Shotgun Honeymoon

by Terese Ramin

  By 6:30 a.m., they’d stopped for gas on the other side of Seligman, and Janina was feeling more than wild, beyond anxious, outside of nervous. Russ was no longer quite drunk, but he showed no sign of swaying from the path they’d set out on.

  His hand resting on her thigh while she drove had played havoc with her concentration, her pulse and her blood pressure. The hand, the fingertips on her thigh had roamed up and down the inside of her leg, just high enough under her short dress to sketch ticklish, teasing circles that claimed her attention and made her catch her breath before stroking back down to the inside of her knee and letting her almost—almost!—relax.

  Then he’d settled his arm around her shoulder, slipped his hand along her collarbone, over her throat, caressed the delicate skin there and slipped his fingers inside the deep neckline of her scooped-neck sundress to draw patterns along the top of her breasts, never quite touching where it ached.

  And all the while he leaned close to her ear and told her to mind her driving, to watch the road, to concentrate on the horizon and not on what he was doing to her….

  Thank God there’d been little traffic to speak of.

  Even though she’d done as he’d instructed and kept as much of her mind as possible on the road, if he touched her again, she’d explode, she was sure. Because by telling her to concentrate on something else, he’d heightened the suspense, sensitized her awareness of him at the same time that he kept her focus elsewhere, sharpened the surprise behind what he did to her, and intensified the sheer eroticism and anticipation of what he didn’t do to her.

  She was beyond needy, beyond ready, beyond…fevered. Her body wept to hold him, cried for his touch, begged—no, pleaded—to take him in. Literally ached to do so.

  She had to do something about that. Had to. For her sake, his sake and the safety of any other driver on the road, she had to find some quiet little private nook and do something to relieve that ache.

  Soon.

  Russ glanced up at her from under the hood of her car and his hot gaze lingered on her mouth, her breasts, her legs, her thighs—the places he’d touched and the places he hadn’t quite—and Janina’s breath tripped, heart hammered. She felt the heat everywhere his gaze touched, as though he made physical contact.

  She had to have more than his teasing.

  Quickly.

  The corner of his mouth tipped up. He knew, damn him. And then she didn’t care what he knew. Because he gently closed the hood, leaned on it to make sure it snapped tight and moved toward her. And backed her into the side of the car, between the open driver’s door and the back door he also opened to keep them out of the way of prying eyes.

  Belly to belly, loin to loin, they rocked together lightly. Frustrated, tormented, tempted; his breath on her neck was ragged, and then his mouth closed on her pulse, his hands molded her rump, hoisted her against his erection and he ground himself against her. She whimpered softly and her body quickened instantly. She arched her throat then hooked an ankle around his calf both to balance herself and to give him better access to the center of her need.

  His need.

  Her entire body sang, from her belly outward, inward, hot and hotter, seeking flame to flame…when Russ abruptly gasped and raised his head. Untangled himself and thrust her away.

  Separated himself from her, breathing hard.

  “No,” he said emphatically—and more to himself than her, “Not yet. I promised. Not yet.”

  Dazed, needy, frustrated and more than a little bewildered, Janina could only blink at him, reaching to draw him back. It didn’t matter where they were, he couldn’t leave her—them—now. He couldn’t.

  “What? Russ, please. I need to finish this. We need to—”

  He looked at her, stunned, and ran a hand over the side of his face, trying to collect himself. “I can’t, Janie, we can’t. Not yet. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that to you. Not yet. Not here.”

  “Why, Russ, why? Please. You don’t know where you’re leavin’ me hangin’. I need you.”

  His snort of laughter was short and harsh. “Trust me, you don’t know what need is till you’re standin’ in my skin. If I can’t have you soon…” He shut his eyes and swallowed.

  She’d dated, been married, and there’d been other guys. A few at least. It didn’t matter. When he’d met Janina she’d been too young and too innocent, and he’d never quite been able to get over thinking of her that way.

  He’d known that no one else would satisfy, no other woman would do since very shortly after he’d first seen her. Known it so hard that he’d been Celibacy R Russ because he didn’t want anyone but her.

  But he also understood that most people wouldn’t understand things the way he did. They wouldn’t believe that he, a man—and not a particularly tame one at that—could live his life in so-called innocence—or at least without the trappings of sex—while the woman he craved seemed to live hers on the other side of it, because marrying Buddy certainly hadn’t kept Janina innocent. But he didn’t see it that way.

  Because the one thing he knew after a lifetime of living, of friendship with Maddie, of growing up Indian on the reservation in Supai long before he’d become a Winslow cop, of watching people and being a cop was, that innocence was not a by-product of virginity the way the romance novels Mabel was always reading suggested. Janina had been married to a bully and dated and probably had sex, but compared to him…innocent of the world’s evils didn’t begin to cover it.

  He knew in his heart which of them was innocent and which of them had never been. And sex and virginity had nothin’ to do with it.

  Wherever she’d been, whatever she’d done, Janina had managed to come through it with hope, faith and self-possession intact. For whatever reason, he’d been born wearing the raw material of an adult: uncertainty, cynicism, irony, a sense of desperation and fear. And he knew gut deep to the soles of his feet that she would be better for him than he could ever possibly be for her, and that if she ever figured that out…

  She couldn’t be allowed to ever figure that out.

  He shut his eyes, rested his forehead on hers, put an infinitesimal distance between the length of their bodies with great care and cupped her face between his palms. “Just leave it at I promised myself I wouldn’t do that to you. Wouldn’t use you. Wouldn’t be anybody else you might…know. That for us—between us—it’d be different than…anybody else. Any other guy and you. That we’d be married first. Do you see?”

  “No.” She couldn’t understand anything yet. Her body was still too focused on what it wanted and needed from him. She caught his hand, held it, grounded herself. Her body was still on high alert, strung taut, but her immediate concentration was on him. “No, I don’t quite see. No.”

  He swallowed and looked down at their joined hands then turned his gaze to the desert for several long moments before bringing it back to her face. The sober man was taking over and the Russ who’d seduced her at the Bloated Boar fought him valiantly, warred to communicate with her still.

  And then he did.

  “I promised myself a long time ago to wait to bed my woman until after our wedding,” he said simply. “We’re getting real close to me breaking that promise and I don’t want to, not with you. You’ve been hurt enough. You’ve had enough promises made to you and broken. I don’t want something to happen to get in the way of the wedding even for a minute, so…” He hesitated. “I want you badly. I also very much want to marry you. But I don’t have a lot of control left on the want you part. So if we could just get in the damn car and break the speed limit to Vegas I’d appreciate it.”

  Chapter 4

  Puzzled, Janina stared up at her fiancé, trying to sort out the subtleties of what he hadn’t said.

  And then she did.

  Stunned, dumbfounded, she swallowed. Hard. Waited, had he said? As in waited? As in there was nobody before her? Not even…

  Maddie?

  With all that history, all that time, all that everything
?

  She looked up at him for confirmation. He shrugged.

  “Why?” Not, perhaps, the most sensitive thing she might have said, but her mouth wasn’t taking orders from her brain at the moment. “How?”

  He snorted. Grinned. “Opportunity. Desire. Your lack of availability at the…ah…fitting moments. My lack of verbal…um…eptitude in the dating game. Never got around to it I guess.”

  “That’s not a word.” Obviously she was in shock and couldn’t be held accountable for what she said.

  He canted her an odd glance. She deserved it. “What’s not?”

  “Eptitude.”

  Another snort. “Sue me. It fits.”

  “But, Russ, what about Maddie?”

  “Who?” The uncharacteristic looseness, the remaining uninhibitedness brought about by his beer consumption faded. “What?”

  “Everybody said…they knew…they thought—” She floundered, lost in repeating gossip from the trial.

  Thirteen-year-old gossip that had followed him from the moment he’d started defending Madelyn Thorn from an overabundance of small-town speculation. Because he’d known Maddie since long before either of them came to Winslow.

  He went rigid beneath her hands. “Everybody knew nothin’,” he said harshly. “Everybody knows nothin’. Not about Maddie, not about me. What they think or thought’s got nothin’ to do with anythin

  She was trembling under his hands, the wide brown eyes looking up at him, the same brave but frightened ones that had peeked out at him over her mother’s shoulder, her body half hidden behind her mother’s skinny, unprotective frame. Oh God, he’d never been able to get past that picture of her, of the girl who’d taken down a shotgun and followed him to make sure he didn’t get hurt when he went into a lethal situation alone.

  Of the woman who didn’t know he knew what she’d done for him. And therefore by default for Maddie.

  “Ah, screw it.”

  “Russ, don’t. Wait—”

  Shaken, sobered—and sobered up—he released Janina and slammed shut the wagon’s rear door, shoved himself away from everything he wanted-needed-craved, and turned to long-leg-it to the highway’s edge. Emptiness crossed by electric lines and black ground spotted by straggles of vegetation and lumps of sandstone against a spectacular rising-sun backdrop—Arizona at its finest—spread out before him. He saw it and didn’t.

  “Russ!”

  He heard but ignored her.

  “Russ, damn it.”

  She was angry, but still he didn’t turn. There’d been reasons beyond simple choice he’d kept body, soul and self to self where women—and Winslow’s women in particular—were concerned since he’d taken Maddie’s father down.

  Since the publicity from the trial had raked him and his lifetime connections to Maddie over, dissected him and them, and changed him.

  There was more that he’d protected Janina from than him simply thinking she was too innocent for him.

  More that he’d forgotten in his annual drunks with his brothers than he realized.

  When he’d burst into the Thorns’ trailer that night to find Maddie disfigured, torn up and bleeding to death, he’d also found her holding the bloody weapon that had been used to shoot her brother over—and over. Cherry on the job that he was, he hadn’t thought about gunshot residue or anything else that might clear her—he’d thought only about the horror in front of him, and he’d taken the weapon from Maddie, cleaned her fingerprints off it and thrown it into Lake Havasu on his next trip home to the difficult-to-reach Havasupai reservation he’d grown up on. He and Maddie had never talked about what had really happened, because she couldn’t remember, so he simply covered up what he assumed happened at her hand. She’d suffered enough—nothing could be proved….

  But the suspicion he’d brought on himself by standing by her, being her friend, had been considerable. She’d been used, abused and pimped out by a pedophile since she was twelve and Russ hadn’t known, but the looks he’d gotten when the defense got him on the stand and asked him about Maddie, about knowing her in high school, about the things she’d done for his football, basketball and baseball teammates, and that they insinuated she’d done for him when she hadn’t because he wouldn’t let her, had been enough to label him for life.

  The term conflict of interest had been flung about n his captain found out about Russ’s past relationship with Maddie. Cover-up was what the newspapers wondered when it couldn’t be proved definitively one way or another whether or not Maddie had killed her brother that night in self-defense, or someone else had done it.

  Small towns had long memories for gossip and innuendo and Winslow was no different than most. The couple of times he’d gotten his verbs together in coherent order and thought about dating respectable town women way back when, he’d been discouraged from it in no uncertain terms by “right-thinking” moneyed types like Buddy Carmichael’s father, who’d…

  No. He didn’t like remembering what he’d worked hard to put aside. He didn’t want Janina thinking what others thought—used to think—about him, ever. He didn’t give a flying fig in hell about anyone else and never had, but Janina…

  Was standing in front of him. Slapping his chest with the edge of her fist—she winced—and kicking him once in the shin with the side of her foot for good measure to get his attention. He looked down at her, bemused.

  “Hey,” she said, almost loudly enough to wake the dead. “You got a problem I oughta know about, maybe you should tell me before we get to Vegas.”

  Russ frowned and canted a brow, remained silent. He was good at silent. Best to stick with his strengths in unfamiliar situations.

  Janina sighed. He’d startled her with his admission and she didn’t do surprise or silence well. Both were designed to elicit comments that could leave her with her foot in her mouth. This time she had a feeling she’d stuck them both there.

  “So.” She tapped a foot, wondering where he wanted to be. To go. Trying to decide where she should be. Because reckless or not, the road to Vegas with Russ Levoie still looked like the most awesome, and the most right, ride to her. “I take it you’ve suddenly sobered up and gone taciturn on me again?”

  Russ tried not to smile. Tried to maintain a straight face and not to acknowledge the question at all. If you wanted to call failing at both by giving in to lip tugs and twitches some kind of success, he almost succeeded.

  “Yeah.” Janina gave him wry face. “That’s what I thought.” She considered the space between them for a moment, opened her vista to take in the light khaki tan of his neatly pressed short-sleeved shirt, the triangle of white T-shirt showing where he’d left his collar buttons open, the healthy expanse of native bronze skin above where she wanted to place her open mouth, leave her unmistakable “do not poach” brand….

  She shut her eyes on a half smile, half grimace, shook her head at the ground. Looked up at Russ. Who waited. “You ever see yourself in the mirror?”

  “I don’t want anyone else, Janie,” he said simply. “I never have.”

  “But—”

  He gave his head a negative tip. “You tie up my tongue. I can’t think straight around you. All that old stuff…you shouldn’t be part of it. We can go back.”

  She stared at him astonished—and miffed. Which meant her tongue got away from her again. “The hell we are!”

  His grin was startled and genuine this time.

  She took it as an invitation to let her tongue get away from her some more, and poked him in the chest, backing him toward the car. “We’re not goin’ back, mister. We’re goin’ forward.”

  His grin widened. He nodded. “Forward.”

  “To Vegas,” she affirmed, just in case he had any doubts about what forward meant. She pushed him backward another few steps. “Go west, young man.”

  “West,” he said, casting a glance over his shoulder in the direction she was herding him that was certainly not west. “Toward Vegas?”

  “Don’t be so literal,�
�� Janina ordered, catching the amusement. “You know what I mean.”

  “Get in car, go west, through Vegas.” Russ’s eyes gleamed with unholy light.

  “Stop Vegas,” Janina said. Patiently. She was, perhaps, working with an idiot, aka a man, albeit one she liked a lot, after all.

  “Ah.” He fetched up against the driver’s door of her wagon. “Stop Vegas.” He mimicked her inflection perfectly. “Got it.”

  She planted herself in front of him. “You were a handful when you were a child, weren’t you.”

  His teeth showed when he grinned. “Me?”

  She cleared her throat of a snort. “Yeah. And no girl’s ever told you they wanted to lie down because when the gene pool spit you out, you got all the breaks.”

  He shrugged. Turned and backed her against the car. Did the tall-man slouch to surround her, bringing his mouth within range of her ear. “Told you. Never wanted easy. I want you.”

  Which could mean any of a variety of things, but when he nuzzled her lips apart and kissed her as though she was the answer to a quandary he’d long been seeking the solution for, Janina forgot to wonder what he meant.

  The giddiness started in her toes. Laughter gurgled through her and the smile that spread after it was brilliant, joyous. Her heart sang. Her soul soared. Her palms started to sweat.

  Impossible as it seemed, she believed him. He was all hers.

  And he wanted her badly.

  At once.

  As soon as they were married.

  She wanted him now. But she’d settle for the minute they were married.

  Which meant…

  She pushed out from underneath him, heart pumping crazily, breathing hard. “I take it you’re sober enough to drive?”

  His smile was slow and muzzy, sleepy, desiring of darkness and the back seat instead of the front. “Yeah.”

  “Good.” She slipped through the driver’s door and slid across the seat only as far as she had to in order to give him room to drive. “Then do it.”

  Russ ducked into the car, glanced at where she was sitting—essentially half in his seat and pressed tight to his thigh with her arms ready to wrap around his neck—and his smile widened. “Better buckle up,” he advised, “because until we get to Vegas, I’m peggin’ this baby out.”