“Ran?”
“From job to job. I was never fired. I just…left. Any time I felt myself getting attached, getting tied down, I took off.”
Alarm shot through his pulse. She hadn’t done anything but answer his question. But it wasn’t the kind of answer she’d give a stranger. It was too honest. Too uncomfortable. “So I take it you don’t want to be tied down?”
“That’s what I told myself for years. But the truth, I think, is that I’d absolutely loved to be tied. I just couldn’t let myself be….”
The song ended. She quit talking and dropped her hands from his neck. Talk about heartless. If felt as if the blood was being separated from his veins.
Hell. They hadn’t remotely touched any critical body parts. There was just something about that woman that annihilated his previous conceptions about life, rational thinking, sanity—and that wasn’t even counting what she did to his hormones. Furthermore, she’d opened a whole box of curious questions that she hadn’t even started to answer—but temporarily, there was nothing he could do.
Some mother grabbed him and locked him behind a table, serving punch. She said the kids tended to spill less if the adults poured the cups. Merry took over the Valentine cookie table again, which was clearly an endless job, because kids that age could mainline a dozen at a time.
He assumed he’d get back to Merry quick enough, only things seemed to keep happening. The first was when two snot-nosed squirts tiptoed toward the back exit door—as if even the most brainless adults wouldn’t guess they were sneaking out to smoke.
Right after he came back in, he aimed straight for Merry, only to see her hightailing it toward the dance floor. Initially he couldn’t see why, but then the sea of bodies parted. Who’d have guessed pipsqueaks that young had a clue how to French kiss? But it was the behavior of Merry, The Morals Police, that completely charmed him. He had a long, lazy vision of her naked, wearing police boots and a holster, talking the criminal youngsters into behaving with her soft-spoken voice and big eyes.
And right after that, he heard some kind of scuffle on the side of the bleachers. Boys, after all, would be boys. Once the squabblers were separated, the chaperones all clustered in a frenzy to discuss their punishment, but overall, the two knock heads had only torn a shirt and bruised each other’s egos. Add unpredictable hormones to too much sugar—and girls all dressed up—and naturally a few tempers were gonna fray. Jack told both boys to get a brain, keep a low profile and stay away from each other or he’d bash their heads for them.
Their beef was resolved easily enough, but then the chaperones had to get broken up before they talked it to death.
Finally he had a chance to search out Merry again—only to find her bearing down on Charlene. The kid was standing in the open doors, catching the fresh air, talking to the tall guy she’d been dancing with earlier. When Jack realized Merry was going to interrupt them, he finessed the bodies on the dance floor at a fast jog and did his job. Grabbed her. Swung her into his arms again.
“So…” he said. Which was all he could manage, until he’d rearranged her hands around his neck, and his around the flare of her hips again.
“Jack. It’s a fast dance again.”
He didn’t explain, because there was no point in repeating himself, and by then he figured she knew the score. He didn’t know how to fast dance and that was that. So he just did the sway thing. And so did she. Who cared what music they were playing anyway? “So why did you quit jobs if you liked them? I didn’t understand what you meant, about leaving every time you got attached to something.”
“I didn’t understand it for a long time, either.” She smiled at him. One of those smiles that went woosh to his brain. “You dance so darn well. It makes me think you’d make love the same way. Easy. No performance stress. Just…get into it…with all your senses. Heart, eyes, textures, smells, touches—”
He squinted down at her. “Mer…are you trying to drive me crazy?”
“Maybe a little. I just keep wondering…you must have noticed how this comes up, every time we’re together? Pun intended. It’s more than your spirit rising. So…are you going to take it the next step, or are you just gonna tease me to death?”
“Ms. Olson, there are children around here.”
“None of whom can hear me. Neither of us are doing anything inappropriate.”
“You are.” Okay, maybe she wasn’t physically. But she sure as hell was doing some illegal stuff with her eyes.
“All I did was ask you a question. If you don’t want to make love with me, that’s totally all right. We can just keep ignoring this…thing between us. I can do denial. There’s no real reason we have to do anything about it, for heaven’s sake—”
Jack would have answered her. He had no idea what he would have said, but he would have answered her. Only a woman’s voice said, “Merry!” and suddenly a trio of moms were volunteering her to start the clean-up.
The dance was over?
How the hell could the dance be over? He just got there. He’d known from the get-go that every second of this evening was going to drag incessantly, and instead…he glanced at his watch. Three hours had actually passed. His eyes narrowed as he watched Merry blithely clap paper cups together and chuckle with the other women.
Unless he was mistaken, she’d just offered to sleep with him.
It was possible he was mistaken. Every time he was around her, he seemed to be so confused he couldn’t see or think straight. But all the same…a guy could generally wake up from a coma, erect and ready, for the promise of sex. At least he could. If he wanted the woman.
And he sure as hell wanted Merry.
WELL, YOU COULD LEAD a horse to water, Merry mused, as she listened to Charlene’s chatter on the way home.
And that’s all she’d been trying to do. Lead Jack into thinking—about her, about them. A woman couldn’t get what she needed or wanted in life by snoozing in the backseat. Not these days. And certain risks, Merry was willing to take. Certain hurts, she was willing to risk.
But at this precise moment, the opportunity to jump Jack seemed as remote as a trip to Tahiti.
“Dougall is so, so stupid,” Charlene said, which was a refrain of the same song she’d been singing the whole drive.
“I thought I noticed you dancing with him several times?”
“Yeah, well. What we were mostly doing was arguing. About Space Zest. It’s one of those world-building games,” she added, as if knowing full well Merry wouldn’t have a clue what the context of the name was. “I beat him. But he claims he got to a higher level. Like yeah, right. I know exactly how smart he isn’t because I see him in math class—”
“I thought Dougall was in eighth grade.”
“He is. Come on, Merry. You know I’m in the eighth-grade math class. And it’s so much better. Because in my class, everybody was calling me a nerd. In the eighth grade, I’m not so far ahead so it isn’t so embarrassing. Anyway, Dougall…”
Dougall took up another full fifteen minutes of dialogue—long enough to get them home, to get coats thrown on chairs and shoes shucked at the door and milk poured. The telephone rang just as they were headed back to Charlene’s bedroom, annoying Merry no end. Charlene never opened like this, much less chattered like a nonstop magpie, so she hated interrupting it with a phone call.
More annoying yet, there was no one on the other end of the line. Or someone was there, but they didn’t speak. Merry hung up, vaguely aware that the same thing had happened yesterday—a call where no one talked, just hung up—but it wasn’t like it was a heavy breather or porn call. She put it out of her mind, caught up with Charlie in her bedroom, still carrying the glass of milk.
Charlie had already peeled off her dance clothes and pulled on the giant old T-shirt of her dad’s that she slept in. Now she bounced on the bed and snuggled up, accepting the milk from Merry. Merry perched at the foot and kept on listening.
“So…like suddenly this girl walks up, all mad and
red in the face. Says, ‘Hey, Dougall, you came with me, remember?’ As if I were usurping her, you know? And yeah, he had to come with someone because otherwise he wouldn’t have been at the sixth-grade dance, but it wasn’t my fault he was talking to me. He started it!”
“So did you know the girl?”
“Oh, yeah, Tiffany. She isn’t in most of my classes, but I still know her. She wears this color, like this blue-aqua. Because it’s the Tiffany logo color, you know, like for the jewelry store. Does that tell you enough about her?”
“Oh, yeah.” Merry wanted to bounce on the bed a few dozen times. The whole conversation was enough to bring tears to her eyes. They were having a real-life girl conversation. A bonding conversation. It felt better than winning the lottery.
“She has big boobs already. And a Tiffany bracelet. And she puts a lot of junk on her eyes. The guys all call her a slut-in-training.” Charlie glanced at her with a pause, as if waiting for a scold on the slut word.
“That sounds pretty darn accurate,” Merry said instead, but she was thinking how the whole Dougall thing was starting to add up. The fight. The hurt feelings. The denial. The explosion of excitement and conversation. Was there anything more painful than a first crush? And this whole outpouring affirmed that Charlie’s style choices had nothing to do with gender issues but were just about her dad.
When she could get a word in, she tried to delicately bring up another girl subject. “Charlie…some of the moms were talking about bras. It seems a lot of girls in your class are wearing those training bras now, so I thought maybe—”
“Not me.”
“All right.”
“Every time I hear the term ‘training bra,’ all I can think of is ‘what are we training?’ Horses? I mean, how do you train boobs? Besides which, I’m not growing breasts. Ever.”
Merry didn’t say, you already are. But since they were already sneaking into mighty touchy waters, she tried, “Being at that dance reminded me of how I felt in sixth grade. It seemed right around then all my friends were talking a lot about sex….”
“My dad told me everything I ever need to know,” Charlie said flatly.
Damn, Merry thought, she’d screwed up again. Charlene shut down faster than a slammed door. She didn’t suddenly turn rude. That was never Charlene’s way. She just finished her milk and answered any further questions in monosyllables and finally just said that she was “way tired” and wanted to crash.
Merry ambled out, climbed into a robe, washed her face and moisturized, then wandered back into the kitchen. She puttered around for a few minutes, too wired to sleep even though it was almost midnight. After a bit, she tiptoed back to Charlene’s room, and found her dead to the world. She really was beat. Merry snuggled the blanket closer under her chin, turned off the bedside lamp, and then tiptoed back to the kitchen again.
She should go to sleep herself, she kept thinking. But her mind kept spinning over the night’s events. So many things had gone well for Charlene tonight. It seemed she’d finally broken out of her shell, enjoyed the dance and the other kids—whether she realized it herself or not.
But every loving instinct in Merry worried that the child was still buried under her grief. She still hadn’t cried. She mentioned her dad often enough, but usually as some kind of defense. There was pain there. Anger, too, Merry mused.
She’d already read a bunch of parenting books, and another bunch on grief and kids coping with grief. Wearily Merry leaned against the counter and closed her eyes. If it were another kid, she’d push harder for the counseling route, but darn it, Charl was one of a kind. She had her own way of thinking through things, and more complicated yet, she was smarter than most books and most people. What she needed…
Was a mom.
And that was the real problem. Merry just wasn’t sure what a good mom would do in this situation. Charlie had never had an active mother—and Merry hadn’t, either. So between the two of them, it was something like the blind leading the blind. She just wished there was some magic rule book so she could know if she were taking the right steps…or the wrong ones.
A knock on the door made her jump in surprise. Before she could possibly jog over to answer it, Jack bolted in. “Don’t you ever lock your door? Ever in this life?”
Well. He was certainly in a fine mood.
“Aren’t your boys home?”
“Yeah. They’re sleeping like logs. Didn’t even wait up to find out what happened tonight. How about Charlene?”
“She dropped like a stone.”
“I saw your light on….”
She nodded, not unhappy he’d come over, just unsure what all the attitude was about. He stomped in like a bull who’d been cooped up for a couple of years with no fresh air, had a scowl on big enough to put the O in ornery. Something was sure wrong.
He peeled off his jacket, tossed it on the chair. It slumped to the floor. He didn’t seem to give a damn.
“So I knew you were awake. And we sure as hell have a conversation to finish.”
“We do, huh?”
“Don’t you smile at me.” A finger pointed at her, royal as a king’s. “The only reason in hell I haven’t jumped you was because I didn’t think it was a good idea. For you.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “So that’s what you’re here for.”
She told herself that she’d lost the mood. It’s not as if she’d stopped thinking about Jack, stopped wanting to jump him, stopped wanting to push and see where the relationship could take them. But she’d just assumed there was no way to follow through tonight, after which she’d had absolutely nothing on her mind but Charlene….
She was sure of that. Absolutely sure.
Until she identified the look in his eyes. Even as he strode toward her, looking darker than thunder, crabbier than that cooped-up bull, she knew what he was going to do.
Probably before Jack did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JACK SURE AS HELL hadn’t stormed over here to touch her. Or kiss her. Or anything like that. He’d come home to his boys after that crazy kid dance, anticipating that both his sons would be up and dying to grill him in minute detail about the whole chaperoning thing. Instead, he’d found them snoozing up a storm, Kicker sprawled on the floor, Cooper splayed the length of the couch, the TV still on—as well as every light in the house, or close to it.
So big deal, he’d go to sleep, he told himself. Instead, he’d found himself pacing from room to room, hall to hall, aimless as a summer wind, restless as a storm. Eventually he found himself at the sink, glaring at the light across the yard in Merry’s kitchen.
She was there. Moving around. Wide awake like him.
He certainly didn’t intend going over there. It was midnight, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t do impulsive things. His life was as well ordered as a textbook, as mathematically organized as the puzzles he solved.
There was no cupid in his life. He wasn’t the kind of guy to give Cupid or Chaos or Fate credit for anything that happened in his life. Responsibility was on him, period, and his goals and choices were crystal clear to him.
Or they had been until the damned woman moved next door. He’d analyzed it until he was blue in the face. Possibly her mouth had some intoxicant genetically ingrained in her lips—a drug, like one of those exotic plants in the rain forest. Only rarer. The kind of thing where you could die if you couldn’t have it, even if you’d never wanted it and never heard of it. And it could even look like the weed. It could look like something you totally knew better than to touch.
Not that her lips looked like weeds. It was just so difficult for him to understand how or when or why he’d become so addicted to being with her. She was too young for him—maybe not in years, but in maturity. And for that reason alone, Jack knew he couldn’t possibly be knocking at her door past midnight for no good reason whatsoever.
Furthermore, once he’d barged in and found her leaning against the counter, in bare feet, wearing some kind of girly, pink fuzzy robe with
white cream on her nose, you’d think he’d get some sense, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?
Yet he heard himself say gruffly, “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. That’s why I haven’t jumped you. Trust me, that’s the only reason I haven’t jumped you.”
And then he jumped her. Walked right in, left the door hanging open—which should have set off some loud internal alarms that he was picking up her bad habits. But the warning just didn’t take. Next thing, he framed her face and took her mouth. Hard and completely.
He meant to stop. He’d never pushed himself on a woman, couldn’t imagine it, had every intention of backing off and then apologizing up the wazoo…but he kept waiting for her. He intelligently assumed that she’d perk up with a clear no—or else have the brains to smack him upside the head.
Instead she made a winsome, yearning sound, as if all this time, she’d needed him desperately. His lips sank in, feeling cushioned by her endless softness. Her arms folded him in, folded him up. His mind…who could explain the inexplicable? Merry just completely sucked him into her vortex. It wasn’t his fault. She was the wild one.
“Hey,” she murmured. “I’m right here. Take it slow.”
That voice of hers…she sounded as if she were nurturing someone, being careful with someone who was coming apart at the seams.
Not him.
That wasn’t anyone remotely like him. Jack never had a needy bone in his body and sure as hell didn’t plan to take up neediness at this late date.
Her fuzzy robe peeled off. Beneath was nothing but her warm skin, smelling of some kind of warm lotion. The scent reminded him of summer rain, and the texture of her skin under his hands…God. Nothing was this soft. His palms whiskered over her arms, shoulders, back, sides, anywhere, any how he could touch.
And Merry, darn her, didn’t have the protective instinct of a goose. He wanted to growl. Even his thoughts came through his head in growls. She just gave and gave and gave, as if she had an inexhaustible well of sensuality and warmth and giving. And heat.
Blame it on Cupid Page 18
