by Lilian Darcy
But he knew that if this was what he recommended, John Van Shuyler would immediately, and with checkbook in hand, want him.
So I’m resisting, he thought to himself. I don’t want it. She doesn’t want it. Am I doing my job properly?
“This is the room where we have our class,” Lauren said.
She pointed at the glass-walled aerobics studio, where the class he’d seen was still in progress. The best thing that could be said for it was that it didn’t front onto the street or the parking lot, but anyone who got past Vanessa could have lobbed a brick at the glass or invaded the room in person.
Daniel was torn. Was he simply protecting Lauren against the kinds of things that had happened so far? Or did he have to consider a further escalating pattern of threat? And how much notice did he have to take of the fact that she basically didn’t want him here at all?
He sighed. “Where do you usually go?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, where do you stand in the class? Front? Back?”
She shook her head. “Anywhere I happen to fit, I guess. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“In future, steer clear of this side. Go as close as you can to that solid wall and avoid the glass. Don’t hang around the locker rooms if the place is quiet. There’s an outdoor pool, right?”
“Yes, you can see it through here, from the deck of the café.” She walked in that direction, and he followed her.
“Avoid the deck. Stick to the indoor pool. You don’t want to make it too easy for someone to get to you and get away again without being intercepted on the way.”
“I hate this.”
“I know.”
He sighed again, letting the air escape through the side of his mouth. He was tempted to lay it out on the table, letting her know that this wasn’t the best protection he could offer her. But it was the only kind he knew she’d accept given her attitude.
“Try to vary the times you come here, and the places you park,” he said instead. Halfheartedly. “It’s—” he spread his hands “—obvious, all of it. You just have to learn to think this way.”
“Great! Fun! Because it’s not like I have any other new kind of thinking to learn about in my life right now!”
The sarcasm dripped from her mouth and she stalked through the open-plan café and out to the deck that overlooked the pool. Leaning her forearms on the wooden railing, she scowled down at the deserted area around the drained pool.
“To point out the obvious,” she said. “This is closed for the winter. One less thing to worry about. Gee, that makes such a difference!”
Okay, time to say it.
“There’s an alternative.”
“There is?” She looked at him across the fine-boned shape of her shoulder, which was hidden beneath a knit sweater of wedgewood blue wool. She wasn’t wearing a coat today.
“Round-the-clock personal protection,” he said. “Me, when possible. A roster of people on my staff, after hours.”
“No. No!”
He shrugged in an offhand way, purely to deny his relief. “Your choice.”
She looked at him steadily. “It wouldn’t be Dad’s choice, though, would it?”
“I expect not.”
“So we won’t tell him. I’ve got some good evidence that you can keep secrets when you want to.”
Suddenly it wasn’t good enough. Sure, they could present a united front and pretend to Lauren’s father that they had this all under control, but John was the one who was right.
“Is this really a point in your life where you want to take chances?” he asked her.
“This guy—couple, whoever—isn’t spooking me, Daniel. I’m angry more than anything else.”
“What about the baby?”
“What about the baby?” Her face had hardened defensively. The look of defiance and toughness didn’t belong there.
“What percentage of a risk are you prepared to take when it comes to the safety of your unborn child? Ten percent? Twenty? Do you drive with no seat belt? How much alcohol do you drink?”
“Zero risk. For mercy’s sake, you know that! You’d have to, after the way I fell apart under that rubble six months ago, afraid I’d lose my child. Zero risk!”
“Well, I can’t offer you that, not the way we’re handling this at the moment. And isn’t any threat to your safety equally a threat to your child’s?”
“I can’t think about this now!” She closed her eyes.
“You have to!”
“We’ll finish the tour of my routine. You wanted to see my church, take another look at my town house. Then I’ll think.”
“Okay.”
“I’m cold.” She crossed her arms and began to rub her hands up and down the sleeves of the blue sweater, but he sensed that the chill was emotional rather than physical.
She drove to the church she normally attended, which was on the edge of a business district that, she admitted, was almost deserted on a Sunday. Daniel wasn’t happy about it.
Neither was she. “Now I’m supposed to skip church!”
“Change. Stay with your dad in New Jersey and go to his.”
“He’s not there every weekend. He has a woman friend he’s become close to who lives in New York. He spends a lot of time with her these days.”
“Come to my church. The location is safer, and the parking lot is very public and adjacent to the building.”
She didn’t reply. It made him wonder at his own crazy impulse in making the suggestion. He was sure she wouldn’t show up.
At her town house, she wasn’t a whole lot more helpful. He described the alarm system he thought would work best and told her he could have it put in tomorrow. She agreed. He asked whether she kept any valuables here. Was there a safe? Did she have cash or jewelry in her file cabinet? She gave a sarcastic reply, asking how he knew that the tire slasher was planning to diversify into petty theft.
He refused to bite, just asked, “Do you keep your file cabinet locked?”
“Yes! See!”
Without even turning to look at the cabinet just behind her, she angled her body a little, stretched out a hand and gave an exaggerated tug on the handle of the pale gray metal cabinet’s top drawer, obviously expecting to meet the resistance of the lock. Instead, however, the drawer slid smoothly open and she almost lost her balance.
Daniel caught her and set her on her feet. He felt the familiar quickening of his blood at her touch and her warmth. His body had an impressively short reaction time when it came to this woman. He was still standing too close to her, his gaze caught by the serious bow of her mouth and by the tendrils of fine, dark hair at the nape of her neck.
He remembered those. He’d first known them by touch and smell, six months ago.
She, on the other hand, seemed genuinely far more rattled by the open drawer than by the sensation of his hands on her shoulders. “That’s weird!” she said. “I do keep it locked!”
“And where do you keep the keys?”
“One set on my key ring, and the other here in this little—” She broke off and stared at the small antique pewter jug, half-filled with paper clips, that sat on a shelf next to the cabinet. “They’re not here.”
“No, they’re here.” He reached behind her and picked them up off the shelf, right next to where the pewter jug had stood. His sleeve brushed her shoulder, and his heartbeat sped up a little more. “Did you toss them back in and miss?”
“If I did, I— No, I didn’t, and I locked that drawer!”
She pivoted and paced the room, her hands clasped beneath her chin as she thought about it.
“It was about a week ago. I remember because the phone rang before I got the key to turn. It’s stiff unless you push all the drawers in real tight. When I’d finished the call, I came back and made sure I’d done it properly. And I buried the keys under the paper clips. I actually don’t keep any sensitive materials in here, but…”
She’d lost color, especially around her mouth, h
er pupils had widened, her breathing was fluttery and Daniel’s first concern was suddenly no longer her personal safety or the security of her files but how much food she had in her stomach and whether she was going to pass out.
“I’m going to make us a meal,” he said. “Then we’ll go through this properly. You feel like someone has been in here?”
“I know it! Daniel, I know it! I can’t tell if anything’s missing yet, but someone has looked through these drawers.”
“And you’re mad, right?” he asked, knowing she wasn’t. “You said before that you were mad about what was happening.”
She lifted her chin, took a step closer and met his concerned regard head-on.
“No,” she answered. “This time I’m scared!”
Maybe it was the unconscious appeal in her widened eyes. Or maybe it was their particular captivating shade of blue and the dark length of their lashes. Maybe it was the way her full lower lip was trembling. Whatever the reason—whatever the excuse—Daniel had to touch her.
The scant second he’d spent with his hands on her shoulders a minute ago, steadying her balance, was like tasting one shrimp when he’d come for the all-you-can-eat buffet. It just wasn’t enough.
He wasn’t sure that touching her would be enough, either, but it was a start. His fingers and palms slid over the soft weave of her wool sweater, crossed at the knobbed line of her spine and settled against the muscles of her back. His chin brushed across her hair, then he bent his head, seeking her lips.
Just one small kiss. Nothing more than that, he promised himself too late. Just for comfort, not for seduction.
It didn’t work. She made a little sound in her throat. It might have started out as a protest, but by the time it was finished, it was anything but. She wanted this, too.
He softened his mouth and touched it gently to hers. Once, twice, three times. The spaces between each kiss blurred and he stopped counting. Stopped thinking. Stopped telling himself this was wrong. It couldn’t be wrong, could it? Not when it felt this good. Her hair was thick and silky and fragrant. Her mouth opened and her neck arched back. He was raining kisses into her willing mouth and she was drinking them in. The tight clutch of her hands on his sweater, just above his pants, was asking for more.
He gave her what she wanted.
Anchoring his hands on the hard mound of her pregnancy, loving it because it was part of her, he let his lips trail down, across her jaw and neck. The sweater’s rounded neckline was loose and open, but not loose enough. His mouth couldn’t reach beyond her collarbone, and yet he was aching to get to her breasts.
Hands or lips, it didn’t matter. He just wanted to touch her there, feel her ripeness and her warmth and her weight.
She was wearing a second garment beneath the sweater—something silky and stretchy and thin that hugged her swollen body snugly and rested on her shoulders with two fine straps. Running his hands over it, sandwiched between silk and fuzz, he found what he was looking for. Two full, pouting curves that jutted above the larger shape of her pregnancy and strained against a lacy bra that was getting much too small.
She shuddered when he touched her there and made a sound of need as he thumbed her sensitive nipples through the layers of fabric. They furled at once into hard peaks. Her head twisted back on her neck and her breathing came fast and shallow.
Awed by the evidence of her pleasure, he kept his hands where they were, touching, exploring. Bending forward, he nudged each bra strap with his lips, and the straps of that other wisp of clothing he didn’t even have a name for, until they slid from her shoulders. Her fullness spilled into his hands, firm and silky and oh-so-sensitive.
“I want to protect you, Lauren,” he whispered. “I want to look after you.”
“No, just kiss me.”
He kissed her and touched her for what felt like minutes. Kissed her mouth, her throat, the whisper-soft tendrils of hair just behind her ear. Touched her breasts, the fine skin of her back, the warm knobs of her shoulders. Her hands were anchored to his hips, holding him against her. He loved the blind need she showed. She wasn’t thinking about this, she was simply living it, feeling it.
Her eyes were closed. If she could feel the throbbing demand of his arousal against the side of her thigh, she didn’t care. She wanted it. Her hands moved to cup his backside, claiming it, teasing him in the way she caressed the creases at the tops of his thighs.
Needing more, he bent his head and touched his lips to her earlobe, then whispered, “Take this sweater off. And this silky thing. Please. I want to see you. I want to touch you and taste you with nothing getting in the way.”
The words broke the spell for both of them. She had already stepped back, crossed her arms and grabbed hold of the sweater’s stretchy waistband, ready to pull it up and over her head as he’d begged her to do. Her eyes were open but they looked blurred. Her hair was all over the place.
In his imagination, he could already see how she would look—the tiny, fine-skinned creases where her arms met her torso, the ripe bulge of her pregnancy, the push and swell of her breasts in their loosened cradle of lace. He’d pull her bra off completely with one flick. He’d touch her again…
But then she froze, shook her head, dropped her hands and held the baby instead, defensively. One shoulder had slipped free of the sweater, and when he reached for it, it was to slide the soft knit back up, not to explore the revealed shape as he ached to do. She let him, then shook her head, ran her hands lightly over her breasts as if reliving his touch, then let them fall to her sides.
She was right. Damn it, she was!
“We don’t need this, Daniel,” she said. “You know it as well as I do. For some reason, our bodies think we do, but they’re wrong.”
“Why are they wrong?” He needed to hear it from her. Maybe that would drum it into his head! His own pep talks and reasonings had been patently insufficient.
“Because building something real, something that matters, between the two of us right now would be like building a fifty-floor building on a swamp. I don’t know where this baby stands with Ben. Nowhere, I suspect. I have to work out for myself what that’s going to mean. I have this stalker, whoever he is. And you…you know how much stuff is going on inside you. We’ve got no foundations, either of us, for anything but a short-lived affair, and I won’t do that to myself, or to the baby.”
“Lauren—” he began.
But Lauren shook her head. She didn’t want to hear an argument from him that she knew would be based purely on physical need. The need itself, unfortunately, was not in doubt. They both felt it, deceptively powerful, deceptively alluring with its promise of ecstasy and oblivion, and its memory of what they’d given each other six months ago. Who wouldn’t want to follow through on the chemistry they seemed to generate together?
But she knew that too much of what they should feel was missing, and too much of what they did feel was suspect in its origins. Emotionally, they were both coming from the wrong place.
“If you’re going to try to argue,” she told him, “answer a few questions for yourself first.”
“What questions?”
“How much do you trust my emotions? And how much do you trust your own?”
“Not one bit,” he agreed. “I wasn’t going to argue with you, Lauren.”
He leaned back against the gray-blue wall of her study, supporting himself with shoulder blades and elbows, his fists pushed against his lower back and his hips thrust forward. She knew he’d been aroused a moment ago. Hard, eager. She’d felt it—sought it, even—and the knowledge of his male response had melted her inside. But his sweater hid the evidence, now, and no doubt it was ebbing rapidly.
“You’re right. You don’t need to say it. I’m not sure that I’ve got it in me to find, with another woman, the trust that I should have felt for Becky. To find all the things I should have given her and didn’t. Just the thought of trying to generate all of that makes me tired.”
“I can under
stand that,” she answered. “When you’ve tried with someone and it hasn’t worked, it does make you tired. It feels that way for me, too.”
“You know, sometimes it would be easier, wouldn’t it, if we were like some animals? If we could have lain together that night six months ago, joined our bodies and then gone our separate ways. Instead, we have this craving for it to fit somehow, for it to mean something. But you’re right. It doesn’t. It can’t. And we can’t accept that, which makes it awkward, and messy, since we have to spend time in each other’s company. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you just now.”
“No,” she blurted out. “You shouldn’t have kissed me six months ago.”
“Not then, either,” he agreed. “I won’t do it again.”
“Suits me!”
The harshness of his assessment as to what lay beneath their need for each other suited her, too, the way a cold shower might have suited her, or an antibiotic injection. Things like this were hard to appreciate at the time, but they paid off later on.
“You looked pale earlier,” he went on. “Really white. I’m worried about the effect all this is having on you.” He gestured at the gray file drawer, which still gaped open. To her suspicious eye, the contents looked messier than usual. “It’s after six already. I have a meeting later on, so Mom’s with the boys at my place tonight. Why don’t I order in something to eat and we can reach a decision about the level of protection you need?”
She nodded silently, too drained to protest against any of it.
Chapter 6
Daniel cooked steak after she nixed the idea of sending out for something.
“Right now, even the thought of getting food delivered, having a stranger come to the house, is spooking me,” she confessed as she tossed a salad to accompany the meal. “I have to get over this! I will get over it!”
“Couldn’t you stay with your dad?” Daniel set a couple of baked potatoes in the microwave.
She shook her head. “He worries about me so much, it would make both of us neurotic.”
“A friend, then?”