and handed it to Wade. “In my spare time I build kaleidoscopes.”
Wade raised the toy to his eye and looked
through at the brilliant-colored patterns. Each one seemed to be trying to outdo the last as he rotated the cylinder. His logical mind knew he was looking at nothing more than the reflections of bits of colored glass, that a kaleidoscope was nothing more than a pair of mirrors and a couple of lenses. In his heart as he looked at the bright, pretty colors he thought of Bronwynn and magic.
His heart lodged in his throat. It wasn’t at all like him to be whimsical. What was she doing to him, he wondered as he lowered the kaleidoscope and looked at Bronwynn. She was busy gazing into another of Wizzer’s creations, one with a polished wood cylinder. Her face was alight as if she’d never seen anything so wondrous or beautiful. She was wealthy enough to buy herself virtually anything she wanted, yet she was enchanted by something as simple as the toy she held.
After they’d finished their herbal tea and snacked on bread made from some part of a thistle, Wade and Bronwynn headed back down the trail toward Foxfire, leaving Wizzer behind them brewing dandelion wine and singing “Surfin’ Safari.”
“Well,” Wade said as they stepped out of the woods into Bronwynn’s backyard. “I should go home and get a little studying done.”
Bronwynn stepped in front of him to open the gate of Muffin’s pen—one of Wade’s first projects—glad he couldn’t see her expression. If she ever got her hands on that Murphy character, he was going to be one sorry son of a gun. Three days after Muffin had eaten Wade’s Pentagon report another one had shown up. She’d been doing her darndest to distract Wade from it ever since.
Forcing a light tone, she said, “Okay. Thanks for helping with Bob and Ray.”
Wade frowned as he watched her unhook the sheep’s gate. Muffin bleated an excited greeting, rubbed her head against the leg of Bronwynn’s jeans on the way out of her pen, then stopped and fixed Wade with an imperious glare before moving on to join Tucker under a maple tree.
“I’d hang around and help you with the house, but I really need to get through that report.”
Bronwynn shot him an absent smile then bent to check on the sheep’s water bucket. “That’s fine, Wade. I understand.”
“We can’t all drop out on our responsibilities the way Alastair Bralower did,” he said testily.
“Nope, we can’t.” She hooked the gate open so Muffin could go in and out as she chose. “Of course, some of us try for a balance. And then some of us . . . don’t.”
Wade planted his hands on his hips. He scowled as she exited the pen. “My work is important, Bronwynn.”
“I never said it wasn’t.” She dismissed the topic with a bland smile she knew was setting Wade’s teeth on edge. She almost could hear him grinding the enamel off. “I won’t be able to have dinner with you unless we make it late. I rented a steamer from Hank. I’m going to remove the old wallpaper in the kitchen. Once I get going I know I won’t want to stop until I’m finished.” She pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. “See you later.”
Wade watched her start toward the back porch, her long, slim legs carrying her gracefully away from him. What could Bronwynn possibly know about running a steamer? Probably about as much as she knew about patching holey jeans. The ones she was wearing were worn out in both knees, and one spot on her delectably rounded derriere was held together by single strands of fraying white thread. When she stooped to examine the rip in her screen door, Wade could see panty lace through the near-tear.
His dark eyebrows drew together in an annoyed
stare as he strode across the lawn. “What do you know about running a steamer? Do you have the proper electrical outlets for something like that?”
She shrugged and raked her baby-fine hair back out of her eyes. “ I guess. It has three prongs on the plug. All I have to do is find an outlet with three holes, right?”
Wade pressed his eyes closed and shook his head. “I don’t know how you ever managed to survive to maturity.”
“I guess it was a miracle,” Bronwynn said dryly.
An hour later they were in the middle of the hot, dirty job of removing the hideous kitchen wallpaper—or rather, Wade was in the middle of it. Bronwynn, who had changed into a lightweight cotton sundress, was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor with her arms impatiently crossed over her chest, watching Wade take over.
It happened every time. Every time he begrudgingly told her he’d help with a project, he invariably herded her away from the work and ended up doing most of it himself. Bronwynn nipped at her lower lip and told herself it was just as well if it kept Wade away from the pressure cooker of his own work. It was exactly what she wanted to happen, exactly what she had planned to happen. Still,
it rankled.
She was caught in a trap of her own making. She played the careless incompetent to insure Wade would take over, but she hated having him think she wasn’t capable of handling manual labor. Every once in a while she wanted him to see she could handle the job of renovating Foxfire. What she wanted was to have it both ways. It was Wade’s fault she couldn’t.
“Chauvinist,” she muttered.
“What’s that?” Wade called over his shoulder above the hiss of the steamer and the rock music coming from Bronwynn’s ever-present boom box.
What the heck, Bronwynn thought mischievously. She took a step closer to the ladder he was standing on and smiled up at him. “I said you’re a chauvinist.”
Wade looked thunderstruck. He turned the steamer off. “I most certainly am not a chauvinist.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.” Pressing his lips together into a firm line, he broke off the childish bantering. He wagged a finger at her. “I’ll have you know I was
endorsed by a number of women’s organizations.”
He was so cute when he got peeved. It was all
she could do to keep herself from hugging him. She definitely couldn’t resist egging him on. “Oh? Which ones? The League of Women for Congressmen with Cute Butts?”
Try as he might, Wade couldn’t form an angry retort. His reputation was being questioned, but he couldn’t quite force himself to get angry about it. He consistently voted for equal opportunity for women, but he was the one holding the wallpaper steamer, wasn’t he?
It didn’t have anything to do with Bronwynn’s gender, he told himself. It had more to do with the fact that Bronwynn plus power tools added up to disaster.
“You want to run the steamer?” he asked. “Do you remember what happened when you wanted to run the carpet cleaner in the parlor?”
“How was I to know that rug was wool?” she asked. “It was ugly anyway.”
“And what about the day you wanted to run the electric hedge trimmer?”
“Too much shrubbery distracts from the beauty of the house.” Her lips twitched and she gave in to the giggles. Wade laughed along with her. She
raised her hands in defeat. “All right, I admit I’m
not terribly mechanical.”
“Muffin is more mechanical than you are.”
He had a valid point. She really wasn’t very adept with power tools, even when she was trying to be. She tossed a scrap of wallpaper at him. “Please, Wade, please let me run the steamer,” she begged, fighting back laughter. “I’m bored to tears standing down here with nothing to do but clean up the mess.”
His gaze was speculative. “Hmmm . . . I don’t know. Do you really think I have a cute butt?”
“Hand it over, Grayson,” she said sternly.
“Gee, I don’t think I can, Bronwynn,” he said, peering over his shoulder. He patted a hand to the seat of his jeans. “I’m kind of attached to it.”
“I’m going to attach my foot to it in a minute. I rented that darn steamer. I’m not taking it back until I get to use it.”
“Okay.” He capitulated with a long-suffering sigh. “But you
will
let me show you how to use it first, and you
will
pay attention.”
“I promise.”
Instantly she was on the ladder with him, snuggling up against him as she tried to get a good close
look at the machine.
“Bronwynn,” Wade said, “two people should never be on the same ladder at once.”
She made a face. “Wade, you’re such a fussbudget. It has to be strong enough to hold us both; our combined weight isn’t that much. You know they must build these things strong enough so enormously fat people can use them too. Otherwise it would be discrimination, right?” She snatched the steamer out of Wade’s hands and began examining it. “Now, how do you work this puppy?”
As she turned half her attention to the steamer and half to the Springsteen song on the radio, she nearly shoved Wade off the ladder. He grabbed hold of one side and prayed they wouldn’t end up on the floor amid a pile of splinters. When he was reasonably certain she could handle the steamer without endangering herself, he climbed down.
“I wonder how Bob and Ray are adjusting to forest life,” Bronwynn said as she worked. She paid no mind to the sway of the ladder as she began moving to one of her favorite songs. The possibility of danger never entered her mind—not when she was on a ladder, not when she crossed a Boston street against the light.
“Oh, I imagine all their new animal friends are holding a housewarming for them tonight,” Wade
said sardonically as he searched through the rubble
of junk-food wrappers on the marble-topped work
island, looking for his cigarettes.
Watching Bronwynn dance around on the ladder was enough to make him long for a roll of antacid tablets. Oddly enough, he didn’t have any with him. He found a half-crumpled pack of cigarettes and extracted a slightly bent one. He lit it, drawing the smoke in deeply as he leaned back against the work island, wondering if it really was only his third of the day.
“Anything would be preferable to being made into a coat,” Bronwynn said. “I’m not much for fur coats myself. They give me the creeps. It makes my skin crawl to think I’m wearing something that used to be alive.”
She aimed the steamer at the green wallpaper that sported little copper kettles and crossed forks and spoons. She already had carefully measured the walls and ordered new paper in a dainty country print with a blue background. “I’ve often wondered about camel hair too. I mean, is it really the hair of camels or is that just a name? Haven’t you wondered about that?”
Wade regarded her with a look of puzzlement. If
he lived to be a hundred, he’d never figure out the way her mind worked.
Methodically, he tapped ash into a Styrofoam
cup and took another long pull on his cigarette. As he exhaled he said, “Bronwynn, I wonder about things like political unrest in the Third World. I don’t have time to wonder whether or not my top-coat is courtesy of some hairy hump with legs wandering around the deserts of Saudi Arabia.”
“That’s the trouble with you, Wade,” Bronwynn said, turning on the ladder to face him, one foot dangling in midair. “How are you ever going to be able to solve big problems if you never question the little things?”
The sheet of paper she’d been working at loosening suddenly gave way and crushed over her head like a wall-covering tidal wave. Wade couldn’t help but chuckle. Where Bronwynn had stood on the ladder, unaccountably lovely in a dress that hung like a gunny sack on her, was now a pyramid of inside-out wallpaper.
“Okay, Grayson,” came a disgruntled mumble. “You’ve had your little chuckle, now get this thing off me.”
“It’ll be easier to get
you
out from under
it.”
He lifted the sheet of paper and stepped under it, taking the steamer from Bronwynn and setting it
safely out of the way. Getting Bronwynn out of the
tangle wasn’t so simple. The paper clung tenaciously
to the top of her head. Not quite able to see what she was doing, she missed a step as she tried to descend, and she and the ladder parted company. Bronwynn fell into Wade’s arms. The domino theory carried them both to the floor, the paper falling over them like a blanket.
“Honey,” Wade remarked dryly, his hands running lazily over Bronwynn’s supple back, “if you wanted to be on top, all you had to do was tell me.”
Bronwynn grinned, looking down at him. She could still make out Wade’s handsome, clean-cut features. Her body was pressed along the length of his, leaving no doubt in her mind as to his virility. She arched her hips and gasped as his body responded accordingly. Bronwynn had never thought of herself as a temptress, but Wade brought out laten talents in her. She ran her tongue along her lower lip and said huskily, “I want to be on top.”
Wade’s breath lodged like two fists in the very bottom of his lungs. With Bronwynn rubbing against him, he was getting hard fast. He wanted her, and he wanted her right away. As usual, he wanted her with an intensity that would startle him when he thought of it afterward. Now he had a difficult time thinking of anything but the way her body felt melting into his. He was a man who was ordinarily in control of every aspect of his life; with Bronwynn he barely knew the meaning of the word.
“I’ve never gotten smoochy on the kitchen floor under a sheet of wallpaper before,” she said, lowering her upper body so her nipples teased him through the thin fabric of her sundress and his shirt. She wanted to feel them naked against the carpet of rough curls on his chest. She wanted to feel his thumbs tease them, his hot mouth close over them.
“Bronwynn,” Wade said, his voice full of dark promises as his hands slid over her bottom to the tops of her thighs. His fingers worked the soft cotton of her dress upward. “You’re one of a kind.”
A pleased smile tilted her lips as she pressed them to Wade’s. “Thank you.”
He worked her panties down and kneaded the tender flesh of her buttocks. “It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. Ouch! No biting!”
With desire preaching urgency, their clothing was dealt with accordingly. She unbuttoned Wade’s
shirt and pushed it open. He unbuttoned the front of Bronwynn’s sundress and pulled the straps down her arms so the fabric pooled at her waist, and her breasts were bared to his gaze and touch. His fingers ran over her bottom, hurrying to explore the moist warmth between her thighs as she leaned over him, offering one taut nipple to his mouth.
Cries and moans caught in her throat and came out as whimpers and sighs as Wade’s teeth and lips tugged at her breast. They were well acquainted with each other’s bodies and needs, and the heat between them rose quickly to the flash point of passion.