The quiet of the house should have been a soothing balm, but he sensed an underlying turbulence. There was trouble brewing. And it wasn’t just Charmaine.
He flicked on the desk lamp and booted up the computer. Slipping on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, he began to tackle the receipts and scribbled notes that littered the small room in monumental piles. Each of these he methodically transcribed to the computer in a hunt-and-peck method dating back to the Stone Age of typewriters. The whole job should take him about a year or two at this rate, he figured. By then he expected to be dead of frustration or boredom or out-and-out brain freeze.
He had been working for about a half hour when his head shot up with alertness. He smelled her before he saw her.
Charmaine stood in the open doorway behind him. He spun his swivel chair halfway around to face her.
“Holy cow, Charmaine! Are you crazy? Coming here in the middle of the night, dressed like that?”
“What?” she said, glancing down at the old, oversized LSU T-shirt she wore, and presumably nothing else. The sleeves went halfway down her upper arms, and the hem reached midthigh of her long legs, but she looked sexier than a buck-naked Playboy centerfold. “I’m covered. You can’t see anything.”
I can imagine, and believe you me, I am imagining. “Is that my shirt?” he choked out.
“Yeah. I forgot to pack my nighties.”
Nighties? Well, thank God for small favors. “Charmaine, go back to bed. This house is not big enough for the two of us.”
She ignored his words and said in a breathy voice, “You’re wearing glasses.”
Huh? Since when do breathy and glasses go together?
“I wear them for reading and computer work.” He took them off.
She moaned softly.
Cocking his head to the side, he asked, “What did I do that made you moan?”
“You took your glasses off.”
“Have you been drinking?”
She shook her head. “Is there anything sexier than a man when he takes his glasses off?”
Never rocked my world.
“Especially when he does it kinda slow and looks at a woman when he’s doing it, which you did. Sort of implies he’s about to get down to serious business.”
A torpedo to his groin area exploded with about a million testosterone pellets. Be still, my heart… and other places.
“Not that I’m interested in that kind of business with you.” She flashed him a shy grin.
Charmaine shy? My brain must be fried from all these numbers. She was probably just pulling his chain, but then, you never knew with Charmaine. “You should not be telling me things like that, chère. It gives me ideas. And I definitely do not want to be having ideas about you.”
“Me neither,” she said with a sigh that could have meant just about anything. Her eyes scanned the room then, and she concluded, “What a mess!”
“Yep.”
“What are you doing? I could hear your painfully slow tapping all the way to my bedroom.”
“Sorry if I woke you. I never did learn to type very fast.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
There was some meaning in those words, as there had been in the sigh, but he wasn’t about to investigate. He explained what he’d been doing.
“Hey, I can help you.”
I doubt that sincerely, unless you plan on spending a week or so in my bed. No, no, no, I did not think that.
“With your computer,” she added. “Not with all that computer geek business Jimmy mentioned, but inputting data is a no-brainer.”
Oh. That kind of help.
She pulled over a chair, forcing him to wheel himself a bit to the right, making room for her. Once again, he was assailed by the scent of Charmaine, all flowery and feminine.
“Why would you want to help?” he asked churlishly. It was that or make a grab for her, which he was not going to do. I hope.
She gave him a sidelong glance, which pretty much put him in the category of ungrateful cretins, but then she spoiled the guilt trip she laid on him by pointing out, “It’s my ranch, too.”