“By the barn. In the shadows.”
She could see it then, now that she knew where to look. It was a low-slung, older model Chevrolet. “Wannamachers,” she said.
“You’re sure? Is that the kind of car they drive?”
“It has to be them!”
“But have you seen that car before?”
“No...I don’t know.”
“Shh...someone’s outside the car.”
“What are they doing?”
“I can’t tell from here,” he said.
Immediately Carolyn thought the worst, imagining the barn suddenly bursting into flame. “Bratwurst’s in the barn tonight! I made the girls put him in because the weather report said we were getting down to ten degrees or so with windchill!” She instinctively moved around him, reaching for the door.
His hands grasped her shoulders and pulled her back against his chest before she could wrench the door open. “Wait,” he breathed in her ear. And even as she felt the jolt of fear-induced adrenaline coursing through her veins, her knees seemed to quaver at the sensation of his hot breath playing against her skin.
“Wait here,” he murmured, and she could feel his lips moving at her temple.
He released her shoulders and she heard him moving swiftly away. She sagged against the doorjamb, not knowing if she was afraid of what waited for them outside or how the stranger Pete made her feel.
He was back in a matter of seconds. “Stay inside,” he growled, gently pushing her out of the way and silently turning the knob. “At least I got that damned squeaky screen door fixed,” he said as he pulled open the back door and pushed on the screen. It swung out and wide and then screeched like a banshee.
Carolyn scarcely noticed Pete’s muttered oath as she heard two other higher-pitched swears and the sudden slamming of car doors. She realized several things in the split second that Pete leapt out of the door: one, Pete was armed with Craig’s old .38 pistol, and two, the vehicle she hadn’t even heard idling was already pulling away.
Pete was well into the driveway and taking aim at the car before Carolyn could even draw a breath. But he didn’t fire. He stood, legs parted, knees bent, arms straight forward, gun hand resting in the other for accuracy. Then he abruptly raised the gun heavenward and dropped his left hand as he straightened.
A completely irrational part of Carolyn’s mind thought how much the girls would have appreciated this particular sight; for a moment Pete had looked exactly like one of their heroes from the movies. Then she burst out the back door, not even feeling the starkly cold night.
“Why didn’t you shoot?” she demanded.
He turned as if surprised she were there. He glanced once at the distant taillights of the disappearing car and back to her. “Could have been kids looking for a place to park.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked angrily. “We both know who it was!”
“Do we? I like to be a little more certain before I shoot somebody. Let’s go in. It’s cold, Carolyn,” he said.
He didn’t seem to notice that he’d used her name. It was the first time since they’d met that he’d called her anything at all.
“Get inside,” he said.
“We’ve got to check the barn.”
“You’ve got to get inside. I’ll check the barn.”
“I want to see what they did.”
“They’re gone. There’s no sign of a fire in the barn. I’m freezing my ass off and I’m dressed more warmly than you are. Now get inside.”
Pete had only been with them for a short time, granted, but this was probably the longest speech he’d uttered in her presence since his arrival. And the fact that he said it with absolute command made a frisson of unknown reaction ripple through Carolyn’s body.
She’d always had to be the strong one in her marriage. Her husband might have come outside to investigate a prowler, but he would have asked her what they should do next.
Pete swore then and strode forward to take her arm and not so gently lead her back to the porch and up the steps he’d mended only that afternoon. “If it makes you feel better, I swear I’ll check the damned barn as soon as I get my shoes on!”
The warmth of the house was palpable as he shoved her inside and shut the door behind them. Carolyn shivered then, unaware in her fear and anxiety that she’d been standing outside in subfreezing temperatures in nothing but a fake-satin nightshirt and a pair of heelless raccoon slippers her daughters had given her for Christmas the year before.
At least she’d had slippers on. Pete’s feet must be excruciatingly cold. She wanted to say something to that effect, but his back was to her as he pulled a chair out from the table, all but slammed the pistol to the surface and reached for the hiking boots and socks he’d obviously cast aside when he heard the car outside.
Why was he doing this for them? There wasn’t anything in it for him. No money. No promises. No nothing.
She had to ask him. “Why are you doing this for us?”
He didn’t answer as he pulled on his socks and hiking boots in sharp, rough jerks and tugs.
“I really want to know,” she said softly.
He remained silent as his hands flew in the process of tying a fierce knot in his boot laces.
“Pete? What do you do for a living? Why were you out in the desert?”
He stood abruptly and took a long stride toward her. He was no more than a single inch away from her. She could feel the cold from the outdoors wafting from his clothing and the heat that burned underneath.
“I thought you said you didn’t care why I was out there.”
“I—I know I said that.”
“But you didn’t mean it.”
“No, I did, but...”
“But you’ve reconsidered?”
Why was he so angry with her? Because she’d snapped at him? She thought it was something more, something she hadn’t even triggered, something caused by the sight of strangers on her property. And her questioning him had simply been a final straw of sorts.
“No, I just...I’d just like to understand why you’re doing this for us.”
“Jenny’s birthday money and three squares a day.”
She wanted to smile but couldn’t. He’d said the words without a vestige of humor and the explanation was patently absurd.
“The real reason you came here, Pete. Please tell me,” she said softly. “Please.”
“Okay,” he growled. She could feel his exhalation of air, the soft play of his breath against her hair. “You,” he growled.
“W-what?”
“You.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do, Carolyn. Nobody’s that blind.”
She shook her head, but wasn’t sure what she was negating—his words or his proximity. The truth in his words.
“You want it spelled out? Okay. I agreed to come play handyman and bodyguard because of your laugh. Your smile. Hell, I don’t know, maybe the way you said ‘please.’”
“I d-don’t understand...” she began again but trailed off as his ice-cold hands grasped her shoulders.
“Don’t lie to me, Carolyn. I can see through a lie at a hundred yards. And I’m nowhere near that far away,” he said.
“I think you’d better—”
“I think so, too,” he said, and slid his hands down her arms only to encircle them and roughly pull her against him as he lowered his full, very warm lips to hers.
Chapter 5
The slow fire he’d started when he’d been standing all but naked and wet in her hallway upstairs burst into flame as his hands slipped into her hair and he cupped her face with the heels of his palms, drawing her even closer.
His tongue, hot and tasting vaguely of creamed coffee and a hint of tobacco, swept into her mouth, strong, demanding, a raw exhortation for her to respond. His hands trembled slightly and his body was rock hard against hers, no longer cold now, but hot, seemingly on fire.
She couldn’t withhold the moan that escap
ed her as his hands dropped to her waist and pulled her against him. Her thin nightshirt felt nonexistent and her legs quivered as she leaned into him.
This was wrong, she thought, she didn’t know him. He was a stranger and a mystery. But how could anything that felt this good be even remotely wrong? Like hot fudge sundaes, lobster dipped in melted butter, filet mignon... wonderful delights, but they were bad for you... Was he bad for her?
And as his hands began a slow, deep caress of her back, her bottom, and then raising to cup her aching breasts, she ceased to think at all. Wrong or right, she arched against him, granting him greater access, clinging to his broad shoulders and meeting his lips with a fevered kiss of her own.
“Oh, Carolyn,” he groaned as he released her lips and pressed a trail of liquid fire down the line of her jaw and onto her sensitive collarbone. “You’re so beautiful it hurts.”
His words seemed to release her fragile hold on reality another notch and she dropped her head back as he arched her even further and nuzzled her rock-hard nipples through the flimsy nightshirt. He blew hot breath against them and grazed her lightly with his teeth. His hands lowered and cupped her rounded bottom and slowly rotated her against him, letting her know a measure of the extent of his desire for her.
She felt liquid, molten, and every part of her body seemed to tremble and quake with unvarnished need, with a longing so intense it was nearly agonizing.
Pete knew he had to let her go, to call a halt to this utter luxury. But he would have to have been made of pure steel, totally lacking in emotion and passion and devoid of the glorious sense of touch in order to release her now. And he lacked none of those feelings...not one of them.
He could scarcely tell where her satin nightshirt ended and her skin began, so soft and silken was her exquisite body. The hollows beneath her chin smelled of the soap he’d used in the bathtub and her lips tasted of peanuts and raw heat.
The feel of her body melting against his roused a demon in him that made him forget the past, the future, everything but her velvet touch, her ragged breathing. He felt nearly mindless, his entire being was focused on her, on her ragged breathing, her soft inchoate murmur of acceptance and possibly denial, not of him but of what they were doing.
“Mom? Are you downstairs?”
He heard the words, even registered them in some deep recess of his brain, but it wasn’t until Carolyn went perfectly still in his arms that he understood them, understood the implications behind them.
With the greatest reluctance in the world, he slowly pulled away from Carolyn, still holding her but stepping back a pace. He could feel her entire body trembling and he thought she might slide to the floor if he released her fully. Somehow the very notion made him feel powerful and he ached to pull her back against him.
“Mom?”
He half smiled as she cleared her throat before she answered, “Yes, Shawna, what is it?”
He wondered how she could tell which of her daughters was speaking. Was it a mother thing or would he know if he spent enough time around them?
His smile faded from his lips. He wasn’t going to be spending time around the Leary women; he was going to be leaving before what happened tonight progressed to other levels. They had been granted a reprieve even if, at the moment, it felt like a curse.
He realized that Carolyn didn’t know how lucky she was her daughter had called at that precise moment. Like a guardian angel, the little girl had rescued her mother from a colossal mistake.
“I forgot to do my math homework.”
Carolyn straightened even more and turned slightly, freeing herself from his grasp. He shoved his hands into his pockets, his fingertips tingling with the remembered feel of her skin, the weight of her breasts.
He closed his eyes when Carolyn breathed a short curse. She’d done the same thing in the hallway; apparently she didn’t swear aloud around the children. “Will you have time to do it in the morning?” she called. She ran her hands through her hair and tugged at her nightshirt as if it would lengthen by such a maneuver.
“There’s so much I’ll never get it done!” Shawna wailed.
Carolyn looked at him then, a tentative flickering glance that exposed her candid vulnerability, her lingering desire, and something else, a barrier, a guard that hadn’t been there two minutes before.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Pete frowned. “I’m not.”
She frowned then and Pete knew he hadn’t understood what she meant, nor had she known what his words implied. He wanted to ask but knew it wasn’t the time, nor—because the kitchen remained dark and she remained alluring and Shawna was waiting—was it the place.
“I—I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, but her words hung between them not so much as a statement but as a question.
“Lock the door after me,” he said, nodding, thinking it sounded as if he were telling her to lock him, out. Maybe he was.
She nodded as he crossed to the table and hefted the .38. He turned it aground and handed it to her grip-first. He felt odd pressing the cold steel into her hands. “Put this back in the living room closet. On the top shelf. You don’t come out of that door tonight—or any night till this is all over—without it in your hand, okay?”
He stepped around her and opened the back door, letting a blast of cold air blow through the kitchen.
Carolyn gasped behind him and he slipped through the door without looking back at her.
“Pete?” she asked, halting him in the act of shutting the door. He felt a tentative touch against his shoulder blade.
“Yes?”
“I—nothing,” she said.
Whatever she’d been going to say could wait until light of day, until dawn made this madness in her dark kitchen seem like nothing more than a dream, he thought.
“Good night,” he said, pulling the door shut. The icy February air slapped his face and clawed at his shirt. He drew a deep, thankful breath and pushed the screen door that didn’t make a single sound gently back into place. He heard the click of the dead bolt Carolyn slid into place and laid his hand against the door frame as if he could feel her through the wood.
“Good night,” Carolyn whispered to the empty kitchen, resting her forehead against the cool doorjamb.
“Mom?”
“Coming, Shawna,” she said wearily.
“Can I stay up, too?” Jenny called out.
“Not a chance,” Carolyn said as she left the kitchen. Her legs shook as she mounted the stairs and her hand, when she took Shawna’s math book, trembled so noticeably that her daughter took it back.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
No, she thought. She was far from okay. A thousand miles from all right. She’d come very close to surrendering to a complete stranger on the floor of her own kitchen.
“Mom?”
“I’m fine, sweetie.” She shook her head a little as if shaking the memory of Pete’s impassioned kisses from her mind.
“There’s twenty-five problems!” Shawna said in an aggrieved tone.
“When you do one, there will only be twenty-four. And then twenty-three.”
“You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“If you want every answer wrong, sure,” Carolyn said, dropping her arm around her daughter’s slender shoulders and guiding her down the hall to her own bedroom.
She tried to feel comfortable with the notion that Pete was outside while she was in but all she felt was restless and out of sorts. Her lips burned and an unfamiliar sensation of an elevator falling at least four floors gnawed at her insides.
Shawna settled at the old desk in the corner of her mother’s bedroom and Carolyn stood over her as she opened the math book and took out a folded paper with only one answer on it.
“Twenty-four problems to go,” Shawna said, and sighed.
Carolyn looked out the window and down at the lighted window in the bunkhouse. She felt her heart jolt as Pete’s shadow crossed between the lamp and window only to stop, a s
olid silhouette. She could almost feel his stare at her own lighted window, her own shadowed form.
“How much is sixteen times one-half?”
“One half of what?” Carolyn asked absently.
“Oh, Mom!” Shawna giggled.
Jenny spoke from the doorway. “I’m scared in there all alone. Can I sleep in your bed while Shawna does her homework? I won’t say a word, I promise.”
Carolyn sighed and turned away from the window. This was the reality, two wonderful daughters in a ramshackle old farmhouse. What happened in the kitchen had been nothing more than an aftermath of fear and the accidental chemical reaction of two lonely people. That’s all it was...and all it ever would be. It would never happen again because she wouldn’t let it.
What if Shawna had come down the stairs before calling out? Worse, what if they hadn’t been interrupted?
She pulled back her covers and motioned for Jenny to hop in. She was rewarded with a blinding grin that brought a smile to her own lips.
“Why are you shaking, Mom?” Jenny asked.
Why, indeed?
Pete waited until all the lights were out in the house before donning his heavy sub-zero parka and a pair of work gloves. He carried a can of white paint to the side of the old barn. Muttering a string of highly improbable threats to the absent Wannamacher brothers, he slapped a coat of cold-thickened paint over the spray-painted scrawl.
Get Out Or Get Dead!
“I’d like to spray a couple of phrases on you two,” Pete growled. “With mace.”
Damnation, it was cold. Whoever thought the desert southwest wasn’t cold in the winter hadn’t been painting over a threatening message in the dead of night in February.
When the words were covered with the sluggish paint, he stepped back to survey his handiwork. The new white paint stood out in sharp relief against the dirty, weathered barn’s original coat.
Pete shook his head, but a grin lifted one corner of his lips. Now he’d have to paint the whole damned barn. That would take him at least a week. Or more. The other side of his mouth lifted.
He glanced up at Carolyn’s darkened window. He’d done a thousand things in his life that he could regret, but coming to Carolyn’s ranch wasn’t one of them. She needed him. The girls needed him.
Almost Perfect Page 8
