He pulled me onto his lap. Unable to fight his compassion, I collapsed against him, sobs seizing my body.
“I guess I called everyone I was supposed to, I don’t really remember. The OB, Palmer. He threw a plank of wood through his windshield after we hung up, someone told me later. I called Momma.”
Reardon passed a handkerchief over my cheeks. He swiped under his eyes, his mouth grim. He hugged me closer.
“Hospital and doctors and ultrasounds. Teaching hospital, there were always students in my room, intruding on my miscarriage.”
“Jesus, darlin’.”
“Paperwork, there were a lot of forms to fill out. And wait and see, wait and see. Until they stopped coming, they weren’t even monitoring me anymore. Just my doctor the next time, he looked so sad.” I hadn’t cried then. Now I scored Reardon’s back with my nails, pressing against him. “She was dead, I’d lost her. I was too far along. I had to deliver Delilah, knowin’ I’d never ever hear her cry.
“It took a long time because I wanted to keep her inside me. When I gave birth to Delilah, they let us spend some time with her. Such a tiny baby, so pale and still, wrapped in those blue and white and pink blankets. She was beautiful, Reardon.”
She’d been so fragile, tiny in my arms. I’d watched her chest, waiting for breaths that would never come. Little ears, fingers and toes. I counted every part of her, kissed every bit of her the same way I would’ve done had she been all red and squalling. Instead she was so silent. Cuddled against me, I couldn’t let her go.
Palmer beside me, his hand huge, shaking, when he stroked her face.
We held her between us. Palmer crooned, his words choppy, a broken song from a daddy to his daughter. He held her, me, held us together for the first time, for the last time.
“I told the chaplain to go straight to hell, I gave the silent treatment to the grief counselor, I threw the ugly pink water jug at the goddamn hospital speakers every time they played Brahms’
Lullaby
when a child was born.
“They told us the bleeding couldn’t be stopped, they needed to fuck with my insides, I had a lot of cysts, scarring, but I was lucky I didn’t need a hysterectomy, yet.” Nausea backed up my throat. “I was supposed to be happy I could keep my woman bits, never mind the baby I buried beside my daddy.”
Reardon didn’t need to know the rest. Spilling my guts wasn’t part of the contract.
I smeared my face against his shirt and didn’t speak about the follow-up appointments where I was pushed and prodded in such a way my insides felt raped. When we met the specialist, his prognosis cut out any last hope. Conception ridiculously unlikely and the chance of fetal mortality just as dire.
Fetal mortality. Delilah had been reduced to a scientific term.
I’d been shaking, Palmer shaking his head.
I got it then. I was made less of a woman, and Palmer was unmanned. Stoically suffering, unable to continue the Greer name. Losing his baby girl, the one he already doted on. He changed, after that. I didn’t blame him. I did this to him. And he believed he did it to me.
“I still feel her here.” I tapped my stomach. “Phantom kicks.”
Reardon’s hand folded over mine.
“I don’t talk about this.”
“Maybe you should.”
I retreated to the end of the couch. “Don’t,” I warned. “Just don’t. I know what I can handle, and I cannot relive this over and over again.”
“Okay.” He gingerly approached me until I settled into his embrace.
“I’m more myself now than I’ve been in a long time. And you, you make me feel something, even if you piss me off more often than not.”
He chuckled.
“I’m more me with you than with...than I am with Palmer.”
It wasn’t a matter of Palmer not loving me anymore. How could he? He didn’t even like himself.
Setting me on my feet, Reardon tipped my chin forward for a small kiss. “Go get cleaned up, I’ll make something to eat.”
“Why? I look a mess?”
He didn’t answer the question, simply pointed me down the hall to the bathroom. Facing the mirror, I saw why. Mess didn’t cover the half of it. The puffy bags beneath my red-slit eyes rivaled Bill Clinton’s during the Lewinsky Love-in. I could pack my weekend trousseau up in there.
After repairing some of the damage, I went to the porch with a fresh drink and my smokes.
Reardon’s kiss tingled on my cheek. “Give me ten minutes, darlin’, then let me take care of you.”
And he did take care of me, holding my hand while we ate.
I slumped against him when dinner ended, and he shushed, “Let’s get you to bed.”
And he did, not watching–well, I think he peeked a bit–as I undressed and fell into the awesome-as-hell ten hundred million thread-count sheets.
He took off his clothes and wrapped himself around me. “Get some rest, Shay. I’ll be right here.”
Swaddled by Reardon, I fell asleep.
* * * *
I woke groggily, a buttery yellow glow brightening the bedroom, or maybe that was my eye boogers clogging up the works. The sheet over my head, I groaned only to pop out at the sound of a rumbling laugh.
Reardon.
My nipples reacted to his dirty laugh. I failed to suppress them, even with my arms crossed over my chest.
Sitting in a chair across the room with a newspaper folded over his lap, his smile faltered.
I pointed my finger at him. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. Now you’re givin’ me the look they all do. See how sorry the pathetic childless woman is.”
He muttered a string of, “Stubborn, ridiculous, unbelievable,” as he stood. The mattress heaved when he sat beside me. “I assure you, I could never see you that way.”
Pushing him onto his back, I rolled on top of him. The sheet draped to my hips, leaving my breasts bobbing in his face. He could have helped himself to an eyeful, but he pulled my chin toward him until our faces were level. “I admire you.”
Braced on his chest, it only took a shimmy to wriggle into position until–
Oh God
–I felt him.
“Shay.”
I didn’t care. Arching my back, I rode along him, panting with each lunge he delivered.
Pushing his palms into my panties, he squeezed my ass, dragging me over his stiff ridge. Slamming into me in the hottest dry hump I’d ever had, he grunted. “We need to stop.”
“No, we don’t,” I panted, pulling his mouth to my breasts.
He tore me away. “Jesus, Shay, stop! Fuck.” Reardon whispered, “Don’t cry, please don’t cry, darlin’.”
“You don’t want me.”
“That’s why I’m ten seconds and one kiss from fucking you until you can’t walk a straight line or talk a full sentence.”
“Oh!”
“Exactly. You’re not ready for this. But when you offer yourself to me, I can’t control myself.” Ragged breaths shook his chest. “You’re not ready for me.”
“I know.” I was ready for all those things he didn’t want. Friendship, intimacy, holding hands, hanging out, and then a whole lot of sex. My conscience congratulated me, my cha-cha gave me the stink-eye.
“I’m sorry, I never should’ve thought–” Tugging his hair into cowlicks, he said, “I shouldn’t have hired you.”
“You firing me?”
“Honestly? I don’t know what the hell to do with you.” His eyes were turbulent as the ocean when he admitted, “Only thing I’m sure of is how much I want you.”
“I want you too.”
“I know.”
“Y’all are incorrigible, you know that?” Suddenly I felt easy, but not like an easy lay, because...was he about to change his rules? “Get back over here.” I opened my arms.
“Shay,” he groaned.
“What?”
“The goddamn sheet, woman.”
I toga’d myself, hooking my fingers at him.
His lips warmed a trail to my earlobe. “Compromise?”
“Companionship?”
“With a side of seduction,” he agreed.
* * * *
After breakfast we sauntered to the beach. In the soft white dunes, Reardon pitched an umbrella on account of my fair skin. Impatient for me to shed my gauzy wrap, he urged me on. “I take it you packed a bathing suit after all?”
Aw, did I detect a note of disappointment that I wasn’t actually going to skinny dip?
Shucking the cover-up, I twirled and tossed it at him.
He crinkled it in his fists, stepping back, closing his eyes, and pitching a tent in his shorts.
Awesome.
“You’re...uh.” He tugged his shorts, tugged his hair, and took all of me in. “Mmm, Shay.” His hand wavered over my cleavage spilling from the small Granny Smith green triangles of material. “Now that should be illegal.”
A group of college boys walked by, tossing a football back and forth and staring at me longer than was appropriate.
Or maybe it was the beautiful house behind us
.
Reardon grumbled, “Should’ve thought twice about bringing you to the beach.” No, it was me.
Pleased with my unveiling, I sat down, dug out my book, and ignored it in favor of ogling a very antsy Reardon, who finally announced, “I’m going for a swim, I need to do something about my…” He rubbed his lips. “You. Yeah. I’m goin’ for a swim.”
He jogged to the surf, every muscle a mirror of the rippling sea current.
The water was too warm to be refreshing, but I swam out after him. I kissed from his shoulders to the indent of his spine, running my fingers along the sinews of his ribs. Diving under, he surfaced behind me, effortlessly tossing me into the eddying tide.
We swam together and joked. Splashed and laughed and made out until I was wrapped around his waist, and he was absolutely hard everywhere.
“Feels so good, baby.” I smattered his face and chest with kisses, holding his hot erection under the water.
“You’re going to make me come if you don’t stop.” His hips kicked faster.
Mmm, I closed my hand around the ridge below his head, the long shaft throbbing, hardly withheld by his bathing suit.
He halted my hand and jostled me over his shoulder, cave-manning me to the shore. Lowering me to the beach chair, he sprayed me with water as he shook his head. His trunks mesmerized me, wetly outlining every inch of his cock.
Thank you, Lord Jesus, for the ocean, this man, and clingy fabric.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he begged.
I licked my lips and stared harder.
“Let’s go for a walk, vixen.”
“What about no long walks on the beach?” I shoveled shells with my toes, looking for that thing more mythical than a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, an unbroken sand dollar.
“Doesn’t matter.” He squinted over the sequined horizon.
“And you introduced me to Whistler. How’s that discreet?”
“Didn’t really have a choice, did I?”
I prickled. “Well now, that’s not very complimentary.”
He kicked a pile of seaweed. “You know that’s not what I meant, Shay.” He enclosed his gold chain in a fist until his knuckles turned as white as a sun-bleached shell. “I’ve never wanted one of my mistresses to meet my friends.”
There, he’d said it,
mistress
. One of many.
“I’m going to have a bath,” I sniped.
Bastard. Rat Bastard in board shorts riding far too low on his carved hips.
Back at the house–more like a shambling multimillion-dollar mansion–I sloughed off my bikini and topped up the tub, adding candles and bubbles and all the fancy accoutrements I could find.
“Ah,” I sighed, submerging into the deep tub, tugging my hair into an untidy bundle of red. The warm water, the scented bubbles, memories of kissing Reardon... Water broke over the lip of tub as I fingered myself into a slick realm of short breaths, stiff nipples, bursting clit. My labia parted for my smooth caress, my mind cartwheeled with remembrances of Reardon on the beach, his cock against me...ohhh, his cock in me
….