by Carole Buck
John insinuated his tongue slowly into her mouth, savoring her yielding sweetness with languorous strokes. After a few heady moments, she reciprocated.
He tasted of the espresso he’d drunk at the end of their meal. He tasted of the voluptuously rich chocolate mousse he’d consumed for dessert, too. And there was something else. An underlying flavor that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with hunger. Leigh knew the flavor as though it had been imprinted on her DNA.
Yes, she thought again, a spark streaking downward to ignite a wildfire flame deep inside her. She closed her eyes. Oh…yes. Please.
The intensity of the kiss escalated as though by mutual agreement. Leigh moved her hand up his chest to clasp his shoulder. John’s right arm slid around her waist, his hand settling possessively at the base of her spine.
She did not dispute the claim implicit in his embrace. It felt too good. Too right. Rather, she exerted one of her own, stroking her hand from his shoulder to the nape of his neck.
Her partner urged her closer, his fingers insistent against the small of her back. She let herself be gathered in. It seemed preordained that she should do so. She moved her hips restlessly, conscious of the adamant press of John’s masculine arousal against her lower body. He groaned something deep in his throat. She moved her hips again, her soft, secret places throbbing with need.
She’d been here before, she realized, ravished by sense memories she’d thought had been obliterated. She’d surrendered herself to this same delirious, don’t-care-about-theconsequences swirl of desire in the past.
But how could that be?
How could she be feeling now what she’d felt back then?
She opened her eyes, staring wonderingly up into the compellingly male face she was just beginning to know. She saw a complex array of emotions, including signs of an inner tumult that was as great as her own.
A single-syllable name fought its way to the tip of her tongue, battling rationality every millimeter of the way. The name wasn’t John.
She scraped together a breath, intending to speak. Exactly what she would have said, she never knew. She was forestalled by a summons from the top of the stairs.
“Mommy?” her son called down in a decidedly unhappy voice. “You have to come up right now. I didn’t mean to, but I wetted in my bed.”
John Gulliver left Leigh McKay’s home with the taste of his former lover’s kisses lingering on his lips and the memory of her uncharacteristically mercurial behavior weighing on his mind.
He returned to her front door twenty minutes later cursing a blue streak and chilled to the bone, but still torqued up by what had happened prior to his departure.
In the interim, he’d discovered that his rental car had given up the ghost and that nothing—but nothing—he tried could bring it back to life. In point of fact, he hadn’t even been able to determine what was wrong with the damned thing.
“J-John,” Leigh stammered when she opened the door to him. She was holding the neck of a bulging, brightly patterned pillowcase with her left hand. John assumed it contained the “wetted” sheets from Andy’s bed. Poor little kid. He’d been so humiliated by his accident. His embarrassment had added impetus to John’s exit. Someday he would have to assure his son there was no need to feel ashamed about what had happened. “What—?”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, keeping his voice down. “My car won’t start.”
Leigh’s sky-colored eyes flicked away from his, darting in the direction of her driveway.
“I know, I know,” he said quickly, flexing and unflexing his cold-numbed fingers inside the pockets of his raincoat. “It sounds like a con. But it isn’t. I swear.”
There was a sudden gust of wind. He hunched his shoulders against the arctic blast. Leigh stepped back, her clothing spackled with glistening flakes of snow. Shivering visibly, she gestured him inside with her free hand. He accepted the invitation with alacrity.
“Thanks.” He shut the door.
“You’re w-w-welcome.” The response was delivered through chattering teeth. Dropping the pillowcase, Leigh wrapped her arms around herself. “So, what’s wrong?”
John grimaced, resisting the urge to stomp his feet against the hardwood floor. He could hardly feel his toes. “Beats me.”
“Mmm.” Again, her gaze darted away from his.
“Leigh-”
She silenced him with a look. A rather amused look, in point of fact.
“I believe you, John,” she said, an unexpected hint of humor playing around the corners of her soft lips. “If this were a con, I’m sure you would have come up with something more persuasive than the old my-car-won’t-start ploy.”
John stared, taken aback by this comment in much the same way he’d been taken aback by her post-story-hour remarks about the tomahawk he’d given Andy. Suzanne Whitney would never have said something so…so deliberately flippant. In all the time she’d been with Saint Nick Marchand, he’d never heard her use her wit to score a point over another person.
“Thanks,” he responded dryly after a second or two. “I think.”
Leigh inclined her head, her fair hair gleaming in the illumination from the foyer’s overhead lighting fixture. John swallowed hard, his body starting to warm. He waited for his former lover to say something. She didn’t.
“Do you have a set of jumper cables?” he finally asked.
“Jumper cables?” Leigh furrowed her brow. “Uh…no. I don’t. Sorry.”
“Well, then, can I use your phone?”
“To call—?”
“A tow truck.”
“Oh, dear. There’s only one garage in the area. It closes at six.”
Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. “Taxi service?”
“Not really. And in this kind of weather…”
“Great.” John raked a hand through his snow-sodden hair, considering his options. He couldn’t very well ask to borrow Leigh’s car. That would leave her and Andy stranded. And he didn’t want to suggest that she drive him back to the inn. Wait! The inn! What if he phoned and asked the proprietor—
“You could stay here.”
He stiffened, genuinely surprised. It wasn’t that Leigh’s proposal was so untoward. He’d thought of it himself. But he’d refused to broach it for a variety of reasons. And he’d certainly never expected—
“Would you be all right with that?” he questioned bluntly.
Although he believed he’d made some real progress in gaining Leigh’s trust this evening, he recognized that it had been a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of thing. What would have happened had Andy not put a, uh, damper on the flame rekindled by their kiss was a major question mark.
“If you’d be all right with sleeping downstairs on the sofa.”
“Are you sure?” Instinct told him it probably seemed suspicious to push, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d seen how skittish Leigh was. He couldn’t help but wonder how she would handle having him stay in her home overnight. He had a fleeting vision of her sitting on the edge of her bed, her face pale and strained, her fingers clutching a loaded gun….
“Positive.” Leigh smiled mischievously, suddenly looking a great deal like her young son. John’s heart contracted. “You can thank me in the morning by digging out the driveway.”
He let a moment or two slip by, watching her very carefully. Then he matched her smile with one of his own and said, “Deal.”
She settled him quickly. So quickly that John found himself wondering about it. Maybe Leigh McKay wasn’t as unaccustomed to sleep-over guests as he’d assumed.
The possibility disturbed him. A lot. It also brought back the memory of the masculine territoriality he’d detected in Wesley Warren’s eyes when they’d encountered each other in the bookstore. God, he thought, his gut knotting. Maybe it wasn’t Wes’s professional affairs he should be checking into!
He had no right to be jealous, he reminded himself. He had let Suzanne Whitney go. He’d acquiesced in the cons
piracy that had allowed her to believe that he—or rather, Saint Nick Marchand—was dead.
So, if she’d moved on…
If she’d taken another lover or lovers…
No. Not her. Leigh McKay. Because Leigh McKay was the person Suzanne Whitney had become.
Although exactly who Leigh McKay was—
“Anything else you need, John?”
Time, his head said firmly.
You, his heart insisted. Right now.
“No,” he answered, gazing at the delicately featured face of the woman he loved but was still getting to know. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll see you in the morning.” She turned toward the stairs.
“Leigh?”
She pivoted back, her movement graceful, her expression slightly wary. “Yes?”
“About the, uh, baby…seeds.”
She blushed, her hand lifting to the base of her throat. “John-”
“What I said about nothing I didn’t know already,” he went on in a rush. “I wasn’t talking about the facts of life.”
“Well—” she swallowed quickly “—I should hope not!”
“Andy told me about wanting a baby brother while we were waiting for you at the clinic on Monday. He also told me he didn’t think it was going to work out because he didn’t have a, uh, daddy around.”
“Oh, God.” The rosy color in Leigh’s cheeks intensified. “Is there anything you two didn’t talk about?”
“You.”
She went still as a statue. “M-me?”
“And how lucky any little boy would be to have you as his mother.”
Chapter 6
The image of John Gulliver bedding down on her living-room sofa caused Leigh’s pulse to throb at a faster-than-normal rate as she carried out her nightly check of her home’s second floor. Still, she stuck to her self-appointed rounds, disciplining herself against the distraction of her physical responses, trying not to think about the man who had caused them.
She tested each window to make certain that it was locked and secure. She opened every closet to reassure herself that there were no bogeymen lurking within. She even pulled back the shower curtain in the bathroom…just in case.
All was as it should be.
Or so it seemed.
She lingered a few minutes when she reached her son’s toy-strewn, nightlight-illuminated room. Andy was sprawled crosswise on his twin-size mattress, the Batman pajama top he’d donned after his accident rucked up around his armpits, the freshly changed bedclothes wound tightly around his legs. He was clutching his precious plastic tomahawk in his left hand, the brightly colored feathers tickling beneath his nose. The garish fluff stirred slightly each time he exhaled. He appeared to be fast asleep.
She knew he’d been terribly embarrassed by his loss of bladder control. Bad enough that he’d regressed after many, many months of accident-free nights. But that his hero had been present to witness his disgrace as well! Andy had been horribly humiliated. There’d been a few dicey moments when Leigh had feared that his painfully obvious sense of shame would lead to a tearful scene.
John had handled the situation with remarkable sensitivity, all things considered. While he’d stuck around long enough to make it clear to his young buddy that he didn’t think any less of him because of the bed-wetting, he’d seemed to understand that the little boy required privacy to recover from his upset. He’d tactfully taken his leave about twenty minutes after Andy’s initial announcement.
To say that Leigh had had mixed feelings about his departure was to understate the case. Still, given the incendiary implications of what had happened in the minutes before her son had called down from upstairs, she’d told herself that his exit was for the best. The kiss she and John Gulliver had shared had rocked her in more ways than she could count. She’d needed time to sort through her reactions, to decide what she was going to do about them.
Sighing, Leigh gently extricated the tomahawk from Andy’s stubby-fingered grasp and set it aside. He made a whiny sound of distress as she did so, his brow corrugating like cardboard and his mouth twisting. For a second, he seemed on the verge of waking up.
“Shh,” she soothed, stroking his furrowed forehead with the tips of her fingers. “I’m putting your tomahawk right here by your bed, Andy. You can play with it first thing in the morning.”
Her words must have penetrated at some level of consciousness because Andy calmed as soon as she spoke them. His inarticulate protestation softened into a breathy murmur of contentment. His features relaxed, his lips easing into a mysterious little smile.
Leigh studied him for several seconds, debating whether to disturb him further. He couldn’t be comfortable with the bedclothes twisted around him the way they were, she finally told herself. And he would probably catch cold if he wasn’t properly covered up.
Straightening his sleepwear was a relatively easy task.
Rearranging the bed linen was a tad more complicated. She’d just gotten Andy free of the sheets when he’d decided to flop over onto his stomach. In addition to retangling his legs, he almost tumbled off the side of the bed. She caught him just in time, narrowly avoiding getting smacked in the face by his flailing right hand as she did so.
“Numm…kummeez,” he said loudly, then giggled.
“Numm-kummeez yourself, slugger,” she retorted with a wry half-laugh, easing him into a less precarious position and drawing the covers up and over him. Rolling onto his left side, Andy brought his knees up toward his chest and curled into a ball. He smacked his lips together two or three times, then settled back into a deep slumber.
Leigh watched over him for another minute or so, her heart very full. When all was said and done, she had to rate herself an extraordinarily fortunate woman. While the circumstances of Andy’s birth were an ugly far cry from the fairy-tale dreams of marriage and maternity she’d once entertained, her son himself was a blessing.
Even if he did have a big mouth.
She nibbled on her lower lip, flashing back to the remarkable exchange she and John Gulliver had had earlier in the evening.
“Andy told me about wanting a baby brother while we were waiting for you at the clinic on Monday,” he’d admitted to her. “He also told me he didn’t think it was going to work out because he didn’t have a, uh, daddy around.”
“Oh, God,” she’d groaned, knowing her cheeks must be as red as radishes with mortification. “Is there anything you two didn’t talk about?”
“You.”
She’d gone very still. Whatever she’d expected John to say in response to her essentially rhetorical question, it hadn’t been this. After a moment she’d managed to stutter, “M-me?”
“And how lucky any little boy would be to have you as his mother.”
Leigh leaned down and brushed her mouth against her son’s cheek. “1 do the best I can, sweetie,” she murmured, breathing in the faintly soapy scent of his skin. “If I make mistakes, I’m sorry. Just remember—you’re my extra-special boy and I love you very, very much.”
“Mmm…” Andy sighed blissfully, burrowing his cheek into his pillow.
Straightening, Leigh picked a careful path away from the bed. “Night-night,” she whispered over her shoulder as she stepped out into the hallway. She pulled the bedroom door almost—but not totally—shut.
A gust of wind rattled her home’s outside walls and howled up under the eaves like a wild animal seeking refuge. She heard the roof groan. A floorboard creaked beneath its covering of foot-worn carpeting as she headed down the hall.
Although such sounds had disturbed her peace of mind when she’d first moved in, she’d become accustomed to them over the years. It had been a long time since she’d paid them much heed.
She heeded them now.
Now…when her body thrummed with desires she’d thought tainted beyond cleansing by an act of violation and an enduring sense of shame.
Now…when a man she’d known for less than a week was sleeping
on her downstairs sofa at her invitation.
“It feels longer,” that man had observed scarcely two hours ago when she’d reminded him of the brevity of their acquaintanceship.
She’d understood what he meant, of course, although she’d had no intention of admitting so. She’d shied from the intimacy he seemed to be asserting. She wasn’t ready for it. She didn’t know whether she would ever be ready for it!
“Yes, well, I can’t rely on how a situation feels, John,” she’d answered. “I have to depend on how it really is.”
One big problem. She had yet to determine what this “reality” on which she’d maintained she needed to depend actually was. It seemed to be one thing when she was apart from John Gulliver, a whole host of others when she was with him.
Reality wasn’t supposed to change—was it?
Leigh paused on the threshold of her bedroom, listening to the wind and the discordant sounds it elicited from her home. After a moment or two she felt for the light switch on the wall and flipped it on, narrowing her eyes against the sudden flare of illumination from a pair of bedside lamps. Then she stepped inside and firmly shut the door behind her.
Where Andy’s bedroom was a celebration of primary colors and joyful kid-style junk, hers was a study in impeccably matched pales and monastic neatness. The last adult male to enter it had been a furniture deliveryman, nearly four years ago. He’d brought the old, oak-framed cheval glass that stood in the far corner of the room.
Nothing in the room had belonged to her for longer than five and a half years. Save for a small suitcase filled with a hodgepodge of clothing and toiletries, she’d been allowed to take nothing with her the morning the federal authorities who had informed her of Nicholas Marchand’s death had escorted her to what they’d described as a “neutral” site. What had happened to the items she’d left behind—among them, silverframed photographs of her late parents, scores of books she’d purchased from secondhand shops and the ruins of a highly personal gift she’d received from her first and only lover—she didn’t know. She hadn’t asked. The men who’d taken her away from her “old” life had indicated that it would better for all concerned if she didn’t.