by Ruby Laska
And insomniacs.
Which Griff generally wasn’t. In fact, he usually had no trouble at all falling asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.
But it wasn’t every day—or every night—that he took a woman to bed, intending to give her a night to remember, and found himself in way over his head, manhandled like a mouse in the paws of a tiger.
Make that tigress. God, she was something. He felt the blood rush to his temples again, just thinking about Junior. Those…muscles. The way she gripped him between her thighs and taunted him with those incredibly long strokes, pure magic below him, making him ache, making him beg for satisfaction before arching against him, plunging them both into ecstasy again.
Well. Griff reddened, took a long, deep gulp of the soda. Ecstasy for him, anyway. When he’d finally given up and ridden the tide to the most thunderous climax of his life, it was marred only by the knowledge that the woman in his arms was just waiting it out, putting up with him, probably—what, bored? Or worse—
He couldn’t bear to take that thought to its conclusion. Griff wasn’t the type to brag, but never before had any complaints from a lover. Just the opposite. He’d come to view himself as more than adequate, just a fact, like the fact that he was six-foot-two or the fact that his golf score hovered around 80.
The embarrassment was total. Griff stifled a disgusted groan and drained the rest of the can. His…third? Fourth? A tough way to caffeinate, but coffee was out of the question. They had left last night’s pot on for hours and now the bottom was coated with a smoking, gluey mass.
When Junior had nodded off, minutes after…the debacle, it had only been nine-thirty. Which meant that Griff had had seven hours to sit around her kitchen tormenting himself by trying not to think about her.
He’d be gone—out of here, out of this damn town—and well on his way to forgetting all about her, except for a few pesky little details.
Number one: he’d just deflowered a virgin.
Number two: the virgin had mere months to live.
And number three—except there was no number three because he was for damn sure doing his best not to think about it—that virgin had somehow managed to get under his skin.
Staying put was just the right thing to do, Griff reminded himself. Any guy worth his salt would do the same. You hold open a lady’s door, you light her cigarettes, and if you just happen to give her a really crummy first intimate experience, you stick around to apologize.
Crash.
Griff jerked his head up. The sound had come from upstairs, from Junior’s room, and before he could think twice Griff was bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He careened down the hall and came to a stop in her door frame.
Junior was sitting—stark naked—on the floor, gingerly rubbing her elbow. When she saw him, she blushed deeply, but managed a grin.
“Oh, hi,” she said.
“What the hell was that?” His momentary panic had quickly given way to irritation. It wasn’t her fault, exactly, that she was sitting cross legged without a stitch on. And it wasn’t her fault that the sight was making his blood pound, or that he was suddenly very, very anxious to join her on the floor.
“I tripped. On this.” Dorothy held up one of her clunky sandals, then sighed and tossed it into a corner. “Course I guess my head was spinning a little too. I don’t, y’know, drink much.”
“Got a hangover, do you?” Griff asked, forcing his gaze away from her. He stared very deliberately at the ceiling, the curtain rod. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he stuffed them in his pockets.
Hell, next he’d be whistling.
“Uh huh. I think a pretty bad one. I sort of didn’t eat yesterday, either, after lunch.”
Junior got to her feet, and still the woman didn’t seem to notice or care that she was stark naked.
“‘Scuse me,” she mumbled, and gently pushed him aside as she passed.
Griff cleared his throat. “No problem,” he managed to croak.
He waited until the bathroom door shut before he dared to turn around, then bolted back downstairs.
Okay, so she didn’t appear to hold last night against him. So he was off the hook. Right? No harm, no foul. He’d done his best, and even if it hadn’t been perfect, at least she had experienced the touch of a lover, an extremely enthusiastic one at that.
Except –
A horrible thought gripped Griff. He sank into one of the mismatched flea market kitchen chairs. What if she didn’t even remember it?
She’d certainly had a lot to drink. And yet, she wasn’t exactly incoherent. She’d seemed pretty much alert right up to the moment when she began to snore gently in his arms, even as he was struggling to catch his breath.
But why else would she be acting so cool this morning?
But she was naked!
Was it possible that she hadn’t noticed? Hell, this was unreal. Griff squinted his eyes shut and tried to think. In his worst hangover, had he felt miserable enough that he wouldn’t have noticed if he woke up without a stitch on? Alcohol hits women harder—he’d read that somewhere. Maybe it affected them differently too, disoriented them somehow, scrambled their senses. So maybe Junior had forgotten everything after his arrival last night, and assumed she’d gone to bed alone.
But if that was true, what would Junior say when she figured out she was completely naked? Which, doing whatever women do in the morning, she was about to—
“Come on, it wasn’t that bad, was it?” growled a husky voice inches from his ear. Griff nearly fell out of his chair. Instead he straightened, opened his eyes, and found himself staring into a multicolored tie-dyed vortex.
He focused—it was a T-shirt, or had been once, but now it had been cut into some sort of sleeveless nightshirt. The bottom, which barely skimmed the top of her thighs, was fringed with a wide band of lace.
“‘Mornin’,” Junior said, yawning. Before she turned away from him she wove her fingers into his hair and gave him a playful ruffle, as if he was a kid fresh out of the tub.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since I first saw you,” she added sleepily. “How much did you have to pay somebody to do that to you?”
“Uh—excuse me?”
“Your haircut, silly.”
Griff reddened. As a matter of fact, it had occurred to him before that fifty bucks was a heck of a lot to pay somebody to simply cut off half an inch every few weeks. But he wasn’t about to admit it to this ravishing hillbilly. Other women liked it, after all—they’d told him so.
“Some people like it,” he said stiffly.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Junior said mildly, opening cabinet doors and taking things out. She barely glanced at the smoking coffee pot before putting it in the sink and running water on its burnt contents. Then she slid a saucepan in its place and turned on the coffee maker.
As she poked around the top shelves, her nightshirt slid up her silky white thighs, barely covering the curve of her bottom. “You just don’t see much of that sort of thing around here. All that hair. On guys over the age of four, anyway.”
Griff steamed. This was good, though. Irritation was better than what he’d been feeling before, way better than chagrin and embarrassment and guilt and even the unmistakable urge to cup his hands on the nicely rounded curves of her derriere.
“Sugar?”
“Huh?” She was staring at him expectantly. He reddened and wondered if those wide green eyes could see what he’d been thinking, if they could read the lust in his eyes. That would certainly add to the jerky behavior he was guilty of.
But when she spoke again, her voice was throaty and there was a hint of a smile in the corners of her lips.
“I said, Sugar?”
Sugar. She’d said it twice, and there was something unexpectedly nice about it. The last—the only?—endearment a woman had for him before had to do with his privates, something he’d never gotten entirely used to. But this was something else, Junior�
��s whiskey and molasses accent and her just-woke-up hoarseness…
“In your coffee? Hello? Anybody there?”
Sugar. Duh.
“Uh—yeah.” Griff felt his skin redden as a trace of amusement made its way into Junior’s grin. “And cream.”
“Well, I don’t have any. Of either one. Sorry. Guess you’ll just have to drink it black.”
“Well, why’d you ask then?”
Junior shrugged, measured coffee out of a brown paper sack. “Just, y’know, curious.”
Irritation returned. This woman was irritating. It wasn’t his imagination, or her hangover. She just was.
“How come?” he demanded.
“How come what?”
“How come you were curious? About how I take my coffee? Does it mean something around here? Some sort of small town voodoo or something?”
Junior turned and regarded him. She let her eyes travel up and down, and Griff was acutely aware of his stubble, his wrinkled shirt. Her killer smile.
“Hey, what did you do with those steaks?” she finally asked.
The man could cook, at least, Junior had to admit. She plowed through the steak, which was grilled to perfection, blackened on the outside and almost mooing in the middle. Griff sat across the table stabbing his half-heartedly with a fork, not saying much.
Well, what did he expect? She knew she hadn’t been much fun last night, and she felt bad about that, really, but it was hard to work up much contrition the way Griff was moping around.
He looked as though he’d been up all night. Interesting. In Junior’s experience, most guys didn’t stick around until morning, and if they did, they were the kind that would sleep until noon and wake up wanting to know if she’d mind doing their laundry.
“Great steak,” she said suddenly, and smiled brightly. Poor guy. Maybe it was just dawning on him, what they’d done. Making a baby. Hell, when she got around to letting herself absorb that fact, Junior was pretty sure it was going to lay her flat, too. But for now, her priority was food, coffee, and figure out what to do with the sweet, hapless guy sitting in her kitchen.
In that order.
“Thanks,” Griff said. “They had a pretty good selection over at the supermarket.”
“Dudder’s,” Junior corrected him, automatically. Supermarket? The place was a dusty corner grocer, the only one in town, though lots of folks drove the thirty miles to the Costco in Sedalia once a month to stock up.
“Yeah,” Griff replied, and the ghost of an ironic smile flitted across his lips. “Dudder’s.”
Junior frowned. Why was it that everything this man said sounded like criticism? Or was it just her own insecurity making her wonder if everything had a deeper meaning.
After all, did it really matter what he thought about Poplar Bluff? He wasn’t going to be spending any more time there if last night paid off. Or even if it didn’t. Junior had a feeling that if she hadn’t managed to get pregnant the night before, she wasn’t going to be making any second attempts. Griff was on his way right out of her life.
A brief pang surprised her. What did she care if he left in ten seconds, or ten minutes or even ten hours? He was nothing to her. A means to an end.
Which felt kind of bad. Kind of wrong, if she was really honest with herself. Men used women all the time, in her experience, but Junior found that being on the other end for once didn’t feel very good at all.
“Hey,” she said. “About last night--”
“Yeah, we need to talk,” Griff agreed, a little too quickly. “Look, I feel really bad about, you know…” his voice trailed off and his features worked as he tried to come up with the words.
“Me passing out?” Junior finished his sentence for him. She grimaced. She had to admit that she really hadn’t kept her end of the bargain up very well. Oh, she’d tried to make the experience pleasant for him, but she hadn’t really given her all. She couldn’t—not with the liquid courage she’d consumed earlier.
Griff blushed and waved his hand dismissively, staring at a point somewhere over her shoulder. “You know, the whole thing, I could have been more sensitive to, to your—”
“Hey, not to worry.” Junior mopped up the last of the steak juice with a piece of toast. “No problem. You were great, really. I mean I’m sure that if I’d been able to—oh, forget it. Besides, the whole point was to, you know…” Junior paused, stumped. Do the deed? How exactly did she thank this guy for his bodily fluids? What was the etiquette for a situation like this?
Griff blinked rapidly several times. Junior wasn’t entirely sure he was still breathing until he coughed and finally looked at her.
“The thing is…I realized, and I’m feeling really awful about this, ordinarily I never forget, though things moved a little quicker than I expected last night…”
Junior furrowed her brow in puzzlement. He was stammering like a teenager, and she could detect faint beads of sweat popping out on his brow.
“Spit it out,” she suggested.
“We didn’t…I didn’t use any protection,” Griff finally finished. He had crumpled his napkin so tightly in his hand that his knuckles had gone white.
“Huh?”
“You know, birth control. Condoms. I didn’t use one,” Griff said, his face nearly purple now.
“Ah.” Junior looked him over carefully. That was it. He was having second thoughts. Regrets.
How could she blame him? The plan she’d hastily come up with was nothing short of selfish. How could she have asked him to create a baby with her, and one that he would never know about, much less be a part of its life. Well—she never would have, on her own. But Griff had practically insisted. And—well, he didn’t have to be so damn irresistible. That certainly hadn’t helped.
She knew those were just excuses, but given the swirl of emotions in her, something had to give. She just had to get through today. Junior tried to push her guilt aside. She took a deep breath and turned so she wouldn’t have to look in his eyes. She tried reminding herself that she’d only done what lots of guys did without even thinking—taken advantage of a near-stranger in bed.
“Am I somehow missing the point, but why exactly would we have used a condom?” She bit the words off hard. “When the whole point is that I am trying to get pregnant?”
When Griff said nothing, she snuck a glance at him.
It was like watching a movie cut to slow motion. A movie about a war, maybe, where the hero—a young Allied soldier—discovers that he has just been betrayed by the commanding officer, sent into a mission that will almost certainly result in his death. Griff’s mouth fell slowly, silently open, and his eyes widened, and the napkin fell from his hand.
“Pregnant?” he finally whispered.
“Yeah. You know, with a baby. Hey, keep breathing here. I don’t need you to go fainting on me. C’mon, innnnnn…outttt.”
Junior rounded her lips and drew air deep into her lungs in an exaggerated parody, then slowly let it out, nodding at him in encouragement. He was going pale, and he looked like he was going to pitch forward.
Griff slowly shook his head. “But…”
Junior sighed. Honestly! Was it possible he’d talked himself into some sort of amnesia? “Remember? You heard me and Rosie talking? About my fibroids and my endometriosis? And how it’s basically now or never for me to get pregnant?”
Griff opened his mouth, moved his lips without speaking, and coughed. He tried again. “Endometriosis?”
“It’s this condition where a woman’s—”
Griff made a chopping motion with his hand. “I know what endometriosis is. What I’m asking is, is, you’re telling me you aren’t dying?”
“Dying!” Junior couldn’t help it. She started to laugh, a weird choked laugh that didn’t even sound like her own. “Now come on, I know I tied one on last night, but I really think I’ll pull through.”
“What I heard Rosie say,” Griff said slowly, enunciating each word as though he was speaking to someone with a limi
ted command of English, “was that you had only a few months left, and that you wanted to make love before your, uh, time came.”
Junior giggled some more, even as his shocking words sunk in. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I don’t know why this is so funny. It’s just, oh, I can’t believe…”
“And…I guess that means you’re not…”
“Not what?”
“A virgin.”
Now Junior quaked, unable to get a sound out. It wasn’t funny at all. This had to be some kind of hysteria, but what was she supposed to say—nope, not since the prom?
“No, sorry,” she managed.
She didn’t sound sorry. Griff seized the arms of his chair and launched himself out of it, lurching a few steps before he caught his balance. Yeah, maybe the news had knocked him a little flat—but that was her fault, and at least she could have the decency to keep her mouth shut while he sorted it out.
“Sorry you got me in the sack under false pretenses? Or sorry you’re not a virgin?” he demanded sourly. “Let’s get something straight here. This conversation is no longer about you. I’ve made a major, major mistake here and I need a few minutes to think.”
There was a pause, and then Junior, in a much smaller voice, said “I said I was sorry. I am sorry. But you don’t have to yell.”
“I wasn’t yelling.”
Griff glared at her, then stood up. He paced the length of the kitchen a few times before noticing that the coffee was finished. Unfortunately it was in the saucepan. Griff started searching for a ladle, anything to get the stuff from the pan to a cup so it could begin to do its job and clear his head.
He yanked a drawer open. Sure enough, there was a jumble of kitchen tools in it, along with dozens of pens, batteries, lipsticks, paper clips, takeout menus, rubber bands and a pizza coupon dated 2007. He managed to spoon some coffee into his cup, trying hard not to glance at Junior, who was now pouting with her arms crossed.
“I wasn’t yelling,” he repeated, this time carefully lowering his voice to a mere growl. “However, I don’t, whatever you may think, take this sort of thing, that is take sex, lightly.”