Lucy And The Loner

Although it was common enough for women to cross the street just so they could walk by a fire station, Boone couldn’t recall a single incident where one had actually come to a firefighter’s house. Although now that he got a better look at her, he decided it might not be such a bad tradition to start.

“Hi,” she greeted him with a bright smile. “Remember me?”

For a moment he couldn’t say a word. He could only stare into those compelling blue eyes that had lingered in his thoughts until sleep had claimed him. No, he suddenly remembered, that wasn’t exactly true. Even in sleep, those eyes had haunted him.

“Yeah, sure I remember. You okay?”

She nodded anxiously but said nothing to confirm her condition for sure.

Boone nodded vaguely in response and forced himself to pull his gaze away from her eyes. Inevitably, though, it roved relentlessly over the rest of her. Cleaned up, he noted, she looked a little sturdier than she had the night before. Cleaned up, she looked a little heartier. She looked older, too, probably near his own thirty-six years, and much less fragile and commanding of care. Last night, she had seemed close to crumpling into a hopeless, helpless heap of despair. But now...

Now, he realized, in spite of the baggy, masculine, obviously borrowed clothing that hung on her body like sackcloth, she actually looked quite...fetching.

Although her bangs were long—nearly down in her eyes— her black hair was cut shorter than his own. The style might have been boyish had it not topped such utterly feminine features. Her lashes seemed even darker than her black hair, a stark contrast to the pale blue of her irises. Her cheekbones were well-defined and stained with pink, though Boone knew without question that the color didn’t result from any manufactured cosmetic. Her full lips, too, were blushed with color, though again, he could see that heightened emotion, and nothing more, caused the flush.

Dropping his gaze lower, he also saw that she bore a nasty bruise on the left side of her chin that reached to her mouth and swelled a small portion of her lower lip. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he curled his forefinger lightly against her mouth and brushed it gently over the injury. Vaguely he noted the warm breath that danced over his fingers. Vaguely he marveled at how soft her skin was. Vaguely he realized how much he wanted to touch her in other places, to see if they were warm and soft, too.

Her lips parted a mere breath, but her pupils expanded to nearly eclipse the blue of her irises. Only when he noted her reaction did Boone fully understand the intimacy inherent in his gesture, and the strangely erotic path his thoughts had suddenly begun to follow. He yanked back his hand with then speed of a viper and shoved it down to his side. Then he tried to meet her troubled gaze with as much indifference as he could fake.

He was about to say something else—although he couldn’t quite remember what—when she seemed to throw off the odd spell that had descended and snatched his hand back up to inspect it. Until then, he had forgotten about the jagged red line that rent his thumb from the cuticle nearly to his wrist.

“Oh, my God, did Mack do that to you?” the woman asked, stroking the pad of her thumb delicately over the wound.

Boone jerked his hand out of her grasp, uncomfortable with the way his skin warmed under her touch. But all he said in response was, “Yeah.”

She reached for his hand again, and when he snaked it back to his side, she looked positively dashed. “I am so sorry about that. Mack would normally never scratch someone. Really. He was just scared last night. He wasn’t himself.”

Boone expelled a dubious sound. “Yeah, I’m sure. Just tell me his shots are all up-to-date.”

“Of course they are,” she assured him. “Honest, he really is the sweetest creature in the world. If you got to know him, you’d realize that.”

Boone tried to keep his voice impassive when he replied, “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”

“I mean it. If you want—”

“You look a little battered yourself,” he interrupted, lifting his chin to indicate the contusion that marred her otherwise flawless complexion. “Did you have that checked out by a doctor?”

She shook her head, then touched the bruise and her lower lip with considerably less care than he had, working her jaw as if testing the damage. “It wasn’t necessary. It’s not as bad as it looks. I think it must have happened when I was coming down the stairs,” she added. “I don’t really remember much of what happened. One minute I was waking up in bed, the next I was standing in the yard holding Mack, watching my house burn to the ground.”

“It’s not unusual for people to experience that kind of thing when they’ve been through something like that,” Boone told her.

She nodded quickly, and he began to understand that the action wasn’t so much born out of her agreement with anything he said as it was her complete uncertainty about the situation.

“The insurance guy has already come by, can you imagine?” she hurried on. “I had no idea they’d be that efficient. Unfortunately they’re not quite as efficient at issuing checks. He could only give me an advance for now. Still, it’s better than nothing, right? And they already found the source of the fire, too,” she added, her obviously forced cheerfulness beginning to fade. “It was my clothes dryer. Of all things...”

She chuckled, but the sound was strangled and uneasy and accompanied by a sparkle of moisture in her eyes that she hastily swiped away with the back of one hand.

Although he couldn’t imagine why he cared, Boone heard himself ask, “Is there anything you need? Do you have someone to stay with? Family in the area?”

She sniffled and shook her head. “No. My folks passed away a few years ago, and I’m an only child.” She hesitated for a moment before amending, “Actually, I do have—”

She physically shook off whatever she was going to say, and as quickly as she’d changed the subject before, she changed it again. “The advance will cover anything I’ll need right away—clothes, food, that kind of thing. I’ve got a room at the Arlington Motor-on-Inn. Don’t know how long I’ll have to stay there, though.”

Boone nodded, his mind reeling at the dizzying wealth of information she’d imparted in that one quick announcement. And for some reason, he felt oddly cheated that there wasn’t some small thing he could offer to do for her. The reaction was more than a little strange. He hadn’t wanted to do something for somebody in a long time. Not since he’d offered himself heart and soul and lock, stock and barrel to his fiancée—or rather, his ex-fiancée—and received a good, swift kick in the teeth for a wedding present.

“Mind if I come in?” the woman asked, squashing the usual bitterness that generally rose with memories of Genevieve before it could rise to the fore. She held up her other hand to display a fast-food-issued cardboard caddy that held a bag of doughnuts and two plastic cups of coffee. “I went by the firehouse to look for you, but the guys there said you got off at eight and had already gone home. They also said you wouldn’t mind if I stopped by, as long as I brought you some coffee and doughnuts when I did.”

She grinned brightly, but it was clear that she was still none too certain about the response she was likely to receive from him.

“They, uh...they told me where you live,” she added, her smile falling somewhat. She seemed to think it was very important that he have that information. “I, um...I didn’t even have to ask for your address. They wrote down directions and everything. One of them even drew me a map.”

Boone gazed at her for a minute, trying to picture the scene at the station as it must have unfolded. Twelve randy firefighters ogling an attractive woman with eyes the color of a tropical sky. Yep. Must have been interesting.

“They told you I like coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?” he finally asked, somewhat mystified about that particular part of the story.

She bit her lip a little anxiously. “Actually, um...what they said was that you’d love to have me this morning, because you always like a little something, uh—” She cleared her throat indelicately, and the pink in her cheeks turned to red. “They said you like something, um, hot and sweet...in the morning. I just naturally assumed what they were talking about was—”

“I see,” he interrupted her before she could finish. Oh, yeah. He was going to have a little chat with his brothers down at the station. Pronto.

Reluctantly Boone stepped aside for her to enter, and she sailed past him on a breeze redolent of Ivory soap. The scent was appropriate for her. She seemed like the clean-cut, eat-all-your-vegetables, go-to-church-every-Sunday kind of woman. In other words, not at all his type. Not anymore, anyway.

“Look, lady—” he began as he closed the door behind himself.

“Lucy,” she corrected him over her shoulder. “Lucy Dolan. Where’s the kitchen?”

“Lucy,” he repeated obediently. “Keep walking. At the end of the hall turn right.”

He hesitated for a moment, then halfheartedly followed her to the room in question and found her making herself way too comfortable way too quickly. Without asking for permission to do so, she searched his cabinets until she located his dishes in the one by the sink, and carried two plates to the small oak table. Then she unpacked two doughnuts—presumably one for him and one for her—and took a seat at one of the chairs. Too tired and bemused to protest, Boone pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, then removed the plastic lid from the cup of steaming, fragrant coffee and brought it to his lips for a sip.

Fortified by even that small gesture, he lifted his doughnut for consideration before taking a bite. When he swallowed, he said, “This is about that debt you said you owe me last night, right?”

She nodded as she bit into her own doughnut, but was obviously too polite to speak with her mouth full.

“I told you that you don’t owe me anything,” he said. “But it was nice of you to bring me breakfast. Thanks.”

She swiped at a dusting of powdered sugar on her upper lip, then licked a scant dribble of jelly from the corner of her mouth. The gesture, although more than a little stirring—for him, anyway—seemed nervous, but he couldn’t imagine what she might have to feel uneasy about.

“Actually,” she said, decorously hiding her mouth behind her hand as she spoke, obviously embarrassed by his scrutiny, “this is about that debt, but you can’t possibly think that I’d consider a bag of doughnuts sufficient repayment.”

“Why not? All I did last night was my job. And I didn’t even do that well enough to save your house. Or much of anything else, for that matter.”

“You did a lot more than save my house,” she told him. “You saved my family. You saved me.”

“I saved your cat, you mean. You were almost out the door by the time I got there.”

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Well, as much of his hand as she could cover with those child-sized fingers of hers. They were good hands, though, he noted. Sturdy with short, blunt nails and seemingly no special care. They were working hands, plain and simple. Boone liked that. Genevieve’s hands had Jooked like something out of a diamond advertisement. He’d never been able to understand women who seemed to make a career out of grooming their hands as if they were thoroughbred horses.

When he looked up at her face again, Lucy was studying him with an intensity that made him uncomfortable. And as much as he wanted to look away, he found that he just couldn’t.

“Like I said,” she told him softly, “you saved my family.”

Her cat was her family? he wondered. Her cat? Hell, even he wasn’t that alone in the world. Not really. Not like that.

He pushed the thought away and focused on Lucy instead. His gaze drifted to the angry blue discoloration on her chin again, and he wished he could have arrived at the scene of the fire sooner—before she had taken her spill. Nothing should mar skin that beautiful, he thought, especially something like a bruise.

Then he reminded himself that thinking such things had gotten him into trouble in the past. And he could no more afford that kind of trouble now than he had been able to then. Playing the sucker once was bad enough. No way was he going to get taken in like that a second time.

“I saved your cat,” he reiterated.

“And me, too,” she reminded him. “You carried me to safety.”

“I just happened to be the one on the scene,” he said, explaining away the action before she could interpret it as heroic. “I was just doing my job. Anyone else in my situation would have done the same thing. It was no big deal.”

She shook her head in obvious disappointment, then withdrew her hand from his and wrapped it around her cup again. For a moment she only stared silently down into its dark depths. Then she said softly, “That’s okay. I don’t expect you to understand about me and Mack.”

When she looked up at him again, a stark sadness glittered in her eyes. “But the fact of the matter is that last night you ran into a burning house—a burning house, for Pete’s sake— to save my cat. A cat that means more to me than you can imagine. And for that I owe you. Big.”

Boone wondered if she’d feel the same way if he told her the reason he’d returned to that inferno to retrieve her cat last night was because he’d thought he was going back to save a child. What would she say if he confessed that had he known what he was risking his neck for was a cat, he probably would have just sat out on the lawn and let the damned thing be toasted into a kitty waffle?

Ultimately he decided it was probably better to keep that information to himself. It was one thing to brush off a woman’s concern for a debt that didn’t exist It was another matter entirely to make her want to strangle you with her bare hands.

“And I’m going to pay you back for what you did,” she told him again. “I promise you I am.”

When Boone Cagney said nothing in response to her assurance, Lucy fidgeted a bit in her chair. Hoo boy, she thought. She’d really managed to get herself into it this time. Last night, in the chaos and panic of the moment, she hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to her rescuer’s looks. But now, seated here in the picture of domestic bliss at his kitchen table, sharing doughnuts and coffee as if it were something the two of them did every morning, she realized he was a lot more attractive than she had recalled.

Not handsome, really. His features were too irregular, too unconventional for that. But definitely very attractive. His heavy-lidded eyes gave him a deceptively calm appearance, but there was a fire burning in their green depths that was too vivid, too bright, too hot for her comfort. His thick, dark blond curls might have been considered tousled on another man, but on this man, their dishevelment seemed more the result of anarchy.

His mouth, however, was what drew her attention most. Lush, mellow and evocative weren’t words Lucy would normally use in relation to a man who seemed so hard and unrelenting, but they all sprang immediately to mind when she gazed at Boone Cagney’s mouth. It spoke promises of incomparable sensuality without him ever having to utter a word.

She lowered her gaze when she realized she was staring at him. Then she felt her face heat up at the blatant hunger that hummed in her midsection at the sight of his naked chest and the rich scattering of dark blond curls that swirled from his shoulders to his belly and beyond. Lucy had never much gone for the overdeveloped, muscle-bound type. And although Boone Cagney was clearly a man who worked out and took care of his physique, he was no bulging neckless wonder like so many body builders seemed to be.

His form was solid, but in no way overdone. Swells of well-defined musculature corded his torso, and sculpted curves of sinew whipped around upper arms that were truly things of beauty. His forearms, too, were lean and hard with muscle, and an involuntary tremble shook her when she realized those arms were what had carried her to safety the night before.

Figures she’d only be semiconscious during something like that, Lucy thought wryly. That was the way her luck always seemed to run. Then again she wondered if any woman would remain at all coherent when arms like those pinned her to a body like that.

Had she remembered how attractive he was, she might have reconsidered the proposition she was about to make. But she was resigned now to what she was going to do. Because she simply could think of no other way to repay him for all that he had given her.

“You don’t have to pay me back,” he insisted in response to the promise she scarcely recalled making.

That was another thing about him that made her nervous. That voice. So low and husky, so slow and sexy. He rolled over every word leisurely, thoroughly, as if each one were an erotic vow of the most carnal variety. It was the voice of a man who would be quick to seduce and slow to satisfy. Every time Boone said something, it sent a ripple of hot delight buzzing right through Lucy’s libido.

She ignored his assurance to the contrary and told him, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”

“Lady... Lucy—” he immediately corrected himself when she opened her mouth to do it for him “—like I keep telling you, it’s not necessary to pay me back for anything. Okay?”

Instead of succumbing to his tone of command, Lucy hurried on before she had a chance to change her mind. In a rush of words so quick they almost sounded like one, she told him, “Here’s the deal. I’m giving you myself for one month.”

When the only response she received was a silent stare of complete incomprehension, Lucy tried again. “I’m yours to do your bidding, at your beck and call, for four weeks.”

But still he seemed not to understand.

Finally, in an effort to make it as clear as possible, Lucy took a deep breath, met his gaze as levelly as she could and told him, “For the next thirty days, Boone Cagney, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. Because for the next thirty days, I’m going to be your slave.”

Three

Not even the slightest flicker of acknowledgment lit his features when she outlined her intentions. Instead, he lifted his cup to his mouth for another idle sip of coffee and continued to gaze at her in that drop-lidded, maddeningly level way that made her want to reach over, take his hand lightly in hers and whisper, “Hey, big boy, why don’t you take me to the Casbah?”

“Did you hear me?” she asked instead, her voice sounding hollow and hesitant, even to her own ears. “I said I’m going to be your slave.” When he still remained silent, she elaborated further, “For one full month, starting today, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

He bit his lower lip thoughtfully for a moment, his eyes never leaving hers, and gradually her offer seemed to register. “My slave,” he finally repeated blandly.

She nodded, but said nothing more.

“For one month.”

She nodded again.

“Starting today.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I see.”

Then he sipped his coffee negligently, his expression thoroughly bored, as if hers was the kind of offer he received every day. Then again, who was Lucy to say that he didn’t receive offers of enslavement from women everyday? She wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to discover that there were scores of wemen just begging him to tie them up in his basement. Or wherever. And why did that realization bother her?

“That’s all you’re going to say?” she asked, surprised she could keep her voice steady. “‘I see?’ ”

He sipped his coffee carelessly again. “What am I supposed to say?”

She scrunched up her shoulders for a moment, then let them drop. “You’re supposed to take me up on my offer.”

“Well, since you couldn’t possibly be serious about your offer, why should I give you a serious response?”

“Who says I’m not serious?”

He rose out of his chair and leaned forward, bringing the naked upper half of his body over the table until his face was within inches of hers. His hooded eyes no longer seemed sleepy and disinterested, Lucy noted. On the contrary, they suddenly came alive with something indecent and incandescent.

“You’re offering to be a slave for a month to a man you don’t even know,” he said in that soft, slow voice, “and you consider it a serious offer?”

Well, when he put it like that, she thought, it did kind of sound a little...well...different from what she had originally intended.

“I mean, slave,” he repeated, pushing himself even closer to her, his voice growing quieter, more sinister, as he spoke. “That word just conjures up all kinds of...interesting images, doesn’t it?”

Lucy leaned back in her chair, but the action did nothing to distance her from his interrogation. “Um, now that you mention it, I guess it could, if—”

“Just what kind of woman,” he interrupted her, “would allow herself to be enslaved by a man she barely knows?”

Instead of seating himself in the chair that he’d occupied directly across the table, he plummeted into the one immediately next to Lucy and scooted forward. Then he propped one elbow on the table and settled his chin in his hand, and he leaned in close—very close—to her again.

He smelled of pine soap and wood smoke and something else she couldn’t identify, the combination intoxicating and irresistible. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply of his scent, holding her breath in her lungs for a long moment before releasing it in a ragged whisper of air.

“Hmm, Lucy?” he murmured softly. “What kind of woman makes an offer like the one you’ve just made?”

When she opened her eyes again, she found that he had moved closer to her still. If she’d wanted, she could have tilted her head just the tiniest bit and kissed him without the slightest effort. But of course, she reminded herself absently, he was actually little more than a stranger, and she didn’t want to kiss him. Not really.

Not yet.

The odd realization ruffled her, and she stammered out her reply. “One who...uh...who has a big debt to pay,” she finally managed to get out. “A really, really big debt. Huge, in fact,” she added emphatically, still shaken by her wayward thoughts. “Really...very...um...huge.”

Boone nodded, his gaze still boring into hers with a heat unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. “A huge debt, huh? Wow. I can only imagine what it’s going to take to repay a debt that big.” He paused a deliberate beat before adding, “Boy, can I imagine.”

He seemed to be pondering something that she was pretty sure he had no business pondering. Lucy observed him through narrowed eyes, wondering about the look he threw her as the wheels turned in his brain. Curiosity warred with speculation on his face, both traits inflamed by a kind of murky desire. For one heated, beady moment, she felt herself responding to it. For one heated, heady moment, a curious, speculative, not-so-murky desire wound through her.

Until she stamped it out and extinguished it thoroughly. There was absolutely nothing sexual about her offer, she reminded herself. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Just because a man had the most come-hitherest bedroom eyes she’d ever seen, and just because the thick swirls of hair strewn rampantly across his chest and torso absolutely commanded a woman’s touch, and just because she couldn’t quite dispel the hazy, half-remembered vision of being carried to safety in those incredible arms, and just because it had been a long, long time since any man had made her this jumpy and aroused, and just because his mouth was so...so...wow, so—

Lucy gave herself a good mental shake and reminded herself of the task at hand. Just because of all those other things, it didn’t mean she had to succumb to Boone Cagney. Being his slave for a month was one thing. Being his love slave for a month was a different matter altogether.

Although, now that she thought about it...

Stop it, she chastised herself. Don’t be that stupid. Again.