She went out the kitchen door and stood on the back porch, just watching until Jones looked up. He glanced at Andy but didn’t have to say a word. The kid disappeared.
Jones wiped his hands on the thighs of his jeans as he came toward her. He was smiling, but his eyes were guarded—as if he wasn’t quite certain of his welcome.
He was correct to be uncertain. “What do you think you’re doing?” Melody asked.
He turned to glance back at the tent as if double-checking exactly what he’d erected there. “The inn’s a bit pricey,” he told her. “I figured since I’m going to stay awhile, it’d be more economical to—”
“How long, exactly, are you planning to stay?” Melody couldn’t keep her voice from shaking. How dare he just set up camp in her backyard where she would be forced to look at him, to notice him, to talk to him if she wanted to tend to her gardening?
Jones propped a foot up on one of the back steps and rested his arms on his knees as he gave her his best smile. “As long as it takes for you to agree to marry me.”
She sat down on the top step. “Gonna get pretty cold in a couple of months, living in a tent. But after a few years, you’ll probably get used to it.”
He laughed. “Honey, there’s no way you and I could live this close to each other for even a few weeks, let alone a few years, without one or both of us spontaneously combusting.”
Melody snorted. “Get real, Jones. Have you looked at me lately? Unless you have a fetish involving beach balls, I’m not likely to set your world on fire any time soon.”
“Are you kidding? You’re gorgeous. It’s very sexy….”
Melody closed her eyes. “Jones, please don’t do this.”
She never should have closed her eyes. She didn’t see him settle on the step next to her, and by the time she felt him put his arms around her, it was too late. She was trapped.
She hadn’t forgotten how strong his arms felt, how safe she felt inside his embrace. And when she looked up at him, she found she hadn’t forgotten the little flecks of brown and gold floating in the always changing green ocean of his eyes either. And she hadn’t forgotten the way the mysterious darkness of his pupils widened, seemingly enough to swallow her whole, right before he bent to kiss her.
He tasted like coffee, two sugars, no cream. He tasted like Paris in the moonlight, like the rough feel of bricks as he covered her mouth with his and pressed her up against a house that had been built four hundred years before Columbus had sailed west to reach the Far East and discovered America instead.
He tasted like chocolate, like expensive wine, like a second helping of dessert. He tasted like everything she’d ever wanted but had taught herself to refuse for her own sake.
He kissed her so gently, so sweetly, almost reverently as if he had missed her as much as she’d pretended not to miss him. And, God, she had missed him. There was a place in her chest that had felt hollow and cold for all these months—until now. Now she felt infused by warmth, both inside and out.
She felt him touch her, the warmth of his palm lightly pressing against her extended belly.
“My God,” he breathed. “It’s really all you, isn’t it?”
Melody saw it then. Jones made an effort to smile as she looked up at him, but he couldn’t hide the fact that he was thoroughly unnerved. She was having his baby, and as long as he was with her, there was no way he was going to forget that. She could see from his eyes how disconcerted he was, how unsettled he felt.
And just like that, the hollowness was back, making her feel emptier than ever.
She knew with a dead certainty that if Jones were granted only one wish, it would be that he’d had a condom on that flight to Paris. She knew that being tied down with a wife and a child was the last thing on earth that this man wanted. She knew that the last place in the world that he wanted to be was here, sitting on her porch, talking her into doing something he himself didn’t want to do.
And yet here he was. She had to admire him for that.
She could see the determination in his eyes as he leaned toward her one more time. His lips were so soft as he kissed her again. She was reminded just how very astute he was when it came to reading her needs. He somehow knew that these gentle, almost delicate kisses would get him much further than the intensely passionate, soul-sucking inhalations of desire they’d shared time and again in Paris.
Of course, it was entirely possible that he was kissing her without that explosion of passion because he no longer felt passion for her.
And why should he? She was a constant reminder of his obligations and responsibilities. And on top of that, she was about as sexy as a double-wide trailer.
Still, he kissed her so sweetly, she felt like melting.
Melody was in deep trouble here. Lt. Cowboy Jones was a warrior and a psych expert. While other men might well have been put off by her constant rejections, he was unswervable. And it was more than obvious that he had a battle plan as far as she was concerned. He’d figured out that she wasn’t immune to him. He’d realized that he was still firmly entrenched under her skin and he’d dug in to wait her out. Time and her traitorous hormones were on his side. She was going to have to be even stronger.
She was going to have to start by pulling away from this delicious kiss that was making her knees feel even more rubbery than usual. She was going to have to unlock her fingers from the thick softness of his hair. She was going to have to be tougher than this.
Melody stood up, slipping free from his embrace. “Excuse me,” she said. It was amazing how she could sound so calm when inside she was experiencing an emotional tornado. “I have to go inside.” He stood up, too. “Alone,” she added.
He tried to hide his frustration by taking a deep breath and smiling. “Mel, honey, what do I have to do to convince you—”
“I think the presence of your tent on my property constitutes trespassing. I’ll thank you very much to remove it.”
He laughed at that. “I figured this way it was hidden behind the house. I thought the fewer people who knew about it, the better. But if you insist, I’ll move the tent over into the Romanellas’ yard. Vince said that would be okay. Of course, then everyone in town will be able to see it from the street.”
“I don’t care,” Melody said. “Odds are everyone in town knows it’s there already.”
He took a step toward her and she took a step back. “Mel.” He held out his hands, palms facing down as if he were calming a wild animal. “Think about this for a minute. We’re both on the same side here. We’re both trying to find the best solution for this situation.”
“Jones, I know you don’t really want to marry me,” she said. “What I don’t know is how you’d be able to make yourself say those wedding vows. It would all be a lie. ’Til death us do part. Yeah, right. Until divorce us do part is more like it. You know it as well as I do.”
He leaned back against the porch rail, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re right about the fact that I don’t want to get married,” he admitted. “But if I’ve got to marry someone, I’d just as soon have it be you.”
“And I’d just as soon have it be someone normal—” She cut herself off. “God, haven’t we had this conversation already?”
“Yes,” he said. “And I’m going to say it again. I’m no different from any other man.”
“Except for the fact that when you get in a knife fight with four-to-one odds against you, you win.” Melody shook her head. “Jones, don’t you see how incredibly out of place you are here?”
“I’m a SEAL,” he said. “I’ve been trained to adapt to any environment or culture. Appleton, Massachusetts, shouldn’t be that big a deal.” He straightened up. “Where’s the edge trimmer? In the garage?”
She blinked. “What? Why?”
He adjusted his baseball cap as he went down the steps and started walking backward along the path toward the garage as he talked. “You said you couldn’t picture me using an edge trimmer. I’m going t
o help you out by actually letting you watch me use one.”
Melody’s laughter was on the verge of being hysterical. “You’re not going to leave, are you? You’re just going to stay here forever and torment me.”
He stopped walking. With the sun shining down on him, glistening off his tanned skin, gleaming off his gold-streaked hair, he looked invincible. “That depends on your definition of ‘torment.’”
Melody sat down on the steps, fighting the urge to burst into tears. She was so tired. She had all that she could handle working three-quarters time during these past few months of a difficult pregnancy. There was no way she could do that and go one-on-one in a battle of wills with a man who didn’t know what it meant to quit.
Jones came back toward the porch, his eyes darkening with concern. “Honey, you look a little tuckered out.” His voice was soft. “Maybe we should skip the lawn-care demonstration so you can go on upstairs and catch a nap before dinner, huh?”
She knew what he was doing. He was trying to show her that he knew the words and music to the middle-class, suburban song. He was trying to be normal. His words sounded as if they’d been married for years.
But all he’d proved was that he’d watched a few dozen reruns of The Cosby Show or Family Ties. It was one thing to mimic and play pretend games. It was another thing entirely to keep up the pretense of being happily married for the rest of his life.
Melody hauled herself to her feet. “You are not normal,” she told him. “You’ll never be normal. And don’t kiss me,” she added. “Ever again.”
Another of his smiles slipped out as he reached for her again, but she escaped into the house, locking the screen door behind her.
“Thank you for hanging the curtains in the nursery,” she told him stiffly through the protection of the screen. “But the next time you come into my house uninvited, I will have you arrested.”
If Jones’s smile faltered at all, she didn’t see it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“YOU DID WHAT?”
“I gave him a key,” Brittany repeated calmly as she checked the rice and turned on the burner underneath the wok, bending over to adjust the gas flame.
Melody’s knees were so weak she had to sit down. “To the house?”
“Of course to the house.” Brittany added some oil to the pan and went back to cutting up the vegetables for the stir-fry. “What good would an open invitation to use the bathroom and the shower be without a key to the house?”
Melody put her head in her hands. “Brittany, what are you doing to me?”
“Sweetie, your SEAL’s been living in the backyard for almost a week now—”
“Thanks to your first asinine invitation!” Melody proceeded to give a ridiculously unflattering imitation of her sister’s voice: “No, Lieutenant, of course we don’t mind your tent in our backyard. Of course, Lieutenant, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.’ I was waiting for you to offer to do his laundry and lay a chocolate out on his pillow each night. Jeez Louise, Britt, didn’t you even consider the fact that I might not want him underfoot twenty-four hours a day?”
Her sister was not fazed. “I’m not convinced you know what you want.”
“Whereas you do?”
The oil was hot enough, and Brittany tossed thin slices of celery into the wok. “No.”
“Yet you insist on encouraging him to stay.”
“My encouragement hardly makes up for your discouragement. But since he hasn’t gone away yet,” Brittany said, “I think it’s a pretty strong indication that he intends to stay until you give in.”
“I’m not going to give in.”
Brittany turned to face her, knife in hand. “That’s right. You’re not going to give in—if you keep doing what you’re doing. When you leave for work in the morning, you make a beeline for your car. When you come home, you make a beeline for your room. You haven’t let the poor man say more than three sentences to you in the past four days.”
Melody lifted her head. “The ‘poor man’?”
Brittany returned some of her attention to her cooking, adding broccoli and thinly cut strips of zucchini squash to the wok. “I’m with Estelle and Peggy on this one, Mel. I know that’s hard to believe—those two seeing eye to eye with me—but it’s true. We think you should stop thinking only of yourself and marry the man.”
Melody sat up even straighter. “You swore when I first told you that I was pregnant that you wouldn’t lecture me. You said you’d support me whatever I decided to do.”
“What I just told you wasn’t a lecture,” Brittany said firmly, stirring the vegetables. “It was an opinion. And I am supporting you, the best way I know how.”
“By giving Jones a key to the house and an open invitation to just walk in whenever the mood strikes him?”
“The man is a gem, Mel. This yard has never looked so good!”
Of course the yard looked good. Every time Melody turned around, Jones was outside her window, raking the leaves or tinkering under the hood of Brittany’s car or lifting enormous amounts of weights. Every time she turned around, she caught a flash of sunlight reflecting off smooth, deeply tanned muscles.
Whether it was sunny and sixty degrees or drizzling and barely fifty, Jones went outside without a shirt on. Whether he was working in the yard or sitting and reading a book, he was naked from the waist up. You’d think that after a while she’d get used to the sight of all those muscles rippling enticingly in the sunshine or gleaming wet from the rain.
Yeah, right. Maybe in her next lifetime…
“And I don’t know what your lieutenant’s done to my car, but it hasn’t run this well in years,” Brittany added. “You really should let him look at yours.”
“He’s not my lieutenant. And if a smoothly running car is what you’re after,” Melody said hotly, “maybe I should marry Joe Hewlitt from the Sunoco station instead.”
“You’re impossibly stubborn,” Brittany complained.
“Can we talk about something else?” Melody pleaded. “Isn’t there something going on in the world that’s more interesting than my nonrelationship with Harlan Jones?”
Brittany made room at the bottom of the sizzling wok for the cubes of tofu she’d cut. “Well, there’s always the latest installment in the Andy Marshall adventure.”
Melody braced herself. “Oh, no. What did he do this time?”
The stove timer buzzed, and Brittany turned off both it and the heat beneath the rice. “Tom Beatrice caught him outside the liquor store on Summer Street. He’d just given Kevin Thorpe ten bucks to buy him a six-pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes.”
“Oh, Andy, you didn’t…” Melody sighed, resting her chin in the palm of one hand. “Damn, I thought he was finally adjusting to Appleton.”
She’d seen Andy out in the yard, hanging around Jones while he worked. Jones always had time to talk. Sometimes he even stopped to toss a ball around with the kid. She’d been secretly impressed with his patience and hoped that Andy had finally latched on to a man who was, indeed, a worthy role model.
There was no doubt about it. The boy was starved for affection and attention. Melody had run into him a few times downtown over the past week.
The first time they talked, he’d hesitantly reached out to touch her belly again, smiling almost shyly when the baby kicked.
The second time, she’d bumped into him—literally. His cheek was scraped and his lip was swollen, and although he’d insisted he’d fallen off his bicycle, she knew Alex Parks and his friends had been giving the younger boy trouble again. The third time, he’d actually greeted Melody with a hug. He’d said hello to the baby by pressing his face against Mel’s stomach—and got kicked in the nose for his trouble. That sent him rolling on the ground with giddy laughter.
He was a good kid. Melody was convinced that deep inside he had a sweet, caring soul. He shouldn’t be trying to grow up so fast, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. “He’s only twelve. He probably doesn’t even like
the taste of beer.”
“He’s twelve going on thirty,” Brittany said grimly, “which, at the rate he’s going, is how old he’ll be when he finally gets out of jail. It’s a wonder Tom didn’t lock the little jerk up.”
“Who’s Tom and which little jerk didn’t he lock up?”
Melody’s shoulders tensed. Just like that, merely at the sound of Jones’s voice, she was an instant bundle of screaming nerves.
He was standing on the other side of the screen door, looking into the kitchen.
“Tom Beatrice is the Appleton chief of police. And the little jerk is the kid who’s running for Troublemaker of the Year—Andy Marshall. Come on in,” Brittany called from the stove. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
Melody stood up, crossing to stand next to her sister. “You invited him to dinner?” she whispered through clenched teeth.
“Yes, I invited him to dinner,” Brittany said evenly. “There’s beer in the fridge,” she told Jones. “Help yourself. And if you don’t mind, would you grab one for me and pour a glass of milk for Mel?”
“It’d be my pleasure. Hey, Mel.” Jones had dressed for the occasion. He was actually wearing a T-shirt with his jeans, and his hair was pulled back from his face in a single neat braid. “How’re you feeling?”
Betrayed. Melody sat down at the kitchen table and forced a smile. “Fine, thanks.”
“Really?” He sat down directly across from her, of course, where she wouldn’t be able to keep from looking at him while they ate. Why did he have to be so utterly good-looking? And why did he have to smile at her that way all the time, as if they were constantly sharing a secret or a very personal private joke?
“Mel’s been having trouble with backaches again,” Brittany announced as she set the wok on a hot pad in the middle of the table.
Jones took a sip of his beer directly from the bottle as he gazed at Melody. “I’m available any time you want a back rub.”
She remembered his back rubs. She remembered them too well. She looked everywhere but into his eyes. “Thanks, but a soak in the tub’ll take care of it.”
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 88
