Something Different/Pepper's Way (21 page)

Thor knocked on the door. A deep-throated “Woof!” and various other indefinable sounds came from within. Then the door swung open.

“Come in,” a sweet, breathless voice invited. “If you’re Thor, that is.”

“I’m Thor,” he managed, stepping inside automatically. The door closed behind him while he tried to collect himself. It wasn’t easy; his mental picture of Pepper had been uncannily on target.

Since she was in socks only, he could gauge her height nicely; if she was stretched on a rack for ten minutes, she might possibly be five feet tall. Her hair was so light that
silver
was the only color that could describe it, and it fell nearly to her hips. Her face was finely drawn and delicate, and flattered the word
beautiful.
Only her eyes varied from his image, and he was glad they did; plain blue could never begin to compare with that glorious pale violet.

And—though tiny she certainly was—the mature and somewhat startlingly voluptuous curves filling out her jeans and knit top belonged only to a woman.

“I’m glad you found the place,” she was telling him in that ridiculously intriguing little-girl voice. “Would you like to sit down, or—”

A loud thump from somewhere in one of the other rooms interrupted her, and she half turned from Thor, exclaiming fretfully “Oh, damn, he got out!”

Before Thor could ask the foreboding question in his mind, a two-pound fury hurtled across the carpeted floor, uttering a hysterical yapping sound, and attached itself ferociously to his trouser leg. On closer inspection the fury turned out to be a Chihuahua that would have had to be dipped in milk and rolled in bread crumbs to weigh two pounds. It was light brown in color, and obviously possessed the temper and general disposition of a drunken marine.

In patient silence Thor shifted his weight onto his unencumbered leg and raised the other about a foot off the floor. The fury clung tenaciously, growling and trying fiercely to bring down its intended prey entirely unperturbed by the fact that it was hanging in midair. Thor returned the foot and attached dog to the floor and lifted his eyes to Pepper. She was, he noted, looking down at the tiny dog with a fondly exasperated expression.

“What’s it doing?” Thor asked politely.

Pepper looked up, surprised. “He’s attacking you, obviously. He’s an attack dog.”

Thor looked hard for mockery on the lovely face, and found only solemnity. “Oh. Do you mind calling him off?”

“Well… I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Thor decided that if both Pepper and this Lilliputian canine thought that it was an attack dog, who was he to argue? “I thought there was a command to call them off.”

“There is,” she agreed cheerfully. “It’s ‘break.’ But Brutus ignores it; he always has.”

Incredulously Thor dropped his gaze to the tiny creature.
“This
is Brutus? You can’t tell me your landlord objects to this little mite!”

“Of course not.
Fifi’s
the problem.”

“Fifi?” Thor decided that he had wandered through Alice’s
mirror by accident. The scary part was that he was enjoying it. “Uh… where’s Fifi?”

Looking surprised again, Pepper half turned and gestured toward the couch a few feet away. Thor’s gaze followed her pointing finger, and he immediately understood her surprise; his only excuse for having missed seeing the creature until now was that he’d been too fascinated by Pepper to look at his surroundings.

“Fifi” was a respectably sized mountain of short gleaming black and tan fur, quivering from pointed little ears to stub of a tail. It was lying on its belly with its face thrust underneath the couch, and a quick and rough calculation told Thor that it would be nearly three feet tall on all fours.

It was a full-grown and heavily muscled Doberman pin-scher, which Thor had always considered one of the wickedest-looking dogs in creation. And it weighed every ounce of a hundred pounds.

The landlord’s horror, he reflected, was now perfectly clear. He tried to picture the expression on Mrs. Small’s face when she saw Fifi and hastily abandoned the effort when the first fleeting image came to his mind.

“Fifi?” Pepper called softly, and the dog quivered even more, not moving an inch.

“What’s it doing?” Thor asked curiously.

“She’s hiding.”

“What’s she hiding?”

“Herself.”

“But I can see—”

“Shhh!” Pepper made a hasty gesture to silence him.
“She
thinks she’s hiding. Since she can’t see you, she thinks you can’t see her.”

Thor decided to let that pass; for the life of him, he didn’t
know how to respond. He realized suddenly that he was still being savaged. “Look, can you get this dog off my leg? I’m going to look a little peculiar walking around with him attached to me like this.”

Pepper looked down at Brutus, frowned for a moment, then stepped closer. She bent over and swatted the tiny dog firmly on the rump. Immediately he whirled to contend with the surprise attack, and she snatched him up and tucked him under her arm. Apparently still blind with rage, Brutus was on the point of sinking his teeth into her arm when her voice stopped him cold.

“Don’t… you… dare,” she told him in an unexpectedly icy tone.

Pointed ears that were overlarge on the tiny head perked up, and there was such a ludicrously expressive “Oh, it’s
you
!” look on the dog’s face that Thor burst out laughing. Brutus immediately threw a snarl his way, clearly trying to save face.

“What do you feed him—gunpowder?”

“Of course not. I told you he was an attack dog.” She waved a hospitable hand toward the small living room they were literally standing in. “Why don’t you sit down? On the couch there, by Fifi. She’ll come out once she gets used to your voice.”

Thor went over to the couch, making a lengthy detour around Fifi’s ample rump to sit a prudent distance away from her. He was taking no chances.

Pepper sat across from him in a chair, holding the ever-growling Brutus firmly in her lap. “Are you still interested?” she asked wryly.

Looking at her instead of the dog, Thor murmured, “More than ever.”

If she heard anything in his voice to suggest that it was she, rather than her dog, that Thor was interested in, Pepper didn’t show it on her face. She was completely natural, and obviously didn’t possess a single coquettish bone in her body.

And she didn’t, Thor reflected thankfully, weigh him with a speculative and unnerving eye, as so many women seemed to do these days. He wondered suddenly if she were as old as her body suggested.

“How old are you?” he demanded abruptly.

Pepper seemed neither surprised nor offended by the question. Instead, she released a long-suffering sigh.
“Et tu, Brute?
I’m twenty-eight.” At his obvious surprise she added dryly, “I have to carry a special police identification card because nobody ever believes that. Shall I show it to you?”

Thor grinned. “No need; I’ll take your word for it.”

“Thanks. And you never told me how old you are, by the way.”

“Thirty-four. And nobody
ever
disbelieves that.”

She studied him with a total lack of self-consciousness. “I can see how they wouldn’t,” she said ingenuously. “You have a rough sort of face; it has a history.”

Thor immediately felt at least ten years older than he was. History? Glancing aside to collect his thoughts, he found himself under scrutiny from a pair of panicky brown eyes that widened in even greater panic and then disappeared. Fifi was hiding again. Thor looked at Pepper, and she shrugged, giving him a rueful smile.

“She’ll get used to you.”

“She’s a coward,” he observed dryly.

“Well… I guess you could say that. She barks once and then hides.”

Thor remembered the deep-throated bark he’d heard. “Uh-huh. Some watchdog she’s going to make.”

Pepper smiled at him happily, the bottomless pools of her violet eyes oddly riveting. “Are you saying that you want her?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Definitely But I don’t know about taking her with me today. She’s so nervous, and my car—”

“What kind of car do you have?”

“A Corvette.”

Pepper winced. “That’ll never do. Tell you what. I have a van, so why don’t I do the relocating? We can come tomorrow.”

Convinced that Pepper wouldn’t abandon her pet totally, Thor nodded and smiled. “Sounds great. You can help her with the—uh—transitional period.”

“Wonderful! What time tomorrow shall we come?”

“Any time after noon.”

“We’ll be there.” Pepper looked down at the huge, quivering dog, and smiled fondly. “I’m sure she’ll be braver in the country.”

Thor blinked and then looked down at the dog as well. He’d nearly forgotten about Fifi. “Uh…yes. I’m sure she will be.”

two

GRAY EYES,
PEPPER THOUGHT, LEANING BACK
against the closed door and staring absently across the room. He had gray eyes. Combined with his red-gold hair and deeply tanned skin, the gray eyes were startling. They were also sharp, intelligent, and held a lurking twinkle.

Releasing her pent-up breath in a long sigh, Pepper bent to set Brutus on the floor. She saw that her hands were shaking and wasn’t surprised by that. But she was surprised by her reaction to Thor Spicer. At twenty-eight she’d ruefully decided that she would probably remain unattached, because she had not, in all her travels, met a man whose voice set her heart bumping and raised goose bumps on her flesh.

Almost reluctantly she lifted an arm and examined her lightly tanned skin. Uh-huh. Gooseflesh. And heaven knew her heart was bumping against her ribs as though she’d been running.

Still leaning against the door, she watched Fifi rise, shake herself, then wag a happy bobtailed rear end and follow Brutus toward the kitchen and their food dishes. Pepper shook her head slightly. What had her
brilliant
newspaper ad gotten her
into? Simply because she’d wanted to find Fifi a good home with a kind man…

The truth floated into her consciousness gently, unthreat-eningly: like most of the schemes and plans her active mind spawned, this idea had looked innocent and logical on the surface. Experience had taught her that her “logical” plans generally possessed hidden pitfalls. However, she’d never given up her scheming just because of a few minor stumbling blocks.

Cal’s voice surfaced suddenly in her mind, a little desperate and a lot wild: “You’re dangerous, you know that? You’re
ruthless
and, God, who’d guess it by looking at you?”

Pepper grinned to herself. That had been wailed at her just moments before Cal’s wedding to Marsha five years ago, and just after a long and somewhat involved courtship in which Pepper had played a vital role. Matchmaker. She was good at that.

After all, Cal and Marsha were still married, and very happily so from the looks of it. And the other matches she’d engineered over the years were still going strong, not a divorce or separation in the lot.

This time Johnny’s voice popped into her mind: “Let’s all band together and get Pepper settled; it’d be poetic justice! She’s the only one of the gang still footloose and fancy-free.”

Absently Pepper moved over to sink down on the couch, drawing her legs up and tucking her feet under a cushion. The gang was indeed all settled. Most within driving distance of one another in the Northeast; she, herself, was the farthest north at the moment, living in Maine. Her original college crowd numbered nearly a score—and that wasn’t counting the strays she’d happened across on her travels and brought home to be matched with her friends.

Ruthless? She thought about that for a moment. Certainly
she was ruthless. But she would never do anything to hurt a friend—which was probably why she had so many of them. She was also a helluva lot smarter than she looked, and perfectly capable of taking care of herself even in the turmoil of Third World countries.

So, being a smart and ruthless lady, she had never yet hesitated to go after what she wanted, be it a seat on a booked airline or some trinket requiring haggling in a language she didn’t speak.

But a man? No, she’d never gone after a man. Heaven knew she had plenty of male friends spread out over the world. But no gooseflesh. Until now.

She grinned to herself. “Okay, Pepper,” she murmured out loud, “how do you propose to do the thing? And never mind the idea. The idea is dumb…and dangerous.” She brooded silently for a moment.

“He’s interested. That was obvious. I don’t know why, but he is.” She winced as Fifi clambered up onto her lap—all hundred pounds of her. Stroking the sleek fur, Pepper gazed sternly into mild brown eyes. “He didn’t want you, old girl. I’m sure he’ll give you a good home, and love you once he gets to know you. But curiosity brought him here. He wasn’t interested in a hundred-pound lap dog. However… he
said
he wants you. I wonder if he realizes I won’t totally abandon you to a stranger?”

Fifi whined what could have been taken for an agreement.

“I wonder exactly how far his interest goes?” Pepper mused to her sympathetic canine friend. “He doesn’t look like the home-and-hearth type. I was right; his face has a history. That little scar above his left eye … And he looks tired. I wonder what he does for a living? Something out in the weather. That’s not a swimming-pool tan, and his hands have seen rough use. And he’s strong.”