She felt his tension in his legs, in the motion of his hips as he shifted under her, in the swift beat of his heart as she skimmed her hands across his chest. Through his T-shirt she discerned the smooth lines of his torso, the sleek, firm muscles, the convulsive clenching of his abdomen when she approached the waistband of his jeans. And then he shifted again, lifting and turning her until she was lying on the cushions, under him.
His kisses grew hungrier, greedier. His body, stretched on top of hers, grew harder. He pulled her shirt free of her shorts and yanked it up over her head; she shoved his shirt up until it was bunched around his arms. This wasn’t just about Joe wanting her, she acknowledged. This was about her wanting him, wanting his trust, his friendship, his passion.
His chest was magnificent, the muscles not bulky but cleanly defined, enhanced by an arrow of dark-blond hair aimed at his navel. She ran her hands over his skin, savoring its warmth, savoring even more the way his breath caught and then emerged in a low moan when she rubbed her fingertips across his nipples. He propped himself up so he wouldn’t crush her, and she took advantage of the space between them to caress his shoulders, the arch of his ribs, the indentations below his stomach. When she once again reached the waist of his jeans, he nudged her hands aside and tugged open the button of his fly, and then the zipper.
She peered up at him. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness, and she could make out the glint of his earring, the silken tumble of his hair across his brow, the profound yearning in his gaze—yearning, and desire, and...trust. She saw it, recognized it, and knew that even if they were a total mismatch, even if this marriage was a sham, an understanding existed between her and Jonas Brenner, an empathy as precious and binding as love.
She skimmed her hands up his back and into his hair, and pulled him down to her. His lips crushed hers, placated hers, teased and coaxed and then abandoned hers to trail down her chin to her throat, to the satin shoulder strap of her bra. He wedged his hands beneath her to pluck open the clasp, then pulled the undergarment off and let it fall to the floor with their shirts. He continued grazing downward, pausing to suckle one breast and then the other. She dug her fingers deep into his hair, holding him to her, wanting his kisses never to end.
He nestled one leg between hers, and she rose instinctively, undulating against his thigh. She heard him groan, heard herself sigh as ripples of longing coursed down from her breasts to her hips. He rose to strip off her shorts and his trousers, and then settled back into her embrace, warm and naked and aroused.
Her hands roamed along his back, learning its supple contours. Her fingers skimmed the firm curve of his bottom, the lightly haired skin of his thighs. He sat back on his haunches, allowing her to touch him, and she did, stroking the steel-hard length of him and smiling as he closed his eyes and gasped and surged against her palms. Control, she thought, curling her fingers tighter. She loved being in control, exciting him until he seemed ready to burst.
But she had little time to enjoy her mastery over him. With a final shudder, he pulled her hands from him and pinned them to the cushions. Then he kissed her again, traced a line with his tongue along her midriff, across her belly and down to the points of her hipbones, to the tops of her thighs, to the soft curls of hair between her legs. His breath danced over her, his lips, his tongue, and her body lurched, hot, desperate, melting for him, for Jonas, her husband, her lover.
He slid back up her body, pulling her legs around him, and planted a fierce, fiery kiss on her lips as he plunged into her. She returned his kiss with the same ferocity, her hands tight around his shoulders, her body moving in rhythm with his. His thrusts urged her onward, ahead of himself, closer and closer to the edge. She felt her control slipping, snapping, shattering. With a soft cry, she let go, soaring, falling, lost in the ecstasy Joe had given her.
After a long moment he sank onto her, spent and weary. His breath was harsh, his skin slick with sweat. She closed her arms loosely around him, savoring the pleasant heaviness of his body and her own exhaustion.
Another long moment, and he eased onto his side, wrapping her in his arms and looping one leg around hers. She hadn’t realized how narrow the sofa was, how much she needed him to keep her from tumbling onto the floor.
Her head rested snugly against his shoulder, her lips less than an inch from his collarbone. Her arms were folded between their bodies; her hips stayed against his, even as he softened and slid from her.
Slowly, agonizingly, her consciousness returned. She heard the screech of the crickets, felt a humid, tropically scented breeze wrap around her body, remembered who she was, who Joe was and what they’d agreed to when they’d gotten married a month ago.
This wasn’t love, she told herself. She didn’t love him, she couldn’t love him. He was a bartender, his life rooted in this hot, muggy island. She was an architect from the cool, misty Northwest.
A total mismatch.
His voice reached her from above, muffled by her hair: “Any chance you’ll consider moving down the hall to my bedroom?”
“No.” Her answer popped out before she could give much thought to his request, and she decided to stick with it. She needed to rely on her self-protective reflexes, and they were warning her that if she moved into Joe’s bedroom, into his bed, she would make love with him every night, whenever she could. No man had ever made her feel what he’d made her feel just now—even if it was only physical, even if he wasn’t her type, even if she didn’t like his earring, even if...
“You didn’t have to think long about it, did you,” he muttered, although she detected an undercurrent of wry amusement in his tone.
She couldn’t let herself think long about it. If she thought at all, she would think about how good it felt to lie in Joe’s enveloping arms, his glorious body sheltering hers. She would think about how she’d never in her life indulged in casual sex, and this certainly hadn’t been casual. Its very seriousness made it dangerous to her.
She would think about how Joe’s lovemaking had eradicated her rationality, obliterated her composure, stampeded her self-control. Good God, she hadn’t even stopped to ask him to use protection. She’d been too transported to care.
It simply couldn’t happen again. Once his crisis and hers were resolved, she was going to be leaving him. That was the deal they’d agreed to.
“Joe.” She sighed, wishing it didn’t feel so downright comfortable to snuggle this way with him. “You know we haven’t got a real marriage.”
“I recall signing a legal piece of paper. Don’t you?” Again she discerned the mixture of amusement and solemnity in his voice. “But what the hell. I’m not talking about marriage. I’m talking about sex.”
And I can’t talk about sex without thinking about love, she almost retorted. She forced herself to wriggle out of his embrace. Sitting up, she felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature and everything to do with not having Joe’s arms around her anymore.
He rolled onto his back and gazed up at her. His eyes were lucid, cutting through the midnight gloom like twin blue lasers. They seemed to slice right through her, penetrating all her defensive layers and burning into her soul.
“Jonas,” she said sternly, trying but failing to disguise her exasperation, “you can’t just barge into my life after ignoring me and Lizard for days and days, and expect me to welcome you with open arms.”
“But you did welcome me with open arms,” he pointed out with infuriating logic. He undercut his words by gathering her hand in his and touching his mouth to her palm in a tender kiss. “Not that I’m complaining. This was great.”
“It doesn’t matter how great it was,” she argued, withdrawing her hand. “And it doesn’t matter that we signed a legal document. We’re practically strangers.”
He contemplated her charge and shrugged. “That could change,” he said.
Only if he changed it, she pondered. Only if he decided to participate in Lizard and Pamela’s world. Only if he joined them on
outings to the beach, and helped them with Birdie’s house, and talked to them instead of hiding behind the newspaper at the breakfast table.
But if the change occurred, if he worked his way into their life...how would Pamela keep herself from making love with him again? How would she keep him from eroding her control? How would she keep herself from falling in love with him?
She swung her legs off the sofa and gathered up her clothes. Maybe she and Joe were a total mismatch—but right now, the worst mismatch she could think of was her head and her heart—her head warning her to keep her distance from Jonas Brenner, and her heart aching to love the man she’d married.
Chapter Thirteen
LONG AFTER SHE’D LEFT the porch he was still sprawled out on the couch, enveloped in the wee-hours darkness. His body was spent but his mind was on red-alert, transmitting all sorts of scrambled signals. Fortunately, he was a night owl. Decoding those signals might have been impossible for most people at that time of night, but not for Joe.
The signals, once he translated them, were telling him how wrong Pamela was for him. From the instant he’d seen her, he’d understood that she was too straitlaced, too prim and proper, too everything that had always turned him off in a woman—which was what had made her a perfect wife for his particular needs. And yet... In spite of it all, wrong just didn’t seem to be the operative term at the moment.
Right didn’t fit the bill, either. She was too skinny for his taste. She had hardly any upholstery on her. He’d been too conscious of the angles of her knees, the sculpture of her shoulders, the delicate protrusions of her ankle bones. Her breasts had flattened into nearly nothing when she’d been lying on her back, just two slight swells peaked with round, red, alluring nipples that begged to be kissed...
Start again, he admonished himself.
Too skinny and too pale, even after her day at the beach. Her complexion reminded him of milk. Or maybe cream. Then, too, her face had flushed a delicate pink when she’d been aroused, and her lips had turned crimson from his kisses, and those gloriously enticing nipples of hers had been the color of ripe berries and just as sweet, and her skin, that pale, pale skin had felt like white silk against his hands, and she’d felt even more like silk around him, a hot, tight sheath of silk when he’d plunged into her...
Damn. He was hard again. And she was planning to spend the night in her own room, in her own bed. Probably with the door locked and a chair wedged under the knob, just in case.
Get back to right and wrong.
Okay. She’d been absolutely right to decline his invitation to spend the night with him. The agreement they’d cobbled together didn’t include sex. And even if it had, Joe didn’t have any rights when it came to making love with her, not after he’d treated her so coldly. If he’d wanted her to get friendly, he should have gone to the beach with her and Lizard today, should have made more of an effort to overcome his skepticism about her hit-man story, should have been an a-number-one first-class hubby to her. Signing that legal piece of paper didn’t give him special privileges. He’d signed it only because he had to have a woman like Pamela in his home, the way you had to have a refrigerator or dependable plumbing.
Requiring her services as if she were a household fixture guaranteed him nothing in the way of bedroom activity. What had happened on the porch just minutes ago had been a fluke. It wouldn’t happen again.
What a tragic prospect. To hell with that stupid notion that Pamela wasn’t his type. She’d definitely been his type when he’d kissed her, and touched her, and taken her body with his. Thinking about her now, running up a list of all her shortcomings and finding himself getting more and more aroused with each addition to the list, indicated that she was as much his type as any woman had ever been.
You know we haven’t got a real marriage, she’d said. A real marriage, he conceded as he pulled himself languorously off the sofa and tugged on his jeans, would obligate him to make a commitment. It would mean accepting as fact everything she’d told him about Mickey Mouse, or whatever the hit man’s name was, and including himself in her life in all sorts of ways. It would require him to show up, every day, no excuses.
He could do it. For another chance to experience the most incredible sex he’d ever had, sure, he could turn this thing into a real marriage—as long as Pamela gave him a chance.
And if the sex had been even half as good for her as it had been for him, the odds were pretty decent that she would.
***
“I’M GOING TO HELP YOU at Birdie’s today,” he announced over breakfast the next morning.
“Oh?” Pamela flickered a brief glance at him, then drank some coffee, hiding behind the mug. For the first time in the month they’d been married, she had monopolized the newspaper. Joe had come downstairs to find her immersed in the paper, devouring news of foreign insurrections and international politics along with a slice of whole-wheat toast and an orange sliced into wedges.
Lizard was on the screened porch, constructing her version of the Taj Mahal out of modeling clay—or maybe it was supposed to be a hippopotamus. Joe couldn’t tell, and he was too tactful to ask. As it was, he didn’t even want to acknowledge that his adorable little niece was creating an innocent clay sculpture just a few feet from where, last night, he and Pamela had created the beast with two backs.
Nor did he want to think about the fact that one half of the two-backed beast was right that minute facing him across the breakfast table—or would be facing him if she ever lifted her nose out of the damned paper.
She seemed to be laboring hard to avoid eye contact with him. Her effort not to look at him allowed him an unabashed view of her. He could stare at her for as long as she refused to acknowledge his staring. As he sipped his coffee, he took in the straight blond fringe of her hair, her elusive eyes, the tension in her pursed lips, the taut line of her throat.
Had he actually considered her too skinny? Too pale? Not his type?
“The way I figure,” he continued, after her silence extended beyond a minute, “is that if you’re really tearing down Birdie’s walls, you could probably use a little help.”
“We’re doing all right without you,” Pamela said tersely.
“Since when is all right good enough?”
She flashed a silver-eyed look his way. She seemed to be framing her reply, contemplating it, discarding it and framing another reply. “Is that a rhetorical question, Joe, or do you really want to help us?”
“I really want to help you.”
He wished her gaze wasn’t so guarded, so dubious. Then again, who was he to resent her for distrusting him? Hadn’t he been busy distrusting her for the past few weeks?
She fingered the newspaper nervously. The pages made a faint rustling sound. “It’s messy work,” she warned.
He chuckled, but the laughter carried an edge. “Oh, well, in that case, forget I offered. A gentleman like me would never want to get messy.”
“Jonas...” She sighed, and he saw a hot blush rise in her cheeks, the same blush he’d seen last night when she’d come while he was deep inside her. Remembering made him pretty hot, too. “Forgive me for being suspicious, but why, all of a sudden, do you want to do this?”
“You know damn well why,” he answered calmly, then took a healthy swig of his coffee. He was actually feeling far less confident than he sounded. Not that she could ban him from Birdie’s house, but if she decided to crank up the drawbridge at his first attempt to march across the moat, getting her into his bed was going to be more difficult than he’d imagined.
“All right,” she relented, then frowned in deep concentration as she focused on an article about a budget crunch in the state’s welfare system. Her abrupt surrender, mixed with a tantalizing measure of evasiveness, appealed to him as much as her pink cheeks and her bony shoulders and the small swells of her breasts barely curving the fabric of her loose-fitting yellow T-shirt.
He’d messed up last night with Pamela, and he had no regrets. He certain
ly wouldn’t mind getting messy with her today.
***
SHE HAD TO ADMIT he was an enormous help.
They stood side by side in Birdie’s enclosed porch, removing huge chunks of the wall that had once separated it from the kitchen. They had sent Birdie and Lizard, along with most of Birdie’s cats, across the street to Joe’s house to occupy themselves with Lizard’s herb garden. The absence of Birdie and Lizard had proven as useful to Pamela as the presence of Joe.
The air was warm and cloudy with plaster dust. Joe had supplied Pamela with an old duck-billed cap of his, and he wore one himself. He’d also provided bandannas for them to tie around their noses and mouths, to keep from inhaling the dust.
Wearing the bandannas prevented all but the most necessary talk. When a slab of plasterboard came loose, Joe lugged it out to the back yard, freeing Pamela for the more painstaking work of scraping excess plaster from the counter and removing shreds of dry-wall from the vertical studs. Much as she hated to admit it, they made a good team.
Just like last night.
A treacherous thought. She tried not to pay attention to Joe’s strength, his lithe movements, the powerful flexing of his back as he hoisted the heavy debris and hauled it outside. She tried not to notice the beautiful blue of his eyes, visible in the space between his improvised face mask and the visor of his cap. She tried not to remember the way they’d teamed up last night, how good it had been.
“Why did you sha-she-booty?” he asked.
She lowered her chisel and scowled at him. “Huh?”
He set down the slab of dry-wall he’d been holding and enunciated more carefully through his bandanna gag: “Why did you decide to do this?”
She turned from him to stare at the tattered remains of the wall. She could have told him she’d done it to make Birdie’s house more livable, or because it was the closest she could come to practicing her profession while she was living in Key West. She could have told him she’d done it because she wanted to work hard, sweat hard, keep Lizard busy and keep her mind off her own problems. All of that would have been true.
CRY UNCLE Page 21
