Rule Breaker

by Barbara Boswell

  “That’s one end of the scale. You’re at the other, putting your hapless admirers through the paces, cracking the whip, dangling the carrot, pulling the strings—”

  “Do you know any more cliches?” snapped Jamie. “Why not add them to the list?”

  “Sure.” A feral smile curved his lips. His slightly-too-dark-to-be-golden eyes held a challenging glint. “Here’s the most cliched cliche of them all. The bickering would-be lovers in a hot clinch.”

  And before Jamie could speak, move or even breathe, he yanked her into his arms. Pressed tightly against him, she could feel the burgeoning strength of him, every taut line of him.

  For a split second she was too shocked to struggle. And then the words came all at once, rushing from her in a breathless torrent. “I don’t find your Neanderthal tactics amusing in the least, Rand Marshall. I’ve tried to be a good sport, but now you’ve gone too far. Let me go this instant or—”

  “You’ll scream?” Rand asked with interest. He lowered his head and brushed her lips lightly with his. “You can’t, it’s a library, remember?”

  His hands moved audaciously over her, molding her even closer to his strong, male frame. Jamie fought the syrupy warmth that crept through her, making her limbs tremulous and her mind fuzzy. “I’ll scream so loudly I’ll have the Merlton police here within minutes,” she insisted. She felt dizzy and weak, but she denied the overwhelming urge to cling to Rand for support.

  “Mmm, will you?” He nibbled sensuously on her earlobe while his big harfds smoothed over her back with long, i sweeping strokes.

  “I’ll press charges.” Her eyelids were getting heavy, ajjid ! she had to fight to snap them open. She wanted to relax against his masculine warmth and revel in his strength Cheeks scarlet with shame, she silently admitted that she wanted his hands to keep caressing her until... until—

  By a sheer act of will, she pulled herself together and jerked backward. He was still holding her, but she’d gained j enough leverage to pull back and glare up at him. “I know 1 almost all the cops on the force. They’ll throw you in jail.” “They’ll have to charge me with something first,” Rand murmured softly, smiling down at her, not at all concerned with her threats. He began nibbling again, this time on her neck. “What’ll it be?”

  Jamie whimpered. A thick, hot river of sensation bubbled through her, but she determinedly struggled against it.

  [ “Sexual harassment.” She wriggled against him in another 5 effort to break loose. He didn’t loosen his grip, but her movements electrified them both. Reflexively, Jamie moved again, in order to free herself, but unconsciously, involuntarily, she moved more sinuously this time.

  It was a major mistake. Rand made a strange sound that was a combination of a laugh and a groan. “I think it would be damn hard to figure out who’s sexually harassing whom at this point, Jamie.” His voice deepened and thickened. “Jamie.” His mouth hovered seductively, hungrily over hers.

  “No,” she protested weakly. Though her mind commanded her to push him away, her body refused to accept the order.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Oh yes.”

  His mouth opened over hers and he kissed her, hard.

  She wasn’t prepared for the stunning surge of need that swept through her as his arms more tightly enfolded her. He was so big and strong; his masculinity evoked a powerful feminine response, the force of which she’d never before experienced. Her eyes fluttered shut, and she gave up the fight and slowly slid her arms around his neck to bring her body even more fully against his.

  His mouth was ardent and hungry as it moved over hers. Of their own volition, her lips parted for him, and when he thrust his tongue into her mouth, she made a small, soft sound and gave in to his delicious, erotic demands. Her tongue reached for his, and they rubbed sensuously, tasting, probing, stroking.

  A glowing heat blossomed deep in her belly, a secret swelling throb that ached for his touch. And the kiss went on and on, growing deeper and hotter and hungrier. There was nothing in the world but Rand, dominating her mind and body with his passion and his voracious male need. Clinging to him, writhing sensuously in his arms, Jamie felt a pleasure so intense that it bordered exquisitely on pain.

  Her mind, always so ordered and controlled, splintered and spun away. For the first time in her life her senses took over, and they were filled with Rand, with the intoxicating taste, touch and scent of him.

  Then, abruptly, incredibly, it was over. Rand ended the kiss and pulled away from her.

  He stared at Jamie, his eyes dark and intense, his body hard as stone. He felt as if the top of his head had been blown off, a phenomenon often experienced by Brick Lawson’s characters, but one their creator, Rand Marshall, never had experienced before. Not cool Rand Marshall, the master of his passion, the smooth operator whose emotions had always remained comfortably detached from his superb technique.

  Until now. Somehow sexual desire had combined with emotion to explode into a passionate conflagration. He’d never been so stirred by a single kiss. And they were in a library, of all places, hardly a setting noted for its romantic ambience. But she’d been so passionate and responsive in his arms that he’d quickly reached the point where kissing wasn’t enough.

  If he hadn’t torn himself away from her when he aid, he would’ve pulled her blouse from inside her wide belt and unbuttoned it. And then he would have put his mouth over her nipples, which were so hard and tight that he’d felt thfeir^ small pressure against his chest when he held her—

  A sharp shudder of desire racked him, and he focused his gaze on her lips, which were rosy and wet and slightly swollen.

  Jamie stared back at him. The heady taste of him lingered on her lips and her tongue. Her breasts were achy and swollen, the tips tingling and acutely sensitive. There was a warm, provocative moisture between her thighs. She stood there, caught in his gaze, her breathing erratic, her face flushed.

  She wanted him. Her body vibrated with urgency. When he looked at her, it was as if he was physically touching her again. She felt a soft thrust of sensation in her already taut nipples as they grew more pointed beneath her clothes. Sharp sensual spears pierced the hot, secret core of her. She was rocked by ambivalence, wanting to press herself tightly, wantonly against Rand as much as she wanted to flee from the sexual danger he presented.

  She felt confused and off balance. Never in her twenty-five careful years had she experienced this elemental and profound need to merge with a man. To claim him for herself, to belong to him completely.

  It was unnerving, it was insane. Cool, calm Jamie Saraceni wasn’t the type to lose her head over a man’s kiss. But she had this time; there was no denying it. She was horrified.

  “You have to leave,” she said in a breathless, husky voice, which she hardly recognized as her own.

  “Now I know your secret.” Rand’s mouth curved into a slow, sexy smile. “The lady librarian isn’t controlled and repressed, after all.” He sounded inordinately pleased with his discovery. They were going to be dynamite in bed together.

  A fierce surge of anger swept through her. She felt exposed and vulnerable, a new experience for her, and she didn’t like it one bit. That smug male smile of his and the teasing lilt in his voice were the figurative equivalent of tossing a lighted match into a pool of gasoline. Her fury flamed to flash point. “Get out of here, Rand Marshall. I’m aghast at what happened!”

  Rand’s laugh was sexy and deep. “Honey, you’re hot and bothered because of what happened.”

  Her whole body was one hot blush. For him to know, to tease her about it. She was mortified.

  “I’ll leave now, Jamie.” His tone made it plain that he was leaving because he wanted to, not because she’d told him to. “And I’ll call you,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the door.

  “I won’t talk to you,” she called after him.

  “Yes, you will,” he replied amiably.

  She wouldn’t, she insisted to herself. The lost contine
nt of Atlantis would reemerge from the sea, a UFO would land on the White House lawn, and New Jersey would secede from the Union before Jamie Saraceni consented to speak to Rand Marshall again.

  Three

  Every time the phone rang that evening, Jamie jumped. There were calls for her nephews, eight-year-old Brandon and seven-year-old Timmy, for her father, Al, for her mother, Maureen, for her grandmother, and at least five calls for Saran.

  There were no calls for Jamie or her sister Cassie, the divorced mother of the boys. Cassie sat in front of the television set—in the Saraceni household, the TV was on from News at Sunrise to the end of The David Letterman Show—engrossed in a program, oblivious to her lack of calls.

  Jamie wished she was. She felt restless and on edge. Not that she wanted Rand Marshall to call, she assured herself. There was only one telephone in the house, in the always occupied kitchen, so privacy during a phone call was unheard of among the Saracenis, and if Rand was to start in with sexually charged innuendos...

  “Honey, you’re hot and bothered because of what happened.” His voice echoed in her head, complete with his rakish laughter. She thought of that rapacious kiss in the library, and her pulses quickened. A sensuous little shiver tingled along her spine.

  Even sitting here in the kitchen, surrounded by tax forms—she did the family’s taxes every year and April fifteenth was only a month away—Jamie could still feel that stunning shock of sexual awareness that had flashed through her at her first sight of Rand Marshall.

  She stared absently into space, reliving that moment. She didn’t see the two big cats, a black tom and a gray Persian, coming until they’d leaped onto the table, one after the other, and began a spirited wrestling match. The year’s worth of receipts, old checkbooks, credit card slips and tax information returns that Jamie had arranged in neat little piles went flying. A cross-eyed Siamese cat with a well-documented predilection for chewing paper chose that moment to leap onto a tax form that had fallen to the floor.

  Jamie groaned in frustration. She was not a cat fancier, which was a definite drawback in a house with seven cats. Sensing that she was not enchanted with their presence, the two furry wrestlers resumed their match under the table, and the Siamese escaped with the tax form between his teeth.

  With Jamie hot on his trail, he streaked to one of the upstairs bedrooms and disappeared under a bed. When she heard the unmistakable sound of paper tearing, she conceded defeat and returned to the kitchen muttering, her eyes smoldering as she surveyed the year’s worth of income and spending information, which she’d spent hours sorting, scattered all over the floor.

  “Jamie doesn’t like cats much,” Grandma Saraceni observed to no one in particular. “I trace it back to the time she was seven, when Tiger—remember him?—ate her parakeet.”

  “Gross!” enthused Timmy, looking up from the video game he and his brother were playing. The Saracenis had two television sets in their family room, one for watching, the other hooked up to the children’s electronic game system. Both were continually in use.

  “I bet there was blood and feathers everywhere!” Brandon added with relish.

  “We had a funeral, remember, Jamie?” Grandtna said with a smile of reminiscence. “We put the remains—and there sure wasn’t much left of that bird—in a shoe box and sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic^ before we buried him in the garden.”

  “I remember, Grandma, it was lovely,” said Jamie, stooping to gather the papers.

  “Did that nice young dentist drop by the library with any more gifts today, dear?” asked Jamie’s mother, glancing up from the doll’s hair she was combing. As children, neither bookworm Jamie nor tomboy Cassie had liked dolls, so their mother had taken to collecting them herself. Today, she had over three thousand of them, dolls from the sixties, seventies and eighties, crammed into every available space in the house. She bought, sold and traded them to fellow collectors all over the country.

  “He isn’t a nice young dentist, Mom, he’s a jerk,” said Jamie. Jackass, creep, fool. She could hear Rand’s voice echo in her head and she almost smiled. “And I didn’t hear from him today. Hopefully, he finally realized that I have no intention of ever going out with him.”

  “Nice young dentists don’t grow on trees, honey,” observed Maureen, dressing the doll in a shimmering black strapless sheath. “Some lucky girl is sure to snap him up.” “Mom, Angela’s madly in love with him,” Jamie said patiently. “Even if Daniel Wilcox wasn’t a jerk, which he most definitely is, I couldn’t go out with him without hurting her.”

  “You’re a wonderfully loyal friend, Jamie.” Maureen glanced from the doll she held in her hand to her daughter. “And I know that someday soon you’re going to meet just the right man for you.”

  “Maybe she’s already met him,” Saran piped up. Her big brown eyes widened guilelessly. “Maybe he’s that hunk who was coming on to her in the library this afternoon, Rand Something. He’s cute enough to be on TV, even if he is an insurance salesman.”

  “Claims adjuster,” Jamie corrected automatically, shooting Saran a look of cousinly reproof. She hadn’t forgotten that the little rat had given her phone number to Rand Marshall. She took a deep breath and braced herself for the barrage of comments that was sure to follow.

  “Handsome enough to be on TV?” Her mother looked pleased. “Tell us more, Jamie.”

  “Handsome is as handsome does,” said Grandma tartly. “There have been more handsome murderers than I’d care to count, getting by on their looks to hide their fiendish natures.”

  “Maybe I’d better look through your crime magazines and see if I recognize him in any mug shots, Grandma,” Jamie said dryly. Her grandmother, a crime buff since the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in underworld Chicago, considered everyone guilty until proven innocent.

  “I did it! I found a Warp Zone and it took me to World Four!” bellowed Brandon exultantly, talking in the incomprehensible electronic game jargon that all kids these days seemed to understand. He and Timmy jubilantly slapped each other’s palms in a high five.

  A white cat and a red-striped one bolted through the room, chased by the big black tom. They ran right through the bowl of popcorn, sitting on the floor between the boys, overturning it. Popcorn went everywhere.

  The subject of Rand Marshall was dropped as everybody sprang into action, scolding the cats and sweeping up the popcorn. Jamie was relieved. For reasons she didn’t care to examine too closely, she was singularly unwilling to discuss Rand with anyone.

  Her uncharacteristic reticence puzzled her. She’d never hesitated to share information about her other hapless pursuers. She knew that some considered it odd that a self-supporting twenty-five-year-old career woman still chose to live at home with her family, but it was her own choice. She liked the involvement and the company. The thought of returning each day to an empty apartment, relentlessly neat and quiet as a tomb, held no appeal for her.

  For a moment, she allowed herself to fantasize about coming home to the imaginary cozy home she shared With^ her imaginary husband. She pictured the charming country kitchen where they would cook dinner together while sharing the details of their day. She visualized the lovely old-fashioned bedroom with the cushioned window seat, the canopied bed with lots of pillows and thick down comforter, a fire crackling in the fireplace. Her husband would love to read in bed, just like she did, and they would lie there side by side, propped up on the pillows, engrossed in their books until their eyes met. And then they would smile and close their books and reach for one another...

  Jamie suppressed a sigh of longing. She was careful to keep her fervid romantic streak a well-hidden secret. Her family and friends saw her as methodical, prosaic Jamie who ran her life the way she filed the books in the library. Orderly and precise. She knew her parents were eager for her to find a nice young man to marry in a big, beautiful white wedding; she wanted that, too.

  But there could be no love and no wedding until she found a m
an she could fully trust. Without honesty and trust, a relationship was temporary and meaningless, like her older brother Steve’s string of affairs, like her sister Cassie’s disastrous marriage to that lying cheat, Wayne Blair.

  Observing her brother and former brother-in-law through the years had given Jamie a sort of sixth sense for spotting those charming, self-centered users, cynical and spoiled by the parade of women who kept falling in love with their good looks and smooth lines.

  They didn’t interest her in the slightest. She was searching for a man who wanted emotional involvement along with the physical intimacy, a man who wasn’t merely seeking sexual pleasure without making a commitment and an emotional investment in the woman he took to his bed. The man of her dreams would have a sense of humor so they could laugh together, he would share her values of marriage and family, and he would love her as much as she loved him.

  He had to exist. She’d been waiting for him all her life.

  When an image of Rand Marshall flashed before her mind’s eye, she tried to firmly erase it. How dare he invade her tender, private thoughts of her dream man. It was practically sacrilegious. Rand Marshall was trouble; everything she wanted to avoid. He was even worse than Daniel Wilcox and the other insincere charmers who’d attempted to weasel their way into her life in the past. At least they’d never dared to touch her, while Rand Marshall hadn’t hesitated to grab her, to caress her, to kiss her...

  Desire, swift and sharp and hot, shuddered through her. The searing heat scorching her made her feel feverish and achy all over again, just the way she’d felt in Rand’s arms. Frowning, she remembered how he’d laughed that wicked laugh of his and taunted her about rules being made to be broken. She remembered her loss of control in his arms.

  Jamie shivered. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever met. He tempted her, he made her feel things, do things, want things.

  Jamie steeled herself against the hot tides flowing through her. She wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Rand Marshall, she vowed. Though he would never know it, he was the one man she’d ever met who made her want to break all her own rules.