Something Different/Pepper's Way (2 page)

“Corsair?” the man muttered blankly, standing where she’d left him between their two cars and watching her open her car door and extract a bundle of cream-colored fur from inside. As she turned back toward him, he saw that the bundle was a large—a very large—Himalayan cat. Its face, paws, and tail were a dark chocolate color, and its broad face wore what seemed to be a permanently sulky expression.

“Just look at him!” she said angrily. “It’s not enough that you killed poor Daisy; you nearly gave Corsair a heart attack!”

To the man’s clear, jade eyes, Corsair didn’t look as though he’d ever be—or had ever been—startled by anything short of
a massive earthquake. He started to make that observation out loud, then realized that by participating in this ridiculous conversation, he’d only prolong it.

“Look—” he began, but she cut him off fiercely.

“This is all your fault!”

Jade eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. “You’re certainly hell-bent to prove this was my fault, aren’t you? I’ll bet you don’t even— How old are you?” he demanded abruptly.

Gypsy drew herself up to her full height of five nothing and deepened her glare. “You should never ask a woman her age! Where did you learn your manners?”

“Where you learned yours!” he retorted irritably.

Into that tense confrontation came a slow, grinding
thunk,
and Daisy’s entire engine hit the ground in a little puff of dust.

Gypsy stared rather blankly for a moment and then began to giggle. “Poor Daisy,” she murmured.

The man was leaning back against the low hood of his car chuckling quietly, his icy temper apparently gone. “Why don’t we start over?” he suggested wryly. “Hello, I’m Chase Mitchell.”

“Gypsy Taylor,” she returned solemnly.

“Gypsy? Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“No reason at all, I’m sure.” Gypsy sighed, her amusement brief. “How am I going to get home? Daisy isn’t going anywhere without the aid of a tow truck.”

“I’ll take you. We have to exchange insurance information anyway.” He was looking down disgustedly at the slightly crumpled hood that he’d just stopped leaning against, then looked up quickly as a thought apparently occurred to him. “You
are
insured?” he asked carefully.

Knowing full well that Daisy’s lack of brake lights made her at least partially to blame for the accident, Gypsy had
stopped protesting. “Certainly I’m insured,” she responded with dignity. After a beat she added, “At least… well, I think I am.”

“How can you not be sure?”

“Well, I move around a lot.” Unconsciously Gypsy had gravitated closer to the dented Mercedes. “Sometimes the notices from the insurance company get lost in the mail or—” She broke off hastily as she noted a disconcertingly icy storm gathering in his jade eyes. Gypsy loved a good storm, but she wasn’t an idiot. “I’m insured. I know I’m insured.”

“Right.” As pointedly as she had done before, Chase looked from the top of her short black curls to the toes of her sneaker-clad feet. In between he noted a petite but nicely curved figure that in no way belonged to a teenager, and a face that was lovely—with fine bone structure and wide, dreamy gray eyes. “I thought you were about fifteen,” he murmured almost to himself, “but I think I was wrong.”

Gypsy blinked. “You certainly were.” She was neither flattered nor insulted. “By about thirteen years. I’m twenty-eight.” She blinked again, and added in a scolding voice, “And that was a sneaky way to find out!”

He grinned suddenly, and Gypsy was astonished at the change it wrought in his stern face. The jade eyes gleamed with amused satisfaction, laugh lines appearing at their corners, and white teeth flashed in a purely charming and surprisingly boyish smile.

“Well, I had to find out,” he said. Before she could ask why, he was going on briskly. “Hop in and I’ll take you home.”

Having always relied on her instincts about people, Gypsy didn’t worry about getting into a car with a stranger. Not this stranger. For some reason she instinctively trusted him. With a sigh and a last lingering glance toward the fallen Daisy, she
started around to the passenger side of the Mercedes. Then she hesitated and went back to her car long enough to pull the keys from the ignition.

“Shouldn’t you lock it up?”

“Why?” Gypsy asked wryly, heading back to the Mercedes. “Daisy isn’t going anywhere.”

Conceding the point, he got in the driver’s side of his car, shut the door, and started it up. “Where to?”

Gypsy pointed along the winding, steadily uphill road. “Thataway Follow the yellow brick road.”

As the Mercedes pulled onto the road and began to climb smoothly, Chase distinctly felt baleful eyes on him. He risked a glance sideways, and found that it was the cat’s gaze he was feeling.

Because of a childhood allergy—and no inclination since then—he’d had little experience with cats. But he recognized the expression on this one’s face. Only cats and camels could stare through supposedly superior human beings with such utter and complete disdain. It gave him a disconcertingly invisible feeling.

Caused by a cat, it was a hell of a reaction, Chase thought.

“Your cat doesn’t like me,” he observed, eyes firmly back on the tricky business of negotiating the road’s hairpin curves.

Gypsy looked at him in surprise, and then glanced down at the cat resting calmly in her lap. Corsair was fixedly regarding one chocolate paw. “You’re imagining things,” she scoffed lightly. “Corsair’s never met anybody he didn’t like.”

Chase risked another glance, and then wished he hadn’t. “Uh-huh. So why is he glaring at me?”

Gypsy glanced down again. “He isn’t. He’s looking at his paw.” Her voice was mildly impatient.

Chase decided not to look again. He also decided that
Corsair was a sneaky cat. “Never mind. Tell me, Miss Taylor—”

“Gypsy,” she interrupted.

“As long as you’ll return the favor.”

“Fine. I hate formality.”

“Gypsy, then. Where exactly do you live? I know this road, and it dead-ends a mile or so further up. There are two houses—”

“One of them’s mine,” she interrupted again.

“Yours?” He sounded a bit startled.

“I’m house-sitting,” she explained absently, looking out the window and thinking as she always did, that it was nice to have the Pacific for a backyard. “The owners were temporarily transferred to Europe—six months. I’ll be sitting for them another four months.”

“I see.”

He sounded rather faint, and Gypsy looked over at him in amusement. “I’m not quite as disreputable as I look,” she said gently. “I’m dressed like this because I had to take Corsair to the vet.”

“And the peace sign?”

His mind obviously wasn’t on the conversation, and Gypsy wondered why. “It was a gift from some friends. Sort of a private joke,” she explained automatically, gazing at him searchingly She thought that he had the look of a man who had bitten down on something and wasn’t quite sure what it was. Odd. Before she could attempt to probe the cause of his strange expression—Gypsy wasn’t at all shy—he was speaking again.

“Do you live around here? When you’re not house-sitting, I mean.”

“I live wherever I happen to be house-sitting. Before this, I
was in Florida for three months, and before that was New England. I like to move around.”

“Obviously.”

“Not
your
favorite life-style, I see,” she said wryly.

“No.” Abruptly, he asked, “Do you live alone?”

Gypsy thought briefly of all the bits of information a single woman generally didn’t reveal to strange men—like whether she lived alone. However, if she was any judge of character, this man hardly had rape or robbery on his mind. “Usually I don’t. A housekeeper usually lives with me; she’s a good friend and practically raised me. But she’s visiting relatives right now, so I’m on my own. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.” He sent a sidelong glance her way. “You aren’t wearing a ring, but these days asking a woman if she’s single doesn’t automatically preclude a live-in ‘friend.’”

Gypsy looked at him thoughtfully and tried to ignore the sudden bump her heart had given. She’d been on the receiving end of enough male questions to know what that one was pointing to, and it was not a direction she wanted to explore. As handsome as Chase Mitchell undoubtedly was, Gypsy nonetheless told herself firmly that she wasn’t interested. At this point in her life, a man was a complication she hardly needed.

And Chase Mitchell would prove to be more of a complication than most, she decided shrewdly. They obviously had nothing in common, and he wouldn’t be the sort of man who could fit in with her offbeat life-style.

Frowning, Gypsy wondered at the trend of her own thoughts. Why on earth was she hesitating? Usually she disclaimed interest immediately in order to avoid complications before they arose.

Before she could further explore her inexplicable hesitation, Chase was going on in a smooth voice.

“Of course, you could have a ‘friend’ who doesn’t live with you.” It was definitely a question, she thought.

Gypsy answered wryly, “The way I move around?”

“Some men would consider plane tickets a small price to pay,” he murmured.

She wondered if that was a compliment, but decided not to ask. With that kind of fishing she was half afraid of what she might catch. Instead, she chose a nice, safe, innocuous topic. “Do you live around here?” she asked casually.

He nodded, his eyes again on the road. The road was still both winding and tricky, but it no longer bordered on the cliffs. Trees hid the ocean now as they progressed further inland. “I’ve always lived on the West Coast,” he said. “Apart from school years, that is.”

Gypsy nodded and sought about for more safe topics. “Nice car,” she finally managed inanely.

“It was,” he agreed affably.

She shot him a goaded glare and immediately became more irritated when she noted that he wasn’t even looking at her. “I didn’t
mean
to wreck your nice car,” she said with dignity. “And if it comes to that, you didn’t exactly leave Daisy in great shape, you know!”

“If I were you,” he suggested, ignoring the larger part of her accusation, “I’d get another car.”

“Well, you’re not me. I’ve had Daisy since I was seventeen; she’s a classic. She’s also my good-luck charm.”

“Judging by the number of dents in her that I can’t claim credit for,” Chase said dryly, “she doesn’t seem to have been very lucky.” He was completely unconscious of following Gypsy’s lead in using the feminine pronoun to describe Daisy.

Uncomfortably aware of her accident-prone nature, she didn’t dispute his point. And she was enormously relieved to see her house as they finally completed the long climb and the
road leveled off. She pointed and Chase nodded, slowing the Mercedes for the turn into her driveway.

Her home for the next four months was a sprawling house, modern in design but not starkly so. Lots of glass, lots of cedar. It blended in nicely with the tall trees, and from the back it boasted a magnificent view of the Pacific. But the house next door was by far the more beautiful of the two. It
was
starkly modern, geometric in design, with an abundance of sharp angles and impossible curves. Cunningly wrought in glass, cedar, and stone, it was a jewel utterly perfect in its setting. And the landscaping around the house was among the most beautiful Gypsy had ever seen.

She usually didn’t care too much for modern houses, but she loved that one. Glancing toward it as the Mercedes pulled into her driveway, she wondered for the hundredth time who lived there. She’d only seen a gardener who came every day to care for the trees and shrubs.

The thought slipped from her mind as Chase stopped his car just outside the garage. Reaching for the door handle, she said, “You’d better come in; it may take a while for me to find the insurance card.”

He nodded and turned off the engine, his eyes fixed curiously on the somewhat battered trailer pulled over onto the grass beside the driveway. “What—” he began.

Gypsy slid from the car before explaining. “That,” she told him cheerfully, “contains all my worldly possessions when I move. Aside from Corsair, that is; he rides in Daisy with me.” She reflected for a moment as she watched Chase move around to her. “Although I don’t suppose one could call a cat a possession.”

“Not any cat I’ve ever heard of,” Chase agreed, eyeing Corsair with disfavor. “They seem to be complete unto themselves.” He accompanied Gypsy and friend up the walkway.

She fished her keys from a pocket and unlocked the heavy front door. Opening it and stepping inside, she murmured, “I suppose I should warn you.”

“Warn me? About wha—” Beginning to follow her inside, Chase suddenly found himself pinned solidly against the door-jamb by two huge paws. Inches from his nose loomed a black and white face in which a grin of sorts displayed an impressive set of dental equipment. It was a Great Dane, and it looked as though it would have considered half a steer to be a tidy mouthful.

A calm Gypsy holding an equally calm Corsair studied Chase’s still face for a long moment. “Meet Bucephalus,” she invited politely. “He was named after Alexander the Great’s horse.”

“Obviously,” Chase murmured carefully. “Two questions. Is it yours?”

“No; he belongs to the Robbins couple—the ones who live here. Second question?”

“Does he bite?”

“No.” She considered briefly. “Except for people who rear-end cars. He makes an exception for them.”

“Funny lady. Would you mind getting him down?”

“Down, Bucephalus.”

The big dog immediately dropped to all fours, looking no less huge but considerably more friendly. His long tail waved happily and he tilted his chin up slightly in order to wash Corsair’s face with a tongue the size of a hand towel. The cat suffered this indignity with flattened ears and silence.

Chase carefully shut the door, keeping a wary eye on the dog. “Any more surprises?” he asked ruefully.

“I shouldn’t think so. This way.” She led him down the short carpeted hallway. A huge sunken den at the end of the hall boasted a brick fireplace, a beamed ceiling, and an open
L
-shaped staircase leading up to a loft. The furniture consisted of an off-white pit grouping with abundant cushions, a large projection television, and assorted tables and lamps.