A Winning Battle

by Carla Neggers

  Page bit her lower lip. “Well... if anyone does drive up, we’ll hear them long before they get here. And I’ve never made love on a wicker lounge. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to be attacked by ants or alligators. Unexpected company and ending up on the floor aren’t big risks, but they’d lend a certain thrill to the proceedings, don’t you think?”

  He quirked a brow at her. “Proceedings?”

  “You know. Lovemaking.”

  “I know, dammit. Do you analyze everything!”

  “Well, if you’d prefer the bedroom...”

  “What I prefer is you.”

  And he stuck his foot out and gave the side of her foot a little kick that knocked her off balance, sending her sprawling down onto the couch. Laughing, she thrust out one leg, hooked it around his knees and brought him down on top of her. She shivered at the salty, sexy smell of him.

  “You’ve got me,” she said.

  He responded with a low growl as his mouth came down on hers, his tongue opening her lips and plunging in with a heat that could match any Florida produced. His hands slipped between their bodies and attacked the buttons on her blouse, wrinkled from the plane and the heat. In seconds he’d dispensed with the blouse and her bra, and her breasts felt full and swollen in the outdoor warmth. He pulled back, his gaze lingering on her pink nipples, and he brought his head down toward them, holding back for what seemed an eternity, until his tongue flicked out, wet and hot against first one nipple, then the other.

  “I’ve thought about this moment all day,” he said, grabbing at the waist of her skirt and pushing it down, until finally he had to tackle the clasp. “On the plane... I could have made love to you right in the aisle.”

  His words further inflamed her, and she helped with the skirt and the underpants and stockings, then with his garments, until they were naked in the spring air, their smooth bodies coming together on the limited space of the couch. A breeze tickled her sensitized skin, and she straddled his hips as, with fingers splayed, her hands trailed over every inch of his torso, up his neck and jaw. He nibbled on the tips of her fingers.

  And he raised her above him and lowered her slowly, erotically, onto him.

  She held back a cry and listened instead to his. Felt him thrust himself deeper into her. Felt his hips arch as he realized her game. “Think you can stay still, do you?” he said in a guttural whisper, and he grinned, seizing her breasts in his palms. “We’ll see...”

  With his thumbs he traced the outline of her nipples, then, first with tiny circles, then larger and larger circles, took in all over the soft swell of her breasts. She had to bite her lower lip to keep on with her game.

  “You feel so good,” he murmured, “so right.”

  He smoothed his hands down her sides to her bottom and, lifting her slightly off him, brought her down quick and hard. She gasped. So much for any game! She could hold back her aching desire no longer and responded with an urgency that matched his.

  When they were spent, exhausted and fulfilled, she collapsed on him and exulted in the scent of grass and roses and the cooling breeze on her overheated skin.

  “I never want to move,” she said, her breathing beginning to return to normal. “I just want to lie here forever.”

  “Same here...”

  “But you know, my level of risk tolerance can only take so much abuse. Do you keep hearing a car?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Neither do I. But I keep thinking I might start hearing one any second.”

  So they got their wrinkled clothes back on. Page commented that they’d have to make a trip to the store; she wasn’t going to wear her things another day.

  “I suppose these friends of yours don’t have a washer and dryer?”

  “Nope. Washtub and clothesline.”

  “Well, I don’t intend to wash out my underwear in the sink every night. There must be a store close by.”

  “Several, I’m sure. This is the booming Sunshine State.”

  “If you’d only told me...”

  “If I’d told you, you’d never have come.”

  “Well...”

  She was going to leave it at that, but he prodded her. “True or false?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s a moot point. I’m here.”

  He relented and headed inside for cold drinks. Feeling almost limp with relaxation, Page sat on the swing and gave herself a push.

  Heaven...

  Chris returned with two tall glasses of fresh-squeezed lemonade and handed her one. “Marry me,” he said.

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  He grinned and sat beside her in the swing. “Don’t have a heart attack on me.”

  “I’m not ...I... were you serious?”

  “Was and am.”

  She tried the tangy lemonade and rested her head back against his arm, flung across the back of the swing. Marriage. The ultimate commitment.

  “I love you, you know,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re thanking me?”

  “Well, yes, I mean...well, why not? I’m glad you love me. I love you, too.”

  “I figured I’d just spring the emotional stuff on you. I know you’re not comfortable with a lot of what your little nieces and nephews would call ‘mushy talk.’ But I do love you and I’m not afraid to say it. I’ll climb on top of the roof and crow it to anyone who’ll listen. I love Page B. Harrington and I don’t care that I don’t know what the B stands for!”

  She was laughing. “You’re outrageous.”

  “Yeah, and you love it. We’re the perfect foils for each other. So let’s get married and fight and love and laugh together for the rest of our lives.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  He drank some lemonade, the glass hiding much of his expression. But his eyes, dark and frank, stared into hers. “Never more serious.”

  “When?”

  “While we’re in Florida. We’ll fetch a justice of the peace out here and get married among the rosebushes. Romantic, don’t you think?”

  “I can’t... I mean, my family, my friends—What would your mother say?”

  “Hallelujah, probably.”

  “But...”

  “Page, if you have to say no, say it. For God’s sake, don’t torture me. If you can’t stand the thought of marrying me, then—” He inhaled sharply. “Then we’ll just have to work out another way of being together. I can’t stand the thought of losing you. So don’t panic. If you say no—”

  “You know, for Boston’s wittiest, nastiest journalist, you can be awfully thickheaded sometimes. I’m not talking about saying no. I’m talking about the wedding ceremony. I just...well, it would feel too impulsive getting married down here. What would I tell my clients?”

  Chris’s eyes narrowed. “You want an organized wedding.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you do want a wedding.”

  Her mind spun with a thousand thoughts, images, sensations and a million hopes and dreams. Marriage…Chris in her life forever...a different kind of stability than what she had now...children...a life and a future to share. She closed her eyes and just floated along with all the possibilities.

  “Page?”

  “It feels so right,” she breathed. “I never thought it’d feel this right.”

  “What does, love?”

  “Getting married. Somehow I thought I’d be losing my stability and my sense of responsibility for myself, my independence.”

  She turned and smiled at him and realized the strange emotions of the past weeks weren’t unfocused, only new. They were the emotions that came with the kind of permanent, lasting, overpowering love she felt for this witty, caring, messy, determined man. She’d never before experienced the sheer strength of such emotion.

  “As it so happens,” she said, “I can’t think of a greater act of independence than falling in love. After all, no one else can do it for you. But the wedding itself…well, there are things to be wo
rked out.”

  “Like what?” Chris asked, his tone filled with challenge and happiness.

  “Invitations, my dress, bridesmaids, tracking down my father in Arizona, giving my mother and the rest of the family plenty of notice so they can be ready... you know. I’ve always wanted a nice big traditional wedding. It’ll take time to organize.”

  Chris groaned. “How much time?”

  “Months. Eight at least. Maybe a year. It’ll probably take us that long to work out living arrangements. I mean, there’s no way I can live in that attic of yours, and I know you’re not the fancy condo type, which leaves figuring out something else entirely or fighting out what goes and what stays from each of our assorted junk piles.”

  “You don’t have any junk,” Chris grumbled.

  “Oh, I do. I’m a pack rat of the first order, just like you. I’ve got junk stuffed everywhere!” She grinned at him, feeling excited, renewed. “I’m just an organized packrat.”

  “Page...”

  “Admit it. You know this is all going to take time to workout.”

  “The hell it is.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a book of matches. “You set fire to your place, and I’ll set fire to mine. We’ll start all over again fresh.”

  She opened her mouth to start a lecture on the lack of wisdom of his proposed idea, but he cut her off with a guffaw that told her he’d gotten her again. With an impulsiveness that was getting to be entirely too much like her, she grabbed an ice cube out of her glass and dumped it down his back... and fled.

  He caught up with her somewhere in the orange grove, and after that it was their battered clothes and the threat of alligators and little bitty black ants that was damned. Nothing could stop them from making love in the soft grass under an orange tree, and nothing did.

  Epilogue

  They lasted until September and were married Page’s way, at the stark white New England church on the town common near her family’s place. The reception afterward was at a Yankee inn with the entire Harrington-Tucker clan there, including Page’s father from Arizona. Everyone behaved, except two-year-old Timothy, who stuck his fingers in the billows of wedding cake frosting. But it was Chris’s parents who laughed harder than anyone.

  They honeymooned Chris’s way, with a packed car waiting for them at the inn. They’d both arranged to take off an entire month, but that was all they arranged. They decided to wing the rest, just go where they felt like going and be free and unrestrained as their love. Page didn’t even mention things like hotel reservations.

  While they were gone, contractors would get to work on the roomy but bedraggled Back Bay town house they’d purchased from the sale of her Four Seasons condominium and his Beacon Street attic. He’d have another attic, she another office, they a master bedroom with two bathrooms and two closets. She would put up with his sweat clothes on the doorknob; he’d put the spatulas back where he got them. They would compromise with each other and, most of all, complement each other.

  But there was still the matter of the coat tree.

  Chris grinned at her as he started the car, a sporty sedan they’d bought together. “The coat tree stays.”

  “It’s an eyesore,” she countered.

  “No arguing on our honeymoon.”

  “Fine. Get rid of the coat tree.”

  “You have to admit it’s convenient.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  He sighed. They’d covered the same ground a hundred times during the past weeks. “What if I polished it up a bit?”

  “It goes in the dumpster first thing when we get back. Unless—”

  She paused, a compromise just having occurred to her. “Well, I suppose I could tolerate it at the back entrance.”

  “What? Where the devil did you think I wanted to put it?”

  “In the front hall.”

  “What, that eyesore in our front hall! No, no, I meant all along for it to go in the back hall.”

  “We’ve been arguing over nothing?”

  “So it would seem.”

  She laughed. “Then everything’s settled, and we’ll have a grand honeymoon.”

  “Uh-uh. There’s one more thing.”

  “What? After the sweat clothes on the doorknob and the coat tree, what else can there be?”

  “The B.”

  “What bee?”

  “In Page B. Harrington. Does it stand for Barracuda?”

  “First you tell me what the O in Christopher O. Battle stands for.”

  “You don’t expect me to trust you, do you?”

  “Actually, no. There are, dear, some things even spouses aren’t to know.”

  * * *

  Sometime after dawn in an unremarkable inn on the southern coast of Maine, Page rolled over and whispered in Chris’s ear, “Beulah.”

  He didn’t laugh. He just turned onto his stomach and said, “Obadiah.”

  About the Author

  New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers has been spinning stories ever since she climbed a tree with pad and pen at age eleven. Now with millions of books in print in more than 35 countries, Carla always takes readers on a captivating journey, whether it’s a tale of friendship, family and love or razor-sharp suspense.

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  In addition to writing, Carla is a dedicated runner, having completed the Covered Bridges Half-Marathon in Vermont several times, as well as the Dingle Half-Marathon in Ireland. Frequent travelers, especially to Ireland, she and her husband live in New England, where they love to garden, hike and enjoy good times — and a taoscán of whiskey! — with family and friends.

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  Learn more and sign up for Carla’s monthly newsletter at CarlaNeggers.com.