Sealed with a promise (31 page)

  “Emmie, do you want me? You act like you do. Yet you’re the one who keeps insisting we can’t be swept away by passion. I try to nail down what’s on the table, and you look like that deer caught in the headlights.”

  There wasn’t any pretend room here.

  He was saying choose.

  She could say scrap the timetable.

  She could pull his head down and spend as much time on his lips-those mobile, perfectly-shaped, smiling, tender-looking lips-she could spend as much time on his lips as she wanted to.

  But the trouble was, she couldn’t do either of those things.

  All day her anger had been draining away. Once her fa?ade of indifference to herself had been breached by Davy’s slighting remark, she had been shocked by the amount of rage she had found dammed up behind it. And the fury had given her the strength to further widen the cracks herself, and let the anger drain faster.

  She wasn’t angry anymore at idiot jocks, her parents, God, or her grandmother. The last bitter drops had run out while she laughed and laughed at herself over her aimlessness, her willful cluelessness about Blount. Davy’s remark had made her mad because it had been true. “Pity fuck” was exactly what Blount (jerk that he was) had thought of her. And who could blame him?

  If he hadn’t given her much in the way of respect and consideration, he also hadn’t asked much. She’d already admitted to herself (and to Pickett this evening) that he had made it easy for her to stay well within her comfort zone. Above all he had made it easy for her to get sex without ever having to admit she wanted it.

  Grace had put her finger right on it. She
had
been trying to obliterate her body. She had symbolically tried to get rid of her body over and over. That wasn’t possible, so she tried not to think about its desires.
That
wasn’t possible, so she tried to pretend that she didn’t think about it.

  How rational she had pretended to be. How cool and distant to keep herself from knowing what she was doing. Talk about hypocrisy! She had found men who didn’t ask her for dates, and that way she never had to wonder if they would ask her for the next one. She called that “freedom from expectations.” She found men who liked to hear themselves talk long enough for her to pretend the relationship was significant. She had called that “building on a friendship.”

  As for the sex they had, she had insisted on hygiene. But otherwise, she hadn’t needed to do anything. Sooner or later in an evening, Blount would say, “Time to take off your clothes,” or something just as memorable. She could have sex without ever admitting she wanted it.

  From the moment he had walked in the door Caleb had demanded that she say it. Say she wanted it. All day long, she had known this moment was coming. Still she had drifted along, pretending that in the end something would happen, and she wouldn’t have to decide.

  This was where she stopped begging for crumbs from life and stepped up to the table, if she could find the courage.

  “Emmie?”

  “You called me a ‘deer in the headlights’-” She shrugged. “This is the way I get. Totally paralyzed. I have never said what I want. You know all those fairy tales about the person who makes a wish and gets it, and it’s terrible-something awful happens?”

  “You looking for guarantees? You want me to say everything will be all right for the rest of your life if you do this?”

  “No. I’m looking for a way to have what I want without taking the chance of asking.”

  She had lost him. Silently, he picked up the two glasses they had used for the Baileys. Cradling them between the fingers of one hand, he carried them to the tiny kitchen. People had bathrooms larger than her kitchen. There was only the sink on one wall with a small refrigerator at the end of the cabinet, an apartment-size stove between the doors, and a little table with two chairs next to the window. There wasn’t room for two people. Emmie stood in the doorway.

  As always he moved nearly soundlessly. At the sink he washed the glasses and set them in the dish drainer. He performed the mundane chore as he did everything- with complete focused attention, no hint of a wasted motion. The glasses made no noise when he set them on their rims in the old yellow plastic drainer. He carefully dried his hands on a towel that had been left on the counter, then hung the towel on its rack, straightened it, and centered it.

  The action might have looked finicky performed by anyone else. By him, it simply looked like he did tasks until they were done, and he did them right. He was going to leave, so, of course, he would tidy any mess he’d made before he did.

  She was more aware of him as a physical man, a person in a body, than she had ever been. No, that wasn’t true. She was as aware as she had
always
been. The only difference was that now, she admitted it to herself. Now, too late, she made no effort to stop herself from wanting to run her hand across his shoulder, down his back, and across his neat buns.

  He turned to face her. The color of his eyes was lost in the deep shadow under his brows, while the glare of the harsh ceiling light threw his strong nose and sharp cheekbones into high relief. There was a scar she hadn’t noticed before on his left cheek. Small, but scarily close to his eye. Her heart contracted to think of him imperiled, at the mercy of the forces that compel us to consider mortality. Yes, she admitted now, she had wanted to touch him.

  She hadn’t done it.

  He wasn’t smiling.

  Her art teacher used to say there’s never a shadow so dark it doesn’t have some light. Though she couldn’t make out the color of his eyes in their deep shadow, she could see the transparent glisten of the lens. She could see him looking at her. For once, even as shadowed as his eyes were, there was nothing hidden in their gaze.

  He leaned against the counter and rested his hands on his hips. It was a way he stood when he had something to say. She hated that she was just now understanding that. Before she’d only seen that the stance brought out the breadth and power of his shoulders and the strong modeling of his forearms, making the point that he was not a man to be trifled with.

  He cocked his head slightly. “There’s a line drawn between us,” he said in his dark umber voice. “It’s a line that
you
made. I didn’t make it. And you’re the one who has to step across it.”

  “You’re not leaving?”

  Now, he did smile, just enough to change the shadows at the corners of his lips. “I’m here, Emmie. Right here. Tell me what you want.”

  She tried to hold out her arms. He could come to her. He could. He knew how. He could take over now. He smiled a little more, raised one eyebrow. Emmie reeval-uated the shoulders and decided she’d been right the first time. Holding out her arms wasn’t going to do it.

  “This is scary for me.”

  “Scary for me too.”

  Emmie hated to confess her ineptitude, but the time for pretense was gone. Nothing, absolutely nothing, came to mind. “I don’t know how to say what I want.”

  “Tell you what. I can’t step over the line for you, but I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. And you don’t have to think of everything you’ll ever want. Just one thing.”

  “But I don’t know. I don’t know how to start.”

  “Don’t treat it like a bunch of moves to be gone through. What do you want? What’s the one, next thing you’re sure you want?”

  “I don’t want to be across the room from you.”

  “That’s what you
don’t
want. What
do
you want?”

  Emmie listened deep inside her body to find what the hunger was, where it lay in her body, what would satisfy it. “I want to be right up next to you. I want to feel your heat against my body.”

  His eyes flared in what? Surprise? Disapproval? Emmie wondered if, even yet, she hadn’t gotten it right, but she didn’t care. “It’s what I want.’

  “All right.”

  Emmie had said what she wanted, but he still stood with his back to the stove. Still with his shoulders spread and his hands on his hips. “Aren’t you going to
do
something?”

  Caleb’s eyes crinkled. “I will. When you help yourself to what you want.”

  Emmie stepped closer. Closer to where his scent, his warmth, came around her. It was wonderful. It was safe and heady and scary. She could feel the power that resulted from intense physicality trained into service of his intellect. It wasn’t control so much as a perfectly tuned agreement among his parts. It radiated from him like magnetic lines of force. She had felt it before. More than once it had irritated her because it could not be ignored, nor could it be contained-not by her. What she hadn’t admitted was how much she liked it. How it pulsed energy deep inside her to make her feel vibrant and focused as if she’d discovered the most interesting sensation in the world. She was oddly languorous, her hips suddenly looser, her breasts heavy.

  There was something else, now that she opened her senses to him. He wanted her. She knew it. She could feel his hunger. And she could feel how he hungered for her to want him. Her own sexual power that she’d first felt a couple of weeks ago had been like a candle flame. Now it felt like the roaring burner of a hot air balloon. It heated her and filled her, and if she loosed the last of her tethers, it would sweep her away.

  The more she allowed her senses to fill, the more the hunger intensified. Her throat felt too full, and she needed pressure. She slid her fingers across the crisp cotton of his shirt around to his back, so she could use leverage to pull him and herself closer.

  It was wonderful. Her arms felt full at last, and paradoxically she could relieve the pressure in her breasts by pushing against him. In a minute, it was still wonderful, but it wasn’t enough. “I want you to put your arms around me. I want you to pull me closer.”

  His arms came around her, wrapping her in strong, hard heat. She could feel his soundless groan of relief under her hands, where she held them firm to his back.

  She couldn’t lift her right arm high enough to put her arms around his neck and pull his head down. She hooked her hands around his back and over his shoulders, pulling herself up. She lifted her face as close has she could get. “Kiss!”

  A silent chuckle shook his diaphragm.

  His mouth came down on hers. Hot. Open. He gave himself for her pleasure.

  After a minute the strain on her shoulder intensified into an ache, and she reluctantly let herself down. “I can’t do it by myself. I can’t do it unless you hold my head.”

  “We could lie down. You wouldn’t have to ask so much of your shoulder.”

  It was a good idea, but… “Not… yet. I want to feel your front on my back.”

  She turned in his arms to put her back against him and through the doorway into the bedroom saw herself in the dresser mirror. The bedroom was in shadow, the only light was the reflection. It was like there was a window in the bedroom open to a different reality.

  Her face looked as she had never seen it before, her eyes large and dark, the lids heavy, her expression remote, yet intent. He sensed her transfixed attention, looked up, met her eyes in the mirror, and smiled. Just the faintest lateral movement of his lips. The smile of a chess master watching the perfect move to set the game exactly the way he wants it to go.

  “Want to see?”

  She couldn’t answer, because she couldn’t take one shred of attention from the woman in the mirror and the golden man beside her.

  He smiled his chess master’s smile. “Watch.”

  Slowly, while one hand rested on her shoulder, he moved the other. In the mirror a golden masculine hand, large-knuckled with long tapered fingers, traveled across the blue silk of the sweater over the woman’s ribs and with excruciating deliberation cupped the woman’s breast then kneaded it.

  With the same deliberation he moved to the other breast to give it the same attention. Then he let his hand fall to his side.

  She knew what she could do if she wanted more.

  Still mesmerized by the woman in the mirror, Emmie brought her hands up to the loops that fastened the covered buttons.

  “You’re unbuttoning the sweater to show your breasts to me.” His voice was deeper, darker, rasping. In it pulsed a triumph he made no effort to hide. “Because you like looking at yourself, and you want me to look at you.”

  When she had unbuttoned the last three buttons across her midriff, pushing his warm hard hands between her skin and the sweater starting at the shoulders, he peeled it down her arms. The whole time, he watched what he did in the mirror. The sweater dropped to the floor.

  He finished with his arms covering her arms, his hands covering her hands. She felt as if she
wore
him now, and in the mirror, the blue lace of the bra made the whiteness of her breasts almost luminous. He looked at them, and as he said, she liked looking at herself when he was looking at her.

  “Now what?”

  “You decide. One next thing. Have you ever felt your own breasts?” His hands still cradling hers, he brought her fingers to her chest. “Here they are. Feel them. Feel what I feel.”

  He took his hands away, and she kneaded her breasts as he had, her white hand against the blue lace. She felt him inhale. Saw his intent face in the mirror.

  “Do you like that? Watching me touch my breasts?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He stroked himself against her buttocks.

  She felt for his hand and brought it to her breast. His golden hand with the long fingers and scarred knuckles. She put her hand on top of his and pressed hard, watching the breast move.

  She made sure she had his eye in the mirror and snapped open the front clasp of her bra. She lifted the lace away. Perky her breasts would never be, but she saw them the first time without judgment. They were white. Even whiter than her upper chest. Faint blue veins crisscrossed under the skin that gleamed with a satin sheen.