When Lightning Strikes Twice

by Barbara Boswell

  “Don’t whine, Rachel.” He laughed softly.

  “I was not whining!” Rachel was instantly indignant. “I have never whined in my entire life! I can’t tell you how insulted I am that—”

  “Shh, baby, I’m sorry. The last thing I want to do is insult you.” Grinning down at her, he freed her wrists. “I want to make you feel good, I don’t want to make you mad at me.”

  He was teasing her, flirting with her, and Rachel felt the antagonism that should’ve restored her sanity and sent her on her way, dissolving like an ice-cream cone in the sun.

  What made her so susceptible to his roguish brand of charm? Rachel wondered desperately. It didn’t seem to matter that she found him irritating, even infuriating; mere moments later she would be completely disarmed by him.

  “Does this feel good?” Quint carefully cupped her breasts with his hands.

  Though he’d released her wrists, a dazed Rachel kept her arms flexed against the wall on either side of her. Instinctively, she pushed her breasts against his palms. He fondled the rounded softness, and she exhaled on a sigh. “Feeling good” seemed a pallid euphemism for this sensuous bliss.

  Yet, it was not enough. Her nipples peaked and strained against her bra; they were taut and sensitive and needed soothing. She was close to begging him to touch her there when his thumbs finally caressed her, alternately making lazy circles and applying gentle pressure exactly where she wanted it, how she wanted it.

  Rachel whimpered. He’d worked her into such a sensual frenzy that her whole body was shaking.

  “Open your eyes, Rachel,” Quint murmured against her ear. “Look at me.”

  Her eyelids opened slowly, and her limpid hazel eyes locked on his lips that were barely touching her own.

  “Do you want me to kiss you?”

  Rachel could not ever remember wanting to be kissed as badly as she did at this moment. She gave her head a faint nod.

  “I didn’t hear you,” he whispered.

  She expelled a tremulous breath. “Yes.” The word was full of want and need, her voice soft with surrender.

  He nibbled on her lower lip, then the upper one, and a tiny moan escaped from deep in her throat.

  “Say my name, Rachel,” he said hoarsely.

  In an act of wanton boldness that would’ve scandalized her usual guarded, coolly reserved self, she slid her arms around his neck. “You talk too much, Quint.”

  “I should just shut up and kiss you?”

  “Yes!”

  His arms fully encircled her then, fitting her soft curves against the hard planes of his body, as his mouth closed fiercely over hers. She parted her lips on impact, and, when his tongue thrust inside, Rachel met it with her own to engage in an erotically intimate little duel.

  Desire flooded her with an urgency she had never before experienced. Her skilled analytical, rational thought processes were incoherent and overwhelmed, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even notice.

  Not when his wonderful hands so exquisitely caressed her breasts. Not when he was hard and thick between her legs, moving against her in a way that sent shock waves of pleasure jolting through her. Swollen and aching and wet, Rachel squirmed, wanting, needing so much more than he was giving her.

  His hands lowered to clench her buttocks, his fingers squeezing hard. She rubbed against him provocatively, aware of the empty, achy void within her, experiencing a previously unknown craving to be filled. By him.

  The barriers of their clothing were suddenly intolerable to her. Daring and desperate, Rachel tugged his shirt from the waistband of his jeans and slipped her hands under it, gliding her palms along his bare back. His skin was smooth and warm and slightly damp.

  She felt as if she were losing herself in him, drowning in the scent and taste and feel of him. But instead of being threatened by his compelling virility, she felt empowered and euphoric.

  I want him. Her whole body vibrated with the wild urgency of that admission. And jolted her back to her senses, like an electroshock altering errant brain waves. She tore her mouth from his and stared up at him.

  Quint saw the glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. And rebelled against it. “We both want this, Rachel,” he asserted, with as much certitude as a lawyer arguing his case in front of the Supreme Court.

  He dipped his mouth to resume his seduction of her neck, his moist little kisses already beginning to undermine her fledgling resolve. “And it feels wonderful, Rachel. It feels right”

  She could hardly argue with that. Still, she tried to present a case for lucidity and restraint. “We shouldn’t do this, Quint,” she whispered weakly.

  “Probably not, but we’re going to anyway, aren’t we?”

  He claimed her mouth again, his body hard and tight, the blood fizzing hotly through his veins. He wanted her with a ferocious urgency that rocked him. She was so passionate, so responsive, a feminine sensual paradox who was both pliant and demanding.

  He was already at the point where kissing wasn’t enough and the clothing they were wearing was way too much. He wanted to carry her into his bedroom and undress her, to feel her bare skin under his hands, to touch her intimately….

  He raised his head slightly but kept his mouth so close to hers that she could feel his lips touch her own when he spoke, could feel his warm breath mingle with hers.

  “I want to make love to you, Rachel. So much.” His hands slipped under her cotton top, and he skimmed the smooth skin of her midriff with his fingertips. “Let me. Please.”

  Before she could reply, he added seductively, “Tell me that you want it, too. Let me hear you say it.”

  “You really do believe in validation every step of the way, don’t you?” An unexpected surge of affection swept through her, further destabilizing her.

  “Yes,” said Quint.

  He stared so intensely at her that she felt he was looking inside her, seeing her exposed and vulnerable, divining all the secret feelings that she’d always managed to keep hidden, even from herself.

  “Yes,” she repeated dazedly. Despite her considerable verbal skills in the courtroom, she was inexperienced and inarticulate in expressing need or desire. But Quint was watching her, and waiting.

  “Say it, Rachel.”

  “I—I want—what you do,” she managed to rasp.

  Quint kissed her again, and Rachel responded with all the passion she’d kept locked deep within her for so long. Lost in a maelstrom of lust and longing, she couldn’t remember why she’d ever tried to call a halt to things in the first place.

  They were so intensely absorbed in each other that neither one heard the car pull into the carport, neither heard the kitchen door open and close or the footsteps on the stairs.

  It wasn’t until an awestruck voice exclaimed, “Wow! Don’t you two ever come up for air?” that Rachel and Quint sprang apart, startled and shocked.

  The descent from their private sensual universe to the real one, where a fascinated Sarah Sheely stood in the hall gaping at them, was swift and brutal.

  Rachel gasped. Quint cursed. Both began to move slowly in opposite directions.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Sarah said, though her tone was merrily unapologetic. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to stick around and bug you. I’m on my way to my room and I’ll put on the TV—and keep the sound up high.” She gave a jovially conspiratorial thumbs-up and went on her way.

  Silently, Quint and Rachel watched her open the door of the room next to Brady’s and disappear inside.

  “I have to go.” Rachel’s entire body was one flaming scarlet blush.

  “Rachel, wait.”

  If he tried to talk her into staying, she would scream. Rachel walked away from him, quickly reaching the staircase and taking the steps two at a time to the ground floor.

  But Quint moved even faster and easily caught up to her before she reached the front door. His hand closed around her upper arm.

  Rachel prepared herself for a fight, she almost welcomed it. Frustration
, embarrassment, and the powerful force of unslaked passion roared through her, seeking an outlet. A ferocious quarrel with Quint Cormack, the cause of it all, would serve nicely.

  “I want to thank you for taking such good care of Brady today,” Quint said quietly.

  Rachel looked up at him, nonplussed and deflated. She knew at that moment he wasn’t going to do or say anything to keep her with him tonight. Perversely, she was disappointed, though she knew she wouldn’t have stayed.

  He released her arm and she unconsciously rubbed the skin there. “If you want to see him again—” Quint paused, looking uncertain. “If you ever feel like visiting—” He took a deep breath and started over. “I just want you to know that you’re welcome to visit Brady anytime, Rachel.”

  She nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak. She rushed to her car, blinking back the tears that were burning her eyes. Quint didn’t follow her, but he remained standing in the open doorway. Rachel saw him watching her as she got into her car and drove away.

  The pent-up emotions she hadn’t been able to release through lovemaking or fighting surged through her with tidal-wave force. Crying might provide some relief, but Rachel had never wept over a man, and she certainly wasn’t about to turn lachrymose now.

  To distract herself, she turned on the radio and hit the button set for a station featuring an all-talk format. An irate voice came blaring over the airwaves, immediately commanding her attention. Tonight’s topic had something to do with a strange plan to resurrect the long-dead dirigible industry, beginning in Camden with two huge hangars that would build a pair of dirigibles every eighteen months and employ fifty thousand people. Most callers blasted the plan as either an insane pipe dream or a ridiculous scam, but a few were hopeful, citing the cottage industries that could be centered around dirigibles, for example, T-shirts and souvenir items of all kinds.

  As Rachel had hoped, listening to the show was an ideal diversion. A dirigible factory? The urge to cry was replaced by sheer incredulity as the debate raged on.

  “Look what I have for you, Katie.” Wade placed a giant-sized chocolate chip muffin on the top of Katie’s desk.

  “My favorite!” Katie exclaimed eagerly. “And from Brunner’s Bakery, too, my most favorite place!”

  Wade was aware of that. He’d made a special trip this morning, driving several miles out of his way, to the bakery in Haddonfield to buy this muffin. He knew the younger Sheely siblings were quite receptive to bribery. He and Tim had done enough of it over the years—to buy silence, to gain privacy, to get information.

  Information was what he was currently seeking.

  Katie swung around in her chair and began to pull the wrapper from the muffin. The phone rang, and she answered it, only to instantly disconnect the caller. “They can call back later,” she said airily. “I want to eat this while it’s still warm.”

  Wade winced. When the phone rang again, he answered it and dealt with the caller himself while Katie ate her muffin.

  “Dana was really upset when I dropped her off yesterday,” he said casually, tucking the message he’d written into the pocket of his suitcoat.

  “Yeah, she sure was mad,” Katie agreed, chomping into the muffin. “And then I had to go open my big mouth and now she’s ticked off at Tricia and Tricia is ready to kill me.”

  “Tricia?” Wade stifled a groan. He wasn’t in the mood to follow Katie on one of her pointless flights of ideas. “Did Dana tell you why she was so angry?” he asked bluntly, trying to keep her on track.

  “You don’t know either?”

  It seemed his bakery bribe had been a wasted effort. Katie was as in the dark about Dana as he was. Wade sighed his frustration.

  “Looked like you were pretty mad, too—the way you peeled out of there at a hundred miles an hour! Man!” Katie sounded impressed.

  “I did not ‘peel out’ or speed,” Wade said tightly. Her admiration of what could only be described as juvenile behavior irritated him. “You must have me confused with your hotshot brother Brendan, who was doing both in Dana’s car.”

  “Sure.” Katie snickered. “Next you’ll be saying you weren’t mad either,”

  Wade walked to the window and gazed out at the lush lawn and towering trees in Lakeview Park, bordering the small man-made lake that had given the town its name. “By the time I got home yesterday, I couldn’t remember exactly why I was so furious.”

  The admission alarmed him as much as this current scene he was trapped in—having a heart-to-heart talk with Katie who was scanning the entertainment section of the newspaper, more interested in celebrity gossip than anything he might say.

  And yet he couldn’t seem to stop talking. “I called your house last night—I actually got through in the five seconds between Emily’s phone calls, and Anthony told me that Dana wouldn’t talk to me.”

  It was still bothering him. Sixteen-year-old Anthony Sheely, currently caught up in a dark, brooding, alienated-artist phase had sounded as if he were relishing the melodrama and his own part as messenger. “Dana says she doesn’t want to speak to you,” Anthony had announced in theatrically resonant tones. “She says you know why.”

  Could she actually be holding a grudge? He couldn’t remember the last time they had parted in anger. They’d always kidded each other, true, but neither took offense. Certainly not lasting offense.

  “Well, just don’t ask me what Tricia said because then both Dana and Tricia would gang up on me,” warned Katie. “And you’d probably be mad, too. So consider my lips zipped!”

  “I don’t care what Tricia said.” Exasperated, Wade willed himself to be patient. He hitched a leg onto the corner of her desk and treated her to a buddy-to-buddy smile. “Katie, how close is Dana to Quint Cormack?”

  Katie licked chocolate off her fingers. “He’s her boss.”

  Wade’s smile turned into a grimace. This was bordering on hopeless. “I know he’s her boss but is she—are they—” His voice trailed off. Trying to subtly pump Katie for information was not working, but he wasn’t sure how blatant he should go.

  The possibility of Dana being involved with her boss had occurred to him last night and steadily nagged at him since. True, she was dating Rich Vicker, but he knew that relationship wasn’t serious—maybe she was even using it in an attempt to make Cormack jealous?

  Until last night, the idea of Dana having a clandestine affair with her boss—or anyone else—would’ve struck him as absurd. She was not secretive, especially not with him, her best pal Wade. But learning that she’d kept John Pedersen’s appointments with the Cormack firm from him had altered his perceptions.

  Dana was fully capable of keeping a secret from him. But why would she want to keep an affair with Cormack quiet?

  As a longtime Sheely family satellite, the answer came to him immediately. If Dana and Cormack were having a fling, she would never want her parents to find out. Quint Cormack was divorced, and Bob and Mary Jean Sheely were as inflexible as the Pope himself on the issue of divorce.

  Vaguely, then with growing clarity, Wade remembered the uproar a couple years back when Tricia Sheely had dated a divorced claims adjustor in the insurance agency where she worked.

  “If you date someone who’s divorced, it could lead to marrying someone who’s divorced, and that marriage could lead to excommunication,” the older Sheelys had said. And shouted. While visiting Dana and the Sheelys during that period, he’d overheard her folks lecturing Tricia over the phone countless times.

  Finally Tricia had stopped dating the guy, and only then was she back in her parents’ good graces. No, a savvy offspring wouldn’t want Ma and Pa Sheely to know anything at all about a relationship with a divorced person.

  Did Dana think he would snitch to her parents if she confided in him? Wade felt hurt. Then he thought how much he loathed the idea of her with Quinton Cormack. Divorce had nothing to do with it, he assured himself; he simply hated that conniving, client-stealing weasel’s guts. To his dismay, Wade realized
that he was entirely capable of telling Bob and Mary Jean Sheely exactly what their darling daughter was up to. And with whom!

  He watched Katie polish off the last crumbs of the muffin and daintily wipe her mouth. “Katie, would you know if Dana is—dating Quint Cormack?” he asked brusquely. He waited, stiff and tense, for her answer.

  Which he couldn’t quite interpret.

  “Whoa, wait’ll Tricia hears that!” Katie burst into laughter. “She won’t be mad at me anymore, she—Oh hi, Rachel.” The girl looked up and greeted a dour Rachel, who had entered the office and stood staring at them.

  “Hey, Rach,” murmured Wade unenthusiastically.

  He recalled Dana telling him that his cousin had somehow ended up baby-sitting for Quint Cormack’s child yesterday, but he decided not to mention it. Not with Rachel looking grimmer than the Grim Reaper on a pickup mission.

  “Aren’t you, like, roasting to death in that?” Katie asked, eyeing Rachel’s dove gray turtleneck jersey that she wore under her navy pin-striped suit jacket. Katie was in a sleeveless chambray blouse and a demin miniskirt, in deference to the presummer heat.

  “Rachel never sweats,” Wade drawled. “She could wear that outfit in a sauna, and she still wouldn’t perspire.”

  Rachel tugged the high cotton neck of her jersey even higher. “It’s supposed to get cooler today,” she arguedly weakly.

  “Yeah, the temperature is supposed to plummet the whole way down to seventy-five,” taunted Wade. “Brrr. Time to bring out the long-johns.”

  ‘There is no time for anyone to stand around and socialize!” Eve Saxon marched into the office like a five-star general reviewing a less-than-acceptable line of troops. “This is an office, not a chat room! Is it too much to expect the workday to begin with work? Is that a concept any of you can grasp?”

  Katie jumped to attention. Wade and Rachel exchanged apprehensive glances. A day that began with a terse, tense Aunt Eve boded ill for everyone.

  And Eve did look and sound terse and tense this morning, which was unusual. Eve Saxon almost always maintained her composure, saving her rare displays of emotion for the courtroom where they were calculated to have the intended effect on a judge or jury.