“Uh-huh, and I appreciate it. But tuna noodle casserole?” She shuddered, scooted off the bed and headed for her cooler. “I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself,” he muttered, then added in an undertone, “You usually do.”
She stopped dead and slowly swiveled her head to look at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What?”
“You can’t whisper, Sarge,” she snapped. “That voice of yours carries like the rumble of cannons. So what do you mean, I usually do suit myself?”
“Nothin’.” He shouldn’t have said it. Had regretted it the minute the words left his mouth. It was pointless to get into all of this again. He knew that only too well. Karen was nothing if not hard-headed. She’d broken up with him and wasn’t about to change her mind. So the question really was, did he actually want to spend the next few days arguing with the only woman he’d ever given a damn about?
“Coward,” she said softly.
His gaze snapped up to hers and held it while he slowly stood up and faced her. Apparently, fighting with Karen was just what he was going to do.
Four
Okay, Karen thought, staring into those glittering pale brown eyes, maybe she’d been a bit hasty. Well, sure. No man liked being called a coward. And a Marine would appreciate it even less.
“Coward?” Sam repeated, the astonishment in his tone reflected in his expression. “You’re calling me a coward? Hah! Talk about your pot calling the kettle black.”
“Hey.” Karen spoke right up. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you a coward….”
“Maybe?”
“Okay,” she admitted, “I shouldn’t have, but that doesn’t give you the right to call me names, either.”
“I’m not the one who walked away from a good thing, Karen,” he reminded her. “I’m not the one who was too afraid to keep caring. I’m not the one who said ‘It’s over’ and didn’t even bother with an explanation.”
No, she hadn’t, and he’d deserved one. But trying to make him understand only would have been more painful than simply walking away.
“I had my reasons.”
“Yeah, but you were too scared to share ’em.”
“I wasn’t scared,” she snapped, and took a step, forgetting all about the cotton balls between her toes. Darn it. So much for feeling guilty, she thought. Hobbling slightly, she moved to the wall, then back again. Pretty pathetic pacing-space in this room.
“Then why?” he demanded. “Why wouldn’t you tell me what was going on?”
She folded her arms across her chest in an instinctively defensive posture. She was not going to get drawn into that last argument again. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it then and she certainly wasn’t going to talk about it now. Not when they’d be stuck together for who knew how long.
“It’s private,” she said simply, hoping against hope he’d accept that and leave the rest of it alone. She should have known better.
“Private?” Stunned, he shook his head and looked at her like she was nuts. “How can something be too private to tell a man who’s explored and made love to every inch of your body?”
She shivered as his words brought back mental images of the two of them, lying in each other’s arms. His hands on her back, his legs brushing against hers. His breath ruffling her hair as he held her long into the night.
Damn it, this wasn’t fair. Using her own memories against her.
“Don’t,” she said, squeezing the single word past the knot in her throat. Oh, God, she might have been better off riding out the hurricane in her stalled car. At least then it would have been only her body in danger. Here, her heart…her soul was at risk.
“Don’t what?” he asked, his voice softer now but just as harsh. “Don’t remember what we had? Or don’t talk about it?”
“Both,” she said, shaking her head again, trying to dislodge the memories. “Either.”
He took a step closer to her and Karen backed up. Not that she was afraid of him. Nope. Not even in the midst of their fiercest argument had she ever been afraid of Sam. In fact, it was completely the opposite. She wasn’t at all sure she’d be able to resist the urge to move into the circle of his arms if he so much as touched her. Damn it, they’d been apart more than two months. Shouldn’t she have been able to control the want nearly choking her?
It should be easier than this, she thought. It shouldn’t be so hard to keep her distance when she knew that staying away from him was the right thing to do.
“This isn’t fair,” she murmured, disgusted with her own body’s reaction to his nearness. For heaven’s sake, she wasn’t a teenager drooling over the captain of the football team.
“Fair?” he countered, clearly astonished. “You want fair? Hell, Karen, we had something good and you just turned it off.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” she said, trying to ignore the sting in his voice and the accusation in his words. How could he think that what she’d done had been easy? Heck, two months later and she was still missing him. Aching for him. Easy? It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.
“Sure it was. For you,” he said, throwing his hands high and then letting them fall to his sides. “It was pretty much a case of here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.”
True, she thought. All true. She edged around the corner of the wall and backstepped down the short hall toward the bathroom. She’d practically rushed out of her house in her anxiety to have it finished and done. In her haste to get some breathing room between them, she hadn’t given him an explanation. Hadn’t been able to bear to talk about her reasons. Hadn’t wanted to give him a chance to argue them.
She’d foolishly thought that if she made a clean, fast break it would be easier on both of them. Stupid. If you lost an arm, would it change anything to know it had been done quickly and not in inches?
Never taking her gaze from his, she watched his whiskey-colored eyes flash with remembered pain and anger. “I did what I had to do,” she said, and wished her voice sounded just a tad stronger. More confident. But then, how could she sound sure of herself when at the moment, doubts were leaping around inside her?
“So you said,” Sam whispered, and that gruff tone scraped along her spine, sending shivers racing through her bloodstream.
How many nights had she heard that same, soft rumble of sound in the darkness?
Oh, thinking like that wasn’t safe at all. “Look, Sam,” she said quickly, putting out one hand to grasp the edge of the bathroom door tightly, “we agreed to a truce, remember? Heck, it was your idea.”
He glared at her for a long moment, then scrubbed both hands across his face. “Fine,” he said, nodding, though she could see that this small surrender cost him. “We won’t fight. But we will talk.”
A sinking sensation pooled in the pit of her stomach. Trapped in this tiny motel room, she wouldn’t be able to avoid Sam for long. And judging by the expression on his chiseled-in-stone features, things between them were going to get worse before they got better.
He slapped both hands against the door frame and leaned in toward her. “We’re stuck here together, Karen. There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. And before this hurricane’s over, you and I are going to set a few things straight.”
For some reason, that little speech of his was enough to put starch back in her spine. She never had cared for his “I’m the Marine and I’m giving the orders here” attitude. It hadn’t worked on her when they were together, and it sure wouldn’t work now that they weren’t.
“We’ll talk,” she told him firmly, “when and if I’m ready to talk.”
And she could almost guarantee him that wasn’t going to happen!
“Oh,” he assured her, “we’ll talk.”
Pushy, that’s what he was. Just plain pushy. See? These are the kinds of things she should remember about him, she told herself. Instead, her brain insisted on recalling his tenderness, his love-maki
ng, his laughter. If she’d spent more time bringing to mind his bossiness, she probably would have gotten over him by now.
“Back off, Sarge,” she snapped, already closing the bathroom door. She wasn’t going to apologize for her feelings. And she damn sure wasn’t going to explain them to him. Not now, anyway.
He laid one hand on the door, holding it open. “What’re you doing?”
She pushed his hand off. “I’m taking a bath, if that’s all right with the Master of the Universe.” Then she slammed the flimsy door shut and turned the pathetic lock. She had to trust in Sam’s sense of honor to give her the privacy she craved at the moment, because that lock wouldn’t keep a determined ten-year-old out.
Turning around, she leaned against the door and stared up at the peeling green paint on the ceiling. But she wasn’t really seeing it. Instead, her mind dredged up the memory of a flag-draped silver coffin, surrounded by black-clad mourners, and her vision blurred behind a sheen of tears. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to block the images, but even as they faded, she knew they’d never really leave her. They’d always be there, at the edges of her mind, waiting.
“Have your bath, Karen,” Sam said, his voice drifting through that door and sliding straight into her soul. “But you’ve got to come out of there sooner or later. And I’ll still be right here. Waiting.”
She tried not to listen to the ache in her heart. He’d be there, too. Just as he was every night, when she tried to lose herself in sleep only to find him in her dreams.
Stepping out of the shower and toweling himself off, Sam knew he’d done the right thing in postponing their inevitable talk. He hadn’t leaped at her the moment she’d come out of her bath. Instead, he’d decided to take a shower and do a little cooling off before getting into anything.
After all, talks with Karen had a way of escalating into either anger or passion or both. And he knew he’d need his wits about him in order to hold his own.
He swiped the steam off the mirror with his towel, then tossed it over the shower rod. Studying his reflection objectively, he saw a thirty-four-year-old Gunnery Sergeant showing a little wear and tear around the edges. And the whisker stubble didn’t help. Hell, four in the morning was no time to be wide-awake and shaving—though he was more used to the early hour than most men might be. But usually, he’d had at least a couple of hours’ sleep.
Hard to believe he and Karen had been up all night. Between finding a motel, settling in and fighting, it had been a pretty full evening. Morning, he corrected himself.
Grabbing his razor, he got through the ritual of shaving in record time, threw on his clothes and left the bathroom, ready, he figured, to face Karen and do some talking.
But when he stepped into the main room, it was empty.
“Damn it,” he muttered thickly, rushing across the room toward the door. “If she left, if she ran away again, I’ll—” He let the sentence die unfinished as he threw the door open to be blasted in the face with a rush of wind and rain.
Squinting into the lightning-shimmered darkness, he scanned the parking area quickly, his heart in his throat. He shouldn’t have tried to force a confrontation. Now, because of him, because he couldn’t let go of the past, she might be in danger. He didn’t even want to think about her being out in this weather. Alone.
Then he spotted her, standing at the back of his car, with her head tipped up to the storm-tossed sky and her arms lifted at her sides. The wind tore at her, pummeling her body, tugging at her soaking-wet shirt, whipping her hair into a wild, blond halo around her head, and still she stood there, seemingly oblivious to the weather’s rage.
Not sure whether to be grateful or disgusted, Sam walked out into the rain to join her. Stopping just behind her, he asked, “What the hell are you doing?”
She didn’t even turn to look at him. Just kept her gaze locked on the roiling clouds above as she said, “I needed some air. I needed—”
“To get away?” he asked, speaking loud enough to be heard over the roar of the thundering wind.
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“From me.”
She swiveled her head to glance at him briefly. “Partly,” she said, then pushed both hands through her hair, “and partly because I wanted to feel the storm coming.”
“We’ve been feeling it come all night,” he reminded her with a shake of his head.
“No, we haven’t,” Karen said. “We’ve been running from it. Preparing for it. But we haven’t felt any of it.”
“Are you nuts?” he asked as she lifted her arms again as though she half expected the wind to pick her up and sail her around the parking lot.
“Maybe,” she said, smiling up at the slanting rain. “But I love the wind. Always have. I used to sit out on the lawn when a big storm came through, just to feel like I was a part of it.” She laughed shortly. “And storms are pretty hard to come by in Southern California. But this…” She shook her head, letting the wind snatch at her hair again. “When the wind hits you, don’t you feel the power in it? It’s almost electrical.”
“If you get hit by lightning, it’ll be damned electrical,” he told her, with a cautious glance heavenward.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
He took her arm and turned her around to face him. “What I understand is that people all over this state are hiding from Hurricane Henry and you’re standing in a parking lot looking to welcome him home like a long-lost lover.” Like he wished she’d welcome him. His hands moved up to her shoulders. Pulling her close, he ignored the wind and rain and the rumble of thunder as he looked down into pale blue eyes that held a storm all their own.
“Can you leave it alone, Sam?” she asked. “Just for a while, can you leave it alone?”
He didn’t want to. Everything in him wanted answers. Wanted her in his arms. But seeing the silent plea in this strong woman’s eyes was enough to convince him to wait. Nodding, he pulled her tight against him for a brief, hard hug. Then he dropped one arm around her shoulders and turned for the motel room. “Let’s dry off…again and try to get some sleep.”
Karen leaned into him. “Sounds good.”
“There’ll be plenty of time to talk later.”
“Later,” she agreed.
Sam had the feeling she was hoping he’d forget about the little talk he’d promised her. But he wouldn’t. Before Hurricane Henry was finished pummeling the South, Sam Paretti was going to find out what in the hell was going on with Karen Beckett.
Five
“One hundred ninety-nine, two hundred.” Sam finished his pushups and eased out of the position, grabbing for one of the motel’s small hand towels. Mopping his face, he then slung the towel over his shoulder, leaned back against the wall and looked at Karen.
Now that he’d finished counting aloud, the silence in the room dropped over him like a too-heavy blanket. Outside, the ever-present storm rumbled on, but inside, the quiet jabbed at his last nerve.
He’d tried to be patient. God knows it hadn’t been easy, either. But he’d promised her last night that he’d back off. Promised not to ask questions. And he hadn’t, had he? But a man couldn’t wait forever, and he never had been accused of having the patience of a saint.
He’d hoped that a few hours’ sleep would give her a different perspective. Make her a little more amenable to some conversation. Instead, he thought, scraping the palm of one hand across the top of his head, it had served to put even more distance between them. And the tension in this tiny room had grown, tightened until Sam felt it strangling him with every breath.
Karen, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered at all. In fact, he thought, scowling, she seemed happy as a clam.
She’d played solitaire for hours, until the slap of her playing cards was about to drive him out of his mind. And just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, she’d at last put the cards away and picked up her book. Yet another solitary entertainment. So far, she’d managed to ignore not only his presence i
n the room, but his very existence.
He watched her, laid out on the bed, pillows plumped behind her back. She had her nose stuck in a paperback book and one hand buried in a bag of chocolate. Her personal CD player lay on the bed beside her, and even through her headphones, he could hear the tinny whine of saxophones. She’d locked him out as effectively as if she’d slammed and barred a door.
Drawing his knees up, he rested both arms atop them, hands dangling, and frowned as he studied the cover of the book that she obviously found so fascinating. A voluptuous woman leaned into a muscle-bound guy with hair longer than the hero-ine’s. The hero held a sword in one hand and kept the other beefy arm wrapped around the woman’s impossibly tiny waist. A romance novel. She was ignoring him and reading about romance.
Oh, yeah, that made sense. Here he sat, a real live man who wanted her more than his next breath, and instead of turning to him, she was indulging in fantasies. Damn it, he didn’t much care for the feeling of coming in second to some romance-novel hunk.
She squirmed on the bed, shifting her hips and rubbing her right foot up and down her left calf. Gaze narrowed, Sam studied her, and for the first time noticed the flush in her cheeks and the way her teeth tugged at her bottom lip. She sucked in a gulp of air and turned the page quickly as if she couldn’t bear to stop reading. She shifted uncomfortably again and he noticed her breathing quicken, her breasts rising and falling with each shallow, rapid intake of air.
His chest tightened and his mouth went dry.
Memories filled his mind. Images, pictures of the two of them, locked in each other’s arms. He remembered the feel of her skin beneath his hands and her passionate, eager response. Something inside him coiled tightly and he swallowed hard against a knot of need that lodged in his throat.
Just watching her get turned on by whatever she was reading had his own heart thudding in his chest—and other parts of his body ready, willing and able to show her just how much better reality could be as opposed to fantasy. He snatched the towel off his shoulder and tossed it to the floor.
Marooned with a Marine Page 4
