Satin Pleasures (15 page)

Salivating like a love-starved nymphomaniac at a 'males only' convention.
Tess looked away. "I'm getting dressed and going to brunch."

"Without any underwear?"

Her emotions, all mixed up in the first place, jumbled further. She was appalled when she burst into tears. Walking on weak legs to the bed, she sat down with a jerk. "No one will know." She sniffed.

Dan sat down next to her. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled the sheet over his lap. "I'd know," he said huskily. "Then, we'd be right back where we started."

Tess glanced at him. "I'm sorry. I guess I haven't—"

"Made love to a man in a long time?"

"I'm not used to—"

"Waking up next to him?"

"I usually—"

"Avoid involvement," he paused to grin when she glared at him, "like the plague."

She chuckled suddenly. He always did that, made her laugh and forget her problems.
At least, for a while.
"You're incorrigible."

"That means 'loveable', right?"

She was willing to change the definition in her dictionary. Dan's sense of the ridiculous was one of the things she loved about him.

Her breath hitched in her lungs.
Sweet mercy.
Is that what happened here last night? Had she made love with Dan because she was falling for him?

No! Tess pushed the notion away before it could find firm ground. Last night was about sex.
Nothing more.
"I think the word you’re looking for is 'deluded'."

Dan laughed.
"Just checking."

He caught her hand in his and threaded their fingers together. They sat quietly for several minutes before he spoke again. "So, do you want to tell me where you're going?"

"I'm going to brunch at my parents' house in Pacifica." When he didn’t comment, she took a deep breath and made the second most irrational decision she'd ever made in her adult life. "Want to come with me?"

She seemed to wait a long time for him to mull it over. "I'd like that, but I have a question first."

Tess held her breath, afraid he'd ask why she'd practically thrown him out of the apartment one minute and invited him home to meet her family the next. She wasn't ready to analyze why she was behaving so strangely. "What's your question?"

"Is this brunch 'formal' or 'underwear optional'?"

“Is this the one, honey?”

Startled by the abrupt question, Tess dropped Irene Emory’s favorite vegetable peeler down the garbage disposal, right behind the apple she’d been paring for her mother’s fruit salad. She checked over her shoulder to make sure Dan hadn’t returned from her father’s small greenhouse in the backyard. “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about, Mom.”

Irene reached around her to dig the utensil and bruised apple out of the hole. “I prefer the fruit tossed in a bowl, Tessa Lynn, and you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve been here more than an hour, but you’re still flitting around like a nervous seagull with a kite string caught in his tail feathers.”

Tess laughed at the childhood memory so she wouldn’t have to deal with her mother’s questions. The last thing she needed to know was that her daughter’s antsy behavior had begun the instant she opened her eyes this morning and found a real, live, naked shopkeeper in her bed!

“You’ll never let me forget that one, will you?” She’d been a precocious ten-year-old when she designed a leash of kite string to wrap around her pet seagull’s tail. “I didn’t raise Salty to teach him how to fly away with the first lady seagull he met. He needed to know where his home was.”

“And he found it when you let him go.” Irene gently pushed her into a kitchen chair on the heels of the reminder.

Handing Tess a bunch of red grapes to pull apart, she rinsed the apple and quickly finished paring it before sitting down, too. “You couldn’t control
Salty’s
nature, any more than you can control the look in your eyes when you’re in the same room with that young man you brought home today.”

That’s what Tess was afraid of, her abysmal lack of control recently. Dan didn’t need to be in the same room with her to push buttons that had remained inoperable for years.
Dreams.
Fantasies.
Need.
Desire
.
The myriad of unfamiliar emotions that had surfaced in the past two weeks was unnerving.

The man had quickly become a distraction—one she could ill afford to indulge. Or resist. She didn’t know if last night’s lovemaking was an aberration, a glorious night never to be
repeated, or the beginning of an intimate relationship she knew in her heart would end badly. None of those possibilities thrilled her.

Is that why you invited Dan to meet your parents today? So he’d see what your ex-fiancé saw? So he’d run away, too, and take temptation with him?

“Are you engaged?”

Tess was conscious of sticky grape juice dripping through her fingers as she stared at her mother. “I beg your pardon?”

Irene shrugged. “The last time you brought a man to meet us, you were engaged to him.”

“I don’t get engaged to every man I bring home,” she said in her defense, dropping the crushed grapes on a napkin and wiping her fingers.

“Dan is the only
man
you have ever brought home, princess.” Tess’s father, Michael, stood in the doorway, his hands firmly wrapped around his canes. He slowly entered the room and began to move toward the head of the table. “The last one was an arrogant weasel who didn’t deserve you.”

“Dad!”
Embarrassment swept a path to Tess’s toenails before she realized Dan hadn’t accompanied her father into the room. “Do you think you could have said that a little louder?”

“Probably.
But I think I’d hear about it, if I did.” He grinned, his irrepressible sense of humor reminding her of the only other male to bring color and excitement and laughter into her life.

“Where’s Dan?” She peered at the empty doorway, away from her dad’s shuffling gait, so she couldn’t succumb to the impulse to leap to his aid. He hated to have her fuss over him, especially since the last operation had freed him from the wheelchair.

Michael set both canes in the umbrella stand against the wall before he eased into his seat. “He’s upstairs washing his hands.”

Tess’s pulse skipped at the thought of Dan’s callused hands and how they played in water last night. She cleared her throat. “And, he’s washing his hands because...?”

“They’re dirty?” Her father blinked, and then smiled excitedly as he always did before launching into his favorite subject. “I showed Dan my
cattleyas
and he mixed all the potting material I needed. After I separate some new
pseudobulbs
this afternoon, he’s going to help me repot the earlier batch.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry, Dad! I can’t believe I forgot about the orchids you wanted to plant last week. I got swamped at the office and didn’t—”

“Tess.”

“...remember that I promised—”

“Tess!”

“What?”

“Forget it. It’ll be done today.” Michael smiled. “Dan’s a natural in the greenhouse.”

It was one thing for him to see her dedication to her parents, but she hadn’t planned to take advantage of the poor man. “He’s going to think I invited him to brunch so I wouldn't have to work,” she muttered, thinking of Dan’s backache the previous day.

Irene laughed. “Anyone who knows you knows that isn’t true!”

“Your mother’s right, Tess.”
Michael nodded. “I was telling Dan—”

“Nothing I didn’t already know or suspect.” Dan, tall and too blasted appealing in the khakis and hand-dyed blue silk shirt he’d bought at the Wharf yesterday, strode into the kitchen and winked at the older man.

A flush of desire suffused her body when Dan flashed one of his wicked smiles in her direction. She was tempted to ask which of her secrets her father had shared, but Dan already knew too much about her. Like where she was ticklish.
And how to touch her to make her fly apart into a million pieces.
“When I hear some wild story circulating the mall grapevine on Monday,” she teased huskily, “I’ll know who to blame.”

“I don’t kiss and tell,” he murmured. His intimate gaze knocked her temperature up another couple of degrees before he broke eye contact. “All he said was that you work too hard. I agreed, so we decided you’ll have to rest on,” he eyed her chair pointedly, “your laurels today.”

She smiled sweetly, stifling a childish need to stick her tongue out at him. It was bad enough when her parents ganged up on her. They didn’t need a new recruit. “If I rest on my laurels long enough, they’ll be calling me ‘Two Ton Tessie’.”

Dan shook his index finger at her like a schoolteacher drumming a lesson into a recalcitrant child’s head. “But I’ll bet the stress card will be blue!”

Clearly enjoying the snappy rejoinders between them, her dad motioned Dan toward the empty seat on his right. “Stress card?”

Automatically pulling the rectangular card from the pocket of her red linen slacks, Tess as good as admitted to the world she put it on her person each morning. She liked to touch it periodically throughout the day, but wasn’t sure why. Every time she did, she thought of Dan and that wasn’t conducive to her concentration or calm.

It wasn’t as if she believed the piece of plastic was doing her any good either. It had simply become a vendetta to make the silly thing turn the correct color. There had to be some trick to it that she hadn’t figured out yet.

She tossed it negligently across the table to her father for examination and, avoiding Dan’s perceptive gaze, rose to set the table. “Dan’s got this idea turning that card blue should become my mission statement in life.”

“Well,” her dad peered at the printed directions, “it seems to me there’s nothing wrong with reducing stress. You’re spread pretty thin lately. The last few times I’ve called you’ve been too busy to talk.”

Dan offered a nod of agreement. “Her office hours could be turned into an Olympic marathon event.”

“And it’s not like you’ve been taking particularly good care of yourself these past few months,” her mother added softly to the litany.

Tess muttered under her breath. “Now I know how a lone fish feels flopping on a beach full of seagulls.”

She picked up the tray of roast beef sandwiches her mother had prepared. “Dad,” she placed the tray in front of him, a conciliatory offering, “I’m launching a new program and it’s taken a little more of my time than usual, but I’ll be able to slow down after I get my promotion.”

Her father lifted one eyebrow. “Pull the other leg, Tess. You get that promotion and you’ll have more work, not less. The worst part is you don’t really want the promotion in the first place.”

“Of course, I want it.” She’d thought of little else for months, until Dan ran into her life and turned it topsy-turvy.

“Why?”

“You know why. I’ve worked hard. I’ve earned it.” She paused. “There’s the prestige, the challenge.”
The money.
The words hung in the air like dirty laundry, unsaid, but almost tangible.

He leaned back in his seat. “But you’re not excited about it, princess.”

“I’m excited.” The instant she opened her mouth, she knew she sounded too defensive.

Her father zeroed in on her weak argument. “Excitement and anxiety
are
not the same thing. You’re anxious about the job, not excited at the thought of getting it, not like when you hired on with that
Thorgram
outfit. You had so many dreams then, of upgrading the center, of expanding. You beamed whenever you talked about it.”

In her heart, she knew he was right. But, dreams weren’t reality and, when she heard about the successes this new surgeon was having with patients like her dad, her promotion became imperative. “That’s because I haven’t gotten it yet.” She turned away and crossed the room to the silverware drawer. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up, either. That’s why you need to know I’m thinking about not having the surgery.”

Not have the surgery?

For an interminable time she couldn’t move, the image of her father lying motionless on a hospital bed burning behind her eyelids. The memory of his face, white with pain and fatigue, still had the power to bring her to her knees. It was as vivid today as her resolve to erase it.

The silverware heavy in her hand, she returned to the table only to find herself confronting the scrutiny of three pairs of eyes. “You’re joking, right?”

Her dad shook his head. “Your mother and I have been discussing it for several weeks.”

Confusion and hurt battled for expression. “But we spoke several times. You didn’t say anything about this!”

Tess’s mom rose to take the utensils from her cramped fingers. “We wanted to tell you, but it didn’t seem right to break it to you over the phone.”