her office had drooled over. Howard’s office. Howard’s company.
That ad in the Vancouver Sun that had jumped out at her just hours after Howard had announced his engagement and introduced his fiancée around had not said one single word about rattlesnakes. Or the Peters brothers. Or men who looked like calendar boys.
Make that colander boy, she said to herself, watching him wrestle the sideboard into the window well. Mr. November.
Still, his body being at its peak like that reminded her that hers was not. She was a lot closer to forty than twenty. And when men looked at calendars, it wasn’t forty-year-olds, they drooled over. Howard’s fiancée was twenty-two.
Evan Atkins would probably never see her the way she saw him—as young, earthy, sexy, desirable. A man had not triggered these strange longings in her since, when? Ever?
Even her first kiss had been a disappointment. A sloppy, awkward incident that had left her wiping frantically at her lips.
She had never attracted men like Evan. During high school, she most likely would have qualified as a wallflower—very shy, very unsure of herself. On those rare occasions that she had been asked out, it was always by the kind of boys with wire-rim glasses who wore V-necked sweater vests and belonged to the science club. Once she had started work it had been different. Men seemed to find her attractive, and she had gone through a stage where she had dated a fair bit—but not men like Evan.
Men with business suits, and thinning hair, and little paunchy stomachs. Men who worked on computers or sold insurance or worked with numbers. Men who talked about the stock market, prime and their mission statement. Men who liked improbable movies about men who were not like them saving the world from terrorists. Men who wore highly polished black shoes, golfed on weekends and hired it out if they wanted something heavy moved. Not unattractive men, but not exciting. Men exactly like Howard.
That probably, she thought wryly, would explain why she was still a virgin, even after the world’s longest engagement, prolonged by her sister’s illness.
“Hey, Auntie Kathy, where do you want this chair?”
“I can’t believe how strong you are,” she said to Mac, and watched him beam. “Right over there would be great.”
The sideboard positioned, Evan stepped back and regarded it thoughtfully. She noticed his skin was now coated in a fine sheen of sweat.
It made her want to touch him more than ever.
The truth was, she had never in her life felt so physically aware of a person as she felt of Evan Atkins. She had never been so aware of how beautifully men were put together, never wanted so badly to run her fingers over silken skin, to feel her softness being gathered in that hardness.
She had the awful, naughty thought that if her first kiss had been with Evan instead of Malcolm Riley, she wouldn’t be the world’s oldest virgin today!
Of course, at the time she was fending off Malcolm’s saliva-filled kisses, Evan would have been what? Ten or eleven?
He’s not ten or eleven now, a voice inside her head told her with wicked smugness.
That was the problem with a person on a diet looking at sweet things. First it was a harmless look. And then a little sniff. And then just a wee taste. And then the whole pan gone.
She wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of liking to look at Evan Atkins.
He glanced up and saw her. He folded his arms across his naked chest and narrowed his eyes at her.
On second thought, she knew exactly what it meant.
And from the look in his eyes, so did he.
From the look in his eyes he didn’t mind looking at her, either. He wasn’t seeing her as old, at all. He seemed to be seeing her as something she wasn’t.
Daring. Passionate. Experienced.
He couldn’t really be much further off the mark. He, thankfully, stopped looking at her, and he was giving Mac a hand shoving that armchair up against the wall. Had she imagined that flash in his eyes, a look so smoldering it turned their color to gray smoke?
He glanced, quickly, over his shoulder at her. His muscles rippled through his shoulders and his back as he gave the chair one final push.
She hadn’t imagined it.
She felt more prepared to deal with a rattlesnake than this kind of emergency: suddenly realizing she didn’t know the first thing about herself.
She longed to touch him. His skin, his muscles, his lips. She hungered to touch him. And her hunger shocked and appalled her.
She practically ran back into the kitchen.
“Auntie Kathy, where do you want the TV?”
“Anywhere,” she called. “I don’t care.”
And it was true. Suddenly she didn’t care one whit where the furniture went. Her mind had been commandeered by these strange and powerful longings inside of herself.
She heard Evan say something to Mac; from here his voice a deep and reassuring rumble. The kind of voice a woman could turn to when she was afraid of a snake in her basement or a stranger at her door. A voice that promised sheer and uncompromising strength.
When had she gotten so tired of doing it all on her own, carrying it all by herself?
She heard Mac laugh, reluctantly, at something Evan had said, and felt yet another new doubt crowd her mind.
All these years she had thought and never doubted that she was doing Mac a favor, keeping his world safe from the ups and downs of her having romantic entanglements. Secretly she had thought Howard would come around. He still had taken her for lunch once a week, seemed to enjoy her company.
But now Mac was twelve. On the verge of becoming a young man.
Who was going to teach him how to do that? Who was going to teach him not to be afraid of snakes? Who was going to teach him he couldn’t get what he wanted by sulking or behaving terribly until the other person gave in?
Who was going to show him how to shave, and how to talk to a girl, and how to be strong in the way men were strong? Who was going to teach him how to be capable—the kind of man who could fix a truck, or mend a broken window, or nail the back step down?
Who was going to teach him to be a man of honor? Look at how Howard had behaved! He could never have taught him that. For the very first time, she felt a small niggle of gratitude that he had not come back, changed his mind, begged her to marry him.
Who was going to teach him that the love between a man and a woman was sacred and beautiful and worth any risk and any heartbreak, when she had acted scared to death of it ever since Howard had called off their engagement? When she had played everything in her life so safe?
“We need something to drink, Auntie—” Mac came through the kitchen door, skidded to a halt. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, busying herself at a sink that had already been cleaned.
“You look like you’re crying,” he said suspiciously.
“No, no. I just got something in my eye.”
Chapter Four
Jesse still hadn’t woken up when Evan went and carefully picked him up from her bed, tucked him into his shoulder.
“Is he going to sleep tonight?” Kathleen asked, taking his hand, Evan’s, and folding his fingers around a container of leftover spaghetti. Did her hand linger on his just a bit longer than was absolutely necessary?
“Are you kidding? It’s part of his torture Daddy routine. He falls asleep around four every day, wakes up at eight or nine, raring to go.”
“And how long does he go for?” Kathleen asked.
“Until one or two in the morning.”
“You get up at five-thirty!”
“If I’m here at five-thirty, I’ve been up since four-thirty. Don’t you see the bags under my eyes?”
“No.”
He liked the way she was looking at him. If he was not mistaken, she liked looking at him just fine. And that “no” had come quick enough to make him think she might have been sneaking the odd peek while he was moving her furniture.
“Has he always been a little night owl?” she asked.
“I’ve only had him since my wife died a couple of months ago. Dee and I had been separated since Jesse was a baby. I didn’t see him.” He took a deep breath. “Most of the time I didn’t even know where he was.”
“Why?” she breathed.
“It’s a long story. Believe me, you don’t have time for it.” But it scared him how much he wanted to tell her, to pour out his heart to her. It scared him how much he felt like he could trust her, on the basis of a very short acquaintance.
And one superb spaghetti dinner.
He was supposed to be the knight here, saving her, not looking to be saved.
“Look, would it help if I drove Mac out in the mornings?”
“No. I’ll manage.” Recognizing he felt vulnerable made him want to push her away, hard.
“How about if I pick him up after work? It’s the least I can do. I can’t believe the two of you got all this stuff in the house. I can’t believe you wore Mac out.”
They went into the living room. Mac was fast asleep on the couch.
“You get your boxes unpacked,” he told her. “Then if you want to pick him up some afternoons, we’ll talk about it.”
Jesse muttered something in his sleep, his fist tangled in his daddy’s shirt, and then relaxed.
“You’re going to have to bite the bullet and get his schedule turned around.”
“I think he keeps the same hours his mama kept,” he said quietly. “Everything takes time. He’ll love the spaghetti. Thanks.”
