Spring Collection (15 page)

“You’d never
ever
get another chance? Under any circumstances?” she murmured questioningly, weighingly, as if to herself.

“Never! Not ever! And I’d
always
owe you!”

“Hmmm.”

“Justine, please,” he implored her. “Please!”

“But I hate hotels,” she said gloomily. “They depress me.”

“You could stay with me! I have a huge loft downtown. Tribeca. You wouldn’t even know I was there, if you didn’t want to.”

“Hmmm.” She remained clearly unconvinced.

“And I have great tickets to the Knicks game tomorrow night. They won’t call that off, wouldn’t dare.”

“Hmmm.” She sounded marginally less dubious.

“I have a ton of food, I’d cook for you and clean up and wait on you hand and foot, cups of tea, Gibsons, Tequila Sunrises, milkshakes, whatever you’re in the mood for. And we could explore my neighborhood, think of it as a mini-vacation. And if there’s enough snow, I have skis for both of us.…”

Justine put her hands on his bare shoulders, looking questioningly into his eyes, as if the mention of skis had seriously tipped the balance in his favor. Did she look like a skier to him? Precariously balanced on his heels as he was, he almost fell into her lap. Aiden scrambled up to his feet and pulled her up toward him by the elbows.

“Would you make my bed?” Justine asked imperiously, leaning back and looking up at him. “I hate to make a bed.”

“I’d make it with hospital corners. I make a great bed. I’d give you clean sheets every day.”

“What else?”

“I promise not to lay a single finger on you,” Aiden said. “I swear it, on my mother’s head.”

“That’s more like it,” Justine whispered approvingly. “But what if …?”

“If what …?” he breathed hopefully.

“Oh, never mind. Just thinking out loud.” She succeeded in not smiling at the puzzled look on his face. Men were so hopeless. Pathetic, really. Did she look as if she drank Tequila Sunrises? Or milkshakes, for that
matter? He had a lot to learn about her. For some reason her good mood had returned.

“I’d better go throw a few things into a suitcase,” Justine said and pulled out of his arms. As she reached her icy bedroom she’d started humming again. A mini-vacation, she thought, might actually be a good thing, she’d been working too hard lately and with this freeze the weekend would be tedious, even if the house were warm. Even if she had a good book.

W
hat had come over her, Justine wondered, locked in an agony of second thoughts, as the cab, possibly the last one in New York, continued to creep uncertainly downtown, bouncing into every possible pothole. The West Side Highway was already closed and they were taking some mysterious overland route known only to Tribeca dwellers. It had started to snow seriously even before the last workmen left. Aiden had made one more tour of the pipes before she’d locked her front door and cast a sad good-bye look at her house.

She could be settling into a warm luxurious hotel by now, Justine thought, she could be surrounded by a secure, impersonal network of room service and phone operators and assistant managers, she would have ordered flowers up from the lobby florist, bought all the new magazines and be snugly prepared to ride out whatever the elements brought to the city, but no, she’d allowed a whim, a vagrant impulse, to overtake her judgment and now she was captive of a man she had met only twenty-four hours earlier, much too up close and personal with a virtual stranger who had already proved himself a prime fuckup.

A loft in Tribeca, Justine asked herself? How could she have said yes? She’d hated lofts on principle even though they’d been the rage when she’d first come to New York. She could picture it now: defiantly ugly high tech, all one big sneer of industrial steel and exposed
plumbing. The whole loft concept was crazy, except for studio space or moviemaking. People were meant to live in welcoming, human-scaled rooms, not former factories with inadequate separations between spaces for different functions. This Aiden Henderson creature probably had installed a shower in his kitchen just to show it could be done. She’d had one dinner with him, allowed one or one and a half pecks on the cheek, and now she’d committed herself to be snowed in with the man who’d ruined her house. Was she a victim of the Stockholm syndrome?

She didn’t recognize the rundown West Side neighborhood they were passing through but the taxi driver was having so much trouble with his car that it was clearly too late to change her mind. They were almost in the Hudson River as it was. Shit! She hated everything about snotty downtown lowlife, she hated its pretensions to being so much more interesting and “real” than uptown with its Chinese drag restaurants that offered bad attitude and worse food, with the panting worship of film producers and restaurant owners, who were often the same people of limited talent, with the idealization of flops full of trisexual teenaged, junkie street kids, whose spacey lives consisted of skateboarding by day and raves at night, whole tribes of the living dead who thought that anyone over nineteen was senile.

Why had she been so
easy
? At the least Aiden must have been astonished that she’d taken him up on his offer. Why hadn’t she told him that with her busy social life there was no way she could be free for an entire weekend? Oh, dear God, she
had
lost her mind! The traumatic destruction of her furnace had caused her to throw all normal social conventions to the wind.

Justine sneaked a peek at Aiden’s profile. He looked grim and distant, intent on trying to get the cabdriver to follow his precise directions when it was obvious that the poor man hadn’t the faintest idea of how to get to Tribeca, much less Laight Street. Where was that pleasant smile now? Ten to one this thug had
never gone to the University of Colorado, ten thousand to one he hadn’t shown up on her doorstep just to do a favor for her friends who had recommended him.

What kind of contractor would start a job the day after he got it? A contractor without any other work, that’s who. A gypsy contractor, a contractor who’d had his license taken away, a contractor in disgrace! Why hadn’t she asked to see proof of his bona fides, why hadn’t she called someone at City Hall and had his name and license checked out? Why had she let herself be influenced by the honest impression made last night by this great big cowboy with the kind of broken nose that had made the young Brando into more than another pretty face? Why had she, Justine Loring, expert in all the falsity of character that could be achieved by sheer physiognomy, allowed herself to be intrigued, even, admit it, slightly … charmed, God help her … by this so-called contractor’s con-artist’s gift for exuding a kind of reassurance that came from being large and seeming to be capable—ha!—and acting as if he had no idea of how good-looking he was? Wasn’t that the classic technique? Didn’t all bunko artists work that way?

The snow wasn’t just getting thicker, it was sticking, wet and heavy, a snowstorm as dense as a chenille bedspread. The wipers on the windshield were barely working. Justine shivered in her long blanket coat made of heavy white wool, lavishly wreathed with long fringes of curly white Mongolian lamb from collar to hem. She pulled her old knit cap down until it almost covered her eyes and clasped her fur-lined gloves together in rising panic. Even her feet, in shearling-lined boots and thick socks, were getting icy. But, blizzard or not, if Aiden Henderson made one wrong move, just one, even a fucking
gesture
, she’d escape from that loft and get back to civilization even if, yes, even if it meant taking the subway!

Why was Justine so silent, Aiden Henderson wondered, as he covered his discomfort by helping the cabdriver find the right route. Why was she cowering
silently in the corner of the cab, covered by a bizarre pile of frizzy white hairy stuff, as if she had something to fear from him? Did a couple of quick kisses on the cheek indicate that he was going to molest her? He’d never dreamed that she would take him up on his crazy offer to spend the weekend. He’d only made it under the influence of her broken heart. Christ, he didn’t know if he even had any clean sheets—God willing, Mrs. Brady had managed to get in to clean today and brought the laundry. And whatever a Tequila Sunrise was, he’d never made one. Justine Loring, for Pete’s sake—she must have all sorts of other things to do, men to meet, parties to go to, a big, complicated glamorous life to go with her glamorous job about which he knew nothing at all except that some silly people thought it meaningful to civilization that women grow taller and thinner every year.

Had he been dreaming or had Justine been leading him on back there in the basement? Was he some kind of exotically low new experience for her? A weekend with a contractor or how I got to wallow in the depths of depravity with a man who works with his hands? Well, he had a surprise for her. He’d only asked her to stay because he had a businessman’s responsibility to provide her with shelter and she’d insisted that hotels depressed her.

Well, tough, weekend guests depressed
him
. Why hadn’t he remembered that the sight of a woman in tears deprived him of all his common sense? He’d been looking forward to a quiet couple of days to go over a bunch of complicated lighting bids for the new factory he was building in Long Island City, to say nothing of the four big football games he intended to catch. Now he was stuck with a latter-day Anna Karenina buried in a pile of dead sheep, the expression on her face suitable to someone who was about to be thrown off a sled into the Russian winter. Had he really promised to
make her bed?
No way! If she even mentioned it, if she so much as breathed a word about her bed being made, he’d
escort her to the subway, give her a token and let her go and be depressed in a hotel.

The cab skidded to a shaky stop and Aiden helped Justine out and grabbed her suitcase. While he paid the driver she looked around, seeing nothing remotely safe about the dimly lit street or the dark hulk of what looked like a deserted warehouse. Silently they rose in a creaking freight elevator until they reached what Justine judged must be the top floor of the building. They emerged onto an anonymous landing and as Aiden unlocked his front door Justine sniffed the air suspiciously. Odd, she thought, anyone would say wood-smoke and … and linseed oil? He grasped her elbow lightly so that she wouldn’t trip on the sill and flicked on several light switches. Justine took one step inside and stopped abruptly.

“Oh,” she said in astonishment. “I don’t believe this.”

“Yeah.” He grinned at her tiny bewildered voice. “It took seven barns, three big and four small, all abandoned, most of them built before 1800. I salvaged them in Indiana for almost nothing. I can’t get enough wood in my life, I’m crazy about the stuff, I’ve got seventeen varieties in here.”

“But you said a
loft,”
she laughed in sheer relief.

“Technically it is a loft.”

“It
was
a loft. Now it’s a … a giant … what? Barn? Log cabin? Ranch house? Stable? It’s a little of everything,” Justine insisted, walking around the great room in enchantment, peeking through doorways to other, smaller rooms with low ceilings.

“Since I built it with my own two hands I’ll let you call it whatever you choose,” Aiden said, delighted with her reaction. Everybody was startled by his place but not everybody liked it as much as she seemed to. Maybe she’d even get around to taking off her weird coat if he waited patiently. He moved across the huge room to a massive fireplace, built from flat old stones, where a sturdy pile of logs was laid, waiting for his match.

“You built it yourself?” Justine asked, coming to
stand in front of the fire and removing her gloves. “How long did it take?”

“Almost seven years,” Aiden told her proudly. “I was working full-time and living in the neighborhood so I did it on weekends and nights, but once I found the wood, the rough-sawn poplar and the barn siding and the big oak timbers and the black walnut, the wood pretty much told me what to do with it. You can’t go too wrong with old wood, it knows what it wants. I couldn’t even let anyone else do the electrical and the plumbing. I got so possessive I was afraid they’d mess up. I almost hated coming to the finish carpentry, the bookcases and the cabinets—it’s the end of the job, except for the painting, so it’s sort of sad in a nice way.”

“But who decorated it?” she asked, taking off her cap and looking around the room where each fascinatingly battered piece of painted country furniture called out for her inspection, where the walls were hung with American primitive paintings and framed quilts and faded hooked rugs were scattered over the poplar floorboards.

“It isn’t decorated. I just kept looking around until I found things that looked right. Got kind of lucky, especially with the quilts. The one over the fireplace was made by my great-grandmother but the others I found in the Amish country, some upstate and a few beauties in Nova Scotia. Now there’s a place to live if you don’t mind the cold. Can’t beat it in the summer.”

“Nova Scotia where the salmon comes from?”

“The very one. If that was a hint, I’ll take a look in the kitchen and see what I can dig up for dinner.”

“I’ll come too,” Justine said, eager to see what the kitchen looked like.

“Oh, no, that’s not the deal. I said I was going to feed you and if I let you in the kitchen your natural womanly instincts might take over, and you’d start doing who knows what? Anyway, you’d be in my way. I’ll show you the guest bedroom and you can make yourself comfortable.”

Alone in the small, deliciously cozy guestroom with
its immaculate bath, both of which seemed as if they must look out on an Alp, Justine unpacked hastily. This probably wasn’t going to be as bad as she’d thought. At least he had some interesting furniture, she told herself, as she shivered in excitement. Actually, if you could judge a man more by his house than by his face, Aiden might possibly be what he had seemed yesterday. Perhaps she hadn’t lost her mind after all. That, in itself, was a reassuring thought. Just as the idea of him with a hammer and nails working away patiently for seven years was reassuring. Patience was a good thing. Wood was a good thing. Patience in dealing with wood was an even better thing. Or so she believed.