‘Don’t be stupid. Twenty minutes,’ Cale said, before disconnecting.
Maddie placed her mobile on the windowsill, watched the walls recede a little and, feeling like an idiot, almost wept with relief.
Twenty-five minutes later, Cale parked in a visitor’s parking bay and looked at the small brick block of flats encircled by a wrought-iron fence.
He hopped out of his car, re-adjusted his grip on his toolbox and walked up the front steps. As Maddie had said, the front door opened to her code and he walked up the stairs and straight through her front door. Her flat smelled like its owner: light, fresh, slightly intoxicating. She’d used the open space well, filling the living area with comfortable-looking furniture, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase took up one wall. The room looked restful and lived in, although he wasn’t sure about the red walls.
Cale turned into the passage and opened the first of three closed doors. He grinned at the mess. An unmade bed, a hot pink T-shirt over the back of a wingback chair and a violet bra on the duck-egg-blue duvet. Putting the toolbox down, he put his hands on his hips and looked around, taking in the details. Like the fact that the wall above the bed was dominated by an abstract painting in creams and browns. Cale nearly dismissed the painting, but something made him look at it again. It was a massive swirl of neutral colours, fluid, filled with emotion and… sex.
It looked like a cream and brown orgy.
Or it might just be an abstract cream and brown painting and he’d see sex in a tub of margarine.
Dragging his gaze away, Cale looked around the room. Deep brown curtains and an antique dressing table dominated the room, groaning under the weight of all the junk he’d come to expect from the female of the species. Necklaces and beads spilt out of copper woven baskets, perfume bottles vied for space, and lipstick tubes, scraps of paper and small change littered the rest of the wooden surface.
‘Cale? That you?’ Maddie called.
Cale walked into the dressing room. He presumed beyond the shut door was the bathroom. ‘Yeah. How you doing in there?’
‘Getting a bit cold.’
‘Hang in there. Not long now.’ Cale looked around her dressing room; in such an intimate space he felt surrounded by her.
‘I see that you still keep the retail sector of the city in champagne and caviar,’ Cale told her through the door.
‘What are you on about?’
‘Your immense selection of clothes. How can you possibly need so many shoes?’ Cale asked as he bumped his thigh against an open drawer and glanced down. Naturally it was her lingerie drawer. Cale swallowed, unable to resist lifting a semi-transparent candy-pink thong that was hardly bigger than dental floss.
‘It’s a girl thing,’ Maddie grumbled. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I won’t even try to,’ Cale assured her.
‘Stay out of my lingerie drawer,’ Maddie warned him.
Cale quickly dropped the non-offending article. How could she know he was… Did she have X-ray eyes?
‘Nothing would fit me,’ Cale joked as he put down his toolbox and placed his hand against the door.
‘Ha-ha. Can you hurry up? I’m getting really cold.’
Cale looked at the hinges on the door and sighed. The hinges were covered in paint—many layers of paint—which would make them difficult to unscrew. He tested the handle on the door, just in case, and heard the click-clack of the faulty mechanism. He thought he heard Maddie’s snort of impatience and didn’t blame her. Crouching again, he assembled his drill and, with plug in hand, stood up to find an electrical outlet. He disconnected the hairdryer and plugged the drill in. Placing himself between the door and the edge of the closet, he felt for the creases that indicated where the screws were and in a few minutes had them in his hand.
Grabbing hold of the wrong side of the door, he pulled it away from the frame and saw Maddie, wet-haired and shivering, a small towel barely covering her from collarbone to crotch.
With her makeup-free face and wide eyes she looked about seventeen.
‘It’s like a fridge in here!’ Cale exclaimed as he stepped inside.
Maddie clutched the top of her towel, her hands white and her bottom lip almost blue. Being so close to her in the tiny bathroom, he could see the fine shivers trembling through her. Cale looked towards the sash window Maddie gestured to.
‘Tell me about it. The cord got jammed ages ago. I’ll have to get it fixed soon.’
‘Why didn’t you get back into the warm bath?’
‘Hot water ran out.’ Maddie shrugged
‘Get dressed,’ Cale ordered. ‘You’re going to get sick.’
Maddie looked towards the door that half stood, half hung in the doorway. She clenched the top of her towel tighter and stepped around him. Yanking some clothes off a hanger, and some underwear from the drawer, she moved into the bedroom.
Cale took a deep breath and looked down through the dressing room into Maddie’s room. In her haste to get warm and out of his sight she’d started dressing in the far corner of the room and he could see her reflection in the dressing table mirror. Unable to pull his eyes away, he watched as she dropped her towel and gracefully pulled on a pair of low-cut panties. Her stomach was gently rounded, her legs long, her hips slim. Cale swallowed as she slid trousers up her legs and reached for a gauzy cream bra and snapped it into place, doing that weird jiggly thing woman did to make sure it fitted exactly right.
Cale swallowed a moan. Since he hadn’t had any action for a while he was surprised that moaning was all he did.
As opposed to lying her on that bed…
‘Cale?’
Cale blinked. She was shoving her arms into a shirt and turning to look at her reflection in the mirror. Stepping back just in time, he leaned against the open sash window.
‘Yeah?’
Maddie appeared in the small area between the hanging door and the frame. ‘Thanks. It was turning out to be a long, cold morning.’
Cale shrugged off her thanks and gestured to the window. He spoke brusquely. ‘You need to get this fixed or else you’ll freeze.’
‘I keep meaning to and I don’t seem to get it done.’ Maddie nibbled at her bottom lip. ‘I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to inconvenience you like this—and on a Saturday morning, too.’
‘Maddie, it’s fine. No worries.’ Cale practically spat the words like bullets.
Her eyes heated and her mouth firmed. ‘Then the least you can do is be gracious about helping me instead of a doing a great impression of a bear with a thorn in its paw!’
Cale closed his eyes as if seeking patience. ‘Can we drop this, please? It’s a stupid conversation.’
Her eyes lightened with frustration. ‘But—’
‘You just don’t know when to shut up, do you?’ Cale burst out, his breath ragged. He stood up and took two steps to reach her. He looked into her desperately pretty eyes and grimaced. ‘Okay, Maddie, see if you can handle this. Pretty, feminine room. Sexy painting. Lingerie. Wet woman in towel. Wet woman getting dressed around the corner. Keep thinking about what I want to do to you in that bed. I want to do you in the worst way possible. Getting the picture yet?’
It almost amused him to see how the tips of her ears and then her cheeks blushed. ‘Oh…’
‘Yeah. Oh.’
Maddie stepped back into the dressing room and leaned against the shelves—yet he still managed to connect most of his body with hers