Off in the distance a child laughed. Another shouted. A toilet flushed. A cat yowled.
Jill jerked and rolled onto the floor, the nightmare like a shot of one hundred proof espresso.
That answered any questions about her ability to see the future. The hounds of hell would win the Iditarod before she sentenced herself to that scenario.
It really was too bad, she decided. Ethan would probably make some woman a very good husband. Just not her.
“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked, no doubt startled awake by her self-ejection from the cot.
“Nothing.” What else could she say? I don’t want to let my guard down too much or I’ll end up spending all my time calculating the unit price of diapers?
She couldn’t make any sense of it, so he wasn’t likely to. Bemoaning the loss of waistline and sexy underwear after a decade of marriage wasn’t exactly pre-first date conversation.
“Okay,” he said in a voice that let her know he thought she was anything but that.
“Bad dream,” she muttered. “Very bad.”
Without saying another word she crawled back up on top of him, wiggled herself into a comfy position and fell back to sleep.
* * * * *
He heard her long before he saw her.
Lying on the cot, wondering if he’d been decapitated during the night because he sure couldn’t feel anything below his neck, he listened to his mother give somebody holy heck.
“My Ethan would never even steal a car, never mind kidnap somebody. What would he want with an old man, anyway?”
Ethan cringed and tried to roll over. The paralysis wasn’t total, because his fingers twitched, but he wasn’t getting out of bed anytime soon.
A light weight on his chest lifted and Jill peered down at him, her eyes still half closed. “What time is it?”
“They took my watch,” he replied. Not that he could have lifted his wrist high enough to look at it.
“Maybe they thought you’d try to hang yourself with it.”
“I still might if they give it back in time. My mother’s here.”
Her blue eyes opened to full alert status. “Will she bail us out?”
“It sounds like she’s going to try the harassment and intimidation route first. Did you sleep on top of me all night?”
“Half, at least. I was uncomfortable, so you pulled me up here.”
“Remind me to never do that again.”
Not that he’d have the chance, he reminded himself. They were fast approaching the end of the road—in more ways than one. And for some reason, despite her history of scrapes and the lack of feeling in his body she had caused, he wasn’t looking forward to it as much as he’d once thought he would. Unbelievably, she seemed to be growing on him.
The voices were getting closer—coming down the hallway—and he heard Sheriff Dodd say, “Ma’am, I—”
“My son is not a criminal.”
“Ma’am, I—”
“I want you to release him right now.”
Ethan heard a sliding sound, a thump and a gasp before his mother shrieked, “Oh, good lord, I’ve killed a sheriff.”
“Uh-oh,” Jill said, leaping off him in a flurry of elbows and knees that left him gasping for air and with plenty of aching evidence that his body wasn’t permanently numb.
“Do something, Kenny!” his mother yelled.
Kenny? That guy she met on the bus had traveled with her? Alone?
With a groan that came from the tips of his pins-and-needles-racked toes, Ethan managed to roll and shove his way to a sitting position. That was the last time he ever played a human mattress.
“Mrs. Cooper,” Jill called through the bars. “He’ll be fine. He’s sleeping.”
Very gingerly, Ethan stood and made his way to the cell door. Every muscle in his body protested at the sudden rush of blood and oxygen, but he didn’t seem to have sustained any permanent damage.
His mother rushed to him and Ethan felt a rush of guilt. Her face was pale with worry and exhaustion, and her hands trembled as she reached through the bars.
“Ethan!” She grasped the sides of his face and pulled in his to the bars so she could kiss his face.
The metal was cold and none-too-soft against his cheekbones, but he let her do her maternal thing.
“I was so worried about you. I saw you on the news and I had to call around to find you and then Kenny and I came straight here.”
She had to pause to take a breath and Ethan jumped in. “I’m fine, Mom. Really, it was just a misunderstanding.”
“Maybe when the sheriff wakes up we can get out of here,” Jill said.
Ethan heard a little click in his mind, followed by a thunk in his stomach. “You saw us on the news? What news?”
A man stepped over to his mother and rested his hand on her back. Ethan made a low growling sound in his throat that nobody seemed to notice. Damn good thing there were bars between him and this geriatric gigolo, he fumed.
“Ethan, this is my friend, Kenny Sanford. Kenny, this is my son, Ethan and his girlfriend…”
“I’m not his—”
Jill cut herself off, and he realized that the same thought had just occurred to both of them. His mom still didn’t know the woman her son spent the last two nights with was the same woman who had left her high and dry at the library.
They were granted a temporary stay of introduction when Sheriff Dodd snorted a few times and sat up. He pushed himself to his feet, grumbling under his breath.
“Dadgummit. I hate it when that happens.”
His mother left off squeezing his cheeks through the bars and threw up her hands. “It’s a miracle!”
“I told you he wasn’t dead,” Jill said.
“Maybe you should ask if they’re going to release them,” his mom said to her friend, “since I nearly killed him.”
The sheriff hitched up his gun belt. “Ma’am what I was trying to tell you before my unfortunate episode is I’m releasing Mr. Cooper and Miss Delaney right now.”
Ethan breathed a sigh of relief. The nightmare was over.
“Miss Delaney?” his mother repeated. “Jill Delaney?”
Okay, the nightmare was almost over.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sheriff Dodd said. “Bobbie Jo done told her daddy if he didn’t ‘fess up to the whole truth she was gonna put him in a home. The cheapest one she could find. Spilled his guts like filleted trout.”
Ethan and everybody but his mother cringed at that tasty visual. His mother was too intent on sizing up Jill. He needed to distract her before somebody said something that spelled a second nap for the good sheriff.
“What do you mean you saw us on the news?”
His mother shifted her gaze to him, and then shook her head. “Some tourist passing by on the highway saw the ruckus and had his wife lean out the window with the video camera. They showed it on the news and I recognized you right away, even though you were handcuffed and blurry.”
“Took us nearly an hour of phone calls to find you,” Kenny added. “Then we had to rent a car to get here.”
The sheriff cleared his throat like a congested bullfrog. “Y’all want out of there, or you wanna socialize for a while?”
* * * * *
Safe at last in their Orlando hotel, Ethan left his mother off at 219, glared at Kenny unlocking 222, tried not to watch Jill entering 226 and let himself into 225.
Cozy. The only ray of sunshine in this Senior Spring Fling monsoon was having his own room. Even if it was directly across the hall from Jill Delaney. Between the nap—very long nap—in the car and thinking about that how much he’d like to have had the chance to see Jill on her hands and knees, he’d be lucky if he slept at all.
He’d wondered in the car if the vacation sex came to end when they reached their destination, or when they arrived back in New England. They hadn’t really established clear terms. That got him thinking about all the ways he’d still like to have her, which got him hooked on an image of her ass in the
air. His denim-constrained hard-on had him squirming all the way through Georgia.
But, logically, he knew it was over. They weren’t going to have wild and free vacation sex with his mother, her friend and half the town’s elderly community surrounding them. He’d go his way and she’d go hers. Maybe they’d bump into each other during his visits to his mom. Maybe they’d even get together for some macaroni and cheese and a few laughs. He didn’t even want to think about it right now. Too depressing.
His mother had arranged for his suitcase to be delivered from the bus he’d spent so little time on to his room, but he didn’t have time for a shower before they met for the group dinner that certainly hadn’t been his idea. Once he got under that hot water, it was going to be a very long time before he got out again.
Instead he dug his newly recovered wallet out of his back pocket. Sitting on the edge of the bed with the free notepad and stubby pencil, he did a quick tally of what he owed Jill. He’d pay her later and that would be the end of it.
The end of everything. No more chaos, no more impulsiveness. No more Jill Delaney.
Ethan flopped down on the bed. There was a good reason why this was the end of the road for them. Several good reasons, he thought. He just couldn’t remember a single damn one of them.
He took the time to peel off the Garfield T-shirt. The garbage can beckoned, but he dropped it on the floor next to his suitcase. He’d never wear it again, but he couldn’t throw it away.
A door slammed down the hall, and he donned a plain white T-shirt and dragged a comb through his hair. Then he shoved his wallet back in his pants and double-checked that he had his key. An hour, hour and a half at the most, and he could retreat to his room. He wasn’t really in the mood for socializing.
It didn’t help when he walked into the dining room and saw Jill and his mother already seated and laughing at something the dastardly Don Juan had said. They were his women, dammit.
“We’re absolutely sure they returned the Taurus?” Jill asked as soon as he sat down. “The right Taurus?”
“Hello to you, too. I called the rental company myself,” Ethan said. “I’m not about to leave anything to chance at this point.”
His mother chuckled softly from across the table. “You never leave anything to chance—at any point.”
Then why did he feel like his life had spun out of control and was about to hit the guardrail?
* * * * *
Jill wanted to laugh, but she already had a weird walking-on-eggshells feeling. The whole library promotion thing was lurking just below the surface and she didn’t need laughing at the woman’s only child as an icebreaker.
“So what’s on the Spring Fling agenda for tomorrow?” Kenny said in the too-loud voice of one trying to smooth an awkward moment.
It didn’t work, of course. If talking too loud cured awkwardness, Jill would have taken to carrying a megaphone with her a long time ago. But she could see the man was trying to be friendly, despite the fact he couldn’t miss Ethan’s sullen expression. He looked like a four-year-old pouting, for goodness sake.
“Epcot, I believe,” Debra replied, then they were all quiet while perusing the vastly overpriced menu. Jill was disappointed. There didn’t seem to be a fried lump anywhere.
“What do you do, Mr. Sanford?” she asked, when their orders were given and awkward silence ruled once again.
“Call me Kenny. And I make a pretty good living bilking lonely, widowed librarians out of their used book sale money.”
Debra laughed first, then Jill joined in. Even Ethan chuckled when Kenny winked at him.
“My first job was forty-nine years of plumbing. Worked my butt off, built a nice little nest egg for myself. Looked around one day and realized I had plenty of money, arthritic knees but I’d never found myself a good woman.”
He paused, then rested his hand on Debra’s knee. “Until now.”
Jill felt Ethan tense next to her and she hoped he wouldn’t cause a scene. His father had been gone a year, which probably didn’t seem like much to him, but Debra clearly enjoyed the man’s company. And they did seem to have hit it off quickly. Love at first sight?
She glanced sideways at Ethan. They’d hit it off pretty quickly, too. Maybe they’d had a rocky beginning…and a rocky middle, but the attraction had been there from the start. The spark. And they’d experienced a lot in their short time together. But he didn’t look at her the way Kenny Sanford looked at Debra Cooper, that’s for sure. Only when they were having sex, and that wasn’t enough.
“You won’t find one better,” Ethan finally told Kenny, but he didn’t exactly sound as if he was ready to walk his mother down the aisle.
“So,” Debra said with the air of one deciding just to jump headfirst into an icy pool. “Let’s talk about the library.”
Jill stalled by draining her water glass. “I, umm…”
“I’m not accepting your resignation. That’s all there is to it.”
Ethan chuckled and she kicked him under the table. He knew very well how she felt about getting her job back. It just wasn’t right that she should get her job back because she was screwing the boss’s son. Especially since said boss didn’t know how very temporary the screwing was.
“Mrs. Bright accepted my resignation. And it wasn’t really a resignation. It was more like quitting during a hissy fit, as Ethan described it.”
“I’ve read your file, and on the day I report to work I’m unaccepting your hissy fit. You are too good at your job and I need you too much.”
“Mrs. Cooper, considering my, uhhh, relationship with your son, I don’t feel that it would be very appropriate to—”
“Bullshit,” the older woman barked, and they all shut up. “Not a single person at this table thinks there is anything underhanded about your relationship with my son. It will be nice, actually. After Ethan sells my house in Connecticut, there will be enough so I can help you guys get a little house and he can do furniture while you work part-time for me and finish your degree.”
Jill felt her face freeze and she was pretty sure her expression resembled the Mona Lisa as painted by Picasso.
Ethan stood up so quickly his chair nearly fell over. “Let’s all hit the salad bar. The radishes looked really good and the sesame seeds…”
A little piece of her heart seemed to dry up and crumble away. She knew he didn’t want his mother to know they weren’t serious about each other—which was fine. But he couldn’t have handled that a little more smoothly? It was now painfully obvious to everybody at the table that Ethan didn’t see a future with her. And she’d known it, but it hurt to know that Debra and Kenny now knew it, too.
It hurt, period. She knew she wasn’t—and didn’t want to be—the domestic goddess Ethan would look for in a wife. She knew she wasn’t his type, and that vacation sex was exactly that. But opposites were supposed to attract, dammit, and she wanted him to be attracted to her. Not her body. But her.
She sighed and followed them up to the salad bar. Another hour, tops, and she could hide in her room and cry herself to sleep. As long as her roommate, Mrs. Henderson, was asleep. The woman would talk to a hairbrush, for goodness sake.
She took a deep breath and put on her best public-servant smile. Her heart might be breaking but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of showing it.
Chapter Eleven
Jill knocked as softly as possible on the door, but the sound echoed accusingly around her. Maybe he was asleep. He wouldn’t hear the knock and she could pretend she’d never come.
She shouldn’t have. Not after his mad rush to the salad bar at dinner. But she couldn’t be so close to him and not touch him—one last time. A goodbye kiss, at least.
Ethan opened the door, clad only in a white hotel towel tied around his hips. Or maybe a goodbye quickie, even. She stared at the knot for what seemed like forever.
What was it she’d come to say? For the life of her she couldn’t remember a single basic English word.
&n
bsp; “Hey, sunshine. You lost again?”
That was one way to put it. “I, uh…I can’t sleep.”
“Did you try warm milk?”
It’s really over. He’d told her it would be, but on some level she hadn’t believed him. But when a scantily clad, sexy-smelling woman knocks on a man’s door late at night and he suggests warm milk, the spark has fizzled out.
“No, I didn’t. I tried counting sheep, but Mrs. Henderson’s snoring kept scaring them off.”
Ethan folded his arms across his bare chest and leaned his hip against the door jamb. That knot wasn’t pulled very tight. She tried really hard not to look. “Maybe you’re tense.”
Tense. That was it. His lean, naked torso and smoldering dark eyes made her tense. She nodded.
“And the shower didn’t help?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe a massage would ease some of that tension.”
Was this her Ethan oozing sizzling male sexuality like hot fudge over a dish of soft serve vanilla?
She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “Do you know a good masseuse in Orlando?”
“No, but I’ve got a phone book in my room. You can let your fingers do the walking.”
Think provocative, she told herself. Blank. Blank. “I used to do that with Barbie shoes when I was little.”
“Okay.” He tilted his head. “You used to do what with Barbie shoes?”
Was that high-pitched giggle coming out of her mouth? She slapped her hand over it, just in case. “Um…put them on the ends of my fingers and…walk them around. I liked the high-heeled, white cowboy boots the best.”
“I’m trying to have sex with you here.”
There was that giggle again. “I know. I’m just…”
Ethan stood straight again and lifted his hand to her face. His fingers traced a line from her temple to her chin and she turned her cheek to his palm.
“Why are you nervous, sunshine?”
She had no idea. Wasn’t sex what she was hoping for when she knocked on his door?
Twice Upon a Roadtrip Page 12
