"Yes, I guess he is," Maddy said, smiling fondly after the waving plume of tail.
"I wasn't talking about him." Zack gestured at the puppets and the magical stairways of sunlight that angled down from five skylights, then walked toward her. "I mean all of it. This house, the puppets… you."
"Me?" She shook her head emphatically. "I'm not amazing." Her voice shook, and her eyes seemed to darken. He realized with another shock that she was afraid of him. He felt the desire he'd first felt the day she'd fainted in his arms in the pool, the desire to erase that fear from her eyes. To see her eyes grow luminous and soft, and finally close in complete trust and surrender…
Very slowly, he reached out and touched the nose of the large pink dragon she had gathered into her arms. To his astonishment, the dragon sneezed, then rubbed its nose with its tail.
"Gesundheit," Maddy said, watching Zack over the dragon's blue crest. She was smiling, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes held shimmers of laughter. "This is Bosley. Bosley, say hello to Zack."
The dragon muttered, "Hello." It sounded like a sulky frog.
"Bosley's nose is very ticklish," Maddy explained. "However, he does enjoy having his neck rubbed."
"Oh, yeah?" Zack murmured, and wondered if Maddy did. Feeling only a little silly, he stroked the velvet underside of the dragon's chin. The dragon made a purring sound. Zack was captivated and amused to see that its eyes had closed.
"My goodness," Maddy said, her voice sounding something like a purr as well. "I see you have a way with dragons as well as with cats and children. You must have a magic touch."
Zack didn't answer. He just looked into her eyes and slowly and with deliberate sensuousness began to stroke the dragon's neck. The dragon made delighted Mae West noises and wound itself around Zack's forearm. It rubbed its cheek ecstatically against his biceps, then rested its head on his shoulder and gazed up at him with adoring eyes.
"Hello, big fella," the dragon said in Mae West's sexiest voice.
Maddy looked startled. "Boz! You never told me you were a girl!" Her cheeks were as pink as the dragon.
"Honey," Bosley purred, "you never asked."
"You're good," Zack said softly to Maddy. "You're very, very good."
"Maybe," the dragon said, lowering her eyelashes demurely. But when I'm bad… I'm better."
"Boz!" Maddy seemed genuinely scandalized.
Zack laughed appreciatively, but even as he was doing so, he was battling intense frustration. She was good with that thing-too damn good. He knew exactly what she'd done, and knew that she'd done it deliberately. She'd used that puppet to hold him off, just as effectively as if it had been a third person-a roommate, say-instead of a toy made of velvet and papier-mache.
But Zack hadn't forgotten for one moment that under the pink fabric and paint he had caressed a soft, shapely arm. And that the dragon's head, however uncannily lifelike Maddy's skill could make it seem, was a hand-Maddy's hand. And for a few moments it had stroked his arm and shoulder and rested warmly in the hollow of his neck. His skin still tingled with his awareness of her. It was a kind of awareness he hadn't felt in a long time-hadn't even wanted to feel. And right now he knew that he wanted her hands touching his skin without the interference of cloth and cardboard. In fact, he wanted her skin touching his skin, without interference from anything at all…
But for the life of him, he didn't know how to get past her chaperones.
Four
Maddy saw that the smoky look was back in Zack's eyes and wondered if she'd gone too far. She couldn't imagine what had come over her, to use Bosley to flirt that way. Good heavens, a sensuous dragon! Who'd have thought she had it in her?
She didn't have it in her-not really. It was just the darn puppets. She was so accustomed to interacting through them in highly charged emotional situations that they sometimes took on personalities all their own. She glared accusingly at Bosley, but the dragon only returned her look of reproach with one of sleepy-eyed innocence. With a small noise of helpless dismay, Maddy plunked the puppet back onto its stand.
Now she felt naked and defenseless. Zack's presence in the huge, sunlit room made it seem too crowded, the air precious. Realizing that she was twisting her hands together in a childish manifestation of nervousness, she waved one in the general direction of the sofa and said, "Um… won't you sit down? Ill go fix some coffee-unless you'd prefer iced tea." She wondered for a moment if he needed something stronger after the shock of seeing Theresa, and was trying to remember whether she'd saved the bottle of rum Jody had brought to make eggnog last New Year's Day.
"Do you suppose," Zack asked with a disarming flash of his famous smile, "that I could have a glass of milk?"
A peculiar warmth flooded Maddy's chest. She found herself smiling back without her usual reserve. "Oh. You really do drink milk!"
His smile slipped. "Yeah… a habit that stayed with me." His hand was resting flat against his belly, just above the waistband of his jeans. Through the thin knit of his white polo shirt Maddy could see the sculptured muscles. She had a sudden vivid recollection of that chest, smooth and tan and beaded with water droplets, and felt an unfamiliar squeezing sensation in her own midsection.
Belatedly realizing that she'd been staring at both the hand and the body beneath it for quite some time in tongue-tied silence, Maddy felt the heat from her chest surge upward into her cheeks. She didn't know what she mumbled as she turned and made a hasty retreat to the kitchen.
Coward, she thought as she groped in a cupboard to find a glass. Idiot, she moaned inwardly as she opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk. What was the matter with her? He was only a man, and a very nice one, at that. Okay, so he was Zack London, but he wasn't Aquaman, or any other superhero. He was a perfectly ordinary, human man.
Except that there wasn't any way her brain was ever going to convince the rest of her that this man was "ordinary." Even now, as she watched him through her kitchen's pass-through window, she could feel the rhythms of her body change in subtle but frightening ways. Not only her pulse and respiration, but all her senses and life forces had somehow intensified. Even from this distance she could see the way the hair grew on the back of his neck, longish, unruly, undisciplined. And for the space of one heartbeat, like a dream or a memory in which a whole range of events and emotions are telescoped into a single instant of awareness, she knew what it would feel like to weave her fingers through the crisp silk of that hair and touch the hard-muscled column of his neck. She could feel his skin, like warm satin beneath her fingertips; she could smell it, soap and sunshine and a faint tang of chlorine; she could taste it…
Amanda, for heaven's sake!
The sensual images collapsed under an avalanche of guilt. With a degree of care and concentration completely unwarranted by so simple a task, she poured a glass of milk and put the carton back in the refrigerator. Carrying the glass, and her body, like fragile crystal, she walked back into the cottage's main room.
Zack hadn't accepted Maddy's invitation to sit down. He was prowling the perimeters of the room, examining the puppets that filled and overflowed every shelf and tabletop.
"This is quite a hobby you have here," he said, turning as she moved toward him. Though his eyes were in shadow, making it impossible to see the expression in them, something about the stillness of his body as he watched her made her terribly self-conscious.
"Oh, well," she murmured with a little shrug as she handed him the glass of milk, "it's actually a bit more than a hobby."