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“It’s hard not to,” she muttered. “Aren’t you cold?”
“No. Are you?”
Since she was fanning herself with the grocery receipt, she could hardly say yes. Instead she said, “I’m not the one wearing shorts.”
“More’s the pity,” Jack replied, his gaze traveling down her legs.
It was all Kayla could do not to tug on the hem of her skirt. The look he’d just given her made her feel as if she were wearing black fishnet stockings instead of perfectly respectable tights. “I’m leaving,” she firmly declared. “You’re clearly too stubborn to have anything happen to you, so I’m sure you’ll be fine on your own.” Not that she thought he’d be on his own very long.
“Hey, come back tomorrow and we’ll do this again,” Jack called out after her.
The sound of the door slamming was his only reply.
“So, buddy, tell me again why I had to spend my morning off patching this hole in your wall? Or maybe we should start with how you put a hole in the wall in the first place,” Boomer Laudermilk told Jack the next morning. Boomer was a ten-year veteran of the Chicago Fire Department, the same as Jack, and was one of Jack’s closest friends.
“It was a simple misunderstanding,” Jack replied.
“Yeah, right. Like the time the captain caught you short-sheeting his bed.”
“Something like that.”
“Which still doesn’t tell me much.”
“I smashed the tip of my crutch through the wallboard.”
Boomer’s bushy, blond eyebrow lifted almost to his hairline. “In a bad mood, were you?”
“I thought she was breaking in—”
Boomer interrupted him. “She? You didn’t tell me there was a woman involved. Man, I shoulda guessed. There’s always a woman involved where you’re concerned. So what happened this time? You fall for a female cat burglar?”
“I haven’t fallen for anyone! Certainly not a bossy errand girl named Kayla, even if she does have the best legs I’ve ever seen and incredibly big baby blue eyes that show her every emotion.”
“Uh-oh, buddy, this doesn’t sound good.”
“She’s got a kid,” Jack declared, as if that said it all.
“Is that a problem?”
Jack shrugged.
“Don’t your parents run a day care center?” Boomer asked.
Jack nodded.
“Then I’d think you’d be used to kids.”
“You’d think wrong. My folks are good with kids. Not me.”
“So what are you going to do about this Kayla woman you’re not falling for?” Boomer asked.
“Damned if I know.”
Kayla was running late when she got to Jack’s apartment Thursday afternoon. It didn’t help that she’d had to stop three places before finding Jack’s stupid imported ale and the right brand of salted beer nuts. On her way out yesterday, she’d given Ernie the Doorman the rejects. Ernie had responded by smiling at her, or at least she’d assumed the slight movement at the corner of his mouth was a smile—he wasn’t exactly the demonstrative type.
Now Jack was another matter entirely. He certainly let you know how he was feeling. She’d called a cleaning service to stop by this morning, only to have them call her back and say that Jack had thrown a fit and refused to let them in. It had taken Kayla fifteen minutes to calm down the cleaning service owner, a necessity since Kayla often worked with them. No, she was not feeling kindly toward Jack at the moment.
And those feelings took another nosedive when she saw the note taped to his front door. It had her name on it, as well as the name of the pizza place around the corner. Apparently Jack didn’t believe in using blank paper for writing when he could make do with odds and ends.
Along with her name, he’d written half a dozen errands for her to run—including buying a five-dollar lotto ticket, picking up the latest video releases, buying a package of men’s white jockey shorts in size thirty-four as well as a bottle of pricy perfume.
It sounded as if the man had something special planned.
So why did that bother her? Why should she care what he did with Misty or Mandy or any other woman? She didn’t care. It just irked her that he’d written the note as if she were a peon and he the great lord ordering her about. Not to mention her aggravation at the way he’d treated the cleaning service people this morning, after she’d gone to all that trouble to get him squeezed in. If Jack thought she was cleaning up after him, he was sadly mistaken.
She rang the bell and pounded on the door. When that got no response, she was about to get out her key when Jack finally answered the door. Seeing how pale he was, she asked, “What happened to you?”
“What do you mean what happened to me?” he growled. “I broke my damned stupid leg, that’s what happened. And then I was kept up most of the night with women calling me, trying out their phone-nurse routines, asking me what I’d do if I couldn’t work as a firefighter anymore. What the hell kind of question is that to ask a man?”
Since he was weaving on the crutches like a drunken sailor on shore leave, Kayla said, “Maybe you should sit down—”
“I’m fine,” he growled.
“You don’t have to snap my head off,” she said, inexplicably hurt by his curtness. “I was just trying to help you...”
“I don’t need any help.” His words were gritty with anger and frustration. This was only his third day in the cast and already he was going nuts.
“Right. I can tell you’re doing just peachy on your own,” Kayla mockingly noted, waving her hand at the living room strewn with clothes, newspapers, dirty dishes and empty bottles and cans. “Why did you send away the cleaning people?”
“Because I don’t want strangers around. Besides, I told you I hate people fussing over me,” he growled.
“Yes, well, I hate people fainting on me,” she retorted, “and that’s what you’re going to do if you don’t take it easy.”
“I’ve never passed out in my life.”
“There’s always a first time, big boy.”
“Listen, little girl,” Jack shot back, “don’t order me around!”
“Hey, don’t yell at me because your girlfriends kept you up all night” was her immediate comeback.
An x-rated reply was on the tip of his tongue, but he bit it back because the truth was that Kayla had been the one who had kept him up all night—in every sense of the word. Jack hadn’t been able to get her off his mind and that was driving him out of his mind.
“That wasn’t yelling. THIS IS YELLING,” he shouted, working up a good head of steam. “If this is the way you treat your other clients, I’m surprised you’re not out of business. You couldn’t even buy a simple bottle of beer and some beer nuts without screwing up!”
Kayla didn’t care if this job might lead to good things for her company, nobody was going to talk to her that way! “If you don’t stop yelling at me, I’m going to break your other leg!”
“This isn’t going to work,” Jack declared. “I’m going to hire someone else.”
“You didn’t hire me, your Uncle Ralph did.”
Jack waved her words away as if they were of no importance. “I’ll get someone else.”
“Good luck. You’re so impossible no one would work for you! Your uncle warned me about you.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t warn me about you. He should have known better. He knows I don’t like bossy women.”
“You want to hire someone else? Fine. I’ll even help you find them,” Kayla stated, her anger fiery hot at his accusation that she was bossy. Retrieving her ever-handy notebook from her oversize purse, she said, “I’ll write up the help-wanted ad for you. Let’s see... how about ‘impossible, irritable, arrogant man looking for blindly devoted slave to run errands for him at any time of the day or night. Salary—not enough. Benefits—none. No appreciation, no courtesy.’”
“Wrong. The ad should read ‘Good-looking, smart, good-natured guy with great sense of humor looking for temporary help. Emotional types need not apply.’”
“Emotional types?” she repeated in disbelief. “I’m not emotional! You’re just impossible! You’d try the patience of a saint.”
“You’re claiming to be a saint?”
“Of course not. If I were, I wouldn’t be irritated by your preposterous demands and outlandish expectations....”
“Irritated? Oh, I think you went past irritated some time ago,” Jack retorted. “Try furious and bossy.”
“Stop calling me bossy!”
“Or what?” he taunted her.
Too furious to say another word, she turned to leave.
Afterward Kayla couldn’t be sure if Jack reached out a hand to prevent her from leaving...or to open the door to boot her out.
Either way, he tottered on his crutches and ended up flattening her against the closed door—tumbling her into his arms.
Three
Kayla instinctively put her arms around Jack’s waist to steady him. His breath was warm and minty against her cheek as he braced his arms against the door, his hands on either side of her head. His lower torso was intimately pressed against hers so that she could feel every bone and sinew of his muscular frame.
She saw the hunger flare in his incredible smoky eyes even as she felt the throbbing of his arousal through his running shorts. Her coat was open, and her denim skirt wasn’t thick enough to provide any protection against the heated intensity of his powerful body.
Not that she wanted protection. She wanted him to kiss her. He did, slowly but fiercely consuming her as if he had all the time in the world to enjoy every millimeter of her mouth and couldn’t wait a second longer to do so.
This was no first kiss. There was no tentativeness, no awkwardness. Instead there was an uncontrollable passion, flaring with wild abandon. What her lips asked for, his tongue took. His mouth was slanted ravenously across hers as each velvety stroke of his tongue fueled the fire deep within her.
Kayla hung on for dear life. But she was no passive partner. She melted against him, wrapping her arms more tightly around his waist, wrapping her tongue around his in an erotic tousle that was as elemental as fire itself.
The blood was pounding through her body. In his arms she was a different person, forgetting everything but him. She shivered with excitement as she felt his fingertips gliding up her thigh, lifting the hem of her skirt. Fiery licks of pleasure danced over her skin wherever he touched her.
Things got so intense that her knees shook, her head swam and there was a buzzing in her ears. A loud buzzing....
It wasn’t until Jack lifted his lips from hers that reality returned. She snatched her hands away from him as if burned.
“What was that?” Kayla whispered, holding her trembling fingers to her lips.
“The door buzzer.”
“No. I meant...that...between us—” she waved her hand toward him. “Where did that come from?”
“Okay, I admit, you turned me on...”
She blushed. “I wasn’t talking about anatomy. I meant, we hardly know each other. You’re a client.” She raised her hands to her burning cheeks as she muttered, “I don’t do things like this.”
The intercom buzzer sounded again, more stridently this time.
“You better get that,” she said, leaning down to get Jack’s fallen crutches for him. As she did so, her forehead almost brushed against his thighs.
Muttering under his breath, he took the crutches and made his way the few feet to the intercom. “What?” Jack growled into the speaker.
“This is Ernie, your doorman. I just thought you might be interested in knowing that a traffic officer is stopped farther down the street and is issuing parking tickets.”
“Why the hell would I care?”
“Because your visitor double-parked her minivan in front of the building.”
“Did you double-park out front?” Jack asked Kayla.
“Yes! I was only going to stay a minute, drop off your beer and beer nuts. I’ve got to go!”
“Wait! You’ll come back, right?” Seeing her hesitation, Jack said, “You’re not really going to quit, are you? You didn’t seem like the type to give up easily.”
“I don’t aim on giving up...anything,” Kayla quietly informed him before closing the door in his face.
By the time Kayla went to pick up her daughter at the day care center that evening, she felt as if she’d been run over by a truck. She hadn’t been fast enough to avoid getting a parking ticket at Jack’s, and her day had continued to go downhill from there. The Shellburgers’ dry cleaning had gotten lost and it had taken her an hour at the cleaners to retrieve it. A simple exchange at the shoe store for Sally Galanter had also turned into a fiasco.
And then there was The Kiss—the one Kayla was determined to wipe from her mind. No amount of determination could completely erase the steamy memories, however.
Still, it helped when Kayla walked into the day care center and switched into “Mommy” mode.
But she’d no sooner stepped into the building when her beeper went off. Checking it, she recognized Diane’s number. Unfortunately Kayla’s cellular phone battery had just gone out on her not an hour before, forcing her to ask the day care owner, Corky O’Malley, if she could use her phone.
“Sure,” Corky cheerfully replied. Her short dark hair was generously peppered with white, creating a salt-and-pepper look that reminded Kayla of her own mother. There the similarity ended, however. Corky was much more loving and giving than Kayla’s mother had ever been. “Come on back and use the phone in my office. It’s quieter there.”
“Thanks.” Kayla quickly called Diane and reported in, assuring her that she had indeed found the missing dry cleaning.
“Rough day?” Corky asked sympathetically once Kayla had hung up.
“You could say that. There’s one client in particular who is the most demanding man I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t believe...”
Kayla’s voice faded away as she stared in amazement at the framed photo on Corky’s desk. She’d never used Corky’s phone before, but she had certainly seen the man in that photo before. He’d been kissing her senseless not three hours ago.
“What wouldn’t I believe?” Corky prompted her.
“Who is that in the picture, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I don’t mind at all,” Corky replied. “That’s my son, Jack.”
“Jack Elliott?”
“Why, yes. Do you know him?”
“But your name is O’Malley,” Kayla stuttered before gathering her wits. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s really none of my business.”
“We adopted Jack when he was thirteen. He claimed that Jack O’Malley sounded like the name of a bar, so he kept Elliott. Actually, I think the truth was that Jack felt it would be disloyal to his natural parents to discard their name since they’d only died a few years before. Not that he’d ever say that. Ah, but he’s a stubborn one, is our Jack.”
“You can say that again,” Kayla muttered.
“So you do know him. Oh, my!” Corky grinned. “Could Jack be that impossible client you were referring to?”
Kayla thought about denying it before guiltily nodding. “I’m afraid so.”
“Don’t feel bad about it, dear. I’ve said worse about him myself. I tried to help him right after he broke his leg, but he was like a bear. I’m his mother and I couldn’t cope with him when I went over there. He said I fussed too much. Are you the surprise my brother Ralph said he was getting for Jack?”
“Yes, I am. I gather Ralph has gotten surprises for Jack before,” she said before blushing, wondering if his mom knew about the exotic dancer Ralph had sent over.
Apparently Corky did, because she grinned before saying, “Ralph thinks very highly of Jack. So do L Don’t get me wrong, I love him dearly. He’s courageous, loyal, caring. He likes helping others and is always the first to face any challenge. In fact, the word impossible is not in Jack’s vocabulary. But he does have a few faults.”
“He seems very popular with women.”
Corky nodded. “He always has been, ever since he was in junior high school. They flock around him like bees to honey. He’s played the field for so long that I wonder if he’ll ever settle down. Not that he wouldn’t make a good husband. He would. I just want him to be happy.”
“This is just so weird, your being his mom and running Ashley’s day care center.”
“It’s a small world, hmm?”
“So have you learned any way of dealing with Jack’s stubbornness?”
“I’m afraid not. The good news is that he comes to his senses sooner or later. There’s just no hurrying him along. How bad was he?”
“On a scale of one to ten, he was about an eight.”
“And his apartment?” Corky asked. “Did it still look like a bomb had gone off in it?” Seeing her hesitation, Corky added, “You don’t have to lie, believe me, nothing can be as bad as his room used to be when he was a teenager. Funny how he always knew where everything was, though. He’s really not a total slob, and I raised him to be quite a good cook. You should try his Irish stew sometime.”
“I don’t know about that...” Kayla muttered.
“So what did he do to upset you today?”
Kayla couldn’t exactly tell her that Jack had kissed her as if she were the only woman in the world for him and that she’d kissed him back with the same heated intensity. So she focused on his other misdemeanors instead. “I hired a cleaning service to stop by his place but he refused to let them in. And I got a parking ticket for double-parking in front of his building to drop off this stupid imported beer he likes.”
“Ah, blame the beer on my husband, Sean. He got Jack going on that Irish brand of ale.”
“Mommy, Mommy!” Ashley yelled from outside the office. “I’s here. Look!” She waved a large piece of paper, half-crumpled in her excitement. “I got stars!”
“So you did, sweetie.” Kayla leaned down to give her daughter a big hug before smoothing out Ashley’s artwork. “Let me see.”
“It’s a monster. Like that mean man who walks with trees. I bet he kilt those trees. Put a spell on them. Made them fly through the wall.”
“Those aren’t trees, they’re called crutches and the man was using them because he broke his leg.”
“How come he broke his leg?”
“It was an accident.”
“Like the time I spilt my milk all over?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’ like him,” Ashley declared. “Hugs don’ like him, neither.” She lifted her ever-present teddy bear as if to prove her point.
“Is my son Jack the monster Ashley has been talking about for the past two days?” Corky asked.
“There was a slight misunderstanding when we first arrived,” Kayla replied. “He thought I was trying to break in.... Anyway, it all worked out in the end.”
“Jack never has been very good with little ones,” Corky admitted regretfully. “He never stops by the day care center when the kids are here. I’m not sure why he avoids children, perhaps they remind him of a time when he was young and vulnerable.”
“I’s hungry now, Mommy,” Ashley announced. “Hugs is hungry, too. Hugs wants choclotts for dinner.”
“Hugs has to eat what we eat and we don’t eat chocolate for dinner,” Kayla stated. “We’re having spaghetti.”
“I want mine naked,” Ashley said.
“She doesn’t like spaghetti sauce,” Kayla explained for Corky’s benefit.
“An’ I don’ like the monster man, neither!” Ashley declared.
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