Whispers at Midnight (33 page)

The look he sent her was unreadable. “She was upset, all right?”

“How upset?”

He sighed. “Crying. She was crying. She’s been having a hard time dealing with the fact that she and I as a couple are over, and she was sitting out there in her car crying because she thinks I’ve found someone new. Which, in case you’re wondering, would be you.”

Carly winced. She’d never thought she could possibly feel sorry for Miss Queen of Everything, but suddenly she did. “What kind of promises did you make her? Before you broke up with her, I mean?”

Matt looked outraged. “None. Hey, I never make promises. Anything she thought to the contrary was all in her head.”

The sad thing was, she had no doubt that he absolutely believed every word of that. Such male obtuseness made her feel like smacking him upside the head. “You slept with her, didn’t you? Listen, you lunkhead, to a woman that’s a promise right there.”

“No, it isn’t. She wanted to get married and I didn’t. She knew how I felt about marriage going in. I never promised her anything. I never did anything to make her think I wanted to marry her.”

Except have sex with her. Carly didn’t say it aloud, but the words were there in her head, a neon sign flashing caution.

“There, you see: You did it again. That kiss-and-run thing. Admit it. That’s what you do. That’s what I meant when I said you have issues.”

“Since when does not wanting to get married mean that somebody has issues?” He sounded exasperated.

“Since every time you start getting too involved with somebody you get scared and just cut and run.”

“I do not get scared.”

“Yes, you do. You pulled it on Shelby. You’ve pulled it on me twice. No telling how many other poor, unsuspecting women you’ve pulled it on.” She scowled at him. “So let me ask you something.
What, exactly, did you envision happening between us when you asked me to go for a motorcycle ride with you today?”

“I was going to take you out to dinner.” He glanced at her, then smiled a little ruefully. “Okay, I was going to take you out to dinner and then I was going to take you to bed. Now that I think about it though, I see that it was a really bad idea. At least, the bed part was.”

There was a pause in which neither of them spoke. Carly turned the facts of the situation over in her mind. The man had issues, all right. He had problems. He had hang-ups. Only a masochistic idiot would enter into any kind of a romantic relationship with him. He needed a big Danger sign to wear around his neck to warn off the unwary. All he had to offer any woman was half a loaf.

Sex. Probably great sex. But nothing beyond that.

Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
Next.

But he was Matt, and she had loved him for most of her life, and wanted him for nearly as long as she’d loved him. With anyone else, she would have said, take your half a loaf and shove it. But with Matt, she was starting to think that her grandmother had known what she was talking about.

“Just out of curiosity,” Carly asked politely, “
why
is dinner and bed a bad idea? At least, why is it a bad idea now, when it wasn’t a bad idea earlier? I mean,
you
climbed three stories up a ladder to my roof and kissed me and asked me out. Nobody was holding a gun to your head.”

He was still heading due west, toward her house. The last stoplight before they left town behind turned red in front of them, and he braked to wait it out. The sun was shining directly in at them. Matt flipped down his visor to shield his eyes, and Carly did the same. The protection was welcome, and probably even needed, but Carly got the feeling that he did it at least partially to stall for time. She also got the impression that he was weighing just how honest to be.

“Look, Curls,” he said finally. She could tell that he had opted for total frankness, and wished, as she had on numerous previous occasions, that they didn’t know each other well enough to make that an option. Sometimes being allowed to maintain a few of one’s illusions was a plus. “Here’s the thing: Sometimes men think with their dicks.
If you’d stayed away from me, we would have been fine, the just-friends thing would have been fine, but you didn’t, you dumped lemonade all over my head and I kissed you and now we aren’t fine. Specifically, I’m not fine. I want to sleep with you so badly that I’ve pretty much been walking around with a woody ever since you kicked me and ran out of my office. And you want me too. I know you do. So there it is: I want you and you want me. When I asked you out I thought maybe we could go with that, just have dinner and maybe sex and see how it went from there. But I’ve got to admit that you’ve got a point with the kiss-and-run thing. Whenever I get the feeling a woman is after a commitment, I tend to get the hell out. And the woman tends to end up getting hurt.” He glanced at her. “And I don’t want that for you. Which makes the bed thing a bad idea. Because, basically, you and I want two different things.”

“We do?” Carly watched the play of light and shadow over his face as the car started moving forward again, and made up her mind. She was going to go with half a loaf, and damn the torpedoes.

“Yeah, we do. The bottom line is, I want sex, you want love and a husband and babies and forever.” He glanced her way again and must have seen something in her expression that made him suspect that she was about to disagree, because he shook his head at her. “Don’t even try to mess with me. I know how you think.” He gave an un-amused-sounding snort. “I love you like one of my sisters and I want you so much that at least half of me thinks I’m a damned fool for telling you this, but I don’t do forever. Not even for you, I don’t.”

“Did I ask you to?” Carly tried not to wince as the “sister” thing went home. Determinedly she embraced her inner slut. “I’m with you: forever sucks. Been there, done that. You keep forgetting that I’m older and wiser than I used to be. I’m all grown up. I’ve been married and divorced. And what I want now is basically the same thing you do: great sex, no strings.”

And if she crossed her fingers behind her back, well, he didn’t have to know.

24

“B
ULLSHIT
.”

Matt said it without heat. The lack of heat was an indication of how little he believed her, Carly realized. She also realized that deceiving a man who knew her as well as Matt did was going to be something less than a piece of cake.

“Try me.”

He shot her a skeptical glance.

“Not happening, Curls.”

Carly could not believe that she was having to practically con this man into making love to her. Somebody’s priorities were not in the right place.

“For goodness’ sake, Matt, use your brain. I’ve only been officially divorced for a few months. Why on earth would I want to even think about getting married again? The first time was enough to permanently turn me off the whole institution, believe me.”

This time there was a glimmer of interest in the look he sent her.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Carly said, watching the First Baptist Church go by on the left. If she didn’t think fast, she’d be home in less than five minutes. “You know, I’m starving. You could still take me out to dinner,
and I could tell you all about my horrible, no-good, very bad marriage while we eat.”

“No,” he said.

“No?”
Carly repeated, starting to get annoyed. “What do you mean, no?”

“Baby, you think I haven’t been on the receiving end of enough come-ons that I don’t know when somebody’s trying to talk me into bed?”

Carly glared at him.

“You’re not conceited or anything, are you, Matt Converse?”

“Are you trying to make me believe that you’re
not
trying to talk me into bed?”

Carly’s lips pursed. Blast the man, he knew her too well.

“Okay, so maybe I am,” she conceded. Then she took a deep breath and came out with the clincher, “Dammit, Matt, I haven’t had sex in
two whole years.
”

He glanced swiftly at her, then just as swiftly returned his attention to the road, which had grown both bumpier and curvier over the last few miles. She watched as his jaw tightened, and as he shifted his foot from the gas to the brake. The car slowed, and Carly tried not to let any trace of the thumbs-up she mentally gave herself show as he pulled over on the grassy verge.

“Okay,” he said, putting the transmission in park and releasing his seat belt and turning a little sideways in his seat so that he could look at her. The quality of the light was golden now, gilding the tops of the tall corn that grew on one side of the road and the sparse grass of the cow-cropped pasture on the other, gilding the black fences and the road itself and Matt’s face. His eyes narrowed as they ran over her; his mouth thinned and lengthened mistrustfully. But there was a restless gleam in the depths of his eyes, and she knew him well enough to recognize that gleam for what it was: desire.

He could fight it all he wanted, but he wanted her, too.

Her heart started to beat a little faster.

“You want to run that by me one more time?”

“You know, this is embarrassing.”

His brows twitched closer together. “If it embarrasses you, you
shouldn’t have brought it up. How come you haven’t had sex in two years?”

“More than two years, actually,” Carly said, scrupulously honest.

“Curls …” His voice held a note of warning.

Carly glanced away, out at the narrow black ribbon of road winding off through the fields and trees and hills, and rubbed her hands down her jeans-clad thighs because her palms were suddenly a little sweaty. Talking about sex wasn’t something she usually did with men, and getting down to the nitty-gritty of such a personal topic really did make her feel kind of embarrassed, even if the man was Matt and she didn’t have a whole lot of secrets that he didn’t know. But the goal was a worthy one, she thought, and with that in mind she crossed her arms over her chest and looked back at him.

“Why do you think? I haven’t had anybody to have sex
with.
”

The look he gave her spoke volumes.

Carly was outraged. “Believe it or not, I don’t sleep around.”

His eyes softened slightly. “Okay, that I believe.”

He reached out to tug on a wayward lock of her hair. As the curl twined around his finger, Carly reflexively jerked her head out of his reach, and he smiled. They’d been playing variations on that same scenario since she was eight, Carly realized, and glared at him.

“What about your husband? Like you said, you’ve only been divorced a few months.”

“He had a girlfriend.” Carly’s voice went flat. “It took me a while to figure out what was going on. We didn’t make love, but I thought he was busy, or stressed, or, well, something. Whatever men get when they don’t want to get you in bed three times a day. And I was busy with my restaurant—you know I owned a restaurant, the Treehouse.” Matt nodded; Carly was too familiar with the jungle-drums quality of gossip in Benton to be surprised. “Well, running a restaurant is a lot of work, and … and I didn’t really feel like having sex anyway. I didn’t have time for it, I was stressed, the whole bit. The truth is, I was so busy with work that the state of our marriage just kind of got away from me. Even when I realized something was wrong, I never guessed he was cheating. I didn’t figure that out until I came home early from work one day and caught him with his girlfriend in our bed.”

“Sounds bad.” There was sympathy for her in his eyes.

“It
was
bad.” Carly took a deep breath. “Actually, it was awful.”

“Want me to go to Chicago and punch the bastard in the nose for you?” The offer was made in an almost negligent tone. Carly saw that he was only partly joking. Looking at him, at his broad shoulders lounging back against the window and his strong neck and the bulging muscles of his arms, all set off most attractively by the clinginess of his decrepit tee shirt, Carly had a sudden mental vision of slender, bespectacled
I’m-so-proud-of-my-intellect
John and realized that any physical confrontation between the two of them wouldn’t even be a contest. A slight smile still lurked around Matt’s mouth, but his eyes were serious. Carly knew that if she really wanted him to punch John out for her, she had only to say the word.

“You really would, wouldn’t you?” Her tone mixed admiration and scolding.

“You bet.”

“My hero,” she said as she had many times before while they were growing up, trying to keep it light, batting her lashes at him in exaggerated adoration. Usually the words were a joke between them. This time she meant every syllable.

“As always.” His voice was dry. The words were his stock response too, but the look in his eyes for her—it was all new.

Her breath caught.

There was an invisible tension in the air between them suddenly, a sense of connection, a blast of heat. He was still on his side of the car and she was still on hers, but the space in which they were confined all at once seemed much smaller, the distance between them reduced as though something, the moisture, the molecules keeping them apart, something, had just evaporated.