When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (12 page)

A king-sized bed dominated the cabin. He must need a big bed—just look at him—but the way the thing consumed the room . . . well, it made Grace nervous. Especially since Dan stared at her from the other side of the bed as if waiting for her to meet him in the middle. She continued to hover by the door.

“Listen to this.” Dan pushed a button on the answering machine, which sat between two precarious towers of books atop the nightstand. Perry’s voice filled the cabin and Grace couldn’t stop herself from scowling.

“Don’t bother to come looking for me, Chadwick. Mrs. Cabilla has given me leave and I’ve already left. You and Miss Lighthorse are on your own. Play nice. And your distributor caps are in the lake.” He hung up snickering, and Dan jabbed the erase button with a curse.

“What do you make of that?” he asked. “Think the guy has finally gone to the dark side?”

“He didn’t have far to travel if he did. Weasel spirit.”

Dan laughed. The sound was so infectious, Grace laughed, too. “I figured it was just me who thought he looked like a weasel,” he said.

“How could it be just you when the guy does look like a weasel? I think his aura would be muddy gray.” She wrinkled her nose. “That shade indicates a sneaky person.”

“Aura?” Dan’s smile died. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I kid about something like that?”

“You see auras?”

“Well, I don’t see floating colored clouds, though I’ve heard some people do. The aura is an energy field that surrounds every living thing. I feel things about people, and for me, feelings have colors.”

He didn’t look convinced, but what did she care? There was no use trying to explain feelings to people. Especially people like him.

“If Perry is gray, what am I?”

She caught a glimpse of a vulnerable little boy within those midnight eyes. A little boy who wanted her to tell him he was gold. Gold was very good.

Grace refused to
tell him what he really was, because passion was red, awareness orange, and those little silver twinkles meant fertility.

She crimped her lips together and shook her head, and the little boy fled. Dr. Chadwick came back. He was kind of gray, too, but a shade of gray that meant he left no job undone.

“This is serious work here.” Dan’s voice had gone stuffy again. “I need serious help.”

Damn, she was good. The guy needed to loosen up, or at least let go of that gray part of himself once in awhile. Maybe a few rounds with Olaf would help Dan more than it had helped her, but she doubted Dan would see it that way.

“I am serious. Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Do you see the air you breathe? Do you see love? Do you see the wind? No wonder you can’t find a cure. You need to look past the nose on your face.”

“That’s what Mrs. Cabilla said.”

“She was right.”

He looked at her for a long time, and while his eyes looked storm-tossed, his voice, when he spoke, was as calm as a lake ‘round about midnight.

“We should get back to the lab. I already called the service station in town, told them about the distributor cap theft at Mrs. Cabilla’s, and asked them to drive the cars home for us once they’ve fixed them.”

Grace had to wonder if he’d heard a thing she’d said. The man was infuriating. “Such service,” she mocked. “Are yo
u buying? Or is this on Mrs. Cabilla?”

He didn’t take the bait. Dan was a very hard man to rile. From the muscle working in his jaw, he also looked to be a prime candidate for an ulcer. “Nope,” he said. “It’s on Perry.”

“You think so?”

Dan looked her straight in the eye. “I know so.”

Grace tilted her head and stared right back. She liked what she saw. Perry didn’t stand a chance.

Chapter
Eight

They were on their own—for three weeks. No Perry, no Mrs. Cabilla. Just Dan and Grace, in the lab. Would he live through it? Or self-detonate from repressed lust and aggravated annoyance? Grace pushed his buttons as no one else ever had. Had she brought up that aura stuff just to see what he’d do? Nah, sensing auras was very Grace.

He stared at her over the wide expanse of his bed. She’d twisted her hair into one of those braids that started at the center of her forehead, wiggled over the crown, and squiggled all the way down her back.
Fancy
. He’d like to watch her do that—preferably naked, right here on this bed.

Dan gave himself a good mind-cursing. He would never make it through the next few weeks without dreaming of her—of touc
hing her, kissing her, wanting her. Inappropriate things to feel for his research assistant—especially one with a partner who wanted to break him in half just for breathing.

Dan soothed his conscience with the fact that he hadn’t hired her; she’d been foisted upon him. He wasn’t paying her, so she wasn’t really an employee. True enough, but a sense of impropriety remained—and with it just a twinge of the forbidden that had always excite
d him. “A little rebellion problem,” as his mother liked to call it.

While a child, temptation had always called to Dan louder than most. He’d rarely been able to resist— even though he quickly learned that he always got caught, embarrassed, and punished. Yet temptation continued to beckon to his rebellious soul. Right now temptation’s name was Grace.

Dan dragged his gaze from her face and glanced at his watch. He stared, then blinked. The time remained the same. A glance at the bedside clock revealed the same time, and he started around the bed.

He’d been daydreaming in here for a quarter of an hour. He never did that. He couldn’t do that and keep his research alive. There were too many pots boiling on his stove to daydream, but obviously the tendency to daydream increased with the scent of Grace on the wind.

He motored around the bed and headed for the door, intending to brush by her. Instead, being Dan, he bumped into her.

She stumbled a bit and he caught her elbows. She glanced into his face. He completely forgot what was cooking in the lab as things heated up considerably in his cabin. Especially him.

His hands slid beneath the short sleeves of her loose-fitting, neon-orange jumpsuit. Only Grace could wear such a thing and make the outfit look like a ten-thousand-dollar wedding gown instead of prison attire. His thumbs caressed inside of her arm, sliding across the softest skin he’d ever known.

She shuddered at his stroke and tried to pull away. Dan took a deep breath and tasted Grace on his tongue without even trying. His body kicked into the next dimension, just as the smoke alarm went off in the lab.

Dan picked Grace up and set her aside, then ran toward the blare of sound. He burst through the back door, skidded through the kitchen and came to a dead stop inside the laboratory. Grace thumped into his back.

“Umph,” she said. “What is it?”

He grunted and approached a boiling cauldron on a hot plate. He’d purposely put the hot plate beneath the smoke alarm to keep accidents to a minimum in his lab made of wood. Not that he’d ever burned a place down—not yet anyway. To be honest, he’d never forgotten an experiment before, but then he’d never had Grace in his bedroom before either.

“Can you make that noise stop?” Grace asked in a tight voice.

Dan glanced over his shoulder to find her wincing at the volume of sound, hands over her ears, shoulders hunched. She looked like she was in pain, and he hurriedly removed his experiment from the hot plate and walked away, waving his free hand through the steam to disperse the heat. A few seconds later, the alarm squawked one last time and went silent.

Dan was already intent upon what was in the pan. He’d meant for the concoction to boil to just that point; the experiment wasn’t ruined, but it didn’t yield anything new either. His sigh came from the depths of his disappointed soul.

“What’s the matter?”

The sound of Grace’s voice made Dan start. He just wasn’t used to people hanging around in the lab, and Grace moved so quietly she’d snuck up on him. Not that he’d completely forgotten she was there—how could he?—but he’d spaced out of this world for a moment.

Dan set the pan back on the counter, put his hands on the edge, and let his head fall between his shoulders. “Nothing’s the matter.”

“Is the experiment ruined?”

“Then why the face?”

He straightened. “What face?”

“This one.” Grace pulled her features into an exaggerated version of despair.

Dan laughed, surprising himself. She made him laugh in times of trouble. No one ever had before. “I didn’t look like th
at,” he said, still laughing because she was still making the face.

She stopped. “How would you know? I was the one doing the looking.”

Silence fell between them. They’d both been doing a lot of looking—and a lot of touching. Dan wanted to do a lot more. From the look on her face, so did Grace.

She turned away, walking toward the ba
nk of windows that overlooked the lake, and staring through them as if she could find answers out there to her greatest dilemma. Dan wished answers were that easy to find. If they were, he’d look out those windows a whole lot more.

“This has got to stop,” she said, still looking at the lake.

“What?”

“All the looking,
and the touching, and the kissing.”

“Why?” He sounded like an instructional tape on the best way to write a newspaper article—who, what, when, where, why and how—if you needed those questions asked, then Dan was your man.

“We’ll never get anything done if we keep drooling all over each other.”

Dan did not drool, but he got her point. “Maybe we should just sleep together and get it out of our systems.”

That surprised a bark of laughter from Grace. “Spoken like a true man.”

Dan straightened. No one had ever called him a true man before, though her words hadn’t sounded like a compliment.

Grace turned. “I don’t think so, Dan.”

His shoulders sagged again. “Why not?” Sounded like a great idea to him.

“Because this” —she moved her slim, long-fingered, naked hands about in a dance that aroused him right then and there— “this doesn’t feel like something that would burn out in one session to me. Does it to you?”

He was silent for a long moment. Truth or dare? He couldn’t lie about this. He couldn’t lie about much of anything. “No.”

“So instead of working we’d be . . .” She shrugged. “You know.”

“And that would be bad?”

“Yes. I don’t sleep with the enemy, Dan.”

“I’m not the enemy.”

“Yes, you are. We both want the same thing—the Cabilla Grant. I’m not giving it up. Are you?”

“No.”

“Then let’s get started.” She stepped toward the worktable.

He put a hand out to stop her. “How do I know you won’t sabotage my work?”

She looked at him as if he were the biggest idiot on the planet. Grace could make him feel like that as easily as she could make him feel like the coolest guy on campus.

Women
, he thought. Or maybe just
Grace
.

“Why would I sabotage your work? If we find a cure, you’re out of my hair. If I screw you up, and Mrs. Cabilla finds out, I’m out on my butt. I’d be better off helping you. Besides . . .” She sighed. “I really could use some help with those stiffs at the hospital.” She looked him up and down. Even though the look was cool, Dan went hot. “I think you talk their language in your sleep.”

“Want to find out?”

“Dan!” She smil
ed at him like he’d just discovered penicillin. “You made a joke.”

Not really, but if making a joke caused her to smile like that, he was willing to play along.

“There’s a first time for everything,” he said.

Grace spent the rest of the morning typing the results of Dan’s experiments into a computer program. Seemed Dan could do many things, but typing was not one of them.

“My fingers are too big. They hit two keys at once sometimes.”

His face reddened as if that were his fault—and a major fault at that. Grace looked at her own bird-fingers, as Olaf always called them, and wished she had
such problems. In her business big hands were a good thing.

Grace shrugged. “My father always said typing was a marketable skill. He was big on marketable skills. He had me pecking away at his office from the day I knew my letters.”

“You must be pretty good.”

“Eighty-five words a minute.”

He gaped. “You could get a pretty good job doing that.”

Her smile at his comical expression of amazement froze at the accidental insult of his words. “I have a pretty good job, wi
thout sitting on my butt and doing other people’s grunt work.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “This wasn’t my idea, if you’ll recall.”

“I know.” She put out her hand. “Just give me the stuff and show me what you want me to do with it.