'Uh-huh.'
'I played basketball and ran in track.'
Her shoes were tied. She threw him a defiant look. 'You don't seem tall enough to be a basketball player.' She stood up, pulled her sweat shirt down at the waist, then reached around him to get a brush from the top of the dresser. He didn't move, only turned his head aside to watch her shoulder and breast brush close to his arm.
'I was one of those quick wily guards. What I lacked in height I made up for in speed.'
'I'll bet.' She smirked, and he finally straightened, then pulled out a small boudoir chair from under the kneehole of the dated dressing table, slung his leg over as if he were mounting a bronco and straddled it, facing her.
'I detect a wry note in that comment.' He relaxed back, catching both elbows on the table behind him. The two top buttons of his shirt were freed, revealing a V of pale brown hair on his chest. His tuxedo jacket fell aside while the snowy ruffles of his jabot thrust forward, framed by the deep low U-shaped curve of his vest. The pose was unqualifiedly masculine. Unequivocally sexy. And it conjured up in Winnifred's mind the word 'hombre.' With his knees widespread on either side of the low delicate back of the diminutive chair, he looked more virile and tempting than ever. The black fabric of his trousers stretched taut across his groin.
She raised her eyes to find his had been watching the direction of her study, and she dredged up a comment to put him in his place because she herself was acutely discomfited by what she'd just seen.
'Short and fast, that describes you pretty well, I'd say.'
'I'm tall enough to put you where you belong, and I can be as slow as the next man when the occasion merits.'
'We
'Are we?'
She was removing the hairpins from her coil when he answered the last question with one of his own. Her hand stifled in midair, and she treated him to the guileless single-eyed blink that fascinated him so. She did it with her left eye, again in slow motion, and he was certain she wasn't aware of the fact that she possessed this intriguing reflex, or that it showed up whenever she was tense or embarrassed.
Suddenly she seemed to realize she was staring at him, motionless, and began searching her hair once more for hairpins. She pulled out a handful while he watched her every movement, then indolently reached out a palm, waiting. She dropped the pins into his hand, stepped back a safe distance and began brushing her hair while he watched her as carefully as if she were poised prey.
'You have the most fascinating nervous reaction that I'll bet you're not aware of.' She kept pulling the brush through her hair but made no reply. 'Did you know you sometimes blink only your left eye? In extremely slow motion?'
'I do?' The brush stopped.
'You do. And it makes me want to do things I have no right to think about.'
Abruptly, almost angrily, he thrust himself forward, swung his leg over the chair back, stretched to his feet, but turned his back on her. When all was silent for a long minute, he glanced back over his shoulder and ordered harshly, 'Keep brushing, for God's sake, and let's get out of here!'
She couldn't help smiling at his smooth black shoulders, wondering if the reason he'd leaped off that chair was the one she thought-because if he hadn't, things were going to start showing any second.
'I'm ready. All I need is a sweatband. Excuse me.'
He whirled and jumped out of her way when he discovered her close behind him, waiting to get at a drawer of the dressing table. She stood only a scant foot from him while ducking down to see in the mirror, slipping a braided red headband over her disorderly hair. 'I'm a mess, but what the heck. All I'm going to do is run.'
Maybe not, he thought, but smiled at her refreshing acceptance of her rather unflattering state. She looked better to him now in her baggy sweat pants than she'd looked in her pink ankle-length dress. She looked approachable, messable and altogether feminine.
At his house they crept. 'Shh!' he warned. 'My brothers are sleeping.' He snapped on a dim light in an old crowded back entry. Basement stairs led straight ahead, and up one step to the left was a kitchen. It was as vintage as his cars, this house. It was built in the forties most likely and had as much class as a four-buckle overshoe. He'd said it was his grandparents' home, and she could see touches of the grandmother left behind: an ivy in a brass pot hanging by a chain above the kitchen sink; an old black cast-iron Dutch oven with a cover, sitting on a very dirty stove; a kitchen dock shaped like a red plastic teakettle. The floor was covered not in vinyl, but with linoleum-one-foot squares of red and gray straight from 1950. It was worn in front of the stove, and the black sublayer was beginning to show through. Linoleum, for heaven's sake! He left her to go upstairs, and she poked her head into a dark living room and heard the floorboards creaking overhead where Joseph rummaged for his athletic clothes. A bass voice mumbled something, and Joseph's answered-undoubtedly he'd roused one of his brothers. She heard what sounded like an ancient dresser drawer screeching as it resisted closing, then two thumps that might have been Joseph's dress shoes hitting the floor. She switched on a living-room lamp and perused the room: leftovers of grandma's. An overstuffed sofa with a matching chair, both of wear-like-iron nylon frieze; a step table with a bowl of peanut shells on it; an NFL magazine that was six months old and a stack of newspapers not much newer; an embroidered doily that needed washing and starching-or better yet, throwing away; a black-and-red wool lumberman's shirt and a disreputable-looking pair of work boots with leather strings and oily curled-up toes; ancient ecru-lace panel curtains-lace? Stucco walls. But upon them she saw the first touch she knew to be Joseph's: large color photos of vintage cars, framed in stainless steel and fronted with glass. There were five of them in the room, each one classier than the next. She was facing the largest of them when Joseph spoke just behind her shoulder.
'That's my dream. To own one of those babies one day.'
She leaned forward and inspected the fancy English round hand at the bottom of the picture. '1932 Duesenberg Model SJ.' She turned her head to watch his profile as he studied the picture with a reverence she found enlightening.
'When you get it, will you take me for a ride?'
His hand stole up and squeezed the side of her neck. 'Honey, it's a date. I'll find you if you're findable by dry land.'
She was suddenly saddened to think that if that day ever came, she couldn't go for the ride with him. She remembered the way he'd kissed her in the Haynes this afternoon, how he'd carefully dipped his head down to miss her hat brim, then had to dip back out again as he retreated. She thought of their encounter in the gazebo. And suddenly she wished he'd turn her around by the shoulders and kiss her again, without hat or hairdo to be careful of, with nothing more than their soft sweat suits between their two honed bodies. But instead, he only squeezed the side of her neck and spoke about the car before them.
'They say there were less than forty of those made. But they were the most prestigious car ever produced anywhere, and in their day had an exclusive reputation that put Rolls-Royce to shame. They'd deliver three hundred horsepower and perform like no other machine before or since. The SJ could top one hundred miles an hour in second gear! And she could go from a standstill to one hundred miles an hour in seventeen seconds. And you want to know something sad?'
She didn't, but he went on, still gazing at the picture. 'The man she was named after was killed in an accident while driving one of these in 1932.'
She lifted her face and half turned to look up at him. 'In a way that's not as sad as it might have been. He died doing the thing he probably loved doing best in all the world.'
His eyes met hers. 'You're right, Winn. I never looked at it that way before. And he accomplished a lot in his life that was left for posterity-he and his brother had a lot to do with developing the Indy 500 into what it is today.'
'You mean the Duesenberg is an American car?'
'As apple pie.'
'It sounds German.'
'They were immigrants, the Duesenberg brothers.'
