She lumbered closer and shook her cane under Liss’s nose. “If you can’t comport yourself with proper dignity, then I’ll have no option but to let your in-laws know that you aren’t a fit mother—”
“Hey!” Kirk’s voice sliced through the diatribe like an ax. He snatched Mrs. Healey’s cane and aimed it at the ceiling, rather than at Liss’s face. “‘Immoral conduct’?” he thundered. “After the way you and Brose lived, you can dare to talk about immoral conduct in others? Listen, you sanctimonious old—”
“Watch it, sonny,” she said, wrenching her cane free and poking his belly with it. “When I lived here with Ambrose, there were no children involved.”
“For your information, Liss’s children were not involved in any way with what we were doing,” Kirk said. “They are upstairs asleep in their beds, and what Liss and I do is none of your business. When you saw we were . . . busy, you should have had the decency to keep on going. We are both adults and do not require a chaperone, and I won’t put up with any interference from you!”
“Children have been known to wake up,” Mrs. Healey said with self-righteous pedantry. She lowered her cane, nonetheless, perhaps intimidated by Kirk’s anger. “You wouldn’t have heard them coming any more than you heard me. “
“My kids make a lot more noise than you do when you choose not to pound your cane on the floor,” Liss said. “There’s nothing sneaky or snooping about Ryan and Jason.”
Mrs. Healey glowered at her. “Mothers need to take extreme care with their actions and reputations, especially mothers whose children have grandparents who might be rightfully seeking custody. So I suggest you watch your step from here on, miss. Very, very carefully, because I will be watching, too.”
She turned and stumped away.
“Oh, hell, I’m sorry,” Kirk said as Liss spun around, turning her back to him. Her shoulders were heaving, and choking sounds came from her throat. “Ah, Liss, don’t cry, sweetheart. I won’t let her hurt you or your kids. I didn’t mean for anything like that to happen, I didn’t intend to forget where I was, what I was doing. I’m not saying I’m sorry it happened, only that I’m sorry it happened where it did, and when.” He turned her around and lifted her face. “Please, look at me.”
Liss opened her eyes and stared up into his misery-filled face. She covered her mouth with a hand, but nothing could stem the giggles that burst forth. “Oh, Kirk! The look on her face! Wasn’t it priceless?”
“You’re laughing?” he exclaimed. “This isn’t funny, Liss!”
“It is, it is.” She laughed again. “Kirk, please, don’t look so tragic. Not much happened, and what did wasn’t your fault. Don’t worry about it.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t my fault?” he asked, jamming a hand through his hair. “Of course it was my fault! Damn! If that pious old bat makes trouble, do you know what it will mean to—” He broke off and sighed gustily. “I guess I’d better get back to work.”
Liss tried not to giggle again, but it bubbled forth in spite of her. “Boy, I bet your carpet-laying manual never covered anything like this either.”
He looked at her for another couple of seconds, clearly finding no humor in this situation. “Nothing I’ve ever read or done or imagined covered anything like this.”
He stomped out of the room and returned with the new carpet, which he unceremoniously dumped on top of the underlay. After he’d eased it into position, Liss flattened the loose end to the floor and began to roll it out. It controlled the underlay very well.
“Hold it away from the tack strip if you can,” he said. “I don’t want it getting hooked on the tacks prematurely or it will lie crooked.”
As he instructed her he picked up what he’d earlier called a “carpet kicker.” The rubber-and-metal device, when placed against the carpet surface and rammed with his knee, stretched the rug tight enough so that it reached the wall and could be forced down over the nails in the tack strip.
“Damn her!” He set the carpet kicker into place and slammed his knee into it. “I’ve punched out more than my share of dirty-minded men and boys for that kind of attitude when it was aimed at my mother, but I’ve never in my life even considered hitting a woman.”
For a moment, as he met Liss’s gaze, he looked positively fierce. “I came pretty damned close to wrapping that cane around her neck.” He smashed his knee forward and more of the carpet was forced into place. “You bring out some strong primitive instincts in me, Liss Tremayne.”
Primitive instincts? she repeated silently. Did those equate with animalistic behavior? Abruptly she felt sick. Kirk was right. There was nothing remotely funny about what had happened. It must have been hysteria making her laugh like a loon. She had never had a purely sexual relationship and hadn’t thought she was capable of having one—at least until this afternoon when Kirk’s touch, his kisses, his very presence sent her into a sensual haze where edges blurred and she forgot how short a time she’d known this man. Then it hadn’t mattered. And it certainly should have! Mrs. Healey, if she chose, could make plenty of trouble for her. What had Kirk been about to say after Mrs. Healey left? What it will mean to whom? To her? To him? It wouldn’t affect him at all, except he might feel a certain amount of guilt, which was foolish. Mrs. Healey was right. The woman was the one who had to take care. Kirk should know that, too, as the illegitimate son of a woman who’d probably been blamed all her adult life for her “mistake.”
Liss was glad of an excuse to change the subject. “Your . . . your mom had a hard time, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said. “About as rough as it comes.” Wham! He kicked the carpet forward again. “A woman with an illegitimate child didn’t get a lot of respect in those days. Most people figured she was unwed because the man refused to marry her, but in her case, it was the other way around.”
Wham! “She turned him down,” he said as he progressed along one side of the room, “even knowing she was pregnant. In fact, she didn’t tell him about me because around the time she realized I was on the way, she also realized she couldn’t link her life up with Brose’s”
Liss frowned. “That couldn’t have been an easy decision to make.”
“It wasn’t, but she’s one tough lady, my mom, and I give her all the respect other people—Brose included—denied her.” Wham! He paused for a moment to line the kicker up again. “You’d never know, looking at her, how strong she really is. Velvet over steel,” he said musingly before he rammed the instrument home. “Like somebody else I know.”
When Liss failed to respond to the bait, he went on.
“She had to be strong, of course, to make her escape from a man like Brose, who was a human steamroller. “
“Why didn’t she want to marry him? Didn’t she love him?”
He glanced at her, and they turned the corner of the room, heading up the other side as she continued to hold the carpet up a few inches. “Oh, yes, she loved him. But in spite of that, she wouldn’t let herself be walked on, and he was determined to make all the decisions about their life.” He paused to rub his knee, then resumed the work as well as the story.
“She knew it would be better for her child to be raised in happiness by one strong parent than torn apart by the massive differences in outlook between her and Brose.” He glanced at her again. “Much the way you turned down an affluent life and a secure home with your in-laws because it was better for your kids not to be under their influence.”
°I don’t think your comparison works,” she said, uncomfortable with it. They had reached the last few feet of carpet, and he was much too close. She let him have the carpet end and walked across the room, ostensibly to test the depth and texture of the thick, cushiony brown pile. Kirk was wrong about her, she thought, watching his broad shoulders heave as he forced the carpet down. She wasn’t strong. She wasn’t tough. Most of the time since she’d left her in-laws’ home she’d been teetering on the thin edge of terror-fear for the future, fear that her children’s needs weren�
�t being met, fear that someone would look at her and find her seriously wanting in some way, a washout as a mother. Exactly as Mrs. Healey had done today.
“I think the comparison works fine,” Kirk said, finishing the last corner of carpet. He left the carpet kicker there and limped over to her. “She refused to marry him because he wouldn’t consider a church wedding and that was important to her. Brose had a very low opinion of churches and believed religion in any form was bad. He called it a crutch for the weak. My mother couldn’t agree, so she left him.” He smiled at Liss. “Too bad Reverend Daisy wasn’t around in those days to convert him.”
“But then you’d never have known your dad, Martin Allbright,” she reminded him.
He slid a hand around her neck. “Neither would I have had a chance to meet you,” he said softly, drawing her inexorably closer, as if completely oblivious of their nemesis only a room or two away, and the warning she’d given them.
Liss had not forgotten. She twisted away quickly, dislodging his hand before she could be caught up in the magic web of his touch. “Stop it,” she said.
“What’s the matter? You’re the one who found it funny. “
“Now, I don’t. Now, I’m scared.” She backed away from him.
“Are we going to let that old bat dictate our actions?” he asked, following her. She took another step back. He took one forward. She stepped again—and her back was to the wall. Kirk leaned one hand beside her head and with the other stroked her cheek, her shoulder, her neck, sending her heart rate into a crazy, looping, rising spiral. “Velvet over steel,” he murmured. “A strong woman to turn on a strong man.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Yes. Come on, Liss, admit it. You left a secure home with your in-laws because you thought it would be better for your sons. You came here, despite your misgivings, also because it would be better for them. You were determined to tough it out, to take on a life completely alien to you, and in the process, you discovered how you could make it work for you, found a positive side to it with your photography. You’re a survivor, Liss. You’re strong, you’re tough, and you don’t let other people make the important decisions for you.”
She laughed bitterly. “If you believe that, why are you trying to make this one for me?”
His denial was quick. “I’m not. You want what we could have together every bit as much as I do.”
“I can’t give in to feelings like that,” she said raggedly. “And I won’t, because it would be wrong. A purely sexual relationship isn’t for me. I have two children whose happiness is at risk because Olga Healey would like nothing better than to cause trouble. That’s something I have to bear in mind every minute of every day.”
He leaned closer. His breath was warm on her face, his eyes dark and intense. “What we’re doing isn’t wrong. It’s important, Liss, to both of us. I don’t know yet how important, because it’s too soon, but I do know it isn’t immoral. We’re getting to know each other the way men and women have since time began. How can that be bad?”
She knew he was making sense. She wanted to know him better, to explore the growing emotion between them. It could be so much more than sex. She knew that. She knew, too, that Mrs. Healey was in the wrong, but still she had to acknowledge that the older woman could do a lot of damage.
She slipped under his arm and strode to the center of the room, putting several feet between them.
“No,” she said. “My kids are what’s important to me. I can’t risk their happiness for a moment’s pleasure.”
“Run away now if you like,” Kirk said, “but one of these days you’ll realize there’s no place left to run, and you’re going to have to make good on those silent promises I see in your eyes, city girl.”
She swallowed hard. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you. My eyes are making no promises or even suggestions to you, because I want more than I know a man like you has to offer a woman. “
Her forthrightness sent a sudden jolt through Kirk. For an instant he was the one who wanted to run, because he could almost see himself making her the kind of offer he knew most women wanted to hear. Let me take you away from all this. . . . But, hell, “all this” was his life, and a damned good one at that. He had no intention of changing it for anyone, let alone a woman he’d known for less than a week. “Come on, Liss,” he said. “Aren’t you asking for too much, too soon?”
“No. That’s the point. I’m not asking for anything except that you respect my wishes in this. Seems to me you’re the one doing most of the asking. “
That set him back on his heels, too, because he knew she was right.
Hearing the boys awake in their room, he knew he had only moments more to get this settled. He crowded in close, backing her up to the opposite wall this time. He braced both arms against the wall on either side of her, not touching her, but feeling as if she were pressed against him. “I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give,” he said. “For the love of Mike, woman, I’ve kissed you. I’ve felt you respond. You want me as badly as I want you. Why not simply give in to those feelings, Liss? They’re natural, normal, and damned compelling. “
His gaze was compelling, Liss thought. She met it and forced herself to withstand the power of it. He maybe strong, as was his desire, his need. And hers! But she would be stronger. Hadn’t he said she was strong, tough, a survivor? He might not like it, but there was nothing to prevent her from using that strength to fight him, was there?
With a physical act of will, she forced herself to duck under his arm and flee upstairs, but not to her children. Entering her room, she shut the door and leaned on it, shivering with reaction to all that had transpired during the afternoon.
“What if I don’t want it from anybody else?” he’d asked, and the temptation to listen to him had been so great, she’d nearly succumbed. She might have if they hadn’t been interrupted. She felt as if she’d narrowly missed slipping over a precipice, and wondered how big a push he would to give her before she tumbled into the same abyss as all the other women in his past.
“No,” she said aloud. “It will not happen to me. I will not get caught in his trap. I have to provide the cake, but not the kisses. Those, he can get elsewhere.”
* * * *
With Liss’s sofa and chairs in place on the new carpet, along with the bookcase and a couple of small tables, and a fire on the hearth, the playroom took on a warm, inviting air.
“Hey, this looks good,” Kirk said Friday evening when he poked his head into the room. Liss had just jumped down off a chair, having finished adjusting the drapes. She froze in place, her breath caught in her throat as she looked at him. Dressed in a cream-colored sweater and dark slacks, he carried a jacket over his shoulder, and for the first time since she’d met him, he wasn’t wearing cowboy boots but highly polished black loafers. He was on his way out. She swallowed the pain in her throat. After all, she’d told him to respect her wishes and leave her alone. She couldn’t complain if he did that, could she? But dammit, he looked great, making her acutely aware of her scruffy jeans and baggy sweater. The woman he was going out with would be dressed nicely, too, casually, as he was, but with quality and flair. Into her mind popped a picture of Gina Holland in her high heeled boots and tight blue jeans, which she’d undoubtedly changed for something more suited to the environment she expected this evening..
Kirk leaned on the door frame, his gaze sweeping over her, making her hot and uncomfortable and making her doubt the wisdom of demanding that he respect her wishes. Because when she looked at him, her wishes took on an entirely different character. She met his gaze for as long as she could, then turned to carry the chair back to a table in the corner, where the boys sat gluing macaroni elbows to sheets of cardboard.
“Come out with me, Liss,” Kirk said abruptly, surprising himself. He pushed away from the door frame and followed his instincts across the room to her, feeling drawn by her wary gaze. To hell with “respecting her wishes,” he tho
ught. To hell with the caution he’d preached to himself since Wednesday. He wanted to spend time with Liss Tremayne, and he wanted a hell of a lot more than that. A man couldn’t be hung for trying, he told himself.
“I was going to meet a couple of friends in the bar,” he said, “but I’d rather go someplace with you. We could take in a movie. There, might even be a band tonight at the Legion Hall.”
Liss thought about sitting at his side in a darkened theater, maybe holding hands, maybe snuggling within the curve of his arm. She allowed herself to think, briefly, of dancing with Kirk. How long had it been since she’d danced? As she’d told him, she’d been out of circulation a long time. With a silent sigh she shook her head. “Sorry. I have plans.”
Kirk was taken aback. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been turned down so peremptorily. Hell, yes, he could. He’d been in high school and covered with zits. “Like what?” he asked, remembering the excuse Rhonda Simons had used. “Washing your hair?”
Liss grinned. “No. I did that this morning. I joined the library today.”
He blew out a long, frustrated breath. “It’s Friday night! How can you contemplate staying home with a library book?”
She had to laugh. He really had no idea, did he, in spite of being raised by a single mom? “This is how I spend most of my Friday nights. And Saturday nights, too, for that matter. I don’t suppose you’ve got a baby-sitter in your back pocket.”
“But Mrs. Healey’s here and—” He broke off. “No. I suppose not.”
“Right,” Liss said. “Absolutely not.”
“Okay, then.” He flung his jacket onto a chair and sank down on the sofa. Sticking his long legs out in front of him, he toed off his loafers, then, feet on the coffee table, he reached for the top book on her stack. “We’ll stay home and read library books together.” As he saw alarm leap into her eyes, he decided maybe he’d have to, after all, respect her wishes. But dammit, he’d do it on his terms, not hers. She’d never said they couldn’t spend time together, only that he couldn’t try to seduce her into his bed.
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