by Arlene James
“It’s not the same thing at all!”
“Isn’t it?” he asked softly. “Laura, I love my children, but I’m not very good with them.”
“You can be!”
He was shaking his head before the words were out. “Not like you. I know, I’ve tried.” Then: “If I thought you would stay with them…”
“No!” She pushed back, yanked free and came to her feet. Didn’t he understand that she could not stay? No, of course he didn’t. How could he? And she couldn’t make him understand without telling him the truth and endangering him and the children more than she already had. She had no choice but to lie. “I—I told you, I want to go back to school. I’ve waited so long for my chance, and… Well, if you want to know the t-truth, I’ve been feeling a bit…itchy-footed.” She had to turn away to say the rest of it. “I’m used to going from pillar to post as the mood moves me. I’ve—I’ve hardly spent two weeks in the same place in…so long.” She couldn’t go on without risking that her voice would break.
“Well,” he said bitterly, “far be it from me to point out that three innocent little children are—” He stopped abruptly. “No.” The chair scraped as he got to his feet, and then he was there at her back, his hands hovering over her shoulders. “That wasn’t fair,” he said in a near whisper. “They’re my children, my responsibility, and I’m the one who has… I want to take care of them, but I don’t know how, and you’re so very good with them.” He sighed. “Maybe it’s just that I’m frustrated because I can’t seem to find anything to do. I need a job, damn it, a business, a career!”
She turned slowly, careful to step back and keep a safe distance between them. “You’ll find something,” she assured him, “and the kids will come to trust you. It’ll all be worth it. You’ll see. They’re great kids.”
“They’re scamps,” he said bluntly, grinning. “But they’re my scamps.”
She nodded. He was exactly right. He was their father, and she couldn’t stay, no matter how much she might want to. “You’ll do fine together,” she said, putting on a bright face. “They just have to see that you aren’t going to leave them again, and they need to know that you love them. They need to be reassured about that as often as you can.”
He backed away, lifting a hand to the back of his neck. “I’m not very good at that sort of thing,” he said, “but I’ll do my best.”
She chanced one look into those golden eyes. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
He nodded briskly and looked away. “You, ah, will stay until I can find a replacement, won’t you?”
“Oh.” A replacement. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. She swallowed down a lump in her throat. “Of—of course.” She tried to sound light and teasing. “I didn’t mean that I was ready to walk out the door, you know.”
He nodded and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Sure. Good. I’ll…start to look. It’s, um, liable to take some time, though.”
“Right. Well…whatever.”
He backed away. “I’m tired. I think I’ll go on to bed.”
“Me too.”
Yet neither of them moved for a very long moment. Then he slowly leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. It felt right and friendly and comforting—until she looked up into those golden brown eyes.
She looked away again as quickly as possible, but she had already seen enough to wonder whether there might be another reason he didn’t want her to go, a personal reason. She had seen enough tangled emotion to begin thinking that maybe there was another reason to want to stay, which meant that she had seen…too much.
She jerked awake, her pounding heart and a sense of terror telling her that something was very wrong. She lay in the dark, warm beneath the comforters piled on her bed, but still able to feel the intense cold lurking beyond the dark confines of her room. Was it the storm? The evening news had warned of the possibility of a late, intense blizzard in the next few days. It was hard to imagine a cold more intense than what she had already experienced, but she’d heard talk of subarctic temperatures and raging snowstorms since coming to Minnesota. She lay in the stillness, trying to hear winds whistling beyond her heavily insulated window. She heard only the swish of fabric and the nearly imperceptible slide of footsteps over carpet. Her soft bed felt suddenly chilled. She threw back the covers and leaped out of the bed. Ignoring her cheap quilted bathrobe, she hurried across the room in nothing more than a big, loose T-shirt that skimmed her thighs and the heavy wool socks she’d worn to keep her feet warm in bed.
Quietly she cracked open the door of her room and peered down the hall. Across and down the hall a bit, the door to Adam’s room was tightly shut, and no thread of light showed beneath it. Was it one of the children, then? She slipped out into the hallway. A tiny orange light burned low on one wall. It illuminated a space perhaps three feet across to about the height of her knees, enough for one of the children to make his or her way to Adam’s room, not enough to let her see who or what waited beyond it. Laura gulped and began moving slowly and silently forward, the fingertips of her right hand trailing along the wall at shoulder height. The door to the boys’ room swung silently inward when her fingers gently pressed. In the faint glow of another night-light, Laura saw that their small beds were empty. Had they awakened her, or had they, too, been awakened?
She moved swiftly past the remaining rooms at that end of the hall, pausing only when she reached the foyer and felt a wave of intense, unusual cold, as if someone had recently opened the front door. Someone from the outside? Doyal! The thought engendered terror that was not at all abated by the furtive sounds of movement farther down the hall. Oh, God, where were the boys?
She ran on eerily silent feet. As she passed the dining room, she snatched up the heavy crystal wine decanter that sat empty on the end of the buffet, its etched facets glowing dully in the murky light emanating from the den. Raising the decanter high over her head with both hands, she rounded the corner and slid to a teetering halt. A ghostly light flowed from the den, its gray-blue haze cut by a partial shadow upon the floor, a shadow cast by a figure standing to one side of the open doorway inside the room. Across the huge, dim expanse of the den, Laura saw two little boys lying in front of the television on their bellies, their legs bent at the knees, bootied feet waving in the air, chins propped on plump hands suspended above elbows dug into the plush carpet. They whispered and giggled, obviously enjoying this illicit moment of forbidden TV, while the silent figure by the door watched and waited.
Laura rushed forward. The distance was but steps, and yet in the brief flash of time that it took to cross it she wondered frantically what she would tell Adam when he found Doyal Moody with his head bashed in on his den floor. Worse, what if she failed? What if Doyal, in all his evil, heard or saw her coming and escaped? What would he do to those precious little boys then? She had no doubt about what he would do to her.
It was with crushing dismay, then, that she felt her quarry step sideways, twist slightly and throw out both arms just as she swung the decanter down. The decanter thumped uselessly to the floor and a hand slapped over her mouth. Suddenly she was being propelled backward and shoved up against the wall, a firm, hard body pinning her in place. She stared, wild-eyed, up into the face of Adam Fortune.
This was an Adam she did not know, fierce, menacing, silently expert at quelling her senseless attack. This was the soldier Adam had trained to be. This was an efficient killer. And yet the fear that had clutched at her since the moment she had awakened abruptly drained away. Limp with relief, she sagged against the wall, confident that he would hold her up.
“Thank God!” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.
Some of the fierceness left Adam’s face, and he looked to the boys, twisting his neck and canting his head backward. Laura followed his lead, and found the boys relatively undisturbed. Ryan had rolled up into a sitting position and was casting a glance at the door, but he obviously could not see into the hallway, and the lure of late-night
television was just too delicious to be ignored. Within heartbeats, his whole attention was focused once more on the screen.
Adam backed away slightly, his gaze once more trained on her face. He quirked an eyebrow upward in silent interrogation, grasped her by both shoulders and propelled her around the corner and down the hallway. Just short of the foyer, he shoved her up against the wall again and held her there with a hand splayed flat against her breastbone.
“You damned near cracked open my skull!” The steel beneath the words belied the softness of his tone.
“I—I thought you were an intruder!”
His finely honed senses zeroed in on that word. “Intruder?”
She quickly corrected herself. “A—a burglar! I was afraid if the boys saw you…him, I mean…h-he might hurt them.”
Adam shook his head in disbelief. His hand left her chest to skim over his hair. Even as she babbled her explanation, Laura noted in some perverse part of her mind that he wore soft gray sweat pants and a white short-sleeved T-shirt that molded almost lovingly to the firm contours of his muscled chest and upper arms. “Something woke me up—a sound in the hallway. Your door was closed. The light was off. B-but the boys weren’t in their beds, and—and someone had opened the front door!”
“That was me, checking to be sure they hadn’t slipped out to play in the snow. It wouldn’t have been the first time.”
“Well, how was I to know that?”
“You might have asked.”
“I didn’t think of that, and when I saw your shadow… The boys were just laying there, and I thought, if they see him, he’ll h-hurt them!”
“So you grabbed the wine decanter and tried to bash in my skull,” he said wryly. He shook his head again, a slow grin curving his mouth. “This is St. Cloud, Minnesota, Laura.” He leaned a forearm against the wall, his body swaying close to hers. “We don’t have ‘intruders’ much in these parts, you know.”
She was intensely aware of her own body, of the silk panties she wore beneath her oversize T-shirt, the hugging knit of her socks. She should have been cold, but she was not, and her lungs clamored for oxygen that she couldn’t seem to provide them. “Th-that never occurred to me,” she gasped. “Burglars are all too common where I come from.”
“And where,” he said, fingering a strand of her hair, “is that, exactly?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but it was the first time she wasn’t able to dissemble. She simply couldn’t think quickly enough to keep the truth from tumbling out. “Denver.”
“Ah.” He curled a finger beneath her chin and lifted, tilting her head back and bringing her face close. “You know, Laura, I’m very pleased that you’re so protective of my children that you’d take on a burglar with nothing more than a wine decanter, but next time, you might just knock on my door first. Better yet, you could just open it and come on in. If I should be there but I’m not, you can safely assume that I have the matter under control. If I’m there… Well, either way, I have a lot more experience at subduing dangerous ‘intruders’ than you do. Agreed?”
She nodded, but when she dropped her gaze, he lifted her chin again, and this time his hand stayed to caress the curve of her throat. For some reason, all she could see was his mouth, and she swallowed, trying desperately to shift her gaze. “We…” She had to close her eyes to think logically. “We should get the boys back into bed.”
He brushed his thumb across her mouth. “Yes.” Then his mouth covered hers, gently at first, his lips parting and moving subtly, drawing her into the kiss with aching sweetness. She found herself leaning into him, her head sliding to one side. His mouth slanted across hers, and he pulled her away from the wall, wrapping his strong arms around her, holding her against his body. She felt softness, softness in his lips, in the cotton and fleece of his clothing, and beneath that softness the hardness of muscle and desire, strong male desire. Suddenly her woman’s body was aware of every hard inch of him. Her arms convulsed, pulling tighter, breasts swelling against his chest, pelvis rocking forward. If she hadn’t been standing on them, her legs would have wrapped themselves around him. She welcomed his tongue into her mouth. Something opened in the pit of her belly, and secret female muscles tightened in response. She could feel herself growing damp, feel the world spinning away, reducing itself to this tiny space in a darkened hall where two bodies pressed together, mouths melded, limbs entwined, desire blossoming.
She forgot everything—the children, Doyal, that she was leaving, that he was her employer, the terrible folly of her own judgment. He pressed her back against the wall, his hands sliding down to lift the hem of her oversize T-shirt and cup her buttocks, pulling her up and against him. With one hand, he held her there; with the other, he journeyed upward and around to capture her breast, the nipple lifting and hardening against his palm. One of them moaned, Laura was uncertain which. She didn’t know what she was doing anymore. She only knew that he was pressing between her legs, and that she wanted, needed, more. She tried to pull it from his mouth, tried to catch it with her hands, hold it with her arms.
Suddenly he was tearing himself away, his hands at her waist, pushing her from him, holding her against the wall. He was panting, gulping, trying to force out words. “Damn! I…never…” He jerked his hands away and stepped back, swallowing and licking his lips. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” He turned away, as if unable to look at her. “The boys… Someone better—”
“I’ll do it!” But she couldn’t seem to peel herself off the wall.
He nodded, pushed a hand over his face, then shook his head. “No. I’ll go. You’d better get to b—get some sleep.”
He was dismissing her. Still, she couldn’t move. Her body seemed unable to shift gears. She felt a stab of resentment that he could turn away so easily. It was some consolation when he reached out a hand to her, but then he fisted it and pulled it back, turning to move purposefully down the hall in the direction from which they’d come.
Laura bit her lip, slumping with dejection and misery, as if suddenly freed from whatever bonds had held her to the wall. God, what was wrong with her? It had only been a kiss. She should be glad that it had stopped at that, glad that she was safe, whole. She turned and made her way slowly to her room, where she leaned against the closed door and blinked away her tears, telling herself it was relief that produced the need to cry them. After all, it had only been a kiss shared in the dark of night after a moment of fear. It meant nothing. Nothing. And that was precisely why she cried.
Adam tucked the covers beneath the chins of his small sons, hoping the lecture he had just given them would curtail their late-night activities, and shut off the overhead light before slipping out the door. He walked to his own room and closed himself inside. He was tired. He went to the bed and lay down, lifting the covers to slide his feet beneath them, but he had hardly settled down when the first memory flashed across his mind’s eye.
Laura, in that big T-shirt that covered little and revealed all, her feet encased in bulky wool socks. He closed his eyes and felt his arm wrapping her firm, slender waist. He sat up and passed an arm across his eyes, as if that would sweep away the memories.
Laura, turning her head, her mouth trembling beneath his, her breasts heaving beneath their thin covering.
His breath quickened. Blood rushed to his groin. He groaned and fell back upon his pillow.
Laura, her small, sleek buttocks in his hands, her fingers clutching at his shirt, her nails scraping his flesh through the soft cotton.
He had meant to drag her in here, rip off what little clothing she wore, put her back to the bed and make love to her. He hadn’t thought about his children or the fact that she was leaving or how little of herself she had revealed. It had only been when he pulled away that the doubts slid in. They had come weighted with one word: Denver.
Three or four times he had asked where she was from, but only tonight had she answered him, and that after she’d nearly bashed his head open, after he
nearly broke her neck. He gulped, remembering that moment when the hairs had stood on the back of his neck, remembered grabbing her, feeling the weight of that wine decanter in her hand. Had he followed protocol, he’d have twisted her arm behind her back, wrenching it from the socket in the process, cupped her chin, braced the back of her head with his shoulder and twisted. It had been the blond hair that swept his face, the soft feminine curves that melted against him, the perfume of Laura, that stopped him.
She had her own unique smell, clean, fresh, wholesome. He had inhaled it as he tasted her mouth. It had wafted through him, turning on desires he’d long ago shut off. It had felt so good to think and act like a sexual being again, but then he had moved away from her, and he had thought, Denver. What else don’t I know about her? How will I feel when she goes back there?
And she was going. She had made that plain. He didn’t want to live separate from the woman in his life again. He had almost conquered that feeling of loss, that emptiness. Loving Laura, making love to Laura, would only bring it back again. Only this time it would be worse, somehow he knew it would be worse.
He sighed into the darkness, feeling cold seep into his bones. Maybe it would be best, after all, if she didn’t stay. Maybe it would be easiest for everyone if she went on her way as quickly as possible.
I’ll call the agency tomorrow, he told himself. The children would be sad and disappointed, but he’d find someone else for them, someone who would do just as well. He knew what to look for now, he assured himself. There had to be someone who could make them laugh and behave with the same look, someone who would love them unconditionally and yet let them go when the time came, someone who would protect them with her life, who would make him face his responsibilities as a father, who could teach him to love and be loved by his own children. Laura. Only Laura.