Cinderella Search (5 page)

Lissa nearly choked. Damn that Ginny. Always sailing too close to the wind. It was just like her to give Steve an opening like that, a reason to ask questions.

“No!”

“No you don’t sing, or no you don’t want to trade jobs with her?”

“No to both.”

He drew her even closer. “Good,” he murmured, his breath fanning her ear. “I’d rather dance with you than with her.” He slid his hand lower down on her back, pressing her to him. “You and I, we fit.”

It was true. There was just enough height difference that she felt comfortable with him. Too comfortable. She wished the band would choose something else, something fast, something lively, something that would get her out of Steve Jackson’s arms, get her far enough away from him that she could breathe without drawing in the scent of his body.

On their next pass near the stage she could ask Charlie, the pianist, to pick up the pace. Some Creedence Clearwater Revival material would be good. Charlie liked the old stuff, and Ginny was good at belting out Lookin’ Out My Backdoor.

Assuming Lissa was still breathing by then. Was she breathing now? She wasn’t sure, but somehow it didn’t matter. She was … feeling. Feeling too many things, her senses all tangled up and confused. They passed the stage. She couldn’t have called out to Charlie any more than she could have stopped dancing with Steve as long as the music played. Music? Did she really hear it, or was that just her heartbeat roaring in her ears? Suddenly, she was afraid that it had stopped, and she was on the floor with Steve, swaying in time to a beat only the two of them could hear.

It wasn’t until she had to force her eyes open that she realized they had been closed. She lifted her head off Steve’s shoulder, unsure how it had ended up there, or how long it had been there, and cast a pleading glance at her best friend, as they danced near the stage.

“Chicken Dance,” she managed to croak out, and could only hope Ginny had heard, had understood. Thank goodness! Just before Steve spun her way from the stage, she saw Ginny turn and murmur something to Lorne, on the sax, who in turn spoke to Charlie.

She almost broke away from Steve, ready to stick her elbows out and start clucking, but then Ginny’s voice softened, deepened, the saxophone moaned in a heartbroken sob, Charlie’s fingers dropped an octave on his keyboard and Marsha’s violin wept along with the sax.

“When I fall in love,” Ginny sang, her mouth close to the mike, “it will be forever …”

Steve’s breath fanned her hair, which, thanks to the exertion of their earlier fast dance, was escaping from the clip that held it back. Softly, he began to sing along. “‘Or I’ll never fall in love …’” He had a mellow voice, deep and throaty, and it seemed to seep through her pores, right into her soul. His arm across her back drew her closer, his hand holding hers tucked in between them. This was too much. It was too close, but she couldn’t seem to break away. The world spun, whirled, went dark and soft around her.

“‘And the moment I can feel that …’”

Suddenly she felt overwhelmed by the urge to cry. She squeezed her eyes shut, turned her face toward the center of Steve’s chest in an attempt to escape the sound of his voice, the feel of his breath against her ear, and found all she’d accomplished was to put herself into even closer contact with him. She gave up and surrendered to the feelings, taking each moment as it came, reveling in it, allowing herself these few minutes out of a lifetime of whose emptiness, whose bleakness, she’d never been fully aware until now.

Slowly, tenderly, Ginny drew the song out to its very end. Then all that was left was the sweet melancholy of the last few notes Lorne wrung from his saxophone.

After a moment of complete silence, the dancers as well as the listeners around the bar began to applaud enthusiastically. Steve released Lissa’s numb body. He, too, applauded. She tried to lift her hands, but it was all she could do to simply keep herself upright on the floor.

“We’ll be takin’ a little break now,” Ginny said into the microphone, and the dancers slowly left the floor. For a moment Lissa thought she’d be unable to move. Then her dad came up behind her and Steve.

“It’s 10:30, honey,” he said. “You ready to go?” Weakly, she nodded.

She managed to lift her gaze to Steve’s and murmur, “Good night,” before her father slid his arm over her shoulders and she wrapped hers around his waist for support.

The cooler, rainy air outside brought her back to her senses and she drew in several deep breaths of it. “Thanks for dinner, Dad. I’d better go down to the boat and get ready for work.”

“Yup,” he said, kissing her cheek again. “See you tomorrow? The meeting’s at ten.”

“I’ll be there,” she said, then watched him walk away into the night.

“But tonight,” she added to the dark sky, “is absolutely the last time I’ll be here. At least until Steve Jackson has gone.”

What in the world had come over her? She’d danced with him as she’d never danced with another man before, not even when she was young and foolish and thought every fleeting emotion she felt must be true love. She was older now, and a heck of a lot wiser. Wise enough to recognize that the wild sensations Steve had created in her had another name—lust.

But lust was something she could control. All it took was a little self-discipline and a lot of remembering the trouble it could get a girl into. There was only one way to deal with a man like him: from a distance. A very, very long one.

Yeah, right. “Time to go, honey” and off she went, just like that, Steve thought, watching Lissa go off with the gray-haired man. What the hell! Hadn’t she felt any of the things he’d felt? Hadn’t she understood exactly how right they’d been together? Not only in size, but in mood. They’d felt the same things, heard the same words, taken the same meaning from those songs, especially that last one. He could have sworn to it. But then her gray-haired boyfriend had stepped right in, and in a flash she was gone with him, her arm draped affectionately around his waist.

What the hell did the old guy have that Steve didn’t? Hah. Stupid question. What did most old guys who attracted young women have? Moola, bread, liquid assets, whatever you wanted to call it. And what was he? A currently unemployed commercial diver. Big deal.

He stomped to the bar and got himself another beer, sat down on a stool and watched the dancers. There she was again, that leggy blonde. Sitting down, the big bruiser nowhere to be seen.

Sure. Why not? Carrying his beer, he crossed the dance floor, weaving his way between gyrating couples, and set his glass on her table.

“Dance?” he said, determined to wash away the memory of the way Lissa Wilkins had felt in his arms. It had been a fluke, of course. Any woman would have felt that way to him, after his long dry spell.

She smiled up at him, her eyes even glassier, and hopped nimbly to her feet. She might be a bit tipsy, but it didn’t stop her shaking her bootie at him. He grinned, snapping his fingers, encouraging her.

Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have encouraged her quite so enthusiastically. Maybe he should have tried to stop her when she jumped onto a chair, then onto an empty table, where she spun so fast her skirt flew up around her waist, but he didn’t.

All it earned him, though, was a fist grabbing the back of his collar, another holding the back of his belt, and a rapid trip out the door, his feet crunching and splashing in the rain-soaked gravel of the parking lot. Then all six-foot-three, two-hundred-odd humiliated pounds of him was shoved up hard against the tailgate of a muddy pickup.

Jase had at least three inches in height, six in reach, and forty pounds of heft over Steve. Even if he hadn’t been so badly outgunned, however, he wouldn’t have wanted to make an issue of it. Not once he’d gotten a good, hard look at the blonde’s nether regions, prettily displayed by her very high-cut black bikini briefs, and discovered there was no tattoo low on her left cheek. So he just apologized to Jase, and with another shove, Jase let him go on his way.

He crossed the potholed road to the inn. A middle-aged woman whose face bespoke sore feet or an aching back stood behind the front desk where Steve had hoped to find Lissa. She looked at him as if he were Jack the Ripper reincarnated, and he quickly turned away from her before her glare turned him to stone. In the lounge, a bored bartender polished glasses while overseeing three elderly couples. Two couples played cards at one table, while the third appeared embroiled in a rousing game of Scrabble.

The male Scrabble player rose unsteadily and tottered toward Steve.

“Hey. You the man on the top floor?” Steve hesitated, then nodded.

“A little less noise tonight, if you please. My wife and I are both eighty-seven years old and have been coming here for fifty years. We’ve never been subjected to such shenanigans. We need our sleep. All that carrying on, crashing and banging—there’s no excuse for that kind of behavior in a nice place like this. You want rowdy, you stay in that den of iniquity across the street. You got that, sonny?”

Steve bit back a smile. Chuckles, a den of iniquity? But then, compared to the Saturday-night crowd in the Madrona Inn, maybe it was. Solemnly, he apologized, but offered no explanation.

As he headed up the stairs, he heard a quavery little female voice say, “Good for you, Harry. These youngsters need …”

The rest was lost as he rounded the corner of the landing. Need what? Discipline? he wondered. A good talking to once in a while? He chuckled. It was a long time since he’d thought of himself and his contemporaries as “youngsters.” Still, he supposed to eighty-seven, thirty-seven might seem almost young.

Well, maybe the old man had a point. As he flopped down on his bed, he felt like a sophomore who’d just seen the cute girl taken away by the senior football hero.

And he wasn’t thinking about the blonde.

The sound of creaking footsteps jerked Steve out of a deep sleep. He rubbed his eyes and sat up in his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Was the sound coming from the attic?

No. It seemed to be coming from his closet. His heart beating fast, he heard what sounded like wire hangers, rattling, clanking together then … there was nothing. Moments later, an even odder sound came from the closet. He sat very still, staring at its door. Slowly, he got to his feet and flung it open. Inside, his pants, shirts and jackets, neatly arranged on hangers, which he had hung from the right side of the closet, had mysteriously moved to the left side.

He scowled, wondering if the old inn had sunk a couple of inches on one side in the past few moments, causing his hangers to slide. But no. New buildings settled. Any settling in this old stone-and-wood structure had long since taken place. The bar in the closet appeared perfectly level.

Carefully, he moved his clothing back to the right side of the closet and shut the door. He was halfway across the room when he heard the hangers moving again. This time, he lunged at the closet and jerked it open in time to see his clothing back on the left, still swaying slightly, the few empty hangers clinking gently together. He returned everything to where he wanted it and backed away. Leaving the closet door open, he sat on the edge of his bed and waited. And waited some more. But nothing happened. Finally, convinced that whatever weirdness was going on in the room had finished for the night, he returned to bed, switched off the light, and lay down.

His eyes could only have dropped shut for a second or two when he heard a distinctive sound of metal hangers sliding on a wooden bar. He flung himself out of bed, and flicked on the light. His clothes were back on the left, still swinging just a bit.

“All right. Fine. Stay there,” he said, slamming the closet door.

Sleep was the last thing on his mind now. He dragged on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and left his room.

Glancing at his watch he saw it was nearly one o’clock. Maybe he’d find a little distraction downstairs in the lobby. He grinned in anticipation. Like maybe behind the front desk.

He was in luck. The sour-faced woman was gone, as were the bartender and the guests from the lounge, and Lissa was on duty, working at a computer. She glanced over her shoulder, met his gaze with a startled stare, and made two quick keystrokes that cleared her screen before he was close enough to see what was on it. He had the uncanny sensation that for just an instant, she had had a guilty expression. What had she been doing? Did women visit porn sites?

Guilty expression or not, she looked cool and unruffled, just as she had the previous night. Her hair was pulled back into that tidy braid, and she’d changed from her jeans into a long, chocolate brown skirt with pink swirls, topped by a pink blouse. There was a slight flush in her cheeks as she rose, and a slight tremor in her hands, which she quickly tucked behind her.

“Hello, Mr. Jackson.” She came to her side of the long desk and offered him a distant smile. Right now, she was a far cry from the warm woman who’d melted into his arms while they danced, the woman whose brown eyes and moist lips had tempted him beyond all reason. If the other guy hadn’t whisked her away, he’d have danced with her all night, even after the band quit. The dance she made him want to do didn’t require any music.

“How’s your ceiling holding up this evening? Any falling objects?” She grinned. “Or fallen women? You do seem to attract them, don’t you?”

“Are you referring to yourself?” he teased.

“I was referring to Caroline Newson failing onto your lap.”

“You can hardly blame me for that.”

“Blame? I wasn’t blaming you. I hope you enjoyed your evening.”

“Parts of it,” he said, leaning on the counter. “Some a whole lot more than others. How about you?”

She gave him a cool smile. “Some parts a bit more than others. What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”

He cleared his throat. “Call me Steve, for one thing.”

She clasped her hands together in front of her. “All right. What can I do for you, Steve?”

“I, uh, can’t sleep.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She didn’t say, “And what do you expect me to do about it?” but the implication was there in her tone. Laughter—or mockery—lurked in her brown eyes, ready to bloom at any second. Okay, so she wanted him to believe she hadn’t experienced any of the things he had during those two close, slow dances. But he didn’t believe her. Not for a minute. However, the reason for her pretense intrigued him.