“Are you nuts?”
Ben only had time to glimpse an infuriated female face before the woman dropped to the floor.
“Damn and blast! You’ve made me spill the paillettes!”
At that point, all he could see was a well-rounded upturned bottom in black leggings.
“Don’t just stand there, get down here and help me dig these things out of the cracks in the floor.”
“I-I’m sorry,” Ben stammered. “I thought Marian was here.”
“Well, she’s not. I am. She’s gone to get some more blue paillettes.” The woman at his feet was picking up small flat disks of what looked like blue glass. “Ah, gotcha!” she said, and held up one of the shards. “Are you going to help or not?”
Ben dropped onto his haunches. A completely unruly mass of chocolate curls fell over the woman’s face. Her fingers were workmanlike with short, unvarnished nails. He slid one of the fragments of blue from a crack and handed it to her. “Here.”
“Lovely. That only leaves about fifty more. We’ll never find them all.”
She sat back on her heels, pushed her hair off her face and turned to frown at him. She peered over horn-rim half glasses and said, “Ben. Of course it would be you.”
Her eyes were the color of dark Barbados rum.
He sucked in his breath and felt suddenly as though he were Butch Cassidy in the last scene of the movie. Everything had turned golden. The world tilted into slow motion.
“Close your mouth, Ben Jackson. You look like a dead carp.”
He tried to snap his mouth shut, but only succeeded in gulping. “Uh…wha…who?”
“You don’t even recognize me. Par for the course.”
He wanted to say, “You look edible, luscious, wild and sexy and dangerous and crazy and I want you.”
“Uh, familiar” is what he said. He controlled his libido—it didn’t control him. Or never had, until now. Then the penny dropped. “Annabelle? Annabelle Langley?”
He heard the door open behind him. “Ben! Belle! Why are you two crawling around on the floor?”
He tore his eyes away, and reached a hand back to Marian as though she were offering him a lifeline.
“Get up, Ben, you’ll get filthy,” Marian Wadsworth said.
He stood easily and realized he was smiling stupidly at the woman on the floor.
“You going to leave me down here?” The woman held out her hand.
Ben took it automatically and felt the same jolt he’d experienced once when he’d plugged his electric razor into a bad socket. The hair on his arms stood up.
She pulled against him, and a moment later came up against his chest.
The hair on his arms wasn’t the only thing that came to attention.
“Sorry, Marian,” Annabelle said, and stepped back. She kept looking at him warily. Why not? He must look as fatuous as Bottom after he turned into a jackass in Midsummer Night’s Dream. How appropriate.
“Ben surprised me. I dropped the paillettes. You think we’ll have enough if I don’t find them all?”
Marian held out a small cardboard box, perhaps five inches by seven. “Plenty. You have to stop squirreling things away in your apartment, Belle. Or at least develop a decent filing system.”
“Sorry. Next time, I’ll go do the hunting.” She glanced at Ben. “It’s safer.” She picked up a fragile length of white Belgian lace off the worktable, and took a three-inch glass-headed dressmaker’s pin from a large pincushion on her wrist.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at first.” Ben said. “You were in my brother, Steve’s grade. Right?”
“It’s been a long time. High school.” Annabelle stuck out her hand. “I was a lowly freshman when you were a senior, but everybody knew the president of the senior class. I’m your mother’s new chef d’atelier.”
Ben closed his eyes and whispered, “I am going to kill my mother.”
“Ben!” Marian said.
“Oh, God.” Ben opened his eyes. “I didn’t mean—I’d never…”
“Get out now, please,” Annabelle said. “Before I toss you out.”
“It’s just an expression.”
“Now!” She crunched up the lace in her hand. “Ow!” She held up her hand. The pin had embedded itself in her left index finger. She yanked out the object and raised her finger to her lips to suck the drop of blood, but didn’t manage to catch it before it fell on the lace she held in her other hand. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
“Ben,” Marian said quietly. “Go downstairs. I’ll handle this.”
“But…”
“She knows you didn’t mean anything by your remark. Go.”
Confused, embarrassed, and feeling like the biggest klutz in this or any other universe, Ben went. He took the stairs fast and turned not toward the living room, where he could still hear Brittany’s voice, but toward the kitchen, and then out the back door into the yard.
Without a conscious thought he grabbed the branch of the oak tree, planted his foot in the crotch and swung up and into the leaves. His hands and feet remembered as though he were still a boy of ten who hid out in his tree whenever he wanted to avoid chores or wanted to read a book. Then when he was 18—the summer after Judy died—he’d practically lived up here for a couple of months.
He covered his face with his hands and braced his back against the big limb twenty feet up. Thank God the tree had grown enough to support his weight. He hadn’t given that a thought.
He did not dare see Annabelle Langley again, that was for sure.
How could he go back in and charm Brittany when, as of ten minutes earlier, she had ceased to be an important part of his world? It wasn’t her fault. It was his mother’s.
Cupid must be laughing his head off, the sadistic little bastard. How could Ben Jackson, the rational, left-brain, goal-oriented young law-and-order assistant district attorney on the rise, fall head over heels in love at first sight? And with a woman who had killed her mother?
BEN WAS STILL PROPPED along the branch of the tree fifteen minutes later when the back door burst open and Annabelle Langley, her face as cheerful as an executioner’s, stalked down the back steps and stood staring out at the backyard.
The effect she had on him hadn’t changed.
He tried to look at her critically, compare her to Brittany in hopes that his rational mind would kick in before it was too late. Hadn’t his mother accused him of being a robot? Robots didn’t fall in love.
Yet something in Annabelle ripped through his defenses.
He did not like it, didn’t want it, didn’t approve of it. Passion hurt, feeling hurt. Love meant loss. Hideous, horrible loss that came with pictures that exploded inside his brain without warning, even now.
He couldn’t afford empathy. He could not be open to emotion and do his job properly. He owed his entire focus to the people he was sworn to protect. One less criminal on the street meant one less victim—one less Judy.
Annabelle couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was there. He might have said something the instant she came out that door, but the opportunity had already passed.
So he studied her dispassionately. What was the big deal?
She was at least three inches shorter than Brittany.