Whispers at Midnight (29 page)

Caught red-handed, hammer in hand and nails in a pouch slung around her waist, Carly had thought fast. Last night Sandra had slept through Annie’s barking. Sandra had no idea that Carly was growing increasingly paranoid about the things that went bump in the night—especially the things that went bump in the night outside her bedroom window. Sandra was pursuing Antonio with the single-mindedness of a hunter after a twelve-point buck. Sandra was also the biggest coward on the planet.

If, for Sandra, it came down to a choice between true lust and chickenheartedness, Carly didn’t want to find out which would win. It was better to skirt the whole issue by keeping the fear factor from entering into Sandra’s calculations.

So she had replied to Sandra’s question about the hammer and nails by saying that she was just on her way up to fix the roof.

Which needed doing anyway, so she did it. Or at least, she got started.

“So what brings you up here?” she said to Hugo, on the theory that a little friendly conversation might help pass the time.

Hugo, unfortunately, did not seem to be in the mood to be scintillating company. He gave her a baleful stare, then went right back to his grooming as if it were the most important thing on earth.

But she knew her cat well. That was his way of saying that all was not catnip and tuna fish in his world.

“Okay, I know you have a problem with Annie,” she said, hammering another nail home and then dabbing it with the roof goop. “I know you wish you were back in our nice condominium with the nice central air and the nice view of the lake. I know it’s hot here and
you’re shedding and you’re probably picking up fleas from being outside and now we’ve got a dog. But maybe what you need to do is think of this whole thing as a growth experience.”

“Who on earth are you talking to?” The voice—Matt’s voice—coming at her seemingly out of nowhere almost made Carly, who was in the act of driving another nail, whop her thumb with the hammer. Snatching her hand out of harm’s way in the nick of time, she scowled and looked around to find Matt regarding her quizzically. He was standing on the narrow ladder she had propped against the side of the house to gain access to the roof. His head and shoulders were the only parts of him visible above the roofline.

“Hugo.” Now that she had ascertained where he was, Carly repositioned the nail he’d made her miss and this time hammered it home. Then she sank back on her haunches and looked at him again, her scowl firmly in place.

“Catch my burglar yet?” Hostility simmered in her voice.

“Working on it.”

“Great. I take it you’re not calling on official business, then. So what are you doing here?”

“I brought back your cooler. And your cap.”

He didn’t seem one bit discomposed by the obvious fact that she was not happy to see him. As Carly, on all fours now, deliberately ignored him in favor of clobbering another nail, he climbed onto the roof. He was wearing a gray tee shirt that said
ATLANTA BRAVES
across the front of it, scruffy jeans, and decrepit-looking sneakers. Dressed like a bum, with the faintest suggestion of stubble darkening his jaw and his black hair waving from the heat and his eyes narrowed against the glare bouncing off the roof, he still managed to look so handsome that her scowl deepened into a full-blown glower.

If they were being cast in some kind of Southern-fried version of
Beauty and the Beast,
she knew which one of them would get to play the Beast.

“You know, you seem to have real trouble following directions. I thought I told you that I never wanted to see you again.”

“Was that before or after you kicked me in the leg?” Having repaired the roof many times himself when he was a teenager, Matt
knew enough to respect its pitch. Moving carefully, he eased into the patch of shade where she was working, and spotted Hugo by the chimney. “Hey, Pussy.”

“After. And don’t call him that.”

“He likes it. He …” Matt’s voice trailed off as Hugo, after giving him a disdainful look, stood up and walked away with a haughty swish of his tail. “All right, so maybe he doesn’t like it.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like
you.
” Her memory of Mike and Antonio’s tale of Matt fetching Hugo down from the tree was still vivid.

“That’s always a possibility.”

Matt grinned and sat down on the spot—just about the only flat spot on that section of the roof—that Hugo had just vacated.

Carly drove another nail. “Okay, you brought back my cap and the cooler. You even climbed all the way up here to tell me you brought back my cap and cooler. I’m impressed. I’m grateful. So now how about you go away?”

Matt looked at her for a moment. His expression was impossible to read. At least, with her on her hands and knees looking at him over her shoulder while holding in place another nail she’d just positioned for driving, it was impossible to read.

“Did I ever happen to mention that you’ve got a really great ass?”

For just a second, Carly had to run that through her auditory sensors one more time to make sure that what she’d heard was what he’d actually said. It was. Outraged—and only then realizing that her position had afforded him an excellent view of her butt—she sank back on her haunches and glared at him.

“Okay, that’s it. Now leave.”

He grinned at her without budging. “I hear I need a prescription for Viagra.”

Carly remembered that Sandra had been in town.

“Maybe you shouldn’t listen to gossip,” she said, and, taking care not to present her backside to him this time, hammered in her nail.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell lies.”

“How do you know that came from me? I’m sure there are lots of women ready, willing and able to gossip about you and your need—or
not—for Viagra.” She broke off to bestow one more flattening whack on the head of the nail she’d just driven. Pretending it was Matt’s head helped her to give it a really satisfactory blow.

“Actually, not that many, not lately. In fact, none lately.”

“Yeah, right.” Carly threw him a look while she fished in her pouch for another nail. “What about …” she almost said Miss Queen of Everything, “Shelby?”

He shrugged, watching her. “We went out for a few months. We broke up in March.”

“Oh, sure. You broke up in March, but she’s over at your house early on a Sunday morning and your sisters seem to think she has a claim on you and she looked at me like she wanted to hit me over the head with an ax after … after—”

“She caught us kissing in my office?” His voice, filling in the blank for her when she couldn’t quite say the words, was silky smooth. Carly felt a rush of heat to her face as an explicit memory of that kiss took momentary possession of her senses. Mentally shoving it away, hoping that he would credit any deepening in her color to the heat, she positioned the nail and whacked it with an extra degree of savagery.

“Erin is engaged to Shelby’s brother. Since I’m the closest thing to a mother Erin has now and I’m not much help as far as flower arrangements and bridesmaids’ dresses and things like that are concerned, Shelby is helping to plan the wedding. That’s basically why she’s still hanging around.”

Carly positioned another nail. “And that explains why she looked at me like she wanted to kill me.”

Matt quirked an eyebrow at her. “Jealous, Curls?”

This time she did hit her thumb. “Ouch!” Dropping the hammer, she shook her injured hand.

“No, I’m not jealous,” she said, glaring at him. “I can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”

Matt grinned at her. On the verge of losing her temper, Carly decided that doing so right at that point might make it look like she was, indeed, jealous, which was the last thing she wanted him to
think, especially since it absolutely, positively, was not true. Taking a deep breath, she opted for dignity instead. Shaking her hand one more time, she decided that her thumb was going to live and picked up her hammer again.

“Look, I’m trying to fix a roof here. Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be?”

“Nope.” He reached over and plucked the hammer from her grasp. “I took the afternoon off.”

That would explain his clothes.

“So why don’t you go fishing or something?” The question was tart. “Or bird-watching? Or butterfly-chasing? Or whatever it is you do for fun nowadays.”

Sinking back on her haunches again, she surveyed him with disfavor. Grappling with Matt over her hammer would be undignified—and also useless. From many years’ experience in dealing with him, she knew the score: if he didn’t want to give it to her, she wasn’t going to get it back. Instead she reached for her roof goop. Taking the high road in the certainty that it would annoy the dickens out of him, she started slopping sticky red stuff over the nails she’d already put in place.

“Actually, I am out having fun; I’m on my motorcycle.”

Carly stopped slopping goop to look at him.

“You still have a motorcycle?” She hooted. “Let’s see, I seem to remember somebody saying,
The more things change…
”

“Hey, I’ve moved up in the world. This one’s a Harley.”

“Whoa. I’m impressed. A Harley. That
is
moving up. So why don’t you go ride your Harley and let me finish fixing the roof?”

“Besides bringing back your cap and your cooler, I stopped by to see if you wanted to go for a ride with me.”

That caught Carly by surprise. She let a couple of heartbeats pass before she replied.

“What?”

“I came by to see if you wanted to go for a motorcycle ride with me. Maybe we could grab supper somewhere.”

Carly slowly put the brush back into the can of goop. She looked
at him narrow-eyed. “Matt Converse, are you by any chance asking me out?”

His eyes met hers.

“Yeah, I think I am.”

For a moment Carly simply looked at him without replying. She had been so furious at him—was that just the night before? And so hurt and wary, too. And she still was; at least, part of her was. But another part of her, her heart, she guessed, kept whispering:
It’s Matt.
A whole lifetime’s worth of memories chased one another through her head. Wasn’t there some song that said something like,
how do you repay someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
For her, that someone was Matt.

“Wait a minute,” she said, aware that her heart was already starting to beat faster. “You’re not going to pull that kiss-and-run thing again, are you?”

His smile was slow, crooked, and devastatingly attractive. It took a long time to reach his eyes. By the time it did, Carly was breathless—annoyed at herself for being such a sucker for Matt’s smile, but definitely breathless anyway.

“That would imply that you think I’m planning to kiss you.”

“Well, are you?”

“Maybe.”

“Not good enough, Sheriff.” Carly reached for her brush, and slopped more goop on the roof without even caring if she actually got anywhere near the nails or not. Her heart was pounding so hard now that she could actually feel her blood thudding against her eardrums. Butterflies were taking wing in her stomach. Going out with Matt, getting involved with Matt, kissing Matt—God help her, the very thought of that made her dizzy—was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake. She knew it with every fiber of her being. But she wanted to make that mistake so badly that she already knew, too, that she was going to do it; she was going to leap right out of the frying pan into the fire. The worst thing about it was, she was doing it with her eyes wide open. If she got burned again, she had no one to blame this time but herself.

Carly sank back on her heels and glared ferociously at him. “I’m
warning you right now that if you pull that
friend
crap on me again, I’m going to cut off your balls with a butter knife.”

Matt looked at her for a moment, his eyes widening with slow-dawning delight. Then he chuckled. Reaching over, he grabbed her arm and hauled her toward him, goop-filled brush and all.

“You’re scaring me, Curls,” he said, and kissed her.

22

H
IS KISS WAS EVERY BIT
as mind-blowing as the last one had been. Carly closed her eyes and was lost. When he lifted her onto his lap, she wrapped her arms around his neck. His lips were firm, dry, and warm as toast. When he touched her lips with his tongue, she parted them helplessly. Her body was quaking, on fire, hungry. This was Matt and she wanted him. Pressing her breasts up against his chest, she kissed him back.

He tasted faintly musky. His tongue was hot, strong, demanding. It filled her mouth and she felt dizzy, almost as if she were floating, as if he were the only solid thing in the world and if she let go she would whirl away like a leaf in the wind. She touched his tongue with hers, stroked it, explored his mouth as he was exploring hers. When he turned her so that her head was resting back against his broad, hard shoulder, she felt small and helpless and ravished, and because it was Matt, she loved the feeling. Drawing a deep, shaken breath, she started to caress the warm skin at the nape of his neck, realized that she was still holding the paintbrush, and dropped it. It hit the roof with a soft clatter, and she didn’t think about it again.