Tears pooled in Cait’s eyes for no good reason. She tried to blink them away, tried then to rationalize why the image would make her cry. She was tired, maybe. Frustrated, certainly. Angry about what had happened to the school funds. Worried about her mother. Lonely…and alone. All these things might be the cause.
Only she knew they weren’t.
It had more to do with something else. With life’s preciousness and its temporal nature. How beautiful moments can exist in time and in memory, but can’t necessarily last outside of them. About the innocence of three small children, blissfully unaware of future pain.
She swiped at her eyes and scrolled through his iPod’s song list. Incubus. Shinedown. Amy Grant. Bob Dylan. The Fray. She did a double-take when she saw a handful of old classic tunes from Singin’ in the Rain on his list, though, and clicked on the title track.
Garrett returned a minute later, smiling. “Interesting choice. It’s sunny out.”
She handed him the iPod, their fingers rubbing in the exchange. Cait’s spine turned to Jell-O. “I like Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Ronald O’Connor,” she said, moving a few steps away from him. Such close proximity had a strange effect on her lumbar system. “Besides, old movies always make me feel better,” she muttered, sinking into his sofa.
He fiddled with the volume then asked, “Why? Are you feeling ill?” He held eye contact with her the way he might grasp a rope in a game of tug-o-war. She could tell he wasn’t going to be the first to let go, so she shook her head and immediately pointed to the watercolor.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “When did Marianne paint it?”
“Last year. I liked it, so she sent it to me as a late Christmas gift.” Garrett skimmed his fingers along his jaw, his eyes on the painting, but he seemed focused on something farther away.
“You didn’t see her last Christmas?”
“She spent it with her boyfriend’s family. I’d intended to see her for New Year’s but…there was a change of plans. I left a few hours before she arrived.”
They didn’t speak for a few moments.
“So,” he said, “are you doing okay now that you’ve had a chance to relax?”
Cait nodded though this was, of course, a blatant lie. The song changed and the cheery voice of Debbie Reynolds sang about dreaming of someone “the whole night through” in the background.
She held her breath. This man she’d been resisting in person, and even more vehemently in her mind, had wedged his way into every form of her consciousness. Her blood cells pranced inside of her, pulsing against the walls of her arteries as if to announce their heightened interest.
Garrett sat in the space next to her and slid over a few inches until their arms brushed lightly.
All he did was look at her, touch her. Bone, sinew, marrow, flesh, the tiny hairs blanketing her skin—every part of her began to join in the dance. She’d fought valiantly, but it was clear this was a battle she’d been destined to lose from the beginning.
“I need to find out who’s behind the leak,” he said.
She sighed. Ambition first, again. Another Fredric Lloyd situation—take two. If she could control it, she’d banish for good every emotional and physical reaction she had toward Garrett. He might enjoy many things, but the dream man she’d always wished for, the one who placed her ahead of all worldly goals, the soul mate who made her feel second to no one…this was not him.
Garrett had too many plans that didn’t include her. And a life out East to eventually return to.
Cait forced herself to concentrate on strategizing. “Okay, let’s work through this. We need to keep track of everyone who makes any claim on the money earmarked for the festival. I’ve already set certain things up differently, though, because it’s not going to be held on school grounds.”
“Somehow, we need to alert the vendors to be careful without explaining all the details,” he said. “To make sure they’re getting the funds allocated to them but not accidentally tipping off the thief.” He grabbed a pen from the end table and began scribbling some names down on his paper.
“What are you doing?” she asked when she saw her name written in red.
“These are people I’ve confirmed who requested money or wrote checks for the past three big festivals—last year’s Harvest Hoopla, the Valentine Carnival of Love and the May Day Festival.”
Cait read the names besides her own. Jenna, Marlene, Loni and Ronald were on it, just as she remembered. Shelley McAllister, of course, and two other board members, Doug Chippenak and Mike Firenzi. Oh, and Sonja their secretary. “So nine, including me.”
“Right. You’re in a position to know the teachers much better than I ever could. Do any of them have any financial woes at the moment? Any cash-flow problems?”
Jenna had four kids so, of course, money was always tight. But Cait knew her like a sister and couldn’t imagine she’d steal from the district. She didn’t know Marlene or Loni quite as well, but her intuition didn’t lead her in their direction either.
She shook her head. “Not anything serious, Garrett. Nothing I know of anyway. Do you have any suspicions about the board or the administration?”
He wrinkled his nose. “Shelley’s been after money as long as I can remember, but she married rich. Her husband’s some kind of high-level banker, so she should be firmly in the black now, unless greed is an issue. As for Mike and Doug—both are successful businessmen. Mike has the Four Gates Country Club, which charges an arm and a leg for entry. Doug is vice president of Chippenak Chemical, a company owned by his uncle, so he’s not hurting for cash either.”
“And Sonja’s simply too good natured to be involved in something like this,” she said.
“Well, though this may be true, I needed harder evidence than that. With the superintendent’s blessing, I read through all of her receipts and records from the past six months. They all checked out clean.”
“Which leaves Ronald,” she said.
“Yes.” He sighed. “He makes an administrator’s wages, but he’s maxed out his credit cards and doesn’t have any rich relatives to bail him out.”
“That’s true of a lot of people, though. Few people come from families remotely like yours.”
He shot her an irritated look. “You’ve got that right.”
Cait was reminded, once again, how little she really knew about Garrett’s family life. True, his father was a pillar in the financial world, but those kind of men rarely blabbed about their home lives. And, sure, Garrett had a chatty sister, but even Marianne hadn’t divulged in any detail the nature of the problems he faced. She wished she could ask him what went wrong and why he fled his home state.
“What did the superintendent say?” she asked instead.
“Ronald is his leading suspect, but the principal also spends a lot of time around the board members—especially Shelley, Doug and Mike. Of course, that could all just be for school politics.”
An awful thought came to her. “Garrett, you don’t think Shelley and Ronald are getting together in any other, um, manner…than in a political sense, do you?” She held her breath, stunned by the mental picture of the pale Principal Jaspers passionately linked with the scarlet Mrs. McAllister. Would their spouses believe it? Would anybody?
He looked at her, amused, then shook his head. “Not that I wouldn’t put it past either of them, but I doubt it. Shell’s got a tendency, as you well noticed, to hang on people she’s interested in and ignore those she’s not. I watched her with Ronald for two hours, and there was a friendly camaraderie but little else. At least not on her side. She and Doug Chippenak seemed to catch each other’s eye fairly often. But I don’t know if there’s any kind of romantic history between them.”
Cait swallowed, still trying to shake off the prior image. “Doug and Shelley?” she repeated. “It’s not impossible, but I doubt it. Doug is such a low-key guy. Not too flashy. Kind of, well, boring.”
“Exactly. Not Shelley’s usual type. Without fail,
she goes for high fliers and athletic men, which puts Mike Firenzi into the watch zone. With her, we shouldn’t rule out anything.”
Cait sank further into the sofa. The firm leather was soothing beneath her skin. She ran her hands along the cool black surface, closed her eyes and enjoyed the ending strains of the latest song. When she opened them again Garrett was watching her.
A few seconds later, he stretched his lean legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. She couldn’t pull her gaze away from the way his Levi’s clung to his muscles, making contact with all the important bends and straight-aways, defining them like a dictionary.
Garrett slid another two inches toward her and glanced down at the page with heavy concentration before setting it aside on the end table.
Gene Kelly crooned in the background as Garrett’s attention turned on her. Her stomach spun around a few times before it flipped.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t even a quarter past four, but her body felt wrung with exhaustion. Admit to nothing, her rational brain screamed. “Not at all,” she said.
Garrett slid toward her another couple of inches, and she realized her mistake. He shifted to face her. He reached over and gently tugged on her shoulder, maneuvering her into eye-to-eye contact. She held her breath, sure that even the dust particles had stopped falling.
“Cait,” he whispered, “we’re on the same side.”
“I know,” she said. And she knew that their strategizing and tenuous alliance underscored this truth. He’d chosen to let her fight on his team.
“Cait, I’m going to kiss you.”
She nodded, feeling every internal vow shatter. This, too, she couldn’t deny. “I know.”
He trailed his thumb down the side of her face with a stroke as tender as if he were frosting a sugar cookie. His fingers came to rest just under her chin. He used them to tilt her jaw higher until her lips were just beneath his.
She felt the pressure of that extraordinary mouth against her own, the well-formed ridges indenting her lips as they merged. His mouth looked softer than it did from a distance. Ruddy. Red. Just a hint of roughness. It astonished her that within seconds she’d lost the ability to tell which part of the kiss belonged to her and which to him.
He drew the tip of his tongue along the fullness of her lips, and slipped between them to a warm welcome. He pressed against her with tantalizing gentleness—memory lost, future strategies forgotten, only this moment seemed real. “Oh, yes,” she said.
“Cait”, he said, the fingers of one hand effortlessly parting her legs and coming to rest like a hot iron on her upper thigh. Everything in the vicinity began to burn.
“I don’t know if we should do this yet,” she whispered, or tried to. But that was her logical mind talking. Her body made her add, “But I really want to.”
To Garrett’s ear, Cait mumbled something, but he didn’t care if they never spoke in words again. His mouth delighted at being occupied this way, and his fingers itched to talk in the most primitive form of sign language.
He’d lost a bunch of memories in a second—all that indecision, resentment, discontent. Every unpleasant feeling was swiped clean, and he was left with a mystifying awareness of bliss. It’d been ages since he’d let someone, anyone, get this close. Admire a beautiful woman? Sure thing. Invite her to rummage through his soul? He almost laughed. Not hardly.
Once or twice, with a few fingers laced in Cait’s spun-gold hair and others happily squeezing the softness of those supple leg muscles, Garrett tried to pull back his mind, his emotions. He knew his body was a lost cause. But there was something about being with her that made a deeper connection possible. That made him briefly consider a romantic life beyond the short term.
Her lithe body slid underneath him, and he grew vaguely aware of his role in assisting. He rocked on top of her carefully. Every delicate bone became a newly discovered treasure. They were fully clothed, and he wanted nothing more than to undress her. He flicked open a couple of buttons near the top of her white blouse, released the front clasp on her bra, traced the upper crest of her nipple with his fingertip. His tongue followed.
“Yum,” he said.
Cait gasped. She couldn’t believe what she was feeling. Fredric had never inspired sensations this intense. Nothing close. And, besides, any other kiss but Garrett’s felt like a trillion light-years ago.
But the simple, invading memory of Fredric was like the jolt of real-life bad news upon awakening from a joyous dream. How could she forget the hurt she’d felt when a relationship that appeared good turned out to be a lie?
And as for Garrett…oh, boy. She’d already fought for control and lost. With him at the helm, she’d be left to count the minutes, hours, days until this new dream turned nightmarish. She had to put a stop to it now.
“Hey—” she began. Then he did something especially creative with his tongue and all she could say was “Ohhh.”
Garrett delved deep into fantasy, reenacting the kitchen love scene from a movie he once saw. He became aware of a few more murmurings coming from Cait and kissed her harder. He slipped a hand between them, brushing the snap on her jeans and the top of the zipper. The film’s characters had tried erotic experiments with black olives, syrupy cherries, rotini pasta, and…yes, oh yes…honey. But, first, restrictive garments had to go.
The snap flipped open with an insistent push of his thumb. “That’s right,” he told her jeans. He reached for the zipper, but five firm fingers clamped his wrist.
He pulled back and slid to the open side of the sofa, a dangerously narrow place, and tried to keep his heart from racing like an Indy 500 frontrunner. “Is everything okay?”
The beautiful woman in front of him exhaled heavily and reclaimed her own lips with a quick darting of her tongue. “This is all a little fast for me,” she told him.
He swallowed. “I like you, Cait.”
“Well, I like you, too.”
Cait realized she was speaking the truth aloud and it threw her. Fear seeped into her arteries and began a frenetic race through her bloodstream. She grasped at her open shirt, eyeing Garrett with growing anxiety, and he studied her expression in return. Something unspoken passed between them and she knew that he knew…
“It’s just—” she began. “I told you I was hurt before. Seriously hurt, Garrett. I thought I’d worked through that but—but, I guess, I’m afraid if—”
“I get it.” He leaned in and gave her forehead a smooch. “You’re not sure you wanna eat breakfast here yet. Is that it?”
She gave his shoulder a tiny squeeze. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Okay.”
Garrett forced in a few lungfuls of air, laboring to get his fantasies of her naked out of his mind for thirty seconds. “We’ll cool it. For now. But I’ve got a question.”
“Yes?”
He looked at her and grinned. She was so lovely…and so tense. Her face was splotched with patches of heat, and her brow was all scrunched up. “Have you got any allergies I should know about?” he asked her, using his innocent voice.
“None I’m aware of.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I’ve got this really tremendous fantasy for us someday involving vanilla ice cream and fresh strawberries where…”
Cait gave his chest a hard shove.
“…where…aaah!” He fell on the floor with a thump.
She wasn’t exactly smiling, but there was a light in her eyes that gave him hope.
“That’s okay,” he said. “Blueberries’ll work, too.”
STEP 7:
Add about 1/4 cup of cherry-flavored syrup.
Mmm, mmm, tasty!
~From Mr. Koolemar’s Top Secret,
Kool Kreme Ice Kreamations Recipe Book, pg. 97
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cait had no idea how she’d managed to drive home. Ten long miles in a blizzard of emotions counted as unsafe conditions. There should’ve been signs: “Hazards Ahead�
��Beware.” “Slow Down.” Or, like the old Bon Jovi album, “Slippery When Wet.”
What was she going to do?
She hadn’t felt this vulnerable since, well, since that chilly morning at Sydney’s Kingsford-Smith Airport when Fredric said, “So sorry, Cait, but Paige and I were meant for each other. I didn’t realize it until I was back home again.” Back home.
Garrett lived out of his element now, too. What would happen when the other girlfriends of his past resurfaced? The other tenacious Shelleys, who held their collective breaths, waiting for him to get bored with the Midwest? Cait knew she was just a stand-in until the real thing came along for him. Someone to amuse him until he returned home. To the East. To his family’s multimillion-dollar corporation. To where he belonged in society.
Oh, she knew how it’d start. He’d say he was going back “just for a visit,” but ambitious men behaved in predictable patterns. What would happen next was a given: He’d leave her.
She felt a cramp in her gut that traveled upward, painting her body from chest to head in rising achy strokes. The grief was already there, priming her.
She groaned. Heartbreak aside, other problems existed in the world. Nearly forgotten in the midst of their lip-lunging was the odd connection between Shelley and Ronald. Or maybe Shelley and Doug. Or Shelley and Mike. Yikes. What was going on there?
Then there was her mother. It seemed Mom had been forgetting to take her high blood pressure medication. Seth found a full bottle in the bathroom cabinet, almost untouched from her last prescription refill in June. His first call tomorrow morning would be to Dr. Zimmerman.
She stumbled into her apartment, collapsed on the bed and curled into a fetal ball. She tried to breathe deeply. To let the anxieties go. But her fears pelted her until she fell into a fitful sleep, haunted by unsettling dreams.
***
Marlene, perched on one of Cait’s classroom desks before school the next morning, raised her fist in a victory cry as she spoke. “Hurray for the Hoopla! Long live its fearless leader!”
Sweet Temptations Collection Page 28