Free Forsaking All Others by Lavyrle Spencer Page A

“Oh, you don’t have to.”
    But he tugged them off anyway, then stood looking around the room while she removed her jacket and waited for his.
    “Hey, this is like a touch of summer. You do all this yourself?” he asked.
    “Yes. I like green, as you can see.”
    “Me too.” His eyes scanned the room, moving fromitem to item while he shrugged from his jacket and absently handed it to her. “You have a nice touch. Looks to me like if you ever wanted to give up photography, you could take up interior decorating.”
    “Thank you, but you’re making me blush. Please, just . . . just sit down and make yourself at home.”
    One brow raised, he glanced back over his shoulder with a grin to see if she was really blushing, but she was busy hanging up their jackets in a small closet behind the door.
    She turned, caught him grinning at her, and gave him a little shove toward the living room. “Go . . . sit down or something. I’ll be right back.”
    While she was gone, he walked around the room, noticing the tape player, the healthy plants, the daybed out on the closed-off sun porch. The main room was marvelous, full of light and color, its rich wood floor gleaming, tasteful art prints in chrome frames hanging on the walls. A decorator easel stood in one corner, and he wondered why it was empty. Hands in pockets, he ambled over to the opposite corner and was gazing at the ceiling hook that held up the suspended chair when she returned to the room.
    “Doubting Thomas?” she inquired archly.
    He glanced over his shoulder. She had put on some lip gloss and combed her hair. On her feet were huge, blue fuzzy slippers. “You read my mind so easily, do you?”
    “Everybody who comes in here goes over to that chair, looks up, and asks ‘Will this thing really hold me?’ ”
    “Not me. I didn’t ask.”
    “No, but you were about to.”
    “No, I wasn’t.”
    She went to the kitchen end of the room and opened the refrigerator, in search of eggs. Funny, she had an inkling he’d ask it, even before he asked it.
    “Hey, will this thing hold me?”
    But he was already inserting himself into the almost circular basket, but very, very gingerly, as if it were going to drop him the moment he settled his full weight in it.
    “Nope!” she answered.
    He laughed, crossed his hands over his belly, pushed gently with his heel, and called across the room, “Hey, I want an under-duck.”
    “A what?” she asked, popping her head up from the depths of the cabinet where she was searching for a bowl.
    “An under-duck. You know . . . when you were a little kid and you got pushed on a swing, didn’t you call it an under-duck when they’d go running right under you?”
    “Oh, that!” She laughed, cracked the eggs into the bowl, and remembered back. “No, I think we used to call it . . .” She screwed up her face, trying to remember.“Would you believe I can’t think of what we used to call it.”
    “Shame on you. How will you teach your kids those all-important things if you forget them yourself?”
    “Haven’t got any kids.”
    From the depths of the basket chair Rick studied her while she beat the eggs with a wire whisk. The movement made her shining hair bounce at the ends, and inside her baggy sweatshirt he could make out the outline of her breasts bouncing, too. He let his glance rove down to her derrière—tiny, shapely buns . . . trim hips . . . long, supple legs.
    You will have kids, he decided, admiring what he saw. “Do you plan to have kids?” he asked.
    “Not for a while. I’ve got a career to establish first. I’m just getting up a good head of steam.”
    He liked the way she moved, brisk and sure, taking a moment to wipe her palms on her thighs before reaching into the cabinet for a salt shaker.
    Allison was conscious of his eyes following her, though she wasn’t even facing him. It was disconcerting, yet welcome in a way, too. She was standing uncertainly, gazing into an open cabinet as