“I have no idea,” I said. I mean, parents name their children strange things sometimes. I’d gone to high school with a girl named Epiphany. And if Frenetta was a family name...
The woman sniffed. “Frenetta runs this place. I’m just one of the guests. My boyfriend and I were busy when you rang.”
“Sorry to get you out of bed,” I said politely, since the way she’d pronounced ‘busy’ left no doubt what they’d been doing. The same thing Rafe and I would be doing a few minutes after we got to our room. “We’ll just get ourselves situated if we can’t find Frenetta.”
She tossed her hair again. “Three of the rooms upstairs are occupied. We’re in number 1. Number 3 is across the hall, and there are two women in there. And an old couple is in number 4. Number 2 is empty.”
Then number 2 must be meant for us.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
“Breakfast from eight to ten. This morning was waffles.”
So tomorrow would probably be something else.
“I’m sure whatever it is will be fine,” I said. I was pregnant, so I didn’t really care what I ate as long as there was plenty of it. And two years of prison food had taught Rafe not to be picky.
Not that I imagined he’d been used to haute cuisine before that, either. The Colliers’ diet had probably been pretty simple, too, between LaDonna, Old Jim, and the lack of money.
The woman shrugged. Her breasts jiggled under the loose T-shirt. “Suit yourselves. Frenetta is probably asleep. She’s, like, ancient.”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Thanks for coming down to open the door.”
She finally took the hint and moved out of the doorway so Rafe and I could get into the house. Rafe locked the door behind him.
“I’m going back upstairs,” our new friend said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. If you stick around.”
She walked away, leaving Rafe and me to stare at one another. He arched a brow.
“What does she imagine we’ll do?” I demanded. “We have a reservation!”
He shrugged. I looked around. “I guess maybe we should try to find Frenetta.”
“If she’s in bed, I ain’t walking in on her.”
Well, no. I guess I didn’t really want to do that, either.
“Like you keep saying, we got a reservation. And there’s an empty room upstairs. I vote we go on up there and get comfortable.”
There was a lot to be said for that approach. Even though it felt sort of weird, making ourselves comfortable in a house where the owner didn’t know we’d arrived.
“It is kind of late, I guess...”
“And our wedding night,” Rafe reminded me, with another wiggle of his eyebrows. Both of them this time.
“Right...”
He shook his head. “Those good manners are gonna be the death of you one of these days, darlin’. C’mon.” He scooped me up—bags and all—and headed in the direction our fellow guest had disappeared.
I squeaked, but didn’t bother to tell him I was too heavy. It was obvious I wasn’t. He was carrying me, with baby onboard, and both bags through the house as if we weighed nothing at all.
However, it was just a week since he’d been injured.
“Are you sure you should be doing this?”
“I’m fine,” Rafe told me, not even out of breath. “You can see for yourself once we get upstairs.”
I intended to, and told him so. And then I let him focus his efforts on climbing the stairs, since in spite of his assertions to the contrary, I wasn’t at all sure he was fine.
Chapter Three
The stairs came up in the middle of the house, and we found ourselves on a landing surrounded by four doors. They were numbered from 1 to 4, with number 1 behind us on the right, and numbers 3 and 4 to the left. Everything on that side of the house was quiet, but from behind door number 1 came the sound of bedsprings squeaking and what sounded like a couple of piglets grunting and squealing. Since there was unlikely to be piglets inside the house, it was probably just our new friend and her significant other going at it.
“Didn’t waste any time,” Rafe said softly.
I shook my head, trying to keep a straight face but failing miserably. “We don’t sound like that, do we?”
“I don’t,” Rafe said. “You...”
“That’s awful!”
He grinned, white teeth flashing in the darkness, and I added suspiciously, “You’re joking, aren’t you? It’s a joke, right?”
“Yes, darlin’. You don’t sound like a dying frog when you come.” He stopped in front of the door to number 2 long enough to let me reach down and turn the knob. “You’re not so much a moaner as a screamer.”
“Am not!” Making that kind of noise in that situation—especially where other people could hear—was unladylike.
“Sure you are.” He nudged the door wider with his foot and carried me across the threshold. “I’ll do a better job of this when we get home. When I don’t have both you and the bags to deal with.”
I knew it. “I’m too heavy.”
“You’re not too heavy.” He kicked the door closed behind him. “The bags are too heavy.”
The bags were not too heavy. “I’m fat.”
“You’re pregnant,” Rafe said. “And my arm had a knife go through it a week ago. Now shut up before I drop you.”
“You wouldn’t drop me.”
“Watch me.” He let go of my legs, and I squealed—but not like a dying frog, or for that matter a piglet—and dropped both bags to hang on to him. He chuckled, and lowered the rest of me gently to stand in front of him.
The next minute or two were nice and peaceful. Just Rafe’s arms around me, and Rafe’s mouth on mine: the scent and taste and feel of him. I was getting nice and relaxed and turned on, which isn’t a bad thing on your wedding night.
Until something banged hard against the wall and kept banging.
I buried my face in Rafe’s shoulder. My cheeks were hot, but I’m not sure whether it was embarrassment or humor.
Rafe had no such problem. He was shaking with quiet laughter.
“This is awful,” I told his shoulder.
His voice was uneven. “Gimme two more minutes, and that’ll be you and me.”
“Over my dead body!” I was not providing prurient entertainment for the people in the room next door.
“And here I thought you couldn’t get enough of me.”
“I can’t get enough of you,” I told him. “I just don’t want the people next door to talk about us the way we’re talking about them.”
“I don’t care if they’re talking about us,” Rafe told me. “I just wanna make love to my wife.”
How could anyone possibly fail to melt? I felt myself going all gooey inside, and not just in the sexual way.
However— “Can you do it quietly?”
“I can.” With emphasis on the pronoun. “Not sure about you.”
I sniffed. “I’m a lady.”
“Not in bed,” Rafe said. And added, “Thank God.”
OK, then.
“And anyway, you’re married to me now. I think your status got revoked.”
“Thank God,” I said.
He grinned. “No regrets?”
I shook my head. “Not a one. I’d marry you again tomorrow.” And the next day. And the day after that. And ten years from now. And twenty.
“It ain’t just cause I knocked you up?”
“No.” How could he even suggest that? “I love you. I’d marry you if I weren’t pregnant, too.”
“Good to know.”
I tilted my head to look up at him. “You weren’t really worried about that, were you?”
“It crossed my mind.”
I shook my head. “No. I married you because I love you. I want to have your children. But I would have married you anyway.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. After a second I added, “For the record, you didn’t propose
just because you knocked me up, did you?”
“No,” Rafe said. “I woulda married you if you weren’t pregnant, too. But I guess it made it a little easier to ask.”
Why on earth?
“Less chance you’d turn me down. I figured if you were having my baby, you’d have incentive to say yes.”
“So we were only having so much sex so I could get pregnant so you could make sure I wouldn’t say no when you proposed?”
“No,” Rafe said. “We were having sex so you could get pregnant so I could make sure you’d say yes when I proposed so we could have more sex.”
“So it’s all about the sex?”
“Course.” He grinned. “I’m a man. It’s all we think about.”
“Good.” I grinned back. “Because I’ve spent most of the day planning how to get you out of the monkey suit.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. That’s why I kept forgetting my lines. I was thinking about you naked.” I reached out and started flipping his shirt buttons open.
He stood there and let me do it, but he sounded shocked. And maybe a bit intrigued. “You’re kidding.”
“No.” The last button gave way, and the shirt fell open. I reached up to brush it from his shoulders. “You look good in a tuxedo. But you look better like this.”
I bent my head to drop a kiss on his chest, although I have to admit that running my palms across his skin had just as much to do with making sure none of his wounds had opened back up again as with pleasure. It was just a week ago that some maniac had used him for whittling practice, and the scars were still pink, and—from his quick inhalation—sensitive.
“Just making sure you’re all right,” I murmured.
“I’m fine.” If a little breathless. Hard to tell whether it was from pain or something else.
“Yes,” I agreed, “you are.”
He chuckled. “For the record, I’ve been thinking about how to get you outta that dress, too.”
“Really?” That was gratifying. “The simplest way is to ask.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.” I turned my back to him. “There’s a zipper.”
He took a step closer. “Not exactly playing hard to get, are you?”
“What’s the point? I married you. You paid for the cow.” I waited for him to find the zipper and pull it down. The rasp of tiny teeth was loud in the quiet room. Next door, the bed made a final convulsive bang against the wall and subsided, quivering. We heard simultaneous gasps.
“The walls must be made of cardboard,” Rafe muttered, as I shrugged the dress off my shoulders and let it drop to the floor. He reached out a hand to help me step out of the cloud of frothy chiffon, and added, when I turned to him, “Oh, yeah.”
The underwear. “My mother has good taste,” I said demurely.
“If you don’t mind,” Rafe answered, “I don’t wanna think about your mother right now.”
Come to think of it, I didn’t either. “Sorry. But she put together a lovely wedding for us.”
Rafe nodded. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“I thought you liked it when I kept them on.”
“Not the kind of shoes I was thinking of. But I do.” He took a step back and looked me up and down. Strappy sandals, skimpy lingerie, and round stomach. I resisted the temptation to cover the bulge with my hands, and when his eyes came back to meet mine, I was glad I had.
“Mine,” he told me.
I nodded, my heart beating faster. “All yours.” Every inch. Including the extra-large stomach.
“Everything OK in here?” He reached out and put his palm flat against the side of it. His hand was warm and hard, while the air conditioning pumping from the vents was cold.
I nodded. “I think he’s asleep. Or she.” At four months along, I had started to feel occasional flutters when the baby was awake and moving around inside me, but I still didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl.
“You mind if we wake her up?” His arm glided around to my back to pull me closer. The lace of my bra pressed against the heat of his skin, and the satin of my panties slipped across the worsted of his pants with a whisper of sound. My stomach poked his.
“Not as long as we’re quiet.” The occupants of the room next door were showing signs of life. I could make out voices and hear the squeaking of bedsprings. Hopefully it was pillow talk and they were settling down for the night instead of gearing up for another round.
“You just worry about yourself,” Rafe told me, with a nudge toward the bed. “Although it ain’t much of a wedding night unless there’s a little blood and someone screaming.”
“You’ve been in law enforcement too long.”
“That ain’t the kind of screaming I was thinking of, darlin’.”
We reached the bed, and stopped. I’m not sure why things were so awkward, since we’d been sleeping together for months now without any awkwardness at all.
And Rafe must be thinking the same thing, because he looked sheepish. “I didn’t figure it’d be like this.”
I shook my head. “I thought we’d drive back to Nashville and be in our own bedroom by sundown.” Familiar. Comfortable. With nobody banging like hammers on the other side of the wall.
His smile turned genuine. Or maybe ‘cocky’ would be a better word. “Bet I can make you forget where you are.”
I bet he could, too. And part of me wanted him to. The other part was still convinced I had to be ladylike and quiet so the neighbors wouldn’t guess what was going on.
Rafe took a step closer to me. His voice turned low and seductive. “Mrs. Collier.”
I gulped. Other than the preacher, and the toasts during the reception, this was the first time anyone had called me that. And it was amazingly effective. I felt my knees weaken. Or maybe that was just because of the look in his eyes.
He leaned closer. My breath hitched and my eyes went out of focus. When he reached out and gave me a push, my knees buckled and my butt hit the bed.
He followed me down, and for several minutes, nobody said a word. He was as good as his word: by the time he stopped kissing me, I’d forgotten all about where I was. And when I looked around and realized it—Florida; people on the other side of the wall—I couldn’t care less.
“Don’t stop.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Rafe told me, fumbling for his zipper. “Dunno if I could if I tried.”
I didn’t believe that for a minute. He had absolute control over himself. If I told him to stop, he’d stop, no matter where he was or what he was in the middle of doing.
But in this case I didn’t want him to. I waited, twitching with impatience, for him to shimmy out of the tuxedo pants and underwear and come back to me. And when he did, I wrapped my arms around his neck and held on.
Things went on in this vein for a while, with touching and kissing and stroking and petting. I wasn’t fully cognizant of what was going on around me, I have to admit. I was too focused on what I was feeling to really pay much attention to what was going on. I was busy processing how it made me feel.
Good, in case you wondered.
He was careful not to lean too hard on my stomach, but other than that, it was business as usual. When Rafe touches me, I pretty much forget everything else.
Until he shifted between my legs, and thrust.
I must have made a sound then, because his hand came up to cover my mouth.
“Shhhh!” he whispered. “Be vewy, vewy quiet.”
In Elmer Fudd’s voice.
I laughed, of course. He grinned back. And then he moved. And my laughter turned to a moan—not a particularly quiet one—and after that, I didn’t really care who was in the next room or how thin the walls were or what they could hear.
I woke up the way I usually do, curled up on my side spoon fashion, with Rafe’s arm around me, his hand splayed on my stomach, and his nose buried in my hair. He was breathing slowly and evenly, his respirations tickling the fine hairs at the nape
of my neck.
We had forgotten to close the drapes last night, so bright sunshine was pouring into the room. I looked around, while taking care not to move too much. Rafe sounded like he was sleeping, and he’d had a big day yesterday, between the wedding, driving to Florida, and what we’d spent half the night doing. I figured I should let him sleep. But since I hadn’t really seen the room when we arrived, I wanted to take a look now.
It was a pretty good size. About the same as our room in Mrs. Jenkins’s house at home. They were both Victorian houses, built within a few years of one another, and the bedrooms are usually pretty generous. Not the size of master bedrooms in the McMansions they build these days, but bigger than in houses that were built during the middle part of the twentieth century.
It was nicely decorated, in a sort of tropical/Victorian/old lady blend. The walls were bright yellow, and most of the furniture was white wicker. The chairs all had doilies on the arms. Tropical turquoise doilies. The bed was a four-poster with drapes—or perhaps it was mosquito netting—dragging the floor. Sort of romantic—unless you thought too hard about the Florida bugs. The sheets were tan—probably because they were easier to keep clean than white—while the comforter was striped. A big, ornate mirror hung above the low dresser on the other side of the room, its frame covered with shells. And the top of the dresser was home to an eclectic mix of stuff. A bowl of shells rubbed elbows with an old-fashioned boxy TV and a stuffed bird, while a row of colorful paperbacks stood upright between two starfish bookends. By squinting, I could read the titles on the spines, and recognized one of my favorites: Tryst in Tartan by Barbara Botticelli, better known—at least to me—as Elspeth Caulfield, David’s mother and the girl who had taken advantage of Rafe in high school.
I hadn’t cracked the spine of a Barbara Botticelli romance since I realized who Barbara was, and that there was a reason every hero in every book she wrote reminded me of Rafe. The knowledge that every time the hero dropped his drawers, she’d imagined Rafe naked, had been enough to sour me on Barbara Botticelli ever after
Of course I’d also realized, after thinking about it, that her imagination couldn’t compare to my reality. She’d based her heroes on Rafe at eighteen, drunk and in pain. I had him in my bed every night, and you can believe me, Elspeth’s love scenes had nothing on mine. Her imagination had been woefully inadequate when it came to describing Rafe at thirty and thirty-one.
Busman's Honeymoon (Savannah Martin Mystery #10.5) Page 3
