“No,” he admitted. “To what do I owe all this?” He realized that his jaw was tight, the muscles working. He smiled to cover the tension.
She shrugged, and he wished that it had not made him aware of the movement of her breasts under the fabric. “I’m showing you my gratitude. You’ve been very nice to me.”
“I thought you had your heart set on a big dinner party.” He looked around the corner toward the living room. “Should I expect the Rotherbergs and Bortonis to leap out from behind the curtains?”
She grinned and shook her head. “No, it’s not a surprise party. It’s just a surprise.” She sipped her champagne and looked into his eyes. “For you.”
“Why?” He tried to seem casual. “I mean, I guess I should just say, ‘Thanks.’ ” Unexpectedly, the rest of it came out. “But, to be honest with you, coming in and finding someone inside my house is not my favorite experience. I suppose that for a lot of people, it must be an accepted custom: it seems to turn up in television plots almost as often as the Evil Twin or the Long-Lost Father, and nobody else seems shocked. But I am. If I want somebody to come, I invite them.”
The suddenness of her smile staggered him. It seemed to come from absolutely nowhere, and to be immune to anything he had said. She shrugged. “I gave you every opportunity, but you don’t seem to let yourself think about anything personal until after work, and that would have been too late, wouldn’t it? If I’d known it would bother you, I would have done it another way.” She turned away and began fiddling with the objects on the table again.
He was positive that he was right, but he began to regret having said the words. When she spun around to face him, she seemed to have forgotten he had spoken at alclass="underline" the smile seemed more radiant. “This doesn’t get you out of my party, by the way. When your wife comes home, I’m still going to have a bunch of the local gentry over for dinner. That pays you back officially for helping me last night.”
He waved his hand at the table. “Isn’t this enough?”
She cocked her head at him. “This isn’t the official thanks, which will be completely insincere and self-serving, and which Jane and I will like more than you do. This is something I thought of after I called you today. You’re all alone and you don’t know when your wife is coming back, and you sounded unhappy. Now is the time when a woman can offer something that will actually do you some good. So I decided to cook you a meal. Big deal.”
She pointedly set her champagne glass beside the nearest plate and pulled out the chair at the head of the table. “I’ve done enough explaining and I’m hungry. So sit while I serve you.”
Carey sat in the chair and she reached over his shoulder, then ceremoniously placed the linen napkin on his lap. “This is really something,” he conceded. He turned his head as he said it, and found her still leaning over him, her face much closer than he had anticipated. He could smell the subtle scent of her hair, see the big liquid green eyes glinting in the candlelight.
“It’s meant to be,” she said. “No empty promises.”
He was relieved when she brought out the big pot and began to serve the food. She had made bouillabaisse, and it had certainly not gotten worse during the hours after she had expected him to arrive. He tasted it.
“A small, neatly inscribed thank-you note would have been more than sufficient, but the food is wonderful,” he said.
She tasted it too. “It turned out okay. I gave myself a tour of the house while you were out. When I got a good look at the kitchen, I figured I’d have to take this seriously if I was going to give you what you were used to.”
“Well, thank you. You really know how to cook. You must like to.”
She shook her head. “I hate it. I learned because men like to eat, and I like men.”
He hurried to change the subject. “I just remembered that I saw your car in the driveway. Did everything go all right?”
She shrugged. “It was pretty much what you said in the morning. They were there all the time. The man I paid the ransom for my car said they don’t always hear the phone ringing from outside.”
“How much was it?”
“Three hundred. Isn’t that outrageous? A hundred for towing the car down there, and two hundred for the fine. And they don’t take credit cards.”
Carey said, “I feel terrible. It was partly my fault. I’d like to pay for it.” He had a strong impulse to make all accounts even, so the give-and-take would stop.
Her amused look returned. “That’s very chivalrous. But it’s not the money, it’s the effrontery.” She seemed to realize something that hadn’t occurred to her before. “And anyway, the whole point of the evening was to get out and meet people, and I guess it served its purpose. I met a lot of people, and made one friend.”
He gave a noncommittal smile and a little nod. He tried to decide why the idea made him so uncomfortable. Maybe living in a small city all his life had made him conservative and timid about meeting new people, but he had known Susan Haynes little more than twenty-four hours. The word “friend” sounded premature, almost presumptuous.
There was also an element of danger in it that he did not find appealing. She was enormously attractive, and her conversation always had a sexual edge to it that seemed uncalculated but that his common sense told him could not be. It wasn’t entirely clear whether she was overtly tempting him or treating him as though he were asexual. Maybe she was just behaving with a kind of adult openness that he had become entitled to as a married man, and he wasn’t used to it yet. Maybe when you were happily married, women simply accepted you as safely ineligible for sexual relationships and became less guarded. But it was difficult to imagine a friendship with Susan Haynes extending into the future. Conversations would be full of tension and ambiguity. He suspected that Jane would take one look at her, listen to about three sentences, and announce that she hated her.
Carey realized that the silence had gone on for too long. “Did you make more progress in getting settled today, or just slave over a hot stove?”
“Not much progress. I spent most of the day thinking about you.”
“Oh?” Trouble.
“Oh?” she mocked. “As if you weren’t thinking about me.”
He decided he had better not evade that one. “To be honest with you, over the years I’ve gotten to be pretty good at keeping my mind focused on my work during the day. I find I lose fewer patients that way.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She shook her head and stared down at her lap. “I’m doing it again. It’s like a reflex. I guess that’s why I couldn’t get you out of my mind—you’re the witness to my gaffe. I made such a mess of things last night. It was completely unfair.”
He noticed that Susan had stopped eating some time ago, and he had eaten as much as he wanted. “What was unfair?”
She smiled apologetically and shrugged, then looked at him from behind a strand of blond hair. “Sometimes when you meet somebody—even though you like them, or maybe because you like them—you start off wrong, and just keep going that way. You know it isn’t the way you want to be with them, but somehow you can’t figure out how to stop and start all over again. What I should have done last night was have a pleasant dinner with you, then call a cab and go home.”
He silently agreed with her. He fervently wished he had made some excuse and called her a cab. “I really didn’t mind giving you a ride,” Carey lied. “None of this was any trouble at all.”