“You think it would have been a mistake?” His tone was neutral, so it was hard to gauge the intent of his question. Was he angry or in agreement?
“Don’t you? We’re clearly wrong for each other.”
“Are we?” he asked.
“Aren’t we?” she asked back.
“You’ve been adjusting rather well to this place. You can actually walk around the farm without me or Rosa May being right there next to you. Shannon likes you.”
“Shannon likes having cool hair.”
“You can touch the cows now without having to put gloves on first.”
“Yeah, but I puked up my guts when I found out that the piglets’ names weren’t jokes.”
Ross twitched his lips. Ham and Bacon had endeared themselves to Claudia. She thought they were pets. When she found out they were food, she had tossed her cookies into the hay, marched out to where he’d been repairing some fence, and called him a list of vile names, beginning and ending with pig murderer.
Maybe she was right. She couldn’t handle farm life, which meant she couldn’t stay. If she couldn’t stay what made him think that making love to her would have been a good idea? His hormones, he answered. Hormones, however, should never outrank brains.
Claudia continued with her list of reasons in case one wasn’t enough. “You could never make it in New York, either. You don’t dress well enough. Rosie would be stuck in an apartment all day. No. No. It’s all wrong for us to be together.”
“What if we were together for the time you had left? Would that be so wrong?” he wondered.
No, she thought. Yes, she thought. Before she had been able to talk herself into a short, mutually pleasurable affair. One where she walked away with good memories and no regrets. Unfortunately, that had been her hormones talking. Vicious little devils. Somehow they had managed to short-circuit her brain and convince her heart that she would feel no pain. Now that she had them under control, she could honestly admit that she’d been lying to herself. Leaving Ross would hurt.
She wasn’t the brief affair type. And she would walk away with a pierced and bleeding heart, if she had Ross for a time, then was forced to give him up. Besides, he didn’t really want her. Oh, he wanted her, but not all the way. If they made love, would he even ask her to stay? The answer was too easy: he wouldn’t.
“Yes. It would be,” she said sadly, answering his question.
Ross sighed. She was right. He couldn’t very well conduct an affair under the nose of his daughter. An affair that would never end in marriage. What kind of example would that set for Rosa May?
So ask her to stay.
Ross dismissed the idea as soon as he had it. Of course she wouldn’t stay. She had a business, friends and a life back in New York. For her to give all that up to stay, she would have to love him.
Starting the engine, Ross pulled the pickup farther up the driveway. He and Claudia were silent as they walked toward the house. They found Betty asleep on the couch and Rosa May crouched halfway up the stairs, hoping to catch a good-night kiss.
“To bed, Rosa May. The show is over,” Ross called to her.
“Oh, Dad. I miss all the fun!” There were a few stomps then nothing.
Claudia waited a beat. “No good, kid. It’s at least five stomps to your door from the steps. I only heard three.”
“Oh, man!” This time the stomps were real.
Ross smiled, as did Claudia. It was a shared moment of recognition over a wonderful child. Suddenly, the air was thick around them. It was almost as if they were a family. Almost. But Ross and Rosa May would never be hers. She didn’t know why that should make her so sad, but it did.
Together they woke Betty and paid the groggy baby-sitter. Claudia handed her a mug of coffee to keep her awake during her drive home. After she left, the two stood in the living room wondering what should happen next.
“I guess I’ll go to bed,” Claudia announced first. It was the best course of action. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of mind was right! She was out of her mind if she thought she was going to be able to stop thinking about him for a full minute.
“That would be good,” Ross agreed. “Tomorrow, we’ll start over like none of this ever happened.”
Claudia nodded and started for the stairs. She had climbed the first two when she stopped. Sprinting, she returned to where Ross stood rooted in the living room. As quickly as she could, she leaned up and pecked his cheek.
“I just wanted to say thank you for tonight. You know, before we start over.” She sprinted back to the stairs and took them two at a time.
Ross stared at her back as she left him. “Stay,” he whispered to an empty room. But nobody heard him.
“IS IT OKAY if I go to Suzanne’s house today?” Rosa May asked. “Her dad just built an outside pool and he invited me over to go swimming.”
Claudia placed the waffles on the table and waited for Ross’s answer. If his reply was negative she fully intended to lend her support. The way she saw it, Rosie did far too much work around the place. A girl her age should be swimming in a pool with a friend. Not mucking stables and milking recalcitrant cows all summer.
“You’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard this week, Rosa May. Don’t think I haven’t appreciated your help. Do you need a ride?”
Claudia turned her back from the table with a goofy smile on her face. For as different as they were, they were often on the same wavelength. Don’t go there, she told herself. After a restless, sleepless, agonizing night, she’d come to the decision to bury any and all feelings she might have for the farmer.
“No, Mr. Davis is going to pick me up. I just have to call. But I need to use the phone.” Rosa May blushed a bit with embarrassment when Ross paused. He indicated for Rosa May to come closer and then whispered in her ear. After a few seconds, Rosa May hightailed it upstairs.
“Oh, come on,” Claudia shouted. “I will not give my location away! You think I want Rocco and his goons to come after me? Give me a little credit.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he explained.
Claudia poured herself a cup of coffee, winced at the bland flavor and lack of foam, and sat down across from him. “For the last time, it’s called an espresso machine,” she mumbled, then returned to the matter at hand. “I know. It’s just that you don’t trust the world. Spare me the lecture. My father gave me the same one when he said I couldn’t date Vito Camarari in the eleventh grade. He drove a motorcycle.”
“It’s for the best this way. Now, there will be no doubt if another leak occurs.”
“I understand that, but I miss my friend. I’m all she’s got besides that goon, Rocco. She’s never had to go this long without speaking to me. In a lot of ways I’m more like her mother than her best friend. How would you feel if you couldn’t get in touch with Rosie?”
An answer wasn’t necessary. Regardless, she still wasn’t getting the phone. “Listen, we have other priorities today.”
Uh-oh. Rosie was gone. Chores still had to be done. It was back to the barns for her, she just knew it. “Okay, here’s the deal,” she started before he could say anything. “First, I will feed the chickens and gather the eggs, except for Gretchen’s of course. Second, I will pitch hay, but I will not muck. My days of hand milking are over, that you know. But I can herd the girls into the barn. And I refuse to feed the piglets, thereby contributing to their extinction and your next breakfast. Agreed?”
He chuckled in response. “Agreed. But that wasn’t what I was referring to.”
“Oh.”
“You need to learn how to drive.”
“Huh?”
“Drive. As in a car. As in case there is an emergency and I’m out in the fields. You need to be able to get to me, or to the nearest neighbor for help. If I’d known you couldn’t drive before, I would have begun your instruction earlier. It’s ridiculous that a woman your age doesn’t know how to drive a car.”
“First,” she snapped, “a woman my age is still
considered a very young woman. Second, I don’t need to drive in New York. Not when there are professional cabbies to do the job for me.”
Ross had ridden in a New York cab back during his days with the FBI. He breathed a sigh of relief that she was still alive. “You have no choice. Your life is in danger, and you need to take precautions. It’s either a car or a horse. Take your pick.”
Like she was going to pick the horse.
THE SUN WAS LOW over the farm, hailing the end of the day within the next few hours. Rosa May had been invited to spend the night at her friend’s and had accepted the invitation, leaving Ross and Claudia to themselves. Claudia would have been worried about being alone with him after last night if it wasn’t for one critical fact: at the moment she hated his guts.
“I said reverse. Reverse. As in backward!” he shouted.
“For the last time, stop yelling at me!” she shouted back. “I’m trying.”
The pickup pitched forward, stalled, the gears ground together in a symphony that would make Ross’s mechanic a very rich man, and after all that they hadn’t moved backward.
Inhaling as large a breath as he could to calm himself, Ross began again. “Let’s start over.”
“Nooo,” she whined. “Not again.”
Gritting his teeth against her whining and steeling himself against the power of her pout, he placed her hand over the gearshift, his own on top of hers. “This is first gear,” he said as he moved the stick in the correct direction. “This is second. This is third. This is fourth. This is reverse.”
“I don’t understand why you need four gears to go forward and only one gear to go back. Forward, back. That’s all any car has to do.”
Apparently his lecture on engines, power and speed had gone unheard. “Your gas is on the far right, your brake is next to that. Your clutch is next to your brake. You have to shift and clutch at the same time. Shift and clutch.”
Claudia looked down at her feet and the three pedals on the floor. She wasn’t stupid, but for whatever reason she was having difficulty grasping the basic concepts. Maybe it was the vocabulary. “Clutch,” she mentioned. “Clutch makes me think of pulling. That’s why I want to pull this thing over here when I shift.”
Patiently, Ross corrected her. “And that would be right. If that were the clutch and not the emergency brake.”
“Emergency brake. Regular brake. What’s the difference?” she asked testily.
“One you use in an emergency and after you have parked the car,” he answered slowly. “Maybe it would help with a little hands-on training. Switch seats with me.”
In a practiced move, Ross lifted Claudia on his lap and then pushed her off to the side. Then he moved behind the wheel, and pushed the seat back as far as it would go. “Okay, now come here.” He pulled her close and again lifted her into his lap settling her between his legs so that his feet were on either side of hers. It should have been a reminder of the position they were in last night only they were both so irritated with the other that they failed to notice. “Now watch. I clutch and shift at the same time.”
Claudia felt his arms push against her own. One hand held her own to the steering wheel. The other pinned her right hand against the gearshift forcing her to mimic his motions. His legs hugged hers, and his feet pressed hers into the pedals.
“Hey, watch it,” she cried. “You’re ruining my good leather sandals with your icky work boots.”
Ross glanced down at said “icky” work boots, ready to contradict her insult and keep her mind on the task at hand. The words froze in his throat when he spotted her milky white legs. Today her shorts were white. A snowy white that emphasized the little sun she’d received during her stay on the farm. They rode so high up on her thighs and clung so tightly to her body that he couldn’t imagine where she found the room for panties. The idea stirred his imagination and other parts of his anatomy as well. He shifted his weight a bit. She wore a white crop top to match her shorts and Ross discovered that from his position he could peer into the depths of her meager yet satisfying cleavage.
It must have been the puff of breath that hit her neck and stirred the sensitive hairs there that alerted her to his change in mood. It wasn’t an irritated sigh or an angry huff. It was sensual. Hot. Arousing. It reminded her that she was surrounded by him. Encompassed by his heat and his hardness.
The fighting stopped. The bickering ended. Conversation came to a halt altogether. Claudia didn’t dare move. Any shift, any sigh, any deep breath would have pressed her body more firmly into his. If a match had been lit the spark alone would have ignited the whole inside of the truck.
Time passed. So much time that it was apparent what was happening to both of them. If someone didn’t say or do something quickly, there would be nothing to stop what they both decided was so wrong last night.
“Maybe I should give the horse-riding thing a try,” Claudia announced.
8
“GOOD IDEA!”
Ross almost fell out of the car, he was so quick to escape. The two of them, a jumble of legs and arms, tumbled out of the pickup onto the dirt below. Unable to defuse the tension, they bolted to the stables in search of a horse.
The smell, Claudia mused, was enough to get anybody out of the mood. She stood in the doorway of the barn while Ross escorted Shannon toward her.
A little saner, a little less aroused, she reconsidered, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
Slowly, the horse plodded toward her, pushing her backward. Ross carried a saddle over his shoulder. With quick efficient movements, he buckled the saddle around the horse’s belly, pulling the leather straps tighter than Claudia believed was comfortable.
“It’s a saddle, not a girdle,” she reminded him.
“Shannon is a trickster,” he explained. “She takes a breath of air while she’s being saddled to keep the straps loose. I wouldn’t want you falling off on your first ride.”
“She-devil,” Claudia muttered. It wasn’t enough that the horse had bit her butt, now it seemed she wanted to drop her on it.
Once the horse was ready, Ross turned toward Claudia. “Take off your shoes. I don’t want you hurting Shannon with those spikes.”
“Me hurt Shannon? What about Shannon hurting me?”
A flick of his wrist sent the reins looping over the horse’s head. Ignoring her reluctance, and her apparent fear, Ross instructed her patiently. “Hold the reins tightly in your left hand. But don’t pull too hard or you will bruise her mouth. Put your left foot into the stirrup and your right hand on the pommel.”
“The whattell?” she asked as she moved closer to the horse, patting its hide to show that she’d come in peace.
“The knob sticking up on the front of the saddle.”
Claudia obeyed, but when she finally got her foot into the triangle rung, the damn horse moved way, pulling her along while hopping on one foot. When she was finally able to release her foot she toppled over and fell flat on her butt. “I can see where this is going,” she mumbled.
“Come on, try again. This time I’ll help you hold Shannon steady.”
“What a pal.”
Leading the horse back to her, Ross wiped clean any smirk he might have been sporting. “Try using her neck for leverage. Put both your hands on her neck, your left foot in the stirrup. Now heave.”
Heave. Come on, Claudia told herself, heave! “Are you heaving?” Ross asked. He moved around the horse to stand behind her.
“I’m heaving,” she grunted. She just wasn’t getting anywhere. It was like trying to do a chin-up in high school. Her arms then, her arms now, simply didn’t have what it took to lift even her meager weight.
“You’re lifting too much with the arms,” he told her. “Use your left leg to boost you up.”
That was an idea. Claudia started to straighten her knee, but instead of lifting her up, she was being pushed out. Then the dreaded horse started to shuffle, and Claudia could sense she was about to fall before she did.
This time Sir Galahad had the decency to attempt to catch her, but he was too late. She went flying off the horse, and before he could get a decent grip on her, she flew into his arms. The two of them stumbled over each other and onto the ground, leaving Ross pinned to the dirt and Claudia sprawled on top of him.
Puffing out breaths of air, she said, “Maybe I could learn to run real fast.”
He chuckled. Ross reached up and brushed a smudge of dirt from her cheek. She didn’t know it yet, but her pure white outfit was now pure brown. He could almost hear the screeching that would take place when she finally saw her reflection. That was his Claudia.
“Hmm.”
“Whaaat?” she wondered.
“No hair spray. I can run my fingers through your mane rather easily today.”
“I’m running low,” she offered in explanation. “And I refuse to buy generic, over-the-counter at a grocery store, hair spray. I was thinking maybe, if I’m still here in a few weeks, I could have my favorite salon deliver me some supplies.”
“If you’re still here.”
“If I’m still here.”
What was left unsaid was the alternative.
It was the alternative that seemed to erase the doubts in both their minds. What had been so wrong last night, seemed ridiculously right in the light of day. Time was limited and since the inevitable was…inevitable, there was no sense in wasting precious minutes.
Ross made no effort to remove her weight. Claudia made no offer to do it herself. In fact, she was quite comfortable with his big body sheltering her from the ground. If he didn’t protest, she would be more than willing to remain in this position until she did have to leave.
“Claudia?”
“Hmmm?”
“Rosa May is gone for the night.” Ross moved both hands into her hair, loving the feel of its rich texture as it slid through his fingers.
Claudia traced his cheekbones with the tip of her finger. “So she is.”
In return he kneaded the back of her neck with his strong fingers, loosening the muscles, loosening her. “So what are we having for dinner?”
The Doc's Double Delivery & Down-Home Diva Page 26