Never Trust A Lady

by Kathleen Creighton

  It took a moment; her tongue felt wrapped in cotton wool. When she did try, her words kept getting caught in her breathing and bumping into her wildly pounding heartbeat, so they came out in broken gasps. “I keep…thinking I feel…like I’ve never…done this before.” She tried to laugh and failed miserably. “Silly…”

  “But you haven’t,” he said. And neither have I. He kept trying to believe otherwise, that it was as she’d said, that she was no different than any of the other women-lovely women, each and every one-he’d been in lust with during the past seven years. He was trying his best to make it all about sex, but it kept getting away from him and turning into…something else. What. exactly, he didn’t know. What he did know was that all the women he’d made love to in his lifetime hadn’t prepared him for making love to this woman. Nothing had prepared him for Jane.

  Prepared. The thought hit him like a bucket of cold water.

  How, he wondered, silently cursing himself with all the virtuosity of half a lifetime’s international experience, could he have been so stupid? He felt as clumsy and ill-equipped as an adolescent boy.

  “What?” The word was a warm, frightened puff against the base of his throat, and he realized that he’d gone stiff and still as a post, with his hands neatly cupping the part of her that had contributed most to his lustful fantasies, not to mention a couple of recent sleepless nights.

  “Carlysle,” he groaned, “please tell me you’re on the Pill.”

  “I’m not.” She pulled back a little, frowning. “I mean, there wasn’t…” He sighed, and slowly eased his hands away from her bottom. “Wait,” she gasped. “Don’t go ’way.” And before he could stop her, she’d slipped out of his arms and was darting across the bedroom, forgetting to be self-conscious about the fact that she was wearing only a pair of formfitting leggings.

  A diaphragm? he thought, bemused. Would such a thing still be functional after five years? But no, she was making, not for the bathroom across the way, but down the hall to one of the bedrooms he’d assumed belonged to her daughters. He heard a door open, then drawers scraping in and out.

  A moment later she was back, looking embarrassed but triumphant as she came to him, all too aware now of her nakedness, but determined not to cower. He wondered if he could ever make her understand how sexy she looked to him. She was right, hers was a forty-five-year-old’s body, not a young girl’s, and all the more beautiful because of it…lush and ripe as the fruits of summer, or a velvety, full-blown rose.

  “How’s this?” she said breathlessly as she dropped a foil packet onto the nightstand. She flushed and nervously pushed her hair back from her face, and didn’t look at him as she explained, “I got them…a while back. For Lynn. She’s on the Pill now, so I don’t think she’ll mind.”

  “You bought condoms…for your daughter?” Hawk didn’t know why he felt so shocked; some sort of residual fatherhood instinct, he supposed.

  Jane leveled a look at him and said in her quiet way, “She’s twenty-two and has a steady boyfriend. What would you have me do?”

  He didn’t answer. But he was thinking again as he gently pulled her against him and felt her breasts nestle in his chest hair, about what she’d said about nothing being as simple as when they were young. He was wondering what his life might have been like if Jason had lived, and what kind of father he’d have been. Wondering how it was that he could think of Jason now and feel only a twinge of pain, and the bittersweet ache of regret.

  Wondering if it might have something to do with the woman he held so closely in his arms that right now he could feel her heartbeat as his own.

  They finished undressing each other quickly after that, and lay together side by side…almost, for that moment, at least, like old lovers. As if, Hawk thought, they’d both accepted that this time, the first time, there was just too much tension for languid explorations, too many nerves and inhibitions for prolonged and inventive foreplay.

  And yet, when he reached for the foil packet, she leaned across him and placed her hand over his and whispered, “No…don’t. Not yet. I want to touch you first. You feel…so good.”

  He didn’t say a word, just drew her down onto his chest and cradled her head in his hands, and gently wove his fingers through her warm, damp hair while she explored his body with her hands and her mouth and all the speechless wonder and curiosity of a child with a newfound treasure. He wondered later where he got the self-control to keep his hands so gentle and his body so still, when he felt as tight and tense as an overwound spring, and full to the point of pain. Her mouth, her tongue, her sweet, warm breath felt cool as rain on his fevered skin…

  This feels so good…he feels so good, Jane thought. I’d forgotten. No-did I ever know? It was so different, not like anything she’d ever experienced before. Not like David with another name, but something completely new, completely wonderful. The way he gave himself up to her so completely, encouraging her so gently, never urging, never forcing, just…enjoying. Enjoying her.

  And when he finally growled, “Enough…” and took back control from her, it didn’t seem like a taking at all, but more as if they were two pianists making music on the same keyboard, first one taking the melody, then the other, in beautifully synchronized rhythm. Or like a dance. Yes, she thought again as she had before, in the car. That was what it was like. The most glorious…incredible…beautiful dance.

  He became her partner in the fullest sense of that word. He seemed tuned to her body’s rhythms, seemed to understand better than she did how she felt, what she needed, when to go slowly and when to pick up the tempo. And like the very best of partners, he telegraphed his every move, so that she never felt clumsy, or awkward, or shy. She felt graceful, beautiful and incredibly sexy. She felt earthy, and daring, and…free.

  Chapter 16

  It was so easy. So incredibly easy.

  Somnolent as a cat, she watched him put on the condom and felt no apprehension at all, not one smidgen of tension, urgency or doubt She felt glazed and dewy as an overripe plum, warm and weighted, and at the same time pulsing with anticipation and excitement. And joy…oh, yes, that most of all. What she was most conscious of as he gently, so gently, so perfectly filled her, was…happiness.

  He chuckled when she sighed, and leaned over to kiss her, languidly, deeply, a long sweet kiss, intoxicating as champagne. And then she laughed, too, partly with relief because it was so easy, but mostly with sheer joy.

  Braced on his forearms, he held her face between his hands and kissed her nose, her eyelids and then her mouth again, and all the while he was moving inside her, moving to the rhythms of her own body, fitting himself to her so perfectly, it seemed as if he’d become part of her.

  And as he came into her body and became part of it, it seemed as if he’d also entered her mind and her heart and her soul and become part of those, too, so that she knew nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing, except him. At last there was no such thing as thought. Only feeling.

  Only him…and her…and such incredible. overwhelming emotions… feelings…sensations. She could feel them gathering strength and power within her, like a tsunami, building- and building until they took her over completely, until finally all she could do was close her eyes, cling helplessly to Tom and hold on for dear life while the wave broke upon her. While it battered and tossed and pummeled her and finally flung her, dazed and sobbing, into the quiet eddy of his arms.

  “Oh,” she whimpered, awed and shaking. “Oh, dear…oh…my.”

  “Stay with me,” he gasped, his voice raw and grating. “Stay with me, love…”

  And she did, and felt the wave take him, too. She held him safe as he had held her, and afterward they clung to each other like castaways, like shipwrecked and battered survivors flung up on the same shore.

  Inevitably, thought must return. Her first was What now? This was the scary time. Now, when she was at her most vulnerable, what would he say? What would he do? Trembling, she waited, knowing he could spoil it all, sha
tter her joy and crush her spirit with the wrong word.

  But what he said was the most beautiful. most perfect thing she had ever heard, lovelier than a sonnet, more stirring than an anthem. Breathed like a benediction across her sweat-damp temple, one single word: “Wow.”

  Emotion tumbled through her and emerged in the form of laughter; words were limiting, and risky besides. Words were hard to organize and easily misunderstood. Silence was better, a sweet, lazy silence filled with the thump of heartbeats, the whisper of breathing, the settling-down rustles, twitches and sighs of their cooling bodies.

  I wish I could stay like this forever, Jane thought, and was awed by the fact that Tom seemed to feel that way, too. Even when he finally, and with obvious reluctance, separated from her and shifted his weight to one side, he pulled her with him and wrapped her warmly in his arms, tangling his legs with hers in the damp tumble of sheets, as if he meant to stay there for a good long time. No jumping up and dashing off to the bathroom to wash, the way David always did, as if her body had somehow soiled him.

  Hating the fact that she should think of David at a time like this, she stirred restlessly, spreading her fingers wide across the hills and valleys of Tom’s chest, turning her face against the wet-silk roughness of his hair. Instantly he responded, stroking her back, her hair. She felt the warm press of his mouth on the top of her head, heard the sleepy rumble of his voice in her ear.

  “Well, Carlysle, what have you got to say for yourself now?”

  She thought about it, laughed a little and ventured, “I don’t know…I feel a little bit dumb, I guess. To think I was so worried…”

  “Hmm, I could have told you, it’s not something you forget how to do.”

  “I guess not… Hey,” she said when his stomach growled suddenly, stroking her hand downward into the shallow, hardmuscled valley below his ribs, “you must be starving. How ’bout that soup now?”

  “Mmm, what’s this preoccupation you have with soup?” He took her hand and pushed it farther down, across his belly and into the damp, springy thicket of hair below. Her breath caught, and he laughed softly. “Worried about keeping my strength up?”

  “How can you?” she said weakly. “So…soon?” But she was already exploring the hardening shape of him, and delighted when he groaned with pleasure.

  She was unreasonably delighted, too, when he said, “It’s been a long time for me, too…guess I’ve been saving up.” For a while, then, he let her hand have its way, before he stopped her with a little chuckle of regret “But you’re right, I can’t live on…sex alone. And neither can you. Maybe we should both have some of that soup.”

  “It’ll just take a minute. I’ll go turn it on…” Eager to please him, she was already scrambling out of bed, bending to pick up the tunic that lay abandoned on the floor.

  “Hey, you don’t have to wait on me.”

  She turned, the tunic still clutched to her chest, to find him propped on one elbow, watching her with a peculiar half smile, half frown on his face.

  “I just thought…” she faltered. “Would you like to take a shower while it’s heating?”

  The frown disappeared as the smile pushed it aside. “Why, do I stink?”

  “No!” she cried, mortified. “I didn’t mean…” But there was something about his smile, a glint in his eyes that made it devilish rather than poignant. And something in that which banished her embarrassment like a mist in a hot desert wind.

  With one knee on the mattress, she leaned across to kiss him, and said in a throaty murmur, “You smell…delicious. Very sexy. Earthy. I just thought you might like to wash some of that off before you…”

  “I’d love to…” his mouth opened under hers, and she sank into it gladly “…if you’ll come…do my back. Soup can wait…”

  Soup…life…the world.…reality. They could all wait. Sooner or later, she knew, daybreak would come and she would have to wake up to the reality that Tom’s place in her life was fleeting at best; an Interpol agent who called a boat home, who lived and traveled mostly in distant, exotic places, he was like a wild mountain lion taking a daytime stroll through the quiet, sunlit garden of her life. By sheer chance, because of a case he happened to be working on, his world had brushed briefly against hers. But the truth was, he had no place in her life, nor she in his.

  Tomorrow…tomorrow she would find out the truth. And when she did, and told him what he needed to know, he would have no more reason to stay. No reason at all.

  So, there was only tonight. For now, this was the only reality. She would think about everything else…tomorrow.

  For now, she would be happy to once again shut down her mind, and just…feel. Feel the gentle sluice of warm water over her skin, the slippery caress of soapy fingers. Feel the teasing tug of his teeth on her nipples, the drumming of her pulse against his hand…his mouth…his tongue.

  How could she think at all, when his fingers were pushing… probing…filling her, when his tongue was following the water’s course into valleys and deeps…into her body’s secret and most sensitive places…the hollow of her throat…her navel… the soft, swollen petals between her thighs?

  How could she think…breathe…stand, when her whole body was being rocked by such exquisite torture, such unimagined sensations, when she was being torn apart, shattering into a million quivering pieces?

  What could she do but feel? And cling, sobbing, to Tom’s broad, slippery shoulders while he held her, oh so tightly, and stroked her back, buttocks and thighs, and whispered words of love against her belly that he didn’t mean.

  “Easy…easy, love…”

  They were words, just words. Of course he didn’t mean them. she told herself afterward as she stood in the kitchen stirring soup, her wet hair dripping onto the shoulders of her tunic, her knees still weak from the residual effects of her body’s most recent cataclysm. She could hear Tom whistling as he toweled himself dry in her bathroom. Probably, she thought, he didn’t even know he’d said that-it was doubtful he’d be so cheerful if he had known.

  She sniffed a little as she wiped away shower drips with the back of her hand, set aside the ladle and turned off the burner under the steaming minestrone. Turning to survey the table, she murmured, “Oops,” and bent to scoop up Tom’s jacket, which she’d just noticed lying on the floor behind one of the chairs. For a moment she stood and held it, stroking the old, butter-soft leather with her hands, bringing it to her face, inhaling deeply of the musky, already-familiar smell. Tom’s smell.

  Was that when it happened? she wondered. Did I fall in love with him there in that moving van, when he put his jacket over me, thinking I was asleep? Almost certainly that was when she’d known she could fall in love with him.

  There was something in one of the pockets. Something hard, and…

  A peculiar vibration began in her spine, right between her shoulder blades. I won’t look, she thought. I won’t look…I mustn’t look. It’s not what it seems.

  She could just see the corner of a handkerchief sticking out of the pocket. The vibration spread from her spine and into her chest as, in a kind of hypnotic and unwilling fascination, like someone passing by the scene of a traffic accident, she watched her own fingers touch the handkerchief, then slowly, slowly pull it forth. Pull it until the folds of clean white cotton parted, and she could see the pale blue gleam of china. China that perfectly matched the soup bowls sitting on the table a few feet away.

  The shaking was all through her now. She shook as if with a terrible sickness, unable to do anything but stare down at the broken pieces of the bowl she held in her hands, nestled in Tom’s handkerchief. What does this mean? What does this mean?

  Moving slowly and stiffly, like a mechanical toy forgotten too long in the garden, she turned her head toward the doorway, trying to listen through the roaring in her ears. She couldn’t hear Tom whistling now. Any minute he might walk in. Any minute. Jerkily, she shoved the handkerchief back into the pocket from whence it had come and dropp
ed the jacket onto a chair.

  What does it mean?

  It wasn’t an oversight,. a forgetful accident. She remembered very clearly. He’d deliberately hidden the pieces from her, wrapped them in his handkerchief and tucked them carefully away in his pocket. Why?

  Oh, but she knew why. There just wasn’t any other reason she could think of that Tom Hawkins would have pieces of her broken china in his pocket. China only she had handled. She just couldn’t bear to admit it. So…that’s why. That’s what he really came for.

  Of course, she thought, aching and sick inside. I should have known.

  Interpol. The word conjured up such exotic, romantic images, it was easy to forget that it was just another police department. And that Tom was, first and foremost, a cop. He was working a case, a case in which she, obviously, was still a suspect. Of course, she thought, drawing in deep breaths and trying desperately to calm her trembling before she had to face him again. Why hadn’t she realized she’d still be a suspect?

  But he didn’t know what she knew-all right, suspected-so why wouldn’t she be?

  Maybe I should have told him, she thought. Then he wouldn’t have had to go to all this trouble.

  But she’d been so shocked and devastated to think she could have been so badly fooled, so stupidly naive, such a lousy judge of character…all right, and just plain hurt, too, to think she’d been used by someone she’d considered a friend, someone she’d trusted. She’d wanted to find out for herself if it was true. She’d wanted to be sure.

  And if I’d told him, I wouldn’t have had this. I wouldn’t have had tonight

  Calmer now, she leaned against the edge of the sink and gazed at her image in the night-darkened window. Her forty-five-year-old reflection stared back at her, with eyes full of inexpressible sadness. “Dummy,” she whispered, and her image did, too, mocking her.

  Feeling lost and adrift in a sea of unfathomable sorrow, she took a deep breath, affixed a smile on her face and went to see what was keeping Tom.