Terry McLaughlin - A Perfect Stranger

She stilled a moment and waited for her heart to do that odd flippy thing it did whenever she saw him. She had no idea why the sight of the terminally repressed businessman with an undertaker’s fashion sense and a constipated outlook on life could make her heart stutter. Maybe her heart needed a tune-up, too.

Henry sure looked like he could use one. Someone had mussed his hair and loosened his tie. Not too much, or she might not have recognized him, though the sedate silver sedan parked in front of her house was a pretty big clue. The mussing couldn’t be Henry’s doing. He never mussed—er, messed up. Especially not his appearance. Razor-sharp, that was his personal style. Every tie knotted, every crease pressed, every hair perfectly—and predictably—in place.

She ambled across the narrow, rutted mountain road. “Hey, Hank, what’s up?”

“How many times do I have to tell you my name’s not Hank?” He struggled upright. “It’s Henry.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She dropped her canvas tote on the step below his feet. “Several hundred more, at least. It’s not that I forget your name, you know. It’s just that ‘Henry’ doesn’t go down as smooth as ‘Hank.’”

“That’s ridiculous.” He belched, and a whiff of whiskey-soaked misery floated her way. “Henry is meluf…meliful…it’s poetic. Hank is a truck driver in North Dakota.”

Hank Barlow drunk? In the middle of the afternoon? What was the world coming to? “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Checking to see if Norma needs any…” He waved a long-fingered hand in the air. “Anything. While Sydney’s gone.”

Anyone who knew Norma, Syd’s retired landlady who lived in the ground level of the Victorian-era house, knew she could take care of herself. Hank’s reason for being here was as flimsy as his hold on his dignity.

He dribbled an expensive single malt into the faceted crystal glass in his hand and took a loud, slurping sip.

“For cryin’ out loud.” Harley shook her head. “Ditch the Waterford and put the booze in the bag. You’re embarrassing me here.”

He stared at the glass. “I rang Norma’s doorbell to ask about Sydney’s plants, but she didn’t answer.”

“Today’s Wednesday. Norma’s bridge group meets on Wednesdays.” She settled beside him on the sun-warmed porch. “Why don’t you come over to my place? I can fix you some coffee while you wait for her. We can have a nice talk. About what’s bothering you, for instance.”

A jay swooped past with an annoyed squawk to fill the empty spot where Hank’s response belonged.

“Syd playing hard to get again?” asked Harley.

“It’s only a temporary setback. I’ll talk to her and straighten this out when she gets back.” He stared into his glass. “I have to marry her. It’s an investment in the future.”

Harley frowned. “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.”

“There are a number of important factors to consider. And I’ve considered them all, very carefully. It’s the logical thing to do.”

Harley noticed he hadn’t mentioned love. But she’d try to be supportive. He was a nice guy, even if he was a little stiff. “Being logical is important in a relationship, I suppose.”

“It’s good to have someone understand. You’re a nice woman, Harley.” He tossed back the last drops of whiskey in his glass and set it on the step. “Except when you call me Hank.”

“And you’re a nice man, Hank.” She patted him on the knee. There were some nice, lean muscles under those sharply pleated slacks. Who’d have guessed?

There was a nice, steady heart beating beneath that neatly pressed jacket, too. Hank Barlow was one of the nicest men she’d ever met. That wasn’t saying much, because most of the men she’d met were jerks. Even so, Hank wasn’t the kind of guy who deserved to get dumped just when he was closing the deal on getting Syd to the altar.

But Syd was a nice woman, too, and she didn’t deserve to be shackled to a guy she didn’t really love.

Why couldn’t life just work out sometimes? And why did Harley have to get stuck in the middle of this mess?

“Come on, big guy.” She reached out a hand, waited for Hank to take it, and then struggled to get him to his feet. “Let’s go.”

Hank belched again and mumbled an apology. “I don’t usually do things like this.”

“I kind of figured.”

“I’m usually more shir—more circumzz—”

“Circumspect?” Harley shook her head. It was a pretty sad state of affairs when a man’s drinking vocabulary sounded like something from a public affairs network.

“Circumspect,” he said. “It means—”

“I know what it means, Hank.”

He wobbled a bit and glanced down at her. “You don’t look like the kind of woman who would know what that means.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What kind of woman do I look like?”

“I can’t say.” He frowned. “I wouldn’t want to insult you.”

“Any more than you already have, you mean.”

“I do?” He swayed a bit, and she shoved him upright. “I did?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?”

She took him by the arm and led him down the porch steps. “I like you fine.”

“Meredith likes me,” he mumbled to himself, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Sydney’s mother. That’s the kind of woman who finds me attractive. Middle-aged battle-axes.”

He stumbled over some loose gravel, and Harley slipped an arm around his waist. He leaned against her, big and solid and warm. “I’ve been hitting on the wrong demographic,” he said. “Young women in singles bars or on the slopes. From now on, I’m looking for my dates at bingo parlors.”

“It’s not as bad as all that, is it?”

“Just about.” He stopped and lifted his hands to her shoulders. “Do you find me attractive?”

Oh, God, yes. She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think I should answer that question.”

“See? That proves my point.” He closed his eyes, wobbled a bit and leaned his forehead against hers. “You’re not an elderly battle-ax.”

Her heart was flipping and flopping so fast she thought she’d pass out, right there on the street. “No, I’m not,” she whispered.

“You smell good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t.”

“It’s the whiskey.”

She closed her eyes. “I know.”

“Harley?”

“Hmm?”

“This is probably the whiskey, too,” he said, and then his mouth pressed against hers.

She froze for a moment, while his lips skimmed a teasing line along hers and his hands drifted down to settle at her waist. She tried—she really tried—to remember that Hank was feeling a little unsteady, that technically he was still Syd’s boyfriend and that they were standing in the middle of the street where the neighbors could watch the show. But then his tongue swept inside her mouth, and he pulled her tight against him, and a moan rumbled up from his chest, and she was lost in the delicious, delightful surprise of his kiss.

The surprise had nothing to do with the fact that she’d never imagined this kiss could happen. A girl was entitled to her fantasies, after all. No, the surprise was that there was nothing repressed, or sedate, or stiff, or predictable, or nice about this kiss. This kiss was the opposite of nice. It was a take-no-prisoners assault, a seductive and sensual plummet into something dark and deep.

Her heart flipped and flopped one last time, and then it fell into Hank’s oversize hands with a thud.

NICK’S FINGERS danced over his laptop’s keyboard the morning after the play as he roughed out a scene for his mystery novel. The clack of the keys was faint competition for the whoosh and whir of the traffic noise rising like vapor from the rain-moistened pavement below. He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled the aroma of early-morning London wafting through his open hotel window. Cooking oil and diesel fuel blended in a cheap scent: Big City.