Somewhere on St. Thomas: A Somewhere Series Romance (6 page)

“Rafe’s here for Christmas dinner,” Mom said. “He’d like to say hi.” And before I could do more than open my mouth to protest, I heard his voice.

“Ruby girl.” He said it low like he was walking away from the phone, but I knew where it was tethered to the wall, an innocuous pistachio-green device with an extra-long cord. We used to step inside the pantry when we wanted privacy, and I could tell he’d done that by the cessation of noise. “I got your letter.”

“Which one?” My voice came out high and breathless as my eyes scanned the room, frantic that anyone should catch me talking to Mr. Kryptonite himself.

“You know which one.”

I was sitting in a seldom-used formal-looking parlor with cream-colored carpeting and the kind of shiny furniture that pushed you into good posture. I wound the cord of the phone I was on around my finger. “I’ve sent you so many.”

“That one. About the guy. Listen.” He pitched his voice low and intense, and I felt just the sound of it set up a throb between my legs. Yep, he still had an effect on me. He was still the man who’d switched my body
On
, I still kind of hated him for it.

“Don’t play with this poor sap Henry. He sounds like someone who could get serious about you, and you’ll break his heart if you let it continue when you’re not meant for him.”

“Who am I meant for?” I could hardly breathe the words, couldn’t believe I’d said them. Was afraid he’d answer them and was relieved when all he said was:

“Not him.” Another long pause, then, “I want to see you again. Can you come to California when school is over?”

“I don’t know. Money’s really tight. I’m working at the dining hall, but all I make goes to living expenses. I don’t know how I can afford it. It will be a miracle if Mom and Dad can even bring me home to Saint Thomas for the summer.”

“I’ll send you the money,” he said. “Meet me in San Francisco. I’ll show you around. It’s a great city. You should see it with me.”

“Okay,” I said faintly.
He was going to pay my way out to San Francisco?

“I better give the phone back to your parents or they’ll think this was a marriage proposal,” he said with a nervous laugh, the first I’d heard from him. “Keep the letters coming. Be honest. I like it.”

And then I heard noisy chaos again, and talking and laughing, and my dad came on and I had to scramble my wits back into coherence.

After all that, I needed to be alone to sort through the storm of feelings the call had stirred up. “I’m going for a walk to the park,” I announced, putting on my new jade-green beret and winding the matching scarf around my neck

Sam, who was assembling an elaborate 3-D puzzle of the Statue of Liberty with Sean and their dad, jumped to his feet. “Want to run?”

“No, just a walk for a little Christmas contemplation,” I said, opening my mouth to ask him to let me go alone, but I couldn’t bear to when he was already shrugging into his down jacket with alacrity.

We went down the steps of the brownstone and along the now-familiar sidewalk. I hunched my shoulders as the wind cut through my wool pea coat.

“You should get something heavier for these winters,” Sam said from beside me. “Here. I grabbed this out of the closet just in case.” It was a heavy Gore-Tex parka. He put it on over my coat, tucking my arms into the sleeves. It was so big I knew it must be his and that’s why it fit over everything I had on. “But keep that green hat on,” he said, pulling the hood up over my head, “because it looks amazing with your hair.”

“
Ah, mais oui. Vous êtes un gentleman
.”

His hands stopped pulling the hood tight under my chin. “Is that French?”

“
Oui. Je suis Juliette. Je vive en les isles des Antilles
.” I batted my eyes.

“No. Anything but French. Don’t do this to me.” He pulled me close by the cords of my hood, making me stumble so I landed against his chest. “I have a thing about anything French.” And then he was kissing me. His mouth warmed me all the way to my frozen toes in my too-thin boots, and pretty soon I was pressed up against his solid width. It felt like climbing the side of a building. Both of our faces disappeared inside the voluminous parka hood.

Ah, Sam’s kiss. It was rugged, and thorough, and beardy and delicious and lighthearted at the same time as being earnest and hungrily sexual as his tongue played with mine, imitating the act in such a way that I found my fingers digging into his down parka just so I wouldn’t fall to the ground.

“Get a room!” I heard Sean’s teasing holler from the doorway and realized we hadn’t made it fifty feet from the brownstone.

Embarrassment made me break away and run, and Sam caught my hand and we ran together until we’d gone a block or two past the house. I slowed to a walk but still let him hold my hand.

“I was going to walk to clear my head and think about things,” I said. “But now I’m all confused again.”

“About what?” His light brown eyes had specks of green and gold in them, like the strangely beautiful toads that came out after the rain on Saint Thomas. What a strange thought to be having, right now in the winter in New York City, with this man from a privileged family. “Your eyes remind me of toads in Saint Thomas.
Que ce est beau
.”

He laughed and pulled me close to kiss me again. I didn’t let him, instead running down the last few frozen blocks until we reached the park, rendered stunningly beautiful by last night’s snowfall, and even on Christmas Day, full of people.

“Toads. You must mean something good by that,” he said as we slowed, taking a meandering pathway under the barren trees.

“
Oui
.” I was still doing Juliette a little. “The toads on Saint Thomas come out after it rains. Hundreds of them. Sitting around in the puddles in the road and getting squished by cars. They have the most beautiful eyes.” I stopped, took his square-jawed, handsome face in my hands. “They have flecks of yellow, bronze, green, sometimes even purple in them, and they’re gold. Yours remind me of them. Remind me of home, somehow.”

I felt my own eyes fill with the homesickness I’d been fighting all day, and when I closed them, fat tears rolled out the sides. I gulped back a sob.

“Aw, Ruby.” He pulled me into his arms. My name sounded good in his mouth. The thickness of our winter wear had me feeling like I was hugging the Michelin Man. “God, you’re sweet. I’ve never had such a nice compliment on my eyes before. If I were a chick, I’d be in heaven right now.”

I laughed wetly and smacked him on the heavily padded arm. “So I’m not such good company. I’m homesick and I spoke to someone on the phone at home. It was—confusing.”

“A guy?” He’d taken one of my arms and pulled me in against him as we started walking again. “Come on. You can tell me.”

“Yes, okay, a guy. Someone…” I shivered at the memory of Rafe’s voice. “Older than me. Really gets to me somehow. He’s impressed on me, like I was a duckling or something.”

“He’s older. Probably hot.” Sam’s voice had steel in it now, and I remembered that in spite of his playfulness, one of his life goals was to be a federal judge. “But he’s eight thousand miles away, and I’m here now. And I like you. A lot.” He stopped, and this time he cupped my face in his gloved hands. “I never expected to meet a girl like you. Such a great friend. Makes me laugh. So pretty.” He smacked his lips against my cold-pinkened ones. “Just an amazing body and a great mind, too. And you’re brave and fun. You’ll try anything. I’ve also discovered I’ve become one of those red-hair fetishists.” He took my beret off and stripped the gloves from his fingers, stuffing the whole handful of winter gear into a capacious pocket. “It reminds me of flames,” he said conversationally, sifting handfuls of my long, wavy hair so that it fell over the shoulders of my dark coat. “Or scarlet ribbons full of gold and cinnamon. There’s a color in here like a nice cabernet, too.”

“Waxing poetic,” I murmured, but I didn’t want to break the spell he was casting as he stroked his fingers through my hair again and again. It felt insanely good and I shut my eyes to feel his hands on my scalp, in my hair. Again and again.

“I can’t believe I met you in winter,” he muttered against my ear. “Because I want to see you in summer, all this white velvet skin getting a little color on it, and too many freckles for me to find and count, popping out all over you.” He demonstrated with little kisses across my nose. “One, two, three, seventeen hundred…”

I pulled away. “I didn’t expect this either, Sam. But since we’re being honest, I’m also dating a guy back in Boston. Henry. He’s pretty into me.”

“Don’t lead him on, then,” Sam said. He put his face down in the warm hollow next to my neck inside the jade-colored scarf and rubbed me with that smooth-rough beard, sending shivers of delightful feeling through my body and straight south to the action zone. “Don’t waste his time. Because you’re going to be mine now.” He kissed me then, in that conversational way he had, as if there was all the time in the world for him to invade my every corner with his big, bluff, warm, irrepressible self and persuasive tongue.

“I’ll think about it,” I said when I came up for air. For a minute those golden-brown Viking eyes blazed like a hawk’s, and then he laughed.

“You’re a tricky little virgin,” he said, and squeezed my butt with a big warm hand. “I can see I’m going to have to bring my A game if I’m going to chase off these other guys.”

I looked down and shuffled my snowy boots. “I’m not looking for a relationship. I’m at Northeastern University for the studying.”

“Uh-huh.” Disbelief permeated his reply.

We walked on as I tried to explain. “And the virgin thing. So embarrassing, but it’s only because I grew up religious. I guess it still matters, because I want my first time to be—special.” I kicked the snow ahead of my impractical secondhand boots. “I want to be in love. And have it mean something. But I’m not waiting for marriage or anything.”

“In love. Meaningful. Special. It’s good to have a dream,” he said laconically, and I socked him again, and he made me chase him and then gave me a piggyback ride, and for the rest of the walk back we talked all about school, what we were studying and what our plans were for the next year.

Somehow I felt like something had been decided, and spoken, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

* * *

The next week flew by. Sean went back to his hospital residency, a miserable-looking ordeal, and Shellie and Sam made it their business to show me all over the city, taking me on the ferry to Ellis Island, to visit the World Trade Center, to ride the carousel in Central Park, and to attend
The Nutcracker
ballet with the whole family. It was wonderful.

And in the back of it all, somewhere buried in my mind, was Rafe’s voice.
I have to see you. Come to California.
Could I be so crazy as to listen to that voice?

We were taking the train back to Boston the day after the New Year, and on New Year’s Eve the three of us watched the ball drop in person in Times Square, and I screamed with excitement as it became 1989, and at the turn of the year Sam kissed me so hard it split my lip. I didn’t care, caught up in the revelry, excitement, and warmth, not to mention a few too many sips off of his silver flask of single-malt scotch. I was touched when he kissed the sore spot on my mouth until it felt better than any fat lip ever had.

But the next morning I felt like I was playing a familiar scene as Sam said goodbye. He had to leave for football team workouts and early strategy meetings at Cornell. He pressed his address and phone number into my hand and told me to write. “I’m serious. I want to see you when we can. Spring break, you’re coming back to New York with Shellie, and we’ll go on a real date.”

I shrugged, trying for flippant. “Shellie tells me you’re a player in more than one way, so don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

He set a little silver box in my hand, his golden eyes as intent as they’d ever been. “Open this and see how serious I am.”

I was terrified but I opened it, relieved to see a beautiful diamond-encrusted heart on a platinum chain, not a ring of any sort. “I love it. Wow.”

He took the necklace out of the box, impatiently pushing my heavy hair out of the way and clumsy with the tiny clasp, but he eventually fastened it around my neck. My head bent before him and neck exposed must have proved tempting because he bit and sucked my neck, giving me a hickey that branded the mark of his mouth on the nape of it. I loved the feeling and arched back and rubbed my butt against him. He filled his hands with my ample breasts in the fuzzy red hand-me-down cashmere sweater Mrs. Williams had passed on.

“I want you so bad. I can’t believe how much I want you,” Sam said. I realized, as his hands roamed my fully clothed body and he pulled my ass back to rub against his erection, that our bodies were kindling like sticks making a fire and this was the first time we’d ever touched each other indoors.

Shellie opened the door a few minutes later to find us making out on the couch. Sam’s hands were under my sweater and mine were all over his naked, magnificent torso as I straddled his lap, and our lips were locked. She retreated with a squeal, yelling, “Sam, you’re supposed to be going! Dad’s waiting in the car!”

Sam took his hands out and squeezed the rounds of my breasts affectionately through the fuzzy sweater, and said, “We have a date. For lots more dates. And more of this kind of thing, too. At spring break.”