Kyle’s Bargain (6 page)

“No, I do have to get up.” She sounded a little more awake.
“Laurie panics if I’m not there when she wakes up.”

An unexpected slash of jealousy spiked through him. “Does it
happen often?”

“Hardly ever. That’s part of why she gets so upset. She
needs routine. She doesn’t know how to handle anything out of the ordinary.”

He sighed and released her. “All right. Coffee coming up.
Hit the shower.” She rolled off the side the bed and hobbled off to the shower.
A pang of guilt struck him as he watched how stiffly she moved. He’d used her
harder than he should have. She admitted she hadn’t had a lover in quite a
while.

While Meg showered, he crossed the hall to his bedroom and got
into fresh jeans and a polo shirt before he went to the kitchen and started the
coffee brewing.

He’d already started on his cup by the time she got there
and had one steaming on the counter, ready for her. She added the sugar and
milk she preferred and took a careful sip. A look of bliss spread across her
face.

“I bow down before you. This may be the best coffee I’ve
ever tasted. How do you do it?”

“Starts with good coffee. I buy the best beans I can afford
and my coffeemaker grinds them fresh right before it starts the drip.”

For a moment her expression changed. A flash of sadness
crossed her features so quickly he barely saw it before she contained it and
let the joy of the coffee take over again. He couldn’t figure out how to ask
about that momentary dismay, but it made him uneasy.

“You want some toast or eggs for breakfast?”

“No thanks. I’d better get going. I’ll need to make
breakfast for Laurie, so I’ll just cook something then.”

For reasons he couldn’t explain to himself, he didn’t want
to let her go. “How about if I take both you and your sister out for
breakfast?”

The regret he saw in her eyes wasn’t the same as the sadness
of a few moments past. “I’d love it, but not yet. Laurie needs time to get used
to people. Maybe after she’s seen you with me a few times.”

“All right.”

Meg finished the coffee and put the cup on the drain board.
He took the hint, got his wallet and car keys and led the way out to the SUV.
She gave him directions to her apartment block.

“I’ll be thinking about the problem of your location,” he
told her as he got close to her home. “It may take some time to come up with
any ideas. I can’t promise there even can be a solution that will satisfy you.
But will you trust me when I say that I’m not ignoring your problem?”

She gave him a long look that seemed to burrow down into his
soul before she answered, “I’ll try.”

Meg had only been in the kitchen five minutes or so when
Laurie wandered out of her bedroom, the hem of her overlong bathrobe trailing
on the floor. The girl wiped sleep from her eyes and smiled at her sister. “You
had fun last night?”

“Yes.”

Laurie’s smile widened. “Good. Are you going to marry Mr.
Harrison?”

“
Marry
?” Meg almost dropped the spatula into the pan
of half-cooked scrambled eggs. “Good heavens, hon, I don’t know him nearly well
enough for that.”
Really
? She asked herself. “Last night was the first
time I even went out with him. We would have to learn a lot more about each
other before we could think about something like that.”

Did last night even qualify as a date? It was…mind-boggling,
amazing, thrilling and exciting, and yes, it probably could be called a date.

“You like him, though, don’t you?”

Did she? Some aspects of him, certainly. “Yes, I do. But it
takes more than that to get married to someone.”

“I know. You have to fall in love. He’s handsome. It should
be easy to fall in love with him.”

Meg scraped the cooked eggs onto plates and carried them to
the table Laurie had set with placemats and silverware. “He’s handsome, but a
man has to have more than just looks. He has to be intelligent and honest and
kind and responsible and…well, it helps if he’s fun to be with.”

“You had fun with him last night.” Laurie gave her a very
serious look. “I like him. I hope you’ll marry him.”

Meg almost hoped so too. And that thought scared her right
down to her toes. She was still totally blown away by what had happened the
previous night and suspected he might be the most sexually compatible man she
was ever likely to meet. But there were so many other things working against
them. The ruthlessness and shades of arrogance lurking behind his amiable
exterior worried her. She wasn’t at all sure she could trust him to keep his
word. And there was something else deep inside him. Something had happened with
his late wife, something she suspected still colored his approach to any new
relationships.

And she had her own issues. Laurie—David had broken their
engagement rather than be saddled with the lifelong burden of her care and the
knowledge that Meg would always have to divide her attention between her sister
and the man in her life. Maybe it was David or maybe the deaths of their
parents, but Meg couldn’t give her trust lightly or easily anymore. Certainly
not to Kyle Harrison, who had too much going on behind the pleasant exterior.

She finally managed to steer Laurie away from marrying her
off as they prepared to leave the apartment. The rest of the day was
uneventful. Every time Meg moved, a few stiff muscles and some soreness gave
treasured reminders of how much fun she’d had the night before. Her only
disappointment was the discovery that the spanking itself hadn’t left a hint of
a mark, not even a pink shadow. And why did she want to have a bruise or
something, anyway? How un-PC, antifeminist, even plain ridiculous was that? How
perverse was it to want to be marked? But she did.

The rest of the day dragged as she found herself absurdly
hoping he’d call or come by. Of course he did neither.

The next day she and Laurie did the normal Sunday chores of
cleaning the house, washing clothes, paying bills and taking out the trash. And
Meg spent way too much time still thinking about Kyle Harrison, still hoping he
would call.

On weekday mornings, Meg usually got in a couple of hours of
database work after dropping Laurie at school and before she opened the store
at ten. That Monday morning, though, she’d just turned on the coffeemaker,
booted up the laptop and settled in to work when an odd rumbling noise pulled
her to the door to find its source.

Not far down the street, a line of trucks with flatbed
trailers poured into the crumbling parking lot of the now-empty strip of shops
that mirrored theirs from the other side of the street. Each truck carried a
backhoe or tractor or other piece of heavy equipment she couldn’t name. The
convoy crossed the broken pavement and headed up a slight incline to the field
behind it where a couple of rickety old abandoned houses stood. The vehicles
parked. Drivers got out and began to unload the machines. One truck near the
end of the line held a small cabin-like structure while another carted a
collection of Porta-Johns.

So much for Kyle Harrison’s promise to consider their
situation.

On the other hand, the sheriff hadn’t come to the door to
tell them they had to get out. Surely Kyle wouldn’t just knock down the stores
without removing them first. That wouldn’t even be legal, would it?

Monday morning traffic in the store tended to be sparse, so
she couldn’t blame the lack of customers on the roar of machinery firing up or
the dust rising as they began to clear away debris. Still Meg wavered between
fury and depression. She fought the urge to call Kyle and tell him what she
thought of his “promise” to consider her problem. Only the facts that no one
had forced them out yet and the equipment remained on the other side of the
street between the two aging shopping strips convinced her to hold her peace a
while longer.

And what could she do about it, in any case?

She tried to concentrate on the database she was realigning,
though the constant roar and clatter distracted her, as did the occasional
customer. She’d mostly blocked it out by the time Laurie got there at three
thirty.

“Meggie! Have you seen all the trucks! They’re knocking them
down.”

“Knocking what down?” Surely not the trucks.

“The old stores across the street. They’ve got a big ball
that bangs them and knocks them down.”

That explained some of the louder crashes she’d heard.

“Can I go watch it, Meggie?”

Meg sighed. “I guess so. But stay on this side of the
street. And if any of the trucks or tractors or whatever get too close, you
come back inside and tell me. Okay?”

Laurie’s face broke out in the radiant smile that always
broke Meg’s heart. “Okay. Can I take a seat out to sit on?”

“Sure. I’ll bring you some juice in a little while.”

“That’s nice.”

Carla came by in the afternoon with a box of cookies. “Guess
you didn’t have any luck with the ogre?” She gestured with a snickerdoodle in
the direction of the bulldozers doing their thing.

“Well, actually…” Meg considered exactly what to say. “He said
something to the effect of he’d consider our problem.”

“Whoa. That’s just so seriously reassuring. Especially with
the monster trucks breathing fire and destruction across the street.”

“But we’re still here. No sheriff’s deputies showing up to
make us move out.”

“Yeah.” Carla took another bite of cookie and chewed
thoughtfully. “And that’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“So maybe he is trying to work something out.”

“You believe him?”

Meg shrugged. “I want to.”

Carla gave her a wry grin. “What kind of deal did you work
out with him anyway, to get him to come talk to us?”

“That’s sort of private.”

“Aha!
That
kind of deal.”

“No,” Meg protested, “not
that
kind of deal. But I
don’t want to go into the details.” Of course, in point of fact, it was
that
kind of deal. No one else needed to know that, though.

“Hey, doesn’t matter to me,” Carla said. “If I were twenty
years younger, I’d have a go at him myself. You gotta agree, the man is hot. I
mean those eyes. You find them in the dictionary next to ‘bedroom eyes’.”

“Good-looking’s not worth much if it doesn’t come with
integrity.”

Carla grinned wryly and took another cookie. “I don’t know.
I can think of lots of things to do with a man like that that don’t involve
integrity at all.”

“And you want to make sure there are no leftovers and kiss
him goodbye in the morning.”

The other woman’s expression got serious. “Uhm, yeah.”

Belatedly Meg realized she might have just described Carla’s
own experience. Too late to do anything about that, but… “Don’t ask. Just
please don’t ask.”

“Gotcha, hon.” She gave Meg a sharp look. “Don’t…” She
paused, reconsidering whatever she’d planned to say. “Take care of yourself,
okay? Don’t take chances.”

“Laurie depends on me.” She wasn’t sure if that answered the
other woman’s concern or not.

Carla nodded and got up to go. “We should know something
pretty soon, anyway.”

The machinery and its work fascinated Laurie. She sat on the
walk outside and watched for the rest of the afternoon until the operators shut
down the machines sometime between four and five. The workers departed then,
leaving their equipment parked in the field.

The next day went pretty much the same with an increase in
the volume. Knocking buildings down was an excruciatingly noisy business.
Several times pieces of wall or roof must have come crashing down. The thuds
rattled glass and shelves in her shop. The dust became a constant irritant,
coating her car, the windows of the store and everything left outside. It blew
in every time someone opened the door. Laurie had a coat of grime on her when
they went home, so Meg had to make her take a shower before she went to bed
each night.

She didn’t hear from Kyle again until Wednesday. When the
phone rang around one thirty and she heard his voice on the other end, her
heart did a stupid, fluttery thing in her chest.

“I’ve had some thoughts on your problem, and I think I might
have a solution, but I wanted to run it by you and see if it’s agreeable before
I take it any further,” he said. “Can I take you out to dinner tonight to talk
about it?”

The flutters in her chest turned into somersaults.

“I’ll have to see about getting someone to take care of
Laurie. Can I let you know?”

“Much as I would love to, I’m not planning that kind of
night. She can go with us.”

Meg drew in a deep breath. “I don’t… I’m not sure either of
you is ready for that.”

“Why not?”

How to explain? “She’s not the…neatest of eaters. She’s
worked very hard on it, but she still has some problems. But that’s not the
biggest thing. Laurie’s emotions are very close to the surface and she doesn’t
have the same kind of internal controls others do. She can be…difficult at
times. Also she forms attachments to people she likes very quickly. And she
liked you when she met you Friday.”

Kyle was quiet for a moment before he answered, “I don’t
mind the possible mess or emotional outbreaks, but you know best and if you
don’t think it’s a good idea, I’ll rely on your judgment.”

“Thank you. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
Thank
you, thank you
, she repeated mentally once she’d hung up. A man who wasn’t
sure he knew best in every situation. That clashed with her mental image of
Kyle’s arrogance, but she could live with being a bit wrong about that.

It took a few minutes and a phone call to make the
arrangements. Mrs. Smith would be at home this evening and would be glad to
look in on Laurie. When Meg called Kyle to let him know it was taken care of,
he said, “Good. Can I pick you up at seven? At your place?”

Meg agreed. After she hung up, she restrained herself from
standing up and dancing around the store. Just barely. A quick mental review of
her wardrobe made her realize how few nice things she had. One dress would be
suitable for a dinner with Kyle. Maybe one of the pantsuits too if she dressed
it up with some nice costume jewelry. After that… She’d worry about it if there
was an “after that”.

Time dragged, even when Laurie got there. “They’re all
gone,” she reported to Meg when she arrived. “Stores across the street. All
gone. They’re breaking the parking lot.”

“Not ours?”

Laurie shook her head. “Across the street.” Her expression
darkened. “They’re not going to knock us over, are they?”

“Not without warning us first.”

“I don’t want them to. Mr. Harrison will stop them from
knocking us down, won’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Meg admitted. “I hope so.”

Laurie sighed and went back to watching the destruction
across the street.

Meg found herself glancing at the clock every few minutes,
wondering how time could have slowed down so much. Finally Cate got there and
Meg took Laurie home and fixed her supper. By the time Kyle arrived, promptly
at seven, she’d tried and discarded three different styles for her hair,
finally just letting it hang loose to her shoulders as she normally did.

He looked as handsome as always when she opened the door to
him. The man flattered whatever he wore, whether it was jeans and no shirt or a
dark business suit. Although he was freshly shaved and his hair neatly combed,
shadows under his eyes suggested tiredness. A remnant of tension lingered in
the tight lines of his face. For a few seconds she thought he looked older than
the thirty-three she knew he was.

When she invited him inside, the smile that spread over his
face lightened his expression.

“You look like you’ve had a hard day,” she told.

Kyle shrugged. “A lot going on. I—”

Before he could expand on it, Laurie rushed out of the
kitchen into the living room, saying, “Mr. Harrison!” and threw her arms around
Kyle’s waist, hugging him. Surprise chased away his smile for a moment and
Meg’s stomach clenched. Moments later the smile returned in a somewhat wryer,
more amused form. He put an arm around Laurie’s shoulders and squeezed.

Something inside Meg slipped and rearranged itself, a
barrier in her heart starting to slide open.

Laurie stepped back suddenly, saying, “Oh” and looked from
Kyle to her sister’s face. “I did that wrong, didn’t I, Meggie?”

“It’s not the way you’re supposed to greet people you don’t
know very well.”