by Nora Roberts
“That’s the Templetons. They’ll bet on anything. Look at the way Kate, Margo, and Laura bet on the shop.”
“I keep meaning to go by there again. I’m not much on fancy-lady shops, but I’m wondering how Laura handles clerking.”
“I think you’ll be surprised, and impressed. I have been. It’s given them something solid and special.”
“Gives them a living.”
“It gives them more than that. It gives them unity, and a goal and love.” Either the beer or the women were making him sentimental, but Byron went with it. “I wasn’t around when they conceived it, put it together, took the chance. Margo selling off almost everything she owned, my conservative accountant pooling her investments to make her share. And Laura selling her wedding ring.”
“She sold her wedding ring to build that shop?”
“Yeah. It was right after they found out Ridgeway had pretty much cleaned out their joint accounts. She wouldn’t take Templeton money for the shop, so she hocked her wedding and engagement rings to make the down payment on the building. What women they are!”
“Yeah.” Michael frowned out to sea. “The socialite, the model, and the accountant.”
“They sweated over it. They cleaned and sanded and painted. And figured out how to make it work. It knocks me out to walk in there and see how they are together, how they are together anywhere. You see them out on the cliffs, rooting around in the rocks and dirt for Seraphina’s dowry. All these years they’re still together, still looking. Kate was wild tonight when she told me Laura had found another coin.”
He was trying to see it all, to settle all these facets into an image in his head. He blinked. “Laura? She found a coin? When?”
“Last night. Took a walk down on the cliffs. Kate says she does that from time to time when she needs to clear her head or just be alone. She found one, a gold doubloon just like Margo did, and Kate did. Oddest fucking thing. Each one of them finding a coin, months apart, by accident rather than design. Their treasure hunts turn up nothing, then boom, one of them just picks up a gold piece off the ground as if it had been there all along. Makes you wonder.”
The back door slammed open and Thomas’s voice boomed out. “Is this a poker game or a damn church social? Cards are getting cold.”
“Then deal ’em,” Byron called back. “Coming?” he asked Michael.
“Yeah. Laura walks on the cliffs at night?”
“Now and again.” Byron waded through the dogs, who ran circles around him.
“And last night she just reached down and picked up a gold coin?”
“Spanish, 1844.”
“Son of a bitch. That’s weird.”
“I’ll tell you what’s weirder. I’m beginning to believe they’re going to find the whole thing. That they’re the only ones who will.”
“Never believed it existed.”
“Ask Laura to show you her coin,” Byron suggested. “You might change your mind.”
“I might do that,” Michael murmured, then walked back into the comforting arena of cigar smoke and beer.
When he dragged himself up the stairs at three A.M., he still had his shirt, his horses, and his ego. He would have counted himself lucky for that. The fact that he was also eight hundred dollars richer was just icing.
He thought he might put it toward buying a pretty yearling Quarter Horse he’d had his eye on.
He stepped through his front door and stumbled over the warm bundle stretched out there.
“Jesus Christ!” As he hit the floor, the dog yelped, shuddered, then licked humbly at Michael’s face. “Bongo, what the hell are you—Jesus, get your tongue out of my mouth!” Michael swiped a hand over his face, shifted and ended up with wriggling puppy on his lap. “Yeah, yeah, you’re sorry. How the hell’d you get in here? Learn how to pick locks now?”
“He came with me.” Laura stepped out of the bedroom. “He loves me. He didn’t want to sleep in my bed all alone. Me either.”
Maybe it was the beer, or his abrupt meeting with the floor, but his voice seemed to have been lost somewhere along the way.
She was standing in the lamplight, smiling. And wearing nothing but one of his shirts. Her hair was tousled, her skin flushed. And when he managed to clear his vision, he noted that her eyes were bright, if a bit unfocused.
She was in simple words, beautiful, sexy, and drunk.
“Did you come for the rent?”
Her laugh was low and frothy. “It’s after business hours. I came for you. Thought you’d never get here. How was the poker game?”
“Profitable. How was the movie marathon?”
“Illuminating. Did you ever watch, really watch, the way people kiss in black and white? It’s . . .” She sighed, ran a hand down her breasts until he had to roll his tongue back into his mouth. “Wonderful,” she decided. “Just wonderful. Come and kiss me, Michael. In black and white.”
“Sugar . . .” He had very few rules and was struggling to remember this one as he set the dog aside and rose. “You’re plowed.”
“I am, indeed.” She shook back her hair, leaned against the doorway for balance. “D’you know, Michael, I have never been drunk in my life. A little tipsy, I will admit to having been, on occasion a little tipsy. But drunk, never. Not done, not acceptable for a woman of my standing in the community.”
“Your secret’s safe with me. Bongo and I will walk you home.”
“I’m not going home.” She straightened, steadied herself, enjoying the liberating way the room tilted as she stepped toward him. “Until I’ve had you. Then you can tell me if I kiss as good as Kate and Margo.”
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “Word travels fast around here.”
“You can even rip my clothes off again.” She linked her arms around his neck. “It’s your shirt anyway. I like wearing your clothes. It’s almost like having your hands on me. Are you going to put your hands on me, Michael?”
“I’m debating.”
“I’ll tell you a secret.” She pressed against him, put her mouth on his ear. “Wanna know my secret?”
She was going to be sorry come sunrise, but—he skimmed his hands under the shirt—what the hell. “Yeah, tell me a secret.”
“I have dreams about you. I used to have them before, too. Long time ago, when you would come around with Josh, I had dreams about you. But I never told anybody, because—”
“It wouldn’t be appropriate for a woman of your standing.”
She chuckled, nipped his earlobe and sent his blood pressure through the roof. “ ’Xactly. You know what I’d dream about you? I’ll tell you. You’d find me. I’d be on the cliffs or in my room or in the forest, and you’d find me. And my heart would start to pound, so hard, so fast.”
She took his hand, pressed it against her heart. To show him. “I couldn’t move or breathe, or even think,” she continued, and her hand laid over his on her breast. “You’d come toward me, not saying anything, just looking at me, looking until my knees were weak, until the blood was rushing in my head. You’d kiss me, so rough, so hot. The way no one else ever would. No one else would dare to touch me the way you touched me.”
“No.” It was like drowning, he thought. Staring into those deep gray eyes was like drowning. “No one would.”
“You’d rip my clothes, rip them off, and take me right there, wherever we were. Just the way you did that night, just like in my dreams. I must have always known you would one day.”
She circled away, arms lifted like a dancer on point while he stood where he was, aching. Viciously aching.
“That’s my secret. I dreamed of you. Oh, my head’s spinning.” She laughed, pressed a hand to it. “Being drunk feels just like it feels having you on top of me, inside me, pounding in me. God, God, I love it.”
She combed her hair back from her face, grinned at him. “Look at you, standing there, watching me. Never expected to hear such talk from Laura Templeton, did you?”
He knew, standing ther
e, watching her, that if he’d been dying of thirst he would have begged for her rather than a single sip of water. “No. And if you don’t remember this in the morning, I’m going to be damn sorry.”
“I’m just full of surprises tonight.” She lifted her arms, hooked them behind her head and stretched. “I watched all those movies, drank all that wine. Ate chocolate and laughed. And cried, and sighed. All those things women do.”
Laura lowered her hands again and turned a slow, fluid pirouette that made his shirt flow up, out.
“I watched Margo talk Annie into having her nails painted, and Kate dozing off with her head on my mother’s lap. Margo nursing the baby when he woke. I loved it all so much, loved being with them. My life is them and my babies, but through it all, you were in the back of my mind. Where is Michael? Does he still want me? And I thought, we’ll see. I’ll be there when he comes home, and we’ll see if he does. If I can make him want me. Do you?”
He didn’t speak, couldn’t have. Simply crossed to her, dragged her against him and plundered. Joy and need and pleasure burst through her in one sizzling ball of heat. Her laugh was smoke, like her eyes as he pulled her to the floor.
“No, no.” Giddy now, and brave enough, she rolled on top of him. “Let me. This time. I want to see if I can.”
He was ripe to explode and pulled her down again. “Laura, for Christ’s sake—”
“Me.” She jerked back, shook her reeling head. “I want to do things to you, things that might be considered inappropriate for a woman of my station.”
He struggled to clamp down on hurry when she straddled him. “Want to use me, do you?”
Her lips quirked at the gleam in his eyes. “That’s right. Look, we scared Bongo. He’s curled up in the corner.”
“He’ll get over it. What do you want to do to me?”
“I have to figure it out.” She blew out a breath, toyed with the buttons of his shirt. “I’ve got another secret.”
“If it’s anything like the last one, it’ll probably kill me.”
“It’s not a good one.” Now her lips pouted. “Well, maybe since it turned out this way it is. Peter never ripped my clothes off.”
“Christ. Forget it, and him.”
But when he reached up, she evaded him. “I want to tell you so you’ll know. It’s kind of funny, really. We always had very appropriate sex. Not like with you.” She traced the vee above the button with a fingertip. “Always proper sex, except when we didn’t have sex at all which was most of the time and all through the last year we were married. And you know what?” She placed her hands on either side of his head and leaned down, a heavy-eyed, more-than-tipsy woman.
“What?”
She hummed in her throat as he stroked her breasts. “You can do that,” she murmured. “I don’t mind at all. But I was saying. We had a system. No, he had a system, I was just there. He would put on classical music. Chopin, always the same sonata. I sometimes still get a tick in my eye when I hear it. He would close the door, lock it, lest a wandering servant be shocked by the goings-on, though the staff would hardly have business in there at ten forty-five in the evening. It was mostly always at ten forty-five.”
“So he was a creature of habit.” Michael flipped open buttons and found her flesh.
“Umm. No, you don’t.” She sat up again. “You’re trying to distract me. He would turn off the lights, get into bed. He would kiss me three times. Not two, not four, but three times. Then he would—”
“I don’t think I want a play-by-play here of Ridgeway’s style in the sack.”
“In the marital bed, please. Well, we’ll just skip right along, then, since it isn’t very interesting anyway. At eleven-oh-five, he would wish me a pleasant night and go to sleep.”
“The twenty-minute special, huh?”
“You could set your clock by it. Oh, Michael.” She stretched her arms up, giving him tempting glimpses of soft white swells. “I thought it was me. I thought that was just the way it was, had to be. But it isn’t, it wasn’t, it doesn’t.”
She cupped her breasts in her hands, let her eyes close. “It’s never predictable with you. I never know what you’ll do, where you’ll touch me next, or how. And it’s never proper. It’s so wonderfully improper. The things you do with your hands, with your mouth on me.” She dropped her hands to his chest. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to discover, at thirty, that you have a sex drive?”
“No.” He couldn’t help but smile at her. She was so beautifully drunk. “I found mine at sixteen and never lost sight of it.”
She laughed, flinging her head back and making his teeth ache with the need to bite into that slim white throat. “Oh, but this is better. Has to be. It’s like finding Seraphina’s dowry. Somehow you know it’s there, somewhere, or hope it is. And then when you find it, after all that time, all that wondering, it’s so sweet.”
“Since you found that elusive sex drive”—his hands slid up her torso—“why don’t we put it to use?”
“I’m going to make you sweat.” She eased down again, scraped her teeth over his jaw. “You might even beg.”
“Now you’re getting cocky.”
“I take that as a challenge.” To demonstrate, she shoved up her sleeves, which fell right back down again. “Are you man enough to agree not to touch me until I say you can?”
He lifted a brow, wondering just what the lady had in mind. “Your loss, sugar.”
“I don’t think so, ultimately. No hands,” she murmured and pressed his to his sides. “Except mine.”
She lowered her lips to his, brushed, teased, nibbled. “Margo said you had a very tasty mouth.” She smiled when he winced. “She was right. I think I’ll stay right here a while.”
She lingered on his mouth, changing the angle, the depth, the tone of the kiss. Light one moment, intense and urgent the next, then sultry, smoky.
His fingers, aching, curled into the carpet. “Not bad for a beginner,” he managed in a voice rusty with need.
“And I learn fast. Your heart’s pounding, Michael.” She nipped at the pulse in his throat, cruised over dampening flesh. Then she gripped his shirt at the shoulder, pulled. When the seam stayed fast, he chuckled from both humor and frustration.
“Want me to do that for you?”
“I can handle it.” She eased back, kept her eyes on his as she yanked hard. The seam ripped, exposing muscle and skin. She pounced on it like a starving cat. “Oh, your body,” she whispered, then crossed her hands, taking hold of his shirt and sending cloth and buttons flying. “You have such a body. Tough and scarred and tight. I want it.”
Her mouth streaked down his shoulder, over his chest. Quick, greedy bites and sucks, feathering openmouthed kisses and flicks of tongue. But when his hands came up to grip her hips, she shoved them away with a single word.
“Mine.”
Rising up, she shrugged off the shirt, then once more bent to her task.
She was destroying him in a way he hadn’t known he could be destroyed. Slowly, inevitably. She was taking him in a way he hadn’t known he could be taken. Greedily, intently. His breath thickened, caught, released on a groan when she laved her tongue low on his belly. Every muscle quivered, taut wires close to snapping.
Thoughts filled and emptied from his mind so rapidly that he couldn’t gain hold. Sensation rammed violently into sensation like two clenched fists. The scent of her, elegant as royalty, the sheen of her skin, glossy as a damp rose, and the stroke of her hands, restless as lust.
Giddy on her own power, she tugged open the button of his jeans, felt his body tense like a runner on the mark. She lowered her mouth, tasting there, just there where denim and flesh met. And heard him choke out her name.
She could do this to him, she thought as she dipped her tongue under the denim to tease. She could create this desperation, and weakness, this violent need in a strong, vital man. She could make him want her to the point of madness, and she could take whatever she wanted from him.
She nudged the material down, closed her teeth over his hip. And heard the breath explode out of his lungs. He was helpless, she knew, lost in her. And she could make him ache.
She took him into her mouth, clamped him in a wet velvet vice and shot his system into chaos.
His hands fisted in her hair as his body bucked under her. When her mouth cruised up to his belly again, over quaking muscle, he was ready to kill to have her.
Still gripping her hair, he yanked her head back, reared up. She felt one shocking jolt at the dark burn of his eyes, then his mouth was clamped on hers.
“I didn’t say you could touch me.” She panted it out as his lips branded her throat, her shoulders, her breasts. “You didn’t beg.”
“I need you.” He found her with his hand, shoved her over the peak he was still clinging to. “Now. Goddamn it, take me in.”
Triumphant, she threw her head back, and her laugh was rich and wild. Locking her legs around his waist, she arched back, “Yes.” Bowed like a bridge when he drove himself into her.
She cried out, no longer surprised but shuddering nonetheless over the speed and violence of the orgasm. She arrowed up again, her body locked to his, her hips pumping.
“More,” she demanded, tearing nails down his back. “Michael. More.”
Blind with greed, she shoved him back, dug her hands into his waist, and took more.
The storm raged through him, whipping toward peak, but he could see her. Rising and falling over him, her eyes closed to heated slits, her head back in abandon. The animal inside him mated with hers until she’d ridden both to exhaustion.
Through hazy vision he saw her melt down on him. And felt the quakes of the aftershocks rush through her. His own body felt bruised, numbed, weightless so that he wasn’t even aware that his arms were locked tight around her, like a man holding everything that mattered.
“Told you I could do it,” she murmured, turning her lips to his throat.
“Yeah, you sure showed me.” He pressed his lips to her hair, wallowed there. “Laura.” He said her name quietly, almost to himself. Then closed his eyes and tried, for both their sakes, not to hear the rest of it. I love you. Love you.
