Uncommon Pleasure (8 page)

Realized he didn’t need one. Hell-raisers never did. They just walked, but to walk he needed his shirt.

When he came back Lauren had one wrist cuff off and was working on the other. The pink flush on her throat was still visible, but fading quickly, and damn, she was strong. The muscles of her abdomen were defined, like the sexy cover of an exercise magazine. He could watch her all night long.

“Takes all the fun out of it if you can get free on your own,” he said, bracing one shoulder against the doorframe.

She flicked him a look through the tangled fall of her hair, her
eyes stormy sea gray under languid satisfaction. “You want to go there? Because that involves quite a bit of trust,” she said.

Between the implication that this was about anything other than casual sex and his gut response to anything less than complete trust from her, he went rigid for a second. Fortunately, she was fumbling with the stubborn buckle, so she didn’t see his involuntary reaction. He had to act like this didn’t matter, so he went to her, deftly unfastened the buckle and tugged the loosened leather over her hand. She looked up at him. Still naked, she stood with her back to the windows, and shadows and her hair hid her face. The scent of sex and sweat clung to her tanned skin.

Sometimes the release didn’t satisfy the need. Sometimes even the hottest sex only tempered the ache rather than cured it. Each time worked her further under his skin instead of getting her out of his system, and that drove careless words from his mouth. Made it sound like none of this touched him, like he wasn’t dreaming about her, watching for her. “Two more weeks, Lauren. We can go wherever you want to go. You want more, you know where to find me.”

“I do,” she said lightly.

For a split second he thought she meant
more, right now
, maybe
always and forever
, and he had to remind himself he was no longer in the
always and forever
business. Just the
live in the moment
business.

“On the sixth bench from the door,” she continued. “I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

He blinked, shocked by getting out-hell-raisered by a geologist, but that was what he wanted, a woman who didn’t want anything, didn’t need him, felt nothing, like he did. Being alone was better than letting someone into the mess inside him.

Right?

Right.

Tumultuous emotion roiled inside him. He snagged his shirt from the floor and tugged it on. “See you around, Lauren.”

Lauren laced up her running shoes with quick jerks, scrambled to
her feet, grabbed a plastic bag full of diced hot dog, and hauled the door open. To her utter shock Ty’s truck stood in the driveway. He was halfway around the hood, his keys in his hand, when she stepped onto the front porch.

“Ty,” she said. “Did you text?” When he paused, clearly shifting gears, she looked at his feet. He wore jeans, a polo, good boots with thick lug soles. Good for walking, and she bet he’d know how to turn a neighborhood upside down. “Never mind. Gretchen ran away again. Help me look for her? Please?”

It was his turn to blink. “Again?”

“If I leave her loose in the backyard she digs her way under the fence. If I attach her collar to her chain, she sits on the deck and ignores me, when she’s not looking at me with her big, sad brown eyes. I try to watch her, but if I’m weeding in the garden, sometimes I get lost in what I’m doing, and she gets away.”

He looked like he was considering wisecracks about her useless
little escape artist dog, but all he said was, “It’s a nice night for a walk.”

She stood at the end of her driveway and looked around as if seeing the scenery for the first time. It was a beautiful clear fall night, the breeze not cold or strong enough to chill her bare arms. Crickets chirped, and leaves rustled in the trees. At the back of her mind she knew this wasn’t why he’d come to see her, but concern for Gretchen trumped everything else.

“Getting dark,” he said, and opened the toolbox on his truck and pulled out a big, heavy flashlight.

“I searched the western end of the neighborhood already. Gretchen,” she called as she set off down the sidewalk. “Gretchen, come!”

“Does that work?” Ty asked, clearly amused. “Or is it the hot dogs that get her back?”

“She follows commands when she feels like it, and I’m not above bribery. I need to manage her weight, but hot dogs work better than carrots. I tried those the last time she got out of the yard, and got nothing. Mrs. Lacross two streets over found her under her bush. I think it was a hydrangea. Or was it forsythia? I can’t remember. Anyway, she got her out from under the bush with two hot dogs. I know a better tactic when I see one, so I adapted. I just have to find her and coax her out.”

“And this happens how frequently?”

“She’s following her instincts,” she said defensively. “Dachshunds were bred in Germany in the 1600s to go after small game—rabbits, foxes, rats—and they’d follow animals into burrows and then fight them to the death, including badgers.
Dachs
is German for
badger
.”

“No kidding,” he said.

She smiled at the new respect in his voice. Trust a man to find a fight to the death in an enclosed space admirable. “No kidding,”
she said. “They’ve been turned into lapdogs, but their instinct is to dig and roam. She’s just being who she is. I can’t blame her for that.”

“You go to a lot of work for one little dog.”

They stood by Mr. Minnillo’s corner lot. Rosebushes lined the terraced slate slabs leading to his front door, and peonies bowed along the picket fence enclosing the yard. She’d found Gretchen under the peonies a few weeks ago, but not tonight. Lauren let the white, scented blooms droop, straightened, and looked at him. “Did you have pets growing up?”

“Not to speak of,” he said. “We had farm dogs and barn cats. But there was always a dog to take fishing or a litter of kittens to tempt a girl into the hayloft.”

His voice got lower, slower, the drawl more pronounced when he had that one thing on his mind, and despite her worry, the image of a younger Ty without the dark shadows in his eyes, exploring the edges of his sexuality in a hayloft, sent dusty, summer-hot lust flickering through her. She swallowed, looked away from the answering heat in his heavy-lidded eyes. “We didn’t have pets,” she said, and the memory firmed her voice. “Not even cats. When you change posts every twelve to eighteen months and the health regulations vary from country to country, keeping anything that lived longer than a hamster wasn’t going to fly. I’ve wanted a dog my whole life. Gretchen isn’t perfect, but she’s
mine
.”

He looked around. “I figured you for a condo downtown in one of those loft buildings, not in an old, established neighborhood,” he said. “No kids on bikes, just old folks on porches. You’re probably the only single woman around. Why did you buy here?”

“It’s fifteen minutes from work, and because it’s an old, established neighborhood,” she said. “Look around.” He scanned the neighborhood over her head, but she got the feeling he’d already taken its measure. “What do you see?”

“I see the opposite of base housing,” he said.

She shifted the bag of hot dogs to her other hand. “Exactly,” she said simply. “This is what people do when they put down roots. They get a house and a dog. Many of these houses have been owned by the same people for forty years. They raised their children here. Weekends and summer vacations the street is full of grandkids on bikes, high on sugar cookies and getting spoiled rotten. They know how to do things I never learned to do because we moved all the time. Mrs. Leddershin can name all the trees and flowers and bushes and flowering shrubs in all the yards in Galveston. We didn’t even grow plants in flower boxes on the bases. When Dad earned offbase housing, Mom flatly refused to deal with the yard, so Dad got one of his aides to mow for us. Problem solved.”

“What did your mother do?”

“Raised us, then eventually got a PhD in seventeenth-century English literature. We were in Virginia long enough for her to go ABD—all but dissertation—then write her dissertation from wherever Dad was stationed. She teaches classes online now. What did your mother do?”

“Cotton farmer’s wife,” he said laconically.

“So she did everything,” Lauren said. At his raised eyebrow she said, “My grandmothers on both sides were farmers’ wives. Kansas. They remembered growing up during the Depression. You couldn’t save enough money or have enough food. They both had big freezers in their basements, and they could talk about meals someone made decades ago. And when they weren’t cooking or cleaning or sewing they were helping in the fields. Dad joined the Army because his choices were farm or go into the Army. Mom jokes that she married Dad because he didn’t want to farm and swore she’d never have to grow or can or pickle or preserve anything. She never has.”

“But now you do.”

“We moved ten times in the twelve years I was in school. I wanted roots. I saw my run-down fixer-upper among all these
gorgeous yards, and I was sold. After I moved in I knocked on doors, pleaded total ignorance and begged for help, and now I can grow tomatoes and peppers and roses.”

Professor Stekel looked up from his front porch swing. “I haven’t seen her, Ms. Kincaid,” he called.

“Thank you, Professor,” she called over Ty’s amused huff. “Retired oceanographer. He trains carrier pigeons now.”

“And now you have roots,” he said, glancing back at the professor, then around the neighborhood again. She remembered the single duffel in his hotel room, the basic toiletries in the bathroom. He could up and disappear from the hotel room, from Galveston, possibly from the face of the earth, in under a minute.

“I do,” she said. “Is all your family in Georgia?”

“My mom died a couple of years ago. My dad’s still there. My sisters, their husbands and children are still there, growing cotton. The girls were smart, though. They got jobs with benefits.” He pulled back low-hanging honeysuckle draped over a white picket fence and peered behind it. “You think she’ll be in the bushes?”

“That’s where I’ve found her every time,” she said. “Why didn’t you go home after you left the Corps?”

“I like the ocean,” he said without inflection, then shone the flashlight toward the trellis at the garage end of the Gileses’ driveway. The powerful beam picked up a rolling trash can, a recycling bin, and three bags of yard waste.

Lauren groaned and put the back of her hand to her forehead. “I’ve found her in the bushes every time except the one time she got into the Lucases’ garbage. Tomorrow’s garbage day.”

He followed her to the end of the block, to a house with great bone structure, peeling paint, and a yard bordering on overgrown. “The Lucases are in their eighties, and neither one of them likes the stairs. They just drop the garbage over the porch railing and the
guy who runs the route walks back to get it. Every couple of weeks she makes pork chops or leg of lamb, and the bones go in the…”

They rounded the corner, Ty’s flashlight held cop-style, clasped in his fist at shoulder height, illuminating coffee grounds, tea bags, half-eaten sandwiches, tissues, and clumps of rice smeared with a mixture of mold and cream of mushroom soup strewn in a semicircle at the end of the driveway. A trail of gristle and grease led under the overgrown shrubbery lining the driveway.

“Trash,” Lauren finished. “Oh, Gretchen.”

They hunkered down by a quivering, rustling bush, Ty using his big body to block the path to the street while Lauren parted the branches. When the beam from the flashlight hit Gretchen she shrank back against the fencing, jaws clamped around a gnawed pork chop. Her tail whipped between her legs. She didn’t release the pork chop, but she didn’t growl, either. The stench of rotting meat and barbecue sauce made Lauren pull her T-shirt up over her nose.

“What am I going to do with you?” she said into the cotton.

“Careful when you grab her,” Ty said as she moved to do just that. “She may be pretty protective of that bone.”

Lauren gripped Gretchen’s rib cage just behind her forelegs and gently tugged her out onto the driveway. Still crouching by Gretchen she said, “Drop it.”

Gretchen released the bone and looked up at her so apologetically Lauren could do nothing but sigh.

“Or maybe not,” Ty said.

She picked her up, supporting both hind and forelegs, and held her close. “Holy cats, you stink,” she said, keeping her voice singsong and soothing, then turned to Ty. “I need to tell Mrs. Lucas what happened. Would you—”

Before she could finish the sentence Ty shifted the flashlight beam to illuminate the path into the backyard and the stairs to the porch.
The steps shifted under Lauren’s weight. With a muffled curse he braced himself against the short edge along the driveway, and the wooden structure stabilized.

“No wonder they don’t like the stairs,” she said as she knocked on the door, but Ty was already examining the posts.

The porch light flicked on and Mrs. Lucas’s lined, cheerful face appeared in the door. “Oh dear,” she said when she took in Gretchen, and the state of Lauren’s T-shirt.

“Mrs. Lucas, I’m so sorry,” Lauren said. “I need to take her home, but I’ll come back later and clean up the mess she made.”

Ty’s voice came from beside and below her. “Ma’am, do you have a shovel in your shed?”

“Mrs. Lucas, meet Ty Hendricks,” Lauren said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“How kind of you, young man. I believe we do,” Mrs. Lucas said.

“You don’t have to do that. I can do it,” Lauren called over her shoulder.

“Stay there or you’ll send that porch crashing to the ground,” was all he said. The deck shifted back to the left, then the flashlight beam swerved to the stepping-stones set between the porch and the shed. The door creaked open, and a moment later Ty emerged pulling a plastic trash can on wheels. A shovel handle and several lengths of two-by-four stuck up above the edge of the trash can. Mrs. Lucas produced a clean bag. Lauren held Gretchen with one arm and held open the other side of the bag with the other hand, and in moments the trash was back in a bag. Ty pushed the can against the porch, then wedged the two-by-fours into the soft earth next to the rotting supports.