She shook against his neck, and he rubbed his hands over the softness of her bare back and said helplessly, “I’m sorry.”
She pulled back, and she was smiling. The relief hit him in the chest like a hammer, and he fell back on the bed, threw an arm across his face, and groaned. “Oh, man. You mess me up so bad. I meant to be gentle. That was the idea.”
“But in a totally controlling way,” she pointed out.
“Well, yeah.” He had to smile. “I can’t help that part.”
She crawled over his body, her hair a wild tangle around her, looking nothing at all like a buttoned-down, conservative lawyer and every bit like a woman who’d just been tied down, dominated, and overwhelmed, and who was ready for you to do it again. She kissed his chest, propped her chin on her hands, smiled into his eyes, and said, “I’ve never had a night like that in my life. All I’ll have to do is think about it and I’ll be getting there all over again. You asked me for my fantasy. It’s you. You’re my fantasy, and you always have been. I want you to dance with me and give me a blanket so I don’t get cold and carry me to bed. And then I want you to hold me down and make me yours.”
He groaned, and he meant it. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Knowing I excite you,” she said, “that I satisfy you? That excites me more than anything.”
“Even if I’m taking something out on you.” He sobered, saying it. “Something you don’t deserve.”
She was silent a moment. “Candy. And my parents.”
“Yeah.” It was a sigh, and he was smoothing a hand over her silken hair, down her back.
She kissed his chest again, gentle still. “Maybe I get it. Maybe none of it’s simple. Maybe it’s complicated.”
“That’s for sure.”
She raised her head and looked straight at him out of those blue eyes. “As long as you aren’t taking out your girlfriend on me. April. I don’t want to be the way you get back at her. I don’t want to be your revenge.”
“Aw, baby.” How could she make him feel so powerful, and so helpless? “No. I know who I’m in bed with. I know it’s you. And it’s all I want.”
The scarf was still draped over the lamp, the light still held that rosy glow, and Evan’s body was still warm and solid beneath hers. And then he reached out for the clock on the bedside table, set it back down with a sigh, and said, “I need to go pick up Gracie.”
“Oh. Right.” They’d never even made it under the covers. That was one of those tests. Did you get under the covers afterwards, snuggle and talk, fall asleep? Or did one of you get up, get dressed, and go home?
She should think about that some more. Not doing it would be a mistake and she knew it, but she didn’t want to do it now. Her dress was half on the bed, half on the floor, and every bit crumpled, but she grabbed it, pulled it around herself, and fumbled for the buttons.
Evan’s hand came down over hers, stilling it. “I’d like you to stay.”
She swallowed. “Even if Gracie’s here?” Wouldn’t that make it real? she wanted to say and didn’t. That wasn’t something either of them needed to look at too closely. At least it wasn’t something she was in any big hurry to do.
“She’s a baby. Like you said. Besides, she likes you. I like you too. I know you don’t have your nightgown or whatever, but you know—nightgowns are overrated.”
He took his hand away, and she finished buttoning her dress and said, “I have a toothbrush in my purse. And so you know—I sleep naked.” Instead of Really, I need to get up early. Maybe you could drop me off, which would have been a much smarter response.
He stopped in the middle of buttoning his jeans. “Really. Doesn’t seem all that proper.”
“Could be I’m not as proper as I look.”
He pulled his shirt on over all that chest, then smiled at last and said, “You know—I think I figured that out. And if there’s anything sexier than a good girl with a secret bad side, I can’t think what it is. Could be I’d be crazy about having you naked and next to me all night long. In fact, why don’t you unbutton that thing again and get started on the naked part right now? I could stand to come home to that.”
She hesitated. “Is Gracie at your mom’s?”
“Yeah.” He was frowning, and she knew why.
“If I came with you, it would make it real,” she said quietly. “Like you dancing with me in front of Candy and Rob Farnsworth.”
He waited a minute, then said, “That doesn’t make me sound too good. Like this is about me proving something, and using you to do it.”
That lump in the pit of her stomach? It was reality. “A lot of effort for nothing, making that statement to the world—at least the Wild Horse part of it—when I’m leaving in a week.”
He looked at her as he finished buttoning his cuffs, and she couldn’t read his expression one bit. “On second thought,” he said, “why don’t you come with me to pick her up? Keep me company.”
It took ten minutes to get to his mom’s house, because it turned out she didn’t live in town. There were so many things to say, though, and ten minutes wasn’t enough. Eventually, she said, “I just realized that you always knew where my family lived, and I never knew where your family did.”
“Your kind of family doesn’t tend to know where my kind of family lives. And not so much family anyway,” he said before she could react to that. “Just my mom.”
“Are your parents divorced?”
“Yep. Dad took off a long time ago. Barely remember the guy.”
“So how—” She stopped, then went on. “How did you get to be such a good father?”
“Same way my mom learned to be a good mother. I was the only one left to do it. This is it.” He pulled into a blacktopped driveway and parked beside another car, and Beth climbed out and followed him through the black night, up wooden steps onto a neat deck edged by terra cotta planters. Yellow light and the sound of voices—television voices—came through a screen door, the other door left open to let in the cool night air.
“You didn’t grow up with neighbors,” she said.
“Nope.”
“That’s why you need the quiet.”
“Probably.” He knocked once on the screen, called out, “Hi, Mom,” and went inside with Beth following.
A sturdy brunette dressed in a blue cotton robe swung her slippered feet off of a brown chenille couch, looked between Beth and Evan, and said, “Well, hi.”
Evan said, “This is Beth Schaefer, Mom. My mom Angela,” he told Beth. “How’s Gracie doing?” he asked his mother.
“Hasn’t shaken that cold,” his mother said. “Or maybe she was just missing you, because she sure didn’t want me to put her down tonight.”
She didn’t say it like she was paying attention. She was looking at Beth, and not in an “Isn’t this wonderful” kind of way. Beth said, “Gracie’s so sweet. It must be nice having a grandchild.”
“Uh-huh,” Angela said. “It is. I didn’t realize you were living in Wild Horse.”
“Visiting,” Beth said. “For a month or so. I’m on vacation, housesitting for Dakota and her stepfather.” And all right, she’d tossed that out in a pitiful bid for approval. But there was something in Angela’s face, and it wasn’t delight.
“I’m going to get Gracie,” Evan said. He headed down the hall, and Beth thought, Wait. Don’t abandon me. She got some idea how Evan had felt all those years ago when her mother would walk into the room and find Beth painting trim beside him. She’d swear Angela’s expression right now was exactly the same.
Angela asked, “Did you all have a good evening?”
Beth tried not to think about the fact that her hair wasn’t as neat as it had been a few hours ago, that despite her sweater, her dress wasn’t as opaque as a lady’s ought to be, or that, worst of all, she might smell like sex.
So what, though, if she’d just made love with Angela’s son? They were both adults. Surely a mother would want her child to be happy, and she’d made Evan
very happy. She concentrated on her breathing and said, “Evan took me to Busano’s in his boat, and we ate on the deck. It was beautiful out there.”
Fortunately, she didn’t have to hear Angela’s answer, because Evan was coming out of the bedroom, the diaper bag over his shoulder and a blanket-wrapped Gracie in his arms. Beth forgot about Angela, because the sight of the sleeping baby, her mouth pursed in sleep, her eyelashes like starfish against her round cheeks, and Evan’s arms holding her so securely . . . well, it was what she’d told Evan. A biological response. Babies were made to give you that feeling. Women got it more than men, even if the baby wasn’t theirs. Brain scans proved it. It was science. Unfair, but that was Nature. Unfair all the way.
“We’ll head out,” Evan said softly, being careful not to wake Gracie. “Thanks, Mom. See you tomorrow.”
Outside again, he put Gracie gently into her car seat and buckled her in, and the baby stirred, made a little complaining noise, but didn’t open her eyes. Beth climbed into the passenger seat and Evan got in beside her, then pulled out of the driveway. When he got back to the main road, though, he turned his head to look at Beth for an instant, then looked back at the road and said, “What?”
“I don’t think your mom likes me.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well. Guess you have to expect that.”
“I do? Why?”
“Is it so amazing that your parents might not be the only ones? Parents care about how people treat their kids. If it’s not good enough, look out. Moms could be a little bit worse than dads, though I’m not so sure. It’ll be a while until I really test it, but I have a feeling I could be about as bad as it gets.”
“Wait. She knew? About you and me before?”
Another quick glance. “It’s a small town.”
“So everybody keeps telling me,” she muttered. “So what’s wrong with me now? Or is it still my general awfulness lingering over the years?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Could be nobody’s good enough for me. Or could be she doesn’t forgive easy. Not on the big stuff. And that she’s worried it’s going to happen again.”
“You say that like I cheated on you. Stole your money. Slept with your best friend.”
“Nope,” he said, making the turn into his driveway. “Just broke my heart.” She was still reacting to that when he said, “Look at it this way. I don’t imagine I’ll be on your parents’ good list either once they find out how you’re spending your summer vacation.”
He got out of the car and took Gracie gently out of her seat. Beth grabbed the diaper bag and shut the van door, then said, quietly so she wouldn’t wake the baby, “But you see, that’s where you’re wrong. I already told my mother you’d probably be climbing through my window. Who’s hanging onto the past here?”
She could still go home, Beth thought. But she didn’t. She and Evan both knew where they stood, after all. Nobody was fooling themselves, not this time. It might even be good for them. It was uncomfortable to face the past, sure, but it was important. Closure, they called it.
Well, not closure, exactly, but . . .
All right. Sex, and maybe even some romance. Reminding herself what a good man—her kind of man—looked like. Tough in the ways that mattered, big and bad when you needed it, and still able to hold his little girl like that. A man who would take you to see dragonflies and dance with you on the dock. And then . . . yeah. Everything else he could do. And if some of that was about him showing the town, or her parents, or even her, that he was more than they thought, that he could win? Maybe she owed him that.
Anyway, wasn’t it all about being your whole self? Supposedly. She might have had better insight about exactly what was going on here if she’d done any of that self-improvement reading or meditating during her reboot instead of focusing on being outdoors, Jane Austen, smutty novels, and the pleasures of the flesh. But who wanted to be careful all the time?
She’d tried being careful. She’d checked off every box. She’d scored the highest in every single metric for nine long years. And look what had happened.
Maybe your self was like a pie, all the different slices of who you were, and the slices on the opposite side were exactly . . . well, opposite. Like the way you only saw one side of the moon, but that dark side was there all the same. But if only a few slices were acceptable, and you had to hide the others even from yourself, so you ended up narrowed down to that one thin little wedge? That was too tight a space. How could you breathe in that wedge?
Or it could be something much less high-minded. Maybe she just wanted her next A-plus to come in Kink 101, and she didn’t need Mexico for that, because she had some pretty good help right here. She’d been honest about what she was doing, and Evan wasn’t complaining.
What the hell. Which had never been her philosophy one bit, but she followed him into the house anyway.
What the hell. She was on vacation.
Did she leave it at that? Of course she didn’t. When Evan had eased Gracie down into her white-painted crib in a room illuminated by a purple butterfly night light, had switched on the humidifier and closed the door not-quite-all-the-way? When Beth had brushed her teeth, untied the bows of her frivolous copper sandals, unbuttoned her dress once more, and watched Evan hang it in his closet like they were a couple? When he’d pulled the bedclothes back and climbed in with her, turned out the light, then pulled her up close kissed her gently, and said, “Thanks for staying”?
Did she curl up beside him in the dark, enjoy the luxury of sleeping with him the way she’d never had the chance to do, and wonder if he’d wake her up in the night to help her uncover a few more of those wedges?
Nope.
She kissed his shoulder, laid her palm on the slab of his chest, and said, “Both of our moms worry, I guess.”
“Yeah.” His voice was a low, comforting rumble in the dark. “Probably. Did you really tell your folks about me?”
“My mom. Yeah. I really did.” She kissed his shoulder again. “Seemed like the least I could do, for you and me. She’s not a bad person. She’s just . . . overinvolved. And a bit of a snob with wacked-out priorities, because she grew up without money and that seems like the scariest thing in the world to her. She doesn’t always get what makes people . . .” She hesitated. “Good.”
“Huh.” That was all he said, but she didn’t feel tension under her hand, and his arm was still wrapped around her.
“Your mom,” she went on cautiously. “That’s not just about me. That’s about April, too. And I wondered, is she worried April won’t come back? Or that she will?”
Bingo. His muscles tensed under her palm. “What do you mean? She probably just thinks I’m too soft. Dakota said the same thing.”
Beth’s head came up off his shoulder. “Too soft? Uh, Evan. I don’t think that’s your besetting sin.”
“Sucker for women,” he added, like that would explain it.
“Ah.” She lay down again. “That you’re a rescuer. Because why didn’t I know about your dad, all those years ago? Why didn’t I know about your brother?”
“Because I didn’t tell you.”
“No. Because I was too busy telling you about myself, and I was too chicken to ask you the hard questions when you clammed up. I didn’t seem strong enough to take any of that weight off you, so you never shared it.”
“You were twenty.”
“And what were you when you were twenty? When you were nineteen? I think I know. I saw you with Dakota back then and thought you were going out. You weren’t. You were protecting her. From what, I don’t know. But that’s it, isn’t it?”
A pause, then Evan said, “Not my story to tell.”
Something caught at her heart, there in the dark. Caught, and twisted. “There. There it is. You are such a good man.”
His chest moved in what might have been a laugh. “Not really. You were right tonight. I was taking it out on you. Not fair.” A moment, and then, like it had been dragged out of him, “Been both
ering me.”
She had to kiss his shoulder again, then. Had to hold him tighter. “That’s how you can tell, don’t you know that? That’s the test. Whether it bothers you.”
“Maybe.”
“Yes.” She hesitated a moment longer, then asked it. “Are you still in love with her?”
“Who? April? No. No.”
“I wondered,” she went on, determined to see this through. It was dark, and if she didn’t have the courage to ask this now, when would she have the courage to do anything important? “You had a child with her. And maybe it’s that Taurus thing, stupid as that sounds when I say it out loud. You’re loyal. First and last. You always have been. And all this bitterness . . . I’m no expert, but it looks like love to me.”
It hurt, saying it. Acknowledging it. It sliced right through her, because she still hadn’t grown those layers of skin back. If anything, she felt more defenseless than ever, a shellfish who’d lost her shell.
But Evan wasn’t hers. He was hurting, and maybe she could help. She owed him that.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know how to say it more than that. No. If I’m bitter, it’s because she didn’t have the guts to tell the truth, or maybe because I didn’t have the guts to face it.”
“Which of us can face that?” she asked. “Which of us can see that our life isn’t working, and face why?”
“You did.”
She couldn’t answer. Her first reaction was exactly the same as his had been. No. “Wow,” she finally said. “That’s the last thing I’d have said. All this time, I’ve felt . . . helpless. Confused. Weak, if I have to admit it. Weak. I ran out on my job. I ran home. To my parents.”
“Your life wasn’t working,” he said. “You faced it. And you’re not with your parents now.”
It was actually true. Wow. Maybe she wasn’t a confused mess. Or maybe she was a confused mess who was at least moving. Finally. “Sharks have to swim forward,” she said, “or they die.”
No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2) Page 20