When she returned to the mall parking lot, a cold drizzle was falling. She turned up her coat collar, but she had neither a hat nor an umbrella. By the time she got to her car, her hair was wet, and she was chilled. She shivered all the way from Costa Mesa to North Tustin.
She figured there was a good chance he would be at home. If he was a student, he would not be in class on Saturday. If he worked an ordinary nine-to-five job, he would probably not be at the office, either. And the weather ruled out many of the usual weekend pastimes for outdoor-oriented southern Californians.
His address was an apartment complex of two-story, Spanish-style buildings, eight of them, in a garden setting. For a few minutes she hurried from building to building on winding walkways under dripping palms and coral trees, looking for his apartment. By the time she found it—a first-floor, end unit in the building farthest from the street—her hair was soaked. Her chill had deepened. Discomfort dulled her fear and sharpened her anger, so she rang his bell without hesitation.
He evidently did not peek through the fisheye security lens, for when he opened the door and saw her, he looked stunned. He was maybe five years older than she, and he was a big man indeed, fully six feet five, two hundred and forty pounds, all muscle. He was wearing jeans and a pale-blue T-shirt smeared with grease and spotted with another oily substance; his well-developed arms were formidable. His face was shadowed by beard stubble and smudged with more grease, and his hands were black.
Carefully staying back from the door, beyond his reach, Laura simply said, “Why?”
“Because . . .” He shifted from one foot to the other, almost too big for the doorway in which he stood. “Because …”
“I’m waiting.”
He wiped one grease-covered hand through his close-cropped hair and seemed oblivious of the resultant mess. His eyes shifted away from her; he looked out at the rain-lashed courtyard as he spoke. “How . . . how’d you find out it was me?”
“That’s not important. What’s important is that I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, and yet I’ve got a toad menagerie that you’ve sent me, you come around in the middle of the night to leave them on my doorstep, you break into my car to leave them on the dashboard, and it’s been going on for weeks, so don’t you think it’s time I knew what this is all about?”
Still not looking at her, he flushed and said, “Well, sure, but I didn’t . . . wasn’t ready . . . didn’t think the time was right.”
“The time was right a week ago!”
“Ummmm.”
“So tell me. Why?”
Looking down at his greasy hands, he said quietly, “Well, see …”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
She stared at him, incredulous. He finally looked at her. She said, “You love me? But you don’t even know me. How can you love a person you’ve never met?”
He looked away from her, rubbed his filthy hand through his hair again, and shrugged. “I don’t know, but there it is, and I … uh … well, ummmm, I have this feeling, see, this feeling that I’ve got to spend the rest of my life with you.”
With cold rainwater trickling from her wet hair down the nape of her neck and along the curve of her spine, with her day at the library shot—how could she concentrate on research after this insane scene?—and with more than a little disappointment that her secret admirer had turned out to be this dirty, sweaty, inarticulate lummox, Laura said, “Listen, Mr. Packard, I don’t want you sending me any more toads.”
“Well, see, I really want to send them.”
“But I don’t want to receive them. And tomorrow I’ll mail back the ones you’ve sent me. No, today. I’ll mail them back today.”
He met her eyes again, blinked in surprise, and said, “I thought you liked toads.”
With growing anger, she said, “I do like toads. I love toads. I think toads are the cutest things in creation. Right now I even wish I were a toad, but I don’t want your toads. Understand?”