Starstruck (16 page)

“But you won’t have a babysitter, either,” he pointed out.

“I’ll hire one.”

“Who?”

“I’d rather have Joe, Mom,” Stephen interrupted, looking up from his book to add his unfortunate opinion.

I wouldn’t,
Liv thought, feeling trapped. But she didn’t see any other way out of it. Margie wouldn’t take them. She couldn’t find anyone else on short notice. She stalled, studying the wallpaper, the pine needles scratching on the window screen, the assorted blues in the hand-braided rug underfoot. “All right,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t know what else to do.” Probably, she thought, Joe would get sick of his magnanimous gesture within two or three days, anyway. Surely
he couldn’t keep up this concern
ed-father role for more than a week And then maybe she could just take a few days off work. Marv wouldn’t mind a week, but stretch it into two and he would flip.

“I knew you’d see sense,” Joe said, chucking her under the chin. “Now, off with you. The chef gets mad when he has to eat cold pork chops.”

Liv went, her mind reeling. She had visions of running into Frances on her way home. “What are you up to?” Frances would ask. “Moving in with Joe Harrington,” Liv would reply. It was good that Frances didn’t have a heart condition.

By the time Liv returned, she had the whole week
mapped out in her head. “The only way it will work,” she told Joe with the brisk efficiency of a first-grade teacher, “is if we have ground rules.”

Joe looked at her from over the top of his newspaper, a grin twitching at the co
rn
er of his mouth. “Oh, yes?” he inquired politely.

“Yes. Now the way I see it, we can put Theo and Stephen in the blue bedroom because they’re both sick. Jennifer and I can use the bedroom at the back, and Ben can sleep on the couch. He’s already had the chicken pox, anyway. We’ll use the blue bathroom and leave the gold one off the master bedroom for you. I’ll cook breakfast and dinner and I can make the kids sandwiches and leave them for lunch. I went to the store and got plenty of food—Ben’s putting it away now. Then, as soon as I come back at night, I’ll be sure they stay out of your way. We’ll go into the den or the bedrooms and play games or something and—”

“You missed your calling.”

Liv stopped midsentence and stared at him. “What?”

“I said, ‘You missed your calling.’ You’d have made a terrific traffic controller—or prison warden.” Joe eased himself out of the chair and crossed the room to where she was standing by the wind
ow. Liv
backed instinctively toward the kitchen until she ran into a bookcase and was trapped. “Calm down,” he said softly.

“But
—
” She was trembling at his nearness.

“Calm down.” His hypnotic green eyes measured her from head to toe. “You are as uptight as a stretched-out rubber band. One more ground rule and you’re going to snap.” His hand reached up and snaked behind her neck, closing on her nape and massaging gently. “That’s better,” he murmured as though he felt her muscles relaxing—as indeed they were relaxing, against her better judgment. He led her, unprotesting, to the sofa and pushed her down gently but firmly. She felt a momentary frisson of panic as
sh
e recalled the first time they were on this couch together.

“Cut that out,” Joe said firmly. “I’m not going to attack you. I haven’t attacked you yet, have I?”

“No,” she allowed shakily.
But it doesn’t me
an
you won
’t,
she thought,
or that I might not attack you.

“Was that a note of disappointment I heard?” His voice was teasing, but she thought she detected a note of hope in it.

“No!”

“Rats.” He sat down next to her, the couch sinking under his weight, and turned her shoulders away from him, continuing to massage them with his large, strong hands, working the tensions out of her. “Now,” he said lazily, his voice a rough whisper almost caressing her ear, “listen to my version of the ground rules. Your sleeping arrangements are fine—I'm not expecting you to share my bed. You can cook breakfast if you want, because I’ll probably never get up early enough to eat it anyway. Lunch, however, is my job, and so is dinner. Hush,” he commanded as she started to protest. “I make terrific peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

“I heard,” she murmured wondering how he could talk about peanut butter at a time like this. His breath was warm on her shoulders. She could feel it through the thin shirt she wore as it raised goose bumps on the back of her neck.

“Right. And I want to cook dinner. When I’m doing a movie I never have time. Now I do, and I have people to do it for. So the job is mine.”

“If you insist.” His hands were reducing her to putty. She should get up and move away, but it felt so good and she’d had a long, hard day.

“I insist I also insist that you stop worrying that you and the kids are an unwelcome burden and stop trying to hide away in a closet somewhere. That’s ridiculous. If you persist I will have to take measures to see that you behave.” His thumbs were massaging the sensitive cord at the back of her neck, and she felt as though she would melt against him in another second.

“Whatever you say,” she mumbled, trying and only just succeeding to remain upright.

Joe chuckled, his thumbs working their way down the column of her spine, teasing each ridge as they went. “I’ve never seen you so malleable and amenable.”

“You’re hypnotizing me,” Liv complained. If he could reduce her to jelly with no more than a back rub, what could he do if his hands had her whole body as a playground? The thought hit her like a bolt
of lightning and she jumped up.

“What’s wrong?” Joe was staring at her, astonished, as she scurried across the room and took refuge behind an overstuffed chair.

“We need a rule about that, too,” she said, her voice so breathless that she was humiliated. She cleared her throat.

“About what?”

“About
…
about your touching me,” she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, feeling like a first-rate fool.

“What?” His face was all innocence, but for the twinkle in his eyes. “No back rubs?” He lifted an eyebrow in amusement.

“Something like that.” She groped about for an explanation that wouldn’t sound too inane. “When I was in high school, our drama teacher had a rule he used to call the one-foot rule.”

Joe’s mouth quirked. “Which was?” he prompted.

“Well, it was dark backstage, and people kept, um,
bumping into one another
and, um, well, you know—
”
She knew her face was the color of Theo’s toy fire engine. “So he had this rule that said that everybody had to stay a foot apart.”

Joe’s grin was all over his face. “Are you making this up?”

“Of course not! I wouldn’t be capable of making it up, it was too stupid.”

“And yet you’re suggesting the same thing now,” he reminded her softly, still grinning.

“Well—
” Liv shoved a nervous hand through her
blond hair, wishing she had pinned it up again when she’d changed into more casual clothes. It made her feel more businesslike that way, more remote, more able to resist the likes of Joe Harrington. “I still think we need something,” she maintained.

“A treaty? With boundaries?” Joe asked, cocking his head so one dark strand of hair fell across his forehead.

“Yes.”

“To keep me in my place?” His eyes bored into hers.

“Yes,” she said, and then, because she wanted to be honest with him, she added, “And to keep me in mine.”

Joe’s eyes widened momentarily. “You can touch me all you want,” he said magnanimously. “I don’t mind if we have an affair.”

“But I do,” Liv replied, her fingers clenching in the nubby tweed fabric of the chair. “I couldn’t handle it.”

Joe didn’t say anything for a moment. He chewed on his thumbnail, considering, and then scratched his nose. Liv watched him warily, thinking how unutterably stupid she had been to come here in the first place. How could she ever think that she could live in a platonic relationship with Joe Harrington in the same house for more than a week? How could she have imagined that he would even go along with that?

“All right,” he said slowly now, nodding his head.

“All right what?” she asked, wanting to get it straight, not willing to believe that he was agreeing.

“All right, I won’t seduce you. I won’t touch you. I won’t
do
anything,” he said roughly, jamming his hands in his pockets and dipping his head so that he looked for all the world, Liv thought, like a boy whose mother had just slapped his hands away from the cookie jar.

“Thank you,” she said, wondering if she was losing her mind. She was certainly losing her sense of propriety—and, she thought ruefully, her sense of danger. Otherwise she’d be backing out the door this minute,
saying, thanks, but no thanks, no matter what he promised. “I’m sure we can work it out,” she said, more to convince herself. “After all, we are adults.”

“That,” Joe told her scathingly, “is the whole problem.” And he turned and walked out of the room without looking back. It was Liv who rescued the pork chops burning in the kitchen.

I
t might be a problem, Liv thought, but it definitely had its compensations. For one thing, it was glorious to have another adult in the house full-time. Life was so much smoother when there was someone else besides herself to say “Time to brush your teeth” or “Pick up your tennis shoes before you go upstairs.” She smiled thoughtfully as she curled into the comer of the couch and remembered hearing Joe herd the kids upstairs to bed. He had read Jennifer a story while Liv finished doing the dishes, and had poked his hea
d
into the boys’ room while she was saying good night to tell her, “I’m going to take a shower now.”

It was as though they were a family, she mused, and then corrected herself. They were living together, for convenience’s sake, for a week. He was a famous Ho
llywood star, she was a divorcé
e with five kids. He was doing her an enormous favor and she was giving him nothing in return Absolutely nothing, she thought, remembering his reluctant agreement to what he had referred to all evening as The Chicken Pox Treaty.

Well, at least he had been a good sport
.
Given the press coverage of his libido she would hardly have suspected it. She sighed and opened the book she had taken from a shelf of the late architect’s library. It was a novel written about two years ago that, like almost everything else written since she had become a full-time single parent, she had never read. But it was immediately absorbing, and she sat bathed in the pool of light from the table lamp, reading and listening to some lilting, haunting music by Debussy until she heard Joe’s footsteps on
the stairs, and she looked up to see him come into the room.

He was wearing clean jeans and a pale blue open-necked sport shirt, buttoned only halfway up his chest, affording her a glimpse of a tanned, hair-roughened chest. Her heartbeat quickened, and she swung her feet off the couch planting them firmly on the floor. “How was your shower?” she asked, hoping for a noncontroversial topic.

“Cold.”

He gave her an ironic grin that accelerated the thuds inside her chest even further, and she buried her nose in her book, intent on ignoring him. Joe must have had similar intentions, for he didn’t comment further, just padded silently on bare feet over to the bookcases built into the wall next to the fireplace and poked through them, eventually extracting a book, which he took to the chair farthest from her and sat down.

Liv’s eyes flickered once or twice to glance at him in the warm, golden lamplight, but he was motionless in his chair, scowling at the book in his lap. Gradually, then, she relaxed, burrowing deeper into the co
rn
er of the couch, tucking her feet back under her and laying her head against her arm as it rested along the back of the sofa. The haunting softness of Debussy’s music wove a spell around her, and she closed her eyes, reaching over to shut off the reading lamp beside her. Gentle breezes blew through the open windows, and cicadas hummed in the trees by the lake. Her body drifted on the sounds, mellowed by the music, the steady hum of the insects, and cushioned by the plush softness of the corduroy couch beneath her.

The sound of bare feet hitting the polished wooden floor with a thwack jolted her. She opened her eyes to see Joe striding across the room to the stereo, pausing only to flick on the bright overhead light before he jerked the needle off and yanked the Debussy record off the spindle. Liv stared open-mouthed as he bent down
and riffled through the records in the cabinet below, pulling out another album and slapping it on the turntable. Moments later the sounds of John Philip Sousa reverberated throughout the room.

“What the…
”

Joe spun around, hands on his hips, legs spread slightly, enough to tauten the material across his thighs. “Do you want this treaty to work or don’t you?” he growled.

“Of course!” Liv was astonished, looking into the full brunt of his glare.