“I want you to be my first dinner guest. I’m a lousy cook, but I grill a pretty decent steak and anybody can make a salad. Will you come?”
He tried to be pleased that she still wanted to see him after she moved out. They weren’t splitting up, he reminded himself. She was simply moving into her own place. Claiming her space. They could still date. Have dinner. Spend the occasional night together. Maybe she’d give him a key to her apartment.
He touched a hand to his stomach, wondering vaguely if something he’d eaten at lunch had disagreed with him. He was suddenly feeling rather nauseous.
Apparently bemused by his silence, she cocked her head and frowned comically at him. “You don’t think I can handle a steak and salad? You think I’m going to poison you or something?”
He sighed. She was being very difficult to talk to this afternoon. “Of course not. What I want to say is—”
“Hang on.” Nicole snatched up the telephone and waited breathlessly as the last twangy notes of the song ended.
And then she sighed and recradled the receiver when another song immediately began. “No foghorn. Now, what were you saying?”
“How much do you like the apartment?” he blurted.
She considered the question a moment, then shrugged. “It’s nice,” she conceded, capping the polish. “Hardly luxurious, but better than some places I’ve stayed. If Mom comes to stay with me for a while, I’ll have to sleep on the couch, but it won’t be the first time for that, either. But, for the money, it’s not a bad apartment, and it’s furnished, which is another plus. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve really enjoyed having you here,” he said, not exactly answering her question.
She smiled a bit mistily. “I’ve really enjoyed staying here,” she said softly. “You’ve been wonderful to me. I guess you never dreamed when you left for your club on New Year’s Eve that you’d be bringing home an unexpected houseguest.”
“No,” he admitted.
Two weeks and two days ago, he hadn’t even met her. And now he found himself wondering how he would ever get by without her.
“Poor Andrew. It was certainly an eventful New Year’s Eve for you, wasn’t it? Everything that could go wrong did.”
He shook his head. “Not quite.”
As far as Andrew was concerned, none of the bad things that had happened had overshadowed the wonder of having Nicole come into his life. “I’ll always remember that night, Nicole.”
She glanced down at her drying toenails, almost as though she wanted to evade his eyes. “So will I,” she said, so softly he hardly heard her.
“Nicole, I—”
She snatched up the telephone, fingers poised for dialing.
Andrew exhaled gustily. Why were country songs so damned short? “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you’ll stop doing that!” he snapped, his nerves shredding his patience.
Her eyes widening, Nicole hung up the phone. “I’m sorry. Was there something you wanted to say?”
Hell. He sighed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I...”
“That you what?” she prodded when he hesitated.
He opened his mouth to tell her that he didn’t want her to go. How could he be satisfied to see her only occasionally when he’d grown accustomed to having her sleep in his arms, to seeing her smile first thing every morning? And if their schedules remained as they were now, he knew their time together would be limited and frustrating, at least as far as he was concerned.
And then he swallowed the words as he wondered bleakly what he had to offer that she wouldn’t find for herself in her new apartment. They’d known each other only two weeks, he reminded himself brutally. She would think he’d lost his mind if he proposed marriage now. She would probably be right. Because that was exactly what he wanted to do.
He didn’t want to date Nicole. He wanted to marry her. He wanted to have a family with her.
He’d known those staggering facts since the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. And she would probably think him insane if he said so.
A streak of cowardice he didn’t want to examine too closely kept the impulsive words locked inside him. He knew of only one way to let her know how much she had come to mean to him in such an incredibly short time.
“When do you have to leave for work?” he asked abruptly.
She glanced at the clock. “I’ve got another half hour or son.”