by Terese Ramin
She didn’t know what to say. She knew how he felt. She’d felt the same way on a different scale with Ian and then with Matthew. It was hard to forgive yourself for being naïve and stupid in a world full of cynics. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to alleviate the clustered silence. But there were no words, only feeling; a fullness and sadness and understanding that could only be conveyed by touch.
She went to him, outlined his jaw, stroked his chest, put her arms around him. He tried to disentangle himself from her embrace, to push her away, but she held on, anchoring him. He ceased struggling and wrapped himself around her, burying his face in her neck. His sobs were dry, silent shudders through him.
In that instant, the world and her self-designated part in it seemed to shift under Alice’s feet. After nearly twenty years of resolute denial, it took her heart barely a split second to acknowledge the irrevocable commitment her head would rather have ignored. She knew now what she’d been looking for in Matthew, what had made her feel like such easy prey for Ian. Gabriel was everything they hadn’t been and much, much more. Danger and safety, arrogance and vulnerability, unadulterated passion and generosity. He was adventure, larger than life. He was part of her blood. Not just in it, not simply a burst of adrenaline through her veins, but an essential ingredient of it, like white blood cells and iron.
Given time and opportunity, I don’t think I’d find it difficult to love you, Alice Meyers, he’d said.
Alice shut her eyes and clenched her fists on Gabriel’s back. She didn’t need time to know that she already felt what she’d promised herself not to feel for him, with him. She didn’t want to live a safe uneventful underdeveloped life anymore. She wanted to be foolhardy. She wanted to be reckless. She wanted to risk her heart on the basis of the last forty hours, to be part of Gabriel body and soul. No matter what kind of future, pleasure or pain that meant.
It won’t happen, Alice, he’d said. We’re in the middle of the main drag and I’m not an exhibitionist.
She opened her hands and hugged him harder, reaching up his bare back to the long hair curling over the base of his neck, tangling her fingers in it and the rough chain that held his St. Jude medal. There was, she thought, nothing quite as impossible as this felt right now. She pressed her face tightly into his neck. Gabriel stilled.
“Alice?” He shifted in her arms, whispering her name first as a question of concern, then as a knowing caress, soft and erotic. “Alice.”
“Gabriel.” His name was drawn out of her like a sigh of despair, like an anguished plea.
He rubbed his hands down her back, roughly up, twisting them in her hair, tilting her head back. “I’ll take care of you, Alice, I promise,” he whispered raggedly. “You won’t be hurt. I won’t hurt you.” His lips, teeth, tongue tasted the taut curve of her throat, left heated imprints along the open V of her blouse.
“Gabriel, please.” Alice’s breath sobbed in her throat. She raked her fingers down his back, into the rough denim at his hips and tugged, arching to fit him. “Please, Gabriel, I need you. Please.”
Her hunger entranced him, spurred him on. Where his heart ached, she soothed it. Where his mind cried out, she answered the call. Where his muscles knotted with anger, she eased them, then built in them a new kind of tension. Where his gut twisted with self-loathing and disgust, she filled him with surety and heat.
He lifted his head to look down at her, letting the beauty his eyes saw quench the thirst in his soul. Her lips parted.
“Please, Gabriel,” she whispered again, and unable to stop himself, he bent his head and buried his tongue deep in her mouth. He would give her what he could in this shadowed room at the heart of her house where he couldn’t give her all of himself, where he couldn’t protect her from the consequences of their loving, couldn’t trust himself to let her touch him, comfort him, the way she wanted to. The way he needed her to. Not when he couldn’t offer her a forever-and-always guarantee. Even though he wanted to.
Her body twisted in his arms, reaching for the union his tongue mimicked. Gabriel dragged his mouth from hers and bent his knees, keeping them from that most intimate contact even as he pulled her blouse from her skirt, freed its buttons from their buttonholes. “No, Alice, not like that, not here. Not now. Like this, love. Let me...”
He parted her blouse and slipped a hand up her back to release her bra, pushing the hindrance aside to expose the fullness of her breasts, to shape, tease, and mold. Alice gasped and arched toward him again, moaning softly. He eased her back against the kitchen wall and dipped his head, brushing his tongue across her belly and up between her breasts as he hiked her skirt up her thighs, over her hips. Then, while his mouth outlined her breasts and his hands shaped her
bottom, he sandwiched one jean-clad thigh between hers.
Alice’s eyes widened and she inhaled sharply, tightening instinctively on him. Gabriel kissed her again, rocking her hips gently. “It’s all right, love,” he murmured against her lips. “It’s all right, Allie, trust me. Let me love you.”
Wordlessly, thoughtlessly, Alice tangled her fingers once more in his hair, brought her mouth to his. He tasted hot and sweet; his teeth were sharp and smooth, his tongue rough-textured, rough-playing, sliding against her own. She felt one of his hands massage the small of her back in tiny nerve-tingling circles. The other lightly claimed her breast, stroking it so it swelled to his touch, tracing her nipple without quite touching it until she strained upward in frustration.
Tension coiled inside her like a spring about to burst.
Whatever he was doing, she needed more of it now. When he tucked an arm about her waist and slipped his fingers down her stomach and along the elastic waistband of her panties, she surged toward him with relief. When his teeth nipped an enticing passage down her throat and breast, then paused, Alice pressed forward eagerly, begging him to continue. As though of their own volition, her hands roved down his chest to find that he’d left the buttons of his fly undone when he’d pulled his pants on. She parted the denim fabric and reached for him, bent on releasing him, touching him, involving him. Loving him.
With a groan, Gabriel caught her hands, pushed them away. He was already too close to the edge of taking her; if she touched him, he was lost. He wanted this moment to be for her; his pleasure would come from hers.
He flexed his knees and drew her nipple into his mouth at the same time as his fingers found and invaded the damp secret part of her body. Alice gasped and folded mindlessly around him, burying her face in his shoulder as she parted her thighs to his hand. His touch was exquisite. Each intimate stroke made her burn, melt, tighten. Her hips moved to quicken the rhythm, and he turned her slightly, deepening the caress as he turned his attention to her other breast, flicking his tongue across its excited tip until he felt the tremors begin inside her.
Alice bit her lip to keep from crying out her satisfaction when he drew in her nipple deep and hard. The tension inside her built to a peak. She felt herself trying to hang onto it, to keep herself from falling, but she couldn’t. Gabriel wouldn’t let her. He touched her, and she felt herself let go for him, splinter and float. He captured her mouth, catching the cry she couldn’t hold back, holding her while the earth trembled around her. Trembled with her.
“Gabriel,” she whispered brokenly, “Gabriel.”
“I’m here, Alice. Hold on to me. I won’t let you go.”
“But you…we didn’t…I want to—”
“It’s all right, Alice, it’s fine. You’re wonderful, beautiful. Hold on to me. Don’t let me go.”
“But you…right now…it’s not right. It doesn’t seem fair. I didn’t mean to use you, Gabriel.”
“Use me?” Unnerved by her choice of words, Gabriel rocked back on his heels to stare at her incredulously. “Use me?” he repeated angrily. “Is that what you think just happened?”
Guiltily Alice nodded and turned her face to the window.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think, I just—”
/>
“Felt.” Gabriel’s voice softened. “Enjoyed.” He caught her chin, drew her face gently his way. “Trusted me. Gave me the most precious and irreplaceable piece of yourself because I needed you to. Because I asked you to. But, God, Alice, use me?” He shook his head. “No.”
“But you’re still—” Alice began and stopped uncomfortably.
“Aroused?” Gabriel smoothed her hair behind her ear. “Physically encumbered?” He smiled when she gave him a hesitant nod, and kissed her reverently. “Do you know how beautiful you are when I touch you?” he asked. “What you do to me? How you make me feel inside? Now, I won’t deny it’d be a helluva relief to jump your bones right now, Alice Meyers,” he said softly, “and sometime when the time’s right, I hope to do just that. But until then, know this—” he took a breath “—what you just gave me is worth a damn sight more to me than some temporary physical relief and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”
“But—”
“No, Alice.” He touched an open palm to her face, inhaling some unnamed emotion when she lifted her cheek into his hand. “I want you, Alice Meyers,” he said huskily, “make no mistake about that. But right now what I need more than anything is to hold you, be with you, know you’re there. Please,” he implored, and Alice thought she felt her heart burst. “Let me hold you.”
She smoothed his face, took his hand. “Come to bed,” she told him. “Gabriel, come to bed.”
*
She awoke at sunrise to an unfamiliar sense of complete peace and a too familiar sense of impending interruption. Gabriel had pulled the sheet over them when they’d gotten into bed and now slept spooned along her back with one leg thrown over her thigh and one arm tucked around her middle, hand possessively encompassing her bare breast. The feel of him made her ache with anticipation and the need for privacy so that she could wake him the way she wanted to.
She shifted carefully in his embrace, trying to distract herself by straightening the twisted clothing she’d slept in. Instead she succeeded in making Gabriel stir. His hand contracted, thumb stroked across her nipple, making it harden. Alice sighed with pleasure. Gabriel murmured something soft and wordless and repositioned himself more firmly against her back, tucking his leg around her this time, as well as his arm. She thought she felt him smile in his sleep against her neck. She shut her eyes and loved the feel of his smile.
Her sense of impending interruption and disaster increased with her sense of contentment and desire. All she wanted to do was bask in Gabriel’s warmth, to at least replay last night to an even more satisfying conclusion in her dreams, but something niggled at her awareness, something that wasn’t quite so. She glanced uneasily around as much of the living room as she could see. The house was too quiet, she decided, and her everymother’s instinct warned her it had been too quiet for far too long. Something, she realized, was about to explode.
Unfortunately, she understood her instincts well.
There was a springy whine, a hesitant click and the front door was eased open into the living room. Before he even woke up, Gabriel flung himself away from Alice and across the four feet to the doorway, surprising the intruder as she came in. He crooked his arm about her neck, bent her arm behind her back and forced her face first against the wall. Then he stood there blinking and shaking his head groggily.
The intruder struggled with him, alternately sobbing and emitting tiny shrieks that came out sounding a lot like “Mom.”
“Becky?” Alice took one look at her youngest daughter, used another one of the words she’d been saving up for eighteen years and scrambled off the bed, buttoning her blouse as she came. “Gabriel, let her go. It’s my daughter.”
Chapter Ten
“Huh? Oh.” Embarrassed and still yawning, Gabriel released the struggling teen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
Becky shushed him with a look of teary loathing and threw herself into Alice’s arms. “Mom,” she sobbed. “Oh, Mom!”
. “Shh, baby, shh.” Alice sat down on the bed, holding Becky, smoothing her daughter’s hair, comforting her child. “He didn’t know it was you, darlin’. He didn’t know.”
“It’s not him.” Becky gulped and sniffled back a sob. “I don’t care about him—were you sleeping with him? Your clothes are kind of rumply. It’s Michael. He—” She gulped
again and threw herself face down on the bed, sobbing. “Oh, Ma! It’s such a mess—I’ve made such a mess. I’m not…and Mike—”
“What’s going on?” Mamie whispered from the twins’ bedroom doorway. “Is somebody crying? Is it my boys?”
“No, it’s—”
“What’s going on out there?” Aunt Kate staggered blindly into the hallway, pulling the black sleep mask she’d worn to bed up from over one eye and blinking. “Whoever it is better not try anything funny,” she said querulously, patting the pockets of her robe. ‘‘I’ve got a knife here somewhere and I’m not afraid to use it. Alice Marie, where is your bra, and is that your blouse I see unbuttoned? Young man—” she waved a threatening finger at Gabriel and made a move toward him “—I thought I warned you—”
“Mother!” Mamie eased herself into the hall, squinting at Alice’s clothing as she took her mother’s arm. “Leave them alone. It’s nothing. If you’ve really got a knife, give it to me and go back to bed. Honest to God, I don’t understand why I do this...” She maneuvered Kate back into
Alice’s bedroom and shut the door behind them.
Alice gaped after them for a moment, then crossed her eyes and flared her nostrils, making a they’re-driving-me-nuts face at Gabriel before turning once more to Rebecca, who was leaning on her elbows sniffly and watery-eyed, but interested. “Wow, Mom,” she said. “Aunt Kate, Cousin Mamie...” She narrowed her eyes and glanced speculatively at Gabriel. “Him. What’d you do last night? It must have been a hell of a party.”
“Don’t swear,” Alice admonished automatically.
“God, Ma!” Rebecca shoved herself off the sofa bed in disgust. “I’m eighteen. I don’t even live here anymore. I come home to get your advice on this problem and all you can do is tell me not to swear. I’m old enough to swear in front of you if I want to. God, I mean, I don’t want to get to be your age and find out I’m still curbing my natural speech patterns in front of you like you do in front of Grandma because you’re afraid of offending her. I mean, really, is that what you want, Ma?’
“Ah—” Alice began, but the side door slammed open, saving her from replying.
“Cousin Alice,” Mamie’s oldest son shouted. “Cousin Alice, you up? We can’t sleep out there anymore with the sun comin’ up, so we thought we’d get up and make breakfast and get Dad and go fishing. We caught some really freaky night crawlers last night. You got a camp stove and some eggs and bacon and potatoes and sourdough? If you don’t have the sourdough, we’ll take some Jiffy Mix or Bisquick and frozen blueberries. Oh, and a frying pan. Gotta have something to cook in.”
Alice rose stiffly and advanced toward the kitchen, gritting her teeth. “Do I have what?” she asked carefully.
Gabriel put a hand on her arm and pointed her at Becky. “You handle this,” he suggested. “I’ll take care of that.”
“Wise choice,” Alice muttered and eyed her daughter. “Front porch?” she asked.
“It might be more private,” Rebecca agreed and went out the door she’d just come in.
Alice took a quick look down at her clothing. Who the hell had told her life to start imitating her dreams? Her bra was practically around her throat, the front of her blouse was buttoned at an angle, and her skirt was full of static cling and riding up her back. She spread a hand over her face and heaved an oh-God-wouldn’t-you-know-it sigh of humiliation, wondering exactly how Aunt Kate would embellish this story. She might as well resign herself to her fate, Alice thought. Because no matter how Aunt Kate told the story, Alice’s sisters would have a field day with it when she was through. It would be handed down in the Brannigan annals
as The Day—or rather The Night—Aunt Alice Went Mad. It would be like playing telephone round the dinner table when they were kids: each telling would get more and more ridiculous, until finally the story would have Aunt Alice dressed in a toga wearing grape leaves on her head being fed the grapes by some bronzed young god—who might or might not resemble Gabriel—with oiled skin and wearing very few clothes. Alice yanked her clothes into place with a sound of irritation. Some nights, she thought, it simply didn’t pay to go to bed.
But the up side was, she also no longer felt quite so old....
*
Outside, the late June morning was still cool and soft around the edges, but the stark yellow of the rising sun promised heat when the dew burned off. Alice stretched and for a moment simply stood to take in the morning’s beauty, looking up and down the street at the facing rows of matching houses. Sunlight glinted off windows, barely filtered through the cover of maple and locust leaves where the trees farther down lined the street. Lawns, both the ragged and the well-kept, glistened with dew; roses, petunias and pansies were alive with it. Serenity touched the neighborhood while there was no one about to see it.
Except here. Alice looked down at the porch steps where Becky awaited her, head bowed, face peeking out at her mother between long strands of dark brown hair. The big deep-lidded hazel eyes that had first attracted Alice to Matthew and were his unsung legacy to both of Alice’s daughters, blinked guiltily when Alice sat down on the chilly concrete.
She’s been lying to somebody, Alice thought, recognizing the look. But who to? Me? Michael?