he muttered, “why can’t women be sensible—like men?”
After what felt like minutes he said, louder, “I’ve got that mutt here and I’m not taking her with me when I leave. Come on down and get her. Unless you just want her to wander off and get…lost.” You had to be careful with Jilly over some things. Most things.
He lobbed more pieces of gravel, being careful to make sure they barely touched the glass. She’d have to hear them.
The next one he tossed a little harder—and he winced. The pane cracked. He blew up his cheeks and stared upward. What kind of luck was that, dammit? A piece of gravel thrown underhand and gently shouldn’t break a window.
Aw hell, he had broken her window. And he was a bit old to run away.
He kept on looking up but there was no sign of Jilly. She was in, he’d stake his life on it. Admittedly her car wasn’t around to prove it, but that didn’t mean a thing since the Beetle was in the shop.
Kneeling beside the dog once more, he told her, “I give up. The woman is totally unreasonable. You stay here and bark whenever you feel like it. If you leave it could be curtains—for both of us. But she’ll show eventually and take you in—she’s too soft to turn you away.” He lifted one ear flap and growled softly. “Do that. It works every time.”
Jilly had opened the front door a couple of inches while Guy had been throwing rocks at her bedroom window. She couldn’t believe a grown man would kneel there in the dirt giving a dog instructions as if the poor animal understood and would do as she was told.
“Only you would try to frighten a sweet dog like that,” she said.
He started and looked at her over his shoulder, and she did believe that if there were any light she’d see he was blushing.
“Why didn’t you let me in?” he demanded.
“Before you broke my window, you mean?”
“There must be something wrong with the glass for it to break like that. It’s your own fault, anyway. I need to talk to you and you wouldn’t let me in.”
“I’m letting you in now. Get up and move before I call the sheriff and have you hauled off to jail.”
Guy could see the glitter in her eyes but very little else. “You can be so annoying,” he said.
“Thanks—maybe you don’t need to come in after all.”
“I thought you were upset. Crying.”
She swallowed. “Why would I be? If you’re coming in, come, and don’t leave her outside or you’ll be back with her before you can check your fly,” Jilly finished with her mouth open. She never, ever said things like that.
Guy decided against suggesting she had a fly fixation. He stood and went inside. Neither of them needed to worry about whether Goldilocks would join them.
“Do you always break people’s windows if they don’t answer the door?” Jilly said. “Do you have any idea how bizarre that is?” She led him into her small sitting room and turned on the lamps.
Ignoring her, he went directly to the windows and drew the drapes.
“You,” she said while her insides shook. “You don’t get to come in here and do as you please.”
“We’d rather not be seen,” he said. Bareheaded for once, he’d found the time to change into clean jeans and a white shirt.
“You’re right,” she told him. He looked good—much too good.
Now that he couldn’t give her the manly, calming hug he’d practiced in his mind, Guy scrambled for a way to make conversation. “Someone put a dead chicken on my engine block.” Great. He could have said anything but that.
She narrowed her eyes. “When?” The thermal cotton pajamas she wore wouldn’t have been so appealing on any other woman.
Guy’s throat dried out. “Not long ago. I was getting ready to come here and left the engine running a bit. The smoke and smell were my first clues.”
Suddenly, she dropped into the corner of an orange suede couch and he realized she had turned pale. “That’s something to do with voodoo,” she said, pulling up her knees. “You’re making it up, of course you are. People don’t do those things anymore.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m makin’ it up. Get dressed and I’ll take you to see the mess it made. I’m goin’ to be smelling burned barbecue for weeks.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That could have been a warning.”
“What kind of warning?”
“Not to do something you’re doing. To keep your nose out of people’s business, maybe.”
“Did you put it there?” Sometimes the devil made your tongue loose.
Jilly gathered her voluminous hair behind her head and gave him the kind of steady, sharp hazel stare intended to make him back off.
“No, of course you didn’t. I’ll have to follow it up, because unless it was put in my car by mistake, some-one’s following me around and looking for opportunities to be a pain in the neck.” He smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.
Time for a new angle. “Jilly, Cyrus told me you were real upset. He’s worried about you.”
Jilly couldn’t stand thinking she’d troubled Cyrus. “I don’t know why you thought coming here would make a difference.”
“Because,” he said, standing over her, “Cyrus told me it’s my fault if you’re unhappy. He said I don’t treat you well. In fact, he said I treat you badly.”
“Sit down,” she said. “My neck’s starting to hurt.”
Rather than retreat to either a dark blue chair, or a love seat, he sat down right where he was, on the couch beside Jilly with his hip touching her drawn-up bare feet.
Goldilocks jumped up at his other side, but before she could make herself comfortable, he ordered her down. “Dogs need a lot of attention,” he said. “They need a home where there’s more than one person to make sure they do what they’re supposed to.”
“Millions of people on their own have dogs.”
Silence lengthened. He slid his hands behind his neck and squinted at the ceiling. Let her be the one to start talking.
Finally he glanced at her—and found she’d closed her eyes.
Well, hell. “Do you keep the kitchens and the back gate locked at the café?”
Her eyes popped open and she frowned. “Of course not. People are coming and going all the time. And the garbage is out there. D’you like chocolate?”
She was changing the subject. “Yeah.” He thought about the next thing he needed to say.
Jilly scooted to her knees and bent over the side of the couch. Her bottom stuck up in the air and he heard her open a drawer in a cabinet. She puffed and struggled and slowly pulled and pushed herself back where she’d started from.
She took the top off a box of pralines and held them out.
Guy looked into the box but his vision glazed. He still saw Jilly’s bottom, tidy, round, curvy as a bottom should be curvy, and the way she crossed her feet to get more purchase while she all but stood on her head.
“Take one,” she said, sounding irritable.
“I thought you said chocolate.” He felt a little disoriented and the idea of the lady’s nether regions had awakened other parts of him.
“That was just a question,” Jilly told him. “I was thinking about the pralines all along.”
He took one and put the whole thing in