Still, her deplorable lack of control over her hormonal response to him didn’t seem to completely explain the chugging, charging, uneasy beat in her pulse. Spence was turning into a serious friend. No one else, not even her sisters, understood how much or how long she’d felt trapped. Spence’s perception had come as a surprise, like finding a kindred spirit, and he’d been so nonjudgmental and undersranding....
Abruptly the oven timer buzzed. Swiftly Owen whisked out the brownies and set them on the rack to cool, then glanced at the clock and mentally shook her head. The boys would be raring wide awake by six-thirty. It wasn’t time to think. It was time to crash. She’d be crabbier than a porcupine if she didn’t catch some shut-eye.
She turned out lights, checked on her monsters, then climbed into a Miami Dolphins T-shirt and burrowed between her lemon-yellow sheets. That quickly, the whole house was dark, quiet and peaceful.
Yet she tossed. Then turned. Sleep refused to come. Those uneasy warning bells kept clanging in the back of her mind.
Spence’s whole plan about helping each other sounded wonderful. She craved some free time right now. She needed the space to figure out who she was and where she was going with her life. Josh and Jacob thought Spence was “majorly cool,” and likewise, she was crazy about his daughter. For fellow single parents to help each other was the best of all worlds, because they both shared the same concerns.
It was just that she felt ... steamrollered ... into the plan. Spence couldn’t help being a dynamic, take-charge type of man. But Gwen was just coming to understand that hiding in a steamroller’s shadow was exactly what she had done with Ron. It was all too easy to let a lion lead—if you were a mouse. And by making a man her whole life, she’d not only bored one husband straight into divorce court ... she’d become boring to herself, somehow lost any concept of her own life in the process.
She needed to be careful. Infinitely careful not to fall seriously for Spence. Eventually she’d look for love again—after she mastered this independence business and learned to stand up for herself. But she already knew that she was a disastrous failure with steamrollers. Spence could never possibly work for her.
Falling for him would be her worst nightmare.
Spence decided he was going to put up his feet and read the newspaper—as soon as he quit pacing the floors. The kitchen clock read 8:20. He always had a full quota of energy, but he’d never been a nervous man. There was no earthly reason for him to be wearing a path between the kitchen, hall and living room.
The house was quiet. Dead quiet. Mary Margaret had long gone home, and all three kids had hit the sack around eight. They were already asleep. He’d checked. Josh and Jacob were camping in the spare bedroom, and April was sawing zz’s on her pink pillow. The plan, in the morning, was for him to wake up the boys in time for them to flash over to their own house to get dressed for school. The boys had loved the idea of sleeping over, and that way Gwen didn’t have to fret about getting home at some exact time.
She could dance until dawn if she wanted to, Spence had told her.
He’d even meant it.
Sort of.
There was no reason to expect her home, he told himself irritably. No reason to be prowling around the house when he was whipped after a long day. He could dive into the paper or a book. Pour himself a drink. Call his younger sister. Turn on his computer and work on a new advertising program that had been biting on his mind all day.
All those ideas struck him as stupendous, but he was still pacing a road between the kitchen and living room when he finally heard a sound just before nine.
She whisper-knocked on the front door and poked her head in. “Spence, are you there?” she said softly. And then she saw him in the far doorway, grinned and sprinted inside. “Were the boys good? Everything okay? How were the kids for you?”
“It went fine. They had a great time together. And you don’t have to whisper—the bedrooms are in the far wing, and I looked just a couple minutes ago. All three of them are sound asleep.” Once Spence got that informational chitchat out of the way, he said what was on his mind. “Holy kamoly.”
“Uh-oh. I look weird, huh?” Owen dropped an armful of packages in a noisy crinkle and crunch of paper, then straightened back up.
“You don’t look weird.”
“Too much putting on the dog? Too much makeup? Too wild ... ?”
The only thing “wild” Spence noticed was the wild, vulnerable uncertainty in her face. Deliberately he circled around her with narrowed eyes. As he circled, her cheeks flushed. Nervously she pulled on an earring, then the other earring... and started talking faster than he could draw breath. “I just thought it’d be fun. To have a make-over. And once I had all that new makeup on, it seemed like I might as well try a haircut and a little different hairstyle. And I haven’t actually bought clothes—except for the boys—in a month of Sundays. The stores were showing a bunch of new stuff for fall....”
She finally trailed off. Spence understood he was expected to say something. And he would. As soon as he found his voice again.
He’d known she was beautiful. She just didn’t have a flashy type of beauty—or any awareness of her allure. Still didn’t.
But Spence did. And the changes in her tonight only put an exclamation on a declarative truth he already knew. Her hair had been short before, but now it was feathery, framing her face in soft spikes, giving her a tousled, sexy, French look. Something about her eyes looked darker, more dramatic. The new silk blouse wasn’t fancy, just a blouse, but the cream color set off her golden skin and the coral cameo she had pinned at the throat. The skirt was swishy and long and cruelly hid those damn fine legs of hers, but the style was pure female. Pure her.
“You look stunning,” he informed her seriously.
“Hardly that.” But she laughed, both nervously and with a little relief in there, too. “It was kind of fun. Just...goofing off. And you’ll never believe what happened.”
“What?”
“These two guys whistled at me on the escalator. You know what else?”
“What?”
“Another guy tried to pick me up in the parking lot. I was just walking toward my car when he was walking toward his. When he started talking to me, I thought he was just being nice, you know, the way friendly types wander into conversations when you’re stuck in lines or in elevators or wherever? But good grief, he asked me out. I almost had a heart attack.”
So did Spence. “Got a taste for the reckless life, did you?”
She chuckled. “Maybe not reckless on a parachute jumper’s terms, but I haven’t wasted an entire afternoon since ... well, since I can remember.”
“Getting out was good for you.”
“Yeah, it really seemed to be.” She seemed surprised when he wrapped her hands around a glass of fresh-squeezed limeade. In between breakneck pacing around the house, Spence had more than enough time to make it. And since she was still hovering by the door, close to her packages, he figured she was planning on leaving lickety-split unless he did something to stall her. “I should check on the boys and go, really—”
“You’re welcome to look in on the boys, but I bet it’d feel real good to kick your shoes off for a minute and relax?”
“Well...”
She was thirsty, he could see. And he didn’t have to coax her that hard into crashing for a few minutes on his saddle leather couch. She even slipped off her shoes and curled her legs under her. Either the shopping or turning herself into a sexy femme fatale had clearly temporarily zapped her quota of nervous energy.
His quota of nervous energy, by contrast, had soared somewhere near the stratosphere.
He