by Neesa Hart
He kissed her again, a kiss rife with tenderness and longing. Tendrils of need licked through her. His hands were warm and reassuring through her cotton robe as they roamed her body. When he slid one large hand inside to stroke the sensitive flesh of her belly, she felt the caress to the very core of her body. She gasped. He swept his hand upward in a searing exploration.
Cammy breathed his name and pressed herself into his palm. When he raised his head, she was sure the stars she’d seen in the sky now shone in her eyes. Overwhelmed by the depth of her feeling, she pressed her head to his chest.
She felt his hand tremble as it slowly eased from her robe. “If you even mention,” he said, his voice a husky rasp, “the words ‘delayed gratification’ to me in the next two days, I’m going to strangle you.”
Cammy laughed as she raised her flushed face to his. “No you won’t. I’m too useful.”
“And you’re trying to torture me with that fact, aren’t you?”
“It builds character.”
“That’s not all it builds,” he grumbled. With a hand between her shoulder blades, he guided her to the porch swing. “And if I don’t come up for air very soon, you’re going to have to commit me.”
“I’m not trying to be hard on you.”
“For the record,” he told her, his eyebrows raised, “you have an absolutely devastating effect on me. I’d advise you not to misuse it.”
“I wasn’t—”
He interrupted her with a quick kiss. “I’m not finding fault, just laying down ground rules. For the most part, whatever you’re asking for with that look in your eyes, the answer is an unqualified yes.”
She smiled. “Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s probably the most intriguing offer I’ve ever had.”
“And I aim to keep it that way.” He indicated the porch swing with a tilt of his head. “Since this obviously isn’t going anywhere tonight, what do you say we swing for a while? Unless you’re sleepy.”
“I’m not.” She studied the swing. “I’ve never been on one of these.”
A rough chuckle pulled from his chest as he seated himself. “It’s a Southern courtship ritual.”
“Swinging?”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded his head toward the living room window. “Couples can sit on the swing while nosy parents watch Lawrence Welk and chaperone.”
“Is that what your parents did?”
“That’s what they did to my sisters. I was smart enough not to sit on the swing in the first place.” He held out a hand to her. “It’s restrictive.”
She glanced at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
With a slight smile, he shifted so his back rested against the corner. He extended one jean-clad leg, then guided Cammy so her back rested against his chest, and she sat securely in the V of his legs. His hand tickled the hairs at the nape of her neck. “I mean, that there’s not a whole lot of trouble you can get into on one of these. Some Southern father designed them to guarantee minimal hanky-panky.”
She settled against him, savoring the feeling. “Come on, adolescent males are the most ingenious creatures alive when it comes to making time with adolescent girls.”
With a shove of his foot, he set the swing in motion. “Honey, believe me. If there was a way to fool around on this thing, I’d have figured it out years ago.” He trailed a finger along her arm as they lapsed into a comfortable silence. Several long minutes passed before he spoke again. “Cam?”
She was feeling lulled by the warmth of his embrace, the solid feel of his body behind her. “Um hmm?”
“So, you want to tell me why you looked so sad when I came out here, or do I have to drag it out of you?”
She thought it over and realized, with some surprise, that she found the idea of talking things over with him oddly comforting. She’d talked about her childhood before, often with her colleagues and even, on occasion, with patients who needed to feel they could trust her to relate to them. But she’d never wanted to. She turned the thought over in her head for several seconds. Jackson waited in silence, his touch reassuring but patient. “I was thinking about my parents.”
His hand momentarily stilled, then continued its gentle stroking of her forearm. He waited in silence. The caress of his hand mesmerized her into a comfortable lassitude. “The only time I ever brought someone home with me, my parents went out of town.” A sad smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I was secretly relieved.”
“What did he think?”
“He who?”
“Your boyfriend.”
“Oh. It wasn’t a boyfriend. I never brought a boyfriend home. It was my college roommate. She didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. I knew if my parents had been there, we would have ended up fighting in front of her.”
“It was lonely, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He wasn’t talking about a single holiday, he was talking about the tone of her life. “Sometimes. My mother wasn’t well. Isn’t well. My father didn’t know how to handle a sick child and a sick wife.”
“You weren’t sick, Cam.”
“Haven’t you ever noticed that when people put you down long enough, you start to believe them?”
He snorted. “You’re smart enough to know better. You’re an extraordinary woman. In case I haven’t told you lately, I’m phenomenally impressed with you. Truth is, I’m almost beside myself with awe that you even have anything to do with me.”
She pinched his arm. “Liar. You are not going to trap me into believing that your self-esteem isn’t perfectly whole.”
“Can I at least get you to realize you’re an amazingly gifted woman?”
She hesitated. “The bad stuff is easier to believe.”
“I hate it that you think that.”
“It’s okay, Jackson. I’m old enough now to understand that my father had some very serious problems. Whether he found my deafness unendurable or not doesn’t change what it was. The world’s more tolerant today, and it’s easy for people to condemn him for his attitude.”
“He was a bastard.”
“Thanks for your loyalty.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” She squeezed his hand. “Durstan was . . . ill-suited to the demands of a challenging relationship. He married my mother because she came from a well-respected, wealthy family. She was supposed to be a political asset. He didn’t count on mental illness.”
“What happened to ‘in sickness and in health’?”
“Don’t be so hard on him,” she warned. “My mother didn’t exactly think he was the love of her life, either. They had what I consider to be a fairly typical political marriage. It was a partnership, not a commitment. You know the type.”
“Unfortunately.”
“It works very well for some people.”
“Maybe it does. They should know better than to have children, though.”
“My parents didn’t plan to. Accidents happen.”
“And, naturally, they felt obligated to inform you of this fact so you could walk around with the knowledge that you were an accident. I just like them more and more.”
She heard the scorn in his voice. With a smile of amusement, she stroked the back of his hand. “Even before she grew chronically psychologically ill, my mother was prone to lapses in her mental stability. She’d rant. Sometimes she said things she shouldn’t. I can’t really hold that against her, and I stopped letting it hurt me.”
His arms tightened. “It makes me mad.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. You have a very strong sense of justice and responsibility and compassion. It’s a powerful combination. It’s bound to evoke powerful emotions.”
“And you don’t like it.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t say that.”
“You think I’m too passionate.”
“I think you’re impulsive. That makes you different from me. Not wrong different, just differe
nt.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his gaze probing for secrets. “Do I scare you, Cammy?”
She swallowed. She didn’t know how to answer that. She felt fear when she was with him. She knew that much, but she’d be lying if she pinned the source of that fear on him. The expression in his eyes told her he knew that. And he’d wisely refused to give her the out. “No.” She stroked the back of his hand. “Sometimes, I fear the person I am when I’m with you.”
He stopped breathing. “Why?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet.”
The swing rocked back and forth as they sat several moments in silence. “Did you ever wonder,” he finally said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation, “why your parents were so self-indulgent?”
“Some people are. They come by it naturally.”
“I used to think that the material wealth of this country contributed to self-indulgent adults like your parents.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“You’d be surprised. The first time I did a feature story on children was about seven years ago. I was covering a summit meeting in the Baltics when I met this kid outside the U.S. Embassy. His father was an attaché. He’d had to move in the middle of the school year, so he’d left all his friends behind.” She felt him smile. “His name was Rodney, and he loved to play soccer. He was standing by the gate bouncing a soccer ball on his knee. It was midafternoon. I struck up a conversation with him, asked him what he was doing. He told me he’d observed that the local kids got out of school about that time. He figured if he waited until they walked past, he’d draw enough of a crowd with that soccer ball that he could pull a game together. I asked him if he spoke their language, and he just looked at me with the most serious expression and said, ‘Sure. I speak soccer.’ ”
Cammy laughed. “Smart kid.”
“They usually are. It was just so refreshing. I’d been following these politicians around for months, watching them operate, watching them use people, then here was this kid with all the confidence in the world that a soccer ball and a grin could get him to the people that mattered.”
“And you wrote about him.”
“I used the idea that while the politicians were holed up fighting over territorial water rights and ethnic divisions, the kids were down in the street playing soccer.”
“Not everyone would have seen the poetry in that.”
“Maybe not, but a lot of people did. That story struck a chord. People liked it.”
“I remember it. People talked about it for weeks.”
He paused. “I suppose even more important to me than the way people reacted to it was the way I reacted to it. I liked it. I liked what it said and what it accomplished.”
“I can see why.”
“I was recovering from a pretty healthy dose of disillusionment when I wrote that story. I had just gotten burned by a senator’s aide who’d deliberately fed me misinformation about her boss’s opponent.”
“Were you involved with her?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “That’s the worst kind of betrayal. When it comes from someone you trust.”
“I should have seen it coming.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Then maybe you should cut yourself some slack. You were inexperienced. Did you write the story yourself?”
“No. I was still a copy editor in those days. I gave it to an older journalist, a man I had a lot of respect for.”
“And he ran with it?”
“He didn’t double-check it like he should have. When the fallout came, he let me take the blame.”
“It was his byline?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was his fault.”
He shrugged. “I’m no saint, Cammy, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t let some copy editor take a hit for my own incompetence.”
“It hurt you, didn’t it?”
“He was one of my heroes.”
Jackson visibly wrestled with the memory, then pressed ahead. “That’s actually how I met Chris Harris. I got fired from that job and threw myself on Chris’s mercy. AW was a new enterprise then, and they’d take just about anyone. Chris hired me and sent me to help another journalist cover the Baltics event.”
“He ran your story on Rodney?”
“He did. I was surprised when it got picked up by papers across the country. I felt vindicated, and cleansed, somehow, like I’d finally found something worth doing. I started looking, then, for those kind of ironies in the world. And I found out that most of the time, children are just honest—with themselves and the people around them. When you talk to kids, you find out what counts and what doesn’t, who matters and who doesn’t. The older I get, and the more I see of it, I find I’m less and less tolerant of scheming adults.”
“I saw the special you did last year with those children during the war in the Middle East. I’m not surprised you got an award for that.”
“They had questions. I thought someone should answer them. Andy gave me the idea. She called me to ask me why President Stratton was so angry all the time. I started talking to her, and found out she’d heard enough information to be scared, but not enough to feel secure.” He shrugged. “For some reason, she felt like she could ask me.”
“She knew you’d tell her the truth. There aren’t many people children trust like that. I see that with my therapy kids all the time. They know adults patronize them. You have a way of talking to them—I saw it that day you sat in on one of my sessions. You show them that you respect them. They sense it.”
“You never got that from your parents, did you?” he asked, his voice quietly intent.
“No. My mother wasn’t psychologically capable. My father wasn’t emotionally capable. It wasn’t idyllic, but it wasn’t awful either. It wasn’t like I was abused.”
“Why didn’t you ever bring a boyfriend home?”
“What?”
“You said you never brought a boyfriend home. Why not?”
“Oh, that. I don’t know. I never had many, that was part of it. There aren’t very many teenage boys who want to date deaf girls.”
“What about later?”
“After the implant?”
He made a sound of impatience. “No, later in life. College, adulthood.”
“I don’t know. I attended Gallaudet, the deaf university. I had my implant then. It made me something of a pariah. I’ve told you that it’s not widely accepted in the deaf community. It doesn’t work for everyone, and there are a lot of deaf people who firmly believe it represents a concession to the rest of the world. People like Jeffrey Herrington, the activist Lynette told you about, are actively opposed to the technology. When I was eighteen and in college, I was learning to use it, learning to speak. I was serious and extraordinarily focused, and I didn’t really have a lot of time for a social life.”
“Come on, Cam, you had to fall for somebody, sometime.”
“I never really felt serious enough about the few guys I dated to expose them to my family. But there was one I fell pretty hard for.” The admission slipped out with an ease that amazed her. The memory had seemed so vile, but wrapped in the warm circle of Jackson’s arms, with the gentle creak of the swing and the sounds of the night filling the air, the edge was gone.
“Tell me,” he urged, as his hands slid up her forearms. He pressed a kiss to her nape. “I want to know.”
She shivered from the warm contact. “He worked on my father’s staff. It was the last year my father ran for the Senate. Leslie was assigned to do my scheduling for the campaign.”
Jackson snorted, then glided his mouth along her shoulder. “His name was Leslie? That should have been your first clue.”
She jabbed him in the ribs. “He took care of my advance work for any public appearances, made sure I got where I needed to be. We were together a lot. My implant was new to me then, and the press conferences were still confusing. I had a lot
of trouble sorting out all the sound. Leslie handled things. He fielded questions, and just sort of took care of me.”
“What happened?” He had found the verge of her collarbone. He seemed fascinated by the tiny strip of flesh.
“He paid a lot of attention to me. He treated me like a queen, and I reveled in it.” She moaned softly when he licked an especially sensitive spot. “Oh.”
He raised his head. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to distract you.”
“Liar.”
His boyish grin made her heart tumble. “I wasn’t. I’m interested.” At her dubious look, he tightened his arms at her waist. “I am.”
She searched his gaze for several seconds, then tipped her head back against his shoulder. “My father seemed to like him,” she continued, “which helped. I spun all kinds of fantasies in my head, and started reading Bride magazine. I wanted a spring wedding. Sometime after the Inauguration.”
“Did Leslie have other ideas?” He rested his chin on top of her head.
For once, her father had been right. Leslie had wanted an advantageous political marriage that would bolster his political career. For a while, he’d believed that Durstan Glynn’s daughter could give him that. Then Durstan had taken him aside to explain the harsh facts. She could never have children; she’d never be able to pose with him in perfect campaign photos with fair-headed sons and a golden retriever; her mother was insane; and, given Cammy’s other birth defects, chances were she might end up that way, too. The price had seemed too high for Leslie. She drew a shaky breath. “He just decided he wasn’t ready for that much responsibility.”
“Where is he now?” Jackson asked.
“I don’t know. He ran for Congress several years ago, but he lost. I suppose he’s planning his next move.”
Jackson muttered a dark curse. She glanced at him in surprise. “I recovered, Jackson. No need for full-blown outrage on my behalf.”
“I’ve been suspecting for days that some faceless jerk was causing the bulk of my problems with you.”
“You don’t have any problems with me.”
“Shall I list them?”
“Better not. We’ll be awake half the night.”
“I just knew there was some creep who’d done a number on you. I was sort of looking forward to stalking him down and terrorizing him a little.”