Trouble in Paradise

by Jennifer Greene

  Susan nipped back, wound her arms around his waist and looked up at him. “I want to talk to you.”

  “So talk.” Communication was terribly important in a marriage. His hands swept down the supple slope of her back to her waist, communicating terribly important things. Delicate color rose in her cheeks, delighting him. She was getting all the right messages. Tiger could do his own damn bug collecting.

  “About hamsters.”

  He drew back, eyebrows arched. “Hamsters?”

  “Tiger wants one so badly, and Sheila doesn’t want to be bothered.”

  “One of the few things in life I agree with my ex-wife on.”

  “Hmm.” Her fingers chased up a wandering trail until both her arms were loosely hooked around his neck. He smelled as fresh as the autumn breeze outside, all woodsy and male. “It would be something he could have here. Special for him. That his mother couldn’t possibly resent. And if it’s so important to him…”

  “Darling.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Hamsters smell like the pits, are a great deal of work and mess with little return—and my son, hard though this may be for you to believe, will survive without one. Now a dog—”

  “Would be nice. But he wants a hamster.”

  “Have you ever had a hamster?”

  She shook her head. “Cats and fish.”

  “We’ll get a cat, then. You’ve already got the fish.”

  He extricated himself from her reluctantly, seeing Tiger approaching from the window over the sink. His son inevitably came through a door as if he lived in constant fear that the knob wouldn’t work. The effort was usually a crash-through, as noisy and clumsy as possible. Tiger’s brilliant smile inevitably made up for that.

  “Can you believe it? I’ve got three more. How many we got now, Susan?”

  Susan viewed the table impassively. “Thirteen.”

  “Well, come on, Dad, we’re nearly done.”

  Griff’s sigh reverberated through the kitchen as he turned and followed his son. “Susan?”

  She looked up from dolefully regarding the collection. Her smile, by contrast, was remarkably brilliant. “I was just about to start killing them,” she said happily.

  “Susan—”

  “You just go right ahead.”

  “A drop of alcohol. It’s a quick, painless death,” Griff said wryly. “And if it’s really bothering you—”

  “Of course it isn’t!” she said indignantly. What did he think she was, some kind of sissy?

  “And Susan, no hamsters.”

  “Hmm.”

  They didn’t seem to have any rubbing alcohol. Vaguely, Susan remembered throwing out half a bottle when she’d packed up the things from her apartment, but no amount of poking through the medicine cabinets revealed one now. Glancing out the window, she saw Griff in the far corner of the yard, laughing at something Tiger said, and guiltily pulled his bottle of Chivas Regal off the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.

  It was alcohol, she defended herself. She sat down at the kitchen table, rearranged her skirt, smiled for her own benefit and, with the first drop of scotch, dosed a simple housefly. Having willingly swatted thousands of them in her lifetime, she decided that the fly would be the easiest to deal with. After a minute, she carefully peeled the lid open just a little, to find the fly still groggily winging around. Her stomach turned over. She dosed the insect with three more drops, and opened a second container.

  A dreadful acrid smell assailed her. The stinkbug. She’d thought Tiger was joking. She jammed that lid on again and checked out the grasshopper, who looked distinctly innocent, harmless and deserving of life.

  She jammed that lid on, too, and checked the fly again. Murmuring a short eulogy, she gingerly lifted the tiny corpse with tweezers, transferred it to the mounting board, jabbed it with a pin and swallowed hard against her revulsion. This was ridiculous. They were only bugs, dammit. She was no shrinking violet, and had certainly swatted her share of mosquitoes every summer.

  All too soon, Tiger would probably be bringing home snakes. This was nothing. So where was her sense of humor?

  But Susan knew what was really bothering her, and it wasn’t the bugs. A few painful realities were stabbing at her consciousness. Feelings of inadequacy haunted her. Whatever had made her think she was equipped to deal with a ten-year-old boy who had dropped into her life out of the blue? She knew nothing of his interests, so why had she blithely assumed she could easily occupy a special little niche in his life? Yet that’s what she wanted, not to be a mother to him, but to be someone who was special in another way, someone who really cared, someone he could grow to count on…

  She already loved Tiger, but this was their first one-to-one encounter, and she really didn’t understand the monumental importance of red shirts with alligators. Usually so composed, she had quickly lost patience when Tiger was vaulting up and down the escalators in the stores, and as for the squirmy, germ-ridden bugs in her spotless kitchen…

  We do tend to overreact on occasion, Susan told herself wryly, and picked up the bottle of Chivas. At least the bugs were going out in style.

  Chapter 4

  “A little water clears us of this deed,” Susan murmured to herself several hours later as she slid deeper into the warm bath intended to obliterate all trace and memory of her afternoon of bug killing. The blend of water and darkness invoked a lush, lazy sensuality in her. Submerged in clear, scented water to her throat, she leaned her head back against the porcelain tub and regarded the bathroom through half-closed eyes.

  A bathroom was a rather eccentric place to put a twenty-gallon aquarium. Weeks ago, when the house was redolent of plaster dust and the pungent scent of fresh paint, it had seemed the safest choice. Now, Susan had discovered that the aches and worries produced by even the most grueling day dissolved after a few minutes of a hot bath in darkness, with only the dim fluorescent light of the aquarium and the soothing sound of the bubbler intruding on her consciousness. The pale blue iridescence illuminated the room with soothing, sensual tranquillity, and the silver fish weaving in and around their watery greenery had a subtle, hypnotic effect.

  The bathroom had obviously been a small bedroom once. It had been converted in the way of Victorian houses at the turn of the century, like a lavish afterthought. The room was too big, but the skylight was wonderful; in daylight the sun’s rays streamed lavishly down on the tropical plants in the corner. Now she could see stars through the window to the night. The gleam of brass fixtures, the velvety blue throw rug she and Griff had found, the corner of lush greenery, the blue glow from the aquarium, and the hush of night around her… Half smiling, Susan closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, Griff was standing over her. There was a jackhammer pulse in his throat as he watched her. She had no idea how long he’d been there. A pale towel was draped around his hips, and his silver-blond hair had a slick sheen; she knew he’d showered some minutes before. He said nothing for a moment. Only played a thousand and one intricate little games with those dark sensual eyes of his resting on hers in the semidarkness.

  He could see her skin, all white satin beneath the water in the aquarium’s glow, breast and stomach and thigh. By contrast, he stood in the half-dark, just the gleam of that leonine head and the expressive eyes glinting. His broad shoulders were all in shadows…and distinctly bare.

  “I was afraid you’d fallen asleep,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head, instinctively leaning forward and drawing up her knees. He chuckled, almost an imperceptible sound, as if he had read the wild fantasy in her head—that he was a pirate, that she was defenseless. “What did you think I was going to do?” he whispered.

  “Nothing.” She leaned her chin on her knee, her eyes never leaving his. “It’s not possible, Griff.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Stop thinking it. We’d both drown.”

  “What on earth makes you think you know what I’m thinking?”

  “I know. Behave
yourself.”

  The towel dropped just that promptly. She should have known better than to issue a challenge. Or anything he could have taken as a challenge. He stepped into the huge, claw-foot tub with her, sat down and slid his legs under hers, pulling her close. Neither of them was comfortable. Griff’s brows furrowed together, and Susan smiled. He rearranged her legs until they were stretched out behind him and she was straddling his hips; then the furrow left his forehead, and she was no longer smiling. Her skin, like damp silk, took on an erotic flush at the intimate contact. Water now lapped at her nipples instead of her throat; her breasts were displayed like white satin orbs in the water, less than inches from the damply curling hair on his chest. Her bottom was possessively anchored between his thighs, and she couldn’t possibly ignore the portion of his lower body that was like steel beneath the water. Silk steel. He fooled no one by picking up the soap. They were both already clean ten times over.

  “Griff, you’re crazy,” she whispered helplessly. “The tub isn’t big enough…”

  He drew a circle around her breast with the edge of the soap. Then the other breast. He rinsed both off with his hands. “You are,” he said thickly, “a uniquely beautiful woman.”

  “Griff…”

  Not so very long ago, she’d been very shy where intimacy was concerned. But shyness was useless around Griff. He set the soap aside and leaned back for a moment, deliberately not touching her. Her flesh became almost painfully sensitive as she felt his eyes possessively sweep over breast and thigh and velvet triangle, then meet her eyes with a lion’s hunger. And a man’s need.

  Shyness left her, and a surge of love took its place. The shadowy glow from the aquarium illuminated the brawn of his damp shoulders and hair-roughened chest, the power and almost savage intentness in his features. Ripples of erotic awareness hurried her heartbeat, yet that wasn’t all that made up that sweet rush of love.

  She’d loved watching him with his son. He’d never asked Tiger how he’d been doing, but in the course of the afternoon he’d managed to ferret out the incident where Johnny Baker had kicked Tiger in the shin, what kind of lunches the school served, what Tiger did after school, that Mrs. Redding was probably the most beautiful teacher in the entire world. Sensitive to his father’s moods, Tiger had grown tense and unhappy when he perceived Griff’s displeasure over Sheila’s manipulations. Griff didn’t subdue his emotions for his son—neither his anger nor his love. He kept in touch, physical touch, with the boy—a hug here, an easy brush of hand to shoulder there… The shared laughter had rung out in the yard, as Griff had turned boy to match his son’s enthusiastic bug catching.

  Susan knew the love Griff felt for Tiger equaled his feelings for Barbara and Tom. This afternoon had just been special, a chance to really see Griff love his role as father, to see how very much he really enjoyed his son.

  But there had been more, something subtly different about Griff all afternoon, something beneath the laughter with his son. A fleeting flash of sadness and guilt in his eyes, as well as the openly expressed anger. For a man who usually showed his emotions, he kept the sadness and guilt well hidden…but then Susan had been an expert at hiding emotions all her life. His pain was simply something that she couldn’t stand, all the more because he didn’t even know those big dark eyes of his were haunted with it.

  But less so. Less haunted now, as he touched her. She leaned over to press a kiss on his chin. “Griff.”

  “Mmm?”

  “What are you doing?” Her eyes danced up to his, amused that he was doing such a good job of soaping her fingers for the fourth time.

  “The cooties. That’s what we used to call them in fifth grade. When you had to touch a bug—” He watched her face color, and chuckled. Laziness had overtaken that first intense surge of passion; he was glad. Susan was too much fun to play with to hurry anything. He could easily spend a year discovering the feel of her flesh under water, reveling in feminine slopes and hollows, in the way her soft lips parted just so…when he touched, just so. Those fish of hers, that halo of blue light illuminating her expressive features…

  Griff had treated her to the McDonald’s take-home dinner they had planned for themselves and Tiger so he could chat instead of cooking. As it was, Susan had spent the saved time hovering over Minnesota Insects, to Griff’s thorough amusement. He knew damn well she would be bringing home The Care and Feeding of Hamsters from her store on Monday.

  That, too, was Susan—not just the water nymph who was taking her turn at teasing now, brushing her heavy, warm breasts fleetingly against his chest as she scrubbed his very clean shoulder. He took the washcloth from her hand, dropped it and gently draped his arms around her neck. “Susan. No one is expecting you to be den mother of the month, love.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You were perfectly super with him. He’s adored you from the first minute he laid eyes on you.” Griff’s lips twisted. “Naturally. He’s my son, he has good taste. But don’t think I didn’t have the urge to land a solid hand on his backside during the rumpus over the red alligator shirts.”

  “Yes. I’ve noticed your tendencies toward violence, Griff,” she said wryly. “You have a mean streak a mile long. Tiger’s just terrified of you.”

  He took a nonviolent nip out of her shoulder as punishment for her teasing. Or maybe as punishment for other things. She was driving him out of his mind with her subtle little shifts and movements. Her slim thighs cradled his hips; his flesh was already hot from the silken water, yet the heat in his loins was a different quality entirely.

  “I know so little about children, Griff.”

  “You know everything about loving people. A four-foot-tall boy is no more sacred than a six-foot-tall man, Susie.” He tilted her chin up. “Listen to me. I love you…for understanding. For being willing to have the kids with us. I want you to love them. But they’re not perfect, no more so than any other children. And I don’t want you to be afraid to tell me your feelings, or to be angry with them—”

  “Griff—”

  “And there are many, many times when I have no desire whatsoever to think about my kids. As in, skip the children for now. Let’s talk about the house. About a canoe trip up north. About businesses—yours and mine. About logging. About how much I love you. About how damn much I want you at this minute.”

  She looked at him for one long, endless moment, then twisted her hips, just slightly. And surged forward, wrapping her legs even more tightly around him as she heard his startled release of breath, as she felt her whole body violently tremble at the sensation of the man inside her. Her eyes closed helplessly. The water made it…different. The soft, smooth water lapping around them stirred the most sensual messages, while the almost painful thrust of his arousal stirred others. She suddenly felt as limp as a kitten, and her eyes fluttered open again. Her lips parted slightly, needing that quick intake of air, needing to let it out again. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?” she murmured. “Or maybe you wanted to start with the house, Griff….?”

  “The lady,” he growled, “is certainly a great deal more aggressive than when I first knew her.” His lips hovered one teasing moment over her own. “Do you know how good you feel?” he murmured. “All tight and warm. Your skin has an extraordinary luster, and I can feel you trembling, Susan…”

  Slippery hands stole slowly around her back under the water, pulling her that much closer, arching her spine as his mouth settled on hers. Her soft lips parted, inviting the sweet invasion of his tongue. The taste was pure Griff, the suction he created an echo of the hunger she could feel vibrating through his entire body. There was no haunted look in his eyes now, no memories of pain intruding on the emotions she saw in his face.

  She drew up her legs an inch. There was no more room than that. His thighs, trying to tighten around her, had no more room either. “Dammit,” he muttered.

  “Yes, Griff.” She was soaring. His lips had turned feverish, intensely feverish, on her throat. He came bac
k up for air, and that strange blue light illuminated the almost savage beauty of his features. His look of passion was so ardent that she could feel goose bumps rising on her flesh. When was she going to stop feeling like a virgin to his pirate?

  A tiny flicker of danger hissed through her bloodstream whenever his mouth settled on hers and didn’t let go. Danger… She never feared that he would hurt her, but she sensed that the power he held over her was as primitive as the oldest male-female battles. Griff was the stronger, his flesh smooth as metal, his rough, drugging kisses demanding her own response…

  “Please…” she murmured.

  His hands slid between them, grazing her stomach, sliding up to lift both breasts from the water. The valley between them glistened with droplets; water streamed over the satin orbs, so heavy in his hands. He bent to taste, but his lips would reach only so far without his breaking the melding of their lower bodies. Not for heaven or hell would he break that union. Frustration sent a single low growl from the back of his throat. He wrapped his arms around her, loving the feel of silken slipperiness where his chest rubbed against her more tender skin, and he rocked her, his face buried in the hollow of her neck, his lips dipping into every inch of her sensitive skin.

  “Susan,” he whispered roughly.

  “Hmm.” She arched back, welcoming his kiss as she would welcome the warmth of sunlight. His teeth teased at her lower lip, and his tongue slipped inside her mouth again. Then out.

  “Why the hell didn’t you warn me ahead of time that the tub was too small?” he growled unfairly.

  She smiled, but barely had time to comment before he reluctantly withdrew from her. In seconds, she was encouraged to stand on legs that had the tensile strength of marshmallows. Griff flicked open the drain, then surged up out of the water like some streaming bronzed giant. He hastily brushed a towel over himself, and another swallowed her up; then he lifted her, higher, higher…