Elizabeth’s husband, Guy, burst into the kitchen, a pair of empty platters in his hand, a diamond stud glinting in his ear. He glanced at the plate in front of his wife. Sighed. “Uh, honey—isn’t the idea to fill the plate?”
She looked down, gasped at the four lonely goodies left on it. Guy chuckled, then kissed Elizabeth on top of her upswept hair. “I knew there was a reason we bought twice as much food as we thought we needed,” he said, then replenished the plates, giving Elizabeth a wink and a grin as he backed through the swinging door to the living room, balancing all three plates in his hands.
Nancy tried, really tried, to ignore the needles of envy that pricked her heart, and her conscience. She’d had no idea, when she’d relocated to Spruce Lake a couple months ago to take Elizabeth’s place at Millennium Realty, the small agency Elizabeth ran with her mother and Guy, just how much her friend’s bliss would point out the pathetic emptiness of her own life. Not that she wasn’t thrilled for Elizabeth, but seeing her and Guy together twisted a knife in her lonely, underused heart. Oh, sure, intellectually, she knew a woman didn’t need a husband and children. But the fact was, there were times Nancy envied Elizabeth so much it hurt.
“Hey!” Elizabeth duck-walked from behind the counter, grabbed Nancy by the wrist. “If you’re gonna go gloomy on me, you can go do it somewhere else.” She pushed open the door, shoved Nancy out into the living room. “Now go ye forth and schmooze.”
Nancy turned to find herself face-to-face with a gently swinging kitchen door.
“And don’t even think about coming back in here!”
Nancy sighed. Life was much better when she’d been the pushy one.
She finished off the wine, setting her glass on somebody’s abandoned paper plate on top of the piano, then smoothed sweaty palms down the front of her dress. Where, she wondered through the muzzies, had the twenty-plus years gone since Stanley Cohen’s bar-mitzvah dance, when Debby Liebowitz double-dared her to ask Norman Sklar to dance? To this day, though, she had no idea if she had or not. Funny, the way the mind blots out traumatic memories. She tugged discreetly at her underwire bra, which she could have sworn was growing teeth.
“You still there?” she heard from behind the door.
“Bite me,” she whispered in reply, and was rewarded with an evil giggle. She told herself it was boredom keeping her there. Her social life since moving here was not what one would call rip-roaring. Of course, one reason she’d left Detroit was to get away from a singles scene that, from the perspective of a burned-out thirty-four-year-old, had grown very tired. Like a fool, she’d naively thought the camaraderie of small-town living, of being close to Elizabeth and her new family— Guy had three young children already—would help ease the constant ache of being alone.
Wrong. Think Pleasantville on steroids. Which meant Nancy felt more a fish out of water than ever. And her mother, bless the dear thing, clearly thought aliens had sucked out her daughter’s brain. Who moved someplace where who knew what kind of men lived? As it was, Belle Shapiro had yet to forgive Nancy for letting one husband slip through her fingers, never mind that the creep considered himself exempt from mundane concepts like…oh, fidelity?
“But,” Belle had conceded eventually, “maybe this is for the best. If you never have children, you won’t know the heartache of having a thirty-something unmarried daughter throw her life away. No, it’s true—I wouldn’t wish such pain on anybody, least of all my own daughter.”
And the woman wondered why Nancy only called once a week.
But back to the here and now, where she was bored and pleasantly snockered and, okay, ravenous for male attention. She watched as, seemingly oblivious to the chatter of two dozen other guests in the room, Rod leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His long, graceful fingers absently hugged a wineglass as he communed with the fire, which acutely defined the sharp angle of his brow, the clefted chin, and a mouth worth bronzing. His lips were fuller than usual for a man, yet not the least bit effeminate. His eyes and hair were nearly the same color, neither brown nor gold, but something in-between, the cut-and-styled-one-strand-at-a-time hair liberally threaded with gray at the temples.
She took another swig of the wine.
He started when Cora Jenkins, the agency’s office manager, laid a hand on his shoulder, her teeth strikingly white against her dark skin as she smiled, then apparently introduced her date to Rod. He seemed to shake himself, but immediately offered a hand and a smile to the distinguished gray-haired man, as well as a few words spoken in a low voice that, even at this distance and tangled in the threads of other conversations, threatened to turn Nancy inside out. Still.
She twined one wayward curl around her finger, her brow furrowed. Two things thirty-plus women weren’t supposed to get: zits and crushes.
Uh-huh.
Like she really needed this pair-of-tortured-souls-adrift-in-the-night routine. A pair of tortured souls who had absolutely nothing in common, who probably couldn’t sustain a conversation for more than twenty minutes without tripping over some major issue. The man was the epitome of upper-crust conservatism, while Nancy was…not. He probably didn’t even like cats.
Oh, come on. This had nothing to do with cats or backgrounds or anything else. The fact was, polite or not, he’d blown her off. More than once. So—excuse me?—whence came this urge to wrap her arms around the man and tell him everything was going to be okay?
The wine, the heat, the sensuous mingling of perfumes, food aromas, laughter, all fed a gentle whirring in her head that quickly burned a tingling path along her skin…and somehow propelled her across the room to stand in front of someone far too perfect for the likes of her. Women like Nancy just didn’t hook up with fair-haired, racquet-club-raised Golden Boys. Women like her—
He looked up, and the hurt and loneliness and disappointment in those golden eyes yanked her soul up by its bootstraps.
Women like her had no business fantasizing about a relationship with a man like Rod Braden. Then again, she never saw a man who looked more like he could use a little kindness right now. A little feminine…understanding.
Come to Mama, she thought, and got all warm and fluttery inside.
Rod smelled her perfume before he saw her, briefly wondered how—or why—he’d picked out her scent among the dozen or more in the room. He’d apparently startled her: her mouth was open, as if she’d been about to say something. Instead, she lifted a hand to her lips and dissolved into laughter.
He thought she might be just this side of drunk, but when she cleared her throat and looked directly at him again, her deep brown eyes were clear and sparkling, even if her face was flushed.
“That’s not fair,” she said, obviously tamping down a new round of giggles. “I was trying to come up with some wickedly clever line, and you screwed me up.” She sucked in a deep breath. To quell nerves? “So. How’re you doing?”
Loaded question. He took another sip of wine, considering how to answer, even more seriously considering why things that had been comatose not ten seconds before were stirring now. That voice of hers probably had something to do with it—low, sensuous, and far too rich to come out of a body so slender that she probably didn’t dare venture outside on blustery days. He smiled. He couldn’t help it, any more than he ever could help the braided feelings of terror and attraction Nancy Shapiro’s presence sparked, had always done from the first time they met, right before he’d starting dating Elizabeth. Her natural ebullience, the way her emotions crackled around her like summer lightning, at once exhilarated and appalled him. Wasn’t that he didn’t like her. He did. More than she knew, more than he’d ever before admitted to himself. But she was too lively, too witty, too bright, too…much. This was a woman, he suspected, who threw things during a fight, who slammed