“Ah, God, you smell so good,” he said in an entirely different tone of voice. He pulled her into his arms even as Lacy squirmed and tried to slide under them.
As he buried his face in her glistening, fragrant hair he murmured, “I’ve been through hell these past few weeks. I keep waking up at night thinking something is going to happen, like something jumping out at me in the dark or falling on my head when I’m not looking. I’m developing a damned twitch in my right eyelid that won’t go away.” His searching lips hungrily traced her cheekbone, her hairline and then nuzzled the gentle curve of her ear lobe. “I need you with me, Lacy,” he breathed into her ear, “if only to be sure some new brainstorm of yours isn’t going to take me by surprise. Sweetheart, I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned to hate surprises since I met you. I’m as jumpy as a damned cat.”
“Let go of me, Michael,” she gritted. “I know all about how much you complain that you need to marry me to get a good night’s sleep! That was really nasty, what you told your lawyer.”
“I’m not going to bother to explain that.” He traced her eyelid with the tip of his tongue, his gray-eyed gaze full of a quicksilver light. His big hand cupped the back of her head so she couldn’t pull away. “This is not the time for one of our famous arguments.”
“Oh, don’t,” Lacy moaned. His mouth touched the tip of her nose in a feather kiss and then moved slightly lower to grace her upper lip. “Don’t kiss me like this, Michael,” she told him. “You know I can’t stand it. That’s the way this whole thing got started—with those crazy, irresistible kisses!”
Even as she spoke, Lacy knew it was too late. The familiar slow-moving heat was swelling in her veins, settling in her inner body with a decided ache.
“I can’t spend all night making love,” she wailed. “You’re going to make me get married tomorrow, remember?”
“Mmmhmm,” he breathed softly. “Give me your lips, sweet Lacy, that lovely mouth that I feel in my dreams. That is, when I can sleep and don’t expect something to hit me.
“Oh, love,” he said, tugging up her fire-engine-red cashmere to get rid of it, “you—” He stiffened. “Good, God, you haven’t got anything on under this!”
“Let’s not start that,” Lacy cried. She struggled as he seized the bright-red cashmere and stripped it over her head. “I’m not going to sit up all night discussing underwear with you, Michael, or any of your other hang-ups!” But she gave a large gasp as the tips of his fingers found the soft undercurve of her breasts and began stroking the straining pink nipples in slow, sensuous circles that left her body quivering.
“Ah, Lacy, you’re so beautiful,” he murmured raggedly. “You’re just so lovely and warm and trembling when I touch you. I just can’t get enough of you.” He pulled her close, his big, hard hand spread against the bare skin of her back to hold her while his other hand rhythmically stroked her rosy nipples into tight, rigid points. “I can’t wait to see you in the clothes I’ve brought for you to wear tomorrow, darling.”
“That’s it!” Lacy said, shoving him away. “OK, Michael, that’s definitely it!” She went around the corner of the bed at a run. “If you give me any more junk, I’ll—I’ll throw it out the window! You’re not going to force me to wear any more of your freaky custom-made clothes. You’re a compulsive, materialistic ... gift nut!”
“Oh, God, that’s lovely,” he muttered. He stood back to admire her slender body, bare from the waist up, her satiny breasts swaying, her pale-blond hair falling over her naked shoulders as she warily climbed onto the bed and to the other side to escape him.
“You give me the creeps, Michael,” she cried, unable to keep from trembling as his silvery eyes raked her desirously. “You’re trying to crush me, dominate me, with expensive presents! I reject them—reject them, do you hear? I don’t want anything from you!”
“I know that, darling,” he said huskily. “You don’t have to tell me.” He came around the corner of the bed after her, pulling off his Harley-Davidson T-shirt and tossing it on the floor. The muscles of his shoulders rippled as he lifted his hands and pulled open the brass buckle of his wide leather belt.
“Lacy, you’re the only woman I’ve ever met who doesn’t want anything from me, doesn’t like expensive presents, turns down promotions at work—I’m damned if I understand it. I have been called,” he said softly, “stingy as hell, a cold-hearted bastard and a calculating son of a bitch in a lot of bedrooms but never a nutty gift giver before.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured, reaching out for her as she climbed down the far side of the bed, “do you know how many women have wanted to marry me? How many of them I’ve had to chase out of my life? Out of my bed? Sweet darling, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me, Michael—uh, don’t do that,” Lacy cried as he peeled down his tight black jeans, exposing the corded, symmetrical length of his legs. He wore Jim Palmer-style Elance briefs in red, bulging with tiny silhouetted motorcycles. Lacy gave a quick, very audible gasp. “Goodnight, Michael, do you stay that way all the time? I’m just realizing I’ve almost never seen you—”
“Lacy, don’t slide down in the corner like that,” he murmured, stretching out on the bed and reaching for her with both hands. He pulled her up and drew her across the bedspread to lie against him. “I’m going to give you everything tonight, darling,” he soothed her. “Everything you can think of, starting with this.”
“Oh, drat, I don’t know,” Lacy whispered helplessly. Her hands moved down the clenching muscles under the silky skin of his arms. The face bending over her was that of the tough, handsome brute of a biker and the chairman of the board at his commanding, glittering best. Without wanting to, Lacy sighed. Her fingers rose to touch his thick, curling hair.
“Michael,” she murmured, knowing that she was slipping into surrender, ensnared in his beauty and in his erotic power over her. Rocket sparks of pleasure shot through her with the feel of his mouth, hot and demanding, tugging at her breasts. “You always make me do what you want me to do,” she moaned. “And I hate it!”
“You can’t hate it, precious,” he murmured against her fiery skin. “Not when you feel like this. I dream of you like this, beautiful Lacy. Holding you like this. Kissing you everywhere.
“What little sleep I’ve been getting lately,” he said, kissing the curve of her hipbone as he lowered the zipper of her jeans, “is full of dreams about kissing you like this, giving you the one thing you can’t use as a missile or send back to me in the damned United States mail.”
“No, no,” Lacy moaned, writhing under the scalding heat of his mouth. “Oh, Michael, you’re, uh—good heavens, what are we doing?” She raised both knees to help him slide off her boots and then the Levi’s jeans.
“I’m kissing you, darling,” his low, husky voice said as he pulled her little silk and lace bikini panties down her legs and leaned over her to press his lips against the V of her fleecy softness. “Didn’t you say you liked my kisses? I’m going to give you everything, sweet, lovely Lacy, every gift you can think of, and you’re going to take them all.”
“Eeek,” Lacy gasped.
The Zap! bam! powie! had, incredibly enough, ignited a charge of sheer dynamite. He pulled his big, shaking body over her and entered her. “Darling, look at me, open your eyes.” he told her hoarsely as he eased into her. “Say you love me again, Lacy. I want to hear it.”
“I can’t,” Lacy shuddered weakly. “I can’t, Michael—I think I’ve lost my mind.”
She heard him laugh, a wonderful sound. He stroked into her slowly, filling her up with his heavy presence, claiming her possessively. “Darling, look at me,” he whispered. “Come with me, I want to give you this.”
Dazed, overwhelmed, Lacy clutched him. His eyes were silver lights, making her acknowledge that he was her lover, claiming her, his body moving into her with gentle power. For once, Lacy could not fight what she felt.
“Michael,” she murmured,
touching his mouth with the tips of her fingers tenderly, “there was only one time before. In the front seat of a Buick with a boy named Bobby Sullivan when I was seventeen. We drank a whole six-pack of beer, and it was awful,” she quavered, glad to get it out at last. “I never wanted to, uh, have sex again until—until I met you.”
“I know, my love.” His ardent mouth bestowed kisses along the delicate line of her chin and into her throat. “Your father told me.”
“Daddy told you?” she gasped. “Michael, how did he know?”
“One of your sisters told your mother. Oh, God, sweetheart, can we have this conversation later? This is driving me crazy!”
Even as his mouth covered hers, even as they spiraled out of time and consciousness to the never-ending limits of the dark universe, wound together deeply and seeking each other, Lacy breathed the words that she loved him and waited for his words in return. Whatever his answer, it was lost in the glorious, shattering celebration of the very first time they had made love. At the peak of it her own cries were muffled by Michael’s husky roar of perfect, ecstatic possession.
Later, when her lover lay resting peacefully in what was, he had murmured before closing his eyes, his first good night’s sleep in days, Lacy stared wakefully into the dark of her bedroom. Her fingers played wistfully with the links of his gold neck chain and stroked the outline of his heavy arm down to his wrist. All his carefully stated power, his virile passion, his arrogant authority, was wrapped around her, holding her tightly, to keep her.
Oh, what have you done now, Lacy Kingston? the terrible inner voice rose up to say. It reminded her of all the things she had planned for tomorrow, which were already set in motion to destroy Michael Echevarria forever.
Cut and run, the small devilish voice answered. Sneak out now while the going is good, the way you did in Tulsa. Never come back. That’s one sure way out of this mess!
Lacy was tempted to do as the devilish voice said. But heavy arms held her. Michael’s big, powerful frame pressed her down in her bed, holding her there, his legs twined around and between hers, even his feet tucked under her own.
When she stirred, he only gripped her tighter in his sleep. His mouth, pressed against the satiny dampness of her breast growled, “Mine.”
And nothing more.
Twenty-Two
Michael Echevarria’s Silver Ghost Rolls Royce purred quietly into a no parking space directly in front of the municipal-Greek-style edifice of the New York Supreme Court at 60 Center Street, in lower Manhattan, promptly at five minutes before noon.
Edward, the chauffeur, smart in his dove-gray uniform, slid out from behind the wheel to open the doors for the limousine’s passengers. But not before Lacy, her fingers ready on the door handle, had shot from the back seat and onto the sidewalk, closely followed by the tall, broad-shouldered figure of the president and chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises in a splendid Savile Row charcoal three-piece business suit and elegant homburg, carrying a cream-colored woman’s coat, jewel case and a delectable frothy confection of a hat bundled in his arms.
“Lacy, come back here,” the chairman of the board barked as his bride-to-be ran for the entrance.
Former fashion model Lacy Kingston had only readied the first steps of the courthouse before a young woman carrying a microphone with the letters wwor-tv and a power pack on a strap from her shoulder, two television cameramen and a photographer from the New York Daily News, converged on her.
The young television newswoman got there first, “Miss Kingston?” she cried, sticking the microphone in Lacy’s face as Lacy took the long flight of gray marble steps two at a time. “Is it true that you’re going to make a statement to the press that you are being forced to marry Mr. Echevarria, whose intention is to keep you from filing a complaint of sexual harassment against him with the EEOC?”
“No, go away,” Lacy groaned. As she ran, she was trying to grab the zipper on the back of an ivory silk dress with dainty cap sleeves and a swirl of short, pleated skirt. “It’s been canceled, the whole thing!” She lunged for the revolving doors at the courthouse entrance.
“Lacy!” The authoritative voice of the chairman of the board came from behind the television cameramen as he bounded up the courthouse steps, somewhat encumbered by the coat in his arms and the tulle-draped hat with seed pearls in one hand. “Put these on!”
“I don’t want you to touch me,” Lacy yelled.
She was still shaking from the struggle in the Rolls Royce to get her to wear the princess-style coat and the little Dior wedding hat. They had almost come to blows earlier in her apartment over the white satin garter belt and the silk stockings embroidered with tiny ivory-on-cream daisies that Michael had finally yanked on her himself.
“Leave me alone,” Lacy cried, shoving the New York Daily News photographer out of her way. The wwor-tv newswoman was right behind her and managed to cram herself, her microphone and power pack in as the doors began to turn.
“Isn’t it true, Miss Kingston,” the wwor-tv news reporter panted as she stuck the microphone up between them, “that you’ve hired Harrison Potts Promotions, of Boston, to handle your wedding arrangements in Judge Markowitz’s office? And that the Peptic Ulcers punk-rock band is going to provide incidental music for the ceremony?”
Lacy gave a little distracted gasp as the door caught against the heel of her Capezio strappy sandals. There had to be some way out of what was going to happen, she was telling herself, but she couldn’t think of it. She had only herself to blame. What had seemed like a great, fantastic scheme for vengeance was now, in the light of what she knew she would always feel for Michael, a total catastrophe. Not funny, not smart, not a triumph of one-upmanship—just disaster!
“Listen,” she told the woman crammed into the revolving door with her, “let’s go around again and I’ll hold your microphone while you zip me up.”
“Right,” the reporter agreed.
They could both see Michael Echevarria wrestling with the wpix-tv cameraman for a place in the slowly rotating doors. The chairman of the board waggled a tulle-veiled hat at his bride threateningly as he, too, began to revolve, a scowl on his hard, good-looking face under the elegant black homburg.
“Hot damn,” the wwor-tv staffer gaped, watching the tall figure pounding on the glass before him with a handful of custom made cream wool princess coat, “is that mad hunk Echevarria Enterprises, Incorporated? What’s he trying to do?”
“This has to be the absolute pits, this whole idea,” Lacy moaned. “Oh, why couldn’t I be in some other place today. Like the Republic of Outer Mongolia?” She knew when they got to the fifth floor of the Supreme Court Building and Judge Markowitz’s chambers, what they would find it Pottsy had done his work.
“It’s a great dress,” the newswoman said as she pulled up the long zipper in back. “Is Mr. Echevarria still assaulting you? Was he trying to tear you out of your clothes? Can’t you make contact with some women’s support group that can help?”
“Don’t be silly—he’s trying to make me put them on,” Lacy shivered. “I’m a nervous wreck—I haven’t even had time to shampoo and set my hair. He took so long in the shower I couldn’t get in the bathroom. When I did, he’d used up all the hot water. I’m a mess, just look at me!”
“You look great to me,” the news reporter said, staring. “Did I hear you right? You mean you spent the night with Mr. Echevarria? Wow! And you mean you’re still going to denounce him today as a menace to American working women?”
The revolving doors spilled them abruptly out into the lobby before Lacy could think of an answer. As she broke into a run, a New York Daily News photographer darted in front of her, snapping blinding white photoflash shots.
“Hey, Miss Kingston,” the newswoman shouted as Lacy sprinted for the doors closing on an up elevator. “Is it true that you met Mr. Echevarria under rather unusual circumstances in a bar in Lincoln, Nebraska?”
“No,” Lacy cried, diving inside just as the
elevator doors were closing. She fell back against the tight-packed passengers inside with a gasp of relief.
The relief was premature. Michael Echevarria, still encumbered by the woman’s coat and hat, recklessly inserted his hands into the doors and held them open to the accompaniment of tripped alarm bells and warning cries from those inside. Then he squeezed himself into the elevator.
“Don’t let him touch me!” Lacy cried. She burrowed her way through the court clerks, bailiffs, legal secretaries and municipal judiciary toward the back.
“Damn it,” Michael Echevarria growled. His big hands pried two superior-court judges apart to seize her. “Put your hat on, Lacy. And stop yelling.”
“Leave me alone,” she protested. She tried to fight him off as he settled the Dior creation of pale-ivory silk and seed pearls on her head firmly. “I hate hats with veils—I learned my lesson last time!” Her hair tumbled over her face as she glared at him. “You’re harassing me, Michael—you’ve been doing this right from the beginning. Ever since you thought I was a hooker in Tulsa!”
He held the ivory wool coat crushed under his elbow as he worked to open a maroon leather Cartier jewel case. “If you could,” he said to a motherly looking court reporter jammed against his side, “just steady this for me—it would help.”
“We see a lot of wedding nerves,” the court stenographer murmured helpfully. She gasped as Michael Echevarria’s fingers extracted a double strand of matched pearls, each gleaming globe the size of a large hummingbird egg, from the ruby velvet-lined Cartier case.
“Don’t let him give me anything!” Lacy cried. “He’s only marrying me because he has to! It’s all his lawyer’s idea!”
“Sweetheart, stand still,” the chairman of the board ordered as he fastened the pearls around her throat.
“My God, what lovely pearls,” a secretary breathed. “They must be worth a fortune.”
“He has to marry me because—mmmmmfff,” Lacy moaned as Michael lowered his dark head and seized her mouth in a smothering kiss.
Hustle Sweet Love Page 24