Harlequin Special Edition November 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2

by Lilian Darcy

  “And don’t you like them?” she whispered.

  “Have to admit...yeah. Very, very much.” He leaned across and buried his face in the deepened cleft between them.

  Man...

  Then he sucked, cupping her gently, tracing the tip of his tongue around those darkened areolae and hearing her breathing quicken. Which made her breasts move up and down, tempting him to lick more and suck harder. Oh, wow. He felt the tightened creases beneath the new weight, and saw a faint, shadowy tracing of blue veins.

  “And I like you liking them,” she said, very unsteadily.

  He teased her nipples with his knuckles, brushing them back and forth. She gasped and arched, and he rolled her on top of him so that the tight, hot globes grazed heavily against his chest. Then he took them in his hands again, the ridge of his erection pressing against her mound and her swollen lips.

  Squishier, eh? Yes, he could feel. He pulled her against him and ran his hands over her butt. They fit so well. They just did. It was amazing.

  “So let’s get with the program, is what you’re saying,” he whispered.

  “Is what I’m saying,” she confirmed raggedly.

  He got with the program.

  Chapter Nine

  “What are you listening for?” Mac asked Lee an hour or so later.

  “The truck that’s supposed to be bringing the liquor supplies. But that wasn’t a truck I heard just now, it was a boat on the lake.” They were still lying in her bed, replete and happy. Lee didn’t dare talk too much just yet, in case she spoiled the mood.

  This was all very tentative, what had just happened. She didn’t know how to interpret it, how much to trust it. It seemed as if they were back to the way they’d been in Colorado, but she knew they weren’t. They couldn’t be. Too much had changed.

  “When does your sister get back?” Mac asked.

  “Which one?”

  “The one who’s getting back soon. The one who’s living here. Mary Jane.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think she’s been gone nearly long enough.”

  “Oh, you don’t?”

  “Despite its inadequate size, I have to say this bed is more comfortable than the one in my cottage off of exit 21. And yet not quite as private as I’d like.”

  “Does that mean you’re planning to be back in this bed again soon?” She couldn’t quite hide that it was a loaded question.

  And he was silent for a little too long. “I was angry yesterday,” he said. He took a controlled breath. “And scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “It’s scary, having a baby. It’s momentous. I reacted too strongly, and I shouldn’t have. Maybe we should just coast for a while, see where this goes.”

  “It always seems to go to the same place.”

  “A pretty good place.”

  “No argument there.” She snuggled against him, traced patterns with her fingers on his chest and ventured lower down.

  “What did your family say about the baby?” he asked after a minute. “Are they okay with it?”

  “I haven’t told them.”

  As soon as she said it, she knew it would create a problem. She felt him stiffen. “You haven’t told them,” he repeated. He pushed her hand away, tilted his head and stared at her.

  “Not yet. Early days, isn’t it?”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “So what do they think about you coming back here to live?”

  I haven’t told them that yet, either.

  She didn’t say it out loud, but her silence said it for her. When she’d arrived by car last week, four days before the wedding, instead of by airplane the day before, they’d all been surprised and a little concerned.

  “I just needed a break,” she’d told them. “Open-ended. Not sure what’s happening.”

  Soon, she would have to ask about staying on here, whether there was an income for her in helping Mary Jane and Daisy run the resort, or whether she needed to work out something else. They should probably have a family meeting about it and formalize the decision.

  Daisy had moved all her things to Tucker’s very nice apartment above his landscaping business’s office and showroom, but she would be running the Spruce Bay restaurant, open on a limited basis during their off-seasons and for three meals a day all summer, and so she would be here almost every day. Meanwhile, Mary Jane managed the accommodation side of the business, a role she’d gradually taken over from their parents the past few years. She made reservations, directed staff, troubleshooting the various problems that inevitably cropped up.

  But with the renovation almost completed and the whole place looking better than it ever had, they would have increased occupancy rates and more work, and was that what Lee wanted? To help run the family business? Was she done with mountain guiding and ski instructing? Hard to combine those with pregnancy, but once the baby was born...?

  “I don’t want to tell them yet,” she said firmly. “There’s too much still undecided.”

  “By who? By us, do you mean?”

  “Well, by me. First, anyhow, then...” She stopped.

  He’d sat up and swiveled his body out of the narrow bed, the movement pulling on the sheet and dragging it down to her waist. Then he twisted around to look at her. “You are way too big on creating done deals without anyone else getting a say, do you know that?”

  “Have you told people?” It was a rhetorical question, intended to silence him and put him on the back foot, but it failed completely.

  “Yes, of course I have,” he answered quietly. He twisted more, his naked side a smooth column of olive-skinned rib and muscle. “I’ve told my whole family. My parents, my sister and her husband, their kids.”

  “You called them before you left Colorado?” She bunched the sheet up to her neck. Whenever they made love, her body was so trusting—she never felt naked or vulnerable with him at all. She shivered with delight again now, just thinking about the way he’d touched and kissed her breasts, the way he’d moved inside her. But when they argued like this, everything was suddenly different. She needed the self-protection of a covering.

  “No, I drove up there,” he answered, “and we had a big talk about it. About what it meant. How I felt. How they felt. My sister’s kids were thrilled at the idea of a baby cousin. For my parents it was...more complicated.”

  “You drove all the way to—? It has to be a fifteen-hour drive from Aspen to Coeur d’Alene!”

  “Sixteen. Sixteen and a half, really.” He’d withdrawn. She could feel it.

  Well, she could see it. He was dressing with neat, staccato movements. Pulling on underwear, grabbing his shirt. Not looking at her now.

  He was still talking in that quiet, dignified way that spooked her because it seemed to imply that in all sorts of emotional areas, she fell massively short. Was he right? He’d known in Colorado that she held herself back, that she liked her moments of independence, and it hadn’t seemed to bother him.

  “I wanted to tell them in person,” he said. “Didn’t seem like the kind of major life change to announce in a phone call.”

  “Sometimes it has to be.” She was planning to call her own parents soon.

  “Sometimes. Not this time. Not for me. It was only a week earlier that I’d been telling my mom I had no plans for a serious relationship or a family anytime soon. Yes, it’s a sixteen-hour drive from Aspen to Coeur d’Alene, but it’s almost a forty-hour drive from Coeur d’Alene to here. One minute there was a good chance I was moving back to Idaho, close to them, next minute I’m going more than twice as far away as before.”

  She was stunned that he’d driven all that way so he could talk with his family face-to-face. It was...amazing. Heartwarming. No wonder he’d looked red-eyed and exhausted yesterday. And there was more to it t
han met the eye, she was sure. There was something he still hadn’t told her. “You left Colorado when?”

  “A week ago. Reached my parents Wednesday, left again Friday, to come east. Couldn’t quite make it the whole way by Sunday night. I’d run out of toothpicks.”

  “Toothpicks?”

  “For propping my eyelids open. So I crashed at a motel in Syracuse. Told you I was tired yesterday.”

  “I could see you were.”

  “I apologized for it, in fact.”

  “Mac, why was it so important to talk to your family face-to-face?” There was something going on here; she knew it down to her bones.

  Silence. Then, “Why is it so important for you not to talk to yours?”

  “I’m not not talking to them.”

  “I think you are.”

  “Okay, then, I want to wait till I have answers for them, is all.”

  “You honestly think that having a baby is mainly about having answers?”

  “Well, part of it is, this early on.”

  “No, it’s not! There are no answers!” His voice rose. “A baby isn’t a curveball that you shape up to hit. It isn’t an inconvenience that you manage. Or an accessory that you use to make fashion statements.”

  “Mac, I want this baby. I’ve said that. What have I said or done to make you think I’m treating it like an inconvenience or an accessory?” She sat up, but kept the sheet pulled high.

  He ignored her. “It’s major. Huge. And it doesn’t kick in with the birth, it kicks in long before that.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “How do I know?”

  “I mean, I—I’m not arguing.” She felt the faltering in her voice and didn’t understand herself. She was normally pretty comfortable with other people’s opinions about her, and pretty direct about it. How did Mac manage to make her doubt everything, just with that blazing, black-eyed glare? “It is major. You’re right. It is huge. It has kicked in. But why do you say it as if you know it so well? As if you feel it so personally? You don’t have a child, you’ve told me that. Was that not true? Is there actually some woman in Coeur d’Alene raising your ten-year-old?”

  “Of course there isn’t,” he muttered. “Or I would have told you.”

  “So what haven’t you told me?”

  He shook his head and pressed his lips together, stuck his feet into his shoes. She heard the sound of an engine, and knew that this time it was the delivery truck she’d been waiting for.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Mac,” she repeated. “So you’d better think about how you’re going to tell me, because it’s important. I can see that in every line of your body and every breath you take. But right now I have to go tell these guys where to unload.”

  “I’ll go tell them. You get dressed. Restaurant is that nice wooden building with the deck over by the lake, right?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “After they’ve gone, we’ll talk. You’re right. It’s due.” The words sounded ominous.

  She began scrambling into her clothes, hearing his feet thump down the stairs, and then male voices over the idling of a truck engine as he directed the driver across to the restaurant. The staff entrance and service hatch leading to the basement storage rooms were both locked, so she grabbed the keys from the office, along with a jacket because there was snow in the forecast and it was turning cold. Moments later Lee was supervising the unloading of half a truckful of boxes of wine and beer and spirits.

  “Where does it all go?” Mac asked her, and when she showed him the cellar room, he started ferrying the boxes into it and stacking them, shaking his head when she suggested they could be stacked properly later. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “For now we just need to get everything off the truck so we don’t keep the driver waiting.”

  “That means we end up lifting every box twice,” he pointed out. “I’ll do it now.”

  “In that case, I’ll help.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Mac, I can lift a carton with six bottles in it. You know how fit I am.”

  He looked at her and she could see the struggle going on within. Finally, he answered, “The small cartons. I don’t know why you have to make it into a big deal.”

  “I’m not the one doing that.”

  “Maybe not,” he grunted, and then they both let it go because it was obvious that they needed to talk this out, and that couldn’t happen yet.

  They worked without speaking to each other, although they both tried to disguise the silence between them with occasional chatty remarks to the truck driver. Lee was intensely aware of the way Mac worked, hefting each box onto one strong shoulder, balancing it there and then heaving it into position, walking tall and steady, with his butt tight and well-muscled and drawing her gaze.

  He’d taken off his jacket and rolled the sleeves of the button-down shirt, but he wasn’t really dressed for this. He should be in a polo shirt and jeans. He shouldn’t be doing this at all, really, but that was one of the things she liked about him. He always pitched in, whether it was drying dishes or sweeping snow from the steps of the Narmans’ huge house.

  It seemed like an hour before the truck finally drove away, but it wasn’t really. More like fifteen minutes, but it was painfully slow the way those minutes ticked by. Lee locked the service hatch and the staff door and shoved the keys in her jacket pocket, then turned, to find Mac shifting on his feet, watching her.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “Show me the lake.”

  “You want to see the lake? Now?”

  “I want to talk. Might as well walk. I hate doing this stuff sitting on a couch, or whatever. Much rather do it outside.”

  She knew what he meant. They had it in common, this need for air and space. “A walk would be good.”

  They both put their hands in their pockets and stumped along with cold ears. Clouds had come over and the air was getting chillier by the minute. It would be snowing within the next hour. She took him along the new walkway that led between the cabins and out to the beach and boat dock, and they rambled close to the water, where tiny waves lapped the rocks and sand.

  Mac didn’t say anything at first, and since she didn’t know what question to ask him to start this conversation, she didn’t say anything, either.

  “You’re not nagging,” he observed.

  “No, I don’t seem to be, do I?”

  “Thanks. Like that about you.”

  “You’re welcome. I think.”

  They covered several more yards in silence.

  “I don’t have a child,” he suddenly said. “But I thought I was going to, once.”

  “You thought?”

  “I had a girlfriend, Sloane. This is six years ago.” He thought for a moment. “Seven years, almost. Wow.” His voice dropped as if he was talking to himself. “Yes, very soon it’ll be seven years....” His tone changed again. “I was twenty-five, she was twenty-two. We slipped up... No, that’s not really it. She said to leave the contraception to her, but she kept forgetting to take her pill. I’m not telling this right. At all. But it’s hard.” He made a sound of deep frustration.

  “It’s okay.” Lee thought about taking his arm, but he still had both hands pushed deep in his pockets. They reached a rocky promontory jutting out into the lake, too hard to climb around unless you’d come prepared, which they hadn’t. They turned back in the opposite direction, and he began to speak again.

  “She was a professional athlete, a pro surfer, but she loved to snowboard, too. That’s how we met, on a mountain. She was thinking of switching, really wanted to do both, which was overambitious for a start.”

  “Sounds it.” Lee knew a few people who’d been torn between surfing and boarding, but all of them
had had to choose one to focus on.

  “Anyhow, Sloane got pregnant, and she was an overachiever and the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. She honestly thought she could just cruise through the pregnancy and not change anything about her life or her plans, and it wouldn’t make a difference. She didn’t want to get married. I mean, it didn’t even come up. My parents would have liked it ‘for the baby’s sake,’ they said. But I knew it would have been a disaster. Sloane would have pushed against something that conventional, every step of the way.”

  “Did your parents like her?”

  “They liked her as a person. They liked her company. Or maybe they pretended well. But her attitude scared them. Hell, it scared me! She thought she was going to stay on the pro surfing tour with a baby, keep boarding on the side. She wouldn’t slow down. Would not. I don’t know how she was thinking we’d do it. That I’d travel with her and take care of the baby when she was surfing?”

  Mac and Lee reached Spruce Bay’s wooden dock, and he turned and stepped onto it, then walked out to the end and leaned on the rail. The water made musical lapping and slapping sounds against the thick supporting posts. The resort’s boats were still put away for winter, as were most others at various marinas and docks, and the lake was quiet. Just one small motorboat nosed its way around an island, maybe the same boat Lee had heard earlier and thought for a moment was the delivery truck. She stood beside Mac and leaned on the rail, too.

  “I tried to get her to think about the practicalities,” he said, “but she just kept saying she didn’t want to raise a baby in suburbia, and that women have carried their babies on their backs for thousands of years, and all kinds of other stuff. She said we didn’t need a crib, the baby could sleep with us. We didn’t need a stroller, we’d use one of those baby slings. She yelled at me for underestimating her capability, for limiting my vision of our lives. She kept insisting that I would see that she was right once the baby was born.” He shook his head and stared down at the water. “Anyhow, it never got to that point.”

  Lee could barely breathe. “What happened, Mac?”