Cat's Cradle

He gave her a mock-threatening scowl. “Don’t get smart. Are you here to work or make fun of me?”

Some little devil inside prompted her to deliver a snappy comeback. She quelled the devil. She remained businesslike and distant, as she’d promised herself she would be. “What can I do?”

“Sit down.” He patted the space right beside him.

She hesitated, thinking it wouldn’t be wise to sit too close to him. And then she decided that if she didn’t sit close to him, he would think she was nervous around him. And she wasn’t nervous around him. Not in the least.

He held out the booklet. “Come on. Take this. Do something about it.”

She took the booklet and dropped next to him. Then she did her best to concentrate on the diagram he’d been looking at.

“God,” he said.

She shot him a suspicious glance. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just wishing.”

She knew she shouldn’t ask, but she did anyway. “Wishing what?”

He snorted. “That I could get up from here with one-tenth the ease that you got down.”

“Do you want to get up? I’ll be glad to help you.”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I’m working up to it gradually.”

This close, she could see that there were little gold flecks in the velvet brown of his eyes. His chin had a cleft in it. Cat seemed to remember that his blade of a nose had once been straighter. He’d probably broken it jumping out of a building for a movie or riding a bucking bronc in a rodeo.

She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Why did you get down, if you knew it was going to be a problem getting up?”

“Hey, I have to do the tough things, if I ever want them to be anything like easy again.”

“Will they ever be easy again?”

“It’s relative. I’ll never run a marathon, if that’s what you mean.”

They were smiling at each other.

Cat reminded herself once more that she was here to work, not hear all about how Dillon McKenna was dealing with the changes his accident had made in his life. She looked at the booklet again. The page showed the terminals on the back of the VCR. It was a very clear and simple diagram. She glanced up at Dillon, to tell him this little task should be a piece of cake.

But something else entirely popped out of her mouth. “Has it been hard for you?”

He answered frankly. “Yeah. On a lot of levels. But it was time for a change anyway, you know?”

“How so?”

“Well, sometimes, in the past few years, I’ve found myself wondering exactly what it was I had to prove. Risking my life to jump a pyramid of sixty Buicks on a souped-up Harley started to seem more stupid than heroic to me. And the accident at the Mirage was bad. I’ve been broken up a lot in my time, but this was the worst. I was on my back or in a wheelchair for six and a half months.”

Cat thought of her own good, strong body. She depended on it to perform for her. How would she deal with it if she couldn’t walk for six months? Not well, she suspected. Not well at all. “I’ll bet you went nuts.”

“Yeah. You could say that.” He grinned rakishly.

Cat stared at his lips. They were wide and nicely shaped, lips made for rakish grins. There was a faint, jagged scar on his upper lip, like a tiny lightning bolt.

“What’s that?” She reached out, almost touched the scar, but stopped herself just in time.

Dillon knew what she meant. He touched the scar himself, lifting his dark brows at her in silent question.

She nodded in confirmation.

“A steer hooked me. Back when I was still riding the rodeos.”

“With its horn, you mean?”

“You got it. Ripped my lip in half. But that was fifteen years ago. It’s faded almost to nothing now.” He leaned in closer to her, so she could get a better look.

Cat leaned in, too, though she could see perfectly fine from right where she was. She realized that the gold specks in his eyes seemed to be glittering, like tiny flakes of pyrites in a mountain stream. And she also liked the smell of him. A clean smell, with a hint of something else, a little like cedar, tangy and sharp.

Right then, the door chimes rang.

Cat jerked bolt upright as a hot blush went shooting straight up to the roots of her hair.

“I...um...”

But Dillon seemed totally unconcerned. “Great. That’s probably the equipment for the gym.”

She took her cue from him. After all, if he thought nothing had happened, then nothing really had. Had it? She’d only leaned in close to look at that scar on his lip, that was all.

He smiled ruefully. “Either help me up from here—or answer that, will you?”

“Sure. No problem. I’ll get it.” She leapt to her feet and flew to the door.

It was the gym equipment. Since Dillon had to sign for it and show them where he wanted it, she helped him get up as soon as she let in the two delivery men.

The main living area of the house was upstairs, including the master suite. Downstairs was a central room off of which branched three more large rooms and two baths. One of those rooms had been intended for a gym; its walls were lined with mirrors. The equipment had to go in there.

Once everything was inside, it turned out that the delivery men actually were fully trained in assembly of the equipment. So Cat left Dillon to supervise them and went back to the upper level to tackle all the electronic gadgets that waited there.

By one in the afternoon, the delivery men took their leave and Cat had the chaos upstairs under control. She showed Dillon how to work all his new electronic toys, pointing out that he wouldn’t get anything but a few public stations on his fancy big screen until he either hooked up to cable or brought in that satellite dish he’d mentioned.

He said the dish was due this week. “And let’s have lunch. I’m starving.”

“I have a sandwich in my truck,” she said. “But aren’t we done for the day?”

He shook his head. “Don’t forget the wood. I like a fire, especially in the evenings. And I seem to have used up nearly all of what you split for me Friday.”

That was okay with Cat. As the hours added up, so did the money. “I’ll go eat and—”

“What do you mean, you’ll go eat?”

“I told you. I have a sandwich in my—”

“It’s probably peanut butter and jelly, right?”

She felt defensive. “What’s wrong with peanut butter and jelly?”

“So it is peanut butter and jelly.” He looked ridiculously proud of himself to have guessed. “I knew it. And forget it. You’re not going to sit out there on your tailgate, eating peanut butter and jelly in the freezing cold.”

“This is silly. It’s not that cold. And I like peanut butter and jelly.”

“Fine. Save it for a snack later. I’m making lunch.”

“But I—”

“Forget arguing. I’m the boss. Don’t make a big deal out of this, all right?”

She looked at him measuringly for a moment, feeling one-upped somehow. She was suspicious. But why? He hadn’t been any more than casually friendly with her all morning. Had he?

Oh, what was the matter with her? There was nothing going on here. Wild Dillon McKenna had grown up into a very nice man who was paying her good money for honest work—and who was willing to throw a free lunch into the bargain.

She had to get real here. These misgivings she kept having about his motives were completely in her own mind. She was Cat Beaudine, after all. She knew the things people said about her when they thought she didn’t hear.

That she was tough and strong and someone you could count on. And about as feminine as Paul Bunyan. Men were her friends. Men were her equals. But men never looked at her the way she’d seen them look at her sisters—or even her mother, for that matter.

And there was no reason in the world why Dillon McKenna—who could probably have just about any available woman in the Western Hemisphere—would see her any differently than other men saw her.

She smiled at Dillon. “Well, thanks then. Lunch would be nice.”

After she had washed her hands in the half bath off the kitchen, she went and sat at the table. Dillon was just pulling a cooked, cut-up turkey out of the refrigerator.

“Where did you get that?”

“At the store.”

“All roasted and cut up like that?”

He confessed that he’d done the roasting and cutting up himself. “I like to cook. Especially lately. It’s one of the few things I can do for myself that hardly hurts at all.” He got out a cutting board and a big, gleaming knife and began slicing meat off the breast section. Cat’s stomach rumbled, the meat looked so good. He winked at her. “You should have seen me in my wheelchair, flying around the kitchen. I was impressive.”

“I’ll bet.”

When he had a nice, tall stack of meat sliced, he got out bread, mayonnaise and lettuce and assembled two fat, wonderful-looking sandwiches. With them, he offered pickles and cranberry sauce and tall glasses of milk.

“You were right,” she told him, after the first heavenly bite. “This beats the heck out of peanut butter and jelly.”

When lunch was over, Cat went outside and split wood for two hours, carefully re-covering the pile of logs when she was done. Then she carried what she’d split into the garage and stacked it against a wall, so that it would be protected from the elements as well as reasonably easy for Dillon to bring in.

By then, it was growing dark. She was ready to go home. She stuck her head in the kitchen door, thinking she’d just give a yell and tell Dillon she was leaving.

But he was nowhere in sight. When she called, she got no answer. She was forced to step inside.

“Dillon!” She moved through the big kitchen, into the main room. It was then that she heard music, coming from downstairs.

She followed the sound and found him in his newly set-up gym. He was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, standing before one of the walls of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, doing bicep curls with a pair of fat dumbbells. On the floor at his feet was a portable tape player/radio—the kind that kids call a boom box. It was blaring out music by Talking Heads.

As soon as he saw Cat, Dillon put down the dumbbells and switched off the boom box. “Gotta get a stereo in here, too.” He straightened again and came toward her.

He was sweating. There were dark stains on his shirt—at the neck, chest, belly and beneath his arms. Little beads of moisture slid off his damp hair and tracked down his flushed face and corded neck.

Cat felt overwhelmed suddenly, by all that heated male flesh. And then she wondered again what her problem was lately. Since she’d been old enough to wield a hammer, she’d spent her summer months working construction crews on whatever building projects came her way. She toiled right alongside a bunch of sweaty guys with their shirts off and she never thought twice about it.

“All finished?” Dillon asked.

“What? Oh. Yeah. All done.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

His expression was bland, but the gold flecks in his eyes seemed to be dancing. “Yeah. You know. The day after today.”

“You need me tomorrow?”

“You bet.”

“For what?”

“A thousand things.”

“Like what?”

“The satellite dish might arrive.”

“And what else?”

“Let’s talk about it then. Ten o’clock. As usual.”

She felt provoked, though she couldn’t figure out why. “As usual. What does that mean? I’ve only worked for you for one day.”

“Is this an important point?”

“Of course not. I just want things clear, that’s all.”

“Fine. What isn’t clear to you?” A single crystalline drop of sweat dripped down the bridge of his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. She saw the inside of his forearm, shiny with moisture, as hard as a rock and ropy with tendons and veins. “Well?”

She felt dazed. She couldn’t think. “I...nothing.”

He was smiling again. “Good. I do appreciate this.”

Now she felt like a fool. “Of course.”

“Tomorrow, then? Ten o’clock.”

“Yes. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

Four

The satellite dish did not arrive the next day, but Dillon’s books did.

He put Cat right to work measuring and estimating the cost for new shelves in the living area and also downstairs in the big central room. Next, he decided a trip to Reno was in order that very day, to purchase the lumber. He insisted they both had to go, since she was the one building the shelves and he was the one buying them.

She told him that there was absolutely no reason he had to go with her to get the lumber.

He gave her a grin that actually looked shy. “Yes, there is. I want to choose the wood myself. Please?”

He was really laying on the charm, she thought, and refused to admit that it was working. She looked away—anywhere but into those coaxing brown eyes—and gestured at all the open boxes of books strewn around the room. “I don’t get it. What’s this new thing you’ve got about books?”

He made a tsking sound. “Now, Cat. Was that a nice thing to say?”

She glanced at him again, wondering what he was up to. “What do you mean?”

He was pretending to look wounded. “You’re referring to the fact that I almost flunked out of high school my senior year, aren’t you? You can’t understand how a loser like I was could have grown up to need a whole houseful of bookcases.”

“I did not say you were a loser.”

“No, but you thought it. And hey, it’s okay. I was a messed-up kid. It’s not a secret. But now I’m not a kid anymore. And I like to read. When I first started doing gags for the movies, it was books that kept me sane.”

“Gags?”

“Yeah, gags. Stunts. Same thing.”

Cat asked, “Why did books keep you sane?” though she’d told herself all last night that when she came in to work for him today she would keep the talk strictly focused on the job at hand.

Dillon was only too happy to forget the job at hand. “In the movies, it’s always hurry up and wait. You can wait hours, days, for the weather to clear. Or for a shot to be set up. I learned to carry a book along with me all the time. Then when it came time to wait, I had something to occupy my mind.”

Another question she had no business asking found its way out of her mouth. “Did you ever go any farther in school?”

He bent, a little stiffly as always since his return home, and snared a book from one of the boxes. He looked at the title on the binding, then gently opened it to the first page. “Nah. Never got around to it—not that any reputable college would take me.” He glanced up from the book. “What about you? Did you ever get to college?”

“No,” she said quickly, wondering why in heaven’s name she’d asked him that question about going farther in school.

“Why not? I seem to remember that you were a real brain. There was even a scholarship, wasn’t there?”

Cat stuck her hands into her pockets and looked out the window at the trees and the ever-present winter mist. “Yes.”

“What school was it? I forget.”

She wanted to tell him she didn’t wish to discuss this with him, but that would be making a big deal out of it. And if she made a big deal out of it, he would sense that she often regretted missing her chance for a college education. She didn’t want him to know of her regret. It was too personal. And she was being careful to avoid anything personal with him.

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