Candy Halliday - Driven To Distraction - Driven To Distraction / Winging It

Barrett glanced at the dog again, because looking at Stacy while she was talking about whining and whimpering for him was doing strange things to his body. Then he actually envied the dog for snuggling up with Stacy all night, and that had him looking at her again. Sunshine slanted down over her, glinting off her brown hair and making her purple spandex leggings look nearly fluorescent. Her calves were muscular and shiny from what he guessed was suntan oil. Her arms were set off by the white tank top she wore. She was squinting, and then she shaded her eyes with the flat of her hand against her forehead.

“I have something for you,” she said, coming closer. He could smell the light coconut scent that obliterated the fruity scent she usually wore. And since when did he notice scents?

“I made it for you last night. What do you think?”

She shook out a white T-shirt and smiled as he read the words in serious script. Alcohol and Calculus Don’t Mix. Never Drink and Derive. “Cute, huh?”

He smiled. “Yeah…cute.”

She walked closer and handed it to him. “You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to. You’re probably not even a T-shirt kind of guy. It was just for fun.”

He held it up, wondering how long she’d worked on it, and what she’d thought about when she’d made it. “Thank you.”

She shrugged. “It was nothing. I’ll leave you alone so you can get your work done. Let me know if Weasel Boy bugs you, and I’ll come get him.”

He liked watching her walk. There was a bounce to her step, and of course there were the curves of her behind to consider, too. Elmo whined, and Barrett reluctantly drew his gaze to the dog. Happy with just that moment’s worth of attention, Elmo curled up in his lap with his dog sigh. No way was Barrett going to tell Stacy the dog was bothering him. He set the T-shirt over Elmo like a blanket and settled in to work.

Thirty minutes later, a persistent noise penetrated his consciousness. It was time to get a glass of chocolate milk anyway, and perhaps a bowl for Elmo, too. And to find out what that high-pitched buzzing noise was.

The noise, it turned out, was Stacy up on her flat roof with some loud contraption blowing leaves out of the gutter. Since she hadn’t noticed him yet, he figured it was all right to watch her for a minute or two. As she wrestled with the blower, it blew her hair into wild disarray. She wore sunglasses that occasionally caught the sun in a blinding flash. She moved around on the roof with ease, stepping toward the gutter where she aimed the nozzle and blew pine needles and debris over the edge.

In fact, she seemed to be…dancing. That’s when he noticed the headphones. She wiggled her hips and pursed her lips, mouthing the words to a song. Then she twirled with the blower close to her. It blew her hair straight up until she swung it out again.

She was dancing with the leaf blower. And while he should find that preposterous, he found himself smiling.

He forced himself to go into the house before she caught him staring. A woman like Stacy could make him believe things could work between a man used to his comfortable world of research and grants and a woman who wanted romance and worked with dogs. The only thing she lacked to make her perfectly wrong for him was a baby.

He and Elmo enjoyed their chocolate milk out on the lanai, and then Barrett went back to work. He wanted to glance toward Stacy’s place, but he congratulated himself on keeping his focus.

Elmo wandered away only long enough to attend to his canine business before returning to his place in Barrett’s lap. He did the strange air-licking thing for a few minutes and then settled down. Barrett laid out the pertinent field notes he had made over the last year as he’d trekked through Everglades National Park logging tree snail data. He glanced at the calendar and calculated the remaining time he had left. He had virtually no time between this project and the next. He knew his father was disappointed that he hadn’t remained working on Everglades projects for the university. But that wasn’t what called to him. Would he ever find the one thing that kept his interest indefinitely?

The blower noise had grown louder since he’d been in the house, though he couldn’t see Stacy on her roof anymore. Focus on the tree snails, he told himself. If he kept his focus, he could probably complete his project on time. The papers were laid out so he could gather the data he needed from each sheet in order. He got into a rhythm for a while.

Elmo’s head came up a second before the papers on the table spiraled into the air and drifted gently down around and into the pool. The noise stopped abruptly, and he turned and looked up to see Stacy on his roof with her hand over her mouth.

“I’m so sorry!” She set the blower down, stood too fast and lost her balance.

He scrambled to position himself beneath her. She tumbled over the edge of the roof but hung onto the gutter. Without thinking, he wrapped his arms around her to help ease her to the ground. Only he didn’t want to let her go.

She was warm and soft and firm all at the same time, and she smelled delicious, coconuty and sun-warmed. His arms were anchored around her stomach, and his hands brushed her bare waist. A catchy tune pounded from the headphones that were dangling around her neck. He thought about dancing with her, but that would be sillier than…than holding her for much longer than was strictly necessary.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” she said.

For someone who had studied time, who knew the measurement of time remained constant and absolute, those moments felt longer than usual. She turned to look at him. “Barrett, we’ve got to get your notes out of the pool!”

The notes. Of course, how could he have forgotten? She slid down his body to her feet, tossed the radio headphones on the table and pivoted toward the pool. Twenty or more pages floated at the surface, the ink dissolving before their eyes. Stacy slid into the pool and started retrieving them.

“I’m so sorry. You must think I’m a klutz.”

He grabbed the papers he could reach from the edge. “What were you doing up there, anyway?”

“Gene asked me to do their gutters the next time I did mine. I wasn’t going to do the gutter above you, because I was afraid this would happen.” She was plucking papers as she spoke. “I glanced down to see where you were, you know, to make sure I didn’t bother you, and…lost my balance. I never lose my balance. Granny said I had the balance of a monkey.”

The word monkey came out all garbled. The water was up to her mouth as she walked toward the deep end where most of the papers ended up. She wasn’t going to be able to reach them. So he did something impulsive, maybe for the first time he could remember. He got into the pool with her.

The water was cool as it enveloped him. “Here, I’ll get these.”

“You didn’t have to come in here. I’m the one who scattered them into the pool.” She sounded breathless as she treaded water.

He wrapped his arm around her waist and held her up, facing him. “It’s…” He forgot about the cold water, the papers and whatever he’d been about to say. Like when he’d held her as she’d hung from the roof, his body awakened as her body brushed against his. Her skin was cool beneath his hands.

“It’s what?” she asked in a breathless voice.

“Hmm?”

“You said, ‘It’s.’ You never…finished.”

Their faces were inches apart as he pulled her flush against him. Beads of water dotted the pink lip gloss she wore. Why did he have the insane urge to lick them off? He wanted to kiss her, wanted it with every molecule in his body. He felt an intense desire to take her mouth and see if it tasted as good as it looked.