“Alabama the state?”
“Alabama the singing group. I mention that only because I saw a lot of Springsteen in your CD collection.”
He made a careless gesture with his free hand. “I like spicy food, too, and I’ll listen to any kind of music but that stuff from the big band era. And coping with the midnight TV would depend on what you were watching.”
“QVC.”
“That could get you moved to the sofa. Or back into your old room.”
She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I have intermittent insomnia, and nothing’s quite as good for it as seeing all the things I can’t afford, even at those prices. I finally go to sleep in self-defense.”
He pushed himself to one knee then stood. “Insomnia at your age?”
“I guess when you don’t have someone to talk things over with, you worry about them a little more. And I was too busy to worry during the day, so I did most of it in the middle of the night.”
He nodded commiseratingly, then tweaked her big toe. “Well, now you can elbow me awake and dump it on me.”
That thought warmed her until she remembered that she would be able to do that only for an undetermined period.
He started for the bathroom. “I’m going to take a show—”
He was interrupted by a rap on the door. He reversed directions and went to open it. The elegant older woman whose hospitality they enjoyed handed him a giant basket and a bottle of champagne. “These were just delivered for you,” she said. Libby sat up as he brought the basket to the bed. Pearlescent cellophane within the basket enclosed an enormous array of goodies: a tin of pâté, a small box of crackers, fancy cookies and candies, nuts and a pair of glasses to contain the champagne.
Attached to the basket was a note that read: “Only down side to B-and-Bs is no room service! Eat up—and do with the pâté whatever you’re inspired to do. Love, Darren and Justy.”
“Darren and Justy?” she asked. “You mean they did something together that didn’t result in one of them being dead?”
So, she was choosing to ignore the pâté crack. That was probably wise, but something had to lighten her up.
He slipped the glasses out from the paper and reached for his pocketknife and its corkscrew attachment. “Yep. And now that we’re married, I guess I can tell you that they’ll be doing something else pretty significant together, too.”
Her eyes widened as she held the bottle while he worked on the cork. “You don’t mean…a baby?”
“I do.”
“Is that wise?”
“It’s not my call.” The cork was removed with a satisfying pop, and Libby held the glasses up as he poured. “But we’re supposed to be concentrating on us today, not them.” He recorked the bottle and carried it and the basket to a small table across the room while she held the bubbling glasses.
He came back to take his from her. He tipped the rim of his glass against hers. “To us,” he said.
She drank to them, then offered another toast. “And to defeating Lady Barmont.”
He drank to that, then put his glass aside and concentrated on building a fire. Beyond the window, the stormy day had turned to stormy dusk, and rain still fell against the roof and windows with a vengeance.
Libby lit a column candle on the small table, then closed the flowered draperies against the harsh weather. Jared’s fire began to crackle and catch and the room took on a shadowy coziness that prevailed over the outside threat.
He stood and brushed his hands on his jeans. He turned to find that Libby had poured more champagne and offered him his glass.
“Why, Mrs. Ransom,” he teased, “is this a seduction?”
As the atmosphere grew warmer and more intimate, she found the fearless sophistication more and more difficult to hold on to. But she tried. “Why, Mr. Ransom,” she replied with an even gaze, “I thought that was a given.”
He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “You mean, your seduction of me or mine of you?”
“Well…I don’t know. I thought we were just after the…the result.”
No. He didn’t like the sound of that at all. He took her glass from her and put it on the table with his. Then he pulled her down with him so that they sat facing each other on the carpet before the fire.
“We are after the result,” he said. “We have to look as genuinely married as we possibly can. But that doesn’t mean anything is a given. How well or how poorly this goes is entirely dependent on how we approach it. You did sign a contract, and you did make a vow, and it is a little late for regrets—but if you have them…” He held his breath, then added, “Tell me now.”
She looked at him as though she’d never seen him before. He was sure she was going to ask him to annul the marriage.
“I have no regrets,” she said finally, her whole demeanor softening suddenly. She even pulled at the comb that held her elegant topknot in place. Gold silk fell around her shoulders in a rippling sheet. “I was just wondering,” she admitted with a disarming little movement of her shoulder, “if I’ll have them later. If…if we lose.”
That hurt. “You mean because you made love with me for nothing?”
She blinked, apparently surprised and a little affronted by that suggestion. “Jeez, Jared! No. Because I am…attracted to you and because we’ve shared the care of the children I feel a certain…admiration for the way you deal with them and I know…” She was babbling, but she didn’t seem able to stop. “I know sex isn’t about the same things for a man, but I…I’ll be investing real feelings in, you know, making love with you, and it’s just a little unsettling to realize that it could all be over with a decision from the judge. I’ve…never been a woman who lived for the moment. I’ve always thought in the long term.”
Jared appreciated her honesty, and couldn’t remember a time when he’d been both so touched and so annoyed.
“Jeez yourself, Elizabeth!” he said a little too loudly. “And a few words of a stronger nature that I won’t use in deference to our wedding night. I thought I made it clear the other night before your friends…” He stopped and waved a hand as though to wipe away that thought. “Okay, let’s not go there right now. I thought it would have been obvious to you that I have feelings for you, too. I don’t understand them completely, primarily because there’s been so little chance to indulge them with the kids around all the time and the employer-employee thing in our way. But I have…affection and respect for you, too, and I’m willing to invest them, as well.”
They sat Indian-style, facing each other, and she watched the firelight highlight his dark hair, flicker in his eyes, burnish the line of his jaw. “I’ve always approached what I wanted to do with the belief that failure wasn’t an option.” He grinned ruefully. “Still, I’ve lost a few. But those are the stakes in life. You can sit in a rocking chair, or you can live.”
So, he was reminding her that they could lose. But they could also win big time.
She couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he lost the children and she had to leave. Would life go on as it had when she’d been twenty-five, or would she be sent forward again, a failure past and future?
Well, she decided, perhaps it was time to live for the present if she didn’t know where she would be spending her future.
She smiled, then looped her arms around Jared’s neck. “That’s very sane. But I’m giving you fair warning that I’m determined to mother those children, and I can be pretty convincing when I put my mind to it. So if you’re really able to put that look in my eye and the judge believes us—then we’re probably facing a lifetime of each other.”
He rose to one knee, scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bed. “Then it really is time,” he said, setting her on her feet near the side of it, “that we get better acquainted.”
He opened his mouth over hers and kissed her with that confident competence that had shaken the heart of her the last time. There was nothing so erotic in a man, she thought absently, her blood already
beginning to simmer, as the assumption of control when he knew how to use it.
He slipped a hand under her sweater and splayed it against her back, pulling her to him. He kissed her again, his tongue delving, exploring, as his hand stroked her from the waistband of her pants to her shoulder. His touch was warm and strong and textured by the calluses he’d earned from hours spent in the workshop.
His hand roved her again, then brought the sweater up and off her. He unfastened the scrap of white lace that covered her breasts and tossed it at the chair with the discarded sweater.
Then he yanked his own shirt and T-shirt off and pulled her back to him.
She couldn’t help the little groan of delight, of purely animal contentment when her soft breasts were reshaped against the warm flesh that covered his rib cage. She said his name, stunned that this first flesh-to-flesh touch could feel so right.
Jared felt the pearled tips of her breasts against his chest and knew a sensation so strong he was sure they must have branded him. She was like an armful of silk and he couldn’t stop stroking her. Her whispered cry of his name against his collarbone did nothing to slow him down.
He lifted her so that she stood on the edge of the bed. She grasped his shoulders for balance on the unsteady mattress as he unbuttoned and unzipped her pants and caught the waistband of her panties, drawing both down in a fluid sweep. She kicked them off.
Jared kissed the slight roundness of her and cupped her bottom in both hands. The flower-woman scent of her surrounded him, enfolded him, almost disoriented him. He felt her ragged sigh.
She drew his face to her stomach and held him there, letting her head fall back in the delicious perfection of the moment. She was rapidly forgetting all other reasons for being here except finally to know what would result from the fusion of their bodies. She’d wondered almost from the moment she’d met him.
She slipped to her knees and trapped his mouth with hers while she worked at the button and the zipper of his jeans. Her touch weakened him to putty.
It occurred to him, in a corner of his mind not completely occupied with sensual overload, that it was ironic that he’d been the one who’d talked about changing the look in her eyes. Because he no longer seemed familiar to himself. Who was this occupying his body so that a woman’s touch paralyzed him? During a long and adventurous bachelorhood, he’d certainly been touched by women more accomplished than she.
But never by one more seemingly fascinated by him, more artful in her eager interest. That was an aphrodisiac beyond anything he’d ever known. When she slipped her hands between his hips and the jeans to push them down, the pleasure was exquisite.
He yanked them the rest of the way off and pulled her with him to the middle of the bed. He drew the blankets and the fuzzy quilt over them as the fire crackled and rain beat against the roof and the windows.
He drew her to him and her arms came around him, and he felt her lips at his collarbone, her knee slide up his thigh. He felt very literally like a time bomb.
Libby felt the reverence concentrated in his hands as they traced every curve of her, explored every hollow. His hands were everywhere, their movement over her exaggerating rather then satisfying a need that crept along her flesh, calling to him and moving on. Deep inside her a pulse began to tick.
Jared felt the tightening tension in her, the growing heat in her kisses and her touch. What he felt was so deep, so explosive, that he wondered in all fairness if he shouldn’t give her one more chance to back out.
But he didn’t know what he’d do if she took it. He suddenly felt as though all he’d ever been and done would cease to be when he finally entered her. That the mysteries of tomorrow were inside her, waiting for him.
So he rose over her, saw her eyes like flowers in the firelight as she positioned to receive him, and buried himself inside her with tender ruthlessness.
Libby adjusted to his possessive thrust, emitted a little cry of wonder at the perfection of it, and wrapped her body around him. He began to move inside her and she circled his hips in counterpoint, thinking this was almost too exquisite even to be.
Pleasure swelled out of the darkness, taunted her, ebbed away, only to rush toward her again, then retreat as she raised her hips to meet it.
Then Jared moved even deeper inside her and pleasure exploded, tossing her, turning her, pulling her down into a bottomless velvet well.
She was not at all surprised at the love that rose with her as she finally began to surface. She’d suspected it was there all along. But it had grown because of the way he treated the children, the way he loved his family.
Now she knew what it would be like to be the object of his love—and knew it was not a position she would ever abandon without a fight.
Jared, delighted in every little shudder that racked her body, was so focused on the way she whispered his name over and over that he experienced the broadside crash of his own pleasure almost with surprise.
She tightened her grip on him and he abandoned himself to joy, thinking as he spiraled farther and farther beyond that it was unsettling to be that out of control. Then her body tightened around his and he ceased to be able to think, feeling as though she’d drawn him into some soft, fragrant world from which he was powerless to escape. And neither did he want to.
“OHMIGOD!”
Jared, poking at the fire to satisfy himself that it was dying at shortly after two in the morning, heard Libby’s shocked exclamation from the bathroom. They’d pillaged Darren’s basket, made love a second time, finished the champagne, and were now getting serious about getting some sleep.
He pushed the door open without knocking, convinced by the tone of her voice that he’d find at least a rabid grizzly in there with her.
But she was alone, except for her reflection in the mirror. And that seemed to be what was troubling her. She leaned toward it over the sink, naked and graceful and completely distracting, her hair tumbled. He felt a curious catch in his chest. It occurred to him to worry about how vulnerable loving her made him.
He watched his own naked reflection as he wrapped his arms around her and drew her back against him. He kissed her temple and met her stunned blue eyes in the mirror.
“What?” he asked. “A wrinkle? A gray hair?”
“No.” She sighed and leaned into him, a rueful acceptance in her expression as she continued to study herself. “Don’t you see it?”
Because she seemed so serious, he concentrated on her reflection—and then he saw it. It was there in the slightly rounder curve of her cheeks caused by the little smile that wouldn’t quite go away. And it was in her eyes. They were a little darker, as though reflecting deeper knowledge, deeper feeling, clearer understanding.
He’d done it. She looked like a well-loved woman. She looked like a wife.
He raised an eyebrow in self-satisfaction. “You’re surprised?” he asked.
Her answer was to study his reflection.
Alert to what she was doing, he checked his own features and realized in alarm that he, too, looked changed. The arrogance was in place, along with the confidence he’d acquired early and accepted. But something had softened the lines of his jaw and his shoulder. Something had made him look…younger? Wiser? That wasn’t even logical, but there’d been nothing cerebral about the night. Had he heard somewhere that the heart knew best?
She was watching his reflection in wonder, beginning to smile. “I did it to you, too,” she whispered. “I made you look…loved.”
He admitted to himself that he felt loved. In a night filled with startling revelations, that one took the prize.
Chapter Eleven
Shouts and screams came from Jared’s house as he pulled into the driveway. Sure he was hearing things, he turned off the motor and raised a hand to shush Libby when she would have spoken to him.
And there it was, just audible in the ensuing silence—a high-pitched feminine voice and deeper masculine shouts carried on the brisk November air. The rain had washed aw
ay the pewter clouds, and the mid-afternoon sun was bright and golden.
“Was that…Darren’s voice?” Libby asked, pushing her door open.
A feminine shout was clearly heard this time. “Well, where is she? Where is she?”
Libby turned to him sharply. “That was your mother.”
Where was who? Considering his mother was watching his children, Jared headed for the house at a run, drawing the most obvious conclusion.
He found Carlie, Julio and Darren standing in an animated knot in the middle of the living room, all shouting at once in what could only be described as hysteria.
Near the fireplace, Justy paced with Zachary, who screamed at the top of his lungs.
“I told you it would help if you took her to the park this afternoon!” his mother was railing at his brother. “She had to be in all afternoon yesterday because of the rain. But nooo! You couldn’t stop arguing with Justy long enough to help!”
“I said I’d take her!” Darren roared back. “But I was in the middle of…”
“The baby without marriage discussion. I know!”
“Mom!”
“Carlotta.” Julio’s rolling accent gave the name an exotic sound. “You must stop screaming. Darren did nothing to—”
Carlie rounded on him. “Don’t you dare take his side! All I asked for was a little cooperation…”
“Yes, cara, but to you cooperation must always be on your terms. He—”
“What? Well, maybe you’d…”
“Mom!” Darren shouted, taking hold of her shoulders. “Forget my personal life! Forget taking sides! We’ve got to find Savannah!”
In the moment of stark silence that followed, Jared asked in a choked tone, “Find Savannah?” And as his family turned to him, surprised and horrified by his presence, he asked, his heart lurching uncomfortably, “You mean you’ve lost her?”
His mother began to sob. He heard Libby’s intake of breath as she came up beside him.
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