From This Day Forward

A hand that abruptly halted midway. Midway, where a bra strap would usually be.

They both froze. Annie was suddenly, acutely aware not only of the lack of a bra strap, but also that her bare breasts were against his hard chest, with only two thin layers between them. At the thought, her nipples, nestled so closely to Griffin, tightened.

Oh, mercy. She jumped away from him, the soles of her shoes crunching against pieces of ceramic mug. Her face felt flushed and she crossed her arms over herself as she looked down at the mess on the floor. “I…” She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It’s okay,” he said. Maybe his voice was a bit hoarse, maybe not. “Let me take care of it.”

Take care of what? But Annie’s brain wasn’t firing with all the necessary cylinders even as he strode to the broom propped in one corner of the room and then strode back to start sweeping up the mess at her feet. She didn’t prevent him from cleaning, but merely stepped clear of the debris as she giddily recalled the hardness of his chest and the heavy warmth of his hand and how comforting and…and…um, pleasing it had been to feel Griffin against her.

She didn’t stop him from opening the cabinet under the sink, either. He had to toss the contents of the dustpan, after all, into the oversized white garbage pail.

The garbage pail that, she belatedly remembered, was almost overflowing with ice-cream-covered undergarments.

“Oh!” Annie said, dashing forward. She’d even gingerly pawed through the mess with tongs at one point, desperate for something wearable, so that several bras hung drunkenly over the edge to reveal a pile of ice-milk-sodden, but clearly recognizable panties. “I don’t…I’m not…”

Griffin looked at her, his brows raised. “You don’t?” He looked back at the contents of the can. “You’re not?” He looked at her again. “I can…see that. I just don’t understand why.”

Why? How could she possibly tell him about what had gone through her mind yesterday when she was lying on the bank’s floor? Annie chewed on her lower lip, feeling completely foolish about those silly vows. Then someone, a sainted someone in her book, rapped impatiently on her front door. Without a second’s hesitation, Annie grabbed at the opportunity to escape what now seemed horribly embarrassing and completely unexplainable.

“Company!” she said brightly, pasting on a cheery smile. Then she turned and ran to see who it was, as if the man she’d once adored from afar hadn’t just discovered her naughty, though totally innocent, secret.

On the other side of Annie’s front door stood two dear, familiar figures—her mother, Natalie Smith, and Annie’s best friend, Elena O’Brien. “Mom, Elena. Come in, come in.”

With a surge of relief, Annie ushered them inside. They were just the people to remind her of the real Annie Smith. The ordinarily patient and ordinarily shy Annie Smith. She wasn’t the unfamiliar creature who had tossed her clothes away yesterday any more than she was the half-naked woman who’d found herself in the arms of Griffin Chase this morning.

Her mother and Elena would help her remember that.

Annie’s mom looked at Annie closely, an unfamiliar frown on her pretty face. “Honey? Are you all right? You look…different.”

“No, I don’t,” Annie denied quickly. I’m the same. Nothing has changed. “I told you yesterday, Mom, I’m fine. A-okay. Peachy-keen. Hunky-dory.”

“You left out tutti-frutti.” Elena grinned, her sassy smile bright against the golden color of her skin. Her Mexican mother and Irish father accounted for her straight black hair and blue eyes.

“Still,” Elena continued, “your mom wasn’t going to stop worrying until I drove her over here. I told her nothing could shake you—” Her eyes widened as she caught sight of something over Annie’s shoulder. “Whoa. Maybe I was wrong.”

Annie swung around slowly to find Griffin coming into the room. It’s not that she’d forgotten him, exactly, but she hadn’t quite yet figured out how to explain his presence or how to respond to him. Particularly now that she knew he knew that what she wore beneath her skirt and T-shirt was exactly zippo.

But he took the uncomfortable situation out of her hands by walking directly to Annie’s mom and lifting her off her feet in a grizzly-worthy bear hug.

“Griffin!” her mom cried. When he set her down she lifted up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. “You’re home.”

“And completely devastated to discover that in the two years I was gone you had retired.” He smiled down at her. “Any chance I could entice you back? At least just to fill the cookie jar?”

Her mother laughed, and under the cover of their continuing conversation, Elena sidled over to Annie. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Annie rolled her eyes. “I told you yesterday. He gave me a ride from the police station.”

Elena’s brows rose. “What about last night? Any additional, uh…rides?”

Annie lightly slapped her friend’s arm. As if a man like him would look at her twice in that way! “Of course not. Griffin merely came over to check on me this morning. It was a neighborly thing to do.”

Elena’s eyebrows rose even higher. “Neighborly?” she asked, her voice skeptical.

Before she could scold her friend again, Griffin turned away from Annie’s mom to look at the two younger women. “And this is?” He was asking for an introduction to Elena, but his gaze was only for Annie.

Suddenly, beneath her clothes, her skin prickled. She was naked. He knew it, she knew it, it was a secret only the two of them shared, and it only made her feel that much more exposed.

Annie swallowed as more tickles of awareness rose on her bare flesh. “Griffin, this is—this is my friend Elena O’Brien.” She hoped her voice didn’t sound as squeaky to them as it did to herself. “Elena, may I introduce you to Griffin Chase.”

There was a funny little smile on Elena’s face as she stuck out her hand to shake Griffin’s. “Brother of Logan, I presume?”

That caught Griffin’s attention. His eyes narrowed. “You know my little brother?”

Elena gave a casual wave of her fingers. “We go way back. Be sure to give him my best.”

Annie slid a look at Elena. There was bad blood between Elena and Griffin’s “little” brother—now twenty-nine years old and as big as Griffin himself—over a senior prom date gone awry, though Elena wouldn’t speak of it beyond making nasty cracks about Logan whenever they happened to catch a glimpse of him.

Griffin glanced at Annie, then back at Elena. “Your best? I’ll be sure to do that.”

Annie’s friend smiled once more but it wasn’t her usual cheerful one. “Thank you. Be sure to tell him Elena says hello. That’s Elena with an ‘e’ as in every day I thank my lucky stars he left me standing there.”

Nodding, Griffin gave her one more half-puzzled, half-amused look, then switched his attention to Annie. “I’ll be on my way now,” he said. “I brought piles of work home. Will you be okay?”

Those crystal-faceted blue eyes of his made it impossible for her to look away, and even more impossible to forget the sensation of being enclosed by his arms. “I wish people would stop asking me that,” she whispered. It didn’t seem necessary to talk any louder, not when she could have sworn there were only the two of them in the room, maybe in the whole world.

He shrugged, then his hand lifted and he brushed his fingertips across her temple to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers were cool and his touch gentle. Goose bumps skittered across Annie’s neck and then southward, and she found herself once again crossing her arms over her chest.

His gaze flicked down toward her breasts, back up to her eyes. “We’re just concerned,” he said softly. “You’ve been through a stressful experience.”

“My mom and Elena are here.” Somewhere. She remembered how relieved she’d been to see them, because they would remind her of the real, the patient, the so-very-ordinary Annie Smith. The Annie Smith who Griffin Chase had never looked at twice, though she’d followed him around since she was four years old. “So you see, I don’t need a keeper or a…a…brother.”

He blinked. “A brother.”

Annie felt herself flushing. “Or whatever.”

Griffin smiled, and Annie thought he suddenly appeared more relaxed.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m certain you don’t need a keeper, or a brother, or a ‘whatever.”’ Cool fingertips brushed her temple again. “Goodbye Annie.”

Then he was gone.

With the click of the door behind him, her mother and Elena started chattering, as if to fill up the hole his leaving created. Their talk went on around her: Annie’s impending twenty-fifth birthday and how to celebrate it; her big catering job for the elder Chases’ fortieth wedding anniversary; the most recent phone call Annie’s aunt had made to Annie’s mom. Instead of joining in, Annie wandered to the window.

Over the lace café curtains, she could see Griffin stride away. As she watched, she thought of his crystal-blue eyes and how they made her skin tingle and how that tingle made her feel alive and even…yes…impatient. Then he disappeared into the thick stand of oaks that separated her cottage from the Chase’s house.

There was a drive that connected the two residences as well, but the shortest foot route was the way he’d chosen, through the oaks. It would take him past a trellised gazebo, then up the steps to the veranda that encircled the big house.

Formally named the Montgomery Mansion, the Chase’s massive three-story Victorian with its leaded windows and gingerbread fretwork was listed on the national historic register. In modern times, an adjacent carriage house had been replaced by a fleet-worthy garage embellished with similar Victorian styling. The old carriage house had been moved to the other side of the oaks then renovated as the housekeeper’s residence. It was Annie’s now.

Griffin, master-of-the-manor Griffin, lived in the mansion while Annie, silly, tingling Annie lived in the cottage. A distance not easily breached, but she’d been watching through windows across it all her life.

She whirled away from the window and tuned in to her mother and Elena.

“…my sister keeps insisting I should move to San Diego and share her condominium. It’s right on the beach. Some place called the Silver Strand.”

Elena flopped onto the love seat, her straight black hair flying up then settling back into place against her jaw. “The Silver Strand. It sounds heavenly. Why don’t you take her up on it, Natalie?”

Annie’s mom laughed. “Oh, I couldn’t. I’m staying in Strawberry Bay.”

Annie studied her mother. Though she’d retired when the arthritis in her hands made her housekeeping duties difficult, she remained slim and pretty. She didn’t look much older than the woman whose husband had walked out on her so long ago. Yet Natalie Smith had never dated another man or even appeared interested in one.

What was her mother waiting for? Annie mused.

Waiting. That was Annie, too, of course, and she might as well be preparing to celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday instead of her twenty-fifth for all the living she’d done. That truth had bothered her yesterday. She’d vowed to find love instead of waiting for it.

But her common sense had reasserted itself this morning. Yes, common sense…or cold feet?

Through the open window a breeze blew in and the air swept up Annie’s skirt. The goose bumps rising on her bare flesh caused her to remember the tingles that Griffin’s touch made burst across her skin.

Certainly he couldn’t be the right man for her. He was merely the one she’d spun fantasies about, the prince a lonely little girl had put on a pedestal. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to find another who made her feel that way? The breeze brushed by her again. Yet what if waiting patiently meant waiting forever?

“Elena,” she said urgently.

Her mouth open in mid-sentence, Elena’s head swiveled toward Annie. “Huh?”

“Come shopping with me.” Though Elena was the sole support of her teenage sister and worked two jobs, she always managed to look chic.

Elena blinked. “Huh? What?”

Annie headed for her purse. “I need your help. New clothes. From the inside out. And from the department store, not the discount store.”

She didn’t miss the gleam in Elena’s eyes. “It’s a miracle!”

No, said a little voice inside Annie. It’s a man.

She didn’t know who quite yet, but she wanted one.

Despite her cowardly attempt at denial this morning, after yesterday’s experience she was certain she wanted love. And she was no longer content to wait for it to find her.

Chapter Three

“Goodbye, Mother. Tell Dad I’ll be waiting for his call in my office tomorrow.” Shaking his head, Griffin hung up the phone, wondering if his mother would get the chance to pass along the message.

Though Laura and Jonathon Chase were vacationing in Hawaii, the way they spent their days seemed just as separate as when they were in California. He’d seen it with his own eyes on his way home from his stay abroad. He’d spent a few days at their house on the Big Island where he’d observed his father dedicating long hours to the golf course in the same intense manner he dedicated himself as CEO of Chase Electronics when he was in Strawberry Bay.

Griffin didn’t know what his mother usually did with those hours alone in paradise, but today she was worrying about Annie. Did she seem bothered by the bank robbery? Did Griffin think she would be recovered enough to cater their upcoming fortieth anniversary party?

Griffin had nobly bitten back a question of his own. Why the hell his mother wanted to celebrate forty years of glacial matrimony was beyond him. Instead, he’d merely assured her that Annie appeared perfectly able to fulfill her obligations.

Now he just had to ensure that he didn’t take another trek to her cottage to verify that assertion for himself.

Because he already knew she was fine. Naked, but fine.

No. Of course she wasn’t naked. She’d been wearing clothes. Just nothing underneath them. And why that was and why it would so strongly capture his imagination was something better left alone.

With that resolve, Griffin opened a drawer and pulled out his address book. He would find something to do and someone—a woman—to do it with. After working at home all day yesterday and then spending a few hours in the office this morning, he should enjoy Sunday afternoon, after all. But then his gaze snagged on the calendar.

Not just any Sunday, damn it. It was the fourteenth. February fourteenth. A totally lethal day for any entrenched-for-eternity bachelor like himself. Taking a woman out on Valentine’s Day was a statement, easily misread as a commitment for at least the rest of the year. He shuddered, quickly slapping shut his address book. If he wanted to reclaim his single-man, casual-with-women lifestyle—that his workaholic ways suited him for—he couldn’t take the risk of a Valentine’s Day date.

Which is why he was aimlessly wandering around downstairs and considering heading back to the office when his younger brother bounded through the front door. “Hey, bro,” Logan said. “Have you seen my tennis racket?”

Griffin shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks, slid them out. He looked over his shoulder, picked up his feet, then finally pulled at the front of his shirt to peer down at his navel. “No. I haven’t seen your tennis racket.”

“Ha. Ha. Very funny.” Logan said. He jogged toward the staircase that led to his old room. “I can’t remember if I moved it to the condo or left it here.”

Just bored enough to exert the energy it took to follow, Griffin started climbing the first flight of stairs after him. “Tennis with Cynthia, I presume?”

Logan froze on the landing, then looked back down at Griffin, a horrified expression on his face. “That’s not funny either. This is Valentine’s Day, have you forgotten?”

“Well, uh, no.” But Cynthia had been his brother’s girlfriend for ten years. From what his mother hinted at, an engagement was just a nudge or two away. “You’re doing something with her later?”

Logan blinked, then spoke slowly, as if Griffin had lost some brain cells. “Val…en…tine’s…Day.”

“I know.”

“Well then you know that Valentine’s Day is lethal to any firmly entrenched bachelor. You told me that years ago. It’s not something I’ve forgotten, Griffin.”

Griffin felt a spurt of guilt. Was it right for him to have passed along to Logan his own romantic pessimism? “I know, Logan, but—”

“Gotcha.” His brother grinned. “The truth is Cynthia herself declined to celebrate with me today. She’s up for some local commercial tomorrow and she wants to spend all day in a cucumber—or was it carrot?—mask. But we did exchange appropriately mushy e-mails this morning.”

Mushy e-mails? Griffin decided not to touch that with a ten-foot pole. “So who are you playing tennis with, then?”

“Tom Sullivan,” Logan said. “He’s the cop who talked Dad into sponsoring the mentor program at the company.”

As their father’s right hand, it was actually Logan who had convinced the old man to employ at-risk, though high-achieving, high-school students as interns at Chase Electronics. Some of those former students were already out of college and very successful in their own careers, thanks to the partnership between Chase Electronics and the Strawberry Bay Police Department.

Thinking of the police led Griffin naturally back to recent events. “Would your buddy Tom know anything about the investigation into the bank robbery?” Griffin had told Logan about it himself, when he’d finally returned to the office on Friday.

Logan shrugged. “I can ask. How’s Annie doing, by the way?”

Griffin frowned. “How the hell should I know?” he asked in irritation, even though he’d wondered the same thing himself all morning, causing the report he’d been drafting to take twice as long.

Logan’s eyebrows rose. “Hey, it was just a question.” He glanced at his watch. “If I can find that racket, maybe I have time to check on—”

“Don’t bother.” For some reason, Griffin didn’t want his Valentine’s Day-free and not-completely-taken brother to visit Annie. “I’m going by there myself soon.”

Thinking back on it, he remembered Logan tolerating Annie pretty well when they were kids. So Griffin didn’t think it was fair for his brother to make a February fourteenth visit. She just might get the wrong idea.

“Whatever you say, pal.” Logan gave him one strange, thoughtful look, then headed up the stairs.

Griffin headed down them. He’d told Logan that he’d check on Annie.

At least it was something to do.

It took just a few minutes to cut through the oaks and climb up Annie’s steps. When he raised his hand to knock, the sound of loud, yet mild cursing floated through the closed front door. “Darn and darn and shoot, shoot, shoot!” Something clattered against the floor.

Eyebrows drawing together, Griffin knocked.

There was a moment of silence—an almost embarrassed silence, he imagined—and then the noise of odd, uneven footsteps. Clop click clop click clop click. Annie opened the door.

Griffin shoved his hands in his pockets, struck by an unbidden, unwelcome need to touch.

Honey-haired Annie was wearing pink. A soft, talcum-powder pink. A long-sleeved top criss-crossed her breasts and tied at the side of her waist like something a ballet dancer would wear. It revealed a V of pale skin at her neck and a very modest swell of cleavage. The top was tight enough for Griffin to make out the thin outline of her bra.

Yesterday vividly came back to him. The pang in his chest when she’d broken down, the fragile warmth of her in his arms, his hand stroking her back and the sudden realization that his palm didn’t bump over a bra strap. And then her realization of his realization. Her nipples had tightened into hard little pearls that had branded his skin.

Just the memory shot twin arrows of heat from his chest to his groin. Griffin set his jaw and ignored the sensation.

Forget all that. Think about today. She’s wearing underclothes today.

But the discovery didn’t make her any less appealing, not when she was in a matching short, swingy skirt that revealed a length of slender legs. The clop click clop sound of her footsteps was explained by the fact that the strap of one cute, high-heeled shoe was buckled, while the strap of the other shoe hung free.

He smiled at her, he couldn’t help himself. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, before thinking better of it.

Her cheeks flushed, pinker than her outfit. “Well, thanks. Same to you.”

“I’m just checking in.”

“Oh,” she said, making a little face.

Another memory of the day before surfaced. Her big brown eyes wide, Annie had told him she didn’t need a keeper or a brother or a “whatever.”

Because she had a boyfriend?

He was annoyed that the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. Just because there hadn’t been a man in her cottage yesterday morning didn’t mean she didn’t have a man in her life. And Annie struck him as the type of woman who would be very particular about her bed partners, so if there was a man in her life, he wouldn’t be a casual kind of man.

And she was all dressed up—in pink even—for Valentine’s Day.

He tried peering over her shoulder to see evidence of standard February fourteenth fare, like flowers or candy. “Having a good day?”

She made that funny little face again. “Okay, I guess. I’m having trouble with my new shoe.”

“Can I help?” Without waiting for an answer or an invitation, he moved forward. Inside the cottage he would be able to observe more boyfriend evidence. Maybe even be there when the guy came to pick her up. As her post-robbery rescuer it was certainly natural, almost imperative even, that he perform a thorough inspection of the man, Griffin decided.

“Okay.” Blinking rapidly, Annie moved back, click clop click.

Shutting her door behind him, Griffin looked around. It appeared much the same as the day before. No flowers. No boxes of candy, no striped boxes from lingerie stores. Only Annie herself, looking like a perfectly sweet, perfectly tempting Valentine in all that pink.

And one imperfect shoe. She took it off and held it up. “I can’t get the strap through the buckle.”

With all the confidence of a man faced with a simple problem, he took the light piece of leather in his hand and made his way to the love seat. “I’m sure I can fix this in no time flat.”

Hah. The delicate shoe with its even more delicate strap made him feel like each hand was the size and shape of a baseball mitt.

“I need a tool,” he finally said, frowning at the stubborn strap. As slender as the damn thing was, he just couldn’t feed it through the gold-toned buckle either. But with a tool a man was never at a loss.

“What kind of tool?”

He looked up. Annie had a tiny, concerned crease between her light-brown brows that he wanted to erase with the pad of his thumb. He wanted to touch her there, or that place on her cheek where a dimple would wink if she smiled, or at that very smooth, very sweet spot on her temple where he’d touched her yesterday, where he could see her pulse beating today.

Her mouth moved. He thought of touching her there, too. His thumb against that puffy surface, his forefinger painting the deep dip of her upper lip, his own mouth lowering—

Her lips moved again, and he heard the words she said this time. “What tool?” she prompted.

Griffin shook himself. God. Valentine’s Day must be messing with his head. “Needle-nose pliers?”

She nodded and left the room, giving Griffin time to take a few deep, get-his-brain-back-in-the-right-hemisphere breaths. When she returned with the requested tool, he focused purely on the problem at hand and had the strap threaded through the buckle in moments.

Without taking his gaze off the shoe, he set it on the floor. “Slip your foot in and I’ll buckle it for you, then pull the strap through the other side.”