2

      Still Later, and Not a Creature Was Stirring, Except…

      DRIP…DRIP…DRIP. Roxy shifted her stare from the computer screen, where she was designing the Rose Palace—her future home on the Sound—to the leaky kitchen faucet. An upright, with a nice, graceful, swan-curved neck and one handle. Drip! “Damn,” she muttered. She’d called that maintenance guy about it twice now. Begged him to come de-drip the durn thing. She’d been pretty blunt about how much it was annoying her, too, and how she really needed him over there as soon as possible. Which was yesterday, when it wasn’t even so much of an annoying drip as an occasional one.

      So what if her call did have the dual purpose of drip-busting and getting an up-close and personal look at the man? Preferably from behind. Admittedly, she’d watched him a time or two. Or more. From the peephole in her door, from the elevator, in the lobby. He was the kind worth stopping and staring at. Gorgeous bod. Tight. She was betting six-pack abs under his T-shirt. A real appealing package in her 3D life—dull, dreary, dismal—even if all she got to do was look. Looking was good, though. Safe. Uninvolved. Easy.

      Too bad she hadn’t taken that road the first time. But the appeal of a starving artist had seemed romantic at age twenty. Wore off fast, thank heavens. Funny how her working three jobs so that he could stare out the loft window and think about painting had a way of doing that.

      So now she only looked. And Mr. Handyman was a looker well worth the effort. She was thanking her leaky swan-necked for choosing to slaver at that propitious moment, even if, so far, the plumbing Galahad had not come running to her watery rescue. All things considered, she thought she’d been pretty patient about waiting for him to haul his lethally fabulous butt through her front door to obliterate that damned dribble. But now it was getting ridiculous. The drip was running amuck and Roxy was actually more interested in a solution than the butt! Such a sad state of affairs. And pathetic.

      Pathetic but true, Roxy. Admit it. Here it was, 3:30 a.m., and the damnable drippity-drip was so loud she just knew her snoopy neighbor on the other side of the wall would start banging out a Beethoven symphony. From day one in her apartment—was it only a month now?—he, she or whatever had pounded whenever Roxy sneezed, blinked, or when the light in her fridge came on. She did try hard to stay mouse quiet. Didn’t wear shoes, listened to music only through headphones, didn’t swing from the chandelier. The wee hours had always been good to her, and getting home at two-thirty every morning all wide-eyed and raring to do anything other than sleep furnished her with oodles of time to design her new house.

      Until she moved in here. And Mr. Gorgeous Handyman cruising the hall in his drop-dead tool belt didn’t offset the inconvenience of having her nights interrupted by the Pounder.

      Her house…. Roxy smiled, just thinking about it. It would be good. Better than that, it would be all hers with her own personal brand on every single aspect of it. She liked that, the total control, at least at this stage of the planning. The house that Roxy built, or would build, as soon as he got over here and took care of that demon drip from the very bowels of hydrous hell. It was driving her insane right now, not to mention ruining her creativity! And just when she was all set to choose between marble or granite on the…no, wait. That couldn’t be right. Marble or granite dining room chairs? Where’d the bathroom vanity go?

      That demented demon drip stole it!

      Roxy’s gaze shifted back over to the culpable faucet, the one devising its next move against her, and she scrunched her face into an I-dare-you-to-drip-one-more-time glare. Fat lot of good that did, because at that very moment the fiendish faucet morphed itself into a living, breathing entity, one blatantly defying her to do something about it. Okay bitch, you asked for it. Take this… Drip! One single, solitary drip! A laugh! That’s what it was. The faucet Lucifer was laughing at her. Ddd…ri…ppp! This time an exclamation point after the laugh! “That does it,” she snapped. Roxy stormed across the kitchen floor and smacked the faucet with her open palm. “Ouch,” she squealed, pulling her hand back and shaking it. Didn’t phase the drip at all. In fact, the dribbles started coming in punctuated pairs. Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Double-drip dare ya!

      Of course, Pounder on the other side of the wall started right up.

      “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord for ear-plugs, please,” Roxy muttered, pulling open her junk drawer to see if anything in it was up to the task of silencing the one-handled dribble monster. A wrench, a sledgehammer, a stick of dynamite! As she expected, though, there wasn’t a single, solitary usable thing in there—only a red plastic flashlight with dead batteries, naturally, some emergency candles with no matches, of course, and a fistful of wooden skewer sticks, not that she’d ever skewered a thing in her life. Well, maybe Pounder once or twice…in her dreams. But nothing labeled drip-fixer.

      Frustrated that a pipe wrench hadn’t magically materialized when she needed it, Roxy started to slam the drawer shut, but caught herself in the nick of time, gently pushing it back into its place lest the wall-banging dervish on the other side started all over. Then she glared at the dreaded wall, “I hate this place, I hate this place.” Close her eyes, click her heels three times and maybe she’d land in the Rose Palace.

      But mercifully, this apartment was only a temp—a refuge from the rodents and roaches and fleas, oh my! in her former apartment. And it was a quick hop to work as well—a stopgap until the Rose Palace was built, which she hoped wouldn’t be more than a year down the road. Provided he, the fixer of drips, ever got his pipe wrench over here.

      Drip…ka-drip…ka-drip…drrrripppp…

      “Okay, that’s it!” Roxy didn’t care what time it was. She’d already been reasonable with the guy, it didn’t work, so now it was time for him to come play on her turf during her hours. And she had his number. Right at the top of an important phone numbers list stuck to her fridge, just below her fave food deliveries—pizza first, then Chinese. So, he was about to make a little home delivery himself,