Waking Up (18 page)

She stood hurriedly and rushed out of the door with the box held tightly against her chest, and the next moment found her pounding with one fist at the Morrows’ back door. Jason answered it a few moments later.

She stood and stared at him with her large brown eyes gone soft and liquid. In her bright casual clothes, she looked vibrant and healthy, long sleek limbs bare and dark to the summer heat. Her hair was gathered into a simple ponytail from which a few silken wisps had escaped to frame her thin face, and she was shyly, delightedly peering over the flower box at him with her arms around it as if she would never put it down.

After a long look, he smiled slowly, “Why, Robbie,” said he, lightly innocent. “What have you got there?”

She came into the house, set the box down with a plunk, and whirled. “You sent them,” she accused with pleasure. Then as he lifted his brows, her shoulders began to droop. “Didn’t you?”

He laughed softly and to her the sound seemed to hold a deeper, more mellow and contented quality than it had before. As he confessed, she couldn’t resist throwing her arms around his neck and bestowing a hearty kiss on his cheek.

His arms slid around her and held her close. She was flush against his lean, hard body and the pleasure that it brought her was surprisingly intense. She was unprepared for the yearning desire that swept through her body, and she raised heavy-lidded eyes to his face. He wore a curiously intent, bright expression, and slowly he brought down his parted lips. Her breath came short and restricted, and she raised her mouth eagerly for his fierce kiss.

Then his head reared back and he ran his glittering gaze over her facial features. He looked as stunned as she felt. “My God,” he breathed slowly, “how I want you.”

She leaned back against his arms and traced the curve of his collarbone lightly with her fingertips. A rushing, heady feeling of excitement ran through her at the hot tension in his body. He took her by the hand and led her to his room, where they drank deeply from each other and made love with a wild abandon.

Languid warmth filled her body, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open under the heavy weight of her lids. Jason’s heart was hammering hard and fast in his chest as he lay beside her, and she curled up close, one hand laid palm flat against the silken hair and skin of his body in an unconscious, but singularly possessive gesture. She fell deeply asleep.

After a long time, Jason rose up on one elbow and stared down at Robbie’s sleeping face. Feather-light, he drew a half circle from her brow, to her temple, where her pulse beat against thin skin, and then down to the precise cut of her upper lip. She moved at the tickling sensation and murmured, then settled again, her sleep unbroken. There was something blind about that deep rest of hers, her eyes closed and unseeing, her expression softened like that of a young child’s.

He lay back and stared up at the ceiling, the gray of his eyes now smoky with an ebbing ember. The bedcovers were kicked to the floor in the warmth of the afternoon, but Robbie shivered as though chilled and instinctively drew near to his body length. He slid his arm under her head and she nestled her cheek into his shoulder, so while she slept, he held her, though his own eyes didn’t close and his mind took paths that only he could see.

Later she woke up alone. For long moments she just lay in the strange bed and felt the heaviness in her limbs. Lovemaking had a curious way of sapping her energy, and though she had done nothing else physically strenuous that day, she felt exhausted. She stretched, felt the faint friction of her ankle bandage against smooth sheet and the soreness of her muscles, and she had to smile at the memory of Jason’s gentle consideration which was so at odds with his powerful, surging passion. He must be somewhere in the house or garden.

Then a frown began to wrinkle her forehead, and she rolled to her side to curl up as though protectively shielding herself from something. The actual realization dawned on her. She was having an affair. The word instantly brought images of others whom she knew indulged in affairs, and Casey from the restaurant immediately came to mind. Robbie winced and shied away from the comparison. It wasn’t the same thing at all. She was making love to Jason, a lifelong friend. Theirs was a relationship of…of…well, at the moment, she wasn’t sure what their relationship was. But it had certainly endured a lot, and it wasn’t as if she were promiscuous.

She resolved to dismiss the whole thing from her mind for the time being, and she rose to go to the bathroom down the hall and shower quickly. It felt rather odd to be showering in a strange bathroom just next door to her house and the shower she had used now for twelve years. That thought began to bother her, too, niggling at the back of her mind as she wondered what Jason’s parents were doing that day. Most likely they were basking in the Greek Isles and thinking of home. How would they feel if they knew about her and Jason? More unsettling, how would her father feel?

The first seeds of doubt had been well sown.

Wrapped in a towel, she hurried back to Jason’s room and dressed. Then she used his hairbrush to pull back her brown length into another ponytail. When she went searching for Jason, she found him in the back garden, whistling cheerfully as he hung several pairs of jeans and shorts out to dry. She looked out of the back window for some time, absently admiring the play of rippling muscles across his naked back. A quick flush tinged her cheeks as she thought of how she had so urgently gripped that broad male back just a few hours ago.

She glanced back, saw her roses again, still in their box on the kitchen table, and she had to smile again at the fragrant scent that reached her even from that distance. With a quick stride, she gathered them up and slipped out of the back door, heading for her lawn as she called out, “Coming over for supper tonight?”

He threw her a warm smile over his shoulder and removed two clothes pegs from his mouth to reply, “I’m not sure. Sometime this afternoon I’d meant to run over to my apartment and check up on things, but time got away from me.” That with a wicked, white grin. “Maybe I’d better not, but I promise to pop by later on, if you’d like.”

“Sure.” She flashed him a responding smile and turned to go, but he ran over to her and tilted her head up for a long, slow, lazy kiss. Then, after staring laughingly down into her flustered expression, he let her go and went back to his work.

Robbie went inside and rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for something in which to put her flowers. She had to use three vases, one of which she put in her bedroom, the other two she put downstairs. She didn’t know how she was going to explain them to her father. She pondered that logistical problem as she began making supper.

The phone rang, and she hurried to answer it. With an inordinate amount of surprise, she greeted Ian. He sounded peculiarly short and grim as he asked her out for a drink that evening.

“No, I can’t make it,” she replied slowly, unwilling to see him. “I’m busy. Look, is anything wrong? You sound upset.”

He was immediately, painfully hearty. “Good grief, no! I’ve just had a lousy day at work and wanted some company. Well if not tonight, maybe we can get together this weekend, how’s that?”

“Why don’t you give me a call in a few days?” she prevaricated, finding herself unable to give him a second rejection in a row in light of his obviously low mood. “We can talk about it later when I have more idea of what my schedule will be like.”

They rang off and Robbie went back to her cooking in a thoughtful frame of mind. It was strange how her dating days with Ian seemed like another era when they had literally been a matter of days. She felt as though she had changed that much. She wasn’t sure how she had changed, for the depth of her new range of emotions was so vast she had only just begun to explore them, but she was sure that she would never be the same again.

After tucking a roast chicken into the oven and putting potatoes on the stove to boil, she wandered into the living room and threw herself onto the couch. Her father would be home at any minute now and she still had to think of something semi-plausible to tell him about her lovely roses.

A car pulled into the off-shooting pavement that was their small cul-de-sac, and she glanced out of the window idly. It wasn’t her father’s car, nor was it Jason’s or their other neighbors’, and her interest quickened slightly as she watched to see whose driveway it would pull into.

The car purred into the Morrows’ driveway, and curiously she watched the driver step out. The late-afternoon sun caught a gleaming, raven-dark head, and Robbie felt an odd, sluggish shock as she watched Jason’s friend Linda, looking stunningly beautiful, straighten to look around her.

Jason must have also heard the car approach, for he came out of the front door and approached the brunette, who turned and walked straight into his arms. That shook her. That really shook her, for Jason’s golden-brown head came down to rest atop Linda’s for a brief moment, before he gently urged her into the house and shut the door behind them.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything. There could have been a thousand different reasons for her to visit him, and for him to receive her in such a tenderly caring way. Robbie told herself that fiercely over and over again, while desperately trying to dampen down the sick feeling of hot jealousy that choked her throat.

Herb walked through the front door a few minutes later and Robbie put on her normal, cheerful expression. When he saw the flowers, he naturally asked where she had got them from. She was so preoccupied with her jealousy and harsh effort to appear normal that she told him the plain truth. That sent his eyebrows shooting up in surprise, but she didn’t even notice.

Supper tasted like sawdust, though her father complimented her several times. Television couldn’t hold her attention. Later on, Jason phoned briefly to tell them that he wouldn’t be over that evening, and Herb took the call.

Chapter Ten

When the travel agent had suggested the Virgin Islands for a vacation, courtesy of a late reservation cancellation, Robbie had leaped at the idea. She had only wanted to get away to think, to put Cincinnati and home far away in a desperate bid to get her life into perspective. Anywhere would have been fine.

For the first of the two weeks, she had thrown herself into a feverish schedule of sightseeing on the island St Croix. She swam hard in the afternoons and was still going strong in the evenings when she watched the nightclub entertainment. She thoroughly explored Fredericksted, the city where she was staying, and she joined any available tours. She grew even darker after lying whole afternoons in the hot southern sun and struck up several vacation friendships.

A surprising number of men, both young and old, had made advances that ranged from the utterly suave to the rather unsettling, and the downright pathetic. She went out once or twice, but they always seemed to have the same goal in mind and were frantic to get her into bed before the end of their holidays. After a while, she thought she should carry a stopwatch around with her to time each carefully executed maneuver.

To each and every one, she gave a firm and emphatic refusal. Somehow the thought of getting physically intimate with a man after the special experience she had shared with Jason was completely repelling to her. That was a scary realization.

But then everything about Jason scared the sin out of her. Every single thing about him. She had become obsessed with him. She dreamed and thought about him, she yearned, she mooned, she sighed. But somehow she would have to get over her infatuation for him and settle down to leading her life again. He was messing up her mind so that she couldn’t think properly. She had to keep reminding herself of their differences. She should never have made love with him, never, never.

The second week, her nervous energy was spent, and she drooped, either on the beach, in the hotel lounge, or in her room. Her ankle had swelled a few times when she had been excessive in her walking about the city, and so she pampered it. She slept late as was her usual custom and sometimes took naps. The two-week leave of absence she had taken from work simply wasn’t going to be enough.

She was going home tomorrow and she still hadn’t resolved a thing. She was no closer to working out her feelings and fears than she had been when she came, and she didn’t know what she was going to do or say when she saw Jason again.

She hadn’t told him when she was leaving, and that was part of the complication. She didn’t know what he would do or how he had reacted when Herb had informed him that she had left. She didn’t know whether she should expect rage or cheerful indifference, and she found that she was equally afraid of both. The day after he had spent the evening with Linda, she had simply gone downtown to make travel arrangements, fallen into an extraordinary piece of luck with the cancelled reservation, and had left that very evening.

Robbie stretched and yawned as she lay sprawled on her beach towel. The sand was hard under her stomach, and she had to pound out a few bumps that dug into her hipbone. The sun was a fierce, relentless glow. She hadn’t thought it possible, but the day after she had first spent the afternoon in the tropical sun, her skin had been tender to the touch and she had just finished a light peeling, though no red had shown through the deep brown of her tan.

“Hello,” said a strange, male voice from directly above her, and a shadow fell across her head and shoulders. With a deep sigh, she hid her face in her crossed arms for a moment before coolly replying to the greeting. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.