Almost A Family

by Marilyn Tracy

  His estimation of her soared upward a couple of notches. And on the danger scale, she was already in the red.

  Then she chuckled. “Watch Elephant—” she instructed, pointing a slender finger at the smallest of their three dogs, who was belly-crawling toward Steve’s crossed feet. “He thinks we can’t see him.”

  At her mention of the dog’s name, the small mutt whined a little and started backpedaling until he reached his pals.

  “They’re well trained,” Steve said, wondering how she’d managed to command order from both children and animals, especially when everything seemed to come in sets of three.

  “They’re terrible,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “But they’re loving. And that’s all that’s important, isn’t it?”

  He couldn’t answer her; he was suddenly, inexplicably afraid she might be right.

  She stood and walked to the edge of the porch to lean against the rail. The rocking chair she’d abandoned continued to rock gently, as if some part of her had stayed behind, would stay there forever.

  Steve realized that if he pictured her in the future, he would see her in that chair, face serene, a small smile playing on her lips, her eyes closed as if dreaming.

  His list of her obstacles to a second marriage was pure hooey, he realized. Maybe he’d come up with that list just to scare himself off. Lord knew, around her, he needed scaring. Something about her made him want to forget consequences, made him want to just pull her against his chest and kiss her senseless.

  He set his cigar in the ashtray and stilled his chair as he stood up. He wasn’t sure why he’d stopped the rocking, though he suspected it had something to do with leaving part of himself behind to rock beside her.

  He straightened to find her steady gaze on him. Now that she was standing, the golden light from the kitchen illuminated her features. A light breeze tugged at a stray strand of her blond hair and lifted it. Her eyes darted from his to his lips and back again. Her tongue darted out and wetted them.

  Unconscious as it may have been, no invitation had ever been clearer. He took a step toward her.

  “Thanks for dinner,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.” Her cheeks seemed to pale a little. Her lips parted.

  He was close enough to smell her perfume, a scent that strangely reminded him of autumn mornings. A scent that lured him yet another step closer. What in the hell was he doing? This woman was as off-limits as a woman got in his book. She was his college roommate’s widow, she was vulnerable...and he was an idiot. A gullible, pedestalraising, country-boy fool.

  “I’d better turn in now,” he said, yet didn’t make a move toward the door. One touch, he told himself.

  “Yes.” She sighed, as if answering his inner thoughts, not responding to his statement of fact. Of safety.

  Her rapid and shallow breathing caused her blouse to rise and fall. And for the life of him he couldn’t help glancing down. Call him a politically incorrect son of a sea cook.

  Damn, he thought. “Good night,” he said aloud.

  If he’d been out drinking all night, he might have been able to explain the compulsion to keep moving forward, to ignore every rational thought in his brain. And, if he’d had anything to drink but iced tea that evening, maybe he’d have been able to rationalize why his hands were reaching for her.

  Taylor found she could scarcely breathe. She was vaguely aware of the old saying warning dreamers of wishes coming true.

  As if their bodies were in perfect harmony, she leaned forward at the precise moment his hand slid into the curve of her waist. While everything in her rational mind told her she was making a mistake, everything in the shadowed night told her she could lean still farther, arch into his arms, close her eyes, feel his warm breath playing on her skin.

  He slowly, carefully pulled her closer, cupping one large hand over her cheek, fingers slipping beneath her hair, drawing her upward. And then his lips brushed hers. Slowly. Gently. A question, perhaps a quest.

  For a shocking, startled second, she wondered what she was supposed to do with her hands. Then, as if they had a will of their own, they found his muscled forearms and rested there, lightly at first, then with gathering strength, pulling him, drawing him to her as he was enticing her to him.

  He groaned a little, as if in pain, then deepened his kiss, his hold on her, enfolding her in his arms, tasting her, drawing a passion from her she’d thought long buried.

  She literally felt dizzied by his touch, by the contact with him. Whatever electricity had flared between them earlier crackled anew, setting her body aflame.

  She was suddenly, sadly conscious of how long it had been since she’d been kissed, the kind of man-woman, deep, strong-attraction kissed. The awareness of the kiss, the man behind it made her knees weaken, made her cling to him even more. She felt she was drowning and part of her never wanted to come back up for air.

  She didn’t know when her hands left his forearms and linked around his neck, her fingers burying themselves in the soft hair she’d wanted to touch since her first glimpse of him. And she didn’t know when she drew him down still more firmly, fully acknowledging the passion he inspired in her. All she was aware of was the feel of his lips against hers, his hot tongue warring with hers, his hands roaming her back, her waist, steadily stroking her, inciting the fires in her.

  And when his hand slid upward to cup her breast, molding her to his palm, she moaned a sigh of pleasure into his waiting mouth and pressed against him. The flames rippling over her were liquid now, molten in intensity, and the very blood in her veins seemed to run hot and fiery.

  He lowered his lips to a wildly throbbing pulse at the apex of her collarbone. Her fingers dug into his shoulders as he blew hot, shallow breaths into the vee created by her blouse. He raised his head again, looking at her through half-closed eyes, eyes as glazed with desire as her own must have been.

  “You are so incredibly beautiful,” he whispered. “I’ve wanted to do this from the minute I first...since you opened the...” The rest of his sentence was lost in his kiss.

  “Maybe the boys weren’t so far wrong, after all,” she murmured in response, capturing his lower lip gently between her teeth.

  He didn’t suddenly still. Taylor thought he seemed to stiffen slowly, pulling away from her as cautiously as he’d approached her originally.

  “What?” she asked, scarcely able to see him through vision clouded with desire. But she knew he was frowning. Still holding her, but frowning.

  “The boys are wrong,” he said.

  Confused, she could only let her hands trail down his muscled chest.

  “People don’t fall in love after just one kiss, Taylor.”

  That hadn’t been what she meant when she’d said the words, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was his distance now. Though still touching her, he might as well have been on the other side of a great chasm, the far rim of the Grand Canyon.

  And it seemed somehow sadder that he’d used her name for the first time as he ran from her.

  She smiled crookedly. Sadly. Because he didn’t know what he was talking about. “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked. But she knew. She knew.

  “People don’t really fall in love at first sight,” he said, almost angrily. “They can’t.”

  “Who are you trying to convince? Me or yourself?” she asked softly. She dropped her arms to her sides, pinning his hands against her for a moment. It surprised her how much it hurt when he drew his hands away.

  “I just don’t believe in the kind of things you do,” he said.

  “You don’t know what I believe in,” she replied. She nearly smiled. While she knew from personal experience that it was entirely possible to fall in love after one single, blissful kiss, he seemed to feel a great need to deny the possibility.

  “Sure I do,” he said, stepping back from her and running a hand through the hair she’d so thoroughly disarranged for him. “You’ll tell me you believe in thos
e old classic values. Raising kids in a small town. Having sitdown dinners. You’ll tell me you believe in families, community service, doing things for people. That you believed—still believe—in marriage.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “It’s ludicrous to think that sort of thing is possible.”

  “So call me ludicrous,” she said, and smiled to take the sting away. She didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her, but she knew it came from some part of his bruised heart.

  “God, you’re more gullible than I am,” he said.

  She resisted the urge to stroke his cheek. “What a crime,” she said softly.

  “It’s not a crime, Taylor. It’s just not for me. I’ve been around that block twice.”

  She was certain he had no idea how wistful he sounded. Tough guy Texas Ranger Steve Kessler reminded her of a little boy locked outside on a cold night, staring in at a warm family scene.

  “And you don’t believe people can know love the moment they see it, the second they feel it?”

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he didn’t look at her. He said raggedly, “No, Taylor, I don’t.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “I’m just not into the whole marriage package. I’m just trying to be up-front here.”

  She raised a hand to cup his face. “Who hurt you so badly, Steve?”

  Chapter 7

  Steve lay on his back on the folded-out sofa bed, his head resting on his hands. He stared at the ceiling as if expecting it to answer the myriad questions roiling in his mind.

  He still ached with want of Taylor and was still reeling from her question about who had hurt him so badly. He’d only been trying to warn her that she shouldn’t read anything into their kiss. He’d only wanted to let her know straight-out that he wasn’t the marrying kind of man.

  He might have been once. But he’d tried it too many times. Twice too many times. Once, shame on you. Twice, shame on me. Third time...

  He should never have given in to the impulse to kiss her. And once there, he should have pulled back immediately. But he’d been stunned at the depth of her passion, at the intensity of his own. He’d been lost in her sweet taste, the heady scent of her perfume, the feel of her soft skin. And he’d felt like he’d come home, finally arrived at a destination he’d desired for years.

  The house seemed to sigh around him, a soft soughing. He glanced at the window and saw, through a crack in the curtains, that a tree gently bent at the caress of a stray night breeze. A breeze. He’d heard a light breeze. How many years had it been since he’d heard anything less than a full-force hurricane?

  But in Almost, with no one traveling down the wellmaintained county road—that could more accurately be termed a farm-to-market road—and all houses in the village dark, dogs asleep and even the insects silent, he found he couldn’t hear anything but the breeze. If he listened closely, he could probably hear Taylor breathing from her room down the hall.

  He tossed and turned restlessly.

  Less than twenty yards away, Taylor also lay awake, staring at the stars through her opened curtains.

  She had the disconcerting feeling that, like Sleeping Beauty, Steve had wakened her with his kiss. She wasn’t a young girl, as she’d been once, flushed from the throes of unfamiliar feelings and desires; she was a woman now, all too aware of her body, alive to the possibilities inherent in the passion that seemed to flare so effortlessly between them.

  It saddened her to think that Steve claimed not to want the same things she did. And it saddened her more to realize that until he’d voiced them, she hadn’t known she’d wanted them herself. If he’d never cataloged the fundamental desires in her life, would those wants never have surfaced?

  If he didn’t find a nearly dead guy with a bullet wound in his chest, Steve would be returning to Houston. He would go back to his life, his condo probably, and, undoubtedly, his bevy of pretty women. Men who condemned marriage seemed to revel in that rigidly impermanent life-style. Even men who had tried marriage twice. Maybe especially those men.

  And, aside from three boys who would talk about him for days afterward, her life would go back to the exact same routine it had carried for the past couple of years. Wake, cook, visit, cook some more, clean some more and go to bed, sometimes to fall asleep, sometimes to cry herself there.

  Except her life wouldn’t be quite the same now.

  By kissing her, he’d infected her with a restlessness, a longing she’d managed to sublimate for so long, so well and so perfectly that she’d nearly forgotten it existed.

  She pounded the pillow, ostensibly to make it more comfortable, but more likely in lieu of hitting one probably soundly sleeping Texas Ranger. The sooner he left Almost, the better it would be for her. And for her sons. Better for them to learn that many men would rather live alone all their lives than to commit to a family.

  “That’s just fine with me,” she muttered. She might not have realized, until he’d told her, just how deeply she did want a new life, a second chapter, but she understood how firmly ingrained was her reluctance to hook up with another peace officer. One life blown to bits had been enough.

  Oh, but how she’d liked having a man sitting at the dinner table again. And rocking on the back porch with her. And having him holding her in his arms, his lips pressed to her collarbone.

  Taylor groaned aloud and sat up. If Steve wasn’t in the living room, she’d simply get up and go to the kitchen for a glass of lemonade. And maybe sit outside on the back porch for a while.

  A scream pierced the stillness.

  Taylor was out of bed and across the room before she fully recognized the sound as coming from one of her sons. She flew out her bedroom door and down the hall, flicking on the light as she went, and before the second scream rent the night she threw open the door to her sons’ room.

  She hesitated on the threshold of the boys’ large bedroom. Because the three boys had never wanted separate rooms, she and Doug had simply knocked out the walls dividing three bedrooms and turned the space into one very large room. Each boy had a wall for dressers and bookcases, but the three of them had long ago pushed their twin beds to the center of the room to span out like spokes of a wheel with a nightstand and three lamps as a hub.

  The second scream still echoed in the air as she paused, wondering which of her sons was being murdered.

  “Jeezly crow—what’s going on?” Jonah asked.

  “It’s Jason,” Josh answered.

  Taylor rounded Jason’s bed and swiftly sat down on the edge of it. He was tossing his head back and forth as if trying to escape a monster, and his mouth was wide open, ready to loose another terrible scream.

  “Jason...sweetie...Mom’s here,” she said. She repeated her words a second time, stroking his forehead and rubbing his exposed shoulder. She didn’t want to wake him abruptly.

  “What’s wrong with him, Mom?”

  “A nightmare,” Taylor said.

  Jason stopped thrashing but began mumbling loudly, “Don’t come any closer, mister. I mean it. Oh, God, he’s gonna touch me!”

  “No one’s going to touch you, Jason,” Taylor said firmly as she lightly shook his shoulder. “I’m right here, honey. Nothing can hurt you now.”

  His eyes popped open and he stared at her through the shadowy light from the hallway. He gasped at seeing someone so close to him, then realized who it was. “Mom,” he croaked gratefully.

  “Yes, honey. I’m right here.”

  “That dude was chasing me. His face was all covered with flies and he had dirt under his fingernails like he’d crawled out of a grave or something.”

  Taylor’s other sons exchanged murmurs of appreciation for the fright.

  “I was afraid he was going to touch me.”

  “It was a dream, Jason,” Taylor said. “Just a nightmare.”

  “He was all covered with blood. From his bullet wound. I kept thinking that’s how Dad must have looked. All covered with blood.”<
br />
  “Oh, honey.”

  Jason pushed himself to a sitting position and threw his arms around her, squeezing her painfully. “He didn’t look like that, did he, Mom? Dad, I mean. He didn’t, did he?”

  Taylor hugged him tightly, trying to subdue his trembling, trying to convey with her body what words could never do. “No, honey. No, of course he didn’t. It’s okay now. I’m here,” she said.

  “It really creeped me out.”

  “It would have creeped me out, too.”

  “Where is he, Mom?”

  “Yeah, Mom, he can’t come in here, can he?”

  “No. We’re safe here,” she said.

  “How can we be sure? What if he breaks in the window?”

  “What if he kills our dogs and sneaks in the back door?”

  “What if the real killer saw us out there and thinks we know who he is? Like in that movie...?”

  “What if he does something to you, Mom?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you or your mother,” said a deep voice from the hallway.

  All four of them jumped and whirled to face the door.

  Steve Kessler stepped into the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the hall. He literally filled the space inside the door, his hair brushing the lintel, his bare feet on the threshold.

  “Jason had a scary dream,” Josh explained.

  “It was a nightmare,” Jason said hotly, as if the distinction conferred adult status.

  “The nearly dead guy was coming after him,” Jonah said.

  “What if he does come after us?” Josh asked.

  Taylor held her breath as Steve stepped into the room, approaching the spokelike beds. His chest was bare, revealing a broad expanse of male musculature. She closed her eyes briefly. He seemed determined to drive her insane.