And where Greer could have criticized Ryan for interfering if he’d been a friend, she couldn’t bring herself to do so now. He’d gone over her head only because she’d given him certain rights. To love. And in loving, to protect.
Ryan, so very subtly, was bulldozing her with the fact that he considered her part of his life.
He was also busy wandering to and from the other rooms. He placed a hammer in her lap. Then two nails. Then some wire. By the time he plopped into the chair across from her, he managed somehow to look boyishly innocent.
Greer sighed. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve never tried to hang a picture before?”
“I have. But they always end up crooked.” He added hopefully, “Do you want a tape measure?”
“No. You can’t do these things by measuring. You have to do them by the look of the thing.”
She didn’t want to do it. Putting up pictures was another one of those things. Those intimate things. It didn’t involve naked skin, but it was still inescapably intimate. The picture had bothered her from the instant she’d walked in, not because it was on the floor, but because she wanted it in the right place. An idiotic feminine impulse. A desire to put her personal stamp on his place. An instinct that assumed a vested interest, and she didn’t dare give in to it.
“I thought about hanging it over the TV,” Ryan said absently.
“No!” The painting would look wretched there. Dammit. Feeling helpless, Greer stood up, straightening her blouse, and surveyed the picture and the room with a critical eye. “You can’t put it there. Hang it over the couch or on that wall so you can see it when you come in…” Her eye lingered on the far wall.
“Okay.” A step stool miraculously appeared where she was looking. “You want me to do it?” he asked innocently.
She wanted him to take a flying hike. “If you were going to do it, you wouldn’t have brought out the step stool,” she said dryly.
“You need someone to hold the nails,” he said helpfully.
She gave in. They bickered back and forth for the better part of an hour. Greer climbed up and down the step stool forty times to judge the height of the picture, endured no end of comments about her fussiness, paused for a phone conversation with her mother, hammered in the first nail crooked, made a hole in the plaster, suffered his laughter, and triumphantly accepted a glass of wine while they both surveyed the perfectly placed oil painting in shared total exhaustion.
The first sip of wine was sliding down her throat, cool and smooth, when Ryan abruptly murmured, “Stay.”
Her eyes darted up to his. The painting behind him abruptly disappeared. Something went wrong with her focus, because the only thing clear in her vision was Ryan. A man with shirtsleeves rolled up and an open collar, a man with brilliant blue eyes and ruffled hair. A man who wasn’t smiling. A man who couldn’t possibly have playfully patted her fanny moments before when she descended the step stool, because there wasn’t an ounce of play in his eyes now. Just wanting. Honest, bold, clear.
In her heart, she’d been expecting that invitation, but not at this particular instant, not after she’d just very foolishly immersed herself in playing wife for the past hour. Lots of clever reasons why she couldn’t stay popped into her head. The cat. Stockings to wash out. She’d forgotten to water the plant in her bedroom; she just now remembered it.
Gently, his arms draped over her shoulders, pulling her closer. She couldn’t speak; there was something tight and thick in her throat. Maybe the wine. Her cheek rested against his heart a moment later, his arms slowly smoothed around her and he simply held her, length to length, warmth to warmth. He felt so right she could have cried.
“You’re going to have to tell me what’s bothering you,” he said quietly. “Do you know I love you?”
She shook her head, eyes closed.
“I do, Greer. So much. I love the way you think, your eyes, your legs…” He forced her chin up with a smile. “Your sense of humor. I love being beaten by you at chess. I even love your damned cat. And I love…touching you.” Softly, he stroked her hair back from her forehead with a single finger. “I love doing that, too. Making an absolute mess out of your hair, knowing you don’t give a damn. Knowing you care more for the feel of my hands on you than about how you look. Are you going to try to tell me you don’t like it when I touch you?”
“No,” she said quietly, honestly. Her stricken eyes met his. “You know I do.”
“Greer.” His finger stayed gently tucked under her chin, his voice grave, gentle. “Has someone hurt you in bed?”
All his subtlety had disappeared, remarkably fast. She should have known. “No, nothing like that.” She flushed. The knot in her throat refused to budge. Her palms suddenly felt icy, and she was trembling. “I think…” she said hesitantly. “Ryan, I think you want something from me that just…isn’t there.”
The smallest frown furrowed his brow. “You’ll have to explain that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how,” she said helplessly.
“Honey…”
She ducked away from his touch, wrapping her arms around her chest, slowly pacing away from him, and then looking frenetically around the room for her shoes. They weren’t in sight. The door, at least, was. Until he slowly, quietly, moved in front of it.
“Look,” she said abruptly and took a huge breath, facing him. “Ryan, I’ve just never been very good at…sexual relationships.” She worked frantically to keep her tone light, casual. “Some women are the black-nightgown type, you know? Not me. Caring, loving, listening, showing respect-those are terribly important things to me in a relationship. The…other…has never really mattered to me.” She gulped. “I just feel that…that perhaps it would be wiser for us to call it off, not try to go any further. I don’t want to disappoint you, and I don’t want to be hurt.”
“Greer-”
“This is a wonderfully liberated decade. There are lots of women out there who are much more…sexual than I am. It’s not a question of willingness, or even love.” She tried for a smile. “Ryan, I go to bed in a T-shirt with a picture of Garfield on it. Does that tell you anything?”
“Greer-”
“I’ll get my shoes another time.”
Before the tears could blind her, she whisked past him and out the door, fumbled in the flowerpot for her key and whipped inside her apartment. She locked the door and leaned against it, her heart pounding, her eyes moist, her hands shaky.
She was terrified he would come after her, but he didn’t. After several long minutes of just standing there with her head thrown back against the door, she bit her lip and moved through the dark apartment to turn on a light.
The telephone jangling next to her ear made her jump. She grabbed it, for once with no fear of her crank caller, her only purpose in stopping the mind-splitting noise-or for that moment it seemed mind-splitting.
Her caller didn’t wait for her to say hello.
“I love Garfield,” said the low voice, “and the rest, sweetheart, is bull.”
He hung up.
Chapter Ten
As Greer left her apartment the following morning, she heard the sound of coughing through Ryan’s closed door. She hesitated a moment and then hurried on to work. You have to stop making him your business, Greer. Besides, he was perfectly healthy last night.
She worried about him the entire day. When she arrived home just after five, she saw that his car was already parked in the lot, and frowned on her way up the walk. He never came home from work before six.