Another Man's Wife

by Dallas Schulze

  He was wearing faded jeans that clung lovingly to his long legs and a black T-shirt with Donald Duck emblazoned across the front. The T-shirt was courtesy of Danny’s last visit to Disneyland. He’d insisted that the T-shirt was the perfect Christmas gift for Uncle Gage. It should have looked a little silly on him, but instead of laughing at the cranky cartoon character, Kelsey found herself noticing the corded muscles in Gage’s arms and the way the black fabric emphasized his golden tan. She wondered if he spent a lot of time working outside without a shirt, if his torso was as tanned as his arms.

  For no particular reason, she found herself remembering how it had felt to be held against him, her breasts pressed to his chest, her hands wrapped around the hard muscles of his arms.

  “Kelsey?” Gage’s questioning tone and the quizzical tilt of his eyebrows snapped Kelsey out of her preoccupation. “Something wrong?”

  She blinked, dragging her eyes from the width of his chest to his face. He was looking at her, his blue eyes holding both humor and a trace of concern.

  “N-nothing’s wrong.” She had to clear her throat before she could get the assurance out. Hopefully the shadows on the porch were deep enough to conceal the fact that her face was almost hot enough to glow in the dark.

  “I thought you’d gone into a trance there for a minute.”

  “I...ah...was just wondering if I should pull a few more baby carrots. Baby vegetables are one of my best sellers at the market.” Not bad, as recoveries went, she congratulated herself. Now, if the fire in her face would just go out, she’d be doing pretty well.

  “We thought maybe the idea of turning the two of us loose amongst all those vegetables had scared you so bad you couldn’t talk, didn’t we, buddy?”

  “Yep.” Danny leaned against Gage’s leg and gazed up at him adoringly.

  “You know, if you’re going to keep an eye on Danny, there’s no reason why the two of you have to come to the market with me. You could go off and do something else.”

  But Gage was already shaking his head. “We’ll have more fun going with you. Right?”

  Danny nodded, though he looked a little doubtful. Vegetables, on his plate or otherwise, were not exactly something he associated with fun. But if Gage thought it would be fun, he was clearly willing to give it a try.

  “Consider it settled,” Gage said. “You’ve got yourself a kid-sitter. Your troubles are at an end.”

  Not exactly, Kelsey thought, uneasily aware of the way the muscles in his arm rippled as he bent to scoop her son up under one arm and carry the giggling boy across the yard as if he were a football.

  * * *

  “I was starting to think I was going to have to conk him on the head to get him to go to sleep,” Kelsey said as she entered the living room.

  “He’s an android,” Gage moaned without lifting his head. He was lying on the sofa, which hadn’t been designed to hold six feet two inches of prone male, with the result that, with his head pillowed on one end, his feet dangled off the other.

  “It’s obvious he’s not human,” he continued darkly. “A normal human being would have collapsed long before this.”

  “He’s not an android, he’s a four-year-old. They’re related species, but not identical,” Kelsey said. “They tend to be energetic.”

  “Energetic?” He raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “What I saw today goes way beyond such a simple explanation. That kind of energy has to come from an unnatural source, and I suspect it’s got something to do with nuclear fusion.”

  “It’s your own fault for suggesting that we go to the beach after the market closed.”

  “I was trying to be nice,” Gage said indignantly. “I thought he’d enjoy the beach.”

  “He did.”

  “How could he enjoy it? He didn’t stop moving long enough to look at it.”

  “Four-year-olds tend to approach life as participants rather than observers,” Kelsey pointed out. “Besides, you didn’t have to match him step for step. You could have sat on the beach and let him run off some of his energy.”

  “I was afraid he’d head for Catalina if I wasn’t there to stop him.”

  “He can’t swim that far yet.”

  “Who said anything about swimming? At the speeds he can attain, he could be across the channel without touching the water.”

  Kelsey laughed at Gage’s aggrieved expression. He’d pushed the throw pillows off the sofa onto the floor, and she bent to pick one up. “Tuck this under your neck before it cracks,” she told him.

  “Why shouldn’t it be like the rest of my body?” Gage asked. But he lifted his head and tucked the pillow under his neck.

  “If the beach was so exhausting, why did you suggest following it up with hamburgers and a movie?”

  “I’m his godfather. What else could I do?” he asked with a sigh that indicated great personal sacrifice.

  “You were having as much fun as Danny. You just don’t want to admit it,” Kelsey told him briskly. “You’ll live.”

  “I’m glad one of us is sure of that. Personally I have my doubts.” He closed his eyes, the very picture of suffering. When Kelsey only laughed, Gage opened one eye to glare at her. “You’re a heartless wretch. I was doing you a favor.”

  “I warned you that looking after a four-year-old wasn’t easy,” she reminded him.

  “If you’d told me he was jet-propelled, I might have listened,” he muttered.

  “Do you think a cup of coffee would revive you?” she said, taking pity on him.

  “Can I have a straw?” he asked weakly.

  Kelsey was still smiling as she measured coffee into the coffeemaker. Gage made her smile more than anyone else she knew. The world always seemed a little brighter, life a little more interesting, when he was home.

  She didn’t know what she’d have done without him these past couple of years. Despite the fact that he was usually thousands of miles away, she’d always known he was there for her, a rock to lean on, something solid to cling to. Maybe it was a good thing he had been far away, she thought as she got out cups and a plate for cookies. If he’d been more available, she might not have been able to resist the urge to cling to him like a child. As it was, she’d learned to stand alone but she’d always known he was there to catch her if she fell. She and Danny were lucky to have him for a friend.

  When she carried the tray of coffee and cookies into the living room a few minutes later, Gage was crouched by the fireplace, feeding kindling into the small fire he’d started. He turned to look at her, and for a moment the shadows made him almost a stranger. Kelsey felt her heart bump with a sudden, uneasy awareness of him as a man. He stood and then bent to lean the poker against the fireplace wall. She found herself noticing the way the faded denim of his jeans molded the long muscles of his thighs and cupped his buttocks.

  “You’re better than a St. Bernard and a keg of brandy.” Gage grinned as he stepped forward to take the tray from her.

  “Thanks. I think.” Kelsey shook off her strange awareness and frowned at him. “I don’t think I’ve ever been compared to a St. Bernard before. And so favorably, too. I’m flattered.”

  “I’ve never seen a St. Bernard who could bake.” Gage set the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa and reached for an oatmeal cookie even before he sat down.

  “You’re as bad as Danny,” she said, sinking down on the sofa and picking up her coffee cup. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that too much sugar will rot your teeth?”

  “Yeah, but I never believed her.” Gage polished off the cookie and took another one before picking up his coffee cup and leaning back against the sofa. “I figured she was lying because she wanted to eat all the cookies herself.”

  “Mothers never lie.”

  “Mine did,” he insisted. “Not only did she tell us that cookies would rot our teeth, but she tried to make us believe that brussels sprouts were good for us.”

  “But you didn’t believe her?”

  “I think C
ole did. He was too young to know better. But Sam and Keefe and I all realized it was a lie. We’d hide them in our pockets and then bury them in the yard after supper.”

  “Your mother must have loved doing the laundry,” Kelsey said with a shudder of sympathy. “Didn’t it occur to you that she might wonder what you’d had in your pockets?”

  “Nah.” Gage leaned forward to pick up another cookie. “But I remember being scared to death that the brussels sprouts would live up to their name and start growing and Mom would want to know how they’d gotten into her rose beds.”

  Kelsey laughed, picturing him as a boy stuffing unwanted vegetables in his pockets.

  “The four of you must have made your mother’s life a living hell.”

  “We did our best,” he said with modest pride.

  The conversation moved on to other things—Gage’s job, Kelsey’s plans for expanding her business. She had read about some techniques for increasing productivity that she was eager to try out when she put in her spring and summer crops. She also hoped to put in a greenhouse in a year or two, maybe experiment with growing plants to sell.

  Gage’s stint in South America was almost over. He wasn’t sure where he’d be going when this job ended. There was a project in Africa that sounded interesting....

  “Don’t you ever get tired of traveling?” Kelsey leaned her head against the back of the sofa and gave Gage a questioning look. “Don’t you ever want to settle down, stay home?”

  Home? Gage considered the word in relationship to himself and came up blank. Where was home? His mother’s house in Los Olivos? She’d say it was his home. As far as Rachel Walker was concerned, her house would always be a home to her sons. But it wasn’t his home, not anymore. It hadn’t been since he left for college. Since then, he’d lived in a lot of different places—dorm rooms, apartments, hotels, tents and huts—but none of them had been home.

  In the past fifteen years, the closest thing he’d had to a home was right here. From the moment Rick and Kelsey bought this house, it had become almost as much his home as theirs. They’d made it his, opening it to him, acting as if there was nothing more natural than for him to stay with them whenever he was in the country, for him to treat their home as if it were also his.

  Home? He didn’t have one of his own, only this one that he borrowed from time to time, like someone putting on a rented costume and playing pretend for a little while. It was a bleak realization to think this was probably all he’d ever have of home.

  “Gage?” Kelsey’s questioning tone made Gage realize how much time had passed since she’d asked if he ever got tired of traveling.

  “Hmm?” Pulling his gaze from the fire, he looked at her, his eyebrows raised in question as if he hadn’t caught her words. “Sorry. I was thinking of something else. What did you say?”

  “I asked if you ever get tired of traveling and think of maybe settling down.”

  “I never think about it,” he lied. “I don’t think I’m the hearth-and-home type. Wanderlust in the blood, maybe.”

  “You might change your mind if you fell in love with a homebody,” Kelsey said, her tone lightly teasing.

  “Maybe I’ll just make it a point to fall in love with a gypsy,” he said lightly.

  “You’d have to find one first. They aren’t exactly common these days, you know.”

  “A sad commentary on modern society,” he said solemnly.

  “A clear indication of decay run rampant,” Kelsey agreed, shaking her head.

  To Gage’s relief, the conversation moved away from the likelihood of his settling down or getting married. He’d long ago made peace with the choices he’d made, but there was something about discussing them with Kelsey that made him aware of a loneliness he preferred not to acknowledge. Better by far to push it away, bury it deep inside and pretend it didn’t exist.

  It was almost midnight when Kelsey stood. “I’d better get to bed. Danny will be up at six.”

  “After the day he had, I would have thought he’d need more time to recuperate.” Gage rose, too.

  “Four-year-olds recharge pretty quickly.”

  “He’s an android,” he muttered as he bent to pick up the tray that held their coffee cups and the empty cookie plate. Her chuckle followed him from the room.

  When he returned a few minutes later, Kelsey was just turning off the lamp on her way out of the living room. Over her shoulder, he could see that she’d closed the fireplace doors and straightened the cushions on the sofa.

  “The dishwasher was full so I turned it on,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the kitchen, where the hum of the dishwasher could be heard.

  “A man who can run a dishwasher. I’m impressed,” Kelsey said with an exaggerated look of admiration.

  “Don’t be sexist,” he ordered sternly. “This is the nineties, remember? Men are allowed to stretch to fill nontraditional roles.”

  “Gee, and I thought all they were good for is opening pickle jars.” Kelsey fluttered her eyelashes in a fair imitation of helpless femininity.

  Gage’s glance went over her head, and his grin widened. “Now, there’s an invitation I can’t resist.”

  “What?” Kelsey’s brows rose questioningly.

  “That.”

  She followed his gaze, tilting her head back to stare at the dusty little bundle of foliage thumbtacked to the doorjamb over her head. It took her a moment to realize what it was. Mistletoe.

  “Who put...Susan must have hung it,” she said, answering her own half-spoken question.

  “Susan?”

  “Danny’s baby-sitter. She’s seventeen and a firm believer in tradition. Which I’ve always thought was interesting, considering she had her belly button pierced last summer, and since then has been trying to decide whether a nose ring would be the perfect finishing touch or a bit of overkill.”

  “A tough decision,” Gage said, looking less than solemn.

  “It is when you’re seventeen and torn between entering a convent and pursuing your dream of playing guitar in a heavy-metal band.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Gage’s expression hovered between laughter and disbelief.

  “Scout’s honor.” Kelsey held up one hand in the appropriate gesture.

  “Maybe she could combine the two, update the image of the singing nun,” he suggested.

  Kelsey shook her head. “I know they’ve loosened the rules up a bit but I think the Vatican probably draws the line at nose rings.”

  “Very narrow of them,” Gage said, shaking his head sadly.

  “I’m sure Susan would agree with you.”

  “Well, nose ring or no, we can’t let her down,” Gage said, nodding to the mistletoe.

  “I won’t tell her if you don’t.”

  “It’s seven years’ bad luck to ignore mistletoe,” he said, slipping one arm around her waist.

  “I think that’s if you break a mirror.” Kelsey’s voice was suddenly breathless.

  Gage felt a little breathless himself. He’d forgotten how small she was. She was so full of energy and determination that it was easy to forget what a delicate package that energy came in. It was only now, holding her in his arms, that he was reminded of her fragility, of the warm feminine curves of her.

  The light from the hall shone over his shoulder, illuminating her face. Her mouth was still curved with laughter, but there was a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, an uneasiness that Gage chose to ignore.

  “I’m sure Susan didn’t expect anyone to actually pay any attention to that thing,” Kelsey said, staring up at him with wide gray eyes.

  “Then, traditionalist that she is, she’ll be pleased to know we put it to use, after all.” Don’t do it, Walker, a voice whispered inside as his head dipped toward hers. You’re going to regret this.

  But not half as much as he would if he stopped now.

  “Susan’s no botanical genius,” Kelsey muttered. “It’s probably not even mistletoe.”

  “It’
s the thought that counts,” Gage murmured, and set his mouth to hers.

  Bad idea. The words echoed in his head. He’d intended nothing more than a gentle kiss, a gesture of affection between friends. And maybe that’s all it would have been if her mouth hadn’t yielded so sweetly beneath his.

  He felt her breath catch, felt his own heart still for an instant before starting again, the rhythm much too quick and hard. There was a moment when time stood still, when he could have stepped back, defused the danger with a grin and a light comment, when everything could have gone on just as it always had.

  An instant only, and then everything changed. It happened so quickly—the shift from laughter to need, from smiles to passion. There was no gentle transition, no gradual slide from one stage to the next. It all changed in a heartbeat.

  Did his arms tighten around her, or did she press closer to him? Did he ask admittance into the warmth of her mouth, or did her lips part to invite him inside? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the taste of her, the feel of her body against his.

  It was like being in the midst of a raging inferno—all heat and sound. Blinded by the heat, Gage buried his hand in the heavy gold of Kelsey’s hair, tilting her head back to allow him better access to her mouth. His tongue slid inside, demanding and receiving her complete response.

  The low whimper in her throat might have been protest if her fingers hadn’t been buried in his hair, if her body hadn’t been arched to his.

  God, it had been so long. His mouth devoured hers. He was starving for the taste of her, the feel of her. He’d hungered for so long, wanted for so many years. She was everything he’d thought she would be. Her body fit against his as if designed to be there, as if meant for him alone. She was so right in his arms. So very, very right.

  Kelsey curled her fingers deeper into the thick blackness of Gage’s hair, pressed herself closer to the warmth of him. He tasted of coffee and oatmeal cookies—an impossibly erotic combination. He smelled of wood smoke, cologne and man. He was all muscle and heat.

  She wanted to curl deeper into his arms, lose herself in the heat of him. It felt so good to be held, to be kissed, not to be alone anymore. She’d been cold and alone for so long, so terribly long.