Little Secrets Read online

  It felt like she’d gone to bed hours ago, but it had only been about forty-five minutes since she’d slipped under the covers beside him. Ginny yawned with her hand over her mouth, hoping nothing else came up and out. The light from Sean’s clock dimmed, then went out, but not before she caught a flash of something in the hall. Something bright, reflective. Something like eyes.

  “Turn that light on,” she whispered.

  Sean had already fallen back to sleep, or mostly, and he let out a muffled “hmmph?”

  Ginny rolled over to turn her bedside light on, which made Sean grunt and throw an arm over his face. “I saw something in the hallway.”

  Sean sat up at once. “What?”

  Her pumped-up heartbeat wasn’t helping the reflux. “I saw something like…eyes.”

  “The cat.”

  “No,” she said. “Unless Noodles is now the size of a Great Dane and standing on her back legs on a box.”

  Sean got up and went to the half-open door and pulled it all the way to show the empty hallway. “Nothing there. Probably something reflecting off of something. Or the window at the end of the hall. Or the night-light, maybe it was that.”

  She knew he was right, of course he was. The quick, bright flash might’ve even been her imagination or a quirk of the shadows. It could’ve been some light coming in through the window, splitting shadows she hadn’t yet come to know.

  Sean’s warm hand on her back reminded her of how chilly she was, and Ginny turned off her light to snuggle back under the blankets. The reflux was fading with every swallow, just like the memories of her dream. She rolled to face her husband, who was sprawled on his back with one arm flung over his head. His slow, even breaths soothed her. She put a hand on his belly, first on top of the soft T-shirt, then slipped her fingers underneath to lay them on the warm skin beneath. Then, lower.

  “Oh yeah?” Sean sounded sleepy, but amused. Beneath her fingers, he responded.

  “Yeah,” Ginny said. “Definitely.”

  She moved to pull him on top of her, but Sean resisted, rolling her on top of him instead. “Don’t want to squish…you.”

  The baby. He meant the baby. Ginny sighed, straddling him. It felt awkward now. Unwieldy, when she’d simply wanted him to move inside her, but now she had to do some sort of gymnastics routine to get things going. She kissed him when he pulled her down to his mouth, but all at once she couldn’t stop thinking about the landscape from her dream and the inconsistent amount of hot water and the errands they needed to do the next day, which would come way too early the longer they were awake.

  “No?” Sean murmured into her ear, his breath warm. He pushed a hand between them, but the position wasn’t quite right and the pressure against her was more pain than pleasure. “I thought you wanted to.”

  But it was lost, and she didn’t want to tell him so because she’d been the one to start this. It would be unfair to back out now. So she took him in her hand and shifted to slide him inside her, and she moved the way she knew he liked her to move.

  And when it was over, in the dark, she listened to the sound of his breathing slow and deepen beside her. She listened to Noodles’s rhythmic purring. She listened to the soft scritch-scratch of something inside the walls of her house, and it was that sound that finally soothed her into sleep.

  Chapter Six

  The exterminator was much cuter than he had any right to be. Over six feet tall, dark hair, ice-blue eyes. Dimples in both cheeks when he grinned, which he did the second Ginny opened the door and wished she’d put on something nicer than a pair of yoga pants and one of Sean’s old college sweatshirts.

  “Mrs. Murphy?”

  Technically, she was not Mrs. Murphy since she’d kept her maiden name, but it was easier to nod than explain. She stepped aside to let him in. “Yeah. Come on in. Thanks for getting here so fast.”

  “No problem. It’s my job, right?” He turned in a slow half circle, looking up at the ceiling before focusing on her. “I’m Danny.”

  He held out a hand for her to shake, surprising her. Ginny’s hand was engulfed inside his fingers. “Ginny.”

  “You have mice?” Danny asked as he let go. He set down the tool bag in his other hand and put both hands on his hips. He wore a dark-blue coverall with his name on a patch over his heart. Big black boots.

  “I think so.” Ginny tried not to ogle his ass when he turned again to look up, but didn’t manage very well. It was a pretty stellar butt, hard to ignore even in the baggy coveralls. “I’ve heard things in the walls and ceiling. We just moved in—”

  “Yeah, I thought you must be new. I’ve been doing this neighborhood for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve been called to this house.”

  Something in the way he said “doing this neighborhood” made her think of housewives clad in leopard-print robes, martini glasses in hand, standing on top of chairs and screaming while cartoon mice ran around them. “We’ve been in for not quite a week.”

  “Guy who owned this place before never had a contract with us, not even just the standard maintenance. Your husband signed you up for that, so I can take care of that for you today too. If you want.” Danny’s grin made Ginny think he’d take care of lots of things she wanted.

  She shoved that idea away as absurd. She was easily at least ten years older than him, face bare of makeup and inadequately showered. And pregnant. And married, she reminded herself. Still, looking wasn’t touching, and she admired Danny’s dimples again.

  “Did he?” she remembered to say. “What does that mean?”

  “Means I’ll come out every three months to treat your place for spiders, bees, wasps, check for termites. Whatever you need. And if you have any other problems, I’m your guy to take of that too. Like mice.” Danny winked.

  Ginny blinked.

  Danny pulled a flashlight from the tool bag and shone it along the crown molding. “Termites usually aren’t a problem in this neighborhood, but you get a lot of spiders and silverfish. Being so close to the creek, you can get millipedes and stuff in your basement too.”

  “But…you’ll take care of all that. Right?”

  Danny clicked off the flashlight and gave her another of those grins. Ginny wondered if he practiced them. “Yep. All of it. If you want to show me into the basement first, I can take care of you from the ground up.”

  Oh, I bet you could, Ginny thought. Top to toe too. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep a straight face and pointed down the hall. “Basement door’s to the right there, in that alcove. I have a cat. You won’t put anything down that’s poisonous to animals, right?”

  Danny shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  Jesus. Ma’am. It should’ve made her feel old and possibly respected, but instead made her flash on a vision of herself in librarian glasses and a pencil skirt, with her hair in a bun and a ruler in her hand.

  She pointed the way toward the basement, but didn’t follow him down. She was in the middle of not only a cutthroat game of online Scrabble, but also finishing up some final files she needed to send in to the company she no longer worked for. The word game was winning her attention, because while the files were important, they were also the last link she had to her job. As soon as she turned them in, she’d have no more reasons to think of herself as a working woman.

  She got so engrossed in trying to figure out where to use her Q, U and Z tiles for the best results that she didn’t hear Danny until he appeared in the kitchen suddenly enough to make her scream. “You scared me,” Ginny said unnecessarily, one hand on her heart. “God.”

  “Sorry.” Danny looked serious. “I need to talk to you about your basement.”

  That sounded bad. Ginny hadn’t actually been in the basement since they’d moved in. She remembered it as being unfinished and dry, the only thing she’d really cared about. Sean had talked about making it into a rumpus