by Jennie Jones
He released her, and just as quickly captured her face, cupping it in his hands, his focus on her eyes. ‘I want you to need me because otherwise I don’t know what to do with the feelings I get every time I look at you.’
In less time than it took for a hare to run from the headlights of an oncoming car, Adele succumbed to the truth. She didn’t need his help, but she did want his strength. Not for fixing curtain rails and front gardens. For her—entirely for herself. Even if it was selfish or reckless, she wanted his body next to her, like this. She wanted to be close to him, held tightly, being warmed and given a chance to share needs that shouldn’t be a priority, but were. For both of them. They both wanted this.
‘Tom,’ she whispered, unable to ask him to stay and hold her forever but desperate to. She blinked at him.
‘Thank you,’ he said softly, as his arms enfolded her once more and he lowered his face to kiss her.
She’d been with a few men since Ali’s father, she’d even slept with one or two, but nobody had ever kissed her roughly and romantically like Tom. He showed her his need with his mouth, with his hands, with the heat emanating from his chest. She let him. Because there was strength in the way he held her, care in the way he opened her mouth with his, and deep comfort in the intimacy of exploring each other in this way and the stunning, heartburning way he had of peeling self-sufficiency and reserve from her.
Chapter Eight
‘We’re going to go at this easy.’
Adele’s arms were wound around his neck. Her mouth was tingling from his kisses. His big, hard-working attitude and total honesty had won her over and who was she to say she should care about what happened next? ‘We are?’ she asked. A kiss. Another kiss—that’s what she wanted to happen next.
‘Yes.’ He kissed her, his firm mouth open on hers, covering hers, teasing her. His heartbeat was solid and steady and the touch of his lips, so intimate, melted her. He pulled from her mouth slowly, tenderly. ‘There’ll be no pressure from me,’ he said. ‘I promise. No matter how much I want to beg you to let me make love to you.’
She smiled, the warmth inside her like silky ribbons, like curling butter pats. ‘I’m still not sure why I’ve done this,’ she told him.
‘Because I pressured you to.’ He grinned.
She nodded. ‘Yes, you did.’
‘And you wanted it too.’
She couldn’t answer because it was all too truthful, but she smiled and reached up to him this time.
When they’d finished the exploration of each other’s mouths with a deeply provocative kiss, he buried his head at the side of hers, holding her tightly. ‘Adele.’ His lips parted on her skin and he kissed her neck, sending shivers through her. ‘I just want to be with you. Whatever happens during or after, I just want to be with you.’
This wasn’t falling in love. This was recognising—and accepting—a little loving need from someone.
‘This is so bewildering, Tom.’
‘I know.’ He straightened and looked down into her face, his frown of concentration stimulating all the sensitive parts inside her, his eyes shining dark and dangerous, making her stomach flip. ‘But we will go easy, I promise you,’ he said. ‘So long as I can grab you now and again—probably more than you expect—and hold you and kiss you, then I’ll be reasonably satisfied.’ The desire in his dark blue eyes deepened. ‘Reasonably, but not totally.’
He made her smile, and he made her feel too. ‘No kissing in front of Ali.’ This wasn’t a lasting thing. It wasn’t a brief affair either, if what he was promising was true. He wasn’t going to pressure her into sleeping with him but Adele knew in her heart that she would. How could she not? She’d agreed to this kissing fling, or whatever it was they were about to start, because she wanted to be held and romanced by a man. By Tom. She wanted to share precious and private moments with him. If the way he used his mouth to kiss her was anything to go by, or the way his large hands cupped and stroked her body, then sleeping with him was going to be a phenomenal experience.
But not yet. She pushed from him, smiling at him. He let her go, his smile a reciprocal acknowledgement of possible phenomenal experiences.
Damn, she’d blushed. She pressed her hands to her cheeks and gave him a frown. ‘So how are we going to go about this?’
‘I want to spend all the time with you that I can, and as I also want to help Ali, I thought perhaps we could start taking her out.’
‘Where?’
‘Lots of places. The pub. We could go for dinner; kids are allowed in the restaurant.’
‘People will talk.’
‘Not if I ask Imelda to join us. She can be our chaperone. People will just think, “Oh, look, there are the Wades, being all welcoming and magnanimous”.’
Adele laughed. ‘A chaperone?’
He shrugged, his smile tilted to a saucy angle. ‘We’ll need one, believe me.’
‘I have to go to the café to talk to the owner about the possibility of using their back room for the historic society to showcase all their memorabilia.’
‘The new café is great. And if we start by taking Imelda with us, then move forwards to it only being us and Ali, there’ll be nothing to talk about. Everyone knows I won’t be staying in Dulili.’
She mentally pinched herself. ‘Everyone knows I won’t be staying.’ She knew it. So don’t let it worry you. There’s no point.
‘It would be great to get Ali out and about on a social level. She trails at my side when I have to go to town, if she’s not in school. But it’s not on any interaction level.’ Except with Imelda. The woman had gone out of her way to be helpful to Adele over the previous days, and with Ali. ‘I think Imelda might have … might have taken over from you. Because you were away,’ she added, looking up at him. ‘She’s been fantastic with Ali this week.’
‘One day Ali might like to let Imelda babysit for her,’ he said. ‘You know—if we find we need a bit of extra time together. Alone.’
Adele poked him in the chest. ‘One step at a time, big man.’
He grinned, but didn’t answer.
***
As soon as he was able to let Adele go, Tom kissed her swiftly—okay, his mouth lingered and the kiss was a lot longer than most people’s idea of swift—but who was going to blame him? He’d had all that dewy, soft elegance in his arms. He’d had his mouth planted on hers. He’d tasted her lips and he’d made her smile seductively. Plus, he’d had his hands on her skinny backside. Her little round bottom, fitting so neatly in his hands while her small breasts were pressed against his chest.
‘Can I pick up Ali from school?’ he asked. ‘I might as well,’ he added when she didn’t answer. ‘It’s not as though she wasn’t expecting me to come back.’
‘She hasn’t asked about you, Tom.’
‘She doesn’t ask much anyway, does she? Do you think she’ll be mad at me or something?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Tom loved the way she made her decisions. She’d chew on her lip, occasionally the tip of her thumb, her thoughts tumbling, visible on her face as her eyes focused on some internal wrangle about should she, shouldn’t she? But she made her choices fast. It wouldn’t be long now before she—and there it was. She’d made her choice, he could tell by the clearing of her features and the return of the dewy glow.
‘Okay,’ she said.
He smiled. She said it the way Ali said it, with the same determined voice, telling herself she’d made the right choice. She sounded trusting too. He liked that—he especially liked that.
‘Ali is coming out of her shell, Tom. Slowly, but she is. Cath told me she’d made some small responses in the classroom. And she talks to Imelda, when it’s just the two of them together.’
‘They’ve been together?’
‘Imelda brought Ali some plaster moulds, and she’s shown her how to make plaster-cast animals.’
‘She has?’
Adele took hold of his arms. ‘I don’t ex
pect more from you than what you’re able to give, Tom, but I want you to know that I’m placing my daughter in your care because … because she likes you. And I like you. I trust you with her, Tom.’
‘Thank you. Good job I like you both too, then, isn’t it?’
One more kiss. He bent and put as much charge into the quick kiss as he was able to without having his hands on her. Total jerk. Full-time idiot. Why the hell had he succumbed to some pathetic ego-bashing and left her? ‘I’ll let myself out. In case I can’t keep my hands off you at the door,’ he added, forcing himself to leave her side and make his way to the hall.
‘Okay.’ Her breathlessness and the shine in her eyes did more good for his ego than being top of the list for Australia’s sexiest bachelor—which is something that would never happen, but a guy could make stuff up in his head just as much as any woman. Being number one on Adele Devereux’s chart of guys was more than he’d imagined possible.
He opened the door, stepped outside and turned to her, purposefully catching her eye and holding her gaze. He smiled in a way that she couldn’t mistake for anything other than what it was.
She blushed and his heart flipped. Some sort of guy thing. Pride that he was able to make her turn alabaster pink.
‘I’m feeling a whole lot better than I did twenty minutes ago when I knocked on your door,’ he said, his smile hovering, refusing to leave.
She crinkled her eyes and tipped her chin in playful scolding.
He found the wherewithal to close the front door. He thanked whoever ran heaven for giving him the chance to make something better, then he headed for Imelda’s house.
He had twenty minutes before school came out. He hoped like hell the kid would see his sudden return as a good surprise. If not, he’d have to take the knock but he wasn’t about to give up. If there was one more thing he could do, it was going to be for Ali. And he was going to do his damnedest to ensure that kid got a chance to grow up normal, undamaged—or as little as was possible in this world—and happy.
Imelda was in the laundry, turning out cupboards that, as far as he could remember, hadn’t been cleaned out for years. Decades, more likely.
He picked up a plaster-cast mould and turned it in his hands. He was pretty sure she’d made him do stuff like this when he was a boy. This one was a dog. There were others spread on the tiled floor. ‘Was all this gear mine?’ he asked her.
She slammed a cupboard door closed. ‘Some of it.’
He looked around and, sure enough, apart from a few moulds that were obviously children’s the rest of the stuff looked professional. And old. Older than Tom. Older than his mother would be if she were alive. ‘Whose stuff is this?’
‘Mine.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since mind your own business.’
He put the dog mould down. ‘What’s eating you?’
She pushed past him, giving him the Imelda Eye. He remembered that from his youth too but these days he had a mind of his own.
‘You’ve been to your house, then?’ she asked, beginning a task of drying dishes lying on the draining board.
‘I’ve also been to Adele’s house. In case you were wondering.’
‘Took you long enough, didn’t it?’
‘To what?’
She didn’t answer and he didn’t need her to. He slid his hands into his jeans pockets. ‘I’m back now.’ He didn’t have to tell her what had happened in Canberra, as he’d called her every day. Scott hadn’t relented but he’d stayed silent when Tom explained to him how the financial side of the sale of the palace was going to work. Scott hadn’t even blinked. Tom had left it there; he figured there was no need to make the guy feel like a charity case. And anyway, Tom did assume responsibility for the accident. He was the boss. He’d seen what was happening to Scott, and he should have taken him out of the work environment and told him to get lost for a month and sort himself out.
‘I’m picking up the kid from school in fifteen minutes.’
‘So what is it you’re here for?’ she asked. ‘Not sure fifteen minutes is long enough for what you want.’
Tom sighed. He’d never fathomed what it was between them that made them able to understand each other with their barbed, offbeat conversations, but they did. ‘My mother,’ he said. ‘And how the hell did you know I wanted to ask about her?’
‘Because I started the subject. Before you got uppity about something to do with Adele and left.’
‘I’ve been in touch with you every day, Imelda.’
‘Doesn’t worry me what you do usually, but in this case you started something with Adele and you left it.’
‘And now I’m back!’
She stopped drying the dishes and flung the tea towel onto the draining board. ‘For how long?’
‘Don’t tell me you’re wanting me to stay in Dulili. Hell, Imelda, I’ve been gone fourteen years.’
‘And now you’ve got nothing to go away for, have you? So are you using us all as a stop-gap until your next big business venture kicks off?’
‘I’m staying because I like it here, and I like the two people who’ve just moved here—more than I like you at the moment, I might add—but when the time comes, I’ll be gone.’ Because that was a plan and he needed plans or else this whole business of losing Wade Rigging and fighting for the future of his now ex-employees would be a lifetime’s wasted effort and count for nothing.
‘I’ll need to start from scratch,’ he said, referring to his business. ‘That’s going to take years. I’ve got nothing to offer any woman until such time, and as that time is probably a decade away, I’ve no doubt I’ll be too old for any woman to want me.’ Which suited him fine. ‘So don’t take your intuition farther than it needs to run regarding me and my neighbour. There’s nothing going on. We’re just hanging together, appreciating each other. And it’s private, which means—not for public consumption.’
‘Quite a speech. Took you a lot of words to get to that last bit—when have I ever been a chatterbox?’
Tom pulled a chair from the table and sat. ‘My mother,’ he said. ‘Isn’t she the reason we’re arguing? So why don’t we get into the conversation neither of us want to get into?’
‘Why the sudden need to know about Katrina?’
‘Because, as you said, you mentioned her.’ He sighed heavily. ‘You’re being cagey, Imelda. What’s the intention with the houses? You’ve given two away and you’re wanting to do up the other four. Are you keeping yours? Or are you moving out of town too?’
‘Too late for me to move out of town, but I am moving out of a damaging frame of mind.’
Grief. That’s what she’d said to him when the subject of Katrina had first come up. ‘To rid myself of grief, once and for all.’
Imelda stepped from the sink and took a seat opposite him. The first thought that struck him was that they’d never shared the table before. Maybe for paperwork stuff, but not for meals. As a boy he ate while Imelda cooked something for the next day or attended to the ironing. She ate later, when she was ready, as she’d put it. Tom hadn’t sat with his grandfather, Samuel Wade, at mealtimes either although he’d always known that was because Imelda had engineered it that way. Every day, every week.
‘You’re like my father,’ she said. ‘Spitting image. Body and soul. If you’d been in any way like Samuel, I might have had trouble loving you.’
Tom studied her. She’d paused but not because she was thinking about what to say next. She’d tell him, in her own time. ‘I hated him,’ Tom stated. He didn’t need to wait for a response either. Imelda knew he’d loathed his grandfather. ‘I take it my mother hated him too?’ She must have, surely? From what Tom had gathered as a youngster, listening on the few occasions his grandfather had mentioned Tom’s mother, he’d hated her right back—out of spite.
‘She’s likely spitting on his grave from her place in heaven,’ Imelda said, her voice steady.
‘Why did she leave me?’ Little Ali had brought so man
y thoughts of his mother to the fore, and maybe Adele had too, in the way she interacted with her child. Somehow, the appearance of the Devereux girls in Dulili had also kicked something in Imelda’s conscience. Not that Tom had missed out on love as a kid, but Imelda wasn’t over-effusive in the affection department. He’d known he was cared for—body and soul—and that had been enough love for Tom.
He loved Imelda back in the same manner and by showing it with the same rough, off-hand affection. Usually by bickering, but they both enjoyed that. Maybe it was a way of breaking through the past for both of them. Or more correctly, ignoring the past.
‘She was sick, Tom. Can’t say that was wholly Samuel’s fault, but he didn’t help by disliking her from the day she was born. By constantly picking on her for not being good enough as she grew into a young woman. Not that he wanted anything more of her than to grow up and get out of his house. He’d wanted a son. I gave him a girl and he never forgave either of us.’
Hearing it spoken out loud put a pain in Tom’s chest. ‘That’s why he hated me too. I always thought it was simply because he was a pig, without feeling or decent thought for anybody, but it wasn’t only that, was it? It was because I was her son and she’d had me on the wrong side of the bed.’
‘You can call her by her name, Tom. I don’t expect you to think of her as mother but I do expect you to respect her. Her name was Katrina, and I loved her.’
‘I thought she must have …’ Pissed Imelda off, done something outrageous or been a nasty woman, maybe inheriting that trait from her father.
‘You thought wrong, but that’s my fault.’
‘So you’re going to tell me what happened?’
‘Yes.’
Dread seemed to fill him from his boots to his throat. ‘I don’t like the spurts of intuition I’m feeling here.’
‘It won’t be easy, true enough.’
He swung around and put his forearms on the table, interlocking his fingers.
Imelda seemed to stall then, looking away as she thought her thoughts. She glanced up at the wall, pulled herself together and looked at Tom. ‘It’s time you picked the young one up from school.’
