“Hey, I know what I’m being paid to do, and I’ll do it. It just might not go down the way we planned, that’s all.”
Holy moly, Natalie thought. He wasn’t a Mob hit man turned Mob informant. He was a Mob hit man period!
No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. There was a perfectly good explanation for what she was hearing. Hey, she herself had wanted to kill more than a few people in her time, including several of her students just this past week, because a lot of them had neglected to do their assigned reading. So just because someone said, “I’ll kill ’im,” didn’t mean that they were going to, you know, kill ’im. And that business about the crowd being around someone, that could have meant anything. And the part about being paid to do something? Well, now, that could be anything, too. He could have been paid to deliver phone books for all Natalie knew.
Yeah, that was it. He was the new phone book delivery guy. That explained all those nice muscles. A person had to be built to haul around those White Pages.
“Don’t worry, Manny,” Jack said angrily on the other side of his door, bringing Natalie’s attention back to the matter at hand. “I came here to do a job, and I’m not leaving until it’s done. You just better hope it doesn’t get any messier than it already has.”
Okay, so maybe he dropped some of the phone books in a puddle and they got dirty, she thought. She could see that. They’d had a lot of rain lately. And those phone books got unwieldy when you tried to carry too many at one time. And those plastic bags they put them in were cheap as hell. It could have happened to anyone.
When Natalie stood up, she still felt a little muzzy-headed, though whether that was because of her initial fright or the profound lameness of her excuses for Jack’s words, she couldn’t have said. In any event, she was totally unprepared for the opening of his door, and even less prepared for when he came barreling out of it, shrugging on his leather motorcycle jacket. And he was obviously un-prepared to find her lurking outside his door, because he kept on coming, nearly knocking her down the steps before he saw her.
Hastily, he grabbed her to steady her before she could go tumbling back down to the living room in a heap. But she overcompensated and hurled her body forward, an action that thrust her right into that muscular phone book-delivering body of his. And that made her drop both bags of groceries, which did spill out and go tumbling back down to the living room.
“Whoa,” Jack said as he balanced her, curling his fingers over her upper arms to do so. “Where’s the fire?”
Gosh, she should probably just keep that information to herself, Natalie thought as heat began seeping through her belly and spreading up into her breasts and down into her…
And that was when she remembered that, among the groceries she’d bought today, was a box of tampons. Oh, damn.
“I am so sorry to run into you,” she said.
And then she could think of not one more thing to utter. Because Jack’s hands on her arms just felt too yummy for words, strong and gentle at the same time. Hands like his would be equally comfortable sledgehammering solid rock or stroking a woman’s naked flesh, she thought. And speaking for herself, she would have been equally happy watching him do either.
“No, I’m the one who ran into you, so I’m the one who’s sorry,” he told her, his fingers still curving gently over her arms.
In fact, his thumbs on the insides of her arms moved gently up and down, as if he were trying to calm her. Which was pretty ironic, seeing as how the action only incited her to commit mayhem. Preferably on his person. ASAP. That fire he’d asked about leaped higher inside her, threatening to burn out of control.
“I wasn’t watching where I was going,” he added. “You okay?”
She nodded, even though okay was pretty much the last thing she felt at the moment. “Yeah,” she said a little breathlessly. “I’m okay. You just, um, startled me, that’s all.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything more. Natalie only continued to stand staring up at Jack, marveling at how handsome he was, and Jack gazed back down at her, thinking she knew not what. But she wished she did. She wished she could read his mind at that moment and know what his impression of her was. Because he was making an awfully big impression on her.
Finally, softly, “Let me help you pick this stuff up,” he offered.
And before Natalie could decline, he was stooping to collect the nearly empty grocery bags and scooping up the few items that hadn’t gone down the stairs. Like, for instance—of course—the tampons. Amazingly, though, he didn’t bat an eye, didn’t even hesitate as he picked them up and tossed them back into the paper sack. He only glanced up at her and smiled and said, “I got sisters,” and his casualness about it went a long way toward endearing him to Natalie. It also convinced her she had misunderstood whatever he’d been talking about on the phone. Because no Mob hit man could possibly handle a box of tampons that comfortably. It was odd logic, to be sure, but it comforted her nonetheless.
She bent, too, then, to collect her things, wincing at the scattered strawberries. “Oh, damn,” she said when she saw them.
By now, Jack was at the foot of the steps, gathering the items that had made their way down there, placing them into the sack he’d carried with him. “What’s wrong?” he called up.
“My strawberries,” she said. “I love them. And they’re so hard to find this time of year. Not to mention so expensive when I do find them.” She blew out an exasperated breath as she carefully gathered them up and placed them back into their plastic basket. “Maybe I can salvage a few of them,” she said morosely.
Jack made his way back up the steps just as she was dropping the last of her groceries back into her own sack. “I’ll help you get these upstairs,” he told her.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I can manage.”
“It’s the least I can do,” he insisted.
She relented then. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
As he followed her the rest of the way up, Natalie was acutely aware of him behind her. She knew he couldn’t be watching her—with the way she was dressed, what was there to see?—but somehow, she felt the heat of his gaze boring into her. It only added to her already frazzled state, jacking up the fire that was already blazing away in her midsection. But that was nothing compared to the inferno that fairly exploded when they reached her front door.
Thanks to her nervousness, when Natalie went to unlock it, she dropped her keys, which then skittered off the top step and threatened to go tumbling down the way her groceries had. But Jack deftly caught them before they could go too far, then stepped up behind her on the third floor landing, which she’d never, until that moment, considered especially small.
But with Jack crowding her from behind, it was very small indeed. Small enough that he had to press his front lightly to her back when he stood behind her, so that she could smell the clean, soapy, non-Aqua Velva scent of him and feel the heat of his body mingling with the heat of her own. Especially when he leaned forward and snaked his arm around her to unlock her front door himself. But he had a little trouble managing the gesture, and had to take yet another step forward, bumping his body even more intimately against hers, working the key into the slot until it turned and the door opened. And every time he shifted his body to accommodate his efforts, he rubbed
