by Ann Major
The Lincoln jerked to a stop at the massive house, and Lucas jumped out. Even before he opened the front doors, he could hear rap music pouring from his boys’ room in a tidal wave of jivy drumbeats.
Good. The little savages were home. For once their music served some purpose other than to drive him crazy. He could use the pounding beat as a cover to sneak up on them.
He raced up the winding staircase and down the hall, past his bedroom, noting that his shower was on. How many times had he told them to use their own?
When he reached their closed door, he listened outside for a moment. Then, without knocking, he flung it open and charged inside.
Rap music pulsed from two immense speakers.
“We’re all going to be stone deaf,” he yelled as he rushed toward the amplifier and jerked three plugs from the wall.
The sound of the running tap from his bathroom could be heard in the deafening silence that followed, which was odd, because both boys were already dressed for school. Peppin, who was patting pale powder all over his face and smudging eyeshadow under his eyes with a Kleenex, jumped guiltily.
“D-Dad? How come you’re—You’re home!” he squeaked, his eyes darting to Montague.
Lucas picked up the boxes of powder and eye shadow and pitched them in the trash in disgust. “So—you’re not really sick!” He paused. “I talked to Mrs. Peters.”
Montague, who was sprawled on the floor reading a booklet entitled Step by Step: How To Make Awesome IDs while he laced up his combat boots, wisely kept his eyes glued to a page that dealt with the many uses of laser copiers.
“I want to know what the hell you two have been up to!”
“N-nothing, Dad.”
Lucas’s hard gaze flicked away from Peppin’s chalkwhite face. Today, as of late, their room was abnormally tidy, and there was no sign of their large, repulsive pet. No stale scent of droppings, urine or old food. Not so much as a paper or a book on the floor. Only one stray horseshoe.
A bouquet of plump pink roses adorned Montague’s desk. Now that was odd, because Lucas couldn’t remember either of his sons ever so much as looking at flowers, let alone picking them and arranging them in a vase. Suddenly Lucas was remembering that roses were all over the house. In fact, there was a vase of white roses beside his bed.
Did the pet give off some peculiar odor the flowers masked?
Lucas stalked to the closet and threw open the doors, but he saw nothing other than a rumpled sheet, two photographs of himself, a blanket and the favorite old chambray shirt he’d been looking for.
The animal’s bedding? He snatched up his shirt.
Furious, Lucas turned to them. “Where is it?”
“What, Dad?” Montague’s voice was calm, but his hands had frozen on the tangled laces of his second boot.
“Damn it. Your new pet.”
Peppin made a low choking sound. “P-pet?”
“Where is whatever you’ve been feeding all that chicken soup to? What is going on? You’ve played sick, behaved yourselves, cleaned house, cooked supper—all to put me off my guard.”
In the silence, he heard his shower, really heard it.
“Dad, we’re going to be late for school. Could you give us a ride—”
Late was a buzz word. Lucas glanced at his watch and remembered Stinky Brown.
Through gritted teeth, he said, “I’m going to shower. We’ll talk on the way to school.”
The boys stared at him white-faced. “D-Dad. No. We can explain—everything. Right now.”
“I’ve run out of time—now. It’ll have to wait.”
He was vaguely pleased that the boys looked so cowed. If he couldn’t resolve the issue in the car, with any luck at all, they would talk to their friends and find a new home for whatever it was, and the problem would have solved itself by the time he got home tonight.
“You two had better be ready when I am.” Lucas began stripping as he stalked away from them toward his bedroom.
Peppin raced after him. “But, Dad—”
Lucas whirled. “Yeah? What’s with this sudden willingness to confess?”
“Dad, I—I was going to take a shower—”
“Use your own bathroom.”
For once Montague, whose black-booted feet looked amazingly large, had come after him, too. “Hey, Dad, maybe you could use our shower—”
“Suddenly everybody wants to talk and keep me out of my shower.” Lucas yanked his running shorts off. “Well, too bad. I’m stark naked and I’ve run out of time and patience with your games.”
As he strode through his bedroom into his steamy bathroom, he thought he heard Peppin say rather uneasily, “Cool it, Monty. Didn’t he say he wanted to meet our new pet?”
“So?”
“Chill out. This could work.”
What could work?
“Maybe they’ll dig each other.”
“You’re stupid.”
“It could happen.”
Clouds of steam were pouring out of his overlarge shower as Lucas yanked the door open and stepped onto the pink marble that was slippery with soap.
Lucas shut his eyes as the warm water hit his face full force. Automatically he grabbed for the bar of soap in his soap dish, but it wasn’t there.
Then soft warm fingers placed a bar that smelled of roses in his right hand.
“Thanks,” he said as he began to soap the nape of his neck.
It took him a second to get it.
He wasn’t alone.
His hand stopped scrubbing.
His eyes snapped open, and she was there—stepping out of the pink mists behind him like a naked goddess from the wildest adolescent fantasy he’d ever had, like Venus rising from that shell in the sea in that painting he’d seen in Florence.
He knew her.
Her blue eyes flashed with recognition, too.
High cheekbones. Yellow hair. Model-slim. Gorgeous. Skin as creamy as alabaster.
She was an exact replica of the girl who had come to him in his dreams. She was the girl of his nightmare, as well as the girl who’d gotten friendlier and friendlier in every dream since until the one last night when she’d crawled on top of him and teased him until he was insane with desire.
Was he dreaming now? Or was she for real?
For no particular reason he allowed himself to remember the spooky feeling he’d gotten when he’d walked out of the Moran library and he’d felt so positive that someone was watching him. Only there hadn’t been anybody there. And yet he had felt as if some alien spirit who was very powerful and very sweet had connected to his soul. For a few blissful seconds he’d felt unleashed, set free from all his cynicism and bitterness. Torrents of blocked and longedfor feelings had flowed out of him. He still was at a loss to explain it.
Then there were the dreams about the blonde. And suddenly here she was. In the flesh.
This was crazy. Too crazy to believe.
“Hello?” came her velvet voice beneath his ear.
She was real.
He blinked once, twice, and she was still there. Her eyes sparkled. She was lovelier than ever—and as naked as the day she was born. He inhaled the scent of roses.
For a week he had been haunted by that scent. And now he knew why. It was her scent.
He felt like Adam finding his Eve.
He felt that every moment in his life had been lead-. ing to this one.
Funny—even as his eyes locked with hers, even as he carefully forced himself not to lower them, even as he forced himself to concentrate on the way her black lashes were clumped together with dewdrops of moisture around her incredibly blue eyes, he still saw everything.
Shampoo suds spilled from her throat and clung in foamy white mounds to her nipples.
She was built, really built, with high, shapely breasts, a gently rounded belly, a narrow waist and smooth legs that went on forever. Her lips parted in a tender half smile, and he saw that she had a slight gap between her two front teeth. And Lucas, who had be
en an English major in college, remembered Chaucer saying that was an indication of a sensual nature.
Did she give off a glow? Was that why he felt so dazzled?
As if in a daze, he remembered Peppin’s cryptic remark. Didn’t he say he wanted to meet our new pet?
Maybe they’ll dig each other.
Thus far, she hadn’t cried out or made any sound at all—maybe she was as stunned as he.
Or maybe—how did he know this?—she’d been expecting this moment, too.
Slowly Lucas raised his hands above his head, as if in mock surrender—to show her he wouldn’t touch her or hurt her or molest her in any way.
But it wasn’t necessary—because, amazingly, she really wasn’t afraid of him. She was the first to let her eyes travel boldly from his face down his bronze flexing chest muscles, which were matted with dark, crinkly hair, down the length of his flat, tapering stomach and the rest of his lean body. Then she looked at him where his tan line stopped with the same intense curiosity and lack of modesty. It was as if they were already lovers and she had a right to do so. Her eyes continued to touch him intimately. Pulsations of liquid heat raged through him.
He flushed at her saucy impudence and then hastily pushed the shower door open, cursing as he stumbled backward so fast he stubbed his big toe on the shower door. In between grunts of pain, he hopped toward the rack and grabbed a towel.
Where the hell had Peppin and Montague found her?
“Boys!” he shouted as he bunched the thick white terry cloth around his waist. Then, louder, “Boys!”
They were far too clever to answer.
She turned off the faucets and said quietly, “I’m sorry if you hurt your toe.” And then, “It’s not their fault, you know.”
“Don’t defend them.” A pause. “Who the hell are you?” Lucas whispered, hotly aware of her lithe golden body. “How long have you been living—”
But he already knew. “Eleven days?” he croaked, his answer sounding choppy and thick-tongued.
Her face turned crimson. She nodded. “I wanted to meet you, but I was afraid—”
She was the pet. She was the mysterious angelic presence he’d sensed in the house who’d magically improved his life with his sons. Her spell was so powerful she’d even managed to insert herself into his dreams.
No wonder the boys had been determined to fire all those nannies and stay home and tend her.
The girl stepped out of the stall, her blue eyes shining through the mists, her wet hair glued in tangles to her shoulders.
Lucas observed a neatly stitched pink line along her hairline as he roughly pitched her a towel. For no reason at all he remembered Peppin bombarding Pete with all those medical questions. He had felt such fatherly pride at the seductive dream that maybe, after all, Peppin might really amount to something and become a doctor.
His aim was off, and the towel fell to the floor. He leaned down and picked it up, and as he held it out to her, his hands accidentally touched hers. He felt the silken heat of her soft skin, and his heart beat faster.
Her reaction to him was equally intense, although she, too, attempted to hide it, not that she was any better at it than he. For he saw that her hands trembled as she wrapped the towel around herself, and that once it was snugly secured above her breasts, he saw that they trembled, too, as if she was breathing irregularly.
What the hell was going on here?
Never in his entire life had he felt so powerfully drawn to another human being.
Never before had he met a stranger and felt he already knew her.
She hadn’t bothered to dry herself properly, and heated rivulets of water and soap oozed down her skin and pooled beside her bare feet.
She kept staring at him, the pupils of her eyes so drastically dilated that only a ring of blue fire seemed to encircle them. “I wish I knew who I was,” she replied honestly in a small, frightened voice that undid him. “If I knew, maybe I’d know where I belonged and I’d have already gone. I—I thought maybe you could tell me.”
“Me? How the hell would I know?”
“But you looked at me as if you know me.”
He stared at her feet because it seemed the safest thing about her to look at. There were ugly scratches on her slim ankles.
She had tiny feet.
He lifted his gaze and studied that fresh pink scar at her hairline. There were tiny scratches on her cheek. For no reason at all he remembered tiny bloody footprints across a white tile floor. Next he remembered Peppin’s first medical question had been in that hospital parking lot.
And then Lucas knew.
Again he saw the dangling IV above those bloodspattered sheets in the examining room.
This girl was Pete’s patient.
This glorious angel with the soapsuds in her hair who had invaded his house and made him a happy man was the escaped dope addict. She could be anybody.
There was only one thing to do.
He had to call Pete.
“Get dressed,” he said curtly. “Then we’ll talk.”
“Yes, Lucas.”
Lucas.
His name. Just his name. So familiar and yet so…erotically alien. Her husky velvet voice had made it into something indescribably precious.
The adoring quality in her voice did strange things to him. He felt ten years younger and all the logical, self-serving rules he had lived by were shattered.
He felt her silent plea. Tell me who I am.
Damn, people couldn’t talk to each other without words.
He felt turned on by her. And ridiculously safe. As if he’d come home from a long journey to the one person in the entire universe he wanted to spend all eternity with.
Which was absolutely absurd.
He had no bond with her. She didn’t give a damn about anything except using him. She was just some troublesome stranger, a runaway, a doper, maybe. She had invaded his house, tricked his sons into betraying him—
The house sparkled. She had cooked meals for him. Brought roses to him. Roses that he had worn all day, the scent of which had haunted him.
He remembered how badly the boys had taken his finding a new home for their pet Doberman pinscher who’d bitten the postman and chased all the neighbor kids. They liked this girl a whole lot more than they’d liked Kaiser.
So did he.
Lucas reminded himself that she was a worse liability than Kaiser could have been, that he had to get rid of her as soon as possible.
“Get dressed,” he repeated, but in a gentler tone to put her off guard.
Her smile died.
As she stared into his eyes, he had the unsettling sensation that she had zapped into his brain and read every single dark intention and suspicion he had concerning her.
“Please don’t send me away,” she said.
“You can’t stay here.”
Her warm, frightened eyes met his again. “If you throw me out, they’ll find me and kill me.”
Two heartbeats. His and hers. As a grander emotion flared into being.
“Who will kill you?”
“I-I don’t know.”
No way could he let anything happen to her.
“I want to stay here with you,” she said, her gaze and voice warm.
This time it was he who read her mind.
She wanted him to seize her, to wrap her in his arms and pull her down to the marble floor, to make swift violent love to her, while they were still flushed and steaming from the shower.
She wanted him to love her. Forever.
This whole damn thing was too much. Way too much. Crazy, in fact.
“Hold me,” she whispered in a barely audible voice. “Just hold me.”
“Later.”
“No.”
Maybe he could have walked away from her if she hadn’t smiled so sheepishly and charmingly. If the towel above her breasts hadn’t shifted that fraction of an inch lower.
If they hadn’t both reached to keep it from falling.
If they both hadn’t laughed nervously.
If her laughter hadn’t died in that breathless hush. “You want this as much as I do.”
“What?”
She smiled sexily and reached up and stroked his wet hair.
“This,” she said huskily, winding a black strand around a fingertip. “And…And everything.”
If her innocent glances and caresses stung him like flame, what would the full tide be?
Strange, how he felt he already knew.
Her warm knowing gaze locked with his and drew him inside her, fusing all that was holy and all that was not to her shining spirit.
He was a hardened man who had had many women.
He had been badly burned by the one woman he had loved and married.
But this was different.
Utterly and completely different.
And ten thousand times more dangerous.
He could no more resist her than a swimmer could resist the force of a dangerous tidal current.
As he drew her into his arms, wanting her soul as well as her body, he felt a thunderstorm of unreasoning, inexplicable emotions.
For a long moment he savored the sweetness of pressing her resplendent soft damp flesh against himself.
Very slowly, very gently he lowered his mouth to hers.
His kiss was neither hard nor long, but it vibrated inside them both with deep, underlying tenderness and awakened them to shattering, never-felt-before needs.
He would never have believed that a single kiss could hold the power to change him—forever.
“Who are you?” he whispered again, frantic at the speed of this thing, even as he gave her the gentlest smile he had ever given any woman. “Where did you come from? Why?”
“I—I don’t know. I just know that I feel I’ve known you before.”
“I’ve never set eyes on you till today. Believe me. You’re not somebody I could forget.” He wasn’t ready to admit to her that he had dreamed about her.
