Her Christmas Surprise (Silhouette Special Edition)

by Kristin Hardy

  “Okay, so you have a point.” Lex made the turn. “Maybe what we should do is call Stockton.”

  “Not to be a contrarian but only as a last resort. We don’t know exactly what’s on that computer. If it doesn’t hold something to clear us, the last thing we want to do is give him more ammunition. He’s still on the lookout for a target, remember?” And the very last thing they needed was for him to suspect a connection between her and Lex. Keely blew out a breath of frustration. “Go right, here.”

  Turning the other direction would take them to the highway that led to the safe house and the computer and all the questions.

  “Is there a chance Bradley might have left something at your place?” Lex asked, following her instructions onto the road that led to the new country club on the outskirts of town.

  “The feds sure thought so. That’s why they took the place apart.”

  “I’m not talking about files or records. I mean, could he have hidden a password or something somewhere? I have to go to Manhattan day after tomorrow to meet with one of my wire-service clients. You could come with me and look.”

  And they could have time and privacy to figure out just what this thing between them was. It probably wasn’t smart, it certainly wasn’t sensible, but she’d be lying to herself if she said she didn’t want it.

  “All right,” she heard herself saying. “I can’t imagine how we’d find anything they didn’t, especially after the mess they left, but it couldn’t hurt to check.” And the thought of what they might do while they checked sent a little curl of desire twisting through her.

  “Then tomorrow, it is,” Lex said, driving up to the country club’s service entrance. “Now, where are we supposed to take these flowers?”

  It was the last private moment they had the rest of the afternoon. Keely saw Lex only in passing as Jeannie cheerfully put him to work. Keely caught his quick grin and remembered the taste of his mouth on hers. She watched his arm muscles flex as he moved a marble-topped table in the reception hall and thought of how they’d felt, hard and solid and sweat-slicked under her fingertips.

  And as the day wore on, she had to acknowledge the truth of it—she wanted him, pure and simple. She wanted this thing that was between them. Maybe—certainly—it wasn’t smart. It didn’t matter. No matter how much she tried to intellectualize it, she wasn’t going to walk away.

  “Well, Lex was certainly a surprise today.” Jeannie passed Keely the salad bowl that night as they sat with Carter around the dinner table. “I’ll have to do something to thank him.”

  “I don’t think he expects anything.” Keely put some greens on her plate. “It’s enough that you said it.”

  Given that she’d decided to abandon her principles and just try to enjoy the present, it was ironic that at twenty-five she was living as though she were in high school. They’d worked until the end of the day, and then Lex had gone back home to Olivia and she’d come home with Jeannie for dinner with her parents. Although there was no reason she couldn’t leave after, it wasn’t something she’d done before and it would raise questions she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to answer. She wasn’t at all sure she could answer.

  And besides, where would they go? To a hotel? To park the car somewhere and make out? And wonder if Stockton’s people were watching.

  What she wanted was a quiet dinner and a glass of wine with Lex, somewhere peaceful and private. No, that was a lie. What she really wanted was an hour or two of hot, sweaty, wall-banging sex with the man, followed by that quiet dinner, preferably eaten off of his flat, hard belly.

  She concentrated on her asparagus, certain she was blushing.

  “You and Lex seem to be getting along well. Did I hear you talking about going in to Manhattan tomorrow?” Jeannie asked.

  That got her attention. “I wanted to check my apartment, get some clothes, pick up my mail.” Jump his bones. “Take a look around and see if I can find anything that will help us.”

  “Didn’t the police or whoever already do that?”

  “They probably weren’t looking for the same thing. They just wanted to seal their case against Bradley. I want to clear Olivia and me.”

  “Well, good luck. Find something to get my daughter off the hook,” Jeannie said lightly.

  “We’re doing the best we can,” Keely replied. And out of nowhere, her throat was suddenly tight. It was tricky like that, the threat, receding out of her consciousness and then catching her unawares. Prosecution. Persecution. Public humiliation. Incarceration.

  She blinked.

  “Oh, honey,” her mother said, rising to put her arms around Keely.

  “It’s okay, you were joking.” She swallowed. “Most of the time I do, too. It’s just every so often it all just hits me, where this could lead.”

  “Where it’s going to lead is you being exonerated.” Her father squeezed her hand. “You didn’t do it and we’ll prove it, plain and simple.”

  His confidence buoyed her. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Of course he is,” Jeannie said. “We’ll work this out somehow, don’t you worry. We know you’re innocent and we’ll convince them. Now,” she said briskly, “don’t forget to bring back a gown for the Christmas gala.”

  Keely blinked at the change in subject. “The gala?”

  “The DAR Christmas gala. You have heard of it.”

  “I unpacked sixty-five cranberry-glass vases yesterday for the centerpieces. I hope I know about it.”

  “Then you should also know that your father and I buy a table every year. I assumed you’d take one of the places.”

  Keely looked at her mother as though she’d sprouted two heads. “Why would you go? Why would you want to spend time with those people?”

  “You have such a nice, delicate way of saying that,” Carter said with amusement.

  “Oh, you know what I mean.” Her voice was impatient. “Back when we were in financial trouble. All of them, coming to visit, pouring on the fake sympathy while they dug in their claws. The ones who lobbied behind the scenes to get you off their committees since you, God forbid, worked.”

  “The ones who stood by me,” Jeannie countered. “The ones who are still my friends today.”

  “Alicia Smythe, Joyce Barron, Nancy Pittman. They were horrible. They made you cry.”

  “Eloise Lucas, Connie Preston. They made me laugh. They still do. They’re the ones I go for. No, I don’t spend my days in committee meetings anymore but I still support the cause. We still go and we have a lovely time. And if you don’t go, people like Alicia Smythe and Joyce Barron will speculate.”

  “So I’m going to keep them quiet?”

  “No, you’re going because you’ll dance with your father and trade toasts with the Prestons and the Lucases and have a lovely time. What do you think?”

  Keely sighed. “I guess I’m bringing home a dress.”

  Chapter Ten

  She dreamed of him.

  She was in the store, putting together the Pittman arrangements and Lex appeared through the piles of blossoms. He took her hand without speaking, led her out the back door. Instead of the alley, they walked into a glen filled with mounds of lily of the valley, and suddenly they were pressed together, warm and naked in the sun, while the heady scent of the flowers rose around them. And when he poised his body over hers and made them one, she’d never felt anything so fine.

  She dreamed of him and she woke wanting him.

  What if there were no Bradley and no Stockton? Lydia had challenged. What if it were really that simple? Could they make it that way? Could they take it on that basis?

  Keely showered and dressed and her clothing felt foreign on her body, like the touch of another. She put on her makeup and she thought of his face.

  And when she saw him on the doorstep, all she could do was want him.

  They didn’t touch. They walked to the car without so much as a brush of hands. Outwardly, nothing had changed from two days before. Inwardly, everything was dif
ferent. Now they weren’t wondering how it would be; they knew. Now, they weren’t wondering if it would happen; they knew it would.

  And despite all the good reasons not to, she wanted it.

  They drove to the station, talking little. They watched the trains come and go: to Stamford, to White Plains, to Albany. And still, they didn’t touch.

  The commuting hour was past. The platform was empty. Somehow it only made her all the more aware of Lex. They stood in the Plexiglas shelter, carefully separate, and Keely swore she could feel the heat from his body radiating through his coat. The minutes crawled by.

  It was excruciating.

  Keely moistened her lips. She looked at the wires that ran along the track, at the advertisements on the opposite platform, at the wind rattling the bare-branched trees. Down beyond the station, where the track curved away, she saw a train appear. She turned to look at Lex. “Look,” she began, “it’s—”

  He took two steps and fused his mouth with hers.

  It wasn’t temptation, it wasn’t desire. More than anything it was like taking a deep drink of water after days in the desert. Each taste refilled but the need, the thirst had grown to such proportions that it felt like she’d never be slaked. She inhaled his scent, luxuriated in the feel of his arms around her. It was as though the contact of their mouths had some life-giving property, like a magic elixir that could sustain them both.

  And she only wanted more. Somewhere private, somewhere quiet, somewhere they could take their time. Somewhere they could start to discover all the possibilities of pleasure.

  His tongue danced and darted with hers, he kissed as though he would consume her. The roaring of the blood in her ears became the roar of the train arriving on the platform.

  If the minutes had crawled before, now they simply stopped in place. Need pulsed through Keely’s veins with every beat of her heart, somehow even more intense now that they weren’t touching. She sat beside Lex in the train car, afraid to look at him or speak, afraid that if she did she would simply lose control. It was amazing, after that, how life became defined by waiting: waiting for the train to leave, waiting to get into Grand Central, waiting to get out of the station, waiting to get to her building.

  And then they were there, feasting on each other’s mouth in the elevator, stopping during the walk down the hall to taste again, and she was at her door, putting the key into the lock with shaking fingers, desperate to get to the bed and privacy that lay just beyond.

  She turned the knob and pushed.

  “Christ,” Lex said.

  It was worse than she remembered. In the day and a half she’d stayed in town after the search, she’d focused on trying to deal with her ambiguous legal situation, her job, her life. Her efforts to clear away the mess had only been minor and it showed. The living-room floor was still strewn with cushions and books and dirt from the ficus tree that had been knocked over. She could see into the kitchen, with its mess of spilled dry goods that she hadn’t had the heart to clean up.

  “Can you take action on them for this?” Lex bent and picked up a handful of CDs, stacking them back in her holder.

  “How? They didn’t break anything, they just created an unholy mess. It’s paralyzing. I don’t want to think about it,” she said fiercely, pressing her forehead to his chest. “I don’t want to see it, I want it just to go away.”

  I just want you.

  And that quickly, the hunger was back. Maybe it was a way of forgetting about what lay around her, maybe it was really about focusing on what mattered. If the apartment hadn’t been tossed, they’d have already been naked and in bed. Maybe it was a matter of simply refusing to let events she couldn’t control take over.

  Two nights, two endless days had passed since they’d made love. Two days had passed and she’d never once stopped thinking about the feel of his body. She’d never once stopped wanting him. It didn’t matter that her apartment was torn apart. With her eyes closed, she couldn’t see the chaos. With her eyes closed, everything was Lex, everything and all she wanted.

  It wasn’t gentle. Neither of them wanted gentle. After the seemingly endless wait, the want, the anticipation, they couldn’t go slowly. There would be time later, perhaps, for quiet smoothings and tender caresses, but for now their coupling was hard and fast and urgent.

  Feverishly loosening their clothing, they tumbled back on the sofa. It didn’t matter that they could have walked to the bedroom, fifteen feet away. There was no time for that, and no patience. There was no time for anything but each other.

  With mouth and hand, they touched, they took. When Lex slid his hands up under her sweater, Keely gasped at the suddenness, then made a sound of demand. More and now. Everything and anything. His mouth was on her breast, her hands unbuckled his belt. And when she bent to him, his pleasure was her own.

  Time stretched out in a flow of sensation, her mouth on him, his fingers tangled in her hair, the hard immediacy of it all bounding her world, filling it with desire.

  And then he stilled her head and hands, dragged her up. Anticipation made her half giddy. She raised her hips to help him strip down her jeans, then lay back beneath his weight, feeling him press her into the deep, soft cushions. She felt, most of all, alive. She was breathless with the expectation and the waiting and the wanting, and then he thrust himself home within her, thick and hard and slick.

  And she wasn’t waiting anymore.

  It was exquisite. It was unbearable. His body surged against hers. Every time he slid home, it dragged a cry from her because it was too intense and too much, and yet somehow not enough. Never enough, she could never have enough as he took her up and up and up until she was suspended in absolute ecstasy, up and up and up until suddenly her body couldn’t contain any more. For an endless moment, she was suspended on the edge. And then she tumbled over the edge in an avalanche of pleasure, an overwhelming rush and shudder and swirl that left her shaking as his cries mixed with her own.

  Lex didn’t want to go, God knew he didn’t want to go, but he was here to meet Flaherty, not to make love with Keely, though that was about the best and most important thing he’d done all day, not to say all year.

  Kissing her goodbye was hard; walking out the door was harder. And if he didn’t watch it, he’d be harder still. “I’ll be back in two or three hours,” he promised.

  “Where are you meeting him?”

  “Some bar in the financial district. Don’t go away because I’ve got plans for you.” He leaned in to press a kiss on her, lingering more than he’d anticipated.

  And throughout the walk and the subway ride, she stayed on his mind, even after he stepped into Flaherty’s bar.

  It wasn’t a bar so much as a watering hole. The long, polished wood that ran down one side bore an assortment of scars and burns. The planked floor was stained. But John Coltrane played on the sound system. The steaks were thick and juicy, the seats, leather and the liquor, top shelf.

  Flaherty took a blissful swallow of his whiskey. “Mother’s milk.” He sighed. “Nothing like a drop o’ the Irish to improve the day.”

  “Where, exactly, did you pick up your taste for the Irish, Flaherty?” Lex asked. “Was that growing up in Philly or after you moved to Poughkeepsie?”

  Flaherty frowned at him. “’Tis a sad thing when a man can’t get respect.”

  “I respect you. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  The waitress set their plates before them. Based on the theory that the thing to order was what a restaurant did well, Lex had chosen steak, like Flaherty. Or not exactly like Flaherty.

  “Do you eat that way a lot?” Lex stared at Flaherty’s mammoth twenty-ounce London broil.

  “When I can. My wife has me on a diet.” Flaherty slapped his comfortable paunch. “Worried about cholesterol or some such thing.”

  “I can see why,” Lex said.

  It was, he discovered, very good steak, well worth overindulging on. And he wondered immediately if he’d ever be able to really enjoy a
meal like this without remembering the things he’d seen in Africa, the hollow eyes, the sunken cheeks, the hopelessness. Some things changed a man forever.

  “So how has it been lately, on assignment?” Flaherty inquired, as though he’d known Lex’s thoughts.

  Lex forced his mind from the topic, a technique at which he’d grown increasingly skilled. “The same, only more so. Some days better than others. Why? Where do you want me to go?”

  “I’ve been looking at your shots,” Flaherty said instead of answering.

  “You got a problem with my shots?”

  “No. They’re top quality. I’d pick your stuff over anybody else’s any day, you know that.”

  “But?”

  “But when I talk to you lately, you sound like you’re losing your edge.” He bit into a steak fry.

  “Give me a break, Flaherty. I’ve been in Chechnya, the Gaza Strip, Baghdad and Darfur. It hasn’t exactly been a holiday camp this year.”

  “Or last year.”

  Lex scowled. “I’ve already got a mother.”

  “Who might be happy to see you stick around for a while. Maybe you should take a break.”

  “You’re supposed to be a client, not a career coach.”

  “Maybe I’m just a friend.”

  “I’m freelance, Flaherty. I can’t take a break.”

  “You could if you took on a salaried job.”

  “Ah.” The bait, Lex thought, was out. “Can you hand me the steak sauce?” he asked.

  Flaherty passed it over. “Since you’re obviously dying of curiosity, I’ll tell you that I’m taking a one year sabbatical. I’ve had a book project I’ve always wanted to do. The time’s right. I need to leave the desk in good hands, though. The problem is, there’s no one in the organization whose eye I trust. I want you to take over the desk for a year.”

  Lex took a bite of his sirloin and chewed. “Good steak,” he commented after swallowing. “Done just right. How’s yours?”