Shameless (The Contemporary Collection)

by Blake, Jennifer

  She gave a quick shake of her head. “Maybe it won't be necessary. Anyway, I don't know what action the sheriff or anyone else can take, since all Keith has done is threaten me.

  Reid's voice as he answered was uncompromising. “You can't let it pass, not if you want to stop him.”

  “There must be another way,” she said unhappily.

  The look he gave her was steady. “There are only two things. You can fight, or you can give in.”

  “I tried using a gun, remember?” she said with acerbity.

  “A show of force was a mistake, since you apparently didn't intend to follow through. If you won't call the police, then the only tactic left is subversion.”

  “You mean stall? Trick him into thinking I may go back to him until after the divorce is final?”

  “I had in mind inviting your cousin to dinner tomorrow and telling him to come in his patrol car,” he answered in frowning concern. “Or something like bringing a pair of Dobermans into the house, maybe renting a room to a tae kwan do instructor.”

  “I have a better idea,” she said slowly, as alarming, half-formed impulses swirled in her brain.

  “Such as?”

  She didn't stop to test the origin of her solution, or its implications. As it settled, becoming a firm idea, she simply set it in motion.

  Moving toward Reid, stretching on tiptoe, she slid her arms around his neck. Her gaze wide and appealing, her lips tremulous, she whispered, “Kiss me.”

  He was fast on the uptake. His instant of stiff amazement was barely perceptible before he bent his head and closed his arms around her. She pressed her lips to the smooth and firm contours of his mouth and settled against him until the nipples of her breasts nudged into his chest and her lower body molded to his pelvis.

  Reid drew a ragged breath. His hold tightened, and abruptly he took the initiative from her.

  Her lips parted under the onslaught of his kiss. Pleasure spiraled up from deep inside her, tingling along every inch of contact between them. Her pulse leaped to a frantic tempo. Heat invaded her body in waves. She accepted the bold and warm sweep of his tongue between her parted lips, and returned it with fervent grace.

  Lost, she was lost in half-remembered sweetness, in the revival of sensations she had thought were only imagined. They shook her heart so that it expanded, aching in her chest. With a soft sound deep in her throat, she pushed her fingers through the thick silk of his hair at the base of his skull and tightened her arms around his neck.

  He smoothed his hand over her back, with its soft flannel covering, gliding lower to the gentle swell of her hip. His light grasp lingered there, learning the texture and resilience of her, drawing her closer until she could feel the heated hardness of his body, sense the tenuous control that allowed him to trespass just so far and no further.

  Sanity returned with unwelcome suddenness, rippling through her on a shudder. She couldn't believe what she had done, could never have conceived a few hours before that it was remotely possible. It had to be caused by the peculiar events of the evening and the careless raking up of the past.

  That wasn't all. With painful honesty she faced the fact that there was another element involved. Somewhere inside she had a need to find out once and for all whether what had happened so long ago between this man and herself was just a fluke or as startling as she remembered. And, yes, a desire to stroke the panther.

  She caught her breath on a small gasp, and drew back with care. Her voice a little hoarse, she hurried into explanations.

  “I thought — it seemed that if I could make Keith think there's another man in my life now, he might give up and leave me alone.”

  “I figured as much.” Reid's response was soft and not quite even.

  She had thought he understood, but needed to be positive. She went on quickly. “That it's you makes it even better. You're intimidating, though Keith would deny it with his last breath. He was always jealous of you — and it's worse now that you may be coming into the mill.”

  “I see.”

  She could feel her courage receding, being replaced by confusion. Before it could slip away entirely, she hurried on. “The — The trick might be even more effective if you would come inside. There will be no obligation, I promise. And it will be just for a little while.”

  She realized as she spoke that she was taking a lot for granted. The fact that Reid was no longer married didn't mean he didn't have a woman somewhere.

  “For a little while,” he repeated, the words abrupt, almost mechanical.

  She swallowed hard as she turned with him toward the back entrance under the shelter of the porch. Her hands shook as she put the key in the door. She grasped it hard, hoping he wouldn't notice.

  Inside the house, she flicked the lights on while Reid closed and locked the door behind them. She turned then, and saw him watching her with the same careful, measuring expression she felt on her own face.

  Reid exhaled with a short, hard breath. He felt as if he had been handed a bomb and it had detonated in his hands. The concussion had shaken him to the center of his being, had taken his wits and his strength and turned his insides to hot mush. And he was not yet certain he had survived the blast.

  His voice less even than he would have liked, he said, “You're full of surprises.”

  “I don't mean to be.”

  She gave him a swift look, then swung and moved ahead of him through what appeared to be a sitting room located at the end of the long hallway through the house. His gaze rested an instant on the bronze shimmer of her hair hanging down her back, on the sheen of the skin on the calves of her legs, and the slight sway of her hips under his old robe. The knowledge that she was naked under the worn flannel was a white heat in his mind; he knew she was because he had felt it. Dizziness and disbelief caught at him. He gave his head a hard shake before he moved after her.

  They entered a big, airy kitchen with white-painted cabinets topped with yellow tile and a long bank of plant-crowded windows that faced toward the back of the house. It was so much larger and brighter and more open than its counterpart at the Fort that he felt exposed, and that was before she switched on the fluorescent strip lighting. The height of the room from the ground made it unlikely that Keith could see in from outside; still, it made him wary.

  Over her shoulder Cammie said tentatively, “Since I'm taking up your time, I'd like to offer you something for dinner. Will a steak and salad do?”

  “Fine,” he answered through stiff lips.

  She was trying to give herself something to do, he thought, and trying to make the situation seem natural. The least he could do was help her out. Walking deeper into the room, he leaned against the end of the one cabinet and put his hands in his pockets.

  Cammie moved back and forth, taking steaks from the freezer against one wall and putting them into a microwave to thaw, searching out lettuce and tomato, broccoli and carrots from the refrigerator. He watched, thinking how unreal it was that he was there in her house.

  It was funny, in a grim fashion, that it was his background with the mill — and possibly the reputation of his sordid past in covert operations — that made him useful to Cammie all at once. These were the very things he would have expected to repel her. Beyond that, the uppermost emotion he could sort from among those that crowded his chest was gratitude.

  It had been a long time since he had been close to a woman, any woman. They were far too fragile and easily hurt. He didn't trust himself with them, hadn't for a long time.

  Cammie had responded to him. He had felt the slow, sweet burning where their bodies had touched, had tested the frantic pulse in the tender curve of her neck and tasted the sweet tang of desire on her tongue. It struck him as nothing less than a miracle.

  He should leave, he knew that beyond a doubt. To stay was dangerous, for both of them. If he should hurt her, this woman of all women, he might never get over it.

  He couldn't go. Not after what had happened out there on the porch. He o
wed her something for that, for letting him feel for the space of a few quick breaths that he was not the pariah he thought, not just a machine with bestial instincts. He would do, and be, whatever she wanted, if she would allow him to pretend just a little longer that he was a normal man.

  He was staring at her, at the way her hair shifted across her shoulders, catching the light in individual red-gold strands; studying the curve of her mouth, the slender turn of her waist as she moved here and there. He knew he was, but couldn't help it. It was that irresistible. Though the effect on him would very likely disgust her if she noticed it.

  He needed a distraction, needed it in the worst kind of way.

  “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  She flung him a quick look, as if she had never heard a man say such a thing. “Nothing. I can do it.”

  He moved toward her, picking up one of the carrots that lay beside the sink. His voice even, he said, “Do you have a potato peeler?”

  She turned to a drawer and took out the utensil, handing it to him. She watched him as she might a child with a sharp knife while he sliced a long, paper-thin peel from the carrot in his hand. Satisfied, apparently, that he knew what he was doing, she went back to washing lettuce.

  “Keith doesn't do kitchen duty?” he asked as he worked.

  Her lips twitched in the wry smile he was coming to expect. “Like you, we have a housekeeper who comes in by the day. Keith always considered paying her wages his contribution to household chores.”

  “He might have been more willing to pitch in later, when the children came. Most men come to it then.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was there a reason you didn't have any? Children, I mean.” It was a question that had been in the back of his mind for some time. He had been expecting off and on for years to hear that she was a mother.

  She glanced at him with a frown between her eyes before she tore paper towels from the roll to drain the lettuce. “At first, Keith thought we should wait; he didn't want to be tied down. I decided later on, for different reasons, that he was right.”

  He wondered, abruptly, what she would look like when she was pregnant. Nothing less than bewitching, he suspected, much as she was now, but more so. He liked the shape of her mouth, generous, made for smiling, and he thought he could spend quite a while getting used to the way her brows arched. Her witch's eyes with their layers of blue and green, gold and gray, fascinated him; he would like to move in nose to nose, to study them. Her cheeks were a little hollow, and there were shadows under her eyes; she could use a few more pounds and a lot more sleep. Still, she was beautiful, no doubt about it. Pregnancy could only add to it.

  He put down an extremely well-peeled carrot and picked up another one before he spoke in an abrupt change of subject. “I meant to tell you before, I'll check out your car tomorrow and put new tires on it. Will you be home if I bring it by around nine?”

  “There's no need,” she said with a startled glance. “I can send a man from the garage.”

  “I'd rather see to it; Keith may have left you another little surprise.”

  Her movements stilled and doubt invaded her eyes. “More damage? You don't really think so?”

  Did he? He wasn't sure, but it made a nice excuse. He said, “I can tell more about it when daylight comes. In the meantime, I can leave the Jeep here, in case there's somewhere you need to be in the morning.”

  “How would you get home?”

  “Walk,” he said with a shrug. “It isn't far through the woods.”

  The microwave oven chimed as its cycle ended. There was a silence as she moved to take the steaks out and tear open their plastic wrapping. She turned them out onto a platter, found Worcestershire sauce and set it out, then reached for a pottery garlic jar. Holding a garlic bulb in her fingers, she said, “There's another solution.”

  He looked up, alerted by a shading of strain in her voice. “Such as?”

  “You could spend the night here.”

  He put down carrot and peeler and stood with his arms braced and his hands spread flat on the countertop. The tile was cool under his palms, but did nothing to ward off the sudden furnace heat in his brain. As he turned his head slowly to look at her, it felt as if every bone in his neck grated and snapped with the tension that gripped him.

  “Do what?” he asked in toneless disbelief.

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “You heard me.”

  He had. That was the trouble.

  Outside, the rain had begun to pour down again in a steady drumming. He counted his pounding pulse, which made a counterpoint to the soft noise.

  “In one of the spare bedrooms, of course,” she said hurriedly.

  He looked away from her, fastening his gaze on his own pale face reflected in the window over the sink with the dark night behind it. His voice like cracking ice, he said, “I can't.”

  “Why? It's only one night, not a lifetime commitment. There's no obligation involved.”

  “I realize that.” At least he had assumed it.

  “So where's the problem? Unless — I see.” She turned her back on him.

  “I doubt it,” he said, the words measured, louder than he intended, though he couldn't help that. “I don't give a damn about being used — there's nothing unusual in that. It would give me great satisfaction to act as a buffer between you and Keith, if that's what you need. I don't care what the gossipy neighbors think, as long as you don't. And I have no need to deny what you ask out of some misplaced retaliation for the bad blood between our families.”

  “What is it then? Do you walk in your sleep? Or are you afraid I'll be consumed with lust in the middle of the night and crawl into bed with you?”

  A short, hard laugh left him. “That's the least of my worries.”

  “Well?” She turned back to stare at him.

  “Suppose,” he said, switching his gaze to her reflection there beside his own in the rain-speckled glass, “that I hurt you?”

  “You wouldn't. You couldn't.”

  The look on her face was so certain. She didn't understand, even after what he had told her.

  He moved almost before the decision was made; that was the way it worked. Before she could make a sound, before she even began to guess what he intended, he locked his arms around her in a death grip, one of many he had learned too well. He wasn't hurting her, but she could not move without causing herself pain. Nor, given her lesser strength and lack of knowledge, could she possibly break free.

  In those fleeting seconds as he settled his hold into place, he felt the unaccustomed thrust of doubt. His motives for this demonstration, he suspected, were far from noble. To feel the soft delicacy of her body pressed against him again — to know that she was inescapably in his power, however briefly — for these things any excuse would do.

  He shifted slightly to place his fingers on the tender curve of her neck behind and below her ear. His voice no more than a whisper, he said, “Do you realize that I could kill you in seconds, without a sound, by applying pressure just here?”

  “I don't doubt it at all,” she said, the words astringent.

  “Do you understand that I could do anything at all to you, and there is no way on God's green earth you could stop me.”

  The pupils of her eyes dilated, and her breasts rose against him with the depth of the breath she took. She searched his face for a brief instant before she released the air in her lungs. She said, “I can see how it might be possible.”

  “Then you realize why I can't stay?”

  She stared up at him with irritation seeping into her face, collecting in her eyes. “I realize that if you don't turn me loose this minute, I'm going to kick you where it hurts, just like I did Keith.”

  He grinned; he couldn't help it. And he had meant to be so menacing. The only way she could manage to hurt him was if he let her, but that wasn't what tickled his sense of humor. It was her spirit, her sheer, uncaring defiance.

  If there was
a woman who could survive whatever vicious instinct he might have, whatever brutal act he might inadvertently commit against her, it was possible she was the one.

  Possible, yes, but not likely.

  3

  THEY ATE THEIR STEAK AND SALAD IN virtual silence. Cammie, all too well aware that Reid had neither agreed to her proposal nor completely refused it, was reluctant to say anything that might swing his decision the wrong way.

  She glanced up once, to find his gaze resting on a spot a foot or so below her chin. The belt of the robe she wore had slipped, she discovered, letting the neckline fall open, exposing the pale curves of her breasts.

  She should have changed clothes, she thought; she would have been more comfortable. It had seemed awkward and rather coy, however, after wearing the robe in front of Reid at the Fort.

  In a gesture as casual as she could make it, she reached under the napkin on her lap to draw the edges of the robe tighter, closing the gap. When she looked at Reid again, he was giving his steak his undivided attention, and the tops of his ears were pink.

  Her attention was caught by his hands as he sliced off a bite of meat. She had noticed them earlier. They were big and square, but well-shaped. The fingers were long and marked by small white scars. There was precision and controlled strength in the way he used them. She wondered what it would be like to feel them upon her, inside her.

  She drew a sharp, sudden breath and was not surprised to feel heat rising through the lower part of her body. Reaching for the glass of burgundy she had poured to go with the meal, she took a hasty swallow.

  She must be losing her mind, having a mental breakdown; there was no other explanation for the things she had done this evening, beginning with firing her pistol at Keith. It wasn't like her, it wasn't like her at all.

  It would be easy to say her husband had driven her to it, but she wasn't sure she could accept that excuse. It was as if she had stepped over some invisible boundary within herself and now, somehow, was speaking and behaving with primitive intuition. It was frightening, yet exhilarating at the same time. Perhaps it was like the dangerous instincts Reid had been trying to describe to her. There was something seductive in the thought of being controlled by something other than pure reason.