Something Wild (8 page)

"I'll see you tomorrow," he went on. "That is, if you still want to work with me on this project. Because if you don't, I'll figure out some other way, some reason I can't do it."

Penny shook her head. "No, I … actually think we work well together … when we're not kissing."

She looked nervous, but he reassured her. "So do I." It was the truth. "Good night," he said a little more brusquely than he'd intended as he headed out the door and proceeded down the front walk toward the curb, where he'd parked.

Pausing on the sidewalk, he looked over his shoulder to find Penny peering at him from inside the screen door. "One last thing," he said, feeling bolder than he had a right to.

"What's that?"

"Are you gonna marry him?" It was presumptuous as hell, but he had to know.

Behind the screen, she hesitated, and Ryan felt his heart balancing precariously on her answer.

"No," she finally admitted in little more than a whisper. "Of course not. How could I now?"

A flood of relief washed through him. "Good," he said. Then he turned to walk on, taking a full two steps before he stopped and looked back again. "But that still doesn't change things between us. Because Martin's still my boss and you're still too wild for me." He'd just wanted to make sure they both knew where they stood.

"Hey, you're the one who keeps kissing me. All you have to do is stop."

"Right." He nodded. "And I will."

Still, even as he slid behind the wheel of his car, started the engine and drove down the street, even as he reminded himself what was smart and right and rational, Ryan couldn't help feeling inexplicably happy that Penny was no longer tied to another man.

4

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T
he green awnings beyond the plate-glass windows shaded the sidewalk from the scorching midday sun. The lunch rush had ended not long ago and Penny heard the sounds of dishes being washed in the pub's kitchen.

She wiped down the bar, then glanced at the clock. Ryan was probably upstairs finishing his sandwich right now, probably still working in Martin's corner office, too. Thankfully, Grace had been at her desk when Penny had dropped the lunches off today, which had kept her from having to hang around the place. But whether or not she bumped into Ryan at Schuster Systems didn't really matter since he would be showing up at her house again in about an hour. She drew in a deep breath, then let it slowly back out, wishing she didn't feel so twitchy inside just thinking about him and all that had happened.

She kept reliving the moment when he'd brushed that impossibly soft kiss across her lips. It had melted through her like the thrilling purity of a first kiss, like first love, as if she were sixteen and untouched and waiting for that first magical taste of romance. Every time she thought about it, she felt his mouth grazing hers again. But it would probably be wise to stop thinking about it because— Oh, poor Martin!

She hadn't known what to do about Martin until the words had left her yesterday. She wouldn't marry him. Couldn't marry him. Never even should have
considered
marrying him. She guessed being proposed to by a successful businessman, who was truly a nice person on top of it, had been flattering, and it had at least seemed worthy of some thought. But now any delusions of compatibility she'd been suffering had come to an end and she knew—

The rattle of a cup cut into her thoughts.
"Miss?"

She looked up to find their last remaining lunch customer, a middle-aged businessman with messy hair and a wrinkled suit, waving his coffee cup at her from the end of the bar.

"Yes?"

"I
said,
can I get a refill down here?" His dark eyebrows knit and his expression reminded Penny of an angry bear.

She was stunned she'd let his cup go empty and had apparently been ignoring him, too. She always put customers first. Well, except for now, darn it. "Of course. I'm sorry." As she grabbed the coffeepot and scurried toward him, she could feel Patti's scowl from where she sat at a nearby table rolling silverware into napkins.

Great, now the whole Ryan/Martin fiasco was distracting Penny from her job, too. Still, thank God she'd figured out the right answer to Martin's proposal before it was too late.

So it was actually good this whole thing happened, she tried to convince herself, returning the coffeepot to its place. Wanting another guy so much had made the decision about marrying Martin clearer than anything else could have. But now her entanglement with Ryan was over because of his job. Which was also good, because even after she officially broke things off with Martin, it would look awfully suspicious if she and Ryan were suddenly together, wouldn't it? And besides, he had the ridiculous idea that she was too wild for him anyway. "Ha!"

"What?" Patti looked up, clearly perplexed. Penny felt the rumpled businessman's questioning gaze, as well.

"Nothing." She shook her head lightly. She'd not meant to say that aloud, but when she thought about Ryan's accusation, it made her a little crazy inside.

After all, she'd been accused of a lot of things in her day. In elementary school, she'd been called Goody Two-Shoes; in junior high, she'd been the Teacher's Pet; and in high school, she'd not dated a lot due to her reputation as a Nice Girl. Her family and friends had always labeled her with words like
dependable
and
hardworking,
and Patti always distinguished between the two of them by calling her The Sweet One. But no one had ever, by any stretch of the imagination, called Penny Halloran
wild.

On the other hand, she chided herself, you did seduce the man in a limousine. The same man with whom she had to design a computer system now. The same man she couldn't kiss anymore, or have sex with anymore, either. She shook her head in disbelief, then tossed down her rag. The whole thing still didn't quite seem real, and her confusion over it had escalated with Ryan's kisses last night.

Finishing up a few last tasks behind the bar, Penny took a look around. After asking one of the waitresses, Lisa, to refill ketchup bottles when she got a chance, she said to Patti, "I've gotta run. Ryan will be over soon."

"Oh yeah. Time for your big computer date."

Penny blinked and hoped she looked normal. "What are you talking about?" It didn't help that Lisa and Bearface down at the end of the bar were both listening, too.

"I'm not sure," Patti said, sounding irritatingly sleuthlike, "but I'm telling you, you get wide-eyed and sort of … aloof whenever you mention him."

Great, so she
didn't
look normal. "Do not," she protested. And she was arguing like a seven-year-old on top of it.

"Whatever you say," Patti replied in a singsong voice that told Penny her sister wasn't buying it. She got the idea Patti thought Ryan was a better choice for her than Martin even without knowing him.

If only she could keep Martin on her mind for half as long as she thought about Ryan, maybe she wouldn't feel like such a rotten person. She dreaded turning down Martin's proposal, but once she did—and once she got through this system design with Ryan—this would all be over.

And as for the little stab of pain in her chest when she thought of things with Ryan being over … well, Penny never had been particularly skilled at the art of casual dating. So it probably stood to reason that having sex with someone would cause some odd, jarring feelings of infatuation. She guessed that was what you'd call it, and she was a tad disconcerted that it seemed to be getting steadily worse.

But a little—or even a lot—of infatuation didn't matter. It
couldn't
matter. Ryan had made it clear that whatever attraction he felt for her wasn't enough to make him throw away his new job, and she couldn't blame him. After all, they barely knew each other.

Penny glanced toward the bear-faced man to find him looking amused by her discussion with Patti. "She's completely mistaken," she said. Then, mumbling a quick goodbye to Patti, she snatched up her purse and exited the restaurant before her sister could get any wiser that there was more to this story than met the eye.

* * *

Ryan took a deep breath as he approached Penny's front door. It felt dangerous, as if he were returning to the scene of a crime. He still couldn't believe he'd made such a lunkhead move yesterday. No wonder he kept losing jobs—he kept letting his wants get in the way of his responsibilities. What would it take before he learned his lesson? Another job loss? Another relocation? Maybe he'd never get it figured out and go broke in the process. As for whatever insane sense of relief he'd felt driving away from her house last night, he'd decided it only had to do with her decision about Martin easing his guilt a little, making him feel a bit less like a trespasser. Because he'd meant what he'd said, she was too intense for him. And he couldn't keep screwing up every job he got, every chance someone gave him to build a career. So that meant…

You cannot think about her black bra. You cannot think about her slender curves. You can't even think about how soft her lips were yesterday or the pretty scent of her hair.

"Hi," Penny said, opening the door just as he was about to knock. "How are you?" Her eyes sparkled with a surprisingly friendly welcome and her lips looked horribly silken and inviting, which made it difficult not to think about them. And, damn it, her hair still smelled that way. What was it, some kind of flower or fruit? He almost asked on impulse, when he jolted himself to a halt.

"I think it would be smart," he said on an exhale, "for us to skip the small talk and get right to work."

She looked surprised, perhaps irritated, even as her warm blue eyes took on that ridiculously innocent quality he'd noticed before. Yet she caught her breath and said, "Whatever you think is best."

Heading for her desk, he took a seat and set up his laptop, staying focused on the hardware in front of him.

"Something to drink?" she asked. "Not that I mean to make small talk. But it's hot outside and I thought you might be parched."

He resisted the urge to glance up at her, instead watching his computer screen blink to life. Still, from his peripheral vision, he saw she wore her usual khaki shorts and a white sleeveless blouse, and her hair was knotted up on top of her head in some sort of clip. A glimpse down revealed that her feet were bare, which struck him as adorably sexy, although he had no idea why and absolutely refused to think about it. "No thanks," he said.

Did she just roll her eyes at him? He couldn't tell for sure, since he wasn't looking directly at her, but he could've sworn… "Did you just roll your eyes at me?" he asked, swinging his gaze onto hers.

Big mistake. When their eyes met, he felt it in his gut. "As a matter of fact—" she planted her fists on her hips "—I did."

His heartbeat rose to his throat, but he merely lifted his eyebrows in question.

"Look, I understand the need to keep this all about business, but don't you think you're being a little extreme?"

"Nope, just ready to get to work," he claimed, forcing a smile, one of those professional ones that had come a little easier yesterday. He motioned to the laptop. "I want to show you the screens I put together last night."

When she slid into the chair next to his, finally allowing them to get Day Two of the project under way, Ryan exhaled a sigh of relief, then pointed to the laptop with a pen. "Okay, you recall the start-up screen. Now, when you click on the Accounting box—" he demonstrated "—you'll be asked for a password."

Together, they set up a password for Penny to use during the test phase, and she chose "prettypenny," explaining with a wistful smile that her grandpa had called her that when she was a little girl. "He and my grandmother had a farm down in Kentucky, about an hour south of here. The land is covered with strip malls and fast food restaurants now, but back then, there was a silo, and acres of tall corn, and a tire swing that hung from the big apple tree in front of their house, just for Patti and me."

Ryan himself had grown up in a rural farming community, and though Penny's memories of such surroundings sounded warmer than his own, it reminded him of good times. "My brother Dan and I had a swing, too, a wooden one. My dad sat down in it one day after we'd outgrown it and broke right through it."

They shared a smile over Ryan's recollection, and he decided he certainly agreed with her grandfather's nickname for her, but how had they gotten off track so quickly? He determinedly wiped the grin from his face and returned his eyes to the computer, ready to move into the accounting program once and for all.

An incredible sense of relief washed over him as he finally fell into full work mode, soon showing her the accounting elements he'd designed for the pub after leaving last night. He supposed his comfort came from having done this hundreds of times; working with clients had become second nature to him and explanations for each screen display rolled off his tongue with ease. But he didn't really care why, he only cared that it'd happened, that she hadn't distracted him with any more personal stuff, and that he'd finally started acting more professionally before anything could go awry.

Every now and then, Penny uttered an "mmmhmm" or an "ah" or asked a question, and he made sure she understood the relevant features of each component before going to the next. Periodically, he asked her to give suggestions or point out things she disliked, taking notes and responding with suggestions of his own. By the time they'd walked through the screens he'd created, he felt a familiar sense of pride and satisfaction in his work.