- -
- 100%
- +
“Please stop crying. I’ve got you.”
Again, the words seemed to shine, to be illuminated, as beautiful as any she had ever heard.
I’ve got you.
It wasn’t just that she had felt in way over her head since the arrival of her nieces. Even before that, she had been blindsided by Miles opting out of her dreams for the two of them.
She could still picture him frowning at her new bedroom curtains, soft white lace, saying This just isn’t what I want.
What isn’t to want? Trixie had cried. Begged as he packed his things, something grimly determined on his face, They’re only curtains.
But it obviously had not been about the curtains.
So, Trixie was trying to adjust to single life, trying get her fledgling business off the ground, feeling like she was back to square one, as alone as she had been since her parents died.
But this time determined to see her independence as an asset.
“I’ve got you,” Daniel said again, and the words were a shameful relief to someone who was determined to see independence as an asset!
His hand rested on her mummified shoulder, but even through all the layers and layers of padding, Trixie could feel something faintly electrical in his touch, something beyond strength and confidence.
She nodded, and willed the tears to quit spilling, but they wouldn’t. She saw her nieces sitting on the sofa, and the tears spilled harder. She had unwittingly put them in harm’s way. Some aunt she was!
“You look like the tire man in that commercial,” he said, attempting levity, probably because her tears were making him uncomfortable. When she had spoken to him on the phone he had sounded like a man who would be uncomfortable with tears—and she’d been close to crying then, too.
“You know the one?” he went on, in that deep, unconsciously seductive, comforting voice. “He’s totally made of tires? Only his eyes look out?”
She sniffled and swallowed, so trapped she could not even wipe her own nose. It was that thought—her helplessness in the face of nasal dribbles, as much as his attempt at lightness—that made her choke back more tears.
“Or maybe the Bisquitboy.” He was definitely trying to calm her, and his voice was intentionally without hard edges, soothing. “You know the one? He giggles when someone sticks a finger in his paunch?”
Of course she knew who the tire man was! And the pudgy little dough man. Trixie had always considered them both quite cute, but that was before she had been compared to them! But being seen as the tire man, or worse, the Doughboy, was humiliating on your first encounter with a devastatingly attractive man, even as his voice and presence strove to reassure.
Daniel Riverton was inspecting her carefully, trying to figure out where to start unraveling her.
One magazine had dubbed him Calgary’s most eligible bachelor.
Not that she should care! The last thing Trixie was in the market for was a man in her life. She was barely finding her feet after the breakup—make that dumping, a little voice in her head insisted—with Miles.
Still, even if you weren’t in the market, you’d have to be unconscious not to feel that little shiver of something in the presence of a man like Daniel Riverton, especially Daniel Riverton, in rescue mode, with no shirt on. Her eyes lingered on his bare chest.
Deep and smooth, golden, as if he had recently been somewhere warm.
The nearly naked Daniel Riverton decided on a starting point by her ear. He tried to rip through the layers of padded white.
“That’s stronger than I would have believed,” he muttered, and began to unwind the binding from around her head.
He was so close to her. She could see the amazing flawlessness of his skin. His scent—clean, masculine, sensual—tickled at her nostrils despite the fact they were still covered in several layers of tissue.
“Get me a pair of scissors,” he snapped at Molly and Pauline. His voice, to them, was brusque, but the quick efficiency with which he was unwrapping Trixie remained gentle.
“Not allowed—”
That would be Molly, always the leader of the shenanigans.
“Now you are allowed,” he said sternly.
Molly wasn’t about to let that go without challenging it. “Are you the boss over me?”
“You’re damned right I am,” he said. It was definitely the voice of a man who led a successful company and commanded dozens of employees, but Molly cocked her head at him, and narrowed her eyes.
But even a four-year-old could not miss the fact he was not a man to be messed with. She gave in with surprising ease. She slid off the sofa, followed by the ever faithful Pauline. Trixie heard them move a chair across the kitchen floor and start to dig in a drawer.
“So,” he said, his voice once again even and threaded with just a hint of amusement, “The mystery begins to unravel. What color of hair is that?”
“Auburn,” Trixie tried to say, hoping he had unraveled enough layers from around her face that he could hear her. It came out mumbo jumbo.
He frowned in concentration. “What?”
She tried again.
“Aw bum? Oh! All brown? With those big blue eyes, I expected you to be blonde. No, wait, I can see your hair now. It’s not all brown. It’s reddish, like whiskey aged in a sherry cask.”
Whiskey aged in a sherry cask? Good grief! This man knew his way around women. As if she hadn’t already guessed that!
He was talking slowly and continuously, as if he could sense the panic in her was still close to the surface, as if he had happened upon someone on the edge of a rooftop, and it was his voice that could talk them away from the edge.
He had to ruin her relishing the whiskey-aged description of her hair, by adding, “Your hair probably doesn’t usually stick out every which way, like this. It looks like you stuck your finger in a socket. Ouch! It is shooting off static, too.”
Trixie had recently had her long hair cut to a shorter length, mistakenly thinking that it would take less work. Instead, if it wasn’t tackled with a straight iron her hair looked very much like a gone-to-seed dandelion, waiting for someone to blow.
Now, her hair crackled under his touch as he unwound the tissue and batting from it.
“Electricity between us,” he said in that same mild, get-away-from-the-ledge tone of voice. Again, the light, teasing tone reminded her that he knew his way around women. So did the playful, faintly villainous wagging of the dark arrows of his brows.
But Trixie also knew he was one hundred per cent joking because there was no undoing a first impression. The tire man. The Doughboy. Someone whose hair looked as if they had stuck their finger in an electrical outlet.
“You have remarkably tiny ears,” he continued his calm narration. “Pierced, but no earrings. I wonder what kind of earrings you would wear? I’m going to guess nothing too flashy. Small diamond studs, perhaps?”
More like cubic zirconia, but if he wanted to picture her in diamonds, she’d take it as a bit of a counterpoint to the finger-in-the-socket remark.
She knew he was keeping up the one-sided conversation for her benefit only, and it did have a calming effect on her.
“Peaches and cream complexion, nose like a little button, no make-up. But if you did wear it? I’d guess a light dusting.”
Again, that sense that he knew way too much about women!
He had unwound enough of the tissue that he could stop unwinding and tear the remainder away from her face.
He regarded her with a surprised half smile tickling his lips. “And no bright red lipstick on those lips. They are quite luscious without it. In fact, I take it back. You look nothing like the tire man. Or the Doughboy.” His eyes moved to her hair, and the half smile deepened to a full one. “The electrical socket we can do nothing about.”
Her arms and hands pulled against the bindings. She was dying to pat her hair into place, but she was still bound fast. And aware, from the effort of trying to move, that something was wrong with her shoulder.
Still, she brushed that aside and gulped in a deep, appreciative breath of air. She wasn’t sure if she should say thanks, but before she had decided, he dropped the chatter and was briskly all business.
“Are you hurt?”
“Mostly my pride.” Her voice was a croak.
“Mostly?”
“My shoulder hurts,” she confessed, clearing her throat. “But not as much as my pride. I feel horribly stupid. Horribly.”
No, stupid did not cut it. She would have felt stupid if her neighbor, the lovely elderly Miss Twining had found her.
But to be found in this situation by Daniel Riverton?
While he was definitely the rescuer straight out of a dream, it was still absolutely mortifying. His picture had been gracing the cover of major business magazines for at least a year, including Calgary Entrepreneur which she subscribed to, and read avidly from cover to cover, since starting her own small business after being let go—fired, her mind supplied helpfully—from Bernard Brothers a year ago.
“What on earth happened in here?”
When he had introduced himself on the phone a few days ago, she had denied it could be that Daniel Riverton.
But, now with him standing in front of her, in the flesh—literally, she glanced greedily at his naked chest again—there was no denying it. And nothing—certainly not looking at his picture on the cover of a magazine, or listening to his admittedly quite sexy, if irritated, voice on the phone—could have prepared her for the man.
Maybe it was good she was tied to a chair. In her weakened state, four days with her nieces and now running on pure panic and adrenalin for the past hour—plus debilitating pain was shooting through her shoulder and arm—it was probably all that was preventing her from swooning.
Because he was literally in the flesh—his arms sleek and lightly muscled, his naked chest broad, and smooth, without a hair marring the silk of his skin, his pajama pants dipping very low on his hips, showing her that place where hard abs narrowed below his belly button, to an enticing V that made her mouth go dry.
No! she insisted on lying to herself, her mouth was already stuffed-with-cotton dry.
He had black hair, which looked impossibly well groomed even though he had obviously been in bed. And he had features so perfect it could have been the cover of GQ he had posed for rather than business magazines.
Or, with that perfect naked chest, one of those calendars that featured gorgeous men leaning on fire trucks or carrying saddles.
Trixie made herself look away from that, not that the perfect features of his face provided respite from the awareness of him that was thrumming through her veins.
Why did she feel faintly, ridiculously guilty that Miles had never made her feel this way? Miles had never rescued her from certain death, that was why!
Still, Miles with his pasty complexion and shock of thinning red hair, with his cute little tummy and pudgy limbs had been the antithesis of this man.
Daniel had high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a firm mouth saved from arrogance by the plumpness of his lower lip, a chin that was square and faintly dimpled.
His cheeks and chin were ever so faintly shadowed with dark whiskers, which added to, rather than detracted from, how gorgeous he was.
But it was his eyes that were absolutely mesmerizing. The magazine cover had not captured the true blue of them.
Trixie wondered, and hated herself for wondering, was this tingling awareness of Daniel the “something more” that Miles had left her in search of?
He began to unravel the rest of her binding, his way no-nonsense and firm. “There’s got to be a dozen rolls of paper on you.”
Trying to ignore the heated sensation being caused by his hands unraveling tissue from very personal places—that sizzling awareness of something more— Trixie tried to focus. He wanted to know what happened. Stick with the facts, ma’am!
“I was just so tired,” she said. “They never sleep. They’re from Australia. I mean Molly and Pauline are in a completely different time zone, as I told you.”
“And as I could not help but notice!” This said a touch grimly.
“It was your phone call that made me so anxious to not be noisy. I had just gone to sleep. They woke me up jumping on the bed. Then they wanted to eat. Then they wanted to play this game.
“They said their mother let them play it all the time. I was to sit in a chair, and they would wrap me in toilet tissue. I just didn’t see the harm. I was desperate to keep them quiet.”
For you.
Even though she hadn’t said it out loud a sardonic smile touched the glorious curve of his mouth. “Ah, yes, the complaining neighbor.”
“Not that I was blaming you,” she said hastily.
“That’s good.”
“Though you were very intimidating on the phone.” He was still very intimidating. So she tossed her head and added, like a woman not easily intimidated, “And a little rude.”
“I get that way when I’m sleep deprived. So, if you could just continue with your little story.”
Her little story? She was beginning to find her rescuer a bit aggravating. He was just one of those men. So supremely self-confident, so sure in his own skin, that it grated slightly. Daniel Riverton was a man who compared a woman’s hair to whiskey, and guessed at her earrings, as a matter of course.
Still, she did, possibly, owe him her life, so an explanation was in order.
“So they were going around and around me, each of them with their own roll of tissue. They were concentrating very hard, and they were being very quiet, for once, and I was very grateful for that. But it was terribly hypnotic. I must have nodded off. I can’t believe I did that! But I’ve been working all day, and up all night with them, since they arrived, and I just drifted off. And when I woke up, I was trapped. I couldn’t believe how strong it was. You’d think you could just rip through tissue, but, as you can see they got into my quilting stuff, too—”
She was blathering and she noticed he was more focused on the task of releasing her than her “little story.” She shut her mouth with a snap. The twins, finally, arrived with a pair of scissors and he made quick work of the rest of the bindings, seemingly not even noticing that she had stopped talking.
She watched the dark silkiness of his hair as he bent over her, cutting away the twins’ handiwork. As she had suspected, it wasn’t just tissue. He cut through quilting batting as well. Sometime after she’d gone to sleep, the twins had helped themselves to things from her workroom. She noticed an inch of white fluff floated above the floor of the entire living room and knew they had finally succeeded in getting into her bags of cotton stuffing.
Since they had arrived they had been begging her to play with the bags of snow.
And the envelopes—orders—that she had stacked so neatly on her desk, afraid to open them, were strewn from one end of the apartment to the other. She groaned, and he followed her gaze.
“You get a great deal of mail,” he said. He stooped and picked up an envelope. “It’s addressed to Cat in the Hat. What’s that about? Your hair?”
“My hair?”
“Sorry.” He grinned with apologetic charm. “It does kind of have that wet cat look about it. A wet cat pulled from a hat.”
“I thought it looked like I put my finger in an electrical socket.”
“I’m rethinking it,” he said, regarding her so intently she could feel heat burning up her cheeks. “A wet cat who stuck its paw in a socket?”
“Oh! Is it that bad?”
“I’m just teasing you. Sorry.”
She was being teased by the Daniel Riverton? Life certainly had some unexpected twists and turns in it. She contemplated this one. She contemplated that she seemed to like being teased.
Her relationship with Miles could not have been called playful. And she hadn’t been aware, until this very moment, that that was a lack.
He brushed a hand over his eyes and apologized again. “You aren’t the only one who is exhausted.” He cast a look of unveiled annoyance at her nieces. “So why are you getting mail addressed to the Cat in the Hat?”
“It’s a long story.” For a delirious moment she pictured herself pouring it out to him. Who better to share it with? A successful businessman—
“Perhaps another time, then,” he said with utter insincerity, reminding her of the arrogance right under the surface of all the charm...and teasing. “I think we’ve got you free, Miss Cat-in-the-Hat.”
And that would be his cue to leave, and never glance back. Certainly, he would not want to hear about all her production woes with a company that would be so teeny next to his it would be like a mouse standing beside an elephant.
No, closer to a flea.
“You are surprisingly tiny under all that,” he said, letting an enormous ball of tissue drop from his hands as he inspected her. “At least I think you are.”
Despite the fact her freedom meant she would probably never see her neighbor again, Trixie was relieved beyond belief to be loose, and even more relieved that she had on a perfectly respectable, if somewhat bulky, housecoat that she had made herself.
The housecoat might have left her tininess in question, and made her want to call out her weight to him as further proof she was not in any way related to the Doughboy. But this situation could have been even more horrible if she hadn’t had it on. What if she’d been sitting here in her pajamas, a pair of boy-style shorty-shorts and a camisole?
That would take the embarrassment of this already horrendously embarrassing situation to a brand new level.
She shook each limb experimentally, hoping to be able to dismiss him. But she couldn’t help but wince when she shook her right arm.
“That hurts?” he said, watching her way too closely. “It’s the one you fell on when you toppled the chair, isn’t it? You’ve got a mark on your temple, too. Right here.”
He touched her on the bruised flesh of her temple. His touch was exquisite. Tempered, almost tender, despite the powerful energy in it.
Imagine a mere fingertip making her feel like that! Miles’s touch never had.
It made the years of spinsterhood and devotion to her company, which she had recently sworn to, seem like they could use some second thought. It looked as if they might be unbearably lonely. Not to mention boring.
Not to mention, she might be missing something she had never experienced. She had a certain breathless awareness of Daniel—tickling along her every sense—after just a few moments with him, that she had never experienced before.
What if Miles had been right? What if there was something more? What if he’d done them both a favor?
After months of nursing her resentment against her former boyfriend, the thoughts felt like a betrayal—of herself! Daniel was looking at her way too closely, as if her sudden confusion and self-questioning were an open book to him. His finger still rested with exquisite tenderness on the bruised flesh of her temple. “Are you going to be all right on your own?”
CHAPTER THREE
FURIOUS WITH HERSELF, Trixie moved her temple away from his fingertip.
How unfair was that? That Daniel Riverton had stumbled upon the very question she had been secretly asking herself while outwardly declaring her contentment in her new life of independence?
But suddenly, the questions all seemed different. It wasn’t just could she manage her own business and look after herself and her apartment and her nieces? It was, could she live without feeling the way his touch on her temple had made her feel?
He was talking about right now, Trixie reminded herself sternly.
Was she all right? The truth was Trixie was not all right. The unexpected twist her life had taken had made her feel rattled right down to her pale pink-painted toenails.
“I’m fine.” This was said as much to herself, and her life plan, as it was to him.
Stubbornly, anxious to get her night and her life back under control, Trixie tried to get up from the chair, but pushed with that right arm. A startled gasp of pain left her lips. She sat back down, feeling horribly like she might faint.
He was on his knees beside her in an instant, his hand on her arm.
She closed her eyes against two kinds of pain. One, the pain swimming in her arm like a snacking shark, the other the pain of being so close to such a devastatingly attractive, nearly naked man in such horrible circumstances.
He prodded and tugged gently. “I think your arm might be broken,” he said. “Or dislocated? Maybe at the shoulder.”
“But my arm can’t be broken! Or dislocated. I’m barely managing the twins now!” she wailed. The admission was out before she could stop it. Fresh tears pooled in her eyes, and he frowned at her, troubled.
“Where’s your phone? Your arm is in bad shape, and you’ve had quite a knock on your head. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No.”
“No?” His eyebrow shot upward in shocked surprise, as if no one had ever uttered that word to him. Which seemed like a distinct possibility.
“I mean you can’t,” she stammered, and then stronger. “I mean, I can’t.”
“Well, I can, and you are, so live with it. The phone, please?”
It penetrated the fog of her pain and her relief over being rescued that Daniel Riverton was a man just a little too accustomed to getting his own way. And as tempting as it was to have someone taking charge in a situation like this, she couldn’t just give in. She had responsibilities!
“What about my nieces?”
His gaze shifted to Molly and Pauline. The next time she was thinking how attractive he was, she would remember that look. What kind of person looked at innocent children with such undisguised dislike?
Though, much as she hated to admit it, her own view of their innocence was slightly tempered now that they had tied her to a chair with near catastrophic results!
“I can’t go in an ambulance,” Trixie announced firmly. “What would happen to them?”
“Can’t you call somebody to stay with them?” He was frowning at the girls, again, making no effort to hide the fact he found them faintly horrifying. She followed his gaze.
They had a jar of strawberry jam open and were scooping out the sticky red substance with their hands and licking it off. On her sofa. Which, while not new, was one of her nods to her new life, recently reupholstered in a bright, supermodern pattern of large orange and red poppies on a white backdrop, that try as she might, Trixie couldn’t quite get used to.
Could she call somebody to stay with her nieces? It was obvious her arm was going to need medical attention.
Trixie contemplated calling Brianna. Her closest friend lived on the other side of the city, which was strike one. It would be at least forty-five minutes before she could be here. And Brianna would have to be at work in just a few hours, which was strike two. But strike three? Brianna had been nearly as horrified by the twins as Daniel Riverton was.
They are absolute terrors, Trix, she had said, part way through a play date with her own son, Peter. How are you going to survive this?
Apparently without any help from her friend, who had protectively installed Petie in his car seat and driven away well before the scheduled end of the play date.
“I’m afraid I haven’t anyone to call,” she said.
“Mrs. Bulittle?” he suggested helpfully.
She shuddered. “My twin sister, Abigail, would kill me if I left them with a stranger. I think she demands criminal record checks on everyone who is around her children.”
“Amazing,” he muttered, casting her a look that she interpreted as meaning there are two of you, really? But then he cast another glance at the jam-covered twins. “I think they could give the most hardened felon a run for his money.”
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t funny, but she just didn’t have the energy, and it was close to true, anyway. Both she and Daniel watched as one of them—she was almost certain it was Molly—casually wiped a sticky hand on the sofa.