Talk Nerdy to Me (Nerds, #5)(25)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

That was the only explanation for the timing of the exit. They would have had a better chance of leaving undetected if they’d taken off right in the middle of the activities. Instead they’d left after the main event was over. Creepy.

He peered out the doorway, looking right and left. "Where’s the switch for the that light?" At this point he was ready to turn on every damned light in the house. He wanted no shadowy corners anywhere.

"At the far end, right before you go into the living room, and another one by the back door."

Then neither one would help light his way in advance. "Then maybe you’d better stay here. I want to take a look at the back door."

"Are you kidding? Wherever you wander, there I’ll be, cowboy."

He glanced down at her. I suppose that’s better than splitting up, now that you mention it."

"You think?" Her eyes rounded in mock amazement. "I can tell you haven’t seen enough scary movies or you’d never suggest splitting up. That’s the kiss of death. When somebody says ‘you stay here, while I go look around,’ then you know one of them is going to get whacked."

"Neither one of us is going to get whacked." He started slowly down the hall. "If they’d had that idea, they could have done away with both of us very easily."

"Don’t remind me." She followed close behind, her hand on his bare back. "I’m feeling extremely traumatized. I’m worried that I’ll never want to have sex again."

Finally his sense of humor reasserted itself. "It’s just like falling off a horse. You have to get right back on."

"Is that right?" She slid her hand down his back and squeezed his butt. "Are you offering to be my riding instructor, smarty-pants?"

"Why not? Are we going to let some voyeuristic intruder ruin our evening?" He was secretly afraid that he was as traumatized as Eve.

But he also was attracted to the cure he’d tossed out originally as a joke. He was especially attracted to it after she’d squeezed his butt. That brought back the warm sensation of lying between her thighs, his extremely happy dick buried deep inside her as she’d stroked his nak*d backside.

So yeah, once they were satisfied that the house was secure again, they should probably get it on and wipe out all the scary associations. He didn’t know if he’d ever have sex with her again after tonight, and he didn’t want the lingering memory to be the icky feeling of being spied on.

In the meantime, they had to go over every inch of this house while they tried to figure out what the hell was going on. He turned the comer expecting to find that the back door had been pried open once again. But no, his hinges were still screwed firmly in place.

Eve stood beside him. "Maybe we really did imagine the whole thing. Wouldn’t that be great?"

"Yeah, it sure would." Charlie flipped on the light to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, but the door looked exactly as he’d left it. No one had come through this way. "Guess we go to the front door next." He started back down the hallway.

Eve hurried after him. "I just had a horrible thought."

"More horrible than some creepizoid getting his jollies by watching us in bed?"

"I’m not sure I locked my car. The garage door remote is inside the car."

"Then we’d better start with the garage." At the end of the hallway, Charlie veered right toward the kitchen. But the minute he got there, he remembered that he’d locked the kitchen door. "Nope. Even if somebody got into the garage, they wouldn’t have made it through this door without jimmying something." He pulled at the door and it didn’t budge.

When he turned around, Eve was smiling at him. "What?"

"Your clothes." She used her Vanna White gesture to indicate his stuff scattered around. "It tells a whole story. Jacket neatly hung on the chair. Boots lined up and socks inside. Then, judging from the shirts tossed in each corner, something must have snapped."

"In case you hadn’t noticed, wild and crazy doesn’t come naturally to me."

"Not yet." She stepped forward and slid both hands up his bare chest. "But you’re making progress." Leaning forward, she kissed him.

He’d known the kiss was coming and he’d told himself not to get too involved. They hadn’t finished casing the house for clues. But her wide, generous mouth was magic. Before he could stop himself, he’d pulled her close, and in no time, tongues were involved.

Kissing Eve was a stress-buster to end all stress-busters. As he combed his fingers through her silky hair and cupped the back of her head to deepen the kiss, he managed to convince himself that no one had been in the house, after all. The click had been a branch rubbing against the eaves, a piece of ice falling off the roof, an owl dropping a pebble into the chimney. The longer Eve kissed him, the more creative he became in explaining away the noise.

She was the first to pull away. "Oh, Charlie, I just thought of something else."

"Me, too." He slipped his hand under her sweater, gratified that she hadn’t put on a bra. "A couple of things, actually."

"No, about the intruder."

He cupped her breast and rubbed his thumb over her nipple. "I think we overreacted. I’ll bet it was something else, and we leaped to conclusions."

She moaned and closed her eyes. "I hope you’re right, but… oh, that feels so good."

"It’s supposed to." He had a fantasy of doing it in the kitchen, with Eve braced up on the counter. First he’d get on his knees for a little or*l s*x, and then, once he stood, he’d be at the perfect height for the next stage.

He still had his two condoms, because she’d come up with one while they were in the bedroom. She must have snagged it from the bathroom, but that left him with—

"They could have…" She took a shaky breath. "They could have relocked the door."

"What door?" Somehow he’d lost track of the conversation, probably because he was hard as a rock which meant his blood had drained south, exactly as she’d described back in the bedroom. That had been some monologue. He hadn’t realized you could be nerdy about sex. And boy, did it work for him.

"The kitchen door. It’s one of those old-fashioned locks you can open with a credit card. They could have done that and then relocked it."

His hands, which had been so busy under her sweater, stilled. Shit. Sex was making him stupid. How could he have looked at that locked door and made the assumption that no one had gone that way? She was right about the ease of opening a lock like that. Any marginally intelligent person would have come into the garage, used a credit card on the kitchen door, and locked it behind them.

With a bitter sigh of regret he withdrew his hands from under her sweater. "You’re right. Obviously I don’t have a brain cell working."

There wasn’t a smidgen of blame in her blue eyes. "It’s been a long night."

"We might as well check the front door and then we’ll go outside and find out if you left your car open." He walked over to the converter and snagged his flannel shirt. "And this time I promise to concentrate." He buttoned the shirt as he walked back toward her.

"You’ve been concentrating." She stood on tiptoe and gave him a quick kiss. "Just on other things."

"I don’t have that luxury right now." Cupping her cheek, he gazed into those incredible eyes. "I haven’t told you, but I’m taking the next two days off work."

"For me?"

"Yep. You and your invention." "That is so sweet!"

He could live on that sparkle in her eyes. "And necessary. You and I need to get this hovercraft operational so you can take the design to New York. I think someone’s trying to steal your concept, but if we start negotiations with a viable company, we’ll make the thief irrelevant."

"Sounds like a plan." She hesitated. "Um, does that cut out your ‘getting back on the horse’ idea?"

If he hadn’t been falling in love with her before, that question tipped him right over the edge. He wanted her so much at that moment that he couldn’t speak. Finally he cleared his throat and managed an answer. "I don’t think it has to."

"Oh, good."

Yeah, he was done for. How he’d ever reconcile that with his future plans was anybody’s guess. He might have to clone himself.

If she had to be in this situation, Eve was glad she was in it with Charlie. Granted, she hadn’t been in this situation until she’d revealed her hovercraft concept to Charlie, his cousin, and his cousin’s two assistants. Until that night at the Rack and Balls, she’d muddled along on her own, with only a minor explosion.

But as she walked with him to the front door, she wondered if the explosion had been her fault, after all. She didn’t want to suspect Eunice, but it would be just like Eunice to enter the house for her own purposes and then decide to stay and watch the sexual show in the bedroom.

When it came to that, Eunice was the only person Eve could picture doing something like that. And the woman was frustrated by her inability to buy the finer things of life. Yet that didn’t explain why she’d sabotage a project that she wanted to steal.

And there was the broken back door. If Eunice could get in with a key, would she break down the door to confuse the issue? That seemed like a lot of extra work when she could slip in and out undetected.

Charlie walked into the entry way and stopped. "Damn it. The door’s unlocked."

Eve stared at the position of the dead-bolt lever and shivered. It was open.

"You didn’t leave it that way by accident when we left, did you?" Charlie asked.

A headache was coming on. Eve put her fingers to her temples and began a slow rotation. She pictured leaving the house on the way to the bakery. She’d been aware of Charlie watching her to make sure she’d locked the door. And she had locked it.

"I wish I could say I wasn’t sure." She looked at him. "But I am sure. I remember thinking that you’d give me a lecture if I didn’t lock the dead bolt. But I would have locked it, anyway. I’m not casual about that anymore."

They both looked at the door in silence for several seconds.

"Maybe it has fingerprints on it," Eve said at last.

"I doubt it." Charlie sighed. "Whoever is doing this is trying to confuse the hell out of us so we won’t guess. I’m going to bet they’re at least smart enough to wear gloves."

"They were here when we had sex, weren’t they?" Eve looked at Charlie in growing horror. When it had been only a possibility, she’d been able to keep the creepy crawlies at bay, but now, facing the unlocked door, she couldn’t deny the obvious.

"That doesn’t mean they watched."

"Yes it does!" Eve began to shake. "Otherwise, why did they wait until it was over before they left?"

"Could have been coincidence." He gathered her into his arms and nestled her head against his chest.

She rubbed her cheek against the soft flannel and wound her arms around the solid comfort of his body. "Some coincidence."

"No, really. They could have been rummaging around getting whatever they were after and they happened to be ready to leave right then."

"You’re just trying to make me feel better."

"I’m trying to make us both feel better." He nestled his cheek against her hair. "That’s a yucky thought, that someone could have been … standing in the doorway while we—"

"Don’t say it. Let’s decide it was a coincidence." In her gut, Eve didn’t believe the coincidence theory, but she’d work on convincing herself.

"Fine with me. It was a coincidence."

Eve thought she’d have an easier time with the coincidence theory the longer she stayed tucked in Charlie’s arms listening to the steady beat of his heart. "Can we assume they have a key?"

"Not until we go outside and check your car. If you left it unlocked, then they could have come through the garage, like you said. Then, just to drive us crazy, they could have locked the kitchen door after them, but not this one."

"I would have recognized the sound of the dead bolt being locked," Eve said. "I wasn’t sure about the door closing, because it was only a soft click, but that dead bolt going in is a much louder noise."

"And that could be why they didn’t lock it. Both of us would have been out of bed like a shot."

Eve remembered the sated, lazy feeling of lying in bed with Charlie. "Maybe not quite that fast."

"As fast as humanly possible, then. It was only that I wasn’t sure of what I’d heard, and I wanted it to be something else."

"Me, too." She’d felt so warm and cozy with Charlie’s body tucked in around hers. "You have a nice way of not crushing a girl afterward."

"Weight distribution. My forearms and my knees can keep approximately half the weight elevated."

Eve did her best not to laugh, but she had to swallow hard. Between the scary parts of tonight and the lusty parts, all her emotions were turned up to full volume.

"And since the other half is evenly distributed," Charlie continued, "it puts minimal stress on—"

A snort escaped, despite her best efforts.

Charlie sounded offended. "What’s so funny?"

"You." She lifted her head to gaze into his wonderful, intelligent face. "You are such a nerd. And I love that about you." The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she wanted them back. The nerd part was fine, but she could have gone all night without making a comment that included the I-word.

His expression registered the impact of that word, too. She could tell he was trying to think of a response that wouldn’t embarrass them both.

"I didn’t mean that the way it sounded," she said. "It’s just one of those expressions everybody uses."

His gaze told her that he didn’t buy it. But he smiled like the nice guy he was. "Yeah," he said softly. "I knew that."

Chapter Eighteen

Close call, Charlie thought as he released Eve and went back to the kitchen to get his jacket and put on his boots. Good thing they had something to do right now, or no telling what kind of confessions they’d both make. Instead, they could concentrate on this breaking-and-entering situation.