“Somehow, I get the feeling you’re the type of guy who won’t admit defeat even when it’s staring you directly in the face,” she said the moment her breathing resumed a normal pattern. Michael still hadn’t shifted, but her body was growing accustomed to the heavy, delicious weight of him. It had been too long since she’d participated in this sort of sport, wrestling a man with words while he wrestled her with his body.
“Is that what’s staring at me right now?” His finger moved along her cheek, not exactly a caress, but not not one either. “Defeat?”
She struggled against him, wiggling her legs and hips until she rested on her elbows, face-to-face with him. Oh, geez. If she thought she missed the weight of a man, she certainly wasn’t going to think about how nice it felt to be rubbing against one. Focus on the words. They’d never let her down before.
“Does this look like defeat?” She even managed a nicely quirked eyebrow for good effect.
“It looks damn good, I’ll give it that.” He leaned in, seemingly unaware that she was inching away, slowly but most definitely surely. “It also looks like it’s in desperate need of this.”
Rachel knew what was coming. It was in the shift in his weight, still held suspended so near her. It was in the hitch of breath—hers or his, she couldn’t really tell and didn’t really care. The whole day, all fun and lighthearted and full of Michael’s blatant innuendos, had been heading this direction.
What could it hurt? Why, for one delicious moment in the mud, couldn’t she enjoy being a hot-blooded woman pinned underneath an attractive and incredibly hot-blooded man?
The kiss was surprisingly tender and resolve-shatteringly soft.
In her experience, a man like Michael, who drew attention to his male parts like a baboon, was the kind who treated a woman like she was a piece of spaghetti being thrown at a wall. Attack with tongue, mouth, hands and dick all at once. Eventually, one of them would stick.
But his lips on hers were as much a question as they were an answer, and one of those oh, God, so big hands wound up to the back of her head, gripping her hair but not pulling it. There was that lion cub coming out to play again, capable of so much power but restraining it just for her.
She wondered if he knew how much that bothered and turned her on all at once. She opened her mouth and deepened the kiss, but still he held back, giving her only a small taste of what he was really capable of. Letting out a low growl of irritation, she pushed him away, hoping she could read something in his face other than the bovine satisfaction he was sure to be wearing.
Surprisingly, there was a tenderness in his eyes on top of the satisfaction.
But it didn’t last long. As soon as he saw her searching glance, he broke out into that aggravating smile.
“You,” he said, licking his lips as if tasting what remained of her there. “Are an incredibly gracious loser. Is that what they call a booby prize?”
A short bark of a laugh escaped her, and she relaxed. Michael wouldn’t force any sort of soul searching or meaning out of that kiss, and he wasn’t going to go all weird and start touching her every second he got the chance. He was simple and easy, the type of man who took what pleasures were offered him, or, if they were denied, shrugged his shoulders and moved on.
How wonderful it must be to care so little, to see everything through a pair of frat-boy beer goggles.
“I didn’t lose. I distinctly remember passing the finish line a complete five seconds before you.”
“Fine. I’m an incredibly gracious loser, then. Lucky for you.” He grinned and jerked his head toward the top of the hill, where the Airstreams were parked. “I’ll even make lunch. You can get cleaned up over at my place, if you want.”
“Uh…” She imagined the tiny aluminum can and cringed. “I’m okay.”
“Me have shower. Me have electricity.” He laughed and pounded on his chest. “I might even have something you can change into. I promise—it’s not as bad as you think.”
She didn’t know how to gracefully bow out without ruining whatever sort of happy time they were having, so she went along.
She was pleasantly surprised by what she found. No piles of dirty clothes smelling of rancid man littered the floor. No dishes and garbage and other paraphernalia that usually provided the nesting materials for beasts of his nature were scattered about. It was smaller, certainly, than her mother’s house, but the narrow length of it was clean and simple, and shelves all over the walls provided a way for him to store a few movies and personal items with something approaching organization. At one end, a small kitchenette stood, empty and inviting. At the other, a queen-size bed took up quite a bit of space, but the bedding looked clean, if slightly pimped out in black satin. In the center, a couch and a table provided a serviceable living space.
“Bathroom’s through there. The shower’s small, but it works.” Michael moved through the space easily, not the least bit ashamed of the place he called home. He reached into a drawer underneath the bed and pulled out a T-shirt and pair of sweatpants. At this, at least, he had the good grace to change his grin from beaming to sheepish. “It’s not as nice as what you normally wear, but it’ll get you home. I’ll be over at Jennings’s if you need anything.”
She murmured her thanks and waited a full twenty seconds after the door shut behind him to start poking through his stuff.
She was doomed to disappointment, though. Other than an alarming number of farming equipment user manuals and energy bars bought in bulk, there was nothing personal about the space.
Few needs, even fewer possessions. Michael was like a hermit. The Happy Troglodyte, a children’s picture book waiting to happen.
Rachel suddenly felt over-everything. Over-dressed, over-analytical, over-judgmental of everything and everyone. Eric and her sister’s problems seemed miles away, and that distance was flooded with doubt and uneasiness and the sinking suspicion that Michael and his friend weren’t all that bad.
She kicked the shower door.
How dare he? How dare he take away some of her confidence, strip her of the certainty that made it so much easier to do what she knew to be right?
And more importantly—how dare he stop that kiss just as it was getting to the good part?
Chapter Nine
Frailty
Women were changeable. Michael knew that. Accepted it. Played with it, especially when the woman in question was Rachel Hewitt, whose personality was tempestuous and temptress in one increasingly attractive package.
In the few weeks he’d known Rachel, he was starting to get a feel for the way she worked. He wasn’t crass enough to compare her to a piece of machinery that he could break down into its individual parts and rebuild from memory, but he could definitely see the parallels.
She liked control and power. She liked winning and having the upper hand. The moment any of those were taken away from her, she panicked, lashing out at whatever—or whoever—happened to be standing in the immediate vicinity. Lately, that had been Michael, and he doubted anyone else had put himself so much in the way of her wrath before.
Because it was obvious that once her energy was spent, she was soft and pliable and funny and pretty damn great.
It was a cycle: fight and fun. Frolic and flail. At some point, he imagined they could introduce fuck into that equation and find a whole new level of entertainment.
He sure as hell wanted to. If Rachel fought half as hard in the bedroom as she did in her everyday life, he could die happy. And if her response to him out in the racing field was anything to go by, she was willing.
The question was, why didn’t he make a move? Why did Michael O’Leary, with his game face on and balls tight with anticipation, bow out of the running after just one kiss?
Something was very wrong with him.
Even worse, he’d actually enjoyed their afternoon—quiet, comfortable and completely free of dick jokes. After a quick shower, Rachel joined him in the other Airstream with Jennings, and she didn’t even pul
l a face when confronted with a platter of Fluffernutter sandwiches for lunch.
They’d been there several hours once they took into account the three games of Scrabble Michael had been forced to sit through, watching the two of them play. By the time they were done, he was ready to swear she was a different person. Maybe it was the adorable way she’d rolled up the waistband of his sweatpants until they rested loosely on her hips, or the face she’d made when she realized she was wearing a Hooters Vancouver T-shirt, but he’d thought she was really getting into the role of Normal Human Being.
As they neared her house, however, all signs of the fun, lighthearted Rachel fled.
“You can just drop me off here,” she said. They were at the end of her block, a nice, picturesque street with people mowing the lawns and kids’ toys scattered around. Her fingers drummed against the door in a nervous staccato beat.
“Nope,” Michael said casually, peering at the numbers on the houses. What had she said hers was? Ten eighty-eight? “This is a doorside service. I’m a very thorough man—I never skimp on the good parts.”
The challenge went unmet, and his heart sank. He was going to have to try harder.
“And since you won’t ask me what the good parts are, I’m going to have to ask you for my clothes back. Preferably before you exit the vehicle. Or now. Now is good.”
She turned to him and scowled. “You’re horrible at reading people, did you know that? I said let me out of your car, not proposition me with poorly timed sexual advances.”
That’s better. The quiet, internalized Rachel was scary. He doubted she had any idea how much scarier she was than the irate, yelling Rachel.
He didn’t slow the car. At a neighborhood-friendly fifteen miles per hour, she could have easily tucked and rolled her way to safety, but he wasn’t going to make it any easier on her than he had to.
“So what you’re saying is that if my sexual advances are better timed, we’re all sails out and ready to go? Damn, woman. Why didn’t you just say so? I can get my mast up and my canvas billowing—”
“You are impossible!” The drumming had stopped, and there was a wild, murderous look in her eyes. “For a few hours there, I thought we were having a good time. I think there was even a whole thirty minute stretch where you didn’t mention sex once.”
Michael scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “I think it was actually only about twenty minutes. You missed my reference to all the dirty tea bags Jennings had on his kitchen counter.”
He didn’t have time to appreciate the low, guttural obscenities she was about to scream in his ear, because they’d reached her house. It wasn’t the clean two stories of Colonial façade that tipped him off to the cause of her anxiety, or even the line of laundry out back that billowed with silky underthings no decent woman would expose to the neighborhood. No. It was the pair of cop cars in the driveway and the man in a blue hat escorting a very irate-looking woman up the front steps.
Her mother.
“I’m serious, Michael. If you know what’s good for you, let me out and drive away.”
“I’m a glutton for punishment,” he said with a shrug, slowing. He didn’t have time to add anything about his favorite kind of punishments, since Rachel decided she could, in fact, exit a moving vehicle.
He gave her a few seconds to correct the wobble in her step and approach the house before he turned the engine off and got out of the car. He leaned against it as though he hadn’t a care in the world—even though his gaze was sharp under his half-lidded eyes and his crossed arms hid a tension that would have burst into action at the first sign she needed him.
It was a familiar scene to him, the real Walk of Shame. There was nothing shameful about having a little too much to drink on a Saturday night and waking up in a stranger’s bed. There was, however, a whole hell of a lot of shame in being escorted home by police officers when you were too drunk to stand straight—and in the middle of the afternoon.
It was the shame that had pushed Michael’s own parent even further down the path of his own making, strewn as it was with empty liquor bottles. It was the shame that made Rachel refuse to look back and acknowledge him standing there.
Well, he was standing here and would remain that way until he was sure she was okay.
Rachel wasn’t a woman who asked for help or admitted to any kind of weakness. Obviously, neither was her mother. But that didn’t mean either of them didn’t need it.
He’d wait.
He had nothing but time.
“I think one of us should stay home tomorrow,” Rachel said, trying to look casual as she brought the fork to her mouth. She wasn’t hungry, but Molly looked about ready to collapse, her eye still puffy and purple, her shoulders slumped. The only way she would eat was if Rachel led by example. “Just to make sure she’s okay.”
“I suppose by ‘one of us,’ you mean me,” Molly replied, stabbing at her salad. She looked up. “Oh, don’t get on your high horse, Rachel. I just meant that you were the one here today, so it’s my turn tomorrow. I get it.”
Rachel shifted uncomfortably. She hadn’t yet told her sister about all the day’s adventures. The bit about their mother shoplifting a DVD of a movie she’d once had a cameo in, the bit where the cops got called in to escort her home in not one, but two marked police cars that the whole neighborhood had been happy to see—those she shared. But the part where Rachel had not been the worried daughter at home, instead spending the afternoon rolling in the dirt with a man she barely knew and didn’t even like—that she left out.
Especially since she still wasn’t sure what to make of his actions.
The last thing she’d wanted while she got her mother inside and talked to the police was an audience. So when Michael propped himself up on his car hood and read the user manual from his glove box for a full twenty minutes, never once looking up or offering his help, she wasn’t sure whether to yell at him or say thanks. Only once the police drove away and she finally got everything quieted down inside did he make an attempt at contact.
“You need anything else?” he’d asked, as if he were her waiter or an overgrown pizza-delivery boy.
“From you? No.”
“Okay. Call if you change your mind. I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.”
And with that, he’d gotten into his car, an old Pacer with a wicked backfire, and drove away.
Who did that? It would have been creepy if it hadn’t been so…nice.
There was no way she was explaining that to Molly. She couldn’t even explain it to herself.
“What do people normally do, Rach? With parents like this, I mean?”
That was easy. “They move across the country. Then they get married and have kids and feel guilty for not doing more.”
“But you did that. Well, the first part, anyway,” Molly quickly amended. “You had the fancy travel stage job and the cross-country career. But you moved back.”
Their eyes met over the table, and both of them began picking up their dinner things, all thoughts of food forgotten.
Rachel had come back, and it hadn’t been for their mother’s sake. Indira had been just about to get married at the time, still in the highs and sobriety of her newfound love. The truth—which she and Molly both knew—was that Rachel had done it for her sister.
But she’d wanted to see the tour out through to the end, and it was during the final two weeks in Florida that Molly had called, tearful and scared, just hours away from losing her baby.
She hadn’t come home soon enough. She’d let Molly down.
“Well, I guess I’m going to win daughter of the year award, aren’t I?” Rachel kept her tone light and avoided the elephant in the room, even though it was so blaringly white it was difficult to miss. “We could send her somewhere, I guess. They have those rehab facilities in Sedona the stars are always sent to. She’d probably think it added to her prestige.”
“Would she go?”
Rachel shrugged. She hadn’t yet broached the subje
ct to their mother. It was so much easier to bury herself in work and in Molly’s relationships than it was to think about what to do with the woman who had bred them. Other than living in the house she’d purchased when retirement seemed the only alternative to getting continually thrown off shows, they had very little to do with her. Pick up her empty bottles, pick her up from the bar when she’d had one too many, pick her physically up and place her in bed.
Hope another man would come along and pick up the rest.
It was awful to think that three modern women would resort to such awful measures, but there it was. They wanted a man to make it all better.
“Maybe we should call one of the facilities and see,” Rachel said quickly. She could still fix this. “I’m sure they have intervention steps. I know that stuff is hard on you, so I’ll look into it.”
“What about tomorrow, then? I’d just go ahead and stay home, but I was supposed to go out with Eric after work—”
Rachel dropped the wooden salad bowl she’d been carrying to the sink, and pieces of glistening lettuce went flying. She busied herself picking them up, but Molly waited for her to finish, her arms crossed and a frown etched into place.
Truth be told, she finally looked as though she was going to fight for something in her life.
A small part of Rachel cheered. The rest of her wanted to cry. Why, oh, why, did it have to be for that particular man, tattoos and possible criminal activities and all?
“He didn’t hit me, Rachel. It was an accident with the girls, okay? It happens.” Molly’s foot tapped a warning pattern. “I need you to tell me you understand that.”
“Well, I don’t. Even if he didn’t hit you this time…”
Molly threw their plates in the sink. Something shattered, but neither one of them flinched. “Oh my God, Rachel. I’m not an idiot, okay? I know I made mistakes before, but that doesn’t mean every man I date from now on is some sort of psycho serial killer. Eric is nice. He cares about me. Why can’t I just enjoy that for a little while?”
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