by Diana Palmer
He touched her cheek gently. “I wasn’t joking. I want you so much that it doesn’t matter where or when, which is why I couldn’t give you the promise you wanted. You can’t stop what happens any more than I can,” he added quietly. “It’s a fever, burning so hot and high that ice couldn’t quench it.”
“It’s wrong,” she whispered.
“Why? Because we’re not married?” He bent and brushed his lips over her heavy eyelids. “That isn’t my fault. I want to marry you. You’re the one who won’t cooperate.”
“I guess I seduced you?” she asked half angrily.
He lifted an eyebrow and looked down. She flushed furiously. He moved back then and she blushed even more, quickly straightening her clothes while he did the same.
“What a blessing that you’re already pregnant,” he murmured, watching her frantic movements, enjoying the radiance in her face. “We don’t have to worry about getting you that way.”
She gave him a killing glare. “You have to stop doing this!”
“I’m doing my best,” he said heavily. “Can I help it if you’re so damned sexy that I can’t get within ten feet of you without getting aroused?”
That was a hard question to answer. In her condition, it wasn’t exactly an insult to be thought of as sexy, and she had to admit that he tried to get her to marry him almost constantly. His motivation was her one big hang-up. He wouldn’t tell her what his feelings really were, and she couldn’t marry him until she knew. Men, she thought furiously.
“What an expression,” he murmured, smiling with pleasant fatigue as he pulled his shirt down and bent to kiss her nose.
“In the kitchen, standing up, with the door unlocked,” she began in a strained voice.
“They were so wound up in that movie that they didn’t know or care what was happening in here,” he whispered. “But just to reassure you…”
He moved away from her and put a finger to his lips as he gently turned the key to unlock the door.
“You locked it!” she exclaimed, almost sinking to the floor with relief.
“Of course I locked it,” he said, rejoining her. He traced her swollen mouth with his forefinger. “I’m not kinky. Not that kinky, at least,” he added gently. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. But you shouldn’t…” she began uneasily.
“If you don’t like being made love to in unusual places, marry me and we’ll do it like normal couples, in bed at night.” He moved back. “I want you. I can’t turn it on and off.”
“It’s just sex!” she burst out.
He shook his dark head, very slowly. “It’s deep, and rich, and lasting. I hate being away from you at all, especially with my child inside you.”
He could say things that made her feet melt. She stared at him helplessly. “I can’t just walk out on Granddad and Mack,” she whispered. “Even if I could leave Clay to his fate. Don’t you understand? Granddad looked after all of us when Mama died and Dad left. Mack was as much like my child as my brother. I’ve done for them and looked after them and loved them all my adult life. They’re my family.”
He moved closer, framing her face in his lean, warm hands. “So am I,” he whispered. “The baby and I are your family, too.”
Her eyes looked wounded as they met his. He was putting her in an impossible position. Couldn’t he see that?
“I can’t choose,” she whispered. She looked down at his chest. “I wish I could make you understand that it isn’t a matter of choice. You don’t just jettison people when they get in the way of things you want to do. Isn’t that half of what’s wrong with society today? Everybody wants his or her own pleasure first, and everything that gets in the way is expendable. I can’t feel like that.”
He frowned as he studied her face. “Are you telling me that I’m expendable, Becky?” he asked softly.
“Rourke, if I put Granddad in a nursing home and Mack in a foster home, how am I going to live with the guilt?” She lowered her eyes. “That being the case, you don’t have to feel, well, obligated to do things for us.”
He let his eyes slide over her body and back up again. Even though he was satisfied, the sight of her could still arouse him. He didn’t like the feeling of being out of control, but he was never any other way with her lately. Making love to her was only going to increase her guilt and fortify her suspicion that all he wanted was sex. If only he knew what she really felt.
His doubts made him irritable. “You’re carrying my child. I have a responsibility to him, if not to you, for seducing you into pregnancy. I’ll do what I can to make conditions livable around here,” he said, his eyes sliding with patent disapproval around the rough walls. “I owe the child that much.”
“Becky, how about lunch?!” Granddad called suddenly from the living room.
She felt sick all over. “I have to fix something to eat,” she mumbled.
“Becky! How about lunch?” Granddad yelled again.
“How about it?” she yelled back at him, driven to anger by her own raging emotions.
“What are you doing in there?!” the old voice raged.
Becky moved away from Rourke and refused to look at him. Men were the absolute pits and she was certain that she didn’t love him anymore. “I’m undressing Mr. Kilpatrick and preparing him for the oven!” she shouted. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t want roasted district attorney for lunch,” Mack interrupted, peeking around the kitchen door. “Could I have a hot dog instead?”
Becky threw up her hands. “Yes, you can have a hot dog.”
Rourke stared at her rigid back with faint remorse. He suddenly realized that he hadn’t even had breakfast. Perhaps she might be willing to suspend hostilities long enough to feed him. “May I have one, too?” he asked.
She gave him a killing stare. “Only if I get to pick where I put it when it’s cooked,” she said icily.
He pretended not to hear her. He sat down at the table and lit a cigar. “I like mine just barely boiled, and with lots of mustard and catsup and relish. I like chili or slaw on it.”
“I don’t have chili and I’m not making slaw,” she said curtly, slamming a pot under the faucet to fill with water.
“We have chili left over from last night in the refrigerator,” Mack pointed out.
Becky didn’t say a word. She fixed hot dogs and heated up chili, still simmering from her confrontation with Rourke. Her headlong response was her worst problem. He sat there with that damned arrogant look in his eyes and she knew he was remembering it, too. He was almost purring with satisfaction.
Well, she wasn’t giving up Mack and Granddad, so he could just be arrogant all alone. She’d be better off without him anyway, she told herself. If only she’d never gone to work for the law firm in the first place, she might never have met him!
“What were you doing in here?” Granddad demanded when Becky called him to the table.
“Guess,” Rourke murmured with a sensual glance at Becky.
She blushed scarlet and couldn’t look at anybody. How could he embarrass her like this? Of course, it was only later that she realized nobody would believe what they’d done. He’d only given the impression that they’d been kissing.
Rourke insisted on helping with the cleaning up. Then he produced two tickets for an Atlanta Hawks basketball exhibition game that night.
“Atlanta’s air force!” Mack exclaimed, using the nickname that the Hawks’ promotional spots on TV had given it. He went wild. “You’ve got to let me go!” he told Becky, grabbing her arms. “You’ve got to! I’ll die if you don’t let me go!”
“Do you want your brother’s death on your conscience?” Rourke asked her.
She shook her head. “God forbid. All right, you can go.”
“I didn’t say so,” Granddad muttered darkly.
Mack went and took Granddad by the arms. “You’ve got to let me go!” he repeated. “I’ll die if you don’t let me go!” He glanced at Rourke without a trace of r
emorse. “B-ball is my life,” he explained.
“Go on, for heaven’s sake.” The old man gave in as quickly as Becky had.
“I have to go home and change. I’ll be back for you about six,” he told Mack.
“I’ll be ready!” Mack said enthusiastically.
“Thank you for fixing the roof,” Granddad said without looking at him.
“My pleasure. Thanks for the hot dogs,” he told Becky. “You’ll make some lucky man a good wife.”
“Not you, of course,” she said curtly, still stinging from the argument they’d had and his refusal to understand how badly she was needed here.
His eyebrows levered up. “I didn’t say you’d make me a good wife,” he reminded her. “I know you don’t want to marry me. Don’t worry about it—I’ll never ask you again.”
Becky averted her eyes, vaguely aware of Granddad’s hard stare.
“It’s your child,” Granddad said sharply. “It won’t have your name.”
“Becky knows that,” Rourke said. “If that’s how she wants it, who am I to argue? Poor little kid’s going to have hell in school, though. I did.”
“Why?” Granddad asked.
“I’m illegitimate,” he told the old man, without a hint of emotion in his face. “My father, I’m told, didn’t believe in marriage.”
“Idiot,” Granddad said, glancing up at him and then down again. “A child should have a name.”
Becky shifted uncomfortably. They were making her feel terrible. But it was Rourke’s fault, dammit! He was the one who was forcing her to make impossible choices. She turned away. “I’ll make sure Mack has something to wear.”
Rourke watched her go with quiet, speculative eyes. He wished he hadn’t backed her into that particular corner. He’d only made things worse.
He actually had no problem with taking on her family, but he hadn’t told her that. He’d made her think that he was going to take her away from them and leave them to sink or swim on their own.
He hadn’t realized how it would sound to her when he put it into words. What he’d meant was that he wanted to be loved. He wanted her to care so much for him that everyone else on earth would be second in her affections. But she hadn’t understood, and now he’d created an even worse problem.
Besides that, making her give in to him physically was compounding the complications. His temper had gotten away from him and he’d as much as told her that his interest in her was mainly sexual, so seducing her coming and going wasn’t going to help matters. He’d have to get his body under control, along with his tongue, or they’d never get together.
He packed up his toolbox and left to get ready for the game. It didn’t escape his notice that Becky didn’t see him off, or that she avoided him for the rest of the evening. He and Mack came home late, to be told by Granddad that she’d gone to bed with a headache. Rourke had one of his own, but he’d created it for himself. He couldn’t blame it on Becky or her family.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Becky went through the motions of working, but her heart wasn’t in it. She felt as if she’d taken a wrong step somewhere along the way and everything had changed because of it.
Rourke was still around. He’d arranged for a retired man to take over care of the livestock and the plowing. The same man, a soft-spoken apartment dweller who missed the land, was going to plant the fall garden and maintain it. Rourke had sent a carpenter to put the front porch and the screens to rights, and he’d insisted on buying a basketball goal and net for Mack. He’d put it up over the ramshackle garage, and now Mack did nothing but play with his NBA regulation basketball and sing Kilpatrick’s praises.
Granddad grew spryer by the day. He was up and around now, and there was a spring to his step. He’d gone with Becky to see Clay, who was still awaiting trial. His case had been called two weeks past, but J. Davis had been out of town on an emergency and it had to be continued.
That suited Rourke very well. He had used the extra time to good advantage.
He’d gone to see Frank Kilmer, an old friend of his uncle’s and a former public defender who had some of the oddest acquaintances any officer of the court ever assembled. There was a rumor—unproven, of course—that his gardener had once been a hit man for the big boys up north.
“Nice of you to come and see me, boy,” he chuckled, walking around his estate with Rourke. “But from the look of your face, I think I can be forgiven for asking if this is purely a social call. You don’t usually look so preoccupied when you come to visit.”
Rourke turned to the older man, the wind catching his dark hair and lifting strands of it. “I need some advice.”
“Not to do something outside the law, God forbid?” the bent, silver-haired old gentleman asked with his stock horrified expression.
“God forbid.”
He grinned. “What is it?”
“I want to make the local organized crime element give up two of its more expendable colleagues. They set up a friend of mine. Unless I can get them to admit it, he stands to do some hard time.”
Kilmer nodded, scowling. “The Cullen boy.”
Rourke’s eyebrows arched. “Am I wearing a sign?”
“I always know what’s going on.” He glanced sideways at Rourke and grinned wickedly. “I know about the baby, too, but I’ll pretend not to if it will embarrass you.”
“My God.”
“What you want isn’t all that difficult. All you have to do is find a politician with ties to them and put him in a compromising situation.”
“I’m an officer of the court,” he reminded the old man.
“I didn’t say you had to create the compromising situation. And,” Kilmer added with a sharp laugh. “I know just the politician for you. He’s a compulsive gambler. He has a standing Saturday night game, and he’s running for reelection. He also has ties to the gentlemen to whom the Harris boys owe their souls.” He glanced up at the taller man. “Will that do?”
“That,” Rourke replied with a smile, “will do nicely. Thank you.”
“Thanks are not necessary. You can invite me to the christening. I’ve always had the urge to become a godfather.”
“You shady character. You’d have my son or daughter sitting on the knees of hit men and playing tag with numbers runners!”
“I would not,” he returned, offended. “My God, I have nothing to do with the numbers racket.”
BECKY INVITED MAGGIE HOME with her for supper one Friday night, grateful for the older woman’s moral support through the long ordeal. Maggie accepted, and there was nothing critical in her brief appraisal of the house when she arrived.
Granddad didn’t even open his mouth when he discovered that the Maggie his granddaughter had talked about for so long was black. He smiled at her naturally and behaved like a perfect gentleman. Becky hoped her shock didn’t show.
“Are you going to get married before this baby is born, or not?” Maggie asked later, when they were sitting on the front porch swing.
“He wanted me to choose between my family and him,” Becky said miserably. “How could I?”
Maggie whistled. “Rough choice.”
“Yes, it was. Impossible. I can’t put Mack in a home.”
The older woman wrapped her long, elegant fingers around the chain that supported the swing. “Doesn’t he like Mack?” she asked.
“Of course he does. He took him to a Hawks exhibition game, and he’s always bringing him something for his train set.” Becky stopped dead. Why, Rourke was crazy about the boy. He was even fond of Granddad. It was he who’d made the old man want to live again.
“I think you might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick, my friend,” Maggie said gently. “Wanting to come first doesn’t have a lot to do with kicking your family out of the house. Kilpatrick doesn’t have anyone of his own. That makes it hard for him to understand dependents and family loyalty. He may not know that love grows the more you spread it around, or that you can love plenty of people and ne
ver run out of the stuff.”
“Oh, no,” Becky said slowly. “No, it couldn’t be that simple. He said there was no future for us as long as I put my people ahead of him.”
“He’s right. Listen, honey, I had no family of my own when I married Jack. I was jealous of every minute he spent with his parents and his sister and brother. I did everything I could to keep him away from them. Eventually it broke up my marriage, because I gave him an impossible choice. Don’t do that to Kilpatrick. Make him part of your family. Then make him understand that you can love him and still have room left for them.”
“If it’s not too late,” Becky said miserably. “Oh, Maggie, I’ve ruined everything!”
“No, you haven’t. A man has to care a lot before he’ll take on a burden like yours.”
“That’s what Clay said,” she recalled.
“And doesn’t it look as if Kilpatrick has done exactly that?” she added, smiling. “Look around. He’s fixed up the house, taken responsibility for the bills, got Clay that dandy attorney…”
“What?”
Maggie’s eyebrows arched in the light from the window. “You knew, didn’t you? I had lunch with one of the girls who works part-time in the district attorney’s office. She told me it was the talk of the courthouse at the time.”
“He got Mr. Davis to represent Clay?” Becky gasped.
“Yes. Quite a trick, considering that Lincoln Davis was using Clay and Kilpatrick’s involvement with you to get himself elected. But Kilpatrick talked him into it. He paid your grandfather’s hospital bill, to boot. Does that sound like a man who doesn’t care about you?”
“But, he never told me!” she wailed. “He never said a word!”
“The man wants love, not gratitude. Are you blind?”
“I thought he only wanted sex,” she said.
Maggie laughed. “They all want sex, honey,” she murmured dryly. “But if he’d only wanted that, why would he keep coming around when you turned up pregnant?”
“I don’t know.” Becky put her head in her hands. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
