by Rachel Lee
“Sounds great to me.”
“Good! That makes me feel even better. I haven’t done any girl shopping in ages. Gage tries, but the whole mall thing bores him after a while.”
“Well, wear your track shoes. I haven’t been to the mall in ages.” She hadn’t felt like it in months. It had seemed like too much effort.
“Just what I had in mind. Well, I’ve got to get back to work. This weather has got people interested in books again. Oh, could you take the two steaks out of the freezer and thaw them?”
“Sure.”
After she hung up, Angela pulled the steaks from the freezer and set them on the counter. Then her thoughts rolled back around to Rafe. He had to be feeling awful. But maybe he was just asleep? He might have been up really late last night, worrying.
It was nearly eleven, and she decided to risk it. First she showered and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, then she knocked on his door.
He answered it, wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants that looked as if they’d seen better days many years ago. His dark hair was tousled, and his eyes were puffy.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?”
“I was just getting up. Something wrong?”
Now that she was facing him, she didn’t know what to say. Coming up here to cheer him up had seemed like a great idea until she was actually faced with talking to him. He was so imposing, and the bare expanse of his chest prodded her thoughts in directions she did not want to go.
“I was, um, just concerned about you.”
“I’m fine.”
The response seemed to close the conversation, so she started to turn away, but he reached out and touched her shoulder, stopping her. “Could you do me a favor?”
She managed a smile. “Sure.”
“Would you take Peanut downstairs and get him started on his feeding? I really need a shower.”
Carrying the baby felt so good, she thought as she took the child downstairs. The little body, dressed in a fresh playsuit, fit beautifully into the crook of her arm, and the little face was bright and alert. Peanut, at least, was glad to be alive this morning.
He also seemed more interested in observing his world this morning than actually eating, although the minute she offered him the bottle he latched onto the nipple as if starved.
She moved to the rocking chair in the living room and rocked gently as she fed the baby, sinking into a rare contentment.
When he was done with the bottle, she put him on her shoulder to burp him, still rocking gently, still feeling more useful and real than she could remember having felt in a long time.
Babies, she thought, had a way of cutting through all the crap. This was what really mattered in the world.
Rafe joined them twenty minutes later, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to take the child from her. Instead, he sat across from them, watching as Angela propped the baby on her lap and let him look around.
“He’s alert this morning,” she remarked.
He nodded. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
“It seems hard to believe he could be at the center of so much trouble.”
“Well, he’s not the cause of it. I am.”
“You’re being rather hard on yourself.”
He shrugged. “Just being honest.”
“You don’t...you don’t still want to give him up, do you?”
He shook his head. “No. And certainly not to Manny.”
“I don’t see how they could find out that you meant to give the baby to Nate. Who else besides me knows that?”
“My boss.” He rubbed his chin, a quick, almost irritable gesture. “She thought it was a good idea. I can’t work the streets with a baby.”
“No...” But they’d already discussed this. “Did she push for it?”
“She pushed me to find a resolution one way or another.”
“Have you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t give up the kid, but I don’t want to give up my job, either. Oh, hell, it’s a mess. I guess I just need to resign myself to a tame future.”
“Is that so bad?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly led a tame life. I can already feel myself rusting.”
She couldn’t help it A soft laugh escaped her. “You don’t look rusty.”
“Trust me, I can hear my brain cells squeaking.” But he smiled faintly as he said it. “Nah, it’s not that bad, really. But it’s as if the focus of my entire life has shifted. I’m more absorbed in that child than I ever would have imagined I could be.”
She looked down at the dozing baby in her arms and nodded. She knew exactly what he meant.
“Let me take him up and change him,” Rafe said abruptly. “I’ll be back down in a little while. Maybe we can find some way to amuse ourselves on a cold, gray day.”
She watched him leave and waited for his return, but the minutes ticked away, and finally she gave up and went to look outside. The flurries were falling faster now, and she felt cold and barren to her very soul.
Life could be so damn lonely.
Gage returned home midafternoon, stepping inside with a blast of cold air. Rafe had waited to come back downstairs until he heard Angela go into her room.
That was the best thing, he thought. She was getting too close to the private places in his soul, and he was beginning to feel as though he’d been hanging his laundry out in the breeze for her inspection. He much preferred it when people didn’t know much about what went on inside him. Giving them knowledge only gave them ways to hurt him.
After he had left her to go change the baby, he had realized just how much he was exposing himself and wanted to put a distance between them again. Making her mad at him seemed the easiest way to do it.
But then Gage showed up and blew his plan out of the water.
“How’s Emma?” Rafe asked when Gage had closed the door behind him.
“She’s fine, just a little chilled. I came home to get a sweater for her. How’s everyone here?”
“Asleep, except for me.”
Gage smiled. “Well, you can give this to Angela when she wakes up, then.” He reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a white business envelope. “It came in the mail today.”
Rafe took it. “Sure.” Which meant he was going to have to talk to her again, and lately, talking to her had become an orgy of self-recrimination and self-exposure. He wanted to sigh.
Gage went to get the sweater, and two minutes later was on the way back to the library, leaving Rafe to contemplate the depth of silence in a house where two people weren’t speaking to each other, and the third one was sound asleep in his travel bed.
His apartment had never seemed this empty or this silent in the days before Peanut arrived. He told himself he was just getting used to all the noise and activity of having a baby.
Except that wasn’t true, and he knew it He was getting dangerously addicted to having someone to talk to. To having Angela around.
He sat in the silence for a few minutes, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional moan of the wind around the house. The snow flurries had lightened again, but occasional big flakes were still falling. He should have found the sight magical, but he somehow found it as lonely as the silence.
With a sigh, he gave in and took the envelope upstairs. Whether or not he wanted to talk to Angela, he didn’t feel right about sitting on her mail, especially an envelope from a bank.
Upstairs, he knocked on her door. She answered almost at once, giving him a guarded look.
“Gage asked me to give this to you,” he said. “It came in today’s mail.”
She took the envelope and looked at it. “My ex-employer. Thanks.”
She didn’t close the door or turn away, so he hesitated to just leave. Then she ran her thumbnail under the flap and opened the envelope.
Inside, instead of a business letter, was a sheet of notebook paper covered with spidery writing in blue ink. Angela unfolded it, read for a
moment, then gasped and dropped it on the floor. She turned away quickly, covering her mouth with her hand.
Without considering the propriety of his action, Rafe picked up the letter and scanned it.
Dear Ms. Jaynes,
You probably don’t remember me, but you foreclosed our farm last spring. I want you to know I’m grateful for how hard you tried to prevent it. But I thought you should know, my husband killed himself two weeks ago. I’m not rightly sure what the kids and me are going to do...”
Rafe dropped the letter and reached out for Angela, pulling her into a tight hug. She wasn’t making a sound, but he could feel hot tears dampen his shirtfront as he held her. Something inside him seemed to be cracking wide-open, letting pain for her pour through into his awareness, letting it out of the dark place where he kept all his feelings so tightly locked.
“It’s not your fault,” he heard himself saying huskily. “It’s not your fault....”
But still her tears scalded him. When she started to shake like a leaf in a hurricane, he eased her over to her bed and got her to sit. He never took his arms from around her but sat beside her, letting her cry it all out.
“They shouldn’t have forwarded that letter, the bastards,” he said quietly. “They shouldn’t have done that to you....”
“Why not? It’s my fault....” Her voice broke on a sob.
“It’s not your fault. My God, Angel, you didn’t make the rules of that game. The bank did. Their shareholders did. You didn’t make the drought, or the fall in crop prices, or anything else that led to this. And you didn’t make that man kill himself. You didn’t hand him a gun or a noose. You can’t blame yourself for this. You can’t.”
She lifted her wet face and looked at him. “I do. I had a hand in it. Maybe I could have found some way of preventing all this.”
“That woman said you did everything you could. Even she knows it. Angel, you didn’t deal these blows. Life did.”
“I remember the kids,” she said brokenly. “I still remember those kids....” She buried her face in his shoulder, and he held her, rocking her gently, waiting for the storm to pass.
He thought about how unfair life could be. Angela didn’t deserve to feel this way. She had been no more responsible for that foreclosure and its outcome than he had. She was as much a victim of fate, the elements and bank policies as the family that had lost its farm. Not that he blamed banks for what happened, either. All they had done was bet alongside the farmer that he would have a good crop. The only difference between them was that the bank, unlike the farmer, had a way to collect when the crop didn’t deliver.
He tried to express this to Angela but wasn’t sure if she heard him. She grew quieter, though, as if she didn’t have the energy to cry anymore.
After a while she said thickly, “I need to eat. All this stress...”
“Tell me what you want. I’ll bring it up here.”
“I have some candy on the dresser.”
He was reluctant to let her go, but he went to the bag of hard candies and unwrapped a piece for her. She popped it in her mouth, sucking on it as she wiped her eyes.
“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked. “Physically, I mean.”
She nodded. “I just need to get my sugar up....” Her voice trailed away; then she turned from him and hammered her fist on the pillow. “God, I’m so sick of this!”
He didn’t ask what she was sick of. He had a pretty good idea. Between her disease and this damn letter, she had every right to feel that way. He rubbed her back, wishing he could do more to make her feel better.
It was almost a relief when she finally turned to him again and came into his arms. Outside, the wind howled a mournful tune, the perfect counterpoint to what they were feeling in this bedroom. The sound was as lonely as a train whistle at night
She wasn’t crying anymore, and the anger she had been feeling had apparently eased. Her body was soft in his embrace, pliant and relaxed as if she had found a haven. He hoped she had.
And much to his own surprise, he discovered he liked comforting her. It made him feel useful in a way he had seldom felt, useful on an emotional level. Even the baby didn’t make him feel this way. The infant was dependent on him for everything, but it wasn’t the same as having someone turn to him for comfort.
Which revealed to him a quirk in his own psyche. For the first time in his life, he considered his deepest motivation and realized that what he needed most of all was to be needed. His work with the agency had merely been a form of that, causing him to become one of the best undercover operatives they had. Causing him to make himself nearly irreplaceable.
It was part of what appealed to him about Peanut, too. Nobody else could replace him; he was the child’s dad.
Now this. He supposed Angela could replace him with any number of other friends who could comfort her, but right here and now she had turned to him.
And that made him feel damn good.
It was also making him feel something else, he realized as he noticed his body’s stirrings. A warm languor was beginning to fill him, thick and sweet as honey. His heart began to beat heavily, and he closed his eyes, savoring the moment.
He had always loved women but preferred to keep them at a distance, ever since he had learned how much they could hurt him, a lesson he had received early in life. But Angela was already past his emotional barriers, already inside with him, and what he was feeling now seemed like the most natural extension of that. It was, he realized dimly, the exact reverse of the way his relationships with women usually worked.
Alarms should have been sounding, but if they did, they were so muffled he didn’t hear them. All he knew was that holding Angela felt better than anything in his life had ever felt.
And she seemed to feel the same way. She relaxed into him more and more, and he dared to start stroking her back. Then a thought occurred to him, and though he was reluctant to shatter the mood, he had to ask, “Are you okay? Do you need more candy?”
“I’m fine,” she murmured. She started to pull back, as if she realized how much she was leaning on him, but his hold on her tightened, keeping her where she was. She didn’t fight him, giving in with a quickness that told him she was enjoying this embrace as much as he was.
And it was she, finally, who tipped her head to look up at him, bringing their mouths into close proximity.
Her eyes were still puffy from her tears, but she was no longer crying. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she were about to speak, but she didn’t say a word. She moved not a muscle, hardly even breathed, as if she were feeling exactly what he was feeling.
And what he was feeling suddenly blossomed into full-blown hunger for her. He wanted her over him, under him, all around him, wanted to drive himself into her warm moist depths and forget that anything else existed. His heart jumped to a faster rhythm, and he could feel himself pulsing with yearning. The world began to recede. Even the wind’s moan sounded as if it were far away.
Nothing existed except Angela and her soft pink lips only a few inches away. Nothing existed except this woman and her soft, warm body pressed against his.
Time seemed to halt. Dimly he was aware that he was breathing more rapidly, but so was she. The air around them seemed to shimmer, and, faint but distinct, he could smell the sex odors as their bodies awakened.
As his mouth lowered to hers, he realized that he hadn’t learned a thing. He was about to make a huge mistake. And he didn’t care. He needed her.
Her mouth was warm, still tasting of cherry candy. The minute his lips found hers, she opened to receive him, apparently hungering for him as much as he hungered for her. The realization fueled the heat growing in his groin, and he was perfectly willing to take the invitation. His tongue dipped into her mouth, finding hers and stroking it with sexual promise.
He felt her shiver, and she responded in kind, her tongue darting against his, her hands suddenly clutching at his back as if she was afraid she would fall.
Sh
e ought to be afraid, he thought hazily. And so should he. This was dangerous for two people who were so vulnerable right now. Dangerous for two people who had so many reasons not to get involved.
But he was already involved. In a week or so, he would leave and go back to all his problems in Miami, alone. So being involved didn’t matter.
It was as good a rationalization as any for what he was about to do. Distance would make him safe in the end, so he could take the risk now.
Somehow they were now lying side by side across the bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing with a hunger and desperation that crumbled the remaining barriers. He felt her pelvis press against him, heard her little moans of eagerness, and in response his own heat became blinding.
There would be time later for finesse, but right now there was no time for anything except getting rid of clothing as fast as possible.
He tore at her sweater, pulling it over her head. He hardly noticed the athletic bra she was wearing; he was too busy clawing at the fastening on her jeans.
And she was tugging just as eagerly at his sweatshirt. He helped as much as he could while he fumbled at her jeans. He kicked his own shoes off while he pulled her jeans down. They caught on her ankles, and he gave them a mighty tug. When they came free, they continued to sail across the bedroom. In one swift movement, he rose to his feet and shoved his own pants down and away, along with his briefs.
He was naked at last, and never in his life had being naked felt so good or right It was as if this moment had always been meant to be.
He paused an instant, just an instant, to look at her lying there in her white bra and panties. She was still a little too thin, but she was beautiful anyway, with curves in the right places and a vulnerability that tugged at some place deeply inside him.
Bending, he tugged her panties off and bent to press a quick kiss on the curly mound of blond hair he had revealed. Then he lay beside her and pulled off her bra.
She caught her breath, and her blue eyes opened a little, looking at him with a sudden uncertainty that moved him.
“I can stop,” he whispered huskily. “I can still stop.” But he didn’t want to. With the small creamy mounds of her breasts only inches away, with the warm, moist depths of her center within reach, stopping was the last thing on earth he wanted to do.
