by Ruby Laska
Now what had made him say that?
“Oh, is that right?”
“She got time for that with her practice and all? ‘Course she is a smart one.”
If he’d been expecting an argument, he needn’t have worried. The three seemed to lose interest as they remembered their original mission and veered off in the direction of the giant truck.
“Nice meeting you,” Lawrence called over his shoulder. “We’re off to get some more ice. Save us a couple brews, hear?”
“I’ll do that,” Griff muttered, and began stalking with determination toward the house, glancing down often to avoid ruts or cow pies or whatever other hazards might occur on a farm.
Junior saw him coming. She was sitting on the porch rail with Amber Nehigh, who she’d known practically since birth. They were drinking from longneck bottles, balanced carefully on the rail with their backs against the columns, and they’d covered every bit of gossip except Junior’s love life, a topic most of her friends had learned to studiously avoid.
She knew it was Griff because of the way he walked, as though he was afraid the ground itself was about to open up and swallow him. Well, if she were wearing those shoes she might be worried too. They were athletic shoes only in the sense that they had pristine suede uppers stitched with a swoop, and complicated soles of some sort of manmade substance that faintly glowed in the dark. Somehow she doubted Griff wore them to work out in.
This was clearly the shoes’ first trip to the farm.
“Hey,” she called out. Talk and laughter and beer had made her voice a little throaty, and she flushed at the sound of it.
“So that’s him,” Amber said with interest.
“You heard.”
“Of course.”
“Hi,” Griff said, coming to a stop below them. The porch was about four feet off the ground and he stared up, his face illuminated in the moonlight, and raked his fingers carelessly through his hair. The stubborn chunk of hair fell right back in his eye and he didn’t bother with it.
“Hi. Griff Ross, this is Amber Nehigh. Amber, Griff’s here doing a book. I think he, I guess he’s going to take a room over at my place. For a few weeks.”
Amber shot her a deadly look and Junior knew she should have told Amber first. A pre-emptive strike, as it were. Better to have her version out there than let imaginations run wild.
“No kidding. Well, I heard there was a travel author here, and everyone’s been wondering who would want to read about us,” Amber said. She dangled a hand down and let Griff take it and give it a shake.
“So where’s your beer? Get your friend a beer, Junior. I ought to go find the kids, anyway. Lord knows what they’re getting themselves into.”
Amber leapt gracefully off the porch rail and disappeared into the house, leaving Junior alone with Griff.
“I guess I should invite you up,” she said. It had dawned on her that she really hadn’t given him a lot of preparation to come out here. She should have offered to bring him. Clearly it was a new setting for him.
“Or you could come down,” Griff said, smiling.
He had a good smile. A broad, uncomplicated, totally charming smile at odds with those expensive clothes and that wicked body. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? Of course, they hadn’t done a lot of talking before.
“You come up. I’ll take you around a little later and introduce you to everybody. But this way you can get out of helping fix dinner.”
Griff took the porch steps two at a time, and when he reached her he didn’t hesitate before kissing her, leaning in and brushing his lips across hers while his hand barely grazed his cheek.
Dang.
It meant nothing, no doubt, the way she used to hug women she barely knew when she lived in Chicago. Everyone acted so glad to see you there, but she always suspected no one cared as much as they seemed to.
Actually, she had hard evidence of that. In the form of all the guys who didn’t call back.
“Nice of you to come,” Junior said stiffly. The warmth of his kiss didn’t mean anything either. She was just hard up, and unfortunately last night didn’t really count, not in terms of calming that particular ache at least. She was definitely not going to start pinning any kind of romantic illusions on this one.
But that didn’t stop Griff from taking her elbow in a proprietary way that really should have bothered her a lot more than it did. It didn’t stop him from sweeping a few leaves off the porch swing before she sat down, and it didn’t stop him from taking up more than his half so that she had to sort of lean into him to fit.
And it didn’t stop him from starting the swing gently rocking, and draping his arm around her as though they sat out here every night of the week.
“Junior,” he said casually.
“Unnnh?”
“Is this going to be a problem for you? Me staying over at your place?”
“Why would it be a problem?”
“Uh,” Griff said delicately, hesitating. “I bumped into some friends of yours, Lawrence and Trent and some other little guy with a flat nose.”
“Oh.” Junior sighed heavily. Okay, her luck wasn’t running high. She’d known those characters all her life too. She’d played tag with them, gotten into childish fights with them and, regretfully, slept with each and every one of them at some time or other. Not to mention most of their friends.
“They’re all right,” she said, resignedly. “Why, what were they saying?”
“Um, it wasn’t what they were saying exactly, but, you know, the way they were saying it.”
“Look, Griff,” Junior said, straightening and pulling away from him. As good as it felt, as comfortable and safe and warm, she had no business in his lap like some dopey Hallmark card. “Folks here have a certain idea about me and I’m not about to say I don’t entirely deserve it. I’m sorry if it embarrasses you but I’m pretty much used to it and I just sort of try to ignore it.”
She felt his body stiffen beside her, heard him draw his breath in sharply.
“I don’t give a damn about my reputation,” he said tartly. “I just don’t like—I figure a woman deserves a certain amount of respect. Bottom line. Every woman, you know?”
“Yeah, well—” It was complicated. And she didn’t really feel like explaining. Not now, when it would be so easy to kind of forget all that and just enjoy the moon and this man. Forget that they had made love and that she was trying to have his baby, for that matter and just pretend they were two people, two normal people, on a date, in a swing, in a nice place.
She shrugged. “Thanks for caring,” she said simply, even though it sounded frankly stupid.
Griff responded by looping his fingers through a knot of her curls and gently twirling them around his fingers.
“You’re something else,” he said softly. “Red-head even in the dark. I don’t know if I’ve seen that before.”
“Really? You’ve seen a lot, then?”
Griff chuckled, and Junior shrugged off the little jab of jealousy. Of course he had. She’d seen the way Rosie simpered, the long, slow look that Amber had given him. And from what he’d reported, those three lugs had sensed it too, in their primitive he-beast sort of way.
Griff was a natural with women.
“I’ve seen a few things. Not a lot of red-heads, though. I usually…well, I usually don’t.”
“You like blonds.”
She said it like a fact, and she knew it was true. Because it was generally the blonds that ended up with a guy like him. Carefully cultivated blondes, shiny blondes, with tailored clothes and perfect makeup.
Griff shrugged. “The last woman I dated was a blond. But it’s been a while, really. I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy for—” Junior checked herself.
“Why, that strikes you as strange?” There was a challenge in his voice, and Junior realized that Griff was curious. That he wanted to know about her. That he wouldn’t come right out and ask.
“No, not at all. I haven
’t been, uh, with anybody for a long time. As I believe I mentioned.”
“There’s a lot of guys around here,” Griff said off-handedly, but Junior could detect the tension running like electric current in his voice. Something in her responded to him, igniting her own hot desire. He was jealous.
And she liked it.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“And you’re a, well, you’re a very beautiful woman,” Griff went on slowly. “If a rather unusual one.”
He had drawn her imperceptibly closer, and she could feel his breath on her cheek. She was close enough to kiss him, longed to kiss him, but for some reason what she really, really wanted was for him to kiss her first.
“What do you mean,” she breathed, “unusual?”
“What I mean is…” Griff said, but then he stopped. He tilted her chin with one finger, and regarded her with hungry eyes. And then Junior wasn’t sure if she gave up waiting on him or whether it was Griff who pulled her closer and took her lips with his own.
He seized on her desire, knew it somehow and melded it with his own and kissed her deeply, making her moan back in her throat and drawing her against him.
It was Griff who finally pulled away, because Junior would have kissed him forever. It was Griff who looked at her with confusion mixed with the hunger in his eyes.
“What I mean is I want you more than I’ve wanted any other woman. And yet you don’t even remember making love to me last night. What I mean is that every man in this damn town seems to know you better than I do, but for some reason I want to know everything there is about you.
“And finally, it’s an unusual experience for me to have a woman want me just to make a, you know, baby—” Griff’s voice broke off, but he took a deep breath and continued. “—when that’s the last thing in the world I ever went looking for. In short, it’s an unusual situation.”
Junior drew back, too, so that she reclaimed her own tiny part of the swing, and looked at him.
“You said woman,” she said. “You said I was an unusual woman, and now you’re saying it’s an unusual situation.”
“So I did,” Griff said. “I guess I don’t know what I mean. Junior. Junior-I-don’t-even-know-what-your-real-name-is, Junior, you confuse me. I want you. I don’t want to want you. I think it’s a very bad idea to want you.”
He didn’t know the half of it, it was clear. The bad idea was for her to want him. This was supposed to be a simple, clean, wham-bam arrangement. Thank you, sir, and have a nice life. How had they come to be sitting here devouring each other with their eyes like a pair of teenagers?
“Junior is my real name,” she finally sighed.
Griff reached for her fingers, twined them in his own, and suddenly it was a little more okay. It was nice, sitting here. She could hear the revelers in the back yard, and now and then a couple of kids would tear shrieking across the front lawn in some game of chase, but they were alone in the dark shadow of the porch.
“Come on. I know this is a backwards kind of place, and all, but the other women have normal, I mean at least faintly normal, names.”
“My dad wanted a Junior,” she said, smiling at the memory. “But one after another the boys were born and they were all the spitting image of my mom. She was beautiful,” she added a little wistfully.
Griff’s heart lurched a bit. It was inconceivable to him that Junior didn’t understand her stark, shocking beauty, it was that obvious, but maybe not enough people had bothered to point it out to her.
“So they kept waiting, thinking the next one would look like dad, you know, with the red hair and skinny and all that. And, well, number four was me and there I was, carrot top from the get-go, and they say I hollered the minute I saw Dad and he said ‘This is the one’ and my mom’s not exactly a pushover but she knows to get out of the way when he’s got his mind set on something. My middle name is Annabel, by the way. That was mom’s doing.”
“Annabel,” Griff said, turning it over. Ridiculous.
“But if you tell anyone I’ll kill you.”
“Right. I, um, feel about the same way about my own middle name.”
“Really? What is it?”
But Griff didn’t really have the heart to conjure up memories of Maggie Goldman and so instead he kissed her again, and this time he didn’t stop, but just pulled Junior onto his lap where she fit rather perfectly.
Junior slipped in between the circle of revelers, and crossed in front of the bonfire.
She found Taylor and her new husband sitting on a bench that had been pulled up near the fire. Someone had found a pair of white T-shirts that were printed with the words “BRIDE” and “GROOM” in big black letters. Junior sat down next to them and smiled.
“You two sure know how to shake up a town,” she said, and hugged Taylor affectionately.
“This is Raoul,” the girl said and it was clear that the pair was enjoying their young marriage. “He’s real sweet.”
The young man shook her hand earnestly, grinning.
“Well, thanks for providing us all with a reason to party,” Junior said. “I think we’re—I’m—going to get going. It’s late.”
“Sure,” Taylor said. As Junior stood to go, she added, “You know, I’m not the only one that knows how to shake up a place.”
Junior colored and froze.
“Uh, what?”
“Nothing. Just say hi to your guy. Maybe next time I’ll get to meet him.”
“Oh, Taylor, I’m sorry, I just didn’t—”
Taylor dismissed her apology with a wave of her hand and a big grin. “Just make sure he sticks around long enough that I get a chance.”
“They look happy,” Griff said as she re-joined him outside the noisy circle. He slipped her hand into his as they headed out into the darkness, moonlight barely outlining the cars parked in the field. If anything, there were more cars now than earlier, even though it was nearly midnight.
“They are happy. This is a happy place,” Junior said.
“For you, too, Junior? Have you really been content here? Are you now?”
It wasn’t the sort of question Junior felt like answering. It wasn’t even the sort of thing she wanted to hear, because then it would make her think, and thinking would make her question, and really, truly, it was much easier not to. Which is what she would have kept doing if this whole horrible business with the doctor hadn’t changed everything and set her life upside down.
Of course, if all that hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t be here with Griff.
And being with Griff was becoming increasingly hard to resist.
“I’m happy, I’m content, really,” she said. And for the moment it was true.
He squeezed her hand and, despite his earlier performance, managed to guide her quite ably to his rental car, where he opened the passenger door and helped her duck inside.
“You didn’t ask me if I drove,” she accused, smiling up at him before he shut the door.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”
“But what if I had?”
“You didn’t.” He shut the door gently, and a moment later slid in the driver’s seat. Before he eased the car out of the field into the night, he turned to her and trailed a thumb along the side of her face. “Because, see, you knew you were going home with me.”
This time when she slipped out of her dress, she saw how he looked at her and she drank it in deeply. This time she wasn’t going to miss anything.
She worried that she was too pale, too thin, too flat, but then his hands were on her and his touch was needful and tender and she saw that everything was just right.
And then she unbuttoned the first few buttons of his shirt and he made short work of the rest. His trousers followed and he reached for her, but she stopped him with an upraised palm.
“Let me look,” she whispered hoarsely.
He did. He smiled indulgently, turned to the left and the right, and then saw how her eyes widened and her lips parted and
he took her in his arms.
There had been a warning bell in his brain earlier, and he suspected this was wrong, but it was too late now. She made a little whimpering sound as he tugged the thick coil of her hair and exposed her long, pale neck, then trailed his lips along the sensitive skin.
He was ready this time, and he bent to enjoy her, to taste the freckled expanse from her throat down across her delicate collarbones and beyond.
Under his hands, his lips, Junior stirred, and made a noise that was pure enjoyment. It was half purr, half growl, and it made him hot. He wanted to hear it again.
He brushed a thumb against her nipple and got his wish.
Junior arched against him and slid her long legs slowly, sinuously into place, twined among his own, and hummed with pleasure. Griff’s blood pounded through his veins, the delicate friction of her body against him like silk, like melting butter.
“Junior,” he whispered. “This is, ah, different, this time.”
“Mmmmh,” she assented, then opened her eyes wide and smiled at him. “I’m actually all here to enjoy it this time. No first-date jitters, no bottle of champagne…”
And then she skimmed her fingers lightly down his back, down, down, and did something that made him forget all about the last time they’d made love.
“Wait,” he commanded hoarsely. “I’ll be right back.”
Reluctantly he pulled back from her and reached for the tangle of clothes on the floor. In his pants pocket he found the protection he was looking for and started ripping open the packet as he returned to her. The moonlight lit her body like a priceless statue, an artist’s tribute to a woman’s beauty, and he slid back next to her almost shaking with anticipation.
But her smile was gone.
“What are you doing,” she asked, her voice small.
Griff paused. “Protection,” he said.
“But…why? I mean, we already…”
There was hurt in her voice, and he hated it, wanted to comfort, to protect.
But he had to protect himself too.
“Junior.” He reached a hand to caress her face, but she didn’t respond to his touch, just kept looking at him, her eyes wide. “You know I don’t want to—I want to be safe.”
