by Carole Buck
“I... don’t...”
“Yes, you do.”
His fingers splayed. He stroked her from waist to knee, then slipped his hands beneath the hem of her hopelessly wrinkled wine-colored dress. His palms curved possessively against the naked flesh just above her knees. She gasped when she realized his intention.
“Chris—”
“Relax, sweetheart,” he counseled.
She bit her lip as he moved his hands upward. Response rippled through her, lapping away at inhibition. His touch was utterly sure and intensely sensual.
“It’s...d-difficult to relax...”she managed “...when I can’t b-breathe.”
Chris chuckled, massaging the flesh of her inner thighs in an erotically insistent rhythm. “Try.”
Lucy closed her eyes, beginning to feel a bit dizzy. After a moment she asked, “Do you kn-know what the... r-real...problem with our r-relationship was?”
His fingers stopped moving for a split second, then resumed their upward progress. “Aside from interfering families, a disastrous lack of communications skills, your insecurity and my blind stupidity, you mean?”
“Mmm—” she shuddered “—hmm.”
He cleared his throat. “Then not offhand, no.”
She opened her eyes and confronted him. “Our lovemaking was too...g-good.”
This time, more than Chris’s fingers stilled. His whole body seemed to freeze. He gave her a look so incredulous that she began to giggle.
“Too good?” he finally repeated, his voice a note or two higher than it had been. His tone suggested that he was questioning both his hearing and her sanity.
“Uh...hee-bee-bee...huh.”
“This must be one of those gender things,” Chris declared after a slight pause. “You know. Where men and women look at the same set of facts and come to completely different conclusions about them. Because from a guy’s point of view...there’s no such thing as too good.” His well-shaped mouth twisted. “Or too much, for that matter.”
Lucy managed to clamp down on her risibility. The point she wanted to make was not entirely facetious.
“I’ve thought about this,” she insisted, beginning to knead his shoulders. And she had. “No matter how bad things were between us out of bed, we could always make them up in it.”
“And that was a... problem?”
She nodded, her hair shifting around her throat. “I think it kept us from discussing what needed to be discussed, Chris. It was a... uh...diversion.”
“I see.” He began to feather the pads of his thumbs against her skin. The caress was as deliberate as it was delicate. The muscles of her stomach contracted in quivering reaction. “So, what are you suggesting, sweetheart? The key to our making things work this time around is a commitment to celibacy?”
Now it was her turn to give him an incredulous look.
“No!” She wondered whether her voice sounded as breathless to him as it did to her. “Of course not. I was just, uh—” She pressed her lips together as a sudden jolt of pleasure hit her. “Making—Oh, oh!—An, uh, obser... vation.”
“Good.” A hint of masculine smugness edged the word. “Because cold showers and self-abuse aren’t two of my favorite things.”
“Mmm...” Lucy arched back as his hands moved up a critical inch or two. Her pulse was thumping like a crazed jackrabbit. “Doing without you doesn’t exactly appeal to me, either.”
“I’m flattered to hear it.”
“It’s fact.” She inhaled sharply. “Not...flattery.”
“In that case, I’m thrilled.”
She closed her eyes as he brushed against the arousal-dampened fabric of her panties. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was very, very thankful she’d discarded her ruined panty hose when she went to the ladies’ room.
“It wouldn’t be much fun,” she said.
“What? Doing without me?”
“Mmm. A couple of days and I’d be wandering through the produce section of the supermarket, fantasizing about cucumbers or something.”
“Lucy!”
Her lashes fluttered up. Brown eyes met hazel ones. She smiled. Chris seemed shocked. Genuinely shocked. She rather liked that.
“Big cucumbers,” she clarified, in deference to his male ego, struggling to keep a straight face.
“Lucia Annette—”
“Jumbo ones,” she quickly amended. “Or maybe, um...egg—” she broke off on a gasp as Chris edged a finger beneath the thin cotton that shielded the petaled folds of her femininity “—plants.”
“I know it’s been ten years, sweetheart,” her ear-husband said between gritted teeth. “But if you’re remembering that particular portion of my anatomy as being green or purple, you’re going to be in for a major surprise.”
He began to caress her in earnest then, making her shift and twist and cry out. Lucy gave herself up to the acutely carnal sensations, ceding control to Chris...temporarily.
“This—” a white-hot pulse of response detonated within her “—isn’t f-fair to you,” she eventually protested, twining her arms around his neck.
“Don’t worry.” He showed his teeth in a decidedly dangerous smile. “I know you’ll make it up to me.”
Her pleasure-primed imagination served up several explicit scenarios for doing so. Lucy shuddered, a spiking rapture ravishing her senses. When she regained the ability to articulate, she said, “I just don’t like being the o-only one—Oh. Oh, Chris—”
“Only one...what?” he asked, pushing her right to the brink with a diabolically calculated caress.
“Enjoying...m-myself.”
Chris smiled again, his eyes brilliant beneath partially lowered lids. Then he leaned forward and brushed his mouth lightly against hers.
“What makes you think you are?” he inquired with silken intensity.
Lucy never got a chance to answer, because a split second after he asked the question, the man who had been her first lover triggered her release. She came apart, pressing herself against his clever fingers, clinging to his forearms with convulsive force.
“Oh...oh...Chris...”
He blotted out the sounds of her ecstasy with a searingly passionate kiss.
“So, sweetheart,” Chris drawled a long time later, straining Lucy’s softly tangled hair through his fingers. “Was it good for you?”
His ex-wife gave him a startled look. Then her ripe, rosy mouth twitched, and she started to giggle. After a moment, she buried her face against his chest in a less than successful bid to muffle her giddy laughter. Her shoulders shook. Her hilarity was punctuated by several helpless-sounding snorts.
“Lucy...”
She kept laughing.
Chris tamped down a flash of quintessentially male irritation, telling himself that she was succumbing to the strain of their ordeal. A lesser woman would have given way to hysteria hours ago—last year, in point of fact.
Still.
“Lucy,” he repeated, more imperatively than the time before.
Her head came up after a second or two. Her eyes met his.
“S-s-sorry,” she apologized, clearly struggling for control. “You just...r-reminded...me of something.”
Chris quirked an eyebrow. “We’re not back to vegetables again, are we?”
“Wha...?” she began blankly. Then color flared in her cheeks. “Oh. That. No.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“I thought we’d established they were large v-vegetables.”
“Lucy!”
She gave a breathy little laugh and feathered her mouth along the line of his jaw. “Just joking.”
“Yes, well, postcoital comedy can have a damaging impact on a man’s ego.”
“Oh, dear.” Lucy shifted her position a bit, swatting a lock of hair away from her face. She gave him an up-from-under-her-lashes look that raised his internal temperature at least a degree. “Can I kiss it and make it better?”
Chris suppressed a smile. Lord, she was irresistible when
she was playing fresh and feisty! “Later.”
She feigned a pout.
“You can tell me what you were laughing about.”
Her expression cleared. “Tina Roberts,” she answered with devastating simplicity, her dimples deepening at the corners of her mouth.
Chris’s pulse stuttered. “Tina... Roberts.”
“My former maid of honor. Actually, she’s Tina Palucci now.”
Yes. He knew. But he wasn’t sure how to tell her.
“Remembering her made you laugh?” he questioned, stalling as he tried to come up with the right words. That he was going to fess up was a foregone conclusion. He just wanted to do it...right.
“Something she said. It was a long time ago. We were talking about men and, ah, having sex.” She paused, smiling wryly. “Or maybe I should say she was talking and I was listening with rapt—if slightly horrified—attention. Because I hadn’t done it yet, and Tina very definitely had.”
“So—?”
“So, she said that most men follow the same pattern after they’ve done the deed. First, they roll off. Then—”
“They want the woman to tell them how good it was.”
“Great. The adjective Tina used was great. She also mentioned something about guys who want girls to turn into pizzas afterward, but I can’t recall exactly what it was.”
“Mmm.”
“Anyway, when you asked me...” Brown eyes twinkled.
Chris nodded his understanding, then grew serious. Lucy picked up on his change of mood instantly.
“Chris?” she asked, adjusting her position.
“There’s...something I need to tell you.”
She gazed at him for several seconds, her expression serenely trusting. Then she inclined her head and said, “All right. Tell me.”
“My showing up outside this building last night wasn’t really a matter of chance.”
She blinked. “Wh-what?”
Chris quickly related the highlights—if that was the word—of his pre-Christmas encounter with Tina.
“So, you knew I was here in Atlanta,” Lucy recapped when he finished.
“Yes,” he affirmed. “But not until after I started interviewing for the foundation job.”
“And you decided to come looking for me last night after you got stranded.”
“I called your house first” He chuckled briefly, recalling the humorous message he’d heard when he did. “I’m afraid I disappointed your answering machine. I hung up without saying anything.”
“And then you decided—?”
He stroked her cheek. “I was going to come looking for you eventually, Lucy. It was just a case of when my head would start listening to what my heart’s known for a long, long time.”
“That you still...love...me.” Tears glinted in her eyes.
“Absolutely.” Chris waited a beat, gazing at her with an aching tenderness. Then he asked, “You’re not disappointed, are you?”
She looked stunned by the question. “About what?”
“That our running into each other on what would have been our eleventh wedding anniversary can’t be ascribed to...ah...ah...”
“Destiny?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I think fate must have had a hand it,” Lucy disputed. “I mean, if I’d left a few minutes earlier, or you’d arrived a few minutes later...”
He smiled. “I guess some things really are meant to be.”
And then they kissed again. Lightly. Lovingly. The intention was affirmation, not arousal.
Which isn’t to say that Chris wasn’t as hard as a pikestaff when they broke apart. Because he was. His breathing pattern, on the other hand, was decidedly wobbly.
Lucy ran her tongue over her lips, her lashes flicking down to veil her eyes. “While we’re, um, sharing...”
He cleared his throat and forked a hand back through his hair. Once again, his gaze strayed longing toward the storage room door. There was something going on outside. He could hear it. Although exactly what “it” was was a question mark.
He brought his eyes back to Lucy’s. “Yes?” he prompted.
“It’s about—” Her lashes came up. So did her chin. “—Irene Houghton.”
Oh, God.
“What about her?” he asked after an uneasy moment or two.
“I didn’t tell you the whole truth about why I reacted so... badly...when I saw you with her.”
“Lucy—”
“I know she was your first time, Chris.”
His spine stiffened. His jaw went slack. He felt himself blush like an unfledged schoolboy. “H-how—?”
“Your mother.”
“My mother said Irene and I—”
Lucy patted his arm soothingly as he choked off the rest of this indignant question. Although her expression was benign, something suggested that she found his obvious discomfort amusing. Enjoyable, even. Given all he’d put her through, Chris couldn’t really fault her if this was the case.
“Not in so many words,” she answered. “But she did make it very clear that you and Irene were a very hot item during your senior year of high school. And since you once told me you’d lost your virginity around that time...”
He’d told her—?
Oh. Wait. Yes.
Now he recalled.
Lucy had coaxed him into the admission after the first time they made love. He’d been weak. Very weak.
“Who was your first time?” she’d asked.
“At the moment, I can’t remember anything that happened before you said the only thing you were going to want to do afterward was do it again,” he’d replied, referring back to the assertion she’d made when he’d been attempting to ascertain whether she was absolutely sure she wanted to go to bed with him.
Hmm, he mused, reviewing his retort. Scratch the very weak. He’d sidestepped the head-on query pretty artfully if he said so himself.
“All right.” Lucy had smothered a sigh. She hadn’t seemed all that surprised by his refusal to kiss and tell. “Forget who. How about when?”
“You’re asking for a specific date?”
“A general time frame. End of high school.”
“I see,” he said.
“What did Irene do after you kissed her that day?”
Gray-green eyes locked with brown ones. “You mean after she slapped me across the face?”
“She slapped you?”
Chris nodded once, resisting the urge to rub his jaw. Irene had been a junior tennis champ in her teens. “A clean forehand slam to the chops.”
“Ouch.”
“No less than I deserved.”
“Then what did she do?”
“Told me to go after you.”
Lucy’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Really.” He smiled crookedly. “Irene liked you, Lucy. No. More than liked. She admired you. She said I was lucky to have you.”
“This was after the slap?”
“And right before the excellent advice about going after you that I didn’t follow until it was too late.”
There was a pause. Then Lucy asked, “What happened to Irene, anyway?”
Chris grinned. “The last I heard, she was blissfully married with three beautiful kids and living in Boston.”
“Good.” The sentiment was plainly sincere. “I’m glad for her.”
“And I’m glad for us.”
“Oh, yes.” Lucy tilted her head back, raising her mouth toward his. “That, too.”
He was a heartbeat away from claiming her lips when there was a knock at the storage room door. Chris cursed under his breath. They both pulled back. Lucy began fussing with her clothes and fluffing her hair.
“Chris?” It was Butch. “Lucy?”
“It’s unlocked,” Chris called back with conscious irony.
The door swung open. Butch Johnson plodded in. He was carrying a steaming mug of something in each hand and had two pairs of headphones slung in the crook of his left elbow. His eyes were bleary
-looking and rimmed with red. His cheeks and jaw were shadowed with new beard growth.
“Is that coffee?” Lucy asked in a don’t-quite-dare-hope voice as she clambered to her feet. Chris stood up, too, thrusting his fingers through his hair.
“Yeah,” Butch affirmed, extending the mugs. “We used the agency coffee maker. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no,” Lucy assured him, accepting the mug and taking a long, greedy gulp. “Caffeine,” she declared with a fervent sigh. “Nectar of the gods.”
“Thanks, Butch,” Chris said as he accepted his mug. Although his words were more prosaic than his companion’s, they were no less sincere. He took a sip of the rich-smelling brew.
Mmm.
Yes.
Very, very nice.
“You two doin’ okay?” Butch inquired.
Chris traded glances with Lucy, then looked at the balding burglar. “We’re holding up. How about you and Tom and Dick?”
“Not bad.”
“You must be getting tired,” Lucy observed.
“We copped a few Zs.”
“That’s good.”
Butch’s eyes shifted back and forth several times. Then he unslung the headphones.
“Here,” he said gruffly, thrusting the ear protectors at Chris. “You probably ought to put these on once I leave.”
Lucy paused in the act of taking another drink of her coffee. “Are you going to start drilling again?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
Chris found the evasiveness of this reply troubling. The oh-so-casual shrug that accompanied it didn’t do anything for his peace of mind, either.
“Butch—” he began, taking a step forward.
“Everything’s gonna be fine, Harvard,” the other man interrupted. “Couple more hours and it’ll be hasta la vista for us.”
And with that, he pivoted away.
“Thanks for the coffee, Butch,” Lucy said.
The ex-convict turned back. “One more thing. Just so’s we’re clear on this. We’re gonna have to tie you two back up when we clear out. I know it won’t he real comfortable—although I have a feeling you won’t mind all that much. You’ll be okay until this place reopens tomorrow morning.”
Chris felt Lucy stiffen. She lowered her coffee mug, frowning. “Uh—”