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  The next day, Spenser found her early in the lab, perched on a chair at the workbench where she had tossed a stained nitrile glove next to a half-coated ELISA plate. One gloved hand held an Eppen-dorf pipettor, while the ungloved hand held her cell phone to her ear. Wasn’t the woman ever off the phone?

  “I know you spilled the sugar because the counter was fine last night, but I had to clean up the mess this morning.” Trish swung her legs, which dangled a good twelve inches from the floor because of the tall lab chair, and kicked the cabinets under the lab bench. “No, it isn’t just that one time. You also spilled grape juice on the carpet and didn’t clean that up either . . . The big deal? The big deal is that when I finally saw it and tried to clean it up, it had already set and stained the carpet. That’ll get taken out of the deposit, you know . . . Just clean it up when you spill it from now on. Bye.”

  The time was now. Spenser injected himself into the space right next to her, relaxing against the edge of the workbench and invading her personal space. Trish straightened her back to ease away from him, but her pupils dilated.

  He was close enough to smell her perfume — something light, not flowery, more like a sophisticated fruit scent. Acqua di Gio? If he could catch her perfume, he was certain she caught his — Aramis, the new, expensive cologne he’d picked up this weekend.

  He reached out to take the cell phone from her hand, letting his fingers brush an “inadvertent” caress over her fingers. Her breathing hitched, then continued at a faster pace. Her eyelids slowly closed and opened over dazed eyes.

  Then her gaze flickered. She blinked. In the next second, she turned back to the workbench and reached for a fresh glove.

  How had he lost her? “So what kinds of movies do you like?”

  Trish quirked a suspicious eyebrow.

  He met it with whiter-than-snow innocence.

  “Romantic comedies.” A hint of defiance colored her tone. Blech. “What’s your favorite?”

  “I like them all.” She wasn’t making this any easier for him.

  “What have you seen recently?”

  “I watched Pride and Prejudice again.”

  Eeeewww. Wasn’t that movie ten hours long or something like that? “So you like that actress . . .” What was her name? “Gwyneth Paltrow?”

  She nailed him with a glare like a spear thrown at his head. “She wasn’t in Pride and Prejudice.”

  “I was asking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s movies in general.” Oooo, way to think fast on your feet.

  She jumped down off her seat, and the wheeled lab chair skewed sideways with her violent action. Spenser leaped back to avoid getting rolled over. She darted her thick-heeled boot out and hooked one of the metal legs to stop it from wandering away.

  He’d lost his personal space advantage. Then again, she looked pretty dangerous, standing with her weight on one hip, menacing him with flattened eyes. Her mouth, however, had pursed into an annoyed pink rosebud.

  The rosebud opened and snapped, “Are you patronizing me?”

  Spenser’s brain deserted him. “Uh . . .”

  “Go away.”

  Trish had her back to him as she stepped on the footrest to launch back onto the seat, so she didn’t see his face, which probably reflected his thunderstruck reaction. He closed his mouth before drool slipped out, then exited the lab. Quickly.

  THIRTEEN

  Spenser attacked — er, approached Trish outside their building the next day. The wind tangled the wisps that escaped her ponytail, and she swatted at them with one hand while she snapped at someone on her cell phone, “Yes, it was serious! I sliced open my foot on that broken mug . . . Well, I wouldn’t have needed to be careful if you’d cleaned it up when you first broke it . . . You’re lucky it wasn’t very deep . . . No, you’ll have to fix the garbage disposal by yourself . . . Because if we call the manager, he’ll smell the cigarette smoke and see the cat and we’ll get kicked out . . . Well, I told you to — hello?” She stared at her cell phone, mouth gaping. “I can’t believe she hung up on me.”

  Trish twisted around to snatch at her purse straps and put her phone inside. Spenser walked up to lend a hand. She jumped away as if he carried the Ebola virus.

  “Only trying to help.” He put on an injured expression.

  No effect on her. “I’m fine.” Acid dripped from her tone.

  She was just peeved because she was having problems with her roommate. Spenser plunged full-speed ahead. “I watched a romantic comedy last night.”

  He had the satisfaction of seeing her jaw drop and her eyes widen to the size of silver dollars. But she definitely wasn’t as attractive as when she was flaming mad. She kind of looked like a goldfish.

  “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” he answered her unspoken question.

  “Get outta here.”

  “No, I really did.”

  Her eyes narrowed in distrust. “Okay, how long did you last?”

  “From beginning to end. I promise I’m telling the truth.”

  She crossed her arms, but reluctant amusement pulled at her mouth. “I’m impressed. What did you think of it?”

  Here was the dilemma. With any other girl, he could get away with a white lie. But would Trish see through it?

  Probably.

  Other girls would get bent out of shape if he told the truth. Would Trish brain him with her purse?

  Maybe not.

  “It was okay.” He shrugged. Maybe he could get away with a vague answer.

  No such luck. “Define ‘okay.’ ”

  “Um . . .” Spenser paused, then abandoned caution. “To be honest, it was kind of stupid.”

  Her lips pouted in frustration. “No it wasn’t.”

  “Well, it had all kinds of things that didn’t make sense at all.”

  “Like what?” she barked.

  “What the heck is a bloke?”

  Then Trish’s big, glorious smile opened on her face. The spotty gray clouds disappeared and the sun shone down. He found himself smiling back like a dolt — he couldn’t seem to help it.

  “You idiot, it’s like British-speak for a guy. Man. Male.”

  Even though her words made him sound like a dummy, the low sound of her voice did strange things to him. There was a purring somewhere in his ribcage.

  A footstep sounded behind him. He nodded at a coworker, Kevin Clark, who passed them to enter the building. When Spenser turned back to Trish, he found her eyes following Kevin as if he was filet mignon and she was starving.

  Wait a minute. Kevin?

  “Did you know that Kevin’s Christian?” Trish’s voice had lowered from normal to dreamy.

  “What?” Why was she telling him this?

  “I needed to ask him a question about the plate reader, and I forgot it was lunchtime — ”

  “Forgot? Isn’t that bathroom break number thirty-five?” He needed to snap her out of this.

  He earned a venomous look. “Anyway, I interrupted him doing his assignment for Bible study.”

  “So? Rule number one is — ”

  “I know, I know. No looking. I wasn’t looking . . . not really . . .”

  “What’s there to look at?”

  “Are you kidding?” She lifted her eyebrows. “Kevin looks like Keanu Reeves.”

  What? Spenser countered with a disbelieving snort. “Are we on the same planet?”

  Her eyes squinched, and her mouth thinned into a toothpick line.

  “Well, he’s not as cute as Keanu, and he doesn’t have that sexy tousled look.” “He looks like he came straight out of prep school.”

  She ignored him. “But he’s got shoulders out to there, and he cycles, and he fills his jeans in all the right places — ”

  “Hey, hey.” He stabbed at her with his finger. “You’ve been looking.”

  Her face flushed. “Well . . . and he has that strong jaw and those chocolate brown eyes. He’s a little shy and quiet, but he qualifies as a hottie, I think.”

  Kevin? Dorky, skinny Kevi
n? Was she crazy? His frustration squeezed his throat shut, and he started to sputter. “You — He —I — ”

  Her brow creased, and she tilted her head. “You sound like a frog. What’s wrong?”

  A frog? Indignation clamped onto his tongue.

  Trish’s head tilted the other way. “I can’t understand you if you won’t finish a sentence.”

  He finally found his voice. “You prefer Kevin to me?”

  Her confusion melted into a smug gleam in her eye. “First time a girl’s preferred someone else to you?”

  Spenser started sputtering again.

  A wicked grin rolled across her mouth. “I’m honored to be your first.”

  His incoherent sounds deepened into a growl, and he stalked away.

  I’m honored to be your first. Had she really said that? Trish surprised him. Last night, after reviewing that entire conversation in his head a couple hundred times, Spenser decided that it wasn’t worth the repeated insults to pursue her.

  This morning, he just wanted to annoy her.

  He hunted Trish down outside the women’s restroom — where else would she be? Talking on her cell phone — what else would she be doing?

  “I’ve reminded you every day this week but you still leave your door open and the cat escapes . . . Because I got an emergency doctor’s appointment and she gave me allergy medicine. Just because I’m not sneezing lately doesn’t mean the cat dander isn’t making my allergies go haywire . . . Well, the medicine isn’t working . . . No, I don’t want to go back for stronger stuff, this stuff is already giving me headaches . . . Because you promised to give the cat away. It’s against the rules . . . I’ve told you before, I didn’t write the rules.” She snapped her phone shut.

  Then her shoulders sagged, her eyes pooled with despair, and even her hair looked limp. Her mouth drooped in that interesting rosebud shape. “Her cat ate my goldfish. Gonzo.”

  His sarcastic remark died on his tongue. He wondered if she would deck him if he responded with a pun.

  Then she looked past him. In an instant, she shed her distress like tossing off a coat. She bristled and rumbled low in her throat, and he could almost see porcupine spikes rise from her rigid shoulders.

  One of the biologists from virology sauntered by with a loose-lipped smile for Trish. It looked like he intended to stop, but her eyes stabbed daggers at him and he scurried away.

  Spenser raised a questioning eyebrow at her.

  “When I got into work this morning, we passed through a doorway at the same time, and he was groping me.”

  That dog. Spenser clapped his jaw shut. The muscles in his cheeks tightened and spasmed. He inhaled a sharp breath. The next time he saw him —

  “So I stamped on his foot, and he backed off. I was kind of disappointed I didn’t get a chance to elbow him in the gut.”

  Spenser’s righteous indignation deflated. Bloodthirsty girl. Trish obviously didn’t need a knight in shining armor. He’d have to be careful about that personal space advantage next time.

  “It’s all your fault.” She jabbed an accusatory finger at his face.

  He jerked his head away before she impaled his eye. He grabbed the offensive digit and lowered it to a safer vantage point. “What are you talking about?”

  “All these slimy guys are paying attention to me because they’ve seen you with me the past couple weeks.”

  “Hey, I didn’t ask to get transferred to your group.”

  “Who cares? You’ve become the bane of my life!” She accompanied her melodramatic screech by flinging her hands up.

  He should have been offended, but he saw the humor in the situation. Plus, it was fun to aggravate her.

  Another guy approached them. Spenser leaned into Trish and propped his arm against the wall over her head. His proximity made her jump and back into the wall, and he eased closer. Her eyes flitted everywhere but at his face, and her breath quickened.

  She didn’t seem to mind Spenser the way she minded the guy from virology. When she looked up, she looked bemused and hypnotized.

  After the guy walked past them, Spenser pushed away from the wall. Trish remained standing there, confused and dazed.

  Then her eyes snapped into focus and started sparking at him. “Are you doing this to annoy me?”

  “Partly.” He gave her a cocky grin.

  She growled. She sounded menacing even though he stood a good three feet away. Her hands tightened into white-knuckled fists, then she whirled and marched away.

  He resisted the unwise urge to chuckle.

  At eleven o’clock that same day, Spenser stalled Diana to cover Trish’s tardiness to the group meeting. She awarded him during the meeting with one of those terrific smiles and a scrawled note on her notepad: “Thanks. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  He was in her good books. Perfect timing.

  Spenser and Trish returned to their building from the café with their lunch — him with the Friday burger special, her with fried chicken salad. As they entered the card-key doors, he set a gentle hand on the small of her back. She started, but didn’t pull away.

  Things were getting better and better.

  “Trish, I was wondering . . . There’s a great new Italian restaurant that opened on Castro Street. Let’s go tonight.”

  A piercing wail from the direction of her purse nearly shot his ear off. Her cell phone. Again.

  “Why do you keep the ringer so loud?” He rattled a finger in his numb ear.

  “I can’t hear it otherwise. Hi, Marnie.”

  Her fingers suddenly lost hold of her plastic lunch container. Spenser congratulated himself on his Superman reflexes when he caught her salad.

  Trish didn’t even notice. “What? What was he doing there? . . . How did he get a key? . . . Grandma doesn’t have a key, she couldn’t have given Kazuo one . . . He did what? . . . I don’t care if he did it to keep you company, neither of you are supposed to smoke in the apartment . . . You did what? . . . What do you mean, it’s not very big? A burn spot is a burn spot. Our carpet is white, in case you didn’t notice . . . I don’t know how to fix it . . . Okay, bye.” She snapped her phone shut and stared into space, immobile.

  Spenser snapped his fingers in her face, balancing two lunch containers in the other hand. “Trish?”

  She turned to him. Her eyes didn’t quite focus, but at least he had her attention . . . he thought.

  “So, um . . . dinner tonight?”

  She blinked. “Huh?”

  “Dinner. Tonight. With me.” Spenser smiled his warmest, most charming smile. A light came on in her eyes . . .

  No, that was an inferno spitting flames.

  “Dinner?”

  Oops. She shifted moods faster than Dale Earnhardt Jr. shifted gears.

  “How can you ask me out on a date when I’m going out of my mind? ” She exploded into noisy sobs.

  Spenser beat a hasty retreat. Maybe next week . . .

  When Trish had spent all her tears, she sniffled and made her way back to her thankfully empty office.

  What was Spenser doing? He had made her very . . . uncomfortable this week. A girl could almost believe those soulful looks . . .

  She had to stop that. He was up to something. He was annoying. Well, amusing, too. And at times he was quite, quite attractive. Trish let out a puff of air and started fanning herself with her hand. It had taken heaps of willpower to not respond to him this week. That strength must have come from God, because she knew she didn’t have any when Spenser was around.

  She wasn’t really looking, not when he was the one being all weird with her. She did have to work with him. She could almost think he had forgiven her for dissing him.

  She could almost think he was actually interested in her.

  FOURTEEN

  The church kitchen had twenty women and two children in it. One child was getting water from the faucet into a cup. The other child was stuffing Goldfish crackers into a drain pipe in the floor.

  The twenty women bu
stled to and fro, oblivious to the potential havoc caused by Goldfish boy, so Trish nabbed him. He loosed a samurai war screech that brought the smoothly running kitchen to a halt.

  Women stared. Trish could read their minds — the tow-headed boy she struggled with was obviously not her own.

  She pointed to his hands full of crackers. “He was stuffing these down the drainpipe.”

  A blonde mother rushed into the kitchen. “Danny, there you are.” She snatched him away from Trish as if she were a kidnapper.

  Trish did the whole cracker and drain pointing thing. The woman laughed. “Oh, you must be mistaken. He was probably trying to get the crackers out of the drain. Now sweetie, how many times have I told you not to put your hand in small dark places? Let’s wash you up.” She exited the kitchen, cooing to her four-year-old.

  Trish found herself the center of the entire kitchen’s attention, from the teenagers washing pots in the sink to the grandmothers fighting with each other over the space in front of the stove.

  “I’m here to help. Spenser said to show up — ?”

  “Yes, yes.” A portly Asian woman stepped forward from where she’d been rooting in a massive set of cupboards. “Spenser told me. You’re Trish?”

  She nodded and smiled, but the pale-skinned bulldog face didn’t smile back. “He said you can’t cook.”

  Hoo-boy, it was going to be a long Saturday afternoon.

  The woman — Kameko, so maybe her faint accent was Japanese? — shooed Trish to the triple sinks next to two perky teenagers, Molly and Mary. “Wash pots.”

  Well, she could do that. She attacked the burned bottom of a stock pot with vigor.

  She turned to smile at — Molly? Mary? But the girl quickly averted her eyes and resumed chatting with her sink mate. “Did you see Ryan today?”

  “Oh, he’s so hot in his server’s uniform.”

  “I wish we could have been assigned to serving tables.” She pouted and swished her sponge over a glass bowl.

  Her friend scowled at her. “We might have if you hadn’t been flirting so much last year that you dropped the spaghetti on Mr. Romano’s head.”