Balancing Act (Silhouette Special Edition)

by Darcy, Lilian

  “I’ve wanted to do this since I met you,” Brady said. He held her face between his hands and stole another kiss from her mouth, and then another. His eyes, blurred with need, learned her face by heart.

  “It isn’t that long ago,” she answered. Couldn’t even think, at the moment. Felt like hours…or like months. It wasn’t relevant, somehow. She touched him, hips and back and thighs, loving the hard warmth and the solid strength that her eager hands found.

  “Seems longer,” he said. “Seems…intense, you know, important, the time we’ve known each other.”

  “It has been, Brady.” She rested her cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, feeling the weight of his arms around her. “In a lot of ways, we jumped in at the deep end, because of the girls. I’ve tried—”

  “Not to. I know.” He kissed her hair and her temples, coaxing her to give him her mouth once more. She didn’t want to give it yet. She still needed the sound of his breathing, and his heart. Instead, she cupped her hand against his jaw and he began to kiss her palm, his lips soft and deliberately erotic, sending thrills chasing up her arm and radiating through her body. “We’ve tried to hold back,” he said. “To take this sensibly and carefully, but we didn’t anticipate—”

  “Yes. That it would be so hard. I keep wondering if it’s like stirring up a pond with a big stick. The water gets cloudy, and you don’t know what’s really there.”

  The words came spilling out, giving her vertigo. It was terrifying to talk this way, even when she hid behind obscure comparisons with muddy ponds. She took a breath, steeling herself to force out the starker questions, the ones closer to her heart. She couldn’t even look at him. She just needed the warm wall of his chest to lean on.

  “Are we just feeling like this because our daughters are twins?” she said. “Are we just trying to find a way for us to fit together because we want the girls to? Is it all wishful, not real?”

  There was a long beat of silence.

  “That’s too complicated, isn’t it?” he said slowly, at last.

  It probably was. He was right.

  Stop talking, Libby. Keep it to yourself. Safe inside.

  Nothing about this felt complicated tonight. It felt simple. A man and a woman, and chemistry so strong it was like a physical entity, a thick, magical webbing woven around them, a sorcerer’s spell.

  “Way too complicated,” he repeated. He brushed the hair back from her forehead, then tilted her chin upward in his cupped hand and softened his mouth against hers once more.

  It was so good. She wanted to disappear into the blind darkness of it for hours, without thinking, without feeling anything but this. She wanted his strength, his simple certainties, his casual generosity of spirit.

  All of these qualities were contained in the way he was touching her. Arms wrapped around her, body shored against hers, hard and male. Mouth giving, and giving again, pressing against her temples, her hair, her jaw, her neck. Hands exulting in the texture of her clothing and her skin, finding sensations that made him shudder and gasp against her mouth.

  He touched her breasts as if he already knew them, as if he’d wanted them forever, and had explored them in his dreams. He found the gap between top and skirt at her waist and slid his hands inside and up, cupping her, thumbing her nipples, lifting the weight of her breasts and bending his face to hold his hot mouth against them through the fabric of her clothing.

  Sensation ran over her like trickles of ice and fire, and she throbbed inside. She couldn’t open her eyes. Just couldn’t. They were so heavy with need. Her body whipped and twisted against him and she had to cling to him for balance, to keep them both anchored to the earth.

  “Libby, tell me to stop!” he whispered at last, after minutes…or maybe years.

  “Stop,” she said obediently, then, fierily honest, “No, don’t! Please don’t!”

  “I want to take you upstairs.”

  “I like upstairs.”

  “To bed.”

  “I know. I know, Brady.”

  He pulled away. “How can I do this?”

  She read the appeal in his face. He was asking her to help him save them both from this, in case it was a huge mistake. “How can you not?” she answered him. “Even if we stop, can we really go back?”

  “Less of a distance to travel back from just a kiss than from making love to you all night.”

  It was a blunt statement, Brady realized, as soon as he’d said it.

  But he wasn’t sorry.

  It had to be said.

  He couldn’t believe how good Libby felt in his arms, how lost in this and how giving she’d been. No games, no pretense, no hidden agenda, no secondary goals that she wanted to leverage with sex, the way Stacey always had.

  He wasn’t used to this. It was new, and it added hugely to the intensity of what he felt himself. Libby’s blind responsiveness had pulled him close to breaking point with a speed and power that left him breathless and trembling, and the only reason he was holding back now, after that forever-long kiss, was because of her, because she might regret it, or blame him for it, or get caught in the net of its complexities.

  He was sure that he wouldn’t. And anyhow, he didn’t care. He had the dizzy, heart-pounding confidence and carelessness of a man aching and throbbing and desperate for release, and there was just one tiny little part of his mind that had sense enough to know that he might not always feel this way, and that Libby almost certainly wouldn’t.

  So he’d said it, and now he needed her to help, to agree, to take the ball and run with it or, so help him, it would be too late.

  “Yes, okay. Yes.” She stepped back.

  Damn!

  A shudder rippled through her body. She sniffed, smoothed her skirt, tried to smile. “Yes,” she said again. “Thanks for that—uh—timely reminder. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” His voice hurt his throat. “Lord, Libby, don’t be sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I shouldn’t have needed you to talk sense into me.”

  “I shouldn’t have been so good at it!” he muttered.

  She laughed. “Is that some kind of no-means-yes scenario?”

  “Could have been,” he admitted. “I could…uh…probably still appreciate a really powerful argument from you about why I’m wrong, and why it’s more than okay for us to go upstairs and— If you’ve got one?” he added hopefully.

  She laughed again. Nervous. Shaken up by what had happened. He recognized how rocked she was by the intensity of what she’d felt.

  “I don’t think I do,” she said. “I think you were right. If nothing else, we need to sleep on this. Oh, bad word choice! I mean, we need to examine this, in a cooler light, and…probably…as you said…travel back.”

  “Maybe one of us should travel upstairs and take a cold shower.”

  “I’m going to go look at the girls,” Libby said. “They’re my compass. They keep me pointing steady.”

  “Let me finish here, then,” Brady answered. There were still the bench tops to be wiped. That had to be almost equivalent to a cold shower. “I’m imagining myself following you up the stairs and it…uh…leads to other ideas.”

  “Mm.” Libby didn’t want to admit that she found it all too easy to picture those ideas for herself, and backed out of the room quickly while she still had a chance of covering the distance.

  At the top of the stairs, she paused for a moment. Everything was quiet. No sounds from either of the girls. Brady always checked on Scarlett last thing before he went to bed, and there was no real need for her to do so. Still, for some reason she found her feet carrying her in the direction of Scarlett’s room, where she tiptoed to lean over the crib.

  Fast asleep. On her chest and her knees, with her head turned to one side and her bottom stuck up in the air. Colleen often slept the same way. It looked deeply uncomfortable, but apparently it wasn’t. Scarlett’s little quilt had come off, too. Libby tucked it around her shoulders again, over that hump of a b
ottom, and stroked her dark curls.

  She heard the whispered words fall from her mouth almost before she knew she was going to say them. “I love you, Scarlett.”

  Then she clung to the side of the crib until the strength came back into her legs, because she was so scared of the weight of her own feelings, so scared of how much power the future had to hurt her now.

  “I’m going to head straight out after breakfast to shop for a new dryer,” Brady said. “If you want to come. Thought we could see if we can pick up a Vietnamese cookbook, too, and some ingredients.”

  They’d all slept in this morning, and Brady and Libby had been lazy with their routine, getting the girls dressed and fed. It was already almost 9:30.

  “That would be fun,” Libby answered.

  Fun, and like walking on a knife blade, the way she was feeling this morning. Brady hadn’t touched her, and his smile had snapped on and off as if activated by a switch. When she poured two mugs of coffee, he stood back out of the way until she’d taken hers and moved out of range. Out of touching range. Out of body-heat range.

  She hadn’t expected to see so much regret in his body language, so much stiff-as-cardboard caution in the way he moved. He really wasn’t planning to let the electricity back into the air, today.

  Even the innocent presence of the girls couldn’t drain the tension away. Every time Libby looked at Scarlett, and when she picked her up to put her in the high chair, or lifted Scarlett’s bib and used it to wipe the messy cereal from around her little mouth, she thought of what Brady had said about “traveling back.”

  Everything you did for a child took you farther down the road toward feeling like a mother, toward loving like a mother, and Libby didn’t see how you could ever travel back from that. She was stuck. The rock and the hard place. She wanted to give Colleen a full and loving relationship with her twin, and yet she wanted to keep her own distance, to protect herself from loss, even while knowing it was already too late. Loving one twin meant loving the other, and she already did.

  As for Brady…

  Her heart and her stomach both flipped. Organs shouldn’t behave like acrobats. And a mouth shouldn’t have such a good memory. So they’d kissed. They’d acted on the chemistry. And they’d both agreed it was a bad idea. She should be grateful that he apparently wasn’t finding it as hard as she was to forget just how good and right it had felt between them last night.

  Why was it so hard for her? Why did her mouth taste him again, feel him again, purely because they both happened to put their lips to the rims of their coffee mugs at the same time? Why did even one of those short, blink-on-and-blink-off-again smiles of his arrow straight to her heart?

  She wasn’t used to this chemistry. That was part of it. Her feelings for Glenn hadn’t begun this way. She’d needed him for other reasons, seeing him as mature and successful and grounded, someone who wouldn’t let her down.

  In fact, Glenn’s sexual hunger had been too much for her at first. She’d been aware of him trying to rein it in, to control himself at each stage of their growing intimacy, to go slowly for her sake. He hadn’t asked her if that was what she’d needed or wanted, he’d made the decision himself.

  And he’d consciously taught her. “Feel this, Lisa-Belle. This is what happens to a man.”

  And strangely, his attempts to educate her, to romance her with lavish gestures and to go slow with her had had the opposite effect to the one he’d intended. She’d gotten more intimidated about sex, not less. She hadn’t felt able to put her needs and her feelings into words. It had taken them a while to get it right.

  With Brady, in contrast, she felt like a floodgate was about to break open.

  As agreed, they took the girls to the mall after breakfast and shopped for a new dryer, as serious as a bridal couple choosing their silverware pattern, but not nearly as physical. No stolen honeymoon kisses, no special looks. But the salesman assumed they were a couple, of course, and two people couldn’t look at the same dryer without standing pretty close, even when they had two little girls in strollers to get in the way.

  Brady made the final choice about the dryer, and arranged for the new machine to be delivered later that afternoon. Next, they went to a bookstore and found a South-East Asian cookbook with a section of recipes from Vietnam. They sat in the mall’s food court and had some lunch, looking through the cookbook for a couple of recipes to try tonight.

  The book itself looked almost good enough to eat, filled with gorgeous colour photographs of steaming hot dishes, garnished with glossy red chillies or bright green sprigs of coriander. Brady shifted his chair closer to Libby’s and slid the book across so that they could both look at it together, and his arm brushed hers as he turned a page.

  She didn’t move away. Couldn’t. Felt her body lean closer without consciously making it happen. His arm pressed against hers. Her insides crumbled, and she heard Brady let out a jerky breath.

  “Damn it, Libby,” he muttered, and his hand closed over hers. He turned a little, took the hand away again and wrapped his fingers tightly over the back of her chair, then looked into her face with suffering eyes and said, “Help me, here. I’ve been fighting all morning, and I’m aching now. Don’t make me do all the work!”

  Was that what his rigid distance had meant? She felt a sweet wash of relief that she knew was totally unwarranted. Okay, so they were on the same page, but it was blank, Wasn’t it? They’d agreed to leave it that way.

  “Rice paper rolls,” she answered, gabbling. “How about that? And beef with lemongrass. The girls have finished their lunch. We can go. If that’s what you want.”

  “Hell, it’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s painfully obvious what I want, and you know it, but we’ve talked about it, we’ve agreed, so, yeah…yeah, let’s do that.”

  There were several Oriental grocery stores along High Street, so as well as taking a detour through the supermarket, they stopped at one on the way home and shopped for the ingredients they needed, getting some advice from the pretty young woman at the register.

  “What adorable little girls you have!” she said.

  “She’s being tactful,” Brady murmured to Libby. “They’re not being adorable right now.”

  Since it was midafternoon by this time, Colleen and Scarlett had had enough of shopping, and were ready to go home. Freed from their strollers, they toddled around with busy, curious hands, eager to pull the unfamiliar items off the shelves. It took their parents twice as long as it should have done to find everything they needed.

  The twins were tired by the time Brady nosed his car into the garage.

  “Shall we sit them on the couch with a music video and a couple of toys while we put away the food?” he suggested. “Then take them up for a late nap?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  They put away the groceries together, careful in the same way they’d been careful this morning, giving each other too much space. Halfway through the task, the dryer arrived. Brady signed off on the delivery and helped the two men to get the new appliance into position in the basement. The toddler music video burbled away in the background, and Libby finally said, “I’ll go check on the girls. They’re being very quiet.”

  They were asleep together on the couch.

  Libby saw two little shoulders pressed against each other, four fans of black lashes feathered against four pink, satiny cheeks, and eight little limbs lost in a sea of masculine gray and white cushions. Colleen stood out in her bright pink leggings and top, with their white ribbons and little white stars. Scarlett, in navy, almost looked like another cushion.

  But their little faces were just the same, and when she bent closer, Libby discovered that they were breathing in unison. She heard two feather-soft sighs puff from two little noses, followed by two silent in-breaths, and saw two little chests rising.

  She heard Brady behind her. “Hey…” he said.

  “Yes, look,” she whispered back. “Come and look.” She held out her ha
nd to him. “And listen. They’re breathing together.”

  “Oh, wow! Oh, they are!”

  He came forward and they both watched the girls and their synchronized breathing for a long time, without saying a word.

  We should kiss, Libby thought. I want to. And he does. We’re not going to. But it feels so wrong just to stand here. So close, but not daring to touch. Feeling like this, we should hold each other, and—

  “We should cook,” Brady said.

  “We should,” she agreed quickly. “While they’re asleep.”

  It was fun. Something to do. Something to distract them and drain away the tension. The rice paper rolls were tricky, and Brady did better with them than Libby. He made a neat heap of ingredients, including shrimp, shredded cabbage and mint, in the middle of the stretchy circle of softened rice paper, and folded the whole thing into a neat, cylindrical package that stayed in shape.

  “There you go,” he said. “Vietnamese burrito.”

  Libby’s effort, in contrast, was a lumpy mess. She knew she’d have a lot more success with the main dish, which was more like the cooking she did every day and less like a craft project. Brady sliced the green onions for her, and inhaled chili and lemongrass with appreciation as he worked.

  “I like this stuff,” he said. “Reminds me of when we were there picking up Scarlett. My dad served there, too. He never talked about it much, but when he did, it was always about the flavors of the country. The smells and the sounds. The people. The rivers and the rice fields and the sea. He was protecting us, probably, from the stuff he didn’t want us to think about. He was…great that way.”

  His voice had roughened a little, and he twirled a green onion in his fingers without even seeing it.

  “You loved him a lot,” Libby blurted. Her hands stilled over the meat she was cutting, and she immediately wished she hadn’t said it.

  “We were pretty close,” he agreed, still twirling the green onion. “Only child, and all that. Only son.”