Almost Perfect (12 page)

Feeling as if she'd just thrown open the doors to the inner sanctum, Jared followed her with a mixture of amusement and anticipation. Maybe he never knew what to expect out of Cleo Alyssum, but he sure was never bored in her company.

That realization shed a light on his life that he didn't like to examine. He had a lucrative career, one he enjoyed, and everything money could buy. He had no reason to ever be bored.

He'd been bored out of his skull for months.

Okay, enough of that insight for the evening. He'd rather pry into Cleo's entertaining head.

As she flipped on the overhead light of her recently refurbished kitchen, he almost experienced disappointment. At first glance, it seemed perfectly normal. Modern stove, refrigerator, trestle table, chairs, no suffocatingly frilly curtains on the windows. Then his glance swung upward, and in the darkness near the ceiling, he discovered a grimacing gargoyle leaning over a cherry cabinet. Jared grinned in relief and inspected the rest of the shadowed gloom above his head—gargoyles and imps and devils and maybe a leprechaun or two beamed down at him from various perches.

“I really like the way you think, lady.” He tossed the pizza box on the table and wandered over to inspect a
cookie jar in the form of a gingerbread house, complete with witch at the door.

“Doesn't say much for your maturity,” she said dryly, reaching into the refrigerator for drinks. “Maya tells me I'm expressing the inner child I was denied when young.”

“Maya?” Everything about Cleo suddenly seemed fascinating. Swinging around, Jared leaned against her terra-cotta counter and watched in amazement as she reached into her cabinet and removed antique peanut butter and jelly glasses decorated with cartoon characters. An old girlfriend had bought him an identical set years ago, and he kept them on a shelf above his computer in his New York apartment.

Cleo plopped them down on the table and filled them with ice as if they were no more than Wal-Mart cheapware. “Tea, Dr Pepper, or lemonade?”

He lifted the Bugs Bunny glass and filled it with tap water. The paint colors were fading, but the Bugs Bunny toothy grin still smiled back at him. He liked the idea of using the collectibles instead of dusting them. His mother had taught her sons to value antiques and not play with her cut glass, and he'd blindly followed in her path, dusting his treasures rather than living with them. There was freedom in forgetting the strictures.

“This will do.” He held up the glass, testing her. “Do you have any idea what these glasses are worth today?”

She shrugged. “Don't care. Matty likes them.”

She'd already ignored his question about the Maya person. He wasn't backing down so easily this time. “Matty?” He'd seen no evidence of a man in her life. He glanced at her bare ring finger for reassurance.

“My son.” Her tone held a touch of defiance as she threw paper napkins and plates on the painted tiles of the tabletop. He could almost bet she'd taken a junk
table and tiled it herself. She'd spent a fortune scrupulously restoring the house, but scarcely a penny on decorating it. Gazing at her company logo T-shirt, he thought he saw a metaphor in that.

She almost stepped away from him when he pulled a chair out for her. Touchy female. But the news of her son fascinated him as much as everything else. “You have a son? Is he with his father?”

“Lord, I should hope he never will be.” She took the chair and opened the pizza box, ignoring him as he took the chair opposite. “His father is dead, and with any luck at all, frying in hell.”

Okay, that might be a little deeper than he wanted to dig just now. “How old is he? Your son, I mean.”

She grinned wickedly over her pizza slice. “Do people age in hell? What's the matter, McCloud? You're walking around me like an elephant on eggshells.”

He tried glaring at her, but that wasn't who he was. He grinned and reached for a slice. “Okay, you bring out the adolescent in me. I feel like an anxious schoolboy, afraid to say the wrong thing.”

“Afraid you'll get pop dumped in your lap or afraid you won't get a make-out session when the night ends?”

“Damn, you're blunt. Didn't anyone teach you to be polite?” Since he couldn't readily answer her question, he opted for the offensive. That probably wouldn't gain him the make-out session that appealed to him. Now that she'd mentioned it, kissing those sulky lips would go a long way toward easing some of his anxiety.

“Nope. They tried to beat it into me a time or two, but I've got a hard head. Thanks for the pizza, by the way. And for the cartoon. Kismet has almost worn it out.”

Jared caught the way she'd diverted the subject from the more painful admission and let her get away with it, for now. He'd ponder the thought of someone trying to
beat anything into Cleo another time. “You really think she's socially challenged and not developmentally challenged? She doesn't seem too connected to reality.”

Cleo emitted a little moan of appreciation as she finished chewing her last bite. “I don't get pizza often. This is good.”

That little moan raised other parts of him besides his expectations, and Jared squirmed uncomfortably. He didn't hold out much hope of winning her with pizza. “I ordered extra everything. Back to Kismet.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Men have such onetrack minds. Kismet is pathologically shy; I'll give you that. Counseling might be helpful. Chances are good she's been abused in the past. Teachers really need to look for that in troubled kids. They also need to look for hidden talents. No one has ever praised Kismet, told her she was good at anything, encouraged her to come out of her shell and show the world what she is. Maybe she will never be a literary or mathematical genius. Who cares? She just needs to learn to function, and then she can find what she can do on her own.”

Amazed that he'd drawn that much of a speech out of the taciturn creature across from him, Jared figured he'd hit on a hot spot and he'd best stay with it. “It's kind of hard to expect the school system to teach some kids to function while teaching others what it takes to get into college, don't you think?”

“So, what would you do with a whole lost layer of kids who've lived in mud from birth? I don't know the answers. I just know Kismet and Gene are basically good kids in a sad situation.”

“Letting them stay with their mother isn't helping them.” He knew better than to argue when he wanted to taste her kisses instead of pizza, but he hadn't grown up
with his mother's speeches on charity and social reform without learning some social responsibility.

Cleo stabbed the pointed end of her pizza at him as if it were a knife. “You'd rather give them to a system that thinks food and clothing will solve the problem? Kids need love, encouragement, and attention, and there isn't a government in existence that can provide that. Their mother's efforts may be pitiful, but they're better than none at all.”

He lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “From what I see, their mother can't provide for her own needs. I don't know how you expect her to provide for the kids'.”

She ran her hands through her short hair, making it stand on end. “Not easily, but she's never been this bad before. Still, they can hope things will turn around. But if Social Services takes them away from their mother, they take away their only hope. Social workers wouldn't even have a clue if the kids belonged in a white home or a black one.”

Time to derail this topic and move on to something easier. He liked knowing she could be passionate about something—it gave him hope. But he really didn't want to anger her when they were finally talking like sensible adults instead of exchanging insults. “What are you, a burned-out social worker, that you know so much about it?”

She snorted so hard the soft drink almost came out her nose. Wiping her mouth with a napkin, she shook her head in amusement. “You don't even want to go there. Let's just agree to disagree, all right? You'll go away in a few months and forget all about it. I've got to live here. Accept that it's none of your business, and we'll do fine.”

He wasn't accepting anything of the sort, but he didn't have to tell her that. He liked her in a mellow mood. He'd have to bring pizza more often. “All right, then, tell me about Matty and Maya.”

“Why? You're not likely to be around long enough to get to know them. You want blunt?”

She didn't give him time to tell her he'd rather forgo the pleasure.

She plunged on. “You have about as much interest in my family as I have in yours. We come from different planets. I don't know why you had to pick my beach house out of all the expensive condos you could have had all up and down the coast, but proximity doesn't make us anything but temporary neighbors. If I try, I might learn to deal with that. Don't think I'm available for anything more just because you're bored and avoiding whatever brought you here in the first place. Got it?”

The words stung, but he'd learned a thing or two about Cleo Alyssum over these past days. Her scary barriers were all for show. She would never have said what she just did if she hadn't been thinking along the same lines as he was. He had a craving for an intelligent, challenging woman for a change—or maybe to prove he wasn't as shallow as his family thought.

His family had always said he'd never learned to take no for an answer, too. About that, they were right. “Persistence” was his middle name.

Jared pushed back his chair and stood, and she did the same. He liked having women around, always had, so he'd spent a lot of time learning how to achieve what he wanted. Anger wouldn't do it.

“I got it,” he said with a smile. “I don't happen to agree. Only time will decide who is right or wrong.” He could see the suspicion creasing her forehead. He'd known she wasn't unintelligent.

He waited until she came around the table to ease him out the door. Then he caught her stubborn little chin and lifted it until she all but spat into his eyes. “If you try, could you learn to deal with me and not just my proximity?”

Jared didn't give her the opportunity to answer. He'd spent days imagining what it would feel like to soften her sassy mouth beneath his. Now he intended to find out.

She tasted of pizza and tartness. Exploringly, he licked the salt from her lips, and knew the triumph of conquest when she shivered and her mouth relaxed and accepted the pressure of his.

His libido screamed to grab her waist and haul her against him while he had the chance. His conscience gave her more space than that.

Sliding his fingers to frame her jaw, Jared deepened the contact, asking for the next step, the gentleness before the lust, permission before the taking.

She returned his kiss with more than interest, with a hungry need that shook him and pushed him faster than he'd anticipated. When she parted her lips on an exhalation of pleasure, he rejoiced and took possession of her mouth.

Cleo bit his tongue. Hard.

“Dammit, Cleo! What the hell did you do that for?” Nursing his sore tongue, Jared stepped away from the table.

Cleo calmly began reboxing the pizza. Jared McCloud had rattled her bones. If she thought too hard, she'd realize she was shaking. “You might want to take the rest
of this back to your brother.” She closed the cardboard lid and shoved the box at him.

Men never touched her unless she let them. Why had she let him? She'd better figure it out quick, because she wanted his hands on her again. They'd been strong, competent, reassuring hands, and she could easily deceive herself into believing they were caring ones.

No man had ever kissed her like that. Or maybe she'd never been kissed by a real man. The possibility that Jared was the kind of man she'd never known shivered her down to her toes. She didn't need this.

His eyes narrowed as he studied the box, studied her, then focused his gaze on a part of her anatomy she'd rather not reveal. If her flannel shirt had been nearby, she'd have put it on. He was entirely too good at seeing beyond the obvious.

“If you wanted me to leave, you could have just said so,” he said angrily, ignoring the offered box. “If you're still mad at me for letting my party get out of hand, you could have said that, too. You damned well didn't have to maim me.”

Yeah, she did, but she wasn't saying that either. Talking had never got her anywhere. How in hell did he expect her to explain that she had the hots for him, but no way in this universe was she acting on her insane, selfdestructive impulses?

“You wouldn't have taken no for an answer.” She shoved the box at him again. “I'm not mad at you. It's good pizza. Go away.”

He snatched the box, and for a hair-raising minute, Cleo feared he would set it aside and come after her. She couldn't half blame him. They'd really been getting into that kiss, and if he didn't leave soon, she'd be gravitating right back into his arms again. Why in hell hadn't he stomped out and left her alone as he was supposed to do?

She hadn't anticipated her reaction to his kiss, but she was prepared this time. She crossed her arms over her aroused breasts, activating all her defenses.

He must have read her body language. He kept the box in his hands.

“All right, I'm going. Hide out here all you like; it's no difference to me. I'll be gone in a couple of months. You're the one who has to stay in this prison you've built.”