Merri looked ready to protest again, but Grace broke in with a bright “Good, that’s settled,” and a broad smile. “Now, let’s eat. Nic, what progress have you made on the
Schwartzwald
case?”
Suddenly, Jimmy couldn’t wait to get home.
Chapter Three
Merri couldn’t think of a single thing to say on the ride back to Jimmy’s.
He’d been quiet at lunch, and afterward, he’d slipped back to the basement lab while Grace and Annie had shown her around the offices. Despite being on well-traveled Walnut Street, the building was surprisingly quiet. The first-floor rooms were bright and large and painted in soothing shades of khaki and tan with Berber carpets throughout and artwork on the walls.
The front door opened into Annie’s
domain
, the reception area. Another three rooms were situated behind the reception area. Mal and Janey’s office
sat
directly behind, while an empty office separated Nic’s office at the rear of the building. A stairwell near the back led to Grace and Frank’s second-floor offices and Nic’s third-floor apartment while another door across from the empty room led to the basement lab.
She was to have the empty office on the first floor. Right across from the lab door. Jimmy’s lab.
She must have been under a spell to agree to this. Didn’t she have any backbone at all? Grace had steamrolled her, though she’d done it with velvet instead of steel.
“You know, your
face’ll
stay like that if you keep frowning. What are you thinking about so hard?”
Jimmy’s voice, amused but concerned, broke through her thoughts. She turned to see him glance at her.
“I’m just gonna go grab my bag and you can take me to the train station. I’ll call your mom from my apartment and tell her I got called back to work. I’ll make sure she doesn’t blame you.” That made him laugh and Merri grimaced. “I realize she’s kind of…convincing, but we both know you don’t want me here and—”
“Now wait a minute. You don’t know as much as you think you do.” He shook his head. “You need a break. You can’t look at yourself objectively. How much weight have you lost in the past year?”
She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. She’d lost some, and whenever she lost weight, her breasts shrank. Obviously he’d noticed
that
. Well, maybe that’s not all he’d noticed. She’d had to start using a belt to keep her pants from dropping off her hips and her arms did kind of look like sticks.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I weigh myself regularly. I don’t even have a scale.”
“Okay, but you noticed you lost some, didn’t you?” He smiled at her then, a half grin that made her heart thump like an excited dog’s tail. “Give this a chance. I won’t be around much anyway and my mom
would
have my head if you ran.”
So, she lusted after him and he put up with her because of his mother. Great.
Shaking her head, she looked out the window and realized he’d parked in a strip mall in front of a supermarket. “What are we doing here?”
“Food. We need to get you stocked up and I need a few things. Come on.”
She considered flat-out refusing. She’d had just about all she could take of being maneuvered by DeMarcos today. She wasn’t a child who didn’t know how to take care of herself. She’d been living on her own since she was sixteen.
Then again, she was hungry and tired. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner she could get back to Jimmy’s cottage and sleep. Tomorrow she would go home.
She could take the food with her.
“Merri?”
Ignoring him, she got out of the car, grabbed a cart from the corral, and stalked into the market. She stopped in the front of the store and catalogued the headers on the ends of the aisles, mapping out a plan of attack. Shopping, especially for food, ranked right up there with dentist visits.
Luckily, most supermarkets were laid out in a similar design.
She calculated she could be in and out in fourteen minutes then added two minutes to account for the number of registers open.
She took off without waiting for Jimmy.
Two bags of salad, organic dressing, baby carrots, apples, and bananas in aisle one. Cheerios in aisle two. Peanut butter, grape jelly, marshmallow, and vegetable soup in aisle four. Double Stuf Oreos in aisle five. Frozen stir-fry vegetables and frozen cooked chicken in aisle nine. Milk, orange juice, a tub of butter in aisle eleven.
She glanced at her watch as she got into line. Fifteen minutes. Not bad.
“Holy hell, Merri. Did you breathe once during your skirmish? I’m surprised there aren’t any bodies littering the aisles.”
Getting in line behind her, Jimmy had to work hard to hide his smile, knowing Merri would take offense. But he’d never seen anyone approach a grocery store the way she just had. It’d been more methodical than a surgical strike on enemy territory.
And the look she shot him over her shoulder was more venomous than a rattlesnake bite.
“I guess you’re one of those people who love to wander the aisles, deciding what you want to make. You probably stop every other day just to pick up a few things. I don’t like to waste my time.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” He shook his head at the contents of her cart. No wonder she looked like a strong wind would blow her over. “Do you do any cooking?”
With a huff, she moved forward with the line and started to unload her cart onto the conveyor. “Of course I do. I just don’t have the time.”
Yeah, right. She was lying. He could tell from her expression. She probably existed on salads and soup and fast food.
Something else to remind him of Barbara.
It wasn’t a fair comparison. Barbara had been more brittle than Merri, more sharp-edged. And much easier to break.
Merri hadn’t broken yet. She’d bent but she hadn’t crumbled.
And Jimmy really liked that about her. Hell, he pretty much liked everything about Merri.
“Let me make you dinner tonight. You look like you could use a decent meal.”
She snorted but slid him another questioning glance over her shoulder as the teen girl behind the register started scanning her packages.
“You can cook?”
Now he did smile. “Yeah, actually, I can. Not as good as my mom, but she taught me, so I won’t poison you.”
He saw curiosity spark in those green eyes and she peeked into the basket he carried. “You’re going to feed me dill pickles and cheese puffs and milk?”
Her green eyes shone with laughter now and Jimmy’s breath stuck in his throat until he nearly choked. God, she was pretty, with those braids and those green eyes. And, oh hell, her mouth was ten times more enticing when she smiled. Thank God she didn’t do it more often.
Maybe he’d better invite Nic and Annie to dinner, too. “No pickles or puffs. Why don’t you just trust me?”
It took only a second for her smile to fade. Then she turned to look out the window as she nodded. “Dinner would be great. Thanks, Jimmy.”
The short drive back to his home was quiet. She kept her gaze locked on the side window, her teeth worrying the hell out of her bottom lip.
He drove up his lane and parked the car outside the garage next to his house. He told her to hang on while he took his bag into the house and grabbed the key to the cottage.
Merri waited for him beside the car, wide eyes taking in the tall pines that surrounded the house and one-story cottage several hundred yards to the rear. He knew there was something really wrong when she didn’t fight him to carry her bags to the cottage.
Then she surprised the hell out of him by asking, “Has the cottage always been here?”
“It was built around 1905 for the family to live in while they built the main house.” He walked up to the arched oak door then turned to find her stopped on the walk.
“It looks like something out of a fairy tale.”
The tone of her voice caught his attention but her wide-eyed stare baffled him.
He’d always thought the structure resembled a hunting cabin, but maybe a woman would see it differently. The arched door and windows, fieldstone walls and peaked slate roof might give the impression of charm, but he knew the mortar needed to be
rechinked
, the old windows drafted like a sieve in the winter, and the interior was dark.
He opened the door and waited for Merri to walk in ahead of him.
She stopped in the center of the main room and he took the opportunity to study her. Her two braids hung down the middle of her back to her waist. Her jeans hung on her slim hips, and she didn’t have much of a butt to speak of. From the back, you might mistake her for a boy.
But not from the front. Never from the front. She was just too damn pretty.
He dragged his gaze away from her face and took the bags to the kitchen along the far side of the room.
She continued to stand in the middle of the room, her gaze unblinking.
“Like I said, it’s not much, but it’s clean and everything works.”
She nodded and finally met his gaze. “It’s fine. Thanks for everything, Jimmy, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to lie down.”
His gaze snapped back to her face, seeing the fatigue in the droop of her eyelids and the pallor of her skin.
“Sure. Why don’t you come down for dinner around seven?”
She nodded again but didn’t speak, her sigh saying more than words.
He turned and left when the urge to grab her and hold her close nearly overwhelmed his common sense.
Nearly three hours later, while stirring melting chocolate chips, he wondered what the hell he’d been thinking by asking her to dinner. He should’ve gone back to the lab. Should have wrapped himself up in some project, but he’d been afraid nothing would be able to distract him from Merri.
He couldn’t deny his attraction to her. And if he was truthful, he didn’t want to. He wanted her, but he knew mentally she wasn’t in a place where he could try to seduce her. She had too much going in her life right now. Too much turmoil.
He wasn’t surprised when the bell rang precisely at seven. He didn’t think the girl would ever be late for anything.
Before he headed for the door, he took the roast chicken out of the oven. It had seemed like a good choice considering she’d had chicken in her cart.
He’d made comfort food tonight—chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, fudge brownies for dessert. He hoped like hell she’d eat. She needed to put back on some of the weight she’d lost.
When he opened the door, the first thing he noticed was her hair. Curls flowed everywhere. Down her back, over her shoulders, against her cheeks. If she’d had wings, she’d resemble something out of an English fairy tale. Of course, the jeans and pink t-shirt didn’t go with the image, but you couldn’t have everything.
“Hey, Merri, come on in. Have a good nap?”
With a nod, she stepped into the house, the slight floral scent she wore brushing against his senses and jacking his lust into high gear.
Oh, this was a bad idea. A really bad idea
.
But it was too late now. The best he could hope was that he didn’t make an idiot of himself by making a pass.
“I hope you like chicken and mashed potatoes. If not, I guess you could make a meal of the brownies. I always make a double batch so I have extra. I’m kind of a chocoholic. You like chocolate, right?”