Authors: Sherryl Woods
She laughed bitterly. “Ironic, isn’t it? If he’d stuck around, we wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”
“You would have been miserable with a selfish jerk like that.”
“Maybe so, but at the time I thought my world had ended.”
“And you’ve spent the rest of your life making sure that no other man could get close enough to inflict that sort of pain.”
He felt her head shake.
“Yes, you have,” he insisted. “Or you’d have found someone else by now. Instead, you’ve filled your life with all the children no one else wanted to make up for the one this man didn’t want.”
“Now who’s playing psychologist?”
“Am I any good at it?”
“Not bad, actually.”
“Ann…” he began, but she pressed a finger against his lips.
“Just because you know about my past doesn’t change anything, though. Not between us.”
“Are you so sure of that?” he said, kissing her gently. The taste of her tears was on her lips. He wanted to go on kissing her until the memory blurred and finally faded altogether. Instead, he held back and watched her.
“Are you sure?” he repeated.
Blue eyes, fringed by long, sooty lashes, gazed back at him expectantly and he lost track of what he’d meant to say to persuade her to let go of the past. Provocative images replaced all thoughts of idle conversation. He swallowed hard past the lump in his throat as he finally tore his gaze away.
“Maybe you ought to go get some sleep,” he said finally.
She stared at him, then nodded. “Maybe so,” she said softly.
For just an instant, Hank could have sworn he heard regret in her tone, but then she was on her feet and striding toward the house with that long-limbed gait that stirred him so.
It was nearly an hour later when he finally dared to follow her inside. He’d hoped she’d gone to bed, but he found her at the sink, rinsing off dinner dishes with those familiar, sure movements. She’d changed clothes. A man’s wool plaid shirt hung nearly to her knees. Her legs were bare down to the bright yellow socks that had settled in folds at her ankles.
Looking at those legs was dangerous, he decided at once. Taking a beer from the refrigerator, his eyes locked instead on the movement of her hands, soft and slippery against the fragile porcelain. He imagined them sliding over his flesh with the same gentle touch, the same deft strokes, water cascading around them, cooling their burning flesh. His blood surged at the image. He could hear the pounding of his heart, feel the throbbing low in his abdomen. His grip on the bottle of beer was so tight, he was afraid the glass would snap. If she didn’t get out of the kitchen in the next five minutes, he was going to forget all of his honorable intentions and take her right there.
As if she’d guessed his thoughts, she turned suddenly. His expression must have confirmed what she’d sensed, because the cup fell from her hands and shattered on the tile floor. Her lips parted on a gasp of dismay and her eyes widened at the noise, but she didn’t look away from him for even a fraction of a second. It was as if she were waiting for him to act, daring him to, wanting him to.
“I thought you’d gone to bed,” she said shakily.
Silent, Hank moved slowly toward her, watching the flare of excitement in her eyes.
“Do you know what you’re doing to me, Annie?” he murmured as his fingers caressed the curve of her jaw, then tangled in her hair. She nodded. “I want you, Annie love. Now. Tonight.”
Again she nodded and Hank felt the tension inside him shatter like the teacup. He leaned down and touched his lips to hers again, his fingers light against the pulse in her neck. It jerked convulsively, then ran wild. His own senses took off at a matching gait as his tongue
invaded the sweet recesses of her mouth. He gave himself up to the kiss, exploring, tasting. Her soft cries of pleasure broke over him with the force of magnificent ocean waves.
“We’ll be good together, Annie. I promise you that.”
“I know,” she whispered against the burning column of his neck, her fingers now wound tightly in his hair.
The swell of her breasts was evident beneath that oversize shirt. At the stroking of his fingertips, the peak hardened at once. He bent to capture it in his mouth, his hand moving on, drifting lower over her flat stomach, then finding the warm mound between her thighs. She gasped as he rubbed the flat of his palm rhythmically back and forth. Her hips arched into the strokes.
He lifted his head and watched her. Her head was thrown back, leaving her neck vulnerable to his kisses. Her lips were parted as her breathing came in increasingly rapid bursts. He lifted the hem of the shirt and ran his fingers up the inside of her thigh. Her eyes widened as his hand once again touched the heat between her legs, this time with only the most delicate silk as a barrier. He could feel her moistness and it almost drove him wild. If this kept up, he would take her here and now. The heat exploding through him demanded he do just that.
Some guardian angel with a perverse sense of timing stopped him. Or perhaps it was the fleeting look of panic that he’d caught in her eyes before she’d determinedly banished it and given herself up to his loving.
He removed his hand and allowed the shirt to glide back down. It didn’t cover nearly enough of those long, slender legs.
“Hank?” she said, her expression puzzled.
He sighed heavily with regret.
“It’s okay, Annie love.” He pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead. “It’s okay.”
“But I wanted you to make love to me.”
“I know you did and God knows I wanted to.”
“Then why are you stopping?”
“Because it would be wrong. I can make you want me in your bed, but that’s not good enough for you. After what you’ve been through, you’re the kind of lady who deserves forever. I don’t believe in it.”
“I’m all grown-up, Hank. I can make my own decisions. I have no illusions anymore. There were no demands connected to this, no expectations.”
He smiled. “You may not think so now, Annie, but I guarantee you in the morning, you’d have felt differently. Neither one of us would have been able to live with the guilt.” He touched her swollen lips with the tips of his fingers and tried to ignore the hurt in her eyes. “Now go to bed, before I change my mind.”
She turned back to the sink, her shoulders tensed.
He reached out and touched her. She shuddered visibly, which made him feel like crying.
“Go, dammit,” he said, his voice gruff. “I’ll finish the dishes.”
“It’s my house,” she reminded him, with an all-too-familiar mixture of stiff-necked pride and indignation.
“Meaning?” Hank said.
A plate clattered to the floor, shattering. Ann clung to the edge of the counter so tightly, he could see the whitening of her knuckles. He bent down to pick up the shards of china as he waited for her to answer.
“Meaning you don’t give the orders. If anybody goes
anywhere tonight,” she said in a tight, controlled voice, “it ought to be you.”
Grateful for the anger that was escalating by the second, he whirled her around, ready to lash out.
She lifted her chin and stared back. Defiant. Proud. Furious.
Want thundered through him. He held it at bay by sheer will.
“Fine,” he said when he could control his voice. “If that’s the way you want it, I’m out of here.”
Chapter 7
I
t was practically the middle of the night and he was beat, but Hank couldn’t get away from Ann’s fast enough. Gravel flew. Dust curled up behind the pickup as he bounced over the rutted driveway and sped onto U.S. 1 heading north toward home.
Toward sanity.
And, face it, toward safety.
The last bounce, which very nearly sent his head through the roof, reminded him that he’d been meaning to fill in the potholes before Ann’s car broke its axle. The fact that he was still thinking of the chores that needed to be done around her house infuriated him all over again. She was independent. She didn’t need or want him around. She’d made that plain enough when she’d kicked him out just now. She sure as hell didn’t need him making love to her, either. Why couldn’t she see that?
And why the hell couldn’t he leave well enough alone? Why had he gone and practically seduced the woman over the kitchen sink when he knew just how wrong it would be for both of them? He was no oversexed kid who didn’t know how to keep his pants on. He’d never in his life allowed things to go so far with a woman who wasn’t fully aware of the score. Like he’d told Ann, not only didn’t she know the score, she didn’t even know the name of the game.
He turned the radio on full blast, hoping to drown out his thoughts. Unfortunately he was tuned to a country station. He’d forgotten that the lyrics of half the songs out of Nashville were all too explicit about the pitfalls of loving the wrong woman. He should have switched the dial. Somehow, though, he felt he deserved the torment. By the time he’d gotten halfway back to Miami, he was thinking very seriously of just walking away, of turning the whole damn Marathon job over to Todd.
Or murdering him for sending him down there in the first place. As for Liz, he might never forgive her for suggesting this living arrangement.
He was not, therefore, in a particularly welcoming frame of mind at ten in the morning when Todd turned up on his doorstep while he was still tossing and turning and trying to get the first minute’s sleep of the endless night. Yanking open the door at what seemed like dawn to find his cheerful, wide-awake partner on his doorstep set his teeth on edge. He scowled, then stomped back inside. Leaving Todd to make what he would of the irritable behavior, he climbed into the shower, turned it to its iciest temperature and stood under it for fifteen minutes. It didn’t do a damn thing except make him shiver.
Tugging on a pair of well-worn jeans and an old shirt that he didn’t bother to button, he went into the kitchen. He didn’t even growl a thank-you for the mug of coffee Todd handed him in silence. He took a couple of swallows of the strong brew, sat the cup on the counter and began slamming pots and pans into the kitchen cupboard. Undaunted, Todd failed to heed the cues to leave.
“How’s it going?” Todd asked instead, leaning nonchalantly against the doorjamb watching Hank’s performance.
Deliberately misinterpreting the how’s-life-in-general scope of the question, Hank said, “We’re on schedule.”
“No problems?”
“Not since you got that supplier straightened out.”
“How’s Ann?”
The question sounded innocent. Hank’s reaction was not. His gut knotted the way an alcoholic’s would at a casual reference to fourteen-year-old Scotch—with longing. He managed a disinterested shrug. It was the greatest acting of his life. “Fine, I suppose.”
“You suppose? You see the woman every day. Don’t you know for sure?”
“She’s a hard woman to read.”
“Oh, really? I’ve always thought of Ann as being the most straightforward, honest woman around. No subterfuge. No games.”
“We don’t sit around having conversations about her state of mind or her health,” he snapped, then gave another offhand shrug. “Like I said, she seems about the same as when I arrived, so I guess that means she’s fine.”
Todd, damn him, laughed. “She’s getting to you, isn’t she?”
“Right,” he retorted sarcastically. “Like poison ivy.”
“Hmm.”
He shot a glance at the man he’d known for most of his life. Todd was looking very smug. “Don’t stand there gloating, old buddy, or you’ll be down in Marathon before you can say goodbye to your wife and children. In fact, with the mood I’m in, I don’t care if that sweet, innocent baby of yours doesn’t see you again before she turns eighteen.”
“That bad, huh?”
Despite the early hour, Hank grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, took a long, slow swallow, then sighed wearily. Further denials were pointless. Todd had always been able to guess what was going on in his head anyway. They’d bolstered each other up during crises far more devastating than this one.
“Worse,” he admitted. “But hardly cataclysmic.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“You falling for her?”
“Hell, no.”
“Oh, really?”
Todd sounded incredibly skeptical. Hank resumed glowering and slamming things around. “Don’t push it,” he muttered.
“I don’t get it. What’s wrong? Ann’s intelligent, attractive. You’re both single. I’ve never known you to miss out on an opportunity to expand your dating circle.”
“Ann Davies is not my type,” he insisted.
“She’s a woman.”
“Very funny.”
“Come on, give. What’s not to like?”
“She’s a terrific lady, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? That doesn’t mean we get along.”
“I think I’m beginning to get the picture. Is she, by any chance, trying to reform you?”
“She took away my damn doughnuts,” he retorted before he could stop himself.
A sound suspiciously like the beginning of a hoot of laughter was quickly smothered. “That’s serious all right.”
“She wants me to eat oat bran,” he added indignantly. “Can you believe it? The woman does nothing but preach about cholesterol from morning to night. If I eat any more fresh vegetables, I’ll grow ears like Peter Rabbit. I haven’t had a decent steak in the past two weeks. Every time I sneak a cheeseburger for lunch I feel like I ought to go straight to a priest and confess.”
“Just tell her how you feel. She’s a reasonable woman.”
Hank stared at Todd incredulously. “Are we talking about the same woman? The woman who threatened to pour all of my sodas down the drain? The woman who gets hysterical at the sight of potato chips?”
“Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a little?”
“Exaggerating? If anything, I’m downplaying the way that woman is trying to run my life.”
“I’m sure she’s just thinking of your health.”
“Maybe I should bring her a note from my doctor.”
“If your doctor knew what you ate, he’d probably swear out a warrant and lock you up in a hospital for a month to wean you off all of that junk.”
“You sound just like Ann.”
“Well, she does have a point. You’re at that age.”