Ashton let his gaze drift to Felicia, saw that she’d been focused on him but looked away as soon as he caught her at it. “Work it out with Cade,” he said, “and let me know when. Granddad wants me to leave Teddy down there with him, but I can’t do that. If I walked in my house and Teddy wasn’t there, I can’t even imagine how I’d feel.”
Felicia’s eyes seemed to narrow, but he hoped it was his imagination. “Who’s Teddy?” she asked him, and he wouldn’t describe her voice as friendly.
“Teddy is my four-year-old son, my pride and joy,” he answered, making certain that she knew his son came first in his life.
“And where is Teddy’s mother?” she asked, obviously ready to push the issue.
He looked her in the eye. “I have no idea, I am not the least interested in locating her, and she is not interested in Teddy.” Felicia’s bottom lip dropped, she moved her head slowly from left to right and didn’t say a word. Speechless.
He walked over to her and extended his hand. “Hadn’t we better get started on our tour? I promised Teddy I’d read to him tonight, and that means I should be home by seven.”
Still, she didn’t speak, but reached for his hand, took it and rose to her feet almost as if she were unaware of her moves. Without examining his reasons or considering his right to do so, he wrapped an arm around her waist and looked down at her. “I rented the car for the day. Let’s go.”
She was about to enter the car when she stopped, turned and said, “I forgot to tell Damon goodbye.”
“I know, but it’s all right. I didn’t tell him goodbye, either.”
“Could we see Mount Vernon first, since it is farthest away?” she asked him after he drove several blocks. “I’ve never been there, and I hear it’s beautiful, so I’d like to be uplifted before I look at depressing slave sites and other gruesome reminders of slavery.”
“We don’t have to go to those places, and they are depressing. But they’re also very enlightening. It’s wonderful to see what slaves achieved while staggering beneath the weight of the white man’s boot.”
“I’m sure of that, but right now, I want to see something that makes me feel good.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“Because knowing that your son won’t have his mother’s love and nurturing is as much as I can handle right now.”
A strange and unfamiliar feeling gripped him in the region of his heart, and he wanted to park the car and hug her. He hadn’t thought about her in the context of motherhood, but now he wondered whether a beautiful, accomplished and sophisticated woman had genuine maternal instincts.
Felicia glanced at Ashton from the corner of her eye. The chemistry between the two of them could lead them into an affair on that basis alone, and she did not want to be a slave to a man’s prowess in bed. Besides, the more she saw of Ashton, the more she wanted him for reasons other than chemistry. Besotted though she was, she meant to retain her wits.
“I should have known that you were or had been married,” she said. “Tell me what happened.” He could say she didn’t have the right to know, but did he have the right to make her feel as if she were the only woman in the world?
“I dated Karla a number of times and had a casual affair with her. I thought I did everything possible to prevent her from conceiving, but it happened anyway, probably from a broken condom. She told me she was pregnant and asked me for the money to get an abortion. I begged her not to do that and signed an agreement relieving her of all responsibility for the child if she would marry me and give birth to it. We stayed together until Teddy was two weeks old, and she asked for the divorce, a ticket to Italy and one thousand dollars pocket money in case she ever got completely broke. She did not want money. She wanted her freedom from motherhood. I have not seen or heard from her since the day I drove her to Kennedy Airport and handed her an Al Italia ticket to Rome.”
“I see. Well, I don’t see. Did you love her?”
“No, and I never told her that I did. But I cared for her, and I tried to make her life as pleasant as possible during her pregnancy. Actually, I thought we became friends during that time. I took Lamaze classes with her and helped her deliver Teddy, but none of that moved her. She did not want any children, and I’m sure if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have had the abortion in spite of my pleadings.”
Felicia would never have suspected of a corporate bigwig what she had learned about John Ashton Underwood. “Something tells me that Teddy is a lucky little boy. Who’s with him right now?” she asked, but she’d bet anything that Ashton Underwood did not leave his son with a girlfriend.
“I have a housekeeper, who lives with us, but he’s learned how to wrap her around his finger, and he blackmails her, too. Furthermore, he’s proud of it. I’ve told him that I’ll punish him if he does it again.”
“Will you?”
He glanced quickly at her. “Certainly. I always keep my word, especially to my child. What about you? Do you have any children, and have you been married?”
“No to both. I want a family, but I need to get married first, and I haven’t gotten around to that.”
He shifted lanes to exit onto the George Washington Memorial Highway. “The men in your circle must be out of their minds. I’d like to get to know you. May we see each other in New York…Uh, will you have dinner with me tomorrow evening?”
He didn’t plan to waste time and she didn’t want him to. “I’d love to have dinner with you, Ashton, but promise me we can go someplace where we won’t be a spectacle.”
“What do you mean? Oh, I get it. Not where the celebs hang out. I’ll do my best.” His right hand suddenly covered hers, and his touch seemed…well, experimental was the best way she could describe it. She turned her hand over and let her palm caress his.
“You’re getting to me,” he said. “What are we going to do about it?”
She didn’t feel like answering that. “I’d say we take one day at a time, but you seem to be moving on a faster schedule.” She didn’t think Ashton Underwood was a player, but you could never tell about a man. She was on the verge of deciding that she wanted him, and she intended to begin by playing according to her rules, not his.
He squeezed her fingers. “You will find that I am a very patient man, but when I see the need to move things along, I don’t hesitate. Just be sure you don’t toy with me, Felicia.”
“That’s not my style,” she said, and immediately wondered if she’d told the truth. What would happen if she simply went with her feelings without regard for the consequence? No, she couldn’t do that. Hadn’t experience taught her not to let her body rule her head?
He turned into George Washington’s Mt. Vernon estate, paid the parking and admission fees and parked the car. “Let’s go see the slave quarters, storage house and smokehouse before we go up to the mansion,” he said.
“You’re the guide, Ashton. I’ll go where you lead.”
She paid little attention to the rueful expression that claimed his face. And when his right arm eased around her shoulder as they headed for the smokehouse, she moved closer to him, because her heart dictated it.
His arm tightened around her shoulder. “What a simple life this was,” he said. “It’s so peaceful here. The only stress I feel emanates from the bustling, rushing tourists. Could you live without the frills to which we New Yorkers accustom ourselves?” He looked down at her, his expression intimate and very serious.
“My Lord, this is moving too fast,” she said to herself when he stepped closer and she realized that she wanted him even closer. She gazed up at him and saw in his eyes the answer to her most intimate dreams, and her nerves seemed to splinter. She had to do something to straighten out her head.
After backing up a step, she said the first thing that came to her mind. “How old is your housekeeper?”
Although he seemed taken aback by the question, he said, “Eartha’s sixty-one. Why?”
She couldn’t find fault with that. “When had you planne
d to tell me that you have an ex-wife and a four-year-old son?”
He stared at her with considerably less warmth than she’d seen on his face minutes earlier. “You haven’t been so forthcoming about yourself. Why did a woman in your position, and who looks like you, need to pay an escort to take her to a formal affair?”
If he’d stabbed her, it wouldn’t have hurt worse. But she tossed her head in a defiant manner and told him, “Because I do not allow myself to get into any man’s debt. That’s why.”
“Really? You work with a bunch of small-minded men who you delight in outsmarting, and you think you can back every man you meet into a corner. Not this man, baby.”
“Your problem is you’re used to having women fall all over you. Well, not this woman, baby,” she said, parroting him.
“What’s this?” he said, his face a mask of incredulity. “You deliberately picked a fight with me. Any contact would do. Well, I can give you a better outlet for your frustration. Just say the word.”
She poked her right index finger in his chest. “Isn’t that just like a man, defining everything in terms of himself. I am not frustrated.”
“Stop fooling yourself, and quit stabbing me with your finger. What you want is for me to…to—”
“What?” she asked with her flat palm now against his chest, almost daring him to say it. “To do what?”
His hands grabbed her shoulders, and she’d never seen such fire in a man’s eyes. Eyes burning with desire. “Don’t dare me, Felicia,” he said, his expression thunderous. “You think if you provoke me into doing what you want me to do, you won’t share in the responsibility. That it?”
Her gaze drifted from his eyes to his mouth, to the full bottom lip that she longed to feel on her lips, her nipples and all over her. She bathed her lips with the tip of her tongue and didn’t bother to hide her thoughts and feelings.
“Damn!” His mouth came down hard on hers, and she parted her lips, shamelessly wanting him inside her. He locked his arms around her, pulled her tight to his body and drugged her as he unleashed his passion. He loved every crevice of her mouth until, exasperated, she pulled his tongue into her and feasted on it, loving him. His fingers gripped her buttocks, and his breathing shortened almost to a pant as he lifted her and held her to his body. His heat seemed to fire up her nerve ends, and her blood raced to her loins. Her nipples tightened, and all she could think of as his tongue plowed in and out of her mouth simulating the act of love, was how she wanted him inside her. She undulated against him, rubbing her left nipple and moaning her frustration. He let the wall of the two-hundred-and-forty-year-old building take his weight and grabbed her knees as she pressed herself to him.
Suddenly her feet touched the floor and he was no longer kissing her, but leaned against the wall and held her close. “What on earth got into us?” he asked. “How did we forget that we’re in a public place?”
When his mouth touched hers, she hadn’t a thought as to where she was or why she was there. “I don’t know what happened, Ashton. I’ve never been down that road before. I’ve never experienced anything that caused me to behave less than circumspectly. You see what you did?” she said, trying to smile.
As if he understood that her comment was an attempt at levity, his arms went around her in a brief gesture of reassurance.
“It was completely out of my hands, baby. So help me God. You were all I saw, felt or heard. Are you still frustrated and annoyed about it?”
“What I’m feeling now is…I don’t know. I’m just…out of sorts. Are we still having dinner together tomorrow night?” she asked him.
“Yes. There’s a nice little restaurant over near the United Nations. Diplomats won’t be interested in you and me. I’ll be at your place a seven. Okay?”
“I’ll be ready. How do you dress?”
“Business suit. Come on and let’s see the remainder of this place. We have to get the five o’clock shuttle.”
They walked out of the smokehouse arm in arm. In the few minutes she spent in his arms, her life changed, and she knew she would never be the same. Maybe he would become important to her, and maybe he wouldn’t, but he’d taught her how she could feel in a man’s arms, and for that, she would never forget him. She had thought she knew but, in fact, she hadn’t had a clue.
He appeared engrossed in their surroundings, pointing out the birds and the foliage, things that he evidently hadn’t observed earlier. “Wonder what kind of plant that is,” he said, pointing to an evergreen.
She stopped walking, put her hands on her hips and looked up at him. “How can you act as if nothing happened back there. I don’t care how many strange plants George Washington had or how many pigs he slaughtered every week. How can you—”
He interrupted her, seemingly unperturbed by her outburst as his eyes sparkled. “Is that the way it appears to you? You’re neither as tough nor as combative as you want me to believe. You’re in untried, virgin territory, and it’s making you uneasy. I don’t have a long face right now, because I’m not worried. You’re one hundred percent woman, and all that other stuff you show is no more than a fire cracker shooting at stealth bombers.”
She didn’t mind if he saw through her veneer; no other man had bothered to look. Still, she refused to make it easy for him. “Don’t be so self-satisfied,” she said.
He brought her back into the curve of his arm. “I’m not self-satisfied. I’m satisfied with the signals you’re sending me. What’s bothering you, Felicia? Is it your job, your personal life? What?”
She didn’t answer his question, because she didn’t know the answer. She heard herself telling him something that took shape in her mind as she spoke the words. “I’d like to be somewhere in the midst of a peaceful, quiet oasis, where birds chirped, a brook rushed along and flowers bloomed everywhere. Maybe I’d find out what’s going on between us.”
“You’re a genuine romantic. I’ll see what I can do to accommodate you.”
They strolled through the storage house and around the grounds holding hands, and neither seemed aware that they hardly spoke to each other. Felicia remained deep in thought as they went from room to room in the mansion and until she stepped out on the front porch. A vast segment of the Potomac River decorated with shadows created by the late-afternoon sun captured her vision, and a gasp escaped her.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, “but not nearly as beautiful as you.”
At the tip of her tongue were the words, “Don’t make jokes,” but she looked at him, saw the seriousness of his mien and let the words die unspoken. “Maybe he thinks so,” she said to herself. To him, she said, “Thank you, Ashton. If you think so, I won’t argue about it.”
“Why should you? There used to be a little café down the road a piece. Would you like some coffee, tea or a cold drink?”
“Thanks. I’d like some ginger ale.”
He took her hand and started toward the café. Here I am all lovey-dovey with the most eligible man I’ve ever gone anywhere with, a man who says I’m beautiful, who kissed me silly, and I haven’t fainted. What am I going to tell my editor as to why two days have passed since I handed in my daily column? He is not going to be happy doing reruns on consecutive days.
“You’ve become pensive,” Ashton said. “What’s the matter?”
She told him and added, “You’re muddling my brain.”
He opened the café’s door and walked in behind her. “I hope you don’t think Dream or anything like it has been on my mind since you kissed me as if there was no chance of doing it again. This is new, and so far, it’s…well, it’s wonderful…at least for me. So expect to think about it a lot. If you don’t, it hasn’t made much of an impression.” He found seats, and they sat beside a window, holding hands.
“I haven’t spent a leisurely weekday afternoon since I was in college,” he told her, “and the strange thing is that I don’t feel guilty right now, that I’m not horsewhipping myself for
wasting time. Maybe it’s because I need this as much as I need the solace of success.”
“You’re your own boss, Ashton. I’m not. At contract time, I tell my editor that my column sells papers, so I have to produce. Besides, I feel a responsibility to my readers and to myself.”
“All of which is commendable, but I don’t think that’s the problem right now. Level with me, Felicia. Aren’t you afraid this is getting away from you, that you can’t control your feelings? Well, I wasn’t looking for it, but I certainly am not going to run from it. Give us a chance.”
It didn’t make sense to feel as she did about a stranger, a man of whom she knew almost nothing other than his ability to fire her up with his touch. She risked looking him in the eye and shuddered at the softness she saw there. “Let’s start slowly, Ashton. I’m thirty-eight, and I’m feeling the way I should have felt when I was twenty.”
His hand tightened on hers. “You’ve never been in love?”
“I thought I was, and maybe at that age and that time it was real, but I don’t think so now, because it never took control of me the way…” She stopped talking. She wasn’t so besotted that she’d confess it to him. Some things were best left unsaid. His arm eased around her shoulder, and he didn’t have to tell her that he understood all that she hadn’t said.
“What we feel in our youth is fresh and new,” he said, “but I have a feeling that it’s nothing compared to a mature relationship. My love for my son is so all-encompassing that I can’t conceive of life without him. Just being with him gives me so much joy.”
This man loves deeply, and I want him to love me like that. If only I can make myself believe that it’s possible. If I can forget that Herman Lamont ever lived.
“Is Teddy enough for you?” she heard herself ask Ashton. “I mean, do you want any more children? Can you…is there room for…for more?”
“I’d love to have the experience of planning a family with my wife…with the woman I love. As of now, I have no idea what that’s like. I told you how I happen to have Teddy. Maybe that’s why he’s so precious to me. But I don’t want to raise him as an only child.”
Just the Man She Needs Page 4
