5.5 Contingent on Approval

by Jenna Bennett

  He held out empty hands. “No key.”

  “That’s never stopped you before.” I found my own key and inserted it into the lock.

  He grabbed me around the waist as the door opened, and maneuvered me inside the hallway. “But I wouldn’t get to do this.”

  He flipped me around, back against the wall, and proceeded to kiss me senseless. He tasted of chocolate cake and coffee, and I dropped both purse and bags where I stood, and held on with all I had. In no time at all, I was unbuttoning my sister’s Christmas gift to him and shoving my hands underneath, finding soft, hot skin. His muscles quivered under my hands. Until I realized— “Wait!”

  Rafe lifted his mouth from the crook of my neck, his eyes liquid and his voice husky. “What?”

  “What about the lingerie?”

  “Screw the lingerie. I’d just have to take it off you again anyway.”

  He reached down and picked me up. I squeaked and clutched his shoulders. “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “I’m too heavy!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rafe said and kept walking.

  I thought he was headed for the bed, but he’d only gone a couple of steps when he took an abrupt left, into my small kitchenette, and put me down on the counter.

  “I told you I was too heavy,” I said. It was that big piece of cake, no doubt.

  He cut his eyes to me. “I didn’t put you down because I couldn’t carry you, darlin’.”

  “Why did you put me down, then?”

  He quirked a brow. “Don’t you remember? I promised you next time we’d do it on the kitchen counter.”

  The kitchen counter?

  Sheesh.

  I looked around. My kitchen is a tiny galley style, with barely enough room to turn around between the fridge and the stove. “If you wanted sex in the kitchen, why didn’t you suggest it this morning?”

  Rafe stopped in the middle of pushing my skirt up so he could step between my thighs, to stare into my eyes, his own wide. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “There was a lot more room in the kitchen in Sweetwater than there is here.” We could have been quite athletic on my mother’s kitchen counter. Here, I’d probably bang my head against the cabinet door once he got going. Either that, or I’d end up hanging halfway into the sink.

  “I ain’t having sex in your mother’s kitchen!” Rafe said.

  “You had sex in my mother’s bedroom,” I answered reasonably.

  “You told me it was your bedroom!”

  “It was. When I was a girl. Now it’s my mother’s. The whole house is hers. I don’t live there anymore.”

  He stared at me, his hands arrested halfway up my thighs and his eyes a little wild, albeit not with the passion I like to see there when we’re two minutes away from consummation.

  “Does that make a difference?” I asked carefully.

  He shook himself, like a dog coming out of the water. “I don’t guess so. I mean, we’re here now.”

  “Right.”

  Only, he wasn’t carrying on.

  “Would a musical condom put you back in the mood?” I ventured.

  He tilted his head to look at me. “Would it put you back in the mood?”

  “I never really lost the mood.” Sex on the kitchen counter in Sweetwater wouldn’t have bothered me.

  “Well, d’you want one?”

  A musical condom? “Not particularly. I thought maybe you did.”

  He shook his head. “Ain’t a man born who wants to use a condom when he doesn’t have to, darlin’.”

  “Is it better without?”

  “Yeah,” Rafe said, “it is.”

  He added, “But I’ll put one on if you want me to.”

  “Not for my sake.” Especially not a musical one. His equipment is fine just the way it is, thank you very much; I don’t need it to sing to me. “Although... what if I get pregnant again?”

  This wasn’t how I had imagined this conversation, frankly. Not sitting on my kitchen counter, halfway to undressed, with his hands under my skirt, while I tried to ascertain whether he would be upset or happy about another pregnancy.

  He watched me silently for a moment. “Don’t you wanna get pregnant again?”

  “Of course I want to get pregnant again,” I said. “I told you weeks ago that I wanted another shot at that baby.”

  “Are you afraid you’re gonna lose it again?”

  I guess I couldn’t deny that the thought had crossed my mind. November’s miscarriage was my second: I’d also lost a blueberry-sized baby some three years ago, while I was married to Bradley. It was probably inevitable that I should worry about my ability to carry a baby to term. But that fear wasn’t enough to dissuade me from trying again. “No. I mean... I am, but that’s not it.”

  He tilted his head. “So what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know how you feel about it. You never said.”

  “You never told me,” Rafe said.

  Until it was too late. Right. I didn’t want to have that conversation either, half dressed on my kitchen counter.

  He made no move to step away, though, and since he was wedged securely between my thighs, there wasn’t much I could do. Pushing him wouldn’t do any good, since he’s many times stronger than me, and would only move when he wanted to.

  Of course, if I told him to move, he probably would... but I didn’t. He had the right to put me on the spot after what I’d done to him, I figured.

  “I’d tell you this time,” I said. “If you want a baby. With me.”

  He just looked at me for a moment. A long moment. “You sure you want a baby with me?”

  “Positive,” I said. “I told you. I was scared and overwhelmed and worried, but there wasn’t a single minute I didn’t want that baby. Your baby. Our baby. But I want you to want it too. And not just because I do.”

  He leaned forward, to where he could put his forehead against mine, and he removed his hands from under my skirt and wrapped them around my back instead. From heat and desire to tenderness and warmth. I returned the favor and slipped mine around his waist, under the now-unbuttoned shirt. There’s no rule that says I can’t enjoy myself while I give—and receive—comfort, is there?

  We stood—and sat—in silence for a few seconds before he began to speak. Softly, and without looking at me.

  “Elspeth never told me about David. I had no idea she was pregnant back then. No idea I had a kid. He’s twelve, and I didn’t know about him until just a few months ago.”

  “She was wrong for that,” I said. “Although she was underage. Her parents probably told her she couldn’t tell you.”

  “You could have told me, though. And you didn’t.”

  “You were gone,” I said. “And when you came back, David was missing. And then we got busy...”

  Doing what we were doing now, or what we’d been doing until a minute ago.

  But they were excuses, and we both knew it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you immediately. As soon as you got back to town. Or I should have told Grimaldi to find you and tell you. I just didn’t know...”

  “I was starting to get a complex,” Rafe confessed, still with his forehead against mine and his breath warm and sweet against my face. His hands against my bare back were hot under the cardigan and blouse. “Knocking women up, and none of’em telling me I’m about to become a daddy...”

  I hadn’t even thought about that, how the realization that I had kept the pregnancy from him, on the heels of the realization that Elspeth had done the same all those years ago, must have made him feel.

  Stupid, Savannah!

  “It wasn’t because I didn’t want your baby,” I said. “Or because I didn’t want you to be a part of the baby’s life. I wanted both of you. I just didn’t know if you did. We never talked about it.”

  “You never made me think I was anything but a quick fuck before you said yes to Satterfield.”

  I flushed. He knows that kind of lang
uage embarrasses me, but I guess he wasn’t thinking straight right then. Which told me something about his state of mind, I guess. “I know. I should have told you sooner. I just didn’t want to admit it. Because if I admitted that it was more than that, and that I was in love with you...”

  He lifted his head to look into my face. “Your mama might disown you?”

  That too. But— “I was more afraid you’d tell me that you didn’t feel the same. That you got Savannah Martin to bed, and scratched that itch, and you could move on. I wasn’t sure you’d want me or the baby.”

  “I want you. Both of you. All of you.” He leaned in to kiss me, very lightly; just a lingering brush of his lips before he continued. “Dunno what kind of daddy I’ll make, though, darlin’. Never had one of my own, and Big Jim weren’t much of a role model...”

  Indeed not.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said, lifting my hands to frame his cheeks. “We’ll be fine. Together.”

  He nodded. “One more thing before we get busy baby-making.”

  “What’s that?”

  He dug in his jeans pocket. “This.” When he pulled his hand out, the small velvet box was sitting on it.

  Todd’s engagement ring?

  “What about it?” I asked, my heart in my throat. He wasn’t upset, was he? It wasn’t my fault that Todd wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “We need to talk about it.”

  “I don’t know what good it’ll do. It’s not like I’m encouraging him, you know. I’ve told him I don’t want to marry him. He knows I’m in love with you. I can’t help it that he keeps asking.”

  And then I realized something. “How did you get that, anyway?”

  “Your brother gave it to me,” Rafe said.

  Well, duh. I’d figured that. But it wasn’t like my boyfriend looked anything like Todd Satterfield, so why had Dix given it to him instead?

  “Cause you asked him to,” Rafe said when I asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I told him to return it, because I couldn’t accept it, and he said he would.”

  Rafe didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and slowly, very slowly, realization dawned.

  “Oh.” I blushed. “You mean... That’s not from Todd?”

  Rafe shook his head.

  “It’s from you?”

  He nodded.

  A ring? From Rafe?

  “Why didn’t you say something? Surely by this morning you weren’t worried that I’d say no.”

  “I ain’t proposing,” Rafe said. “And besides, it was fun watching you try to hide the box from me.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  He grinned. “Now, where d’you get the idea I was nice, darlin’?”

  Nowhere, I guess. “What do you mean, you aren’t proposing?”

  I reached for the box, but he moved it out of my reach. “We need some time to figure out what we wanna do first.”

  “I know what I want to do,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  “Not so fast. I don’t want you putting it on unless we’re on the same page about what it means.”

  What it meant? Surely there was no question about that. He was giving me a ring, whether he planned to follow it up with a proposal—now—or not. A man doesn’t give a woman a ring unless he’s serious about her.

  Does he?

  “I’d have married you today if you’d wanted,” I told him. “I’ll marry you whenever you get around to asking. I want to spend the rest of my life with you and have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren...”

  “You say that now,” Rafe said, “but after a couple months together...”

  “I’ll still love you in a couple of months. And by then I’ll probably be pregnant, too.”

  “If you get pregnant,” Rafe said, handing me the box, “I’ll propose.”

  “If I get pregnant, you won’t have to.” I opened it. “Mother will drag you to the altar by your ear.”

  He watched me take the ring and slip it on my finger. It was a perfect fit. As I turned my hand back and forth, admiring the flash of blue, he said, “Guess I’d better get busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Knocking you up. If that’s all it takes to get your mother’s blessing.”

  I wouldn’t call it my mother’s blessing, exactly—more my mother’s fear of scandal, making her think that having me marry Rafe Collier at least would be better than having me give birth to Rafe Collier’s baby out of wedlock—but in the end it came to the same thing. If I were pregnant and wanted to get married, even to Rafe, she’d be less difficult than if I told her we were getting married without being pregnant.

  But— “I guess you’d better,” I said.

  “Let’s go.” He scooped me up again.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist and held on. “What happened to sex on the kitchen counter?”

  “Baby-making’s serious business, darlin’.” He glanced at me as he stepped into the living room. “We’ll need the bed for that.”

  He skirted the dining room table and nudged open the door to the bedroom with my derriere. Two seconds later my back hit the bed and he braced himself above me.

  “Handcuffs?” I inquired breathlessly as I slid my palms up his chest. He had ix-nayed the lingerie and the musical condoms—or I had—but he might still want the handcuffs.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Rafe answered, grinning down at me. “No need to tie me down.”

  “I thought maybe—” I trailed off, flushing.

  “I don’t need handcuffs to keep you here, darlin’.”

  True. I wasn’t planning to go anywhere, and handcuffs had nothing to do with it.

  I slipped my hands around his neck and felt the ring snag on the barely-there crop of hair he had left after getting it cut. “I love you.”

  He smiled. “I love you too.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas to you too.”

  “Give me a baby.”

  “My pleasure,” Rafe said, and went to work.

  # # #

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Savannah Martin mystery #6, Kickout Clause,

  scheduled for release in the spring of 2013.

  This excerpt is from an UNCORRECTED manuscript.

  It may—it will almost certainly—change in some fashion by the time the book is released.

  Chapter One

  It was Rafe’s fault. If he hadn’t snuck out of bed before six, going God knows where, I wouldn’t have been in the office at the ungodly early hour of seven, and I wouldn’t have seen Tim washing blood from his hands in the bathroom sink.

  It was a Saturday morning in late February, just about two months after Rafe had crashed my mother’s Christmas Eve shindig at the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater to tell me that it was Christmas, when all good girls got what they wanted, and that if I wanted him, I could have him.

  He didn’t have to tell me twice.

  We’d only rarely been out of bed since, let alone out of each other’s sight, or at least it felt that way. Rafe was out of work, basically, so he could spend every waking moment with me. The undercover job he’d worked for the past ten years—the one the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, had sprung him from prison to do at twenty—had finally come to a close. He had, almost singlehandedly, brought the biggest SATG—South American Theft Gang—in the Southeast to a screeching halt. And had blown his cover sky high in the process. Once the holidays were over and I’d gone back to work, he’d helped me with my real estate business when I needed him, and the rest of the time he’d spent working on his grandmother’s house on Potsdam Street, painting and scrubbing, getting it ready to list and sell.

  I wished I could believe that’s where he was, getting an early start on the weekend’s labor, but it wasn’t. I’d driven past, taking a big, long detour through the Potsdam area, and there’d been no sign of the Harley Davidson outside the big brick Victorian, and no sign of
life inside.

  I pulled into the circular driveway anyway, and crunched my way up to the front door. I even parked the Volvo and got out, traipsing across the gravel to climb the stairs to the porch to press my nose against the wavy glass in the heavy carved front door. There was nothing to see, and the door didn’t yield to my touch. I got back in the car again, gnawing the lipstick off my bottom lip.

  If he wasn’t here, where was he? Where had he gone so early, and without telling me?

  Maybe I should have followed him as soon as I opened my eyes and saw him sneak out. However, he’s much better at sneaking around than I am, a result of those ten years spent undercover. He’s caught me before, and the result was unpretty and embarrassing. And I still had a few shreds of self-preservation and dignity left. If he didn’t want me to know where he was, I wasn’t about to run after him. There are limits to how desperate I wanted to seem. And besides, I wanted him to think I trusted him, even if I, in my heart of hearts, worried what he might be doing that he didn’t want me to know about.

  I thought about going back to the apartment and waiting, just staying there until he came home, whenever that was, to see what he had to say for himself. But if he took a long time, I’d be climbing the walls by the time he got there, and anyway, I didn’t want to make him think I didn’t have anything better to do. After two months of togetherness, I still wasn’t so sure of him that I wanted to take any chances.

  So I drove to the office instead. I often do floor duty on Saturday mornings. It was how I hooked up with Rafe in the first place; he’d called the office one Saturday morning in August, to tell me that our queen bee, real estate maven Brenda Puckett, had stood him up for a showing—of the house on Potsdam Street, as it happened—and when I went out to meet him, we’d found Brenda dead in the library, with her throat cut from ear to ear.

  It’s a long story. I’d been a bit leery after that of doing the Saturday morning floor duty thing, but I didn’t have so many clients yet that I could afford to give up any opportunities, so I toughed it out most weekends. It’s usually a bit later than 6:55 that I pull into the parking lot, though, but I could just as well sit in the office as I could at home, I figured, and with luck, there might be something there that would distract me. Like work. Or a phone call.