Robards, Karen (37 page)

IS MOUTH WAS HOT and urgent and tasted &/Cfaintly of coffee. Her purse landed on the floor with a faint thud. Wrapping her arms around his neck, Grace kissed him back with greedy intensity, plastering her body against his.

Conscious of the ticking clock, her hands slid down the smooth leather front of his jacket to find its zipper, which she pulled down and disengaged at the bottom. Moving her hands to the soft flannel beneath, she started work on his shirt buttons even as he shrugged out of his jacket.

“Jesus, I want you,” Tony breathed the words in her ear as his mouth slid down to her neck and his hands dispensed with, first, the single button that held her blazer closed and then the blazer itself, which fell to the floor to join his jacket and her purse at their feet.

“Mirimm,” Grace said, her teeth occupied in nibbhng his earlobe.

His palm flattened over her breast, and Grace released her victim to draw in a ragged breath as her

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nipple hardened instantly-The white silk shell and flirrisy nylon bra she wore were no protection against the heat of his touch. His hands slid all over the fragile fabric, front and back, exploring and titillating, caressing even such unlikely erogenous zones as her shoulders and the length of her spine and her waist. Meanwhile, her hands dealt with the last of his shirt buttons and then moved inward to find the warm, hairroughened flesh beneath.

His chest felt so good, so warm and firm and masculine, to her touch.

“How does this damned blouse-thing come off?” Tony’s stroking hands stifled on her rib cage, and he lifted his head from where he had been kissing the sensitive area at the side of her neck to look down at her. Frustration, bafflement, and blazing desire combined in his face.

Realizing the purpose behind his exploration of new erogenous zones, Grace had to srm’le.

“There’s a button at the back of the neck.”

Lifting her arms, she demonstrated, dealing with it for him. Before she could return to her journey of discovery across the hard contours of his chest, he caught the hem of her shell and pulled it over her head, then dropped it on the floor, leaving her standing before him in her delicate white bra and bone-colored wool skirt and conservative heels.

He touched her breasts, caressing her through the thin nylon. His hands were large and warm and hard, and her nipples stood up like soldiers called to attention under his ministrations. Her hands lay flat against his chest, her fingers curling into his skin like a nursing

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kitten’s as she experienced an onslaught of desire so intense that her knees went weak.

Her bra had a traditional double hook-and-eye fastening that was located between her shoulder blades. He seemed to have no trouble finding that, because he unclipped it in a matter of seconds. Her bra slid down her arms, then was tugged free and tossed aside. Grace first glanced down at herself, bare now from the waist up, and then looked up at him.

Her breasts were small but firm, with pinkish-brown areolas and nipples that stood stiffly erect. His jaw hardened as he looked down at her body, and his eyes darkened until they were almost black.

His hands, large and bronze against the ivory of her skin, rested on either side of her rib cage just above the waistband of her skirt. Against her skin, she could feel the faint abrasiveness of the calluses on his palms.

Grace’s heart started to pound, and a hot rhythmic quickening began in her loins.

“You are the sexiest thing I have ever seen in my life,” he said, his voice husky.

This drew a shaky laugh from her. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

He glanced up and met her eyes. “Were you now?” Before Grace realized what he meant to do, he bent and picked her up
in his arms, lifting her as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. Arms automatically looping around his neck, eyes widening, she met his gaze as he carried her toward the door that led into the dining room.

“Now that’s what I like in a man: muscles,” she said teasingly, her voice low and throaty with the passion

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that was already causing her bare breasts to swell longingly against his chest, and her nether regions to pulse and burn. But her eyes were smiling into his as he maneuvered her through the narrow doorway.

He smiled back at her, his eyes hot.

“You’re what I like in a woman,” he said. Bending his head, he kissed her nipple, which made her gasp, and then her open mouth. “All of you. Every single inch. “

He kissed her again and was still kissing her as he carried her through the dining room and kitchen and into his bedroom. When he lowered her to his bed and followed her down, Grace had a fleeting realization that the hand-pieced quilt that covered it was as soft as it had looked the other day. Then his hand was sliding up the inside of her pantyhose clad thigh beneath her skirt, trailing fire behind it, and she ceased thinking of anything at all except him.

She kicked off her shoes as he pulled off the rest of her clothes and slid his shirt down his arms. Then he pulled away from her, standing up and stripping off the remainder of his garments with hands that were not quite steady. His eyes flamed as they moved over her, sitting naked as she was in the center of his bed.

She felt naked, too, she thought, erotically naked in a way she had never before felt, even though she was sitting as modestly as it was possible for an unclothed woman to sit, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs.

Her body tingled in greedy anticipation of what was

to come.

Watching him as he pushed his Jeans and shorts

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down his legs and then straightened to stand naked before her, she felt a rush of purely wanton desire that made her feel as if she were melting in that place between her legs. She no longer felt like the thirty-sixyear-old woman, mother, judge, and divorc&e who had been around the block more times than she cared to remember.

. She felt like a girl again, a young and beautiful girl just becoming acquainted with the wonder of desire. No, she corrected herself, she felt like a woman.

A woman in love.

Her lips parted on the thought, and her eyes widened on his face. But before she could react in any other way, he was coming down on the bed beside her, his weight denting the mattress as he pushed her back into the softness of the bed and covered her body with his.

Grace met his kiss with her own, curling her tongue around his and her arms around his neck, opening her mouth and parting her legs for him instantly. There was no need for any preliminaries, no desire for any foreplay, she wanted him inside her instantly and he must have wanted that, too, because even as he settled on top of her he thrust deep and hard, groaning into her niouth. Grace moaned an answer as she wrapped her legs tightly around his waist.

“Tony, Tony, Tony,” she cried as he took her with a fierceness that was exactly what she craved.

She bucked and writhed and clung and then, finally, went exquisitely, quiveringly still, beneath him as he buried himself inside her one last time, holding himself there as he found his own release.

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When it was over, when Grace had at last floated back to earth and remembered all the whos and whats and wheres of the situation, she first smiled a sleepy, contented smile at the black head buried against her shoulder. Next she cocked an eye at the alarm clock beside the bed.

12:35. Grace groaned.

“Tony.” She shoved at his shoulder. He was lying atop her, hot and sweaty, his big body still joined to hers. All that muscle weighed a ton. She was, to all intents and purposes, pinioned beneath him, unable to move.

“Mmm?” he responded, turning his head a little so that his lips could nuzzle her neck.

The touch of those warm lips on such a sensitive spot sent a little thrill all the way to her toes.

“Tony, we have to get up! I have to be back in court in about twenty minutes.”

He groaned and lifted his head, looking down at her with an expression in his eyes that was not quite a smile. The rest of him stayed just where it was.

“You-are-beautiful-and—sexy-and-” he said, punctuating his words with butterfly kisses dropped on her mouth.

“Late,” Grace finished for him tartly. She shoved at his shoulder again. A woman in love or not-and she would have to consider that more carefully later–-she was also a judge, and she had to be back in her courtroom by one o’clock.

He grimaced comically and rolled off her, lying on his back, with no apparent concern for his nudity, and

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crossing his arms beneath his head as he watched her scramble off his bed with scant dignity.

“Whoever said women were the romantic sex obvio,isly never made love to one,” he said in a compi aining tone.

“In, out, thank you, lout,” Grace replied pertly over her shoulder, grinning at him and disappearing into his bithroom for a quick shower to the accompaniment of his shout of laughter.

He appeared moments later, while she was rinsing off the soapy lather she had quickly applied, and stuck his head around the curtain, watching her ablutions with interest.

“I could join you,” he suggested with an exaggerated leer. That he was still naked was obvious from the triangle of bare arm and shoulder, chest and hipbone that she could see.

“What time is it?” she demanded by way of a reply, t1irning off the taps. He obligingly handed her a towel, then glanced at his watch.

“12:39.” Grace groaned again. Wrapping the towel around herself, she stepped out of the tub.

iTony was standing there naked, just as she had surnilsed. He caught her by the shoulders, dropped a quick kiss on her mouth, grinned at her, and stepped ilito the tub, pulling the curtain shut.

“Hurry!” she urged as he turned on the water. Walking into the bedroom, she saw that he had thoughtfully gathered up her clothes from the various places where they had been dropped. Everything-bra, panties, hose, shell, and suit-was in a neat little pile on

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the bed. Her shoes had been placed side by side on the floor nearby.

Hurrying into her clothes, watching the clock with one eye, Grace thought, who in her right mind wouldn’t fall in love with a man like that?

She felt a warm tingling kind of glow rush over her skin from her head clear down to her toes.

She was stepping into her shoes when he emerged from the bathroom, body gleaming wet and a small white towel clutched modestly around his waist. With his broadshouldered, narrow-hipped, hairy-chested athlete’s body, he looked so hunky she would gladly have fallen on him a second time-if she didn’t have to be in court at one P.m.

“Hurry,” she admonished him again. The time was

12:43.

“I already did. That’s why they call it a quickie,” he observed with a wry smile as she rushed by him on her way to the living room, where she had left her purse.

“Get dressed,” she hissed, ignoring his lame attempt at humor. Fortunately, men tended to be speedy about pulling on their clothes, she thought, and all she had to do was run a brush through her hair and apply lipstick and powder and she was as good as new.

Her purse was just inside the door, where she had dropped It when Tony had first kissed her. Snatching it up, she hurried to the rmirror over the fireplace.

She was applying the finishing touch-a thin layer of a translucent lipstick in a shade called all-spice when her gaze was caught by the framed picture on the mantel. The frame was dark wood, the picture itself was small, and it was positioned to the far left, which,

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3he thought, explained why it had not caught her eye earlier.

Because, as she picked it up, she realized that it should have caught her eye. It was a candid summer snapshot of a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, pretty but way too thin, dressed in a filmy white dress with smocking on the bodice and a white ribbon tied in her hair. She had long straight hair as black as Tony’s, and huge, shadowed, dark eyes. She was smihng—grinning hugely, actually. Her arms were lifted and opened wide as though to show off the flowers that surrounded her. They were roses, and the child stood in the midst of a huge circular garden in full bloom. The flowers were lush enough so that Grace, looking at the picture, could almost smell their perfume. Every blossom was a beautiful, creamy white.

It was in color, but the child’s black hair and dark eyes and the white of her dress and the velvety cream of the roses gave the impression of a black-and-white print. The effect was haunting.

The child, of course, had to be Rachel. It could be no one else.

Looking at it, Grace felt a lump rise in her throat. Tony walked into the room then, fully dressed in a sweatshirt andjeans. He was smiling, his face warm and relaxed, his eyes bright and teasing.

His expression changed in the space of a heartbeat as Grace met his eyes across the room and his gaze fell to the picture she held in her hand.

He stopped walking and, for the space of a pair of heartbeats, simply looked at her. Grace could tell from

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his eyes that he was absorbing the psychic equivalent of a fist to the stomach.

“She was beautifiil,” Grace said at last, in a very soft voice.

He moved then, coming to stand beside her. When he reached her side, he looked down at the picture in her hand and gently lified a finger to touch the image beneath the glass.

“She was, wasn’t she?” Grief was there in his eyes, and in the white lines bracketing his mouth, but his voice was steady.

“She looks so happy. Whose garden was it?” He needed to talk about his pain, Grace thought, if he was ever going to move beyond it.

“Hers. Rachel loved roses. That was taken the summer before she died. She and I went to a nursery near where we lived and bought all the white rosebushes they had in stock. When we got them home, I dug up a garden for her in the backyard of our house in Cleveland and planted them. That whole last summer, I watered and fertilized and sprayed the darrined things and did everything but pray over them to keep them alive. Hell, I probably prayed over them, too. They were still blooming when she died. When I left Cleveland, I dug them up and brought them with me. Because she had loved them, I couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”