Lightning That Lingers (5 page)

Strong hands in cashmere gloves pulled her out from the wall and, with a slow, careful movement, resettled her hat. Sky-blue eyes smiled into hers. The warm mist of his breath caressed her lips. Natural light made him more real, much more man than ornament. No dream held her, but a forceful human being. Smothering in his nearness, she missed the approach of the other man until he spoke.

“Friend of yours, Philip?” The tone was filled with disdain, and, twisting to look at the handsome face above the suede jacket she encountered the look she was most accustomed to receiving from very good-looking men: dismissal. But instead of dwelling on that discovery, she thought disjointedly that she knew the blond man’s name.
Philip
. It was one of those names she could never say without imagining it written in longhand in Spencerian script as though it belonged to some Elizabethan scholar-playwright.

“I’d know this worried brow anywhere.” Philip drew off his own light wool muffler and teasingly covered the part of her face that her own hands had hidden recently at the Cougar Club. “No doubt about it. Same lady.”

She recognized his accent. The diction was upper-class, but softened by a lack of either emphasis or affectation. It was the type of voice her mother called Midwest Patrician, and it clearly didn’t match his profession. That profession and all the circumstances of their previous meeting were strong in her mind as she tried to assert herself in a
situation that was inherently flattening. His light touch felt like a capture.

“Look,” she said to the open space between the two men, “I’m sorry about the snowball,”—especially if you think I threw it at you to attract your attention, she added mentally—“but you see, there were four children …” who naturally by now had vanished. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly back to Philip, whose face carried nothing to indicate whether he thought the children were fictitious, or even that it mattered. He was smiling at her in a way she couldn’t fathom, a way she found immensely threatening.

She had no idea what to expect next, so she was startled when he took the muffler and began to arrange it with care around her neck. The fleecy fiber held his body’s warmth, and the soft cashmere of his gloves brushed underneath her chin on skin made hypersensitive by the cold. Bittersweet shocks of reaction wavered through her upper body and compressed her chest, and she inhaled a stinging lungful of chilled air as his hands lightly covered her cheeks, gently massaging them. Filled with strangled pleasure, she was so taken aback that she couldn’t immediately frame the words to make this bewildering attention stop.

Rubbing the back of his forefinger gently up and down the wind-pinked length of her nose, he asked, “Have you recovered from your exposure to the show the other night? Maybe I should say, from my exposure to you.”

She choked.

“It didn’t appear to be exactly your cup of tea,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Jennifer Hamilton.” The sound of her own name
brought her abruptly to her senses, or at least what she hoped were her senses. The wall behind her hampered a dignified retreat, so she jerked herself sideways to escape his hands and almost collapsed backward over the log cabin. His firm grip cradled her waist, steadied her, then released her, and he took one step backward, too.

His expressive gaze lit briefly on the Lincoln fund drive poster. “Are you a librarian?”

“Yes,” she said tersely, her confusion narrowing into a harried wariness.

“I have such fantasies about librarians. If I’d known that last week at the show …” His voice was soft, his half-smile slow, direct. “Why wouldn’t you let me kiss you?”

Draped against the bricks, waiting impatiently, the man in the suede coat had begun to develop a smirk. Pitiless. They were both pitiless, spoiled, much-sought-after macho hunks who were finding some sadistic entertainment in tormenting an awkward, bashful girl. But this shaken victim was not as defenseless as she seemed. Why wouldn’t she let him kiss her? he had asked.

“I thought it might not be a good idea,” she snapped. “I’m allergic to penicillin.”

The words were not meant to be friendly, but as these things always happened, they sounded considerably worse aloud. His bright gaze held hers, never wavering. He even smiled. And when the man in the suede coat said, “Does she mean?…” he answered in an even tone, “She’s afraid I might give her a social disease.”

The words were light, ironic rather than bitter, betraying none of the private sentiments beneath. The smile had grown wider, infinitely more dangerous,
when he said, “Don’t worry, Jennifer Hamilton. They give me a patch test once a week. So this is going to be perfectly safe.” A dollar came out of his jacket pocket, and before she had guessed what he was going to do, he had tucked it into her waistband.

“A donation,” he said. “I give kisses for them—do you?”

Instinct warned her before he moved to take her, and she was stumbling backward when his hands closed on her shoulders and drew her close. She could feel the hard lineup of their thighs, the crush of her belly and breasts against his yielding jacket that tightened to their shape. Her gaze was caught helplessly in his, lotus petals swirling in a blue floodwater, and she was paralyzed everywhere. Her respiration grew shallow, a faint warm pressure against lips parting slowly in wonder at the caressing expectation flowering within her. And she knew that in spite of everything she wanted him, wanted this kiss. His hand was moving gently around her neck, moving upward, cupping and tilting the back of her head, his fingers spreading deliciously through her hair. Ermine-soft in cashmere, his little finger stroked dainty tremors into her spine.

His mouth descended to hers with throat-stopping languor, his eyes holding her entranced until his dark-tipped lashes drifted closed, veiling the brightness. And her eyes closed too, and as his breath swirled lightly with hers, she took a quick, fearful inbreath, and then in the darkness felt his lips come against hers, hardly touching. Her heartbeat hammered in her throat, in her head, and she let his tightening grip press her
hips into his thighs and she burned there, and on her mouth where he was pressing the cool satin of his lips. His breath warmed her cheeks and chin as his tongue followed the modeling of her lips before touching into her mouth with gentle force. And through her body she could feel the scoring heat of it as his hand pushed up on her lower back and bottom, making her slide against him.

When at last he pulled back from her, her numbed gaze wandered over his face, the vivid eyes, the mouth, deliciously damp from her. His hand, which had been cupping the back of her hair, slipped underneath her jaw, cradling her chin.

“Jennifer Hamilton,” he said softly, framing both words as though he were committing them to memory. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

Then she was released. As the trance began to shatter around her, she saw in a bewildered way that a straggling crowd had gathered. Next to the hunk in suede stood a third man with dark curling hair and gray eyes. His hands were thrust into his ribbed leather jacket.

“The things I miss by being last to cash my check,” the stranger said, directing a droll smile at Philip. “I don’t know what in the name of heaven that was about, but it looked damned unpatriotic.” He scooped up the stovepipe hat that Jennifer hadn’t even realized had fallen from her head, and after subjecting it to a dubious examination, set it gently back on her hair. “When she’s not head of state, is she someone?”

“She’s someone. Her name is Jennifer Hamilton,”
Philip said, smiling at the gray-eyed man, beginning to walk beside him toward the street. “And I’m going to make her a happy woman.”

The gray-eyed stranger turned instantly and gave her a look full of humor and delight, and began to laugh. The man she knew only as Peter the Policeman fell in beside them, and she emerged from the final abrupt stage into reality, into a hurricane of fury.

“Not going to make what easy?” she said, the words passing quietly through kiss-numbed lips. She continued to stare idiotically after his retreating figure. Then she repeated, quite loudly, “Make
what
easy?”

He turned halfway across the street and said, “Us.” And she watched him walking backward, gazing at her, until “Peter” took hold of his arm and said plaintively, “For God’s sake, Philip, will you be done with that weird chick? What’s gotten into you? It’s damned embarrassing.”

It might have been the audacity of a man who made his living taking off his clothes describing an encounter with her as embarrassing. It might have been the emotional aftershock of the kiss. Or it might have been the certainty that again the blond stripper had made a spectacle out of her. But Jennifer Hamilton, coming to the end of her rope, dashed her hat on the ground and thought, Damn you! You’re never going to make me a happy woman! Do you understand? Never!

He had vanished into the crowd.

Long habits of dignity caused her to bend slowly and retrieve her hat, looking neither to the left nor right. Shaken, yet steeled, trying her best to pretend that nothing had just happened and that
no one around her had noticed a thing, she turned back to her equipment to make the unsettling discovery that she must have dislodged the smoke mechanism on the log cabin when she had tripped against it. It had been puffing vigorously throughout their embrace. Pride made her remain at her post with a frozen countenance.

It may have been her imagination—but had the contributions picked up a little?

Three

Walking through her front door later, stripping off the frock coat, Jennifer realized that his muffler was still curled around her neck.

It wasn’t until noon the next day that the conviction she was a wronged woman began to waver.

By that evening she was facing the unsettling truth. She had overreacted to mild teasing from an extremely attractive man who probably spent the better part of his days in enthusiastically requited flirtations.

Midnight found her watching
M*A*S*H
reruns and feeling wistful.

The mood persisted throughout the next day, and while she fought against the lowness, it seemed to be growing up and around her. Apprehension tore at her, and that was foolish because nothing was going to happen to her. A chance meeting, a few challenging words thrown out by a man in a temper, a kiss. It had happened, but
now it was over. Let the regrets and the sting of it go.

But the internal disquiet became strain. She was nervous as she locked up the library Monday night. There was no reason to be nervous, of course, even though she was alone, because Eleanor Paynter was outside, warming up her Gremlin for their shared ride home. But the building seemed desolate in the dim glare of the security lights. Somewhere in the back reaches of the stacks a display book collapsed with a sharp crash and Jennifer jumped. Half smiling at her private display of nerves, she moved more quickly than usual through the litany of tasks. Turn the “Open” sign to “Closed.” Make sure the cash drawer was locked. Unplug the coffee pot. Turn down the heat. Double check to be sure the front door was locked. Unlock the overnight book drop—discovering an accidentally locked book drop seemed to bring out the ferocious in people. She’d seen them leave books on the library’s front steps in a rainstorm.

She hurried to the back hallway, dragged her camel stadium coat from the hook and zipped it on quickly, fumbling for the brown tweed mittens from the pocket and pulling the matching cuff hat down over her hair and ears.

The bitter cold outside made her clench her muscles and stamp her feet as she engineered the heavy locks on the service door. Somewhere behind her an engine ran reassuringly. She turned, expecting to race toward the Gremlin. But the Gremlin was gone.

Spent light drifted over the library walls from a distant streetlamp and the reflected gleam of the three-quarter moon on the frozen lake beyond
carved out an area from the darkness, like a barely lit stage. And within that stage she saw that the only car in the desolate lot was an aging station wagon. And leaning on the front of it, one leather boot up on the bumper, was the man in the cream-colored parka whom she had seen wearing so much less. She turned to ice in her tracks. Seeing her, he shoved off the bumper and walked toward her.

Unsteady pulses thumped in strange places inside her body but she’d made a resolution the night before while she was brushing her teeth that never again would she let any man back her against a wall. Looking frantically around for Eleanor, she heard herself utter, “Mrs. Paynter …”

“Eleanor left when I told her I was here to pick you up. She wasn’t averse since she was rushing home to catch The Maltese Falcon’ on cable.”

The attractive voice was matter-of-fact, the stance relaxed. His moonlit features revealed no nuances. Trying to cope with the reality of his sudden appearance, she took one hard sustaining breath, feeding oxygen to her poor besieged brain. Okay, brain, what’s going on here? His casual use of the head librarian’s first name and his just-as-casual reference to Eleanor’s plans for the evening were such a severe check that she could only falter, “Eleanor left? Just like that?”