Here Comes Trouble Page 4

  There was a rustling sound, followed by some other noises that she figured were Brett making something to eat for the little hellion. Just picturing him in there, being all domestic and caretaking for the tiny little furball, only served to further strengthen the warm fuzzies she was feeling. That softly crooning man, along with the one who had raced to her rescue, was such a far cry from the dusty, leather-clad, intimidating road warrior who’d shown up at her door a few hours ago. Or the man she’d ascribed him to be, given his appearance. Clearly those were at odds with the man himself. She recalled thinking upon checking him in that he’d actually been rather quiet and soft-spoken. A few hours of hard sleep, if his tousled bed head when he’d raced out to save her had been any indication, and a little shot of adrenaline had certainly livened him up.

  Seeing him buck naked while she was hanging twenty feet up in a tree had certainly livened her up.

  The sound of the phone ringing at the front desk on the main floor down below snapped her out of her reverie. Her heart skipped a beat, as it always did. It might be someone calling to book a room. Even though she knew it was far more likely a sales call, she clung to her optimism. Just as she turned to head down the stairs, the ringing stopped…and the door opened behind her.

  She spun back around, wishing for the life of her she had something more official looking in her hands than the empty tray she’d left his room with. A clipboard, laundry cart, portable phone…something. Anything that would make it look like she hadn’t just been standing outside his door all this time…listening. “Um, hi. Can I help you?”

  He frowned for a moment, but was clearly distracted and thankfully didn’t seem all that interested in following up on why she’d still be standing there. “I—wait.” He stepped into the small, third-floor landing area and pulled the door behind him. “Just in case,” he added, shuffling forward to completely shut his door, which crowded her back a little against one of the other closed bedroom doors.

  The top floor basically emptied into a small landing area that fanned out toward the three doors leading to the uppermost floor’s bedrooms. And though it wasn’t big, it allowed coming-and-going traffic reasonably well. Providing all the guests weren’t coming or going simultaneously. But she’d had to tear out and rework the floor plan so that each room could have a more generous closet and its own private bathroom, so it had seemed well worth the traffic risk. Until that moment, anyway. At the moment it seemed much, much more narrow a space than she’d realized.

  “I was wondering, you don’t happen to have anything like cedar chips, sawdust? Newspapers, even?”

  Now it was her turn to frown. “I’ve got plenty of newspapers, but what do you need sawdust…” She trailed off as he nodded back toward his bedroom door and she realized he was referring to the kitten.

  “I was worried a little on whether she was old enough to eat a bunch of regular food, so I mushed up the bread and tuna with some milk and the damn thing scarfed it up like it hadn’t been fed in days. Then I got to thinking that, you know, what goes in…”

  “Right, right,” Kirby said, already on the same page.

  “I could hit a drug store, or something, but thought I’d ask first.”

  “I’m sure we can figure something out. Temporarily,” she added with a gauging look at his face. “Right?”

  “Right. Of course. I figured I’d let her settle down some from her scare, then start making some calls tomorrow.” He propped his hands on his hips. His very lean, narrow hips. At least he’d pulled on another T-shirt. Bright blue this time. Made his green eyes look almost electric.

  She kinda preferred the black one. The black flashed her back to the leather and the motorcycle and all those visuals she really didn’t need to recall. Especially when combined with the naked ones. Most especially. She realized he was waiting for her to respond and cleared her throat. “Good plan,” she said, sounding like she’d been out in the desert too long with no water. At some point she was not going to be an idiot around this man. If, perhaps, he stayed long enough.

  A few weeks might do it. Or kill her.

  “Glad you agree.” He folded his arms over his chest and smiled.

  Okay, so kill her it was.

  “Could you give me some names, places to start?”

  “Sure. Let me go down and see what I can find for a litter box.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “No, no bother.” She motioned to the stairs, making him aware he was going to have to move if he didn’t want her plastered up against him as she made her way past him.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, backing up against his door. “Hey, Ms. Farrell?” he said after she’d made it safely to the top step without making any actual physical contact.

  Great, she thought. She was fantasizing about him scooping her up in those strong arms, holding her against that ridiculously gorgeous chest, and carrying her in to the very delicious bed that she knew lay just beyond that door. And he was Miz Farrelling her. Lovely. She supposed it could have been worse. At least he hadn’t ma’am’d her. “Yes? And please, you saved my life. It’s Kirby.”

  “Kirby,” he added with another brief smile.

  He was both sex on a stick and cutely adorable all at the same time. There should be a law. She tried not to swoon.

  “If you tell me where the stuff is, I’ll get it.” His smile flashed to a grin for a brief moment. “I figure you’ve done about enough for the little beast for one day.” He nodded in the general direction of her body. Very general, very vague nodding…but that didn’t stop some very specific points of her body from responding. Two, in particular.

  Her long-sleeve tee was a bit on the thin side, so she folded her arms in front of her, just in case. It was only midafternoon, and yet it felt like an enormously long day.

  “Some of those scratches looked pretty nasty. You okay?”

  “Fine,” she said, a bit mortified that not only had he seen her naked stomach in all of its not-twenty-five-anymore glory…he’d also gotten an additional eyeful of ugly, bloody scratches for the trouble. Yeah, that was the visual she wanted him to have. Definite fantasy material right there. If you were Stephen King. “They don’t feel as bad as they look,” she lied.

  “If you say so.” He paused for a moment, and she’d have sworn he looked a little uncertain about what to say next, but he wasn’t ducking back into his room, either. Clearly wishful thinking on her part. Or he was trying to find the words to tell her something she didn’t want to hear.

  “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “Uh, no. No, that’s all. I’d—follow you down, but maybe I should go check on the beast. Make sure she hasn’t shredded something irreplaceable.”

  “I’ll be back up in a few minutes with a cardboard box and whatever I can dig up.”

  “Okay.” But he lingered a moment longer, so she paused, but then he finally turned back to his door. “Thanks again.”

  “Sure,” she said, then headed back down the stairs once his door was shut behind him again. So, had that just been her? Or had things suddenly gotten awkward there at the end? Awkward in that way where you weren’t ready to end a conversation, but weren’t sure how to prolong it without seeming dorky.

  Except the dork in that situation had clearly been her. And yet, he’d been the one to prolong the moment past its natural comfort zone. You’re really stretching if you think he was somehow flirting, or wanting to keep your company.

  Besides, who knew why he was there, or how long he’d been on the road. Maybe he was just starved for any human interaction. He certainly had been nothing if not polite, not coming onto her in any discernible way. And he’d saved her life, or at the very least saved her an extended hospital stay. So…maybe it was just that. Not knowing what to say to someone you’d kept from breaking her own fool neck.

  Didn’t keep her from thinking about what it would mean if he really was coming onto her. Except a guy who looked like him, and was confident enough
to spring into action and play white knight like he had…probably had very few awkward moments with members of the opposite sex. As polite and gentlemanly as he’d been since his arrival, she didn’t doubt that if he wanted to spend more time with her, he wouldn’t have been at all awkward about making her aware of it.

  She went about gathering whatever she could find to make a decent litter box for the wee beast, making a mental note to give Pete a call later. She’d given her guest a hard time about finding a home for the critter, but she’d been bloody and a little annoyed at that moment. She actually thought it was pretty sweet that he’d cared one way or the other what happened to the kitten. Which, so did she, or she wouldn’t have climbed, literally, out on a limb to save its sorry little fuzzy butt.

  But she also knew Pete was a softy who’d have kept it at the animal control compound until he found a home for it; so turning the kitten over to him wasn’t the heartless action it had come off as, either. She layered a stack of newspapers on top of the stuff she’d already put in the empty cardboard box and headed back up the stairs.

  She knocked on his door with her elbow. “Room service.”

  He opened the door an instant later and essentially tugged her into the room by her elbow, then shut the door immediately behind her. Startled by the action, and thinking she normally didn’t go for brutish kind of guys, but that he could manhandle her all he wanted…she stutter-stepped to a stop when he immediately let her go as soon as the door was shut behind her. Still staggering a little, she watched as he turned and dropped to his hands and knees to look under the wide opening beneath the sleigh bed.

  Yeah, not exactly the next part she’d pictured in her fantasy scenario, right there. Although it did give her a great excuse to stare at his mighty fine backside once again. Which she did. Openly. It was like she’d reverted to some primordial version of herself that was merely a slave to her inner, baser instincts.

  “Come on,” he was crooning. “You really don’t want to make a bed out of…” He trailed off on a sigh and then levered himself back up to stand. “Sorry for yanking you in there like that, but she’s been tearing around the room like some kind of Tasmanian devil and I didn’t want her ripping out the door.”

  “We could still call Pete, you know,” Kirby said.

  The quelling look he gave her was rather comical when you thought about it.

  “She just needs some time to calm down. I just sort of wish she hadn’t picked my sweater to do that in,” he said, glancing back toward the area under the bed. “But…there are other sweaters.”

  He wore sweaters. He struck her as a faded, beat-up-sweat-shirt kind of guy. Well, the guy who’d rolled in wearing dusty leather certainly had. This guy was…she really wasn’t sure yet. But it was certainly a more interesting puzzle to worry over than, oh, say, how she was going to pay the bills this month. At least his being here was also making that part a bit less daunting. So, it was only natural, really, that she spent so much time thinking about him.

  “You know, Pete isn’t a bad guy,” she said, fessing up. “He’s not like the proverbial dog catcher. He’ll find her a home.”

  Brett turned back toward her. “Which you knew, earlier.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Why did you let me haul her up here?”

  “Post-traumatic stress from my tree ordeal?”

  His lips twitched.

  “Plus, you seemed pretty bent on playing white knight—which, if I didn’t take the time to thank you profusely for that, by the way, I’m very sorry. I really can’t thank you enough for being so quick on your feet.” His bare feet, she recalled. Bare lots of things, in fact. She forced her mind away from that. Standing next to him, right beside a perfectly great bed, was enough of a test of her conversational skills at the moment.

  “Anybody would have done the same thing,” he responded easily, not even looking at the bed. Or her. In that way. Totally not distracted. “I’m just glad the ladder crashing woke me up.”

  She winced a little. “Not such a great stay in the inn so far. Again, my apologies. Why don’t you let me get the kitten out of your hair, so to speak, so you can get the rest you checked in here for.” She bustled into motion, setting the stack of litter box stuff on his bed to free her hands up for kitten wrangling. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I really am a better hostess than this, I promise.”

  “It wasn’t like you purposely tried to fall out of a tree.”

  She had knelt on the floor on the far side of the bed to look beneath it, but his comment had her stretching back up to look at him across the other side of the bed. “True, but I’m sorry all the same.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. And, to be honest, I think we should just leave the cat where it is at the moment. She’s been through enough today without being taken somewhere else. We’ll be fine.”

  Kirby ducked back down and peeked under the bed. The tiny ball of fluff was curled up in the middle of what appeared to be a very nice, very expensive cashmere sweater. She frowned. Cashmere? This guy? Then she remembered the manicured hands, the roll of money, and, well…he was an enigma wrapped up in a mystery, he was. The kitten was sacked out, and he was probably right about disturbing the poor thing again. She pushed up to a stand just as he was scooping up the box of stuff she’d put on the bed.

  He rooted through it. “What is all this stuff?”

  “Uh, just things I thought would make a good litter box.”

  He spread out the papers, a small, shallow plastic tray, a box of baking soda, several old towels, and an old blanket.

  “And some bedding,” she said, lifting one shoulder. “Which, honestly, I’d have picked the cashmere, too. Sorry. I’ll pay to have it cleaned, or…whatever else might need done to it. Replace it. Once she gets up, just put that stuff under there instead.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Thanks,” he said, carrying the box into the bathroom.

  She realized she was just standing there, watching him again, and snapped back to attention. “No, thank you. I—the least I can do is fix you dinner. For, you know, saving me. Earlier.”

  He paused in the bathroom doorway, his hands empty now. He looked remarkably…domesticated. All well worn blue T-shirt and faded jeans. Bare feet, tousled hair. He also looked worn out.

  “I’ll—let me get out of here so you can rest. Just say the word later and I’ll bring a tray up for you. Pot roast. It’s not much, but—”

  “That would be great, actually,” he said, surprising her. “What time?”

  “Uh, anytime you’d like. Just ring down and I’ll—”

  “I mean, what time are you eating? Unless you’d rather eat alone.”

  “No,” she blurted, even more surprised. “That would be fine. Usually a bit later for me, around six thirty.”

  “Sounds good. If I don’t come down, if you wouldn’t mind, just ring the room and wake me up.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather sleep?”

  He shoved his hands in his front pockets, the picture of laid back and relaxed. Or would have been if it wasn’t for the tired lines creasing the corners of his mouth and eyes. “I’d have thought so, yes. But the distraction is proving to be kind of nice, too.”

  She stood there a moment longer than necessary, trying to figure out if he meant what most men would mean when they said something like that…or, if it was more like he was just being honest. Maybe he really was just hungry for some human contact.

  Do not look at the bed, she schooled herself. There were all kinds of human contact. “I’d enjoy having some company, too.”

  “Good.” He smiled. “Don’t let me sleep through.”

  “I won’t,” she said, scooting around the bed and heading toward the door, before any of her thoughts dared play out on her face. Only once she was in the hall, door shut safely behind her, did she allow herself a sigh of relief. Now she had a few hours to figure out how to stop thinking about her only guest—her only payin
g guest—as a possible bed mate.

  And how to make pot roast.

  Chapter 4

  Brett finally gave up on sleep and rolled off the bed, intent on heading for the shower. One peek under the bed showed that the kitty from hell was having no problem snoozing. “Good thing you look like you do,” he muttered, looking over the snagged and balled-up cashmere sweater the little fuzz ball was now calling home. “Couldn’t take my T-shirt or old sweats.” He’d packed light when he’d left Vegas, putting everything else into storage until he decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Which meant that, short one sweater, he basically had nothing decent to wear down to dinner.

  He dragged his bag across the bed and rooted around until he found the one T-shirt with long sleeves, and dug that out. He shook it out, shook his head, and took it into the bathroom with him. It was doubtful any amount of steam was going to make it look much better, but at least he’d make an effort to look halfway decent.

  The hot, steamy shower felt like heaven on earth as it pounded his back and neck. He should have done this earlier. It was almost better than sleep. Almost. He’d realized after Kirby had left that he’d probably only grabbed a few hours after arriving, and he’d fully expected to be out the instant his head hit the pillow again. But that hadn’t been the case. This time it hadn’t been because he was worried about Dan, or Vanetta, or anyone else back home, or even wondering what in the hell he thought he was doing this far from the desert. In New England, for God’s sake. During the winter. Although it didn’t appear to be much of one out here.

  No, that blame lay right on the lovely, slender shoulders of Kirby Farrell, innkeeper, and rescuer of trapped kittens. Granted, after the adrenaline rush of finding her hanging more than twenty feet off the ground by her fingertips, it shouldn’t be surprising that sleep eluded him, but that wasn’t entirely the cause. Maybe he’d simply spent too long around women who were generally over-processed, over-enhanced, and overly made up, so that meeting a regular, everyday ordinary woman seemed to stand out more.