Mr. Right Next Door (7 page)

She grabbed the sugar canister and looked inside.

Nothing but sugar, it looked like.

Who would have helped themselves to sugar in her apartment?

Her sister Kate had a key, just because it seemed like a good idea for someone else to have a key, in case Kim lost hers. Her landlady had a key, and there were times when Kim felt like Mrs. O’Connor was a little more nosy than she should be. She wouldn’t have been upset if Mrs. O’Connor needed to borrow some sugar, but she’d like to know about it before the woman helped herself to something inside Kim’s apartment.

Kim started pulling out the other canisters, three with her favorite teas, one with coffee for guests who preferred that, one with flour, again for those rare times she made something.

It looked like there were a few coffee grounds on the counter, too, behind that canister.

Okay, someone borrowing coffee and sugar at the same time without telling her seemed even weirder.

It gave her the creeps.

She turned and scanned her apartment carefully, going into the living room, the bathroom, her bedroom. Were things just a little bit out of place on her dressing table? Perfume bottles rearranged, maybe? A stack of papers not quite as straight as they’d been when she’d left them on top of her satchel on the floor beside her nightstand? Maybe the stuff in her medicine cabinet not quite the way she’d left it?

She couldn’t be sure. She’d lived in the building for three years now, first in a two-bedroom apartment she’d shared with Kathie, then in this one-bedroom alone, and never felt anything less than completely safe here. There was a newly-married couple in the apartment she and Kathie used to share, Mrs. O’Connor on the first floor and a sweet little old lady named Mrs. Beasley in the other first-floor apartment. Lizzie Watson was in the other apartment on Kim’s floor.

Someone was always here and Mrs. O’Connor was as good as a watchdog. Better, even, because she could talk.

She went to find Mrs. O’Connor, but when she knocked on the woman’s door, she didn’t answer.

Mrs. Beasley did answer her door, as usual with a welcoming smile.

“Hello, dear, how are you?”

“Fine, Mrs. Beasley. And you?”

“I could not be better, my dear. What can I do for you today?”

“I’m looking for Mrs. O’Connor. Have you seen her?”

“She just left with her daughter to visit her granddaughter, the one who’s expecting a baby soon, who lives in Macon. Why? Is there a problem?”

“No. Not really.” Kim didn’t want to worry Mrs. Beasley. “I was just wondering. Did you see anyone heading upstairs today who…well, someone who’s not usually here?”

Mrs. Beasley gave her an odd look, but thankfully just answered the question.

“That nice young man from the phone company was here, to check on someone’s phone. I met him in the hallway as I was going for my afternoon walk,” Mrs. Beasley said.

“Someone’s phone was out?”

“Well, I’m not sure. He said he had to check on someone’s phone.”

“And he was wearing a phone company uniform?”

Mrs. Beasley nodded.

“He’s the only one you saw?”

“Yes, dear. Are you sure everything’s all right?”

Kim nodded, trying to look like she believed it.

“Thank you, Mrs. Beasley.”

She went upstairs and checked on her phone, just to make certain nothing was wrong with it. Her first thought had been that maybe Eric hadn’t called her because there was something wrong with her phone. And she wouldn’t have been all that surprised if Mrs. O’Connor had let someone from the phone company into her apartment and forgot to tell her. Or that maybe the Whitakers upstairs had phone trouble, and maybe while the phone guy was here checking on their phone, he’d checked on Kim’s, too, just…because.

What that had to do with her sugar container or her coffee supply, she didn’t know.

But it was easier to imagine than someone searching her sugar and coffee canisters, which was just weird.

Why would anyone search anything of hers?

When she picked up her phone, it was working. She called the Whitakers to be sure, and Betsy Whitaker answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Betsy. It’s Kim from downstairs. Have you been having trouble with your phone?”

“No, why? Are you?”

“No,” Kim said. “Just…well, Mrs. Beasley said someone from the phone company was here today and…Oh, never mind, Betsy. Sorry I bothered you. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Did they have phone lines outside anyone’s apartment? Or a phone box of some sort somewhere? Maybe wiring that someone needed to check that day?

She knew next to nothing about phone boxes or wiring or anything like that.

She just knew that her phone seemed to be working fine, that Eric hadn’t called and that someone seemed to have searched her sugar and coffee canisters.

What could anyone possibly expect to find in there?

N
ick was playing Peeping Tom again. As best he could considering it was daytime.

Not that he was looking forward to nighttime, either.

He wasn’t looking forward to anything.

Certainly not bath time.

Torture time, as he’d come to think of it.

Did she take a bath every day? Or was that a kind of treat? A relaxation thing? An indulgence?

So far, she’d taken a bath every night.

Although her climbing out of the shower couldn’t be that much better.

Nick groaned just thinking about it as he watched her look around her apartment like she’d lost something. As long as it kept her out of the bathtub, he was happy.

Harry called on Nick’s cell, no doubt because Nick refused to turn on his radio. Harry could be damned irritating.

“Yeah,” Nick said, sitting in his spot by the window, looking down into her apartment with grim resolve.

“I’ve got fifty bucks that says she takes a bath again tonight,” Harry said.

“Shut up, Harry!”

“Ahhh, come on. We have to have a little fun.”

“What did you find out about the phone number?” Nick asked.

“It’s a cell. One of those pay-as-you-go ones, just like we suspected.”

“Dammit,” Nick said.

Those things would be outlawed if he had anything to say about it, because there was no friggin’ paperwork. No name. No address. No nothing. Anybody could buy one at any time and call anyone else, and unless you could catch the call bouncing off a satellite somewhere because you had the party on the other side of the call under surveillance, there was no way to trace the call.

“Yeah. I know. We dialed. Guy didn’t answer. The message feature has one of those weird, computerized, fake voices saying you can leave a message, so there’s no voiceprint. No way to know if he’s even still using the phone or if he’s ditched it. Hell, he could have a dozen of these phones and never use the same one twice. We gotta figure out what to tell Little Miss Gorgeous about it.”

What would be best to tell her, Harry meant. What would further their investigation?

“Okay. We tell her the truth, she’s probably going to think it’s odd that he’d be using a phone like that,” Nick said. “Or that he has lousy credit and is a lousy prospect as a boyfriend.” None of which they wanted. “We tell her the line’s not working and then she’s got an excuse for why he hasn’t called her. Although why he wouldn’t call from work or home or borrow someone’s phone…”

“Believe me, I wouldn’t let a phone being out of order keep me from calling her,” Harry said.

“Yeah. We tell her it’s a landline, she’s going to want an address so she can try to find him herself—”

“Or if she has another way to contact him, she’d probably use it then.”

And they needed to know if she had another way to contact him.

The only problem was, Nick didn’t want her having anything to do with the guy. Not personally. Professionally he had to want her to contact the guy, if it led him and his people to the jerk.

“We don’t want her suspicious, but we do want her trying to contact him,” Nick said, thinking out loud. “I’m going to tell her the number’s not working, but that we couldn’t figure out why. Then I’ll just ask if she has another way to contact him. I think she’ll tell me if she does.”

“’Cause she likes you?” Harry asked.

“She tolerates me.”

He wasn’t kidding himself about it being anything more.

“Tell her tonight,” Harry said. “We need to move this thing along.”

Yeah, they did.

Kim thought about calling her brother, because the whole thing with the sugar and the coffee was creeping her out. But in all likelihood it was nothing. Mrs. O’Connor forgetting to tell her she’d let the phone company guy in and the phone company getting mixed up about whose line was giving them trouble or something like that.

This was Magnolia Falls, after all.

Nothing really dangerous ever happened in Magnolia Falls.

And her brother tended to be a tad overprotective anyway. She tried not to ever give him an excuse to worry even more about her and he’d worry about this. He’d probably freak out about this. He’d come over and dust for prints, probably haul in every guy who’d worked for the phone company in the last ten years for questioning. It would not be pretty.

And he’d watch her even more closely than he already did, despite the fact that she was a completely reasonable, rational twenty-four-year-old woman, more than capable of watching out for herself, her little travel difficulties notwithstanding.

So what if she’d had her wallet, her credit cards and her traveler’s checks stolen in New York City once, taken in by a fake mime in Central Park? She’d just thought he was doing some kind of magic trick, that’s all, and everybody liked magic tricks, didn’t they? She’d still gotten home okay. And that whole thing with the car accident in Mexico because there was a goat on the road…. That had been way overblown. It hadn’t hurt her or the car that much, and there was no way she was hitting a goat. She still didn’t believe that was a scam. That the goat’s owner forced him out into the road at least once a day in hopes of running a tourist off the road, then scamming them into letting him fix their rental car so they didn’t have to report it to the insurance company or the car-rental place. He’d been a very nice man, after all, and way too nice to the goat to shove him into the road. And she hadn’t nearly drowned in Vienna. She hadn’t!

But her brother was a little odd about things at times and she did not want to call him unless she absolutely had to.

So the phone company guy had made himself a cup of coffee and he liked sugar and hadn’t cleaned up that well after himself?

No big deal.

She wouldn’t begrudge him a cup of coffee.

She wouldn’t make a federal case of it, either.

And yet, as the sun went down and darkness slowly descended around her, she hated the idea of being in her apartment alone.

She started turning on lights. All of them. She locked the door, unlocked it and locked it again. Yes, the lock was working. She had a dead bolt. It was working, too.

She was heading for the stereo, to turn it on, so she didn’t have to stay there in utter silence, listening for every little thing that went bump in the night, when someone knocked on her door.

“Ahhh!” She couldn’t help it. It startled her.

“Kim? Are you okay?”

It was her neighbor Nick’s voice, sounding as worried as she felt.

“Kim!”

“Yes. I’m here. Hang on.” She got to the door, fumbled with the lock.

Why did he sound so scared?

Had the mysterious phone guy been trespassing in his room, too?

She pulled open the door and it was like some mysterious force was pushing her forward, toward him. Like for a moment, it was all she could do not to throw herself into his arms and play the helpless, frightened female, ridiculous as that notion was.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, moving closer, his hands closing around her upper arms in a firm, reassuring grip.

“Nothing,” she said, her quaking voice ruining any claim she might have made at that point.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said with an urgency she didn’t understand and didn’t like hearing. “What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened.”

“Kim, you’re trembling,” he said, still hanging on to her.

Not that she objected to that. She was still fighting the urge to curl up against his big male body. She didn’t think he’d object. Oh, he’d probably be surprised and demand even more answers, but at least she’d feel safe for a moment and feeling safe sounded really good to her.

“I’m being silly,” she said.

“In what way?” he said, doing that enunciating-so-carefully thing that he did, the familiar shot of impatience and irritation back in his voice.

She grinned in spite of herself, because that was Nick and the familiarity was reassuring at the moment.

“In what you’d no doubt think of as a silly, female way,” she said, feeling much better now that he was here.

He didn’t seem amused. Or even remotely satisfied by her answer.

If anything, it irritated him even more.

His mouth stretched into a grim line, and his eyes went all smoky and dark and…interesting.

He was a very interesting man. She couldn’t deny it.

She wasn’t interested, she told herself. She was in love, after all.

But it didn’t render a woman blind to every other man in the universe.

She could say with complete objectivity that he was a very interesting, even attractive, man.

He looked like a man who couldn’t quite figure out what to do with her. His hands were still locked on her arms in a grip that was firm, yet reassuring and somehow even gentle. There was heat radiating from his body, which didn’t seem hampered or injured in any way at the moment. And the idea of curling up against him while she caught her breath—tried to catch her breath—and stopped shaking was almost more than she could deny.

“You can tell me,” he said, his voice going soft and deep, impossibly compelling.

She inched closer just a bit, took a breath and tried to let it out with deliberate, calming slowness.

“I know something scared you. I have trouble thinking it was simply because I knocked on your door. Surely lots of people come and see you. I bet they all knock on your door, that it’s not something that normally frightens you.”

Kim hovered there, blessedly close to him, confused, tempted, irritated with herself and with Eric for not being here when he should be—still feeling a bit scared and silly and just not knowing what to do.

“Someone scared you?” Nick asked.

“No,” she whispered.

“Something?”

She nodded.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

An invitation that sounded impossibly appealing. Nearly as appealing as resting for a moment in his arms.

He drew her to him, then, little by little, inch by inch, giving her all the time in the world to object or to pull away. Pulled her to him so slowly that she wondered if he had to fight himself to let her be that close to him.

It felt oddly sexual and oddly not.

Sexually charged, actually, and yet like he was erecting some kind of wall between them, touching her and yet not letting himself really touch her.

She got to where her forehead brushed against his chin and then her chin rubbed against the top of his shoulder as she turned her head away from him and laid her head against the surprisingly hard muscles of his chest. Ever so slowly, she let her body rest against the strength of his, reassured and a little bit scared.

It felt good.

Really good.

Better than it should have, she decided, to a woman newly fallen in love with the man of her dreams.

Who was not here, hadn’t been here, showed no signs of coming here.

And yet, she loved him, didn’t she?

Eric, her savior from the ship?

Did a woman in love get to feel this good in the arms of another man? Even if it had started out in a completely innocent way? Even if she was scared?

Kim wasn’t sure.

She’d never been in love before.

“What happened?” Nick demanded, the voice nothing at all like the way he held her in his arms.

His arms were pure strength, reassurance, acceptance, as if there to serve her every whim, standing ready to fulfill any need she might have. His voice was harsh, demanding, impatient to the core. The incongruity of it registered on some level, but she had too many other things to figure out to puzzle over it for long.

“It’s silly,” she said, her arms at his waist, hands curling around fistfuls of his shirt. If he tried to move away, she feared she’d hang on for dear life to keep those arms of his around her.

She shuddered once, then again, couldn’t help it, and sank against him.

His whole body seemed to go on alert, tension in every pore. It was like she could feel him searching the apartment behind her as best he could, ready to spring into action.

What in the world?

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me now, so I can take care of it.”

He could?

He would?

What did he think happened? And how could he take care of it?

Although having someone do just that sounded really good to her.

“I think someone’s been in my apartment,” she said.

“Been here? Or is still here?”

“Been here and gone.”

“You checked?” he demanded.

“I checked.”

He pushed her to the side, grabbed at his shoulder, his hand fumbling there, then hesitating. What was it with him and that shoulder?

“Stay behind me,” he said. “I want to check for myself, just to be sure.”

“You think he’s still in here?” she yelled.

“I want to be sure, Kim. Humor me.”

He didn’t say it like a man wanting someone to humor him. He said it like a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed.

What kind of orders did a guy who planned parks for a living normally give?

Kim followed him anyway, because she didn’t want to be anywhere alone and she figured the safest place for her was right next to him. He searched every nook and cranny of her apartment, much in the same way she could picture her brother doing if she’d called him with her crazy story about the phone guy and stray coffee grounds.

When he was finally satisfied they were alone, he closed her apartment door and locked it, then took her by the hand and led her to the sofa, sat her down on it, then sat on the edge of the coffee table, facing her and said, “Tell me everything. Now.”

“You’ll think I’m being silly,” she said, now that she knew no one was here except him and her, and she’d stopped shaking.

“Do I look like a man who finds many things even remotely silly?”

“No.”

“Then give it your best shot. Try to amuse me,” he said.

Kim’s mouth twitched, aching to smile, because it was so very Nick-like, even if his recent behavior was not. For a moment, it was like he was someone else completely, someone she couldn’t begin to know. Like Clark Kent in the old movies turning into Superman in a whirl, a cape and the lack of his dorky glasses making all the difference in the world.