“Do you do other impressions, too?” he asked her. “Or just fire hydrants?”
Kay gave up and tossed the paper towel into the trash. “The show’s over, Robert. You can go home now.”
He looked utterly distressed. “Why, Kay, is something the matter? I sense you’re not having the rewarding experience I’d hoped for.”
“Are you kidding?” she growled. “I’m having
exactly
the experience you hoped for.”
Robert laughed. “No, I have to admit that even I didn’t envision anything quite this humiliating. That big black mutt summed up all my feelings for you with one little lift of his leg.”
Kay lunged toward Robert and almost had a double fistful of his lapels when an arm snaked around her and yanked her backward. Someone had grabbed her. Twisting around, she saw that someone was Matt. In the midst of her fury at Robert, she hadn’t even heard him come in.
“Let
go
of me!” She struggled wildly against Matt, wanting nothing to come between her and her homicide target, but by now he’d wrapped both arms around her, trapping her against his body.
“Kay...?” Matt’s voice was low and deliberate. “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on here.”
She pointed a furious finger at Robert. “I want him gone. No. Let me amend that. I want him dead!”
“Really, Kay,” Robert said, folding his arms across his chest. “Isn’t it about time you learned to control your temper?”
“You haven’t even begun to see my temper, you slimebag!”
“Oh? And just what do you intend to do this time? You’ve already shaved every animal I’ve got.”
While Kay continued to squirm in Matt’s grip, Robert smiled broadly. “Well, Forester, I can see you’ve got your hands full, so I’ll be going. It was nice chatting with you, Kay. I’ll drop by again next time I’m in the neighborhood. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.” Robert gave her one last nasty little chuckle, then turned and strode out the front door.
“Matt! Let...me.
..go!"
“Are you going after him?” Matt said.
“Yes!”
“Then I’m not letting you go.”
Kay yanked vainly at Matt’s forearm, then tried twisting left and right, but his grip was far too strong. “I’m not really going to kill him, Matt. I swear. I’m just going to make him
wish
he were dead!”
“Just calm down,” Matt said in a disgustingly reasonable tone of voice, “and tell me what happened.”
“You want to know what happened? Take a whiff.”
He sniffed, then leaned away slightly to glance down at the leg of her jeans. “Uh-oh. Which dog got you?”
“Rambo. Robert showed up here to gloat just about at the time that canine cretin mistook my leg for a tree. Of course, Robert thought it was the most hysterical thing he’d ever seen. I hate him, Matt. I hate everything about him. I hate the way he looks, the way he walks, the way he talks—”
Matt pulled a kitchen chair away from the table and sat Kay down in it. She immediately tried to rise. He put his hands on her shoulders, shoved her down again, then pulled out a chair and sat down beside her.
“Kay? Can I ask you a question?”
She crossed her arms and fumed silently.
“Why in the world did you want to marry a guy like him?”
She met Matt’s gaze, staring at him a long time. She hated to say it out loud, because it sounded so dumb. “As soon as I told my family that Robert proposed, you’d have thought I won the lottery, the way they went on. By the time they got through telling me how lucky I was, I figured they’d disown me if I turned him down. I think it was the first time in my life I did something they actually approved of.”
Matt stared at her blankly for a moment, as if he hadn’t quite comprehended her meaning. “
That’s
why you were going to marry him?”
“You don’t understand, Matt. My parents are attorneys. My sister’s an attorney. All I am is a legal assistant, and even that’s pretty recent. Before that I was...”
Kay paused, feeling as if she was about to confess that she’d once been a streetwalker, and a pretty sleazy one at that.
“...a waitress.”
She waited for that subtle twist of the mouth, the slight turning up of the nose she always saw on people’s faces whenever she mentioned that word. But on Matt she saw neither.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a waitress,” he said. “It’s good, honest work.”
Kay blinked with surprise. “I quit college my freshman year,” she went on, knowing most people with advanced degrees thought dropouts were morons. Her family certainly did. But Matt just shrugged.
“College isn’t for everyone.”
Maybe he wasn’t hearing her right. She shifted around and looked at him head-on. “I once got suspended from high school for toilet-papering the principal’s house.”
“I know a guy who went with his friends to his history teacher’s house and lobbed raw eggs onto her skylights. It was a hundred and two degrees that day. They fried.”
“What happened to him?”
“He graduated, went to college and became a veterinarian.”
Kay smiled, even as her heart was breaking. As easily as her family made her feel inferior, Matt made her feel wonderful. Why couldn’t he be more to her than just a friend?
“So what did you do in kindergarten?” he asked her. “Spray paint your ABCs on the schoolhouse wall?”
Kindergarten. She winced at the very thought of it. “No, but I once had to spend three days of recess time standing in the corner because I refused to color inside the lines.”
Matt raised his eyebrows. “You really
were
a radical.”
“Yeah. My teacher thought the world was going to end if I didn’t get that red crayon in exactly the right place. My mother felt the same way, because the punishment didn’t end with my nose in the corner at school.”
“Conformity is overrated. Look at the way you solve problems. You wanted the cat litter. I wouldn’t buy it, so you got them to donate it.”
“That was no great accomplishment,” she said, waving her hand. “Anyone with the gift of gab could have done the same thing.”
“And you work hard at the shelter. The Cat Room looks like the Ritz Carlton.”
“Big deal. Anyone with a strong back and a strong stomach could manage that, too.”
“And for the first time in a long time,” Matt said, his voice softening, “I don’t hate the thought of coming home at night.”
Kay closed her eyes, his words filling her with such warmth and comfort that the cold sting of her family’s disapproval disappeared from her thoughts in a mental
poof.
Then frustration crept in again. Why was he saying such wonderful things? Didn’t he know it made her want him that much more?
“Stop listening to your family,” Matt said. “They’ll make you crazy.”
Hadn’t Sheila told her that at least a hundred times? Wasn’t it time she started believing it? “I
don’t
listen to them. I don’t care what they think. Not anymore.”
Kay’s mouth moved with conviction, but she just couldn’t get the rest of her body to follow suit. She bowed her head, then felt the tears coming.
Damn.
She was such a fool. Why else would she spend her whole life looking for approval from people she didn’t even like?
She blinked quickly, feeling utterly ridiculous for crying over something she shouldn’t even care about in the first place—especially in front of Matt.
“Okay,” she said, sniffing a little. “So I’m not there yet. But I’m getting better.”
At that moment Matt decided he hated every single member of Kay’s family, and he’d never even met them. How could they do that to her? It infuriated him to think that someone could be as smart and capable as Kay, yet be told all her life she wasn’t.
“So I guess it must have been pretty awkward when Robert broke your engagement,” he said.
Kay’s eyes widened. “Is that what he told you? That
he
broke our engagement?”
“Uh—yeah.”
For a moment Kay looked positively homicidal. Then her expression settled into one of disgusted resignation. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. If he’d have sex in his office with another woman three months before our wedding, he wouldn’t think twice about lying about it, now would he?”
Matt’s mouth dropped open. “He cheated on you? In his
office?”
“Knowing Robert, he was too cheap to get a hotel room.”
Matt couldn’t believe it. All this time Hollinger had led him to believe that he was the noble one and Kay was the savage. Now that he knew the truth, Hollinger’s stock had just plunged to an all-time low.
Kay sat in silence, staring down at her hands. To his dismay, he saw tears fill her eyes again. Then he had a thought that was completely intolerable. Could it be she still had feelings for Hollinger?
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Robert’s not worth it.”
“No,” she said, waving her hand. “It’s not that. Believe me. I don’t give a damn about Robert Hollinger.” She sighed. “It’s just the whole idea of it, you know? Finding out you’re less important to the man you’re going to marry than a cheap brunette and three cocker spaniels?”
Matt thought he’d known what a jerk Hollinger was, but now he realized he’d only been seeing the tip of that iceberg. First her family, then her fiancé.
“Now I really know why you had those dogs shaved.” He smiled. “Good for you.”
Kay sniffed, then shook her head. “No. It’s
not
good for me. I’m too impulsive and it gets me into trouble every time. If it wasn’t for the fact that I did the dog-shaving thing, I wouldn’t even be here.”
Matt slid his palm against her face, brushing away a tear with his thumb. “And that,” he said, “would have been my loss.”
She froze, her blue eyes widening with surprise. Caught in her gaze, he couldn’t look away. He trailed his thumb along her cheekbone, and slowly her surprise melted into a look of awareness, of expectation. She inclined her head to lean into his hand, closed her eyes and exhaled softly. Oh, boy.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted something as desperately as he wanted to kiss her right now. With her eyes closed he gazed at her leisurely, at the feathered lashes that brushed her cheeks, the delicate bone structure of her face and those warm, lush lips that were sending him a silent invitation to come closer. It was as if a thin, delicate thread was drawing him toward her, compelling him to kiss her so thoroughly and completely that it would make up for all the time he’d wasted not kissing her.
But he couldn’t. Not yet.
And the reason he couldn’t was because Robert Hollinger was a nasty, manipulative jerk who’d maneuvered him into a position where he had no choice but to act as if he was, at the very most, Kay’s big brother or best buddy. And big brothers and best buddies couldn’t even conceive of the thoughts that were running through his mind right now.
With great reluctance, he pulled his hand back and leaned away. She blinked her eyes open and stared at him, looking a little disoriented.
“I think I heard a car door outside,” Matt said, his voice a little shaky. “Maybe it’s a family with six kids and they all want a pet.”
Kay blinked. “Yeah. Okay.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “I’ll tell them we’re having a two-for-one special.”
She managed a wobbly smile, then grabbed a paper towel on her way out of the kitchen and dabbed at her eyes. As she disappeared into the hall, Matt dropped his head to his hands and let out a long breath.
He kept telling himself she wasn’t the right woman for him. That in the long run she wouldn’t understand about the shelter, that she’d resent the money he spent just to take care of a ragtag bunch of animals. But the warnings he issued himself were only halfhearted, because now he knew that Kay hadn’t gone looking for Hollinger. He’d just been the convenient fulfillment of other people’s expectations, which meant her life goals probably didn’t center around his-and-hers limos and a winter house in Florida.
She had less than fifteen hours left to work at the shelter. Once she’d put in her time, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be moving out, and all at once he realized he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving. It had been so long since he’d had a warm, breathing human being beside him that he’d almost forgotten what it was like, and now that he remembered, he never wanted to be without it again.
Without her again.
How had this happened? It wasn’t just loneliness, and it wasn’t just lust. He’d blamed his feelings on those two things for quite some time now, but slowly his brain was admitting what his heart already knew. It wasn’t just any warm body he wanted next to his. It was Kay’s.
He didn’t know how much longer he could play this game. Sooner or later she was going to see in his eyes how much he wanted her, and hear it in his voice, and he wouldn’t be able to fool her anymore.
Later that evening, Matt came in the kitchen door just as his phone rang. As soon as he picked it up and heard the voice on the other end, he wished he hadn’t
Hollinger. Just hearing that smug voice, after what Kay had told him today, made his blood boil.
“I just wanted to let you know how pleased I am with the way things are turning out,” Hollinger said. “That little show this afternoon was worth every string I’ve had to pull to get you that grant.”
“Those things happen sometimes when you’re around animals.”
“Yes, they sometimes do. And seeing it happen to Kay made my day.”
Matt was silent.
“I wanted to let you know, too, that the awards ceremony is in two weeks.”
Matt froze. “Awards ceremony?”
“Of course. At the Fairmont Hotel. We’re expecting two hundred people. And the press will be there—”
“Press? Now, wait a minute, Robert. You never said anything about—”
“What did you think was going to happen, Forester? Did you think I’d just send you a check in the mail?”
That was exactly what he’d thought. “No. Of course not. I just—”
“Two weeks from today at seven o’clock.” Robert paused. “I assume there’s no problem with that?”
“Uh—no. No problem.”
“Good work, Forester,” Hollinger said. “I knew I could count on you.”