by Cindy Gerard
Dumbly, she followed the motion of his hand as he reached behind her and turned off the burner on the stove.
“Oh,” she said. “Um,” she added, articulate as ever.
He relieved her of her spatula. “Do you have to go to work today?”
She had an answer for that. And as soon as the sludge cleared out of her brain, she’d do her darnedest to give it.
He was grinning as he took her hand and, walking backward, led her out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the bedroom. “One nod for yes, two for no,” he instructed as if he was dealing with the village idiot. Which, of course, he was. “Can you do that for me?”
She could. She did.
“Yes? You have to work?”
Another nod as they cleared the bedroom door.
“What time do you have to be there?”
She needed to blink but she didn’t want to miss even a nanosecond of the view. His smile was playful, his blue eyes teasing but telling what he had on his mind. So was the tenting action going on below the waistband of his boxers.
Oh, joy!
“Ten.” She wet her lips and swallowed. “Thirty.”
When the back of his knees hit the bed, so did the rest of him. He tugged her backward with him until she was sprawled on top of him.
“So what do you say?” She wasn’t the only one who shuddered when his hand tunneled up under her top and found her bare breast. “You think I’ve got time to tip the cook?”
“Ve haf vays of making you talk.” Leslie loomed over Phoebe’s desk at noon that same day, a dark scowl in place, one eyebrow cocked in her best maniacal interrogator impersonation. “Now you vill tell me zee truth if you ever vant to zee your homeland again. Did you or did you not get zome last night?”
“Yes!” Phoebe shouted in a dramatically staged confession, giving up and joining in on the silly game Leslie had been playing since Phoebe had stumbled into the library, loopy with love and muzzy-brained from amazing, knee-weakening sex. “I admit it! Is that what you wanted to hear? We did the big nasty! Satisfied?”
Leslie broke into a broad grin. “The question is, are you?” She laughed then and so did Phoebe. “Okay. Asked and answered. So give. I need details.”
Phoebe slumped back in her chair, a happy, boneless lump, and hugged herself. “Not a chance. It’s way too good to share.”
“Uh-oh.” Suddenly serious, Leslie eased a hip on the corner of the desk. “You know what you’re getting into here, don’t you, sweetie?” she asked softly.
Recognizing her tone for concern, Phoebe sobered, drew a deep breath. “I do. I’ll be fine.”
And she would be.
“You’ve fallen in love with him,” Leslie concluded gently.
It wouldn’t do any good to deny it. “Yeah. I’ve fallen in love. And I’m going to enjoy every single moment of it for as long as it lasts.”
She rose, walked around her desk and tugged a resource book from the top of the bookshelf. “If it’s just for today, or for a week or however long Daniel wants it to last, I’m going to enjoy it.”
Leslie’s silence relayed more apprehension.
“Look, Les, I’m not foolish enough to think that he loves me. He likes me. A lot. He likes making love to me,” she added and felt her toes curl inside her shoes. “But I don’t have any illusions about where this is heading.”
No matter what Claudia and Ash had said last night—maybe even because of what they’d said—she’d taken a long look at things on her way to work and finally understood that Daniel did not want to fall in love with her.
She rounded her desk, sat back down and hugged the book to her breast. “He likes his life the way it is. He likes me because, unlike his family, I don’t put any pressure on him to change. He can be himself with me, which means that he can leave when the wanderlust hits him or when he needs an adrenaline fix that can only be satisfied by climbing to the top of a mountain or diving off a cliff.”
She sniffed, ran her thumb along the book’s binding. “And I’m okay with that. I’m going to take whatever time he’ll give me.
“Does that make me pathetic?” she asked with a shrug, then answered her own question. “I don’t think so. I think that for the first time in my life it makes me brave.”
She met her friend’s eyes. “I’m tired of living on the world, Les. I want to live in it. I want to experience it. And I want every experience with Daniel Barone that I can get.”
Leslie let out a deep breath. “He’s a fool if he leaves you.”
“No. He’s a kind, funny, sexy, honest man. It wouldn’t be honest for him to compromise who he is. And it wouldn’t be fair for me to ask him to.”
Leslie forced a smile. “Well. At least make sure that when he walks—if he walks—he knows he’s walking away from the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Oh, I intend to,” she said, her mind already wrapping around a scenario that would ensure she’d be on Daniel Barone’s mind for a long, long time to come.
Daniel lay in the dark, aware that Phoebe was awake beside him. It was after midnight on a Friday night. They were in his bed tonight. The super king had added dimensions to their lovemaking that wouldn’t have been possible in her standard double. So had their choice of reading material. Earlier, while she’d read an article in one of his National Geographic Explorers he’d read a love scene from one of the romance novels she always carried with her in her purse. Well, what choice had he had? He’d had to take her back to bed and put his own spin on that hot little scene.
Now she was soft, naked and as spent as he was. They’d just thoroughly exhausted each other again, so he didn’t know what was keeping her awake. He had a pretty good handle, however, on the reason he was wide-eyed and restless.
It was time he was moving on. Time to be moving out. He didn’t have a single obligation that required his presence here in Boston. So why was it so hard to leave her?
At first, he’d used the excuse that he was worried about her. But he’d hired a locksmith and her whole house was now as secure as Fort Knox. He’d spent some time at the police station and they’d promised him they’d have a little “off the record” chat with Jason Collins. He’d taught her everything he could think of to make sure she could defend herself against the creep.
Then, he’d been sticking around for Karen’s party. Well, that had passed over a week ago, just before he’d lost his mind completely and ended up in Phoebe’s bed.
Now he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. And that was the part that worried him. He kept finding other reasons to stay. There was a new movie playing, one she actually wanted to see. Then he’d found out that she’d never been to a baseball game. Well, come on, it had been his duty to take her to Fenway. And then Claudia had called with extra tickets to a concert in the park. Phoebe loved concerts in the park. So, of course, he’d taken her.
Yeah. He’d found a lot of things to do with her, but mostly they talked. God, he loved to talk to her. And they made love. She was so incredible. So open and responsive in bed, so undemanding out of it. She hadn’t asked him about the future. But then, he hadn’t expected her to. Not Phoebe. She’d never ask him for what he couldn’t give. And he just couldn’t be what she needed.
There was really nothing else he could do, short of throwing a few things in his flight bag, hitting the road and picking up where he’d left off on a life he liked just fine, instead of lying here trying to fabricate some reason to stay a little longer.
Yet when she sighed heavily beside him, his heart picked up a beat at the possibility that she might be about to say something, anything, that would make him change his mind. Something to give him a reason to stay a little longer.
Just a little longer.
Ten
“You’re thinking awfully hard. What’s on your mind?”
She turned her head on the pillow and with sleepy, sated eyes smiled up at him. “I’ve just made a decision.”
Play it cool, Daniel told
himself as he spread his fingers across her bare tummy and kneaded gently. “You’ve decided that you like sex?”
“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s okay, I guess. Ouch,” she yelped then laughed when he tweaked her hip. “If you’re going to get all broody about it, I love sex. With you.”
“Ditto.”
“Such a way you have with words,” she teased, turning on her side and smiling at him.
He traced a finger around the shell of her ear. “So, what’s this big decision?”
“Well, I’ve decided that life was not meant to be a spectator sport.”
She averted her gaze to his throat, as if she was debating what to say to clarify that statement. On a bracing breath, she met his eyes again. “My mom is an alcoholic. Sometimes, when I was little, she was a mean one.” She paused, looked away again. “Sometimes she could be very generous and loving, but mostly, she was verbally abusive and cruel.
“No.” She touched a hand to his jaw, then withdrew it and tucked it under her chin. “Don’t look like that.”
He knew how he looked. Angry and sorry and as though he wished he would have been around for her when she’d been going through that hell.
“I’m not telling you this to elicit sympathy. I just want you to understand that I learned real fast to sort of blend into the woodwork. It was great as a self-preservation technique, but the residual effects slopped over into the rest of my life. It’s why I tend to watch from the shadows, too much of a coward to come out and play.
“Let me finish.” She flattened three fingers against his lips this time when he started to interrupt her again. “I have been a spectator. You, on the other hand— Oh, how I wish I could be more like you.”
He kissed her fingertips, wrapped them in his hand. “I can think of a number of reasons why I’m glad you’re not. For instance, I like how you’re so soft here.” His hand found her breast under the sheet, then moved to cup and caress her saucy bottom. “And here.”
“Yeah, well, I like that you like that, but I was referring to the way you submerge yourself in life, the way you mix it up and dive right into the thick of things. You’re so brave, Daniel. You aren’t afraid to face down your greatest fears and then conquer them.”
He didn’t even know what to say. He didn’t think of himself as brave. Mostly he thought of himself as selfish. He did what he did because it was fun and because he had nothing—no commitment, no ties—keeping him from it.
“Now me, on the other hand… Well, watching the popcorn bag explode in my microwave is about as exciting as my life ever gets.”
She levered herself up on an elbow. “I want to break the mold,” she said decisively. “I’m tired of me. I’m tired of my life. It’s been nothing but an endless string of Seinfeld reruns.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Seinfeld?”
“You know. That old sitcom about nothing? That’s my life. Nothing. I want to do something to change it. Something wild, something scary. Something—”
“—that convinces you about something I already know about you? That there’s more to you than you’ve ever let yourself be,” he concluded gently.
“Yeah. Exactly that.”
She lay down again, crossed her arms over her breasts and stared at the ceiling.
She looked so cute in her determination, but he didn’t want to make light of it. This was a huge decision for her. “Anything particular come to mind? Anything that—”
She turned her head to look at him. “—that just the thought of doing scares me to death?”
Her eyes were so wide, so bright with thoughts of staring down her greatest fears that he had to smile. “That’d be a start. So what are you thinking? There’s a great roller coaster over at—”
“Skydiving,” she whispered, sounding as if she was afraid if she said it too loud, he might actually think she meant to do it.
The funny thing was, he did. “Skydiving? You’re sure?” he asked with a lift of his eyebrow.
“Are you kidding? I’m definitely not sure. But it’s what I need to do. I can’t think of anything that terrifies me more.”
He regarded her with new interest, understood the resolve she had mustered to even suggest the idea. He was going to do this for her, he decided right there and then. He was going to make sure she proved to herself just how brave she really was.
“Okay,” he said and promised himself he wouldn’t let her back out of it. “I’ve got a friend just outside of Cambridge. He runs a skydiving school there. It’s where I got certified. I’ll set it up. How about this weekend?”
“This weekend?” she squeaked as he lifted her then shifted her until she was straddling him in all of her soft, naked glory.
“We’ll jump tandem the first time. I’ll be with you every inch of the way.”
“The first time?”
He took her mind off her fear then. And took his mind off leaving. She’d just given him his reason to stay a little longer. Just a little longer, he promised himself as she settled over him, onto him, and took him deep.
As the four-passenger Cessna bumped down the runway, Phoebe sat on the floor where the seats used to be and tried to think about how blue the sky was overhead. She didn’t look at the big hole in the side of the plane that was covered only by a roll of canvas with plastic windows and held in place by Velcro. Soon that canvas was going to be rolled up and she was going to— Oh, God. She couldn’t think about it.
So she stared at the sign on the back of the pilot’s seat: Sit down, shut up and hang on!
Well, that wasn’t a problem. She had to sit; her legs wouldn’t support her. She couldn’t talk; she was scared speechless. And hang on? Like she would even consider letting go?
“Relax.” Beside her, in his black jumpsuit, helmet and goggles, Daniel squeezed her knee then double-checked the harness that would soon bind them together. “You’re going to love this.”
She reached deep for a smile. When he laughed, she knew how unconvincing she’d been. She did not love this. She did not love knowing that they were going to jump into space at eleven thousand feet and that the pilot would slow the plane to around ninety miles an hour, then cut the engine just before they jumped, which, in effect, gave them two chances to die on this little quest to rub out her yellow streak.
Another sign, this one above the canvas that was loosely referred to as a door, caught her terrified attention as they lifted off the runway: If riding in an airplane is flying, then riding in a boat is swimming. If you want to experience the element, get out of the vehicle.
She so did not want to get out of the vehicle. Not now that it was about to leave the ground. She closed her eyes and tried not to watch as the earth fell away and her stomach went into a marathon pitch and roll. Yes, she’d sat through the instructional video, and yes, it made her feel a little better to know that Daniel was a veteran of over two hundred jumps and was a certified instructor. It was the actual diving-to-the-ground part that was giving her trouble.
“Okay, Phoebe, it’s time.”
Already? Oh, God.
Funny thing about absolute terror. It affected everyone differently. In Phoebe’s case, it made her as malleable as a lump of clay. She sat like a slug as Daniel rolled up the canvas, then physically turned her toward the jump door before he sat down behind her, straddling her hips with his legs.
Everything registered in a blur then as he hooked them together and the pilot yelled over his shoulder, “Are you ready to skydive?” to which Daniel yelled back, “Yes!”
And the next thing she knew, her heart was in her throat and they were free falling through space. The following sixty seconds were a terrifying, exhilarating, breath-stealing blur. And then they were at four thousand feet and Daniel had pulled the rip cord on the parachute.
Suddenly, everything was silent and peaceful. She felt as if she was in suspended animation as they floated slowly toward the ground. And there was no more fear. Just a glorious, spectacular descent made s
weeter by the notion that quite possibly she wasn’t going to die after all.
She heard a voice, possibly hers, say, “This is incredible!” And then, in a landing so soft a baby would have slept through it, they were on the ground.
She was crying softly when Daniel unhooked their harness and started reeling in the chute. When he turned her to face him, she threw herself into his arms. “Thank you! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
He was grinning from ear to ear when she pulled away, wiping tears from her eyes. “When can we do it again?” she asked. “Do you think I could go solo next time?”
Phoebe was still pumped on an adrenaline high the next morning. She left Daniel in bed and jumped in the shower. After setting the coffee on to brew, she threw on an old tank top and cutoffs and headed for her studio in the basement.
Yesterday had been one wild day; the night had been even wilder. Once she’d made that first jump, she’d had to do another and then another. Never, ever, in her entire life had she experienced such unqualified exhilaration and such a sense of accomplishment. She couldn’t begin to put it into words. She’d been bouncing off the walls when they returned to Boston and her bed last night. And then, well, the thrills had started all over again.
Her life, suddenly, was the stuff that romance novels were made of and she was living every glorious moment to the fullest.
She’d just centered her clay on the potter’s wheel and her hands were gunky with slurry when she heard the stairs creak under the weight of Daniel’s footsteps.
A shiver of anticipation eddied through her. How could she want him again, after the way they’d spent the night tangled and sweaty in each other’s arms? Maybe because she was a different person now than she’d been before Daniel had charged into her life and saved her not only from Jason, but from spending the rest of her days in a dull and colorless void.
“Good morning,” he said softly as he came up behind her. His voice was husky. From those two little words, she understood that she wasn’t the only one with raging hormones this morning.