as I could not help but notice!” This said a touch grimly.
“It was your phone call that made me so anxious to not be noisy. I had just gone to sleep. They woke me up jumping on the bed. Then they wanted to eat. Then they wanted to play this game.
“They said their mother let them play it all the time. I was to sit in a chair, and they would wrap me in toilet tissue. I just didn’t see the harm. I was desperate to keep them quiet.”
For you.
Even though she hadn’t said it out loud a sardonic smile touched the glorious curve of his mouth. “Ah, yes, the complaining neighbor.”
“Not that I was blaming you,” she said hastily.
“That’s good.”
“Though you were very intimidating on the phone.” He was still very intimidating. So she tossed her head and added, like a woman not easily intimidated, “And a little rude.”
“I get that way when I’m sleep deprived. So, if you could just continue with your little story.”
Her little story? She was beginning to find her rescuer a bit aggravating. He was just one of those men. So supremely self-confident, so sure in his own skin, that it grated slightly. Daniel Riverton was a man who compared a woman’s hair to whiskey, and guessed at her earrings, as a matter of course.
Still, she did, possibly, owe him her life, so an explanation was in order.
“So they were going around and around me, each of them with their own roll of tissue. They were concentrating very hard, and they were being very quiet, for once, and I was very grateful for that. But it was terribly hypnotic. I must have nodded off. I can’t believe I did that! But I’ve been working all day, and up all night with them, since they arrived, and I just drifted off. And when I woke up, I was trapped. I couldn’t believe how strong it was. You’d think you could just rip through tissue, but, as you can see they got into my quilting stuff, too—”
She was blathering and she noticed he was more focused on the task of releasing her than her “little story.” She shut her mouth with a snap. The twins, finally, arrived with a pair of scissors and he made quick work of the rest of the bindings, seemingly not even noticing that she had stopped talking.
She watched the dark silkiness of his hair as he bent over her, cutting away the twins’ handiwork. As she had suspected, it wasn’t just tissue. He cut through quilting batting as well. Sometime after she’d gone to sleep, the twins had helped themselves to things from her workroom. She noticed an inch of white fluff floated above the floor of the entire living room and knew they had finally succeeded in getting into her bags of cotton stuffing.
Since they had arrived they had been begging her to play with the bags of snow.
And the envelopes—orders—that she had stacked so neatly on her desk, afraid to open them, were strewn from one end of the apartment to the other. She groaned, and he followed her gaze.
“You get a great deal of mail,” he said. He stooped and picked up an envelope. “It’s addressed to Cat in the Hat. What’s that about? Your hair?”
“My hair?”
“Sorry.” He grinned with apologetic charm. “It does kind of have that wet cat look about it. A wet cat pulled from a hat.”
“I thought it looked like I put my finger in an electrical socket.”
“I’m rethinking it,” he said, regarding her so intently she could feel heat burning up her cheeks. “A wet cat who stuck its paw in a socket?”
“Oh! Is it that bad?”
“I’m just teasing you. Sorry.”
She was being teased by the Daniel Riverton? Life certainly had some unexpected twists and turns in it. She contemplated this one. She contemplated that she seemed to like being teased.
Her relationship with Miles could not have been called playful. And she hadn’t been aware, until this very moment, that that was a lack.
He brushed a hand over his eyes and apologized again. “You aren’t the only one who is exhausted.” He cast a look of unveiled annoyance at her nieces. “So why are you getting mail addressed to the Cat in the Hat?”
“It’s a long story.” For a delirious moment she pictured herself pouring it out to him. Who better to share it with? A successful businessman—
“Perhaps another time, then,” he said with utter insincerity, reminding her of the arrogance right under the surface of all the charm...and teasing. “I think we’ve got you free, Miss Cat-in-the-Hat.”
And that would be his cue to leave, and never glance back. Certainly, he would not want to hear about all her production woes with a company that would be so teeny next to his it would be like a mouse standing beside an elephant.
No, closer to a flea.
“You are surprisingly tiny under all that,” he said, letting an enormous ball of tissue drop from his hands as he inspected her. “At least I think you are.”
Despite the fact her freedom meant she would probably never see her neighbor again, Trixie was relieved beyond belief to be loose, and even more relieved that she had on a perfectly respectable, if somewhat bulky, housecoat that she had made herself.
The housecoat might have left her tininess in question, and made her want to call out her weight to him as further proof she was not in any way related to the Doughboy. But this situation could have been even more horrible if she hadn’t had it on. What if she’d been sitting here in her pajamas, a pair of boy-style shorty-shorts and a camisole?
That would take the embarrassment of this already horrendously embarrassing situation to a brand new level.
She shook each limb experimentally, hoping to be able to dismiss him. But she couldn’t help but wince when she shook her right arm.
“That hurts?” he said, watching her way too closely. “It’s the one you fell on when you toppled the chair, isn’t it? You’ve got a mark on your temple, too. Right here.”
He touched her on the bruised flesh of her temple. His touch was exquisite. Tempered, almost tender, despite the powerful energy in it.
Imagine a mere fingertip making her feel like that! Miles’s touch never had.
It made the years of spinsterhood and devotion to her company, which she had recently sworn to, seem like they could use some second thought. It looked as if they might be unbearably lonely. Not to mention boring.
Not to mention, she might be missing something she had never experienced. She had a certain breathless awareness of Daniel—tickling along her every sense—after just a few moments with him, that she had never experienced before.
What if Miles had been right? What if there was something more? What if he’d done them both a favor?
After months of nursing her resentment against her former boyfriend, the thoughts felt like a betrayal—of herself! Daniel was looking at her way too closely, as if her sudden confusion and self-questioning were an open book to him. His finger still rested with exquisite tenderness on the bruised flesh of her temple. “Are you going to be all right on your own?”
CHAPTER THREE
FURIOUS WITH HERSELF, Trixie moved her temple away from his fingertip.
How unfair was that? That Daniel Riverton had stumbled upon the very question she had been secretly asking herself while outwardly declaring her contentment in her new life of independence?
But suddenly, the questions all seemed different. It wasn’t just could she manage her own business and look after herself and her apartment and her nieces? It was, could she live without feeling the way his touch on her temple had made her feel?
He was talking about right now, Trixie