Talk Nerdy to Me (Nerds, #5)(17)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

Denise would go into her bossy routine immediately and probably insist on one of those dopey alarms. Eve would have to remember that this was her house, not Denise’s house, and resist the alarm campaign. Denise had one, and that was the main source of Eve’s horror of them.

She’d made the mistake of staying a weekend with Denise a couple of years ago. During that one short weekend, Eve had managed to set off Denise’s alarm a grand total of six times. The first few episodes had brought the cops to the door, but eventually they’d figured out it was Eve mishandling the system and had called before they sent out a squad car. That had thrown Denise into a tizzy because she was sure now the cops would ignore an actual emergency.

Eve had felt rotten because it might be true—the little-boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. She’d tried really hard to master the alarm sequence, but the pressure to get it right in a certain amount of time had always been her weakness. Give her a relaxed atmosphere and she could perform most any task, but put her under time constraints and she froze up. That was another reason to love pool. It was a leisurely game.

After picking up the screwdrivers, Eve paused, listening for Charlie’s footsteps. He must still be out in the garage. She tried to picture what would happen after he’d fixed the door and couldn’t decide for sure what he’d do. A guy like Charlie wouldn’t feel right leaving her to face the rest of the night by herself.

But they had issues. He might think sleeping on the couch was the best alternative for dealing with those issues. Eve had other ideas. But if push came to shove, and the birth control stayed inside the bathroom cupboard, Charlie would probably be able to hang on to his virtue.

Setting the screwdrivers on the bathroom counter, Eve opened the cabinet under the sink and took out the box she’d put there. She’d moved the condoms from her New York apartment along with all her other bathroom supplies. Although she’d had no immediate use for them once Lyle was out of the picture, throwing them away had seemed silly. They hadn’t expired yet.

She hadn’t thought of Lyle much until tonight when she’d used his name in conversation without thinking. Or maybe her subconscious had wanted Charlie to know that Lyle had existed and why she’d turned him down. Despite knowing she had no future with Charlie, she kept creating those tiny bonds, opportunities for Charlie to get to know her better. Maybe the effort was futile, but she couldn’t seem to stop doing it.

Tucking a couple of condoms in the pocket of her overalls felt like clandestine behavior. But the more she thought about it, and she’d been thinking about it a lot recently, she wanted to have sex with Charlie. So what if it led to nothing? She’d had sex with Lyle, and that had led to nothing. But that had been her choice not Lyle’s, and she realized the distinction.

She’d heard that Lyle hadn’t taken their breakup very well. Some mutual friends had reported several nights of heavy drinking during parties he’d attended alone. But he was seeing someone now, and from all indications he was over her. Eve was happy for him. She had nothing against Lyle except the golden cage he’d wanted to put her in.

As for Charlie, she knew going in that he was planning to leave Middlesex. She wouldn’t try to keep him here, either. Because she’d expect the relationship to be short-lived, she could prepare for that—assuming she could get Charlie to have sex with her in the first place.

"Hey, Eve!" Charlie called to her as he came down the hall. "Guess I won’t need the screwdrivers, after all. I found your cordless …"

She spun around, putting her body between the door and the open box of condoms still sitting on the counter.

". . . drill." He paused in the doorway, a fistful of metal hinges in one hand and her cordless drill in the other. She didn’t think he could see the condom box, but she probably looked both startled and guilty. She certainly felt startled and guilty.

She glanced at the cordless drill. "So you found the attachments? That’s great!" Too hearty. She needed to tone it down.

"Yeah, I did." His gaze was difficult to interpret, but he was definitely cloaking his reaction.

She decided he’d either seen the box or he had a good idea what she’d been doing over there by the cabinet. But he was going to act as if he hadn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could broach in casual conversation. "I found your cordless drill! And I see you’re getting out some condoms! Good to know!"

Or maybe he was trying to think how to gracefully derail her obvious interest in hav**g s*x with him. Damn it, she’d wanted to be more subtle than this, but she’d blown it due to her tendency to get lost in her thoughts. Denise had tried to assign a bunch of alphabet letters to that tendency, but Eve hadn’t paid any attention because it sounded too much like a stock market symbol. Denise loved to categorize things, but Eve didn’t fit neatly into any category, which drove Denise crazy.

Nevertheless, Eve’s meandering thought process had left her in the awkward position of being caught with her condom box open. She decided there was no getting around this embarrassing moment. Better to plow right through it.

"You’re probably wondering what I’m up to," she said. "Standing here by the cabinet where the condoms live."

Charlie started to laugh. Pretty soon he had to lean against the doorframe because he was laughing so hard.

She couldn’t help smiling herself, although she wasn’t sure what the joke was. "What’s so funny?"

"You." He gasped for breath. "Us. This whole ridiculous situation." He laid the hinges and drill on the bathroom counter, took off his glasses, and swiped his arm across his eyes. Then he put his glasses back on. "You really want to, don’t you?"

"Don’t you?"

"More than you can imagine." He cleared the laughter from his throat. "But I don’t see how it’s a good idea, all things considered."

"We could pretend this is wartime."

"What?" Then his confusion faded and he started to grin. "Wait, I get it. I’ve just enlisted and am being shipped out any day. In the meantime, we’re grabbing what happiness we can. Is that the routine?"

"It works in the movies."

That telltale warmth softened his gaze. "You are something else. I could gobble you up."

Her skin began to tingle. "I’d like that. I’d like that a lot."

"Me, too," he said gently. "But before we make any decisions, I have to fix your door." He picked up the hinges and the drill. "Let’s go back there and get that done."

"Okay." She felt encouraged by his reaction so far.

"And bring your condoms."

Now she was really encouraged.

Chapter Twelve

Charlie was toast and he knew it. After all his inner debate about the ethics of going to bed with Eve, he’d walked down the hall and discovered her digging out the condoms. He didn’t know how a guy was supposed to resist that kind of enthusiasm.

He could rationalize that she’d had a bad scare and he needed to stay and comfort her. Comfort could easily take the form of satisfying sex. On the surface that made perfect sense, but when faced with a hot woman supplied with condoms, all rationalization became unnecessary. He’d be a fool to reject what she was offering.

When he got to the damaged back door the wind had blown it partway open again. He closed it and laid the drill on the floor to hold it shut while he figured out exactly how he wanted to attach the hinges.

She walked into the small hallway. Even if he hadn’t heard her footsteps on the hardwood floor, he would have known she was there because the temperature went up several degrees. Or so it seemed to him. He resisted the urge to open the door again to cool himself off. He needed to get this door secured before he let himself think about what the two of them might do with those condoms.

He picked up one of the hinges, placed it head high on the doorjamb, and used a small drill bit to scratch marks in the wood where the screws would go.

"The hinges are a good idea." There was a little quiver to her voice.

He was egotistical enough to think it might be because of him. And damned if that didn’t feel wonderful, in spite of his misgivings about the direction they were headed. "They seemed like the best option."

There was a quiver in his voice, too. Well, what sort of man wouldn’t have a quiver in his voice at the thought of hav**g s*x with Eve Dupree? "I was surprised to see them, though, if you’re not interested in carpentry."

"If I tell you why I bought them, you’ll probably laugh."

"Were they another impulse buy at Middlesex Hardware?" He glanced over his shoulder at her.

Whoops, he shouldn’t take a chance on doing that. Looking at Eve when he knew she had condoms in her pocket was like his first glimpse of the erector set he’d gotten the Christmas he was nine. He hadn’t been interested in anything else that day. His other presents, Christmas dinner, singing carols around the battered old piano—he’d been oblivious to all of it.

"Not that there’s anything wrong with impulse hardware store buys." He forced himself to turn back to the job at hand. What had he been doing with this hinge? Oh, yeah. Holes had to be drilled. Screws had to be inserted. If they seemed like a metaphor for something else right now, he’d ignore the implications or risk doing this job while sporting a woody.

"There’s a crawl space over the garage," she said. "A pretty big one, as a matter of fact."

"And you wanted to make a trapdoor." He chose a drill bit, positioned it in the jaws of the drill, and tightened it down.

"I did want to make a trapdoor." She sounded delighted. "How did you know that?"

"Lucky guess." He wasn’t sure how he’d known. Maybe he was beginning to understand how that imaginative brain of hers worked, which was kind of cool. He turned on the drill and braced himself against the door as he pushed the whirling bit into the wood. "So what would you put up there?" Judging from the amount of staff she had all over the house, she could fill a crawl space in ten seconds flat.

"The hovercraft."

He stopped drilling and glanced at her. "You’re kidding. You’d need a forklift to get it up there."

"Or something similar." She looked smug. "I have some rough plans for a hydraulic system that would raise and lower it."

"Yeah?" God, she was sexy when she talked like that. "Hydraulics would definitely work. I could help you build it." She wouldn’t be able to beat him off with a stick. He was all over that hydraulics idea.

Her smile dazzled him. "I thought you might like that part. I haven’t worked out the kinks yet, but I think it’s viable. Then it would be out of the way so I have the available space for whatever I wanted to invent next."

He nodded. "Nice." He wondered if any other man in the world would be turned on by this kind of discussion. He sure was. All he had to do was listen to her ideas for fascinating machinery and he was ready to go. She was the most exciting woman he’d ever met.

"It’s a short-term solution, though. I can’t store every invention in the crawl space."

"Do you already have an idea for your next invention?"

"Oh, yeah!" Her face glowed with excitement. "How about a personal rocket system that includes its own parachute? Forget about climbing ladders to fix that hole in the roof. Just shoot yourself up there and parachute back down!"

"That’s great!" Charlie was sinking deeper with every minute. He wanted to be around for the next invention, and the one after that. He could be her guinea pig, her project consultant, her marketing adviser, her lover…

"Charlie."

"What?"

"You’ve stopped fixing the door."

"Oh!" Jumping to attention, he squeezed the trigger on the drill he was holding at crotch level and damn near ended his sex life. "Right."

Putting down the drill, he took screws out of his pocket so he could insert them partway into the holes he’d drilled. Once all the holes were made and the screws tucked inside, he’d take out the drill bit and use the screwdriver attachment to speed things up. With the potential of ending up in Eve’s round bed, he didn’t want to waste too much time on this job.

Thoughts of Eve’s inventions mingled with images of Eve nak*d. His brain was on such overload that it was a wonder sparks weren’t coming out of his ears. His hand-eye coordination was off and he had trouble getting the screws in the holes.

"About the personal rocket system."

"What about it?" He managed to insert the screws and start the next round of drilling.

"I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention that to my sister Denise."

"Eve, I wouldn’t mention it to anyone." But he’d forgotten that Denise would be showing up tomorrow. Chaperone time. Tonight could be his one and only chance to be alone with Eve and her pocketful of condoms.

I didn’t think you would," she said. "You’re the discreet type. In fact, I should have told you about the hovercraft immediately when we met for pool."

That still bothered him, that she’d told Rick years ago and then withheld the information from him, her knight in shining armor. "So why didn’t you?"

She took a deep breath. "Once I heard your name, I figured out you had to be Rose Shepherd’s son. I thought about your SATs and your magna cum laude and I was afraid to."

"Afraid to?" He abandoned the drilling and turned around. "That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. I may be a lot of things, but one thing I’m definitely not is scary."

"Oh, yes you are, Charlie Shepherd. You not only have an excellent brain, you know how to use it. You ace tests and you win academic honors and you march in graduation processions with special tassels hanging from your cap. I… can’t seem to do any of that. I just fool around with inventions."

He stared at her in amazement. She was without a doubt miles ahead of him in brainpower, and yet she had no confidence in her mental abilities. Somebody, or several somebodies, had done a number on her. Her teachers might be partly to blame, but in Charlie’s experience the buck stopped with the parents.

He hoped he was wrong. A genius born to unsupportive parents could live in agony. "I can’t believe no one ever told you how smart you are."