Emmie laughed. Until this moment she’d never seen it from this perspective exactly.
His eyes were gold again. The angles of his cheeks softened, and his lips, those shapely, full, firm-looking Brad Pitt lips, opened in an unconscious smile. He wrapped one hard hand around her upper arm, tugging her forward, lifting her onto his lap. “I don’t think you’ve ever been typical in any way.”
He tucked her left arm between them and settled her right hand on his shoulder so that her arm was completely supported when he leaned her against his chest. “Shoulder okay?” he murmured. Instead of kissing her as she expected, with smooth strokes he molded her until she relaxed against him with her head on his shoulder.
Emmie nodded, her eyes suddenly hot and wet. Emmie had encountered his strength before. She’d seen the smooth confidence with which he moved her body when he needed to. No matter that she still wasn’t sure how much she trusted him-at some point her body had decided it trusted his. Pickett had told her repeatedly to become more aware of how she was being treated. He wasn’t dominating her as he’d done before when he’d buckled her seat belt. She couldn’t yield though until she understood… something.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
A soundless chuckled moved his diaphragm. “Holding you.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“Is that a good enough reason?”
“ Emmie. Stop trying to figure out the regulations for what’s happening between us.”
Was that what she was doing? From the first she’d been a little afraid of him, sensing he wasn’t a man who would be easily kept in his place. Time had proved her right. She hadn’t successfully managed him. At every point he had been doing what he wanted to, what he saw fit to do, and as she had expected, she hadn’t been the reason.
“And don’t ask me what is happening,” he said, apparently having read her mind. “All I know is I went looking for my father and found you. That’s enough for now.”
Enough for now. The words moved around in his mind as if he was deep in a forest, and they were echoes tossed from tree to tree, sometimes right beside him, sometimes impossibly distant. After a while they fragmented, became softer…
Something had changed. Something that defied every bit of her experience (albeit limited) with men. Despite his protests that he had pulled her in his lap because he wanted to hold her, Emmie had expected him to make love. She had waited, and waited, trying not to control what he was doing. But she did like to understand the goal, and his response indicated there wasn’t one, which wasn’t entirely satisfactory. And then-she wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to her-he had fallen asleep.
Draped across him as she was, the sensation of moving with his breath was almost like floating, and when he didn’t do anything… and didn’t do anything… she had been lulled into deeper and deeper relaxation. When eventually she had realized that his breath had become deep and regular and he might be asleep, she hadn’t known whether to laugh or to cry. She’d had plenty of experience with men who couldn’t get rid of her fast enough when they learned she wouldn’t put out, but if he could ignore the fact that she was there and go to sleep even with her on his lap, she was insignificant indeed.
On the other hand, she’d noticed how much of the smiling ease with which he approached life was in fact ironclad self-control. He was miles from the swaggering jocks with their sense of entitlement and unwillingness to take seriously anything that didn’t directly impact their own egos. She was a little ashamed of herself for ever having thought that of him. This afternoon she’d become aware that there was a price for the seeming ease with which he managed and mastered every situation. Maybe the bill had come due, and he was simply exhausted.
The arm under her was going numb, but she didn’t want to move lest she wake him. It was a small enough courtesy to give the man a few minutes of peace. She was mastering his lexicon of smiles, but she’d never seen his face in repose. He’d sighed deeply and expertly shifted her so that the pressure on her arm was relieved. She was disappointed a few minutes later when he removed the hand on her hip to look at his watch.
He opened his eyes. Outside the broad slats of the white plantation blinds, night had fallen. He must have dozed for a minute.
Funny, he couldn’t remember the last time he had dozed off, accidentally, without preparing himself for sleep first. He wasn’t good at going to sleep, period. He’d never gotten the hang of power-napping, as some guys could, sleeping for ten or fifteen minutes wherever they were, no matter how noisy or bright or uncomfortable.
He’d survived as a SEAL only because he required less sleep than most. Through meditation he could achieve profound relaxation that allowed his body to rest, while he remained alert. He lifted his left arm from where it rested on Emmie’s hip to check his watch. He’d only been out a few minutes. That he had done it while holding Emmie on his lap defied imagination.
“Are you awake now?” she asked.
“Um- hmm.” He felt ridiculously good, and when he put his hand back down, he felt even better. The flap in her skirt-the flap that had teased him and tantalized him all afternoon-had come open. His hand encountered the silky mesh of her hose. He was instantly as alert, as fully conscious, as he had ever been in his life. And as hard. But there were some particulars he needed to know first. “When’s your birthday?”
“February 16.” Suddenly, Emmie sat up straight. “Birthday! I forgot.”
“Whose birthday?”
“Tyler’s. That was Pickett on the phone. I’m supposed to ask you, instead of going out to dinner, would you be willing to go to Aunt Lilly Hale’s family reunion? It’s like a Christmas party she throws every year.”
“Tonight?” All the plans he had made for an intimate dinner to set the mood, a little wine, and then back to Emmie’s cottage, disappeared. He couldn’t think of much he wanted less than to make conversation with people he didn’t know in the huge formal rooms of Lilly Hale’s house. He wanted Emmie. Needing to have her was getting close to an obsession.
“Yes. She wants me to meet her there.” She looked at his face, which he knew wasn’t radiating joy. “Forget it. I’m sure a family party of people you don’t know doesn’t sound like a fun time. You don’t have to go.” She started to scoot of his lap. “I hope you’ll excuse me from dinner with you.”
“Wait a minute,” he anchored her hips in place. “Yeah, I’d rather have an evening alone with you-a chance for us to talk-yeah, talk, not the other four-letter word. But if this is what you want to do…”
“Usually, it wouldn’t be. But I’ve seen so little of Pickett lately. We’ve talked on the phone, but it isn’t the same.”
“This isn’t for Pickett, it’s for y
ou? You want to see her?” Emmie nodded. He gently helped her off his lap. “Stand up for a second. I need to get my cell phone. I left it in my jacket pocket.” He punched in numbers and in a distant part of the house, Emmie’s phone warbled. A look of confusion appeared between her brows. “Your phone is ringing,” he told her. “You left it in the bathroom.”
Chapter 25
Emmie padded in her stockinged feet through the kitchen and the bedroom. She had to turn on the light in the bathroom. The phone was on the lip of the tub.
What kind of game was Caleb playing now? She was asking for a sudden change in plans, and she’d been a little disappointed when Caleb wouldn’t go along, but not surprised. Blount had never wanted to do anything that was her idea-blowing her off for the faculty dinner wasn’t out of character-she should have expected it. And he’d sneered more than once at what he called her “country cousins.”
She and Pickett had sworn they would keep their friendship strong, and if that meant going off and leaving Caleb, she would.
“Hello,” she said.
“Is this Emmie?” Caleb enquired, for all the world as if he hadn’t expected she would answer her own phone.
Emmie swallowed a surprised laugh and played along. “Yes, it is.” Phone to her ear, she started back to the living room.
“This is, your friend, Caleb.”
“Yes, Caleb.” Emmie suppressed another giggle and added with dry understatement, “I had guessed it was you.”
“There’s a party at Miss Lilly Hale’s house tonight. I’d like to go, but I don’t have a date. I was wondering if you’d go with me?”
The sheer sweetness stopped her in the doorway to the living room. If he’d said, “Okay, I’ll go with you,” never in a million years would she have trusted that he was doing anything but placating her. His back was to her. He was touching items on her desk in one of the few aimless gestures she’d seen him make. “Yes,” she whispered past the yearning that threatened to close off her throat. “I’d love to.”
He must have known she was there, but he kept his back to her. “Do you want me to pick you up?”
Emmie thought they were done. Why was he carrying it further? “Pick me up? You’re standing in my living room.” She closed her phone. “Caleb, what is this about?”
He turned around, clipping the phone to his belt. “It’s called multitasking. We’ll go to the party. We’ll go because you want to see Pickett. But I want it to be perfectly clear- you’re going with me because I just asked you for a date, and you accepted. Even if you spend the whole evening talking to Pickett-this counts as our second date.”
“Sit tight.” Caleb pushed the gear lever into park and shut off the engine. “I’ll come around and get you.” It wasn’t a suggestion. She had asked for this. Put that man anywhere near a four-wheel drive vehicle, and every alpha trait he had came to the fore. He pressed the latch of her seat belt before she could reach it. In the glow of the delayed turn-off headlights, she thought she caught a trace of a smirk.
He opened her door.
At least a token protest was called for. “I’m perfectly capable of climbing down myself.”
“I know you are. Lean forward.” He grasped her waist. Emmie was used to the casual strength with which he picked her up, but he didn’t set her on her feet. Instead he pulled her flush with his body.
Her breasts brushed his chest as he slowly let her down.
“You’re using this as an excuse to cop a feel!”
“Right.”
“You’re taking advantage of me.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I thought you were doing the ‘man has to be in charge’ thing.”
He tugged one of her curls. “Think multitasking.” The corners of his Brad Pitt lips dug deeper into his cheeks. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Golden oblongs of light streamed the promise of welcome and warmth from every window of Aunt Lilly Hale’s house into December’s early dark. Emmie pulled her coat closer. Damp wind chased leaves across the sandy driveway. Because they were late, Caleb had to park almost at the highway.
He bent and put his lips to her ear. “Look.” He pointed to the edge of the field where a drainage ditch divided the field from the road. “Deer. Five of them.”
“Aunt Lilly Hale says that during hunting season they actually come onto her lawn, right up to the house, in daylight. They know no one will shoot that close to the house.”
One of the larger deer raised its head. In less than one second they vanished so completely it was difficult to believe they had been there.
Emmie slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were a little cool, the bones tiny. His eyes prickled. He had been the sexual aggressor, and yeah, aggressor was the right word. He’d gone after her without a lot of concern for the impact he would have on her life. She had always responded, but except for the beginning when she’d grabbed his arm and dragged him into the small office, she had never touched him first. An odd pride filled his chest that somewhere in this day she had given him this much trust.
Emmie led him around the house to a back door. “Nobody uses the front door.”
“What do you mean? Everybody used it at the breakfast.”
“That wasn’t a family gathering. That was social. Different rules.” Emmie led him up a short flight of brick steps and onto a screened porch. Without knocking, she opened a glass door decorated with a spray of pine boughs gathered with a large red bow.
They entered to cries of, “Hey, look who’s here,” and an olfactory blast of roasting turkey and sage, tangy cranberry, cinnamon, yeasty rolls, and an oddly refreshing resiny smell coming from pine boughs stuck everywhere. There was also the smell of a lot of people. American people.
Every place had a smell, and the people in a country also had a discreet, recognizable odor. He’d left Afghanistan months ago but he was still was surprised sometimes to smell a bunch of Americans in one place.
“Don’t get hung up on expectations,” he’d told trainees. “Once you’re inserted, it’s never the way you thought it would be, and even if you’ve been there before, it’s never the way it was.”
He knew better, but he’d fallen for his expectations.
He’d anticipated a low-key, decorous gathering. Not this. The kitchen was a surging mass of people, colors, sounds, and smells, and calls for consultation shouted above the noise of a mixer.
Underneath it all was the smell of the house. He remembered it from before. There was a certain smell all old houses had in common. Old wood, old wool, old dust-no matter how clean. This one had that smell. But he also thought it smelled like stability, lives lived to completion, and kindness, sweet and dark and rich and complex.
At the stove in conversation with other cooks, Miss Lilly Hale, a large poinsettia-printed apron over her sweater and slacks, heard the commoti
on and turned around. “Do-Lord, I’m so glad you’re here!” She held out her arms in clear expectation of a hug.
Do- Lord had one of those “where the hell am I?” moments. Everybody had them. They could be scary seconds of disorientation when waking up in a strange place. Or Zen moments in which the juxtaposition of the familiar into the unfamiliar produces an awakening when you suddenly find it remarkable that you are here. It could totally derail one’s focus, which usually wasn’t good. It could also make perception hyperclear. A person suddenly knew how remarkable, special, and singular this particular instant is.
Of all the things he’d ever done, hugging an old lady wasn’t one. He wasn’t sure what he should get hold of her by. He stepped closer, and her arms came around his middle and squeezed while he tried to reason where he could safely put his hands. Lilly Hale Sessoms was a substantial woman, so he was surprised at how little she felt, and how fragile. And peculiarly soft. Not flabby. But like some crucial binder that keeps flesh together was breaking down. He didn’t dare squeeze her. He settled for placing his hands lightly on her shoulder blades until she let go of him.
As she pulled away her gray curls brushed the underside of his chin, and his throat tightened around a strange lump. And the world settled back into ordinary reality.
After a few exchanges of ritual greeting phrases, Lilly Hale twinkled, so obviously sizing him up it was impossible to take offense, and said, “I expect you’re a very useful young man.”
Sealed with a promise Page 25
