Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  “And he’s good with the kids. Yes. And he’s got cute buns.”

  “Taylor!”

  “Oh, admit it, Carolyn. You’re attracted to the man. And he’s equally smitten.”

  Carolyn couldn’t lie about that no matter how much she wanted to.

  “It’s all right, you know. People who have lost someone are allowed to feel an attraction to someone new. It’s in the widow’s almanac somewhere. Page 350, I think.”

  Carolyn lifted one corner of her mouth. “He told me to call the FBI and ask about an F. Peter Jackson.”

  To Carolyn’s surprise, Taylor chuckled. “The man’s got a sense of humor.”

  “Sense of humor?”

  “Sure. You remember that big prison riot back East a few years ago? The one demanding real meat instead of soy patties, and a host of other prison benefits? Well, the supposed ringleader was one F. Peter Jackson.”

  “Oh, God,” Carolyn said.

  “Well, this Pete can’t be that Jackson, because that guy was in on a first-degree murder charge and serving about a hundred consecutive terms. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—be out.”

  Carolyn felt her blood boil a little at Pete’s joke. And she’d been worried all morning about him. And she’d felt sorry for him.

  “I’ll take you up on your offer to take the girls,” Carolyn said. “And, I wouldn’t miss the picnic for the world.”

  “There you go,” Taylor said, rising to her feet. “Though I should think staying out here with your Pete might prove a temptation.”

  “Not a chance,” Carolyn said firmly, deliberately avoiding her sister-in-law’s quizzical gaze.

  With the girls off with Taylor and crew, the ranch should have seemed silent, forlorn even, but it didn’t. To Carolyn, the storm threatening in the eastern quadrant of the sky seemed to be making its tension felt on the ground. The day was hot, unseasonably so, and the air that had been wildly blowing earlier was still now and oppressive. The calm before the storm.

  Carolyn could hear the steady pounding of Pete’s hammer as he worked on the corral fence. He’d been there most of the time since Taylor left. Carolyn poured a glass of sun tea over ten or twelve ice cubes and set a couple of deviled eggs on a small plate.

  She almost stopped and turned back for the house when she saw that he’d stripped his shirt off and was a study in rippling, sweat-glistened muscles.

  He had his back to her, but something must have told him she was there, for he lowered the hammer slowly and turned around. He glanced at the small plate of deviled eggs and the tall glass of iced tea.

  “Thought you might be thirsty,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the tea and draining it in one long swallow that made Carolyn wish she’d brought tea for herself, for her mouth was unaccountably dust-dry.

  He popped one of the deviled eggs into his mouth, and his eyebrows raised and a smile quirked at his lips. “These are good,” he said thickly, reaching for the second one. “First-rate.”

  Carolyn knew people liked her deviled eggs, she even liked them herself. So what was it about the way Pete seemed to enjoy them that took her to an entirely different place?

  He took one of the ice cubes from his glass and ran it over his forehead and cheeks. “Damn,” he said, unknowingly echoing her own oath.

  The electrical storm building beyond the corral and barn was nothing compared to the one threatening to flare between the two of them. Water dripped from his eyebrows and he shook his head. Carolyn was vaguely aware that Bratwurst was shaking his dark head, also.

  She hadn’t realized she’d been standing stock-still with the empty plate still half held out to him until he reached for it and took it from her numb fingers. He balanced it on a fence post and set his drained glass atop that.

  Carolyn watched his motions, knowing he was putting the objects down so that her hands would be free, so that she could respond when he kissed her. She knew that and yet she didn’t move an inch. She knew she should say something to stop him but was completely unable to think why she would want to. Her eyes traveled his muscled torso, broad shoulders and down his tawny arms. The hair, so dark on his chest, was lighter colored on his arms, longer, silkier. Alluring. Enticing.

  He had a tattoo on his right forearm, red and black and deadly looking, a glowing-eyed skull inside a cowled robe. It wasn’t a finely executed tattoo; in fact, it looked as if it had been carved into his skin with a piece of broken glass. She’d seen something like it once, but couldn’t think where. It made her shiver a little since it was another thing she hadn’t known about him, didn’t know about him still.

  He turned back around then and came to within an inch of her.

  She tried to forestall him. “I...we...shouldn’t—”

  “The hell with ‘shouldn’ts,’” he growled, cupping her face with his hands and lifting her to his lips. His mouth was cold from the iced tea but his tongue was hot and tangy and knowledgeable. His fingers splayed across her face and into her hair, caressing, exhorting, drawing her closer and deeper into his kiss.

  She raised her hands to his velvet arms and moaned a little when he dropped his hands to her shoulders, gripping them tightly for a second, then gentling, rocking her to him. And she sighed into his kiss as his hands lowered still further, gripping her waist, her rounded buttocks, her tight thighs.

  Carolyn sighed as he pulled his lips from hers with an agonized groan and she trembled as he dragged at the warm desert air like a man who was drowning, and grasped her body to his as if seeking a life preserver.

  “You have no idea,” he said but didn’t continue. Somehow she seemed to know what he meant. He had no idea, either. Like her, he couldn’t understand how a single touch could spark a flame of such intense light, such remarkable heat that she couldn’t begin to think let alone resist.

  His touch was a spell and his lips the magic that carried her into another dimension, a place where FBIs and doubts didn’t matter and where trust and faith were promises that could, someday, come true.

  As he freed her lips yet again and trailed a series of burning, searing kisses down her neck and collarbone, she gripped his forearms as if for dear life.

  Pete didn’t say anything; lowering his lips to her outthrust breasts,

  “Please...?” she asked, but wasn’t sure what she was pleading for. She turned her head to press a kiss to his shoulder, savoring the tangy taste of his moist, sun-warmed skin. Do me a favor...

  His hot breath played against her breasts and as his fingers swept her buttons free, exposing her to his avid gaze, she ran her own hands down his solid torso, reveling in the rippled muscles on his back, the rock-hard taper of his waist.

  Don’t teil them where I am.

  She realized suddenly that she was with him regarding his not wanting anyone to know where he was. She didn’t want him gone. She wanted him right here on her ranch, holding her in his arms, kissing her, tasting her, making her shiver with want, ache with need.

  Her knees seemed to buckle and she knew in a moment she would slide to the dusty ground. He turned her then, pressing her against the corral. She felt the top rail of the fence bite into her shoulder blades and moaned aloud as he gave a sharp tug to her brassiere, freeing her completely only to capture her with his lips.

  She heard a thud and the sharp tinkle of breaking glass but didn’t look to where the plate and glass had been. She could only close her eyes and shudder as wave upon wave of sensation rippled down her body, inciting a riot of reaction. Cold, then hot razor-sharp spikes of desire warred within her.

  She trembled and ached and whispered his name. He raised his head and stared at her with glassy eyes, a gaze tortured with longing, blank with the fire that raged between them.

  She knew her own gaze to be heavy lidded, her breathing ragged and uncertain. And she knew little more than that she wanted this man, this stranger. She raised her hand to his chest and felt his heart thundering beneath her shaking fingers.

  She c
ould read the question, the plea in his face and half wondered if it was echoed on her own.

  “Carolyn...” he murmured, leaning closer, pressing against her hand.

  She raised her free hand to his face and had to close her eyes against the raw supplication in the kiss he turned into her palm. He brushed her hair back from her eyes and whispered her name again, a question and a seeming answer in his gentle touch.

  Kissing him, feeling the quickening in her body, the deep, tortured ache in her soul, she rested her forehead against his broad shoulder, her eyes on his velvet skin, the taste of him in her mouth, the longing for him making her shiver, making her feel as if heady wine coursed through her veins now. Now that he’d touched her.

  Seeking any excuse to stay the moment, to delay what felt to be an inevitable union, she lowered her eyes to his tattoo. “Did it hurt?” she asked, trailing her finger across the gruesome image. It was both strangely beautiful and incredibly dark.

  “Yes,” he said. “In more ways than you’ll ever know.”

  From beneath a cowled hood, the glowing eyes of the darkened skull seemed to meet hers. A flex of Pete’s muscle seemed to make the eyes glow redder, a baleful, evil stare.

  He lowered his lips to hers again, blotting out questions, thought, erasing futures and yesterdays, creating a moment out of time, out of space.

  The storm building behind them seemed an extension of the want that flared so dramatically between the two of them. She clung to him because, without clinging, she would have slid to the ground. And she arched against him because she could do nothing else.

  Mindless, caught by a wave of desire so strong, so insistent that any thought was impossible beyond savoring his taste, she inhaled the scent of his salty skin and moaned at the feel of his roughened hands on her own body.

  “Carolyn,” he mouthed against her collarbone. And murmured her name again as his hot tongue laved an aching, turgid nipple.

  And suddenly, without warning, Carolyn remembered where she’d seen the death’s-head tattoo before. An exiting parolee had told her about it years ago, had drawn a picture of it so she’d know it in the future. She just had forgotten. Touching Pete, kissing him, feeling his skin against her own had erased all thought, all memory.

  The death’s head tattoo was a prison symbol of honor. Honor among murderers. It signified one thing only: killing someone inside prison and getting away with it.

  He pulled back from her a little, his eyes focusing on her now, the desire not ebbing but shifting to a wariness. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. Why hadn’t she seen his tattoo in the hallway outside the bathroom? Because she’d been looking elsewhere, desperate not to see too much of his naked body.

  Because she hadn’t been looking for it.

  “No, there’s something,” he said.

  What could she say? You killed someone in prison? She’d known better than to bring a stranger to the ranch. She’d known better. And yet she’d trusted him with her ranch, with her children. With her own unbridled passion.

  “Tell me, Carolyn,” he said gently, though his tone implied command.

  “I worked as a social psychologist in Dallas,” she said. In the face of his stiffening silence, she added, “Primarily with exiting parolees.”

  she felt his fingers digging into her shoulders, felt his chest harden beneath her hand. “And?” he asked softly. Coldly.

  She couldn’t meet his gaze and couldn’t lower her own back to that dreadful evidence of his past. “And I know what your tattoo means.”

  “I see,” he said.

  He said it so carefully she had to look at his face. “Do you?” she asked.

  “I think so,” he said. There wasn’t so much as a nuance of inflection in his even tone.

  Carolyn drew a deep breath. She had to tell him to leave. It was the only right thing to do. For her daughters’ sake. For her own sake. Whatever she’d conjured in her imagination about his past—thievery, tax evasion, fraud, all of those could be condoned on some bizarre level, but murder...never.

  “So,” he said, pulling away from her and turning his back to her. “What happens now?”

  Still limply draped against the corral railing, she lifted numb fingers to readjust her bra, to attempt fastening her blouse. She made sorry work of it. “I don’t know,” she muttered. She did know though. He had to go.

  “What about the Wannamachers?”

  Carolyn closed her eyes. A known murderer versus two known thugs. A man who had murdered someone and gotten away with it versus two bullies who terrorized a widow and her daughters and got away with it. A man who was kind to her daughters, afraid of hurting an old horse... versus two terrorists who didn’t mind frightening two little girls and their mother half to death.

  Pete grabbed his shirt and shoved his arms into it. He didn’t reach for the buttons. With his back to her, he stood perfectly still for several seconds. What should have appeared defeat or despair merely seemed a cautious, poised waiting.

  Finally he asked, “You didn’t call the FBI, did you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  What could she possibly tell him? I didn’t call the FBI because doing so would have seemed a violation of trust...he had to know as well as she did that murder was the greatest violation on the face of the earth.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  He turned around then and met her gaze with his own sad, tortured eyes. “I do,” he said, lifting a hand to her face.

  She didn’t flinch, though a part of her wanted to do exactly that, to duck from a truth too stark and too harsh to face. A stronger part fought the impulse to lean into his rough caress.

  He lowered his lips to hers in the briefest, most sorrow-filled kiss she’d ever known.

  The first drops of rain splattered onto her upturned face and felt like cold tears against her cheeks.

  Chapter 8

  Pete packed his gear swiftly. Angrily. As furious with Carolyn as he was at himself.

  She hadn’t asked him to leave. Why not?

  He could have told her the truth days before, he thought. He could have wiped the doubts from her face with a clean, simple explanation. All he’d had to do was open his mouth and tell her that the tattoo on his arm had been his sole means of protection while behind bars.

  He knew he’d taunted her with his elliptical challenge to call the FBI. A part of him had wanted her to do just that, to have the truth out in the open. And a part of him exulted in the fact that she hadn’t called them, had apparently decided to accept him on faith, to trust him despite her lack of knowledge.

  That damnable trusting nature of hers unmanned him. No one should be that trusting, that vulnerable. And yet, it was her very ability to give such unwarranted trust that had made him agree to come to her ranch, made him long to clean up her difficulties, to set the world right for her.

  He could tell her now, he thought, simply halt the confusion in her lovely face by just spilling the sordid details of an even more sordid ten-year confinement in hell. But what would the telling solve? He didn’t know what the future held. He couldn’t make her any promises, though God knows a part of him wanted to do just that.

  The rain had already stopped, but the storm in him raged on. Even as he shoved what few items he’d unpacked in the bunkhouse, he wondered why he was so angry with her. For accepting him without needing proof of his good intentions? For leaping to a conclusion that anyone would? For being more afraid of the Wannamacher brothers than she was of a confirmed murderer?

  Or was it far more complicated than that? Was he angry, not at her, but at himself, for believing in the trust, for needing it to the point of duplicity?

  “Damn,” he said, looking out his window in time to see her placing a covered tray on the back seat of the Ranger. He leapt for the door of the bunkhouse, but was too late to do more than call out her name before she slammed the door of the Ranger, threw the vehicle in ge
ar and roared out of the driveway.

  The picnic. He’d completely forgotten about that picnic. He stood in the cooling afternoon watching Carolyn disappear down the road and tried to understand her motivation for leaving a known murderer in charge of her ranch.

  Either she was the biggest fool this side of the Missouri river...or he was.

  Since he could still feel every nuance of her in his arms, the sensation of her skin beneath his fingertips and the silk texture of her lips lingered upon his own, he knew he was the fool. By not telling her, by not giving her a measure of the trust she’d offered him, he’d thrown away the only possibility of happiness that he’d been offered in ten years.

  “I’m sorry, Carolyn,” he said aloud, but there was no one there to hear him. There was no one besides a restless horse and a mother cat to know how deeply he meant the apology, how many years it had been since he’d made one.

  Thunder anew rumbled in the sky and echoed in his soul.

  Everyone in Almost, Texas, except the bedridden and Pete Jackson, attended the Almost Over-Sixty Club’s Annual Spring Picnic...including the Wannamacher brothers.

  Of a town comprised of some six hundred pleasant, familial people, the Wannamaehers couldn’t have been more affable, more considerate, and more helpful to those in need of a paper cup filled with pineapple punch or a plate loaded with beef ribs or a variety of the homemade tidbits brought by the Almost citizenry.

  If she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t been faced with their dirty dealings at a personal level, she easily could have been led to believe Bubba and Jimmy Wannamacher were two of the nicest old boys the county had to offer.

  It had taken her two days to get Pete to tell her what their latest spray-paint message had read. The fact that he’d wanted it withheld from the girls had warmed her heart and had made her feel protected, safe.

  But seeing the Wannamachers now, knowing they’d tried terrorizing her with Get Out Or Get Dead! she felt nothing but cold revulsion. And a wish that Pete had come with her.

  Wannamachers...Pete. Thugs and murderer.