Nick stirred.
“Hi,” she said softly.
His lids opened slowly. “I must have died and gone to heaven.”
“Uh-huh. Me too. Would you like some tea?”
“No.” One well-muscled arm came out from under the silky sheets and reached toward her. “I want you.”
Halley set the cup on the table and moved onto the bed, sitting down next to him until her hip pressed cozily against his. She looked at his tousled black hair and smiled.
Nick shifted beneath the covers.
“It’s morning, Nick. Would you like something to eat? I’m starved.”
“Eat?” His fingers crawled into her lap, and slipped beneath the voluminous folds of the robe.
“Food, you know.” She squirmed as the heat of arousal spread through her.
“Let me just hold you first.” He withdrew his hand and tugged her down beside him, wrapping his arms around her tightly and cradling her head to his chest. “I need to be sure you’re real, Halley.”
She nodded and rubbed her cheek against his bare chest.
“I don’t want to ruin the night with words, but I do want you to know this—”
She tilted her head up until she could see the tenderness and love in his eyes.
“—it was very special, Halley, even more than I dreamed it would be.”
The sensations that flooded through her were too overwhelming to describe, so Halley nodded again. Why did she feel tears building up? This was a happy time.…
Nick twisted his fingers into her hair and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I didn’t expect this to happen,” he murmured softly into her hair.
“Nor I. Barons and librarians don’t usually end up in bed together.”
“It’s a pity. It works so well.”
Halley laughed. “Shall we try to reeducate people?”
“I’m a selfish man, Halley. I only care about us.” He stroked her gently while he talked, his fingers rubbing across the fleecy fabric of the robe. “You’ve filled a big void in me that I wasn’t planning on having filled.”
“What kind of void, Nick?” Her voice was just a whisper, and the words were ones she somehow knew he wanted to hear.
“I was married once, Halley, to a wonderful woman. Her name was Anne Melrose, and she died in an automobile accident.…” He paused while Halley digested his statement and made the necessary connections. Damn, he should have told her this days ago, but he hadn’t expected to care so much.…
Halley’s heart lurched. Her mind grabbed on to the words and processed them neatly, but her heart refused to stop clamoring beneath the thin wall of her chest. “Melrose …” she murmured.
He drew her closer. “Yes, she was Abbie and Stan’s daughter.”
“You loved her very much.”
He nodded against her hair. “Yes. She was the … the first person in my life that I loved.” He had always, in his thoughts, said only person he had loved. Halley’s presence had changed that, and Nick stirred, feeling vaguely guilty. “And she loved me back, fully, without any reservations or calculations. When she died, a part of me was buried too. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to love again.”
Halley thought of the cemetery and the shadowed pain she had seen on his face. “It must have been awful for you.”
“I moved into this condo and built a life of work—”
“—and parties,” Halley added.
“A foolish kind of escape, but one I knew well.” He kissed her cheek. He wanted to make love to her again, right away, to block out the old, painful memories, but he couldn’t. His feelings for her were too important. Loving Halley was complete in itself; it couldn’t be connected to any other purpose. He eased himself away from her and pushed back the covers. “Maybe we do need some food.”
Halley lay still while he walked across the room, her heart full of a range of feelings that defied categories. She watched his naked back and loved the way he moved, bending over to pull the shade, stretching in the thin light that slid through. She hated to think of the hurt he’d been filled with.
And she had trouble imagining a woman other than herself in his life.
By the time she’d showered, Nick had a stack of lukewarm toast piled in a basket on the kitchen table and was struggling to release two flat, anemic-looking eggs from the skillet. His thick hair was combed, and he wore a pair of blue jeans with an elegant blue cashmere sweater.
“Jeans. I’ve never seen you in jeans before,” she joked, padding across the floor in bare feet. Her thick hair hung loose and free about her shoulders, and she wore a huge yellow warm-up suit that Nick had pulled out of his closet. “Sexy. Very sexy.” She slapped his buttocks playfully.
“Careful there, Contessa. Little do you know the power of your touch.”
Halley wrapped her arms tightly around his waist while he put the eggs onto the plates. “When will you admit I’m not a contessa?” She loosened her arms and moved alongside him. “There’s no contessalike glamour here, Nick. Finnegan glamour, maybe—that’s all.” She wondered briefly what Anne had been like. Her mother was certainly elegant …
Nick slipped his fingers beneath the fall of hair and kissed her lightly on the top of her head. “What kind of glamour is that, my love?”
Her voice was soft and husky when she leaned her head back to look at him. “Oh, Pop says it’s a little auto grease or garden dirt beneath your fingernails now and then, and a sparkle in your eye. That’s about it.”
Nick felt it again, that crazy, earthquake-type lurch, only it came from inside him, not somewhere under the ground. He reached down and captured her fingers between his palms, his voice strangely choked. “How much more glamour could a man handle? Now eat, Halley, or you’ll blow away.”
They sat across from each other at the glass-topped kitchen table, plates of eggs, the aura of their love-making, and thoughts of Anne Melrose Harrington between them.
“You may have to use your imagination with this breakfast. I don’t cook much,” Nick apologized.
“It’s fine.” The eggs slid down her throat, and she watched Nick’s hands as they held the fork. Strong, firm, wonderful hands. “How long ago?”
“Four years.”
“That’s a long time, Nick,” she said softly.
He reached out and held her hand tightly, pressing it into the thickly woven table mat. “Time kind of stopped. It’s hard to explain, Halley. Our lives have been so different, yours and mine. Your family …”
“My family?”
“The way they dish up love so readily—big daily doses of love. Mine was different. I never even knew my parents, really, and with Anne I felt that kind of closeness that you’ve probably never not felt. It gave me a footing. And when she was gone, it was too. I couldn’t seem to get things together.”
“I see.” Halley threaded her fingers through his and lifted his hands to her lips. A lot of things fell into place now. Not everything, but certainly more. Beneath the handsome, powerful facade of her Baron was not only a loving, kind man, but a vulnerable one as well.
Nick watched her closely. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking; hell, he wasn’t even sure what he was thinking, or why he had gone into all of this. Why was he thinking of Halley in terms of his future when she had so recently become a part of his present? He looked out the window at a perfect, blue sky, but it held no answers.
A pleasant sensation drew his eyes back across the table. Halley’s head was bent so that her hair flowed over his fingers in rippling auburn waves, and slowly, carefully, she was kissing the pad of each finger on his hand.
“Nick?” she murmured softly.
“I’m right here,” he said, his voice suddenly dropping.
“I have an hour and a half before I said I’d meet my folks for Mass.…”
“An hour?” he said vaguely. “And a half …”
“We could do the dishes or …”
He nodded. Hot, fiery streaks were shooting from his finge
rs to every imaginable part of him.
While he was thinking, Halley walked around the table and coaxed her way onto his lap, pulling his arms around her.
“… or we could make more eggs.”
Nick moved his legs beneath her in delicious torment. “Or?”
“Or we could watch an hour and a half of a two-hour movie.” She wiggled and sunk deeper as his legs parted slightly.
“Or we could …” He slipped his hand beneath the warm-up top and began to stroke her stomach lightly.
“Mr. Harrington the Third, where is your mind?” she said huskily.
“Let’s see if we can find it,” he breathed into the hollow of her neck. “If I can still walk. That may be a problem by now.”
Halley slid off his lap. “I’m sure we can take care of whatever the problem is.” She glanced down at his bulging jeans and grinned mischievously. “We’re down to one hour and twenty-eight minutes.”
“And we’re not going to lose another second.” Nick grabbed her hand and led her back into the bedroom.
Ten
Nick tossed and turned in the bed. It was lonely without her, lonely as hell.
He stumbled into the kitchen and plugged in the coffeepot. He wanted Halley Finnegan beside him, wanted to twist his fingers tightly into her thick, silky hair and have her head tilt back, her eyes look up at him, a sea of love and laughter cascade over him.
He had loved her. He loved her. Yes, it was love. Nothing else could account for the way he felt. He also knew, because Halley was incapable of shrouding anything in those lovely green eyes, that she loved him back.
Nick slid open the terrace doors and stepped outside into the crisp breeze that blew over the city. Traffic was starting to get heavy, people were moving down below, tiny insectlike figures on the sidewalks and streets. He breathed in the air deeply, trying to block out the parts of his mind that were shouting at him, warning him that when you loved someone, you let them know all of you and what you were all about. Otherwise, they only loved part of you, and what would happen when they discovered the rest?
Nick shook his head and walked back inside. He’d think about it later. Maybe when he met Halley for lunch. Maybe tomorrow.
“You’re beautiful.” Nick kissed her lightly, and then once again, not so lightly.
“And you’re clouding my glasses.” Halley took his hand in hers and fell in step beside him as they walked down the street. “Rosie’s meeting us. She invited herself to lunch.”
“Where?”
“Finnegans’ Place.”
“Your folks?”
“Yes. Why pay when you can get it free?” She laughed, bouncing her hip against his. “Besides, my mother was feeling cheated. Everyone had met my incredibly sexy friend but her.”
Nick watched the light reflect off her hair and breathed in the clean smell of her. She’d suggested they meet outside the neighborhood post office today, and that had been fine with Nick. He’d meet her anywhere she said, and he’d go to a doughnut stand with her for lunch if that’s where she wanted. Or Pierre’s in France. Or her mother’s.
“I’m having a hard time concentrating on my library work, Nick,” she confessed solemnly.
“What?” He tried to focus on her words instead of the gentle sway of her body against his.
“Work. You—you’re becoming a liability.”
“Hmm.” He leaned down and dropped a flutter of kisses into her hair. “What are we going to do about that?”
Halley squeezed his hand tighter. “Don’t know. I can’t seem to walk past D. H. Lawrence’s books—or Balzac’s—without this crazy sensation carrying me off.”
“It sounds serious.” Nick released her grip on his fingers and wrapped his arm tightly around her. “Maybe I could camp out in your closet. Then we could—you know—take care of problems as they arose.”
“Librarian Finnegan’s closet … hmm. I think I like the sound of it.”
Nick slipped one hand inside her red cardigan sweater and lightly began to rub the soft jersey material of her shirt. “What about the feel of it …?”
“Nick!” Halley blushed fiercely but made no move to pull away. “You now have sent at least three shopkeepers to the phone, and if it reaches the postman, by dinnertime everyone will know Halley Finnegan was molested on River Street by a rogue with black hair and sex-starved eyes.” They turned off the business street onto a block of neatly kept two-story houses.
“Sex-starved eyes?” Nick laughed huskily.
“Well,” Halley said demurely, “I know mine are, so I assumed the same about yours.”
“There is certainly a bit of Irish fire beneath that calm, easygoing exterior.”
“Aye.” Halley nodded. “And it’s off to the back of me soul with it for now, because here we are.” With a sweep of her hand she motioned toward the white two-story house off to the right. Clumps of neatly pruned red-and-gold marigold bushes dotted the walkway leading up to it, and stretched across the front was a wide, freshly painted porch.
Nick smiled and started up the sidewalk. “Someday, Halley, I’m going to get me a porch just like this.”
“A porch.” The thought made her smile. Nick, who had everything money could buy, including a high-rise apartment, wanted a porch—a very middle-class porch. “It might be difficult to attach it to the side of that building of yours.”
“Maybe I’m outgrowing that building,” he murmured, surprised by the passing thought.
“Why do you want a porch, Nick?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe it’s because porches are for sitting on, and talking and laughing, being close. It’s an image I’ve had tucked away since childhood.”
“Like vine-covered cottages,” she said, weaving her fingers through his and thinking hard about porches.
The screen door swung open as they reached the top step. “Hello! You must be Nick.” A small woman with Halley’s eyes stepped out onto the porch and captured Nick’s hand.
“Hello, Mrs. Finnegan,” Nick said as he looked down into the familiar sea of green.
She smiled. “Jane, please.”
Nick scrutinized her face to find Halley’s features in it. Except for the eyes, he couldn’t, but her face was very lovely just the same, outlined by soft brown waves of hair wisping around her high cheekbones.
Jane turned and embraced her daughter, then ushered them both inside. “Rosie and Mickey are stirring the soup.” She wiped her hands on her apron, and they followed her through the small hallway into an enormous, warm kitchen..
“Hi!” Rosie looked over her shoulder, her eyes sparkling. “Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks, Rosie,” Halley retorted. “Don’t mind if we do.” She walked across the waxed wooden floor and sat down on an old-fashioned oak bench with a high back. Nick joined her, his gaze sweeping the room. The bench was in front of a huge brick fireplace, and on either side were two cushioned chairs. Everything was within earshot of the large working island where Rosie and Mickey were diligently stirring.
Nick glanced at Mickey, who was lifting a large spoon to his lips. “Say, sport, seems everywhere I go, I see you.”
Halley’s head jerked up to stare at Nick. For a moment she wasn’t sure why she was surprised, and then it came into focus. It was his tone of voice … or the lightness to his words. Or something. He’d greeted Mickey with a new ease that she was sure had not been there before, and it pleased her far more than was rational.
“I knew you were coming,” Mickey said, his huge blue eyes watching Nick. “And Grams likes me to be here.”
Jane Finnegan laughed, and Nick discovered something else Halley had inherited from this lovely lady—that soft, lilting laugh with the silver edge to it. “Mickey is our little pass-around,” Jane continued, “since he’s not in school full-time. And he does love my Irish stew.”
Mickey walked over and nudged his way onto the bench beside Nick. He looked up and smiled, and Nick smiled in return; then, without thinking,
he settled his arm around the small boy’s shoulder.
“Seems you have a little fan in our Mickey, Nick.”
Nick smiled and gave Mickey a playful rub on the top of his head, then settled back and watched Jane glide around the kitchen, pulling down bowls, folding napkins without a thought, straightening a marigold leaning against the vase. Halley had gotten up to help her, and the two of them moved in an unspoken rhythm with each other, laughing at small things the other said, teasing Rosie as she tasted more than she stirred. He caught Jane watching Halley, paying close attention to the shining, lovely glow that touched her smile. He wondered what she was thinking, how she felt about it. Halley looked like he did, like someone alive with the glow of loving.
Suddenly Jane dropped her dish towel on the counter and walked over to the table where Halley was straightening the place mats. “I love you, little Finn,” she said as she hugged her daughter tightly.
Nick felt the power of the exchange all the way across the room, and it caused him to shift involuntarily on the bench. It was intimate—and so natural.
Jane looked over at him and smiled. “Halley was our firstborn, you see, and her father was so proud of her, he took her everywhere: Knights of Columbus meetings, parades, restaurants; and she was nearly a fixture at Finn’s garage. Folks took to calling her little Finn, a chip off the old block.” She brushed Halley’s hair back from her forehead and laughed. “Although she’s far prettier than Joe.”
There it was again, that easy loving manner. Nick cringed slightly, wondering if it was something he could learn.
During lunch Rosie regaled them all with tales of searching through an attic in a Gothic mansion for dresses for her store and accidentally locking herself in. The old lady who owned the house forgot she was there and was sure it was a ghost making all the racket, so she had found a mystic and held a seance in the drawing room.
Halley watched Nick as his strong face softened in amusement. He seemed oddly comfortable in this room that had held years of laughter and tears and loving.
They left the house after lunch and walked back to the post office, reluctant to go their separate ways. “I feel like a kid,” Halley murmured. “I have a pile of work a mile high, and all I want to do is …”
The Baron Page 13