Desire by Design - By Paula Altenburg Page 0,17
spoken a word since they’d reached the car. It was the one punishment in life she found difficult to bear—the silent treatment.
“Look at us,” she said brightly, needing to break a silence that felt far too oppressive. “All dressed up, and no place to go.”
He grunted, his eyes glued on the road ahead.
“You have a leaf in your hair,” she ventured, ignoring the bird’s nest in her own.
He cranked open the window, plucked the offending leaf from his hair, and released it into the night.
“I’m sorry,” she tried again, willing to start the apologies rolling. “I should never have dodged Lena like that.”
“That wasn’t your finest moment,” he said.
The old, familiar anxiety slowly twisted her stomach in knots, and she resented it. Perhaps she could have handled things differently, but it wasn’t as if she’d planned for any of it to happen. She hadn’t been alone in those bushes.
“At least I covered for us nicely.”
“You told my uncle you lost an earring,” Matt said.
“Well, I did.” Her fingers strayed to her naked lobe. One of her favorites, too. She really needed to stop playing with them.
“That’s the second earring you’ve lost this week. You should consider using staples.” He looked directly at her for the first time since they’d crawled from the bushes and limped to the car. “No offense,” he continued, “but you come off a little scary sometimes.”
Eve slowed for a corner. “What do you mean?”
“You ordered my uncle to trim his hedge.”
“It was a ragged-looking.”
“Only because you’d crushed it.”
“I crushed it?” If they were going to cast stones about crushing things, she still had his hand imprint on one of her breasts.
“Hey,” Matt said. “The hedge was yours. I did the forsythia.”
“It’s nice of you to remember that I wasn’t alone.”
“Believe me, it’s not something I’m likely to forget.”
Eve, concentrating on her driving, missed the grin accompanying his words. All she heard was criticism.
Something inside her snapped. “This is so typical.” She swerved around a pothole in the street, narrowly missing the rear end of a parked car. “It’s always the woman’s fault, never the man’s.”
Matt shifted in his seat, turning toward her. “Wait a second. I never said—”
“You didn’t have to say anything. I know what you meant.”
“Eve, I think you’re being—”
“I know what I’m being,” she interrupted again. She was being an idiot. Her nerves had been wound too tight since Claude’s phone call, and now she was taking it out on Matt. She knew the whole disaster of an evening was her fault. Why didn’t he yell at her and be done with it? Why was he torturing her like this?
His voice gentled. “Stop the car, please.”
Eve could see the train wreck coming but was helpless to stop it. If Matt was about to become all sensitive and understanding, she was going to have him killed. She didn’t need sympathy right now. She felt tears welling behind her eyes, and that made her furious—with both him and herself. She hated to cry.
She pulled the car over and double-parked in front of a dark restaurant on a quiet street. Grabbing her handbag and holding it up to the dreary glow of a streetlight, Eve whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and slapped it into Matt’s palm.
“Maybe you should call yourself a cab,” she said.
Matt stared at the money in his hand, his expression unreadable. Then, he carefully placed the money on the dashboard and glanced into the back seat as if looking for something.
“What are you doing?” she snapped.
“Don’t you keep tissues in your car? Women always seem to keep tissues everywhere.”
Eve rolled her eyes. Why’d he have to be right all the time?
He reached into the back, and just as his fingers closed around the box, a car with flashing red-and-blue lights pulled up behind them. A few moments later, a stocky police officer rapped on Eve’s door. When she rolled down the window, he shone a flashlight into the car’s interior.
“What seems to be the trouble?” the officer asked.
“Just a little misunderstanding,” Matt said.
“A little misunderstanding, huh?”
The officer’s light shone in her eyes. Eve plucked the box of tissues from Matt’s hand and helped herself, heartily blowing her nose. The light picked up the money on the dash, then the officer flashed the light back on Eve before returning it to Matt’s face. “Whatever you’re negotiating, do it someplace else. You’re double-parked and blocking traffic.”
Matt cleared his throat. “The money is for a cab.”
The officer’s ruddy face creased into a wide grin. “Whatever you