He left; the ride to the Heights seemed to take hours instead of the half hour it actually took. A half hour in which Jake waged a silent war in his head about what to do with Cole. He paused on his porch to pick up his mail, then came inside and tossed his gear onto a chair, mindlessly stepped around the drop cloth and sawhorse in the middle of his living room where he was staging his own private renovation. As he came to the dining room, he looked down at the laptop he had left open, the books stacked neatly to one side, and the pile of papers that marked the class work he had planned to finish tonight. With a sigh, he looked through the mail, tossed the bills aside, then proceeded to his bedroom and a hot shower.
A short time later, he went to the kitchen to make a double-decker sandwich and found himself thinking of Robin Lear again, thinking that she was really pretty . . . but bossy. And full of herself. He mulled that over, and was reaching for a beer when the phone rang.
With a growl, he put his sandwich aside and picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said unceremoniously.
“Jake?”
“Hey, Lindy, how are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“I had a long day, actually. I’m pretty beat.”
“Perfect. I made some brownies for you.”
God. That was exactly what had gotten him involved with the girl in the first place. He certainly wasn’t in the habit of dating women fifteen years his junior—actually, he wasn’t really in the habit of dating—but he’d met Lindy on campus, admired her pert little breasts, and asked her out for coffee after class one night. Lindy came to class the next week with a baggie full of homemade cookies. She was a nice girl, a good girl, the kind of girl who would dote on a man. And although he hadn’t really been interested enough to date her, he hadn’t been fool enough to turn down homemade cookies. Lindy had taken his acceptance of her cookies as a green light.
“Uh . . . that was really nice of you,” he said uncertainly. “But I don’t need any.”
“Well, nobody needs brownies.”
“Umm . . . well, maybe some other time,” he said, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “But I really gotta run. Got a lot to do.” A lot of sandwich.
“Want help?”
“Not this time, Lindy.”
She sighed, and Jake could almost see her twist a strand of hair around her finger. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll just have a bath and go to bed,” she said listlessly.
At the mention of bath, the thought of a lithe young body flit across Jake’s mind, but strangely, it wasn’t Lindy’s. “Okay. See you in class.” He hung up, turned blindly back to his sandwich, alarmed by the fact that he had just imagined Robin Lear naked. In a bath. And the thought had been strongly arousing.
He took a big bite of sandwich and pondered that. In his work, he encountered a lot of society women who had more money than most governments. They were overly pampered, almost always too pleased with themselves—Robin was definitely all that and change. But then again, she was different, too, and bizarrely interesting. Still . . . he was not the kind of guy to get his thrills at work. He was way too serious about the business he was trying to build.
Nonetheless, the thought of her was so magnetic that she kept popping into his head the next day. When he took Cole to the park, he thought of her. At the grocery store, buying for his mom, he thought of her. Over his class work, his invoicing, and during the Astros game that Sunday he thought of her, wondered what she was doing. He thought of her in her torn jeans and Curious George pajamas. Worst of all, when he slept Saturday night, he dreamed of making love to a woman who turned out to be Robin Lear, whose blue eyes glazed over in the throes of a powerful, nails-in-the-back climax.
He even thought of her when Zaney called and said he would not be at work on Monday or Tuesday or for that matter, maybe even Wednesday. The news didn’t perturb Jake nearly as bad as it ought to have done. The only thing he could think was, he’d be alone with Robin Lear.
But so what? She had thought he was a pervert! How he had managed to turn one encounter into a fantasy like this was a little troubling. Yet by the time Monday rolled around, Jake was sort of anxious to go to work and see her again.
He arrived at the house on North Boulevard earlier than he had wanted, but was smiling as he let himself in and put his things in the dining room and noticed the aroma of coffee in the air. And when he heard the bedroom door open, he turned expectantly and looked down the hall . . . and whammo, felt the huge stab of disappointment. It had never occurred to him, had not once crossed his mind. What an idiot he was! It wasn’t Robin who came walking out of the bedroom at all, but a guy, a nice-looking guy at that, wearing nothing but a pair of silk boxers.
Chapter Eight