Love Lessons

Feeling something brushing against his leg, he glanced down and grinned. “Well, hello, Norman. Nice to see you again.”

The cat meowed a greeting, then arched and purred when Mike reached down to stroke his soft fur.

“He seems to remember you,” Catherine remarked, watching them. “You really do have a way with cats.”

“I grew up with them. At one time my sisters had four in the house with us, one cat for each sister. I had a pet snake at the time, just as a way to assert my masculinity.”

“You have four sisters?”

He chuckled and straightened away from her cat. “All older. There are a few people who might tell you I was just a bit spoiled growing up.”

Her smile transformed her face in a way that made his pulse jump in instinctive male reaction. It added warmth and personality to her cool expression and drew his attention again to her perfectly shaped lips. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Actually, it’s absolutely true,” he admitted with a laugh. “I was shamelessly indulged.”

Whatever she might have said in response was interrupted by the ring of her telephone. Her smile vanished. “Excuse me,” she said, and turned to pick up the cordless extension that had been lying on the glass-topped wood coffee table.

He concentrated on his work as she carried the phone into the kitchen. While Norman lay at his feet begging for attention, he unscrewed the broken blind from the window casing. He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on Catherine’s conversation, but he couldn’t help overhearing a few snatches of what she was saying. Not that it mattered. Though she was speaking English, she might as well have been talking in a foreign language.

Obviously, the caller was someone from her work. She seemed to be giving instructions to whoever it was on how to do some sort of procedure that apparently involved a lot of steps and many multisyllabic terms that Mike had never heard.

He’d been told that some men were intimidated by brainy women. He, on the other hand, had nothing but respect for intelligent women, having been raised in a house full of them.

As for himself, he was smart enough to read the signs when a woman was interested in him, and he wasn’t getting any of those signals from Catherine Travis. So, despite his respect for her body and her brains, he would keep things strictly professional while he was here.

He glanced at the coffee table as he set the broken blind on the floor and reached for the new one he’d brought with him. A stack of science journals and notebooks teetered at one end of the table, looking as though she’d been reading through them when he’d arrived. A workaholic? Seemed to be in character with his first impressions of her.

By the time she had finished her call, he had just completed the installation of the new blind. He opened and closed it a couple of times, raised and lowered the slats to assure himself that everything was working correctly, then he closed his toolbox. “All done,” he said as Catherine came back into the room. “I told you it wouldn’t take long.”

She nodded. “I appreciate it. I’ll tell Lucille how much I’ve appreciated your quick responses this week.”

He shrugged. “It’s been a pretty slow week. You seem to be one of the few tenants having breakdowns at the moment.”

To his pleasure, the smile he had admired before returned. “I got lucky, I guess,” she said.

Before he could decide if there was even a hint of flirtation in her response, her expression grew serious again and she reached for the door. “Thank you again,” she said, her tone now politely dismissive.

“You’re welcome.” He stepped outside and glanced back at her. “Have a nice…”

The door closed in his face.

“…day,” he finished wryly. Shaking his head, he turned to leave. He had a class to get to that evening. He didn’t have time to stand around mooning over a pretty, but decidedly distant, scientist.

“So, you’ve really had a lousy week,” Julia observed, reaching for a tortilla chip to dip into the salsa that sat on the restaurant table in front of her. “First you spent your birthday alone, and then everything in your apartment broke. Not to mention a difficult week at work.”

Catherine took a sip of her punch and set the plastic tumbler back down on the table before replying to her friend of almost two years. “It wasn’t so bad, really. I received some lovely gifts for my birthday. Thank you again for the gloves, by the way. They’re gorgeous.”

“You’re welcome. I’m just sorry I had to be away on that business trip and couldn’t celebrate with you. A girl shouldn’t be by herself on her thirtieth birthday.”

“Norman and I had a very nice little private party.”

“The cat doesn’t count.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Catherine advised with a smile. “Norman is very sensitive, you know. And as for things breaking in my apartment, that turned out okay, too. The management responded very quickly each time, having the repairs done the very day I reported the problems.”

“Wow. That is efficient. I hope you didn’t have to deal with gripey old Luther again.”

Catherine concentrated on scooping a tortilla chip into white cheese dip, keeping her voice casual when she replied, “Actually, no. There’s a new maintenance guy now. His name’s Mike.”

“Really. Nice guy?”

“Yes, he seems very nice.”

A sudden, rather loaded silence from the other side of the table made Catherine look up. “What?”

“How did he look?”

She started to give a vaguely generic answer, but then she sighed and said, “Like he just stepped off a surfboard. Or—since we’re a ten-hour drive from the nearest beach—a skateboard, maybe.”

“Young guy, huh?”

“I’m not very good at guessing ages, but I’d say twenty-five. Maybe a year or two older.”

“And you say he’s nice looking?”

“Like someone you would see on the cover of one of those teen magazines my mother would never let me buy,” she replied with an exaggerated sigh. “Blond, blue-eyed, athletic build, beautiful smile. Nice teeth. And enough charm to sell sand in a desert.”

Julia shuddered. “Sounds like one of those guys who are about as deep as a rain puddle.”

Julia had a well-known aversion to handsome, shallow men, having been hurt very badly by one in her younger, more trusting days.

“He seemed quite nice, actually. But—as always happens when I’m in the presence of a good-looking guy—I displayed the wit and personality of petrified wood.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “I doubt it was quite that bad.”

“Trust me,” she said with a groan. “I couldn’t even remember poor Norman’s name. All I could do was just sit there, staring at the guy. He probably thinks I’m the most boring tenant in the entire complex.”

“Oh well, it isn’t as if you’d be interested in boffing the maintenance stud, anyway,” Julia said with a shrug. “You’ve got more common sense than that.”

“No, of course I wouldn’t be interested in anything like that,” Catherine agreed with a laugh that sounded a bit hollow to her own ears.

“And he hardly sounds like the kind of man you’d want to date for any other purpose. A young maintenance man? What on earth would you have in common with him?”

Julia, bless her, was pretty much as clueless as Catherine when it came to men. A natural blonde who defied all the stereotypes, she was a fiercely focused and ambitious dynamo in a deceptively fragile-looking package. Unlike Catherine, Julia was frequently the target of passes from prowling males, few of them interested in her mind. Her experiences with the opposite sex had left her decidedly cynical when it came to romance.

Losing interest in the subject of buff young men—and totally oblivious to the man who was openly ogling her from a table nearby—Julia launched into a discussion of a workshop she had attended at the conference in New York. Catherine was quite sure her friend had rarely, if ever, left the conference hotel to enjoy all the wonderfully exciting things to do in the “Big Apple.” For Julia, nothing in the city was as interesting and challenging as scholarly discussions of the law.

Hopeless, Catherine thought with a slight shake of her head. Both of them.