“And then some,” Daniel agreed and, with a side-long grin, watched the pleasant sway of her hips as she walked away.
Wondering why a woman possessed of so much vibrant and natural beauty would choose to hide it behind professorial glasses, an unimaginative haircut and brown-paper-bag-plain clothes, he tracked her progress as she moved through the crowd. He was still watching when the kid wielding the ice cream scoop nudged him back to the business at hand.
“Hey, bud. You want ice cream or what?”
Daniel slowly returned his attention to the counter. “Yeah. Sorry.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and, still grinning, hitched his chin in the general direction she’d taken. “I’ll have what she had. Double dip.”
It wasn’t Baronessa gelato, he conceded after the first bite, but it was ice cream and he’d been craving it for almost a month now. He was pretty sure, though, that he wasn’t enjoying his half as much as a certain champagne-blonde was enjoying hers.
He glanced around, searched for her briefly. Not that he expected to spot her in this crush of people, not that he knew what he’d do if he did. Didn’t matter anyway. She was long gone, swallowed up by the milling crowd.
Telling himself that it was just as well, he headed in the general direction of his car. He needed sleep anyway, not a distraction. The thought of a real bed with clean sheets and a soft mattress made him groan. So did the memory of his apartment with its light-darkening shades, the cool hum of an air conditioner set on seventy degrees and about twelve solid hours of shut-eye.
Simple pleasures. Foreign pleasures, of late. A month deep in the red sands of the Kalahari could whet a man’s appetite for many simple pleasures.
Like sweet, rich ice cream.
Like a bed that you didn’t have to check for spiders and snakes and was softer than a patch of sun-parched earth.
Like the unaffected smile of a pretty, satisfied woman.
He grinned again—this time in self-reproach—when he couldn’t stop an image from forming.
Her head resting on his pillow…
Her body soft and warm and pliant beneath his…
Her incredible smile not only satisfied, but stunned, sated and spent…
Phoebe Richards wandered the marketplace among the throng of tourists and Bostonians who were out enjoying the hot August evening. She ate her plain vanilla ice cream—her reward for six days of ice cream abstinence and one lost pound—and refused to think about the calories. She window-shopped at the trendy boutiques that she couldn’t afford, applauded the lively antics of the street performers whose free acts she could afford. And she spared a thought—okay, maybe two—for the handsome stranger with the incredible blue eyes and interested smile.
She didn’t get many of either in her life—handsome strangers or interested smiles—and that was fine. It was fun, though, to entertain the fantasy that something might have happened between them if she’d invited it. But that would require an adventurous spirit that she could never in a million years claim. Besides, that kind of electrifying occurrence only happened in the romance novels she devoured to the tune of two to three a week. Her life to date was as far from romance-novel material as a life could get. In fact, lately, it had leaned a little closer to horror.
Determined not to think about the ugly situation with her ex-boyfriend, she walked on, opting, instead, to dwell on a lesser evil: the fact that she was too much of a coward to even encourage the spark of interest that had danced in those amazing blue eyes.
“Like anything would have actually happened, anyway,” she muttered as a statuesque blonde in designer clothes and flawless makeup accidentally bumped her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Phoebe murmured, even though she’d been the bumpee, not the bumper. Her reaction was automatic and had little to do with being polite. It was knee-jerk conciliation and it was an old habit she was supposed to be trying to break, just as she was supposed to be trying to learn to hold her ground on any number of issues.
As if on cue, a stockbroker type in pricey Italian shoes and a dark scowl barreled toward her.
“Excuse me,” she murmured and stepped aside before she could stop herself.
“Why do you always do that?” her friend Carol had asked her the last time they’d gone to lunch together and she’d apologized to the waiter because her soup was stone cold and the lettuce in her salad was as rusty as a junk car. “You do not owe the general population an apology for its screwups. You have rights, too.”
Yes. She had rights. She had the right to remain timid. She couldn’t help it. She was innately apologetic. Or pathetic. Or something equally as hopeless. It was simply easier to bend than to buck. Easier to yield than to stand. She’d learned that life lesson early on.
“Look,” she’d told Carol once in an uncharacteristic revelation about her childhood. “When you’re an ugly duckling twelve-year-old, twenty pounds overweight and constantly belittled by an alcoholic mother to whom you are an eternal disappointment, you learn to bend with the best of them.
“And I also learned to fade into the background until I got so good at it that no one hardly ever noticed me. Life was just easier that way.”
Life was still easier that way, she thought defensively. And old habits were hard to break. At the ripe old age of thirty-three she wasn’t really hopeful of changing them at this late date.
“Besides,” she’d further explained to Carol, sorry she’d opened her mouth when her friend’s expression had changed from disgusted to sympathetic. “Confrontation gives me heartburn. And sweaty palms. And a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach that rarely makes it worth the effort.”
Suddenly aware of a trickle of perspiration trailing down her temple, she dabbed it with a tissue. The lingering heat from the one-hundred-degree day rose from the sidewalk in arid waves and burned right through the bottom of her sandals.
“August,” she said aloud as she bit into the last of her ice cream. “Gotta love it.”
It was close to eleven o’clock and the city was still as steamy as a jungle. Since she had to get up and cover another shift at the library tomorrow, she decided it was past time to get home and go to bed. Alone. As usual.
“Just another exciting Friday night on the town for Phoebe Richards,” she murmured on a wistful sigh and made room for a pair of lovers to pass her on the sidewalk.
They were so engrossed in each other, so cute, and so in love, it made her smile. It also made her ache. The longing to fill that empty place in her chest seemed to have grown larger and more hollow as the years passed…as the world turned…as all around her, love bloomed and flourished.
She pushed out a snort that passed for a self-effacing laugh. “You are a pathetic lump,” she assured herself in disgust. “And you’re no poet, either.”
After checking the traffic, she jaywalked across the street to walk the three blocks to her car, shoring herself up along the way. One bad relationship did not make her a failure at love. Two might, though, she conceded, gnawing thoughtfully on her lower lip. Three or four took it past failure to disaster.
All right. Her love life was a disaster, or as Carol frequently said with a sad shake of her head, “Girl, you sure know how to pick ’em.”
Yeah, she thought with a resigned sigh as Jason Collins came to mind, she sure did. On the upside—and despite the lack of love and romance in her life, she was always determined to find an upside—she did know how to find parking spots.
“Maybe you ought to play on that talent if you ever get another date,” she told herself with a sarcastic little smile as the scene played out before her.
“Well, you’re not exactly calendar material, are you, Ms. Richards?” the man of her dreams stated bluntly as he squinted at the