Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (33 page)

“Trust me, I’ve got no choice.”

I locked the door behind him and asked, “Can I offer you anything? There’s about half an ounce of orange juice and a pretty old leftover salad from Barker’s Grill in the fridge.” Truth. Lame, but true. And I wouldn’t normally tell anyone I had gross old food in the fridge because I kept forgetting to take it out on trash night and I couldn’t let it sit around in a trash bag inside before then.

“Tempting, but no, thanks.”

I turned down the lights, but the alarm system had a default that always kept the place dimly lit so that no one would feel free to break in and feel his way around in the dark, taking stuff until the police arrived. Which, in our town, wasn’t always all that fast. In some ways, Mayberry was alive and well.

“Let’s go in the back anyway,” I suggested.

He followed me back and I closed the door behind us.

It was no bedroom back there, with bolts and bolts of fabrics and supplies and unopened stock boxes, but because we also worked in the back, there was a comfortable sitting area with a long plush sofa, a couple of easy chairs, and a TV.

But we didn’t get that far before I turned to him and said, “I’m sorry I’ve always let you down.”

He laughed, clearly surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“You were always nice to me and I always let you comfort me and fix me and I never gave anything worthwhile back to you. I don’t know why you’re nice to me at all.”

“Because I love you, Quinn.”

This time I was the one who was surprised. “
What?
”

“You heard me. I’m not waxing rhapsodic about it, not hitting my knees and begging you to hand me a crumb. I don’t want crumbs. I’d rather starve.”

“I’m not offering crumbs, but still, I don’t blame you.”

He quirked a smile. “Good.”

There were no words beyond that. Because there was nothing else to say. And there was
definitely
nothing else to do.

So how it happened that one minute we were making noise about all the
nothing
we had between us and the next his mouth was on mine and I was clutching his shoulders and pulling him closer, I don’t know.

The urgency was immediate.

Ten minutes ago, I’d been the person I’d grown very familiar with being; practical, carrying on, a little limp maybe, but without dramatic ups and down. Now the man whose betrayal had been creeping around the back of my mind was nowhere, and here was Frank. His tongue was in my mouth, and I was parting my lips to bring him deeper but feeling like he could never get deep enough. I could not get close enough, I needed to
be
him in order to feel close enough. This wasn’t the act of friends, not old friends, not new friends, not any sort of generic comrades. To anyone else in the world, we would have looked like lovers at an eagerly anticipated romantic reunion.

The soldier back from a long hardship deployment, maybe.

And that’s what it felt like. It had been a decade since our two hot nights, and clearly neither of us had forgotten, and that amped up the urgency tenfold.

For all its wild inappropriateness—and there was no question that this kiss was wildly inappropriate, given everything between us that was too messy to overcome—it felt exactly
right
.

Every time our lips touched, I remembered his taste, and a single kiss brought back those nights I thought I’d all but forgotten. It was like having a favorite ice cream again or something. A flavor nearly forgotten but immediately remembered and loved.

The same was true of the smell of his skin. I am cursed with an unusually good sense of smell; if I weren’t doing what I was doing for a living, I probably could have been a “nose” for one of the finest perfumers in Paris, and I could smell the soap on his skin, but also the
him
underneath the soap, and it wrapped me in a sense of peace and well-being. It was only the familiarity, I tried to reason; though our time together had been brief, he reminded me of running away from pain and feeling safe in the arms of a strong man. But it was more than that. I could feel it.

So much more that it scared me. Because there was no
halfway
with
this
man. No push-and-pull, no games. However nice he’d once been—and however nice he really still was—Frank Morrison was no boy, and he was not playing games.

So I was on a cliff.

“Stop,” I said feebly against his mouth.

He slid his hands around my rib cage. “I don’t want to.”

“I do.” I kissed him again.

“Do you really want me to?”

“You were never able to read me.”

“Bullshit. I know you better than you know yourself. You just never allowed yourself to see that, when you were wrapped up in that other situation.”

That other situation
.

Burke.

How could it be that Burke suddenly had no pull on me? That thinking his name or picturing his face didn’t matter in the heat of this moment?

In a way, that was a relief.

For a long moment, we just kissed some more. I couldn’t stop. It was crazy. I loved it and hated myself for loving it and giving in to it. Even though it was ridiculous for a grown woman to have so little self-control as to be pining in different ways for two different men.

Right now, though?

There was only one man.

He ran his hands up under my shirt and unhooked my bra in a single movement. When he cupped my breasts with his heat, I was gone. There was
no
stopping this, and I knew exactly where it was going. Obviously even an idiot from another planet could have seen where this was going, and I was going with it.

He pulled my shirt off over my head, and I let my bra drop to the floor.

He bent down and kissed my shoulder, my collarbone, then took my nipple in his mouth and sucked, first one side, then the other. Normally this doesn’t do much for me, and I don’t know what Frank does right that everyone else did wrong, but it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Meanwhile, he unbuttoned my jeans and shoved them down over my hips and down my thighs until they heaped at my feet on the floor and I stepped out of them.

There was something incredibly hot about standing before him, all but naked, completely vulnerable, while he was dressed and working my body with his hands and mouth like I was just there for him to devour.

He moved me over to the sofa and I fell back against it, completely unresisting when he knelt in front of me and pulled my plain white panties off. (Had I known this was coming, I would have worn one of the cute pair I had from Victoria’s Secret.) And then I was completely naked, completely at his mercy.

And he was not a sexually merciful man.

Lucky for me.

He put his hands on my inner thighs, parting them farther, opening me totally to him, then he kissed my stomach, my hips, my thighs, and everywhere but the place that ached the most for him. He was good at this, better than most, driving up the need until it reached a fever pitch. I didn’t know what he’d been doing all these years—and I really didn’t want to know—but he clearly hadn’t been sitting around doing nothing but reading the
Financial Times.

I arched against him, reaching to pull him closer until I felt his tongue flicker lightly against me. Then it was back to the tender spot between my pelvis and leg, where he ran his tongue slowly down, following the map closer and closer to my need until, suddenly, and without teasing, he took me in. And this time he did devour me. He held me in his hands at the hips and locked me in place with his mouth until I couldn’t stand the anticipation anymore.

“I need you,” I rasped, clutching at his shirt and tugging it to pull it off him.

He helped, and tossed it aside, then did the same with his jeans, leaving his briefs on as he knelt before me again.

I closed my eyes and reveled in it for a moment, before what he was doing could no longer be enough, and I pulled him up to me, catching his briefs with my toes and pushing them down out of the way.

He met my gaze and hesitated just for a moment before pressing into me, never losing eye contact. Then he moved down very slowly to kiss me, still looking at me, and me looking back. There was communication there, without a word. Understanding of something inside, though the questions of past and future remained.

There followed an intense moment I could neither define nor turn away from, before I threw my arms around his neck and pulled him closer, closing my eyes and willing him to fill me up and take me over.

We held fast and didn’t let go, never losing that contact even when he moved me on top of him. I cupped his face with my hands, gazing at the man I realized I had so much more to learn about, and kissed each temple, the top of his head, then his mouth.

“This is amazing,” I whispered.

He rolled me over again. “What about this?”

I smiled and felt my warmth wrap around him. “This too.”

He kissed me and increased his power. I yielded, and touched my hands against his chest, feeling every movement flex in his muscles. It was easy to dissolve into this. It was what I wanted. It was what I wanted more than anything.

I had known this man almost all my life. Had he been my fate all along? Had life drawn us together over and over, only for me to focus on the wrong man?

There was no stopping now, there was no way I could.

I gave in to it.

Because the need to meld into him was overwhelming, and for moments it felt like we did just that, but ultimately I knew this action raised many, many more questions than answers.

We kept going. It was amazing, with dizzying moments of unity that made me feel like we’d transcended our humanness and gone into eternity.

And afterward I again experienced fleeting moments of harmony, but the voice in my head—or my heart?—kept interrupting them.

Say good-bye
.

This nagging voice in my head began like a siren in the distance but grew louder and louder as the inevitable moment of parting drew near: How could we be doing this? How could we ever do it again? It was just too complicated. Too ceaselessly complicated.

Yet, at the same time, what would it be like to have this—to have each other—every single night?

After we lay there for I don’t know how long, I made myself get up. It wasn’t easy. I forced my movements, and then my words. “I have to go,” I said. “Early day tomorrow.” And there was the lie.

“Is something wrong?” he asked immediately.

I didn’t turn to him as I put my pants on—a giveaway right there, I guess, but I didn’t want to lose it in front of him. “No, not at all, but”—I forced a laugh—“this was an unexpected detour tonight.”

“Yes.” I heard him get up and could see him dressing from the corner of my eye.

This was wrong, this hurried return to normality, like nothing had happened. Making love like that deserved a long, warm, secure rest and recovery time, to let the spirit settle back into place. Not a harried pulling on of pants, an inside-out shirt, and a walk of shame to the car.

This was me,
I
was the one doing this, but I couldn’t stop myself. Everything in me said it was time to go. I wasn’t sure what everything in me was reacting to, probably nothing more than fear or the weakness I felt for him under his touch, but I had to get out before I made a mistake I could never take back.

“So.” I smoothed my shirt and grabbed my purse as he slipped on his second shoe. “I guess I’ll see you at the wedding.”

“Yes, you will.”

We headed toward the door and I opened it, allowing him through first.

“Should be exciting.” Who was I suddenly? A children’s show hostess?

He gave a laugh. He was probably thinking something along the same lines. But he came over to me, wordless, put his hands on my shoulders, and drew me to him, kissing my forehead. “Good night, Quinn.”

And, boom, just like that he had the advantage. Even though I knew he wasn’t playing a game, and “advantage” would have sounded wrong to his ears, that was where we were. He had control now because I cared in a way I had never quite cared before.

“Good night.” I turned back and locked the door, then went to my car without looking at him again. It was only when I was safely locked in the private bubble of my car that I told him my final truth. “I love you.”

In a way it surprised me as much as it would, undoubtedly, have surprised him.

Chapter 25

“I’m sorry, I can’t work here anymore.”

I looked at Becca in disbelief. It was four hours before Dottie’s wedding and I was in a bind trying to get everything together and take it to the church. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “As of
now
? As of
right now
?”

She looked pale. A moment passed when she pressed her hand to her month and looked like she was going to puke before she said, “I’m pregnant. Again. And I can barely get out of bed. I threw up all weekend long.”

My sympathy kicked in. “Pregnant?”

She nodded, and there was very little happiness in her eyes at the announcement. “We weren’t planning it. But this time I’m so sick.” She paused again. “I just hope it’s a girl.”

“It will be great either way. As long as
you’re
okay. So go home,” I said, even though it was the last thing in the world I wanted. Becca hadn’t been here for three days, and prior to that, when I looked back on it, she
had
been acting a bit off. She must have been feeling crummy longer than she’d admitted.

“Thank you,” she said, clearly not wanting to waste one more penny on explanations.

The bells over the door trilled, and I looked to see Taney coming in.

Oh, great
was my thought.
Just add insult to injury here
.

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” she said in her quiet voice. It looked as if she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and a little puffy, but it was her blotchy skin that gave it away. “I wanted to know if you were looking for any help here in your store?”

There was no way. Life never went like this.