Bungalow Nights. Christie Ridgway
She tilted her head. “Because you look a little...prissy.”
Insult shot steel into Baxter’s spine. He played mean and stinky roundball with his old high school buddies on Saturday mornings. He regularly signed up for 10K races—beating his own time the past five outings—and just last month he’d participated in the Marine Corps’ mud run. Nobody he knew had caught him taking that yoga class and he’d only agreed to it because the woman he’d been dating at the time had promised banana pancakes afterward.
Wait—were banana pancakes prissy?
The internal question made him glare at Addy, even as he noted the self-satisfied smirk curling the corners of her mouth. Without a word, he turned back around and started stacking boxes and hauling them from the closet.
“That’s enough,” she finally said. “This is a good start.”
He paused. After the first few he’d stopped to remove his suit jacket and roll up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. His hands, as she’d predicted, were gray with filth and there were streaks of it on the starched cotton covering his chest. Addy, on the other hand, was hardly marred. With a pair of colorful cross-trainers, she wore soft-looking jeans rolled at the ankle and a T-shirt advertising a film festival in Palm Springs. Her white-blond hair stood in feathery tufts around her head and her cheeks were flushed, but Baxter thought that was Addy’s normal state.
She’d appeared...excitable to him from the very first.
As if his regard made her uncomfortable, she shifted her feet. “Don’t blame me if you’re mucked up. I told you this wasn’t work for a guy in business wear.”
He blamed her for things, all right—sleepless nights, a guilty conscience—but not for the state of his clothing. “What exactly is all this stuff?” He popped the lid off the nearest box and eyed a stack of yellowed paper. “Why would you be interested in it?”
Her pale brows met over her nose. That feature was small like the rest of her and he repressed an urge to trace it with his forefinger. “You must have been in another world yesterday afternoon,” she said.
“Huh?” Baxter knew exactly where he’d been yesterday afternoon. Face-to-face with the woman who had been his singular out-of-character event. His lone antimerit badge. The one and only time he’d gone off the BSLS—Baxter Smith Life Schedule.
She shrugged. “I talked about all this at lunch and I suspected then you weren’t listening. Vance calls you All Business Baxter, so I suppose while your body was sitting at Captain Crow’s, your brain was back at your desk or something.”
Or something. His brain had actually been recalling a summer night nearly six years before. The night of the Smith family’s annual Picnic Day, a noon-through-night celebration at their avocado ranch. Open to the public, it featured food, drink and a dance band. Lights were strung everywhere...except in the dark shadowy corners where kisses could be stolen.
And peace of mind lost.
Addy gave him a strange look, then bent to ruffle through the box he’d opened. “I’m a grad student in film studies. My thesis focuses on the history of Sunrise Pictures—the company famous for its silent films made here at Crescent Cove.”
She peeked into another box, then lifted it onto the tabletop. “That closet is supposed to hold everything from the studio’s business records to the original scripts to the correspondence from movie stars of the time. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“I made a deal with the descendant of the original owner of Sunrise. I’ll spend the month cataloging what I find in return for unlimited access to the material.”
“Oh,” Baxter said again, because he wasn’t listening with any more attentiveness than he had yesterday. Then, he’d been unbalanced by the flood of memories seeing her had invoked. He hadn’t liked the feeling. He was a sensible, rational, always-on-an-even-keel sort of man. Seeing Addy had reminded him of the night that impulse had overridden common sense. The night that he’d done things and said things without considering the consequences. With no regard to the Schedule.
Afterward, the memories had preyed upon his conscience. Finally, he’d managed to assuage the reawakened guilt by promising himself he’d right things with her someday. The very next time he happened to see her.
Which had taken much longer than he’d expected to come about.
But that time felt too short now because broaching That Night with this near-stranger didn’t seem as if it would be an easy thing.
With a little cry of pleasure, she yanked out a handful of old-looking postcards, the ends of her hair seeming to vibrate with enthusiasm. Six years ago, she’d had masses of the stuff, curling like crimped ribbons away from her scalp and then floating in the air toward her elbows. The slightest breeze had wafted the fluffy strands over her features and across her chest, and he’d had to part it like clouds to find the heart shape of her face.
She wore a different style now, and he recognized an expensive cut when he saw one. The platinum locks had been sheared to work with her hair’s texture, the curled pieces a frame for her smooth forehead, her pointed chin, her amazing green eyes. It was short enough to reveal her dainty earlobes and her graceful neck.
As she dug back into the box, he saw her swallow, the thin skin of her throat moving in the direction of her collarbone. A dandelion, he mused, with that fluff of hair and slender stem of neck. One wrong breath and he’d lose her on the breeze.
As if she heard his thoughts, she jerked her head toward him. “What?” she asked, catching him staring.
His brain scrambled for something he could say. He couldn’t just launch into his apology, could he? “Well...” Glancing away from her questioning expression, he took in the boxes and tried remembering what she’d told him about them. “What made you pursue...uh...film studies?”
She was staring at him.
Had he gotten it wrong? “Or, um, film studios?” God, he sounded like an idiot.
“Film studies.” She returned her attention to the box. “I love movies. Always have, since I was a little kid.”
“I remember that.”
Her head whipped around. “You couldn’t. You didn’t know me then.” She looked anxious at the thought he might.
Baxter couldn’t figure out why. He frowned, searching back in his mind for a picture of Addy as a schoolgirl. But his memory stalled on her at nineteen, heat rushing to his groin as he pictured her blushing cheeks, her sun-kissed shoulders, her—
Stop! he ordered himself, shaking the images from his head. He shoved his hands in his pockets and cleared his throat. “I remember you getting a boatload of DVDs as birthday presents. Your parents threw a big bash for one occasion and invited the entire neighborhood. Vance and I breezed through...” His words trailed off as her face turned scarlet.
She rubbed her palms on the fabric of her pants. “It was my thirteenth. I can’t believe you came to it.”
“We were probably hoping to score some cake and make our mothers happy.” He studied her still-red face. “The memory doesn’t seem to be a pleasant one for you.”
“I didn’t like being the center of attention at that age.”
Baxter frowned, thinking back again. “Yeah, I remember the party, but I don’t remember you there.”
“Good,” Addy said, her voice fervent. She half turned from him, her focus back on the box.
The bare nape of her neck drew him closer. Six years ago, it had been hidden under all that hair. Her skin was so pretty there, smooth and vulnerable. “Which means,” Baxter murmured as he moved in, driven by some undeniable impulse, “that I owe you a birthday ki—”
“No!” She spun to face him,