At the same time, they each spoke the other’s name. He’d been about to offer an apology, but he swallowed it and waited instead for her to go first.
“I appreciate your help. If I’d had to strip that table myself, it would have taken forever,” she said, awkward for the first time since he’d met her. “Now I’ll keep the promise I made last week. I won’t bother you anymore.”
“Honey, you bother me whether you’re standing right here in front of me asking favors or pretending that I don’t exist.”
Looking unhappy and regretful, she continued to stare past him to the dresser. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...” Then hopefully, “I can move. I can find another place down here. I can stay at Smith’s condo until—”
A few strands of her hair had worked free of the braid and curled damply beneath her ear. Reaching out, barely touching her, he lifted them, smoothed them behind her ear, then let his hand slide down to her shoulder, let his fingertips glide down her arm past her wrist, wrapping lightly, just enough to catch, around her hand. “Do you honestly think a few buildings or a few miles will make a difference? It’s too late for that, Cassie. You could find a place on the moon, and you would still bother me. You would still be the only thing on my mind. You would still be the only woman I...” At last, good sense and self-preservation caught up with him, stopping the words before they escaped. The only woman I want. The only woman I fantasize about. The only woman, God help me, that I could need forever.
After a moment’s hesitation, she curled her fingers around his, not tightly, just enough so he could feel the pressure, then gave him a faintly wary look. “But you don’t want that. You don’t want to be bothered.”
He sighed softly. “I don’t know what I want.” But that wasn’t true. He wanted her. He just couldn’t convince himself that it was all right to have her. He couldn’t convince himself that it wasn’t desperately wrong, that it wouldn’t lead to more sorrow than he’d ever known, more sorrow than she ever should know.
She gave his hand a squeeze, then pulled hers free and stuck both hands deep in the pockets of her dress. “You figure it out, and when you do, let me know. Until then, I’ll keep my distance. I won’t speak to you. I won’t do anything to remind you that I’m around.” Turning, she walked to the door, switched off the fluorescent lights overhead, then waited, facing the street, for him to join her.
Leaning against a table, he pulled his sneakers on without untying them, then crossed to the door. She didn’t turn or give any indication that she knew he was behind her, not even when he made the second-biggest mistake of his life and slid his arms around her waist, pulling her body against his, followed by the biggest mistake: honesty, pure, harsh and merciless.
“I want you, Cassie. I want you so damn much I hurt with it. But I can’t give you anything. All my life, I’ve been told I’m no good, that I’m worthless, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t find any reason to not believe it. I’ve been in trouble with the cops since I was a kid. I don’t have any real relationship with my family. I’ve got two lousy part-time jobs that any idiot could do, but I’m damn lucky to have them because no one in his right mind would hire me. I don’t have any friends, and I’ve got a whole neighborhood full of enemies. Any way you look at it, I’m a loser, Cassie. It’s all I’ve ever been, and it’s all I ever will be. I’m the last thing you need in your life.”
She brought her hands up to his wrists and grasped them tightly. “What if I think you’re the only thing I need?”
“You’d be wrong.”
Releasing him, she twisted around to face him. She was smiling, one of those quiet little smiles that robbed him of his ability to reason. “I’m never wrong, Reid. Not about what I want. Not about what I need.”
“You could get hurt.” That was easier than saying it the other way. I could hurt you. No matter how he phrased it, though, the end result would be the same. She could suffer, and it would be his fault. It would be unforgivable and, possibly, unavoidable.
“Maybe. Life’s full of risks, Reid. Maybe we’ll have an affair and wind up as friends. Maybe it’ll end and you’ll hate me. Or maybe we’ll fall in love and live happily ever after. We’ll never know until we try.”
Her words brought to mind a conversation he’d had with Karen last summer. Someday, she had suggested, he might meet a woman, fall in love and discover that their lives weren’t complete without children. At the time, he’d thought she was crazy on all counts. He’d known too well that this world was no place for children—certainly not for his children. As for falling in love, hell, he’d had less personal experience with love than Cassie had had with sex.
But Cassie was suggesting that loving him was at least within the realm of possibility. Maybe she was crazy... or maybe she knew what she was talking about. Maybe someplace thoroughly hidden deep inside him there was something worth having, something worth loving. Maybe she could find it, and maybe she could teach him to find the same feelings within himself.
It was tempting. God help him, it was almost more than he could refuse. He’d lived a lifetime of never measuring up, of never being enough, of living alone and unwanted, and now she was offering to change all that. She was offering things he’d never believed he would have, things he had never believed he deserved, things he had never even let himself want. He’d known since he was a kid not to waste his time on impossible dreams. Now Cassie was saying that it was neither impossible nor a dream. All he had to do was take a chance. Face the risks.
And if she was wrong about needing him, about the possibility of loving him? If there was nothing for them but an affair—no love, no happily-ever-after, no future, no nothing? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d lost...though it would be the worst.
And if there was more? The possibility was too important, too dangerous, to consider.
Life’s full of risks, Reid. We’ll never know until we try.
With a sigh, he brushed his fingers lightly over her cheek. “You’ll regret this,” he warned.
“No, I won’t.” She sounded so confident, so sure of herself. He wished he shared her confidence, but he knew better. He’d made too many mistakes in his lifetime to kid himself about the enormity of this one. There was one very small chance that this could turn out well, and about a million tremendous chances that it would destroy him. Not very good odds.
But when had life ever given him very good odds?
Cassie closed the classroom door, locked it and started toward the street. Reid fell into step beside her, his jaw set, his expression troubled, his gaze distant. She could easily hate Jamey and Meghan for what they’d done to their son, but Jamey had carried his own blame and guilt for a long time. As for Meghan, Cassie had never laid eyes on the woman, but, yeah, she could hate her. If she was alive. If she hadn’t drunk or drugged herself into an early grave.
As they stopped outside O’Shea’s and Reid pulled out his keys to open the door, she suggested, “Let’s clean up and go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. We could play tourists in the Quarter or take my car and get out of town. We could go for a drive.”
With a shrug, he opened the door and waited for her to go in. “Okay.” That was all he said, and not with. a lot of enthusiasm. That was all right. She could be excited enough for both of them.
Upstairs he went into his apartment while she scrubbed the foul-smelling mineral spirits and paint from her hands and arms. Dipping a cloth in cool water, she grimaced at her reflection in the mirror. She hadn’t bothered with makeup this morning. Her face was damp and flushed, and her hair was working free of the braid and frizzing. She wasn’t a pretty sight. No wonder Reid had put his arms around her from behind, instead of face-to-face, there in the classroom.
But what counted was that he had done it. It was nothing less than a miracle.
She washed her face, brushed her hair back and secured it with a tortoiseshell clasp, then left the bathroom for her apartment. A
fter knocking at Reid’s open door and calling that the bathroom was free, she let herself into her apartment and quickly changed into khaki shorts and a white button-down shirt, both neatly tailored and pressed.
Leaving the apartment, she locked up once more, then sat down on the top step to wait. Only a moment later, he came out of the bathroom, his hair damp, his T-shirt from this morning wadded in one hand. She tried to swallow but couldn’t, tried to look away but wouldn’t. She had been half-teasing earlier when she’d recommended that he deal with the heat by taking off his shirt. If he’d done it then in those few steamy moments that had followed her suggestion, her virtue would be long lost. They would still be on the floor over there, doing all sorts of things that had never been taught in school.
“Give me a minute to change,” he said, coming toward her. If he noticed that she’d gone hot, wondered about her inability to move or recognized the appreciation that surely must be in her eyes, he gave no sign of it on his way into his apartment.
Finally she breathed, expelling the air that threatened to explode her lungs. It was perfectly all right to find the male form appealing. If men and women didn’t find each other physically attractive, where would the human race be? Still, she felt like a silly schoolgirl seeing her first devastatingly handsome, sinfully sexy, bare-chested man up close and personal. She was almost too giddy for words.
She—Cassandra Wade, described by all who knew her as overly mature, serious., calm, elegant, refined, cool, distant and aloof—was giddy. Now, there was something that didn’t happen every day.
Through the open door, she could hear sounds drifting out—drawers closing, the closet door squeaking, footsteps. She leaned back for a glimpse inside. What little she could see was depressing. Green walls, faded unevenly by the sun that came through the front windows. Gold drapes that looked like something her mother might have thrown away twenty years ago. A sofa as battered and lumpy as her own. One end table, one coffee table and a plain wooden floor in need of a little TLC.
It wasn’t the drabness she found depressing, though. It was the utter lack of personality. From her vantage point, she could see absolutely nothing that said Reid Donovan lived there, nothing that said anyone lived there. No books or magazines on the tables. No pictures on the wall. No cozy little pillows or throws. No knickknacks, keepsakes or souvenirs. No sign of his artwork anywhere. Nothing. It was about as homey as a ten-dollar-a-night motel room, as if his stay there was strictly temporary, as if he might be moving on tomorrow or the next day.
Those weren’t his plans. When she had asked him why he didn’t leave Serenity, he had made it clear that this was where he belonged. This was his home. So why didn’t the apartment look like it?
He came out of the bedroom and caught her looking. She responded with a smile as she used the banister to pull herself to her feet. “Ready?”
He simply nodded as he locked up. She led the way downstairs, out the French doors and around Kathy’s House to her car. As they approached it, she offered him the keys. “You can drive.” When he looked blankly at them, she asked, “You do know how to drive, don’t you?” According to Jamey, he was one hell of a mechanic. A man couldn’t like cars enough to work on them on every day and not know how to drive.
“I can drive,” he acknowledged, still refusing the keys. “I went for my first drive when I was fourteen. Unfortunately my friends neglected to mention until the police pulled us over that the car was stolen.”
“Did they arrest you?”
He shook his head and circled around to the passenger side. “I outran them. Where I grew up, running wasn’t a sport. It was a part of survival. If you didn’t run fast enough, you didn’t live long enough. I was the fastest of them all.”
She opened the door and flipped the power lock, then faced him over the roof of the car. “And did you outlive them all?”
Without answering, he climbed into the car and fastened his seat belt. She followed suit in time to hear his sigh, heavy with sorrow. Was he thinking of all his friends who had died young? No doubt there had been a lot of them—too many. Everyone in her family had lost at least one friend to violence, to drugs and alcohol, drive-by shootings, assaults, robberies, suicides and cold-blooded murder. Everyone except her. Her parents had gotten her away from Serenity before she’d experienced such tragedy.
“A lot of them.” He sighed again, a cleansing sort of breath, as they pulled onto the street and drove toward Decatur and away from Serenity. “Anyway, the point of all this is, yes, I know how to drive, but I don’t have a license.” Glancing at her across the seat, he almost grinned. “Never had access to a car that wasn’t stolen, and I figured that taking the test in a stolen car wasn’t a particularly good idea.”
“You can use mine. You can go tomorrow after work.”
“I don’t need a license. I don’t have a car, and I’m not likely to ever have one.”
“You can use mine when you need to go somewhere.”
A week ago, his reaction would have been sullen. This afternoon he was amused. “And where do you think I’ll be going?”
“Well, let’s see... Last weekend you went to lunch downtown. Yesterday you went to Smith’s condo, to my parents’ house and that great little restaurant, and today here you are, just going for a drive.” After stopping for an intersection, she glanced to her left and straight ahead before turning right. “Who knows, Reid, you just might discover that there’s a whole world outside Serenity.”
He turned his head to gaze at the scenery outside the window. “Honey, I’ve known that for a long time. It’s just not very friendly to people like me.”
On that note, he fell silent, and she let him stay that way. She turned on the radio, set to her favorite station, and focusedon driving, following a meandering trail that led to a dirt road running alongside Lake Pontchartrain. Finally she parked the car, got out and went to stand in front of it.
After a moment, Reid joined her. “You come here often?” There was a cynical note in his voice as he glanced around.
There wasn’t much to see, she acknowledged—the lake in front of them, the interstate some distance behind them, a few fishing boats on the water. There were places along the lake that were truly pretty, but this wasn’t one of them. This was simply a place to come, look at the water, listen to it lap against the shore and relax.
“Did you know the lake covers over six hundred square miles?”
He leaned back against the hood and stretched his legs out in front. Long legs, she noted. Being close to five-ten, she had a fine appreciation for men with long legs. “And it’s only about sixteen feet at its deepest.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Not the best place for dumping bodies.”
She mimicked his position, elbowing him in the ribs as she settled in. “You haven’t dumped any bodies.”
“No, I haven’t,” he admitted. Pushing away from the car, his arm brushing hers as he moved, he walked a few yards away to the water’s edge. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Maybe so I could have my wicked way with you.”
“You’re a virgin. What could you know about being wicked?”
She studied him for a moment, listening to his words in her mind. Was he teasing? Merely making conversation? Or maybe issuing a challenge? Reid didn’t tease, and he probably wouldn’t challenge her for fear that she would take him up on it, would walk across the few feet that separated them, wrap herself around him and prove once and for all that virginal was not synonymous with ignorant. While she might not have experienced much—never anything like his kiss this morning—she wasn’t totally oblivious to the things that went on between a man and a woman. For example, she knew that if she got him aroused, he would take care of the rest. He would teach her the rest.
Slowly she straightened, and the look in his eyes grew wary. Underneath the apprehension, though, there was also anticipation. Interest. The same desire she’d seen this morning in the instant before he’d kissed her and, yes, the same r
egret.
She walked toward him, and he took an involuntary step back. When she got close, though, she didn’t wrap her arms around his neck. She didn’t plaster her body to his the way Tanya had yesterday. She didn’t indulge in an indecent display of hunger and need for hot, hard, wild sex. Instead, she stood near but not near enough and answered his question. “I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know enough about being wicked. Guys are funny. Once they find out that you don’t intend to complete the act, either they think they can change your mind or they lose interest. Since I never wanted some hormonally influenced boy trying to force me into something I didn’t want, I never let things go far enough to make them expect more.”
Beside her he was still facing the car—still, she would bet, wearing that vaguely wary look. “What am I supposed to expect?” His voice wasn’t quite steady. It was husky and conjured up images of naked bodies in a shadowy room, of heat and hunger, enough need to make a strong man plead and enough satisfaction to make an emotionally reserved woman weep. It was the same voice that had crawled under her skin this morning in the arbor when he had warned her, pleaded with her. Don’t tempt me, Cassie. Don’t let me think I can do this. Don’t let me think you might want this. Don’t make me think you want...
What should he expect? There were so many answers she could give him. Affection, friendship, love. Desire, passion, sex. An affair, a relationship, commitment, marriage. He could expect what any man might expect from a new relationship. The possibilities were limitless. The potential was tremendous. A doomed affair, a broken heart, a long and happy marriage, a bitter divorce—they all started at the same place, with a man and a woman who felt something special for each other.
The Taming Of Reid Donovan Page 13
