His Perfect Family. Patti Standard
best bosom buddies.
“Two years, since I retired from the military. But my dad was a builder, so I grew up in the trade.” Chat, chat, chat. He looked up to make some friendly eye contact and found himself fascinated as she dipped a fry in ketchup and brought it to her mouth. The oil glossed her lips, and little crystals of salt clung to them.
“What branch?”
He took a large bite of his hamburger, chewed determinedly, and swallowed. “Navy.”
“A career man, huh?”
“Twenty years.” His eyes followed her tongue as it slid across her bottom lip, catching a drop of ketchup at the corner of her mouth. He swallowed twice more, hard.
“Well, that certainly explains the posture.”
“And the haircut,” he ageed.
Adrianne smiled in response to the mocking curve of his lips. He seemed more approachable today, and she relaxed a little. This wouldn’t be so bad after all. Now that he mentioned it, he definitely looked ex-military. Tough and hard and very, very competent. To last twenty years in the service, he’d need to be. Bosnia, Somalia, the Gulf... She paused with a fry halfway to her mouth. “Vietnam?”
He froze for a brief moment, then calmly reached for his drink. “Just missed it.”
“Not a very popular move, I bet, enlisting right after the war.”
“No.”
She waited, but he didn’t say anything else, just finished his hamburger in three more efficient bites and wiped his fingers with a paper napkin. He looked too big sitting there at her kitchen table, too male, too... She didn’t know what, but whatever it was it made her shift uncomfortably in her chair. She wasn’t used to testosterone, if that’s what was soaking into her air. Any pheromones she encountered in the course of her day were safely cloaked in dark suits and wrapped in ties, camouflaged with aftershave, sanitized by a wedding ring and photos of kids on the desk. He must have felt her stare because his dark eyes lifted to hers — cool again, emotionless, as detached as that predatory cat’s.
“Intelligence.” She voiced her thought without thinking.
His thick brows rose. “Now and then.”
That initial spark of approachability was fading fast. It was back to name, rank and serial number, she thought, exasperated. She was trying to make polite conversation, for goodness’ sake, not pry state secrets out of him. She still had half her burger to go — they had to talk about something. “That must have been an exciting time,” she continued, “being in the service at the end of the cold war, knowing you played a part in tearing down the Berlin Wall —”
“Nobody needed to tear it down.” His fingers tightened on the napkin, wadding it into a ball. “It would have crumbled into ruins in a few more years anyway, just like the rest of the Soviet bloc.”
“But —”
“Failing factories and ancient farm equipment brought it down, not naval intelligence. All we had to do was wait for the rust.” He stood abruptly, stuffing his wrapper and napkin into the paper sack. “I better get to work. Thanks for lunch.”
Well! She stood, too, and took the sack he held out to her. Her fingers brushed his, and she started at the tiny current that sizzled the length of her arm. Completely unexpected. Completely unwanted.
Completely arousing.
Her gaze flew to his face, her fingers still touching the back of his as if pressed there by a magnetic field, unable to withdraw. She was aware first of his hand’s warmth, then of its thickness and strength, so large compared to hers, then of an excruciating embarrassment at the thought that he might sense her reaction to him. But he returned her startled look with no sign he was affected in the least.
She jerked the sack from him, breaking the contact that could be measured in milliseconds, yet had felt like aeons. “I think I’ll get some lasagna ready for supper and bake a cake for Lisa. She likes a sweet after school” She flashed her best polite smile, trying to keep the edges from cracking, a thank-you-for-stopping-by smile, but he simply nodded and turned toward the pantry.
Cutter flexed his fingers, massaging away the residual heat left by her soft touch. Big mistake, touching was. Big mistake. There’d be no more of that, he warned himself. Friendly didn’t mean stupid. And the feelings her touch had set off in him were the kind that led men to do stupid, stupid things.
He heard cupboards banging in the kitchen as Adrianne prepared Lisa’s “sweet.” The last thing that girl needed after school was a piece of cake, he thought caustically as he levered himself through the hole in the floor into the cool, dark crawl space. A couple of times around the block would do her a hell of a lot more good. Obviously Adrianne didn’t see the connection between meeting her daughter at the door with a full platter and the size of the girl’s thighs.
Not his problem, he reminded himself as he lay on his back in a fine layer of dirt and began to connect the bathtub to the existing drainpipe. None of his business. He flexed his fingers again. Definitely none of his business. Besides, it wasn’t like he had any answers. If he’d learned one thing in his twenty years in the service, it was that he was not one to fix things. He’d learned that the hard way.
He remembered how proud his parents had been when he’d enlisted that summer day the week after he’d graduated. His father had been in the navy and recollected his two-year stint with a hazy fondness. Cutter was going to follow in his footsteps. Change the world. Well, in twenty years, the world had changed, all right, he thought as he gave a fierce twist to a piece of pipe, but it had nothing to do with him. Communism had crumpled with barely a whimper, and he and all his cohorts had stood there in their wrinkled trench coats with their suddenly obsolete codes and just as obsolete lives.
He thought of Lowenstein and Rush and Cadenza, all the agents killed over the years in the name of freedom. Freedom! His teeth clenched. Communism imploded from its own weight, making a mockery of all their cloak-and-dagger operations. All they’d had to do was wait, kick back on the deck of a ship in the warm waters off Guam and wait. He’d seen the signs during those last years; he’d tried to tell his superiors that if the Russians couldn’t manage gas for their cars or bread for their bellies, how were they supposed to launch a nuclear war?
Cutter heard the sound of the oven door shut and then water being drawn into a bucket in the sink. He followed the thump of Adrianne’s determined tread up the stairs and knew she was about to attack another room. So much for their friendly little chat. He’d had in mind pumping her for information, not the other way around. He didn’t expect to have to talk about Berlin or a war the world referred to as cold, a war he knew was the exact temperature of freshly spilled blood.
He’d come home when he could manage it, and each time he’d been shocked by the new twist to his father’s fingers, the increased swelling, the number of pain pills. Bit by bit, he’d given up fighting the system, slowly, assignment by assignment — and visit by visit, he’d watched arthritis wrench his father’s big, strong hands into helpless, painful knots. Then one day he’d returned to Little Rock after a frustrating assignment teaching formerly despised enemies, now esteemed colleagues, how to upgrade their navigation system. And that night, he’d stood helplessly by while his mother cut his father’s food into bite-size pieces. The man who had once fixed Cutter’s world could no longer fix his own food — and Cutter decided he was through trying to fix things, as well.
The world could get along just fine without his help. He’d turned in his commission that day and had since spent his time forming raw slabs of wood into coffee tables, buffets and bookshelves. Oak could be shaped, planed, sanded, slowly guided in the direction he wanted it to go.
Nothing else could.
Adrianne heard the front door slam in that aggravating way Lisa had of announcing she was home from school. She took a last swipe at the top shelf of her closet, then stepped off the chair she balanced on