LITMIR.BIZ

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thought for a moment. “He looks like a Vinnie ‘The Eraser’ Mancuso.”

      Natalie sighed, unable to stop the smile that curled her lips. “I see,” she said as she lifted her teacup to her mouth for another sip.

      “And even though Mr. Miller was the one who signed the lease,” Mrs. Klosterman added, “it was another man who originally looked at the apartment and said he wanted to rent it for someone.”

      Which, okay, was kind of odd, Natalie conceded, but certainly nothing to go running around crying, “Mob informant!” about. “And what did that man look like?” she asked, telling herself she shouldn’t encourage her landlady this way, but still curious about her new neighbor.

      Mrs. Klosterman thought for a moment. “Now he looked like a John Miller. Very plain and ordinary.” Then her eyes suddenly went wide. “No, he looked like a federal agent!” she fairly cried. “I just now remembered. He was wearing a trench coat!”

      Natalie bit her lower lip and wondered if it would do any good to remind Mrs. Klosterman that it was October, and that it wasn’t at all uncommon to find the weather cool and damp this time of year, and that roughly half the city of Louisville currently was walking around in a trench coat, or reasonable facsimile thereof. Nah, Natalie immediately told herself. It would only provoke her.

      “I bet he was the government guy who relocated Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman continued, lowering her voice again, presumably because she feared the feds were about to bust through the kitchen door, since in speaking so loudly, she was about to out their star witness against the Mob, who would then also bust through the kitchen door, tommy guns blazing.

      “Mrs. Klosterman,” Natalie began instead, “I really don’t think it’s very likely that your new tenant is—”

      “Connected,” her landlady finished for her, her mind clearly pondering things that Natalie’s mind was trying to avoid. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for. He’s connected. And now he’s singing like a canary. And all his wiseguy friends are looking to have him capped.”

      Natalie stared at her landlady through narrowed eyes. Forget about the tea smoking. What on earth had Mrs. Klosterman been reading?

      “You just wait,” the other woman said. “You’ll see. He’s in the Witness Protection Program. I just have a gut feeling.”

      Natalie was about to ask her landlady another question—one that would totally change the subject, like “Hey, how ’bout them Cardinals?”—when, without warning, the very subject she had been hoping to change came striding into the kitchen in the form of Mr. Miller himself. And when he did, Natalie was so startled, both by his arrival and his appearance—holy moly, he really did look like a Vinnie “The Eraser” Mancuso—that she nearly dropped her still-full cup of tea into her lap. Fortunately, she recovered it when it had done little more than splash a meager wave of—very hot—tea onto her hand. Unfortunately, that made her drop it for good. But she scarcely noticed the crash as the cup shattered and splattered its contents across the black-and-white checked tile floor. Because she was too busy gaping at her new neighbor.

      He was just so…Wow. That was the only word she could think of to describe him. Where she and her landlady were still relaxing in their nightclothes—hey, it was Saturday, after all—John “The Jack” Miller looked as if he were ready to take on the world. Most likely with a submachine gun.

      Even sitting down as she was, Natalie could tell he topped six feet, and he probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. He was dressed completely in black, from the long-sleeved black T-shirt that stretched taut across his broad chest and shoulders and was pushed to the elbows over extremely attractive and very saliently muscled forearms, to the black trousers hugging trim hips and long legs, to the eel-skin belt holding up those trousers, to the pointy-toed shoes of obviously Italian design. His hair was also black, longer than was fashionable, thick and silky and shoved straight back from his face.

      And what a face. As Natalie vaguely registered the sensation of hot liquid seeping into her fuzzy yellow slippers, she gaped at the face gazing down at her, the face that seemed to have frozen in place, because Jack Miller appeared to be as transfixed by her as she was by him. His features looked as if they had been chiseled by the gods—Roman gods, at that. Because his face was all planes and angles, from the slashes of sharp cheekbones to the full, sensual mouth to the blunt, sturdy line of his jaw. And his eyes…

      Oh, my.

      His eyes were as black as his clothing and hair, fringed by dark lashes almost as long as Mrs. Klosterman’s were in their daddy-longlegs phase. But it wasn’t the lashes that were scary on him, Natalie thought as her heart kicked up a robust, irregular rhythm. It was the eyes. As inky as the witching hour and as turbulent as a tempest, Mr. Miller—yeah, right—had the kind of eyes she figured a hit man would probably have: imperturbable, unflappable. Having taught high school in the inner city for five years, she liked to think she could read people pretty well. And usually, she could. But with Mr. Miller—yeah, right—she could tell absolutely nothing about what he might be feeling or thinking.

      Until he cried, “Jeez, lady, you tryin’ to burn me alive here or what?”

      And then she realized that it wasn’t that Mr. Miller had been transfixed by her. What he’d been transfixed by was the fact that hot tea had splashed on him. Which was pretty much in keeping with Natalie’s impact on the opposite sex. Long story short, she always seemed to have the same effect on men. Eventually, they always started looking at her as if she’d just spilled something on them. With Mr. Miller she was just speeding things up a bit, that was all. Not that she wanted any things to even happen with him, mind you, let alone speed them up. But it was good to know where she stood right off the bat.

      And where she stood with Jack Miller, she could tell right away, was that she was stuck on him. In much the same way that melting slush stuck to the side of his car, or a glob of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. At least, she could see, that was the way he was feeling about her at the moment.

      “I am so sorry,” she said by way of a greeting, lurching to her feet and grabbing for a dish towel to wipe him off. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

      Hastily, she began brushing at her new neighbor’s clothing, then realized, too late, that because of their dark color, she had no idea where her tea might have landed on him, or if it had even landed on him at all. So, deciding not to take any chances, she worked furiously to wipe off all of him, starting at his mouthwateringly broad shoulders and working gradually downward, over his tantalizingly expansive chest, and then his temptingly solid biceps, and then his deliciously hard forearms. And then, just to be on the safe side, she moved inward again, over his delectably flat torso and once more over his tantalizingly expansive chest—you never could be too careful when it came to spilling hot beverages, after all—back up over the mouth-wateringly broad shoulders, and then down over his delectably flat torso again, and lower still, toward his very savory—

      “What the hell are you doing?”

      The roughly—and loudly—uttered demand was punctuated by Jack Miller grabbing both of Natalie’s wrists with unerring fingers and jerking her arms away from his body. In doing so, he also jerked them away from her own body, spreading them wide, giving himself, however inadvertently, an eyeful of her…Well, of her oversized flannel jammies with the moons and stars on them that were in no way revealing or attractive.

      Damn her luck anyway.

      “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller,” she apologized again. “I hope I didn’t—”

      “How did you know my name?” he demanded in a bristly voice.

      She arched her eyebrows up in surprise at his vehemence. Paranoid much? she wanted to ask. Instead, she replied, “Um, Mrs. Klosterman told me your name?” But then she realized that in replying, she had indeed asked him something, because she had voiced her declaration not in the declarative tense, but in the inquisitive tense. In fact, so rattled was she at this point by Mr. Miller that she found herself suddenly unable to speak in anything but

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