Secret Desire

Horrified, she could see that his look of innocence was not feigned. He leaned forward, appeared to reach for her, then pulled back his hand. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I was enjoying being here with you. I don’t often have the company of a woman who wants nothing from me except time and good conversation.”

She believed in being honest. “I’m sorry, too. I’ve got a ten-year layer of social rust, plus I’ve had a lot more of my own company than was good for me. I’m out of practice, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Shall we go?”

“You’re wonderful company, rust or no rust,” he said, his grin hard at work. “I do want to ask if you have any idea who that man was who robbed you. If a criminal intends to shoot after committing a crime, he doesn’t usually let himself be talked out of it.”

“He seemed young, not more than twenty-five. I didn’t see his face, though, because he wore a hood. I’m wondering if my in-laws didn’t find out where we are and put someone up to it. They don’t want me to succeed. I’m sure of it.”

He sat forward, his posture rigid, as if he sensed approaching danger. “Your in-laws? If they’re wealthy upstanding citizens, would they hire a hit man? Somehow, I doubt it.”

“Then why would he have put the gun away when I told him he was frightening Randy and begged him to spare us?”

Luke drummed his fingers on the table. “Beats me, but I’ll get to the bottom of it. Be sure of that.”

He stood, looked down at her, and extended his hand to assist her from the booth. She took his hand, but released it as soon as she was safely on her feet. Inwardly, she laughed at herself. Why would a thirty-eight-year-old woman let a man make her jittery? She’d been married and was the mother of an seven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake. She stood straighter and held her shoulders back.

“This has been wonderful. Actually, it’s my first night out since I’ve been here. And what do you know? I think I stepped out with the king of the hill.”

He had the grace to be embarrassed. “Come on now, Kate. You’re exaggerating.”

The waiter didn’t bring a bill, and she decided not to ask for one. Since he ate there regularly, he probably had an account with the restaurant or someone had slipped him the check. In any case, he didn’t seem the type who’d split the bill with a woman the first time they ate dinner together. A few April sprinkles dampened them as they strolled half a block to Luke’s car, but he didn’t hurry. She’d already noticed that Portsmouth inhabitants, like the Charlestonians among whom she grew up, took their time about most things. He walked with her to her apartment door, and her nerves started a wild battle with one another. She didn’t think he’d ask to come in, but…

“I’ve enjoyed this evening with you, Kate. I enjoyed it a lot. I hope we’ll get better acquainted.” Before she could say a word, he winked, turned around and headed down the hallway.

“Luke,” she called. “The dinner was wonderful, and so were you.”

He waved, opened the building’s front door, and disappeared into the night. She stared at the hall that led to the building’s lobby and shook her head. She knew herself as a conservative woman, one whom Nathan Middleton in his perverted gentility had taught to wait for the man to make the first move. In a flash, she realized that Nathan had discouraged, even rejected, her advances early in their marriage until she’d stopped making them. Ultimately, he had set the tone of their relationship and called all the shots. Ultimately, she hadn’t cared.

Maybe she was about to find out who she was, or to rediscover herself. She couldn’t figure out what had gotten into her. She’d dared Luke, flirted with him and challenged him, and she wasn’t even ashamed. Ashamed? She’d enjoyed every second of it. But he’d kept his counsel, and she suspected he’d just let her know that he didn’t go in for casual good-night kisses, not even pecks on the cheek. It was just as well. If he’d kissed her, she’d probably have landed on the clouds. She had always wanted to fly with a man, and the woman in her knew instinctively that Luke Hickson could take her with him on wings of ecstasy. However, she’d been certain of that once before, and in ten years of groping for fulfillment, she’d gotten nothing but emptiness, a painful kind of loneliness—a thousand disappointments, like a field of scentless roses or an orchard of flowering cherry trees that bore no fruit. She didn’t feel like retracing those steps.

Luke propped his left foot on the step stool he kept in his walk-in closet and pondered his sudden urge to look at his family album. Why, after a dozen years or more, did he need to see pictures of his late parents and of him and Marcus as growing boys? He put the photo album back in its place without opening it, clicked off the light and wandered into the den. It wasn’t a time for nostalgia. He’d loved and cherished Eunice, and until her horrifying demise, they’d had a wonderful marriage—a happy marriage, comforting and companionable. But, he realized all of a sudden, it had been unexciting. Kate Middleton exhilarated him. And she had a streak of wickedness that brought out something strange in him, a kind of wildness with which he was unfamiliar. He’d controlled it, but he’d give anything to know what would happen if he felt it again and let himself give in to it.

He knew the danger of taking up a woman’s challenge, and she’d practically dared him to show her the man that he was. Not that he was gullible; he’d walked away from more glittering pitfalls. What got to him was the thin layer of sadness beneath her jocular manner. That, along with her wit and charm, made him vulnerable to her, piqued his curiosity and made him want to know everything about her. He went to the refrigerator, got a can of beer and took a few swallows. An inner urging told him to bide his time, and he knew he’d better listen.

He snapped his fingers as he remembered her fear that her in-laws might be trying to prevent her from succeeding with the bookstore. It didn’t quite wash, but to be on the safe side, he’d assign a detective to watch that block first thing Monday morning.

When Kate walked into her living room, she found Madge Robinson snoring in front of the television and Bugs Bunny savoring a carrot while he plotted mischief. She awakened the woman by turning off the TV.

Madge jumped up. “I didn’t expect you’d be back in no two hours. If I went anywhere with Captain Hickson, I’d keep him half the night, too.”

She didn’t have much patience with busybodies. Madge Robinson had known she’d been with Luke because she’d walked to the edge of the garden and peered through the hedge, snooping. “Mrs. Robinson, it’s only nine-fifteen, and I’d hardly consider that half the night. Did Randy give you any trouble?”

Madge sat down and flicked the television back on. “I didn’t see the rest of Bugs. No, Randy didn’t give me a speck of trouble. I went to my place and got him some ice cream, and he went to bed as peacefully as a lamb, just like he promised.”

Just what Randy needed, someone else to pamper him and cajole him into doing what he knew he should do. “You mean, you bribed Randy to go to sleep?”

Madge glued her gaze to the television. “That tiger’s gonna catch Bugs if he ain’t careful. What? Oh. It was better for him to sleep than give me a hard time. Besides, he was tired, anyway. Poor kid said he hadn’t slept all last night.”

“How much do I owe you, Mrs. Robinson?”

“What? Fifteen. That’s my regular price, and call me Madge, like everybody else does. I’d rather not charge for keeping the tenants’ children, but everybody wants to pay. It’s a pleasure for me, ’cause I’m always by myself ’less someone wants me to keep the kids. I never had any, so I enjoys it. I ’spec you want to turn in, so I’ll go on home soon as Bugs is finished.”

Kate inhaled a long breath and sat down to watch Bugs Bunny. Within minutes she had closed her eyes and begun to relive the evening.

She opened her store the next morning at nine o’clock, the usual hour. Beside the doorknob, she noticed a buzzer that hadn’t been there before the robbery. She’d ask Luke about that. Half an hour later, she answered the buzzer and opened the door for a policeman.

“’Morning, Miss Kate,” he said, tipping his hat. “I’m Officer Cowan, and I’ve been assigned to patrol your area. I just wanted to give you my pager number, in case you have a problem. I won’t be more than eight or ten blocks from you at any time, so feel safe. You can turn this buzzer off till near dark. I doubt anybody’s gonna bother you in broad daylight.”

That air that whistled through his teeth with each word he uttered and the large patch of black hair beneath his left ear guaranteed that she wouldn’t forget him. She thanked him, and he left, but she wanted to ask somebody if Luke Hickson took such good care of every citizen in his precinct. The protection gave her a sense of security, but she didn’t want special favors. One way or another, you paid for them. She’d rather spend her precious funds on a store guard and keep her independence.

She rang up a sale, handed the change to the buyer. Then, as her gaze caught Luke heading toward her, she jammed her finger in the drawer of the cash register. She’d thought him handsome, but as she stared at him in his captain’s uniform she nearly swallowed her tongue. He glided toward her, his stride purposeful and powerful and his gaze fixed on her.

He stopped beside her customer and touched his cap. “Glad to see you’re up and out, Miss Fanny. You had a long siege.”

“Oh, Captain,” the woman exclaimed, “I don’t know what I’d have done if you and your men hadn’t kept a close check on me.” She turned to Kate. “They’re my family. Brought me food and the paper every single day. Good, hot food, too, ’cause, honey, I wasn’t able to get up and cook. I’m going to bake them some gingerbread soon as I feel up to it.” She pointed a finger toward Luke. “He loves gingerbread, gingersnaps and whatever else I can put ginger in.” Kate wrapped the woman’s purchases—a volume of poems and a copy of Fools Rush In—and handed them to her.

“I’ll be back soon as I finish Fools Rush In,” Miss Fanny called over her shoulder as she left.

“Did you sleep well?” Luke asked.

She nodded. “Wonderfully. Thanks.” Then she remembered the buzzer. “Luke, did you have that buzzer put on my door?”

He flipped back his cap and closed his eyes for a split second. “Yeah. Of course I did. It’s dark long before you leave, and most of the stores in this block close a couple of hours before you do. You’re vulnerable. What’s the matter? You don’t want it there?”

What could she say? Of course she needed that, and any other protection that would prevent her from losing her store. “Please don’t think I’m not grateful. I am—”

He frowned and barely narrowed his left eye. “But what, Kate? Tell me you’re going to do this all on your own, that you don’t need anybody’s help. Fine. Give me a screwdriver, and I’ll remove the buzzer.”

Now she’d done it. What was it about men that made them see things in black-and-white? “I appreciate your kindness, but in ten years of marriage, I wasn’t allowed to make a single meaningful decision. I was spoon-fed, managed and manipulated. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m supersensitive about my independence.”

He stepped closer and burned her with his all-knowing gaze. “If your marriage wasn’t a happy one, why did you stay?”

“I have a son, and I took a vow.”

She’d said more than she wanted him to know. But then, she’d already accepted that she wasn’t normal around him.

Something akin to recognition—or could it be approval?—gleamed in his intense gaze. “You’re an admirable woman. I just dropped by to make certain everything’s all right. Did Cowan introduce himself to you this morning?”

She nodded, perplexed. The man whose company she’d enjoyed the previous evening had been swallowed by that captain’s uniform. She didn’t know what to think. “Officer Cowan said he’d be checking on me. Luke, do you think it’s necessary to go to so much trouble?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “For a simple robbery, I wouldn’t take such steps, but you’ve implied that you’re in jeopardy, and until that robbery case is solved, it’s my job to protect you—whether you like that or not. What time will Randy be here this afternoon?”

She tried to imagine what was behind the question. “Three-thirty. Why? What did you have in mind?”

“I’d like him to come over to PAL.” He gave her the address. “You can’t begin too early. He has the profile of a kid who needs help, and you have to straighten him out now.”

She knew he didn’t exaggerate. “All right. I’ll…I’ll send him.”

Her nerves shimmered when his hand covered hers in a gentle gesture of comfort. “One of the counsellors or officers will pick him up at three-thirty and bring him back before you close. Relax, now. He couldn’t be in better hands.”