Christine Rimmer - Cat's Cradle

“This is silly. It’s not that cold. And I like peanut butter and jelly.”

“Fine. Save it for a snack later. I’m making lunch.”

“But I—”

“Forget arguing. I’m the boss. Don’t make a big deal out of this, all right?”

She looked at him measuringly for a moment, feeling one-upped somehow. She was suspicious. But why? He hadn’t been any more than casually friendly with her all morning. Had he?

Oh, what was the matter with her? There was nothing going on here. Wild Dillon McKenna had grown up into a very nice man who was paying her good money for honest work—and who was willing to throw a free lunch into the bargain.

She had to get real here. These misgivings she kept having about his motives were completely in her own mind. She was Cat Beaudine, after all. She knew the things people said about her when they thought she didn’t hear.

That she was tough and strong and someone you could count on. And about as feminine as Paul Bunyan. Men were her friends. Men were her equals. But men never looked at her the way she’d seen them look at her sisters—or even her mother, for that matter.

And there was no reason in the world why Dillon McKenna—who could probably have just about any available woman in the Western Hemisphere—would see her any differently than other men saw her.

She smiled at Dillon. “Well, thanks then. Lunch would be nice.”

After she had washed her hands in the half bath off the kitchen, she went and sat at the table. Dillon was just pulling a cooked, cut-up turkey out of the refrigerator.

“Where did you get that?”

“At the store.”

“All roasted and cut up like that?”

He confessed that he’d done the roasting and cutting up himself. “I like to cook. Especially lately. It’s one of the few things I can do for myself that hardly hurts at all.” He got out a cutting board and a big, gleaming knife and began slicing meat off the breast section. Cat’s stomach rumbled, the meat looked so good. He winked at her. “You should have seen me in my wheelchair, flying around the kitchen. I was impressive.”

“I’ll bet.”

When he had a nice, tall stack of meat sliced, he got out bread, mayonnaise and lettuce and assembled two fat, wonderful-looking sandwiches. With them, he offered pickles and cranberry sauce and tall glasses of milk.

“You were right,” she told him, after the first heavenly bite. “This beats the heck out of peanut butter and jelly.”

When lunch was over, Cat went outside and split wood for two hours, carefully re-covering the pile of logs when she was done. Then she carried what she’d split into the garage and stacked it against a wall, so that it would be protected from the elements as well as reasonably easy for Dillon to bring in.

By then, it was growing dark. She was ready to go home. She stuck her head in the kitchen door, thinking she’d just give a yell and tell Dillon she was leaving.

But he was nowhere in sight. When she called, she got no answer. She was forced to step inside.

“Dillon!” She moved through the big kitchen, into the main room. It was then that she heard music, coming from downstairs.

She followed the sound and found him in his newly set-up gym. He was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, standing before one of the walls of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, doing bicep curls with a pair of fat dumbbells. On the floor at his feet was a portable tape player/radio—the kind that kids call a boom box. It was blaring out music by Talking Heads.

As soon as he saw Cat, Dillon put down the dumbbells and switched off the boom box. “Gotta get a stereo in here, too.” He straightened again and came toward her.

He was sweating. There were dark stains on his shirt—at the neck, chest, belly and beneath his arms. Little beads of moisture slid off his damp hair and tracked down his flushed face and corded neck.

Cat felt overwhelmed suddenly, by all that heated male flesh. And then she wondered again what her problem was lately. Since she’d been old enough to wield a hammer, she’d spent her summer months working construction crews on whatever building projects came her way. She toiled right alongside a bunch of sweaty guys with their shirts off and she never thought twice about it.

“All finished?” Dillon asked.

“What? Oh. Yeah. All done.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

His expression was bland, but the gold flecks in his eyes seemed to be dancing. “Yeah. You know. The day after today.”

“You need me tomorrow?”

“You bet.”

“For what?”

“A thousand things.”

“Like what?”

“The satellite dish might arrive.”

“And what else?”

“Let’s talk about it then. Ten o’clock. As usual.”

She felt provoked, though she couldn’t figure out why. “As usual. What does that mean? I’ve only worked for you for one day.”

“Is this an important point?”

“Of course not. I just want things clear, that’s all.”

“Fine. What isn’t clear to you?” A single crystalline drop of sweat dripped down the bridge of his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. She saw the inside of his forearm, shiny with moisture, as hard as a rock and ropy with tendons and veins. “Well?”

She felt dazed. She couldn’t think. “I...nothing.”

He was smiling again. “Good. I do appreciate this.”

Now she felt like a fool. “Of course.”

“Tomorrow, then? Ten o’clock.”

“Yes. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

The satellite dish did not arrive the next day, but Dillon’s books did.

He put Cat right to work measuring and estimating the cost for new shelves in the living area and also downstairs in the big central room. Next, he decided a trip to Reno was in order that very day, to purchase the lumber. He insisted they both had to go, since she was the one building the shelves and he was the one buying them.

She told him that there was absolutely no reason he had to go with her to get the lumber.

He gave her a grin that actually looked shy. “Yes, there is. I want to choose the wood myself. Please?”

He was really laying on the charm, she thought, and refused to admit that it was working. She looked away—anywhere but into those coaxing brown eyes—and gestured at all the open boxes of books strewn around the room. “I don’t get it. What’s this new thing you’ve got about books?”

He made a tsk ing sound. “Now, Cat. Was that a nice thing to say?”

She glanced at him again, wondering what he was up to. “What do you mean?”

He was pretending to look wounded. “You’re referring to the fact that I almost flunked out of high school my senior year, aren’t you? You can’t understand how a loser like I was could have grown up to need a whole houseful of bookcases.”

“I did not say you were a loser.”

“No, but you thought it. And hey, it’s okay. I was a messed-up kid. It’s not a secret. But now I’m not a kid anymore. And I like to read. When I first started doing gags for the movies, it was books that kept me sane.”

“Gags?”

“Yeah, gags. Stunts. Same thing.”

Cat asked, “Why did books keep you sane?” though she’d told herself all last night that when she came in to work for him today she would keep the talk strictly focused on the job at hand.

Dillon was only too happy to forget the job at hand. “In the movies, it’s always hurry up and wait. You can wait hours, days, for the weather to clear. Or for a shot to be set up. I learned to carry a book along with me all the time. Then when it came time to wait, I had something to occupy my mind.”

Another question she had no business asking found its way out of her mouth. “Did you ever go any farther in school?”