Bachelor Mom

by Jennifer Greene

  Her head whipped up to see Spence in the doorway. “I thought you’d gone—I didn’t realize you were still standing there!”

  “I didn’t want to leave you with a yardful of trouble and a phone call to handle at the same time. Are you okay?”

  She had been. More than okay. She’d had a great day and was full of bounce and bubbling energy over the project ahead with the children. Now she was conscious that her shoulders were sagging, and she was embarrassed that Spence had caught her rubbing her temples. “I’m afraid I don’t handle my ex well,” she admitted dryly. “I swear I need to take a course in assertiveness one of these days.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “God, no.” Swiftly she pushed off from the wall and straightened up. “Honestly, I’m fine. And I didn’t mean to hold you up from wherever you were planning on going for the evening—”

  He motioned to the production line of bowls and pots on her counters. “What all do you have to do to get this ice-cream thing started?”

  “Actually, almost nothing. Everything’s done—all I have to do is whip the cream. Won’t take more than five minutes, and after that, the whole project goes outside. The kids get to do the cranking work, and I just play the decadent lady of leisure.”

  “Sure you do. And then a genie comes in afterward to clean up all the mess?”

  “I have a couple of spare genies just for that purpose,” she assured him. “Now you scoot! Go have fun!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m leaving. I can tell when I’m not wanted.”

  Gwen chuckled at his put-on, aggrieved expression, but once he banged out the screen door, she assumed he was really gone. She promptly applied her attention to whipping the heavy cream, but paused every couple minutes to glance out the window and check on the children. Spence wasn’t in sight.

  After the cream was done, she folded all the other mango ingredients together in a giant bowl. The bowl was so heavy it took two hands to carry, so she used her hip to push open the screen door and cart it outside... and abruptly stopped dead.

  Spence was still there. She’d noticed his neat, tailored shirt and dockers before, and tried not to speculate if he was dressed that way to take a woman out for a casual dinner. She specifically hadn’t asked about his plans. Helping each other out didn’t give her the right to pry. What he did with his free time was none of her business. And she’d had a tough enough time erasing the memory of that last embrace from her mind, without thinking about his embracing other women.

  Positively, though, he was dressed too nicely to romp around with children... and how he’d gotten roped into swinging the four-year-old Gertrude in his lap was beyond Gwen. She had to yell to be heard over the kids’ symphonic din. “All right, y’all! We’re ready—and everybody gets a turn at the crank, and that’s a promise. But the first thing everyone has to do is wash their hands—and that means you, too, Gertrude!”

  “Does that mean Mr. McKenna has to wash his hands?” Gertrude wanted to know.

  “No, Mr. McKenna gets to bump this pop stand and escape this madhouse.”

  She met Spence’s eyes, and he mouthed the words, “Thanks, and really, I’m leaving this time.”

  But somehow that didn’t happen. For a few minutes she was just too busy to pay attention to where Spence was... or wasn’t. The stampede crashed helter-skelter into her house to wash hands in the back bathroom, then crashed helter-skelter back outside to the ice-cream chum. Gwen had set up a “draw straws” take-turn system to avoid fights, but that of course didn’t work. Three bickering matches broke out before there was a prayer of exerting any order... and then the real mess began.

  Once the mixture started turning firm, the goal was to carefully remove the dasher and repack the ice cream in ice and salt to “ripen it.” Only no kid in the history of ice cream making could wait for that ripening process to sample the goods. Gwen was prepared with spoons, but there was no chance of conning the monsters into using them, either. It took about an hour and a half before the ice cream was made... and devoured...the process being more or less simultaneous. Conservatively, Owen figured that at least half the ice cream ended up on clothes, hair and faces.

  Spence was in the thick of it, Protecting him—or his clothes—was like trying to hold back a tidal wave. Gwen couldn’t fathom why he stayed. Even less did she expect him to have so much fun. Twice she’d yelled over the troops’ heads, “Are you sure you want to be here? You’re supposed to be getting time off for yourself!”

  He kept assuring her that he was leaving any minute. He just didn’t do it. By the time her entire yard—and every child in it—had a goopy, gloppy coating of mango ice cream, Spence was holding his sides with laughter. “Now I understand why you had the garden hose out,” he said, chuckling.

  “Honestly, it’s the only way. No self-respecting parent is going to let them in a house in this shape—and I’ve got dry clothes in enough kids’ sizes that no one is going to catch cold from being wet.... Josh!”

  She called her oldest son over to hand him the hose. “Josh is my quiet, responsible one—the only one I could possibly trust with the hose,” she explained to Spence.

  “Josh is quite the philosopher.”

  “Oh, dear,” she murmured wryly.

  “Yeah—those ‘oh, dear’ questions are his specialty, huh? The other night he hit me with Where’s God... What’s queer mean ... How come girls don’t have a penis... How do they make mirrors...”

  “His questions can wear me out in fifteen minutes flat,” she said with a chuckle. “On the other hand, he isn’t half as physically rambunctious as Jacob, and I can always count on him to behave...oops.”

  “Perhaps not tonight,” Spence said, deadpan.

  Gwen galloped over to intervene before the water war escalated. Josh had turned the hose over to Jacob.... She knew from past experience that giving Jacob hose control was a disastrous mistake. Little Gertrude got splashed and started shrieking, and then the twins from down the road decided they wanted a turn at the hose “snake.”

  Beyond monitoring fairness and safe play, Gwen had no reason to exert any toughness. Getting wet was part of getting clean, and the monkeys were really having a blast. Once the sun dropped and the temperature turned chilly, she’d have to call it off, but as long as the evening was still warm, she was inclined to let them play... and Spence, by then, had collapsed in a far corner of the yard and was chortling with laughter at the kids’ antics.

  Gwen saw when April took her turn with the hose. She just never anticipated a problem. She knew Spence’s daughter. April was a blond, blue-eyed angel, such a striking pint-size beauty that Gwen had long guessed his ex-wife must have been an incredible looker. April was a lovebug, bright and inquisitive and always sweet, a little on the shy side but easily coaxed out of her shell. Just then, though...oh, God, just then...the little sweetheart took ahold of the hose...

  And aimed it full power on her dad.

  Demo version limitation

  Demo version limitation

  Demo version limitation

  Demo version limitation

  Nine

  An hour after the phone call from Spence, he hustled in her back door. “Got it. Extra large. Triple cheese. Mushrooms on half, no anchovies, should be enough extra-hot peppers to burn our throats for the next five, six hours.”

  Gwen chuckled. “I can smell it from here. Bring it in, bring it in. And you get hero status for life for thinking of this.”

  “Hey, all I did was suggest the pizza. It was Loretta and Stan who volunteered to take all the kids to the movies. With guts like that, who needs courage? You want the pizza on the table?”

  “The table’ll do fine. Just sit down and relax. I’ll be there in two shakes.”

  Well, she meant to be. Spence had called with the impromptu pizza idea only a few seconds after Loretta telephoned about herding up the neighborhood kids for fast-food burgers and a movie. She’d bustled the boys into fresh clothes and a face-and-ha
nds wash before letting them loose in public. There’d been no time—or reason—to change from the white shorts and plain raspberry T-shirt she was wearing. No time or reason for her to fuss in any way for such a casual shared dinner.

  Yet she suddenly found herself hiking around the kitchen at the speed of sound. Cracking ice cubes, rummaging around for her good glasses, pouring iced tea, automatically adding a fresh sprig of mint to make the tea just a little fancier. Then the kitchen table looked so naked that she whisked around and found table mats. Then she foraged in the cupboard for company napkins instead of those on-sale easy-shared jobs she used every day. Then...

  “Hey, tiger. Come and sit down before it gets cold.”

  She promptly sat down. Then bounced up again. They needed a spatula and a sharp knife. And maybe she was used to treating pizza as a finger food, but Spence might prefer real live silverware. And the flower centerpiece was right in his way...

  “Um, Gwen? I know appearances are deceiving, but I swear I’m not helpless. If I need anything, I can get it myself. And I’ll have to shoot you if you keep trying to wait on me.”

  She chuckled at his teasing threat...and sat. But the thought hit her with the subtlety of a blow from a blast furnace—she had been waiting on Spence, when she’d sworn from here to Poughkeepsie that she’d never catch herself waiting on another man again.

  Tarnation, every other woman in the nineties seemed to drop the old traditional female roles with no sweat. She seemed the only one left with the problem. Blast it, nurturing had always come naturally to her. Taking care of people just seemed to be a hopeless flaw in her nature. She didn’t mean to. She was trying desperately hard to master this selfishness business. But it seemed an unnerving measure of how deeply she’d come to care for Spence that fussing over him was such a pleasure she’d forgotten it was an old, rotten habit she was trying to break.

  Spence forked over a wedge of pizza on her plate big enough for a Marine, but he eyed her over the box top. “Are we, uh, nervous for some reason? Is something bothering you?”

  “Heavens, no. Any night I don’t have to cook is manna from heaven—I couldn’t be more relaxed than a lazy slug on vacation.”

  “Lazy slug, huh?”

  The skeptic appeared to need proof. She bit into a huge cheese-dripping chunk of pizza to illustrate how unnervous she was. Mutual starvation took over then. They both dove into the pizza like piranhas. Conversation shuttled from kids to St. Augustine politics to school to books. He liked history and an occasional thick saga. She liked romance and an occasional gruesome horror. Talking with him came so naturally and easily that the word safe sneaked into her brain. Maybe her feelings for Spence spiraled into the dangerous realm, but he’d always had the gift for putting her at ease and making her feel comfortable and safe with him.

  Yet that word safe had been hanging out in her mind like an imbedded sliver for days. Safe was dull. Safe was predictable. Her whole life, she’d chosen the safe, traditional, foolproof woman roles, and she’d come damn close to boring herself to death.

  A few minutes later Spence threw up his hands. “I see there’re two pieces of pizza left, but I’m pleading mercy. How about you?”

  “Definitely stuffed ... but they sure weren’t stingy with those hot peppers. I need another glass of iced tea, would you like one, too?”

  “Sounds great—but I’ll get it for both of us.”

  Spence sprang up to take their glasses to the pitcher by the sink. At the same time she moved to refrigerate the leftover pizza and toss out their paper plates.

  He said something to her, but she didn’t catch it.

  She couldn’t exactly explain what went wrong at that instant. Nothing was suddenly different. Her pulse was tumbling and pitching, but her sexual awareness of Spence was becoming as familiar as the sun rising. Her hormones had been in a tizzy since he walked in the door. That was old news. While they were both moving around the kitchen, his gaze skimmed the length of her, the bare legs, the pouchy T-shirt, the fresh sun-swept color in her cheeks. But it wasn’t the first time he’d looked at her. It wasn’t the first time those dark eyes of his lingered.

  Maybe the clock ticked too loud. Maybe a door slammed somewhere. Positively there was no sane reason for her to suddenly whirl around and charge straight toward him.

  He was half-turned, a sponge in his hand, so he had to see her catapulting toward him. He dropped the sponge. As if a completely insane woman had taken charge of her body, she surged up on tiptoe, her arms flew around his neck, and her lips crashed on his with the awkwardness of a fender-bender collision.

  Shock rippled through her. At no time in her life had she ever completely abandoned her common sense. It was the first Gwen knew she even had the capacity to behave so appallingly.

  Spence didn’t seem to be suffering from the same appalled shock. He didn’t even seem surprised. He kissed her back like he’d been waiting, pounce ready, for any excuse to get his hands on her. She’d never expected rewards for such rash, shameless behavior... but, oh God, there were.

  He tasted like hot, hot peppers and cool ice. He tasted like everything she’d ever been afraid of. It was as if this hunger had been buried forever and was suddenly bubbling up to the surface with shivering speed.

  He murmured something gentling, soothing, but she wasn’t gentled, had no hope of feeling soothed. Braced against the sink edge, he drew her into the vee between his thighs. His mouth rubbed against hers, roughly, deeply, taking her tongue and offering his own right back. His thighs pressed so evocatively against her that she could feel the building beat and heat of his arousal. There wasn’t a prayer of a chance that she could remember to be ashamed, not a prayer that she could keep anything on her mind...but those thighs. And that mouth. And the unmistakable evidence that he wanted her.

  When he lifted his head, his eyes seemed darker than pewter and mesmerizingly intense. Dusty sunlight filtered through the kitchen window. Dusk was falling fast, but it was still daylight. In her kitchen. It was not the time or place for this to happen, for anything to happen, yet his gaze so fiercely searched her face. He didn’t seem to notice anything about anything—but her.

  “You’d better tell me what you want, tiger. Real clear, and real fast, because I’m not going to ignore that invitation in your eyes unless you tell me otherwise.”

  She couldn’t think. She just wasn’t prepared. On the back of her tongue she tasted risk, as dangerous and precarious as she’d ever faced before. “I... don’t know.”

  “Yeah. I think you do.”

  “I...” Yeah, she knew what she wanted. She’d known for weeks. But so far the desire springing up between them had been accidental, incidental. It had never occurred to her that Spence would follow through. It had never occurred that he would want to, that he really wanted... her. Anticipation sluiced through her veins in a rush. But so did anxiety. “I”m not very good at throwing caution to the winds.”

  “Is that what you’re thinking about doing, throwing caution to the winds?”

  “Maybe.” Words tumbled out. “Maybe yes. But the children are due home around nine, and I don’t have any—”

  “It’s still two long hours before nine, and I have protection. I wasn’t asking you a question about the details, tiger, I was asking you the big cheese question.”

  “How about a qualified yes?”

  “What’s the qualifying factor?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Sheesh. That’s the toughest problem you can come up with?”

  “Spence, it’s a pretty damn big qualifying factor.”

  Apparently not to him. Apparently expressing a little vulnerable insecurity to Spence was like adding fuel to a fire, a dash of gasoline, a splash of an ignitable explosive.

  He skimmed her raspberry T-shirt over her head, tossed it. Then he kissed her; an embrace that certainly started in the kitchen but seemed to travel at its own speed with a radar sense for where it wanted to end up. His sweatshirt had disa
ppeared by the time they reached her bedroom door, and her bra had somehow taken off somewhere.

  So had she.

  His lips washed a trail down her neck and throat. Hands tugged at her white shorts, skidded, skimming them off her. His mouth skidded, too, skimming the cream off kiss after kiss. A damp palm cupped her breast, kneaded it reverently, and then he dipped down for a kiss that tongued the tip and left it tight and burning.

  Her knees wanted to buckle. As if Spence knew, he yanked at the yellow-and-white comforter and stripped the bedding down to bare, spare cotton. Then he leveled her on the cool, lemon sheets and kissed her senseless, kissed her until there seemed nothing but this liquid fire in her belly and a desire for him clawing all through her.

  He scraped away his pants, the last of his clothes, everything separating them. She kept expecting inhibitions to show up, fears of being inadequate, not enough woman, not skilled enough to please him. She’d always known Spence’s world had to be populated with women more sophisticated, more life-and-sex experienced, than her. Those fears were real. They just never seemed to have a chance to take hold.

  She knew Spence. He had poise, confidence, was always a hopelessly aggressive, take-charge dynamo. Only not now. Not here. Not with her. Sunset gradually softened the room with deepening, darkening mauve shadows. That pate away dusk caught the side of his face, the deep river of emotion in his eyes. It changed thing, when she discovered his hands were less than steady, his heartbeat was frantic as her own, that he was vulnerable... no different from her.

  The need pouring off him was naked, raw, lonesome. She’d sensed he was lonely, sensed he needed someone...but not her. She’d never really believed he could be out of control with her, for her, just for her. His pulse slammed each time she touched him. His breathing roughened like gravel. She stroked his smooth hot chest, the taut muscles, the long hard body, inhaling his texture, his scents, the flash-fire urgency of his response to her.