Finally, Ria spoke. “Stay,” she said, and that was all. Just that one word. It wasn’t a plea, and it wasn’t a command. It just was.
Having said what she wanted to say, plainly and simply, with no hidden meanings, nothing but the bald truth, Ria turned and, with all the dignity she possessed, left the room. There was nothing more she could do.
Maybe Landry would follow, maybe he wouldn’t.
It was up to him.
* * *
“HELL,” LANDRY MUTTERED, alone in the kitchen. He felt like a cross-tied bronco, unable to go in one direction or the other.
Go or stay, cowboy? he thought. What’ll it be?
After long deliberation, which pretty much got him to the same old nowhere, he sighed, crossed the scuffed linoleum floor, switched off the lights and made his way to Ria’s room, moving slowly, but toward, not away. The glow of a lamp spilled softly into the short hallway, guiding him like a faint beacon.
Even then, almost consumed by the wanting of her, a primal drive, powerful beyond anything he’d ever felt before, Landry knew he wouldn’t make love to Ria, not tonight, maybe not ever.
He would simply hold her, no matter how tempted he might be to go further, because of one thing and one thing only: the golden band on her finger.
In her heart, Ria was still another man’s wife. She wasn’t ready to let go of her lost firefighter, and that, Landry decided, had to be okay with him, like it or not, because for him, there were lines that couldn’t be crossed.
It was that simple.
And that complicated.
He paused in her doorway, raising his arms, gripping the framework.
Ria was already in bed, but she was sitting up, pillows propped behind her, leaning back against the white iron headboard, an ornate thing with a bewildering variety of leaves, birds and curlicues. She watched him serenely, her hands folded in her lap.
Landry might have caved, for all his resistance, because she was so beautiful, and he wanted her so badly. But he looked at her hands again, saw Frank’s wedding ring, glinting in the lamplight. No trespassing.
“Just hold me,” Ria said, guileless as an angel. “That’s all I’m asking you to do, Landry. Hold me, this one night. I need to remember what it’s like not to be alone.”
Landry swallowed hard. He could identify with that—there’d been plenty of nights when he’d have borrowed against his very soul to love some good woman, and be loved in return.
Just hold me. I need to remember what it’s like not to be alone.
Oh, yes—Landry understood where Ria was coming from, all right. Did she realize what this kind of restraint would cost him?
Probably. But did she care? That question wouldn’t be so easy to answer.
“I’m not Frank,” Landry said, in a low, rumbling voice that chafed his throat raw with every word. The statement was beyond obvious, of course, but it needed saying anyhow.
“No,” Ria affirmed softly. Reasonably. “You’re not Frank.”
Landry hesitated for another moment, but then he went ahead and approached her, not because he had any fewer misgivings than before, but because he couldn’t leave Ria alone. Not tonight.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress, with his back to Ria, kicked off one boot, then the other.
“Thank you,” Ria said. And then she switched off the light.
“Don’t,” he answered hoarsely, lying down beside her, fully clothed and determined to remain that way.
“All right,” she agreed, in a whisper with no more substance than the touch of a butterfly’s wing.
Ria snuggled close against Landry’s side, rested her head on his shoulder.
Landry wrapped his arms around her, a fairly awkward proposition, since he was on top of the covers and she was underneath. He let his chin rest on the crown of Ria’s head, and her hair was like silk against his beard-stubbled skin, and the wanting got significantly worse, though he would have sworn, only a heartbeat before, that such a thing wasn’t possible.
He drew a long, deep breath, released it, trying to settle down a little, get his bearings, establish some kind of defense.
The room was country-dark, with just a thin shaft of moonlight shining through the window and pooling on the foot of the bed, reducing everything else to shadowy, indistinct shapes.
And that was a good thing, since Landry had the hard-on of all hard-ons and he preferred to keep the information to himself.
“How did he die?” he asked, after a long time. He hadn’t planned on saying anything at all, but there it was.
Ria’s breathing was slow and even, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. Presently, she answered, “Frank was killed in a fire.”
“I’m sorry,” Landry said.
“Me, too.”
“Did you love him?”
“Yes,” Ria replied. A pause followed, one that seemed to have its own pulse. “Did you love your wife?”
Landry might have been amused by this question, deft turning of the tables that it was, if he hadn’t felt like a multiple-injury nine-car pileup right about then. “I thought I did,” he answered, when he was ready. “Later on, I had my doubts.”
There was another brief silence, while Ria absorbed the information. Then, tentatively, she asked, “Was she faithful to you?”
It was a reasonable question, Landry supposed. He just hadn’t expected it to be at the forefront of their first real conversation.
“Probably,” he said.
“Were you faithful to her?”
“Yes,” Landry said. “Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but—yes.”
He didn’t usually engage in this kind of personal discussion, but he was invisible in that dark room, and he liked the way Ria felt, warm and soft and scented with her own perfume, lying so close, one arm slung across his chest.
It was nice, even without the sex. But sex would have been better.
“What reasons?” Ria asked.
It would be so easy to kiss her—to put a stop to the soul probing by opening the door to all the pleasures his body was craving, even as he willed himself not to want her. And it would be so wrong.
“The usual ones, I guess,” he said, when he thought he could trust his voice not to betray him. “I worked long hours, and she was restless, always traveling to some spa or retreat or shopping mecca—so we were apart more often than we were together. And I guess we never had much in common to start with.”
“But you never cheated? Not even once?”
Odd that she kept homing in on the fidelity issue, Landry thought, but he couldn’t track the observation through his brain, wrestle it down and examine it, because not making love to Ria Manning took all the energy he could muster up.
“Not even once,” he finally replied. “Which is not to say I was never tempted.”
“You were pretty unhappy,” Ria surmised sadly, splaying the fingers of her left hand over his heart. The wedding ring burned right through his shirt, like a laser, or the business end of a tiny, red-hot branding iron.
Landry caught a ragged breath. He needed a cold shower, and bad.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was unhappy. But so was Susan.”
Another pause on Ria’s side—sad. Tender, too. “Not a match made in heaven?”
“More like a match made in the boardroom,” Landry answered.
“Then why on earth did the two of you get married?”
If only I knew. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess.” Then, after a long interlude of silent self-discipline, Landry decided it was his turn to do some quizzing. “That sweatshirt you’re wearing—was it Frank’s?”
“That’s a strange question,” Ria said mildly, sounding puzzled, rather than annoyed.
“No stranger than the ones you’ve been asking me,” Landry pointed out.
“No,” Ria admitted, with a philosophical sigh, and Landry thought he heard just the faintest note of amusement in the response.
She yawned lustily, sn
uggled closer, blissfully unaware, he would have bet, that she was making bad matters worse with every move of that sumptuous body of hers, no matter how slight. “I guess not,” she said.
“Then—?”
“No,” she relented, rightly concluding that he wasn’t going to let this go. “I used to wear Frank’s shirts sometimes, after he was gone, but it was a phase.”
Ria began to move her hand on his chest, round and round, in slow circles.
Landry bit back a groan. The hard-on was at full mast now, but still, incredibly, getting bigger, and, damn it, it hurt like hell. If this kept up, he’d probably blow a blood vessel or something.
“Then whose is it?” he asked. He was pushing, but he couldn’t help it. The shirt was big, made for a man with some bulk to him, not for a slip of a woman like Ria.
“That’s essentially none of your business,” Ria purred, after another expansive yawn. Her hand kept making those slow circles, her fingers catching on one of his shirt buttons once in a while, pausing for a split second, as if she might be deciding whether to undo it or not.
God help me, Landry thought.
“True enough,” he answered gruffly, awash in sweet and absolute anguish by then, “but I still want to know.”
She chuckled, a sultry sound, a womanly sound, as far from a girlish giggle as east was from west. “It belonged to a guy I knew in college,” she said. Her hand paused at his collarbone, and she ran a single finger down the row of his shirt buttons, all the way to his belt. And went right on talking, just as if she hadn’t split the atom. “Ted was a jock. I was a number nerd, so we were probably doomed from the first. Things were hot and heavy for a while, but then we both got bored and went our separate ways. I got custody of the sweatshirt because it happened to be in my laundry hamper when the music stopped.” Her finger trailed along the edge of his belt now, drawing a fiery line.
Landry was silent, mainly because he knew if he opened his mouth, if he sucked in a much-needed breath, he’d exhale it as a groan.
“What is it?” Ria prompted, with a sleepy smile in her voice. The finger followed its crisscross path.
Landry caught hold of her hand, stopped the exploration. “Have mercy, woman,” he rasped. “I’m tough as hell, but, damnation, I’m not invincible.”
She laughed. “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” she said. “That you aren’t invincible, I mean.”
He didn’t let go, but closed his fingers around her wrist instead, partly because he liked the way it felt, and partly because he didn’t trust her not to push him over the edge.
“Go to sleep,” he told her, long after she’d spoken.
“Is that an order?” Her tone was teasing, amused. She was definitely smiling, he knew it, even though he didn’t look at her to verify the suspicion.
Landry ground his back molars together before replying, “It’s a suggestion.”
Another chuckle, followed by a mischievous “Do you know what I think, Landry Sutton? I think you want to make love to me.”
Damn. The woman didn’t know when to quit.
Still, Landry wasn’t going to lie. “Of course I want to make love to you,” he said evenly, glaring up at the ceiling. “I’m a man, Ria, not a safety-test dummy.”
Her response? An impish “So what’s stopping you?”
Landry growled a swearword. “This is not going to happen,” he vowed, with a finality that didn’t quite ring true, at least for him.
Ria turned the screw, purred, “You don’t find me attractive?”
“Hell, yes, I find you attractive,” Landry bit out. “I do have a set of working eyeballs, you know. Not to mention a few other parts clamoring for a say-so.”
A breathy giggle. “Then why not—?”
“Stop it, Ria. Now. It wouldn’t be right, and you damn well know it!”
“Why wouldn’t it be right?”
Landry thought hard; strange to feel so desperate to avoid the very thing he wanted, right then, more than anything else in the world. What he came up with was an admittedly lame “Because, when you’re in your right mind, you don’t like me, and, some of the time, I don’t like you all that much, either.”
Ria didn’t deny what he’d said, but she also didn’t give up, either. “But you want me? Physically, I mean?”
He was at the end of his patience, ready to snap, ready to show Ria Manning just how much he did want her, followed by how much he knew about pleasing a woman, with a few new tricks thrown in for the hell of it.
“What do you think?” Landry demanded. “The blood in my veins is as red as any other man’s.” He lightened his grip on her wrist, in case he was hurting her. “Now, one question. And I’m serious here, Ria. Are you torturing me for some viable reason, or just because it’s fun?”
Ria laughed again, a chiming sound, joyous and, no getting around it, brazenly bold. “I’m not trying to torment you, Landry,” she said, when her laughter had dwindled to a series of hiccups. “I’m just feeling a little—receptive.”
“You’re also a little drunk.”
“Am not.”
“Are, too.”
Now, there was an adult exchange.
Suddenly, Ria yanked free of his grasp, sat bolt upright with the speed of a cannonball shot from a rocket launcher and switched the bedside lamp back on, nearly blinding Landry in the glare.
Flirty only seconds before, the woman was suddenly rigid with anger and naked frustration, her arms folded tight across her amazing chest—oh, to divest her of that damn sweatshirt and get down to business—her eyes snapping.
“Some women,” she informed him curtly, “would be insulted by your behavior.”
“And some women,” Landry retorted, just as furious as she was, and horny as hell on top of that, “would have sense enough to know when some man was trying his damnedest to do the right thing.”
“The key word,” Ria pointed out, reddening attractively and still mad as all get-out, “is women. I am a woman, Landry Sutton, not some nineteen-year-old airhead with rhinestones on the back pockets of her jeans!”
Landry sat up, too. He was still irritated, but the emotion was giving way to utter confusion. Women. They might not be from Venus, as that old book title proclaimed, but they sure as hell weren’t from earth, either. “What does that have to do with the subject at hand?” he demanded. “And who said anything about buckle bunnies with rhinestones on their butts?”
Wisely, Landry withheld the observation that those butts were usually fine to look at, and to hell with the rhinestones.
When Ria didn’t answer, but simply looked tight-lipped, he finally caught the drift, his temper in the red zone again, and ranted on, though he did make a real effort to keep his voice down.
“If I had a taste for ‘nineteen-year-old airheads,’ as you put it, I wouldn’t be here right now.” A pause, a raspy breath. “As it happens, lady, I prefer grown women.”
Instantly, Ria raised a hand to her mouth and, for one terrible moment, Landry thought she was going to start crying again, which made him feel like a complete jerk, about to graduate from Asshole U with honors. Then he realized, clued in by the twinkle frolicking in her eyes, that Ria wasn’t on the verge of tears at all. She was trying not to laugh.
He was both relieved and royally bent out of shape. “You think this is funny?” he drawled, his voice as rough and dry as a dirt road in a drought.
“No,” Ria said, with a quick shake of her head. “Of course I don’t.” But she still felt a need to cover her mouth, he noticed. Her shoulders were shaking a little, and that light was still in her eyes.
Landry swung his legs over the side of the bed, turning his back to Ria in the process, and looked around for his boots.
Enough, damn it, was enough.
But Ria laid a hand on his shoulder, and everything came to a wrenching halt.
“Don’t go,” she said.
Landry stiffened, then thrust out a sigh, braced his elbows on his thighs and low
ered his head, shoving the fingers of both hands into his hair.
Up was down. East was west. The sun would probably shine at night from here on out, while the moon took over the day shift.
And, damn it all to hell, when was the last time he’d gone to bed with a woman and kept his clothes on for the duration? Never, that was when. Was he possessed or something?
If nothing else, Landry had always been a man who knew his own mind, a man who thought his decisions through carefully but quickly, made them and didn’t look back. Now, all of a sudden, he not only didn’t know his mind, but he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. He was coming undone, falling apart at the seams, morphing into somebody he didn’t begin to recognize. And it scared him shitless.
If Ria had been on the verge of a giggle fit a few minutes before, she was in a very different mood now. He felt her shift, knew she was kneeling behind him now, and when she spoke, her voice was sad and soft and somehow it fractured Landry’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was messing with you, and that’s not right.”
Landry unclamped his jawbones, but he didn’t turn around, didn’t look at her. He didn’t dare move.
“Forget it,” he replied.
She went right on talking—that was a woman for you. When a man wanted a little peace and quiet, she wanted to “communicate.” When he asked her if something was wrong, though, she invariably said “nothing,” meaning exactly the opposite, and then she clammed up, operating on the crazy premise that if the jerk de jour really cared about her in the least, he’d know what the problem was, without having to ask in the first place.
There was no winning this game.
“Listen to me, please,” Ria continued, massaging his shoulders now, quietly turning Landry inside out. “Either you think you’re saving me from myself, because the ‘little woman’ doesn’t know what’s good for her, or all that stuff about wanting me was just so much fast-talking bullshit.” A beat passed, and then she went in for the kill. “Which is it?”
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