Kate Hamilton was anything but cold. Everything about her was hot. The look in her eyes after he'd soul-kissed her. Her response to him. Her temper. The way she'd torn out of his house like she was on fire. The next time he saw Kate, he fully expected her to hit him with her white-hot anger.
He probably deserved it. He probably should apologize. Too bad he wasn't sorry.
Kate pulled her CRV into her grandfather's detached garage and cut the engine. The door squeaked as it rolled closed in the old metal track. She stared straight ahead at several boxes sitting on her grandfather's workbench.
Rob Sutter had kissed her, and she was still in shock.
Her hands fell from the steering wheel to her lap. Kiss seemed too mild a word. Consumed. He'd consumed her. Overpowered her resistance.
She touched her fingers to her bottom lip, where it was a little tender from his soul patch. She was thirty-four, and she didn't think she'd ever been kissed like that in her life. One second she'd just been standing there eating granola and talking, and in the next, his mouth had been on hers. One second the air around her had seemed normal, and in the next, it had turned thick with passion and need and lust. It had pressed in on her in hot, beating waves, and all she'd been able to do was grab onto him for dear life.
She'd held onto his big shoulders, and when he'd taken her hand and pushed it down his chest, she hadn't had a thought in her head other than the feel of hard, defined muscles and flat, corded belly. He'd scrambled her brains and sucked out her will to say no. Then he'd pressed her hand against his erection. She should have been appalled. Outraged that a man whom she hardly knew had done that. Right now, sitting in her grandfather's garage, she was outraged, but at the time, the only thought that had slid through her brain was, I guess he can get it up. Followed closely by, Mmm, he's big all over.
Kate grabbed her keys and reached for her purse. While she'd been melting all over him, he'd only kissed her to make a point. He could definitely get it up. While she'd been all light-headed and brain dead, he'd made a second point. He still didn't want her. Not only did she feel outraged, she felt rejected, too. Again. She hadn't learned her lesson the first time.
Kate walked from the garage, across the side of the yard and into the house. There was a bowl and spoon in the sink, and Kate dropped her backpack by two empty boxes on the kitchen table. She moved through the living room and took a peek into her grandfather's room. He lay very still beneath a faded patchwork quilt her grandmother had made years ago from scraps of her children's clothes. Above the bed, the shoulders, neck, and head of an antelope her grandfather had shot back in 1979 stuck out of the wall like it was jumping through the Sheetrock. His hands were folded across his chest and he stared up at the ceiling. He looked dead.
Kate rushed to the side of his bed. "Grandpa!"
He turned his head and looked at her though runny, bloodshot eyes. "Did you get Rob his flaxseed?"
"Yes." She stopped by the nightstand and pressed a hand to her beating heart. "You scared me to death. How are you feeling?"
"Pretty good, now. Grace stopped by."
"I know, she said she would." She noticed the Nyquil and aspirin on the stand next to the pussycat alarm clock. Its cute little pussycat eyes winked on the half minute. "Have you eaten dinner?"
"Grace made me soup." He looked back up at the ceiling. "It was pretty good. Homemade chicken noodle. You can tell a good woman by her soup."
Kate thought it probably took a little bit more than soup. "Do you need anything?" she asked as she shrugged out of her coat.
"Yes, I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"I've got some empty boxes out for you to put some of your grandmother's things in." A horrible cough racked his chest, then he added, "I thought you should take anything you might want."
This was news. Big news. Kate wondered what had happened to bring it about, but she didn't ask, in case he changed his mind. "Okay. Anything else?"
"Turn out the light."
She flipped the switch and moved back into the kitchen. She took the bowl and spoon from the sink and placed them in the dishwasher. As she added soap, she wondered how a nice woman like Grace could have raised a man like Rob. How a "good woman" who made a sick old man soup could raise a man who just grabbed unsuspecting women and kissed the breath right out of them. A man who could kiss like that, get that turned on, and not try and take things further. That wasn't natural.
She started the dishwasher and glanced about the kitchen. She didn't know where to start. What was she going to do with a house full of Tom Jones stuff? Rent a shed and store it the rest of her life?
Her gaze fell on the set of Tom decorative plates held in a rack by the table, and her thoughts returned to the kiss Rob had planted on her. What kind of man grabbed a woman's hand and shoved it on his erection? She got a stack of newspapers by the back door and set them on the table. Unfortunately she knew the answer to her last question. The kind of man who wanted to prove he didn't have a problem getting it up. In the calmer part of her brain, she could even kind of, sort of, understand why he'd done it. But what she didn't understand was what kind of man got that hard and pushed a woman away? She'd never known a man that sexually turned-on who didn't think she should drop to her knees and do something about it.
Whatever his reason, it didn't matter. She should have been the one to stop things before they'd gotten to that point. She should have been the one to step back. The one in control. He should have been the one left dazed and mortified.
She told herself that at some point she would have stopped him. That before their clothes hit the ground, she would have grabbed her bag and gone home. That's what she told herself. Problem was, she wasn't all that convincing. Not even to herself.
Kate wrapped a plate in paper and set it in the box. Rob Sutter was a cheater and a bad emotional risk. He was rarely nice, and most often a jerk, which explained her inexplicable attraction to him.
He'd humiliated her twice now. Two times he'd left her embarrassed by her own behavior and stunned by his rejection. That was two times too many.
There couldn't and wouldn't be a third.
Ten
Stanley read over his poem one last time. It had taken him three days to write it, crossing out one word, substituting another, and he still wasn't sure he'd expressed himself right. The poem ended with the word span reimburse, which was, admittedly, stupid.
He knew Grace liked poetry, and he wanted to tell her how much he appreciated her looking in on him. He wanted to tell her he thought she was a good nurse, but he hadn't been able to think up a good word to rhyme with nurse — hearse and purse just didn't do it.
He folded the poem and placed it in an envelope. He'd been out of commission with the bad chest cold for four days, and Grace had stopped by every morning before work and every night after just to check up on him. She'd taken his pulse and listened to his lungs. She talked about Rob and he talked about Katie. She always left him soup. She was a good woman.
He placed a stamp in the corner, then glanced out of the office. Katie was in front with the Frito-Lay salesman, probably getting suckered into stocking the "Natural and Organic" products, which was a bunch of hokum as far as Stanley was concerned.
He hurriedly wrote Grace's address and stuck the envelope under a stack of outgoing mail. A pile of pamphlets sat on his desk, and he opened a drawer and dumped them inside. He knew his granddaughter wanted him to think about upgrading his cash register and bookkeeping system. He wasn't interested. He was seventy-one and too old to change the way he'd been doing business for more than forty years. If his wife hadn't died, he'd be retired by now, spending his retirement fund on travel or some other type of recreation, not on some integrated accounting system.