go into his new apartment and organize his things, set up his weight-lifting gear, watch some mindless television sitcom. He should be leaving Jess Baxter alone, not standing in her kitchen, looking at her legs, thinking dangerous thoughts. Instead, he sat down across from her at her kitchen table.
“You know, I realized I don’t know that much about you,” Jess said, taking a sip of her iced tea and gazing at him with her bottomless dark eyes. She pushed the bowl of sugar and a spoon in his direction.
She was going to ask him some questions. Some personal questions. Rob stirred sugar into his glass, carefully keeping his face passive, fighting the hot surge of anger that pulsed through him. God, he hated questions. He hated lying, he hated all of it. He hated his entire life, loathed what he’d become. Boring, he reminded himself. Make yourself sound unbearably boring. She’ll change the subject soon enough. “There’s not that much to know,” he said blandly. “I work for Epco, Inc., downtown. I work with computers, you know, software consulting. It’s pretty mundane.”
God, he hated small talk. But that’s all he ever did—all he ever could do. It was too risky to have any kind of real conversation, too nerve-racking to say anything that would make someone take a closer look at him. So he always stuck to small talk. Always. For the past eight years, he’d had his real conversations in his head, with himself. Sometimes he felt well on his way to being certifiably nuts. But he had to keep his interactions with other people to a minimum. He had to be boring. He had to remain invisible.
“I travel a lot,” he added, “but I only see the insides of office buildings.”
Jess nodded, still watching him. “That’s too bad.” Her eyelashes were amazingly dark and incredibly long. And she didn’t look the slightest bit bored. In fact, she looked interested. More than interested. Attracted. Beautiful, vibrant, sexy Jess Baxter was actually attracted to dull, mild-mannered, boring Rob Carpenter.
Her cheeks flushed very slightly as Rob met her eyes and held her gaze, wondering if she could see past his disguise, wondering if somehow he’d slipped and given himself away. She looked away, embarrassed or nervous. Damn straight she should be nervous around him.
“With my schedule, I don’t have time for anything besides work,” he added, hoping she’d pick up his double meaning. He didn’t have time for anything else, especially romance. He couldn’t risk the sweet intimacy of a lover’s quiet questions or the expectations of shared secrets and whispered confessions.
Jess took another sip of her drink, removing a stray drop of tea from her lips with the tip of her tongue. It was sweetly, unconsciously sexy on her part, and Rob felt his body respond. Man, it had been too long…
“No hobbies?” she asked, one elegant eyebrow arching upward. “No clog dancing classes?”
Rob had to laugh at that. “No,” he said. “Sad to say, I had to give it up.”
“Music, then,” Jess prompted. “You must have an interest in music—I’ve seen you at some of the folk festivals, and at some of my gigs. You even brought along that friend of yours—Frank. I appreciated your helping pad the audience.”
Rob nodded. “I like music,” he said. That was true, but he’d really gone to those festivals and concerts expressly to see Jess sing. “But I never brought Frank. We’re not friends—more like acquaintances. We both happened to show up at one of the folk festivals and we got to talking—we both work at Epco.”
Jess nodded, taking a sip of her iced tea. “How about movies?” she asked. “Kelsey and I saw you a couple of times at the Gulf Gate Mall theater.”
Now this was something he could talk about. Rob smiled and let himself relax a little. But only slightly.
“We love going to movies,” she continued, pushing a stray curl back behind one ear. “We go to everything a six-year-old can see, that is. I’ve become a Disney expert.”
“I’m more into Pulp Fiction than Pocahontas myself,” Rob admitted. “I’m a Spielberg fan. And I like James Cameron, too. He did the Terminator movies, remember those?”
“Aha.” Jess smiled at him as she took another sip of her iced tea. “You do have a hobby, if you watch movies enough to be a fan of a specific director.”
“I don’t know, it’s slightly more passive than clog dancing,” Rob said, smiling back into her warm brown eyes. God, she was pretty.
“So is stamp collecting.”
“You win,” he conceded. “I guess I have a hobby.”
“We also saw you in Books-A-Million,” she said. “Buying a stack of books about two feet high.”
“I also like to read. Fiction, mostly.”
“But I didn’t see you move in boxes and boxes of books,” Jess said, resting her chin on the upturned palm of her hand as she continued to gaze across the table at him.
Rob shrugged. “I don’t usually live in a place big enough to keep bookshelves. I read ’em, then donate ’em to a local nursing home.”
Her big dark eyes softened. “That’s sweet.”
God, he could lose himself in those eyes. He could just fall in and disappear forever, drowning, suffocating, pulling her down with him. They’d both simply vanish, never to resurface.
“You moved down here from up north,” Jess said, wondering if he could hear the breathlessness of her voice, wondering if he knew it was caused by the way he was looking at her. “Didn’t you?”
Across the table, Rob nodded, pulling his gaze away from her and giving his iced tea another spoonful of sugar and another stir. She’d been wrong about him, Jess realized. She’d thought he was shy, but there was nothing in those brown eyes that suggested shyness. In fact, his gaze was confident and steady. Rob Carpenter wasn’t shy at all. Just…polite. Reserved. Quiet. And as attracted to her as she was to him.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“All over the place,” he answered, glancing up at her and giving her a ghost of his earlier smile.
Could he be any more vague? Jess took another sip of her tea. “I grew up here in Florida,” she said. “Out on Siesta Key. My parents still have a beach house there. I use it sometimes when I’ve got a gig at the Pelican Club.”
He didn’t comment or offer any information on the location of his own childhood. He just watched her.
“My folks are up in Montana right now,” Jess continued, more to fill the silence than because she thought he’d be interested in the whereabouts of her parents. “They’re retired and doing the RV thing. You know, the enormous silver cylinder on wheels? Camping without the nasty outdoors part?”
That got another genuine smile out of him. And a response. “They’re in Montana, huh? It’s pretty out there—different from Florida.”
“I’ve never been to Montana,” she admitted. “Have you?”
He nodded, yes, but didn’t elaborate. She’d asked another faintly personal question that he wasn’t going to answer at any length. Apparently, he was willing to converse about superficial things but he didn’t like to talk about
