Love on the Lifts Read online

  Maybe no excuse was needed. I turned my attention back to Joe, who was watching me with that same intensity that he had at Pile It On Pizza.

  “I don’t know how he’ll get in. He doesn’t have a key, but I guess you’ll hear him when he knocks,” I said quietly, so my panic and worry about Brad wouldn’t echo between us.

  “Yeah, I’ll hear him if he knocks. Maybe I’ll let him in.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Maybe?”

  He shrugged. “Thought he was rude, almost knocking his chair over in his hurry to be with the snow bunny.”

  I stared at him. “You didn’t like her?”

  He jerked his head back in revulsion at the thought and scrunched up his brow. “Please.”

  I don’t know why I took his response as an invitation, but I did. Maybe because it so reflected my opinion of “Cyn.” It made us compadres, in sync, buddies. I lowered myself to the couch. “Why didn’t you like her?”

  “‘I’m so sorry to bother you…’” He did a perfect imitation of her breathless delivery that made me want to laugh. “Give me a break,” he said. “If she was really sorry, she wouldn’t have walked over to begin with. A broken disposal isn’t exactly an emergency.”

  I found it comforting that I wasn’t the only one who was less than impressed with our neighbor, and I didn’t think he was really expecting me to answer. I moved back into the corner of the couch and brought my feet up to the cushion. My legs weren’t nearly as long as Joe’s, so I couldn’t stretch them out far enough to rest my feet on the coffee table.

  “What are you watching?” I asked, deciding I could keep a lookout for Brad here as easily as I could from the deck.

  “Law and Order rerun. I think they’re on twenty-four–seven these days.”

  I snuggled down more deeply into the cushions. “I love Law and Order, except for the fact that there aren’t nearly enough cute guys on the show.”

  “What are you talking about? Lennie was cute.”

  I could tell from his grin that he was teasing, but still I felt obligated to defend my position. “Too old. Still, it was sad when Jerry Orbach died.”

  “Yeah, I was sorry to hear that. I really liked the way he ended each intro with some wisecrack.” He shook his head. “That Lennie.”

  “I was hoping when he left the show that they’d replace him with some really young, sexy detective. I mean, it’s not fair. Jack’s assistants are young, sexy women.”

  “The show isn’t about eye candy. It’s got good writing. That’s the real star of the show.”

  “So you’d be okay if the next time they replaced Jack’s assistant, she wore orthopedic shoes, and her gray hair in a bun?”

  “Hey, let’s not get too carried away here. Don’t need to eliminate the sweets completely…and maybe you have a point about not enough young guys.”

  I drew my legs closer to my body, wrapped my arms around them, and placed my chin on my knees. I liked the way that Joe never tried to bully me into anything, the way he’d helped keep things calm earlier when I’d presented my list of rules.

  “Is that the reason Sam called you Mr. Law and Order? Because you like this show?”

  “Nah, he calls me that because I’m majoring in criminal law.”

  “Are you going to be a lawyer?”

  “No, I’m thinking more along the lines of FBI, maybe CIA.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty ambitious.”

  “Well, don’t be too impressed. I still have three and a half years to go. A lot can happen between now and then. I gotta get all the basic coursework out of the way first.”

  I could see him working for the FBI or the CIA. He didn’t have the overpowering presence that Brad did, but there was something about him that made me feel really safe, comfortable. He treated me like an equal, like someone whose opinion he valued, like I was interesting.

  “Sam’s never talked about you. How did you meet him?”

  Not that Sam was in the habit of talking to me about his friends. As a matter of fact, he seldom talked to me about anything.

  “We live in the same dorm. My room is across the hall from his.”

  “I didn’t see you when I was there for family weekend.”

  “I know.”

  Something about the way he said it…

  “Did you see me?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  As though suddenly embarrassed, he looked at the TV, pointed at the screen. “Angie Harmon. My favorite.”

  It was strange. Sitting here in the dark with the dancing firelight and the flickering images from the TV washing over him, it occurred to me that he might be better looking than Brad. Not in the same rugged way that Brad was, of course. Brad was…well, Brad looked tough. Strong. Joe looked…well, he looked tough, too, but in a nicer kind of way. I wasn’t making sense, couldn’t sort out my thoughts.

  But I discovered that I enjoyed watching him.

  “What color are your eyes?” I asked.

  He jerked his head around so fast that I thought I heard his neck pop.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes. I noticed them earlier, but I couldn’t figure out what color they are.”

  I could make out his grin in the shadows.

  “Depends on what I’m wearing. If it’s blue, my eyes look blue. If I’m wearing green, they look green. Brown, brown.” He rocked his head from side to side. “The official color on my driver’s license is hazel.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever looked that closely at hazel eyes before. They were kind of intriguing. I was tempted to get up and turn on the light so I could get a better look at his, now that I knew what color they were, but it seemed like an odd thing to want to do.

  “Your eyes are one clear-cut color,” he said. “Green.”

  “You noticed, huh?”

  He studied me for a heartbeat before turning his attention back to the show. “Yeah.”

  There it was again. Disappointment…or embarrassment.

  But that made no sense. We were talking eye color for goodness’ sake.

  Joe wore his hair short on the sides and back, a little longer in the front. The strands had a mussed look, the way they might look if a girl had run her fingers through it. Brad’s hair was cropped really short. I wouldn’t be able to tell if the snow bunny next door had touched them. Thank goodness.

  Joe had a well-defined jaw that sported a day’s growth of beard. I guess he would use my bathroom in the morning to shave. That sure seemed intimate. There was a bathroom downstairs between the two basement bedrooms, but the bathroom up here had a door that led into the living room and a door that led into my bedroom.

  So, yeah, he’d probably be using my bathroom first thing. I needed to make sure I had the door leading into my bedroom closed.

  I twisted around and looked at the front door. I heard Joe sigh like he was irritated with me or something.

  “What if he tripped coming over here and he’s out there freezing to death?” I asked. “I’ve heard that you don’t know that you’re dying because you start to get all warm and drowsy. You just think you’re going to sleep.”

  “Trust me. He’s not out there freezing to death. He didn’t trip on his way back over here.”

  “How do you know?”

  He gave me a sideways glance. “I just know.”

  Okay, so if he hadn’t tripped…maybe there was another reason he hadn’t come knocking on our door. But I so didn’t want to think about that.

  “He’s probably staying over there, because he doesn’t have a key and he didn’t want to wake anyone up over here,” I guessed.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s the reason.”

  But he said it like he was sure that wasn’t the reason and he thought I was stupid for thinking it was, that I was stupid for not recognizing that Brad hadn’t come home because Cynthia had given him a reason to stay over there. He wasn’t so different from Sam. I guessed that was why they were friends. I suddenly didn’t like him, his attitude, or his