he’d been leaning all this time against a reproduction of Rodin’s The Kiss, and that he’d just bonked his head on a naked breast hard enough to make himself see stars.
Man, oh, man, he thought as he rubbed at the lump that was already beginning to form. This job was going to shorten his life for sure.
AS NATALIE WAS climbing the stairs to her apartment that evening, juggling two bags of groceries she’d picked up on the way home from the museum, she came to a halt in the second floor landing to adjust the strap on her purse. It had nothing to do with the fact that she heard someone inside Jack Miller’s apartment talking. And she only hesitated a moment after completing that adjustment because she needed to rest. It wasn’t because she thought she heard him use the word whacked. Because he might not have said whacked. He might have said fact. Or quacked. Or shellacked. And those were all totally harmless words.
Then again, maybe he’d said hacked, she thought as a teensy little feeling of paranoia wedged its way under her skin. Or smacked. Or even hijacked. Which weren’t so harmless words.
Or maybe he’d said cracked, she thought wryly, since he could have been talking to someone about the mental state of his new upstairs neighbor.
She really had been spending too much time listening to Mrs. Klosterman this week. And she knew better than to take seriously someone who thought The X-Files was a series of documentaries by Ken Burns. Sighing to herself, Natalie finished adjusting her purse strap and shifted her grocery bags to a more manageable position, then settled her foot on the next step.
And then stopped dead in her tracks—and she really wished she’d come up with a better way to think about that than dead in her tracks—because she heard Jack’s voice say, clear as day, “I’ll kill ’im.”
Telling herself she was just imagining things, Natalie turned her ear toward the door, if for no other reason than to reassure herself that she was just imagining things. But instead of being reassured, she heard Jack’s voice again, louder and more emphatic this time, saying, “No, Manny, I mean it. I’m gonna kill the guy. No way will I let ’im get away with that.”
And then Natalie’s world went a little fuzzy, and she had to sit down. Which—hey, whattaya know—gave her a really great seat for eavesdropping on the rest of Jack’s conversation. But when she realized she was hearing only his side, she concluded he must be on the telephone with someone. Still, only his side told her plenty.
There was a long pause after that second avowal of his intent to murder someone, then, “Look, I had him in my sights all day,” she heard Jack continue, “but there was always a crowd around, so an opportunity never presented itself.”
There was more silence for a moment, wherein Natalie assumed the other person was speaking again, then she heard Jack’s voice once more. “Yeah, I know. But it’s not going to be easy. The guy’s so edgy. I never know what he’s gonna do next, where he’s gonna go. What?” More silence, then, “Hey, I know what I’m being paid to do, and I’ll do it. It just might not go down the way we planned, that’s all.”
Holy moly, Natalie thought. He wasn’t a Mob hit man turned Mob informant. He was a Mob hit man period!
No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. There was a perfectly good explanation for what she was hearing. Hey, she herself had wanted to kill more than a few people in her time, including several of her students just this past week, because a lot of them had neglected to do their assigned reading. So just because someone said, “I’ll kill ’im,” didn’t mean that they were going to, you know, kill ’im. And that business about the crowd being around someone, that could have meant anything. And the part about being paid to do something? Well, now, that could be anything, too. He could have been paid to deliver phone books for all Natalie knew.
Yeah, that was it. He was the new phone book delivery guy. That explained all those nice muscles. A person had to be built to haul around those White Pages.
“Don’t worry, Manny,” Jack said angrily on the other side of his door, bringing Natalie’s attention back to the matter at hand. “I came here to do a job, and I’m not leaving until it’s done. You just better hope it doesn’t get any messier than it already has.”
Okay, so maybe he dropped some of the phone books in a puddle and they got dirty, she thought. She could see that. They’d had a lot of rain lately. And those phone books got unwieldy when you tried to carry too many at one time. And those plastic bags they put them in were cheap as hell. It could have happened to anyone.
When Natalie stood up, she still felt a little muzzy-headed, though whether that was because of her initial fright or the profound lameness of her excuses for Jack’s words, she couldn’t have said. In any event, she was totally unprepared for the opening of his door, and even less prepared for when he came barreling out of it, shrugging on his leather motorcycle jacket. And he was obviously un-prepared to find her lurking outside his door, because he kept on coming, nearly knocking her down the steps before he saw her.
Hastily, he grabbed her to steady her before she could go tumbling back down to the living room in a heap. But she overcompensated and hurled her body forward, an action that thrust her right into that muscular phone book-delivering body of his. And that made her drop both bags of groceries, which did spill out and go tumbling back down to the living room.
“Whoa,” Jack said as he balanced her, curling his fingers over her upper arms to do so. “Where’s the fire?”
Gosh, she should probably just keep that information to herself, Natalie thought as heat began seeping through her belly and spreading up into her breasts and down into her…
And that was when she remembered that, among the groceries she’d bought today, was a box of tampons. Oh, damn.
“I am so sorry to run into you,” she said.
And then she could think of not one more thing to utter. Because Jack’s hands on her arms just felt too yummy for words, strong and gentle at the same time. Hands like his would be equally comfortable sledgehammering solid rock or stroking a woman’s naked flesh, she thought. And speaking for herself, she would have been equally happy watching him do either.
“No, I’m the one who ran into you, so I’m the one who’s sorry,” he told her, his fingers still curving gently over her arms.
In fact, his thumbs on the insides of her arms moved gently up and down, as if he were trying to calm her. Which was pretty ironic, seeing as how the action only incited her to commit mayhem. Preferably on his person. ASAP. That fire he’d asked about leaped higher inside her, threatening to burn out of control.
“I wasn’t watching where I was going,” he added. “You okay?”
She nodded, even though okay was pretty much the last thing she felt at the moment. “Yeah,” she said a little breathlessly. “I’m okay. You just, um, startled me, that’s all.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything more. Natalie only continued to stand staring up at Jack, marveling at how handsome he was, and Jack gazed back down at her, thinking she knew not what. But she wished she did. She wished she could read his mind at that moment and know what his impression of her was. Because he was making an awfully big impression on her.
Finally, softly, “Let me help you pick this stuff up,” he offered.
And before Natalie could decline, he was stooping to collect the nearly empty grocery bags and scooping up the few items that hadn’t gone down the stairs. Like, for instance—of course—the tampons. Amazingly, though, he didn’t bat an eye, didn’t even hesitate as he picked them up and tossed them back into the paper sack. He only glanced up at her and smiled and said, “I got sisters,” and his casualness about it went a long way toward endearing him to Natalie. It also convinced her she had misunderstood whatever he’d been talking about on the phone. Because no Mob hit man could possibly handle a box of tampons that comfortably. It was odd logic, to be sure, but it comforted her nonetheless.
She bent, too, then, to collect her things, wincing at the scattered