The Stable Affair

by Jessica Andersen

  All modesty aside, Sarah thought she looked pretty darn good. The months of riding had sculpted her legs and stomach in the most intriguing ways, and her waist was as tight as the collar of her show shirt.

  She glanced at her right shoulder and was pleased to see that it almost matched the other one now thanks to all the exercise she was getting at the farm. Idly thinking she might like to get the last of the scars removed, she stepped into the shower.

  “Aaaargh!” She jumped right back out again, howling as she grabbed for a towel and scrubbed at her body, teeth chattering. She cranked the shower hotter and stuck her shaking hand into the stream, hoping against hope for a vestige of warmth. Maybe the shower was just slow to warm up.

  No luck.

  “Christ!” Sarah pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon horse on it asking, “Why does everyone keep whispering?” and stomped to the “ofice.”

  “There’s no hot water in room eleven.”

  “Ayuh?” The teenager manning the desk did not seem overly disturbed by this fact. He wandered over to the sink near the encrusted coffee maker and cranked the right hand knob, producing a steaming gush.

  “Water in here’s hot,” he offered. “It’s probably just your unit. I’ll call Joe, he’ll look at eleven for you.”

  “When?”

  “Today… tomorrow at the latest.”

  Sarah chuffed out a breath. “But I need to take a shower now.” The vision of a hot scrub and some down time started to fade.

  “Sorry.” He picked up his hotrod magazine and began to read again, clearly wishing she’d go away.

  “Sorry? I don’t think you get it. I’m paying you for a room with hot water! Currently, I have no hot water. What are you going to do about it?”

  The pimpled youth shrugged, “Not much I can do. No refunds, and we’re full up or I’d let you into another unit to use their shower. But I can’t just let you into someone else’s room.”

  That sparked a glimmer of hope on Sarah’s dark horizon. “We have a second room, unit ten. Rented to Devers. You could let me in to their room, they won’t mind.” She’d be in and out before Dante got back from the show, and Ellie was going out with her friends.

  The youth hemmed and hawed but eventually gave up the key to room ten, admonishing her to return it when she was done. “If you don’t, the maid’ll have to climb in the window again to clean.”

  Well, that made her feel safe.

  Sarah zipped back to room eleven and collected her toiletries and her foolish flowered robe. Letting herself into room ten, she paused at the threshold, feeling suddenly shy.

  The clothing Dante had worn when he arrived the night before was tossed casually over the lone chair in sloppy contrast to the neatly folded clothes in Ellie’s vinyl Snoopy suitcase. A one-eyed bunny guarded a pile of change on the dresser, and a dog-eared picture book of The Black Stallion was stacked on top of the latest Clive Cussler novel.

  Resisting the urge to poke around, Sarah scampered to the bathroom. She shucked off her jeans and shirt and tossed them casually on the floor between the beds then closed the bathroom door intending to steam the place up thoroughly. She indulged herself, uncapping the bottle of his aftershave and sniffing deeply.

  Dante had officially had it with taking pictures for Horseman’s by mid-afternoon that day. All the animals and people looked the same and all the frames were identical to his eye. His shoulders ached and he felt a migraine brewing.

  He started fantasizing about a beer, a shower, and his bed at the motel—not necessarily in that order. Then he’d be fresh for dinner with Sarah, a prospect he’d been trying not to obsess about all day. What would it be like so see her all prettied up, just for him?

  He tried to picture her in a dress and failed until he imagined the naked woman of his dreams, then painted a little blue dress on her. His fingers jerked convulsively and he ended up photographing his left foot and half a pile of manure.

  “Christ, I give up.” So what if the show would still run another hour or so? He wasn’t doing himself or the magazine any good staying. He headed to the Jeep and steered it toward the Seaside Motel.

  Why was Sarah’s truck in the parking lot? She wasn’t the type to leave the show early for any reason and Dante was immediately concerned. He knocked on her door but there was no reply; he tried to look through the window but was foiled by the blinds. “Maybe she’s taking a nap or something,” he muttered to the big number eleven on her door. He hadn’t heard that she had crashed a horse or anything serious at the show.

  He wrote a quick note on a scrap of paper and stuck it under her door before digging through his pockets for the key to room ten.

  The first thing that hit him was the steamy heat—his room felt like a lukewarm sauna. Then he noticed the discarded clothes on the floor. Was he in the wrong room? He looked at his key, at the number on the door, and at his and Ellie’s things. No, this was his room.

  So who was in his shower? He skirted around the two double beds and raised his hand to knock politely on the bathroom door.

  It opened before he touched it, letting out another billow of superheated, moist air. The humid puff was redolent with the odors of shampoo and woman.

  “Hi Dante.”

  Sarah Taylor stood before him in that ridiculous silk robe with her hair wet and her blue-green eyes wide. She smelled like jasmine and hay, which was the scent that haunted his dreams. He jerked back, need slamming through him like a fist to the gut.

  She pulled the robe tighter and smiled wetly. “I was just thinking about you.”

  He breathed through his nose and tried to calculate f-stops in his head. “So you thought you’d use my bathroom?”

  “There was no hot water in my room. I thought I’d be done before you got back.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, her eyes locked on his. “Where’s Ellie?”

  He stepped back, knowing if he touched her there’d be no stopping. The back of his legs came up against the yielding edge of a mattress. As he watched, a droplet fell from Sarah’s hair to land on the upswell of one creamy breast just above the V of her robe. “Off with her friends.” He swallowed convulsively.

  “Then we’re alone?”

  “Yep.” Dante found himself unable to force more than that one syllable through his closed throat. For so many weeks, he had been denying his need for this woman but now she was here, almost naked in his hotel room. What was he supposed to do with her? Send her away? Not likely.

  Sarah allowed the robe to sag open a bit and enjoyed the way his eyes locked on the gap. She shrugged, loosening the robe another notch. Somewhere between herbal shampoo and wildflower conditioner she had decided that she was tired of stolen kisses and smoldering glances at work. She would have her man here, now, tonight. His early arrival at the motel had been a surprise, but she was a flexible, modern woman.

  They could eat late.

  His gaze was locked on the widening gap through which he could see the edges of her full breasts and the slight concavity above her navel. She had three little moles there arranged in a triangle. He realized she was waiting for him to say something, but his mind was blank. There wasn’t enough blood left in his head to form a coherent sentence.

  Then she swayed slightly toward him as if she was drifting on a breeze, and his mind suddenly filled with all the reasons why they shouldn’t do this. He jumped away. “I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” he said even as his body strained back toward her.

  What? Sarah jerked away from him, her dreamy mood broken. Had she been misreading the signals all along? She fumbled for a moment, her face burning with quick embarrassment at being alone with him in a cheap motel room wearing nothing but her little robe and a big smile.

  “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought…” She pulled the robe closer over her breasts. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’ll go and get dressed and hang out in my room until it’s time to go to dinner, if you still want to go. If you don’t, that’s okay too.”

/>   Seeing that she meant to bolt, Dante grabbed her by her upper arm. “No. You thought right—I’m the one that’s sorry. I’m not explaining myself well. Of course I want you, I thought I’d made that pretty clear over the last few months.”

  “Then why…” Comprehension came slowly. “Because of what happened at the lab and what’s happening now?” She nodded. “You’re afraid to be with me.”

  Dante nodded. “Yes, but not the way you think. There’s something really important that I need to talk to you about, but not like this. I was hoping we could talk at dinner.” He wanted to have this discussion in public where she’d be less likely to kill him when she found out he’d been lying all along.

  She shivered as the shower-warm air started to deaden and a cool trickle from her hair ran down her back. “Okay I guess. I’ll go get dressed now.” She paused. “But will you tell me one thing?”

  Dante still held her upper arm, he couldn’t seem to make himself let go and he was supremely conscious of the swell of one breast brushing against the back of his hand. The soft globe was a temptation that threatened to derail all his good intentions. “Hmm?”

  “If we just met at a bar—no, scratch that. If I were nothing more than a horse trainer who’d always been a horse trainer, would you be hesitating now? Would you want me if things weren’t so complicated?”

  The true answer was that if that were the case, they never would have met, but he couldn’t tell her that without getting into the conversation he was dreading, so he took the question in the way it was meant. “No. If you were just a horse trainer and I was just a photographer, we would’ve been lovers a long time ago.”

  He shifted his grip on her arm and took her other hand to swirl her in a slow, dreamy circle, indulging himself as much as her. He was very aware that only a flimsy robe hid her naked body from his greedy eyes. “Maybe not that first day we met—I thought you were pretty annoying. Maybe not the second, even though I thought you looked pretty hot in that orange shirt.”

  What did he mean if he was just a photographer? What else was he? Sarah started to ask, but the question was lost to pleasure as Dante slid his hands to her waist and continued to waltz her around the little motel room as if she was the princess at the dance again. She snuggled close against him, content to be led for a moment.

  What was he doing? He should be letting her go, pushing her out the door of his room and locking it behind. This wasn’t what Dante had planned.

  But it was what he wanted.

  He spun her away then brought her in even closer, until she was pressed against his chest as they swayed in time with the silence. His breath feathered against her cheek when he continued. “But probably that night in Newcastle when I had you in my arms. You would have known it was me you were kissing.” He dropped his head to kiss her and the memory of another hotel room swamped him with feelings. Just once, he promised himself, just once and I’ll send her away to get dressed.

  “I knew it was you all along.” She slid her lips along his jaw as they continued to dance around the room to the music of their hearts.

  “How?” He spun again and closed his eyes so he could feel the dizziness when he buried his face in her hair and inhaled.

  “I knew because he never kissed me like you did.” Sarah slid her lips across his provocatively. “When you kiss me, I feel like the princess and the champion all in one. It makes my heart shimmer and my fingers itch to touch you.” She rubbed her callused fingertips across the soft spot between his collarbones. “Let me touch you.”

  In that instant, Dante was lost.

  With a groan of surrender he sank into the steamy, swirling depths of her mouth, lifting her up to mold her body closer to his and take her under again and again.

  Sarah kissed him back wetly, avidly, carnally, and when he clutched at her robe she sought to even the odds a bit, tugging the soft shirt free of his jeans and sliding her hands beneath it to trace the path of wiry hair. He pulled back far enough to yank the jersey over his head, baring his torso to her completely for the first time since that night in Newcastle when she’d been too overwrought to properly appreciate the sight.

  Now she had all the time in the world to savor the contrasts—the soft skin that flowed over hard ridges of muscle and bone, the downy hair that was rough against her flattened palms, the smoothness that surrounded his hardened nipples.

  He was lean, she had expected that, but she hadn’t been prepared for the subtle power and symmetry of his body. Humming with pleasure, she took her lips on a voyage of discovery, charting a path that traveled across one collarbone, lingered for a moment to explore the hollow of his throat then continued to navigate downward into more foreign, dangerous territory.

  Dante groaned and sagged backward as his legs threatened to collapse under the delicious torture Sarah was inflicting upon him. He felt the springy give of a mattress against his calves and fought a brief, losing battle with his conscience before he swung her up in his arms and let both of them fall together onto the nubbly green bedspread.

  Lying face to face on the bed, they studied each other, asking themselves and each other a litany of silent questions. Who are you? Who am I? Why are we here, together, in this place, this time? What is this force that binds us together? Is it love? Is it something less? Something more? What happens now?

  Dante answered that last question by tracing a gentle finger over her lips, down her throat, and across the upswell of one breast. “I’m sorry.”

  Sarah trembled with the sizzling jolts of electricity one simple fingertip could create when it spiraled ever inward toward a rosy, puckered nipple. She rolled onto her back and arched upward on the bed as his clever fingers continued to entice her delicate flesh almost to the point of ticklishness. Eventually, his words made their way to her spinning brain. “Sorry for what?”

  “Because I meant to stop.” But he didn’t stop, for which Sarah was profoundly grateful. If he had, she might have screamed in frustration. Instead, he bent worshipfully over her and drew that sensitized nipple into his mouth with such agonizing slowness that Sarah cried out in need and threaded her fingers through his thick hair to draw him closer, urge him faster.

  She slid one bare leg between his denim-covered calves, enjoying the rough texture of the material as it stretched over his straining limbs. When she worked her leg higher, until it just brushed against the bulging seam at the juncture of his thighs, he groaned and clutched her tight.

  The hair on his chest was coarse against the moist flesh of her breasts when Dante held Sarah close and kissed her again and again until the world spun on its axis and she had to clutch at his shoulders to keep from floating off the bed.

  They strained together in a tangle of legs and hands and lips, rolling until Sarah’s robe bunched up beneath them and Dante tore it free and tossed it on the floor to join the scratchy green bedspread. His jeans were soon added to the pile, followed by the Donald Duck boxer shorts Ellie had picked out for him on their last shopping trip.

  These surprised a giggle from Sarah which turned to a purr of satisfaction when he returned to her and braided his bare legs with hers, rubbing his lightly furred calves against her smooth ones. His arousal slid sinuously across her belly as Dante trailed that electric fingertip down Sarah’s hip to cup her bottom and bring her closer against him.

  When they were poised for that most intimate of joinings, Dante paused and looked at Sarah, and it seemed as if his eyes were asking her for something. Forgiveness perhaps? Permission? She wasn’t sure. She was sure of only one thing: that she wanted this to happen here, now, with this funny, loyal, lovable man.

  “You weren’t thinking of stopping now, were you?”

  Dante tried to hold back, tried to stem the clamorous urgings of his body until he was sure of what he saw in her eyes, but it was to no avail. Instinct took over and he surged heavily into her, gasping as her narrow passage closed around him and drew him in. “Not a chance.”

  “Thank God.�
� Sarah arched back on the bed and opened herself to him, inviting him deeper and closer until he touched the very center of her and joined his soul to hers.

  They flowed together in a dance as old as man, responding to an urge as ancient as life itself, and when the end came for them both, Dante touched his brow to hers and said again to Sarah, “I’m sorry,” before he cut himself loose and followed her over the edge of the cliff toward that eternal place of mad sanity.

  Reality returned far too soon when the hotel phone beside the bed began to ring irritably. Sarah sat up and reached for it before she remembered that they weren’t in her room. Dante just flopped off her and lay there, ignoring the shrilling instrument.

  “Leave it, they’ll hang up.”

  Sarah lifted the one remaining blanket to cover her naked breasts before poking him in the shoulder. The awkwardness of the moment after love was broken by her instinctive fear of telephones ringing at strange times. “It could be important. One of the horses could be in trouble and they’re trying to find me.”

  Dante shrugged, too bonelessly relaxed to be bothered. “So answer it. Or you could come back down here and cuddle while I regain the feeling in my feet.”

  The phone continued to ring annoyingly and Sarah’s shoulder blades started itching. “I’m not answering your phone. What if it’s your father or something?”

  “Dad passed on a few years ago, so that’d be awfully tough.”

  Sarah poked him again. “You know what I mean.” She tried another tact. “It could be Ellie wanting you to come pick her up. What if she’s not feeling well or something?”

  Sure enough that one got through, and Sarah continued to envision an emergency vet call or another fire at the farm while Dante picked up the phone on the twelfth ring.

  “Yeah? Oh, hey man, what’s up?” He paused and his eyes, which had been glued to the sagging blanket that was sort of concealing Sarah’s breasts, suddenly grew troubled. “Yeah. Okay, we’ll meet you at the fish place on the rotary in a half hour.” His lips quirked up in a brief grin that barely touched his deep blue eyes. “I’m pretty sure I know where to find her. We’ll be there.”