He’d already revealed too much of himself to her. He’d let her glimpse beneath the wisecracking facade of the witty columnist. She’d seen his fear and confusion. Things had gotten extremely personal.
He was used to giving a woman everything he had physically. But not emotionally, not the way he just had with Allison. It frightened him a little, opening up to her like that, letting her in on the real James McCoy Jr., putting her in touch with the guy who wanted to do the right thing but seemed to have done too many things wrong, who liked being in control of his life but wasn’t in control of it now. She’d seen the scared soul behind the cocky smile.
So far she hadn’t shown any inclination to reject him, even knowing that he wasn’t exactly perfect. In fact, she seemed a whole lot friendlier than she’d acted Saturday night, when he’d thought he and she both were performing pretty close to perfect. If she liked the flawed reality of Jamie better, he’d go with that for as long as she let him.
“Do you have to be anywhere?” he asked as they stood on the curb waiting for the light to change.
“Now?”
“I was just wondering…” Damn! Why did he feel so insecure? He wasn’t used to so much self-doubt, first as a father, then as a potential suitor. “Maybe we could take a walk or something?” he half asked.
“Now?”
“Well—” desperate, he resorted to humor “—either now or sometime next year.”
She cracked a smile. “I think I’m booked solid next year, so it’s going to have to be now.”
He smiled, too. He’d spent all of their dinner whining about his meeting with Russo. He wanted to laugh about something, think about something other than his own screwy life.
The traffic light turned green, and they crossed the street. The downtown stores and offices were mostly closed for the day, but the slanting sun glazed the building facades and windows with a copper sheen, and the city seemed almost restful. Cars weren’t jammed bumper to bumper along the streets as they’d been an hour ago; rush-hour traffic had thinned, leaving the downtown district almost peaceful.
In her stroller, Samantha snoozed. “I really like her when she’s sleeping,” Jamie commented.
“Sleeping babies are enough to make a person believe in angels,” Allison agreed.
“And screaming babies are enough to make a person believe in Satan.”
“Tell me about it.” Allison slid the handles of her tote higher on her shoulder and dug her hands into the pockets of her white slacks. “I had a riot in the neonatal nursery today. One little infant got the others all revved up. A real rabble-rouser. In ten seconds flat, he had them all bellowing at full volume.”
“Why?”
“Does there have to be a reason?” She chuckled. “It’s their way of exercising. They can’t work out on an Exercycle or jog five miles, so they scream.”
“And they give you a chance to get your exercise, too—sprinting out of the nursery faster than an Olympic gold medalist.”
Still chuckling, she shook her head. “After a while, you learn to tune out a lot of the noise in the neonatal nursery. I imagine construction workers who’ve been on the job long enough don’t notice the rumble of jackhammers.”
“I can’t wait till I reach the point where I can tune out Sam’s screaming,” he groused.
“By the time you get used to it, she’ll be much bigger. Newborns are actually pretty quiet compared to older children.”
“Oh, no!” He gasped in pretended shock. “I guess their vocal cords grow along with the rest of them, huh.”
“Their vocal cords and their lungs.”
Jamie ushered Allison around the corner, passing a darkened candy store, a darkened coffee shop and a darkened shoe boutique, the shoes neatly segregated into men’s and women’s in the showcase windows. A couple of young office workers bounced past, whispering and giggling. Across the street, a man in a hotshot business suit and a bike helmet glided past on a racing bike. The building that housed the Arlington Gazette was still alive, its windows lit up as the evening staff settled in for their shift. Except for his brief stint working there, Jamie had managed to avoid commuting to a downtown district to earn his living. And until Samantha’s arrival, he’d managed to arrange his work environment so he didn’t have to listen to anyone screaming—either a boss or a baby.
“Nurses must be a brave lot,” he surmised, genuinely impressed by Allison’s courage in tolerating screaming babies every day.
She shrugged. “No braver than lots of other people. Nurses put in their hours just like everyone else. Most of the time we just do routine tasks. Every now and then we’ve got a high-risk preemie, and then it’s really rigorous. But usually the work I do is happy work. It’s not like hospice care or ICU, where you’re dealing with critical patients all the time.”
“Yeah, but you put in your hours with the screaming babies—and the occasional high-risk preemie—and then you come and teach bozos like me in the Daddy School.”
“Well, that won’t last long,” she muttered.
He shot her a quick glance, then eased the stroller over the curb as they crossed to the next block. “You can’t wait to get rid of us,” he said.
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
Her mood had changed markedly, whetting his curiosity. “Are you talking about taking a break between semesters? How much time do you take off between this class and the next one?”
“There isn’t going to be a next one,” she said laconically.
He gave her a longer, more attentive perusal. She remained in profile to him, her hair pulled back from her face and held with a tortoiseshell clip, although the thick locks seemed to be straining for freedom. Her chin was high, her eyes squinting slightly against the angle of the setting sun. She looked both proud and resigned and extremely peeved.
Suddenly he felt unforgivably self-centered. He’d been crabbing about his problems the whole time they’d been at the diner, and meanwhile she clearly had problems of her own. He should have talked less about himself and asked how things were going with her. He should have remembered that whether or not they ever got around to finishing what they’d started Saturday night, they were still friends—at least he hoped they were.
“Why isn’t there going to be a next class?” he asked.
“No support.”
“What do you mean, no support? I support what you’re doing—and you could ask any one of those guys in the class. They all support you—Damian, Leon, Harold, all of them. All the guys adore you for what you’re doing.” And at least one of the guys had a serious case of lust for her, too.
She turned to him, nearly singeing him with the exasperation burning in her eyes. “The hospital won’t support me. They won’t fund me. They think I’m stretching myself too thin. They’re downsizing the staff and they want the nurses to put in more hours. They think I should be devoting my energy to training mothers. They think I’m wasting my time working with fathers, that the younger ones are going to walk away from their babies and the older ones are going to wind up hiring nannies.”
“They think that?” Jamie was offended. Even if, every now and then, he got to fantasizing about how nice and easy his life could be without Samantha in it—and even if most of his classmates probably harbored similar fantasies at times—he was doing his best. He’d bet some mothers harbored the fantasy of walking away from their babies, too. “That’s incredibly sexist,” he remarked, amazing himself. Jamie McCoy, the consummate guy, was protesting sexism!
“Believe me, I’m not happy about it. I had hopes of expanding the program, introducing a second level of classes my friend Molly was going to teach. She runs a preschool, and she wanted to develop a class for fathers of toddlers. Now it looks as if the whole thing is going to die as soon as your class is finished.”
“That stinks,” he said, indignant on her behalf—and on his own, and on behalf of the entire Daddy School. “Who’s in charge there? I could talk to them, write a testimonial—
”
“It’s not your problem, Jamie.”
“The hell it’s not. You’re working wonders for fathers like me. I’m sure there are hundreds of them out there.”
In spite of her obvious anger, she laughed. “Oh, sure—hundreds of men who wake up one morning and find the result of a vacation fling sitting in a basket on their front step.”
“It was the back step,” he corrected, then grinned. “Okay, maybe not hundreds. But there are lots of fathers like the other guys in the class. Kids who need to understand what’s in store for them. I mean, they don’t have a clue.” He thought about it a moment, then reluctantly added, “As if I were any better prepared than they are. I didn’t have a clue, either.”
She dug her hands deeper into her pockets. He could make out the ridges of her knuckles through the cotton fabric; her fingers were curled into fists. “Well. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but it isn’t going to do any good. My supervisor gave me the final word today. The hospital’s pulling the plug.”
“Not a good metaphor for what a hospital should do.” He veered around a fire hydrant, taking a moment to appreciate the stroller’s suspension system. “What kind of money are you talking about, anyway? Thousands of dollars?”
“It’s a matter of time as well as money. The hospital wants me in the neonatal unit for longer shifts.”
“Time is money,” he returned. “They want you in the unit because it costs them less if you’re in the hospital than if you’re in the YMCA teaching a class and someone else has to take your place in the unit. I’m just wondering what the bottom line is. What’s your time worth to them?”
“I don’t know. The business department doesn’t share information like that with mere nurses.”
He mulled over the idea taking shape inside his brain and decided he liked it. “People could donate money to make up the difference, couldn’t they?”
She fired him a quick, resolute look. “You’re not donating money to the Daddy School.”
“I’m not?” Even more than he liked his idea, he liked the way her eyes blazed when she was revved up, the way energy seemed to crackle like an electrical field around her. He liked the way she pursed her lips—as if she were challenging him to kiss her mouth back into a smile. He liked the way she squared her shoulders, the way she tossed back her hair, the way she pulled her spine taut. The old cliché about how some women looked beautiful when they were angry was definitely true in Allison’s case.
“No,” she said vehemently. “You’re not going to donate money to the Daddy School.”
He suppressed a smile. “How are you going to stop me?”
“Jamie.” Her voice was gritty. “We have—” she picked over her words carefully “—enough complications in our relationship right now without adding money to the mix. I won’t let you do that.”
“What complications?” he argued, even though he knew exactly what she was talking about. “All I want to do is keep a worthwhile program from going down the tubes. What does that have to do with our relationship?” He hated that word, but he couldn’t come up with a better label for whatever was going on between him and Allison.
“If you gave money to the Daddy School, I would feel indebted to you.”
That would suit him fine, but he could see how a woman with her overabundance of pride wouldn’t care for it. Her pride shouldn’t enter into it, though, any more than the fact that it was his money they were talking about. What mattered was keeping the Daddy School afloat.
He didn’t want to detour into a fight with her, though. If he extricated himself from the whole idea, maybe she would view it more objectively, without having her vision clouded by all that “relationship” nonsense. “There have to be other sources of funding. Have you looked into city grants? State money? Private foundations?”
“I did get some money from the city for this first class. But that grant hinged on the hospital’s support. With the hospital backing away from the program, I won’t see any more money from the city. As far as the state goes, I made some inquiries and was told that the governor is in a tax-cutting mood and there’s no way the legislature will fund any new projects when so many of the old projects are scrambling for pennies. And private foundations—I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Then you’re going to have to figure it out. Maybe someone at the newspaper would know,” he said, noticing the Gazette building looming ahead as they completed a circuit around the block. “I could ask around.”
“Thanks, Jamie, but no.”
“Why not? You’re accomplishing something significant here. You’re saving a lot of guys from blowing the most important job they’ll ever have. This program shouldn’t die.” She didn’t dispute him—she couldn’t, since he was only saying what she already knew—so he pressed ahead. “Let me just ask around. I know people at the newspaper. I used to work there. They’ll know how to get the money.”
“I told you, Jamie, I don’t want to be beholden to you.”
This was not the voice of Allison, the noble young nurse. It was the voice of Allison, the woman who had come dangerously close to being seduced by Jamie two nights ago. Allison, the woman who had stood in Jamie’s clothes on Jamie’s porch and returned Jamie’s kisses with a passion that bowled him over just thinking about it. That other woman, the noble nurse, would have no compunctions about being beholden, unlike this woman, the alluring lady, the almost-lover…
Beholden. Bad choice of words, he thought, stopping and turning fully toward her. It made Jamie realize whom he wanted to be holding.
As he slid his hands over her shoulders, turned her to face him and brought his mouth down hard on hers, he had no compunctions at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE KNEW SHE mustn’t let this happen. Bright red flags of alarm waved wildly in her mind, sirens clanged, warning flares shot into space like fireworks….
Or maybe it was his kiss that was igniting the fireworks. Maybe it was his strength—the strength of his arms around her, the strength of his mouth claiming hers, the strength of a man who wasn’t afraid to let a woman see he wasn’t always strong.
If only he didn’t kiss so well.
If only this didn’t feel so right.
If only Allison could find enough strength in herself to back away, to tell him to straighten out his life before he lured her into it.
But she had already decided that it was futile to dwell on ifs. Ifs could not change the fact that Jamie was the most intriguing, most delightful, most downright sensual man she’d ever met, and if one kiss was going to lead her to her doom, well, so be it.
Far in the distance, a car horn honked. A summery breeze gusted down the street, amplified by the office buildings and shops lining the sidewalks and carrying the scent of hot concrete and urban dust. In the stroller, Samantha slept, oblivious to the activities of the two adults casting their merged shadows over her.
For all Allison knew, the entire world was oblivious. Nothing existed beyond the circle of Jamie’s arms, the heat of his lips on hers. Nothing existed but the pressure of his hands on her back. Nothing existed but the warm pool of arousal that gathered below her belly.
She felt safe within his embrace, even though it was probably the most dangerous place for her to be.
He moved his hands down to her waist. She felt the contours of his palms through the fabric of her sweater. She was aware of how powerful his hands were as they came to rest above her hips, his fingertips digging lightly into the small of her back and his thumbs venturing around her sides and forward. They were hands that could turn a woman on merely by thinking about them, that could obviously turn her on much more by stroking, exploring, possessing with a subversive gentleness that made it impossible for her to think at all.
She barely felt herself moving, yet suddenly she was standing closer to him, much closer. His hands had ordained it. They had guided her, and she’d gone willingly.
Those same magical hands glided around her
ribs and upward, coming to rest beneath her breasts. She caught her breath and sighed, wishing she and Jamie weren’t standing on a public street, wishing they were somewhere private where he could tear off their clothing, and really touch her.
How on earth could she feel safe in his arms? Nothing was safe when she was with him.
He skimmed his hands higher, his body shielding hers, lending privacy to his touch. She moaned as he swept his fingers over her breasts. Her nipples swelled painfully, and heat massed in a fierce knot between her thighs. “Jamie,” she whispered, though she couldn’t hear herself. Her heart was beating too loudly. Her voice was too faint.
“Come home with me,” he murmured, stroking her breasts, lightly pinching her nipples.
“I don’t know, I…” She damned well did know. She couldn’t go home with him, because going home with him would mean going to bed with him. She couldn’t risk sharing so much of herself with him. Her heart was already too open to him, too ready to let him inside. Sleeping with him would somehow make all her feelings irrevocable. She wouldn’t be able to extricate herself without getting destroyed.
“Allison, it’s me, Jamie. You know who I am, where I’m coming from—you know more about me than anyone else. You know I wouldn’t hurt you.”
Not deliberately. But she could wind up hurt, anyway. If she let him make love to her, she would become too caught up in his life, in his problems. She knew he was heading into a dangerous, dizzying maze. And neither he nor she knew whether he’d ever find his way out. She wasn’t ready to enter the maze with him, to lose herself inside it for him.
Still, when he rubbed his thumbs so tenderly against her breasts, teasing her flesh as his tongue teased her trembling lower lip, she could scarcely breathe, let alone explain calmly and coherently why she thought it would be better if she didn’t go home with him. He had a way of making her feel tiny even though she was taller than average, a way of making her feel petite and protected even when his erotic caresses stripped her of every protection she had. He bent his knees slightly and leaned his hips into hers, letting her know the effect the kiss was having on him.
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