by Lynn Turner
The instant before his mouth would have crashed down on hers, she turned her head, pressing her cheek to his shoulder.
‘Please … you’re scaring me.’
The timid admission slipped out of her all on its own. Abbie thought it couldn’t possibly have surprised Mal any more than it had surprised her. She held her breath while she waited for his reaction.
One of his hands lifted to her head, his touch suddenly gentle. ‘Am I?’ he murmured hoarsely.
She nodded. ‘A little.’
His chest expanded as he drew a deep, uneven breath. ‘Were you telling the truth when you said you were twenty-three before you made love for the first time?’
Abbie grimaced. ‘If I’d wanted to lie, I’d have said I was eighteen or nineteen,’ she told him drily.
Mal’s fingers slipped into her hair and began to rake through it lightly, almost absently. ‘How old are you now?’
‘Twenty-five,’ she murmured with a frown. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
He ignored the question. ‘And how many men have there been since that first time?’
‘Are you writing a book?’
She said it exactly the same way he had, when she’d questioned him about Roxanne. Mal also repeated her response, but with a thread of lazy amusement running through his deep voice.
‘No, just curious. Are you going to answer the question?’
‘One,’ Abbie muttered reluctantly.
‘And I’d be willing to bet they were both perfect gentlemen,’ he drawled. ‘Polite, well-mannered—’
‘Considerate,’ she put in with a smile.
‘Dull.’
‘Gallant.’
‘Predictable, boring three-piece suits. Well, I’m none of those things, Abigail. I can be as considerate as the next man, but I’m seldom predictable and I almost never bother to be polite. And as for gallant. .. tell, I’m not even sure what it means, but if somebody accused me of being gallant when I had a few beers under my belt, I’d probably punch him in the mouth.’
Abbie closed her eyes and slipped her arms around his waist. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Garrett—that you’re not a gentleman?’
‘Not on my best day,’ he muttered. ‘You said that when you see something you want, you go after it. So do I, and what I want right now, more than anything, is to make love to you. A gentleman might have taken you for a stroll in the moonlight, maybe stolen a few kisses before he tried to manipulate you into bed. Sorry, darlin’, but that’s not my style.’ He paused a moment, then murmured huskily, ‘Now the question is, would you rather go to bed with a nice, polite three-piece suit, or with a rude, crude male chauvinist pig who promises to love you like you’ve never been loved before?’
Abbie answered by stretching up to kiss him. She was boldly aggressive, communicating her preference in a language far more eloquent than words would have been. Mal returned the kiss, but that was all. She could feel the control he was exerting in every rigidly tense line of his body. The laboured rhythm of his heart against her breasts and the occasional shudder that rippled through him told her how much that control was costing him. She pulled back enough to whisper, ‘In case there’s any doubt left in your mind, I want you, Malachi Garrett, not some boring old three-piece suit.’
‘Are you still afraid?’ he asked hoarsely against her lips.
She shook her head. ‘I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. It was just that you… took me by surprise.’
His ragged sigh seemed to drain the tension from his body. His hands shifted, gathering her closer so that the hard evidence of his arousal pressed into her stomach.
‘Well, darlin’, just so I don’t give you any more nasty surprises—’ he bent his head to murmur in her ear ‘—this is what’s going to happen next…’
Some of the things he whispered should have made Abbie blush from head to toe. She did in fact quickly become flushed with heat, but she didn’t delude herself that the sudden dilation of every capillary in her body had anything to do with embarrassment. He roused wants and needs she hadn’t been aware she possessed, calling forth a primitive, sensual part of her that had, until now, lain dormant.
By the time they had finished undressing each other and moved on to the bed, not a single inhibition or reservation remained. Her inquisitive hands and mouth stroked, rubbed, tasted and explored with eager abandon, until a tortured groan erupted from Mal’s chest and he reached out to stop her.
‘No more,’ he said in a thick voice totally unlike his normal lazy drawl. ‘Dear God, Abbie, how much do you think one man can take?’
She ducked her head and bit his shoulder, then loitered to run the top of her tongue along the tiny indentations her teeth had made. ‘That’s the first time you’ve called me Abbie.’
‘If you don’t stop teasing me, it may be the last time I call you anything,’ he gasped. ‘Because I’ll be either unconscious or dead.’
Abbie lifted her head, finding his mouth by instinct in the dark. ‘I’m not teasing,’ she whispered as her hands glided down his body.’
A sound that was part moan, part growl and all male rumbled up from his chest and into her mouth as his arms locked around her and he rolled, pinning her beneath him. Abbie clasped him to her with an eagerness that made his head spin, welcoming his strong, gliding thrust with a tiny cry of joy, calling his name between gasps and whimpers and soft moans of ecstasy.
Their loving was fierce and frantic and utterly satisfying. As soon as Mal was able to move he eased on to his back, taking Abbie with him. Her head settled on his shoulder, one slender hand coming to rest over his heart. He stroked her hair and she felt him place a kiss on the top of her head.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. The slight catch in his voice told her that the ferocity of their passion had shaken him as much as it had her.
‘I think so,’ she murmured. Her own voice was far from steady. ‘Ask me again in a week. It’ll take me at least that long to recuperate.’
A husky chuckle accompanied Mal’s one-armed hug. ‘I hate to burst your balloon, darlin’, but I suspect that a week from now we’ll both be in cardiac intensive care.’
Abbie fell asleep before she could think of a suitable reply.
He woke her just before dawn, his hands and mouth coaxing her out of a deep, dreamless sleep. Their lovemaking was slow, achingly tender and piercingly sweet, and as completely satisfying as it had been the first time. They fell asleep in a tangle of limbs and bedclothes, and didn’t wake again until almost ten. Mal jumped out of bed and started gathering the clothes they’d discarded in such haste the night before, cursing himself for not remembering to order a wake-up call and muttering dire predictions that Roxanne and Tony were probably halfway to Washington by now. When Abbie informed him that she wasn’t going anywhere until she’d had a shower, he grumbled and complained, cursed some more, and then—when she climbed out from beneath the sheet and stretched luxuriously—did an abrupt about-face and decided to join her. When they emerged from the bathroom they were still running late, but he was in a much better mood.
While Abbie checked to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, Mal collected their luggage and carried it out to the car. His enraged bellow brought her running to the door. She saw the reason for his fury at once.
Both tyres on the driver’s side of the Shelby were as flat as pancakes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘The bitch!’
In the first minute or so after he discovered the flats, those were the only words Mal uttered that didn’t turn the air blue. Abbie hurried around the car to check the other two tyres.
‘The ones on this side are OK,’ she reported.
‘Of course,’ he said flatly. ‘The Sable was parked on that side. She wouldn’t have wanted Tony to know about her dirty little trick.’
He lifted the hood to check for additional signs of sabotage and said a word that made Abbie wince.
‘What else?’ she asked anx
iously.
He held up a long strip of rubber. ‘Fan belt.’
‘Broken?’
‘Cut,’ Mal said tersely. He stuck his head back under the hood and announced that two fuses were also missing. ‘She wasn’t taking any chances,’ he muttered as he removed his cap to rake a hand through his hair.;
‘How bad is it?’ Abbie asked. ‘I mean, how long will it take to pump up the tyres and replace the belt and the fuses?’
He leaned against the Shelby’s fender and considered the problem. ‘I brought a few spare fuses, just in case one blew, and there’s probably a service station nearby that has a portable compressed air tank. If it was a weekday, I could make one phone call and have the fan belt delivered in a matter of minutes. But this is Sunday. God knows how long it’ll take to find an auto parts store that’s open.’
‘Then we’d better start making calls,’ Abbie suggested.
Mal straightened and closed the hood. ‘First let’s check with the manager. If he lives around here, he can probably narrow down the list of places we should try and hopefully save us some time.’
The day manager turned out to be a young woman, and it just so happened that her cousin’s husband’s brother was the parts manager for a local Ford dealership. She called him at home, briefly explained the situation and then handed the phone to Mal. When he hung up, the man had agreed to deliver a new fan belt within the hour.
‘He’s bringing a portable air tank, too,’ he told Abbie as they walked away from the desk.
She went into the restaurant just off the lobby and ordered two sausage and pancake breakfasts to take away while Mal went to replace the missing fuses. When she returned to the car he was sitting inside it, the calculator balanced on one knee and a spiral notebook on the other. The door to their room was still standing open. Abbie carried the bag containing their breakfasts inside and unpacked two coffees, two orange juices, two styrofoam food containers and two sets of plastic utensils. Mal appeared in the doorway just as she finished setting everything out on the desk.
‘I wondered where you’d disappeared to,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’
‘Breakfast. Come and eat before it gets cold.’
He inspected his hands and decided he’d better wash them first. On the way to the bathroom he paused to give her a lingering kiss. ‘You’re gonna make some man a dandy little wife, Abigail Prudence,’ he said in an exaggerated drawl.
‘Not likely,’ she muttered.
Mal had already entered the bathroom and turned on the water, so Abbie didn’t think he’d heard. Just as well, she thought dismally. She would prefer not to be called upon to explain the remark. After last night, it was impossible to convince herself that she wasn’t head over heels in love with him. It was equally impossible to sell herself on the idea that he might eventually forgive her for the way she’d deceived and used him. And, since very few men married women they despised, it didn’t seem likely that there were any orange blossoms or wedding bells looming on her horizon.
Telling herself that there was no point in dwelling on such negative thoughts, she started wrestling an armchair across the floor to the desk. She’d managed to drag it about three feet when Mal’s hand suddenly grasped her upper arms and he gently moved her aside.
‘What do you have against marriage?’ he asked, hefting the chair as if it were a box of Kleenex.
Abbie tried to exude sophisticated nonchalance. ‘Nothing. I just don’t want to be a wife.’
Mal waited until she was comfortably situated in the armchair before he sat down beside her. She couldn’t help thinking that he displayed very nice manners for a man who rarely bothered to be polite.
‘Heaven knows, I’m no expert,’ he drawled, ‘but I’ve always thought that when two people got married, one became a husband and the other became a wife.’
‘Which is exactly why so many marriages end in divorce,’ she said as she opened the plastic container of maple syrup and dumped it on her pancakes. ‘If I ever do get married, I’ll hire somebody to be the wife.’
Mal cocked his head, his expression quizzical. ‘Are you saying you’d pay another woman to sleep with your husband?’
‘Of course not! I’m talking about hiring somebody to do all the dreary, thankless chores that wives get stuck with—washing, ironing, scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning the house moss out from under the beds and the cobwebs off the ceilings … that kind of thing.’
‘Thank heavens,’ he muttered. ‘I thought this was some goofy new feminist craze—surrogate wives, or something like that.’
Abbie gave him a speaking look, but she refused to be drawn into an argument about feminism. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said after a moment. ‘Nine times out of ten the woman gets saddled with all the stuff that’s just plain drudgery, while hubby goes off to play golf or tennis or whatever.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, surprising her. ‘But I don’t think hiring a “wife” is the answer. Has it occurred to you that if you married a man who was already accustomed to keeping house for himself, the problem probably wouldn’t arise in the first place? You could divide the housework and then both go off to play golf or tennis or whatever.’
‘Great idea,’ she said drily. ‘Unfortunately, men like that are as scarce as hen’s teeth. At least, heterosexual men under the age of fifty. If you know one, point me to him.’
Mal wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then sat back and tapped his chest. ‘You’re looking at one,’ he said with a lop-sided grin.
Abbie choked on a sip of orange juice.
He jumped up and quickly moved behind her chair. ‘That’s not a very flattering reaction,’ he drawled as he whacked her between the shoulder-blades.
She struggled to clear her windpipe and think of something to say, in that order. The former was accomplished fairly easily. The latter proved to be much more difficult. She coughed a few more times to give herself another couple of seconds.
There was a tentative knock at the door, which Mal had left open, followed by a man’s voice asking, “Scuse me, but do y’all belong to the black Cobra with the busted fan belt?’
‘That’s us,’ Mal answered. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He bent over and stared into Abbie’s tear drenched eyes. ‘You going to be OK?’
She nodded vigorously and waved him away. When he’d followed the man outside she wilted with relief, grateful that she had a minute or two of privacy in which to recover from the shock he’d given her.
‘You’re looking at one.’ What on earth had he meant by that? Surely he hadn’t been presenting himself for consideration. Had he? The thought alone was enough to make her heart palpitate.
‘Get serious, Abigail,’ she muttered as she started clearing away the remains of their late breakfast. He had’ been teasing her again, that was all—joking, kidding around. It would be absurd to imagine anything else.
They made one short stop to fill the tank and were back on the interstate a few minutes past noon. Abbie didn’t bother to consult Mal about their speed. Conscious of how much time they’d already lost, she accelerated steadily until the speedometer registered ninety miles per hour, then maintained that speed all the way to Charleston, West Virginia. Fortunately the radar detector remained silent for the entire two hundred and fifty-nine miles.
They had left behind the relatively flat terrain of the Midwestern plains. As they travelled eastwards the land rose in a series of progressively , steeper hills, with lush green valleys nestled between their slopes. It was a particularly beautiful part of the country, and Abbie regretted the fact that they couldn’t spare the time to stop occasionally and spend a few minutes just admiring the scenery.
The sky over Louisville had been sprinkled with high, fluffy white clouds. By the time they reached Charleston the clouds had formed a dense, low-hanging mass, its dirty grey belly ominously close and heavy-looking. Every few minutes thunder rumbled overhead.
‘Looks like we’re in for a gully-washer,’ Mal
l remarked.
Abbie glanced at him in concern. ‘Should we stop, or keep going and hope we can outrun it?’
‘I’d rather keep going, unless you need a break. How are you holding up?’
‘Fine,’ she said truthfully. ‘I should be OK for another hour or two. We’ll be coming to the interchange for I79 before long. Maybe we’ll leave this stuff behind once we head north.’
Unfortunately, such was not the case. Five minutes later it was raining so hard that Abbie turned on the headlights and reduced their speed to sixty, and then fifty. While she concentrated on keeping the car between the barely visible white lines, Mal kept his eyes peeled for stalled or slow-moving vehicles ahead.
For the next hundred and twenty miles they averaged between thirty and forty miles per hour. Wind-whipped sheets of rain blasted the Shelby from every direction, and in places the road was covered by almost a foot of water. The windows quickly fogged up, which meant the defroster had to be run continuously. Even with the fan on high, Mal had to clear the windscreen with a tissue or a paper napkin every two of three minutes. Before long the interior of the car began to feel like a sauna.
‘I’m beginning to think we should have stopped at that last rest area,’ Abbie said as an especially strong gust of wind nudged them on to the shoulder of the road. She steered to the left to compensate, barely managing to keep the tyres on the road.
They had passed two rest areas, the last one about forty miles back. The parking areas of both had been crowded with cars, trucks and vans.
Mal nodded as he leaned over to wipe away the condensation on her side of the windshield. ‘Apparently everybody but us had sense enough to pull over and wait this thing out. How are you doing?’
‘Don’t ask,’ she said with a grimace. ‘I’ve discovered that at any speed below fifty your wonder-car handles like a log wagon.’
He reached out to gently tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. ‘Next time we make a trip like this, I’ll be sure to provide you with power steering.’