Desire by Design (6 page)

“Believe me, it’s not something I’m likely to forget.”

Eve, concentrating on her driving, missed the grin accompanying his words. All she heard was criticism.

Something inside her snapped. “This is so typical.” She swerved around a pothole in the street, narrowly missing the rear end of a parked car. “It’s always the woman’s fault, never the man’s.”

Matt shifted in his seat, turning toward her. “Wait a second. I never said—”

“You didn’t have to say anything. I know what you meant.”

“Eve, I think you’re being—”

“I know what I’m being,” she interrupted again. She was being an idiot. Her nerves had been wound too tight since Claude’s phone call, and now she was taking it out on Matt. She knew the whole disaster of an evening was her fault. Why didn’t he yell at her and be done with it? Why was he torturing her like this?

His voice gentled. “Stop the car, please.”

Eve could see the train wreck coming but was helpless to stop it. If Matt was about to become all sensitive and understanding, she was going to have him killed. She didn’t need sympathy right now. She felt tears welling behind her eyes, and that made her furious—with both him and herself. She hated to cry.

She pulled the car over and double-parked in front of a dark restaurant on a quiet street. Grabbing her handbag and holding it up to the dreary glow of a streetlight, Eve whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and slapped it into Matt’s palm.

“Maybe you should call yourself a cab,” she said.

Matt stared at the money in his hand, his expression unreadable. Then, he carefully placed the money on the dashboard and glanced into the back seat as if looking for something.

“What are you doing?” she snapped.

“Don’t you keep tissues in your car? Women always seem to keep tissues everywhere.”

Eve rolled her eyes. Why’d he have to be right all the time?

He reached into the back, and just as his fingers closed around the box, a car with flashing red-and-blue lights pulled up behind them. A few moments later, a stocky police officer rapped on Eve’s door. When she rolled down the window, he shone a flashlight into the car’s interior.

“What seems to be the trouble?” the officer asked.

“Just a little misunderstanding,” Matt said.

“A little misunderstanding, huh?”

The officer’s light shone in her eyes. Eve plucked the box of tissues from Matt’s hand and helped herself, heartily blowing her nose. The light picked up the money on the dash, then the officer flashed the light back on Eve before returning it to Matt’s face. “Whatever you’re negotiating, do it someplace else. You’re double-parked and blocking traffic.”

Matt cleared his throat. “The money is for a cab.”

The officer’s ruddy face creased into a wide grin. “Whatever you say. Have a nice evening.”

Eve watched him walk back to his cruiser, then tucked the used tissue in her bag and tossed the box in the backseat. “I’ll drive you home.”

“You know what?” Matt’s voice turned thoughtful. “I think maybe I’d better take that cab.”

She watched as he got out of the car, wanting to tell him she was sorry, and that her ex-husband was the one she was angry with, not him. He was more like a civilian casualty.

Matt hesitated, then reached back in and grabbed the twenty off the dash. “I’m a little short on cash.” He gave her an exaggerated smile before he turned away from her.

He had a right to be angry, too. She should be relieved this was how he expressed it. Instead, it made her feel awful. There wasn’t much left for her to do other than leave him standing in the street, with the red-and-blue police lights pirouetting behind him. She drove off, a spittle of mist dampening her windshield, guilt and mortification eating at her conscience.

By the time she reached her neighborhood, the mist had graduated to streaming black rivers of rain. She wiped the steam off her windshield with the back of her hand, hoping Matt had his cellphone with him. Otherwise, he was going to have a long, wet walk back to his hotel, and she had enough to apologize for already.

The inky eyes of her house gaped at her as she cut the car engine. She groped for the door handle, wishing she’d thought to leave her front light on. Readying her house key, she made a mad dash through the downpour, fumbled with the deadbolt, then slammed the door shut behind her, shaking the water from her hair and face. The clock on the mantle in her living room chimed the hour, chasing a sudden chill up her backbone.

Her house felt…different.

Half turning, Eve noticed a daub of mud on the first step of the stairs leading to the second story. She tried to think of how that mud might have gotten there and couldn’t come up with anything comforting.

Someone had been in her house…and she had a good idea who it had been. But she didn’t know whether or not he was still there.

With adrenaline warping through her veins at lightning speed, she jerked open the door and fled back through the rain to her car. It wasn’t until she was six blocks from her home that she slowed down.

Pulling the car to the curb, she pressed her hot cheek against the steering wheel and considered her options. She wondered if she should call the police. Again. And be brushed off. Again. She could still hear the officer’s calm, reasoning voice that night years ago when she’d made the decision to leave Claude.

“In order to get a peace bond, you’ll have to prove the person poses a threat to your safety. If the person obeys the peace bond for a year, though, you won’t be able to get it renewed. Are you sure this is the route you want to go
?”

She hadn’t bothered back then because he was leaving the country. Besides, she had punched him. He hadn’t hit her, he’d only threatened, as far as logistics were concerned. And she wasn’t going to the police now only to have them tell her that a phone call, a funny feeling, and a few specks of dirt weren’t enough by way of evidence to get her a peace bond this time.

She wasn’t going to run crying to her brothers, either. It was a little late to be telling them the truth about her marriage. That window of opportunity had closed a long time ago. She did have work boots and a pair of coveralls in her car, though, and plenty of work left to do at that volunteer project Bob had conned her into. She could spend the night shaving those doors down, then go back to her house when daylight came.

And if she worked hard enough, maybe she could forget for a while that she owed Matt an apology.

…

Matt’s long legs ate up the steep city sidewalk, the early morning sunshine warming the nape of his neck, a trickle of sweat dampening the back of his moisture-wicking running shirt.

He’d Googled Eve’s home address—not without difficulty—and decided to work it into his morning run. It felt sort of stalker-ish, but at the same time he wanted to make sure she was okay. He didn’t know her well, but even he knew something bigger was wrong. She’d been on edge since she’d picked him up at the hotel last night. He’d thought it was about the design, and maybe it was, but it certainly wasn’t the whole story.

It’s always the woman’s fault, never the man’s,
Eve had said
.

It still felt personal. But he no longer thought it was personal toward him.

He’d run by her house and at least make sure her car was in the driveway, he told himself.

As he ran, he tried to take note of the different architectural styles he saw. While it was true that the city had a certain period feel to it, as he moved away from the downtown business district, he saw more and more examples of multicultural influences. For centuries, people from all over the world had immigrated to Canada through this port city, and those who’d settled here had left their marks. He had no doubt he could design the perfect City Hall to reflect the city’s diverse history, yet still give his uncle a modern, trademark Matt Brison building.

Eve’s tidy little two-story house was located in an aging neighborhood of starter homes for young, upwardly mobile professional couples. Station wagons and minivans speckled the driveways of its steep, winding streets. Lattice-work fences, intertwined with creeping vines and scrubby underbrush, divided property lots. Ash, maple, poplar, and juniper sprouted in rocky, grass-retardant backyards.

And Eve, dressed in a pair of coveralls, with what appeared to be wood shavings in her ponytailed hair, was standing in a flowerbed at the side of her house, staring up at a window. It seemed she was an early riser, too.

He mopped at his forehead with the crease of his elbow, glad that the morning was cool and he wasn’t sweating too much. The breeze off the harbor kept the temperature down.

“Lose another earring?” he called to her from the safety of the sidewalk. He didn’t want to take her by surprise—not until he’d found out what kind of self-defense lessons her brother had given her and how warm she was feeling toward him that morning.

Eve spun around, and Matt blinked. Her coveralls were layered in a thick coating of sawdust and drywall spatters, and the dark circles under her eyes were big enough to cut the glare of a supernova.

He was doubly glad he hadn’t crept up on her. At this point, he doubted her nerves could survive it.

Eve didn’t answer his question. Instead, she scrambled over the clematis and cut him off at the corner of the house, as if there were something she was trying to keep him from seeing. Before he had time to wonder about that though, she’d tilted her chin upward and pinned him with those deep, dark-lashed eyes.

“I am
really
sorry about last night,” she said, looking so angelic that Matt might have been fooled if he didn’t have reason to know better. He was learning more about her all the time, and while she might be cute, she was definitely no angel. “I have no idea why I behaved the way I did.”

He thought that she did but didn’t want to explain it. And he thought it best not to pry.

“I came to apologize to you, too,” he said. “Oh, yeah,” he added, patting at the side pocket of his running shorts, “and to return your twenty dollars.”

“You don’t have to do either. I deserve to pay your cab fare after ditching you like that in the dark and the rain.”

The blaze of Eve’s smile left Matt bordering on tongue-tied. She really was cute.

He tried to shake it off with a joke. “In that case, you owe me money. Twenty dollars didn’t quite cover it.”

“I’ll have to write you a check.” Eve bounced her house keys in the palm of her hand, indecision etched all over her face. There was a palpable moment of awkward silence. “Or would you settle for a cup of coffee instead?”

Matt resisted the urge to reach over and pick the wood shavings from her hair, only because he didn’t want her to withdraw that offer of coffee. Her hesitation suggested she wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but he was suddenly very curious about how the inside of her home would look.

“Coffee sounds good,” he said, and followed her across the lawn, up her front steps, and into a small entryway.

She closed the door behind them, bent over and unlaced her steel-toed work boots, then dropped them in a corner.

“I’ll just put the coffee pot on,” she said. “Why don’t you have a seat in the living room?”

The living room was off the foyer to the left, a comfortable room filled with overstuffed antique furniture. Photos of family littered the tables and walls. It was a woman’s room, and not at all what Matt had expected. He thought of his own sparse condo, with its geometric furniture and early Ellsworth Kelly original artwork. Eve’s tastes couldn’t be more different than his if she’d made a deliberate effort to make them so. Yet, despite Eve’s busy work schedule, her house managed to look like a home, while Matt’s condo looked like…

Like it had been designed by an architect. One who spent most of his time at the office.

An open scrapbook displayed on the coffee table caught his eye, and he picked it up. He could hear Eve rattling around in the kitchen. She returned a few moments later, pausing between the yawning double glass doors.

“The coffee will be ready in a minute. I’m just going to run up and change my clothes.”

Matt’s eyes followed her up the stairwell. Even in coveralls and a layer of sawdust, there was no mistaking that Eve was a beautiful woman. He shook his head. Despite her little idiosyncrasies, he was definitely attracted to her.

Physically, it made sense. It was healthy and normal. What he couldn’t quite figure out was what she intended to do with the baseball bat she was clutching in a white-knuckled hand.

Chapter Five

Eve was glad Matt had happened along while she was still trying to work up the nerve to enter the house. Having him downstairs made it easier to keep calm when the mess in her bedroom left her anything but that.

Tossing the bat onto the bed, she clamped her eyelids shut, then popped them open, but nothing had changed. Her panties still dangled from the lampshade.

The remainder of her clothing littered the bedroom floor, and a large, cedar-lined oak wardrobe sprawled drunkenly facedown on top of her great-grandmother’s antique hooked rug. A copy of Eve’s final divorce decree was skewered to her pillow with a finish nail.

She spun in a slow, incredulous circle and stared at the chaos around her, then curled her fingers into fists. She plucked the nail from the pillow and inspected the antique linen pillowcase. There was a small hole. Blinking back angry tears, she crumpled the divorce decree and crammed it into the back pocket of her coveralls. She stooped to grasp the front end of the wardrobe. One sharp corner screeched against the hardwood floor as she tried to lift it.

Matt’s voice drifted up from the foot of the stairs. “Is everything all right?”

Releasing her hold on the wardrobe, Eve bit her lip. She could ask him for help. She probably should. But they had to work together, and she wasn’t sure she could trust him to keep this to himself.

“Everything’s fine,” she called back, listening until she heard him move back into the living room.

Then she did a quick search of the rest of the upstairs, although she already knew Claude was gone. He wouldn’t want to be caught in the act. He wanted to send her a message, and he knew she’d never been good at his games.

The upstairs was empty, just as she’d expected. She went back to her room, dragged a brush through her snarled hair and, showering wood chips onto the floor, re-fashioned her long, curly ponytail, then changed into shorts and a T-shirt she’d grabbed off the floor. Clicking the bedroom door firmly shut behind her, she pattered down the stairs in her bare feet.

Matt lounged on the flowered sofa right where she’d left him, his massive male presence looking ridiculously comfortable amidst the damask cabbage roses. He was flipping through the pages of a scrapbook that contained clippings of past projects Eve had consulted on—none of which were likely to impress a brilliant architect of his caliber.

Uneasy prickles chased up her spine. Eve quickly was reminded that she knew enough brilliant men to last her a lifetime. Matt seemed harmless enough, but so did they all, at least at first.

“How would you like your coffee?” she asked.

He didn’t lift his head from his reading. “Black, please.”

She carried two steaming mugs back to the living room and placed them on the low pine coffee table, nudging aside a glass trifle dish piled high with more of the family photos her mother kept sending her. Eve then chose an easy chair to sit in—the one farthest away from the sofa.

Matt snapped the scrapbook shut and held it up. His thick-lashed blue eyes met hers, warm and sincere. “Your work is good.”

Eve would have to be flatlining not to appreciate a compliment of her work, especially from Matt Brison. It was the warmth of his gaze, however, that made her want to burst into tears.

Her home had just been trashed, and she’d like nothing better than to throw herself into a friendly pair of arms and let someone else deal with the mess. But Eve was stronger than that.

“Thank you,” she said, amazed by how calm she sounded.

“There’s no reason why we can’t work together on the City Hall project,” Matt continued, tapping the scrapbook thoughtfully. “Maybe even brainstorm a little. I told you, I’m always open to suggestions.”

She lifted her coffee cup to her unsteady lips and concentrated on business. She couldn’t resist poking him a little, just to see if he’d laugh. She could use one herself.

“You don’t have any ideas of your own?” she said.

He slumped deeper into the sofa and clasped his fingers behind his head, his gaze stroking her from head to toe. A lick of heat leaped into his eyes. “I’ve got plenty of ideas.”

She focused on her coffee and tried not to take his words out of context. Matt was a rich, handsome man, famous in his field, and flirting came naturally to him. It had nothing to do with her.

And no way was she finessing the budget, if that was his game.

“Why don’t you just come right out and tell Bob that this project isn’t your style and be done with it?” she suggested. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about new ideas.”

“I don’t know,” Matt said slowly, smoothing his chin with the pad of his thumb. He had a nice chin, strong and solid—it went well with the rest of him. The navy running gear showed off a far different frame than the one she’d expected based on his business suits. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had ideas like this,” he added. “They might be well worth exploring.”

Eve took a long, flustered swig of coffee and choked on it, burning the inside of her nose. Matt jumped to his feet and thumped her on the back until she feared for a few of her ribs. Then he switched to a gentler rub between her shoulders. Bending forward, he brought his face within inches of hers and dropped his free hand to her bare knee.

“Better?” he asked.

Not really. Now she couldn’t breathe at all.

The phone rang.

“Let me grab that for you,” Matt said, reaching for the cordless handset since he was closest to it.

Eve couldn’t read the caller I.D. from where she was. Panic-stricken, she thought of who might be calling her and settled on the worst-case scenario.

“Let it ring. It’s probably my mother.” Unless, of course, it was Claude, calling to see if she’d gotten the message he’d left her. That would be the post-apocalyptic scenario.

Matt had already grabbed the phone, though. His apologetic smile as he passed her the receiver seemed to say, “
Isn’t that cute? She doesn’t want to talk to her mother when there’s a man in the house
.”

Which was true enough. Eve didn’t want her mother getting any of her hopes up. Eve was through with men.

She hit the green Talk button. She’d feel stupid not answering it now.

Her mother’s voice came through loud and clear. “Hello, sweetheart. I was wondering…if it rains, we can’t have the party outdoors. Do you think we should rent one of those big tents, just in case?”

What Eve thought was that the whole family should have chipped in and sent her parents on a cruise for their fortieth anniversary. But what she said was, “Renting a tent sounds like a good idea.”

“And you’re sure you’re still coming?” her mother finished anxiously, reigniting Eve’s all-too-familiar pangs of guilt. She’d blown off too many family functions in the past, and this one was important. Her mother kept calling it a party, when in fact it was more of a family reunion.

“Of course, I’ll be there.”

“Good. Because there’s someone we’d like you to meet.”

Eve’s guilt gave way to an equally familiar irritation. Her mother couldn’t seem to understand that she wasn’t interested in meeting men. Her glance drifted to Matt, and she shifted around in her chair to face away from him.

After she said good-bye, she turned to find his clear blue eyes fixed on her. She lowered her own in confusion. It would be too much to hope that he hadn’t overheard that last bit of the conversation. Her mother’s voice carried, after all.

“My mother thinks marriage is the greatest accomplishment a woman can achieve,” Eve said, heat clawing her cheeks. “She’s always trying to fix me up with men.”

“If it helps matters any, my mother has a thing about marriage, too.” Matt laughed without a whole lot of humor. “She’s tried it five times. I think she holds the record for the shortest marriages in history.” He picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa. “People who can’t commit shouldn’t keep trying.”

While Eve found five excessive—one had been more than enough for her—she still felt the need to defend his mother. “Maybe she wants to commit but is having difficulty finding the right man.”

Matt’s expression conveyed his opinion of that theory. “Don’t get me wrong. I love her. But she’s done enough comparison shopping to at least be able to find one she can tolerate. I think a person should know what they want and go after it. None of this ‘Oops, I made a mistake.’ Do a little research beforehand. Whatever happened to ‘marriage is forever?’ Why else would anyone bother?”

Inside, Eve winced. He had some strong opinions on the matter, but she’d heard too many similar comments from her own family to let that statement pass.
Nobody ever said marriage was supposed to be easy. Couldn’t you give it more time? Couldn’t you at least try and work things out
?

“Maybe she’s looking for that special someone she can respect and admire, and who respects and admires her in return,” Eve said.

Matt’s dark head tilted slightly sideways, and he stared at her for a long moment. “Is that what you look for in a relationship? Mutual respect and admiration?”

When she’d married Claude, she supposed she’d done so because he’d made her feel respected and admired. At first. And she’d certainly been impressed by him. At first.

She drained the last drops of her coffee and stifled a huge yawn. “I’m not looking for a relationship. I’m quite happy with my life the way it is.”

“Huh,” Matt said thoughtfully, giving her the distinct impression she’d just disappointed him somehow.

If so, she refused to feel sorry about it. Rebellion kicked in. She was tired of being viewed as a disappointment to others. Didn’t anyone ever care that, just maybe, she might be disappointed in them?

…

Matt couldn’t come up with the right word to describe the swarm of emotions Eve elicited from him.

Confusion, possibly. Irritation, undoubtedly. But it was the view of those short-shorts, tanned legs, and glittery, pink-tipped toenails that had him once more wanting to kiss her.

The silence grew so loud he could hear the ticking of his wristwatch. Until today, he hadn’t even known it made any noise.

“Why don’t you let me see some of those ideas of yours?” he suggested, changing the topic.

Her eyes widened. “You mean, right now?”

Matt shrugged. “Why not?”

She disappeared with a swish of her ponytail and a flurry of those tempting bare limbs and reappeared moments later, tottering under a stack of papers that required the weight of her chin to keep them from toppling over.

“Here’s the first of them.” She dumped the papers in his lap. Then, palming a letter opener off a small escritoire, she settled back in her chair and began sorting through a mound of mail, methodically slicing open each envelope. Matt placed a protective hand over his throat.

She paused, the letter opener poised in mid-air, sunlight glinting off its pewter blade. “Something wrong?”

Matt forced his hand away from his throat and picked up the top file. “No, of course not.”

“I’ll try not to disturb you,” she said.

Too late. She’d already disturbed him. Just not in the way she might think.

In spite of that, it wasn’t long before he became totally absorbed in the papers in front of him. She was good, he conceded, adding the file he’d just finished to the growing stack on the floor at his feet. Given the proper education and training, she could be great. He stretched the kinks out of limbs stiffened from too much time spent in one position.

Why didn’t she do more with her talent?

He started to ask her, then realized she was sound asleep, curled up in the overstuffed chair. The sun no longer shone through the front window, and his stomach told him it was getting close to lunchtime, but she looked so adorable curled up with her hands under her cheek and her tanned knees against her chest that Matt was in no hurry to leave.

She gave a soft sigh, a frown crinkling her delicate brow. The position she was in couldn’t be comfortable, yet the shadows under her eyes told him how badly she needed the rest. A tiny knot twisted in Matt’s stomach. Could he move her without waking her?

The trill of the phone shattered the quiet. Eve, however, didn’t twitch a muscle, which answered Matt’s question—he could tap dance beside her, and it wasn’t likely to wake her.

The phone persisted, and he debated whether or not he should answer it since she hadn’t seemed to want him to before. Then he decided to wait until the answering machine picked up. If it sounded like an emergency, he’d wake her. He glanced doubtfully at her sleeping form. Well, he’d try.

When the machine finally kicked in, however, the caller hung up—then the phone began to ring again almost immediately. Matt listened to this cycle twice more before deciding to answer and put an end to it.

“Hello?” he said, speaking softly even though it seemed unlikely that anything short of dynamite could accomplish disturbing Eve’s nap.

There was a brief hesitation on the other end of the line. “Who is this?” a low, male voice demanded. The hair on the back of Matt’s neck stood up at the frigid tone of the man’s simple words.

“Who is
this
?” he countered. His eyes darted to Eve, still asleep in her chair.

The line went dead then, and Matt stared at the receiver in his hand for a few brief seconds before replacing it in its cradle. He thought about Eve’s jumpiness, the dark circles under her eyes, and the baseball bat. He remembered the strange noises coming from her bedroom, as if she’d been rearranging furniture, and the way she hadn’t wanted him to answer her phone.

He didn’t like the conclusion he was coming to.

He ditched the remaining files on the floor and got to his feet. He couldn’t leave her here alone without making sure she’d be okay. First, though, he’d move her to the sofa and make her more comfortable. He slipped one arm beneath her knees, the other under her shoulders, and held his breath, waiting for her to open her eyes and demand to know what he was doing. Her head lolled against his forearm, and her mouth fell open. She snorted daintily, and Matt grinned, wishing he dared drop a kiss on the end of that trim little nose.

The knuckles of her limply dangling hand brushed his thigh, and he dumped her on the sofa as if she’d suddenly burst into flames. She sighed, rolled over, and mumbled something under her breath. Matt’s heart pounded hard in his chest. It was probably, “
Get a life.
”