Authors: Melanie Greene
“I helped you make it.”
“Ah, but you missed the final steps, doing Anna Lucia’s crown.”
Janice’s fingers twitched briefly, but she forced them to stillness. “You did something tricky right there at the end, did ya?”
“Oh, sweet Janice, I have all kinds of secret tricks.”
The frogs were in her throat again. No other way Janice could explain her short breath and croaked, inarticulate reply. Miguel was leaning in to her, or maybe she was leaning in to him, and delicious though the dinner was, she wasn’t in the least inclined to take another bite. Janice set the fork down and let her hand continue its trajectory, coming to rest on Miguel’s thigh.
Keeping her gaze down, she could just see her hand there. His quads flexed, and she didn’t entirely mean to follow their length a little higher. It was just easier to see her hand that way. So she had a good view of the way her fingers dug into his adductor muscles when his lips brushed against her neck.
She gasped a little. Which was ridiculous, because of course he was going to kiss her neck. They were going to have hot hot sex any minute now, and that would involve a lot of kissing. A lot of touching. Her hands would get to touch every muscle in his thigh, should they so wish.
There was absolutely no reason to get jumpy about the merest warm breath passing from his lips to her skin.
“So your niece is super cute,” she said, grabbing up her fork again and leaning forward for another bite. “I get why you’re always talking about her.”
Miguel’s hand stopped tracing her scapula. He’d lifted his head when she’d gasped, but hadn’t scooted out of Janice’s personal space. His voice was calm as a pond at midday when he said, “Do I talk about her so much?”
“You do. Didn't you know that?”
“I suppose I've mentioned her before, si.”
Janice nodded emphatically. "Probably a few times per month. Way more than you ever mentioned Sophie, that's for sure."
At that, Miguel’s fingers beat a quick tattoo on her shoulder. "Yes, well, Anna Lucia is around all the time. I suppose I don't feel the need to keep her all to myself."
“Is that what it was?"
“To be frank, I think it was a lot of things. I think much of it had to do with how I wanted you to see me, like I said," and now he slid his hand down so it rested on her waist. "With you, I think of myself as a man, not as a papa.”
“But you’re both."
"I am, si. But I admit, I wanted you to think of me in, well, a masculine way. And you imagining me at ballet recitals and taking my daughter for manicures was not conducive to that."
Janet shot him a look. Smelled a bit like the north end of a southbound bull to her, but in all fairness, his version of masculinity wasn’t any more of a throwback then her mama's version of femininity was. And Janice had, mostly, learned to work around that. “Sophie’s in ballet?"
"Not anymore. But when she was younger yes. She quit around the time I met you."
"Lucky Sophie,” Janice muttered. Not that she precisely resented the young woman. But the twinge of jealousy when she heard of others who got to choose was hard to suppress.
“When did you quit competing?” Miguel asked.
“College."
“Why did you quit?"
Janice sighed. She had done it now. And she only had herself to blame, because she was the one who told the kid about the dancing to start with. Even interrogating her about Nacogdoches, Miguel might’ve been sated without this particular story.
She pushed back away from the table some. Now just their calves were touching, which felt like more than enough to Janice. Deciding the quickest way to get from the dinner table to the bed was just to go ahead and tell Miguel some part of it all, she shuffled the info in her mind, looking to convey the story without opening herself up to an outpouring of follow-up. And if her telling it meant he decided she was too selfish and reckless with her life, and changed his mind about the sex, well, she wouldn’t have wanted him then anyway.
Or that’s what a sensible gal would think. And Janice was nothing if not sensible.
Janice was coiling inward
, pulling up the drawbridge and readying the boiling oil against invaders. Or invader, singular. Miguel didn’t have any doubt but that he was the target
número uno
of her defense systems, and he could see her wheels churning as she decided how to launch her story at him without collateral damage to herself. He was strongly tempted to give her an out, tell her the past was the past, kiss her again until she forgot he asked about dance or anything.
But he had a battle plan of his own, and wouldn’t be the man he’d promised himself if he backed off from it now. He was confident—fairly confident—that there would be more, physically, between them soon. If Janice approached their lovemaking as another way to put him in a manageable place, like she did with her nicknaming and other arm’s length tactics, Miguel knew he’d have infinite trouble persuading her they were in a relationship of equals. He needed to be the conqueror, at least this once, and that meant Janice needed to admit to a vulnerability.
So he went after her truth again, but phrased it differently. “Sophie quit partly cause she wasn’t a superstar like you and Anna Lucia, but also she was looking at going into high school and how demanding dance was, trying to balance that with just being a kid. Alicia and me, we didn’t want her to miss out on the being a kid part, not after we’d had to grow up so fast ourselves.”
Janice didn’t put her lovely warm hand back on his leg, but she did unfurl a tiny bit, so he kept going. Even though it meant talking more about watching Sophie be a teen, at a time when he wasn’t yet thirty and remembered all too vividly what his own life at her age had been. “Three of my brothers were married by then. Sophie used to help their daughters put on dance recitals for the family whenever she visited me. She was a really good teacher, you understand? Loved the little girls and was so patient with them. She has, well, Alicia and her husband have a couple of sons, but Sophie has no sisters. So she gravitated to her cousins and all those girly things when she was in Houston.”
Janice’s foot was tapping steadily, and Miguel wove his fingers in and out of the smooth loose strands of her hair.
“The dance was fun for her. She liked performing. But even though she chose to leave off lessons, she still has plenty of that teacher in her, and the—well, the kind of things a college girl grows into, after being a child who loves her tutus and giggling with her cousins. She dresses with flair, my Sophie, and spends her time at the mall, and does her eye makeup like she’s a cat or an alien or whatever bold thing strikes her fancy. She’s my mermaid girl.”
He knew he was grinning a bit foolishly as he said it. He knew, because his cheeks just wouldn’t relax, but also because Janice’s face had opened up towards him, her eyes scanning his expression, and softening. And honestly, he didn’t need any more of her seeing him as proud papa and wearer of pink bandaids. It was counter to his strategy of making her see him as a virile man, but what else could he do? Janice’s underlying sadness had dissipated as he’d talked. And it had hit him that he didn’t want her defeated by her past.
Much as he yearned for her to succumb to his superior strength, it would kill him for Janice to lose her own power. Better she win outright this war of wills between them, and Miguel go back to being her conquered foe, than for his victory to be paired with her surrender of everything that kept her fighting.
So he cupped the back of her head in his palm and moved in for a kiss that made no secret of his intentions. And before he could get lost in the pure raunchy joy of kissing Janice, he let her lips go to say, “You’re no one’s mermaid, I think, sweet Janice. Will you tell me about college?”
As he’d suspected, he’d found the soft spot she’d been so busy protecting. There was a distinct vulnerability surrounding the scholarship she’d so casually dismissed to his niece. Her spine became steel, which separated their torsos without requiring him to remove his hands from her. Janice’s tongue tasted her bottom lip, which tightened both his rod and his hand, but she resisted letting him bring her closer. And that was okay, because her ripe-pecan eyes remained wide and focused on Miguel, and her hands flew up and down the length of his arms. After a resolve-gathering nod, she spoke:
“Nope, not a mermaid, you’ve got that right, Toots.” Her eyes flicked to his pursed lips, and she licked her own before correcting: “Miguel.”
His kiss was fast and firm. She’d followed his trail and found a way to answer his query, and the heat between them when she’d fixed her misstep seemed to melt whatever barricade was holding back more of her story.
“Um. So. Like I told the kid, Mama had me in tap and ballet back when I was still stumbling around like a newborn foal. It was fine when I was little, really. We lived in such a nowhere place, there weren’t a plethora of kids around, so going over to the dance studio meant I got to see my friends. I can’t say I ever cared much about the costumes and makeup and all the other stuff that came with recitals, but it made Mama happy, that was clear, so it was fine. And I liked winning, when that started to happen.”
Miguel repressed a laugh, though surely Janice saw him doing so. No one who knew her more than two minutes would be surprised by that truth about Janice. Likely even Anna Lucia knew it, and she was barely seven.
“You think I’ve got a competitive streak, you ought to meet Mama,” Janice said. “Woman was accused of sabotaging her own twin’s volcano project just so she’d win the science fair. And she never denied it, either. But I guess after a time, she grew too old to enter contests herself, so I was the one bringing home the gold. Or sometimes the silver, but I learned it was my job to win, and win big. Mama would stay up half the night sewing up my costumes, and if she didn’t think I was up to scratch, I’d stay up with her, practicing and practicing until I was good enough to go to bed.”
She’d stopped looking directly at him, Miguel noticed. Her gaze was half-focused somewhere past his ear. His mind’s eye was equally distant, imagining a smaller, lonelier, defenseless Janice in patent tap shoes. It was hard to visualize, but at the same time, painfully creditable.
“I asked to stop, you know? Starting when I was ten or eleven, and I just didn’t want to spend half the day in the car driving to some competition, or another night sharing a motel room with Mama. There was never any time to just sit and talk to my friends, if any of them were at the same event. Mama always needed me to redo my hair or help fix an outfit or something.”
She trailed off, then shook herself, settling her hands firmly on the sides of his neck. “You don’t need to hear all this. The point is, come time for college, it didn’t matter what Mama wanted. Not taking the scholarship just meant I put myself through school, but that’s how most everybody I knew did it, so it wasn’t unusual. A few years at junior college, plus I had work at the gym and that gave me a lot of experience, so when I transferred to SFA, it was easy to get the job at the warehouse where I started learning all the supply chain stuff. So then I had my career, and I ended up at Lanigan, and you ended up at Lanigan, and here we are.”
She swiveled towards Miguel, interlocking their legs and lacing her fingers at the back of his neck. And being kissed by Janice was a full-body experience, Miguel found. Their hands roamed each other, light and everywhere. Their jeans rasped as their legs slid together. Her lips softened as she moaned into him, and his tongue explored each contour of her mouth. Beneath the taste of his pasta sauce, Janice was pure sweetness and carnality.
When his hands cupped her ass to lift her onto his lap, Miguel groaned with longing and pleasure. She’d teased him, earlier, with the idea of squeezing her ass. Walking that sexy dancer walk away from him, pretending just to show off for his niece when clearly she’d been taunting him. Begging him to put his hands on her. Well, he was an obliging man.
Also, as it happened, un idiota.
He should have expected her to launch a sex bomb to distract him from the vulnerable heart of her story. So now he was an idiot with an insistently throbbing shaft. Miguel sighed as he slid Janice back to rest on his knees and leaned his forehead into hers.
The pollywogs had grown up
and spawned new tadpoles and they’d raised up another generation and all seven billion froglets were hopping madly along Janice’s every nerve ending. It was time for the sex. Miguel was afire and she was afire and they were so highly combustible they wouldn’t need his grill to char more steak, and that definitely meant it was time for the sex.
“Hey, you stopped kissing me,” she complained, hooking her leg up around him in the chair. It gave her leverage and the next step was to crash her pelvis into his, but suddenly his hands were holding her back by the hips.
He wasn’t kissing her, and he was holding her off of him.
She tilted her pelvis forward, ensuring he knew what she wanted, but he only locked his arms to keep her back. His compressed lips told her he wasn’t playing around.
“Wait just a moment,” he said, as if he was being sensible.
“Not sure I can.” She pulled at him with her leg again, but again he failed to budge.
“You haven’t finished your story. What scholarship?”
She shook her head. “How is this relevant? I don’t think events from a lifetime ago are why you invited me over here tonight, are they? Because I gotta tell you, I have quite a different agenda at this moment.”
“And maybe we will get there, sweet Janice. But not just yet. First I want you to explain about the scholarship. You earned it for dance, but opted not to take it?”
The other thing decades of performance gave Janice was the ability to put a good face forward, no matter how someone’s words sliced through her body. “What does it matter?”
“If it doesn’t matter, what’s the problem with telling me?”
Well, it just about served her right. She known he’d scorn her when he heard her whole tale. He worked so diligently to put himself—and apparently his daughter, too—through school, and she’d gone and thrown away a golden opportunity at a free education. She hadn’t even told Miguel how she’d disrespected all her mama had worked for, and here he was breathing hard, smelling of grill smoke and fresh tomatoes and a little of the lemon hand soap in his kitchen, and deliberately not kissing her.