entitled to a fairy-tale ending, even if, like Cinderella’s coach, she’d turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.
Okay. So she was mixing her fairy tales and her metaphors. She didn’t care. For this brief moment in time she indulged. She let herself forget about pumpkins and different worlds when he turned to her.
His blue eyes were thoughtful and interested as they met hers over the tanned arm that gripped the gearshift. The streetlight cast stunning shadows and shading across his incredible face. He smiled that devastating smile. “All set?”
“To the castle,” she murmured and settled back as his soft, warm chuckle enveloped her.
Three
Phoebe’s euphoria didn’t last past the first intersection. The adrenaline rush that had kicked into full stride during the ugly scene with Jason wore off quickly. Plus, she was far too grounded to let herself drift on this little dream cloud for long. Grounded or not, though, without the adrenaline to shore her up she was a wreck by the time Daniel had deftly followed her directions and pulled onto her street.
Daniel Barone. She still couldn’t quite grasp it. And he, well, if he found her neighborhood lacking compared to the pricey Beacon Hill residence where he’d grown up and the circle of wealth in which he ran, he was too polite or too polished to let it show.
He was also the picture of the perfect gentleman. Except that he drove too fast. She hadn’t needed to read the Boston Globe article about him to know that it was part of his MO. The speed. The thrills. The daring to do what most mortals feared. His exploits were legend. She supposed it should be exciting, racing through the night in this shining bullet of a car, but her slight case of the shakes was prompted more by apprehension than any spirit of adventure.
She was hopeless. And he was so wrong about her name. Mouse suited her perfectly. She had the backbone of a snail. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d been the victim of one of those hit and run urban legends—like the one where some unsuspecting soul fell asleep in a motel room and woke up in a bathtub full of ice and missing their kidneys. Only in her case, it was her spine that had been surgically removed.
She sighed heavily. She didn’t belong in this silver Porsche. She didn’t belong in either dream or reality with this man, no matter how hard he tried to put her at ease. And bless him he did try. To her utter mortification, however, their conversation on the half-hour drive to her house consisted mostly of her stuttering apologies for putting him out and his teasing her about her white-knuckled grip on the console.
Out of her league.
She should have felt relief when he finally swung the car into her driveway and cut the engine. Instead, an unsettling mix of remorse and regret swamped her.
She smoothed her hand lovingly along the melting soft leather seat, heaved another resigned sigh and reached for the door handle.
And so ended her romance with romance.
“Wait,” he said. “I’ll get that.”
Because she wasn’t as resigned to the end as she’d thought, she waited while he got out of the car, walked around the hood and opened the door for her with all the gallantry of a medieval knight.
The castle, Daniel noted, turned out to be a modest ranch, white trimmed in black, circa 1960. It was set in the middle of the block in a quiet and fairly well-kept neighborhood of Boston proper. Lamplight glowed from inside the house where a huge, fat tabby lounged in the bay window and regarded them through the glass with golden eyes and a superior attitude as they approached.
He was a detail man and noticed that the parched grass was mowed and twin rows of sunburned flowers struggled to brighten the sidewalk leading to the front porch. The porch was actually little more than a concrete stoop covered by a shingled overhang that boasted a hanging basket of deep-purple petunias and peeling posts.
He wasn’t sure what affected him more: the fact that she was a woman who planted flowers, that she probably mowed her own lawn, or the peeling paint that said she was either pressed for money or time.
In the end it was none of those things. It was the sight of an ugly, fist-size plaster frog squatting on the stoop. He didn’t have a clue why it got to him.
“Well,” she said as he watched her avoid his eyes by tucking her chin and staring at the center of his chest. She tugged on her hair, something she seemed to do a lot when she was nervous—which she obviously was around him. “Thank you. Again. Really. And you didn’t have to walk me to the door.”
As she’d been doing since about midway through the drive across town, he could see her gearing up for another apology for putting him out.
“Don’t you dare say it,” he warned her before she wound up for a good start. “We reached an agreement, remember? You aren’t going to apologize anymore.”
“You’re right. I’m s—” she caught herself and smiled sheepishly. “I’m so not going to apologize again.”
Looking pink and flustered and adorable, she bent to pick up the ugly frog.
Daniel stood there in suspended silence…absorbing the pleasant scent of vanilla ice cream and summer that surrounded her…studying the endearing little cowlick that parted her hair with a swirl at her crown…considering touching the silky soft strands that looked baby fine and so touchable he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching out and sifting it through his fingers.
He didn’t get it. He didn’t get why he was so fascinated by her. She was as far from a siren as Dame Edith and yet she called to him. He should feel relief now that he’d done his duty. He’d delivered her safely to her door. He was free to go. So he sure as hell didn’t know why, when she turned that stupid frog upside down and slipped a key out of the compartment hidden in its belly, he felt a surge of tenderness that sent warning bells ringing in every rational part of his brain.
Aside from general concern, it shouldn’t matter so much that the woman was being hounded by an ex-boyfriend with a whole lot of mean on his mind. It shouldn’t matter so much that she hid her house key in a frog and probably regarded it as a security measure.
It shouldn’t matter so much that at first glance, he’d thought of her as ordinary.
And yet it did.
She was as far from ordinary as a dive along the outer reefs of a Micronesian atoll. As far from ordinary as the rare Lapp Orchid he’d had the pleasure of seeing in the wild in the mountains of Abisko in northern Lapland.
Far from ordinary.
Also, far from sophisticated. She wasn’t glamorous, wasn’t worldly. In fact, she quite possibly needed a keeper.
He should leave before he did something really stupid and volunteered for the job.
Instead of a quick goodbye, though, he shook his head and heaved out a sigh. Then he pried the key from her rigid fingers, inserted it into the lock and swung open her front door. Cool air gushed out of the house and into the heated night in welcome waves.
She was in the process of stammering out an, “Oh, um, well, thank you again,” when he propped his hand above her head on the doorjamb and looked down into a face that made him think of a very cute, very sweet, very vulnerable baby owl about two wing-fluffs away from taking
