by Arlene James
He didn’t seem in the least cheered. “We could have thrilled him,” he said. “We could have given him grandchildren.”
She didn’t pretend not to understand. “No, Ed, we couldn’t.”
He looked at her a long moment, then slowly nodded and stood, thumb and small finger massaging his temples as if he had a headache. “You just call if you need me. You know all the numbers.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that, but it’s going to be fine. The hard part’s over now, and it’s going to be fine.”
He looked at her as if memorizing her as she was at that moment, as if he expected some remarkable change to alter her before he saw her again. She smiled, and he turned away, dragging his feet toward the door. The baby burbled, calling Kendra’s attention down to her lap. She made sheep’s eyes at the little thing and tickled her under the chin while Edward made his exit. She looked up to find Parker smiling at them, his forearms folded against the edge of the table.
“You look good with her,” he said softly, “like you belong.”
She felt a drop of icy fear slide down her spine and instantly raised her barriers. “I should,” she said. “I’ve handled children of all ages and sizes throughout my career. That’s one of the reasons I’m here, isn’t it?”
He just looked at her and reached for the wineglass, leaning back from the edge of his chair. “One of the reasons.”
She kept her expression carefully neutral, weighing that answer with the memory of his arm draped possessively about her shoulders while they sat on her father’s sofa, the feel of his mouth on hers and the weight of his hand on the back of her head. She thought how happy her father had been to hear that she had married this man, how completely accepting of it he was. She thought how right it had felt to sit in her father’s living room as a married woman with this man at her side and his infant in her lap, and she wondered if she was sane, if Edward saw much more clearly than she realized, after all. She had given up Africa for this.
No, not given up, she promised herself, merely postponed. She would go to Africa in six months, the marriage annulled, the baby safely placed and cared for, her obligations to three good friends met in full. Her conscience would be clear, her heart light. She would even find a way to make it all right with her father and Edward. Everything would be fine if she just kept these things in mind.
She looked at Parker, lounging on the edge of his chair, his dark eyes holding her image in their black centers. He was devastatingly attractive, his hair waving away from his handsome face, long arms and legs bunched with muscles even in relaxation, soft shirt molding to the sleek, hard planes of his chest. She looked at him and congratulated herself for recognizing the danger there in that lean, hard body and sculpted face. She looked at him and knew this wasn’t going to be as easy as she wanted to believe.
“It’s time this little one and I put it to bed,” she said, lifting the baby in her arms as she stood. “Thanks for the dinner. Good night.”
He said nothing as she walked away, just smiled down into his wine as if he knew a secret he wasn’t about to tell.
She carried the baby back to the bedroom, changed her, zipped her into a sleeper and laid her on her side, patting her tiny back until the lids lowered over her eyes and her breathing deepened and evened. She was a good baby and so very beautiful with her black hair and eyes and ivory skin. Kendra smiled down at her, then tiptoed away to gather her things for the night. She shed the jeans and T-shirt she’d traded earlier for the pearl-white suit with the gold braid that she’d worn to be married in and slipped into a long nylon shirt with a simple V neck and short sleeves. She brushed out her hair, twisted it up and fastened it atop her head with a butterfly clip, then went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, wash her face and moisturize her skin. She padded back into the bedroom on bare feet, folded back the covers on the bed, and turned out the light. With a sigh, she slid between the sheets, piled both pillows together and settled down to sleep.
Ten minutes later, the door onto the gallery opened softly, casting a distorted rectangle of light onto the carpet and foot of her bed. Parker walked into the room and over to the crib, where he leaned his forearms on the rail and gazed down at the baby. He stood that way for a long time, smiling to himself and moving his gaze over the tiny form. Finally he leaned forward and placed a feather-light kiss on that dainty brow, then he straightened and turned away. A single step carried him to the bed. He turned and sank down onto the edge of it, the mattress pitching slightly beneath his weight. He stretched his arm across her and planted a hand upon the mattress near her hip, leaning slowly forward to kiss her cheek and nuzzle her with his nose.
“You smell wonderful,” he whispered, before drawing back a short space. “Sleep in tomorrow if you can, and I’ll see you about five in the afternoon. I’ll leave the office number next to the phone in the kitchen. It’s a private line. You can call if you want. Oh, and I’ll leave some money on the counter, too. Do whatever you want about dinner, okay?”
She nodded, and he reached up to release the butterfly clip holding her hair. It tumbled down, and he smoothed it away from her face, rubbing the silky strands between his fingers. He smiled and leaned forward again, kissing her gently on the mouth. Then he stood and looked down at her.
“Sleep well, and take care of my little girl for me—wife.” He turned and moved quietly from the room, taking the light with him.
As the door closed, Kendra let out her breath and lifted a hand to her chest. Her heart was racing so hard and fast that the whole room seemed to vibrate with it. She closed her eyes and tried not to feel his hands smoothing her hair away from her face, his lips on hers, the heat of his breath. “You smell wonderful,” he had said. She bit her knuckle and forbade herself the luxury of fantasy.
* * *
The baby woke Kendra twice in the night. The first time she slung on her bathrobe and stumbled into the kitchen to warm a bottle. The second time, she stumbled in her nightshirt, the bathrobe fallen in a forgotten heap beside the bed. She was dismayed the second time to find that the last diaper had leaked, soaking the infant from chubby knees to nonexistent waist and the bed sheet in a large circle beneath her. She propped the bottle long enough to get a dry pad beneath the baby and her clothing changed, then cuddled her close while Darla sucked down three ounces of milky formula, burped and dropped into a sound sleep. Kendra laid her in the center of her own bed while she stripped away the crib sheet and mattress pad, only to find that she had nothing with which to replace them.
She searched the bathroom, the dresser and the laundry room off the kitchen. She looked through the closet that opened onto the gallery and made a cursory check of the coat closet in the entry foyer before turning reluctantly toward the master suite. She tapped lightly at the door, waited and turned the knob, pushing the door open with infinite care. Six feet into the large chamber, she found herself standing in thick darkness, wondering where to look first. Mentally, she went over all the furnishings in the room: the entertainment center, the dresser, the wardrobe, the nightstands, the chairs, the chaise, the massive king-size water bed with its unique sleigh-style frame hinting obliquely at Egyptian influence. The contents of the dresser she knew well. The wardrobe then. The doors squeaked softly as she pulled them open.
“Ken’ra?”
She whirled, staring into the dark shape of the bed. She waited, but no other word came. She canted her head, taking stock. His voice had sounded heavy and thick, the syllables slurred and indistinct. Could he possibly have spoken in his sleep? She tiptoed closer to the bed, bending forward at the waist in an attempt to discern whether or not he slept or merely waited. He sighed and shifted slightly. Sleeping, she thought, and bit her lip, wondering if she should wake him or continue searching in the black shadows. He mumbled something unintelligible, and she decided to wake him. Moving about the room while he muttered in his sleep smacked too much of voyeurism for comfort.
She whispered his name, but he made no respon
se. She spoke a bit louder, wanting to penetrate his slumber but not startle him out of it. He rolled onto his side, facing her. “Hmmmm?”
“I need sheets for the crib. The baby wet—”
He rubbed a hand drunkenly over his nose. “Hmmmmm?”
“Sheets for the crib.”
Nothing.
She sighed in exasperation and reached far forward to nudge his shoulder. He rolled over onto his back, his hands coming up to fasten onto her arms. Effortlessly, he pulled her to him. Her thighs hit the high, heavy frame of the bed, and she toppled over on top of him, knocking the breath from her lungs in a near silent whoosh as the bed dipped and rocked upward again. He slid his arms around her, one across her shoulders, the other against the small of her back.
“Come here, honey,” he muttered, shifting his hips beneath her. His breath was hot against her temple, his chest hard beneath her breasts, the long lump of his sex pressed intimately into the softness of her belly. The bed undulated beneath them, and she gasped. He sleepily followed the sound to her mouth, sliding his tongue inside and sucking lazily at her parted lips. Of its own accord, her body relaxed, warming to the erotic pulse of his as they rode the gentle swell of the water bed. His hand slid down to cup her buttocks, pulling her higher as he thrust against her. She felt the hard length of him like a jolt of white-hot electricity through the cotton sheet and her nightshirt. Instinctively, she recoiled, recognizing the danger and her own vulnerability in a crystalline burst of clarity. She pushed up onto her knees, one hand planted in his midsection just above his navel. The bed roiled, nearly throwing her down atop him again. He doubled up sharply, impelled by the weight behind that hand in his midsection and effectively threw her off.
“What—” He levered his upper body weight onto one arm and spread his legs in an effort to stabilize the bed, his other hand pushing into his hair. “Kendra?”
She scrambled off the bed, knocking her knee painfully on the frame in the process. “Sheets!” she gasped. “Crib sheets!”
“Sheets?” he repeated dumbly.
“For the crib, dammit! I need sheets for the crib!”
She could see him thinking as he lay there on the gently undulating bed, his arm bent beneath him. She knew the moment he realized the condition of his body and the reason for it, the moment he found an answer for her.
He pushed his arm from beneath him and lay back on the bed. “Bottom drawer.” He pointed toward the opened doors of the wardrobe. “Front left corner.”
He would know exactly where they were. She whirled and stalked to the cabinet, fell down on her throbbing knee, yanked the drawer out and grabbed the neatly folded square from the front left corner. She shoved the drawer closed and leapt up to her feet, heading for the doorway.
He went up on his elbow again. “Kendra?”
She paused, not daring to turn back. “Hmm?”
“What happened?”
She deliberately misunderstood him. “The baby wet the bed.”
Silence, and then he said, “Oh.”
She nearly collapsed with relief. “Sorry-I-woke-you-good-night.”
Safe in the baby’s room, she put her back to the door and pumped calming oxygen into her lungs.
What happened?
What had happened? She shook her head. Nothing—except she’d felt him hard and ready beneath her, and her treacherous mind had whispered, “Husband,” and her body had almost believed it. God help her if her heart hadn’t believed, too, for an instant. And for an instant, she had been his, wanting so badly to have him buried inside her, wanting so badly to make pretense real. When had she started wanting him? When had she not wanted him? Wild, sexy, provocative, arrogant Parker, who had had so many women wake him from a sound sleep that he automatically started to make love by rote when the opportunity presented itself. Had she always wanted him in some dark, secret part of her, always been drawn by the lure of forbidden fruit, the excitement of that dangerous eroticism? She knew she had, but she knew, too, how utterly foolish it would be to fall victim to that allure. She lay awake well into the morning, trying to ignore the heat that smoldered deep inside her body and kept turning her mind to fantasies of what it might have been like.
* * *
Kendra was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted when Parker crept into the room the next morning to take a look before he left for work. Darla, too, was slumbering contentedly—on her back, he noticed, though he clearly remembered Candace saying that infants should be put on their sides or stomachs to sleep. He shrugged, quite sure that Kendra knew what she was doing, and put it out of his mind. Though he wanted to, he didn’t kiss the baby, for fear that he’d wake her and put an end to Kendra’s rest. Kendra herself looked as if she could sleep through a small invasion on her person. He bent, smoothed the hair from her face, and kissed the slight indentation of her temple. It was not enough. He wanted so much more. He wanted to touch her in all the intimate places of intense pleasure. He wanted to make her smile, make her sigh, make her pant and scream and scratch his back with her nails.
He had thought for a dreamy, confused moment last night that she wanted the same thing. He had awakened to the wonderful idea that she had come to him, that he was to have his wedding night after all. When the truth had penetrated the fog of sleep around his sex-drugged brain, he’d felt the kind of deep, distressing disappointment that he’d thought he’d left behind him in adolescence. He’d lain awake quite a while pondering that. He’d had almost as many failures with women as successes—any honest man did—but he’d never before felt the kind of depressing disappointment that had swamped him last night. It didn’t quite make sense unless... Being married, having a wife and all the attendant rights was a strangely erotic phenomenon, except that Kendra wasn’t completely his wife. Yet. But she would be. He’d felt it when he’d put his tongue in her mouth and her body had melted against his like hot wax to flame.
He closed his eyes, remembering again the shocking weight of her breasts, much heavier than he’d realized, and the inviting suppleness of her belly. He’d been surprised by the narrowness of her waist, the lushness of the curves above and below, the long slender limbs. She did not dress to accentuate her assets, his little wife, and he found himself strangely pleased with that. He’d felt as if he’d held a secret in his arms last night, a very sexy, very female secret, the depths of which he had not even begun to plumb. He brushed his lips against the corner of her mouth and made himself leave.
He was eager to get into the office, eager to bring some normalcy back to his life. He wanted to settle into the new office, see his name chiseled into granite alongside those of the other partners. He needed to work, to design again, building the vision in his mind and transferring it to paper, watching it take shape stage by stage until it stood before him, a livable work of art. He’d been giving thought lately to redesigning his own home yet again. He just hadn’t planned on a baby when he’d come up with this latest rendition. Besides, he loved playing with the basic plans, seeing what he could come up with, given the parameters of a fifty-year-old original structure. He studied different ideas on the drive downtown to work.
Over its many transformations, he’d given the elevation of the house a decidedly French flavor via a hip roof, stucco, cornice detailing and paned glass windows, while producing a sleek modern look inside with the aid of recessed lighting, raised ceilings, multilevel floors and a score of thirty-inch columns. He was thinking now that he might add a room or two. After all, he really ought to maintain space for guests, and Darla would soon require a place to play where the clutter of children’s things would not disrupt the general orderliness of his—their—home.
Orderliness. He shook his head over the discoveries made behind the neat facade of his bedroom this morning. Who’d have thought his delicious little wife was such a slob? He’d already made some adjustments in the bathroom, but that closet was going to take some time. How on earth did she ever turn herself out so attractively from such a muddle? Wel
l, he was sure she’d take the hint from the improvements he’d made in their bathroom arrangement and do something about that closet. Perhaps she would even fold some of those things she’d crammed into his dresser drawers. He wasn’t bothered by the obvious incompatibility of their organizational styles. His was by far the superior, and she was bound to see that. Kendra was nobody’s fool, after all.
He parked in his new reserved space in the tiny parking lot next to the ultramodern granite-and-glass high rise designed, built, owned and operated by his firm. He strode along the sidewalk, briefcase and plan tube in tow, aware that he was not quite as ebullient as he ought to be on his first day as a partner in one of the area’s most distinguished and successful architectural firms. But then, that was understandable, all things considered. No matter what he did, he could not rid himself of the black knowledge of his brother’s death. And yet, his dissatisfaction felt oddly foreign to the tragedy. Ah, well, one could but endure until the clouds lifted.
He pushed through the heavy glass door into the building, crossed the empty lobby to the elevators and slid his bright copper executive key into the executive’s elevator lock. The door opened immediately. He stepped inside and pushed the top floor button. The elevator whisked upward silently and floated to a stop. The door opened, and he stepped out into the plush, quiet luxury of the executive floor. The receptionist leaned forward and smiled welcomingly, pushing a button on the underside of her desk. Doors opened on every side and people stepped out to greet him.
“Mr. Sugarman, welcome back.”
“Good to see you again, Parker.”
“So sorry about your brother and his wife.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Welcome to the executive suite, my boy. We’ve set you up in a nice quiet office right around the corner.” The last came from the senior partner, who ushered him away from the others. They turned the corner and came to a sterile cubicle containing only a desk and a telephone. “Your secretary’s space,” he was informed. “You’ll also need a drafting assistant, of course.” He was shown another space, somewhat larger and with a door, then was escorted on to his own office.
