One Summer (13 page)

When the response to this was a shouted “No!” the flashing overhead light changed to a glittering ball that swept the room with tiny red and purple pulse points.

“Ain’t it romantic?” The entertainer sighed into his microphone, then struck up the opening bars of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.”

“If that’s so, you haven’t been dancing with the right man.” Johnny lifted her hands to his shoulders, then grasped her waist just above her belt, pulling her close to him. Gingerly Rachel let her hands rest on the hard muscle and solid bone of his shoulders. He was wearing another of his ubiquitous white T-shirts. Through the thin cotton she could feel the ripple of his muscles as he moved and the heat of his skin. Even with the help of her heels, he was much taller than she, and she wasn’t sure whether she liked or hated the feeling of vulnerability that assailed her when confronted with the difference in their sizes.

“I suppose you think you’re the right man?” Rachel scoffed. He smelled faintly of sweat and beer. Held so near, Rachel found she was having trouble thinking, much less talking. She was not plastered against him. Her body only just brushed his, but the effect on her senses was electrifying.

“Could be,” he said, and at the sudden huskiness of his voice she glanced up to discover that he was looking down at her, unsmiling. For an instant, no more, those smoky blue eyes were dark and intent on her face. Then he pulled her tight against him and pushed his blue-jean-clad thigh between her legs and swayed with her to the hot, sweet music.

“ ‘Be my—be my little baby,’ ” the singer crooned.

Rachel had never danced like this in her life. He shimmied with her, turned with her, dipped her back and pulled her up into his arms again. All the while the friction of his leg moving between hers stole away the last vestiges of her good sense.

After a single shocked attempt to pull away, Rachel, mesmerized, didn’t even try to resist him. He was taking her with him to heaven or to hell—Rachel didn’t know which—and as the explosive combination of song and man and her own longing stripped her of her reason, she didn’t much care.

When the music ended, she still clung to him for a befuddled instant. Her eyes were closed, and her forehead rested against his chest. Her fingers held tightly to his shoulders. His hands were hard about her waist. His leg was between hers, pushing the demurely knee-length dress halfway up her thighs. The silky barrier of her pantyhose might as well have been nonexistent for all the good it did in protecting her skin from the abrasion of his jeans.

“See what I mean?” he murmured in her ear as the emcee said something over the loudspeaker that Rachel didn’t catch. The overhead light started to flash again.

Dropped without warning straight back into reality, Rachel lifted her head from his chest and blinked into his wickedly glinting eyes. It was a moment before she realized just how intimate their entwined posture was. Yanking her hands away from his shoulders as if they had suddenly grown teeth and were snapping at her, Rachel jerked free of his hold and stepped back. Shaken, she could do nothing but stare at him. In the surreal surroundings the white T-shirt took on an otherworldly glow, accentuating the breadth of his shoulders and the swarthiness of his skin. Like his body, his face was lean and hard and possessed of a dangerous masculine beauty. He was watching her with a raptor’s unblinking gaze, unsmiling, his mouth long, full-lipped, and sensuous, his eyes fixed
on her face. Rachel felt breathless suddenly from just looking at him.

The pianos crashed into the opening bars of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.” All around them couples started to writhe with manic energy.

“I—I’ve got to go,” she said, looking anywhere but into those too-knowing eyes. At her obvious discomfiture, his mouth stretched into a slow grin.

“You can run, teacher, but you can’t hide.” The soft words were tauntingly seductive, threatening and promising at the same time. He reached for her, clearly meaning to draw her back into his arms.

“No!”

Rachel turned away with more haste than grace, pushing through the tangle of bodies to reach the edge of the dance floor. Johnny followed her. She knew he did, though she never once glanced around. She could feel him behind her with unerring certainty, and his presence seemed to make the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

Without a word to him she made her way through the darkness back up to where she supposed her table was. As she climbed, she realized that her knees were shaky and her stomach was in knots. With unsteady hands she smoothed her skirt around her legs. It was best not to allow herself to recall how her dress had gotten so twisted in the first place. It was best to put the last incredible quarter-hour clean out of her mind.

She would never be able to put it out of her mind.

Drawn by a force impossible to resist, she looked around finally to try to catch one last glimpse of Johnny before she returned to Rob. The flashing light made identifying individuals difficult. She might have missed him altogether if he had not been wearing the white T-shirt with its strange purplish glow. Or maybe her eyes would have been drawn to him as unerringly as her body was, T-shirt or no. But for whatever reason, she found him, and when she did, the bottom seemed to drop out of her stomach.

He was on the dance floor again, performing his special brand of erotic lambada with Glenda.

At least, Rachel thought, she knew where she stood. For some reason, he got a kick out of coming on to her. He wanted her to want him. But while what she felt for him was like nothing she had ever felt before, what he felt for her was the same thing he felt for countless other women: horny.

That was the word he’d used, wasn’t it? It suited him very well, she thought savagely.

Gathering up the tatters of her dignity, Rachel walked up the stairs without casting another glance at the dance floor. If he was a randy goat, why she hoped he got what he was after. But he wouldn’t get it from her, ever.

She had to edge a quarter of the way around the club before she spotted their table at last. Rob and Dave were talking together, and Rob was frowning. Susan was just getting to her feet. Rachel headed toward them.

She would not think of that dance with Johnny again.

“Sorry I took so long,” she murmured, sliding into her seat beside Rob. He took her hand and raised it to his lips.

“We thought you’d fallen in,” Susan said with a grin as she sat back down.

“Susan was just going to look for you. We were worried about you.” Rob’s tone reproved Susan’s levity. “Are you okay?”

Rachel leaped on the opportunity. “To tell you the truth, I’m not. I must have picked up some kind of bug.” Named Johnny Harris, was the thought that popped unbidden into her mind. She bulldozed it under ruthlessly. “Would you mind terribly if we left?”

Rob looked at the others, who shook their heads. “Of course not. The music’s a little loud for my taste anyway. Let’s go.”

As she followed him out of the club, Rachel never looked at the dance floor, and she held tightly to Rob’s hand.

12

F
rom the pulsating darkness beside the dance floor, the watcher fixed Johnny Harris with an unwavering gaze. Couldn’t he somehow feel the pull of unblinking eyes? Apparently not, because he never glanced the watcher’s way.

The watcher experienced wave after wave of increasing coldness even as the heat from so many energetic bodies packed into too small a space brought beads of sweat to his brow. Anger, long buried, rose to fill him like an icy gray fog.

Once again, Johnny Harris was begging to be taught a lesson.

The watcher meant to make sure that this time it was one he would never forget.

13

I
t was shortly after two that same night, and Johnny was in a lousy mood. He revved his motorcycle through Tylerville’s deserted streets, taking perverse pleasure in the roar that told him the muffler needed some work. It was a beautiful night, warm and nearly cloudless, so that he could see the road just fine by the soft glow of the full moon. No streetlights were needed, which was just as well because Tylerville had precious few of them. The place was a backwater. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the pride its most upstanding citizens took in keeping it that way. When he finally buried the baggage from his past that had haunted him for the last ten years, he would get the hell out of here before the place sucked all the juice from him, just as it had from everyone else.

The wind rushing against his face and bare arms felt good. The machine between his legs was fast and powerful, and his. His belly was full, he’d had more beer than was probably good for him, and he’d gotten laid. So why did he feel like a piece of three-week-old crap?

He knew the answer, but the knowledge didn’t make him feel any better.

The woman he’d screwed hadn’t been the woman he’d wanted. Glenda was an old friend, and she had a nice body, and he wasn’t turning down anything thrown his
way after so many years of doing without. But it wasn’t Glenda who made him get hard just by looking at her.

It was Rachel. Miss Grant. Teacher. He’d had a thing for her since high school. She would have been shocked if she had been able to see inside the head of the teenage boy she’d taught English. He’d spent nearly every class period, and a good part of his nights as well, imagining what she looked like naked. What she felt like naked. What kind of sound she made when she came. If she came.

But the boy he’d been had never done more than imagine. He’d accepted as gospel the idea that she was so far above him that he was more likely to jump over the moon than get in her pants. There was the age difference, of course. At sixteen and seventeen and eighteen years old, a five-year gap had seemed more like a quarter of a century. Then there was the fact that she was the teacher, and he was one of her students—a definite taboo. But the most insurmountable obstacle between them, in his own mind at least, was their relative positions in life. Rachel and her family had money. They had a huge old house, and fancy cars, and good educations, and a gardener and a maid. That, as far as the young Johnny had been concerned, was the ultimate in class. While as for himself, as far back as he could remember, from birth it seemed, he’d known that he and his family were poor white trash. The whole town looked down on them. The other kids made fun of his drunken parents and tattered clothes and less-than-clean body and did not invite him to their birthday parties or their homes. When he grew big enough to take care of himself and mean enough to put the fear of God into them, they were respectful to his face, but still the nice ones, the ones with parents who checked their homework and gave them curfews and would one day send them off to college, gave him a wide berth. By default, he hung out with the bad crowd. And since he did, he’d taken it upon himself to be the baddest one of all.

Rachel Grant wouldn’t be caught dead with someone like him.

Johnny smiled with wry inner amusement as he remembered the kid he had been. He’d had plans, big plans. He would leave Tylerville as soon as he’d graduated from high school and go off into the big world and make his fortune, though just exactly how he would accomplish that, he had never quite worked out. At the time the details hadn’t mattered. What had mattered was that when he was rich, he would come back and lord it over all the country club snobs who’d looked down their noses at him and his family, and he would buy or bully his way into the affections of Miss Rachel Grant. With the confidence of youth to bolster him, he’d seen not the slightest bit of impossibility in his dreams.

But life has a way of chopping people off at the knees, and he was no exception. Ten years of his life had been stolen from him. Now he wasn’t wasting another minute. He wanted to experience everything he had missed, to eat and drink and read and work and fuck as he pleased. His dreams were smaller now, but they were still dreams, and he was going after them with everything he had.

Foremost among them was to get Miss Grant into bed. If the way she clung to him tonight was any indication, sooner or later he would succeed.