“That’s not boring?”
“Depends. If it escalates into the stealing of lawn furniture and garden gnomes, I’ll be on the edge of my seat.”
He laughed, then said, “Well, there’s a pretty nice case involving embezzlement and arson…”
“Go for it!”
His argument lasted all through the chocolate banana split, and just as the girls were beginning to get restless, he finished “…so there’s a clear precedent, and that’s the way I went with my argument.”
“And of course I have no idea if you’re right,” Mary Jane said, “but you talked it through really clearly. I understood the issues, and the way you made your case.”
“Good, because so much of it is how you argue. Language is an amazing thing. You can use it to make things clear, or to completely confuse and misdirect. In the law, you act as if it’s factual and precise, and it can be, but it can also be so emotional and loaded, too.”
“Are you practicing your exam again, Daddy?” said the girls, rolling their eyes.
“Have to, my honeys, or I won’t pass.”
“What happens if you don’t pass?”
“I’ll take it again until I do.” He turned to Mary Jane again. “But it’s interesting. The pass rate is highest for first-time takers, and for people who’ve done their degree in the state of New York. It drops for repeaters and for people who’ve studied elsewhere. I find that incredibly discouraging at three o’clock in the morning when I can’t sleep.”
“It’s just statistics,” Mary Jane said.
“I tell myself that. But you can’t help reading it as a message that says, ‘Pass the first time, California-law-school sucker, or you never will.’”
“Gotta avoid the negative talk, Joe,” she told him, because she knew all about that.
Apparently he did, too. “So I tell the mirror every day.”
“Mirror isn’t impressed?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
The girls needed to go home. They were still at the table, but only just. Any minute, their wriggling bodies looked as if they might ricochet all around the room.
“Can I get this?” Mary Jane asked, putting her hand over the black plastic folder with the check tucked inside it. It seemed like the safest way of saying how much she’d valued the evening.
But Joe shook his head. “No, you can’t. It’s mine. Those chocolate banana splits were the big-ticket item.”
He was exaggerating on that, but not wanting to turn it into a big deal, Mary Jane didn’t argue. At Spruce Bay, she didn’t need him to tell her that this was the end of the evening. “Have to get these two home,” he said. “I’d love to come back. But I’d better not.”
“The bar exam?”
“How did you guess? Is that okay? Could I call you when I take a break and tell you in very nonlegal language about how much I wish I was with you and what I’d be doing if I was?”
“You could.” The attempt at being coy and a little hard to get lasted about two seconds, then she added what was really in her heart. “I hope you do. Please do. I’ll be here.”
“I’d kiss you if the girls weren’t watching,” he muttered out of their hearing. She saw his gaze drop to her mouth and it felt like a kiss—the hottest promise of a kiss she’d ever had. “Tomorrow,” he said, making it a statement, not a question. Then he seemed to realize that it needed to be a question. “Tomorrow?”
“Depends when. I’m working most of the day.”
“At night, after the girls are in bed. Just for a couple of hours. Can I come over?”
“Wait until I close the office at nine-thirty?”
“If that’s what works best for you, then, yes, nine-thirty.”
“See you then,” she agreed.
“See you. Talk to you before that.”
“Yes.”
Oh, shoot… Oh, damn… Oh, everything!
She wanted this too much.
Chapter Eleven
The next night, two hours unfolded into three, and unfolded some more.
Joe arrived ten minutes early, bringing dark whiskey chocolate and a cream liqueur. “Thought you might need to unwind.”
“You thought right.” Mary Jane rubbed the back of her neck. She’d had an evening filled with difficult guests, and reservation tangles. A couple of complaints about dishes missing in cabin kitchens, bookings canceled and remade and changed. “But I can’t. Not yet.”
“What’s up?”
She told him.
The smoke alarm had gone off in one of the motel rooms and she couldn’t get it to stop, even though there was no obvious cause. In the end, with the occupants begging her to do something about the noise, she’d disconnected it. Then they’d wanted to move rooms because of fire risk and she’d had to juggle things around and give them a room already reserved for some guests who hadn’t yet shown.
The couple would probably arrive soon to check in, and this was a problem she hadn’t yet solved.
“Do you have spare alarms?” Joe asked.
“I do. The guests didn’t want to wait while I fitted one. They decided the room was ‘unsafe’ and that was that.”
“Seems like an overreaction on their part, but let me put one in for the new people.”
“That’s the easy bit. The other couple only checked in today, but somehow they’ve still made a mess in the bathroom, and the bed looks used and there’s dirt on the floor. So the room has to be cleaned before the new couple arrives, and of course our cleaning staff are long gone.”
“C’mon, we can do it together. You’d probably better do the bed and the bathroom, but I can fit the alarm and vacuum the floor.”
“No, Joe, you don’t want to be—”
He pulled her into his arms and said a quarter-inch from her mouth, “Mary Jane Cherry, do I really have to tell you why I’m impatient to get it done?” The quarter-inch disappeared and she closed her eyes, and it was like their phone conversation late last night, so much power in such small details. He was right. He didn’t have to tell her why.
How did he do this? How could he make her forget everything so quickly? It was a wicked kiss, so deliberate in the way it teased. He knew she couldn’t move and that her legs had turned to jelly. He could tell. He could feel. He knew she’d closed her eyes because she wanted to shut out the whole world except for him.
After a few seconds, she stopped even trying to pretend. “Oh, Joe,” she whispered, and pressed her mouth against his neck, tasting his skin, before she lifted her face for his kiss once more. She found all the places she wanted to touch—his work-hardened back, his tight, beautiful muscles, the hard length of his thighs, the beard-roughened shape of his jaw.
He was laughing, even while he squeezed her against him and melted against her mouth. “See? Need to be able to close up this office and switch off the ringer on the phone, don’t we?”
“Mmm.”
He laced his fingers in the small of her back and swung her from side to side. “So we’ll clean first, and we’ll do it faster if there’s two of us.”
“Does doing it faster with two apply to the next item on the agenda, too?”
He grinned at her. “No, it’s weird that doesn’t work the same way at all. The next item on the agenda goes a lot, lot slower instead.”
Reluctantly, they let each other go.
She went through to the storage and supply rooms behind the office and found the box of smoke detectors and the cleaning supplies, then put the answering machine on and locked the office. On the office door, she attached the sign with the clock hands that she could adjust to show what time she’d be back, and they went over to the motel room together. It was at the end of the row of rooms, overlooking the pool and barbecue area on one side and the woodsy landscape between the cabins and cottages on the other.
It took them the full twenty minutes she’d estimated, and they were just finishing up when the phone rang in her pocket and it was the guests she was expecting. They we
re parked outside the unattended office, wanting to know where she was.
“Drive over to your room,” she told them. “Room 20, at the end of the north wing. I’m just checking that it’s in order, and I have your keys for you here.”
“What’ll they think?” Joe asked. “Two of us in here, this late at night?” He had his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his top three buttons undone, and looked energetic and capable in his jeans and running shoes, with a cleaning bucket at his feet.
“Well, we have the right props,” she said.
“Props? Are you suggesting a little role play, Miz Cherry?” He swooped right up to her and hauled her against him, one strong arm wrapping around her backside and swinging her weight onto his hip. Her breath huffed out and she could have swooned. He was grinning at her wickedly, daring her to play along, mouth close to hers. “The buttoned-up hotel manager and the handyman with the tool…belt…that she can’t resist?”
Okay, Joe Capelli, I can match you on this.
“Admittedly, yes,” she said to him, giving her head a sly tilt. “She’s been watching those rippling muscles for weeks. Um, let’s see now, you mentioned a tool belt. Ah, yes, Rod Steele—the name suits him so well, and the tool belt is mighty fine.”
“Rod Steele, huh?”
“Don’t you think?”
“And Rod has been watching the way Miss, uh, Miss Melody Knickers…”
“Really, Rod?”
“Really. The way Miss Melody licks her lower lip and brushes back her hair every time she sees him.” He brushed the ball of his thumb across her mouth, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“And when Miss Melody has to page Rod Steele for a repair job, her heart goes all fluttery, and she’s been stripping him to the buff in her fevered imagination…”
“And now, at last, they’re alone, and there’s a huge bed right in front of them, and they’re both thinking—”
She pushed him away. “They’re both thinking that the sound of the car outside is the guests arriving, because it only takes about a minute to drive over from the office, and Rod had better grab that cleaning equipment this second, because it’s one of those fantasies that just wouldn’t work right now.”
“You are such a spoiler.”
“Only now. Later I won’t be.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” She grinned at him and then opened the motel room door.
She welcomed the guests and told them to drop in to the office the next morning to check in properly. They were staying all week, and she had all their booking details in the computer, so there was no urgency. If the couple thought there was anything strange in her pink cheeks, and Joe’s presence, and the exaggerated I-am-a-janitor way he was carrying the cleaning equipment, they didn’t say so.
*
Ten minutes later, they were safely upstairs in her apartment, with the resort going quiet for the night and the office locked again.
She was amazing.
Joe really hadn’t expected her to go for that role-play thing back in the motel room, but she’d played along with a wicked smile on her face, an even wickeder gleam in her eyes, and some impressive quick thinking when it came to the ridiculous name she’d given him.
Rod Steele.
Ridiculous, and yet strangely flattering…
He couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if the guests hadn’t shown up when they did. “Any chance that Rod and Melody are still around?” he asked her hopefully once they were upstairs in the apartment.
“Nope.” She smirked at him, and the gleam was back. “They’ve clocked off for the night. But working the late shift we have…let’s see…” She picked up the chocolate box and the bottle of cream liqueur. “Ms. Bailey Irish and Mr. Jack O’Daniel Dark, a pair of sweet-toothed rodeo riders with a taste for a late-night tipple.”
“Oh, we do?”
She went doubtful, all of a sudden, unsure of herself. “Only if you want. Were you kidding back there in the room?”
He gathered her in his arms again—he loved doing that, just reaching for her and pulling, and finding her right up against him, giving him her weight and softness all the way up his body. How long had he known this woman? A week? Twenty years?
Both.
“Not kidding if you weren’t,” he told her.
He watched her mouth as he spoke, because he loved doing that, too. She always had a look on her face that said she was half-hypnotized by his gaze held so deliberately on her lips. She didn’t know which way was up, and it reflected exactly the way he felt.
How long was it since he’d told himself that he didn’t have room in his life for anything like this? About three days? The warnings he’d given himself didn’t seem to matter anymore. She was terrific, in bed and out of it. So far, things seemed pretty good between her and the girls. No danger signals that he’d picked up on yet. He would make room in his life. For once, he was going to make love to a woman who had the power to save him, instead of the capacity to destroy.
“Whatever you like, Ms. Irish,” he said very soft and very low.
“I think I like what you like, Jack.” She had the open box of chocolates in her hand, and she took one out and pressed it to his mouth.
He bit half, then nudged the rest between her parted lips. “I’m starting to think you might be right.”
It was sweet and messy and chocolatey and slightly whiskey-flavored, with the occasional flirty slice of cowboy and rodeo queen in the mix. And it was passionate and intense and bone-melting. He’d told her two hours, but neither of them could hold to that. After two hours, they were just getting started.
Again.
Without the liqueurs and chocolate and role-play this time, just the two of them, Joe and Mary Jane, naked in her queen-sized bed, discovering each other. She loved the attention he lavished on her breasts. She hated when he accidentally tickled her sides. She loved being on top. And underneath. He loved pretty much everything.
And he very definitely didn’t want to go home, not even when they were fully sated and should really be ready to fall asleep. This seemed too important, too nice, for sleep.
They lay there talking instead, spooned against each other beneath the covers.
“Is it your dad who’ll be worried if you’re not home, or the girls, or you?” Mary Jane asked.
“All of us.” He added more truthfully, “Me, mostly. Worried that they’ll be worried. Or that the girls will have a bad dream.”
He told her about the dreams, and his fears about their origins.
“All kids have bad dreams,” she said.
He thought that was too easy. “About bad men, and bad places?”
“I used to. Even though there was nothing in my real life to act as a source.”
“So where do those things come from?”
“Scary books and movies. The dark. The underneath of the bed. Primal instinct from long ago.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Maybe you worry about them too much.”
Again, it sounded too easy. “I’m the only one to do it.”
“I bet your dad worries, too.”
“That’s why I worry more, so that he can worry less.”
She laughed gently, and he felt it against his stomach. He was lying behind her, arm thrown over her, cupping a sweet, soft breast in his hand. “Joe, I don’t think worrying is like stacking firewood—the more you do of it, the less there is left of the job for someone else.”
“You don’t believe in productive, preemptive worry?”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“If I worry about the right things, I can head them off before they happen, so that Dad doesn’t even need to think about them.”
“You mean, say, if you get to the girls when they have a nightmare, before your dad even wakes up…”
“Exactly.”
“Wouldn’t it be less of a burden on you, if you had someone else to share the worrying?
”
“Not if that someone else is Dad. It’s too hard on him.”
“A different someone else? A teacher, or counselor?”
“They’ve had some therapy in California. I took them to someone. She was really good. Just play therapy, where she asked questions occasionally, so that if there was something on their minds they could talk about it.”
“Did anything come up?”
“A few things.”
“Wanna tell me?”
Yes, he did. This was good for him, he thought. He had a sense of his burdens lightening. When she’d said “Someone else?” he’d almost said, “Yes, you.” But he’d clawed the words back, not wanting to scare her, not wanting to jump too far, too fast, out of…
Out of loneliness. Out of the struggle. Out of this glorious sense of rightness about lying here with her, talking about the girls and feeling increasingly reassured that she cared.
“They did a few things with dolls. Stories they acted out. The little doll couldn’t get the mommy doll to wake up. She wet her pants and then the mommy doll smacked her. The superhero doll was a bad guy, not a good guy. He had a mean laugh, and he hit one of the other dolls with his gun.”
She hissed in a breath, then said, “Hit, not shot?”
“Hit. Pistol-whipped. Bam, bam, bam, on the side of the doll’s head. The therapist asked them about both those bits of play and it did seem as if they were coming from real experience. She thought they were great kids, though, couldn’t see any serious signs of damage.”
“So it’s okay.”
“That’s what I tell myself.”
“And you worry anyhow.”
“I do.”
After a moment, she told him, “Roll over.”
“Yeah?”
“My turn to spoon you, now.”
“Mmm, yes please…” He rolled over, and so did she, reversing their positions. She was holding now, and he was held. Held warm and strong and soft, while her lips nuzzled the back of his neck and the dip between his shoulder blades.
He knew why she was doing this. She wanted to hold him and cradle him and make everything better, and she probably had no idea how well it worked. This was what he needed.
It Began with a Crush (The Cherry Sisters) Page 13