SMITTEN (Loveswept, No 392) Read online

  “No!” Lizabeth cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “I’m not ready to get married. I had one bad marriage, and I don’t want another. I don’t want to rush into something I might regret later. Besides, I have a suspicion that if I said ‘yes’ to your proposal you’d take the first train out of town. You’re playing with me.”

  There was some truth to that, Matt thought. He could afford to be bold about commitment, knowing she’d reject him, but he didn’t think he’d take the first train out of town. Impossible as it seemed, even to him, he actually, wanted to get married. “Okay, so let’s go over this then. You like me. You might even decide you love me after due deliberation.” He was ticking each point off on his fingers. “You don’t want to rush into another marriage. And you obviously don’t want to rush into what might be an incredibly passionate but purely physical relationship.”

  Lizabeth gave a sigh of relief. He understood. “Yes.”

  “How far do you want to go?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I thought it would be helpful to set some boundaries. Just to make everything clear. So I know exactly how far I can go.”

  Relief turned to alarm. “Do we have to decide that now?”

  “I don’t want to make any mistakes. I assume kissing is all right.”

  “Kissing is fine.”

  He leaned across the table. “With tongues?”

  She felt the flush beginning to creep up from her shirt collar. “Tongues are okay.”

  “How about touching? What body parts am I allowed to touch?” His eyes dropped to her chest. “Can I touch your breasts?”

  Lizabeth unconsciously pressed her knees together. “I don’t think this is necessary right now…”

  “Can I take your shirt off? Can I—”

  Lizabeth smacked him on the side of the head with the doughnut bag. “Listen up. I am not going to bed with you. As far as I’m concerned, anything up to that point is fair game, but I put the burden of stopping on you. You are totally responsible for maintaining my virtue.”

  “That’s rotten!” Matt narrowed his eyes and grinned malevolently. “You’re doing this because you have no willpower. You’re putting the burden on me because you’re afraid once you get going you won’t be able to stop.”

  “Yup. That’s true.”

  “Heh, heh, heh.”

  Lizabeth picked up her coffee cup and took a sip, looking at him over the rim. “You don’t scare me. You’re an honorable person and you’re supposedly in love with me.”

  “Yes, but I’m also a desperate man.”

  “So you’re telling me you’d take advantage of me when I was in a weakened position?”

  “Damn right!”

  Elsie came in for another doughnut. “What’s going on in here?”

  “We’re making plans for a barbecue,” Lizabeth said. “We’re going to invite the whole neighborhood.”

  “I’m not going to have to cook for this, am I? Don’t think I’m making potato salad for two hundred people.”

  Lizabeth shook her head. “We’ll ask everyone to bring something—a dessert or a covered dish. And we’ll provide the hot dogs. We can borrow a couple of grills.”

  Elsie pulled a cherry Danish out of the bag. “Sounds like a pain in the behind to me. You got some good reason for having this shindig?”

  Lizabeth hesitated, debating whether to confide in Elsie. Elsie wasn’t known for her ability to keep secrets. Not that it really mattered this time. In fact, maybe it was for the best if the flasher knew he was about to be found out. “I thought if I got all the men in the neighborhood together I might recognize the flasher.”

  Elsie’s eyes sparkled in approval. “You’re from the Hawkins side all right. We don’t just sit around on our butt. No sir, we go out and get the job done. You think we need to have a gun on hand in case he gets unruly? I’m real good with a gun.”

  “No guns!” Lizabeth stood at her seat, palms flat on the table, and leaned toward Elsie to make her point. “I don’t want any guns in this house.”

  Elsie bit into her doughnut. “I suppose it wouldn’t be neighborly to shoot him, anyway.”

  “And the police would frown on it,” Lizabeth said. “They’re not fond of vigilantes.”

  Elsie turned her attention to Matt. “Did you come over here just to plan a barbecue?”

  “No. It’s supposed to rain tonight, so I thought I’d take a look at the roof. I might be able to patch some of the worst spots.”

  Lizabeth caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “You don’t have to go up on the roof to do that, do you?”

  “Worried about me?” Matt asked, looking pleased.

  “Of course I’m worried. The roof is a mess. The tiles are loose and the wood is probably rotted. If you fall off and get hurt they’ll raise the rates on my homeowner’s insurance.”

  He drained his coffee cup and rose. “I’ll keep all that in mind.”

  ‘Do you need help?”

  “You bet. I need someone to hold the ladder.” He slung his arm around Lizabeth’s shoulders and dragged her out of the kitchen. “Holding the ladder is a very important job. Not just anyone can do it. It has to be someone you trust.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And if you turn out to be good at holding the ladder, later on I might let you hold something else.”

  Lizabeth’s stomach did a rollover. “I’m not sure I want to hear this.”

  He turned and pinned her against the front door. “Lizzy Kane, you have a dirty mind.”

  He was silently laughing, and his mouth was just inches away. She could feel his chest crush into hers, feel the soft denim of his jeans slide between her bare legs, feel his heart thumping behind his black T-shirt. “You set me up,” Lizabeth said.

  His face was a study in offended innocence. “Not true. I was thinking you could hold my shirt if it gets too warm on the roof, or you could hold my hammer while I carry the shingles.” He leaned even closer, and his mouth settled onto hers in lazy possession. He slid his tongue along the inside of her upper lip and pulled away just enough to be able to look into her eyes. “You were the one who thought about holding more intimate objects,” he whispered. “You want to know what I think? I think you want to hold my—”

  Lizabeth made a strangled sound in the back of her throat.

  “Something wrong?” Matt asked. “I thought talking was okay. I thought everything was allowed except the ultimate act.”

  She felt her temper flare. He was seeing how far he could push. Well, that was great. Two could play that game. “Fine,” Lizabeth said. “You want to play hardball?”

  He was close enough for her to feel the laughter rumbling deep in his chest.

  “No,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that I’d lose.”

  “Really? Scared of me, huh?”

  “Yup. I’m in love with you, and that makes me vulnerable. If you wanted, you could squash me like a bug. You could trample my ego flat.”

  “I bet when you were a kid you got away with murder,” Lizabeth said.

  Matt propped the ladder securely against the house. “What makes you think that?”

  “You know all the right things to say to disarm a woman. You probably had your mother wrapped around your little finger.”

  “Hardly. I was the fifth kid in a family of seven. Half the time my mother couldn’t remember my name.”

  To Lizabeth it seemed like a bitter statement to make, but there was no bitterness in his voice. In fact, there was no inflection at all. The tone had been flat. Matter-of-fact. His eyes, usually so filled with feeling, were blank, and his face held the sort of vacuous expression that came with denial or followed unbearable pain. There’s been a tragedy here, Lizabeth thought. And it has been dealt with and filed away. She didn’t want to drag it out and open old wounds.

  She silently searched for something to say, but found nothing. She wanted to hug him, but she wasn’t sure if he’d like that. It was so much easier with c
hildren, she thought. You could ease their hurt with a kiss and by holding them close. You could tuck a little boy under your arm and read him a book and chase all the dragons away, but men were much more complicated. From her limited experience she realized men had a strange ego that one had to contend with. And they had weird ideas about what represented weakness. Her ex-husband had detested her protective instincts. Not that she wanted to judge all men by Paul, but it was all she had to go on.

  Matt watched her slim hands nervously twisting the hem of her T-shirt. Great, he thought, good going, Hallahan. He had made her feel bad. “Look, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. My childhood left something to be desired, but it’s behind me.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  He took her in his arms and held her close, pressing a kiss into the curls at the top of her head. “It’s okay if you pry. You’re allowed. When you grow up in a family of seven kids you get used to people prying. Privacy was an unknown quantity in my life.”

  “Wouldn’t that make you want to guard it all the more?”

  Matt’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. “No. Mostly what I guarded was my underwear. I had four brothers who all wore the same size.”

  “I guess that pretty much puts things in perspective,” Lizabeth said. “It always helps to have your priorities straight.”

  “You have any brothers or sisters?”

  She shook her head. “No. I was the pampered, overprotected only child.”

  Matt squatted while he opened a box of shingles. “These aren’t going to match exactly, but at least they’ll keep the rain out.” He looked up at her, his lopsided grin giving his features a rakish quality. “Did you wear pretty dresses and bows in your hair and white socks with lace on the cuff?”

  Lizabeth laughed. “Yes, but the effect was usually marred by skinned knees, unruly hair, and grass stains on my skirt. I was a completely unmanageable child. One time I tied a tablecloth around my shoulders and jumped out of a tree Superman style and broke my leg.”

  “But mostly you wanted to be a fairy.”

  She was surprised he had remembered. “Yes. Fairies were my favorites. A fairy isn’t afraid of anything,” Lizabeth said. “A fairy just grabs life by the throat.”

  “That’s not what I heard. I heard fairies were outrageously promiscuous. I heard they grabbed life about two and a half feet lower.”

  “Hmmmm. Well, I suppose there are all kinds of fairies, just as there are all kinds of carpenters. Some are undoubtedly more sexually oriented than others.”

  Five

  Lizabeth snatched her clock in the darkened room and held the luminous dial close to her face. One-thirty. And Elsie was still sitting in the rocking chair by the window. “Aunt Elsie,” Lizabeth said. “If you’re that desperate to see a naked man I’ll rent you one. I swear, if you’ll just go to bed I’ll thumb through the yellow pages first thing in the morning. I might even be able to find one that dances or does aerobics.”

  Elsie rocked with her feet flat and her knees spread. She got a good push off that way. “You know what’s wrong with these damn perverts?” she said. “You can’t count on them. No consideration for other people.” She rocked forward in front of the sheer white curtains and back into the black shadows. She rocked steady as a metronome. Grrrch, the chair went back. Slap, her feet hit the floor coming forward. grrrch, slap, grrrch, slap, grrrch, slap.

  Lizabeth buried her face in the pillow and groaned. She had to go to work tomorrow. She needed sleep. She needed peace and quiet. She wasn’t used to old ladies rocking the night away in a corner of her room. “He’s flashed for two nights now,” Lizabeth said. “Maybe he’s tired. Maybe he’s taking a night off.”

  “Damn pervert,” Elsie said. “He should be locked up. He should be ashamed of himself for going around terrorizing defenseless women.”

  “You don’t seem very terrorized,” Lizabeth observed.

  “Yeah, but I’m a Hawkins. You know us Hawkinses are tougher than most. It takes more than a naked man to terrorize a Hawkins.”

  A stone pinged at the window and Elsie stopped rocking. There was silence in the room while both women held their breath, waiting for another stone to hit. Lizabeth crept from her bed and pulled the curtain aside. A spot of light slid across the window, briefly illuminating Lizabeth. There was darkness for a moment, and then the flasher turned the light on himself.

  Elsie let out a small gasp. “Well, will you look at that!” she whispered. “The man’s standing there just as bold as could be in his birthday suit!” Her eyes narrowed. “The nerve of that man! Don’t this beat all.” She moved a fraction of an inch closer to the window. “Is that all he does? He just stands there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t it get boring?”

  “Yup.”

  Elsie watched him for a moment longer. “I suppose it’s a good thing he’s not dangerous. If he were dangerous I’d feel like I had to get my forty-five and blast him one.”

  “Don’t even think about it. Nobody’s getting blasted from my window.”

  “Nothing to worry about. I don’t shoot to kill. I always aim for the privates. Nothing a pervert hates more than to get shot in the privates.”

  “Yeah,” Lizabeth said, trying not to smile. “That’d put a crimp in his style.”

  Elsie mournfully shook her head. “I’m a pretty good shot, but I’d have a hard time with this guy—he hasn’t got much of a target. No wonder the poor man wears a bag over his head.” She looked hopefully at her niece. “Don’t it ever get more exciting?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Well,” Elsie said, “thank heaven for small favors.” She grasped the screen and slid it up into the top half of the window so she could lean out. “Hey, you damn pervert,” she yelled at the man. “You should be ashamed of yourself, going around showing everybody your business. Haven’t you got anything better to do than to stand there looking like a damn fool?”

  There was an audible gasp of breath from the flasher, the light blinked out, and the man ran off, crashing through the juniper and azalea bushes that bordered the backyard.

  “Ow,” Elsie said, “that’s gotta smart.”

  ———

  “I should never have told you,” Lizabeth shouted after Matt. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  Matt looped a length of electrical cable over his shoulder. “That’s what Elsie said. But I don’t care what body proportions this flasher has, I don’t want him coming near you.” He handed a two-hundred-watt floodlight to his electrician and pointed to the large oak at the rear of Lizabeth’s property. “I want a flood installed there and the cable run underground. I want one at either end of the house…”

  “This is my house,” Lizabeth said, running to keep up with Matt. “You can’t just come into my yard and take over. You can’t tell me what to do with my house.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “November third.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her to him. He kissed her long and hard and released her. “Happy birthday,” he said. “It wouldn’t be polite to refuse a birthday present, would it?”

  “I don’t like being bullied.”

  “You’re not being bullied,” Matt said. “You’re being protected. And if this doesn’t scare him off, I’m moving in.”

  Lizabeth stuffed her fists onto her hips and glared at him. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

  Matt handed the cable to the electrician. “I want a switch installed in her bedroom and in the kitchen.” He looked down at Lizabeth and grinned. “Damned if you aren’t cute when you get all riled up like this.”

  “And another thing: You kept calling me ‘honey’ at work today. What will the men think?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. None of those men think while they’re working.”

  “And it was very nice of you to have that fancy restaurant cater lunch for me, but I felt a little conspicuous.�
��

  “I swear, I didn’t order the violin player,” Matt said, raising his hand. “They threw him in as a bonus.”

  Lizabeth shot him an intensely peeved look.

  “All right, all right. I admit, I’ve gone off the deep end. I have this horrible compulsion to do things for you. I can’t control myself. Boy, I tell you, love is hell.”

  “Oh yeah? If it’s such hell why don’t you sound more miserable? You’ve been looking absolutely smug all day. And predatory. I have a cat. I’ve watched Wild Kingdom. I know predatory when I see it.”

  “I have a plan,” Matt said.

  He was wearing a navy T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, and it tucked into jeans that were almost white from wear. The jeans had a frayed, horizontal slash across the knee and were perfectly molded to masculine bulges and hard, muscular thighs. He smelled like pine sawdust and musk, and Lizabeth thought he was the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. If his plan was half as enticing as his perfect butt, she was in big trouble. “What’s the plan?”

  ‘You might not want to hear it. It involves sweaty, naked bodies… ours. And there’s this part where you’re on fire—internally, of course—and you’re begging me to make hard, passionate love to you.”

  “That’s not a plan. That’s a fantasy.”

  Matt smiled. “Not the way I see it.”

  Elsie pulled into the driveway in her big blue and white Cadillac. She levered herself out of the car, took a grocery bag from the front seat, and started across the lawn. “What’s going on here?” she said. “What’s all the fuss about?”

  Lizabeth took the bag from her. “Matt’s having lights installed around the house for security purposes.”

  Elsie smiled broadly, creasing her face. “Good idea. It was a shame we had to miss that guy bashing his way through the azalea bushes last night.”

  “It’s a waste of time and money,” Lizabeth said. “He’ll probably never come back. And besides, it’s supposed to rain tonight. No one would be dumb enough to flash in the rain.”

  Eight hours later, Lizabeth admitted she’d been wrong about the flasher. There seemed to be no limit to his stupidity. Rain softly pattered on the windowpane and ran in narrow rivulets down the screen while Lizabeth and Elsie peered out at the bedraggled exhibitionist. His paper-bag mask sat limp and wet on his head, his tie was plastered to his chest, and his docksiders were sunk a good inch and a half in mud.