Reid, however, wasn’t looking for disagreement or reassurance. He was simply stating the facts as he’d been taught them.
“Do you mind if I tell you something personal?”
Slowly he sat up, drawing one knee up and resting his arm on it. “You just told me that you’re a virgin. How much more personal can you get?”
She smiled. Only about two feet separated them right now, not enough to help her resist the temptation that was deviling her. Scooting closer, she nudged his arm over just a bit and rested her own arm beside it on his knee. She could feel his muscles tighten, could hear the uneven tempo his breathing fell into. He wanted to pull away so hard and so fast that she would fall flat, but she suspected he couldn’t bring himself to move. “I like you, Reid,” she said softly. “I like you a lot.”
As the flush returned hotter and deeper than ever, she pushed against his leg to get to her feet, then offered her hand. He looked at it for a moment, then another, before reluctantly accepting it. She pulled, but doubted that she was really any help in getting him to his feet. He used his own strength and simply held her hand. Even once he was up, he held it loosely, his palm warm, his skin callused, his fingers lean and strong. Tilting her head back, she met his gaze, and she tried to smile, to make light of the moment, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate.
He looked so serious. His eyes were filled with shadows, his jaw set stubbornly. If she didn’t know better, she might think he was angry. But she did know better. He was uncomfortable. He was probably searching for a polite way to push her away. He would let her walk into his arms and kiss him as if her life depended on it, no matter how much he didn’t want her there, no matter how little he wanted her kiss, because he didn’t know how to gently say no. Hadn’t he proved yesterday with Tanya that he was uncomfortable rejecting unwanted advances?
For a moment, she considered doing it anyway—taking the few steps that would close the distance between them. Wrapping both arms around his neck. Inching that final millimeter forward so her body was in complete contact with his. Sliding her fingers into his hair, persuading him to bend his head and finally, finally, taking his mouth with hers. So what if he didn’t want her to do it? She didn’t think he would find her totally repugnant—no man ever had—and who knew? Maybe he even would discover that he liked it. Maybe he would like it enough to want more.
And maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would find her repugnant. Maybe he would rather kiss Tanya or Alicia or any other woman on Serenity than her.
She forced her fingers to go limp. All he had to do was open his hand, and he would be free to walk away. She waited for him to do it, to let go and leave her, but he didn’t.
Instead, he raised his free hand, hesitated, then touched her hair. She wished instantly that she’d worn it down this morning, no matter that down was hot, that down was certainly no style for cleaning and painting old furniture. As his palm slid the length of her braid, he looked regretful, as if he, too, wished it were down. When he reached the end, he lowered his hand to his side once again, then finally spoke. His voice was husky, thick and made her think of long nights, wicked games, sex and heat and her big, empty bed. “Don’t tempt me, Cassie.”
She liked the idea that she could. “How am I tempting you?” she asked, her own voice as husky. “Tell me.”
For one brief moment, he seemed torn by what he wanted to do and what he thought he should do. Then he reached for her, his fingers closing around her wrists, using the grip to pull her close, to guide her arms around his back, to clasp her hands together at the small of his back. “Don’t let me think I can do this,” he murmured, bringing his hands to her shoulders.
They were close now, closer than they’d ever been. When a breeze blew through the arbor, it wrapped the long, loose folds of her skirt around his legs. The lightweight challis caught on denim, hanging for an instant before falling again.
“Don’t let me think you might want this.” He slid his hands over skin and narrow straps, along her throat to her jaw. “Don’t make me think you want...” The rest of his warning was forgotten as his mouth brushed hers once, twice, before settling for a kiss. There was no hesitance, no reluctance, just instant need, instant heat. It made her weak and hungry, robbed her of breath, of thought and reason, of everything except pure, hot sensation. Her nerves trembled. Her. muscles tightened. She had never felt such intensity, had never experienced such fierce need. She wanted him to stop before it was too late, before she discovered some secret, hidden, shameless part of herself that would cling to him. She wanted him to never stop.
But he did. After only a moment—or maybe an hour—he drew back. Underneath the tan, his face was pale, his blue eyes dazed. He was breathing heavily, and his fingers, where they touched her jaw, were trembling. For a long time, he simply stared down at her. Then he gave a shake of his head as if trying to clear it. “Don’t tempt me, Cassie,” he repeated, but this time it wasn’t a warning. It was a plea.
A prayer.
It was hot in the classroom, in spite of the open windows and door. Reid sat on the floor, half of an old Sunday Times-Picayune spread in front of him and the ugly little half-round table standing at an angle. He had stripped the top and bottom shelves down to bare wood and decided that it wasn’t so ugly after all. Now he was using a giant scrub pad to remove the heavy layers of stain and paint from the ornately curved legs and the fluted shelf edges and making very slow progress.
It didn’t help that the work was tedious and allowed his mind to wander. It sure as hell didn’t help that it kept wandering to Cassie, only a few yards away, barefoot and bent in front of the old dresser with her full skirt tucked tightly between her legs to control the excess fabric. He wondered if she realized that her position pulled the skirt taut across her bottom or that the top of the dress gapped enough around the oversize armholes to offer a glimpse of the swell of her breast. Just a glimpse. Too much. Not enough.
He wanted to see more. To touch. Kiss. Stroke. Claim. Hell, yes, he wanted to claim her, every inch of her, for his own.
He’d spent the first hour in here working to convince himself that he regretted the kiss and the next trying to persuade himself that it had been enough, that it had satisfied her curiosity and his hunger. Then they’d gone to lunch in Karen’s backyard, sharing the picnic bench once again, and Cassie had touched him, bumped him and leaned against him often enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. He had finally admitted that the kiss had just been the beginning. Unless he discovered some tremendous new strength, there would be more. No matter how wrong, no matter how selfish on his part, there would be more.
God help him, he might not survive it, but as long as she did...
Realizing that he’d quit work completely and was instead simply watching her, he forced his attention back to the table. He had volunteered to do this piece instead of the bookcase, which she had stripped completely in the time it had taken him to do half of one turned leg. He’d completed the leg while she had sprayed the first coat of pale green paint over the wicker dresser. She had completed the first coat of white enamel on the bookcase and was now finishing the dresser’s second coat of green, while he still worked on his one piece.
A dozen feet away, she laid the spray can on the floor, then bent lower, until her palms were spread flat on the tile. It was a backache-easing, bone-popping sort of stretch, the kind he indulged in after a long morning under the hood of a car, but he had damn sure never looked that good doing it. She straightened slowly, unfolding, rising vertebra by vertebra to her full height, then came to crouch across the papers from him.
“You know, if I’d had to do it myself, I probably would have painted it,” she announced as she watched him work. “I would have just given it a light sanding, then added one more layer of paint.”
He shook his head. “You would have had to strip it. There are at least eight or ten coats on here already.”
“I wouldn’t have the patience to do it right.” She blew out
an exaggerated sigh. “Want something cold?”
“Yeah. How about a bucket of ice water over my head?” His face was damp with sweat, and so was his T-shirt. His jeans were sticky and uncomfortable, and, like Cassie, he’d kicked his shoes off a long time ago.
“At least you could take your shirt off.” She used the hem of her dress to blot her forehead.
“So could you,” he retorted without thinking. Then, hearing his own words, he looked up sharply and found her giving him a speculative look. Deciding to bluff it out, he shrugged. “It’s private back here. If you didn’t tell, no one would know.”
“You would know.” Her voice was soft, full of promise, and made the muscles in his belly clench. It stirred to life his desire, so recently settled, so long unsatisfied, so impossible to ignore.
“Yeah,” he agreed, his mouth dry. “But I wouldn’t tell, either.”
“It would be our secret, huh?” Somehow her voice managed to get even softer, less substantial, breathless. He was pretty damn breathless himself. “Of course, you make this suggestion knowing full well that this is a one-piece dress, that I don’t have a shirt to take off.”
“And knowing full well that if you did, you wouldn’t.” Not that he knew any such thing. Again he was simply bluffing, hoping that, since she was young and virginal, modesty would prevail.
She gracefully got to her feet and started toward the back of the room. She’d gone only a few feet past him when abruptly she came back, placed both hands on his shoulders from behind and bent until her mouth was only a breath above his ear. “Someday, Reid,” she whispered, “I’m going to surprise you.”
He waited until her footsteps faded into the storeroom before murmuring to himself, “You do every day, darlin’. Every day.”
She returned a short while later with two cups of tepid tap water. He would prefer the bucket of ice water—or seeing her half-naked—but this was better than nothing. He had learned in his life to be grateful for anything more than nothing.
“You’re good with your hands.”
The familiar words made him stiffen. Jamey had made the same observation one day last fall. The surprise accompanying his words had made it clear that he’d never expected his only son to amount to anything, to ever display any talent that wasn’t illegal, to ever do anything for good rather than harm. “I can draw, paint, use a hammer or handle a shovel. I can reglaze a window, refinish a table, build walls or tear them down.” Out of habit, his voice turned sarcastic. “I can also pick any lock on this street, hot-wire any car or disarm your basic burglar alarm. I can break into a place and clean it out while the owners are asleep in their bed, and I know the fences who will offer the best prices for the merchandise. Anything you want—illegal drugs, illegal weapons, somebody killed—I can send you to the best person for the job. For more than a few of your standard crimes, I am the best person for the job.”
“Why, you can do just about anything.” Her tone was sarcastic, too, and mocking. “You show particular talent for building those walls, don’t you?”
Uneasily he glanced at her. She was giving him the sort of look he imagined she must give her students when they misbehaved, a chiding, chastening look designed to make him feel about two inches tall.
“It was a simple compliment, Reid. You could have said thanks. You didn’t have to say anything at all.” She folded her hands primly in her lap. “So...who would I go to down here for drugs?”
“Tommy Murphy or one of the Rodriguez brothers.”
“What about weapons?”
“Vinnie Marino, Trevor Morgan or the Rodriguezes.” He gave her a narrow, warning look. “Of course, you go asking something of Vinnie Marino, he’s going to want a lot more than money in payment.”
She didn’t look as if the idea bothered her in the least. “And what do you want in payment for your favors?”
His skin heated, as if, in a heartbeat, the temperature in the room had gone from springtime-warm to blasting-furnace hot. How many favors would he have to do to earn the payment he had in mind? Thousands of them? Millions? “I don’t want anything,” he mumbled, focusing on the table once more.
“Then you’re a much more generous person than I am.” Returning to their earlier conversation, she asked, “Where did you learn about tools and cars and things?”
He shrugged. “I just learned.” He couldn’t say how exactly. From time to time in Atlanta, he had helped one neighbor or another work on their cars. He’d had a friend or two with cars of their own, and he’d read a lot. The rest just seemed to come naturally.
“Oh, I see. We all have an engine-repair gene in our makeup, and yours got magically activated—probably because you’re a man—white mine is defective—probably because I’m a woman—which is why I don’t notice little things like oil lights, loose belts or low tires.”
“Makes as much sense as your version of why wisteria grows on oaks.”
She raised her head high. “I suppose you have a better theory.”
“Maybe it’s an epiphyte, like Spanish moss. It doesn’t take anything away from the host, but it doesn’t contribute anything, either. It just needs a place to grow. Or maybe it’s a parasite. Maybe it’s sucking the life right out of that oak, wrapping its woody little tendrils around it until the oak can’t breathe or get any sunlight, suffocating it until finally it dies.” He’d intended that last part to be a little goofy, like her story, but she wasn’t amused, and too late, with a glance at her purple dress, he realized why. Only an idiot would fail to recognize the similarities between them and her silly tale. Apparently he was an idiot, because he’d just twisted it to make the wisteria lady—Cassie—a life-stealing parasite destroying the tree—him—with her very presence. He muttered a heartfelt “Damn.”
For a moment, she sat very still, not saying anything, not doing anything. Then, her voice cool, her tone distant, she spoke. “Epiphyte. Now, there’s. a word I haven’t heard since high-school science.”
“I came across it somewhere,” he mumbled. Bending closer to the table, he traded the stripping pad for a toothbrush and worked to loosen a particularly stubborn bit of paint. When it finally came loose, he glanced up but didn’t make eye contact with her. “I didn’t mean...” He didn’t go on, and she didn’t prompt him. With another curse, he tried to focus all of his attention on the table.
After a moment, she returned to work, too, cleaning the paintbrushes, making sure the lids were secure, then scrubbing bits of green-and-white paint from her hands and arms with a paper towel dipped in mineral spirits. It was the same way they’d spent the past several hours—mostly working, talking a little—but the nature of it had changed. Before, the silence had been easy, companionable. Now it was stiff, stilted. He felt guilty, and she...she probably wondered why she even bothered. She could find plenty of men to spend her free time with, easier men, men more like her, more like everyone’s expectations of her. If she gave any hint that she was interested, they would no doubt line up at her door, willing to accept whatever she offered and be grateful for whatever it was.
Intensely hating the idea of Cassie with another man, he finished the last leg with more energy than it required, wiped the entire piece down with mineral spirits, then got to his feet. “Now what?”
She was standing ten feet in front of the dresser, arms folded across her chest, studying it. After a moment, she glanced at him as if his question had just registered and shrugged. “I think that’s enough for today. I’ll leave everything here for now, then put it in the back room this evening. I’ll work on it again tomorrow night.”
Not tomorrow after school, when he would be free to help, but tomorrow night, when he would be tending bar at O’Shea’s. After the stupid remarks he’d made, she might never again ask him to help with anything. She certainly wouldn’t want his advice, but he offered it anyway. “You can’t stay over here alone at night.” Serenity was safer these days, but just like before, you could never predict when or where violence would occur
. All it would take was for Vinnie Marino, Trevor Morgan or one of their buddies to see Cassie alone at the school—not at all difficult with the lights on and the windows and door open. They never missed the chance to harass a vulnerable woman. If they had even the vaguest idea of his interest in this particular woman, harass wouldn’t begin to cover what they might do.
“It won’t be a problem. Karen and Jamey will be only thirty feet away.” The words were accompanied by a look that was cool and dismissive, a nonverbal reminder that he was in no position to be granted a say in what she did. Well, damn it, he did have a say. Maybe he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he had no right to it, but he was going to say it anyway.
“It’s a hell of a lot farther than thirty feet to their quarters at the other end of the house. From the living room, Jamey and Karen can’t see the carriage house and, unless all the windows are open and everything is quiet inside, they can’t hear anything, either. Vinnie and his friends are good at what they do. Their victims rarely get the chance to scream even once. So it is a problem—one that I’ll discuss with Jamey.”
The faint acknowledgment of defeat entered her eyes before she looked away. Jamey might not refuse flat out to let her work in the school at night, but he would insist on being there with her, which would mean sacrificing the few hours he had free to spend with Karen. Cassie wouldn’t let him do that.
If she had lost this point, why didn’t he feel as if he’d won? Why did he feel like some selfish, mean-spirited bastard who had stolen her pleasure just for the fun of it?
He went to stand beside her, looking, as she still was, at the dresser. “It looks good.”
“Yes, it does.” After each coat of paint, she’d given it a few minutes to dry, then wiped it lightly with a cloth, removing just enough of the paint to let the white show through. It gave the piece the look of a wash, light and airy, well suited to the wicker’s weave. It would fit perfectly in her bedroom with the white bed and the sunny yellow walls. Now all she needed to complete the room was a chair, a big one that could be filled with pillows, that would be just the right place for reading, relaxing or just thinking.
The Taming Of Reid Donovan Page 12
