Taylor's Temptation

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He was in that place halfway between sleep and consciousness, his face buried in Colleen’s sweet-smelling hair, his body still cradled between the softness of her legs.

  So much for willpower. So much for resolving not to make love to her again. So much for hoping that Wes would forgive him for one little, single transgression.

  Ah, but how he’d loved making love to her again. And no red-blooded, heterosexual man could’ve resisted the temptation of Colleen Skelly, naked, on his lap.

  And really, deep in his heart, he knew it didn’t matter. Wes was going to go ape over the fact that Bobby had slept with Colleen. Realistically, how much worse could it be to have slept with her twice? What difference could it possibly make?

  To Wes? None. Probably. Hopefully.

  But the difference it made to Bobby was enormous.

  As enormous as the difference between heaven and hell.

  Speaking of heaven, he was still inside of her, he realized, forcing himself to return to earth. Falling asleep immediately after sex was not a smart move when using condoms as the sole method of birth control. Because condoms could leak.

  He should have pulled out of her twenty minutes ago. And for that matter, he should also have been aware that he was still on top of her, crushing her.

  But she hadn’t protested. In fact, she still had her arms tightly wrapped around him.

  He shifted his weight, pulling away from her and reaching between them to…

  Uh-oh. “Uh, Colleen…?” Bobby sat up, suddenly fully, painfully, completely alert.

  She stirred, stretched, sexy as hell, a distraction even now, when he should have been completely nondistractible.

  “Don’t leave yet, Bobby,” she murmured, still half asleep. “Stay for a while, please?”

  “Colleen, I think you better get up and take a shower.” Condoms sometimes did something far worse than leak. “The condom broke.”

  She laughed as she opened her eyes. “Yeah, right.” Her smile faded as she looked into his eyes. “Oh, no, you’re not kidding are you?” She sat up.

  Silently he shook his head.

  Twenty minutes. She’d been lying on her back for at least twenty minutes after he’d unknowingly sent his sperm deep inside of her.

  Was it possible she already was pregnant? How quickly could that happen?

  Quickly. Instantly—if the timing was right. In a flash, a heartbeat.

  In a burst of latex.

  “Well,” Colleen said, her eyes wide. “These past few days have certainly been full of first-time experiences for me, and this one’s no exception. What do we do about this? Is a shower really going to help at this point?”

  Count on Colleen not to have hysterics. Count on her to be upbeat and positive and proactive in trying to correct what could well be the biggest, most life-changing mistake either one of them had ever made.

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “Although…”

  “I’ll take one right now, if you want me to. I’m not sure where I am in my cycle. I’ve never really been regular.” She was sitting there, unconcerned about her nakedness, looking to him for suggestions and options and his opinion, with complete and total trust.

  That kind of trust was an incredible turn-on, and he felt his body respond. How could that be? The disbelief and cold fear that had surged through his veins at his discovery should have brought about an opposite physical response—more similar to the response one had from swimming in an icy lake.

  And his mental reaction to a broken condom should have included not even thinking about having sex for the next three weeks without shaking with fear.

  But there was Colleen, sitting next to him on her bed, all bare breasts and blue-green eyes and quiet, steadfast trust.

  Right now she needed him to be honest about this. There was no quick fix. No miraculous solutions. “I think it’s probably too late to do anything but pray.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s not about fault—it’s about responsibility, and I am responsible.”

  “Well, I am, too. You were coerced.”

  Bobby smiled, thinking of the way she’d sat on his lap, intending to seduce him, wondering if she had even the slightest clue that his last hope of resisting her had vanished the moment she’d appeared in the kitchen wearing only that robe.

  “Yeah,” he said, “as if that was really hard for you to do.”

  She smiled back at him, and his world shrank to a few square feet of her bed—to her eyes, her smile, her face and body.

  “It was another one of those first-time endeavors for me,” she told him. “I was proud of myself for not chickening out.”

  “You’re a natural.” His voice was husky. “But that’s not what I meant. I meant it wasn’t hard because when it comes to you, I’m a total pushover.”

  Just looking into her eyes like this made him want her again—badly enough that he wasn’t able to keep it any kind of secret.

  Colleen noticed and laughed softly. “Well now, there’s an interesting, hedonistic approach to this problem.” She crawled toward him, across the bed, her eyes gleaming and her smile filled with the very devil. “You know that old saying, when a door closes, somewhere a window opens? Well, how about, when a condom breaks, a window of opportunity opens?”

  Bobby knew that wasn’t necessarily true. He knew he should stop her, back away, stand up, do anything but just sit there and wait for her to…

  Too late.

  Colleen sat up. “Oh, my God.”

  “Mmph,” Bobby said, facedown on her bed.

  It was 11:05. Fifty-five minutes to make it to her law school in the Fenway from Cambridge. Without a car, on the T. “Oh, my God!”

  Bobby lifted his head. “What’s the—”

  She was already scrambling for the bathroom, climbing directly over him, inadvertently pushing his face back into the pillow.

  “Mmmrph!”

  “Sorry!”

  Thanking the Lord—not for the first time today—that Ashley was still on the Vineyard, Colleen flew down the hallway stark naked and slapped on the bathroom light. One glance in the mirror and she knew she had to take a shower. Her hair was wild. And her face still held the satisfied look of a woman who’d kept her lover very busy all morning long.

  She couldn’t do anything about the face, but the hair she could fix with a fast shower.

  She turned on the shower and climbed in before the water had a chance to heat up, singing a few operatic high notes in an attempt to counteract the cold.

  “You all right?” Bobby had followed her in. Of course, she’d left the bathroom door wide open.

  She peeked out from behind the shower curtain. He was as naked as she was, standing in front of the commode with that utterly masculine, wide-spread stance.

  “I have to take a tuition check to my law school,” she told him, quickly rinsing her hair, loving the fact that he was comfortable enough to be in the bathroom with her, feeling as if they’d crossed some kind of invisible, unspoken line. They were lovers now—not just two people who had given in to temptation and made love once. “The deadline’s noon today, and like a total idiot, I pushed it off until the last minute.” Literally.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  She turned off the water and pulled back the curtain, grabbing her towel and drying herself as she rushed back to her bedroom. “I can’t wait for you,” she called to him. “I’m literally forty-five seconds from walking out the door.”

  She stepped into clean underwear and pulled her blue dress—easy and loose fitting, perfect for days she was running dangerously late—over her head, even though she was still damp. Feet into sandals.

  “What do you know,” Bobby said. “A woman who can go wheels-up in less than three minutes.” He laughed. “I feel as if I should drop to my knees right now and propose.”

  Colle
en was reaching for the tuition check, which she’d hidden for safety in her complete collection of Shakespeare, and she didn’t freeze, didn’t faint, didn’t gasp and spin to face him, didn’t let herself react at all. He was teasing. He didn’t have a clue that his lightly spoken words had sent a rush of excitement and longing through her that was so powerful she’d nearly fallen over.

  Oh, she was so stupid. She actually wanted…the impossible. As if he really would marry her. He’d told her just hours ago that staying single was part of his career plan.

  She made herself smile as she turned around, as she stuffed the check and a book to read into her knapsack, as she checked to make sure she had money for the T, then zipped her bag closed.

  “It’s going to take me at least a few hours,” she said, brushing out her wet hair as she headed back into the kitchen to grab an apple from the fridge. He followed her, followed her to the door, still naked and completely comfortable about that.

  Colleen could picture him trailing her all the way out to the street. Wouldn’t that give little old Mrs. Gibaldi who lived downstairs an eyeful?

  She turned to face him. “I’d love it if you were still here when I got back. Wearing just that.” She kissed him, lowered her voice, gave him a smile designed to let him read her very thoughts. “And if you think getting dressed in three minutes is fast, just wait and see how long it takes me to get undressed.”

  He kissed her, pulling her into his arms, his hand coming up to cup her breast as if he couldn’t not touch her.

  Colleen felt herself start to dissolve into a puddle of heat. What would happen if she didn’t get that check to the office on time?

  She might have to pay a penalty. Or she’d get bumped from the admissions list. There were so many students waitlisted, the admissions office could afford to play hardball. Reluctantly, she pulled back from Bobby.

  “I’ll hurry,” she told him.

  “Good,” he said, still touching her, looking at her as if she were the one standing naked in front of him, lowering his head to kiss her breast before he let her go. “I’ll be here.”

  He wasn’t in love with her. He was in lust.

  And that was exactly what she’d wanted, she reminded herself as she ran down the stairs.

  Except, now that she had it, it wasn’t enough.

  The phone was ringing as Bobby stepped out of Colleen’s shower.

  He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around himself as he went dripping into the kitchen. “’Lo?”

  He heard the sound of an open phone line, as if someone were there but silent. Then, “Bobby?”

  It was Wes. No, not just “It was Wes,” but “Oh, God, it was Wes.”

  “Hey!” Bobby said, trying desperately to sound normal—as opposed to sounding like a man who was standing nearly naked not two feet from the spot where mere hours earlier he’d pinned Wes’s sister to the wall as they’d…As he’d…

  “What are you doing at Colleen’s place?” Wes sounded funny. Or maybe Bobby just imagined it. Guilt had a way of doing that—making everyone sound suspicious.

  “Um…” Bobby said. He was going to have to tell Wes about what was going on between him and Colleen, but the last thing he wanted was to break the news over the telephone. Still, he wasn’t going to lie. Not to Wes. Never to Wes.

  Fortunately—as usual—Wes didn’t particularly want his question answered. “You are one hard man to get hold of,” he continued. “I called your hotel room last night—late—and you were either AWOL or otherwise occupied, you lucky son of a bitch.”

  “Well,” Bobby said, “yeah.” He wasn’t sure if Wes particularly cared what he was agreeing to, but the truth was he’d been AWOL, otherwise occupied and a lucky son of a bitch. “Where are you?”

  “Little Creek. You need to get your butt down here, bro, pronto. We’ve got a meeting with Admiral Robinson at 1900 hours. There’s a flight out of Logan that leaves in just under two hours. If you scramble, you can make it, easy. There’ll be a ticket there, waiting for you.”

  Scrambling meant leaving before Colleen got back. Bobby looked at the kitchen clock and swore. Best-case scenario didn’t get her back here for another ninety minutes. That’s if she had no holdups—if the T ran like a dream.

  “I’m not sure I can make it,” he told Wes.

  “Sure you can. Tell Colleen to drive you to the airport.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said. Now, here was a secret he could divulge with no pain. “No. She can’t—she sold her car.”

  “What?”

  “She’s been doing all this charity work—pro bono legal stuff, you know? Along with her usual volunteer work,” Bobby told Wes. “She sold the Mustang because she was having trouble making ends meet.”

  Wes swore loudly. “I can’t believe she sold that car. I would’ve lent her money. Why didn’t she ask me for money?”

  “I offered to do the same. She didn’t want it from either one of us.”

  “That’s stupid. Let me talk to the stupid girl, will you?”

  “Actually,” Bobby told Wes, “it’s not stupid at all.” And she wasn’t a girl. She was a woman. A gorgeous, vibrant, independent, sexy woman. “She wants to do this her way. By herself. And then when she graduates, and passes the bar exam, she’ll know—she did this. Herself. I don’t blame her, man.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right, just put her on the phone.”

  Bobby took a deep breath, praying that Wes wouldn’t think it was weird—him being in Colleen’s apartment when she wasn’t home. “She’s not here. She had to go over to the law school for something and—”

  “Leave her a message then. Tell her to call me.” Wes rattled off a phone number that Bobby dutifully wrote on a scrap of paper. But he then folded it up, intending to put it into his pocket as soon as he was wearing something that had a pocket. No way was he going to risk Colleen calling Wes back before he himself had a chance to speak to him.

  “Put it in gear,” Wes ordered. “You’re needed for this meeting. If Colleen’s going to be stupid and insist on going to Tulgeria, we need to do this right. If you get down here tonight, we’ll get started planning this op a full twelve hours earlier than if we wait to have this meeting in the morning. I want those extra twelve hours. This is Colleen’s safety—her life—we’re talking about here.”

  “I’m there,” Bobby said. “I’ll be on that flight.”

  “Thank you. Hey, I missed you, man. How’s the shoulder? You been taking it easy?”

  Not exactly, considering that for the past twenty-four hours he’d been engaged in almost nonstop, highly gymnastic sex. With Wes’s precious little sister. Oh, God.

  “I’m feeling much better,” Bobby told the man who was the best friend he’d ever had in his life. Not a lie—it was true. The shoulder was still stiff and sore, and he still couldn’t reach over his head without pain, but he was, without a doubt, feeling exceptionally good this morning.

  Physically.

  Emotionally was an entirely different story. Guilt. Doubt. Anxiety.

  “Hey,” Bobby said. “Will you do me a favor and pick me up in Norfolk alone? There’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Uh-oh,” Wes said. “Sounds heavy. You all right? God—you didn’t get some girl pregnant did you? I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone since you and Kyra split.”

  “I didn’t get anyone…” Bobby started to deny, but then cut himself off. Oh, Lord, it was possible that he had indeed gotten Colleen pregnant just this morning. The thought still made him weak in the knees. “Just meet my flight, okay?”

  “Ho,” Wes said. “No way can you make hints that something dire is going down and then not tell me what the—”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Bobby said, and hung up the phone.

  Chapter 14

  When Colleen got home, Clark and Kenneth were sitting in her living room, playing cards.

  “Hey,” Clark said. “Where’s your TV?”

  “I don’t have a TV,” she told h
im. “What are you doing here? Is Ashley back?”

  “Nah. Mr. Platonic called us,” Clark answered. “He didn’t want you coming home to an empty apartment.”

  “He had to go someplace called Little Creek,” Kenneth volunteered. “He left a note on your bed. I didn’t let Clark read it.”

  Bobby had gone to Little Creek. He’d finally run away, leaving the two stooges behind as baby-sitters.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m home now. You don’t have to hang here.”

  “We don’t mind,” Clark said. “You actually have food in your kitchen and—”

  “Please, I need you to go,” Colleen told them. “I’m sorry.” She had no idea what Bobby had written in that note that was in her bedroom. She couldn’t deal with reading it while they were in her living room.

  And she couldn’t deal with not reading it another second longer.

  “It’s cool,” Clark said. “I was betting we wouldn’t get the warmest welcome, since you’re one of those liberated, I-can-take-care-of-myself babes and—”

  She heard the door close as Kenneth dragged Clark out.

  Colleen took her backpack into her bedroom. Bobby had cleaned up the room. And made the bed, too. And left a note, right on her pillow.

  “I got a call and had to run,” it said in bold block letters—an attempt by someone with messy penmanship to write clearly. “Heading to Little Creek—to a meeting I can’t miss. I’m sorry (more than I can say!) that I couldn’t stick around to kiss you goodbye properly, but this is what it’s like—being part of Alpha Squad. When I have to go, I go, whether I want to or not.”

  He’d then written something that he’d crossed out. Try as she might, Colleen couldn’t see beneath the scribbled pen to the letters below. The first word looked as if it might be maybe. But she couldn’t read the rest.

  “Stay safe!” he wrote, both words underlined twice. “I’ll call you from Little Creek.” He’d signed it “Bobby.” Not “Love, Bobby.” Not “Passionately yours, Bobby.” Just “Bobby.”

  Colleen lay back on her bed, trying not to overanalyze his note, wishing he hadn’t had to go, trying not to wonder if he were ever coming back.