He fled upstairs with a bunch of unwanted sports scores and an ache of longing in his chest.

  He wished he’d had an excuse to kiss her.

  Once he was back in his own apartment, he flipped on the television to catch some news before he went to bed. There was news, all right. Lots of news. The usual trouble in hot spots, the murders, the strikes, the endless politics. And then the soft features. After seeing his face on the front of Kate’s paper, it didn’t entirely surprise him to see himself on the TV, but it was still a nasty shock.

  Damn it, why couldn’t they leave him alone?

  The story was simple. Matchmaker magazine’s Match of the Year was missing. Yes, indeedy. His bolt from the metropolis had not gone unnoticed. He scowled at his TV. Was every news outlet in America this hard up for news or was this whole thing some cosmic joke engineered by God, or more likely Darren’s father, to destroy Darren Jr.’s chance to prove himself in his own way.

  Balked at finding their prey, eligible bachelor-hunting women were going public to find Darren and convince him to return home to various promised treats ranging from dirty weekends to love everlasting.

  Serena Ashcroft was one damn smart operator, Darren realized with a sour smirk. He’d disappeared in order to lessen his news value. She’d turned his disappearance into news. Now the chase was on to find the missing Match of the Year. The magazine was posting a reward—and he couldn’t help but wonder if dear old dad hadn’t kicked in a few bucks—which immediately made him feel churlish.

  His dad had been loudly angry, but he’d never betray his son intentionally.

  Women were appealing for help in locating him. He might as well be on America’s Most Wanted.

  His only consolation was that he’d been sighted more often than Elvis recently, everywhere from Noma, Alaska, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. People were calling in from all over who’d swear they’d seen him walking down the street, eating in a restaurant, buying gas. No one knew he was in Seattle. He was going to work in what sounded like a small, unpretentious computer firm, and when he wasn’t working, he was going to be hiding out here at home working on his own projects.

  So long as his sexy neighbor didn’t clue in to his identity, he felt as well-hidden here as anywhere.

  5

  DARREN YANKED OFF his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. He was having trouble focusing on the computer screen. He’d need real glasses soon. Two weeks at his cozy little job with SYX Systems to give him a few hours out of the house was more like a nightmare you could never wake from. Harvey hadn’t been kidding when he’d said they were behind on a big job.

  Darren didn’t see how they were going to meet the deadline, even with all of them working eighteen-hour shifts. His dad—who’d wanted him to take over the advertising firm and not waste his time on computers—would be thrilled if he could see how much Darren was beginning to hate the sight of a computer screen.

  The most frustrating part of his job at SYX was that it left him little time or energy to work on his own programs. Darren had fully intended to work eighteen-hour days once he started working for Harvey, but he’d planned on spending nine each day at work and another nine on his own project. If the pace didn’t let up, he’d have to quit. Except he hated quitting a job before it was done; he liked the people he worked with; he was getting out of his apartment regularly; and, best of all, he doubted anyone here had ever heard of Matchmaker. Reward hunters, women with love on their minds and reporters could comb Seattle and the chances were good they’d never find him.

  He heard a droning monotone that indicated Harvey was rallying the troops. As a motivator, the man was no fireball.

  Harvey came weaving among the workstations toward Darren, buzzing and blinking like a fly caught in a beer bottle. He’d had to meet with the client again today, so he’d traded in his usual glasses, with lenses so thick he resembled a space creature, for the hated contact lenses.

  “Tracked that bug down yet, Dean?” It had taken a while, but Darren was finally getting used to answering to Dean.

  “Standing right in front of me.” Darren mimicked a can of insect spray. “Pssst….pssst.” He sprayed Harvey with the imaginary lethal aerosol.

  His boss blinked, looking worried. “I meant the bug in the program.”

  The man had no sense of humor. Darren sighed and shoved his glasses back on. “Yeah, Harvey. I think I’ve disarmed it. I just need to test my fix.”

  In two weeks he’d become Harvey’s right hand. They shared the obsession. Computers were more than just a job, they were magical creatures of endless fascination. If there were a Computer Addicts Anonymous, he and Harvey would be working on a twelve-step program.

  “Just for today, I will not turn on my computer,” Darren intoned gravely, “I will not touch it, communicate with it, worship its circuit boards.” He didn’t realize he was mumbling aloud until he saw Harvey’s anxious face through the fog of tiredness.

  “Maybe you should go home early.” His boss appeared distinctly alarmed.

  “But the night is young. It can’t be more than nine or nine-thirty.” In two weeks Darren hadn’t once left before midnight.

  Joseph Goode’s voice joined the discussion. “It’s nine-forty-five, and if you guys aren’t fried, the rest of us are.” Joseph was the only one of the computer programmers in the unit who was married, as he rarely let them forget. He swore his wife would think he was having an affair if he had to tell her he was working late every night.

  Looking at him, Darren had a hard time believing he’d found one woman who could love him, never mind two. Apart from his annoying personality, there was the small problem of body odor.

  Harvey looked around at the group of eight programmers, all bleary eyed and morose from lack of sleep. He blinked a few times and then nodded suddenly. “We’ll knock off now. Yes. Good idea, Joseph. See you all back here first thing in the morning.”

  Darren drove home with the windows wide open to make sure he stayed awake. He was shivering when he finally stumbled out of the car. If he could just make it up the stairs, he could fall into bed and forget about computer bugs for a few hours.

  He opened the door of his apartment and for a stunned moment thought he’d been burgled. He liked to keep his things tidy, and what he saw horrified him.

  Dirty laundry was strewn all over the place—every night for two weeks, he’d stripped, discarding his clothes carelessly, and dropped into bed, so tired, he found it an effort to brush his teeth.

  If he didn’t watch it he’d be the next Joseph Goode. Sniffing the air gingerly, he thought he caught a whiff of old Joseph.

  God, he stank.

  He was wearing the same shirt he’d worn yesterday, because he’d discovered this morning he was out of clean clothes.

  Laundry. That was it. He’d have to do some laundry. If he wasn’t a grown man he would have cried. He was too tired to do laundry.

  Stumbling like a drunk, he picked up jeans, socks that made his eyes water, shirts and underwear. He stripped, adding the discarded clothing to the pile, and threw the lot into the empty computer box that was his makeshift laundry hamper.

  He shuffled into his bathrobe, shoved his feet into sneakers and slipped outside. The breeze of a summer evening reminded him forcibly that he was naked under his knee-length navy robe. He forced his tired legs to move faster into the laundry room next door to Kate’s suite.

  Darren stuffed the washer, added detergent and started the machine. He decided to wait for the load to finish so he could put his clothes in the dryer and a second load in the washer—no sense going upstairs, he’d just fall asleep and have nothing dry to wear tomorrow.

  He’d never noticed how soothing the sound of a washing machine was. Maybe if he just rested his head on it for a minute…

  “Dean…Dean!” Something was shaking him. Must be Harvey. “Bugs all gone. Pssst pssst.” He motioned his imaginary spray can at Harvey. “All fixed. Go away.”

  “Dean, wake up!”

  That wasn’t Harvey’s voice. It was sweet, and lush and feminine. He was dreaming. That redhead downstairs was getting into his dreams again.

  “Don’t think about her,” he ordered himself. “She’s taking her hair off. Anybody can see it’s fake,” he mumbled. “No camisole. Not thinking about the camisole.” Not thinking about the camisole made him smile. He was still smiling when the shaking finally woke him.

  The woman from downstairs wasn’t a dream, she was real and trying to pull him off the washing machine.

  Darren raised his head slowly, attempting to focus on the woman in front of him.

  One look at him and her eyes narrowed. She sniffed the air suspiciously, with her hands on her glorious, curvy hips. She’d pulled some of her curls on top of her head with a kind of elastic thing and they spilled down to join the rest, like a fountain.

  “Have you been partying?” she demanded.

  He shook his head to clear it. Walked over to the laundry sink and doused his face with cold water. “Mmm, sorry,” he answered at last. “Not partying. Working.”

  “I was beginning to think you’d moved out.” She still looked suspicious, but there was a hint of a smile in her big green eyes. She was wearing black pants that clung where they touched and a shiny lime-green shirt. She wore big gold hoops in her ears, more bright gold at her neck and bangles on her wrists.

  “No, I got a job. The company’s fallen behind on a big project, and we’re working around the clock to catch up.”

  She seemed torn between amusement and annoyance. Then he saw the laundry basket on the floor beside her.

  A horrible realization dawned. He groaned. “What day is it?”

  It was definitely amusement in her eyes. “Tuesday. One of us seems to have misread the computer-generated schedule. Now, let’s see…” She made a big production out of studying the schedule, running a bright red fingernail down the printout taped to the wall. “Why, I believe Tuesday is my day.”

  “I’m really sorry.” He felt like a jackass. “It’s just that I haven’t had any time off in the last two weeks. I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “That’s okay, I hate schedules, anyway.” Kate smiled widely, enjoying her triumph.

  He just stood there, feeling too stupid from sleep deprivation to reply.

  She looked at him for a long moment, and the amusement he read on her face changed to sympathy. “You look awfully tired, why don’t you go to bed? I’ll put your stuff in the dryer.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” He would argue if he wasn’t so damned tired, but the idea of going to bed was too sweet to resist. And if he didn’t go soon, he’d make a complete fool of himself by inviting her to go with him.

  “Not at all. I usually do laundry on Tuesdays, anyway,” she said sweetly.

  He gave a tired chuckle. “Thanks, I owe you.”

  “Oh, and Dean?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You have nice legs, for a guy.”

  He’d forgotten he was wearing his robe. Exhausted or not, he left the laundry room at a trot, the bathrobe flapping with each hurried step.

  Her bubbling laughter followed him all the way to his front door.

  AS SHE FOLDED DEAN’S clothes, Kate shook her head over some of his choices. She couldn’t make him out. He was so garish about his wardrobe and yet so reticent about normal friendliness. He was a mass of contradictions.

  He must be awfully smart, though, to do all that complicated computer stuff. And when she’d caught him asleep on the washer, with his face unguarded, she’d felt an odd instinct to touch him. Nothing too drastic—she’d merely wanted to cup his cheek in her hand, or stroke his hair, the way you would with someone you felt affection for, which was a little crazy. She would never be attracted to someone like Dean. She was probably a little overtired, too.

  Still, she stayed up longer than she’d intended to make sure his washing, as well as hers, was all done.

  IT SEEMED ONLY MOMENTS LATER that the blaring alarm clock told Darren it was six-thirty. Stumbling out of bed, he made straight for the shower. It was only as he was toweling himself dry that he realized every piece of clothing Dean Edgar owned was in the laundry room. It took all his courage to don the bathrobe and prepare to walk past Kate’s apartment to retrieve his clothes.

  He never got past his front door.

  On the landing outside, neatly folded, was his washing. She had even ironed his shirts. And she hadn’t done it for Darren Kaiser Jr., heir to Kaiser Image Makers, or because some stupid magazine thought he was the Match of the Year, she’d done it for Dean Edgar, the geek with computer chips for brains.

  He whistled as he dressed.

  And was still whistling when he arrived at work in a freshly ironed shirt. As soon as the stores were open for the day, he called a florist and ordered a dozen long-stemmed pink roses to be delivered to Kate.

  “Certainly, sir,” the perky female voice said. “May I have your credit card number?”

  His teeth ground audibly. Fool. Why did Kate Monahan make him act like he was Darren Kaiser again? All he needed was for some florist’s clerk to tip off the media that Darren Edgar Kaiser Jr.’s credit card had just been used in Seattle. No. He was a cash only man these days.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say, coughing to disguise his voice. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  He put down the phone, resisting the urge to bang himself senseless with the receiver. Dean Edgar didn’t send women long-stemmed roses by the dozen.

  Okay, so what did Dean Edgar do? He decided on a little research. His colleagues were all versions of Dean Edgar. They would guide him.

  He wandered back to his workstation. “Gord,” he called to a gangly young man with pale red hair and freckles who was probably the closest to himself in age.

  “Whah?” Gord turned eyes so pale a blue they were almost colorless toward Darren.

  “Gord, if a woman did you a favor and you wanted to thank her, what would you do?”

  Gord scratched his neck. “You mean like give you a ride to work? Or make you dinner, something like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gord looked up at the ceiling as though for inspiration. “I don’t know, send her a thank-you e-mail, I guess,” he finally answered.

  There was no such thing as a private conversation among the programmers, they were jammed too tightly. Joseph Goode piped up. “You can’t just send an e-mail, Gord. If a woman did something nice for me—I’m speaking hypothetically, of course, being a married man—I would buy her a small bottle of perfume. Ladies love perfume, you know,” he announced in his smug way.

  “Yeah, to drown out the smell of you, Sir Stinkalot,” another programmer, Steve Adams, muttered.

  Steve was less of an ubergeek than most of Harvey’s hires, so Darren asked him, next.

  “I’ll tell you what you do, Dean.” He leaned back as though contemplating the origins of the universe. “You want one of those big boxes of candy, in a red box—you know the ones? In the shape of a heart? You’ll be in there before you know it.” He made an obscene gesture in case Darren had any doubt what he meant by “in there.”

  “Great, thanks,” Darren managed to say.

  His other consultants suggested a fish fresh from Pike Place Market, a computer game, more candy and a gift certificate to a computer store.

  Harvey suggested he stop wasting everybody’s time since neither he nor anybody else had time for the ladies until the project was completed.

  Darren decided he could please his two selves by going to Pike Place and buying fresh flowers. Ignoring Harvey’s protests, he left the office.

  He’d almost forgotten what daylight looked like.

  He strolled down to the market, enjoying simply being out in the fresh air. He paused to enjoy the lively banter at the fish stall. He smelled all the smells—the seaweedy scent of the harbor, just-baked breads and pastries, coffee, spices and cheeses. His senses seemed starved after so many hours in front of a computer, and he let them all feast.

  At the flower stall he hesitated over the colorful bouquets. None seemed quite right. Then a shelf of potted plants caught his eye. He remembered the jungle in Kate’s living room, the pots of herbs growing on her window sill. He settled on a small hot pepper tree, then reluctantly he returned to work.

  It was just after 1:00 a.m. when Darren got home. Taking the carefully wrapped plant out of the car, he stopped to scrawl a note that simply read Thanks, Dean, and set the plant by her front door before he dragged himself up to his apartment.

  He didn’t see Kate again until Sunday, when Harvey finally allowed the programmers a day off. Darren slept until early afternoon and woke feeling like his old self. After cooking an omelet and tidying his apartment, he felt desperate for some fresh air and exercise. Digging out a pair of shorts and decent athletic shoes, he grabbed a faded blue T-shirt, made sure he had dark glasses and a ball cap pulled low over his face, and headed out for a run.

  He fell into a blissful pounding rhythm, enjoying the warm air filling his lungs and the stretching and bunching of muscles that hadn’t been exercised in weeks. He was streaming with sweat as he rounded the corner to his own street. He slowed to a walk, hunching his shoulders as soon as he saw Kate unloading groceries from her tiny hatchback.

  She wore short shorts and a top that showed a lot of lightly tanned back. And the contours as she bent forward made his hands twitch. If anything, he was panting harder than during his run. Even after cursing himself for a pervert, he stood watching her bend over, digging around in the back of her car for something.

  She was so different from any woman he’d known. Full of life in a sassy kind of way. He was used to cool elegance—they seemed to teach it in high school back where he came from. But what Kate had was a zesty flamboyance.

  That and a body engineered for high performance.

  He watched her pull up, a rogue apple in her hands, which she stuffed back into a grocery sack. She’d turn and spot him lusting after her body any minute.