Think About Love

by Vanessa Grant

  He would pull under the trees on a side road, pull her into his lap, cup her buttocks, and she'd clench inside, hungry... ready. Needing.

  She didn't. Not actually need. It was... cumulative hunger, because this feeling had been waiting for her all these years, and now she'd discovered her own body in Cal's arms... his body... she couldn't seem to get enough.

  They were traveling the new Island Highway, built to take them from city to city. No side roads, nowhere to pull off.

  "Cal?"

  "Hmm." He didn't turn his head, but he reached out a hand and captured hers to bring it to his side.

  Of course she wouldn't ask him to stop. That belonged back at Haida Sunset, with their honeymoon. They had things to do today. Cal would be flying back to Seattle for his Monday afternoon meeting. Even now, she could see him thinking of work. He'd be planning, going over the priorities for the Lloyd e-commerce phase. She needed to get back, take over responsibility for Dorothy from Adrienne and look after Kippy. She needed to check her e-mail, too, to make sure nothing had come unraveled over the weekend.

  "Did you say something?" Cal asked.

  "I was wondering if we'd make the eleven forty-five ferry to Gabriola."

  He shot her a smile that sent her pulse hammering. "We'd have made the ten-forty if we hadn't stopped to make love."

  "How long will you be gone?" She'd been determined not to ask, determined not to need him so badly she'd beg for him to return, beg him not to go.

  "I can't get back tonight." He sounded irritated, and she couldn't stop a stab of satisfaction that he seemed as disappointed as she was. "I'll be back tomorrow night, though it may be late. I'll bring your car, shall I, so we'll have it to drive back to Seattle with Kippy? Do you think there's room in the trunk for Kippy's things?"

  "Yes, except the playpen, but we can get one in Seattle."

  Yesterday, in the caves, she'd decided she wouldn't live with him, that she would return to Seattle, to her own apartment. A short-lived decision. She'd be alone tonight, but tomorrow night he would love her again, although they'd have to be quiet, not to disturb the baby. Tomorrow, she decided, she would be calmer, tamer. She'd enjoy it... oh, heavens, she'd enjoy it, but she was getting used to his touch, wasn't she? And she'd take it more calmly next time.

  Right.

  They caught the eleven forty-five ferry, though only because it was ten minutes late.

  "I'll have to take off right away," said Cal as he drove onto the ferry. He'd arranged to have a local pilot fly the chopper to Dorothy's so it would be waiting for him when they got back.

  "Yes," she agreed, unfastening her seat belt as he parked the car in the ferry's center aisle. "I'm going to go up front to watch the water."

  He came with her and they stood, staring at Gabriola as it came closer.

  "We'll come here a lot," he said.

  "You don't take enough time off to go anywhere a lot."

  "I will now."

  Uneasiness crawled at the back of her mind. She'd lost control this weekend, big time. First in the dark, in bed, then it had spread to the shower, to the daylight, and now she felt sensitized, as if one look could bring her to his bed, no matter where it happened. At work, in a crowded conference, in the car crawling through Seattle's rush hour.

  She'd been counting on circumstances being on her side. He'd go back to work and the job would swallow her. They'd touch, love, in the dark, at night, and the rest of her life would return to something approaching normal.

  And it would. He might plan to take time off, but Tremaine's would swallow him, because he loved it and couldn't let the reins go. She'd get herself back under control, at least during the daylight hours.

  Dorothy was sitting cross-legged on the lawn, some twenty feet from the waiting helicopter, when Cal and Samantha drove up. She got to her feet as Samantha climbed out of the car, lifting the baby into her arms and walking toward them.

  "Grandma!" Samantha hurried to Dorothy. "I'll take Kippy. You shouldn't be lifting her."

  Dorothy accepted Samantha's kiss and held onto the baby. "She's sleeping. I'm putting her down for her nap. Don't worry about me. Adrienne's watching me like a hawk. When Kippy wakes up, you tell her I'll be back in a few hours. Adrienne and I have an appointment."

  "Don't you need to get back to the hospital?"

  Dorothy snorted. "That's nonsense, too, and at least Adrienne has the sense to see it. We're off to the university."

  "The university?"

  "That's right," said Dorothy, and she left Samantha staring after her as she walked slowly to the house, the baby against her shoulder.

  "What's she talking about? She's sick. She shouldn't be carrying a baby, shouldn't be tearing around."

  Cal said, "We'll get the story from Adrienne."

  "You have to leave." She didn't, wouldn't let herself need him to get through the day. Bad enough she couldn't imagine a night without him. "You'd better go. I'll look after this."

  Cal ignored her words, taking her hand and walking toward the house. Dorothy disappeared inside and Adrienne came through the door to stand on the porch with her hands on her hips, watching Cal and Samantha approach.

  "You're looking a little more relaxed, brother," she teased.

  Cal grinned. "What have you been up to while we were gone? Dorothy's talking about going back to college."

  "Not back," said Samantha. "She's never been."

  Adrienne held out her hand to Cal. "Give me your keys. We need to catch the one-twenty ferry. We'll take your car. Dorothy's needs a valve job. You should do something about that, brother."

  "What's going on?" demanded Samantha.

  Cal's sister smiled at her. "Sorry, I'm so used to teasing Cal, I didn't think—I'm no cardiologist, but I can't make sense of this doctor's diagnosis of Dorothy. She's having spasms, cramps, but no pain in her left arm, and the fever isn't consistent with heart failure. I've called in a couple of favors and taken an extra couple of days off. I'm taking Dorothy over to the university research hospital where a friend of mine has agreed to run a few tests."

  Cal frowned. "You're leaving Sam stranded without a vehicle."

  "Who's doing the tests?" demanded Samantha.

  "Dennis Rachers," said Adrienne. "Head of the cardiology unit."

  "Oh."

  Cal said to his sister, "I'll get you a rental car."

  Samantha shook her head. "Take Cal's. I'll use Dorothy's."

  "It's got bad valves," said Cal.

  "It's good enough to get around the island."

  "We'll be back first thing in the morning," said Adrienne. "The tests are being done tonight, after the place closes." She grinned. "How else did you think I could get her past the waiting lists? We'll stay in a hotel out by the university, and get back on an early ferry tomorrow. There's food in the fridge, diapers, and formula in the pantry."

  Cal said, "I don't like leaving Sam with a dodgy car." He was looking at Samantha now, his face stern.

  "I'm fine," she said impatiently. "If the car won't go, there's a taxi service on the island. Your sister is getting Dorothy in with a specialist she'd probably have to wait months to see, and she's welcome to my car—to your car, I mean."

  He didn't like it. "You'll call a taxi if you need to go somewhere?"

  "I won't need—"

  "Sam!"

  She gritted her teeth. He could be the most infuriating man. "Yes, all right. Now go, get back to Seattle."

  "Not yet," he said and pulled her into his arms.

  She should have pushed him away, should have closed her lips because she was irritated with him for perpetually trying to run the details of her life. If she let him, he'd be choosing her friends, making her appointments, taking her over.

  She knew better, but she met his mouth with hers open and hungry, and they kissed each other breathless in seconds.

  "I'll see you tomorrow night," he said when he pulled away from her. "If I'm late, don't wait up. Get some sleep."

 
She flushed, because neither one of them had got much sleep in the last forty-eight hours. She told herself she wouldn't watch him leave, but she was still staring when the helicopter disappeared over the trees to the south.

  Kippy hadn't woken from her nap when Dorothy and Adrienne left to drive to the ferry. Samantha walked back into the house, hoping Adrienne was right and the doctor who'd diagnosed Dorothy's heart condition wrong.

  In Kippy's bedroom, she stared down at the baby. She hoped she could be as good a mother as Dorothy, as good as Sarah would have been if she'd lived. Cal would be a good father—he'd promised, and, growing up in a family filled with love and security, he'd learned how.

  "Kippers," she whispered. "This scares me. Marriage. Motherhood. I'm not sure I know how to do any of it."

  Kippy woke cranky when Samantha was halfway through the flood of e-mail messages that had accumulated since Friday afternoon. Samantha walked her, murmuring soothing sounds that seemed to get Kippy's attention.

  She had decisions to make, and Kippy seemed to sense her impatience. Stacey in accounting had just asked for a six-month leave of absence because she and her husband had been called up on an adoption list—babies everywhere! Stacey had recommended her assistant Elaine for the job, but Sam wasn't sure Elaine would be up to it. Tremaine's had more than a hundred employees now, and Cal's plans to promote the company as a major application service provider meant the next six months to a year would be a constant round of recruitment challenges.

  Jallison, the developer she'd hired to look after contracting their new premises, had sent a series of five e-mails over the weekend. Problems with delivery of office furniture for the new developers. Problems with the security system. These were exactly the things Samantha had hired Jallison to look after. She needed to have a serious talk with Cal before he signed the agreement with Jallison for the second stage.

  She needed to be back in Seattle, now, today.

  Kippy wouldn't settle to play on the blanket Samantha spread on the floor, wouldn't sit happily in the high chair, bashing her plastic spoon on the tray. Samantha tried typing a reply to one e-mail while holding the baby in her lap, but Kippy thought bashing on the computer keys was a great idea and Samantha gave up.

  Why hadn't she talked with Cal about Jallison over the weekend?

  Because I spent most of the weekend in bed. Because whenever he touched me, looked at me, I couldn't think of anything else.

  Still couldn't.

  "Gaa-gaa," said Kippy.

  "You're right." She had a baby to look after, Dorothy to worry about, a court appearance coming up Wednesday, and a few million work details to look after by remote control.

  "Gaa," said Kippy.

  "Yes, you're right. You come first." She propped Kippy on her hip and went to get the baby pack out of the linen closet. "Things might get more organized after we arrive in Seattle, but meanwhile, let's both take a long walk and clear our heads."

  When the baby saw the pack, she gurgled and rammed her fist into her mouth. As Samantha laced Kippy against her breasts, she felt an overwhelming surge of tenderness. Such a miracle, tiny feet and hands, laughing eyes. Alive. She remembered Sarah eight months into her pregnancy, the baby big in her belly. Samantha had placed her hand on Sarah's belly, had felt the strong, living kick of this small human being. She'd asked Sarah what it felt like to have a child growing inside.

  "It feels like a miracle."

  One day, if she and Cal had a child....

  Perhaps even now. They'd practiced birth control, but not that time in the shower.

  With Kippy at her breast, her own hands laced over her belly, Samantha felt the memory of an embryonic Kippy kicking against her palm when Sarah invited her to feel the baby in her womb. She couldn't shake the image, couldn't outwalk it, even though she and Kippy walked all the way to Peterson Road and beyond, down the hill to Drumbeg Bay.

  "Your mommy loved you so much, Kippy."

  Tears kept surging behind her eyes, pressure in her throat. Fear, joy, hope—she couldn't seem to find her way through the tangle. Cal....

  I need you to know that I'm in love with you.

  She couldn't be in love with him, could she? Fantasies of Cal's baby, growing inside her. Heaven knew she melted every time he touched her, every time he looked at her in a way that showed desire. Maybe that wasn't love, but it seemed to be a lot more than just sex.

  Jeanette had been in love a dozen times, maybe more. Over-the-rainbow love that swept everything in her world along... especially her children, who were dragged along, always leaping off cliffs with their mother, always leaving people and places behind.

  Samantha wasn't Jeanette. She didn't have her mother's magnetism, her charm, her fast hot rages, and she certainly didn't have her urge for turning life upside down every eighteen months. Every time Jeanette threw one life out the window and leaped for another, the child Samantha had become more careful, more aware that if she didn't look after Sarah, no one would.

  Jeanette hated responsibility, and that wasn't Samantha by a thousand miles. By the time she'd put time in on a couple of summer jobs, working her way through college, she'd recognized her own desire to create order, stability. Recognized, too, that she was good at it.

  "Early training," she told Kippy, who nodded against her chest. Walking like this often put Kippy to sleep, but not today. The baby was wired, full of energy, kept lifting her head and commenting in gurgles and incomprehensible words about their surroundings.

  She hadn't talked like this when Samantha first arrived last week, and Dorothy hadn't mentioned it. The talking must be new.

  "By the time you're ten, you're going to be running things." That image made Samantha laugh, because, face it, Kippy was running things right now. Wasn't Samantha here, walking a baby instead of sitting down with her email? Between Kippy and Cal, in the space of a week Samantha's life had slipped out of her control.

  "That's not true."

  The words she spoke echoed off the rock face beside her, and a raven picking at something on the ground paused. Kippy might be running her life, but a baby had a right to. Certainly Jeanette hadn't let her children rule her life, which had been part of the problem. Yet Dorothy had willingly accepted responsibility for two young girls at a time when she could reasonably expect to have her home to herself. She'd let her life be torn upside down by her grandchildren, although Samantha had never seen any sign of resentment.

  Neither would Kippy. She promised herself that.

  Cal was a different matter. She'd stood her ground with him well enough at Tremaine's, but up at Haida Sunset, she'd lost her footing. Their lovemaking had softened something deep inside her, awakening need. It was easy to imagine Cal's power over her growing, spreading. He was always making decisions, telling her what to do, and she'd got to the point now where she reacted to every word he said, she was so aware of the risk.

  The bossiness had started when he flew her to Nanaimo last week had extended into almost every part of her life, to the extent that he'd managed to make her promise to call a taxi if she needed to go somewhere, even though Dorothy's old clunker was perfectly safe.

  Last week, she'd been a competent woman he respected, but today he didn't trust her to choose her own transportation. He'd used the helicopter and his sports car to take over her transportation. He'd brought in his medical family to take over Dorothy. Right now Adrienne was at the university hospital with Dorothy, when it should be Samantha standing at her grandmother's side.

  Cal had taken over Samantha's right to decide where she worked, and how, by getting her to sign a prenuptial agreement that committed her to eighteen years as Tremaine's second-in-command. Eighteen years as Calin Tremaine's wife.

  She stumbled as she stepped off the road and onto Drumbeg Bay's wharf.

  He'd already done it, had already taken over every part of her life except this, her care of Kippy. And he meant to take that over, too. He'd be Kippy's father, and as the weeks went on, Samantha would fi
nd herself controlled more and more.

  Didn't she know the pattern? Hadn't she been here before? She'd been so sure she wouldn't repeat her mother's life, so different from her mother. And she was right, she was different, because there may have been far too many men in her mother's life, but somehow Jeanette had always picked good, secure men.

  Not that Cal wasn't secure. But he was also a man who needed to control everything he got near. Damn it, she'd known that about him, had recognized it. At work, it had been a challenge, because she knew she was strong, knew she wouldn't knuckle under. She'd done that once, with Howard, and she'd learned her lesson forever.

  Maybe it was excusable for a woman to fall in love once, to make one major mistake. After all, control had never really been an issue with the men Jeanette chose. As far as Samantha had been able to see from her child's view of Jeanette's relationships, it was her mother who ran the men ragged, not the other way around. So she'd had no way of knowing that Howard would be different.

  He'd been strong, affectionate, in love with her, and she'd fallen for it. She'd ignored her own warning voice, because Howard was a young man who obviously loved her, wanted to care for her, to shelter her. She didn't need sheltering, she'd learned to stand in the rain, but she was seduced by affection and sex and a dream of enduring partnership. She'd fallen in love.

  In January of her senior year, she'd become Howard's lover. In March, she'd accepted his ring of engagement, and they'd planned the wedding for June. A week later, he urged her to move in with him because he couldn't wait, and at the end of March, she did.

  Janice and Maggie, her roommates, disappeared from her life. It was only later that she discovered Howard had intercepted messages from her friends, had failed to pass on messages from Sarah, and had opened her mail and held back letters from Dorothy, who wanted her to come visit in May before she took a summer job. She didn't know about his interference with her friends and family at the time, but every day she felt him taking over another piece of her.