Authors: Jennifer Greene
Kay broke off, staring up at him. Her eyes weren’t sherry-brown at all, but suddenly very dark. And her lips were red and trembling.
He still held the umbrella in one hand, but it had tilted. Rain was pelting down on both of them; neither seemed to have noticed.
“Now, you listen here…” Her voice was shaky. Her lashes lowered; she ran her hand through her hair. “Is this your car?”
“Yes. Kay…”
No one had ever kissed her like that. As if she were the first Christmas present opened, during one of those too-few years when one honestly believed in Santa Claus. As if she were brand-new and ever so special, and so desperately
wanted
it hurt.
The skies suddenly exploded, the rain hurtling down in a torrent. Kay glanced up, then took a step backward. Enough of that.
Kay, we are twenty-seven—we no longer fall in love at first sight. In fact, we usually have the sense to back off at the first pass.
“Kay—”
She backed off another pace, refusing to meet his eyes. She’d never given herself to a man like that in her life. What on earth was there to say?
Nothing.
She turned and darted through the rain toward her own car.
Ten minutes later, Kay reached the outskirts of Moscow. Welcome, said the sign on Main Street, a soothing reminder that she was within minutes of home.
No one seemed to know why the town had been named Moscow; its residents certainly had no affinity for Russian politics. Paradise Valley had been its original name, and that, to Kay, captured the flavor of the place. Steep hills, ancient maples and oaks and ash, a delightful blend of rustic and cosmopolitan. Wheat farmers had been buying supplies at Ward’s for generations, and homemade ice cream was still sold on Main Street, yet the University of Idaho sponsored a wide range of cultural events. Muscovites enjoyed the symphony and ballet and even the Moscow sci-fi convention.
As Kay shoved her car into first gear for the steep climb to her home, she passed regal old houses half hidden in bushes and trees. All of the houses were familiar, and so were their inhabitants. The world had not abruptly changed, contrary to what the beat of her heart was telling her.
As she parked and stepped out of her car, the lingering smells of late fall wafted toward her like a soothing balm. The rain had stopped, but the wind had brought down the last of the leaves, and walking along the sidewalk was like wading through oceans of crimson and gold.
Pushing open her front door, Kay tossed her purse on the white couch. An indefinably enticing aroma was drifting out of the kitchen; her eyebrows cocked curiously. As she slipped off her damp shoes, her stocking feet immediately curled into the fluff of cherry-red carpet.
Kay’s best friend was into interior decorating. Susan had definite ideas about color schemes and furnishings for an old Spanish-style house with stucco walls and arched doorways. Susan had suggested heavy scrolled furniture and rich, dark colors.
Unfortunately, Kay was a big fan of red and white and wanted a hodgepodge of things she loved around her. A restored trunk was her coffee table; a collection of alabaster elephants stood on top of it. More collectibles cluttered the bookshelves; music boxes and porcelain owls jostled for space with dozens of books, most of them with dog-eared pages. The old Morris chair had been her father’s; it didn’t go with anything else, but it was familiar and comfortable. And besides, the antique love seat with its white velvet cushion didn’t go with anything else either.
Susan regularly despaired of her taste, but Kay felt delightfully relaxed whenever she came home. At least most days. But then, most days she didn’t go around kissing strangers in the pouring rain.
For the fourth time in ten minutes, she shoved the incident determinedly from her mind. Following her nose, she wandered toward the kitchen and paused in the doorway with a grin.
Two dozen fresh doughnuts lay in an open box on the kitchen table. Next to them was an astonishingly large pair of cowboy boots; above that was a pair of long, jeaned legs. The rest of the body was hidden behind an open newspaper, except for one long arm that extended around, groped for a doughnut and disappeared behind the newspaper again.
Five doughnuts had already disappeared from the two dozen.
“Good morning,” she said severely.
The paper folded down. “I was going to leave them on the kitchen table, but then—”
“You got greedy.”
“I didn’t eat breakfast.” Stix grinned at her beguilingly.
Stix had grinned at her just that beguilingly when she was sixteen. He’d been her first date. The traditional boy next door—give or take a few houses. He’d taught her a lot about kisses, most of which was hard earned. Since he was six foot six and she was five foot four,
any
physical contact had been hard earned, and not, they’d discovered, worth all the trouble. Stix had moved on to taller women, about nine thousand of them, by Kay’s last count, but he popped over regularly and made himself at home.
Lots of people did that to her, actually. She’d never figured out if it was just that kind of neighborhood or if there was an invisible sign on her door that said Endless Open House. She would have missed her family a great deal more if it hadn’t been for her friends, and Stix, unquestionably, was a special friend.
Choosing a cherry-filled doughnut, she plopped down on the kitchen chair across from him and glanced disapprovingly at his feet on the table.
The cowboy boots obediently dropped to the floor.
“You’ve got to stop using this house as a second home,” she remarked idly.
“Can’t understand you.”
With a grin, she swallowed her mouthful of doughnut and repeated the comment, adding, “People are going to think you live here. This is your third visit this week. You do still have a home of your own?”
“Certainly. That’s the place I keep my dirty laundry.”
Kay sighed. “So who’re you going out with tonight?”
“Samantha.”
“Heavens, that’s lasted two months now. Don’t tell me you’ve finally convinced someone you’re worth keeping?”
They bantered over two more doughnuts, after which Stix hinted tactfully that he was honestly hungry. Shaking her head resignedly, she fed him four peanut-butter sandwiches. She felt obliged to feed him. If Samantha ever discovered how much food he consumed, Kay would never have him off her hands.
It was a lazy kind of Saturday afternoon. Stix roused himself long enough to take a wrench to her leaky faucet, then settled in front of the TV set to watch a football game while she got out a dust cloth. The next time she looked, he’d been joined by Sandra, a teenager from across the street who claimed she would have been forced to clean the garage with her family if she hadn’t escaped.
Kay threw them both out before dinner, to allow herself time to get ready for her date. Just a movie and drink afterward, with Tim, a teacher at the high school. They had a reasonably good time, and she was home, kissed at the door and in bed by midnight.
The entire day she’d had Mitch on her mind. He wasn’t an obsession, but he was there, like a dream one couldn’t forget when one woke up, like the lingering taste of champagne after the glass was long empty.
She kept remembering his gentleness with Peter, so much in contrast to the hard lines of his face. She kept remembering his aloofness when she’d tried to talk to him, so much in contrast with the blazing warmth of his eyes when he looked at her. His simple announcement out of the blue that he was going to kiss her—but his kiss hadn’t been at all simple…
Impatiently, she switched the light back on, fluffed the pillow under her head and reached for a book. The old torch song “Stormy Weather” kept crooning in the back of her mind, nostalgic and moody and…disgustingly romantic. She flipped impatiently through her newest book on trivia.
The weather had been stormy, all right. So why had she had this warm glow inside her ever since Mitch had kissed her in the parking lot?
“Don’t give me that. Every guy knows that half the time when a girl says no, she means yes,” Jeff said disgustedly. “If a guy didn’t push it a little once in a while, he’d never get anywhere.”
A chorus of foot-stomping approval—entirely male—erupted from the back of the classroom. “I’m glad you said that,” Kay said cheerfully. “That myth has been kicked around for generations. It’s another way of saying that a girl just wants to be coaxed. Is that what you mean, guys?”
A half dozen “right ons” were pelted in her direction. Kay nodded as if pleased. The girls were staring at her as if she’d suddenly turned into Benedict Arnold. Hands were waving like flags of protest. Kay motioned them down; her attention, for the moment, was directed solely toward the males in the class.
“There’s just one problem with that,” she said regretfully. “When you coax people into doing something sexual that they’re not sure about, you’re in a position to hurt them very badly. Maybe in a way that will affect the rest of their lives.” She slid off the desk, aware that a few of the smiles in the back of the room were suddenly fading. In the silence that followed, she said softly, “Do you really want to be responsible for that? Jeff, can’t you understand what it’s like to be just plain scared?”
“Hey, wait a minute. You think a
guy
isn’t scared?”
“Very.”
Kay agreed quietly. “Maybe more than most of you want to admit. Men often have a hard time acknowledging vulnerability, but that’s exactly why, when
either
partner says even a tentative no, the other partner must honor it. Now, let’s talk about some more of the sexual myths that get passed around. One of them is the notion that a girl means yes when she says no. Another is that a man can’t stop after he reaches a certain point. Now, what are some other myths?”
Mitch shifted in the open doorway, unseen, unnoticed. Kay played her class as if it were a symphony orchestra—a noisy clamor of basses, short silences, then the softer timbre of her voice making points that forced them to think.
Sex education had definitely changed since he was in school. At fifteen, he could well have been one of the boys in the back of the class—belligerent, wise-cracking, his jeans too tight, and just the first word on the subject of sex enough to raise his hormone level to the combustion point.
But in those days, sex education had consisted of the football coach belting out a few gruff words on the subject. And Coach had looked nothing like Kay.
She wore an open-weaved violet sweater, with sort of puffed sleeves and a rounded neckline. The clingy fabric skimmed gently over her slim figure, softly revealing the pert swell of her breasts. Her straight skirt, a plaid in muted jewel tones—violet and sapphire and topaz—not only hugged her hips but showed off her legs. And he’d been right about her hair. She did wear it simply brushed back, swirling around her shoulders whenever she moved.
Her skirt hiked up as she pinned two magazine photographs above the blackboard. “Sexual stereotypes in ads,” she announced. “One for makeup and the other for a motorcycle. You see dozens of ads every day, and each one tries to tell you what the Ideal Man or Ideal Woman in our culture is supposed to look like. Steven, do you think the girl in this ad is good-looking?”
“You better believe it,” hooted the boy from the back of the room. Two girls turned around to scowl at him.
“Is she sexy?” Kay asked.
There was a chorus of male agreement.
“She doesn’t have a single flaw,” Kay agreed. “Heck, she doesn’t even have a pore. The camera makes us believe she’s absolutely perfect. And the ad makes us believe that perfection is the goal for a woman. But it’s pretty easy to feel self-conscious, intimidated, even inadequate comparing oneself to that kind of role model. So…are these ads valid? Mark, answer a question for me. Is that your standard? When you feel attracted to a girl, is that what first appeals to you—how close to a perfect beauty she is?”
Finally, to Kay’s relief, they began to talk about their sexual feelings. For a while, she thought the boys in the back of the room were going to do nothing but smirk and wisecrack. For eleventh graders, some of them were remarkably immature.
It was her last class of the day, and she was glad when the bell rang. “Hold it one more second,” she ordered. “On Monday, I want you each to bring me pictures from magazines or newspapers that tell us more about sexual roles in our—” she spotted Mitch in the doorway, and gulped in shock “—society. Be prepared to talk about what
you
think is sensible in those roles, and what you think is unimportant, illogical or unfair.”
The class, dismissed, headed toward the open door with the collective grace of a charging bull. For a minute, Mitch’s face was lost in the shuffle. Maybe she had only imagined he was there? She hadn’t heard from him since the previous Saturday and hadn’t expected to; they hadn’t even exchanged last names.
But when the kids cleared out, he was definitely there, leaning against the doorway, an old brown leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a brown-corded leg shoved forward as he waited for her. She felt a flush climbing her cheeks as she hurriedly retrieved her books and papers.
“I’ve gone through more trouble than you know to find you, Kay Lucretia Sanders.” His voice boomed out in the empty room.
She grabbed her coat with a sudden smile. “I can understand how you might have learned my last name, and even how you tracked me to this school. But
not
how you uncovered Lucretia. That middle name’s been buried for years.” Her eyes flashed impish glints. “You must be a very determined man,” she said solemnly. “Either that, or unbelievably nosy. Did you enjoy the lesson?”
“I wanted to come in and sit on the kid in the back row, but I controlled myself.”
She chuckled, switching out the light as they left the room. “Jeff will come around one of these days. Compassion and patience work a great deal better than stem reprimands, at least for my subject.”
“Maybe, but sitting on him would have been a great deal more satisfying.”
She chuckled, sliding him a sideways glance as they headed for the back door of the school. The kids in the hall—particularly the girls—were giving him plenty of eye attention. He didn’t seem aware of it. As he held open the glass door, his expression was inscrutable.
“I had in mind spiriting you away,” he said casually.
“Did you?”
“You undoubtedly have something planned for later, since it’s a Friday night. But I was thinking that maybe for an hour or two…”
“Sounds fine,” she said gently. A gentle voice seemed to be called for. She could see Mitch was uncomfortable. The word
shy
flitted through her head, as it had once before, yet it seemed so impossible. Neither his looks nor his manner nor anything else about him gave him any reason to suffer from shyness. “I haven’t been kidnapped in a long time,” she remarked.
“Then there’s something wrong with the men in this town.”
And with the women, she thought, if this delectable man was actually at loose ends on a Friday night. Outside, they were instantly assaulted by a burst of wind. Clouds were bunching together in low, swirling masses, blocking a sun that had already started its downward descent.
“Your car?” he asked suddenly.
She shook her head. “I almost always walk.” Since Moscow was built on hills, walking made for excellent exercise, at least until the snows hit. “Where are we going, anyway?”
He cleared his throat. “Tell you in a minute.” As soon as he figured it out himself. He’d spent the entire week just
finding
her, this lady who seemed to have entered his soul like sunlight. He’d simply wanted to see her one more time, see if she was as real as he’d remembered, only somehow he’d never gotten around to worrying about what to do with her then. And maybe he’d expected to find her talking to a class about reproductive functions in some academic way, not happily chattering about sexual intimacy in front of a roomful of teenagers.
Damn it, he’d faced death—more than once. He’d shaken hands with courage, and he had no doubts about himself whatsoever in terms of strength of character or fortitude…but he hadn’t figured on a lovesick attraction for a woman who spoke about sex as if it were toothpaste. Normal, average stuff. For
her.
Sliding into the seat beside him, Kay tossed her books in the back of the car as Mitch started the engine. She resisted an urge to brush back that single shock of white hair that had fallen over his forehead. He was so quiet! She had the feeling Mitch took life far too seriously—maybe he had had to.
At the first stop sign, he tossed a sudden, lazy smile her way. “How do you feel about climbing fire towers?” he asked gravely.
Normally, just the word
climb
was enough to set off a phobic reaction in Kay. But she took another look at Mitch. His eyes, settled on hers, were like polished stones still warm from the sun, and she found herself catching her breath. “That sounds like an occasion for a bottle of wine,” she responded, just as gravely.
***
“You can put me down anytime, you know. Really. What’s a pair of shoes? And the ground isn’t that damp.”
Kay glanced back; she wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with her skirt hiking up around her waist as Mitch carried her piggyback. Still, there was no one around to sneak a peek at her blue-and-white polka-dot underpants.
It was one of those Robert Frost woods. Lovely, dark and deep. Also nearly impenetrable. Regardless, it smelled marvelous, like clean winter wind and pungent bark and rich, dark earth. A few leaves still clung to the trees, just enough so the wind could whistle through them in exotic, ghostlike murmurs.
She was having a wonderful time. When they’d first stepped out of the car, Mitch had looked first at the thick brush tangling the forest floor, and then at her attractive leather shoes. “Would you believe this has changed more than a little since I was a kid?” he’d said wryly. “Could we start over? Pretend I never came up with the idea of walking to the tower. I’ll take you out for a drink, and if you have time we’ll go out to dinner.”
That struck Kay as a terrible idea. Every instinct told her that being surrounded by people would do nothing to loosen up Mitch. So she’d convinced him that they
just had
to climb that fire tower of his today. In the process, he’d
tried
to maintain that quiet reserve of his, but how long could a man stay formal while carrying a woman on his back? And as she’d suspected from the beginning, he had an irrepressible sense of humor.
“You’re getting heavy,” Mitch complained.
“You’re not even breathing hard,” she pointed out.
“Give me a chance. We’re not even near a mattress.”
She blinked, staring in delighted surprise at his dark, wavy hair. That remark was definitely risqué. He was really warming up. And she was determined to get some full-blooded laughter out of him if it killed her.
Her arms were curled loosely around his neck. A bottle of wine and some plastic cups in a brown bag were snuggled between his back and her chest, inside Mitch’s jacket. His forearms had a firm grip on her thighs, and she had the delightful sensation of being carried off like pirate’s booty into the middle of absolutely nowhere. Piggyback wasn’t a romantic position, but it was certainly suggestive, though her fanny was taking most of the cold wind. If she’d worn a full skirt today, she could have pulled off a somewhat more modest posture, but heck, a little end justified the means.
“Where’d the white streak in your hair come from?” she asked conversationally. Her finger stroked that half-inch-wide streak of crisp hair; she’d been wanting to touch it from the first minute she’d seen it. “Genetic thing in your family?”
“No, I earned it carrying two-ton women around in my youth.”
He was the stingiest man with a secret she’d ever met. “Do I have to tell you one more time that I could have walked?”
“And had your feet soaked and your shoes wrecked from the brush.
Down.
”
She slid, rather unglamorously, down his back to the ground and was given a second and a half to restore her skirt to propriety before he turned around.
“I should have peeked at what my hands were holding all this time,” he remarked.
“After all your grousing, you should be so lucky. Why—” But she could see why they’d stopped. It only
looked
like the middle of nowhere. Half hidden in dead vines was a metal ladder leading up to the planked floor of the fire tower. In the dusky woods, it hadn’t been immediately visible. She studied the lower steps first, and then her eyes slowly trailed up, and up again.
“It’s rather a long distance to the top,” she commented.
“About three stories’ worth.”
“That platform up there doesn’t look solid.”
“It’s very solid.”
“People can get shortness of breath if they go too high.”
“You’re scared of heights.” Mitch sounded resigned.
“Certainly not,” she assured him, and gulped. “You first.”
“No way.”
A latent burst of propriety made her remind him politely that she was wearing a skirt.
“I already noticed. And I’ve already had my hands on your fanny, so it’s too late to worry about modesty. If you fall, you’ve got a cushion. Me. So it’s ladies first. I won’t look.”
Which was fine, only she hadn’t taken ten steps up before he remarked on her terrific legs, the stinker. Actually, from his position Kay knew he couldn’t really see her legs. From the instant she’d lied about her acrophobia, he’d flanked her every move. His long arms stretched above hers and he made mischievously sure his body was surrounding her with every step. No wonder she was dizzy. It had nothing to do with soaring above the trees…but those steps did keep coming.
She glanced back to look at him. His grin was wicked, his eyes were dancing and his cheeks were ruddy. She had a feeling he hadn’t done anything quite so crazy in years, which was enough of an incentive to drive her up the rest of the way. So her heart was beating in her throat and the vertigo was making her head spin. So?