Wife for Hire - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,27
loved. She wondered if he had similar feelings, and then she realized with a shock that of course he did…he was the sex fiend of Skogen. He probably felt that way about every woman he met.
Disappointment hit her like a hard slap in the face. She narrowed her eyes. “I’m giving you thirty seconds to get off my bed. I don’t sleep with indiscriminate womanizers.”
She saw the expression of playful affection change to one of hurt and surprise, then anger. Direct hit, she thought grimly.
Hank heaved himself to his feet. He thought she understood the man behind the reputation. Hank whistled for Horatio. The dog trotted into Maggie’s room and looked at his master expectantly. “Stay,” Hank told him, and without even so much as a backward glance at Maggie, he strode from the room and slammed the door behind him.
He’d been honest with her. Hank fumed. What more did she want? He turned on his heel and went back to Maggie’s room, yanking the door open. “You have a lot of nerve calling me an indiscriminate womanizer. I’ve been beyond reproach since you’ve been here.”
“I’ve been here for three days!” Maggie shouted. “You expect me to be impressed with three days of abstinence? And for all I know you’ve been sneaking out at night, burning down barns.”
He felt the heat flooding into his face again. He stormed into his own room and slammed his door.
Maggie sprang up from her bed. “And don’t come barging into my room without knocking!” she shouted. Then she slammed her door too.
She threw herself into bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin. She grunted and rolled over, stuffing her face into the pillow. “Men!” she said. “Ugh!” She thrashed around for a few more minutes until her bedclothes were totally tangled. She got up, remade the bed, and calmly crawled back in. She was hot and exhausted and sorry. She shouldn’t have made that crack about the barn burning.
“Damn stubborn temper,” she said. A tear rolled down her cheek. She wanted Hank to love her. Only her. She didn’t want to be just one more conquest, one more event. She wanted to be special, and she didn’t want to suffer the fate of his other girlfriends. She didn’t want to turn into a Hank Mallone groupie.
Elsie slammed bowls of oatmeal onto the table. “Anyone who doesn’t eat this and like it gets liver for supper.”
Hank rattled his paper, and Maggie tapped a spoon against her coffee mug.
“And I don’t put up with spoon tapping neither,” Elsie said. “I feel darn cranky. I didn’t get any sleep last night. Bad enough we got some fool wandering around the upstairs, then the two of you decide to have a shouting match and door-slamming contest. I got more rest when I was living in the old people’s home. The most noise anybody made was when they dropped their bedpan. Except for the time Helen Grote set her walker down on the cat’s tail.”
The memory brought a smile to her face. “That was something.”
Hank folded his paper and placed it on the table beside his oatmeal. He glared briefly at Maggie and splashed milk onto his bowl.
Maggie glared back. Fine. If he wanted to be childish and stay angry, so would she. No problem for her, she thought. She could stay angry forever. After all, she was the most stubborn female Riverside had ever spawned. She could show him a thing or two.
The trouble was she didn’t want to stay angry. She wanted to cuddle up behind him while he was eating his oatmeal, wrap her arms around his neck, and kiss him on the top of his head. His hair was freshly washed and shiny and looked like it would be nice to kiss. His cheek looked like it would be nice to kiss too. And his mouth…Maggie sighed at the thought of kissing his mouth.
The sigh prompted him to glance up from his oatmeal. He stared at her, but he didn’t say anything. He looked annoyed.
“Well, excuse me,” she snapped. “Did my sigh disturb you?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. It would take a lot more than a sigh to get me to notice you.”
Elsie made a disgusted sound and plunked a platter of French toast on the table. “What are you two so bent out of shape about? This is the most realistic fake marriage I’ve ever seen. If you get any more married, you’ll have to get a divorce.”
The back door opened and Bubba ambled