He nodded and a haggard smile appeared. “How can I fault you for thinking that? I just—” He took another drink.
I picked up my wine and followed suit.
“I just wanted you to tell me…that you cared.”
Well, that made me feel like a grade-A asshole. My stomach twisted around on itself. I took his hand and held it to my cheek. He immediately began stroking my skin, and I couldn’t bear to fight anymore. “I can be patient,” I said. “I don’t exactly have a traditional job anymore, either.”
He swept in for a kiss that nearly snapped my bra off. His lips were hot and desperate, fired up by angst. Pulling back, he said, “You know that I think you’re the funniest and most brilliant actress alive, right? You pretty much steal whatever you’re in, my short redhead.”
What egocentric thespian wouldn’t grin after a line like that? “Yes, I’ll sleep with you. You don’t have to go on and on.”
“I know you’ll sleep with me. It’s my principal certainty in life, besides you crying when I don’t want you to. Which is always.”
Oh, sure, mock me just because I tear up faster than you can say, ‘Look, a Sarah McLachlan commercial about abused animals.’
“Maybe I won’t sleep with you,” I muttered before polishing off my dinner with one giant bite. I wasn’t that easy!
“Yes, you will.”
Yes, I was.
He downed the rest of his beer and caught the eye of our waiter. Sam handed over his credit card without looking at the bill. I wondered which alias’ name was on it. Sam was definitely his actual, real, birth-certificate first name. After that, things got fuzzy. “Should I be thanking Richmond for my meal, or Bert?” I asked. “Perhaps Ernie?”
He pulled my arm and drew me to him until there was no air between us. His whisper was hot on my ear and danced down my neck. “How, exactly, will I be thanked?”
“Who, exactly, are you?” I finished my wine, my stomach warming to it, and him, and our game. “I’m not familiar with Bert. Perhaps he doesn’t like it when I unzip his pants with my teeth.”
A small, breathy moan escaped his mouth. It blew across my neck, already over-stimulated. I could swear it blew across my pussy, too. His voice got low and deep, the way it did when he pushed me into the mattress and… “Everyone here at Thief Industries enjoys it when you do that. How about this—” His fingers skimmed upward and unzipped my dress a scant inch, and then teased the exposed skin at my nape. I locked my jaws together to stifle my whimper. “Let me take you back to the apartment and convince you that I have the utmost respect for your heart. And for,” he nuzzled my earlobe, “a lot of your other places.” He tugged the zipper pull up again, one millimetre at a time. “Maybe you can teach me that teeth thing.”
I find that most things in life would go so much more smoothly if sexy people suggested them. ‘Let’s create world peace,’ a saucy lady might say, or ‘Sheltering the homeless is a capital idea,’ says the half-naked male model, and suddenly—boom!—all problems ever are solved because of the worldwide orgy. I guess that’s called ‘advertising’, and was why the characters on Mad Men were always raring to get it on.
Sam craned his neck to see my face. “I’m not sure I want to know what you’re contemplating, but I believe you’re agreeing with me?”
I smiled. “Mmm-hmm.”
We rose to leave, his hand in the small of my back and straying lower. I giggled and swatted him away. I did not need a cell phone pic of me getting goosed by an international fugitive. No way was I so famous that folks were stalking me hoping to get a moment for TMZ, but with my ill luck, it would figure.
In the street, he tugged on my hand and led me to the street corner, then farther into the shadows between two stone buildings. He pushed me against one and whispered, “This is a skimpy dress, Miss Lytton. If I pulled your panties to the side, it would be nothing to fuck you right here.”
My back protested the sharp stone, but the rest of me was ready to sacrifice my underwear to the alley and get going. I cupped his face and kissed him, sucking on his lower lip as if my lust depended on it. And suddenly he was gone, ripped away from my mouth. “What?” I managed to say before a bag enclosed my head.
Chapter Three
That Old, Familiar Fleeing
I sucked in a panicked breath and stale burlap filled my dry mouth. Two sets of hands jerked my arms in opposite directions, but I pulled against all of them and kicked in front of me. I could tell someone stood there, and he cursed when I connected with whichever part of him. One of my arms flew free. By some miracle, my purse still hung from my shoulder, and I swung it to the right and then the left. My other attacker fell away. I jerked the bag off me to see Sam on the ground wrestling with one guy, another going to his accomplice’s rescue and a dude behind the wheel of a black car close by on the street. “Get ‘em!” yelled car guy in an American accent.
Oh, hell no. I was way too fucking horny to let my piece of ass be kidnapped. Also, I loved him and stuff.
I unleashed fury on both the dudes pummelling Sam, now bagged on the head, too. I shrieked and kicked and punched, and the guy on top let Sam go to deal with me. Luckily, just then, a stream of burly guys came a-running from the pub next door. Our goons nearly flew into their awaiting car and sped off, a couple of the pub dudes in hot pursuit on foot.
“Sam!” I knelt on the alley ground and burst into tears, like any proper woman in a melodramatic movie from the 1930s. I removed his burlap sack. He blinked and tried to talk, so I kissed him for being alive. I tasted blood in his mouth, streaming from a rapidly-purpling punch mark.
“Thanks for kicking me,” my loving lover said.
Whoops. I attempted to sniff my tears back into my eyeballs. “Sorry, I had a bag on my head.”
“If I had a nickel for every time you wounded me, I could hire a bodyguard.”
I chose to ignore that ridiculous remark. I only ever hit him when he deserved it, or when he startled me, or sometimes in the middle of the night—allegedly, since I never remembered this, and everyone knows that thieves are liars.
“You all right?” asked one of the helpful men who’d saved us.
Sam’s brow thunderations increased as he counted the number of potential witnesses. “We need to get out of here,” he muttered to me as he steadied himself on my arm on the way to a wobbly standing position. He kept pulling me towards the street, where his other hand was already hailing a cab.
Our rescuer pursued. “Did they mug you? Let me call the police, yeah?”
A horrible growl rumbled forth from Sam, and I took that as a sign for me to say my lines. “No, thank you! We’re okay.” Sam shoved me into a back seat and yanked the door closed behind us. “Thank you!” I screamed, hoping the friendly crowd could hear me and wouldn’t consider all Americans to be ungrateful jerkfaces. I grinned and waved like a mad lady. One gent returned my wave, even as he shrugged confusedly.
I turned to Sam, who was attempting to clean the blood from the corner of his mouth while the cabbie looked askance in the rear-view mirror. “Bar fight,” I lied. “Don’t worry.” I grinned until the driver stopped caring, then gave him the address for my apartment. “Sam, baby, are you—”
“Not here,” he replied.
“Well, I’m okay, thanks for asking.” I slumped into my corner of the cab and laced my fingers together. They’d begun shaking at some point. His bigger hand came down over mine, the gesture warm and saying the opposite of his testy protestations. I threw myself across the seat to lean on his shoulder, and he held me, wordlessly, as we fled from yet another attack that had rained down upon us no doubt because of him. I wiped my nose and considered that I hadn’t been harassed in an entire year.
When a milestone like that was a mark of favour in your relationship, it was a bad sign, akin to seeing someone post ‘out of French fries’ at McDonald’s.
I couldn’t stop the fresh tears. We arrived at my building, and I kept my face down through the lobby and i
n the elevator. My hyperactive fear and relief battled with each other to see which would drain my muscles of energy.
Inside the apartment, I dropped my purse in the middle of the floor and continued into the living room, where I fell onto the couch face-first. Sam swept into the bathroom and washed while I kept shaking like a wind-up toy. Every time I’d try to take a deep breath and tell myself it was over, I’d hear the squish-thud when one of the assailants punched Sam, or feel the scratchy bag close my eyes for me, and begin quaking again.
After a few minutes, Sam returned and sat beside my legs. I twisted into a cross-legged position facing him. Oh, my poor baby—he had a righteous shiner that almost blotted out his dimple. I reached one finger to brush the place on his cheek where it should have been. “Come out, come out wherever you are,” I whispered. His brows came together in an expression of such sorrow, I just had to kiss him. Nothing mattered more than making that horrible sadness flee.
We grappled with each other, clothes flying, breathing laboured, desperation palpable. He pulled my dress off over my head and wrapped his arm around my waist to face me towards the back of the sofa while on my knees. He held me that way, his chest naked against me, and spread small, sharp bites across my neck while he fumbled with the fly of his pants. His fingers teased my pussy, but almost perfunctorily, a means to his end, and mine.
I spread my knees wider, and he grunted in approval. Not even bothering to remove them, he pushed my panties to the side and slid into me, roughly, knocking the breath from me in a startled moan of pleasure. I braced myself on the couch as he fucked me, thrusting in fast, then pulling out slowly, as if to make me lose my mind. I think I did right around the time he began fisting his hand in my hair to pull my head back. We moved as one, making the couch quake and thump on the wall.
I reached behind me to grasp the tight, working muscles of his ass, so smooth and gorgeous in my hand. It spurred him on, and he moaned, “Fuck me, Samantha,” hot and wet, into my skin. My entire body hovered on sensation overload, and I begged him to never stop. Stopping was thinking, and neither of us wanted that.
He eventually did slow and release me. He slumped into the cushions and said, “Come here.” I dropped onto his lap, his cock stretching me tight, my body a little sore from his passionate onslaught of this afternoon. But I didn’t care, and soon I slid on him without coherent thought. It seemed he couldn’t pull me close enough—both arms wrapped around me, his face in my breasts, hair, and kissing me so deep and slow that the sensation fluttered from my lips to my hips. I rode him until I could no longer take in a full breath, until he came and shuddered underneath me, gripping me so tight it hurt, until I finally burst with my own orgasm and fell over him.
“I love you,” I said, my breath faltering.
His head on my shoulder, he said it back to me, achingly, full of the emotions I’d tried to release us both from. I got up, took his hand, and we went to the bedroom and dropped into the covers without another word.
I don’t even remember falling asleep, but awoke at five a.m. local. I made a trip to the bathroom and watched Sam sleep for a long time, until the sun had come alive. I should have been snoozing, trying to acclimate to the time change, but I figured I’d feel like crap one way or the other.
The conversation I was having with myself, I should be discussing with him. We’d avoided it long enough, believing that love and great sex would carry us through a relationship model that looked like a tightrope walker balancing above a crocodile pit.
“Hey—” said a sleepy voice.
I started and stiffened in my armchair beside the bed. “Hey. You should go back to sleep,” I said.
“I’ve been here for a week. I’m mostly adjusted.” He sat up, the sheets bunched around his waist and legs. His skin glowed in the morning light, and his hair flopped in a rumply, sexy mess over his forehead. “You should come here.” He patted beside him.
I avoided his eyes and decided it was a great time to pick invisible dust off my robe.
He sighed. “Okay. We have to talk about it.” My gaze stayed averted. The ball was so far in his court he was sitting in the line judge’s lap. “I have an idea about what’s going on.”
“Please don’t tell me,” I burst out. The moment I said it, I understood it to be true. I couldn’t know. Knowing things would put me in even deeper boiling water than I already was. He’d destroyed my life one time, and I’d rebuilt it—better, stronger, faster. My new life was pure Bionic Woman, and damned if I’d give it up so easily.
“I wasn’t going to tell you.” After this razor-edged reply, he shifted in the sheets and decided what to say, his mouth pursed and bitter. “Look, I know this is hard. I miss you.” His voice broke, just a bit, just enough to shatter my composure. “I miss you all the time. You’re like a tick on my skin.”
Ah, the romance of a country boy from North Carolina.
He continued his love poem, “And I understand that this situation is untenable. But I’ve spent quite a few years building a…lifestyle and a means of making money that wasn’t above-board. I can’t snap my fingers and make it stop. People know who I am. They know who you are, obviously.”
I sucked in a gasp. “They followed me.”
“Yeah, probably. Not your fault.”
Of course it wasn’t, but my stomach twisted all the same.
“I’m trying to get out. I’ve been a straight arrow since the Picasso debacle. Well”—he shrugged and sent the dimple into the fray—“I may have been forced to circumvent local statutes here and there in the interest of staying un-jailed, but—”
His smile did not help. I felt betrayed by the dimple for the first time in ages. Lately, it had told me truths instead of lies. Truths like ‘I love your boobs in that sweater’, or ‘I enjoy giving you the last of my Tater Tots’.
I bunched my hands in my nubby pink robe. “I can’t believe I’m going to say a sentence like this, but I have an image to protect now, Sam. What happened last night—it could have led down a road that destroys my career. I’m finally doing what I love. And I’m good at it! People seem to want to watch me doing it, which is bizarre, but fantastic.”
“God, Samantha, you have to believe me when I say I don’t want to put any of that into jeopardy—”
“But you will. You do. You can’t help it.” I turned to watch the street begin to wake up into the zip of morning traffic. “I knew this going in.”
“Yes, you did.”
His bitterness was palpable. I tasted its sour notes, with a finish of…being finished.
I couldn’t say the words. How could I say it? I began to cry—the silent kind, where the tears just slip away, but still sting your eyes long after they’ve gone.
How had an ill-advised lark got so out of control? How was it that I was a…B- or C-list movie star? What was my life?
And what kind of stupid, moronic woman chooses the one man she can’t take to a public premiere unless she wants the FBI tip line to go nuts? I wiped the tears from my face with my robe in a pathetic effort to feel less pathetic.
He slid to the end of the bed and leaned to grab my hands. My face jerked up to find him searching my eyes. “I could let you go and say it’s the right thing to do and be noble, but fuck that. I’m not noble, and I love you. I want you more than I’ve wanted anything, and I will fight to make this work.”
“How?” I shook my head and turned my gaze from his eyes to his chest. But I couldn’t look at him there, either. Every last piece of him would undo me, dissolve my resolve and turn it into lust or love or some highly magnetic combination of the two. Lord a mercy, he was human quicksand. He wants me more than he’s wanted anything, but I don’t hear from him for weeks on end. Suuuucccckkkk. He doesn’t want to put me in jeopardy, but oops lol kidnappers. Ssssuuuuuucccccckkkkkk!
His jaw worked as he set my hands on my lap in a way that was a wrenching combination of loving and angry. He whipped on his pants, his back to me. I didn’t want to be thinking g
oodbye when I watched his butt disappear. We’d had so many swell times, me and his firm posterior. So many well-fitting pairs of jeans.
“I’m going to find out what the hell happened last night.” His shirt and shoes on, he paused at the door of the bedroom, his face puffy from sleep and hard from worry.
“Yes, wonderful, the solution to our problems is for you to leave.” I stood to try and reach the moral high ground. “How long will you be gone this time, ‘figuring things out’? A week? Two? When will I hear from you? Will it be an actual call so I can hear your voice and pretend we’re in the same room, or will a dirty text suffice for the all-clear?”
He grimaced in an obvious effort to not hurl expletives at me and sagged against the door jamb. Shaking his head, he said, solemnly, “I’m sorry. And I don’t know. I’m not an accountant, and I didn’t know you resented me so much for it.”
“It’s not that fucking hard, Sam! You pick up the phone. You can even track me with mine! Isn’t that what you wanted? I guess I should be keeping tabs on you. At least then I wouldn’t go to sleep at night and pray for a ghost.” I clutched my hands to stop them from reaching out.
“So what is this? Are you dumping me?”
There they went again—the tears, sliding down, like my stomach, like my heart. “I don’t know. I’m heartsick from wondering about you. Every. Day. It’s not cute anymore.”
“I was going to take you sightseeing today, so…” He laughed, the dimple giving a little bow. “Sorry. Again.” Standing there for another moment, he waited for me to speak, to beg him to come back and give me kitchen scraps. But I had a stubborn streak as wide as the Mississippi, and I merely nodded.
I’d spent a year ignoring the reality of my relationship with Sam, ignoring that it wasn’t a relationship. Or maybe that it was. Ignoring that I wrote ‘Mrs Sam the Thief’ on my mental Trapper Keeper every day in glitter pen. Now was the time to face things, and to hold fast to myself, and my needs. I’d made lemonade from Picasso, and damn it, I would drink up. You have to take care of yourself before you take care of anyone else, Oprah told me in my brain.
The Dimple Strikes Back Page 3
