by Noelle Adams
Blake felt her cheeks redden at her unexpected feeling of jealousy. Seeing her face, Caleb reached for her hand and squeezed it. At his touch, the warmth of her blush seemed to spread, flowing out to her extremities, settling between her legs. She shifted, unsure what to say.
“Here you go.” Dina returned briskly, placing menus on the table in front of them and pulling an order pad out of her apron. “You want drinks? Coffee?”
Caleb spoke for both of them. “I’m guessing Blake would like iced tea,” he looked at her for confirmation before continuing, “and I’ll have – “
“And coffee for the cowboy,” Dina interrupted, scribbling away. “Real coffee, real cream.”
“You got it,” Caleb answered. He was talking to Dina, but he was looking at Blake.
“Back in a jiffy,” Dina said, and sailed away again.
Blake was flattered but disconcerted to realize that Caleb hadn’t taken his eyes off her since he’d taken her hand a moment ago. She picked up her menu, hoping to distract him.
“So what are you having?”
“Breakfast,” he answered promptly. He looked down at the menu. “Breakfast is my favorite dinner. Omelet, bacon, hash browns, toast.”
“What about fruit? Don’t you eat that?”
“Orange juice, woman. Haven’t you ever heard of it?” Caleb smiled as Blake shook her head. “So, what are you having?”
“The fruit and yogurt plate,” she told him self-righteously. “Real fruit, and no fat.”
“Sounds boring.”
“It’s not boring. It’s good for me – and helps me keep in shape. Not all of us can be as naturally perfect as you are.”
“Oh yeah, I’m just all kinds of perfect.”
Behind his laugh, Caleb was worried. After Blake had left the pier today, Pinkshirt had continued to follow her, and had gotten himself into a fender-bender near Malibu Road, when Blake had apparently decided not to go back to the beach house. That seemed like good news at first, since the man wasn’t likely to continue a tail in a car that was obviously fresh from an accident. But then it had occurred to Caleb that there might be somebody else – or more than one somebody – who was watching her, and he’d realized that he was no longer comfortable just protecting her from a distance.
So he’d convinced Steve to put another man on Pinkshirt, and with Steve’s blessing, Caleb had invited Blake to the movies. Of course, for Caleb it wasn’t just about the operation. Tonight had given him that thing he’d been craving for three long days: a chance to see Blake. To really see her, not just from a distance. To look into her eyes, to touch her hand, to steal a kiss. He’d done all those things this evening, and he wanted to do them again. And again. And more.
Just a little while longer, he told himself. When Steve got the results back from the fingerprints that they’d lifted off that milkshake cup, they’d have a real identification on that bozo who’d been following her. And then he’d tell Blake everything – why he was here, what he’d been doing. He wasn’t sure that she could forgive him, but he owed her the truth. And she would get it.
Thirteen
Oh, this is bad, Blake thought. Really bad. Really, majorly bad.
The noise level in the coffee shop rose steadily, as people continued to swarm in for late-night sustenance. She had to lean closer to Caleb to hear what he was saying.
“Of course, Andie was only about this big at the time,” he held his hand at slightly above table level to show the height of his niece when she was three, “but she was already an opinionated woman. That day, her mother tried to get her ready for church by putting her in this cute little dress with old-fashioned saddle shoes. It was quite a little getup, but apparently Andie didn’t think it was fancy enough. So she went digging through her grandmother’s dress-up trunk, found some old Halloween costume and ended up going to church in a Cinderella dress and a rhinestone tiara!”
Blake laughed at the image conjured by his words. “Already a little princess.”
“You know it!”
“Well, I can relate to that.” She sucked a sip of tea through her straw, unable to take her eyes from Caleb’s face. When he talked about his family, his whole being lit up, became animated in a way she’d never seen before. Blake felt her heart warm in response: a tiny flicker of affection that was glowing brighter by the minute, dangerously close to flaming into the worst of the four-letter words: love.
And that was majorly bad. Really. Falling in love with Caleb would be the least kind
thing she could do to him, or to herself. There was no room in her life for love right now.
When they left the diner it was well after midnight. Caleb took Blake’s hand as they crossed the street toward his motel. The touch of his skin on hers was like an electric shock. As they climbed on his bike to go back to the Entwistle Ridge house, she again recited to herself the reasons that she shouldn’t get any more involved than she was.
They were all good reasons, sensible reasons. And yet when she was nestled behind him on the motorcycle, speeding through the soft, dark night, she couldn’t help but direct him back up Mulholland Drive, to that same little place where they had stopped before.
When they pulled up on the side of the road, Blake slipped off the seat and removed her helmet. This time she waited for him to do the same before pushing her way through the underbrush to the clearing. He followed close behind her, pushing his bike along carefully. When they reached the clearing he settled the bike firmly on its kickstand, then waited to see what would happen next.
What was going to happen? Blake was wondering that herself. Why had she brought him here again, to this sweet sacred spot that she treasured so much?
“I must be a damned fool,” she said abruptly. She took a breath and continued. “You’re a really decent guy, Caleb.”
“Uh-oh. This can’t be good.” His voice was easy, but she sensed tension. “Conversations that begin like that usually end with ‘goodbye.’”
She turned her head and smiled at him. “This isn’t one of those conversations.”
He met her eyes, his gaze intense, focused. Her heart flipped. “Good,” he said.
She hurried to continue. “This is the ‘I don’t know what you must think of me,’ type of conversation.” He tilted his head, but didn’t reply. “My life – it isn’t exactly what could be called ‘decent,’ now is it?”
He took his time before answering, shifting his balance from one foot to the next. “I don’t like to make judgments about the way people live. Near as I can tell, we’re all just trying to make it from one day to the next without hurting anybody – least of all ourselves. I don’t have to understand your life to know that you and Rube must live the way you do for a good reason.”
“Not everybody gets Rube and me,” she heard herself say. “But we’re not really what everybody thinks. We’re friends – good friends.”
“With benefits, as they say,” Caleb supplied easily, no trace of condemnation in his voice.
“Actually, no. No benefits… at least, not the ones you mean.” Blake sighed. She felt Caleb listening, not wanting to interrupt. “Remember I told you that when I was sixteen I ran away to Paris to do a modeling job?”
“Of course.”
“In some ways, that was the beginning of some of the best years in my life. I traveled all over, I made good money. And I had great friends, but even so, there were times when I was awfully lonely. My parents – well, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me at that point. At least, that’s what I told myself. I’m not so sure it’s really true, but at the time, I guess you could say that I was young enough to think I knew everything.”
A dry, dust-scented breeze blew across the side of the mountain, ruffling the gray-green brush and raising goose bumps on her legs. She shivered slightly. When Caleb saw that she was cold, he took off his jacket and moved to drape it around her.
“Thanks,” she murmured. As she reached up to adjust it, she touched his fingers as
they lingered on her shoulders. Again she felt that electric spark, and suddenly her legs went weak and rubbery.
Although Blake silently cursed herself for feeling like some giddy schoolgirl, she allowed her knees to bend and she settled on the rough grass, pulling her legs up close and wrapping her arms around them. After a moment, Caleb settled beside her, close but not touching. In a great display of casualness, he leaned back on his elbows, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing his ankles. And that, Blake thought, was the difference between the two of them. She was drawn in tightly, holding on to her secrets for dear life. And Caleb was sprawled out, open and honest.
She stared blindly out over the glittering vista before them, searching for the answer to a question that hadn’t yet been asked. “My mother is a high school principal, but when I was a kid she was an English teacher. She raised me on a steady diet of classical feminist literature: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen. She had big plans for me – college, grad school, maybe even a PhD. But I didn’t want any of that.” Blake felt her mouth twist into a cheerless little grin. “I wanted to be a rock star, you know? I wanted to see the world, have adventures, have handsome men falling all over me. And as much as I loved my mother and all she stood for, I knew that life wasn’t for me. So when the chance came to get away, I took it. And for a while, it was everything I’d always wanted. But when I was seventeen, I fell in love, really in love, for the first time.”
She paused, remembering. Her eyes were focused on the horizon, seeing not the pinpoints of light that marked the streets of Hollywood, but other roads from long ago and far away. “It was Paris, and it was springtime. And when you’re seventeen, on your own in Paris in the spring, you really have no choice but to fall in love. His name was Gregory. He was a photographer, and one of the most beautiful men I’d ever met in my life. We had three glorious months together before it all fell apart.”
“What happened?”
“Pregnancy scare.” She laughed without humor. “Actually, he was more scared than I was. By the time I found out it was a mistake he had already dumped me. I thought we were in love, that he might even welcome the chance to father my child. But it wasn’t like that at all. The funny thing is, it was so long ago that I can barely remember what he looks like… except for that moment when he was telling me he didn’t love me. His face in that instant is frozen in my mind, and I’ll never forget it.”
It surged upward now, the memory of his exquisitely handsome face, made hideously ugly by his betrayal. And with it, as always, came the flush of remembered humiliation and furious anger, followed by the agonizing crush of heartbreak and the mortification of realizing she’d been a damned silly fool.
Blake pushed it all away, banishing it once again to the past where it belonged. “I realized that I’d been living in a fantasy, and I needed to go home. So I came back to the States and tried to patch things up with my folks, but they were still so hurt… well, I realized that I wasn’t doing any of us any good by staying there in Sacramento, so I left again, came here to L.A. By that time I was overboard without a life preserver – drowning, you know? Completely at loose ends. I had no idea what I was going to do, or how I would survive. Then Rube found me, and a whole new fantasy began. Of course, at that point I didn’t want a ‘real’ relationship. I’d had it with sex, and I certainly didn’t want to risk getting pregnant again. So what Rube proposed seemed like the perfect solution.”
Caleb spoke for the first time in many minutes. His voice held a deliberate casualness. “What exactly did he propose?”
Blake turned and looked at him. “Rube and I aren’t ‘together’ in the conventional sense. What I mean is – well, we don’t have sex.”
Fourteen
Caleb sat up and looked at her disbelievingly. “Are you telling me that the two of you have been together for almost ten years and you’ve never – “
“No.” Blake’s cheeks were burning, and she was already beginning to regret blurting out the truth. She had no right to go telling Rube’s intimate secrets to anyone.
“But how is that possible? I mean, you’re – well, look at you! How could any man live with you and not make love to you every day?”
Blake uttered a startled but flattered laugh, even as understanding dawned on Caleb’s face. “Oh wait – is Rube gay?”
“No,” Blake said again. “Although it would be considerably easier on him if he were instead of…” She sighed. She could see that now that she’d opened this particular door, she had to allow Caleb to come all the way through. It would be worse if she didn’t. She just had to tell Caleb everything, and hope that he was as trustworthy as she believed him to be.
“A long time ago – long before I met him – Rube was in some kind of accident. He doesn’t like to talk about it, and to be honest I don’t know all the details, but, well, he can’t… you know. It’s not something he talks about, of course. In fact, as far as I know, nobody knows about his condition except me and his doctor.” She paused. “And now you.”
Caleb digested the information in silence, and Blake stumbled on, wanting him to understand. “Anyway it’s never been important to us. Our relationship isn’t about sex, it’s about companionship. I take care of the houses, give parties, hang on his arm when he goes out to socialize. I’m his wife in every sense except legal and physical. We’re committed to each other, and that’s all that counts.”
“You’re in love with him.” The way Caleb said it, Blake couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement.
“I do love him,” she said. “How could I not? I mean, I know what the world thinks of guys like Rube, but he saved my life. I was dead broke and drifting when he found me. I’d washed up as a model. I had a GED but no real life experience and no direction. Rube put me through college, gave me a home, gave me a life. I do charity work, I run the house, and I look after Rube. And what’s so wrong with that?”
Blake’s voice had risen and become more defensive with each syllable. When she finished speaking, Caleb remained silent, and her words hung in the crisp night air like wisps of smoke.
“Sorry,” she said after a moment. “That tone wasn’t aimed at you. I was reliving the argument I had with my mother the last time I saw her.”
“So your parents know about you and Rube?”
“They know that Rube and I live together, and that’s enough. They don’t exactly approve. A few of my close friends understand that Rube and are aren’t really a ‘couple,’ but I think that most of them suspect we started out as a full-romance, and that we’ve turned into a relationship of convenience. But I’ve never volunteered the truth, and they don’t ask questions.”
Again there was that typical Caleb silence, the silence that said, I’m going to sit here and digest all of this carefully before speaking. But this time Blake couldn’t wait for him to finish chewing over his thoughts. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said, “or I’ll go nuts.”
“I’m thinking that I’ve misjudged you,” he told her honestly. “And that doesn’t happen very often.”
“It’s more like I misled you than you misjudged me.”
“You didn’t mislead me,” Caleb said quickly. “At least, not any more than you’ve done to everyone else, so I can’t fault you on that. The thing I’m wondering now is, out of everyone you know, why are you telling this to me?”
Blake hadn’t anticipated that particular question. But the moment he asked it, she told herself she should have known it was coming. Now she was the one who paused, searching for the right words. “I guess because I wanted you of all people to see me as I really am, and not just some glamour girl who lies on the beach all day.”
He drew up his legs and rested his elbows on his knees in an unconscious imitation of her posture. “Again I have to ask the question: why me?”
The question made her laugh. “Oh, I think you already know the answer to that one, Caleb McKenna.”
He turned to face her, his green eyes glowing
like jade in the darkness. She laid a hand on his arm and spoke softly. “You do know, don’t you?”
He pulled her into his arms, and a chuckle rose deep in her throat. “I guess you do.”
But her laughter died as his mouth closed on hers. His lips were at once soft and demanding, his embrace both safe and dangerous, sending chills crawling along her skin. The flame that had been flickering so tentatively flared into a roaring fire, and before she knew it she was lying back on the ground, pulling him along with her.
The rough grass poked tiny spears through her blouse, scratching her back as the delicious weight of Caleb’s body pressed her further into the ground. She slid her hands under his shirt, feeling the hot soft skin against her palms. She moaned into his mouth and tugged upward, trying to get the shirt over his head and out of her way. She wanted more of him – all of him – and she wanted it now.
But he pulled away, leaning back on one elbow, putting too much space between them for her liking. “We can’t do this,” he said, breath coming roughly. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that you’re a good man, an honest man. I know that you like old movies, and you wanted to be an astronaut when you were a little boy, and you love your nieces and nephews. I know an awful lot,” she said quietly. “I know enough.”
His eyes probed hers like beacons through a foggy night, guiding lights to which would bring her soul safely to home port. She left herself motionless, waiting, open.
Whatever he saw in her face must have convinced him, because he lowered his head, and claimed her mouth once more. This time when she tugged upward on his shirt he didn’t resist. Her blouse was next, each button undone with trembling fingers. It landed on the grass next to his, and other items of clothing followed, until they were both bare to the night, and to each other.
They wasted little time with preliminaries; as soon as she’d helped him roll on a condom, she pushed him onto his back and rose over him, glorious and golden in the moonlight. She closed her eyes as he penetrated her, hard meeting soft and both finding new pleasures in their counterpoint. When he was settled inside her, she began to move, her rhythm clumsy at first, desperate with desire.