“Not tonight,” he said.

“I’d like to know why not.”

“Because I’m not taking you there.”

“Do you have something you have to do tonight? She can come pick me up.”

“Stop being deliberately obtuse. I’m not buying it. I’ve got you right where I want you, and I’m keeping you there.”

My temper began to fray. “I am not going to be your little sex toy for you to play with whenever you get the urge. I have a life to get back to. I have to go to work tomorrow.”

“You can go to work tomorrow. But I’ll take you, not your mother.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever. What if something happens and you have to work? I’m correct that you can be called in at any time, right?”

“It’s possible, but I’m not called on to go to the crime scenes very often. That’s what my detectives are for.”

“I don’t need to be taken to work anyway. My car has an automatic transmission, and I can buckle my seat belt one-handed. I’m perfectly capable of driving, and don’t start with that two-hands-on-the-wheel stuff again.” I was as determined now to leave as he was determined for me to stay. I hadn’t been before, but he was calmly assuming he could tell me what to do, and I had to nip that in the bud, now didn’t I?

He was silent for a moment; then he completely undermined me with a quiet, “Don’t you want to be with me?”

I stared at him, mouth open. “Of course I do,” I blurted before I could catch myself; then reason reasserted itself and I said indignantly, “I can’t believe you’re that underhanded and sneaky. That was a girl argument, and you used it against me!”

“Doesn’t matter. You admitted it.” He gave me a smugly triumphant smirk, then blinked. “What’s a girl argument?”

“You know, appeal to the emotion.”

“Damn, if I’d known it worked that well, I’d have used it before.” He reached over and squeezed my knee. “Thanks for the tip.”

He winked at me and I couldn’t help laughing. I swatted his hand away. “I realize circumstances got in the way, but you haven’t lived up to our bargain. You haven’t courted me at all. So I want to go home.”

“I seem to remember having this discussion before. Your idea of courting and mine aren’t the same.”

“I want to go out on dates. I want to go to movies, to dinner, dancing-You do dance, don’t you?”

“Under great protest.”

“Oh, dear.” I gave him the BSE-big sad eyes. BSEs are just one step below tears in the arsenal. “I love dancing.”

He darted an alarmed look at me, then muttered, “Shit. All right. I’ll take you dancing.” He said it with a long-suffering air.

“I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.” If that wasn’t the perfect place for the classic feminine low-blow, I’d never seen one before. If he took me at my word, he knew he was disappointing me, but if he did take me dancing, he had to pretend he was enjoying it. This is one of the ways women get back at men for not having periods, you know.

“But-after the date is over, we do what I want to do.”

Two guesses what that was. I pulled a shocked look. “You want me to pay for a date with sex?”

“Works for me,” he said, and squeezed my knee again.

“Not going to happen.”

“Good. Then I don’t have to go dancing.”

Mentally I added Uncooperative and not willing to do things for me to his list of transgressions. The way that list was going, it was going to be in volumes like the encyclopedia.

“No comeback?” he prodded.

“I was just thinking of things to put on your list.”

“Would you forget about that damn list! How would you like it if I made a list of all your mistakes and shortcomings?”

“I’d read it and try to work on my problem areas,” I said righteously. Well, I’d read it, anyway. What he considered a problem and what I considered a problem might be two very different things.

“That’s a crock. I think you actively cultivate your problem areas.”

“Such as?” My voice took on a very sweet tone.

“Your smart-ass mouth, for one thing.”

I blew him a kiss. “You liked my mouth this morning when I was kissing my way down your zipper.”

That reminded him, all right, and he visibly shuddered in response. “You’re right,” he said thickly. “I liked it a lot.”

I knew what he meant. All day, I’d been harboring some longings myself. I wanted to forget all this jockeying about as we fought for the upper hand and for once just eat him up, enjoy him, wallow in sex and pleasure. Maybe when I got him home-Until then, though, there was no point in letting him think he’d won.

“You also like my Pebbles hairdo, even though you made fun of it.”

“I didn’t make fun of it. And, yeah, I like it. I like everything about you, even when you’re being a pain in the ass. You’re a walking wet dream, you know.”

I gave him a doubtful look. “I don’t know if that’s good or not.” The image in my mind was decidedly sticky and icky.

“From my point of view, it is. Personally speaking, not professionally. You’re playing hell with my concentration at work. All I can think about is getting you naked. Probably when we’ve been married a year or two that’ll slack off, but right now it’s pretty intense.”

“I haven’t said I’ll marry you,” I said automatically, but my heart was doing a tap dance and my own concentration kept wanting to slide off our conversation and instead focus on getting him naked.

“It’s gonna happen and we both know it. We still have some details to get ironed out, like this trust thing you’re so worried about, but I figure in a couple of months I’ll have that under control and we can maybe have a Christmas wedding.”

“Definitely not gonna happen. Even if I said yes, which I haven’t, do you have the tiniest clue of how long it takes to plan a wedding? This Christmas would be impossible. Next Christmas, maybe-I mean, it would be possible to plan a wedding in that length of time, not that I want to get married next Christmas, because even if we did get married, it wouldn’t be at Christmas because our anniversary would get lost in all the holiday hoopla and I’d hate that. Anniversaries should be special.”

He grinned at me. “You said ‘our anniversary.’ That’s tantamount to an acceptance.”

“Only if you don’t understand the English language. I said ‘if,’ not ‘when.’ ”

“The Freudian slip overrode that. It’s a done deal.”

“Not yet it isn’t. Until and if I say those three little words, I haven’t committed myself to anything.”

He gave me a thoughtful look, as if until now he hadn’t realized that neither of us had said “I love you.” I don’t think men put as much importance into saying “I love you” as women do. For them, it was more about doing than it was about saying, but while they might not understand why it’s important, at least they get that it is important to women. The fact that I hadn’t said it to him got his attention, though, made him realize that perhaps things weren’t as cut-and-dried between us as he assumed.

“We’ll get there,” he finally said, and I was relieved that he hadn’t said “I love you” as a means of prompting me to say it too, because then I would have known he didn’t mean it. Lord, this man-woman stuff was complicated; it was like a game of chess, and we were equally matched opponents. I knew what I wanted: total reassurance that he was in this for the long haul. I hoped, but until I knew, I was holding back a little part of myself. He was having fun, I thought; I was having fun, even when we argued. At some point the chess game would be over and then we would see where we stood.

He took my hand. It was my left hand, of course, since he was driving, so I couldn’t move my arm very much. He gently slid his hand under mine, and laced our fingers. No doubt about it, he was a damn fine strategist.

That night was far different from the first two nights. He did laundry, both his and mine, and impressed me by not messing up. He cut the grass, even though it was dark by the time he got around to it. His riding lawn mower had headlights on it and he also turned on his outside spotlights. I felt as if I were Ms. Bower Bird, watching Mr. Bower Bird build his nest with all sorts of interesting sparklies to show what a good provider he was, then parading in front of it, hoping to lure Ms. Bower Bird inside. This was Domestic Wyatt in action. To be fair, though, his yard was well-maintained anyway; I could tell he regularly mowed the grass.