Stranger Read online

  Again.

  “I’ll call you later,” Sam said. “Let’s go to dinner.”

  He chucked me under the chin—yes, an actual chuck, like I was some cute, tomboy cousin with a crush! If my life had a sound track and a Foley crew, just then you’d have heard the sound of spring being sprung and a bell being rung. Sproing-oing-oing, ding!

  “No?” He gained points for interpreting my expression, at least.

  I shut my mouth so hard my teeth clicked. “Dinner would be fine.”

  Sam rolled up his sleeves to his elbows. “The look on your face says dinner isn’t fine.”

  “No.” I shook my head and got out of bed, conscious that with him dressed and mouthwashed, he had the emotional advantage, even if it was purely imaginary on my part. In the bathroom I scrubbed my teeth quickly and spoke through foam. “Dinner’s good!”

  Sam looked taller than ever in the slightly skewed doorway to the bathroom. His spiked hair actually brushed the top doorjamb. “What’s the matter?”

  What could I say that wouldn’t make me sound like a complete idiot? That after sleeping with him once and putting him off for weeks, I’d finally decided that something with Sam wasn’t something I could deny I wanted any longer? That while I would forever appreciate the comfort he’d offered me last night, morning had come and I wanted to do the same?

  Which, idiotic sounding or not, was exactly what I said.

  “And apparently, you’re not interested!” I finished, slightly out of breath, and crossed my arms over my chest.

  Sam had listened to my words with a faint smile, but now he leaned forward to say into my ear, “I’m interested.”

  I wasn’t totally mollified. “So…?”

  “So, this way,” Sam murmured with an added flick of his tongue on my earlobe that sent a shiver along my every nerve, “you’ll be thinking about me. All. Day. Long.”

  Oh.

  Was that perhaps the longest day I’ve ever spent? With each minute seeming to last an hour, I’d say so. I kept myself busy with updating our Web site and ordering new brochures and forms, but it didn’t help much.

  “More coffee?” I asked Shelly, who sat reading a tabloid magazine at her desk.

  She looked up from the lurid tales of celebrity divorces. “More? Grace, you’re going to overdose.”

  I lifted my mug. “So, is that a no?”

  Shelly smiled. “No. Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Well…because this is the fourth time you’ve asked me if I wanted more coffee.” She looked as if she meant to say more, but the phone rang and she answered it, while I tensed.

  Death call? Would I have to miss my dinner date with Sam? My coffee sloshed over my fingers, burning them, and I grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk to wipe them. She didn’t gesture to me, and I relaxed.

  There are days in the funeral business that begin before sunrise and don’t end until night falls, with death calls and services and deliveries. There are also days when I sit at my desk and file my nails while I play game after game of solitaire on the computer. Today was shaping up to be one of those days.

  It gave me too much time to think about my date with Sam.

  Date.

  I winced as I filed too hard and brought blood to a cuticle and looked up at the knock on my door. My dad, my laptop in hand. My stomach did a flip-flop and skidded down to my toes before rocketing up to my throat.

  I got up. “Hey, Dad.”

  “I brought back your computer. Heard you got the other one up and running.”

  My dad held out my PowerBook, which I promptly cradled like the baby I never intended to have. “Yes. I did. Did you…get everything you needed from this one?”

  My dad shrugged. “I printed out the register, but your mom’s been keeping me so busy I haven’t had much of a chance to look it over. I figured if you were having real trouble, you’d let me know.”

  It was the closest I’d get to him backing off, and we both knew it. “Yes. I would.”

  He nodded again without looking at me or coming farther into the office. Since usually he charged right in and made himself at home, to see him lingering there in the doorway seemed odd. I stepped back, giving him room to enter if he wanted, but my dad didn’t come closer.

  “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Me and Stan are going fishing tomorrow and I want to get to the sporting-goods store to check out a new rod.”

  “Again?”

  I’d been a little worried about the way he was acting, but the look he shot me confirmed it was, indeed, my father standing in my doorway and not a pod-person. “Aren’t I entitled to a little relaxation?”

  “Of course you are, Dad.”

  My dad made a familiar, half-disgruntled snorting sound and waved as he backed out of my office, leaving me to stare after him in confusion. I didn’t have time to ponder his odd behavior because the phone on my desk rang, which meant Shelly had switched the call through to me…which meant she knew it was from someone I’d want to talk to. Which meant I grabbed it up and tried not to sound too eager as I expected Sam to be on the other end.

  “Grace? Are you all right?”

  My sister.

  Everyone kept asking me that. “Yes. Fine. What’s up?”

  “I know it’s last minute, but I was hoping you could come over after work to watch the kids until Jerry gets home. I have to go someplace.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got plans for dinner.”

  The dead silence that followed my answer told me Hannah had been expecting me to say yes. “Oh.”

  “Yeah…sorry.”

  My sister must have heard the lack of sorrow in my voice, because she sniffed. “Can you maybe go later? I just need you until Jerry gets home.”

  Since Jerry had a history of never being on time, I wasn’t convinced today would be any different. In fact, he’d probably be even later than normal just because I really needed him to be home on time. “I can’t. I have…a date.”

  More silence, so long I wasn’t sure if my sister had hung up until she said, “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “Great.” Just as I hadn’t sounded sorry, she didn’t sound happy. “Well, good for you. I guess.”

  Annoyed, I looked at the clock. An hour to get ready before Sam would be by to pick me up, and I still wanted to shower and change. “I’m sorry I can’t watch the kids, Hannah, but maybe Mom can.”

  “She can’t. I already asked.”

  “Sorry.”

  Hannah sighed, sounding incredibly put out. “Never mind. I’ll just have to wait until Jerry gets home.”

  She’d always been good at making me feel guilty about things that weren’t my fault.

  Though sort of, this time, it was my fault—inasmuch as I wasn’t saying no, as I’d done in the past, because I had to work, but because I had social plans. I thought back quickly. I’d never told my sister no in favor of my own social plans, which had always generally been set to my own convenience.

  Clearly, Hannah didn’t think that ought to change.

  “Sorry,” I repeated, sounding less so than I had earlier.

  “Have fun on your date,” my sister said, and hung up.

  Her emphasis on “your” had seemed out of place, but time had ticked by while we talked, and since Shelly hadn’t appeared in the doorway with a message slip saying I needed to return a family’s call, I wanted to take advantage of the timing to run upstairs and spend the extra twenty minutes plucking and tweezing and shaving myself into presentability.

  I shut down my computer and tidied the papers on my desk into one neat pile then went out to tell Shelly to lock up behind herself when she was done. I found Jared leaning on her desk, his face intent and hers unreadable. Neither looked up when I came out, until I spoke, and then only Shelly turned to me. Jared just walked away, his back stiff and straight, as if someone had whacked him someplace tender.

  “I’m going to head up
stairs. Can you lock up before you go?”

  Shelly nodded, then blinked, and I caught a sheen of tears. “Sure.”

  “Do you have a ride home?”

  Another nod, and this time she bit her lower lip. “Jared’s taking me home.”

  Oh, how much I wanted to comment on that, but I didn’t. “Good. See you tomorrow.”

  She nodded and busied herself with tidying her papers and shutting down her computer, looking for all the world like any other busy office manager. But I saw the way her gaze kept cutting down the hall I couldn’t see, the hall down which Jared had stalked only moments before.

  “Good night.” Shelly answered half a minute after I’d already walked away, and as I glanced over my shoulder, she was looking down the hall again.

  Sam scared the living bejesus out of me by knocking on my apartment’s never-used outside-access door. I’d been pacing the kitchen, wishing I had a bad habit like smoking to keep me occupied while I waited for him to show up, and the rap on the door startled me so fiercely I knocked over my can of cola and watched the puddle spread along the kitchen table and start dripping onto the floor before I could wrassle my mind into grabbing a cloth to toss down on top of the mess. By that time, Sam had rapped again, and I’d determined the noise was coming from the door behind the set of steel shelves I’d set up to give myself some more storage.

  “Just a minute!” It didn’t take much muscle to move the shelves, laden with disorganized cookbooks, pots and pans and several boxes of whole-wheat pasta I’d forgotten about until they fell off. It didn’t leave much room to get the door open, though, which was sort of the point.

  “Hey.” Sam slid in between the narrow space between the counter and the shelves and let the door close behind him. He pulled his hand out from behind his back.

  “Flowers?”

  He grinned. “Just for you.”

  They looked a bit worse for the wear after being slightly mangled in their precarious journey, but I lifted them to my face and breathed in. “Wow, Sam. Thank you.”

  Sam opened his arms. “That’s all I get? A thank-you?”

  I hesitated, the flowers in my hand making me abnormally shy. Sam saved me by turning his cheek and tapping it with one finger. Laughing, I moved in to kiss him there, but at the last moment he turned his face. My kiss landed on his lips, instead, and his arms closed around me to hold me close.

  Neither of us noticed we were crushing the flowers.

  “Now, that’s what I call a thank-you,” he murmured against my mouth. His hands pressed my back for a moment before he let me go and I stepped back with heated cheeks and parted lips.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” I accused, turning to find a vase and using that as a good excuse to hide my hot face. “Nobody ever uses that door.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that.” Without asking, Sam reached to lock the door and pull the shelves back in front of it, losing only a pot and a wire whisk in the process. Both fell with a clatter but missed his feet, and he picked them up to put them away while he grinned at me. “I thought it would be better than ringing the bell downstairs. More dramatic.”

  “It was dramatic, all right.” I fluffed the velvety petals and leaned in again to sniff them.

  “You’d think I’d hate the smell of lilies, since we have so many of them around here.”

  Sam leaned forward to sniff, too, before sneezing loudly. “I figured if you liked it in your froufrou bath stuff, you’d like the flowers, too.”

  I didn’t ask him when he’d noticed my bath products. His sneeze had made his eyes wet and nose a little red, and he looked incredibly adorable. So much that I turned away to feign fussing with the flowers some more.

  I knew this feeling. The skip-jump-pitter-pat of my heart. The flush of my cheeks.

  Holy shit, I was back in junior high, crushing on the senior captain of the football team.

  “Ready to go?”

  I looked up. “Yes. Is what I’m wearing okay?”

  He hadn’t told me where we were going. I’d figured a slim black skirt and hot-pink blouse were dressy enough to go anywhere but still casual enough to be comfortable. The look on Sam’s face made me think again, though. He circled me, shaking his head and frowning.

  “No?” I said.

  “I’m going to have the damnedest time keeping my hands to myself.” He looked up.

  “Well,” I said with a hand on my hip, “who says you have to?”

  “We don’t want to shock my brother, do we?” Sam reached for my hand. “He’s already going to have a cow that we’re late.”

  “We’re going to dinner with your brother?” I grabbed up my purse and lightweight jacket as he led me to the front door. “We’re late?”

  “I’m never on time for him,” Sam said as I locked the door to the apartment and we headed down the stairs. “He’d have a heart attack.”

  I personally didn’t like being late for anything. “I thought you and your brother didn’t get along.”

  Sam waited as I locked the main door behind me. “Why? Because he beat the crap out of me?”

  “Well…yeah.” His car waited next to Betty, proving again what a little love and work could do for my poor old car.

  “Nah.” He opened the door for me and waited until I’d slid all the way in before closing it for me.

  “So you’ve worked things out?” I glanced at him as he slid into the driver’s seat, and he gave me a grin.

  “Sure.” The Camaro roared to life with a rumble I felt in the pit of my stomach. Then again, maybe it was the way Sam reached over to slide his hand along my thigh. “For now.”

  Dan Stewart lived in Harrisburg, but though I’d made the drive up Route 322 through Hershey many times by myself, it went much faster with Sam in the car. He sang along with the radio, changing the lyrics and challenging me to do the same. My voice wasn’t as good, but I was better at coming up with off-the-cuff rhymes, and more than once he high-fived me.

  He was a good driver, though, rarely taking his eyes off the road. That meant I could stare at him as much as I wanted. I wanted to quite a bit. He caught me though, when he pulled up in front of a nice little house in an older neighborhood. The worst part was, he didn’t seem surprised. Like he’d known all along I was watching him.

  “This is it.” He made no move to get out of the car.

  I peered out the window at the neatly trimmed grass and hedges. The house was small, but this neighborhood was one of the nicest in the city, with well-kept homes and nice vehicles parked in front of them. Sam’s car, as well as it had been refurbished, looked out of place at the curb between the Mercedes and the Jaguar.

  “My brother’s a lawyer and his lady’s some sort of fancy number cruncher,” Sam explained. He leaned over me to look out my window. “Pretty soon they’ll start pumping out little nerdlings. Ain’t that cute?”

  Something in his tone turned my face toward him, and he turned toward me. We were at kissing distance, though we weren’t kissing. He blinked, his mouth thin, and I gave in to my impulse to cradle his face in my hands and kiss him back into a grin.

  “Whoa. What was that for?”

  “Do I need a reason?” I stroked my thumb along his lower lip, gently teasing open his mouth.

  “No. I guess you don’t.” Sam leaned in to kiss me again, but we both caught sight of the front door to Dan’s house opening and he sighed. “Hold that thought for later, okay?”

  As if I could forget about it. It was all I’d been thinking about all day long, just as he’d promised I would. I used the minute it took him to open my door to swipe my nose and cheeks with powder and freshen the gloss on my lips.

  I was a little overdressed for dinner at someone’s house, but I shouldn’t have worried.

  Dan’s wife wore an even more formal outfit, probably what she’d worn to work, though instead of matching pumps she wore a pair of ridiculously large, fuzzy slippers.

  “Nice kicks,” Sam told her, kissing her on the chee
k. “Elle, you remember Grace, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” She shook my hand and smiled. “It’s nice to meet you under different circumstances. Dan! Sam’s here!”

  “Tell that bastard he’s late!” came the answering shout from down the hall.

  Sam and Elle shared a look, and she put on an even bigger smile. “Your brother’s making spaghetti.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Don’t you mean pasta à la Dan?”

  Elle covered a laugh with her hand. “Shh, Sam, he’s actually made his own sauce.”

  She looked at me. “C’mon, Grace. Let’s get you some wine and let those two wallow in their own testosterone.”

  I wasn’t going to turn down the drink. As Sam headed down the hall, Elle took me down the two steps to the sunken living room, where she poured me a glass of good red wine and showed me around.

  “How long have you lived here?” I admired their floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the casually elegant furniture. I’d never be able to throw together something like this, even if I did have a much higher cash flow.

  “A little over a year. I had a town house down by the Broad Street Market and Dan had his own place, but this place needed a lot less work than either of ours. And…well, it’s more practical for a family.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I told her sincerely, and her face lit.

  “Elle!”

  She looked toward the sound of the shout, then back to me. “I’m being paged. C’mon.”

  In the kitchen, Sam sat on top of the counter, his long legs dangling and a beer cradled in one hand. His brother stirred a pot on the stove from which steam wafted. I smelled rich, tomatoey goodness and garlic bread…and smoke.

  “Grab the bread, Elle, would you?” Dan jerked a thumb toward Sam. “Sammy’s claiming oven phobia again.”

  Elle laughed and set her wineglass on the table to open up the oven and pull out the tray of garlic bread. “Sammy, move your ass. I want to set this there.”

  Sam hopped down at once and came to stand next to me. “See how my brother has corrupted her? It’s Sam, Elle. Sam.”

  Elle gave him a glance over her shoulder that didn’t look as if he’d convinced her, and she leaned over to taste the sauce on the spoon Dan was offering. “Fine. Sam. Move your ass, Sam, and set the table.”