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Had Kent seen this under her baggy clothes?
She smiled tentatively into the mirror. Maybe she actually would wear this dress for him on Saturday. She’d need to get some decent heels. She’d also have to ask Sylvie what to do about panties since all Phae owned were the regular kind and the lines of the pair she was wearing clearly showed under the tight dress.
She wondered if that was why some women wore that torturous thong underwear. She’d bought a pair once in Chicago but had been so aghast at how she’d looked that—
“What am I doing?” she asked her reflection.
She scowled into the mirror, wondering if she’d gone temporarily insane. She’d been acting like those women in those cereal commercials she sometimes saw on television while she was exercising.
How many times had she laughed at those women preening before their mirrors? And now, here she was doing it herself.
She hopped off the bench and began to jerkily undress.
She’d looked like a bimbo, she said to herself as she rolled the dress up over her chest. And she’d only been surprised to see herself in something so outrageously provocative and that was why she’d acted so vain.
Phae threw the dress haphazardly over a hanger and shoved it into the back of the closet. She’d keep the dress, but only because Kent gave it to her.
She noticed the clock on her bedside table as she picked up her nightgown from the bed. It was past three-thirty in the morning. She quickly redressed, scooped up the stepper bench, and nearly ran to the spare bedroom.
Kent was fast becoming a nuisance in her well-ordered life, albeit a handsome, sexy nuisance. She wound her way through the various pieces of exercise equipment and yanked open the closet door.
She pulled out the pile of clothing and gear she’d hidden earlier. Tossing the mess onto the nearby weight bench, she sat and began to sort through the pile.
As she swiftly sorted and cleaned, she thought about Kent. He’d created what she’d come to think of as a sexual fog which completely enveloped her senses whenever he was nearby. It even happened once over the phone.
She couldn’t stop remembering what they’d done in that grove of trees at the fair. Her skin warmed at how she’d blatantly propositioned him, and not just once.
As the days passed, she’d become more and more embarrassed. It wasn’t like her to proposition men, or to be embarrassed for that matter.
By the time Kent had called this past Wednesday, she’d convinced herself that she’d never be able to face him again, and that he must think of her as a desperate, sexually starved pity-case. But then his deep, sultry voice had flowed through the speakers and she was lost in the Kent fog again.
She knew she needed to make a decision about her relationship with him, and soon. She was certain that their dinner on Saturday would lead to other, more sensual pleasures. Was that what she wanted?
Her body shrieked yes. She’d never experienced such overwhelming passion in her twenty-eight years. But her heart and mind knew that she and Kent were moving too quickly.
She needed to learn more about him. And he needed to learn more about her. And more than anything else, she needed to detach herself from the boggling confusion of intense physical desire.
She stacked the gear neatly on the top shelf of the closet then retired to her bedroom. As she switched off her bedside lamp and settled under the covers, she told herself to quit making herself crazy about Kent.
If he attempted to seduce her Saturday night, she knew she would never be able to find the strength to stop him. And if he didn’t, well, damn, that’d be the worst outcome. Regardless, she had to leave the problem up to fate.
In the morning, she had a long day in front of her and working in the beauty shop was merely the beginning. She decided that she’d take a long nap after work since she needed to wait until late to make her rounds.
Then there was the special project she had planned for the night. It was probably one of the most complicated and important things she’d ever tried to do. She fervently hoped she’d be successful.
As she fell asleep, her last thought was of Kent, and wondering why he hadn’t kissed her before he left.
KENT PUSHED THE LIGHT BUTTON on his watch. It was almost eleven thirty. He’d been crouched behind the reeking dumpster for over an hour and a half, his only company the tree frogs and cicadas singing wildly in the darkness.
Something needed to happen soon before his nasal passages became permanently damaged by the noxious fumes he was breathing, made all the worse by the hot, muggy night.
He tensed when he saw the lights go out in Phae’s apartment. Finally.
The minutes passed slowly as he waited. He began to relax, thinking she’d simply gone to bed. She hadn’t lied to him. She wasn’t Captain Nice Guy. She was still his perfect woman.
Then her door opened.
There she was, nearly unrecognizable under a coating of thick black face paint, slinking out the door. Though some wispy clouds occasionally obscured the moonlight, he could clearly tell that the woman walking stealthily along the fence line was Phae.
She was camouflaged in solid black from head to toe. She even wore the stocking cap he’d noted the previous night. It must be ungodly uncomfortable to wear such a thing in summer.
Damn. There was no getting around it now.
Phae Jones was Captain Nice Guy.
He could hardly believe it, and felt numb.
As she crossed the alley and disappeared between two buildings, the corner streetlight illuminated her sufficiently for Kent to see that she wasn’t wearing a stocking cap after all. She had braided her thick hair and wrapped it around the top of her head. He wondered if the strange strap on her head held the hairdo in place.
He crept from behind the dumpster and followed her into the shadows.
Her lithe body moved swiftly and silently through the darkness. Although Kent moved as rapidly and as quietly as he could, he found it difficult to keep her within sight. He’d barely traveled two blocks when he lost her.
He hid behind a telephone pole and scanned the long row of houses. She’d disappeared. He ran behind the nearest house, hoping to gain a long view down the back yards.
He’d only taken two steps into the yard when he heard a low, menacing growl from a dark corner. Great. A dog. Slowly, Kent retreated. When the dog burst into frenzied, deafening barks, Kent turned and ran.
He went full-out for a good block before he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the dog wasn’t pursuing him. Ducking behind an overgrown forsythia bush, he attempted to calm his racing heartbeat.
The dog must have been penned or tied, he realized. He hadn’t been able to see it in the dark, but if its bark bore any relation to its size, then it must have been a monster.
When his heartbeat returned to normal and the dog quit barking, Kent resumed his search for Phae. After wandering down the next street, trying to stay cloaked in shadows, he realized that the search was pointless. He should return to her house and wait for her to come home.
A second later, less than five houses down from where he stood, he saw Phae cross the street. Bingo. He loped after her.
He was chasing her down a residential street when she stopped by a car parked on the curb in front of a small house. He slipped behind a massive oak tree to watch her.
Phae crouched down to open the car door, reached inside then noiselessly shut the door again. She dashed to the front porch of the small house, opened and closed the mailbox, then slipped back into the shadows at the side of the street.
Kent raced to the porch to see what she’d left. He reached into the mailbox and pulled out a set of car keys. Shaking his head, he lowered the keys back into the box then set out after Phae again.
As they traveled farther and farther from Phae’s apartment, Kent watched her repeat her act with car keys several times. He wondered how all these people would find their keys in the morning.
She must be crazy, he thought, or at leas
t woefully misinformed about the rate of car theft in Zeke’s Bend. If people left their keys in their cars, then there probably wasn’t much to worry about. If there were, people would lock their cars at night on their own. They didn’t need a night-time do-gooder to do it for them.
Kent thought he’d lost her again when she disappeared along the fence between two houses. He hastened after her, but when he cleared the side of the house, he found himself in an enclosed back yard, and Phae was nowhere in sight. Carefully, he searched the yard. Nothing.
He ran back to the street and barely stopped in time to prevent her from seeing him. She was creeping out the front door of a house on the other side of the fence. How had she gotten over there? And what was she doing inside?
When Phae moved on down the street, Kent checked the door of the house she’d exited. It was locked. He began to wish he’d brought along a notepad so that he could write down all the questions he wanted to ask her.
He couldn’t help but be amused a short while later when Phae carefully rolled away a kid’s bicycle from behind a car. There was no question about her motives in that one.
He became confused again, however, when he watched her remove something from her belt and attach it to the bike. After Phae left the scene, he investigated.
