Tender Loving Care

by Jennifer Greene

“But he wanted kids.”

  “Naturally he wanted kids.” She added wearily, “Men seem to feel it’s macho to appear footless and ready to pursue a brief affair, but they have the same nesting urges that women have. When it comes down to the bottom line, men want a home, a wife and kids. It’s no different for them than it is for women.”

  “In other words, the bastard split on you.” Rafe couldn’t keep the sharp coldness from his tone.

  “He wasn’t a bastard!”

  He paid for hitting that nerve. Her eyes snapped open, and her shoulders grew tight; he had to work on those muscles all over again. In time, she calmed down…in direct proportion to his tensing up. Thigh-to-thigh contact had already contributed to an unavoidable male response, but now he found his jaw clenched and his arms and shoulders coiled as tightly as a bowstring. Leave it alone, he told himself. Only he couldn’t. “You still love him?”

  She didn’t answer that.

  “Look, Zoe. He was a damned fool. It’s not as if the two of you didn’t have any other options-like adopting kids if he was so hot on-Never mind, never mind! Forget I said anything.”

  When her lips parted, he gently shoved her head down again, discovering he didn’t want to hear her defend the bastard. He also didn’t want her tense. When his fingers gently kneaded her scalp again, she arched like a kitten in the sun. That was how he wanted her. Free to be soft and lazy. Easy, sleepy, safe.

  Out-of-control protective urges rushed through him. All he could think of was that her attitude toward kids made sense now. She felt she had to avoid men who liked children. The ability to have kids had been taken away from her, and that trauma had been followed by the emotional blow of rejection by a creep who had led her halfway to the altar and then ditched her as if he’d discovered she was a mutant.

  He meant to shut up and stay shut up, but, dammit, he couldn’t. His tone had a gruff scrape to it that he just couldn’t help. “That bastard didn’t leave you with the idiotic notion that being unable to have kids meant no man would ever love you, did he?”

  “Rafe, stop talking about him that way. Our breakup was as much my fault as his, and I…” When his hands stopped massaging, it was as if he’d broken a magic spell. She was barely aware of what she’d said or of why they’d been talking about Steven. Rafe’s touch had mesmerized and comforted her after a terrible day, but Zoe had never been one to allow herself the excuse of extenuating circumstances. She pushed back her tangled hair and gave a quick laugh. “Look, I’m sorry for bending your ear like this. Steven and I parted a long time ago; it’s not your problem, and-”

  Rafe wasn’t listening. “He must have made you feel totally inadequate. No wonder you’re uptight on the subject of kids.”

  “Of course he didn’t. I told you, it wasn’t all his fault. For heaven’s sake-”

  Too fast, he swiveled her around so she was facing him. Not expecting the quick move, she felt suddenly disoriented, and a two-second glance at Rafe’s face was all it took to tell her he was angry. His brows formed a grooved furrow, and his eyes snapped like the facets of a sapphire. The fire illuminated his rigid jaw and the compressed line of his mouth, but his voice came out soft and husky. “You don’t still love him. But maybe we’d better make absolutely sure you know that.”

  She knew what he intended. She saw his blue eyes coming for her, and she saw his lips parting to take hers. It was like watching an avalanche headed her way with all the escape routes blocked. When she tried to duck her head, his fingers anchored her chin. When she tried to rise, his arms surrounded her and the pressure of that first kiss scolded her for even trying to escape.

  Her body had a small problem: It still felt like a marshmallow from all his soothing caresses. Limbs that normally obeyed mental commands simply didn’t want to work just now. Her common sense seemed suddenly to have taken a vacation to Tahiti. She knew better than to allow him to kiss her. She’d sampled Rafe’s kisses the night before, and her pulse rate signaled that she was in danger…only the danger tasted so delicious.

  She stopped struggling, only because a temporary submission was better than an awkward argument. As it happened, the mental fib wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t a simple submission Rafe wanted at all. Kiss followed kiss until she was breathless, until the snap of the fire sounded like a roar in her ears, until her arms were tightly wrapped around him and her fingers were laced in his hair. Responding to him wasn’t a matter of choice. She only wished it were.

  When he finally lifted his head, the anger had disappeared from his expression. His eyes intimately searched hers, and whatever he saw there aroused the trace of a smile. Still, his low voice had an edge. “Don’t ever peg me on the same hook with him, Zoe. Children don’t matter to me; they’ve never mattered to me. It’s damned hard to find someone to talk to, someone you want to wake up to in the morning, someone who’ll still be there if you make a mistake. If and when a man finds someone like that, he’d be a damn fool to let her go. Believe me, you don’t still love him.”

  Loving Steven wasn’t an issue, and she would have told Rafe that if he’d give her the chance. He didn’t. When his hands slid under her shirt, she shuddered. His palm stroked one breast until the tip hardened and her eyes closed, and his lips labeled the pulse at her throat “his.” The hollow above her collarbone was treated to a similar branding.

  Any minute now, her heart was going to stop quaking. Tenderness and excitement didn’t go together like this. A man couldn’t be both fierce and tender. And a woman couldn’t possibly feel both helpless and superlatively, powerfully, exultantly female.

  “You felt like this with him? As though the whole world were burning up? Do you know how you make me feel when you respond like this?”

  “Rafe, stop…” Talking. She didn’t want to hear; she didn’t want to think. If he was trying to tell her he wanted her, he was making himself crystal clear. If he was trying to banish the thought of any other man from her mind, he was doing a good job of that, too. Steven had taught her something about need; Rafe was teaching her about a maelstrom of need. He made her feel as if she’d just discovered desire. He could make a woman believe she would die if she didn’t have him.

  When he eased her down to the carpet, she welcomed its cushioning support in a world that was rapidly becoming blurred, indistinct, without edges. Her whole body tightened when his thigh slid between hers. His tightened when he impatiently released the buttons of her shirt and discovered bare skin.

  Obviously, she shouldn’t have let him discover bare skin. His breath was suddenly a hoarse rasp, his eyes blazed blue, and need shuddered through his body. Through the thin material of her bra, she felt his lips on her nipple, and then his tongue.

  He was going too fast, much too fast. She knew every reason why this was wrong, and couldn’t care. Maybe for too long she’d refused to believe that a man could want just Zoe, just the woman, not for what she could give or produce but for who she was. Maybe it was different because he was Rafe-patient always, but not now. Easy and slow always, but not now. Logical and rational always, but at the moment he couldn’t seem to manage the simple catch of a bra, and he kissed her like he was damn-well starved.

  “Touch me, Zoe. Do you want me to go crazy?”

  Was that the question of a rational man? “Rafe.” She managed to capture both his hands before they burned her up with a touch that was hotter than fire. “If you give me a chance, I will,” she murmured softly.

  He opened glazed eyes on her smile. Whatever he saw made him momentarily still. Her tumbled hair was catching the glow of firelight, and his fingers reached up to touch it, and while he was busy with that she raised her lips to his. She offered him a woman’s kiss, a woman’s wooing, soft, exploring, a sharing of promises. Her fingers strayed over his forehead, his cheekbones, the line of his jaw.

  “You know this isn’t wise, don’t you?” she whispered, but she didn’t stop. The pulse in his Adam’s apple leaped when she traced it with her forefinger. She opened th
e top button of his shirt, and then the next and the next. His chest was smooth and brown and warm to her touch.

  “This isn’t wise,” she echoed, but sensations kept flooding her, and wisdom was easily jettisoned. She felt brazen and desirable and joyful. She hadn’t voluntarily touched a man in three years. She couldn’t. The right to be loved was inexorably linked, in her mind, to her right to love, to come to a man as a whole woman. For three years, she’d felt like apologizing to every man she met for being flawed. Not with Rafe. When Rafe touched her, she felt infinitely whole, deliciously powerful as a woman. Her lips brushed his heartbeat with sweet abandon.

  “Stop me, Rafe,” she whispered. All of it was illusion. It had to be. Maybe she just wanted to believe with this man it was different. Touch was only going to complicate her life and his. She knew that, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Her own needs led the dance she’d thought she’d never know again.

  “So precious, Zoe. You’re so precious…” His palm slid down her side to her hip. He molded her length to his, kisses falling on her nose, her cheeks, her closed eyes.

  “Hi,”

  Rafe instantly turned to stone at the sound of the sleepy soprano.

  “Whatcha doing?” Parker asked interestedly. His pajama bottoms sagging, he had one foot propped on the other in the doorway.

  “We were…” Rafe took a rapid breath. He turned eyes glazed with horror on Zoe, but only for a second. In the next second, his hands were groping for her shirt. “I was…Snookums had a small hurt. I was fixing it.”

  “Daddy did that for Mommy all the time.”

  “Did he?”

  Parker nodded. “He kissed her to make it better. Mommy did that for us, too. Except that most of the time she kissed our hurts on the kitchen counter. Daddy always took Mommy into the bedroom on Sunday mornings while we were supposed to be-”

  “I get the picture,” Rafe said rapidly. He shot Zoe another look, an interesting blend of murderous frustration and mild amusement. She was too busy climbing back to the real world to ponder it. He was having problems closing the blouse over her breasts, mostly because his hands were distinctly unsteady. Finally, he appeared satisfied and straightened up.

  He pushed a hand through his hair and stared for several seconds as if the child were a Martian. “Did you want something?”

  The urchin nodded. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Thirsty.” Rafe repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. “Thirsty?”

  “I’m milk thirsty. Not water thirsty. Otherwise-”

  “You could have gotten it yourself.” Rafe muttered a fierce “Do not move, Zoe. Do not think, do not breathe, do not do anything,” and lurched to his feet.

  Thoughts began to reel through her head the instant he and Parker were out of sight. Shakily, she got to her feet and pulled her blouse closed, buttoning fast. From the kitchen, she could hear the two talking, the refrigerator door closing, a glass being set on a counter.

  It wasn’t long before the light flicked off in the kitchen and Rafe headed for the stairs with the little boy in his arms. Parker’s head was already lying on Rafe’s shoulder, and his eyelids were drooping.

  Minutes later, Rafe came back downstairs. Waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, Zoe had her hands on her hips. His gaze seared on hers when he saw her expression. “You didn’t do a very good job of staying put,” he said softly.

  “We both knew that either of them could have woken up at any time. And we were right there in plain sight on the living room carpet.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “And the wonder of it is that you forgot about the kids for a few minutes.”

  “Rafe-”

  “Yes, I heard you. We were way out of line.” He took the last step down, blocking her path to the stairway. Gently, he brushed her hot cheeks with his knuckles. “We’ll have to be more careful about choosing a time and place.”

  “No,” she said simply.

  He didn’t pretend any confusion about what she was saying no to. “It will happen again,” he said quietly. “I think you know that.”

  She shook her head and stared at the blur just beyond his shoulder. To look in his eyes was to see things she didn’t want to see. To be touched by him was to feel things she shouldn’t feel. She took a breath. “If this happens again, I’ll leave. They’re better off with you anyway, Rafe; surely you can already see that?”

  All he could see was that she ran scared whenever kids came into the picture. Time. He desperately needed time with her. “You can’t leave,” he said swiftly.

  “I can.”

  “But you wouldn’t, Zoe,” he said softly. “You wouldn’t leave the children stranded with me unless you were absolutely sure they’d be happy here. You agreed to give it three weeks in my place and another three at yours. I intend to hold you to that. At the end of that time, we’ll agree about where they’re better off, but you’ve got to give-” He almost said “the two of us,” and immediately corrected that. “You’ve got to give them that much time.”

  She searched his eyes a long time before she said quietly, “You’re right. I won’t leave you stranded,” and sighed. “Rafe, we’ve both been thrown into this situation against our will, so maybe it’s natural for us to need each other, to turn to each other. And maybe we got temporarily carried away, but we’re not going to be together permanently. One of us is going to have the kids. The other one isn’t. And to start something-”

  Rafe’s palms framed her face, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen that you don’t want. No one’s going to push you into anything you can’t handle. Believe me?”

  “No.”

  Humor glinted in his blue eyes. For two cents, he’d kiss that stubborn chin until it melted. “Maybe you can believe something that’s far more important, then,” he whispered. “A man scraped your emotions pretty raw because he wanted a mother for his kids. You can be damned sure that what I feel for you has nothing to do with children. Any children.”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “Yes, it is. I want you for you, Zoe. And what the two of us feel for each other is the only thing that matters.”

  There was just no talking to him. Zoe shot him a look, and then ducked under his arm and hurried up the stairs. Inside his bedroom, she leaned back against the closed door, feeling her breath come quick and uneasy in the darkness.

  Rafe was clearly an irrational man. Any sane human being would see that a relationship was impossible because of the kids. It was sheer selfishness for them to think of each other when they had to do what was right for the children.

  Eventually, she moved away from the door and burrowed under the bed covers. And eventually, it occurred to her that, like a total idiot, she was lying there fully dressed. She pushed herself back up, rid herself of her clothes and tugged on a nightgown. Between soft sheets and the warm weight of a comforter again, she discovered her hands were annoyingly cold and trembly.

  It seemed she was capable of being as irrational as Rafe. When he touched her, she felt as if she’d found something she’d thought irretrievably lost, the quality of feeling whole and good about herself and free and just…a woman. She wanted that feeling. She so badly wanted the man. In his arms, she’d never once thought of the kids.

  Two people naturally turned to each other when they were thrown together in an emotional situation. That was all that was going on. She knew better than to involve herself in a relationship with a man who needed her only to care for children. She would never be sure she was loved for herself. And as far as the kids went, everything that had happened since they’d arrived had shown her she had no ideal-mother potential whatsoever.

  She had to think of the twins. In her heart, she knew they would be better off with Rafe. Kids don’t matter to me, Zoe. They’ve never mattered to me. Yes, she’d heard that, but she also saw how he was with them. His job, his house, his whole life would be affected when he took the children; naturally, he felt unsure about his
ability to handle it. He needed time. He was such terrific father material. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Punching the pillow, Zoe settled down and determinedly closed her eyes. She’d stay because she had to stay. She’d stay until he saw how precious the twins were, and with time she had no doubt that would happen. The only thing that couldn’t happen was her falling in love with him.

  Except that in the darkness, in the silence, she was terribly afraid that it had already happened.

  Chapter Six

  The next night, as soon she came downstairs after putting the boys to bed, Rafe was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs with two pool cues in his hand. The balls had been racked, the game ready to play. They played, Zoe’s nerves hammering, but he never said a word about stakes or total dominion, nor did he protest when she announced that three games were enough and she was going to bed.

  The next night, he set up a Trivial Pursuit board. The night after that, they watched a movie on television. She would have gone to sleep immediately afterward if Rafe hadn’t heated up two mugs of mulled cider and brought them into the living room. And Thursday night she was so tired; the boys had been pistols all day. Rafe insisted that she go for a walk with him. The night was pirate-black and crisp and special; starlight sparkled on snow. He never touched her.

  He just talked and made her talk. Not about kids. Once a day, he affirmed that there was no possible way he could handle the children without her, but after that, the subject of kids was banned. They discussed more important issues. Like how many whimsical hats she owned. Whether Bogart or Tracy was the best actor of the forties. How serious her allergy to clams was. How many stars filled the night sky. How many feet there were in a fathom.

  Gradually, against her will, she could feel her pulse leaping as soon as the kids were in bed. Knowing she’d be with Rafe was like the promise of an ice-cream sundae after a sweltering day. Even during the most harrowing hours with the fractious twins, she knew relief was coming. He’d seen reason…she was so glad. She needed him as a friend, and he was such a good friend; any deeper emotional relationship would have cluttered up everything, and she was relieved that he finally saw that.