Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (17 page)

She glanced down at the program in her hand as the enormous room fell silent. The first piece was by Bach, a double violin concerto—words that meant absolutely nothing to her.

Then the music began and she forgot that she didn’t know what she was listening to.

The two solo violinists stood at the front of the stage before an orchestra that barely registered with her. Their bows flashed with movement. Their fingers danced wildly over strings, their heads nodded strongly with the music. And she could
hear
it.

She could hear them dancing.

One violin chased the melody high and then higher still, the music of the other violin spiraling beneath as the sound of the first tumbled over the top and fell rippling down until the music rose again and the second violin pushed the sound higher. Sometimes they dueled, each topping the other in rapid succession, and then they flirted, melodic fencing with one instrument chasing the other’s music. When they slowed and
the battling melodies turned into lovers, one sound sliding and curving around the other, she blinked and felt the tears spill at the beauty of it.

She felt Spencer take her hand in his, lace his fingers with hers, but she didn’t look at him. Just held on tight.

The final movement jumped into sudden life. In her mind’s eye she saw her great-aunt, young and passionate as the musicians on the stage, bent with fire over the violin that now hung on Addy’s wall. Addy’s breath caught in pain and her heart ached. The music was rushing to a finale she could feel in the tips of her fingers. When the last notes came to a sudden, perfectly timed halt, she was too stunned to applaud.

She felt the pressure on her arm as Spencer leaned over to her.

“I’m thinking about her, too.”

Addy shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it. That anyone could give this up…

When the music started again, she gave herself up to it and pushed all thoughts of the woman who’d abandoned her music, and Addy’s mother, down deep. By the time the musicians took their bows to crashing applause, she joined in the clapping, feeling only her enjoyment of the sound.

Even dinner turned out to be more than pleasant, the older couple they were out with being both charming and funny. When they said good-night and Addy told them she was glad to have met them, she meant it. And in the limo, too much champagne making her sleepy, she didn’t hesitate to curl up against Spencer’s side as he stroked her arm gently.

“Maybe I’m a little bit of a symphony girl,” she admitted in a whisper to his lapel. His hand squeezed her shoulder.

He held her hand entering their home and she walked with him up the stairs. At the top, she moved toward his room, willing for once—no, wanting—to enter it with him, but his hand pulled her in the other direction and she walked down the length of the hallway to her bedroom.

They’d never made love in her room. She stood with him next to her bed and reached up behind her head to undo the
knot of her hair. It spilled out over her shoulders and she dropped the pins to the floor. He helped her lift the dress off over her head and then it, too, fell to the floor. Then she helped him undress, until he stood as naked before her as she stood before him.

They lay down on her bed and she moved with him, so slowly that the world seemed to stop on its axis and pause for them. She told him that his hands on her touched her the way the music had, and his kiss on the trembling skin of her stomach spoke of something more than sex. When she fell apart in his arms, he held her. When she felt herself drifting into sleep, she held him.

And knew that he wouldn’t leave her before the morning.

W
hen the shriek of her alarm blasted her out of sound sleep the next morning, Addy bolted out from under the covers, certain she was late for a meeting. The strong grip on her ankle nearly tumbled her onto the floor.

Disoriented, naked and half falling off the bed, she craned her neck around and spotted the trouble. She narrowed her eyes.

“Trouble.” And indeed he was, lying there on his side, head propped on one hand and smiling in appreciation at the sight of her. Then she caught sight of the alarm clock suddenly silent under his other hand, and her grumbles transformed into shrieks.

“It’s six o’clock! In the morning!” She double-checked the days of the week in her head. “On a Saturday!”

“Yes it is.”

She flopped over on her back and spoke to the ceiling.

“So, Judge, sir, can you really consider it intentional homicide, considering the circumstances?” She answered herself as she felt the bed shaking at her side. “No, Ms. Tyler, you
cannot. In fact, one can only consider it to have been involuntary manslaughter, at best.” She nodded, feeling righteous. “Thank you, Judge. I knew you’d see it my way.”

Then she flung an arm over her face and tried to block out the light.

“Easy, Counselor.” He rolled on top of her and pulled her arm down. She looked to the right and then the left. Anything to avoid his traitor’s face. Then she thought better and looked him in the eye for one last glimpse of him.

After all, he’d be dead soon.

Even sooner if he didn’t stop grinning at her.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one who hates mornings?” she asked grumpily.

“I thought I’d wake you up early. Show you one of the benefits of what we grown-ups like to call ‘sleepovers.’”

“What’s that?”

He dragged blunt fingernails slowly down her side until his fingers rested on the flesh of her hip, flexing his hand on the joint between hip and thigh. She felt herself catching fire from his touch.

“Morning sex.”

The benefits of which, she was willing to concede a half hour later, were considerable.

Addy was halfway through her second coat of paint on the upstairs bathroom that afternoon before she realized that by startling her out of sleep and turning the moment playful, he’d managed to take the hour she’d dreaded and make her enjoy it. He’d given her yet another gift.

“Spencer Reed,” she said aloud, leaning her head against the wall—a spot not yet painted, thank God, she thought a moment later. She felt as old, or older than, the hills. “You’ll be the death of me yet.”

And just like that, their patterns shifted again.

Like a light switch flipping from off to on, her desire for him, her need to have him naked and in bed—preferably, but
she’d settle for just naked and anywhere—went from being something she could confine to the middle of the night to a constant obsession. Instead of being cautiously glad when their schedules limited the time they could spend together, she found herself becoming remarkably cranky if she left without talking to him in the morning and returned home to find that he was still out.

On one of the late nights when she stayed up, fighting sleep to be awake when he finally came home, she finished
Pride and Prejudice.
She slammed the cover shut with a loud clap and tossed the book to the floor, not sure what she was more irritated with: Spencer’s absence, the storybook happy ending or the ridiculous misunderstandings Elizabeth and Darcy went through because they couldn’t see each other clearly.

“Novels,” she muttered, before shutting off the light and trying to sleep. She was still awake when Spencer came home and into her bed.

And if their schedules weren’t bad enough, her family was worse.

After weeks of giving the “couple” plenty of alone time at home, it now seemed that they were determined to drop by at all hours and it took forever to get them to leave.

First Maxie showed up, in tears at having broken up with a boyfriend Addy didn’t even remember hearing about. She needed an entire night of tissues and red wine to get her through the weeping and out the other side, where the absurdity of dating an actor who was entirely
too close
to his co-leading man could make her giggle again.

Her brother came by after confronting the pub’s owner with his manager’s embezzlement, wondering if he’d be looking for a new job soon and looking for sympathy. Even Addy’s mother stopped in, after Spencer apparently had mentioned to her on the phone how much he’d loved the jambalaya all those Sundays ago. She brought an enormous pot of the spicy stew over with her, something Addy couldn’t remember her
doing in all the years that Addy had been living alone, and of course they had to invite Susannah to stay for a while and share it with them.

Meanwhile, Addy wasn’t getting laid, frankly, nearly as much as she wanted to. And the worst thing was that her family did all this coming and going without calling first, a habit she’d never had a problem with in the past. But she was seriously considering banning such behavior outright, particularly after Sarah rang their doorbell one Saturday afternoon, approximately two minutes before the view from the door window into the foyer would have gotten extremely interesting.

Not to mention that she still hadn’t managed to get Spencer to a Cubs game.

She was standing on the front walk in the dawn hours of a late-May Tuesday morning, drinking Diet Coke and threatening her garden with a fate worse than death if something green didn’t start pushing up out of the dirt soon, when she solved that problem at least.

She heard Spencer come out of the house but pretended she didn’t, just so she could enjoy the pleasure of him walking up behind her and wrapping his arms around her.

“You can’t talk a plant into sprouting for you, love,” he said in her ear. She ignored the shiver that ran through her at the casual word.

“Shows what you know,” she said and leaned her head back for his kiss. She could smell the scent of coffee on him. “My book says that talking to your houseplants has been proven to make them healthier.”

“Putting aside the fact that cursing flowers to eternal damnation is probably not what they meant by talking, can you explain to me what houseplants, with leaves and such, have to do with seeds buried six inches deep in the ground?”

“They’re bulbs, thank you,” she corrected him and accepted his murmured apologies for blatantly misrepresenting the world of flora. “And, I don’t know, they’re all part of the same plant family thing, aren’t they?”

“Search me.”

She spun around in his arms and flung her hands behind his neck.

“There’s something else I’d rather do with you.”

His hands dropped to her hips and pulled her closer.

“What’s that?”

“Watch baseball.”

It only took five minutes, full of protests of a busy day on his part and accusations of being a deal welsher on hers, before she talked him into clearing his afternoon in time for them to make the 1:20 p.m. start of the game that day.

On Addison Avenue at one o’clock, she tugged on the hand Spencer held, dragging him through the crowds and urging him to hurry.

“It’s bad luck if we miss the national anthem,” she scolded as they sprinted across the street against the stoplights, winking at the cop directing traffic. They had already stopped at a bar a block from the ballpark to buy tickets from her favorite scalper. Spencer had looked askance at her when she’d walked up to the tall, grizzled man with broad, bony shoulders leaning against the bar as if he lived there. The man she knew only as Blue greeted her with a smacking kiss and his standard, “Hey there, girlie!”

When Spencer introduced himself as her husband, arm firmly in place around her shoulders, she couldn’t sputter out a denial or an explanation fast enough to prevent Blue from making a wedding present of the tickets she wanted.

“You shouldn’t have told him that.” They were entering the park, still arguing about his possessive gesture.

He wiped a hand across his mouth for the third time. “I can’t believe I just did a shot of whiskey at one in the afternoon.”

“It was the least I could do after he gave us the tickets.” Spencer grunted in reply. “He did offer to let you call the shot, remember. Besides, he went to high school with my dad.”

“Lovely.”

“For a long while, Blue was the most arrested man in Chicago.” She cocked her head, considering. “Not sure if he
still holds the title. There are some up-and-coming young ticket scalpers these days.”

“Just tell me that you don’t kiss them all.”

To his credit, once they were inside the park, Spencer followed her every direction without protest. Seated in the bleachers, where there were no individual seats, only numbered tags screwed into benches every sixteen inches, he even seemed to find a silly joy in crowding her, insisting that the man on his left was pushing him over. He stood and cheered with her and the entire stands when Sosa sprinted all the way to the outfield wall at the start of the game. He drank the marginally cold Old Style beer without flinching.

When a five-year-old two rows in front of them—hopped up on cotton candy, cola and hot dogs—threw up in his mom’s lap from overexcitement, Spencer didn’t even blink. He just casually mentioned that in the box seats there were both waiters and no small children unless one invited them.

She didn’t even take her eyes from the field as the opposing team’s pitcher wound up and let it rip. A second later, she was on her feet with the rest of the crowd, shouting.

“You call that a strike? Why don’t you call your optometrist?”

She looked down at the sound of laughter. The beginnings of a slight sunburn reddened Spencer’s cheeks. He was sweating a little in the direct sunlight and smiling up at her. For a moment, the world spun and she braced herself with a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay?” She saw his concern and forced a smile, nodding, and blamed it on the odd feeling she’d had all afternoon. As much as he fit in her world and as much as she’d enjoyed his on the night of the symphony, she was still caught off guard sometimes by how different they were. It was as if seeing double and being unable to determine which vision was the true one.

His hand under her elbow eased her down. “A shot of whiskey at one in the afternoon can have that effect.”

She swallowed at the thought and shrugged it off. “I know.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Even at nineteen I wasn’t crazy enough to streak around the block
sober.
”

The frozen lemonade at the vendor’s stand suddenly seemed more appealing than beer, though, and she didn’t object when he followed her lead.

After the game, they walked over to the pub where her brother tended bar, far enough from the park to avoid the postgame crowds. Calling for pints of water to battle their sun-beaten dehydration, they snagged seats at the far end of the bar, under the television where the sportscasters played out their game analysis on mute. Addy and her brother settled into the comfortable tradition of the analysis of the loss. They explained to Spencer that you couldn’t consider yourself a true Cubs fan unless you toughed it out through twice as many lost games as won.

When he asked how many games he’d have to sit through before the Cubbies won one, they pelted him with balled-up napkins.

Cubs talk led to rehashing who’d been the better baseball player in their misspent youths, which led soon enough to sibling rivalry being played out on the seventy-five-cent pool table fronting the bar’s plate-glass windows.

After the wager reached best four out of seven, Spencer offered to settle the tie by playing each of them. He proceeded to run the table first on her brother, which made her cackle, and then on Addy herself, which made her scowl as she handed over the ten-buck forfeit. He just winked at her.

“You’re not the only one with a misspent youth.” When she gaped at him, he grinned and shrugged. “They don’t call law school study sessions ‘
bar
review’ for nothing.”

She begged off the rematch, pleading sunburn and general exhaustion, and kissed her brother goodbye. Outside the bar, she took a deep breath and pressed a hand to her stomach. Two hot dogs and the peanuts had obviously not been a good idea. She wondered if it would be impolite to burp.

“Sorry to interrupt your winning streak,” she apologized to Spencer, “but the smoke was getting to me.”

He hailed a passing cab. “I’ll trounce you anytime you like, sweetheart.” She felt him press a kiss on top of the baseball hat she’d bought for him but ended up wearing. “Let’s go home.”

At home, they collapsed on the sofa in the library and argued over who was going to get up and go to the kitchen for drinks of the caffeinated sort. After a few rounds, Spencer played what he considered to be the ultimate card.

“
I
drank Old Style.”

Addy thought for a moment.

“
I
bought it.”

“That, my dear, is not exactly something to brag about.” When she pitched one of the many aptly named throw pillows at his head, he fielded it with ease and tucked the pillow under her feet on the sofa before standing up, pressing a quick kiss on her mouth and heading to the kitchen. She could hear him from where she lay reclined in the early summer sun, a cool breeze carrying the scent of cut grass through the open window. He was on the phone, ordering a pizza for dinner. His dinner at least, since the thought of food still made her stomach do a slow backflip.

She called out to him and he carried the phone with him as he came back into the room.

“Will you skip the green peppers tonight, please?” she asked. At his curious glance, she explained. “My stomach’s still out of whack and the thought of that smell—” she grimaced “—yech. Sorry.”

When he sat down again next to her and pulled her feet onto his lap, unlacing her shoes and starting a slow, deep foot massage, she could have groaned out loud. She draped her head over the sofa arm and gave in to the urge.

“God, I like you so much.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m rubbing your feet. See how much you like me when I make you get up and answer the door when the pizza gets here.”