by Lori Wilde
“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid Harry, stupid Sally.”
“Or,” she said, “I suppose you could look at it from the opposite angle. They let sex spoil a wonderful friendship.”
“You can’t have a great love relationship and a great friendship at the same time?” Tuck asked. Then before she could answer, he said, “No, wait, you’re the woman who doesn’t believe in true love at all.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in love,” Jillian said. “It’s just that I don’t believe it’s some magical, fairy-dust kind of thing. Seriously, do you?”
“I used to. Once upon a time.”
“And now?”
“I’m not so naïve. I thought true love would save me from pain. What I found out is that it causes more pain than you can possibly believe.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose there is that.”
They looked into each other’s eyes, there in front of the flickering firelight.
“Come here,” he murmured.
“What?”
He reached out and ran his fingertips along her shoulder, and she moved closer to him, anxious to feel his breath on her neck, to feel the beating of his heart beneath her palm.
She was someone new. Different. No longer a legal eagle from Houston. No longer that stepchild on the outside looking in. No longer the dirty mistress, the judge’s ugly little secret standing on the doorstep on Christmas Eve dressed like a Victoria’s Secret cowgirl.
Tuck just held her in the circle of his arms. Held her and looked straight into her. “You’ve never been valued the way you deserve.”
“I’m no Magic Woman.”
“You are.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t believe in magic.”
“David Copperfield would be so disappointed.”
“He knows there’s no such thing as magic. He makes a living faking people out.”
“Why are you so afraid to believe?” Tuck asked.
Jillian wrinkled her nose. “I hate getting my hopes dashed.”
“There is something out there, Queenie.” He tightened his arms around her. “Something that can’t be explained. I saw it in those learning centers I designed.” And apparently in the music box he’d designed for Evie. It felt good, knowing the magic was back.
“Yeah, so why did you stop designing them?”
He drew in a deep breath. “You’ve got me there.”
They sat there for a long time, snuggled up on the couch together, listening to the wind howl and Mutt snore.
Tuck played with a lock of her hair. She had such beautiful hair. Silky and straight. He had so many questions to ask her. They’d known each other almost two months, and he hadn’t asked her the truly important things about her past.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me about your pain. Tell me what makes it so hard for you to believe.”
“It’s a long sordid story,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.”
He waved a hand at the bank of snow pressing heavily against the window. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere. What was your childhood like? I’ve gotten the impression it wasn’t good.”
Jillian sighed, moved from the circle of his arms, and curled her legs underneath her. “I don’t even remember my mother, and I barely remember my father.”
“They’re dead?”
“My father is. My mother …” She shrugged. “Who knows where she is?”
“You never tried to find out?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She never wanted me.”
He waited, not pressing, letting her tell her life story at her own pace.
She stared into the fire, seemingly hypnotized. When she spoke again, it was almost to herself. “My parents hooked up when they were quite young. My mother was eighteen, my father nineteen. From what I gleaned from my stepmother, they had a very tumultuous relationship. Then again, her version of things tend to get pretty skewed.”
Tuck gave her his full attention.
Jillian pulled her knees to her chest and clasped her arms around her legs. The pensive look on her face told him she was leafing through her memories. “My dad was married to my stepmother when he got my mom pregnant. My mother didn’t tell him about me. But having a baby didn’t stop her from hanging out in bars and pool halls. She had an alcohol problem. I realize that now. I remember falling asleep on shuffle-board tables to the sound of Hank Williams and Merle Haggard on the jukebox and the smell of beer and cigarettes in the air. In the meantime, my dad had this whole other family I knew nothing about. Two other daughters. Legitimate daughters.”
Tuck thought about his own stable, loving family. His parents who were still happily married after forty years. He’d been so lucky and he knew it.
“Then on Christmas Eve, when I was three years old, my mother left me on my father’s porch with a letter of explanation pinned to my chest, rang the doorbell, and just drove away.”
“Damn. That was cold-blooded.”
“I don’t remember that day, but I suppose in her mind she was doing the best thing for me.”
“You must have felt so scared and lonely that you blocked it out.” The thought of that three-year-old kid abandoned on a doorstep on Christmas Eve fisted anger inside him. What kind of person would do such a thing?
She blew out her breath, and that’s all Tuck thought he was going to get out of her. He said nothing further. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t want to talk about it.
But then a few minutes later, she surprised him by saying, “My stepmother was very unhappy to suddenly have a third daughter to raise. I don’t think that marriage was a happy one. My stepmother wasn’t the most stable person emotionally, and my dad threw himself into his work. He’d leave before I woke up in the mornings, and often he wouldn’t return until long after I was in bed. Like I said, I was really little, and I don’t remember that much about him. The one clear memory I have of him was this one time he took me fishing, and he bought me this little pink tackle box with yellow daisies on it. In a dumb way, that was one of the reasons I was so excited about inheriting a lake house. So I could go fishing.”
The vision of a little black-haired girl clutching a pink tackle box with daisies and a kid-sized rod and reel caused something inside him to unravel. “Aw, hell, Queenie.”
Jillian paused again and glanced over at him. The raw pain on her face was almost unbearable.
In that moment, he saw past her beauty, beyond the dark enigmatic eyes that were often hooded to hide her thoughts. Beyond the high, feminine cheekbones, the thick black eyelashes, the regal nose. He saw beyond the promise of her beautiful mouth and the chin she kept clenched so firmly, as if she feared it would give away too much of her heart if she relaxed her hold.
“My dad died in a car crash when I was five. His secretary was in the passenger seat. She died too. My stepmother claimed they were having an affair.” She shrugged again. “Maybe they were.”
“What happened to you?”
“My stepmother raised me, but she treated me differently than her daughters. I suppose it’s understandable under the circumstances, but a kid only knows she’s being singled out, punished more often. Not long after my father died, my half sister Kaitlin and I were playing hair salon, and I whacked off Kaitlin’s hair. My stepmother had a fit. It was Christmastime, and that year she put coal in my stocking. She told me I was a very bad girl and Santa didn’t love me. Later on, she mellowed, or the doctor got her on the right medication, and she stopped being so mean, but those early years …” Jillian shook her head.
Quick anger pulsed through him that anyone could treat a child so cruelly. No wonder Jillian was locked up so tight and afraid to trust. She’d been betrayed in so many ways; he couldn’t blame her.
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I were. One time when I was nine or ten, she just took off with her kids for the weekend and left me at home alone. During the day I was fine.
In fact, I liked having the house to myself, even though I was supposed to clean the entire place while they were gone. But that night, a storm rolled in. I was in my bed upstairs, all alone. Not even a pet. My stepmother hated animals. Refused to let us have any. So I finally fall asleep, and in the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m sure I’ve heard a sound downstairs.”
“You must have been terrified.”
She nodded. “I lay there, not really knowing if I’d heard a sound or if it was something I dreamed. I held my breath, listening, hyper-alert to every creak of the house. My blood was strumming through my ears. Did I hear a noise or was it my imagination? But my mind was being so loud I couldn’t hear. I didn’t move, terrified that if someone was in the house, they’d hear me and come after me.”
“That’s horrible.”
“There are lots of people in this world who had it worse. I know that. I had a roof over my head and food to eat. But I wanted out of there. I studied hard in school, luckily it came easy to me. I excelled. Got scholarships to college. Got my wish. Got the hell out of there. Graduated magna cum laude from law school.”
It aroused something inside Tuck that she’d trusted him enough to tell him all this. He wanted to touch her, to comfort her for that long-ago pain, but he had no business, no right. Still, he couldn’t just leave her with her shoulders tensed, her chin clenched, her mind ensnared in the past. He skimmed her forearm with his fingertips—briefly, lightly, just enough to let her know he cared.
“I’m sorry.”
Tuck couldn’t handle the swell of emotions flooding through him. He couldn’t keep looking at Jillian. Instead, he got up and threw another log on the fire. When he turned, he saw tears reflected in her eyes.
It shook him. She was so strong, so brave. He didn’t think of her as the sort who cried. Unlike Aimee, who had bawled at Hallmark commercials.
“Jillian.” He went to the couch and put his arms around her.
She blinked. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually do this. I don’t even talk about it.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“It was so long ago. I got over it. I survived.”
Tuck squeezed her tighter. “You never get over something like that.”
Jillian made a noise, half bravado, half sorrow. “Hey, we all have our crosses to bear. You lost someone very precious to you.”
Every cell in his body ached. He knew what it was like to suffer a great loss. She looked over at him. This shared intimacy forged a deeper understanding, a tighter bonding between them.
“Losing Aimee changed me forever, you know.” He swallowed, unable to believe he was talking about his wife with her. “I’ll never be the same.”
“Right.” She moved from him, dabbed at her eyes.
His arms felt strangely empty. He liked holding her, but he wasn’t sure that he liked that he liked it.
“I think this calls for a stiff drink. You want something to drink?”
“I don’t think we have anything stronger than Coke.”
“Let me see.” Tuck got up, grabbed the flashlight off the table, and rummaged around the kitchen. He thought there might be a beer or two in the fridge, but it was empty. He checked the kitchen cabinet. Nothing. Then he checked the cabinet over the stove.
Score!
“Look what I found,” he said, coming to the archway between the kitchen and the living room and holding up a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream for her to see. “Irish coffee anyone?”
“Oh me, me.” Jillian waved at him from the couch. “With this cold weather outside, I could use some warming up inside.”
Tuck had to bite his tongue to keep from saying something raunchy and totally inappropriate. He concentrated on pouring the coffee and stirring in the Baileys and trying not to think about how much he wanted to kiss Jillian. He couldn’t very well go back in there with a boner.
Think about carpentry.
Finger joint, butt hinge, tongue and groove.
Oh crap, that was only making things worse. He’d never realized before what erotic terminology his profession employed.
“Hey,” she said, sashaying into the kitchen. “Can I help? Need me to hold the flashlight?”
“Yeah,” he said, and passed her the flashlight. “Thank God for battery-powered coffeemakers.”
“Thank God,” she echoed.
She was standing so close that he could smell her unique Jillian scent. He was in serious trouble here, and there was nowhere to run.
And at that moment, Tuck realized running was the last thing on his mind.
TWO HOURS AND THREE Irish coffees later, Jillian was giggling like a teenager. They’d been playing truth or dare, and Tuck had just dared her to stand on her head.
“Ten years of yoga,” she said from her upside-down position, with her back against the wall beside the fireplace.
“You win, pretzel lady. Come down before you get a headache.”
Jillian dropped her feet to the floor and sat upright, combing her fingers through her hair.
Tuck laughed. He was at his most alluring. Dark eyes filled with anticipation, his mouth quirked up at one corner, warm, inviting, sexy.
And Jillian was at her most suggestible. Tipsy and snowed in with a sexy man she’d been having erotic dreams about for quite some time. In a flash of sudden knowledge that almost knocked the breath from her body, she recognized she was falling for him.
It was more than friendship. She wanted sex from him and lots of it.
His masculinity aroused her, his cleverness intrigued, his intricacy provoked her. She admired his dedication to family, his loyalty to this town, his empathy to his friends.
She considered what he’d revealed by talking so intimately about Aimee. She sipped at the Irish coffee long past the point where she should have stopped drinking. Her head spun and her heart pounded and she felt warm all over.
Wings of panic fluttered against her rib cage. The new understanding that her feelings for him had strengthened, deepened, altered her reality. She wanted to make love to him.
Now and for a long time to come.
Jillian was scared, terrified that this glimmer of joy she was feeling would evaporate if she studied it too hard. How could she trust in this tenuous emotion? She’d let down her guard with Alex and look what happened.
But Tuck’s not Alex and he isn’t married.
No, he was worse. He was a widower still in love with his dead wife, and there was no way she could compete with a ghost.
Confusion wrapped her in its grasp, and the most she could manage was a simple, “Thank you.”
Tuck said nothing, just sat there watching her in the firelight.
She didn’t expect him to feel the same way about her. That was too much to hope for. But the hungry expression in his whiskey-colored eyes told her that at least he wanted her sexually. Wanted her quite badly, in fact. That was easy enough to read. His eyes roved over her body and his jaw tightened.
Jillian had spent her adult life telling herself sex was enough, but with Tuck, she didn’t know if she could keep convincing herself that was true. She gulped, suddenly swallowed up by unexpected melancholia. Jillian shook her head, mentally warding off the sadness. She wanted him. She would take whatever she could get. If sex and friendship were all he had to offer, so be it. She didn’t really believe in anything more than that.
“I … I need to go freshen up,” she said, and set her mug down on the coffee table. “I’ll be right back.”
She rushed into the bathroom that Tuck had just finished renovating the week before. He’d textured the walls in Venetian plaster. The beautiful sage green color she’d picked out made her think of the prairie in springtime. Since the lights were out, they had candles going in every room, and the dancing flames enhanced the old-world look of the new décor.
Jillian washed up in the new copper sink he’d installed in the stylish yet rustic bathroom cabinetry he’d built himself. She splashed cold water over her face, trying
to dampen the effects of the Baileys Irish Cream and snap herself out of the magical spell the blizzard seemed to have cast.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror and saw how wide and shiny her eyes looked. “I don’t believe in magic,” she told her reflection. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”
But she did believe in great sex, and there was a handsome man out there, and it had been months since she’d had sex. There were condoms in her purse, and he seemed as interested as she, so why not take a gamble?
She left the bathroom and went to change from her sweater and jeans into a pair of silk sapphire blue lounging pajamas and a diaphanous matching bathrobe. She hesitated a moment when she remembered Alex had given her the pajamas and robe set, but then she thought, What the hell? They looked good on her no matter where she’d gotten them. The material flowed like water over her body, soft and fluid, and the neckline showed off just the right amount of cleavage.
Sexy but not blatantly so.
And that’s when Jillian knew she was going to seduce him. She went back to the bathroom and brushed her teeth and then her hair. She put on just enough makeup to give her a fresh, dewy look—charcoal mascara, pink cream blush, cinnamon-flavored lip gloss—applying it as best she could in the restricted lighting. She peeled off the slouch socks she liked to wear around the house and went back to the bedroom in search of the blue feathered mules that matched the silk pajamas and robe.
Taking a deep breath, she affected her sexiest walk and sauntered back out into the living room, stopping long enough to open her purse, find the condoms, and slip them into the pocket of her robe.
Tuck didn’t hear her approach. He was busy poking the red-hot embers and adding fresh logs to the grate. She paused a moment to admire him in the firelight.
Even in studious repose, the man exuded a rugged sexuality that took hold of Jillian and wouldn’t let go. Maybe that was the very reason she wanted him so much. He brought a raw, primal realness into her world.
She ran her hands along the pajamas, the silky material rubbing against her body, the feel of it escalating her excitement. How she wanted him!