Love Is a Four-Legged Word (23 page)

“Tom, I—” she mumbled against his mouth in surprise but he just kissed her harder. His mouth was firm and warm and delicious. She stopped trying to talk and started to kiss him back, relax against him, enjoy it. Until he broke the kiss.

“Hey,” she said. “Don’t stop.
That
kind of caveman tactic I like.”

His hands gripped her shoulders so tightly she winced. “Maddy, this is not something to joke about. I’m just so thankful that you’re all right.” He dropped his hands from her. “I wonder if you truly appreciate the gravity of the situation. When I saw you there with that madman Stoddard . . .”

His deep, husky voice trailed away and he paused a moment to collect himself before speaking again. “As it was, everything turned out okay. Comical, really, with Snowball the hero of the day. But you heard him threaten to slit Brutus’s throat. I believe he’s capable of it.”

“With me . . . with me watching.” Nausea rose in her throat as she remembered the look in Jerome’s eyes.

“What if Stoddard had had a knife with him or—God forbid—a gun?”

A gun! Maddy shuddered. A poisoned T-bone. An oversized block of chocolate. All weapons with an element of buffoonery. But she hadn’t thought of Jerome carrying a gun.

“Maybe . . . maybe I underestimated Jerome.”

Tom looked searchingly into her eyes, his expression intense and unreadable. He skimmed his thumb over her cheekbone and down the side of her face as if to reassure himself that she really was unhurt. “Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again. Okay?” His voice wasn’t quite steady.

 

 

 

Tom could tell from Maddy’s pallor and the way she was chewing on her lip how bad she felt about the Stoddard fiasco. He wanted to pull her into his arms but he didn’t dare. He wasn’t sure he could stop comfort from flaring into passion. And she’d made it quite clear she wasn’t ready for that yet. Though he’d had to—just had to—kiss her.

“I won’t,” she said. “Pull a stunt like that again, I mean. I realize how out of order I was. I’ll never, never forgive myself for putting Serena at risk.”

Tom knew she wasn’t faking the meekness of her tone. But he wanted to make sure she really understood his worry.

“And you, Maddy. How do you think your friends would have felt if anything had happened to
you
? Imagine how your father would feel if I had to convey that news to him? Your grandmother.” He paused. “Me.”

She flinched at his words and he felt immediately contrite. But he felt she had to know how it had felt for him to see her in danger. How it had jolted him into a realization that he was developing feelings for her.

Her flinching didn’t last long. The pretty chin rose again. “My grandmother would have done exactly the same thing. She wears all her lucky charms around her neck so she’s never without them.”

Tom forced his eyes not to turn heavenward.
All
her lucky charms? Was Maddy a chip off an older and equally eccentric block? “So that would have made it easier for her if something happened to you?”

“Of course not, but—”

She was exasperating. Adorable, but exasperating. “Maddy, I don’t think I’m getting through to you. I’m trying to tell you how I felt seeing you in danger, fearing I’d gotten there too late to help . . .”

She stilled. “Oh, but you are getting through to me. Loud and clear.” She chewed on that lip again. Her eyelashes fluttered. “When I saw Jerome hit you I was so frightened. Terrified. Didn’t know what I’d do if you were hurt. I . . . I felt so powerless.”

Tom was unexpectedly shaken by her words. He sought the right thing to say in response. “So . . . so you risked destroying your priceless china pony to come to my aid.”

She turned her face away from him. “Don’t mock me, Tom,” she said in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “I know it’s far from priceless to anyone but me.”

He couldn’t bear the hurt that crumpled her features. With two fingers under her chin he turned her back to face him again. “I’m not mocking you, Maddy. Please don’t think that. I appreciate what you did. What throwing that thing meant to you. I just thank God it didn’t break.”

The air seemed charged between them and he thought they were actually saying more to each other than the words they were exchanging.

“You would really have seen murder then,” she said.

“Who? Me or him?”

“Never you, Tom,” she said. A tentative smile danced around her mouth.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. Her smile spread wider, became more endearing, became—

“I wish you wouldn’t do that!” he said.

“Do what?” she asked, bewildered.

With his finger he traced the freckles scattered across her nose. “Screw up your nose in that cute way you do.”

“I do?”

“You do. It makes it impossible to stay cranky at you.”

“It does?”

Maddy tried wrinkling up her nose but it didn’t have quite the same endearing effect as before.

Tom shook his head. “No, not like that. Maybe you can’t do it on purpose. Maybe it just . . . happens.”

Maddy tried again. Only to make herself cross-eyed trying to look down her nose to see if it was working.

He laughed. “That isn’t quite so cute.” In fact, she looked downright ridiculous. But even looking ridiculous she was the cutest woman he’d ever seen.

“Well, you were the one making me do it,” she said, this time her forehead doing the wrinkling.

Tom laughed but his laugh turned into a groan. “You have no idea what you do to me, do you?” He took a step back from her. He raked his hair with his fingers. “I didn’t mean to get attached. God knows I’ve fought it.”

“Attached? Attached to what?”

“Dammit, you know what I mean. Attached to you. Feeling like this about you isn’t in—”

“The plan,” she finished for him, nodding thoughtfully. “Feeling like what,Tom?”

Maddy’s heart started thudding double-quick time. She felt the same breathless anticipation as when she was about to pull a soufflé from the oven. Would it be puffy and perfect or disap pointingly flat? Was Tom about to tell her he was falling in love with her? And if he was, how did she really feel about it?

He turned and paced a few steps away, then turned back to face her. “Feeling responsible for you. Feeling like if anything had happened to you . . . Feeling, I don’t know . . .” He shrugged. “It’s hard to put into words.”

Responsible? Was that all he felt for her? Like he was the busy attorney and she the nuisance client? Was that what he was trying to tell her?

Her mental oven door shut with a slam, her spirits as deflated as her most unsuccessful soufflé.

“You don’t have to feel responsible for me, Tom. I’ve looked after myself for a long time now. It’s only eight more days and then—”

His hair stood up in spikes by now.“I didn’t mean that, Maddy. I meant something more personal. That you’ve become . . . well, special to me.”

He flushed under his tan.

Maybe the soufflé could be saved. As she smiled at him Maddy could feel her spirits rising. “You’ve . . . uh . . . become special to me, too, Tom.”

She moved toward him but was stopped by paws scrabbling on her legs and a sad, attention-getting whine. Brutus. Of course. The canine master of interrupted intimate moments.

Tom glared down at the dog. Brutus held his paw up to shake. His pushed-in face was tilted at an angle.

Maddy couldn’t help a giggle. “You see,” she said to Tom. “It was the tone of my voice. He thought I was saying nice things. Which I was, but not to him.”

“Well, he can forget it. It’s my turn now.”

“I’ll tell him that, shall I?”

Tom’s grin was broad, the dimple back in full force. “You did the nose thing perfectly when you said that,” he said, stroking her hair. Shivers of awareness ran through her.

“Did I? I’ll try again and see if I—”

“Don’t try,” he said. “The cross-eyed thing isn’t quite so alluring.”

She went to huff, but—at last—he kissed her, hard and swiftly as if sealing an agreement.The best kisser in the universe back in action again. She wound her arms around his neck in anticipation. What other romantic thing might he say?

Brown eyes bored down into hers. “So don’t even think about leaving this apartment when I go back to the office.”

“Wh . . . what!” she spluttered, her arms dropping to her sides. “You’re going back to work?”

“No choice, I’m afraid. Some reports from London came in overnight. Stoddard’s known to the police in Britain, under another name.”

“You mean he’s not part of Walter’s family?”

“Stoddard is his real name and he is related to Walter. He operates under aliases for his borderline criminal activities.”

“Borderline?”

“Fake diet schemes, get-rich-quick frauds, that kind of thing. Preying on the gullible. Despicable really.”

“Does that mean he can’t challenge the will?”

“He’s a blood relative. He has the right to contest.”

Maddy cringed as she remembered how attractive she’d first found Jerome. Misled again by her weakness for handsome men. “And to think I liked him when I met him. Does that make me gullible?”

Tom absentmindedly tucked a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear, as if he wasn’t aware of doing it. “Don’t beat yourself up about that, Maddy. He’s a con man, he trades on making a good first impression. He didn’t fool you for long.”

“And he didn’t fool Brutus for one second.” She compared Brutus’s instant liking—no, adoration—for Tom to his animosity toward Jerome. There was something to be said for animal instinct.

“Stoddard is a bad guy.You have to stay in hiding.”

“Yes, Grumpy,” she said, with exaggerated repentance that masked her genuine remorse that she hadn’t taken his warnings more seriously.

“And reporters from all around the country are flooding my office with calls. Stoddard contesting the will is keeping the millionaire mutt story alive. Which is all the more reason for you to stay put.”

“Yes, Grumpy.”

“And don’t call me Grumpy.”

“Yes, Gr—”

“Maddy!”

“Okay—Tom.”

“So do as you’re told and don’t move from this apartment!” he said, giving her one brief, hard kiss before he opened the door then slammed it hard behind him.

Eighteen

After Tom left, Maddy found she couldn’t stop smiling, a ridiculous grin that kept tugging at her mouth. A warm happiness bubbled around her heart. She felt like singing, dancing, whirling Brutus around the apartment in her arms. She was special to Tom. He’d said so.

As she ballroom danced with Brutus, she kept thinking about Tom’s words. And what about the wrinkled-nose business? What did he mean by that?

She popped Brutus down on a chair and tried out the nose thing in front of the mirror.Tom thought
that
was cute? Hmm.

Maybe it was like making perfect meringues; if she tried too hard, they always flopped. It had to be effortless, unrehearsed. She tried again. And again. And could only conclude that the scrunched-up nose and crossed eyes was not a good look.

But who cared what she looked like? There was no one to see her except a little dog who made his devotion to Tom slavishly apparent. She and Brutus, Tom’s two-person—no—one person-and-a-dog fan club. She dropped a kiss on the little dog’s head. “What do you think Brutus? Me and your alpha male?”

He cocked his head on one side and she could have sworn he was grinning. He barked. She laughed. “Yes, you’re absolutely right. I should be preparing for that audition. Like now. Not moping around the place getting all dreamy over your master.”

First on the stop-grinning-like-a-cat-who’d-gotten-the-cream agenda was to unpack the supermarket order. She was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the delivery. Even the flowers were market fresh. A room wasn’t a room without fresh flowers, and they’d do something to personalize Tom’s arid living space. She couldn’t understand how he could be happy in a place that was so . . . gray.

Carefully, she unpacked a whole fish that had been fastidiously packed in ice. What was that thing Grandma used to say about the way to a man’s heart? To show Tom how special he had become to her, she wanted to cook something really nice for him tonight. Something that fit his healthy eating habits.

That would be a challenge. Although she preferred cooking lavish, forget-the-calorie-count foods, she could see how people with dietary restrictions or watching their weight might want something lighter but with the same flavor and appeal.

She paused, a bundle of asparagus in her hand. Could that concept work for the television show? Gourmet recipes but with the “thinner version” as well. Hmm, yes. Though, hard as she might think, she couldn’t think of a light version of her triple-chocolate macadamia brownies. Maybe that was it. She could show which recipes could be “thinned down” and which couldn’t.