“So…I got over there,” he continued slowly. “And they put me to work, pretty much on the kinds of projects you’d expect them to assign someone like me—rebuilding schools, trying to organize the old teachers, spending time as a sort of liaison with the townspeople. I carried a gun, but I never had a reason to aim it. There were incidents. Plenty. But I wasn’t really personally affected. I just did my thing, what I was getting the stripes for, what I really went there to do.…”
“Here,” she said firmly. “You need cherries on that sundae. And more marshmallow—”
But when she tried to grab his bowl, he hooked her wrist instead. They weren’t exactly done eating. They weren’t done with dishes, either. But for some unknown reason they went outside, sat on her back steps and sipped in the crisp spring night. The dogs were chasing around the bushes, happy to be out and free. Clouds whispered a promise of rain. He dropped his jacket on her shoulders and picked up his story, his tone still as even as a tailor’s hem.
“The local kids started coming around. Nothing odd about that. Kids always know when an adult honestly likes them, you know? And the kids wanted their schools back. So they started hanging with me. And I could speak some of the language, so I’d get them going. I’d teach them some English, they’d teach me some of their language. We talked about rock and roll, and games, and ideas, whatever they wanted.”
His jacket was cuddled around her shoulders, when all he had to warm him was a shirt, yet she was the one whose fingertips were chilled.
“So…there was a certain morning. It was hot. Over a hundred. Sun blazing, just like every other day. I’d started work early, gotten up before anyone else—God knows why, probably because I was nuts. Anyway, I’d turned around this corner, was picking up a box of supplies, when a kid came in the alley. A boy. Not even half-grown. Big, dark eyes. Beautiful eyes. I see the way he looks, and think he must have been sleeping in that alley, so my mind’s running ahead. I figure he’s orphaned, and then that he might be hurt, because he’s got that kind of deep, old hurt in his eyes.”
Mop and Duster came flying back to flop on his feet. His feet, not hers. Damn it, they knew.
“So I start talking to him, like I always do with kids, same tone, same smile. Bring an energy bar out of my pocket, offer it to him. I’m thinking what I’m going to do if he’s in as bad shape as I think he is, because I’m sure as hell not leaving him alone in that alley. I’m thinking, this is exactly what it’s all about. Not the guns. Not the bull. But this. Finding a way, a real way, to give a wounded kid a life.”
“Fox.” There was gravel in her throat now. Gravel in her heart. It came from looking at his face, the naked sadness in his eyes.
“He had the dirty bomb under his clothes. Did something to detonate it.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“I can’t explain the rest. Why I came home so messed up, so angry. I mean, obviously it was tragic and horrible. But it’s not as if I could have stopped it. I never actually saw him die, so it’s not like that specific memory could be part of the nightmares. I didn’t. I didn’t see much of anything—I have a real vague memory of being blown against the far wall and knocked out, but that’s it. I didn’t know anything else for hours. But when I did wake up…I woke up angry. Beside-myself angry. Mad enough to punch walls and cuss out anyone who tried to help me—”
“Fox.”
Finally he looked at her. “I haven’t told my family most of that. Didn’t want to. Hell, I don’t honestly know where all the rage came from. But that story better be a good enough explanation for you, red, because that’s all I’ve got. That’s what happened. There’s nothing else—oomph!”
Maybe he’d intended to say more, but she swooped on that man with the fury of an avenging angel. She knew he still had half-healed wounds and a half-dozen seriously sore spots. She knew it was stone chilly on the back porch steps. Most of all she knew that she’d never again intended for Fox to see her sensual side…but the damn man.
What was she supposed to do? Listen to that terrible hurt of his and do nothing? Listen to how badly he’d hurt for that child, so badly he couldn’t stop hurting himself, and pretend it was just a story she was hearing that didn’t affect her?
She kissed him and kept on kissing him, thinking he deserved every damn thing she could give him and then some. If he lost respect for her, then that was how the cookie crumbled. Sex was a way to show love, to give love. To pour on love. It was only one way, but at that very second, she needed to pour five tons of love on the damn man, and she didn’t have a zillion other options at her disposal. Sex was too darn handy not to use it for all it was worth.
Still kissing him, still teasing his tongue with hers, she pushed the jacket off her shoulders and then started to pull up her sweater. Both of them needed a second to suck in air, and it was that second when she yanked the sweater off her head and tossed it.
Not a great idea. Mop and Duster promptly took off with it and tore across the yard, but that was an oh-well. Fox’s eyes were open at that moment. Dark and deep and confused. He opened his mouth—so she shut it again.
Headlights suddenly glowed from the neighbor’s driveway—far enough away that they couldn’t really see much. Or maybe they could. She didn’t care. She didn’t unbutton his shirt because she’d have to kill him if he caught cold because of her. She went directly for the snap on his jeans.
He needed gentle treatment, she thought. He needed tenderness.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to get either.
At that instant she hated the kind of world that would hurt Fox that way. The kind of world where a child could die that way. It was infuriating and untenable and despairing and awful. She told him, in hot velvet kisses, in angry pressure-cooker kisses, in rubbed-in caresses and kneaded stroking. She told him, with her hands, sliding over skin, touching, owning, claiming every part of Fox she could love. She told him by closing her eyes and concentrating and emoting every ounce of love she could beg, borrow or conjure.
He hissed a swear word. She was pretty sure it was her name.
She gave him her fury…another gift she could offer through the sense of touch and sound and taste. She whispered kisses on him, closing his eyelids with the most precious touch, painting softness with more kisses down his throat. It wasn’t fury the way a man would express it, but it was a torrent of feeling all the same. It was all she knew how to do. When something was this unbearable, it was all she could do. There was no fixing his wounds, so all she could try to do was share them.
She whisked more kisses down his chest, over his shirt, down to the open vee of his zipper. My. He popped up faster than a kid for candy. She couldn’t make that memory disappear for him. Now, and maybe forever, she’d never make that mental picture disappear for herself, either. But she could slip her hands inside his jeans and slide that fabric down, down, down. He yelped when his bare, bony fanny connected with the cold boards of the deck.
“Is this any way to treat an invalid?” he demanded in a whisper.
“Don’t try to get out of this.”
“Are you out of your tree? I wouldn’t want to get out of this if my life depended on it. I’d just as soon we weren’t arrested for public exposure, though. At least until after.”
“We might be. But my neighbors aren’t kids. Don’t have kids.”
“Good,” he murmured, and then took his turn at sweeping her under. Most of her clothes had undergone major rearranging by then. Her sweater was completely gone. One bra strap seemed to be hanging off her shoulder. Her black slacks seemed to be hanging around her hips—but only for another second or so, because once Fox got motivated, he could have given courses in inspired action.
Yet there was suddenly a moment when he slowed everything down. He threaded his hands through her hair, just looking at her in the moonlight, and then tortured them both by tuning their channel to slow, lazy motion. He scraped his bearded cheek between her breasts, polished her nipples with his
tongue, took in each breast. Tenderly. Ardently. He offered a caress of tongue and teeth that pulled at every need she’d never known and made a girl-growl hiss from her throat.
“Oh, yeah, you,” he murmured. “Now. Now, Phoebe…”
She was doing the seducing, darn it, but somehow…somehow he was the one strapping her legs around him, probing and then diving in, then fitting the two of them tighter than satin Velcro. Moonbeams danced in front of her closed eyes. Sunshine seemed to shine from the inside of him to the inside of her. He started the ride…a wild, wild ride on the cold porch on their dark, dark night…and something loosened in her that had never been loosened before.
It was the rage, she thought. She’d never been angry like this.
That had to be it.
They both seemed to tip off the cliff at the same time. He let out a joyful yell that made her want to laugh…yet she felt the same exuberant burst of joy. Nothing was going to erase that terrible experience for him, she knew that. But for this moment—these moments—that sadness had been bearable. Love had a way of lifting and healing, she believed from the heart…which was why she simply had to offer him hers.
Eyes still closed, still breathing like a freight train, she kissed him and kissed him and kissed him. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. They started regaining their breath—and a cold whisk of midnight air made them both shiver…and smile at each other. A private smile that belonged to the two of them and no one else.
No one had ever smiled at her the way Fox did.
No one had ever made her feel the way Fox did.
He stroked her hair back. “You take my breath, red,” he whispered.
“And you take mine.”
“We’re going to catch our death.”
“I know. We need to go in—”
“And we will. But I just have to tell you…” He shook his head, still smiling, still looking at her with midnight-dark, loving eyes. “You’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever known. You’re my dream.”
Her smile died. She froze completely—inside and out.
Nine
F ox turned the corner. Just ahead was Lockwood’s restaurant, lit up brighter than the Taj Mahal. His brother Moose had never done anything halfway. You couldn’t get in the restaurant door without a tie. A kid in tux parked the cars. Even on a cool spring night like this, the outside garden was decked out with teensy lights and a golden fountain. Hell, the cheapest thing on the menu was $50 a plate.
Fox parked behind the building, next to his brother’s BMW. Thankfully there were back stairs, so he could sneak up to Moose’s place without being seen. He was wearing old, battered jeans and a USC sweatshirt from his college years—which was held together by threads.
He hadn’t played poker in over a year, and wouldn’t be now if Phoebe hadn’t put the idea of a night out in his brother’s head. Fox had to unearth his “lucky” clothes from the depths of his closet.
And he needed some luck, he thought as he clomped up the private back stairs. Not for poker. But with Phoebe.
He thought they’d turned a milestone the other night. Making love—my God, who could deny how powerfully they came together, who they became together? Even for a man who’d never wanted love, who didn’t believe he was in a position to offer love—or a life—Phoebe was forcing him to rethink everything.
If he couldn’t live without her, he obviously had to find a way to kick himself in the butt, completely heal and start a real life again.
It would seem he couldn’t live without her.
It would also seem that he couldn’t possibly live without making love to her—preferably every night, possibly more often, for the rest of their natural lives.
Only, she’d freaked after. He mentally replayed those moments after they’d made love. Yeah, he’d told her she was the sexiest woman alive. That didn’t seem like an insult, did it? I mean, for damn sure, he should have said she was the most beautiful, the most brilliant, the most wonderful woman in the world before he got to the sexy adjective. But God knew, he meant the compliment with love. He meant it with honesty. And he could have sworn Phoebe didn’t need flowery packaging to tell her something straight from his heart.
Besides, he’d known she had a little thing about thinking of herself as unsexy. But that was the point. Why he’d said it. Why he’d wanted to compliment her that way. Guys prayed to find a lover who was honestly, uninhibitedly hot for them, someone who fired up for the same things he fired up for. Yet no male with a brain really thought he’d ever find that. You worked at sex just like you worked on everything else.
Except with Phoebe. She was more than his dream. Every time they touched, she felt like his missing half. He’d reached heights with her he hadn’t known existed…and as far as he could tell, she had, too. Yet he’d made that comment, and suddenly she’d run inside on the excuse of their needing to warm up. Then she’d insisted his session time was up. He’d said, what the hell did that matter. She’d said, “Fergus, I thought you were only going to be here for two hours. I’ve got a baby scheduled to come over tonight. It’s not as if I knew we were going to make love.”
And that was the crux of the crisis. Not what she’d said. But that she’d called him Fergus instead of Fox.
She might as well have punched him in the stomach.
When he reached the top of the stairs at Moose’s place, he knocked once, then freely opened the door. “It’s just me,” he called out.
But he still couldn’t get his mind off Phoebe. He loved his brother, even loved to play poker, once upon a time. Just not tonight. He needed time alone. It wasn’t just that he was all riled up about Phoebe, but that he needed concentrated time to think about life. A job. The serious decisions looming imminently in his future.
Still, again his mind sneaked back to Phoebe with another itchy problem. He never had gotten an answer about what happened with her ex-fiancé. That had to be a major key, he figured, because hell, if it wasn’t a major key, he was in major trouble. She’d only committed to helping him for a month, and that month was up in a matter of days.
He knew, as sure as he knew he was allergic to clams, that once that month was over, she was out of there unless he found some way to stop her in her tracks.
“Moose? Where the hell are you?” he called out.
He assumed the poker table would be set up in the den. It always had been. But the den was as quiet as the kitchen, where Fox automatically opened the fridge and pulled out a beer.
The whole upstairs apartment was bigger than it looked, and Moose wasn’t one to deprive himself of creature comforts. The kitchen looked like an audition for appliance heaven, and the living room was fancied-up with a home theater, set-in bar, recessed lighting and a lit-up aquarium with exotic fish.
“Moose? Am I really the first one here?”
Past the leather and sleek technology center were a pair of bedrooms and baths, one on either side of the hall, and then came a long narrow sun room that Moose had always used for an office. Now, though, Fox saw the gaming table as he crossed the threshold. He opened his mouth to offer a greeting and instead closed it faster than a gulping fish.
Moose jerked to his feet. “Hey, Fox, didn’t hear you come in. You’re a little early—”
“I know, I—”
“Fox, you know Marjorie, don’t you? Marjorie White?”
“No. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” Fox stepped forward with his hand outstretched because his mom hadn’t raised any sons who didn’t know their manners. But in a single glance, he could see the gaming table had no cards on it, no drinks, no junk food. No one else was in the room but Moose and this woman.
And where he was dressed like a rag man and holding a long-necked bottle of beer, she was wearing what his mom called country club clothes. Stockings. Clunks of gold here and there. Blond hair sharply styled. Subtle makeup, little black dress, expensive perfume.
“Fergus, I’ve heard so much about you for years.”
/> “Well…I’m glad to meet you.” He said politely, and then shot a shocked and confused look at Moose.
“I thought you two hadn’t met each other before,” Moose said heartily. “Marjorie doesn’t teach, Fox. But she used to be married to Wild Curly Forster. Remember him? Linebacker, my class, not yours, but turned into the sharpest lawyer this side of Gold River.”
“Sure,” Fox said, who had never heard of the guy before.
“He died a few years ago. Car accident.”
“I’m sorry,” Fox said automatically.
“So you both know something about loss,” Moose said firmly.
“Say what?”
Marjorie intervened with a quiet little laugh. “Your big brother is springing this surprise on you, I realize. But we don’t have to make a big deal out of it, Fergus. He just thought you’d like some feminine company for a change. Let’s just have a drink and talk a bit, all right?”
“Sure,” Fox said, and again spared a glance at his brother. Murder was too good for him. Hell. Torture was too good for him. “I could have dressed differently, but I assumed I was coming for a poker game.”
Moose slapped him on the shoulder. “Marjorie could care less how you’re dressed. You two just put your feet up. Get to know each other. I put a couple DVDs in the machine, got some wine cooling. I’ve got to go check downstairs. We’re having a hell of a gig downstairs tonight, company party for Wolcott’s.”
“Moose, hold up—”
“I had the boys make up a tray of finger foods, so just pull it out when either of you are hungry—”
Marjorie hadn’t stopped looking at him, and now a miserable flush climbed her neck. “Fergus, I realize you weren’t told about this. I never liked the idea of blind dates, either. But I’d thought, from what your brother said…I mean, it’s not like I’m so hard up that I need to be set up.”
“Of course you don’t.” Hell. Hell. Hell. Her feelings were hurt. Fox could plainly see the flush, the trembling mouth, and thought he was going to strangle his brother, and enjoy doing it. He couldn’t fulfill that daydream quite that fast, though. “Marjorie, just sit down, all right? We’ll talk. I really didn’t mean to come across as…”
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