by Cait London
His body was already hungry again, and Uma sighed, rocking gently against him. Mitchell breathed harshly and closed his eyes as she experimented with an exercise that had tightened her lower belly. He groaned slightly and then frowned as the caller began to speak.
Mitchell glanced at Uma, who was just smoothing his shoulders and wondering where she could nibble. He was like an unexplored, exciting territory just waiting for her. She traced his nipple, watching it peak.
“Umm. I’m helping Uma with a household project, Mike. Can’t you take care of him?”
Mike’s voice rumbled urgently, and Uma studied Mitchell, whose expression said he was torn between hunger and frustration. She decided tempting Mitchell could wait until she had his full attention. She eased to her feet, took the telephone, and braced it in the crook of her neck while she crossed her arm in front of her breasts and held a kitchen towel in front of her.
“Yes?” she managed to say, and knew her husky tone probably reflected their lovemaking just heartbeats ago.
Mike’s voice cruised across the lines. “I need you to come pick up Everett. He’s mooning about losing you to Mitchell Warren. Uma, the guy waited twelve years for you—the least you can do is to come pick him up so he doesn’t embarrass himself even more.”
“Uh—” Uma couldn’t think, blindsided by the nude, evidently aroused male sitting before her, his arms behind his head.
The heat inside her body seeped outward, wrapping her in a full-body blush. She turned away from that dark intensity to try to focus on what Mike was saying. “Umm…Mike, do you suppose—?”
Mitchell’s arms slid around her, cupping her breasts, his face hot and rough against hers, his breath swirling in her ear. The hardened length pressing between her thighs said he was going to finish what she had started, experimenting with him.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said as Mitchell’s hand slid lower, caressing her.
She managed to hang the telephone on the cradle just before Mitchell gently bent her toward the counter. Blunt and hard, he eased intimately into her femininity and instantly the dizzying pleasure jolted through her. “This isn’t…ah…very conventional…ah—oh, my…”
Mitchell’s ear nibbles were very effective, she thought distantly as she gripped the counter, and in the living room, cartoon banjo music played happily as Rosy grunted.
She had her own problems, Uma decided, trying to keep a grip on the fast-moving heat within her, and then Mitchell touched her just there—
THIRTEEN
It was true—men did have wolfish smiles. Mitchell was absolutely smirking as they sat at Everett’s table in Clyde’s Tavern.
She scowled at Mitchell, whose shirt buttons were torn from their mooring. The flour smudges on his face weren’t too noticeable, but the gob of batter at his temple was. She reached to brush his cheek and to remove the evidence that she had actually, actually—right in her mother’s kitchen…
The last session of lovemaking, the one where she had clawed at a stack of neatly folded dish towels and heard her long, riveting cry echoing in her own mother’s kitchen—her mother’s kitchen—Uma’s legs wouldn’t have supported her. While Mitchell held her from behind and caressed her and she gradually surfaced one more time, Uma had tried to remember what was important, what pressing issue—other than Mitchell—had to be handled.
She was certain that their last time together had something to do with male possession, a primitive sealing of ownership. Uma shivered as Mitchell reached to lightly stroke the back of her neck with one finger. His sultry look said that collecting Everett was only a detour on the lovemaking trail.
Vince Gill’s love songs throbbed from the jukebox. In the light of the neon advertisements over the bar, couples slyly looked at the threesome featured in Madrid’s newest gossip. After all, Uma Thornton was known to be a logical, controlled woman and just today she’d shot down Main Street in her car, tires squealing. Her neighbors had verified that Mitchell had left her house early that morning carrying a tool box and wearing a heavy growth of beard. Men at the bar shot curious glances over their shoulders as she sat between Mitchell and an evidently, but pleasantly, drunk ex-husband.
She glared back at them. She’d known them all her life, and what’s more, she knew the stories of their ancestors, the good and the bad. She’d been at their weddings and their children’s baptisms and listened to their tales of divorce woes. In one case, she had even acted as matchmaker. She leveled a stern stare at them. If she had a day out of her normal calm, she should be allowed. So what if she was sitting between her ex-husband, who had waited twelve years for her, and a new lover—a new, still-simmering lover? Neither man was showing signs of leaving the field to the other. She chose to battle the crowd, turning to them. “What exactly are you looking at?”
Immediately their heads turned away.
Straightening her shoulders, determined to preserve some dignity, Uma poured coffee into Everett’s cup from the carafe Mike had brought; she received a woozy, happy smile from him. “No, thanks. I’ll have another of whatever Mike has been bringing me.”
“You’ve had enough of those. Drink the coffee,” she stated, heedless of her sharp tone. The last thing she needed everyone in town to see was her disheveled, still stunned by Mitchell’s last little surprise.
In her own mother’s kitchen! Uma smoothed her hair and tried to think of her best fortune cookie reassurance. It escaped her.
That last time, Mitchell had wanted to prove his point—that she was his. It was almost a controlled lovemaking, as though he were determined to hold her on the point of pleasure, just to make another point. She wasn’t certain she liked that—her knees were still wobbly, her body full and heavy and sated, her breasts aching slightly from the light nibbling of his teeth, the suction of his hot mouth—
Uma inhaled raggedly and her flush deepened as Mitchell smiled at her. It was a knowing, sensual smile of a male who knew that he had pleased a woman to the maximum. She mentally labeled him as “Maximum.” Maximum everything—concentrated, heavy duty, powerful, big maximum.
At her side, Rosy sat sniffing at the table goodies. In the mélée to get her to leave the television—because Mitchell insisted on bringing her with them to the tavern—Rosy’s bow had slipped slightly.
Uma adjusted it and frowned when she noted the deep puncture wounds in Rosy’s bristly hide. A questioning look at Mitchell drew a warning “Tell you later” frown.
“I love you guys,” Everett was crooning. “First time I ever saw Uma all wrinkled and her hair sticking all out. She’s always so perfect and cool, and now—”
Everett tilted his head to study her. “Now, Uma looks hot and kinda simmering and on edge. She was never ever like that when we were married. In fact, now that I think back, she was kinda boring. Every day was the same old routine. Everything in its place. A woman like that can put real stress on a man. I think maybe she was like my mother.”
He reached to carefully pick something from her hair. He studied it keenly. “Looks like fruitcake—candied pineapple, I think. Is it Christmas?”
“It’s the first week of August, and I was never like your mother.” Uma shoved his hand away and tried to smooth her hair.
“Well, you were comfortable, like an old shoe. Maybe that was why I loved you. Why I still do.”
“I love you, too, Everett. It’s because we’re friends and we grew up together. Those kinds of friendships usually last.”
Mitchell’s smile was angelic, innocent, and she knew he wasn’t. Oh, how well she knew he wasn’t.
While Everett patted Rosy and was momentarily distracted crooning to the pig, Uma leaned to whisper to Mitchell, “Just where would you learn something like that?”
“Huh?” he asked too innocently.
“You know,” she shot at him in a low voice.
Mitchell’s smile widened, humor crinkling the lines at his eyes. “Not here.”
Hurrying to get dressed and hustlin
g a protesting Rosy into her small car hadn’t given Uma time for control or composure. She needed caresses and afterplay and—
“You’re looking all steamy and sweet, honey,” Mitchell said in that deep, husky tone that said he also would have preferred a longer ending to their lovemaking. He poured Everett another cup of coffee and leaned back to place his lips against her ear. “I was just thinking that one of those candied cherries might look tempting in your navel.”
An electric quiver shot through Uma and headed straight for her oh-my. There it lodged and hummed and heated. She crushed the napkin in her hand, her nails digging in deep to her palm.
She wanted to drag him home and have him.
Uma put her hands to her face and found it hot. She’d heard about the sexually addicted, but that couldn’t be happening to her; she’d always been so controlled.
In an effort to distract herself, she launched another topic. “What happened to Rosy? You never did explain why you have her.”
Mitchell’s expression changed, that closed, dangerous look he’d had when discovering the bullethole in her window and telling her about the danger to Shelly. As Everett’s head nodded to his chest, Mitchell put a hand out to brace him upright and spoke quietly. “Kitty and Bernard brought her over. Someone knows their early nightly schedule to let her wallow in their backyard mud hole before cleaning her for the night. Whoever is causing trouble dropped a barbed wire noose around her neck and tied it to a post. The Ferrises had taken out their hearing aids, and they didn’t hear her squealing until the neighbors complained. Fighting the wire, Rosy ran around the little slide they’d made for her and almost strangled herself.”
“And they called you?”
“I’m Rosy’s babysitter until this thing is over. I happened to tell them one time that I had worked as a security guard…so naturally, I’m qualified to keep their pig. They’re more afraid for her than they are for themselves. Try giving a pig a bath when she’s scared. I had to get in the shower with her. The wounds aren’t deep enough to do damage. I’ll put more antiseptic on them later.”
Mitchell nudged the cup of coffee toward Everett. Clearly, Mitchell didn’t want to continue the discussion now. “Drink that, will you, chum?”
“I love you guys,” Everett crooned drowsily as he placed an arm around her and Mitchell. “I thought I just loved Uma. But I think I love you, too, Mitchell.”
Mitchell looked up at the balloons fluttering in the breeze of the ceiling fan. “Sure. Can we go now?”
Lonny’s patrol car followed Uma’s compact red one—stuffed with tall, broad-shouldered men—to her house. She supposed she looked conspicuous with Mitchell filling the passenger side, and Rosy and Everett, equally big, pressed together in the back seat, Everett’s arm around Rosy.
While Mitchell and Uma were helping Rosy and Everett out, Lonny stood on the sidewalk. “Hey, Uma. Did you know that you’ve got stuff in your hair?” he asked, picking out a bit of dough. He sniffed at it. “Fruitcake. Heard you were baking that after getting all worked up at the garage earlier.”
She didn’t want to discuss fruitcake or her “ungrip” on her emotions just then. Uma eyed him and smiled tightly. “Shouldn’t you be getting home to Irma? Say, just how is that sexual potency formula working? Okay?”
Lonny zoomed out of her danger zone.
“Kitchen is a mess. Uma usually has everything in tip-top shape,” Everett slurred as Mitchell urged him up the stairs to the Lawrence guest room. The two big men bumped against alternate sides of the stairway as they ascended to the bedrooms.
Rosy plopped to a rug as Uma set to furiously cleaning up the evidence of lovemaking in her mother’s kitchen. Yes, she was thirty-six, but echoes of good-girls-don’t haunted her.
Uma watched Rosy laboriously work her way upstairs as the Ferrises had taught her to do. Apparently, the pig wanted to get out of firing range.
The rapid clump-clump of a big man descending the stairs preceded the view of Mitchell’s arms reaching down around the pig and hefting her upward. His return up the stairs was louder, due to carrying Rosy’s weight.
It had been a very long day, from Tessa’s upset to Mitchell this morning through the garage scene that Uma wanted to forget, right through the two very unconventional lovemaking sessions with Mitchell, to collecting an ex-husband from Clyde’s Tavern.
Coming from upstairs, Rosy’s squeals sounded more angry than frightened, but Uma hurried to her bedroom, where she found Mitchell kneeling on the floor, one arm wrapped around the pig and the other hand managing a tube of antiseptic. “You could help me.”
“Or not,” she stated, but for Rosy’s sake, she knelt to help him.
Mitchell dosed Rosy liberally and then wrapped gauze around her chunky neck. “We’re taking a stroll outside and then we’ll be back. We need to talk.”
Everett snored loudly in the guestroom and Mitchell sighed deeply as he replaced Rosy’s leash and led her downstairs.
Who would want to hurt Rosy? Uma hurried to shower pieces of fruitcake batter out of her hair. As she collected the bits of candied fruit and nuts from the drain catcher, she was horrified at the amount of evidence Mike and Lonny must have seen.
Then, after a long day, she gave herself to the luxury of her shower, the warm spray, the scents—
And Mitchell stepped into the shower, his size crowding her against the wall. Through the steam, she recognized that sensual look. “Not one more time today. I need to get back into one piece, and my ex-husband is sleeping in the other room. I am starting to doubt who I really am. I knew, and now I don’t—because of you. Peaks and valleys, all in one day, aren’t me, and everyone knows it. It will take me forever to live down today. I was totally out of control—and it’s your fault.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, as he calmly began soaping himself. She was still crowded against the side as he stepped under the shower and shampooed in less time than she could turn around.
The shower curtain opened and closed, and the water and steam enclosed her in privacy.
So he was done? Not desiring her after making love that morning and twice that evening? Just like that?
It was silly to feel disappointed that Mitchell had had his fill of her, of the pleasure between them—wasn’t it?
Uma dried furiously, wrapping a towel around her head and another around her body. She braced herself, turned the doorknob, and stepped into her bedroom.
Mitchell lay on her sheets, a towel resting over his hips, his arms behind his head. Rosy was already snoring gently on the braided rug beside the bed. In the guest room, Everett’s snores sounded like a chain saw.
Unused to this intense intimacy, Uma hurried to her bedroom’s dresser, extracted a prim set of cotton pajamas, and returned to the bathroom. After dressing and brushing her hair, she braced herself once more to see Mitchell.
This time, he was wearing his slacks and sitting up, scratching Rosy’s ears. He patted the bed beside him and Uma sat down. “Who would want to hurt Rosy?”
“That’s the question—who? Are you up to talking? I think you may know something that can add all this up. Lauren’s killer, the dead shooter, Rosy, the accidents around town. Some small thing might turn into a lead.”
“Yes, of course. What do you mean, ‘accidents around town’?”
Mitchell hesitated, then said quietly, “Rosalie could have been murdered. Her daughter said that she never went upstairs. She always waited to have her family retrieve whatever she needed. She’d promised not to endanger herself by going up those stairs, and she’d kept that promise for years. Her sewing room downstairs was usually neat, orderly. But that day, she’d left her measuring tape on the floor and her sewing basket had tumbled onto the floor. The ironing board was upright, but the cord was unplugged and neatly wrapped around the iron—Rosalie used to leave it plugged in and just turned it off. She used it too much. And her appointment book was missing. She took very good care of that.”
> “Mitchell, if you’re thinking that one of her customers pushed her down those stairs—she’s altered clothing for almost everyone in Madrid for years.”
He playfully waggled Rosy’s ear the way her owners would. “There are a whole string of accidents that are starting to make sense. Whoever’s out there is getting worked up to kill again. It’s someone who knows the habits of the people here, their weaknesses and their life stories.”
“Oh, Mitchell, I don’t want to believe that—”
“Believe it,” he stated grimly. “What do you know about Gerald Van Dyke?”
“His tractor ran over him. He was elderly; it was a farm accident.”
“Try again. Lonny checked with his son, who said his father always was very careful not only to turn off the tractor and brake it, but to place blocks in front of all four tires. Van Dyke was meticulous about those blocks, and when he was found, they were a foot out from each. My guess is that someone moving fast pulled them out. The question is why they would want to hurt Gerald.”
“Everyone loved Gerald…he’d been courting Rosalie for years, but she thought they were too old to get married.”
“Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have. Maybe our guy didn’t want witnesses.”
She gripped his arm, feeling safe just by touching him, just as Kitty and Bernard trusted him with their beloved. Rosy. “What can we do?”
“Talk…try to fit the pieces together. You know this town and the secrets in it better than anyone. And you could live with me.” At his last words, Mitchell took her hand and brought it to his lips, watching her intently.
“You want to protect me.”
He nodded and studied her hand in his. “I do. I think Shelly is the primary target, just by the evidence so far—she’s had more accidents and that spray of bullets says she’s made someone real angry.”
“Shelly has never done anything wrong in her life.”
“A lot of people think she has. This town holds a grudge. She was an unwed mother. She didn’t give away her baby, like her mother wanted. It could be some friend of her mother’s. We need to look at Mrs. Craig’s friends, who she might have told about Shelly. Roman is staying with Shelly. He’s put his plans on hold to open the garage for full business. Until this is over, he’s sticking close to her and helping her with her cleaning business.”