Ryan had implied nothing. He’d said it straight out.

The police had assured him that nuisance callers rarely followed through on their telephone threats. Despite that, every instinct told him that this caller was a sexual threat to Greer.

And Ryan was disturbed, frustrated, fiercely protective and beginning to worry about even fourteen-year-old boys who looked at her.

He coaxed. “You haven’t seen my place since it was decorated in packing crates. We can eat there just as well.”

“I need to change my clothes, my mother calls on Mondays, and I-”

“You can call her from my apartment, or vice versa. I had an extension of your phone installed this morning.’”

“You what?”


***

Greer’s temper simmered helplessly while Ryan shoved some kind of gourmet TV fare in the oven, showed her around the apartment, nudged a dish of mixed raisins and nuts into her hand, and left her to muddle around while he disappeared to change his shirt.

By the time they finished dinner, she figured he had to have exhausted himself with inconsequential nonstop patter about engineering, and weather, and his mother’s love of gardenias, and health care in England. Only after dinner, he installed her on the couch. His furniture was new; she couldn’t help but approve of it. The couch was an off-white nubby affair, and she sank into it so deeply and so comfortably that she doubted she could get up.

Her stocking feet seemed to be propped on an ottoman, and she hadn’t seen her shoes in an hour. It was tough, dredging up irritation when she was so comfortable. The rest of his new furnishings were equally pleasing. He had placed them all wrong-men will be men-but they were tasteful and appealing. Brass lamps, an oak rolltop desk, shelves in pecan, a coffee table in that rare dark marble she’d seen only in books before… The only thing he hadn’t found a place for was a painting.

The oil was resting on the floor against the wall, a seascape at dawn; the creamy breakers were rolling in, and the waters beyond were a bright, endless blue. The blue of Ryan’s eyes.

“That’s been sitting there for days,” he said casually. “Wouldn’t have any ideas where I should hang it, would you?”

She had several ideas where Ryan was concerned, none of them mentionable. In a demonstration of totally out-of-character garrulousness, he’d mentioned lightly that he’d had a very busy day with the police and the phone company on her behalf. Now her phone-temporarily-rang in his apartment as well as her own. Since it was past time to get to the bottom of the caller mystery, he couldn’t imagine that she had any objections.

Four times she’d opened her mouth to read him the riot act. Four times she’d closed it.

Confusion kept her silent. She heard Ryan’s overt message, but she heard the unspoken one as well. She’d given him certain rights when she made love with him. Privacy and lovers didn’t go together, of course. Or they shouldn’t. When you loved someone, you bared your vulnerabilities, laid open your weaknesses. Like the things you were afraid of.

And where Greer could have criticized Ryan for interfering if he’d been a friend, she couldn’t bring herself to do so now. He’d gone over her head only because she’d given him certain rights. To love. And in loving, to protect.

Ryan, so very subtly, was bulldozing her with the fact that he considered her part of his life.

He was also busy wandering to and from the other rooms. He placed a hammer in her lap. Then two nails. Then some wire. By the time he plopped into the chair across from her, he managed somehow to look boyishly innocent.

Greer sighed. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve never tried to hang a picture before?”

“I have. But they always end up crooked.” He added hopefully, “Do you want a tape measure?”

“No. You can’t do these things by measuring. You have to do them by the look of the thing.”

She didn’t want to do it. Putting up pictures was another one of those things. Those intimate things. It didn’t involve naked skin, but it was still inescapably intimate. The picture had bothered her from the instant she’d walked in, not because it was on the floor, but because she wanted it in the right place. An idiotic feminine impulse. A desire to put her personal stamp on his place. An instinct that assumed a vested interest, and she didn’t dare give in to it.

“I thought about hanging it over the TV,” Ryan said absently.

“No!” The painting would look wretched there. Dammit. Feeling helpless, Greer stood up, straightening her blouse, and surveyed the picture and the room with a critical eye. “You can’t put it there. Hang it over the couch or on that wall so you can see it when you come in…” Her eye lingered on the far wall.

“Okay.” A step stool miraculously appeared where she was looking. “You want me to do it?” he asked innocently.

She wanted him to take a flying hike. “If you were going to do it, you wouldn’t have brought out the step stool,” she said dryly.

“You need someone to hold the nails,” he said helpfully.

She gave in. They bickered back and forth for the better part of an hour. Greer climbed up and down the step stool forty times to judge the height of the picture, endured no end of comments about her fussiness, paused for a phone conversation with her mother, hammered in the first nail crooked, made a hole in the plaster, suffered his laughter, and triumphantly accepted a glass of wine while they both surveyed the perfectly placed oil painting in shared total exhaustion.

The first sip of wine was sliding down her throat, cool and smooth, when Ryan abruptly murmured, “Stay.”

Her eyes darted up to his. The painting behind him abruptly disappeared. Something went wrong with her focus, because the only thing clear in her vision was Ryan. A man with shirtsleeves rolled up and an open collar, a man with brilliant blue eyes and ruffled hair. A man who wasn’t smiling. A man who couldn’t possibly have playfully patted her fanny moments before when she descended the step stool, because there wasn’t an ounce of play in his eyes now. Just wanting. Honest, bold, clear.

In her heart, she’d been expecting that invitation, but not at this particular instant, not after she’d just very foolishly immersed herself in playing wife for the past hour. Lots of clever reasons why she couldn’t stay popped into her head. The cat. Stockings to wash out. She’d forgotten to water the plant in her bedroom; she just now remembered it.

Gently, his arms draped over her shoulders, pulling her closer. She couldn’t speak; there was something tight and thick in her throat. Maybe the wine. Her cheek rested against his heart a moment later, his arms slowly smoothed around her and he simply held her, length to length, warmth to warmth. He felt so right she could have cried.

“You’re going to have to tell me what’s bothering you,” he said quietly. “Do you know I love you?”

She shook her head, eyes closed.

“I do, Greer. So much. I love the way you think, your eyes, your legs…” He forced her chin up with a smile. “Your sense of humor. I love being beaten by you at chess. I even love your damned cat. And I love…touching you.” Softly, he stroked her hair back from her forehead with a single finger. “I love doing that, too. Making an absolute mess out of your hair, knowing you don’t give a damn. Knowing you care more for the feel of my hands on you than about how you look. Are you going to try to tell me you don’t like it when I touch you?”

“No,” she said quietly, honestly. Her stricken eyes met his. “You know I do.”

“Greer.” His finger stayed gently tucked under her chin, his voice grave, gentle. “Has someone hurt you in bed?”

All his subtlety had disappeared, remarkably fast. She should have known. “No, nothing like that.” She flushed. The knot in her throat refused to budge. Her palms suddenly felt icy, and she was trembling. “I think…” she said hesitantly. “Ryan, I think you want something from me that just…isn’t there.”

The smallest frown furrowed his brow. “You’ll have to explain that.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know how,” she said helplessly.

“Honey…”

She ducked away from his touch, wrapping her arms around her chest, slowly pacing away from him, and then looking frenetically around the room for her shoes. They weren’t in sight. The door, at least, was. Until he slowly, quietly, moved in front of it.

“Look,” she said abruptly and took a huge breath, facing him. “Ryan, I’ve just never been very good at…sexual relationships.” She worked frantically to keep her tone light, casual. “Some women are the black-nightgown type, you know? Not me. Caring, loving, listening, showing respect-those are terribly important things to me in a relationship. The…other…has never really mattered to me.” She gulped. “I just feel that…that perhaps it would be wiser for us to call it off, not try to go any further. I don’t want to disappoint you, and I don’t want to be hurt.”

“Greer-”

“This is a wonderfully liberated decade. There are lots of women out there who are much more…sexual than I am. It’s not a question of willingness, or even love.” She tried for a smile. “Ryan, I go to bed in a T-shirt with a picture of Garfield on it. Does that tell you anything?”

“Greer-”

“I’ll get my shoes another time.”

Before the tears could blind her, she whisked past him and out the door, fumbled in the flowerpot for her key and whipped inside her apartment. She locked the door and leaned against it, her heart pounding, her eyes moist, her hands shaky.

She was terrified he would come after her, but he didn’t. After several long minutes of just standing there with her head thrown back against the door, she bit her lip and moved through the dark apartment to turn on a light.