by Lora Leigh
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It’s just that I think I’ve been going about this all wrong,” she said, the amazement obvious in her voice.
“Wrong? You mean you’ve been dating wrong?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. See, I’ve convinced myself that I will have trouble writing if there isn’t a man in my life, someone I consider my ‘boyfriend du jour.’ I bet that sounds pathetic, but it’s true.” She gauged Vincent’s expression but his face remained open and attentive. “It just dawned on me that maybe I’d be better off with no man at all instead of the kind who doesn’t inspire much passion in me, and therefore my writing. I think I’ve been barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.”
That last comment got a faint smile out of him, and Vincent chuckled into his coffee cup. “So you go through muses at a rapid rate, is that what you’re telling me?”
“I go through men at a rapid rate. You’re the first man I pegged as an official muse. You’re a first for me, Vincent.”
“I like that,” he said. “Is it working?”
“Hell yes it is!” Win laughed with gusto. “I’ve written more stuff—good stuff—in the last two days than in the last two months!” She got up to clear the table. “Hey—where are you going to be at the beginning of next month, when I’m in revision hell? Do you think you’ll be free to marry me?”
She’d meant it as a joke, but the energy in the room had changed. Vincent adjusted his position on the chair and looked down at his hands. She hadn’t meant to say that. She hadn’t meant to imply that there was anything real happening here, or that there was any future for them. But the damage had been done. “Look—that was just a joke, Vincent,” she said, knowing it sounded lame.
He raised his eyes and gave her a sheepish grin. “At the beginning of next month, I’ll probably be at the edge of the earth somewhere, attracting stray bullets. I’m not exactly marriage material, Win.”
“Well, I’m not either.” Win loaded the dishwasher and went back for Vincent’s plate and utensils. She looked down at him. “I’m a little particular about my surroundings. I like things just so. I enjoy being single and having no one to worry about but myself, no one I have to make compromises for. I enjoy hefty doses of retail therapy. I’m not particularly suited for parenthood.”
“You’ve done pretty well with Fifi,” he said.
“It’s Lulu, and I think she’s a little less work than a baby.”
Vincent nodded but didn’t say anything.
“How about you? Had you ever thought of having kids?”
He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and a little sad. “You know, every once in a while I wonder what I’d be like as a dad, and how I’d take my son here to the cabin, and to baseball games and stuff, like my dad did with me. Then I realize I’m nearly forty and I’m not home enough to even subscribe to the newspaper. I don’t have a girlfriend, let alone a wife. So, no. Kids aren’t on my radar screen.”
Win flipped on the dishwasher, but nothing happened. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “What’s the deal?” She laughed. “Is there an appliance poltergeist here or something?”
Vincent chuckled and removed the front of the dishwasher, seeing that the touch panel had been disconnected. He plugged it back in. “Artie arranged to have all this stuff not work so that you’d be sure to come get me.”
Win laughed. “Boy was I an easy mark.”
“I was too.”
She smiled up at Vincent. “Remind me to call Artie tomorrow and cancel the car. He promised me he’d bring me home in three days if I didn’t like it here.”
Vincent reached for her, and Win looked down to see how her small hands were swallowed by his. She thought it was the perfect metaphor for this—Vincent MacBeth was swallowing her. She was being consumed, sucked into a place she’d never gone before.
“So do you like it here, Win?”
“To a surprising degree,” she said. “And you?”
“I’ve never liked it better,” he said.
Vincent made a fire. And soon, Win found herself naked again, lolling on the rug on the floor, Vincent’s tongue probing and licking between her spread legs as she soared out of her head with the pleasure. She was floating, swimming, drowning, crying out, and then his big body was around her and on her and inside her, and she knew that this kind of sex was very different from the sex they’d had earlier that day. It was sex with connection. It was sex with affection.
This kind of sex felt an awful lot like making love.
Chapter Four
Mac and Win fell into a rhythm that seemed to work for both of them. Most nights he stayed with her, taking his musing responsibilities quite seriously, making her come and shake and sigh and fall asleep in his arms, a big smile plastered across her pretty face. Most mornings, she got up at a preposterously early hour to write before the sun came up. They’d spend the rest of the day in episodic sex that damn near bordered on Zen at times, punctuated by highly productive spurts at the keyboard for Win, who now wore her “lucky jammy pants” all day, every day, and hours of work for Mac at his dad’s cabin.
Win often napped in the late afternoon. Mac would return to the house and wake her up by licking the inside of her thighs until she spread for him, eventually welcoming him back into her body.
Mac also talked on the phone with his superiors, who were kind enough to tell him he was headed to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan as soon as he was medically cleared. And every day he took time to visit his dad at the assisted-living place in town. With a combination of speech and handwritten notes, they talked about Realtors and his dad’s physical therapy. One day, about two weeks after her arrival, they talked about Win Mackland.
“You like her?!” his dad scrawled the words on a blank page of his spiral notebook. Mac grinned and patted his dad’s arm and thought he was looking less tired today. Maybe the fact that Mac had mentioned a woman by name for the first time in thirty years had lightened the old man’s heart.
“I do like her, Dad,” he said. “She’s funny and beautiful and talented. You’d like her too. She writes movies.”
His father’s words came out garbled but Mac knew what he’d just requested—he’d asked him to bring Win for a visit. It sounded innocent enough, but he wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Somehow, bringing her here would be letting her all the way in. Maybe too close. It might give her ideas that there could be something between them once they left the mountain, which wasn’t likely.
Yes, she was sexy and great and fun. No, he wasn’t relishing the fact that their time was drawing to a close. But in the final analysis, he didn’t see how a woman in New York and a man who split his time between the nation’s capital and various points in hell could make it work.
“I’ll try, Dad,” he said.
“Good,” his father wrote. “That’s my boy.” Then Old Mac scrawled out on the paper, “Any movies I’ve ever seen?”
Mac sighed, shoved his hands in his jeans pockets, and nodded. He knew his dad was going to love this shit.
“She writes the Lethal Mercy movies, Dad. Max Mercy is her creation.”
The smile started in his dad’s eyes, then spread across his face, culminating in a crooked grin and a robust laugh.
“Thursday after bingo,” he wrote in his notebook.
The next afternoon, Mac tackled a job he’d been putting off to the last minute—emptying the old rolltop desk in his father’s bedroom. It was crammed full of cancelled checks from as far back as 1970, along with receipts for repairs done at the cabin, deliveries of gravel for the drive, and even a birthday cake ordered from the bakery in town. Based on the 1981 date, Mac figured that particular cake was for his seventeenth birthday, the first without his mother. As he recalled, the cake had been yellow with white frosting, and got thrown in the trash untouched.
Mac stared at the receipt, remembering in vivid detail how he and his dad had come to blows that
day. They’d beat on each other standing up inside the cabin, with hits to the face and gut, then tumbled out the front door, down the porch steps, and crashed to the grass, where the pummeling continued. At the time, Mac was still growing into his strength while his dad was still hanging on to his, and it was a fairly even match. It ended when his father sat on his chest and pinned his arms.
Mac gazed out his father’s bedroom window now, the view unchanged from his earliest childhood. The funny thing was, he didn’t even remember the injustice that had set him off that day. It could have been anything. But he had been pissed as hell—that much he remembered—and certain his dad couldn’t possibly understand. Mac sighed, seeing his seventeen-year-old self from his forty-year-old point of view, and knowing he’d been nothing but an angry child that day, raging at a world that allowed his mother to die. Who can a teenage boy blame when disease takes his mother? It was easy to blame his father. So that’s what Mac had done—for a lot of years.
Without thinking, Mac folded the bakery receipt and stuck it in his wallet. He continued on with the desk, eventually stumbling on an old black-and-white photo of the cabin, its paper edges yellowed and dog-eared. The two men standing in front of the cabin were his grandfather and his father, who was no more than seventeen himself. Mac let go with a surprised laugh. His grandfather had to be about forty in the picture—Mac’s age now. They looked like each other—eerily so. A date carefully written on the back read August 1946. His grandfather must have just built the place, home from the war. He’d been a navy man, too.
Mac collapsed into the desk chair and let the photo dangle from his fingers. He had to be insane to sell this place! So what if the proceeds would pay for anything his dad might ever need? Selling a fraction of the property would accomplish the same thing.
Mac stood up and paced, eventually putting the photo in his wallet next to the bakery receipt. No, he probably would never have a son to give this place to, but his dad had given it to him two weeks ago. It was his place now, and his decision to make.
He couldn’t wait to tell Win.
Vincent was unusually quiet driving back from the assisted-living place Thursday, and Win occasionally glanced at him behind the wheel of his big black, shiny truck. His shoulder had healed well, and he sat straighter than he had three weeks ago. She studied his strong, dark profile, and smiled to herself. It was astounding that in such a short amount of time she’d become accustomed to this man. She could read him. She knew him.
And it was obvious that bringing her to meet his father had been difficult for him.
“You okay, Vincent?” She reached over and touched his hard right thigh, stroking him through his jeans. “Your dad is sweet. He seems to be doing well.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, if you’re hacked off at me for something, the least you could do is tell me. That way I can be pissed at you too, and we could have our first real fight. It might be a cleansing experience.”
He turned her way and gave her a half-smile. “Do we need cleansing?”
“Apparently so.”
He put his big rough hand over hers and squeezed. “I’m not angry. What time are you leaving tomorrow?”
Win looked out the window, realizing that he must be feeling the same sense of dread she was. How could these three weeks have gone by so damn fast?
“Artie said he’d send the car after lunch.”
“All right.”
Vincent raised her hand to his lips and Win blinked away tears, keeping her gaze directed out the window. She didn’t want him to see her cry.
“How about we take Fifi for a walk when we get back?”
Win turned to see him grinning at her. She smiled back. “I’m sure the Fif-ster would love that.”
She packed a lunch of cheese, crackers and fruit, tucked it into Mac’s backpack, and they set off through the woods. It was a warm and bright day, the light subdued by the towering stands of trees, and Win suddenly wondered just how beautiful this place might be in the fall. With a twinge of sadness, she realized she might never have an opportunity to find out.
“I’m not going to sell the cabin, Win.”
Vincent had been quiet for several minutes and his words surprised her, both in their content and the fact that he spoke at all.
“What? When did you decide that?”
He shrugged, and Win wondered if the backpack was digging into his shoulder. “Want me to take that for a while?”
He smiled down at her and brushed a hand through her hair, which she imagined was wild and woolly in its freed state. “I can handle it, cutie.”
She laughed. “Cutie, huh?” She rubbed into his touch, hating the idea that today was the end of all this. “So what’re you going to do with the cabin? Rent it out?”
Mac nodded. “I had this crazy idea I thought I’d run by you.” He stopped where he was walking and grabbed both of Win’s hands in his. He kissed her on her forehead, and the gentle ownership she felt in his touch shocked her. Win suddenly had the wildest thought. What if he was going to ask her that? Could it be? Was he going to get down on one knee right here in the woods and ask her if she would . . .
“. . . consider renting it from me?”
Win whirled back from La-La Land. The man was talking real estate while she was thinking real love! She sighed. “What in the world would I want your dad’s place for?”
The biggest, most devilish grin spread across Vincent’s face. “You could keep an eye on it while I’m away. Maybe you could pop up one weekend a month to write. You know, for inspiration.”
Win scrunched her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Would these monthly visits coincide with your shore leave, by any chance?”
Vincent laughed. “Shore leave? I’m not on ship duty, baby.”
“Whatever you call it, then. My point is, will you be here when I am?”
“I can try.” Vincent’s smile disappeared and he looked down at his boots. “I’ll give you all the money you need to keep things repaired, decorate it any way you want. Maybe Barbara Jacobs could help you with that.”
Win laughed. “I sure hope you won the Lotto while I wasn’t looking.”
“Naw. But Dad and I have decided to sell one hundred acres. With the market the way it is right now, that will take care of everything he might need with plenty to spare for knickknacks.”
Win frowned at him. “And all this luxury would run me how much a month?”
Vincent shrugged. “How’s a dollar sound?”
“Better than Manhattan rentals, that’s for sure.” Win cocked her head and studied his face, a face she was going to miss like hell. “Once a month at best, eh?”
Vincent’s gaze turned serious, and he stroked her cheek. “Sometimes, I don’t know when I’ll be leaving, when I’ll be back, or how long I can stay stateside. There will be times I can’t tell you where I’m going. I won’t be reachable while I’m away.”
She blew out air and looked around at their surroundings, noting Lulu was tugging at the leash. “Sounds like the makings of an ideal relationship.”
“That’s my reality. That’s who I am.”
Win swung her gaze back to Vincent’s face—her fantasy man made real, and a real man with a life that was anything but fantastic.
Vincent cleared his throat. “I guess I was thinking that if you used the place, we’d be connected. There’d be a reason for us to bump into each other.”
Win felt her face heat up and her eyes grow wet. This was not how she pictured their time together ending—in some kind of messy, snotty, emotional meltdown. She couldn’t help it though, and she felt her lips tremble.
“Oh, Win. . . .”
Vincent had placed his hands on her shoulders but she smacked them away. “Bump into each other?” she shouted. “We spend three weeks getting about as close as two people can get and now you just want to bump into each other?”
He laughed. “I love the way your accent shows up when you’re upset.”
Vincent didn’t move. It looked like every muscle in that formidable body was tensed and ready.
“And I don’t reckon anything of mine is going to be bumpin’ up against anything of yours, anytime soon!”
Lulu went airborne at the end of the leash when Win spun around—only to find she’d backed herself right up against the creek. She had nowhere to go but the moss-covered rocks, and her mind raced. What did a woman do when faced with the fact that she’d fallen in love with a man whose life didn’t mesh with her own? Were sudden moves a good thing or a bad thing? Should she just go back to finding another perfectly serviceable metrosexual boyfriend with a compatible lifestyle?
Or should she forget about men entirely and just get a full-time dog?
Win decided to jump up on a moss-covered rock, noting a moment too late that she’d somehow jerked Lulu around so much that the dog’s leash was tangled in her ankles and she was close to toppling over into the creek.
Suddenly she was up off her feet and pressed against Vincent’s body. His mouth was hard on hers, kissing and kissing and kissing until she couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe, and her arms went around his neck and he flipped her so that she was chest-to-chest against him, her feet dangling above the ground. He pulled his mouth away and said, “Stand for a second so I can take off your jeans.”
“Whaa—?”
He had her belt undone and her jeans and panties around her feet in seconds flat, then began to undress himself.
“Wrap your legs around me, Win.”
She did, because she really wanted to, and realized that in the script, this was the scene where Max had leaped into the air, snatched Eva by the hair to save her from tumbling to her death into a raging canyon river, only to be smacked hard across the face.
