The Fiance Thief

by Tracy South

  “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked.

  “Like where?”

  “Don’t you want to go chase Miranda some more?”

  “Why should I? I got my story,” he said.

  “So I heard.” Claire popped open another suitcase and began to aimlessly transfer items from one piece of luggage to another. “It’s funny, considering that she never meant to go down to the pond to talk to you. I overheard her tell someone she sent you there to get her out of her hair. But when she saw me eating lunch with Roger, she must have wanted to make me jealous.” And it worked, she added silently. Her body tensed as she felt Alec step away from the door and come up behind her.

  “What were you doing having lunch with Roger?” he asked.

  She turned to face him, only to find he was even closer than she thought. She tried to step back, but the sofa was in the way. Lifting her chin a bit, she said, “What makes it your business?”

  “This makes it my business.” He put his hand under her chin and pulled her lips to his. It was a sweet kiss, a gentle kiss, and Claire knew she could break away from it, could go on pretending there was nothing between the two of them but a light hint of flirtation. But there was no denying the passion, a passion that made her whole body quake as Alec began to explore her mouth with his tongue, claiming not only her lips but all of her.

  She bit his lip, and his arms tightened around her. When one hand moved from around her waist to cup her breast gently, her knees started shaking, and Alec pulled her on top of him as he sat down on the sofa, pushing her suitcases off onto the floor as he did so. Circling and teasing the nipple of her breast through the linen of the shirt, he whispered, “I need to see more of you.”

  Any feelings of self-consciousness Claire had ever had around Alec were suspended. For how long, she didn’t know, but she wanted to revel in the time while she had it, to let him enjoy her body just as she wanted to enjoy his.

  Claire traced her lips down Alec’s jaw and neck, bestowing kisses on him as his fingers moved down the buttons of her shirt. He pushed his hands into her blouse, moving his strong, warm fingers to the snap on her bra.

  Claire watched, her ache for him almost uncontrollable, as his tongue licked her nipple before he took all of her in his mouth.

  Desperate to feel his skin against hers, Claire tugged at his shirt, pulling it out of his jeans and pushing it up, then running her nails along his hard stomach. As she shifted her weight, she felt the hardness of him pulse under her, and she pressed herself against him.

  “Oh, Claire,” Alec said, letting go her swollen breast to slip his shirt over his head. “You’re everything perfect, did you know that?”

  In answer, she kissed him, and as their tongues teased one another, Claire felt Alec’s hand pop the button on her khakis and ease the zipper down, his fingers brushing against her. Still kissing him, she rose a little, needing for him to be able to touch her. Her own fingers went to the button on his jeans, and she felt the bulge of him just as his fingers slipped under the white cotton of her panties.

  Two fingers went inside her, as his thumb found the locus of her desire, and he taunted her with his touch. She rubbed her face against his hair, cradling him against her chest.

  She cried out as his hand pulled away from her, but he used both hands to pull her pants off, then stretched her legs out across the couch as he shed his own jeans.

  He was standing beside her, wearing only his briefs, and she couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t let go the sight of his muscular body. She reached out and traced her fingers along him, feeling the uneasy heat raging through her own body as she watched him shudder.

  “You’re so beautiful,” she said to him. She took his hands and pulled him down on the couch, loving the feel of his whole body stretched out against hers. His briefs were the only thing keeping them apart, and when she felt the rock-solidness of him move against her, she reached to pull the shorts down.

  He moved her hand back up to his stomach, and began caressing her along the length of her inner thighs, making her catch her breath.

  “Claire,” he whispered. “I don’t have anything.”

  It doesn’t matter, she wanted to say. She wanted him inside of her, damn the consequences. She reached to touch him again, then stopped. “A friend…um, she gave me something. It might be in my purse.”

  Alec rolled off her as she lowered herself to the floor andcrawled past the suitcases to her purse a couple of feet away. She dug through it frantically, finally spilling the contents as Alec leaned down over her, tracing kisses along her back and moving her legs apart as he touched the inner core of her again.

  She had just decided to give herself up to the storm that was brewing inside of her when she saw the red, foilwrapped condom under a stack of bank receipts.

  She handed it to him, and suddenly what hadn’t seemed possible was really happening. Within a moment, he was inside her. She gripped his shoulders as he pushed against her.

  “My sweet Claire,” he said. “You feel so good.”

  All her words were flying away, replaced only by the powerful sense of being taken somewhere where her language, her gift of words, would not help her. She had only Alec as her guide, only Alec to help her navigate whatever terrain they were entering.

  He rolled over, pulling her on top of him, clutching her hips as she felt herself losing control. She, who’d kept her emotions and her body locked up as tightly as possible, now felt her world collapse, crying out at the wave that built and crashed inside of her. She slumped against Alec, his hands pulling her hair, and his lips whispering her name again. He drove into her twice more before he, too, was still.

  She blinked against the tears she was threatening to shed, then buried her face in Alec’s chest as she felt his arms encircle her and felt the brush of his lips against her hair.

  She didn’t say anything, just drifted into sleepy daydreams as they curled together on the floor, saying nothing.

  “I love you, Claire,” she thought she heard him whisper, but by that time she had fallen too far asleep to be able to respond in kind.

  HANK HEARD the obnoxious blast of the newsroom phone and reached blindly for it.

  “Weekly Tribune,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t betray his sleepiness.

  “Wake up, Rip Van W.,” Mick barked. “My damn boat’s been stolen.”

  Hank took a second to process the information. “But you aren’t supposed to be on your boat anyway.”

  “Look. Right in front of you is the disk with my stories.” Hank looked. Unbelievable, but it was there. “Now, are you going to help me or not?”

  “Let’s think this through,” Hank said, rubbing his eyes a little. “Is anything else missing?”

  “Some stuff out of the fridge, but there’s an ugly old Maverick parked in my driveway. There was also a mascara tube in my bathroom.” Mick’s voice became even more outraged. “There hasn’t been mascara in my bathroom since my wife left.”

  Hank moved to forestall the monologue that went with any mention of Mick’s ex-wife, but he was too late.

  “She said, I’m not coming back until you learn there’s more to life than newspaper stories and fishing rods.”

  “Now that your boat’s been stolen, maybe you won’t be fishing as much,” Hank said.

  “I even stay stocked up on the foods she likes, in case she decides to stop by,” Mick continued.

  “Have you called the police?” Hank interrupted.

  “Not yet,” Mick said. “I wanted to call you first, find out if you had any ideas.”

  Thinking that was one of the most flattering, if not one of the smartest, things he’d heard in a while, Hank was about to answer Mick when the other line rang.

  “Just a second,” he said. “Weekly Tribune.”

  A country voice answered his hello. “I’m looking for Lissa Barnard.” “She won’t be in until Monday,” Hank said. If her social calendar permits, he added silently. “I ca
n take a message, though.”

  “This is Eddie, of Eddie’s Garage and Parts Shop,” the man said. “I had kind of a slow day over here at the shop, and I was able to get that red baby of hers running again. It’s supposed to be the customer’s own fault when their car’s damaged by towing, but tell her I’m not going to charge her anything. She can just bring my Maverick back.”

  “Your Maverick?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t usually loan cars,” Eddie said. “She was with her sister’s old boyfriend, though—the one who went to the rain forest—and she was trying to get them back together again.”

  “She’s nice that way,” Hank said.

  “Maybe if the sister won’t take this guy back, the two of them could go out,” Eddie said. “They looked cute together.”

  “Try not to think along those lines, Eddie,” Hank said. He thanked him for his call, then clicked back to Mick.

  “Did you get dictation straight from Rome or something?” Mick asked.

  “I know where your boat is,” Hank said. “Do you know how to get to Miranda Craig’s house on the lake?”

  “I know how to get there by boat.”

  “You don’t have a boat, Mick. By land.” Hank paused to let Mick think, and as he did, a movement at the door caught his eye. A floppy disk with a stuck-on label was shoved under the door and onto the carpet. “Hang on,” he told Mick and dropped the phone onto the desk. He threw the door open just in time to see a black-haired girl in a short, bouncy skirt and fashionable jacket straighten up from her crouch on the floor. When she saw Hank, she jumped.

  “You scared me to death,” she said, putting her hand over her heart. “Claire said no one would be here when I came to drop the disk off.”

  “Claire said…” Hank repeated. “Listen, do you know how to get to Miranda Craig’s place on the lake?”

  The woman nodded. “Her cousin drove me out there once.”

  Hank ushered her into the office, to a spot by the door. “Don’t move,” he said. Picking up the phone again, he said, “Mick, I’ve got our guide. Her name is um…”

  “Allie,” she supplied.

  “Allie,” he said into the phone. “We’re on our way.”

  “Let’s go,” he told Allie, following her out into the hall. He flicked off all but one row of lights, then locked the door behind him. He had taken just a few steps when he stopped and turned back. “Forgot something,” he told Allie, unlocking the door and slipping back into the semidarkened room. He pulled open a drawer at his desk and took an unlabeled floppy out from under some files near the back.

  “Now we’re ready,” he said as he rejoined Allie in the hall. The two of them started on their way.

  11

  HAD HE EVER TOLD a woman he loved her? His mother, but even that was only on special occasions. That wasn’t what he was talking about, though. Had he ever told a woman woman?

  He hadn’t. He’d dated a lot of women, liked some of them an awful lot, but nothing about them had made him want to do anything but run in the other direction the minute he saw they wanted to be something more than good-time girlfriends. If he’d pictured himself voicing the phrase at all, it was to some nameless perfect woman in some incredibly fantastic setting. Instead, he had said it to Claire Morgan, a woman whose flaws he now found irresistible. And they weren’t on the top of a skyscraper, fireworks going off around them. They were on the floor of Miranda Craig’s guest room. And she hadn’t even heard him.

  Alec eased himself away from Claire and reached up to the bed for the blanket there. He wrapped it around her, looking at her again as she slept. Gently Alec lifted Claire onto the bed. She stirred a little as he held her, but had soon settled back into sleep. He headed for the shower, and he, who had never had an urge to burst into song in his entire life, had to restrain from humming the whole time he was in there. Being in love was one thing, but turning into a major-class goof was another.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, his hair freshly dried, his face clean shaven and his shirt crisp and pressed, Claire was still asleep. The cold-shower remedy had done nothing for him, and as much as Alec wanted to do nothing more than sit on the bed and stare at Claire, he thought he should probably do something a bit more constructive with his time. Old habits die hard, he told himself.

  He knew he couldn’t get his Miranda Craig story completely written before dinner, but he could start transcribing their talk, anyway. He flicked on his laptop, rewound the tape and plugged the headphones into the small tape recorder. He’d heard the first notes of Miranda’s voice when a guilty feeling made him look back toward Claire. Was he going to look like a jerk if she woke up and found him working? On the other hand, if he did nothing but sit and watch her sleep for the next hour or so, he was really going to look like someone with no inner resources.

  Slipping the headphones off, he rubbed his hand through his hair. Never had a woman made him question everything about himself. He couldn’t even transfer words from tape onto paper without indulging in some kind of love-stricken existential crisis. He rewound the tape to the very beginning again, put the headphones on and steeled himself to get to work. Force of habit made him crave a cola or coffee while he typed, and he leaned over to the minirefrigerator to see if there were any colas there.

  He pushed a bottle of Chardonnay out of the way to grab a diet cola, then snatched up the bottle, too, in case Claire wanted to have some when she woke up. There were some cut-up and covered chunks of cheese on the bottom shelf, as well as some chocolate confections that looked suspiciously like truffles. Alec added all this to his haul, then got up to move the stuff to the small table on the other side of the room. As he stood, his hip knocked off Claire’s collection of papers. Bending down to retrieve them, he remembered she said she was going to work on the south Ridgeville story.

  He looked at the first paragraph. “Terri McCormick used to play tag in the high grasses of the field next door to her house. She and her friends would chase each other, shrieking and squealing, until they fell exhausted onto the bumpy ground. They would lie there in giggling heaps, quieting only to listen for their mothers calling them to supper or to pay silent childish homage to the awesome sunsets in the sky far above them. McCormick, who is raising her own daughter in the same neighborhood, wishes her daughter could run, carefree, in that field. But she says for more than two decades harmful toxins have been dumped there, mostly under the cover of darkness, rendering that land and two other Ridgeville sites dangerously polluted, if not deadly.”

  Not bad, Alec thought to himself. A little prosy, maybe, but that could be cleaned up. He read the next paragraph, then sat down and slipped off the headphones. He read to the end and began the story again, the wine and cola warming unopened, the truffles and cheese still sitting covered on the desk.

  CLAIRE ALWAYS HAD incredibly vivid dreams, but this one had been something else all together. She and Alec had been together on the floor of the guest room, having the best sex she’d ever had in her whole life. The way her body felt even now, so well loved. She didn’t know you could dream physical sensations so accurately.

  Claire stretched a little, still mostly asleep, and pulled the covers around her. She snuggled tighter against the blanket, warm and scratchy against her bare skin.

  Her bare skin? Now she was awake. Claire sat up in bed, her heart racing, and peeked at herself under the blanket. Yes, she was completely naked. She looked around for Alec, then saw him, dressed for dinner and sitting at the desk with his back to her. If her nearsighted eyes weren’t deceiving her, he was looking at the pink pages of her story as he typed on his laptop.

  It was all too much. Claire sunk back into the bed, closing her eyes and feigning sleep again so she could dwell on what had happened in this room between the two of them. The way he had touched her, the way his mouth had traveled along her breasts, the sweet things he’d whispered to her. If she’d thought for a second that those were the fantasies of an overheated mind, waking up naked wa
s all the evidence she needed that their lovemaking had been real indeed. And had she heard him say he loved her as she drifted to sleep? Or had that part of it been a dream?

  Sitting up again, she saw that Alec was still absorbed in whatever he was doing. Clutching the blanket to her, she reached down from the bed and silently dragged one of her suitcases across the carpet. Her eyes strayed to her “comfort clothes”—bicycle shorts and a wildlife T-shirt in XL. She knew she should be trying to impress Alec with her new wardrobe, but after the tumultuous events of the day, she had a craving to be plain old Claire for a few minutes. She could at least wear this until it was time for dinner.

  She dressed in bed, and although she made as little noise as possible, she thought it was strange that Alec was so completely engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t seem to sense any stirring in the room at all. Not sure what to say to him, she settled for clearing her throat as she walked across the room. He didn’t hear her. She tried again, just two feet away from him, but still got no response.

  “Alec,” she said firmly. Expecting him to be startled, she saw he was so into whatever it was he was doing that the sound of her voice didn’t even phase him.

  He looked up at her and smiled, typing a few words even as he did so. “Did you sleep well?” he asked, turning back to the page. “You look great.”

  “I don’t think you looked at me,” she said.

  “Short tight black pants, shirt with some kind of endangered species you probably think we should save,” he said, his eyes still on the text and his fingers still moving across the keyboard. “Hang on till I get to a stopping place.” He went for another thirty seconds, then quit. Half standing up, he leaned over and gave Claire a full kiss on the mouth, then sat back down again and resumed work.