Beneath his bare arm, he squinted down at her through bloodshot eyes as if he didn’t quite recognize her. He wore the same jeans and Molson T-shirt he’d worn the day before. He was wrinkled and his hair stood up in front. “Clare?” he finally said, his voice rough and sleepy, as if he’d just rolled out of bed.
“Bingo.” Light brown stubble shadowed the lower half of his face, and the shadow from his arm rested across the seam of his lips. “Did I wake you?”
“I’ve been up for a few.”
“Late night?”
“Yeah.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “What time is it?”
“About a quarter after two. Did you sleep in your clothes?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Out carousing again?”
“Carousing?” He dropped his hands to his sides. “No. I was up all night reading.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him picture books weren’t really considered reading, but she was going to be nice today if it killed her. Calling him a dickhead the other day had felt good. For a while. But by the time she’d pulled into her garage, the elation had worn thin and she’d felt undignified and gauche. The nice thing-the ladylike thing-would be to apologize. She’d kill herself first. “It must have been a good book.”
“It was interesting.” A ghost of a smile curved his mouth.
She didn’t ask what kind of book he’d read. She didn’t really care. “Is your father around?”
“I don’t know.” He stepped aside, and she walked past him into the house. He smelled like bed linen and warm skin, and he was such a big man, he seemed to dwarf the space around him. Or perhaps it just seemed that way because she was used to Lonny, who stood a few inches taller than her own medium height and was quite thin.
“I searched for him in my mother’s house and he’s not there.” She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and looked at Sebastian as he closed the door. He leaned his back against it, folded his arms across his chest and stared at her feet. Slowly, he lifted his gaze from the toes of her red sandals and up her halter dress with the deep red cherries on it. His attention paused on her mouth before continuing to her eyes. He tilted his head to one side, studying her as if trying to figure something out.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He pushed away from the door and moved by her into the kitchen. His feet were bare. “I just put on a pot of coffee. Want some?”
“No. By two, I’ve usually moved on to Diet Coke.” She followed close behind, her gaze taking in his broad shoulders. The arms of his T-shirt fit snuggly around the bulge of his biceps, and the ends of his sandy blond hair touched the ribbed collar at the base of his neck. There was no doubt about it. Sebastian was a man’s man. A guy. While Lonny had been particular about his clothing, Sebastian slept in his.
“My dad doesn’t drink Diet Coke.”
“I know. He’s an RC Cola man, and I hate RC.”
Sebastian glanced back at her and moved around the old wooden table stacked with notebooks, legal pads, and index cards. A laptop lay open, and a small tape recorder and three cassettes sat next to a BlackBerry. “He’s the only person I know who still drinks RC,” he said as he opened a cupboard and reached for a mug on the top shelf. The bottom edge of his T-shirt pulled up past the waistband of his jeans, riding low on his hips. The elastic band of his underwear looked very white against the tan skin of his lower back.
The memory of his bare behind flashed across her brain, and she raised her gaze to the back of his sleep- tousled hair. That morning at the Double Tree, he hadn’t been wearing underwear. “He’s a very loyal consumer,” she said. The memory of that morning made her want to sink into the floor and hide. She hadn’t had sex with him. While that was a huge relief, she had to wonder what they’d actually done, and how she’d ended up virtually naked. If she thought he’d give her a straight answer, she would ask him to fill in the blank spots.
“More like stubborn,” Sebastian corrected with his back to her. “Very definitely set in his ways.”
But she didn’t believe he’d give her the truth without embellishing it for his own amusement. Sebastian could not be trusted, but that wasn’t exactly news. “That’s part of his charm.” A few feet from him, she leaned her behind against the table.
Sebastian grabbed the carafe with one hand and poured coffee into the mug he held with the other. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
“Yes.” With both hands, she grasped the tabletop at her hips and purposely let her gaze once again slide down the back of his rumpled T-shirt and the long legs of his jeans. She couldn’t help but compare him to Lonny, but supposed it was only natural. Besides the fact that they were both men, they had nothing in common. Sebastian was taller, bigger, and surrounded by a thick testosterone haze. Lonny was shorter, thinner, and had been in touch with his feelings. Perhaps that had been Lonny’s appeal. He’d been nonthreatening. Clare waited for the ta-da bells to ring in her head. They didn’t.
Sebastian set the carafe down, and Clare turned her attention to the tape recorder by her right hand. “Are you writing an article?” she asked. He didn’t answer, and she looked up.
Sunlight spilled through the kitchen window across his shoulder and the side of his face. It poured across the stubble on his cheek and got tangled in his eyelashes. He raised the mug to his lips and watched her as he blew into the coffee. “Writing? Not really. More like typing and deleting the same opening paragraph.”
“You’re stuck?”
“Something like that.” He took a drink.
“Whenever I get stuck, it’s usually because I’m trying to start a book in the wrong place or I’m going about it from the wrong angle. The more I try to force it, the more I get stuck.”
He lowered the mug, and she expected him to say something deprecating about writing romance. Her grasp on the table tightened as she steeled herself and waited for him to point out to her that what he wrote was important, and to dismiss her books as nothing more than fantasies for bored housewives. Heck, her own mother trivialized her work. She did not expect better from Sebastian Vaughan, of all people.
Instead of launching into a condescending diatribe, however, he looked at her as he had earlier. Like he was trying to figure something out. “Maybe, but I don’t ‘get stuck.’ At least I never have before, and never for this long.”
Clare waited for him to continue. She was ready for him to jump on the literary bandwagon and say something derogatory. She’d been defending herself, her genre, and her readers for so long, she could handle what he threw at her. But he simply drank his coffee, and she tilted her head to the side and looked at
Now it was his turn to ask, “What?”
“I think I mentioned yesterday that I write romance novels,” she felt compelled to point out.
He raised a brow as he lowered the mug. “Yeah. You mentioned it, along with the fact that you do all your own sexual research.”
That’s right. Dang it. He’d made her mad, and she’d said things she wished she could take back. Things that were coming back to haunt her. Things said in anger that she’d learned long ago to keep behind the happy facade. “And you don’t have one condescending thing to say?”
He shook his head.
“No smarmy questions?”
He smiled. “Just one.” He turned and set the mug on the counter by his hip.
She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “No. I’m not a nymphomaniac.”
His smile turned into a chuckle, laugh lines creasing the corners of his green eyes. “That isn’t the smarmy question, but thanks for clearing that up.” He folded his arms across his rumpled T-shirt. “The real question is: where do you
Clare dropped her hand to her side. She figured she had a couple ways to answer that question. She could get offended and tell him to grow up, or she could relax. He seemed to be playing nice today, but this was Sebastian. The man who’d lied to her about having sex with him.
“Are you afraid to tell me?” he goaded her.
She wasn’t afraid of Sebastian. “I have a special room in my house,” she lied.
“What’s in the room?”
He looked totally serious. As if he actually believed her. “Sorry, I can’t divulge that sort of information to a
