His Cinderella Next Door Read online

  For some reason, the destruction of the pomegranate—or maybe the fact Oscar had not been loved passionately, the way he deserved to be loved—made her want to cry.

  “I’ve ruined my shirt,” she said, her voice wobbly. She didn’t like wobbliness, and she was miffed at herself that she was experiencing quite a bit of it since landing in Vancouver.

  However, if it had to come out, she was glad it was with him. She was pretty sure Oscar was the only person in the whole world she ever trusted with this side of herself. Not the fearless photographer, but the side that wobbled every now and then.

  He was looking at her so intently. As if he knew darn well it wasn’t about a shirt. She realized she had missed seeing his eyes: the intensity of his gaze, the intelligence, the compassion.

  “We’ll get you a new one,” he said, going along with her claim it was about the shirt. “There’s some of the best shopping in the world here.”

  Normally, she would have reminded him she hated shopping. But suddenly, she wanted to shop. To find something new. Maybe to let loose a side of herself she had never dared explore.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Well, that was the surprise answer,” he said with a grin.

  That grin—lopsided, boyish, charming—drew her back to their simple days together, filled with friendship and laughter. Days when maybe she had dared to hold the secret hope—even as she proclaimed her independence, her utter lack of need—that she would have a normal life and a normal family, despite the fact she had not been raised to see that as a worthy goal.

  Don’t fall into the trap of security, her father had always instructed her. Adventure is the elixir of life.

  And fall into the trap she hadn’t. And yet the pursuit of adventure had left her feeling strangely empty sometimes. And that emptiness seemed more acute standing here with Oscar in his kitchen, smashing a pomegranate.

  “Hey,” he said, gently, the one who could always read her, the one who there was no hiding any of her secrets from, “we’re supposed to be having fun.”

  It was too intense. She saw him too clearly. He saw her too clearly. The six years separating them made it uncomfortable in ways it had not been before. Before they had been kids. Now they weren’t. It added a sharply unexpected dimension to their relationship.

  Molly did what she always did when she felt exposed. She pulled out her devil-may-care reckless persona.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. She took her dripping pomegranate-juice-stained hand, and made a swipe for his face.

  He ducked out of the way. “Um,” he said, reluctant laughter tickling across the beautiful firm line of his mouth, “maybe I should define fun.”

  “You? Define fun?” She scooped up some of the mash and reddened her hands even further. “No, I think I’ll define fun.”

  He read her intent and dashed away from her. He put the sofa between him and her. “Molly, squishing pomegranate into someone’s face isn’t fun.”

  “I think it might be. I won’t know until I try it.”

  Molly leaped over the back of the sofa. Oscar had expected her to try to come around it, but Molly was not one to do the expected.

  He had seen the truth on her face for that split second.

  She wanted to have children. She didn’t trust herself to have children.

  This was what was behind that “secret”—that she liked photographing babies.

  And this was her way of trying to keep him from her truth. He vowed he would get back to it later. That’s what friends did. They helped each other with truth. She had seen his instantly, hadn’t she? That the death of his brother had exposed the weaknesses in his relationship with Cynthia.

  And so, they would help each other outrun that truth until the time was right to tackle it. Oscar sprinted away from the threat of her little red-stained hands.

  He felt laughter rise in him. He realized it had been a long time since he’d had a day like today: laughter, right in the bottom of his belly, rising to the surface, like bubbles rising in champagne, rolling out of him, chasing everything else away.

  He circled, just out of her reach, back to the counter and doused his own hands in the massacred pomegranate.

  “I’m armed,” he warned her.

  “Good. I couldn’t have a fair fight with an unarmed man.”

  “You’ll ruin your shirt completely.”

  “It’s already ruined.”

  “No, I think we could save—”

  She lunged at him. He shouted with laughter. They chased each other around the kitchen island and in and out of the living room furniture. He knocked over a lamp, and the vibration on the floor knocked one of the pictures on the wall crooked. The cat jumped off his favored chair, yowled once, protesting, then hightailed it down the hall. Oscar and Molly chased each other until they were both breathless with the sheer merriment of being silly.

  “Stop,” he finally said, pulling a dining chair in her path to try to slow her down. “I’m going to get a noise complaint letter from the condo association.”

  “Aw, that’s a shame.” She pushed past the chair. It toppled over with a crash. “You’ll lose your gold star.”

  “No, seriously,” he said, turning so he could face her.

  “So long, Resident of the Month Award,” she said, undeterred, charging toward him with her red mash hands.

  He moved swiftly backward. “The neighbors are going to complain. This is not the kind of place where people stampede about like a herd of elephants.”

  He felt the hassock hit the back of his knees. He fell backward over it.

  Chortling wildly, she was on top of him, squishing pomegranate into his face, until he could feel the juice running toward his ears. He retaliated, wiping his hand from her jaw to her cheekbone, and across her nose. It left a wide welt of red.

  She snickered, then threw back her head and let loose a warrior howl that matched her face paint.

  He shouted with laughter, condo association be damned.

  And then he became very aware that she was on top of him. Her every curve was molded to him, the heavy chef’s apron providing scant protection of his sudden, disconcerting awareness of her. Her scent—wild huckleberries on a sun-drenched day—filled his senses. The light from the kitchen shone behind her, illuminating her curls, each strand spun in gold. Her freckles were scattered across her nose like a mad toss of fairy dust had landed on her.

  Oscar’s laughter died abruptly. So did Molly’s.

  The air between them became charged with an electrical current.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MOLLY TOUCHED OSCAR’S FACE, not playfully now, but ever so gently, exploring. Then, she trailed her red finger, a pomegranate aril clinging to it, over his lip. His tongue, of its own volition, darted out of his mouth and took that seed from her finger.

  The charge between them intensified, hissing and snapping like a storm-broken electrical wire on the ground.

  The current held Molly and Oscar prisoner in its field. Oscar found himself helpless to resist the force that pulled him closer to her. He reached up, slowly, deliberately, and put his juice-drenched hand to her lips.

  Everything intensified. The color of her eyes. The sensations along his skin. The sounds of both of them breathing. The delicate heave of her chest.

  Molly’s tongue flicked out, pink, soft, moist. She tasted the juice that clung to his skin, a hummingbird tasting nectar. He watched her eyes darken to a shade of green he had seen only once before, in a mossy and shaded dark corner of a forest.

  And maybe once before that, even. After her father had died, and their lips had found each other in a moment so exquisite and so tortured it had burned a permanent etching in his brain.

  He should have learned a lesson from that. He had felt things he had never felt before. But Molly had disappeared from his life as quickly as
mist burned off by a hot sun, leaving him with a sense that the kiss had ruined everything.

  Taken the most important thing in his life from him.

  And yet, here it was again, the most delicate form of torture he had ever endured. Her lips, as soft as velvet, as plump as a ripe strawberry, on his hand, a gentle nuzzle that sizzled. Her eyes, wide and smoky, on his face.

  He held his breath. Was she going to taste the pomegranate juice on his face, as well as his hand, with those delicate, exquisite lips? She leaned in toward him. He leaned toward her, pulled on a cord of desire that had been there for a long time between them. Invisible. But no less powerful for that.

  Could it be different this time?

  Was he willing to take that risk?

  Did he have any choice?

  The fire alarm shrieked at the same time he realized the burning smell was not his own heart going up in smoke.

  They snapped apart from each other. She leaped up. He leaped up. The cat raced by them and hid under the sofa.

  Despite the possibility the place was burning to the ground around them, they stood frozen, staring at each other. She should have looked hilarious, with her curls gone crazy around her clown-stained face. She looked anything but.

  He whirled away from her. He had totally forgotten about sticking those bread rolls in the oven.

  He must be forgetful these days. Because he had also totally forgotten the consequences of their last kiss. But he’d been lucky, this time. Fate had intervened before he ruined everything again.

  He should have been more grateful than he was at the dark smoke that curled out of the oven door and hung wispily around the ceiling.

  While he dashed to the oven and took the charred remains of the bread out, she grabbed a tea towel and stood under the smoke detector, fanning wildly at it until, with a final indignant whimper, it gave up.

  “Eviction,” he told her solemnly, “is imminent.”

  “But where will we live?” she asked, just as solemnly.

  We. It seemed, for one insane moment, it wouldn’t matter where he lived if she were with him. Molly could turn a cardboard box under a bridge into a grand adventure.

  He turned deliberately from her and pulled the remains of the other item from the stove. She came and stood beside him.

  “What was that?”

  “A soufflé,” he said. “Cheese. My first attempt.”

  “Maybe we could salvage it.”

  The soufflé took that moment to collapse completely in on itself.

  “It reminds me of a building imploding,” she offered, and then after a moment’s consideration, “we could still eat it.”

  “It’ll taste like smoke.”

  “We could pretend we’re camping.”

  All of it an adventure, with her. Even the things that didn’t go right. Maybe especially the things that didn’t go right.

  “It’s pretty much my fault,” she said. “It was the wrong time to start a pomegranate war. I can see that now.”

  She tried to look contrite, but her red-stained face made it very hard to take her seriously. His face probably looked just about the same.

  “There’s a right time to start a pomegranate war?” he asked her.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “There’s a little spec of—”

  She reached out to his lip. He caught her hand. They had literally been saved by the bell—or the alarm, as the case may be—and she could undo that with a single touch.

  Wordlessly, he looked down at her. He wanted to lick every drop of that pomegranate juice off her face. He wanted her laughter-filled eyes to darken to that mossy shade of green again.

  But he resisted all temptation, except one. He picked her up, his arms under her shoulders and her thighs, cradling her slight form against him. Her curls tickled his chin.

  She didn’t resist, either, but wrapped her arms around his neck. She sighed against him, and her breath whispered hot across his chest.

  He had the unfortunate sensation of being a warrior with his plundered bride. Molly seemed to have surrendered to whatever might happen next. He could not allow himself to even contemplate the options.

  There was only one option. They both needed some cooling off. He strode across the living room and slid open the sliding glass door to the deck with his foot. He took three long steps through the driving rain and across the smooth surface of the Italian-marble-tiled patio and leaped into the pool with her in his arms.

  The water closed around them, cool and delicious. Just yesterday, he had not been the guy who would be leaping, fully clothed, into his pool, with a woman in his arms.

  “You know what I like about you?” he asked, when they had both surfaced and were shaking drops of red-stained water from themselves.

  “Everything?” she suggested, impertinent, despite the fact she was choking on laughter and water in about equal parts.

  “Besides that.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing ever goes as planned.”

  “Oh.”

  “Should we order pizza for dinner?”

  “After we’ve had a swim,” Molly said. “The water is glorious.”

  She tilted back her head and caught raindrops on her tongue. The tongue that had touched his hand.

  “I can’t swim in these clothes, though.”

  “I have suits—”

  “Don’t be silly, Truck.”

  A little late now for her to be telling him not to be silly.

  “You’ve already seen my undies today. Plus, we’ve been swimming together in our underwear since we were kids.”

  She slid out of the apron and tossed it. Next came her wet blouse. She inspected the sleeve mournfully, then tossed the blouse on the deck and shucked off her trousers. They joined the blouse in a sodden heap on the deck.

  This was not quite the same as glimpsing her panties through torn pants this morning. It was very evident to him, seeing her in her underwear now, that they were not kids anymore.

  “Take off your pants,” she invited him.

  Nothing ever goes as planned, Oscar thought dryly. Not that he had ever planned her extending that particular invitation to him, but if she had, he would have hoped the circumstances might be different.

  “Are you being shy?” she laughed. “I’ve seen your tighty-whities lots of times.”

  It was true. They’d always done this. Raised by her father, she’d never had the long list of dos and don’ts that most of the girls—and then women—in his acquaintance had had. There was nothing suggestive about her leaving her clothes behind if they became inconvenient. Molly had always prided herself on being one of the guys. She had never thought a single thing of stripping down to her underwear when their adventures had led them to the discovery of an unexpected swimming hole.

  Not only would she strip down, Oscar remembered fondly, but she’d be the first one in the water, even in the spring, when you practically had to break the ice off of it to get in. And the tire swing hanging from a tree branch was never enough for her. No, she had to climb up the tree, to the top branch, as high as she could go, and swan dive into the water below. It was nerve-racking to watch her, even when you knew her stuntman father had been teaching her his crazy art at the same time she was learning to walk.

  It occurred to Oscar that if he had thought he was lessening the danger between them by plunging them into the waters of his pool, he had made a serious miscalculation.

  Molly was wearing underwear as utilitarian as the khakis she’d arrived at the airport in. He had seen bathing suits far more revealing than her black sports bra and her high-waisted white panties.

  And yet her sliding through the water, effortless, strong, near naked, felt like one of the sexiest things he’d ever seen. And really more than his battered defenses could take. This new complication made hi
m able to resist the temptation to be drawn back into the carefree world they had once shared—and the temptation to show her he no longer wore tighty-whities—and he hauled himself out of the pool.

  “Towels are over there in the cabana when you need one. I’ll go see about that pizza.”

  He needed a friend more than a lover, he told himself sternly. And the loss of his brother should make him very wary about loving Molly beyond the way he already did.

  A woman who embraced danger was a poor match for a man who had learned the hard lesson that loving someone did not protect you from the loss of them.

  It only made that loss, when it came, so much worse.

  Molly floated in Oscar’s pool, on her back, the rain splashing down on her face. As always, Truck was the reasonable one. He sensed the danger building between them and he’d walked away.

  She, on the other hand, truly her father’s daughter, never walked away from danger. She was invigorated by it. Exhilarated.

  And the danger between her and Oscar had been as real as any she had ever felt, and she had experienced—and invited—many dangers in the quest for the perfect photograph.

  In the quest to feel exactly what she was feeling right now.

  Alive.

  After a while, the pure joy of being alive lost some of its luster. Molly moved to the hot tub. She looked into the condo, craning her neck, but it looked dark. She did not see Oscar.

  She waited, hoping he would see that moment of danger between them had passed and come back out.

  But he didn’t.

  Finally, relaxed and tired despite the fact it was daytime in Germany, she got out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel. On the way across the deck, she noticed raised planter boxes that she had not seen the night before.

  There were neat rows of herbs growing in dark soil. Each was neatly labeled, all capitals, in his precise printing. Basil. Oregano. Rosemary. Thyme. Mint. Parsley. Beside the herbs, two cherry tomato plants grew vigorously.

  He was that guy. The guy you could rely on. He always had been. The guy who could keep plants alive. Thank goodness he had pulled away tonight, before she had given in to that thing that could wreck what he represented to her: the only stability she’d ever known.