It was clear he wanted to put the question behind him. Still she hesitated to follow his lead. His past was none of her business, but the tight set of his jaw hinted that he hid an open wound deep inside and the woman in her wanted to soothe it.
It had nothing to do with him personally. It couldn’t possibly; she’d just met the man. It was fellow feeling for the pain that humans could inflict on each other. Her mothering instinct, her father called it. As a teenager, her favorite part of baby-sitting jobs had been soothing away the tears of a scraped knee while applying simple first aid. Kiss it and make it better.
She raised her gaze to his firm mouth. For an instant, she was back in the nightclub with his lips brushing against hers. She wondered what he would do if she pulled his head down to hers and matched the contours of her mouth to his. Her breath caught for a moment, then she pushed the thought away as she felt the rise of heat up her neck. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“We have company.” His head was cocked to one side as he gestured toward the ground near their feet.
Following his gaze, a surprised laugh escaped her. A mother hen with a brood of small yellow chicks had come out from under a shrub to investigate the strangers in their midst. “How adorable. I wish I had something to feed them.”
“You’d have to carry a large sack. By law, chickens are allowed to run free on the island so they’re everywhere, including the public parks and the open-air restaurants. People love to throw them bits of their hamburger buns, so they’re always underfoot.”
“That’s so cute.”
“You’ll think so,” he murmured as he stepped around the clutch of fowl and led her down the sidewalk, “until you step in chicken droppings.”
She punched him lightly in the arm, her clenched fist bouncing off the muscle. Her fingers straightened as she dropped her hand. That was a mistake. One she’d made twice. She should not be touching this man with the casual air of old acquaintances. Or at all. She cleared her throat, searching for something to say. “I’ll have you know I watch where I’m going.”
“I watch where you’re going too.”
Kara turned her head sharply in his direction, but Niko wasn’t looking at her. Deciding it must have been an innocent remark, she pushed away the edgy awareness and focused on sight-seeing.
The street quickly became more commercial as they strolled back toward the main square. The owners of some of the houses had converted the front rooms to small stores. There were art studios with paintings and pottery, handmade clothes and jewelry as well as salons for tarot readings. There was even a small bar that delivered cold bottles of beer out of the window of what used to be the living room. They window-shopped and sometimes stepped up onto the wide front porches to check out a particularly interesting object, but didn’t find anything to draw them into the deeper recesses of the stores.
“You do seem to know your way around,” Kara said as Niko guided her across a busy street and back into the relative quiet of a residential area.
“Key West is just a couple of hours from Miami by boat or car. My friends and I came here often for the weekends.” He stopped on the sidewalk and turned toward her, a smile curving one side of his lips. “We were typical college students; scuba diving in the day and bar hopping at night. Sometimes, I miss those days.”
Kara stared up at him, trying to imagine him as young and carefree. It was impossible. He was a big, sexy male, confident in a subtle way that made her want to relinquish control to him. She had the crazy idea that this was a man she could follow to the ends of the earth if he asked. There was nothing more she wanted to do than sink into the shelter of his arms, to smell the sun-warmed musk of his skin, to pull his head down to hers for a long kiss. Instead, she stepped back, breaking the connection.
He gestured toward a tall wrought iron gate beside them. “This is Ernest Hemmingway’s house. Would you like to go inside?”
Two story and square, its wide balconies were graced with fanciful wrought iron railings. It stood in the midst of a small garden with tall trees and bunched bamboo that shaded the meandering brick paths. On one side of the house was a water garden edged in white coral rock and with lilies scattered across its shallow, glassy surface. On the other, the music of a small fountain could be heard, splashing into its wide bowl.
They had just missed the beginning of the guided tour of the famous author’s house. So they opted to wander the gardens, searching for the offspring of his six-toed cats. Hemingway cats, they were called by the locals. The kittens were highly prized and often disappeared under the arms of visiting tourists. There were several animals to be found lounging beside the fountain or sprawled under the shade of hibiscus bushes. Most were either asleep or lay with their eyes half-closed against the glare of the noon sun and the curious stares of the two-legged intruders.
“Are you a cat person?” she asked Niko as she settled on a bench strategically placed below a bougainvillea covered arbor. “Or a dog person?”
He reached up to remove his sunglasses, folding them and hanging them from the neck of his shirt. “Neither.”
She threw him a mock horrified glance, briefly meeting the liquid blue-gray of his gaze. His pupils were large, tempting a woman to swim in their depths, but sharp intelligence gleamed beneath the surface. She suspected that he recognized the conflicting emotions that ebbed and flowed through her today. It had been easier, less personal, to talk to him with the protective shield of the darkened glass between them.
To hide her unease, she gave a dramatic shudder. “You’re not one of those guys who keeps snakes or lizards?”
“Hardly.” He leaned against the wooden edge of the arbor then reached to pluck a fuchsia bloom from its vine, twisting its stem between his fingers. “I always thought I’d like to have a dog when I was a kid, but my mother wouldn’t allow it. She was a model, so designer clothes were everyday wear for her. I was only allowed to hug her after she’d checked to make sure my hands were clean. An animal jumping on her would not have been acceptable.”
Kara tried to imagine a childhood without a mother who’d showered her with hugs and kisses. “It sounds a bit bleak.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t think so. Mother had lots of friends, so I did too. There was always the nanny, tutors or the housekeeper to keep an eye on me. When she traveled for work, she left me with friends who had children my age, so I got to play with their pets.”
No matter what he said, it was not the same as having a dog that licked your face while you cried because your first boyfriend dumped you or a cat that lay beside you and purred away a long, rainy afternoon while you read.
Niko leaned close. With one swift movement, he pushed the stem of bougainvillea that he held under the rubber band she had used to pull her long hair back from her face. His feathery lashes concealed his eyes as he straightened.
* * *
“Te
l
l me about Frank.”
The words startled him almost as much as her. He needed to know whether she was miserable because she missed him or was troubled about the confrontation that would occur when she returned to face him. Or maybe he just wanted to hear her voice and the words didn’t matter. He waited, tension dragging down his shoulders.
“That would be – awkward.”
“How so? There is only me and the cats to hear. We could be just the impartial listeners you need.”
Her protest was immediate. “You’re hardly impartial.”
There was a grain of truth in that, one he thought it best not to admit. “Sometimes, just saying the words out loud brings things into focus. It might help you decide how to handle the situation with Frank when the time comes.”
“I don’t think–”
“I’ll start,” he interrupted. “You and Frank work together, right? I think that you both drifted into this relationship and everyone around you expected it to go further, so you let it happen. What I can’t figure out is why Frank waited until the last minute to back out.”
The silence stretched and, for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to open up to him. She sighed, a long, soft sound that he barely heard over the chatter of tourists who strolled on the paths nearby.
“I can answer that. Frank was having second thoughts, but wouldn’t admit it. He couldn’t bring himself to hurt me.”
Leave it to a woman to always find the most compassionate point of view. “Maybe so, but as your impartial judge, I must point out that an honorable man would have talked to you, not cheated on you the first chance he got.” He didn’t try to hide the dry disdain in his tone.
“He was acting so oddly last night,” she said slowly. “He’s not usually affectionate in public and he was all over that woman in the back of the car.” She pushed a stray tendril of hair back from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. “Frank is a nice man. Maybe it was nerves or the alcohol or his friends egging him on. I’ve never seen him be so rough, and he’s certainly never talked to me as rudely as he did. I wouldn’t have put up with it.”
His heart jolted painfully, then started again with hard slow throbs. She was making excuses for him. She couldn’t seriously be considering taking him back? Something would have to be done to change her mind. He gave a derisive snort. “A nice man? Maybe. Weak? Definitely.”
She was silent for so long that he thought he’d stepped over the line. She was still in love with the man. That didn’t change in a day, a week or a month. Along with that love came a need to defend, to rationalize what she hated most about the person so that she could love him unconditionally. He waited, his breath caught in his throat, for her to deny what he’d said.
“You could be right,” she said at last. “There were things about him – well, I blamed them on him being shy. Maybe it was deeper than that.”
He leaned forward, intent on her words. “Things like what?”
“He could never make a decision, for one.” Her voice grew stronger as a twinge of irritation crept in. She crossed her arms over her chest. “When I asked him to help with the wedding arrangements, he’d tell me to do what I wanted. He never had an opinion on the simplest decision like whether to serve chicken or steak. I thought he was just being – nice.” She faltered on the word. “But really, it was everything. I was always the one who decided what we’d eat or which movie we’d go see. It was annoying.”
His lips twitched slightly. Anger was re-surfacing. Strike two for the ex-fiancé. “He needed you to be strong for him?”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” she said, her tone considering. “But I can understand why he’d be attracted to someone if they came on hard to him. He’s easy to persuade.” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “They looked so … passionate together. It would be hard for a man to resist.”
“Trust me. It’s not that difficult to turn down a drunken quickie.” His choice of coarse words was deliberate.
She lifted her face to study him, her gaze considering. “Well, he was never like that with me.”
He was shocked into stillness. Frank must have been out of his mind not to see what he had in his grasp. “Do you think you’re not irresistible? That you can’t inspire passion?”
She drew back slightly. “I’m just your average girl-next-door.”
“You underestimate yourself.” As much as he wanted to pressure her to see things his way, she had to come to her own realizations, at her own pace.
“Now you’re just being kind.” Her voice dropped several degrees, decidedly cooler. “Really, it isn’t necessary. I’m not falling to pieces. I appreciate you trying to help me though this, but I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you will.” On her own. She didn’t say the words, but they were implied.
She didn’t need him. The thought brought a frown to his brow. Needy women were clingy, and he detested that. She was obviously trying to handle this herself. So why was he so insistent that she accept his help?
He straightened, giving them space both physically and emotionally. He felt the need to restore the comfortable camaraderie he’d been building all morning. His gaze touched on a young gray tabby who had decided to sniff at the food in a nearby bowl. “So, how about you? A dog or a cat person?”
“Dogs definitely, but I can’t have one in my apartment, so I have a cat named Houdini.” She nodded toward the tabby. “A gray, like him. He belonged to my best friend, but her new husband was allergic to cats, so I agreed to keep him when she moved out of the apartment. He’s all right, but fickle. Some days he likes me, some days he doesn’t.”
“Cats are like women then. Moody.”
She tilted her head to look up at him. “Not all of us are like that.”
“Aren’t you?”
The words hung in the air between them, simple yet with an undercurrent of tension. He wasn’t sure himself if he were referring to the women he’d known in general or to her specifically. He’d certainly seen her pass through some emotional highs and lows in the short hours they’d known each other.
Something resembling a grin twisted her lips as she said, “I might get the tiniest bit moody when I’m hungry.”
He laughed, rewarding her for her concession. Reaching down both hands to grasp hers, he pulled her up from the bench. “There’s nothing worse,” he said, the tone of his voice a bit lower than normal, “than a woman’s who’s hungry. I know just the place to satisfy your cravings.”