Only Ryan made her feel as if it were…fun. As if touch had to do with laughter. As if kisses had to do with mischief. As if fooling an entire crowded restaurant had been…exciting. As if she were a different kind of woman, a woman who enjoyed enticing, and low-voiced laughter, and private, intimate teasing…
Goose. If you ever tried to play that role, they’d laugh you off the stage, Greer. Go to sleep.
She did.
Chapter Six
“Stop,” Greer whispered into the telephone. “Would you just stop? Leave me alone!”
She put down the phone and promptly burst into tears. Her breather had called incessantly this week. Dragging a hand through her hair, she paced the living room in her bare feet, her eyes blinded by tears. She was still dressed for work, in a tan-and-white skirt and tan blouse. She had kicked off her shoes and tossed her white jacket on the couch hours before. She’d worked like a slave ever since she’d come home.
She didn’t normally work on Friday nights, much less schedule a follow-up meeting with Ray for a Saturday morning. Only because it was Ray had she agreed. The man had been so damned impossible to work with this past week. She’d snatched at the chance to establish some kind of decent professional relationship with him.
After fifteen straight hours of work, her nerves were on the tensile edge of exhaustion. Her breather calling at this late hour had been the last straw after an impossibly long day. The tears kept dripping, and fear filled the weary corners of her mind. Most Friday nights she went out. How could he have known she was home on this one?
Unless he was watching. Heart pounding, Greer whirled around to face the living-room windows, but the draperies were closed. Or nearly. There was a thin strip of darkness where they didn’t quite meet, and she rushed over to pull those ends together.
Fresh moisture brimmed in her eyes. Grabbing Truce and a bag of knitting, she let herself out of the apartment, leaned against the bare white wall in the hall and took one calming breath after another. Why do you persist in believing you’re safer out here?
Because safety wasn’t the issue. This was a matter of putting distance between herself and that white wall phone, that man. And the caller was a man. She knew the sound of a man’s deep breathing.
With a loud, emphatic sigh, she sat on the hall carpet with her legs tucked under her and grabbed her knitting needles and a long strand of pale green yarn from her tapestry bag. Click, click. She sniffed. More click-clicks, until an entire row of Robin’s sweater was finished, that row a little tear-blotched but basically straight.
When the hall door opened at the bottom of the steps, she jumped three feet, still sniffing.
“Greer?”
Before she could blink, Ryan’s work boots had bounded up the steps and settled in front of her. She did not want to see him. The man had run her through an emotional maze all week, darting in and out of her life as if he belonged there. Depending on him was asking for trouble. And that was half the darn problem anyway. He was incredibly easy to depend on.
“Hey.”
He was also difficult to ignore. “Hi,” she said brightly.
His long legs bent at the knees, jeans straining to accommodate the muscles in his thighs. Apart from jeans and work boots and a blue work shirt, he was wearing impatience like an outer garment. She couldn’t see his face, since she was busy click-clicking with her knitting needles, but she could smell his mood, the way a fawn could sniff a hunter’s closeness. “You wear jeans more often than any engineer I ever heard of,” she remarked casually, and refrained from sniffing one last time. Furiously, she blinked away the last hint of tears. “And don’t you ever keep regular hours? You realize it’s nearly midnight?”
He didn’t move toward her. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t move so much as an inch away, either. “You’re all right?”
“You told me one time that mechanical engineers are high-class grease monkeys. How did you put it? ‘A mechanical engineer plays with a drawing board half the time. The other half he has to figure out why,’ I quote, ‘his half-assed designs didn’t work.’” Knit-purl, knit-purl. “Is that why you’re so late?”
“Because of a half-assed design? In a way.” He paused, and then his voice continued, as soothing as butter, calming, reassuring. For a moment. “They can teach you a great deal in school about mathematical precision. Nothing about the human factor of blending man and machine. Efficiency, safety, timing-those problems can’t be solved on the most brilliant man’s drawing board. Exactly why I opted for the mechanical end of engineering. And you’re excellent at doing that,” he added abruptly.
“Doing what?”
“Getting a man to talk about his favorite subjects. But you can stow it with me, Greer; I’m no Daniel. Now what the hell are you doing out here? As if I didn’t know.”
“It was hot in the apartment. Something’s wrong with that air conditioner again.”
“You’ve been crying.”
“You’d cry, too, if you’d just dropped four stitches.”
“How many times has he called today?”
“No one has called,” Greer assured him, salvaging another straggly length of yarn that Truce was trying to paw.
“Would you stop that?” he said irritably. “Look at me.”
“Nope.”
He almost smiled at the stubborn tilt to her chin. He’d seen her when she left for work that morning, all crisp efficiency in her white blazer and white pumps, her hips swinging briskly in the tan-and-white A-line skirt on the way to her car. Her outfit hadn’t changed so drastically since then, only her expression. Now, she looked crisp, efficient, and stubborn.
He’d seen that look a lot this week. In terms of attire, he’d seen her in her bag-lady gear, dressed alluringly for a date, in the pastel business suits that showed off her legs, and that once he wasn’t likely to forget, naked. Greer was a lot of women in one, but the image that was undoubtedly going to drive him over the edge was the slightly irrational woman with the big brown eyes and the stubborn streak.
If he’d been a less obstinate man, he might have given up over the past seven days. As if he could have stopped himself from falling in love with her. Her quick humor, her compassion, her keen mind, her love-every-day spirit…she gave so much to him, without half trying.
That Greer was his, he already knew. Convincing her of that was proving a battle of wits, only Ryan was just beginning to realize that the harder she fought, the more success he was having. It had been tough understanding that. His engineer’s rational brain rejected the off-the-wall premise as illogical, but then he’d had to try to think a little like Greer.
Silently rising to his feet with a frown, he disappeared inside his apartment and returned moments later with a small box. He hunched over and started setting up a marble chessboard.
Greer flicked the yarn over her needle, only mildly shaking her head when she saw what he was doing. “First of all, that’s not necessary. It’s past midnight and you must be tired. Second, contrary to outward appearances, I do not require a babysitter. And last, you really don’t want to play chess.”
“Why not?” Ryan had won tournament after tournament in college. He might be a little rusty, but he was good enough so she’d never know when he let her beat him.
In the first game, Greer beat him in fifteen minutes. In the second game it took her nearly twenty minutes. And when Ryan set up the board a third time, he had that distinctly sour look that men get when they’ve been bested in any competitive sport-by a woman.
“You don’t play rationally,” he told her.