Read No More Mr. Nice Guy for Free Online

a tin of beluga caviar and a box of wafer-thin crackers.
    She gulped three sips of the sparkling wine, stared at Alan and swallowed another gulp. Champagne and caviar for lunch?
    He seriously had in mind living in a barn?
    Was this Alan, or did he have a twin brother recently escaped from a mental institution?
    She took another sip of wine, and would certainly have finished the glass if Alan hadn’t taken it from her. In its place, he handed her a cracker mounded high with Russian black roe. “Now,” he said with satisfaction, “we can talk.”
    “I think we’d better,” she said faintly.
    “But not standing up. First we get comfortable.”
    He motioned her down to the blanket. As far as comfort went, the wool blanket was scratchy and the straw unyielding, but none of this was of immediate concern to Carroll. Alan stretched out next to her and propped himself up on an elbow. In contrast to the startled alarm in her own eyes, Alan’s reflected the cool blue of a fathomless pond.
    “Caro,” he said gently, “most people seem to want a two-story colonial house in a suburb. It’s a predictable choice, a sensible, logical choice.”
    “Yes.” She couldn’t say much more. He’d urged the cracker to her lips, and her taste buds were exploding under the unexpected saltiness of the delicacy.
    “We’ve been looking at houses for weeks, because we like to look at houses, because we both like to imagine what it would be like to live with different floor plans and layouts and in different areas. Yes?”
    “Yes,” she agreed.
    “Yes,” Alan echoed, “but last week it occurred to me that we’re forgetting to dream, Caro. And that standard traditional houses may be someone else’s dream. What about a place that could be made totally individual to us? A nest for just our dreams and no one else’s. Are you listening?”
    She was listening, or perhaps feeling more than listening. Alan was serious. She couldn’t remember ever having seen quite that brooding intensity in his expression. A shock of hair brushed his temples, out of place. His palm drifted from her cheek to her throat, where his thumb idly stroked the soft underside of her chin. He was looking at her…possessively. Alan never looked at her possessively.
    “A barn seems pretty unlikely at first, doesn’t it?” he said quietly. “But look closer, honey.” He leaned back, drew her into the crook of his shoulder and motioned toward the roof. “Can you picture a double skylight up there, on both sides of the beams? And a huge stone fireplace in the center of the room. Can’t you imagine sleeping up there in one of the open lofts, with a view of the stars above and the warmth and glow of a fire below?”
    She wanted to share the whimsical dream, but it was hard. A cold wind was whistling through the barn boards, and there were cobwebs strung from beam to beam. “A person could fall out of those open lofts pretty easily,” she said hesitantly.
    “We’d have railings.”
    “What about bathrooms?”
    “We’d have bathrooms, too.”
    “Where?”
    “Anywhere you want to put them.”
    “Heaven knows, there’s room for ten bathrooms downstairs alone,” she murmured.
    Maybe insanity was catching, because she could almost imagine the massive old barn being transformed into a house. Homey—never. But with paint and partitions and windows and carpets… She tried to envision it as a home, for Alan’s sake. For the moment it seemed less important to worry about what had brought on his drastic personality change than to tend to the crisis at hand. Alan was looking at her. He seemed to need something important from her, something she couldn’t fathom.
    She pushed the lock of hair from the temples of her stranger. “Alan, are you serious about this?”
    “You know exactly what I’m serious about?”
    “What?”
    “I want a place for you to dream, Caro. A place for you to be absolutely anyone you want to be. We can make a nest anywhere…on the