The Guy Next Door

chapter THREE



SHE WAITED AT THE TALL wrought-iron gate in front of the Hemingway Home & Museum, checking her watch again. The brochure said to be there at precisely 8:00 a.m., with cash or credit card, wearing comfortable shoes. It said not to be late. Gail had done all those things, yet she was alone on the sidewalk and it was now 8:04.

The airport cab driver had warned them that Key West operated on Margaritaville time. Apparently, he wasn’t joking. Now it was 8:05.

She heard laughter from the other side of White-head Street and turned. Gail squinted through the soft morning light, not quite sure she could trust her eyes. An elderly couple was making slow progress along the crosswalk, with the sexy captain at the woman’s elbow, gently guiding her toward the gate. He wasn’t wearing his jaunty cap that morning, and his thick black hair curled around his ears. The earring was back. And so was a hint of the salt-and-pepper fuzz. And he was smiling—a big, glorious, white-toothed smile she was seeing for the first time.

Gail gulped in air. She pressed her butt against the high stone wall that surrounded Hemingway’s house and hoped she could fade into the background. She held her breath. But Jesse looked up, and Gail could see that he recognized her instantly. She watched surprise flash in his eyes, followed by irritation, just like when he’d caught her staring at him the day before. Clearly, Captain Jesse might have big, bright smiles for little old ladies, but only a suspicious frown for her.

“I’m just here for the tour!” Gail busted out with that pronouncement before he’d even reached the curb, as though she needed to explain herself. Which was silly. She had nothing to apologize for. She might have fantasized about her gorgeous neighbor just a tiny bit the night before, in the privacy of her bedroom, with the blinds drawn, but it wasn’t like she was stalking him or anything.

“You’re here for the 8:00 a.m. walking tour?” Jesse dropped the old woman’s elbow and stared at Gail warily. “The ‘In Hemingway’s Footsteps’ tour?”

“Well, yeah.” Gail clutched her straw shoulder bag to the front of her body, as if protecting herself. “What’s it to you?”

That’s when she heard it for the first time—Jesse’s laugh. Its rich resonance penetrated her flesh and bone, causing her to shudder with pleasure. The intensity of that reaction startled Gail. Why did this guy affect her like this? How did he reduce her to a fool while setting her on fire inside? She didn’t like it much. It made her feel as if she wasn’t in control of herself.

Jesse shook his head, letting go with a deep sigh. “Then the gang’s all here, I suppose.” He gestured to the elderly couple. “This is Pete and Lana Purdy of Little Rock, who are celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary, and this is—” Jesse stopped in midsentence, his scowl deepening. “I’m sorry, Gail, but I didn’t get your last name.”

“Chapman.” Gail released the grip she had on her shoulder bag and shook the couple’s hands. “Dr. Gail Chapman from Beaverdale, Pennsylvania.”

Jesse exploded with a strange sound somewhere in between coughing and laughing. It figured, Gail thought. Deep down, the erudite captain was just another eighth-grade boy who thought anything with the word “beaver” in it was absolutely hilarious. She ignored him.

“Oh, how marvelous!” Lana Purdy said, beaming. “Pete here had a GP practice for fifty-five years. Delivered nearly six hundred babies, didn’t you, dear? And what is your specialty?”

This happened a lot. Gail smiled down on the pudgy little lady with short white curls. “I have my PhD in literature. I’m an associate professor at a small liberal arts college.”

Lana smiled. “How perfectly lovely!”

“Just great,” Jesse said under his breath.

That was it. Gail had reached the limit of her patience with this guy. He might be sexy as hell, but that had already been canceled out by the fact that he cursed at inanimate objects, had the emotional maturity of a Little Leaguer, scoffed at her profession and walked around sporting a near-permanent scowl. The man couldn’t be much older than Gail, but somewhere along the line he’d become a curmudgeon. How sad for him.

Gail cocked her head to the side and glared at Jesse, and he met her gaze straight on, unabashed. She scrutinized his face for flaws—there were none—while he studied her, one dark brow arched over one of his dusky blue eyes. The two of them remained in this standoff for several seconds, while Gail wondered about a few things. Why was Jesse here, anyway? Why did he feel the need to introduce everyone? Did he fancy himself some kind of rude one-man island-greeting committee? And where was the tour guide?

Suddenly, Jesse’s expression changed. The curiosity disappeared, replaced by a calm determination. Gail knew he was going to say something to her. She had a feeling it would be something important.

“Cash or credit?” he asked.





HOLY HELL, WHAT A MESS this was shaping up to be.

Beaverdale Gail knew far more about Hemingway than he did, which wasn’t much of a shocker considering she had a PhD in American Literature and Jesse’s only qualification was that he was a nautical-suspense author filling in for a flighty ex-sister-in-law who’d once again been summoned to traffic court.

It occurred to Jesse that if he had any hope of making that extended deadline in two weeks, he’d have to find a way to stop anyone else from asking for more favors. Maybe it was time for one of his deadline lockdowns: disconnect the phone, unplug the DSL and lock all his doors and windows.

The little tour group had come to one of their designated stops, 328 Greene Street, the site of the original Sloppy Joe’s Bar and Grill. Jesse explained that it was once a ramshackle establishment run by Ernest Hemingway’s fishing and carousing pal, Joe Russell, and went into his summary of Hemingway’s legendary drinking. “He had a tendency to get into trouble when he’d had a few too many,” Jesse said. “He had his famous fistfight with the poet Wallace Stevens here.”

“Actually,” Gail cut in, speaking more to the Purdys than him, “Hemingway was at home that evening, completely sober, when his sister told him that Stevens was at a house party claiming that Hemingway was a horrible writer. Ernest was so angry he drove to the house on Waddell Street and pummeled Stevens into a bloody heap on the floor. The poet was hospitalized and had to be fed through a straw for days.”

“Fascinating,” Lana Purdy said.

Jesse stared at the professor in wonder. Clearly, she had a lot of free time on her hands back in Beaverdale. But Jesse was the local. He was the tour guide here. He may have gotten that one detail wrong, but he had a whole arsenal of useless Hemingway minutiae at his disposal and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

He turned to Lana Purdy, who seemed to be legitimately interested in all this garbage, bless her soul. “Intriguingly enough,” Jesse began, the sarcasm dripping from his tone, “Wallace Stevens wasn’t even a famous poet at the time. He was still making his living—”

“Selling insurance,” Gail said. She slowly raised her gentle brown eyes to Jesse’s. “But you were right about Ernest often getting into trouble here. He met up with his third wife on a barstool at Sloppy Joe’s.” She smiled a smile so slight that he could have missed it if he weren’t paying close attention. “It was love at first sight for both of them,” she added.

Jesse laughed hard at her typical female delusion. Gail had romanticized what was essentially a sexual sting operation, not unlike the one that had snagged him. “I’m not sure about that, Professor Gail,” he said, still chuckling. “It was garden-variety entrapment. The chick ambushed him, actually paying the bartender twenty bucks to introduce her to the very married Hemingway.”

Gail raised her chin. “I take it you don’t believe in love at first sight?”

Jesse smiled kindly at her. “I believe in criminal background checks, Professor. And credit reports and not chucking the God-given capacities of my frontal lobe just to get me some—” Jesse stopped himself, suddenly remembering that Dr. and Mrs. Purdy were hanging on his every word. “Just to spend time with a pretty woman.”

Gail made a dismissive clicking sound at the back of her tongue and rolled her eyes. It reminded Jesse of a thirteen-year-old being told to clean her room. She turned on her heel and started walking.

They continued their stroll through Old Town at senior-citizen speed, passing French pastry shops and sidewalk eateries and art galleries. Jesse didn’t mind the slow pace because it gave him plenty of time to watch Dr. Gail walk. As he spoke about the publishing projects Hemingway worked on while living in Key West, Jesse studied Gail’s appearance and tried to decide why, exactly, he found the woman so damn alluring. She wore a preppy cotton skirt that hit just above her cute knees, a simple tailored sleeveless blouse and a pair of sensible sandals. Her hair was back in a ponytail. She wore very little makeup. And she was lugging around a shoulder bag big enough to stuff a corpse in.

For the life of him, Jesse couldn’t figure out why he found that unremarkable getup so provocative. Maybe living here most of his life had made him immune to tight spandex minis and cleavage-enhancing halter tops. Maybe his imagination was getting the best of him again, deciding that beneath the professor’s old-school exterior was something untamed, something deliciously and thoroughly…well…wild.

“Actually,” Gail said, correcting what had apparently been yet another of his tour-related inaccuracies, “To Have and Have Not was a character study of Key West locals, but it was also a commentary on the distribution of wealth in this country during the Depression.”

“Fascinating!” Lana said.

“I’ll tell you what’s fascinating,” Dr. Purdy said, marking the first time he’d opened his mouth since the tour began. “How the hell could a man as pickled as Hemingway write his own name, let alone a whole slew of novels?”

Jesse decided it was the perfect time to discuss Hemingway’s creative process, but Gail beat him to it.

“He did most of his work in the first half of the day, between eight and one, when the air was at its coolest—and before he started drinking,” she said.

Jesse jumped in. “He usually wrote in the studio he kept on the second floor of the pool house, which we’ll see when we get back to the Hemingway House in just a few minutes.”

Gail’s warm brown eyes flashed at him. Obviously, she was enjoying their little battle of trivia as much as he was. Without warning, Jesse’s mind traveled to that small liberal arts college she mentioned, where she stood at the front of a lecture room, skirt slit up to here and blouse unbuttoned down to there, her loose blond hair swinging as she turned her back to write something on the board. In the fantasy, Jesse’s mouth began to water as he stared at the professor’s gorgeous bottom cradled in the tight skirt. In reality, he was focused on her smooth legs and small sandaled feet, and his walking shorts were starting to tent.

He was in a heap of trouble. No way had he intended to hit on the temporary mami from next door. What the hell was going on here?

Dr. Gail was behaving like a snooty academic and he was, he knew, acting like an ass. But it didn’t seem to dampen a damn thing. Every time they looked at each other, his skin sizzled and his blood pounded. Gail was a brown-eyed, blond, buttoned-up package of female smarts and sensuality, and he was captivated. Simple as that. And though every working synapse in his brain was telling him to back away, he couldn’t help but nudge closer every opportunity he got. It was crazy. It was stupid. He knew better.

The very last thing he needed was to get involved with another woman who wanted a piece of his money and fame.

“By the way, Jesse, are there any other jobs of yours I should know about?” Gail smiled sweetly when she asked that question—no sign of sarcasm whatsoever. “Because I’m headed to the Pirate Museum tomorrow and I’m half expecting to see you employed there, too.”

Jesse’s heart stopped. She had no idea who he was. Well, of course she didn’t. He hadn’t told her, after all. They hadn’t met at a book signing. Sure, he was famous enough, but it was entirely possible that a brainiac like her didn’t read popular fiction. She might not have ever heard of J. D. Batista, author of the blockbuster “Dark Blue” suspense series set in the Florida Keys.

As if on cue, Jesse’s gaze wandered two doors down and he knew he had to act fast. He lodged himself between Gail and the huge display window of Island Books, where his face and latest release were prominently displayed.

“Shall we cross here?” he asked, placing a hand at the small of Gail’s back and pushing her toward the busy street. “Dr. and Mrs. Purdy? Would you come along, please?”

Though Gail frowned at him as though he was a madman, Jesse got the group across Duval and away from his poster-sized publicity photo. If pretty Gail didn’t know who he was, that meant all the electricity being generated between them was real. He wanted to keep it that way. Jesse couldn’t remember the last time he’d been attracted to a woman who wasn’t aware he was a local celebrity. This was too interesting to ruin now.

“Well?” Gail asked him. “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

Jesse smiled at her and shrugged, making sure his body blocked her view of the bookstore as they walked. “Like most locals, I piece together a living doing a little here and a little there, but I can assure you I don’t work at the Pirate Museum.”

Gail tipped her head just a little and inspected him from stem to stern. “Hmm,” she said. “That’s a shame. I think you’d fit right in.”

Just then, Lana Purdy giggled. “I must say, this has been the perfect way to celebrate our sixtieth anniversary.”

“I’m glad,” Jesse said.

“The two of you just crack me up,” she continued, hooking her arm in her husband’s. “Watching you two flirt so outrageously reminds me of our courtship so long ago.” Lana squeezed her husband close to her side and gave him a playful kiss on the cheek. “That was such an exciting time, wasn’t it, dear? We couldn’t get enough of each other back then!”

They still had a block to go to get back to the Hemingway House, but Gail stopped walking. Jesse watched her pull the giant carryall to the front of her body and stare at Mrs. Purdy in shock. Okay, fine. The old lady was a little off base, but did Gail have to look that horrified?

“Courtship?” Gail asked, her eyes widening.

Jesse laughed. “I think you’re mistaken about that,” he told the cute old woman. “Gail and I hardly know each other.”

Lana smiled and patted Jesse’s arm. “Oooh!” she said, shimmying her shoulders daringly. “That makes it even better!”





GAIL STOOD BEHIND THE red-velvet rope that dissected Ernest Hemingway’s bedroom. She stared down at the double bed that he’d shared with his wife. Or wives. Or, technically, his mistresses prior to becoming his wives. She studied the simple white chenille bedspread and matching pillow shams, picturing what the scene would have looked like all those years ago, the covers rumpled up and soaked with sweat from unbridled—and possibly even illicit—lovemaking.

She immediately straightened, looking around the room to make sure no one had witnessed her mental debauchery. What in the world was her problem? When had she become such a slattern? Why did she have sex on the brain?

One quick glance at Jesse, and she had her answer. He stood so close to her side that the skin of her arm felt hot. Technically, she felt hot all over. She needed to get a grip. She needed a cool glass of water.

“That’s a damn small bed if you ask me,” Dr. Purdy said, the second statement he’d made all morning. “Can’t get too creative in a bed that small.”

“Oh, you!” Lana said, giggling.

Gail could see the corner of Jesse’s mouth curl up in a faint smile, and he looked everywhere but at her.

“As I was saying,” he continued. “Hemingway had a ramp installed from the bedroom to his pool house studio, so he didn’t even have to…”

Gail wasn’t paying attention to Jesse’s words. She couldn’t hear much anyway because the seductive sound of the man’s baritone had caused the inside of her skull to hum. She decided to look at anything but the bed. Her eyes traveled to the way Jesse’s shirtsleeve had been rolled up on his muscled forearm. Then they strayed to the front of Jesse’s shorts. That had been a mistake.

She dabbed at her damp forehead, praying that no one in any of the tour groups converging in the Hemingway House could sense her private struggle. Of course they couldn’t. To everyone gathered near the velvet rope, Gail was just another visitor strolling through Hemingway’s bedroom. No one had any idea that she, Gail Chapman, PhD, was having a life-altering crisis.

Suddenly, the room began to reel. It felt as if her world was coming off its axis. Hemingway’s bed mocked her. It was nothing but a monument to uncontrollable desire and wild sex and everything she’d been doing without for too long, and it was all she could do not to start panting and howling like some kind of rabid animal.

She didn’t dare look at Jesse again. She didn’t have the courage. She kept her eyes down and her bag clutched tight as people moved around her.

“Gail.” Jesse’s deep voice had become a whisper, just for her, so close to her ear that she could feel the heat of his breath.

Slowly, cautiously, she looked up at him, and his sultry blue eyes wrinkled in a smile. Gail found herself counting the short silvery hairs sprinkled through the dark stubble on his chin and cheeks, and wondered if the barely there beard would feel rough to her fingertips.

“Gail?” he repeated.

“Yes?” Her focus lingered briefly on his wide, sumptuous mouth before she looked into those remarkable eyes once more.

“The group is moving on to the pool house,” he said, nodding his head toward the crowd clomping down the outside steps. “Would you like to come along?”

She couldn’t speak. All she could do was surrender to those dark blue pools of wantonness. Oh, God, she was going under.

“Are you all right?” Jesse’s trademark frown had reappeared, but it was fainter this time, and it seemed to be born of genuine concern rather than disapproval. “You look a little flushed, Professor.”

She nodded. Maybe she should say something. Maybe she should tell him that the whole morning had been too much for her repressed libido to handle—the taunting bed, the sultry heat, the witty repartee, the references to Hemingway’s sexual bravado and Jesse’s god-awful good looks. Maybe she should just tell Jesse the truth—that everything about him was so mesmerizingly masculine that she couldn’t trust herself. She was on the verge of doing something completely out of character.

That’s when Jesse reached up and brushed a loose strand of hair from the side of her face. That barest tickle of his touch sent an electric rush through her.

“I…” That was all she could get out. Gail swallowed hard. If only she’d rented a house that happened to be next door to a cute little retired couple like the Purdys, or, better yet, a group of vacationing Buddhist monks. Then maybe she wouldn’t be coming unglued like this.

“Yes?” Jesse asked.

It was the small hoop earring that sent her over the edge. It caught the sunlight and zapped her like a laser. Later, she would convince herself that the bright flash had short-circuited her brain.

“I haven’t had sex in two years,” she blurted out, breathing hard. “I’m a wreck. I came here hoping to meet a man of dubious character who could make my knees weak. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I’m unstable, and very, very deprived. You should probably stay away from me.”

Jesse’s eyes widened significantly. Gail held her breath. Would he laugh at her audacity? Would he be offended? Sickened? Would he call for museum security?

He did none of those things. Instead, Jesse’s eyes mellowed, then he helped himself to a languid visual journey of all things Gail, from the crown of her hair to the tips of her toes. When he was done, he leaned in close.

And kissed her.