“Because last night it was one thirty when you did your midnight gardening routine? Yeah, things are looking up, sweetheart. You’re getting closer to daylight hours.”
She swept him a look out of eyes the color of moss agate. “You don’t have to get up every night and rescue me when I go bonkers.”
“Yeah, I do.” His voice was flat, uncompromising.
“Because you’re a professional fireman. I get it.”
He shrugged because no, she didn’t. Rescuing someone had always been secondary to him. It was the thrill of the dare, the risks he took that had made him who he was. He knew he lacked Battalion Chief Fred James’ commitment to serve and his best friend Luke Cade’s passion for helping people. He knew it but could experience only emptiness.
For him, it was the rush of doing something that might, just might, get him killed.
When he pictured what it meant to care about someone, he heard the snap of a lighter, the sound of his mother’s voice.
Hiding in a closet when he was very young. Making breakfast for her to sweeten her temper. He knew to run if any of her johns looked at him with interest but sometimes…he couldn’t get away…
“I have, what do you call them, fresh yellow peppers?”
A faint warmth in her eyes, like a spark in the darkness. “You raided my vegetable garden again.”
His lips quirked. “Guilty. But they are great with fresh steak.”
“I wouldn’t know. Vegetarian here.”
“Of course.” She was too nice to even eat meat. He had to stay away from her. He’d been trying for months but somehow she’d snuck under his armor, so he watched her and wondered. Made it impossible for him to sleep through the night.
And made it impossible for him to leave her alone in her grief.
She hurt and he could feel it. It haunted him like wrenching music.
The contents in the pan sizzled, the only sound in his kitchen until the birds woke up and began to chatter outside as he made her omelet. When it was done, he cut it in half and placed it on two plates.
He sat down at the table next to her but not too close.
The strung wire tension of her shoulders seemed to ease. He wished he could reach out and push her hair behind one of her ears.
“It’s good.” She looked so surprised that he cocked an eyebrow.
“Glad you like it. It’s the first time I’ve ever made breakfast for a lady.”
She blinked. “You have, ah, ladies here all the time.”
He gave his attention back to his early breakfast. “They don’t sleep over.”
It was quiet again except for the sounds of their eating. When he glanced over to measure how much she was putting away, he relaxed when he saw she had plowed through most of her omelet. She was a little thing, which oddly only made those lush breasts look larger.
“You’re right,” she said. “I never realized it, but your visitors’ cars are always gone in the morning. I, uh, just thought they were early risers.”
He had to grin at that idea, but then it sank in, how she’d had that insight into his private life. She was his neighbor, she knew things about him—when he forgot to put out the trash, what time he came home on a Friday night—and possibly insight into his unconventional love life.
The thought sent a burn of heat to the base of his neck. He didn’t know if it was embarrassment or arousal.
Jenny never made things easy on him. She was not an easy woman.
“Have you…talked to anyone?” He’d been dying to ask her the question for weeks, but she’d been so fragile when he’d first caught her in her sleepwalking act that he’d been afraid to push.
She swallowed hard and he got up, grabbed a mug and filled it with coffee fresh from his timed maker.
“Yes,” she said again in that very soft voice.
More questions rose to his lips. He strangled them down.
She’s not ready to talk to me about this.
Although why Jenny would ever be ready to confide in him was an audacious thought. Just why did he imagine she’d want to do that? She was a shy little mouse and he…was not.
He fought off the urge to reach out and pull her onto his lap. Make her confide in him.
Patience.
She sipped the coffee. Her hands shook so that the liquid sloshed. Belated shock?
“Jenny.” He steadied her hands with his own until she settled. Her face tightened but she didn’t scream the way she had the first couple of times he’d woken her out in her garden. “Will you try something with me?”
Worried eyes studied him.
“A breathing exercise. You know I, uh, teach yoga?”
Her eyes widened. What had been running through that agile and secretive mind of hers? “Yoga, really?”
Color burned his cheeks. “Yeah. I took some classes a while back and… Well, now I teach it, okay?” His tone sounded annoyed to his own ears.
She smiled. “Okay.”
“Breath work can be very calming to the body,” he continued, unable to meet the innocent curiosity in her gaze. He knew she was curious about him. She must sense that he had secrets. “Do you want to try?”
“Would I have to sit in the lotus position or something?”
“Nope. Just put down your mug and close your eyes. You can follow the directions of my voice.”
“I won’t, like, suddenly want to do handstands with one arm or something?”
He laughed, delighting in her sense of the ridiculous. “No, that’s hypnotizing someone. I won’t do that.”
He reached out, took the mug from her and put it on the table. He saw with satisfaction that she’d eaten every scrap off her plate. Feeding her gave him a primitive kind of satisfaction, as if she was his woman to care for.
“Close your eyes.”
She chewed her bottom lip, which was pink and slightly less full than the top one owing to an overbite. He thought it was sexy as fuck.
“
Close them.
” Without thinking, he had used his commanding tone with her but oddly it didn’t seem to freak her out. Instead, she instantly obeyed.
“Now I want you to take some deep breaths. In and out, that’s it. Let your shoulders fall as if you’re sliding into a hot tub of water.”
“Like your hot tub out back?” When she smiled, she had dimples.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah.” Had she seen him out there in the nude?
“I’ve always wanted one of those, but I’d probably pretty mine up with landscaping, give it a fake waterfall.”
“That’s good. Picture renovating mine.” He let his voice drop, become roughened velvet to wrap around her. “You can hear the soft tinkle of falling water and above your head, a breeze is playing with the palm leaves, making them rub against each other.”
“They sound like paper crackling when they do that,” Jenny mused.
“Yes, that’s right, Jenny. As you float on your back you can pick out the stars, the planets hanging above you like points of light. You have nothing to do, nowhere you need to be.”
“Sounds so nice.” Her voice was wistful.
“Now I want you to close your lips and inhale slowly. That’s it, slow, yeah… And now, when you exhale, pretend you’re blowing toward a candle right in front of you. See it, Jenny, a pink candle with a slender flame. You want to blow just hard enough to make that flame flicker but not blow it out.”
A frown line briefly appeared between her eyes as she took her first two scripted breaths, but in only a moment she had it. Again he felt warmth move through him. He was helping her. It felt completely right that she was here, under his roof, fed by his hand, protected from the night terrors by his body and his voice.
“You’re doing so well, my good girl.”
When she slumped back in her chair, her face impassive with deep relaxation, he risked stroking her hair. “Mmmm.” She turned her face toward his touch.
His heart jolted.
Mine.
He yanked his hand back. What was he doing? He knew she’d only responded that way because he’d put her in a light trance.
“Jenny.” His voice was hoarse.
She didn’t respond this time. She was dead asleep, sitting upright in his kitchen.
He got up and quietly put away the dishes and cleaned up. He lived alone, but he was meticulous about cleanliness and not living the careless bachelor life.
Then he couldn’t put it off anymore. He knelt beside Jenny and carefully pulled her into his arms. She was very slight, her head resting against his collarbone.
His heart pounded as he just gazed down at her, seeing the purplish shadows under her eyes. How much sleep was she managing? He knew she worked at home as a computer programmer, which was probably the only reason she’d managed to hold her job while dealing with the fallout of her attack.
Did she catch a catnap only to wake in terror?
He was fucking tired of worrying about her.
He headed deeper into his house, past the door that led to the basement—which he’d have to remember to lock—and up to the second floor where he kept a home office, a master bedroom and the tiny guest room that consisted of a twin bed made up militarily neat. A couple of boxes sat in one corner. The room was barren of any life, but it wasn’t atypical of the rest of his house.
He laid her on the bed and covered her with an old quilt. She looked so small and pale, and again he flashed back to seeing her in the hospital. He remembered hearing her crying one night when he’d come to visit her. He’d frozen outside her room, unable to enter but also unable to leave, as if somehow it was important that someone heard Jenny Ann sob her heart out alone in the dark.
“Sleep, honey,” he whispered and then, because she wasn’t awake and he couldn’t make her afraid, he kissed her forehead.
Chapter Two
Jenny woke in a strange place.
One minute she was curled into a warm ball, feeling oddly floaty and safe, like when she’d slept in as a child. Then her eyes snapped open and the sights, the smells did not belong to
her
house.
The first thing she spotted were a couple of closed moving boxes in one corner. She jerked upright, looking around wildly, only to catch the view of her garden from a second-story window.
The bright zinnias, the dahlias and roses and the copper bowl that had gone green and served as a bird bath immediately soothed her. And told her where she was.
Taz. Intimidating, six and a half feet of gorgeous black-haired, green-eyed man. Her neighbor. And the man she’d had an embarrassing crush on before—
She cut off that thought like switching off a light.
Off, on, off, on.
She’d gotten good at doing that. She’d had to, in order to survive. Only at night when her mind opened up in dreams did things come out that she didn’t want to face. Not ever again.
So Taz must have…carried her up to this bedroom after he’d fed her that omelet? Usually he just left her on the double porch swing beside her front door, covering her with an afghan.
He’d been doing it for a month and a half now.
Heat burned her cheeks as she imagined him finding her out in her garden again, acting like a crazy person. Which was what she was. Nothing she did seemed to help with the sleepwalking. She’d tried relaxation tapes, over-eating, sleep deprivation and yes, yoga before bed. But as soon as she fell asleep it was like she was swallowed by a black hole, dragged down.
She threw off the blanket and climbed off the bed. She realized she wasn’t dizzy for a change then remembered how Taz had insisted on feeding her a very early breakfast. Weird. She usually had trouble keeping anything down and had no appetite. His food hadn’t been particularly good, but she’d eaten it all without thinking about it.
It was just that way he had of acting as though of course you’d do exactly what he wanted. It used to make her toes curl, imagining him behaving that way with her instead of coldly rebuffing her shy offers of friendship.
Taz had told her once that he wasn’t friends with women, that they were good for one thing.
Oooh boy. She rolled her eyes. Why did she still like the guy, caveman that he was? That attitude was what had most annoyed her about some of the Southern boys she’d dated in high school, except they had been a lot smoother about hiding it. She’d vowed never to let herself be dumb or pathetic enough to belong to a caveman.
Why else had she moved to the West Coast, far away from her busybody family?
At the thought of her family, she rubbed her forehead, knowing she’d have to call home today. She’d downplayed her attack as much as possible. She’d been grateful that her mom had come out and stayed with her for a month right after it happened, but it had been hard to keep up the façade that she was fine. She’d begun to feel like a bright, smiling robot, parroting whatever she thought her mother most wanted to hear while burying those overwhelming feelings into that deep hole.
Which had worked out brilliantly.
Her mom had finally returned to Georgia, and Jenny Ann had started sleepwalking.
Putting aside thoughts of the upcoming phone call she was duty bound to make, Jenny decided it was a good opportunity to take a look around Taz’s house—as long as he didn’t catch her snooping, of course.
Maybe it came from growing up in a small town, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, but she had wanted to see the inside of this house for months. She’d even gone so far as to bake Taz a pecan pie and bring it over so she could get a peek into his kitchen.
He’d informed her that pecan pie was not on his diet, but he’d been known to eat pretty little brunettes.
She remembered the shock she’d felt at his bold double entendre. At first she hadn’t believed he’d meant…
that
. But then, as if reading her mind, he’d added, “Yeah, I mean putting you on my kitchen table, shoving up your skirt and eating
you,
sweetheart
.
”
His green eyes had burned her, taking in the way she’d started trembling, then he’d made a sound of disgust and shut the door.
In her face.
Leaving her with her embarrassment and a whole pie she had no idea what to do with.
Horrible man.
She’d finally wised up and begun ignoring him, though it went against her friendly Southern grain. Until the night she’d woken up in a hospital bed, hurting and so blackly depressed she’d wanted to die. And somehow Taz had been there, slumped in a chair by her bed, smelling of smoke.