Chapter 4
“Wake me at nine.”
They were the last words Peter said to me before closing the door to his room, and they echoed in my brain for most of the night.
When I finally fell asleep—after trying in vain to read, then trying in vain to do a crossword puzzle, even creeping upstairs and trying in vain to sketch out the glaze pattern for the fruit bowl I’d thrown earlier that week—it was nearly one in the morning.
I awoke again at two-thirty, four fifty-five and six-ten, and each time the same thing happened.
I turned over and came slowly to consciousness, then opened my eyes with a start when I remembered that Peter was there.
With that recollection came a simultaneous jumping in my stomach that was a long time in settling.
When I finally gave up the fight at seven-fifteen and climbed out of bed, I wasn’t at my best.
Wake me at nine.
The hands of the small stove clock crept.
It wasn’t that I was eager for Peter to be up and with me, because I certainly wasn’t.
I had nothing to say to him. He was here for one reason and one reason alone—to defend Cooper.
I assumed that he planned to spend the morning in town chatting with whomever he could find who’d be willing to open up on the subject.
That was fine with me. If he thought he’d just sit around the kitchen, dawdling over breakfast for several hours, or hang around the living room—or worse, my studio—that wasn’t so fine.
I wasn’t sure I could take it. He might just as well sleep later.
It appeared that that was just what he was going to end up doing.
At nine on the dot, I went upstairs and knocked on his door.
When there was no answer, I knocked again.
After a minute, I accompanied a third knock with his name, but even that failed to elicit a response.
So, slowly and cautiously, I turned the knob and eased the door open.
Peter was sprawled facedown on the too-small bed.
One bare arm was hooked over its edge and hung nearly to the floor, the other was curved under the pillow.
The covers cut diagonally across his body, starting beneath his right arm and ending at his left hip, and beneath the covers, his legs were widespread.
I even detected his feet conforming to the vertical end of the mattress.
My stomach was at it again, jumping in the way that had become familiar during the night.
I looked toward the ceiling, but that didn’t do much good.
In the minute that I’d studied what was on the bed, certain things had etched themselves indelibly on my mind.
Such as the hard muscles of Peter’s shoulder.
The dark tuft of hair beneath his arm. The firm flesh at that spot on his hip that would normally be covered by briefs.
Helplessly my gaze fell back to the bed. “Peter?” I called softly, then wondered why I wasted the effort. If my knocks hadn’t woken him, a soft call wouldn’t. Something stronger was needed.
“Peter!” I called more sharply, then, in annoyance as much as anything else, “Peter.”
He stirred. He moved his legs, then his hips, but when he went still again, it was clear that he’d simply made himself more comfortable.
“Peter!” I shouted. I was beginning to feel mildly panicked. If he didn’t wake to my voice, I was going to have to shake him, which meant putting my hand on his skin. I wasn’t sure I could do that.
“Hmmm.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. It hadn’t been much of a sound, but it had been something. “It’s nine o’clock, Peter. You said to wake you at nine.”
He turned his head on the pillow so that I could see his face. His eyes were still closed. “Mmmm.”
“It’s nine.” When he didn’t respond to that, I said, “Peter?”
“I hear,” he grumbled groggily and turned his head the other way.
I had the distinct impression that he was going right back to sleep. “Are you getting up?”
“Ten,” he mumbled. “Wake me at ten.” The words were slurred.
Eager for any excuse to leave the room, I said, “Fine,” and backed out, closing the door behind me.
That left me with the dilemma of what to do with my time.
What I’d planned to do, before Peter had popped his little surprise about wanting me for his girl Friday, was to work.
But an hour wasn’t much time. No sooner would I have everything set up than it would be ten, and at ten I was supposed to wake him again, and that meant breakfast soon after, and Lord knew when he’d be finished.
By that time whatever I’d been working on would have dried out.
So I ruled out working. I’d already showered, dressed, made my bed, dusted my room, as well as dusted and dry-mopped the entire downstairs, which was really quite funny, since I’d done it all just the day before.
But there was something to be said for expending nervous energy, and I was filled with that.
Baking seemed like a good idea.
I wasn’t normally any more compulsive a baker than I was a cleaner.
Though my family occasionally mentioned my having gone north to commune with the sea and bake my own bread, I’d never gotten into that routine.
Oh, I’d tried. It was truly a romantic thought, and there was nothing more divine than the smell of fresh-baked bread.
But I never seemed to do it quite right.
My bread came out looking deformed, and all too often the smell that filled the kitchen was of something burning.
Far easier, I decided, to buy my bread at the store.
Muffins, on the other hand, were my pals. Mix everything in a bowl, pour into paper-lined muffin tins, bake. Very easy.
Over the years, I’d made the standard blueberry muffins, corn muffins and bran muffins. With the taste of success, I’d grown bolder. Among my repertoire were apple-nut, zucchini and wheat germ, cottage cheese and chive, even ones heavily laced with dried fruit and rum.
Today I decided on cranberry-pumpkin. I had a bag of fresh cranberries in the fridge and several cans of pumpkin on the shelf. The other ingredients were all staples. So I went to work.
Two dozen muffins were in the oven baking when ten o’clock rolled around.
Wiping my hands on the dishtowel, I went upstairs. I tried knocking first. After all, Peter was a new acquaintance. I couldn’t just barge into his room, assuming familiarity simply because he’d been in a dead sleep earlier.
I discovered to my chagrin, after repeating the ritual of knocking, then calling his name, then timidly opening the door, that he was still in a dead sleep, sprawled much as he’d been at nine.
“Peter?” I waited, then raised my voice. “Peter.” I waited, then shouted, “Peter!”
He shifted. “Hmmm.”
“It’s ten. You said to wake you at ten.”
He neither moved, nor made a sound.
“Peter.”
Nothing.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether he always slept this soundly, or whether he was doing it to annoy me. If the latter was so, it worked. Taking the few steps necessary to reach his bedside, I shook his shoulder. “Peter! It’s ten!”
I snatched my hand back. Annoyed or not, I was affected by the firmness of his shoulder and the warmth of his skin.
He shifted, inhaled a deep breath, stretched.
I thought I’d die when the covers slipped to reveal twin dimples at the top of his buttocks.
I bit down hard on my lower lip to give myself something to think about, but the pain I caused wasn’t half as interesting as those dimples, or the virile plane stretching above them, or the finer, paler skin under his arm, or the sprinkling of freckles across his shoulders.
Move, I told myself, but I couldn’t budge. I’d never seen anything that had as debilitating an effect on my knees as the body spread before me.
“Ten o’clock,” I sang out in a high, shaky voice. “Get up, Peter. It’s ten o’clock.”
He turned his head on the pillow, opened an eye and did his best to focus, without much success.
I was ready to put money on the fact that he didn’t know who in the devil I was—and I felt more than a little peeved, even hurt by that —when he said my name.
It wasn’t much more than a tired moan, but it was my name.
“Jill.”
“Got it in one,” I said in that same, higher-than-normal voice.
He barely moved his lips. “What time is it?”
“Ten.”
Moaning, he turned his head away. “I should have been up at nine.”
“I woke you then, but you told me to come back at ten.”
“I’m so tired.”
I hadn’t considered that. I’d been too preoccupied with my nervous energy to think about why Peter was having such trouble waking up, and it wasn’t as though the nervous energy was gone.
But it had changed. As I stood there, unable to move from his bedside, it had become something softer and sweeter, something that I wanted to call exciting.
“What were you going to do this morning?” I asked. I was feeling the beginnings of compassion for the man. He seemed so zonked.
“Walk around,” he mumbled. “Check out the local police.”
“What time is Cooper due here?”
“One.” He stretched again, this time half turning to his side, and in the instant before he drew his top leg up, I caught a glimpse of a line of soft, dark hair on his belly.
My heart reacted wildly, and my eyes shot upward, following that line as it widened in a spray of hair over his chest. I had just focused on a small, brown nipple when it disappeared beneath the covers, which Peter drew up.
A helpless little sound slipped from my throat. Horrified, I coughed to cover it up. Between that cough and the newly risen covers, the spell was broken.
“Are you getting up?” I asked as I headed back toward the door. I didn’t care that I sounded cross. Enough was enough.
Apparently not. “Eleven. Wake me at eleven.”
“Oh, Peter.”
“I’m beat. Too many late nights.”
That’s your problem, bud, I was on the verge of saying when he added, “Had to clear my desk to get here.”
I should have known he’d say something like that, something I couldn’t berate. I sighed. “Eleven?”
“Mmmm.”