Mr. Fix-It (2 page)

“Stop calling me ‘ma’am’,” she complained irritably. “I’m younger than you are.”

He opened the closet and unlatched the tiny steel door concealing the circuit breaker. “You don’t know how old I am.”

“You’re thirty-two.”

“Guess my weight, I’ll give you a prize,” he teased. “How did you know my age?”

“Daphne.” Everything she knew about him came secondhand from Daphne, who would perch on a counter or lean against the wall and chitchat with him while he made his repairs.

Daphne was the reason unit A required so many little tweaks and adjustments lately. Breaking things was more fun than simply calling Carter and inviting him over for coffee and conversation like a normal person. Not that Khela should be throwing stones at that particular glass house. A normal person would be able to speak to Carter as easily at home as she did out on the street.

Even though she had lived in the brownstone he maintained for so long, she hadn’t had cause to run into him often. She worked from her loft bedroom, which doubled as her office, and she could go for days without leaving her unit. Only since Christmas, when Daphne had been visiting and seen Carter shoveling the sidewalk, had Carter become a more frequent presence in her apartment.

There was something about him that rendered her guarded when he was in her home. He seemed too comfortable, as though he owned all he surveyed. When he turned his lovely, disquieting eyes on her, she felt as though she were his property. She should have been offended, but she wasn’t. That fact alone was enough to send her into hiding whenever Daphne schemed to get him to unit A.

Khela shook off her feelings of anxiety to watch Carter work. She guiltily stared at the smoky-gray glass floor tiles as Carter surveyed the circuit board. He immediately zeroed in on the problem. The switch powering the kitchen was in the
off
position. He flipped it to
on
, and the instantaneous reaction launched his testicles into his neck.

Every appliance lined up on Khela’s long black granite counter was zapped to life: the blender, toaster, mini flat-screen television, radio, electric can opener, food processor and sturdy Kitchen Aid mixer whizzed, blared, screeched, whirred, grated and clanged in a cacophony of ear pollution that had Khela and Carter dashing around the room, hitting switches and buttons and snatching plugs from outlets.

When the only noise left was the whir of the ceiling fan, which spun in a blur at its fastest speed, Carter grabbed Khela’s wrist and pulled her to the circuit breaker. “The next time you want to get me up here, don’t turn on every dang appliance in the place. Just flip any one of these switches. You could have shorted out my whole building with this little stunt.”

He released her wrist, gently brushed her aside and closed the door to the circuit board. He had his toolbox in hand and was heading for the door when Khela overtook him and blocked his way.

“Your accent becomes stronger when you’re angry,” she blurted. “Alabama, right? Decatur?”

Too late, he tried to hide the fact that he was impressed with her guess. “I was born in Decatur but I grew up in Speake.”

“I’ve got family down South,” she explained. “You learn not to confuse the Decatur speech with that of Tuscaloosa or Mobile.”

“You got a good ear, Khela.” He tried to nudge past her. “Are you holding me hostage, or…”

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she awkwardly apologized. “Earlier. When you asked about my hives.”

“Not a problem.” He tried to step around her, but she glided into his path, holding her hands up.

“Mr. Carter, please. I’d like to speak to you for a minute.” His forward momentum carried him right into her waiting palms, and the heat of her delicate hands through his T-shirt stopped him clean. “I do have something on my mind,” she admitted. She abruptly dropped her hands, sticking them deep in her pockets as though punishing them for enjoying the feel of the hard muscle under his shirt.

“Does that something have anything to do with my tux?”

She nodded. Her ponytail danced and Carter wondered what that hair would feel like tickling his bare chest.

“I have an event to go to tonight,” she explained. “It’s formal, and it’s business-related. I’m expected to maintain a certain image, and I can’t show up without—”

“A date,” he finished for her.

“Right.” She swallowed nervously.

“So you’re asking me on a date.”

“Yes,” she smiled. “No!” she quickly corrected, gesticulating madly. “No, this isn’t a date. It’s a favor. A great big-ass favor that I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for if you agree to do this for me.”

He turned a shoulder toward his tux to hide a sly smile. “Why do you want me?”

Because you’re so frickin’ hot!
was her first response, which she suppressed only by biting the corner of her lip. She also couldn’t tell him that the sight of him in his worn jeans made the backs of her knees sweat, or that the offhand, casual smiles that came so easily to his sensuous mouth made her thighs quiver. If he only knew that his scent was the one she recalled on particularly lonely nights when she sought a moment or two—or three—of battery-assisted tension release. “You have the right look,” she said lightly. She scratched the back of her right hand and started pacing the living room.

“Miss Halliday?”

She stopped pacing, stopped scratching. “You can call me Khela.”

“What time should I pick you up, Khela?”

She dazzled him with a smile of relief and gratitude. “The event organizers are sending a car for me at seven.”

“That really doesn’t give me much time to get home and slap on that tux.”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Didn’t Daphne tell you?”

“She said you lived nearby,” Khela recalled, although nearby could be any number of towns—Somerville, Mattapan, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain. Boston was one of the smallest big cities on the east coast.

“I live across the street,” Carter said. “In the white limestone with the dark green awning.”

“That explains how you get here so fast when Daphne calls,” Khela reasoned. “Do you take care of that building, too?”

“Sure do,” he said.

“That’s a nice trade-off,” Khela said, assuming that he lived in a Commonwealth Avenue townhouse for free as part of his compensation for his superintendent services.

“I’d better get a move on it,” he said. “I’ve got a quick repair in another unit before I wrap myself in this tux.”

The apples of Khela’s cheeks deepened in color, and Carter had the feeling that her blush did not bode well for him. “Actually,” she said, slanting her gaze away from his, “if we’re going to do this right, you’ll need a little more than just a tux…”

“How much more?” he asked warily.

“Do you have a suitcase?”

* * *

Carter slung his weekender into the trunk of the limousine blocking one of the two lanes of westbound traffic on Commonwealth Avenue. Typical Boston, the inconvenienced drivers forced to pass in the one remaining lane communicated both displeasure and interest through loud, sustained honking.

Inside the limo, Khela sat with one leg elegantly crossed over the other, her hands neatly resting on the clasp purse balanced on her knee. She leaned forward and wrapped her knuckles smartly on the tinted window to speed the driver along. “How long can it take to stow a duffel bag?” she muttered irritably.

Looking more carefully out the window, she saw that the limo driver was laughing and talking to her date.

She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile.
I have a date, I have date!
she sang in her head. He was her super, but no one at the convention would know that. She was tempted to knock on the window to signal him to get into the car. The drive to the Harborfront Regency Hotel was short, but Boston traffic was unpredictable, and Khela didn’t want to risk being late.

The driver slid into his seat and Carter entered the cabin. He positioned himself on the long bench seat, his back to the driver and facing Khela. They had agreed to meet at the car, so Khela was getting her first good look at him. And damn, did he ever look good.

She’d intended to school him on some of the authors he would meet, but her intentions evaporated in her contemplation of him. As good as the tux had looked lying across the back of her sofa in its drycleaner’s bag, it looked a thousand times better on the man in front of her. He sat with the masculine elegance of James Bond, one leg hung lazily over the other, his right elbow propped on the armrest. Above his warm brown eyes, his hair had been combed off his face, the left-side part executed with almost surgical precision. His cuff links—surely imitation platinum, and the best she’d ever seen—glittered in the glow from the track of pale amber lights circling the roof of the cabin.

When he opened his mouth, Khela half expected him to offer her a medium-dry martini—shaken, not stirred. Instead, he offered an apology.

“I’m sorry I dawdled back there,” he said as the driver smoothly eased the limousine into traffic. “Jerry makes a lot of runs to and from the brownstone, so I see him fairly often.”

“Was he surprised to see that you were a passenger this time?” Khela uncrossed her legs and, after carefully rearranging the long skirt of her diaphanous gown, brought her feet up to the seat and made herself more comfortable. To Carter, she looked like a contemporary Aphrodite in repose upon the dark aniline leather.

He cast an amused glance at the privacy screen between them and Jerry. “Nothing much surprises Jerry.”

Carter was thankful she had heard none of Jerry’s snickered speculations as to why it had taken Carter so long to “bag” Khela, or his lascivious suggestions as to what activities they would engage in during the course of their “lovers’ getaway.”

Without disabusing Jerry of his pornographic notions, Carter had responded to his comments with good-natured chuckling. He was spending the weekend with Khela, but she’d made it perfectly clear that this was a legitimate business trip, not a monkey-business trip.

Not that Carter would mind a little monkeying around.

The pale apricot of Khela’s gown imparted a warm honey glow to her bare arms and shoulders. The dusky-peach blooms in her cheeks came from nature rather than from a makeup counter; Carter knew that because they intensified in color the longer he stared at her. When she dipped her head, dangling diamond baubles at her ears glittered, and graceful tendrils of her upswept hairdo caressed her long neck.

He shook his head ruefully. From ingénue to starlit goddess…this possibly could be the longest weekend of his life.

“Exactly what kind of convention is this?” he asked, eager to think of something other than the way the subtle spice of her perfume made his heart jog faster.

“Ro—” she started, catching herself mid-word and finishing with “iting.”

“Ro-iting?” Carter repeated with a James Bond-worthy lift of an eyebrow. “Never heard of it.”

“I’m a writer, Mr. Carter, and we’re going to a big writing thing.” A rapidly spreading blush softened her prim delivery. “It’s the East Coast Writing Association Convention.”

“Hmm,” he grunted quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Khela was suddenly second-guessing her decision to bring him with her. To her own ears, the East Coast Writing Association Convention sounded like a gathering of authors wandering from vendor to vendor collecting pens, bookmarks and other promotional schwag from industry folk. There was that aspect to it, but there was the other side—the reason Association members turned out almost in full every year: the writers.

Every year, fiction and nonfiction authors in every genre arrived en masse in the host city to reconnect with distant friends, attend workshops devoted to their craft and career, celebrate their successes, and bemoan their failures, all in the company of their fellow artists. The pens, notepads, tote bags, T-shirts and complimentary books just happened to be dandy fringe benefits.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I knew you were a writer, but I didn’t know that you were so big.”

Stung, Khela stared at him. She’d been amazed and gratified that he had accepted her invitation, but now a stab of regret made her head slightly achy. It wasn’t her style to flaunt her career or her success, but for reasons unknown even to herself, she wanted him to be impressed. She would have settled for interested. Or at the very least, she’d hoped that he would have asked her about her work.

But in all fairness, they didn’t know each other, not at all. He had come to her apartment fairly regularly lately grateful for her flirty friend. Khela smiled to herself, imagining Daphne’s reaction when she saw her favorite super transformed into super sexy.

Chapter 2

“Men are the weaklings, the cowards, the frauds!

Women don’t need to be rescued, it’s that men need to be heroes!”

—from
Secrets and Sins
by Khela Halliday

Daphne’s pop-eyed, wide-mouthed reaction to the sight of Carter in his formalwear was nothing compared to Khela’s increasing amazement—and alarm—at his performance as the evening progressed. From the moment he helped her from the limo and onto the red carpet in front of the Harborfront Regency, he had been gracious, charming, and had displayed the manners of a royal consort. He was the first man under the age of sixty that had ever pulled out her chair to seat her for dinner.

He was too good to be true.

He was also one of only two men seated at the head table, and the only one of her ten tablemates who wasn’t a romance author.

Garland Kenny, who wrote lavish medieval historicals for Warrington House under the name Margaux LaPierre, was almost two feet shorter and a hundred pounds heavier than Carter. Garland seemed just as captivated by him as the eight women were.

“All this industry talk must seem terribly boring to you, Mr…?” Garland ventured halfway through the first course—an endive salad with caramelized onions, apples, spiced pecans, goat cheese and sherry-walnut vinaigrette. “I’m sorry, but Khela neglected to give us your name,” he smiled, revealing two rows of ultra bright capped teeth.

“Forgive me, Garland.” Khela leaned over her untouched salad. “This is—”

“Carter Radcliffe,” Carter interrupted smoothly, with a devilish grin at Khela. Her expression of mortification and the reappearance of another ferocious blush made him take one of her hands in both of his and pat it as he undertook an explanation. “When Khela and I first met, she thought Carter was my last name. She called me ‘Mr. Carter’ for years before she realized that Radcliffe is my family name. She still calls me Mr. Carter from time to time. But only when she’s feeling particularly fond of me.”

Khela quietly cleared her throat and then introduced her other tablemates even as she wondered why Carter had yet to release her hand.

“Tell me, Carter,” said Martine Kendall, one of Cameo Publishing’s best-selling Regency authors, “are you a writer, too?”

He chanced a glance at Khela, who was staring resolutely into her salad plate. “No,” he said simply. The rest of the table waited in vain for him to elaborate. He took a bite of his salad instead.

Khela looked at him, pleased at how relaxed he seemed with nine pairs of expectant eyes boring into him. At fifty-five, Martine was handsome in a dated Alexis Carrington from
Dynasty
kind of way. Early in her career she had flourished as a mystery writer, and Khela knew that Carter’s unembellished “No” would not keep her at bay.

“Carter is a jack of all trades,” Khela hurriedly explained. “When people have, uh, problems, they come to him. And he fixes them,” she finished lightly.

His hand tightened around hers as he rested it on her thigh. “Actually, I handle the operation of—”

“You’re a troubleshooter!” Garland chimed in gleefully. “A genuine corporate runabout. I should have guessed.” He pointed his fork at Carter. “The cut of the suit never lies. You’re corporate, not creative like the rest of us here!”

Garland’s guffaws drowned out the polite laughter of the women. Khela was glad to see that Garland’s interruption derailed Martine—so glad, her hand relaxed within Carter’s.

“Let’s talk about something other than work,” Martine said with a roll of her heavily lined eyes.

“I had contemplated slipping out for an update on the Red Sox-Yankees game,” Carter said, sitting back and hanging his hand over the back of Khela’s chair. When his thumb brushed softly over the skin between her shoulder blades, her ever-present blush began to burn. “But honestly, Ms. Kendall, I’m enjoying all the shop talk. It’s surprisingly stimulating.”

His thumb continued to ignite sparks of heat that traveled beyond Khela’s cheeks. He splayed his fingers, drawing his fingertips lightly over her bare shoulder blades until the warmth of his hand came to rest on her right shoulder, close to her neck. Khela turned her face slightly to the right, and his index finger whispered along her jaw. A pleasant shiver moved through her.

“You’re a man,” Carmen Almeida said to Carter. Carmen wrote multicultural romances under the pen name of Carrie Fiore for Cameo’s Sizzler line. “I need a man’s opinion.” She cast a disdainful glance at Garland, who was using the flat surface of his knife as a mirror to tidily twist one end of his Snidely Whiplash moustache. “I’m working on a novel about a woman who isn’t sure which of two men fathered the child she’s carrying.”

“Why darlin’, that hardly sounds romantic,” offered Kitty Kincaid, a sixty-something author from Georgia who cultivated the same Southern belle image she assigned to the heroines of her lengthy, Savannah-based historicals. She pressed the diamond-laden fingers of her left hand coquettishly to the base of her throat. “But I suppose anything goes in those hot-blooded contemporaries you churn out by the dozens, Carmen. I myself would never create a leading lady of such questionable morals.”

Carmen’s long blue-black hair was arranged in fetching layers of curls atop her head. Elegant tendrils of her hairdo quivered with subdued anger, which sent color rushing to her terra cotta skin.

Writers rarely criticized each other’s styles and genres, at least to their faces, but the tension had begun brewing between Carmen and Kitty at the start of the evening, from the moment Carmen’s
A Hard Man Is Good to Find
and Kitty’s
The Cutlass and the Corset
were listed as nominees for the much-coveted Romance Reader’s Choice award…the engraved crystal teardrop now sitting at Carmen’s right elbow.

“Kitty,” Carmen began sweetly, “you stick to your thirty-year-old antebellum virgins and I’ll keep peddling realistic characters modern women can identify with.”

Black-clad waiters glided in to replace their salad plates with the second course, and the table was spared Kitty’s response. Carmen, who had selected the grilled Maine lobster tails with orange chipotle vinaigrette, returned her attention to Carter.

“If you were one of the men in the situation I described, what could the woman say or do to make you sympathetic to, rather than disgusted by, her predicament?”

January Rose—her actual name—injected her thoughts on the subject. “I know your work, Carmen, and I know you.” She gave Carmen an approving wink, and the heavy laugh lines about her dark eyes deepened. “There’s no way you have your heroine knocking boots with two men.” With a sly look at Carmen, she added, “Unless they were identical twins.”

Carmen’s brow lifted. “Very perceptive, Rose,” she grinned. “In my manuscript, my heroine—unbeknownst to her, of course—is drugged at a party, and has sex. She’s sure it was with the man she’s been dating, until she turns up knocked up, and the man’s twin claims that he was the one who was with her around the time the baby was conceived. Even worse, he claims that
she
was the one who seduced
him
at the party.”

“Clever,” Garland said as he piled cucumber, dill and champagne compote atop a sizeable bite of the salmon he’d chosen for his entrée. “Clear-cut villain at work.”

“Carter?” Carmen prompted. “How would you react to being told that your twin brother could possibly be the father of a baby you desperately want to be yours?”

He finished chewing a bite of his grilled chicken and touched his napkin to his lips. “I suppose my gut reaction would be to distance myself from both my brother and the woman. But loving both, I’d have to find a way to forgive and accept the situation. A brother is blood. That’s an unbreakable bond. And if I loved this woman…” His awareness of Khela suddenly became keen and he felt her gaze on him. “If I loved her, I know I wouldn’t let her go. No matter what.”

He met Khela’s eyes then, and he didn’t notice the way his response left the table spellbound.

“What are your thoughts on the subject, Khela?” Kitty asked.

“I—I…” she stammered. Thoughts? She had none. To produce thoughts, one had to be capable of thinking, and with the soft golden light from the chandeliers sparkling in Carter’s eyes, Khela’s brain relinquished control to parts of her body residing well below her brain. “I…”

“Khela?” Carter stroked the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “Are you okay?”

Another pleasant shiver coursed through her before she could snatch her gaze free of his. “I-was-just-thinking-about-the-exploding-genitalia-of-the-drone-honeybee,” she said in a rush, her hand trembling as she raised her water goblet to her mouth and took long, noisy gulps.

“I beg your pardon, honey?” Kitty drawled.

“That certainly bears explaining,” Garland chuckled.

“Nature has interesting ways of ensuring parentage.” Once again, embarrassment set Khela’s face on fire from the inside out. “There are thousands of male honeybees—drones—in a hive, but only one female. Competition for the queen is fierce, so to make sure that her babies have only one daddy, nature devised a bomb.” The table, Carter especially, was intrigued, so Khela went into greater detail. “When the drone mates with the female, he sticks his palp—”

“Now it’s my turn to beg your pardon,” Carmen deadpanned. “What’s a palp?”

“His reproductive organ?” January guessed, peering at Khela over the top of her purple-rimmed half-glasses.

“Right,” Khela said. “When he consummates the deal with the queen, the process eviscerates him. The drone dies at the moment of climax.”

“What a way to go,” Garland said under his breath, winking at Carter, who almost spat out a mouthful of grilled asparagus.

“No other male can mate with the queen because the dead drone’s palp blocks entry,” Khela said. “Nature found a foolproof way to ensure parentage.”

January whistled. “Suicide. The ultimate proof of paternity.”

“The Argentine Blue-Bill has a spiny penis with a bristled tip,” Khela went on, “kind of like a bottle brush. These ducks are pretty promiscuous, and scientists theorize that the tips evolved as a way to remove the sperm of previous ducks when an Argentine Blue-Bill male mates with a female.”

“Ew,” Carmen chuckled.

“My dear Khela,” Kitty gushed, “you never fail to entertain and educate, and when I look at you here with this handsome, adoring man stuck to you like hair on a biscuit, I am persuaded that you truly are a torchbearer for romance.”

The Torchbearer Award would be presented after dessert, and with two courses remaining, Khela felt her time was running out. She had no appetite, and now that Kitty had actually mentioned the award, Khela literally felt as though she were suffocating. She plucked the napkin from her lap and dropped it atop her chicken. “Would you please excuse me?” She sprang from her chair and was halfway to the exit before Carter and Garland could even stand.

* * *

“I like your friends.”

Khela inched closer to the narrow strip of flat stone separating a pair of the two-story windows forming the harbor side wall of the banquet hall. With Boston’s skyline puzzled together in glittering lights before her and hundreds of guests enjoying raspberry sorbet enrobed in Belgian chocolate behind her, Khela was ready to gnaw her own leg off to escape the upcoming award ceremony.

Carter’s appearance at her side calmed her—a little.

“You didn’t have to follow me.” Her fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arms, and she shivered. “I just needed some air.” Of course, if she’d known that the April night would be so chilly, she would have run to the lobby instead.

“Ms. Kincaid seems to think she offended you in some way,” Carter explained.

“Go in and tell her I got the vapors. She’ll appreciate that.”

Carter peeled off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. His proximity, his clean woodsy scent in the jacket and the weight of it covering her in warmth down to her knees almost made her turn and bury herself in his embrace. Even though she remained still, he must have sensed her need because he rested his hands on her shoulders and gave them a comforting squeeze.

“Are you still cold?” His breath caressed her left ear.

“No.” The breeze carried away the quiet syllable.

“But you’re shivering.” His hands moved to her upper arms, raising goosebumps under the jacket to prickle her skin.

“I’m nervous,” she lied, before truthfully adding, “I’m really not looking forward to standing before all those people at the luncheon tomorrow. Tonight’s different. I don’t have to make a speech. All I have to do is stand there and look pretty and grateful.”

“I have a feeling that you’ll be fine.”

Khela turned then, her gaze met his, and before he could cloak his expression with indifference or merriment, she translated the look in his eyes: she had managed the pretty part. She gripped the lapels of his jacket, pulling it closer about her shoulders.

“Uh…” Wishing that he still had his jacket to hide the evidence of his reaching attraction to Khela, Carter shifted his eyes toward the banquet room. The lights had dimmed and three soft beams from overhead illuminated the podium set on a stage lining one wall. “I think you’re on soon.”

He discreetly opened one of the glass doors just enough to hear the matronly president of the national Romance Authors of America Organization finish up her spiel.

“Once every ten years, the romance writing arm of the ECWA nominates five authors to whom we are indebted, for without their brilliant stories, hard work and dedication, the genre of romantic fiction would cease to hold its own against those who refuse to acknowledge it as a legitimate form of literature. Most of you know who you are.”

A soft rumble of chuckling traveled through the darkness. Khela almost applauded the president’s words. Many of the writers in the room, specifically those published by university presses, had a tendency to openly joke about romance.

“Khela Halliday’s debut novel,
Satin Whispers
, was a Cameo Publishing Private Collection release ten years ago, when she was a twenty-one-year-old senior at Fieldcrest College in St. Louis, Missouri. That book landed on the
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestseller lists and led to an unprecedented seven-book deal with Cameo Publishing. The rest, as they say, is history. Ten years and eighteen books later—fourteen of them bestsellers—Khela has written for Cameo’s Private Collection, Treasury, Whisper, Sizzler and Unlaced lines, and next year, her first young adult series will debut with Cameo Sass books.”