The Widow's Protector

by Rachel Lee

  With a temerity that should have shocked her but didn’t, he gently rubbed her tummy. “You and Linda Marie are going to be just fine,” he said quietly. “If it’ll make you feel safer, I can take you to the shelter.”

  Safer? How could she possibly feel any safer than she did at this moment? What’s more, she didn’t want to give up the shelter of his arms for that dank hole in the ground. As far as she was concerned, there was no choice to be made.

  She gave a little shake of her head, then heard a roll of thunder that quickened her fear again.

  “It’s just an ordinary old storm,” he repeated as the radio confirmed his words with a new song.

  What she was feeling now was nothing ordinary. She tilted her head to look up at him and found him regarding her from those silvery eyes of his. Liquid silver, she thought. Hot silver.

  Heat leaped in her in response, driving every other thought out of her head. Let the storm blow outside. The only storm that mattered was the one inside her.

  He must have read her response because now his eyes darkened, and his lids drooped a little.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “Absolutely beautiful.”

  The compliment should have overwhelmed her. It was not as if she’d heard that very often over the past years. Nor had pregnancy made her feel anything but ungainly and fat. But before it quite penetrated, his hand left her tummy to cradle her cheek. Then, glory of glories, he dipped his head to kiss her gently.

  The world went away. She lost awareness of anything except the gentle quest of his lips against hers. The contradictorily soothing search that ignited a wildfire inside her.

  She gasped with the pleasure of it, and he took it as an invitation, slipping his tongue past her lips into the warm depths of her mouth. As if he wanted to possess her. As if he already did.

  Waves of passion began to pulse through her in time to the thrusts of his tongue. She wanted it to go on forever. Then she wanted it to grow. She needed more but didn’t know how to ask for it.

  She responded as ardently as she knew how to his kiss, raising a hand to cup his cheek the way he cupped hers, enjoying the roughness of a day’s stubble, the hard line of his jaw, the way his cheek moved as his tongue mated with hers.

  Enjoying the growing depth of her own need.

  But just as she was about to whisper that need, just as it was about to push her to become bold, thunder cracked so loudly and so close that everything inside her seemed to freeze.

  Her eyes opened wide. Ryder lifted his head and looked around. He swore.

  She felt like swearing, too. The moment had been destroyed and destroyed way too early. Common sense didn’t seem to want to return.

  “Hell,” he said, adding to the colorful curse he had started with. “Damn.”

  He looked like one upset and angry man. That might have frightened her because of Jeff, but somehow the silliness of the moment caught her instead and she giggled.

  He looked down at her again, lifting one brow. “Okay, my timing sucks. I was outta line anyway.”

  She pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

  “Okay, I won’t.” He sighed, then astonished her by scooping her up into his arms and carrying her to the living room where he put her in her favorite chair and lifted her feet onto the hassock. “Look at those ankles,” he remarked as her jeans pulled up a bit. “I don’t know damn all about pregnancy, but aren’t you supposed to take care of swelling ankles?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Then keep your butt in your chair. I’ll get you something to drink. Food, if you want. Just tell me what sounds good.”

  So she asked for iced coffee and sat with her hands folded over Linda Marie, trying to absorb the storm that had just passed through her, leaving her feeling almost like a different person.

  A man had wanted to kiss her. An attractive man. And he’d told her she was beautiful. Now didn’t that beat all?

  Ryder returned five minutes later with a tall glass of iced coffee for her, a plate of cookies to put at her elbow, and another for himself.

  “I put the dough in the fridge,” he remarked, “and yes, I covered it. I also turned off the oven for now. So just relax. I’ll be back in a second with the radio.”

  Unfortunately, now that her intense arousal had settled down, the storm outside seemed to demand her attention. It sounded bad and her estimation of it was being affected by the tornado from four days ago. How could it not be?

  She tried to argue herself into a reasonable calm. The radio would broadcast a warning, first of all. Second, why would a tornado strike the same place twice? Not likely.

  But as flashes of brilliant lightning washed out the color in the room, she wasn’t so sure of her estimation of the odds.

  Ryder returned with the radio, which had switched from bluegrass to Garth Brooks, and set it on top of the useless console TV. “It may sound bad out there, but it doesn’t seem to be worrying anybody.”

  “No,” she admitted. “I just wonder if I’ll ever feel the same about a thunderstorm again.”

  “Not for a while, I expect.” He sat across from her. It was only a small distance away, but it seemed significant. He was right, she thought dismally. Whatever was happening between them, it didn’t promise the long term. Better not to get even minimally involved.

  In fact, she should be wary and so should he. They were both just emerging from bad marriages, which probably made them too vulnerable to anything that would make them feel better. Damn, she hated logic.

  “Tell me about Ben,” she suggested, hoping to find safer ground and distraction. Another crack of thunder made both her and the baby jump.

  “Ben?” He paused. “Seems like a great guy.”

  “Seems?” She caught the word and thought it significant.

  “Oh, he’s one of those charming guys who could probably sell ice to Eskimos, if you get my drift. Lots of charisma, always ready with a joke, cheerful, likable. He draws people like honey draws flies.”

  “But you don’t trust that?”

  He hesitated. “He loved Brandy.” As if that answered everything.

  “But?” she repeated. “It’s practically hanging on every word.”

  He smiled faintly. “I guess I have a native distrust of folks who are glib and charming. The problem is me, I suppose, not him. I mean, he seems sincere, especially about Brandy. But…” He shrugged. “Sometimes I get the feeling he has a hard core, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Yet you still feel you need to go talk to him.”

  “There are wounds here, Marti. For both of us. Maybe if we just hash it out it will help. I get the feeling he thinks I could have done more. Maybe he was right. And if he’s right, then he needs to tell me because I need to know for me.”

  There was little she could say, knowing next to nothing about the situation. So she asked, “Didn’t you say you did everything the docs told you?”

  “Of course I did. Every single thing. But in the end I have to ask myself if it wasn’t a failure of care, but a failure on my part. Something I didn’t say, something I didn’t feel, something I didn’t think of.”

  “Those are the kinds of questions that can drive you crazy.”

  “No kidding. Hence the Johnny Appleseed trip across the country. Time to think. And that’s why I want to see Ben. Maybe he’s got some answers that aren’t apparent to me.”

  “If Ben’s already blaming you, maybe he’s not the best person to ask those questions.” As soon as she spoke, her own temerity surprised her. She didn’t know squat about this guy’s marriage, about Ben, or about what had happened.

  “Maybe,” he said, lifting one corner of his mouth. “And maybe what I need is a harsh critic.”

&nb
sp; “I think you’re already the harshest critic you could find.” Immediately she wished she could call the words back. Damn, she needed to stop offering opinions when she knew next to nothing. “Sorry. I don’t know enough to have an opinion.”

  “It’s okay. You might be right. Only time will tell.”

  He fell silent, and this time she kept her mouth shut. What did she know about depression or relationships or anything else? Her own marriage was a sorry lesson in how messed up things could get and how you sometimes couldn’t even figure out what to do. All it had done was make her an authority on screwing up. Hardly a guideline.

  Rain started to fall, blowing hard enough to rattle like ice at the windows. She jumped and tried to see out the window over her shoulder. “I hope that’s not hail.” Hail meant tornadoes. Where had she learned that? Was it even true?

  “I’ll go look.”

  He only went as far as the front door, but even that short distance left the room feeling empty. The sensation surprised her because she hadn’t felt the house was empty even after Jeff’s death. That was sad, she supposed, but she felt more concern about how Ryder’s momentary disappearance affected her. She really needed to stop this before she got in any deeper.

  He was gone only a minute, but his return filled the room. “It’s not hail. It’s just the rain hitting the glass hard.”

  He remained standing. “What do you want me to make for dinner?”

  “I can do that.”

  He eyed her ankles. “I’d like you to reconsider that, if you wouldn’t mind. The swelling still hasn’t come down.”

  “I always have some late in the day. It can’t stop me from doing ordinary things or I’ll go nuts.”

  A chuckle escaped him. “I know that feeling. All right, we’ll do it together when you’re ready, but I’m bringing the hassock into the kitchen.”

  He seemed to have caretaker built into his genes. “Who takes care of you, Ryder?”

  He appeared startled. Then, “Well, I seem to remember some lady saving me from a tornado, and she’s been making me some pretty fine meals, not to mention

  cookies…”

  She had to laugh, even though she knew full well he hadn’t answered her core question. But maybe she already knew the answer: Ryder took care of Ryder. She had been doing the same for herself until his arrival, and she knew from personal experience how empty life could seem when you didn’t have even one other person who did just a few caring things for you.

  You started to feel you didn’t deserve them. Hadn’t he brought that problem up himself, asking her what she felt she deserved?

  Ryder measured himself by taking care of others, she decided, a good metric to a point. But what had he said about people deserving care just because they were people? That it shouldn’t have to be earned or paid for?

  Maybe Ryder needed to be on the receiving end if she could just figure out how.

  There had to be a way, something she could do to express her gratitude, some way she could make him feel as if he really mattered, too, the way he was making her feel.

  Yes, she would figure out something.

  * * *

  Ryder wanted to go to the attic and check on the tarps. The way the wind was blowing he feared it might push some water in. But given how Marti jumped at every sound and crack of thunder, he didn’t want to leave her alone.

  He could understand her fear. He shared some of it himself. That had been one hell of a storm, and he figured he was probably lucky to be alive. He was also fairly certain he owed that to Marti picking him up and sharing her shelter.

  He might escape the uneasiness when he hit the West Coast. Or when he went back East, but here he couldn’t quite evade it, no matter how rare that kind of event was supposed to be.

  It hadn’t affected him as much as it had her, though. Of that he was certain. He might be a little more alert than normal as the thunderstorm rolled over them with its rage, but he wasn’t jumping at every crack of thunder or pellet-spray of rain.

  He wished he had some magic words to take that fright from her. He didn’t want to imagine her here alone when he left in a couple of weeks, dealing with that terror all by herself. But he didn’t see what he could do about that.

  Inevitably, he remembered holding her and kissing her and how good it had felt. She had felt just right against him, and her mouth had been so sweet. He would have liked to have carried that a whole lot farther.

  Saved by the lightning, he thought with an almost bitter amusement. He wasn’t anywhere near ready to consider another relationship, and Marti struck him as the kind to deserve that, not a one-night stand. But he had to get on to Ben eventually. Then he had to sort out his own head enough so he might be good for something.

  Right now he figured he wasn’t useful for much except hard physical work. He hoped he would be able to help Ben, though. That brother-in-law of his was hanging out there like an important, unfinished chore. He owed Brandy’s brother at least that much.

  But as he thought about Ben, disquiet stirred. First, he didn’t like that Ben was getting angry about how long it was taking him. Eight months had passed already. What could a couple of extra weeks matter?

  He wondered, too, for the first time, if Ben might be exactly the wrong person to talk to. Marti might have had that right: if Ben was so angry with him, the conversation might only be destructive.

  So what was this? A mea culpa for sins he was unaware of but sure he must have committed? Did he need someone to beat him up to feel better?

  The idea that his thinking might be that far out of joint disturbed him. He’d thought of this as a mercy mission for both him and Ben. Maybe it was masochistic instead.

  Thinking over his conversations with Ben during the past few weeks, that discomfort grew. Ben was angry. Of course he was angry, but he’d all but exploded earlier when Ryder had told him he was hanging around out here for a couple of weeks to help a widow lady. Then he had suddenly calmed down. What had calmed him? The information about exactly where he was? Marti’s name?

  Maybe it was the name as much as anything, a reassurance that Ryder wasn’t just stalling. But how well did he really know Ben? After five years of marriage to Brandy, the guy was still a stranger to him in a lot of ways. Impenetrable behind all that charisma and hail-fellow-well-met surface. Had Ben ever shared a genuine feeling with him other than anger over Brandy?

  If so, he couldn’t remember it.

  That brought him right back to thinking about what he truly hoped to achieve with this trip. Peace? He doubted he would find it. Understanding? Was he hoping that Ben might be able to relate stories from Brandy’s past that would illuminate her problems? Was he hoping if they both just sat and talked it through for as long as they needed they might reach acceptance if nothing else?

  Something in him had clearly needed to make this journey, but he was beginning to wonder what and why. Ben’s hostility toward him had often been overt since Brandy’s death, but he had thought he understood it and could help with it.

  But could he? Did he really understand? Maybe nothing could ease Ben’s hostility any more than Ryder could fully shed his feelings of guilt.

  Crap, he was beginning to think he needed a shrink himself. His thoughts had begun to resemble a mouse scrambling for an escape hatch. But there was no escape from this mess. Not since Brandy had made it final.

  Maybe that was the truth he needed to get around to accepting: there was no escape.

  He yanked himself out of his own head and looked at Marti again. She was sitting quietly, hands folded over her tummy, eyes closed, listening to the storm.

  He wondered if she had any idea just how sexy she was, even while pregnant. Or maybe because she was pregnant. He didn’t know because he had no comparison with Marti-not-expecting. But she was sexy enough to make his pulse rac
e merely by looking at her.

  Then he wondered why he was just sitting here and doing nothing about it. She hadn’t repulsed his kiss earlier—in fact, she’d told him not to apologize for it. Maybe she was as hungry as he for that kind of connection.

  He’d caught her looking at him a few times with the same sexual appreciation he was feeling. Was he being a gentleman by ignoring it or an idiot? Very possibly an idiot. One thing was for sure—he knew he had failed his five-year mind-reading course with Brandy.

  * * *

  Marti heard Ryder stir and opened her eyes in time to see him closing the distance between them. Her heart tripped then sped up as she caught the intensity in his gaze.

  He perched on the arm of her chair, touched her cheek and hair, then started lowering his mouth toward hers.

  “Tell me to drop dead if you don’t want this.”

  The notion never even crossed her mind. What did cross her mind was that she wanted this to be more than a kiss.

  He lowered his head until their lips touched, and she tilted her face up to him like a flower seeking the sun. At first his mouth nestled gently against hers, a gentleness that made her heart ache with longing before it struck the tinder of her body.

  Again and again he lowered his head, just barely tasting, his mouth soft and questioning, until her lips started to feel as sensitive as the most secret places of her body. Little streams of pleasure began to trickle from them to the rest of her body, teaching her a new lesson in passion: patience and tenderness.

  A door to a whole new world began to open to her, a world where desire didn’t have to be hasty, demanding and impatient. A world where it was a tender journey of discovery rather than a destination to be reached as quickly as possible. She loved it.

  When at last his tongue slipped past her sweetly sensitive lips into the warm interior of her mouth, she welcomed and savored it, letting it go on as long as he wanted. She encouraged him only with little murmurs of pleasure and a hand on the arm on which he propped himself.