Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(42)

The digs were so common she barely noticed them anymore. “Is Kate done with her intervals yet?” Bev heard the machine groan as it shifted levels, and a distant sound of panting during a long pause. Kate, her twenty-two-year-old half-sister, was her best bet. Her closest friends would do anything for her, but quitting their jobs and leaving their husbands and toddlers seemed a bit much for a few office supplies jammed under a door. And Kate was family. She’d benefit from cleaning away the bad blood as much as Bev would.

“Hey,” Kate said on the phone, breathing hard. “What’s up?”

“Don’t let Mom come up here and interfere.” Kate was the baby and the favorite. She could finagle anything.

“She’s kind of freaked about her sister trashing the house,” Kate said.

Not so freaked about Bev being in the house while it happened, though. “You know, it’s gorgeous up here. Feel like a change of scene?”

“To Oakland? Isn’t it nasty?”

“God, not at all. It’s beautiful. You wouldn’t believe the view.” Bev threw her mind around for something else tempting. Kate had just got her B.A., had no job, and as much as she was doted on by their mother, complained often of living at home. “The house is right next to a huge park. Lots of redwoods with running and hiking trails.”

“Really?” Bev heard her pause to take a drink. “Any indoor equipment?”

“Oh, sure. There’s a treadmill and a chin-up bar and all kinds of crap. And more at the office. Everything.”

“Really? How’s the weather?”

“Cool. Not so hot. Sunny in the afternoons, fog in the morning. You should see it roll in over the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I was thinking about taking a few classes. Something marketable. Nobody’s hiring.”

“UC Berkeley is right down the street. They have an extension catalog.” She paused. “If you think you could keep up. It is Berkeley, after all.”

“Of course I could keep up. Just because I did two years of community college doesn’t mean I’m not as smart as the boring dorks who didn’t have any fun in high school.”

“Like me?” Bev was smiling.

“You think you got me, don’t you, with that Berkeley crack?’

Laughing, Bev knew she did. “I’ll pay for your gas,” she said just as Kate hung up on her.

Now Bev just had to make it through tonight. Leaving on the lights she changed into sweats, made herself a quick ham sandwich, and turned on the TV.

After the third close-up on the clinically probed remains of a murdered brunette, she realized TV was a mistake. The room, the house, the neighborhood—all too quiet. She got up and checked the locks again, the windows, then feeling exposed with all the black windows staring at her, sank down and sat on the floor.

When the doorbell rang she jumped.

Then sighed in relief. She got up and hurried to the door, paused to compose her face, and pulled it open.

“You’re just going to pop it open like that?” Liam stood in front of her, arms over his chest, glowering. “You didn’t even wait to see if it was me?”

“I checked the peephole.” She should have. But she’d known—known—it was him.

“You couldn’t have. I ducked.”

“Ducked? Why?”

“To see if you’re being careful,” he said. “Obviously not.”

“You didn’t seem so worried about me an hour ago.” She meant to sound cynical, not petulant. But after breaking into the house for her—which had been a vision of male physical prowess that would probably resurface in her dreams—he’d just left her there alone.

His mouth twitched. “Need rescuing again?”

“If I did it would hardly be polite of you to rub my nose in it.”

He bent down and picked up a cylindrical sack at his feet she hadn’t noticed before and pushed past her into the house. “Polite is overrated.”

“What are you doing?”

He walked over to the sofa, reached into the sack, and pulled out a red sleeping bag, spreading it out over the cushions then sitting on top of it. The light material puffed up around him. While Bev stared, he began taking off his shoes. “Since somebody else wants you gone more than I do, I’ve decided to change tactics.” With his shoes parked on the floor, he lifted his legs to stretch out on the couch.

She’d been too upset before to notice the jeans. Now she had to tear her thoughts away from muscled thighs encased in worn denim to hear him. “You’re sleeping here?”

“If anything else happens, I want you to know it wasn’t me. Even if something happens to you at Fite—big or small—it won’t be me. I’m not saying I’ll bend over to help you, and I’m still going to point out how much happier you’ll be in L.A., but I’ll be real obvious about it. Nothing sneaky.”

She sat down on the edge of a chair. “Like, say, dumping a decade’s worth of paperwork on my desk?”

“Not that it wouldn’t be useful to go over past lines if you really were going to stick around as the owner of the company, but since you won’t, I’ll have to be patient. You’ll become unhappy enough to leave without any help from me.”