Seven
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
She squirmed out of his arms, stripping off her gloves. He let her go slowly, so that she slid the length of his body before coming to a precarious rest at his feet, his arms still encircling her. She bumped up against him as the dog bounded into them, barking happily in joy at their return and in a clear request to be let out now.
Spencer reached behind him with one hand and yanked the door open far enough for Elwood to squirm through into the cold night air. He shut the door again and pulled Addy back to him before she could escape.
“Why not?”
There were no lights on in the hall, but she could see him well enough to know he wasn’t laughing at her. The cloth of his coat was cold beneath her bare hands, even as she felt his body’s heat beneath.
“Because,” she said, frustrated again by her lack of words in the face of the awkwardness of their relationship. Why was it that he never seemed to get tongue-tied around her? She tried to explain. “Because it’s a symbol of something. Of a kind of love relationship.” She stuttered to a halt. “Of something we just don’t have,” she finished lamely.
His hands slid down until his arms rested around her waist. She still wasn’t going anywhere. In the darkness, she felt the pull of his gaze.
“I don’t know what we have.” His voice was low and husky and vibrated in her bones with the steady hum of a tuning fork striking just the right note. “All I know is that we’re married for the next six months at least. And I for one can’t get my mind off my spouse.” His hands began making small circles on her lower back. “I had a hard time concentrating during dinner. All I could think of was how it felt to have my mouth on you.”
Did men know that it was their words that seduced women more than anything else? Addy felt herself go under again at the spell of his.
“Me, too.”
Just once, she told herself as she pulled his face down to hers. Just once she’d let herself make the first move. Then never again. But she had to have this one time, so help her, or she’d go mad.
The heat of his mouth burned into her, a warmth that raced through her body as her mouth opened and she tangled her tongue with his. Tasting him was like drinking greedily of the richest wine, a heady rush into intoxication that sent liquid fire sparking over her skin until she tangled her fingers in his hair to stop their electric tingling. But she only pulled him closer. Fiercely she attacked his mouth, taking out her frustrations in sucking bites at his lips before welcoming the thrust of his tongue against hers once more.
God, she was hot. Stifling.
“Wait.” His protest as her arms left him turned to eager help as she shrugged out of her jacket and pulled her hat and scarf off to dump them on the floor. Finished, she kissed him again, their mouths connecting awkwardly as both their hands tugged at the buttons on his coat until it, too, fell to the ground in a heap at their feet. Closer now to his body, but not as close as she wanted to be, Addy let her hands roam over his shoulders and the muscles of his back that she’d eyed so hungrily only hours before, and welcomed his mouth again.
When Spencer tugged on her hair until her head tilted back, and burned the skin of her throat with hot, wet kisses, she knew what it was like to live a fantasy.
The gentle stroke of his tongue on the pulse in the hollow of her throat had her breath hitching with desire. He tugged on the handful of her sweater bunched in one fist, bending her farther backward, and she gasped as the rough fabric dragged over her hardening nipples.
That he could read her every breath showed as he bent over her arched torso and captured one aching breast with his mouth. Her hands were back in his hair, pulling him closer, pushing him away—she didn’t know which, just that she was dizzy with wanting him.
When she stumbled and landed on her weak ankle, she tried to muffle her yelp, not wanting the pressure of his mouth dampening the fabric of her sweater to cease. She cursed under her breath when he stood up.
“Damn it.” His words echoed hers.
He wrapped his arms around her waist, hauled her off her feet and walked her backward through the dark room until his foot struck the bottom step of the staircase. He turned, sat down heavily and pulled her across his lap. He wrapped one hand around her shoulders, fingers stroking the side of her neck, as the other raced up under her sweater, popped open the front closure of her bra, pushed it aside and cupped her bare breast.
“Now, where were we?” His whisper vibrated against the sensitive skin of her lips. She licked them to still the sensation and then licked his lips because it seemed the better idea. His tongue chased after hers. His thumb was rubbing back and forth over the pebble of her nipple while his fingernails scraped gently against the outer curve of her breast. She was moaning into his mouth as his hand shifted, his palm resting between her breasts as his fingers and thumb stretched wide until he was stroking both of her nipples at once.
Her insides melted into liquid heat. She ached between her legs with wanting him. She needed him, his clever hands and his hot mouth to be everywhere.
When his hand reached for the hem of her sweater, she was already tugging it off. Her arms were still tangled in the sleeves above her head when he bent down and sucked one nipple into his wet mouth. She arched her back, offering him more. She would offer him everything if only he wouldn’t stop.
Hands free at last, she was incoherent in her demands as her hands streaked over him, pulling at his sweater, until finally she forced her hands beneath his chin, pulled his mouth off her and got his attention.
“Off.” She pulled his sweater up over the smooth skin of his torso.
“Yes, ma’am.” He lifted his arms and let her pull the offending garment over his head. Finally. She pressed her breasts against the hot skin of his chest and reveled in the purely sensual feel of skin on skin. The scent of him radiated and she sucked it in like pure oxygen.
Until his mouth covered hers again and she breathed him in instead. She wrapped her hands around his biceps and felt the muscles, like stone under silk, tightening beneath her fingers. Then pulled her mouth from his and attacked him with lips and tongue everywhere she could reach, lingering in places that made him groan in turn.
The strong tendons of his throat. The almost delicate ridge of his collarbone. The small, hard bump of his nipple. She dragged her fingernails down the length of his spine past the waist of his jeans and felt him shudder beneath her. He returned the favor, making her back arch with pleasure like a cat, until his long fingers were buried down the back of her jeans.
When he flexed his fingers against the bare skin of her butt, she knew he’d realized something.
“Why, Mrs. Reed,” he drawled in the dark, “I do believe you aren’t wearing any drawers.”
“I know.” She felt his grin against her mouth as she kissed him again. “Don’t go thinking it’s because of you. I almost always go commando.”
“I’m never going to be able to look at you the same way again,” he said and flexed his fingers one more time. “I’ll always be thinking about getting my hands in your pants.”
“Whatever. Stop talking.”
Her hands framed his face as she pulled it back to hers, her tongue reaching for his as their mouths danced.
It seemed an instant and an eternity later when they paused. Spencer moved to reclaim her breast and Addy sucked in several deep breaths, flooding her system with sense-heightening oxygen. He stroked the nape of her neck with featherlight fingers and she shivered, but not from being cold. If anything, she was warmer than ever, sweating in fact, and seriously considering taking off both of their pants, when she heard Elwood bark.
She ignored the dog without a qualm and started working her hands between their two bodies, certain she could find the button fly of Spencer’s jeans if she tried hard enough. Besides, the dog sounded far away.
When the barking, polite but determined, continued, Spencer lifted his head from her breast and cursed in
frustration.
“Why the hell do I own a dog?” He pulled her arms off his neck and scooted her butt off his lap and onto the stair riser. “I have to let him in or he’ll freeze to death. Don’t move.”
Five long strides carried him to the door. Elwood burst through as soon as it opened, and stopped to shake snow all over the hall and the heaps of their discarded clothing. By the time Spencer closed the door and turned back to her, Addy was on her feet, one hand braced against the wall.
The other hand she raised in front of her, palm out, to stop him where he stood.
“Aw, no, Addy. Don’t do this.” His request was quiet, the outline of his body dimly visible in the darkness. And the darkness made it too easy to pretend that what they’d been doing wasn’t real. Was simply a fantasy come to life in a dreamland of shadow that would never come to the light of day.
She shook her head and slid her hand along the wall until she found the plate of a light switch. Turned it on.
The flood of light made her eyes blink until they adjusted, but she welcomed it. Welcomed the light and the cold air that had swept in from the outside to chill the hallway. She needed these reminders of the real world.
In the light, she saw him as he saw her. Stripped to the waist, both with jeans and boots still on. She didn’t try to cover herself. The time for modesty was long past. She watched his eyes move over her nakedness and felt pleasure when their gazes locked again, knowing he wanted her even more at the sight of her.
“I want you.” She saw the electricity of her words race over his body before leaping back to her own. Her knees trembled with the truth of the words and she said them again. “I want you.”
The silence between them was broken only by the sounds of the dog noisily galloping off, in search of food no doubt.
“But.” It wasn’t even a question.
She answered it anyway.
“But I have to know what’s right for me. And at the moment, that’s unclear.” She grimaced at the understatement of the year. “I’m not going to let myself get hurt.”
“And I don’t plan on hurting you.”
“Plan it or not, if this goes too far, you could. Hell, you could be nothing but kind—” that word again, refrains of her mother’s voice at this definitely inappropriate time “—and I could end up hurting myself. Because in six months this all comes to an end.”
Her words sat between them like the uninvited guest at a party. His lips tightened. She could tell he was debating whether or not to say something, and waited for him to decide. A moment later he spoke.
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Doesn’t what?”
“Come to an end.” He was watching her closely. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to speak, Spencer continued.
“What if in six months’ time we still like each other? Get along fairly well, even. What’s to stop us from letting things go from there?”
“You mean, if one of us hasn’t killed the other by then, let’s stay married?” She could have grinned at her phrasing—almost.
Spencer wasn’t smiling. “Something like that.”
“We may be legally married. And I may want the hell out of you.” She reached out a hand and gripped the stairway banister. “But I am always going to want more out of marriage than that.”
She turned and began making her slow way up the steps. She stopped on the third stair and looked over her shoulder at him where he stood still in front of the door. He hadn’t moved an inch since she’d thrown her hand out and stopped him.
“You were right earlier,” she said, trying to offer him something in the face of her withdrawal. “It’s when I decide to go to bed with you. Not if.”
She continued limping upward, not stopping even as she heard his voice call her name.
“Addy.”
She knew he was putting something important into the shape of her name but chose to answer him lightly.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know when I make up my mind.”
Once in her room, she headed straight for the bathroom, where she cranked on the hot water in the shower and finished peeling off her clothes. I probably ought to be taking a cold one, she thought, if only I weren’t using the shower as an excuse to close one more door between myself and temptation.
Ten minutes later, hair wrapped in a towel and emotions wrapped in a firm grip of controlled reason, she stepped back into her room. The tableau that met her stopped her in her tracks.
An old-fashioned mahogany bed tray rested on the foot of her bed. On it sat a still-steaming pot of tea, a flowered teacup and saucer, a towel and a sealed plastic bag of ice in a metal bowl. A note card rested on top of the teacup. She picked it up.
Your mother made me promise to see that you iced that ankle again. I thought you’d rather see to it yourself. The tea is chamomile. Drink it if you have trouble falling asleep. I know I will.
S
She tucked the note into her sock drawer with its mates, removed the tea fixings to the safety of the nightstand and climbed into bed with the bag of ice. She draped the towel over her ankle, plopped the bag of ice on top and leaned back against a stack of pillows, determined to close her eyes and relax.
After ten minutes of staring at the opposite wall, her ankle was thoroughly chilled and her mind as thoroughly tangled in knots.
If only the man would stop being so goddamn nice to her, she might be able to think straight. She dropped the sloshing bag into the bowl on the floor beside the bed, turned out the light, rolled over and punched a pillow into suitable submission beneath her head. She muttered the name of her husband-slash-tormentor with evil intonation and willed herself to sleep.
At some wee hour of the morning, after slugging back two cups of cool chamomile tea, she finally managed to drift off. Her dreams were filled with a darkly sardonic Mr. Darcy in the grand romantic tradition—but he’s blond and has blue eyes, her sleeping mind protested dimly—who loomed over her and never ran out of subtly persuasive words. She felt herself as Elizabeth struggling to fence back with a wit that seemed barely sufficient.
“To yield readily—easily—to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you,” he said to her, as if such a thing were a crime.
“To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either,” she answered back.
The words Speak English, damn it! made up the lingering refrain in her mind when her alarm woke her from sleep to the darkness of a winter morning at six o’clock.
She dressed in a hurry and skipped breakfast when the smell of brewing coffee caught her in the hall.
She wasn’t avoiding him. Not exactly. After all, she’d admitted that she knew they’d end up in bed together sooner or later and explained that she needed some time to figure out how to do that without getting too tangled up in emotions. She just hoped that putting some space, both figurative and literal, between them might cool the fire in both their pants for a little bit.
“No yielding without conviction,” she said aloud as she opened the front door and braced herself against the icy air.
That was going to be her new motto all right. No yielding without conviction.
As it turned out, she wasn’t given the chance to be tempted. For the next week, even when she started coming home early or leaving late for work—not trying to run into Spencer, of course—she didn’t catch a glimpse of him. It seemed he was as determined to give her some space as she had been initially to have it. She gladly ignored her personal problems at work, diving into technical problems of solving floodplain issues and satisfying the Army Corps of Engineers, who supervised such matters.
But by the time the weekend rolled around, she was feeling unjustifiably neglected and starting to get irritated again.
When Saturday morning dawned bright and unseasonably warm after a week of gloomy weather, she decided to take a page from Spencer’s book. She left a note propped against
a brewing pot of coffee, snagged a couple of the dozen rubber doggy balls rolling around the house, hooked a leash on Elwood and headed out.
He found her a half hour later in the park down the street.
The coffee had lured him out of bed, and when the caffeine had finally woken him up to coherent thought, he’d read her note. He’d hoped that avoiding Addy for a few days would draw her back into conversation with him. Smiling, he’d folded the card in one hand, wrapped the other around his mug and headed back upstairs to dress.
At the park, his approach went unobserved. Addy was laughing out loud as she watched Elwood tumble head over heels in a vain effort to brake himself as he overtook the red rubber ball she’d pitched for him. Both the dog and the woman were filthy, evidence of multiple spills in the muddy, melting snow, but it was clear that neither of them cared a bit. When Addy stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled, Elwood raced back to her, ball clenched in his drooling mouth, and then danced away as she tried to grab it from him.
“Elwood, come here! Here! You silly dog!” she shouted at him. She chased him for a few steps and then stopped. “Come! I can’t throw it for you if you won’t give it back.” The dog slinked toward her, teasing in his offer to hand over the ball, and then leapt away again as she stooped for it. Then he spotted Spencer and galloped over to him, barking around a mouthful of ball all the way.
Elwood skidded to a halt at his feet and promptly dropped the ball. Spencer bent over and ruffled the dog’s wet fur, thumping him lightly on the sides a couple times in praise.
“Good dog.”
“Traitor.” She was grinning at him as she jogged over, even as she stuck her tongue out at the dog. “I’ve chased him for a good half mile every time before he lets me throw the ball.”
Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, and dark curls rioted from under the edge of her knit cap. Her eyes squinted until she shaded them from the glare of sunlight reflecting off snow, and when she knelt down in the muck and hugged his goofy, drooling dog, Spencer didn’t think she had ever looked sexier.
Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) Page 12