Neither did I.
CHAPTER 12
IT SEEMED ONLY MOMENTS LATER WHEN I opened my eyes, drawn awake by the smell of newly made coffee. Jasmine Day, wearing nothing but one of my oversized shirts, stood beside the bed holding a tray. On it sat a coffee pot and two clean cups.
“How do you like your coffee?” she asked.
“Black and strong.”
“Good,” she said. “Me too.”
Holding the tray level, she eased her way back into bed and settled against the pillow I held up for her. She filled the two cups and handed one to me.
“Good morning,” she said.
For a time we said nothing else. We each sat there with our respective cups in hand, thinking our own private thoughts. It’s tough going to bed with a stranger. There’s nothing much to talk about the next morning when you wake up.
I stole a furtive glance at her. Without makeup, Jasmine Day’s eyelashes, eyebrows, and short hair were all the same tawny golden color, the texture of the individual hairs fine and delicate. No, I decided, there was nothing masculine about the haircut. It showed off the fine molding of her smooth skull and accented the firm set of her chin and high cheekbones. There was nothing dykish about Jasmine Day’s looks any more than there had been anything dykish about her behavior in bed a few hours earlier.
“It’s raining,” she said suddenly.
The sound of her voice startled me. I jumped, slopping some of the hot coffee on my bare chest. I mopped it up with a corner of the sheet. She watched me do it.
“Am I still making you nervous?”
“You’d better believe it.”
She laughed. “Well, I won’t for very much longer. I’m scheduled to do two talk shows today. We tape one this morning and do a live one this afternoon. I’ve got to go back to the hotel to get ready. Would it be too much trouble for you to drop me off, or are you still determined to send me home in a cab?”
I glanced at her and could see she was laughing at me. “I don’t hold grudges,” I said. “I’ll be happy to give you a ride.”
“And can I use your shower?”
“Sure. Help yourself.”
She refilled our cups, put the tray down on the foot of the bed, then got up and walked toward the bathroom. I watched with considerable interest while she gathered up her clothes. My shirt was long on her, but not quite long enough. When she bent over to pick up her purse, the view was tantalizing.
My response was classic and predictable. I lay on the bed, drinking my coffee and arguing with myself about it while I heard her turning on the water in the shower and adjusting the temperature. Finally, I made up my mind. After all, she had started it. So what if it was a case of mistaken identity? She was the one who had put the idea in my head, who had said ground rules were made to be broken.
I got up and tapped gently on the bathroom door. She opened it a crack and peered out at me through a cloud of steam.
“May I come in?”
She smiled. “That’s up to you.” She reached out a bare arm and clasped it around my neck, pulling me into the room with her.
One of the things I had marveled about when I bought the penthouse at Belltown Terrace was the massive sunken tile bathtub and shower in the master bathroom. I had wondered about it, but in the few weeks I had lived there, I’d had no chance to field test it the way Jasmine Day and I did that morning, with the needle points of hot water stinging our naked bodies and thick steam boiling up around us.
Later, as we dried off, I gave her an appreciative flick on her water-dotted rump with my damp towel. “That is undoubtedly the best shower I’ve ever taken,” I said.
“Not bad,” she replied.
As she began to rummage through her purse for makeup, I heard the phone ring. When I answered it Peters was there. He still sounded as if he was talking from the bottom of a large tin can, but he seemed cheerful, more like his old self, more like the man who had been my partner until his neck got broken.
“Look, Beau. No hands.”
“What do you mean, no hands?”
“The phone. It’s a speaker-phone with an automatic redialer. All I have to do is press one button, and it dials you up. We’ve programmed in twelve different numbers, and nobody has to hold it for me. It’s a present from Ralph Ames.”
That figured. Ames, my attorney and friend from Phoenix, is a gadget freak, particularly when it comes to phone gadgetry. He was the one who had forced me to accept an answering machine in my house, and I was well aware of his own automatic redialer. I suspected I wasn’t nearly as grateful for my answering machine as Peters and the rehabilitation floor at Harborview were for Peters’s handless phone. Ames had somehow found a way to give Peters back a small measure of independence.