“You don’t have to do anything. Just be natural, be yourself.”
That was easy to do in Sarah’s presence. Easier, she was finding more and more, than in anyone else’s presence, which included her mother and her longtime friend Nancy. With Sarah, she didn’t need the walls to be so high anymore. The ease with which she’d cried on Sarah’s shoulder about losing her patient a couple of weeks ago had shocked her. And yet she’d not been able to help herself. There was something about Sarah that made her want to confess her deepest feelings, mostly because she sensed they’d be safe with Sarah, that she would be comforted and not judged by her. Even when they had a disagreement, when words and disclosures between them became heated or painful, it brought them to a new level of mutual understanding, of closeness. All of which had kept Joss up a few nights, pondering how the hell she was supposed to deal with this kind of intimacy with not only another person, but a lover. Joss rolled the word around in her head, trying to get used to it. Sarah was her lover now. What, in God’s name, was supposed to come next?
Joss breathed out, breathed in again, slow and steady to try to quiet her galloping heart. Now that they’d made love, there was no more physical distance between them and even less emotional distance. How, she wondered with a sliver of panic, would they be able to go back to being platonic friends? Would she be strong enough to do it? She knew it would take all her willpower, all her powers of concentration and discipline, to be able to dial things back at the end of the week. Sarah was not a woman in whom you deeply invested yourself and then, with the flick of a switch, divested yourself. She was far too unforgettable, too complicated for that. Sarah was, Joss feared, forever tattooed on her heart and body now. Fuck, I wished I’d figured that out a few days ago. And yet, no. She would not have changed anything.
She shifted her attention to watching Sarah work—the little furrows of concentration in her forehead and at the bridge of her nose, eyes that were clinical, like a doctor’s, as they scanned Joss’s face, then flicked back to her sketch pad. Her hand moved expertly, sometimes in short strokes, sometimes in longer, more fluid strokes. She’d stop to brush at the image with a finger, then go back to her pencil. The charcoal came later, after, Joss supposed, she had the image down first in pencil. She liked watching Sarah work, found herself appreciating the knowledge and expertise and efficiency with which she went about it. It was probably the way she herself looked when she performed surgery, she supposed. It was the look of knowledge, skill and experience coalescing into efficient, confident action.
God, Sarah was so freaking hot! If this was a test for Joss, a challenge, she considered that for the first time in her life she might not be strong enough to get through to the other side. She just might not get out of this unscathed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After a thrown-together dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and a Caesar salad, as the sun met the horizon beyond their little patio at the back of the cottage, Sarah sipped her glass of cool, crisp Chablis and deflected Joss’s halfhearted pleas to let her see her work in progress.
“I’m not happy with it yet,” Sarah said. “But I’ll have it done for your mother for Christmas, I promise.”
“What if it, like, shows me naked or something?”
“Nice try. You’ll have to trust me. And no snooping. I’ve packed it away for now.”
“Oh, you’re no fun, you know that?”
Sarah gave her a suggestive look that quickly had Joss recanting. They’d had more fun in two days—most of it in bed—than seemed humanly possible. Sarah’s body had so quickly become accustomed to Joss—the way Joss touched her, the way she pleasured her—it felt as though they’d made love a million times before. She could get used to this, she knew, and yet she couldn’t. The comfort and familiarity they’d effortlessly slid into would come to a halt in four days. Joss would go back to being a workaholic with little time for anyone, and Sarah would go back to…to what, she wasn’t sure, other than her part-time teaching once the holidays were over. Returning to the grind of trying to sell her paintings and of creating more paintings held little appeal these days. She’d need to make some decisions soon. Life-altering decisions. And as she snuck a look at Joss gazing at the setting sun, she wondered how and if Joss would fit into any of those new plans, whatever they might be. She wished she could be as committed, as dedicated, as chained to her career as Joss. Then she’d be able to relegate everything and everyone else in her life, with an iron will, to a distant back burner. The way Joss seemed to be able to do so effortlessly.
“There’s something I asked you about a while back that you never really answered,” Sarah said. She wanted to understand Joss, and one of the keys to that, she felt sure, was knowing more about her relationship with her father. “You never answered me when I asked if you went into medicine to please your father, or to get his attention.”
“Why is that important to you? It was a long time ago.”
“I think it is important,” Sarah pressed.
Joss sipped her wine, her face revealing nothing of her thoughts, but her eyes had drifted to the window. “Like I said, I was good at math and science,” she finally answered. “It was easy for me.”
“Then why not engineering? Or rocket science?”
“I knew what a surgeon’s life was like. I didn’t know anything about those other things.”
“So you chose a profession where you would never be home? Where you would never have time for a family or a spouse? For other interests? Because that’s the lifestyle you knew based on his, right?”
Joss’s eyes shone with something. Unshed tears, or perhaps anger. “People respected him. They looked up to him.”
“But did you? Did your mother?”
“Of course!” Joss’s voice split the air like an ax splitting a log.
The desire to provoke Joss, to burrow into why she emulated and worshipped a man who, as far as Sarah could tell, gave very little of himself to his family, was tempting. Instead she softened her voice as she thought of a young Joss, who probably had to perform cartwheels to get her father to notice her. “But did he love you, Joss? Did he respect you?”
“Why wouldn’t he? I was his daughter. His only child.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Sarah thought. “Could it be, that becoming a doctor, just like him, was the surest way of earning his love and respect?”
Joss waved a hand and sipped her wine without looking at Sarah. “That’s silly.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” Joss’s voice and eyes left no room for doubt. “And while we’re on the subject of fathers, what about yours? Why haven’t you cut your father loose for not respecting who you are? Why do you still keep him dangling? For financial security?”
The accusation felt like a slap. “You make it sound like I’m using him.”
“Aren’t you?”
No more than you and I are using each other, Sarah thought with a sense of detachment. “It’s complicated, him and me.”
“It seems to me rather simple. You fulfill a role for him, he fulfills one for you. And neither of you respects the other.”
Sarah bristled with anger. It was so easy for Joss, who’d grown up with two parents, to sit in judgment. “After my mother left us, he was all I had. We were all we had.”
“Then maybe you should get back to that. Back to that place where the two of you lost everything but one another. Tell him you won’t be somebody he’s trying to make you into, that you are who you are. But it also means you can’t ever accept another penny from him.”
Tears gathered in Sarah’s eyes. Joss moved next to her, the quiet fury between them morphing into an alliance of understanding. They were more alike than not in their father-daughter dynamics.
“You’ll be okay, you know. If he can’t accept you.”
Sarah shook her head, not at all sure she was ready to go it alone. As uncompromising as her father could be sometimes, it scared her to think she had no one she could
go to in a pinch. No blood family outside of him. She’d be alone.
“I won’t,” Joss whispered, “ever let you be destitute.”
The heat of her outrage propelled Sarah off the love seat. “So now you’re suggesting that you take my father’s place? That I replace one despot with another?”
Her voice razor sharp but calm, Joss said, “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just call me that. And I’m saying that as your friend, as someone who cares about you, I won’t let anything bad happen to you, all right? I will be here for you. I promise you that.”
“I don’t need to be anybody’s kept woman, you know.” Tears, hot and insistent, flowed down her cheeks. Is that really what Joss, what her father, thought of her? That she was a little girl who needed to be taken care of? That she would ultimately fail and needed some kind of security blanket? “You know what, Joss? Fuck you. And fuck my father too.”
Sarah stalked to her bedroom and slammed the door.
* * *
Sleep eluded Joss for much of the night. Three times she reached across her small double bed, feeling for Sarah. Amazing, she thought, how quickly she’d adapted to having someone share her bed. Her banishment last night was well deserved. She hadn’t meant to push her so far, but it upset her how much crap Sarah put up with from her father. It was no wonder she often doubted herself and her ability, given her father’s low expectations of her.
Shortly after dawn, Joss padded to the kitchen and, as quietly as she could, pulled a frying pan from the cupboard. Sarah’s relationship with her father was none of her business. Just as Joss’s feelings about her own father were none of Sarah’s business, even though Sarah had ventured into some uncomfortable territory last night. Her questions, her accusations, continued to reverberate in Joss’s mind. Why shouldn’t a kid emulate a man who saved lives for a living? A man who was among the best at what he did and was revered for it? Of course Joseph McNab had his shortcomings as a husband and father. What man didn’t? Medicine was a noble profession, and Joseph McNab had been a master at it. He wasn’t superhuman, wasn’t perfect, and so something had to give, which was his home life. Joss was simply smart enough not to make the same mistakes.
She cracked three eggs in a bowl, added butter and milk and whisked the contents. He had been a good man, her father, if absent much of the time. And her mother had made up for it as best she could. Like the time they were all set to drive to the Gulf coast in Texas for a week’s holiday when Joss was eleven. Her father had canceled an hour before they were to leave, but Madeline and Joss went on anyway, determined not to miss their vacation. There were too many missed school plays and concerts and the state track meet where Joss won a gold medal when she was twelve that her father couldn’t make because of work. She got over it because she had to. Because, as her mother pointed out from her earliest memories, other people were counting on Daddy more than they were. Her needs, and her mother’s needs, were less important in the grand scheme of things. And Joss went along with it because she’d had no other choice.
She poured the egg mixture into the hot frying pan, spatters leaping up. She knew all too well the obligations, the distractions that defined a doctor’s life. But it sure beat the hell out of a boring nine-to-five job, and it beat the hell out of boring relationships with their obligations, expectations, rituals and roles, resentments and unfulfilled dreams. Her life was fine the way it was, thank you very much.
Moments later, she carried two plates to Sarah’s closed door and tapped lightly on it with her elbow. She hadn’t been wrong in the things she’d said last night, but she owed Sarah an apology for the blunt, insensitive way she’d gone about it.
“Come in.”
It took a juggling act and a contortionist’s skills to get the door open. Joss brought the plates to Sarah’s bed, handing one to her. She pulled a wooden chair up to the bedside and settled her plate on her lap.
“I’m not sure I deserve this but thank you,” Sarah said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “It’s very thoughtful of you.”
Joss dug her fork into her eggs and took a bite. “I pushed you too far last night. I’m sorry. I was an ass.”
Sarah had been so angry last night, so full of red-faced fury. Now her voice was soft as the breaking sun and full of contrition. “No,” she said, her cheeks pinking. “I overreacted. And I’m so sorry.”
“I guess we shouldn’t have gone to bed angry, huh? At least, that’s what couples seem to say in the movies.” Okay, that sounded stupid, but she didn’t know anything about this making up business. Or about being part of a couple.
“At least we’re not waking up angry.” Sarah smiled, and Joss’s worry dissolved. “And I’m starving by the way.” She dug into the eggs like she hadn’t eaten in days and took a big bite of her toast.
“There’s coffee too, but I only had so many hands.”
“What, the multitalented Joss McNab couldn’t carry two plates and two cups of coffee?”
“I guess my résumé is deficient in the waitressing department.”
“Mine’s not. Maybe I should have brought the food in.”
“You waitressed?”
“My first couple of years of college.”
Joss knew it would earn her a slap if she told her, but her fantasy of Sarah in a tight-fitting, low-cut, high-thighed waitress’s outfit was turning her on. “I bet you were the sexiest waitress there was at…Where did you waitress?”
Sarah blushed again. “Chili’s.”
Joss laughed. “A Tex-Mex place? With your red hair and light skin, I would have pegged you for working at an Irish pub.”
Sarah’s voice dropped an octave. “I know what your dirty little mind is picturing.”
Joss raised an eyebrow. “Oh you do, do you?”
“A green bustier and fishnet stockings, aren’t you?”
It was Joss’s turn to blush. “You think you have me all figured out, don’t you?”
“When it comes to some things, yes. Now put these plates aside and let me prove it to you.”
Joss didn’t need to be told twice. She set the half-finished plates on the dresser and scooted onto the bed beside Sarah. Her breath caught as she peeked under the sheet. Sarah was naked. Talking was overrated, she decided. Sex was not.
“Did you miss me last night?” Sarah whispered.
Joss leaned over her and kissed her long and slow and deep. “Does that answer your question?”
“Sort of.”
“Need more evidence?”
Sarah’s eyes danced. “Absolutely.”
Joss reached under the sheet, cupped a breast, squeezed it lightly. With her thumb she caressed the already rigid nipple. “Oh, that so needs my mouth on it.”
“Oh, it certainly does,” Sarah said, desire straining her voice, her breath becoming more shallow.
Joss moved on top of her, began sucking and licking the breast Sarah practically pushed into her waiting mouth. Sarah had the most beautiful breasts Joss had ever seen, and she’d seen plenty if you factored in what she did for a living. Sarah’s were full and round, as smooth and white as the richest custard. Her nipples were a soft shade of pink that became dark red when she was aroused. She could spend hours loving these breasts with her hands, her mouth, but already Sarah was fidgeting. Her hands were in Joss’s hair, her body had begun moving beneath her, signaling its need for more.
Sarah moaned as Joss moved lower to suckle and lick her way south, fully aware of how badly Sarah wanted her, how she craved Joss to pleasure her. She could easily stretch out the torture, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to taste Sarah, wanted to make her come every bit as badly as Sarah wanted her to.
“You’re so wet,” she said to Sarah as she touched the tip of her tongue to her.
“Oh, God.” Sarah’s head thrashed from side to side. Her chest heaved. “Joss, you have no idea what you do to me.”
“Oh, I think I do, darling.”
What she didn’t want to think about was what Sarah
was doing to her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The thirty-two-foot catamaran sliced through the water as easily as a knife bisecting a block of butter, kicking up a fine mist of spray that, thankfully, stayed out of Sarah’s champagne flute. The sun was setting, weaving streaks the color of orange and cranberry through the sea. Three other couples were enjoying the cruise, which came with complimentary champagne and trays of cheese and fruit. It was romantic, loose, intimate. And maybe, Sarah realized belatedly, not the best setting for a couple that wasn’t really a couple and certainly wouldn’t be in two more days when they returned to Nashville.
Beside her at the railing, Joss sipped from her glass, her eyes fixed on the horizon. There was nothing about her posture or her expression that indicated she had a care in the world. And maybe she didn’t, but before their trip home, they’d need to talk about where they stood, to make sure they were both on the same page. Sarah dreaded having that talk. Dreaded having to pretend she was tough and stoic and able to handle returning home where everything would go back to the way it was—two people in a mutually beneficial business arrangement. The closer that time got, the more Sarah feared she wouldn’t be able to do it. But she would have to do it, she told herself, because the only other choice was a heart full of pain she might not recover from.
She cleared her throat nervously. “When we get back, I’m going to talk to my father.”
Surprise registered in Joss’s face. It was another moment before she spoke in a voice that was softly encouraging. “I’m glad. Will you be okay?”
“Yes. Eventually.” Sarah didn’t know if it would bring to an end her relationship with her father, but it was a gamble she needed to take. “You were right. I can’t reach my potential until I stop feeling…I don’t know, almost like I’m embarrassed around him for being an artist. I need to fully commit to being an artist and that means telling anybody who doesn’t believe in me to go to hell. And be prepared to not have them in my life.”
By Mutual Consent Page 17