FANTA C

by Sandra Brown

  "Is this ... what you, uh, had in mind ... when you put this ... hmm ... this hammock here?"

  "Can you think of a better use for it?"

  She sighed. "No."

  Half an hour earlier he had said, "Walk me home."

  She had thought the idea was crazy, but since she was reluctant for this night to end, she'd consented. She slipped on her ripped nightgown when he tossed it to her after retrieving it from the floor.

  He'd stepped into his slacks ... nothing else ... and carried the rest of his clothes. They had crept out of the house, careful not to awaken the children, and left by way of the back door. Neither of them had noticed before how loudly its hinges squeaked until they pulled it open.

  Laughing, and feeling wonderfully, naughtily adolescent, they had tiptoed across the cold, damp grass toward his house. Along the way, they stopped several times to kiss and caress. He had suggested that they try out the hammock he'd hung so well between the two trees. Elizabeth had made a bawdy crack about everything he had being well hung and he'd laughed and hugged her and told her she was an adorable, delightful contradiction.

  So now they lay in the hammock. They should have been cold, but they weren't. Elizabeth was oblivious to the chill, even though the long skirt of her nightgown was bunched around her waist. She wasn't cold because Thad was lying on top of her ... and inside her.

  The arches of her feet, they had discovered, fit his calf muscles perfectly. That's where she rested them, when she wasn't reaching down to the ground to give the hammock a gentle push with the tips of her toes. The hammock's rocking motion was lazy, but heightened their sensations of each other a thousandfold.

  "I didn't know you could— I mean, it's been— How can you stay—"

  "Hard?" he asked. "How can I stay hard for so long?"

  "Yes." She groaned as he pressed higher. "It's nothing short of a miracle?"

  "It's nothing short at all." He bobbed his eyebrows and grinned devilishly.

  She laughed. The delicious vibration caused him to wince with pleasure. "We've been here for ... what? Ten minutes?"

  "Yeah, but that's nothing," he told her around a kiss. "I've been hard for almost two weeks."

  "What?"

  "Ever since I put my hands around your waist and lifted you out of that tree. The top of my head wasn't the only thing that nearly blew off."

  "My composure slipped too. Even though you treated me with the respect befitting a neighbor widow lady. Nothing at all like the furious man who almost raped me tonight."

  "Admittedly, I was furious. I didn't hurt you, did I?"

  "No," she replied, touched by his concern. "I wasn't afraid you'd hurt me. But I didn't know you could be so aggressive."

  "Only when sorely provoked and slightly drunk."

  "Why were you sorely provoked and slightly drunk?"

  "Because I couldn't stand the thought of you doing this with Cavanaugh. With anybody but me."

  His honesty disarmed her. "Are you always so candid?"

  "To a fault."

  "I'm glad you don't play games. I admire straightforwardness."

  His eyes turned dark with renewed desire. "Do you?"

  "Yes."

  "So if I wanted something," he said huskily, "you'd rather I come right out and ask instead of beat around the bush?" He dusted her lips with his.

  Her heartbeat speeded up with excitement. "Yes."

  "Lower the top of your nightgown," he whispered.

  She hesitated for only a moment, then slowly raised one hand to the lacy, elastic edge. Her breast swelled creamy and smooth above it as she gradually pulled it down. Thad groaned when the lace skimmed her nipple, caught on it, and drew it even more erect. At last her entire breast was revealed and she made to withdraw her hand.

  "No, leave it there. Right there. Oh, God."

  Staring fixedly at her hand and the idle movements of her fingers, he began to lightly grind his body into hers. Then not so lightly. The rotations quickened and her hips rose to meet them. Seconds later it ended in a frenzy of simultaneous explosions.

  It took a long time for them to garner enough energy to leave the hammock and walk to his back porch. Holding the screen door open, he leaned out for one last, lingering kiss during which his tongue made sweeping, swirling motions inside her mouth. "I wish I could sleep with you," he said when they finally drew apart.

  "So do I."

  "Let me."

  "I don't want the neighbors to see you sneaking out of my house at daybreak. Or let my kids find you in bed with me in the morning."

  "No, I guess not."

  "Please understand, Thad."

  "I do." He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. "But I'm inviting myself to breakfast. What time should I be there?"

  * * *

  Chapter 9

  «^»

  They looked innocent enough when Matt and Megan stumbled sleepy-eyed into the kitchen and found them sitting together at the table and staring into each other's forgotten cups of coffee.

  "Did Thad spend the night here?"

  For all their subterfuge, that was the first thing Matt said. To the children's puzzlement, Thad and their mother burst out laughing.

  "No, I didn't spend the night," he said. "It just looks that way to you. Your Mom invited me for breakfast."

  "Funny, I thought you invited yourself," Elizabeth said to him out of the corner of her mouth as she rose to pour the children their ritual glasses of orange juice. He swatted her on the fanny, something that the kids thought was hilarious.

  "Did Thad tell you about Baby's bath?" Megan asked. Elizabeth shook her head no. "He let us give her a bath. Cats don't like water, did you know that, Mom? But we bathed her anyway. She got real clean and fluffy, but we kinda made a mess.

  "Only, Thad helped us clean it up or— What is it, Thad? Like in the army?"

  "Police the area," Thad supplied.

  "Yeah, we policed the area. Didn't he tell you, Mom?"

  "No, he failed to mention that." She cast the man, who looked wonderfully good and right sitting at her breakfast table, a sidelong glance.

  "As I recall, we had better things to talk about." He looked at her meaningfully and she grew warm beneath his gaze.

  "And he let us order a pizza over the phone from the man who brings it to your house."

  "Yeah, we told Thad that you said that kind of pizza was junk."

  "But he said that you weren't here and so he was in charge and he liked that kind of pizza."

  "Can we call the pizza man again, Mom? It wasn't junk, honest."

  Placing her hands on her hips, Elizabeth faced Thad. "Thanks a lot. In a few hours you undid years of nutritional indoctrination."

  He seemed supremely concerned. "What's for breakfast?"

  "Curds and whey," she replied flippantly.

  The children shrieked with laughter. To help calm them down, Thad supervised them setting the table while Elizabeth cooked the food.

  "Hey, everybody here has to pull KP," Thad called to the children as they headed for the television set in the den as soon as they had finished eating. They didn't give him the argument they usually gave Elizabeth. She watched, her mouth agape, as they obediently returned to the table and cleared their own place settings, carrying the dirty dishes to the sink.

  "How'd you do that?" she asked.

  "Bribes." He took two packs of chewing gum out of his shirt pocket. "Sugar-free," he told Elizabeth before handing a package of gum to each child. They dutifully said thank you, which endeared them to their mother.

  "And what does the cook get?"

  "The cook gets a kiss."

  Megan and Matt came to an abrupt halt on their way to the door and, as one, turned around in time to see Thad encircling their mother's waist with his arms. He angled his head to one side and kissed her on the mouth.

  "Thad's kissing Mom!" Megan exclaimed.

  "Ooh, gross!" That from Matt.

  As soon as Thad and Elizabeth drew apart, the
children started circling them like the attacking Indians around a wagon train. They whooped and hollered and flailed their arms wildly. Relieved and pleased that the two children were so enthusiastic about this sudden turn of events, Thad and Elizabeth started laughing at their antics, which only egged them on.

  As usual, Matt's excitement got out of control. The harder Thad and his mother laughed, the more animated he became until on one unbalanced pivot, he crashed into the china cabinet. All the dishes rattled. A wooden bowl of fruit was overturned. Apples and oranges rolled in every direction. A tomato splattered onto the tile floor. Several sheets of notebook paper went flying about like chicken feathers before drifting down one by one.

  Matt froze and glanced up at his mother apprehensively. "I didn't mean to."

  "You're such a dork," Megan said, now acting much older and much more superior.

  Matt dropped to his knees. He avoided the globs of tomato, but collected the scattered sheets of paper and carried them like a peace offering to Elizabeth. "Here, Mom. Your papers didn't get dirty. We didn't get pizza juice on them either. Thad moved them off the table and put them on the cabinet so they wouldn't get messed up. He said they might be important."

  Elizabeth accepted the handwritten sheets from her son, who began crawling around on the floor, picking up the pieces of fruit.

  "Just leave them, Matt." Elizabeth's voice was as thin and tight as a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. "I'll clean up later. You and Megan please go upstairs and make your beds."

  With the keen perception of children, they sensed that the mood in the room had drastically shifted and it wasn't because of Matt's accident. Something beyond their understanding had happened; it had made their mother's face go from rosy and smiling to pale and haggard. Her laughing lips were now drawn into a narrow line that barely moved when she spoke. Together, they left by way of the swinging door, making as little commotion as possible. They feared that something hung precariously in the balance and they didn't want to be the ones to upset it.

  Elizabeth meticulously straightened and put the sheets of paper in numerical order before blinking the written words into focus. She knew what they were, of course. She'd written them while soaking in a bubble bath. Every phrase was familiar.

  There was her pirate, tall and dangerous. There was his captive, shivering before him, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She rifled through the pages. Yes, there was the part where he ripped her nightgown and kissed her breast. And there, in that paragraph, the captive, overpowered by his masculine charm, began to submit and respond.

  She tossed the pages onto the kitchen table and turned her back quickly. Folding her arms over her middle, she rubbed her forearms, though the kitchen was sufficiently warm for an autumn morning.

  "You read it, didn't you?"

  "Listen, Elizabeth, I—"

  She spun around. "Didn't you?"

  Thad's chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. "Yes."

  Tears filled her eyes. One instant the hot, salty products of humiliation weren't there, the next instant, her vision was blurred with them. She covered her chalky lips with a cold, trembling hand and turned away from him again. She couldn't bear to look him in the face, because of her embarrassment because of his deceit. She didn't know which caused her the most pain.

  In a quiet, soothing voice, the kind doctors use to break the bad news to the family, he said, "I didn't realize what it was at first; I thought you had left an unfinished letter lying around. But then a few words just leaped off the pages at me."

  She faced him, her expression scornful. "'Leaped off the pages'? Can't you do any better than that?"

  He had the grace to look chagrined. "Haven't you ever thumbed through a novel in a bookstore, and when a certain word catches your eye, you stop and read a few paragraphs. And if it's a sensual passage, you keep on reading. Before you know it, you've devoured five or six pages standing there in the aisle. If that's never happened to you, you aren't normal."

  "We're not talking about me. We're talking about an underhanded manipulator who used me in the lowest, meanest, most disgusting way possible. How could you?"

  "I didn't do anything you didn't want me to."

  She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. "I knew something dreadful would come of this. I never should have listened to Lilah, never let her talk me into this."

  He looked confused. "Lilah talked you into dreaming up the story?"

  "Into writing it down. She's submitting my fantasies to a publisher."

  "Then why are you so ashamed of it? I read it and thought it was damn good."

  She opened her eyes and glared at him. Anger had deepened the color of her eyes almost to the piercing hue of his. "Yes, you read it and turned it to your advantage. Why didn't I realize what was going on when you tore my nightgown? It was so out of character for you. You're not like that."

  "How do you know?" he challenged. "We'd never made love before. And I was jealous enough and mad enough and drunk enough to get a little rough." He stepped forward and lowered his voice to a sexy growl. "And you liked it."

  She backed away from him in revulsion. "Last night you told me that you thought I deserved better than just—" She couldn't bring herself to say the words.

  "Apparently after reading my fantasy you changed your mind. I became fair game. After reading that," she said, gesturing down at the manuscript, "you must have thought I was pining for a flesh-and-blood lover. Or did you imagine that I must have a lot of them? Didn't the fantasy convert you from Good Neighbor Sam to Jean Lafitte because you thought that's what I wanted?"

  "No. That's not what happened at all. Everybody has an alter ego, Elizabeth. Probably several of them. Yours surfaces in your fantasies. Mine surfaced last night. I wasn't even thinking about the damn fantasy when I came into your bedroom."

  "Oh, please." She groaned with sarcastic disbelief. "You acted it out word for word!"

  "Subconsciously maybe. I was an angry, jealous man responding to the woman I wanted like hell to take to bed. Reading your fantasy turned me on, yes. But it also made me crazy. I saw Cavanaugh in the pirate's role. Everything you described in such arousing detail, I imagined you doing with him."

  "Well, I didn't. Because he's not a sneak and a liar and—" Another horrible thought occurred to her. "Is this the only one you've read?" He looked at her with a bewilderment too profound not to be phony. "It isn't, is it? You read the one about the pilot and the fain girl, didn't you? That's why when I came in and found you sick—"

  She clapped her hands to her burning cheeks, just now fully realizing the implications. His interest in her coincided with when she first started writing down her fantasies. She always discarded her first drafts. "What have you been doing, scavenging the trash can every morning like an alley cat, looking for fresh material?"

  How many handwritten drafts had she thrown away? How many had he enjoyed, snickering as he read each sensuous paragraph? "I'm amazed that you came up with the idea of the hammock on your own. I hadn't written a fantasy about that yet."

  He propped his hands on his hips and assumed that arrogant, aggravated male stance. Elizabeth despised it because it strongly suggested that she was being incredibly stupid and unreasonable.

  "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he said. "What's that about a pilot? And my being sick? Do you think I faked a fever of one hundred point four?"

  "I wouldn't put anything past you." She summoned all the animosity she felt for him and placed it behind her next words. "Leave my house."

  He shook his head no. "I'm not leaving while you're angry. Not until we get this settled."

  "It's settled. I don't want to see you, ever again. I'm not sure I can even tolerate your living in the house behind me."

  "Just like that?" He snapped his fingers.

  "Just like that."

  "After last night?"

  "Nothing that happened was real."

  "Oh, it was real," he said wit
h a short laugh. "And you've got the marks on your body to prove it."

  She blushed, remembering the faint bruises she had discovered on her breasts and thighs while she was showering. An hour ago, she had gloried in them, equating them to an artist's signature on his masterpiece. Now she was ashamed to think of how his mouth had put them there.

  "Look, Elizabeth," he said with diminishing patience, "I don't blame you for being angry. I don't even blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusion. I read something I shouldn't have. It was personal and private. I violated your privacy by reading it. But" – he paused for emphasis – "the only way it changed my opinion of you was to make you more fascinating."