The Tough Guy and the Toddler

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The Tough Guy and the Toddler Page 16

by Diane Pershing


  Jordan’s body began to writhe with impatience, so he gave her what she wanted. Slowly he withdrew partway, then pushed into her with all the force of the first time. Out again, then in, the intensity of his movements increasing each time.

  He watched her face as more surprise, then ecstasy shone on it, and he pumped in and out, waited till she reached the crest. This time, as her muscles clenched around him, as every one of his muscles tightened into unbearable tension, he roared his release into her. The sound he made was primal. He poured it all into her, everything he’d been saving for her since the day he’d first set eyes on Jordan Carlisle.

  When it was over, Jordan somehow found herself lying on top of Dom. As she fought to catch her breath, she wasn’t sure how she’d wound up in this position or if she remembered how to breathe. Wonder filled her. And awe. Had that really happened? Had that been Jordan Carlisle—the same woman her husband used to call boring and unexciting—who had given herself up so totally to sensuality, moaning and writhing all over the floor, even screaming in passion? How, Jordan wondered, had she gone so long without experiencing this total, no-holds-barred, voluptuous experience?

  Her cheek lay against Dom’s sweat-slick chest. His struggle for breath made her head rise and fall. Was she hurting him? she wondered. Instead of asking him, she rolled off him and onto the carpet. Just that effort cost her dearly, and for the next moments she lay on her back, totally depleted, her eyes closed.

  “Oh,” she said finally, dragging the word out.

  “Mmm,” she heard Dom say in reply.

  Twice, she’d exploded with powerful orgasms. If she’d died the first time, she’d been reborn with the second. If her body was thoroughly, totally relaxed, her mind was adrift with hazy, delicious memories of sensations.

  Dom’s steady, even breathing made her wonder if he was asleep.

  Opening her eyes, she gazed around the part of the small living room she could see from her position on the rug. Burnt orange corduroy-covered sofa, two paisley-patterned armchairs, pastoral scenes and family pictures on the walls. The room was cozy. Theresa, Jordan imagined, had put it all together, and her taste had been good.

  Jordan turned her head to gaze at Dom. His eyes were closed, one arm slung above his head, the other resting loosely by his side. His chest hair and underarm hair was black and curly, as were all the other thatches of hair on his body. And she was in the position to know.

  She raked his form with her gaze. Tawny skin, thick muscles, strength of body. He was perfect.

  “Are you asleep?” she asked him.

  He grunted noncommittally. He’d probably hate it if she tried to discuss what had just happened between them. But she wanted to talk about it, needed to tell him what it had meant to her. “You know,” she began, “I thought I wasn’t going to be very good at this.”

  He frowned but didn’t open his eyes. “You’re kidding.”

  She turned onto her side, crooked her elbow and rested her cheek on it. “Well, I’m a little out of practice,” she said with a smile. “There hasn’t been anyone since Reynolds’s death. And,” she added with candor, “there wasn’t much of him before then.”

  Dom’s eyes popped open, and he angled his head to look at her. “I don’t understand.”

  “In case you haven’t gotten it yet,” Jordan said ruefully, “my husband wasn’t a very nice man. Oh, he could be charming and thoughtful, when it was convenient, when he wanted something. He came after me, got me, then didn’t want me anymore.”

  As her body temperature returned to normal, she felt a chill. She spied a crocheted afghan draped over an ottoman, so she grabbed it and covered herself with it, then resumed. “Anyway, I lived with him for ten years, and until then I don’t think I ever realized the extent to which one human being can bring down another. It was subtle, I think, gradual, like Chinese water torture.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, a little comment here, a small dig there. He made me feel awful about myself, and of course I played a part in it—the partner always does in these things. I let him. I hardly ever defended myself or stood up for myself. I don’t think I knew how.”

  His mouth thinned. “Did he treat you badly in bed?”

  “No, it was more like neglect. All the lovers he had, all his conquests—he would tell me about them and explain it was because I didn’t satisfy him.”

  Dom’s nostrils flared, and he turned his head so he was gazing upward. “Another creep. If he were still alive, I’d take him and his buddy Hal into an alley.” He shot her a glance. “You didn’t believe that bull, did you?”

  She lifted her shoulder. “Remember, I was eighteen when I met him, and not real experienced, so yes, I believed him.”

  He turned onto his side so he was facing her. Leaning on one elbow, he studied her, then reached over to adjust the afghan so it covered her more completely. She wondered if he was aware of that unconscious caretaking gesture, of the several unconscious caretaking gestures he’d shown her since the day they’d met. She wondered if he knew how much goodness he had under that tough-guy exterior.

  Dom regarded her. “You started modeling at, what? Fifteen? What was that like?”

  She was in a talkative mood, as though something had been released from prison and needed the air. “I was scared a lot of the time. I think I was still unable to believe that my career was anything other than a fluke and that one day someone would come along, snap his fingers and say, okay, it’s over. Back to the Wyoming dust. I used to huddle in my hotel rooms and watch old movies on TV.”

  She reached over and smoothed a lock of hair off his forehead. “All of which goes back to the fact that I was a blank slate when I met Reynolds, and spent the next ten years of my life feeling like an insignificant carpet. Not a pretty picture, huh?”

  His nostrils flared again, and she knew he was on the verge of saying something crude about her late husband. She put her fingertips on his mouth to hush him. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s over, I got past it, I’m a grown-up now, no longer a child.”

  He took her hand in his and kissed the palm. “Amen to that,” he murmured.

  His mouth on her skin made her feel all warm inside. “And besides, when Michael came along, I changed. Motherhood can change you.”

  Dom’s gaze flickered to a point above her head, and he brought her hand to the carpet. A frown creased his brow, ending the brief moment of sensuality. “So can lack of motherhood.”

  Jordan angled her head to glance behind her, following the direction of his gaze toward the fireplace mantel. A framed portrait of a woman was placed there. She was round-faced, with sandy colored hair and freckles and an open, sweet smile. Jordan turned to face Dom. “I take it that’s Theresa.”

  Dom nodded, unable to speak. Theresa had been staring at him and Jordan the whole time they’d been making love, had been witness to all the acrobatics, the tastes, the smells, the sighs and the screams.

  Not that he actually believed Theresa was there, in that picture. But the spirit of her haunted him still in a vague, unsettling way.

  “Hey, Dom.”

  Jordan’s voice brought him to the present. She lay on her side, her straightened arm serving as a pillow for her head. She gazed at him, her expression filled with a sweet, trusting tenderness that about broke his heart.

  “Are you all right?” Her concern for him was obvious.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “I did what you told me, you know. Put away my worries about Michael for tonight, let myself go. Are you having trouble doing the same thing? I mean—” He watched her fumble for the words, waited.

  “This must be hard for you,” she said finally. “We both have spouses who are gone, but my memories are, well, not exactly fond ones. Yours are the good kind. Do you feel—I mean, is it like you’re being unfaithful to Theresa or something, making love with me?”

  “Don’t, Jordan,” he warned, as his defensive hackles rose. She was trying to get into his head again
, in that way she had, and he wasn’t sure this was a good time to let her. “This has nothing to do with Theresa. You have nothing to do with Theresa, nothing at all.”

  “I know that. But these things are complicated,” she persisted. “I mean, we can tell ourselves we should be feeling a certain way, but—” She left the sentence unfinished, then shrugged. “Okay, you’ll talk to me when you want to. I won’t pry.”

  She yawned, then pulled the afghan a little more tightly around herself.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I wouldn’t mind moving to the bedroom.”

  Again, he felt his back stiffen at what was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. In the three years since Theresa’s death, he’d never brought another woman to the house. He’d always gone to their place. But he’d broken that little tradition tonight, hadn’t he? Another woman was most definitely on the premises. Was he ready to bring that other woman to his marriage bed?

  Marriage bed? The phrase echoed in his head. Old-fashioned nonsense. He was a single man, his wife had been gone for three years, he slept in a bed, he could do in that bed as he pleased. But even as he told himself how he should be feeling—there was that word again, should—turmoil raged in his gut.

  Did he think Theresa would judge or punish him for having sex? Nah. Hell, she’d have told him to take care of his needs as best he could. Yeah, Theresa would have understood. But it felt as though she was judging him for something.

  No, he realized. He was judging himself and laying it on Theresa. He could screw his brains out with a hundred faceless women and no problem. But with Jordan, it was more than screwing, and that made it different. It meant giving and receiving promises he couldn’t keep. He might mean them at the time, but they wouldn’t stick, and his late wife’s picture was there to remind him of that very fact.

  But Jordan was here and she was cold and he needed to take care of her. He scrambled to his feet, pulling her up with him. He adjusted the afghan so it was draped around her more tightly, then led her past the guest bedroom that had, one time or another, housed various members of his and Theresa’s large families. The door was open, and a night-light burned brightly enough to reveal cartons and papers scattered on the floor, stacks of files on the bed.

  He grimaced. “The place is a mess, but it’s not dirty. Someone comes in to clean twice a month.”

  His bedroom was only slightly better. At least he’d pulled the covers up that morning, and he’d changed the sheets a few days before. A table lamp was on, so it was impossible to miss the clothing draped over the small armchair in the corner. Dresser drawers were open, a trash basket was filled with gum wrappers and old newspapers, and there was a general feeling of disorderliness.

  “I’m not much good around the house, you know, domestically. Or is that obvious?”

  Jordan offered a wry smile. “I’m not here to grade you on your housekeeping skills. You have other gifts.” With a laugh, she climbed into his bed, then opened her arms to him.

  He wanted to laugh with her, but somehow he couldn’t. Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. A cigarette. Damn, how he wanted a cigarette For some reason, the words of an old greeting card he’d seen when he was about nine popped into his head. Something about lifting a glass to the three greatest pleasures in life—a cocktail before and a cigarette after. He’d brought the card to school—he’d just discovered the facts of life, and he and his buddies had found the suggestive message uproariously funny. Sister Mary Magdalena hadn’t agreed, and for days after, his knuckles were raw from her punishment.

  “Hey,” Jordan said softly.

  Her voice zoomed him to the present. He looked at her.

  “Where were you?” she asked, her fingertips stroking his back.

  Her touch felt so good, so real. “Thinking about the nuns.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He lay on his back, his head resting on his bent arms, and stared at the ceiling. “There was one who had a face like a prune, and she made my life hell.”

  “Why? I mean, how did a nun come up?”

  “I guess I am a little guilty,” he said, feeling he owed Jordan honesty. “Like I said, it has nothing to do with you, but...”

  He struggled to find the right words, and to her credit, Jordan didn’t prompt him. She waited until he began to speak. “See,” he began without making eye contact, “we had a bargain, Theresa and I. She wanted marriage, a large family, a home with a garden—we didn’t have gardens in my part of Brooklyn—and I would give her those things.”

  “What was her part of the bargain?”

  “To be a good cop’s wife, which is a rough thing to be. She never complained, rarely nagged. Put up with my moods. There were always hot meals when I got home. And...she loved me unconditionally.”

  “How lucky you were,” she murmured, “to have had that.”

  Saint Theresa, Jordan thought, and she sounded too good to be true. Too darned perfect. For the first time, Jordan wondered if—in memory—Dom had placed his late wife on a pedestal, if his view of her was unrealistic, if he’d glossed over the bad times.

  “Yeah, I was lucky,” he said.

  “So what’s the guilt about?”

  “About the night she died, for starters.”

  “I know you weren’t there, and it was a horrible death, I’m not minimizing that. But you were working. How could you work—how could anyone work—and be with her twenty-four hours a day?”

  “You don’t know the whole story. It was this motherhood thing. She wanted babies. God, she wanted them so much. You should have seen her with her sister’s kids, she went nuts with the little ones. And we kept getting pregnant, and she kept having miscarriages. Finally the doctor said no more, that it was dangerous for her. So I said fine, we’ll adopt, but she wanted to give me a child.” He angled his head, and his troubled brown eyes met hers. “I swear, it wasn’t that important to me.”

  “I believe you.”

  He was talking to her, Jordan thought, rejoicing silently. He was letting her in without fighting, without his tough-it-out attitude toward confidences. She felt honored and a little scared, too. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing, didn’t want to shut off the spigot of his confession.

  “Then, those last couple of years,” he went on more slowly, “it was all she could think about. I would come home and find her crying, and she’d wipe her eyes and he and say she’d just been watching a sad movie. She was depressed, real depressed. I tried to get her to get some help, but she pooh-poohed it. I didn’t push it.”

  “Then she got pregnant again.”

  “Yeah, and she didn’t tell me this time. I had no idea about that last one. Her sister Patty told me about it afterward. Theresa had been so happy, she knew this one was going to be okay. She was going to wait, Patty said, until she got past the fourth month and then surprise me with the news.” He closed his eyes, and she saw him fighting for control.

  She laid her hand on his arm, compassion for him filling her. Let it out, she told him silently, all of it. Jordan, of all people, knew how important it was to exorcise ghosts. If a painful secret was kept inside, it festered like an untreated wound. It invaded the rest of your mind, your brain, your personality. It changed you.

  “Do you know what happened that last night?” she asked gently.

  He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. “We reconstructed it later. She probably woke up with real bad stomach pain. The tube had burst, the doctor said. She went to the bathroom, fell to the floor. Either she was hurting so bad she couldn’t crawl to the phone or she just passed out and bled to death.”

  Tears of sympathy for a woman she’d never met gathered in Jordan’s eyes. She removed her hand from his arm to wipe under her lids, and that movement drew Dom’s attention. An expression of sheer misery on his face, he turned onto his side, away from her. She watched his ribs move up and down with his breathing.

  Several moments went by before he spoke again, and she stared
at his back as he did. “You want to know why I’m guilty?” he said, his voice hoarse with feeling. “It wasn’t just that I wasn’t here the night of her death. I didn’t push her to get help for her depression. I didn’t keep tabs on our birth control, didn’t wear a condom or even get a vasectomy. I didn’t make sure she was protected, didn’t convince her that adoption was a fine thing to do. We had a bargain, Theresa and I, and I didn’t keep my end of it. I didn’t keep her safe. My mind wasn’t on the home front—it was on my job. I was the breadwinner, yeah. Good cop, lousy husband. I wasn’t there for her. I wasn’t there for Theresa.”

  Dom’s shoulders shook with emotion, but he kept himself angled away from her. Jordan moved closer, curving her body against his, slung her arm over his ribs and hugged him as tightly as she could. She felt his thick chest hair against her palm, felt the rapid beating of his heart. If he was crying, he did it soundlessly, and it was obvious he didn’t want her to see his face as he did.

  Still, she told herself, he was letting her in, allowing her to be present while his insides ached with grief. It was a start, a good one.

  They lay like that for a while, then she felt his hand cover hers and press it tightly to his chest. Cuddling even closer to him, she kissed his back. “Would you like to hear my guilt story?” she murmured.

  She felt Dom go still, then he turned onto his other side and faced her. His eyes were dry but slightly reddened, and she wondered idly if men’s tears were somehow thicker than women’s so that less of them escaped the tear ducts.

  “You?” When she nodded, he said, “Tell me.”

  “For months, I thought Michael’s death was my fault. You see, I shouldn’t have let Reynolds take him for the day. I knew he was in one of his foul moods and that his driving could be erratic. I was going to go with them, but I had a bad headache that day, and Reynolds said he would take him without me. I wanted Michael to have a close relationship with his father, so I let him go. I made Reynolds promise he would be extra careful with his son in the car, which annoyed him, I know it, maybe even made him drive carelessly, on purpose, to get back at me. Afterward, I kept saying if only I hadn’t let him go, if only I’d been along, if only I hadn’t had that headache.”

 

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