Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (5 page)

But, an engineer.

“Please don’t be offended if I tell you that that was not what I expected.” He decided that honesty would be best, and waited to see if she would spring out of her chair and attack him for it.

“You mean like I didn’t expect to find you living in my great-aunt’s house?” she asked with a real smile. She was warm. She was cozy. There wasn’t enough energy left in her body right now to get into a fight. Elwood strolled in the library door and flopped down in front of the fire. That’s how she felt, too.

“Yes, something like that.” He smiled at her, crinkling the corners of his ocean-blue eyes, and for the first time, she just smiled right back at him. The firelight was doing interesting things to his hair, dancing bronze and gold sparks off the ends. As their gazes held, she felt those same sparks take up dancing in her stomach.

“You’re going to explain that, right?” she asked at last, cutting through the building tension with her voice.

He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s only temporary while my condo is being renovated. I knew Adeline my whole life. My
family have been her family’s lawyers for almost a century, and when she heard I was going to move into a hotel, she invited me to stay here.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart. You can ask my mother.” The thought of meeting the society matron who’d raised him did not excite her. “I hate hotels.”

“Me, too,” she murmured and curled up a little more in her blanket. The warmth of the fire was so soothing on her face, the low crackling of the flames hypnotizing. “So tell me what’s in all those papers.”

“Certainly. You should know, first of all, that this last version of your great-aunt’s will was drawn up just last year. Since there are no other living relatives outside of your family, there should be no contesters as to the validity of the will. Assuming you fulfill the conditions of the bequest, there will be no…”

Spencer’s measured baritone was very calming. His tone of voice asserted that there were no problems in this world that reflection and clear thinking could not solve. She was so reassured, in fact, that she thought she’d just rest her eyes for a moment while he spoke. She could listen to his very reasonable description of the terms of the will while she relaxed just a little bit after what had been an extremely long, tense day.

She fell asleep as she was listening to the conditions of the bequest, her sleepy brain certain that everything seemed very reasonable indeed. She even nodded her approval.

The room was silent when she next had a conscious thought. She wondered why the fire wasn’t snapping and hissing. She considered opening her eyes to look at it.

Too much effort.

Someone was stroking her hair, she realized fuzzily. Static electricity had strands pulling away from the side of her face as the hand drew away. Gentle fingers returned to tuck the hair behind her ear.

Her eyes drifted open slowly. Spencer was crouched down
at her side, one arm draped along the chair back, fingers tangled in her hair. His other hand rested on her knee. She felt a physical
click
run through her system as his gaze locked with hers, bringing her closer to wakefulness.

“You know, you’re incredibly beautiful when you sleep.” His voice was soft and low. Maybe she was still asleep. Now he was smiling at her. “It helps that your mouth is shut.”

His shadow fell over her first as he leaned toward her and then captured her lower lip between his and sucked on it lightly. She opened her mouth in surprise and he immediately covered it with his own, his tongue smoothly curling around hers in a dizzying attack on her senses. She was electrically conscious of where his hand was tracing small circles on her knee.

“What—” Her voice was sleep-rough as she tried to speak between kisses.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured. She could feel the vibrations of his voice against her lips. “When you sleep.” His mouth pressed hers open again.

Someone was moaning softly. Addy was afraid it was her. As her body surged into awareness of this man who was kissing her, who she wasn’t even sure she liked but whose touch was turning her insides into a puddle of melted wax, her brain struggled to recall how she’d gotten into this situation.

His teeth nipped at her lower lip. He swallowed her sudden gasp. Her fingers were running themselves of their own will around his neck and dipping, touching him beneath the collar of his shirt.

She couldn’t think. Tried harder. His hand was skating up the outside of her jean-clad thigh. He had been talking, explaining something about the will. Fingers slid under the bottom of her borrowed sweatshirt and skimmed the bare skin at her waist. There was the house and the money. His hand kneaded firmly at her hip. Something about living here for six months. His mouth was fiercer on hers now, the pressure arcing her head back and pressing her breasts into his chest. There was more, though, she was sure of it.

She had it.

With a near shriek of rage, she tore her mouth from Spencer’s and shoved hard at his shoulders. Scrambled to get her numbed legs out from under her and clawed her way past him and out of the chair. Standing in the evening-dark room in her stocking feet in front of the embers of a banked fire, a blanket half draped over her shoulders, she only wanted the answer to one question.

Could she possibly have heard him correctly?

“Did you say that I have to be married?”

“O
w.”

Spencer looked up from his plate and across the corner of the long dining room table.

“Just pinching myself,” Addy said, sucking at the sore spot on the back of her hand. The silver fork and knife in her hands were heavy, another world from her stainless-steel utensils at home. “Thought I must have been dreaming to agree to stay here tonight.”

He tore his eyes away from the sight of her lips pulsing against her own skin. “Look outside. It’s like the blizzard of ’76 all over again.” He pointed to the velvet-draped windows. She didn’t turn to look at the swirling clouds of white made only more opaque by the light shining out of the room into the night. “You can’t drive in that, even if we could manage to dig out your truck.”

She glared at him. They’d already gone a few rounds about the fact that he’d let her sleep for three hours in front of the fire. He’d found it difficult to defend his decision since he
wasn’t at all sure why he’d done such a thing. Being attracted to this prickly, sarcastic, hotheaded witch was one thing, but making sure she’d be stranded for the night with him was such a ridiculous strategy that he was startled to have given in to it.

He’d watched her struggle to pay attention to his words as the first wavelets of sleep began washing over her, then seen her head nod in approval of what he was saying even as he knew she was miles away in dreamland. And at first, he’d just meant to let her nap for a few minutes.

He had watched her sleep. Ruddy shadows and warm gold highlights had flickered over her face in the dancing light of the fire. Without her usual anger and defensiveness animating it, her face had looked like that of a teenager, the curves of her lips parted just enough for breath. Violet watercolor smudges had tinted the delicate skin around her eyes. She’d tucked her hands beneath her cheek, and the small, birdlike bones of her wrists had highlighted her aura of fragility.

He nearly snorted out loud, catching himself in the middle of this ridiculous reverie. Addy Tyler was about as fragile as a lead pipe, and she bent as much as one, too. It had been a battle every step of the way to get her to set foot in this house. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him that she understand what she was giving up with her obstinate refusal to have anything to do with her great-aunt’s estate. He only knew that he’d planned to drag her to the house screaming for the police all the way if necessary.

The last thing he’d expected was to see this stubborn, un-sympathetic woman brought to the edge of tears by an old family portrait, an emotion that he knew surprised her as much as it did him.

He was beginning to wonder if that momentary glimpse of softness would turn out to be his downfall.

Of course, since at the moment she was only speaking to him when absolutely necessary, there didn’t look to be much chance of the two of them falling anywhere together.

On the upside, at least she wasn’t yelling at him anymore. It was almost peaceful right now, sitting at the same table and sharing a meal.

“This is very—” he began.

Silverware clattered as Addy threw her knife and fork onto her plate and shoved her unfinished meal away, an expression of disgust twisting her face.

Perhaps he’d spoken too soon.

“Was she insane?” she demanded. “I have a right to know whether there’s a history of mental derangement in my family. It might affect my decision to have children someday.” She threw herself back in her chair and crossed her arms on her chest. “Don’t give me that look. I’m being about as rational as good old Great-Aunt Adeline was in her will.”

He didn’t think this was the right time to mention that Adeline had considered Susannah’s branch of the family tree to be the unstable one. He’d settle for a smaller measure of the truth. “Your great-aunt was in her right mind until the day she died.”

“Says you,” she said, knowing she was displaying the maturity level of a two-year-old. She blamed her crankiness on leftover sexual tension. Waking up to what had at first seemed a continuation of a sensual daydream, she’d been overwhelmed by the slow pulse of sensation throughout her body. Her memory of Spencer’s description of the will’s terms, and her anger, were life preservers she’d clung to with the desperate grasp of a person swept overboard.

She was hanging on still.

“She was nuts.”

“Maybe she was just trying to make sure that you were, um…” Spencer paused for a moment. Was he hesitating? “That you were taken care of.”

Of all the insulting… “I don’t need a husband to take care of me.” She tried to keep her tone below that of a shout as she jerked out of her chair and stood next to the table. She didn’t think she’d been successful. “I take care of myself just fine, thank you. Where’s the kitchen?”

“All the way at the back of the house.”

She collected her tableware and squelched the thought that she was being rude beyond belief, leaving her host sitting at the table, finishing the meal that he had made for the two of them. Hey, at least she was clearing her own dishes.

At the end of the long hall, she found the kitchen, an enormous cavern of a room that ran most of the width of the back of the house. The faint odors—tomato and spicy sausage—of the Italian dinner Spencer had put together while she’d slept still lingered in the air. The room seemed to have been built before the advent of dishwashers, so she dumped her plate in the sink, determined to turn her back on the washing up and use some of her involuntary jail time here to explore the house.

She got as far as the door to the hall.

“A slave to my upbringing,” she muttered two minutes later, up to her elbows in soapsuds and dirty dishes. The freedom to wander the house wasn’t worth listening to her mother’s voice in the back of her head, haranguing her for leaving the cook to do the cleaning. She’d tossed the pots and pans from the stove into the sink for good measure. No sense doing a half-assed job.

The house was old enough to give her fair warning when Spencer followed her into the kitchen minutes later, floorboards creaking from under the rug in the hall. His footsteps in the kitchen were silent. They’d both ditched their wet, snow-caked shoes soon after entering the house.

But she didn’t need to hear him to know when he stood behind her, too close. She could see his reflection in the window above the sink, but more, she felt the warmth of him radiating into her. Imagined his breath stirring her hair. Pictured it until she could
feel
the strands stirring and then had a hard time keeping her wet hands from grabbing the back of her neck to still the shivers she felt there.

“Did you want something, Reed?” She rapped the question out like a drill sergeant, trying to shatter her awareness of him standing behind her, breathing.

His arm sneaked into the corner of her vision as he reached
past her to put his plate on the counter to the side of the sink. As she opened her mouth to snarl at him again, she felt a light weight drop onto her shoulder. A dish towel. At the same moment, Spencer snaked his hands down the length of her arms until his fingers tangled with hers in the hot water. He tugged her hands up.

“I’ll finish up here.” His voice was normal, denying the intimacy of their position. She was caged between his arms, between the solid strength of his body pressed against her back and the edge of the counter against her hips. She shivered and knew he felt it.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Those who cook don’t clean.”

“Addy.” He let go, dragged the towel off her shoulder and wrapped it around her hands, then turned her to face him. He ducked down a little to capture her downturned eyes with his own. She stopped avoiding them. “I’m sorry you’re stuck here for the night. But since you are, you’re my guest, and guests don’t scrub pots.”

He smiled at her and her stomach tripped and fell down an elevator shaft. Did his eyes have to be so damn blue?

“Besides—” he gave her a little push toward the door to the hall “—I know you’re dying to take a look around.”

She stuttered to a halt and turned back to him, hands still cocooned in the towel. “I like it better when you’re not being so nice to me.”

He covered the smile well. “I know.”

She threw the towel at his head.

Catching the cloth one-handed, he turned to the sink with sublime indifference to her scowl. He waggled fingers in the air over his shoulder.

“Run along. I’ll find you when I’m done here.”

She stuck her tongue out at his back.

“That’s very mature.”

Damn. She’d forgotten that he could see her in the window’s reflection. Time to get out before she made even more of an ass out of herself.

She ignored the central staircase for the time being, its two sets of stairs crossing like department-store escalators in the middle, one coming from the front and one from the back of the house. There were still more rooms on the ground floor that she’d yet to venture into.

The house faced west and was split in half by the massive staircase, with rooms opening to the north and the south off the side halls that ran the length of the building. The library butted up against the kitchen, at the rear of the north side of the house, with the tiny tea closet behind the next door as she walked slowly toward the front of the house. Another bathroom came next, this one done in shades of cream and palest gold.

The last room, at the very front of the house, was long enough that two sets of intricately carved wooden doors that slid into recesses in the walls opened onto it from the hall. She entered at the near set.

She felt as if she’d stepped into a Jane Austen novel.

It was a music room. Or at least that was what she supposed you would call it. Mossy green walls imposed an atmosphere of meditative calm, with framed copies of what looked like original music scores scattered here and there. At the front of the room, where light from the windows would fall upon it as the sun set, was a massive ebony grand piano. A harp, gilded and taller than she was, stood in the middle of the room near a clustered arrangement of chairs and sofas. Balancing the room at the near end was another piano, this one smaller and oddly constructed.

A small, framed black-and-white photograph just inside the door caught her eye. The image was of a young woman in a long, dark skirt and a pale blouse, cradling a violin in her arms. She wondered if the violin was the same as the one she’d seen in the hall earlier.

Then she wondered if the woman in the photograph was her great-aunt.

“My grandfather saw her play once.” Spencer spoke from
the doorway. Not startled because she’d somehow known the moment he entered the room, Addy stared at the photo.

“Great-Aunt Adeline?” It felt embarrassing to admit that she didn’t recognize her. She tried willing some sort of recognition beyond that of similar bone structure. If this woman
was
a part of her family, shouldn’t she feel more of a connection with her image?

“Yes, with the CSO. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” At least Spencer didn’t seem to think it too odd, her not knowing what her own great-aunt looked like.

“I’m not an idiot, you know. I know what the CSO is.” Though, truth be told, she would probably have had to think about it for a bit. Highbrow culture wasn’t exactly her thing.

“He said she was absolutely luminous. That he couldn’t take his eyes off her, onstage.”

“So why did she quit playing?” She turned away from the photo and leaned against the wall, watching him. He’d unrolled his sleeves but had not rebuttoned the cuffs.

Spencer shrugged. “I don’t know. Grandfather said that years later, he and his wife would invite her to join them in their box at the symphony and that she always turned them down. Every time. As far as he knew, after she stopped playing, she never attended another performance in her life.”

“Strange.”

“Sad.”

They stood in companionable silence for a bit. For no good reason, Addy found herself sighing a little, so she straightened and looked around the room again. Spencer blinked and seemed to shake off an invisible net of distraction. They walked together to the piano.

“Do you play?” she asked, tilting her head to look at him. She could see the curve of his cheek rise as he smiled.

“Ten years of lessons as a kid,” he said and laughed. “You would think that I could.”

“Twins, separated at birth,” she intoned with an emcee’s exaggerated voice. She ran her palm along the sleek wood of
the propped piano lid. Catching his confused look, she continued, “I don’t think I made it through ten years, but it was a lot. And all I can play today is the first page of the theme to
The Pink Panther.
”

“Isn’t that just the same four chords over and over again? Da-dunh, da-dah. Da-dunh, da-dah. And so on?” he teased from the opposite side of the baby grand.

“Hey, put up or shut up,” she said, laughing. “What can you play?”

“Aside from ‘Chopsticks’?” He slid onto the piano bench, stared at the keyboard for a moment and then started playing a ragtime melody with one hand, fumbling occasionally for a note. Thirty seconds later, he stopped and she applauded the effort with enthusiasm. He scooted off the end of the bench near her, took a quick bow and grinned. “‘The Entertainer,’ Scott Joplin. First page, right hand only.”

“Congratulations. You’ve got me beat.” She waved a hand at the rest of the room. “Got any other masterpieces in you?”

He shook his head. “Are you kidding? The harp is for girls—mind you, this is how I thought at ten years old—and only old people listen to the harpsichord.” She guessed that was the odd-looking piano at the other end, glad she hadn’t embarrassed herself by not knowing what it was. “The piano wasn’t the trumpet or the sax, but it was still vaguely cool.”

“My dad was a sax player,” she said. She felt the words settle like a blanket over the room, muffling the brief burst of good humor between the two of them. She regretted it, but couldn’t resist the urge to talk about her dad in this house. This house, into which he’d never once been welcomed. She stared at her hands. Her fingers had twisted themselves awkwardly together. She forced them to separate and hang empty at her sides. “I heard him play in a club when I was six.” The memory flooded her, as immediate as ever, and she tilted her head back, blinking to clear her eyes. “He was amazing. His music was like honey on fire. Lick-your-fingers sweet and white-hot at the same time.”