One
Daniel Barone wasn’t sure why the woman had captured his attention. In the overall scheme of things, she was little more than a small speck of beige, lost in the vibrant colors of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in the center of downtown Boston.
On this steamy August night, the open-air market was alive with colors and scents and sounds. She, quite literally, was not. Still, she’d drawn his undivided attention as he stood directly behind her at a pushcart outside the buildings of Quincy Market.
Like a dozen or so others, they were both waiting in line for ice cream. Unlike the others, who edged forward as placidly as milling cattle, she bounced with impatience. Like a child—which she absolutely wasn’t—she rose to the balls of her feet and…bounced. There wasn’t another word for it. She just sort of danced in place, as if she found irrepressible delight in the simple anticipation of getting her hands on an ice cream cone.
For some reason it made Daniel smile. Her guileless exuberance charmed him, he supposed. And it made him take time for a longer look.
She was average height, maybe a little on the short side. Her hair wasn’t quite blond, wasn’t quite brown, and there was nothing remotely sexy about the short, pixieish cut. Her drab tan shorts and top showed off a modest length of arm and leg and more than adequately covered what could possibly be a nice, tidy little body. Who could tell? Other than the wicked red polish splashed on her toenails, there truly wasn’t a bright spot on the woman—until she turned around with her much-awaited prize.
Behind owlish, black-rimmed glasses, a pair of honey-brown eyes danced with anticipation, intelligence and innate good humor. And when she took that first long, indulgent lick, a smile of pure, decadent delight lit her ordinary face and transitioned un-remarkable to breathtaking in a heartbeat. The wattage of that smile damn near blinded him.
“It was worth the wait,” she murmured on a blissful sigh before she shouldered out of line and went on about her business.
“And then some,” Daniel agreed and, with a side-long grin, watched the pleasant sway of her hips as she walked away.
Wondering why a woman possessed of so much vibrant and natural beauty would choose to hide it behind professorial glasses, an unimaginative haircut and brown-paper-bag-plain clothes, he tracked her progress as she moved through the crowd. He was still watching when the kid wielding the ice cream scoop nudged him back to the business at hand.
“Hey, bud. You want ice cream or what?”
Daniel slowly returned his attention to the counter. “Yeah. Sorry.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and, still grinning, hitched his chin in the general direction she’d taken. “I’ll have what she had. Double dip.”
It wasn’t Baronessa gelato, he conceded after the first bite, but it was ice cream and he’d been craving it for almost a month now. He was pretty sure, though, that he wasn’t enjoying his half as much as a certain champagne-blonde was enjoying hers.
He glanced around, searched for her briefly. Not that he expected to spot her in this crush of people, not that he knew what he’d do if he did. Didn’t matter anyway. She was long gone, swallowed up by the milling crowd.
Telling himself that it was just as well, he headed in the general direction of his car. He needed sleep anyway, not a distraction. The thought of a real bed with clean sheets and a soft mattress made him groan. So did the memory of his apartment with its light-darkening shades, the cool hum of an air conditioner set on seventy degrees and about twelve solid hours of shut-eye.
Simple pleasures. Foreign pleasures, of late. A month deep in the red sands of the Kalahari could whet a man’s appetite for many simple pleasures.
Like sweet, rich ice cream.
Like a bed that you didn’t have to check for spiders and snakes and was softer than a patch of sun-parched earth.
Like the unaffected smile of a pretty, satisfied woman.
He grinned again—this time in self-reproach—when he couldn’t stop an image from forming.
Her head resting on his pillow…
Her body soft and warm and pliant beneath his…
Her incredible smile not only satisfied, but stunned, sated and spent…
Phoebe Richards wandered the marketplace among the throng of tourists and Bostonians who were out enjoying the hot August evening. She ate her plain vanilla ice cream—her reward for six days of ice cream abstinence and one lost pound—and refused to think about the calories. She window-shopped at the trendy boutiques that she couldn’t afford, applauded the lively antics of the street performers whose free acts she could afford. And she spared a thought—okay, maybe two—for the handsome stranger with the incredible blue eyes and interested smile.
She didn’t get many of either in her life—handsome strangers or interested smiles—and that was fine. It was fun, though, to entertain the fantasy that something might have happened between them if she’d invited it. But that would require an adventurous spirit that she could never in a million years claim. Besides, that kind of electrifying occurrence only happened in the romance novels she devoured to the tune of two to three a week. Her life to date was as far from romance-novel material as a life could get. In fact, lately, it had leaned a little closer to horror.
Determined not to think about the ugly situation with her ex-boyfriend, she walked on, opting, instead, to dwell on a lesser evil: the fact that she was too much of a coward to even encourage the spark of interest that had danced in those amazing blue eyes.
“Like anything would have actually happened, anyway,” she muttered as a statuesque blonde in designer clothes and flawless makeup accidentally bumped her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Phoebe murmured, even though she’d been the bumpee, not the bumper. Her reaction was automatic and had little to do with being polite. It was knee-jerk conciliation and it was an old habit she was supposed to be trying to break, just as she was supposed to be trying to learn to hold her ground on any number of issues.
As if on cue, a stockbroker type in pricey Italian shoes and a dark scowl barreled toward her.
“Excuse me,” she murmured and stepped aside before she could stop herself.
“Why do you always do that?” her friend Carol had asked her the last time they’d gone to lunch together and she’d apologized to the waiter because her soup was stone cold and the lettuce in her salad was as rusty as a junk car. “You do not owe the general population an apology for its screwups. You have rights, too.”
Yes. She had rights. She had the right to remain timid. She couldn’t help it. She was innately apologetic. Or pathetic. Or something equally as hopeless. It was simply easier to bend than to buck. Easier to yield than to stand. She’d learned that life lesson early on.
“Look,” she’d told Carol once in an uncharacteristic revelation about her childhood. “When you’re an ugly duckling twelve-year-old, twenty pounds overweight and constantly belittled by an alcoholic mother to whom you are an eternal disappointment, you learn to bend with the best of them.
“And I also learned to fade into the background until I got so good at it that no one hardly ever noticed me. Life was just easier that way.”
Life
