I'll Be Seeing You

He hit the light switch in the kitchen and flopped down on the sofa again. He stuck the whisper-thin pillow beneath his backside to provide some minimal padding against the torture spring. He covered his eyes with his forearm to shut out the pulsing yellow light, then, instantly, he slept.

The next thing he heard was her screeching.

Kate had not ever known that a man could snore in such a fashion. Oh, she’d heard it spoken of, joked about. But the constant, deep sound that came from her living room all night was beyond the realm of her wildest imagination.

Sometime just before dawn she got up to stuff an extra blanket against the crack beneath her bedroom door to buffer the sound. It helped a little, but she was still agonizingly aware that he was out there. He was invading her life, her world, her plans. Pervading everything that was precious to her, making her stay home from work. Or at least he was trying to. It remained to be seen who would be the victor in that little battle.

“Damn you, Phillip McGaffney,” she muttered just as the alarm went off.

Kate rolled over and slapped her palm down on top of it. Then she was instantly contrite. Phillip McGaffney was dead. What kind of problems did she have compared to that?

Then a particularly resonant rumbling came from under the blanket beneath her door. At least McGaffney had not been forced to spend the night with Raphael Montiel chainsawing away on his living room sofa, Kate thought sourly. It was just possible the man had gotten the better end of the deal.

At least Montiel had left her alone. He hadn’t—

Hadn’t what? A thin laugh escaped Kate’s throat. He hadn’t been suddenly overwhelmed with lust for the single woman just beyond the locked and blanket-bulkheaded door? Not likely, Kate thought. He’d spent most of their interview the night before watching her with those green eyes squinting ever so slightly. Like she was a bug or a microbe on a slide, something he couldn’t quite identify. He had not once glanced at her with anything resembling a gleam in those eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, getting to her feet, swaying slightly from fatigue.

Kate knew her assets, and she also knew that a man like Montiel would never appreciate any of them. She’d tangled with his type before—a man with that same lazy, confident sense of power—and she had been left almost literally at the altar by him in favor of a flighty, vapid, though admittedly physically perfect exotic dancer. She swiped a hand over her head to smooth her wild curls. Then she went grimly to the closed bedroom door.

The problem was that she knew relatively little about men, she realized. She’d been engaged for those six short months and had come out of that experience even more perplexed by the species than she had been before. She did know, however, that men didn’t have to be particularly swept away by attraction to…well, to…want it. And mornings—well, men often felt particularly amorous in the morning, and it was not so much desire that got them that way but testosterone.

Kate eased back from the bedroom door. Better to be safe than sorry, she decided.

She retreated to her closet, then she went to her dresser, gathering clothing. She was not going to bounce back and forth between the bedroom and the bath with a towel wrapped around her. It was best to set a precedent, she thought, right here, right now. Who knew how much longer this situation would be necessary?

After she showered and had gotten dressed she tiptoed into the living room, past the sofa, then she stopped and stared. He was laying on his back. His right arm was flung over his eyes.

He had taken his shirt off.

“Oh, my,” Kate murmured. The arm heaved over his face was corded and looked strong. She hadn’t realized last night just how…well, muscled he was.

He hadn’t used the sheet she’d given him. He still had his jeans on, and she was very grateful for that. But the snap was open, and the dark golden hair on his chest tapered down, narrowing into a V until it disappeared beneath the denim. Kate took in a deep breath and ran a finger under her collar. She took a step backward from the sofa, then two. Coffee. She needed coffee. Now.

She squared her shoulders and turned for the kitchen. Then she stared at her counter, and a sound of pure distress caught in her throat.

There was a carton of milk sitting out. A whole half gallon. And it was the good stuff, too, not two percent, not skim, but the carton she used in recipes. Her gaze flew around the kitchen. She knew every move he had made by the time she breathed again.

There were rye crumbs on the counter. His cell phone sat beside them. She hurried around the breakfast bar and yanked open the refrigerator door. Within another thirty seconds, she knew that both her roast beef and the horseradish sauce had been decimated.

That didn’t particularly bother her. She cooked for others to enjoy, after all. But the waste infuriated her—a perfectly good half gallon of milk!

“What have you done?”

Her cry went through Raphael’s unconscious like a jet breaking the sound barrier. It boomed his heart into sudden overdrive. He rolled and groped beneath the sofa for the gun he had tucked there after removing it from his waistband last night. When he landed on his feet, he was armed. “What?”

Astonishment—and maybe just a little fear—punched the air right out of Kate’s chest. “Put that away!”

Raphael looked around. There was no one in the apartment but them. “What?” he asked again.

“That…that weapon!”

Raphael looked down at himself. Sleep tried to cling to his mind like a sticky spiderweb, making his thoughts track too slowly. “It’s been called a lot of things but—”

“The gun! Are you crazy? What kind of person are you?”

Raphael finally came fully awake. “Me? What the hell did you scream for?”

“I want a new baby-sitter.” She turned her back on him smartly—he doubted if a trained cadet could pivot quite that cleanly—and went to the kitchen. She grabbed the telephone on the wall.

“Your hair’s sticking straight up from your head.”

Kate gave a cry and dropped the phone. She plastered both hands to her skull. Of course it was. She’d stuck her fingers into it in dismay when she’d seen the mess he’d made of her kitchen.

She smoothed her hair frantically, then was appalled to realize that she even cared what he thought. She dropped her hands.

One wild curl had escaped her effort, he realized. It made him itch to touch it, to see if it would wrap around his finger with a life of its own. He was losing his mind.

“I don’t want you here,” she said.

“Yeah. We’ve been all through that.” He snapped his jeans and tucked the gun into them at his back.

Kate struggled for reason. “I understand that the authorities think I’m in danger, but I want them to send someone else to protect me. Clearly, this isn’t going to work.”

Something vaguely uncomfortable gripped Raphael’s stomach. He told himself it was just the way she talked. It was really starting to get to him. Clearly… Then again, he’d rarely been vetoed by any woman, for any reason on any job.

“Why not?” he heard himself ask.

“You’re…you’re…” Kate crossed her arms over her chest and wished he would put a shirt on. “Chaos,” she finished.

“I’m chaos? You screamed.”

“You wasted a whole half gallon of milk while I slept! And you woke up and pointed a gun at me!”

“I thought you were in danger!”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

“Because you were caterwauling!”

This time he could almost predict what she would do before it happened. That sniff. The immediate hoisting of her shoulders. “I was not caterwauling.”

“You sounded like a cat with its tail trapped in a door.”

Color flooded her cheeks. Raphael watched the phenomenon.

Then, finally, for the first time, he noticed the way she was dressed. She wore khaki slacks, socks and neatly laced sneakers. This was topped by a white turtleneck, albeit a sleeveless one. Except for her arms, every inch of skin from her chin on down was covered, laced, pressed, creased. She looked as though she had been up for hours already.