Bedroom Eyes (7 page)

Not invitation, but irritation better expressed Penelope’s reaction. If she wasn’t special, she didn’t want any consideration from this man. “Thank you very much. As you can see, I’m fine.”

His gaze met hers, scorching her with a suggestive look in his dark eyes. “Oh, I can see you’re more than fine. You really ought to wear your hair down more often.”

Penelope caught a curling strand in her fingers, marveling at the man’s brazen audacity, and at her own responsiveness. Why, he created more of a sensation within her than any of her imaginary moments with her dream man Raoul!

He shifted his stance. Gone was the polite person performing a call of obligation. This time he reached out and gathered a handful of hair. “Like a waterfall,” he said in a low voice.

Her throat suddenly felt even more parched than it had before she passed out on the sidewalk. She ran her tongue over her lips and swallowed hard.

He dropped his hand. Concern replaced the sensual expression in his eyes. “You’re still dehydrated.”

She shook her head. It wasn’t thirst for water that caused her reaction.

“Come on, let’s get you some water.” He strode toward the kitchen.

She followed. Reaching into the refrigerator for the bottled water she kept there, she watched him as he sized up her kitchen and opened the cabinet where she kept her glasses, though she couldn’t figure out how he’d guessed right the first time.

It was almost as if he could read her thoughts, because he turned, holding out two glasses, smiling. “Closest to the dishwasher,” he said.

She found herself smiling back as she filled the glasses. She was surprised, but pleased, that he could find his way around the kitchen, the last thing she would have expected from the man with bedroom eyes.

Scarcely able to believe the stranger in the elevator now stood in her kitchen looking very much at home, Penelope put away the bottled water, then dropped ice cubes into the glasses.

He held out one glass to her, and their fingers touched briefly. Ice and heat collided and she snatched her hand away.

“Penelope?” The voice came from her entranceway, an accusing tone shot like an arrow from the throat of David Hinson.

“David?” Penelope realized the door must have been left ajar. She sucked in a breath, slipped the hand that still tingled from the stranger’s touch into the pocket of her slacks and backed toward the refrigerator just as David appeared in the kitchen, cool and immaculate in a tropical-weight wool suit.

“Your door was unlocked. Are you—”

“Downstairs, too?” The man with bedroom eyes drawled his question, his gaze fixed on David in a way that made Penelope extremely nervous.

As he spotted the man with bedroom eyes, David stopped short. “My, my, if it isn’t Olano, police department poster boy.”

“Hinson,” came the wary reply.

Penelope swiveled her head between the two men. David’s lip had curled as if he found the other man’s presence distasteful.

And the man who only moments earlier had set her senses reeling in his laid-back fashion appeared as steely as an anaconda poised to crush and destroy its prey.

Watching the two men standing there glaring at one another, Penelope experienced a momentary thrill. Then she realized she’d jumped to a very egotistical conclusion. Obviously these two guys knew one another, with no love lost between them. They weren’t squaring off over her.

But at least she’d learned the stranger’s last name.

To her surprise, David crossed the room and kissed her on the cheek. Embarrassed at the possessive gesture, Penelope shifted slightly and, thinking to break the tension, said, “So I guess you guys have met.”

“From time to time,” David said, “but we won’t bore you with the details, will we, Olano?”

The other man shrugged and took a long swallow of his water.

“But I didn’t know the two of you were friends,” David said, staring at Olano with eyes that looked like slits of blue ice.

“Oh, we’re not,” Penelope said.

“You may as well tell him,” Olano said. “Hinson’s the kind of guy who wants to know everything that goes on.”

David stared at Olano, then back at her. She felt trapped, especially when David put his arm around her shoulder and said, “I thought you were too new in town to have made any friends. Isn’t that what you told me?”

He accompanied the question with a smile, but Penelope heard a certain disapproval that she didn’t understand. She had said those words to him only a few weeks earlier, but she resented him for assuming she’d had no time to meet anyone other than himself.

Penelope could almost hear Mrs. Merlin chastising her for having no sense of adventure. A spark flamed as she considered the years she’d subsisted on fantasies for emotional fulfillment.

Throwing caution to the wind, she eased from David’s grasp and captured Olano’s hand. Giving him a gentle squeeze and what she hoped was a coquettish glance, she said, “Well, we’re just now getting to know one another, David, but I think I’ve found a great new friend in . . .” Penelope stumbled momentarily. Hectares and horses, she didn’t even know the man’s first name! “In New Orleans,” she finished.

This time it was the man with bedroom eyes who draped an arm over her shoulders. At his touch she experienced an electricity completely absent from David’s contact.

He traced the line of her jaw, setting off more sparks. She smothered a gasp. After all, she’d started this game; Olano was merely playing along.

David, annoyance clear in his pale eyes, said, “Before you get too involved with your new friend, Penelope, you might want to ask for character references.”

Olano withdrew his arm, leaving her feeling strangely bare. “Good advice,” he said.

“ ‘Cause dirty cops don’t mix too well with squeaky clean lawyers,” David said.

“But they’re fine for lawyers with sleaze under their fingernails?” Olano tossed out the challenging words and once again Penelope knew she was witnessing a running feud between the two men.

But she’d had enough. “If the two of you want to argue, you can leave,” she said, enjoying her more dominant self. “I’ve had a rough day, fainted from heat exhaustion, and the last thing I want to do is listen to bickering.”

David opened his mouth, then snapped it shut.

Tony, from his stance near the refrigerator, shot Penelope a mental thumbs-up. She’d stood up to Hinson and played up to him. Not a bad effort for a woman caught between two strong personalities. Not only did she possess hidden fire, but hidden steel as well.

As if to prove that point, Penelope grasped his elbow and steered him to the door. “Thank you for coming by,” she said, once again in that formal tone of hers.

“Anytime you need me,” he said, checking to make sure Hinson hadn’t stayed in the kitchen, “just call.”

Sure enough, Hinson followed, looking every inch the hawk circling its prey.

Almost as soon as he put one foot in front of the other, Penelope dropped her hand from his elbow. She clearly wanted him out, which was just as well. He’d overstayed his welcome, and with a guy like Hinson, that could mean trouble for Penelope. He only wished she’d toss them both out at the same time.

At the door he paused and said to Hinson, “You and I go back a ways, and I want you to know I actually hadn’t met Ms. Fields before today, when she fainted at my feet on Canal.”

Hinson narrowed his eyes. “No? What a shame.” He slipped an arm around her and ruffled her hair. “She’s a terrific girl.”

Penelope smiled a stiff little smile.

Tony wondered what women saw in the guy. And girl was definitely not the word he’d use to describe Penelope; she was all woman.

A complex woman he’d like to get to know.

“Catch ya later,” he said, then halted with one foot out the door. Trained to see and hear the most subtle of indications of something amiss, he’d detected a shifting of the bedroom door. There—again it edged backward, only by a few inches, but enough to alert Tony to the presence of someone behind the door.

Hinson had his hand on the doorknob now, obviously eager to claim time alone with Penelope.

Rather than taking the hint, Tony slouched into his good old boy posture, resting one shoulder against the doorframe, giving himself a moment to analyze the situation.

What if they weren’t alone? There could be an intruder, or potentially even more serious, maybe Penelope had another man stashed in the bedroom. She’d hinted at such a thing earlier.

If Hinson found out and lost his temper, it wouldn’t be pretty. Penelope didn’t look the type, but then, Tony reminded himself, she didn’t carry the profile of a petty thief, either.

Shit. Tony hated being the man who tried to do the right thing.

Penelope shifted from foot to foot, glancing from him back to Hinson.

“Before I go,” Tony said, straightening his body and checking for the .22 he carried in the leg pocket of his khaki shorts, “I think you should know there’s someone else in your apartment.”

“No, there’s not,” Penelope snapped out her response.

Tony raised his brows at her defensive reaction. So she knew.

Hinson stilled the hand he’d been smoothing over Penelope’s hair. Tony read the awareness of danger in the other man’s body as he shifted onto the balls of his feet and freed his arms. He also, Tony noted, unbuttoned with a swift motion his pretty-boy jacket.

No doubt he carried a piece under that coat.

“Would you mind explaining yourself?”

Even now Hinson had to talk like an overpaid lawyer, Tony thought, then cocked his head toward the bedroom.

“There’s no one in my apartment other than the three of us.” Penelope hedged backward, moving protectively toward the bedroom door. “And if you don’t mind, Mr. Olano, that is one person too many.”

“Ooh,” Tony said, grinning at Penelope, which only seemed to set her back up more, “Sticks and stones . . .” As he spoke, he loosened the Velcro opening of his shorts pocket.

Hinson shadowed Tony’s movement toward the bedroom.

Penelope raised her hands. “Stop.” Tony detected a flush to her cheeks and a sparkly light in her eyes he could swear hadn’t been there earlier. What was she hiding? How many layers of deception did this lady have built up?

In a lazy voice, Hinson said, “Why, Penelope, what if a burglar has broken in and is hiding in your bedroom? What if there’s a desperate character in there waiting for us to leave so he can ravish you and—” He slashed a hand across his throat.

Penelope touched her shapely throat with a hand that trembled slightly. Tony saw the nervous motion and knew she was lying to them.

He exchanged looks with Hinson and nodded. As odd as it was for the two of them, enemies for life, to be acting in accord, they lunged together past Penelope and, with guns drawn, burst through the bedroom door.

Chapter 6

“Guns!” Penelope raced after the two guys. That the man with bedroom eyes wielded a gun didn’t surprise her. But David? That was so out of character she couldn’t quite grasp that he’d whipped out a gun that looked even bigger and deadlier than the one Olano had produced.

“Are you guys nuts?” Poor Mrs. Merlin! Her heart might stop from fright. It struck Penelope that she’d never be able to explain to the woman’s family that they only needed a six-inch coffin, and she bit back a hysterical laugh.

They had the closet and the bathroom door open wide. Olano had gone to his knees beside the bed. David had pulled the drapes and stood checking the windows that led to the balcony.

The cookbook and remote control lay on the bed where Penelope had left them, but no sign of the diminutive Mrs. Merlin existed. Penelope wrinkled her brow and poked the carpet with the toe of her house slipper. Had she imagined the entire incident? Had she gotten so out of control with her fantasy life that she’d created the creature in her mind and projected her into the basket of napkin rings?

Olano had risen from the floor beside her bed and was staring at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. David, too, had turned around and was walking toward her. Penelope backed toward the door of the room. Surely they couldn’t get mad at her. They were the ones who had overreacted.

But she might as well not have been in the room. David advanced on Olano, his face gone pale, a dangerous glint in his eye. “Pleased with yourself, Olano? Trying to show off for Penelope, trying to show her what a hot-shot cop you
used
to be?”

Olano, fiddling with his gun, didn’t even look up until after he’d slipped the weapon back into his pocket. Then he shot a glance at David. “Forget it,” he said.

He turned to her and Penelope realized with a swift shot of clarity she didn’t want him to go.

“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then sketched a salute and strode out of her apartment.

Out of her life.

David slipped his gun back under his jacket, and Penelope shivered. Walking toward her, he said in a low voice, the harsh tone belying the smile on his face, “Want to tell me how you know Tony Olano?”

So his first name was Tony. Penelope tested the name in her mind. She liked it. And it suited the man with bedroom eyes.

David put his arm around her and drew her down to sit beside him on the bed.

Penelope wondered whether Tony was short for Anthony. Of course it would be. Anthony Olano. She made a face, thinking it sounded like a mobster sort of name. Maybe that was why he gave off an air of danger, but David had called him an ex-cop.

Pressure on her shoulder, a tiny bit stronger than a squeeze, brought her mind back to her bedroom. Not only was David holding her too tightly for her comfort level, they were sitting on her antique quilt. She tried to edge away, but David held her close to his side.

Tipping her chin up, he gazed steadily into her eyes in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, as if he could read every thought that swirled behind her eyes.

“Olano,” he said, not letting go, “is a very dangerous man. Not someone a woman like you, particularly a lawyer, needs to be associating with.”

So he was dangerous. Penelope realized with surprise that that trait attracted rather than repulsed her. “What did he do?”