by Ryanne Corey
“So do you think this will work?” she asked, dreamily focused on Zack’s lips.
Zack shrugged, smiling faintly. “I hope so, for Carrie’s sake. I guess we’ll know soon.” Even while fighting his inner demons, he couldn’t take his eyes off the woman seated opposite him at the small table. Anna, too, had worn something fancy for the occasion, and it was the first time Zack had seen her in a dress. If Anna could look good in a kimono and bunny slippers, she positively dazzled when she was dressed to kill. She wore a short, black-sequined halter-top dress, shimmering sheer black nylons and strappy heels so high, they brought the top of her head even with Zack’s eyes. Dangling black pearl earrings flashed through her long, honey-gold hair, reaching almost to her shoulders and adding a gypsy-like touch to an otherwise elegant outfit. She stopped his heart.
Naturally men had stared at her when they’d walked in, forks paralyzed in midair. Zack could swear a hush fell over the room. Their waiter had visited their table five times already, and they hadn’t finished their hors d’oeuvres yet. A second waiter hovered nearby, refilling their water glasses each time they took a sip. And the beaming maître d’ had actually come over twice, encouraging them to take their time and enjoy a long, leisurely meal. Zack could hardly figure out who to punch first.
“Why on earth are you scowling at our waiter?” Anna asked curiously. “He’s been very attentive.”
“There’s something about attentive waiters that makes me claustrophobic,” Zack muttered, distracted by her appearance, his own thoughts and the googly eyed males hovering nearby. “Not to mention the attentive busboy and the attentive maître d’. Now I know how you felt in Appleton’s.”
“I promise to catch you if you swoon.” Anna cocked her head sideways, staring at him with a little furrow between her brows. “Zack? Are you all right? You seem awfully preoccupied tonight. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Zack said, taking a long swallow of water while he collected himself. Then, when the young kid with the water pitcher instantly appeared, he gave him a warning look and said flatly, “Go away.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” Anna said, watching the busboy run for cover.
“He was looking at you.”
“I didn’t notice.” A little smile played with the corners of her mouth. Her lips were the most amazing color tonight, a rich burgundy with sheer gloss. Kissable, flirtable, shaped for pure, sweet love.
“I did.” Zack had a hundred desperate thoughts of what those lips could do to him, and vice versa. The strain was evident in his voice. “I’ve just discovered the pain of going out in public with Venus. I can’t count the number of eyes focused on you.”
“You’re exaggerating. I’m just another face in the crowd,” Anna said, looking at him cross-eyed to prove her point. In fact, she truly hadn’t noticed anyone looking at her. She was too busy noticing the man she was with. Putting a tie on Zack was rather like putting a pretty little bow around the neck of a sleek, dangerous lion. “So tell me, what did you do to make Kyle be civil?”
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. He reached across the table for no other reason than to simply touch her hand. He couldn’t be this close to her without touching her. It was impossible. “Kyle had a wake-up call when Carrie walked out on him. Sometimes you need to lose someone before you realize how important they are.” He heard his own words and closed his eyes briefly. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that experience. “Hopefully they’ll manage a happy ending. Change is always a little scary.”
Anna smiled faintly, distracted by their intertwined hands on the cream-colored tablecloth. It seemed she would never become accustomed to his touch. No matter how innocent, no matter how casual, it always took her breath away. “Well, you managed to help him see the light. Carrie actually looked happy tonight when she was getting ready. It was good to see her smile again.” She gave him a look of pure, blue-eyed temptation. “I owe you, Mr. Romantic Policeman. Maybe you can be thinking about how I can return the favor.”
“Don’t do that,” Zack told her darkly. When she wasn’t flirting, she was charming and appealing and sweetly seductive. When she was flirting, no man within fifty miles stood a snowball’s chance in hell of remaining immune. And Zack was a lot closer than fifty miles. “Not unless you’d like to forget about dinner and go home. Now.”
“If I didn’t know better,” Anna replied innocently, “I’d think you have something on your mind besides nourishment.”
Softly, “Oh, yes.”
Anna was actually considering leaving the restaurant then and there, when she noticed Kyle and Carrie walking in. Kyle looked a little awkward in a three-piece suit, as if he might have tied the tie a bit too tight. Carrie was in a gauzy, scoop-necked dress that floated around her knees when she walked. Kyle looked intense and determined. She looked carefree, breezy and untouchable.
“Look,” Anna whispered to Zack, nodding her head in Carrie and Kyle’s direction. “The play begins. Doesn’t she look lovely?”
“Oh, yes,” Zack said quietly, his hungry gaze devouring Anna’s exquisite face. “She looks…perfect.”
Twice their waiter came for their menus and twice they shooed him away. Their eyes peered over the tops of the menus while they watched Kyle and Carrie shamelessly. It seemed to go well, though Anna said more than once she wished she could overhear them. Kyle did quite a bit of talking, actually, taking a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket at one point and studying it while Carrie visited the powder room. Anna barely stifled her giggles. “Zack, you were telling the truth,” she crowed. “He’s reading his notes. My goodness, he’s trying hard. He’s making progress, don’t you think?”
“I think so,” Zack replied quietly, his eyes shadowed as he watched Kyle stand politely when Carrie returned to the table. A tendril of Kyle’s hair was sticking up at his crown, like a cowlick that had broken its bonds of hair gel. Carrie smiled faintly at him, seeing the cowlick and the linen napkin snagged on his belt. Kyle reached out and touched her cheek, very briefly. They had the look of two people who had been together a long time, a man and a woman who could understand and anticipate the other’s emotions. They had come to love one another honestly, as a man and a woman with human frailties and imperfections. The fact that they belonged together was obvious. Looking at them, you knew instinctively that they would last, that beneath the confusion and sorting out of very human mistakes, they were committed. And somehow, as a couple they added up to much more than they ever could have been by themselves. The picture they made was an emblem of honesty, forgiveness and kindness. They were companions.
Zack knew what it was to be a lover, but he’d never been anyone’s companion. That prospect had always left him cold. But now, with Anna, the privilege of being her companion seemed to embody the ultimate achievement. An achievement that seemed so very far beyond his reach.
He closed his eyes briefly, tired of envying Kyle and Carrie, tired of sharing Anna with the ogling men at the restaurant, tired of eating food he barely tasted. He didn’t want dessert. He didn’t want to wait until Kyle and Carrie finished their meal to leave the restaurant. More than anything, he didn’t want to think anymore. He only wanted to feel. “Anna?”
She was still watching her friends. “Hmm?”
Very softly, “I want you.”
At that, she looked at him full on, reading the simmering emotion in his eyes. She realized that her body had been missing his in more ways than she could begin to count. She ached. She wanted to be in a place where they were free, where there were no prying eyes.
Without another word she pushed her chair back from the table. “We can go out the back. I want to go home, too.”
Nine
Carrie didn’t come home that evening. Zack and Anna barely noticed.
They arrived at Anna’s lovely, whimsical Victorian after a curiously silent ride home. Walking up the floodlit front steps, Zack saw many things he hadn’t noticed before. All those detail
s Anna had painstakingly added to the exterior put her own stamp on the precious thing she had finally achieved—a home. Zack thought he understood far better now how very much Anna loved this place, and why. Few people had to fight such a long, lonely battle for a place to belong. No wonder she treasured this house. Like Anna, it was one-of-a-kind, tangible proof that she would never again be at the mercy of the winds of fate. She belonged here.
But I don’t, Zack thought numbly. All that he truly was, he’d left back in Los Angeles. He was only borrowing a few precious moments from Anna’s life, pretending it was permanent. Beyond that, the future was ominously blank. Anna was an amazing example of beating the odds, a woman of strength and grace and resilience. Zack was a product of his environment, a man who had decided long ago not to try and be something he wasn’t. He’d found his peace by expecting a great deal from himself in his work and treading cautiously when it came to his personal life. He knew what he was capable of, and he knew what things were beyond him. If he couldn’t give one hundred percent, he wasn’t going to play the game. That way he could tell himself he had learned something from his father’s mistakes.
Anna knew Zack was lost in his thoughts. She waited until they walked into the shadowed interior of the house, turning on a single, stained-glass lamp in the entry hall. Zack’s brown, chiseled face was hazily illuminated with a soft rainbow of sheer color.
“You look so far away,” she whispered, wondering at the deep shadows in his beautiful eyes.
“I am,” he replied in a hollow voice. “At least three feet too far.”
Anna expected him to move then, to take her in his arms and make the sensual magic she craved. Strangely, he stayed where he was, staring at her. “What’s going on in you?” she asked softly. “Has something happened?”
He gave himself a minute, tugging his tie off. “Something happens all the time.”
He was starting to scare her now. Anna remained rooted to the floor, a succession of confused emotions flashing across her expressive face. Her festive black dress glittered cheerfully with the rise and fall of her breathing, looking strangely out of place in the heavy atmosphere. “What can I do to make you smile again?” she said finally, the words barely audible.
Zack continued to stare at her long and hard. Then, with his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed, he looped his tie over Anna’s head, holding each end and pulling it taut. He drew her toward him, still holding her gaze. He said nothing, but his eyes were suddenly alive with a blazing need.
Anna wet her shaky lips with the tip of her tongue, her fingers splayed across the silky material of his shirt. Her throat felt dry and tight, and her heart was a trip-hammer in her chest. She’d never felt so immersed in elemental desire. In that instant she thought she understood. He was feeling only his most basic instincts. He was giving free rein to them, and the prospect of being the sole focus of his needs shook her to her core. This was about desire. And it was incredibly arousing, because she knew there was so much more between them than just sex.
“Love me,” she whispered in an aching velvet voice.
“I do.” Zack had never said that to a woman, he didn’t even know if Anna realized he was speaking his heart. The moment was sharp-edged and acute, burned instantly and forever in his memory. There was thunder in his ears, a pulse jumping hard in his neck. He swore he could feel the earth breathing beneath his feet. “I do love you, Anna.”
Her eyes softened. She was going to say something then, but Zack didn’t give her a chance. His mouth slanted over hers with barely restrained power, drinking deeply from the siren’s lips that had tempted him all evening. The explosion of feeling was instantaneous, his body hardening in the space of a heartbeat. He forced himself to drive every rational thought from his mind, concentrating only on this woman and this night.
Anna kicked off her shoes, still kissing him. Being almost as tall had been nice, but she would hate to take a tumble at this point and spend the night having a broken ankle set instead of in her bed with the man she loved. She scattered small kisses on his lips, everywhere. She clung to him with all her strength, wanting and giving in equal measure. In the back of her mind she recognized the sound of a button popping off. She pulled back and blinked at Zack, her lipstick smeared and her eyes wide. “Your new shirt,” she gasped in dismay. “I’ve turned into a heathen. I need more practice to be adept. I’m sorry.”
His lips tipped up in the faint question marks she loved. “Adept? Angel, you’re more than I can handle already. If you were any more adept, it could kill me.”
She dipped her chin and gave him a quizzical look, a hint of the devil in her baby blue eyes. “Am I a good student?”
He shook his head. “No. You’re a good teacher. Don’t you know that by now?”
Anna hesitated, caught by the ragged, strained quality in his voice. Something compelled her to gently press her lips against his hard brown cheek, her satin flesh absorbing the heat there. “What could I have possibly taught you?”
Zack took a long moment to answer. There was a whirlwind of anxiety and raw passion inside him, yet at the same time he felt an infinite tenderness. His emotions were no longer segregated into distinct areas, logical and predictable. He wanted her physically, he wanted her with his heart and soul. The long evening spent in a public place had not only intensified his yearning, but his vague, nameless anxiety, as well. Finally he held her face with his feverish hands, willing her to understand. “To be thankful,” he said.
Anna smiled faintly, loving him with her soft eyes. “You’re amazing, Mr. Romantic Policeman.”
“Actually I’m going a little bit crazy.” Zack hadn’t realized it until now, but ever since his talk with Kyle, he had felt odd and unsettled. He wasn’t a man who experienced fear often, only when it seemed that someone else might be hurt due to some mistake on his part. Tonight, as always, he willed everything to be all right. That was the way he had always approached life, the way he handled his job so successfully. He forced everything to go the way he thought it should.
What about now? his conscience whispered, unusually sensitive.
“You’re doing it again,” Anna whispered. “Your eyes…just like that, you go so far away. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart.” Very deliberately he closed his mind to his conscience, focusing for all he was worth on the more urgent needs of his body. He made yearning motions on her back, her shoulders, her hips, holding her, possessing her, memorizing the hollows and curves. He buried kisses in her hair, along the fragile curve of her neck and on the sensitive flesh below her collarbone. As his passion heated, he realized the moment felt oddly out of place in the prim little Victorian parlor. It was the sort of room where you received visitors, where you sat with your ankles crossed and your hands folded neatly in your lap. He had no desire to cross his ankles or keep his hands folded safely in his lap. “Anna, let me take you upstairs—”
“Upstairs? All the way upstairs?” Anna clung to Zack’s shoulders, shuddering as she felt his palms slide beneath her dress, pushing it to her thighs. The combination of sheer nylons, warm skin and hungry fingers made her dizzy with wanting. In her mind she imagined this erotic ritual taking place in the ultraconservative Victorian era, defying their surroundings. That would have been wicked and daring and dangerous.
She loved the thought.
Zack’s mind was a cacophony of emotion, his body cramped and hard with painful need. If he paused, he might remember how tenuous this situation was, how unpredictable the future. He didn’t pause, he barely allowed himself the time to breathe. His mouth was raining kisses on her mouth, her hair, her silky eyelids. He wanted to love her everywhere. Everywhere. Now.
In her eyes, he saw clear, unvarnished emotion. She hid nothing; he knew it would never occur to her to be anything but open with her emotions and desires. Chills of urgency became like icy slivers in his nerves. His craving for possession was insatiable. He groaned, abandoning the last
faint threads of his shredding willpower. Since first looking at her, it had been all he could manage to keep a stranglehold on his baser instincts. To abandon control was ecstasy.
They kissed in lost, fierce ways, their lips barely breaking contact while they muttered endearments and pleas and staggered toward the sofa. There was unrelenting darkness beyond the white-paned windows, but here in this barely lit room was heat and comfort for two hungry hearts who had finally come in from the cold. Hell could break loose in the midnight sky, the cold, uncertain world could shatter and dissolve around them, but they were safe on sacred ground.
Anna had been so careful all her life, with her time, her heart and her hope. Tonight, however, caution was only a vague memory, a burden she was relieved to abandon. Breathless, she sank down to the carved oak sofa, her dress pushed high and her silk-clad legs tangling around Zack’s thighs. Inside she felt as if hot, sweet honey was seeping into her deepest parts. The only sound she heard was her own silent voice demanding that she become part of him, that she give herself to him.
Zack sank against her, fighting fire with fire. She was an erotic weight beneath his seeking body, an amazing source of security and mystery and release. His right hand cradled her head, trying to protect her from the lacquered hardwood edging the tufted velvet sofa. With his left hand he tried to find a bracing point so neither of them took a header off the couch, all the while rocking and pressing against her body like a man possessed…which he was. One thing about those sadistic Victorians, they sure knew how to make a couch uncomfortable. Even a rugged and innovative cop from Oakland couldn’t fight a Victorian sofa.
Out of sheer desperation, they found the carpeted floor. Here they found freedom to move and roll and explore the feelings of wild abandonment. A bed suddenly became mundane, something only conservative folks insisted on. They were different. Exultant and artless, Anna was framed by the glorious halo of her hair. He kissed her sweetly, like a man would kiss an untouched angel; he kissed her hard and long, like a man would kiss a wanton temptress he was trying to tame.