Lovers And Other Strangers

The movement drew Shannon’s eyes back to the solid width of his bare shoulders and chest, and she felt her stomach clench in helpless awareness. She didn’t know what it was about him that brought on this deeply female response. The sight of a bare male chest had never caused this kind of reaction before. It would be nice to believe it was because she’d spent too much time in the sun this morning. With an effort, she dragged her gaze upward and met his eyes.

“Anyway, that’s how I knew who you were. I thought you might not have taken the time to do any shopping when you got in yesterday and might like to have breakfast at my house.”

Reece rubbed his hand absently across his bare chest. She’d guessed right about the shopping. As far as he knew, the only food in the house was a package of slightly squashed Twinkies he’d bought somewhere in Arizona the day before. On the other hand, he hadn’t come back here to develop a social life. He just wanted to put the house in shape to sell and maybe get himself in shape—mentally and physically—while he was at it. No matter how attractive she was, he didn’t want to—

“Coffee’s already made,” she added, as an afterthought.

“Let me get a shirt.” The promise of caffeine was too great a temptation. He still wasn’t sure his new neighbor was all there, but she was beautiful and she had coffee—the combination was more than he could resist.

He disappeared into the house, and Shannon drew a deep breath and then released it slowly. Wow. What on earth had happened to her? It wasn’t as if Reece Morgan was the first attractive man she’d met. Kelly had made it her life’s work to introduce her to every single, straight, attractive male who came within range—a rapidly shrinking pool, as Kelly reminded her tartly every time Shannon turned down a date. She’d never given any of those men a second thought, had barely noticed them even when they were standing right in front of her. But this man—this one made her very aware of the differences between male and female, something she hadn’t paid much attention to lately.

By the time Reece returned, she’d regained her equilibrium and was able to give him a casually friendly smile. Whatever she’d felt earlier, it was gone now, and if she felt a slight tingle when his arm brushed against hers, it was probably only because she had a touch of sunburn.

“I thought you could go years without meeting your neighbors in California,” he said as he pulled the door shut behind him and checked the knob to be sure the lock had caught.

“In California, maybe, but not in Serenity Falls.” She caught his questioning look. “You see, the town is caught in some sort of space-time-continuum warp. You know, like the ones on Star Trek? I think we’re actually somewhere in the Midwest right now. As near as I can tell, the change occurs just as you pass the town limit sign. If you pay attention, you can actually feel the shift as the very fabric of space folds and deposits you in…oh, Iowa maybe.”

“Really? I didn’t notice,” Reece said politely but she caught the gleam of laughter in his eyes.

She liked the way he could smile with just his eyes, she thought. Of course, so far, there wasn’t much about him that she didn’t like. Tall, dark and handsome. The old cliché popped into her head, and she smiled a little at how perfectly it fit him. At five-eight, she was tall for a woman and was accustomed to looking most men in the eye, but walking next to him, she felt small and almost fragile.

As if sensing her gaze, he glanced at her, and Shannon looked away quickly, half-afraid of what her expression might reveal. Distracted, she tapped her fingers against the tailgate of his truck as they walked past.

“It doesn’t look particularly mean to me.” She immediately wished the words unsaid but it was too late. What was it about him that caused her to blurt out the first thing that popped into her head?

“What?” Reece gave her a look that combined wariness with curiosity, confirming her guess that he had doubts about her mental health. Not that she could blame him, she admitted with an inner sigh. She hadn’t exactly been at her best this morning.

“Reports of your arrival spread around town yesterday afternoon. Someone mentioned that you were driving a mean-looking truck.”

“Mean-looking?” Reece glanced back at his truck and shrugged. “It’s never attacked anyone, that I know of.” He frowned thoughtfully. “There was a woman at the gas station yesterday. Skinny, big teeth and a face sort of like a trout. She looked at me like I was an alien with green skin and antennae sticking out of my head.”

“Or Elvis in a spangled jumpsuit,” Shannon murmured, thinking of her conversation with Kelly.

“No, I think she’d have been less surprised to see him,” Reece said thoughtfully.

Shannon’s laughter was infectious, and Reece found himself smiling with her. He wouldn’t be all that surprised if it turned out that she’d escaped from a mental ward, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from enjoying her company. Walking beside her, he was conscious of the long-legged ease of her stride, of the way the sunlight caught the red in her hair, drawing fire from it.

“That was Rhonda Whittaker at the gas station,” she told him.

“Whittaker.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he repeated the name. “I think I went to school with her. She looked like a trout then, too.”

Shannon laughed again. His description was wickedly accurate. Rhonda did look a great deal like a trout—a perpetually startled trout.

“Careful. That trout holds a key place on the local grapevine.”

He shook his head. “I’d almost forgotten what this place was like. Everybody always knew everybody else’s business, and what they didn’t know, they made up.”

“According to Edith Hacklemeyer, no one ever had to make up anything about you.”

“Good God, is that old bat still around?” He stopped at the beginning of Shannon’s walkway and looked at the neat white house across the street. A modest expanse of green lawn stretched from the house to the street, perfectly flat, perfectly rectangular, cut exactly in two by an arrow-straight length of concrete sidewalk. The only decorative element was a circular flower bed that sat to the left of the sidewalk. It contained a single rosebush, planted precisely in the center. The rest of the bed was planted in neat, concentric rows of young plants, bright-green leaves standing out against a dark layer of mulch.

“Of course she’s still there,” Reece answered his own question. “The place looked exactly the same twenty years ago. Every spring she planted red petunias, and in the fall, she planted pansies. It never changed.”

“It still hasn’t.” Shannon wondered if it was just her imagination that made her think she could see a shadowy figure through the lace curtains. She had to bite back a smile at the thought of Edith’s reaction to having Reece boldly staring at her house. She touched him lightly on the arm.

“You’re not supposed to do that.”

“Do what?” He looked down at her, one brow cocked in inquiry.

“Look at her house.” Shannon shook her head, pulling her mouth into a somber line.

“There’s some law against looking at her house?” Reece asked, but he turned obediently and followed her up the walkway.

“You’re stepping out of your assigned place in the world order. It’s Edith’s job to watch you. It’s your job to be watched.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” he said, amused by her take on small-town life. “I can’t believe old Cacklemeyer is still around.”

“Cacklemeyer?” Shannon’s gurgle of laughter made him smile. “Is that what you called her?”

“She wasn’t real popular with her students,” he said by way of answer. “She’s not still teaching, is she?”

“No. She retired a few years ago.”

“There are a lot of kids who should be grateful for that,” he said with feeling.

“According to Edith, you committed petuniacide on at least one occasion,” Shannon commented as she stepped around a small shrub that sprawled into the walkway. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “She seemed to think it was a deliberate act of horticultural violence.”

“It was.” His half smile was reminiscent. “She acted like that flower bed was the gardens at Versailles. If she was in the yard when I rode my bike past her place, she’d scuttle out and stand in front of it, glaring at me, like she expected me to whip out a tank of Agent Orange and lay waste to her precious flowers.”

“So you lived up to her expectations?”

“Or down to them.” He shrugged. “Sounds stupid now.”

“Sounds human. Hang on a minute while I move the hose,” she said as she stepped off the path and walked over to where a sprinkler was putting out a fine spray of water.

In an effort to avoid staring at her legs like a randy teenager, Reece focused his gaze on the house instead. It was a style that he thought of as Early Fake Spanish—white stucco walls and a border of red clay tile edging a flat roof, like a middle-aged man with a fringe of hair and a big bald spot. The style was ubiquitous in California, a tribute to the state’s Spanish roots and its citizens’ happy acceptance of facades. In this case, age had lent something approaching dignity to the neat building. The front yard consisted of a lawn that appeared to be composed mostly of mown weeds and edged by two large flower beds that held a jumble of plants of all shapes and sizes in no particular order. Reece was no horticulturist but he was fairly sure that Shannon was growing an astoundingly healthy crop of dandelions, among other things.

“I don’t advise looking at my flower beds if you’re a gardener,” she said, following his glance as she rejoined him. “I’m told that the state of my gardens is enough to bring on palpitations in anyone who actually knows something about plants.”

“What I know about plants can be written on the head of a pin.”

“Good. I may call on you for backup when the garden police come around.” For an instant, in her cutoffs and T-shirt, her hair dragged back from her face, her wide mouth curved in a smile, her eyes bright with laughter, she looked like a mischievous child. But she was definitely all grown up, Reece thought, his eyes skimming her body almost compulsively as she stepped onto the narrow porch and pushed open the front door. It took a conscious effort of will to drag his eyes from the way the worn denim of her shorts molded the soft curves of her bottom.

The last thing he wanted was to get involved with anyone, he reminded himself. He was here to clean out his grandfather’s house and maybe, while he was at it, figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He didn’t need any complications. Breakfast was one thing, especially when it came with caffeine, but anything else was out of the question.

And if his new neighbor would be willing to start wearing baggy clothes and put a paper sack over her head, he just might be able to remember that.

The interior of the house continued the pseudo-Spanish theme of the exterior. The floor of the small entryway was covered with dark-red tiles, and arch-ways led off in various directions. Through one, he could see a living room, which looked almost as uncoordinated as the flower beds out front. A sofa upholstered in fat pink roses sat at right angles to an over-stuffed chair covered in blue plaid. Both faced a small fireplace. The end table next to the sofa was completely covered in magazines and books. In one corner of the room, there was a sewing machine in a cabinet. Heaped over and around it and trailing onto the floor, there were piles of brightly colored fabric. The comfortable clutter made it obvious that this was a room where someone actually lived, and he couldn’t help but compare it to the painful neatness of his grandfather’s house—everything in its place, everything organized with military precision. The whole place had a sterile feeling that made it hard to believe it had been someone’s home for more than forty years. Pushing the thought aside, Reece followed Shannon through an archway on the left of the entryway.