Sweet Liar (19 page)

Moving away from his friends, Mike came to sit by her on the couch. Behind him the men were arguing over the game, and the women were outside looking at Mike's garden.

“Are you all right?” Mike asked, tucking the blanket around her, even though it was warm in the house.

She nodded, looking down at her hands.

Leaning toward her, Mike slipped her high collar down and put his hand on her throat, on the ring of yellow bruises there. As his fingers slipped around the back of her neck, his thumb rubbed over her lower lip.

Samantha's breath caught in her throat as she looked into his dark eyes. It was as though they were alone in the room, but at the same time she was well aware of the other people around them. When Mike moved closer to her, she didn't pull away, and when his lips were inches from hers, she still didn't pull away. His breath was warm on her lips, warm and sweet and fragrant.

When he touched his lips to hers, she closed her eyes, but when he moved away, she opened them. He was looking at her, looking at her in a way that she didn't understand.

“Sam,” he whispered, then kissed her in earnest, kissed her sweetly, not aggressively, but meltingly, as though he wanted to tell her something, as though he wanted to reassure her—as though he wanted to tell her that he cared for her.

She put her hand up to his neck. Ah, she thought, to touch Mike, to feel the warm skin that she looked at so often, to feel the curls of his hair about her fingers. She applied pressure to his neck with her fingertips and he moved his head, his kiss deepening.

Samantha lay back against the pillows, her fingers tightening on his neck, her mouth opening a bit as she felt the sweetness of Mike's tongue touch hers. He wasn't jumping on her, wasn't forcing her, wasn't overwhelming her.

It was he who pulled away. Her heart was pounding and her breathing was deep and fast.

“You like that better, sweetheart?” he whispered.

“I—” she started to say, but he put his lips to hers again and didn't allow her to speak.

Putting his hands on the side of her head, he ran his thumbs over her cheeks, then moved and touched her eyelids, her nose, her lips. After a moment, he pulled back and held up his hand. It was shaking. “You do something to me, Sammy-girl. I'm not sure what it is, but I've felt it since that first day.”

It was the women coming in from outside that brought them back to the present. Straightening, Mike stood up from the couch, but the way he was looking at her with eyes so hot, eyes that asked so much of her, he may as well have still been kissing her.

“Have we interrupted something?” Anne asked. “Mike, you and your…tenant want us to leave?”

Mike grinned at her. “Actually, I'd rather you stayed. This house seems to get a little, ah, friendlier when there are people around.”

Looking down at her hands, Samantha tried to keep anyone from seeing her blush. What Mike said was true: She felt safer when there were other people with them. When there was an audience, she was sure Mike wasn't going to do something that would take her where she didn't want to go.

At four everyone was starving, so Jess ordered food, enough for at least twenty people. When it was set up on the picnic table, Mike insisted on carrying Samantha outside.

“Shut up,” he said when she started to protest. “You act like I'm a sex deviant when we're alone, but you let me kiss you when the house is full of other people. If the presence of other people loosens you up, I will consider keeping the house packed. Now be still and let me enjoy myself.”

She couldn't keep from smiling as she put her head into the curve of his shoulder.

Mike kissed her forehead. “Sam, you go to bed with me and I'll show you a real good time. I swear.”

She laughed—but she wasn't tempted, not actually. She liked this much, much better than what people did in bed together. She liked the touching and the caressing, the kissing, liked the feel of Mike's breath on her lips, the sight of his muscles moving beneath his clothes. She liked sitting close to him, liked the way he leaned over her when he tucked the blanket around her. All in all, she liked the way a man treated a woman before he'd had what he wanted from her. After he got that, everything changed.

The five of them laughed and talked all through the meal. They talked of people Samantha didn't know, but they always made an effort to explain who the people were. Corey told stories about Mike as a child.

“Did you tell Sam what you did to your sister's friends' clothes?” she asked Mike, pointing a plastic fork at him.

With an embarrassed chuckle, Mike looked at his plate. “I somehow forgot to mention that.”

“All those girls in those white clothes,” Corey said, laughing.

At the mention of white clothes, Samantha became alert. She motioned Corey to tell the story, but Corey looked at Mike, at his pleading eyes, and said no, that it was Mike's story. Nothing anyone said could entice Mike to tell the story.

After dinner, they went into the living room where Mike put on Kiri Te Kanawa singing Puccini and talked. Samantha got Corey into a corner and wrote on her pad,
Tell me about Mike.

“What do you want to know?”

Samantha put her hands palm up to signify that anything Corey told her would be all right.

“I don't know where to begin. He has eleven brothers and sisters, and—” She laughed when Samantha's mouth dropped open in shock. “There are a lot of Taggerts in Chandler.”

Are they
very
poor?
Samantha wrote.

Corey gave a snort of laughter, then began chuckling as she put her hand on Samantha's arm. “You should ask him about that. Let's see, what else can I tell you? Mike's degree is in mathematics. He did all the course work for a Ph.D., but then got interested in his old gangster and never finished his dissertation.” She looked at Sam. “His father would love for him to finish his degree. Maybe you could influence him.”

Samantha shrugged to show that she had no influence over him. She and Mike were nothing to each other, just temporarily living together, and the fact that Mike spent a great deal of time trying to get her to go to bed with him meant nothing. As far as Samantha could tell, all men did that to all women. It meant nothing before the event and less than nothing afterward.

“Mike,” Corey said as she picked up a calculator from a bookcase, “what's two hundred and thirty-seven times two thousand six hundred and eighty-one?”

Mike didn't look around, nor did he take so much as a second before he answered. “Six hundred thirty-five thousand, three hundred ninety-seven.”

When Corey showed Samantha the calculator reading, she saw that Mike was correct. “The whole family is like that,” Corey whispered. “In school we all thought they should have been in a circus.” She pressed Samantha's arm. “Mike's a good guy, a really good guy.”

Samantha looked across the room at him, and as she did so, Mike turned and winked at her. Sam smiled in return.

Why do you like white so much?
Samantha wrote on her pad. She was once again in Mike's bed, and the house was empty and quiet, and she was very tired. In spite of the fact that she hadn't done much that day, it had been a tiring one. Now, she wanted to go to sleep and she didn't want to have to wrestle with Mike, didn't want him trying to continue what they had started on the couch in the library.

“You sure you want to know?”

She nodded as he tucked her in, then started to protest when he stretched out on the bed and put his head in her lap, but he acted as though he didn't hear her.

“When I was fifteen my sister, she was about nineteen, I guess, brought home four of her college friends to spend a week at our house. I thought those girls were the most beautiful creatures I'd ever seen. I followed them around everywhere and they teased me mercilessly.

“To this day I don't know what made me do it, but one day while they were out swimming, I gathered up all their clothes and took them downstairs, threw them in the washers, and added three cups of bleach to each load, then turned on the hot water.

“When the girls got back, they had nothing to wear except their swim suits and clothes that were white and tiny.” He stared into space for a few moments. “They were beautiful. Tiny white shorts. Microscopic T-shirts. Skirts that only reached midthigh.”

What did your parents do?
Samantha wrote.

“It took them half a day to figure out who had done it—I do have brothers, you know—but when they found out, my mother said I should be blindfolded and stood up against an outside wall of the house and the girls should be given shotguns. But Dad said he'd take me outside and beat me. So we walked outside, he grinned at me, rubbed my head, and sent me off to spend the rest of the week with Uncle Mike, but he told me to limp whenever I saw my mother.”

That's all that was done to you?!!!!!
she wrote.

“Sure. Dad took the girls into Denver and bought them new clothes. After the girls left, my father gave me a small white shirt that had no buttons down the front. He said one of the girls had worn it to breakfast, and when she'd reached for something, all the buttons had popped off. He even saved a button for me.”

Why didn't the girls borrow clothes from your sister or your mother and cover themselves?

Mike looked surprised, then smiled, then he laughed. “What a very, very good question. Maybe they liked my father and my brothers starting at them in open-mouthed admiration.”

Still grinning, he rolled off of her and stood up. He stretched and yawned, with Samantha's eyes never leaving his body, especially when his shirt pulled up and exposed his bare stomach. Did he have any idea what he looked like when he did that? she wondered.

Abruptly, he stopped yawning and looked down at her, as though he knew very well that she was watching him. “That's your story for tonight. You wouldn't like to change your mind about…you know?” He nodded toward the empty side of the bed.

Sam shook her head no.

Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he bent to kiss her lips. But Samantha turned her head away. When she looked back at him, he was bending over her, staring at her.

“Sometimes you remind me of those high school girls that you take out to drive-in movies. You go out one night and spend the whole night kissing and, after hours of work, finally getting your hand under her blouse. The next time you go out you think you're going to work on her skirt, but instead, she makes you start back at square one: She won't even let you kiss her.”

In spite of herself, Samantha giggled. She could easily imagine Mike as a randy high school boy.

“Tell me, Sam, did the boys have to start over again with you with each date?”

When she didn't answer him, he handed her the pad and pencil.
I never had a date in high school,
she wrote.

Mike had to read her sentence three times before he looked up at her in disbelief, then taking the pencil from her he wrote,
Have you ever been to bed with any man other than the jerk you were married to?

She didn't want to answer his question.
Why a jerk?
she wrote.

“He lost you, didn't he? Any man who'd do that has to be stupid.”

Samantha laughed, then punched his shoulder. He was lying; he was flattering her, but still, having someone call her ex-husband a jerk pleased her.

“How about a goodnight kiss? Nothing more than that. I'll keep my hands on your shoulders. Trust me. I promise.”

She wasn't strong enough to say no to kissing Michael, especially when he was looking at her like that. As he leaned on the bed, a hand on each side of her hips, she gave him a tentative nod, and he sat down on the bed again and put his hands on her upper arms. Slowly he brought his lips to hers.

With each kiss, she experienced wonder that something could be so lovely. As he'd done today, he didn't force her or try to leap on top of her. She began to sink into his kiss, began to trust him as she slumped back against the pillows, her eyes closed, her body relaxed.