Chapter Fifteen
Pepper snuggled deeper beneath her quilt, halfway through the world’s best comfort food (God bless Entenmann’s raspberry danishes) and the second disc of the BBC’sJane Eyre. There were many fine Mr. Rochester renditions in the world, but this particular incarnation left the others all behind.
Dad’s cryptic postcard had dealt her peace of mind a crippling blow that even starched cravats, repressed passions, and sugary frosting struggled to repair. She reached for her wineglass as her butt buzzed.
She lurched forward to grapple with her cell. An unfamiliar number.Ugh.Who used phones for talking these days? She hit the green Answer button with a rumble of displeasure. “Hello?”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime, Miss Knight?”
Heat radiated through her chest, like she’d slugged a shot of Southern Comfort. No mistaking the owner of that molasses-slow drawl, rich as peach cobbler. “Rhett?”
“Your light’s on.”
Whoa. That was an honest to goodness rumble. Her hand wandered to her inner thigh, her fingers tracing lazy spirals over the sensitive skin. “You spying on me?” Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
“Not hard when your bedroom window’s across the fence from mine.”
“I know,” she murmured. Her wandering gaze might have drifted back to his window, one or two (or twenty) times since the towel incident, by accident, of course. Line of sight and all that. Unfortunately, his curtain had remained drawn.
Wait a second.Her nails drove into her skin. What if he knew she’d peeped on him in the towel? A Danish crumb stuck in her throat.
“Busy?”
“No. Rewatching a movie,” she wheezed, her dry mouth making it hard to swallow. “Brooding gentleman in a scary English manor keeps a mad wife locked in the attic while he falls for the young governess.”
“Romantic.” His drawl went heavy on the sarcasm.
“Shut up! It is. There’s pain. Lots of sweet, sweet pain.” She hit Pause on the computer, freezing Mr. Rochester’s face in a shiver-inducing scowl. “Sorry, lover,” she mouthed.
His low chuckle sent a jolt of heat through her. “Remind me never to hire you for marketing.”
“It’s more than pain, though. It’s watching two lost people find a home in each other, you know?”
The other end went silent. Because what was the appropriate response to that level of blurt?
She licked her lips and fought for composure. Her foot-in-mouth disease had progressed to stage four. The only corrective course of treatment was a total tonguectomy.
A chair creaked on his end. “Can I come over?”
“Wait?” She quit writhing, frozen with surprise. “Now?”
“It’s late.” He sounded chagrined. “But there’s a situation that I need your help with.”
Heneededher? “Yeah. Yes, of course.” That magic word sent her scrambling from bed, yanking up the coverlet and cramming the Danish box into her nightstand drawer before reaching for her trusty lip gloss. “Come on over. I’m just sitting around.” She smacked her lips. Nothing like Peppermint Kisses to restore composure.
“I’ll meet you at the back door,” he answered. “The fence is easy to jump. Keep your yard light switched off.”
She frowned at the strange request. “Why the stealth?”
His response was a muffled grunt. “Never know who is watching who around here.”
She stared down at the phone, the call ended, before glancing to her window. Was that an insinuating comment?
She snapped up her head. No time for worry. Not when she had sixty seconds to appear like she’d spent the night doing something more attractive than stuffing her face with two thousand calories’ worth of jam-filled puff pastry. Lurching to the dresser mirror, she fluffed her bedhead and pinched color into her cheeks.
Not helping. She looked like someone who’d chased a bus.
Taken as a whole, her features were incongruent parts of a jigsaw puzzle forced together. The faint dog-bite scars. Eyebrows too thick. Mouth too thin. The weird mole on her lip. The perpetual frown in her forehead. A truly underwhelming chin.
