by Alicia Scott
“I iron my shirts every morning,” he confessed. His hand slipped to the edge of her silk robe. “With spray starch.”
“Oh God,” she moaned. “Spray starch. I’m not even sure what that is!”
“What are you wearing beneath this robe, Josie? It’s been driving me crazy, those little glimpses of lace beneath your prim-and-proper suits. How did an accountant end up with so much lingerie?”
“Stupidity!” she exclaimed desperately. “Sheer, unadulterated stupidity! Oh, God, Jack, go away before you kill us both!”
He couldn’t. He should, but he couldn’t. He was watching her breasts tighten beneath their thin cover of red silk. He was thinking he’d never wanted anything like he wanted to touch her right now. His carefully controlled life seemed to have boiled down to this one moment when his hand enfolded the soft curve of her breast and her breath escaped as a sigh.
He brushed her lips with his for the first time. She tasted the way he thought she would—not sweet, but hot. Real. Honest. Vital. There was nothing weak or fragile about Josie Reynolds. And nothing conniving or shallow. “Tell me you want me.”
“No, I don’t. I could never possibly want a cop!”
He caught her lower lip. He pulled it into his mouth and sucked lavishly. Her neck arched, her hands unfurled on his shoulders. He angled his head and kissed her deeply, wet, hot and hungry. With a moan, she clamped her arms around his neck. Her body pressed against him, her lips welcoming. His tongue tangled with hers and she gave as good as she got, her fingers digging into his scalp and pulling him closer.
He broke away abruptly, his breath ragged, his eyes glittery.
“You want me,” he stated roughly.
“Maybe the teeniest, tiniest bit,” she admitted hoarsely, and dragged his head back down.
It was an eating kiss. He sucked on her lips, she chewed on his chin. Somehow he had her pressed up hard against the door, and her hands were tugging at his shirt as if she’d shred every fiber. He found the knotted belt around her waist and yanked it free. The kid who’d waited very patiently every Christmas morning to open his presents turned into the man who ripped silk from her lithe frame.
He discovered sheer peach lace and shimmering peach satin. “Oh, my.”
“You like peach?”
“Honey, you could be wearing desert camo and I’d be happy.” His hands roamed down her torso, exploring the lean feel of her rib cage, the soft indent of her waist, the generous curve of her hips. He didn’t know where to begin anymore.
“I haven’t done this in a while,” she whispered.
“Me, neither.” He scooped her up in his arms and headed toward the beckoning bedroom light. He didn’t want to think. For just one moment, Straight Arrow Stryker wanted to follow the thrum of adrenaline in his ears.
He tossed her onto the middle of a feather mattress, then clawed his way through the piles of soft, brilliant pillows to find her. Her hands were tugging on his shirt again, grabbing the edge and pulling so hard it went, snap, snap, snap, all the way down. Her mouth closed over the smooth expanse of his bare collarbone. Her tongue tasted him. He went a little nuts.
Together, they tossed all the pillows aside; plumes of goose down and swathes of floral sheets billowed up. Next, they attacked his clothes like two greedy children, strewing shoes, socks, belt, jeans and underwear all over the floor.
“You have no hair on your chest.” She sighed.
“That okay?”
“That’s perfect.” Her hands drifted lower, finding his naked flanks. “Oh. Oh, goodness.” She sighed with open appreciation and squeezed hard enough to give him goose bumps.
“You’re wearing too many clothes,” he informed her thickly.
“Get them off, get them off!”
He had to take a deep breath before he could handle the teddy. His fingers seemed to be shaking abnormally hard, and he didn’t want to tear the fragile material. When his fingers moved between her legs to find the snaps, she was already so hot and wet he forgot his purpose and stroked her instead. She fell back against the soft feather mattress, her hair pooled around her, her eyes heavy-lidded. The bedside lamp was on, but she didn’t turn it off.
She looked at him with frank longing, and it was the most beautiful, intoxicating sight he’d ever seen. When he finally unsnapped the teddy and pulled the fabric up, she whimpered at the loss of his touch. Her hands settled on his belly. Then they folded around him and squeezed gently.
He almost took her right then.
“Protection?” he whispered hoarsely.
She looked up at him blankly, her hands still moving, her hips still writhing. He closed his eyes and forced his lips to move through the languorous fog building in his mind. “Josie, are you on the pill?”
“The…the pill?” Abruptly, her hands fell away. His eyes opened. She was sitting straight up and her face was stricken.
“I’m not on the pill,” she confessed in a rush. “I don’t do things like sleep with men I hardly know and who think I may have killed my best friend. Other than that, do you have condoms?”
“Uh-oh.”
“Ah!” She hit his shoulder. “I thought you were a Boy Scout! What happened to Be Prepared?”
“I don’t know!” he yelled right back. “I don’t generally sleep with women I hardly know who hate me just because I wear a badge. Other than that…wanna do some heavy petting?”
“Okay.”
He fell on top of her, kissing her deeply. The touch of her skin against him was electric, the feel of her fingernails against his back, divine. “This is a bad idea,” he whispered over and over again, then devoured her mouth.
“Shut up and put your hand right…there. Oh, yes, right there.”
He cupped her breast and she melted beneath him. He lowered his head and drew the hard bead of her nipple into her mouth. He sucked hard and squeezed his eyes against the bolts of desire driving up to his groin.
“Stryker…” Her fingers curled into his hair, massaging his scalp, telling him what he was doing to her. He laved her nipple generously, then nibbled tiny love bites down to the indent of her waist. He tongued her belly button.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” she moaned. He stuck his finger in her mouth to shut her up. She sucked on the offered digit suggestively enough to seduce a saint.
He spread her legs and found her with his mouth.
Her first scream of release caught him off guard. He clutched her convulsing hips with his hands, pinning her in place as he devoured her more thoroughly. Her hands dug into his shoulders. She whimpered, moaned his name and thrashed her head to the side.
The roar built in his ears. He could hear his own heart beating in his veins. She convulsed the second time, and the power of it ripped through him. He wanted… He needed…
God, he hadn’t known anything about anything until he’d held this woman and tasted her skin.
She drew him up desperately. He was too far gone to think anymore.
“Let me, let me,” she whispered. He let her. Her fingers found him, tightened and stroked, and he toppled over the edge with his teeth clamping his lower lip. He was falling, down, down, down. Her mouth was on his shoulder. He could taste the salt from her skin.
He buried his face against her hair, inhaled the scent of strawberries one last time, and for the first time in months, life felt all right.
Everything was going to be all right.
He cradled her against his shuddering body and their breathing finally eased. They both drifted into sleep.
* * *
“Hey, you are not even trying!”
“I am, too,” he protested. “Okay, okay, one more time. I swear I’ll get it.”
He opened his mouth wide, she obediently tossed the kernel of popcorn high into the air. He bobbed too soon and the kernel bounced off his nose. She shook her head.
“Stryker, Stryker, Stryker, how have you made it through life?”
It was 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. Generally,
she was waking up right about now and contemplating dragging her lazy butt to work. Instead, she was sprawled on her bed in her red silk kimono, bearing a large bowl of microwave popcorn—the only food she had in the house. Jack was leaning against a plush stack of pillows, clad only in his white B.V.D.s—he’d struck her as a B.V.D. man from the very beginning. On the other hand, she imagined it had taken him until last night to figure out her secret lingerie fetish. The knowledge made her smug.
She popped another kernel into the air and caught it effortlessly between her teeth, chomping noisily. “Really, Stryker, what did you do growing up, anyway?”
“Hiking, camping, hunting, fishing,” he said promptly. “I can name most birds and identify most trees. Oh, I also know how to tie a dozen different kinds of knots.” He waggled a brow, devilishly handsome in just his underwear. “Want me to prove it?”
She grinned, ridiculously pleased by the fun side of Jack Stryker. She never would have guessed a stuffed shirt like him had quite so many…nuances. And she couldn’t remember when she’d last felt so relaxed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to dwell on it.
She tossed another kernel into the air. At least it hit his lip this time. He recovered it with his fingers and stuffed it in the old-fashioned way. He settled more deeply into the pile of pillows, picked up a strand of her hair and wrapped it around his finger.
“I think this bed is the most decadent thing I’ve ever experienced,” he said.
“Honey, that wasn’t the bed.”
“Oh.” For a moment, he appeared close to blushing. That made her grin more. He shook his head. “And you dress like such a sweet, young thing.”
“I’m a treasurer. Appearances are important.”
“People speak very highly of you, Josie. They say you look like an angel and work like a dog.”
“They do?” That made her genuinely happy. Someone like Jack had had credibility and trust since his first waking moment. Things had worked a little differently for Josie. The life she’d built in Grand Springs, the job she took so seriously, were valued by her precisely because of how hard she’d had to work to get them. And in a perfect world, she’d be the only person who would ever know exactly how far she’d come.
Jack’s gaze had grown sober and contemplative. She threw more popcorn into the air, not willing to let it end so soon.
“So how long had it been, Stryker?”
“How long what?”
“Since you had sex. You said it had been a while.”
She had the pleasure of seeing his eyes widen, then blink. Jack Stryker was officially flummoxed. “I wasn’t the first person since Marjorie, was I?” Josie asked in sudden shock. “A man who looks like you, I would imagine you get plenty of offers.”
“Well… I mean…” He was definitely blushing. He shook his head, chagrined. “There were a few women afterward. You know—the ‘get back on the horse’ sorta thing. But nothing…serious. It’s…uh, it’s been a few years. And we haven’t exactly had sex yet, for the record.”
She shrugged. “Close enough.” She volunteered on her own, “Four years.”
“Four years? To quote someone I know, ‘A woman who looks like you, I would imagine you get plenty of offers.’”
“Oh, sure, but most of the men doing the offering could be pinups in a Creep-of-the-Month calendar. The truth is, Stryker, that good men are an endangered species in most towns. My theory is that it’s due to women’s natural superiority over men—”
“Do I really want to hear this?”
“Absolutely. See, when a woman finds a good man, she doesn’t doubt it. She recognizes gold when she sees it and she takes him out of circulation. A man, on the other hand, will encounter a perfectly good woman, hem and haw over whether or not there might be some elusive better woman somewhere out there, and walk away. Thus, good women are a dime a dozen, and good men are nowhere to be found.”
“I see.”
“Stryker, stay a bit, will you?”
He studied her a moment longer. His fingers brushed her lips. “All right,” he said quietly. “I will.”
* * *
“These are your parents?” He held up the silver-framed portrait from the bedside table. It was 10:00 a.m. now, morning was fully upon them, and reality seeped in as surely as the rays of sun snaking through the venetian blinds. Josie lay against him, her head on his shoulder, her hair mussed, her body covered only by shifting swathes of red silk. He’d been holding her for hours and his body was hard again. He didn’t do anything about it. They still didn’t have any protection, and he didn’t think it would be right to seduce her once more, then simply walk out the door. Besides, it had been a long time since he’d lain with a lithe body curled up next to his, hair tickling his nose, weight putting his arm to sleep. She felt good. Better than he would’ve thought. Better than he was prepared for.
What had his father told him? Life is messy.
He returned his focus to the portrait. It was old, the color having faded to a yellowish-green tone, the way old film was prone to do. The smiles on everyone’s faces, however, were still brilliant. The man was big and heavy, his sandy blond hair cut a little wild and his suit ill-fitting. He looked at the camera frankly, however, and the laughter and love in his eyes were unmistakable. He had his arms around a petite, ethereal blonde in a simple pink dress and a bit more wisdom in her eyes. She leaned into the man’s embrace, not just accepting it, but returning it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The two simply fit. Before them sat a little girl in cutoff shorts, a too-big T-shirt and a gap-toothed smile. Her hair had been hastily clipped back, but blond strands still curled riotously around her cheeks and temples. Her smile, the tilt of her chin and the twinkle in her eye marked her as Josie.
“They look very much in love,” he said at last. Josie had stiffened beside him, but she hadn’t pulled away. Her finger doodled a small, unconscious circle on his shoulder while her gaze remained locked on the portrait.
“Her name was Rose,” she said softly, and pointed at her mother. “And that’s Stan. They were perfect for each other.”
“Was it an accident?” He felt her resistance in the subtle changes of her body. The inch of air that appeared as she shifted slightly away, the loss of warmth as she curled more tightly in on herself.
“Something like that.” A vague answer. The man in him was hurt, the cop in him suspicious. He carefully returned the portrait to the bedside table.
“The hardest part, I find,” he said finally, “is the need to remember the people you’ve lost. The burden of it. Because if you don’t remember them…if you don’t tell the stories of your brother’s sixth birthday or the day he learned how to drive or the time he taught you to fish, then no one will know who he was. He really will be gone.”
Josie turned in his embrace. She looked at him, something vulnerable and tentative in her eyes. “I don’t have any other relatives,” she said abruptly. “No grandparents, no aunts, no uncles. There is no one alive who knew them but me. I’m the only one who remembers just how in love they were, how hard they worked to build some semblance of a home when my father…he really wasn’t qualified for much. He did mostly odd jobs—sales—so money came and went. They had their arguments…my mother used to beg him to settle down, but my father was a dreamer. He always had some scheme….” She shrugged. “Then there were the afternoons the three of us would sit in the kitchen eating cookies, and I would think I was the luckiest girl in the world because none of my friends spent their afternoons eating cookies with their parents. No one saw the kind of love I did. And sometimes… Sometimes…”
“Sometimes you’re so angry because you loved them so much and they went and died.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
“I used to worship Tom,” Jack whispered. “I never told my parents that. But when I was little, it just seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was wild, he was reckless. He was…he was beautiful in his own way. Just to watch him on
the football field—no one played the way he played, all fierce and passionate. Afterward he’d rumple my hair because he knew I hated that, and he’d say, ‘Don’t bother, Jack. Football’s too dirty for you.’ I’d take a couple of swipes at him, but it made me idolize him even more. Then one night, he drank a six-pack and climbed onto his motorcycle without a helmet.
“What a stupid, stupid thing to do,” he blurted out harshly. “For one moment of glory, he killed himself. And he destroyed our mother. She goes through her days now looking at the empty spaces he left. She eats dinner every night staring at his empty chair. Sometimes I hate him for that.”
“But you can’t hate him,” Josie filled in, “because you also love him. And I bet when you finally played your first football game, you wanted to cry afterward because you couldn’t tell him about it and prove that you’d finally gotten dirty.” Jack was nodding. Her voice picked up. “I went to my prom when I was sixteen. I got all dressed up, and my foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Brattle, took pictures of me and my date. They were very kind, very supportive, and that made it even worse because I stood there the whole time wanting my mother. I wanted her to be the one to do my hair. I wanted her to help me pick out my dress. I wanted to come home afterward and tell her about dancing and my first kiss. And I couldn’t. When I got home, I got so angry I took scissors and cut my dress into little pieces. And then I felt so guilty, I cried.”
“I stole one of Tom’s football trophies from his room and smashed it in half. Then I spent four nights putting it back together with superglue and tweezers.”
“You shattered a trophy?”
“Even Boy Scouts have tempers.”
She nodded slowly, her gaze contemplative. “I’m really glad you came over,” she said abruptly. Her chin was up, daring him to deny her words.
“I’m glad I came over, too.”
“Why did you, Jack? What am I, your midlife crisis?”
“I don’t think being attracted to a beautiful, intelligent accountant really qualifies as a midlife crisis.”
