Bedroom Eyes (14 page)

“Aunt Tootie, Penelope Fields.”

Penelope nodded. “Very pleased to meet you,” she said in a voice that would have chipped ice.

Tony groaned. Shit. Just when he’d had her about to melt.

“Just picking up a few cookbooks,” his aunt said. “You should come by more often. Come try my new cannelloni. I’m doing a crab and com one that’s to die for.” She kissed her fingertips and smacked loudly.

Tony grinned despite himself.

Even Penelope looked less frozen.

“Well, don’t make yourself a stranger to the family.” She stood up, then bent over to collect her books. “Bring your girl for dinner and we’ll tell her what you’re really like.” She winked again.

Tony stood, kissed her on the cheek, and waved her off.

When he turned back to Penelope, any thaw in her expression had frozen over. She’d gathered her books in her arms.

“So you come here all the time?” She threw him a look designed to wound. “You know what I think? I think you’re a liar. A compulsive liar.” She snatched the book out of his lap and read aloud,
“The Times Crossword Puzzle Answer Book.”

Tossing it back, she said, “So much for helping troubled youth.” She rose and stood over him. “If I catch you anywhere in my line of vision, Mr. Olano, I’ll slap you with a restraining order so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

Chapter 11

“Front and center, Mrs. Merlin!” Penelope slammed her book purchases down on her dining table, still seething over having fallen for Tony Olano’s bogus charms.

“Liar,” she muttered, sweeping the room for sight of Mrs. Merlin. She didn’t know who infuriated her more—Mrs. Merlin and her frog’s testicles or the insufferably egotistical Tony Olano.

Why, she’d actually started to like him as a person, in addition to being superficially attracted to his gorgeous hunk of a body.

Lies. All lies.

Had he spoken the truth once, about anything? She’d known from his first guilty start at the sound of his aunt’s voice that the man with bedroom eyes didn’t frequent Barnes & Noble. Why, from his aunt’s words, Penelope had gotten the impression Olano would rather visit a funeral home than a bookstore.

Where had he ever heard of Tolstoy? Penelope frowned. Maybe he had a sister, an educated sister. She swept into the bedroom, still steaming. She caught sight of her face in the dresser mirror. Anger had stained her cheeks red. Penelope lay her palms over her cheeks and started to count to ten.

When she reached three she pictured Tony rushing in, gun drawn. That fueled her temper, so she had to start over at one. This time she reached five before she remembered how impressed she’d been that he worked with troubled kids.

Hah! She would bet he didn’t even have a job.

Penelope dropped her hands and stood staring into the mirror. Forgetting all about counting to ten, she lifted one hand to the side of her cheek and felt again his touch, so gentle for such a powerful man.

Reluctantly this time, she lowered her hand and said to her mirrored self, “Face it, Pen, you’re feeling foolish and vulnerable. You were well on your way to melting, well on your way to convincing yourself the man with bedroom eyes was actually interested in you, plain old Penelope Sue.”

Turning away from the mirror, she sank onto her bed, unmindful for once of her grandmother’s precious antique quilt, which every night she removed, folded, and placed on the cedar trunk at the foot of her bed.

She set her brain to the task she should have performed sooner. But she hadn’t wanted to analyze why Tony Olano, ex-cop in disgrace, showed up at her every turn.

Why did Tony Olano keep following her?

The fantasy-loving part of Penelope wanted to believe he found her fascinating, that he wanted to get to know her.

“Oh, right,” she said aloud, and plucking a pillow from the pile on her bed, she began to spin it over and over in her hands.

Trained in analytical and logical thinking, she knew she could easily separate fantasy from reality when called upon to do so. She only had to put her mind to the task.

“Fact,” she said, turning the pillow more rapidly. “It wasn’t until after I dated David that I bumped into Olano.” She clutched the pillow to her chest and remembered the way Tony had looked in the elevator the first day she’d seen him.

Smoldering, dark eyes. The crooked angle of his mouth, not quite a smile, but certainly not a sneer. It was, Penelope concluded, a promise of passion. And judging by the way he’d lounged against the wall of the elevator car, lord of all he surveyed, that was a promise on which he could deliver.

Penelope shivered, even though the blood ran hot in her veins. The image in her mind of Tony Olano was so vivid it was tangible. She traced a finger in the air in front of her.

Then she snapped her hand back and sent the pillow spinning once more. That first day, he’d been on her floor in the building where she worked, in the elevator she rode each day to and from the 42nd floor. No accident, that.

A thought crept into her mind and her instinct was to thrust it out immediately. But to face reality squarely, she needed to consider her question.

When had he first begun to follow her?

She couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. Ridiculous to feel nervous. He didn’t act dangerous, but one never knew. And even if he was perfectly harmless, just the idea that someone might have been watching her, invading her private moments, observing her in her unguarded ones, both chilled and enraged her.

“Fact the second,” she said aloud, returning to her analysis, determined to quit thinking of Tony Olano as the man with bedroom eyes and think of him instead as a possibly dangerous criminal. “There’s bad blood between Olano and David.”

Thinking of the grim look on Olano’s face when he’d answered her question about taking his ex-wife back, Penelope knew he was a man capable of exacting his own form of justice.

“Ergo, he’s using me to get back at Hinson. Trying to steal me to get his goat,” Penelope muttered, both her ego and her heart deflating at the inevitable conclusion of her line of reasoning.

She tossed the pillow toward the others piled at the head of her bed. “Stupid man,” she said, again out loud. “As if David Hinson is even interested in me. To him I’m just another lawyer.”

True, he’d kissed her the other night on the balcony of his house and last night tried to do more than give her a peck on the lips. But she didn’t feel what she knew she would if he were seeking her out, man to woman. Her fantasies told her so.

And lately Raoul, her fantasy man, had been playing understudy to Tony Olano.

Not once, Penelope mused, had David appeared as the strong man in her fantasies, the man who swept her off her feet. So Olano was wasting his time trying to make Hinson jealous.

She looked down at her lap, covered in sensible navy linen slacks. Her gaze traveled to her feet, clad in elegant but conservative Ferragamo loafers. She slipped her shoes off and wiggled her toes. She pictured her feet encased in the stack-heel monstrosities she’d seen Brenda next door wearing last week.

Penelope smiled. What wouldn’t she give to have Tony Olano really dying to have her. More than one person could play “get your goat”! She’d go shopping, and this time it wouldn’t be for placemats.

Looking around, she realized she’d sat upon her precious quilt. “Kites and kilowatts!” she cried, and shot off the bed. One more proof that thinking about Tony Olano caused her nothing but trouble.

But her reasoning exercise had helped her to reach a conclusion. Olano would no doubt continue to follow her. He probably laughed at the idea of a temporary restraining order, knowing from his days as a cop how easy it was for an abusive spouse or ex-lover to slip through the cracks of the law even after a court had stepped in.

So, if David did invite her to dinner again, Penelope hoped Olano ate his heart out when he saw just how well she could treat a caring, considerate, polite, and honest man.

She experienced a faint twinge of conscience, thinking that she might be giving David the wrong impression, but Penelope quickly brushed that thought aside. David wasn’t seriously interested in her. He’d initially asked her out after a conference concerning a mutual client and they’d talked business over a glass of wine. Most of their conversations concerned law or politics. With David, business clearly came first.

Unlike Olano, Penelope thought, who apparently never bothered going to work.

She turned to leave the room, her mind returning to Mrs. Merlin now that she’d resolved just how to handle Mr. Bedroom Eyes. She paused suddenly at the sound of water dripping and a scuffling noise coming from the bathroom.

Then a voice joined in.

“If you’re quite through solving the problems in your love life, perhaps you could come help a friend in need.”

“Mrs. Merlin?” Penelope raced across the bedroom toward her bathroom.

“No, it’s Mrs. Claus. Who in the stars do you think it is?”

Penelope halted in the doorway, staring at her normally neat bathroom. She liked her things to be in order; too much clutter and confusion made her skin itch under the surface. Penelope knew she’d become that way during her childhood, when her mother was always too tired after her waitress shifts to clean their trailer.

So Penelope had taken care of instilling structure out of chaos.

Chaos certainly described her bathroom.

The bathroom sink had been stoppered; dripping water had filled the bowl and now overflowed one splattering drop at a time onto her tile floor. Her small rack of hand towels lay on its side, the impact having scattered a fine layer of bath salts from a nearby crystal bowl.

But she didn’t see Mrs. Merlin.

“In here,” the messed-up magician cried.

Penelope looked down, down into the depths of a high-sided silver wastebasket she’d picked up at an estate sale in Chicago.

Staring into the basket at the exasperated face of Mrs. Merlin, Penelope reached with one hand and switched off the dripping faucet. “Well, well,” she said.

“That’s exactly what this is like,” Mrs. Merlin snapped. “It’s about time you made it back. How long does it take to run a simple errand?”

Penelope tapped her foot and crossed her arms over her chest. Glaring at her trapped houseguest, she said in a falsely sweet voice, “You call hunting for frog’s testicles ‘simple’?”

Mrs. Merlin laughed, almost sounding like her normal self. “Oh, that. Now, Penelope, dear, don’t hold that little test against me. Help me out of here and I’ll explain everything.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But I’m stuck!” Her voice wailed, rising at least two octaves.

Penelope held her fingers to her ears. Lowering them cautiously, she asked, “Where’s your magic pole vaulter?” She had trouble believing such a thing existed, but if she accepted Mrs. Merlin’s presence, she supposed a magic incense stick was just one more piece of the improbable package.

“When I vaulted onto the sink I lost my grip on it, then I slipped and fell right off the edge into this tomb.” Mrs. Merlin patted her face. “And I can’t find my glasses, to make things worse. It’s a good thing I’ve kept up my yoga. That fall might have killed a regular old lady.”

“I do hope you’re all right,” Penelope said, looking down to see if she’d crushed the miniature spectacles. She started to get down on her hands and knees to look for them when she remembered how rudely Mr. Gotho had hustled her out of the Bayou Magick Shoppe.

“Tell you what, Mrs. Merlin,” she said. “You explain why you sent me off on that wild goose chase and then I’ll get you out of this pickle.”

Her captive opened her mouth, clearly about to protest, but then snapped her lips shut.

At least this was one negotiation where she had the upper hand, Penelope thought with satisfaction, as she waited for Mrs. Merlin to spill the beans.

The woman, so miniature in size but mammoth in troublemaking skills, took her time settling onto an empty container of face cream Penelope had tossed in the trash that morning. Finally, she said, “I gather you met Mr. Gotho?”

Penelope nodded. “You mean the man who threw me out of that quaint little shop.”

“Oh, dear, well, then you obviously didn’t pass the test.” Mrs. Merlin peered upward, searching for what Penelope could not fathom.

“Explain, please,” she said.

“Candle magick is a most delicate art,” Mrs. Merlin said. “The ingredients of a powerful candle, the type I need to bum in order to get back to being me, are very sensitive to, um . . . to certain negatives in the universe.”

Penelope lifted the stopper to drain the sink. “Negatives such as?”

Mrs. Merlin ticked off on her fingers. “Disordered karma, impurities from the auras of non-believers, items handled by those who walk the dark side—do you want to hear more?”

“Might as well hear them all.” Not that she countenanced a word the gremlin granny spoke.

“Swollen ego—”

“What does that one mean?” Penelope interrupted. Mr. Gotho had accused her of something bad having to do with her ego right before he’d tossed her out.

Mrs. Merlin’s eyes glinted. “So that one catches your interest, eh?”

Penelope shrugged.

“A balanced karma consists of an acceptance of one’s qualities, both embracing of the positive and a sincere commitment to improving any negative aspects. Balance requires working on the negative without wallowing about in self-hatred. It also—You sure you want to hear this?”

Penelope nodded.

“Balanced ego also requires accepting one’s talents as gifts of the goddess and using them fully without falling prey to hubris.”

With a hand towel, Penelope wiped the rim of the sink, then folded it neatly. She wanted to discount the woman’s words, but they did make a certain philosophical sense. “I suppose falling prey to hubris is what Mr. Gotho charged me with?”

Mrs. Merlin pursed her lips. “You do act a trifle conceited at times.”

“Well, I never!” She dropped the towel she’d just folded.

A chuckle floated up from the wastebasket. “Hit a nerve with that one, didn’t I?”

“But I am smart and educated and capable. I went through college in three years. I hold an LLM in tax from NYU. If you say balance implies accepting one’s talents, then I say I’m balanced.” She swooped down and picked up the towel.