Across the table, Lincoln let out a strangled sound and clapped his hands over his ears. Donald grew so red he matched the tablecloth, and Trent asked in the same overloud voice of his maternal parent, “What’s a vajazzle? Matt, do you know what a vajazzle is?”
But the damage—or the repair, depending on your perspective—had already been done. Kendra quietly resumed not eating her dinner and Matt no longer felt compelled to answer her. And as Hilly looked around her with a wide-eyed look, asking, “What? What’d I say?” Matt used the moment to mouth his thanks.
Hilly was a good sister. She might be able to beat him in arm wrestling and try to poison him every month with these family dinners, but if she were an affectionate sort of woman, he’d slap her with a big, hearty kiss right about now.
* * *
“You can’t fix her, you know.”
Matt eyed Hilly warily. He’d forgotten that his generous feelings toward his sister rarely lasted more than an hour at a time. The second he thought they were finally about to agree on something, she pulled rank and started ordering everyone around.
“I never said I was going to,” he protested.
Hilly plopped her coffee cup down, spilling the almost opaque, too-milky liquid all over the coffee table, which was little more than several shellacked pieces of firewood glued together to form a horizontal surface. In their pre-tanning-salon entrepreneurial days, Hilly and Donald once decided to make and sell driftwood furniture out of their barn, take advantage of the rural antiquing crowd. Unfortunately, a shortage of driftwood in landlocked Pennsylvania meant they’d turned to their winter firewood pile for parts. Hilly thought no one would notice the difference. They noticed.
A tabby cat with the size and stripes to rival a tiger jumped onto the table and started lapping the milk. It was only a matter of time before her other seven cats—another barn project—came to share the bounty, so Hilly abandoned her after-dinner beverage altogether.
“You always think you can fix them,” she said, settling back into her overstuffed chair, upholstered in the swirled brown and orange velour of the seventies. “That’s your thing. You’re drawn to broken women.”
“I am not,” he said irritably, focusing on his mug.
“Case One, Jenny Hefflemeyer.” Hilly refused to back down. She never backed down from anything. Put her against a drunk biker or an irate camel—he knew who would come out on top. Armed with Jenny Hefflemeyer, and the odds were stacked even more in her favor.
“Don’t be mean. You said you wanted to talk about Trenton’s grades.”
“Trenton’s reading skills aren’t the ones fornicating in public,” she said, her tone magnanimous. Matt retreated once again into the welcoming bosom of his coffee. This town’s gossip would be the death of him. “You remember Jenny, don’t you?”
Of course he remembered her. She was the first girl he ever kissed—a sweet, shy neighbor who’d been having a hard time fighting off a fifth-grade bully. “Sure. What about her?”
“Don’t you remember how you took it upon yourself to make her popular? That poor girl just wanted to be left alone with her books and her weird doll collection.”
He sat up straighter. “What are you talking about? She was bullied. I see it all the time in schools today. It’s not a joke.”
“Oh, the other kids teased her, I know. Don’t forget—I’m the one who drove you to and from school every day.”
He wouldn’t forget. Not only because he knew how much he owed his older sister, but because she mentioned it at least five times a month. Subtlety had never been her strong suit.
“But she never noticed any of it. Seriously—you could have placed that girl on top of a polar bear and she would have blinked and given it a little pat. I don’t know why you ever took it into your head to make her class president, but she hated every minute of it. You know her family transferred her to the charter school because of you.”
“I don’t know what version of history you’ve got on playback, but that is not what happened.” He remembered it well—Jenny was one of the main reasons he’d gone into teaching in the first place. She always ate lunch alone, spent recess sitting on a swing, rocking back and forth and singing under her breath. To everyone else, she’d always been the weird kid. To Matt, she’d just seemed lonely.
So he’d befriended her. Sat on the swing next to her at recess, ate lunch next to her in the cafeteria. She’d never been overwhelmingly excited to see him, but she’d just needed a little warming up, that was all. The class president thing had been a fluke—he’d thought it would help her make a few more friends. And it would have, if she hadn’t gotten moved to a new school. All she’d needed was someone to believe in her.
“I was her friend,” he insisted.
“No.” Hilly reached out to pet a black cat that wound in and around her feet. “You tormented that poor child right out of town with your...your...”
“Kindness, Hilly. It’s called kindness.”
“Is it?”
He didn’t care for her ironic tone. “So, what? You’re saying I’m going to cause Whitney to cry in an assembly when she wins class president? Is that it? Because I’m warning you, she strikes me as the type of woman who might have had her tear ducts surgically removed on a whim.”
“I’m saying you suffer from chronic white knight syndrome. You’re always looking for a woman to save. Shy Jenny. Unfaithful Laura. And now this Whitney woman, who, if town rumor has anything to say about it, is a train wreck just waiting to happen.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never tried saving Laura.”
“Are you sure? Isn’t that what you’re still trying to do?”
Always, it came back to this. Always, his family and friends refused to leave him in peace to deal with things on his own terms. He jumped to his feet, scattering the cats.
“It was nice seeing you, sis, and I appreciate the meal, but I think you’ve said enough for one night.” And she had—more than enough. But as his blood warmed up, Matt realized he’d barely scratched the surface of what weighed on his mind. Maybe Hilly had earned the right to speak out against Laura...but he’d be damned if he’d let her say a word against Whitney. “And what is that supposed to mean, Whitney is a train wreck waiting to happen? You don’t even know her.”
“I’ve heard enough.”
“From who? Natalie Horn? A bunch of stubborn shop owners who refuse to adapt to change? I’ll tell you all you need to know about Dr. Whitney Vidra. She speaks her mind and doesn’t let the borough’s single-mindedness dictate her actions. I, for one, think that’s something we should all aspire to.”
“Matt?” Lincoln called. “What are you talking about?”
Naturally. No outburst of Matt’s would be complete without an audience. And opinions from each member thereof.
“Whitney. And me. I’m talking about me. No matter what you think, what any of you think—” this time he turned to include Kendra in his pronouncement, “—I’m more than aware of the repercussions my actions have on the women in my life.” Acutely so. Painfully so. “If you’ll all excuse me, I’m leaving.”
Hilly’s mouth firmed, but she knew better than to try and stop him. He didn’t offer more than a tight nod to Kendra and Lincoln, who sat arguing with Donald over a Scrabble board, all three of them misspelling catharsis. On second thought...he reached down and traded an e for an i.
“Tell Trent and Dylan I said goodbye,” he added, and walked out the front door.
The cold night air that washed over him did little to soothe his anger, the austere moonlight only enhancing his feeling of isolation among the people who were supposed to matter to him most.
Yes, he’d done a lot of things wrong with Laura—there was no doubt of that in his mind. He hadn’t tried hard enough to hold on to her, he hadn’t forced her
to communicate when they started sharing more silences than they had conversations.
But he’d never tried to save her. If anything, he’d pushed her to find her own happiness, never making demands or forcing her to do anything she didn’t want to. Early on in their marriage, he’d been offered a principalship in New Jersey—something he’d always wanted—but she’d hated the thought of being away from Pleasant Park and her family. He’d gone along with her wishes, happy to thrive at Hamilton Elementary and come home every night to their two-bedroom cottage on the outskirts of the borough.
After all, that was what a marriage was supposed to be, right? A partnership? A place where both people shared a vested interest in the future?
He slid into his car and pulled the handle roughly, narrowly missing slamming his fingers in the door. Gripping the wheel, he willed some of his anger to ebb away and was surprised to find that his knuckles had grown white.
Anger. This was anger.
The strange thing was, he had no idea where he intended the emotion to land. Hilly, Laura, Kendra...even Whitney danced through his mind, fueling a sudden urge to grab Lincoln’s gun and start shooting cans.
As he started the car and pulled across the gravelly drive instead, satisfactorily kicking up rocks that pinged against Lincoln’s car, he realized that the person he was angriest at most was himself.
Because the reality was that he didn’t think he needed to save Whitney.
But, oh, how he wished she’d ask him to try.
Chapter Eleven
“So then we thought maybe Kendra had printed the address or the date wrong or something.” Whitney’s hands moved rapidly as she talked. It made sense that she would be a hand talker, what with being a plastic surgeon and all, but Matt wished she’d sit still for a minute instead of pacing the tiny, slightly creaking floor of his apartment. “But it was all correct. We sat there for like three hours this morning, assuming someone would eventually show up to apply, but the only living thing that stopped by was a three-legged dog. We might have to try to find candidates from Philadelphia and pay them to relocate or something, which is only going to set us back further.”
“It could just be a fluke.”
“I don’t believe in flukes,” she retorted. “In this economy, how can there be no one in the area who needs a job? Do you want to quit teaching and come be my medical assistant?”
“No offense, but I can’t think of anything worse than taking orders from you all day long.”
As if a flip switched, Whitney’s mood instantly shifted. Gone were the fast movements, the faster talking—in fact, it was as if time slowed down, and her eyelids dropped as she slinked across the living room carpet toward where he stood in his linoleum-paneled kitchen. “Is that a fact? And what if I ordered you to sit your tight little ass down in that chair?”
Matt felt himself growing hard. One look from this woman—that was all it took. It wasn’t that he was a stickler for flowers and foreplay and all that, but it would have been nice to think he had some willpower.
Technically, this was the only reason she’d come over to his apartment today. Not flowers. Not foreplay. His only real responsibility here was to enjoy himself. The conversation about her work, the sharing of her troubles, that was just a bonus.
Her eyes glittered a warning.
“I’d sit,” he said, resigned. And he did.
“Oh, I like this,” she cooed, moving closer.
“But then I’d tell you to sit here with me.” He beckoned. Whitney’s eyes lit and she swung her legs—clad, as usual, in the tight, sexy-secretary skirts that shaped her body into a gift to the world—up over his legs. Sidesaddle. She was planning on riding him sidesaddle.
He claimed her lips for a kiss, taking his time in a slow, sensual play of their warring tongues. Whitney had a tendency to be a frantic—though generous—lover. She knew exactly how to grind her ass against his erection, forcing him to grip her hips and calm the incredible sensation that jerked him even through layers of fabric. If she wanted him to kiss her deeper, to plunge into her mouth without remorse and leave them both panting for air, she’d bite his lower lip, spurring him to action. And if she decided he wasn’t getting his hand up her skirt fast enough, she’d start making the journey on her own.
“Hey,” he said, when all those actions came into play at once. “You might have ordered me into this chair, but I’m not leaving until I’ve taken a little time to enjoy it. Sit still.”
She grinned and did the exact opposite, her squirms sending jolts of pleasure through his center.
“I mean it,” he growled. He began kissing a trail along her neck. Past the gentle slope of collarbone. Into the deep vee of her shirt, where the round peaks of her breasts rose from a scrap of wispy lace. He tasted one of those breasts, enjoying the soft swell of flesh against his tongue. “I intend to spend at least ten minutes doing nothing but this. You have the most amazing body. Let me savor it. Let me savor you.”
Pushing the lip of her bra out of the way, he took one of her nipples into his mouth. Hard and yearning, just like him. He suckled deeply, loving the way the skin puckered and rolled under his tongue.
As she gasped for air, he moved higher, kissing her jaw, her throat, all of it waves of rippling silk under the cinnamon-scented tumbles of hair that blanketed them both. Breathing deep, he nuzzled a path from her neck, enjoying the line of her shoulder unbroken by anything but his touch.
Whitney arched her back and ground into his lap. “Oh, God. I can’t.” Forceful hands on his shoulders pushed him out of the warm, blissful haven of her skin. Her eyes, for once, had lost their glaze of lust, replaced by something much more serious. “You have no idea how it aches. I can’t stand the buildup, knowing I don’t get to have you inside of me, knowing your absolutely perfect cock isn’t going to rip me in two. When you kiss me like that, it’s all I can think about. You. Filling me.”
A sudden blaze of fury intensified his rising lust. Filling her was all he could think about too—sweet kisses a different kind of agony. She wasn’t the only one suffering here.
“That’s not fair. You know that option is off the table if this thing between us is going to remain nothing more than a fling.”
“Exactly.” Her voice was strained. “Which is why you can’t take your time and...and...worship me like that. Get me off, Matt, make me scream. That’s all I’m asking. That’s all I’m here for.”
As you command. Fueled by the pulse of anger in his blood and the desperation in her voice, he stood. As she was still halfway on his lap at the time, she stood with him, her legs unsteady at the suddenness of it all. He used her lack of balance to bend her over the kitchen table, one hand nudging her legs apart, the other holding her neck to keep her in place.
If she wanted nothing more than skin and sensation, that was precisely what he’d give her.
“Yes. Like that.” She moaned and spread her legs, her back arched so that her ass rose in the air. He hiked her skirt around her waist, barely taking time to register the sight of her panties, tiny and damp, peeking enticingly up at him from between her legs.
Skin and sensation. Nothing more.
One finger slid in. Then two, tight and hot. Three, deeper still, and he kept her pinned to the table as she rode his hand to a shuddering, moaning halt.
The encounter was rough and crude, harsh in ways he didn’t know he was capable of. When he pulled away, Matt felt oddly shaken. Normally, he’d take a moment to drop a kiss near her ear, maybe offer a self-congratulatory joke. But today, he felt only that he’d somehow let them both down.
And he had, because he couldn’t give her everything she wanted. Everything she deserved. He was powerless in this relationship—something he’d never felt with Laura, even after she threw them away.
When Whitney turned to face him, she shared none of
his remorse. With an almost malicious glint in her eyes, she licked her lips and zeroed in on his crotch, making it clear she had every intention of returning the favor. Even though Matt’s entire body throbbed with yearning, he crossed his arms and shook his head. He refused to accept her version of affection right now. Not like this.
Since work conversations seemed to be the only other intimacy he was allowed, he fixated on that.
“Don’t get all noble on me, Galahad,” she warned. “I can see quite clearly that there is some unfulfilled need saying hello over there.”
“I had a thought.”
She finished adjusting her clothes. “Does it involve me on my knees?”
“I don’t know,” he said irritably. “Do you listen better from down there?”
Whitney laughed, missing a valuable opportunity to ask him the source of his troubles. Probably because she already knew and refused to care.
“Do you want to hear it or not?” he asked.
“Okay, I’ll bite. And I’ll listen.” Whitney inclined her head. “What is this all-important thought?”
He waited a moment before speaking, willing his body to cool off and focus on her flop of a hiring fair. It wasn’t what he—or his body—wanted from her right now, but at least this was a concrete problem he might actually be able to solve. “Honestly? I think the reason you aren’t getting a whole lot of job applicants is because of your business model.”
“Wow. You really know how to make a girl feel all warm and fuzzy in her post-orgasm glow, don’t you?” Then, more suspiciously, “Why? What do you think is wrong with our business model?”
There had been talk in the teacher’s lounge lately—well, talk until he’d shown up—about the intrusive nature of a plastic surgery practice in a place where holistic health centers and family-owned businesses had long been the borough staple. Not to mention the intrusive nature of the practice’s founding members.
“You might be going at it a little aggressively, that’s all.”
The Rebound Girl (Getting Physical) Page 14