by Beverly Bird
“Perhaps she doesn’t blame you.”
“She’s human, Katie. The only person I’ve ever met who never blames people is you.”
“Oh, but I do,” she answered quietly.
He turned back to her sharply. “Who do you blame?”
“For a long time, I hated Frank for not living up to his vows, for trapping me in a marriage that wasn’t a marriage.” As it had turned out, she couldn’t divorce him here in the anner Satt Leit world, either. She couldn’t do it because as far as these authorities were concerned, she had never been married to Frank in the first place. The Amish never trooped into Lancaster for such a thing as marriage licenses.
“That’s forgivable, Katya,” Jake said shortly. But then she threw him a curve ball.
“And sometimes I get just furious with myself,” she added.
“Why?” He was stymied. As far as he could see, she had done everything she’d set out to do.
“For putting us into this...this limbo.” It was a new word she had learned and she grinned at it. “I should have married you right away. What was I thinking? That my feelings would change?”
His head swam. “Or mine would.”
“Did they?” She held her breath.
“Yes.”
She felt like the air in the room was going to crush her chest.
“Now it’s even more important to me,” he added.
She stared at him. Slowly, one beat at a time, her heart started moving again. “But you don’t touch me anymore.”
“Well, there’s a good reason.” He could barely get it out. He was losing his voice.
“I thought you didn’t want me any longer,” she went on. She had caught him looking at her. Not often. Most often she just felt him studying her. But sometimes she turned quickly enough to catch him at it—and on those occasions the look of longing in his eyes had nearly buckled her knees.
“That’s not true,” he managed.
“Then what is your reason?”
“I can’t...compromise you.”
She stood from the chair. “How in the world would you do that?”
How? he thought. There had been ways, a lot of ways, just moments ago. “By taking something from you that your God meant to be given only in marriage. I know that’s important to you, Katie.”
“Is that what you think that I want?”
“It’s not what you want, damn it!” he argued, his anger growing. “It’s what you deserve. I’m being honorable.” Possibly, he realized, for the first time in his life.
“You’re being silly.”
“Katya, for God’s sake—” Then he broke off, the words shattering in his throat like glass, as the little flower at the top of her bodice fell away.
He wasn’t even sure she had done it on purpose. Her fingers had moved so fast From her side to that spot just above and between her breasts. Then the flower fell loose and her hand came away again. He stared, trying very, very hard to figure out how intentional it had been.
“Uh...” he began.
“Jacob, I really hate having other people make my decisions for me,” she said softly.
“Yeah. I’ve figured that out,” he agreed, his voice raw. “But I don’t. I never do that.”
“Yes, you do. You’ve been doing it.”
The whole front of the dress was tiny hook-and-eye buttons from neck to hem. She reached up and popped one.
“Don’t do that if you don’t mean it.”
Katya laughed.
Actually, it was a nervous reaction. She had planned this, more or less, since halfway through the sermon this morning. The pastor had been talking about giving. About going out of one’s way and helping others out even when it hurt or it was inconvenient. So she would help Jacob along. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t mentioned marrying her again, since they had come here. Now, she decided, she would urge him along. She was tired of waiting, and her regret that she had ever asked him to was weighing her down more with every passing day.
She popped another button. This one was right between her breasts. Her heart thundered. She watched him stare at her, his gaze sliding up, down, up, down, between the buttons and her face. She reached for the next one.
Jacob finally moved. He shot at her like a bullet and caught her hand. “You can’t do this.”
“Jacob, you’re wrong. Here, in your world, I can do whatever I want.”
“Within reason, for God’s sake! There are two plate-glass windows over there facing onto a city street!”
“Don’t yell. The children will hear you and come downstairs.”
“Well, they’re another reason we shouldn’t do this!”
“Chicken?” she asked. And she laughed.
“Me? Honey, I...” He lost his voice as she tugged her fingers out of his and quickly unlooped three more buttons. He grabbed the two gaping sides of her dress in both hands, holding them closed again.
And he knew he was at the end of whatever honor he possessed.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’ll talk about this.”
“We just did.”
“Not to my satisfaction. We’ll...uh, we’ll—”
“Get married?”
“I never stopped wanting that!”
“You have an odd way of showing it.”
She stepped back from him quickly. But his hands didn’t release her dress in time, and the end result was that the pull on the fabric popped the next five or so buttons. A couple spattered on the floor. She laughed again at his look of horror, then her heart leaped as his eyes came slowly back to hers, and the laugh died in her throat.
His eyes were on fire.
She turned and hurried into his office in the back. She could hear him following her. She shrugged quickly so the dress dropped off her shoulders. She let it pool on the floor and stepped out of it. She was still decently covered—she wore a lacy slip and undergarments, even shoes with pretty little heels—but she heard his feet skid up short as he came into the office behind her.
She shimmied out of the slip, as well. Jake was having a ridiculously hard time breathing. He took another quick step into the room and closed the door behind him.
“Not here, Katie,” he managed one last time. “Not now.”
“I believe you said that the first time we made love, too.”
And it hadn’t stopped them then, either, he remembered. “Yeah, but—”
“This is perfect, Jacob. It’s where we’ve worked together and wanted each other for six months,” she interrupted. “It’s where we’ve waited, to make sure this matters.”
“Five and a half months,” He corrected inanely.
“It was forever,” she breathed. “So very long.”
Finally, he thought, something he couldn’t argue with.
“Lock the door, Jacob.”
Jake stared at her a moment longer, his heart thundering. There was a lot to stare at. If she didn’t spend a lot of money on her dresses, then he thought she had probably splurged a little on the lingerie. He had never imagined that anything so demure could be so sexy, how anything so simple could almost immobilize him with need.
Her bra was purely white, just a hint of lace at the top. No bikini panties—they came all the way up to her waist, but the legs were high cut. And her stockings—dear God, her stockings. They were the thigh-high kind, and he knew somehow that in the back of her mind, she was being practical—it was hot as blazes out there after all—but he wondered, too, if she knew what effect they would have on him.
A fist grabbed his throat and tightened as she stepped backward and lifted herself onto the desk with a little hop. She sat there neatly, prettily, waiting.
Waiting.
He needed to say the words again, he realized. They were halfway up his throat, but they lodged there, tangled with fear, though what she wanted was obvious. He opened his mouth, swallowed carefully, and she took her bra off.
There was only so much he could stand.
He threw the lock
quickly and closed the last of the distance between them. He caught her hair in both hands. She always wore it down now, enticing him, almost as though to please him. He ground his mouth over hers. She gave a little cry and reached up to grab his wrists. His mouth left hers, went to her ear, her neck, her collarbone, with a hunger he had only barely dared to acknowledge all these months.
Katya was elated, then even that emotion washed out of her on a tide of something else, of something like sweet delirium. So long. She was absolutely sure she had wanted this man since before she was born.
He dropped her hair. Her eyes flew open, then she felt his hands slide beneath her on her desk, and he lifted her against him. She wrapped her legs around him instinctively, though she knew he’d never let her fall.
“Jacob...”
“I never stopped wanting you,” he rasped.
“I know.”
“I wanted you too much.”
“I know that, too.”
“I love you. Marry me, Katie. Please. Now. This afternoon.”
“Whenever you say, Jacob. Just not in the next half hour or so.”
He felt something lift off his chest with the words and he could breathe again.
She felt her eyes burn with simple relief, with happiness.
His mouth was back at her neck again, then he lifted her higher. And all thought shattered in her mind as his mouth found her breasts and nuzzled there. And this time when she tilted her head back and sighed, he didn’t stop her.
His tongue circled one nipple then the other, and she tangled her hands into his hair to hold him there, at the same time wanting so much more. Then he groaned and his mouth went back to her ear, to her hairline.
“This still isn’t right,” he managed. “Not here.”
“It’s what I want,” she gasped.
He made a sound that might have been laughter. “Well, then, that settles it.”
He eased her back down onto the desk. He leaned over her, claiming her mouth again, finding the waist of her panties. He slid them down and she shuddered and called out his name.
Not Jake. Jacob.
He tossed the swatch of nylon aside. Need was pounding in his blood now, hot and violent. He had to get his clothes off and didn’t want to leave her lying there to do it. So he leaned over her again, kissing her, and he felt her fingers tangle in the buttons of his shirt. She pulled as he had inadvertently done to her dress, and the buttons flew.
He laughed aloud that time, and shrugged it off his shoulders. He tugged off his boots and slipped out of his jeans. She sat up to watch him hungrily.
He was overwhelmed, shaken, still, after all this time. That she could be so pure and so perfect...with everyone but him. Just him. He finished undressing as quickly as he could.
There was not, after all, any way he could draw this out, make it as incredible as it had been the first time, so sweet and giving. The office wouldn’t allow it. But there would be a later, he realized. There would be a million laters. For now, there was only an urgency too big to be denied, for both of them.
He lifted her hips and slid into her without warning. He watched her eyes widen a little, then a smile twitched on her mouth. He eased her back onto the desk again—tried to. She’d have none of it, and he laughed again.
She twined her arms around his neck and held on, planting a frenzy of kisses over his chest as he moved inside her, with exquisite care at first, then more desperately. There was a thump on the ceiling upstairs and her legs tightened around him and he thought, Got to yell up to those kids to be good, but then he felt the first tremors rock through her and he was gone.
It was a long time before she leaned back onto the desk with a sigh. He leaned over her still, but his mouth was gentle now as it traced her jaw.
“Do you know...” she whispered.
“Hmmm?”
“I’m probably never going to be able to watch you sit here at this desk again without blushing.”
“Good.”
In the meantime, chaos was erupting upstairs.
He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet again. She came reluctantly. He couldn’t resist running a finger beneath the top of her stockings.
“What’s with these?” he asked, half-grinning.
“It’s too hot out there to be trussed up like a sausage. And I don’t have to be anymore.”
He gave a bark of laughter. He’d known it.
“And I thought you’d like them.”
“I do.” He drew her into his arms. “Oh, yeah, I do.”
The next crash from upstairs was far more ominous. Katya groaned.
“Would you mind listening for the phones, Jacob? I’ve got to stop their shenanigans before they crash right through the ceiling.”
He stepped away from her. “I’ll do it. I have something to hold over Levi’s head.”
She blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Spy school.”
“Spy school?”
“It’s a sort of program some of my old buddies on the D.P.D. put together for the inner-city kids. But I think he’d like it.”
“It’s a program to be a policeman?”
Well, Jake thought, it was mostly designed to show kids how easy it was to grow up on the right side of the law. To give them some incentive. Jake had retired from the department to run ChildSearch, but he was offering his help with the program. It taught kids about being a cop, too.
“Yeah,” he answered and began dressing. He was halfway to the door when he stopped and looked back. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”
Her heart skittered. “What?”
“The way we do marriage, in my world, you can leave if you want to.”
“I don’t want to,” she whispered. She couldn’t believe she’d ever want to.
He crossed back and kissed her. He wondered if she could taste his relief. “Good. Because I’d have to follow, have to hunt you down and bring you back.”
She smiled widely. “And you can find anybody, anywhere. You’re so smart, Jacob.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
She wouldn’t. And she would spend the rest of her days making sure he didn’t, either.
Watch for Saving Susannah, the last book in
The Wedding Ring trilogy, coming October 1997 from
Silhouette Intimate Moments.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7242-2
MARRYING JAKE
Copyright © 1997 by Beverly Bird
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