The Sweetheart Rules

by Shirley Jump

  She tiptoed her fingers down his chest, hovering her touch just above his hard length. “Then I will tease you a hell of a lot more.”

  He laughed, scooped her into his arms, and crossed the lanai to the cushioned chaise in the far corner. He deposited her on the soft padding, then climbed on top of her. His skin was warm against hers, erasing the chill from the water.

  “Outside?” she whispered. “Like, right here?”

  “It’s dark, your yard is fenced, and if you’re quiet”—with that word, he slid a finger into her and she let out a sharp gasp—“then the neighbors will never know.”

  “You are bad, Mike Stark. Very, very bad.”

  “Yes, I am. And you love it anyway.” He grinned.

  “I do,” she said, and thought of the words she had said so many months before. I love you.

  Did she? Or had that been a moment of insanity?

  Either way, when Mike positioned himself between her legs and slid into her in one long, smooth move, all thought left her mind. Diana reached around Mike, holding tight to the only man who had ever made her lose track of herself.

  Twenty-two

  They lay in Diana’s bed, warm and content under the blue-and-white gingham comforter. She was curled against his chest, her eyes closed, her breath even and slow. He held her, letting the moment wash over him.

  He didn’t want to leave. Didn’t want to get out of this bed and go back to his own, or worse, go back to his rack at AIRSTA Kodiak. A fierce, powerful urge to stay here, today, tomorrow, and the next day after that surged in his chest.

  Maybe it was the homey room, decorated in bright white and cornflower blue. Maybe it was the afterglow of some amazing sex. Or maybe it was Diana herself, who had this way about her of drawing him in, making him crave the very things he had convinced himself he didn’t want.

  Home. Hearth. Family.

  Like a late-night coffee commercial or one of those long-distance phone company ads, Mike Stark was getting all maudlin and bittersweet. He told himself he should leave before he got too comfortable in this big bed. Before he got too comfortable with her.

  Diana roused, and pressed a kiss to his chest. Maybe he’d stay just a little bit longer.

  “What time does Jackson get home?” Mike asked.

  “Eleven thirty.”

  “So we have a whole ’nother hour?”

  A devilish smile curved across her face. “Think we can find a way to fill that time?”

  “Honey, I could fill a whole year for you if you’d let me.” The words left his mouth before he thought about them. A year was a commitment, and Mike Stark didn’t make commitments.

  She seemed to read that, and dropped the subject. She shifted position against him, adding just a tiny bit of space. “We could talk instead. After all, I’d hate to wear you out in one night.”

  “Wear me out? Or you?” He slid a finger down her breast, and she let out a squeak.

  She swatted at his hand. “You are bad.”

  “Hmm… I seem to remember that being a good thing just a little while ago.”

  “Oh, it was good—very, very good.” That blush he loved filled her cheeks, bloomed in her chest. “Okay, talking for a little bit, as punishment.”

  He laughed. “If you insist.”

  Besides, talking might keep his mind from crazy thoughts, like wondering if it would be possible to spend forever in this bed, in this blue-and-white world that Diana inhabited.

  She bit her lip, thinking. “First question… how did you end up in the Coast Guard?”

  An innocuous question. The kind dozens of people had asked him over the years. He’d always kept the answer simple—the whole wanted-to-travel-and-see-other-parts-of-the-country kind of thing, but right now, with Diana against him and the gingham of the room wrapping him in that homey feeling, he said instead, “I was a kid in trouble, looking for some direction. A recruiter came to my school during one of those college fair things. I wanted a way out of Gainesville, a way out of my life, and signed on the dotted line.”

  “And it suited your OCD personality.” She grinned up at him.

  “I think it turned me into that. I was a mess before I joined the military. I found out I liked the discipline and the schedules and… the order of the military. It was as if I’d been wandering around in the desert for years, and then finally found the right road out of hell.”

  “I know what you mean. Vet school did that for me. It was as if I finally found what I needed. I’d gotten… off track back in high school when I got pregnant with Jackson, but once I got to college, I found the structure I needed.”

  He’d thought he had it hard, getting through boot camp, then working in the wilds of Alaska. None of that compared to what Diana had gone through, pretty much single-handedly raising a baby. “That must have been tough, going to college and raising a child.”

  “Beyond tough.” She blew a lock of hair off her forehead. “I waited until Jackson went to preschool to start college. I’d drop him off and run to class, then work on my homework after he went to sleep.”

  “Did Jackson’s father help out a lot?”

  She snorted. “Sean? Heck, he was barely here. We lived together then, in this tiny little apartment in Rescue Bay, but it was like living alone. He went to work, went out with his friends, and if he was home before midnight, that was an early night. We broke up, got back together, broke up, so many times I lost count. Thank God I had a wonderful neighbor who was a great babysitter and just adored Jackson. My mom would help me out a lot, too. She’d take Jackson to the shelter with her and he’d help out with the animals. He loved doing that. Still does. They were really close, and since she died, he’s kind of gone through a rough time.”

  Do I have anotha grandma? Ellie’s question came back to Mike. If he introduced his girls to his mother, would she be the kind to bake cookies and take them to fun places like she had with him when he was little, before his father died? Or was he dreaming of possibilities that no longer existed? “Not all kids have that. Jackson is lucky.”

  She laughed. “Try telling him that. All I get is the don’t-bug-me attitude.”

  “He’s fifteen. Give him time. He’ll come around.”

  “I hope so.” Diana let out a long breath. Something told him she was holding a bit of the story back, but instead of expounding on her son, she changed the subject. “How are things going with the girls?”

  Mike liked this, the easy day-to-day conversation with Diana about raising kids and living in Florida. Simple, easy, no-pressure. It was the kind of ordinary world that had always seemed as foreign and unreachable as Mars. “The girls and I have a sort of truce going. We’re still working on peacetime negotiations.”

  She covered a laugh. “You make it sound like the end of World War Three.”

  “Sometimes it feels like it is. I never thought it would be this hard to get along with two people who share half my genes.”

  “Give it time. They’ll come around.”

  He drew her against his chest and grinned down at her upturned face. “Turning my advice around on me?”

  “Oh, yes.” She gave him an impish grin. “I believe in recycling, Mr. Stark.”

  He laughed, then kissed her, and before long, they were going beyond kissing. He had taken his time making love to her the first time tonight, but this time, the rush to have her, to be joined with Diana, that warm, soft woman who made everything seem right in his world, was hard, powerful. He thrust into her, fast, strong, and she arched and gasped and clawed at his back. He sank himself into her sweet warmth over and over again until they came together in a quick, powerful explosion that left him breathless and spent.

  “Now that’s how to waste an hour,” he said, when she had curled back into his arms again.

  “I wouldn’t call that a waste. At all.” She grinned, then kissed him on the chest. She laid her head on the place she had kissed and splayed her palm across the other side. He trailed a lazy path down her back and inh
aled the light floral fragrance she wore.

  They lay there like that for a long time, while the ceiling fan spun in rapid cooling circles and the pool gurgled outside.

  “Tell me about the scars, Mike,” Diana said, her voice soft in the dim room.

  His hand stopped moving. He stiffened and resisted the urge to bolt from the bed, to run from the number-one conversation he avoided. His gaze went to the swirls of plaster on the ceiling, an endless loop of white, like one of those mazes they built in Asia or Europe or somewhere for meditative walks. He followed the path, loop to loop to loop, until his breath relaxed and his body uncoiled.

  Diana lay on his chest, patient and quiet. Her palm had settled above his heart, and for some strange reason, that small touch opened a hole in the wall Mike kept around his past. “When I was five,” he said, the words tasting strange in his mouth, “my father went out to get the paper and kept on going.”

  “He never came back?”

  Mike shook his head. “He had a heart attack at the store. He collapsed, right there by the newspapers, with the Sunday paper in one hand and fifty cents in the other. He wanted me to go with him that morning, but I didn’t want to go, and I’ve always regretted that. I can still see his car leaving the driveway, still remember how guilty I felt that I didn’t go. I was only five, but it still felt like I should have done something.”

  “Oh, Mike.” She traced his heart, an easy, soothing circle. “That is such a tragedy for any boy, and too much of a burden for you to carry. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah. But still…” He shrugged.

  “Still you wish for a do-over.” She gave him a smile as warm and soft as butter. “I’m sure he’s looking down, as proud as a peacock of the man you turned out to be.”

  The memories of what came after his father died reached out, tangled tight around his lungs. Mike lifted his gaze to the loops in the ceiling, and concentrated on breathing in and out, following the path of the white spirals circling in and out of themselves. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely. Look at you. Serving your country, raising two girls. Any father would have to be crazy not to think how awesome that is.” She spread her fingers across the left side of his chest and kept her gaze on the rise and fall of his breath. “At least you had those first few years. My mother broke up with my father before I was born. I never knew who he was. Never met him until last week when he stopped by, out of the blue.”

  Mike thought back. “Wait, was that the guy who came to the adoption event at the shelter? I only caught a glimpse of him, and remember thinking he seemed out of place.”

  “That was him,” Diana said. “After my mother died, I found a note with his name among the things she left behind. I wrote him a letter, and he came down here a few days ago.”

  “How’d that go?”

  She shrugged. “We talked a couple times. It’s harder than I thought it would be to let him into my life.” A harsh laugh escaped her, then she cut it off and her voice turned wistful. “Oh, hell. I might be thirty years old, but I’m still that little girl who kept thinking that one day my father would show up with a giant teddy bear and an apology for letting me down. I used to tell myself he was a spy and that was why he couldn’t come to see me. Or that he was marooned on a desert island, pining away for the daughter he left behind.”

  “And the reality isn’t quite the same thing, is it?” Mike sighed. When he was a kid and reading adventure stories, he’d imagine his father was a swashbuckling pirate sailing the seas or a brave knight riding into a village to save them from a dragon. “I told myself a lot of the same lies. When the truth was much simpler. And colder.”

  “Yup. My father and I are working on finding a relationship. Who knows where we’ll end up?” She traced his heart again, and like magic, it eased the pain in his chest. “What about your mom? Do you see her very much?”

  The million-dollar question. The one that he’d asked himself earlier tonight. In the end, he’d dumped out his beer and come here, instead of answering it for himself. He couldn’t keep running from the painful shit in his life. All it did was delay the inevitable, and push him farther and farther away from this gingham world he wanted deep down in his soul, but knew he could never have. “I haven’t seen my mother since I joined the Coast Guard.”

  “She’s never met the girls?”

  He shook his head. Before, his excuse had always been that he was protecting the girls, keeping them away from the stepfather who had ruined Mike’s life. But now that man was gone, had been for going on three years now, and Mike’s excuse for not visiting was wearing thin.

  Do I have anotha grandma?

  “Didn’t you say she lived in Florida?” Diana asked.

  “In Gainseville. She moved in with the first man who came along after my dad died. She wanted financial security, I guess, and so she married a guy with a fat checkbook.” He let out a short, dry laugh. “My mother made a deal with the devil. A guy who made discipline into a contact sport.”

  Diana’s jaw dropped, and a soft whoosh escaped her. “The scars… are from him?”

  “His belt. If he was in a good mood, he’d remove the buckle first.” The joke stung his throat, hung in the air, flat and heavy. He was over it. Damned well over it. Mike glanced at the ceiling again. He followed the infinite pattern, loop, loop, loop, until it unraveled the tight fist in his chest. “My mother got a beautiful house on a lake and I got that road map on my back.”

  Diana gasped, then put a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Mike, that’s horrible. Truly horrible.”

  “Don’t worry, he only beat me when I disappointed him by forgetting to close a door or pick up my socks, or brought home a B instead of an A.” He shrugged, as if he had moved past it all, as if those scars in his head, and not just the ones on his back, didn’t burn like wildfire right now. “You know, those major federal offenses that justify a beating.”

  She shifted onto his lap, cupped his face, and held either side with her warm, soft palms. She met his gaze until he returned the connection, and there, in the easy green pools of her eyes, pushed past the walls and denials in Mike’s head. “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” He tried to look away but couldn’t.

  “And it wasn’t yours, either.” She held his gaze. Held it as tight as his face. “Mike, it wasn’t your fault.”

  The words hovered over him, like one of those clouds over a cartoon character. It wasn’t your fault.

  “Yes, it was.” He’d known from the beginning that it was his fault, that he had let himself and his mother down. He should have stepped up when his father died, instead of hiding away in his room. “I should have stopped my mother from inviting that monster into our lives. I should have stopped him, protected her. Been brave enough to…” He shook his head and cursed.

  Shit. Where was he going with this? Why was he opening this can of crappy worms? He looked up at the ceiling again, but the loops of white didn’t offer solace. They seemed instead to be giant question marks.

  “To what?” Diana asked.

  The clock on her bedside table ticked away the time, waiting, waiting for him to say the words. Outside, the pool gurgled its water song. And beside him, Diana waited for him to be ready, to open that last door to the guilt Mike had tried so damned hard to keep at bay.

  “I should have been braver. Tried to…” He shook his head and cursed. “I tried, so hard, so many times to… to fight back, goddammit. I never did. I never hit him back. Never stopped him. Never got up the fucking guts to throw him out the door.” There, he’d said it. The truth about who Mike was, deep down inside. A coward, a boy who had stood by and let this happen instead of being the man his father would have wanted him to be. The guilt clawed at him, thick and strong. His eyes burned and his throat clogged. “I was a coward, Diana. A goddamned coward.”

  “No, you weren’t. Oh, Mike, you are the bravest man I know,” she said, her voice breaking. She leaned closer, not away, closing the gap betwee
n them instead of widening it. He couldn’t see the ceiling or the loops or anything but her wide, trusting, gentle green eyes. “You did nothing wrong. Not a damned thing. Not. One. Damned. Thing.”

  “I—”

  She shook her head, cut him off. “Mike, it wasn’t your fault.” Then her words softened and her eyes filled, and she leaned in even closer, until the world filled with Diana and the soothing whisper of her words against his lips. “Oh, baby, it wasn’t your fault at all.”

  Diana held him against her chest until the words sank in and trickled past his guilt, his pain, his regrets. One word after another, paving a path across the scars in his head. Not one damned thing. Not one damned thing. Not one.

  A balm of forgiveness settled across Mike’s conscience. He listened to Diana’s voice, her soft sweet voice, saying it over and over again—“It wasn’t your fault”—and for the first time in a very, very long time, Mike knew what home felt like.

  Twenty-three

  A little while later Diana roused herself out of a drowsy, satiated, half-sleep state. What an amazing night. Not just the making love part—that had rated right up there at a hundred on the Richter scale—but the moments afterward when he’d opened his heart and told her about his childhood.

  That horrible past explained so much about him. Why he had joined the military. Why he had no parenting guidebook instilled in him as a child. Why he stuck to schedules and order like they were lifelines.

  She realized they were such similar creatures, she and Mike, both wounded by their pasts and surrounded by brick emotional walls. Mike had broken down some of his walls tonight. Maybe it was time she did the same. Opened up. Let him in. Trusted.

  Mike drew her into his arms. “Hey, you’re awake.”

  She chuckled. “Barely. Somebody wore me out.”

  “Speak for yourself. I did all the work.”

  She arched a brow. “All of it?”

  “Okay, you did your fair share, especially the third time.” He grinned. “Though my memory is already fading. Maybe we need an instant replay.”