Her First Vacation (31 page)

“Then why were you going?”

She shrugged.
“Because for years I’ve
been there without really being there.
I was always in the kitchen,
making sure the caterer got the food ready on time and that the wine was just
right and the linens and countless other little details like that. And even if
I hadn’t been in the kitchen, it wouldn’t have mattered. No one paid the
slightest bit of attention to me, unless it was Mother or Diane making some
comment on the inappropriateness of my dress or my hair or my lack of makeup.
Tonight, things would have been different. Maybe some part of me wanted to
prove that I could do it. Or maybe it was just a childish desire to have
something I’d been denied too many times.” She glanced over at him as they
stopped at a light. “You know, all little girls want to get to be Cinderella
sometime.”

Colin ached for the sadness in her eyes, the years of pain
he knew she’d lived with. He reached out and closed his hand over hers where it
rested on the gearshift.

“I’ll take you to a ball, sometime.
Somewhere.
You can count on it.”

She shrugged and smiled and the echoes of sadness in her
eyes vanished in a flash. “I don’t need fairy tales, Colin. The truth is
,
I almost didn’t come tonight at all. It suddenly occurred
to me this afternoon that whatever I thought I would get from the party, it
wouldn’t be what I really wanted. I certainly never expected to find the man I
loved waiting for me when I walked through the door.”

The light changed, but neither of them noticed. Colin was
kissing her again, feeling his heart thud heavily as her words washed over him.
She loved him. She’d said it out loud. Finally, someone behind them honked, and
they separated like a pair of teenagers who’d been caught necking. Claire
smiled a little shyly, then put the Jeep in gear and moved through the
intersection. It took them another five minutes to reach his hotel. Claire had
known where it was because she knew there wasn’t another hotel in the town that
offered a full service kitchen. The others were roadside rest stops.
Rooms with beds and bathrooms and little else.
Colin checked
out of the hotel, tossed his suitcase into the back of the Jeep, and they headed
off again. By that time the snow was really starting to come down. Claire
stopped and put the Jeep into four-wheel-drive like a pro, then continued
without so much as acknowledging Colin’s amused stare. Finally, they reached a
neat little grouping of surprisingly large duplexes. Claire parked in front of
one of them,
then
turned to smile at him.

“Home sweet home.”

He heard the thread of nervousness in her voice and wasn’t
surprised by it. She’d shown him that she was willing to flirt with him
earlier, but this was the moment of truth. He leaned over and cupped her cheek.
He kissed her lightly, tenderly, and he felt her sigh against him. When he
pulled away, it was with great reluctance and nerve-shattering anticipation.
She killed the engine and got out. By the time Colin had pulled his suitcase
out, she was unlocking the front door of her half of the duplex. He followed
her inside, kicking off his shoes inside the small foyer so he wouldn’t track
snow all through her home. He sat his suitcase down and turned to face Claire.
She’d dropped her keys and purse on a small table, and now she just stood there,
looking almost as nervous as she had the night he’d followed her to her room.

He wanted to lift her onto that little table behind her and
part her legs so he could bury himself into her warm body. He wanted to drop to
the floor and pull her down with him. Hell, he just wanted her. But he didn’t
move. Instead, he gave her a smile he hoped didn’t show the strain he felt.

“This has been sudden, I know. If you’re not ready, that’s
fine.”

He watched her as she watched him and prayed that she
wouldn’t tell him she’d changed her mind about him staying with her. He could
go back to the hotel. He doubted they’d given his room away this quickly. And
if he had to, he could go through the process of a real courtship. He’d take
her to movies and dinner. He’d give her all the time she needed. But it would
damn near kill him to keep his hands off her. Just when he thought she was
going to turn around and pick her keys back up, she released a soft sigh and
took a step toward him. She was still nervous, but the flirtatious light he’d
seen in her eyes when she’d teased him about her underwear was back.

“I thought you wanted to know what I have on underneath
this dress.”

The teasing in her voice was all the invitation he needed. He
reached out and caught her by the nape, pulling her up against him as his mouth
came down on hers. Fire coursed through him, generating so much heat he figured
she wouldn’t need to turn up her furnace to ward off the cold. She made a small
noise deep in her throat, and he felt his body clench in response. He loved the
sounds she made when he touched her. He loved the taste of her. He was almost
giddy with the ecstasy of just having her body pressed tightly to his.

He told himself he’d go
slow
. He
would show her with his gentleness just how much he loved her. He’d keep the
need screaming inside him leashed so that he could prove how much he adored
her. He was doing an admirable job of maintaining his control, too, until she
pulled herself just far enough away from him to allow her hand to slip between
their bodies and cup the front of his pants. That touch, both bold and
tentative, blew all his grand plans right out the window. He growled as the
need took over, and before he even realized it, he had spun her around and
lifted her off the floor.
Her
back was against the
wall and her legs came up to clamp around him. He rocked against her and nearly
lost it when he felt how hot she was. He looked down into her smoky gray eyes
and forced himself to at least hold on long enough to find her bed.

“Bedroom?”

Her voice was breathless as she answered. “Upstairs.”

He spun around and headed for the stairs he could see
through the open doorway a few feet away. They made it half way up before he
had to stop and lower her to the floor. She kept rocking against him, rubbing
herself along the length of his constrained erection. In the end, Colin stopped
trying to fight himself. He pushed her dress up past her hips, opened the front
of his pants and shoved her panties aside so he could sink into her. Neither of
them had the control to hold on more than a few moments. He screamed her name
as her muscles clenched around him and pushed him over the edge. Eventually,
they made it to her bedroom. Colin got to enjoy the way the burgundy satin of
her matching bra and panties looked against her creamy skin for the short
moments it took him to rid her of those small scraps. They fell to the bed, in
each other’s arms and touched and tasted and loved until exhaustion finally
claimed them and they fell asleep in a tangle of arms and legs. As Colin felt
sleep pulling him under he said a quick prayer of thanks that at last he’d
found the peace he’d once believed would never be his.

Claire woke slowly and stretched, only to moan as her body
protested the movement. She was aching in more than one place. But then she
knew she had good reason to feel as if she’d done a strenuous workout. She and
Colin had been all over each other and her bed. She felt a flush of heat in her
face as she added the staircase. She reached out, searching for him with her
hand. Her eyes flashed open when she found the bed empty. The first thing that
went through her mind was the memory of the last “morning after” they’d shared.
He’d left her then, too. Pain squeezed her heart, and she sat up as she felt
her stomach begin to clench. Then her eyes found the clothes lying strewn in a
trail from the door to the side of the bed. They’d already been undressing each
other before they even made it to the top of the stairs. From where she lay,
she could see his jacket lying right beside the bolero that matched the dress
she’d so casually left lying in a pool on the floor just inside the door. She
focused on each item of his clothing, willing the tightness that had gripped
her body to ease. He wasn’t gone. He wouldn’t have left his clothes behind.

She listened and realized she could hear sounds coming from
directly below her. The duplex wasn’t particularly well soundproofed. Not
within each individual unit, at least. She heard the refrigerator door close,
then a muffled curse. He was in her kitchen, and from the sound of things, he
was cooking. She felt the last threads of fear and pain wash away. She slid out
of the bed and pulled her robe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door.
She slipped it on as she headed for the stairs. When she reached the kitchen,
she stopped in the doorway and just watched.

Colin wore his underwear and nothing else. He was at her
stove, cursing beneath his breath as he struggled to get the front, right burner
to light. She watched him for a moment, allowing her gaze to take in the tight
curve of his rear as he bent to examine the burner, as if he might somehow see
what was causing the problem. She felt heat flush her body that had nothing at
all to do with the heating vent that was blowing warm air directly onto her
head. She stepped into the room just as Colin straightened and moved the frying
pan he’d found onto a different burner. She moved up behind him and reached out
to run her hand over the tight curve she’d been admiring moments before. Colin
jumped and spun around so fast that Claire had to step back to keep from
getting an elbow in the face.

“What are you doing up?”

She arched a brow at the terse question. “Someone was
making enough noise right below my bed to wake the dead.”

He gave her a sheepish look. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think
about your bedroom being right over this room.”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I’m an early riser anyway,
remember?”

He smiled. “Yes, I do.” His smile turned to a slightly
scolding frown. “But now how am I going to bring you breakfast in bed?”

“How about we cook it together,
then
go back to bed as a pair?”

She saw the hunger leap into his eyes. He pretended to
consider her suggestion for a moment, then reached out and pulled her up
against him. “Yeah, I like your idea better.”

A few minutes later, Claire was positive they’d never make
it anywhere near her bedroom before they gave in to the inevitable need. A few
more minutes and Colin proved her suspicions right. The kitchen table would
probably never be the same. She certainly knew she’d never sit down to eat at
it again without blushing. Finally they fixed breakfast and ate. They showered
and dressed, though it took them a while to get to that point since the act of
showering kept being interrupted by their need to pleasure each other. Claire
managed to convince him to get into his clothes eventually, though. Then she
drug him out of the house and into the street where they were almost
immediately embroiled in a massive snowball fight that Claire knew had probably
been going on most of the morning. Half the kids involved had been her students
in the past. If they were curious about Colin, they didn’t ask. They just
accepted him into the game and did their best to bury him beneath an avalanche
of fluffy snowballs.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was lunchtime when she and Colin stumbled through her
front door, slamming it just in time to avoid getting hit by a fresh barrage.
She laughed out loud as the thuds landed against the solid wood. And then Colin
was kissing her again. When he let her go a few moments later, he was grinning
like one of the kids outside.

“I haven’t done that since I was a kid. Maybe, I never did
it at all.”

She smiled up at him. “You know they’ll probably be waiting
for us when we go back out. You got them good with that sneak attack of yours.”

His grin widened. “Yeah, there are some benefits to being
good at playing dirty.”

They stripped out of their outer clothes, and Claire headed
for the kitchen, calling back to him over her shoulder.

“You know what we have to have,
don’t
you?
Hot chocolate.
It’s the only thing that will do
after a morning like this one.”

She heard him call out for her to go ahead. She turned
around, frowning when she realized he wasn’t following her to the kitchen. She
kept going, though, knowing
he’d be along soon. She was just
lighting that front burner he’d had trouble with earlier when he came into the
room. She lifted her gaze, smiling. “I bet it’s been a long time since you’ve
had real, homemade hot chocolate, too.”

He shook his head. “I’ve never had homemade hot chocolate.
The stuff my mom fixed came out of a pouch.”

There was something in his eyes that made her hold in any
comment she might have made. After all, she knew very well what it was like to
come from a home where things were done for convenience instead of comfort. Her
mother had never, as far as Claire could remember, made hot chocolate. Even
from a pouch.

“Is something wrong?”

He shook his head, but he still looked anxious. Claire
reached back to flip off the stove, then crossed the room toward him. He had
his hand behind his back, and she suddenly wondered what he was hiding.

“What’s in your hand?”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he pulled his hand around
and held the present out to her. Claire knew, from the slightly messy condition
of the paper, that he’d wrapped it himself. The bow was off center, the creases
uneven. She lifted her gaze to his.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

It was way too big to be a ring, unless he was one of those
people who went in for disguising things by wrapping them in boxes that would
throw off anyone trying to guess at the contents. Claire seriously doubted
Colin would be that kind of person. She took the gift, noting its weight as she
did so. She held it in her hands for a moment, not at all certain why it felt
like he was proposing when she knew good and well that he wasn’t giving her a
ring, and that he hadn’t so much as mentioned marriage.