by Lee Damon
"Why go home? You can stay here."
"You're out of your tiny mind. If you think for one minute that I could sleep with you and not—"
"I'm not totally stupid, toad-prince. You can sleep in Ez's room. What time is it? You won't get any sleep at all by the time you go home and then come back. It's ridiculous."
"Mmmm. Maybe. It's almost three. Lord, have we really been here that long? You do have a way of making time fly, my Kitt."
"We're both mad. At this rate, I'll probably get rid of my kink because I'll be too tired to panic."
"That's not my main worry, you dingbat. If this is the method we've got to use, by the time I can make love with you, we'll have to spend that week in bed catching up on our sleep. And that's not at all what I have in mind."
"With your deviously inventive imagination, I have every confidence that you'll come up with a solution. Are you sure you don't want to sleep here?"
"Positive. It's impossible. Ummm. Very nice. Now, right now, let me up."
"I'm not the least bit afraid yet. Not a twinge."
"You've got all the makings of a wanton, love. Not that I mind, as long as you confine your experiments to me, but... stop it, you tease... that's enough for now."
"My, but you move fast, O'Mara. A regular hoppy toad. Aren't you going to kiss me goodnight?"
"I just did, and that's all you're getting for at least the next five hours. Does Ez have any pajamas? And is there a lock on that door?"
"Why do you need—"
"I want to make sure you stay in your own bed."
"O'Mara! It's not funny. As if I'd—Well, maybe I would at that. All right, all right, I'll stay here. There are some pajama bottoms in the second drawer of his bureau. Don't ask me where the tops are. I think he throws them away."
"Goodnight, love. Ahhh, you'd better put that back on before you get cold. 'Night, Hero."
"Good morning, toad-prince. Don't worry, I'll wake you up by eight."
"Why do I sense a threat in that? If you dump cold water on me, I'll blister your butt."
"Would I do anything so obvious?"
"Much as I love you, there are moments when I don't trust your weird sense of humor an inch. In your own delightful way, you're every bit as crazy as Ez."
"Hold the thought. 'Night, O'Mara."
Chapter 14
Tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, Kitt leaned in the doorway of Ez's room with Hero cradled in her arms and lovingly watched O'Mara sleep. Only half-awake, her instincts and inclination urged her to join him on the big bed. The strong, tanned expanse of bare back practically cried out to be stroked, and she wondered if the rest of him were naked too, under the sheet tangled around his hips and legs. Maybe he hadn't bothered trying to find pajama pants, especially if he didn't usually wear them. Somehow, she rather thought he slept in the raw, and she leaned hard against the door jamb as her knees weakened at the vision of the two of them spending endless nights naked in each other's arms.
God. The man is turning my mind to mush. She straightened up, mentally kicking herself, and decided firmly that what they both needed was a strong dose of fresh air and exercise. Slowly and silently, she moved to the foot of the bed and carefully set Hero down.
"Wake him."
She leaped back to the doorway as Hero's banshee howl echoed around the room.
"What the hell!?" By the time the second word was out, O'Mara was off the bed and crouched in the middle of the floor, blinking around for the source of the unearthly ululations. It took only seconds for him to add Hero to a laughing Kitt and come up with—
"Wake up call!" trilled Kitt, and then dissolved in giggles as she spun around and dove for the bathroom with O'Mara one jump behind her. She flipped the lock on the door just as his palm hit it, and she leaned back against it, laughing.
"Damn your eyes, woman. That's a hell of a way to wake a man out of a sound sleep. It's a wonder I didn't crack my spine."
"I knew you wouldn't," she called through the door. It sounded as if he were leaning on the other side of it, she thought. "I wake Ez up like that all the time, and you're in every bit as good shape as he is."
"I think I'd have preferred the cold water," he said in a disgusted voice.
"But I didn't want a blistered butt," she protested.
"You may get one anyhow," he growled. There was a pause, and she could hear him laughing softly. "Kitt? I'll forgive you. Open up. We'll take a shower, and you can scrub my back in atonement."
She turned her head so her mouth was next to the edge of the door. "Mmmm," she purred. "It truly is a fascinating offer, but I'm not going to take a shower right now. I'll wait until we get back from running."
"Coward. How will I get my back scrubbed?"
"I've got a nice extra-long-handled bath brush. Don't go away. I'll only be a few minutes."
"Wait! Kitt? I've only got the suit I wore last night. Did Ez leave any clothes here? Jeans or something?"
"Yeah. All kinds of stuff. I think there's a couple of warm-up suits in there, too. Help yourself."
Within half an hour, they were in the Mercedes on their way to Beach Avenue. Kitt glanced over at O'Mara, thinking how easily they had meshed their morning routine. While Kitt brushed her hair and her teeth and had a quick wash, O'Mara had called home to reassure Gus and Andy that he was all right and would be along later. He took over the bathroom, and she started the coffee before scrambling into a smoky blue warm-up suit, which somehow, for all its looseness, seemed to accentuate the slim length of her legs and the firm shape of her breasts.
As she left her room, she could hear him moving around in Ez's room and called, "Coffee's ready. Will toast and strawberry preserves hold you for now?"
"Fine. Be right there." His voice was muffled, and she wondered what he had found to wear.
She had the answer two minutes later when he strolled into the kitchen in a warm-up suit that exactly matched hers.
"Thank heavens for drawstrings. Ez is a couple inches bigger around than I am."
"Mmmmm," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the dark cloud of fur visible where he'd zipped the jacket only halfway up.
"Behave yourself, love," he chided, laughing. "If I must," she sighed.
"Where is your mind, love?" At the soft question, Kitt blinked and realized that they were stopped beside the beach.
"It was... ah... um... on other things." She tried hard for an insouciant look, but ended up blushing and laughing.
Shaking his head, he gave her a very male smile, murmuring, "I knew I shouldn't have kissed your breasts."
"O'Mara!"
"Come on, you oversexed wench. Let's run."
It was a beautiful, brisk morning, and they loped easily along Beach Avenue, past Lords Point and out to the end of Great Hill Road before turning and heading back to the car. Kitt recognized several of the morning regulars and smiled a greeting. It was a few minutes before she realized just how much attention they were attracting, and raised a questioning eyebrow at O'Mara.
"I don't usually run along here. And definitely not with a tall, delectable toad-kisser." His grin was pure challenge. "Most particularly not in his-and-her outfits. Add one darling dog, and everyone in town is going to know what's going on by noon."
"I hope Ez's shoes pinch your big toes." She gave him a formidable scowl and stuck out her tongue.
"Hmm. Later, love." He laughed and grabbed her hand, holding it for the rest of the run.
Since Kitt still hadn't food-shopped, he insisted on taking her to breakfast again at the small restaurant in the square. They bantered and laughed their way through omelettes, freshly baked, still-warm cranberry-orange muffins, home fries and grapefruit juice. Over their second cups of coffee, they made tentative plans for the rest of the week.
"Tonight, you and Hero are invited to supper. Andy is agog with anticipation. As might be expected, Ez wrapped her around his little finger Sunday. She was practically panting over him and spent two hours making her special lasagne and a
Black Forest cake when he 'just happened' to mention that they were two of his favorite treats."
"He has an appalling effect on older women," said Kitt, straight-faced.
"Women have been spoiling him rotten all his life. I don't know how he does it. He gets this look on his face, utterly pathetic, that seems to say 'Inside this great, hulking body is a poor, starved little boy,' and they fall all over themselves to feed the poor, deprived mite. Yuck! Stop laughing. That's exactly what he does."
"I know, I know," Kitt gasped. "But I think you're just jealous. Ooo. Brute. Don't grab my knee like that. I take it back. You've got more than your share of females flinging themselves at your feet."
"Mmm. But they aren't offering home-baked goodies," he teased.
"Never you mind," she purred, a challenging gleam in her eyes. "I'll take care of the goodies, home-baked or otherwise."
"I'm counting on it." His smile promised delights that she thought it best not to dwell on at the moment.
At the sound of gasps and a muffled groan from her right, Kitt glanced around to discover four pairs of dazed female eyes fixed on O'Mara. She turned back to watch him curiously to see what he would do.
He directed the smile, now turned down a few notches, toward the young women at the next table, nodded, and murmured a polite "Good morning, girls."
"Oh, subtle. Very subtle," Kitt said, grinning.
Reaching across the table for her hand, he raised it to his mouth and slowly kissed each finger, a wicked glint sparking in the sapphire eyes as he played to his audience. "You give me confidence," he claimed audaciously. "Now that I've got you to protect me from importunate females, I can—"
"You can stop the blarney, O'Mara," she hissed. "You can also stop nibbling on my fingers. Have another muffin. Wicked toad. Behave. You're giving those girls spasms. Oh, damn you."
Resisting all her efforts to pull her hand away, he held it to his mouth while he wrote messages on her palm with his tongue. Stifling a nearly uncontrollable desire to giggle, she didn't even try to decipher his words—the outrageously sensual blaze of his eyes said it all.
"O'Mara!"
He released her hand with obvious reluctance and an unrepentant grin, winking conspiratorily at the fascinated girls.
"You're impossible," Kitt groaned.
"Hmm," he agreed. "Now, about the rest of the week. This is Tuesday. Tomorrow evening we'll leave open until we can talk with Gus, but Thursday evening he's in a school play. You will go with me, won't you?"
"Love to. What's the play and what part does he have?"
"It's something to do with a Little League team facing it's first experience with a girl teammate, and he plays the captain, who doesn't think much of female baseball players. I'm not going to tell you any more, or it will spoil the suspense."
"Sounds great! I love school plays. The kids get so involved if they've got the right coaching, and sometimes they turn in remarkably good performances besides having a lot of fun. And that takes us to Friday, when the Midge-and-Ez Show rolls again."
"Lord help us all," O'Mara intoned. "At least we've got two very public evenings planned, which should keep them under reasonable control part of the time."
"Don't count on it," she warned. "He gets worse as he gets older, and an audience only encourages him to wilder flights. Unfortunately, he's such a natural comedian that even his most outrageous performances make everyone laugh. Not too long ago, I saw him tie up traffic for fifteen minutes at a busy city intersection while a couple of hundred people, including three cops, fell all over the place in hysterics."
"What in the world was he doing?" asked O'Mara, folding his arms on the table and leaning forward in anticipation.
"You know the intersection of Boylston and Tremont Streets in Boston?"
"Oh, my God," he said in awed tones.
"Indeed. Well, we reached the middle of it in conjunction with one of Boston's feistier cabdrivers, and you know how belligerent they can be. Neither he nor Ez would back off, so they both ended up in the middle of the street debating the rights of man, cabdrivers and civilians."
"I can hear it now."
"I only wish you could have. Ez was at full parade-ground bellow, which was positively echoing off the Prudential Tower and the John Hancock Building—and you know how far away they are—while this five-and-a-half foot cabby was literally jumping up and down in rage trying to make himself heard. It was ludicrous. Ez is looming there, roaring at the skies, and this little cabby is trying to shake his fist under Ez's nose but can't reach him. People were lining up on the sidewalks, and finally the drivers of all the waiting cars got out and joined in the debate. After two or three minutes, when he'd gathered a nice crowd, Ez climbed up on the hood of the car, flung out his arms and roared, 'Let the people decide!' He then appointed a judge, twelve jurors and the prosecuting and defense attorneys from among the spectators."
"You're making all this up," O'Mara gasped. "I don't believe it."
"Could I make up something like this? Listen. I don't know how he does it, but he got them all to go along with it. I think by then they were so stunned by the noise and fascinated by his act that they just got carried away. He kept it going for at least ten minutes, coaching everyone in their parts and conducting both the prosecution and the defense. Just about the time that police sirens could be heard heading our way, he waved everyone back to their cars, directed the cabby to a parking space, found one himself, gathered up the cabby, the cops and a few bystanders, and took us all to Jake Wirth's for knockwurst and dark beer. What with one thing and another, we never did make it to the matinee performance of the play we were going to."
"Who needs the theater when you've got Ez?"
"Too true. Yipe! Look at the time. I've got twenty minutes to get changed and open up."
The rest of the day seemed to fly by. Somehow, Kitt kept feeling that she was losing an odd hour here and there. Late in the afternoon, she finally decided that the clock wasn't skipping but, rather, her mind kept drifting off into enticing scenarios of her and O'Mara in a variety of isolated places such as sand dunes at midnight, mountain cabins and a houseboat anchored in mid-ocean.
When Midge arrived at three, she took one look at Kitt's smudgy eyes and not-quite-with-it expression and pushed her toward the stairs. "Go take a nap or you'll fall asleep in the middle of supper. O'Mara's house is supposed to be fabulous, and you're not going to be able to keep your eyes open wide enough to see it. Go on, Kitt. I'll close up and make sure you're awake before I leave."
"Okay. I'm sold," mumbled Kitt as she half-stumbled up the stairs and drifted down the hall. She was asleep seconds after pulling a quilt over herself.
The persistence of something tickling her cheek and nose and the sound of boyish chuckles finally impelled her to open one eye, and she found herself looking into Gus's laughing face. It took a few seconds of disorientation before full awareness returned and her mind started receiving a jumble of messages. Lying on stomach. Gus must be kneeling on the floor. That's Hero on my feet. Something's tipping the mattress. O'Mara sitting on the edge of the bed. Suppertime.
She opened the other eye and smiled at Gus. "Hi. If it isn't my favorite mini-O'Mara." Her voice was sleep-husky, and she cleared her throat. "What's everybody doing here? Thought I was coming to your house."
"We came to get you so you wouldn't have to drive home alone late tonight. Dad says I should start getting used to taking care of you." His grin was pure imp. "Uh, I think maybe I'd have better luck with Hero. I bet you can hold your own with anybody, especially if you've been taking lessons from the crazy bear."
"I'll bet I can hold my own with you, my lad," cried Kitt, suddenly throwing back the quilt and grabbing Gus, hauling him up on the bed and tickling him. Laughter and breathless protests intermingled as they wrestled back and forth across the wide bed, watched by an indulgent O'Mara. Hero, trying to join in the melee, almost got knocked to the floor before O'Mara caught him up and held him in his lap.
>
"Okay, you two, break it up." O'Mara set Hero on the floor before plucking a laughing Gus off of Kitt's stomach and dropping him beside the excited dog. "Gus, you take Hero for a quick run around the block while Kitt gets herself put together. Don't be long. We want to show her the house before it gets dark. Hustle, now."
"We're gone. Come on, Hero. Wait'll you see our captain's deck, Kitt."
O'Mara dropped back down onto the edge of the bed and leaned over Kitt, his hands braced on either side of her. "You look very enticing like that. Hair all mussed, buttons half-undone, and you'd better get that gleam out of your eye or we'll embarrass Gus when he gets back," he ended in a deepening voice.
"One kiss?" She deliberately fluttered her lashes at him, but spoiled it by giggling. "Come and get it," he said softly.
In a quick, fluid move, she was kneeling beside him with her arms wound loosely around his neck. "Just one, now," he murmured provocatively as her mouth touched his.
When she felt his hands on her hips, she instinctively started to tense up, but then relaxed again as she realized that he was just going to let them rest there. In another moment, as his tongue touched hers, she forgot about where his hands were.
"Mmmmmfff... behave... I said just... witch... let go... this bed is... too tempting...."
The hands on her hips tightened momentarily, and she found herself swinging through the air and landing on her feet in the middle of the room.
"Coward! I thought I was supposed to set the pace," she complained.
Laughing and fending her off, he dodged out the door, calling back, "Within reason, love, within reason. Hurry up and get ready. I really do want you to see the Rock for the first time in daylight."
Kitt hurried. Within twelve minutes, she had showered, whisked a brush through her hair and scrambled into navy cords and a plaid velour vee-neck pullover—which just happened to blend with the navy cords and plaid Pendleton shirts worn by Gus and O'Mara. She lifted a sardonic eyebrow at the identical smug grins on their faces as they realized what she had done.
