To Love a Man (32 page)

“Sam, look out!” It was too late. He was off balance, then falling, turning the air blue with his curses as he hit the floor with a resounding thud, pulling the lamp off the table to crash down beside him. Lisa was at his side almost instantly, kneeling, her hands shaking as she touched him. He lay on his back like a turtle on its shell, his eyes closed, a grimace twisting his face. A steady stream of curses fell from his lips.

“Are you hurt?” Lisa’s hands were moving anxiously over his cast. It seemed to be in one piece. He opened his eyes, glaring at her. She glared back at him just as fiercely.

“I told you to sit down!” she snapped.

He looked furious, but then, to her surprise, his lips twitched. “You did, didn’t you?” He was grinning crookedly at her. Lisa stared at him dumbly, taken aback by the sudden laughter that twinkled in his eyes. “Next time, remind me to listen.”

“You’re not hurt, are you?” A smile was hovering on her own lips as she scanned him from head to toe. He had propped himself up on one elbow, and he looked very long and wide lying there on the brown carpet, his white cast thrust out stiffly before him.

“No, no thanks to that thrice-damned lamp!” He gave the offending lamp a vicious prod with the end of a crutch. It rolled, and its whole back side fell off. He looked at it for a moment, then started laughing. Lisa, looking from his face to the lamp and back, joined in.

“Laugh at me, will you, my girl?” he growled at her through bursts of merriment. “I’ll teach you to show some respect!”

He grabbed for her, pulling her down against his chest. Lisa lay on that wide expanse, giggling helplessly while he made threatening noises against the silky skin of her throat.

“What’s going on in here? We could hear you in the kitchen!”

They hadn’t heard Jay enter, but there he was, leaning over the back of the couch and looking disapproving as he watched them wallowing on the floor behind it.

Lisa pulled away from Sam and sat up, smoothing her clothes and hair. She looked from Sam, who was making no move to get up and still had the remnants of a grin hovering around his mouth, to Jay, who was looking more and more bewildered.

“Oh, nothing much. Your father was just asking me to marry him,” she said airily, then grinned as she watched identical dumbfounded expressions appear on both hard male faces.

“You’re kidding,” Jay said finally, looking as if he didn’t believe a word of it.

Lisa shook her head. “No.”

“You really asked her to marry you?” Jay looked to Sam for confirmation.

Sam grinned. “I guess I did—if she says so. Far be it from me to call a lady a liar.”

Lisa sent him a killing look.

“Well, what did she say?” Jay demanded, impatient with all their fooling around.

Sam looked at Lisa, his eyes holding a question.

“She said yes,” Lisa told Jay, but she could feel the sudden relaxation in the long body that lay stretched out behind her.

“That’s great!” Jay yelled, coming excitedly around the couch. “Really great! Congratulations, Lisa! I knew he really liked you, of course, but—marriage! Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” This was directed at Sam, along with a worried frown. Then he added hastily to Lisa, “No offense, but he doesn’t usually do this kind of thing. You don’t suppose it’s the drugs or anything, do you?”

“Thanks a lot,” Lisa muttered, making a face at Jay. Sam roared with laughter.

“It probably was,” he told his son, recovering. “But it’s too late now: I’m committed. Just think how embarrassing it would be for Lisa if I were to back out.”

“Yeah.” Jay appeared to take this seriously. Lisa, indignant, opened her mouth to defend herself, but Jay had another thought. “You’ll be my stepmother, won’t you?” He grinned cheekily at Lisa. “Think I should start calling you Mom?”

“ ‘Lisa’ will do,” Sam said dryly. “She’s not all that much older than you.”

“She’s not, is she?” Jay pondered that for a moment. “Do you think you two will have kids?”

Sam shot Lisa a teasing look. She could feel her face turning red.

“We’ll talk about it later,” he told his son firmly, sitting up at last. “Come here and give me a hand up.”

Jay obediently came around in front of Sam and, taking hold of his outstetched hand, hauled him to his feet. Lisa got up in the meantime, and stood next to the two of them, self-consciously brushing down her clothes.

“What were you doing down on the floor, anyway?” Jay asked, looking from one to the other as Sam moved around to the front of the couch and collapsed on the upholstered seat. “It seems like a funny place to propose.”

“Your father tripped,” Lisa said, frowning at Sam repressively as he chuckled.

“Your lunch is probably getting cold,” Sam said to Jay, giving Lisa a quick, gleaming look.

The boy shrugged. “I finished it before I came.”

Sam lifted an eyebrow at him. “Then . . .”

“Oh, I get it, you two want to be alone, right? Okay, I’m going. By the way, is this a secret? Can I tell anybody?”

Sam looked at Lisa. She smiled at him.

“Tell whoever you want,” she said to Jay. “It’s not a secret.”

And Sam returned her smile with a slow, charming one of his own as Jay went out.

Amos took the news well, considering everything. At the very least, he seemed resigned. He wasn’t senile yet, he told Lisa in the privacy of his study, and he’d known for a long time that things weren’t working out between her and Jeff. If she was sure Sam was what she wanted, he wouldn’t stand in her way.

“You’re going to have trouble managing him, though,” he said warningly to Lisa as she was about to leave him to go to bed. “He’s used to giving orders, not taking them. I can’t see you wrapping him around your little finger like you do the rest of us.”

Lisa turned back from the door, smiling at her grandfather. “I don’t care. I love him,” she said softly.

“Then grab him, girl,” Amos answered, his voice gruff and his eyes suspiciously bright as he looked at her. “If you think he’ll make you happy, grab him. Your happiness is more important to me than anything in the world.”

“I know. I love you, too, Amos,” Lisa said, coming back across the room to kiss his leathery cheek. He hugged her briefly, then sent her off to bed with a watery chuckle and a pinch on the chin.

Christmas Day dawned cold and clear and very bright. During the afternoon, a few fat flakes of snow fell, not sticking to the ground but adding to the atmosphere. They stuffed themselves on turkey and all the trimmings, expertly prepared by Mary Dobson, then spent the remainder of the day lazing around the roaring fire in the huge fireplace that took up one wall of the living room. Amos and Jay played chess, while Sam and Lisa sat side by side on one of the overstuffed couches that flanked the fireplace and murmured to each other. From time to time Sam toyed with the gift Lisa had given him. It was a pocketknife containing everything from scissors to a corkscrew to a can opener, and he seemed very pleased with it. Lisa had agonized over what to get him for some time, instinctively knowing better than to buy him anything too expensive. Sam’s gift to her, purchased through Jay, was a lovely porcelain figurine of an eighteenth-century girl. It was exquisitely detailed, and she loved it.

Lisa, after kissing Sam and Amos good-night and being assured that Jay would render Sam any assistance necessary in getting to bed (Sam had flatly rejected the services of the male nurse she had hired for him, and, after one quick look at that stony countenance, Lisa had told the man to go), went to bed early. It had been a long day, and she was tired. She still slept in the lovely, old-fashioned bedroom that had been hers since childhood, partly out of deference to Amos’s sensibilities and partly because Sam, with his injuries, needed to sleep undisturbed. Sam himself was not terribly thrilled with this arrangement, but he accepted it with grim good humor. As Lisa told him, as soon as her divorce was final—perhaps another three months, according to her lawyer—and they were married, they would be sleeping together for the rest of their lives. It wouldn’t hurt them to spend what little time she had left under Amos’s roof honoring an old man’s prejudices.

Her room was furnished in stately Queen Anne, with a huge, elaborately canopied and draped bed set against the far wall. The bed was flanked by two long windows that looked out over the grounds and afforded an occasional glimpse of the bay. A gold velvet chaise-longue cut diagonally across the wide-planked floor and one corner of the fringed oriental carpet. The whole room was decorated in shades of green and silver with touches of gold. It was a beautiful room, and Lisa loved it. She had chosen its furnishings and decorations herself.

It didn’t take her long to prepare for bed. She took a bath in the connecting green-and-silver bathroom, then came through to her bedroom, brushed her hair, creamed her face, and slid into her nightgown. This last was a deceptively simple affair of silvery gray silk and lace that was a handful of nothing until she put it on. Then it took on the shape of her body, leaving very little unrevealed without being at all revealing. The neckline, edged with lace and descending from spaghetti straps, was demure. The skirt was long, covering her to her ankles. It was the shimmery, clinging quality of the silk itself that made the garment worth every penny of the quite exorbitant price she had paid for it. Lisa smiled at her reflection in the mirror, wishing Sam could see her like this. He would be staggered, she knew. Remembering the rough, dirty khaki uniform she had worn nearly ever since she had known him, she was dying to show him just how feminine and seductive she could be in her own clothes. For a moment she was tempted to sneak downstairs and join him in his bedroom. Then she thought of his injuries, and Amos, and sighed. He would have plenty of time to be entranced by her after they were married. In the meantime, she could go to bed alone. She had been sleeping alone for almost the past two months, during the whole time Sam had been in the hospital, so why was it so difficult for her tonight? Then she thought of Sam in the room directly below hers, and grimaced at herself. While he had been in the hospital, he had definitely been unavailable. Now he was close, just a staircase away, and she knew he would welcome her with open arms. Lisa thought of that long, hard body sprawled between the sheets, and felt her mouth go dry. She wanted him with an intensity she had never dreamed she could feel. When she had been married to Jeff, they had often gone for months at a time without so much as exchanging a halfhearted kiss, and it had bothered her not at all. In fact, she had begun to think that she had a low sex drive, as she had read some people did. But since she had met Sam, her body had gone crazy. It craved the touch and smell and taste of him so much that it was like a physical pain inside her. She was addicted to him, she realized with a half-rueful smile, like a junkie to a drug. If she didn’t get a steady fix, she suffered withdrawal pangs.

Lisa hesitated a moment longer, then climbed into bed, turning out the light and subsiding with an irritable thump against the pillows. She would not go sneaking downstairs to him like some sort of sex-crazed adolescent. She was an adult woman, in total control of her senses, and she could wait. . . .

It must have been around midnight, and she had been dozing fitfully for the past hour, when she heard a series of muffled thumps in the hallway that led past her door. What on earth . . . ? she thought, sitting up and reaching to flick on the bedside lamp. Had the plumbing gone crazy, or was the house being burglarized, or . . .

Her doorknob turned, and Lisa stared at it with disbelief. Then the door itself swung open before she could so much as open her mouth to scream. Her eyes huge, she looked fearfully at the tall apparition that stood on her threshold—and immediately relaxed.

“How did you get up here?” she demanded, looking at his cast and crutches and thinking of the tall, curving staircase.

Sam grinned, levering himself over the threshold and closing the door behind him.

“Don’t ask,” he advised her. “Believe me, it wasn’t very dignified.”

“You could have broken your neck!”

“I was careful,” he assured her, moving toward the bed. His eyes slid over her, widening appreciatively on the lovely picture she made, sitting bolt upright with the bedclothes down around her waist. Her silver-gold hair was wildly tousled, and her face, innocent of makeup, was delicately flushed. The paler silver of that unbelievable nightgown emphasized every luscious curve of her body. He grinned faintly as he realized that her nipples were erect and pressing against the silk. Scold or not, she was glad to see him. . . .

“You idiot, you shouldn’t be climbing stairs! If you fell, you’d be back in the hospital for months! If it didn’t kill you outright! You need a keeper!”

He was standing beside the bed now, grinning at her, looking devilishly handsome with his black hair curling around his ears and over his forehead and those blue eyes sparkling roguishly down at her. He was dressed only in a white toweling robe that was tied at the waist and reached to just above his knees. Beneath it, she knew, he was naked. She could see the crisp curling hairs and hard muscles of his chest where the lapels of the robe parted; his skin against the white terrycloth was deeply brown. A faint bluish black shadow darkened his jaw, and deep grooves slashed his cheeks as he smiled. She wanted to bash him over the head for his foolishness and pull him into her arms at one and the same time. She frowned crossly at him.

“Don’t be mad at me,” he said coaxingly. “I brought you a present.”

Balancing on one crutch, he reached a hand into the pocket of his robe and withdrew a small, gaily wrapped parcel. Lisa, staring at it, felt her heart speed up. She knew instinctively what was inside.

He gave her the package, then sat down on the edge of the bed beside her and watched her with a smile in his eyes as she unwrapped it with unsteady fingers. As she had suspected, it was a ring: a beautiful square-cut emerald flanked with diamonds. It was the most gorgeous piece of jewelry she had ever seen, and she looked from it to him with delight.

“Well, aren’t you going to put it on?” he asked with a broad grin. Her amazed reaction pleased him enormously.