will be better when I wake up.”
Pete followed her to the door and stood patiently while she opened it. “It’s not so bad, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No one got hurt, and we got to go to a neat party.”
“You crashed that neat party. And you insulted poor Sam Gundy.”
“Hey, I even got dressed up. I wore my tux.”
Louisa let her gaze travel the length of him. “What about the jeans and sneakers?”
“What about them?”
Louisa unlocked her door and stepped into the foyer. Pete followed. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“I figured you’d want to offer me a drink or something.”
“Nothing! I’m not going to offer you anything! And I don’t want you in my house.”
“How about coffee? Do I get a cup of coffee?”
“How about a knuckle sandwich? How’d you like that?”
He smiled and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “I suppose this means a good-night kiss is out of the question.”
“Out!” She pointed stiff-armed to the door. “Out, out, out.”
Pete came awake with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He lay perfectly still, waiting for the confusion of sleep to leave him, wondering what had nudged him toward consciousness. He felt the cat shift at the foot of the bed, heard it growl low in its throat.
Pete’s gaze fastened on the DVD display across the room with the LED lights glowing red in the darkness. The lights went black for a moment, then reappeared, and Pete knew someone was silently moving around his bedroom. A body had passed between him and the LED lights.
Reason told him to stay calm. Instinct told him to panic. Instinct won out. He sprang from the bed in one quick movement and hit the floor running, heading for the door. Halfway across the room he collided with the intruder, and they both went down in a heap on the floor.
Louisa sat at her kitchen table, elbows resting on the table, chin resting on her hands. She glumly looked at the clock on the wall. Three-fifteen. She couldn’t sleep. Once again, it was all his fault. The fiend upstairs was keeping her awake. This time he was stomping around in her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She sighed and slumped a little lower.
She was in bad shape. Pete Streeter had looked good to her earlier. When he’d made the crack about the good-night kiss, she’d actually given it a second thought. She pushed away from the table and shuffled over to the refrigerator. She opened the door and stared at the bottles and jars for a while before deciding on orange juice.
Hers was a normal reaction, she told herself. Streeter was gorgeous. Any healthy, sexually deprived woman would find Streeter attractive—unless she lived with him, of course. To live with Streeter was to hate him.
She drank her orange juice and padded back to the bedroom. She was about to crawl into bed when there was a loud thump overhead. It was followed by more thumping, then a crash that made her ceiling shake. He was at it again. The man had no consideration.
“Quiet!” she shouted. “Don’t you know what time it is? It’s three-fifteen in the morning!”
There was another ceiling-shaking crash, more thumping and scuffling sounds. “This is too much,” Louisa muttered. “I absolutely am not going to tolerate this any longer.”
She cinched her floor-length blue velour robe around herself with a vicious yank on the belt, stuffed her feet into her big furry slippers, and charged out of her bedroom. On the front porch she pounded on Streeter’s door.
“Open up!” she demanded. She gave the door another shot with her fist, it swung open, and she stepped into the foyer.
“Streeter, what the hell are you doing up there? I’m trying to get some sleep! I have to be at work early tomorrow!” Her only answer was more thrashing and grunting. The man was exercising!
“Streeter!”
Still no response. Big surprise, she thought. How could he possibly hear anything over the racket he was making. She flicked the light switch on, scooped her robe up into her hands, and climbed the stairs to his apartment.
Standing in the dimly lit living room, she realized Pete was rolling around in his bedroom in the dark, and had a brief flash of panic that he might not be alone, that he might be in the throes of passion. She did an eye roll and reminded herself that it didn’t matter what the man was doing; the point being he was doing it too loud.
She