Blame it on Cupid (3 page)

Minutes later, Merry tore out of the office as if being chased by bees, carrying a thick slug of papers and the house key. Her heart was pounding and her stomach roiling with acid. Oxford's personality sure matched his alligator shoes. He was scaly and aggressive.

He hadn't said one personal word about the child! Not one! Her mind was still ranting when she climbed back in her car…until she glanced at the rearview mirror and saw her eyes spitting tears. Okay. So she tended toward overemotional. But that little girl needed someone who
gave
a damn.

Not just someone who wanted to administer her so-called estate from behind a black lacquer desk.

She couldn't
wait
to get her hands on Charlene.

T
HE COMBINED ODORS
of beer, cold pizza and cigars hovered in the air like nectar. There was a time for women, Jack thought, and a time when a guy just needed to relax.

A man could enjoy a woman, be challenged by a woman, love a woman. But for damn sure, he could never relax with one.

“Sorry,” he said, without an ounce of remorse in his voice, as he scooped up the heap of poker chips. The faces around the table reflected various degrees of aggravation.

“You're damned lucky tonight, Mackinnon.” Robert, alias Boner to his guy friends, was the investment banker who lived two doors down.

“It's not my fault I'm good.”

“You know what they say—lucky at cards, unlucky at love.” Macmillan was another neighbor. He worked at Langley, like Jack, and was the toughest poker competitor for the same reason he was great at his job—he knew how to keep his mouth shut and reveal nothing in his expressions.

“Yeah, but Jack here's lucky at love, too. It's not fair. Hell, his back door's a steady stream of women leaving early in the morning. I should know, since I can see his back door from across the street.” Steve was his best friend in the neighborhood, and not just because he was suffering male-pattern baldness before the rest of them.

Still, Jack couldn't let that dig pass. “Hey, you're married, so you're free to get it every night. A whole lot easier than being single.”

“What? You assume marriage means a guy gets it every night? Whatever gave you wild illusions about marriage like that?”

“I don't have any illusions about marriage. Trust me. If I'm ever inclined to try the institution again, I hope one of you'll be a good friend and give me cyanide.” He dealt the next round, already sucking it up because he knew he had to lose this hand. Years ago, he'd realized he had the strange problem of a photographic memory. It was a huge asset in his work, but hell on friends. At least if he was playing poker. Obviously no one would play with him if he won all the time. Jack couldn't shut down his brain, but he did his damnedest to tune it out to make the game fair.

Most of the time, anyway.

He had to admit to a teensy competitive streak. He not only liked to win, but he hated to lose. At anything.

His house line rang. Rather than interrupt the game, he just took his cards with him and hooked the kitchen extension to his ear. The cord extended an ample distance for him to ante at the table. He'd drawn a slim pair of fours.

Steve and Boner, for damn sure, had nothing, because Boner was shooting back another beer and Steve was restlessly shifting his butt. Sometimes people were even easier to read than cards.

“Hey, Dad, how's it going?”

Jack kept playing, but his “dad buttons” went on red alert. He knew his sons. Kicker, at fifteen, was already three inches taller than Jack, couldn't make it through doors without bumping his head, planned on a football scholarship to get into college and had a theory that he didn't need good grades. Kicker, thank God, put his whole personality out front where anybody could see it. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Totally nothing. Mom made me call, but I'm fine.”

So it was bad. “What happened?”

“Nothing, really. I'm home.”

“Home from…?”

“The emergency room.”

“Uh-huh. Break or sprain?” He swiveled the cord, anteed another two bucks, then backed up to the sink counter again.

“Neither one. Mom just insisted I go to the hospital. You know how she is. She freaks every time I play football. And we were just passing a few, you know?”

What Jack knew was that he didn't want to get into another wrangle with his ex-wife. He was tired of losing skin, which was always how he felt after talking to Dianne. Unfortunately, he knew the boys played both parents against each other, so it wasn't as if he could automatically take Kicker's side without knowing more details. “Where exactly are you hurt?”

“Just a bump on the head. Nothing. But Mom's on me again about quitting.” Jack heard out the whole tale. Kevin, alias Kicker, was his firstborn—by eleven minutes. Kevin was the jock, where Cooper was the brain, the quiet bookworm, the one who looked at him with those deep brown eyes and always made Jack feel as if he'd failed him as a dad. Girls chased after both boys nonstop. It'd help if the boys weren't so damned good looking. Kicker attracted them with his charm and the sports-star thing, but just as many seemed to fall for Cooper's loner brown eyes.

He could talk to his kid and play poker simultaneously any day of the week, but while he was leaning against the granite counter, he happened to glance next door. Charlie Ross's kitchen window faced his. Actually, since neither man had ever lost a minute's sleep about their lack of curtains, Jack could see in most of Charlie's windows, and that was a vice versa as well.

The house next door, though, had been black as a tomb for two weeks, and suddenly lights blazed in every downstairs room. “Okay, Kicker. I agree, a concussion isn't worth a federal case. It happens. But let's talk in the morning. And try not to bounce any more balls off your head until the noggin heals, okay?”

Instead of hanging up the phone, Jack seemed to forget it for a moment. The view across the yard just…startled him.

He already knew the brunette was over there. He'd seen her zoom in the driveway past dark, slam on the brakes of her toy car, and run for the house. It wasn't like he kept track—the guys had come over; he'd been busy—but as far as he could tell, she only had one speed. A boob-bouncing run. And he had to shake his head.

She was one gorgeous cookie, from those sleek long legs to the lustrous swing of chestnut hair. He had yet to notice a flaw, and Jack was good at noticing women's flaws. In looks, she could make a monk perk up.

In personality, though, she did seem a little…floofy.

He leaned closer to the window, disbelieving his own eyes. The view into Charlie's living room wasn't as clear as the kitchen, so maybe he was mistaken—
surely
he was mistaken? Because there seemed to be a table-sized Christmas tree in that living room. A bonbon confection of a
pink
Christmas tree.

It was halfway through January, for Pete's sake.

Not even counting the craziness of a holiday tree being baby-pink.

A shadow streaked past the window again. The brunette. She was charging around too fast for him to see much, but he still caught a delectable glimpse of a heaving upper deck in motion.

Not that looks were everything, but Jack was hard pressed to believe a man would ever need Viagra, even in his nineties, around a woman who looked like that.

“Hey, Jack. You've been called, you hustler. Show 'em.”

With a laugh, he hung up the phone and rejoined the game. By that time, he had three of a kind, ace high. The others took one look and made ugly hissing noises. Jack threw up his hands. “I can't help it if I win,” he said, and this time it was dead true. He'd barely looked at his cards.

Between hands, he poured another round of beer—since everyone was walking home, no one had to fret intake—and shook out more chips for the salsa dip. They played the Wednesday night game as if it were Vegas. What was said there, stayed there. Not about the game. Whoever won likely broadcast that news through the neighborhood and beyond. But any private news was considered sacred.

“How many times you got laid this week, Jack?”

“More than you, that's for sure.” Hoots naturally followed that insult. Jack folded, had a hand too lousy to waste a bluff on. Crazy, but he somehow found himself back at the sink, glancing out the window again.

And there she was. Not in the living room this time, but the kitchen.

Her back was to him. Jack could see her refrigerator door was gaping wide open—she was cleaning it out. Undoubtedly stuff was still in there from before Charlie died.

She was scrubbing like a fiend. And, God, what a butt she had.

Not that Jack was a fanny connoisseur, but, well, actually he was. And hers was whistling cute. Whatever she was wearing—sweats?—caressed the shape of that little butt just so. The farther she leaned inside, rubbing and scrubbing, the more fabric dipped down her spine. The swell of two fine,
fine
fanny cheeks were revealed. And…

Jack pressed his nose to the window.

A tattoo. By damn, she had a tattoo on one fanny cheek. And not a little one either. He—

“Jack, what the
hell
are you doing?”

“Nothing, nothing.” He hustled back to the card table and parked there, but that fanny tattoo was so ingrained in his head that he lost his entire photographic memory skill. And all the money that went with it.

Usually the game broke up by eleven—everybody had work the next morning—but tonight no one wanted to leave. They were having too much fun watching him lose.

“It does the heart good to see you suck, Jack,” Steve said affectionately.

“Does the heart good, hell. It does the wallet good. May you have a slump like this that lasts weeks,” Boner chortled, as Jack watched the last of his stash get cradled into the banker's big fat hands.

“What is this? Does nobody have any sympathy?”

“For you in life, sure. For you in cards, never.”

They always played at his place. After the divorce, Jack told himself he needed this mountain of a house in the suburbs like he needed a spare ear, but he'd never put it on the market. It was so easy to have a guy function here, like the card game, because everybody else was married and the women all hated their messes. The real reason he kept it, though, was for his sons. When Dianne took off on him, she also uprooted the boys, stuffed them all in a city apartment in D.C.

Once the neighbors left, his mood nosedived. It was too darn easy to remember that whole divorce debacle—the custody war, his ex-wife's selfishness, his feeling impotent and frustrated at trying to reason with a court system that catered more to moms than dads. Jack did
not
do helplessness well. And maybe the system should cater more to mothers, most of the time, but not in
their
case. And aw, hell, letting it all ooze back in his mind was like picking at a sore.

With the house yawning empty, the smells of stale beer and cigars weren't quite so appealing as they'd been earlier. He cracked a window, started sweeping dishes into the dishwasher, then found himself stalled at the sink window again.

She was still up.

It was just a pinch away from midnight, but now all the lights were on, both upstairs and down. The preposterously pink Christmas tree had a visible mound of wrapped packages under it. In the kitchen, the fridge door was closed, but he could see heaps of stuff on the counters—fruit, bags, bread and what all.

He could also see the front doors—the double oak doors—gaping open.

In January. With snow drifting down like confetti, testimony to the temperature.

Maybe she wanted to chill the inside? Could she really be that flaky?

When he saw her breeze past another window, he turned off the sink light. Naturally he immediately suffered guilt for spying on her…but he could sure see better without the background light.

God knew what all the woman was doing, but she was sure doing it fast. Running. From room to room. Carrying things. Then vacuuming. And dusting. And then carrying more things.

Midnight passed. Then one.

By that time he'd long finished the cleanup, sanitized the chalk-and-granite kitchen, and was ready to hang it up for the night…but he couldn't seem to resist one last look. She was still up. Still visible. He wasn't sure what room she was in, because he didn't know Charlie's house that well, but she was still on the first floor—which meant she should have noticed the north wind blowing in her front door. She obviously hadn't, though, because at some point she'd stripped off the bulky sweater he'd seen her in earlier. Beneath was a body-hugging tee, red as a raspberry, and a headline announcement that her front side was as exquisite as her damn-fine behind.

The boobs weren't huge. Just perky. Firm. Not round-round, more…well, when it came down to it, nothing else was exactly like a perfect breast shape, so there was no point in trying to compare it to anything.

Jack vaguely realized he'd settled in, resting his elbows on the sink—and damn it, he had to work tomorrow!—but at that precise instant he couldn't possibly move. She was peeling off that raspberry long-sleeved tee. He saw a strip of black bra, but only from the back. Then he lost sight of her—until he picked up her moving around two rooms down, when she turned back into the Vacuum Queen.

Apparently she wasn't stripping down to go to bed, like a normal human being past midnight on a weeknight. She was just peeling off clothes because she was hot from all that running.

He was definitely hot from all that watching.

With a sigh, he eased away from the sink, knuckled the sore muscles in his back, and grumped around until he located some shoes, then his jacket.