Crazy for You Read online

  Not that he wanted to. Much.

  “Go over there and kidnap your wife,” Nick said. “The hell with waiting.”

  Max snarled at him and went back in the office, and Nick stared at the Subaru and tried to get a calm rational grip on the way he felt about Quinn without actually thinking about the way he felt.

  Okay, everything was under control. He’d lost her before for two weeks after the night on her couch, and that had made him edgy but only because he liked having her around, liked hearing her voice, her laugh, seeing her face, watching her hair swing—Quinn, her hair cropped, twisting under him, beautiful cheekbones, the shape of her skull under his hands as he pushed into her—really liked her as a friend for companionship and conversation. Like reading the articles in Playboy, which were damn good.

  And now it had been almost a week since he’d seen her—naked, round and wet—and he wanted her back.

  To talk to.

  He couldn’t believe how much he missed her. As a friend. She’d been his best friend, and now she wasn’t in his life anymore—See, he wanted to tell her, this is why it was such a bad idea for us to have sex, I knew this would happen, I told you so—and he missed her. Talking to her.

  He hadn’t really appreciated how important conversation with a woman was until he’d spent time with one who didn’t have any. Barbara was a perfectly nice woman aside from her addiction to married blue-collar workers, but if he never had to spend another five minutes with her again, it would be too soon.

  Quinn had always had plenty to say. They’d talked about books and movies and people and her teaching and his abysmal dating habits, but it wasn’t until his week dating Barbara that Nick realized that it was Quinn’s conversation he missed most. They were friends. They should be talking.

  And that was why he wanted her back. He nodded. That was good. Reasonable. Sensible.

  He loved Quinn like a sister, so of course he wanted to be with her. It wasn’t her body he loved—lush and tight and slippery under him, never mind that sister thing, bad analogy, forget that, don’t go there—no, it was her mind he loved, who she was, Quinn, the person, not Quinn the body.

  Perfectly reasonable.

  But the problem was that—entirely separate from the love thing, the two things were totally different, not even in the same universe, completely apart—he craved her body shuddering hot under his.

  That made sense, Nick told himself. That was fairly simple. It was like separation of church and state, integral to the continued freedom of both. Love over here, sex over there. No mixing.

  Of course, it was easier if there were two women involved instead of one. In fact, he realized now, one of the things that had made his life so easy up until now was that he’d loved Quinn and slept with other women. So since it was easier to find women to sleep with than to love, he’d just keep loving Quinn—he didn’t think he could stop anyway—and find somebody else to fuck.

  The memory of her body came back to him—hot and yielding under his hands, the way he’d learned her, felt her, sensed her, known her, made her shudder and made her come—and that made him hard all over again.

  He had to have her again, or he wasn’t going to get anything done.

  Nick leaned on the Subaru, almost defeated. Okay, there was no need to panic. He could still do this. He just had to remember to keep the two things separate. Love the mind, fuck the body. That way when he stopped fucking the body, he could still love her mind.

  Clearly logical. Maybe he could talk her into buying it.

  But first he had to convince her to let him near her without kicking him.

  The phone rang while he was trying to think of a way, and when he answered, Joe said, “Nick? Could you come over here when you’re done tonight?”

  “Here?” Nick said. “You mean Quinn’s?” He couldn’t possibly be this lucky.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Quinn just fell down the stairs and messed up her ankle. The stair rail came loose.”

  “Oh, hell.” Nick’s libido evaporated with his concern. “Is she all right? You need me to take her to the hospital?”

  “Darla’s taking her.” Joe’s voice sounded grim. “I think somebody loosened that rail. It’s supposed to have three screws in each bracket and there was only one in each. I put it back up, but it’s loose now. And when I got home last night, I smelled gas, somebody’d messed with the valve in the basement, and when I went down there, I found a broken window. Anybody could have gotten in here. I think this place is booby-trapped.”

  “Who—” Nick started to say and then stopped. “Not Bill?”

  “I don’t want to believe it, but yeah, after that thing in the storeroom, that’s my guess, too.”

  “What thing in the storeroom?” Nick said, and as Joe told him, his concern for Quinn morphed into rage, much easier to deal with than love and fear. “Christ,” he said. “You should have called me and we could have both gone to see him.”

  “Quinn said no,” Joe said. “You know how she likes things calm. I think she thought if she was patient and didn’t cause a fuss, he’d just give up, but after this, we got to do something. I got a call in to Frank Atchity, and I’m going through the house now, but I want somebody double-checking me on this. If you—”

  “I’ll come over now,” Nick said. “So will Max. It’s Saturday, we can close an hour early.”

  “Thanks,” Joe said.

  “My pleasure,” Nick said.

  Thirteen

  Nick brought deadbolts, and they put them on all the entry doors and the door to the basement. Then they began to check everything, starting in the basement. Two hours later, they only had the downstairs done.

  Bill had been thorough.

  It seemed as if everything with a screw or a nail in it had been loosened. Wires had been frayed, pipes unscrewed slightly, a leg on the couch weakened, cans poised to fall out of cupboards. “It must have taken him hours,” Max said finally, and Joe shook his head, years as an electrician and general handyman behind him. “Always takes longer to fix than it does to screw up. You don’t have to be careful when you’re screwing up.” Nick stayed silent, testing everything he found twice, feeling more and more outraged with every sabotage they found.

  They were just heading for the stairs to do the second floor when the phone rang, and Nick picked it up.

  “Hello,” he said, and Zoë said, “Who is this?”

  “Oh, good,” Nick said, her voice coming back to him over twenty years. “You I needed right now.”

  “Nick?”

  “Yep.”

  “So I hear you’re fucking my sister.”

  “Every chance I get,” he said. “She’s not here. I’ll tell her to call you.”

  “Wait a minute, if she’s not there, what are you doing there?”

  When he’d told her, she was silent for a minute, and then she said, “Shit. Move in with her.”

  “What?”

  “Move in with her. She loves you, you love her, and that nutcase needs to know that. Stop screwing around and move in.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Nick said.

  “Oh, grow up,” Zoë said. “You’ve loved her forever. Stop being a baby.”

  “Gee, I’ve missed you,” Nick said. “I’ll have Quinn call you.”

  “Do that. But in the meantime, you stay there and watch out for her. I mean it, Nick,” she added, annoying him as much as ever. “Don’t screw up.” Then she hung up.

  “Who was that?” Joe asked as he came down the stairs.

  “Zoë,” Nick said, hanging up the phone.

  “You do have an interesting life,” Joe said and got a screwdriver from the drawer. “What’d she say?”

  “She wants me to move in with Quinn,” Nick said.

  Joe smiled. “That’s my Zoë. Hell of a kid.” He started back up the stairs, but stopped as the front door opened and Quinn hobbled in, Darla’s arm around her, holding crutches. Quinn’s ankle was taped, and there was a big Band-Aid on her e