“Jimmy! Sorry to just walk in but your door was standing wide open. You really shouldn’t leave your door open. Anyone could just walk in.”
In his ear, his sister had gone conspicuously silent.
“Gotta go, Janey.”
“Uh huh.” Janey’s mutter held way too much speculation. “Why don’t you say something to Merri about dinner tonight? We’ll meet you guys at El
Vez
around seven.”
“Jimmy?” Merri’s voice had gotten closer and he realized he could hear her walking back the hall to the first-floor master suite. His bedroom. “Are you here?”
He stood in the center of his bedroom holding his underwear in his hand.
And the door to his bedroom wasn’t closed.
“Shi—See
ya
, Jane.”
“
Wai
—”
He clicked off the phone, tossed it at the bed—
And realized Merri stood in the hall.
He froze for a full five seconds as she stared at him. And she was definitely not gazing into his eyes.
“Oh wow.”
He couldn’t help himself. His lips quirked just before he started to grin full out.
She blinked several times. “Uh, Jimmy. You’re naked.”
Yeah, he was. But he wasn’t about to act like a total dork and make a frenzied leap into his shorts, which he still had in his hand.
“Yep, I am.”
Her head tilted to the side, her gaze still locked on the midsection of his body. Then she blinked, her gaze landing on his boxers. “You lied. You do have pink clothes.”
He took the few steps to close some of the distance between them, watched her eyes, which had not dropped back down, widen.
“Merri?”
“Yes.”
Now why did that sound more like a statement than a question? Or maybe he was reading too much into the flush on her cheeks and the faster pace of her breathing.
If he reached for her and kissed her again, would she shy away? Would she run like she had last night?
She didn’t look frightened.
She looked aroused. And that was—
Probably not a good thing while he was standing naked in front of her.
His cock had already started to respond to her and if he didn’t want to be standing here in thirty seconds with a raging erection and nothing to do with it, he had to get her to turn around.
“Maybe you should go back to the kitchen and wait for me.”
She frowned. Actually, you could almost call that a pout. Like she didn’t want to leave.
And his resolution was fading fast.
Finally, she bit her bottom lip, causing him to swallow a groan. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. But really, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You have a beautiful body.”
So earnest. And totally unaware of how she affected him.
Her gaze slipped to his chest—and lower—for a split second before she smiled up into his eyes. “Too bad you have to cover it. I’ll see you in the kitchen.”
Okay, maybe not so unaware.
She turned and left, leaving him gaping at her.
Had she just made a pass at him?
No. He had to be reading her wrong.
Hell, he’d kissed her last night and she’d fled like he’d come after her with a pitchfork. After she’d asked him to teach her how to pick up guys.
He didn’t think she needed as much help as she thought she did. All she’d have to do was smile at them like she’d just smiled at him and—
Wait. He didn’t want her smiling at anyone else like she’d just smiled at him.
Maybe you should just go teach the girl how to make breakfast.
Yeah, that sounded like a plan.
Five minutes later, dressed in a
Pokemon
t-shirt and jeans hiding those pink heart boxers, he walked into the kitchen to see her paging through his only cookbook.
Bachelor Meals: 101 Ways to Not Starve.
She looked up, her expressive mouth twisting in a grimace. “I think the fat content in some of these recipes would be enough to harden your arteries overnight. You don’t really cook like this, do you?”
“No. Janey gave that to me for Christmas one year as a joke. She’s the one who doesn’t cook. She’s almost as bad as Nic.”
“Really? I’d have figured Janey could do anything.”
Turning to the cabinets, he started gathering ingredients. “Janey definitely has her strengths and weaknesses, just like the rest of us mortals. Turn on the oven to four hundred degrees. We’ll put the bacon in there.”
“But your parents definitely aren’t ordinary.”
He laughed as he had her lay out the bacon on a cooking rack. “No, they definitely are not. What about your parents? You have brothers and sisters?”
“Same as you, a brother and sister. But mine are ten and twelve years old than me. When I was little, my mom and sister would dress me up and take me for walks around the neighborhood. They loved when people would come up and say how pretty I was. I was their perfect little doll, red curls, blue eyes, chubby cheeks.”
They’d started on the pancakes now and she’d started to beat the batter. And he did mean beat.
“When I was twelve months old, I started to talk. In full sentences. I could sustain a conversation by the age of two. They didn’t take me out much after that.” Her mouth twisted in a bittersweet grimace. “Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I was neglected. They loved me. I
knew
they loved me. They just didn’t know what to do
with
me.”
Jimmy took the pancake batter before it was so tough, they wouldn’t be able to eat it. “What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s an editor for a small daily local newspaper in my hometown. He works twelve-hour days, sometimes six days a week. My brother had health problems that required a lot of doctor visits. My sister and I were never really close. She always had boyfriends and soccer tournaments and softball games, and I had no interest in kicking a ball around or trying to hit one with a stick. I wasn’t all that much fun for them anymore. Until I could do my brother’s geometry homework.”
She paused and he started ladling out the batter on the griddle, wanting her to continue talking.
When she didn’t continue, he glanced up at her. She looked lost in thought and not good ones.
“I always hated geometry. Nothing blew up.” There, he’d regained her attention and pulled a smile from her. “So how old were you then?”
“Seven.”
“Damn.” Jimmy just shook his head as she nodded. “Guess I was a late bloomer.”
“Lucky you,” she muttered under her breath.
“Had a rough time of it?”
Again, a shrug. “Didn’t everyone have a rough childhood?”
Not really, no. “What about your dad?”
A real smile broke free. “Well, my mom was always running my sister and brother to their activities because Dad worked from like eight in the morning until seven or eight at night. I spent a lot of time at the newspaper after school. I’d sit in the break room and do homework. Sometimes I’d get to sit on the floor with my dad. There was an empty desk in the back, where I could hear the police radio. The police beat reporter back then had to be close to seventy and weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Smoked like a fiend, too, so he’d always be getting up to take smoke breaks and he’d tell me to keep an ear out. I started writing a detailed note for him of everything I heard while he was gone. He’d always thank me for it when he got back. Geez, I haven’t thought about Earl in years.”
“Sounds like you made a friend there.”
“Yeah, Earl and I got along well. I think because he was just too old and too ornery to care what other people thought.”
“What about friends your own age?”
The timer rang for the bacon and he got it out of the oven while she flipped the last of the pancakes.
“I didn’t really have any.” Her tone screamed indifference but her shoulders had slumped. “I was always the smartest kid in class, and you know how kids can be.”
“Yeah, I do. But I had Nic. He’d flatten anyone who messed with me, but he got sick of being the tough guy when I couldn’t keep my mouth shut for more than a day. So he taught me how to fight my own battles.”
“My brother had already moved away when I got to high school, and my sister was in college. And then I skipped a few grades between fourth and ninth.”
“Oh yeah? How many?”
Her nose wrinkled. “Fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. But I had a great gifted teacher in high school. She got me on an accelerated program so I wouldn’t be bored.”
“You didn’t have much of a childhood, did you?”
She shrugged. “It was tough, but it wasn’t awful.”
“Merri, you don’t lie well.”
A pretty pink suffused her cheeks even as she frowned. “It
wasn’t
awful.” She stopped to swallow back a sigh as they carried the food to the table and sat to eat. “All right, some days it was awful. But isn’t everyone’s some of the time? I mean, I didn’t have a lot of friends my own age… Okay, I didn’t really have
any
friends my own age, but I had a couple of great advisors and they got me through elementary and high school without losing my mind.
“When I was fourteen, I decided I wanted to be a teacher. My mom
loved
that. She had no idea what to do with a twelve-year-old who could do AP Calculus and actually enjoyed it. But being a teacher, that was normal, you know what I mean?”
He nodded, watching her as she poured syrup over the dead center of her pile of pancakes then cut them into precise, equal pieces. “So what happened?”
“I got flagged. My high school advisor was a Stanford grad and she talked to some of her former professors about me. That’s how the NSA heard about me.”
“When?”
“Well, I was flagged at ten, but I didn’t find out until I was fifteen, just before I was ready to head to college. I did my undergrad work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison because it was close to home. Right before I left, I heard my parents arguing about it. My dad wanted to let me make my own decision. My mom didn’t want me to be a freak, a lab rat for the government. She wanted me to be normal. But how normal can you be when you start college before you’re sixteen?”
Not normal at all. He knew that firsthand because he’d started MIT at seventeen.
“My mom said she’d come live with me, but she would’ve had to quit her job, and by that time, my sister and brother both had children and she babysat for them a lot. It would’ve been a hassle for everyone.”
Except she’d only been sixteen. “You told her you didn’t want her to come with you, didn’t you?”
Merri dropped her gaze and nodded. “Yeah. I could tell she really didn’t want to go. I mean, it would have meant leaving my dad and finding somewhere for her to live near the college. It was just easier to get an aide, someone to help me.”
Jimmy leaned over and grabbed her hand. “Merri, who wants to be normal when you’re already extraordinary?”
She smiled, but it was a poor attempt. And she withdrew her hand from his. “My mom never understood why I needed to work for the NSA. But after 9/11, there wasn’t anything I wanted more.”