Aggie was frightened when she drove into her yard at two-thirty in the morning and found the barn lights blazing. Her dogs nearly tripped her with their welcome, licking her white jeans legs, stepping on her white sneakers, and bouncing up to nip at the hem of the flowered shirt she wore over a pink tank top. They weren’t nervous, she thought, and they would be if a stranger were in the barn.
She stopped cautiously in the barn’s hall, seeing nothing above the stalls’ head-high partitions. “Who’s here?”
No answer. Only a stall door at the hall’s far end was shut. She strode to it, her heart hammering in her chest, and peered over the door. A long, slow sigh of tenderness and amazement slipped from her throat. Curled up on a fresh bed of wood shavings was her bay mare, Dottie.
Dottie’s eyelashes fluttered as her head nodded drowsily. John was asleep beside her, looking grimy, disheveled, but very appealing in rumpled old trousers and no shirt. His head rested on Dottie’s plump shoulder.
And stretched out beside him, snoring, with its tiny bay head on his bare stomach, was Dottie’s newborn foal. John had draped one arm around its neck. The foal’s stubby black tail twitched with contentment.
Aggie propped her arms on the door and rested her chin on them. She knew she had a giddy smile on her face as she studied the scene in front of her.
John Bartholomew was wonderful.
Five
She hoped he liked oatmeal. Bustling around her small, bright kitchen, Aggie dropped utensils, bumped into the old Formica-topped table, and nearly stirred sugar instead of salt into the bubbling pot on the stove. Her attention was distracted by listening for any sound of John moving around in her grandfather’s room, where he’d spent what was left of the night after they stopped baby-sitting the new foal.
As she began quartering oranges on a cutting board by the sink, she heard his footsteps on the bedroom floor and almost poked her finger with the paring knife. Exasperated, she leaned close to the open window over the sink, pulled the tail of her floppy blue tank top out of her cutoffs, and fanned herself.
The creak of the bedroom door made her tuck the top into her shorts hurriedly and smooth the fine curly tendrils escaping from her hair, which she’d braided loosely down her back. She didn’t want to look like a woman who wanted to impress a man—but she was.
His long, solid strides on the hall’s wooden floor made her hands tremble. She grabbed a piece of orange and fiddled with the peel as if removing it were an art that required concentration.
“You’re a very pleasant sight to see first thing in the morning,” John said from the doorway.
She smiled over her shoulder and kept working. “Hi. Hope you like hot mushy food.”
“Hmmm.” He went to the stove and lifted the lid on the oatmeal. “Gruel. My favorite.”
Aggie glanced toward him, trying not to stare happily. His ruffled hair and sleepy expression were very sensual. He wore loose white trousers and a white tank top similar to her own—except that it was tight and what it revealed of his hard, darkly haired chest was more interesting than looking at herself. His expression as he sniffed the pot of oatmeal made her burst into laughter. “Don’t call my oatmeal ‘gruel.’ ”
His attention flickered down her body for a moment, but politely. She was as soft and hot inside as the oatmeal by the time he met her gaze again. “Good morning.”
She managed a jaunty nod. “Morning.”
“I didn’t mean to sleep late.”
“You didn’t. It’s only seven.”
“I didn’t want to miss anything.”
“I only got up thirty minutes ago. I checked on Dottie and the little guy. They’re fine.”
“He’s got the look of a winner to me.”
“I hope some buyer agrees with you in about ten months.”
“You won’t consider keeping him?”
She shook her head, feeling a surge of regret. “I’ve got no time to train and show weanlings, even the best ones. I’d like to show my own horses someday, but I can’t right now.”
“You need a partner.”
Her hands fumbled with the orange slice. A prosperous English businessman, maybe? But she’d never bring that subject up with him. She had too much pride. And she was cautious where her ranch was concerned. It was all she had.
Was it smart to be cautious about the ranch but reckless about falling in love with him? Aggie frowned at the irony.
“You’re thinking about something awfully hard, Agnes,” he said lightly. “I can almost see a vein throbbing in your forehead.”
“Aw, that’s just the soft spot.”
He reached out and touched his fingertips to the bruise near her hairline. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah. How about you?” She lifted his left hand and examined the bruised thumb.
“First rate. I like comparing injuries with you. We have a lot in common.”
“Bruises don’t count.” She released his hand and looked at him wistfully. “They heal, and you forget about them.”
“Don’t be practical, Agnes. Perhaps I wasn’t talking about heads and thumbs.”
“Oh? Well, I wish all my problems got better so fast.”
“Tell me your problems. I’ll be the doctor.”
She grinned. “Oh, no, I’m not ready to play doctor with you.”
“Don’t I look professional?” He waved a hand at his white trousers and tank top.
“You look like the lead in an Italian art film. All you need is a scarf around your neck and a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. Come on, gimme a sultry look and say ciao.”
He gave her a slit-eyed smile. “Ciao, seducente.”
The look wasn’t just sultry, it had a knowing, predatory edge that seemed to belong to some other man, a less lighthearted one. Feeling nervous, she turned her attention back to the overworked orange. “No fair ad-libbing.”
“Agnes?” he said, sounding concerned. “Seducente means ‘gorgeous.’ It’s a compliment.”
“Oh, I know. When I was living in California I had an Italian housekeeper. She taught me a few naughty words to impress my, uh, husband.” She winced inwardly and thought, Smart, Hamilton. John had complimented her, and in reply she’d brought up her intimacy with another man.
John leaned, hip-shot, against the countertop and propped a hand on the old blue tiles. “Ah-hah. So he was obviously seducente. The lady reveals a bit of her carefully guarded history. Tell me more.” His casual stance was as deceptive as her relaxed smile. She saw the glitter of intense emotion in his eyes and the hardness in his mouth.
“Tell me about all the women you’ve loved,” she countered, still smiling.
“Loved? That narrows the field. Love is when you dote on the idea of sharing another person’s life, warts and all, for every day of the rest of your life. I’ve been infatuated with a person here and there, but I’ve never loved anyone, by my definition of the word.”
“You and your definitions,” she said dryly. “I’d like to have a copy of the dictionary you use.”
He laughed but bowed his head to her with a gallantry that made her catch her breath. “It’s all stored in my heart.”
“Must be crowded, your heart. Wouldn’t want you to clog a valve.”
“Agnes, the heart is as big as a person’s spirit.” His voice dropped to a teasing, seductive level. “And as eternal as a person’s true desires.”
Her hands trembled. She couldn’t let her imagination get the best of her. “I’ll tell you what eternity is,” she replied lightly. “It’s waiting for oatmeal to finish cooking when you’re hungry.”
“Whatever you say, Agnes.”
She picked up her paring knife and jabbed an orange with it. “Don’t sound smug.”
“I’m glad I’m not an orange.”
Aggie pointed the impaled fruit toward a percolator plugged into an electrical outlet above the countertop. “You’re in luck. I calm down after I have my morning cup of coffee. Grab those two mugs and pou
r us some. We’ve got things to do.”
“Such as?”
“Go to the beach. I owe you some fun for all you did yesterday.” Not to mention the wonderful things you did to me on the porch, she added silently.
“You don’t owe me, Agnes,” he said, frowning.
“I want to, okay?” They were silent, sharing a quiet look. He searched her eyes and she stood still, mesmerized. Slowly he smiled. “I’d love it, then. Very much.”
John told himself he was building character. Yes, if he could lie on the warm sand next to Agnes without putting a hand on her, he had more character than he’d ever guessed he had.
“Spring is the perfect time of year to be here,” she told him. “The weather’s still a little cool.” She chuckled. “Eighty-five degrees instead of ninety-five.” Her fair complexion was tinted a warm pink by the sunlight filtering through the enormous red beach umbrella they’d rented. They lay on their stomachs on a colorful blanket, chins propped on their arms. “And on a weekday morning like this, there isn’t much of a crowd.”
“It’s wonderful.” John gazed at her as he said that. “Not crowded at all.”
Her lips pursed in a mild taunt. “Not where you’re looking.”
“You’re looking back.”
“I like the scenery.”
“Hmmm. I like your honesty.”
She fluttered her lashes at him. “I’m looking at the dunes behind you. The sea oats are so pretty.”
“Then you must have incredible side vision, because those eccentric blue eyes haven’t strayed from my handsome self one bit.”
“Eccentric eyes? What a description! You want me to drop a jellyfish on your back?”
“They’re odd in a lovely way, Agnes. They fade inward, as if you’d splashed silver paint into a bucket of blue.”
“You’re getting poetic on me. I’ll blush.”
“We’ll make each other blush.”
“This is a public beach.”
He grinned at her, silently cursed the fact that it was a public beach, and turned his face forward before he was tempted to kiss her. He was aching for much more than a kiss. The soft sand was a welcome cushion for his arousal.
John focused his attention on the panorama of wide white beach and blue-green ocean. A few couples strolled near the tide line, and children squatted in the surf, picking up shells. It was peaceful scenery, he thought, and ought to soothe him.
But he shut his eyes and pictured the ocean breeze stroking a loose strand of Agnes’s hair, the umbrella’s fringe making little shadows across the bridge of her tilted nose, highlighting the scattered freckles there. He smelled her suntan lotion and thought how good her oiled skin would feel under his hands.
“Where in the world did you get that old-fashioned swimsuit?” he asked abruptly. He rolled over on his back and latched his hands under his head, then stared casually up at the umbrella. Her two-piece suit was bright red too.
She chuckled. “A rummage sale. It must have been made back in the fifties. It was faded, so I dyed it. Otherwise, it’s good as new.”
She rolled onto her back, too, then tucked a towel under her head as a pillow. John allowed himself a glance at the swimsuit’s bottom piece. It covered her flat belly and full hips in snug red pleats. The suit might as well have been one-piece.
It hid her from thighs to waist and let only a narrow band of skin show between the bottom and top pieces. The top was similarly pleated and modest, anchoring her full, ripe breasts with its wide shoulder bands and sturdy gathers in the center.
But no matter how modest the swimsuit was, Agnes filled it with the kind of bounce and sway that gave men eye strain. “I like it,” he told her. “But what made you choose an old style?”
“I got tired of bikinis. Every time I went in the ocean all I did was hold the top half down and the bottom half up. I nearly drowned once, trying to keep my dignity.”
He would have paid for the privilege of rescuing her from that predicament. “Why not buy a one-piece, then?”
“Too see-through for my taste. Last one I owned was so sheer when it got wet I swore I could see my tattoos through it.”
Smiling at her nonsense, he turned on his side and rose on an elbow. “Tattoos? Really? Where?” She’d given him a perfect excuse to study her. He scanned her torso with solemn innocence.
She laughed. “No tattoos. But if I’d had some, you could have seen them. So I bought this little red dinosaur, and it works just fine. It’s a nineteen-fifties suit, and I’ve got a nineteen-fifties body. Lots of padding and no sharp angles. I’m a throwback.”
“You’re perfect.” He gestured from her neck to her thighs, skimming his fingertips just above her body. “This sort of body made Marilyn Monroe a star.”
“Wow. Paint-bucket eyes and Marilyn’s body. I could learn to like your brand of flattery.”
“I’m being honest with you.” John leaned over. Her nostrils flared a little, and her eyes widened. She lay as still as the sand, watching him. “You’re very beautiful. Please don’t think I’m flirting.” He hesitated, his mouth twitching with humor. “It is flirting but it’s sincere.”
She dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’ve never heard of anybody around here getting in trouble for kissing on a public beach.”
He put a hand on the center of her stomach. The small patch of bare skin, such an innocent part of a woman’s body, was a silky table making him anxious to explore more of it. She trembled under his fingertips.
“We’re very secluded, back here by the dunes,” he agreed, sliding his propped arm next to her head so he could lower his head close to hers. “No one’s paying any attention to us.”
“Would you mind if we didn’t do anything except kiss?” Her eyes flickered with uncertainty, despite her droll expression. “I don’t feel like Marilyn Monroe in this bathing suit, I feel like Doris Day. And Doris never did anything but kiss.”
The hot breeze lifted a strand of red hair across her face. He drew the hair aside, letting the pad of his thumb trace her cheek. “I don’t want to hurt the friendship we have. And there’s no hurry.”
“John Bartholomew.” She said only his name, but put a world of meaning into it, tentative affection and desire, as if she were testing her emotions out loud, to see what would happen. She touched his lips with her fingers, traced his mouth, then slid her hand in one smooth caress along his cheek until finally her fingers speared into his hair.
“Don’t ever change,” she whispered. “You’re the sweetest man I’ve ever met. You really do have an aura of goodness around you.”
Her words tormented him. He wasn’t good, but she was. There was a helluva lot more to her than he’d learned when he’d researched her past. He sensed that, just like him, she’d been hurt badly by the people in her life. She was desperate to trust somebody, and she wanted to trust him.
And he wanted to deserve that trust.
“You’re thinking too hard,” she teased gently.
“Trying to decide which corner of your mouth to kiss first. You have sexy lips, Agnes. I can’t tell which lip is nicer. I think it’s a tie.”
She grinned. “Kiss me, and I’ll help you decide.”
When he lowered his mouth onto hers she mewled softly and opened her lips, at first playful as she kissed him, then so intense it was all he could do to keep from snatching her into his arms. John shuddered with delight. A sudden and vivid rush of emotion made him feel like a teenager again. Because kissing was the only intimacy he and she could share, restraint heightened every erotic sensation.
He could hardly keep his hand still on her stomach, and underneath it her body flexed like the swells of the ocean. He pictured her giving in to that strong force. He pictured himself riding her currents.
When she moaned into his mouth and he shuddered in response he knew it was time to stop, before he gave in to an urge to seduce her. He already wanted to lead her deep into the sand dunes, where no one could see what they d
id next.
He couldn’t let himself do that. When they were naked and he was making love to her with wild abandon she might doubt his gentlemanly talk about being patient, to say the least. He wanted her to trust him, not wonder if he were manipulating her.
Quickly John pulled back. Looking down into her half shut eyes and flushed face, with its charged expression of desire, he was amazed at his self-control. Maybe there was a little of Sir Miles’s chilvalry in his blood, after all. “You’ve been alone a long time,” he whispered, “and I don’t want to take advantage of that, Agnes.”
She frowned and raised a shaking hand to her forehead, as if trying to remember where she was. “No, I don’t want to be careless. I know better than to move too fast.” Her lips were damp and dark red from the pressure of his mouth. John stared at them in fascination, aching to kiss her again. “Kissing each other is not such an innocent thing, after all,” he admitted.
“Not the way you do it.” She looked regretful. “I’ve been alone because I wanted it that way. But maybe it’s time I took some risks again.”
John brushed his lips over hers. Her low sigh of pleasure and the flavor of her mouth nearly made him forget his troubled thoughts. “You taste like those orange slices from breakfast.” He caught her lower lip in a quick sucking motion then released it. “What a meal I could make of you, my lady.”
Her tiny moan of delight made him kiss her again, and their tongues met in a slow, devastating dance inside her mouth. But she began patting his shoulder almost frantically. He knew what she meant and forced himself to move back.
Sitting up, he faced the ocean and propped his arms on updrawn knees. He took deep breaths of ocean breeze and concentrated on the squawking white gulls constantly patrolling the beach. She sat up also, hugged her knees, and stared silently toward a distant horizon where tiny ships crossed the line between ocean and sky.
John still felt as if she were kissing him. It wasn’t only the desire crackling between them like tendrils of static; it was knowing they had something special, a closeness hinting at shared dreams and shared problems.
Stranger in Camelot Page 8
