mostly sprawled on him. Now, she galloped down the aisle, all perky and bossy.
She started out with, “You and I are going to have a serious talk. About what I’m really doing here.”
“You know why you’re here.”
“Humph.”
She went along with those humphs until right before the baggage claim escalators, where she stopped all passenger flow by stopping dead and wagging a finger in his face. “I’ll help you if I can. That’s not even an issue. But you and I both know what’s really going on here. You want to be with me. I want to be with you. We’re having temporary delusions that we’ve something mystical and fantastic and rare and extraordinary going on together.”
“And this is criminal how?” he asked carefully.
She didn’t answer that. Someone bumped her, and she charged off toward baggage claim again. “This is just not planned out well. I don’t have any clothes, for one thing. For Pete’s sake, all I carried with me were the clothes I needed for a boat trip in Alaska.”
“Doesn’t seem that hard to use a credit card in a store, does it?”
“I hate shopping,” she informed him.
“I knew you would,” he said mildly. Somehow, even with no rest, his eyes gritty from dryness, and Armageddon waiting for him at the lab, he felt as relaxed as a sleepy lion. It was Cate. Everything she’d said was true. Everything about his feelings for her were suspect and not to be trusted and, well, odd. Odd for him, anyway.
No man felt sure of a woman. Certainly, no man after two divorces felt sure of a woman-much less one as capricious and unreadable as Cate.
But there it was. The feeling that anything was solvable when she was next to him. That nothing would ever be right again if she wasn’t.
She fell silent for a brief-very brief-stretch, while they picked up their gear and made the trek to the long-term parking lot. The weather was a mighty contrast to the damp greens of Alaska. The late-afternoon sky sun-bleached and summer heat baked into the pavement. In the car lot, once he’d given her the general location, he had to chuckle when she instinctively aimed for a black BMW 128i convertible.
“How on earth could you guess which was my car?”
“It’s obvious. Look at the rest of the cars in this row-the Taurus and Chevy and Mazdas. But don’t try telling me you bought it because it’s a precision driving machine.”
“It is.”
“It’s also the sexiest BMW they ever put out. How fast can you get that top down?”
“You’re a good woman, Cate. Forget all the insults I said before.”
She rolled her eyes, but she was getting it back-that irrepressible grin. “We’d better quit with the chitchat. Do we have a plan? Besides your needing to clock in some serious hours of sleep.”
“I don’t need sleep.”
“Harm. You’re going to crash, soon and big. You have to have some rest.”
Maybe he did, but Harm figured he’d have to manage. He knew the other men’s travel schedules. Come Monday morning, latest, everybody would be back to work at the lab. That left him the weekend, at most, for him and Cate to take that place apart from stem to stern.
It wasn’t likely to be enough time.
Even so, he had priorities before that. It felt good to slide behind the wheel, get the top off, put his baby in gear. There weren’t that many miles between Logan and Cambridge, but it was Friday, approaching rush hour, so naturally the roads were jammed. Rather than face Interstate 93, he ducked down the side roads around Harvard.
Truthfully, he could have found a better route than that, but he wanted Cate to get a glimpse of Harvard Square, the white-spired churches, the historical streets with the red brick and white trim and black lanterns. Big old shade trees cooled the side streets, showed off small, elegant gardens, history hiding in every side corner.
“You like?” he asked, but he could tell from the way she absorbed it all.
“Totally love,” she corrected him.
“Yeah, that’s how I felt when I first got here. I don’t know the entire region that well yet. And traffic in Boston-there’s no swear word bad enough to describe it. But still…the whole area’s been growing on me.”
“New Orleans was like that for me. I first went because of the fantastic chefs located there. It’s impossible in the summer, not just hot, but sick-hot. Still, there’s so much character and flavor in the city that it was easy to fall in love with.” She turned to him. “You still haven’t told me the plan.”
“Because I don’t have anything that specific.” There was a lot on his mind, but for long minutes, he’d just been aware of the summer wind in their faces, tossing up her hair, her riding next to him, how nothing had felt this easy or right in a long time. Maybe never. “First plan. We need to drop our bags off at my place. Both of us probably want to catch a shower. Then-out for a decent dinner. Too late to get reservations at a place like the Barking Crab restaurant, but I know a good place locally. So…we’ll freshen up, eat, then drive over to the lab. I don’t know that we can get much of anything done tonight, but we can at least map out our time from there.”
“Good plan. One small exception.”
“What?”
“I need clothes. Seriously. Nothing fancy, but I just need some kind of generic store where I could pick up a few basics-specifically clothes that don’t smell like fish and rain.”
“No sweat.” He immediately right-turned, aimed a few blocks into a more commercial area. A man couldn’t have been married, much less twice, without knowing about women and clothes shopping, so…she was going to take forever. He really didn’t care. Actually, he figured he could swing into a shady spot and put his head back, catch a nap. Even a half hour would be better than none.
He pulled onto a commercial street with a half dozen decent shops, angled into a parking spot, then lifted up to pull out his wallet and a credit card.
She shot him a look that could have frozen fire. “Have I neglected to mention that I make damn good money and certainly don’t need yours?”
“But I said I’d pay for expenses. And you wouldn’t need these clothes if I didn’t push you into helping me.”
“Do not irritate me when I have jet lag, Connolly. Trust me. It’s a bad idea. It’s possible you’re right, because it sort of is an expense. But I don’t care. I buy my own clothes. That’s that.”
He wiped a hand over his face as she climbed out and clipped down the street, but then he just put his head back and closed his eyes with a grin. How-or why-a completely irrational woman should make him smile was impossible to analyze.
A second later-certainly no more-she was climbing back in the car with four packages. He blinked in shock. “You just left.” He glanced at his watch. “You haven’t even been fifteen minutes.”
“I easily fit in a size. And the first store was great, hit a sale. Home, Jerome.”
Abruptly, he remembered a few details. “It’s not actually home. It was my uncle’s place. I haven’t had time to sell it, or do much of anything for that matter. He died, I got here, and the whole crisis of the disappearing formula developed from there. So I-”
“So it’s dusty and messy. Got it, Harm. You’re talking to a woman who doesn’t claim anywhere as home. You don’t need to worry about stuff like that with me. Ever.”
“I’m not worried. I’m just trying to warn you what we’re getting into.” To himself, Harm admitted that he had an attachment to the place. Not that he wouldn’t sell it. Not that it didn’t need work to accommodate how he’d prefer to live. It was just…growing up, Dougal had been his favorite family person. He wasn’t just an uncle but a coconspirator, someone a cocky boy could talk to-about girls, about life, about building a windmill in the backyard, about sort of accidentally driving his mom’s car into the ditch a week after he got his license.
So. It wasn’t that the house was so much. It’s just that he wanted her to like it.
When they pulled up she looked it over, said “Really nice” in a tone that told him nothing at all, then started grabbing her packages and duffel. “Point me to a shower, okay?”
He unlocked, carried and then obediently pointed. “Wander anywhere you want. I’ll be in-” He pointed again, this time across a hall “-that shower. I’m going to make a few calls first, okay? Make yourself at home.”
He did have calls to make. The airlines, to make sure what times Arthur, Yale and Purdue were expected home-which was not for another day. After that, he called Fiske’s daughter, then checked answering-machine messages and left callbacks for the firm’s attorney and the P.I. firm. He didn’t expect responses-not on Friday
