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They entered town and drove past the big red Texaco sign. "Why not?" she asked, although she figured she knew the answer.
"Sex can make women psycho," he said.
"That's ridiculous." Yep, that was pretty much the answer she'd thought he'd give. "Sex doesn't make a person psycho. They're psychotic before the sex."
"Yeah, but you can't tell by looking. A woman can look perfectly normal until she shows up at your house with crazy eyes and a.22 Beretta."
"Psycho men can look perfectly normal, too," she said, thinking of how normal Randy Meyers had looked the day he'd walked into her office.
"Yeah, but a man is less likely to freak after a one-nighter when he doesn't get hearts and flowers and a marriage proposal." They drove past the courthouse and Hansen's Emporium. "But you give a woman some good sex, and she's more likely to go postal."
Which was patently absurd. "Are you saying that if the sex is bad, a woman won't go all postal?"
He glanced at her as if she'd asked the obvious. "Why would anyone stalk a lousy lay?" He turned onto her grandfather's street. "Do you like to fly-fish?"
"What?" How had the conversation turned from psycho women to fishing?
"Fly-fishing. Do you like it?"
"Ah… I don't know. I've never been fly-fishing."
He pulled the HUMMER into Stanley's driveway and parked behind Kate's Honda. "I'll take you sometime. It'll be good for your nerves."
"My nerves are fine," she said and grabbed the door handle. "Thanks for the ride."
He reached across and grasped her arm. "Hang on." When she looked at him, he added, "I'll get your door."
"I can get it myself."
"I know you can," he said and was halfway out of the HUMMER. The grill lights were as big and obnoxious as the rest of the vehicle, and for a few brief moments they lit him up like he was on stage. He opened her door and took the hors d'oeuvre plate from her. His hand once again grasped her arm as he helped her out, which was ridiculous, because she was perfectly capable of getting out of a car by herself.
"We should start over." His palm slid to her elbow then dropped to his side.
But, she did have to admit, there was a part of her that liked the old-fashioned male attention. "Start over? You mean forget the night we met?"
"That's not going to happen." He followed close behind as she moved up the dark sidewalk, the soles of his loafers drowned out by the sound of her boot heels. "Maybe we can be friends."
Wow, that's a first, she thought as she stopped beneath the porch light and took the plate from him. She usually heard those words right before she was dumped, and Rob wasn't even her boyfriend. "Have you ever had a friend who was a girl?" she asked and hunched her shoulders as the cold night air seeped down the front of her coat.
"No. Have you ever had a guy for a friend?"
"No." Porch light made the white of his shirt almost fluorescent, while the edges of night outlined him in black. He towered over her and managed to make her, a woman of five eleven with size ten feet, feel small. "Do you honestly think we can be friends?"
"I have my doubts, but if my mother and your grandfather are going to be friends, we're probably going to be seeing more of each other."
She was freezing her behind off, while the cold didn't seem to affect him. "Probably." Maybe the cold didn't affect him because he ate so much. She'd never seen anyone eat as much as Rob had tonight. The man should be fat, but he wasn't. The night he'd kissed her she'd felt his chest muscles and hard, flat stomach. He had to do a couple hundred sit-ups a day.
"It would be nice if you weren't always pissed off at me," he said.
She reached into her pocket with one hand in search of her keys. "I'm not always pissed off at you." Her pocket was empty and she remembered that no one in Gospel locked the doors to their cars or houses. "But you keep bringing up that night in Sun Valley. Obviously it doesn't hold the same pleasant memories for me that it seems to hold for you."
He rocked back on his heels and looked down at her. "How about I don't mention that night, and you don't walk around mad."
She opened the door behind her. She had her doubts whether he could control himself. "We can both try."
"Should we shake on it?"
She held onto the plate with one hand and stuck out the other. His palm pressed into hers, calloused and so warm that her wrist tingled. She tried to pull her hand from his, but his grasp tightened.
