by Cathie Linz
Meanwhile, Frieda and Consuela were having a good time fussing over Hope, who was delighting in all the attention. Consuela had made a little Santa Claus cap for Hope. The baby loved playing peek-a-boo with it, tugging the red cap over her eyes, chuckling to herself, and then pushing it back up again. In honor of the party, Brett had dressed the little girl in one of the adorable frilly dresses Consuela’s daughter had lent her. This one was pink, and had little flowers embroidered on the collar.
So far, Hope hadn’t spit anything on the outfit, but from experience, Brett knew that wouldn’t last long. Thank heavens all the clothes were washable, her own included.
Tired of the black leggings she’d been wearing so much over the past few weeks, today Brett was wearing jeans and a denim shirt along with the colorful red vest that Michael’s parents had given her Christmas Eve.
Mr. Stephanopolis joined them at the buffet table just as Keisha was saying, “We’ve been invited to a Kwansa celebration later today.”
“I never did understand why you’d want to celebrate Kansas,” he declared.
“Who’s talking about Kansas?” Keisha retorted.
“You were.”
“Kwansa not Kansas,” Brett said, sharing a smile with Keisha as Mr. Stephanopolis tapped his hearing aid with an impatient finger.
“And it’s meant to celebrate a sense of family and community as well as our ethnic history,” Keisha added.
“Those are important things,” he agreed. “That makes more sense. Here all this time I been thinking it was Kansas. I gotta go tell the wife. I love it when I know something she doesn’t. Excuse me, ladies.”
Brett and Keisha tried stifling their laughter in their glasses of sparkling grape juice. All Brett ended up doing was getting bubbles up her nose. Michael arrived in time to pound her on the back as she had a coughing fit. She noticed he continued his ongoing football conversation with Tyrone without missing a beat as he absently patted her on the shoulder before reaching around her for some cookies.
She was tempted to do something outrageous, like cupping Michael’s denim-clad derriere within her hand and borrowing Keisha’s expression of “mighty fine.” Instead she held her tongue, even though she’d rather have swirled it around her husband’s full lower lip.
As the men drifted off, Keisha said, “You got it bad, girl!”
“Yeah, I know,” Brett said with a sigh. “Does it really show?”
“You was drooling over your man the way that baby drools over practically everything.”
“I was not!” Brett denied.
Keisha just grinned and handed Brett a paper napkin with holiday greetings on it.
The arrival of Michael’s family was a welcome diversion. Brett had invited them but wasn’t sure if they’d come. She was glad they did. Maria brought poppy-seed cookies and Konrad was the hit of the party with his stories about their Pacific Rim cruise.
Only one thing prevented the gathering from being perfect, and that was the realization that although Brett had fallen in love with Michael, he didn’t feel the same way about her.
She tried to hide her inner yearning when looking at Michael as he proudly showed off Hope, but apparently she hadn’t done a very good job because her new motherin-law patted her on the shoulder and softly said, “Don’t you go worrying about adopting that little baby. Things will work out, you’ll see. Don’t give up hope.”
“Singing in the beans, I’m singing in the beans…” Brett sang her own lyrics to the tune of “Singing in the Rain” as she fed Hope dinner of vegetable pasta.
Actually it was a cooperative operation, with the little girl contributing by putting individual strands of cut spaghetti in her own mouth as well as trying to put one in Brett’s mouth every so often. When she succeeded, the baby got so excited she grabbed spaghetti in both hands and tossed it to the winds. Not exactly what Brett had had in mind when she took the leftover spaghetti from last night’s dinner, minus any sauce, out of the fridge.
“‘The more your baby is permitted to help at mealtime, the faster she will learn to eat on her own,’“ Brett quoted from one of the books she’d read, reminding herself why she was going through this messy and timeconsuming operation as she peeled sticky spaghetti off her forehead. The rain slicker helped, although the first time she’d put on the yellow rain gear to feed Hope, Brett felt like Gene Kelly in the famous musical—hence her own vegetable rendition of the song.
Successive feedings had provided her with more ideaslike spreading newspapers under the high chair during mealtime.
Completely unrepentant of the mess she was making, Hope gleefully bounced in her high chair while babbling “ga-ga-ga.”
As Brett leaned down to check out a full-page sale ad at a local hardware store, the baby suddenly pounded on the high-chair tray and said, “Maa-maa!” Out of the corner of her eye, Brett saw the little girl pointing at her.
Brett straightened so fast she almost got whiplash. Her shriek of excitement made Michael race into the kitchen so fast his socks slid across the linoleum floor.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded as he saw tears in Brett’s eyes.
“She called me Mommy,” Brett said in awe. “Well, actually she called me Mama.”
“Are you sure she wasn’t just saying ‘ga-ga’ like she does?”
“This was definitely ‘mama.’ And she pointed right at me. Say it again, Hope.”
Instead she said “Daaa-daaa!”
“The kid can talk!” he shouted, as thrilled as Brett had been. “Wait a second, I’ve got to get this on videotape. Don’t move,” he told Brett and Hope as he rushed into the other room to get the video camera. “Okay, let me get this thing turned on. Okay, stinky britches…”
“She’s going to see this when she’s twenty,” Brett reminded him.
“Say it again, honey,” he said.
“Say what, sweetie pie?” Brett replied with a sassy grin.
“Very funny.” He paused to zoom in on Brett’s face, unable to resist trying to capture the way she glowed, before aiming the camera at Hope again. “Come on, Hope. Say ‘da-da’ again. You can do it.”
The baby did it all right, picking up several pieces of spaghetti and hurling them straight at the camera lens, chortling with satisfaction at her own cleverness.
“Just for that I’m going to call you stinky britches until you are twenty-one,” Michael told her, turning the camera around to study the damage.
“Did you want some marinara sauce to go with that pasta?” Brett asked him in her best waitress voice while handing him a cloth to wipe the lens.
“Never irritate a man with a camera,” Brett told Hope before removing any further edible projectiles from the baby’s reach.
“Ma-ma,” Hope said, her baby voice filled with overtones of. complaint. “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma, ga-ga-ga-baga!” she gurgled, waving her hands at Brett as if to get her attention.
The little girl already had Brett’s attention. Michael’s attention was focused on the two of them through the viewfinder of his video camera. As he filmed them, he chalked up the strange tug on his heart to something he’d eaten.
“It’s been quite a night,” Brett said as she joined him in the living room.
“We need a couch,” he declared.
She blinked at him. “What brought that on?”
He shrugged, not about to tell her that it was more difficult to “make out” in a recliner than it was on a couch. More difficult but not impossible, he decided, eyeing her. She’d changed from her leggings and sweatshirt into a skirt—a very short suede skirt.
The color, a deep turquoise, suited her. The mohair cropped cardigan she wore with it made him itch to reach out to test its softness. He was also dying to find out if she was wearing anything underneath, because it sure didn’t look like it. The top button was undone and all he saw below it was skin. Her skin, creamy and soft, as lustrous as the single strand of pearls she wore, their demureness a direct contrast to the rest of her outfit.
He licked his lips, hoping he wasn’t openly smacking them. She looked delicious.
She had stockings on beneath her skirt, because he could see the shimmer on her lovely legs as she seductively sauntered closer. Since when had she sauntered like a siren? Lord, he’d never seen such sexy ankles! Hell, he’d never even seen her ankles before—she was always wearing boots or athletic shoes. Now she wore heels and they made her legs look like they went on forever, from slim ankle to seductive thigh. Lots of thigh!
Michael wiped his brow and reached for the remote control, hitting the volume button by mistake.
“Three, two, one,” the announcer said as the screen displayed the illuminated ball at Times Square. “Happy New Year, everybody!”
Michael didn’t care about every body, he only cared about Brett’s.
“Are you warm?” she asked. “I am,” she noted, opening another button and displaying the shadowy valley between her breasts. “It must be because of those hot cinnamon rolls I just baked. The oven warmed things up.”
She was warming things up, he thought to himself, unable to take his eyes from that vee of skin showing between her fuzzy sweater.
Noticing his interest, Brett nervously took a deep breath and told herself not to chicken out now. She’d been planning this seduction for almost a week—the miniskirt; the return of her miracle bra. and nothing else. under the cardigan; the erotic rip-away black-lace panties she was wearing, and last but not least, the hot cinnamon rolls. Just yesterday she’d heard on the local news that a Chicago research scientist had discovered that the scent that aroused men the most wasn’t musk or anything else you could buy in a bottle. It was the smell of hot cinnamon rolls.
Presto, Brett had added baking to her battle plan. She’d even dabbed a touch of cinnamon behind each ear, just to be sure.
Michael, poor sexy soul, looked like a man besieged. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt. She didn’t aim on him wearing them long.
“Ah.” He cleared his throat and started again. “I…ah…never heard of baking cinnamon rolls for the holiday…Have I told you how we celebrate Szilveszter?”
“Who is Silvester?”
“Not a who, a what. It’s New Year’s Eve. And we al ways celebrated the holiday with drinking, dancing and music and eating virsli at the stroke of midnight.”
“What’s virsli?”
“Sausage, sort of.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not keen on that part, but the rest sounds good. I’ve got some champagne chilling in the fridge.”
Michael thought the only way to cool his overheated blood was for him to chill in the fridge.
She came back from the kitchen with two champagne glasses in one hand and the bottle in the other. “I looked out the kitchen window and it’s really snowing hard out there. It’s a good thing we’re staying home tonight. Here, would you pop the cork for me?”
He swallowed, unsettled by the way the overhead kitchen light had backlit her entire body, creating a repeat of the magical image he’d seen when he’d first opened the Rom box. She looked like an angel. And he had yet to find the box, which had been missing since the day after she’d moved in.
“Michael?” Brett repeated. “The bottle? Can you open it?”
“Oh, right. Sure.”
Aiming the bottle in the corner, he almost knocked the star off the small Christmas tree on Brett’s scarred pine dining table with the cork that came flying out of the bottle.
“Nice shot,” she said with a grin. “I guess we really should wait to make a toast until midnight, but there’s no reason we can’t sample the bubbly now, right?”
Nodding, he poured himself a glass and gulped it in one go and then had to watch while Brett daintily sipped hers, driving him crazy with the sultry sheen on her luscious lips.
“Now all we need is music and dancing,” she murmured before taking the remote control. She switched channels to a black-and-white movie classic, Top Hat. Fred and Ginger were dancing and it was magic.
“I always wanted to learn to dance like that,” she said somewhat wistfully.
“I can teach you,” he replied, setting down their drinks and taking her in his arms before she could say no.
They might not have tripped the light fantastic quite as nimbly as Fred and Ginger, but with her right hand in Michael’s and her left hand poised upon his shoulder, Brett felt every bit as light on her feet as the legendary dancers. Of course, the fact that she was in Michael’s arms was the real reason for this blissful sensation of floating inches above the ground. Being held this close to him was more intoxicating than an entire case of the world’s best champagne.
Once the dance was over, the movie characters went on to the next scene. Scooping up the remote control with his right hand, Michael smoothly hit the Off button even as he lowered his mouth to hers for a kiss that was a merging of souls as well as lips. He practiced the subtle art of seduction, captivating her with the thrust of his tongue.
Feeling her knees weakening, she slid her hands around his neck, dragging her fingers through his dark hair. She was delighted by the rough silkiness of it. Murmuring her name, and incorporating it in their kiss, Michael tugged her even closer.
The hem of her cardigan had lifted when her arms had, leaving a patch around her middle bare to his avid explorations. He slid his hand from the small of her back up beneath the mohair material, testing his theory that she wasn’t wearing much underneath. He felt the constricting band of her bra and sought to remove it, but the back was smooth—it must have a front fastener.
Temporarily diverted, Michael slid his hand down her back, appreciating the velvety texture of her suede skirt as he cupped her derriere before sliding lower, to steal beneath her skirt, lifting it as he moved his hand back up until he encountered the elastic top of her thigh-high stockings.
By now, Brett was completely consumed with her need for him. Judging by the way he rubbed against her, she knew he felt the same. There was no time for words as they sank to the floor.
He rested atop her so that they were pressed together from shoulder to hip. The electrifying contact was made even more intimate when he wedged his leg between hers. She was on fire. He’d incited a riot of pleasure within her and the craving for consummation was so intense there was no time to think, only to act.
She reached for the zip on his slacks as he fumbled with the buttons on her cardigan. Once her sweater was undone, he quickly dispatched the front fastening of her bra in order to cup her small breasts in the palm of his hands. Before self-consciousness could take hold of her, Michael had lowered his head. His lips closed around the rosy crest, tugging her swiftly, sweetly into his mouth. He drove her to a higher level of desire with every hot, wet, velvety stroke of his tongue.
He was so painfully gentle and deliciously demanding that Brett didn’t care that they were lying on the dhurrie rug in the middle of the living room floor. She felt as if the world were going to explode any second and she needed him within her. now!
When his hand glided beneath her panties to caress her moist warmth with skillful wickedness, she knew she couldn’t wait a moment longer. Guiding his hand to the narrow sides of her underwear, she whispered, “Rip them off.”
He did. She helped him shove his underwear out of the way and in doing so, her elbow inadvertently hit the remote control button. The large TV screen blinked on, televising Chicago’s countdown.
Michael came to her, surging into her as the count began.
“Ten…nine…eight…”
His heated thrusts coincided with each slipping second.
“Seven…six…five…”
Brett gasped with pleasure as the tension mounted.
“Four…three…two…”
She raised her hips to take him more fully within her.
“…one…”
“Yes!” Brett cried as the first clenching ripples of satisfaction shot through her. “Yes, yes, yes!”
“Happy New Year!�
�
Her inner muscles tightened around him as she climaxed. The TV was abruptly silenced and the room was instead filled with the sound of her breathy moans of joy and his shout of pleasure as he joined her in the culmination of ecstasy that ended with him stiffening and then collapsing in her arms.
When Brett next opened her eyes, she saw fireworks. It took her a second to realize the chromatic display was on TV. Closing her eyes, she ran her hand over his bare back. He had his face buried in the crook, of her shoulder. She threaded her hand through his dark hair, fascinated by the vibrant thickness of it.
When he finally leaned away from her, he gave her that rare, devilish, slow grin of his before saying, “That was better than eating virsli.”
“I should hope so,” she said with a demure smile.
“We went a little crazy,” he murmured.
“Mmm-hmm,” she agreed.
“You still have your clothes on.”
“Not all of them.”
“Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head. “Did I hurt you?” she inquired with a sassy smile.
“You may have put your mark on me here or there,” he replied, flexed his back muscles beneath her fingertips.
“Only here or there?”
“Everywhere.”
“You’re an amazing…dancer, Mr. Janos.”
“So are you, Mrs. Janos. Are you ready for another lesson?”
She let her smile speak for her.
Getting to his feet, he held out his hand to her. Taking it, she let out a surprised squeal as he tugged her up right into his arms.
“There you go, sweeping me off my feet again,” she said with delight.
“This time we’re going to go slow,” he stated as he walked into his bedroom. Setting her in the middle of his tousled sheets, he muttered, “You drive me crazy when you do that.”
“What?” she asked in husky surprise. “What did I do?”
“This.” Leaning forward on both hands, he ran his tongue around her upper lip, mimicking her nervous action of a moment ago.
This time their kiss was slowly evocative and darkly erotic. He kissed her as if he had all the time in the world, as if he were writing a ten-volume treatise on every detail of her mouth. He took his sweet time, leisurely exploring all the delicate unexpected places—the curving slope of the roof of her mouth, the delicious fullness of her lower lip, the demure curve of her upper lip. Each caress was richly extravagant.