“Hey, I even got dressed up. I wore my tux.”
Louisa let her gaze travel the length of him. “What about the jeans and sneakers?”
“What about them?”
Louisa unlocked her door and stepped into the foyer. Pete followed. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“I figured you’d want to offer me a drink or something.”
“Nothing! I’m not going to offer you anything! And I don’t want you in my house.”
“How about coffee? Do I get a cup of coffee?”
“How about a knuckle sandwich? How’d you like that?”
He smiled and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “I suppose this means a good-night kiss is out of the question.”
“Out!” She pointed stiff-armed to the door. “Out, out, out.”
Pete came awake with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He lay perfectly still, waiting for the confusion of sleep to leave him, wondering what had nudged him toward consciousness. He felt the cat shift at the foot of the bed, heard it growl low in its throat.
Pete’s gaze fastened on the DVD display across the room with the LED lights glowing red in the darkness. The lights went black for a moment, then reappeared, and Pete knew someone was silently moving around his bedroom. A body had passed between him and the LED lights.
Reason told him to stay calm. Instinct told him to panic. Instinct won out. He sprang from the bed in one quick movement and hit the floor running, heading for the door. Halfway across the room he collided with the intruder, and they both went down in a heap on the floor.
Louisa sat at her kitchen table, elbows resting on the table, chin resting on her hands. She glumly looked at the clock on the wall. Three-fifteen. She couldn’t sleep. Once again, it was all his fault. The fiend upstairs was keeping her awake. This time he was stomping around in her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She sighed and slumped a little lower.
She was in bad shape. Pete Streeter had looked good to her earlier. When he’d made the crack about the good-night kiss, she’d actually given it a second thought. She pushed away from the table and shuffled over to the refrigerator. She opened the door and stared at the bottles and jars for a while before deciding on orange juice.
Hers was a normal reaction, she told herself. Streeter was gorgeous. Any healthy, sexually deprived woman would find Streeter attractive-unless she lived with him, of course. To live with Streeter was to hate him.
She drank her orange juice and padded back to the bedroom. She was about to crawl into bed when there was a loud thump overhead. It was followed by more thumping, then a crash that made her ceiling shake. He was at it again. The man had no consideration.
“Quiet!” she shouted. “Don’t you know what time it is? It’s three-fifteen in the morning!”
There was another ceiling-shaking crash, more thumping and scuffling sounds. “This is too much,” Louisa muttered. “I absolutely am not going to tolerate this any longer.”
She cinched her floor-length blue velour robe around herself with a vicious yank on the belt, stuffed her feet into her big furry slippers, and charged out of her bedroom. On the front porch she pounded on Streeter’s door.
“Open up!” she demanded. She gave the door another shot with her fist, it swung open, and she stepped into the foyer.
“Streeter, what the hell are you doing up there? I’m trying to get some sleep! I have to be at work early tomorrow!” Her only answer was more thrashing and grunting. The man was exercising!
“Streeter!”
Still no response. Big surprise, she thought. How could he possibly hear anything over the racket he was making. She flicked the light switch on, scooped her robe up into her hands, and climbed the stairs to his apartment.
Standing in the dimly lit living room, she realized Pete was rolling around in his bedroom in the dark, and had a brief flash of panic that he might not be alone, that he might be in the throes of passion. She did an eye roll and reminded herself that it didn’t matter what the man was doing; the point being he was doing it too loud.
She held her ground in the middle of the living room and yelled in the direction of the bedroom. “Listen, Streeter, you macho crumb-”
A four-letter word carried out to her, and two men tumbled through the bedroom door in a tangle of flailing arms and legs. They crashed into Louisa, taking her down with them, knocking the air out of her lungs. One of the men was clothed. One was naked. The naked one was Pete Streeter.
Louisa didn’t have time to ogle as the three of them rolled across the floor and down the stairs. They landed with a thud, smashing into a brass umbrella stand. The intruder scrambled to his feet and hustled out the door, down the steps, into a waiting car. Louisa and Pete lay dazed on the hardwood floor.
“So,” Pete finally said, “couldn’t sleep?”
“I’m afraid to ask what you were doing with that guy.”
“What did it look like?”
“It looked like you were fighting.”
Streeter stood. “That about sums it up.”
Louisa was relieved. She was afraid it had been something kinky. She pulled herself to her feet, ran her tongue over her teeth to make sure none were missing, and willed her eyes to focus above Streeter’s shoulders. It was hopeless. In her mind she was looking into his eyes, but in reality she was staring below the waist. “Jeez,” Louisa said.
Pete’s left eye was beginning to swell shut and he could taste blood in his mouth. He sighed. This was not a good time to be naked with Louisa Brannigan. “I’m not at my best,” he told her.
She was still staring. She couldn’t help herself. “Could have fooled me.”
Pete lifted a trench coat from a wall peg and buttoned himself into it. “I think there’s a compliment in there somewhere.”
“What was this all about?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to talk to the guy.”
“This sort of thing happen to you a lot?”
“You mean rolling down the stairs naked with two other people?”
She shook her head. “You look terrible. You want me to drive you to the emergency room?”
“Not necessary. I’ll be okay. I just need some ice.”
“How about if I do my nurse thing and pour salt in your wounds?”
He grimaced. He was half afraid she meant it. “Sounds like fun, but I think I’ll pass.”
She touched his hand. “I’m serious. Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. In a half hour I’ll have convinced myself I won.” He turned her around and pushed her out the door. “I’m going to stay here until I hear your bolt slide across.” And the next day he’d have better locks installed-and a security system.
Louisa crawled into bed with her robe still on and huddled under the covers. Now that she was alone, her teeth were chattering from fear and from the horror of seeing Pete Streeter cut and bruised. He was in trouble, she thought. Big trouble. She ordered herself to relax, to take deep breaths. The trembling stopped, but the panic remained, hollowing out her stomach, constricting her breathing.
She wasn’t sure if she was afraid for herself or for Streeter. Their lives suddenly seemed to be hopelessly entangled. And for all his annoying habits, she felt drawn to him. There was no denying it…the man had style. He was fascinating. He might even be likable under more favorable circumstances, although that was pushing it some.
The panic lifted and an equally potent but entirely different emotion fluttered in her stomach. She was smitten with Pete Streeter, she reluctantly admitted. Probably it wasn’t so bizarre as it seemed, she told herself. After all, it was probably normal to feel a certain intimacy after tumbling down the stairs with a naked man.
The memory brought a smile to her lips and another flutter in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and reconstructed Streeter, vividly remembering every little detail…and one detail in particular that wasn’t little at all.