Neck & Neck (20 page)

A movement from his left caught his attention, and he turned to see a cat come running down the stairs past him, ignoring him completely as it wound itself around Natalie’s legs. She stooped automatically to pick up the silver and black striped creature, and it bumped its nose under her chin before tucking its head into her neck and purring loudly enough for Finn to hear it from where he stood. She laughed at the gesture, in a way he hadn’t heard her laugh before, completely lacking in inhibition and full of warmth and contentment and affection. It was the sort of laughter that fit perfectly in the place she called home.

Finn had never, ever, lived in a house like this. He’d never even known anyone who lived in a house like this. He’d gone pretty much from one extreme to another, riding on the Mulholland coattails. He’d grown up in a dingy tenement that was barely a step up from the projects, then, once he was turned over to social services, he and Russell had shared a bedroom with four other boys in a cramped house that was barely a step up from that. In college, the two men had rented an apartment that wasn’t much better than the one Finn had known as a boy, and Finn had stayed there after Russell married Marti.

Not that Russell and Marti had done much better, pooling their meager resources to buy a house in a neighborhood that was rumored to be slated for urban renewal—though neither the rumor nor the neighborhood was ever quite substantiated. The first part of young Max Mulholland’s life hadn’t been a whole lot different from Finn’s or Russell’s. Oh, except for the small matter of his parents not being addicted to anything and loving both each other and their kid to distraction. And except for how his father’s job as a game designer struggling to keep his small company afloat afforded Max the perk of sometimes having state-of-the-art game systems and games before his friends had a chance to sample either. It was little comfort to a kid who’d lost his mother early enough in life that he never really got to know her.

Then, boom, virtually overnight, after the launch of the GameViper, Russell and Max had moved into a plush mansion in one of King County’s poshest neighborhoods. Immediately after that, Russell had put Finn on the payroll with a six-figure salary and benefits out the wazoo, moving him into the estate along with him and Max. The place was unbe-frigging-lievable, from its Greek Acropolis-inspired swimming pool to its Golden Age of Hollywood ballroom to the game room that put Disneyland to shame. Finn was still dazzled by the place—and by his suite of rooms within it—even having lived there for more than a year.

Extreme poverty and extreme wealth: those were the only environments Finn had ever known. And neither had ever suited him. In one, there had been so many things he wanted but could never have. In the other . . . Well, hell. There were still a lot of things he wanted but couldn’t have. The difference was that, in his previous situation, money could have provided him with every one of those wants, and in his current situation, what he wanted couldn’t be bought.

But Natalie’s house was neither lacking in amenities nor overflowing with them. It was just . . . normal. Utterly, blissfully normal. This was exactly the kind of place Finn had wanted to live in as a kid, exactly the kind of life he’d wanted: a normal one. It was the kind of place—the kind of life—he wanted to live now.

The kind of place—the kind of life—he feared he would never, ever find.

But instead of saying any of that, he asked, “What’s the cat’s name?”

“Zippy,” she replied without looking up, scratching the animal under its chin in a way that made it tip its head back in a silent request for more of the same. “Zip for short.”

“Zippy?” he repeated distastefully.

“Yes, Zippy,” she replied frostily. “Do you have a problem with that?”

He shrugged. “That’s like naming your kid Algernon.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s like hanging a Kick Me sign on his back. You give a cat a name like Zippy, and it’s just asking all the other cats to beat him up after school every day. He’s gonna need therapy when he’s grown up.”

He wasn’t sure, but he thought she tried to hide a smile at that. Relief washed over him. Rule number one in
The Big Book of Women’s Rules for Men
was: never, ever, under any circumstances, insult my cat in any way. Every guy knew that. At least, every guy who wanted to get laid.

Not that Finn wanted to get laid tonight, he hastily reminded himself. Well, okay, he would have liked to have gotten laid tonight, especially since it had been so long. He just didn’t want to get laid by Natalie. Well, okay, he would have liked to have gotten laid by Natalie tonight. He just didn’t want to wake up next to her in the morning. Well, okay, he would have liked to wake up next to her in the morning—especially if it meant getting laid again. He just didn’t want there to be any kind of consequences afterward.

And that, he knew, was the problem. With Natalie, there would be consequences. Women like her didn’t just jump into the sack with a guy. Or, if they did, it was only because they had some ridiculous romantic notion that there was something between the two of them. Something personal. Something emotional. Something that transcended the mere joining of two bodies for the sake of having a good time. A really good time. A really,
really
good time. Women like Natalie thought there was more to sex than sex. And men like Finn knew otherwise. Sex
was
sex. It
was
the joining of two bodies for the sake of having a really,
really
good time. There was nothing personal, nothing emotional about it. Because once you introduced emotion into it, you were asking for trouble.

Still, he was relieved Natalie wasn’t mad at him because he thought she’d given her cat a name that was, ah . . . unusual.

Natalie gave the animal one last scratch behind the ear, then stood and, as if his thought had cued the cat to do so, it suddenly dashed off at a speed he wouldn’t have guessed a house cat could manage, careening off the sofa before leaping over the coffee table, nearly knocking over a candle as it went.

“That’s why I named her Zippy,” she said. “Because she zips around a lot.” A loud crash in another room made her wince and glance over her shoulder in the general direction from which it had come. “And okay. Also because she can be kind of a pinhead sometimes.”

That made him chuckle out loud. Then, “You have a nice place here, Natalie,” he heard himself say, not sure when, or even why, he’d decided to make the comment.

She glanced back from the mystery noise, but her smile fell for some reason when her gaze lit on his. “Thanks,” she said softly. “I like it, too.”

Suddenly feeling nervous for no reason he could name, he hurried on, “What do they call this style of house? It has a name, right?”

“Arts and Crafts,” she told him. “Or just Craftsman.”

He nodded. “That’s it. There are a lot of these kinds of houses on the West Coast, but I never knew what they were called.” Mostly, he supposed, because he’d always told himself he didn’t care. There had been a lot of houses like this one in Becky’s neighborhood.

“There aren’t very many in Louisville. I guess the style never caught on here. I felt really lucky when I found this one.”

“Have you lived here long?” he asked, wondering why he was making small talk at four in the morning, when he should be calling a cab to take him back to the hotel and letting Natalie get some sleep.

She didn’t seem that surprised or put off by the question. “A little less than two years. Before that . . .” She halted before elaborating, and Finn wondered why.

He was about to ask her to go on, wanted to know where she’d lived before that. And before that. And before that. He wanted to ask her why she wasn’t shacking up with Waterman since the two of them would be moving in together after their nuptials—just when was the wedding, anyway?—not that anything containing the words
Waterman
and
nuptials
was an image Finn wanted to get lodged in his brain.

Still, he was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that. For some reason, Natalie Beckett didn’t seem like the type to live in sin—more was the pity. Unlike Finn, for whom living
was
pretty much sin. Then again, it wasn’t just where she’d lived before now—or with whom—that he was interested in. There was the small matter of everything else there was to know about her, too.

He started to ask her what she planned to do with the house once she married Waterman, since her intended didn’t seem the cozy cottage type, but decided it was none of his business. Not to mention the last thing Finn wanted to talk about at the moment was Whatshisname. So he withdrew his cell from his jacket pocket and said, “I guess I should call that cab.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but Zippy zipped back into the room, banking off a chair this time and tearing right between them, making Finn take a step backward in self-preservation. The animal then circled around and leapt up onto the back of the sofa, its legs splayed wide, gazing at him in a way that made him think it was trying to decide if he was a member of the pack or a wounded wildebeest he should fell for dinner. For a split second, it was man versus nature; then, as suddenly as the cat had reappeared, it disappeared again, darting back up the stairs, as if its work here were finished.

As strange as the brief episode had been, it made Finn feel weirdly honored that Natalie’s cat would trust him with her. But it was also a weird enough realization to hammer home just how late it was and how much a lack of sleep could mess with a person. For one thing, he didn’t give a damn about anyone’s approval, least of all an animal. Especially an animal that didn’t even have a job. And for another thing, even if Natalie’s cat did approve of him on some arcane feline level, she wasn’t the sort of woman he should pursue since (A) he was only in town temporarily, and she wasn’t the temporary type, (B) she was engaged to be married, (C) she was engaged to be married, and (D) she was engaged to be married.

“That’s funny,” she said as she watched the cat’s hasty departure. “She usually hangs around when people are here.” She turned and offered him a smile that looked a little more anxious than it probably should be. “Once she’s zipped around the living room a few times, I mean.”

In other words, Finn thought, maybe what he’d thought was the cat’s trusting him was actually its disliking him.

“Not because she likes people,” Natalie added, seeming to read his mind, “but because she doesn’t trust them around me.”

Finn was about to ask how her cat liked Waterman but checked himself. He really needed to get over this preoccupation he had with Natalie’s fiancé. Of course, the best way to do that would be to get over his preoccupation with Natalie. And the best way to do that would be to leave. Now. And make sure he never saw her again.

But then, he wouldn’t be seeing her again, he reminded himself. Not if he did his job right and made sure she never got within a hundred yards of Russell, something that would ensure she never got within a hundred yards of Finn, either. So what was he worried about? Other than the fact that he was never going to see Natalie again?

He started to punch a number into the phone, then realized he had no idea what number to dial. “You know the number of a cab company?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, but I have a phone book in the kitchen.”

She turned to walk in that direction, and even though she hadn’t invited Finn to follow her, he followed her anyway. Hey, she hadn’t told him not to. When she flicked on a switch inside the entry, the kitchen was cast out of shadow and into warm light, and he saw that it was indeed as welcoming as the rest of her place. Natural wood cabinets fronted with glass revealed dishes stacked neatly in alternating colors, softer versions of the colors in the other room. A small table tucked into one corner suggested she sometimes—maybe even often—ate alone, something that made Finn happier than it probably should have. There were enough pots and pans, copper at that, dangling from a grid overhead to indicate she was serious about cooking, something that surprised him, since she seemed the type who would prefer to have someone, someone like, oh . . . say . . . Waterman take her out to dinner.

Just who was Natalie Beckett, anyway? he wondered. One minute, he was thinking she wasn’t the living-in-sin type, then the next, he was thinking she was the type who liked to be pampered by some overpaid, overbearing, overblown jerk like Waterman. At the restaurant earlier, she’d seemed perfectly at ease in her luxurious, elegant surroundings, as if she’d been born to the life, but at the same time, she was a businesswoman doing whatever it took to land Russell for what sounded like a pretty major fund-raising event she herself was organizing.

To look at her, he’d think she was little more than an expensive bit of eye candy destined to be some guy’s trophy wife. But after talking to her, he’d formed an opinion of a woman who was reasonably smart, reasonably articulate, and who had a reasonably wry sense of humor. Despite the overindulging in drink tonight—which, hey, coulda happened to anyone—she’d impressed Finn as being anything but shallow.

So why the hell was she marrying Waterman, who was the very definition of shallow, and who clearly wanted nothing more than an expensive-looking bit of eye candy for a trophy wife?

His thoughts were pulled back to the present—and not a moment too soon—when Natalie opened not one, but two, cabinets, one above the countertop and one directly below. At first he thought it was because she didn’t know where her phone book was. Then she kicked off her heels and stepped up onto the higher shelf of the bottom cabinet, pushing herself up from the floor to stretch her arm toward the top shelf of the upper cabinet.

“Oh, for—” he began impatiently when he realized what she was doing. He crossed the kitchen in a few quick strides. “If you needed help reaching it, why didn’t you just ask?” He stopped immediately behind her, extended his arm up alongside hers, past where her fingers were trying to catch the edge of a fat phone book, then easily plucked it off of the shelf and set it on the counter.