A Soft Place to Fall

by Barbara Bretton

  "I should do sit-ups," she said, as a wave of self-consciousness overcame her. "I bought one of those tapes and –"

  He leaned over and kissed her belly, dipped his hot tongue into the well of her navel, then laughed low at her sound of surprised pleasure.

  Oh God. His fingers moved down and down until they tangled in the thick curls between her legs. He caressed her gently, easily, pressing lightly here and then there, until she was almost mindless with pleasure. How easy it was to let go, to give into the moment, to open her thighs for his touch. She'd dreamed this last night as she slept in the circle of his arms, dreamed of the moment when her bones melted and everything else fell away. She was hungry for him, starved for the feel of his body. For once in her life, desire was more powerful than her sense of caution, and she reached for the button on the waistband of his jeans.

  Moments later they were naked on the floor next to the sofa. He flipped onto his back, cushioned by the pile of discarded clothes, and pulled her on top of him. She straddled his hips and his slick erection pressed against her cleft. She stroked him with her hand, velvet on steel, how long had it been too long too long. . .

  Her breasts were full and beautiful. Her nipples, deep rose set against the alabaster of her skin. Her wild mane of hair brushed his chest as she leaned forward to kiss the flat plane of his belly. His erection leaped to life between them and she laughed softly but did nothing more. He wanted her to ride him, to pull him deep inside her body and ride him hard. He wanted to see her face when she came, see the look of wonder in her dark blue eyes, hear the sounds she made deep in her throat when it happened. She was wet. He could feel her dampness against his belly and thighs. His hands clasped her hips and he rocked with her rhythm, his own desire growing hotter and more urgent by the second when he realized, with devastating clarity, that he was totally unprepared.

  Her body was supple, moving above him with heart-stopping grace. He wanted her more than he wanted his next breath but some things were non-negotiable.

  "Annie." Her name seemed to hover in the charged air between them.

  She struggled to bring him into focus. She felt drugged, heavy with longing.

  "I didn't plan this," he said.

  Of course he hadn't planned this. Neither had she. How could you plan spontaneous combustion?

  "Protection," he said. "You need to be protected." Another pause. "You're not on the pill, are you?"

  Reality and magic didn't mix. Annie felt like someone had poured a bucket of iced water over her head. "No," she said, feeling naked for the first time. "I'm not." She wanted to tell him that it really didn't matter because in almost twenty years of marriage she had never once been pregnant, but the words wouldn't come. That was part of her old life and she wanted it to stay there.

  The silence between them was deep and profound. She wanted to gather up her clothes and run back to her cats and her cottage and fit herself back into her old life but it was too late. His grasp on her hips tightened and he inched her forward, sliding her up his chest in a way that made her feel like she was about to burst into flame. She could feel his moist hot breath between her legs.

  "Sam?" She sounded hesitant, a little fearful. And the truth was, she was both of those things and more.

  "Let yourself go, Annie." He didn't sound hesitant and he didn't sound fearful. He sounded like a man whose hunger matched her own. "There's more than one way to love a woman."

  His lips brushed her inner thighs. A thousand reasons why this shouldn't be happening battled with the powerful lure of desire. She didn't do things like this . . . she wasn't a very sensual woman . . . oh God what he was doing with his tongue . . . or maybe she was . . . she'd never had the chance to find out . . . his hair felt like silk against her inner thighs . . . nobody not even the man she had loved had ever made her want to slip away from reality and vanish into a world where the senses ruled . . . wasn't it supposed to be about love . . . that's what she had been taught . . . but you couldn't love someone you'd just met . . . not even if he looked at you like you were someone to be cherished . . . not even if he had saved your life . . . it wasn't about love . . . it couldn't be . . . she was getting confused . . . don't stop . . . there . . . yes yes . . . love was just what people called it when their bones were melting and they were about to burst into flame . . . .

  Giving her pleasure was the most selfish thing Sam had ever done. Her smell, her sounds, the long muscles of her thighs as she shuddered against him when she came – all of those things brought him a deeper pleasure than he had ever known before. Her deeply sensual, overwhelmingly female response to his lovemaking carried him to a place he hadn't known existed and he knew that was only the beginning. She made him feel anything was possible.

  So why then was she crying softly against his shoulder as if her heart would break?

  He didn't know what to say. A second ago he had been invincible; now he was reduced to stroking her hair and murmuring nonsense in her ear in an attempt to soothe her. His desire vanished in the face of something much more complicated.

  Faint red marks blossomed along her inner thighs and he was filled with remorse. Had he hurt her? She was so soft and beautifully made and his passion had been veering out of control. He touched her gently, remorse filling his heart. How in hell had something so right suddenly turned into something so damn wrong?

  "I'm sorry, Annie," he said, wishing they could start all over again. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

  She brushed the tears from her eyes with two quick gestures and he could feel her gathering her strength around her like a shield. Those two gestures captured what little was left of his heart. He was hers for the asking and, dammit, she hadn't a clue.

  Annie berated herself for letting things go too far . . . and for not letting herself go far enough. She'd had too much time to think, that was the problem. Too much time to remember who she was in the eyes of everyone in town. Annie Galloway. Kevin's wife. Claudia's daughter-in-law. Kevin's widow. Everything but Sam Butler's lover. Oh God, how she wanted to touch him, to hold him, to run her lips over every inch of his body but she couldn't move. His body ached for her. The evidence was both plain and powerful and she knew he deserved that and so much more from a woman with far less baggage.

  She wasn't a wife any longer but she wasn't sure she was ready to be a lover. She felt greedy, selfish, and altogether a failure.

  "Guess you're having a few second thoughts right about now," she said, trying to ease a laugh around her words. He had given her more pleasure than she had ever known and she repaid him by bursting into tears like a wronged virgin. "I promise you that the rest of the women of Shelter Rock Cove don't start sobbing after a man makes love to them." Only the one who'd buried her husband but still hadn't quite buried her guilt.

  "I don't give a damn about the rest of the women. Did I hurt you?" He sounded worried. If he was angry or disappointed, he hid it well. His touch spoke only of tenderness and concern.

  She was hungry for both of those things and so much more. For comfort and a warm body next to hers and the crashing pleasures of touch and the wonder of someone who knew you right down to the marrow of your being and loved you anyway. The depth of her need terrified her. It was deeper than her loneliness, wider than the dreams she had put aside all those years ago when she realized they would never come true.

  "Did I hurt you, Annie?" he repeated.

  "No, no!" Why did deep emotion always bring her to tears? "It's just – I mean, it was all so – " She was stumbling over her words, suddenly more comfortable with the imperfections of her body than the longing inside her heart. She glanced down at the gold band on her left hand and felt a dizzying combination of anger and shame. "Until today there had never been anyone else."

  "Not even before you married him?"

  "There was no 'before.'" Kevin Galloway had always been part of her emotional landscape, from as far back as she could remember. "I suppose you think it's laughable, marrying the first boy you ever d
ated, but there was never any question that we were meant to be together."

  "I don't think it's laughable," Sam said. "I think he was lucky."

  The look she gave him was equal parts sorrow and anger and gratitude, and he wondered where one emotion ended and the other began. Marriage was a secret society with only two members, a society he'd never had time to join. The rest of the world was on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what was innately without logic or reason.

  "Claudia thinks I should have stayed in the old house but I couldn't, not any longer. Two years is long enough. Once I finally –" She caught herself, horrified that the secrets she had kept locked away for so long had almost come spilling out. "I'm not really like this," she said, shaking her head in dismay. "I'm the one people go to when they have problems."

  He stroked her hair with those large and beautiful hands. "And who do you go to when you have a problem, Annie Galloway?"

  "Haven't you heard?" she said. "I don't have problems. I'm the one who solves them." And she knew how to solve his problem too.

  He started to say something but the phone rang. They listened to it ring once, twice, four times, and he finally went in search of the cellular. The room was bathed in shadows. A cool breeze ruffled the curtains and from the kitchen Max made mournful sounds for his supper. Scraps of conversation floated toward her on the night air as he talked to one of his sisters.

  " . . . not a good time, Marie . . . why don't we talk later . . . yeah, yeah . . . you pay the super . . . he'll call . . . it's not an emergency, is it . . . ask Jimmy . . . no, it's nothing to worry about . . . "

  She slipped back into her black trousers and red sweater.

  ". . . I'm kind of busy right now, Marie . . . "

  She tucked her stockings and bra into her pocket.

  ". . . none of your business . . . I don't ask you questions about . . . "

  She retrieved her shoes from under the sofa.

  ". . . I'll call you back . . . I don't know when, Mare . . . Jesus, why don't you . . . "

  She slipped out the front door and didn't look back.

  Chapter Seven

  Claudia's doorbell rang at eight o'clock on the dot, same as it had almost every Saturday night for the last fifteen years.

  "I have a bone to pick with you, Warren Bancroft," she said as she ushered the man into her living room.

  "Keep it to yourself, old woman." He gave her a hug that she endured with little grace. "You're watching your blood pressure like you should?"

  "My pressure wouldn't be a problem if you would keep your meddling nose out of my family's business."

  "Not that again!" He reached for the tumbler of scotch she always had waiting for him on the side table. "So I undersold the market to give Annie a break on the house. How is that meddling in your family's business?"

  Oh, there were a million things she could say to him about that! Over the years he had developed the annoying habit of always being there when she needed him, a cigar-smoking guardian angel who watched over her family as if he actually had the right.

  "I'm talking about that man you installed in Ellie's old house."

  "Watch that viper tongue of yours, Claudia. You almost drew blood that time."

  She ignored him. "I hope you're not trying to push the two of them together because if you are – "

  "Speak English!" he roared. "If you're going to wrap up your words in riddles, I'll finish my scotch and head for home."

  She drew herself up to her full height – which wasn't quite as impressive as it used to be in her glory days – and snapped at him. "Keep a civil tongue in your head, Warren Bancroft, and tell me you're not up to your old tricks again."

  He took a long slow sip of scotch and she all but flew across the room and pulled an answer out of his throat with her bare hands. "Sam is an old friend of mine," he said at last. "He needed a place to stop for a while and that's what I've given him."

  "Why didn't you ask him to stay at the big house on the Point?"

  He took another sip of scotch, savoring it in the way he knew irritated her almost senseless. "You know I like my space, Claudia."

  "Make an exception. It isn't like your help has much to do."

  He pulled one of those dreadful cigars from his breast pocket and patted himself down in search of his lighter. She refused to offer him a match.

  "Next thing you'll be telling me how to run my businesses."

  "Business has never been a problem for you, Warren."

  He retrieved his lighter from a back pocket with a flourish. "And speaking your mind has never been a problem for you."

  The nerve of him, lighting up without even asking if she minded. "Leave Annie alone," she said in a fiercely protective tone of voice. "Bad enough you encouraged her to sell her house. Don't go playing matchmaker."

  He touched the flame to the tip of his cigar. His cheeks sank in as he drew the rich smoke into his lungs. The old fool.

  "Not everyone turns widowhood into a career. Annie's too young to take the veil."

  His words hurt as they were meant to. Even after all these years, their history still loomed between them but the days of crying in front of Warren Bancroft were a thing of the past.

  "Anne is a grown woman," she said. "She'll make her own decisions without any help from either one of us."

  "Remember those words," Warren said, "because one day they'll come back to haunt you."

  You don't know her the way I do, Warren. I know what's best for her. "Do you want your supper or are you just here to make my life difficult?"

  "I never should have let you go, Claudia," he said as he followed her into the kitchen at the back of the house. "If I had my way, I'd marry you all over again."

  #

  In his senior year of high school, Warren Bancroft was voted by unanimous proclamation the most popular boy in the Class of 1950. He was also named the boy Least Likely to Succeed without a dissenting vote as well. Warren agreed with both assessments. He was the kind-hearted, fun-loving son of a lobsterman who was also the son of a lobsterman and it never occurred to anyone, including Warren, that he would spend his life doing anything beyond setting lobster traps and grousing about the weather.

  Weather was important to the residents of Shelter Rock Cove. Weather determined if you could head out to sea in the morning. Weather determined what kind of catch you came back with. When you came down to it, weather determined if you came back at all.

  On his third trip out after graduation, Warren Bancroft found himself in the middle of a nor'easter the likes of which even the old salts had never seen before. When they limped back to port four days later, Warren kissed the scarred wood of the dock and swore there had to be a better way to make a living. And then he set off to find it.

  At the Class of 1950's ten-year reunion, Warren came home to Shelter Rock Cove, filled with talk of computers like the Univac on Art Linkletter's television show or Spencer Tracy's beloved Emerac from the movie Desk Set. Because he still looked and sounded like the Warren they had grown up with, they all just listened politely then forgot all about his crazy notions until their twenty-year reunion rolled around and he drove up from Boston in a big black Lincoln Continental with a chauffeur behind the wheel.

  It seemed that Warren Bancroft, the boy least likely to succeed, had struck it rich and he didn't mind sharing what he had with the town where he grew up. But what the good people of Shelter Rock Cove didn't know was that for six short months in 1951 he and Claudia Perrine had been husband and wife. It wasn't that he was ashamed of the fact. Hell, he wanted to shout it from the rooftops. It was Claudia who was determined to keep her brief marriage a secret from one and all.

  "The marriage was annulled," she told him the day they said goodbye, "and that means it never happened."

  And because he loved her, he kept their secret.

  Claudia had wanted a husband who came home every night at five-thirty and read the paper in his easy chair while she finished preparing dinne
r. She had wanted a family, a brood of children, who would grow up to be healthy and happy and have children of their own. She didn't understand adventure. She didn't believe in taking risks. She couldn't imagine a life that didn't include all of the things her mother and grandmother had enjoyed over the years.

  Too bad Warren hadn't wanted any of those things. He wasn't even twenty yet and he wanted to see the world. Make his mark on it. There would be time enough for picket fences and babies but not now. Not yet.

  He could still see the tears in her eyes the night she told him she wanted an annulment. "I spoke to the priest at the parish house," she had said, her voice trembling slightly. "I told him that you refused to have children with me."

  "Someday I will," he said, knowing that the battle he fought was already lost. "Just not now."

  "He said that was grounds enough for us to end the marriage swiftly."

  She went on to marry John Galloway and raise a half-dozen children plus Annie Lacy while he watched from a distance and wished they were his.

  Because Warren had a kind heart and kind hearts required an outlet, his name had become synonymous in Shelter Rock Cove with quiet generosity. He paid off the mortgages for everyone in his family. He made sure his friends' medical bills were taken care of. If the town needed a new police car or funds to shore up the sagging pier, Warren Bancroft was the first in line with his checkbook. He established a scholarship for the children of fishermen lost at sea, donated a wing to the local hospital, and generally kept a sharp eye on who might be in need, even if the one in need wasn't from Shelter Rock Cove. It seemed somehow to him the least he could do for all he had been given.

  But there had been two among the many who stood out. Two who had claimed the part of his heart that ached for children of his own.