Authors: Perfect
"Then why didn't you leave after you got me back here and into bed?"
Julie felt as if she were wandering through a field filled with land mines. Even if she had the courage to
look at him and blurt out exactly how she felt about him, she couldn't be certain the announcement wouldn't blow up in her face. "For one thing, I honestly didn't think of it, and besides," she added on a
note of relieved inspiration, "I didn't know where the car keys were!"
"They were in my pants pocket—the pants you took off me."
"Actually, I … I didn't think of looking for the car keys. I suppose I was simply too worried about you to think clearly."
"Don't you find that a little odd given the circumstances that brought you here?"
Julie leaned forward and picked up a magazine that was lying half off the table and laid it fanlike atop the
other two, then she moved the crystal bowl of silk flowers two inches to the left, to the precise center of the table. "Everything has seemed pretty odd for three days," she hedged cautiously. "I can't begin to guess what would be normal behavior in these circumstances." Standing up, she began straightening the
throw pillows she'd disarranged during her nap. She was bending down to pick one up from the carpet when he said in a laughter-tinged voice, "That's a habit you have, isn't it—straightening things out when
you feel uneasy?"
"I wouldn't say that. I'm just a very tidy person." She stood up and looked at him, and her composure slipped a notch toward laughter. His brows were raised in mocking challenge and his eyes were gleaming
with amused fascination. "All right," she said with a helpless laugh, "I admit it. It
is
a nervous habit." As she finished putting the pillow where it belonged, she added with a rueful smile, "Once, when I was nervous about failing an exam in college, I reorganized everything in the attic, then I alphabetized all my
brothers' stereo records and my mother's recipes."
His eyes laughed at her story, but his voice was puzzled and solemn. "Am I doing something that makes
you nervous?"
Julie gaped at him in stunned laughter, then she said with a lame attempt at severity, "You've been doing things that make me
extremely
nervous for three solid days!"
Despite her censorious tone, the way she was looking at him filled Zack with poignant tenderness: There
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was no trace of fear or suspicion or revulsion or hatred anywhere on her lovely, expressive face, and it
seemed like a lifetime since anyone had looked at him like this. His own lawyers hadn't really believed he
was innocent. Julie did. He'd have known it just by looking at her, but the memory of her words at the stream, the way her voice had broken when she said them, made it a thousand times more meaningful:
"Remember when you said you wanted someone to believe that you're innocent? I didn't completely believe you then, but I do now. I swear it! I know you didn't kill anyone."
She could have left him to die at the stream, or if that was unthinkable to a minister's daughter, she could
have gotten him back here, then taken the car and called the police from the nearest phone. But she hadn't. Because she really believed he was innocent.
Zack wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her how much that meant to him; he wanted to bask in the warmth of her smile and hear her infectious peal of
laughter again. Most of all, he wanted to feel her mouth on his, to kiss her and caress her until they were
both wild, and then to thank her for the gift of her trust with his body. Because that was the only thing he
had to give her.
He knew she sensed a change in their relationship and for some incomprehensible reason, it was making
her more nervous than she'd been when he was holding a gun on her. He knew that just as surely as he
knew they were going to make love tonight and that she wanted to almost as much as he did.
Julie waited for him to say something or to laugh at her last jibe, and when he didn't, she stepped back and gestured toward the kitchen. "Are you hungry?"
she asked for the second time.
He nodded slowly, and her hand stilled at the husky intimacy she thought she heard in his voice.
"Starved."
Julie told herself very firmly that he had
not
deliberately chosen that particular word because it had been
used during their quarrel last night in a sexual context. Trying to look innocent of all such thoughts, she
said very politely, "What would you like?"
"What are you offering?" he countered, playing verbal chess with her with such ease that Julie wasn't at
all certain if all the double meanings to their exchange existed only in her fevered imagination.
"I was offering food, of course."
"Of course," he solemnly agreed, but his eyes were glinting with amusement.
"Stew, to be specific."
"It's important to be specific."
Julie elected to make a strategic retreat from the strangely charged conversation and began backing away toward the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. "I'll put out the dinner things and serve the stew over there."
"Let's eat here by the fire instead," he said, his voice like a soft caress. "It's cozier."
Cozier… Julie's mouth went dry. In the kitchen, she worked with outward efficiency, but her hands were trembling so hard she could hardly ladle the thick stew into bowls. From the corner of her eye, she saw him walk over to the stereo and flip through the stacks of CDs, loading them into the revolving tray; a
moment later, Barbra Streisand's lilting voice filled the room. Of all the CDs in the cabinet that ranged
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from Elton John to jazz, he'd picked Streisand.
Cozier.
The word swirled around in her brain; she reached for two napkins, put them on the tray, and then, with her back to the living room, Julie braced her palms on the counter top and drew a long, steadying breath.
Cozier. By his definition, she knew perfectly well that meant "more conducive to intimacy."
"Romantic."
She knew it, just as clearly as she knew that the situation between them had altered irreversibly from the
moment she chose to stay here with him rather than leaving him at the creek or bringing him here and calling the police. He knew it, too. She could see the evidence. There was a new softness in his eyes when he looked at her and a smiling tenderness in his voice, and they were both utterly shattering to her
self-control. Julie straightened and shook her head at her foolish, futile attempt to deceive herself. There was nothing left of her self-control, no more arguments that mattered, nowhere she could go to hide from
the truth.
The truth was that she wanted him. And he wanted her. They both knew it.
She put silverware on the tray, slanted another glance at him over her shoulder, and hastily looked away.
He was sitting on the sofa, his arms spread out across the back of it, his foot propped casually atop the
opposite knee, and he was watching her—relaxed, indulgent, and sexy. He wasn't going to rush her, and he wasn't a bit nervous either, but then he'd undoubtedly made love thousands of times with hundreds of
women—all of whom were much prettier and
unquestionably more experienced than she was.
Julie stilled a compulsive urge to start reorganizing the kitchen drawers.
Zack watched her return to the sofa and, bending down, place the tray on the table, her movements graceful and uncertain, like a frightened gazelle.
Firelight gleamed on her heavy chestnut hair as it spilled
forward over her shoulders from a single side part; it glowed on her soft skin as she arranged the place mats and bowls. Her long, sooty lashes cast fan-shaped shadows on her smooth cheeks, and he noticed
for the first time that she had beautiful hands, the fingers slender, nails long and tapered. He had a sudden
poignant memory of those hands clasping his face to her at the stream as she rocked him in her arms and pleaded with him to get up. At the time, it had seemed like a dream in which he had merely been an uninvolved spectator, but later, after he staggered into bed, his recollections were clearer. He remembered her hands smoothing blankets over him, the frantic worry in her lovely voice… As he looked at her now, he marveled anew at the strange aura of innocence about her, then he suppressed a puzzled smile at the realization that, for some reason, Julie was assiduously avoiding his eyes. For the last
three days she had opposed, defied, and challenged him; today, she had outwitted him and then saved his life. And yet, for all her dauntless courage and her spunk, she was amazingly shy, now that the hostilities
between them were over. "I'll get some wine," he said, and before she could decline he got up and returned with a bottle and two stemmed glasses.
"I didn't poison it," he remarked a few minutes later when he saw her reach automatically for the glass then yank her hand away.
"I didn't think you did," she said with a self-conscious laugh. She picked up the glass and drank some,
and Zack noticed that her hand was shaking. She was uneasy about going to bed with him, he decided; she knew he hadn't been near a woman in five years.
She was probably worried that he was going to jump on her the moment they were done with their meal or that once they started making love, he'd lose control and finish in two minutes. Zack didn't know why she should be concerned about all that; if anyone
should be worried about his ability to pleasurably prolong the act and perform well after five years abstinence, it was him.
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And he was.
He decided to try to reassure her by engaging her in some sort of pleasant, casual conversation.
Mentally, he rifled through those topics of immediate interest to him and reluctantly discarded the subject of her beautiful body, her gorgeous eyes, and—most reluctantly of all—her whispered statement at the stream that she wanted to go to bed with him. The last reminded him of the other things she'd said to him
in the bedroom this afternoon, when he hadn't been able to shake off his numb paralysis and respond.
Now, he was almost certain he hadn't been meant to hear most of them. Or else he'd only imagined some of them. He wished she'd talk about her students; he loved her stories. He was about to try to get her to talk about them, when he realized she was giving him an odd, curious look. "What?" he asked.
"I was wondering," she said, "that day—at the restaurant—did I
really
have a flat tire?"
Zack struggled to suppress his guilty smile. "You saw it with your own eyes."
"Are you saying that I ran over a nail or something and didn't realize my tire was going flat?"
"I wouldn't say it happened exactly like that." He was pretty certain she suspected him now, but her face
was so marvelously bland that he had no idea if she was playing cat and mouse with him or not.
"How
would
you say it happened?"
"I'd say that the side of your tire probably came into sudden contact with a sharp, pointed object."
Finished with her stew, she leaned back and fixed him with a level look that would have shamed an instant confession and apology out of any recalcitrant eight-year-old male. He could almost see her,
standing outside her classroom with a wrongdoer, looking at him with exactly that same expression. "A sharp, pointed object?" she speculated, lifting her brows. "Like a knife?"
"Like a knife," Zack confirmed, trying desperately to keep his face straight.
"Your knife?"
"Mine." With an impenitent grin, he added in a boyish chant, "I'm sorry, Miss Mathison."
She didn't miss a beat. Raising her brows, she said drolly, "I'll expect you to fix that tire, Zack."
The only thing that quelled his shout of laughter was the sweet shock of hearing her finally say his name.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. It was unbelievable, Zack thought, his entire life was in dire chaos, and all he wanted to do was burst out laughing and drag her into his arms. "I don't have to write a three-essay on why I shouldn't have done it, do I?" he asked, watching her huge indigo eyes shimmer with answering
amusement as she looked pointedly at the bowl he'd just pushed aside. "No," she said, "but you're on KP
tonight."
"Aw, gee!" he replied, but he stood up obediently and picked up his bowl. As he reached for hers, he added, "You're mean, Miss Mathison!"
To which she firmly replied, "No whining, please."
Zack couldn't help it. He burst out laughing, turned his head, and surprised her with a quick kiss on her
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forehead. "Thank you," he whispered, choking back a chuckle at her flustered expression.
"For what?"
He sobered, holding her gaze. "For making me laugh. For staying here and not turning me in. For being
brave and funny and incredibly lovely in that red kimono. And for making me a wonderful meal." He chucked her under the chin to lighten the mood a split second before he realized the expression in her shining eyes wasn't embarrassment.
"I'll help you," she said, starting to stand.
Zack put his hand on her shoulder. "Stay there and enjoy the fire and the rest of your wine."
Too tense to sit still, waiting to see what would happen next, no,
when
it was going to happen, Julie got
up and walked over to the windows. Leaning her shoulder against the pane, she gazed out at the spectacular panorama of snow-covered
mountaintops gleaming in the moonlight. In the kitchen, Zack
touched the rheostat on the wall, dimming the lights on the beams above the living room to a mellow glow. "You'll be able to see outside better that way,"
he explained when she threw a questioning look over her shoulder at him. And, Julie thought, it was also much cozier with only the dimmed lights and the
glow from the fireplace to illuminate the room. Very cozy and very romantic, especially with the music playing on the stereo.