chapter Eighteen
When Ellen had sent Caleb the text about chocolate sauce, she’d been imagining a scenario like that morning’s: he would show up in her doorway with a bottle of Hershey’s syrup dangling from his fingers, and with one hot look, he’d liquefy her female bits.
Maybe she would walk backward toward her bedroom, pulling her T-shirt over her head and discarding her shorts along the way. Maybe he would lock up and prowl down the hallway after her, shedding his clothes with a lazy grace that made her wet.
Wetter, anyway. She’d been wet since breakfast.
So it was a bit of a letdown when she heard the doorbell and walked as seductively as she could to the front door, only to find him leaning his forehead against the jamb with his eyes closed, looking like someone had just asked him to shoot Old Yeller.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing fourteen hours of sleep won’t fix.”
“Another long day?”
“You have no idea.”
“Come on in.” She opened the door and noticed the bag of groceries under his arm. “Did you buy all the chocolate syrup in the store?”
“I bought ice cream,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got options.”
He unpacked the cartons on the kitchen counter. Cherry Garcia, vanilla, double-fudge chocolate, sprinkles, Magic Shell, jars of caramel and hot fudge, and a big bottle of Hershey’s syrup. Plus a bag of chips and a six-pack of beer.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the beer.
“In case I get thirsty.”
“You want me to keep your beer in my fridge?”
“I was hoping.”
“And your chips in my cabinet?”
“In case I get hungry after.”
“After the beer?”
He lifted his eyebrows.
“Didn’t I just meet you a couple days ago?” she asked.
“Yeah, and look how well we’re getting along. We’ll be married by the weekend.” He flashed her a winning, if slightly weary, smile.
Ellen rolled her eyes and stomped, stomped, stomped on the tiny fluttering, leaping thing in her chest. “You know, you don’t actually have to try this hard to impress me. I already slept with you twice.”
“I know, but we skipped all the early dates, and I could really use one of those third-date neck massages.”
“The kind where we watch a movie and then I move back behind you on the couch and rub your shoulders, and you offer to take off your shirt to make it easier, and then before we know quite what happened, we’re making out?”
“Exactly. But don’t skimp on the massaging. I have to be seduced slowly, like I don’t really want it.”
“I think you’ve got our roles reversed.”
Caleb flashed her another smile. “Do I?”
“You know, you could just ask me for a massage.” She pried the lid off the vanilla ice cream.
He shook his head. “I swear, Ellen, it’s like you don’t want to be courted.”
“Right. I don’t want to be courted.”
When she bent over the silverware drawer for a spoon, he leaned in close and put his mouth behind her ear. “Suck it up. If you want chocolate sauce drizzled all over your nether regions and licked off, you have to watch the news and flirt awkwardly with me first.”
Ellen straightened, savoring the molten blush his words ignited. “Fine. But only because I’m going to have a sundae.”
He brushed his lips over the pulse at the base of her throat. “That’s my girl.”
Then he kissed her, and she got so distracted by the taste and feel and smell of him, she didn’t remember to say “I’m not your girl” until he’d already walked into the living room.
“You want a sundae?” she called after him.
“No, thanks. Nana fed me plenty of junk already.”
When she made it to the living room, he was already watching the news. If you could call it that. A red-faced pundit pounded on his desk and made snide remarks about people just like her, and Ellen gave up counting how many repellent opinions he’d expressed after the first few minutes. She kept sneaking sidelong glances at Caleb, trying to gauge how much of the rant he agreed with.
“Quit looking at me like that,” he said.
“I’m not. Like what?”
“Like I eat babies.”
“It’s just . . .” She wondered how to put it. “This isn’t the news I usually watch.”
“There’s a shocker.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said hastily.
“Oh?” He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “I’d expect you to have opinions on this kind of thing.”
She did have opinions. Health care reform, feminism, global warming, the economy, unions, affirmative action—she’d developed a lifetime’s worth of opinions in the last few years, and sure, they were a lot like the opinions she’d had before, with Richard, but she cherished all of them now, because this time they belonged to no one but her.
If Caleb’s taste in news programming was any indication, he didn’t share any of them. But that wasn’t the part that worried her. What worried her was that she had a distressingly urgent desire to find out what he thought. To measure the size of the gulf between their views of the world.
And what would the purpose of that be, if not to determine whether it was bridgeable?
No bridges, she admonished herself. Caleb wasn’t her boyfriend, and she wasn’t planning to marry him, so it emphatically did not matter if it turned out that they had next to nothing in common.
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated aloud.
“You think this guy is full of shit.” Caleb said it cheerfully, as if the knowledge delighted him.
“Can we watch the Bogart movie, do you think?”
“What if I don’t like Bogart?”
“Oh, don’t. You have to like Bogart.”
His lips curved into a wry approximation of a smile, and he reached out to squeeze her knee. “I like Bogart. And I don’t agree with everything dick-for-brains here has to say, either.”
Ellen looked at her bowl. She found a hitherto unnoticed pocket of hot fudge and smiled. At the fudge. Not in relief.
“But I do agree with some of it,” Caleb added nonchalantly. “Feel free to ask me which parts.”
“I’m not asking you any questions,” Ellen said. “I don’t want to know. You’re a slab of beef to me, Clark. A bit of stuff.”
He chuckled and stole the spoon from her fingers. After bending over the bowl to fish a cherry from the melted ice cream at the bottom, he looked up. His face was slightly below hers, drawing her attention to how thick and dark his eyelashes were. Eyelashes like that should have been wasted on a man, but they weren’t wasted on Caleb. He gazed at her and ate the cherry. His eyelashes made the fluttery thing in her heart beat its frantic little wings.
His eyelashes. Not the warm compassion in his eyes.
“You do, though,” he said quietly. “You wish you didn’t want to know, but you do.”
Ellen fixed her gaze on the screen. “Look at that guy’s tie,” she said. “It’s an abomination.”
Caleb replaced the spoon and retreated to his spot on the couch. “You’re right. You can rest assured that I’d never wear a tie like that.”
He found her hand and covered it with his own, and Ellen went somewhere in her head where she heard the clink of her spoon against the ceramic ice-cream bowl and felt the cold sweetness dissolve in her mouth. Where the droning of the newscaster’s voice blended with the bold, aggressive images on the screen and the feel of Caleb’s body nearby.
She went somewhere in her head where she could just be with him, and nothing else mattered very much at all.
A commercial came on, and he turned to look at her. Before she could even think about it, the question popped out of her mouth. “Who’s your favorite president?”
“Eisenhower.” No hesitation.
She had to close her eyes for a second. “It can’t be. No one’s favorite president is Eisenhower.”
“Mine is. Who’s yours?”
“Lincoln.”
“Really? I’d have pegged you for an FDR woman.”
Ellen made a pfffft noise. “He tried to pack the Supreme Court. No respect for the law. What could anyone possibly like about Eisenhower?”
“Great general. And he gave that speech warning about the military-industrial complex.”
“That was a good speech.”
“Damn straight.”
“You know you were part of the military-industrial complex, right?”
Caleb chuckled. “Yep. And you just can’t decide what to think about that.” He spread his arms along the back of the couch and put his sock-clad feet up on the coffee table, and the news came back on. When she’d finished her sundae and set the bowl down on the table, he pulled her against his side before she could even start worrying about where she should settle.
A let’s-panic-about-choking-hazards segment came on. “You asked me a personal question,” Caleb observed in a low voice.
“Politics aren’t personal,” she lied.
“The personal is political. Or so I’ve heard.”
Ellen elbowed him in the ribs, and he smiled and pulled her back down, half on top of him this time.
As the so-called news ended and the post-news parade of even more offensive fatheads began, she started to worry that she was enjoying herself too much. Not the politics, but the whole couch-sharing, TV-watching, ice-cream-eating domesticity of the evening he’d created for them. It didn’t violate their contract, but they were definitely becalmed in a gray area here. Had he charted this all out? Had he planned on unsettling her, or was it just the inevitable result of their different priorities for this nonrelationship of theirs?
She sank lower until she was more or less lying with her cheek against his stomach.
“This doesn’t bode well for my massage,” Caleb said.
“Why not?”
“You’re going to fall asleep there.”
“No, I won’t.” She pulled the elastic out of her ponytail and let out a contented sigh.
“You so will. Especially if I play with your hair, which clearly you’re dying for me to do. Girls always fall asleep when you play with their hair.”
“I’m not like most girls. I was going to strip naked as soon as you walked in the door,” she said, and then yawned.
“Really? And look at you now. Cuddling and everything.”
“We’re not cuddling.”
“All right, Ellen. We’re not cuddling.”
His fingers sifted through the strands of her hair, arranging, untangling. They brushed her scalp here and there in tiny, soothing movements. Her eyes drifted closed.
“See, I told you,” he said.
“Shh,” she whispered. “Shh.”
As she listened to arrogant ideologues say things she didn’t agree with, she basked in the sensation of Caleb’s fingers raking over her scalp. The last conscious thought she had before she drifted off was that she could get used to being spoiled like this.
She could get used to Caleb.
She awoke to the feeling of Caleb vibrating with laughter, his taut stomach bouncing beneath her cheek. Ellen sat up, bleary and slightly disoriented.
“Sorry,” he said. He was grinning like a loon. “This show cracks me up.”
Ellen turned to see Jon Stewart on the screen. The opening monologue of The Daily Show. “Oh, I like it, too.”
“How about that? We have something in common besides our favorite sexual position.”
“You don’t know my favorite position,” she said defensively.
“Not yet. But whatever it is, I’m sure when I figure it out, it’s going to be my new favorite.”
She wrinkled her nose, and he leaned sideways and bumped her with his shoulder in a friendly way. They watched The Daily Show for a while, and Ellen began to wonder what exactly they were doing. Weren’t they supposed to have sex? It was getting late—she usually didn’t stay up late enough to catch Jon Stewart, which was a shame, because he was a fox—and she didn’t quite know what to do with Caleb. Send him home? Climb into his lap?
Meaningless sex sounded so much simpler in theory than it was turning out to be in reality.
She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When she came back, Caleb had taken off his dress shirt and slid forward several inches. “How about that neck massage you owe me?”
“Are you going to take off your T-shirt, too?”
“Nah, I can’t do that until you massage around the neckline for a minute. Then after you’ve run your fingers about as far under as you can get them, I’ll nervously suggest it might work better with my shirt off.”
“You’re a stickler for the rules.”
“I am.” He smiled. So easy with the smiles, this man. She’d never known a man who smiled so much, and it warmed her to her toes each time he did it. He was infectious, and infectious was dangerous for a woman like her—a woman who’d been quarantining herself in the house, holding fast to all the routines that inoculated her against disaster.
On the other hand, if Caleb was a virus, she’d already caught him.
Ellen crawled into her spot behind him, straddling his back with her thighs, and laid her hands on his neck. “You don’t have any muscles here,” she said. “Just concrete.”
“Do your best.”
So she did. After ten minutes or so, Caleb ventured to say that he should probably take off his shirt, and she approved. His shoulders and neck began to warm and loosen beneath her fingers. Another ten minutes and the quiet pulse of her arousal became more insistent, the dial turning up with every small movement of his back against her stomach, every quiet, completely-not-sexual moan she coaxed out of his mouth with her punishing touch. She could barely see the TV over his shoulder, but she didn’t mind. All her attention was concentrated on the column of muscle bordering the knobs of his spine, the tiny radiating lines she made with her thumbs on his lower back, the trail of bronze skin that turned pink from increased circulation as she left it behind and turned her attention to a new area.
He had the sexiest body she’d ever touched. Ever been anywhere near. And then there were the sounds he made—the quiet, abrupt inhales when she hit a tender spot, the long, ragged exhales. This wasn’t a prelude to sex. This was sex. And her crotch knew it.
She massaged over the caps of his shoulders and down his upper arms, flattening her breasts against his back. Her nipples were so hard, they hurt. Turn around, she thought. Turn around and kiss me.
When she finally got up the nerve to run her hands over his pecs, down his stomach, to brush her fingers over the hard column she found between his thighs, he did turn around—so suddenly and fluidly that she couldn’t imagine how she’d ended up flat on her back with his tongue in her mouth and his hand clutching her hip, his erection pressing hard and perfect between her thighs. But she liked it.
“You skipped a date or two there,” he said when he broke the kiss. Something had happened to his voice. Something she liked very much.
“I’m dying.”
“Me, too.” He kissed her again, deep and desperate, and said, “Bed.”
Ellen went first. She left her shirt by the front door and kicked her shorts into a corner of the hallway, but when she turned in the doorway to her room, expecting to find Caleb right behind her, he’d disappeared. “Where’d you go?” she called with dismay.
“Just a sec.” He reappeared from the kitchen, and this time he had the syrup bottle, just like in her fantasy.
Ellen smiled and beckoned him closer with a crook of her finger.
She’d barely made it to the bed before he tossed the bottle of syrup onto the mattress and climbed on top of her. Kissing her deeply, he nudged his erection into the damp crotch of her panties, while one capable hand found a nipple and teased it through the cotton of her bra.
The pressure of his cock against her moist heat made her desperate. He was so close, right there, and all he had to do was push a strip of material out of the way and he’d slide home.
But wait. She was a liberated woman. She could take care of this problem herself.
When she reached between them, he captured her wrist and moved both of her hands above her head. Raising his face a few inches, he smiled down at her with that dimple and those friendly, sexy eyes and said, “Hi there.”
She made a noise that sounded very much like a whale call from some New Age CD.
“All my careful flirting has paid off,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “And after all that hard work, I don’t think we should be in a hurry, do you?”
He thrust against her, straining the fabric of her panties as he moved a few teasing centimeters farther into her body, and she wriggled helplessly, totally at his mercy. “Maybe we can hurry now and go slow later,” she suggested.
Caleb wrinkled up his forehead as if considering her offer, then shook his head slowly. “Nah. My way is going to be a lot more fun.” He released her hands and grabbed the bottle. “We’re going to find out how many times I can make you come in half an hour.”
The answer turned out to be three. He sucked chocolate syrup off her nipples and gave her an orgasm with his hand between her legs. Then he painted his name down the front of her torso with his finger and licked it off so slowly that by the time he got through with the B, she was wild to have his mouth on her. She applied a rather generous amount of chocolate between her legs, and he brought her to a climax cleaning it up. When he turned his attention back to her breasts, she decided enough was enough. Pushing him onto his back, she hustled a condom into place and impaled herself on him with a cry of delight worthy of a porn star.
She’d been a very good girl for a very long time, but Caleb made being bad so much fun. She rode him hard until they were both sweaty and sticky, and then she came for the third time, and he followed her.
Afterward, she laid her head on his chest, wrapped her arm around his naked waist, and waited for the questions, slightly apprehensive because he’d obliterated her defenses so completely. What kind of security guard did that? Three orgasms, and she’d tell him where the Lindbergh baby had gone. What happened to planes that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. Whether or not there really was a Bigfoot. She didn’t have the answers to these questions, but she was willing to make something up for his sake. He deserved a prize for making her feel this fantastic.
When his breathing had settled—long before hers did, naturally—he began tracing patterns on her back with his fingertips, caressing her from shoulder to hip, down her thigh to her knee, then back again. In his arms, she became a precious thing. Cherished. Wanted.
Her throat tightened with emotion she didn’t want to think about.
She liked him.
Okay, actually, she more than liked him. She kind of adored him—how he made her feel, his company, his conversation. But it didn’t have to mean anything. He was an indulgence, like a massage. Temporary. People had these flings. She could have one, too, without getting in over her head.
Theoretically.
“What’s Jamie like?” he asked.
She smiled and kissed the smooth hollow under his collarbone. “You know, I get that question a lot.”
“No doubt. But I don’t want to know because I have a crush on your brother. I want to know what it’s like for you, being his sister.”
She had a standard response: Jamie was a very private person. Kind and public-spirited. Talented from the tips of his fingers to his baby toenails. A loving son and generous brother.
All true. He was also her best friend and her best advocate. It was Jamie who’d always told her how smart she was, Jamie who’d encouraged her to go to law school. Jamie who’d agreed that their mother’s worship of him and neglect of Ellen was completely wacked, and Jamie who’d done what he could to right the balance.
But he was far from perfect, and for some reason she didn’t feel like singing his praises to Caleb.
“He’s spoiled rotten.”
She’d never told anyone that before.
Right away, she backpedaled. “Don’t get me wrong. I love him to pieces, and he’s basically a great guy.”
“But . . .”
She hesitated. Caleb’s chest rose and fell beneath her cheek while his index finger traced the shape of her shoulder blade. Cocooned against his body, she could say anything. Even the truth.
With a deep breath, she took the plunge. “But, Jamie’s never been disappointed in his life. He always gets what he wants. He’s accustomed to the universe bending to his whims, and it gives him this protective bubble of entitlement that he’s been floating around in since we were kids.”
“Sounds hard to live with.”
“It is and it isn’t. I didn’t really think about it growing up. It was just the way life was. Jamie has this . . . charisma, I guess, and it wins everyone over to his side. You don’t mind doing things his way, because you feel so special being in his circle. I’ve never met anyone who’s immune to it. Even Richard, actually—Jamie hated Richard, but Richard just rolled over for him. It was unbelievable. He kept a bottle of Jamie’s favorite whiskey around for when he came to visit.” She snorted. “The only bottle of whiskey Richard never cracked, no matter how bad he wanted a drink. If that’s not a testament to his devotion to Jamie, I don’t know what is.”
“So everything becomes about what Jamie wants.”
She tilted her head back and met his eyes. Caleb got it. She wanted to kiss him for that, so she did, and his lips were soft and welcoming. Burying her face in his neck, she breathed him in.
“What do you smell like?”
“Soap, I hope. I took a shower this afternoon.”
She inhaled again. “Mint and cedar and . . . paint?”
“Probably. I was painting over at my parents’ apartment complex.”
His parents lived nearby. They had an apartment complex, and Caleb worked there, at least sometimes.
She knew next to nothing about him.
You’re not supposed to know about him. He’s supposed to be a warm body.
He was a warm body. A very warm body. And try as she might to pretend otherwise, there was nothing anonymous about lying here pressed against him, talking in her bedroom with the dark pressing against the windows. He was Caleb. She liked him. She wanted to know all there was to know about him. Where was the harm in it?
“Do you do that often? Help them out?”
“Yeah, when they let me. My dad used to do all the work, but he had a stroke. He has trouble now with his memory, and he sometimes messes up the jobs. That’s the main reason why I left the service, actually. To be here for them.”
She stopped herself from asking him another question. What it had been like to leave the army behind. Whether he missed it. If he ever thought about going back. She knew where the line was supposed to be—the line that separated meaningless fling from Way to go, genius, you fell for your bodyguard—and she didn’t intend to cross it.
He settled his hand on her hip, where it radiated heat across her entire midsection. Awareness began building again, low and tingling, and she wiggled closer to him, throwing her thigh over his. Not exactly initiating another round, but hanging out her shingle, anyway, to announce she wasn’t altogether opposed to the idea.
“Next question,” Caleb announced. “Did you ever want what your brother has?”
“Are all your questions going to be about my brother?”
Caleb slid his hand to her butt and kneaded gently, encouraging her to scoot her hips a little farther over his. She could feel him growing stiff against her belly, and the tingling became an ache.
“I’m not asking about your brother, babe. I’m asking about you.”
Had she wanted to be famous? Had she wanted the attention, the adoration, the money, the fans? No, she hadn’t. And yes, of course she had.
“I tried out for Brigadoon once,” she said. “At my high school. I saw the auditions were running and I filled out the form on a whim, walked onto the stage, and sang ‘Amazing Grace’ for the teachers who were doing the casting. I got the lead.”
He lifted her hips as if she weighed nothing, placed her squarely on top of him, and made a contented noise as he settled both hands over her butt. “Nice.”
She didn’t know whether he meant the audition or her butt. “Thank you. So I told Jamie, and he said it was awesome, and then I went home and told my mother. And that was the end of that.”
“Because . . .”
“Don’t think I don’t notice the way you keep getting me to talk without wasting your questions.” She kissed his scratchy chin. “Because my mother hauled out Jamie’s rehearsal and performance schedule and explained at length why it would be impossible for us to compromise his commitments so I could be in this play, and how egotistical I was to even think of auditioning when it was so important for our family to support Jamie’s talent. It took her about an hour to convince me I was a horrible, selfish person.”
She didn’t regret never having become a star. She regretted that her mother hadn’t believed in her enough to encourage her to try.
Caleb cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Rolling her onto her back, he said, “That sucks. I’d have liked to see you do a Scottish accent. I bet you would’ve been awesome.” And then he kissed her again, and she decided he was probably not even human, he was so great.
My Alien Lover. Fantasy Man from Beyond.
Caleb sat up, reaching toward the side table for a condom, and she ran her thumb over the scar on his hip. “What’s this from?”
“Shrapnel. A vehicle-borne IED. I was guarding the convoy, riding maybe four or five trucks back from where it happened.”
She saw the dusty, heat-blasted road with the trucks rolling over it. Saw Caleb in uniform, carrying a gun. Saw the explosion rip his world apart.
He could have been killed. That time, and probably plenty of others.
It wasn’t a thought she wanted to dwell on. “Was it dangerous?”
The lamest sort of question. What she meant was, Tell me what it’s like to be you. What kind of man are you?
“Yes.”
She met his eyes, and she knew just how foolish it made her, wanting to know. And how much more foolish that she felt so sure that whatever he told her, she’d like him better for it. She’d just keep liking him better and better until she was in way over her head.
“Does your mother know? About the scar?”
Caleb gave her a bemused smile before answering. “Nope. My sister Katie does, though.”
“Did she cry?”
“Katie never cries.”
Ellen thought she probably would have cried.
“Did anybody die? From the bomb?”
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate, but she heard what he wasn’t telling her. That he’d seen diabolical things. He’d lost people he cared about. She wasn’t going to ask him. Not tonight.
He didn’t need to tell her he was a good man. The best, bravest kind of man. She knew. She just knew.
“Will you kiss me again?”
This time, she slid her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck and closed her eyes, imagining herself as the woman this soldier had come home to.
“You’re not going back.”
“No. I’m here for good.”
And as he moved inside her, she wondered for an instant if when he said “here,” he meant here, in her bed, in her body, in her life.
Strangely, the thought didn’t scare her. Much.
Later, they took a shower together, and Caleb dried her off and got her dirty again bent over the corner of the bed. He pulled back the covers and spooned her against him, untangling her hair with his fingers.
After a while, Ellen leaned over to grab the remote and put the movie on. It was way past her bedtime, and she didn’t know if they’d stay awake for it, but it hardly mattered—she just wanted to pile one indulgence on top of another. The Big Sleep on her TV and the hottest guy in the Midwest in her bed. Bacall should be so lucky.
When Philip Marlowe met General Sternwood among the orchids, she craned around to admire Caleb’s face. Such an absurdly gorgeous man. “Did they tease you in the army for being so good-looking?”
Caleb smiled. “You think I’m good-looking?”
“Don’t be smug. It’s unbecoming.”
He kissed her forehead. “You never said I was good-looking. I thought you were just putting up with my ugly face so you could get your hands on my body.”
She smoothed one hand over his back. “I’ve never really been a beefcake kind of girl.” Her fingers slipped down his side to trail over his hard stomach.
He chuckled and trapped her hands. “No? You like your men short and flabby?”
“Yep,” she agreed, resting her head on his shoulder. “And pale, with pimples on their backs. That way, I know they’ll never throw me over for somebody more exciting.”
He went taut, and then he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his muscles relaxing again.
“You heard,” she said. “About Richard.”
“Yeah.”
It was inevitable, she supposed. In the early days after the divorce, she’d gone around town feeling like she had a big “S” for “Sucker” written on her forehead. As soon as she’d kicked Richard out, everyone from her hair stylist to the guy behind the counter at the deli had begun offering her evidence of her husband’s bad behavior, as if she’d be anxious now to store up knowledge of every awful thing he’d ever done behind her back.
There were rather a lot of them. Some were even over twenty-one.
“Can I ask you about him?”
She owed Caleb two more questions. It would have been three, since he’d had one left over from the chocolate-sauce round, but it had expired. Or it was about to, anyway. She was willing to fudge the timeline if it meant she didn’t have to answer three questions about Richard.
“Maybe,” she said.
“What’s up with the leather vest?”
Surprised, she looked up, and the mischief in Caleb’s eyes made her smile despite her nerves.
“I mean, it looked pretty broken in. Does he wear it all the time?”
She laughed. Caleb tickled her ribs, turning her laughter into helpless giggles.
“Do chicks go for that woebegone poet crap? Huh? Because if that’s what you want in a man, honey, I don’t stand a chance.”
He pushed her onto her back and tickled her armpits and the backs of her knees, smiling down at her as she batted ineffectually at his hands. She laughed until she got a stitch in her side and had to curl into a fetal ball and beg him in the weak, happy voice of a little girl to stop, stop, please stop.
When she finally caught her breath, she said, “I need a drink of water.” She’d go get one. Just as soon as she worked up the energy to move her legs.
“I’ll get it.” He popped up and headed for the kitchen, scooping up his briefs and pants at the threshold and pulling them on.
“If you had blinds out there, I wouldn’t have to get dressed,” he said casually.
“I’m not buying blinds, Clark.”
“I’m not buying a leather vest.”
She smiled as she watched him disappear down the hall, admiring the shape of him. Admiring him.
To think she’d considered him little more than eye candy when he first showed up in her yard. She’d underestimated him. He was smart. A clever warrior, honorable and brave. Frighteningly perceptive. He already understood her well enough to know when to press and when to back off. He’d known she didn’t want to talk about Richard, so he’d played it safe and got her laughing, and now he was giving her a few minutes alone to think.
Maybe she ought to tell him. Not everything. Not all her fears, and the pressure she was under. How it got so heavy sometimes she couldn’t sleep for feeling suffocated. But maybe she could be honest about why she felt so threatened by his need to protect her.
She could tell the truth about what she wanted from him.
Only she didn’t know that herself. She’d told him she wanted sex, but it didn’t feel true anymore. Not only sex, anyway. Maybe something else. Something more.
From the other end of the house, she heard the sucking sound of the refrigerator door opening, and then the clink as he set a glass on the tile countertop to pour water from the pitcher. The bump of a shoulder against something solid as the side door stuck and then gave, opening into the kitchen. And her brother’s surprised voice saying, “Who the hell are you?”