“Do you realize we could have run into half the teenagers in the county? That was obviously his nightly patrolling spot.”
“You sure can pick the places, Greer.”
Her body told her to be tense, to worry about how he would interpret her moments of craziness. Her heart just wouldn’t listen to her body. She dissolved in laughter to match his. “Me? The walk was your idea.” She added, “Haven’t you ever gone down a slide, McCullough?”
“You’re not going to let me live that down, are you?”
“I really don’t think so.”
They chuckled the rest of the way back to the apartment, but Greer unconsciously winced when they entered the brightly lit hall. Like a shout of reality, her knitting was still strewn on the floor, and so was his chess set.
Ryan didn’t seem to feel the same effect. Yawning, he bent over to pick up her knitting and pile it in her hands, then stuffed his chess set back into its box and tucked it under his arm. “Pair of derelicts live here,” he commented.
“Messy. Irresponsible.”
“Tomorrow these irresponsible derelicts are going to spend a day on Cape Hatteras.” He pushed open her door, and then leaned across their loaded arms to lay a swift kiss on her mouth. “No arguments.”
She must have caught the determined note in his voice, because her eyes suddenly met his, as vulnerable as a cat’s. He shook his head. He wasn’t letting her shut herself up again in that independent world of hers. “We’re going.” And if she looked at him like that for one more minute he was going to toss both their stuff on the ground and swing her into a bedroom. Hers or his, it didn’t much matter.
“I can’t, Ryan. I have to meet with one of the men at work tomorrow,” she said hesitantly, and gave him an apologetic look. “You see, Ray and I are both committed to attending a trade show next Wednesday and Thursday, and I promised him tomorrow-”
“Overnight?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re going to a two-day trade show with this guy, you just said. Do you intend to stay overnight?”
She shook her head ruefully. “I’ll be as safe with him as I would be in church,” she said wryly, “so don’t start up on potential callers again. Ray’s specialty is coast-to-coast women; he wouldn’t have time to make idle calls. Anyway…” She frowned thoughtfully, and took a long uneven breath. “I believe we’ll be done by noon tomorrow. We’re meeting early.”
“Noon, then,” Ryan said firmly.
Actually, she was done by ten. Her meeting with Ray went so smoothly she could barely believe it was over.
You’ve misjudged Ray terribly, she thought absently as she drove home under a sweltering sun. There hadn’t been a soul at Love Lace that morning, no hum of sewing machines, no buzz of laughter and conversation. The downstairs offices had been cool, silent and shadowed, almost like eerie tombs, ghostly with only the one light in the back office where they’d been working.
She’d been apprehensive, maybe because of the mood of the place, maybe because any confrontation with Ray aroused apprehension. Instead, Ray had made jokes; he’d been supportive; he’d waxed enthusiastic over practically every idea she had. She felt as if she’d spent the morning with Jekyll instead of Hyde.
The trick, Greer decided, was to work alone with him, away from other people. And to ignore the way his eyes kept…pinning her with those secret, enigmatic looks.
Egotism’s your problem, not his, she scolded herself. Wry humor shimmered in her eyes as she glanced in the rearview mirror. A wonderful humor that she’d had since she woke up that morning. So being around Ray always disturbed her, but how egotistical was that? Just because a man looked at her sideways didn’t mean he was a threat to her. Maybe if she worked alone with him more often, those reactions would go away. And he’d suggested a half dozen more private projects in the future…
Ray dropped easily from her mind as she arrived home and flew into her bedroom. An entire day of play lay ahead of her, a treat she had every intention of savoring. Her feelings for Ryan last night had bubbled over into today. When had she ever laughed so much? She couldn’t let it go. A little voice in her head was nagging frantically about combustible chemistry, but she ignored it. She refused to let anything ruin a perfectly good day.
Her swimsuit was buried deep, for good reason. A reason she ignored as she drew it out of the drawer and slipped it on with a grin. The suit was another of Love Lace’s rejects, but this one wasn’t too dreadfully flawed. It was a black two-piece suit with a modest halter top. The bottom was cut high on the thigh, only an eensy bit higher on one thigh than the other-enough for Marie to reject it, not enough so anyone else would notice.
Over the suit she pulled on a lemon-yellow terry-cloth top and navy shorts, then donned sneakers and a lemon-and-navy scarf. She fed Truce, stuffed a towel into a beach bag, threw open the door to her apartment and stopped dead.
Ryan was standing there, leaning negligently against the doorjamb as if he’d been waiting in that same spot for four and a half years. His long body was casually attired in white jeans and a loose short-sleeved black shirt, open at the collar. His grin, impossibly, was both lazy and impatient. “Your meeting go okay?”
“Yes. Fine,” she said, bewildered.
“Exactly okay? The dude didn’t give you any trouble?”
“Ryan. Of course not. For heaven’s sa-”
“Good. Let’s go find my ocean,” he said.
If she didn’t need a keeper, why did he seem to have the job?
Chapter Seven
“Your ocean?” Greer repeated with amusement some hours later, as they were driving down the central-and only-road along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
“All right, all right, you can claim a little shoreline.” Ryan shot her a grin.
“That sounded grudging.”
“I grew up believing the Atlantic was mine. Your coastline may be a little different from Maine’s, but I’d still swear that’s my baby.”
“Possessive about the little things, aren’t you?” Greer made one more vain attempt to adjust her scarf so the offshore wind wouldn’t blow the hair into her eyes. Giving up, she pulled the thing off and tossed it on the dashboard.
“Better,” Ryan approved.
“You’d think so. I can’t see.”
“Irrelevant. You look more like a sexy mermaid with your hair going every which way and the sea behind you.”
Greer shook her head in despair. “No one’s ever accused me of having scaly legs before.”
She had to shout. When they’d reached the coast, Ryan had opened all the windows, liberally applied his foot to the accelerator and turned up the radio. Barry Manilow claimed he couldn’t smile without them. Greer had always been a sucker for Manilow’s love songs.
And she was getting a glimpse of a very different Ryan today. His lazy grin never stopped; he clearly wasn’t going to allow a serious thought to surface; and he was radiating a Huck-Finn-playing-hooky kind of charm.
Scrub-covered sand dunes whipped past them, bordering the road on both sides. Every once in a while they drove over a low hill and suddenly caught a glimpse of endless gray-green waters and foaming breakers. A puckish wind gathered enough momentum to push the clouds to someone else’s horizon; other than that, the day was impossibly calm.
For Greer, work, people and crank callers had disappeared. And McCullough, she thought dismally, was very badly under her skin-and getting worse. Few people could drag her near the water these days, and yet she hadn’t hesitated to accept the invitation from Ryan, and worse, she had enjoyed every minute of it.