Baby, You're Mine

“In your folks’ home.” He stepped back, taking with him the comfort of his body against hers, leaving her desolate in a way she couldn’t explain. But the kitchen, and Murphy next to her—the rightness of that moment overwhelmed her.

“Your home, too.” She wouldn’t cry. But the pots shone so brightly and familiarly, and she hadn’t felt at home anywhere for so long. “Always your home, Murphy.”

“Your parents were good people.” He turned away from her and went to the industrial-sized refrigerator. “They gave me a...” he paused, his obvious discomfort painful to her.

“They gave you a home, Murphy. They loved you.” She couldn’t keep talking about her parents, about the past. Tears would make it impossible for her to do what she had to. “Mama and Pops loved you. You know that.”

“Here, kid.” He handed Frances Bird a black-skinned banana from the freezer.

“Cold.” She poked it dubiously and frowned. “Why do you put your bananas in your freezer?”

Murphy scratched his chin, ran a finger under the edge of his bandanna. “Because they were going bad?”

“Okay.” Frances Bird smushed the pulp out and into her mouth with a finger. “I like this.” She beamed a wide, smeary smile. Dragging a stool up to the table in the middle of the room, she said, “And you can call me Bird.”

“All right,” Murphy said slowly, his voice whiskey-warm and smooth.

With Murphy’s attention on Bird, Phoebe brushed the tears away from her eyes. Her gaze lingered on the table where Bird sat contentedly mashing frozen banana between her fingers.

Then, like an arrow piercing her, leaving her heart aching, Phoebe realized why the kitchen felt so familiar. “You have the old table from home. From the kitchen,” she murmured, her palm sliding across the smooth-grained walnut surface. She touched the vertical dent where she’d slammed down the turkey roaster in an argument with Murphy one Thanksgiving. If you could call it an argument when the other person stayed as calm and controlled as Murphy always did. She traced the dent again. “You kept it.”

“Pretty,” Frances Bird crooned, running her hand from one end of the table to the other, banana pulp streaking behind her small hand. “Pretty, pretty.”

Murphy’s palm lay on the table across from Phoebe’s, his fingertips stroking the wood as if he were unaware of his lingering touch against the grain.

“I needed a table. Your folks gave this one to me when they bought the new one. The chairs weren’t salvageable.”

“Oh.” She looked at the two painted ladder-back chairs lined up against the wall.

“I’m surprised you recognized the table. I refinished it.”

She swallowed. “I recognized it.” Oh, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, cry. Pain and yearning clamping around her heart, she swallowed again, looking blindly around the room that was like home.

Murphy didn’t want to see the glitter in Phoebe’s eyes. She had no right to go all teary-eyed on him over this damned table. It couldn’t mean anything to her.

She’d shaken the dust from home and town from her heels, diploma in hand, and, as far as he knew, never looked back. It had taken him hours to scrape off the crackled varnish and sand the table, to find the truth of the walnut. Every dusty, sweaty moment of sanding and stripping and scraping had been a pleasure. Compared to that, Phoebe’s tears didn’t mean diddly. That was a truth he needed to remember, too. He shrugged. “Just a piece of wood, that’s all,” he said, but his palm hesitated on the waxed surface.

“No.” Her voice was low and husky with those tears. Mirroring his own motion, her hand moved slowly against the shining surface. “Not just a piece of wood. Memories.” Her eyelashes fluttered, lifted, and for a moment he saw the tear-sparkle of her eyes.

“Piece of furniture. Needed repairing. That’s all.”

She turned toward him, almost as if she wanted to say something else, and her cheek caught the last ray of light from outside. He couldn’t look away from the play of light against her skin.

Her face was as smooth, as glossy as the table’s finish, as tempting to his touch. He’d learned the truth of that old wood, and he’d learned the truth of Phoebe. Like a butterfly, bright, fragile, she drifted here, there. Everywhere. As useless to expect that butterfly to last through the winter as to expect Phoebe Chapman McAllister to stay in Manatee Creek, to put down roots.

He lifted his hand carefully, his fingertips tingling as if he’d run them down a bare wire. Odd thoughts, this notion of Phoebe settling down, putting down roots. Tucking his palms under his armpits, he glanced at her with a scowl.

Her damp shirt clung to her like primer on drywall, every curve and bump outlined by the tangerine-colored, see-through cotton. He cleared his throat. He didn’t need to be thinking about Phoebe’s bumps and curves and how she looked like a juicy orange, all damp and glistening, waiting to be peeled. He tugged the bandanna from his head, wiped his hands and jammed the scarf into his pocket. “You and Frances Bird are wet. Y‘all want to get into some dry clothes?”

“I’m Bird. I told you already. Not Frances Bird.” Sitting on the stool she’d hauled to the table, Phoebe’s daughter beamed up at him. “Unless you’re real, real mad at me. Then everybody calls me Frances Bird.” She patty-caked her banana-coated hands together. Bits of pulp spurted onto the floor. “But I will not ever, ever, make you mad at me and I will stay out of your way while we are living with you and not be a bother at all and I will clear the table and pick up after myself. Okey doke?” She slapped her hands together for emphasis.

Banana shot onto his chin, dripped to his clean floor.

“Frances Bird. Get a paper towel.” Phoebe’s voice was stiff, but he heard the anxiety in it.

“See? I told you how it is. Now Mama’s mad at me.” Bird wrinkled her nose and sighed heavily.

He thought he heard Phoebe sigh too as he said, “Don’t bother, I’m fine. I’ll clean up later. After your mama and I have our conversation.”

“Right.” The quick look Phoebe threw her daughter carried a message he couldn’t quite decipher. Warning, sure. But something else there, too. The little girl settled back onto the stool, her brown eyes as big as paint-can lids. Phoebe shifted her feet, plucked at the drying fabric of her shorts where it stuck to her thighs. But she didn’t say anything more even as her daughter wiggled on the stool.

Wiping his chin thoughtfully with the tail of his shirt, he examined Phoebe, seeing now the disturbing details he’d missed earlier.

Like the purple circles under her eyes, the tiny lines at their corners. Like the strain in her posture. Familiar but different, this Phoebe. He didn’t quite know what to make of her, but he reckoned sooner or later she’d let him know what she wanted.

And sure as God made little green apples, Phoebe wanted something from him.

Her face was tense and her full bottom lip thinned with exasperation, but her eyes softened as she looked at her daughter. “Ah, Bird, sugar. I told you Murphy and I have to talk. We’ve landed on his doorstep without warning, I haven’t had a chance to explain and—”

“And we’re going to stay with him.” The stool went in one direction, Bird in another, as she clambered down. “You said Murphy won’t mind.”

Phoebe was going to have her hands full in a few years with that little dickens. Maybe he’d let the heart-to-heart with Phoebe wait a bit. Murphy let his shirttail fall. No rush to find out exactly what she had in mind. Yeah, she and her daughter were turning his evening upside down, but Bird tickled his funny bone, he was hungry, and he was mighty curious to see how Phoebe was going to try and soften him up. No reason he couldn’t let her play out her hand.

Taking his time, he smoothed his shirt down, and gave her a big grin.

Phoebe squinted at him.

“Taken to wearing glasses since I last saw you?”

She scowled, brown eyes darkening. “No, but I’m wondering why you’re smiling like the devil’s own son. You make me nervous when you smile like that, Murphy.”

“Do I, Phoebe? How...fascinatin’. Never known you to be the nervous type before.” He took a step toward her and noticed with interest that she didn’t move an inch, but her scowl sharpened as he tugged at the edge of her almost-dry shirt, let the back of his knuckle graze lightly against the heat of her belly.

She angled her chin at him, letting him know he was mighty close to some invisible line and daring him to step across it. “Stop this, Murphy. You’re irritating me. I told you not to.”

He let his knuckle slide once more against that velvet skin. “Did you now?”

“Back away, Murphy.” Brown eyes flared dark with temper and something else that made him lean into her, just that tiny bit closer, just to see what burned in those depths.

Phoebe had no idea how irritating he could be if he put his mind to it, and he was of a mind to irritate her, see what was behind her so-called spontaneous visit. Keeping his finger lightly wrapped in the brilliant cotton of her T-shirt, he asked, “So, you and Bird want to stay naturally air-conditioned or take a shower and change? Maybe stay for supper?”

“What are you up to, Murphy?”

He gave a tiny yank to the fabric. “Question is, sweetpea, what are you up to?”

This time he was positive he heard Phoebe sigh.

Chapter Two

The tickle of Murphy’s knuckles against her bare skin sent shivers down to Phoebe’s toes, and she inhaled with shock. She couldn’t help it, didn’t like it, didn’t want to reveal how much the mere touch of him affected her, but the brush of his hand on her skin was so unbearably welcome, so terrifyingly right, that she knew she’d made an enormous mistake in thinking she could live in Murphy’s house. Even for a week.

She couldn’t.

And then she shook her head, clearing the haze from her eyes, and looked, really looked at him.

With each tug of his finger in her shirt, her skin prickled and jumped, but she realized that his teasing smile was that of the boy she’d grown up with, not that of a man intent on flirting. Not the smile of a man with seduction on his mind.

Embarrassed to the roots of her hair at her foolishness—this was Murphy, for Pete’s sake—she smiled brightly, flipped her hair out of her eyes and told herself that she would manage somehow.

And she would keep a prudent, wary distance from Murphy Jones and his slow, easy grin that still turned her bones to pudding and her brain to mush. Heck, she could do that. She’d done it before. Now? It would be a snap, once she had a good night’s sleep. Heck, she had experience, age and desperation on her side.

She would control her own silly reaction to him.

And she could manage Murphy.

Of course she could, she thought dubiously as she saw the tiny movement at the corner of his mouth as she flipped her hair carelessly, her very carelessness a masterpiece of acting.

“Me? Up to something?” She whirled past him, plopped on a suitcase.

“Yeah, that’s the question.” His mouth twitched.

“Why, what a suspicious mind you have, Murphy.” She tossed him a grin, crossed her legs, and swung one leg up and down to the staccato rhythm pumping through her blood. “What with all your questions, a person might suspect you weren’t thrilled to have her drop in for company.” She slowed the gallop of her leg as his gaze followed its length, lingered along the top of her thigh, and moved on up to her face. It took all her effort not to yank at her suddenly too-short shorts.

“Don’t forget. I know you, Phoebe,” he said lightly. “And you’re hopping around like a kid crossing hot sand.”

“Don’t you forget you haven’t seen me in eight years. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” She stood up so abruptly that the suitcase wobbled, thumped flat on the floor. Her heart was beating like a snare drum, and she was afraid she’d say the wrong thing and there wouldn’t be a chance to salvage what she could from this situation that bordered on the disastrous. “People change, Murphy.”

“Do they, sweetpea?” His face was shadowed by one of the pans hanging from the ceiling.

“Of course. It’s called growing up. Maturing,” she said, making her tone as light as soap bubbles. “We all go through it. Even me.” She whirled away toward the door to the hall. “Anyway, I’ll take you up on your offer of food and a change of clothes. Bird and I are bone-tired. A shower will be nice.” Even knowing she was babbling, she couldn’t stop the avalanche of words. “You have hot water, right? Hey, even a cold shower would be a treat after this heat. Golly gee, I don’t know when I’ve felt this grubby and sticky, and I know you’re ready for a shower after working in the sun all day, and Bird—”

“Phoebe. I have hot water.”

Murphy’s amused burr of a voice slid down her spine, silenced her. Oh, Lord, she was making such a fool of herself. She inhaled and scooted a suitcase toward Bird. “Open up, baby, and pick out your sleeping duds.” Flipping open her own suitcase, trying her best to ignore Murphy’s attentive gaze that was destroying her confidence with every tick of the clock, Phoebe crouched down and rummaged through carefully packed shorts and underwear. She finally grabbed blindly at the next piece of clothing that met her frantic fingers, something red and, she discovered too late, skimpy. With her best teddy clutched in her shaking fingers, she tried to shut her suitcase.

A long stretch of denim-covered thigh came so close into view her eyes crossed. She shut them against the splendid sight of muscles tightly wrapped in faded blue. Murphy was in great shape. Terrific shape. The quickly glimpsed shape of him burned against her closed eyelids. Her face burned. She’d swear even her kneecaps burned.

“Here.” Two clicks and he’d closed the suitcases, nudged them neatly against the wall with a dusty work boot. “Easy does it.”

“Right.” She stood and puffed strands of hair out of her eyes. Standing in one place, she jittered. She needed action, movement. She needed escape from the crazy turmoil of her feelings around him.

That was when Murphy’s eyes, dark with pity, met hers and the evening fell apart.

He’d taken her hands in his, and she’d wanted to give up the effort, lean against him and bawl.

Later, oh, much, much later, she would remind herself that she hadn’t thrown herself into his arms. She’d kept her chin up even when his glance dropped from her face to her hands. She could take pride in that, and if a woman sometimes had to take pride where she could, well, sister Suzie, that was life, as her mama used to say.

Pride kept her chattering, filling the silence. A wall of noise to keep the pity from his eyes. A wall to protect herself from the unexpected urge to cry.

No matter what, she wouldn’t cry. Not in front of Murphy. Never, never, in front of him. That was pride, too. Earlier in the day, she’d thought she couldn’t afford pride, but now she discovered she had nothing else. In Murphy’s kitchen with his guarded gaze following her, his gray eyes taking in way too much, she clung to pride.

He showered, returned to the kitchen and leaned against the wall, watching her, not saying a word. She chattered, she cooked, she bounced from counter to table and back again throughout a meal that seemed unending. And then, blessed relief, blessed escape, she bolted with Bird from that beautiful kitchen to the refuge of the bathroom and the comforting familiarity of bathing Bird.

Murphy listened to the sounds of Phoebe and her daughter giggling in his bathroom upstairs. Funny how this house, even as well insulated as it was, carried sound. He could almost turn the female hum into words if he listened attentively.

He didn’t. He let his mind drift over the impressions of the afternoon and evening, trying to figure out the puzzle that was Phoebe. She was the same. She was different.

He recalled asking her, joking, but serious, too, what she was up to. In response, she’d tossed her head and hadn’t answered him, but her pupils had expanded with panic for a second, or at least that was what it looked like to him, and then she’d smiled, brushed her hair back and turned away, his knuckle sliding against her skin.

But he’d felt the tension in her skin before she moved, that little ripple of muscles tightening, of the brain signaling alarm.

For a second he’d wondered about that tiny reaction. Been curious about that hitch in her breath and her deer-in-the-headlights expression. For just that second, he’d fought the urge to trace that smooth skin to the dip of her belly button. If he’d been a different kind of man, if he and Phoebe didn’t have the history between them that they did, he would have cornered her then and there, pried the truth out of her.

But he’d never been a man who rushed anything, especially not a woman.

So, instead, he’d let an easy smile crease his face, he’d crossed his arms, and leaned against the table. Phoebe had flittered and fluttered from one end of the kitchen to the other, murmuring nonstop nonsense that went in one ear and out the other as he pondered her feverish activity and tried to see beneath all the flash and distraction she threw his way. Yawning, Bird floated in her wake, a small, sputtering tugboat.

Knowing Phoebe would continue in perpetual maotion until she dropped in a heap, he’d finally peeled himself away from the table and moseyed over to her. He’d taken both her hands in his, stopping her agitated motions. The tension in her body radiated to him as her fingers trembled in his.

“Stop it, Phoebe. You haven’t made a lick of sense for the last five minutes. I know you want something. Whatever it is can wait. I’m plumb tuckered out, and I’ve been working since before sun-up. Here’s how we’re going to play. First, we’re all going to have a bite to eat. Maybe you want to give your daughter a bath and settle her down for the night. Then we’ll see what’s what.”

“Right.” She’d jerked her hands from his, spun away from him and stuffed her hands deep into her shorts pockets.

Too late. He’d seen the bitten-to-the-quick nails earlier. His gaze lingered on the hidden shape of her balled fists and he frowned. “Thought you quit chewing your fingernails when you were thirteen and started wearing Kiss Me Crazy Red nail polish?”

She’d flushed, stuttered into speech. “Bird and I’ll figure out something to cook while you clean up from work. We’ll eat. Bird will take a bath. That’s what you said? Did I get it right?”

“Yep.” He’d scratched his chin and tried to forget the ragged fingernails, their vulnerability striking at something inside him that he’d rather ignore. “See what you can find in the fridge. A sandwich. Anything will do. Like I said, I don’t need much.”

“Right,” she’d muttered, letting her annoyance show.

He’d have to be dumb as a box of rocks to miss her annoyance. Nobody’d ever accused him of that.

He was secretly relieved, because an annoyed Phoebe was a million times better than a desperate, panicked one. “Oh, excellent, Phoebe. You’ve become a woman of few words. No long arguments. The world must be coming to an end.” He lifted one eyebrow and sauntered out He’d known without looking back that she’d watched him until he was out of sight. She always had.

Back then, when he was a teenager, truth to tell, he’d liked knowing she watched him. Liked seeing that shy pink rip over her face when he caught her looking.

Knowing her eyes were on him, he’d felt his pulse thump with an extra beat and been annoyed with himself. Thinking about that unwanted pulse thump, he’d stayed under the drumming lash of the shower until the water ran cold.

They’d eaten scrambled eggs with green peppers and onions and bacon, Phoebe chewing and swallowing with exaggerated pleasure, her hands in dizzying motion.

And then, balancing plates along her arm, she’d cleared the table and disappeared to bathe Bird while he cleaned up the kitchen. Phoebe had managed to use three of his new pans for her eggs. One for bacon, one for eggs, and one to sauté peppers and onions.

He would have used one pan. But that was Phoebe, turning everything topsy-turvy in a flurry of energy. He had to admit her cooking was better than his. Reflecting on this familiar but unknown Phoebe, he scrubbed and polished his pans, hung them back up on the rack, all facing in the same direction, and waited for her to finish putting Bird to bed.

He’d made a pallet of blankets and pillows for them in one of the empty bedrooms after opening the windows and turning on the ceiling fans. The stale, warm air of the closed rooms had moved sluggishly with the circling blades. He hoped the room would cool down as the night wore on.

For himself, he’d been in no hurry to install air-conditioning. He liked the rich earthiness of Florida’s heat and humidity, but he wondered how Phoebe and Bird would manage with nothing more than the lazy pass of ceiling fans to cool them.

Outside the screened windows of the kitchen, he sensed the stirring of a breeze, heavy with heat, heard the tree frogs chirping in a mad chorus of another kind of heat. Outside in the darkness the air was pungent with the smell of summer and desire.

Inside, though, the air was honeyed with Phoebe.

He’d forgotten how pervasive the scents and sounds of a woman were. And Phoebe? Ah, Phoebe left a trail of sweet-smelling fragrance in his shower, down his halls, a hint of apples and oranges that had him breathing deeply in the solitude of his kitchen, and the sudden hunger gripping him owed nothing at all to the shining pots and pans around him.

The murmuring of their voices, the giggles, all the disruptive, intrusive sounds flowed over him, swamped him with sensations. Crowded him. Made him want to hightail it out of his own house. Nothing new there. Phoebe had always crowded him.

“Hell,” he muttered, looking out the curtainless windows to the dark surrounding his house, a darkness that pressed in on him like the presence of Phoebe and her Bird.

Near the hall, a scarf, light and sheer, moved with some vagrant drift of air against his polished kitchen floor. The shimmering shape, all gold and red, seemed alive. As he stooped and picked up the scarf, the slippery material slid over the back of his hand. Lifting it to his nose, he breathed in the fragrance of Phoebe. More than bottled perfume, it was the scent of her, the very essence of her it seemed. The fabric caught against his end-of-the-day stubble, and he spread the scarf across the stool. That flimsy red thing she’d stuffed under Bird’s clothes in the suitcase was enough to leave a man sleepless for a month. In an instant, before he could stop the thought, he’d pictured her in that tiny piece of fabric, her legs gleaming against the brilliant red, her hips curving under that blaze of shimmery material.

Feminine stuff, all these scents and sounds. Seductive, the silky, slippery textures of Phoebe’s life.

He felt those invisible threads pulling tight around his chest, making his breathing shallow.

He didn’t want those pictures of Phoebe in his head, in his dreams.

But something had driven her to his house.

He didn’t want her here.

Not in his house, and for damned sure not in his well-ordered life. That was the bottom line. His life was finally under control, everything the way he liked it, thank you, ma’am. Bills paid. Business clicking along. Shoot, he didn’t want to think about air-conditioning and whether or not he had acceptable food in his fridge. He didn’t want to think about Phoebe’s daughter’s big eyes staring at him with awe.

He raked his hands through his hair, flicking the ends out of his eyes. Passing the stool where he’d placed her scarf, he let his fingers trail once more down that soft material. He didn’t want all this. Silky scarves. Noise. Faintly perfumed air.

And Phoebe.

Lord knew he didn’t want Phoebe Chapman—No. McAllister. He didn’t want Phoebe by any name in his house, in his life.

But there was that little girl. Frances Bird.

He flattened his hand against the windowpane above the screen and the dark beyond it. Even to get rid of Phoebe, could he ignore that skinny kid with the big eyes that reminded him of Phoebe at that age? That kid who twinkled and dimpled and sparkled up at him like he was something special?