Take Me Home

by Nancy Herkness

  “Easy, sweetheart,” he said, shifting one hand to protect her head from the wooden frame of the chair arm.

  As the spasms weakened to mere shudders, she sank back down and curled into him. She loved the fact that he put his arms around her and nestled her closer, even though she could feel his own unsatisfied arousal against the back of her thighs. “Give me a couple of minutes,” she said. “I think I pulled some internal muscles with that one.”

  “Take your time.” She felt the brush of his lips on the top of her head and heard a smile in his voice. “I’m basking in your afterglow.”

  “It was the sight of you stepping out of the shower. Like a Michelangelo sculpture come to life. In fact, you’re almost the same size as David.”

  “Now there’s a comparison I don’t mind at all.”

  She pressed her ear closer against his skin, loving the vibration of his deep voice. “I was talking about your height.”

  “So was I.”

  “Liar!” She lifted her head to meet his eyes. A dancing imp of mischief lit their gray depths. That was all it took to set desire stirring in her again.

  She squirmed out of his arms, deliberately rocking against his erection for both their benefits. Hooking her fingers into her panties, she pulled them down to her ankles and kicked them off. Then she planted her knees on either side of his thighs, letting his cock spring up between them.

  He seized the hem of her damp shirt and stripped it off over her head as she raised her arms. Before she could unhook her bra, he wrapped his hands around her rib cage and pulled her toward him so he could suck on her nipple through the sheer lace. The inner muscles she thought were completely drained of energy revived and tightened at the sensations of heat and moisture and pressure.

  She reached down and circled the tip of his erection, making him growl against her breast. She stroked down his length and back up again. He shifted his grip so one hand was splayed across her back to hold her against his mouth while the other pushed her denim skirt up to bunch around her waist. Then his cock was between her legs, and she held her breath, waiting for the thrust that would fill the craving inside her.

  “Damn it! I need a condom,” he said.

  She collapsed against him, stifling laughter, as he reached behind his back to scrabble at the clothes hanging over the chair.

  “L-l-let me help,” she gasped through her fits of giggling. “I have a better angle.”

  “In the pocket of my jeans,” he said through gritted teeth.

  She stretched her arms past him and slipped her hands into various pockets, finally locating two foil packets and pulling them out.

  “Now we’re in business,” she said, ripping one open. “Allow me to do the honors.”

  “Only if you promise to stop laughing,” he said. “It might damage my fragile ego and cause erectile dysfunction.”

  “Hmm. Not much fear of that,” she said, circling him with her fingers and sweeping downward.

  “The condom,” he reminded her.

  She rolled it on and started to move back over him when he took hold of her hips and lifted her into position, holding her poised above him for a long moment and then bringing her down as he flexed his hips up.

  She threw her head back and yelped at the rough pleasure of their combined motion. The sensation was so acute it was almost unbearable. “Again!” she begged.

  His grip on her hips was nearly bruising as he moved her upward. Again, they came together hard so he was deep inside her. “Stay there,” he commanded, reaching around to unhook her bra.

  She brushed the straps down her arms and flung the scrap of satin and lace across the room, offering her breasts to his hands and mouth.

  With his cock filling and anchoring her and his tongue teasing her breasts, she could do nothing more than hang onto his shoulders and let him send her spiraling inexorably toward another orgasm. As the pressure built, she began to undulate against him, moaning at the deliciously unremitting assault on her nerve endings.

  When the first wave of orgasm hit, she dug her fingernails into his muscles and shrieked as her whole body convulsed around him. He pushed upward, and her muscles clenched again.

  “Oh God, Claire!” he groaned, his head falling back against the chair. Then his hands were like vises on her waist, moving her up and down until his hips came up off the chair and his cock pulsed inside her while he shouted her name.

  After collapsing back into the chair, neither of them moved for some time. Then Tim’s stomach rumbled loudly, making Claire giggle. “Typical man. Satisfy one appetite and another one makes demands.”

  “We just burned a lot of calories. It’s no wonder I need some fuel.”

  He levered them both out of the chair and then turned and eased her back in it.

  “Ugh! It’s soggy,” she complained as her backside hit the clothes that had absorbed the water from his skin. She started to pull her skirt down from around her waist. “My skirt’s wet too, and not from what you’re thinking about.”

  Tim’s mouth twitched into a wicked grin, but he said, “Luckily, we have a dryer here.”

  They prowled around his office, collecting damp garments and piling them on the chair.

  Claire headed for the bathroom to grab the towel she’d dropped there. Being naked while in the throes of passion was one thing. Lolling around an office without a stitch of clothing was another.

  As she emerged with the towel precariously tucked around her, she found Tim standing in front of a closet, pulling on a pair of clean, dry jeans. “Hey, no fair,” she protested.

  He reached in and pulled out a white lab coat, which he tossed to her. “I think this will be a good look.”

  She pulled on the coat and dropped the towel. “Oh, right, a white tent,” she said as she rolled back six inches of sleeve. Even buttoning the top button left virtually all of her cleavage exposed.

  “I like it a lot,” Tim said, eyeing the expanse of bare skin appreciatively. “You’ll feel less cranky once you have some food in you. Let me get the dryer going.”

  Shirtless, he gathered up the damp heap of clothes and padded barefoot out of the office.

  She wandered around his work space, curious to see what personal touches he had added. The only wall decorations were framed pet care posters from pharmaceutical companies. No diplomas. No photographs. None of the art he collected.

  His blond wood desk boasted a state-of-the-art computer, an elegant leather desk set, and a couple of expensive-looking pens, but no quirky paperweights or funky souvenirs. The small round conference table was completely bare. One wall was filled entirely by built-in Formica shelves and doors, so she strolled over to take a look at the book titles.

  “Have you read Macrocyclic Lactones in Antiparasitic Therapy from cover to cover?” she asked as Tim returned.

  “No, but I listened to it on CD.”

  Claire choked on a laugh. He threw her a grin and pulled open one of the Formica doors to reveal a refrigerator, which he proceeded to empty, spreading an array of food out on the conference table. Adding a basket of plasticware and napkins, he beckoned her over and held out a wheeled chair for her. “What’s your pleasure?”

  “You go ahead,” Claire said, sitting down. She had eaten dinner with her sister, so she wasn’t hungry. “Your stomach’s making so much noise I’d feel guilty eating first.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t get my afternoon snack.” He assembled a multilayered sandwich.

  As he took his first bite, she leaned forward. “Thank you again for what you did this afternoon. All the things you did,” she added, thinking of his comfort when she fell apart on the patio.

  His mouth was full, so he waved a hand in dismissal.

  Claire unwrapped a wedge of gouda and cut off several slices, laying them on wheat crackers and offering the plate to Tim. He transferred a couple to his own plate. “How is Holly doing?”

  Claire hesitated and looked across the table. Tim’s hair had dried in tousled waves
with the usual unruly curl falling onto his high, intelligent forehead. His bare shoulders looked as if they could easily hold the weight of the world. He had put down his sandwich and leveled his dark-gray gaze at her. This was a man she could trust with the truth. “She admitted Frank has hit her before.”

  She could see the muscles in his forearms flex as his hands clenched into fists.

  “Yeah, I wanted to smash his face in too,” she said. “She stayed with him anyway to keep the family together. What kills me is that she had to suffer through it alone.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Only because she caught Lyme disease.” Claire sat back in her chair and sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  Tim uncurled his hands and picked up his sandwich with the air of a man who was ready to listen as long as she wanted to talk.

  “When we were younger, Holly and I were really close. Even after I moved to New York, we talked all the time. Then she married Frank and I married Milo.” Oops, she hadn’t meant to bring her marriage into the story.

  Tim’s eyebrows shot up, but he just took another bite and chewed.

  “Milo and Frank didn’t hit it off, but that wasn’t a problem for a while, anyway.” Until just before Claire and Milo’s wedding. That was really when it started, now that she thought about it—when Holly hadn’t come to the wedding. “Then it got so I’d ask her about something that ordinarily we would have shared without a second thought, and she would change the subject. It began to really hurt me.”

  So Claire had dragged Milo down for Brianna’s birthday. The visit was a disaster. Milo had complained about having to sleep on a lumpy sofa bed and use a toilet that required removing a child’s potty seat.

  Frank seemed determined to provoke Milo into his worst behavior, while Holly did her best to avoid being alone with Claire. The one time Claire managed to pull her aside and ask her what was going on, Holly looked at her blankly and said she didn’t know what Claire was talking about.

  “I tried to find out what the problem was, but Holly just kept pretending nothing had changed between us. I was involved in my life in New York, and I finally gave up trying to fix things. There was so much unsaid between us that it was almost painful to talk with her.”

  Tim had finished his sandwich and was simply listening, his hands resting on either side of the plastic plate.

  “When I found out Holly had a bad case of Lyme disease, I decided to come down and help her. My marriage had ended, and I took it as an opportunity to reconnect.” Claire picked up a cracker and snapped it in half. “From day one, Holly made it clear she didn’t want me here. However, I could see she was really sick, so I stayed anyway. Even after Frank asked for the divorce, she’d been pushing me away. Until the day after his drunken rampage.”

  “I’m guessing that you’ve been beating yourself up, trying to figure out what you did wrong.”

  “Pretty much.” Claire blinked hard to keep tears from overflowing onto her cheeks. “I know I got caught up in my job and marriage, but I thought we would always be close. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t talk to me when things went so terribly wrong.”

  “You know,” Tim said slowly, “Frank did what every other abusive spouse does—isolated his victim so she had nowhere to turn but him. I’m guessing he convinced her it was her fault somehow.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s typical behavior. It gives him leverage. Just like taking the children did.”

  “It makes me sick that Frank would twist everything around that way, and she believed him.” Claire shredded a piece of cheddar. “I know it sounds selfish, but it hurts my feelings that she didn’t tell me.”

  Claire looked up from the little pile of crumbled cheese and crackers she’d created. Tim’s eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, and his gray eyes were shadowed with concern. And pain. She reached across the table to give his hand a quick touch. “I’m sorry. You know, as awful as the situation is, it’s brought Holly and me back together again, so I can’t regret what’s happened.”

  She’d hoped to see his expression lighten, but the darkness continued to hover. “I never had a brother or sister, and I always knew I had missed out on something special. You and Holly are lucky.”

  “Thanks for listening to true confessions,” she said. “Let me fix you another sandwich.”

  “No, the first one hit the spot. I’m going to check on the clothes.”

  He rose from the table and strode out of the office. Claire watched him go.

  Just when she thought she could relax with Tim, the shadows would cloud his face, and he would withdraw. He seemed so solid, so easy with himself, that she forgot he had hidden vulnerabilities. She kept stumbling into them when she didn’t mean to. With a sigh, Claire began gathering up the food strewn across the table and stacking it in the refrigerator.

  As she stowed the last package of cold cuts away, Tim came back in with a pile of neatly folded garments. The frown was gone, but his eyes were still clouded with some pain she couldn’t decipher. “Warm from the dryer,” he said, handing her the top of his stack.

  “Mmm, nice,” Claire said, holding them against her cheek. What she really wanted to lay her cheek against was Tim’s bare chest, but the mood between them had changed. So she simply watched him button his shirt up with a sense of regret.

  “If you keep looking at me like that, we’ll never get out of this office,” he said.

  “Sorry, it’s just a shame to cover up such a work of art,” Claire said, grinning at him. She slipped her panties and denim skirt on under the giant lab coat. Turning away from him, she dropped the coat so she could put on her bra.

  “I might say the same thing,” Tim said. He threaded his belt through the loops and buckled it. “Manet’s Olympia.”

  “Good choice! I always liked her direct stare. I thought you’d go for Goya’s Maja—the unclothed one, of course.” She had pulled on her T-shirt and was finger-combing her hair.

  Much to her relief, the atmosphere between them had brightened again. She hated being responsible for bringing the pain to Tim’s eyes.

  HIS STOMACH SET up another racket on the way home, so Claire insisted on picking up a pizza at the Court Restaurant. The scent filled the pickup truck and kept his salivary glands working on high. Having Claire on the seat beside him, with her short denim skirt doing little to cover her delicious thighs, kept other glands active too.

  Now he balanced the pizza in one hand and threw open the door to his house with the other. Sprocket hurled himself at them, yipping, so Tim didn’t get to see Claire’s first reaction to the slate-floored entrance to his home.

  “Sprocket, sit!” he commanded. The little dog put his rear down for a split second and then bounded up again.

  Claire knelt and let the dog sniff her hand. He put his paws on her knees, trying to reach her face with his tongue. She picked him up and straightened as he licked her face. “What a cutie! Hey, Sprocket, thanks for the free facial.”

  Tim put the pizza box down on the hall table and took the excited dog out of her arms. “Okay, buddy, that’s enough. Only I’m allowed to kiss her that often.”

  Claire looked at him and covered her mouth, her eyes dancing above her hand.

  “What?” he asked.

  She uncovered her wide grin. “It’s just that...Well, I figured you’d have a Bernese mountain dog or a...a Great Dane or something. Sprocket’s so...so little, and the contrast just looks...funny.” She kept erupting into giggles.

  “She’s laughing at us, Sprocket.” Tim gave the dog’s head an affectionate pat. “Luckily, I’m very secure in my masculinity. I used to have a toy poodle.”

  “You did not!”

  “Well, no, but—”

  She picked up the pizza. “Where’s the kitchen?”

  He led her into the next room, which was lined with cherry cabinetry and dark-gray granite countertops.

  “It’s beautiful!” she said, standing in the middle and tu
rning slowly around. She walked to the island and traced a pale-silver vein in the granite. “Gorgeous! Like a streak of lightning against the night sky.”

  He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. This was a woman who had a highly developed aesthetic sense. He was worried about how she would react to his taste.

  As Claire sat beside him at the counter enjoying pizza and beer, he realized that being with her made him more aware of everything around him. Colors seemed heightened, scents were sharper, voices and music sounded clearer and more distinct.

  But he was most aware of her—the intelligence in her brown eyes, the mobility of her expressive mouth, the fragility of her wrists, and the shining flow of her dark hair. She brought his senses fully alive.

  Unfortunately, she also seemed to evoke darker feelings, forcing them up to the surface, where he had to face them. As he had offered comfort over her strained relationship with Holly, it had struck him that his words could apply to himself.

  Someone could argue that Anais’s suicide had nothing to do with him, but it didn’t feel that way most of the time. He kept looking for what he had done wrong. What else had Claire said? It hurt him that Anais hadn’t told him how deeply she was suffering. Not to mention the promise she had asked from him in the letter she’d left. He had kept it. The press had never gotten so much as a whiff of why she had killed herself, even though it meant the blame had fallen on him.

  She wouldn’t let him help her while she was alive, so he had made sure to honor her last wish.

  “Tim? Are you all right?” Claire’s hand was on his shoulder, and she was peering into his face. “Did I say something to upset you?”

  “No, I’m fine. Just”—Just what? Haunted by my dead wife?—“just thinking about Frank.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked confused, and he realized he had no idea what she had been talking about while he wandered off into his own personal hell. “I was hoping he’d refuse to let go of you, so I could deck him.”

  “Hmm, and I thought your threats were all an act. I remember what you did at Holly’s house, using your voice and body language to intimidate him without having to resort to physical contact. I was impressed.”