He knew he was grinning a bit foolishly as he said it. He knew, because his cheeks just wouldn’t relax, but also because Janice’s face had opened up towards him, her eyes scanning his expression, and softening. And honestly, he didn’t need any more of her seeing him as proud papa and wearer of pink bandaids. It was counter to his strategy of making her see him as a virile man, but what else could he do? Janice’s underlying sadness had dissipated as he’d talked. And it had hit him that he didn’t want her defeated by her past.
Much as he yearned for her to succumb to his superior strength, it would kill him for Janice to lose her own power. Better she win outright this war of wills between them, and Miguel go back to being her conquered foe, than for his victory to be paired with her surrender of everything that kept her fighting.
So he cupped the back of her head in his palm and moved in for a kiss that made no secret of his intentions. And before he could get lost in the pure raunchy joy of kissing Janice, he let her lips go to say, “You’re no one’s mermaid, I think, sweet Janice. Will you tell me about college?”
As he’d suspected, he’d found the soft spot she’d been so busy protecting. There was a distinct vulnerability surrounding the scholarship she’d so casually dismissed to his niece. Her spine became steel, which separated their torsos without requiring him to remove his hands from her. Janice’s tongue tasted her bottom lip, which tightened both his rod and his hand, but she resisted letting him bring her closer. And that was okay, because her ripe-pecan eyes remained wide and focused on Miguel, and her hands flew up and down the length of his arms. After a resolve-gathering nod, she spoke:
“Nope, not a mermaid, you’ve got that right, Toots.” Her eyes flicked to his pursed lips, and she licked her own before correcting: “Miguel.”
His kiss was fast and firm. She’d followed his trail and found a way to answer his query, and the heat between them when she’d fixed her misstep seemed to melt whatever barricade was holding back more of her story.
“Um. So. Like I told the kid, Mama had me in tap and ballet back when I was still stumbling around like a newborn foal. It was fine when I was little, really. We lived in such a nowhere place, there weren’t a plethora of kids around, so going over to the dance studio meant I got to see my friends. I can’t say I ever cared much about the costumes and makeup and all the other stuff that came with recitals, but it made Mama happy, that was clear, so it was fine. And I liked winning, when that started to happen.”
Miguel repressed a laugh, though surely Janice saw him doing so. No one who knew her more than two minutes would be surprised by that truth about Janice. Likely even Anna Lucia knew it, and she was barely seven.
“You think I’ve got a competitive streak, you ought to meet Mama,” Janice said. “Woman was accused of sabotaging her own twin’s volcano project just so she’d win the science fair. And she never denied it, either. But I guess after a time, she grew too old to enter contests herself, so I was the one bringing home the gold. Or sometimes the silver, but I learned it was my job to win, and win big. Mama would stay up half the night sewing up my costumes, and if she didn’t think I was up to scratch, I’d stay up with her, practicing and practicing until I was good enough to go to bed.”
She’d stopped looking directly at him, Miguel noticed. Her gaze was half-focused somewhere past his ear. His mind’s eye was equally distant, imagining a smaller, lonelier, defenseless Janice in patent tap shoes. It was hard to visualize, but at the same time, painfully creditable.
“I asked to stop, you know? Starting when I was ten or eleven, and I just didn’t want to spend half the day in the car driving to some competition, or another night sharing a motel room with Mama. There was never any time to just sit and talk to my friends, if any of them were at the same event. Mama always needed me to redo my hair or help fix an outfit or something.”
She trailed off, then shook herself, settling her hands firmly on the sides of his neck. “You don’t need to hear all this. The point is, come time for college, it didn’t matter what Mama wanted. Not taking the scholarship just meant I put myself through school, but that’s how most everybody I knew did it, so it wasn’t unusual. A few years at junior college, plus I had work at the gym and that gave me a lot of experience, so when I transferred to SFA, it was easy to get the job at the warehouse where I started learning all the supply chain stuff. So then I had my career, and I ended up at Lanigan, and you ended up at Lanigan, and here we are.”
She swiveled towards Miguel, interlocking their legs and lacing her fingers at the back of his neck. And being kissed by Janice was a full-body experience, Miguel found. Their hands roamed each other, light and everywhere. Their jeans rasped as their legs slid together. Her lips softened as she moaned into him, and his tongue explored each contour of her mouth. Beneath the taste of his pasta sauce, Janice was pure sweetness and carnality.
When his hands cupped her ass to lift her onto his lap, Miguel groaned with longing and pleasure. She’d teased him, earlier, with the idea of squeezing her ass. Walking that sexy dancer walk away from him, pretending just to show off for his niece when clearly she’d been taunting him. Begging him to put his hands on her. Well, he was an obliging man.
Also, as it happened, un idiota.
He should have expected her to launch a sex bomb to distract him from the vulnerable heart of her story. So now he was an idiot with an insistently throbbing shaft. Miguel sighed as he slid Janice back to rest on his knees and leaned his forehead into hers.
Chapter Thirteen
The pollywogs had grown up and spawned new tadpoles and they’d raised up another generation and all seven billion froglets were hopping madly along Janice’s every nerve ending. It was time for the sex. Miguel was afire and she was afire and they were so highly combustible they wouldn’t need his grill to char more steak, and that definitely meant it was time for the sex.
“Hey, you stopped kissing me,” she complained, hooking her leg up around him in the chair. It gave her leverage and the next step was to crash her pelvis into his, but suddenly his hands were holding her back by the hips.
He wasn’t kissing her, and he was holding her off of him.
She tilted her pelvis forward, ensuring he knew what she wanted, but he only locked his arms to keep her back. His compressed lips told her he wasn’t playing around.
“Wait just a moment,” he said, as if he was being sensible.
“Not sure I can.” She pulled at him with her leg again, but again he failed to budge.
“You haven’t finished your story. What scholarship?”
She shook her head. “How is this relevant? I don’t think events from a lifetime ago are why you invited me over here tonight, are they? Because I gotta tell you, I have quite a different agenda at this moment.”
“And maybe we will get there, sweet Janice. But not just yet. First I want you to explain about the scholarship. You earned it for dance, but opted not to take it?”
The other thing decades of performance gave Janice was the ability to put a good face forward, no matter how someone’s words sliced through her body. “What does it matter?”
“If it doesn’t matter, what’s the problem with telling me?”
Well, it just about served her right. She known he’d scorn her when he heard her whole tale. He worked so diligently to put himself—and apparently his daughter, too—through school, and she’d gone and thrown away a golden opportunity at a free education. She hadn’t even told Miguel how she’d disrespected all her mama had worked for, and here he was breathing hard, smelling of grill smoke and fresh tomatoes and a little of the lemon hand soap in his kitchen, and deliberately not kissing her.
It wasn’t the easiest of feats, standing from her position wedged between Miguel and his table, but Janice was agile. And she had the control over her limbs it took to pick up his serving bowl and their plates and carry them through to the kitchen. Never let her mama accuse her of being a rude dinner guest.
Janice had stashed her wallet and phone on a side table while she and Mami were talking. Didn’t take but four extra steps for her to grab them up and slide them into her pockets. It was sadly ingrained that she couldn’t just walk out, never mind Miguel throwing cold bleach water on her poor miserable froglets. So she turned with a hand on the door. “Thanks for dinner, it was delicious.”
“Dónde coño vas?”
“Home.”
“Bullshit.”
And this was why Mama despaired of her manners. Janice lashed right back at him. “No, Miguel, it’s bullshit that you command me to come over here and, and kiss me! And then you burn my dinner and play with your niece and act like this sweetheart family man. This man who could understand and accept the crap I went through and why I got out and not ridicule me or tell me I was wrong and an ungrateful bitch and a waste of decades of my mama’s investment in me. And you even prove it, you prove you wouldn’t force that life on someone because you go and respect your daughter—your daughter, this stellar girl you’ve been hiding from me but I don’t hold that against you, and I respect that you let her make her own choices, which is parenting I never got myself, but then as soon as you know what an ungrateful bitch I am —”
“Shut up.”
She was never going to be a tall woman, but Janice reckoned when she drew herself up straight and glared, she could reduce any man to a pile of ash and bones. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t judge me lacking without letting me speak, and you don’t talk about yourself that way.”
“I don’t talk about myself that way? I should just sit back and let others talk about me, straight to my face, but I’m not allowed to speak about my own self?”
“Not if you say those same things, no.”
“I can say whatever the hell I want to about myself.” Especially when she’d heard it so often from others it was always on the edge of her brain. Words she hadn’t meant to spill to Miguel, but ones she’d nevertheless long ago accepted as true.
“Bullshit. You don’t go around disrespecting yourself. You’re too good and too strong and too full of power, and passion, and fight. The Janice I know, the real Janice—I know that Janice inside out, and there’s no ingrate there. There’s humor and generosity and acceptance and love. That’s your soul. That’s what you say about yourself, Janice.”
She would not move a muscle, so help her. Hypocrite man, forbidding her to judge herself, then proclaiming he knew all about her. Dictating, that’s what he was doing. Dictating that he knew her soul. As if she’d ever let anyone see her soul.
Just look at the ridiculous things he was saying about her soul, about her. If he really knew her inside and out, he’d never call her strong and generous. Passionate. Powerful.
That wasn’t her.
She backed up the step she hadn’t realized she’d made towards him. Groped for the door handle. Of course, it was locked. He’d shut them in, shut the world out, after his niece left. Kept everything contained between just their two selves.
And brainlessly, she’d fallen for it. Let loose that lonely kid who never got to befriend anyone, in case they distracted her from practice. And it turned out that Mama had been right all along. She should only rely on herself.
She tried to glare at him. “You’re wrong.”
He crowded her, cornered her. Questioned her. “What am I wrong about?”
“Me,” she croaked out. “I’m not those things. You saw me wrong, Miguel.”
“¿Verdad?”
It hurt, his standing so close to her but not touching. If he thought she was all those things, he should want to touch her. If that was her soul, he would hold on to her. She slid further into the corner, away from him, from his eyes that wouldn’t leave hers, from his limbs that wouldn’t brush hers.
“I think I saw right,” he said quietly. “I think you’re the one in the wrong here, sweet Janice. Those judgmental words, I don’t know who said those things to you, but I will be delighted to go tell to her face how wrong she was. I will show her what a remarkable woman you are, and how very, very worthy you are to be invested in.”
It had been Janice’s mama and aunt, mostly. But she didn’t have the ready breath to explain that.
“Hours aren’t enough,” Miguel said, at last reaching to her. A light finger landed on her clavicle, then, as she swallowed, traced her throat and the tender underside of her jaw. He gently pressed her chin up. “Days, weeks, still not enough.”
Janice swallowed again. She could run five miles without a water break and her mouth wouldn’t be this dry. Perhaps all the frogs had stolen her internal moisture to rehydrate themselves, because they were certainly hopping madly within her chest.
Unless that was just her heart.
Miguel pressed forward, which was a good thing, because Janice needed shoring up. “Sweet Janice,” he breathed against her ear, then caught her lobe in his teeth.
She jolted, moaned.
He kissed her neck, her cheek, her ear again. “Querida. It would be any man’s greatest honor to invest decades in you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Each kiss brought her entire body closer to his. Legs first, her knees bumping his calves. Then hands, hers so small, really, compared to the heat they spread through each place she touched. Finally, torsos. Her pelvis against his thigh, his pressing into her stomach.
“Miguel,” she breathed, and because it had been entire minutes since she’d nick-named him, his next kiss was the most ravenous yet.
“You wished to leave?”
She thumped into him, rough and firm, raking her nails along his scalp.
It was perhaps the most primal moment of his life, knowing this woman wanted him, as he wanted her. His body pulsed for her, but the longing wasn’t confined to the sensual. Taste, yes, and touch. Definitely touch. Scent and feel and, yes, also the heavy sounds of their breath, their moans.
And beyond that, the pulse of his heart. The over-the-edge thrum of having admitted his feelings, his admiration and longing and respect and more. Perhaps even admitting to love, a love that had grown with each puzzle piece he fitted, with each moment of sorting out frustrations at work together, of arguing about schedules with her, of laughing over happy hour beers and watching her return from her lunchtime runs.
Of sharing Sophie with her. And never mind her spitting it at him, but her acceptance of his mermaid girl, her generosity in honoring him as a parent, her willingness to entertain and beguile his intrusive relatives, both young and old.
His body pulsed for every facet of Janice, and he gloried that she had at last let him tear down her ramparts to meet him as an equal on the battlefield. It had broken a part of Miguel, hearing those hate-filled words that had scarred his Janice’s heart. But once she’d released them he’d strapped on his armor and gone to fight at her side, shoring up where she was broken, working within Janice’s barricades to expel the intrusive words which had hurt her for so long.
Yes, he wanted a more detailed sharing of their pasts. He wanted to see her first dance studio, and to look her mama in the eye. He wanted her beside him next time he drove up to visit Sophie. But those things would happen in time.
“You’re staying tonight,” he told her, shaping his palms to her hips.
She pulled away enough to meet his eye. “Is that so?”
“Si.” He nodded down the hall. “Do you need the facilities first?”
“Pretty happy right here for the moment,” she challenged.
“This moment is over. We’re moving to the bedroom now.”
He couldn’t, in truth, find the fortitude to step back so she could pass, but keeping hands on her, he managed walking them together back down the hall. By the time they reached the kitchen he had the necessary control to send her the dozen steps further to the bathroom. She used that dance walk again, the one that mimed hands on her ass, and spun to show him her laughing face before shutting herself
in for her ablutions.
Humming half under his breath, Miguel went to darken and secure the front half of his house. As he was clearing the dining room, Janice stuck her head out of the bathroom.
“Miguel?”
“Si?”
“Sorry I accused you of thinking bad of me.”
She was poised to duck away again, watching his reaction, a playful smile toying with those luscious lips. “Oh, querida, I have many bad thoughts.”
She was wearing just her socks, which probably made it easier to spin two full pirouettes before retreating.
But not for long.
He had no intention of letting Janice retreat for any length of time, ever again.
Hurriedly he went to scrape clean the dishes so he could stack them in the sink. There, in his kitchen bin, were her orange tulips. He plucked a still-intact bloom from the top and twirled it, smiling. His sweet Janice had been flustered by his very first kiss. He throbbed with eagerness to watch her react to the rest of his plans for the night.
Tucking the bloom into his back pocket, Miguel waited, listening to the water run in the bathroom. He had instructions ready on the tip of his tongue. And then she opened the door, and she was wearing nothing but panties and a camisole. And those socks.
Her hair was pushed behind her ears, her face open, and again, Miguel thought of love. She was a beacon and he was drawn to her radiance.
“Did you forget them already?”
He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Forget?”
Janice’s smile broadened. “Those bad thoughts. Did they run off into the sunset without you? I can try to chase them down, if you want.”
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