And speaking of her phone, she’d better keep her cell phone with her for emergencies. She looped the string holder around her wrist.
“Milk shake. Milk shake. Milk shake.” She repeated the duress words a few more times with a dance step to her walk as she committed it to memory.
She unbuttoned her jeans and kicked them into a pool in the hall until she wore only her sport bra, high-cut cotton panties and Christmas-green socks. Back before her cancer, she’d lived in a totally orderly world of beige and white, only to discover she controlled nothing. Now, she lived her life differently, vibrantly, with a certain respect for the psychedelic chaos factor.
Her problem lay in trying to blend the two parts of herself, past and present.
She padded down the narrow hall full of pictures of planes and friends snapped around the world. During her recovery, she’d taken a framing class and matted photos from her past in bright colors. She’d populated her home with the memories to give herself hope of adding more images someday. And she had.
Would she add one of herself with Rick to look at after he left?
Now wasn’t that a dangerous thought to carry into her bedroom? She creaked open the door, swinging the cell phone on her wrist, a reminder that Rick was only a simple call and wall away.
Had she been totally reckless to invite him here with their sexual history? Or maybe he was exactly the man to invite under her roof, perhaps under her bedspread, as well. He had scars, too. Could he be the one she could trust to show her own?
All-too-deep thoughts for her exhausted body tonight. She stepped into her room and clicked on the switch for her Tiffany lamp to cast multicolor lights over her Laura Ashley patterned pink-and-white room full of pillows and trinket boxes and her newfound joy in clutter. She soaked in the familiarity of it all, readying to flop into the plump comfort of her bed…
Only to stop short.
Lying on her floral pillow sham rested a surprise box of Godiva chocolates. Which would have been creepy enough by itself, except the box was open with half the candies missing and only the light chocolates remaining, as if someone had removed all the dark.
The kind she didn’t like.
Her fingers shook as she reached for her cell phone, already whispering, “Milk shake.”
Chapter 5
“You can’t sleep on a sofa.”
Can’t? No word stirred Rick to be contrary more than that.
Standing in Nola’s living room after the cops had left from taking their statements, he had plenty of frustration built against her candy-leaving stalker as it was. Rick refused to let her boot him out of her place in some misguided sense of independence that was flat-out unsafe.
Nola had to know this ramped things up to a new level of dangerous. She might look unfazed standing there in her sweatpants and T-shirt with her fists perched on her hips. But he still remembered those same fists shaking when he’d seen her in the sport bra and high-cut panties she’d been wearing when he made his way into her place after her “milk shake” call.
This stalker guy had slipped past her security system while she was out of town—and blown up her car in another city. The fella was freaking everywhere at once. Not a chance Rick was letting her out of his sight, even if it meant sleeping on her flowery sofa that oozed estrogen.
He met her nose-to-nose. Okay, more like nose to curly hair. “Like hell I can’t sleep there.”
“Let’s be realistic.” Her fists slid from her h*ps and she backed away to sit on the edge of the matching poofy chair. “You’re still recovering from major injuries. There is no way I’m putting you on a sofa, or even a pullout couch.”
“And there is no way I’m letting you sleep in this house alone.” He wasn’t going to be maneuvered through her obvious attempt at low-key body language. “The cops may not have been overly concerned about the private investigator vagrant they mentioned being the only disturbance recently, but I’m not dismissing it so easily.”
“It was actually a couple of neighborhoods over,” she said, her voice rock solid. “And my neighbor—”
“That Malcolm Cuvier fella, the ex-cop?”
“Yes.” He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot when the cops showed up. Forced into retirement at forty when he took a bullet in the lung, he still listened to his police scanner religiously. “He’s going to call in some favors and look into it a little deeper for us.”
Rick dropped to sit beside her on the arm of the chair. Besides, his legs were aching a little. He wasn’t getting all softhearted over this lady. He just needed to take care of his body since she was counting on him.
Still his hand gravitated to rub along her back between her shoulder blades absently while she stared off into space. He thought through what the cops had relayed about the stranger dude nearby. “All right, so the vagrant had an accent and was around fifty and claimed to be a private investigator. Could be our guy or hired by our guy. It’s a start, more than we knew before.”
“We?” She tipped her face up to his.
“Duh. You asked me to help out, remember?”
“Right.” She half smiled. “Duh.”