Everything But Marriage

by Dallas Schulze

  She knew better than to argue with him anymore, though. It wouldn't get her anywhere. He could hardly return the bubble bath, anyway. She was just going to have to make sure she proved worthy of the efforts he'd gone to. She didn't want him to ever have cause to regret all he'd done for her.

  She bent to turn on the taps, adjusting the water to something just short of scalding. It had been a long time since she'd had a chance to soak in a luxuriously full tub.

  Sprawled in a big leather recliner in the master bedroom, Devlin heard the hum in the pipes as Annalise turned the water on. He was aware of an almost imperceptible easing of tension. He'd more than half expected her to protest when she saw that there was more than a bed in the room.

  Actually, a bed was all he'd planned to buy, but it had occurred to him that she could hardly keep her clothes in that pathetic cardboard box. As an inveterate reader, he considered a lamp by the bed to be essential, which meant he had to get a table to put it on.

  The bed required sheets, and while he was buying sheets, he'd realized that the bathroom had no towels. From there, it had been an easy step to soap and shampoo.

  He leaned his head back, his book forgotten. He couldn't quite remember when he'd enjoyed shopping as much as he had this afternoon. Not that he hadn't derived a definite satisfaction in choosing the things that had gone into the house right from the start. But it hadn't been quite the same.

  He'd found himself wondering what Annalise's taste was like. Would she prefer a floral design on her sheets or did she like the sharp edges of geometries? What colors did she like?

  He heard her shut the water off. She'd be stepping into the tub now. She'd probably pinned her hair up

  on top of her head, but there'd be a few tendrils that managed to escape. The bathroom would be slightly steamy, lending a soft-focus look to her pale skin.

  He closed his eyes, wishing he didn't know quite so clearly what she looked like without her clothes. Odd, how when he'd had her naked in the shower with him, he'd felt not the slightest trace of sexual awareness. His only concern had been to get her warm, and he'd thought he noticed little more than that she was too thin.

  But suddenly, he was remembering other things. Like the softness of her breasts pressed against his arm, the sleek length of her legs, the intriguing triangle of curls at the top of her thighs.

  He shifted uncomfortably in the chair, his eyes snapping open. His jeans were suddenly too tight. With a groan, he stood up, dropping the book onto the bed as he strode to the window.

  He was acting like a randy teenager, getting hard just because a woman happened to be taking a bath a couple of rooms away. He'd had eight years to conquer his random sexual urges, eight years to contemplate the high cost of his carelessness about whom he slept with.

  And in the year since leaving prison, he'd managed to maintain that iron control. Sexual release wasn't worth the potential price it extracted. He'd channeled everything he had into building this house, into purging himself of eight years of hell.

  It wasn't as if he hadn't seen women he found attractive this past year. He'd contemplated the advantages of establishing a pleasant, no-strings-attached

  relationship with some mature woman, based on little more than satisfying a mutual physical need.

  But he hadn't quite figured out how to go about establishing such a relationship—he could hardly take out an ad. Besides, sooner or later, most women wanted something more. They generally craved the kind of emotional ties he could never give.

  So he'd clamped the lid on his sexual needs. He hadn't found it all that difficult. Until now. Maybe it was the vulnerability in Annalise's eyes or the way she nibbled on her lower Up when she was thinking. Or maybe it was the fragile build of her that made him want to see if his hands could span her waist or just how neatly her breast would fit his palm.

  He wanted to see her wearing nothing but that extravagant length of hair draped over her body. He wanted to wind his fingers in it and pull her close. He wanted to feel her mouth parting under his and her thighs opening to accept him into her.

  "Damn!" The word was a groan. Devlin spun away from the window, forcing the images from his mind. He had to think of something else. Like whether or not he had enough shingles to finish the house or what color to paint the living room.

  Or the soft glow of Annalise's skin as she stq)ped from the bath.

  Growling a low, frustrated curse, he strode from the bedroom, turning toward the back door. Once outside, he drew in a deep lungful of cool night air. A brisk walk. That was what he needed. A nice brisk walk. In ten or twelve miles he'd have managed to

  forget all about the woman he'd just asked to live in his house for an indefinite period of time.

  Annalise awoke to discover she was sharing her pillow with a purring cat. Seeing that she was awake, Beauty stood up, chirped a greeting and jumped off the bed, hitting the floor with a thump. The sound made Annalise smile. So much for the silent slink of the cat. Of course. Beauty was at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. It was probably pretty hard to slink with a belly the size of hers.

  Her smile faded, one hand creeping to her flat stomach. She snatched her fingers away, forcing her thoughts to focus solely on the coming day. Today she was going to get started on proving to Devlin that she was something more than a charity case. He'd hired her to organize his records and deal with suppliers, and that was just what she was going to do.

  It was the most content day Annalise had spent in months. Not only did she have a roof over her head and a job, she felt as if she were getting herself back. She was starting to recover the determined optimism that had Vsgt her going through assorted foster homes and life's assorted curves.

  She'd fallen about as low as it was possible to get this past year, but she wasn't going to dwell on the past. Neither was she quite ready to look too far into the future. But she could focus on each day as it came, which was a step up from where she'd been for so long, when one day had meant nothing more or less than the last.

  She spent the morning sorting receipts into neat little piles on the breakfast bar. She paused long enough to make sandwiches for lunch, taking Devlin's out to him when he showed no sign of stopping for the meal. He accq)ted the plate from her with a quiet thank-you. Annalise didn't linger, sensing that he preferred to eat alone.

  The afternoon was a continuance of the morning, with stacks of receipts soon covering the tiled bar. It was starting to register that Devlin had already spent a small fortune on the house. Everything had been paid for outright, whether it cost three dollars or three thousand.

  Just where had he gotten this kind of money? she thought, fingering the bill for the fixtures in the master bath. She hadn't given it much thought until now, but he'd made no mention of going to work. His only work seemed to be on the house.

  Maybe he just happened to be on vacation at the moment and was using the time to get some work done on his house? She frowned. Possible, but she didn't think so. Wouldn't he have made some mention of that when he asked her to work for him?

  And come to think of it, how many people could afford to hire someone to sort receipts and deal with suppliers? She didn't doubt that he'd invented the job to help her get on her feet and she appreciated the generosity, nevertheless that sort of generosity didn't come cheap. The salary he had offered her wasn't extravagant, but it was more than a pittance.

  It was none of her business, of course, where his money came from. Yet she couldn't help but be a bit

  curious. An inheritance, perhaps? Maybe his parents had been wealthy, like Bill's.

  But Devlin didn't have any of the vaguely privileged air that had been so much a part of Bill. There'd been a sort of naivete about her former husband that stemmed from his inability to believe that life didn't just naturally go the way he wanted it to. Bill had always been suq)rised and a little hurt when things went wrong.

  There was nothing of that about Devlin. On the contrary, there was a certain wariness about him,
as if he r^arded life as more of an adversary, something he couldn't really afford to trust.

  She put down the receipt, reminding herself again that Devlin's finances were not her concern. He'd asked her to organize his receipts, not handle his checkbook. But a little judicious probing couldn't do any harm.

  "You really can cook." Devlin took another bite of fried chicken as if confirming the truth of his comment.

  "You seemed to enjoy the pasta salad last night," Annalise reminded him. "Did you think that was all I could make?"

  "Well, it could have been a fluke."

  Perched on a ladder ten feet off the ground for most of the day, Devlin had had plenty of time to consider his understandable but unwanted reaction to Annalise. And he'd decided that the only way to handle it was to ignore it.

  Part of the problem was simply that he wasn't accustomed to having an attractive woman constantly underfoot. Familiarity didn't only breed contempt. It also bred—well, familiarity. In a few days, he'd hardly notice Annalise as a woman.

  It had all sounded quite simple when he was thinking about it this afternoon. Now, looking at the soft oval of her face, he felt a twinge of doubt. Maybe the air was thinner near the roofline and it had affected his brain.

  It was hard to envision noticing Annalise St. John as anything other than a woman. There was something so feminine about her. It was there in the soft line of her jaw, in the delicate line of her neck.

  He dragged his eyes away from her, frowning down at his plate. It was a simple matter of mind over H-bido.

  "Do you have any family besides your sister?"

  Annalise's question dragged Devlin's attention from his increasingly tangled thoughts. She was looking at him expectantly.

  "Besides Kelly?" It took him a moment to shift gears. "No. Our mother died when Kelly was twelve."

  "That's a tough age to lose a mother. How old were you?"

  "Twenty-two. I'd already left home." And had just started serving time for murder. But there was no need to tell her that.

  "What about your father? Did your sister stay with him?"

  "What is this? Twenty questions?" Devlin pushed his plate away, contained violence in the gesture. He

  didn't like being reminded that Kelly had been left alone with that crazy old man. He didn't like remembering how badly he'd failed her when she'd needed him.

  "I'm sorry." Annalise set her fork down, her appetite vanishing at his quick flare of anger. "I didn't mean to be nosy."

  "No, wait." Devlin's hand closed over her wrist when she started to rise. "I'm the one who's sorry. I shouldn't have snaried at you like that."

  "I didn't mean to pry." The smile she gave him held an edge of uncertainty that made Devlin's anger turn inward.

  "You asked a perfectly normal question. You just... touched a nerve. That's all."

  "I'm sorry."

  She didn't say anything else, didn't give him an anticipatory look, didn't do anything to imply that she expected more of an explanation than he'd given. So why was it that he found himself talking again?

  "Kelly was left with our... father." It was hard to say the word, hard to connect it with the harsh old man he remembered.

  As far back as he could recall, it had been impossible to think of Seth Russell as his father. Fathers played softball with their sons and taught them how to drive. They didn't beat six-year-olds nearly unconscious, purging them of their sins.

  "He was abusive," he said.

  "How awful. Did he abuse you?"

  "Yes." The simple word held a wealth of old memories, old hurts. "But he never hit Kelly. I stayed as

  long as I did because of Kelly, and he never hit her in all those years."

  "How old were you when you left?"

  "Eighteen." Devlin was hardly aware of Annalise's hand closing over his, her slender fingers trying to soothe the pain she sensed in him. "Kelly was eight. I didn't think she knew what had been happening, but she didn't cry when I told her I was leaving. She didn't ask me to stay."

  "You were close?"

  "Very. Mother was.. .well, she wasn't really around, even though she was physically there. I practically raised Kelly. I shouldn't have left. But I was afraid that if I stayed, I was going to kill him."

  "I'm sure Kelly understood."

  "Yeah. But that didn't do her a lot of good."

  "Did he abuse her? After you left?"

  "After Mother died." Devlin stood up, his rage too deep to allow him to stay still. He paced over to the back door, staring out the screen at the darkness beyond the porch Ught. "She doesn't talk about it much."

  Annalise watched him, her eyes dark with compassion. She knew what it was to blame yourself when someone you loved was hurt. That deep-down feeling that you could have prevented it somehow. If only you'd said or done the right thing. If only...

  And all the "if onlys" in the world couldn't change what had happened. She'd felt that way when her parents died, sure that if she'd just eaten her broccoli hke her mother had asked her to do that last night.

  then their car wouldn't have skidded on a patch of ice and slammed into a telephone pole.

  "You can't blame yourself," she said finally, wishing she had the right to go over and smooth the tension from his shoulders, to put her arms around him and help ease his pain.

  "I can't?" He turned to look at her, his eyes dark and bitter. "I left her there. She was my little sister. She trusted me. I should have been there for her."

  "Did you know what was happening?"

  "No."

  No, Kelly had written him cheerful little letters that never hinted at the hell she was living. She'd continued to write even when he'd stopped replying. He couldn't bear to tell her he was in prison, and he'd convinced himself that she would be better off thinking he'd forgotten her. But he hadn't been able to bring himself to cancel the post office box to which Kelly was writing. Nor to tell Reed to stop forwarding her letters. Sooner or later, she'd quit writing, leaving him completely alone.

  She hadn't quit writing and he'd treasured each letter, reading them over and over again until they'd threatened to fall apart in his hands. He'd tried to imagine what she looked like as she grew from the freckled eight-year-old he'd left behind into a young woman. He'd pictured her going to dances, laughing with her friends, graduating high school.

  Instead, she'd quit school rather than deal with then-father's anger at her wasting her time getting an education. She'd endured his religious fanaticism, his pe-

  riodic attempts to cleanse her of the devil that dwelled within every female by beating the sins from her.

  She'd survived and managed to escape. She had a husband who worshiped the ground she walked on and a beautiful baby. When Clay started school, she planned to go to college.

  "Where is Kelly now?' AnnaUse's question shook him out of his thoughts.

  "She lives in Remembrance."

  "Is she happy?"

  "Yes." He could answer that without hesitation. "She's married and very happy."

  "But you still blame yourself for what your father did."

  "I should have been there," he said flatly, allowing no room for self-forgiveness.

  "I seem to recall someone telling me recently that it didn't do much good to spend too much time worrying over the past," Annalise said thoughtfully. "Something about the past being past and nothing could change it."

  Devlin stared at her, caught off guard by having his own words so neatly turned against him.

  "Very clever," he said softly, his mouth starting to curve.

  "I thought so." She looked so smug that his smile widened to something that might almost have been called a grin.

  Annalise felt her breath catch. She'd wondered how he would look if he really smiled. She hadn't been prepared for the change the expression wrought in his lean features. If she'd thought him attractive before.

  she now realized the word was too anemic to apply. He was... devastating.

  His smile revealed two deep d
imples that creased his cheeks and banished the rather stem forbidding look he usually showed the world. He suddenly looked younger, approachable. The loneliness that haunted his eyes disappeared, replaced by a gleam that made them more blue than gray.

  He looked altogether different, entirely too attractive. She felt a warming in the pit of her stomach that could have been, but wasn't, something perilously close to desire. She'd never felt anything quite like it before.

  She swallowed hard and reminded herself that she had a life to get in order. And she certainly wasn't going to complicate the process by letting a mere sexual attraction get in the way.

  "Okay, so now that you've heard my life story, what's yours?" Devlin leaned one hip against the counter and looked at her expectantly.

  "Mine?" Annalise shrugged. "There isn't that much to tell." At least not that much she was willing to tell.

  "Your parents?"

  "Dead. They were killed in a car wreck when I was eight."

  "That's tough."

  "Yes. They didn't have any relatives who were willing to take me so I was put in a foster home." She ran her thumbnail along the edge of the table, remembering. "The Stomans. They were good people. I was with them for a year and then I went to live with the

  Polachecks. They had eight children of their own. Sometimes, it seemed as if they had so many kids in and out of that house that they hardly knew which were theirs, and which were friends. I'd never been part of a big family. It was nice."

  "How long were you with them?" Devlin asked, trying to picture her as a child. Thin, long legged, her face dominated by those big blue-green eyes. She must have had long hair even then, but it would have been finer, more flyaway.

  "I stayed with the Polachecks almost two years. I think they'd have kq)t me longer, but Mr. Pola-check's company transferred him to a new job in another state. So then I went to stay with the Johnsons. They were considering adoption. I heard them talking about it, but they decided they wanted to adopt a younger child, instead of one that was already half-grown.

  "Then it was the Mannings. That was for three years. They had a horse. Then the Sanfords, but that was only for a few months. It turned out Mr. Sanford had been borrowing money from his company's retirement fund.