by Anne Calhoun
“That is between me and your mother,” she said stiffly. “It’s none of your business, and it wasn’t charity.”
The muscle jumped again. “Stay there,” he said, reached into the backseat for a lightweight jacket, then got out of the car.
The driver’s door slammed, and behind her something slid to the floor. She peeked over her shoulder to make sure it wasn’t anything fragile or important and saw her stack of books slipping forward in an elegant domino sprawl. The Essentials of Living Aboard a Boat edged toward the floorboard, then thudded on top of How to Sail Around the World.
Her interlibrary loan books, the ones she’d told Alana to ship back to their home libraries, were in Adam’s backseat.
The passenger door jerked open. Adam stood in the opening, the jacket held above his head.
“What are you doing with my books?”
His gaze flicked to the backseat, then met hers without a hint of apology. “Can we discuss this after we get out of this monsoon?”
Now he minds the weather? She met his gaze for a moment longer, then stepped out of the car. He held the jacket over their heads as they dashed across the street, into the restaurant. He shook the jacket outside the door, then hung it up on a coatrack next to the cash register. A cheerful hostess in a black skirt and a white shirt said, “Two? This way, please.”
They were seated at the back of the restaurant, in a dark corner lit mostly by candlelight. Adam held her chair for her, then slid into the booth seat opposite. The hostess handed them each a menu. Marissa set hers down, flattening the napkin perched on the appetizer plate.
“Why do you have my books?” she said, fighting to keep her voice low.
“Before I picked you up I ran into the library to pick up a couple of books on public speaking. Alana asked me if I was going to see you soon. When I said yes she gave me your books to bring to you. Is that a problem?”
“Just . . . don’t say anything to anyone about it.”
“Why not? Is it a secret?”
“No,” she said, then added rather nonsensically, “I just don’t want anyone else to know what I’m reading.”
“Sure,” he said easily. Too easily. His knee bumped hers under the small table as she met his gaze, like getting shocked in two places at once. Tension thickened the air, but it wasn’t all from the intimacy of sitting in a dark restaurant, talking about secrets. Desire eddied around their ankles like a rising tide. The dim light picked out the planes of his cheekbones and forehead but threw the rest of his face into shadow. When he didn’t say anything else, she picked up the menu again.
“You got books on public speaking? Pretty serious stuff for a best man’s speech,” she said as she looked at the menu.
“Delaney’s marrying my best friend. It’s a big deal. I’m not going to do it half-assed,” he said.
And there was Delaney again. Keith, too, but this wasn’t about Keith. It could be a good diversion to get his mind off the books. She didn’t need him curious. “Why did you break up with Delaney anyway?” she asked as she began to scan the menu options.
Silence. She lowered the menu to see him looking at her with a completely unreadable, nearly cold expression on his face. Big, big mistake, but not because he was angry. He was . . . nothing, absolutely nothing. Shut down in every possible way, a pulse, a breath, nothing more. While her goal had been to shift attention from her to him, she’d meant to stay superficial, not go deeper. His reasons for ending his engagement to Walkers Ford’s good girl clearly went straight to the heart.
“It’s none of my business,” she backtracked.
“I’ll tell you, if you really want to know.”
“I don’t,” she said, then looked around the restaurant. Anything to not see the emptiness in his eyes. Buildings. They could talk about buildings. They had that, at least. “Bamboo flooring,” she noted. “A contractor I know down here put it into a yoga studio when they couldn’t find enough reclaimed oak or maple.” He’d said the studio owner would have killed for Brookhaven’s floors, but Adam didn’t need to know that.
“It’s getting popular as a renewable hardwood resource,” Adam replied. He flicked Marissa a glance over the top of the menu. “Want some help?”
“Desperately,” she said. “I don’t recognize half the ingredients, let alone the names.”
“We’ll get a few things so you can try them all,” he said. She sat back into the utterly unexpected pleasure of watching a man order for her. He chose a range of appetizers and main courses in varying heat levels, then added what their waitress said was the house specialty. He ordered a beer, while Marissa stuck with a diet soda.
“Why this restaurant?” she asked after the waitress brought their drinks.
“I like Thai food,” he said. “During one WESTPAC cruise we had a few days’ R and R in Sukhothai, and another time our LT arranged a sailing trip in Phuket.”
He put it out there casually, leaving it up to her to acknowledge that yes, she knew that Phuket was a prime sailing location in the Indian Ocean, had seen pictures of greenery-draped limestone cliffs rising over white sand beaches. “You went sailing in Phuket?” she asked, mimicking his pronunciation.
He nodded, his stance lazily casual, his eyes anything but. The appetizers arrived. The waitress set the tom kha gai in front of Marissa, the spring rolls in front of Adam, and the lettuce wraps on the table between them. Marissa dipped her soup spoon into the broth and lifted it to her mouth. He watched, a half smile on his face, as she hesitantly sampled the soup. Surprise and delight widened her eyes. “It’s good,” she said, and tried a more satisfying mouthful. “Really good. What’s in it?”
“You got me,” he said. “I like Thai food but I’ve never tried to make it. Be careful, though. Takes a while for the burn to build.”
She nodded in agreement and swapped him the bowl of soup for the spring rolls. “They’re like little egg rolls,” she noted, and examined the contents after she bit into one. After tipping the sauces onto her plate she tried each one. “Too hot,” she said as her eyes began to tear up. She drank most of her water trying to kill the burn, then a couple of swallows of Adam’s beer.
He dipped the tip of his finger in the sauce and sampled it. “You might want to skip the kaeng phet. So far so good?”
A smile and a nod, then, “Tell me about Thailand.”
“The first time I was there I went to Sukhothai, which was the country’s first capital. Great ruins, great backpacking along the river.”
“Who did you travel with? Other Marines?”
“Yeah,” he said. “There were always a couple of guys who wanted to see something other than the tourist district and the inside of bars and whorehouses.”
Her eyebrows lifted, but he paused while the waitress arranged dishes on the table. She scooped a generous helping of rice and a little of each dish onto her plate, and asked for a soda and some more water.
“Whorehouses?”
He shrugged. “Sorry about the language,” he said.
“I’ve heard worse,” she said with a smile. “You’re not the only ex-Marine in the area—
“Former Marine.”
“What?”
“You’re never an ex-Marine. You’re a former Marine, because you’re always a Marine, just not on active duty.”
“Does that explain your bumper sticker?” She’d seen the yellow sticker with red lettering one of the times she rounded the back end of the car to hop into the passenger seat. “To err is human. To forgive is divine. Neither is Marine Corps policy,” she quoted.
He shrugged, and added more rice to his plate.
“So if you’re not human, and you’re not divine . . . you’re a Marine?”
“Something like that.”
No mistakes, a policy she could understand with lives at risk in a war zone, but how did a man avoid making mistakes? What transpired inside when the inevitable happened?
“I’ll remember that,” she said. “Anyway, some of the former Marines end up a
t the lumberyard, waiting to get a truck loaded. After a while they forget I’m there.” They talked over, around, and past her, striving to outdo each other with stories.
“No, they don’t,” he said. “Maybe other women get forgotten. Not you.”
His eyes were heavy lidded, and the flush sitting high on his cheekbones wasn’t just alcohol and spicy food. The air between them popped and crackled, lifting the hair at the nape of her neck.
She smiled, then tucked her hair behind her ear and sampled another dish. Working her way counterclockwise around her plate she sampled everything he’d ordered. He ate most of the kaeng phet while she made a dent in the pad thai.
“So you traveled to avoid temptation,” she said.
“Among other things. Ship duty is one thing, but it’s hard when you’re deployed to come down from the adrenaline rush of combat. Sitting on a beach sipping drinks with fruit on little umbrellas didn’t appeal. I figured I’d marry Delaney and settle down in Chatham County, so I got everything I could out of it. The LT had two speeds—off and balls to the wall—so he didn’t want to sit around on beaches, either. One day we’re sitting in the mess and he drops a map of Thailand on the table with a mountain circled and says ‘Next shore leave I’m climbing that. Who’s in?’ But his first love was sailing, so we started planning sailing excursions. He’s been sailing all his life and didn’t see being deployed as a reason to stop.”
She watched him come alive in front of her eyes, glowing from the inside out as he talked. “So that’s how you did it. Stayed faithful to one woman for twelve years.”
He pushed what was left of his rice around on his plate. “It was part of it, yeah.”
“What was the rest of it?”
“Tell me about the books.”
She’d tweaked him over Delaney to change the subject; now he’d tweaked her right back. “It’s no big deal,” she said.
“Whenever someone says that, they usually mean it’s a very big deal.”
“I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands,” she said, striving for casual. “When I’ve got a job, I work, sleep, and eat, but when there’s no work, I’ve got hours of free time. I read. I read lots of different things. This is just what I’m reading now.”
“What else have you read?”
“Construction books to work on Brookhaven—wiring, plumbing, framing—tons of stuff on architecture,” she said promptly. “I’ve also read everything in the library’s Classics section—although I can’t get into the Russians—most of the Poetry section, and a good chunk of Biography. My interests vary, and I go off on tangents. That’s all this is. A tangent.”
“Alana called it ‘your average, run-of-the-mill obsession.’”
She and Alana were going to have words when she got back to Walkers Ford. “It’s not.”
He sat back and studied her, the focused gaze threatening on so many levels. “You’ve never been sailing.”
She laughed. “I’m fifteen hundred miles from the nearest ocean, so only in my dreams, as they say,” she said lightly.
“Speaking of dreams,” he said. An odd sensation expanded in her chest. “I want to help with the paneling.”
It took her a moment to recognize disappointment, the emotion unfamiliar because she’d tamped down what caused it—unfulfilled anticipation. She’d anticipated that Adam would say something else, like, Let’s go sailing, a laughable statement when South Dakota was last covered with ocean during the late Cretaceous period; or even, Let’s go to bed. Instead he brought up Brookhaven. Her real dream. Her obtainable dream. Because she wasn’t going sailing, and he was leaving.
She shouldn’t do this. One day with him and they were already right back where they left off. Not quite where you left off . . . Maybe getting Adam involved would make her take the step she couldn’t seem to take. “You’ve got other things to do,” she said.
He held up one long finger. “Prepare a best man’s speech.” A second finger went up. “Find an apartment so my mom gets her garage back. That’s it.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s the whole truth,” she said, and was rewarded with a slight widening of his eyes. But the last thing she wanted was Adam Collins rising to the challenge. “We can talk about it on the way home.”
8
THEY RODE IN silence back to Walkers Ford. Marissa had spent plenty of time riding shotgun with Adam, both in the passenger seat of whatever car he was fixing up and driving, and on the back of that dangerous motorcycle. Sometimes they talked. More often than not they just drove around until they found their way back to Brookhaven’s barn. She knew his silences as well as most people knew their lovers’ words, so she sat in the stillness heating between them as the car prowled the county highways, toward Brookhaven. In the cocoon created by the car’s solid feel, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and soft rock playing on the radio, the mood in the car shifted. He didn’t touch her, didn’t look at her, but she didn’t need a hand on her knee or a quick glance to know what he was thinking. What he finally, finally would do.
What she’d always wanted.
He parked at the apex of the semicircular drive, and when he got out of the car to open her door, the gesture no longer felt gentlemanly. He stayed close, letting her bump into him, feel the heat and strength of his body as they walked around to the servants’ quarters entrance. While she unlocked the door he ran his palm over his buzzed hair and flung the collected water to the side, and something in that automatic gesture stripped away her resolve.
“I told you about the books,” she said. “Tell me how you stayed faithful, seeing Delaney once or twice a year.”
“It loses something in the telling,” he said. “I could demonstrate, though.”
Her pulse stuttered, then shot into high gear. She liked men, loved sex, wasn’t afraid to own her sexuality. Given explosive chemistry with a man disciplined enough to remain utterly faithful to one woman for twelve years, the possibilities for sexual exploration were endless, intriguing. Silently she pushed the door open in invitation. He tilted his head. Ladies first. She walked into her tiny kitchen and flicked on the wall sconce over her little kitchen table. Dim light pushed at the shadows in the room.
“Would you normally do this after a first date?” he asked, his head bent as if he was studying the floor.
“That was hardly our first date,” she said lightly. When he lifted an eyebrow, she relented. “Depends,” she said.
“On what?”
That was harder to answer. “On lots of things. The guy. The date. How long it’s been.”
“How long has it been?” he asked, still not looking at her.
“Three days,” she said. “You were there. Shots of whiskey, pantry. Remember?”
Then he lifted his head and nailed her to the wall with his heated hazel gaze. “Before that.”
Months. Months and months and months alone, because she was busy in the summer, and worn down, and in the winter the weather kept her off the roads. The longing for touch, for a man’s hands on her body, against her body, swept through her. Maybe it was a betrayal of honor and self-respect. The night in the pantry probably was. But she’d long since given up denying what her soft, animal body wanted. Needed. “A while,” she said.
“I know how that feels,” he said.
“I expect you do,” she said. Longing surged in the room like a rising tide, engulfing them by degrees, rhythmic, predictable.
“It’s an ache,” he went on. “Low and tight. Heavy.”
Her mouth went dry. “Yes,” she said.
He crossed the tiny kitchen in a single step, backing her against the wall by the door to her bedroom. One elbow braced by her head, he laid his big palm flat against her lower belly, not quite cupping her sex. “Here. It’s steady. Relentless. After a while it doesn’t matter if you get yourself off or not. It never goes away.”
Air slowly left her lungs, drawn to the heat simmering between them. She inhaled shakily and looked up at him, then cupped
the thickening bulge in his jeans. “Is it the same for you?”
He shifted, rubbing against the heel of her hand, while his fingers gathered the loose fall of her hair. “Lower,” he said. “Right at the base, and in my balls.” When she turned her wrist and applied a little more pressure, he groaned and ground against her. “It’s a need,” he said, low and rough. The hand slowly twining in her hair tightened for a split second, then released. “But the Marine Corps taught me how to deal with needs.”
Two steps, her retreating, him advancing into the dark, warm air of her bedroom, and they were up against her double bed. She stopped but Adam didn’t. He slipped an arm around her waist and lifted her, bearing her back onto the unmade bed, breaking their descent with his other hand. He was braced on one arm, stretched out beside her, his hazel eyes dark with restrained desire. Her heart thudded hard against her breastbone. This was a moment she loved, when the promise of sex began to permeate the air. But they were both fully dressed, and something unknown glimmered under the building heat.
His long fingers curled under the hem of her sweater, caught under its bottom, and began to tug it up. Adam, a bed, darkness, and privacy—her teenage dream. Cold air kissed her belly, then her ribs, puckering her nipples inside her lace bra. A little shifting and he tugged her top over her head and dropped it on the floor.
“In boot camp you never refer to yourself in the first person. No ‘I’ or ‘me.’ It’s ‘this recruit,’ with the objective being to graduate from recruit to Marine. Before Receiving, I had needs,” he said, then bent to the exposed skin. She expected a kiss and got the scrape of his teeth over her collarbone, then the kiss, a softer touch that zinged straight to her nipples, then to her clit. The shudder that ran through her had nothing to do with air temperature. “‘This Marine’ closed his mind to everything that might cause him to fail. This included all images and thoughts of sex.” His tongue slid into the valley between her breasts, then gently under the scalloped edge of black lace. “For example, ‘this Marine’ didn’t look at porn.”
The distancing effect heightened the sense of untouchability she found so desperately desirable. “No porn?” she said.
