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She knew she should keep her mouth shut. She knew she should just close the car door and drive away. Instead she said blankly, “A couple of hours?”
“Yeah.” He gave her another of those slow, dangerous smiles. “Three hours would be even better, because I figure that when I do kiss you, we’ll both end up naked.”
eight
Oh,” Jaine muttered to herself as she drove to work on autopilot, which in Detroit traffic was more than a little hazardous. “Oh?” What
kind of snappy comeback was that? Why hadn’t she said something like “In your dreams, buddy,” or “My goodness, did hell freeze over while I wasn’t looking?” Why hadn’t she said anything except oh, for cripes sake. She could do better than that in her sleep.
She hadn’t said it nonchalantly, as if she had been asking for information and the answer wasn’t very interesting. No, that damn syllable had been so weak it didn’t even register on the Wuss-O-Meter. Now he’d think all he had to do was waltz over to her house and she’d fall on her back for him.
The worst part of it was, he might be right.
No. No, no, no, no, no. She didn’t do casual, and she wasn’t good at serious, so that pretty much took care of the romance department. No way was she going to have a fling with the next-door neighbor, whom only yesterday—or was it the day before?—she had thought of as “the jerk.”
She didn’t even like him. Well, not much. She definitely admired the way he had slammed that drunk facedown on the ground. There were times when brute force was the only satisfying response; she had felt extremely satisfied, seeing the drunk smashed into the dirt and handled as easily as if he’d been a child.
Was there anything else she liked about Sam, other than his body—that was a given—and his ability to manhandle drunks? She thought for a moment. There was also something appealing about a man who refinished his cabinets, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was; a touch of domestication, maybe? He definitely needed something to offset all that macho swagger. Except he didn’t swagger; he strolled. He didn’t have to swagger when he wore a pistol as big as a hair dryer on his belt. As far as phallic symbols went, he pretty much had that aced—not that he needed a symbol with the real deal he had right there in his pants …
She clenched her hands on the steering wheel, trying to control her breathing. She turned on the air-conditioning and adjusted the vents so the cold air blew on her face. Her nipples felt tight, and she knew if she checked, she’d find they were standing up like little soldiers.
Okay. What she was dealing with here was a major case of the hots. The fact was there, and she had to face it, which meant she had to be a sane, intelligent adult about this and get on birth control pills as fast as possible. Her period was due any day, which was good; she could get the pills and get started on them almost immediately. Not that she would tell him. The pills were just a precaution, in case her hormones overruled her gray matter. Such a silly thing had never happened before, but then she had never before practically had a meltdown at the sight of a man’s sticky-out part, either.
What in hell was wrong with her? she wondered wrathfully. She’d seen sticky-out parts before. Granted, Sam’s was impressive, but as an intensely curious young woman in college she’d seen a couple of porn films, flipped through the occasional Playgirl, so she’d seen bigger. Besides, for all the fun they’d had talking about their Mr. Perfect and how big his penis had to be, the penis wasn’t nearly as important as the man to whom it was attached.
Mr. Perfect. Memory returned like a slap in the face. Damn, how could she have forgotten?
The same way she had earlier forgotten about Sam and his Mr. Happy because she’d been preoccupied with the silly newscast, that was how. As distractions, both subjects ranked right up there with, say, her house burning down.
Today should be fairly quiet, she thought. Out of the eight hundred and forty-three people who worked at Hammerstead, the odds were several of the people who knew them had seen the newscast and would guess their identities. Someone would directly ask Dawna, she would spill the rest of the beans, and the information would flash over the entire building with the speed of E-mail. But as long as that information was contained to Hammerstead, T.J. had at least a chance of keeping Galan from finding out. He didn’t socialize much with his wife’s coworkers, except for his obligatory attendance at the company Christmas party, where he stood around looking bored.
Surely there would be something more important that would happen today, locally if not nationally. These were the dreaded dog days of summer, when Congress wasn’t in session and all the senators and representatives either had gone home or were junketing around the world, so there wasn’t much national news unless there was some sort of catastrophe. She didn’t want a plane to crash or anything like that, but maybe something that didn’t involve loss of life could happen.
She began praying for a stomach-churning stock market dip—so long as the market began recovering by the end of the day, of course. Another roller-coaster ride before the market suddenly surged to an all-time high would be nice. That should keep the newscasters occupied long enough for Mr. Perfect to be forgotten.
As soon as she pulled up to the gate at Hammerstead, though, she saw that her expectation of a quiet day had been optimistic. Three television news vans were parked off to the side. Three scruffy-looking men with Minicams were each filming one of three individuals, a man and two women, who stood in front of the fence with Hammerstead in the background. The three reporters were spaced far enough apart that they didn’t intrude on each other’s shots, and they were talking earnestly into their microphones.
Jaine’s stomach made a dive. She still had hope, though; the stock market hadn’t opened yet.
“What’s going on?” were the first words she heard when she entered the building. Two men were walking down the hall ahead of her. “What’s with the TV crews? Have we been bought out or closed down, or something?”
“Didn’t you watch the news this morning?”
“Didn’t have time.”
“Seems some of the women who work here have come up with their own definition of Mr. Perfect. All of the television stations are running it as a human-interest feature, I guess.”
“So what’s their definition of Mr. Perfect? Someone who always puts the lid down on the John?”
Whoops, Jaine thought. They had forgotten that one.
“No, from what I heard it was the usual Boy Scout junk: faithful and honest and helps old ladies across the street, shit like that.”
“Hey, I can do that,” the first man said in a tone of discovery.
“Then why don’t you?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to.”
