by Janet Dailey
How could she tell him that she did when she didn’t know how much of her desire was rooted in nostalgia? Both of them had changed so much. It wasn’t possible to feel the same. But there was unquestionably smoke coming from an old fire and the ashes were still hot.
“Then I found out about Randy,” he said in a tone that indicated the knowledge had changed his thinking. “So you’re here, claiming he needs a father.” His gaze made a slow sweep of her, taking in every curve of her body. “And there you stand—a sexy, young widow with money to burn and no one to tell her how she should spend it, and with eleven years of having to be a good wife behind her. A half-grown son is bound to be an encumbrance.”
“That’s not true,” Dawn protested, stung by his implication.
“Isn’t it?” Slater challenged, stopping in front of her. “You say he needs a father. Are you planning to dump him on me so you can go out and have your fun? It must be difficult to go husband-hunting with a brat in tow. How much easier it is to pawn him off onto someone else.”
She was trembling with anger, too incensed to voice any kind of denial to such totally false and denigrating accusations. The recourse left to her was completely instinctive, the impulse to strike the words from his mouth.
The lightning arc of her hand aimed for his cheek, striking it with all the force she could put behind it. The blow turned his head to the side, the impact stinging the palm of her hand. Her own temper made her indifferent to the retaliating anger that darkened his expression. If anything, she felt satisfaction seeing the white mark on his jaw slowly turning red where she had struck him.
Dawn had acted with no thought of the consequences, forgetting that violence was invariably answered with violence. She was forcibly reminded of it when her arms were seized and she was yanked roughly against him, his fingers digging into her soft flesh. The murderous light smouldering in his eyes brought a flicker of alarm to her expression.
The glimpse of it made Slater pause. An expression that was both wry and bitter with regret swept across his features, but his gaze continued to bore into her. The grip of his hands had pulled her onto her toes and arched her body against the length of his. Sensitive nerve endings picked up the sensation of her bare thighs pressed to the cotton texture of his slacks and the solidness of his hip bones ground against hers. The peaks of her breasts were flattened to the hard wall of his chest. Dawn was hardly drawing a breath while her heart beat unevenly, not certain what would happen next.
His mouth thinned into a grim line as he released a disgusted breath that warmed her face. “Ours always was a very physical relationship,” Slater muttered thickly as if that explained this mutual show of violence. “We still can’t seem to communicate on any other level.”
Her glance slid to the discolored area on his cheek where she had hit him, and taken pleasure in it. Dawn was sorry now, but—as always it seemed—her regret came too late. Her hands rested loosely on his rib cage, no longer resisting his closeness. Even as she silently acknowledged the accuracy of his statement, she was cognizant of the necessary qualification it needed.
“But we never used to try to hurt each other,” she reminded him.
“No, we didn’t,” he agreed.
A darkness blazed in his eyes, but it was no longer sparked by anger. She could feel the burning heat of it moving over her face and neck. It warmed her in a way that was all too familiar. Without seeming to loosen his grip, his hold on her shifted. One hand curled into her hair at the back of her neck while the other glided down her back.
A half-smothered groan came from his throat as he bent his head toward her. Dawn smelled the whiskey on his breath and turned her lips from him at the last second, letting his mouth graze her cheek.
“You’re crazy drunk,” she warned him, not because she didn’t want his kiss. She did. But she remembered too clearly how their brief, torrid embrace this afternoon had turned him bitter and angry with regret. She didn’t want to put either of them through that again.
“Yes, I’m crazy drunk.” His mouth, his nose, his chin kept moving over the side of her averted face, nuzzling and exploring what territory was accessible to him. “I’m like a wino who’s been on the wagon for eleven years. Then he finds a bottle of wine—the same vintage as the one he took his last drink from—and he wonders if it still has that same wild and sweet bouquet. One little taste, he says.” He lipped her ear, drawing a shudder of pleasure from Dawn, and took the lobe between his teeth in a sensual love-bite. “One little taste and that’s all. He won’t take any more, so he thinks. But all it takes is one taste, and the wino discovers he won’t be satisfied until he has the whole bottle.” His mouth hovered against the corner of her lips. “You’re my bottle of wine, Dawn. I’ve already had the first taste—the one kiss. I won’t be satisfied until I’ve taken it all.”
It was a husky entreaty to give it to him. Inside she was a trembling mass, needing him as much as he claimed to need her. It didn’t take much effort to turn that short inch to bring her lips into contact with his mouth. At first their mouths brushed over each other in a feather kiss that heightened the sensitivity of their lips.
When the anticipation level had reached a fever-pitch that had them straining against each other, his mouth rolled onto hers, opening to consume it whole. Her reaching hands went around his middle and flattened across his back, trying to defy physical laws and bring them still closer together.
For endless, whirling minutes, they kissed passionately, devouring each other, his hands roaming, touching, and molding her to fit to his hard contours. When their lips finally untangled so each could draw a labored breath, there was the rawness of dissatisfaction. Slater buried his face in the curve of her neck where her pulse was throbbing madly.
“You don’t know the hell I’ve gone through,” he muttered with an ache in his voice, “knowing you legally belonged in another man’s bed—and picturing you lying in his arms.”
“And you don’t know what the agony was like for me—” she whispered to let him know he wasn’t the only one who had been haunted by images, “—lying with him and having him touch me and kiss me all the while wishing it was you. Worse, I never stopped wishing it was you.”
“What are you wishing now?” His hand had found its way to the bare skin at the small of her back. Slater lifted his head to bring his face inches above hers while he studied her. The black pupils of his eyes had widened until only a silver ring showed around them.
“I’m wishing that you’d love me.” In every sense of the word, she meant it, but it seemed unnecessary to elaborate.
It was a wish that seemed destined, at last, to be fulfilled as the crushing weight of his mouth rocked onto her lips. They parted to invite a deepening of the kiss to its fullest intimacy. When her feet were lifted off the floor by his carrying arms, Dawn felt weightless.
She was barely conscious of the lengthening shadows outside the office windows as the darkness of dusk settled over the building. It was only a short distance to the sofa from where they had been standing. Slater set her down on a cushion, his hands lifting the bottom of her tanktop and pulling it over her head as they came away.
Her deep blue eyes were heavy with desire as he leaned toward her and let a hand slide onto her naked breast. She was reaching for him to draw him down on the cushion with her as she lay back. It was imperative that nothing come between them—not the past or the future—or the silken shirt covering his chest from her seeking fingers.
While his lips made exciting forays from her throat to her maturely rounded breasts, she was tugging at the shirt buttons to unfasten them. As soon as his shirt was hanging open, her hands slipped inside to feel the heat of his skin. It was a sensation she didn’t have a chance to enjoy for long as his teasing tongue had her writhing with another need.
Actions and sensations all began to flow into one another—his hand pushing the elastic waist-band of her shorts over her hipbone; the searing taste of his kiss drinking deeply of her lo
ve; the weight of his flatly muscled body settling onto her; naked flesh against naked flesh; and the golden fire in her loins consuming all thought but the pleasure that came from giving love and receiving it. The sound of her name coming from his lips became her only touch with reality. It was repeated over and over, interspliced with love words that were too quickly lost.
How long she lay afterwards in the possessive clasp of his circling arms, their bodies squeezed together by the narrow width of the sofa, Dawn couldn’t have said. But in its own way, this holding of each other was equally as pleasing as the sexual gratification had been. His musky body smell was all around her, warm and enveloping.
“It’s been so long since I’ve felt like this.” She traced the hard edge of his jaw with the tip of her finger, feeling the faint bristle that had scraped the skin around her mouth and left it tender.
Slater lightly captured her fingers and lifted them to his mouth, drawing her glance to its male line as he pressed her fingers to it. When she looked at him fully, his expression seemed unnaturally somber. He held her gaze, the gray of his eyes probing in its search for something.
“You got your wish, didn’t you?” His comment sounded casual. Dawn wasn’t able to detect any hint of bitter mockery.
She nodded once. “It was your wish, too, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes.” Slater glanced at her ringless fingers. “I’ve wished for this a long time.” His look was almost gentle, a tinge of sadness in it, but no regret that Dawn could see. A muscle flexed in the arm she was lying on. “Move,” he said. “My arm’s going to sleep.”
Reluctantly she propped herself up on an elbow to take her weight off his arm. Instead of merely changing position, Slater sat up and reached for his trousers. She released an inaudible sigh. This moment of supreme closeness had to come to an end sometime, but she had wanted it to last a little longer. But no one could hold on to this rare kind of happiness forever.
By the time she had pulled the hem of her tanktop down around her waist, Slater was standing by the desk. He switched on a tall lamp, chasing away the intimacy of near darkness with the sudden glare of light. Shirtless, the upper half of his body had a sun-bronzed sheen to it that rippled with the play of his muscles as he turned his back to her and reached for something on the desk.
“Cigarette?” he asked with a glance over his shoulder.
“No thanks.” Dawn bent down to slip on her sandals, hooking a finger in the back strap to ease it over her heel. She heard the snap of a cigarette lighter, and the click of it being shut.
When she straightened, he was leaning against the edge of the desk, half-sitting on it while he watched her. There was something unnerving about his absent stare. She sensed that he had withdrawn from her and become preoccupied with his own secret thoughts. She couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on in Lis head.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she said with a quick smile to make her curiosity appear more casual.
His mouth twitched almost into a smile. “You could have bought them for that once, but I’m worth more than that now.” The drawled response eased much of her concern.
“I noticed all your business trophies on the walls.” Dawn glanced briefly at the plaques of achievement.
“I don’t claim to be in Simpson Lord’s league yet,” Slater stated dryly and flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette. “But he had a couple of generations’ headstart on me.”
It had not been spoken entirely in jest. There was a competitive edge in the words, as if the worth of a man was judged by the amount of money in his bankbook. Dawn had learned the hard way it was a false standard to use in the search for happiness. And she didn’t want Slater to think she still believed that was important.
“That doesn’t matter to me, Slater,” she insisted quickly.
Again his mouth slanted with a crooked smile. “That’s right. This time it’s for love, isn’t it?” he mocked. Before she could respond to that vague jibe, the muted ring of a telephone sounded in the outer office area. He picked up the receiver on his desk. “MacBride,” he said into the phone. Without speaking again to the calling party, he straightened from the desk and held out the receiver to her. “It’s for you.”
Briefly startled by his announcement, she crossed quickly to the desk to take the phone from his hand. “Hello?”
“Dawn?” It was her mother’s voice on the other end of the wire. “I’m sorry to call you but it was getting so late and I—” She trailed off lamely without completing the sentence.
“It’s all right,” Dawn assured her that she wasn’t upset by the phone call.
“I just wasn’t sure how late you would be—whether I should wait up for you or leave the housekey under the mat outside the door,” her mother explained so Dawn wouldn’t think she was trying to dictate what hour she should come home.
“I’ll be there shortly,” Dawn promised, guessing that Randy was probably as anxious as her mother to find out what had transpired during the long discussion with Slater. She couldn’t very well tell either of them how much had been said without words.
“All right. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important,” her mother added.
“You didn’t. Good-bye.” She waited until her mother had echoed the word before hanging up the phone. She glanced at Slater as he paused near the desk to grind out his cigarette butt in the ashtray. “That was—”
“—your mother,” he interrupted to finish the sentence and identify the voice he’d heard.
“You recognized her voice,” she realized.
“I suppose the clucking mother hen was checking up on her missing chick,” Slater guessed with a smoothness that bothered her.
“In a way,” Dawn admitted, and glanced at the darkness outside the window panes. “It’s later than I realized.”
He looked at his watch. “Past your parents’ bedtime,” he acknowledged. “I suppose they’re anxious to lock up the doors and turn in.”
“Yes.” There was something about this conversation that she didn’t like, although it seemed innocent enough on the surface.
“Do you suppose they’ve guessed what we’ve been doing all this time?” he asked, then answered his own question. “I don’t imagine they have. They were always a few minutes late on the scene, whether it was your mother waiting on the porch five minutes before you were supposed to be home or your father not finding us on my boat until the next morning. Was that the night Randy was conceived?”
He was dredging up too many memories and appearing to taunt her with them. Her mind was whirling, trying to keep pace with the changing direction of his sentences.
“It must have been,” she nodded.
Slater turned from her and she found herself facing the muscled smoothness of his tanned back. “You’d better go,” he said. “You promised your mother you’d be home shortly.”
“Yes.” But she didn’t make any move to leave, not wanting to go now that everything between them suddenly seemed so unsettled. “Slater.” She came up to his side and laid her hand on the taut, sinewed muscles of his upper arm.
With grudging slowness, he faced her and looked down the straight bridge of his nose at her. There was indecision in his eyes, an inner war being waged with himself. Dawn swayed toward him, in some way wanting to reassure him.
The little movement brought his arms around her to catch her to him, and gather her hard to his body. His mouth was coming down as he muttered roughly, “Damn you for twisting me up into knots like this.”
There was something hard and demanding in his rough kiss that hadn’t been there before, as if he was trying to exorcise her ghost from his system. Dawn pulled away from his mouth and stared at him in hurt and half-angry confusion.
Instantly he released her and moved away, but she had a glimpse of the darkening frown gathering on his forehead.
“I’m sorry, Dawn.” But he didn’t say for what. “Go,” he urged with absent gruffness. “Before your mother starts getti
ng worried.”
She hesitated a second more then walked to the door, letting his apology take the place of an explanation for the time being. She had the inner door open and was halfway out of it when Slater added, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
He tossed the remark after her with an absent indifference. Dawn saw it as a desire to continue their relationship, however reluctantly it was expressed. There had been a few minutes when she had thought it was going to fall apart all over again.
When she stepped into the clear night, bright stars shone in the sky overhead, and a big, old moon rode high above the horizon. A cool sea breeze drifted off the water to scent the languid air. It was a long time since she had noticed such things.
Chapter Six
All the breakfast dishes were washed and returned to their respective places in the kitchen cupboard, except for a coffee cup. It was sitting on the table where her father was still reading the morning paper. Dawn hummed along with the song being played on the radio while she swept the kitchen floor, tapping her father’s shoes so he would move his feet and allow the broom to reach the area under him.
Her mother was hurrying around drawing all the window shades and drapes to trap the lingering coolness of the night air inside the house. Randy was outside, playing by the garage. Every once in a while, Dawn heard the basketball hitting the backboard her father had installed above the garage door.
As she swept the dust into a small pile, Dawn was absently amazed at how easily she had reverted to the habit of doing household chores after so many years of having them done for her by others. Maybe she’d tire of them, but right now she didn’t resent doing them at all. Maybe that acceptance came with maturity, too.
