Within Reason: Mill Brook Trilogy, Book 2

by Carla Neggers

  “You know.”

  “Uh-uh. I don’t.”

  “Your... um... wanting me like that. It’s weird.”

  Weird? Adam stabbed a sausage with a fork and flipped it out onto a paper bag to drain. Weird, he thought. The woman was going to drive him mad. He glanced around at her, a flush spreading from her cheeks to the smooth skin exposed where her robe was wrapped loosely above her breasts.

  “How come weird?” he asked in as neutral a voice as he could manage. It wasn’t very neutral.

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall in an exaggerated movement that only made her seem more nonplussed, which nobody back in Mill Brook would believe. She said, “The name Adam Stiles and control have always gone hand in hand. But last night...”

  Her voice trailed off, and Adam got all the sausages out of the skillet before turning back to face her. “Char,” he said dryly, “last night should have confirmed, not undermined, any reputation for control.”

  She sprang to her feet. Adam took a perverse pleasure in knowing he was getting to her, that it wasn’t just her getting to him, but he hid his grin from her by grabbing the skillet and emptying the fat into an old coffee can. He heard Char mumble something about being back in a few minutes, then the sound of her bare feet padding on the hardwood floor. He assumed she was getting dressed. A wise decision. In a few minutes she would have seen just how weird and out of control he could get.

  He sighed. What did she take him for? Did the women of Mill Brook gossip about the ascetic one-handed sawyer up on the river? Had they come to the conclusion he was no longer interested in sex?

  Weird.

  Control.

  Adam had never been a man who concerned himself with other people’s opinion of him. What his reputation was or wasn’t had never crossed his mind. This, however, was different.

  It was insulting was what it was.

  How could Char be surprised he wanted her so much when she had damn little idea, really, of how much he did want her? He had controlled himself last night.

  He called back to the bedroom, “You know, just because I’m a one-handed widower doesn’t mean it should surprise you I can still kiss a woman.”

  He couldn’t make out her response, but it sounded argumentative. He cleaned out the skillet, and by the time he had it back on the stove, heating up for the pancakes, Char came bounding out from the bedroom. She had on jeans and a teal sweatshirt and her hair was all over the place.

  “You are such a jackass,” she told him.

  Now they were on firm ground, Adam thought. Char being straightforward and crabby he understood. Her flushing and mumbling threw him off. He said mildly, “Just trying to figure you out, Char.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, prosecutorial style. “I wasn’t talking about you wanting a woman in general being weird, but me in particular.”

  He stirred the pancake batter. “Why should that be weird?”

  “I’m not your type.”

  “What’s my type?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to say, but if I were it, you’d have noticed me sooner, seeing as you’ve known me since I was in a cradle.”

  He laughed. “Thought I’d wait until you were toilet-trained before I made any moves on you.”

  “Damn it, you know what I’m talking about!”

  He turned on the faucet, wet his fingers and flipped droplets of water onto the heating skillet. The water danced and then evaporated. Perfect. He ladled in batter for one large pancake.

  “I could say the same thing about you,” he pointed out, “except that it occurs to me maybe you haven’t ‘noticed’ me. I’m the one who’s barged into your life. Char, are you trying to tell me I’m shoving myself on you and you’d just as soon I backed off? If so, out with it.”

  She shook her head tightly, and Adam quickly set down the ladle, careful to hide the rush of relief he felt. He wasn’t sure he was ready to confront his own feelings about Char yet, never mind have her confront them. Being a repressed Yankee—never minding that such a stereotype would annoy her—she didn’t articulate her feelings any more easily than he did.

  Sighing, she said, “No, that’s not what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Adam grabbed a spatula and kept his eye on the cooking pancake. ‘Then are you trying to tell me that our attraction to each other has more to do with raging hormones and a very small house than anything deeper?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Then I suggest,” he said, watching bubbles form on the top of the pancake, “we eat breakfast and get out of this house for the afternoon.”

  “What about our hormones?” she asked, a welcome touch of humor in her tone.

  He looked around at her and grinned. “Let them rage.”

  And rage they did.

  Thinking it would be safe there, Char took Adam to an amusement park. The summer crowds had thinned somewhat, but it was still jam-packed. The weather was clear and warm, and country and western music, which always seemed to reenergize Char, was playing everywhere. After their drive to the park in the close confines of her car, she welcomed anything that would help clear her head, and ease her aching awareness of Adam.

  He, naturally, only went to amusement parks for the sake of his kids. Even so, he never rode any of the rides. “Always seemed like a waste of time,” he said to Char as she stood back and let him pay for her ticket. It wounded her pride, but she was down to twenty-three days to come up with next month’s rent. Anyway, she’d pay him back every cent.

  “Well, that’s why we’re here,” she told him.

  ‘To waste time?” He shook his head as they headed into the park. “No way. We’re here to distract ourselves.”

  She angled a look at him. “Think it’ll work?”

  He met her gaze, his eyes bright in the noontime sun. “Not a chance.”

  Char suddenly felt warm... wanted. She hadn’t felt that way in a devilishly long time. Needed, yes. By her daughter, her clients. But not wanted. Without thinking, she hooked her right arm through Adam’s left arm. She hardly noticed the absence of his hand.

  “Well, we’ll just have to give it a try.”

  They tried.

  Char dragged him onto all her favorite rides: a wild rollercoaster—Adam didn’t scream; a fun water ride—he didn’t even get wet; a waterfall ride—he did get wet, but he still didn’t scream. He looked a little out of place in the lines, a stolid, one-handed man in a work shirt and jeans always checking around for stray kids. “I feel like a nine-year-old,” he’d mutter from time to time. Char accused him of feeling guilty because he was spending a Sunday afternoon doing something so useless as riding down a made-up waterfall and getting wet on purpose. He ought to be looking after his kids or cutting wood or fixing dinners for the next week. Doing something productive.

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  “Before you decided to come down here and meddle in my life,” she persisted, “what did you have planned for this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do, too.”

  He scowled at her. “Okay. I was going to clean the chimney.”

  It was all Char could do to hold in a victorious hoot. Instead she said, as if in a courtroom, “I rest my case.”

  “It needs cleaning before winter.”

  “Of course.”

  He bit off his next comment and climbed into their seat for her favorite maniacal ride. “My idea of a good time,” he grumbled, “isn’t getting turned upside down on an amusement-park ride.”

  “No, cleaning chimneys is.”

  The look he gave her was a scorcher and all she needed to realize the afternoon wasn’t distracting him at all. Not letting up, he said, “Hardly.”

  Fortunately the notorious ride began to move.

  As they were being whipped around, Char thought she heard Adam give a yell of pure abandon. Since everyone else—including she—was screaming, she couldn’t be sure. But she thought it was his pu
rely Vermont voice yelling as they went into the second wild upside-down turn.

  Afterward, he suggested ice-cream cones.

  Amusement park and self-denial, she decided, were having their effect.

  Their final ride ended any fading notion she might have had that they could find, even for just a few hours, an innocuous middle ground between being a couple of people who had always just tolerated each other and potential lovers. The ride was a drencher: a giant inner tube floated down a river in manufactured white water and under a waterfall. It wasn’t scary or nauseating. It was just wet.

  They both got soaked to the skin.

  The sight of a fully clothed Adam Stiles, the hard-case president of Mill Brook Post and Beam, dripping wet was more than Char could handle. She hadn’t laughed so hard in months.

  Adam, however, wasn’t nearly as amused. At first Char thought he was going to complain she hadn’t sufficiently warned him about just how wet he might get, but he didn’t say a word. Then a cool late-afternoon breeze struck her and his arm brushed up against her. Char almost lost her balance. With the wind on her wet skin and his touch, she had the delicious sensation of feelings hot and cold at the same time. Her shirt was matted against her breasts, outlining their shape in detail, but before she could cover up she saw that Adam had already taken due notice of her hardened nipples.

  She also saw that their afternoon out had no more distracted him than it had her.

  “The sun will dry us in a few minutes,” she said, her voice raspy. “Want to head back? I know a great place for barbecue on the way.”

  They were still damp when they arrived at the barbecue place, so they decide to get their sandwiches and coleslaw to go. Char loftily insisted on paying. But she wasn’t hungry when they got back to her house. She felt clammy, there was a slight chill to the air and Adam still had a couple of hours before he had to be at the airport.

  Char excused herself and slipped into the shower, turning the water on extra hot. Maybe consciously or unconsciously they had planned it this way, she thought. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. She supposed it didn’t matter. Whatever her motives or his, here they were. And she wasn’t going to let the weekend slip away. She wasn’t going to let Adam slip away.

  She wasn’t going to wait for tomorrow’s regrets.

  When she joined him back in the living room, he had put on fresh clothes and had shaken his sleeping bag out and spread it neatly on the floor so that he could roll it up for travel.

  He scanned her bathrobe and bare feet. “You dress like this for dinner every night?”

  “Not every night.” She suddenly felt self-conscious and dropped onto a giant pillow. ‘I’ll get dressed in a little bit. You can use the shower now, if you want.”

  “Let me finish with this—”

  “That’s okay. I’ll finish it for you. You go ahead.”

  Eyeing her with open suspicion, Adam climbed to his feet. Char had no clear idea of what she was doing; she had no plan, no goal. All she knew was that when she started her new job tomorrow morning, when Adam was back in Vermont sawing logs, she didn’t want to be confronted with a slew of regrets. She wanted to give whatever they had percolating between them at least half a chance to boil over.

  “All right,” Adam said with a slight shrug, and headed for the shower.

  Char cursed silently.

  The bathroom door closed with a firm thud, and Adam began to whistle. She heard the shower come on. The man wasn’t going to make this easy on her, was he? She flopped back against another pillow and kicked out her legs in front of her so that she was lying flat on her back staring at the ceiling. It needed paint. She needed something, too. A total overhaul, probably. She had to be crazy wanting a thickheaded, dull Yankee like

  Adam Stiles. Only Adam would have left her sitting there inches from his spread-out sleeping bag and gone in to take that shower.

  Unless...

  Char shot upright and glared down the hall toward the bathroom.

  Unless he wanted her to be absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure that she would have no regrets ... that she wouldn’t pull back in the last second as she had last night. Maybe he was giving her that one final chance to come to her senses.

  Except she wasn’t out of her mind, she realized. She was stone-cold rational and knew—knew—she couldn’t let Adam slip away. She didn’t have a crystal ball. She didn’t know what would happen to them. But did that matter?

  Not right now it didn’t.

  She climbed to her feet and trotted down the hall to the bathroom. Just what was the etiquette for this sort of thing? Should she knock first? Barge in? Whisper something seductive?

  “Oh, rot.”

  “Char!” Adam yelled, as if she were down in the back forty. “You got a dry towel somewhere around here?”

  Perfect.

  There was one under the sink, of course, but no need to tell him that. “Hang on a second. I’ll have to hand one in.”

  That would alert him to her opening the door, and she could take her cue from whether he was exercising modesty or not. Snatching the towel through the barely cracked door would suggest she should just go and put supper on. Allowing her to walk into the bathroom and hand the towel to him in the shower would suggest she might want to join him.

  She peeled off the towel she had wrapped over her wet hair and cracked open the door.

  Nothing.

  Her heart pounding, she hung the towel on one finger and stretched out her arm as she poked her head into the tiny bathroom.

  Adam wasn’t exercising modesty.

  Sleek and dark and stark naked, he was standing in front of the tub with his eyes on the door.

  “You’re not even wet,” Char blurted.

  “Didn’t want to parade through the house dripping while I hunted up a towel.”

  “I see. Well, here you go.”

  He caught the towel handily, his eyes never leaving her. Then he nodded to the old pedestal sink, where she had left her comb. “You want to comb out your hair before the tangles dry?”

  “I won’t bother you?”

  “Guess that’s up to you.”

  With an unselfconsciousness Char would expect in a locker room, Adam slung the towel over the curtain bar and climbed into the tub. The steam from the hot water escaped when he drew back the curtain, hitting her full in the face.

  “Come in or get out,” Adam said as he pulled the curtain shut. “You’re creating a draft with the door open.”

  The opaque shower curtain meant he was at least out of immediate view. I do need to comb my hair, Char thought, quickly shutting the door behind her. She could analyze her situation interminably. Adam would freeze, her hair would dry in tangles. Best just to close the damn door and then think. Sticking around a few minutes didn’t necessarily mean she and Adam would end up making love on the bathroom floor. There wasn’t enough room, anyway. Even if they scrunched up...

  She saw how red her face was in the steamy mirror and abandoned that line of thinking.

  The comb, she thought. Grab the comb and get busy.

  It seemed so natural, combing her hair at the sink while Adam took a shower. She could hear him lathering up a washcloth.

  ‘There’s enough hot water?” she asked, raising her voice above the noise of the shower.

  “Plenty.”

  If she hadn’t known Adam as well as she did, his reply would have sounded like a growl to her…a growl of frustration, of wanting. They were torturing each other. She tore the comb through her hair, tears springing in her eyes as she ripped through tangles. Was she out of her mind? She shouldn’t have come into the bathroom. Let the man shower in peace, for heaven’s sake.

  Suddenly the shower was off. The tiny bathroom was silent; Char stood motionless at the sink.

  “You still in here?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She put down her comb; she was finished, anyway. “I’ll go—”

  “Don’t.”

  He pushed op
en the shower curtain and came to her, sweeping his arms around her before she could think to protest. Not that she would have. This was what she wanted; this was why she had delivered him the towel in the first place. He had left it dangling from the rod. His body was wet and hot and hard. Her robe grew damp as its worn chenille absorbed the water from his chest and abdomen, aroused her almost as much as his touch.

  “We’ve waited a long time for this,” he said. “Too long.”

  His mouth found hers. She groaned softly, opened her lips, welcoming, urging. She could feel him burning with her, could feel herself becoming wax melting around a hot flame. Drops of water dripped from his hair onto her cheek, then down her throat and over her breasts, singeing her.

  The loose tie of her robe gave way, suddenly exposing her nipples to the sleek muscles and prickly hairs of his chest. She gasped at the sheer ferocity of her want. Was she mad? Could he possibly want her as much as she did him?

  Then, before she was aware of what was happening, he drew her tighter to him. His tongue probed deeply into her mouth. She could feel the tension in his muscles, suddenly knew that the kisses, the burning, the touching were only a small hint of how much he wanted her. He was holding back, straining against a longing that she suddenly realized was every bit as great as her own.

  The robe fell off her shoulders, and he hungrily tore it the rest of the way off and cast it onto the floor. His mouth came off hers for that instant. She tried to catch her breath, but saw his eyes, dusky and absolutely focused on what he wanted. Before she could gulp a breath, he took one of her nipples in his mouth and teased it between his teeth until she cried out with the heat that engulfed her. She stroked his shoulders, ran her fingers into his wet hair... felt the heat and strain of hanging on in him.

  She was gasping. “We should go in the other room...”

  ‘‘No time.”

  “There’s no room—”

  “There’s room.” His smile was ravaged, aching. “Trust me.”

  Unable to delay another second, she gave in and dropped to the floor. She could have been on cold, bare tile for all she would have cared, but the handwoven mat she had carted with her from Vermont and her tattered cast-off robe were cushion, and warmth, enough.