Perfect Read online

  Trying to ignore the treacherous leap her heart gave at the sight of that enthralling, intimate smile, Julie hastily sat up. “Your friend—Dominic Sandini—he didn’t die,” she told him, wanting to put his mind at ease about that immediately. “They think he’s going to be all right.”

  “I heard that.”

  “You did?” Julie said cautiously. It occurred to her that he might have heard it on the radio while he was dressing. If not—if he remembered her telling him that—then it was mortifyingly possible he might remember the other things she’d said in those unguarded minutes when she thought he was beyond hearing. She waited, hoping he’d refer to the radio, but he continued watching her with that smile tugging at his lips, and Julie felt her entire body grow warm with embarrassment. “How do you feel?” she asked, hastily standing up.

  “Better now. When I woke up, I felt like a potato being baked in its own skin.”

  “What? Oh, you mean the bedroom got too hot?”

  He nodded. “I kept dreaming I’d died and gone to hell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the fire leaping around me, and I was pretty sure of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said, anxiously searching his face for any sign of lingering ill effects from his exposure to the elements.

  “Don’t be sorry. I realized very quickly that I couldn’t really be in hell.”

  His light-hearted mood was so infectious and so utterly disarming that she reached up to lay the back of her hand against his forehead to test his body temperature without realizing what she was doing. “How did you know you weren’t in hell?”

  “Because,” he said quietly, “part of the time, an angel was hovering over me.”

  “You were obviously hallucinating,” she joked.

  “Was I?”

  This time, there was no mistaking the husky timbre in his voice, and she pulled her hand away from his head, but she couldn’t quite free her gaze from his. “Definitely.”

  From the corner of her eye, Julie suddenly noticed that a porcelain duck was turned the wrong way on the mantle beside his shoulder, and she reached out to straighten it, then she rearranged the two smaller ducks beside that one.

  “Julie,” he said in a deep, velvety voice that had a dangerous effect on her heart rate, “look at me.” When she turned to look at him, he said with quiet gravity, “Thank you for saving my life.”

  Mesmerized by his tone and the expression in his eyes, she had to clear her throat to stop her voice from shaking. “Thank you for trying to save mine.”

  Something stirred in the fathomless depths of his eyes, something hot and inviting, and Julie’s pulse tripled even though he didn’t attempt to touch her. Trying to switch the mood to one of safe practicality, she said, “Are you hungry?”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” he persisted.

  His tone warned her that he wouldn’t allow a change of subject until he’d gotten answers, and she sank down onto the sofa, but she looked at the centerpiece on the table because she couldn’t quite meet his searching gaze. “I couldn’t leave you out there to die, not when you’d risked your life thinking I’d drowned.” She noticed that two of the white silk magnolias in the centerpiece were bent at awkward angles and she obeyed the automatic impulse to lean forward and fix them.

  “Then why didn’t you leave after you got me back here and into bed?”

  Julie felt as if she were wandering through a field filled with land mines. Even if she had the courage to look at him and blurt out exactly how she felt about him, she couldn’t be certain the announcement wouldn’t blow up in her face. “For one thing, I honestly didn’t think of it, and besides,” she added on a note of relieved inspiration, “I didn’t know where the car keys were!”

  “They were in my pants pocket—the pants you took off me.”

  “Actually, I . . . I didn’t think of looking for the car keys. I suppose I was simply too worried about you to think clearly.”

  “Don’t you find that a little odd given the circumstances that brought you here?”

  Julie leaned forward and picked up a magazine that was lying half off the table and laid it fanlike atop the other two, then she moved the crystal bowl of silk flowers two inches to the left, to the precise center of the table. “Everything has seemed pretty odd for three days,” she hedged cautiously. “I can’t begin to guess what would be normal behavior in these circumstances.” Standing up, she began straightening the throw pillows she’d disarranged during her nap. She was bending down to pick one up from the carpet when he said in a laughter-tinged voice, “That’s a habit you have, isn’t it—straightening things out when you feel uneasy?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I’m just a very tidy person.” She stood up and looked at him, and her composure slipped a notch toward laughter. His brows were raised in mocking challenge and his eyes were gleaming with amused fascination. “All right,” she said with a helpless laugh, “I admit it. It is a nervous habit.” As she finished putting the pillow where it belonged, she added with a rueful smile, “Once, when I was nervous about failing an exam in college, I reorganized everything in the attic, then I alphabetized all my brothers’ stereo records and my mother’s recipes.”

  His eyes laughed at her story, but his voice was puzzled and solemn. “Am I doing something that makes you nervous?”

  Julie gaped at him in stunned laughter, then she said with a lame attempt at severity, “You’ve been doing things that make me extremely nervous for three solid days!”

  Despite her censorious tone, the way she was looking at him filled Zack with poignant tenderness: There was no trace of fear or suspicion or revulsion or hatred anywhere on her lovely, expressive face, and it seemed like a lifetime since anyone had looked at him like this. His own lawyers hadn’t really believed he was innocent. Julie did. He’d have known it just by looking at her, but the memory of her words at the stream, the way her voice had broken when she said them, made it a thousand times more meaningful: “Remember when you said you wanted someone to believe that you’re innocent? I didn’t completely believe you then, but I do now. I swear it! I know you didn’t kill anyone.”

  She could have left him to die at the stream, or if that was unthinkable to a minister’s daughter, she could have gotten him back here, then taken the car and called the police from the nearest phone. But she hadn’t. Because she really believed he was innocent. Zack wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her how much that meant to him; he wanted to bask in the warmth of her smile and hear her infectious peal of laughter again. Most of all, he wanted to feel her mouth on his, to kiss her and caress her until they were both wild, and then to thank her for the gift of her trust with his body. Because that was the only thing he had to give her.

  He knew she sensed a change in their relationship and for some incomprehensible reason, it was making her more nervous than she’d been when he was holding a gun on her. He knew that just as surely as he knew they were going to make love tonight and that she wanted to almost as much as he did.

  Julie waited for him to say something or to laugh at her last jibe, and when he didn’t, she stepped back and gestured toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” she asked for the second time.

  He nodded slowly, and her hand stilled at the husky intimacy she thought she heard in his voice. “Starved.”

  Julie told herself very firmly that he had not deliberately chosen that particular word because it had been used during their quarrel last night in a sexual context. Trying to look innocent of all such thoughts, she said very politely, “What would you like?”

  “What are you offering?” he countered, playing verbal chess with her with such ease that Julie wasn’t at all certain if all the double meanings to their exchange existed only in her fevered imagination.

  “I was offering food, of course.”

  “Of course,” he solemnly agreed, but his eyes were glinting with amusement.

  “Stew, to be specific.”

  “It’s important to be specific.”